The Passion of Gandhi

by Suranya Aiyar

Originally published by Dastangoi Collective in February 2022 here.  

‘In a gentle way, you can shake the world’ Mahatma Gandhi 

With the extinguishing of the Amar Jawan Jyoti at India Gate, the plan to install a statue of Subhash Chandra Bose there, and the removal from the Beating Retreat ceremony of the song Abide With Me, the Government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has sounded the bugle on a new chapter in its project for India. 

So far, its efforts had been focussed on dismantling the India of the past, to remake it in its vision of a Hindu majoritarian hard state. But now it has made a much more cunning move in a different direction - of dismantling India’s past. 

Some hints of this appeared late last year when the Government’s well-known cheerleaders in the twitter-verse, such as the Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut, began taking pot-shots at the idea of Gandhian non-violence, and its role in the Freedom Struggle.

At the time it appeared to be just another best-forgotten-soon twitter scrimmage. But the Government’s actions around India Gate and the Beating Retreat ceremony make clear that it has a deliberate plan to make, not just the India of the present and future, but also that of the past, into the country of the Hindu Right’s imaginings.

Abide With Me is popularly known as an ode to the Fallen Soldier. It is played as such in military ceremonies the world over. It was also known to have been a favourite of Mahatma Gandhi’s. This made the song especially symbolic as the closing piece of the Beating Retreat.

After the splendid military pageantry, with the battalions resplendent in their uniforms, and the music invoking all the pluck and valour of the serving soldier, Abide With Me would effect a profound change of mood. The deep pathos in its measured strains, with the slow tolling of bells at the end, would remind us both of the cost of war, and the spirit of Gandhi. 

In expunging this song, and this experience, from the Beating Retreat ceremony, the Modi Government has thrown down the gauntlet before the national memory of Gandhi, and all that he stood for. A gesture underscored by the decision to replace the Eternal Flame for the Unknown Soldier at India Gate, with a statue of Subhash Chandra Bose in military dress, making a salute.

Talk about a change in mood.  

If the objective of the Government was to shake up the historical understanding of the founding of India, then it has certainly succeeded in doing so. It was deeply disorienting to see this outstanding position being given to a freedom fighter who admired fascism, and wanted an armed revolution against the British, when the whole point and purpose of our Freedom Struggle was non-violent civil resistance.

How would this towering statute of Bose in the centre of the country’s capital, not send out a very different message about India to our children from that of Mahatma Gandhi’s, no matter what we taught them about the Freedom Struggle and Satyagraha?

A sure and subtle move indeed by the Government, to confuse our history and dislodge its ideals. And this is only a start. One can only imagine what else has been planned to replace the symbols, ideas and sentiments around which we once came together in our collective consciousness, as a nation.

Why does this reaching out by the Government into the past feel even more disturbing to us than everything that it has been doing to remake India in the present? Perhaps because in the midst of the devastation wrought by the Modi Government on the idea of India as upheld in our Freedom Struggle, there was a certain solace and hope from the past. We could tell ourselves that one day, surely, the India of that cherished memory would be brought to life again. But now, that memory was being distorted and erased.

So long as the towering figures of the Freedom Struggle, and the events of that time retained their place in history, we, the opponents of Modi Nation, might have felt lost, but we had our bearings. The famous marches and demonstrations of civil resistance; the living example of sacrifices and restraint by common people, in remaining faithful to the principle of non-violence; the powerful correcting impact of Gandhiji’s fasts-unto-death, on blood-thirsty mobs, inflamed by communal passions; the final firm but affectionate send-off of the British - all this history spoke to us above and beyond anything that was going on in the present.

Our relationship with this history was organic and felt. I reckon that I am like most fellow Indians in not having made any extensive study of Gandhi or the Freedom Struggle. I absorbed all these things simply by living and growing up as an Indian. Nationhood is not attached to mere chronology or speeches. The sentiments, ideals and mood that evolved over the course of the Freedom Struggle, crystalised into the idea of our nation, which was passed on from generation to generation by being remembered and enacted in the course of each of our lives.

The Hindu Right, which always opposed the ideals of our Freedom Struggle, sees this. It is aware of that ethereal zone, connected with, but above arguments and reasons, where the consciousness of a nation rests. It has been hard at work since the time of the Freedom Struggle to arouse very different sentiments, to assert very different ideals, and to create a very different mood for India. Under Narendra Modi’s Prime Ministership, backed by an overwhelming majority in Parliament, the project of over a 100 years’ is finally being implemented.

In this fight for the spirit of the nation, facts are only ancillary. The challenge we face, does not end with demonstrating and re-asserting the truth of our history, against the falsehoods and distortions of the Hindu Right. To carry conviction, we need to operate in that ethereal zone of feelings and memories; of mood and spirit, which the Hindu Right is trying to capture.

The mood of the India of the Hindu Right is wrathful and agitated. Raudra Rasa. This is why it is doing all it can to appropriate big names from the Freedom Struggle, like Bose and Bhagat Singh, whose actual politics had nothing to do with its own. It is enough that Bose’s and Bhagat Singh’s demeanour fits the mood that they are seeking. With the huge voters’ mandate behind them, they need only to cultivate this mood to cement their hold on the Indian mind. In a strange way, the hurt, anger and resentment that the Government’s actions arouse in us, its opponents, help it by maintaining that mood.

I got some inkling of this a few years ago, when looking for a photo of Gandhi to post on Independence Day as a protest against the Modi Government. I wanted to find one with a pained or angry expression.

To my surprise, I could find none. Almost every single photo of Gandhi has him smiling, or, at most, looking thoughtful or tired. But never the hint of a hot emotion. Was this a lesson in the Gandhian way?

I was reminded of this when looking at the tributes to Gandhiji this 30^th January, the anniversary of his assassination, on my Facebook feed. His memory was certainly being felt all the more keenly and widely as a result of the Government’s callous action on Abide With Me. But the anger and bitterness of the posts struck me as rather un-Gandhian. Something else was needed to express what had been lost.

To offer a counterpoint to Modi Nation, we need to evoke the Passion of Gandhi. We need to convey a sense of the extraordinary nature of his leadership, which had its power, not in bending you to his will, which is the way of a lessor strength, but in challenging you to match his moral resolve with your own, and staking his life on it.

This is why he spent so much time talking to us, Indians. His first concern was that each one of us should accept and adopt his moral ideal for India. He used the same Gandhian method on us, of challenging us to match his moral conviction with whatever other one we held. Having prevailed on our conscience, on our compassion, on our better selves, he then ranged us against the British.

This was the magnificent spirit before which our colonial masters were compelled to bow. Modi Nation is very small indeed before it. But Gandhi is no more, and we now have to decide whether we are up to the profound task of resurrecting that spirit to face down Modi Nation. 

How is one to do that? It is far beyond my humble abilities to give the answer. Here, I will only assay some ideas, in hopes of interesting others to take up this line of thought.

***

The arts are one obvious medium for this project. It is not surprising that these thoughts about mood and spirit should have sprung up over a song. Mood and spirit are, after all, the business of all art. The Indian arts are particularly suited to the project of reclaiming India from the Hindu Right, as they are a living expression of our syncretic culture. In Hindustani classic music and dance, especially, no matter finely you slice them, it is impossible to separate Hindu from Muslim.

We find support even if we go further back in time to the literature of ancient India, the glory of which the Hindu Right claims to be engaged in reviving. Take any text, whether religious or secular from that age, and you will find a peculiarly Asian characteristic which the Hindu Right will find very difficult to get around. This is that the arts and the sacred are inextricably intertwined.

Pick up a volume of the Valmiki Ramayana, and very quickly you see what a breath-taking literary tour de force it is. It is exquisitely composed and shows the writer’s complete mastery over all aspects of the Indian arts. As we move from sarga to sarga, each rasa of the classical arts is effortlessly invoked, elaborated and gathered to a perfect resolution. As an aside, is it not astonishing that these three stages have remained as the basic format of sub-continental classical performance arts from the ancient, through the medieval, to the modern ages.

Even more moving than all this, is the celebration in the Valmiki Ramayana of everything that makes up this land and its life – from the rivers and mountains, to the trees, flowers and seasons. Each beloved tree of the sub-continent, so much a part of our experience of its landscape, is lovingly drafted into the narrative; banyans, peepals, ashokas, champas, coconut palms, neems, anar trees, mango trees, and so on and on.

The same love is evident in the Valmiki Ramayana, of everything else that came out of this land. The music, the statuary, the jewels, even the finely spun cloths. Would you believe that each drum of ancient India is brought into the mirthful and rhythmic verses describing the waking of Kumbhakaran? The last battle between Ravan and Ram takes the form of a perfectly choreographed dance, with the pauses in the battle drawn like the paintings you see in our traditional artforms depicting this very same battle.

This artistic virtuosity and elegance can also be seen in secular texts from ancient India, like Kalidasa’s Meghadootam.

These are only two examples, but I hope I have been able to convey a sense of the breadth and sophistication of these works, of the refinement of the culture they embody, and, perhaps even more relevant for the present discussion, the largeness of spirit so evident in those who composed them.  

There could not be a more telling contrast to the images of sweaty sadhus consuming glasses of gau mutra, with their noses pinched between their fingers; or to the thoroughly aesthetically mortifying laser shows and disco beats of Modi Nation.

By invoking the true heritage of this land, we can both destroy Modi Nation’s myth of Hindu revivalism, and show-up its execrable aesthetics. Theirs is no revival of Ancient Hindu high culture. What is more, it was the very Nehruvians whom they so detest, who diligently sought out, studied, revived and propagated this culture since the birth of the nation in 1947. All our sahitya and kala akademies, cottage emporia and craft revival projects were a deliberate part of our founders’ efforts to build our ancient heritage into the construction of modern India.

***

All this has taken me several days to express in words. In real life, everything operated much more immediately, on the level of the gut, rather than of the mind. I saw the news of the removal of Abide With Me from the Beating Retreat ceremony on the Sunday, and was flooded with memories of the song. In a flash the idea came to me that if the Government was going to expunge it from its official celebrations, then we could keep it alive by playing it ourselves. Even better, I would rustle up my artist friends and colleagues to do a version in Hindustani.

I roused my writer friend Mahmood Farooqui out of bed on the Monday. He sent me a beautiful translation by the afternoon. In the meantime, I had sent the music to my Ustad, Arif Ali Khan, who called back to say that the song gave him goosebumps (“Suranyaji rongte khade ho gaye”) and that he was happy to make it into an orchestral performance.

He had the melody ready by Tuesday. Wednesday, we practiced. Thursday, we shot the video; all in my drawing room. We were up the next two nights editing after work with my film and photographer friends, Bharat Tiwari and Avani Batra.

A beautiful rendition of the song was released on You Tube on the morning of Saturday, January 29^th, the day of the Beating Retreat ceremony, translated as ‘Tum Mere Paas Raho’, played on the sarangi, sitar, tabla, flute and santoor, with a chorus of vocalists (including me).

The song did well. A newspaper picked up the story, and gave us a lovely photo piece. Mahmood and the Ustad were interviewed. Mahmood was brilliant, quoting ad lib from the Rig Veda: “‘Aano bhadra krtavo yantu vishwatah’- Let noble thoughts come from every quarter.” This was in response to the Government’s pretext for removing the song, which was that it was “not Indian”.

I was busy with the music recording, so we had had no time to confer on what he would say. I read Mahmood’s interview in the paper and said to myself for the hundredth time, what is obvious to us all except those on the Hindu Right – that we are already a fully integrated society, deeply familiar with and celebratory of, and oftentimes expert in, each other’s cultures.

We had decided that the musical arrangement for Tum Mere Paas Raho would have solo improvisations on the base tune, as is always done in Hindustani classical music. It is the distinguishing feature of Hindustani classical music that these improvisations are not composed in advance, but developed extempore by the artist while performing. Over and over, while we were rehearsing, my Ustad would ask one or other of the artists to go into their solo; and each time it was mellifluous, superbly timed, and completely different, even while matching the base tune. Each time.

This is nothing unusual for anyone familiar with Indian classical music. But still, it was exhilarating to watch the supreme ease and skill with which these artists, some merely in their teens, delivered their pieces.

They were all trained in the guru-shishya parampara. We have such a such a wealth of unique traditional talent and skill. Why is this not enough for national pride? For the enormous appetite that the Hindu Right says it has for reclaiming ancient glory? It is all already there, arrayed magnificently before our very eyes.

***

It was an emotional weekend. The day after we uploaded the song, was the anniversary of Gandhiji’s assassination. The work of the past week had brought the event very close to my mind. I found myself driving to Birla House. I thought I would sit there somewhere quiet and play our song to him from my mobile.

I reached Birla House only to be turned away. The policemen at the gate said it was being secured for the Prime Minister, who would be attending the memorial function scheduled for later that day.

Grimacing at the rather bitter irony of this, I returned home with a sense of incompleteness. Then I began to scroll through the internet as one is wont to do when at a loss.

It is then that I came across video upon video of readings of Nathuram Godse’s last speech at his trial for killing Gandhi. This was prompted, no doubt, by my repeated searches for Abide With Me, a correspondence made by the You Tube algorithm that is a fitting metaphor for the state of affairs in the country.

My thumb hovered over the first video. Maybe this is the moment for me, while I am filled with this sense of urgency and immediacy about Gandhi, to finally face Godse; to take in exactly what he said, and see if I could find an answer, or even find it in myself to answer.

So, I listened very carefully and patiently. And after coming to the end, I felt that this is something that all of us who want to win back India should do.

There are all kinds of treatises of the Hindu Right, but I doubt that there is any to match the frankness and clarity of Godse in this speech. With the honesty of a condemned man, he does not gloss over any part of the Hindutva interpretation of Gandhi and the Freedom Struggle. In this way he lays bare its ideas, without the embellishments and sleights of hand of others in his ideological family.

In answering Godse, we can really speak to the inner-most preoccupations and true emotions of the Hindu Right.   

One of Godse's central arguments is that Gandhi's doctrine of non-violence, though admirable in theory, is unworkable in practice. That non-violence only makes India, and Hindus as a society, weak and submissive; and that, as a nation, we can never obtain the respect and honour that we deserve, unless we reject Gandhian non-violence, and take our place in the world as a strong people.

By ‘strong’, he seems to mean both militarily, armed and willing to use force, and as a society, prevailing over non-Hindu opponents (he addresses himself only to Hindus) by force, rather than reaching out for peace and friendship.

This is Godse's case against non-violence, and, no matter what this administration, the BJP or the Sangh Parivar may say to distance themselves from him, it is abundantly clear from every single act of the Modi Government, that this is exactly what they believe about non-violence.

This is why freedom fighters and thinkers who used bombs and guns, and who advocated an armed struggle against colonial rule, are being resurrected by the Government. The idea is to nudge Gandhi and the leadership that came up around him away from the central place they occupy in the Indian mind, as leaders of the Freedom Struggle, and to include as equals, who will eventually replace them, all the other so-called "lessor known" or "ignored" leaders spoken of by the Modi Government.

Godse, unlike the current Hindu Right, acknowledged the reasonableness and moral authority of Gandhian non-violence. His objection was that it did not work in practice, and would lead to the subjugation of Hindus, and India.

But we have nearly three-quarters of a century of experience to show that Godse was wrong about this. Peace among peoples and nations are, today, a universal objective. Civil disobedience and non-violent resistance have been demonstrated to be strong and effective political strategies in our times, not just in India, but in the world beyond, as well.  

We also have abundant evidence to establish the ultimate failure of terrorism, no matter how dedicated or prolonged; and the failure and cannibalism of strong and violent states, no matter what ideals they claim to uphold, through violence, for their people.

Perhaps Godse acted with the words of Nazi and Fascist rulers still ringing in his ears, and in a world dotted with vicious dictatorships. That was the late 1940s. But since then, dialogue, debate and other peaceful means have become the established mode in which international and national affairs are conducted, even by very powerful nations. If anything, it is the violent states that are isolated, and constantly under siege.

Godse refers to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as examples of how the use of violence is necessary to achieve good. This is the weakest part of his argument. If we are going to be drawing on Hinduism to make the case, then surely it is the cause of peace, of ahimsa and shanti, that wins.

The Mahabharata, if anything, is a searing indictment of war and violence in any cause. Krishna comes to Earth in order to instigate all kings to turn their violence upon themselves. His mission, assigned by the gods, is to provoke a bloody fraternal massacre that will drag every king of Bharatvarsha into a vortex of death and revenge, until they are all wiped out.

Again and again, the Mahabharata denounces all wars and all battles, whether just or unjust; whether fought nobly or by deceit; whether for wounded honour or power; whether for revenge or duty. No one is spared the bloody consequences of their espousal of violence; not Draupadi, not even Krishna. In the end, the Mahabharata leaves you devastated, and almost deranged, by the sheer horror and waste of war.

As for the story of Lord Ram, his very existence on Earth was planned by the gods to put an end to the aggressive and all-powerful Ravan. It is very clear on which side the Ramayana stands between the righteous state and the strong one.

Moreover, the Ramayana does not support Godse's schizophrenic separation of principle from action. I wonder if any religion can do so. The central concern of the Ramayana is the moral imperative to align action and principle, and means and ends, in achieving good. And this is also the endeavour of Satyagraha.

At the end of the Ramayana, where after all the planning, the sacrifices and the moving of heaven and earth, to fight Ravan to take back Sita, she is betrayed by Ram, and descends into the Earth before his downcast eyes, the listener is forced, even in the moment of triumph in war, to confront its utter futility.

This is the Ramayana speaking to us, not some "misguided" Gandhian.

There are some important differences between Godse's ideas about Gandhi, and those of today's Hindu Right, which are also worth thinking about. Godse did not dispute that it was Gandhi who made the Freedom Struggle into a mass movement. Nor did he deny that it was Gandhi and Gandhian ideology that led India to Independence.

This is different from what the Modi Government is trying to do, in recasting the Freedom Struggle as consisting not of Satyagraha, but of lone terrorist attacks and mutineers in the British Indian Army, the latter allegedly inspired by Bose. These are not Godse's, but Narendra Modi’s and his partymen's claims, made nearly a century after the events in question.

Godse's complaint, if anything, was that the Freedom Struggle was fought on the principle of non-violence. His case was that this gained an Independence that was not worthy of India; it resulted in the division of India, accompanied with extreme violence upon Hindus, that was not sufficiently acknowledged, let alone avenged; and that it led to the weakening and dishonour of Hindu society.

Godse uses a powerful metaphor when speaking of Gandhi, Partition and Hindu-Muslim violence in India. He says that if Gandhi was the Father of the Nation, then he failed in his duty to treat his children equally, by always reprimanding Hindus for violence, but forgiving it in Muslims. As a son, says Godse, it was my duty to avenge the carving up of Mother India by Gandhi.

This is the most heart-breaking part of the speech. Listening to a man who committed murder in broad daylight, in full view of the world, and who walked with his head held high to his fate, you cannot but feel the depth and sincerity of Godse's emotions. But he allowed himself to be ruled, indeed to be driven mad, by nothing more than these emotions.

What insanity to have committed such an act against such a noble and gentle man, whose greatness even he, Godse, salutes in his speech, in the heat of emotions whipped up by the events of Partition, that none foresaw, and of communal riots and butchery that have been, sadly, as much a part of the story of this land for centuries, as have the promise of peace and fraternity that it holds out.

I think of myself, my sisters and my parents; I think of myself as a parent to my two children, and I ask myself, has a parent ever treated each child equally? Also, is there not always a special worry for the smallest or weakest of our children; for the one we fear is most vulnerable against the world we have brought them into?

If we are all children of India, then I am numb with grief at how wrong my brother Godse was. I listen to all of Godse's complaints against Gandhi, and I hear his deep hurt and sense of betrayal. But I see a man unable to comprehend the immensity and grandness of the mother he so loved. The mother who dandled on her vast, magnificent lap, his many brothers and sisters; for each of whom her love and duty were, and are, indivisible.

Godse, like the rest of the Hindu Right till today, allowed himself to be disoriented and overwhelmed by the contradictions and imbalances of India. Whereas Gandhi made it his mission, if not to resolve, then to at least honour and redeem them.

The speech has many weak arguments. It also has preposterous, even false claims. These should be rebutted, and have been, by many distinguished writers. What I have tried to do here, though, is to go right to the heart of what Godse is saying. It is a shame that words that would have been dismissed out of hand by most Indians, even a generation ago, have now to be given such weight. But I think we will have to overcome our repugnance, and do this painstakingly for all the arguments that have come to make up the litany of the Hindu Right. We have to go beyond the logic of their arguments, and address their spirit, because it is this spirit, this angry mood, which now possesses so many of our fellow Indians.  

We, believers in Gandhi, should take this as our second Satyagraha. This time it will be without the power and charisma of the stalwarts of our Freedom Struggle, but, perhaps, in the absence of the light they radiated, their ideas will be seen all the more clearly.

***

It is not easy to rise above the ugliness of Modi Nation, and go into the rarefied place of these matters of the spirit. Already as I write this essay up for formal publication, I struggle to recapture the mood of a fortnight ago, when everything that I have described was thought and done.

Events followed fast, one after the other. Lata Mangeshkar died, and a photograph of the actor, Shahrukh Khan, and his Hindu manager praying over her remains, each in the way of their respective religions, went viral as a symbol of Hindu-Muslim fraternity. Within hours, there was a thoroughly debased and mischievous claim put about by those who will not allow such a thing, of his gesture of blowing a dua at the end of his prayers as “spitting”.

How does one respond to the ‘spirit’ of such unrelenting pettiness and malice?

Then came the countering response, with people hitting out at Lata Mangeshkar for her right-wing proclivities. As if this was not known before. One felt caught in a vice between such talk on the one hand, and story after story, on the other, of her deep bonds with Muslim colleagues throughout her career.

There is her interview describing her gantha-bandan with Ustad Aman Ali Khan of the illustrious Bhindi Bazar Gharana of Maharashtra. This is not a relationship that you enter into lightly, or without deep mutual respect and affection. Then there is the story of how Dilip Kumar spurred her to learn Urdu to perfect her diction. There are her heartfelt renditions of Allah Tero Naam and Vaishnava Jana To. And we all know the legendary story of how she reduced Pandit Nehru to tears with her Ae Mere Vatan Ke Logon.

Personally, I was never a fan of Lataji’s high-pitched voice, and could spot her saffron tendencies from a mile off. Spotting political tendencies of whatever hue – orange, white or red - is something one has to become adept at, just to get by in India. I can tell from the first glance at any fellow Indian, as I can tell from the opening ‘sa’ of any classical singer, just what I am in for.

But the conversation around Lata Mangeshkar, triggered by the low blow on Shahrukh Khan, like any discussion with a communal aspect, quickly became a race to the bottom. Lata Mangeshkar was what she was, but it is absurd to sum up her life and extraordinary musical career from her lay political remarks.

The same can be said of the school of radical left criticism that has flourished in recent years against Gandhi. If his admirers are not the last word on him, then neither are his critics. Those who care about peace and harmony in India, need to consider whether the broad denunciations of Gandhi by some in their quarter were wise, or even correct.  

But there is no time to breathe between one provocation of the Hindu Right, and the next. This is also part of the challenge we face.

Hot on the heels of the Shahrukh Khan-Lata Mangeshkar controversy, came the video of Muskan Khan in her burqa, walking alone into her college in Karnataka, with a crowd of Hindutva thugs shouting ‘Jai Sri Ram’ right in her face. They bayed and surged around her like a pack of wild dogs.

That was not a very Gandhian sentence. But the whole incident made everything that I was writing here feel absurd and irrelevant. Who knows what other such, and worse, incidents would have occurred by the time this essay is published. Does it make any sense, is it not even rather outrageous, to ask that we look beyond the ugliness of the Hindu Right?

I do not have an answer to that. But I did complete this essay, and it is now in your hands.

Note: I have based the discussion on Nathuram Godse’s speech on material on various internet sites attributed to his last statement at his trial for the killing of Gandhi. I address them regardless of their authenticity, as it is the ideas expressed in these claimed reproductions and translations of Godse's speech that have become imprinted in the minds of people, and it is to these ideas that I am attempting a response in this essay.