Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) was a close associate, even an acolyte and disciple of Gandhi. She not only exchanged a long correspondence, but enjoyed a witty, irreverent, and yet admiring friendship with him. For years Sarojini was also the unofficial ambassador of the Indian National Congress, travelling extensively to spread the gospel of the Indian freedom struggle under Gandhi’s leadership. A child prodigy, she passed the Madras matriculation examination at the age of 12, wrote long poem at the age of 13, fell in love with a considerably older man at 15, went to England to study, but did not complete her degree at Girton College, Cambridge, returned to India to marry Dr Govindarajulu Naidu when she was barely 21, had four children in quick succession, but then grew disenchanted with the sequestered life of a Hyderabadi housewife, and plunged into the freedom movement at the behest of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Gandhi’s ‘guru’, going on to become the President of the Indian National Congress in 1925 and first woman Governor of India’s largest state, United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), after independence.
But before she joined politics, Sarojini was already famous as a poet. She come in contact with the fin de siècle poets in English, whose leader was Edmond Gosse. Both Gosse and the British symbolist poet, Arthur Symonds, befriended her and championed her work. Sarojini’s first collection of verse, The Golden Threshold (1905) was published by Heinemann in London, to much critical acclaim. She published two other collections, The Bird of Time (1912), and The Broken Wing (1917), before poetic fashions changed decisively with the onset of modernism. Sarojini was famous as an Indian poet before Tagore, though the latter was a much greater writer and won the Nobel prize. She was called the ‘Nightingale of India’ and was renowned as an eloquent public speaker.
In a memorable and stirring speech significantly entitled, ‘My Father, Do Not Rest’, broadcast on the All India Radio on 1 February 1948, Sarojini hailed the Mahatma’s spirit, which she believed had risen Christ-like on the third day after his assassination: ‘Like Christ of old on the third day he has risen again in answer to the cry of his people and the call of the world for the continuance of his guidance, his love, his service and inspiration’ (Naidu 2010: 285). This seldom-studied speech is a crucial part of the evidence that I have assembled to offer my reading of Gandhi’s death, for it is Sarojini who inaugurates Gandhi’s haunting of India.
Sarojini, though full of sorrow and tears like all the bereft followers and admirers of Gandhi, imagines that Gandhi is not really ‘dead’. It is her way of turning the colossal tragedy of the assassination into a sort of spiritual triumph, quite like Christ’s resurrection:
And while we all mourn, those who loved him, knew him personally, and those to whom his name was but a miracle and a legend, though we are all full of tears and though we are full of sorrow on this third day when he has risen from his own ashes, I feel that sorrow is out of place and tears become a blasphemy.
(Naidu 2010: 285)
According to Sarojini, the reason such a transformation is possible in Gandhi’s case, is because all his life the Mahatma taught that the spirit is more important than the body:
How can he die, who through his life and conduct and sacrifice, who through his love and courage and faith has taught the world that the spirit matters, not the flesh, that the spirit has the power greater than the powers of the combined armies of the earth, combined armies of the ages?
(Ibid.)
Sarojini proceeds to set up a contrast between the small and the large, the frail and the powerful, the physical and metaphysical, the material and the spiritual, this world and the other world:
He was small, frail, without money, without even the full complement of garment to cover his body, not owning even as much earth as might be held on the point of a needle, how was he so much stronger than the forces of violence, the might of empires and the grandeur of embattled forces in the world? Why was it that this little man, this tiny man, this man with a child’s body, this man so ascetic, living on the verge of starvation by choice so as to be more in harmony with the life of the poor, how was it that he exercised over the entire world, of those who revered him and those who hated him, such power as emperors could never wield?
(Naidu 2010: 285)
Thus she constitutes a mythos of superior power and glory, the proof in life and death of the greater might of soul-force over brute force, the strength of truth and non-violence of one ordinary man over the falsehood of empires and armies.
Interestingly, as her narrative continues, Sarojini, gradually if unconsciously, begins to admit the great distance between Gandhi and the rest of us, in which she includes herself. Gandhi’s life and action are not to be judged or understood in terms of the yardstick set by the common run of humankind. Indeed, though she seeks to represent him, explain and articulate his uniqueness to the world, she finds her inspiration flagging. Gandhi is not to be easily explained or captured in words; it is as if she begins to lose grip on her project to encapsulate him or arrest his essence for a stunned nation mourning his loss. A gradual distancing is thus evident as her peroration progresses:
It was because he did not care for applause, he did not care for censure. He only cared for the path of righteousness. He cared only for the ideals that he preached and practised. And in the midst of the most terrible disasters caused by violence and greed of men, when the abuse of the world was heaped up like dead leaves, dead flowers on battlefields, his faith never swerved in his ideal of non-violence. He believed that though the whole world slaughter itself and the whole world’s blood be shed, still his non-violence would be the authentic foundation of the new civilisation of the world and he believed that he who seeks his life shall lose it and he who loses his life shall find it.
(Naidu 2010: 286)
Again, she takes recourse, in the end, to Biblical allusion and phraseology to account for Gandhi’s extremism, his impractical and persistent adherence to his beliefs in the face of impossible odds. It is as if she is tacitly admitting that Gandhi’s stubbornness was misplaced if not mistaken, that the ‘real’ world was far too brutal and ugly for his idealism and purity.
Sarojini next goes to the root of the hatred that resulted in Gandhi’s slaughter, the internal strife and division in the nation, not only between Hindus and Muslims, but between Hindus and Hindus, whose far-reaching consequence was not just the Partition of the country amidst untold violence and bloodletting, but the very killing of the Mahatma whose idea of the nation was predicated upon unity and brotherhood. More profoundly, Sarojini hints that violence directed outward also strikes inside a community – the problem of Hindu vs. Muslim could never be separated from the problem of Hindu vs. Hindu. The killing of the Mahatma was a great tragedy for the Hindus, who out of a mistaken notion of his partiality to the Muslims, had taken the extreme step of killing him. What greater irony could there be than the greatest Hindu of modern times not being recognized or understood by his own co-religionists?
It was very evident that it was not any community but his that disapproved so violently and showed its anger and resentment in such a dastardly fashion. Alas for the Hindu community, that the greatest Hindu of them all, the only Hindu of our age who was so absolutely and unswervingly true to the doctrine, to the ideals, the philosophy of Hinduism should have been slain by the hand of a Hindu! That indeed, that indeed is almost the epitaph of the Hindu faith that the hand of a Hindu in the name of Hindu rights and a Hindu world should sacrifice the noblest of them all.
(Naidu 2010: 286)
Here, albeit in passing, Sarojini touches on the horror, the pollution, the shame, the sorrow – indeed the unspeakability – of the Nathuram’s crime. Again, we notice how unbearable the event is so that it must not, cannot, be dwelled upon. Sarojini, too, passes beyond it rather too hastily:
But, as I say, it would be the act of faithless deserters if we were to yield to despair. If we were indeed to believe that he is dead, if we were to believe that all is lost, because he has gone, of what avail would be our love and our faith? Of what avail would be our loyalty to him if we dare to believe that all is lost because his body is gone from our midst? Are we not there, his heirs, his spiritual descendants, the legatees of his great ideals, successors of his great work? Are we not there to implement that work and enhance it and enrich and make greater achievements by joint efforts than he could have made singly? Therefore, I say the time is over for private sorrow.
(Naidu 2010: 287)
It is peculiar how Sarojini contrasts private sorrow with public avowal of Gandhi’s mandate, choosing the latter to overcome the former.2 Why does she not consider the possibility of public sorrow and private avowal of non-violence and satyagraha as the more logical way ahead? I think that is because the immediate task is to deny mourning, to forbid sorrow, and to interdict a national soul-searching on what might be the meaning of Gandhi’s death. On the third day after his death the more pressing task is to heal, to move forward, to fill the void caused by the Mahatma’s demise.
Sarojini’s next move is, therefore, to be expected: it is a call to action, to divert the mind from the loss and to engage it in meaningful work:
The time is over for beating of breasts and tearing of hair. The time is here and now when we stand up and say, ‘We take up the challenge’ to those who defied Mahatma Gandhi. We are his living symbols. We are his soldiers. We are the carriers of his banner before an embattled world. Our banner is truth. Our shield is non-violence. Our sword is a sword of the spirit that conquers without blood. Let the peoples of India rise up and wipe their tears, rise up and still their sobs, rise up and be full of hope and full of cheer. Let us borrow from him, why borrow, he has handed it to us, the radiance of his own personality, the glory of his own courage, the magnificent epic of his character. Shall we not follow in the footsteps of our master? Shall we not obey the mandates of our father? Shall not we his soldiers carry his battle to triumph? Shall we not give to the world the completed message of Mahatma Gandhi?
(Naidu 2010: 287)
The call to action helps refocus the attention of the nation, to shift the polluting blot of the murder into a rousing mark on the forehead, a battle cry for non-violence that will resonate across the nations unto the high heavens:
Though his voice will not speak again, have we not a million, million voices to bear his message to the world, not only to this world, to our contemporaries, but to the world generation after generation? Shall sacrifice be in vain? Shall his blood be shed for futile purposes of mourning? Or, shall we not use that blood as a tilak on our foreheads, the emblem of his legion of peace-loving soldiers to save the world? Here and now, here and now, I for one before the world that listens to my quivering voice pledge myself and you, as I pledged myself more than thirty years ago, to the service of the undying Mahatma.
(Naidu 2010: 287)
In a sense, Sarojini is sowing the seeds of the afterlife of Gandhi in his dying moments, pledging herself – and her listeners – to his ideals, to service and sacrifice. The dead Gandhi has thus been apotheosized into ‘the undying Mahatma’.
After so much Christian terminology, Sarojini now suddenly resorts to a gesture that is both autobiographical and quintessentially Hindu. She remembers her own father, Aghorenath Chattopadhyay’s, dying words:
What is death? My own father, dying, just before his death with the premonition of death on him, said: ‘There is no birth. There is no death. There is only the soul seeking higher and higher stages of truth.’ Mahatma Gandhi who lived for truth in this world has been translated, though by the hand of an assassin, to a higher stage of the truth which he sought.
(Ibid.)
The great tragedy and loss of the Mahatma’s death has thus been deftly averted. He is not dead, but has been translated to a higher level of truth. It is not just that this earth with all its sorrows is not the ultimate reality, but that, as the Gita would remind us, death itself, like life, is merely a transition in an unending sequence of a soul’s evolution to higher levels of truth.
There is also the question of who will reap the spiritual surplus that Gandhi has generated. Who will be the inheritors of Gandhi’s mantle and mandate, who will harvest the enormous loyalty and sympathy generated by his murder? The answer is clear. As a loyal soldier of the Congress Party, Sarojini also anoints Gandhi’s successors:
Shall we not take up his place? Shall not our united strength be strong enough to preach and practise, his great message for the world? I am here one of the lowliest of his soldiers, but along with me I know that his beloved disciples like Jawaharlal Nehru, like his trusted followers and friends Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Babu, who was like St. John in the bosom of Christ,3 and those others of his associates who at a moment’s notice flew from all ends of India to make their last homage at his feet. Shall we not all take up his message and fulfil it?
(Naidu 2010: 288)
Nehru is the Prime Minister; Prasad the President, and Vallabhbhai Patel the Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of independent India, all leaders of the Congress Party, who rule, Sarojini implies, in Gandhi’s name. Sarojini, also a beneficiary, although less spectacular, of the windfall that accrued to the Congress, was the Governor (or, as she sometimes said jokingly, the Governess) of India’s largest state, the United Provinces.
But it is in the last lines of her soulful oration that Sarojini really performs her most stunning and creative manoeuvre. Instead of a conventional apotheosis or a translation to a higher state, in contrast to her earlier attempt to resurrect or immortalize Gandhi, she suddenly prays that he not rest in peace. She does not want, through her very act of memorialization, to dismiss and forget Gandhi; she does not want his bones to rest in peace and for the people who adored him to carry on as before; she does not wish to put an end to the Gandhian narrative. On the contrary, instead of laying him to rest, she turns him into a ghost who haunts the nation:
May the soul of my master, my leader, my father rest not in peace, not in peace, but let his ashes be so dynamically alive that the charred ashes of the sandalwood, let the powder of his bones be so charged with life and inspiration that the whole of India will after his death be revitalised into the reality of freedom.
My father, do not rest. Do not allow us to rest.
(Naidu 2010: 289)
Gandhi now becomes the ‘ghost who walks’ – not the Phantom of the US comic book produced by Lee Falk, which incidentally was the most popular comic in India for decades – but a peculiarly Indian sort of spirit who produces, as Rajkumar Hirani’s lovable goon Munna says, a chemical locha (a chemical disturbance) in the brains of succeeding generations of Indians. Gandhi’s life is over, but his afterlife will continue to move, disturb, and haunt us.
Sarojini ends by giving us some hints of what this afterlife will be like, even as she asks of the dead Mahatma the strength to keep her pledge:
Keep us to our pledge. Give us strength to fulfil our promise, your heirs, your descendants, your stewards, the guardians of your dreams, the fulfillers of India’s destiny. You, whose life was so powerful, make it so powerful in your death, far from mortality you have passed mortality by a supreme martyrdom in the cause most dear to you.
(Naidu 2010: 289)
The pledge, the bond to which she wishes to tie all Indians with the ‘Father’ of the nation is of course a sort of debt to be repaid. We have incurred the debt by being directly or indirectly responsible for his death; it is a crime or sin we should atone for, a pollution that we need to cleanse before we can be free or whole again, restored to our unbroken essential state. But it is also a debt in the sense of a gift which the nation’s founding father has left us by virtue of his bequest to enjoy into perpetuity.
Hindus believe that they are born with debts and obligations – to the Gods, to the ancestors, to parents, and to teachers – similarly, contemporary, post-colonial citizens of India too have incurred debts from those who ensured that they would be born free in their own nation state. Sarojini hints that the only way to repay our debt to Gandhi is to contribute to the ongoing project of nation-building and society-formation, by giving back and discharging our responsibilities so that what we have inherited is neither wasted nor spoiled, but preserved and increased for the next generation. The power of the Mahatma is hereby augmented in passing from embodiment to disembodiment, his martyrdom to the cause dear to him, non-violence and the brotherhood of all Indians, serving as a trigger to his enhanced estate.
In the process of such a transformation, however, Gandhi’s action is not over, his task not finished. Instead, he is to have no peace, no rest; like any idea that resonates after the death of its staunchest advocate, he too is to persist and continue beyond his ashy grave or magnificent memorials into the very hearts and minds of Indians in generations to come. Somewhat like the ghost of someone snatched untimely from life, Gandhi’s calm and fully conscious confrontation with death turns him into a spectral presence haunting post-colonial Indians. There is a way to escape this haunting, this visitation, though Sarojini does not spell it out. It is by undoing the two-nation theory, by making peace between Hindus and Hindus, Hindus and Muslims, men and women, upper castes and dalits. That, to put it simply, would be Gandhi’s way.
Notes
1 See Naidu and Paranjape (ed.) Sarojini Naidu: Selected Poetry and Prose (2010) for a more detailed engagement with her life and literary works.
2 Perhaps, she (un)consciously echoes Tennyson’s famous lines from ‘In Memoriam’:
Is this an hour
For private sorrow’s barren song,
When more and more the people throng
The chairs and thrones of civil power?
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/In_Memoriam_A._H._H.
3 Sarojini’s many allusions to Christian traditions is not merely a reflection of her education but also of ready-made templates to reinscribe the meaning of Gandhi’s death. See Jonathan Dollimore’s Death, Desire, and Loss in Western Culture (1998) for a reading of how death is understood in the West, India’s most intimate civilizational Other.
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