The gulf between Gandhi and us

As India celebrates Gandhi's 156th birth anniversary, R.K. Narayan's novel about the Mahatma remains sharply prescient

- Somak Ghoshal

I was in Ahmedabad last weekend, where, during a visit to Sabarmati Ashram, I picked up a copy of R.K. Narayan's 1955 novel, Waitingfor the Mahatma, from the bookshop on the premises.

The afternoon sun was beating down, but a cool breeze wafted in from the river. I sat on the steps on the banks of the Sabarmati under a shady tree and settled down to read for a bit.

All around, a melee of visitors streamed in and out. Families, couples and groups of friends orchestrated their movements carefully to catch the best angle for selfies and posed photographs. People directed each other with earnest seriousness as they shot Reels. Some insisted on several retakes, others tried out multiple variations of the same theme. The unseasonal September heat made tempers fraught, passions high, and patience fragile.

As I turned the pages and observed the drama around me, I wondered what Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would have made of this unruly assembly inside the haven of discipline and order he had established in 1915. In just a few days, India would commemorate Gandhi's 156th birth anniversary, though the principles he had espoused have long receded from our national consciousness. I didn't want to indulge in a maudlin lament, but rather, the book I was reading was forcing me to reckon with the afterlife of Gandhi's Olympian legacy, one that was hard to preserve even when he was alive.

Narayan realised this acutely and grappled with it in the novel. He knew that despite the magnetic respect Gandhi commanded from Indians, the great man mostly inspired an awed reverence in ordinary men and women. People worshipped him as the "Mahatma", they hung on to every word he preached, they were willing to burn their mill-woven clothes and donate their gold for the cause of independence.