Potrayol of Gandhi in Waiting for Mahatma free essay sample

Vol. I, Writers Workshop,  Calcutta. p. 86). On page 123 of his  My Dateless Diary  Narayan  has recorded that a young American novelist, to whom he had given this novel to read, remarked that â€Å"we don’t learn anything about Mahatma Gandhi from it,† a view many Indian readers would perhaps readily endorse. For us Indians the mere mention of Gandhi’s name conjures up the vision of a â€Å"man of God† who â€Å"trod on earth†, as Nehru described him in one of his speeches after Gandhi’s death. He was  acclaimed  a  Mahatma  and worshipped as an  Avatar.Exasperated by  Narayan’s  handling of Gandhi in  WFM  my  teacher Prof. C. D. Narasimhaiah  had even suggested that  Narayan  would have done well to withdraw it from circulation  (The Swan and the Eagle. Indian Institute of Advanced Studies,  Simla. 1969. p. 155). There is no gainsaying at all that  WFM,  for all its readability, is  indeed  unsatisfactory and disappointing as a novel. We will write a custom essay sample on Potrayol of Gandhi in Waiting for Mahatma or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page But if we could see it for what it really is in itself, we would be able to arrive at a fair assessment of it as well as  Narayan’s  handling of the  Gandhian  motif in it.The first thing to note about  WFM  is that it is  not  a â€Å"Gandhi-Novel† as one is very likely to assume it to be. Uma  Parameswaran, for instance, has asserted: â€Å"It is aGandhian  novel.. . and the theme is  Gandhism. †Ã‚  (A  Study  of Representative Indo-English Novelists. Vikas  Publishing House,  New Delhi. 1976. p. 65) But  Narayan  has not written one such, although once again he uses with considerable subtlety the  Gandhian  motif in his later novel  The Vendor of Sweets  (1967). Nor is  WFM  a â€Å"political novel†, properly so called.Some of the strongest strictures against it have sprung from these assumptions. But the readers are not wholly to blame. For the title of the novel rouses several expectations, especially regarding the Mahatma, which unfortunately are belied. Had  Narayan  chosen a different and less assuming title without the Mahatma in it, the readers’ response would have been less  unfavourable, if only because many of the expectations roused by the present title and disappointed by the novel would not have been there at all.WFM  cannot be called a political novel, though several political happenings between the First World War and Gandhi’s assassination are referred to in the  course  of the novel. As is his wont,  Narayan  aims at telling a straightforward story of some people belonging to  Malgudi, the town of his mythical imagination. Briefly,  WFM  tells the story of two young people of  Malgudi,  Sriram  and  Bharathi. Sriram  is an orphaned young man brought up without a care by his pampering grand-mother, who makes over to him on his twentieth birthday a considerable fortune.He is shaken out of his life of complacency and stagnation when he gets to know  Bharathi, a  Gandhian  volunteer. She too is an orphaned  child. Her father had been shot dead white offering  satyagraha  against the British during the Non-Co-operation movement of 1920. She, who was just an infant then, was adopted and brought up by the  Sevak  Sangh, a  Gandhian  institution, as a foster-daughter to Gandhi. Sriram  and  Bharathi  happen to fall in love with each other. It is they who wait for the Mahatma at the  Birla  Mandir  in  New Delhi  to obtain his final consent for their marriage.Thus  WFM  is actually the love story ofSriram  and  Bharathi  told against the background of the  Gandhian  decades of  India’s struggle for freedom. It also tells how  Sriram’s  love for  Bharathi  sustains him throughout the ups and downs of his life since his joining the freedom struggle. This aspect of the novel has to be sufficiently  emphasised  to see it in perspective. Narayan  introduces into this fictional world Mahatma Gandhi as one of the characters and gives him considerable importance in it. In doing so  Narayan  was taking a very great risk.For Gandhi is too large a subject to be ushered into a small-scale novel. And there are other attendant problems for the novelist. Although  Narayan  attempted this novel some years after Gandhi’s, death, still he was much too close in time to Gandhi to view him with sufficient artistic detachment. The next major problem for him is one of balancing properly the  Sriram-Bharathi  motif and the Gandhi motif in the novel. It is a commonplace that  Narayan  as novelist is almost invariably interested in people who are average and ordinary and in studying their relationships.That is at once the strength as well as the limitation of his art. Sriram  and  Bharathi  of  WFM  are of this kind. The problem for the novelist is, what particular aspects of Gandhi’s life and person  should he  include in the novel to be at once historically authentic and aesthetically consistent with the rest of the novel. Gandhi was not only â€Å"a giant among men†, as  Radhakrishan  described him, but in the eyes of the millions of his countrymen a saint, a Mahatma, a living legend, inspiring veneration and worship.When such a character as this is introduced into the novel, inevitably he overshadows and dwarfs all the others in it, resulting in a thorough imbalance of interests. What is worse, it may even result in huddling together the sublime and the ridiculous. In spite of  Narayan’s  carefully devised strategy,  WFM  has not been able to escape wholly these lapses. Yet another problem confronting  Narayan, one peculiar to him, is the necessity of having to bring into the novel in a good measure the political developments of the  Gandhian  decades, although, to be sure, Gandhi was no mere politician.For, as  a  writer of  fiction  Narayan’s  interest in politics and political  ideologies has always been minimal. He himself has testified more tha n once that politics do not interest him as a creative writer. His studied avoidance of current politics as major themes in his fiction has given room for some dissatisfaction with his work as well as misunderstanding of it. But  Narayan  is neither blind nor indifferent to political happenings. The several incidental references to them in his works, early and late, demonstrate how observant he is.However, it is a matter of his artistic temperament that the vicissitudes of politics, which are ephemeral, do not engage his attention as much as the processes of life do. When he has to take note of them, as in  WFM,  he takes a deliberately detached and an ironical view of them. This may very well be one of  the reasons forNarayan’s  rather belated use of the  Gandhian  theme; long after novelists like  Mulk  Raj  Anand  and Raja Rao, contemporaneous with him, had used it even in the ’Thirties. To steer clear of  these hurdles  Narayan  has had to devise for  WFM  a narrative strategy consistent with his own artistic temper and intention. What he does is to focus attention mainly on the humane qualities of Gandhi, which had enthroned him in the hearts of his countrymen, in spite of his towering far, far above them in other respects. This device enables the novelist to avoid any detailed discussion, debate or elaboration of the politics of the day, which Gandhi guided. Thereby the chief Interest of the novel and of Gandhi in it remains human rather than political, and the novelist feels free to allow his comic irony to play upon events and people, as he does in his other novels. Therefore, in its essentials  WFM  is not political at all.