Gandhian Ideology in the Fiction of Chaman Nahal

Abstract

Mahatma Gandhi was a freedom fighter as well as a social reformer. He was a man of action and intuition. He held no political office. Yet he could arouse the consciousness of an entire subcontinent! A lean, frail, ‘half-naked fakir’—armed with a wooden staff and dignity of a human being, he fought against greatest empire the world has ever known. It was just a moral grandeur of his soul which enabled him to fight against the brute power, in any form, and even vanquish it. As a defender of the human rights, he made people more conscious of their duties, to set a moral order in the society and also to make people learn that the true source of right is duty only. A saint, social reformer and humanist Gandhi held out “a message” which based on “a series of experiment with truth”, touched upon every domain of human life: social, economic, moral/spiritual, cultural, political. Therefore, he is a perennial source of writing and has influenced different disciplines and many writers from different fields like history, politics, philosophy, literature, sociology, and so on. In his principle of non-violence, Gandhi introduces technique of resistance to evil and untruth. His Satyagraha is inspired by boundless love and compassion. It is opposed to sin and evil. Gandhi was the speaker of truth and he did not like falsehood. His fight against untouchability and the notions of superiority and inferiority by birth were well known. R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, and many other Indian writers like Chaman Nahal explore Gandhiji’s view in their writings. Chaman Nahal is the first novelist in the post-independent ethos who delineated Gandhi and Gandhian ideology more realistically than any other writers of the era. Chaman Nahal has exquisitely explored almost all the dimensions of Gandhian Ideology such as Truth, satyagraha, azadi (in true spirit of Swaraj), simplicity, women emancipation, sacrifice, affirmation, belief in equality, humanitarian attitude for weaker sections, Hindu Muslim amity and last but not the least his non-violence.