Moreover: Deconsecrating Gandhi

Anonymous.The Economist; London Vol. 348, Iss. 8083,  (Aug 29, 1998): 73-74.

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Moreover: Deconsecrating Gandhi

Anonymous.The Economist; London Vol. 348, Iss. 8083,  (Aug 29, 1998): 73-74.

Unlike the US and the Soviet Union, India was founded by genuine saints: Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Much Indian writing about India dwells today on the gulf between the vision of its founders and what their country has become - not that Gandhi and Nehru has the same vision: Gandhi had no use for industrialization or the state, both of which the westernized Nehru thought indispensable. Iconoclasm is one of the more fashionable voices. A more cynical age seems to demand a steelier look at India's founding saints, particularly Gandhi. Yogesh Chadha's new biography of Gandhi purports to rescue the man from the myth. The Insider, a novel by a former prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, makes it clear that self-seeking and venality were the order of the day in India's politics from the first days of Nehru's rule.

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Headnote

Does fashionable muckraking about modem India's founding heroes say more about them or about India's disappointment with itself?

"AT THIS supremely dangerous moment in history," wrote Arnold Toynbee in the shadow of Soviet and American nuclear weapons, "the only salvation for mankind is the Indian way." His faith in India was once as commonplace as his despair over the superpowers. Unlike the United States and the Soviet Union, India was founded by genuine saints: Mohandas Gandhi, who broke the British empire with hunger strikes and a spinning wheel, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, who made democracy, socialism, religious tolerance and non-alignment the pillars of the new state. Westerners from EM. Forster to the Beatles trooped to India for decades in search of virtues they could not find at home. While Gandhi and Nehru were alive, it seemed possible to believe that India would be great because she was good.

Alas, the dream of greatness proved hardier than dedication to goodness. The bloody partition that carved Islamic Pakistan out of Hindu-dominated India was the first and greatest insult to Nehru's sectblind creed. Over the next half century the affronts to that and other ideals hardly ceased. Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, temporarily assumed dictatorial powers in 1975. It was she who injected into mainstream politics the notion that "Indian" and "Hindu" were synonyms, an idea that animates the current ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Bjp, Economic planning and non-alignment, Nehru's other two axioms, were finally demolished along with the Berlin Wall. And now India has exploded a nuclear bomb, making its neighbourhood the likeliest venue on earth for a war of mass destruction. The tremors at the Rajasthan testing ground must have set Toynbee spinning.

Much Indian writing about India dwells today on the gulf between the vision of its founders and what their country has become-not that Gandhi and Nehru had the same vision: Gandhi had no use for industrialisation or the state, both of which the westernised Nehru thought indispensable. Some of that writing is celebratory or defiant; much of it finds fault with the founders, and some looks wistfully back to an age of relative innocence and wonders how it can be relived.

Iconoclasm is one of the more fashionable voices. A more cynical age seems to demand a steelier look at India's founding saints, especially Mohandas Gandhi, the ideal freedom-fighter, perhaps, but certainly not the model husband or father. Gandhi expected his long-suffering wife and children to be as self-de- nying as he was, an illiberal trait that is a central theme of a spate of recent works about the Mahatma ("great soul"). A play by Ajit Dalvi, "Mahatma v Gandhi", focuses on Gandhi's troubled relationship with his eldest son, Harilal, who boozed, whored and converted to Islam; a biography of his wife, Kasturba, written by their grandson, recounts Gandhi's sudden vow of chastity at the age of 37, an early example of many unsought sacrifices heaped upon her.

Yogesh Chadha's new biography, published last year by John Wiley, purports to "rescue the man from the myth" with the aid of tales from the Gandhi household. This kind of domestic muckraking is never difficult, whoever the subject. Gandhi himself confessed that "I have a strain of cruelty in me . . . such that people force themselves to do things, even to attempt impossible things, in order to please me." He threatened to evict his wife from the house for refusing to clean an untouchable's chamber pot and temporarily disowned his son, Harilal, for marrying without his permission. Mr Chadha gives us both the heroism and the cruelty, but, in a book that reads more like chronology than biography, fails to give either its due weight.

Such myth-smudging seems inevitably beside the point. Revisionism is unlikely to rob Gandhi of what made him unique: his refusal to conceive of independence as the mere recovery of the stolen national property of sovereignty, though it was also that. In the midst of the struggle Gandhi was fasting to the point of death to stop untouchability from being enshrined in the constitution; obliging officials in the Indian National Congress to spin cloth for half an hour a day to show their commitment to cottage industry and the eradication of caste distinction in dress; and bending over backwards to make common cause with the Muslim minority-distractions at best to any nationalist not consumed as Gandhi was by the question of what sort of nation would an independent India be.

Much as they differed, Gandhi and Nehru both had answers that bade India to be at once various and singular, to celebrate the invasions and conversions that left it a jumble of languages and religions. To Nehru India was "an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden . . . what had been written previously."

Almost at once, though, the sordid and the ordinary claimed their places. "The Insider" (Viking India), a novel by a former prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, makes it clear that self-seeking and venality were the order of the day in Indian politics right from the first days of Pandit Nehru's enlightened rule. The main interest in this clunky, semi-fictional tale is the apparent contrast between the hero, an incorruptible socialist, and the author, who as prime minister gave India its first real dose of freemarket reform in the early 199os but left of fice amidst scandal.

A far better guide to India's fall from grace is Sunil Khilnani's bracing study, "The Idea of India" (Penguin; 7.99). Mr Khilnani pins much ofthe blame on Indira Gandhi, who promoted a populist brand of democracy that ended up inciting castes, states and religious groups against each other. One piece of shrapnel killed her-she was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984; another destroyed the Babri Masjid mosque eight years later, an act of religious vandalism by Hindu fanatics, blessed by the BJP.

And now the BJP heads the government. It has softened in office, it is true, and may anyway not last long atop a fractious 13party coalition. Yet its election in February heralds the arrival of a dark horse in the idea-of-India stakes, one largely unnoticed behind the Gandhian and Nehruvian entries. The BJP's India is not non-aligned but a power in its own right, with the nuclear bombs to prove it. In its rainbow of cultures one-Hindutva, "Hinduness"-is unmistakably the strongest. It is an India that can even find a warm spot for Nathuram Godse, who killed Gandhi in 1948 in a rage at his insistence that India honour a debt to Pakistan while the two countries were at war. "This is Nathuram Godse Speaking", a play based on the assassin's trial self-defence, drew such crowds recently in Bombay that a nervous sIr persuaded the state government of Maharashtra to ban it.

To many thoughtful Indians, the idea of their country embracing an armed-to-theteeth chauvinism seems both banal and appalling. To Arundhati Roy, who wrote the bestselling novel, "The God of Small Things", that threat marks "The End of Imagination", the title of her lament this month in Frontline, a fortnightly magazine. "The air is thick with ugliness," she writes, "and there's the unmistakable stench of fascism on the breeze" That is indeed alarming, if true. But against it there are hopeful signs: the decrepitude of the Bjp's government suggests that India's multitudes are not willing to accept Hindutva or any other mono-vision. There may be life yet in the Indian way.

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Copyright Economist Newspaper Group, Incorporated Aug 29, 1998