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Gandhi's Uses - Guest - 11-22-2004
<span style='color:red'>Gandhiâs Uses</span>
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I remember for the first and only time wearing a âGandhi capâ. That was in 1961 when my father was posted as an Assistant Engineer in Sirsi, a small town in Karnataka. My parents were still young, they had five small children, and Sirsi was a âmofussilâ town with little of the pleasures and provenance of urban 1960s India. My elder brother and I were enrolled in one of the local schools, and in celebration of Gandhi Jayanti we were all asked to wear the âGandhi capâ to the dayâs events. We were proud and a little self-conscious wearers of the cap, and the only thing that I recall in some detail of the day is getting separated from my elder brother: he was eight and I was five. But we both made it home safe, and soon we were sent away to grandparents in Mandya (my elder brother and elder sister) and Bangalore (myself) because my parents were overwhelmed minding us all in the small town. We left our Gandhi caps behind in Sirsi.
On arrival in Bangalore at my paternal grandparentsâ house, I noticed that the only photograph displayed on the walls, other than that of Hindu <i>murtis</i> and gurus was that of Gandhiji â in the famous âstriding with a walking-cane/Dandi marchâ pose. I was told that it belonged to one of my uncles. Not much talked revolved around Gandhiji at my grandparentsâ house, if I recall correctly. Lower middle class in stature, my grandparents headed a household that still included two or three of my unmarried uncles, a couple of unmarried young aunts, and where everyone was busy minding the house, going to college, or struggling with their first jobs. Talk in the evenings and over weekends was mostly about domestic issues. But the photograph of Gandhiji was a statement of the household, and it is still etched in my memory.
Gandhiji of course was in all our school history books. He was the âFather of the nationâ, we were told, and on a pedestal we all put him. We read about his eating goat meat and ruing the act, his sailing to England, the South African episodes, about nonviolence and âSatyagrahaâ, the march to Dandi, Round Table conferences, the Quit India movement, and his assassination. Later, in high school I recall reading an expurgated version of âMy Experiments with Truthâ that was given to all students studying at the National College in Bangalore, whose then principal Dr. Narasimhaiah was a Gandhian, and which college my elder brother attended.
Now I have an 8 ½ by 11 inch copy of an artistâs rendering of Gandhijiâs smiling visage sitting atop a book-shelf in my office. And I often wonder when I walk into my office what it is about Gandhiji that has mesmerized us all, and how we have all used him selectively for our own purposes. This introspection became even more urgent when I read that the CPI-M mouthpiece is soon going to publish a series of articles to frame the RSS for Gandhijiâs murder, and the renewed debate about the role of people like Savarkar in the assassination.
Left ideologues also assert that for Savarkar and the Sanghis the âpurpose and goal of freedom was to establish Hindu rashtraâ. For Gandhi, Nehru, and for the Left, they say, the âgoal was to establish a modern, plural, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, democratic Indiaâ. That this is a gloss and a simplistic assertion is not lost on many Indians who prefer to ignore the ramblings of the opportunistic ideologues.
While the charge against Ghodse, Savarkar, and the RSS continues, I am really not troubled by the fact that Ghodse was indeed an RSS swayamsevak for a while, or that he continued to be in touch with the RSS at the time he assassinated Gandhiji, or even that he received encouragement from Savarkar. I am also not troubled by the fact that former RSS leaders or present day leaders have quarrels with Gandhiji. Who did not have quarrels with him? We forget the fact that Gandhiji was a politician first and whatever else later. It was not just the RSS that quarreled with him but so did Jinnah, Annie Besant, Aurobindo, Ambedkar, and a host of others. Annie Besant told Durga Das that she thought Gandhiji was leading the country to anarchy. Gandhijiâs personal peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies drove quite a few people up the wall. He was considered by many to be a âdifficult person,â and why not with his insistence that those around him and the people of India follow him in his peculiarly âasceticâ ways?
Christian missionaries heaped abuse on him, and the Communists did everything possible to undermine him. That these two political chameleons now seek to paint the RSS red with the blood of Gandhiji therefore is neither surprising nor out of character. Muslims did not really consider him their leader, and that the Mahatma comes in handy to them now to beat the RSS with is no different from othersâ use of him. I recall that in the U.S. a well-known Indian Muslim organization refused to use the term âMahatmaâ to refer to Gandhi because, of course, Mohammed is the last prophet, and there are no great souls after him.
The Congress Party that rode to power on Gandhijiâs coat-tails (or dhoti ends) does nothing more now than pay lip service to some of the most important ideals the Mahatma tried to propagate â simple living, honesty and openness, and non-violence. The Congress is as much a party of goons, opportunists, criminals, and ignoramuses as any other political party in India. The only difference is that the Congress Party wishes to claim Gandhiji for itself and to use his good name to continue in power by demonizing the BJP and the Sangh Parivar as the Mahatmaâs murderers.
Ghodse has been turned into an epitome of evil, and Gandhiji put on a pedestal. Thus, we have little opportunity to study the two as human beings. Ghodse was both an assassin and a good man: he was as much an ascetic and a lover of the Bhagavad Gita as was Gandhiji. Gandhiji was both a fascinating moral leader and a flawed politician. And Gandhiji is now etched in our memories as an extraordinary man in no small measure because he was assassinated and did not die a frustrated and bitter old man neglected by the country and Congress leaders.
Because he was assassinated we now ignore the frailties and the follies of the Mahatma. Prof. Bharat Gupt of Delhi University argues that Gandhijiâs was an Indian medieval mindset which sought personal salvation akin to the followers of the Bhakti tradition. He sought to organize society for reasons of Bhakti rather than for social reform and control that previous Indian reformers had fought for and espoused. That is why people like Ambedkar did not much care for Gandhijiâs social movement. His was a contrast from the classical Hindu vision of balance between the four stages of the individual life â <i>brahmacharya, grihastya, vanaprastha, and sannyasa (chaturashrama)</i>, and the four concerns of Hindus â <i>dharma, artha, kama and moksha (purushaarthas)</i>. His was a mind that was fairly ignorant of the ancient systems of Indian knowledge and arts, and hence his restrictive definition and view of the Hindu self. Gupt argues that Gandhijiâs transition from the medieval to the modern without the understanding of the ancient led to his incomplete view of Indian history, culture, and mores.
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Gandhiji defined <i>satya</i> (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence) as positivistic and absolutist respectively. In his autobiography, <i>âMy Experiments with Truthâ</i> factual and ethical truth is equated with ultimate truth. But in the practice of ahimsa, a mystical force of non-violence is presumed to be experienced as ultimate truth that can bring about the change of heart in the opponent. In other words, his practice of truth or transparently right conduct acquires the mystical power of saving the self and the others. This is the medieval <i>Vaishnava</i> practice where surrender through right conduct âsavesâ the devotee. But as a political doctrine this approach does not always deliver the change of heart in the opponent, let alone oneself. Thus Gandhijiâs disappointing engagement not only with Muslims, Christians, the British, and the secular-millenarian Communists but also to a large extent with Hindu Indians too. Unless we understand clearly why Gandhiji evoked mixed responses, we will simply continue to deify him by building his statues and naming roads after him, and by ignoring him in our daily routines.
Similarly, Gandhian economics rests on sharing with the <i>bhaktas</i> the material wealth and regarding the owner as the trustee. It also rests on the principal that frugality is essential to keep the mind free for higher activity. The same is true of his attitude to sex. All these of course are/were neither new nor strange in ascetic and spiritual practices. But to bring them into the public sphere and to insist that all Indians follow him was both the weakness and the arrogance of Gandhiji. Individual transformation is what is emphasized in Indian/Hindu spiritual practice. The organization of society for pragmatic ends needed and needs a different approach. The utopian society that Gandhiji wanted to construct thus is not dissimilar to any other millenarian ideal, and thus fraught with the same dangers.
Gandhiji, strangely enough, was not averse to pragmatism. He wrote a lot, he traveled enough, and he put himself in the limelight often so that the world would not ignore him. Even in the modest India collection at our university there are shelves overflowing with Gandhiana. While the Catholic Church will not anoint him a saint anytime soon, he is already sainted by the world which frowns upon any criticism of him, and which then promptly ignores him.