Gandhi For A New Generation

How does one make the Mahatma relevant to a generation that has no context to place him in?

- Sopan Joshi

We are a nation of 1.3 billion Gandhi exp-erts. Every Indian and his WhatsApp group co-member has an opinion and a half on Mohandas Karam chand Gandhi (MKG). And why not? We grow up feeling familiar with MKG, seeing his image over and over—on currency notes, street names, busts, pictures. Event organisers too lazy to find a suitable topic find ceaseless recourse in ‘Relevance of Mahatma Gandhi’ (spoiler alert: he is always adjudged relevant). There is a rich range of apocrypha attributed to MKG; he is misquoted over and over by those looking to elevate their own thoughts with bumper-sticker wisdom.

One reason for this mistaken familiarity is the extent to which his life is documented along open-source principles—and published in 100 volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. For decades now, his name has diligently serviced the demand for titles of academic papers. It goes like this: ‘Gandhi and __’ (fill in the blanks with a topic of choice). One editor I knew was so annoyed about receiving articles titled ‘Gandhi and Marxism’, ‘Gandhi and caste’, ‘Gandhi and what-have-you’ that he actually ran an article under the headline ‘Gandhi and potato’. Anybody can cherrypick an incident or a piece of writing from his life that suits his requirements, given that Gandhi made his life entirely public. Yet the level of ignorance about his life is astounding.