Revealing the Extremity of Passion

It seems we shall be getting back Bapu’s spectacles, after all. Regrettably, retrieving the vision the Mahatma saw through those glasses is likely to prove far more difficult. An uproar was created in Parliament when it was revealed that a pair of Gandhiji’s iconic spectacles were to come up for public auction in New York. The glasses are the property of the greatgrandson of the last nawab of Junagadh, who in the 1930s was gifted the spectacles by Gandhiji. When the nawab, who after partition decamped to Pakistan, asked the Mahatma for inspiration, Bapu handed over his spectacles, saying “These gave me the vision to free India.”
Today, thanks in large part to the Mahatma’s vision, we are free of colonial rule. But are we free from the shackles of our own hypocrisy? When news of the New York auction broke, there was great outrage in India, with Gandhiji’s greatgrandson, Tushar Gandhi, describing it as a “grave insult” while reportedly putting together the estimated Rs 20 lakh he would need to bid successfully for his great-grandfather’s glasses.
In the event, however, an amicable settlement seems to have been reached and the Mahatma’s spectacles are going to be restored to India without having to go under the auctioneer’s hammer. A happy ending, except for a couple of embarrassing points. According to the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972, it is not permissible for a private individual to either export or import an item of historical value. Enacted to prevent India losing its cultural heritage, this law has been known to backfire on itself, as it did when it prevented Vijay Mallya from bringing Tipu Sultan’s sword back from Britain to India.
Such legal niceties aside, there remains a major moral question mark about getting back Bapu’s glasses: Do we really deserve them? The brouhaha created over the Mahatma’s spectacles is of a piece with the cynical tokenism, the hypocritical lip service with which we treat the legacy of the Father of the Nation. We bow reverentially at the pedestal on which we have placed him while desecrating in public life every principle he stood for: from non-violence to austerity, from tolerance for all to a steadfast refusal to let the end — no matter how alluring — justify dubious means. The empty rhetoric of Gandhi-worship lives on; Gandhism as not just an abstract philosophy but as a way of everyday life is long dead and buried in the nation that claims him as its Father.
What would Bapu — who shunned pomp and ceremony as much as he did sycophancy and flattery — make of this storm in a spectacle case? What would he have said? Never mind my glasses and the pious sentiments you attach to them, which are both equally unimportant and irrelevant; what is relevant is that you try to live and act, day to day, even a little like i tried to teach you to do, live in and through the daily practice of honesty, humility and love for your neighbour.
Thanks to Munnabhai, at best what exists of Gandhism is Gandhigiri, a watered down, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People version of the original. Gandhigiri is not a rigorous and remorseless search for truth within oneself, in all one’s thoughts and actions; Gandhigiri is merely salesmanship with a saintly smile.
Coleridge remarked that ownership of a book ought to be determined not by the fact of purchase but that of appreciation: a book should rightly belong not to the person who buys it, but to the person best equipped to understand it. By this yardstick we in India don’t deserve Gandhiji’s glasses or any other memento of him.
Perhaps no one does in today’s world, Gandhism — the relentless pursuit of Gandhian truth — being far too demanding a vocation for us lesser mortals. If that’s the case, why make matters worse by getting into unseemly, and very un-Gandhian, squabbles over the Mahatma’s memorabilia. Never mind his glasses. At least let the poor soul’s memory rest in peace.That’s the least — or perhaps the most — that we can do for our lost Mahatma.