In my book, ‘The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi’ (Penguin 2015), I said that more than anyone else, Gandhi is the ‘man we hate to love and love to hate’. This paradox explains his enormous persistence, if not appeal, in India.The year-long sesquicentennial celebrations of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth came to an end on 2nd October, 151 years after his birth in 1869. It was a somewhat tepid close, at least from the intellectual point of view, with hardly any new ideas or ways of understanding the Mahatma. Kicked-off last September by a committee headed by the President of India, it saw a number of programmes and events subsumed under one rubric,“Gandhi in action.”
It was PM Narendra Modi’s idea, according to the official Gandhi@150 website (https://gandhi.gov.in/karyanjali.html), that most of the programmes during the celebrations should focus on government initiatives. Hence the title, Karyanjali. Naturally, the celebrations were integrated with the government’s own flagship activities, such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, whose symbol was the easily recognisable pair of Gandhi’s spectacles.
It was as if Gandhi was looking at us as we struggled to clean up our actions and surroundings. But more, in the time of a global pandemic, Gandhi’s emphasis on both physical and moral cleanliness was sure to resonate across the globe. Gandhi, we must not forget, was also the father of public health in South Africa and India, showing us how to stay healthy in his two very popular books, ‘Guide to Health’ and ‘Key to Health’.
Unfortunately, the emphasis on ensuring the continuing relevance of Gandhi, both nationally and globally, was not adequately addressed through a deeper engagement with his life and ideas. Not at all surprising considering that the cancel culture and Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements have not spared Gandhi. Along with other notables such as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, Gandhi statues were also desecrated on both sides of the Atlantic, in both Washington DC and London.
In March 2015, a 9ft bronze statue of the Mahatma had been unveiled in Parliament Square, London, by the late Arun Jaitley, then Finance Minister, in the presence of then UK Prime Minister, David Cameron. That statue was defaced with the expletive “racist” on its base and spray painted in white by protesters on 8th June.
But, Gandhi, paradoxically refuses to die. That is because like any other Mahatma, his afterlife is greater than his life, the legend grander than the man. As Raja Rao puts it in the just republished, ‘Mahatma Gandhi: The Great Indian Way’ (Penguin, 2020): “Every man’s life is a fable. The not-two becomes two, and so the story.
The great man is one whose life is a legend. A legend is just an epic fable, an hierophanous tale. … He who achieves the impersonal, the principle, he the great being, the Mahatma. He it is that’s become the Law, from the laws that hold (dhru) the sun and the moon, the negative and positive in electricity, man and woman, the good and bad, and the law that makes the waters go down to the sea. When the sea and the waves are seen as water you see greatness. Greatness is not great. It is.”
Facts according to Raja Rao, do not do justice to the life of a great person — only legends can do that. Rao invents a pauranic style for the retelling the Gandhi’s story.I call it ‘seeing with three eyes’ in my Introduction: ‘The first eye sees only facts. The second espies the fable behind and around the fact. It is only the third eye, the eye of wisdom, that can combine both to see into the depths of things, their secret significance and meaning.’
Raja Rao calls this special way of seeing ‘fact against custom, history against time . . . geography against space.’ In this book on the Mahatma, Rao accomplishes precisely this, making ‘life larger than it seems.’ The very things that we react so much to when it comes to the Mahatma, with their ‘small impurities and accidents and parts, must perforce be transmuted into equations where the mighty becomes normal, and the normal in its turn becoming myth.’
In Raja Rao’s magical retelling of Gandhi’s life, ‘prose and poetry thus flow into one another, the personal and the impersonal, making the drama altogether noble and simple.’ Why yet another biography? Raja Rao answers this question in the Preface: ‘A biography of Gandhi, it seemed to me, had to be written as it were from the inside, desperately, faithfully. It’s an ambitious task. Should one have done it – I have.’
Raja Rao is right. You can bring down a statue, you can tarnish a reputation. But it is very hard to erase a legend, to undo a purana or epic. Like Rama, who has been more attacked in the present times than ever before, continues to matter to Indians to the point that his return to Ayodhya is cause for national rejoicing. Similarly, there remains something ‘noble and simple’ about Gandhi too that cannot be denied or tarnished. He remains India’s most recognizable and respected world-wide figure, a great symbol of Indian values and our enduring soft power.
Why has he endured? The answer is simple apart from the things we dislike or adore about him, notwithstanding his many mistakes or miscalculations, even if we think his brand of ahimsa is unworkable, Gandhi’s truth is capable of being its own defence. He needs no other defenders nor apologists.The reason Gandhi matters is that he represents the power and potential of the human condition to seek and attain the better life through moral rather than wicked means. Even more importantly, for the human race to transform itself so as to attain that higher consciousness which alone can save us and our planet from suicide.(Views are personal)
Makarand R. Paranjape
Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla
Tweets @MakrandParanspe