In memoriam

Goodbye to Ramu

ONE of the problems of modern Indian biography is that it wavers between scandal and hagiography. The moment a man dies, he acquires sainthood for a week. What was a tortured, searching, contradictory person becomes frozen, fixed, familiar; a monument, a statue. If one tries to be neutral, the memoir sounds like unsuccessful curriculum vitae. We turn our friends into commemorative stamps, licking the first day covers of forgetfulness.

Ramu Gandhi, India’s finest philosopher died last week. But that says little of the man. Brilliance can be painful, especially when it tries to repeat itself. To summarise Ramu as a career would be cowardly. He was a thought experiment, a metaphor of searching for all of us. He was a story we must tell honestly, without embarrassment. He was a pain in the social neck, an albatross embodying the promise and potential of a philosophical revival, a brilliant intellectual and maddening storyteller, especially when his metaphors were too ripe or too raw. He was a friend, teacher, stranger, enemy. A celebration. An embarrassment.

He belonged to no institution, because he exhausted so many of them. Delhi, Hyderabad, Shantiniketan, Shimla, Oxford. He was utterly generous but always in search of a listener. He could be totally compelling, yet stun you with the curare of boredom, with a prolonged verbosity that made you desperate for a cup of tea or something stronger. Accompanied by tea, he was a joy; without tea he could be unbearable. Taken neat, he was a pleasure but when he mixed philosophical metaphors, he gave you a hangover. Between the intoxication and the hangover, there was always Ramu, my favourite bazaar of contradictions.

As a philosopher he could torture or seduce texts in any direction. He was a conjurer afraid of failed magic. He had seven league boots for a mind, but could limp tiredly for hours groping with life and a life of ideas. He was an outstanding exponent of Advaita, of non-duality, yet sometimes struggled helplessly between Mary and Magdalene. Deeply and fundamentally, Indian intellectuals are afraid of the sexual and the erotic. Ramu struggled openly with both. He realised that the problem of the secular idiom was its a-sexuality, its anti-erotic politics. He sought to constantly seed it with the fecundity of a more supple language as metaphor and as myth. He was afraid of old age and yet it redeemed him. Magdalene became Madonna or a Modigliani painting.

He retired to the IIC, a pretentious little club, like a sage returning to a forest and became its informal scholar in residence. It was the only institution that honoured him in its everydayness and eventually mourned him. Not the bureaucrats but the waiters at the bar. He was their friend and familiar. He loved his glass of rum every evening. It was an unfailing ritual. The day after he died, one of the waiters left a glass of rum near his chair. It was a superb salute by an unnamed waiter. A moment of grace which honoured our finest thinker, an act which no formal institution could perform.

The official institutions and their directors must have sighed in relief. As a statue they could salute him; as a living evolving thinker they could not cope with him or honour him or find him a niche, a nest that could let him ferment playfully in peace. It was the thoughtfulness of individuals that sustained him. Loyalty as Vidya Rao, a Suresh Sharma or an Udayan Vajpayee proved could be an art form and Ramu inspired such phenomena. They created the hospitality, the spaces, even an elegance when our institutions were too prim to house Ramu as a scholar in residence. We still have to learn how to provide hospitality to a nomad, home to a wanderer and refuge to an untiring warrior of the mind. A domesticated professor of philosophy is everyone’s dream; a living, inventive, fermenting thinker is a nightmare. Ramu’s was a perpetual love affair with ideas. I can hear him muttering, ‘I contradict myself, therefore I am,’ or ‘I invent myself, therefore I am.’ Then laughingly asking, ‘What is the self that you and I seek to invent everyday at rum time?’

Ramu’s philosophy was a struggle with cosmology, with politics as history, and with biography. To borrow from R.K. Narayan, he was a painter of ideas, metaphors and signs.

As a philosopher, he struggled to celebrate the availability of religious ideas. Around philosophy, he created a triptych, around Ramkrishna/Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi and Mohandas Gandhi. The first two were treated respectfully as harbingers, inventors of an India to come. They created the philosophies, the attitudes, the ethos that made the freedom movement possible; the forest of symbols, seeds and weeds, around which modern India grew. The second figure was Ramana, Ramu’s special delight. Ramana just was. His Arunachala made the British empire verbose and irrelevant. All he had to do was to smile or burp and the Churchills and Curzons looked meaningless. It was the power or the powerlessness of a different worldview. Then there was Gandhi as possibility, as responsibility, as burden, a hermeneutics in a loin cloth. His was a politics around philosophical and religious inventiveness, a semiotics of body, dress, tools, prayer and vulnerability which the imperial sensorium could not match.

This triptych of philosophical ideas was the tool box with which Ramu confronted three problems of politics: (i)) the partition and with it every riot and demolition, (ii) the girl-child and with her every metaphor of sex, eroticism and domesticity and, (iii) Swaraj as a search for autonomy, authenticity and self-realization.

Around these topics Ramu could be exasperating, inventive, surprising, refreshing and futile. This roller coaster ride through Indian history, politics and religion produced the worst and the best of Ramu. He saw unexpected complementarities between Gandhi and Subhas Bose. He created playful connections between kabbadi and racism. He was like a child general, precociously summoning Ramkrishna, Jnaneshwara, Ramana and Aurobindo to answer modern questions, summoning his modified myths to respond to modern dilemmas. It was a Leela in a modern sense. I have heard Ramu discussing the emergency at the CSDS, quarrelling happily with a fantastic cast of scholars – K.J. Shah lisping Wittgenstein, Nandy playing Nandy, Kothari summoning politics to battle metaphysics, Dhirubhai ordering every Machiavellian question to stem Ramu’s poetic flow and Veena Das insisting on rigour, while being seduced by the charm of Ramu’s enthusiasm for metaphors. It was the best of times for Indian social science with T.N. Madan and J.P.S. Uberoi adding tadka to an endless debate. Ramu was a part of Indian social science when the whole was more than the sum of the parts, when each intellectual added some energy, quality, magic to the other. It did not last long, but for those who were there it was Camelot before the moderates turned up and the knights went into self-destruct. Truth and ethics was still currency and political correctness was still far away.

Ramu’s books do not quite capture the muscularity of his oral thought. When you read Muniya’s Light you want to shake him in desperation. Brilliant ideas, badly written, can drive you to despair. He sought all kinds of channels for his performance – from discourses to dance dramas. A jugalbandhi with himself turned into a jugalbandhi with other creative people, with Shovana Narayan and Tyeb Mehta in particular. In this he was charming, playing the ascetic aesthete with great verve.

If there was one field where Ramu’s plasticity of metaphor was somehow in control it was in confronting painting. His long essay on Tyeb Mehta’s triptych at Shantiniketan, Swaraj, has powerful insights. By locating Mehta’s work between Picasso’s Guernica and Francis Bacon’s The Scream, Ramu is able to play between higher and lower octaves of art, between Picasso’s economy and inventiveness and Bacon’s excess and despair. Swaraj is his gift to his friends in art, from Tyeb Mehta and Ram Kumar to Arpana Caur and Vivan Sundaram. It is also an acknowledgement that the philosophical metaphor in language meets its counterpart in the visual metaphor of the art. A Wittgenstein needs a Duchamp, a Russell a Chagall, a Heidegger a Bacon.

As a triptych, Ramu himself has to be grasped beyond cosmology and politics as a struggle with biography. Here one is often tempted to get psychoanalytical, but Ramu was his own therapist. I read Ramu’s life as a composite of three phases. The first was the young Ramu, Oxbridge accent on his kurta, complete with Indu and Leela. Indu became a riddle he could only handle at a distance, while Leela was the laughter of his life. But worse, there was a burden of genealogy, the fact of having Gandhi and Rajaji as grandfathers. Ramu and Harilal were in fact the most interesting responses to Gandhi. I must admit that the three brothers came out brilliantly, each with his own approach to Gandhi. Rajmohan was the most dutiful, producing the books that explained the legacy. Gopal Gandhi was lighter, but not light-hearted with a civility and elegance he created as a style. But Ramu was the most brilliant, both in explicating Gandhi and for putting Gandhi to task, solving new philosophical problems from the bomb to the Babri Masjid. These years, especially around the emergency saw Ramu at his freshest.

The next decades were mixed ones, where as one wag put it, ‘He was an enigma rapt in a riddle, swathed in humbug enclosing a genuine search for a new hermeneutics of dissent.’ He was alternatively playful and painful, but those who sat with him saw a complex mind at work. I learnt philosophy just watching Ramu perform at the Delhi School cafe everyday. Wittgenstein, Berlin, Bollywood, Ramana were all part of his philosophical musical chairs and I was grateful for it. There were flaws, there were scars, but both were open. One felt Ramu’s mistakes were more precious than the establishment’s answers.

In the last years he invented a new Shantivan for himself at the IIC, becoming its greatest scholar in residence. These were lonely years, but he developed a sense of equanimity adding a soul to the soullessness of central Delhi. And it is there that he passed away as a roving director of ideas in the university that he loved best, turning it into a gurukul, even a lonely gharana of ideas.

He must have been alone. As long as Nirmal Verma and J. Swaminathan were there, he was assured of a companionship of the mind. I can picture them now sitting in some non-dualist dhaba, between heaven and hell, talking away and drinking life to the full. They were not boy scouts of the mind, sipping life in little pipettes. I can see Ramu telling some God that He needs to create new metaphors or driving heaven crazy with his horrible puns. My favourite – ‘creation as a rum metaphor’. I am sure God, unlike some vice-chancellors I know, has given him a new philosophical Rubic’s cube to entertain himself and the world around him. So goodbye Ramu. You were friend, teacher, trickster, bore, babble, philosopher, intellectual. Good Bye and thank you for being perennially Ramu.

Shiv Visvanathan