The ambivalence about Gandhi

Ashis Nandy Himal mag.com/2006/march

Gandhism – not as an ideology, but as a reasonably well-integrated normative position in public life, and a particular kind of social vision – is greater than Gandhi the man. Gandhi himself would have happily admitted this: he believed that the ideas he espoused, particularly non-violence, were as old as the hills.

Nor was Gandhi a perfect Gandhian; it was not possible for him to be so. He was an active politician, a fact that he never forgot. Indeed, he could be credited with creating both the centrality of politics in British India, by taking mass politics to the villages, and with establishing militant non-violence as a viable global political force. This emphasis on politics guaranteed that he would make mistakes. If politics is the art of the possible rather than a sure science, assessments of the range of those possibilities can at times go drastically wrong. Gandhi himself discussed some of his blunders, and I am sure that future generations will talk about many others.

However, this also means that Gandhi cannot be shelved as a dreamy-eyed spiritual leader who occasionally strayed into public life as a hobby or pastime. That is why his name is still invoked, in admiration and in hatred, nearly sixty years after his death. I cannot resist the temptation of citing once again what was arguably the finest obituary of him – not the one by Albert Einstein, but the one by the British economic historian Arnold Toynbee. After Gandhi, Toynbee wrote, humankind would expect its prophets to live in the slum of politics. I remember I first heard that from the poet Umashankar Joshi, who used the quote to explain to the philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi that saints were a dime a dozen in Southasia. Gandhi’s ability to politically empower his vision was what was so unique, and which ensured the long-term survival of his ideas.

That vision transcends the boundaries of the nation state called India. That is why the three greatest Gandhians today are neither Indians nor Hindus: Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama. Incidentally, the first two of these started as radical social democrats. They turned to Gandhi only after people started referring to their politics as Gandhian. A combination of long-term moral vision and practical politics brought them to Gandhi. The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, does not have to call himself a Gandhian, even though he says that Gandhi has inspired him ever since he was a small boy in Tibet. Like Gandhi’s, his life is his message, and that message happens to be Gandhian.

In any case, I do not see the reason to impute to Gandhi superhuman visionary powers, nor a saintly status. Doing so would only make him less relevant and accessible to contemporary times by elevating him beyond mundane, day-to-day politics and everyday life. That is the line the Indian state has already taken. It has hijacked him and turned him into an official symbol and a totem of the Indian state – ‘the father of the nation’, as the officialese goes. The less the Indian state has to do with Gandhi and his ideas, the more it becomes a conventional, hard, hyper-masculine nation state, by rejecting one-by-one all of the elements of Gandhian thought. In so doing, the more it is forced to talk of the beautiful legacy of the nation’s ‘father’.

That thousands of political and social activists have begun to walk the path of Gandhi – while neither knowing the man, nor claiming to be Gandhians – is a tribute to a person who rejected the hyper-individualist and consumerist certitudes of our times. Virtually every major modern dissenting movement has drawn inspiration from Gandhi. The movements for environment, alternative science and technology, eco-feminism, human rights, anti-consumerism, and resistance to nuclearism and globalisation – they have all directly or indirectly, knowingly or unwittingly, drawn upon Gandhi’s legacy.