With his Buddhistic insight into suffering as something universal and indivisible, Gandhi made compassion the basis of political action. In the process, he rejected the idea of politics as an occasionally grubby means to a predetermined end (independence, revolution, regime change), something that an elite of experts carried on among itself for the sake of some imagined good for society. He didn’t only infuse it with ethical responsibility, he tried to make politics an ongoing public and private process, a matter of individual conscience rather than of an arbitrarily decided general will.
For Gandhi, satyagraha or non-violence was not merely another tactic, as terrorism often is. It was a whole way of being in the world, of relating to other people’s and one’s own inner self: a continuous project of spiritual self-awareness. He knew, as Václav Havel wrote in a collection of essays titled Living in Truth, that ‘the less political policies are derived from a concrete and human “here and now” and the more they fix their sights on an abstract “someday”, the more easily they can degenerate into new forms of human enslavement’.23
Gandhi practised what Václav Havel, living under a totalitarian regime, once described as ‘anti-political politics’, that is, ‘politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the useful, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them’.
In this vision, politics was inseparable from the spiritual life of individuals. It was an arena of action where human beings nurtured those basic dimensions of their humanity that the impersonal power structures of the modern world had exiled into the private realm: ‘love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy and tolerance’ which, as Havel wrote, ‘were the only genuine starting-point of meaningful human community’.24
Regardless of the regimes they lived under – British or Indian, capitalist or socialist – individuals always possessed a freedom of conscience: the freedom to make choices in everyday life. To exercise this choice correctly – to work with what the Buddha called right view and intention – was to live a moral as well as a political life. It was also to take upon one’s own conscience the burden of political responsibility and action rather than placing it upon a political party or a government.
Gandhi knew as intuitively as Havel was to know later that the task before him was not so much of achieving regime change as of resisting ‘the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power – the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages and political slogans’. This was the fundamental task that Havel believed ‘all of us, East and West’ face, and ‘from which all else should follow’. For this power, which took the form of consumption, advertising, repression, technology or cliché, was the ‘blood brother of fanaticism and the wellspring of totalitarian thought’ and pressed upon individuals everywhere in the political and economic systems of the modern world.
It was why Havel once thought that the western cold warriors wishing to get rid of the totalitarian system he belonged to were like the ‘ugly woman trying to get rid of her ugliness by smashing the mirror which reminds her of it’. ‘Even if they won,’ Havel wrote, ‘the victors would emerge from a conflict inevitably resembling their defeated opponents far more than anyone today is willing to admit or able to imagine.’
Gandhi knew that ‘a genuine, profound and lasting change for the better can no longer result from the victory of any particular traditional political conception which can ultimately be only external, that is, a structural or systemic conception’. Writing after a century of cruelly botched revolutions, Havel was convinced that
such a change will have to derive from human existence, from the fundamental reconstitution of the position of people in the world, their relationship to themselves and to each other, and to the universe. If a better economic and political model is to be created, then perhaps more than ever before it must derive from profound existential and moral changes in society.
But the examples of the Buddha and Gandhi lacked sufficient force to prevent India from embracing the clichés of modern politics. A few months after India’s long-delayed independence in 1947, a Hindu nationalist called Nathuram Godse assassinated Gandhi.
Godse turned out to be one of the many rationalists and advocates of realpolitik exasperated and bewildered by Gandhi’s attempt to combine politics with morality. In a remarkably coherent statement in court, he explained that he had killed Gandhi in order to cleanse India of such ‘old superstitious beliefs’ as the ‘power of the soul, the inner voice, the fast, the prayer and the purity of the mind’.25 He had felt that non-violence of the kind Gandhi advocated could only ‘lead the nation towards ruin’. With Gandhi out of the way, India, Godse said, would be ‘free to follow the course founded on reason which I consider to be necessary for sound nation-building’. It would ‘surely be practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces…’
More than half a century after Gandhi’s assassination, I met Nathuram Godse’s younger brother, Gopal Godse, in the western Indian city of Pune. Godse spent sixteen years in prison for conspiring with his brother and a few other Hindu nationalists to murder Gandhi. In his tiny two-room flat, where the dust from the busy shopping street outside thickly powdered a mess of files and books and the framed garlanded photographs of Gandhi’s murderers, Godse, a frail man of eighty-three, at first seemed like someone abandoned by history.
But recent events in India seemed to Godse to have vindicated his Hindu nationalist cause. The massacre by Hindu nationalists of over two thousand Muslims in Gujarat had proved that the Hindus were growing more militant and patriotic. The Muslims were on the run not just in India but everywhere in the world. India had nuclear bombs and was willing to use them; it was growing richer and stronger while Pakistan was slowly imploding. Only recently, Godse reminded me, the deputy prime minister Advani had advocated the dismemberment of Pakistan.
India had turned its back on Gandhi, Godse claimed, and had come close to embracing his brother’s vision. His brother, Nathuram Godse, had not died in vain. He had asked for his ashes to be immersed in the Indus, the holy river of the Aryan settlers of India, which flows through Pakistan, only when Mother India was whole again. For over half a century, Godse had waited for the day when he could travel to the Indus with the urn containing his brother’s ashes; and he now thought he wouldn’t have to wait too much longer.
Western Dharmas
MY JOURNEYS OUT OF India took me out of what I began to think of as a stagnant and limited world. I found attractive the prospect of travel, of exposing myself to new places and peoples – the prospect that I had once dreaded. The opportunities came in the form of small journalistic assignments, which also paid well, allowing me to feel finally free of the financial worries I had lived with for so long.
They involved me with more and more people; kept me out of Mashobra for long stretches, and took me back there only for very brief periods. I often returned just long enough to write my articles in the silence and seclusion of my cottage.
I hadn’t signed a lease or contract for my house with the Sharmas. I wouldn’t have known how to go about it. I paid them a flat sum occasionally, based on the figure Mr Sharma had first quoted. As years went by, I increased the amount. They themselves never brought up the matter of rent. Mr Sharma always looked slightly embarrassed while accepting the money I gave him. He often said on such occasions that he hadn’t built the house in order to make money and repeated that it was meant as a place of retreat for scholars and writers. But I continued to think, especially when I was away from Mashobra, that I depended too much on his goodwill, which I feared could run out at any moment. I wondered whether Mr Sharma, who didn’t appear very rich, would some day be compelled to put the house on the market.
Even after many years in Mashobra I couldn’t quite believe in my good fortune of having found a place of my own; never ceased feeling the fragility of my claim upon i
t; and I returned to the village at the end of each winter burdened with a grim sense of foreboding.
On one of my trips I found that Daulatram had married and had come to live with his wife, Girija, beneath my cottage, in the small room where apples were previously stored. Mr Sharma built them a tiny bathroom. He bought them a double bed, a gas cylinder and stove, a pressure cooker and some pieces of crockery. Crammed with these domestic things, the room took on a new hopeful aspect.
As the days passed, the hiss of the pressure cooker, the fragrance of burning spices, the subdued voices of Daulatram and Girija, and the old film songs on All India Radio, rising from below, became familiar and comforting.
Returning to Mashobra one summer for a short stay I learnt that Mr Sharma’s mother had died the previous week. Mr Sharma and his father, Panditji, had just returned from immersing her ashes in the Ganges at Hardwar. They spoke of the unpleasantness they had faced on the plains. The Brahmins officiating at funeral ceremonies had cheated them. Policemen at a checkpost had demanded bribes and Panditji had had to contact his political friend, the former king of Rampur, in order to smooth his way.
Thirteen days after her death, Mr Sharma hosted a feast on the lawn facing his house. Many people from the village joined his relatives under the bright tent, the shopkeepers dressed nervously in their best clothes. The next issue of Divyajyoti was dedicated to the memory of Mr Sharma’s mother. The cover had a photograph of her, taken one bright summer afternoon with my camera. Inside, there were tributes from her husband, son, daughters, sons-in-law.
Her husband spoke of her support and energy during the difficult period of poverty he had known in the 1920s and 30s when he was trying to find a job as a Sanskrit teacher. Other contributors offered similar instances of her generosity and kindness. I read them, surprised by the number of people whose lives she had touched, even altered, in significant ways. It made me see how much solid endeavour and achievement even a life as restricted hers could contain.
There were other changes, although I wasn’t then much aware of them. People I knew had got married, or found work elsewhere and moved away. Wildflower Hall, where I often went walking, burned down in a fire. One evening I went to see the charred ruins. The flowerbeds still bloomed in the blackened lawns, and tourists wearing Himachali folk-dress posed for pictures amid them.
Mr Sharma, who had acquired a new set of teeth, looked much older. Older still, his father, whom I saw meditating on the balcony, rarely left the house. Mr Sharma came with his nephew Vayur before dusk to help Daulatram milk the cows. While Vayur returned to the main house with a brass pail full to the brim, Mr Sharma dropped in. He was still incurious about my travels and my long and frequent absences from Mashobra. He spoke of how little or much it had snowed the previous winter and what it portended for the apple harvest later that year. He spoke again of the growing unpredictability of the weather; and blamed it often on modern society and its constant need for progress, for new shiny things.
As the years passed, I saw less and less of Mr Sharma. I had always thought of my time in Mashobra as preparation for the larger world, where I hoped that a professional career as a writer awaited me. And now, almost imperceptibly, the writing commissions steadily accumulating, my ambition had been realized.
In London, where I had started to spend some months each year, my life as a freelance writer was placid. I worked most of the day. Occasionally, I would meet publishers, editors, agents and other writers. Sometimes I joined various academics, think-tank experts and journalists in the studios of the BBC to comment on international events – the news, usually bad, emanating from what seemed from London to be the remote and dark places of the world.
My illusions about the writer’s life diminished. To be a writer wasn’t, as I had imagined, to arrive at a plateau of wisdom; it wasn’t even to possess a special anguish, or to assume a critical attitude towards the social and political arrangements of the day. I was disconcerted when men I considered successful and confident suddenly revealed anxieties about the sales, publicity and distribution of their books, and began resentfully to compare them with the publishing records of other writers. Writing had become (or had always been) a profession like any other, pursued in solitude but contaminated by many of the jealousies and tensions of the public workplace.
I couldn’t complain much. I had worked hard to be in London, the very heart of the empire that had shaped my life and the primary source of the modernity whose cold hand touched my father even in his remote village, and whose finer achievements I could see around me: efficiency, the rule of law, a tolerance of diversity.
I cherished the freedom of the freelance writing life – the kind of fringe vocation that could not have been possible outside the metropolitan world, which required information about the world outside and so spent its surplus wealth on maintaining individuals like myself: freelance writers, academics, journalists, think-tank experts. I compared my situation not to that of other writers but to those of the people I had first seen at European and American airports, pursuing the richness of the world, the Arabs, Africans, Iranians and South Asians, who in London seemed trapped in their small shops, kiosks and minicab cubicles.
And, without the idea of a literary life, and the sense of being supported by a culture of writing and reflection, I would have felt too exposed to the young Bangladeshis in long beards who preached radical Islam in the streets near my flat in the East End, or their secular counterparts, the aggressive white boys wearing the hoods of their sweatshirts over their heads.
I was content to anchor myself to my desk, to work with what was familiar rather than to try to break through the inscrutable surface that faces, gestures, clothes and houses presented – the strangeness that had dissolved slowly since my first day in London when I saw Sophiya among the crowd of ashen faces emerging from the underground station.
As always, I had thought that history could be my guide, and for several years I kept seeking out books about London. No city appeared to have been more written about. It had its own prolific chroniclers – Dickens, Mayhew – and then almost every Indian or Asian visitor in the last two centuries had felt compelled to record his or her admiration, awe and even, occasionally, fear and repulsion.
The reputation was still overwhelming. It had been the capital of a great empire. Millions of men had left its protective light in order to bring the remotest parts of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean into the web of trade and industry. Millions had arrived in the city seeking security and prosperity. There was hardly a part of the world that had not known its language and laws. Kipling’s words, ‘The Thames has known everything,’ had gone round in my mind when from the plane I first saw the river curving across London, and the grand buildings in the narrow streets and alleys of the City, near where I lived and where I knew that a few bankers and traders had once decided the fate of India, had seemed to possess the same oppressive air of experience and omniscience.
This imperial past reared up frequently in the statues standing in squares of colonial administrators or military officers, whose names I associated easily with a place or event – the building of a North Indian canal, the quelling of the 1857 Mutiny. It existed in the bearded, slightly brutal faces of the men in the National Portrait Gallery, and in the mock-imperial Gothic of the Parliament building and St Pancras station. But the grand avenues and vistas, and the imposing monuments that were meant to overawe the natives in Calcutta and New Delhi, were absent from London itself. And the past that was still alive for me was unrecognizable for most English people my age.
The books I read made me approach London as a historical abstraction. They placed the city in the light either of empire or the industrial revolution, of the drastic transformations – the destruction of small crafts and trades, the growth of population and slums, the steady and savage impoverishment of millions of people – that England, specifically London, had undergone before any other place in the world. They made it easy to enter the attractive fant
asy of London as a series of linked villages, nothing but open fields between Oxford Street and Hampstead.
The fantasy didn’t last long. Ever-growing London had managed to relegate even its modern past – the scars of the industrial revolution and of the Blitz – to its museums. In the cramped rooms of Georgian houses in the East End, all traces of an old meanness had been banished by the developers outfitting them for investment bankers. The tenements of the East End had been turned into studio apartments for rich conceptual artists, and the monuments constructed out of the wealth of industry and empire – the National Gallery, the Albert Hall, the Royal Academy, Buckingham Palace and the many separate town halls with Grecian facades – co-existed uncomplainingly with the watering-holes – McDonald’s, Pizza Hut – of another, even more commercially minded empire.
In India, the past never went away, or, being ever present, never became the past. But in Europe it was mainly tourists with cameras and Walkmans who gathered in the shadows of cathedrals; the monks, knights and troubadours had been absorbed into the heritage industry. The individual figures I had admired in India – Montaigne, Flaubert, Proust, Tolstoy, Emerson, Nietzsche – people who had been marginal within their own societies, alienated from, and often actively opposed to, their main political and economic tendencies, had, in a prosperous and confident age, been reincarnated as representatives of western civilization, their solitude, melancholy, bitterness and passion turned into the cold artefacts, the classics, of high culture.
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