He returns to people’s thoughts wherever love, freedom and truth are assailed

Literature vs Traffic, an art installation by Luzinterruptus Michigan Photography

No installation will make him look dated and embarrassing, not even the ridiculous official caricature of him only as a pair of glasses for promoting some pet ideas of those who are brought up despising him

When historical narratives become semantic beggars, anecdotes help in lighting up collective memory. Some years back, I was in Berlin. This was the post-perestroika and unified Berlin. As I was walking outside the grand buildings of Berlin University, where Karl Marx had been a student a century-and-a-half ago, I noticed a curious installation. This was just outside the university library. It was designed to take one by complete surprise and shock. On the pavement, as one walked, one suddenly saw a small cavity covered in glass. It was the size of a cellar, or a war-field bunker. Inside it, there was some light, but not bright enough to show at once what was inside. As one peered into the dimly lit room under the glass roof, one noticed a single shelf of books, with no books on it. Perhaps, just one or two books were on the shelf, lying lifeless. The inscription placed next to the glass surface read, “This is the place where Adolf Hitler burnt books of many thinkers in May 1932 after dragging them out of the library.” The inscription brought home the brutality of the regime that took pride in attacking free thought. The installation was an apt statement for the tradition of Marx brutalised by Hitler.

The eloquent installation has remained in my memory as an unforgettable experience. It suddenly surfaced again when sometime ago I walked past a similar installation. This time, it was in Michigan, a bastion of free thought, fighting to preserve its identity in the present regime in the United States of America. This installation, created by the little-known Luzinterruptus arts-collective in Spain, was made up of 10,000 books spread on Liberty Street. They were opened, as if someone had been reading them, but was only halfway through. Many of them were children’s stories, some about text and design and some travellers’ tales. But the larger bulk included books of philosophy. The inscription placed coyly on one side said, “You are welcome to walk over these books, take them away and do what you like with them.” For any book lover, the scene was painful. It brought home with utmost clarity that the phrase ‘post-truth’ means an utter contempt for ideas.

A day after I had passed by the installation in Michigan, the American television channels were reporting how pipe-bombs had been delivered at the CNN office and the residences of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The analysts were unanimous in claiming that this was a moment when the entire nation must condemn in one voice and a joint communiqué be issued to warn the ones who had dispatched those lethal things. They also pointed out that probably it was Donald Trump’s tirade against the democrats that had emboldened the perpetrator to use such violent devices. One would have expected some shade of remorse in Trump’s statement on the horrifying incident. There was none, though, when he actually spoke. Rather, he used the tone of a scolding school teacher and reprimanded Obama and Clinton, “No one should carelessly compare political opponents to historical villains”. This was exactly like Narendra Modi responding to violence involved in mob-lynching or attacks on suspected beef-eaters. Capitalism had many ills; but it had a certain ethical decorum. The post-truth political regimes have turned capitalism more naked by throwing away even the pretence that capitalistic democracy had of being based on consent and dialogue. Criticism and questioning have become bad words in the post-truth crony capitalism of the Trumps and Modis of the world. Obviously, books are here to be trampled upon.

A related anecdote that comes to my mind is about the Kasturba memorial in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune. Kasturba Gandhi died there when she, Gandhi and Mahadev Desai were imprisoned in it at the height of the Second World War and the Quit India movement. Recently, I had the privilege of hosting a large conference in Pune in which writers from 87 countries participated. I thought it would be a good idea to bring the writers to the Kasturba memorial, and so I did. I had imagined that these writers from far-off countries would look at the place, have a few photographs and then would want to leave. To my surprise, they suggested that they would like to sit down on the ground and observe silence as a tribute to Gandhi and Kasturba. The genuine respect and love they inspire even among those who are complete strangers to their work and ideas is phenomenal.

Although Hitler was younger than Gandhi by some 20 years, the two can be seen as contemporaries dominating the world-stage. It was approximately at the same time that Hitler burnt the books and Gandhi defied the colonial salt law and chose to be jailed. It was the same time when Gandhi came up with his idea of ‘civil disobedience’ as a statement of one’s moral courage in the face of injustice and Hitler started demanding ‘complete obedience’ towards the supreme leader. Hitler justified and promoted violence in every form, Gandhi devoted himself to preaching non-violence. Hitler made propaganda the basis of his continued right to dominate, Gandhi spoke of truth as the path towards freedom.

It is an irony of history that the world is celebrating the 150th year of Gandhi’s birth, 2018-19, precisely when the tendencies for which Hitler was known have started characterising rulers in many countries. Was Gandhi’s idea of truth so fragile that the world would forsake it not long after his death? The writers gathered in Pune brought home to me poignantly that Gandhi is still seen by the larger humanity, irrespective of one’s nation, creed, language and race, as the prophet of freedom. He returns to people’s thoughts wherever love, freedom and truth are assailed. The post-truth era in history will no doubt make him sound as relevant as he was in the times of colonialism and Hitler’s festival of violence. No installation will make him look dated and embarrassing, not even the ridiculous official caricature of him only as a pair of glasses for promoting some pet ideas of those who are brought up despising him.

The author is a literary critic and a cultural activist

e.mail : ganesh_devy@yahoo.com

courtesy : “The Telegraph”, 07 December 2018

https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/the-post-truth-era-is-ironically-making-gandhi-more-relevant/cid/1677855

There remains a deep reservoir of communal solidarity within Naga society

Natwar Thakkar's life’s work was to forge an honourable compact between the Nagas and the Indian Union.

Source: Nagaland Gandhi Ashram

Nagaland is one of only three states of the Indian Union that I have not visited. I had planned to go there next February, at the invitation of Natwar Thakkar, a social worker whom I had corresponded with but never met. Born in western India in 1932, Natwarbhai came under the influence of the Gandhian and patriot, Kaka Kalelkar, and as a young man chose to devote his life to social service. He went to Nagaland in 1955 and established an ashram in a village called Chuchuyimlang, about 30 miles from the town of Mokokchung.

The year after Natwar Thakkar moved to Nagaland, the insurgency led by A.Z. Phizo intensified and the Indian army moved in to suppress it. Natwarbhai married a Naga lady, Lentina Ao, and with her lived through 40 years of brutal conflict, raising a family, seeking and serving. The couple focused on establishing cottage industries and on vocational training among Naga youths. They started a dairy, and encouraged sericulture and beekeeping.

The Nagaland Gandhi Ashram was visited by Morarji Desai in November 1978, when Thakkar’s fellow Gujarati-speaking Gandhian was prime minister. Four years later, a future prime minister came visiting. This was Manmohan Singh, at the time a member of the Planning Commission, an economist with policy interests and absolutely no political ambition. After spending a day with Natwar Thakkar and his colleagues, Singh wrote: “This Ashram is doing excellent work which is of tremendous significance in making programmes of decentralized development a success. Humanising development, improving productivity of work while retaining identity and self-respect of human beings is the most challenging task. The Gandhian approach to these vital issues provides exciting opportunities. In this Ashram I saw a harmonious blend of machine and human labour.”

I first heard of Natwar Thakkar in the 1980s, while working on a biography of the British-born Indian anthropologist, Verrier Elwin. Elwin had lived for extended periods in the Sabarmati Ashram, attracted by Gandhi’s interfaith credo and his personal charm. However, in later years, and as a result of living with the adivasis in central India, he came to distance himself from the Mahatma’s puritan attitudes towards food and alcohol. In Elwin’s papers I found a letter written in 1959, describing with delight the pork he had eaten and the rice beer he had drunk on a visit to a professedly ‘Gandhian’ ashram in Nagaland.

Sadly, Natwar Thakkar died this past October, and so I will not get to meet a man I exchanged many mails with. However, my resolve to visit the state he made his own has been renewed by reading Rupa Chinai’s recent book, Understanding India’s Northeast — A Reporter’s Journal. The longest chapter of this book is on Nagaland; it draws on many visits to the state over the years. Chinai writes with sensitivity and feeling about the costs of the conflict between the rebels and the Indian army, a conflict that has “extracted a huge toll on the civilian population in terms of lives lost, stagnant development, psychological and physical stress and fratricide within Naga society”.

Chinai justly criticizes the policies of successive Central governments, which have imposed a standardized form of ‘Indian’ education which takes no account of the specificities of Naga life, and which, in the name of development and aid, has promoted a nexus of corruption between businessmen, bureaucrats, and politicians. As she writes: “The sub-standard public roads, drains and buildings; the palatial private bungalows and over-stuffed wallets of their children — bear testimony to how ‘development aid’ has been converted to ‘easy money’ that nurtures the luxuriant lifestyles of the creamy layer of urban Naga society. It has seen the creation of an elite class in Naga society’s egalitarian ethos, which thrives because of the insurgency conditions and the inflow of ‘easy money’. All this has been at the expense of Naga villagers who have not received a share in prosperity. They provide the bulk of the cadres for the insurgency movement.”

In 1964-5, when the insurgency was less than a decade old, Jayaprakash Narayan went to Nagaland to seek to bring about reconciliation between the Indian State and the rebels. He travelled through the hills and valleys, profoundly impressed by the egalitarian ethos of those who lived and laboured there. After he returned to Patna, JP gave a public lecture entitled “Nagaland mein shanti ka prayas” (The Search for Peace in Nagaland). Here he remarked:

“People here [in the Indian heartland] think of Nagas as uncivilized. But if one travels there one sees how advanced they are… Let me give you an example. Near the town of Mokokchung is a village named Ugma, which is perhaps the largest village in Nagaland. About four thousand people are resident here. There is a very big church there. This is bigger than any church found in Assam or elsewhere in this region. It has a seating capacity of five thousand. You will be astonished to learn that the church was built entirely by the voluntary labour of villagers. They used no material nor any expertise from outside. You may not believe this, but they did not even need an engineer from outside to help them construct this church. The people of the village built it themselves. And the church is so beautiful! Not just this church, even high schools were built by the villagers themselves. And these schools are very pretty too. Wood and bamboo are freely available here… But the most remarkable thing is their spirit of service. A Naga even if he has a B.A. or M.A. degree, does not consider physical labour to be beneath his dignity. The deficiencies that one finds in educated people elsewhere in India are absent here. If a boy comes home on holiday, he would happily help his parents in the fields or in housework. What we [Gandhians] try to teach under the rubric of ‘basic education’ is already part of the teaching here… The greatest quality of the Nagas is the dignity of labour in daily life, which we can learn from” (my translation).

Rupa Chinai’s book appears more than 50 years after JP said these words. Yet is heartening to see that for all the insecurities caused by decades of bloody violence, and the moral corrosion caused by years of State-aided corruption, there remains a deep reservoir of communal solidarity within Naga society. Chinai describes the workings of the intricate system of irrigation management in Naga villages, the taking of water to each field through stones and pipes that divert and regulate its flow. She also provides a vivid account of the building of a new house of a friend, in which every adult male in the family participated, a living example of that great Naga quality, “the dignity of labour in daily life, which we can learn from”.

Natwar Thakkar’s life’s work was to forge an honourable compact between the Nagas and the Indian Union. He sought reconciliation, based on respect for the culture and ethos of the Nagas; not assimilation based on the submergence of proud traditions of community living into some homogenized way of life prescribed by ideologues. He is gone, but I hope still to visit the state he made his own, and his ashram too. I trust it still serves pork and rice beer.

e.mail : ramachandraguha@yahoo.in

https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/conflict-cannot-crush-nagaland-s-gandhian-spirit/cid/1677976?ref=top-stories_home-template 

Two intellectual heroes with not a trace of pomposity and a fine sense of humour

In the past decade, I have often visited Cambridge, Massachusetts, and come to like it enormously. The town has fine cafes and bookshops and — as the home of Harvard and MIT—a greater concentration of intellectual talent than any other place in the world. The best time to visit it is in the fall, when the air is crisp and the sky cloudless, and the colours are beginning to change.

I spent the last week of October in Cambridge. I ate at some nice places, rummaged through the shelves and cartons in the Harvard and Raven Bookstores, walked through the streets, met some old friends and made some new ones. I also made a trip to Walden Pond, taking a long parikrama around it, observing the other worshippers, young and old, as well as the glorious foliage that surrounds these holy waters.

For me, among the attractions of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is that it is home to two scholars I enormously admire. One is the great historian of modern China, Roderick MacFarquhar. Rod (as I call him) is of Scottish extraction. He was born in 1930 in Lahore, where his father was a colonial civil servant. He was sent to boarding school in Scotland, and then went up to Oxford. On graduating, he became a journalist, covering Jawaharlal Nehru’s funeral for the BBC and Mao’s Cultural Revolution for The Economist. He then served a term in the UK Parliament as a Labour MP.

Roderick Macfarquhar
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

In 1960, while still a journalist, Rod MacFarquhar had founded The China Quarterly, which quickly became the leading English-language journal on contemporary China. Before entering politics, the editor had himself written several books on China. After he failed to win re-election to Parliament, Rod chose not to return to journalism but to become an academic instead. In the 1980s, he was appointed to a professorship at Harvard University and, later, became a much admired head of its Government Department. In between his teaching and administrative duties, he authored three landmark volumes on the origins of the Cultural Revolution.

American universities have no retirement age for their professors. Some carry on teaching into their eighties and even into their nineties, determined to have a say in new appointments and curriculum changes even when manifestly out of touch. Like most politicians, most academics also do not know when to retire. Rod MacFarquhar was different. He chose to vacate his prestigious named chair when people would ask ‘Why?’ rather than ‘Why Not?’. A young friend of mine took one of his last classes, a seminar on ‘Political Leadership’, which had its students absolutely enthralled.

In retirement, Rod MacFarquhar continues to write the odd essay in The New York Review of Books, to attend seminars and answer queries from younger academics (when asked). But unlike most other academics and unlike almost all politicians, he has no desire to cling on to the vestiges of the power and the status that past accomplishments have awarded him.

Rod MacFarquhar has lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the past three decades. Another scholar I venerate moved there more recently. E.S. (Enuga) Reddy was born in Nellore in 1924; after taking a first degree in Madras (where he was active in student politics), he went to New York for further studies. Thereafter, he joined the United Nations, where he worked for 35 years, ending as Assistant Secretary-General.

Mr Reddy had many different assignments in the UN. However, he was best known for steering the organization’s Special Committee against Apartheid. From the early 1960s to the mid 1980s, he catalyzed world opinion against the racist regime in South Africa. After he retired, he continued the campaign in his personal capacity. When apartheid finally fell, Mr Reddy visited South Africa where he was received like the hero he was, and decorated with a high State honour. Not long afterwards, in Mumbai, I met an activist from Durban who had spent many years in exile. When I mentioned Mr Reddy’s name, he instinctively stood up as a mark of the respect that so many ordinary South Africans have for this extraordinary Indian, and which must surely mean more to the man than the Order of the Companions of O.R. Tambo that he also possesses.

While working on South Africa, Mr Reddy developed a serious scholarly interest in Gandhi. He now has the largest collection of articles and clippings on the subject outside of the Sabarmati Ashram. These he shares freely with scholars of all nationalities and countless books written by others have been made possible by his generosity.

Mr Reddy and his Turkish wife (a translator of the poet, Nazim Hikmet) lived for more than 50 years in Manhattan. However, a couple of years ago, their daughter persuaded them to move to Cambridge where she was herself based. It was in this town that I saw the Reddys last month, in their new apartment off Western Avenue. We spoke, as always, mostly of the Mahatma.

Enuga Sreenivasulu Reddy

On this last visit, I also saw Rod MacFarquhar in his apartment on Memorial Drive. As I entered, Rod paid me an unexpected compliment; I was, he said, the third Indian he had known who always arrived on time. (I asked for the names of the others; they turned out to be the patriot and liberal parliamentarian, the late Minoo Masani; and the maverick economist-turned-hardline Hindutvavadi, Subramanian Swamy.)

Note that I call one man by his first name and the other by a respectful prefix. This is because I got to know Rod in the informal, relaxed world of the American academy; whereas Mr Reddy is my father’s age and has been, in terms of his influence on my own work on Gandhi, a father-figure.

Roderick MacFarquhar and Enuga Reddy do not know one another. It is very likely that they do not know of each other. Yet, in this writer’s mind, they make for a natural pairing. Both have made major contributions to scholarship and to public life. Both have nurtured institutions and mentored many talented individuals. Both have strong roots in their native country but are greatly admired in a country not their own: China in the case of Roderick MacFarquhar, South Africa in the case of E.S. Reddy. And yet both made their home and carried out their profession in a third country altogether: the United States of America.

Rod and Mr Reddy are also united by attributes of personal character. In their prime, both wore their learning as well as their professional distinction lightly. Now, in retirement, they absolutely do not crave or miss the power or fame they once possessed. Neither has a trace of pomposity; both have a fine sense of humour (often aimed at themselves). Both are generous with their time and their resources; Mr Reddy has donated rare South African materials to Yale and rare Gandhi materials to the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, while Rod is keen to donate his great library of Chinese materials to a university in India.

While in Cambridge in late October, I enjoyed my time in the bookstores around Harvard Square and my walk around Walden Pond. But the highlight of my visit was the darshans I had and the conversations I conducted with Roderick MacFarquhar and Enuga Reddy, two of my personal heroes.

courtesy : "The Telegraph", 10 November 2018

https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/rod-and-mr-reddy-a-natural-pairing/cid/1674521?ref=comment_home-template