I love gossip. Gossip is a guarantee that the dialogue of democracy is still alive, no matter how mangled the form. I love the gossip of three places in particular. Each provides a sense of theatre of the power of gossip. The first is the barber shop, which combines the everydayness of body with the theatre of the exotic. The second is the tea shop, which carries the whiff of different conversations. The third is the university café, which has a sense of classical academic ideas.
One expected much from these places after the protest movement of Sonam Wangchuk. One witnessed a certain openness, a certain ambiguity, a certain ability to listen. But what one noticed was a sense of emptiness of ideas. We were still caught between radicalism as ideology and official policy. As one observer put it, the cafés are caught between patriotism, patriarchy and policy.
Watching this emptiness, one felt nostalgic for likes of Tagore and Gandhi. One wanted a festival of alternative ideas. And in this context, one again sensed the continuing relevance of Gandhi.
I must emphasise that Gandhi is not just a method, a diktat or a catechism of yes and nos. Gandhi is an imagination—free floating, inventive, open-ended, confident enough to challenge hegemony and empire. There is a playfulness to Gandhi.
One sees it best in his humour which undermines the categories of empire and fascism. I recollect, in particular, Gandhi’s encounter with Mussolini. Mussolini was excited and demanded that he review his troops. Gandhi was asked to speak after that. All he said was one line: “You all look healthy to me.”
There is a usual scepticism of Gandhi. Many cynics ask, how did he respond to the atom bomb and the concentration camp? How he would look at an encounter between Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, scientist Robert Oppenheimer and himself. Would Gandhi allow Oppenheimer to stick to the answer that the atom bomb was a technical answer to a technical question?
One has to open up Gandhi by inventing new case studies. I was thinking of a classroom where a lecture is taking place on diversity. The students are incessantly told that diversity is drastically declining. Gandhi would have responded not with text book repetition, but his sense of the school as an ethical sense of the diversity. He would suggest that every school should become a custodian of a disappearing language or a species.
Violence today is much more inventive than morality. Morality has become arid and protestant. What one needs is a new anthology of violence which includes genocide, obsolescence, triage. One has to think of new ways of conquering obsolescence.
Gandhi would have recommended the story of handloom innovator Uzramma Bilgrami of Dastkar and Malkha, who used people’s memory to reinvent the indigo dye. Here, memory rather than a dead text created a new encounter with invention.
Gandhi would have also challenged the wholesale patenting of inventions. Many inventions, he would have pointed, are a part of the commons. Gandhi would add that non-violence and commons go together. And the idea of the Anthropocene—the world as a vulnerable entity that needs to be healed—would be an essential part of the satyagraha movement. Non-violence and re-invention, healing and memory become part of the peace movement which has to redeem the brutality of today. The Gandhian Satyagraha in that sense wears a hearing aid fully attuned to the complexities and nuances of the world.
Gandhi would also confront violence inside India. He would be impressed with the Truth Commission Desmond Tutu created to heal South Africa post-apartheid—a conversation of cosmologies indigenous and Western, and the idea of ubuntu that became almost a magical wand enabling rapprochement between hegemony and victimhood.
Gandhi would have devised an indigenous form of the Truth Commission for Kashmir and the Northeast. He would have understood that mere compensation would not do—that rights speak a restricted language and that healing requires new epistemologies that professionalism lacks. He would have agreed that while Henry Kissinger was technically brilliant, the writing of U Thant or Dag Hammarskjöld was important as carriers of the perennial wisdom of peace.
Gandhi would probably have tried to revitalise traditional Gandhian centres. The ashram of today is seen as a mere retreat desiccated of ideas. Gandhi would have turned it into a research centre. One must not forget that traditional ashram did produce research that led to innovation. Gandhi’s charkha was itself a reinvention by the Polish engineer and theosophist Maurice Frydman. Gandhi would have made the ashram a centre for a new ethics sensitive to the fact that genocide, terror, the concentration camp and even the ideas of development need a new ethics. Ashrams would not be restrictive entities, but networks of ethical activities spread around cities and village.
The contemporary Gandhian ashram would link up aesthetics, ethics, politics, ecology into an interacting framework. It ashram would emphasise the exemplars and disciples of those who innovate and those who sustain ethics. Ethics would become as innovative as any aspect of technology. But it would, in addition, continuously measure the costs of technology and the possibility of alternatives. In a strange way, Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj as critique of cities is India’s response to science fiction and the future.
We have been looking at Gandhi to understand him as an ethical and technical inventor who emphasised the everydayness of invention. For him, everything from prayer to protest was open to reinvention. In that sense, Gandhi should no longer be seen as a conservative figure, but one who opened ethics, ecology and science to a combination of new possibilities. He was a futurist in disguise. And he was poetically correct when he said that the real responsibility of the colony was to rescue the empire from its modernist delusions.
We need a new form of storytelling to understand Gandhi’s power and relevance today—to accept that, as a catalyst, he can change the global system. From climate change to genocide, India as a civilisation must pursue his ideas, reread them and reinvent them while working towards a new vision of the future.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)