"Think Different."
Gandhi, in
his younger days a sophisticated and Westernized lawyer, did indeed
change
his thinking more radically than most people do. Ghanshyam Das Birla,
one
of the merchant princes who backed him, once said, "He was more modern
than I. But he made a conscious decision to go back to the Middle
Ages."
This is not, presumably, the revolutionary new direction in thought
that
the good folks at Apple are seeking to encourage.
Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract,
ahistorical, postmodern,
no longer a man in and of his time but a freeloading concept, a part of
the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed,
used, distorted, reinvented to fit many different purposes, and to the
devil with historicity or truth. Richard Attenborough's much-Oscared
movie
Gandhi struck me, when it was first released, as an example of this
type
of unhistorical Western saintmaking. Here was Gandhi-as-guru, purveying
that fashionable product, the Wisdom of the East; and Gandhi-as-Christ,
dying (and, before that, frequently going on hunger strike) so that
others
might live. His philosophy of nonviolence seemed to work by
embarrassing
the British into leaving; freedom could be won, the film appeared to
suggest,
by being more moral than your oppressor, whose moral code could then
oblige
him to withdraw.
But such is the efficacy of this symbolic Gandhi that the
film, for
all its simplifications and Hollywoodizations, had a powerful and
positive
effect on many contemporary freedom struggles. South African
antiapartheid
campaigners and democratic voices all over South America have enthused
to me about the film's galvanizing effects. This posthumous, exalted
"international
Gandhi" has apparently become a totem of real inspirational force.
The trouble with the idealized Gandhi is that he's so
darned dull, little
more than a dispenser of homilies and nostrums ("An eye for an eye will
make the whole world go blind") with just the odd flash of wit (asked
what
he thought of Western civilization, he gave the celebrated reply, "I
think
it would be a great idea"). The real man, if it is still possible to
use
such a term after the generations of hagiography and reinvention, was
infinitely
more interesting, one of the most complex and contradictory
personalities
of the century. His full name, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was
memorably--and
literally--translated into English by the novelist G.V. Desani as
"Action-Slave
Fascination-Moon Grocer," and he was as rich and devious a figure as
that
glorious name suggests.
Entirely unafraid of the British, he was nevertheless
afraid of the
dark, and always slept with a light burning by his bedside. He believed
passionately in the unity of all the peoples of India, yet his failure
to keep the Muslim leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah within the Indian
National
Congress's fold led to the partition of the country. (For all his
vaunted
selflessness and modesty, he made no move to object when Jinnah was
attacked
during a Congress session for calling him "Mr. Gandhi" instead of
"Mahatma,"
and booed off the stage by Gandhi's supporters. Later, his withdrawal,
under pressure from Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, of a
last-ditch
offer to Jinnah of the prime ministership itself, ended the last faint
chance of avoiding partition.)
He was determined to live his life as an ascetic, but, as
the poet Sarojini
Naidu joked, it cost the nation a fortune to keep Gandhi living in
poverty.
His entire philosophy privileged the village way over that of the city,
yet he was always financially dependent on the support of industrial
billionaires
like Birla. His hunger strikes could stop riots and massacres, but he
also
once went on a hunger strike to force one of his capitalist patrons'
employees
to break their strike against the harsh conditions of employment. He
sought
to improve the conditions of the untouchables, yet in today's India,
these
peoples, now calling themselves Dalits and forming an increasingly
well-organized
and effective political grouping, have rallied around the memory of
their
own leader, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, an old rival of Gandhi's. As
Ambedkar's
star has risen among the Dalits, so Gandhi's stature has been reduced.
The creator of the political philosophies of passive resistance and
constructive
nonviolence, he spent much of his life far from the political arena,
refining
his more eccentric theories of vegetarianism, bowel movements and the
beneficial
properties of human excrement.
Forever scarred by the knowledge that, as a 16-year-old
youth, he'd
been making love to his wife Kasturba at the moment of his father's
death,
Gandhi later forswore sexual relations but went on into his old age
with
what he called his "brahmacharya experiments," during which naked young
women would be asked to lie with him all night so that he could prove
that
he had mastered his physical urges. (He believed that total control
over
his "vital fluids" would enhance his spiritual powers.)
He, and he alone, was responsible for the transformation
of the demand
for independence into a nationwide mass movement that mobilized every
class
of society against the imperialist, yet the free India that came into
being,
divided and committed to a program of modernization and
industrialization,
was not the India of his dreams. His sometime disciple, Nehru, was the
archproponent of modernization, and it was Nehru's vision, not
Gandhi's,
that was eventually-- and perhaps inevitably--preferred.
Gandhi began by believing that the politics of passive
resistance and
nonviolence should be effective in any situation, at any time, even
against
a force as malign as Nazi Germany. Later, he was obliged to revise his
opinion, and concluded that while the British had responded to such
techniques
because of their own nature, other oppressors might not.
Gandhian nonviolence is widely believed to be the method
by which India
gained independence. (The view is assiduously fostered inside India as
well as outside it.) Yet the Indian revolution did indeed become
violent,
and this violence so disappointed Gandhi that he stayed away from the
independence
celebrations in protest. Moreover, the ruinous economic impact of World
War II on Britain, and--as British writer Patrick French says in his
book
Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division--the
gradual
collapse of the Raj's bureaucratic hold over India from the mid-'30s
onward
did as much to bring about freedom as any action of Gandhi's. It is
probable,
in fact, that Gandhian techniques were not the key determinants of
India's
arrival at freedom. They gave independence its outward character and
were
its apparent cause, but darker and deeper historical forces produced
the
desired effect.
These days, few people pause to consider the complex
character of Gandhi's
personality, the ambiguous nature of his achievement and legacy, or
even
the real causes of Indian independence. These are hurried, sloganizing
times, and we don't have the time or, worse, the inclination to
assimilate
many-sided truths. The harshest truth of all is that Gandhi is
increasingly
irrelevant in the country whose "little father"--Bapu--he was. As the
analyst
Sunil Khilnani has pointed out, India came into being as a secularized
state, but Gandhi's vision was essentially religious. However, he
"recoiled"
from Hindu nationalism. His solution was to forge an Indian identity
out
of the shared body of ancient narratives. "He turned to the legends and
stories from India's popular religious traditions, preferring their
lessons
to the supposed ones of history."
It didn't work. In today's India, Hindu nationalism is
rampant in the
form of Bharatiya Janata Party. During the recent elections, Gandhi and
his ideas have scarcely been mentioned. Twenty-one years ago, the
writer
Ved Mehta spoke to one of Gandhi's leading political associates, a
former
Governor-General of independent India, C. Rajagopalachari. His verdict
on Gandhi's legacy is disenchanted, but in today's India, on the fast
track
to free-market capitalism, it still rings true: "The glamour of modern
technology, money and power is so seductive that no one--I mean no
one--can
resist it. The handful of Gandhians who still believe in his philosophy
of a simple life in a simple society are mostly cranks."
What, then, is greatness? In what does it reside? If a
man's project
fails, or survives only in irredeemably tarnished form, can the force
of
his example still merit the extreme accolade? For Jawaharlal Nehru, the
defining image of Gandhi was "as I saw him marching, staff in hand, to
Dandi on the Salt March in 1930. Here was the pilgrim on his quest of
Truth,
quiet, peaceful, determined and fearless, who would continue that quest
and pilgrimage, regardless of consequences." Nehru's daughter Indira
Gandhi
later said, "More than his words, his life was his message." These
days,
that message is better heeded outside India. Albert Einstein was one of
many to praise Gandhi's achievement; Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai
Lama and all the world's peace movements have followed in his
footsteps.
Gandhi, who gave up cosmopolitanism to gain a country, has become, in
his
strange afterlife, a citizen of the world: his spirit may yet prove
resilient,
smart, tough, sneaky and, yes, ethical enough to avoid assimilation by
global McCulture (and Mac culture too). Against this new empire,
Gandhian
intelligence is a better weapon than Gandhian piety. And passive
resistance?
We'll see.
Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay, India, is the author of
"The Moor's
Last Sigh."
Source of the essay: "TIME100/leaders/profile/gandhi"
To learn more about the Mahatma, I urge you to visit
the Website of
the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence by clicking on the banner
below:
The following is
not a eulogy,
but a clear and pithy treatment of the life whose outward simplicity
belies
its inward complexity.
