© Getty ImagesGandhi in 1942.
Be the self-righteous misogynist you wish to see in the world.
In August 2012, just before India's 65th Independence Day,
Outlook India, one of the country's most widely circulated print magazines,
published the results of a blockbuster poll it had conducted with its readership. Who, after "the Mahatma," was the greatest Indian to have walked the country's soil? The Mahatma at the center of this smarmy question was, of course, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
There's nothing surprising about the fact that
Outlook passed this assumption off as truth. Gandhi has become the obvious, no-duh barometer for Indian greatness, if not greatness in general. After all, who doesn't like Gandhi? We've come to know him as this frail, nobly malnourished old man with a purely moral, pious soul. He's a guy who ushered in a new grammar of nonviolent resistance to India, a country he helped escape the constraints of British imperial rule. He soldiered through some valiant hunger strikes until a Hindu nationalist shot, killed, and effectively martyred him.
My maternal grandfather went to jail with Gandhi in 1933, so I grew up knowing this myth was cobbled together from half-truths. My grandfather took the lessons he'd learned in jail to begin an ashram in the bowels of West Bengal. As a consequence, my parents raised me with an intimate understanding of Gandhi that teetered between laudatory and critical. My family adored him, though we never really bought into the idea that he single-handedly orchestrated India's independence movement. This is to say nothing of Gandhi's bigotry, which we didn't touch in our household. In the decades since his assassination in 1948, the image of Gandhi has been constructed so carefully, scrubbed clean of its grimy details, that it's easy to forget that he predicated his rhetoric on anti-blackness, a vehement allergy to female sexuality, and a general unwillingness to help liberate the Dalit, or "untouchable," caste.
Gandhi lived in South Africa for
over two decades, from 1893 to 1914, working as a lawyer and fighting for the rights of Indians—and only Indians. To him, as he expressed quite plainly, black South Africans were
barely human. He referred to them using the derogatory South African slur
kaffir. He lamented that Indians were considered "little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa." In 1903, he declared that the "white race in South Africa should be the predominating race." After getting thrown in jail in 1908, he scoffed at the fact that Indians were classed with black, not white, prisoners. Some South African activists
have thrust these parts of Gandhi's thinking back into the spotlight, as did a
book published this past September by two South African academics, but they've barely made a dent on the American cultural consciousness beyond the concentric circles of
Tumblr.
Comment: Given the above analysis, one shudders to think how modern day Germany is in a position to effect the lives of so many Muslim refugees who are basically at their mercy.
See: Refugee crisis in Germany - Nazis on the rise - 'Never again' is happening again