Has Mahatma Gandhi’s charkha come full circle? Is our Father of the Nation dying of the once flourishing symbolism that he had nurtured? The state of the nation he left behind, crowned by the banning by his home state of a new biography that hasn’t yet reached bookstores, suggests as much.
Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India has just been published in the US and instantly banned in Gujarat.

Because reviewers armed with advance copies mentioned that the book suggests that Gandhi was slightly racist in his early years in South Africa, and perhaps had a homosexual or “homoerotic” relationship with his friend Hermann Kallenbach. Maharashtra, that uninhibited protector of chauvinist sentiment, is contemplating a ban too. So was the Government of India, though it has backed off. But how can the Centre not take credit for protecting Gandhi’s honour? So it seems to be cunningly devising ways to jail anyone who dares to disrespect the Mahatma. Apparently, the law ministry is tweaking the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971, so that disrespecting Gandhi is treated at par with an offence against the National Flag or the Constitution. Finally, the Mahatma of Symbols is getting proper recognition.
Gandhi’s incredible vision and human insight made him one of the greatest leaders of the world, the “naked fakir” who armed the wretched of the earth with a deadly moral weapon. But what really made him the Mahatma was his brilliant use of symbols. He recognised the importance of symbols as a rallying force and used it to fantastic effect — from building the “Mahatma” brand to leading a huge, demographically diverse, politically fractured, culturally pluralistic, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-caste, multi-linguistic, mostly illiterate country to Independence.
Politics is largely a game of cultural symbolism, and Gandhi perfected the art. It started with his own body — the frugality of his vegetarian meals, the poor and “Harijans” he ate with, the loincloth he wore instead of a lawyer’s suit and tie. “It has become the fashion to laugh at my loincloth”, he had said archly to the British. And explained why. “Millions of Indians own nothing in the world but that little strip of cloth which preserves them from disgrace. I am not leading a ‘back to the loincloth’ movement. We have been in these straits ever since the British have ruled India. In London, if I am invited to visit His Majesty the King Emperor, I will wear nothing more than that which is the symbol of India’s distress — the loincloth”.
Gandhi harnessed the power of symbols. So a march to the seashore to pick up a handful of salt could unite the country in rebellion. His protest fasts could bring the Raj to its knees. His broom and his community prayers could gather followers in humility to build a casteless, pure society. And his charkha could become the symbol of self-reliance and the struggle for freedom.
But symbols have their limits. Especially when you forget what the symbol represents. Rabindranath Tagore, who was Gandhi’s good friend and supporter and the one to hail him as “Mahatma”, had voiced this fear way back in 1925. “The charkha does not require anyone to think”, he said, “one simply turns the wheel of the antiquated invention endlessly, using the minimum of judgment and stamina”.
In his essay Cult of the Charkha, Tagore made an incisive and perhaps prophetic argument against Gandhi’s symbolic use of the spinning wheel. He pointed out that opposing scientific advancement with ancient technology was against progressive thought, and emphasised the importance of intellectual judgment and clear reasoning against mechanical wheel-spinning in any struggle for self-realisation. “I am afraid of a blind faith on a very large scale in the charkha, in the country which is so liable to succumb to the lure of short cuts…” Tagore wrote, “Our country is the land of rites and ceremonials, so that we have more faith in worshipping the feet of the priest than the Divinity whom he serves”. He hated the idea of a “people dazed into obedience” mindlessly spinning. Tagore wished for more intellectual involvement, more rational commitment of the people for any constructive social or political change.
“I am strongly of the opinion that all intense pressure of persuasion brought upon the crowd psychology is unhealthy for it”, he wrote. “Some strong and widespread intoxication of belief among a vast number of men can suddenly produce a convenient uniformity of purpose, immense and powerful”. This “miracle of a wholesale conversion” is a “catastrophic phenomenon” that “stuns our rational mind” raising false hopes “like a boom in the business market”. We need to go beyond symbols for lasting progress.
Today, almost a century later, we fiercely cradle symbols while crushing the ideas they stand for. Banning Great Soul is just another example — along with the rampant corruption, dishonesty, caste politics, religious appeasement and other ailments of Mother India — of how horribly lost we are in empty rituals. Keeping booze shops closed on October 2 doesn’t quite make up for it.
This week, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi announced in the Assembly that he was banning the book because it was “perverse” and “hurt the sentiments of those with the capacity for sane and logical thinking”. (No, we don’t know why such easily hurt people did not employ this “capacity for sane and logical thinking” while thousands of Muslims were butchered in Gandhi’s home state in 2002.) The Congress opposition quickly chimed in supporting the Bharatiya Janata Party government, calling the book perverse, baseless, an insult to the Mahatma and calling for means to ensure that such things never happen again.
As all parties fall over each other to protect Gandhi from aspersions of bisexuality, they reveal our ignorance of Gandhi’s ways and our shameful homophobia. We have forgotten that Gandhi had embraced celibacy as a symbol of purity — and wrote at length about his experiments with his own sexuality — but retained a passionately amorous language to express his love for others. The death of his nephew Maganlal had “widowed” him, he said. And wrote to the sick C.F. Andrews: “If you cannot have a nurse like me, who would make love to you but at the same time enforce strict obedience to doctor’s orders, you need a wife…” Maybe the Mahatma’s protectors would like to ban his Collected Works?
In the hands of the rudimentary, simple-minded folk who rule today, Gandhi’s three monkeys telling us to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, have become censors of free thought. Sadly, the charkha of Gandhi’s symbolism has turned against Gandhi’s quest for truth.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com