My visit to India was motivated by a strong wish to stay for two weeks in the house where Gandhi lived the last day of his life. I did not succeed in realising it. I wanted to meet the spirit of Gandhi the man, more than Gandhi the Mahatma. Not surprisingly because, in the Ambassador’s words before the invitation arrived, my visit had to generate awareness about Gandhi not as an icon of the past but as a hope for the future through an appropriate programme in the Gandhi National Museum, Gandhi Smirti, University Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtrya Hindu Vishwavidyalaya and the Institute of Gandhian Studies.
On 28 January 1948, Gandhi had a premonition of the final hour. Sitting outside his room in Bula House (his home since 9 September 1947) on a warm winter afternoon, he told Rajkumari Amrit Kamur: “If I am to die by the bullet of a mad man, I must do so smiling. There must be no anger with me. God must be in my heart and on my lips.” Two days later, on his way to the prayer ground, he died a martyr’s death exactly the same way he had wished – with God on his lips.
These hallowed precincts are now Gandhi’s Smirti, the national memorial to the Father of the Nation. It is a place of pilgrimage for millions of people from all parts of India and even beyond her shores. A mass of humanity continues to come to this place as if “to atone for the sin committed by one of us on Friday, 30 January 1948 and to seek Gandhi’s forgiveness for not being worthy children.”
All this was said to me by Dr Savita Singh, director of Gandhi Smirti, as she guided me from the main entrance where a statue of Gandhi along with two children, a boy and a girl, stands on a globe symbolising his concern for those helpless. It is inscribed with a famous quotation: “My Life is my Message” to the Martyr Column – and leads to a memorial stone erected at the spot where he fell, inscribed with his words and the date and time of his death: He Ram – 5:17 Evening – 30-1-1948.
Little beyond, next to the lawns where Gandhi was assassinated, is a bronze Eternal Flame sculpted by Sankho Chowhory and flanked by a large rock inscribed with Albert Einstein’s words in both Hindi and English: “Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked on this earth”.
After I paid homage and kissed three times the Martyr’s column when Dr Singh greeted me with a shawl on my shoulders I asked her: “How could this happen? He was the voice of India’s poor and masses?” And Dr Singh answered with a low and emotional voice: “In 1947, as the battle he had waged for three decades approached its fruition, Gandhi himself was being relegated to history while still alive. During one of his last prayer meetings he expressed his desperation over how events were unfolding: ‘No one listens to me anymore. True, there was a time when mine was a big voice. Then everyone obeyed what I said; now I am crying in the wilderness’.”
Walking in the footsteps that led Gandhi to death, I felt haunted by his spirit that entered my soul. A spirit that I have still to placate and ask: “Is it the fate of all great men to be often praised and blamed for the wrong reasons?”
When it comes to politicians or leaders, they often wrote about their policies which were often eulogised blindly and referred to but seldom read. Gandhi is luckier in that regard. His nation has built these houses, memorials, publishing houses. And yet he too has his quota of detractors and fashionable iconoclasts. It has been said for example, that he is too idealist, too much in the past at the cost of the present with its tensions, its angers and rejections, its heat and dust.
I was equally moved when I visited the Gandhi National Museum and was interviewed on TV. A signboard by the entrance to the museum describes the India of Gandhi’s dreams: “I shall work for an India in which the poorest shall feel that this is their country, in whose making they have an effective voice; an India in which there shall be no high class and low class of people; an India in which all communities shall live in perfect harmony.”
He wrote this in September 1931. After that there is a big glass case containing a couple of Gandhi’s teeth and an ivory toothpick alongside his dentures – thrilling for those who get a kick out of dental relics, somewhat repellent to everyone else. The stark absence of visitors to this depressing museum, with its buzzing fluorescent lighting, adds to the impression that Gandhi has become an irrelevance in today’s India.
It may be that a younger generation scarcely knows who Gandhi is, and those who do know think he is a historical icon. Such criticism ignores a basic premise in learning evaluation. It needs to be pointed out straightaway that a great man speaks or writes what is unique in his time and moves his inner soul, and it is for that very reason that it becomes both universal and timeless.
There is nothing fashionably contemporaneous, nothing superficially modern in it. Gandhi spoke from his soul – every word is a document of our soul and its agony and freedom and not existing reportage of current affairs or shallow gimmicks on what the times demands or the age deserves. Gandhi was too great a leader to be anywhere near such superficial preoccupations.
My next stop was at the Gandhi University, known as Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtrya Hindu Vishwavidyalaya. It was my turn to deliver a talk: Developing Culture of Peace through Education – my experiences at the Peace Lab.
It was an occasion to mark the visitors programme at the University. My prayer sought to uncover the various aspects of a culture of peace. I said that peace is a positive state of mind as well as a social goal. I examined the meaning of peace in different cultures. Gandhi’s approach is an integral one in that he includes transformation of individual as well as reconstruction of society.
Prof. Gopinalkam, vice-chancellor of the University, insisted that more research on peace culture and related issues needs to be undertaken in many countries. He praised the initiative of the Peace Lab to show Gandhi as a role model to children in Malta. He recalled that it is difficult to judge Gandhi purely as a pioneer in non-violence education. For he very nearly answers to his own and the Indian concept of a total man. Religion, music, poetry, social organisation, education, nationalism – all that concern man and his world were his concern ,and to everything he contributed significantly.
In my last day in Delhi I spent some hours sitting in Warda, the hut where Gandhi lived. I was trying to absorb the spirit of peace and imbibe in me his message. There was something about the hut that impressed me greatly. First, its spiritual aspect. I very much liked its simplicity, beauty and neatness. The hut proclaims the principle of love and equality with everybody. Since the place where I live in Hal Far is in many ways like this hut, I could understand its spirit.
As you enter, there is a place where you take off your shoes and prepare yourself physically and mentally to go into the hut. And a space where Gandhi himself sat and prayed. The hut of Gandhi demonstrated to the world how the dignity of the common man can be brought up. It is also a symbol of happi-ness which we can derive from practising the principles of simplicity, service and truthfulness.
Part 1 was carried last Saturday