We have just completed celebrating the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. It was an event planned with all the precision of a commemoration, meant to reduce Gandhi’s ideas and principles to inoffensive, bite-sized snacks. To be swallowed whole and eliminated from our systems without thought. Just not in the open.
What we are left with now is just form. A flimsy shell of a Gandhian practice – the invocation of cleanliness – completely shorn of the real feeling and impulse from which such ideas flowed for him. We might even say that the ritualisation of Gandhi, begun years ago, is now complete, or is nearing completion at any rate.
This kind of act is not new in a culture like ours, where rituals and blind practices of all kinds can abound – and largely still do – divorced from the religious or spiritual ground from where they spring up. In fact, Gandhi’s life was a fight against many rigid practices and un-humanistic modes operating within the large body of Hinduism.
Now that Gandhi has been made into an empty metaphor, what we need most is a re-interpretation of him for us, the way he interpreted to Indians what it meant to be alive and responsive as a people at the beginning of the 20th century. I say we need to re-interpret Gandhi not because he was so great that we cannot move beyond him, but because he is going to hang around in our debates, even if as nothing more than a symbol of an open-defecation-free India.
For a large mass of us who have taken to blindly consuming what is served up, whether by commercial brands or by political ones, we need someone to speak to us about who or what the real enemies are. But who is that someone? Gandhi did not point us towards the British, he pointed the finger to a place deep within ourselves and asked us to begin the quest for truth. This search would have to take the form of freedom from colonial exploitation in the political sphere, freedom from communal feeling and untouchability in the social sphere and a move towards self-rule or self-enlightenment (swa-raj) in our personal lives.
That was then. What would living a truly enlightened life in the 21st century mean? This is the question he poses to us. It falls on each one of us to ask ourselves what it would mean to be really free in our inner and outer contexts today. The answer to some aspects of this question are relatively easy to identify, even if responding to them with truth will test us like nothing else before. So, we must join the fight against the exploitation of the Earth. We must, in whatever way we can, consume less and more consciously, and take only as much as we need.
But there are other aspects to this question that may be much harder to address in the climate of heady nationalism that grips us now. If we were to rediscover Gandhi and ask the question of freedom in a way that pertained to all spheres of action (political, social and personal), how would we think about or act towards those whom we consider ‘others’ – whether they be Muslims or Dalits or anyone else?
Political regimes may try to impose the meaning of certain epochal figures upon us, but it is up to us to make up our mind about their significance. Isn't it time to take back Gandhi and examine for ourselves whether or not he makes sense, and if he does, in what ways?