An ism is an all encompassing ideology. It is a total system. It is an enclosed world view. In the past few decades India has been subject to two grand isms — Gandhianism and Marxism. Each has suffered a disastrous fate and each has suffered it differently. This essay is a reflection on both.
Gandhianism became an ism only after Gandhi died. As an individual, Gandhi was experimenting with truth and he was involved in a whole network of debates with the likes of Tagore, Saha and Nehru. As a result he never became a closed mind. Gandhi was clear that he wanted his house to be open on all sides but refused to let the winds of any one idea blow him over.
The Gandhian closure came with his assassination. His followers, with a few exceptions like Kumarappa and Vinobha Bhave, became custodians of his memory, whereby they museumised his thoughts. One still feels respect for the Gandhians for the way they lived. But that very form of life mothballed Gandhi into a limited mnemonic. If Gandhi came alive it was through the social movements or the Gandhians abroad. Gandhi resonated through Martin Luther King, Gene Sharp, Lanza del Vasto, Steve Biko. But our local Gandhians smell of formaldehyde.
If Gandhians were mothballed, Marxism as a legacy was moth eaten. There was a naiveté, an idealism, in the old generation of Gandhians. They might have lacked the spark, the inventiveness of the Mahatma, but there was still a sense of integrity about them.
Marxists have been more slippery. The Gandhian idea did not die out; It might have been fading away. But Marxism as an official ideology was stone dead. The change needs a detailed ethnography. I remember a time few decades ago when any illiterate radical would say, “What about class?” and reduce the gathering to a hushed silence. Only some as wicked and intellectually playful as the psychologist Ashis Nandy could be a match for them. I remember once at a seminar at the Delhi School of Economics, Nandy rose and addressed the chairperson as follows: He said, Mr X always asks, “What about class? Why not we request him to ask the question first, and we can then proceed with the seminar”. But as a true dissenter, Nandy was amongst the first to recognise the importance of Marxism, impishly chuckling, “If Marxism didn’t exist we would have to invent it”.
The sadness was that Marxism never tolerated dissent, committed as it was to a truth. The older generation around the trade union movement has a core of lived simplicity but the later generations were simply ambitious and power hungry. They captured the academic citadels and replaced class with rule by committee. They were eventually as intolerant and restrictive as any group in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Right and Left as ideologies became mirrors of authoritarianism. The simpering pomposity of official Marxists was maddening. Yet, because a lot of it was tactical and instrumental, Marxists had no problems slipping eel like into other positions.
When the idea of class ran dry and the promise of revolution looked silly, Marxists engaged in no debate on what went wrong. One is not asking for a public breast-beating but for an internal critique. On this, there was an unembarrassed silence, even indifference. With a quick amnesia, they built their paranoid bastions around secularism, science and rights making a hash of each concept. The Left notion of secularism was so narrow that it showed its illiteracy about religion and cosmology. Religion got reduced to communalism, forcing believers on the defensive. Probably the worst understandings of the Narendra Modi regime came from the Left secularists.
The Marxist understanding of science was equally obtuse. They failed to read and grasp the Marxist understanding of science reworked in the classic writings of Joseph Needham on China, or John Haldane on diversity in India. Whether it was the debate on Lysenko on heredity or the Communist takeover of Hungary or the poignancy of the Prague spring, our Marxists remained deaf to democracy, and to the changing nature of science. Their belief in the official progressiveness of science turned moments like the Kerala Sasthra Sahitya Parishath (KSSP) into extension counters of the regime.
Today one can hear ex-Marxists piously talk about a critique of Descartes, or how the Communist Party of India should be a part of Bhakti Movement, or praise Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj without a twinge of remorse. One does not mind the change in ideas but one often asks whether quick-change artistes are intellectually trustworthy or have any real originality as they peddle the critique of development with the enthusiasm of new converts.
One wishes they had stood their ground and set up the fabric of truthful debates, like D.R. Nagaraj and others did around Ambedkar and Gandhi. One wishes that there was another variant of the little classic Truth Called Them Differently. This little pamphlet chronicles the great debates between Nehru, Gandhi and Tagore. Similarly, one wishes there had been a dialogue between Hind Swaraj and the Communist Manifesto. These are two great political documents still begging for an intellectual encounter.
The sadness lies in the emptiness of the two isms. One wishes one could playfully reinvent both at a moment when globalisation is epidemic and a new generation thinks of justice as an outdated form of mobility. There was a power and poetry to both ways of life which would have added much to the ethical quality of life today. What could have been reworked looks lifeless. I have always believed that India was a compost heap of world’s knowledges. Sadly, today, the India humus we called civilisation is unable to rework them. Two great isms look on helplessly as the market moves genocidally on and new spiritual cults pretend to interpret Indian civilisation and provide a culture of meaning.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist