This article was downloaded by: [The University of Manchester Library] On: 27 November 2014, At: 08:08 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK South Asian Popular Culture Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsap20 THE LURE OF ‘NORMAL’ POLITICS: Ashis Nandy Published online: 21 Nov 2007. To cite this article: Ashis Nandy (2007) THE LURE OF ‘NORMAL’ POLITICS:, South Asian Popular Culture, 5:2, 167-178, DOI: 10.1080/14746680701619586 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746680701619586 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsap20 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/14746680701619586 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746680701619586 http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions Ashis Nandy THE LURE OF ‘NORMAL’ POLITICS: Gandhi and the battle for popular culture of politics in India Unlike cultures split between the high and the low—the classical and the popular, or the ‘exclusive’ that enjoys distant respect and the easily accessible popular that occupies a huge public space—in Afro-Asian societies there is usually a tripartite division among the classical, the popular and the folk. For the folk in such societies is that part of the popular which has not been decisively defeated by the death or decline of communities and, despite the encroachment of the market and the formidable power of media, continues to be a living reality. The tripartite division is not rigid and there are clear continuities, but the social locations of the three are distinctive. The folk, for instance, is much more fragmented and decentralized and occupies only a vernacular niche, unless it is processed by the popular or given a greater reach by the classical (as sometimes happens in music or theatre). The popular actually means primarily popular in urban, modern or modernising sectors of society, which define, produce and propagate the popular. Indeed, the popular is expected to cut across local, vernacular boundaries the way the classical or high culture has traditionally done, but at a much larger scale. However, it is possible to conceptualise these apparently clashing strands of consciousness as different levels of cultural and psychological functioning, one of which may become dominant and the others recessive, depending upon situations, events and persons. Perhaps each generation has to face this task all over again and there is no permanent victory or defeat in the politics of awareness. If you take such a position, the folk can be viewed as the underside of the popular. I begin with this odd formulation because there is a widespread belief that Gandhi and his worldview enjoy intrinsic support in India’s popular culture and invite either hostility or hypocritical hagiography from India’s power elite. For his politics crossed the limit set by these elite and it threatens to break into the popular. The critical acclaim for and commercial success of popular films like Jahnu Barua and Anupam Kher’s Maine Gandhi ko Nahi Mara and, even more so, Rajkumar Hirani and Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Lage Raho Munnabhai have in recent times reinforced these beliefs. This easy, defensive formulation underestimates the resistance in Indian society to Gandhian values and politics. It may be more fruitful to propose that Gandhian values are more like a potentiality incompatible with both the classical and some aspects of the popular and can appeal to these sectors only under specific conditions. This potentiality probably has a built-in compatibility with only the folk. While the classic tends to be backed by formal knowledge and training, the popular has to establish a South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 5, No. 2, October 2007, pp. 167-178 ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online � 2007 Ashis Nandy http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14746680701619586 D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14 quid-pro-quo with the urban, the modern and the western and the carefully built culture of commonsense in India—an apparently durable mix of the local and the global, Indian and western, that has evolved over the last 200 years with contributions from some of the cleverest minds in the country. This limitation of the appeal of Gandhi and his political values are not patent because in the popular culture of competitive democratic politics there is often no dramatic clash between different strands of consciousness. Despite efforts of political actors to dramatize their differences, these strands are seen as ‘normal’ ideological diversities and public postures, meant to advance political interests. Their fates are decided through electoral politics, which is seen as a verdict on the political competence of the ideologues, not their ideologies. That is also a part of the new culture of commonsense in India. Thus, while it is true that a recent survey shows Gandhi to be by far the most popular and significant ‘ego-ideal’ among the Indian youth,1 a powerful section of the urban middle class holds his political values and political style to be red herrings that lead one to underestimate the sharks populating international and domestic politics and to shun the beauties of development and mega-technology. This paper explores the depth of the discomfort with Gandhi within popular culture and the limits of that discomfort. In 1996–97, during one of her early tenures as the Chief Minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party, precipitated a first-class public controversy by attacking Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Mayawati had not emerged as a national figure at the time and many saw her stridency as a crudity that was ‘natural’ to her kind. Others saw it as normal Dalit politics, which had always displayed some discomfort with Gandhi. Yet, Mayawati was only joining a long line of distinguished critics of Gandhi, stretching from Shankaran Nair, the nineteenth- century liberal, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the classical liberal turned Muslim nationalist, to E. M. S. Namboothiripad, the scion of Indian Leninism, and Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena fame. New, aggressive critics of Gandhi are now being thrown up now by the knights of globalisation in India. The fear of Gandhi has been widespread and consistent during the last ninety years in India and it has never been confined to the expensively educated Indians who flourish in the global knowledge industry. This fear is often entwined with some discomfort with ordinary citizens suffering from that incurable disease called Indianness and suspicion of open politics that empowers them and allows them to bring into India’s public life their strange, alien categories. The suspicion cuts across the entire ideo-logi-cal spectrum and is a part of the popular culture of Indian politics that overlies the more humble, folk culture of politics constituting the underside of Indian polity. Nathuram Godse took this fear to its logical conclusion on 30 January 1948 when he assassinated Gandhi. Godse was not an insane killer who did not know what he was doing, as Jawaharlal Nehru innocently believed. His was the third attempt on Gandhi’s life made by the Hindu nationalists, the first of which was made in the early 1930s. No such attempt was made against any other important secular leader in India or against Muslim leaders who were seen as enemies of Hindu nationalism. The murder at Delhi was certainly not an aberration caused by the senti-ments aroused by the partition of India. Gandhi had marginalised Hindu nationa- lism through open politics and reduced it to the stature of a lunatic fringe in Indian public life. That hurt. 168 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14 Godse was convinced that he was executing Gandhi on behalf of a majority of Indians. Similarly, as Mayawati and, before her, Namboothiripad felt that they were speaking on behalf of majority of Indians—the bahujan samaj, the proletariat, the Shudras and the Dalits—when they attacked Gandhi. However, once the movement to which Godse belonged began to falter as an ideological formation and succeed as a set of political formations dreaming of capturing power, it began singing a different tune. The Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh included Gandhi’s name in the daily prayers of its branches and, in the 1980s, the Bharatiya Janata Party even adopted for a time ‘Gandhian socialism’ as its official party ideology. May be Mayawati’s hostility to Gandhi had not yet waned when she attacked him because she was yet to make a bid for pan-Indian political presence and, hence, did not feel compelled to reach out to a sizeable section of the Indian people. At the other end of the spectrum, the Leninist orthodoxy has continued to see Gandhi as a retro-gressive force advancing the cause of the Indian bourgeoisie and feudalism. Some Leninists later tried to be kinder—Namboothiripad and Hiren Mukherji immediately come to one’s mind—but such revisionists had much less influence than the party hacks who consider-ed Gandhi a menace to progress, modernity and rationality. The respect to Gandhi that some of the retired Stalinists have begun to show in recent years is a consequence of their political demise. The vendors of secular salvation now find that Gandhi has survived our times better than they have. In institutionalised politics, he may be only a vestigial presence, but he survives defiantly in environmental, peace, feminist and alternative science-and- technology movements. M. N. Roy, who broke away from Marxism, disagreed with the Leninists on many crucial theoretical issues but not on the meaning of Gandhi. However, his three essays on Gandhi, read chronologically, show a declining hostility towards the Mahatma. The first is dismissive, the second ambivalent, the third mildly positive. As his confidence about being able to mobilize a sizeable section of the Indian people for his version of revolution faltered, and he was removed from the field of competitive politics, his attitude changed. He came to appreciate Gandhi’s ability to touch the ordinary Indians despite, what to Roy must have looked like, his inferior and irrational credo. Indian Maoists in the late 1960s and early 1970s were no less hostile to Gandhi. He with his toothless smile seemed to them a sly, scheming, political warhorse brain- washing rural India with his bogus ideology, whereas they, despite their direct communion with the forces of objective, scientific history and theoretical guidance from the great witch doctor at Beijing, had been exiled to urban India to fight for survival as an ordinary terrorist outfit. As Gandhi had been dead for more than two decades by then, they took out their anger against him by breaking his statues. Within a decade or so, however, from within the ranks of Indian Maoists emerged political theorists who drew upon heavily, often creatively, from the ideas and strategies of Gandhi. Pushed to the margins of Indian politics, with their dreams of an early Indian revolution in tatters, the now-not-so-young lions began to ruminate over their failures and to take Gandhi more seriously. Two steps backward and one- step forward, as the great helmsman might have said! The liberals have never found Gandhi digestible either. Their discomfort has re- emerged in the wake of globalisation. Only they have been less honest about it. THE LURE OF ‘NORMAL’ POLITICS 169 D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14 Sir Shankaran Nair had said early in this century that Gandhi was against everything that the great sons of nineteenth-century India stood for.2 Gopal Krishna Gokhale was as forthright when he read Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj; ‘he was horrified and pronounced it the work of a fool, and prophesied that Gandhi would destroy it after he spent a year in India.’3 Recent decades have not seen such honest estimates, mainly because the liberals have in the meanwhile found in Gandhi a useful weapon against the extremists at both ends of India’s political spectrum. Indeed, many liberals have produced for their own consumption a housebroken version of Gandhi—modern, nationalistic, progres-sive, statist and secular. There is nothing left of the politically incorrect, intellectual maverick who took on the imperious Enlightenment vision and refused to accept that its global dominance was proof of it being the end of history. The common elements in all critiques of Gandhi are: (1) that he flouts the conventional ideas of progress rooted in the Enlightenment vision; (2) that he refuses to give centrality to the modern nation-state in human affairs; and (3) that his vision includes a critique of mainstream science and technology and the urban-industrial vision. All three have by now not only pervaded the popular culture of India’s burgeoning urban middle class, none of them can be jettisoned by even the Hindu nationalists, eager to go swadeshi on the slightest pretext. Their idea of a Hindu rashtra remains an unedited version of the modern nation-state, waiting to be captured in the name of an ancient faith. Nor are they keen to give up on western nuclear and missile technology. Occasional testi-monials to and flirtations with Ayurveda are all right, but not any ‘adventurous’ flirtation with denucleari-zation and anti-militarism or with any so-called distinctive Indian ways of resis-ting aggres-sion. Jit Singh Uberoi neatly summarises the relationship between the ideology of Hindutva and the idea of Indic civilisation that moved Gandhi: The Indianness of India, from a national, structural or relational view, will be found to be inversely proportional to its Hinduness or Hindutva, for example, as this is understood by its chief exponent in the twentieth century. V. D. Savarkar, who hated Gandhi from the time that they knew one another in London, 1908, wrote that the strength, cohesion and progress of India depended, in the last resort, upon the strength of Hindutva, relegating questions of social reform and Hindu-Muslim unity to mere side issues. The view that he canvassed at length is entirely European and modernist, not to say Orientalist, in origin.4 This part of Hindutva’s vision is perfectly compatible with that of their liberal and leftist opponents. All share a built-in antipathy towards the everydayness of Indians, an everydayness that Gandhi celebrated and built upon. On this plane, Gandhi stands for something more than a specific political ideology. He stands for the unheroic mainstream of Indian public life, not in the sense in which the country’s national newspapers talk of the mainstream, but in the way the self-contradictory, multivalent, sceptical, wily Indians in the survival sector see it. Whatever touches of heroism one sees in the Gandhian political style derives paradoxically from that unheroic or anti-heroic ordinariness, which swallows up in the long run all those who enter the public sphere dreaming of engineering the Indians into something better and more respectable. Now that Mayawati has returned to power in Uttar Pradesh and has entered mainstream politics, she too will also discover the virtues of Mohandas Karamchand 170 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14 Gandhi after mainstream politics digests her and turns her into a ‘normal’ political actor. The next section illustrates, with the help of a specific instance, how the persistent and uncompromising criticisms of Gandhi play out in real life at the level of popular culture. I. Politics of memory In the summer of 1998, in the fiftieth year of the murder of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a young director Vinay Apte staged a new Marathi play in the city of Mumbai. Called Mee, Nathuram Godse Boltoi, roughly, ‘This is Nathuram Godse Speaking’, the play was written by one Pradip Dalvi and produced by Mauli Productions of Uday Dhurat. All three are well known, though not famous, names in Marathi theatre. The play centred on the assassin-ation of Gandhi and assassin Nathuram Vinayak Godse’s reasons for killing Gandhi. Godse had spelt out these reasons in his last testimony at the trial court that sentenced him to death.5 The play, which could be read as an easy introduction to the subject for a new generation of Indians, was built on Godse’s testimony, published soon after he was convicted. It was almost immediately banned by a nervous, insecure government, even though it was a part of court proceedings. Twenty-five years ago, when I worked on the political psychology of Gandhi’s assassin-ation, I had to take advantage of my stay at the University of Texas to consult Godse’s testimony. The reasons for the hostility to the testimony soon became clear to me. In it, Godse defends himself in terms dear to all uncritical admirers of the Indian state, most hues of nationalists; a large majority of India’s modernising middle class, and conventional political wisdom of the left and the right. Though tinged in the language of Hindu nationalism, the core categories of the testimony, even today, are such that few academics and non-academics would find them meaningless or insane. For India’s burgeoning middle class and urban, westernised literati, that testimony has a charm and an appeal all its own. Indeed, Dalvi’s play was earlier staged in Gandhi’s home state, Gujarat, a number of times, first under the name Ahuti Yajna Vedi or ‘The Site of a Sacrificial Rite’ and, then, under the name Gandhi ke Godse, ‘Gandhi or Godse’. There had been no protest and no demonstration, not even a serious public debate on the play. Middle-class Gujarat, successfully commun-al---ised during the 1970s and 1980s by the Hindu -nationalist parties, found nothing offensive in the play. This time too the play had been cleared by the Maharashtra Stage Performance Scrutiny Board, technically an autonomous body, though headed by a person reportedly sympathetic to Hindu nationalism.6 In Mumbai, however, the play ran into trouble, though at first it was a hit. It was being performed in a hall at Dadar, a Hindu nationalist stronghold, and the audience loved the anti-Gandhi rhetoric. ‘Hysterical cheering and derisive hoots’ greeted every offensive comment on Gandhi and the play drew packed houses since it was first performed on 10 July 1998.7 At the beginning, there were fervent but dignified protests from sources within the city. Professor Usha Mehta, political scientist, freedom fighter and Gandhian, was one of the most conspicuous among them. She started a stir against the play and threatened court action. The producer had to file a caveat in the high court, to pre-empt an ex parte injunction. THE LURE OF ‘NORMAL’ POLITICS 171 D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14 However, things did not end there. The ruling coalition of the Maharashtra state and Mumbai city were dominat-ed by the Hindu-national-ist Shiv Sena and, naturally, to the main opposition, the Indian National Congress, the play came handy. The Congress mobilized public opinion against the play. There was a demonstrat-ion by some 300 persons against the play in front of the Shivaji Natya Mandir at Dadar West, a Shiv Sena stronghold, where the play was being staged. Shiv Sena’s minister of cultural affairs, Pramod Navalkar, was to see the play on the day of the demonstration to decide whether administrative action had to be taken against it. However, once the police used batons and canes and arrested some 150 of the demonstrators to stop them from turning violent, the manage-ment of the hall refused to hold any further performance. The cause of the demonstrat-ors was helped by one of Dalvi’s inter- views, in which he declared his determination to clear the name of Godse and to ensure that the people of India knew Gandhi’s true self.8 Gandhian politics have brought during the last sixty years, what Indian officialese calls the back-ward castes to the centre of Maharashtrian politics, earlier dominated by the upper castes. These newly empowered, numerically preponderant castes tend to be partial towards Gandhi. After the assassination of the Mahatma in 1948, there were fierce anti-Brahmin riots in the state. Mee, Nathuram Godse Boltoi was written by a Brahmin and it defended an assassin who was not merely a Brahmin, but oozed the discontent of Maharashtra’s modern-ised Brahminic élite with Gandhian mass politics. The play could be read as a lament for their displacement from the centre of Indian politics. True, the Hindu nationalist parties have given the displaced Brahminic élite slightly better play in recent years, but the dis-comfort with Gandhi remains. For the opposition, the play was a god-sent opportunity to discredit the ruling parties in the state and the centre, both unwilling to precipitate a political clash on this issue. The Shiv Sena knew this and tried to defend the play. One member of the Sena even quoted the Bombay High Court’s decision of 1968 to lift the ban on Godse’s autobio-graph--ical account published the previous year, Gandhi Hatya ani Mee. However, once Sharad Pawar, at the time a Congress leader, raised the issue in Parliament, such niceties did not cut much ice. There was chaos and furore in the house and even the Sena’s ideologi-cal ally, the BJP, wanted to avoid embarrassment. Home Minister L. K. Advani of the BJP, though consider-ed soft on hard core Hindu nationalism, issued a statement saying that ‘the govern-ment strongly disapproves of anything that denigrates the hallowed memory of Mahatma Gandhi and belittles the unique role he played in leading the nation to freedom from colonial rule.’9 Alternatively, among those opposed to the ban were some known for their commitment to an open society and opposition to Hindu nationalism. Foremost among them were Girish Karnad, the renowned playwright and actor-director sympathetic to the Gandhian vision, and Shyam Benegal, the noted film director who made the biopic, The Making of the Mahatma. In a joint statement Karnad, Benegal, director-cameraman Govind Nihalani, scriptwriter Shama Zaidi and actor-director Amol Palekar said: We would like to express our sense of revulsion at the hooliganism that has greeted the presentation of the Marathi play, Mee, Nathuram Godse Boltoy in Mumbai. … Carefully orchestrated disruption of law and order to get a work of art banned or a public event stopped is becoming a regular and dangerous feature 172 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14 of our social life. … Whatever its critique of Mahatma Gandhi, we all have a right to see the play and decide for ourselves the merits of the playwright’s arguments. The attack on the play is as execrable as the earlier attacks on artists like M. F. Hussain and Salman Rushdie or thinkers like Ambedkar. It is ironic that public violence and official repression should be invoked in the name of Gandhi. They do more damage to Gandhian ideology than the play could possibly have done.10 The co-ordination committee of the Marathi drama producers, too, decided to observe 17 July as a ‘black day’ every year and suspend all Marathi theatre performances on the day to protest the ban on Mee Nathuram Godse Boltoy. They expressed strong feelings about the attitude of the political parties involved and felt that the way the authorities banned the play, without even seeing it, was ‘an insult and disgrace to Marathi theatre.’11 Once the play became controversial in Bombay, there were reverberations at Delhi. There was a discussion in Parliament and it turned bitter and stormy. Finally, Advani, as the home minister, had to take a clear position on the issue and ‘advise’ the chief minister of Maharashtra, Shiv Sena’s Manohar Joshi, to ban the performance of the play. The BJP deputy chief minister, Gopinath Munje came out strongly in favour of banning the play, but added that ‘the killing of Mahatma Gandhi did not halt the spread of Gandhian thought. Nor would the ban on the play suppress the views of the pro-Godse elements.’12 The BJP, he said, did not subscribe to Nathuram Godse’s views.’13 In a convoluted way, the statement established near-perfect continuity between the central govern-ment led by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1948 and the Hindu nationalist regimes at Delhi and Mumbai in 1998. Plebiscitary politics decided the fate of Pradip Dalvi’s not so memorable play. Otherwise, the play was not saying anything that urbane, sophisticated, modern, upper-caste Indians had not uttered under their breath since Gandhi gatecrashed into Indian politics in the 1920s. Indeed, anti-Gandhian sentiments have offended many Indians mainly when they have been mobilized by particular persons from particular parties. What did the clash tell one about Gandhi and the popular culture of Indian politics? II. The return of Gandhi A person is known not only by his life but also by his death. Gandhi, who once claimed that his life was his message, could not have foreseen that his death would be his most dramatic victory against his adversaries. For Gandhi this death was a triumph.… He died as the kings do, felled at the height of their powers, and Sarojini Naidu was right when she said that it was appropriate that he should die in Delhi, the city of kings. ‘‘What is all this snivelling about?’’ she exclaimed, when she saw the women crooning over the dead body of Gandhi. ‘‘Would you rather he died of old age or indigestion? This was the only death great enough for him.’’14 THE LURE OF ‘NORMAL’ POLITICS 173 D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14 It is possible that Gandhi sensed his increasing isolation in public life and the way he had been losing ground in the popular culture of politics. The 200 years of western domination had done its job and the definition of normal politics had changed in India. Gandhi chose death, using as his accomplice the naı̈ve, lost ideologue, Godse, to sharpen the contradiction that had arisen between the Indian civilisation and the newborn Indian nation-state. His assassin, in turn, was seeking redemption of a different kind in death. He wanted to free the Indian state from the burden of a person who stood against universally accepted ideas of statecraft and national interest. Like his mentor Savarkar, Godse was perfectly willing to jettison core components of Indian culture to ensure normal politics. What about the high culture of India’s policy elite? Gandhi’s death made it clear that his famous disciples were now running a newly independent state and they were a trifle tired of an old man talking of moral politics. B. R. Nanda, for instance, reports: … Nehru told Mountbatten, the Mahatma was ‘‘going round with ointment trying to heal one more spot after another on the body of India, instead of diagnosing [its] cause and participating in the treatment of the body as a whole.’’ This assessment would have been endorsed by Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad and other leaders…. More important was the fact that his views seemed utopian and impracticable not only to Nehru and Patel, but to almost all member of the Congress working Committee on whom the burden of decision rested.15 Normal politics was demanding its pound of flesh from Gandhi in an India to which he was becoming a stranger. At one time, he had wanted to live 125 years. Now at 79, he was an ill man with chronic ailments and psychosomatic symptoms. Terrifying nightmares and a killing sense of guilt over the partitioning of India dogged his steps and he longed for an early death.16 So did a large section of his society. ‘Let Gandhi die’ was the most popular slogan at Delhi when Gandhi was on his last fast and his mail usually brought a large number of abusive letters. The attendance in his daily prayer meetings was dwindling and most of those who came, some say, came ritually. The police found the ‘Muslim lover’ Gandhi even more tiresome and, despite having clear information on the assassination plot, did not follow up the information. That inefficiency is often attributed to the rivalry between the Bombay and Delhi police,17 but Robert Payne is unequivocal: the police were a part of the conspiracy. Many others in authority, who were warned of the plot, were as careless.18 His assassins were buoyed by such sentiments. Madanlal Pahwa, a young refugee brutalised by the Partition violence, was part of the conspiracy and threw a bomb at one of Gandhi’s prayer meetings on 20 January 1948. He could proudly say after 50 years, ‘I’m happy I’ve done something for the country and I am still proud of it.’19 The assassin’s brother Gopal Godse, another of the conspirators, is even optimistic: ‘Look, my generation is practically over and the current generation might not see it. But the next one might see Nathuram Godse for the patriot he was.’20 P. L. Inamdar, one of the defence lawyers, says the following about Godse’s last statement in court, on which, the reader may remember, Dalvi’s play was based: 174 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14 When it was presented to the Court, it came out with such unassailable and compelling reasoning, that even the might of the Law and Home Departments of the Government of India quailed before it and the Government lost no time in banning Nathuram’s state-ment though made in a Court of Law …. As we got up to leave the Court after hearing the statement, every person, either from the Court establishment or from amongst the visitors in the Court had an expression of pride, relief and dismay on their faces.… The sobbing humanity in the audience had listened to Nathuram with tears flowing down their cheeks, but an indescribable glow on the faces.… The ladies sat with their sari or dupatta ends in their mouths, wiping the flowing streams of tears with their already wet handkerchiefs, and the gentlemen also kept mopping their faces with hands or handkerchiefs. 21 Obviously, new norms of statecraft had infiltrated the middle-class consciousness. Only, the infiltration was not deep enough at the time of Gandhi’s death; millions who disagreed with him were devastated by his death. Yet, it would take two generations for Gandhi to make serious inroads into popular culture, exactly as it has taken two generations for the South Asians to take a closer look at the violence of Partition. If popular culture is an arena where standardised, globally dominant ideas of politics and statecraft have to contend with culturally grounded, dissenting concepts of ethics and public life, the recent re-emergence of Gandhi in popular cinema becomes not merely an event in the history of cinema in India but also perhaps a new moment in India’s popular culture. What we are probably witnessing is the emergence of a new sensitivity, in which on the one side is uncritical, easy acceptance of the axioms of normal politics. On the other side, is a vague awareness that someone in this very country dared to experiment with another kind of politics, defying academic and bureaucratic canons and, while this other politics might be a taboo in the high culture of the Indian state, it still makes sense to millions in the world—to global movements for peace, environment, alternative technology and de- masculinisation of the public sphere, and to visionary politicians the world over. This moment and the awareness that underpins it are reflected in the successful popular movie, Lage Raho Munnabhai, a comedy woven around the story of a Mumbai gangster who turns Gandhian, with mixed, often-comic results. The protagonist, Munnabhai, finds Gandhi accidentally. Smitten by a sprightly, attractive radio jockey and determined to impress her, he pretends to be historian with a scholarly interest in Gandhi. He gets into her radio programme on Gandhi by the only means he knows— by kidnapping the other prospective participating scholars in the show. That is only half the battle won. To pass himself off as a Gandhian scholar, Munnabhai has to go to a library and learn something about Gandhi. That proves his undoing, for Gandhi himself appears before him and begins to mentor and guide him directly, or so at least Munnabhai thinks. The vision of Gandhi to him is a call to a larger cause; it does not arouse fear or self-doubt but promises to be self and life enhancing. (Those who have seen the earlier Munnabhai movie might even see in this Gandhi a vague continuity with Munnabhai’s lovably naı̈ve father, convinced his son was a socially conscious THE LURE OF ‘NORMAL’ POLITICS 175 D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14 doctor, not a Mafia don). Others see his preoccupation with Gandhi, first, as harmless delusion and later, as an unbearable interference in the ‘normal’ business of dealing with a professional gangster. Most comic effects in the movie come from that disjunction. To resolve the contradiction, the exasperated former friends and business- partners of Munnabhai, deeply sceptical about and troubled by his new incarnation, confront him with a psychiatrist who diagnoses his especial access to Gandhi as a symptom of mental ill health. The psychiatrist ‘proves’ that the Gandhi who guides Munnabhai knows about himself only what Munnabhai has come to know from his stray readings in a library. Munna is crushed; he is nearly convinced that he is sick; not knowing that this moment of defeat is also his moment of triumph. For, if the Gandhi he has as his companion is only a projection of his ‘sick’ mind, that Gandhi cannot but be a possibility latent in him.22 Cinematically, Lage Raho Munnabhai conforms to all the well-known conventions of popular Bombay cinema. However, despite being a comedy, it is a serious departure from many of the assumptions of the normative frame that has dominated Bombay cinema for nearly three decades now. In that respect, the film barges into the popular culture of politics that has increasingly marginalised and ridiculed, over the last three decades, the values that can be even vaguely identified with Gandhi. Yet, the film is not preachy; it does not allow Gandhi to be an overbearing, moral presence. He is not yet part of the culture of commonsense, but he has revealed serious cracks in that culture. Readers acquainted with Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938), may recognize that the novel deals with a similar situation—coping with Gandhi from a distance, in one case as an apparition and in the other as almost a rumour—from within a different culture of resistance. Kanthapura is a small, forgotten village close to nowhere and the news of Gandhi’s movement seems to reach it through a very slow process of osmosis. Yet, the characters that begin to live by Gandhian values and become satyagrahis slip smoothly into their new role and new self. Unlike Munnabhai, they show no painful self-doubt and do not have to question their own sanity. Nor do they face any serious disjunction between their social context and the new awareness that enters the village. The radical innovations in Kanthapura are, in many ways, a natural outgrowth of the lifestyle and worldview at Kanthapura. To do so, the author has to assume a seamless continuity between the classical and the folk and virtually to ignore the popular. Probably in 1938 what we now call the popular had not yet fully come into its own; perhaps in the charged atmosphere of the freedom movement, borders between the classical, the folk and popular had become more porous. Lage Raho Munnabhai makes no such assumption. The contestation within the popular is sharp and open, not so much as an ideological confrontation but as a clash of two definitions of everydayness and normality. Anyone who has been exposed to both the film and the novel cannot but discover that they operate within two radically different models of accessibility to Gandhi— one through a tormented, personalised self-exploration mixed with a childlike wonder and excitement, the other through an unheroic everydayness that transmutes into a state of this-worldly self-transcendence. This is where the borders between the popular and the folk get defined and where the resilience of Gandhi and Gandhian politics are determined outside the culture of official India and academic professionalism. 176 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14 Notes 1 Based on an opinion survey among Indian youth, sponsored by HT, CNN-IBN and CSDS. Kumar and Yadav. 2 For more details, see Mahadevan. 3 Payne 224–225. 4 The same Orientalism explains the attempts of a number of eminent scholars to read Hindutva as another version of Hinduism. (Uberoi v.) 5 Godse. 6 Hindustan Times, 18 July 1998. Revealingly, Shantaram Nandgaonkar, Chairman of the MSPS Board, tried to give a clean cheat to the play by drawing attention to how the audience had ‘lapped it up.’ Kamdar 18 July. 7 Ibid. 8 The Hindu 18 July 1998. 9 The Statesman 18 July 1998. 10 The Hindu 19 July 1998. 11 The Statesman 21 July 1999. 12 The Hindu, 19 July 1998. 13 Ibid. 14 Payne 648. 15 Nanda 5. 16 Ibid. 17 For instance, ‘Crazy for a Cause.’ India Today 1 August 1998. 18 Nandy ‘Final Encounter’. 19 Menezes 93. This is, however, not the full story. To get a glimpse of the complex personality of Pahwa, see keynote address by Nandy, ‘Heroic and Unheroic Killers’. 20 Menezes 94. 21 Inamdar 197, 205, 174. 22 Rao Kanthapura. References Godse, Nathuram. May it Please Your Honour. Delhi: Surya Bharati, 2003. Kamdar, Seema. ‘Shiv Sena Touches in Godse Play.’ The Statesman 18 July, 1998. Inamdar, P. L. The Story of the Red Fort Trial 1948–4. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1979. 197, 205, 174. Kumar, Sanjay and Yadav, Yogendra. ‘Ignorance is Bliss for Proud Indians.’ Hindustan Times 27 January 2006. Mahadevan, T. K. Dvija. New Delhi: Affiliated East-West Press, 1977. Menezes, Saira. ‘I Regret I Wasn’t the Man to Kill Gandhi.’ Onlooker 2 February, 1998, 93. ————. ‘Ashes for Posterity.’ Onlooker 2 February 1998, 94. Nanda, B. R. ‘Tragedy and Triumph—The Last Days of Mahatma Gandhi.’ Seminar on Partition in Retrospect, National Institute of Punjab Studies at the India International Centre, New Delhi, 8–9 August, 1997. 5. Nandy, Ashis. ‘Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi.’ in Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980. THE LURE OF ‘NORMAL’ POLITICS 177 D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14 ————. ‘Heroic and Unheroic Killers: Handling Culpability in a Remembered Genocide.’ keynote address at the 29th Annual South Asia Conference at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2000. Payne, Robert. The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: Dutton, 1969. 224–225. Rao, Raja. Kanthapura (1938). Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1947. Uberoi, J. P. S. Religion, Civil Society and the State: A Study of Sikhism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. v. 178 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE D ow nl oa de d by [ T he U ni ve rs ity o f M an ch es te r L ib ra ry ] at 0 8: 08 2 7 N ov em be r 20 14