Mahatma Gandhi had expressed the opinion that a human lifecould span 125 years and that he would quite like to live that long. “Ifhe had his way, he would have departed not in 1948 but around 1994,”best-selling author Manu S. Pillai writes in his latest book, also posing someintriguing questions, among them: would he have sided with Indira Gandhi to endgenocide in East Pakistan and help birth Bangladesh, would Mrs Gandhi havethrown him into prison during the Emergency and most importantly, “wouldthe tragedy that was Babri Masjid have pierced the Mahatma’s heart as heaproached his own deadline of a century and a quarter?”
Admitting that to venture on a journey of ‘what ifs’ couldbe a “foolish exercise with a man who said and did things with noparallels and which are still open to endless interpretations”, Pillaiadds: “There is little that can be said with certainty, but many are thequestions one must ask of the Mahatma and his message, of what he offered then,and what he might have offered later had he had the chance.”
What if Nathuram Godse’s revolver “been snatched fromhis hand before the trigger that changed history was fired, asks Pillai, thewinner of the 2017 Yuva Sahitya Akademi Award, in his third book, “TheCourtesan, The Mahatma & The Italian Brahmin: Tales From Indian History(Context-Westland/pp 384/Rs 599).
“Would India, on the cusp of its socialist embrace ofmodernity, have grown tired of its greatest elder, parking him on some variantof the present day Margdarshak Mandal? Or would be have retired to his ashram,writing as much about his bowel movements as against the new dams andJawaharlal Nehru’s industrial ‘temples’? Gandhi is to us a martyr, but might hehave become, instead, a resigned old man with no place in the world,”wonders Pillai, who has worked as an aide to Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, withLord Karan Bilimoria and with the BBC on its “Incarnations” historyseries.
Noting that “Gandhi in the flesh had raised aformidable question to new leaders who replaced foreigners in the old seats ofpower”, Pillai asks: “Had he acted on his desire to live in Pakistan,would the old man have become, for Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, thatinconvenient thing: ‘an international problem’?”
Then, it is “not impossible to conceive” ofrelations between Nehru and Gandhi “crumbling into polite disrepair”,especially on the question of India’s governance.
“As early as 1938, the two had clashed, each asdetermined as the other, and in this lay the seeds of discord. Perhaps, atfirst, Nehru’s affection might have let the Mahatma prevail, but eventuallywould they have parted ways,” the author asks.
While Gandhi sought ‘legitimacy…in the conscience of man’as one scholar put it, Nehru, meanwhile, “absorbed more lessons fromhistory – institutions and courts married to the steel frame of bureaucracyalone offered stability to a diverse land which, even during the midnight trystin 1947, saw bloodshed in the West and rebellion in the East”, Pillainotes, also pointing to severe differences on issues like economic planning andmodernisation.
What would have come of Indian education had Gandhi lived?
“Would Gandhi, through his words, have breathed lifeinto causes that were strange then and remain so to this day? Would the tallestIndian leader have gone down in the minds of many as a proponent of what weknow as the imposition of Hindi,” Pillai wonders.
“Never will we know what Gandhi might, or might nothave done. But a glance at the history of this nation can assure us of one fact– if the Mahatma had lived a full life, as he once desired, the obituary on hisdeath would have sadly said: ‘Mr Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, one-time barristerat law, one-time freedom fighter and neglected thinker of an orphanedphilosophy, passed away yesterday. He was 125 years old and died of a shatteredheart, in a country he no longer recognised’,” Pillai cocludes. poignantly.
Divided into three parts – Before the Raj, Stories from theRaj and an Afterword – the book grew out of a weekly column, “MediumRare” on a series of historical themes dating to the past that Pillaibegan writing for the ‘Mint Lounge’ section of the Mint newspaper in 2016.