I recently read Tariq Ali’s brilliant
piece in Viewpoint (“an activist
alternative to the corporate-mainstream media”) on Saadat Hasan Manto, unarguably,
South Asia’s best chronicler of the horrors of the subcontinent’s Partition in
1947.
Ali’s piece (Manto & ‘1947’) is a mix
of the polemical and the personal, in which he adroitly combines personal
history, opinion, translations of poems by Faiz and Sahir to profile Manto and
contextualise his continuing relevance to South Asian societies in present
times.
Non-partisan historians generally
accept Ali’s analyses of the causes of the Partition and its fallout
five-and-a-half decades later in South Asia.
He states, “Nehru and Jinnah were both
shaken by the orgy of barbarism (of Partition riots). It offended all their
instincts. But it was Mahatama Gandhi who paid the ultimate price. For
defending the right to live of innocent Muslims in post-Partition India he was
assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a fundamentalist Hindu fanatic. Godse was
hanged, but two decades later, Godse’s brother told Channel Four that he
regretted nothing. What happened had to happen.
“That past now rots in the present and
threatens to further poison the future. The political heirs of the hanged Godse
are shoving aside the children of Nehru and Gandhi. The poisonous fog of the
religious world has enveloped politics. History, unlike the poets and writers
of the sub-continent, is not usually prone to sentiment.”
I
was reminded of another interpretation of the dichotomy between the ideas of
Gandhi and Godse by Ashis Nandy.
Traditionally, most historians have misconstrued
(perhaps deliberately) Gandhi as a liberal secularist not much different from
Nehru, which is not to say that Gandhi was an illiberal fundamentalist. But there is a fundamental difference between Gandhi and Nehru and Gandhi
defies attempts at such compartmentalisation of people and ideas into mutually
exclusive and opposing categories.
Nandy gives a penetrating insight in this
dichotomy between Gandhi and Godse (Outside
the Imperium: Gandhi’s Cultural Critique of the West from Traditions, Tyranny and Utopia Essays in
Politics of Awareness – A VeryPopular Exile, Oxford India Paperbacks).
Nandy notes, “Gandhi died, almost
necessarily, at the hands of one who represented the modern world and sought a
secular-scientific orientation to statecraft. The young assassin, Nathuram
Vinayak Godse, supposedly a religious fanatic, gave a spirited last speech in
court before the death sentence was passed on him. It was essentially a
fervent, rationalist, modern plea to recognise the dangers Gandhi posed to the
growth of the modern state in India and to the conduct of ‘normal’ politics
along the lines of Professor Henry Kissinger would have approved of. The plea
invoked interesting reactions. Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, called
Godse an insane killer who did not know
what he had done. Yet, Nehru’s government banned Godse’s last testament lest
others should find it too sane. The government knew that it was Godse who was
seeking the secular solution, Gandhi the religious.”
Nandy adds, “It is a measure of the
success of modern science in India that his ultra-Hindu, Brahmanic assassin
accused Gandhi of bringing in anti-scientific ideas like soul force and
morality into politics. Nathuram Godse claimed that he had unwittingly to kill Gandhi
on behalf of the modern world, especially on behalf of modern ideas of
statecraft and rationality, so that the newborn Indian nation could survive.
One of Godse’s last wishes was to take the appeal against the death sentence
passed on him for killing Gandhi to the Privy Council in Britain – still the
highest court of appeal for India in 1948 – so that the world could judge his
action impartially. He felt that the modern world would give him a better
hearing than the superstitious, effeminate, Hindu admirers of Gandhi in India.”
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