The Mahatma used Angika (body language), Vachika (speech and music), Aharya (props and costuming), and Satvika (inner feelings) to reach out to the masses
“How many of the 310 millions in India have heard of Gandhi?” Sir Thomas Jones, secretary to the British Cabinet, asked Harold H Mann, an agricultural scientist who worked in India, serving as principal of the College of Agriculture, Poona, and chemist to the government of Bombay in 1918, and the author of a book called Earth-eating and the Earth-eating Habit in India. “At least 309 million” was the answer.
Indians did not see MK Gandhi as an avatar or a rishi or a muni or an acharya or even a saint. He was not perceived as a renouncer either as he was intensely active, morally restless, a tireless fighter and passionately involved in the world.
“He was not above political manipulation either and had his share of human failings which included a widely recognised touch of vanity,” says political theorist and academic Bhikhu Parekh.
Hindus instinctively knew who he was not, but could not figure out who he was for the simple reason that they had never in their long history encountered anyone like him. Following Rabindranath Tagore, they settled on the general and rather bland title of 'Mahatma'.
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His message was his life
Gandhi needed to draw larger sections of India’s unarmed humanity into his struggle against the British. He told Indians that they themselves are to be blamed for their own subjugation: “We wore Manchester cloth and this is why Manchester wove it”. He called upon his people to put their many differences aside and to unite in order to shake off the shackles of subjugation.
He needed to inject into the urban and rural masses a new mentality of fearlessness and a belief in their own capacity to achieve it. He brought forth a carefully planned, creatively symbolic, morally disciplined, geographically extensive struggle based on Satya and Ahimsa.
“It was this holistic, principled communication that marked Gandhi ‘for generations to come’ figure of Albert Einstein,” says Peter Gonsalves, teacher of communication at University of Rome.
Gandhi was able to harness the faith of the multitudes into a considerable moral authority through his austere living which he was able to convert into political authority and he was also given a social authority as Bapu to advise the national family as a father figure.
He was convinced India needed a new Yugadharma. Every community had to find answers by trial and error for the perennial problems of human existence. Individuals, too. His message was his life and the experiments with truth that he attempted.
4 modes of communication
Carnatic violin maestro Lalgudi Jayaraman told me once that many families in Lalgudi (a municipality in the Tiruchirapalli district of Tamil Nadu) did not light kitchen fires when Gandhi was fasting in Yerawada jail or elsewhere. Narayan Desai, son of Gandhi’s secretary Mahadev Desai, mentioned the same happened even in the North Western regions of India and in the East and Middle India.
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Communication is thought to be the idea of sharing. Communication, says the Natyashastra, the ancient Sanskrit treatise on dramaturgy, is the aim of all performances.
Gandhi used all four modes of communication or abhinaya, described in the Natyashastra, becoming a performance manager of the freedom struggle.
Congress House, Bombay, 1931
The four modes of abhinaya communication (the way of leading the viewer to another world) are Angika (through the body); Vachika (through words, speech and music); Aharya (through props and costuming), and Satvika (through expressing inner feeling). The goal is to create Sahridayas (audience that feels the rasa or the mood). Gandhi’s Sahridaya was the Satyagrahi. All his life, he worked to create his Sahridayas.
Angika: Body as a mirror of the soul
On February 2, 1946, when Gandhi was travelling from Madras to Madurai by train, a group of weavers in Chinnalapatti came and sat on the rails to stop the train to have a darshan of Gandhi. They had even manipulated the railway signal for the train to stop. Gandhi was made to come and stand at the door of his compartment.
He did not speak. He just looked at all of them at a glance. Everyone present there later boasted that he had looked at him or her specifically and given a message.
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Once when he had to speak to a large gathering on his silent day, he just raised his hand, showed five fingers one by one and finished his address. An associate explained to the crowd that he wanted everyone to remember five things and incorporate them in their lives.
The first finger was for education. Education meant questioning and girls must have formal education. The second finger was for the avoidance of intoxication. The third finger to use as much as possible nature-friendly, village-made, handmade products. The fourth finger was for mother tongue and 'rashtra bhasha' Hindi. The fifth finger was for truth and nonviolence which were a compound word for him.
On his visit to Madras in 1915, a large number of students who had come to receive him at the station were looking for Mr and Mrs Gandhi in the first-class compartment but these two had got down from a third class compartment and were waiting to be received. Host GA Natesan had organised a horse-drawn carriage to move the Gandhis to his place but the students unharnessed the horses and drew the carriage by hand up to Natesan’s house. How did they know him? He was not yet a leader of the freedom struggle in India in 1915.
Gandhi was not unaware of his charisma. He gave a lot of attention to his body, looking at it as a mirror of the soul and a source of strength. He had an obsessive interest in hygiene and diet which was seen as an eccentricity. The stories related to his hygiene work and his bare-chested walk mesmerised his people.
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What more could be a more dramatic message to the world than a 24-day walk to pick up salt at the shore of Dandi when it could have been done in fewer days much closer to Ahmedabad? On an average, Gandhi walked around 18 km every day for nearly 40 years. (During his campaigns from 1914 to 1948, it is estimated that he walked approximately 79,000 km, which is equivalent to circling the Earth twice.) He gave interviews to the press and met political leaders during his walks.
Vachika: Music as the message
Gandhi’s verbal and written output is astonishing. A cursory glance at the indices of the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi will reveal an enormous number of speeches, comments, interviews, discussions, letters, replies, diary notes, telegrams, reports, messages, petitions, appeals, articles and books. One can hardly believe that a bumbling student and a nervous lawyer could go on to become such an effective journalist and communicator. He replied to every letter he received. He addressed different topics, including menstruation, in his letters.
The use of devotional music was an important vachika aspect of Gandhi’s communication. He used music to give his messages. In his speech at the Second Gujarat Educational Conference in 1917, Gandhi said “music must get a place in our efforts at popular awakening.” He perceived music to be an instrument of communication, a means to reach out to the people, a medium of spiritual development. Gandhi also used it as a means to calm crowds and orient them to his discourse.
Aharya: The power of dress
Gandhi used his costume to give out a message to the world. Younger Gandhi was like other educated Indians of his time, trying to imitate the British in clothing, trying to starch his shirt and wearing three-piece suits. But it was the death of a miner in South Africa that prompted him to change his clothing to Indian dress as a message of mourning.
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He changed his Kathiawadi turban and ceremonial dhoti to simple dhoti and wore the Gandhi cap only a few times in 1915. In 1921 in Madurai, he decided to do away with the stitched shirt and wore his dhoti up to his knees. He wore the same clothing during his trip to London. He just changed the upper cloth on to the other side for his meeting with King George V in Buckingham Palace in the month of November in London! He knew the power of dress to touch the sensibilities of his audiences.
Satvika: Silence and fasts
Silence became a mode of his communication several times. His silent days gave him an aura that people began to believe he was a saint. Added to it were his many fasts, 21 days being the longest among the 18 major fasts he undertook. These fasts had to be communicated to people and the results had to be obtained. It had to be public.
On September 5, 1947, a Bengali journalist asked him for a message to his people just after his fast in Hyderi Manzil. Gandhi wrote in Bengali, “My Life is My Message.”
