Gandhi but not Gandhi 1.1

I wrote about the Gandhi dream in my last post. This is a continuation of that dream.

From Ritwik’s tutorial, my brain moved to Gandhi talking to a villager in Sabarmati Ashram. Gandhi was passionately describing his concept of an ideal village. The villager then asked Gandhi that why doesn’t he take another tour and spend more time in villages this time.

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’.

Swimming in Ideas

When I saw the course Gandhi’s Critique of Modernity on YIFP curriculum, I expected it to be an extension of Makers of Modern India by Rudrangshu Mukherjee. Gandhi was the only leader whom we did not discuss in that course so I was looking forward to a story-telling of Gandhi’s life and reading some of his writings. Critique of modernity was a phrase for me that did not go beyond what Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj. Coming from a non-social science background, my only introduction to such movements has been through Gil Harris and Anunaya Choubey in their courses on Shakespeare and Art Appreciation respectively. So here’s how the cloud of ideas has influenced me so far, where the pivot is learning about modernity.

I am an economist and an engineer by training, so rational thought is like the core of my being. It is surprising that while championing rationality, I never stopped to define or explore what rationality is.