Delving Into A Historic Relationship Between Two Idealists

Sudhir Kakar has penned works that travel through the specific contours of the Indian psyche, burrowing not only into academic sources and formal accounts, but also into the country’s myths, folktales, songs and superstitions. Kakar, in particular, comprehends the peculiar Indian dilemma – of contending with modernity with all its material bells and whistles, while wrestling with an ambivalence towards tradition. In Mira and the Mahatma, Kakar plays the role of a psychoanalyst and novelist, examining one of the more fascinating relationships in Indian history – of that between Madeline Slade (Mira) and Mahatma Gandhi.

Drawing from authentic source materials – like Mirabehn’s diaries, letters she exchanged with Gandhi, the Mahatma’s prolific missives to her, recollections of eye-witnesses – the work occupies a space between fiction and non-fiction. Kakar fills gaps in the records with a storyteller’s make-believe, and with deep psychological insights into how these characters might have ‘really’ acted. Kakar uses a fictional narrator, Navin, who watches Mira’s unfolding in India and the Mahatma’s quirks and not-always-saintly human traits, as an inmate of Sabarmati Ashram and as Mira’s Hindi tutor.

Who was Madeline Slade to begin with? She was the daughter of a British Admiral, whose long-distance attraction to Gandhi was sparked off by reading a biography of the leader. She was gifted the “slim volume” that led to her lifelong tumult or quest, by the author Romain Rolland. Though she had, as a child, spent some time in Mumbai, it was only as the daughter of a high-ranking British official, because of which she was shielded from the discord and jibber-jabber of the ‘natives’ – who only appeared in her life, as the brown-skinned staff or ‘servants’ of her parents’ household.

Later in England, during a year of preparing for life at the Ashram, Madeline started taking lessons in Urdu and learning to spin, while also sitting cross-legged and sleeping on the floor. In addition, she relinquished wine and meat, much to her mother’s consternation. Departing to India via Paris, where her Admiral father waved his daughter off, Madeline readied herself for the sparse life that awaited her in other ways. Her luggage consisted of a few books – a treatise on Urdu grammar, a French-English dictionary, Romain Rolland’s biography of Gandhi, and French translations of the Bhagvad Gita and Rigveda – and five shapeless frocks spun from khadi. She had donated all her other personal possessions to her parents’ servants.

On that ship, she would occasionally enter a fugue-like state, deeply contented, bereft of thoughts. She herself described this as a state of grace, similar to experiences that had overtaken her since childhood, when she stumbled on a fragile swallow’s nest or bunch of dandelions. This was a state that had also eluded her of late, and was to return again, only when she encountered Gandhi. “Grace is the only guide I have always trusted to steer me through the shoals of an unknown fate,” she said.

1925, when Madeline arrived in India, was a relatively quiet year; the British were even disposed to write off Gandhi as ineffective. After all, he had called off the movement after the violence at Chauri Chaura. Besides, Gandhi was adamant about focusing on internal issues inside the movement – like untouchability, Hindu-Muslim amity and the propagation of spinning. Her ship was met by a Parsi lawyer, deputed by Gandhi. Madeline insisted on leaving at once for Ahmedabad, rather than halting or resting in Bombay (Mumbai).

At the ashram, she quickly acclimatized herself to Gandhi’s disciplinarian measures – a strict routine that he imposed on himself and on all ashram residents. Gandhi wasn’t the kind to succumb to resident pleas for a somewhat gentler lifestyle. For instance, all residents were woken up at 4 a.m. by a loud bell. During a meeting, when a resident asked if he could wake up later, since he struggled to arouse himself from deep slumber, Gandhi suggested raising the crescendo of the wake-up bell instead. By having everyone bang on their thaalis with spoons.

Since there were expected gripes about Gandhi’s partiality to the European entrant, the leader’s response to such complaints was both unusual and creative. In public view, Gandhi assigned Madeline the job of cleaning the latrines: “Hers was a task that everywhere else in the country was considered the lowest of the low, to be performed only by the untouchable scavenger.” Of course, the leader himself cleaned the latrine with her, when assigning her the responsibility, another public act whose semantics Gandhi must have been acutely conscious of.

The ashram was not an ideal community by any means. Like in any neighborhood or village, there were differences and squabbles. “The ashram was not free of the inevitable discord, petty jealousy and envy among a people who shared a community life…” Gandhi, himself, while observing all this, never seemed to give up on anyone or on the community as a whole. He always saw the potential in all human beings, rather than getting tangled up in their present-day rancor or pettiness.

He wanted Ashram lifestyles to mimic Nature as closely as possible – simple foods, physical activity, traditional medicines – which also included four hours of meditative or prayerful spinning. Anyone who fell sick inside the premises was rewarded with two physical visits by Bapu, with the prescription of some outlandish treatment or the other. One recommendation included “mud packs around the abdomen and head as panacea for most minor ailments.”

Gandhi helped chop off her hair when Madeline also took a vow of celibacy, and renamed her Mira. She gave up her khadi frocks and started wearing khadi saris. Mira mostly kept to herself inside the ashram. As Kakar puts it, “…when I began to work on the story of her life, I discovered that Mira’s need for solitude was a part of her character…”

Around then, Gandhi had called for civil disobedience and non-cooperation. Navin, the book’s narrator and Kakar’s alter-ego, was aroused by that call, and also by the leader in other ways. He even planned on staying celibate, at that time. His infuriated father refused to talk to him, often transmitting his distress through his wife – “Navin’s mother, tell that son of yours…” Navin’s mother also tried to dissuade him, with disappointed sighs, or by fasting or pecking at her food in his presence.

Gandhiji also addressed students at Navin’s Gujarat College. Gandhi was a much smaller and thinner man than Navin remembered. What Gandhi said that day did not resonate well with the crowd. He said the students should clean their lavatories of faeces and also pick up garbage strewn on crowded streets – in order to eradicate the scourge of untouchability. He drew attention to the elevated work performed by sweepers. Gandhi said, “Sweeping is an art in itself. If I had my way, I would be out there sweeping those roads myself.” The leader was clear about his overarching purpose: “I am not interested in freeing India merely from the English yoke. I am bent upon freeing India from any yoke whatsoever.”

Navin was intensely nervous about entering Gandhiji’s hut inside the Sabarmati Ashram, where he had been summoned to live like the poor. He was shaken by the simplicity of Gandhi’s dwelling. When he finally summoned the courage to enter the room, he was once again struck by the modesty of the interiors: A low table, covered with papers, a reed pen, an ink bottle. An earthen water jug and tumbler. A spinning wheel, a basket with spun cloth, unused balls of cotton. Gandhi’s life almost seemed to reflect how little each of us could live with.

Some other habits that struck Navin, included Bapu’s insistence on using all scraps of paper, in order to write. Like the “backs of envelopes, letters, circulars which had writing only on one side, were cut into different sizes and shapes to leave him maximum writing space.” Bapu was always conscious that the ashram itself was supported by the donation of many poor people, and hence he was obsessive about not wasting anything, including the smallest fragments of paper. “To serve the poor, we must live as the poorest among them,” he said. “What people listen to is your life, not your ideas.”

Mira was even more taken in when she accompanied Gandhi on a train journey. At every station, she watched crowds pressing their faces to the train’s windows, faces filled with awe and devotion. Gandhi himself was slightly wary and perhaps even burdened by so much adulation. But such closeness came with a glimpse into the leader’s not-very-salubrious traits too: “As I was soon to discover, although Bapu was invariably gentle and calm in public, tranquil in even the most trying circumstances, he could get very angry, furiously so with those who were closest to him.” Gandhi once told Mira: “You love another person not because of his virtues – that is infatuation – but in spite of his faults. Love has no place for idealization.”

In 1929, after the Congress passed a resolution to ask for complete independence, Gandhi retreated to Sabarmati, where people were kept guessing about his next move. There were rumors that he would urge people to resort to violence, as non-violent means did not seem to be working. Gandhi came back with a one-word response, that was to remain in global memory as a sheer flash of genius: “Salt.” Bapu knew that the action undertaken by the movement had to be one that would resonate across socioeconomic classes, and more so with the poorest.

Kakar describes the motley crew of non-violent ‘soldiers’ that set out on the much-memorialized Dandi March: “Some were barefoot, others wore old, brown canvas shoes or cheap leather chappals, the soles reinforced by swathes of rubber cut from discarded truck tires.” Strange, that the leader, felt that such a bedraggled crew, physically enervated, almost clownishly weak, could take on the might of the British Empire.

The outcome of the freedom movement is well-known. Mirabehn’s own life did not seem to end in a fairytale manner. After being bewitched with, and perhaps too adulatory of Gandhi, she was attracted to Prithvi Singh, another revolutionary hero, who did not return her affections. She returned eventually to Europe, where she re-engaged with a childhood obsession – the composer Beethoven, whose biography also penned by Romain Rolland, had led her to encounter Gandhi. But as Kakar puts it, we don’t really know if she was happy or not. After all, can any human being penetrate the subjective state of another, even if they are as close as the legendary Mirabai was to her dark-skinned God, Krishna?

References

Sudhir Kakar, Mira & the Mahatma, Penguin (Viking), New Delhi, 2004