:: Opinion

Gandhi, Chaplin and Modern Times

Tridip Suhrud

Oct.02 : On November 5, 1931, Mahatma Gandhi along with other delegates to the Second Round Table conference was invited to a garden party at the Buckingham Palace. The invitation specified that guests should wear "morning dress". Gandhi and Mahadev Desai went to the gathering in their "usual dress". As Gandhi came out, he was asked about his lack of proper attire by reporters. Mahatma Gandhi is supposed to have said, "His Majesty was wearing enough for the two of us".

Its textual veracity notwithstanding, if anyone could have said this it could only have been Gandhi. This was not just a quick and sharp repartee but a political retort at a time when the English textile industry was reeling under the impact of Gandhi’s call of swadeshi.

So was Gandhi a humorous man? He was capable of great deal of laughter and self-deprecating wit. His humour, like his life, was sparse, economical and in some ways very English. He was taken to inspect the Balilla, where young Italian boys were being trained in Nazi military parade, and he reportedly quipped, "You look quite well-fed"; something only a man who knew the virtues of fasting could have said.

Gandhi cut an interesting figure for the cartoonists of the world, with his lanky frame, bald head, toothless smile and idiosyncratic preferences like goat’s milk. And yet, all his caricatures look alike — simple lines, a face in profile, with his round, rimmed glasses. The cartoons capture the essentials, but are rarely funny, except when he is shown in the clothes of a late Victorian gentleman that he tried to play for a while.

It was very difficult to deprecate Gandhi, except when he chose to do it himself. This failure to mock at Gandhi came from the fact that he was given to transparency and honesty. Caricature requires hypocrisy from the subject of caricature. It requires certain superciliousness. Gandhi was neither. And to make the job of the cartoonist more difficult, he had a lightness about his own experiments and idiosyncrasies.

Gandhi did not have the inclination or the time for humour in the usual sense of the term.

When Charlie Chaplin sought an interview with him, he politely asked "who this distinguished gentleman was". Needless to say that during the meeting he spoke to the maker of Modern Times about spinning and the charkha.

Gandhi was truly free only inside the prison. That was leisure time when he read, wrote, spun and had long, sometimes idle conversations with his fellow prisoners, like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Mahadev Desai and Sarojini Naidu.

Those long months and years were filled with laughter and the kind of bad, almost unpalatable, cooking that only Gandhi was capable of — the only time Sarojini Naidu allowed him near her makeshift kitchen was in the prison.

Humour was not the leitmotif of his life. It was search for equanimity. As India erupted in a frenzy of self-destructive and macabre violence, Gandhi became a lonely, brooding, sad man. He searched within himself, hoping to find the inner-voice that would show some light and dispel the darkness that enveloped him and the country. As he increasingly gave himself up to Ramanama, the self-deprecating humour also disappeared.

We are trying to reinvent Gandhi for our times, sometime we do it a la Munnabhai. Gandhi as an apparition is what we want, devoid of his deep spirituality, his unnerving moral politics and guilt-inducing simplicity. And in so doing, we have managed to do what the best cartoonists could not do. We have turned him into a caricature, devoid of any transformative potential. He has became a floating symbol that could sell anything from computers and gym equipment to Congress’ new-found love for its past austerity and a new limited edition Mont Blanc pen.

As an empty symbol, he becomes available for consumption. His memorabilia can be auctioned and bought. But we want nothing of his politics that challenges the basic features of a consumption society. How would he respond to his new avatar?

Gandhi was once asked, "What do you think of the Western civilisation?" He is reported to have said with a chuckle, "That would be a good idea". That probably would be his response to the possible new Disney movie on Gandhi.

Tridip Suhrud is an academic based in Ahmedabad. He has translated Narayan Desai’s four-volume

biography of Gandhi ,My Life Is My Message.