Significant Others - Dipika Guha on the Gandhis

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Playwright Dipika Guha joins Liza to give insight into the complicated relationship between her home country of India and Gandhi's legacy in this time of call-out culture.

Welcome back to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien. In yesterday's episode, we learned about the incredible life of Kasturba Gandhi, who was so beautifully voiced by my friend Dipika Guha. Today, Dipika joins us again to talk about Kasturba from the perspective of someone who grew up in an Indian family. Dipika, thank you for joining us today. I have such a rigidly Western perspective when it comes to Gandhi, and I'm wondering, what was the myth of Gandhi in your family, if there even was one? Well, yeah, it's interesting. I found myself, so Liza, thank you. Thank you for this. Thank you for the opportunity to go back to this story. It's been a while since I've

even thought about Gandhi. And I mean, I grew up in a secular India in the 90s. And so I found it massively emotional yesterday and this last week. And as I was looking over the story again and seeing your point of view, not just on who he was as a national, international figure, but who he was as a husband and what this relationship really was between teenagers. Yeah. Not even. Right. Barely. I know. I think it was very simplified when I was growing up, sort of father of the nation, freedom, like he, you know, the salt march and nonviolence. And, you know, we certainly didn't know about all of this stuff about his sex life. And, you know, that those chapters, I think, are only recently coming out. And it's not to be subservient for his wife was a virtue. And right or wrong, judge that as you will, it gave her life great meaning and purpose. want to, that's not the marriage I'm hoping to enter into, but, um, but then there are probably, you know, values there that I can't appreciate basically. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I think that it's both, it's both and sort of, uh, kind of having to sit with the complexity of that, that he was selfish and narcissistic in this way in in his pursuit of truth and purity if we accept

that which i think i mean i i think i do i take that at face value that that is what was happening and and he was maybe conflicted about his celibacy in a way that he couldn't express within the confines of the of the mission that he had taken on. Whatever that was, we can say it wasn't okay. And also a man who embraced the widest possible of ideals, which is that until all of us are free, none of us are free, which he did. I think that's what I felt most strongly going back to this, that they were yoked together by that mission and she, who knows how she felt about it, but like the catastrophe of that, like she could not have,

I can't imagine that she could have known at 13. what was gonna what was gonna happen what was gonna be asked of her and we don't I don't quite know the way that his philosophy sort of unfurled but when it did it when it crystallized you know in South Africa it felt like there was no going back that was it yeah and no I mean I I like when my husband goes on a diet i'm annoyed you know what i mean like i'm i am so i'm so in awe of uh people who are able to suffer for a you know for a real purpose um i'm i'm such a marshmallow um but but I'm wondering because honestly this subject was suggested to me for this episode and I literally don't think I ever knew Gandhi had a wife so was how aware were you of her existence I'm not not hugely aware I mean, I knew that she existed and I think we celebrate her birthday, possibly in India. There's that kind of like, we know, but she's a very sort of shadowy, in support of Gandhi sort of figure.

Interesting. and interesting um there's there's so much i don't know but it's it's it's interesting how quiet that lineage has been like he had 13 grandchildren and we don't hear from them either right is that partly because of some of the you know complicated again this is all very kind of like, you know, backseat understanding of the history of it. Speculative on my part. Greatly speculative. Perfect. That's what we're here for. My specialty.

Gossip about. Exact things I'm very rarely acquainted with. Yes, that sounds great. Hit that subscribe button. So, but there was, as I understand it, sort of this, you know, he, he, he was able to galvanize so much hope and then able to deliver on that hope in terms of liberating the nation. And then after the liberation, things weren't perfect. And there was a lot of infighting and I, there was like a backlash. I think there's often a backlash for any great person. And I wonder if how much the quiet of the family comes from sort of retreating in the face of, you know, hey, wait a minute. know, hey, wait a minute. Turns out he wasn't perfect after all. And maybe he's actually to blame for some stuff, which, you know, I don't know if that's true. And how much of it was more

personal, like these poor children. I mean, growing up with an iconic parent is probably never uncomplicated, but he really would have been a tough one, I think, to have as a parent. And yeah, I think maybe there's some of that, the sort of the shadow of how do you live up to that, the responsibility and maybe not wanting to and the backlash and India changing and then the shadow of partition, which was so horrible and bloody and messy. And then we're three countries on the other side of that struggle and then i was it occurred to me today is it because unlike other dynastic figures in india that family had nothing because that was part of satyagraha like they were poor and so the descendants i mean they they i think everybody followed sort of had middle-class

lives and um there was no generational wealth which is sort of unusual for a big political yeah dynasty and um it it i mean greed has been such a defining feature, I think, of modern India. And accumulation, of course, I think about it in relationship to partition and where in 1947, no one had anything. And so there has been this great emphasis on the growing middle class and accumulation of wealth. So I'm not unreservedly judgmental just reservedly so perfect of uh of where we are but like i wonder if there was there's some shame around that or some way in which those values the values he held the gun and gandhian values a way, have just fallen out of fashion and fallen out in terms of what we're raised in.

Right. No one's even promoting them anymore. No, or has any understanding of what that meant. And it was pretty common at the time that people understood it meant to devote your life to a cause bigger than you. I've been feeling so emotional about it because it just feels like that tie to secularism has gone in the last decade or so. in the last decade or so, because we've had a really right-wing government in India that has been beating the drum of Hinduism and Hinduism above all else. And Gandhi was, of course, fiercely, fiercely secular. And, you know, deeply, I mean, partition hurt him, like it hurt the whole country, but hurt him enormously. I mean, he was so invested in protecting the Muslim population, which is, there are more Muslims in India still than there are in Pakistan. Like we have a huge Muslim population and he was really believed that, you know, we have as the Hindu majority our obligations to protect them.

And all of that has been turned on its head with the rhetoric of the government in recent times. And, you know, historically Hinduism, Hindus, we've had, we had no identity. Like the word Hindu was given to us by the invading Muslims, the Mughals when they invaded India, kind of referred to everybody east of the Indus river as Hindus. There was no, we've had no identity. And I think that in this age of nation states and us clawing for some kind of sense of who we are, like it's sort of that search has been co-opted. It was co-opted by the British first, you know, the whole divide and rule thing, because we had no unifying principle. We had no nothing that was sort of tying the country together because it really wasn't a nation. That's a recent invention and they were opportunistic about it. And then now it's

been co-opted by the right to say that not only are we Hindus who have, you know, an identity that needs protecting, that we have been sort of hard done by because of our minorities. It's the same rhetoric that's happening here, of course, and in many other countries. So, yeah, I was reading today that in India, in parliament, there's a big kind of photograph of Gandhi and opposite that photograph is a big photograph of the man who assassinated him. Wow. Who's being revered because, of course, he was Hindus for India for Hindus. Right, right. Hindus for India for Hindus. Right, right.

So I, and I haven't lived in India for a very long time. And so I don't even know quite what that, what it feels like now and what that, our textbooks are all different than it was when I was growing up because I grew up in a different country. We're all in this moment of teetering between liberal democracy and autocracy and conservatism and it's fascinating that it that it's resonating even in this

way like where you think there are some surely there are some idols that are are safe no and and i thought maybe some of them wouldn't be saved for their own reasons. Like, yeah, okay, maybe Gandhi wasn't the best husband, but, you know, and we can fault him on that. But to feel that he's up for discussion in other ways, too, is interesting. saddening and I and I found it sort of heartbreaking because apart from as you say quite rightly there's been a re-interrogation of Gandhi in terms of his sex life and those brahmachari practices that he did and quite quite rightfully so but it also seems like we're of course we're we're missing out to focus on calling him out now. Like, I know. Yeah, that doesn't, yeah, it doesn't account for the whole picture, of course, but like, yeah.

I was listening to this conversation between a South African freedom fighter who had been a white barrister there and a Black British,ish like civil rights advocate or agitator and they were having this conversation about this kind of you know what do we let stand from previous generations when we recognize how flawed the idols are and And the South African guy who had had his arm blown off in a, you know, a bombing during the fight against apartheid said, why not turn it into an, you know, a sort of art exhibit where you invite artists to come and add to the statue and adjust it or layer onto it instead of this sort of,

you know, this urge to purify and cleanse and remove the history in an effort to write some sort of wrong? Why can there not be an ongoing, you know, active conversation, renegotiation about it that can be sort of beautiful, which I was amazed by that suggestion. is that we're losing the opportunity for dialogue in every instance, in outright rejection. And I think it kind of loops back to Gandhi in a way and the passive resistance, sort of the core of what he was saying, which is passive resistance and nonviolence. And it seems to me that at the heart of that, there is both acceptance when you resist something, you are also accepting the conditions that it does exist. You're not saying it does exist. So there's like a profound acceptance in that. And there's also in not engaging with those terms, there's an opportunity for renegotiation.

Yeah, it struck me as I was learning more on a granular level about his legacy, which again, I had known, you know, in a very broad strokes kind of probably whitewashed, not terribly nuanced understanding of his work, that this was never explicitly stated in anything that I read, but to me, it felt as if one of the levers that he was able to employ to great effect was shame, he, you know, invited people, his people. And I know that is part of the complication of his legacy also because, you know, the South African blacks felt excluded by him. And, you know, I know that there were caste issues initially in around his work, which I think he shifted during his time to address. But he invited people, especially when the women were able to get involved, who were demonstrably vulnerable and put them in or invited them to put themselves into harm's way to expose the governments for being bullies. And that was

effective. And I feel as if one of the characteristics of our current moment is that shame is leeching away and that shame is this very useful part of human psyche, right? It's what keeps us all, you know, able to perform some sort of civil experiment with one another. And, you know, that's like, there's no shame on social media because we don't have the face-to-face interaction, you know, and people act and speak very differently on social media than they do in real life. And it's because they don't have to be accountable in person. So anyway. Yeah. And I guess my question,

response to that is, can you have accountability without shame? Yeah, I don't know. Can we get to, you're like, no. I don't know. Can we get to a place where it's, because the fear about shame is that it is, underneath it is real resentment because you haven't processed. You haven't taken accountability or you just want people to like you again. You just want the specter of shame off.

So right underneath that, you've got another world war coming potentially. Which is sort of where we are. It's exactly where we are. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I could talk to you for hours. Yeah, I could talk to you for hours.

I feel like I've said many uninformed things, but this is what we're about. Pleasure to talk to you about them. Shreds of thoughts. Thanks again to the brilliant and lovely Deepika Guha for joining us today. And listen in next time to learn why Abraham Lincoln insisted on getting married immediately after he proposed. And finally, if you enjoyed what you heard today, be sure to rate and review wherever you get your podcasts.