We have seen how in executing the Father of the Nation Nathuram did what, in a sense, no Hindu had dared to before him. His action thus caused an almost unbridgeable rupture between India’s past and its present. From another perspective, the significant but hardly studied philosopher Basanta Kumar Mallik1 also regarded Gandhi’s death as a watershed separating the old from the new in a decisive way. The old to him was the community-oriented way of life that Asian traditional societies once followed, but which was India’s present, until the first half of the twentieth century.
Mallik spent a memorable weekend with Bapu when the latter was a guest at his in-laws’ at Hazaribagh. After Gandhi was assassinated, Mallik circulated a note called ‘Mahaprasthan’, which later became the introduction to a small book, Gandhi – A Prophecy (1948). Madhuri Santhanam Sondhi, one of the few scholars to have engaged seriously with Mallik, calls it ‘a mediation on the significance of Gandhi’s death and the new direction to which it pointed both for India and the world’ (2008: 273). This remarkable book is also fascinating because Mallik calls it a ‘prophecy’. It was written, Sondhi says, ‘in a mood of prescience and insight … recording what Gandhi said’ (ibid.: 275); in other words, Mallik thought that Gandhi’s spirit was speaking directly to him, not entirely unlike Munna Bhai in the Bollywood blockbuster Lage Raho Munna Bhai, to which we shall pay more attention to in a later section.
Mallik is drawn into an inquiry of the historical implications of Gandhi’s death. He is convinced that Gandhi’s assassination ‘is not just another unfortunate tragedy, but an event that signifies a watershed in world history’ (Sondhi 2008: 276). ‘In macro terms’, this event for Mallik, ‘signals the end of the era of tradition not only for India, but for the rest of the world’ (ibid.). According to Mallik, the event had four major implications. First of all, Gandhi’s killing was a ‘rejection not only of Gandhism as narrowly defined, but through Gandhi of the Indian tradition in its entirety’ (ibid.: 277). The reason for such a conclusion is that though it was Nathuram who pulled the trigger, much of India had already rejected the Mahatma’s message. For Mallik, this meant that ‘no ideal or plan can ever come to fruition without the consent of those for whom it is intended’ (ibid.: 276). But the implications were far deeper: Gandhi’s assassination showed the ‘climactic failure’ of ‘the second restatement’, after Sri Ramakrishna’s, ‘of Indian tradition’ (ibid.) rearticulated for modern times, but retaining its classical form. For Mallik, Gandhi’s death therefore marked a clean break with the past; it proved that ‘after the nineteenth century it has not been possible to effectively restate the Indian tradition’ (ibid.). That was the reason why Gandhi’s call in Hind Swaraj for a return to the ‘Moral State’ of a traditional group society such as India had been for centuries had few takers; what the text proposed was, essentially, impossible. The death of the ‘Gandhi-Indian tradition’ was ‘final and absolute at this particular point in history’ (ibid.: 278). One reason for this failure was that Gandhi’s non-violence may have itself been coercive, and to that extent violent, placing ‘an unnatural strain on the other’s moral nature’ (ibid.). Not surprisingly, ‘Gandhi left behind no heritage, no bequest for humanity. When he died, his vision died with him’ (Sondhi 2008: 278). As Gandhi himself said, no one person would fully succeed him or embody his vision.
Secondly, according to Mallik, in the present condition of the world, it was impossible to solve the conflicts between major worldviews and types of civilization, of which there were primarily three types: the humanistic-individualistic, founded in ancient Greece, one version of which was Western-style modernity; the Asian absorptionist or mystical type, of which India was an example; and the Abrahamic, dualistic type, based on monotheism and strong group identity. In the present age, we notice ‘conflicting and opposed human purposes remain in a perpetual conflictual see-saw of victory and defeat, until both sides together reach frustration’ says Mallik (ibid.), prefiguring Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996). Both Gandhi and Jinnah had succeeded, but only partially. Gandhi freed India from British imperialism but was frustrated in his aspiration for a united or undivided subcontinent. Jinnah, on the other hand, freed his Muslim followers from Hindu majoritarian rule, but could not create a successful Islamic state. Gandhi’s great dream of ‘restoring the group society’ also ‘remained unfulfilled’; as Sondhi puts it:
It may still be argued that with Gandhi’s death there was an unprecedented simultaneous frustration of all types together, unprecedented for in the past any defeated scheme was always superseded by its victorious opponent or competitor.
(2008: 279–280)
But in the present scenario it was not as if the failure to revert to her ancient civilization meant that India’s tryst with modernity was successful:
Although free India apparently took the path of individualism through the adoption of several ‘modern’, which Mallik had classified as European/ humanist, institutions and knowledgeable-systems, i.e., appeared to supplant the group scheme with the individualist, Mallik looked upon it as an artificial transplant, doomed to rejection, as indeed political developments in post-independence India appear to confirm.
(Sondhi 2008: 280)
The logical conclusion for Mallik was that the death of the Mahatma signified the ‘onset of an entirely new era … an era struggling to be born and recognized’ (ibid.).
The third significance of the death of Gandhi to Mallik was the persistence of suffering for individuals as well as societies. Somewhat like the Buddha, Mallik believed that ‘there is no escape from suffering’ (1948: 280). This suffering, however, is not merely individual or existential, but also social and political. As Sondhi puts it:
Mallik points to the illusion of agency in a world of intrinsic relatedness whereby we either create suffering in the clash and competition of contradictory values, either through one side inflicting frustration on the other or undergoing it when the reverse takes place.
(2008: 280)
Thus we are at a time when no side wins clearly, but each has an illusory sense of agency. Action of this sort is without decisive outcome, dogged by competition and the clash of conflicting values, resulting in all-round frustration. This is a sort of ‘world pessimism’ because ‘in the end’, according to Mallik, ‘nothing happens … The values and objectives remain equally unfulfilled’ (ibid.).
Finally, given that there was ‘no escape from the framework of the universe’ in which ‘conflict is inevitable’ (ibid.: 281), the only way forward is not the ‘restoration of old values’ but ‘the opening of a path towards discovery of new norms and organization’ (Sondhi 2008: 281). What these might be is not yet clear, even 60 years after the death of Gandhi. As Sondhi puts it,
Today, Gandhi can no longer be regarded as a force in political life; he serves either as a model for selective imitation in non-violent protest movements … or as an example to be shunned, as by global and industrial modernizers and believers in realpolitik. … He is also often viewed, especially in his own country, as an interesting curiosity belonging to an idealistic ‘bygone’ age but defying emulation in the present.
(Ibid.: 281)
Gandhi’s sudden eclipse makes sense if we were to regard him, following Mallik’s opinion, as ‘the last major experiment in re-enacting the values of tradition’ (ibid.). But the defeat of tradition and of Gandhi is actually ‘the promise of a very different type of fulfilment’ hinted at in Mallik’s idea of ‘Bapuji’s society of beings’ (ibid.: 282). The fuller implications of this were, however, never spelled out by Mallik, but it seems to indicate the next stage of historical evolution, somewhat like Sri Aurobindo’s idea of the supermentalization of the earth. More immediately, the assassination was ‘a radical break with past historical patterns. The world had now been catapulted into the fourth stage of non-triumphalism in which no traditional scheme could prevail by commanding absolute faith and allegiance’ (ibid.: 294). Given that a ‘simple return to India’s Moral State’ as advocated by Gandhi in Hind Swaraj was no longer possible, nor was a ‘cross-civilizational leap into a humanistic or Legal State’, what India had to do was to try ‘to search for the basis of a new “World State” dominated neither by group nor individualist values, mediated neither by authoritarian nor libertarian methods’ (ibid.: 335).
As Sondhi concludes, ‘For Mallik the two events of Partition and Assassination were interlinked: the former he had already described as the defeat of India and Gandhi; the latter’s assassination put a seal on it’ (Sondhi 2008: 339–340). Godse’s act of supreme and ruthless individualism brought the era of the collective social relations of India to an end; it represented the partial victory of anti-traditional modernity. Individualism, which was modern Europe’s signature, had at last made decisive inroads into India. We may also regard Nathuram’s act as supremely modern because he was able not only to break an age-old taboo against patricide, but because his cold, deliberate, premeditated assassination made him an agent of a special kind of instrumental rationality that is uniquely modern. That he tried to legitimate his actions by referring to the Bhagawad Gita is somewhat misleading. This does not make him a traditionalist at all; his Hinduism, on the contrary, like Savarkar’s was pragmatic, semiticized and quite modern. This was a defensive and anxious Hinduism, worried about its survival in the world. Paradoxically, it still saw as its principal enemy medieval Islam, not having overcome the hatred and phobia of the long period of Muslim rule in the country.
Godse’s was a Hinduism that seemed more to subscribe to the Mosaic law of ‘an eye for an eye’ than the Hindu ideal of ahimsāparamodharmā (non-injury is the highest imperative). Godse’s greatest grouse against Gandhi was that the latter was weakening Hinduism by destroying its fighting spirit. He did not hesitate to kill Gandhi to express his disapproval. Gandhi was seen as the stubborn obstacle to militarizing the Hindus so that they could also turn belligerent in the face of threats from others. Hindu fanaticism of this sort, like Islamic jihadism later, was a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Godse’s proud patricide was a fundamentally unHindu act, implying the negation of age-old taboos in favour of a coldly calculated exercise in realpolitik.
There is another sense in which Gandhi’s death marks a finality, a break with the past, an irreversible step towards a new social, political and religious consciousness. Gandhi’s was the last, even though failed attempt, to reconcile Hindus and Muslims in a traditional spiritual brotherhood. Another way of saying this was that he tried to invent a new but a modern national religion, which was not merely civic or secular, but truly interdenominational and spiritual. He called it, after Vinoba, sarva dharma samabhava, an equal disposition to all faiths. The ingredients of this religion included the study and, to an extent, practice of other faiths than one’s own; non-judgement and non-criticism, but respect of others’ beliefs; in times of conflict, accommodation rather than provocation; non-belligerence; eschewing the desire to dominate or convert others; believing in one God, but also in God as Truth rather than as some theological construct; and solidarity between all people, regardless of their religion. He tried to institute such a religion in his ashrams, especially in Sevagram, where worship took place in an open space under the skies, without the symbols of any faith or any structure that could be identified as a temple, mosque, or church. The worship consisted of reciting passages from various scriptures and singing communal hymns and bhajans. Gandhi’s new ‘national’ religion was meant to remove religious causes of competition or conflict between contending groups. It was, in a sense, a bit like Akbar’s Din Illahi, the interdenominational faith that the emperor invented to give all his subjects equal rights. However, like Akbar’s experiment, Gandhi’s failed too. After his death, most of its adherents reverted to their traditional faiths, in fact, to even narrower versions of these.
While Indian secularism continues to show respect rather than an indifference towards all faiths, the fact is that religion, along with caste and community, have been highly politicized and exploited in post-independence India. Other attempts at forging a national culture using Gandhian ideas of religion, such as Svadhaya’s tenet of sarva dharma sveekar (the acceptance of all faiths) are successful largely in Hindu majority areas. Whether they can be applied at a larger scale is not clear. With a recrudescence of religious intolerance the world over, what is the future of Hindu-Muslim relations in the subcontinent? Pakistan’s state policy of promoting Islamism under Zia-ul-Haq has rebounded upon them, making that country one of the most strife-ridden and violent places in the world. With the Taliban still active across the porous border, the spate of killings by religious extremists continues on both sides. The chances of the revival of Gandhi’s formula of a religious or spiritual union of hearts seem rather remote in our times. Instead some sort of secular or civic rapprochement might have greater chances of success. In India, the economic and social success of the majority appears to have split the sizeable Muslim minority into those who wish to participate and join in the Hindu majority-led Indian narrative, and those who are recalcitrant and counter-systemic. There is still another even smaller set of strategists who, believing that Muslims are essentially inassimable into any other religious or social formation, dream of a reunited subcontinent in which their numbers will give them sufficient leverage to rule. In the meanwhile, they are working to make their votes count in those areas of India where they can swing the votes one way or another, determining who actually comes to power. Such calculations, to Gandhi, would have only been a cynical use of religion and identity politics. Not that he was alien to it in his own life. Whether it was the issue of separate electorates for the depressed classes or the creation of Pakistan, he had seen at first hand a rejection of his call for an understanding of religion that was uniting, rather than divisive.
Note
1 Mallik grew up in India, read Philosophy at Calcutta University, worked as a private tutor to the sons of the Prime Minister of Nepal, spent many years at Oxford where he had many influential friends including Robert Graves, and developed his own, unique philosophy and sociology of history. See Basanta Kumar Mallik: A Garland of Homage (1961) edited by Winifred Lewis.
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