The Most Extreme Mom of South Asia- Mahatma Gandhi

Last night I watched the film "The Most Extreme Mom” on Animal Planet channel. The most extreme of them all is Sea Louse. She makes the ultimate sacrifice for her family.

Her babies kill and eat her.

Marathi speaking poet-saints call Vitthal, a male deity, mother “Vithai”. Vithai makes all kinds of sacrifices for her sons and daughters. Bhakti literature is awash with those stories.

Like Vitthal, Mahatma Gandhi too was mother to South Asians although Indians now call him the father of the nation.

William Dalrymple reviewed few of the books, released to coincide sixtieth anniversary of India’s independence, for FT (Aug 18, 2007).

He says: “…Partition brought on a sectarian Armageddon that left 14.5 million uprooted and more than half a million dead in inter-religious massacres… Gandhi’s ideal of an India of village republics remained the enthusiasm of a minority, along with his spinning wheels, friction baths and saline enemas. But thanks to the way he died, India remained the pluralistic democracy he had always fought for, and the Hindu extremists he so disapproved of were marginalised for the next 40 years.”

And mother, after her death, managed to leave a “clean smell” even for a skeptic like George Orwell, for who the stench of all other political personalities of 20th century was unbearable.

Orwell wrote in January 1949 :”… And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air? ……regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind! “




Artist: Dana Fradon The New Yorker February 17, 1968