by SUNIL KHILNANI
“Oh God”, Gandhi once said, “save me from my friends, followers and flatterers”. It’s remarkable how Gandhi—someone who seems to transmit a clear, direct message, whose life seems to follow a defined parabola, whose place in history we are sure we know—continues to surprise and unsettle. In his own life, he went through a parade of identities, and so too in his afterlife. But it’s not just that each age will have it’s own Gandhi. There is something deeply discomfiting about the life as it was actually lived—before it was tidied up by his self-appointed friends, followers and flatterers into a Life that now apparently requires protection by our politicians.
Gandhi appeared to embody harmony and unity, yet his own life consisted of anything but those qualities—often impulsive, inconsistent, conflictual, fragmented. He would launch political initiatives like satyagrahas and civil disobedience, then abruptly end them; he would establish communities and ashrams, and move on; he would win the leadership of the Congress, and then retire to spinning and toilet cleaning; he would enter into intimate friendships, then turn away. He insisted that his own life and action was of a piece with his thought and principles—yet repeatedly they pulled in different directions.
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Gandhi was prone to infatuations—after brawny Lower House, in later life it would be more ethereal creatures like Esther Faering and Saraladevi Chaudhurani. But at the end of the day—as his letters to Kallenbach and to others display, letters concerning what Gandhi perhaps mock-solemnly called the ‘food question’, which detailed precisely how many nuts he had eaten, how much milk he’d consumed, and railed against ‘full-mealers’—Gandhi was more interested in his digestive rather than his sexual organs: in mastication, not masturbation.
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Joseph Lelyveld’s book arrives in India apparently already pre-read and certainly pre-judged. We need to put aside that false knowledge—so we actually read and genuinely discuss it. We can then, finally and thankfully, hope to move into a new phase of biographical scrutiny of figures like Gandhi—where basic questions can be raised, taboos explored, and where we can start to see them as humans in hard times. Studies by Rajmohan Gandhi, Narayan Desai, Tridip Suhrud, and now Lelyveld—all let us see Gandhi not as the prim pope of non-violence, but as a more subtle being, often in emotional turmoil, ragged in his personal relationships and cruel to his family, a better starter than finisher, dependent on entourages of aides and adorers, selfless and egotistical by turns—and always able to command the deepest loyalty.
The idea that a politician like Narendra Modi can self-erect to defend Gandhi’s legacy, that he and Gujarat are Gandhi’s guardians against supposed charges of perversity and racism, is laughable. I well remember sitting in a Gandhinagar cinema a little more than a decade ago, at the very time when Modi was manoeuvring himself into power in that city, watching the film Hey Ram—and can never forget how, at the very moment when Godse is shown pumping bullets into Gandhi, the cinema hall erupted into wild applause to celebrate Gandhi’s death. I remember too watching the West Indies playing a Test match at Ahmedabad’s Motera ground—and when they took to the field, being pelted by bananas and greeted by monkey whoops. Today’s Gujarat, before it can imagine it has any claims to Gandhi, let alone to defending his memory, has a long way to go.
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