Gandhi in an unGandhian land

The day began discouragingly: an 18 km tuk-tuk ride through Ahmedabad’s canyon-streets of horn chaos, gridlock and blue exhaust out to Adalaj Vav, described as one of the most beautiful step-wells in India with its golden layered depths and exquisite sculptures, only to find a construction crew has closed and filled theses depths with scaffolding.

Next stop the Sabarmati (Gandhi) ashram.

Today a shaded and restful memorial-museum compound with fine displays, the ashram is where the Mahatma lived from 1917 to 1930. Here he held meetings with weavers and Harijans (Untouchables), discussing with them their rights and working with them to re-establish the manual textile industry in Ahmedabad.

 

It was also from here that he and 80 followers launched their 3895-kilometre Salt March against the British Salt Tax Law, a march that gathered 90,000 protestors, many of whom the British jailed. This early campaign was based upon Gandhi's principles of non-violent protest called satyagraha, which he loosely translated as "truth-force" and is formed from the Sanskrit satya, "truth" and agraha, "asking for." The British never conceded the Salt Tax Law. But the beating and jailing of the non-violent protesters received worldwide news coverage, and the subsequent satyagraha actions were a major factor in creating more social justice in India and bringing about India’s independence. The satyagraha approach also significantly influenced the American civil rights movement and many other oppositional, non-cooperation and non-violent, movements around the world.

In spite of almost 2,000 visitors a day, Sabarmati is a place of calm.  Visitors move slowly, attentively through the collection of documentary photos, Gandhi texts and descriptive commentary, all so all so clearly and stylishly, even reverently, presented in a quiet way.

One evocative room as been preserved, dusty white plastered walls, almost empty except for a spinning wheel, a thin white mattress, a few personal items – round spectacles, seamless white dhoti, wooden shoes – all the more poignant by their association with well-known photographs of an every-so-slight, erect, walking, so often walking, determined Gandhi, staff in hand.

We welcome the calmness here as visitors move with interest through the collection of photos, Gandhi texts and descriptive commentary, In another building a woman gives some kind of lesson or talk to a group of 20 year olds, then they sing something that sounds like a prayer. Two large groups of elementary-age children enter the compound as we leave. 


It’s good to see all these young people, especially amidst such an un-Gandhian new India -- its inequities and discontent easily turned into politically-incited 'sectarian' violence (here in Ahmedabad and Gujarat especially), its criminalized politics, its ever-widening industrialization and stupifying of work, its spending of billions on armaments (India is now the world’s largest arms buyer).

In this context, displayed examples of Gandhi’s voice are as refreshing and necessary as the shade trees … like his statements on ‘democracy’ [see photos], his abiding attention to independent thought and personal conscience, the right to disobey if the law is against truth, the egalitarian satisfying of essential needs and of human rights, the importance of the reflective, examined life, the idea of basing production (and consumption) on the skills of our hands and needs and health of the embodied human being ….

I have wondered since how Gandhi would have experienced this place, his ashram-become-museum. Like those documentary photos, so many of which have taken on iconic, non-historical qualities. Or the displays of selective texts, speaking to admired (and, for me admirable) principles and ideas (including his almost unique opposition to finger-printing by the state), but filtering out other thought-provoking responses (he didn’t grasp Nazi malevolence and counselled Jews and other Europeans to follow non-violence). What would be say about the reverential atmosphere at Sabarmati, the sense of Saint Gandhi? "Everybody is eager to garland my photos," he said late in life, just before being assassinated. "But nobody wants to follow my advice."

There is a fine, critical essay by Ashis Nandy, “Gandhi After Ghandi,” on this subject.

Of all Sabarmati’s photos, there was one and a type of another that especially moved me. The one is of a boy (I understand he is Gandhi’s grandson, Kahna Gandhi) pulling on Gandhi’s staff, seeming to pull him ahead, the two perhaps enjoying a playful moment, perhaps also youth taking the elder’s staff further ahead into a still to be determined future.

The other photos – the ones without the many crowds, the meetings with Indian and world leaders, the many public speeches – those others, often dark and shadowy, showing a lone Gandhi in spare homespun, staff in hand, walking, so often seeming to be walking, remembering conversations, imagining, giving shape to his ideals and his so practical social concerns, knowing against his wishes that principle and political strategy will rarely if ever come together – make me feel the necessity, the urgency of many ‘Gandhis’, as responsible individuals, as trouble-makers, as the not so quickly beguiled by new India’s glitter or taken in by this or that bully-theatre of ‘enemies’ and ‘honour’ and ‘vengeance’.

Across the country, as Ashis Nandy says, a widely celebrated ‘Gandhi’ has made Gandhi the man suffer a miserable fate. His portrait hangs in offices and homes (like guru-saint, giving protection for anything I want), a national holiday is held in his ‘honour’ (which few seem to have thought of the reasons for), and pigeons have more and more Gandhi statues on which to shit.

Meanwhile, the dangerous Gandhi – demanding, anarchistic, anti-violent, contradictory, humane, self-reflective, despiser of the modernist devotion to obsessive production-consumption, determined to give shared human power to his vision – has long been shunted to the rusting side rails of ‘independent’ and now ‘new’ India. That, more likely than in the ashram, is where you’ll find a few mavericks and trouble-makers, like Nandy himself, who take the man’s struggles seriously in their own thoughts and practice, but hardly mention the man himself.

Ahmedabad: walking through the uncertainties of ‘heritage’

“Heritage Week” in Ahmedabad. I have been thinking about how we understand a community’s “heritage,” and those things associated with heritage, like history, social and personal remembering, the layers of meaning in those places where we stand right now, who gets to ascribe “meaning,” how is the “past” alive today for people in this place?

                                                                                            

Today we joined a superbly guided “Heritage Walk,” led by a woman volunteer, through threads of lanes linking the pols (centuries-old self-contained neighbourhoods) of old Ahmedabad. Most of the people on the walk are from other parts of metropolitan Ahmedabad, a first visit for many, and we hear in their responses that this feels to them no less “foreign” than it does to us.

The pols are the oldest quarters of a city founded in 1411, but likely much older. We move along deep, narrow lanes between shadows and bright dappled sunlight under the arching silhouetted lines of balconies, wooden screens, carved roof brackets, stairways, walls and towers of the surrounding wood-carved havelis and stone temples. 

For centuries each pol was like a self-contained village based on trades, crafts and caste. Merchants, weavers, woodworkers, washerwomen, printers, tailors, jewellers, families with their milk cows – everyone needed in the larger city. Each pol’s winding lanes met in a common courtyard or square, each had their own wells and chabutaras, great stone bird feeders sitting on tall columns. Each also had great wooden gates and security systems, cul-de-sacs and secret passages, suggesting periods of conflict, or at least fear of such, within the larger city.

This particular morning women and a few men wash clothes in plastic buckets and worn stone basins; a pol of farmers feeds their big-horned cattle (deep inside this city of six million); a stout elderly women in pink sari, silver trim sparkling, sits framed between her second-storey shutters watching the passing neighbourhood; a 15 or so year old girl pulls up a bucket of water from a large barrel. Suddenly drums and horns sound, the canyon lanes erupt and a procession emerges from another street, high-stepping camels pulling decorated chariots carrying effigies, dancing drummers, banners, colourful wagons pulled by great-horned bulls, more drumming, more men in festive dance – the celebration, we are told, of a senior Jain nun’s birthday.

Further along, a man, hands seamed black, sits surrounded by polish pots, hammers, needles, and a squat work bench, stitching soles on a pair of shoes. On temple steps, a woman weaves garlands of red and yellow marigolds. Teenage boys play cricket using someone’s rusty bike as a wicket.

This is a lively, living place, the people unself-consciously welcoming, the lanes brushed clean. All this in a physical environment that feels so worn by use and weather, derelict even … bleached pastel walls, pink, yellow, blue, covered in dripping screens of black mold, the once-varnished wood carved porticos and brackets now cracked and worn dull grey. Rusted signs, sagging roof overhangs, a late 20thC cat’s cradle of wires running every which way overhead. Time’s jumble of portico’s decorated with flowers and elephants carved by 15thC stone masons alongside the plain surfaces of modernity’s squared functionality.

Back out on main street it’s “heritage” everywhere. The local newspapers can’t use the word enough. The India PO has launched a new Heritage Ahmedabad cancellation mark. The city’s “glitterati” has attended the launch of a new fabric collection. The contributions of African and Chinese residents are celebrated.

But today’s headlines, “Banking on Heritage,” belong entirely to New India. Described are someone’s plans for a “giant heritage park” straddling a section of the banks of the mighty Sabarmati River into which our rickshaw driver yesterday tossed a large bag of garbage. From the illustrations, the “giant heritage park” will feature smart new buildings celebrating Gandhi’s ashram, “a recreation of the aesthetical essence of  the Mughal age, a “wall of fame” for city heroes and heroines, a “cluster of life-scale replicas of pol architecture” and much much more – a kind of well-scrubbed, all-inclusive “heritage” for the age of bankers, B.Comms., developers, engineers and lawyers. (Deeper into the same paper I read that last night, the police moved in with clubs and bulldozers and tore down 2,000 “shanties” of the poor along the banks of the same Sabarmati.)

Later in the day, our thoughts still on heritage, we talk with Anis, the desk clerk at our hotel, and a Muslim, about the politicized sectarian violence this city and Gujarat state have experienced during the past 60 or so years, much of his life-time. A man with a quick, kindly smile and gentle voice, he found the conversation increasingly painful. It turns out that his nephew was killed in 2002, along with up to 2,000 other people, the majority Muslims. Subsequent inquiries (where bribes, lies and threats against witnesses have been commonplace) point to how Gujarati Hindu politicians inflamed anti-Muslim feeling at the time, with some Hindu leaders inciting violence and the police seemingly under orders to do nothing. A number of these politicians have more public power today than they did in 2002.

Anis says that Hindu-Muslim tension is still high across the state and here in the capital, that it can feel frightening to be a Muslim here (about 35% of residents, including many shop keepers) and that most people fear to talk openly about 2002 – a point possibly echoed by the absence in our “heritage” walk of any reference to the repeated waves of violence. Relying on today’s Ahmedabad edition of the Times of India, with its opening pages given over to Heritage Week and its front page “Banking on Heritage” headline, a visitor would be ignorant of what brings Anis to tears when we ask him about his city.

The very little of the “heritage” I have learned about in Ahmedabad is full of claimed certainties (for example, the self-interested certainties of BJP leaders’ who claim some pure Hindu tradition and India as the land of Hindus) and so much evidence that question and undercut the power of these certainties … as, for example, the stone and woodwork of temples and mosques across India and here in Ahmedabad. Notice inside Sidi Sayyid’s Mosque the carved heroes, heroines and animals from Hindu myths, the accepted contributions of Jain and Hindu craftsmen in the building of this mosque in the late 16thC. Or the 260 elegant stone pillars supporting the prayer hall of the grand Jama Masjid, each unmistakably covered with Hindu carvings. Or similar work in the elegant 1514 mosque of Rani Sipri.

One-dimensional hateful certainties or the physical evidence of these places – I wonder with what “heritage” the people of Ahmedabad will make their future? They’d be wise to listen to people like Anis, his belief in importance of patient understanding, his kindly smile, his sadness … the living dimensions of his own felt-heritage.

FOOTNOTE - On the 2002 Gujarat massacres and continuing denials and violence, see the following:

Pankaj Mishra, “The Gujarat massacre: New India’s blood rite”

BBC report, “India court orders probe into Gujarat 'fake encounters',” January 2012

Ward Berenschot, “Riot Politics: India’s Communal Violence and the Everyday Meditation of the State.”

Bruised to Bhuj

“You’ll enjoy it,” says Anis, the usually helpful hotel desk clerk. “Very comfortable. A double bed. Yes, a mattress of course. Very comfortable.” The man next to him nods and smiles.

We have been asking about the nine-hour overnight ”sleeper bus” ride from Ahmedabad to Bhuj. Have they ever taken this bus? Or travelled anywhere over night for nine hours in a “sleeper bus”? We should have asked that too. In any case the trains are full. “Can you get us a bed that is NOT over the rear axle?” “Not a problem.” Our ticket says “Seat 7 and 8.”

Ten p.m., we clamber into the bus, counting seats and beds. Three and four, five, six, seven and eight – heh, here we are, dead over the rear axle. “Not a problem.” Who would have thought that this is what was meant? We take a look, but there’s not much to see. Call it a submarine bedroom, fourth-class. And the mattress? As promised, but cardboard thin and just as hard. Then there’s the blood-soaked thug movie and its bizarre Bollywood dance numbers blasting from the bus ceiling and a speaker so thoughtfully built into our cubicle.

We’re almost settled when we launch towards Bhuj, the bus weaving this way and that through the traffic, stop and go, stop and go, our bodies tossed back and forth against the window, walls and one another, grabbing for some missing something to avoid being thrown onto the floor.

We sit up, hunched over. We lie down. Sit up again, heads cracking on the bunk above. The lights dim outside. We’re in the country, flat saltpan country, the straight smooth highway due west. Again we lie down then another double swerve and thump-thump-thump, that axle like a slingshot snapping its steely bar into our spines. 

We peer outside into the dark. They’re rebuilding the road or setting drains or putting in speed bumps. Something’s behind these stretches of barriers and washboard gravel, laid out randomly it seems, each a cunning little surprise. Nothing better to keep the nerves alert, raw. Boom! Up bounce, down thump. Mr Axle, Mr Spine, Mr Speedbump and Mr Pain … like those tag team wrestlers my hundred-year-old grandmother used to boo and cheer.

We brace ourselves across flat saltpans, ease off, settle just a little, begin to let go … then … of course, we’re at it again. It’s hopeless. Only the road and the bus and Ganesh know when to deliver the next WHACK!  We roll on our stomachs. A punch in the gut. On to our sides? A drop-kick in the kidneys, another in the ribs. Back on our backs and one wheel drops off the road, tossing us towards the aisle already full of the wounded and an assortment of wandering shoes, suitcases, boxes, a sock and shirt.

“Sleeper bus” indeed.

The garbage bag

In a moto rickshaw on our way out of Ahmedabad to the Adalaj Vav, a famously beautiful step-well which – no one seems to know – will be closed when we arrive. 

Suddenly our driver pulls to the edge of the Nehru Bridge mid-distance over the wide Sabarmati River, reaches to the floor, pulls up a bag of garbage, steps to the bridge edge, tosses it into river, steps back into the rickshaw and drives off. We are speechless. 

Sometimes one or the other of us has questioned people for such acts; we have even berated a few, to the puzzlement, astonishment or quiet cheering of others nearby.

Today, though, we are speechless.