As the world discovered its inter-connections more than ever with a global coronavirus pandemic that cuts a deadly arc across high and low, privileged and underprivileged, it demonstrated the great failure of the twin gods of science and technology that defined the advent of modernity. In India too, the pandemic has become germane to the idea of individual selfhood and community relations, albeit with a crucial notation not found elsewhere: the linkage of this disease with reflections on Gandhian ideology and its immediacy and relevance to our times.
Gandhi, it seems, speaks to us no matter at which difficult cross road we may be standing. There are many reasons for this Gandhi recall, though none of them is in the nature of direct similitudes. Historically, the fear of death, of endangered selfhood, the near impossibility of winning the fight against a superior power whose reach is immeasurable are, without doubt, moments of reliving Gandhi.the present dramatic scenario of pandemic spotlights the relevance of Mahatma Gandhi’s clarion call (articulated in his 1909-manifesto Hind Swaraj ) to extricate ourselves from the mesmerisation of modernity. He even went as far as to discredit modernity’s alleged civilisational status as a “disease” to which we must endeavour not to fall victim. With modernity’s shining gloss getting unmasked as a deceptive mirage, it is dawning on us that our globalised lifestyle has made us weaker than ever (from a Gandhian perspective morally as well as physically).1
And curiously enough, for Indians, the pandemic recalled with immediacy another context which seemed unlinked to it, but had the same sweep and scale as it juggernauted across the globe: the still living memory of the mighty British Empire and its imperial stranglehold. Analogically, the Empire and its death-like grip could be approximated with the virus and its infernal capacity to crush the human spirit and denude the body of life. Thus, both the mighty British Empire with its inter-continental reach, and the coronavirus with its own frightful crown, rule through a pervasive fear circulated through a media that reaffirmed their unquestioning dominance through daily accounts. Furthermore, in the evocative words of the poet William Blake, the imperial and the bodily contagion continually created ‘mind forg’d manacles’ through a steady stream of broadcasts in multiple media. Both, however, it seems, find their comeuppance through a counter-narrative drawn from Gandhi.
To understand, thus, the close relationship between anticolonial struggle, print culture and its meshing in the figuration of Gandhi, it becomes useful to interrogate the establishment of journalism as a means, firstly of imperial dominance, and later, of its complete reversal. Thus, it is imperative to cast a look at the history of the press in India from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In India, British efforts to encourage the development of the press to help support the colonial endeavour had an unforeseen consequence. Even as British-controlled newspapers presented the imperial vision, they also unwittingly fomented a slow but ever-growing anti-colonial resistance to it. The slim minority of Indians who read English-language newspapers began slowly but steadily forming a visceral resistance to imperialism. This resistance to the British version of the imperial endeavour was shaped through the daily, or more often, weekly reading of various print accounts in steady circulation. Thus a restive, though tiny, republic of letters grew from the written worlds encompassed in pamphlet, periodical, poetry and prose. Nevertheless, it was most notably in the domain of the regional language press as well as newspapers in English in India that the steadily changing relationship between master and subject was captured.
Moreover, newspapers effectively blurred the binary between high and low culture by covering ideas that ranged from the spirit of anti-colonial resistance, the steadily burgeoning nationalism and the everyday minutiae that pointed to the steady modernizing and capitalist impulse of India by the 1940s. Newspapers bridged this gap successfully as they segued from reporting news of national and global import while simultaneously keeping alive the details of everyday life and its struggles. Indeed, it was the growing influence of newspapers in India that seminally shaped and helped achieve Indian sovereignty to a marked degree. However, this intersectionality is still an underexplored area: while a few scholars have done substantive work in the area, overall the relationship between the freedom struggle, nationalistic fervour and the creation and sustenance of a visual and verbal iconography about a new set of powerful politicians is still an underexplored area of critical enquiry.
It was this rise in print culture and the reading republic that created what Jurgen Habermas famously denotes as the public sphere.2 Habermas’s classic text, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, and its English translation in 1989, made a strong critical impact in how to evaluate the close and complex relationship between a reading public that became steadily politicized and consequently questioned statist versions of a single truth. Central to Habermas’s thesis was the increasing vocalization and localization of new ideas via print media and its resultant effect on the reading public in eighteenth-century Europe. In essence, Habermas theorized that this growing readership now ideologically inhabited an alternative space of public dialogue and debate that replaced feudal structures of knowledge transmission. To reaffirm, the growth in print media led to the creation of a new and vital constituency constructed via the newspapers. It is a thesis that is also elegantly presented in Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on South East Asian polities and their shrugging off of the imperial yoke in the early part of the twentieth century.3 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has set the standard for any scholarly understanding on how the newspaper became the site of anti-colonial resistance and, later, supported the mobilization of freedom movements across South East Asia. However, Anderson’s focus on the overwhelming influence of American and European models for constructing the idea of the nation-state worldwide, even in the diverse and complex cultures of Asia and Africa, has been oft contested (for instance by Partha Chatterjee and Pheng Cheah). Nevertheless, for the purposes of this chapter, Gandhi’s sophisticated manipulation of the space created by what Anderson famously denoted as ‘print capitalism’ is still significant.
In the Indian context, this new knowledge system crafted by the advent of print culture is what Philip Altbach referred to in The Knowledge Context. Altbach knit together the heritage of colonialism and its gift of English to provide space for a new ideology that was a complex reification of the West and the East.4 Nowhere was this complexity more apparent than in the English-language newspaper that used the language of the masters to unmask their moral, philosophical and economic duplicity. And, undoubtedly, the most gifted and formidable adversary who played the arch unmasker is M. K. Gandhi. It is he who understood the rich harvest that could be gleaned by using the space of English-language newspapers to further his agenda of swaraj, self-rule.
With the advent of Fleet Street in India from the late eighteenth century onwards, the newspapers steadily became a space for multivalent representations of what constituted and defined a country, its people and its culture. As mentioned above, Gandhi was one of the first ones to harness its capacity for affecting fundamental ideological change. This is borne out by S. Natarajan in his review of the role of the press during the crucial period of the freedom struggle: ‘the last quarter of the century saw the rise of several Indian newspapers in English which grew to be organs of national opinion within a very short time’.5 As Natarajan avers, ‘The press fed off the Empire voraciously, and in doing so, came to have an influence on its affairs’.6 It also became a source of disseminating critiques of political decisions and their ramification on a subject people. Thus, ideas that were possibly seditious were now available for thought, discussion and possible action. Given his trans-continental education and a work-life that took him from the shores of Kutch, to London, to South Africa, and finally back to India Gandhi steadily used newspapers to mount his successful global campaign for India’s freedom. It was, as Sunil Khilnani writes, while he was in London, ‘that Gandhi had an immersive experience in a culture dominated and shaped by essayists, novelists, poets and philosophers’ who had effectively created a print empire in ink.7 Traumatized and painfully isolated as Gandhi was in London, how did he acculturate himself in what was undeniably an alien culture? In Khilnani’s words: ‘In London he began to read the daily newspaper (something he had not done in India), and was impressed by the functional, informational style of the press. He became a promiscuous reader’.8
From reader to practicing writer in South Africa saw the transformation of a now deeply politicized Gandhi. His own understanding of the race politics of his new country and his refusal to submit to it took shape in his launching his career as a journalist with great eclat. But, this account is not concerned with the oft-discussed career of Gandhi and his numerous, highly successful, publications given the existing scholarship on it. Rather, I seek to take this account beyond Gandhi, the highly successful journalist, to argue how he himself became a means—especially in the influential English-language newspapers in India—to reflect upon and comment on the swiftly changing reality of India in the defining year, 1947. The central argument in this chapter is related to how Gandhi’s life, thoughts, travels and words all become a critical signifier and barometer to interrogate the miasma that steadily overwhelmed pre- and post-independent India as it finally raised the victory standard of freedom. And all this is enshrined for us in the often poorly printed and badly preserved metropolitan newspapers published variously from Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and the Madras Presidencies. This chapter explores, through the sampling of some days in the defining year 1947, how Gandhi’s own carefully plotted self-fashioning in terms of his representation in the public sphere was ruptured, interrupted or kept alive in a seamless continuum by newspapers. In particular, I will examine vignettes in two major newspapers: the organ of the swaraj politics, the former Akali-owned and later G. D. Birla-owned Delhi-based Hindustan Times , and, the paper established in the late nineteenth century under the leadership of the redoubtable Robert Knight, the Statesman (jointly published in Calcutta and Delhi). Gandhi’s involvement with the founding of the Hindustan Times is a well-known story. However, for purposes of this chapter, I refer to my own account of it in a recent essay on print culture and Gandhi where I mentioned that the appointment of Devdas Gandhi to the position of a Managing Editor seriously influenced the manner in which Gandhi, his father, was represented.9 Additionally, in 1947, ‘as the Devdas Gandhi helmed newspaper attained the status of being the dominant newspaper in Delhi, unsurprisingly, it is the one paper that had the most in-depth reportage on Mahatma Gandhi throughout the year’.10
But what of the Statesman and its continual engagement with Gandhi even as he moved away from East India (where he had largely been since November 1946 given the horrific communal killings) to Delhi in September 1947? And, more significantly, how does this chapter keep the Gandhian vision of peace and amity alive for its reading public through this difficult time? It is important to remember here that, unlike the nationalist Hindustan Times , the Statesman was a newspaper that was founded by British entrepreneurs, and thus, notionally should have owed its allegiance to Fleet Street and followed the diktats of the masters in Great Britain. Margarita Barns, in her 1940 survey of Indian newspapers, alluded to the great success of the Statesman , especially in Calcutta and commented that ‘This paper is independent and has been critical of the British Government and the Congress alike’.11 Barns’s assessment, accurate though it may well have been in terms of the political persuasion of the newspaper, seemed to gloss over the credentials of its first, most illustrious editor, the aforementioned Robert Knight and, in consequence, did not examine the nature of the coverage afforded in 1947 to the most illustrious Congressman, Mahatma Gandhi.
Decades after the summary dismissal of Knight, and long after his death in straitened circumstances, it seemed that his imprint still lay at the core of the Statesman . A brief account of Knight is in order to partly understand why Gandhi was so much part of narrative of this British-owned paper. Commenting on the heritage of this paper and on Knight, Edwin Hirschmann in his article ‘The Hidden Roots of a Great Newspaper: Calcutta’s Statesman ’, writes thus
Two great success stories from Victorian India were the Times of India of Bombay (now Mumbai), the pre-eminent paper of Western India, and the Statesman of Calcutta (now Kolkata), the pre-eminent paper of Eastern India. It is a little-known fact that both of these newspapers were the creation of one remarkable man, Robert Knight, whose zeal, fearlessness, and editorial brilliance rocked the shaky boat of Anglo-India. His critical, acerbic, and often incisive views of the Raj helped to establish his newspapers, first in Bombay and then in Calcutta, and provided a role model of adversarial journalism for the first generation of Indian nationalists. Knight was, apparently, the first European journalist to accuse the British government of plundering the Indian economy (in 1859), the first to call for a representative legislature in India (in 1860), and the first to endorse the call for self-government by the newly formed Indian National Congress (in 1886). Such an editor might well be an embarrassment to the Raj.12
Thus, against the backdrop of these two papers I exhume the construction, representation and subsequent consumption of Gandhi by the largely urban readers, particularly in the crucial time before, and soon after, the declaration of independence in mid-August 1947. The central argument reflects on the fact that at the moment of India’s independence the news is largely about the pageantry and panoply of the public celebrations. In vivid contrast almost, the man who fought for this celebratory hour without pause and without compromise is largely absent in the grand narrative of its victorious close. For instance, the Times of India has virtually no report on Gandhi either on its front pages or inside, barring one significant departure, of which I will speak of later, during the run-up to the granting of poorna swaraj.
This is even more noteworthy since throughout much of 1947 the Gandhi phenomena is inextricably intertwined with how India begins to imagine and define itself. Almost across the newspaper archive there are often daily reports of Gandhi’s prayer meetings and his constant musings on how this new entity, the Indian nation, will define itself. The broad parameters of this discourse are based on the opposing visions that he daily struggles with: whether the new polity will endorse a process of systematic othering based on increasingly virulent caste and communitarian politics, or protect the shared ground of mutual respect and trust? As mentioned earlier, how Gandhi’s views on multiple issues were either suppressed or shared via the daily newspaper reports gives us a useful insight—not only upon the fratricidal times—but also how they become historical markers of how we imagine ourselves as true-blue Indians till now. Consequently, the historical conundrum was thus: while Gandhi reports in certain sections of the English-language newspapers testified to his enduring presence in the new dispensation, its readers and the public at large seemed to disregard his words through actions that were totally contrary to his central philosophical ideal of ahimsa.
This understanding of Gandhi and his deep relationship with newspapers was brought forth, curiously enough, in London. On 8 January 1948, just three weeks short of his martyrdom, the erstwhile editor of the Statesman , Sir Alfred H. Watson, delivered the Sir George Birdwood Memorial Lecture. This Keynote Address was chaired by another journalistic savant, Colonel, The Honourable J. J. Astor, Chairman of the Times Publishing Company. Tracing the long and illustrious history of the English-language press in particular, Watson remarked that in 1948 there are in India ‘over 18,000 newspapers and periodicals; 3400 in English, the remainder in many vernaculars’.13 At the summation of his lecture which was entitled ‘The Growth of the Press in English in India’, he mentioned how the first English-language newspapers in India from the late eighteenth century onwards were meant for an overseas audience: ‘Most of the early newspapers were wholly designed for the British reader’.14 Rapidly sketching the history of English press, Watson referred to the steady assertiveness of the press from late 1885 onwards.15
Watson also signals towards the shift from Calcutta—the erstwhile seat of imperial power—to the ‘new capital’, Delhi. Furthermore, Watson speaks of the category of ‘The Indian journalist, [as] very frequently a man educated in England’ who understood the power wielded by Fleet Street. He also speaks of its continuance in the new India: ‘There could be no more firm assurance that, whatever other changes new political conditions may bring to India, the printing of papers in the English language will survive and flourish’.16 This was because ‘They are indispensable to the interpretation of the new Indias to the outside world, as Mr. Gandhi himself recognises in the English edition of the Harijan ’.17
From the time of his return from South Africa to India in 1915, Gandhi slowly but steadily became the most interviewed, filmed, imaged person in early twentieth century, even when he was not directly in position of power and authority. What is being emphasized here in the context of 1947 is that he is not a passive bystander who is at the mercy of whatever the print or other forms of visual materiality wish to make of him. Neither is he constrained by his present reality of being seen as a person whose great work is behind him, because this is the Mahatma who cannot be set aside, ignored, forgotten, hidden or silenced.
In fact, here was a man who often controlled, directed and edited the ‘news’ that was centred on him, his ideology, his various causes and their representation in the public sphere. However, by 1947, I contend that there is a marked shift in terms of which Gandhi one will encounter within the pages of the daily newspaper, or, increasingly, if one will even encounter him at all. As the year rolls on and the transfer of power became imminent, the new normal moves with a frightening speed from the seeking and gaining of freedom to the division of spaces, peoples, objects and the allocation and management of assets and liabilities, human and other. All of this is now controlled by a newly empowered bureaucracy jointly controlled by the departing colonialists and the politicians of the twin states of India and Pakistan. The newspapers, in direct response to this urgency, often become spaces of factual information rather than reflective, judicious reporting on the complex times.
In this shifting, mad world where information is key to one’s very life, where the practicalities of daily life were felt even more urgently than ever before, what became of Gandhi and his vision, his moral sense, his unique view of the human condition? Did the newspapers and their readers still seek to understand the shifting mental, emotional and physical cartography through the thoughts and words of the man who unquestionably won them this longed for freedom? Or, did his lustre dim and his life’s philosophy become increasingly irrelevant to the times he now lived in? In this new world, one, which seemed to forget to heed his belief in the respect for all, it is, unsurprisingly, his son, Devdas Gandhi, as Managing Editor of the Hindustan Times , who keeps the reader’s gaze firmly on him.
At the beginning of 1947, far from Delhi, in the killing fields of Noakhali, where he went at the end of 1946 to stem the communal bloodshed, the Mahatma still held a special place in most news as the miracle man, despite his seeming absence from the centrist pull of governance and nation building. In the early month of 1947 he spent most of his time in Bihar with visits to Delhi, but in August, the defining month, he embarked on travels to Kashmir and Rawalpindi. August 1947 begins with newspapers announcing Gandhi’s travels from Rawalpindi en route to Kashmir. Thousands come to meet him at the various train halts but the mood was not of veneration alone. The Statesman , reporting on 1 August, gave an account of what occurred at Amritsar station as the train halted on the way to Rawalpindi. Referring to the black flag demonstration by Sikh youths at Amritsar station in his evening address in Rawalpindi, Gandhi recalled how they kept shouting, ‘Gandhi go back’. No longer the Mahatma—or even Bapu to them—they refused to listen to him and, he asked plaintively of this audience: ‘What harm have I done to them?’18 The noise, he said, ‘made him close his ears and he closed his eyes and kept repeating the name of God’, the Ram that the Christian run paper was silent on.19 What the report underscored is the image of a bewildered Gandhi, uncertain and homeless in this fluctuating world with its shifting ethical prism. As the newspaper reported, Gandhi shares this trauma with a mixed community Rawalpindi audience comprising men, women and children hanging out from balconies, thronging the streets and paying homage to him even as fellow Indians, nay Hindus, shun and castigate him. It is a telling moment that foreshadowed the end of the man who won India long sought freedom. How terrible this time was and how conflicted people were come into even sharper focus by newspaper reports that mention the unsuccessful attempt to blow up the Frontier Mail in which Gandhi and his party were travelling.
In Srinagar, he faced the same public response upon his arrival at a meeting where thousands have gathered to welcome him. Even as he was being garlanded by Begum Abdullah, slogans of ‘Quit Kashmir’ were raised against him according to the report in the Statesman on 3 August in its front page. At Baramulla, the scene was repeated; the reception arranged by the National Conference was aborted by Muslim Conference demonstrators who shouted pro-League and anti-Congress slogans and tried to mob Gandhi, who is then surrounded by a huge police posse. This telling verbal image showed the shift in public perception: the man who stood for the idea of communal harmony was now himself communalized and cast as an adversarial Hindu. On 4 August the same newspaper, while mentioning his meetings with various dignitaries, has another item placed right below it with the caption: ‘Gandhi asked not to interfere’.20 These responses of public, well-crafted felicitations and their obverse—the hostile public response on the streets—are reflective of the total confusion only some ten days or so before the declaration of independence and the official creation of the twin states of India and Pakistan. The people of Kashmir were on the knife’s edge as the Amritsar Treaty sale deed was to lapse on 15 August 1947. Yasmin Khan endites that there were ‘no maps to help even the most well informed English speaking listener’ which country they would belong to21 and, hence, ‘it was left to newspapers to publish their own creative interpretation’.22 Gandhi, possibly for many of these frightened, uncertain people, was more a symbol of the upturning of their lives than a messiah of their freedom from colonial rule. People were panic stricken, especially in the states at the geographical edge of the subcontinent, due to the new category of ‘citizenship’ now touted as the methodology for belonging or exile, to or from, a nation. Joya Chatterjee, tracing the whole complex and twisted, inconclusive debate on the question of citizenship, remarks: ‘It soon became apparent that the issue could not easily be resolved, and so discussion of the citizenship clause was postponed’.23
Interestingly, this agitation and the consequent treatment of Gandhi by some members of the Kashmiri public was not the version that was reported by the Hindustan Times . Reporting on 4 August 1947 of the abortive public meeting on 3 August, the item spoke of the presence of ‘over 20,000 people’ whom ‘Gandhiji’ could not address on ‘account of people’s indiscipline’.24 The report also maintained his social and political prestige by informing its readers that his first meeting was with the Maharaja of Kashmir and that there were ‘three state cars’ at his disposal.25 Furthermore, it detailed the large number of women and children who came to the meeting, and that Pandit Ram Chandra Kak, Prime Minister of Kashmir, was the second personage to meet him one on one. The paper provided a veritable galaxy of the illustrious and powerful who come and meet him. However, it would appear that Devdas Gandhi was not content with this representation of the unquestioned status of his father, and the Father of Nation. Thus, the article ended with an evocative account of his walk around the magical Dal Lake at night time ‘under enchanting moonlight’.26 While most of the reports of Gandhi come from the Associated Press of India (API), it is of critical interest to see what precisely is privileged and what is suppressed in advancing the Gandhi image and vision. In the case of the Hindustan Times , what is represented in the public sphere, without variation, is the compelling image of a charismatic, still powerful and ever-relevant man. With the highlighting of his solitary walk around the romanticised landscape of the magical Dal Lake—a walk calmly undertaken despite the intense exertions and tensions of the day—the account stepped away from the hostility and rejection on ground. In fact, in a nuanced manner this report painted a verbal portrait of a unique man who had the great ability to live at ease in the public world while maintaining the silence and meditative self of the private world. He was, in consequence, a man of this world, even as he simultaneously inhabited another, higher spiritual sphere. In short: The Mahatma.
The great divide, the Partition in mid-August 1947, found Gandhi in Calcutta as he puts his life—once more—on the line and restores a blood-maddened Calcutta to one where there was relative sectarian amity and peace on the day of the declaration of independence. It was a hard-won victory for him and won, like many of his other famous battles, at great personal cost. There was, however, one crucial difference: his earlier struggles for decades were against the cruel despotism of a monstrous imperial power. The privations and bruises that were visited on his body and spirit were a sign of his greatness and his Christ-like capacity to take on the wounds and sufferings of others. In Calcutta, however, there is the moment where his house in Belliaghata is encircled by enflamed Hindu youth who threaten to attack him, and finally shatter the windowpanes. The Statesman reports on 14 August, two days after the attack, that the brick thrown inside the house narrowly misses Gandhi but a ‘European visitor’ is injured in the charge on the compound.27 The reporter details at length how the angry demonstrators stay for hours and about 200 youth keep yelling, ‘Go back!’ In a frightening replay of some aspects of his Kashmir visit, this report of the violence directed against Gandhi and his party on 12 August in Calcutta also showed Gandhi surrounded by a large armed and unarmed police force stationed for his protection from his own people. It also suggests a dimming of his image; his idea to meet with some twenty of these youth has no effect at all as they keep insisting he move out of Belliaghata to some other part of the city. Even the address of the Mayor of Calcutta requesting the agitators to calm down falls on deaf ears and there is, in fact, a charge on the house. The report departed from factual reportage to give an account of a visibly disturbed Gandhi who tried valiantly to keep his composure and attend to his correspondence.
The reverberation of this fundamental rupture in the transcendent and inviolable image of Gandhi was even picked up by the Times of India . After a gap of almost two weeks in which it had focused on the political class that would form the new leadership of the twin Dominions, there was a front-page news item related to this attack. On 14 August the headline on the front page announced: ‘Mr Gandhi’s House Stoned by Mob; Hostile Demonstration in Calcutta. Usual Prayer Meeting Abandoned’.28 The shock of all reports from across the country at this unbelievable and unspeakable attack on Gandhi was widely circulated through the newspapers. Tragically, and as with historical hindsight we know today, the final violation was still to occur on 30 January 1948.
What is worthy of mention was that the Hindustan Times published on 13 and 14 August observed a complete silence on the Calcutta attack on Gandhi. Instead, its front page mentioned the desire for a UN membership for India and, closer to home, it shared the news that there were some 35 fires in Lahore on the day of the Boundary Award. Furthermore, it gave a list of the numerous shops gutted in Anarkali market, Lahore, and listed that some sixty died and about a hundred were injured in street violence. There was one news item on Gandhi, but it is more in terms of privileged information derived from knowledge of his inner circle. The readers were told that Gandhi’s party in Calcutta would include Professor Nirmal Kumar Bose who will act as his Secretary, with the further addition of his granddaughter Miss Manu Gandhi and his grand-daughter-in-law, Mrs. Ava Gandhi.29 Even as the larger family of his beloved countrymen seemed to turn on their respected elder, the Hindustan Times gave an image of a familial group that surrounded and revered him.
Yet, the Gandhi magic still seemed to work despite this and there is a restoration of his symbolic and real value for his countrymen at the eve of Independence. Finally, Calcutta is calm on 15 August with Gandhi doing what he does best—fasting, prayer and observing silence. Victory apparently still followed him and his ideals. He was a saint and not a man quite like the others. More significantly, he was not one who needed to seek the trappings of power like those in the capital city, for instance, whose smiling visages, whose golden voices, inaugurate sovereignty and independence. But Calcutta was not where he closed his life work or his life. For that, he had to go the new locus of power and authority, the city of Delhi, the city that claimed him.
After more than a month in Delhi, where he visited numerous refugee camps that were now the spatial and political sign of the huge human cost of liberty, the newspapers, especially the Hindustan Times , constantly refer to his daily deep engagement with the unprecedented scale of suffering. By September 1947, the daily killings, the constant spewing of anger in word and deed seemed to be wearing Gandhi down, and at his prayer meetings he often spoke aloud his despair and wondered if all have gone mad. But then arrived the month which we Indians have now marked in our yearly calendar as the only secular birthday celebration that is sacred to us: Gandhi Jayanti, 2 October 1947, Gandhi’s only birthday in free, independent India. The reportage of the day seems to put back the spotlight on him as the central figure in the history of this new nation. The Statesman ’s Delhi edition had a front-page photo of his bare torso, his hands folded, in profile with the announcement ‘Mahatma Gandhi 78 today’.30 It also stated that it was declared as the first public holiday by the Government of India and that peace processions would be taken out, and spinning demonstrations would also occur. The report also informs the readers that in honour of Gandhi’s birthday, the East Punjab government had ordered complete prohibition. Citing the words of Mr. Prithvi Singh Azad, Minister of Excise, East Punjab Government, it claimed: ‘We can pay no better tribute to him than to follow his teachings’.31 Calcutta is also gearing up for big celebrations. In Delhi, at 4 pm, the readers are informed that in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk there was to be a public rally to felicitate him and it would be jointly addressed by Nehru and Patel. From today’s vantage point, it becomes interesting to see how the Gandhi signature is already being laid onto the physical schema of the erstwhile imperial capital, with a designation of a space open for large public gatherings: the newly named Gandhi Maidan. It is a fitting tribute to a man who did not believe in monuments, but in the creation of monumental spaces where all could foregather, pray, discuss, disagree and engage in dialogue.
Appropriately, it was left to the Hindustan Times to give the greatest coverage to this rare honour. On 1st October, in addition to the general account of spinning, weaving, peace processions and fasting common to all newspapers, it printed a big notice on a special programme by the All India Radio dedicated to Gandhi on his special day.32 The programme listing includes a musical repertoire of his favourite bhajans (hymns), one even sung by the diva M. S. Subbalakshmi; a broadcast of excerpts from Gandhiji’s writings and speeches in English and Hindi by a K. M. Munsi; a special talk by Dr S. Radhakrishnan in English on him; closing with his favourite hymn, ‘Vaishnava Jana ko tene kahiye’. October 2, the day of the birth, is commemorated by the Hindustan Times through printing on its first page a photo of Mahatma Gandhi: dhoti clad, with a folded newspaper in his hand, mid-stride, smiling. The man who was news and the man who read the newspapers where he was news seem to come together in a semiotic signal that is hard to miss.
The recently concluded global celebration of Gandhi’s 150 birth anniversary is now part of the new element in Gandhinama, the Gandhi story. In India too, in a world far removed from the one Gandhi laid down his life for, the steady stream of Gandhi-centric events became a carefully orchestrated method of seeking a continuum between Gandhian philosophy and the reality of a deeply fractured contemporary India as most recently demonstrated in the linkage between the pandemic and Gandhian thought mentioned at the opening of this chapter. In 2019, most English newspapers, especially from mid-September, began printing on their front pages a daily account of the Gandhi milestones. In these efforts, the Hindustan Times , though now far removed from its earlier anti-establishment incarnation, launched its own special supplement on 16 September 2019 with an editorial note titled, ‘In memory of the greatest Indian ever’, ‘At 72, India is still young enough to remember the man who became the Mahatma. Yet, more than a billion of its 1.2 billion population were born after his death and could do with a refresher on why Gandhi matters today (the truth is, he matters even more than before)’.33