Meaning, magic of the Mahatma

There is something about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi that is incredibly seductive. Decades after his death, I still visit Sabarmati Ashram every year on October 2. It is always disappointing. There is a spate of badly sung bhajans, the usual attendance of a few religious leaders looking like something made in a wax works, a few remaining Gandhians smelling of age and mothballs. Thousands of people come to the ashram that Gandhi left in 1930, never to return. One senses a ritual, a sense of tourism redeemed by the few who come to pray and find some sense of the politics of Gandhi.
October 2 becomes a report card time to assess the fate of Gandhi and his ideas.
The village he dreamt about is disappearing and the agriculture and the crafts which he saw as the life blood of a people appear obsolescent. Between suicides of farmers and the fear of farming the younger generation is showing, agriculture appears a tenuous activity.
Even the ashram which he saw as a site for future thought experiments appears ethically empty. Gandhi conceptualised the ashram as a place that would tackle the problems of the world even while it slept. As one walks around the ashram one senses the aura of the place. It survives even a few idiot Gandhians reciting Gandhi like a multiplication table. A visitor senses the museumisation of the man. He is now a memory banalised into a collection of souvenirs. One can pick up kitschy statues for `200. They are badly made and overpriced. The shop has old pictures retouched so badly that they would not grace a barbershop.
One lazily walks to the room where he lived. The charkha he worked on sits like a live object, almost pregnant with meaning. One wonders why it was seen as a luddite object, a piece of anti-technology when it was an invitation to an alternative way of inventing. Gandhi wanted technology to create community, to add to the competence of citizenship, to fight obsol­escence. He who wanted to fight the idiocy of the village where men were toothless by 50, is being treated like a village idiot. One forgets that this man wanted the ashram to rework the world. His Archimedian point was an ethical one. With ethics as foundation and prayer as a lever, Gandhi could say give me an ashram and I will transform the self.
As you walk around Charles Correa’s building, you sense that this modest building might be one of the most endearing of the architect’s creations. As one reads the quotations on the wall, walk past photographs as fragments of history, one senses the building is devoted to the art of memory. It seems to say walk and remember. Every time I jaywalk through this history, I am moved. The museum is dog eared, the arrangements slap dash and yet one is captured by the magic of the man. One trembles at the prospect of the Gandhi tucked into each man whispering other possibilities.
As one walks in the hot sun, thinking of Dandi, it strikes one that while there have been studies of Gandhi’s fasts, prayers, his attempts to confront sexuality, one discovers little attention has been paid to his idea of walking. I am referring to the everydayness of walking not just the ritual of the padyatra.
Walking for Gandhi was the measure of the body. Walking defined the proportions of the city. Walking was a measure of locality. Walking defined the nature of place and its familiarity. Walking defined and gave content to the idea of Swadeshi. Walking provided an ethics of scale. Gandhi’s theory of walking was profound and profoundly everyday and yet one finds little on it. Thomas Weber who recreates Dandi with care often with a scholar’s pedometer has no reflection on walking. Gandhi’s ideas on walking are more bereft of scholarship than his life in South Africa.
One walks over to Meera Kuteer, a fragment of a cottage where Madeline Slade and Vin­obha once stayed. The ceramic commode has a sculpted quality to it. It has a sense of proportion. If architecture were to define minimum need, this would be the place. It almost feels like a cloak rather than a house. Its modesty gives it a sense of the sacred and the onlooker realises history was made from such little building blocks. My walk has become a pilgrimage.
It is about three in the afternoon. Another movement for agriculture is about to start. It is a yatra, half pilgrimage, half protest against the fate of agriculture.
The Gandhians who speak are inane but the activists smile tolerantly. They realise theirs is a long struggle. I speak to one of them. She is practical. I ask her for her badge. She gives it happily. It is at that moment you realise that while Gandhians might have mothballed Mahatma into inanity, these activists have created a more sustainable view of his ideas. They stick to their ideals, more pragmatically and join your laughter. They understand the ebb and flow of politics better than one and hint history flows like a stream only in retrospect. Struggles have a sense of ebb and flow which they seem to recognise and even enjoy.
I feel an un-gandhian need for tea. Tea with pakoras. As I walk back, visitors are hugging Kantibhai’s statue of Gandhi as if it was their favourite uncle. A Japanese visitor stands more reverentially for a photograph. You sense a difference. Foreigners stiffen with respect, acknowledge the sense of sacred and history. Indians scurry like mice. If the statue sloped like a seesaw, they would slide happily down the side. As one leaves, one salutes the other statue warning one “to see no evil”. Ironically it seems a warning that once you leave the place one is returning to Modi’s Gujarat.
An autodriver’s drama later, one has moved on. You realise you are caught in a time warp, only you are not sure whether it is past or the future. I feel uncomfortable. Gandhi haunts you. He is no nag but he can sense the need for goodness in every man. Only he insists ordinary goodness is not enough. It is a quiet reminder that as evil gets inventive, the civics of goodness has to think out-of-the-box. You dream of a Satyagraha that can fight terrorism and smile helplessly to yourself.
The auto moves tiredly across the city.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist