Narayan Desai, who passed away earlier this week at 90, is best known as a chronicler of Gandhi’s life. The son of Gandhi’s friend, disciple, fellow activist, stenographer and translator, Mahadev Desai, he had a close view of the Mahatma. He wrote extensively about growing up with Gandhi, as well as Gandhi, the philosopher-activist. His four-volume epic biography of Gandhi in Gujarati, My Life Is My Message, is not merely a sketch of Bapu, but also a political tract of his time. Nearly a decade after he completed it, he chose to turn into a kathakar to narrate the journey of Gandhi to a wider public, and in a popular format. Why did he decide to do Gandhi Katha?

Desai started performing Gandhi Katha in 2004, and after many discourses in Gujarat, held the 50th performance in New Delhi. During an interaction then, he told this reporter that Gandhi Katha was his response to the anti-Muslim massacres that Gujarat witnessed in 2002. At 80, he said, he could not lead a political movement. I can only talk about an alternative world, he said.

In a state riven by sectarian violence and administered by a callous government, could there have been a more political act than to repeatedly remind people that truth and non-violence were the essentials of Gandhian thought? To recall how Gandhi walked through the bloody tracks in Noakhali to end communal violence and how the divide and rule policy of the British, the two-nation theory of the Muslim League and the ideology of Hindu Rashtra culminated in the murder of the Mahatma was to put history and the importance of political memory in perspective for a people who had forgotten the essence of Gandhian praxis and the roots of communal politics.

Clearly, Gandhi Katha was the last act of an activist who had an acute sense of history and politics. The katha, which followed the model of a spiritual discourse by combining storytelling and singing, did not attempt a polemical discussion on Gandhi’s life and ideals. Instead, it turned out to be a remarkable exercise in reinventing a popular performance tradition to valourise an alternative vision of history, politics and living. It sought to conscientise listeners and prod them to organise to fight injustice. It reminded people that Gandhi was a man of action, and that he organised people and fought injustice without compromising the ideals of non-violence. He chose to debate with those who disagreed with him and when he failed to win them over, he refused to be bitter. And, most of all, he considered all religions to be true and held that Hindu-Muslim unity was central to building a better India. These were the themes that Desai elaborated in detail over hours and days, through anecdotes, personal experience and the wide material of autobiographical writings and commentaries left behind by the historical cast of his Gandhi Katha. It was as much a class in history and politics as it was an intimate view of the world and words of Gandhi and his contemporaries.

Desai, however, didn’t limit the idea of violence to physical acts of violence, like riots, bomb blasts and such. He recognised the forms of violence embedded in social, political and economic structures. The polarisation of communities along religious lines in Gujarat and elsewhere, according to him, was not merely the outcome of people following different faiths, but also a reflection of political mobilisation that fed off structural violence, manifest in the lopsided management and distribution of wealth and resources and in conspicuous consumption. The way we live has a huge effect on the society that is created. It is not only wealth but also the way wealth is displayed that adds to the structural violence, he said. Recalling Gandhi, he added that the means needed to be in line with the ends.

Desai’s political work was in the finest tradition of sarvodaya activism. He headed the Shanthi Sena, which Vinoba Bhave set up in 1957 to combat communal violence, between 1962 and 1978, and turned it into a vibrant organisation. However, he chose to be with Jayaprakash Narayan when JP launched the Total Revolution against corruption and the Emergency in 1975, and was jailed. After JP’s death, Desai set up the Institute For Total Revolution in his village, Vedchi, in Gujarat to train activists in sarvodaya. He was no “priestly” or “governmental” Gandhian, but a political and radical Gandhian who refused to be silent when faced with violence and falsehood.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was one of the few politicians to condole Desai’s death. “Narayanbhai Desai will be remembered as a scholarly personality who brought Gandhiji closer to the masses,” Modi said in his tweet. It is important to know the Gandhi that Desai spoke about, and the apolitical and ahistorical Mahatma the Sangh Parivar is projecting, and the difference between them.

e.mail : amrith.lal@expressindia.com

courtesy : “The Indian Express”,March 21, 2015

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/recalling-the-political-gandhi/