Fifty years ago, Mr. Nehru, taking office as India’s first prime minister, described Independence as the moment “. . . when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” The explanation for the nation’s present unwillingness to throw its Nehru topi in the air lies in the subsequent battering administered by history to that newly liberated soul. If, in August 1947, many Indians had idealistic hopes of a great new beginning, then August 1997 is suffused by the sense of an ending. Another age is ending: the first age, one might say, of the history of post-colonial India. It has not been the promised golden age of freedom. The prevailing mood is one of disenchantment. Private citizens and public commentators alike readily provide a long, convincing list of reasons for this disenchantment, starting with the dark side of Independence itself; that is, of course, Partition. The decision to carve a Muslim homeland, Pakistan, out of the body of subcontinental India led to bloody massacres in which over a million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims lost their lives. Partition has poisoned the subsequent history of relations between the two newborn states ever since. Why on earth would anyone want to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of one of the century’s great tragedies?
Like many secularist Indians, I would argue that Partition was an avoidable mistake, the result not of historical inevitability or the true will of the people but of political antagonisms—between Gandhi and M. A. Jinnah, between the Congress and the Muslim League—which gradually turned Mr. Jinnah, originally a strong opponent of the idea of a separate Muslim state, into its most ardent advocate and eventual founder. (Of course, the divide-and-rule tactics of the British did nothing to help.) My own family, like so many of Muslim origin, was cut in half by Partition. My parents opted to stay in Bombay, and so did my two uncles and their families, but my aunts and their families went to West Pakistan, as it was called until 1971, when East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. We were lucky, escaping the worst of the bloodletting, but our lives were defined and shaped by the frontier separating us. Who would celebrate the descent of the Iron Curtain, the building of the Berlin Wall?
The period after Partition gives rise to a further, familiar litany of woes. The nation’s great social ills have not been cured. Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s famous slogan, Garibi Hatao, “Remove Poverty,” was an empty promise; India’s poor are as poor as ever, and more numerous than ever, thanks in part to her son Sanjay’s hated forcible-sterilization campaign during Mrs. G.’s mid-1970s period of dictatorial “emergency rule,” which set back other efforts at birth control by more than a generation. Illiteracy, child labor, infant mortality, the privations imposed by casteism on those of lower or no caste, all these great questions remain unanswered. (The placing of a garland of shoes, an old Indian insult, around the neck of a statue of the Dalit or Untouchable leader Dr. Ambedkar recently led to days of rioting in Bombay.)
Ancient violence takes on new forms. The practice of burning brides for their dowries is on the increase. There is terrifying evidence that ritual child sacrifice is being practiced by some followers of the cult of the goddess Kali. Communal violence erupts regularly. Terrorists advocating a separate Sikh state plant bombs in the Punjab, and terrorists advocating Kashmiri separatism abduct tourists in the beautiful Valley. Large-scale bloodshed has been seen in Meerut, in Assam, and in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, after the destruction by Hindu nationalists of the Babri Masjid, a mosque believed by some to stand on the birthplace of the Hindu deity Lord Ram.
My hometown, Bombay, for a long time believed itself immune to the worst of India’s communal evils; a series of explosions in 1993 destroyed that myth, giving proof that the idealisms, the innocence, of the first post-Independence age had been blown away, perhaps forever—and doing so in the heart of that great metropolis which contains all that is best and worst in the new, modernizing India, all that is most dynamically innovative and most hopelessly impoverished, most internationally minded and most narrowly sectarian.
And then there’s corruption. In my novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, a character offers his definitions of modern Indian democracy (“one man one bribe”) and of what he calls the Indian theory of relativity (“everything is for relatives”). Like most things written about India, this looks like an exaggeration but is actually an understatement. The scale of public corruption is now almost comically great. From the Maruti scandal of the 1970s (huge sums of public money disappeared from a “people’s car” project headed by Sanjay Gandhi) to the Bofors scandal of the 1980s (huge sums of public money went astray from an international arms deal that besmirched the reputation of Rajiv Gandhi) to the 1990s attempts to fix the movements of the Indian stock market by using, naturally, huge sums of public money, things have been going from bad to worse. Dozens of leading political figures, including the last Congress prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, are under investigation for corruption. And then there is Laloo Prasad Yadav, chief minister of the state of Bihar (one of the poorest parts of India), who has been charged with involvement in Bihar’s so-called Fodder Scam, a swindle involving the diversion of, yes, huge sums of public money to support the rearing over many years of great herds of wholly fictitious cattle. More than $150 million is alleged to have vanished in a scheme that even the immortal Chichikov, anti-hero of Gogol’s great scam-novel Dead Souls, could never have invented.
It would be easy to continue in this vein. There is the rise of extremist Hindu nationalism, the decay of the Civil Service on which Indian democracy has depended for so long, and the tendency of the coalition supporting the minority Indian government of Prime Minister I. K. Gujral to fragment. Bits of it have been breaking off with distressing frequency—the Yadav faction has gone, and the Southern DMK party has also threatened to leave the coalition—and the government survives only because nobody really wants a general election; nobody, that is, except the militant Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the largest single party in Parliament, presently excluded from power but likely to win even more seats next time around, and thus be harder to gang up against. And, if you’re old-fashioned, you can complain about the effect of MTV culture on Indian youth, and if you’re a sports fan you can lament India’s lack of world-class athletes.
And yet I do feel like celebrating. The news is not all bad. (For example, the election of India’s first Untouchable president, Mr. Kocheril Raman Narayanan, will perhaps result in an assault on the worst excesses of casteism.) Above all, however, I want to extol the virtues of the most important thing that came into being on that midnight fifty years ago, the thing which has survived all that history could throw at it: that is, the so-called idea of India. I have spent much of my adult life thinking and writing about this idea. At the time of the last bout of anniversary-itis, in 1987, I traveled all over India asking ordinary Indians what they thought the idea was, and whether they found it to be a valuable one. Remarkably, given India’s size and diversity, and Indians’ strong regional loyalties, everyone I spoke to was entirely comfortable with the term “India,” entirely certain that they understood it and “belonged to” it; and yet, when one examined the matter more closely, one saw that their definitions differed radically, as did their ideas of what “belonging” might entail.
And that multiplicity, finally, was the point. In the modern age, we have come to understand our own selves as composites, often contradictory, even internally incompatible. We have understood that each of us is many different people. Our younger selves differ from our older selves; we can be bold in the company of our lovers and timorous before our employers, principled when we instruct our children and corrupt when offered some secret temptation; we are serious and frivolous, loud and quiet, aggressive and easily abashed. The nineteenth-century concept of the integrated self has been replaced by this jostling crowd of “I” ’s. And yet, unless we are damaged, or deranged, we usually have a relatively clear sense of who we are. I agree with my many selves to call all of them “me.” This is the best way to grasp the idea of India. India has taken the modern view of the self and enla
rged it to encompass almost one billion souls. The selfhood of India is so capacious, so elastic, that it manages to accommodate one billion kinds of difference. It agrees with its billion selves to call all of them “Indian.” This is a notion far more original than the old pluralist ideas of “melting pot” or “cultural mosaic.” It works because the individual sees his own nature writ large in the nature of the state. This is why individual Indians feel so comfortable about the strength of the national idea, why it’s so easy to “belong” to it, in spite of all the turbulence, the corruption, the tawdriness, the disappointment of fifty overwhelming years.
Churchill said India wasn’t a nation, just an “abstraction.” John Kenneth Galbraith, more affectionately, and more memorably, described it as “functioning anarchy.” Both of them, in my view, underestimated the strength of the India-idea. It may be the most innovative national philosophy to have emerged in the post-colonial period. It deserves to be celebrated; because it is an idea that has enemies, within India as well as outside her frontiers, and to celebrate it is also to defend it against its foes.
July 1997
Gandhi, Now
A thin Indian man with not much hair and bad teeth sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch of handwritten notes in his hand. The black-and-white photograph takes up a full page of the British newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full color, is a small rainbow-striped apple. Below this, there’s a slangily, ungrammatically American injunction to “Think Different.” Such is the present-day power of international big business. Even the greatest of the dead may summarily be drafted into its image campaigns. Once, half a century ago and more, this bony man shaped a nation’s struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is history. Fifty years after his assassination, Gandhi is modeling for Apple. His thoughts don’t really count in this new incarnation. What counts is that he is considered to be “on-message,” in line with the corporate philosophy of the Mac.
The advertisement is odd enough to be worth deconstructing a little. Obviously, it is rich in unintentional comedy. M. K. Gandhi, as the photograph itself demonstrates, was a passionate opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the typewriter, the loincloth to the business suit, the plowed field to the belching manufactory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, he would almost certainly have found it abhorrent. The very term “word processor,” with its overly technological ring, is unlikely to have found favor.
“Think Different.” Gandhi, in his younger days a sophisticated and Westernized lawyer, did indeed change his thinking more radically than most people do. Ghanshyam Das Birla, one of the merchant princes who backed him, once said, “Gandhi was more modern than I. But he made a conscious decision to go back to the Middle Ages.” This is not, presumably, the revolutionary new direction in thought that the good folks at Apple are seeking to encourage. What they saw was an “icon,” a man so famous that he was still instantly recognizable half a century after his assassination. Double-click on this icon and you opened up a set of “values,” with which Apple plainly wished to associate itself: “morality,” “leadership,” “saintliness,” “success,” and so on. They saw “Mahatma” Gandhi, the “great soul,” an embodiment of virtue to set beside, oh, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, the Pope.
Perhaps, too, they found themselves identifying with a little guy who vanquished a big empire. It’s true that Gandhi himself saw the independence movement as a kind of Indian David struggling against the Philistines of the empire-on-which-the-sun-never-sets, calling it “a battle of Right against Might.” The struggling Apple company, battling with the cohorts of the all-powerful Bill Gates, wished perhaps to comfort itself with the thought that if a “half-nude gent”—as a British viceroy, Lord Willingdon, once called Gandhi—could bring down the Brits, then maybe, just maybe, a well-flung apple might yet fell the Microsoft Goliath.
In other words, Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a free-floating concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented, to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth.
Richard Attenborough’s movie Gandhi struck me, when it was first released, as an example of this type of unhistorical Western saint-making. Here was Gandhi-as-guru, purveying that fashionable product, the Wisdom of the East; and Gandhi-as-Christ, dying (and, before that, frequently going on hunger strike) so that others might live. His philosophy of non-violence seemed to work by embarrassing the British into leaving; freedom could be won, the film appeared to suggest, by being more moral than your oppressor, whose own moral code would then oblige him to withdraw.
But such is the efficacy of this symbolic Gandhi that the film, for all its simplifications and Hollywoodizations, had a powerful and positive effect on many contemporary freedom struggles. South African anti-apartheid campaigners and democratic voices all over South America have enthused to me about the film’s galvanizing effects. This posthumous, exalted “international Gandhi” has evidently become a totem of real, inspirational force.
The trouble with the idealized Gandhi is that he’s so darned dull, little more than a dispenser of homilies and nostrums (“an eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind”) with just the odd flash of wit (asked what he thought of Western civilization, he gave the celebrated reply “I think it would be a good idea”). The real man, if it is still possible to use such a term after the generations of hagiography and reinvention, was infinitely more interesting, one of the most complex and contradictory personalities of the century. His full name, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was memorably—and literally—translated into English by the novelist G. V. Desani as “Action-Slave Fascination-Moon Grocer,” and he was as rich and devious a figure as that glorious name suggests.
Entirely unafraid of the British, he was nevertheless scared of the dark and always slept with a light burning by his bedside.
He believed passionately in the unity of all the peoples of India, yet his failure to keep the Muslim leader Jinnah within the Congress fold led to the partition of the country. (His opposition denied Jinnah the presidency of the Congress, which might have kept him from assuming the leadership of the separatist Muslim League; his withdrawal, under pressure from Nehru and Patel, of a last-ditch offer to Jinnah of the prime ministership itself ended the last faint chance of avoiding Partition. And for all his vaunted selflessness and modesty, he made no move to object when Jinnah was attacked during a Congress session for calling him plain Mr. Gandhi, instead of the more worshipful Mahatma.)
He was determined to live the life of an ascetic, but as the poet Sarojini Naidu joked, it cost the nation a fortune to keep Gandhi living in poverty. His entire philosophy privileged the village way over that of the city, yet he was always financially dependent on the support of industrial billionaires like Birla. His hunger strikes could stop riots and massacres, but he also once went on hunger strike to force his capitalist patron’s employees to break their strike against their harsh conditions of employment.
He sought to improve the conditions of India’s Untouchables, yet in today’s India, these peoples, now calling themselves Dalits, and forming an increasingly well organized and effective political grouping, have rallied round the memory of their own leader, Dr. Ambedkar, an old rival of Gandhi’s. As Ambedkar’s star has risen among the Dalits, so Gandhi’s stature has been reduced.
The creator of the political philosophies of passive resistance and constructive non-violence, he spent much of his life far from the political arena, refining his more eccentric theories of vegetarianism, bowel movements, and the beneficial properties of human excrement.
Forever scarred by the knowledge that, as a sixteen-year-old youth, he’d been making love to his wife, Kasturba, at the moment of his father’s death, Gandhi forswore sexual relations b
ut went on into his old age with what he called his brahmacharya experiments, during which naked young women, often the wives of friends and colleagues, would be asked to lie with him all night, so that he could prove that he had mastered his physical urges. (He believed that the conservation of his “vital fluids” would deepen his spiritual understanding.)
He, and he alone, was responsible for the transformation of the demand for independence into a nationwide mass movement that mobilized every class of society against the imperialist; yet the free India that came into being, divided and committed to a program of modernization and industrialization, was not the India of his dreams. His sometime disciple, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the arch-proponent of modernization, and it is Nehru’s vision, not Gandhi’s, that was eventually—and perhaps inevitably—preferred.
Gandhi began by believing that the politics of passive resistance and non-violence could be effective in any situation, at any time, even against a force as malign as Nazi Germany. Later, he was obliged to revise his opinion, and concluded that while the British had responded to such techniques, because of their own nature, other oppressors might not. This is not so different from the Attenborough movie’s position, and it is, of course, wrong.
Gandhian non-violence is widely believed to be the method by which India gained independence. (The view is assiduously fostered inside India as well as outside it.) Yet the Indian revolution did indeed become violent, and this violence so disappointed Gandhi that he stayed away from the Independence celebrations in protest. Moreover, the ruinous economic impact of World War II on the United Kingdom, and—as the British writer Patrick French says in Liberty or Death—the gradual collapse of the Raj’s bureaucratic hold over India from the mid-1930s onward, did as much to bring about freedom as any action of Gandhi’s, or indeed of the nationalist movement as a whole. It is probable, in fact, that Gandhian techniques were not the key determinants of India’s arrival at freedom. They gave Independence its outward character and were its apparent cause, but darker and deeper historical forces produced the desired effect.
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