Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (60 page)

Some bystanders dug up clumps of bloodstained earth from the garden to keep as holy relics. Manubehn Gandhi saved fingernail clippings. His ashes were scattered at various points across India. The process goes on. Tushar Gandhi recovered some from a vault of the State Bank of India in 1996 and immersed them at the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna rivers. As recently as 2010, another small cache of this latter-day saint’s ashes was strewn off the coast of South Africa, in
Durban’s harbor, into which Gandhi first sailed more than a century earlier.

Estimates of the crowds that lined the route of his funeral procession ranged from one to two million. The mood was one of remorse as well as grief. Among historians there’s general agreement that the murderous hatreds that had lashed the subcontinent for a year and a half finally burned themselves out with the assassination, or at least lapsed into a period of latency. An Indian academic argues that the country was permanently altered for the better by “
a certain kind of bodily sacrifice in the public sphere—and a refusal by one outstanding leader to give his consent to the particular conception of the political community that was emerging.” That conception—that Muslims had no place in the new India—was rendered illegitimate by the murder of the leading exponent of unity across communal lines. Hindu-Muslim violence continued to flare intermittently and locally thereafter, but there wasn’t anything on the scale of the partition-era killing for more than half a century, until 2002, when pogroms against Muslims in Gandhi’s home state of Gujarat led to an estimated two thousand deaths in a little more than three months, during which some 200,000 Muslims were driven from their homes. The killings were tacitly sanctioned, even encouraged, by a right-wing Hindu party lineally descended from extremist movements that were banned for a time following Gandhi’s assassination on suspicion that they’d been complicit in the murder. That party has held power ever since in the Gujarati state capital named Gandhinagar, after
the favorite son who deplored its brand of chauvinism, expressed in a doctrine of national identity called
Hindutva
, usually translated as “Hinduness.” As often noted, it’s diametrically opposed to the doctrine of Gandhi, who repeated in the last weeks of his struggle against communal violence what he’d started saying a half century earlier in South Africa: that members of the community should see one another neither as Hindus nor as Muslims but as Indians; their religions were a personal—not a public—concern.

“
Today we must forget that we are Hindus or Sikhs or Muslims or Parsis,” he said on the eve of his final fast. “If we want to conduct the affairs of India properly we must be only Indians. It is of no consequence by what name we call God in our homes. In the work of the nation, all Indians of all faiths are one … We are Indians and we must lay down our lives in protecting Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs and all others.” That view is alive in India, even if it remains partially eclipsed in Gandhinagar.

When it comes to the Father of the Nation, contradictions not surprisingly abound. They start with the decision in the immediate aftermath of the assassination to put the military, still under the command of a British general, in charge of his funeral arrangements. Thus the era’s prophet of nonviolence was transported to the cremation ground on an army weapons carrier pulled by two hundred uniformed troops, preceded by armored cars, mounted lancers, and a police regiment. Air force planes dipped their wings and showered rose petals on the mourners. Later a naval vessel would be used for the immersion in the Ganges, near where it flows into the Jamuna, of bones picked from the cremation site. If (as Gandhi had written in his rudimentary Bengali on leaving Calcutta five months earlier) his life was his message, his death was a message that the Indian state now had license to reinterpret its meaning to suit its immediate requirements.

Weeks after his cremation on a tower of sandalwood, his political and spiritual heirs gathered at Sevagram, his last ashram, in a meeting that was supposed to consider how they would now go forward without him. The security forces, fearful of another assassination, insisted that the ashram be ringed with barbed wire to protect Prime Minister Nehru, who was due to attend. Uniformed police stood guard with fixed bayonets.
Vinoba Bhave, widely considered Gandhi’s spiritual heir, noted that he was meeting
Jawaharlal Nehru, his political heir, for the first time. This showed the degree to which the Mahatma had kept the activities of his ashrams and his political initiatives in separate spheres.

Cremation by the Jamuna, January 31, 1948
(photo credit i12.2)

Nehru acknowledged as much. In a speech that was both touching and revealing, he admitted that he often found it hard to understand Hindustani, the demotic amalgam of Hindi and Urdu that Gandhi promoted as a lingua franca, and that, anyway, he was illiterate in both Hindi and Urdu. He also confessed that he hadn’t bothered to keep track of his master’s cherished “constructive” programs, didn’t “know much about them in any detail,” and didn’t understand how Gandhi could have proposed to take the Indian National Congress out of politics now that it was responsible for running things. “
Congress has now to govern, not to oppose government,” the prime minister said firmly. “So it will have to function in a new way, staying within politics.”

A little forlornly but without apologies, the prime minister then ticked off other large points of difference between Gandhi’s newly empowered political disciples and the man they all called Bapu: on the need for a modern military, for instance, or for rapid industrialization. Yet, he said, these differences were not fundamental. They were all still committed to Gandhi’s ideas, meaning presumably his broad goals of binding the nation and tackling
poverty. “
What we need to consider,” he said, “is why the ideas that had so much pull in Bapu’s hands do not have that same power in ours.”

Gandhi’s followers went their various directions, pursued their various
programs, some of which continue to this day on their own small islands of Gandhian endeavor scattered around the vastness of India. In Wardha, I met Dr.
U. N. Jajoo, a professor of medicine at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Science, affiliated with the Kasturba Gandhi Hospital, who starts the training of his students by requiring them to spend fifteen days in nearby villages where the institute has organized health insurance plans and sanitary latrines for each household, along with clean piped water, resulting in a steep drop in infant and childhood mortality rates. The students are expected to survey the health issues in each household, including the poorest, and return at least monthly for the five years of their training. The medicine is modern, the goals Gandhian, and maybe thirty villages have been covered so far. Dr. Jajoo spins the yarn for his own clothes.

In Ahmedabad, I spent a day with the Self Employed Women’s Association, known as SEWA, the largest movement in the country that might be called Gandhian, which brings primary health care, midwives, banking services, and training to impoverished, typically illiterate women—many of them
Dalits, many Muslims—traditionally condemned to lives of unrelieved menial labor.
Ela Bhatt, the movement’s founder, told me she’s more convinced of Gandhi’s relevance than she was when she first started organizing female “headloaders”—women tasked with hauling goods to market on their heads—nearly four decades ago. “He’s a measuring rod,” she said.

Gandhi lives in Dr. Jajoo, Ela Bhatt, and others, but they’ve had to find their own ways on the fringe of India’s rowdy, often corrupt power politics. No national movement survived him, an outcome he seems, on occasion, to have foreseen. “
Let no one say he is a follower of Gandhi,” he said. Protean and infinitely quotable, Gandhi bequeathed an example of constant striving, a set of social values, and a method of resistance, one not easily applied to an India ruled by Indians, with a population nearly triple what it was when he perished.

One of the most widely known of his enduring exhortations is for sale as a printed sampler, ready for framing if not embroidering, at the gift shop of his first Indian ashram near Ahmedabad. It’s offered to schoolchildren and other tourists there for a few rupees as “Gandhiji’s Talisman.”

“
Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test,” Gandhi urged in this undated note typed out in English just before or after independence, possibly to Pyarelal; possibly to
D. G. Tendulkar, an even earlier biographer, the first to publish
the note, which the Mahatma signed twice, in Hindi and Bengali; possibly to Manu, or to himself. “Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubt and your self melting away.”

Causing doubt and self to melt away is a traditional aim of Indian religious disciplines involving diet, meditation, and prayer. It’s causing them to melt away by means of social and political action that stands out as distinctively Gandhian. As leader and model, Gandhi himself mostly passed his “test.” But the hungry and spiritually starving millions in large measure remained.

Trying to build a nation, he couldn’t easily admit that their interests—those of Hindu and Muslim, of high caste and untouchable—often clashed. He struggled with doubt and self until his last days but made the predicament of the millions his own, whatever the tensions among them, as no other leader of modern times has. And so his flawed efforts as a social visionary and reformer can be more moving in hindsight than his moments of success as a national leader, if only because the independence struggle long ago reached its untidy end.

In India today, the term “Gandhian” is ultimately synonymous with social conscience; his example—of courage, persistence, identification with the poorest, striving for selflessness—still has a power to inspire, more so even than his doctrines of nonviolence and techniques of resistance, certainly more than his assorted dogmas and pronouncements on subjects like spinning, diet, and sex. It may not happen often, but the inspiration is still there to be imbibed; and when it is, the results can still be called Gandhian, even though the man himself, that great soul, never liked or accepted the word.