T.N. Madan: The Secret of Gandhi’s Greatness // Gopalkrishna Gandhi: We need to do more than lament the tragedy // Sarojini Naidu's AIR broadcast Feb 1, 1948:"My Father, Do Not Rest"
Gandhiji has been killed by his own people for whose redemption he lived. This second crucifixion in the history of the world has been enacted on a Friday - the same day Jesus was done to death one thousand nine hundred and fifteen years ago. Father forgive us
Hindusthan Standard January 31, 1948
T.N. Madan: What the Secret of Gandhi’s Greatness Really Was
By general worldwide recognition, Mohandas K. Gandhi was not only the greatest man of modern India – notwithstanding passionately sincere dissenters such as B.R. Ambedkar – but also one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. Whom would one place by his side as a political leader of our time who stood or stands tall because of moral stature? Nelson Mandela and the present Dalai Lama come to mind. Who else? Charles Andrews, who had once in South Africa been prevented by Gandhi from touching his feet because it would “demean” him, had warned him that he would find it difficult to make people desist from this traditional gesture of reverence in his own country. Reverence there is in ample measure, but understanding is harder to achieve.
Taking his cue from a letter from Andrews, Rabindranath
Tagore, eight years Gandhi’s senior in age, had in 1918 addressed him as
‘Mahatmaji’. A year later, Motilal Nehru, in his presidential address to the
Indian National Congress, referred to him by the same honorific. Nearly a
hundred years have passed since then and ‘Mahatma’ has survived as an
inalienable part of Gandhi’s name and personality: Mahatma, the Great Man.
Additionally, he came to be called the ‘Father of the
Nation’ by someone who surely had been wronged by Gandhi. Speaking on July 6,
1944 from Azad Hind Radio somewhere in South-East Asia, Subhas Chandra Bose
sought the “blessings” of the “Father of the Nation” at the commencement of the
“holy war” against the British.
When four years later Gandhi was assassinated on
January 30, 1948, the United Nations flag flew at half mast in homage to a man
who was not the head of a member state, only an honoured citizen of a newly
independent country. And the citation of “The People’s Peace Prize in
accordance with the Will of Alfred Nobel”, posthumously bestowed on Gandhi on
December 5, 2015 by the Peace Movement of Orust in Sweden, calls him the
“Lodestar of the Peoples of the World”.
What was the secret of Gandhi’s greatness? Much has been
written about it but somehow it remains elusive. Perhaps even he himself did
not know it. He was a very complex man, a mix of contradictions. The key that
he had discovered in Jainism to the understanding of the “many-sidedness” (anekanta)
of reality could well be kept in mind by anyone who seeks to understand the
nature of Gandhi’s greatness. One may then perhaps glimpse an aspect of it.
Erik Erikson has written about Gandhi’s greatness in his
insightful study, Gandhi’s Truth (1969), drawing attention,
among other things, to his sense of mission, the call to leadership, and a
sense of indispensability. He had this sense from the time of his father
Karamchand’s death, Erikson observes, when he was just 16. He lived in guilt
ever after for not having been with his father at the time of his death, as if
his presence at the deathbed had been indispensable.
Decades later, Gandhi obviously considered it his moral
responsibility to prevent the homicidal madness that had seized Hindus and
Muslims alike. He also wanted to stand firm like a rock against the demand for
the division of the country on communal lines. Nirmal Kumar Bose, the Calcutta
University professor who worked as his secretary during the critical years
1946-1947, recalls how he found a sleepless Gandhi agonising at night, “Main
kya karoon? Main kya karoon? (What should I do? What should I do?)”.
He surely addressed to himself the question that he asked on
March 19, 1947 of Congressmen in Bihar, who had remained mute witnesses to the
massacre of Muslims, including the killing of a 110-year-old woman: “Main toh
apse poochhna chahta hoon ki aap zinda kyun rahe? (I wish to ask you,
how could you live … How could you tolerate it?”). He then said, “I have
vowed to do or die. I will not rest nor let others rest. There is such a fire raging
in me that I will know no peace till I have found a solution for all this.” (Discussion
with Congress Workers, 19 March 1947; The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi,
Vol 87, pp. 118-119). He did not find the solution, and true to his word,
he died, although at the hands of an assassin.
In this self-questioning lament there is a most unusual
combination of humility and moral egoism. From the early years of the century,
when Gandhi was in South Africa, he had the conviction that he had to be the
leader; and to be a public figure, he had first to awaken his own moral
conscience. In a 1942 letter to an obtuse Englishman, Viceroy Linlithgow, he
wrote: “A mission… came to me in 1906, namely to spread truth and non-violence
among mankind in the place of violence and falsehood in all walks of life.” And
to achieve this mission, he had taken the vows of chastity and poverty and
surrender to the will of God.
Inevitably, on his return to India, Gandhi assumed the
leadership of the national movement in 1920. For this he had already shaped the
powerful instrument of non-violent satyagraha – insistence upon truth in all
one’s actions. Civil disobedience was a specific form of this mode of action in
the political arena. The immediate objective was swaraj; the means
to it, satyagraha; and the ultimate goal, sarvodaya.
For a quarter century, from the early 1920s to the
mid-1940s, Gandhi was the leader of the Indian national
movement, a colossus, and that too most of the time on his own terms. He
was indeed a charismatic leader who almost always managed to win over
dissenters, who suppressed their doubts about his approach, and eventually fell
in line. The most notable example, of course, is that of Jawaharlal Nehru.
There were some, however, who felt displaced and became his bitter political
foes, foremost among them being Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
From Quit India to Partition
The leader was his own stern judge and on occasion confessed
to what he called his Himalayan blunders. One of these perhaps, although not
acknowledged as such by him, was the Quit India movement launched in August
1942. It led to the immediate imprisonment of Gandhi, his closest associates,
and the top rung of Congress leaders. The political space was thrown open to
his opponents, notably the Muslim League under Jinnah, to spread their appeal
and consolidate their position. Partition became a reality in less than half a
dozen years, although Gandhi had said this could happen only over his dead
body.
Before the eventual turn of events came the event of his
being sidelined by his own followers. Gandhi was released from detention in
1944 in view of his deteriorating health. Viceroy Wavell believed that he would
never again be physically strong enough to resume the role of the leader.
Gandhi himself acknowledged that the countrywide fervour generated by the Quit
India movement had been exhausted: “History can never be repeated,” he said.
Gandhi recovered remarkably well and soon enough for him to
embark upon new initiatives on his own; the top Congress leadership was still
in prison. He began with a series of meetings with Jinnah which produced no
agreement because Jinnah was by then a changed man and fixated on his idea of
Pakistan, which however remained only vaguely defined.
After the end of the war in Europe in 1945, Wavell and the
new British government, headed by Labour Party’s Clement Attlee, took several
major steps in just a year in an effort to arrive at a satisfactory manner of
transfer of power in India, which had become inescapable for a variety of
reasons. These efforts failed primarily because of the unwillingness of both
the Congress and the Muslim League to compromise, and Jinnah’s refusal to
acknowledge that the Congress could negotiate on behalf of all Indians
including the Muslims. This intransigence derived some legitimacy from the
surprisingly good performance of the League in the elections to the Central
Legislative Assembly in early -1946.
During this momentous year, Congress leaders began to act
independently and even in defiance of Gandhi’s advice. Nehru went so far as to
question Gandhi’s vision of a future India based on his idea of the ideal
village. Gandhi clearly saw the writing on the wall: his days of leadership of
a unified national movement were drawing to an end. The Muslim League had
established itself as a rival to the Congress. More significantly, his
long-standing position as the supreme leader of the Congress had ended. Gandhi
stood “rejected” – to borrow this blunt word from his grandson Rajmohan
Gandhi’s 2006 book Mohandas.
The final phase
But Gandhi’s greatness had not really been rooted in the
shifting sands of politics. He had long been recognised as a ‘Mahatma’, a
spiritual person rooted in moral principles – in an ethic of conviction or
conscience. The shutting of the doors of the political arena did indeed open
wide for him the vast universe of ethical conduct unsullied by the quest for
political power.
Stalled by an unyielding Congress and what he considered an
unsympathetic British government, Jinnah ironically announced in the summer of
1946 “direct action” for the achievement of Pakistan; he had always opposed any
but the constitutional means of achieving political goals. Wavell had feared
such an impasse between the two leading political organisations would result in
large-scale violence. Standing firm on the principle of an undivided India,
Gandhi’s emphatic response to him (August 27, 1946) had been, “If India wants
her bloodbath, she shall have it.” This might seem like it was said in anger.
We know better: it was said in sorrow, but with moral conviction. Principles
are after all most important; those who would rather live by expediency are
perhaps better dead. “Kitne marenge (how many will die)?” Bose used
to recall Gandhi asking Nehru.
The first enactment of the bloodbath was on the streets of
Calcutta which were taken over on August 16 1946 for three to four days by
Muslim League rioters. Gandhi rushed there to join with others, including
Premier Suhrawardhy, to restore peace and sanity to the city. But more was to
follow. Muslim majority Noakhali erupted in flames in October, and Gandhi
arrived there to a hostile reception in early November. Retaliatory killings of
Muslims began soon after in Bihar, but Gandhi continued with his mission of
communal harmony in Noakhali.
Each day began with prayers, including most poignantly
Tagore’s haunting song, ‘Ekla chalo re’, as though it had been
specially written for him: Walk alone/ If they answer not to thy call, walk
alone… O thou of evil luck/ With the thunder flame of pain ignite thine own
heart/ And let it burn alone…”
Under enormous pressure to go to Bihar, Gandhi finally got
there in February 1947, and heard horrifying accounts of Hindu brutality
against Muslims. I have already mentioned his anguished speech when he asked
Congressmen how they could have remained mute witnesses to the killings and not
done anything to protect innocent Muslims even if this might have meant their
own death. Once again he did his usual best to restore calm. From Bihar he went
to Delhi and later in the summer to Kashmir.
And then he decided to return to Noakhali, but the situation
in Calcutta which had continued to simmer, had taken a turn for the worse.
Gandhi was in Calcutta on August 15, Independence Day, which he observed
as a day of fasting and silence. This time he had to resort to his famous fast
unto death in September in order to bring peace to the city. Peace was restored
once again, and after assurances that seemed to satisfy him, he went to Delhi.
He was in Delhi on October 2, 1947. It was to be his
last birthday. What was going through his mind – the sense of disillusionment –
found expression in very poignant words that day: ‘Today is a day of mourning.
I am still alive… nobody listens to me anymore. In such a situation there is no
place for me in India, nothing for me to do… Today I have reached the age of 79
and this is a thorn in my flesh’. He did not suffer long: in just another four
months, but after one last fast in mid-January for communal harmony, Godse’s
bullets put an end to his misery.
It is not my intention here to go over the incidents of
1947-1948 culminating in his assassination on January 30, 1948. An uncharitable
critic, Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri, grudgingly admitted the significance of
Gandhi’s assassination when he said that the only thing that could not be
“taken away” from Gandhi, whom he judged to be a total failure, was “the glory
of martyrdom”. Rather, I am looking for a clue, surely just one among many, to
the secret of Gandhi’s greatness. May one say it lay in his boundless love for
all human beings, and particularly his compassion for the suffering? For long,
one of his favourite hymns chosen for daily singing was Narsinh Mehta’s Vaishnava
jana to …: They alone are godly people who feel the pain of others as
their own.
It is noteworthy that genuine Christian seekers detected
this virtue quite early. Andrews, I noted at the outset, wanted to touch
Gandhi’s feet in heartfelt reverence during the early South African days. In
1921, John Haynes Holmes called Gandhi in a sermon, “unquestionably the
greatest man living today”, and even considered him to be Jesus returned to the
earth. Rabindranath Tagore in a 1933 letter compared him to the Buddha for his
limitless compassion for all living creatures.
Gandhi as a leader of people has few peers in our time. In a
timeless perspective, he belongs together with Gautama Buddha and Jesus Christ.
His all-embracing compassion was, surely, an aspect of
Gandhi’s many-sided Truth.
Rashtrapati Bhavan has many remarkable works of art. Of them
one is astonishing. This is a large painting by Polish artist Feliks Topolski. Its subject is Mahatma Gandhi. No big deal in that! There
are countless portraits of that man, some of them being famous such as Jamini
Roy’s seated Gandhi and Nandalal Bose’s strident ‘pilgrim’ in Noakhali.
So, what makes Topolski’s painting astonishing? This, that
it portrays dramatically and magnetically Gandhi’s assassination by a man
holding a smoking gun. A depiction of Gandhi’s assassination by a celebrated
artist has to be of interest. But how does that make it ‘astonishing’? The work is astonishing because Topolski painted it before
the assassination. Before?
That is right, and that is what makes the work astonishing.
In a stroke of prescience, he painted a possible future assassination of Gandhi
well before January 30, 1948. The work, anticipating the event in startling
detail, is, in a sense, figurative. There he is, Gandhi, looking all of his 79
years, in fact, more. It is almost as if he has suddenly aged to become
something like 89, slumping, with a gnarled right hand raised in an ambiguous
gesture that could suggest surprise, forgiveness, an appeal.
The assassin too
is portrayed with startling clarity, to the front of the stricken figure,
facing us. But the work is important for more than its anticipative,
prescient theme. It’s saying something that is barely audible, but is
impossible to ignore. The dying man is doing something as life ebbs out of him.
He is speaking and his raised hand is also part of the message that is being
conveyed. Is ‘Rama’ on his mind in the painting? I am certain he is.
Gandhi became, as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay has said, an
‘ichhamarani’, meeting the end he desired for himself in the ideal that
Tulsidas describes in chaupai 10 of the Kishkindhakanda of Sriramacharitamanas:
Janma janma muni jatanu karahin / anta Rama kahi avat nahin — sages strive from
birth to birth, yet in dying they fail to say ‘Rama’. And despite his
assassin’s contesting in court the belief that Gandhi invoked ‘Rama’ as he
fell, that invocation will be immortally linked with Gandhi’s last moments.
But ‘Rama’ apart, there has to have been something like the
last full sentence spoken by Gandhi. And it has been recorded by Pyarelal as
having been spoken something like two minutes before he was shot without any
knowledge of imminent death. Referring to his delayed arrival at the prayer
ground that evening, Gandhi said in Gujarati to Abha Gandhi and Manu Gandhi, “I
hate being late”. This very ordinary comment, a workaday remark, has no
significance beyond its contextual salience. But such is the mystique of men
like Gandhi that it has been raised to great metaphorical height by Lanza del
Vasto, the Italian philosopher. Vasto imagines Gandhi looking his assassin in
the eye and saying, “Brother, you are late.”
Metaphors are untruths that seek to convey a truth. And so
Gandhi telling Godse, in this imaginary line, that he, the assassin, or his
act, the assassination, was late in coming is both a fantasy and a verity.
Gandhi had done everything in his power to stem the blood-tide of India’s
Partition but he could not avert it, could not prevent butchery, rape,
abduction, dispossession. He had said words to the effect of ‘Partition over my
dead body’. Partition had happened and he was not dead. Not for five and a half
months after the division. He to be washed into that river of defeat. And on 30
January, 1948, he was drowning but he was late, according to his own time, his
own chain-watch, dangling famously and now reproachfully, at his waist.
Different eyes read different meanings into works of
ideational art. His up-raised hand in the painting, and his tremulous
forefinger can indicate a different thing to each beholder. To me they seem to
say ‘Hold it! Don’t proclaim me an ichhamarani…I am not going with any sense of
fulfilment…I am late…I have missed the boat…Don’t miss yours…But perhaps that
is what was meant to happen…this young man who has just shot me… His violence
is only a sign of the violence everywhere around
us…Hatred….Spite…Intolerance…Hindu and Muslim…India and Pakistan…
This way it
will never end…this conflict…Now it is up to you to change things…to stop this
intolerance in thought and word and deed...Don’t you miss the boat…don’t you be
late…’
That finger addresses us. The assassin’s smoking gun
addresses us too. Topolski gives us the choice between the signalling hand and
the smoking gun. And then the master artist offers us two extraordinary
redemptions. The first is from the hand, firm, young, confident, rising
to hold the dying man’s hand as it is about to come down. It says ‘See, Bapu, I
am not late…I am right here…’
The second is another figure, above the prone figure’s
right, which is unquestionably the Mahatma in an after-life, stronger and
younger than his 79 years, perhaps, at a 69, moving out of the mortal frame,
haloed, and confident that he has been heard, heeded.
Today, on the anniversary of that day, we can and must do
better than lament the tragedy of that assassination, tragedy that it was, the
greatest that has visited Independent India. We must see the smoking gun for
what it is: A sputtering tube of insanity. And we must see the brave and strong
hand that has been raised to hold Gandhi’s.
The hand raised by civil society to warn and check
intolerance has without doubt slowed its spread. But the polarisation of our
people, which is the psychological co-efficient of Partition, remains high on
the divisive agenda. And terror, in all its gruesome versatility, is delighted
by the polarisation. The two — fundamentalist terror and fundamentalist
intolerance — fulfil each other.
Festivals used to be communal flashpoints. Our collective
good sense has made riots over festivals rare. But elections, democracy’s great
festival, load the communal gun. Bihar grabbed it, ejected the cartridges from
its muzzle. But we cannot be too vigilant, we cannot be complacent. The
steaming mouth is only at one remove from the smoking gun. The unnamed hand that Topolski shows ready to clasp Gandhi’s
is now supporting more than one man’s dream for India. It is supporting India.
ALSO SEE:
The Other Side of Maoism
Communist Party of India's Homage to Gandhiji October 2, 1947 // Communist Party's Appeal to the People of Pakistan August 15, 1947
V.D. Savarkar and Gandhi’s murder
Madhu Limaye's (senior socialist leader) observations on the RSS (1979)
Communist Party of India's Homage to Gandhiji October 2, 1947 // Communist Party's Appeal to the People of Pakistan August 15, 1947
V.D. Savarkar and Gandhi’s murder
Madhu Limaye's (senior socialist leader) observations on the RSS (1979)
