Gandhi has gone

TRIDIP SUHRUD

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IN March 1948, the extended Gandhi family came together in Sevagram. Vinoba, Nehru, Kriplani, Rajendra Prasad, Kumarappa, Kishorlal Mashruwala, JP, Azad, Kaka Saheb, Bibi Amtussalam and Thakkar Bapa, along with many others, had gathered to ask themselves and the nation a question, a question of faith. Do we have the faith to strive towards a society based on equality and justice through means of truth and ahimsa, they asked themselves and us.

Vinoba’s agony was most palpable. He had relinquished caste, but was unable to forget that he belonged to the same caste as the man who had killed Gandhi. He was both sad and filled with a sense of shame, deeply perturbed that those who had killed Gandhi had invoked the Gita, a philosophy by which both Gandhi and he had sought to live their lives. The fundamental question for him was whether those who professed to live by Gandhi’s ideals had the requisite faith in the ideals of ahimsa to sacrifice their all. He, like everyone else in that conference, was groping. All present felt enveloped by darkness, unable to see their way forward, seeking illumination from the life and death of Gandhi.

Their question was framed by an organizational dilemma. What kind of an organization would enable them, the Congress and the newly formed Congress-led government, to move towards a society that was both just and equal? Vinoba argued against an organizational, institutionalized Gandhi. He wanted each one to find his/her own understanding of what Gandhi meant. He argued that to mourn the loss of Gandhi’s principles was to believe that these ideals were uniquely available only to Gandhi, as if they were his ‘hereditary property’. For him, though Gandhi most epitomized these ideals, they were as available to him and to all others in equal measure. His conflict was a choice between his desire to be silent, become a tapasvi and the call of his colleagues that he lead the new movement and new organization.

J.C. Kumarappa likened the meeting to the meeting of Jesus’ disciples. With his deep distrust of the extant forms of governance and logic of power, he articulated the need for an organization that would take forward the true legacy of Gandhi. What this true legacy consisted of was not a matter of doubt for him and all others gathered at Sevagram. Gandhi for them epitomized the ideal that engaged with fellow beings to alleviate their pain and suffering through means that were pure and practitioners who were equally pure. Along with Kriplani and Mashruwala, Kumarappa spoke eloquently for ‘constructive programmes’, and setting up an organization that would be a federation of all organizations that Gandhi had created for constructive activities. And yet, despite his fervent advocacy, he was the one who was most sensitive to Vinoba’s fears that institutions and structured organizations have a tendency to increase violence and deepen untruth.

 

Most of the conference was devoted to thinking about a structure that would simultaneously be an organization and a ‘brotherhood’, as Vinoba imagined it to be. Others like Pyarelal were torn between Gandhi’s ‘last will and testament’ which called for the dissolution of the Congress and the creation of the Lok Seva Sangh and their awareness of the role that the Congress had both played and was expected to play in the future. The result of this deliberation1 was the creation of the Sarva Seva Sangh, a non-political2 organization committed to a casteless and non-exploitative society through twenty-one constructive programmes.

The conference displayed a deep antipathy towards politics and governance. It was left to a sad, lonely and tired Nehru to provide an eloquent defence of the political realm, even as he agreed with Kriplani and Kumarappa that ‘governance’ came accompanied with an aesthetic problem. More than the others, he was troubled by the barbed wires and guards with open bayonets which had imprisoned him in ways that even the British never could. He spoke candidly about the problems of governance and the limits and constraints of governance. He also acknowledged the need for an organization that would carry forward the fundamental legacy of Bapu, as the government by itself could not solve everything.

 

But, he opposed the idea of the dissolution of the Congress and its replacement by a non-political organization like the Lok Seva Sangh. He pointed out that Congress and Gandhi had helped create the political realm, arguing that neither can the political realm be wished away nor can political life be brought to an end. He spoke of the need to retain the political character of the Congress while retaining its organic link with the constructive institutions.

The dilemma that the constructive workers faced and articulated remains a central question in our times. Which Gandhi? Whose Gandhi? Do we go to the Gandhi whose principle quest was to attain moksha, self-realization, to see God face to face? In other words do we seek out the Gandhi of Vinoba and Mashruwala, or do we embrace the Gandhi of Kumarappa, of constructive work? Or do we deal with the political Gandhi? What are we to do with the Gandhi of the Satyagraha Ashram, an institution that he claimed was his finest creation? Any new scholarship around Gandhi and the Gandhian question has to both ask and respond to this question.

 

A similar dilemma informs Rajmohan Gandhi’s biography of Gandhi.3 Rajmohan Gandhi’s quest is to search for the ‘true’ Gandhi, not the mythic Gandhi, not the Gandhi shrouded in metaphors, not the Gandhi of folklore, nor that of the billboards. He wants to peal off these layers and find the Mohandas. Rajmohan Gandhi has a further question: Which Gandhi should be considered the real one? Gandhi the politician or Gandhi the saint? Rajmohan Gandhi wants to ‘free Gandhi the person from his image or images, and present his life fully and honestly.’

This he does with admirable clarity. He narrates the story fully, comprehensively. His familiarity with the large body of biographical and memoir literature around Gandhi in various Indian languages is all too evident. He also brings to bear on this work his long and sustained engagement with subcontinental lives: Sardar Patel, Rajaji, Jinnah and other ‘Muslim minds’, not to forget his moving study of Ghaffar Khan as also his earlier biography of Gandhi. The narrative that he weaves is straightforward, faithful, unburdened by psychoanalytical leaps. The story is told as ‘one piece’ – from boyhood to the day he gave himself up to Ramanama. This is a story told with candour, with no attempt to gloss over any uncomfortable memories or episodes.

 

But, does he create a ‘touchable, seeable’ Gandhi? At least on this one account the book fails to satisfy. One does not get to meet the Gandhi of the ashram, the Gandhi who sought to be a satyagrahi and a sthitpragna, the Gandhi who was moved by the Christ on the Cross, the Gandhi who searched for the meaning of fasting and prayer, the Gandhi whose quest was to see God face to face. If it is Gandhi’s soul-searching that was enriched by the spiritual and political quest of ashramites that one wants to find from this account, one is likely to be dissatisfied. Nor do we get the Gandhi who sought to create a nation through the constructive programmes, for him a moral entity. Overall thus Rajmohan Gandhi’s Mohandas does not sufficiently illuminate us about the relationship between Gandhi’s politics, his spiritual quest, his ashrams and constructive programmes.

Perhaps the only biography in recent times that comes closest to this ‘touchable, seeable’ Gandhi is Narayan Desai’s four-part biography of Gandhi: My Life Is My Message.4 This quality is attained not only because Narayan Desai continues to live his life as a ‘Gandhijan’, a lifetime spent as a soldier in the peace army and as a constructive worker, his childhood years in Gandhi’s ashrams or that his life is equally illuminated by Gandhi, Vinoba and JP. It also comes from the fact that unlike most other biographers, Narayan Desai realizes that Gandhi’s quest was one indivisible whole, that there cannot be a Gandhi of the Dandi march different and separate from the Gandhi who fasted for self-purification. That the Gandhi of the discourses on the Gita cannot be divorced from the Gandhi who went out day after day cleaning the streets of Sindi village near Sevagram. He recognizes the inviolable link between Gandhi’s Ekadash Vrata (the eleven vows), his politics, spiritual quest and constructive activities.

 

Narayan Desai also foregrounds the ashram and the ashramites, for Gandhi’s story is incomplete without Polak, Kallenbach, Maganlal Gandhi, Charlie Andrews, Mirabehn, Mahadevbhai, Kishorlal, Kumarappa and Vinoba. They and other ashramites experimented along with Gandhi, on food, politics, body and brahmacharya. It was as much through their striving as his own that Gandhi sought to validate his experiments. They submitted to him but in and through their submission they also provided a critique of Gandhi. They allowed the manifestation of Gandhi that Vinoba spoke of to be possible.

Sudhir Ghosh’s memoirs5 of the role that he played as Gandhi’s emissary with the British Labour Government during 1945-47 is rich both in original historical material and anecdotal accounts. Ghosh considered Gandhi as ‘perhaps the greatest spiritual genius of India after the Buddha.’ Yet, though his own journey to Gandhi was through the Quakers like Horace Alexander and Agatha Harisson, Ghosh chooses to leave out this part of the spiritual journey from his account.

 

Unlike Rajmohan Gandhi who strove to capture the man and not the image, some seventy years before him a young man of 26, travelling aboard Samaria from New York to Dublin, dreamt of capturing the image of Gandhi. A.K. Chettiar resolved to make a documentary on the life of Gandhi.6 The year was 1937. Over the next two and a half years, he travelled across the world collecting rare, original footage, including about 200 feet of film given to him by Henry Polak of Gokhale’s visit to South Africa. The result was astounding – 50,000 feet of footage, which was edited into a 12,000 feet documentary film.7 Possibly, it is a reflection of our times that the film has been erased from our memories, as we chose instead to celebrate a Ben Kingsley and a Munnabhai.

To each of these chroniclers of Gandhi the world of scholarship owes a great debt. But without doubt, the greatest chronicler of the Mahatma was Mahadev Desai. He was not just the witness or the chronicler, he was the bearer of Truth. His unmatched diaries capture the unfolding of truth.8 C.B. Dalal followed in Mahadevbhai’s footsteps and provided a day-by-day account of Gandhi’s life in two volumes.9 K. Swaminathan and C.N. Patel’s careful scholarship is evident in the hundred volumes of the Collected Works.

 

The two recent contributions from Gopalkrishna Gandhi10 place him in this grand tradition of the chroniclers of the Mahatma. His A Frank Friendship is sheer delight, intellectually and visually. Beautifully illustrated, this book does not miss out even opaque leads from Gandhi’s various visits to Bengal. We, for instance, even learn what the Grand Eastern Hotel looked like and what plays were running in Calcutta – Gandhi did watch a play in Calcutta, purchasing a dress circle ticket for Rs 4 during his first visit to the city in 1896. All of Gandhi’s sixty-four visits to Bengal totalling to 566 days are chronicled in fascinating and hitherto unexplored detail. Bengal enriched Gandhi, and he in turn showered some special gifts on the province – his lonely pilgrimage through Noakhali, his miraculous fast in Calcutta and his moving exchanges with Tagore. The book captures the deep ambivalence that Bengal felt and continues to feel about the political and moral positions of Gandhi. Gopal Gandhi’s cultural chronology will help us understand this ambivalence, which Gandhi too felt and shared.

Incidentally, Gopal Gandhi’s anthology is quite unlike the earlier one by Raghvan Iyer. Here the unity is provided not by thematic arrangement but a personal journey – Gopal Gandhi’s journey to understand his grandfather, the desire to hear Gandhi narrate his story to a restless grandson. It is anchored in a belief that if only he had the capacity to hear, Bapu would tell him the story ‘between visitors, meetings, marches, mud packs, bursts of temper, and explosion of love.’ Gopal Gandhi has both the capacity to ask the questions of Gandhi and patiently await the response. The outcome is an anthology that is structured as a biography narrated in the first person. An instructive exercise, it teaches us how to read Gandhi, literally and figuratively. Like Narayan Desai, Gopal Gandhi also believes that Gandhi is best understood through his self-practices, however unsettling or quirky they might seem. Gopal Gandhi does write that his anthology has been rendered redundant by Rajmohan Gandhi’s Mohandas. But on this he is wide off the mark. In fact, a far better way to read Mohandas is to read Gopal Gandhi’s anthology and chronology as companion volumes. It is when read together as personal quests of two equally restless grandsons that the ‘touchable, seeable’ Gandhi emerges.

 

Rajmohan and Gopal Gandhi’s remarkable books, Sudhir Ghosh’s memoirs, A.K. Chettair’s journey and Narayan Desai’s biography of epic dimensions confirms one fact, to borrow Ramchandra Gandhi’s phrase, the fact of the ‘availability’ of Gandhi. Each of these approaches Gandhi as a faithful, but with the knowledge that submission allows for a critical insight that may elude a sceptic, generating a vision that is intensely personal. Yet despite its undeniable power this raises a troubling question: Is Gandhi available only as a personal vision, as an exemplar? It is troubling because in part this Gandhi has been available to us in the lives and practices of numerous followers. What we mourn is the loss of a societal Gandhi, the political Gandhi. Today, when we raise doubts about Gandhi’s relevance, it is the relevance of a moral polity that we question.

 

To find an answer to this dilemma we have to go back to that debate of March 1948. None of those present had the slightest doubt that Gandhi would continue to illuminate their personal lives. Their concern was whether the dream of a just and equal society attained by means of truth and non-violence by practitioners whose personal striving was to be equally pure was any longer possible, then and now. Vinoba said that a personal Gandhi is available through tapasya, but he agreed with Kumarappa that a societal Gandhi was possible only when we understand pain and suffering. Pain and suffering for them were not political categories of victimhood.

This pain, they argued, could be alleviated by engaging with society through constructive programmes and, as Nehru said then, by continuing to regard politics as a moral space. The answer for us then may not lie in the Sarva Seva Sangh, nor in being rigidly faithful to the list of twenty-one constructive programmes that the conclave agreed on. The real challenge for us is to re-imagine constructive programmes for our times, just as we re-imagine a personal Gandhi.

This would require that we give less primacy to the political realm, to free many categories like pain, suffering, loss, justice, forgiveness and even truth from the tyranny of the political. This might possibly allow us to think about our present equally through non-political metaphors. It might also unburden the political realm, if not free it from the desire to provide all answers. This could be our Lokniti.

 

Footnotes:

1. The deliberations of this conference held in Sevagram from 11 to 15 March 1948 have been published in a bilingual edition. Gandhi Is Gone: Who Will Guide Us Now? Edited by Gopalkrishna Gandhi (translated from Hindi by the editor and Rupert Snell), Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2007.

2. The Sarva Seva Sangh has got involved in direct political work twice; once during JP’s Sampoorna Kranti Movement in 1974/75 and again in 2002 elections in Gujarat to register its opposition to the ‘shameful happenings in Gujarat and the role of that government.’

3. Rajmohan Gandhi, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire. Penguin/Viking, New Delhi, 2006.

4. Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, translated from the original Gujarati by Tridip Suhrud, (Forthcoming: Orient Longman, 2008). Of course, the most alive Gandhi is to be found in 23 volumes of Mahadev Desai’s Diaries.

5. Sudhir Ghosh, Gandhi’s Emissary. Routledge, New Delhi, 2007 (originally published in 1967).

6. A. K. Chettiar, In The Tracks of The Mahatma: The Making of a documentary, edited and introduced by A. R. Venkatachalapathy, translated from the Tamil by S. Thillainayagam, Orient Longman, Chennai, 2006.

7. The complete English version of the film has been traced to the archives of the Gandhi Peace Foundation, Madurai.

8. Mahadev Desai’s diaries cover the period from 1917 to 1942. The diaries for the period 1917-1937 have been published in Gujarati in 23 volumes. The diaries for the other four years remain to be published even in Gujarati. A full translation of the diaries in English and Hindi remains incomplete.

9. C.B. Dalal’s Gandhij ni Dinvari is published in two parts. The first part covers the period from 2 October 1869 to 9 January 1915, while the second part covers the period from 9 January 1915, the day Gandhi returned to India from South Africa, to 30 January 1948.

10. Gopalkrishna Gandhi, A Frank Friendship: Gandhi and Bengal: A Descriptive Chronology, Seagull, Calcutta, 2007 and The Oxford India Gandhi: Essential Writings, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007.

 

  Seminar 581, ‘India 2007’, January 2008, pp. 92-95.

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