RK Dasgupta, The Statesman/Asia News Network, Calcutta
Where is Mahatma Gandhi today may not be a rhetorical question. It is a relevant question today. We do not hear of the Mahatma either in our conversation or in our political addresses. I do not hear of any seminar in any university or in any non- academic institution on the relevance of non-violence in public and private life at a time when violence is steadily on the increase throughout the world. We have individual violence, party violence, state violence.
When Gandhi was alive we certainly heard of opinion condemning non-violence as an ideal, but on the whole we adored Gandhi for his ideal of non-violence and we thought that the world, including Britain, respected Gandhi as an exponent of an ideal which was capable of bringing peace in India and the world. As a Bengali I read the distinguished anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose's Bengali work, Gandhi Charit and Gandhiji Ki Chan. His English work My Days with Gandhi was in those days a work of great value.
Now we do not seem to realize that there is such a thing as Gandhi scholarship and we can think of a Gandhi Library in all our big cities preserving 90 volumes of his Complete Works published by the Publications Division, Government of India, in 1958-1984 and the eight-volume Life of Mahatma Gandhi by DG Tendulkar containing 2,821 pages in all and published between 1951 and 1954.
We cannot be happy to see that the first biography of Mahatma Gandhi is by an English Missionary. Rev J Doke, serialized in the London Indian Chronicle in 1909. The Government of India reprinted the work on the occasion of Gandhi's 125th birth anniversary. Rabindranath's first biographer too is an English, EJ Thompson.
Perhaps it is not so widely known that the world has a deep interest in the ideas of Gandhi as is evident from the publication of a number of works on the subject published in the last five years. I mention some of them because they are not mentioned in our conversation even by those who are interested in our political problems.
They are David Hardiman's Gandhi in His Time and Ours showing that the Mahatma's ideas are still valid today, Claude Markovitss The Un-Gandhian Gandhi: The Life and the After-Life of the Mahatma (translated from the French by the author and published in 2003), Mark Juergensmeyer's Gandhi's Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution published in 2003 and Ronald J Terchek's Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy published in 2000. I am mentioning these titles only to show that the world is still looking up to Mahatma Gandhi for a solution to the problem of violence in the world.
It is this English woman who has said that Gandhi's combined vision and action gives an "enduring significance" and makes him a person "for all times and all places". Is it not strange that a British historian of Oxford should say this about Gandhi when a British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, called the Mahatma "a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of Viceroyal palace".
The author is an eminent scholar, is former director of the National Library of India)