Gandhi and reflections on the idea of India, past and present

How did we come to be where we are today? Using this fictional device of reconstructing his friend’s manuscript, Kumar gives us an evocative portrayal of the events of the last few decades and their disturbing, psychological impact on a generation brought up on the vision of India as dreamt by Gandhi, Nehru and others, an India that was “a modern yet kind, considerate nation.” The author vividly portrays Munna’s tragic descent into despair and desperation as he sees the more expansive idea of India that he is brought up on slowly collapse with the rise of the new dispensation. These are interwoven with Munna’s engagement with Gandhi’s rich idea of Hinduism, his guarded view of science, his notion of truth as a symbol for “the ingredients of morality” and not as mere “fidelity to facts” and his complex ideas on non-violence, swaraj and satyagraha. The narrative ends on a poignant note where K longs for Munna to hear him say “India is a great teacher, my friend, and it never fails to teach whoever tries to bend it.” It is in Gandhi, the philosopher-healer, who virtually becomes the embodiment of India, that we have a reminder of India’s distinctness and its plural ethos. Gandhi instead attempts to reconstruct several practical domains in an integrated way as alternative “sites of learning” — the sphere of health and dietetics, erotic, civic conduct and others — all of which are meant to nurture the “practices of the self.” Contrasting religion as inquiry with religion as identity, a distinction informing Gandhi’s reflections on religion, the author shows what we take to be Hinduism are “traditions of reflecting on experience.” It is immersion in these traditions that “allow Gandhi to diagnose and resist experience-occluding structures in different domains.” Despite their different formulations and diagnoses of our current predicament, both Krishna Kumar and Vivek Dhareshwar reveal to us how Gandhi and his world of ideas offer us rich conceptual resources to reflect on our present and invite us to engage with the question of how we came to be where we are as a society.