Reflections on Gandhi in India

[Alice Bosley]

As I sit in my comfortable, (cool) American room reflecting on my three-week Overseas Seminar to India this summer, I find it not only hard to decipher what I came away from the trip with, but also to believe that the trip ever even happened. The days of Indian-style toilets, bucket showers, and constant stomach troubles seem so distant and out of place in the environment I’m in now that I find it hard to bring myself to remember those days. There is one thing I know for sure: I got more out of the trip to India than I can even fathom, though most of it had less to do with Gandhi himself and more to do with a quest for truth, whether it be historical, societal, or personal. The conversations I had with people on the trip were unbelievable, and the discussions and reflections on Indian society and society as a whole brought up ideas I never would have thought of on my own.

Since the India trip was an effort to search for Gandhi and his legacy, though, I’ve been reading back through the journal I kept while I was there in search for the places I found Gandhi. I lost faith in Gandhian institutions fairly soon after we got to India, when we visited Gandhi Smriti and the Gandhi interactive museum. The exhibits, things like “blow into the microphone in the fake pot to hear Gandhi’s favorite song,” were insulting, not only because they were disrespectful exhibits at the sight of his assassination, but also they were in direct contradiction with most of Gandhi’s principles. Gandhi was against technology, against modernization, and against waste or excess- all things on which the museum seemed to pride itself. Most importantly, Gandhi was against being revered or idolized in memory. What would Gandhi have thought if he had seen the gigantic flashing screen that displayed his most famous quotes? Or the exhibit where you get in a fake train that interactively leads you through the main sights of nonviolent movements?

By the end of the trip, most of us had come to the realization that those institutions and people that labeled themselves as “Gandhian” were most likely focusing on the shallow definition of Gandhi- the fasting, or the spinning, or the praying, rather than the more fundamental ideas that were behind Gandhi’s actions. One definitive thing I can say is that I found Gandhi more in the people of India than in any of the institutions built up to remember Gandhi and his legacy. The individuals who spontaneously decided to serve others as their lives, like Ravi and Manzil, the drivers who never seemed to get angry with the amount of traffic, the men who worked with the community centers in the slums because they themselves had lived in those slums- those were the people in whom I found Gandhi.