Touchstones: The disillusionment of Mahatma Gandhi

I am sitting down to write this column on October 2, which is being celebrated this year both as Gandhi Jayanti and Vijayadashami. I cannot remember this remarkable confluence as having ever occurred before in my life so I must share with you what I feel about this coincidence.

Vijayadashami (or Dasehra) was the day when my mother was born 102 years ago. Her presence has been a huge influence on the lives of all of us siblings and thousands of people she touched through her writings. As the embodiment of the fearless but loving matriarch, we owe her a debt that we can only pay by remembering her life. She lives on in her writings and even after so many years, her books are steadily sold all over the country. She has left a piece of herself in each one of us and, as with so many mothers, continues to speak to us in a voice that can never be forgotten. For the values she instilled in us, the courage to follow our own path and never deviate from the right, she was the embodiment of Gaura (Parvati), the goddess she was named after.

I have written about her in a memoir published soon after she died but the bond between us is what makes me the person I am now as I approach the age she was once. To detach yourself from all the strings that bind you – whether your children, possessions or desires – is easier said than done, believe me, but it is what life teaches you (often cruelly). She taught us this difficult lesson by living it with courage and dignity.

That said, let me come now to my homage to the Mahatma. Just as I look at my mother not as a famous author but as my guide, I try and assess what the Mahatma meant to the generation born after he died. Our lives were shaped by the Nehruvian age and although we were never allowed to forget what Gandhiji meant to an earlier generation, he became an icon we never related to in the same way. Our parents called him Bapu or the Mahatma, we called him Gandhiji. Our emotional connect was with Chacha Nehru, who reached out to us children so effortlessly. He was ours in the way that Gandhiji could never become. This is perhaps a reason why slowly the Mahatma became a revered icon we offered flowers to on his birth and death anniversaries but gradually, forgot what he had given us: swadeshi, satyagraha, non-violence.

The hard-won independence, achieved without shedding blood, by sweet reasonableness and the courage of one’s convictions make so much more sense to us now when all we see is sectarian violence, hatred and lies peddled as political ideology.

Years ago, when I was editing a journal, I asked several eminent people to write why, while Gandhiji has been forgotten by his own country, he lived on elsewhere: in Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. I asked a prominent columnist (who was also the head of a very successful company) to write on what lessons our industry could learn from him as an economist. Notably, Gandhiji was close to several industrialists (such as the Birlas, the Bajajs and the Sarabhais) so it was not as if he shunned industrial enterprise per se. It was then that I was made aware of the notion of trusteeship that Gandhi often mentioned and encouraged our prominent industrialists to view wealth not as a means of accumulating more, but of giving back and detaching themselves from money-making for its own sake.

Reflect on how all these families along with the Tatas became the earliest Indian philanthropists and never flaunted their wealth in the vulgar way that is now the fashion. Philanthropy and investing in education and health care is still being done but the motivation is entirely different. Look at how many so-called educational institutes are set up by dubious means by neta wives and relatives who corner prime land and pay no attention to the quality of education in these so-called medical colleges or management schools.

Perhaps this is why in his last days, Gandhiji was a deeply disillusioned man. His promotion of communal harmony was betrayed by the bitter partition of the land, his lessons of peace and non-violence lay in tatters and he became an uncomfortable presence in the very party that he had led. No one quite knew how to accommodate him in the new India that was being created. He pointedly stayed away from the famous handing over of power and wept alone in Noakhali where Hindus and Muslims killed each other in the communal riots that followed the division of Bengal.

His disillusionment has been movingly captured in a book by Sudhir Chandra, (An Impossible Possibility) that meticulously records Gandhi’s writings and speeches from August 15, 1947 to the day he died on January 30, 1948. He left this world a broken man and his last words, ‘He Ram’ were both an invocation to his God and a regret for having birthed a nation that forsook his most basic lessons of Truth and Non-violence. Ironically, the god he invoked also realised that the throne he finally ascended was meaningless, bereft of the wife who stood by him through his exile.

The writer is a social commentator