Outlook Anniversary Issue: Márquez’s Macondo And Gandhi, Still Undeciphered

Macondo, in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, begins, famously, as a town founded in the middle of nowhere, born out of flight.

José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán leave their old village because their love is feared. They are cousins, bound by desire and threatened by superstition. A rumour follows them like a curse, that their union will produce a child with the tail of a pig.

Violence gathers around this fear. A man is killed. Guilt settles in. The couple flee, carrying both passion and prophecy with them, searching for a home where love can begin again without being policed by blood or belief.

Their journey is an act of refusal. They walk until the land seems to forget itself, until memory thins, and until a clearing appears where no one has yet decided what rules must govern intimacy. There, almost by accident, they found Macondo. A town built not through conquest or design, but through persistence, curiosity, and the shared labour of living.

José Arcadio dreams of science. He believes knowledge can bend reality. Úrsula believes in the endurance of love. She bakes, trades, organises, and keeps the household alive while generations bloom and scatter. Between his restless imagination and her practical devotion, a world takes shape.

The Buendía family grows large enough to forget its own genealogy. Children run through rooms filled with inventions, obsessions, and failed experiments. Love breaks rules between cousins, across classes, and against expectation.

Macondo grows too. Houses multialy. Life spills outward. The town expands not by design but by desire. It feels porous, experimental, alive.

This is how imagined worlds often start. With disobedience softened by joy.

Into this world comes Melquíades, the gypsy from the East. He is a magician, scientist, and archivist of time. He brings magnets, ice, telescopes, the wonders of a modernity still unnamed, objects that make the villagers feel the world widening.

He also brings something strange. A scroll written in code, which no one can read. Life feels too full to stop and decipher it. It is stored away like a relic and its meaning is deferred.

As the years pass, the Buendía household becomes a universe. Children and grandchildren repeat names as if caught in a spell. José Arcadios and Aurelianos returning like seasons. With the names come temperaments. The José Arcadios drawn to appetite, force, and spectacle; the Aurelianos drawn to solitude, thought, and prophecy.

Aureliano Buendía, the most famous of them, grows from a quiet boy into a colonel who fights endless civil wars, signing treaties that resolve nothing. The struggle itself seems less like politics than a kind of incurable weather.

And yet, life continues apace, because people remember how to argue, how to laugh, how to gather. There is prosperity. A school opens. A bookshop appears. Knowledge circulates.

Then the outsiders arrive, not as enemies, but as investors. The banana company enters with its clocks, fences, rules, wages, and promises.

Macondo becomes a company town. Workers organise. A strike erupts. And then comes the massacre: soldiers fire into a crowd of workers. Thousands die. Their bodies are loaded onto trains and carried away. Official history insists nothing happened.

The town is commanded to forget.

Most people obey, not because they believe the lie, but because memory becomes dangerous. A whole event is erased not only from records but from collective belief.

From there, the town begins to slide. Rain falls for years. Houses rot. Dreams shrink. The family collapses inward, fractures into secret rooms, unwanted pregnancies, forbidden desires, and a loneliness that grows more hereditarily than wealth.

Love persists but becomes haunted, desperate and furtive and incestuous once again. But now it is not a rebellion or a breaking of taboos. It is just a refuge, a last attempt to feel alive.

And finally, the prophecy returns. The fear that once drove the founders to start a new town is fulfilled. A child is born with the tail of a pig. Not as punishment, but as culmination. In Márquez’s universe, blood flows across thresholds, through streets and toward the river. History refusing to stay contained.

In one last, fleeting image, three figures meet in a bar. They exchange glances. They are the only ones who still remember that there was once a town of laughter and work, a school and a bookshop, a life before the trains carried bodies away. They do not speak much. Memory has become too fragile for speech.

At the very end, the scrolls are deciphered. The revelation is not that Macondo was doomed by fate, but that it was undone by forgetting. Everything, love, war, prosperity, massacre, solitude had been written in advance. The message, once decoded, is devastatingly simple: remember.

Macondo vanishes because it has forgotten itself.

And yet, inside the story is another lesson. The town flourished when it was left alone to grow through love, labour, and curiosity. Science and hard work created abundance. Greed, ego, and the invitation to outsiders to rule and extract hollowed it out. Solitude, in its earliest form, was not a curse but protection of a space where love could make a home.

Names change. Faces change. The story insists on being told again.

Our century feels like an uncanny echo of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It carries its own habits of repetition and its own way of forgetting.  Its founding moment was in April of 1917, when two men stepped into history, breaking taboos. Each was in search of a home, in a country that could be built on equality and dignity.

Mahatma Gandhi entered Champaran, in Bihar, articulating his first act of civil disobedience against colonialism, defying the law to demand justice for indigo cultivators. That same week, Vladimir Lenin presented his April Theses, calling for the dismantling of feudalism and monarchy.

The backlash came quickly, swelling into a new hierarchy called fascism. Wars were fought, treaties signed, and peace repeatedly failed to hold. Yet the memory of Gandhi and Lenin’s ideas for a better world persisted and was joined in part by Roosevelt and Churchill’s resolve.

Different languages, different methods, but a shared assault on the inevitability of hierarchy. Together, they dismantled the old architecture of feudalism, colonialism and fascism.

Out of that wreckage emerged an audacious post-war attempt to build a new order. The United Nations, international law, non-violence as a political ethic, scientific modernity as a public good, and even the dream, never fully realised, of a global trade union of peoples.

Home and country in these years, was imagined expansively, not just as territory, but as rights, institutions, protections, and the promise that no one would be left entirely outside history.

This was the Macondo moment of the modern world. Families and institutions multiplied, schools and libraries appeared as acts of faith, constitutions tried to protect the fragile from the powerful, and dissent was not treason but participation.

When Mahatma Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1917, he carried with him an idea of a strange, improbable town, so fragile and subversive that it could only survive if people chose to believe in it together. He called it The India of my Dreams.

India was not yet a nation-state. It was a vast, quarrelling, wounded space that was colonised, impoverished, divided by language, caste, religion, region, and class. And yet Gandhi imagined it as a home that could hold contradiction without collapse. A country that would not be built on purity, but on plurality; not on conquest, but consent. Provisional, noisy, incomplete. Its incompleteness was its strength.

If Márquez’s Macondo begins as a place “so recent that many things lacked names”, Gandhi’s India was older than history and yet unfinished, waiting to be named anew.

India-as-Macondo was born in this audacity.

Like all imagined worlds, it depended on memory, repetition, and care. It aspired to be a space where there could be a home for everyone, where power did not have to silence the poor and, where dissent, science, faith, and collective life could coexist.

All this would be protected by the Constitution, universal franchise, public education, libraries, scientific institutions, and a commitment to secularism, equality, and redistribution. Its leadership in Non-Alignment and anti-colonial solidarity was part of this same wager. Independence was ethical. Sovereignty was practical.

Like the Buendía household, India in these years was noisy, argumentative, and excessive. Memory circulated through stories, textbooks, public debate, cinema, songs, street corners. History was not yet a closed script; it was a field of contestation. People believed, sometimes fiercely, sometimes foolishly, that tomorrow could be different.

This flourishing did not mean the absence of conflict. Partition’s violence was unresolved and its ghosts never exorcised. Borders hardened. Wars with Pakistan returned periodically and reactivated fear. Scarcity and debt shadowed optimism. But even here, the grammar of public life still made room for complexity. Disagreement was not automatically treason. Critique was not yet criminal.

The Constitution was not just a legal document; it was a moral map. Universal franchise arrived not as a reward for literacy or property, but as a birthright. Millions who had never been counted before were suddenly invited into politics and addresses written in as ‘pavement-dweller’ were not questioned.

Polling booths appeared in deserts, forests, islands. The Election Commission walked where roads did not exist, carrying democracy on foot. Inclusion was the governing instinct. Panchayats decentralised power right down to the smallest village.

Education, too, was imagined as a public good. Universities, schools, libraries, scientific institutions, research labs were built not to produce obedience, but inquiry. Knowledge was subsidised because ignorance was expensive. Campuses became unruly spaces, full of argument, ideology, theatre, poetry, dissent.

The country spoke in many tongues with 26 official languages and hundreds more lived and breathed. This plurality was not yet seen as a threat. “Unity in diversity” was not a slogan to be performed, but a condition to be explored and lived.

The economy reflected this moral architecture. Trade unions were not aberrations but institutions. Cooperatives flourished. Small farms and small businesses were not residues of the past but pillars of the present. Nationalised banks extended credit to those without collateral but with labour. Planning was imperfect, often clumsy, sometimes paternalistic, but it assumed that prosperity had to be shared to be legitimate.

It all hummed with contradiction. India argued constantly with itself, with its leaders, with its writers. It made mistakes. It disappointed its own ideals. But it remembered why those ideals existed. The poor were not invisible. The state was not yet a spectacle. Power still needed justification.

Looking back now, the question is not only what happened to that imagination, but how it was allowed to dissolve. How did a society learn, step by step, to stop remembering itself?

In Márquez’s novel, the tragedy of Macondo is not that it begins in innocence, but that it forgets how it began. India’s tragedy, too, does not come from idealism, but from amnesia.

From the slow replacement of ethics with efficiency, citizenship with consumption, plurality with performance. In the earlier moments, though, the town still breathed.

As in Márquez, the unravelling did not arrive all at once. It came quietly. Corporate power, symbolised in the novel by the United Fruit Company, began to replace local innovations with big cash flows. Economic liberalisation hollowed out the commons.

Banks funded big instead of small businesses even as export processing zones weakened trade unions and labour laws. Schools and universities were defunded even as students were jailed. Independent newspapers and TV channels were censored and shared stories disappeared. Archives were weakened and history was rewritten, simplified, and mythologised.

In Macondo, after the massacre of the trade union workers, people were told nothing had happened, that the past they remembered was an illusion.

Today, in India and across much of the world, we are once again being instructed to forget. We are told that nothing was achieved in these one hundred years of solitude shaped by civil disobedience, class struggle and social democracy. That the effort was futile. That an older, vaguely imagined past was purer, stronger, more authentic.

The lie flows steadily, crossing thresholds, moving through institutions, toward public memory itself. It works not because it persuades, but because it refuses to stop.

The banana company is no longer foreign. It is internalised. Profit displaces memory. Spectacle replaces debate. Citizens are reduced to consumers. Caste becomes arithmetic. Religion becomes performance. Language becomes a battlefield. Democracy survives as ritual while being emptied of substance.

Home becomes precarious. The nation is surveilled. The nation-state itself shrinks into a narrowing room where obedience is taught as virtue. What emerges is a toxic synthesis of feudal hierarchy, capitalist extraction, colonial methods of control, reassembled without needing an external empire. History does not end with a bang but with forgetting.

In Márquez, the curse returns in the form of the child born with the tail of a pig. In our world, it looks like the rise of authoritarian leaders who dismantle institutions while keeping their shells, mock equality, erase archives, censor speech, weaponise religion, and replace solidarity with spectacle. Love is disciplined. Laughter becomes suspicious. Memory is treated as a threat.

It is time to ask whether we are now living the final century of solitude, where memory itself may disappear, where only performance remains, where people no longer remember a time when equality, joy, irreverence, and collective dignity is possible.

And, so, the question returns to the scroll. What if Gandhi and his ethic of non-violence, minimalism, decentralised power rooted in villages, was the gypsy of the East that Marquez wrote of? Not a saint to be worshipped, but a method to be deciphered. What if his message was never meant to be commemorated, but practised? And what if, like Macondo, we have admired the magician for a century without reading what he left behind?

Márquez’s warning is that forgetting is fatal. If Macondo teaches us anything, it is that worlds do not vanish when they are defeated. They vanish when they forget why they once dared to exist.

But when all else fails, writers return. Writers preserve what the powers try to erase. They hold memories against enforced forgetting. They keep working at the code, line by line, until the scroll becomes legible again.

That belief is reckless, tender, defiant. And it is where the story truly begins.

Ruchira Gupta is the author of The Freedom Seeker and I Kick and I Fly, and professor at New York University

This article appeared as 'Márquez’s Macondo And Gandhi, Still Undeciphered' in Outlook’s 30th anniversary issue ‘Where is Elsewhere?’ dated January 21st, 2025, which explores the subject of imagined spaces as tools of resistance and politics.