[Reader-list] Shahid Amin on Gandhi's letter, etc

[Ravikant]

GANDHI’S LETTER 
 - A whole history of the making of Gandhi-in-India awaits retrieval 

  Shahid Amin
The Telegraph,  Monday, July 09, 2007
Page url: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070709/asp/opinion/story_8030107.asp

The successful exertion by the government of India to stymie the auction in 
London of a letter written by Mahatma Gandhi has created quite a stir. The 
facts of the case are of great intrinsic interest: the letter was written by 
Gandhi — in the pre-dawn hours as was his wont — just two weeks before his 
assassination. As with much else that he did in the last months of his life, 
this letter was apiece with his strenuous efforts to maintain sanity in the 
capital city, witnessing a haemorrhaging of its Muslim population by death 
and flight; it was simultaneously a plea for linguistic and orthographic 
tolerance — a faint voice, but rising above the din, against “the malice and 
intolerance…of the opponents of the Urdu script”. 

The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi reproduce a full paraphrase, but not an 
actual translation of the letter. Six hours later, at 11.30 am on January 18, 
1948, a motley delegation led by the president of the Congress, and 
comprising the representatives of the Hindu Mahasabha, the Rashtriya 
Swayamsevak Sangh, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema, prominent Muslims of Delhi along with 
the city’s adminstrative officers, and the high commissioner of Pakistan, 
read out a seven-point declaration, written in Urdu and Devanagari 
scripts “at Gandhiji’s insistence”, to the fasting Mahatma at Birla 
House. “Muslims will be able to move about in Subzimandi, Karol Bagh, 
Paharganj and other localities just as they could in the past,” the 
signatories averred, bloodying the contours of the mohallas I drive through 
en route my son’s school. “We shall not object to the return to Delhi of 
Muslims who have migrated from here,” the pledge-takers solemnly affirmed, 
ending with an artless plea to “Mahatmaji to believe us and to give up his 
fast.” Gandhi believed them and accepted a glass of juice from Maulana Azad: 
he was so weak that what he told this small delegation had to be repeated 
aloud by Pyrelal and Sushila Nayyar. 

There is then a heightened poignancy to everything that Gandhi said or wrote 
in the last month of his life, which seems to have been lost in laying claim 
to each and every piece of memorabilia associated with the Father of the 
Nation. Interesting facts have come to light: that Gandhi’s typist walked 
away with a box-full of his last-days’ letters, that this trove was spirited 
out of India, and some of the effects reclaimed by diligent diplomats in the 
recent past. Extracts from the letter have appeared in the press, with the 
news of its expected auction-price dwarfing the significance of its contents. 
Its newsworthiness seems to lie in the successful diplomatic pressure exerted 
by our high commission in London, and the willingness of the ministry of 
culture to rewrite the rules about government making bids at auctions, in the 
interest of national self-esteem: a reminder, that we have not forgotten 
Mahatma Gandhi — the greatest brand-ambassador for India (in the admen’s 
language) “that ever walked this earth”, in the words of Albert Einstein. The 
point, however, is not that we have forgotten “the greatest Indian teacher of 
all times”, as Professor Mohammad Habib called him in his presidential 
address to the Indian History Congress a month before the tees janvari 
assassination. It is that we no longer routinely commemorate him, as we did 
in the past. 

For India’s midnight children, those born in a freshly-partitioned and free 
Hindustan, Gandhi and Nehru represented the two facets of adolescent, 
post-colonial pride. We knew from our text books that the young Gandhi had 
refused to cheat at school as his teacher had nudged-and-winked him to copy 
the correct spelling of ‘kettle’, so as to present the visiting inspector 
with a class of word-perfect spellers. We could almost hear the goat which 
kid Mohandas had consumed with a friend (to be like “the mighty Englishman/…
Because being a meat-eater/ He is five cubits tall”), bleating normatively 
inside young Gandhi. We awaited with solemn, juvenile eagerness the two 
minute break from all scholarly activity at 11 am on Martyr’s Day — 30th 
January, when Gandhi was gunned down that evening at Tees-Janvari Marg in 
Lutyen’s Delhi. 

But every subsequent national commemoration of the Father of the Nation 
rightly required that we remembered the Mahatma outside the disaggregated 
space of families huddled over an evening cup of tea. It must have been 
Nehru’s idea, that even if mildly anachronistic, individual Indians stand up 
in non-familial groups, wherever they were — at offices, schools, colleges, 
factories, not at 5.17 pm but at 11 am — in silent tribute to Mahatma Gandhi. 
A siren used to go off in the city to mark the duration of that two-minute 
commemoration, the only time that our individual watches were overtaken by 
the national time that the assassinated Bapu had forged into being. This 
routinized memorialization seems to have fallen through the empty time of our 
recent past: perhaps there is a file, signed by a relevant joint secretary, 
authorizing this lapse (with appropriate reasoning), but unlikely, as with so 
much of official paper, to be made available to a future historian. 
Which brings me to the question of the updating of the Collected Works of 
Mahatma Gandhi, the CWMG as it is known to historians in the trade. The 100 
volumes of the Collected Works, published between 1956 and 1994, are a 
mammoth product of post-independence historical scholarship. Between 1998 and 
2001, unknown editors recast the original volumes, deleting a whole lot of 
speeches, even letters, “which did not seem to be authentic”; a new set and a 
CD were hurriedly pushed through by the National Democratic Alliance 
government. The gratuitous violence of this exercise by anonymous 
vandal-editors was highlighted by scholars like Tridip Suhrud, and it appears 
that the original set of volumes is being reprinted. 
But that still calls for additions to the corpus of newly-discovered material, 
mostly in the shape of Gandhi’s speeches delivered in small towns, or at 
railway stations, specially during his triumphant tour in the winter of 
1920-21. These were reported either in local newspapers, or scribbled in CID 
scrapbooks and printed in police reports. By what touchstone of authenticity 
are we going to exclude forever Gandhi’s speeches delivered in end-1920-early 
1921 at centres of a powerful peasant movement in central Uttar Pradesh, or 
at the Chauri Chaura railway station, a year before that violent 
confrontation of February 4, 1922? 

And would it not make sense for the State to spend some of the 150 crores of 
rupees earmarked for official commemoration of the ‘Freedom Struggle’, on 
publishing the 4000-odd depositions made by peasants to Gandhi’s lieutenants, 
including Babu Rajendra Prasad, detailing the oppression suffered in the 
dehats of indigo planters in Champaran district of north Bihar? For just as 
his deftly defiant letters to the Champaran officials allow us to study up 
close the very making of Gandhi-in-India, it is the peasants’ eagerness in 
deposing before his unofficial inquiry that went into the making of both that 
famous satyagraha and of Mahatma Gandhi himself. 
In this gala year of anniversaries, the peasants of 1917 North Bihar need not 
remain forever “the anonymous masses” who also ran for Our Freedom. True, 
their humble petitions, were these to reach Christie’s, would not create an 
auctioner’s stir, as did recently that letter of Gandhi. But Champaran, April 
1917 and Delhi, January 1948 are not that far apart in space and time, as the 
auction market in London may suggest at first sight.
  
The author is professor of history, University of Delhi