Mohandas Gandhi not as Mahatma but a self-assured man of epic conceit

By Mayank Chhaya

Mayank Chayya

On the 75th anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination today, it is only becoming that we liberate him from the shackles of Mahatmahood and view him for what he really was—an astoundingly self-assured man with a strong moral compass as well an astute understanding of the human condition.  Couple that with an epic conceit to devote his entire life to causes of enormous consequences and yet not be attached to it all.

That I come from the same state as Gandhi, namely Gujarat, and even the same specific part of the state, namely Saurashtra, does not necessarily equip me with any special insight into his mind. What it does do though is offer me a socio-cultural entry point into his world that I am so intimately familiar with.

One defining aspect of that world for Gandhi and I dates back to the early 15th century in the life of the great poet-philosopher Narsinh Mehta, the creator of, among other writings, the masterfully secular bhajan ‘Vaishnav Jan To’. To know the quintessence of ‘Vaishnav Jan To’ as the ultimate benchmark for a moral, civil and empathetic life is to know the quintessence of Gandhi.

The very opening lines of this one of the world’s most widely sung songs lay out brilliantly who a truly civilized human being is. It is one who empathizes with the pain of others and derives no arrogance from helping fellow humans. That the bhajan became Gandhi’s lifelong moral compass as well as the defining part of India’s freedom movement speaks of the enduring resonance of its message for him.

As was his wont, Gandhi did not necessarily engage with the writer of the song, Narsinh Mehta, but with the song and its message. It is almost as if for him, it may as well have been written by anybody else and it would still be as essential. There is nothing to suggest that Gandhi ever talked about Mehta. My personal reading of his writings suggests not. His preoccupation was the philosophy of the song rather than philosopher who espoused it. It is no wonder then that a vast majority of those who know the song think it was written by Gandhi.

Mehta, of course, is a revered name in Gujarat and is considered its ‘Adi Kavi’, meaning the original poet. He was born in a village called Talaja near Bhavnagar sometime in 1414 and most likely died 1480. Much of his body of work, that included hundreds of songs and ballads, was created in Junagadh n the foothills of the 65 million-year-old Mount Girnar.

‘Vaishnav Jan To’ was always in the air of Saurashtra as a morning song or moral reinforcement. Gandhi ought to have been aware of it from his early life although it was only in 1905 that he incorporated it as one of the main songs of his Phoenix commune life in South Africa.

On the face of it, the song’s core advice is to be a person who is empathetic, non-judgmental, civil in language, free of malice and guile, unaffected by material lures and someone who has sublimated desires and has become a renunciate. When you analyze those attributes, you realize each of those requires a great deal of self-assurance.

Taken together, they demand an epic self-belief. Examining Gandhi’s life over the decades, it becomes obvious that as a process he tried to live up to one or many or all of those attributes. That he managed to absorb most of them and internalized them as part of his personal and public conducts illustrates his grand sense of self.

It is not clear whether he already had those qualities naturally when he became aware of ‘Vaishnav Jan To’ or not but it is remarkable how many of those were so demonstrably present in his character. It is from this standpoint that Gandhi’s life has not been examined. To that extent, historians have been unfair to him by installing the beatific halo of Mahatmahood around him.

When viewed from that vantage point, as someone who actively worked to evolve those attributes, he comes alive as an astoundingly self-assured man who was both pragmatic at the daily operative level and lofty in articulating his grander vision.

It is that Gandhi that India and the world ought to pay attention to rather than a deified figure who, as the great Albert Einstein said, the world might scarcely believe walked among us.

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