Mahatma Gandhi Tribute to Mahatma Gandhi

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist

Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

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Mahatma Gandhi Tribute to Mahatma Gandhi

 

August 15 is the second anniversary of Mahadev Desai’s death. Two or three correspondents have administered a gentle rebuke. The following is my paraphrase of the first of their remarks: You have become President of the Kasturba Memorial Fund Trust. Mahadev renounced everything for your sake and even laid down his life for you. He died at a much younger age than Kasturba and yet how much he achieved in that relatively short space of time! Kasturba was verily a sati, but while India has produced many satis, all will admit that it has produced only one Mahadev. If he had not chosen to throw in his lot with you, he might have been living today. His talents would have enabled him to achieve front rank distinction as a savant and man of letters. He might have even been rich, brought up his family in all material comfort and provided his son with the highest education. Instead, he chose to merge himself in you. You regarded him as your son. May I ask what you have done for him?

These sentiments seem to me to be natural. The contrast between the two is too striking to be missed. The one was ready to drop off like a fully ripe fruit. The other had yet to ripen and mature. Life still lay before Mahadev as ordinary standards go. He had aimed at living up to a hundred years. The amount of material that he had piled up in his voluminous note-books called for years of patient labour to work up and he had hoped to do all that. In his trunk was found a memo of my talks taken down on the day previous to his final end. Probably, none besides me can today make them out, and even I don’t know to what use he would have put them. He was a living example of “the wise, who live and work as if they were born to immortality and everlasting youth”. But, if all our dreams could be realized, life would become a phantasmagoria, and there would be utter chaos on earth. God in His mercy, therefore, has ordained that His will alone should prevail on earth.

Mahadev, though an idealist and a dreamer, never allowed his feet to be taken off the firm earth. He, therefore, adorned everything that he attempted. To Mahadev’s admirers, I can only offer this consolation that he lost nothing by his association with me. His dreams rose above scholarship or learning. Riches had no attraction for him. God had blessed him with high intellect and versatile tastes but what his soul thirsted for was the devotional spirit. Even before he came to me, he had assiduously sought and cultivated the company of devotees and men of God after his heart. One may say that it was in furtherance of this quest that he came to me and, not obtaining full satisfaction even with me, (shall I say) he turned his back upon me in the fullness of youth, leaving behind him his weeping relations and friends, and set forth to seek realization of his quest in the bosom of his Maker.

The only fitting service that I can render his memory is to complete the work which he has left behind him unfinished, and to make myself worthy of his devotion obviously a more difficult task than merely raising a fund for his memorial. It can be fulfilled only through Divine grace. Mahadev’s external goal was the attainment of swaraj; the inner, to fully realize in his own person his ideal of devotion, and if possible to share the same with others. The raising of a material memorial to the deceased’s memory is outside my scope. That is a task for his friends and admirers to take up. Does a father initiate a memorial for his son? I was not responsible for the Kasturba Memorial. In my previous statement I have explained its origin. I have become the President of the Committee only in order to ensure the use of the fund in accordance with its object. If friends and admirers of Mahadev similarly set up a committee to raise a memorial fund and invite me to become its president and give guidance for its proper use, I shall gladly accept it.3 A word to litterateurs.

They know or should know that he put the charkha above literature. He took delight in spinning for hours. It was a daily duty. He would encroach upon his sleeping hours to finish his daily minimum of spinning. Why this insistence? Not, I assure them, to please me. He threw in his lot with me after much deliberation. I never knew him do a thing without conviction. He thought with me that the material salvation of India’s teeming but famishing millions was bound up with the charkha. He discovered too that this daily labour with the hand enriched whatever literary work he did. It gave it a reality which it otherwise lacked. The raising of funds is good and necessary. But a sincere imitation of Mahadev’s constructive work is better. The monetary contribution to a memorial fund ought not to be a substitute for the more solid appreciation.  

 

Reference:

 

The Hindu, 12-8-1944