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.
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.
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