The Gandhi who circulates in global consciousness bears only passing resemblance to the historical figure who lived from 1869 to 1948. This is not merely a case of simplification—all historical memory involves compression—but something more systematic: the active suppression of contradictions that would complicate the icon's usefulness as a symbol of moral purity.

The commemorative apparatus that emerged after Gandhi's assassination in 1948 faced a peculiar challenge. Here was a figure whose political utility required consistency, yet whose actual life and thought contained sharp discontinuities, troubling episodes, and positions that subsequent generations would find indefensible. The solution was not to explain these contradictions but to excise them, producing what the historian Tridip Suhrud calls a 'portable Gandhi'—a figure reduced to quotable aphorisms about non-violence.

Understanding how this sanitization occurred matters beyond the particular case. Gandhi's transformation reveals the mechanisms by which historical memory operates: what gets remembered, what gets actively forgotten, and whose interests these selective processes serve. The hagiographic tradition that calcified around Gandhi illuminates broader patterns in how societies construct usable pasts from contradictory materials.

The Gandhi who emerged as a global symbol of non-violent resistance was largely a post-independence construction, though the foundations were laid earlier. During his lifetime, Gandhi was a polarizing figure even within the independence movement—criticized by revolutionaries as too passive, by constitutionalists as too disruptive, by socialists as insufficiently radical on economic questions. His assassination by a Hindu nationalist in January 1948 initiated the commemorative machinery that would flatten these debates.

The newly independent Indian state required legitimating myths, and Gandhi—now conveniently martyred—provided ideal raw material. The government that came to power included many who had clashed bitterly with Gandhi over strategy and principle. Yet these same figures now oversaw the construction of a state-sponsored Gandhi cult: the establishment of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, the proliferation of Gandhi statues and street names, the incorporation of Gandhian imagery into official nationalism.

The international dimension of Gandhi's iconization followed different but complementary logics. During the Cold War, Gandhi offered Western liberals a non-communist model of anti-colonial resistance—proof that empire could be challenged without revolution. Martin Luther King Jr.'s explicit adoption of Gandhian methods in the American civil rights movement further cemented this interpretation, making Gandhi synonymous with a particular style of moral suasion that threatened no fundamental social arrangements.

What disappeared in this process was the specific content of Gandhi's political thought. His critiques of industrial civilization, his vision of village autarky, his complicated positions on caste, his experiments with celibacy and dietary restriction—all of this became background noise, occasionally acknowledged but rarely integrated into the commemorative image. The 'Mahatma' (great soul) honorific, which Gandhi himself found uncomfortable, became the dominant frame: a saint rather than a political strategist with specific and debatable commitments.

The hagiographic tradition also required managing the documentary record. Gandhi was among the most extensively documented figures of the twentieth century—his Collected Works run to over ninety volumes. This abundance of evidence posed problems for coherent commemoration, since attentive readers could find Gandhi contradicting himself or expressing views incompatible with his saintly image. The solution was selective quotation: Gandhi reduced to 'Be the change you wish to see in the world' (a statement he never actually made) rather than the difficult thinker who wrote thousands of pages on topics from diet to political economy.

Takeaway

The construction of historical icons typically requires the suppression of internal contradictions—not because the original figure was consistent, but because commemorative utility demands coherence that actual lives rarely possess.

The sanitized Gandhi requires the systematic minimization of episodes and positions that complicate his moral authority. These suppressions are not random; they follow patterns that reveal both what contemporary commemorators find unacceptable and what the commemorated figure actually believed at various points in his long life.

Gandhi's early career in South Africa presents particular difficulties. His political awakening there is central to the hagiographic narrative—the transformative moment when a British-trained lawyer discovered the humiliations of racism. Less frequently discussed are Gandhi's explicit statements during this period distinguishing Indians from the 'Kaffirs' (native Africans), his arguments that Indians deserved better treatment because they came from an ancient civilization, his participation in British military campaigns against African populations. These positions reflected the racial hierarchies of his era, but acknowledging them complicates the image of Gandhi as universal champion of the oppressed.

Gandhi's positions on caste have undergone similar selective transmission. The commemorative tradition emphasizes his campaigns for 'Harijan' (children of God) uplift and his personal practices of caste-mixing. What receives less attention is Gandhi's long defense of varnashramadharma—the four-fold division of society by occupation—which he distinguished from 'untouchability' while maintaining that the basic caste structure represented a rational division of labor. His debates with B.R. Ambedkar on these questions reveal positions far more conservative than the hagiographic tradition acknowledges.

Gandhi's experiments in bodily discipline—particularly his practices of celibacy that involved sleeping naked with young women to 'test' his self-control—have largely disappeared from mainstream commemoration. These practices, documented in his own writings and those of close associates, were controversial during his lifetime and led to serious ruptures with family members and colleagues. They are not easily assimilated to any contemporary framework, whether traditional or progressive, and thus tend toward simple omission.

The pattern across these suppressions is consistent: what cannot be explained away is simply left out. The result is a Gandhi who never struggled with the prejudices of his era, whose positions on social hierarchy were uniformly progressive, whose personal practices were conventionally respectable. This figure is useful for commemorative purposes but has been severed from the historical Gandhi who was—like all historical figures—embedded in and shaped by the specific contradictions of his time and place.

Takeaway

What gets suppressed in biographical traditions often reveals more about the commemorating society's anxieties than about the commemorated figure's actual significance—the silences in historical memory are never neutral.

The hagiographic consensus on Gandhi has never been universal within India. A robust counter-tradition, centered on the figure of B.R. Ambedkar and continued by contemporary Dalit intellectuals, offers fundamentally different evaluations of Gandhi's legacy. This counter-memory is not marginal; it represents the perspective of communities constituting roughly a quarter of India's population.

Ambedkar's critique of Gandhi, developed across decades of political engagement and intellectual production, centered on what he saw as Gandhi's fundamental commitment to preserving Hindu social order. For Ambedkar, Gandhi's anti-untouchability campaigns were reformist measures designed to prevent more radical transformation—treating symptoms while defending the disease. The famous Poona Pact of 1932, in which Gandhi's fast-unto-death compelled Ambedkar to abandon separate electorates for Dalits, remains in Dalit memory not as a triumph of unity but as political blackmail that subordinated Dalit interests to upper-caste Hindu nationalism.

Contemporary Dalit scholarship has extended and systematized Ambedkar's critique. Historians like Anand Teltumbde and Kancha Ilaiah have documented how Gandhi's interventions on caste consistently prioritized Hindu unity over Dalit liberation, how his romanticism of village life ignored the specific violence that villages represented for lower-caste communities, how his category of 'Harijan' imposed a patronizing framework that Dalits themselves rejected. This scholarship draws on the same documentary record that hagiographers use, but reads it against the grain.

The existence of Dalit counter-memory reveals the stakes of biographical interpretation. Whose Gandhi becomes authoritative has consequences for how contemporary India understands its founding moment and its ongoing caste conflicts. The mainstream commemorative tradition's marginalization of Ambedkarite critique is not innocent; it reflects and reinforces particular distributions of cultural authority.

International reception of Gandhi has largely ignored this counter-tradition. The portable Gandhi who circulates globally as icon of non-violent resistance carries no trace of the Dalit critique, which complicates both his moral authority and his political usefulness. Recovering this suppressed dimension of Gandhi's reception is not merely an academic exercise; it demonstrates how commemorative practices actively shape which historical interpretations gain currency and which remain confined to subordinated communities.

Takeaway

Counter-memories maintained by marginalized communities often preserve critical perspectives that dominant commemorative traditions have actively suppressed—the existence of alternative interpretations is itself historical evidence about power and memory.

The sanitized Gandhi persists not because the contradictions have been resolved but because they have been rendered invisible to most audiences. This invisibility is itself a form of historical violence—not against Gandhi, who is beyond harm, but against the complexity of the past and the communities whose interpretations have been marginalized.

Recovering the contradictory Gandhi matters not to diminish his achievements but to understand what historical memory actually does. The processes that transformed a controversial political figure into a universal moral icon are the same processes that operate on all historical memory. Studying them in Gandhi's case illuminates how commemorative traditions are made, who makes them, and whose interests they serve.

The question is not whether Gandhi was 'really' a saint or a villain—biographical questions framed in such terms already concede too much to the hagiographic mode. The question is what we learn about ourselves from the ways we have chosen to remember him, and what remains to be recovered from the Gandhi who has been forgotten.