If Mahatma Gandhi returns on his 150th birth anniversary

If on his 150th birthday, the Mahatma were to come back, the Salt March would become the Aadhaar Satyagraha, challenging the idea of citizenship as identification

Updated - December 03, 2021 08:04 am IST

The statue of Mahatma Gandhi with Parliament House in the background. PTI

The statue of Mahatma Gandhi with Parliament House in the background. PTI

I always dreamt that India possessed a sci-fi imagination, but instead of aliens arriving from Mars or the return of Dracula, one imagines the possibility of Gandhi’s return and the revival of ashrams. Such a return would, first of all, threaten our conventional gurus, who have robbed spirituality of ethics and distanced ethics from politics. What one hears is the language of power, testifying to each other on birthdays, but one rarely hears truth speaking to power, or truth reinventing itself to create a different song. Even if one cannot invent a return, one can create the heuristics of a return, imagining what Gandhi would confront today.

Where would he begin? Sadly, not with salt, because salt is back to being a chemical. It’s lost its semiotic power; it is impotent to bring down empires. Salt summons a sensorium but doesn’t evoke further narratives.

 

Gandhi would still return to the body to redefine the body politic. He would realise that the fate of the body captures the violence of our times. His Hind Swaraj would emphasize machine, but it’s more about the obsolescence created by science, and would emphasise the fate of the seed instead.

With the Seed Satyagraha, Gandhi would focus on agriculture, but Gandhi would immediately sense that seeds, for all their regenerative power, have lost some of their poetics to the gene. But while a gene evokes reductionism, the seed still signals a sense of emergence, of the unexpectedness of life.

There is a politics to the seed but the creativity of the body is still supreme. All the prosthetics on the world does not quite achieve a sense of the body, its iconicity, its sense of the sacred, evoking desire and sublimity, inviting in turn the erotic, the ascetic and the sacramental. The body as site can still define this sense of the body politic.

A different body

Gandhi will return to the body but to a more vulnerable body, subject to vivisection and genocide. His Hind Swaraj will have the body caught in the intersections of medicine, food and cosmetics challenging the current iatrogeny of science. The citizen’s body can challenge power; the fasting body can challenge the obese body of consumption.

Between fasting, sacrifice and martyrdom, the body can still battle Fordism, Taylorism, the camps, the logic of the bomb. The body understands its genealogy of creativity from sacrifice to surrealism to Satyagraha. The body for all its phenomenological ordinariness still retains its spirituality. It is the site for ethical experiment, political resistance.

 

The body still stands potent and vulnerable, ready to cope, battle, survive the camp, the Gulag, the sheer crassness of socio-biology and torture. The grammars of brutality are new and collective, but the body stands ready to enter history again. Martyrdom, by affirming life and yet sacrificing it, can make terror feel meaningless and even envious.

Between body and time, one can begin the dance of citizenship, a choreography of ethical possibilities. Swadesi and Swaraj acquire a new iconic power, encompassing neighbourhood and cosmos, microcosm and macrocosm. The body acquires what philosopher Raimundo Panikkar calls the ‘rhythms of being’; moving from a simple breath to cosmic cycles, each cycle creating a raga of cosmic variations.

Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj still remains an ode to body and nature, but instead of challenging progress, which now sounds rusty, even naïve, it challenges triage and erasure. It is only the body as memory that can serve as witness to truth. Gandhi would be much more inclusive and make his Hind Swaraj speak to The Communist Manifesto and the Rights of Man . Instead of Roussian, he would include a cyborg manifesto.

 

His rewritten Hind Swaraj would still capture the three sites of culture — body, language and technology — but Gandhi would grant a new inventiveness, not to science but to evil, replacing Ruskin with Arendt, seeing in Eichmann the new apartheids of the mind, the table of dualisms that we call Enlightenment.

The Satyagrahi would realise he needs the inventiveness of the ashram to outline a new body politic, where prayer and song acquire a new meaning, where technology, technocracy and management become a vernacular for a planetary ethics, creating new rhythms between Swadeshi and Swaraj . It is the inventiveness of freedom, the creativity of ethics that can challenge the power of evil.

Memory amputated

Vulnerability becomes the source of creativity and sharing. The body is the new commons resisting the enclosure and the panopticon. The ashram is revived to engage with technocratic think tanks, creating new enclosures of the mind. For Gandhi, Partition and the Bengal Famine marked the defeat of the Satyagrahic body. First, memory was amputated and the triage of the Bengal Famine was sublimated into the science of planning. Second, Partition became a reason of state, with the cacophony of history substituting the silence of genocide. The technocratic body emasculated the living body, creating amnesia, erasure and the normalcy of a new science called planning.

Gandhi would trace the move from Narmada to Naxalbari to development to show how displacement and terror create new languages of impersonality and indifference, which almost become ideological. It’s the defeat of memory, the failure of language, and the disengagement of technology from ethics that created the monstrous body of the new nation state. Citizenship, Gandhi would say, needs a new unconscious of vulnerability, humility, generosity. A new backstage where temporariness, exile and displacement are archived into a new rhythm of remembrance.

Gandhi would argue that the NCR was a failure of Satyagraha. The Eichmanns of the survey need to be challenged. Gandhi would say the National Register banalises the violence of the Partition, enacting not one monstrous border but a multitude of borders. Borders, Gandhi would argue, destroy homecoming, with the creativity of democracy fossilised into majoritarianism.

A new cartography

The Modivian state is Bismarckian state, a 19th century dream of centrality and hierarchy that’s outdated. Modi’s politics is as outdated as the political science he has or has not read. Gandhi’s Salt March would now become the Aadhaar Satyagraha, challenging the idea of citizenship as identification and certification. As Aadhar cards are burnt and taxes defied, Gandhi would find a J.C. Kumarappa to carry out a new survey, which would seek to redefine citizenship as homecoming for the nomad, exile and migrant.

Gandhi would invoke memory and storytelling to create a new cartography of place. He would, in fact, argue that security was the new Malthusianism, which feared the stranger and the alien, as it feared the minority and the margins. As Aadhar cards are burnt, it would help rework the IT industry from the idea of security to the idea of the commons. India would secede from the intellectual property regime as it is a threat to livelihoods. Gandhi would carry out a series of heuristic secessions where the register, reified as a vision of a centralised state, would be reread plurally. He would hand it over to local panchayats to enact solutions, where panarchy or multiple solutions confront the univocality of policy.

The NRC is a monotheism of the statist mind. What challenges it is a pluralism of hospitality, where Gandhian ashrams would become knowledge panchayats working on panarchic solutions. Each panchayat would create a Truth Commission to create a weave of mutual understanding. Policy, Gandhi would remark, would give way to a “home science” of solutions, patchwork but local, where Swadeshi meets a new Swaraj.

Beyond economics

The new Quit India movement would abandon a uniform nation state for plural, anarchic solutions, where the ‘make-do’ wins over efficiency, where livelihood solutions score over policy handouts. He would lead the nation in prayer and fasting so that consumerism is outvoted. A sense of hospitality and grace that India lost would return when democracy moves beyond the economics of cost-benefit analysis to allow for alternative and new inventions of livelihood, for an embedded economy of crafts, forests, farms, rivers, and nomads, with enough interstices to accommodate the homeless.

The language of debate has to be made more forgiving. Democracy has to come alive again, as an inventive citizen goes beyond the passivity of voting and citizenship.

It is hard work but the craft of citizenship must be revived, like the craft of weaving. The necrophily of modern governance must be broken. With Gandhi’s return, a new sense of inventiveness would create a new rhythm of being as India is reinvented. One senses the laughter of democracy returning at last. Where citizenship becomes not only an invention of the self but a discovery of the other.

The writer is an academic associated with the Compost Heap, a group in pursuit of alternative ideas and imagination.

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