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| Santosh Bakaya |
My MPhil
class was in full swing. I was going full throttle talking about Gandhi, Satyagraha, civil disobedience and non-
violence.
“We don’t need Gandhi. Gandhi has lost his relevance. Hitler is the need of the
hour. Madam, don’t keep harping on Gandhi. He was responsible for the partition
of the country. He was partial towards the Muslims, he was a casteist …”
Before the vain student, sheathed in an aura of unshakeable arrogance, could hurl more he was-es at me and use more derogatory words, I asked him:
“Have you read My Experiments with
Truth?”
“No.” A vigorous shaking of head.
“Have you read Hind Swaraj?”
“No.” More vigorous shaking of head.
“Have you read Mein Kamph?”
“Mein Kamph, what, madam?”
“What do you know about Hitler?”
“He was great.” A glow on the young
face.
“Really? Any great deeds you know of?”
“Well, he was brave.” The face sparkled.
“Brave! Was he?”
A vehement nodding of the head.
“You patronize the WhatsApp University, cannot differentiate between fake news
and the truth, go hoarse in the throats discussing photo-shopped pictures of
Gandhi, I am not sitting here listening to your vile words. If you have to
criticize someone, first read about them and then criticize. ” Saying this, I
left the class, fuming in rage.
If I had eyes behind my back, I would
have noticed twenty young faces running the whole gamut of emotions-
bewilderment, confusion, anger and indignation.
As I raced out of the classroom, I could also hear a babel of voices behind me.
Strident. Shrill. Satirical. Squeaky. An
admixture of good and bad.
“How can Gandhi be relevant in this new
age of computers, mobiles, and social media?”
How could his charkha spinning solve our problems ?”
“How would he have dealt with all this violence all around us?”
“He was idiosyncratic.”
“Do you even know the spelling of this
word? Had he been around, he wouldn’t have allowed us to mutate into robots.”
This was the voice of a girl who was holding her own against the nineteen
other naysaying students.
I was in no mood to give my rejoinders to them, so I did the next best thing –
kept silent- with the intention of coming back later with my robust counter-
arguments.
Deep in my heart I felt, it was my
responsibility as a teacher to make Gandhi and his simple philosophy simpler to
the confused students, who were inadvertently reading complexities in his
simplicities.
On my way back to the staff room, there was a churning in my head. There is a
plethora of Gandhian Studies Centers, where, Gandhian scholars are invited to
deliver lectures on different aspects of Gandhism, where I have seen the
audience, not just students, but also teachers, waiting desperately for the tea
break. It is indeed a paradox that the
more books are written on the moral icon, more and more cynics and naysayers
are born.
“Gandhi is dead, why revive him?” Boom
the detractors.
In thoroughly researched papers, in international and national conferences on
Gandhi, highly erudite scholars reiterate the relevance of Gandhi, frothing at
the mouth, using complicated and convoluted vocabulary for the ideology of a
simple man, who listened to his inner voice, was perennially experimenting,
candidly confessing his mistakes, and evolving every day.
“ When Martin Luther King Jr, American Civil rights leader visited India [10
February – 10 March 1959] after the enormous success of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott, which had been inspired by Gandhi, he famously said, ‘to other countries I may go as a
tourist, but to India I come as a
pilgrim’.
“Really, madam?” One of the
students asked me when I said this in another of my talks.
“Can you tell us something about The Montgomery Bus Boycott and his India
Visit?”
“If I tell you everything, what will YOU tell me? I am also a student, on a
perennial quest.” The student looked askance at me for some time, and then
smiled.
When he met me again after some days, I
was pleasantly surprised that he had not only read everything about the
Montgomery Bus Boycott, but could also draw similarities between the Dandi March
and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
“The Montgomery Bus Boycott was the first large scale demonstration against
racial segregation in the USA; it started the Civil Rights Movement in the
United States. They said that the great man, Gandhi had inspired them.” He
talked on and on, his eyes beaming.
Agreed, Gandhi had some quirks, he could be idiosyncratic, fastidious, and obstinate
– but we shouldn’t forget that he was an ordinary man who rose above the ordinary,
through his moral gumption.
I remember telling one of my students, not very long back:
“You are obsessed with the latest brands, try becoming obsessed with the Gandhi
brand- the brand of truth and nonviolence.”
He looked at me as though I had gone insane. It is not easy for a student of
the present capitalistic, brand -conscious society to find some commonalities
with Brand Gandhi. How to identify with the
soul- force that he so soulfully talked of?
Gandhi walked the talk. But, we, teachers just talk. And talk.
All of us know that he was a great walker and even laughed at the youngsters
who felt exhausted after walking a little. But he was always trying to learn
from his mistakes, trying to become a better version of himself by walking the
talk.
“You know the Salt march appealed to everyone. During the march, many had
blistered feet, many became tired, but not the sixty one year old Gandhi who,
considered walking twelve kilometers child’s
play.
I told some school students in a talk on Gandhi one day.
“Did this really happen?”
“Leaning on a lacquered bamboo staff, he and his seventy -eight followers
walked two hundred miles in twenty four days, treading on winding dirt roads,
uneven terrain, peasants kneeled by the roadside as the pilgrims passed, during
the Dandi March.”
“ Is this true or just heresy?”
“Why did he choose salt as a mode of protest? Salt is such a small thing. ” One
youngster wanted to know, his curiosity triggered.
“You know, Subhash Chandra Bose compared
the Dandi March to Napoleon’s March to
Paris on his return from Elba.”
“But wasn’t he Gandhi’s staunch critic?”
“Read for yourself and find out. You need to know things on your own, so Read a
lot. If you read you will come to know
many things.” Things grew curiouser and curiuoser for them.
Then they tried to satisfy their curiosity- by reading and reading.
What the students are in dire need of,
is not scholarly essays, but random incidents from his life narrated to them with
a raconteur’s delight, in a way which makes them yearn to know more. In many
workshops in schools and colleges, I have related incidents from his life, and
made the students perform skits based on those incidents. They later told me that they would never
forget those incidents, because by enacting them, they had become a part of
them. Some youngsters even called me later to inform me that they were reading
more and more books on Gandhi, and many cobwebs had been removed from their
minds.
I believe that we, the teachers need not have stiff upper lips while discussing Gandhi with students. Getting our papers published in reputed UGC approved journals is only going to add to our academic achievements; the students will not even read them, unless they are in their syllabus. I am speaking from experience.
Believe me, I have seen students arguing against the idiosyncratic man, and
then the same students arguing in favour of the magician in loincloth. I always tell my students that we should not
put him on a pedestal, because like all of us, he was not without his fads and
foibles. Many were the times that his best friends bantered with him regarding
his points of view which they found na├пve and impractical.
It was Gurudeb Tagore, who conferred the title of the Mahatma on him. Both respected each other tremendously, but also
differed on many ideological issues. Tagore penned the essay The Cult of the Charkha, [an essay by
Tagore, September 1925, Modern Review]
critiquing the importance of the charkha,
but nonetheless was firmly convinced of the authority of the moral colossus,
considering him the very embodiment of Shakti.
Sarojini Naidu once quipped, “Do you know
how much it costs every day to keep you in poverty?” Undoubtedly, a tongue- in- cheek remark by his feisty,
frank friend, which was taken seriously by his detractors. It was this spunky friend
who remarked ‘Hail Deliverer’, when
on 6 April, 1930, at 8. 30 AM, Gandhi picked up a piece of salt in the coastal
town of Dandi left by the waves of the Arabian Sea, breaking the British law which made the
possession of salt, not made by the British, a punishable crime. It marked the
beginning of the civil disobedience Movement, dealing a blow to the ‘nefarious
monopoly’ of the British to make salt.
No amount of Gandhi- bashing, effigy-
burning, mud- slinging, idol desecrating, assassin- glorifying, murder-
glorification, can bash or burn or desecrate the values which Bapu stood for.
It is time to remember the words of Martin Luther King Jr. ‘Over the bleached bones and jumbled remains of numerous civilizations
are written the pathetic words ‘too late’. We still have a choice today, nonviolent co- existence or violent co- annihilation.”
If we do not uphold the principles of truth and nonviolence, the day is not far
when humanity will find itself hurtling down an abyss, and it will be too late
then.
Why should we wait for it to be so late, when hatred, bigotry and intolerance
sharpen their claws to attack the vestiges of humanism and love is gobbled up by
the capacious mouth of hate? Reminds me of what a thirteen year old, his face
wreathed in utter perplexity, asked me in a workshop on Gandhi,
“Madam, itni saari nafrat aati kahaan sey
hai? [What is the root of all this hatred?]
Yes, exactly - From where? And why?
On King’s death, The New York Times said, “A man of peace, he died violently. A man
of love, he died hated by many.” The
same can be said about our Bapu.
Peeping from the sepia- tinted pages of history, we can still see images of the
Dandi Marchers, led by a frail figure, leaning on a staff, walking briskly,
giving the youngsters a complex, rousing
a comatose nation out of its centennial stupor, casting his hypnotic spell on his
awestruck disciples, the champion spinner, spinning and smiling toothlessly, people
running pell- mell to catch a glimpse of this extraordinary man, the half- naked fakir of Churchill, lying on
the funeral pyre fully clothed in the garment of love, compassion and non-
violence, while devastated people hung from precariously creaking branches to
catch the final glimpse of a man, the likes of which visit the earth just once.
