What would Gandhi do?

 Vijayadashami and Gandhi Jayanti falling on the same date must have some cosmic significance, especially for those of us who would like to be useful in the world!

Coincidentally, I finished reading Krishna Kumar's wonderful novel, "Thank you, Gandhi" yesterday. As a person who aspires to be a peace educator, Professor Krishna Kumar is an educationist whose writing and views I have long sought out. This book is a departure from what I have read of his work and it was a wonderful surprise.

Assailed with all the disappointments and anxieties engendered by the world we now live in, he does not rant. Artfully, he uses fiction to say the things many of us would like to say. The device he uses is so simple that reviewers have assumes he is writing about himself and his friend--and perhaps this is the case--but that is arguably just their assumption. 

The protagonist is left a series of files written by his childhood friend who has died, asking that he complete this book project. The notes themselves are reflections on a changing India written by a bureaucrat who has served over decades of rapid change. This friend sees the change, as many of us do, as being a deterioration in values and political culture, barely mitigated by an even-handed improvement in quality of life. He reads about Gandhi and he reads Gandhi and he converses with Gandhi to try and make sense of this world. 

The Union Carbide factory leak looms large because the friend was an MP IAS officer and served in Bhopal in the relief work at the time. But his notes also mention the epidemics of caste-based killings, gang-rapes and lynchings that go unheeded. 

I found it very difficult to read at a stretch the first 40-50 pages, which are the protagonist's contextual account. We might say the prose is triggering; more precisely, it was actually both gut-wrenching and a relief to find that someone had written down words that we now find ever-harder to utter. We are surrounded by sycophantic commentary, self-congratulatory self-promotion and lies. No one seems to remember history. Hardly anyone is able to ask questions. Some who do are punished for it. Others are barely heard. It was so hard to see all the things that I feel written down and printed. Even as I read, I felt fear for the author. 

But the use of fiction blunts the sharp edge just enough as the book oscillates gently between reminiscence, relatively distant history (which actually is not that remote, given the public health impact of the Bhopal gas leak lingers) and biting comment on our times. 

The discussion of Gandhi's ideas, Gandhi's relevance and the conversations with Gandhi take forward in some ways what my cousin Niranjan Ramakrishnan wrote about in his book, "Reading Gandhi in the 21st Century" and what Rajmohan Gandhi writes about, especially in "Why Gandhi Matters." For most of us who grew up during or in the shadow of the Gandhi-Nehru era, this moment is especially baffling and it is challenging to find ways to be and act that feel true. This part of the book spoke to me less than the rest and I think it is because there were so many parallel conversations underway in my head. Perhaps I will come back to this at another time. 

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The book works the way I have always imagined that many of Professor Krishna Kumar's classes do--starting with the idea of the journey he wants to facilitate, raising questions, reflecting honestly, enabling a variety of perspectives to be explored and articulated and not necessarily with a pat conclusion. Learning is a journey. Political action is a journey. And both can be done creatively. I will just close by saying, "Thank you for writing this book!"