Saturday, 1 December 2012

'Gandhi's Experiments with Truth' by Chandra shekhar Dubey


Gandhi’s experiments with truth are his experiments with life and his different natural, candid and naive reactions to the spur of moments. Gandhi begins with his childhood experiences,  moves on to his school days memoirs and subsequently his journey to Europe, experiments in South Africa, India and his entry in the national politics, freedom struggle and his experiments with nonviolence,satyagrah.All these experiences have been candidly narrated by the author.His experience evoke a sense of morality and musings keeping readers spelt bound.Plain,simple,ordinary and very bizarre accounts as these are appeal to the readers .These truths come from the depth of heart.Any reader may find these accounts as Gandhi’s moral courage, his convictions and above all guts to speak in public.He touches imagination of the readers, as he grows to share his fears, apprehensions and little known secrets. Gandhi never sounds louder, never dissociated and this could be a plausible reason for why  his experiences are so inspiring. The grains of truth are put on test. Many of his experiments may not go with the ideology of the readers but no one may question the moral courage inherent in those experiments. Gandhi himself finds some of these unacceptable at later stage of life. He confesses that on many counts, he was adamant, unyielding but his lived even his whims and fancies as his convictions .Gandhi’s subjectivity has an undertone of objectivity. He shares his human fears, anxieties and failures in context of a cultural matrix, He speaks of his child marriage, which was very common in India in his time and till very recently in states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, Gandhi speaks in a tone of a reformer, a psychoanalyst, a moralist and visionary. He shares with his readers how Indians who went  toEngland to pursue further studies feared to be ridiculed, to confess that they are married. Gandhi had also this fear but he overcame it with his sense of truth,There are many such naive issues which he discusses as his experiments with truth.This piece of autobiography        held as the most successful work in the genre of autobiography depicts Gandhi as an ordinary man with humane limitations,foibles,deficiencies and weaknesses growing to a legendary figure of the 20th century and generation to come,Einstein rightly pointed out”Generations to come will scarce believe that   such  one as this  in flesh and blood  ever walked upon this earth”.


No comments:

Post a Comment