June 14, 2007
Ramu Gandhi:
A Solitary Thinker in Smug, Noisy Times By Manish Chand
Not many get to choose the place they die in, but knowing Ramchandra
Gandhi, one gets an eerie feeling that this peripatetic thinker
would have wanted to breathe his last moments in a place that was
his home and yet not his home for so many years, symbolising the
eternal homelessness of the modern intellectual.
Ramu Gandhi, as he was affectionately called by friends and
admirers, was a deeply solitary man and a compulsive arguer at the
same time who loved the unique blend of privacy and gregarious
intellectual chatter that a place like the India International
Centre encouraged and nurtured.
But he was not the kind whose relentlessly questing mind and athirst
spirit could be confined to one place for long or belong to a
particular institution. As the news of Ramu Gandhi's death flashed
on TV Wednesday and almost vanished into the deluge of babel that
poses as profundity, my mind raced back to those hallowed meetings
of Philosophy Society (Philo-Soc, to the initiates) of St. Stephen's
College at the residence of R.K. Gupta, the then head of the
philosophy department, in the early nineties. Occasionally, one had
a glimpse of Ramu Gandhi in his trademark kurta-pyjama at the
free-ranging play of ideas that cut through all categories and
hierarchies in the pursuit of the secrets of the text under
discussion, be it Plato's "Symposium" or Martin Heidegger's "Being
and Time".
Ramu Gandhi, the fine listener that he was, mostly kept quiet,
following the subtle cadences of thoughts of fellow discussants, but
on the rare occasions he paused to make a point, he was all
eloquence and gravitas, his words coming from the depths of a mind
that has long lived with these ideas and listened intently to what
they really had to say.
But it wasn't unrelieved high seriousness all the time; Ramu Gandhi,
the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari, brought with
him not just a mind that delighted in philosophy as a way of
dwelling in this world that was all easily seduced by poseurs and
impresarios, but a witty tongue as well. It was thus pure delight to
converse with him and a tingle of pleasurable anticipation passed
over one every time Ramu spoke about his favourite philosophers and
seekers like Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sri
Aurobindo and Raman Maharishi or his other pet passion: cricket. One
invariably emerged richer and wiser from such encounters, his wit
and irreverent humour whetting the appetite for the life of the mind
he epitomised.
A few years ago, I bumped into him at his favourite haunt and
habitat: IIC, the elite club that has now collected a more eclectic
bunch of people in its rarefied fold. He had not changed a bit: it
looked like he had floated straight from those freeze-frame memories
of college days - clad in kurta-pyjama, holding a mineral water
bottle in one hand and a book in another. He looked genuinely
pleased to be reminded of the Philo-Soc meetings, and spoke about
some novel he was writing. He appeared to be in a hurry and promised
to speak more about it some other time. I tried to prod him into
revealing more about his new offering, but couldn't succeed: it was
a surprise to hear about this great thinker and philosopher straying
into the temptations of writing fiction, a presumption that would
have exiled him in Plato's "Republic".
Then one day, while browsing through a bookshop in Khan Market, I
chanced upon "Muniya's Light: A Narrative of Truth and Myth." The
author, I peered closer to double-check it, was Ramachandra Gandhi.
My curiosity piqued, I immediately bought the book and read it over
the next week. Reading it was a transfiguring experience, to say the
least. Part autobiography, albeit a disguised one, and part novel,
as it claimed to be, the book traced the inner journey of a
middle-aged professor as he comes home with his friend's 22-year-old
daughter from the US. The book imaginatively intertwines the
metaphysical idea of the young female child as the perfect
embodiment of the atman's radiance, "the perfect picture of... the
self-luminous reality of selfhood" with contemporary evils like
female infanticide.
To me it was yet another reaffirmation of the intellectual's
vocation, which as Edward Said so memorably, consists of "relentless
erudition", always engaging with issues of this world with an
other-worldly detachment - something that Ramu Gandhi had already
demonstrated in "Sita's Kitchen" which he wrote to express his
anguish at the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.
I last met this habitual loner at the launch of his brother
Rajmohan's biography of their beloved grandfather, the father of the
nation. He looked slightly unwell, but intellectual passion in his
eyes shone undiminished. It was one of the rare occasions where all
the surviving Gandhi siblings were present under the same roof and
for the same event. Even as Rajmohan and Gopalkrishna Gandhi mingled
with the guests and engaged with the powerful (none other than Sonia
Gandhi had turned up for the book launch), Ramu Gandhi chose to stay
in one quiet corner, nurturing his willed solitude and apartness
from the crowd. He looked like "a monk in the world", albeit one who
is not averse to camaraderie - not an easy thing in the best of
times, as Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote so clairvoyantly.
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