Seeing a Gandhi, Being a Mahatma

As a kid I saw Gandhi, the father of nation, on books, in statues, in images on national television where a beautiful stoke of brush painted his spectacle frame. Only the painted stroke fascinated me then. As months went ahead I saw more of him, in history, in english, in hindi. Even further, started seeing more of him, in films, in songs, in poetry, in prose. Never thought of observing through all these events. He was there, he was there.

Some years later realized his being a Mahatma, at prime youth, we discussed how stunted his ways were, and how he led to partition and how we would have won freedom much earlier if he wouldn’t have been there. Really? Who were we to decide, but this never occurred to us.

Later he came to me with his experiments with truth. Very very intriguing, so profound, so humane, i decided that he was a brilliant man but either Gandhi and mahatma were not the same or he changed after he was gotten over by politics. He was no longer just a picture but he did not mean anything beyond it too.

Yesterday I came across an American-Britishman, who gave a significantly altered idea of Gandhi, and somehow I felt i got him being a Mahatma. Proff. Tim Bassinger, spoke about the British Bombay and Lockwood Kipling, the arts and crafts movement, John Ruskin and William Morris. Post the industrial revolution, Ruskin realised that the development and machines are making human life ugly and miserable. They wanted to go back to the rural areas, where handicrafts were more beautiful than the machine produced. Ruskin sights that perfection is not human and if you try to mechanize him it would be unnatural. The village craftsman and craftsmanship are the most natural and wonderful things. These led to the nostalgic aesthetics of these certain Britishers towards colonized India. The most interesting thing that came across at the end of the lecture was Gandhi’s association with Ruskin’s thoughts/ literature when he was in Africa and his application of the similar in the independence struggle. He says that the barber and the lawyer have same right to earn wages and that India identifies itself in the villages. The swadeshi movement where the clothes exported were shed off and that every person weaving his/her own cloth is the personification of the arts and crafts movement where the villager maintains his art and controls industrialization in his own small way.

Somehow, Gandhi tried to patronize local/traditional arts of our country. Just a few days back, i came across a discussion about Siv Sena and its methods of justice. It taught and supported people to fight against but what after they win or lose? And somehow they keep liberal theorist away from the struggle by labeling them as elite. And that's where I went beyond seeing Gandhi as being a Mahatma. His vision is so vast that one might take years to see it. Not only did he want independence, he wanted us to be proud of our traditions, accepting modernities but without becoming machines. He wanted to create a nation which would not be lost after independence, not knowing where to go. Following his ideas, may be we would not have faced the heavy migration in metro cities that we see today, nor the endangerment of indigenous traditions, and major unemployment crisis.

Feeling blessed to have thought over this on the occasion of his birth anniversary. I don’t think Gandhi today would be pleased with his statues and names to every street in the country, he needs to be lived in our lives, he i believe didn’t want to be a Mahatma, but propagated being one, and wanted everyone to be one of his self mahan atma, a divine soul.