Gandhi as my double
Shiv Visvanathan
Years ago, legend has it that Mohandas Gandhi was asked by a foreign journalist, “what do you think about Western Civilization?” Gandhi replied promptly and pithily “It would be a good idea.” Decades later there was a cartoon with Gandhi in heaven being asked “What do you think of Indian civilization?” He replied sadly, “That too, would be a good idea.”
Oddly, the man Gandhi haunts us even though he hardly takes space in NCERT textbooks. His anniversary celebrations sound cursory today. In an everyday sense, he is eminently misquotable and frequently cited by those for whom violence is a way of life. Many people feel he is vaguely present but somewhat irrelevant. Hardik Patel sums up that attitude when he claims that if Gandhi were present today, he would abandon non-violence. Patel argued that the modern Indian state is far more vicious and tyrannical than any colonial incarnation. Despite such mindsets, Gandhi is always alive for me and that too in a very particular way.
For a child brought up in the immediate years after independence, Mahatma Gandhi conveyed a different kind of ecological presence. Other leaders like Azad were a legacy, by the Sixties, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was an anecdote, by the Seventies, Nehru belonged to the museum. They were either exhibits or memorials, evocative as history but not quite musical in everyday life. But Gandhi floated around. He literally buzzed around my everydayness. As my father claimed, he was the norm, the ethical measure we all sought to live up to. Gandhi became a part, an ecology of our everyday and the future. In fact, he functioned like a double with whom you had imaginary conversations.
Sometimes when you began a new project or were about to make a decision which required more than habit, you asked “How would he have done it?” Oddly in this thought experiment, one did not cite any Gandhi chapter and verse. Gandhi was a deeply Gutenberg phenomenon, but true to type, he was more. He was a folk figure who continually reinvented himself and nagged you to be inventive. He was not exactly a conscience which functioned more patriarchally but a double, a playful presence who walked and worked along with you, who, through body language or key words, kept pushing one to question oneself and somehow go beyond standard limits. I felt he was not judgmental. This internal Gandhi always hinted that the story was not complete. He treated my mind as an ashram while he and I discussed new experiments with my truth. It was as if he were playfully suggesting that I was not experimental enough, that I was too ritualistic or ideological, that he wanted fresh answers to everydayness warning me that my rhythms would become rote and routine. With Gandhi around, I felt that walking, writing, thinking and every craft of life was actually a philosophy, that walking was not just a sculpting of the body but the beginning of ethics. To be at home with him, one often had to move away from the herd. I quarrelled with him in sheer frustration even commenting pettily that my handwriting was better than his. He admitted it readily but then suggested neither of us were quite calligraphists. His presence asked for no obeisance or idolatry, he literally laughed at his own quotes. In fact all he asked was that I invent myself. He was not a citation or a catechism but a heuristic asking, inviting a new generation to reinvent itself.
I remember having this maddening conversation in my head where I cited him wickedly and he replied calling me ‘mothballs.’ He said “you quote me, therefore I no longer am. I live not as a quote unquote but a quote misquoted. A slippage is the beginning of invention.” Anyone who studies memory would realize recitation is both recollection and invention. He added once “in a shakha, you repeat yourself, in an ashram you reinvent. A shakha teaches you discipline, an ashram invites self-reliance.” He then added, “of course you cannot attribute this to me.” I realized goodness is always a trifle mischievous.
I realized that my Gandhi did not summon me to history. He was happy with nature and everydayness. For him, work was the foundation but work had many layers. It was labour which was physical. It was craft where you learnt from exemplars. It was like walking which was neither work nor leisure but the beginning of curiosity or philosophizing. When you walk, you communicate with your surroundings. It was a conversation. Work was also prayer and all of these domains – work, craft, walking, prayer, were a kind
of weaving. Working is weaving oneself.
The body is central to it. It was every man’s test tube and sensorium. Smell, taste, touch and sight created memory and ethics. The body was the site of all his experiments. You experimented on yourself, on diet, cooking, handwriting. I once teased him. ‘Your morality sounds like a home science class.’ And he replied “Home science did as much for science and moral science as physics did. Also, it was a women’s science, it began with the household.” History, he claimed, “began with the household. Between household and ashram, you create history which retains a sensibility about and a sensibility to nature.” He said, “my old friend Ela Bhatt at SEWA understood it when she said,” ‘Women’s work has to end in peace, a women’s piece on world peace.’ My Gandhi had an interesting habit of adopting people across centuries so that Socrates and Ghaffar Khan belonged to the same neighborhood of time. It is contiguity that often created new metaphors, new comparisons where I often felt Ghaffar Khan was a Socratic figure, one who used silence to articulate a philosophy. Gandhi had this bevy of women he often consulted. He called them “his World Bank” and “my consultants”. He referred to Simone Weil and Madeleine Slade (Meera Bai). I sensed his feeling that they were people who not only did things right but the right things. The first he felt was aesthetics or competence, the second was ethics.
I asked him about khadi. He said weaving still made sense and he added India still has thirteen million weavers struggling to make a living. Weaving, he felt, linked town and country. He then added it was not his answer that was important but the question. What is this thing we call the city? He felt it globalized temporariness, created a place for migrants who were perpetually moving. A city institutionalizes homelessness. You can be home in a city but does a city give a real sense of home? He often referred to the city as a collection of old age homes. He added, one does not create freedom till you rework the modern city and its sense of nature from drainage to waste to a wasted people. The city, he felt, was the new sacred of social science such that policy has nothing to say about the village but no courage to invent beyond the city.
I argued with him, that he lived in a city all the time from Ahmedabad to London to Durban and Delhi and he did not deny it. But he said, name a city with a heart. I invented ashrams in a city to show people what a city could be. Between the ashram and the slum we could have invented a new city where head and heart think and work in a new way. The ashram and the slum were two inventions which could have rethought the city but my successors felt that one was too spiritual and the other was too pathological. Urban planning, he seemed to suggest, was a science but the city he claimed required a sense of craft, where work built community and community created value. In that sense, a city is never a commons, it is a panopticon arising out of the enclosure movement called industrialization. He looked me slyly once. “Let us see if you have guts as a sociologist. Try writing Hind Swaraj as a manifesto for a city and don’t give me your social science. Create a work of craft, a home science of a city and remember home science began with household, hygiene, and women.” It is as good a formula for city building as anything else. He laughed and added that the national movement was futuristic. Any civilization is and he referred proudly to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s idea of a post-industrial society. “Post Industrialism was an idea we hatched, we were the first to invent it” and he shrugged “also the first to abandon it.”
Gandhi’s real talisman, his theoretical frame was his jugalbandi of concepts called Swadeshi and Swaraj. Swadeshi was a sense of locality, a confidence about dialect, a faith in the vernacular; a sense of home, a feeling of neighborhood as community. Local was
the sense of surprise and security you felt operating around a home, proud of what grew around you but local was never parochial or even ethno-centric because Swaraj never allowed for closure. The circle did not close, it spiralled out into the planet and universe. The neighbourhood has to resonate the cosmos.
Swaraj was planetary. It extended the idea of the commons to the planet and the globe. It was a sense of connectivity and responsibility for the universe. You did not own the universe, you were only trustees for your fragment of it. Swaraj was an affirmation of all the creatures in the world. It defied ethnocentricity in space and time and made the nation state look parochial, genocidal, and silly. The nation state brutalized the idea of citizenship by forcing it into uniform. Swadeshi and Swaraj, my Gandhi argued had a better sense of scale as ecology and morality than the idols of social science, which were the nation state and the current fetish about globalization.
For Gandhi, ethics was not old fashioned. It was the most inventive of sciences because creativity demanded you weave together an ethics of memory with an ethics of innovation. When violence is more inventive than ethics, the satyagrahi has to rework himself. Satyagraha is the new civics, the hygiene of citizenship in a modern world. This much he taught me and this much I am sure of in today’s world. It is not the question of Gandhi being relevant. It is how he teaches you, teases you to be relevant in today’s world. For that, a thanks giving.
The author is a social science nomad. He can be reached at svcsds@gmail.com.
