In October 1939, about a decade before he was assassinated, Mohandas K. Gandhi issued a warning to his admirers. “Some would like to erect my statue in public places, some others would have my portraits, yet others would proclaim my birthday as a public holiday,” he wrote in response to praises he had received on his birthday . “These are days of dissension and discord, I should feel deeply humiliated if my name became in any way an occasion for accentuating them. Avoidance of such opportunities is a real service to the country and to me.”

Yet of the many things that India’s independence leader achieved, curbing the proliferation of his likeness wasn’t one of them. His bespectacled face and slight frame have become synonymous with peaceful resistance and civil rights movements around the world.

Somehow he has also become an ambassador for Apple and, more recently, a poster boy for the political party that is directly connected to the Hindu nationalist who fatally shot him in 1948. He graces T-shirts and mugs and refrigerator magnets. He was on “The Simpsons.” His image has been both glorified and trivialized, meme-ified, simplified and stretched so far that the man — his flaws, complexities, and actual message — has been reduced to a cliché, a fictional superhero.

“A hyper-icon has been created,” said Sumathi Ramaswamy, a history professor at Duke University who has researched Gandhi’s role in India’s visual culture. “He has come to be appropriated even by forces completely antithetical to his message.”