Gandhi’s face is on our currency notes and classroom walls, yet two Gandhis have grown from half-understanding: a gentle saint garlanded each October, and a man blamed for cowardice and for Pakistan. Truth and ahimsa are not ideologies, and ahimsa starts with not ruining one’s own life. What made him worth remembering was insistence, turned first on his own failings, then his household, the empire and his own people. Garland or stone, are we sparing ourselves the trouble of reading him?
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Originally published in The Pioneer on 3 October '26
Gandhiji’s 157th birth anniversary falls on 2 October. The United Nations observes it as the International Day of Non-Violence. Few faces are more familiar to Indians than his. His image appears on currency notes and classroom walls, and most people carry some early memory of him, an essay written in school or a story told at home. He came to be called the Father of the Nation, and for decades discourses have been delivered in his name, speeches made, seminars held. Many of them carry a gentle lament that the country is forgetting his thought. The truth may be quieter than that. The country is not so much forgetting him as never having quite understood him.
Out of that half-understanding, two Gandhis have grown. The first is garlanded every October as a gentle saint who preached non-violence to the world. The second, in some town or other, has shoes and filth thrown at his statue, a villain whose every failing is paraded and whose every choice is called a betrayal. Between the garland and the stone, the man himself has gone missing.
