Disha Mullick

It is among the most challenging tasks to be called upon to explain the role or influence of an inexplicable presence in your life.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
Born of the sun they travelled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
– Stephen Spender,
‘I think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great’

It is among the most challenging tasks to be called upon to explain the role or influence of an inexplicable presence in your life. A presence filtered through history, through years of, primarily, school history textbooks. And so, the presence takes on a meaning very much determined by what you are told to believe, the myths and legends, which the community would like to sustain. It requires an effort to step out of these pre-moulded, convenient conceptions, and reassess what a larger than life figure, somehow always in some layer of your consciousness, means in your life now.

Author Vikram Chandra says that the tremors of history often affect us in ways that we are not even conscious of, and I think this describes well my relationship with Mahatma Gandhi. There is a weightiness that surrounds the phenomenon, so to speak, of Gandhi: one that I personally feel disconnected with, but that still affects and interrupts my life, even unknowingly. I acknowledge him as a somewhat ghostly presence, remembered – if you can claim to remember someone you have never actually known – infrequently.

Our education system throws us into confrontation with Gandhi more than a few times in a period of ten years or so. Each time, I grappled with the magnitude of his work and his philosophies more strenuously, more critically, separating the man from the work he did, recognizing the humanness of his actions, his vulnerability, his culpability; the extreme strength he must have had to ignite and then feel the political will of the country. I must admit though, the closest I have come to reading Gandhi himself, was to discuss his Hind Swaraj, with a friend in college who was taken aback, and then greatly impressed with the astuteness of his arguments. The ghost momentarily made its presence known, and I was strongly drawn to the idea of knowing Gandhi through his own words, instead of the words and motivations of others. But then I was caught in the storm of events, that is college, and Gandhi's ghost lay dormant yet again.

My thoughts on this pervasive influence, this ghost, must tend towards the cynical, finally. Apart from all the ways in which Gandhi makes his presence known in my life, infrequently, circumstantially; there is a sense in which I refer to him more often. Maybe even subconsciously. And that is, the many of the idea(l)s he made known to the world – maybe most famously non-violence, and an effort to bridge communalism – are conspicuously absent when you read of so many of the issues that confront contemporary India. It seems, overwhelmingly, that all the ideals Gandhi was, and is still valorised for, hardly filter through to the way we, as a nation, think of our actions and interactions.

The man, therefore, has become much bigger than the reasons he was extraordinary – which were, perhaps, a host of ordinary, human qualities that he deployed with great intelligence and perceptiveness, at an appropriate time in history. It is deeply saddening if a figure that, to a great extent, defines the country's struggle through and after dependence becomes little more than an empty icon.

I am forced to think of what the generation that follows mine will absorb of Gandhi. Will the ghost, which murmurs in my ear, and lends a perspective to my understanding of politics, and social structures, and does not let me accept injustice at face value – murmur to generations who do not feel the tremor of his influence as I do? Is there, perhaps, a need to make Gandhi more forcefully relevant to, more resonant in our times?

Disha Mullick

Disha Mullick, 25, daughter of Deepak and Binu Mullick, graduated in English Literature from New Delhi and did Gender Studies in UK. She works as a journalist with a Delhi magazine.