'The whole world is but one family' - Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Australia

April 2010 Vol. 7 No. 10
Gandhigiri: Satyagraha after Hundred Years
In a time ravaged by large scale violence and
unending terror where nothing seems more
promising and urgent than to be reminded of
another possibility: the path of non-violent struggle
for justice exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi
continues to be the subject of enduring relevance and
interest as it is evident in the interest and passion
generated by popular movie, Lage Raho Munnabhai.
Gandhigiri is gradually entering into popular
imagination and academic discourses. His writings,
running into more than one hundred volumes contains
wide range of views on different issues. In the nearly
six decades since his death a large and diverse range
of writings—comparative, expository, biographical,
hagiographical and dialogical—has appeared on
Gandhi.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, described variously
as the ‘father of the nation’, ‘Mahatma’, ‘apostle
of non-violence”, and then disparagingly by his
detractors as ‘the half-naked fakir”, Mr Gandhi as
Jinnah insisted and later ‘Maulana Gandhi’ as the
Hindu right sneeringly called him instead of Mahatma,
was quite simply addressed as ‘Bapu’ by his followers.
He devoted his life to truth, non-violence and the
promotion of communal harmony. Ironically, he fell
to the bullet of an assassin—a violent death at the
hands of a Hindu Fundamentalist man who harboured
hatred and malice.
The life of Mahatma Gandhi is abundantly
documented; perhaps no life in any period has been
more so. Certainly it was an extraordinary life, fusing,
as it did, ancient Hindu religion and culture and
modern revolutionary ideas about politics and society.
There are at present about four hundred biographies
of Gandhi, yet, as Jawaharlal Nehru once observed
“no man can write a real life of Gandhi, unless he
is as big as Gandhi.” In Nehru’s view, the best that
anyone could hope to do was to conjure up some
pictures of that life: “Many pictures rise in my mind
of this man, whose eyes were often full of laughter
and yet were pools of infinite sadness. But the picture
that is dominant and most significant is 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 the quest and pilgrimage, regardless of
consequences.” Leaving aside the riddle of who but
Gandhi could write his “real life,” the writer’s task
would have to be to discover and truthfully portray the
heroic but human pilgrim amid the myths that began
proliferating around him when he started his quest and
that have inevitably become more numerous because
-B.N. Ray*
the quest ended in martyrdom. In fact, the very core
of Gandhi’s thought, presented and developed in
tens of thousands of his writings and speeches—his
search for God through celibacy and cleanliness,
through mastery of all human needs and functions,
mental and bodily, and through insistence on personal
hygiene and public sanitation—has been obscured by
mythologies fearful of debasing and sensationalizing
their martyred hero. Perhaps because Indians rely for
information more on the spoken than on the written
word, and because they still live close to the soil.
There is need to explore the contemporary meaning
of Gandhi’s life and work—both his stupendous
contributions in terms of making and remaking the
world he lived in and his own strong sense of tragedy
and trauma where he found he had failed to live up
to his own expectations on matters that were close
to his heart and to his sense of purpose and meaning
in life. These are to be seen not merely as events or
encounters during his own lifetime but also in the
context of today’s challenges and failures of the
human enterprise, both building on what he has left
behind and building a new edifice, struggling our way
through the maze of ambivalences that seem to be out
now and in the years and decades that lie ahead. For
we do face, as individuals and peoples and the world
at large, as a planet and a cosmos, now and in the
years and decades to come beyond which it is difficult
to prognosticate, a highly uncertain future, in many
ways going downhill yet somehow trying to keep hope
alive while knowing fully well the depth of the crisis
facing humanity. For, it is only through a major act
of imagination backed by sustained experimentation
through which new stirrings of both conscience and
consciousness take place that the proverbial candle of
hope can be generated. As the French philosopher and
ecologist, Jacques Ellul has said, it is only at a time
of abandonment and anguish that the need for hope