Rangeen Kagaz: Gandhi but not Gandhi 1.0

I knew Gandhi wrote a lot but I did not realise that every scrap of paper he wrote on, is preserved. I was reading some texts for the course Gandhi’s Critique of Modernity when I came across this website that has a collection of his letters. These are not just political letters or letters published publicly by Gandhi, these are everyday letters to his sons, Ashram dwellers, and so on. When there is so much material available in his own lucid words, Gandhi should be an easy to understand figure. Alas, that is not to be. He was a prolific thinker and kept grappling with his experiments with truth until the end. 65 years after his death, the reader’s quest is to wade through numerous pages to grasp the essence of what Gandhi said.

I have been so engulfed in Gandhi’s writings that they are cropping up in my dreams now. In last night’s dream, I kept trying to figure out where Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj ideas got sidelined by his larger-than-life image of ‘Bapu’.
He consistently championed truth and the four stages of Swaraj, yet the public just followed the political tools of non-violence and Satyagraha. Maybe because there are so many facets to his journey, my brain kept moving fluidly across time and space boundaries. If Prof. Kenwyn Smith was here, he would say that is to be expected- dreams are the product of right brain thinking.

My dream started with Gandhi’s arrival in India in 1915. I zoomed into Gandhi in a photograph taken in Karachi on February 1916[1]. Gandhi is sitting in a carriage. His eyes are downcast making him look like a shy figure instead of the lawyer who’d successfully led the Satyagraha movement in South Africa. The carriage is surrounded by throngs of people who had come to see him. He was almost an instant celebrity when he returned to his homeland. Today it is hard to imagine a Gujarati Hindu going to Karachi and receiving a warm welcome by the Citizen’s Association while addressing a public gathering. Religion played a role in his popularity then too as many of the people who welcomed him were Hindus living in Karachi. Gandhi had not yet started looking like Bapu in this picture. He’d chosen Indian over Western style of clothing and his bowed head was covered with a flat black cap. It was only in September 1921 that Gandhi gave up wearing shirt and cap and resolved to wear only a loin-cloth in devotion to homespun cotton and simplicity[2].

Bapu’s image of a man in a white shawl and dhoti is indelible. Even when one imagines him speaking at a Congress convention before 1921, one still holds the classic image of Bapu. Perhaps this is why Jamil Dehlavi in the movie Jinnah always shows Gandhi like that. My dream had taken me from Gandhi in Karachi to Gandhi in Calcutta Congress session in 1920 where he is sharing the stage with Jinnah. Compared to Attenborough’s Gandhi, Dehlavi’s looked a little clownish with a weird accent. While the movie is about Jinnah, it shows how powerful Gandhi had become in just four years of active political life in India. As soon as Jinnah says “I beg to oppose this hasty resolution” against Gandhi’s proposal, somebody from the audience interrupts with “Mahatma ke khilaaf baat naa karein”, meaning do not speak against the Mahatma. The speech also shows the early dissent against Gandhi’s ideas as Jinnah refers to them as “dragging in of religious symbols”. He addresses Gandhi as “Mr. Gandhi” in his speech for which the public shouts him down. In the scene, a man stands up in the audience and shouts “Say Mahatma”.

But who was the Mahatma? In my dream, I was thinking of the ephemeral figure that flits around in Lage Raho Munnabhai or the statues of lathi-wielding Gandhi that are omnipresent in India. I then saw myself sitting in Ritwik’s tutorial, discussing the four types of Gandhi mentioned in an Ashish Nandy article[3]. We had decided that Lage Raho Munnabhai showed the ragamuffin Gandhi, the third type out of the four kinds of Gandhi described by Nandy. When the second type of Gandhi was mentioned, I thought of khadi-wearing old men drinking goat milk at the bank of the Sabarmati. And then probably because of the nature and food references, I opened Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan on my laptop. I sat there wondering how Gandhi would have answered Pollan’s question of what to eat for dinner in today’s life? He’d probably have lamented and fasted for the whole American society for their industrial food supply chain. It is funny and at the same time interesting how our brains link topics. I was studying Pollan for Sociology of the Environment and it popped up when I was dreaming about Gandhi. In the dream, I started paying attention to Ritwik who was talking about the deification of Gandhi, people thronging for his darshan, and miracles invoked by uttering Gandhi’s name[4]. But in these swirl of images, what happens to the fundamentals that Gandhi stood for? His three basic themes of Swaraj: self-respect, self-realisation and self-reliance. He championed privileging the rural over the urban because he perceived that power balance was heavily tipped in favour of urban elite.[5] My dream took me to different scenes with Gandhi to try to find out where his ideas lost power. But I’ll keep that description for my next post. It was one long dream.

[1] "The Man, The Mahatma." ThinkQuest. Oracle Foundation. Web. 10 Feb. 2013. .

[2] "Chronology 1921." Chronology of Gandhi's Life. Gandhi Serve Foundation. Web. 10 Feb. 2013. .

[3] Nandy, Ashish. “Gandhi after Gandhi”. The Little Magazine, Vol 1(1). Web. 8 Jan. 2013

[4] Amin, Shahid. “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakphur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2”. Subaltern Studies III. Ed. Ranajit Guha. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984. 289-348.

[5] Heredia, Rudolf C. “Interpreting Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj”. The Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 34 no.24 (1999):1499

Patna gets world's tallest Gandhi statue (ibnlive.in.com)

Gandhi letter sells for £115,000 (bbc.co.uk)

Gandhi's faithful dissenter (thehindu.com)

The truth about Mahatma Gandhi: he was a wily operator, not India's smiling saint (telegraph.co.uk)