In recent days, I have been reading essays on Mahatma Gandhi, an architect of the national independence of India from British colonial rule. One among them is Akeel Bilgrami on ‘Gandhi as Philosopher’, where he articulates that integrity is an essential element of Gandhian thought. Another is Faisal Devji’s Gandhian logic of suffering as immanent to Gandhian nonviolence. And others include Karuna Mantena, Uday Mehta, Ashis Nandy, Gene Sharp, Shahid Amin, David Hardiman, and Ajay Skaria, who have all discussed an aspect of Gandhian thought which constitutes his logic of worldmaking after empire.
In his essay, “Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi”, Nandy argues that Gandhian thought and ideas posed a threat to the traditional society that persisted in India. Nandy suggests that Gandhi was ‘neither a conservative nor a progressive’: neither did he seek to preserve the past nor to protect the new. He would effortlessly transcend between the two—and in doing so, he ‘simply reconciled the common essence of the old and the new’. However, despite the synthesising act, Gandhian thought was highly subversive of the Indian, or the Hindu, culture.
Gandhian thought had two intrinsic aspects that posed a threat to the traditional authority of the Hindu society.
First, Gandhi continuously attempted ‘to change the definitions of the centre and periphery in Indian society’. That is, the Gandhian theory of social justice was premised on a rejection of the westernised, modernist, middle-class intelligentsia, which had until then both benefited from British rule and simultaneously voiced for Indian nationalism.
However, with Gandhi’s focus on the ashram-like, dhoti-clad, half-naked, charka-steering, saintly lifestyle, the nationalist movement itself was steered towards the poor and the exploited. In this sense, Gandhi’s politics sought to deintellectualise Indian nationalism. In doing so, it also challenged the caste structure that instituted the urban middle-class intelligentsia. By presenting things that were associated with the low-status caste groups—such as activities that constituted the peasant cultures—as mainstream and genuine Hinduism, Gandhi sought to subvert the centre-peripheral relations that constituted the Indian society.
Second, Gandhi constantly negated the concepts of masculinity and femininity implicit in Indian traditions as well as in the colonial state. In Brahmanical and as in European cultures, male was associated with dominance and women were degraded to submissiveness. However, Gandhi’s ideas are deeply influenced by his mother, whom he called the first satyagrahi, who fasted and self-penalised to acquire and wield womanly power. This had a significant influence on Gandhi himself.
Unlike the patriarchal and Brahmanical expectations of a man-like warrior who is valiant in war and death, Gandhi subverted the very nature and expectations of sacrifice—as a suffering of self—to attain the truth. Gandhi sought to fight the colonial rule by fighting the psychological equation of what constitutes a masculine and a feminine. In this sense, ‘the rulers and the ruled of India could share a new moral awareness, an awareness that the meek would not only inherit the earth but could make femininity a valued aspect of man, congruent with his overall masculinity’.
In spite of this worldview, Gandhi maintained that he would never consider himself a revolutionary. He thought of himself as a Sanatan Hindu, an orthodox in character. He considered himself to be the upper-caste echelon—and in doing so, mobilised the lower classes in society. In doing so, he subverted the traditional notions of salvation, responsibility and self-awareness. And this is exactly what Gandhi posed a threat to. He never claimed that he was challenging the traditional order, all the while he was doing it.
This is precisely what Nathuram Godse detested. A Chitpavan Brahman himself, whose lineage was traced from Parashuram, a warrior Brahman who claimed to have killed hundreds of Kshatriyas, Godse believed that Gandhism was ‘emasculating’ the Hindus. Godse, like Gandhi, believed that Indian nationalism was largely a problem of the Hindus. Gandhi was an ascetic, and so was Godse. Gandhi considered himself a Sanatanist, and so did Godse. In fact, it was Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement in the 1930s, which began the political life of Godse.
But, unlike Gandhi, Godse’s characteristics were driven by a militant nationalism that premised itself on a rationalist zero-sum characteristic: one’s loss is another’s gain. That is, Indians have to take up arms to fight the British and Muslims so as to create an independent India. Godse looked at history as a chronology of events. Nandy points, as does Devji, that Gandhi was ahistorical. He never cared about chronology, and never thought of history as anything but some myths. In every sense, Gandhi posed a threat to Godse’s ideology and politics.
On January 30, 1948, at an evening prayer meeting, Godse marches towards Gandhi, and bows down to him, and just as he does so, he takes his Beretta Pistol and shoots Gandhi three times in the chest. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s lieutenant and India’s first Prime Minister, in a radio speech claimed that Godse did not know what he was doing. And Nandy argues, Godse knew precisely what he was doing. And in fact, he goes on to suggest that, as K.P. Karunakaran had argued earlier, it was only Godse (who killed Gandhi) and G.D. Birla (who befriended Gandhi) who understood Gandhi completely.
Nandy provocatively asks: ‘How far did Gandhi and his political heirs in the Indian Government collude with his assassins?’ For one thing, Gandhi was a depressed man with the Indian independence in 1947. Gandhi was deeply disturbed by the violence that resulted in the killing of a million people and the displacement of another 15 million. He never supported partition, and he was willing to concede to Jinnah’s demands to a great extent. He would say: ‘I can never be a willing party to the vivisection’ of India, and if Congress wishes to accept it, it is ‘over my dead body’.
Despite preaching nonviolence all his life, Gandhi openly ‘yearned for a violent death while preaching pacifism.’ He once told his grandniece, Manuben, that ‘he now only wanted to die bravely; he felt that could turn out to be his final victory’. Similarly, as the Kapur Commission Enquiry into Gandhi’s death has highlighted, ‘bureaucratic inefficiency and sheer lethargy’ in the police helped the state collude with the assassins to end Gandhi’s life. There were several cues towards the end. There was a failed attempt at a bomb throwing to kill Gandhi. Elsewhere, in the last days of his life, people shouted: ‘Let Gandhi die’ at his face. But, despite these cues, the police failed to protect Gandhi.
This essay provocatively captures the psycho-social context that contributed to the emergence of Gandhi and Godse in their contexts. As Nandy puts it, ‘Every political assassination is a joint communique. It is a statement which the assassin and his victim jointly work on and co-author’. In this essay, Nandy presents the communique in terms of reasons why Godse sought to end Gandhi’s life.