DEIFIED and vilified, both, M. K. Gandhi, the Mahatma who led India to freedom from the British, and was assassinated soon after, was “humanised”, even if for four minutes daily, in a rare radio tribute that ended last Saturday.
The state-run All India Radio’s (AIR) 100-episode serial broadcast on its frequency modulation (FM) network, heard by millions, depicted his quest from Jan 9, 1915, on his return from South Africa.
Gandhi had left India’s shore 28 years back as a nobody. Preceding him was his fight against the apartheid in South Africa — enough to be feared by the British. The media had noted his work in South Africa, and the growing intelligentsia was curious about what he meant to do back home. He was 45 years, three months and seven days old.
World War 1 had begun. Gandhi, not terribly well known in India, arrived to a lukewarm reception. Many prominent Congress leaders whom he met thought he was a self-indulgent person with bizarre ideas.
Working for freedom was neither easy, nor adequate. He needed to know India by travelling and meeting people.
Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who had entreated him to return, and whom he called his “guru”, held him to a vow that Gandhi would not speak on political issues without fully grasping them.
Gandhi writes in his book, Satyagraha in South Africa — “Every word of Gokhale glowed with his tender feeling, truthfulness and patriotism. Gokhale prepared me for India”.
Although Gokhale died a month later, Gandhi abided and gained immensely through that silence. The serial is aptly named Khamoshi ki Dastan (Chronicle of the Quiet Days.
He talked anything but politics, but what definitely constitutes politics today — untouchability, terrorism, saving energy, advocating Hindu-Muslim unity and stressing that the onus for communal harmony lay with the majority Hindus. He urged Congress and the Muslim League to unite in their fight against the British.
These concepts had few takers in the early years. He angered many. His adversaries grew in numbers and intensity, even as he gathered followers. Yet, in that first year, he laid the foundations of a new course in India’s freedom movement by injecting non-violence and non-cooperation.
Besides Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi met Congress leaders Ferozeshah Mehta (who attended his first meeting), Annie Beasant, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who later founded Pakistan.
All for freedom, their ideas differed. Many preferred to petition rather than confront the British. The England-educated, South Africa-returned “native” was an enigma to them. It took Gandhi years to give the struggle the shape of a non-violent mass movement.
His first satyagraha (fight for truth), later to become his principal weapon against the British, was urging Jinnah to speak in the Gujarati language to a Gujarati gathering. When Jinnah ignored him, he responded in Gujarati. Jinnah realised that he was up against someone unconventional and formidable.
In the serial, Gandhi comes across as intensely human, fired with the zeal of working for India’s freedom, struggling to find his feet. He would be angry, berate his supporters and tear off just-drafted letters.
Determined to work with or without family support, he would argue with wife Kasturba, who had objected to his admitting an “untouchable”. Any reform, in thought and action, had to start with her and the family, he would insist, and brooked no protest.
Unsurprisingly, the first to fall out that year was eldest son Harilal. His ambition to study law in England thwarted by Gandhi, Harilal later disowned his father and turned into an alcoholic.
This is contemporary history based on records, brought to life using the broadcasting medium. Incidentally, Gandhi himself visited AIR only once, on Nov 12, 1947, after independence, to record an appeal for peace.
Playing Gandhi’s fellow traveller right from South Africa is the serial’s producer and sutradhar (narrator), New Delhi-based journalist-broadcaster Madhuker Upadhyay. For this novel way of recalling and recording history, he can well be called a “pop-historian”.
“The show presented the human side of Gandhi’s personality to a generation that does not know about him,” says Upadhyay.
His is, perhaps, the best tribute, as India observes the centenary of the return of its most famous pravasi, the diaspora.
It is a welcome change from the current zeal of some scholars, who want to re-write India’s history and convert as history the mythology propagated in epics Ramayana and Mahabharata.
This was Upadhyay’s first production for the Indian media, after a decade of research in Mumbai, Delhi, London — wherever records of Gandhi’s early years in India were stored.
Doing a serial on Gandhi, minus songs and music on FM channels, popular among the young for its entertainment, was not easy. But, AIR’s feedback was that rather than a drop, the listenership actually rose.
“I have kept returning to Gandhi,” Upadhyay, 59, says, “as it is the most enduring theme relevant to the present times. Caste prejudices, sectarian violence, terrorism, an amalgam of the good among the traditional and the modern — all are important five generations hence”.
In 1995, he “re-enacted” for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) the “Dandi March”, or the Salt Satyagraha (1930). Gandhi had exhorted people to make salt from the sea to protest the colonial authorities’ restrictions. BBC later made it into a film.
In 1997, he “reconstructed” for BBC through interviews “50 days to India’s freedom”.
The first spark ignited as a Parliament correspondent. He saw the “contrast” between Gandhi asking the British to “Quit India” in 1942, and in 1991, India’s then finance minister Manmohan Singh, while introducing economic reforms in his annual budget, asking for foreign technology and investment.
Manmohan had then promised that in the long run, the reforms would “touch the last man in the queue”.
Reforms have been under way since and foreign investment is pouring in, but has the “last man in the queue” been “touched”?
Upadhyay’s reply is a big “No”. One cannot but agree with him.
The writer is NST’s New Delhi
correspondent