On October 24, friends and admirers of Gandhian scholar and thinker Dharampal will commemorate the 18th anniversary of his passing. To offer a glimpse of just how significant his contribution to post-independence Indian intellectual life was, we might refer to his most widely read and acclaimed book, The Beautiful Tree (1983).
The title came for an almost-forgotten speech by Mahatma Gandhi on October 20, 1931. Speaking at a Chatham House meeting at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Gandhi made the startling claim that illiteracy had increased under British colonial rule: “Today, India is more illiterate than it was 50 or a 100 years ago…because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out…and the beautiful tree perished (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi vol 54: p 59)”.
Gandhi, when challenged by Sir Philip Hartog who met him on December 2, 1931, admitted that more evidence was needed to back his assertion. Decades later, Dharampal rose to the occasion by defending Gandhi’s claim and the honour of India.
The story of post-independence India’s intellectual decolonisation hasn’t been fully told. Especially the part played by a few outstanding intellectuals, and the critical role played by visionary scholar-researchers like Dharampal from outside colleges and universities, without support from government agencies or the establishment.
Born in 1922 in Kandhla, a small town in western Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district, Dharampal abandoned his studies to join Gandhi’s Satyagraha in 1940. During the Quit India movement, he was also arrested for a short while. When almost the entire Congress leadership remained imprisoned, he was active after his release among the younger, more radical members of the Congress socialists including Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and Aruna Asaf Ali.
In addition, working closely with other Gandhians like Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade, a British admiral’s daughter), he learned about India, following Gandhian principles from the grassroots up. After independence, in 1949, he planned to spend some time studying the Kibbutzim system in Israel. But, having to reroute his journey through England, a chance meeting in the Devonshire countryside changed the course of his life. In September 1949, he met Phyllis Ellen Ford. Soon they were married.
Dharampal’s work has enjoyed a revival after being neglected for decades. This is largely due to the untiring efforts of several of his admirers, including Claude Alvares and members of the Patriotic and People-oriented Science & Technology collective. Over 20 years back, Alvares published the Collected Works of Dharampal from his Other India Press in Goa. In 2007, Bhawarlal Jain, the head of the large corporate house Jain Irrigation, started the Gandhi Research Foundation in Jalgaon. It created a digital repository of all of Dharampal’s works.
Several senior members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), especially Suresh Soni, also urged the republication of his collected works, already published in Gujarati (2005) and Hindi (2007) translations edited by Indumati Katdare of the Punarutthan Trust, Ahmedabad. In 2021, Jitendra Bajaj and M D Srinivas of the Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai, brought out a slightly different version of Alvares’s original five-volume set, co-published with an RSS affiliate, Rashtrotthana Sahitya. The mainstreaming of Dharampal, with more than adequate government patronage, may thus have been accomplished. But this does not mean a serious engagement with his work has been undertaken.
Rereading Dharampal is crucial to understanding modern India because Dharampal was a Gandhian with a difference. Not a doctrinaire or a political Gandhian, but a Gandhian who understood and articulated the dynamics of Indian society from the perspective of ordinary people. He called it, quite eloquently, Bharatiya Chitta, Manas, aur Kala (1993) in the Hindi original, which Jitendra Bajaj retained in his English translation of the book. We might render it as India’s Psyche, Mind, and Cosmos, or Indian Consciousness, Intellect, and Time, though neither would be entirely accurate or evocative. The book offers a blueprint for the decolonisation of the Indian mind.
Dharampal’s fundamental theme is Indian society at large thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the Western world and India’s own westernised elites. So colonised are the latter that, even after Independence, they still remain alienated from the masses and continue to obstruct India’s attainment of swaraj or selfhood. This is a truth that Gandhi recognised very clearly in his seminal work Hind Swaraj (1909). His belief was confirmed on his return to India from South Africa in January 1915, when he toured the length and breadth of the land, trying to identify with the true spirit of its people.
Colonisation was so destructive and traumatic precisely because it ruined and despoiled India’s traditional society that had, in large measure, managed by the early 18th century to recover from centuries of Muslim rule. The Partition and its horrifying bloodletting notwithstanding, Dharampal, till the last phase of his life, continued to believe, like Gandhi, that the primary adversary of Hindu society was Western modernity, not its internal Muslim minority.
The Muslim threat, both external and internal, did not excite or exercise him much. But after the Babri Masjid was demolished on December 6, 1992, Dharampal came out on the side of those who wished to reclaim the site as Sri Rama’s birthplace. He wrote about this in Ayodhya and the Future of India (1993), edited, once again, by Jitendra Bajaj. He thus endured the risk of breaking ranks with several of his Gandhian and secular friends.
The best introduction to his work is the excellent one-volume reader, The Essential Dharampal (Publications Division, 2015) compiled and edited by Gita Dharampal, his daughter and distinguished historian. Its Hindi and Tamil editions are expected shortly. It is hoped they will enable a more serious engagement with his profound and transformative ideas. Indian society, which he studied and served so diligently, owes at least this much to Dharampal.
Makarand R Paranjape
Author and commentator
(The author would like to thank Gita Dharampal for her comments on the longer version of this essay.)
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @MakrandParanspe)