Journey to self

Years ago, long before Gandhi-giri became a fad, I went on a whirlwind tour of Delhi. The architectural splendours of Lutyens’ Delhi and the sandstone marvels of the Mughal era had always beckoned me. Any sightseeing trip of Delhi, as you know, is incomplete with a pilgrimage to the Rajghat and the Gandhi Museum. 

The Rajghat, Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial, has an aura of holiness surrounding it. An eternal flame burns here as if to remind the world of the relevance of Gandhism for time to come.  The black-marble-slab memorial on the banks of the Yamuna invites as many as 10,000 visitors every year, apart from heads of state and visiting dignitaries. It has the epitaph ‘He Ram’ (O God), which he uttered with his last breath.
Rajghat and the Gandhi Museum were on the last leg of our trip. Visitors were few and scattered on that wintry afternoon in January – most people on our bus had walked away after making a ritualistic tour of the place – and I saw a feeble, old man making his way to the memorial.  He wore a crumpled Gandhi cap and leaned on for support to a young man who looked like his grandson.
Even as I watched, the man stumbled his way to the black stone, touched it in reverence, and, in what would remain in my memory for a long time to come, buried his face in his hands and wept uncontrollably. Tears streamed down his weather-beaten face. I felt a lump in my throat.
There was no doubt that he was witness to the “lovely dawn of freedom”, as the poet Sarojini Naidu remarked. But what did that mean to this poor man from some remote corner of India? What spell had the old man with a spinning wheel cast on him? Or a million others like him? My journey in search of Gandhi had just begun.
Significantly, we saw a revival of the Gandhi cap in the anti-corruption crusade led by Anna Hazare. Thousands of people, young and old, sported them as they held candle-light rallies and meetings in support of him. But do symbolic gestures such as this or wearing khadi or using handmade paper mean anything?
Beyond idolising Gandhi, a theologian friend told me, it becomes imperative to reinterpret Gandhian principles. For instance, writing in Young India, Gandhi said: “The extension of the law of non-violence in the domain of economics means nothing less than the introduction of moral values as a factor to be considered in regulating international commerce.”
How would we engage with Gandhi’s positions on caste, patriarchy and trusteeship?  How would we reconcile with the vision of a poverty-free India, as expounded by a minister, that 85 per cent of the Indian population should live in cities and to the idea that all urbanisation processes should be halted. How would we be led forward into action to build an India where “women will enjoy the same rights as men”?


Mannequins wearing Gandhi caps.

Those laying claim to the legacy of Gandhi will have to do more than wear his cap or ‘like’ it on Facebook. That would be to resist all forms of structural violence as well. Structural violence is the result of policy and social structures, and change needs to come from altering the processes that encourage these. Thus young professionals in the forefront of anti-corruption also have to make active interventions in preventing the commoditisation of health care, education, and other essential needs of citizens.
It is also very Christian to have this sort of generalised dissatisfaction, “a maladjustment to the world”. As theologian Richard Beck says, “More, these feelings help with resisting idolatry, letting us know that the status quo isn’t the Kingdom.”
In one of his speeches, ‘Proud to be maladjusted’, Martin Luther King, one of Gandhi’s greatest admirers, said: “…[T]here are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of goodwill will be maladjusted until the good societies realise. … I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few….”
Gandhi himself said Jesus was the most active resister known perhaps to history. “This was nonviolence par excellence.”
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says Jesus would have joined the Occupy movement to protest against social and economic inequality. “Jesus would be there, sharing the risks, not just taking sides,” he said. Jesus, who “constantly asked awkward questions” would be “steadily changing the entire atmosphere by the questions that he asked of everybody involved — rich and poor, capitalist and protester and cleric.”
Another Christmas. Another spiritual journey to know the mystery of the Incarnation.
“…were we led all that way for Birth or Death?
There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.
--- ‘Journey of the Magi’, T.S. Eliot.