When I look back on that visit and the discussion that followed, I am convinced that, without quite realizing it, what we had blundered upon was nothing short of momentous. This was the discovery of the repression of Gandhi’s death, or to put it more accurately, his brutal murder, or to use the description of those who considered the slaying an act of bravery and patriotism, his execution. This was not any ordinary killing; it was the assassination of the Father of the Nation himself. Nor was the killer any ordinary criminal. The killer was Nathuram Godse, a Brahmin from Pune, who used Gandhi’s favourite scripture, the Bhagawad Gita, to justify his action. Suspended in those manicured lawns of the old Birla House was a question of gigantic proportions, one that had the potential to destabilize not just the modern Hindu psyche but the nation itself. To understand Gandhi’s afterlife, what he really meant to India and Indians, was no less than to understand all the ramifications of that question. So threatening and destabilizing was it that the only way that either the state or civil society could deal with it was by repressing it, turning away the visitors’ attention to the somewhat more well-rehearsed, if not banal, facts of his life. The question had to be papered over, swept under the rug, or deflected somehow. Just as we wish to forget some searing and incomprehensible childhood trauma, this event that had dumb-founded the newly born nation of India was one of the deepest wounds of its infancy. Though we wish not to remember or confront it, without its unearthing the nation, fractured from without and fractious within, could not be healed or made whole. In the solution to the riddle of Gandhi’s assassination also lay the answer to India’s future.
That is why the sandstone steps marking Gandhi’s footprints on the grassy lawns of the old Birla House stop midway, leaving a looming question mark in the air. It is an overwhelming question pertaining to an act so heinous that the Hindu psyche has yet to fully come to terms with it. Gandhi has been called the Father of the Nation: his image adorns our currency; his name adorns our streets, localities and towns; his statues stand sentinel in the public gardens and parks of our country. It is he who is above all the symbol of the nation, whether in India or abroad. But we killed him. This uncomfortable fact is what all the monuments and memorials to Gandhi wish to hide or escape from. So strong is this aversion to his assassination that the event has been elided out of school textbooks.1
In popular accounts, Gandhi’s murder has often been called a martyrdom. The Hindi words for it that come to mind are shahadat and balidaan, but these are, once again, attempts to repress the most uncomfortable aspect of this killing, which are that a Hindu killed Gandhi; that the killer was neither demented nor out of control but perfectly calm, deliberate, and rational; that he was a well-read Brahmin who quoted the scriptures; that he stood for and articulated the anti-Gandhi sentiments of a sizeable section of the population; that the government was negligent in preventing this tragedy; that the specious if elaborate reasoning offered to justify the murder still has adherents; and so on. But these discomforts are nothing compared to the one overwhelming horror: that the act was self-consciously committed as a patricide. It is this killing of the ‘Father of the Nation’ by one of his ‘sons’ that is so intolerable and shocking to the Hindu psyche as to demand its continued repression.
We do not need much imagination to interpret Nathuram’s act as patricidal because he himself saw it as such, according to his own court statement:
Gandhiji is being referred to as the Father of the Nation – an epithet of high reverence. But if so, he has failed in his paternal duty in as much as he has acted very treacherously to the nation by his consenting to the partitioning of it … I stoutly maintain that Gandhiji in doing so has failed in his duty which was incumbent upon him to carry out, as the Father of the Nation. He has proved to be the Father of Pakistan. It was for this reason alone that I as a dutiful son of Mother India thought it my duty to put an end to the life of the so-called Father of the Nation who had played a very prominent part in bringing about the vivisection of the country – Our Motherland.
(Godse 1989: 153)
From this statement it is clear that Nathuram considered it his sacred ‘duty’ as a ‘dutiful’ son of Mother India to kill the ‘treacherous’ Father of the Nation who had failed in his ‘duty’ and instead become the ‘Father of Pakistan’. The repetition of the word duty is surely striking. It is a direct invocation of the Bhagawad Gita, the scripture that Nathuram quoted to justify his act. In common parlance, the Karma Yoga of the Gita is often translated into English as the doctrine of doing one’s duty without desiring the fruits thereof.
Here Nathuram’s justification of his deed fails on two counts: not only does he hanker after the goal of ‘Hindu Rashtra’ but he is willing to go to any extent to attain it. Far from being desireless, his act is solely instrumental and directed at achieving a specific goal. In addition Nathuram, in characterizing his act as the carrying out of a ‘duty’ in order to punish or correct Gandhi’s failure to do so, arrogates to himself the capacity to accuse, prosecute, judge, and execute his adversary. The Gita does not empower one to judge the failure of another to carry out his duty or to punish him for it; it merely enjoins one to carry out one’s own duty without hankering after its fruits. How can a murder, carefully plotted and ruthlessly executed with the sole desire for the fruit of the action, that is to kill a political adversary, be seen as ‘desireless action’? No wonder no scholar of the Gita has found it worthwhile to point out the doctrinal fallacies in Nathuram’s arguments, nor any of his supporters thought it necessary to justify his act on scriptural or philosophical grounds. Clearly the constant reference to ‘duty’ and thus to the Gita is a red herring; no matter how Nathuram wished to view or legitimate his act, we must look elsewhere to understand its sources and effects. The real clue, as I suggested earlier, lies not in Indian classical sources, but in Western ones; not in the Gita, but in Oedipus Rex. The matter is not of doing one’s duty as the Gita enjoins, but of patricide, something too heinous to contemplate for the Hindu mentality.
It is also crucial to see the link between the Partition and the assassination of Gandhi so explicitly clarified by Nathuram himself. The killing, coming less than six months after Partition, thus becomes a repressed dyad in my own analysis into the nation’s unconscious. The repression of the Partition, following Frederic Jameson’s argument in The Political Unconscious, signifies not just the failure of the national project as envisaged by Gandhi and his associates, but also the unacknowledged desire for a reunion some time in the future. The utopian impulse for a united India based on Hindu-Muslim unity may be repressed, but that does not mean that it is dead or will never come back. For noted philosopher Basanta Kumar Mallik (1879–1958), ‘the two events of Partition and Assassination were interlinked: the former he [Mallik] had already described as the defeat of India and Gandhi; the latter’s assassination put a seal on it’ (Sondhi 2008: 339–340).
Ashis Nandy in his essay ‘Final Encounter: the Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi’, an extended examination of the event in the book At the Edge of Psychology: Essays on Politics and Culture (1990), fails to detect or stress the Oedipal pattern of the assassination despite his being India’s leading political psychologist. Though he quotes from Nathuram’s court speech and identifies the parricidal2 nature of the event, his reading continues his older thesis, first propounded in The Intimate Enemy (1983), of maladjustments and discontents of Indian masculinity, of which he considers both the celibate Nathuram and the womanizing Apte as examples. ‘The womanizer and the homosexual’, says Nandy, ‘both articulate, through diametrically opposite kinds of sexuality, the same sensitivities’ (1990: 86), the one wanting to prove he is a man, the other fearing women, and uncertain about his masculinity (ibid.). Nathuram, according to Nandy, the ‘ascetic misogynist’ and Gandhi’s ‘other’ (ibid.: 85), murders the Mahatma driven by
fantasies of a mother who becomes a victim of rapacious intruders, a weak emasculated father who fails in his paternal duty and collaborates with the aggressors, and an allegiant mother’s son who tries to redeem his masculinity by protecting the mother, by defeating the aggressors in their own game and by parricide.
(Nandy 1990: 83–84)
Apart from this diagnosis of Nathuram’s personal pathology, Nandy devotes a considerable portion of his analysis to the political psychology of the Chitpavan Brahmin community to which Nathuram belonged.
Indeed, the bulk of his essay is aimed at proving that the murder was
a case of the dominant traditions within a society trying to contain a force which, in the name of orthodoxy, threatened to demolish its centre, to erect instead a freer society and a new authority system using the rubble of the old.
(Ibid.: 93)
Nandy claims that the killing was engineered by ‘the main strain of Indian, particularly Hindu, culture’ for whom Gandhi’s ‘political activism’ was ‘highly subversive’ (ibid.: 71) because of Gandhi’s ‘continuous attempt to change the definitions of centre and periphery in Indian society’ and his ‘negation of the concepts of masculinity and femininity implicit in some Indian traditions and in the colonial situation’ (ibid.). According to Nandy, Gandhi tried to ‘de-intellectualize Indian politics’ (ibid.) through a ‘process of de-Brahminization through de-intellectualization’ (ibid.: 72), which is what made the upper-caste Hindus retaliate and seek revenge. Gandhi also gave importance to the ‘rediscovery of womanhood’ making the woman the model of the satygrahi: ‘It would therefore seem that Gandhi’s innovations in this area also tended to simultaneously subvert Brahmanic and Kshatriya orthodoxy and the British colonial system’ (ibid.: 74). Nandy asserts that ‘Gandhi not only wanted to be a trans-secular mahatma or saint in the Indian sense; he also wanted to be a bride of Christ – a St. Francis of Assisi – in the Christian sense’ (Nandy 1990: 74). Godse killed Gandhi because the former was not masculine or manly enough to defend Mother India from the aggressions of the British and the Muslims.
For Nandy, Gandhi was radical precisely because he claimed to be a traditionalist, a Sanatani Hindu, but who went on to upturn the traditional hierarchies and the centre–periphery relations: ‘He mobilized the numerically preponderant non-Brahmanic sectors of the Hindus, the lower strata of society, and the politically passive peripheries: the low castes and untouchables, the peasants and the villagers’ (ibid.): ‘The danger that Gandhi posed to the greater Sanskritic tradition was in ‘making its cultural periphery its centre’ (ibid.: 76). Therefore, Nandy argues that this group revenged itself on him through Godse. But if this were true, why did so many upper-caste and middle-class elites support Gandhi or become his devoted followers? And why did the dalits continue to distrust and denounce Gandhi as an upper-caste leader, who wanted to maintain the hegemonic, hierarchical structure of Indian society? Similarly, the charge that Gandhi was irrational and anti-modern was not confined to Godse or the Brahmanical groups alone, but was also famously levelled against him by Ambedkar himself.3
But Nandy is right to the extent that there was widespread resentment of Gandhi among the Hindu right, constituted mostly by Brahmins. Poona was one of the centres of such malice, but anti-Gandhism was rampant in other parts of India, including Rajputana, and Central Provinces and Berar. For instance, during a brief period from 19 April 1947 to 7 February 1948, when Dr Bhaskar Narayan Khare was the Premier, the small Rajput state of Alwar was the hotbed of right-wing Hindu ideology and politics. Khare, a disgruntled and dismissed member of the Congress and later member of the Constituent Assembly of India, even pronounced a ‘Brahmin’s curse’ on Gandhi during a public meeting (see Kapur 1970–71: Vol. II, chapter 13; T. Gandhi 2007: 781–787).4 After Gandhi’s murder, Khare was immediately sacked and put under house arrest in Delhi, but though his sympathies with Gandhi’s killers were well known, there was no material evidence proving his part in the conspiracy. Khare joined the Hindu Mahasabha on 15 August 1949, served as its President, and was even elected to the first Lok Sabha of independent India from Gwalior, which was also one of the seats of Hindu cultural nationalism. After all, it was in Gwalior that the Beretta used to kill Gandhi was obtained.5
If we examine the findings of the Kapur Commission, it is evident that there were at least three groups of overlapping Hindu nationalists who hated Gandhi:
- Sections of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha, who were also anti-Congress, anti-Muslim, anti-Partition, but did not have the mass support of the people.
- Some princes including Alwar and Gwalior who were sympathetic to these elements and to the idea of a Hindu Rashtra; but these too lacked popular support.
- G. V. Ketkar, Lokmanya Tilak’s grandson and editor of the Kesari (saffron) newspaper, and the so-called ‘Kesari group’ of Poona were also in favour of a more militant Hindu activism and regarded ‘Gandhism-cum-False Nationalism as their enemy no. 1’ (T. Gandhi 2007: 793; Kapur 1970–1971, Vol. II, 15.32). However, this group did not like Savarkar either, and wanted to organize the Hindu right under a different leadership.
Several members of these groups boasted that they would kill Gandhi and Nehru, ‘liberate’ Hyderabad state from the Nizam, or even bomb the Pakistan parliament, but they were not taken seriously and, indeed, nothing came of these boasts. Only Godse and his associates actually did what they intended; they killed Gandhi.
That a section of the Hindu right wanted Gandhi eliminated and that many of its leaders and cadres were Brahmins is correct. However, Nandy’s thesis begins to falter when he chooses to indict the whole Chitpavan community for Gandhi’s death, something that the Congress-supported rioters did after the assassination, burning homes, destroying property and targeting specific individuals and groups of Brahmins, especially Chitpavans.6 Nandy resorts to large-scale stereotyping to show how this community was ideally positioned to assassinate the Mahatma. He considers Poona to be the symbol of the loss of Brahmanical power which was trying to strike back at Gandhi for
dislodging them. Claiming that Chitpa-vans combined ‘the traditional prerogatives of the priestly Brahmans and the kingly Kshatriyas’ (Nandy 1990: 77), he argues that they founded their ‘anti-British nationalism’ on the ‘reconstituted and self-created tradition’ of themselves as ‘upholders of a tradition of Hindu resistance against the Muslim occupation of India’ (ibid.): ‘They saw themselves as the previously powerful, now weakened, competitors of the British. So terrorism directed against the Raj came naturally to them. Their aim was the redemption of their lost glory’ (ibid.: 78). According to Nandy,
[Gandhi’s] constant emphasis on pacifism and self-control … posed a threat to the warrior cultures of India … by constantly stressing the feminine, nurturing, nonviolent aspects of men’s personality, he challenged the Kshatriya identity built on fear of woman and of the cosmic feminine principles in nature.
(Ibid.: 78)
Thus Gandhi posed ‘more or less the same kind of threat to India’s martial cultures as to her priestly cultures’ (ibid.). But if this were true, how is that Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s foremost disciple, belonged to the same community, as did his political ‘guru’, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who was also from Poona, and a Chitpavan Brahmin? Incidentally, Y. D. Phadke, the historian whose expose of Dalvi’s play I cited earlier,
was also a Chitpavan. An entire community cannot, quite obviously, be attacked for the act of one individual. Nandy’s ethnic profiling is thus not convincing: while it is true that Hindu right-wing ideologies continue to attract sections of this community, to tar all of the group with the same brush is unjustified.7 The real issue, as far as I am concerned, however, is not Nandy’s blaming the Chit-pavans; it is that he misses the Oedipal structure of Godse’s act.
But why is Nandy unable to see the classical Oedipal pattern in Nathuram’s act? Is it because, like Sudhir Kakar, he believes that in South Asia, it is the mother not the father who is the dominant figure in a child’s infancy? Earlier in the book, Nandy says that South Asia produces so many female leaders because ‘competition, aggression, power, activism, and intrusiveness are not so clearly associated with masculinity’; instead, these qualities are often associated with women in mythology and folk lore: ‘The fantasy of a castrating, phallic woman is also always round the corner in the Indian’s inner world’ (Nandy 1990: 42). Nandy’s otherwise fascinating and provocative reading thus misses the main point of patricide, dwelling instead on the political psychology of dispossessed and vengeful elites.
Writing several years after but following in Nandy’s footsteps, Anup Kumar Dhar in his paper ‘Survival of Violence: Violence of Survival’ (2004), offers a psychoanalytic explanation of Godse’s act using the latter’s own account of events. His thesis is that Godse
provides the prototype of an ‘emerging Hindu self ’ that finds ‘fruition’ in the Gujarat riots of 2002. I shall not engage with this aspect of the argument because I am primarily interested in his reading of Gandhi’s murder. Dhar advances the patricide angle a little farther:
Godse was looking for in Gandhi a somewhat menacing abstraction of the paternal role as the possessor-protector of the mother and the place of the Law. Instead Gandhi happened to be the effeminate internal other of the nationalist Hindu self. … And this foreclosure of the inassimilable internal other could be done only in the name of the survival of a dying race. … Hence an assassination – an assassination that in turn sets up possibilities for a more violent encounter with the threatening other – the other as foreigner, as outsider – as the external other of hegemonic Hindu identity.
(Dhar 2010: 67–68, emphasis in original)
I would argue that the enormity of Godse’s deed leads to a collective repression precisely because it is, to use Dhar’s appropriation of the Lacanian phrase, inassimilable. Patricide produces the tremendous foreclosure in the Hindu psyche, rendering it confused and incapable of understanding its continued sense of unease and neurosis in contemporary India.
Notes
1 See, for instance, Mukherjee, Mukherjee and Mahajan, RSS, School Texts, and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi: The Hindu Communal Project (2008), which tries to establish a link between the RSS, school textbooks, and the murder of the Mahatma. The omitting of Gandhi’s murder, according to the authors, is an attempt to shield the RSS from blame: ‘The silence in the historical record is at one with the attempt of all-Hindu communal parties to hide their link with Gandhi’s murder by any means possible – dissociating, disowning, dissolving and reinventing’ (2008: 48). But as I show at length, all these mechanisms of erasure have also been practiced by others; the repression has been so widespread as to be a national practice.
2 Interestingly, the word Nandy uses is ‘parricide’ rather than patricide. The former means the killing of parents and close relatives, whereas the latter specifically refers to the murder of the father by his offspring. My analysis hinges on the ‘impossibility’ of patricide rather than parricide in the Hindu imaginary.
3 For continuing dalit attacks on Gandhi see TNN, ‘Mayawati Faces Flak Over Remarks on Mahatma Gandhi’ in Works Cited. For Ambedkar and Gandhi see, for instance, Paranjape (2009), Altered Destinations: Self, Society, and Nation in India, or ‘The “Persistent” Mahatma: Rereading Gandhi Post-Hindutva’ in Paranjape (2012), Making India (237–251).
4 This arch-enemy of Gandhi and the Congress was once a loyal and valued leader of the party. The Haripura Congress Souvenir of 1938 describes him as ‘one of the creators of the Congress triumph in the Central Provinces’ who ‘strove for a united Congress Party and he succeeded in his effort’ (Kamat Research Database 2009). It adds that ‘Imbued with Gandhian spirit. … He played a notable part in imparting fresh vigour to the Congress movement in C.P.’ (ibid.). When the Souvenir was published, Kher was the Premier of the Central Provinces elected on a Congress ticket.
5 See Malgonkar (1978; 2008: 135–137); also see Vinayak Chaturvedi’s essay (2003: 155–173) based on his detailed interviews with Dr Upendra Parchure, the son of Dr Dattatraya Par
chure of Gwalior, who procured the gun for Nathuram on 28 January 1948. Details of the gun are also found in the Kapur Commission Report, Part 1, Volume I.
Interestingly, the Gwarliar royal family had staunch supporters of Hindutva such as the Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia, who became the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party after being a long-standing member of its predecessor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. Her son, Madhavrao, the heir-apparent and then the Maharaja of Gwalior, broke with her and joined the Congress, where he became a senior leader and member of the Union Cabinet. His son, Jyotiraditya, the current Maharaja, is also a Congress Member of Parliament from Gwalior, while his paternal aunt, Madhavrao’s sister and Vijayaraje’s daughter, Vasundharaje, continues with the BJP and was Rajasthan’s former Chief Minister.
6 See Malgonkar (1978; 2008: 278); in several places, the army had to be called in to restore order. A fictionalized account of the attacks on Brahmins in the wake of the assassination can be found in Vyankatesh Madgulkar’s Waavtal 
translated into English as The Winds of Fire. Admittedly, these attacks were part of older tensions between the Brahmins and non-Brahmins, but the latter found this a convenient occasion to attack the former. For a personal account, see Arvind Kolhatkar’s ‘Gandhi Assassination Backlash in Satara’ (2009). For the rise of non-Brahmin elites, see ‘Consolidation of Maratha Dominance in Maharashtra’ by S. M. Dahiwale (1995: 336–342).
7 It is perhaps time to reveal, for those who do not know, that I too hail from the same community. The power of the Godse myth continues to appeal to sections of the Chitpavans, though its votaries are dwindling. When I was growing up, I myself heard views supporting Godse’s stance, particularly the opinion that he had not been given a ‘fair’ hearing; on the other hand, several members of my family ridiculed these claims as being totally unfounded.
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