Thank You, Gandhi
By Krishna Kumar
Viking/Penguin, 224 Pages, Rs 599.00

“Will Gandhi’s idea of truth help me cope with the pain and stress I suffer each day as a witness to relentless defacing of the India I grew up in? I am not used to seeing videos showing scenes of lynching or someone tied with a chain being dragged by a car. Everywhere I look, there is fear of violence. Those who agree with the dominant ideology want to redefine India’s selfhood.”

This could have been the starting point of a diary-like rumination on the search for Gandhian values in contemporary society. Or it could begin a formal, academic monograph, replete with footnotes and source citations. One can imagine beginning a field reportage piece after these lines too.

Krishna Kumar, a well known educationist and a former NCERT director, has chosen a form as innovative as it is interesting. In his ‘Thank You, Gandhi’, these are the opening lines of a manuscript. Before his death from Covid-19, a retired IAS officer, nicknamed ‘Munna’, had sent it in email to his lifelong friend, ‘K.’, the narrator and presumably the author. K. adds context, with a sixty-page preface, reminiscing about their childhood in Madhya Pradesh, their studies and careers. He also inserts his views, in a different typeface, to the manuscript.

Thus, we have two friends, the story of their growing up in an India that is no longer around, and the story of what they make of the emerging new India. Their reference point in both is Gandhi, Father of the Nation. The values he preached and practised shaped the contours of this nation initially, but then things started changing, to the point that a Lok Sabha election candidate termed Gandhi’s assassin as a patriot – which is the trigger that prompted the retired gentleman to pen his thoughts.

The Preface material, which provides the context to the ‘manuscript’ material, borders on a first-person non-fiction piece. Indeed, almost the entire book treads the fine line between fiction and non-fiction, past and present, memoir and social commentary. What matters more than categorisation, however, Gandhian contemplations, regardless of how they are packaged.

Paying homage to the enduring legacy of the Mahatma can be full of clichés, and ‘Thank You, Gandhi’ manages to evade each of them; bringing a freshness, candidness all its own. Among wonders along the way, there’s a Gandhian reading of a portion of Colm Tóibín’s novel ‘Nora Webster’ (2014) too!

A cri de cœur about the times we live in, an impassioned lament, a nostalgic tribute and a poignant ode to boyhood, ‘Thank You, Gandhi’ has at its core the profound bond between K and Munna whose lives are inextricably intertwined with India’s tumultuous history and Gandhi’s teachings.

The ingenious narrative device of the book inside the book becomes a timely conversation between two nations, one of the past and one of the present. When K pieces together Munna’s manuscript, feeling honour-bound to complete it, he discovers his late comrade all over again. Even as he grapples with India’s complex political landscape and the challenges of upholding Gandhi’s ideals in a rapidly changing world, the bifocal lenses of Munna’s experiences and his own introspections serve as a turbulent reckoning.

A novel unlike any other, ‘Thank You, Gandhi’ takes the reader into a liminal space beyond the confines of genre and invites them to confront the difficult questions of where we are and how we got here through a layered and rare exploration of male camaraderie. It can also help the reader face “fear of violence”.