Courtesy JK Photography
Ashoak Upadhyay
“Every single thing a sign, every atom adding up to a tale.” —Geetanjali Shree, That Empty Space p 8
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n October 2nd, Sudhir Chandra wrote a meditation on remembering the Unremembered Agony of Gandhi in The Beacon. Itwas an anguished recall of the tragic ironies of Gandhi’s first birthday in Independent India–soon to be his last. By October 2 1947, his 79th birthday, Gandhi had lost the desire to live; that “”incorrigible optimist” who had, earlier so often said he would want to live over a hundred years now seemed to yearn for death.
His words spell the unbearable load of loneliness; of irrelevance in what he had begun to feel was an alien Hindustan and a grief at his still being around.
“This is for me a day of mourning. I am still kying around alive…” he mourns his life. 2 October 1947 just as the new India is gifted its freedom in a mephistophelian deal: A bloodbath that split two communities with murderous hatreds as never before. How could Gandhi have a place in this Hindustan? But he did. He had been a fighter, he had walked into the worst riots to tamp down the fires of hatred and killings. Yet two months after freedom, on his birthday, he publicly expresses his desire for death; if life is mourning then death is liberation, he seemed to say. As Sudhir Chandra sees it “His moral scheme did not countenance the idea of suicide. But, given his faith in prayer, he was attempting precisely that. In any case, to lose the will to live and crave, seriously, for death is not vastly different, and distant, from actual physical death.”
Heaven knows there was enough happening in this blood-drenched new nation to despair over and become cynical about. But this cry of anguish? This aranyarodan? The desire for death? The burden of sorrow made heavy, indeed unbearable not just by irrelevance or loneliness but by a grief about Hindustan; “”his sorrows,” Chandra points out “ were the whole country’s sorrows.” So his agony is a cry for the nation, a “dukh”at the partition and the resultant violence, the abandonment of non-violence by his “closest associates who were now the country’s rulers neglect and exploitation of the poor; summary rejection of the model of free India that he had envisaged in his seed-text, the Hind Swaraj; and corruption within the government.”
He shuddered to think where it would all end. He foresaw. the author tells us, the “dark ahead” and moaned
“ ‘Whatever is happening to the country that could make me happy?’ ”
“Hindustan did not think so” says Chandra. It didn’t care. It “cast Gandhi aside”. It turned him into a ‘Father’ a symbol of a freedom struggle that had itself become a symbol symbolizing nothing but itself.
So we do not remember his agony before Godse’s bullets ended it a few months later. Why? “It pluralises the assassination and the assassin. And leaves none of us unimplicated.”
Should we care at all? We, the urban middle classes, articulate in our frenzied worship of materiality and, occasionally rueful of its increasing costs on our lives, would do well to look back to that complicity in neglect that turned him irrelevant, killed his incorrigible optimism for life; we may find clues to our nightmare Present and apocalyptic Future. In our dismissal of his dreams and visions for a new India we could retrace the wrong turnings we took even before the Partition turned out to be the bloody crucible of our ‘freedom.‘ We just might learn that the hatreds were outcomes of those wrong turnings.
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Through the unknown, remembered gate/When the last of the earth left to discover/Is that which was the beginning;” –-T.S. Eliot. Little Gidding)
Two years earlier almost to the day, on October 05, 1947 Gandhi wrote a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru asking for clarifications on the path post-Independent India would take and the difference, if any, between their respective outlooks. “If the difference is fundamental then I feel the public should also be made aware of it. It would be detrimental to our work for Swaraj to keep them in the dark” Gandhi was pitching for a simple life,, village centered communities based on nonviolence and truth. Nehru was to dismiss this vision impatiently despite Gandhi’s subsequent clarification that by the village he meant not the existing one that Nehru viewed as backward and primitive but the “village of my dreams” Nehru would have none of it. He was all for Industries as Temples of India . As Sudhir Chandra had put it in his book, “An Impossible Possibility”, Nehru represented the “average modern” Gandhi the dreamer, the radical visionary. No prizes for guessing who won out. In any case, Gandhi had already begun to get isolated within the Congress; the whiff of freedom as early as the mid 1930s had begun to shape the Congress’ emergent vision of India and none symbolized it as clearly as Nehru.
[The end at the Beginnning: Gandhi Nehru lettters]
Perhaps the seeds of that modernising urge of the “average modern”, the urge to build India’s future in the image of Europe and America—predicated on capitalism, the Nation-State, standing armies, the city, heavy industrialization—had already been prefigured and shaped in and by the Imperial Raj and its epistemology. As Mithi Mukherjee asks in her brilliant if underrated book, India in the Shadows of Empire, why did the freedom struggle end in a ‘trasnfer of power’ This ‘Transfer of Power’ and not a revolution mind you, like the American revolution or French one, stretched the shadow of Empire over the framers of the Constitution and shaped the instutions and laws of the new Nation-State. Needless to say, the Gandhian discourse of ‘renunciative’ politics in which the State would wither away, was nowhere in the reckoning; it had never been.
The result, as points out:
“The state is the source of all laws not the people. The state—not the people—is therefore thee source of the Constitution” (p191)
The imperial discourse had won. In more ways than one
[Empire Struck Back!. Review of India in The Shadows…]
Mithi Mukherjee’s brilliant analysis foregrounds the possibility that very early on Gandhi had realized the quest for Swraj had been abandoned by his closest colleagues. If the freedom struggle had been viewed by Gandhi as the expansion of the Political, the arena for an inclusive engagement and articulation of “democracy” by people transcending their narrow identities, then it had been usurped, or was on the verge of being usurped by that ‘transfer of power.’ For what did it imply other than the attenuation of the Political into politics, that exclusionary sphere of legislative/ representative power transmission in which the people would become mere target beneficiaries of yet another ‘monarchical’ dispensation in which the Imperial monarch-as-judge was replaced by the State dispensing justice as equity at its own discretion. The idea that Parliament and through it the people had authority over the State was and remained a myth peddled by liberals seduced by the illusions of that transfer of power.
And we cheered on our leaders, our monarchs, dispensing justice, manipulating our freedom within the barricades of consent steering and corralling the very idea of liberty to suit their needs through the manufacture of consent. As complicit, obedient ‘citizens’ egged on by a liberal faith in the notion of future Progress as the utopic remedy for this backward Present, how could we not embrace the emergence of a nationalism based on violence to fellow humans and non-human life? How could we not succumb to the Idolatry of materiality, the premise that the bricks of Self-Promotion shall build that ‘house on the hill.’ India could now march in the footsteps of the developed nations, their Past our Future. Nothing had changed. Just that Gandhi hd been forgotten.
But had he?
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“Chop off every tongue/if you can/but the words will still/have been utttered.”Lal Singh Dil
It is no small irony that Gandhi comes alive at the very moment in India’s precarious post-Independence history when the legacies of that ‘transfer of powper’ discourse are bearing bitter fruits: monarchical authoritarianism, bigotry and an oligarchic capitalism in which resources are being transferred to the very rich and ‘Vikas’ represents nothing more than the weeding-out of the weak and dispossessed as unsavoury reminders of Not-So-Shining India.
Three post-2014 events suggest a resurrection of the Gandhi spirit, or, better still, a remembrance of it in the only way he would have thought appropriate and apposite: through praxis towards Swrajya. One singles out these three simply because they are in the public eye, but there are many more and perhaps instead of listing them, one may adumbrate their uniquely Gandhian praxiol;ogy.
In the anti-CAA movement best symbolized by Shaheen Bagh, the historically unique farmers’ struggle against the farm laws now more than a year old and the struggle by the sants of Matri Sadan since 1997 to save the Ganga from sand mining and the fragile eco-system of the Himalayas from the depredations of development through large dams across rivers and hydel projects we can discern the most crucial elements of Gandhian discourse. It does not matter that these and other struggles, for instance that of the boatmen on the Ganges at Varanasi to save their livelihoods endangered by ‘Vikas’ plans to turn the river and its ghats into a global tourist spot, do not spout or quote Gandhiam texts as gospels, decalogues or beatitudes. They may not even mention his name. They don’t need to. They are Gandhian in essence.
All of them mark a break from the marketplace of representative politics by creating and expanding what Ramin Jahanbegloo in The Disobedient Indian terms the Political; “the space of autonomous action by human beings in a historical context.”This radically different from politics that is the “space of competition and contestation for the very basis of power and authority.” (p 55) The Political creates “the pulis sense of living together” so it is inclusssive, an arena in which dialogic participation become the vehicle for the appropriation of agency, in which self-foundation as the basis for progress is replaced with community wellbeing, without subordinating the individual voice. The abiding qualities of that arena of the Political, or publicness are a commitment to non-violence to satyagraha as forms of civil disobedience. Both the anti-CAA protests and the farmers’ struggles bear eloquent testimony to this publicness as does the satygraha by the seers of Haridwar.
That political arena provides the spaces for an even more profound Gandhian ethos, perhaps one even he would have surprised by and heartily endorsed. Each of these arenas of civil disobedience collapses Time. They are rooted in a Present that is also the Past and beckons the Future. They do this by harkening back to tradition in the sense Walter Benjamin meant: an appropriation of tradition as the common properties of radical change.
“In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.” Walter Benjamin (p 255)
The strong presence and leadership indeed of thereby at Shaheen Bagh broke the stereotype of the house-bound tradtional Muslim woman, confirming not just the tradition of female agency in what has been considered the most hidebound faith as a male bastion but something more procrustean. What the women at Shaheen Bagh were consecrating and celebrating was their attachment to what they considered their watan; the protest against the CAA laws was at its very heart an assertion of the woman to land; not in the sense of a constitutional entitlement alone but as a recall of the myth of Mother Earth, of self-identification with the nurturing power of the land from which she cannot be uprooted or sundered. The struggle was meta-physical, not just existential. And the mythos of nurturing expanded. The kitchens that sprang up at the protest sites, the langars that fed and continue to feed the protesting farmers, the langars that fed migrant workers fleeing the pandemic in utter confusion, penniless and hungry—all these assert the recovery and appropriation of that ancient tradition of the woman as Mother Earth nurturing and reproducing Life itself and not the least, an evocative articulation of the enmeshing of the sacred and secular myths of nurturing.
That tradition of the bond to your watan, to your environment and Mother Earth’s bounties and the threats of rupture inform and sustain the protests; they represent, existentially and not as a encoded philosophical doctrine, rejection, renunciation of the “average modern” to use Sudhir Chandra’s term, that ‘development agenda so heartily and now mercilessly adopted all along the political spectrum.
Too, Gandhi would have smiled his benedictions on the fasting seers and sants of Matri Sadan at Haridwar, who have been protesting sand mining in the Ganga and the construction of large large dams and hydel projects that endanger the fragile eco-system of the region. Walter Benjamin too would have nodded approvingly alongside Gandhi: Sants using scientific data to protest a development agenda that threatens their holy river that has sustained life for centuries and of which they speak of in devotional terms.
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“This grain of salt/Will hold the world together” — Anamika: Picks in The Bin…
Let us see view these protests and numerous others that as elements of struggles grounded in particularisms and constitutive of varied identities to be sure butt also examplars of a common radical citizenship working towards a radical and plural democracy that is always in the process of becoming as Chantal Mouffe defines it in The Return of the Political. For Gandhi swaraj remand a quest, never an established fact.
And those struggles as Mouffe points out are critical.
“When there is a lack of democratic political struggles with which to identify, their place is taken by other forms of identification, of ethnic, nationalist or religious nature, and the opponent is defined in those terms too. In such conditions, the opponent cannot be perceived as an adversary to contend with, but only as an enemy to be destroyed.” P6
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References Walter Benjamin. Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited and Introduced by Hannah Arendt. Schocken Books New York. 2007
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