Thinking of India
Visayan Daily Star Bacolod City
Perspective
15 Jan 2007
Rowena V. Guanzon
Thinking of India
Arriving in New Delhi at three o’clock in the morning with temperature at 5 degrees was truly like arriving in an Asian country like no other. As I passed through Customs, I saw people outside wrapped in what looked like blankets, half visible in the fog, and I thought, it looks like a photograph of India in the time of Gandhi in the 1940s. It was and is, Gandhi’s India, site of his “Satyagraha,” freed from British rule in 1947, and 60 years after, a nation of one point three billion people.
The taxi ride to the hotel, with almost zero visibility, made me all the more feel like I was thrown back in time, thirty years ago. I had no conversation with the taxi driver who barely spoke English, and since it was useless to worry that the car behind or in front of us would hit my cab, I closed my eyes and opened it only when we stopped in Amrat Hotel.
India, for two hundred years under the British rule, documented its struggle against foreign rule not only through history books but through its Gandhi Museum. There you will find, in the house where Gandhi often stayed when he was in New Delhi, the cot where he slept on, his photographs, a life size figure of Gandhi and his wife by a Thai artist, the place where he meditated, and the exact place where he was shot to death by a man belonging to the Sikh religion, a fundamentalist who hated Gandhi’s teaching that the Hindus and Muslims are brothers and sisters.
The greatness of Gandhi was such that he led his people against injustice and oppression, yet remained humble to the end, lived a celibate and Spartan life, went to prison for his political convictions, and remained unbroken by the oppression of colonial masters.
Yet when we look at his personal and political history, it is his personal experience with discrimination and oppression that totally changed him from living a life for himself into living his life only for others. Mahatma Gandhi, who was the Brahmin caste, was married off as a child to a girl-child, together with his two older brothers. His father and uncle thought it was cheaper to marry them off in one celebration. It was Gandhi who was sent to law school because he was bright, and when he studied law in London his mother gave permission only if he swore that he would forsake wine, women and meat.
After law school, and when his law practice was not going well in India, he was recruited to practice in South Africa, and there he stayed for 21 years, lawyering for Indian nationals. It was during his first train ride in South Africa, when he was thrown out of the first class car because it was exclusively for white people that he first became aware that the discrimination against Indians and other people of color must end. Many years later after Gandhi’s death, in accepting an award in behalf of his father from then President Nelson Mandela, Gandhi’s son said that it was there that Gandhi was launched.
Twenty –one years after his successful law practice in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India fully aware that his people have to struggle against the British, but he lead a revolution through non-violent means, “Satyagraha” From a successful lawyer who could have lived a prosperous life, Gandhi transformed into a selfless, celibate man who wore only the cloth he personally spun from a spinning wheel and lead his people out of their servitude. Theodore H. White’s “Gandhi” presents a very interesting biography, but Gandhi himself wrote a book, “My experiments with truth,” an autobiography.
One irony of the Indian people’s struggle for independence is that up to now, many of them still practice the caste system, where the Brahmin or priestly class is the highest, and the Dalit or untouchables are the lowest, who are employed to do menial jobs like cleaning toilets. Many Indians still marry within their caste. The caste system was brought to India by the Aryans, who came to India from the Caspian Sea. They were fair and blue eyed, which is why the high caste are fair in skin. The Aryans drove the original inhabitants, the Dravidians, down south. An interesting note that one lawyer told me there is that the swastika, the sign of Nazi Germany, is a religious symbol in Hindu. Surely a carry over from the Aryans, who believed they were the superior race and hence they created the Caste System.
Sixty years after, the Indians outnumber the Chinese. It has a seven percent growth rate but its people live in extreme poverty in the countryside, more than the poverty I have seen in my country. Yet Indians are among the most educated people in the world, a great number of whom have doctorate degrees. They are enterprising when they live in foreign countries, and succeed in business and inventions. Among Asians in the U.S. they are said to outnumber other Asians as entrepreneurs. Bose, the stereo, was invented by a Dr. Bose from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. India manufactures cheap quality medicines but I do not know if these are easily accessible to their poor.
Gandhi’s India has changed a lot since the 1940s, but we can learn a lot from its political history and culture. Among Asian countries, it stands out as one which has the Rule of Law, and its Supreme Court is a leading light in its decisions on human rights.
