Confined Wisdom

It would be impossible for me, a Pakistani, to write a critical piece on Gandhi and not emotionally provoke the Indian reader. However, I shall attempt to do this as politely as possible and hope for the best. Please be advised that I am neither an anti-Indian nor an anti-Hindu individual. This piece is not meant to offend any one. Please read through the entire text before passing any hateful comments.

“Oh God,” said Gandhi, right after he was shot by Nathuram Vinayak Godse, as he fell to the ground and died. Relatively unknown TV actor Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of the Mahatma made its way into the hearts of millions around the world in 1982′s multiple Oscar-winning Gandhi. In truth, the actual words he uttered right before he died were “Hai Ram”, but since that translates to “Oh one-quarter-avatar-of-the-seventh-reincarnation-of-the-Lord-Vishnu”, the word “God” was used for simplicity.

Revered in his homeland as Bapu (father of the nation) and widely accepted as an evangelist of peace, a model of abstinence and the liberator of India, the real Gandhi was a lot, lot more. And this isn’t praise. A complex man, Gandhi’s faults have been consistently pushed under the rug time and again, whenever they have raised questions. Richard Attenborough’s epic did just that. Financed partially by the Indira Gandhi’s government (out of state treasury at that!), Gandhi is a cleaned out, sanitized and beatified portrayal of the man that he really was. In India, and in other parts of the world, Gandhi has achieved a saint-like status, brought on by numerous literary works of appreciation as well as a generally projected image of a man who did no wrong. But, like the rest of us, he was human. And like the rest of us, he wasn’t flawless. There were, however, certain sides of him that were not only rife with flaws, but exposed a dark and sinister being living inside the body of a frail old man in a loincloth.

Before he turned all Bapu, Gandhi was a loyal imperialist who organized a brigade of Indian soldiers to help the Raj fight the Zulu uprising in South Africa, because he was upset that the white people saw him and his countrymen in the same light as they saw black people. Denounced as “Kaffirs” by the South African whites, the Zulus felt the racist hate of Sergeant Major Gandhi and his band of soldiers. MKG could not tolerate being placed in the same racial tie-up as the black people of South Africa, as he stated: “Ours is one continued struggle sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.”

On his return to India, MKG protested against the British proposal to grant rights to the Dalits, the “Untouchable” caste in the Hindu system. Gandhi was a devout Brahmin, and fasted for days until the British took back the proposal. By not giving the Dalits separate electorate, he kept them in slavery. He said that one would have to go over his dead body to abolish the caste system. He referred to the Dalits as Harijans – a name that they have rejected because it is condescending.

It wasn’t until much, much later in the Indian freedom fight that MKG turned into a pacifist. Earlier he had been anything but. He won a war medal for the Zulu campaign, and later fought for the Raj in WWI. Swearing his allegiance to the crown, he organized the Indian Volunteer Corps, and wrote to the Viceroy: “I would make India offer all her able bodied sons as a sacrifice to the Empire at this critical moment.” Although his own peers disapproved of this, Gandhi continued to support England’s cause in the war because he believed he owed the empire that sacrifice in return for it’s military protection. He organized “War Recruitment Melas” in various cities to gather support for Her Majesty’s army, and was widely criticized as hindering and deterring the build up of the Indian uprising.

Only a few years later, when opportunity presented itself, Gandhi took over the mantle of the evangelist of peace. The revolt of Chauri Chaura in 1922 was the biggest of it’s kind, but was muted by MKG as he regarded it as a crime. Suddenly, after years of war service to the Raj, MKG had returned to the Indian side and was suddenly a pacifist. His order (days of fasting) for retreat from Chauri Chaura was described by Subhash Chandra Bose as a “national calamity”. Gandhi demanded that the downtrodden of India put down their fists and practice ahimsa, his ideology of non-violent protests. Chauri Chaura could have instigated a chain of events where Indians collect in masses and protest the Raj. Had it been allowed to continue.

Gandhi’s non-violence ideologies were not the most appropriate for the situation India was in, particularly because Gandhi himself had not always been an out-and-out example of ahimsa. The Indians outnumbered the British by scores, and protests like Chauri Chaura, especially if frequent, could have pushed the British out way before 1947.

“I feel that India’s mission is different from that of other countries, India is fitted for the religious supremacy of the world….India can conquer all by soul-force”.

The secular leadership of India was disturbed by MKG’s irrational stance on leadership by religion rather than by practicality. Gandhi referred to God regularly in his speeches and texts. Where such references would be looked at cynically coming from any other national leader, Gandhi’s claims of being a medium to God for the Indian people were accepted without question. His religious-centric views were based on his studies of the Gita, from which he understood pacifist idealism, eventually leading to his ahimsa movement. It was Gandhi’s religious views, which he forced on to his subjects, that delayed the independence of India. His frequent use of the term Dharma to demonstrate how the oppressors should behave with their captors led to an Indian mass that went in not to fight, but to get killed by the thousands. Defenseless and underprivileged, the masses came in numbers in an attempt to tire out the guns of the Raj. In any democratic view, the oppressed have the fundamental right to liberate themselves by any means necessary, but Gandhi believed otherwise. And he believed it so much that in 1941, as Hitler moved towards conquering Poland, Gandhi urged the Jews to commit collective suicide, so as their souls are free. On another occasion, he urged the British to let the Germans take over England by stating: “Let them take possession of your beautiful island with all your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls nor your minds.”

Gandhi used his spiritual self within the framework of a political uprising, which caused an ideological rift between the various leading figures of the Indian independence movement. Jinnah went on to propose a Muslim led India, out of fear that Gandhi’s India would be a Hindu India. The bloodbath of partition that followed is a mere consequence of Gandhi’s erroneous ideologies.

The movie Gandhi cleverly alludes from mentioning a lot about the real MKG, which is understandable considering where the funding of the film came from. In contrast to what India has become today, Gandhi was heavily opposed towards the idea of modernizing and industrializing the world, and more specifically, India. On many occasions he said that he didn’t mind if the British remained in India, to police it, conduct foreign policy, and such trivia, if it would only take away its factories and railways. Gandhi opposed the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the airplane, and many such things that marked a significant level of evolution in the world towards the 20th century. Of course, much later in his life when he was heading the “Quit India” movement, he would use the telegraph extensively and would broadcast daily over All-India Radio during his highly publicized fasts, but, as history has shown, MKG’s life was splashed in abundance with contradictory behavior.

Gandhi’s vision for India was set in times gone by, where evil machines didn’t exist, and man made his own yarn, weave his own clothes and pushed his bullock carts – much like the idyllic past that India had been through already. And yet, it is almost inexplicable that the man he chose as the first Prime Minister of India was Nehru, a man known to strongly advocate policies of heavy industrialization and modernization and who immediately went on to develop a model for a new India that could, in the near future, sustain an impressive socio-economic status.

For a man not only known for his services to his country, but also generally regarded as a modern-day Jesus figure, MKG was not much of a family man. His attitude towards his family was something the Indian media has gone to great lengths to cover up. His son, Harilal had wanted to go on to college to pursue law, much like his father. Gandhi would not allow it as he believed a western style education would not help in the struggle for Indian independence. “Dear Bapu, “Harilal wrote, “In your laboratory of experiments, unfortunately, I am the one truth that has gone wrong….”

Gandhi said his son, Harilal, was one of the greatest regrets of his life. Gandhi had banished his second son just for giving money to Harilal. The boy was so uncared for no one came to his bedside as he lay dying. He once wrote of his wife, “I simply cannot bear to look at Ba’s face. The expression is often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling, as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she is saying something.” When she got pneumonia, Gandhi refused her penicillin and simply allowed her to die. He once wrote of them, “What I expect from the Gandhi family is that all members should devote themselves exclusively to service work, observe the utmost self-control and have no desire for wealth. They should not marry and those who are married should observe brahmacharya. They should live on whatever they get from service work.”

In a review of a biography by MKG’s grandson, Time magazine wrote: “Exceptions to the author’s reserve mostly center on Gandhi’s limitations as a family man. Where the world sees a saint, Rajmohan Gandhi sees a cruel husband and a mostly absent father, paying scant attention to his children’s schooling and dragging wife Kasturba across continents at will, belittling her desire for the simplest of material possessions, then expecting her to comply when he turns from amorous husband to platonic companion to apparent adulterer.”

Gandhi took on a magnetic personality in the presence of young women, and was able to persuade them to join him in peculiar experiments of sleeping and bathing naked together, without touching, all apparently to strengthen his chastity. It is anyone’s guess whether these experiments were actually successful. At the same time, his views on birth control and his opposition to sex for pleasure were vigorously challenged by Margaret Sanger. It is said that the debate had to be cut short because Gandhi had a nervous breakdown. (Read the debate here!)

The complex history of Gandhi presents some very interesting, and disturbing paradoxes. One one hand he supported the British in three wars (Zulu war, WW1 and WW2), and on the other he advocated non-violence. For the most part, both Indian leaders and the Indian people ignored Gandhi’s precepts. They ignored him on sexual abstinence. They ignored his modifications of the caste system. They ignored him on the evils of modern industry, the radio, the telephone. They ignored him on education. They ignored his appeals for national union, hence the birth of a Muslim state – Pakistan. Even in Gandhi’s time, his weaknesses, his contradictions, his hypocrisies, his perversions, his racism and his oddities were noticed. Yet, instead of standing up to the frail man, he was allowed to run free, spreading unrealistic messages of madness, challenging the oppressors to slap him across the face and got millions of people to follow him at it. Today, India’s generally (and somewhat seemingly) secular masses fail to realize that behind the little man in the loincloth was a zealous Hindu leader who, in the interest of widespread appeal, tried to suppress his personal demons, with little luck. Even with the pedophilia, the wife-beating, the strange sexual antics, the incessant starvation regimes, the enemas (loads of them) and the lunacy, Gandhi’s saving grace came to him because of the time he had spent in the UK and South Africa. It was only this exposure that opened him up to the possibility of a imagining democratic India. His strict Hindu upbringing would never have featured lessons on this all-important global mindset.

Gandhi’s followers have, for the most part, been the devout Hindus of India. For them, Gandhi was a Mahatma, a superior soul, a holy man. He was a symbol of sanctity, not a guide to conduct. Hinduism has a long history of holy men who, traditionally, do not offer themselves up to the public as models of general behavior but withdraw from the world, often into an ashram, to pursue their sanctity in private, a practice which all Hindus honor, if few emulate. The true oddity is that Gandhi, this holy man, having drawn from British sources his notions of nationalism and democracy, also absorbed from the British his model of virtue in public life. He was a historical original, a Hindu holy man that a British model of public service and dazzling advances in mass communications thrust out into the world, to become a great moral leader and the “father of his country.”

Gandhi, the film, although a production masterpiece, presents an over-simplified version of the MKG story. The film was meant to mainly appeal to western audiences, and to present the beloved father under a more than favorable light. Perhaps most of Gandhi’s dark side was covered up, or perhaps it was never revealed to the makers, but one thing’s for sure – much like the oddly phrased “Oh God” which I mentioned at the very beginning, the rest of the Gandhi story has also been lost in translation.