Recovering Gandhi
Rajan Venkatesh
My friend’s mother recalls her college life of 1949-50. Such was the powerful inspiration of Gandhiji that she and her friends would happily boycott their English class, work enthusiastically on the charkha and tailor their own clothes made from Indian cotton. Today, nearing 85 years of age, she lives alone with a servant, has learnt to operate Skype, and speaks every day to her son, who lives a migrant’s life in the USA. Gandhiji remains as a pleasant memory, while the force of modernity has had its own gross influence in the way her family thinks, speaks, and behaves – it has progressed and it has disintegrated at the same time.
This story can be my story too; it could be yours and everybody’s.
We must acknowledge the fact that Gandhiji and modernity point in two different directions. This has created an inner contradiction in us, and that is a fate that we Indians have to accept – a reverence for a great human being and a simultaneous dependence on a decadent society which he warns us about; the undoubted appeal of his spiritual guidance and the freedom it promises, and a simultaneous thrall for things modern and worldly, and the bondage that comes with it.
Every now and then, when the inevitable problems created by modern society reach an extreme, like with the swing of a pendulum, we gaze in the other direction, and wonder if Gandhiji’s wisdom and vision could help. But usually not for long, because – who has time? – the struggle of everyday existence quickly overwhelms the moment.
So while discontent is useful, for it makes us give a brief look elsewhere, perhaps what is needed is complete discontent. Not just with the curriculum, but with the structure and purpose of school itself; not just with the education system, but with the economic, political, governance, and justice systems too; not just with one nation, but with the whole of humanity. Perhaps this is what Gandhiji demands.
This relatedness of different dimensions of life comes out clearly and effortlessly in Gandhiji’s talks and writings. When speaking about education, he highlights economic freedom of villages; when speaking on economics, he highlights spiritual growth of the being; when speaking about the spiritual path, he highlights duty to family and society; and when speaking of mankind itself, he highlights the oneness of purpose of society, economy, education, and spirituality – that of perfecting the character and conduct of the human being, and elevating him to a higher consciousness.
This wholesome view can at once be fascinating as well as daunting. For the teacher, it means not just a reading of ‘nai talim’ but understanding the crux of modernity, of the colonial mind-set that pervades all systems today. It means making an effort to understand social economics, not just monetary economics. It means to understand the significance of right livelihood, not just jobs. It means the study of the gram vyavastha, of India’s traditional roots, its philosophical beliefs, its socio-cultural systems, its agriculture, architecture, its art, craft, science and aesthetics. And then, as Gandhiji repeatedly said, to work towards perfecting it. Not to reject all of it at the altar of colonial culture, as we are habituated to do.
The first step is the daunting part – the willingness to see the connections in the whole. But now, as modern systems multiply their mistakes, one has little choice but to discern these links. They are screaming out from behind newspaper headlines – the relationship of economics to social disharmony, the relationship of industrial progress to ecological ruin, the relationship of biotechnology to farmers’ suicides, the relationship of education to mediocrity and insensitivity, and the direct relationship of modern systems and methods to insecurity, exploitation, domination, and war. The more modernity is defined and the more sharply it is seen, then the more we gaze, as the pendulum swings, at Gandhiji, because, as we said earlier, modernity and Gandhi are two different directions.
So now is as good a time as any to visit or revisit Gandhi. Without a readiness for full exploration, which I consider a necessary first step, reading or an attempt at studying Gandhi may quickly hit some conceptual road blocks: “It is certain that modern, foreign, education makes young people unfit for any useful function in life” (uh, really? how?, one may think). “To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them” (hey, but we all benefited, didn’t we?). “I would therefore begin the child’s education by teaching it a useful handicraft and enabling it to produce from the moment it begins its training” (but shouldn’t a little child just have fun?). “I can imagine a school entirely self-supporting, if it became, say, a spinning and weaving institution with perhaps a cotton field attached to it” (but that is the function of vocational institutes, no?). “Free trade may be England’s salvation, but it spells our ruin – we have yet to formulate a system of Indian economics” (but will this work in today’s era of globalization? one may ask).
Such trepidations would be considered normal if suddenly confronted by Gandhi with no prior warning. But subsequently, if there is no inclination to pursue these questions in their fullness, then one is prone to dismiss Gandhiji quickly as anachronistic or easier still, pin the “idealist” label on his vision. Whereas, with a commitment to re-search the truth of his holistic view of man and mankind, of Indian civilization and western behaviour of the last 400 years (which is modernity), one may stumble upon insights which can be liberating, humbling, empowering.
The teacher may approach Gandhi in two ways. For a gradual movement, one may read his My Experiments with Truth, his book Towards new Education, browse the website http://www.mkgandhi.org/edugandhi/ and refer to the various collections of his selected writings – in any order one chooses. Or, if one is adventurous and is prepared to make a fundamental leap, then one may simply make full effort to comprehend Hind Swaraj, the little booklet written in 1909. It is little, but it packs a punch.
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If I may be allowed, for a bit, to personalize this narration, there is an experience to share from what was a small experimental school called Bodhshala in the Himalayan villages of Garhwal.
We were inspired by Gandhiji, his life and his vision. And we saw living evidence of what he spoke about: the gradual obliteration of vibrant village communities, the futility of contemporary education which cut the child from his home, from his traditional livelihood, his language, and his customs. An education which uprooted the child and left him a sulking stranger in his own village, with no confidence in himself, and with a feeling of inferiority when facing the world.
It is in the school that the seeds of disintegration are sown – it is here that the child is separated from family, culture, handicraft, and agriculture, it is here that he is taught to despise manual work as lowly, it is here that he begins to lose touch with morals, ethics, camaraderie and sense of duty, and in return for all this loss, he carries with him vague aspirations of job and money, and a dream of getting rich quick.
Such a ‘development’, which should normally shock civilized society, somehow translates into a positive integer as GDP, because the modern economy is not interested in the quality of schooling, it wants cheap and obedient labour – it wants portable employees, people without geographic or cultural roots, who can be deployed anywhere, easily, like machines. And our schools are doing precisely that, uprooting children from their traditional communities, individualizing them to be fed to the global economic engine. It will not be wrong to say that our schools are in a large way responsible for widespread migration.
Seeing all this evidence, and quite shaken by it, we set about experimenting ways to reorient the school to community. What was good for the community, what strengthened it, what made for self-sufficient and prosperous families, that was our syllabus. This took the shape of a Learning from the Local Environment programme, which means that we tried to use the village environment to introduce ‘subject’ concepts of language, math, science, and social science. It also took the shape of a Production-Integrated Basic Education programme, where the objective was to practise and understand sustainable living, for which a necessary means was swavalamban, self-sufficiency. We identified our needs and set about producing as much of it from local materials and sources as we possibly could.
And as the experiment progressed, one could see the truth of many of Gandhiji’s assertions – of learning happening in a wonderful way through production activities, of ‘subject’ matters being understood effortlessly using the local environment as medium, of the child’s positive emotional and intellectual development when addressed in his own cultural context, and of the significance of ethics, the seeing of truth and false, right and wrong, as a natural basis for thought and action.
A valuable lesson I myself received is about sustainable living. It is not merely about campaigns to save the tree or save the turtle. Sustainable living is about sustainable relationships. It is about a harmonious eco-system, a harmonious whole. And this is ideally practised and lived in small communities. The Indian gram vyavastha is designed for this, it is ready and waiting to fully embrace sustainable living. I believe that by understanding the village, one can understand the world. By being a responsible citizen of one’s community, one can be ready to be a responsible global citizen.
Sustainable progress is wholesome because it comes without disintegration. Gandhiji’s vision is naturally sustainable, and, for the teacher, the exploration can be in either direction – a study of Gandhi will lead to sustainability, and an understanding of true sustainability will lead to Gandhi. They point in the same direction. Away from modernity.
The author ran the experimental school, Bodhshala, at the NGO Sidh in Tehri-Garhwal. He is a keen student of traditional Indian socio-economic systems and is currently researching at Sawantwadi, Maharashtra. He can be reached at venkateshrajan31@gmail.com.
