ABSTRACT
I first met Ramu at the home of the sociologist Shiv Visvanathan. I was then some kind of Gandhian Marxist. I had always admired the Mahatma, but my secular-socialist self sought to rid him of the
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spiritual baggage which seemed unnecessary to his broader message. As Shiv watched amusedly, his young protégé — for it was he who had sent me to do a Ph.D. in Sociology in Marxist-infested Calcutta — now clashed, in the living room of his Ashok Vihar flat, with one of his own mentors. Could not one follow Gandhi in his empathy for the poor and his insistence on non-violence, I asked Ramu, while rejecting the religious idiom in which these ideas were cloaked? Ramu answered that the attempt to secularise Gandhi was both mistaken and misleading. If you take the Mahatma’s faith out of him, he told me, then Gandhi would not be the Mahatma. His religious beliefs were central to his political and social philosophy — in this respect, the man was the message.
