Step Across This Line (21 page)

Gandhi, Now

A thin Indian man with not much hair and bad teeth sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch of handwritten notes in his hand. The black-and-white photograph takes up a full page of the British newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full color, is a small rainbow-striped apple. Below this, there’s a slangily, ungrammatically American injunction to “Think Different.” Such is the present-day power of international big business. Even the greatest of the dead may summarily be drafted into its image campaigns. Once, half a century ago and more, this bony man shaped a nation’s struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is history. Fifty years after his assassination, Gandhi is modeling for Apple. His thoughts don’t really count in this new incarnation. What counts is that he is considered to be “on-message,” in line with the corporate philosophy of the Mac.

The advertisement is odd enough to be worth deconstructing a little. Obviously, it is rich in unintentional comedy. M. K. Gandhi, as the photograph itself demonstrates, was a passionate opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the typewriter, the loincloth to the business suit, the plowed field to the belching manufactory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, he would almost certainly have found it abhorrent. The very term “word processor,” with its overly technological ring, is unlikely to have found favor.

“Think Different.” Gandhi, in his younger days a sophisticated and Westernized lawyer, did indeed change his thinking more radically than most people do. Ghanshyam Das Birla, one of the merchant princes who backed him, once said, “Gandhi was more modern than I. But he made a conscious decision to go back to the Middle Ages.” This is not, presumably, the revolutionary new direction in thought that the good folks at Apple are seeking to encourage. What they saw was an “icon,” a man so famous that he was still instantly recognizable half a century after his assassination. Double-click on this icon and you opened up a set of “values,” with which Apple plainly wished to associate itself: “morality,” “leadership,” “saintliness,” “success,” and so on. They saw “Mahatma” Gandhi, the “great soul,” an embodiment of virtue to set beside, oh, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, the Pope.

Perhaps, too, they found themselves identifying with a little guy who vanquished a big empire. It’s true that Gandhi himself saw the independence movement as a kind of Indian David struggling against the Philistines of the empire-on-which-the-sun-never-sets, calling it “a battle of Right against Might.” The struggling Apple company, battling with the cohorts of the all-powerful Bill Gates, wished perhaps to comfort itself with the thought that if a “half-nude gent”—as a British viceroy, Lord Willingdon, once called Gandhi—could bring down the Brits, then maybe, just maybe, a well-flung apple might yet fell the Microsoft Goliath.

In other words, Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a free-floating concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented, to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth.

Richard Attenborough’s movie
Gandhi
struck me, when it was first released, as an example of this type of unhistorical Western saint-making. Here was Gandhi-as-guru, purveying that fashionable product, the Wisdom of the East; and Gandhi-as-Christ, dying (and, before that, frequently going on hunger strike) so that others might live. His philosophy of non-violence seemed to work by embarrassing the British into leaving; freedom could be won, the film appeared to suggest, by being more moral than your oppressor, whose own moral code would then oblige him to withdraw.

But such is the efficacy of this symbolic Gandhi that the film, for all its simplifications and Hollywoodizations, had a powerful and positive effect on many contemporary freedom struggles. South African anti-apartheid campaigners and democratic voices all over South America have enthused to me about the film’s galvanizing effects. This posthumous, exalted “international Gandhi” has evidently become a totem of real, inspirational force.

The trouble with the idealized Gandhi is that he’s so darned dull, little more than a dispenser of homilies and nostrums (“an eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind”) with just the odd flash of wit (asked what he thought of Western civilization, he gave the celebrated reply “I think it would be a good idea”). The real man, if it is still possible to use such a term after the generations of hagiography and reinvention, was infinitely more interesting, one of the most complex and contradictory personalities of the century. His full name, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was memorably—and literally—translated into English by the novelist G. V. Desani as “Action-Slave Fascination-Moon Grocer,” and he was as rich and devious a figure as that glorious name suggests.

Entirely unafraid of the British, he was nevertheless scared of the dark and always slept with a light burning by his bedside.

He believed passionately in the unity of all the peoples of India, yet his failure to keep the Muslim leader Jinnah within the Congress fold led to the partition of the country. (His opposition denied Jinnah the presidency of the Congress, which might have kept him from assuming the leadership of the separatist Muslim League; his withdrawal, under pressure from Nehru and Patel, of a last-ditch offer to Jinnah of the prime ministership itself ended the last faint chance of avoiding Partition. And for all his vaunted selflessness and modesty, he made no move to object when Jinnah was attacked during a Congress session for calling him plain Mr. Gandhi, instead of the more worshipful Mahatma.)

He was determined to live the life of an ascetic, but as the poet Sarojini Naidu joked, it cost the nation a fortune to keep Gandhi living in poverty. His entire philosophy privileged the village way over that of the city, yet he was always financially dependent on the support of industrial billionaires like Birla. His hunger strikes could stop riots and massacres, but he also once went on hunger strike to force his capitalist patron’s employees to break their strike against their harsh conditions of employment.

He sought to improve the conditions of India’s Untouchables, yet in today’s India, these peoples, now calling themselves Dalits, and forming an increasingly well organized and effective political grouping, have rallied round the memory of their own leader, Dr. Ambedkar, an old rival of Gandhi’s. As Ambedkar’s star has risen among the Dalits, so Gandhi’s stature has been reduced.

The creator of the political philosophies of passive resistance and constructive non-violence, he spent much of his life far from the political arena, refining his more eccentric theories of vegetarianism, bowel movements, and the beneficial properties of human excrement.

Forever scarred by the knowledge that, as a sixteen-year-old youth, he’d been making love to his wife, Kasturba, at the moment of his father’s death, Gandhi forswore sexual relations but went on into his old age with what he called his brahmacharya experiments, during which naked young women, often the wives of friends and colleagues, would be asked to lie with him all night, so that he could prove that he had mastered his physical urges. (He believed that the conservation of his “vital fluids” would deepen his spiritual understanding.)

He, and he alone, was responsible for the transformation of the demand for independence into a nationwide mass movement that mobilized every class of society against the imperialist; yet the free India that came into being, divided and committed to a program of modernization and industrialization, was not the India of his dreams. His sometime disciple, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the arch-proponent of modernization, and it is Nehru’s vision, not Gandhi’s, that was eventually—and perhaps inevitably—preferred.

Gandhi began by believing that the politics of passive resistance and non-violence could be effective in any situation, at any time, even against a force as malign as Nazi Germany. Later, he was obliged to revise his opinion, and concluded that while the British had responded to such techniques, because of their own nature, other oppressors might not. This is not so different from the Attenborough movie’s position, and it is, of course, wrong.

Gandhian non-violence is widely believed to be the method by which India gained independence. (The view is assiduously fostered inside India as well as outside it.) Yet the Indian revolution did indeed become violent, and this violence so disappointed Gandhi that he stayed away from the Independence celebrations in protest. Moreover, the ruinous economic impact of World War II on the United Kingdom, and—as the British writer Patrick French says in
Liberty or Death
—the gradual collapse of the Raj’s bureaucratic hold over India from the mid-1930s onward, did as much to bring about freedom as any action of Gandhi’s, or indeed of the nationalist movement as a whole. It is probable, in fact, that Gandhian techniques were not the key determinants of India’s arrival at freedom. They gave Independence its outward character and were its apparent cause, but darker and deeper historical forces produced the desired effect.

These days, few people pause to consider the complex character of Gandhi’s personality, the ambiguous nature of his achievement and legacy, or even the real causes of Indian independence. These are hurried, sloganizing times, and we don’t have the time or, worse, the inclination to assimilate many-sided truths. The harshest truth of all is that Gandhi is increasingly irrelevant in the country whose “little father”—
Bapu
—he was. As the analyst Sunil Khilnani has pointed out, India came into being as a secularized state, but Gandhi’s vision was essentially religious. However, he “recoiled” from Hindu nationalism. His solution was to forge an Indian identity out of the shared body of ancient narratives. “He turned to legends and stories from India’s popular religious traditions, preferring their lessons to the supposed ones of history.”

It didn’t work. The last Gandhian to be effective in Indian politics was J. P. Narayan, who led the movement that deposed Indira Gandhi at the end of her period of Emergency rule (1974–1977). In today’s India, Hindu nationalism is rampant, in the form of the BJP and its thuggish sidekick, the Shiv Sena. During the present elections, Gandhi and his ideas have scarcely been mentioned. Most of those who are not seduced by sectarian politics are in the thrall of an equally potent, equally anti-Gandhian force: money. And organized crime, too, has moved into the public sphere. In Gandhi’s beloved rural heartland, actual gangsters are being elected to office.

Twenty-one years ago, the writer Ved Mehta spoke to one of Gandhi’s leading political associates, a former governor-general of independent India, C. Rajagopalachari. His verdict on Gandhi’s legacy is disenchanted, but in today’s India, on the fast track to free-market capitalism, it still rings true: “The glamour of modern technology, money, and power is so seductive that no one—I mean no one—can resist it. The handful of Gandhians who still believe in his philosophy of a simple life in a simple society are mostly cranks.”

What, then, is greatness? In what does it reside? If a man’s project fails, or survives only in irredeemably tarnished form, can the force of his example still merit the supreme accolade? For Jawaharlal Nehru, the defining image of Gandhi was “as I saw him marching, staff in hand, to Dandi on the Salt March in 1930. Here was the pilgrim on his quest of Truth, quiet, peaceful, determined, and fearless, who would continue that quest and pilgrimage, regardless of consequences.” Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, later said: “More than his words, his life was his message.” These days, that message is better heeded outside India. Albert Einstein was one of the many to praise Gandhi’s achievement; Martin Luther King, Jr., the Dalai Lama, and all the world’s peace movements have followed in his footsteps. Gandhi, who gave up cosmopolitanism to gain a country, has become, in his strange afterlife, a citizen of the world. His spirit may yet prove resilient, smart, tough, sneaky, and—yes—ethical enough to avoid assimilation by global McCulture (and Mac culture, too). Against this new empire, Gandhian intelligence is a better weapon than Gandhian piety. And passive resistance? We’ll see.

February 1998

The Taj Mahal

[
Written for a
National Geographic
survey of the great marvels of the world
]

The trouble with the Taj Mahal is that it has become so overlaid with accumulated meanings as to be almost impossible to see. A billion chocolate-box images and tourist guidebooks order us to “read” the Mughal emperor Shah Jehan’s marble mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, known as Taj Bibi, as the World’s Greatest Monument to Love. It sits at the top of the West’s short list of images of the Exotic (and also Timeless) Orient. Like the
Mona Lisa,
like Andy Warhol’s screenprinted Elvis, Marilyn, and Mao, mass reproduction has all but sterilized the Taj.

Nor is this by any means a simple case of the West’s appropriation or “colonization” of an Indian masterwork. In the first place, the Taj, which in the mid-nineteenth century had been all but abandoned, and had fallen into a severe state of disrepair, would probably not be standing today were it not for the diligent conservationist efforts of the colonial British. In the second place, India is perfectly capable of over-merchandising itself.

When you arrive at the outer walls of the gardens in which the Taj is set, it’s as if every hustler and hawker in Agra is waiting for you to make the familiarity-breeds-contempt problem worse, peddling imitation Mahals of every size and price. This leads to a certain amount of shoulder-shrugging disenchantment. Recently, a British friend who was about to make his first trip to India told me that he had decided to leave the Taj off his itinerary because of its over-exposure. If I urged him not to, it was because of my own vivid memory of pushing my way for the first time through the jostling crowd, not only of imitation-vendors but also of prescribed readings, past all the myriad hawkers of meaning and interpretation, and into the presence of the
thing-in-itself,
which utterly overwhelmed me and made all my notions about its devaluation feel totally and completely redundant.

I had been skeptical about the visit. One of the legends of the Taj is that the hands of the master masons who built it were cut off by the emperor, so that they could never build anything lovelier. Another is that the mausoleum was constructed in secrecy behind high walls, and a man who tried to sneak a preview was blinded for his interest in architecture. My personal imagined Taj was somewhat tarnished by these cruel tales.

The building itself left my skepticism in shreds, however. Announcing itself as itself, insisting with absolute force on its sovereign authority, it simply obliterated the million million counterfeits of it and glowingly filled, once and forever, the place in the mind previously occupied by its simulacra.

And this, finally, is why the Taj Mahal must be seen: to remind us that the world is real, that the sound is truer than the echo, the original more forceful than its image in a mirror. The beauty of beautiful things is still able, in these image-saturated times, to transcend imitations. And the Taj Mahal is, beyond the power of words to say it, a lovely thing, perhaps the loveliest of things.

June 1999