Godse

[Bharat Gupt]

Artur Karp wrote:
>
> Gandhi, Nandy says,  "[...] was trying to fight colonialism by fighting the
> psychological equation which a patriarchy makes between masculinity and
> aggressive social dominance and between femininity and subjugation. To fight
> this battle he ingeniously combined aspects of folk Hinduism and recessive
> elements of Christianity to mark out a new domain of public intervention"
> (74).
> According to Nandy, "Nathuram Vinayak Godse [...] was a representative of
> the centre of the society that Gandhi was trying to turn into periphery"
> [76].

> Artur Karp

In retrospect, all this analysis by Pritish Nandi seems jargonistic talk with more of a
political than a cultural agenda for any worthwhile transformation of Indian social
order.

How relevant is Gandhi's sermonising on women or feminity after fifty years of
Independence in India?  There was nothing special about the feminine role that Gandhi
was able to project. In  the words of Raja Rao, the celebrated author of the novel
Serpent and the Rope, Gandhi only made "little men" out of women. That seems to be
pretty much the  political scene in India today as not even ten percent of its
legislators are women.

Not only did Gandhians and the Congress that played the role of his heirs
kept women in the background, even the Indian intellegensia was unable to define any
distintive role for the Indian women. Even today women-liberation movement is
derivative of European movements.

As for Godse, he gave his reasons for killing Gandhi in the court. The fact that his
statements are not made so accessible, nor openly discussed and then evaluated or
condemned only indicates that there is a lobby that wants keep the pot boiling over
Godse. The recent Marathi play on this issue was banned promptly, why ? Was it a
potential threat to peace or was it a Satanic Verse?
Bharat Gupt
Assoc Prof, Delhi univ.