GANDHISM

Le
o Tolstoy corresponded with him. Albert Einstein was astonished by him. Martin Luther
King emulated him. General Smuts and Winston Churchill were profoundly irritated by
him. George Orwell tried to analyze him, George Bernard Shaw was intrigued by him
and Charlie Chaplin admitted to being nervous about how to open a conversation with
him. Even P.G.Wodehouse, arguably the most apolitical of great writers, could not escape
making a reference to him in one of his Jeeves novels. Without a shadow of doubt,
Mahatma Gandhi is India’s most notable export. When I started teaching creative writing
in US, I realized that my students knew next to nothing about India. But without
exception, they all knew one name: Gandhi. In each course that I teach, I ask my
students: “What do you know about Mahatma Gandhi?” The three most common answers
are: “He was an apostle of peace”; “He practiced truth and non-violence”; and “He was a
spiritual leader.” They only vaguely know about Gandhi’s role as a great freedom fighter
against the British. They know absolutely nothing about some of his even greater
achievements: His lifelong struggle against untouchability; his role in liberating the
women of India; his undying concern for the Indian village; and his total commitment to
communal harmony. Similarly, all my students are blissfully ignorant about some of the
more controversial ideas of the Mahatma: His abhorrence of family planning, his distaste
for modern medicine and surgery, his suspicion of machines and technology, his frequent
and nebulous references to the “inner voice”. The exported version of Gandhi is clearly
an oversimplified version. Not unlike the one in Munnabhai’s head. However, this
oversimplified and exported version of Bapu is perhaps as useful to the modern world as
the more complex and accurate version of the historical Gandhi. To a war-torn, fear
gripped planet, the simple message of being nonviolent, compassionate and being civil to
your opponent is profoundly important. What I find most charming in the exported
version of Gandhi is his image as a “spiritual leader”. Calling Gandhi “spiritual” creates a
new definition of spiritualism that is extremely valuable: not necessarily knowing the
inner workings of God, but being truthful, fearless, humble and deeply ethical.

By Abhijat Joshi
(The writer co-wrote the screenplay of Lage Raho Munnabhai)