Whenever people ask me about Mahatma Gandhi, I would remember conversations with my father. For him, Gandhi was even more unique than Albert Einstein. He told me the problems and issues that Gandhi raised were perennial. No one else could raise the spelling of the word better to such a classic level. It becomes the Plimsoll line for a kindergarten ethics. In that sense, Gandhi’s questions were always contemporary.
He was not a Luddite. People forget that the kind of charkha he introduced was a more efficient reinvention made by the Polish theosophist and engineer Maurice Frydman. Frydman, who went on to have over a 100 engineering patents, was intrigued by Gandhi.
One must also add that the loudspeaker as a political instrument in India was introduced at one of Gandhi’s rallies. I recollect an even more iconic story about a Gandhi rally. He was addressing a group of workers in Manchester after a swadeshi boycott. He looked at the state of the plant and said, “No wonder the Japanese are beating you.”
For my father, Gandhi was someone you learnt from. I remember we were travelling in a local train from Jamshedpur to Kharagpur, where my father occasionally taught. He was sitting at the door when one of his chappals fell off. He was not upset—instead, to our surprise, he immediately took the other one off. He said, “One lost shoe is a crisis and a pair is a gift [to someone else].” A message of solidarity. Gandhi, for him, represented future solidarities.
What made Gandhi’s philosophy perennial was his use of the body as a model and metaphor. For Gandhi, the human body was perpetually contemporary and vulnerable. It became an index of a civilisation’s sense of violence. The body was also a site for experiments. Who else would boldly call the body a source of experiments? The body as a perennial metaphor received the everyday questions of ethics.
One can understand why scientists like Jagdish Chandra Bose and others treated him as a contemporary. In many senses, Gandhi thought like a scientist. He was aware of the question why the Sermon on the Mount had the status Pythagorean theorems had in geometry. He even dreamt of teaching maths through the charkha.
Gandhi was more concerned with innovation than with the dullness of professions. He wanted to revitalise the modern entity called the city and create a different organicity around it. This is why he said the only thing we many need from the West was a good sewage system, as the ones created by English social reformer Edwin Chadwick. As Gandhi used his ashram as a perpetual site for innovation, Gandhians like Satish Chandra Mukerjee experimented on the flush tank, which they saw at the heart of modern technologies.
What made Gandhi classic and contemporary at the same time was his childlike sense of humour. He could be like Alice in Wonderland. Once industrialist Jamnalal Bajaj gifted Gandhi’s ashram a Ford car. It worked for a few weeks and then collapsed. Gandhi had it pulled by two bullocks. When visitors came, he introduced the contraption as “Meet my ox-Ford.” We need to bring back the sense of play to the political to encounter differences of perspectives. Use of humour does not have to be any less serious.
I remember another of his encounters with a scientist. Once, C V Raman had to leave his wife with Gandhi as he went for a meeting. When Raman hurried back, he asked how she was. Gandhi wickedly said, “Her science is better than yours was before you left.”
His humour gave him a sense of perspective. When Mussolini asked him to review his troops, Gandhi was surprised but he agreed. All he said was, “All of you look very healthy to me.”
Yet, Gandhi had a deep understanding of innocence—not just the physical brutality of violence. He understood and classified varieties of violence from obsolescence to triage to genocide. It was Gandhi’s idea of iatrogeny as doctor-induced illness that made him argue for a greater responsibility from patients. Only Gandhi could understand a patient getting a Nobel prize for understanding the language of suffering. The body periodically returns to reiterate its importance.
It was the Scottish biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes who noted that while German science was troubling with jackboots, India was creating a post-Germanic science. He talked with Gandhi how Bose had created some of those post-Germanic domains. In fact, Bose, Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore were planning Shantiniketan as a place for a new agricultural science. One wishes the national movement world rework itself in terms of these key activities.
Gandhi also integrated the idea of responsibility. He was clear of the necessity of accountability. But he went on to add trusteeship, sacrifice and caring at a different level. This is why Gandhi’s experimentation with ethics is so critical.
One has to note that his language was always ordinary. Even his theorising was transparent. That is why Gandhi remains more democratic than many others. He realised democracy demanded an ethical vulnerability of a different kind.
For Gandhi, India needed to operate its traditional institutions. He wanted the ashram to revitalise the city and create new, innovative means for both technology and spirituality. In a way, this representation of Gandhian life is relevant even today as we look for models beyond the Anthropocene. A new way of thinking about spirituality, technology and innovation. One wishes that, instead of falling into orthodoxy, the ashram had created a new hermeneutics for India.
One must add that Gandhi’s idea of childhood was imaginative. Indian nationalism was not just about the nation-state, but about rethinking the idea of childhood and its future. What one needs is an update of these facets to understand the time people spent on thinking about childhood. This creativity was the gateway to the creativity of the future.
One mistake several in the current generation make is to think that Gandhi is outdated. It is Gandhians who need to come up with new experiments, new books, new explorations—to renew the idea of India as a plural civilisation.
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations