whoosh

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anedumacation:

woh-battameez:

I know I talk a tough game against Gandhi, and usually have a list ready on why was he such a ridiculous person, can tell you exactly why his shit is so problematic.

But, when I’m back home, and nani, mum or my sister are talking about Gandhi — I just can’t talk.

While reading my grandmum’s journals that detail her life as a young swadeshi freedom fighter, I can’t do anything but just turn the pages.

When dad and his friends talk of the Hindu right, the legacy they owe to Gandhi, I seethe in my room.

One day, I’ll talk about the living legacy of Gandhi — out of text too.

Till then, I need you people to remember that Gandhi did more harm than good, to people living and dead.

Oh dear, its so complicated. He’s so intertwined in everything. And I hate that criticizing Gandhi is tantamount to committing fucking treason, in India. In the diaspora communities, as well. Nothing gets you shut down faster, nothing turns you into more of a pariah, than talking openly and honestly about the incredibly harmful legacy that Gandhi has left us all.

Its one of the reasons I honestly don’t give a shit if people, even white people, make fun of Gandhi. Usually, at least some sliver of defensiveness pops up, when I see Americans making unnecessary fun of our accents, our habits, our religious practices — all that goes out the window, when it comes to the Mahatma. Please, please make fun of him. Take the asshole down a peg. Have him shuffle out in robes, and then have him break-dance. Anything that makes us laugh at him, rather than fall to our knees. That show, Clone High? The show that pissed off the Official High Council of Indian-Americans so much that the show was taken off the air? The one that depicted Gandhi as a teenage horn-dog who just wanted to make it with some fine ladies? Eh, totally cool, in my book.

Anything that reminds me that he’s actually not a god, I eat up.

Because its so hard, to hold that in your head and in your heart, when you were raised to worship him. When every older person that you love and revere sees him as their actual, literal savior.

[Serious warning, non-south asian people STAY THE FUCK AWAY from this discussion, unless you are thoroughly versed with the Indian freedom history]

It’s *so* fucking hard to even recognise how deep Gandhian philosophy goes — especially when you were raised, as Hi-C said thinking he’s a god. Every fucking history text book I studied calls him the “father of the nation”, government offices, railway stations, streets are littered with his photographs, park benches have his quotes. Mumbai even has that Gandhi museum — that we’d visit at least once in two years. Even now, talking about Gandhi on the internet, so far away from the place I’ve grown up in, feels like a little betrayal.

My doctor — the only asshole whose meds have somewhat made my pain manageable — is from the Gandhi camp. He says shit like, “lifting up the downtrodden masses”, quite regularly and without any irony whatsoever. His wife (an ob-gyn surgeon) refused to give someone I know an abortion, because she firmly believes women are meant to be mothers. This is the living legacy of Gandhi.

My grandmum and her friend (who after the partition moved to East Pakistan, now Bangladesh), exchanged letters for a few years, both talking about how they felt Gandhi had promised something else entirely than what they got, after Independence. I’d like to think, my grandmum would be more critical of Gandhi today, but I can’t be sure. She after all, stepped out of her house and into political activism because of the Swadeshi movement. But then, when Nehru had come over to Bombay, he’d come over to our house for tea, and she prepared his fucking tea, and didn’t speak a word to him. So much had changed for women, for caste and religious minorities after 1947, people who were heard for the first time in Indian national history were relegated to the inner courtyards and untouchable sections.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, a movement can only be measured by who it takes along, who it allows to be included in its fold and ultimately the space it makes for people — especially those who don’t fit into its imagination of the community.

Gandhi promoted the Swadeshi movement — a movement that envisioned a village to be a self-sustaining organism — however, allowed entry to women largely as consumers, not as technical producers. He also called Dalit people “traitors” for “siding with the British”, because many Dalit people didn’t necessarily think the British Raj was *entirely* horrid (the education system for the British, for the first time gave entry to Dalits and women, an institution the Hindu Bhramincal patriarchy barred them from).

His “do or die” sentiment asked people to sacrifice their lives in the name of non-violence, and yet, the dude is made into a God, six decades later. Gandhi was popular with the masses — and perhaps more importantly, the new elite and the upper-castes because he didn’t rock their boat. Periyar and Ambedkar on the other hand, questioned the very institutions the Bhraminical patriarchy consolidated and confirmed.

Today, to even side with Ambedkar as I do (politically and ideologically) feels like a slap in the face of everything I was brought up to live up to, to the extent every time I’ve broached it at home, I’ve only gotten stony hostile silence as the best response.

How the fuck do you justify Gandhi as a “good man who did considerable good” then? And the thing is, I am not the only one who deals with such a backlash, as many of you have said, in reblogs and PM’s.

There’s something to be said about that — that most of us say (in one form of the other), “There’s so much wrong with Gandhi and I’ll never be able to fully express it”.