Narasinha Mehta No Choro entrance, Junagadh. Photo: Vinay Lal
Vinay Lal
M
ohandas Gandhi has most frequently been described, and is doubtless best known the world over, as the principal embodiment in history of the idea of nonviolence, as the author of satyagraha, and as the chief architect of the Indian independence struggle. In the years following his assassination, his reputation has in some respects both diminished and grown. It has diminished in that he has come under relentless attack from an ever increasing number of people belonging to various constituencies. Where during his lifetime he was subject to the usual critiques of being bourgeois and friendly to industrialists, much too tolerant of the institution of caste, and effete both in his personal bearing and in the political views that he sought to introduce to the public sphere, in recent years he has also been accused of harboring profoundly racist sentiments towards black people and similarly being not so much a sexual puritan as a sexual deviant who hesitated not a jot in exploiting his lofty standing as a “mahatma” to prey on young women. But his reputation has also grown, to some extent in quite unanticipated ways: to take some evident examples, he is now frequently seen as a forerunner of the many-tentacled ecological movement, a prescient and forceful critic of rampant growth and consumption, an astute critic of industrialized medicine, and much else. In India, he is not unknown to be celebrated in business schools as the model of a “shrewd negotiator”, an expert in marketing, and as a superlative fund-raiser.
Oddly, in what is a gargantuan and still growing literature on Gandhi, no one has really ventured to advance in a concerted fashion what appears to me to be a plausible reading of how Gandhi might be located in relation to Indian civilization and its spiritual and intellectual ethos. An earlier generation of public intellectuals—V. S. Naipaul and Nirad Chaudhuri notably come to mind—known for their acerbic commentary would have deemed the very idea of locating Gandhi in the Indian intellectual tradition as an idle if not bizarre exercise, if only because he was viewed by them, and by scholars such as Aghenanda Bharati, as poorly read and as singularly ill-informed about Indian philosophy and what might be called the spiritual wealth of Indian civilization. Gandhi had not much of an appetite for books, on their view, but, to take an even greater indictment, he was altogether lacking in intellectual curiosity. It would be churlish to dwell on the fact that Bharati himself has been reduced at best to an obscure footnote, and that Nirad Chaudhuri, though his command over English was marvelous, is only remembered as a gadfly rather than as anyone who had any serious engagement with ideas. He had a gift for spinning seductive titles to books but could write, with utter unawareness of the politics of knowledge and with evident fascination for the jejune British obsession with titles, heraldry, and peerage, of the “Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of the Rt. Hon Friedrich Max Muller, P.C.” As for Naipaul, who wielded the pen with devastating effect, there is no gainsaying the fact that he also had the unusual gift of observation—and often nothing else. He could be unforgiving and unsparing; and in like fashion one should say that he also could be downright idiotic and morose, appearing even comical on account of his pompousness. One can only feel pity for a writer who often conveyed the impression of having learnt nothing over a lifetime: what he says of Gandhi in A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (2008) could have come straight out of An Area of Darkness (1964). Gandhi, Naipaul avers, “came at the right time; the world was oddly vacant; there was room for him; and in 1909 he could get away with the nonsense and anti-modern simplicities of his first book, Hind Swaraj (“Indian Home Rule”). The book would not be read in India, not even by scholars (and still hasn’t been) . . .”
The point here is neither to mount a defence of Gandhi nor to cavil at the pretensions of pedants who think that Gandhi was scarcely educated. It is noteworthy that in the first volume of his 3-volume selection of the Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (1986), Raghavan Iyer devotes 40 pages to listing the scores of books that he read. The writers and others who think that the book was more or less an alien object to Gandhi may be reminded that he shipped a library of nearly 10,000 volumes when he returned to India from South Africa in early 1915. Ian Desai put it rather intriguingly when, in an essay for the Wilson Quarterly in 2010, he argued that “though philosophically Gandhi disavowed material possessions, he became a savvy and serial collector of books and peoples.” Herein hangs another tale—the nature of non-possession (aparigraha), and to what extent if at all Gandhi’s passion for books calls for a radical reinterpretation of his vow of aparigraha—that is the subject for a different essay. More germane to the present argument are these two considerations: Is Gandhi’s relation to the philosophical and spiritual legacies of India to be understood only or even largely through books and treatises? If it may be accepted that in some respects he embodied the very ethos of Indian civilization, a sentiment that both Tagore and Nehru would in their own varying fashion have acceded to without any difficulty, how best might Gandhi’s location within the Indian tradition be captured?
It is my submission that, more than anything else Gandhi is best viewed as the last representative of the sant traditions of India. The rest of this short essay shall be devoted to an exploration of this proposition, most particularly with reference to Gandhi’s unequivocal admiration for the bhajan, “Vaishnavajana to” (“Call Only That One a Vaishnava”). In putting forward this proposition, I by no means wish to disavow the other claims that, with perhaps greater justice or more evidently in congruence with the views that have predominated for a century since he rose to the helm of Indian politics, have been made on his behalf.
He is, as I have suggested, more easily to be grasped as a supreme exponent of nonviolent resistance, as an ecological thinker who was far ahead of his time, as the most influential advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity, and as a public figure who was insistent in advancing the idea that the litmus test of the ethical life resides in the arena of political action.
At the same time, in suggesting that inadequate consideration has been bestowed on Gandhi in relation to the bhakti-sufi traditions of India, and as greatest example in the 20th century of a sant, I am well aware of some of the pitfalls in uncritically deploying the idea of a “bhakti movement”. But it is precisely because this idea, generated to some (and perhaps substantial) degree by nationalists who were in search of some grounds for Indian unity as anti-colonial sentiments began to surge, has been so useful in shaping the notions of both “Indian civilization” and a “composite culture”, that Gandhi’s own spiritual, emotion, and intellectual investment in the bhakti tradition calls for much greater attention.
Gandhi’s religion, as I have described it previously in the pages of this forum, defies easy description. Though Gandhi viewed himself as a Hindu, he also maintained that a man could describe himself as a Hindu and yet not believe in God. Many of his most determined foes harbored no doubts about Gandhi’s betrayal of the Hindus, but others were equally certain that he contaminated public life in India by his insistent resort to the paraphernalia of Hinduism—its stories, myths, symbols, and much else. He almost never visited temples and everything in his conduct suggests that he remained indifferent to the temple-going experience; yet no one made as concerted an attempt as he did to open up Hindu temples to Dalits (or, as they were then known, the Untouchables). Indeed, Gandhi’s attempts to open up the temples to Dalits earned him the wrath of Ambedkar.
But the conundrums do not end here: Gandhi venerated the Ramacaritmanas, the immensely popular version of the Ramayana penned by the poet-saint Tulsidas in the late fifteenth century, but he also insisted that passages in Tulsidas which were anathema to one’s conscience and reason—such as the one which characterizes drums, the illiterate, animals, the lower castes, and (disobedient) women as fit to be beaten—ought to be summarily rejected. It is this outlook that I have described as “critical veneration” and to which Ashis Nandy, writing in an analogous vein but with a larger purview of subjects in mind, gave the term “critical traditionalism”.
To the end of his life Gandhi persisted in describing himself as a believer in the idea that Hinduism rightly prescribed duties for each of the castes (varnashrama dharma), but he made it known that he would only bless intercaste weddings. Moreover, much to the chagrin of upper-caste Hindu society, Gandhi displayed absolutely no qualms in picking up a broom and sweeping toilets, work that in Hindu society was considered fit only for the “lowest of the low.” He went so far as to declare that he would only want to be reborn as a scavenger (bhangi) whose very presence would be polluting to an upper-caste Hindu.
Perhaps nothing underscores his anomalous standing as a Hindu more than two facts: while M.A. Jinnah—his staunchest political foe and eventually the chief instigator of the idea of Pakistan—persisted in viewing Gandhi as the supreme representative of the Hindu community, Gandhi’s assassin partly justified his act with the observation that Gandhi was not Hindu enough.
With this, we come to the bhajan or devotional composition, “Vaishnavajana to”, that has become intertwined with Gandhi’s life and supremely embodies, in the public imagination, his religiosity. I have, time and again, been struck by its singular place in what may be called the Gandhi canon, even if one can easily acknowledge that “Raghupati Raghav Rajaram” was perhaps the other great fount of his devotionalism. Last year, for instance, while attending the celebrations of his sesquicentennial birth anniversary in the Canadian cities of Winnipeg and Ottawa, where there was time enough for only one musical composition to be sung alongside the pious homilies and the genuflections that customarily accompany acts of homage to the Mahatma, I found that, yet again, the organizers decided to play the soulful tunes of “Vaishnavajana to”, a composition by Narasinha Mehta, the great bhakti poet sometimes described as Gujarat’s adikavi. Nor is it accidental that, on the opening page of his 4-volume biography of Gandhi, Narayan Desai introduces his subject and his native Gujarat by sketching the milieu around Porbandar, the coastal town where Mohandas was born, thus: “Not far was Junagadh where the saint poet Narasinh Mehta sang to the divine in the colony of the untouchables.”
That Narayan Desai, the son of Mahadev Desai, whose own majestic and yet unassuming life as Gandhi’s secretary and faithful companion still awaits real scholarly consideration, should have put Gandhi and Narasinha Mehta in such close proximity suggests not only the far-reaching impress of Narsi (as he is popularly known) on Gandhi but also the fact that the modern exemplar of bhakti may yet have shaped our reading of Gujarat’s adikavi.
The Bhagavad Gita was, to Gandhi, a manual for daily living; and it is in the Gita that we first have a fulsome explication of bhakti yoga, the way to God through devotion. In Gandhi’s native Gujarat the most famous exponent of bhakti was doubtless Narasinha Mehta, born into the orthodox caste of Nagar Brahmins around 1414. His songs would have been known to Gandhi from his childhood; but Narsi’s compositions were also greatly admired by Srimad Rajchandra, a philosopher and ascetic sometimes who appears in Gandhi’s life as Raychandbhai and who counseled Gandhi, at this time living in South Africa, to be more attuned to the culture of his native Gujarat and be attentive to “early family influence.”
A more precise inventory of all the circumstances that shaped the way to Gandhi’s embrace of Narsi is beyond the scope of this essay, but one fact stands out: in South Africa Gandhi was surrounded by fellow Gujaratis. South Africa has been seen by some as a laboratory for many of the ideas that he was keen to put to the test, and at the Phoenix Settlement, which he established in 1904, Gandhi initiated the practice of communal religious worship—something that would continue to evolve over time as he added scriptures and hymns from various religious traditions. Narsi’s “Vaishnavajana to” was part of the repertoire of songs at the settlement and it was one of the hymns that continued to be sung at his ashrams over the decades.
It was at the prayer meeting ground in Birla House on 30 January 1948 that Gandhi, having taken the bullets in his chest, could irreproachably lay claim to being the ideal subject of the hymn’s fundamental refrain, “Call Only That One a Vaishnava / [Who] Knows the Pain of Others”.
Gandhi’s unbound affection for Narsi’s composition “Vaishnavajana to” is as good a way as any to gauge the Mahatma’s religious sensibility. Vaishnavism was an important part of the religious milieu in which Gandhi grew into adolescence, and in the opening chapter of his autobiography Gandhi describes his mother as a saintly woman for whom a visit to the “Vaishnava temple” was “one of her daily routines.” But he sought to endow the term “Vaishnava” with a more capacious meaning, one that would also give him the tools to think through the barriers put up by the caste system.
Much like other bhakta-poets, Narsi was oblivious to caste differences and scarcely moved by bookish learning. His biographers are agreed that he deeply offended his own community of Brahmins as he would often consort with the lower castes, even singing in the houses of the Untouchables and spending his nights in their homes. Narsi’s fellow Brahmins eventually excommunicated him, but Narsi was no more perturbed on that account:
“They say I am impure, and they are right. / I love only those who love Hari [Krishna]. / I see no difference between one Harijana and another.”
It is Narsi’s term Harijans, meaning “children of God,” that Gandhi would controversially adopt in the 1920s to designate the Untouchables. But the students of Gandhi’s life can easily find other parallels—for instance, in his willingness to take Harijans into his ashram and risk the opprobrium of his fellow Hindus and his financial patrons.
Narsi’s bhajan permitted him to enter into the state of being of a true Vaishnava. Narsi sings: “Vaishnavajana to tene kahiye, je pira parayi jaane re / par dukha upkaar kare, to ye man abhiman na aane re.” Call only him a Vaishnava, says Narsi, who feels another’s pain as his own, who helps others in their sorrow but takes no pride in his good deeds. The rest of the bhajan further adumbrates the qualities of a Vaishnava, who is pure in thought, action, and speech; despising no one, and treating the low and the high alike, the Vaishnava adopts the entire human family as his own and so works for the liberation of everyone.
It is from Narsi, and not from the Gita alone, that Gandhi imbibed the values of nonattachment, humility, and the renunciation of avarice. When, as Narsi says, “all pilgrimages sites are embodied within the body of the Vaishnava” (sakal tirtha tena tanma re), we are better positioned to understand why Gandhi did not share the Hindus’ propensity towards pilgrimage sites.
Vaishnava Janato Inscribed on plague, Birla House, New Delhi. Photo: Vinay Lal
“Vaishnavajana to” was, as I have pointed out, sung at Gandhi’s daily prayer meetings. As Gandhi commenced his almost 250-mile march to the sea in 1930, writes Narayan Desai, he was handed his walking stick by his close associate Kaka Kalelkar, and Narayan Khare sang “Vaishnavajana to”. The bhajan remained on the lips of Gandhi and his companions throughout the Dandi March. Widely known as Narsi’s bhajan undoubtedly was to Gujaratis, it was unquestionably Gandhi who popularized it through the length and breadth of India—indeed, I would go so far as to say that Narsi’s life, too, is now inconceivable without a consideration of Gandhi.
The bhajan has been set to music by some of India’s famous instrumentalists, among them Shivkumar Sharma, Amjad Ali Khan, and Hariprasad Chaurasia. The rendition of M. S. Subbulakshmi—whose “musical gifts” Gandhi amply acknowledged in a letter to her on 28 September 1944—has done much to give it an iconic status in the register of devotional music and more recent performances by the likes of Lata Mangeshkar have ensured its popularity.
One of the more intriguing testimonies to the afterlife of Narsi’s bhajan is the fact that Sahmat, an activist cultural organization with a distinctly left-secular outlook founded in the 1990s, thought it fit to print a large poster of the bhajan in attractive calligraphy and circulate it widely. We may interpret this as an acknowledgment, if perhaps unwittingly so, by a cultural organization that has been the torch bearer of Indian secularism that Gandhi came to secularism not a student of the French Revolution but as a devout Hindu. We may also say that Gandhi attempted to live by the ideals described in Narsi’s devotional song, and he would have seen in the song’s popularity at least some faint signs of what he took to be India’s enduring interest in the spiritual life.
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Hear version by Riyaaz Qawwali here:
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Vinay Lal is Professor, History at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), United States. A sample of his extensive writings: Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009.India and the Unthinkable: The Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics. Co-edited with Roby Rajan. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. A Passionate Life: Writings By and On Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Co-edited with Ellen C. DuBois. Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2017.Blog:https://vinaylal.
wordpress.com/ Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/ dillichalo
More by Vinay Lal in The Beacon
Visions of an Insurgent Spirit: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay on the ‘Global South’
The Ayodhya Verdict: What it means for Hindus
Gandhi’s Dharma: Itineraries of a Religious Life
Listen to Vinay Lal at KLF: Ambedkar and religion
