My first memory about the Mahatma is his autobiography among my amma’s books. The title itself is enough to get your attention: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, but for a boy who was reading borrowed comic books from his cousin the thick, heavy worded monologue did not interest me. My personal encounter with the book was much later, against the backdrop of a spinning compass trying to find its moral direction and world view. By then the schooling, media and society had instilled in me an image of infallible Mahatma who is larger than life.
Surprisingly, the book was a complete letdown. The man was nothing like I was led to believe. He was just like any other ordinary man who has self-doubts, trying to define him on the basis of his heritage and religion instilled values. It was a total shock to learn that the Mahatma even supported varnashramadharma, the ideological basis of the caste system. Needless to say, it intrigued my curiosity: how did this man become Mahatma? The autobiography stops at the year 1921, so I started to read about him.
The literature on Mahatma is quite exhaustive. Over the many years that followed my understanding of the man evolved. His life has been looked through every possible shade of glass and hence the picture is very vivid. Mahatma’s portrayal ranges from that of a naive, utopian dreamer without a real understanding of underlying socio-political forces which caused India many problems (some of which we are still relevant) to that of a political prophet who made an independent India possible through peaceful means.
Off all the vast literature on him ironically, I find the best testimony about who the Mahatma was in the words of his assassin, Nathuram Vinayak Godse’s statement made to the Punjab High Court on why he killed Gandhi. The following sentences are taken from his statement:
His activities for public awakening were phenomenal in their intensity and were reinforced by the slogan of truth and non-violence which he paraded ostentatiously before the country. No sensible or enlightened person could object to those slogans.
Gandhi had done very good in South Africa to uphold the rights and well-being of the Indian community there.
But above all I studied very closely whatever Savarkar and Gandhiji had written and spoken, as to my mind these two ideologies have contributed more to the moulding of the thought and action of the Indian people during the last thirty years or so, than any other single factor has done.
If you discount Godse’s misplaced anti-muslim ramblings and blown up idealistic fantasy about our singular glorified past, which is what actually made him pull the trigger, he says how the Mahatma was instrumental in unifying the county to act as one.
This is how I want to remember him: The man who made a platform for ethnically diverse, linguistically divided, anthropologically different nation to come together as one and demand independence. Before Mahatma the need for Independence and freedom struggle moment was confined to the elite, educated self-proclaimed upper class. All other struggles stemmed out of local causes rather than out of nationalistic realization.
He is not perfect, nor did he have all the solutions for our county’s problems. He couldn’t even play a decisive role during the partition or prevent needless bloodshed that followed. Looking back from today’s India it is easy to find fault with the Mahatma but there is no denying that this India, the nation-state, was built using his blocks.
Mahatma, who walked through the history of this nation with his long wand creating a unifying magical middle ground for all to come together and be one as a single strong nation. Today 150 years after his birth I fear that the Mahatma’s magic is slowly wearing off.
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