Gandhi, the Commodity

We knew that the young Gandhi had refused to cheat at school, even when his teacher hadnudged-and-winked so as to present the visiting inspector with a class of word-perfectspellers. We could almost hear the goat which kid Mohandas had consumed with a friendbleating normatively inside young Gandhi. We awaited with solemn, juvenile eagerness thetwo-minute break from all scholarly activity at 11 am on Martyr’s Day—January30—when Gandhi was gunned down at the eponymously rechristened Tees Janvari Marg inLutyens’ Delhi. As Stanley Wolpert’s empathetic and meticulous biography makesclear, the assassin’s bullet found its mark that day in 1948 just after five in theevening: “Mahatma Gandhi’s passionate heart poured its crimson blood out ontohis white shawl. His gentle body collapsed and stopped breathing at 5.17 pm.”

But national commemoration of the Father of the Nation rightly required that weremembered the Great Man outside the restrictive space of families huddled over an eveningcup of tea. So even if mildly anachronistic, individual Indians stood up in non-familialgroups, wherever they were—at offices, schools, colleges, factories at 11 am—insilent tribute to Mahatma Gandhi. In our youthful, febrile imagination we debatedinconclusively whether trains screeched to a regulation two-minute halt an hour beforenoon. We were unaware of the travails and triumphs of India’s most famous third-classpassenger, who since his first such rail journey from the Calcutta Congress to Rajkot in1901 was to hitch his career as a nationalist to this novel and plebeian carriage.

But those days, to bend the language a bit, is past now. No such commemoration seems totake place in schools these days. “What is Martyr’s Day?” is a generalknowledge question 11-year-olds have to get right in a school test; they don’t livethose two Gandhian minutes every year any longer. One wonders whether the average aspiringkarorpati on the Star TV show would get it right first shot, without phoning a friend orgoing 50-50!

Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma, though written for theworld at large, is timely for us living in the India of today. Wolpert’s attempt isto demonstrate through a close reading of Gandhi’s own voluminous writings the uniquecombination of yogic tapas and Christian passion—“the suffering of Jesus Christon the cross”—that the Mahatma embodied in his body-polity. The notion ofsacrifice is of course central to all mass nationalist leaders, for if nationalism is thesuccessful inculcation of a unifying sentiment in a diverse populace, the differencebetween the leaders and the mass can be made bridgeable by the practice of tyag, and not tapasalone.

Wolpert takes us through the trials and tribulations of Gandhi’s life with asurefootedness that is often lacking in other scholarly exercises. His story of the lifeof this supreme votary of non-violence repeatedly reminds us of the tremendous physicalviolence that Gandhi had to endure in his political career. In South Africa an enragedPathan who thought Gandhi had sold out to General Smuts nearly broke his ribs; in 1934when he had taken on the cause of untouchability, bombs were hurled at what his high casteassailants in Poona thought was the car carrying Gandhi, and in the run-up to thePartition, which he could oppose only ineffectively, he was repeatedly attacked andverbally abused in Calcutta and Delhi.

There is of course a fair amount here on Gandhi’s obsession with bodily functionsand his demonstrative brahmacharya, but equally important for this study of Gandhi’spassion is an account of sheer bodily pain that Gandhi endured and inflicted upon himself.Were Gandhi not such a masterful, modern mass leader, one would be tempted to give the nodto the lazy generalisation that much like the yogis and sufis of yore, Gandhi practisedausterities in order to induce states outside the realm of normal experience. But whateverthe exact locus of his small “inner voice”, to which Wolpert draws repeatedattention, Mahatma Gandhi was a nationalist, and given the modernity of that categorycould never have been a ‘living god’ to the millions of his peasant followers.

This point needs some emphasis, for when Wolpert writes of the “illiterate millions,who (in 1921) fought to bow and touch his bare feet or his naked legs, and worshipped theMahatma as their living god, walking all day and night for a glimpse of his baldhead”, he overdramatises. And for two reasons. First, Mahatma Gandhi was neverdeified in the proper sense of that term. Popular adoration of Gandhi, the mad quest forhis darshan produced for sure a category of active peasant followers who acted upon theirown understanding of his message, often in starkly un-Gandhian ways. It never created asect of Gandhipanthis, as happened with a Kabir or other medieval saints. And that wasbecause Gandhi was a nationalist leader, and nationalism leads tocitizenship—howsoever circumscribed for some—in a nation-state, not to amembership in a sampradaya or a silsilah.

The obverse of this nationalist ‘deification’ of Gandhi was thecommodification of his name and of his image. Gandhi was incensed by a packet ofcigarettes bearing his impress that were being marketed by an Indian manufacturer inGorakhpur in eastern UP and in distant Assam. He perhaps did not notice that one Dev Das& Co. of Benares had made a Mahatma Gandhi rubber-stamp in mid-1921 at the height ofthe non-cooperation movement, pricing it at a high Rs 3.50. Advertised as “ideal forpatriots, and for panchayats, courts and for sewa samitis”, it was often purchased bya District Congress Committee, which alone could afford it, to convert an ordinaryregister into a Nationalist Register. The Register of Volunteers, Gorakhpur CongressCommittee of early 1922, which included the names of some of the peasant nationalists whowere to turn violent at Chauri Chaura on February 4, had been rubber-stamped by such a‘Mahatma Gandhi’.