The starting point of this inquiry into the wider and deeper ramifications of the death of Gandhi may be traced to a course I taught on ‘M. K. Gandhi: Study of an Author’ at the Centre for English studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, in the winter semester of 2009. What I had felt intuitively about the significance of Gandhi’s death gradually became clearer and clearer as the course progressed. But the turning point was the field trip to the various sites and institutions associated with Gandhi in Delhi. I scarcely understood it then, but this field trip turned into an interrogation of both the dead and the living Gandhi.
Gandhi’s death was palpable, in more senses than one, most materially in the monuments that memorialized him but also less obviously in the decaying or moribund institutions founded or named after him, some of which we visited. Yet despite the all-pervasive atmosphere of decay there was something vital, even vibrant about his presence in the capital of India. More startling and unforgettable, however, was the unresolved cognitive discomfort generated by his actual assassination. It was this lingering, brooding sense of disturbance, even irresolvable distress that remained as the defining after-effect of the field trip. The assassination of the Father of the Nation, clearly, is something we have not been able to come to terms with. This book endeavours if not to resolve this crisis, then at least to address it comprehensively.
Delhi, destroyed and rebuilt several times, remains an imperial city – like Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul, Istanbul, Rome, Madrid, London, or St Petersburg. Though it is also one of the great cities of the world, a seat of power and majesty for hundreds of years, Delhi has always also been a city of tombs, cenotaphs and memorials to the dead. It is not as if the city itself conveys a sense of death, only that its grandest buildings usually commemorate some dead king or other. And how many such dynasties ruled Delhi, each leaving behind one impressive catacomb after another? From the mythical times of the Pandavas to the Tomara and Chauhan Rajputs, and thence, to the dynasties of Mamluks, Khiljis, Tughlaqs, Sayyids, Lodhis and Mughals, to the various Viceroys of British India, right up to the several memorials to our recent leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Charan Singh and Indira Gandhi. Some of Delhi’s grandest buildings are these tombs, of Altamash and Balban, Ghiyasuddin and Feroz Shah Tughlaq, Mohammad Shah and Sikandar Lodhi, Humayun and Safdar Jung, right down to Gandhi’s Raj Ghat and Indira Gandhi’s Shakti Sthal.
Interestingly, Delhi contains the mausoleums of not just kings and emperors but also saints and sages. All around Mehrauli, the first city of the Islamic conquerors of Delhi, are the tombs of many fakirs, pirs and saints, most of whose names have now been forgotten. Of those remembered, Delhi is a resting place of some of the greatest Sufi masters, especially of the Chisti order: not only Khwaja Qutubudin Bakhtiyar Kaki but the even more charismatic and popular Hazarat Nizamuddin, who is called Mehboob-e-Ilahi (Beloved of Allah), is buried here. The former was the direct disciple and successor of the founder of the lineage, Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti (Garib Nawaz) of Ajmer, and the latter the disciple of Bakhtiyar Kaki’s disciple, the celebrated Baba Farid Ganj-e-Shakkar. The last great Sufi saint of Delhi, of the same lineage, was Khwaja Nasirudin Chirag-e-Dilli (the Lamp of Delhi). The localities Nizamuddin and Chirag Dilli derive their names from these very saints. Indeed, the city is literally littered with hundreds of graves of Sufi saints.
But Delhi is famous not only for the graves of these sufis. Right beside Jawaharlal Nehru University is the shrine of Baba Gangnath where the great Nath yogis are commemoralized. The Mehrauli area, even before Muslim conquest, was dotted with Jain temples, where similar statues of Tirthankars and Jinns, those who have conquered all their enemies and passed beyond the world of process, are enshrined. Not only is this city the final resting place of our great Sufi saints, it is the site of the martyrdom of the ninth Sikh guru, Guru Tegh Bahadur, for whom two gurdwaras, Sisganj in Chandni Chowk, and Rakab Ganu, in Raisina Hill, at the heart of New Delhi, were built. More recently, the Delhi government built another massive memorial to the Guru on the Singhu border of Delhi, handed over to the nation by Rahul Gandhi in July 2011. Interestingly, Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother, Indira Gandhi, was murdered by her Sikh bodyguards; following her assassination, nearly 4000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi in anti-Sikh riots during the first days of her son and Rahul’s father, Rajiv Gandhi’s term as Prime Minister of India. The eighth Sikh Guru, Har Kishen, who was Tegh Bahadur’s nephew, also died in Delhi of smallpox at the age of seven. The magnificent Bangla Sahib Gurdwara in New Delhi was built to commemorate his death. Therefore Gandhi comes at the end of a long line of holy predecessors and lies in good company.
To compare the tombs of emperors and saints, however, yields curious results. When one wanders through Mehrauli, Delhi’s first Muslim city, one notices that the tombs of the kings are in ruins while those of the saints are centres of living pilgrimage and active social life. Ghiyasuddin Balban (1206–1287) ruled Delhi with an iron hand for 20 years, but today his tomb is a burnt-out pile of sandstone and mud, overgrown with grass and stubble. Just a stone’s throw away lies the pristine and almost unchanged sanctuary of his older contemporary, Khwaja Qutubudin Bakhtiyar Kaki (1173–1235). Attacked and damaged in the aftermath of the Partition, it was restored at the behest of Gandhi, who himself attended the Urs (annual feast) of the saint in January 1948. This shrine attracts hundreds of devotees every day and is still a centre for spiritual practices. Similarly, not too far from the Khwaja’s darga are many more sites of the Jain religion, several of which had been demolished to build Muslim Mehrauli. One such shrine is the Dada Bari, where many Jinas and Siddhas (perfected beings) are represented in stoic and stereotypical postures signifying their transcendence of earthly demands and defilements. In the area that is now known by his name lies the grave and shrine of Hazarat Nizamuddin Auliya. Here at all times of the day, well into the late hours of the evening, devotees and supplicants flock to offer flowers and chadar (a ceremonial sheet of cloth), pray and fervently ask for boons. Such shrines are centres of worship and pilgrimage, with throngs of devotees. Similarly, all the gurdwaras associated with Guru Har Kishen and Tegh Bahadur continue to be active centres of devotion, with crowds of visitors and worshippers. The tombs of the emperors of Delhi, on the other hand, have not fared so well. The more obscure are in total ruin, while the famous ones are tourist attractions, maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India. Of these the most celebrated is Humayun’s tomb, which today is a World Heritage site, recognized by UNESCO. This means that it has been restored at the cost of millions of dollars, with an entrance fee for visitors that is higher for foreigners than for locals. It was here that the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, defeated and deposed, had taken shelter with hundreds of his followers and dependents. Of cause, he was not saved; his sons were hanged and he was transported to Rangoon, in Burma. The memorials to dead kings, were it not for some official patronage and management, would be vandalized and overrun by illegal occupants, as many ancient buildings in space-starved cities of India have been.
Of the great dead and buried, only Tegh Bahadur and Gandhi have two or more memorials dedicated to them. This struck me during our class field trip to Raj Ghat, the ‘royal steps’ leading to the bank of the Yamuna river, the place where Gandhi’s body was cremated, and where his ashes now officially lie in state. In addition to Raj Ghat, another famous complex memorializes Gandhi. This is the Gandhi Smriti (literally ‘Gandhi Memorial’), just a few kilometres away, also in the heart of New Delhi’s elite residential zone, which has some of the most expensive real estate in India. This was the erstwhile Birla House, the home of G. D. Birla, probably India’s richest man at independence, and the place where the Mahatma was murdered by Nathuram Godse.
This double commemorialization makes Gandhi special; it is almost as if he combined in himself the majesty of temporal power, for which the state built a memorial, and the piety of a saint, for which he is remembered today at the site where he was felled by his assassin. Gandhi thus combined in himself both temporal power and spiritual authority. Before Gandhi, Guru Tegh Bahadur represented a similar confluence of ‘miri piri’ (worldly glory and spiritual power); after being tortured at Aurangzeb’s behest for refusing to change his faith, he was beheaded in Chandni Chowk, the great boulevard of medieval Delhi stretching from the seat of imperial power, the Red Fort, to the royal Fatehpuri Mosque. Where his decapitated head fell, many decades later, a great gurdwara was erected called Sis Ganj Sahib (sis meaning head). After his decapitation, it is said that despite the large posse of Mughal troops guarding his martyred body, some devotees managed to smuggle his remains away and cremate them in the vicinity of Raisina. On that spot a Gurdwara stands today called Rakab Ganj Sahib (rakab meaning body). This double commemoration is not surprising: the great Guru was both the temporal and the religious leader of his people, as Gandhi himself became 372 years later.
In one of the most eloquent tributes on his death, it was Sarojini Naidu, the poet and national leader, who noticed the strange appropriateness of Gandhi’s death in the city of emperors and kings:
I used to wonder very often during his many fasts in which I was privileged to serve him, to solace him, to make him laugh, because he wanted the tonic laughter of his friends – I used to wonder, supposing he died in Sevagram, supposing he died in Noakhali, supposing he died in some far off place, how should we reach him? It is therefore right and appropriate that he died in the city of kings, in the ancient site of the old Hindu empires, in the site on which was built the glory of the Mughals, in this place that he made India’s capital wresting it from foreign hands, it is right that he died in Delhi; it is right that his cremation took place in the midst of the dead kings who are buried in Delhi, for he was the kingliest of all kings. And it is right also that he who was the apostle of peace should have been taken to the cremation ground with all the honours of a great warrior; far greater than all warriors who led armies to battle was this little man, the bravest, the most triumphant of all. Delhi is not only today historically the Delhi of seven kingdoms; it has become the centre and the sanctuary of the greatest revolutionary who emancipated his enslaved country from foreign bondage and gave to it its freedom and its flag.
(Naidu and Paranjape 2010: 288–289)
Sarojini, with her poetic gifts and vision, had long ago noticed how Gandhi was both kingly and saintly, how his death was at once both royal and saintly, how his commemorialization would therefore partake of both discursive traditions.
On Gandhi’s death his anointed heir and successor, Jawaharlal Nehru, was also aware of the grave importance of the appropriate way to memorialize him. As Yasmin Khan observes,
Nehru was strikingly self-conscious about Gandhi’s memorialization and reflexive about the ways in which Gandhi’s memory could be usefully appropriated after his death. While wishing to honour him and to avoid opportunistic commemoration, Nehru astutely recognized the utility of Gandhi’s death-memorials to the national cause. The importance of theatricality, performance, ritual and commemoration was as well understood by Nehru as by his viceregal predecessor – ‘brick and mortar has its uses’ he wrote on a proposed national memorial for Gandhi, ‘and is desirable to give some solid and substantial shape to our work. This has a psychological importance and a permanence’.
(2011: 77)
Despite such attempts to impose an authorized and official way of commemorating the fallen Mahatma, the more popular and vernacular attempts to remember him, as we shall see, could not entirely be suppressed.
Nehru, however, ‘consistently attempted to define the limits of commemoration and to create a centralized monopoly on the project of Gandhi’s memorialisation’ (ibid.). First of all, he had to contend with those who, literally, wanted a ‘piece’ of Gandhi; ashes, relics, even a bit of the soil where he was killed or cremated. That is why he recommended the most ‘modern’ of materials, cement concrete, for the place of cremation. In an undated note that the Union Cabinet accepted on 3 February 1948, Nehru had recommended that ‘The surface of the platform on which Mahatma Gandhi’s body was cremated may be cemented in order that people in search of sacred earth from the spot will not be able to tamper with it’ (Nehru and Gopal 1988: 45–46). Khan, citing this note, remarks: ‘Concrete, then, the ultimate symbol of the modernizing and developmental aspirations of the postcolonial state, could, quite literally, be used to seal Gandhi’s memory and to limit people’s interaction with his corporeal remains’ (ibid.: 78). Nehru also actively discouraged the indiscriminate proliferation of statues, especially ungainly and ugly ones (ibid.). Yet hundreds of statues did come up, some lending themselves to easy satirization as in the film English August, which shows Gandhi’s walking stick propping up one from the behind, almost as if suggesting ‘up his ____’. Today, it is Bhim Rao Ambedkar’s turn to be thus memorialized all over India, in a blue suit, holding a book, and pointing ahead.
Even if the state’s investment in Gandhi’s commemorialization was severely disciplined, if not curtailed, the two monuments in Delhi bear, albeit differently, its all too evident stamp. Yet the contrast between Raj Ghat and Gandhi Smriti may be seen as the difference between how state power and civil society tried to come to terms with this dual legacy of Gandhi. What do we make of this man, who was at once the tallest political leader and hero of his times and also the nation’s conscience-keeper and public saint? It was therefore somewhat uncanny that when we went from Raj Ghat to Gandhi Smriti the first question that the Director of Gandhi Smriti asked was, ‘Please tell me how you felt at Raj Ghat as compared to what you feel here?’
Intrigued, we quickly brought to our minds our experience of Raj Ghat. We had parked our bus in the official parking lot which contained many other tourist coaches. The first thing that struck me was how touristy and commercial Raj Ghat had become – a ‘must-see’ in the itinerary of every visitor to Delhi. Though it seemed like a quiet day, we still had many tourists, including busloads of school children, visiting along with us. We went around the niches that, almost like meditation chambers of some ancient monastery or the ramparts of a fortification, adorned the periphery of Gandhi’s Samadhi. Each niche contained a quotation by Gandhi, written in the many different languages of India. We, this class, at a national university, made up of students from different parts of India, were moved to read these quotations, trying to decipher their different scripts and languages. We were from different parts of the country, spoke different languages, belonged to different religions and ethnicities, but Gandhi had helped to make us a nation. And because we were a nation, we were all together today, studying at one of India’s better universities in the capital, open to admissions to students from all over the subcontinent and beyond. Somehow, Gandhi was central to our story, to who we had become.
We went to the central flame where a bhajan, not entirely euphonious, was in progress. Then someone commented that the place was bound to be spruced up if a foreign dignitary were to visit. Of course it was customary for every visiting head of state to place a wreath on the grave of the Father of the Nation, but I was glad that there was no such visit that day or this whole monument would be cordoned off for security reasons. Raj Ghat, on further reflection, did exude a feeling of being slightly unkempt that day, even somewhat derelict. As if no one really cared for the Mahatma except to pay lip service to his memory, certainly not to engage deeply with his words and deeds. There were broken tiles and sandstone masonry; in several places the paint had peeled off and some of the letters in the plaques bearing his words had been chipped off. True, there was no garbage lying about, but the gardens were not in perfect shape.
We left the sarkari (official) precinct to connect with Gandhi’s spirit in a less conspicuous place nearby. Sitting in a circle on a grassy knoll, we commenced on an impromptu discussion on Gandhi, which later erupted into a series of multilingual songs on him and the freedom movement. I for one, was startled at the variety and range of talent present in our own small class, and was also surprised to find my students able to break free from their detached and dispassionate academic stance to something more spontaneous and involved. From being a sombre and sober reflection on Gandhi at the site of his Samadhi, our little gathering had almost turned into a celebration. The singing drew us together and our spirits soared, we broke into laughter, conversation, and song, without the least self-consciousness. Just then a large group of schoolchildren from a very modest government school seemed to surround us; they were a boisterous, carefree, and happy lot, tumbling down the grassy slope, noisily playing, chasing or fighting with one another.
At that moment I understood in a flash what being a free country really meant. The most humble and ordinary citizens as well as their children could romp all over the very bones of the founding fathers of their nation. To be ‘free’ meant not so much that you could do as you pleased, but that you actually owned your country. In British India the forefathers of these children would have never dared to run amuck in the lawns around India Gate or in any of the exclusive environs of New Delhi. They were servants and outsiders in their own land, their movements and access restricted as the signboards in many places clearly indicated, ‘Indians not allowed’.
But while I was thinking over my experience at Raj Ghat, Dr Savita Singh, the Director of the Gandhi Smriti, had gone on to answer her own question. Raj Ghat represents the death of Gandhi while Gandhi Smriti commemorates his life, she said almost triumphantly. She had a point, I thought, when I recalled to my mind the slightly sad and isolated samadhi, with the quietly burning flame, at the centre of a huge manicured lawn within a faceless government complex, frequented by visiting dignitaries and curious tourists. But she was only partially correct, because our own corroboree and the capers of the frolicking, unruly school children certainly suggested that Raj Ghat was not just a place of the dead but a favourite holiday destination, even a picnic spot, where life in its variety asserted itself in celebrating the freedoms which the frail old Mahatma had died to uphold. It seemed to me that Raj Ghat, ‘tainted’ by officialdom and dampened perhaps by the odour of death, nevertheless remained vibrant, attracting the living in their teeming and irresistible variety, represented not only by tourists, hawkers, unemployed youth, retired loungers and occasional pilgrims, but also by frisky children and furtive lovers. The vernacular appropriation and celebration of the monument had overshadowed its official script. Was there something intrinsic to Gandhi that defied the deadening clasp of state officialdom, or is this the common fate of any public monument in our country, not exclusive to Gandhi?
I was reminded of another memorial to Gandhi, in far off Pondicherry, where right in the middle of the promenade by the sea, stands his large, somewhat muscular statue, avuncular but larger than life. Under his white French-style canopy, the dark, bronze Gandhi, looks to be smiling straight across at the smaller Nehru statue across the road. Not too far away is the solemn and silent samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, beautifully decorated, bedecked with flowers, where thousands visited each day, and hundreds gathered in hushed meditation after bowing down reverentially at the cold marble. Not too far from Gandhi’s statue and much more recently, another impressive memorial has been erected by the state, this time to Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, the leader of the erstwhile untouchables. I see many admirers remove their footwear as they enter the premises to pay their respects. But unlike these ‘sacred’ memorials, marked by cheerless awe and sombre gravity, Gandhi’s statue is surrounded by the concourse of ordinary life, hundreds of eating, strolling, talking, laughing, playing members of the public. His memorial is a favourite haunt of children, especially, who use its slopes as slides, playing catch around giant bronze feet. Of all religions, sizes and ages, they are free and irreverent around the Mahatma, totally relaxed as the children and future citizens of a free country ought to be. Likewise at Raj Ghat, outside of the actual Samadhi, the common people of the land have taken over Gandhi’s memorial, overrunning it with an affectionate intimacy that all but erases the government’s official ideology stamped on the authorized national memorial to the Mahatma.
At Gandhi Smriti our experience is indeed different. This is the old Birla House on Tees January Marg, the street thus renamed to associate it forever with the day of the Mahatma’s martyrdom, 30 January, over 60 years ago. The large stately mansions of the native capitalist class, along a tree-lined, genteel avenue, surround the site where the Mahatma was felled. In those days of course the Birla clan, led by its redoubtable patriarch, Ghanshyam Das Birla, himself Gandhi’s acolyte, was one of the biggest business conglomerates in India. This Birla home in India’s new capital was handed over, after some reluctance and back-pedalling by its erstwhile owners – quite expected given the immense value of the property – to the Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Trust. Outside the gate sit hawkers, adjacent is a taxi stand, and the street is lined with auto rickshaws waiting for custom.
As we enter we feel a somewhat festive atmosphere with various stalls exhibiting Gandhian products, paraphernalia and memorabilia arranged to greet visitors. One of these stalls has an old man plying the charkha, the humble spinning wheel that Gandhi turned into a symbol of national self-reliance. Many of my students have never seen a real charkha, let alone someone spinning on one. So we crowd around this craftsman, fascinated by how he spins thread out of small balls of cotton. The director has arranged for us to be taken on a guided tour. We begin in Gandhi’s own room, not too far from the entrance. I am struck by its stark simplicity, the absence of any furniture except a mattress covered in a spotless white sheet, beside which are Gandhi’s spectacles, spinning wheel, sandals, a small, low desk and writing implements. The room is pregnant not only with Gandhi’s presence, but with a message. Just as Bapu Kuti, his hut in Sevagram, Wardha, in backward and rural central India, tells a story, so does this room in the heart of opulent New Delhi. It takes a while to understand what the room means.
Gandhi was telling the world that he simply lived in the old Birla House, but he did not belong to, or in, it. It was just his Delhi camp office. He lived in it as he was wont to in his ashram at Sevagram. The truth was that Gandhi had made Birla House his Delhi headquarters quite reluctantly. His usual and preferred location for several years had been the untouchable Bhangi or scavenger colony. But he could stay there no longer because the government had told him that his security could not be guaranteed in the open and unregulated slum, asking him, instead, to stay at Birla House. Gandhi was surprised at their choice of accommodation for him, as he said in his first prayer meeting in Delhi on 10 September 1947 from these premises. He had obliged because he did not wish to cause too much trouble. Bhangi colony, moreover, was overflowing with refugees from Pakistan. Gandhi had no official position, either in Government or in the Congress Party. Where, then, was he to put up? There was literally no place for him there, no room in a sense for the Father of the Nation in the capital of the newly independent India! As Gandhi himself put it: ‘I have been brought to stay at Birla House because refugees have been accommodated in the Harijan colony. Their need is much greater than mine’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 355). That is why Bapu was conveying through his lifestyle and the arrangement of the single room he had chosen to occupy in the huge mansion that he would not allow Birla House to own him, nor would he be overwhelmed by its comforts or conveniences. As he told his unnamed correspondent in the fragment of the letter of 4 November 1947:
I am in the midst of this violent conflagration. Although I am in a house as big as a palace in the grand city of Hindustan, I think of the plight of innocent children and thousands of women in this cold season. My heart bleeds but I do not cry. I do not believe in crying. In the end I have to do or die. I wish God grants this humble prayer of mine.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 226)
Leaving the rest of the house to its own purposes, he had occupied a tiny corner of it, where he worked and slept on the floor, in the same simplicity and austerity that he was used to. Gandhi was simply in the Birla House, not ‘of’ it.
What strikes me suddenly is that if Raj Ghat cannot appropriate Gandhi, nor can Birla House. Raj Ghat represented the power of the state and Birla House the power of big business. Neither the state nor big business could own Gandhi: though he occupied centre stage in both these realms of temporal power, he resisted both with equal firmness, and it would appear, with comparable ease. He had marked for himself a special domain of his own where he was neither contaminated by the blandishments of political power nor the inducements of big business. Gandhi’s room in Birla House, like his hut in Sevagram, was not merely a space of habitation but a symbol of who he was and what he stood for.
From Gandhi’s room we are led to the back of the house down the steps to the lawn, onto the path he took on his last day, walking to the red sandstone platform from where he would conduct his prayer meeting. The actual steps he took have been marked, somewhat obviously, with sandstone replicas, embedded into the lawn. This means that visitors are almost literally forced to walk in Gandhi’s footsteps. Abruptly the steps stop in the lawns, midway to the platform, almost as if those in charge had forgotten or simply abandoned the completion of the path. Then the design becomes clear. The steps stop midway because this was where Nathuram Godse had pumped three bullets from his revolver into Gandhi’s bare chest – as Dr Singh put it somewhat poetically to us, ‘He died with a garland of bullets around his neck.’ I remember what his grandson Ramachandra Gandhi had once told me in a personal conversation, ‘Gandhiji died like a true warrior of peace, taking the bullets of his adversary on his chest, not shot in the back, trying to run away or escape from his enemies.’ From times immemorial, taking the blow on the chest rather than on the back has been the mark of a true Kshatriya or warrior.
As we know, Nathuram had first bowed to the Mahatma, pushing aside one his two living ‘walking sticks’, Manubehn, his 19-year-old grandniece, before straightening himself to fire his fatal charge. Manu had stepped in front when Nathuram had leaped up upon them to say, ‘Brother, Bapu is already late.’ As Manu fell to one side, the mortally stricken Mahatma had fallen on his other walking stick, Abha, the nearly 21-year-old wife of his grandnephew, Kanu Gandhi (Gandhiserve 2010). According to Abha, even as the Mahatma col-lapsed, his head in her lap, he uttered, ‘He Ram’, the name of the Lord and his favourite deity, on his lips.
Thinking of Gandhi’s dying words and recalling that sad scene, we then go to what used to be Gandhi’s seat at the far end of the garden wall, now marked by a sandstone bench. After dwelling there in silence for a few minutes, we return to the Birla House through the exhibition mounted in tents pitched to our right. Inside once again, we enter at the start of the permanent photo exhibition on Gandhi’s life arranged chronologically from his birth in Porbandar in 1869.
Later we are taken to a more interesting, ultra-high-tech, almost postmodern exhibition curated and designed by Ranjit Makkauni, which uses digital tools and toys to bring home Gandhi’s message to a contemporary generation raised on laptops and mobile phones. The common objects of Gandhi’s daily use are cleverly transformed into learning devices, lighting up screens, initiating interactive, often speaking images, to explain some aspect of his life or thought. One interesting exhibit is the circle of peace where we have to join hands in a group so as to light up the floor, suggesting that peace only comes from cooperation and solidarity. We have almost run out of time, the premises are shutting down with the staff locking up and asking visitors to leave. Our guided tour and interaction with the Director and with another scholar, Madhuri Santhanam Sondhi, whose parents knew Gandhi personally, has brought us much closer to a world about which we had only read in books.
On our way back in the minibus a most interesting discussion ensues over what we have seen that day at Raj Ghat, Gandhi Darshan, Gandhi Museum, Gandhi Peace Foundation and finally at Gandhi Smriti. One of the most insightful observations has to do with the Gandhi Smriti, the site of the assassination. As one of my students, Siddhartha Chakraborti, observes, ‘You are taken to the place where Gandhi was shot. But then, that’s it! You don’t know what to do with what happened.’ Indeed, despite all the information and gadgetry, they have given us no tools or means either to make sense of Gandhi’s murder or to come to terms with it. Instead, we have just been led back to the old and by now worn-out story of his life in the same photo exhibition that has been similarly mounted, with the same pictures, in dozens of places all over India. This is the Gandhi story institutionalized by the state and its ancillary outfits, reproduced in Gandhi museums all over the country and abroad. As the discussion continues I feel as if we have stumbled upon something both disturbing and quite profound this afternoon. It will take me months to try to understand its fuller implications. Least of all do I know that it will impel me to write a book about it.
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