CULTURE-INDIA: Remembering “Gandhi ji”

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sudhamahi Regunathan

NEW DELHI, Sep 17 1996 (IPS) - History records and having done so moves on. But some memories, some dates are recalled like the 125th birth anniversary of India’s independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.

On his birthday on Oct. 2, a year-long celebration across the country — in schools, in villages, towns and cities that he lived in or visited, at institutions set up to keep alive his ideals — will reach a climax.

Apart from the official functions, there will be meetings organised by citizens’ groups, candle-lit vigils in Porbandar, the coastal town where he was born and in the ‘ashram’ or home that he built on the banks of the gentle Sabarmati River.

Round the year there has been a stream of visitors, young and old, to his memorial in the Indian capital and to the permanent exhibition nearby. Some of them are from a fast vanishing generation of people who worked with Gandhi or saw him as he criss- crossed the country speaking at pro-independence rallies.

“I heard him speak,” says Rajamma who has come all the way to Delhi from Tiruvayur in south India, a three-day journey by train, to pay obeisance at his memorial, Rajghat. “He patted me on my head as he accompanied my father home.”

Revered particularly in India’s villages as “Bapu” or father, Gandhi led India to independence in 1947 from British colonial rule. The struggle was non-violent, based on the principle of “Ahimsa”.

The universality of his philosophy and the myriad interpretations it lent itself to attracted people from all spheres of life to join the “fakir in the loin cloth” (as he was referred to by the British) in his march for freedom.

It is the same magnetism that has brought many professionals born in the post-Gandhi era to recreate the aura around the man who every schoolchild knows as Mahatma Gandhi, the “Father of the Indian Nation”.

Haku Shah, an authority on indigenous Indian art and a well- known artist himself, has produced a book on Gandhi for children. It starts with a child asking why birds do not wear clothes. This leads gradually to Gandhi’s philosophy for wearing just a ‘dhoti’ (like a sarong) and subtlely exposes the material obsession of modern times.

“For children of today, Gandhiji is just a historical figure. To keep him alive and meaningful to the coming generations as he has been to ours, we have to reinvent our presentation of his life and works,” says Shah who is based in Gujarat, the western Indian state where Gandhiji was born 125 years ago.

A similar desire to perpetuate his values has prompted the Gandhi Peace Foundation here in the Indian capital to mark the anniversary with the launch of a feature service. “We worked out a series of puzzles, crosswords and games to introduce Gandhi to the future generations,” says Rita Roy, who is in charge.

The Foundation has been dispatching the features regularly to a long list of both Indian language and English-language dailies and periodicals across India with encouraging results.

Where the printed word does not reach, the Gandhi Peace Foundation has been organising “padyatras” or long walks to convey Gandhiji’s message to every remote Indian village and town.

Wadhwa, who is in charge of the programme, said the Foundation has set up 35 centres countrywide from where its representatives have been going off in all directions to meet people from all walks of life.

“They have covered a major portion of India, even violence- ridden Kashmir. The padyatra will continue for the whole year,” he explained.

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts located in Delhi, a premier institution for the arts, organised the holding of a special “shadow” puppet show at the beginning of the birth centenary year. The story of Gandhi’s struggle for Indian independence was told by puppets from behind a white screen on a stage lit with oil lamps.

The story was told in verse set to the metre of traditional texts by a musician from southern India, whose adaptation of the age-old medium of telling folk stories to relate a socio-political was a tremendous effort.

Apart from this, there have been seminars and talks and even the release of a film to mark the anniversary.

Directed by one of India’s finest filmakers, ‘The Making of the Mahatma’ deals with the 21 years that Gandhi spent in South Africa — from the age of 24 to 45 years — where he evolved the concept of ‘satyagraha’ (non-violent struggle) and then tested his theory in the strongly racist atmosphere of that country.

Shyam Benegal’s film is based on Fatima Meer’s book ‘Apprenticeship of a Mahatma’ and was premiered in South Africa in April this year. The cast is Indian, with a bright young actor Rajit Kapoor in the role of the Mahatma (or great in Hindi) and the well-established Pallavi Joshi as his wife Kasturba.

Like the director says the film shows the man not the myth — the very ordinariness of Gandhi, that he was not a genius or godlike and it shows the process by which he became a committed human being — messages that are even more important today for a generation that only thinks of itself.