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Personal
tragedy Mahatma vs
Gandhi
The strength of the novel, however, is that nowhere is there any "Bapu bashing." Joshi has simply given the facts, as they must have been. Over the past decades, it has become all too common to blame the parents for the failure of the children but Joshi has, thankfully, avoided falling into that trap. However, it is acknowledged by the author, as was also written by Sri Rajagopalachari in his letter to Kishorilal Mushruwala, "Harilal was a fine boy, like all earthly things, Bapu’s glory too cast a shadow which became Harilal’s lot." On the other side, the failure with Harilal has been described as one of "the most painful chapter in Bapu’s life. In his life time, Bapu had failed to convince two persons—one was Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the other was Harilal." The story of Harilal is a sad one. His resentment against some of Bapu’s decisions, yet his craving to be accepted and admired by him, transformed his life into a private hell, where he was continually battling demons, mainly of his own making. This duality in his mind also manifested into newspaper headlines, screaming Police Arrests Drunk Harilal for Creating a Scene on the Road, and sometimes Harilal himself declaring from the dais of a fundamentalist Muslim organisation’s meeting: "I shall continue fighting till Bapu and Baa embrace Islam." However, Dinkar Joshi is in no way judgemental about the father and son rather treating the whole painful relationship with compassion. He explains about his motivation in writing the book: "This book is a novel and not a historical documentation of facts this is not the scrutinising eye of a historian or research scholar but the pen of an artist and a novelist, who is making an effort to understand yet another enigmatic facet of human life." Thus, Dinkar absolves himself of any factual lacunae and lets the reader also indulge in a suspension of disbelief, as they read on about two distinct characters—one larger than life, who shaped a nation’s destiny and the other, his son, who made innumerable wrong choices in his life, finally dying in anonymity. That Harilal resented Bapu’s decisions for his children is a fact that is reiterated throughout his life. Bapu had rejected formal education but Harilal longed to be a barrister and study in England. In fact, Harilal was never a good student even when given a chance and to give him the benefit of the doubt, he was "never able to study continuously, swinging between several places. Sometimes, he’d forget what he was taught he found it extremely difficult to re-learn what he had forgotten and felt at an absolute loss when the forgotten lesson would be faultlessly reproduced by much younger students in his class." However, when Bapu was asked to send a child from Phoenix Farm, near Durban, South Africa, to study in England—and this happened twice—Harilal felt cheated that he had not been selected. In fact, Harilal did good work at the Phoenix Farm until he revolted and returned to India. And thence started the downfall of the weak son of an unusual and extraordinary man. When Bapu was busy in motivating a nation to shrug off the yoke of slavery without a drop of blood being shed, his son fell into a quagmire of debt and failed endeavours. His recurring failures pushed him towards alcohol and prostitution. His wife and children lived in poverty and Harilal, unable to face his failures, slipped deeper and deeper into money owing, depravity and petty pilfering. The story of Mahatma vs. Gandhi is the tragedy of a child who longed for the approval of his great father. It is also the tragedy of the father, ready to forgive but not being able to help his misguided son, who could only watch in pain and the mother (Baa) and the wife (Gulab), who suffered silently. It’s a dramatic tale. Joshi has done justice to the telling of it, no wonder it spawned the play Mahatma vs. Gandhi, successfully directed by Feroz Abbas Khan, who is also the man behind the film Gandhi my Father. Unfortunately, the translation is somewhat indigenous which, in some places, makes the narrative jerky.
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IN
modern parlance, Harilal would be called ‘a loser.’ The life
of the eldest son of Mahatma Gandhi comes alive in this
translation of the Gujarati novel Prakashno Padchchayo,
which loosely means "in the shadow of light." It is an
evocative and believable tale of a super-achiever father and his
son who could never make anything of himself—who, in fact,
died as a pauper and in ignominy.