Gandhi After Gandhi After Gandhi

Ashis Nandy

There are four Gandhis who have survived Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s death. Fifty
years after Gandhi’s (1869-1948) assassination, it may be useful to establish their
identities, as the British police might have done in the high noon of colonialism. All the
four Gandhis are troublesome, but they trouble different people for different reasons
and in different ways. They are also useable in contemporary public life in four distinct
ways. I say this not in sorrow, but in admiration. For the ability to disturb people — or,
for that matter, be useable — one hundred and thirty years after one’s birth and fifty
years after one’s death is no mean achievement. Frankly, I do not care who the real
Gandhi was or is. Let academics debate that momentous issue. Contemporary politics is
not about ‘truths’ of history; it is about remembered pasts and the problems of
fashioning a future based on collective memories. For better or for worse, Gandhi seems
to have entered that memory.

Two qualifications at the beginning. First, I am no Gandhian. My opinion should not

count but Gandhism, as I understand it, is greater than Gandhi was. Gandhi himself
more or less admitted so, when he gave the entire credit for his ideas to ancient wisdom,
and he is certainly not diminished by that admission.

Actually, he comes off as more human and, for that matter, more self-reflexive. Gandhi
could not live up to his principles partly because he was a practical politician, and the
job of politics is to dilute ideological and moral purism. To use my favourite
commendation, borrowed from the obituary written on him by Arnold Toynbee, Gandhi
was one prophet who was willing to live in the slum of politics. He could not afford to be
a perfect Gandhian. It is a tribute to his memory when one calls him an imperfect
Gandhian.

Second, I should clarify for the sake of the incurably scholarly that the Gandhis I discuss
are all Weberian ideal types. They are tools of analysis and at places — this Max Weber
did not bargain for — caricatures. That means they are unreal but not untrue. In this
respect, I have been influenced by literary theorist D. R. Nagaraj who loved to claim,
following William Blake, that stylised exaggeration could be a pathway to wisdom.

Now, the surviving Gandhis. All of them are well known. I am merely bringing to
awareness tacit knowledge. However, it is my responsibility as a psychologist to register
the warning that the knowledge that exists and is tacit is often the most disturbing and
the most painful to own up.

The first Gandhi is the Gandhi of the Indian State and Indian nationalism. I find this
Gandhi difficult to gulp and so would have, I believe, Gandhi himself. But many people
find only this Gandhi tolerable and live happily with him.

The biography and political career of this official Gandhi began early. After
Independence, the political presence of the Father of the Nation, his memory and his
writings were proving very problematic to the functionaries of the young Indian state
and to intellectuals who had already begun to specialise in hovering, like so many flies,
over the State’s patronage-structure. Not merely the strong anarchist strand in his
ideology, but even his peculiar denial of clear-cut divisions between the private and the
public, the religious and the secular, and the past and the present, were proving to be a
real headache. These intellectuals were as disturbed by him as his assassin was.
Nathuram Godse, a self avowed rationalist and modernist, in his last statement in the
court that sentenced him to death explicitly claimed he had committed a patricide to
save the nascent Indian State from an anti-modern, political neophyte and a lunatic.
After independence, Gandhi’s own associates would have liked to bury Gandhi six feet
under the ground, while keeping his image intact as an icon of the Indian nation-state.
Not because they disliked Gandhi, but because he looked such an anachronism in the
post-World War II atmosphere of centralised states, social engineering and ‘realist’
international politics.

Since then, Indian statists of both the right and the left have never acknowledged their
enormous debt to Mr Nathuram Godse for imposing on the Father of the Nation a
premature martyrdom that straightaway gave him a saintly status and effectively
finished him off as a live political presence. Their brainchildren still hold it against
Gandhi that he has occasionally refused to oblige them and has defied the saintliness
imposed on him, presumably as a strategic means of neutralising him. He would have
certainly differed fundamentally from his gifted grandson, philosopher Ramchandra
Gandhi on this issue.

This is the Gandhi, we the residents of the imperial city of Delhi are once in a while told,
who is about to be ensconced on the pedestal vacated by King George V at India Gate. It
will probably be his final coronation as the patron saint of India’s creaky First Republic.
It will also be the most comic use of Gandhi since that middle class, tragic, romantic
hero, Subhash Chandra Bose, named one of the brigades of the Indian National Army
after Gandhi during the final days of World War II. With the declining status of the
Indian state and with various westernised versions of Indian nationalism sprouting like
so many mushrooms around us under the guise of cultural self affirmation, this Gandhi
is presently not in the best of health. What the late Mr Godse could not do to him, the
Hindutva brigade and the two Bombay film buffs turned potency-driven flag-bearers of
Hindu nationalism, Bal Thackeray and Lal Krishna Advani, between them have already
managed to do through the Babri mosque episode.

The second Gandhi is the Gandhi of the Gandhians. He is at the moment suffering from
an acute case of anaemia. The Gandhians’ Gandhi is occasionally quite loveable and has
a grandfatherly, benign presence in the Indian public lore. But he is often a crushing
bore, apart from being a Victorian puritan mistakenly born in India. He drinks
Nimbupani — unlike the Gandhi of the Indian state and nationalism who drinks Indian
made Campa Cola, technically made by an Indian company, but not Coca Cola, made by
a multinational corporation — and wears home-made khadi. One thing the second
Gandhi does not do. He does not touch politics. In fact, he cannot touch politics, lest the
subsidy and grants from the Government of India to the various Ashrams named after
him, to hand-spun khadi, and to the ritual seminars on Gandhism dry up. He does
occasionally, in this incarnation, convene meetings to condemn the growing
criminalisation of politics, uneven development or corruption in the country. In these
seminars everybody sheds bountiful tears about the state of affairs in India without
naming any names and without mentioning any party. Everyone is happy after the
event; even the corrupt politicians who have criminal connections lustily join in the
applause.

The Gandhi of Gandhians travels all over the world to preach Gandhism or lecture on
Gandhian thought. He speaks through the Gandhians to the public in India much less
frequently. Rightly so, because in India his audience is usually pathetically small. And
even that small audience frequently looks sleepy, inattentive and tired at the beginning
of the sermons. They come because they expect to be seen and because it would not look
good if they are absent. The average age of such Gandhians is at the moment about to
touch hundred and the average age of the listeners not much behind. The Gandhians
feel that this is because Indian people have failed Gandhi. Others less respectful towards
such Gandhians feel that actually the Gandhians have failed both the Indian people and
Gandhi. They point out that those who swear by Gandhi day and night could have
walked another kind of road, as the likes of Baba Amte, Anna Hazare and Sunderlal
Bahuguna have done.

The third Gandhi is the Gandhi of the ragamuffins, eccentrics and the unpredictable.
This Gandhi is more hostile to Coca-Cola than to Scotch whisky and considers the local
versions of Coca-Cola more dangerous than imported ones. This is because his objection
to highly mechanised fast foods is structural and, therefore, he considers it more
dangerous if, on nationalist grounds, long-lasting, deep-rooted Indian structures are
created to produce superfluous items of mass consumption within the Indian economy.
And he says so in so many words. Not given to bogus nationalism, he would rather
import Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola, for those Indians who cannot live without them, than
underwrite Campa Cola.

This Gandhi — vintage Hind Swaraj — is also bit of a nag and a spoilt-sport. He loves to
be a maverick and an oddity in our public life. It is this Gandhi Vandana Shiva had in
mind, whether she knew it or not, when she filed a suit in an American court against the
patenting of some derivatives of ​neem​. It is this Gandhi who has guided the notorious
agitation of Medha Patkar against the Narmada dam, Claude Alvares against Operation
Flood, and Vandana Shiva against the Green Revolution. And it is this Gandhi who lived
in the writer-dancer-thinker Shivaram Karanth who in his late eighties took on the
deceit, stupidity and necrophilia of India’s nuclear establishment.

This Gandhi has other subversive affiliations, too.

He prefers the company of known critics of his worldview like V. M. Tarkunde and even
Pakistanis like Asma Jehangir to the company of those who claim to bear his name and
have had the run of Indian politics for more than two decades. The average age of those
who keep the company of this Gandhi is low, but it would have been lower, but for some
young-at-heart like Tarkunde and Kuldip Nayar who push it up inconsiderately. And
both this Gandhi and his young friends are a real nuisance to the Indian State, to the
country’s officially defined security interests, and scientific establishment. They are a
menace to the common sense that passes as sanity but can be actually called, adapting
an expression used by my erstwhile guru, Sigmund Freud, psychopathology of everyday
public life. I have a personal stake in this Gandhi and his terribly irresponsible young
friends. Many of the things I have done in my life these youngsters are now doing better.
The party of the ragamuffins is growing in strength. To spite my numerous enemies I
can even say that, even after my death, what I am saying and doing will be said and done
more aggressively, confidently, elegantly and with greater political finesse by them. This
thrills me, for even after my death, I should be able to haunt my enemies who survive
me.

Incidentally, this Gandhi does not have to wear khadi or abjure alcohol. His usual dress
is blue jeans and khadi ​kurta ​and, to please journalist Raminder Singh who wrote about
it with great relish in ​India Today​, he also carries a ​jhola​. Many suspect that this Gandhi
has now very tenuous links with his birthplace, Gujarat, and that he may disown the
state as one that has disowned him.

I am afraid this Gandhi and the evil company he keeps are going to be a real pain in the
neck for the sane, rational, well-educated Indians in the coming decades. Anthropologist
and political activist Fred Chiu of Taiwan, frequently reminds me of the old saying that
wherever civilisation goes, it takes with it syphilis. He claims that nowadays wherever
global capitalism goes, it takes with it political activism, NGOs and, presumably, the
jholawalas ​who at the first opportunity begin to harass heroic corporate investors and
captains of industry. This, the votaries of global capitalism and the business tycoons are
tearfully coming to realise, is an unmentionable hidden cost of capitalism. Frankly, I
have a secret admiration for the gumption of those who extract this cost.

The fourth Gandhi is usually not read. He is only heard, often second- or third-hand.
While a few like Martin Luther King carefully and critically assess and use his work, the
rest do not even know what he wrote. Nor do they care to. Their attitude to Gandhi is
similar to that of the late A. K. Gopalan to Karl Marx. He reportedly once said that he
had not read any Marx because he would not have understood him, but he remained a
Marxist nonetheless.

This Gandhi is primarily a mythic Gandhi. Unlike in real life, he conforms fully to his
own tenets — at least according to his admirers in the environmental, antinuclear and
feminist movements. For, the ‘realities’ of his life are derived from the principles of
Gandhism as they have spread throughout the world as a new legend or epic.

Some years ago, an American columnist, Richard Grenier, taken aback by the immense
popularity of Richard Attenborough’s ​Gandhi,​ tried to debunk Gandhi by pointing out
major discrepancies between Gandhi’s life and philosophy. (Grenier of course did not
have anything to say about whether he rejected Milton and Beethoven because they had
a record of child abuse or Plato because he justified it in the context of homosexuality.)
But such attempts at demystification do not work because the Greniers of the world
confront the need to believe in human potentialities and a curious compulsion to
intercede in situations of man made suffering that often seems basic to human nature.

When the Polish workers rose against their authoritarian regime in the late 1980s, they
talked of Lech Walesa as their Gandhi, a description the Vodka-guzzling, tough
speaking, trade union leader must have found difficult to swallow. But the Polish
labourers were not interested in the historical, verifiable similarities or dissimilarities
between the two; they were making a different statement. They were saying something
about what they themselves wanted and about how Gandhi with his weapon of militant
nonviolence, had become in our time a symbol of defiance of hollow tyrants and
bureaucratic authoritarianism backed by the power of the state and modern technology.
For above all, this Gandhi is a symbol of those struggling against injustice, while trying
to retain their humanity even when faced with unqualified inhumanity. That is why
when Benito Aquino of Philippines was assassinated, the demonstrators on the streets of
Manila did exactly what the Polish labourers at Gdansk did. They shouted ‘Benito, our
Gandhi,’ and if this seems only a coincidence, the Burmese students who rose against
their military regime some years ago also invoked Gandhi in the same way. Only their
leader this time was Aung San Suu Kyi, who had not read Gandhi when she began to be
thoughtlessly accused of being an uncompromising Gandhian. At different times, this
epithet has fitted different people — from Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan to Nelson Mandela.

The fourth Gandhi walks the mean streets of the world threatening the status quo and
pompous, glib bullies everywhere and in every area of life. The tyrants undervalue him,
because he has no arms to back him up and the professional revolutionaries make fun of
him because he talks of nonviolence. But both usually pay heavily for this
under-estimation. In the long term, the former can only take solace from the fact that
sometimes the intended revolution against them fails, paradoxically after succeeding
spectacularly. Revolutions, whoever does not know, eat up their children both physically
and morally. The revolutionaries — nowadays usually a motley crowd of middle-aged,
armchaired, cynical academics, past their prime and enjoying sinecures in the
universities — can take solace from the fact that they can hold ponderous seminars on
the ‘historical’ limits of Gandhism that should have ensured its death decades ago. But,
by the time the seminar ends as a resounding academic success, this mythic Gandhi has
moved on to other slums of the world to lead new formations against his erstwhile
proteges.

I have given you four Gandhis and indicated my preferences, so that you can make your
choice. But then, you do not have to choose any of the four. Perhaps that will be the
wisest course. For Gandhi can be dangerous. It is much better for you to hang his
portrait in your office or home, like many others do, to show your respect to this new
addition to the Indian pantheon, and then take your children to a picnic on the public
holiday that his birthday has become.