Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was assassinated on this day in 1948.

He was much reviled and  criticised in his own time, but also, of course, revered all over India and the world as very few people have ever been. Then he was nearly forgotten, except for all sorts of tokenism, such as this day being declared Martyr's Day, he being nicknamed Father of the Nation, his face adorning all currency notes, and liquor sales being banned countrywide on his birthday. Lage Raho Munnabhai said it all. 

About forty years after the assassination, I reviewed Professor Amlan Dutta's book, The Gandhian Way, for The Telegraph of Calcutta. I remember writing 'lo, the tide of times has brought him back in fashion!'

Three and a half decades more have passed since that review. On the threshold of old age, I can see that today Gandhi is being remembered more to be abused and ridiculed than otherwise, and some people are trying to elevate his assassin to the status of a different kind of national hero.

I have thought about Gandhi all my life, and I shall write a longish essay here putting down some of the things I have thought. Keep coming back.

A few thought-starters...

Most of the people who revile Gandhi in the crudest terms these days have one thing in common: they have not read a single book by him or about him written by any literate, informed and civilized author. Their 'opinions', such as they are, are drawn straight from social media, supplied by others as stupid, ignorant and bigoted (or driven by vested interests) as they themselves are. My way of dealing with them: ignore, in toto. In many situations, silence is golden.

It is little known that this apostle of non-violence categorically said that if he were given a choice between a violent man and a coward, he would choose the first without second thought, because the violent man has potential for self-improvement, civilizationally speaking, but the coward does not. And on this, he and his bete noire Winston Churchill were completely agreed: courage is the mother of all virtues. As for his own courage, it is again little known that he was awarded a medal for extraordinary bravery when serving as an ambulance driver during the Boer War, while Hitler, that supreme preacher of 'macho' violence, ran away when the police fired upon a procession that he was leading before he came to power. And he faced down blood-crazed mobs unarmed and virtually alone in his last days.

He was already a very famous man respected and admired by many for his peaceful, and to a great extent successful, struggle for the rights of coloured people in South Africa, before he returned to India and plunged into her politics in 1915.

He was the kind of man that the rulers of the greatest empire in history deferred to whenever he declared that he would stop eating if some serious political demand of his were not met, so great was the public upheaval they feared in case he died. This in a country where the vast majority lived on the brink of starvation and famine almost all the time. I have wondered all my life how he did it: and that too in a world without the internet and twitter!

He was an ardent environmentalist long before Rachel Carson wrote her seminal book, and a votary of 'sustainable development' long before that became a fancy catchword. Now the wise and rich and fashionable are taking to bicycles again, drinking tea from designer earthen cups, wearing handloom fabrics, eating all kinds of 'organic' food and learning to renew, recycle and re-use.

He was a grassroots fighter for better public hygiene and dissolution of caste barriers who did much more than most armchair revolutionaries fighting for those same things ever did in their lives. Those who are curious should read about these things.

He tried very hard to find a via media between the two rampant and intensely hostile ideologies of his day, capitalism and communism, because he knew that neither could benefit the mass of mankind in the long run in any comprehensive way, both being fundamentally and inevitably destructive, driven as they were by greed, fear, jealousy and hate. That he did not succeed was not his failure, just as it was not Christ's - it simply means that mankind is not ready to realize their dreams.

He was a man who could draw and retain the deepest reverence of the most diverse of men, such as Sardar Patel and Rajagopalachari, Tagore and Subhas Bose. Englishmen like Elmhirst and Andrews worshipped him. Mountbatten said he felt like an errant schoolboy before an irate headmaster in his presence. Albert Einstein said of him that generations to come would scarce believe that such a one as he ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth; on hearing of his death Bernard Shaw remarked that the assassination proved that in this world it is still 'too dangerous to be too good'. Charlie Chaplin, who in his autobiography claimed that Gandhi had left him unmoved, was nevertheless deeply enough impressed to make a movie as scathing about industrial capitalism as Modern Times: if that is not Gandhian in spirit through and through, I don't know what is. Nehru in his first Independence Day speech referred to him as 'the greatest man of our generation', and at his death mourned, 'the light has gone out of our lives'. And - to my mind an indispensable part of the character of a truly great man - he had an exquisite sense of humour, often directed against himself. So he excused his lack of 'sufficient' clothing when he was meeting the King-Emperor in London with the quip, 'The King was wearing enough for both of us'; so he said, when someone praised him as a saint, 'If you knew how hard it is to be a saint, you would pity me, not envy me'; so he called his bullock cart his 'Ox-ford', and it was he who uttered what I regard as the single most devastating put-down in history - when asked what he thought about western civilization, he shot back 'That would be a good idea'!

He was a man who insisted lifelong that he was a devout Hindu, yet he did more than any other nationally-prominent Hindu to accommodate Muslims in peace and friendship; he was a devotee of Christ, and he was quite clear that in matters of faith, he would be guided by his own reason and conscience rather than any hoary creed. He sang the Ram Dhun modified in his own idiosyncratic way, and dreamt of re-establishing Ram Rajya. That was of course a pipe dream like any such other, and many of us could not live with many of his tenets, but look at what kind of Ram Rajya many people are hell-bent on establishing today, and compare with his ideas, and decide for yourself.

I must also hasten to point out that, though he was oft reviled as a prime representative of 'eastern orthodoxy', in his love of individualism and personal moral responsibility, in his insistence on the need of the aesthetic and spiritual in human life, in his passionate attachment to the need for democratic local self-government as opposed to centralized power and so on, he was inspired much more by western idealists, to wit philosopher/author/reformers like Tolstoy, Ruskin and Thoreau, as well as the American model of federal government, than most people know these days.

I was reading up on Dr. Bindheshwar Pathak, the founder of the Sulabh Shouchalaya movement who lived in the post-Gandhian era but was profoundly inspired by Gandhi, and died only last year. He is the kind of man, like Kailash Satyarthi, that we the educated elite of India hate to know about and would like to pretend didn't exist, because with their life's work they, like Gandhi, showed up our abiding shames to the world, such as that until very lately millions of 'inferior' people traditionally cleared human wastes for their superiors in this 'great' country, and tens of millions of children were bonded to, and ruined by, the practice of child labour so that we could live in cheap comfort as a matter of 'entitlement'. We never mention these people to our children as inspiring success stories, as distinct from cricketers, movie stars and billionaire businessmen.

I also wonder about how much we have changed, diminished as a thinking species since his time. It seems, judging by both the social media 'debates' and most of the commentaries on the regular mass media, that we cannot make layered, nuanced, balanced, well-informed judgments about 'great' people any more. To mention just one example, most people nowadays, even 'educated' ones, cannot understand how Gandhi and Tagore could have so deeply respected each other despite having so many, so very marked differences. We simply want every judgment to be a clear case of black and white, 'good' and 'bad', as if we are living in a fairy tale for children; we cannot begin to imagine that the greater the man, the more complicated, even contradictory he is likely to be, and our judgment of him must be calibrated, finessed accordingly. So it is entirely possible for me to be profoundly respectful and full of awe about Gandhi while at the same time sadly shaking my head at (what I think to be -) his many eccentricities, follies and mistakes. But abuse him, never, for at least three good reasons: the sun doesn't care if a billion candles abuse him; the man did and attempted to do enough good things to make for ten thousand 'successful' lives on the scale of ordinary human beings, and abuse merely shows me up as a vulgar and ignorant idiot.

So the last thought for now, unless there are comments which stimulate further thinking: I wonder how Gandhi would have dealt with India today?