Whenever I try to balance between the esoteric and the everyday, my mind tends to go back to the memory of my teacher, Ramchandra Gandhi.
He was a remarkable philosopher, an authority on mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. I still remember the way Ramu would come to class and quote Whitehead’s lecture at Harvard. Whitehead had apparently once walked into the classroom, banged his head gently, and said, “Gentlemen, I have disturbed the most distant star,” referring to the interconnectedness of the cosmos.
For Ramu, communication and connectivity were part of everyday life. The way he linked them reminds me of the way he used to talk about nationalism. For Ramchandra Gandhi, nationalism was a filigreed moment—full of nuances, a dissenting imagination that created a pluralistic world.
For him, deep down inside, nationalism was a different way of looking at reality—a dream world that created a sense of alternatives. Within this context, he pointed out that the world of nationalism was not actually an invention of the nation-state. For India, and in fact for many nationalists, the dream of nationalism was a dream of inventing an alternative childhood.
Childhood, in fact, was the focus of many nationalist moments. It’s best captured in Rabindranath Tagore’s statement: “Every child born today is an indication that god is not yet tired of man.” In this sense, Tagore captured the essence of the Indian national movement.
Childhood was a dream of flexibility. Childhood was a dream of freedom. And childhood brought about a sense of playfulness. This sense of play—with the capacity to imagine and inhabit alternatives—is something we have lost today. The dream of playfulness is caught in many ways in how we learn to live with uncertainty and celebrate plurality. It is this sense of play that we have lost in our nationalist movement, which has become more monologic, more uniform. We have created a monopoly of ideas, which now come as dictates rather than dialogues. Playfulness—the politics of play—is something our politics has forgotten.
The first thing we have to understand is that the emphasis on the nation-state is misleading. For many nationalists in India—from Tagore to Patrick Geddes to Maria Montessori—it was their childhood that was the basis of the dream world. Childhood, in a way, was an articulation of alternatives. And this is what we must begin by emphasising that the nation-state was not so much a political economy as a pedagogic construct—a new way of understanding reality, teaching it, and communicating it. What marked childhood, and what marked nationalism in particular, was a certain sense of playfulness. This can be brought out by a series of examples.
One of the first things one thinks of is Mahatma Gandhi’s own work on the charkha. The charkha, he said, was not just an instrument; it is a weave of playful ideas. In this context, he said the charkha could be used to teach Pythagorean ideas and mathematics—a pedagogic tool, an invention to teach through play.
Gandhi emphasised again and again the sense of fun that nationalism and play brought about. I am reminded of the time when industrialist Jamnalal Bajaj gave Gandhi a Ford Motor car. It ran in the ashram for a week or two, then broke down. Gandhi had it pulled by a set of oxen, and playfully introduced it to visitors as “my Ox-Ford”.
It is this sense of playfulness, this sense of alternatives, this openness to interpretation that made nationalism not only a dissenting imagination, but a dream of alternatives—something we have lost today.
As Ramu pointed out, nationalism was a dream of childhood, a dream of playfulness. And connecting the two was a deep sense of alternatives.
I still remember my father telling me that during his school days, he worked on vacation with the Raman group in science at Bengaluru. He was still at school, but was invited to the discussions. Because he took part in them, he obtained his first publication in the journal Nature while still a schoolboy.
National playfulness, then, was the possibility of the unexpected, the uncertain, the plural—and it is this playfulness that we lack today. Play was not just a rule-bound game. Play was an attempt to create a different kind of creative imagination. One can think of this in two contexts—in the debates between Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi.
Gandhi wanted the charkha to be an instrument of daily discipline. He pointed out that merely creating a charkha in an imitative sense was not enough. One needed to create a sense of diversity. And it was in this context that he emphasised that the erotic must be part of the everyday.
Tagore’s critique of Gandhi, then, was about how to bring the erotic—the sensuous and the creative—into the everyday. And this could be done only through a notion of playfulness.
Gandhi went further. He pointed out that colonialism cannot be seen only as a dreary ethic of protest and resistance. Anti-colonialism, he felt, must contain playfulness. In this context, Gandhi said one of the deep tasks of India was to “rescue the West from its dreariness”.
It is here that play becomes central to the Indian national movement.
So what Ramu Gandhi analysed was that the Indian national movement was plural, playful, a dream of childhood—and, in this context, it provided a structure of alternative thought. Ramu pointed out that it is precisely what we miss today. Distinctiveness lies in being playful, serious, plural—in creating an alternative world of imagination.
The Indian national movement was full of different dreams of childhood. One can think of Montessori, of the occult child of whom Jiddu Krishnamurti was an example, or of Tagore’s dream of Shantiniketan, where childhood became an anchor for an alternative world.
It is precisely this that one finds missing today.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)
