We have made the Mahatma our national Zelig, patching him in wherever it might suit our convenience. As his knotty ideas are flushed of their substance, we’re bedecking him in on-trend cultural raiments, scribbling over him quotes we might wish he had said but actually didn’t (‘be the change…’), squashing his spectacles into the logo of a political campaign.

While India configures Gandhi as the Grand Janitor of a superpower in waiting --please wait, the soothing robo-voice says; history will be with you soon--a western academia short on radical heroes and emaciated by the pursuit of theoretical purity draws sustenance from his ideas. Gandhi’s marginalized ‘postcolonial’ voice can be conveniently ventriloquised. He’s a Blakean anti-enlightenment siren. A Heideggerian artisanal philosopher. A gadfly anti-liberal moral extremist. These are just a few of the current avatars you’ll find among the high professoriate.

Locally and globally, our sense of Gandhi has become at once both more abstract and more banal, which makes it harder for the public to grasp why some of his ideas are still important to wrestle with--ideas that were sometimes wrongheaded and naive, but also visionary and unnervingly prescient. The Gandhi I’ve encountered in my readings would retreat from the distracting seductions of pious anniversaries like this one, as much as his ego might be tickled. For he lived less by a public calendar of anniversaries, elections and publication dates than by his own rhythms, and by inventing his own unique forms of action and protest. A more fitting way to honour his memory, then, is to recover some of the acid that ran through his arguments.

After all, the bug-eyed, big-eared boy born 150 years ago grew up to continually provoke and chastize his fellow countrypeople. His followers might have liked to call him Bapu, yet his own steadfast habit was constantly to distance himself, not just from his family (a delinquent father to his own children, and as bad or worse to his wife), but from much of the India of his time. Determined estrangement from social conformity, intellectual fashion, and political ideology was a defining feature of his practice.

So let’s set aside the diluted Purell version-- the Sanitary Mahatma -- and grant the man back his strangeness. For without it, we won’t grasp the full uncanniness of his ability to foist sometimes wild ideas upon millions of Indians and launch them into bursts of concerted action. He made these moments - Khilafat, NonCooperation, Dandi, Quit India - appear as if conjured by magic. In fact they were the result of shrewd manipulation of crowds, advanced media-spinning technique, and a showman’s flair for symbol and spectacle.

Until his assassination in 1948 by a Hindu militant with RSS connections, he directed his abilities towards two world-historical tasks. The first was to undermine the largest empire in human history. The second was to challenge the world’s most anti-egalitarian, hierarchical society, one in which violence defined and permeated its daily life. He was, that’s to say, taking on Britain and India at once.

That first ambition he lived, just, to see completed - though amidst disarray that plunged him into despair, as the violence he sensed coursing through in Indian society burst its runnels. But the second enterprise remains as incomplete as it ever was.

Among those of his arguments that proved, in the kindest gloss, over-optimistic centered on caste. Gandhi chose to see the projection of caste stigma as simple instances of individual moral failing and myopia among the upper castes. Just as he’d shamed the British into retreat, he believed he could shame India’s elites and non-Dalit castes into treating better those whom they were oppressing. But shame doesn’t come easily to elites of any kind, and especially not to our own. After all, they’ve been squatting on the top of the heap longer than most elites anywhere.

Ambedkar knew that well. Yet Gandhi entirely ducked Ambedkar’s profound insight: that caste, with its structure of graded inequality (a structure that was psychologically internalized at both the individual and collective level), was India’s distinct contribution to human oppression. It could only be blown apart by Dalits acting for themselves. Not upper caste self-reform, but Dalit self-assertion just might enable the birth of a new community of Indians who could be citizens together not just in their shared right to vote, but with actual social equality and common fraternity.

Gandhi was too hopeful in another of his core beliefs, that he could separate religion and violence--as his own fate made desperately plain. He felt he could release the scriptural declarations of tolerance, peace and diversity that feature in a variety of religious traditions and use such better-angels concepts to tame the violence which religious belief also entails. His was a brave effort to counter the weight of history’s evidence, previous and since, that there may be, between faith and bloodshed, a near-ineliminable connection. The only thing that can weaken that connection, we also know from history, is a state that refuses to belong to any religion - especially when that religion forms a social majority.

In other lines of argument, though, Gandhi’s radar seemed to pick up future dangers. For one, roughly a century before Twitter and TikTok, he understood the vulnerable circuits of our modern minds and our addiction to distraction. in Hind Swaraj , he wrote of how easy it was for a person’s mind to become a “restless bird”, flitting constantly in its cage: “the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied.”

He foresaw as well the ecological catastrophe we are now approaching fast. “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West”, Gandhi wrote more than 90 years ago. If it did, “it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

One of Gandhi’s cardinal convictions was that freedom for societies such as India meant the liberty not to ape the west. Today we’re aping hard on consumption, our economists consulting and advising on how to increase sagging consumption levels. What can we do to improve weak vehicle sales in time for the fresh air season of Diwali: One can scroll many such articles lately when caught in a three-hour traffic snarl. In the (now not so) long run, we’d do better to let another passage from Gandhi ring in our heads: “Formerly, men were made slaves under physical compulsion. Now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy.”

By rights, this and other of Gandhi’s rebukes should make us stumble a bit in our unthinking routines and ideological enthusiasms, just as we remember that, in his own experiments and ideas, our great man stumbled too. To entomb our heroes’ memories in soft gauze, as we so often do, is to hide the most revealing edges. So it seems to me that Gandhi’s 150th birthday is a fine occasion to unwrap him: to open ourselves up to the incitements of this most unusual figure in our history, and keep on arguing with him.

( Sunil Khilnani is a scholar of Indian history and politics)

