Lounge
Manu Gandhi's diaries shine a light on Gandhi's deepest struggles
Summary
As the Constitution of India turns 75, scholar Tridip Suhrud revisits Gandhi’s legacy as filtered through his niece Manu Gandhi’s diaries
In 1943, a year after M.K. Gandhi’s close associate Mahadev Desai died, 13-year-old Mridula Gandhi, nicknamed Manu, came to live with her great grand-uncle and aunt. Over the next few years, Manu kept a diary, scrupulously chronicling her days and bearing witness to some of the momentous shifts of her time, including the deaths of Kasturba and M.K. Gandhi, in 1944 and 1948, respectively.
Unlike Desai, another compulsive diarist, Manu wouldn’t be as much liked by others—partly due to her youth, but also her quick ascension to the role of a “partner" in Gandhi’s yajna, his striving to attain salvation. If her initial diaries are testimony to the struggles of a motherless child receiving a difficult education at Sabarmati Ashram, her records from 1946-48 offer a ringside view into Gandhi’s despondency over politics, especially the vexed Hindi-Muslim question. Most explosively it describes his experiments with brahmacharya, an act that caused scandal and outrage among a majority of his followers, and, of course, his assassination by Nathuram Godse.
Also read: The women architects of India's Constitution
By sharing his bed with 15-year-old Manu, Gandhi aimed to rise above base temptations of his nature, but the fallout was severe on the young woman, who had to put an end to the practice by withdrawing her consent. Among the many troubled questions this act raised, one of the sharpest has been asked by Tridip Suhrud, acclaimed scholar, editor and translator of Manu’s diaries: “Would Gandhi have consented to be a partner in a yajna sought to be undertaken by a woman brahmachari?" We don’t know the answer, but Manu’s diaries give us a framework to think about it. Suhrud spoke to Lounge about the black, white and grey areas in his latest project, The Diary of Manu Gandhi (1946-1948). Edited excerpts.
How would you describe the scope of Manu Gandhi’s diary? What did it mean to have her diary regularly inspected and signed by her “Bapu"?
These are the most extraordinary set of diaries, and I say this with the awareness of the 23 volumes of the diaries of Mahadev Desai. We should read these diaries with the knowledge that they deal with death—the first part with Kasturba’s death and the second with M.K. Gandhi’s. For a contemporary reader this is something they know. The diarist did not and yet, in a profound way, she seems aware of the impending deaths of Ba and Bapu.
We also know that during the last phase of his life, Gandhi was alone in a way he had never been before. He is without Ba, whose absence is palpable in the manner he remembers her, including in a dream and the rituals of remembrance that he and Manu create on each of her monthly death anniversaries. He has realised that his only real purpose is to “wipe every tear from each eye". Never since the establishment of Phoenix Farm in 1904 was Gandhi so alone. These diaries capture the “Lonely Pilgrim", as Manu calls him.
The fact of Gandhi seeing her diaries and correcting errors, including those of grammar and spellings, at one level give “authenticity" to them. She is aware that she lays bare herself to him in the diaries daily, including moments when she is unhappy with him, bewildered by him, or simply unable to cope with the demands on her. There are days on which she writes she would not show the diary to Gandhi and she does not. But both Manu and Gandhi are conscious that the journey Gandhi has undertaken is without precedent in modern times and are at pains to create an archive of each day.
How do Desai’s diaries compare with Manu Gandhi’s? Did she continue to keep a diary after Gandhi’s death?
Mahadev Desai is the exemplar for Manu and other associates of Gandhi. Gandhi, for him, was a “master", “preceptor", but not in the place of a grandfather or mother, as he was to Manu. Mahadev was already an accomplished writer and translator when he met Gandhi, he shared a deep and abiding love for books with Gandhi. Mahadev’s aspiration is to capture Gandhi’s “experiments with truth". There is nothing of the personal in his diaries, he does not even mention the birth of his son. They remain a faithful record of Gandhi’s life and words, both oral and written.
One crucial difference between the two: Mahadev is liked by all of Gandhi’s associates, he is the friend everyone wants. Manu is a pupil for Gandhi and his fellow inmates at Aga Khan Palace that served as a prison for them. She is deeply uncertain about her abilities. The readers of the diaries will immediately sense that she is not liked, not for who she is, but for the position she came to occupy in Gandhi’s life, as a principal care-giver and partner in his yajna, someone he will not forsake.
Between December 1946 and January 1948 she seems to have received affection from only four people: Abdul Ghaffar “Badshah" Khan, Pandit Nehru (who would teach her skipping), Devadas Gandhi and Lakshmi Gandhi, who continued to care for her after Gandhi’s death. For others she is someone whose presence can be ignored. Gandhi’s closest associates decry her; there is petty gossip, jealousy bordering on meanness. Thus Mahadev and Manu, though sharing similar aspirations, write very different diaries.
Manu was devastated by Gandhi’s death. She would have spent her remaining short life in obscurity but for Nehru, who asked her to travel across the country, narrating the story of Gandhi’s life to school students and Navajivan Trust, which asked her to write. She published seven important books based on the records she had kept, but did not maintain a diary as without Gandhi there was nothing to bear witness to.
You elaborate on Manu’s role as a partner in Gandhi’s ‘yajna’. Would she have ever felt like a pawn? To what extent was she able to bring her agency into her role?
Manu’s anxiety, the weight that she felt, is for us to read in the diaries. She responded bodily to her situation. There are references to nose bleeds, migraines, fevers, and they had an “interiority" about them. They were related to her “being in the world". I am not trained to write or speak with any insight on her psychosomatic world but as someone who has lived with her writings for several years, read her closely and sought to convey her words through translation, I am aware of the almost visceral response that she had.
She felt inadequate, special, cared for, sometimes neglected, even derided but not as a pawn or an instrument. Her personhood is evident and recognised by those around Gandhi. Two illustrations: her interactions with Professor Nirmal Kumar Bose and Badshah Khan are clear examples of others recognising the undeniable necessity of her presence for Gandhi. Others, especially Nehru and Lakshmi Gandhi, who came daily to meet Gandhi, never left without a sign of affection for Manu. So, it was not all bleak, friendless.
Gandhi had radically claimed to be a “mother" to Manu. He also celebrated femininity, be it in daily action, demeanour or in the practice of ahimsa. In spite of these proto-feminist gestures, his attitude to women was far from uncomplicated. Was his relationship with Manu like no other he had with women like her (Abha Gandhi, for instance)?
Gandhi had been Bapu, father, to many, but he was a “mother" only to Manu. And I do wish that we would take that seriously. In this conversation, I would prefer to remain “textual", i.e retain Manu as a vital and necessary reference. Theirs is a relationship where he is the teacher but is deeply “taught" by her when she sings Ishwar Allah Tere Naam, something that came to be etched indelibly on his conscience. She was convinced that Gandhi was mother. And this remains the difference between Manu and other younger or not-so-young women around Gandhi, including daughters and daughters-in-law of the extended family.
Prof. Bose said the women around Gandhi had a tendency to view him as an “exclusive possession". His remark is both insightful and somewhat generalised. This is was certainly not true of many women in Gandhi’s life. The person who could have made such a claim was Kasturba, who never made claims of any exclusivity while retaining and guarding not exclusivity but exceptionality—there was a domain that only the two of them shared. Yet there were women (and men in equal measure) who sought to cling to him or sought his attention on matters that need not have concerned him. Was this irritating for him? Quite often it was, not just for him but also for those around him joined by concentric circles where the world of the home merged in the home of the world.
Prof. Bose’s remark is specific to the situation in Noakhali, where Gandhi had gone in response to communal violence. But there is no denying that many sought and obtained Gandhi’s attention, care and tutelage, sometimes requiring him to send them to a far away place for “constructive work."
As we celebrate 75 years of the Constitution, where do you think India stands vis-a-vis Gandhi’s visions?
We are more than ever before aware of the need for justice and equality and we demand that the idea and the practice of justice be expanded to include concerns that Gandhi had not thought of. There is something deeply hopeful about it. Also, we are more cognisant of the imperfections of Gandhi and others who were considered as great teachers, if not “founding fathers" (the need for which seems to have become recessive). This ability to ask fundamental questions to those who worked for a society that was more just and tolerant, less violent, less exploitative is central to our aspiration as a democracy.
And yet, we seem to have become somewhat less caring of each other; empathy is not a central category in much of our organisational structures. The project of collective non-violence, not just individual ahimsa, has been under strain since Gandhi’s times and is no longer the measure of things. For Gandhi these were captured by the idea and practice of "seva" (“together with") and seva is recessive.
