In the Ashutosh Mookeriee Memorial Oration delivered in Calcutta on 4 July 2005, the Governor of West Bengal and grandson of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Gopalkrishna Gandhi — diplomat, bureaucrat and thinker — spoke on the Mahatma's experience at the giving and receiving end of violence.
There is almost a practice with us, of putting our good and great, including our unorthodox reformers, on a pedestal, enshrining them, and thereby creating new orthodoxies. In India, iconoclasts become icons themselves and idol-breakers become idols. Atheists have temple-like shrines built to them, non-conformists want conformism among their followers, dissenters seek assenters. As a people we take to praising when appreciation would do, adulating, deifying and worshipping when honest, sincere acknowledgement is all that is needed. Cults are wrong; they obscure the human being in the aura of veneration.
Among those who have suffered iconisation is Gandhi. While he will always be hailed the world over as 'Mahatma Gandhi', the fact remains that he was never comfortable with that description. And, in Bombay in 1921 when he was greeted by crowds comprising both Hindus and Muslims with 'Mahatma Gandhi ki jai', he said the word 'Mahatma' grated on his ears for the very same crowd had been violent, looting and humiliating the microscopically minority communities — Parsis, Eurasians — for not joining the Congress-led boycott of the Prince of Wales and had even killed some policemen on duty. "I must refuse to eat or drink anything but water till the Hindus and Mussalmans of Bombay have made peace with the Parsis, Christians and Jews," he said. Boycotting the Prince of Wales was a political duty. But turning that boycott into violent action aimed at vulnerable innocents was despicable.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the man who felt, who agonised, who could be angry and enraged, who could err but never lie, was infinitely more real than the idolised and logo-ised Mahatma. Infinitely more than the one we see in statues, on stamps and — incongruously for an anasakta with a revulsion for Mammon — imprinted on currency notes. Gandhi is farthest from the thoughts and deeds of economic offenders — who personify a kind of aggression — but he lies in stack upon stack of notes undisclosed in the vaults of those offenders.