Month ago, a senior government officer visited Sabarmati Ashram and explained me that how much it is difficult to understand Gandhi and complex thoughts, approaches and methods of him. Today i came across similar thoughts in article titled The missingness of Gandhi by Shiv Visvanathan.
Instead of editing/commenting his thoughts or text; I simply felt to reproduce it here, because it exactly fits into my thoughts and feelings about usages of "Gandhi" in my age...
...as Shiv Visvanathan says....
I must confess I am an
old-fashioned man. I feel out of place and even out of time. I belonged to an
age which honoured the self and not the selfie. Yet I feel strangely relevant
as I realise my anger and my memories, my sense of classic and craft has something
to say. I have stories that are still worth listening to, yet I feel sad when I
look around me.
I know my world has
shrunk. My icons do not make sense. People have not heard of them. Some even
call them my collection of eccentrics. But I want to talk about them. For all
of them the hero was Gandhi. Nehru was the future, as deputy. I remember an old
wag telling me Nehru dreamed and Gandhi prayed and it was Gandhi's dreams that
came true. There were like two octaves in an invisible music we kept hearing.
The last years of nationalism had a cornucopia of heroes. What was beautiful is
that these ideals were also lived out in the first decade of
Independence.
Today people say the
Nehru or Gandhi era is over. The obituaries sound like celebrations and I admit
my nostalgia sounds like hypochondria. When I talk Nehru or Gandhi, or of all
my other heroes, I sound like a list of ailments, their missingness seems part
of a strange disease. There is not an Alzheimer's of forgetfulness, mine is the
pain and joy of living so many memories.
Of late I have been
reading pieces about Gandhi. He is called the first corporate Guru. Some would
even say he is the original pioneer of CSR. But Gandhi never outsourced ethics.
He dreamt it, lived it in the rhythms of the day. Ethics was not an
extracurricular activity, a piece of social work to compensate for corporate
antics. Gandhi is also attacked for not being as radical as Ambedkar. Ambedkar
is promoted as this week's flavour by politically correct radicals without
understanding the matrix, the quarrel and the complementarity between the two.
So from corporate don, he becomes a lesser Ambedkar. Then the RSS which faded
away after assassinating Gandhi, says India needs a statue of Godse. Godse, to
them, was not an epitome of hate but a service boy. Gandhi got in the way of
the logic of the nation-state and had to be dispatched. Godse to the RSS
excelled in the line of duty and therefore needed to be redeemed. His
assassination was a clerical act and Godse, a mere functionary.
To this regime of
forgetfulness and critique, we can add the obscene appropriation of Gandhi by
Modi and his regime. Modi epitomises the violence of hate and the
instrumentalism of development, where there is no ethics of means and ends. Yet
all these distortions of Gandhi are fashionable today.
Recently I saw
Attenborough's film on Gandhi and fell asleep. I used to celebrate it and yet
it failed to echo with resonances today. It sounded too much like a white man's
idea of Gandhi, a Gandhi made easy for the West. I realise there is no easy
access to Gandhi. He is eminently quotable but there is no catechism of Gandhi.
He is a continuous series of thought experiments. He refuses replication. He
wants you to invent your own ethical world.
Yet the complex
simplicity of the man, who allows no simplification, is seductive.
Gandhi to me is both
craft and classic. He knew his Gita and his Ruskin. He knew the power of the
book but understood that the life of the book and the book of life could not be
separated. His sense of civilisation covered both canon and folklore, the text and
the orality of memory around text. To the over-literate Indian who read a
hundred books, his answer was my literacy consists in reading the same book a
hundred times. Exploring a book a hundred time is not repetition. It is
reinvention and discovery. It is an act of pilgrimage discovering or renewing
the sources of the sacred Out of this reading comes a strange book, Hind
Swaraj.
We have to stop reading
Hind Swaraj as an eccentricity. It is a manifesto and has to be read along with
other manifestoes like Discourses on Irregularity, Rights of Man or
Marx-Engel's The Communist Manifesto. It is as relevant, as important, and as
incomplete as any of them. Gandhi's silent message is to tell the reader to
write or live out the rest. Each man or woman has to write his or her own Hind
Swaraj like UR Ananthamurthy did in his last book, or Ela Bhatt has done in her
100 miles thesis.
Between Swadeshi and
Swaraj you absorb the world. No Gandhian would say: “Climate change is not our
problem.” To claim it is a problem of developed countries is to be global. To
insist it is a problem for everyman is to be planetary. Swaraj was planetary.
The last man is not just a putty, a piece of suffering. For all his
vulnerability he owns up to the world. For Gandhi, a pascalian wager is not
enough. A Gandhian wager goes beyond goodness has to outinvent evil. Gandhi
would not want a justice where the Third World would say to the first, it is
our turn to destroy the world. The new consumerism cannibalised the world.
Remember Gandhi in his Hind Swaraj wanted to rescue the West from its violence.
The new Hind Swaraj would include a critique of climate change. As CV Sheshadri
would say Gandhian truth should combine thermodynamic truth, that is, climate
change would include life, lifestyle, livelihood, life cycle, life chances in
one set. Here the technical, the ethical, the political, the cultural are not
separated. A classic is a way of keeping things together and connected.
But Gandhi was
perpetually for experiment. Walking, fasting, wearing, printing, cooking,
protesting were all experiments. Morality was experimental because ethics
needed to constantly transform itself, work within a range of contexts. Ethics
and craft had a lot in common. One had to craft an ethics and make sure it
never gets outdated. In that sense everyman becomes a craftsmen responsible for
his world. The idea of rethinking waste, repair, fasting are ways of dealing
with the world. There are no throwaway cultures or human beings. Healing,
caring and working are seamless. Craft as ethics has rigour and style and most
of all the inventiveness of diversity. For Gandhi, ethics as craft has to be
inventive enough to challenge the new inventiveness of evil. Today genocide,
the death of a waterfall or a mountain, the displacement of a people, the
disappearance of culture are new forms of evil, where violence is seen as
inevitable and death, mass death has no rituals of mourning. Gandhi did
not live to link nuclear war to ordinary violence, genocide to murder, or
technology to the military industrial complex. In fact, in his way if Gandhi
were asked, “What do you think of modern ethics”? He would have said, “It would
be a good idea.”
For Gandhi, ethics
could not be extracurricular. It had to be every day. Protest had to link to
lifestyle, caring to livelihood, passion to humour so that nothing got
dogmatic. The body was the site of ethics and the ethics of the body provided
the framework for an ethics of the body politic. The body becoming the tuning
fork of a complex world and its problems. Non-violence for Gandhi was not
something you associate with war, non-violence was something you brought in to
mitigate your war with the world, the violence of everydayness. In that sense
ethics gave you agency, not just the concrete, the face to face with your
children, strangers, it gave you agency against abstract systems where cause
originated somewhere and consequence emerged somewhere else. What we need today
is a Gandhi of the concrete combining with the Gandhi fighting abstract
systems, complexities which often make an individual feel fragile, futile and
helpless.
In an odd way for
Gandhi charity began with the world and public policy at home. The body set the
rhythms of the body politic. Ethics set the tone for self-discipline and
self-reliance and therefore eliminated mass discipline and surveillance. If you
had the conscience, the panopticon as a centralised system of management was
unnecessary. The citizen is never passive and pacifism has nothing
passive about it. A pacifist like Thoreau was constantly reinventing society.
In that sense civil disobedience was an attempt to restore civility and
civic duty . The human conscience is the greatest cybernetic mechanism
invented.
One has to notice that
ethics is not only experimental but full of mistakes and ethics begins by
redeeming mistakes. In owning up to the mistake, you own up to self and world.
A mistake is an incomplete conversation with the world. Mistakes, the relation
between ends and means, the connectivity between life and livelihood, show a
new ecology of ethics where the body as biology, as person, as symbol becomes
the theatre for truth. There is fragility and strength here as one discovers in
vulnerability, the power of resistance. Many students confronting water cannons
for the first time during the Nirbhaya protest felt empowered in their moment
of vulnerability because they understood the brutality of the state. One wished
they would have continued their resistance because protest would have gone
beyond mere protest to a deeper sense of alternatives. Years ago, Walt Whitman,
the great American poet claimed he sang “The body electric". Our
protestors similarly could have claimed, “I sing the body satyagrahic”, if they
had addressed both violence and truth of what causes violence Here in lies the
challenge of Satyagraha today.
It has to challenge
large systems twice, first in the locality and then as a planetary idea. Even
in battling or creating work one must have an emerging theory of peace.
Satyagraha cannot be sequestered as an applied social work project
because ethics has to be political responding to wider issues.
One must remember that
Gandhi's satyagrahi was an imagination. Gandhi's ashrams were laboratories
where one invented alternative possibilities while the world slept. It was the
one place where everydayness as invention as rhythm talked to the future.
Gandhi was no luddite. William Shirer in his biography of Gandhi narrates
that the loud speaker was introduced for the first time in a rally addressed by
Gandhi. His charkha was not a traditional tool but something reinvented several
times. But Gandhi's craft like his ethics followed a linguistic rather than a
techno-innovative model. He was sensitive to displacement, waste, obsolescence.
His technology spoke dialects rather than attempt to create standardised forms.
In fact, it challenged us to return to ethics, he wanted ethics to be more
inventive than mere techniques. His creativity demanded that innovation should
be more than instrumental. Every man than becomes a craftsmen creating a new
commons of ideas to be shared. There is none of the hypocrisy of intellectual
property rights which confuses need and greed.
Such a world goes
beyond the make-in-India model which only wants to manufacture but fails to ask
ethical, ecological questions, where productivity displaces justice. A cosmetic
Gandhi threatens India twice, first as a farce and second as a tragedy.
The man haunts me. His
experiments fascinate me. He demands the storyteller. I feel his magic. He made
mistakes. He knew it. He did not ask us to repeat it. His leadership appealed
to the ethics of my generation. I feel it is time to reinvent it. One senses a
world ready for the poetry of it. This essay is a prayer for that other world.
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