Raghu Karnad writes inthe LRB
Mother Father
Gandhi: The End of Non-Violence
by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee.
The British introduced non-violent politics to India. Instead of Kings or Princes fighting wars to determine who controlled territory, elections were held. The party with a majority in the Legislature formed the administration. By 1937, all the British Indian states had elected Premiers.
Gandhi could neither advance or retard this process which, by and large, was wholly determined by Tory grandees. However, once Atlee became PM in 1945, a pro-Congress Cabinet was in power in Westminster.
Gandhi’s adversaries seem to have prevailed.
Jinnah was his adversary. He prevailed. The Justice Party was Gandhi's adversary. One may say that the Dravidian parties in TN are its lineal descendants. They have prevailed. Ambedkar too was an adversary. It might appear that he has prevailed but his followers have overplayed their hand. It may be that Reservations won't get renewed in 2030.
The last generation of his disciples is dying off, and his pedestal can now be dismantled.
Congress, which still requires its embersto swear they are habitual spiners of cotton, is in the doldrums because Rahul is useless.
In the LRB in 2012, Perry Anderson could still describe a reverent consensus around the Mahatma,
because people thought Rahul would become PM & lead his party to victory in 2014
which he then assailed with a catalogue of Gandhi’s missteps and obdurate follies. In 2014, Arundhati Roy wrote an introduction to Annihilation of Caste (1936) by B.R. Ambedkar, a leader of the untouchables, explaining his contempt for Gandhi, who in 1932 had begun a ‘fast unto death’ to end a plan that would have given untouchables separate electoral representation.
The Rajah-Moonje pact had already been done. The Brits were propping up Ambedkar. That is the only reason he had some bargaining power.
Also in 2014, Hindu nationalists won the general election in India:
Hindu Nationalists won elections in Hindu majority states in 1937. Nehru, as Premier of India (shorn of Muslim majority Pakistan) presided over massive ethnic cleansing of Muslims.
power was now held by admirers of Savarkar,
The BJP is descended from the Jan Sangh which was set up in opposition to Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha
who had been tried as an accomplice to Gandhi’s assassination, and of Nathuram Godse, who had fired the gun.
Ambedkar spoke for many when he said that it was a lucky thing a great nuisance had been ended.
The assassins’ point of view – that Gandhi was a misguided pacifist who had appeased Muslims and compromised Hindu interests – had become the establishment’s.
Gandhi had tried to fool Muslims and Dalits. It was in Congress's interests to pretend they believed they had a religious duty not to fuck either up.
Gandhi’s vast correspondence was combed for its most egregious or dated remarks.
Sadly no sensible remarks could be found.
It is true that he was too hostile to modern industry
He took money from mill-owners but pretended to be on the side of the weavers. Maybe he was simply stupid rather than hypocritical.
and too cold towards militant labour; he was too cautious in 1922, when he called off the Non-Co-operation Movement against British rule,
He could have been transported to the Andamans on a charge of conspiracy to wage war against the King Emperor. That is why he cooperated witht he Prosecution and pleaded guilty to sedition. He expressed gratitude that a clause re. disloyalty to the King was removed because he considered himself a loyalist. He was given six years but released quite soon. However, he remained politically inert for the entire length of his sentence. In other words he was the opposite of Sa'ad Zaghloul which is why Egypt got Independene (as did Ireland & Afghanistan) while India got nothing.
By 1926, the new Viceroy's big problem was not Indians trying to kill Whites, but Hindus & Muslims slaughtering each other.
but too reckless in 1942, when he launched the Quit India campaign;
to be fair, he thought the Brits would lose. Few appreciated how quickly American military might could grow.
he was effete but a bully, a pious Hindu crank, a Muslim-lover.
He did force his wife to cook mutton chops for Maulana Azad. To be fair, he had also enjoyed beating her.
Then there’s the weird sexual stuff – his trials of chastity – intensely criticised by his followers during his stay in Noakhali, a district in Bengal, near the end of his life.
He thought he gained superpowers by sleeping naked with his great-niece.
By the 2020s, it seemed to be harder to recite the events of his life than the faults and failures that attended them.
No. It's just that internet had made all sorts of archival material available almost instantaneously. Thus the events of his life were
1) burning passes in South Africa. Sadly, after a few weeks in jail, Gandhi decided that carrying a pass was a good thing. Indians should do it voluntarily. Government should not make it compulsory. This was an incredibly stupid theory. If not carrying a pass is bad, the Government should punish the action. Some Pathans beat the fuck out of Gandhi because they believed he had been bought off. Gandhi then understood that he needed to spend at least a year in prison otherwise his own people would fuck him up something fierce.
2) Gandhi betrayed his Chinese allies & did a disadvantageous deal with Smuts when the latter was at his weakest. Gokhale knew it was a bad deal & that Gandhi was a shit negotiator, still if Indians believed it was a 'win' for the Naram Dal, why not play along?
3) Champaran. Hindus had been attacking Muslims across the length and breadth of Bihar with the result that cow slaughter ceased. Gandhi was sent to Champaran to distract attention from this and thus preserve the Congress-League alliance engineered by Jinnah. Later, Muslims would offer 'cow protection' for 'Khilafat'.
4) Gandhi tried to raise troops for the Brits in Gujarat. His own people chased him away with vim and vigour.
5) Gandhi's two Himalayan blunders- viz. launching mass agitations but withdrawing them once violence broke out. In Egypt, spontaneous uprisings had forced General Allenby to back UDI. Gandhi's Satyagraha were meticulously organised to fail utterly and completely.
As Nehru noted, after 1922, there was only one political question- viz. that of land ownership. That was the only thing which mattered. Having the British around was a good excuse for doing nothing about this even after the 1935 Act put the matter in the hands of the Provincial Legislature.
‘And now, the more terrible and darker the picture you draw of Noakhali, the more is my mind steeled to stay,’ Manu Gandhi, not yet twenty years old, wrote to her great-uncle Mohandas – ‘Bapu’ – before joining him in December 1946
this was after Direct Action Day in Calcutta where the Hindus had prevailed.
on Bengal’s eastern coast. He had warned her that, as well as physical danger and hardship, their mission in Noakhali would involve intense trials of the spirit.
He didn't add that it would be wholly useless.
The local situation was ‘an altar for self-sacrifice’. Since October, it had been a preview of Partition: hamlets had been burned down, women and girls abducted; thousands were dead and tens of thousands had fled. There had been rioting in Bengal for years. In Noakhali, however, a district in what would soon be Pakistan (and is now in Bangladesh), the object was unprecedented: to push out the minority Hindu population and shut the door behind them.
This poor schmuck didn't get that ethnic cleansing was a two way street.
Manu, who was one of those closest to Gandhi after the death of his wife, Kasturba, in 1944, was happy to reach Noakhali. ‘The journey was trying,’ her diary says, but ‘that day is written in letters of gold in the book of my life.’ Manu marched beside the 77-year-old Mahatma as he went from village to village. She cooked and cleaned, treated the cuts on his feet, attended his sermons, took dictation of his letters. It was a strange place to find the beacon of the national movement as India careened towards self-government.
No. Viceroy Wavell, an army man, warned that Indian politicians would have to work together to avoid a blood-bath. Gandhi said 'If India wants a blood-bath, it will have it.' Wavell had thought he would need to evacuate the White population. But, if Indians were too busy killing each other, the Whites would be perfectly safe.
Noakhali was a swampy, mofussil district midway between Dhaka and Chittagong, where Gandhi did not speak the language. He wanted not only to halt the flight of the area’s Hindu residents but to summon them back, even to their deaths.
He assured them that. in his native Kathiawar, Princes lived to rape. Why go to the trouble and expense of moving to a Hindu majority area if you could get raped and slaughtered in the comfort of your own homes.
Would Indian politicians have been able to arrange a peaceful transfer of people? Yes. There was a huge army presence. Sadly, Indian politicians simply didn't care about saving human lives. A Parsi war-reporter summoned to Punjab by British officers noted that, in Bombay, even a White High Court Judge who used a walking stick because he was lame in one leg, had to have a licence for that stick. In Punjab everybody was armed to the teeth in public.
He was there, as Manu was, to offer the same sacrifice.
What was needed was an evacuation plan. What was not needed was a shithead saying 'stay here & get raped. Why have you slit your own throats you lazy cunts?'
Anyway, the Muslims decided the Mahacrackpot was a nuisance. They chased him away. Still, for three or four months, the cunt was out of the hair of the Viceroy.
By that example of ahimsa, he hoped to reverse the tide of violence that was carrying India towards Partition.
He failed. So did the Maharishi. Yogic levitation doesn't really spread 'peace rays' which prevent wars from happening.
As late as 1946, the British position was still that ‘neither a larger nor a smaller sovereign state of Pakistan would provide an acceptable solution to the communal problem.’
Had Churchill been in power, the Brits would have wanted 'Pakistan & Princestan'- i.e. a Balkanised Hindu India.
This was the conclusion of the cabinet mission dispatched by the prime minister, Clement Attlee, to Delhi and Shimla to thrash out the terms of independence. Carving through the middle of the Punjab and Bengal, it said, would be ‘contrary to the wishes and interests of a very large proportion of the inhabitants’, sharing as they did the ties of language, history and tradition. Still, it was clear that the increasing bloodshed and unravelling trust between India’s Muslims and Hindus required a constitutional remedy before any transfer of power.
There is no 'constitutional remedy' for Islamic militancy. Kaffirs should fuck off from Muslim majority areas. They may make room for themselves by expelling Muslims from areas where people of their own faith are the majority. At any rate, that is what happened in Punjab.
The Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was by now the sole representative of Indian Muslims.
Because Gandhi had been foolish enough to treat him as such. Still, it must be said, the 1946 election reflected a reality- Muslims had not enjoyed living under Congress Ministries. They wanted Pakistan & they got Pakistan.
Gandhi was intent on a single national destiny;
Not really. Still, he could be useful. Mountbatten could say 'Gandhi is a one-man boundary force' which is like saying 'we don't have to save up money for Christmas pressies. Santa Claus will provide'.
Jinnah was adamant there must be separation. The weary cabinet mission arrived at a baroque compromise to end the deadlock. It proposed a single federal entity: India’s provinces would be grouped along religious lines, with separate constitutions.
in other words, Muslims would get more than their fair share.
Nehru, leader of the Congress, consented to the plan but then backtracked.
Which is why he remained in power & founded a dynasty. When the tough decision had to be made, he made it.
Jinnah complained of sabotage. It was time, he said, for Muslims to ‘bid goodbye to constitutional methods’. He promised a general strike and a day of ‘direct action’ on 16 August. ‘If you want peace, we do not want war,’ he declared at a rally in Bombay. ‘If you want war, we accept your offer unhesitatingly.’
To be frank, non-Muslims would always be vulnerable in Muslim majority areas unless a powerful King or Dictator protected them. Sadly, if kaffirs become refugees, they may try to chuck out Muslims so as to make space for themselves.
The competitive identities of Hindu and Muslim had hardened in Bengal earlier than in the rest of India.
This was irrelevant. Wherever there were Muslims, the end of a multi-Ethnic empire- or a Communist tyranny- led to a clash with kaffirs.
In 1905, Lord Curzon split the province in two: his sole object, in the view of the Liberal MP Henry Cotton,
a member of the INC
was ‘to shatter the unity and to disintegrate the feelings of solidarity which are established’ there.
by enabling East Bengali Muslims to rise. As Tagore pointed out, this would inevitably result in Hindu zamindars losing their estates in the East.
The decision was so unpopular, and so helpful to agitators, that the partition was reversed in 1911. (George V made the announcement himself, at the Delhi Durbar, a huge gathering to mark his accession.)
Why? The answer is that it had resonances with the problem of Ulster. When Ireland was partitioned, it became inevitable that India too would be partitioned.
More than a century later, there are still efforts to identify and disenfranchise Bengali-speaking migrants from Bangladesh.
Not if they are non-Muslim in which case there is a constitutional assumption that they have fled to avoid persecution.
Every country- including Pakistan and Iran - deports illegal Muslim immigrants.
The contention is that Bengali-speaking Muslims are ‘infiltrating’ India, demographically transforming and ‘Islam-ising’ eastern states.
Not anymore. The BJP has won Assam and now West Bengal precisely because they claim to be tough on this issue.
India’s most inflamed arguments about national identity revolve around the figure of the ghuspetia, a Bengali Muslim ‘infiltrator’.
The argument is over. Can a political party rely on 'infiltrator' votes to stay in power? Not in Assam or West Bengal. There is Hindu consolidation. The big question now has to do with UP. Will Yogi win a third term in February? If so, he becomes Modi's natural successor. Maybe Akhilesh will ally with Owaisi- whose party did well in Bihar.
In the days following the general strike on 16 August, hearing reports of the ‘direct action’ taking place in Bengal, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White flew to Calcutta. The Muslim League had taken power in the province after elections earlier that year. In Calcutta, a tea-shop owner called Nanda Lal gave her a vivid account of his street’s descent into havoc. It had begun with lorries arriving on Harrison Road and unloading a rabble who began to attack non-Muslim shops and houses. College students and rival party cadres were drawn into street fighting. Soon, Bourke-White wrote, ‘through the entire city the terror and arson spread, through the crowded bazaars, the teeming chawls and tenements.’ One night, Nanda Lal was approached by a neighbour, the owner of the Gulzar Shawl Repair Company, and asked to help rescue nine Hindu college girls (they were smuggled home through his courtyard). He was taken aback. ‘He had completely forgotten ... that Mussulmans could be benevolent human beings.’ On the third day, the army arrived and began to use machine guns. On the fifth day there was silence. To Bourke-White, who had been in Germany the year before, Calcutta’s streets ‘looked like Buchenwald’. Thousands were dead (the majority Muslims) and ‘vast areas were dark with ruin.’ But ‘Calcutta was only the beginning of a chain reaction of riot, counter-riot and reprisal’; the next link in the chain was Noakhali.
Suhrawardy had gambled & lost. Hindu gangsters had preserved Calcutta for India.
A Hindu minority of about 20 per cent, many of them landowners, had prospered in Noakhali under the Raj. An organised local movement of peasants and sharecroppers was co-opted in the 1940s by the Muslim League, whose utopian promises about a new state easily outshone more pragmatic demands for tenancy reform and interest-free loans. In the same years, the Bengal coast was battered by cyclones, tidal waves and crop failures. In 1942, after the fall of Burma, the British implemented a ‘Policy of Denial’ in Noakhali,
Since this was a Defence matter, the provincial government was bypassed. The question is how White Civil Servants could get this done. The answer is they offered money. To the extent that the thing was done, it was done because Bengalis were paid to get it done. The Ispahanis, big financial backers of the Muslim League, were the primary purchasing agent buying up rice under the 'denial' policy.
in an attempt to impede the anticipated arrival of the Japanese army in Assam and Bengal. Boats and vehicles were confiscated or scuttled and huge amounts of rice disposed of.
They were bought and paid for. Were they diverted to the black market so as to make a big profit for the League's backers? Yes.
Bengali villages were more isolated than ever when famine set in the following year.
Their Bengali rulers were making a lot of money out of the famine which, to be fair, resulted from exogenous supply shocks.
By 1945, in an attempt to feed their families, women in Noakhali were forced to ‘sell themselves ... in hordes’ to the troops moving down to Chittagong and the Burma front, according to a local communist leader.
Communists noticed that Viceroy was sucking off billions of starving Indians so as to cruelly deprive them of their precious bodily essence.
The famine sharpened the peasantry’s anger at landowners,
unless they were Muslim
and by August 1946 the mutation from class struggle to communal paranoia was complete.
There was no 'class struggle'. The Left was wiped out in the 1946 election. Religion mattered. Class did not.
Pamphlets called for ‘a revenge of Calcutta’, and for Muslims in Noakhali to save themselves from a similar fate. One pamphlet, circulated by a subdivisional office of the Muslim League, warned of the ‘secret and evil plan’ of the ‘fascist, bourgeois caste-Hindu Congress in alliance with the bourgeois imperialist British’. It went on: ‘Not just in India, all Muslims all over the world are now living in imminent danger.’ On 10 October, Gulam Sarwar
who had been offered a Congress seat
gave an incendiary speech in the district’s main bazaar. Sarwar, until recently a leader of the peasants’ party, had lost his seat in the election earlier that year to the League and gone over to its cause. His militia blocked the roads and docks, cut telegraph lines and stopped trains from entering the district, as the purge of Hindu households began.
Did Gandhi's arrival help anybody? No. He was useless. Still, the Viceroy could pretend he was using his super-powers to prevent bloodshed.
‘The situation in Bengal is so desperate,’ Horace Alexander, a Quaker,
a useless tosser.
wrote to Gandhi in late October, ‘it can only be cured by a heroic remedy.’
It could be cured by the Army supervising an exchange of populations. But Indian politicians couldn't be arsed to supervise this.
Gandhi was still occupied with the independence negotiations in Delhi. He was old and unwell, but he foresaw that Noakhali would serve as a final trial of his beliefs and the last chance to defeat the logic of Partition.
He failed completely. Similarly, the Maharishi's yogic levitation didn't cause the world to become peaceful.
With a company of disciples – and a party of Sikh army veterans – he left for Calcutta. On 6 November, a boat was arranged to take him to Noakhali. The countryside was described in the gazetteer as ‘a vast rice plain ... where rich groves of areca nut and coconut palms rising out from the dense undergrowth of Mandar [coral] trees ... make every village look like a forest’ – but now it was strewn with looted property and grisly evidence of violence. In one place, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee writes, an anxious dog attracted Gandhi’s attention. It led the group to a spot in the bushes where they found the remains of its human family. On another occasion, a traumatised woman approached Gandhi at a prayer meeting to present him with her husband’s thigh bone. Women in Hindu neighbourhoods told of being abducted, raped and sent home at daylight, just to be taken away again at sundown.
Gandhi was as happy as a pig in shit. Nothing got his juices flowing so much as the spectable of utter abjectness.
In 1930, when Gandhi embarked on his Salt March to Dandi
he was under the impression that poor people were paying ten percent, rather than less than one percent, of their income on Salt. Still, the real reason he took up the issue was because Motilal & CR Das had tried to make it an issue some five or six years previously. Could Gandhi succeed where they failed? No. It was Liaquat, a Muslim Leaguer, who abolished it. But, under Nehru, it was brought back. Why? The price of salt actually went up. India still has a Salt Service.
(an act of civil disobedience aimed at ending the colonial monopoly on the production and sale of salt),
Princely states could break it by making salt from seawater- as Gandhi did- but it was uneconomic to do so.
a similar procession set out to collect salt on the beach at Noakhali. At that time, nobody had yet heard the word ‘Pakistan’. It was the high-water mark of satyagraha, or ‘truth force’, the term Gandhi coined for his practice of non-violent resistance.
It was useless. Still, the fact is, nobody was prepared, as yet, to tackle the real problem- viz. the land question.
It was the high point, more generally, of Gandhi’s charismatic sway over the national movement and of Hindu-Muslim amity within it.
No. Hindu-Muslim amity had vanished at least six years ago. In June 1930, big communal riots broke out in Vellore. However, it was the big Kanpur communal riot in 1931 (occassioned by the Congress hartal re. Bhagat Singh's execution) which was the final nail in the coffin.
But Noakhali was now a symbol of the undoing of all three. V.S. Naipaul, reviewing Gandhi’s autobiography in 1976, invented a poignant image: ‘Sad last pilgrimage: embittered people scatter broken glass on the roads he is to walk. Seventeen years before, on the Salt March, at the other end of India, the poor had sometimes strewn his path with cool green leaves.’
But, a dozen years previously, Gujaratis had chased Gandhi away when he tried to recruit soldiers for the King.
In fact, huge crowds turned out at every stop to hail Gandhi. His party met relief workers and refugees, who were crowded into school buildings, warehouses and any structure promising safety. Muslim Leaguers visited him to pledge peace. They blamed the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha for spreading panic through rumour and exaggeration, and asked sarcastically if Gandhi would go to Bihar, where the counter-riot against Muslims was underway. ‘I find myself in the midst of exaggeration and falsity,’ Gandhi wrote. ‘I am unable to discover the truth.’ In Noakhali, even ‘truth and ahimsa ... seem to fail to show the attributes I have ascribed to them.’
Sadly, they had always failed to have attributes nutters ascribe to them.
To Gandhi, Bhattacharjee writes, satyagraha was a ‘science in the making’,
it was a magical belief in the potency of stored semen. Did you know that if you have sex, you lose the ability to have sex and thus become no better than an eunuch? Thus, to maintain virility, you must never have sex.
subject to experiment and revision. Having failed to validate it at the level of the nation or district, he attempted the smallest scale of praxis: go to a village, stay there. On 20 November he instructed his followers, including the women, to disperse into the countryside. There they would offer themselves up in an exemplary performance of non-violence, becoming martyrs if need be.
Oddly, Bertrand Russell had offered similar advise to the Brits. "If the Germans succeed in sending an invading army to England we should do best to treat them as visitors, give them quarters and invite the commander and chief to dine with the prime minister. Such behaviour would completely baffle them'. He did not add that Winston Churchill should part the butt cheeks of the King Emperor just in case Herr Hitler wanted to sodomize his Brittanic majesty. Oddly, Wittgenstein did not criticize Russell for this omission.
He went to Srirampur, a village from which all but one of the Hindu families had fled. Here, Gandhi hoped, he could be like a gardener, tending to his patch in order to learn ‘the exact conditions under which the plant will thrive’. With him went only an interpreter, the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose, and a stenographer, R.P. Parasuram.
It was important that stupid Gandhians understand that Gandhian methods had failed completely.
On his first evening there, the Hindu’s correspondent found him ‘in his new abode ... sitting calmly in a half-burned house amid ruins’. Of course, Gandhi in 1946 was never alone; visitors were numerous, journalists hovered. He held interfaith prayer sessions and sat with both Hindu and Muslim households. He kept up his daily quota of spinning cloth, sometimes getting back at 11 p.m. to sit at the charkha for an hour before he slept. He woke every day at three. He stayed in Srirampur for 43 nights, which, as his biographer Ramachandra Guha notes, was the longest he spent anywhere apart from his ashrams – or in prison – in more than thirty years of public life.
The good news was that he wasn't in Delhi making mischief. Nehru realised that the only way to deal with Gandhian nutters was to send them off to the villages where they could pretend to have achieved great things- e.g. bhoodan (which culminated in the whole state of Bihar being given away without any land actually changing hands.
Still, he knew he was failing. ‘In spite of all my efforts exodus continues and very few persons have returned,’ he confessed on 3 December. ‘Why does the spell not work?’ he wrote to a friend. ‘May it not be because I have temporised in the question of brahmacharya?’ Manu’s arrival, on 19 December, gave him hope – and brought a strange turn to the Noakhali experiment, one that still confounds his believers and delights his critics. Forty years earlier, in South Africa, he had taken a vow of sexual abstinence. Now he felt it urgent to test his discipline, and his disciple. He asked Manu (who had taken similar vows) to share his bed at night, possibly unclothed. Among his party and his colleagues elsewhere there was muffled uproar. Parasuram – ‘the whole thing is considered wrong by the world’ – left in protest.
He started this practice after his wife died in 1944.
Gandhi, making little effort at secrecy, engaged in earnest correspondence on the question. Vallabhbhai Patel growled about the political risk, the danger of their opponents finding out. Vinoba Bhave observed that, to a true brahmachari, lying with a woman would be no different from lying with a man. Nehru pressed Gandhi to return to Delhi, where his advice and authority were needed. India was on the brink of freedom but no closer to agreement on what that would mean. In his replies, Gandhi was as gently obstinate about continuing his nightly experiment as he was about staying in Noakhali. Manu, to judge by her diary, was distressed only by the intrusive fuss. But her diary wasn’t private: her great-uncle discussed every entry with her. She describes his attentions as tender, maternal care. On 21 December, when he first asked whether she was willing to share a bed with him, she replied: ‘Why did you even ask? I have made you my mother and a child sleeping by her mother’s side sleeps naturally.’ Gandhi, typically forthright, replied: ‘I am like a mother to you. But I am a man, and you are a woman. You are young.’ He likened their trial to a yagna, a ritual fire sacrifice.
So- the nutter was coo-coo for cocopops. My theory is that getting hit on the head in South Africa had left him with a screw loose.
Manu’s mother had died when she was young, and she was raised by Gandhi and his wife at their ashram. After the Quit India uprising of 1942, Gandhi was imprisoned for the remainder of the war in the comfort of the Aga Khan’s mansion in Poona. Both Manu and Kasturba went there with him, and Manu remained after Kasturba died. In Noakhali, the maternal metaphor persisted, though in a euphoric register that hardly calls to mind a more usual mother-daughter relationship. When Gandhi warned Manu not to carry a heavy bucket of water, she wrote: ‘What male shows motherly care and love as he does? ... Oh, joy! I am actually having that experience! It is I who am that beloved child of Mother Bapu!’ As ‘Mother Bapu’ – literally ‘Mother Father’, as Guha points out – Gandhi embodied a chimeric ideal of authority and care, in opposition to the sexual violence, revenge and honour-killing that was taking place across India.
To be fair, there was an old belief that 'sperm retention' gave one super-powers. But sticking pins in wax dolls works just as well.
Bhattacharjee’s book, which describes Gandhi’s final months, interpolates with a free hand snatches of literature and moral philosophy. He relates Gandhi’s ‘division of labour ... between the satyagrahi (by day) and the brahmachari (at night)’ to Foucault’s view of the chaste struggle of the Christian ascetic Cassian, ‘to stay awake night and day – at night for the day, and in the day thinking of the night to come’.
Foucault was a fool. Celibacy for priests had become mandatory in 304 AD (Council of Elvira). Cassian was born 60 yers later. India had celibate monastic orders a thousand years previously.
In Noakhali, Gandhi’s hope was for the pure, sublimated powers of the brahmachari to effect a worldly victory for ahimsa.
There were plenty of actual monks milling around the place. Why not ask one of them to use his 'siddhas' (supernatural powers)? The answer is that neither Congress nor the League wanted power to pass to the priests.
‘The common element,’ Bhattacharjee writes, ‘was intensification: if violence provokes, meet it with a disarmed body. If sexuality distracts, expose yourself to a bare body. Truth is not metaphysics. It had to be confronted daily in the body.’
Bhattacharjee is totes batty. Indians knew how to stop communal violence. This had to do with preventive detention or 'externment' of known touble-makers & one or two lathi charges or police firing. What was important was to give caravans a military export & do 'bundobust' for food & water along the route.
Many have accused Gandhi of doing too much of that.
He was a useless tosser which is why he was useful to the useless tossers who wanted to move into the big bungalows of the British.
Perry Anderson observed that Gandhi’s metaphysics treated the person and the world as fungible. He noted the dual connotations of swaraj, or ‘self-rule’, which was ‘far from simply political. It was mastery of the passions and of the senses in the ascent of the soul’ – something Gandhi demanded of his followers as much as of himself.
The truth is, Indians objected to the slogan 'no taxation without representation'. They wanted 'no taxation' & plenty of paid representation. Gandhi said 'you don't need schools or hospitals or sewers and other such Satanic Western shite. That also means you won't have to pay taxes.' My point is that Gandhianism is cheap. True, it is also utterly useless but cheap is cheap.
Naipaul said of Gandhi’s younger years in England that ‘the inward concentration is fierce, the self-absorption complete.’
Naipaul was wrong. It wasn't till he got hit on the head that he became a crackpot..
Even at the end of his life, the pattern held. But when Gandhi’s distress over the killings and abductions took him to Noakhali, and his febrile obsession with chastity returned, he did not falter in his march. Naipaul: ‘At this terrible moment his thoughts are of action, and he is magnificent.’
Naipaul had shit for brains. Gandhi was a manifest failure. Suppose he had succeeded in appealing to Bengali Muslims. Then, he would have regained 'obligatory passage point status'. Why didn't this happen? The answer is obvious. It was the land question.
Gandhi left Srirampur on 2 January 1947, going ‘on foot, when possible and necessary, from village to village [to] induce the evacuees to return’.
Come back & get killed. Do it for me. I really really want to you die horribly.
He walked barefoot and his party sang hymns as they marched; after sunrise, a crowd would swell around them. In due course, he would relent and go to Bihar,
where he took no action against Congress men who had been busy killing Muslims.
then to Delhi –
where the Muslim population fell from 33 percent to 5 percent when Nehru became PM. Nehru put in a law to prevent refugees who had crossed the border in panic from returning to reclaim their property.
opposing Partition to the last – before returning to Calcutta in August. He was there when the two states formalised independence, fasting in a half-ruined house to demand an end to the riots in the city.
There is no need to riot, it property owners are running away.
They ended, and the peace held, in Noakhali too. Six months later Gandhi was killed, by an assassin who believed – as do others, legion in India today – that he emboldened Muslims, betrayed his homeland and consented carelessly to its partition.;
He was killed by a nutter who greatly helped Congress by ridding it of a nuisance. Interestingly, three people with the surname Gandhi have been killed with salutary effects. Autocracy gets tempered by assassination which is why Rahul is gun-shy.
No comments:
Post a Comment