Perhaps it has all to do with that I have been away for many days from my home. My Indianness becomes that much more precious. My India shines ever more than it did before. So seated in a suburban home in Copenhagen, I find it hard to stomach the notion of a Danish woman who wants to lecture me on how to be a Gandhian. She has worn khadi because she thinks she is meeting an Indian. She discovered India in the fifties and today, almost sixty years later, I sit before her questioning everything that she has built her entire life around.
Including the fine-spun khadi.
I can feel eyes narrow and my brow wrinkle when she utters those loaded words, "I am a Gandhian!" In my lexicon, it is like the fraud who wears the evangelist's disguise and proclaims, "I am a Christian!" If you knew you were one, you didn't have to try and convince me about it, etc.
But it makes me think about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and what he represents to a country he wouldn't recognise any more. I think of my son and his generation. Does Gandhi mean anything to them at all? Or even to the generation before them.
All of us as children were subject to school text versions of what Gandhi was all about: the boy who refused to lie; the man who spent a great part of his youth in prison; the charka and the goat milk and peanuts; the Meera bhajans and that final shot culminating in Hai Ram.
In less than hundred words, an entire lifetime and the parts of a history of a nation could be summed. Is that why Gandhi is no longer no more than a picture that adorns the walls of schools, police stations and government offices?
The Danish woman tries to capture several other beliefs into what she thinks is her Gandhian theology. The Chipko movement and Jayaprakash Narayan's kisan movement.
In her world scarce of heroes, Gandhi is hers. But he can't be mine. So, in a vain attempt, I try and unravel many strands of Indian history to her. But she, like her khadi, resists any new thought. In her world Gandhi advocated a lifestyle and anyone who swerves from it is condoning Indian nationalism!
It occurs to me that if she had her way, she would have us knee deep in slush planting our fields and spinning our thread?
A woman sitting next to me whispers, "It is all romantic idealistic nonsense!"
But a couple of days later Gandhi appears in yet another conversation. This time in Sweden. Once again I try and explain the lack of connection that this generation feels with Gandhi. He is but a face on a 500 rupee note I want to remark, but bite that facetious remark down. When it comes to the father of the nation, sarcasm is dangerous, I reprimand myself. I do wish though that there was a way to nurture that faith in him again. To remember what the man was all about and how much he accomplished.
I wish there was a way to bring to life some of the edicts he lived his life by and some of the truths he showed us. Mostly I do wish we were not such a lost people anymore where a Danish woman without a word of Hindi to save her life thought it her goddamn right to patronise me with an "I am a Gandhian."
The subtext being: Are you?
