Ramachandra Gandhi: the quintessential argumentative Indian

By Ashish Mehta Jun 13, 2007, 16:36 GMT

New Delhi, June 13 (IANS) He was a constant at the India International Centre (IIC), a quiet presence reading in a corner, or studiously writing away in another. Ramachandra Gandhi, philosopher and grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari, Wednesday passed away in his beloved IIC, the intellectual bastion of the capital he lent so much gravitas to.

The 70-year-old Ramachandra Gandhi was at heart a philosopher beyond narrow academic classifications while equally rooted to the soil.

Having earned doctorates in linguistics - he studied with the legendary H.P. Grice - and philosophy, he taught at universities in Britain and the US and in India at Santiniketan, founded by Rabindranath Tagore, Panjab University and Bangalore University. He, in fact, founded the philosophy department at Hyderabad University.

As a teacher, he used to say that three R's of education should be replaced by three E's - Ethics, Ecology and Enlightenment.

Even as he left an indelible impression on a generation of students and teachers, Ramachandra Gandhi - or Ramubhai as he was affectionately known by all - was anything but a straitjacketed academic.

He was at home with Indian philosophy as much as with western contemporary thoughts, but his chief interest was in the Hindu system of thought known as Advaita Vedanta or non-duality.

In 'Moksha and martyrdom: reflections on Ramana Maharshi and Mahatma Gandhi', Ramubhai juxtaposed the two 20th centuries icons - Gandhi, the political leader who inspired non-violent revolutions around the globe, and Ramana Maharshi, who revived the Advaita tradition of Adi Shankaracharya in modern times.

And, just like the Mahatma, his spiritual quest was never divorced from the 'responsibility to the other', and he remained engaged in efforts towards social questions.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Hindu rightwing campaigned for destroying the 16th Babri Masjid and building a Ram temple in the belief that the Hindu lord was born there, Ramachandra Gandhi used his close reading of Hindu epics for a counterargument.

Inspired by an incident from 'Ramayana' on the life of Lord Ram, 'Sita's Kitchen: A Testimony of Faith and Inquiry' was a terse reply to the Hindu rightwing, using the same mythology as it did.

The same method was at work when Ramubhai responded to the 2002 communal violence in 'Gandhi's Gujarat', in which 1,169 people, a majority of them from the minority Muslims community, were killed.

Drawing lessons once again from another Hindu epic, 'Mahabharata', Ramachandra Gandhi reminded us of Gandhari's curse to Lord Krishna after the Kuru clan was wiped out: 'Your people will also kill themselves in fratricidal frenzy!'

His politics, however, was one of a critic in the public sphere. For a man who was grandson of not only the father of the nation but also of independent India's second governor-general, Ramachandra Gandhi was remarkably free of any ambitions to any political position.

His intellectual journey also took him to the world of art and in recent years he penned two magnificent volumes on art criticism. 'Svaraj: A Journey with Tyeb Mehta' is an extended essay on the famous painter's triptych on Santiniketan - which incidentally fetched a record price in the market. Ramchandra Gandhi made it a starting point for his meditations on swaraj, or self-rule, a political concept that coloured India's freedom struggle.

For the Vedanti that he was, the concept went beyond politics and led to a spiritual journey within one's self.

Another foray into art criticism was 'Ideas Images Exchanges', co-authored with critics Ranjit Hoskote and Roshan Shahani.

In recent years, he had also started offering weekend workshops in New Delhi on synthesising politics, culture and spiritualism - and thus extending the history-making work of the Mahatma.

© 2007 Indo-Asian News Service