Against Sordid Spectacles Founded on Epic Falsehoods: Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s The Undying Light

The Undying Light by Gopalkrishna Gandhi (Aleph, 2025)

Former diplomat, former Governor of West Bengal, and a constant writer, Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s latest book, The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India (2025) is a specimen of writing that is increasingly rare now—it is a sustained meditation on the wave-like undulations between public life and private memories. The book’s positionality of literary intimacy is counterpoised by its civic weight. The history of India unfolds herein as fleeting encounters with small worlds—in a ‘majority of minorities’ as Gandhi himself describes, in passing, citing Menaka Guruswamy. Gopalkrishna Gandhi—whose name my insolent autocorrect often chooses to revise as Gopalkrishna Gokhale (after whom the former was in fact christened)—was barely three years old when his grandfather, Mohandas K. Gandhi, was assassinated. To the grandson, the moment was to become an experience that would go on to oscillate between a sacred private impression and a stately public obligation. The result is—what I have elsewhere termed, perhaps in the context of Carl Sagan’s views of ancient India or of the dialogues between Yama and Nachiketa in the Kathopanishad—an air of avuncular, affectionate skepticism. Gopalkrishna Gandhi may well be to Indian political theory and modern history what Alan Watts was to Eastern nondualist philosophy—an entertainer who makes the most complex ideas accessible in a self-effacing manner, although without absenting oneself from the memories of the audience in times to come. Gopalkrishna Gandhi is one of the subjects that he speaks of—the ordinary Indian citizen who keeps alive national ideas not through abstract doctrines but in everyday acts and talismans.

While reading The Undying Light, I felt reminded of Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s fascination with smallness, which he made explicit, for instance, in an article he wrote a few years ago on Nirad C. Chaudhuri (or Nirad ‘Babu,’ as he called him). Much like Chaudhuri, Gopalkrishna Gandhi makes of himself a raconteur one could listen to as if on a small wayside platform, whence to simultaneously watch an entire nation, with its large questions and small scenes, pass by without too much sentimentality.

Early on, Gopalkrishna Gandhi informs of his more-than-passable familiarity with Ruskin Bond (a particular weakness of this reviewer’s too). In the autobiographical Scenes from a Writer’s Life, Bond conjures a most practical theory: “Race did not make me an Indian. Religion did not make me an Indian. But history did. And in the long run, it’s history that counts.” And memory becomes argument. It becomes a way of understanding that identity is less a list of private attributes, privileges, and misfortunes, and more an accumulation of acts, of time, of losses, and of repairs. One such moment appeared during Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s tenure as the Governor of West Bengal in Nandigram, as the left regime was on its way out. The writer’s humility is stoical, perhaps daringly radical. He does not seek to exonerate or flagellate. He humanizes the historicity of 2007—as much as he humanizes the Sino-Indian War of 1962, the Emergency, and the 2002 Gujarat riots. In all of these incidents of national importance—or exigency—Gopalkrishna Gandhi solicits us to rediscover ourselves, as though enshrining Hannah Arendt’s call to our deeper selves to recognize the accountability of things not done; and that includes profundity, wit, and critical temper, without being bitter.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi envisions Indian democracy to be a constellation of improbable acts by which jurists, citizens, and neighbors uphold the sanctity of rights; whereby hope is a daily practice, a shadow to rediscover diurnally. This is obviously an existential crusade rather than a Catholic utopia. For, at the heart of it lies the question: who made independent India? And who are its true legatees—or the legatees of that independence? Belonging in India, as far as Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s philosophy is concerned, is not national, necessarily, but local—therefore romantically unstable. His India is intimate and fragmentary; and that is not a contradiction. The nation works in practice, but perhaps not in theory.

People firmly entrenched in the belief that they have ‘Gandhian’ credentials—khadi, charkha, memories of the freedom movement, familiarity with the contours of Gandhian journeys, a symbolic membership in the cliques that struggled for constitutional values, and the like—do not posses some form of distinguished citizenship in India; even though they may like to; even though we may want them to. For Gopalkrishna Gandhi, this is a glorious paradox of civic Indian life. This is juxtaposed to the problem of India’s material modernity in the face of the nation’s social—(or what is a less-fashionable notion nowadays, that of spiritual)—deficit. But that is no naïve elegy. Gopalkrishna Gandhi asserts that India did not “become independent to clutch at its founders’ shadows.” What he means is that India is not a Frankenstein; that its fallibilities or progress cannot be compared with the visions or feelings of its supposed makers. The nation is autonomous, even from its birth-givers. Like Gandhianism transcends Gandhi, India transcends its ideas, its ‘uneasy plurality,’ its intractable subservience to artificial intelligence, and tourism-friendly smart-island-building exercises among deforested peoples and species of the Global South.

Having heard Gopalkrishna Gandhi speak on the Constitution of India, I know him more as a voice of the invisible ‘spirit’ of the constitution than its ‘basic structure.’ It is in this light that we should understand his diacope: “A dog, a mere dog, showed Gandhi the truth in Dattapara.” William Shakespeare’s Richard III was willing to exchange his kingdom for a horse, in the throes of a lost battle. In Noakhali, as Mohandas K. Gandhi set out to transact an unsteady interregnum for the horrors of the Partition, like Yudhishthir, he was guided by a dog to a grisly truth—the skeletons and bodies of the departed etched on the soil. The ‘God’ that Gopalkrishna Gandhi hopes to be resurrected as ‘Truth’—of ‘Truth’ as ‘God’ in the meditations of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s Mahatma—will manifest in the nation’s institutions in their ensuing battles against sordid spectacles founded on epic falsehoods.