Remembering the Mahatma
In his Introduction to Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995) Andreas Huyssen remarks, ‘Inevitably, every act of memory carries with it a dimension of betrayal, forgetting, and absence’ (1995: 4). Early in this exploration, I spoke of the forgetting and absence, if not betrayal, that the monuments dedicated to Gandhi convey. In Making India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority (2012), I offered a semiology of cenotaphs and gravestones as a way to understand the ‘Renaissance in India’. There, I argued that the graves of key figures from William Jones to Sri Aurobindo signified a gradual but definite shift from the colonial to the national, from the British contribution to India’s modernization to India’s own response to it. This response was clearly mixed and ambivalent; India, it would seem, had a complex and multilayered engagement with modernity, welcoming some aspects of it as derived from the West, resisting others even as it asserted its own traditions, modifying the latter in the light of new ideas, and also creating hybrid and altogether new forms (Paranjape 2012: 213–235). Sometimes what seemed like acceptance was a form of resistance and vice-versa; moreover, different religious groups, classes, castes and sections of society reacted differently to the modernizing imperative. To take this argument to its ultimate conclusion, we might read the monuments commemorating Gandhi as themselves representing this rich and complex narrative.
On the one hand, these monuments are supreme embodiments of the newly independent nation’s notion of who or what it is. This is the first major monument of a leader of independent India, the Father of the Nation no less. However, as I showed earlier, it partakes of the dual heritage of older traditions of commemorialization, a tradition in which a community comes into being through the manner in which it remembers. Like the Sufis and the Sikhs whose memorials bring together complex assertions, both secular and sacred, of those communities, Gandhi’s memorials are also both political and spiritual, emphasizing his dual legacy as political leader and saintly figure. But the key to understanding both these memorials is to unearth what they seek to hide or deny – the killing of the Father of the Nation, which is elided and substituted by the museumization if not mummification of his life. This collective repression, as I have argued, comes from the impossibility of parricide in the Hindu imaginary, a traditional taboo that Nathuram’s supremely modern act seems to defy. But the repression is double because it also hides the causal connection between Nathuram’s act and the fratricidal Partition of the nation. The implications of this forgetting, the guilt that it induces, and the Mahatma’s haunting, which Sarojini Naidu asked for and predicted, have all been touched on in the previous sections. The implication of this whole inquiry, however, is clear: a true reckoning with the issue of the death of Gandhi cannot stop short of the demand for a total transformation of society. Such, indeed, was Gandhi’s vision. That the project of Svaraj failed or at least did not materialize as envisaged need not dishearten us. The utopian impulse within it cannot be entirely suppressed.
In her Introduction to Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, Mieke Bal says that cultural memory is ‘Neither remnant, document, nor relic of the past, nor floating in a present cut off from the past,’ but it is, ‘for better or for worse,’ a way of linking the ‘past to the present and future’ (Bal, Crewe and Spitzer 1999: vii). If I have invoked monumental cultural memory to discuss the killing of the Mahatma, it is, in Bal’s words, ‘to mediate and modify difficult or tabooed moments’ of the birth traumas of a nation because, despite their repression, they ‘nonetheless impinge, sometimes fatally, on the present’ (ibid.). Cultural reflection and recall, Bal reminds us, is neither accidental nor fortuitous, even if it is spontaneous or unreflecting; it is, above all, something we ‘actually perform, even if, in many instances, such acts are not consciously and wilfully contrived’ (ibid.: vii). This recollection of the assassination of Gandhi, then, is one such performance, a re-enactment which has a special purpose.
Of the several kinds of memories, Bal identifies three: ‘unreflective habitual, narrative, and traumatic’ (Bal, Crewe and Spitzer 1999: viii). It is the latter that have greatest need to be ‘legitimized and narratively integrated’ (ibid.). Such a narrativization is necessary so that these memories ‘lose their hold over the subject who suffered the traumatizing event in the past’ (ibid.). But the paradox is that it is precisely such memories that resist easy narrativization or integration. That is because ‘Traumatic memories remain present for the subject with particular vividness and/or totally resist integration’ (ibid.). Such memories often result in compulsive repetition of suffering, blind and bewildering, because they remain ‘outside’ the subject who cannot ‘master’ them. The repression of such memories, in narrative terms, results in two processes according to Bal: in ‘ellipsis’ and ‘omission of important elements’ or in ‘paralepsis’ in which dissociation ‘doubles the strand of the narrative series of events by splitting off a sideline’ (ibid.: viii). We have already seen both these features in the ways that two monuments to Gandhi in the nation’s capital narrativize Gandhi’s life and elide over his murder. At Raj Ghat, the site of his cremation, we see the classical instance of ellipsis, with the details of the assassination of Gandhi practically erased or absent. On the other hand, at Gandhi Smriti, the site of his actual murder, what we see is footprints ending halfway through the lawn, the narrative doubling back as it were to his life, leaving the whole puzzle of his death unresolved. Here, via paralepsis, we are led away from uncomfortable questions about his assassination to the more familiar and comforting story of his life, the heroic saga of a ‘Great Soul’.
Bal, a narratologist herself, invokes the work of Van der Kolk and van der Hart (1995) to show both the vertical dimensions of repression and the horizontal movement of dissociation:
Although the concepts of repression and dissociation have been used interchangeably by Freud and others with regard to traumatic memories, there is a fundamental difference between them. Repression reflects a vertically layered model of mind: what is repressed is pushed downward, into the unconscious. The subject no longer has access to it. Only symbolic, indirect indications would point to its assumed existence. Dissociation reflects a horizontally layered model of mind: when a subject does not remember a trauma, its ‘memory’ is contained in an alternate stream of consciousness, which may be subconscious or dominate consciousness, e.g. during traumatic reenactments.
(Van der Kolk and Van der Hart: 168–169 cited in Bal, Crewe and Spitzer 1999: ix)
The trauma of Gandhi’s murder is repressed, as I have shown, deep down in the recesses of the Hindu unconscious, with all its horror and prohibition of patricide. But its symbolic indications and symptoms are everywhere present in the way the Mahatma haunts the nation. So too the horizontal dissociations from this trauma are portrayed over and over again in Gandhi’s life narratives, reproduced in different parts of India in more or less the same set and chronological arrangement of photographs, with the memory of the murder diverted into an alternate channel of consciousness, irrationally reasserting its dominance from time to time in anti-Gandhian tirades by fanatics, whether Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or dalit. Similarly, cultural memories of the Partition are repressed or disassociated into triumphal narratives of national independence, usually Indian, but also Pakistani. The Partition itself is re-enacted over and over again not only in communal riots in the subcontinent but also in the never-ending war between Pakistan and India, a war that simmers all along the border, right into the snowy and inhospitable heights of the Himalayas, and down to the beautiful valleys of Kashmir.
We might, however, disagree with Bal that traumatic memory is necessarily solitary, lacking an ‘addressee’ or ‘social component’ (Bal, Crewe and Spitzer 1999: x). We might argue instead that there are collective re-enactments of traumatic memory, which might actually help release the pain or give it a narrative form. If it were entirely solitary, ‘inflexible and invariable’ (ibid.: x) then the massive monumentalization of trauma would be pointless. To me, remembering Gandhi, even his murder, certainly serves a social function, especially because it is framed in a context in which, as Bal says of normal memory ‘the past makes sense in the present, to others who can understand it, sympathize with it, or respond with astonishment, surprise, even horror; narrative memory offers some form of feedback that ratifies the memory’ (ibid.: x). It is the narativizing of traumatic events that makes cultural memory an effective way of changing the present and working towards an alternate future. Monuments which cover up the past can be re-read so as to uncover or discover it afresh; they can invite collective witness, moral introspection, penitence, expiation of guilt, and finally positive and remedial action. As Bal says, such a performance of memorializing ‘is potentially healing, as it calls for political and cultural solidarity’ (ibid.: x). But this is only possible when the trauma of the traumatized party is made ‘narratable’ (ibid.). What we have tried to do here is to render ‘unspeakable’ or ‘inexpressible’ memories narratable.
Invoking another kind of theoretical practice, Adrian Parr in Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma (2008), distinguishes two ways of reading monuments. The more common approach, such as I have myself adopted in the earlier part of this book, is to look at ‘memorials and monuments as texts, arguing that these constitute a language in general, and after examining individual examples … demonstrate how these produce meaning’ (Parr 2008: 16). But following Deleuze, Parr also demonstrates another way of reading them: ‘Instead of arguing the memorial or monument is the effect of a system of signification, libidinal semiotics proposes memorial culture is the effect of an investment of libidinal energies and affects’ (ibid.). What does this mean? It means to liberate the monument from the uses to which the state or any other controlling or ‘fascistic’ agency seeks to manage its meaning or channel public desire, memory, or mourning. Such a ‘schizoid investment … in memorial culture,’ as Parr clarifies, works ‘to extract the poly-vocal movement of social energies and affects at play in the process of public remembrance’ (Parr 2008: 16–17). This way of reading monuments saves them from the uses to which they are designed to be subjected.
Monuments, such as Raj Ghat or more specifically Gandhi Smriti, may register ‘the social force of collective trauma’ (ibid.: 17), especially since there is no other memorial to the hundreds of thousands killed in communal and civil violence during the Partition, yet such a registration, as I have been suggesting, ‘operates as an index to prompt the affective dimension of memory to generate future orientated connections’ (ibid.). The memorial no longer allows itself to code the ‘labour of memory’ to ‘fixed use’, as desired by the state or permit the trauma that ‘registers throughout the social field … as a determinate entity’ (ibid.). Both the monument and the memories that attach themselves to it are liberated from the deathly hallows of the past to accomplish, as Deleuze puts it in Difference and Repetition ‘a living connection between the knowledge and the resistance, the representation and the blockage’ (1994: 19).
Thus, as Deleuze and Guattari propose in What is Philosophy? ‘the monument is not something commemorating a past, it is a bloc of present sensations’ (1994: 16) or even more forcefully and brilliantly, ‘The monument’s action is not memory but fabulation’ (ibid.). Later in the same text they add, ‘The monument does not actualize the virtual event but incorporates or embodies it: it gives it a body, a life, a universe’ (ibid.: 177). Using the metaphor of music they say ‘Monuments are refrains’ (ibid.: 184). Such a ‘sensational’ reading of monuments helps liberate them from their fixity and limited-use inscriptions and allows them to act in extremely potent ways to energize thought and action. This is what I meant by the ‘living’ monuments of the Sufi and Sikh saints, as opposed to the dead and decorative tombs of the kings and emperors of Delhi, now only inhabited by bats and pigeons. In the living monuments there are qu’wallis and sabad kirtans, songs sung to re-energize both the revered dead and the devoted living. The day my class visited Raj Ghat, we saw a group of musicians sitting around Gandhi’s Samadhi singing ‘Raghu Pati Raghav Raja Rama’ in not so inspiring or mellifluous tones, but still moving because they were so amateurish. We too sat on a grassy knoll nearby to sing songs that the Mahatma loved, also songs from the struggle for India’s freedom which earlier generations sang, which we repeated spontaneously that day to re-establish our link with them. As Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘Sensation itself vibrates because it contracts vibrations. It preserves itself because it preserves vibrations: it is Monument’ (1994: 211). By questioning the official narratives, by reusing monuments of the state for our own purposes, we may thus remember and resist, liberate ourselves from past traumas rather than merely disassociating from or repressing them. It is not the casual act of forgetting or ignorance, but the conscious one of remembering and resisting that can effect in healing.
The conflict, contradictions, and tensions that inhere not only in Gandhi’s monuments but also in the narratives around his killing, thus all invite us to work through, if not resolve them – but, as noted earlier, a complete resolution would not be possible without a complete transformation of all of India, a project that we need not abandon, just because it is not imminent. Deleuze and Guattari might have implied no less when they declared
A monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides in the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed suffering of men and women, their re-created protestations, their constantly resumed struggle. Will this all be in vain because suffering is eternal and revolutions do not survive their victory? But the success of a revolution resides only in itself, precisely in the vibrations, clinches, and openings it gave to men and women at the moment of its making and that composes in itself a monument that is always in the process of becoming, like those tumuli to which each new traveller adds a stone.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 183–184)
Gandhi’s monuments, thus, need not serve merely the interests of the state to offer us fixed ideas of the nation; they need not, likewise, serve to celebrate the saintly life of the Mahatma, the Father of the Nation; moreover, they need also not be just mute testimonials to a forgotten martyrdom; nor, indeed, might they end up as mnemonic symbols of some traumatic experience now repressed from national memory. These monuments, instead, need to be reappropriated as major constituents of a memorial culture whereby a nation not just remembers its past, ‘inventing a tradition’, giving coherence to its recent, albeit fractured history, but also offering stability and solace to its citizens rather than serving merely as symbols of nationalism to visiting foreign dignitaries. The monuments dedicated to Gandhi must escape from institutional and governmental constraints to act in the present, urging radical intervention and investment towards alternate futures.
While it is crucial to unmask the monumental cover up and deflection that the nationalized, now globalized, Gandhi memorials enact so as to liberate the living and provocative presence of the Mahatma from beneath them, it is also crucial not to go to the other extreme of fetishizing the trauma that is hidden behind the repression of Gandhi’s murder into a sort of hypertrophy of memorialization. We must resist the temptation of consigning the history of the Partition symbolized by Gandhi’s murder to what Huyssen calls ‘the sign of trauma’, functioning in the Indian context, like the Holocaust, as ‘the ultimate cipher of traumatic unspeakability or unrepresentability’ (Huyssen 1995: 9). But without such a journey of uncovering and recovering our past, no alternative future is possible:
while the hypertrophy of memory can lead to self-indulgence, melancholy fixations, and a problematic privileging of the traumatic dimension of life with no exit in sight, memory discourses are absolutely essential to imagine the future and to regain a strong temporal and spatial grounding of life and the imagination in a media and consumer society that increasingly voids temporality and collapses space.
(Ibid.: 6)
We have seen how, to use Huyssen’s phrase, ‘memory and and forgetting pervade real public space’ (1995: 10). This essay has been an attempt to offset the forgetting that those very monuments to memory induce by a deliberate and, I hope, liberating act of remembering. It has been a reflection on remembering and forgetting as cultural practices, and how both processes are at play in sites of memorialization, such as Gandhi’s monuments. Indeed, it is possible to argue that ours is a culture of forgetting, not of remembering, more so now that the information glut of the postmodern condition assails us, beseting us with what Frederic Jameson describes as the schizophrenic ‘historical deafness’ (1991: xi) or loss of history. When it comes to overcoming the massive traumas of the Partition and the murder of the Mahatma, neither remembering nor forgetting, by themselves, work. We need a conscious combination of ways of remembering with kinds of forgetting to overcome such traumas; that is how we might come to terms with the mechanisms of trauma but ‘forget’ the urge to retaliate, to right the wrongs of the past, or to indulge in counter-narratives and revenge histories. At any rate, what we have attempted at the very least is to counterbalance the ‘monumental invisibility’ (Huyssen 1995: 32) of Gandhi’s murder and its implications to the psyche of Hindus and the body politic of the nation with a deeply reflective and healing recovery of the the traumatic ‘truth’ of history. In that sense, we have attempted here what the likes of Jan Assmann (1992) and Richard Terdiman (1993) have called the recuperation of cultural memory. It is through cultural memory that societies ensure continuity and self-understanding, passing on collective knowledge, preserved, through social mnemonics. This makes it possible for future generations to assert a collective identity by constructing and participating in a shared past (Assmann 1992).1
Note
1 Richard Terdiman, in addition, makes the useful distinction between memory and history, arguing that the French Revolution marks a breaking point, a ‘memory crisis’ after which, due to urbanization, industrialization and the ensuing increase in the complexity of life, people lost any implicit or indwelling understanding of the past, and had to rely on historical representation to access the past (Terdiman 1993). I would argue that in India, people may still ‘remember’ though acts of collective invocation, such as attempted here.
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