Mind Games: John Lennon and Mahatma Gandhi

Poorva Paksha

John Lennon’s ‘Mind Games’, the title track from the solo album that he self-produced and released in 1973, was originally titled ‘Make Love, Not War’:

Love is the answer/and you know that, for sure.

Love is the flower/you gotta let it, you gotta let it grow.

But pushing beyond his music from the late ’60s, ‘Mind Games’ blends his classic, anti-war-type hippie sentiment with a more introspective mystical orientation. That is, it’s a powerful blend of the personal and political, with a pretty explicit tip of the hat to Gandhi:

Playing the mind guerrillas/Chanting the mantra: ‘Peace on Earth’.

Millions of mind guerrillas/Putting their soul-power to the karmic wheel.

We all know of Gandhi as the man who brought down an empire through non-violent civil disobedience. Those of us who work in political philosophy also tie up his trans-continental political activity with his eccentric anti-modernism, as seen in writings such as Hind Swaraj. And those who study moral philosophy, or the philosophy of religion, routinely explore his idiosyncratic reinterpretation and application of Jain and other traditional religious ideas such as Anekãntavãda (epistemic pluralism of sorts) and Ahimsa, in relation to his concept of Truth.

In other words, everyone who studies Gandhi seriously recognises the horizontally interconnected nature of his thinking; that is, the organic lateral interrelations of all of his ideas, whether political, moral, epistemological, or religious. As his autobiography reveals, and as Lennon somehow perceptively discerned, all of these public practices were reflections of inward, personal concerns.

What The Story of My Experiments with Truth brings home quite well is that the sharp distinctions drawn between Gandhi’s political action, Satyagraha, Ahimsa, Swaraj, and his work on social reform, removal of untouchability, Swadeshi, and his obsession with health, diet, exercise, hygiene, and celibacy, are merely academic distinctions. Being academic, they suffer from the broader typical defects of academic research and scholarship. That is, they discount the priority of the body, take flight from the flesh, and ignore the grounding of so-called higher themes (spirit, truth) in their organic embodiment. To take just one example, throughout his autobiography, Gandhi writes at length of civil disobedience, of non-cooperation, of swaraj, of political action of all kinds, but only once does he declare what was for him ‘one of the greatest experiments of my life’. What do you think it was?

It was to not drink milk!

And indeed, one surprise after another, what we come finally to learn in the closing pages of the book is that Gandhi’s discomfort with his title of Mahatma turns out to derive from his persistent worry that he cannot possibly be great-of-soul when he can scarcely resist the temptation of —milk.

Two new books about Gandhi have just been published by the popular press Speaking Tiger. One is titled Gandhi: Then and Now – Autobiographies and Conversations. The other, Inheriting Gandhi: Influences, Activisms. Both are edited by faculty members from the University of Mumbai (S Kumar, K Mahadevan, M Bhoot, and R Kharat), and yet, they delightfully avoid the common academic prejudices I mentioned. Perhaps this is because the books look at Gandhi through the lens of autobiography, or else by way of how we come to inherit his grand story in our own tinier ways.

The book Autobiographies and Conversations explores precisely those two things: first, Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth, a book about which so much has been said over the decades and yet enough can never be said; and second, encounters between Gandhi and some of his grand interlocutors, Tagore, Ambedkar, Bose.

The other book, Influences, Activisms, traces so many novel and unexpected ways that Gandhi has influenced far-flung communities or professional practitioners. For example, there’s a chapter on Gandhi’s ideas on nursing and medical care vis-a-vis the Covid pandemic. It also shows various ways that Gandhian Satyagraha can and does get brought into our own day, whether that be with respect to the Covid pandemic, or other current crises, like the crisis of higher education. Most important to me is the way the book looks at Gandhian strategies for overcoming polarities and seeking compromise for mutually beneficial common ends.

These new books are a good reminder of what Gandhi Jayanti itself should be a good reminder of, but that I think we all too often forget. Thankfully we have John Lennon’s music also to remind us…

Keep on playing those mind games forever.

Raising the spirit of peace and love.

(Aakash Singh Rathore as Dr Jekyll is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes)