Vinay Lal - The Time of Death - Gandhi as Mahatma, January 30, 2022

It is at about 5:12 PM on January 30, 1948, that Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated.  The time piece or stop watch that was tucked into his dhoti cracked and stopped when he fell to the ground.  What meaning do we draw from the fact that his watch stopped, indeed all time stopped?  In this talk, I take up the conversations that took place in Shimla, India, at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study when a group of scholars, writers, and thinkers gathered to discuss Gandhi's death.  Speaking of Gandhi's Death, edited by Tridip Suhrud and Peter Ronald D'Souza, came out of those conversations.  I discuss here briefly the views of four scholars:  Ashis Nandy; Mushirul Hasan; Sadanand Menon; and Rajeev Bhargava.  Hasan says that Gandhi was inaccessible to Muslims and Dalits; D. L. Sheth, who passed on in 2020, disagrees and suggests that it was the elite Muslims who were not drawn to Gandhi.  Rajeev Bhargava also points out that, though we may be reluctant to recognize this, Gandhi had a considerable role to play in the emancipation of the Dalits.  Nandy suggests why the conventional, respectable, middle-class notions of Gandhi have taken the life out of him, and Sadanand Menon points to how the Gandhians--those who embraced outwardly what Gandhi appeared to stand for, but had little inkling of the spirit and daring of Gandhi's thought--have produced a sterile Gandhi for our times.  This is a book with many interesting insights.