I re-read Gandhiji, but the texts did not translate into painting. How to retrieve him from his busts and statuary on the road side corners, city squares, from postage stamps and rupee notes?

 

Gulammmohammed Sheikh ||

Reaching Gandhi in Our Times

Reading Gandhi can be both exasperating and exhilarating. And elevating. You often feel exhausted with his fads about health like his staunch avowal for pure and simple life which meant for instance, the tyranny of food without spices in his ashrams. He had a resistance to medicines and tried out on his son Manilal for nearly one and a half month a 'water therapy' which he had read about or 'invented'. It is a relief to learn that Manilal finally recovered. One is enraged when, in the absence of toilet facilities in the house in South Africa he forces Kasturba to carry their guests’ urine to dispose off 'with a smile on her face' as a mark of true seva; or feel angry at his having deprived his children of formal education and the effect it had on one of his sons Harilal, who went through a series of travails, at his righteous justification despite his regrets. There would be umpteen such instances that would leave one confused and unsettled.

It is however the same man who stood facing a violent crowd baying for his blood during the terrible communal riots in Calcutta during the days of Independence in 1947. He escaped a deadly assault when a heavy wooden danda thrown at him missed its target. And as Pyarelal recounts, the man who threw the danda eventually sought his forgiveness after peace was restored. In South Africa and later in India he worked tirelessly to bring honesty into legal practice.  He forgave those who assaulted him and refused to file court cases against them. One reads the diaries of his grandniece Manu Gandhi in rapt attention recounting in detail his daily padayatra which covered over thousand miles; first across the rugged tracts of Noakhali in rural Bengal where the Hindus bore the brunt of an unprecedented violence, and then in rural Bihar, where Muslims suffered in a brutal backlash, to witness the remains of carnage and devastation in village after village ravaged by the worst communal riots. Before beginning the padayatra he had resolved to walk bare-footed in empathy with the poor villagers. He had already abandoned stitched clothing for a dhoti and a chaddar from 1922 onwards during the campaign for the boycott of foreign goods. During the padayatra, he camped in makeshift huts and held daily prayer meetings which began with recitations from Hindu and Islamic scriptures, where he would ask the perpetrators of violence to shun hate, and begged them to bring back their old neighbours who had fled the village. Pyarelal reports of the instances of people expressing remorse over their actions and receiving their old neighbours back into their fold.

Pulled away from these padayatras by the spectre of Partition, he returned to Delhi and lived in the Bhangi Colony from where he conducted his daily prayer meetings. There he was heckled by disgruntled men who objected to his inclusion of the Islamic along with all other prayers. He suspended the prayers until those present agreed to multi-religion prayers. He then began visiting refugee camps and urged his countrymen to return to sanity. And when nothing worked he resorted to his only weapon, of fasting, both to cleanse the soul and instil peace. Going through accounts narrated by Pyarelal in 'Mahatma Gandhi, The Last Phase' and Manu, in her daily diaries, one is left with the sense of trauma at the plight of the victims on both sides of the borders but also of incredulousness at the actions of this one man who seemed to fight an oceanic tide of violence and hate that had engulfed the newly Independent nation. You even wonder if such a man did really exist. He had several forebodings of his assassination but he stood firm, often making jokes about it.  

Reading his own account of South Africa and his autobiography is indeed an uplifting experience. The subtitle of his autobiography is 'My Experiments with Truth'. The steadfast belief in truth was cardinal to his existence; and took on several aspects. These were manifest through an unwavering courage, moral, ideological or physical in his personal and public life. I am not in the least surprised that those who came close to him must have felt a life-changing experience. Here was a man in flesh and blood like any one of us who stood by the ideals he cherished against all odds. He says he is no saint or Mahatma and he betrays all human traits of fallibility and of grace, but above all an unrelenting grit to fight all forces of untruth and violence.

Reading Gandhi today leaves you in a state of total despair as the voices of sanity and civilised conduct in our public life have been extinguished, dissent muzzled, freedom curtailed. Even the detractors of Gandhi would agree that he respected the other, or any view or opinion that countered his own. He listened to those who disagreed with him, who objected to his methods or means, who often reviled him, upholding their right to differ with respect and humility. Manu wrote in her diaries that he continued to answer every mail he received, and would even refer to the hate-mail he received in his daily prayer meets.

My friend, historian Sudhir Chandra described the Gandhi phenomenon as an impossible possibility. Gandhi has begun to matter more as the world he left behind has turned increasingly more violent. Hardly a day passes without the news of violent happenings the world over. There is no need to describe these happenings as we all know they occur with relentless continuity. What would he have done if he were alive today? Sceptics might say he would have been assassinated in the first instance of facing this violence with his Ahimsa. Since he is no more, the question would be about the idea of Gandhi. Some would say, that we have already killed it.
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I was ten during the Partition, so do not remember much of that period. Nor was there any instance of anyone from my family leaving the country. On growing up, I​ gradually learnt about  the trauma  of the  Partition from what I read. Much of the original writings were in Urdu or Punjabi, which I got through Hindi translations. The tales Manto, Kishen Chander and Rajinder Singh Bedi had narrated opened my eyes. Sadly there were no such accounts in Gujarati.

The riots of 1969-70 and 2002 repeated twice over, the days of the Partition I had been spared. The sceptre of the Partition appeared in the divisions of  'we' from 'they', us and them. Reading my name people would begin to switch to Hindi despite my speaking in my mother tongue Gujarati.

I re-read Gandhiji, but the texts did not translate into painting. How to retrieve him from his busts and statuary on the road side corners, city squares, from postage stamps and rupee notes? Finally I spotted and used an image of his being a lawyer in South Africa rummaged from a pile of photos when an invitation to work on the theme of Satyagraha came for an exhibition in Cape Town. While painting an image on the theme of Independence I turned the form of a tree into a churning rod pulled by rival factions, a tiny image of Gandhi emerged from the tumults of partition or in the margins. Later I discovered his topi-kurta clad image seated with Andrews and Tagore in the painting by Abanindranath:  borrowing this I enlarged it to human scale and used repeatedly in two or three paintings. By 2016, I had embarked upon making a map of the city of Ahmedabad as part of  a series of 'city' paintings, I chanced upon the news of an auction with photographs of Gandhiji's 'prized possessions'  published in the Sunday Magazine of 'The Hindu'. The spectacles, slippers, a watch and a metal bowl and a plate of this faqir who did not possess a penny  sold at phenomenal  prices. The images of these objects  inserted in the ashen grey map of Ahmedabad continue to float before my eyes:  a bodiless being with spectacle sans the face, slippers without a  foot,  clutching a watch and holding an empty bowl and  plate staggers to soothen the sighs of souls gone to bed hungry.
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