The ambivalence about Gandhi

Southasia’s difficulties with Gandhi’s legacy
by Ashis Nandy

Nobody calls Gautam Buddha a Nepali, even though he was born at Lumbini in Nepal. If the Buddha seems too august or distant, neither is Rabindranath Tagore’s citizenship taken very seriously. If it were, there would have been at least some scattered demands for changing the Bangladeshi national anthem, now that the country has both a well-developed Muslim nationalism and a budding fundamentalist movement.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s case is different. Although much of the rest of the world may not emphasise his Indian origins, many Southasians do – and they do so in a particular fashion. Southasians constantly offset his ideas against his political practices, which they find contaminated by his Indian-ness and Hinduism, and find him wanting. After Gandhi’s assassination, no less than Albert Einstein said that future generations would find it hard to believe that such a person had walked the earth. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, however, mourned his death only as that of a great Hindu leader. Parts of Southasia are more ambivalent towards Gandhi than even the modern West – his avowed target – has ever been.
This ambivalence has to do not only with Gandhi’s politics, but also with the fact that he was a political figure. In recent times, Southasians have come to believe that the term ethical politics is an oxymoron; that politicians talking about ethics have to be either hypocrites, romantic visionaries, or irrelevant to the ‘real’ stuff of politics. When applied to the likes of Gandhi, in India too (despite its pretensions to the contrary) this belief is certainly not confined to a small section of Hindu nationalists or xenophobes: it includes a large number of radicals, liberals and globalisers. Gandhi tried to disinherit and decentre the middle class; the memory of that still hurts.
Southasia has lost something in the process. I am not a Gandhian, but as a psychologist and political analyst, I have worked off-and-on with Gandhian principles for many years. It has paid me rich dividends. I did not come to Gandhi willingly. Like most Bengalis, I maintained a healthy distance, and my discomfort with him was tinged with a touch of hostility. This unease was aggravated by my parents’ admiration for Gandhi: in my childhood, Gandhi represented authority. How many other Southasians may have a similar story?
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