Ghandi

Ghandi’s grandson recounts life, legacy still revered today

BY MARGOT DIMOND
Rice News staff

He was named an “honorary citizen” of Houston in a proclamation by Mayor Bill White. He was introduced by Skand Tayal, consul general of India, as one who “has held the torch of ideas lit and has kept it high over his head and over the community in India.”

Rajmohan Gandhi

But when Rajmohan Gandhi took the podium, he spoke not of himself, but of his famous grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi — his life, the character of his nonviolence and his legacy.

An audience of nearly 300 came to the Houston Community College’s Southwest Campus auditorium Feb. 28 to hear him. The talk, which was coordinated by the Rice School of Continuing Studies, was the keynote lecture in its current course on India.

Rajmohan, who is a visiting professor of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, began his talk by saying that in the last 10 days, he had heard his grandfather’s name invoked at least four times by various politicians and civil rights activists in the news. “Such references, and invitations that come for someone like me to speak on Gandhi’s legacy, suggest a continuing interest in him and what he stood for,” he said.

Using a combination of historical fact and anecdotes, Rajmohan recounted the milestones of Gandhi’s life: his birth as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1869 in West India; his marriage at 13; his journey to England at 18 to study law; his 21 years in South Africa; and finally, his return to India in 1915, where he lived until his death in 1948.

Gandhi, whose later appellation “Mahatma” means “Great Soul,” appeared to have developed his character at an early age. Although he came from a conservative Hindu family of high caste, young Gandhi championed equal rights from childhood, even defying his family by touching “untouchables,” those lowest in the Hindu caste system. (His devout mother suggested he cancel out this “negative” with another “negative” — touching a Muslim.)

He again distressed his family by going to England, but ameliorated things somewhat by promising them there would be “no women, no liquor and no meat.” And indeed, although he loved London and tried to be an English gentleman, “learning violin, elocution and ballroom dancing,” according to Rajmohan, he also hosted a dinner party with the first all-vegetarian meal, to the delight of England’s nascent vegetarian community.

One other thing Gandhi learned in England, Rajmohan said, was “the basics of grassroots activity for a cause.” As a result of his experience in London, he developed a nonviolent strategy for Indian independence.

Gandhi returned home to India in 1891 after passing his bar examination, and two years later he was practicing law in South Africa. By 1909, he had first-hand knowledge of armed conflict. He had seen the Boer and Zulu wars from close quarters. He had been violently attacked three times — by white settlers, by fellow Indians who felt he compromised with the rulers too much and by fellow prisoners in Johannesburg. He knew about violence academically as well, having thoroughly studied the 1857 rebellion in India.

In 1915, Gandhi was back in India, where he found England’s rule to be a “humiliation that had to be opposed, but could not be irrationally or wildly opposed, in his view,” Rajmohan said. He decided he would oppose British rule, but not hate the British. He would fight the British, yet love them too. “Now this was historically, psychologically and politically a very odd position to take,” Rajmohan explained. “What is remarkable is that so many Indians joined him in adopting it.”

In 1919, Gandhi initiated the first all-India struggle against British rule. It was largely nonviolent, but in places violence did break out. In one incident, hundreds of Indian men and women at a mass meeting were killed by British troops because a British ban on meetings was apparently proclaimed only in English.

One of the major challenges for Gandhi was the mistrust between Hindus and Muslims, which Gandhi addressed directly in a 1939 speech to a Muslim crowd. “If you dissect my heart,” Rajmohan quoted him as saying, “you will find that the prayer and spiritual striving for the attainment of Hindu-Muslim unity goes on there unceasingly all the 24 hours without even a moment’s interruption, whether I am awake or asleep.”

India gained its independence in 1947. In January of the next year, 10 days after a failed attempt on his life by a group of assassins, Gandhi was shot to death by one of the men who had planned the previous attempt.

Although Gandhi spoke strongly against war, Rajmohan maintains that he was not an uncompromising pacifist. He did not oppose armed self-defense, but rather any justification of hate or revenge.

In his writings and speeches, “he limits to the greatest possible extent the use of force.” Rajmohan said. “He calls for reaching out to the people, in addition to the leaders, of the other side. He identifies injustice and he attempts reconciliation. And he throws his entire weight against any suggestion that a whole people can be flawed or defective or evil because of their race or religion or nationality.”

Gandhi also wrote a great deal about love, but in his view nonviolence didn’t equal love. “Nonviolence means more than love. Love may suggest an absence of struggle,” Rajmohan said. Hence, Gandhi created “satyagraha” (“truth force”) as his method of nonviolence.

Rajmohan noted that Gandhi’s legacy is multifaceted. It includes the memory of his life; the nation of India; his method of nonviolence, which was adopted later by others such as Martin Luther King Jr.; his dream of the unity of mankind, from which many draw hope and courage; and his descendants, many of whom, like Rajmohan Gandhi, are continuing his work.