I never thought I would be writing in defence of Gandhi. For a long time in college I viewed him as Indiana Jones in The Raiders of the Lost Ark – we were shown a great story and he was the main character, but the end result would have been exactly the same without him. India would have gained independence as the Empire divested itself.
Except of course, he decided who was in charge, set the tone for independent India, inspired various other freedom/rights struggles and maybe the British would not have released the rest of the empire without India going first. They didn’t let go of Malaysia till 57, Rhodesia till 64, HK until the lease was up, and they still cling on to the Falkland islands. Not forgetting the resulting apartheid regimes in Zimbabwe & SA.
The Hindu right wing has always been upset with Gandhi, this is unsurprising and the political drift has worsened over time with the Congress squatting squarely on Gandhi’s legacy. Yet, happily, no harsh moves have been made over the BJP decade to degrade his stature, or any public space erasure.
Instead what is new, is the attacks from the liberal left. Cancel culture loves skewering cultural heroes out of time and context. They are constantly rewarded on social media for it.
I came across this article on substack – Gandhi was a creep. It is time we stop pretending otherwise and saw all the cheering, the love, the clapping by so many liberal leaning Indians. The Guardian does it too quoting from Ramachandra Guha.
Except they both lack context. And so I clipped on my keyboard and rode out to defend the strangest and hard to defend thing Gandhi did. I do feel it deserves some discussion though, not merely one sided cheering (or defence). Let the readers of BP hold court.
https://indosaurus.substack.com/p/in-defence-of-gandhis-creepiness
I’m going to straightforward about Gandhi. I don’t like the guy’s politics, economics, cultural ideas, etc. In fact if I would be much in line with prime opponent Savarkar ideologically. But the idea that Gandhi was some kind of creep or that he didn’t matter to the character of the republic don’t really hold any real credibility towards to me. At the end of the day these are just the endlessly self-critical instincts of a western liberal transplanted onto Indian politics. I don’t think these ideas have any real space in our discussions.
One of the things I find insufferable about cancel culture is the speaking on behalf of victims.
Liberal Indians too have adopted this white saviour complex, where they insist on declaring a victim, telling them how they should feel, and finally getting outraged on their behalf with some online virtue signalling.
Great article though I am quite triggered not by the subject matter but the Author.
Oh my Lord; Serje Jordan is another Audrey Truschke or Dalyrymples.
White people who move to the Subcontinent and start loudly opining on South Asian affairs.
He is very condescending in his exchange.
Also he uses the word South Asia; but it should be the Indian Subcontinent.
Tbh I have no idea who Serge is, and I’m always wary of adding to the popularity of a specious argument by engaging in it.
Setting that aside, I wanted to observe why hunger strikes are so effective in India. The Hindu belief that self denial and iron fortitude of will can change the physical world, is strangely realised by the nation falling in line and honouring their actions.
The cockroach movement was getting nowhere until Sonam Wangchuk decided to do the Upavasa ordeal.
Gandhiji felt he could stop rioting by virtue of his Brahmachari ordeal. It was a bad idea, he quickly fell back to doing the more palatable Upavasa.
The yogic power works, but only if we all believe in it. Sort of like the bit in 1984, where you can fly, if you and everyone else believes that you can. A collective solipsism without the doublethink.
It was very interesting to see both your and OM’s perspectives on this.
The white man’s burden to civilize us heathen natives is a deeply ingrained recurring theme even now.
On Gandhi, I’m largely aligned with what OM has said, finding myself tilting more towards Savarkar.
As a woman, this particular aspect also made me wonder if the grand nieces were conditioned to accept whatever Gandhi said or did, not unlike most of India at the time. But given his desire to run these bizarre experiments, where did actual consent from the young girls come into play? That line is very blurred imo.
I found the experiments with teenage girls highly abhorrent and revulsion worthy when I read this as a teen myself long back.
Consent is a very complex emotion if you bring coercion into it. Gandhi being the guardian and ‘surrogate mother’ as Manu herself terms it. I don’t think anyone would be satisfied with her consent, judging it from the outside.
It is important to recognise that neither Gandhi, nor his nieces viewed it as a sex act. More like a yagna to affect the universe.
https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/ideas/mahatma-gandhi-manu-gandhi-diaries-tridip-suhrud-11737646395876.html
It depends on your reference, if you are absolutist like the barnevernet Norwegian child protection services, then Indian parenting can seem to be child abuse and the children need to be in protective custody.
There is no clean answer here and high ick factor. As a rationalist and a product of post colonial education I don’t condone his actions at all. I can’t condemn him for them either.
I broadly agree with the assertion that Gandhi was not a pervert. I don’t think he was fwiw, he was just egotistical.
However, no teenage girl imo would be comfortable even with her own biological mother seeing her fully undressed let alone sleep together with like that. It is but natural at that age with the biological process of puberty underway. I don’t buy the “surrogate mother” argument at all.
I’m trying to understand how the brainwashing of a young girl to this extent just to pander to one man’s ego satisfaction is ok in any normal society just because the said man was elevated to the status of Mahatma. If anything, a traumatized girl will try and rationalize the situation or blank it out to avoid further trauma.
Gandhis racism, his casteism, his misunderstanding of muslim politics, his ludditism and his weird experiments need to be called out.
That it is loud on some corners of the internet is not due to some mob or purity culture but the fact that Gandhi was considered a towering personality and one who had ultimate moral credibility. You need to be loud to get your point across. Many would simply not believe any criticism if you were not loud.
No matter the criticism of his moral character I have never come across anyone from a left leaning background diminish Gandhis role in the independence movement.
I dont think knowing about Vaishnav monasticsim or any other context can obfuscate the fact that his nieces were not even 20 when he did his experiments, and were his family. The man had a wife, why could he not do these experiments with her.
She had passed away. He did this for 2 weeks in the midst of heavy rioting, in his 70s.
Ohh was not aware.
I reread the conversation- one thing thst is not very clear is why exactly were his nieces who he did this experiment to control his ‘senses’ with. Most normal human beings even if they are not yogis will not be securely aroused by the presence of their nieces or daughters.
If he was doing some sort of penance for his own failure why not sleep next to beautiful adult women who were not related to him or his wife? That wiuld be more of a challenge. To my knowledge none of the apasaras that try to distract many yogis are related to him.
It makes his penance look insincere if thst is why he was doing this, on top of setting a very bad president for many others who will follow in his footsteps.
He basically did it with all the women in close contact with him. His doctor, his grand nieces. I suppose it was with people he trusted.
It was not a penance for his failings. Rather the Indian populace’s failings.
I’m no fan of Gandhi, so these experiments make me wonder if clearly all that Mahatma adulation indeed went to his head given this attempt of his to transcend into a Yogi state, thereby elevating himself to that level. That is why this weird experiment instead of the tried and tested fasting. That too in his 70’s.
In fact I’d wager that he may have realized that with Independence he would also become politically irrelevant gradually till Godse’s action ensured the opposite.
He was the best politician India has produced.
He should have excluded his nieces. Kind of difficult to fathom why this would be a challenge for any normal man?
I think it was his failing for being unable to stop the carnage in the wake of partition.
Bengal was calmed because of Gandhi?
Was it though?
Don’t want to undermine the man, but the worst of the violence was something already done. He stopped it from restarting like it did elsewhere.
It seems Gandhiji is a matter of halves.
The right dislike his politics but admire the man
The left dislike the man but admire the politics
Both sides amplify some scorn online.
for better or for worse he is a Founding Father of (undivided) India.
he die for Pakistan after all
1) gandhiji was a very clever man. he gained moral high ground from the british. he set an example of living what he preached, unlike today’s.
2) he knew the limitations of indians, including his.
3) he knew hinduism well.
4) he never separated his religious belief from his politics. this appealed to the masses. Nehru was accepted by the masses because he was with gandhiji, and not for his politics.
5) Gandhiji was a brave man who wrote all the things which is being discussed here. the only other example which comes to mind is that of morarji desai with his awkward habits.
6) inspite of all credit given to gandhiji for making congress a mass based party, it was not universal, by which i mean there were many families which did not have a freedom fighter.
I dont think the left dislike the man. Gandhiji is still quite popular, but there has been a pushback against his veneration.
The right in my experience have been at the forefront of trying to diminish his contribution, call him and nehru british agents, say thst he delayed independence and that ultimately Hitler deserves more credit for our independence than Gandhi.
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My sense is that pre-Gandhi, the cultural meaning and moral power of fasting varied significantly across India. Fasting as a tool of social leverage or coercion is not as intuitive to south or east India as it would be to Jain-Vaishnav culture of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Supposedly, in that region, the tradition of dharna has origins in the power dynamics between mercantile communities and princes, it was an accepted way of protest. And the itinerant baba archetype would not resonate as much with the monastic hinduism of the south, where ascetic self-discipline is not theatre. There’s definitely room to critique Gandhi as a moral narcissist within the broader Indian context.
What I find more compelling to debate is the idea that the BJP is the structural heir of Gandhi’s political machine, *not* the INC. Further to that, the centre-left liberals in the INC or popular historians and hagiographers like Ram Guha are terrified of considering that the independence movement was not a popular mandate for left liberalism. You can’t lose something you never had, and the hard work of creating that society, if they so desire it, is ahead of them.
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