Gandhi
After Gandhi -
The Fate of Dissent in Our Times
Ashis
Nandy
New Delhi, 21 July 2000
There are four Gandhis who have survived Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi's (1861-1948) death. Fifty years after
his assassination, it may be useful to establish their
identities, as the British police might have done in the
high noon of colonialism. All the four Gandhis are
troublesome, but they trouble different people for
different reasons and in different ways. They are also
useable in contemporary public life four distinct
ways.*
I say this not in sorrow, but in admiration. For the
ability to disturb people - or, for that matter, be
useable - one hundred thirty years after one's birth and
fifty years after one's death is no mean achievement.
Frankly, I do not care who the real Gandhi was or is. Let
academics debate that momentous issue. Contemporary
politics is not about 'truths' of history; it is about
remembered pasts and problems of fashioning a future
based on collective memories. For good or for worse,
Gandhi seems to have entered that memory.
Two qualifications at the beginning. First, I am no
Gandhian. My opinion should not count, but Gandhism, as I
understand it, is greater than Gandhi was. Gandhi himself
more or less admitted so, when he gave the entire credit
for his ideas to ancient wisdom, and he is certainly not
diminished by that admission. Actually, he comes off as
more human and, for that matter, more self-reflexive.
Gandhi could not live up to his principles partly
because he was a practical politician, and the job of
politics is to dilute ideological and moral purism. To
use my favourite commendation, borrowed from the obituary
written on him by Arnold Toynbee, Gandhi was one prophet
who was willing to live in the slum of politics. He could
not afford to be a perfect Gandhian. It is a tribute to
his memory when one calls him an imperfect Gandhian.
Second, I should clarify for the sake of the incurably
scholarly that the Gandhis I discuss are all Weberian
ideal types. They are tools of analysis and at places -
this Max Weber did not bargain for - caricatures. That
means they are unreal but not untrue. In this respect, I
have been influenced by literary theorist D. R. Nagaraj
who loved to claim, following William Blake, that
stylised exaggeration could be a pathway to wisdom.
Now the surviving Gandhis. All of them are well known.
I am merely bringing to awareness tacit knowledge.
However, it is my responsibility as a psychologist to
register the warning that the knowledge that exists and
is tacit is often the most disturbing and the most
painful to own up.
The first
Gandhi
The first Gandhi is the Gandhi of the Indian State and
Indian nationalism. I find this Gandhi difficult to gulp
and so would have, I believe, Gandhi himself. But many
people find only this Gandhi tolerable and live happily
with him.
The biography and political career of this official
Gandhi began early. After independence, the political
presence of the Father of the Nation, his memory and his
writings were proving very problematic to the
functionaries of the young Indian state and to
intellectuals who had already begun to specialise in
hovering, like so many flies, over the state's patronage
structure. Not merely the strong anarchist strand in his
ideology, but even his peculiar denial of clear-cut
divisions between the private and the public, the
religious and the secular, and the past and the pre-sent,
were proving a real headache. These intellectuals were as
disturbed by him as his assassin was. Nathuram Godse, a
self-avowed rationalist and modernist, in his last
statement in the court that sentenced him to death
explicitly claimed he had committed a patricide to save
the nascent Indian State from an anti-modern, political
neophyte and a lunatic.
After independence, Gandhi's own associates would have
liked to bury Gandhi six feet under the ground, while
keeping his image intact as an icon of the Indian
nation-state. Not because they disliked Gandhi, but
because he looked such an anachronism in the post-World
War II atmosphere of centralised states, social
engineering and 'realist' international politics.
Since then, Indian statists of both the right and the
left have never acknowledged their enormous debt to Mr
Godse for imposing on the Father of the Nation a
premature martyrdom that straight-away gave Gandhi a
saintly status and effectively finished him off as a live
political presence. Their brainchildren still hold it
against Gandhi that he has occasionally refused to oblige
them and has defied the saintliness imposed on him,
presumably as a strategic means of neutralising him. He
would have certainly differed fundamentally from his
gifted grandson, philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi on this
issue.
This is the Gandhi, we the residents of the imperial
city of Delhi are once in a while told, who is about to
be ensconced on the pedestal vacated by King George V at
India Gate. It will probably be his final coronation as
the patron saint of India's creaky First Republic. It
will also be the most comic use of Gandhi since that
middle-class, tragic, romantic hero, Subhash Chandra
Bose, named one of the brigades of the Indian National
Army after Gandhi during the final days of World War
II.
With the declining status of the Indian state and with
various westernised versions of Indian nationalism
sprouting like so many mushrooms around us under the
guise of cultural self-affirmation, this Gandhi is
presently not in the best of health. What the late Mr
Godse could not do to him, the Hindutva brigade and the
two Bombay film buffs turned potency-driven flag-bearers
of Hindu nationalism, Bal Thackeray and Lal Krishna
Advani, between them have already managed to do through
the Babri mosque episode.
The second
Gandhi
The second Gandhi is the Gandhi of the Gandhians. He
is at the moment suffering from an acute case of anaemia.
The Gandhians' Gandhi is occasionally quite loveable and
has a grandfatherly, benign presence in the Indian public
lore. But he is often a crushing bore, apart from being a
Victorian puritan mistakenly born in India. He drinks
Nimbupani - unlike the Gandhi of the Indian state and
nationalism who drinks Campa Cola, technically made by an
Indian company, but not Coca Cola, made by a
multinational corporation - and wears home-made
Khadi.
One thing the second Gandhi does not do. He does not
touch politics. In fact, he cannot touch politics, lest
the subsidy and grants from the Government of India to
the various Ashrams named after him, to hand-spun Khadi,
and to the ritual seminars on Gandhism dry up. He does
occasionally, in this incarnation, convene meetings to
condemn the growing criminalisation of politics, uneven
development or corruption in the country. In these
semi-nars everybody sheds bountiful tears about the state
of affairs in India without naming any names and without
mentioning any party. Everyone is happy after the event;
even the corrupt politicians who have criminal
connections lustily join in the applause.
The Gandhi of Gandhians travels all over the world to
preach Gandhism or lecture on Gandhian thought. He speaks
through the Gandhians to the public in India much less
frequently. Rightly so, because in India his audience is
usually pathetically small. And even that small audience
frequently looks sleepy, inattentive and tired at the
beginning of the sermons. They come because they expect
to be seen and because it would not look good if they are
absent. The average age of such Gandhians is at the
moment about to touch hundred and the average age of the
listeners not much behind. The Gandhians feel that this
is because Indian people have failed Gandhi.
Others less respectful towards such Gandhians feel
that actually the Gandhians have failed both the Indian
people and Gandhi. They point out that those who swear by
Gandhi day and night could have walked another kind of
road, as the likes of Baba Amte, Anna Hazare and
Sunderlal Bahuguna have done.
The third
Gandhi
The third Gandhi is the Gandhi of the ragamuffins,
eccentrics and the unpredictable. This Gandhi is more
hostile to Coca-Cola than to Scotch whisky and considers
the local versions of Coca-Cola more dangerous than
imported ones. This is because his objection to highly
mechanised fast foods is structural and, therefore, he
considers it more dangerous if, on nationalist grounds,
long-lasting, deep-rooted Indian structures are created
to produce superfluous items of mass consumption within
the Indian economy. And he says so in so many words. Not
given to bogus nationalism, he would rather import
Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola, for those Indians who cannot
live without them, than underwrite Campa Cola.
This Gandhi - vintage Hind Swaraj - is also bit of a
nag and a spoilt-sport. He loves to be a maverick and an
oddity in our public life. It is this Gandhi Vandana
Shiva had in mind, whether she knew it or not, when she
filed a suit in an American court against the patenting
of some derivatives of neem. It is this Gandhi who has
guided the notorious agitation of Medha Patkar against
the Narmada dam, Claude Alvares against Operation Flood,
and Vandana Shiva against the Green Revolution. And it is
this Gandhi who lived in the writer-dancer-thinker
Shivaram Karanth who in his late eighties took on the
deceit, stupidity and necrophilia of India's nuclear
establishment.
This Gandhi has other subversive affiliations, too. He
prefers the company of known critics of his worldview
like V. M. Tarkunde and even Pakistanis like Asma
Jehangir to the company of those who claim to bear his
name and have had the run of Indian politics for more
than two decades. The average age of those who keep the
company of this Gandhi is low, but it would have been
lower, but for some young-at-heart like Tarkunde and
Kuldip Nayar who push it up inconsiderately.
And both this Gandhi and his young friends are a real
nuisance to the Indian State, to the country's officially
defined security interests, and scientific establishment.
They are a menace to the common-sense that passes as
sanity but can be actually called, adapting an expression
used by my erstwhile guru, Sigmund Freud, psychopathology
of everyday public life.
I have a personal stake in this Gandhi and his
terribly irresponsible young friends. Many of the things
I have done in my life these youngsters are now doing
better. The party of the ragamuffins is growing in
strength. To spite my numerous enemies I can even say
that, even after my death, what I am saying and doing
will be said and done more aggressively, confidently,
elegantly and with greater political finesse by them.
This thrills me, for even after my death, I should be
able to haunt my enemies who survive me.
Incidentally, this Gandhi does not have to wear Khadi
or abjure alcohol. His usual dress is blue jeans and
Khadi kurta and, to please journalist Raminder Singh who
wrote about it with great relish in India Today, he also
carries a jhola. Many suspect that this Gandhi has now
very tenuous links with his birthplace, Gujarat, and that
he may disown the state as one that has disowned him.
I am afraid this Gandhi and the evil company he keeps
are going to be a real pain in the neck for the sane,
rational, well-educated Indians in the coming decades.
Anthropologist and political activist Fred Chiu of
Taiwan, frequently reminds me of the old saying that
wherever civilisation goes, it takes with it syphilis. He
claims that nowadays wherever global capitalism goes, it
takes with it political activism, NGOs and, presumably,
the jholawalas who at the first opportunity begin to
harass heroic corporate investors and captains of
industry. This, the votaries of global capitalism and the
business tycoons are tearfully coming to realise, is an
unmentionable hidden cost of capitalism. Frankly, I have
secret admiration for the gumption of those who extract
this cost.
The fourth
Gandhi
The fourth Gandhi is usually not read. He is only
heard, often second- or third-hand. While a few like
Martin Luther King carefully and critically assess and
use his work, the rest do not even know what he wrote.
Nor do they care to. Their attitude to Gandhi is similar
to that of the late A. K. Gopalan to Karl Marx. He
reportedly once said that he had not read any Marx
because he would not have understood him, but he remained
a Marxist nonetheless.
This Gandhi is primarily a mythic Gandhi. Unlike in
real life, he conforms fully to his own tenets - at least
according to his admirers in the environmental,
anti-nuclear and feminist movements. For, the 'realities'
of his life are derived from the principles of Gandhism
as they have spread throughout the world as a new legend
or epic.
Some year ago, an American columnist, Richard Grenier,
taken aback by the immense popularity of Richard
Attenborough's Gandhi, tried to debunk Gandhi by pointing
out major discrepancies between Gandhi's life and
philosophy. (Grenier of course did not have anything to
say about whether he rejected Milton and Beethoven
because they had a record of child abuse or Plato because
he justified it in the context of homosexuality.)
But such attempts at demystification do not work
because the Greniers of the world confront the need to
believe in human potentialities and a curious compulsion
to intercede in situations of man-made suffering that
often seems basic to human nature.
When the Polish workers rose against their
authoritarian regime in the1980s, they talked of Lech
Walesa as their Gandhi, a description the Vodka-guzzling,
tough speaking, trade union leader must have found
difficult to swallow. But the Polish labourers were not
interested in the historical, verifiable similarities or
dissimilarities between the two; they were making a
different statement. They were saying something about
what they themselves wanted and about how Gandhi with his
weapon of militant nonviolence, had become in our time a
symbol of defiance of hollow tyrants and bureaucratic
authoritarianism backed by the power of the state and
modern technology.
For above all, this Gandhi is a symbol of those
struggling against injustice, while trying to retain
their humanity even when faced with unqualified
in-humanity. That is why when Benito Aquino of
Philippines was assassi-nated, the demonstrators on the
streets of Manila did exactly what the Polish labourers
at Gdansk did. They shouted 'Benito, our Gandhi,' and if
this seems only a coincidence, the Burmese students who
rose against their military regime some years ago also
invoked Gandhi in the same way. Only their leader this
time was Aung San Suu Kyi, who had not read Gandhi when
she began to be thoughtlessly accused of being an
uncompromising Gandhian. At different times, this epithet
has fitted different people - from Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan
to Nelson Mandela.
The fourth Gandhi walks the mean streets of the world
threatening status quo and pompous, glib bullies
everywhere and in every area of life. The tyrants
undervalue him, because he has no arms to back him up and
the professional revolutionaries make fun of him because
he talks of nonviolence. Both usually pay heavily for
this underestimation. In the long term, the former can
only take solace from the fact that sometimes the
intended revolution against them fails, paradoxically
after succeeding spectacularly.
Revolutions, whoever does not know, eat up their
children both physically and morally. The revolutionaries
- nowadays usually a motley crowd of middle-aged,
arm-chaired, cynical academics, past their prime and
enjoying sinecures in the universities - can take solace
from the fact that they can hold ponderous seminars on
the 'historical' limits of Gandhism that should have
ensured its death decades ago. But, by the time the
seminar ends as a resounding academic success, this
mythic Gandhi has moved on to other slums of the world to
lead new formations against his erst-while
protégés.
I have given you four Gandhis and indicated my
preferences, so that you can make your choice. But then,
you do not have to choose any of the four. Perhaps that
will be the wisest course. For Gandhi can be dangerous.
It is much better for you to hang his portrait in your
office or home, like many others do, to show your respect
to this new addition to the Indian pantheon, and then
take your children to a picnic on the public holiday that
his birthday has become.
*) This essay has grown out of a brief note
published in The Times of India, 30 January 1996 and was
published in its present form in The Little
Magazine, May 2000, pp. 38-41.
Copyright © 2001 TFF
& authors
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