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| Gandhigiri minus Gandhi | | |
Cinema's legendary SS Vasan once told me a successful film should have something for the heart, something for the ears, something for the eyes and a little for the mind. Bengali films flopped, Vasan claimed (this was in the sixties), because there was too much for the brain and not enough to see, hear and feel. Films from Bombay - no Mumbai or even Bollywood then - catered to the heart and even more lavishly for the ears and eyes, but offered little food for thought. If Lage Raho Munnabhai is any guide, the formula hasn't changed.
If "there is no such thing as Gandhism" as the Mahatma himself claimed, how can there be Gandhigiri? Etymological similarity with dadagiri and goondagiri offers an explanation. The craze is an astute creation of commercial salesmanship. A less profiteering form of Gandhigiri among English liberals prompted a verse in that Bible of the fashionable left, the New Statesman and Nation,
"Hitler with his Brown Shirts, riding for a fall
Mussolini with his Black Shirts, back against the wall
De Valera with his Green Shirts, caring not at all,
Three cheers for Mahatma Gandhi, with no shirt at all."
It would be grossly unfair to dismiss the reportedly 43,870 Gandhian groups worldwide as people with an eye on the main chance. But it is entirely appropriate that today's enthusiasts should focus not on Gandhi's concept of the village but on the fun and frolic of a paunchy, ageing bleary-eyed "hero" of the Hindi screen. Rajkumar Hirani's preposterously unreal but hilariously funny fantasia only demonstrates how easily Indians are moved by tear-jerking sentiment amidst the splurge of song, dance and colour that is Bollywood at its best.
The principal characters are brilliant but only as caricatures. Lucky, Circuit and Munna colourfully illustrate the effectiveness of reductio ad absurdum. A phantom Gandhi uttering pieties and platitudes in the quavering voice that Bollywood and TV serials reserve for gurus and godmen has no bearing on Gandhi's known views on modernisation and their relevance to globalising India.
I can think of many significant Gandhian themes. There is his 1909 message that "the railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors and such like all have to go and the so-called upper classes have to live consciously the simple life of a peasant." There was his rebuke to socialites who rose from "overloaded breakfast tables" in "spacious bungalows" and drove to the poor in "posh cars" dangling "stylish vanity bags". There was the anguished refusal of Ranjit Chetsingh, an Indian Quaker, to participate in the World Pacifist Congress "when that great pacifist Gandhi is exhorting the Indian troops in Kashmir to be prepared to die for their country." Such complexities cannot even be mentioned in the context of a frothy film.
Apparently, that didn't occur to the starstruck Sheila Dikshit whose confusion of medium with message set the Gandhigiri ball rolling. But it has not prompted anyone to knock down statues and put away pictures ("A church does not need a building" Gandhi wrote) and enshrine his memory only in their hearts. The absolving and curative therapy of puja demands deities. Puja is also profit profitable.
The film has rollicking lines. Someone recollects Gandhi only as the five-rupee note wallah. For someone else, he fathered Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. The man himself once pronounces Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi with an amusing "English" twang. Most Indians put on a bit of an accent in a Western milieu. There's no reason to think that the Middle Temple barrister in starched collar and frock coat, the first outstanding NRI, was any different.
Richard Symonds, an English Quaker relief worker in whom Gandhi took an avuncular interest, recalls the "simple and charming scenes taken from Gandhi's autobiography" among the Birla House murals. One showed him wearing a tail-coat and playing a violin; another "dancing with a lady of dubious respectability." They were removed because politicians thought they were disrespectful. "It was sad to see the Mahatma treated with such ponderous lack of imagination", Symonds lamented. Those same people will scream "Sacrilege!" if one says Lage Raho Munnabhai is great entertainment but no more.
Among them might be the "portly visiting businessmen" Symonds encountered at Sabarmati "stoking up secretly behind bushes on biscuits and chocolates sold by cycling pedlars who would also purvey illicit cigarettes" because they found the communal meals too bland. They - or their successors - are busy trotting out the film's benefits.
Sanjay Dutt now understands the "value" of Gandhi Jayanti. Shabana Azmi practised Gandhigiri before it was invented. People are again tying rakhi on a banyan Gandhi planted. A $1 million fund from Switzerland's Volkart Foundation has made khadi stylish. Designers like Rohit Bal and David Abraham and high-flying entrepreneurs like Rajeev Sethi and the princely Martand Singh are promoting fine khadi in rainbow colours to be one of the world's most exclusive - and costly - fabrics. Khadi was not an end in itself for Gandhi but "the first indispensable step towards the discharge of swadeshi dharma towards society." He dismissed "men who wear khadi but in all other things indulge their taste for foreign manufactures with a vengeance," and declared in 1931, "They are simply following fashion." Quality didn't matter. When women complained that it was coarse and unattractive, he replied he had never known a mother throw away her baby because it was ugly.
Gandhi tried to stop the recuperating Symonds - whom he had nursed in Birla House - from returning to Kolkata. Symonds protested that Bengal was his second home. "Exactly," Gandhi replied. "You and your fellow Bengalis will weep over each other, and you will eat too much and have a relapse."
Among the speakers - Lord Mountbatten, Philip Noel Baker, Dame Sybil Thorndike and others - at a meeting in London to observe the centenary of his birth in 1969 was a quiet man who had been the Yeravda jailer. He told us how a paste of a brown powder, milk and water that Gandhi produced cured the severe stomach ailment he was suffering from. When the overjoyed jailer asked what it was, Gandhi was at first reluctant to tell him. Pressed, he finally replied, "It is cow dung."
Gandhi lived and died before the age of designer medicines, designer babies, designer khadi or designer Gandhism. The last is called Gandhigiri, and it's a damn lucrative business
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