“You can talk in English if you want,” D.B. Jain, a laparoscopic surgeon, says to me, as I sit across his desk. “Pani!” he calls out. An attendant appears with glasses of cold water which he places in front of me and Ansar Ali, who works at the National Gandhi Museum (NGM). Ali has been trying to help me locate the house of another surgeon — Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, one of the central figures of India’s freedom movement. All we know is a possibly outdated address in Daryaganj and the fact that where Dr. Ansari’s garden once stood is the Shakahar Hotel.
On a quest to locate some of the lesser known sites associated with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the freedom movement, I discover that many of them are totally obscure, their preservation often left to chance.
After much to and fro in our search, we zeroed in on Dr. Jain’s gate. It was locked. Understandably cautious, he initially talked to us over the chained gate.
Later, sitting in his examination room, we learn that Dr. Jain now owns the house, his grandfather having bought it from Dr. Ansari’s family. The house has hosted many significant meetings, as Dr. Ansari, a surgeon, was also a member of the Indian National Congress (INC) and its president in 1927. He had also served as president of the Muslim League and was one of the founders of Jamia Millia. The house’s most famous guest was Gandhi, who met Dr. Ansari in 1915, through Sushil Kumar Rudra, the principal of St. Stephen’s College. Gandhi would often walk, from this house, five miles to Viceroy House, and return to apprise the Congress Working Committee of his deliberations with Lord Irwin. These deliberations would eventually lead to the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of 1927.
Dr. Jain’s grandfather, a municipal commissioner and contemporary of Dr. Ansari, has told his grandson of a time when Gandhi was very weak from a fast while staying at the house. When asked what ought to be done if he died, Gandhi said, “Peeche jala diye (Cremate me at the back).”
Dr. Jain indicates with a movement of his hands that the story is possibly just family lore, but it is not unbelievable. Rajghat, where Gandhi was eventually cremated, vaguely fits that description in terms of its location relative from Daryaganj. What can be verified is Gandhi’s secretary Pyarelal’s documentation of an incident in 1933 when Gandhi was fasting in Pune and became critically ill. Gandhi sent a message to Dr. Ansari saying he would like “nothing better” than to die on the doctor’s lap, to which the doctor said he would not let Gandhi die either on his or anyone else’s lap.
Nothing commemorates this landmark, which was once witness to momentous friendships, policies and debates central to the freedom movement. “There was a plaque some time ago,” Dr. Jain says. Dr. Ansari’s property stays preserved otherwise only because of individual interest and some luck. It is to preserve and document similar sites, video and audio recordings, and documents related to the Mahatma that the Gandhi Heritage Sites Panel was formed. Headed by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, former diplomat, governor and Gandhi’s grandson, the panel submitted its report to the government in 2008. It identified sites, both in India and abroad, including a core list of 39 sites, four of which are in London and South Africa.
The Indian sites are, not surprisingly, scattered across the country, traversing its length and breadth as Gandhi himself did. From the one in Madurai, where Gandhi swapped his relatively elaborate Indian dress for the minimalist dhoti, to the dargah of Bakhtiar Chisti in the Mehrauli area of Delhi, which Gandhi visited days before his assassination. The Panel’s main recommendations were to set up a Gandhi Heritage Mission to oversee the preservation of both the physical sites as well as documents and recordings related to Gandhi’s life. The Panel also recommended the creation of a Gandhi Heritage Portal for digital preservation of documents and pictures. Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad was given charge of enabling the Mission’s projects, which were to be funded from a corpus of Rs. 50 crore, and of creating and maintaining the portal.
As I walk up the mud path towards Sabarmati Ashram, I can hear the sounds of young voices. A class at the girls’ school of the Harijan Ashram Trust is in session and the children are reciting a lesson in Gujarati. I see a group of young people, likely from another country, walking down the path, some with matted hair, in tie-dye T-shirts and flip flops and with backpacks. A stray dog stares at me, its feet neatly placed on either side of tread marks made in the somewhat moist soil. It has rained recently. Construction workers walk in and out of some of the cottages. A man in a spotless white kurta pyjama stands at a gate in front of the cottages. Tridip Suhrud is the director of Sabarmati Ashram. He is a Gandhi scholar, not a Gandhian per se, he clarifies, during our conversation that morning. “I do enjoy wearing a T-shirt and riding my bicycle every morning,” he says. Suhrud got involved with the Ashram’s administration more than a decade ago when the managing trust was looking for ways to reinvigorate the site.
“We started rebuilding the ashram around the portal… we saw it as an opportunity to reinvent ourselves,” Suhrud says. The portal was launched in 2013.
We walk across the road to the other side of the ashram. Today, the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust owns less than 2.5 acres of the original 80 acres purchased by Gandhi. The rest of the land is owned by associated trusts. Little white houses, with red tiled roofs, sit clustered across the road — these are inhabited by the Dalit families who joined the ashram when it was set up in 1917.
One rainy night in 1917, Gandhi and his companions moved to Sabarmati Ashram in a convoy of bullock carts that made its way from the ashram at Kochrab, not 10 km away. The new ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati was not quite ready, but there was no time to waste. The plague had struck Kochrab. The piece of land that Gandhi had purchased for the new ashram happened to be located between a cremation site and a prison and Gandhi thought this was entirely appropriate since, according to him, a true satyagrahi would inevitably end up at one or the other. In 1922, Gandhi himself was His Majesty’s guest at the jail in Sabarmati following his arrest for writing seditious articles in Young India .
The jail and crematorium have been modernised and are functional. “On a good day, you can even smell it,” Suhrud says, laughing.
Gandhi used the ashram until 1930, when he and 78 followers embarked on the Salt March to Dandi. Thereafter, he disbanded it, partly in solidarity with thousands who had had their lands confiscated by the government.
With one million visitors a year, maintaining the ashram infrastructure today is no mean task. With the reinvention came a research and climate-controlled archival centre, new job descriptions and even WiFi. Buildings designed by the celebrated Charles Correa have been renovated and some original structures such as the house of Gandhi’s nephew Maganlal, who was the ashram’s manager, and Hriday Kunj, Gandhi and Kasturba’s house, are well preserved. Someone sits in Hriday Kunj, spinning continuously on the charkha as long as the ashram is open. Gandhi’s room has a few of his original writing desks and the ubiquitous three monkeys. (I was to encounter no less than three sets of these during my travel, but I am still not clear which set is the original).
In Delhi, I visit the old St. Stephen’s College at Kashmere Gate. It is now the office of Delhi’s Chief Electoral Officer, Chandra Bhushan Kumar, who wants to build a museum on elections with a ‘Gandhi Corner’ for which he has enlisted the help of the NGM. The building has a long relationship with Gandhi. When Gandhi, fresh from his successful experiments in South Africa, arrived in New Delhi on April 12, 1915, he stayed with Principal Rudra. He continued to stay there on his visits to Delhi through 1925. The Khilafat Movement was launched here and the Non-Cooperation Movement was “conceived and hatched under his [Rudra’s] hospitable roof,” Gandhi wrote.
I notice a few old structures — a staircase here, a shelf there. The Mission’s experts are consulting the archives at St. Stephen’s College to try and reconstruct the exact location of Gandhi’s stay and his lecture to the students.
Gandhi heritage sites in the public eye, controlled by robust trusts, tend to do well. Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti (GSDS), Delhi, which runs an exhibition and archiving centre near Rajghat, and manages the former Birla House, is a case in point. Birla House, where Gandhi spent his final 144 days and where he was assassinated, is now a multimedia museum and a memorial to his last living quarters and the spot where he died. The place is well maintained and supports an ecosystem that extends beyond the physical space. The young guides are usually from disadvantaged backgrounds and are paid honorariums ranging from Rs. 13,000 to Rs. 16,000 per month. GSDS trains volunteers in eight different trades, including pottery, music and mime; some of them have gone on to lead programmes in Tihar Jail to train prisoners.
But not all high-profile Gandhi heritage sites are as well-kept. In May 2016, The Hindu’s Sunday Magazine reported that Pune’s Aga Khan Palace, where Gandhi, Kasturba and Gandhi’s secretary Mahadev Desai were imprisoned for the Quit India Movement, was dilapidated and in desperate need of repairs. Four months later, the situation is yet to be rectified.
“The building and garden are well maintained, but the museum is still in a shabby state,” says Nilam Mahajan, who has been a guide at the museum for the past 36 years, over the phone. Suhrud says the Mission is awaiting a detailed project report to take the preservation ahead.
India’s 20th century heritage is especially vulnerable, says Anil Nauriya, a writer and Supreme Court lawyer. The Ancient Monuments Act enables the Archaeological Society of India (ASI) to protect monuments at least 100 years old, leaving newer monuments vulnerable.
Dilkush, Sultan Singh’s house where Gandhi ended his 1924 fast for Hindu-Muslim amity, is just one such example. In its place now, in the Subzi Mandi area of Delhi, stands an automobile spare parts shop. In the years after Partition, the priority was to resettle people and not preserve buildings, says Nauriya.
“When you preserve a structure and everybody passes by and they know what it signifies… it creates a new mindset in the person who sees it. It is a way of educating people.”
Talking to people involved with Gandhi heritage work, it emerges that a PPP model for preserving privately-owned sites may be a good way forward.
As the chairman of the Panel has observed, Gandhi “impacted on the physical surroundings that he was in by engaging intensely with those venues, whether by tilling ground, raising cottages, cleaning them, being a prisoner in them, or investing them with the magnetism of voluntary starvation, prayer and, finally, of martyrdom.”
sriram@thehindu.co.in
