Excerpted below is a section from historian Sudhir Chandra’s Gandhi: An Impossible Possibility (Routledge, 2017), translated from Hindi by Chitra Padmanabhan.
I will be gone saying what I am saying, but one day people
will remember that what this poor man said, that alone was
right.
Gandhi, 16 October 1947
Just when Gandhi was beginning to become Gandhi in South Africa, a book on him had come out. In the century and more since, countless books on him have been written: some deify him, some attempt a balanced assessment, still others consider him anathema. This process is unlikely to end soon.
Whatever else it may mean, the continuity and diversity of engagement with Gandhi certainly shows that however much the world may have changed during these 100 years and more, there is something about this man that makes us want to remember and understand him. What is that ‘something’?
There can be no definitive objective answer to the question. More than on Gandhi, the answer would depend on the one seeking to comprehend that ‘something’. How capable is one of seeing oneself in the act of ‘seeing’ Gandhi? How self-reflexive is the ‘seeing’ eye?…
What does it mean to look at ‘oneself’ by way of looking at Gandhi?
What comprises oneself? To me it means examining one’s own self at two levels at the very least: one, at the level of a profoundly individual self – ‘I’; and, two, at a level where the individual self is also part of a larger unstable collective self – ‘we’ – that is constantly forming and dissolving. Wherever, and to whatever extent, a reader’s perception converges with mine, a collective self will emerge.
True, Gandhi’s need is being increasingly felt all over the world. In a world threatened with unprecedented destruction, unrest and insecurity, it is only natural that people should remember him. But his remembrance, the realisation that he is needed, is in itself not enough to create a space for Gandhi. That space can be created only through deep reflection and by changing our narrow modes of thinking – modes that are incapable of freeing our conceptions of what ‘is’ possible and practicable from the constricting hold of what ‘seems’ possible and practicable here and now. So strong is that hold that, forget imagining something new for the future, it even obscures the very real possibilities that existed till yesterday.
Also Read: Reading as a Sadhana: Gandhi’s Experiments With Books
In 1915, when he returned to India from South Africa, Gandhi was famously advised by his political guru, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, to travel the length and breadth of the country for a year and get acquainted with its realities up close. This was because Gokhale felt that Gandhi’s unique South African experiment would not work in India. He was confident that this point would be brought home to Gandhi in the course of his travels across the country.
Gokhale was not alone in thinking thus. Most nationalist leaders and politically aware Indians believed that Gandhi’s satyagraha – force born of truth – would not work in India. Some even made fun of him, saying that India was not South Africa. These were people who otherwise admired Gandhi and considered his work in South Africa to be unprecedented. Just that their idea of what was possible in India had little to do with the demonstrated or intrinsic possibilities of Gandhi’s satyagraha; it stemmed from what they had till then experienced of the reality of public life and national politics in India.
Within just two years that general scepticism started waning, and within four years of his entry into Indian politics, Gandhi was successful in launching a nationwide satyagraha like the Non-cooperation Movement (1920–1922).
In no time public perception of what was possible and workable was transformed. This was Gandhi’s success. Much has been written about that success, analysing it from a variety of viewpoints.
Then, yet again, and even more swiftly, public perception of the possible and the workable underwent another radical shift during Gandhi’s last days. The pendulum swung the other way this time. Widespread distrust in the Gandhian politics of ahimsa (non-violence) was back. It was akin, but not identical, to the public scepticism that had greeted Gandhi in 1915–1916. Yet again, during his last days, Gandhi was engaged in dispelling people’s deepening distrust. Alone and isolated, he sought to put across the same message again and again even as he realised, helplessly, that his was a cry in the wilderness. His words – his reasoning and entreaties – failing to move people, he felt compelled to undertake fasts unto death in quick succession.
This was Gandhi’s failure. Was this Gandhi’s failure? While assessing Gandhi’s ‘success’ and ‘failure’, without denying his extraordinariness, one must keep in mind that if and when he succeeded, it was also the success of those who stood behind him. By the same logic, if and when Gandhi failed, it was because people turned away from him.
For this reason also we have to look at ourselves even as we look at Gandhi. After his death, compared to when he was alive, Gandhi’s success and failure will hinge much more on people, on us.
Gandhi at a prayer meeting. Photo: Public domain
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An impossible possibility?
Gandhi had learnt to recognise the straight line. He could get to the heart of things and state it in a simple, straightforward language….I would like to give three specific examples. These would provide an idea of what he considered important.
Towards the end of November 1947, Gandhi went to speak at Delhi’s Sikh Sabha. That evening he said in the course of his prayer discourse: ‘It pained me immensely that I did not see even a single Muslim on the way. Not a single Muslim to be seen in Chandni Chowk – what can be more shameful for us?’
The second example is from his prayer discourse a day later, in which Gandhi said:
“We may spend a paisa, but whether it goes to India’s huts or not is all the calculation I need. Of the crores of rupees that are extracted from the huts of India, how much can we send back to them?”
The third example is related to Gandhi’s ahimsa. He says: ‘There is talk of wielding the sword for self-defence, but to this day I have not met one man in the whole world who has not struck a blow that goes beyond self-defence.’
All the three issues, so simply enunciated in everyday language, can be academically expounded at length. No exposition will be able to belie Gandhi. The most that can be done is to proffer some real and some imaginary arguments, facts and figures and prove that the condition of minorities in our country is excellent; that there has been unprecedented improvement in the condition of our poor and our villages; and that we are making progress in the matter of social justice.
Sure, there may be some unease on the question of violence. We may search the whole range of human history, from everyday life to extensive international relations, but we will find nothing to contradict Gandhi’s plain proposition. And yet we will not accept it. Invoking the vicious, ceaseless cycle of history – avoiding thereby the difficulty of having to falsify Gandhi – we will employ the same logic of self-defence which Gandhi is showing to be illusory. This vicious cycle of history has become so invincible, and seeing it continually has so distorted our gaze, that if someone like Gandhi shows us that ‘a crooked path cannot lead to the right concern,’ such a person seems to us quixotic.
Also Read: The Relevance of Gandhi in Contemporary Times
The only exception arises when our own helplessness – such as when disarmed Indians were pitted against British might – obliges us to cloak that plain proposition with the veneer of idealism and use it to serve our ends. That accomplished, the same thing begins to seem impractical again, if not vacuous….
We were the ones who made possible this great protagonist’s unprecedented epic. What happened to us then that the country started smelling so foul? We didn’t have to always agree with that great man. Nor did he expect us to. But we could at least have become capable of normal civic life after attaining political independence. Even he, having recognised our reality, had started telling us to be just that during those last days, no more.
Even now we are not able to hear that minimum bit. The big changes
will come when they come – do big changes ever come without small
changes? – but for now maybe we could just heed what he said: ‘[E]ach
one must look at oneself,’ without worrying whether others are looking
at themselves.
We, who once made Gandhi possible because we believed in him, have
made him impossible by not believing in him – and this at a time when
we – and the world – need him more than ever before.