On Being Impervious To the Discreet Charm of M K Gandhi

About the Speaker

Tridip Suhrud is a scholar, writer and translator who works on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Gujarat and the Gandhian intellectual tradition. As the director and chief editor of the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust (2012-17), Ahmedabad, he was responsible for creating a digital archive of all of M.K. Gandhi's works, the Gandhi Heritage Portal. Apart from a number of books on Gandhi's life, Suhrud has co-edited the critical edition of Hind Swaraj, translated Narayan Desai's four-volume biography of Gandhi, My Life Is My Message, and translated the four-volume epic Gujarati novel Sarasvatichandra. His latest book, The Diary of Manu Gandhi: 1943-1944, was published in 2019.

Abstract

At 6:30 am, on March 12, 1930, M K Gandhi, accompanied by seventy-eight marchers left the Sabarmati Ashram for Dandi, a coastal village in South Gujarat. He did not ever return to live in the Ashram that he had created and nurtured since 1917. It is evident that the self-imposed exile applied not only to the Ashram but also increasingly to the city of Ahmedabad and Gujarat itself. In the remaining eighteen years of his life, Gandhi was to spend some three hundred and one days in Gujarat. His last visit to Ahmedabad was on November 2, 1936. His exile from Ahmedabad is reminiscent of a tap. He did not visit Gujarat after January 1942. If we understand something of this obvious turning away from Gujarat on the part of Gandhi, we might be able to capture something of the relationship that present-day Gujarat has with him. This talk would attempt in very broad strokes to capture the fraught cultural relationship that Gujarat shared with Gandhi; in his times and in ours.