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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Journeys |
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Journeys |
Gandhi’s Last Stand
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| A visit to Sewagram Ashram, where Gandhi spent the last years of his life, in search of his living legacy |
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DINODIA PHOTO LIBRARY |
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| Gandhi with Jankidevi Bajaj, the wife of his benefactor
Jamnalal, in Wardha in 1945.
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NE OF OUR BIGGEST PROBLEMS IS THE MONKEYS,” Anant Joshi said. We were standing on the grounds of Sewagram Ashram, to the side of the cottage that Madeleine Slade, aka Mirabehn, built for herself and then ceded to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, as she did everything else in her life during their time together. |
“The monkeys come in troupes. They run all over the rooftops and break up the tiles. These tiles are not so easy to find now. It is expensive to replace them all the time. We never had this problem before, but the forest all around has been cut down and the only trees left are at the ashram, so the monkeys come here. What can we do?”
Joshi, who is the chairman of the Center of Science for Villages, a Gandhian organisation dedicated to bringing appropriate technology such as biogas and low-cost housing to local villages, strikes me as a patient man with many responsibilities. I am conscious that these have not diminished because I have been put in his charge. He has been deputed to show me around Sewagram by Minal Bajaj, the director of the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation, and a great granddaughter-in-law of Jamnalal Bajaj—one of the many wealthy industrialists, including Ambalal Sarabhai and KK Birla, on whose largesse Gandhi and his movement depended.
| MIRA KAMDAR FOR THE CARAVAN |
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Bapu Kuti |
Jamnalal Bajaj not only donated the land for the ashram, a small part of his extensive holdings as the area’s biggest zamindar, he also embraced Gandhi’s efforts to eradicate untouchability and Gandhi’s conviction that the way to bend India to his vision was to work from the meanest village up. In 1928, the Bajaj family’s Laxminarayan Temple in nearby Wardha was one of the first Hindu temples to admit Dalits into its sanctum. To this day, the deities are clothed in khadi. At the end of his life, Jamnalal dedicated himself to goseva, cow welfare, an activity of which Gandhi heartily approved. The Bajaj Foundation, nearly 70 years after Jamnalal’s sudden death in 1942, continues to support a slew of Gandhian initiatives and institutions and to underwrite most of the ashram’s operating budget.
As I follow Joshi around, he fields a constant stream of calls in Hindi and Marathi on his mobile phone. He wears a handkerchief on his head, knotted under his chin. Each time one of his mobile conversations drags on a bit, he searches out a patch of shade, and I follow him to it. I check the weather app on my phone. Though it is only late February, the temperature is 36 degrees Celsius.
| MIRA KAMDAR FOR THE CARAVAN |
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The small cottage that was Gandhi’s second
dwelling at Sewagram Ashram. |
By June, the temperatures will climb into the 40s. When Louis Fischer, the American author whose 1950 biography, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, served as the basis for Richard Attenborough’s 1982 blockbuster film, visited Sewagram for a week in 1942, the only way he could summon the energy to type up his daily notes was to sit naked in a tub on a crate with a towel folded under him, his typewriter perched on another crate nearby. “At intervals of a few minutes, when I began to perspire, I dipped a bronze bowl into the tub and poured the water over my neck, back and legs. By that method, I was able to type a whole hour without feeling exhausted,” he wrote. In addition to the sweltering heat, Sewagram was built on low ground, in an area that became a malaria-infested swamp during the monsoon and that was overrun with poisonous snakes and scorpions. It was near no road, and had no post office and no shops. For Gandhi, it was perfect.
When Gandhi came to Wardha in 1933, he wanted to retreat to a place that had none of the amenities India’s poor citizens lacked. He was by then an international celebrity. In 1931, he had travelled to Europe, where he was mobbed by eager crowds and hounded by journalists, and where he met a roster of the powerful and the famous that included the King of England, Benito Mussolini, Charlie Chaplin and Romain Rolland. Gandhi wrote to Jamnalal Bajaj that he wanted to live alone in a small hut in a small village. But his presence alone was enough to draw scores of acolytes as well as visitors from around the world and across India—Nehru came several times—to even the remotest and most inhospitable outpost. Soon there was a road. One hut became several. The British sent a telephone so that they could communicate with the Mahatma when they wanted. Gandhi’s attempt to disconnect from the world and to change India from outside the quickening course of its trajectory toward independence failed.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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VenSardi
27 December 2011
12:18 AM
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Some people find satisfaction in denigrating Gandhiji just because they think they are being clever and different.. Let them bark themselves hoarse.
After all, don't we watch ...s baying at the moon?
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dark
29 June 2011
11:01 AM
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who says mahatma was murdered by nathuram ..he z murdered bt people like 0x111 every day since ..who r not able to understand his visionary approach towards d welfare of india dat hav people not divided by cast and religion ....
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0x111
22 June 2011
08:42 PM
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Mahatma Gandhi betrayed Muslims/Christians/SC/ST communities to favor Forward caste in India in 4th August 1932 Round Table Conference
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Avinash Rajagopal
4 June 2011
01:00 AM
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Lovely. Absolutely lovely.
This indeed, is the irony, and ultimately maybe even the tragedy of Gandhi.
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