Nina Martyris on the trustee of time
The Most Punctual Man in India..
The watch never left his side. It was the first
thing Gandhi reached for when he rose each morning at 4 a.m., and the last
thing he checked before going to bed, often past midnight. He consulted it
frequently through the day so as never to be late for an appointment. And, at
that final moment, when three bullets from an assassin’s Beretta knocked him
over, his 78-year-old body slumped to the ground, and the watch also stopped.
Mahatma Gandhi’s Ingersoll pocket watch,
costing just a dollar, was among the handful of material possessions he owned.
Since he didn’t have a pocket to carry it in, he attached the watch to his
dhoti with a safety pin and a loop of khadi string. The Ingersoll is displayed
in a glass case at the National
Gandhi Museum in New Delhi
Gandhi’s legendary punctuality had a utilitarian
imperative—without it he would never have been able to answer the sacks of
letters and streams of visitors that demanded his attention each day. But, as
with everything he valued, it had a moral imperative as well. Simply put, time
was tied to his philosophy of trusteeship: the belief that just as we do not
own our wealth but are trustees of it—and thus have to use it wisely—similarly,
we are trustees of our time. “You may not waste a grain of rice or
a scrap of paper, and similarly a minute of your time,” he wrote.
“It is not ours. It belongs to the nation and we are trustees for the use of
it.”
Consequently, any abuse of time was unethical. “One who does less than he
can is a thief,” he wrote to a friend. “If we keep a timetable we can save
ourselves from the last-mentioned sin indulged in even unconsciously.” While
this focus on punctuality may portray Gandhi as skittish and anxious, the
opposite was true: a timetable allowed him to give the issue at hand his
tranquil and undivided attention.
Known to apologize if he was even a minute late,
Gandhi was equally stringent about his personal regimen. Winding up a letter to
a professor, he wrote: “I am also being reminded by Lady Watch that it is time
for my walk. So I obey her and stop here.” Apparently, even the British police
knew about Lady Watch. After Gandhi relaunched the civil disobedience movement
in January 1932, the Bombay
Barely a few days before his arrest, Gandhi had
sent two English watches as thank-you gifts to the Scotland Yard sergeants
assigned to detail him during his stay in London
When his friend the Anglican missionary C. F. Andrews had
objected strongly to his bonfires of foreign cloth, Gandhi took great pains to
point out it was only foreign mill-made cloth he was against since it had
destroyed India
During his stints in jail as a prisoner of the
Raj, Gandhi would often write more than fifty letters a day—even when his thumb
and elbow ached—in addition to spinning, reading the Gita or
works by John Ruskin, learning Urdu, cooking, and cultivating his passion for
astronomy. His secretary Mahadev Desai marveled at his use of time. Gandhi’s
letters are brisk (like his walk) and often acerbic, but also intimate and full
of concern—especially for the way people spent their time. What time do you
wake up in the morning? he’d ask. Or, in a slightly hectoring reminder to the
women of the ashram, “It is now five to seven; you are therefore all on your
way to the prayer hall.” Or, in a guilty self-check when he had written a
longer than usual letter, “I must not give you more time today.” Outside jail,
he had far less time, so the letters became shorter. To those who complained,
he replied sharply: “Do not expect letters from me at present. I have no time
at all. But you keep writing regularly.”
He was unsparing of tardiness from those around
him, even if the offender happened to be a child. On learning that a girl at
his Sabarmati ashram had been delayed for the pre-dawn prayer service because
she’d been combing her long hair, he sent for a pair of scissors and gave her a
bob in the moonlight. His eldest grandson, Kantilal, who was a startled witness
to the Barber of Sabarmati in action, didn’t escape either. When the two of
them were on a train together, traveling third-class as was the Mahatma’s
habit, Gandhi, who was busy writing letters, asked Kanti what time it was, and
was told it was five. But the old man’s eyes slanted to the watch on his
grandson’s wrist and saw there was still a whole minute to go before five. That
was it. The casual glossing over of sixty seconds was treated as a moral lapse:
“He stopped writing and exclaimed: ‘Is it five?’ I replied with a guilty conscience: ‘No, Bapu, it is one minute to five.’ ‘Well, Kanti,’ he said, ‘what is the use of keeping a wristwatch? You have no value of time…Again, you don’t respect truth as you know it. Would it have cost more energy to say: It is one minute to five, than to say It is five o’clock?’ Thus he went on rebuking me for about fifteen to twenty minutes till it was time for his evening meal.”
“He stopped writing and exclaimed: ‘Is it five?’ I replied with a guilty conscience: ‘No, Bapu, it is one minute to five.’ ‘Well, Kanti,’ he said, ‘what is the use of keeping a wristwatch? You have no value of time…Again, you don’t respect truth as you know it. Would it have cost more energy to say: It is one minute to five, than to say It is five o’clock?’ Thus he went on rebuking me for about fifteen to twenty minutes till it was time for his evening meal.”
As is evident from the cheerfully inexact phrase, “about
fifteen to twenty minutes,” the young Kanti was unscathed by his grandfather’s
critique. He was scarcely alone. Gandhi was fighting a losing battle. Indians
have a notoriously relaxed attitude toward punctuality, and as the national
joke goes, the abbreviation IST (for Indian Standard Time) should really stand
for Indian Stretchable Time. One reason proffered is that the approach to time
is fundamentally different. Unlike the Western linear sense of time, Hindu
philosophy treats time as cyclical, a concept succinctly illustrated by the
sameness of the Hindi word for yesterday and tomorrow—kal. As Salman
Rushdie jokes in Midnight’s Children, “No people whose word for yesterday is
the same as their word fortomorrow can be said to have a firm grip
on time.” But Rushdie also parodies the relentlessly accurate tick-tock of the
clock as an “English-made” invention. A similar observation was made by the
writer Ronald Duncan, who visited Gandhi’s ashram in 1937. Duncan wrote: “I
shall always remember the anachronism of the large cheap watch which dangled on
a safety-pin attached to his loincloth: worn this way, time itself appeared to
be a toy, an invention of the Western mind.”
According to the novelist R. K. Narayan, the Indian
inability to keep time comes from an inborn attitude. Narayan, whose shrewd and
gentle stories capture the arrhythmic bustles of small-town India, was
unperturbed by a little lateness here and there. “In a country like ours, the
preoccupation is with eternity, and little measures of time are hardly ever
noticed,” he wrote, adding mischievously that the ideal watch is an ornamental
one that prevents you from reading the time.
A new watch designed by an Indian company—called the ish
watch—fits the bill. Its odd name parodies the Indian tendency to reply,
“Around twelve-ish,” when asked what time a meeting is, or to say, “I made
reservations for eight-ish.” The dislocated numbers on its dial capture this
elasticity, while the caption reads, “Because in India, time is not science but
an art, and we know that art can never be rushed.” Or, to borrow a charming
thought from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, India is where
“adventures do occur, but not punctually.” It’s hardly surprising, then, that
Gandhi’s exemplary punctuality is fondly viewed as another of his
eccentricities along with mudpacks, enemas, and goat’s milk.
“Keep Time and Carry On” could well have been a Gandhian
motto, except that the Mahatma was not very good at keeping time in the literal
sense of being able to keep to a beat or maintain a rhythm. As a young law
student in London, when he strove briefly and disastrously to be a Western
gentleman, Gandhi took six private lessons in ballroom dancing but gave up
after he found it “impossible to keep time.” While carding yarn, he complained,
“I also keep time in my strokes, but imperfectly.” Part of the young Gandhi’s
Western gentleman getup was a gold double-watch chain that he wore prominently
on his Bond Street suit. The arc from that pocket-watch to the
safety-pin-cum-khadi string Ingersoll parallels the arc from man to mahatma.
Apart from the Ingersoll, the other watch Gandhi loved and
wore for almost twenty years was a silver-backed Swiss Zenith given to him by
Indira Gandhi when she was a girl. Gandhi admired its functionality—the fact
that it had an alarm and a radium dial that glowed at night. So great was his
distress when it was stolen at a railway station in May 1947 that he published
an appeal in his newspaper, Harijan, asking for it to be returned.
Fortunately, the thief—a souvenir hunter—had a conscience, and sent it back.
Meanwhile, however, word had spread about the theft. An
English company sent Gandhi a new watch and others offered as well. A gold
watch sent by his friend Nand Lal Mehta provoked an outburst against
ostentation. “What you have done is like caparisoning a donkey in gold,” Gandhi
wrote. (Imagine how scandalized he’d be at the Gandhi 2 Ingersoll,
a watch that comes caparisoned in twenty-two jewels.) That Mehta’s watch was
merely gilded and not gold, cooled his wrath—barely. “Still I did not like it,”
he scolded. “I need only ordinary things. This watch cannot even take a khadi
string. It will need a silken string. And because there is no radium on the
dial, I shall need a torch or something at night. Of course it is not to be
expected that it will have an alarm. This does not mean that you should get a
new one.” He concluded grudgingly, “The watch seems to be keeping accurate
time.”
The silver Zenith passed into the care of Gandhi’s
great-niece, Abha, in whose arms he died.
It was auctioned in 2009 along with his slippers, plate, bowl, and spectacles
for $1.8 million. That an Indian liquor tycoon, Vijay Mallya, bought
it (thus ensuring its return to India) is ironic, given that Gandhi used every
available platform to denounce alcohol as satanic. His birthday, October 2, is
a dry day in India.
Gandhi was late for his last appointment, his inviolable
five o’clock prayer session. On the evening of January 30, 1948, he was so
engrossed in a meeting with India’s new home minister, Sardar Vallabhai
Patel—who was Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s rival—that he forgot the time.
His great nieces, Manu and Abha, who were tasked with alerting him, held back,
knowing how anguished he was by the rift between his two protégés. When they
finally screwed up the courage to interrupt, he rose quickly, went to the
bathroom, and then headed out.
The interfaith prayer meeting was a crucial form of outreach through which Gandhi met the public and tried to calm the fissile atmosphere in Delhi. The capital of a newly independent India had been engulfed in savage Hindu-Muslim riots and only a fast by Gandhi had stopped the bloodletting. Upset, he hurried forth, saying, “It irks me if I am late for prayers by even a minute.” Minutes later, he was dead, as was his watch—not at “around five” or “five-ish,” but at 5:12, a chronometrically precise salute to the man who loved time.
The interfaith prayer meeting was a crucial form of outreach through which Gandhi met the public and tried to calm the fissile atmosphere in Delhi. The capital of a newly independent India had been engulfed in savage Hindu-Muslim riots and only a fast by Gandhi had stopped the bloodletting. Upset, he hurried forth, saying, “It irks me if I am late for prayers by even a minute.” Minutes later, he was dead, as was his watch—not at “around five” or “five-ish,” but at 5:12, a chronometrically precise salute to the man who loved time.
