The Weaponisation Of A Mahatma

Attending a Delhi concert of the activist and Carnatic musical artist T.M. Krishna last week, author Ananya Vajpeyi was moved enough to take to pen.  Krishna’s vocal performance was, in Vajpeyi’s words, “soaring” and “brooding” and even, “plangent.” And while the performance was, I’m sure, enthralling — perhaps because the vocalist was the highly opinionated Krishna and the listener Vajpeyi — Vajpeyi decided that she knew what Krishna really meant when as a finale, he launched into a rendition of Gujarati poet Narasinh Mehta’s Vaishanava Jana.

Vajpeyi took Krishna’s choice of a poem long synonymous with Mahatma Gandhi, to be a political statement.  She immediately wrote an acerbic, very familiar, lamentation over the corpse of the “idea of India” in the age of Hindutva.  Vajpeyi rues the Hindu right’s alleged discarding of Gandhian ideals:

A brief digression: I connect viscerally to Vaishnava Jana, very much as Vajpeyi does.  My maternal grandfather, Maanshankar “Manubhai” Vyas, a Majoor Mahajan labour leader and trade unionist in Ahmedabad, held Gandhi’s hymnal, Ashram Bhajanavali, close to him after he was jailed in the early 1940s during the freedom struggle.  Narsinh’s poetry, put to song, poured forth solace, strength, and fellowship, binding prisoners for the anti-colonial struggles to come.  At the age of sixteen, my grandfather-in-law, Vithaldas Mehta, became one of the youngest Gujarati Gandhians jailed for civil disobedience.  His rendition of Vaishanava Jana, guided by his own harmonium in an ephemerally lilting Raaga Khamaj, invoked a spiritual catharsis at “rāma-nāma śuṁ tāḷī re lāgī” [the ideal person is ever chanting the name of Lord Rāma], even as the verses emanated from the confirmed atheist that he was.

With Narasinh, Gujaratis intimately connect to the context of his poetry.  As much as the allegories of Lord Krishna and Gopi’s romanticism (Naagar nandaji na lal), Krishna’s exploits (Jal kamal chhandi), or Vedantic Mahavakyas (Akhil brahmanda maa ek tu shrihari), are celebrated and recited as daily aphorisms, Narasinh was an original social justice warrior.  He repudiated caste strictures, and took his democratising bhakti gospel directly to the outcastes, whom he was among the first to call “Harijan” [people of God].  He outraged the leaders of his jaati, the vaunted Nagars of Saurashtra, for his preference to sing with the unsung and earned ex-communication.  But for Narasinh, he lived what he wrote: Ghāt ghadiya pachhi nām rup jujhava, ante to hamnu hema hoye [gold may be moulded in different forms and given different names, but it in the end it is all made of the same gold].

And this tradition of outraging casteist oligopolies inspired Swami Dayananda Saraswati, a Gujarati renunciate from the same scraggly terrain of Saurashtra that put forth Narasinh and Gandhi, to destroy the very basis of a hereditary caste system — caste is by worth, not birth — through the founding of the Arya Samaj.  Gandhi was only reconciling philosophical discourse all around him, and this became a cohesive basis with which he attacked and renounced caste-based discrimination.

And so it was that I winced at Vajpeyi collaring this poem, Narasinh’s song, as an axe to grind her antipathy towards India’s ruling dispensation.  For Vaishanava Jana as a metaphorical barb for Vajpeyi’s ideological battles cuts both ways.

Vajpeyi weaponises Gandhi and Narasinh to condemn the BJP rule for forcing, in her words, “the slow, steady erosion of empathy as a public value, leaving us morally impoverished – lesser human beings and lesser Indians.” Rhetorical excess is Vajpeyi’s wont, and right. But Vajpeyi’s bleak dismissal of the Hindu right, and championing of Gandhi, would be a bit more genuine if she had penned similarly angry disavowals of the radical left’s revisionist and profane treatment of the Gandhian legacy.

Where is Vajpeyi’s roaring denunciation of Arundhati Roy’s craven piggybacking on Dalitism in her attacks on Gandhi? Roy, in numerous missives timed around the release of The Doctor and the Saint, torpedoed Gandhi as an unreconstructed, let’s just say it, chatur baniya, for advocating caste even as he condemned caste-based discrimination.  Nearly seventy years after he was killed, Roy illuminated us with this gem:

Roy treaded on no new territory when she became “woke” to Gandhi, and she only recycled Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. So much so, that Roy was shamed into submission and she left the subject when she was hilariously pounced upon by Dalit activists for being an upper-caste person herself, and thus having no right to write about Ambedkar!

Did Vajpeyi spring to Gandhi’s defence when Joseph Lelyveld imposed a “homoerotic” color to Gandhi’s correspondences with Hermann Kallenbach?  Or what does Vajpeyi say of new movements in Africa accusing Gandhi of vile racism and now engaging in a new diversion — agitating to remove his statue in, say, Ghana?  Is it okay to judge a young Gandhi for expressions — not actions — that were sadly normal at the turn of the 20th century in South Africa?  Despite his obvious evolution on this front and embrace by Mandela and Martin Luther King, will Vajpeyi abide with judging a man by contemporary standards for statements he may have made while arguing a case on behalf of a client?

If Vajpeyi is genuinely moved by the memory of Gandhi evoked in Vaishnava Jana, she knows very well that she will have to engage in a dialectic that she has pussy-footed around for too long.  Vajpeyi has tried to thread a needle between the warring legacies of Gandhi and Ambedkar and argued before that the two were not just antagonists, but fellow travelers conjoined in a quest to rid the subcontinent of caste-based discrimination or caste in its entirety.  But Dalit politics, now even espoused by a few American Dalit voices, is strategically cultivating allies for another prize.

The openly stated goal is to create intersectionality between caste and racism, and join, therefore, Dalit and Black voices.

But the difference in goals is very clear: while Black agitations — such as Black Lives Matter — are organized along social justice themes, these Dalit American leaders imbue an anti-Hindu fervour to their work.  A neat, but false equivalence is created: to end caste discrimination, annihilate caste; but, they ludicrously argue, caste is intrinsic to Hinduism and there is no Hinduism without caste; ergo, one must annihilate Hinduism.  Vajpeyi, Arundhati Roy and any other “savarna” is simply cast aside, no matter their protestations and hosannas to Ambedkar.

Gandhi is an inconvenient symbol of the good Hindu, for these activists.  Hinduism cannot be so profane if a Gandhi espouses such a religion.  And so begins the deconstruction of Gandhi with the glibly delivered and egregious pronouncements that Gandhi was a racist, that he was anti-Dalit, that he was a sexual predator, and that he must be discarded from any pantheon of the good.  And this small corpus of Dalit activists busies itself in pushing the United Nations or the British parliament to recognize caste-based discrimination as a denouncement of India, and now have organised with a few radical activist Indian Muslim and Sikh groups to oppose equal treatment in the teaching of Hinduism in American school textbooks.

So if Vajpeyi is to cry for Gandhi, her tears need not shed only over the rise of a Hindu right, but also an ongoing perverse, coordinated movement to disgrace the Indic moral and ethical foundations on which he stood -- yes, the very idea of India.  If Vajpeyi joins Hindus and all Indians in reformation, in fighting caste-based discrimination, ending the scourge of anti-Dalit violence, and working for the ideal society that Gandhi, Dayananda and Narasinh aspired to, she too will live the words of Narasinh that T. M. Krishna sang that night: bhaṇe narasaiyo tenuṁ darasana karatāṁ, kuḷa ekotera tāryā re [Narsinh sings that on meeting such a soul: may she and her entire lineage be liberated indeed].