‘Thank You, Gandhi’ by Krishna Kumar: Deep engagement with Gandhi

A book written by a distinguished educationist and thinker like Krishna Kumar is bound to arouse my interest and curiosity. And as I begin to read it, I realise that unlike his other works, such as ‘Political Agenda of Education’ or ‘Learning from Conflict’, this ‘non-academic’ text is of a qualitatively different kind. Of course, it is about Mahatma Gandhi, but most importantly, it is about the beauty of friendship — Prof Kumar’s sincere urge to present before us his childhood friend Munna’s reflections on Gandhi, particularly at a time when the rise of the triumphant Hindutva, or the aggression of hyper-masculine nationalism seems to have taken us to a world in which the spirit of Gandhi is negated every day. Munna is the nickname of Vinesh Pratap Singh, a sensitive IAS officer, who, as we are told, cherished the dream of nation-building along Mahatma Gandhi’s and Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of a “modern, yet kind and considerate nation”.

Before his death (he too became yet another number in the statistics of Covid-related deaths), Munna sent eight files to Krishna Kumar (or “K”), the friend he loved and trusted, and urged him to refine or re-organise it for a “wider audience”. These files — from G1 to G8 — were about his urge to seek refuge in Gandhi in these dark times. Well, as Kumar has confessed, it was not easy for him to take up this project of editing “this scattered and potentially risky text without making too many compromises with its spirit”. But then, it was the spirit of mutual trust in their friendship that made it possible. Eventually, the text began to invite Kumar to “own it, become a part of it”, and add a couple of “insertions to fill in the numerous gaps that Munna had indicated by dots”.

For an alert reader, it is not difficult to understand the intensity of pain, anguish and despair that Munna passed through as he became a “witness to relentless defacing of the India he grew up in”. It was difficult for him to believe that a Hindu fanatic, who was never shy of praising Gandhi’s assassin, could win in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, and represent Bhopal, a city he loved and served in so many different capacities.

The vision of a secular/progressive republic began to look like a “bruised, broken dream”. Nothing was inspiring him. He was “stunned by the audacity of the new ruling regime — its crassness, its stuffy preachiness, its fakery”. Moreover, the metamorphosis of Bhopal — from a city that was once known for its cultural syncretism, or, for that matter, a city that gave us Bharat Bhavan, the elegant centre for the arts that spoke the language of “freedom” through theatre, music, painting and crafts, to a new city in which “no Muslim can relax” — further intensified his anguish. This disillusionment, it seems, urged him to seek refuge in Gandhi. To quote him: “At times, when I find myself sick with depression at the thought that my life was wasted, I try to regain balance by imagining that Gandhi might have had similar thoughts at several journeys in his life, especially after the Partition.”

This quest led him to engage with Gandhi’s experiments with truth, or the way Gandhi’s cross-religious conversations generated a “reformed and enriched version of Hinduism”, and inspired millions like him to develop “personal ways of sustaining faith in God”. And even when he began to reflect on yet another tragedy that Bhopal passed through on December 2-3, 1984, he could not escape Gandhi — particularly the way Gandhi, far from being mesmerised by science, used to take a critical view of it. Yes, “the poisonous gas spewing out of a leaky cylinder of the Union Carbide factory killed an uncounted number of people in one night”, and Bhopal’s ambition to see itself as “an icon of India’s industrial ambitions”, or the resultant techno-scientific urge “to use advanced chemistry to transform old-style farming” proved to be a disaster. It was something like a “chemical bombing”! Hence, as Munna questioned, how can we negate Gandhi’s critical reading of science as one of his “eccentricities”?

As we see an attempt to throw Gandhi into the “dustbin of history”, Munna, it seems, treated him like “medicine” in order to overcome his psychic trauma.

Thank you, Prof Krishna Kumar for making us know the tales of your sacred bonding with Munna, sharing with us a committed civil servant’s deep engagement with Gandhi, and offering us a book that takes us into a “liminal space beyond the confines of genre”.

— The former JNU professor writes on culture, politics and education