M.K. Gandhi: The White Robe of Simpleness

M.K. GANDHI The White Robe of Simpleness Gautam Dasgupta Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi died from an assassin's bullet a year before I was born in post-independence India. I remember his presence being all-pervasive in the years that followed. The image of a slender, bespectacled , partially-draped old man holding on precariously to his staff, together with the ubiquitous images of Hindu gods and godesses, would vie with each other for space in my visual field. He was deified as few world leaders have been both before and after him. He was more than just a man of peace who had led his country from colonial subjugation to freedom. Neither was he a mere politician adept at conducting high-level negotiations , nor a lawyer (which he was by trade) who used his considerable judicial knowledge to counter legal transgressions imposed by the British on their subjects. He was without a doubt all of these, and yet more. But of his plenitude both as a human being and as a devoted social servant, I was to partake of much later in life. My childhood memories of photographs, in which Gandhi's frail body was framed by a cluster of sari-clad women, remain etched in my mind. But preadolescent fantasies run wild, and I recall disparaging remarks made by my schoolmates and me about his "harem," even his lustiness, of which there was no foundation in truth. In those days of nationalistic fervor, it was easy for one attending an exclusive private boy's school to see Gandhi as a primitive in the social arena. I was mortified by the image of this "halfnaked temple fakir," as Churchill once referred to him, sitting behind a spinning wheel, proclaiming the necessity of spinning one's own cotton and 84 Douglas Perry as Gandhi (Brooklyn Academy of Music) reveling in the joys of hand-crafted amenities-all for that single purpose of building one's self-reliance as a total human being. And this in an era when Nehru, armed with a national mandate, was propelling India into the technological age regardless of its deep and hidden (perhaps even unrealized ) national ethos that favored amorphous spirituality and love of nature. To us young Indians Gandhi was a source of perpetual embarrassment, a man who refused to take the twentieth century too seriously, a god amongst men, a man who truly believed in the possibility of creating the kingdom of God on earth. He did not partake of the cynicism engendered by scientific advances and technocratic know-how that were soon to be the 85 bane of Western industrialized societies. He was all that we were being taught to oppose in school-be it in modes of dress, in mannerisms, in our intellectual beliefs, and in our material and spiritual longings. And then one day, when I was spending time at home going through a family album, a photograph, partly tattered and creased, accidentally dropped out from under a pile of ordinary family group shots. Right away I glimpsed a younger Gandhi, not the image I had of him from the posters that adorned public buildings in India, surrounded as always by a throng of women. Inquiring as to who had taken the photograph, I was soon to learn that one of the figures in the group surrounding Gandhi was my grandmother, who had rarely mentioned him in a personal manner. Later that day I was to learn further that she had marched among millions in the famous Salt March of 1930 and had worked with him during the bloody Noakhali riots that were precipitated by the partition of Bengal. Here was the man whom most considered divine brought down to earth in my presence. It was only gradually that I realized why Gandhi, the political man, was rarely a subject of conversation in our household. Our Bengali heritage could not accommodate that half of Gandhi which participated in the negotiations that culminated in the division of Bengal into East Bengal (which became East Pakistan, then Bangladesh) and West Bengal, which remained a part of India. The partition was not unlike the separation of East and West Germany or, more poignantly, the...