Can the broom redeem dreams, sweep out the muck?: The other day I - TopicsExpress



          

Can the broom redeem dreams, sweep out the muck?: The other day I got up and found my husband holding a broom, looking triumphant. “I’ve been cleaning the street,” he said. I opened the newspaper. The centre page cartoon had Narendra Modi riding a broom, with a beat-them-all look. Just like Harry Potter. I turned on the news channel. Why, there’s Sachin Tendulkar wielding a broom, gripping it with well-gloved hands! Then comes the Mahatma, his footprints marching to “Ekla chalo re”. The rubbish on the lane magically collects and dumps itself on a wagon that sails in from nowhere, and voila! A row of houses appears in what looks like a London suburb. A voice exhorts us: “Make Gandhiji’s dream come true!” The next day, I am in New Delhi for a seminar. The taxi swings out of the airport and what do I see? A mammoth Swachh Bharat poster! As if on cue, the cab radio trills out a chirpy jingle -- “Kkleeheeeen Yin-d-i-yaa”. Says my Delhi friend, “The PM is spot on in demanding a Clean Revolution, in reclaiming Gandhiji’s goals.” Suddenly, I remember a Tamil satire, written in 1941. Santiniketan-educated, firebrand freedom fighter Sakuntala, visits a remote Tambrahm village of wealthy moneylenders, untouched by the freedom movement. Intoxicated by her bewitching beauty and progressive rhetoric, the locals -- particularly the super-smug males -- morph into rabid reformists. The men belt out safaayee slogans, preach prohibition to local drunks, hygiene to labourers, they even sweep the streets to create a model village. Finally, when Sakuntala departs, the spell breaks, people snap out of the dream, things get back to normal. ”Once again, garbage began to clutter the village streets.” Readers always wondered why the writer, a freedom fighter himself who invariably propagated Gandhian goals, ended this story – not with hope, but with a cynical denouement. In 2014 I ask: was it because he was disillusioned by superficial interpretations of Gandhi’s message? Gandhi’s ideals were shaped by personal experiences. The racial discrimination he faced in South Africa made him reflect on the caste inequalities among Indians. “To deserve equality, you have to practice equality,” he reasoned. So in his ashram, toilet building/cleaning had to be everybody’s job –not reserved for a particular caste or class of people. He shoved his wife out – not because she refused to clean the toilet, but because she did not accept the tenets of human equality and the dignity of labour. Soon Gandhi learnt that cleanliness was a matter not of culture alone, but of economics, when a poor woman in Champaran explained that she wore a dirty, unwashed sari because she had no other sari to change into while she washed what she wore. If you read Gandhi’s writings, you know that his cleanliness was not merely a physical matter, but mental, spiritual. Just as we could not blame the whites for enslaving Indians so long as Indians enslaved other Indians, we cannot become clean (swachh) unless we also became pure (shuddh). Like my friend I wholeheartedly support the PM’s Swachh Bharat Andolan. But I know that Gandhi’s dream will not come true even if India becomes another Switzerland. Not as long as we have haters among us – who shave the heads of people just because they look different, attack other faiths, belittle those they consider inferior, violate human rights, oppress the weak. Not unless we can sing Ishwar Allah tero naam with Gandhi’s conviction. Not if we delink shuddh from swachh. And God help us if we misinterpret shuddh, as the Nazis did, as many continue to do in our time. I pick up the jhadu and begin to clean my house. The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist, writing on the performing arts, cinema and literature ColumnAnalysisGowri RamnarayanDNAMumbaiopinionauthorcleanlinessFreedomHuman rightsNarendra ModiRevolutionracial discriminationSachin TendulkarFriday, 24 October 2014 - 5:00amThursday, 23 October 2014 - 10:05pm dnai.in/cq6u1 dnaindia/analysis/column-can-the-broom-redeem-dreams-sweep-out-the-muck-2028751
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 23:39:03 +0000

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