`The real Gandhi'

Interview with Rajmohan Gandhi.

Rajmohan Gandhi, journalist, author, scholar and biographer, now teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His father, Devdas Gandhi, is Mahatma Gandhi's youngest son, and his maternal grandfather is C. Rajagopalachari. Prof. Gandhi has written several books including The Good Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi, Rajaji: A Life and Revenge and Reconciliation: Understanding South Asian History. His new biography of Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, his People and an Empire, was published recently. He spoke about his latest book in a telephone interview.

What side of Gandhi are you trying to portray or explore in this book?

The human Gandhi - the real Gandhi, the Gandhi that we can touch, that we can put our arms around. Gandhi's face is known to us. His statue is known to us. But we don't know the heartbeat of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. I am hoping that through this book, the pulsating human Gandhi will come across.

What were the stories that you feel were left untold? Can you give us any anecdotes?

It isn't as if several stories were left untold. That is not true at all. Most of the stories are widely known. But, somehow the real stories of the real man got lost in the huge landscape of his achievements. Just as you notice the skyscrapers in a city, and you lose the real landmarks; in the same way, the towering achievements of Gandhi's life concealed the humanity of this man. His relationship with his wife, with his sons, with his parents, his close associates. So, it is the real Gandhi concealed by the scale of his achievements that I tried to bring out.

The book is 683 pages [long] and every chapter has some amazingly rich, sometimes moving, stories of a man who was not always perfect. He was a frail human being. Sometimes he was harsh to his wife and children. Other frailties, too, have been recorded in this book. But he also had the capacity to emerge from any difficult situation and to confront the biggest challenges that his people faced. He was not there for his family alone; he was there for the country as a whole and, indeed, for the oppressed people of the world. But, if we can relate to him as a human being, then we feel that at least something that he did, we too can do. This is not a remote Gandhi, but a real Gandhi that we can connect to.

Can you share with us some of your personal memories of him?

There is a picture in the book of me at the age of one and a half, lying in his lap, which I am very proud of. I was with him when I was a very small child in the Sewa Gram ashram in central India. Later, I was with him when I was about seven or eight, when my grandmother Kasturba lay dying in the Poona detention camp, where she finally died in February 1944.

But the most vivid memories are during his last two or three years, when he spent much of his time in New Delhi where I was going to school along with my siblings. My father was the editor of The Hindustan Times. We had an apartment in the same building where the newspaper had its offices. During that time, which was a time of anguish and agony and pain, because India was about to be partitioned and killings were about to take place, Hindus and Muslims were fighting. And Gandhiji was trying to bring courage and solace to the victims, bring sanity to the subcontinent.

I would frequently attend his prayer meetings. I would go before the prayer meetings started. I would stay through the prayer meetings and walk back with him afterwards. And there would be a lot of banter and cheerfulness. This was the amazing thing - that even though I was only 11 at the time, I could notice his anguish as he heard the grave stories of suffering, which was most of the time. All these people would come because they thought of him as somebody who belonged to their family. So they would come and report their sorrows to him. I would sit in a corner along with my siblings and listen to all this, and watch the agony on my grandfather's face. And, I would then watch his face transform itself as he greeted his grandchildren, giving us a great thump on the back. He tried to give his best to everybody - to the refugees who were coming to tell their sad stories - and he would also thump our back with great affection. Even though he was an old man, and often fasting, and so he was a weak man, but this 78-year-old man could give a very powerful slap on your back.

And then I would often sit near him facing the prayer meeting, which was sometimes a few hundred [strong] and sometimes more than a thousand. Occasionally, not often, a section of the audience would express its resentment at him for reciting from the Koran. So Gandhi would try to reason with them - "We are also having the Gita, scriptures from other religions and also Hindu bhajans, so why are you objecting to the Koran? You know what this verse says? It's a beautiful verse." They would often accept his reasoning, but at other times they would say, "We will not allow the Koran." Then Gandhi would ask the others in the audience, "Do you want the Koran recited?" And they would say, "Of course, we don't mind." Then he would say to them, "Please go by the majority, not by your own point of view." Very occasionally, they would say, "Even if everybody else wants it we don't want it and we will shout and we will not let you have it." Then he would say, "In that case, everything else in the prayer will also be left out and we will continue only with my post-prayer discourse."

And I would ask myself that if these angry men come and attack him, do I have the capacity to protect him physically, with no bodyguard? Anyway, the situation never arose. On the fateful day of January 30, when he was killed, I wasn't at the prayer meeting. I was in school with my brother Ramchandra. We were having a sporting event in the school, so we missed that prayer meeting. So, there was no occasion for us to be put to the test as to whether we could protect our grandfather.

Any memories of ashram life?

When I went to the Sewa Gram Ashram once or twice, I was only five or six years old. The general atmosphere was always uplifting and exciting. You felt you belonged to some great national adventure. When I went to the Poona detention camp, where my grandmother lay dying, Gandhiji was there; again, there was that atmosphere, even though they were behind barbed wires. We needed a lot of police permission to be able to get inside the place, but then you instinctively felt that power resided inside those barbed wires, not outside them.

Today the ashrams are lying as museum pieces. Has the Gandhian movement declined?

The question of the actual historical sites, for instance, where Gandhi was born, the Sabarmati Satyagraha ashram, the Sewa gram ashram, Gandhi Smriti where he was assassinated ... these places are used as historical sites. There is nothing wrong in that. If you go to Lincoln's places, you don't insist that Lincoln's house should be vibrant with some kind of social activity, some kind of radical economic activity. You are perfectly content to see a historical place. The same is true of the historic Gandhi sites. So I don't object that these historic sites are places that people wish to go and see.

Yes, the Gandhians as a whole have to examine their role today. A great violence took place in Gujarat in 2002. It was a standing challenge, and indictment of all of us who dare to take Gandhi's name, that in Gandhi's Gujarat, minorities were so horribly treated. So those are the questions that all Gandhians, or those who love Gandhi, need to think about and face. Much that is happening in India today is good. There is a great eagerness to fight for secular values, to fight for the downtrodden, to make sure that India exists not only for the privileged few, not to be satisfied with the rise of a section of the Indian people. Because, the groans, the sadnesses, of so many of our brothers and sisters go unheard.

How actively do you think Gandhians are responding to today's issues?

There are a great many people in India, some will use Gandhi's name, some will not use Gandhi's name, but as long as they activate the Indian conscience, to me they are doing Gandhi's work. Courses in school, documentation of any kind is of lesser importance to me. The real importance is to energise the Indian masses and to activate the Indian conscience.

In writing this book, my task is to present the true Gandhi story. Gandhi deserves to be studied and analysed. People should know the real Gandhi for themselves. My task was to present, in as interesting a way as I could, this extraordinarily real life of a real human being with his frailties, who could not have achieved what he achieved without his wonderful fellow fighters. Many people will recognise their grandparents in this book. Because their grandparents in their tens or hundreds of thousands were the partners or the comrades who enabled Gandhi to succeed.