“Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.”
-Albert Einstein, on M.K. Gandhi
When we talk of Gandhi ji with the epithet of ‘Mahatma’ prefixed to his first name, we give him the status of a ‘great soul’ (literal translation). We accept that he belonged to a different category of humans; a class beyond the reach of normal mortals. We in India have pantheons of gods and demigods to worship and hold sacred in our hearts: Sachin Tendulkar, the God of Cricket; Mother Teresa, the Goddess of Kindness; Rajinikanth, the God of Gods and so on and so forth. We love to make messiahs of men (and slaves of women, but that’s for another day). In the thirst to create a greater figure, an exalted being, a superhuman, we do not take into account the erosive power of time. We focus so blindly on the virtues of an individual that the subsequent, more discerning and less readily impressionable generations have no option but to be cynical of our claims of these great personalities.
Similar is, according to me, the case with Gandhiji. So passionately coloured are our teachers’ (and their teachers’) accounts of his life and actions, that it is impossible for us (the current generation, that is) to relate to a greatness so untarnished and unquestioned. We instinctively rummage through the concise biographies of the great man we find with a quick google search and pick up the negatives from the positives. In our obsessive quest for relatable ‘mortality’, we contort the meaning of words to suit our fancies. We drag his character ‘down to our level’, so to speak. We pull him down from his special status of assigned greatness and try to associate as many vices and carnal traits to his person as words would allow. For it is, after all, words that connect him to us and nothing else. Neither have we heard him speak, nor have we seen him in action, except in grainy, comically sped up archival footage of the Dandi march or the spinning of a charkha.
Many (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/thrill-of-the-chaste-the-truth-about-gandhis-sex-life-1937411.html) in the contemporary world see Gandhi as a sex maniac, especially infamous for the part in his autobiography where he ‘confesses’ to having made ‘boys and girls bathe and sleep together’ in his ashram. We see his ‘experiments’ in sexual ‘deviance’ as somehow taking away the sheen of his other achievements, one of which includes almost completely uniting an entire country and rousing the varied sects and religious factions of the nation to stand up as a unit against a formidable common enemy. What is forgotten in the sea of criticism is the resonation of the ideals of non-violence and the struggle for truth (‘satyagraha’) which make up the fabric of our nation even today, more than 6 decades after religious fundamentalists pumped three bullets into the bare chested, hunchbacked crusader for freedom and unity whom we know as the Father of Modern India.
We forget, quite conveniently, the crookedness of our own character when judging that of the Mahatma. The easiest thing in the world is to criticize the life of an individual. The best way to censure a particular aspect of life around you or the status quo is to make ‘your life your message’ (derivative of the Gandhi quote, “My life is my message.”) Shut up and own up to bribing the neighbourhood traffic cop after jumping the signal. Take action to set right the evil around you, and we will see a day when we won’t need to commemorate a Gandhi or a Bhagat Singh at all: we’ll be our own ideals.
“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
-William Shakespeare, ‘Julius Caesar’.
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