THE DEATH AND AFTERLIFE OF MAHATMA GANDHI
Makarand R Paranjape
Random House India;
XIV+331 pages;Rs 599
He has been gone 67 years, as long as an average Indian’s lifespan. But Mahatma Gandhi keeps turning up all the time. He buys — everything in India (what can be a more cynical symbolism than the picture of one who abhorred material possessions gracing the country’s currency notes?), votes for Tories in Britain, and general fame and respectability everywhere. He sells government programmes, education, caps and handspun fabric, and even films and books — and how! Only a few of these last are memorable (Ramchandra Guha’s Gandhi before India, Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul), some are quizzical (Ved Mehta’s <I>Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles</I>) and the rest slip through the fissures into the abyss of indifference. Professor Makarand Paranjape’s weighty new offering, alas, falls into that category, despite the publisher’s assurance of it being explosive and original.
But the publication of this book at this time is a mere coincidence. It is not even remotely a part of the debasement of the “debate” on Gandhi’s assassination. In fact, the professor’s intents are laudable. He claims to make an “attempt to understand not only Gandhi’s life and message but also the idea of India by inquiring into the meaning of his death”.
And what does he find? After going through long and often only tangentially relevant quotations (the reference list alone occupies 10 pages), we learn that “Gandhi showed us a way to be modern without denying our traditions, how to be an inclusive and non-hierarchical nation, how to flower as individuals without losing entirely our characteristically communitarian and collective way of living. He also showed us how to be secular and deeply religious at the same time, how to be Sanatan Hindus without hating or disrespecting other religions, how to be Indian, even Asian without opting out of a universal world culture”; and “[w]hat killed [Gandhi] was the Partition of India ... but by willingly submitting to such a death, Gandhi overturned the mechanics of partition, countering the engines of hatred, violence, destruction, and death. Just as he did not live in vain, the Mahatma did not die in vain either. This is attested to ... by his death and afterlife”.
Do tell us more, Professor, things that are not couched in current catch-phrases and things we have not heard many times before in over a half a century of delving into Gandhi’s life and death.
The arrangement of the book might appear puzzling to the reader. The first part begins with the description of the assassination and the funeral. We then traverse for a good third of the book the mindscapes of guilt, repression and the various aesthetic and psychoanalytical allusions to them. Gandhi’s afterlife for the author is encapsulated in two films, Richard Attenborough’s <I>Gandhi </I>and Raju Hirani’s <I>Lage Raho Munnabhai</I>. The second part of the book goes back to Gandhi’s life, or more correctly, the last four and a half months of it that he spent in Delhi.
To make sense of this back-and-forth movement, one needs to grasp that the real central concern of Professor Paranjape in taking up this exercise is the guilt, or rather its presence among some leaders but absence in the collective Indian psyche, of what he terms as the act of patricide. We are presented sterile arguments about the idea of patricide, Oedipal complexes, the guilt of manslaughter, largely from a Western academic-psychoanalytical perspective, which lead nowhere.
I am not sure collective guilt is an emotion commonly felt by any society, much less so by India. Gandhi’s martyrdom has made us no less communitarian and violence-prone — Hashimpura, Gulberg Society and Muzaffarnagar figure daily in our headlines. The Germans have expiated for the Holocaust and moved on but gingerly. Americans have denounced their slave-owning past, but have also the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King on their national conscience. The Zionists, at the receiving end of bigotry and violence for millennia, are not above dishing them out at those who they claim are the <I>jihadists. </I>The great flow of history washes away collective guilt, as perhaps great rivers remove the pollution we dump in them — for the most part anyway.
A respected professor of English spending a sabbatical year at a great university building a course on a traumatic event from recent national history and the relevance of literary criticism to analysing it was a novel idea, even an original one. But the translation of that effort into a work of some significance in a field already overcrowded with many luminous (and many, many more mediocre) <I>œuvres </I>is a hazardous enterprise at best, fraught with the risk of sounding repetitive and even banal. Noble intents alone do not a classic make.<hr>
The reviewer taught at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and helped set up Institute of Rural Management, Anand
Makarand R Paranjape
Random House India;
XIV+331 pages;Rs 599
He has been gone 67 years, as long as an average Indian’s lifespan. But Mahatma Gandhi keeps turning up all the time. He buys — everything in India (what can be a more cynical symbolism than the picture of one who abhorred material possessions gracing the country’s currency notes?), votes for Tories in Britain, and general fame and respectability everywhere. He sells government programmes, education, caps and handspun fabric, and even films and books — and how! Only a few of these last are memorable (Ramchandra Guha’s Gandhi before India, Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul), some are quizzical (Ved Mehta’s <I>Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles</I>) and the rest slip through the fissures into the abyss of indifference. Professor Makarand Paranjape’s weighty new offering, alas, falls into that category, despite the publisher’s assurance of it being explosive and original.
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This seems to be the season for dredging up Gandhi’s assassination, for reasons that I cannot quite fathom. Sundry admirers and acolytes of Nathuram Godse, the man who shot the Mahatma at point-blank range and in cold blood, have crawled out of the woodworks. Godse’s defence of his abominable act, which ought to be considered an obscenity, widely circulates on the net. That indefatigable champion of human rights, Teesta Setalvad, has compiled a dossier on the act.
But the publication of this book at this time is a mere coincidence. It is not even remotely a part of the debasement of the “debate” on Gandhi’s assassination. In fact, the professor’s intents are laudable. He claims to make an “attempt to understand not only Gandhi’s life and message but also the idea of India by inquiring into the meaning of his death”.
And what does he find? After going through long and often only tangentially relevant quotations (the reference list alone occupies 10 pages), we learn that “Gandhi showed us a way to be modern without denying our traditions, how to be an inclusive and non-hierarchical nation, how to flower as individuals without losing entirely our characteristically communitarian and collective way of living. He also showed us how to be secular and deeply religious at the same time, how to be Sanatan Hindus without hating or disrespecting other religions, how to be Indian, even Asian without opting out of a universal world culture”; and “[w]hat killed [Gandhi] was the Partition of India ... but by willingly submitting to such a death, Gandhi overturned the mechanics of partition, countering the engines of hatred, violence, destruction, and death. Just as he did not live in vain, the Mahatma did not die in vain either. This is attested to ... by his death and afterlife”.
Do tell us more, Professor, things that are not couched in current catch-phrases and things we have not heard many times before in over a half a century of delving into Gandhi’s life and death.
The arrangement of the book might appear puzzling to the reader. The first part begins with the description of the assassination and the funeral. We then traverse for a good third of the book the mindscapes of guilt, repression and the various aesthetic and psychoanalytical allusions to them. Gandhi’s afterlife for the author is encapsulated in two films, Richard Attenborough’s <I>Gandhi </I>and Raju Hirani’s <I>Lage Raho Munnabhai</I>. The second part of the book goes back to Gandhi’s life, or more correctly, the last four and a half months of it that he spent in Delhi.
To make sense of this back-and-forth movement, one needs to grasp that the real central concern of Professor Paranjape in taking up this exercise is the guilt, or rather its presence among some leaders but absence in the collective Indian psyche, of what he terms as the act of patricide. We are presented sterile arguments about the idea of patricide, Oedipal complexes, the guilt of manslaughter, largely from a Western academic-psychoanalytical perspective, which lead nowhere.
I am not sure collective guilt is an emotion commonly felt by any society, much less so by India. Gandhi’s martyrdom has made us no less communitarian and violence-prone — Hashimpura, Gulberg Society and Muzaffarnagar figure daily in our headlines. The Germans have expiated for the Holocaust and moved on but gingerly. Americans have denounced their slave-owning past, but have also the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King on their national conscience. The Zionists, at the receiving end of bigotry and violence for millennia, are not above dishing them out at those who they claim are the <I>jihadists. </I>The great flow of history washes away collective guilt, as perhaps great rivers remove the pollution we dump in them — for the most part anyway.
A respected professor of English spending a sabbatical year at a great university building a course on a traumatic event from recent national history and the relevance of literary criticism to analysing it was a novel idea, even an original one. But the translation of that effort into a work of some significance in a field already overcrowded with many luminous (and many, many more mediocre) <I>œuvres </I>is a hazardous enterprise at best, fraught with the risk of sounding repetitive and even banal. Noble intents alone do not a classic make.<hr>
The reviewer taught at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and helped set up Institute of Rural Management, Anand