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Magazine
PAST & PRESENT
A philosopher, witty and wise
BY RAMACHANDRA GUHA
“I never came away from a conversation with Ramchandra Gandhi, long or short, without learning something arrestingly new about Mahatma Gandhi, modern India, or life itself.
Photo: AP
Self-deprecatory wit: Ramchandra Gandhi.
I once heard Ramchandra Gandhi say that he held “the Chair of Philosophy at Nathu Sweets”. The reference was to an eatery in Delhi’s Bengali Market, where his day began, eating a samosa and sipping c
hai while reading the newspaper. Then he would proceed to the India International Centre, where he would stay until 10 at night, thinking, speaking, reading, and writing.
An open mind
The self-description was characteristic. At this time he had been unemployed for years — but which other jobless person could have described himself with such wonderful self-deprecatory wit? But it also spoke of the irrelevance of academic distinction to the gaining, or transmission, of true knowledge. Before he occupied that particular post, Ramu Gandhi had taken a D. Phil at Oxford, and taught at the Universities of Delhi, Rajasthan, Hyderabad, and Santiniketan. However, he had learnt as much from the great, untrained sages of India, such as Ramakrishna or Ramana, and from autorickshaw drivers, restaurant waiters, and other unknown Indians.
The philosopher Mrinal Miri describes Ramu Gandhi as “perhaps the most brilliant mind I have known in my life”. Miri probably spoke for anyone who had ever met Ramu or listened to him speak. I knew him for 25 years; in that time, I never came away from a conversation, long or short, without learning something arrestingly new about Mahatma Gandhi, modern India, or life itself. But while Ramu was brilliant one-on-one, he was even better one-on-fifty, and better still one-on-five hundred.
I did not have the privilege of being taught by Ramu, but somehow, in this past decade, I managed often to be in Delhi on January 30. On that day in 1948, Ramu, then a boy of 10, had been taken to Birla House to see the Mahatma’s body. Now, fifty or sixty years down the line, he probed the meanings of martyrdom in talks delivered on the anniversary. One year, I heard him speak of how the ongoing violence between Hindus and Muslims was because we had never conducted the proper obsequies for the souls of the million or more victims of the riots of 1946-8. Another year, he contrasted the Mahatma’s martyrdom with the “martyrdom” of the terrorists who, just a few weeks before he spoke, had tried to storm the Indian Parliament. He also mentioned the “martyrdom” of the Hindu fundamentalists who fell with the domes of the mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. However venal and corrupt our politicians were, said Ramu, they had been chosen through an open, democratic process to represent a billion people. It was that open-ness which fundamentalists, both Hindu and Muslim, sought to undermine or destroy.
Unexpected bounty
This year I could not be in Delhi on January 30. Visiting the city in April, I was invited by a publisher friend to the India International Centre, where a French scholar was releasing a new book. As I walked into the IIC, I heard someone say, “Ramu is speaking”. My instinct told me that this was an opportunity not to be scorned. For, there are French scholars and scholars, but there could only be one Ramu. Instead of climbing the stairs to the conference room where the publisher’s event was being hosted, I turned left into the auditorium where India’s finest public speaker was due to begin his turn.
Rarely has a betrayal been so handsomely rewarded. That day, Ramu was speaking in memory of the great Hindi writer Nirmal Verma. It was a marvellous, magical talk, which moved from literature to love and from politics to friendship. It was also effortlessly bilingual, as when he described Banaras as a city whose buildings soared and whose sewage stank: as he put it: “Wo shahr, jiska Architecture Swarg ka, aur jiska Sanitation Narak ka.”
The writer and the philosopher had known each other for many decades; but had fallen out more than once in the interim. Ramu described an evening in the IIC bar where Nirmal and he were sitting on stools at opposite ends of the counter. They had recently had a bitter fight; and weren’t on talking terms (as Ramu expressed it: “Dosti to thi, lekin maun bhi tha”). For some time silence prevailed, before the writer slowly, if magisterially, began to wend his way towar
ds his estranged friend. To Ramu’s alarm, Nirmal then sat himself down on the stool next to his. The philosopher cleared his throat and said: “Hallo, Nirmal.” The writer answered: “Ramu, I have not come here to speak to you, but merely to be with you.”
I count myself blessed that I lived in a time and place when I could hear live, and many times, Mallikarjun Mansur sing and Ramchandra Gandhi speak. Those not so fortunate can still hear Mallikarjun on tape or read Ramu’s fine works of scholarship, starting perhaps with his philosophical novel Muniya’s Light, a salute to the girl-child which reveals, among other things, the author’s intimate knowledge of the Indian landscape, his devotion to Ramana Maharishi, and
his love of the game of cricket.
Reaching out
Ramu’s dazzzling intelligence reached out in all directions; even as his deep humanity reached out to all human beings, whether rich or poor, scholarly or unlettered. When he died earlier this month, a mutual friend wrote to me that he “always knew the reach of Ramu’s phenomenally feeling mind”. Then he continued: “But yesterday at the funeral I saw for the first time its collective power. Who but he could have brought together Gandhians chanting the Ramdhun, sceptics and agnostics, bar attendants, parents of toddlers and children who regarded him as an unreally real figure out of Disneyland, caricaturists and painters, the well-married and the divorced, the conventional and the alternative, in a spontaneous tribute to his spiritual intelligence? Who but he”.
ramguha@vsnl.com
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