Gandhi Vs Tagore: A Clash Of Dissenting Visions

Finding Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or someone sharing his political and cultural sensibilities is not easy today. In his homeland, it can even be hazardous. India’s Second Republic sees the admirers of Gandhi as self-indulgent, romantic peaceniks or traitors conspiring to stall the country’s journey towards its inescapable destiny: being another neat example of what the late activist-scholar Herbert Feith used to call repressive, developmentalist regi­mes. This is a well-known syndrome in East and Southeast Asia and in South America, where a quicker pace of development—sometimes even glossy pronouncements on a free market economy and future development—becomes a full justification for an authoritarian state.¹

Politically, this syndrome seeks support from populism and masculine nationalism, near-total control of media and blatant crony capitalism. Psychologically, it thrives on cultivated paranoia, a streak of narcissism, and psychopathy in the upper echelons of politics. A few decades ago, this syndrome—let us call it Feith’s demon—entered South Asia and has already left the democracies in the region tottering. More recently, after seriously injuring the world’s most powerful democracy, it is trying to subvert the world’s largest democracy.

Such an ambience may trigger a desperate search for someone carrying the sensibilities and worldview of Gandhi. This is exactly what happened when Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency in India during 1975-77. Many turned to Gandhi as a strategic guide, some reaffirmed his vision of India’s future, and others found solace and hope in his autobiography. As the community already had a widely shared image of Gandhi as a freedom fighter carrying an appropriate message of liberation, some even reimagined Gandhi as a yugapurusha, one who grapples with the existential crises of a people over an entire era or age. So large was the renewed interest in Gandhi that some now see this interest as a sign of spreading fear in the people’s mind of a massive attack on India’s core cultural values and ethics.

Even before his death, Gandhi had come to embody, in public imagination, an important cultural stream in the Indic civilisation, a stream that had links with recessive and marginalised cultures in the civilisation and with half-forgotten indigenous strategies of resistance to oppressive rulers and authorities. Usually, such dissent came from four main sources: (1) the culture of colonial modernity had no space for the values associated with Buddhism, which was apparently dead in most of South Asia, yet was a subliminal presence in the entire region; (2) the Bhakti and Sufi traditions of medieval India, which had more to do with the folk than with the classical, were closer to the vernacular than to the sacred-but-less-accessible Sanskrit and Arabic texts, and were more comfortable with the mnemonic or smarta versions of the epics than with their more authoritative, textual versions.²

The other two cultural strata, while entrenched in Indic traditions, acquired an ambivalent status after colonial modernity began to consolidate itself in India. For, a sizeable section of the Indian elite had already begun to see them as liabilities and not as cultural assets. One was androgyny and the other was the relationship between the cities and the villages.

(3) As for androgyny, all three Hindu religious reform movements of the 19th century—Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj and Ramakrishna Mission—tried to masculinise the Hindus, some by cleansing the pantheon of the powerful maternal deities, others by ‘reconstructing’ the popular male deities who had androgynous traits. All three reform movements had borrowed much from the Semitic faiths, Islam and Protestant Christianity, but neither the androgyny associated with medieval India’s Bhakti movement and Sufism nor the imaginary associated with an androgynous Christ.

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s (1838-1894) attempt to historicise and masculinise Krishna was the first step tow­ards indirectly underplaying the concept of Ardhanarishvara, an incarnation of Shiva as half man and half woman. Then came Swami Vivekananda’s (1863-1902) sharp attack on Buddhism for demasculinising the Hindus, defying the blatant androgynous strain in his guru Ramakrishna. This lamentation on the de-masculinisation of the Hindus was to continue. Years later, Vinayak D. Savarkar, erstwhile freedom fighter and the father of Hindutva, was to take this response to its logical conclusion when he tried, alas unsuccessfully, to change the popular practice of imagining India as Mother India, by switching from matrubhumi or motherland to pitrubhu or fatherland, following the practice of some European states, mainly Germany. The shift may look like an indigenous attempt at social reform and modernisation. But it is difficult to forget the hypermasculine ruling culture of the East India Company under the influence of the Utilitarianism of James and John Stuart Mill.³ The androgynous strain in Indian culture was later reaffirmed by Gandhi’s personality and life and enriched by a clear touch of maternity.

(4) The last cultural stream sought to correct the imbalance between the earlier relationship between the village and the city by giving the city—especially the new colonial metropolitan cities like Calcutta, Madras and Bombay—a new status as presidency towns and pacesetters in the modernisation of British India. Thereby, depriving the village, where four-fifths of India lived, of all autonomy and agency. This was a relatively new development and there were debates in the early decades of the 20th century on this issue. The two protagonists in our story, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1940) and Gandhi, played important parts in the debate. The former actualised his vision of a rural university, despite the many hurdles he faced during his life, never abandoning his ideology and his eco-philosophy. Meanwhile, Gandhi politically empowered Village India by going out of the cities and mobilising Village India for the freedom struggle he was leading. Both these stories are well known.

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These were exactly the domains from where the inspiration and the energy for resistance to the colonial modernity were to come. Gandhi did not emerge from among the power elite of Indian society as did Sigmund Freud’s Moses, deviating from the Biblical Moses, when leading the Jewish exodus from Egypt. ⁴ Nor did Gandhi rise from among the marginalised and the excluded. For, what is required from an imagined freedom fighter was not a ‘correct’ social lineage, but an empathetic sensitivity to the subjugation, humiliation and vulnerability of a people, desperately seeking liberation, while avoiding the beaten tracks of violence. This Gandhi was not the self-made, self-exploring Gandhi of his autobiography. This Gandhi was partly the creation of the people who wished him into existence.

Please allow me now to embark on a longish digression on how, towards the end of the 19th century, the idea of someone like Gandhi took shape in the creative imagination of a gifted poet before the actual Gandhi entered the scene. In this digression, there are clues to the way Indian society opened a conversation with Gandhi.

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The second half of the 19th century was the time when the British rulers of India became truly self-confident—one hundred years after winning the decisive Battle of Plassey in 1757, after crushing the massive mutiny in the British-Indian Army in 1857 with exemplary cruelty to teach the Indians a lesson or two in loyalty, and bringing India directly under the British crown in 1858. After a few years, Queen Victoria was duly proclaimed the Empress of India in 1877, with huge celebrations in Britain and in India.

The rulers now felt secure enough to embark upon their civilising mission in India, the blueprint for which had been prepared decades earlier by the likes of James Mill (1773-1836) and John Stuart Mill (1806-73), inspired by the utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Both were eminent scholars and determined to introduce India to enlightenment values and the regnant idea of progress.⁵ Their stand had been endorsed by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59) who, convinced that Sanskrit and Arabic were worthless relics of barbarism, had in his famous Minute on Education, insisted on making English the official language and preferred medium of education in India. The mutiny might have made the rulers afraid of tampering with the religious taboos and practices of the Indians but, now, the rulers were determined to pull the ambivalent, sceptical Indians into their idea of the civilised world.

In this venture, the rulers did get support from some sections of Indian society, which believed colonialism to be a modernising force and, thus, a necessary evil. However, there were others who sensed that British domination of India was turning into a proper hegemony. In a civilisation nurturing enormous diversities and cross-cutting hierarchies, such hegemony could be more ethnocidal than simple domination and exploitation. Also, in a hegemony, there is always a subtle, seductive invitation to the disarmed subjects to admit that the only way to a successful rebellion is to acquire the means by which the rulers had come to power. This hegemony, too, invited the Indians to become more like their conquerors, through ‘proper’ education, acculturation and acquisition of some ‘permissible’, officially sanctioned, martial qualities in the service of the Empire.

It is perhaps at such junctures that a community throws up individuals who unconsciously capture—within themselves and in their creative works and visions—the anguish, despair and longings of a defeated and humiliated people trying to protect or recreate their cultural and moral universe and seeking new pathways to liberation under changing circumstances.

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Tagore was, during the period we are talking about, a relatively young poet, playwright, composer and lyricist. He had already written a novel and was to later become a noted painter and thinker, too. Though well-known, his genius was yet to have its full impact on Indian society. It was he who responded to the challenge.

Tagore’s family had been exposed to European culture and knowledge for three generations and, at the same time, had strong links with the cultural traditions and social and religious reform movements in various parts of India. They were also open to individual eccentricities, new intellectual and cultural initiatives, and deviant lifestyles.

Strangely, this otherwise liberal family left child-rearing and disciplining to the domestic servants. And this became Tagore’s first exposure to oppressive authorities. In his memoirs, he calls it bhrityatantra, an oppressive regime of domestic servants. His family was easier to handle. Whenever Tagore developed an aversion to his school, he was allowed to change his school or drop out. He did try to continue his studies in England, but Victorian England, industrialising at breakneck speed, seemed boring, mechanical and suffocating. He returned to India without completing his studies. He was by then a well-read, refined person but remained, by conventional standards, both under-socialised and under-educated. This might have, one suspects, left him better equipped to capture and identify with the hidden anguish and unspoken desires for freedom in the air.

Tagore’s memoirs make it clear that he had a lonely childhood. His only companion was the newly inducted child bride of his older brother, Kadambari Devi. She began as a playmate of young Tagore, then became his first reader and critic and, later, his muse till his death.⁶ The relationship though had a tragic end. Kadambari committed suicide by taking opium in 1884, four months after Tagore’s marriage, which she had tried to stall. This was the first major trauma in Tagore’s life. It was to be followed by the death of two of his children and his young wife. Together, these events probably marked the end of his childhood, youth and the first phase of his adult life. As if to cope with the disturbed state of his mind and his private traumata, Tagore travelled almost obsessively all over India during this period, mainly seeking some degree of spiritual solace.⁷

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It is this Tagore who—in response to the underground sentiments of the people around him and the people, cultures and faiths he met during his travels—displayed an uncanny ability to imagine and anticipate the emergence of a new kind of liberating figure in colonised India. In a large number of his poems, songs, plays and fiction, characters with Gandhi-like traits emerged as freedom fighters with a distinctive, quasi-Gandhian message of liberation.⁸

Bizarre though it may sound, almost all of these writings came when neither Tagore nor anyone else in India had heard of Gandhi, then a young, struggling lawyer in South Africa. It remains a mystery how Tagore accessed the silent scepticism in the mass culture of politics in India and internalised the ambivalence towards the modernising mission of India’s new rulers. How could he conjure up the vision of a loincloth-wearing, ascetic figure who would be perfectly at home with India’s poorest of the poor and with the excluded and the forgotten, to give the country a new message of liberation through a non-violent revolution? Were the poet’s ears more sensitive to the private sentiments waiting to become public at that point in time?

In a brilliant act of literary detection, five years after Tagore’s death, Pramatha Nath Bishi wrote a brief, now-half-forgotten Bengali essay on Tagore’s anticipation of a Gandhi-like, ascetic visionary offering a new message of liberation in his writings between roughly 1880 and 1910. Here is a dialogue to which Sisir Kumar Das, rediscovering Bishi’s essay, draws our attention. It is from a play by Tagore based on a novel he wrote in 1883.

‘King: Taxes from Madhabpur have been due for the last two years. Tell me, are you going to pay the tax or not?

Dhananjay: No, we won’t.

King: You won’t! What audacity!

Dhananjay: We won’t because it is not yours.

King: Not mine?

Dhananjay: No. We need it to survive. It belongs to God. How can I give it to you?

King: So you forbade the people to pay their taxes?

Dhananjay: I did. ... They want to pay it out of fear. I tell them ‘never do that. Give your life to Him who gave it to you, but not to the king.

King: You will have to suffer for this. I warn you.

Dhananjay: Suffering is my destiny. I welcome it.’

Likewise, in a poem celebrating the 10th Guru Govind Singh, the Sikh warrior-sage, Tagore’s poetic imagination attributes to the Guru qualities that have little to do with the historical figure of the Guru and, instead, reminds the reader of Gandhi. Bishi also identifies as many as 13 poems in a book of Tagore written at that time, Naivedya, all anticipating the imminent arrival of a great leader, simultaneously a moral exemplar and a public figure who will have direct access to those at the bottom of Indian society. All this before he had even heard of Gandhi. Once he came to know Gandhi and met him, Tagore’s search for a great leader faded out.

There was one exception. In 1931, nine years before his own death and 17 years before the assassination of Gandhi, Tagore wrote a long poem, this time in English, The Child. It is a fable woven around the journey of a community through a night that looks endless. Amidst the terrifying darkness comes a Man of Faith to lead but at every step, he is asked, “How far is the end?” Sisir Kumar Das draws our attention to the following section of the poem.

‘A gust of wind blows out the lamp and the darkness deepens like a sleep into a swoon.’

Someone from the crowd suddenly stands up and pointing to the leader with a merciless finger breaks out:

“False prophet, thou hast deceived us.”

Others take up the cry one by one. Women hiss their hatred and men growl.

At last one bolder than the others suddenly deals him a blow.

They cannot see his face, but fall upon him in a fury of destruction.

And hit him till he lies prone upon the ground…

Suddenly they become still and gasp for breath as they gaze at the figure lying dead.

The women sob out loud and men hide their faces in their hands.

A few try to slink away unnoticed, but their crime keeps them chained to their victim.

They ask each other in bewilderment,

“Who will show us the path?”

The old man from the East bends his head and says:

“The Victim.”

They sit still and silent.

Again, speaks the old man,

“We refused him in doubt, we killed him in anger,

Now we shall accept him in love,

For in his death he lives in the life of us all, the Great Victim.”

Tagore never knew how prophetic this poem would turn out to be. When he wrote the poem, he had known Gandhi for 18 years and had already forged a deep, lasting bond with him. Though occasionally interrupted by sharp differences, this bond never weakened. It was Tagore who gave substance to and endorsed the title Mahatma (the great soul) for Gandhi, which, within a few years, virtually superseded Gandhi’s real name.

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Tagore’s relationship with Gandhi is not the main concern of this digression. I have tried to extend Bishi’s argument that, exactly as the characters of Rama and Krishna lived in the ‘hearts’ of their devotees before Ramayana, Krishna Dwaipayana or Bhagavad Gita were written, Tagore’s vision of a Gandhi-like figure was already available before the living Gandhi arrived in person.⁹ Tagore discovered, on behalf of a desperate society, what he was set up to discover—a response that would define the personality type destined to become an answer “blowin’ in the wind” for those depressed or intimidated by the majesty of the world’s most powerful empire, threatening to become a permanent fixture on the Indian landscape.

I am tempted at this point to erect a fuller profile of Tagore’s vision of an ascetic freedom fighter emerging to lead India to its destiny following the pathbreaking work of cultural anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere on the phenomenology of visionary experiences, woven around Freud’s concept of dream-ego in his early master-text The Interpretation of Dreams. Alas, that would require another long digression from the concerns of this postscript, which centres on the silenced sentiments of a defeated people finding a voice in the poetry and prose of a time-transcending genius who built upon and revalued the relevance of the four devalued, but undefeated cultural strands in the Indic civilisation that I have already listed. Please allow me to return for a moment to touch upon how Tagore handled these strands in the high noon of British India.

It was no accident that all four strands became platforms for Tagore’s creativity in the phase of his life we are exploring. First, the subliminal presence of Buddhism, despite its apparent disappearance from most of South Asia, became a living rea­lity in a number of Tagore’s plays, dance dramas, poems and songs. He probably was the first person in modern times to dep­loy the Buddhist tradition, especially the Jataka tales, to att­ack caste-based discrimination and to plead for a non-violent, civil disobedience movement as part of a liberation struggle. This attempt to deploy Buddhism in the struggle for equity and justice was to reach its zenith, decades later, in Babasaheb Ambedkar’s brilliant, subversive, one-liner, ‘The history of India is a history of mortal combat between Buddhism and Brahmanism’, to which a few young Dalit scholars have rec­ently drawn our attention. I like to believe that Ambedkar here is stepping out of conventional history to enter the unc­h­arted terrain of history of consciousness where this idea of combat not only enters the inner world of Indians as a rallying call, but also haunts every sensitive, thinking Indian to silently say, in the words of the late Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali,

‘Your history gets in the way of my memory.

I am everything you lost. You can’t forgive me.

I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy.’

Second, Tagore reaffirmed the importance of medieval South Asia’s Bhakti and Sufi traditions at a time when many Indian intellectuals, following European usage, had started calling India’s medieval period as its dark age. Whereas it was arguably a golden age that has given South Asia its common heritage, both psychological and cultural, cutting across religions, castes, sects and languages. Tagore was also the first to declare that the cultural cohesion of South Asia was not so much a gift of ancient India as of medieval India, an insight that Gandhi was to later share. The result was a flood of new music, poetry and regional versions of epics that set up a cultural barricade against politically inspired divisiveness and hatred.

Third, Tagore reaffirmed the androgynous strain in both sacred and secular domains—defying the masculinisation of the Hindu pantheon by all three 19th-century Hindu reform movements, including the one to which Tagore and his family owed allegiance.¹⁰ Fourth, Tagore anticipated the significance Gandhi would attach to the recovery of the Indian village as a necessary correction of the pace-setting role assumed by the colonial metropolis. Indeed, many of the initiatives in this area as well as his writings indicate a remarkable sensitivity to, what we now call ecological issues.

In sum, Gandhi was neither a sui generis product of the Indic civilisation nor an accidental discovery of Tagore. He was a response to the powerful influence of the various 19th-century reform movements, which tried to revalue many of the civilisational values in South Asia in terms of their compatibility with the enlightenment values that defi­ned Western modernity. Hence, the persistent discomfort and hostility to Gandhi in most modern ideological schools in India and among some of his closest associates.

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On the 150th year of Gandhi’s birth, we have seen new books on him, some offering remarkably fresh readings of his vision and thought, others offering new revelations about his personal life and new accusations against him for, what they call, his racism, misogyny and betrayal of the Dalits or the oppressed, the new name chosen for the Avarnas, the casteless. Those who chose it forgot that while it was true that the Dalits had been oppressed and exploited over the centuries, it was also true that their resis­tance and the valiant struggle for survival had never been successfully crushed. Their new name undervalues that resistance and struggle. I do not have to deal with that part of the story here.

Looking around, I have come to believe that it is Gandhi’s misfortune that he has become a marketable icon, primarily as a hero but also, in smaller circles, as a villain. Particularly in India, but sometimes outside India, too, Gandhi today has been cleverly turned into a venerable, quasi-divine presence that has no practical significance in everyday life and politics. Modern India has nothing to do with his vision of India. His birthday is now an ‘official’ event and like most official events, a perfectly boring, entirely political enterprise. It is celebrated so that dishonest politicians of all hues, including those belonging to parties that killed him, can pay public homage to Gandhi to please some sections of their constituency. Otherwise too—his critics should be pleased—nothing much of Gandhi survives in India’s public life.

Yet, after saying this, I have to admit that even in this essay, I have managed to portray Gandhi, not as a charismatic figure or an ethical exemplar who, in the words of historian Arnold Toynbee, was one prophet willing to live in the slum of politics. For, in his death, Gandhi has become a strand in the global culture of politics and survives as a vector in our public life—a dangerous, demanding part of our collective self—what Gandhian scholar Ajay Skaria calls ‘a spectral force’.

Rulers everywhere fear him because most successful movements against autocracy in the last 70 years have been led by persons who have been called ‘our Gandhi’ by their societies, correctly or not. They range from Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela to the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso and Danilo Dolci in Italy; from Lech Walesa in Poland to Benigno Ninoy Aquino of the Philippines to Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma alias Myanmar.

The list is long and impressive and it seems to suggest that there has been, what I am tempted to call, a diffusion or dispersal of charisma. Together they project a new, cross-cultural, global image of Gandhi that does not have to grapple with the present ambivalence towards Gandhi in the culture of Indian politics. This explains the claim of Nayanjot Lahiri, the well-known historian of ancient India, that in the entire history of South Asia only two persons from South Asia have universal presence—Buddha and Gandhi.

Thus, after giving you two Gandhis, one that lived in the heart of Indians as a vague vision of an ideal liberator and acquired in Tagore’s writings an autonomous and time-transcending status and the Gandhi who appeared in flesh and blood, with his strengths and frailties intact. Now I invoke for you a third Gandhi who, whether one likes it or not, appears as a universal propensity and a global headache for the various versions of political ‘realists’ and ‘pragmatists’, national security communities and pompous garrison states with their death machines.

Until now, I have not given a clear answer to the question implicit in the title of this essay. Here it is. If you are not satisfied with any of the three Gandhis offered here, you might still find Gandhi today if you care to look within yourself. At least, two of those who killed him did so. One found him in his youth, but quickly ditched him and was the one to shoot him dead; the other, 50 years after Gandhi’s death and facing his own death, tried to own him up with a touch of desperation.¹¹

¹ See for instance, Herb Feith, ‘Repressive-Developmentalist Regimes in Asia’, in Alternatives, October 1981,

7 (4), pp. 491-506; and The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962).

² I should perhaps mention here that the two protagonists of this story, Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi, came from families that had distant, quasi-mythic connections with Islam. Tagores were Pirali Brahmins, a lower order of Brahmins, reportedly because one of their forefathers had inter-dined with Muslims; Gandhi’s mother belonged to the Pranami or Parnami sect, a community that sociologist Imtiaz Ahmed includes among the ‘bridge communities’ that exist in-between the Hindus and Muslims—and some of their variations in South and Southeast Asia.

³ Bruce Mazlish, historian and psychoanalyst, cites John Stuart Mill who says in the beginning of his autobiography, “I was born in London on the 20th of May, 1806, and was the eldest son of James Mill, the author of The History of British India.” Mazlish wryly comments, “Most readers, and this includes most scholars, have not noticed what an extraordinary statement this is. … It invokes a new version of the immaculate conception, in which the mother is entirely missing; indeed, John Stuart Mill never mentions her throughout the published version of his work.” Bruce Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

⁴ When Sigmund Freud’s book Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage, 1939) was first published in 1939, there were criticisms of its historical basis. However, Freud’s thesis acquires a different hue when one starts from the other end of the story. Exactly as cultures and societies live not by historical ‘truths’ but from what they believe to be true, Freud only exercises his right to start from his psychoanalytic construction of the cultural psychology of the Jewish people of his time to explore its possible historical links. This clarification is necessary because this essay, too, roughly follows a similar trajectory. Perhaps, every community tries to redefine its past heroes according to its present needs. As if to prove Benedetto Croce’s dictum holds: all history is contemporary history. In the psychoanalytic sociology of Freud, too, the past and the future have to meet in the present, sometimes defying Freud.

⁵ The younger Mill was to become more ambivalent about remaking India after the death of his father. See Vinay Lal, ‘John Stuart Mill and India: A Review Essay’, New Quest.

⁶ When he began to paint in the last decade of his life, most of his portraits of women bore the imprint of Kadambari.

⁷ This thumbnail sketch of Tagore’s childhood and youth may be adequate for the purposes of this paper, but it does not do justice to the entire range of formative influences on him. For a sensitive and in many ways unique work on Tagore’s inner world and the sources of his creativity, see Sudhir Kakar, Young Tagore: The Making of a Genius (New Delhi: Penguin/Viking, 1913).

⁸ Though I have in mind Freud’s concept of the uncanny, it has been used here in a diluted form. Simply put, Freud mainly had in mind dream situations where the familiar appears in strange or bizarre forms to escape or ‘bypass’ the censorship of repression. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny. Perhaps, repression in any case plays a lesser role in highly creative persons, able to mobilize a wider range of sublimations, in this instance aided by a variety of symbolisations.

⁹ Bishi reminds us that the characters of Rama and Krishna were there in the people’s mind before they were given more authoritative forms in the poetic imagination of the epics Ramayana and in Krishna Dwaipayan. Later, the laboured attempts of writers like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay to historize or modernize the characters failed to break the spell of the earlier poetic imaginaries, which survive as the ‘truth’ in the public culture. Bishi, ‘Rabinndra Sahitye Gandhi Charitrer Purvabhash’, pp. 89-90.

¹⁰ This was also probably the time when Tagore became aware of the tension between the European-style ideology called nationalism and the old-fashioned, instinct-driven sentiment called patriotism, a form of territoriality that human beings share with a number of other species. This awareness reflected the civilizational values and the androgynous sensitivities that would shape his own rejection of nationalism as well as Gandhi’s nonviolent anti-Imperialism. See my The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); and ‘Nationalism, Genuine and Spurious’, in Regimes of Narcissism, Regimes of Despair.

¹¹ Ashis Nandy, ‘Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi’, At the Edge of Psychology (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980); and ‘Coming Home: The Exiled and Secret Selves of Madanlal Pahwa’. Public Culture, 2010, 22(1), 127-47; Pahwa, a member of the group that killed Gandhi and spent 18 years in jail, had during his long series of interviews with Gandhian scholar-activist Rajni Bakshi and me, started as an angry, abusive Gandhi-hater. Towards the end of the series, he claimed he had become a different person, a ‘humanist’. He not only softened his hostility to Gandhi and the Muslims, he listed some of the new values he espoused, not noticing that a few of them were dangerously close to Gandhi’s worldview. Nor did Rajni Bakshi, who was interviewing him at the time. She was perhaps still trying to cope with Pahwa’s earlier confessions of his long career of murders, plunder and rioting.

(Views expressed are personal)

Ashis Nandy is a Sociologist and Homi Bhabha fellow at the Centre For The Study Of Developing Societies, Delhi

(This appeared in the print as 'Voices Of Dissent')