India Book Review: Inhaling the Mahatma, by Christopher Kremmer
on Richard Johnson (India), 06/May/2010 11:09, 34 days ago
Nearly fifty years after theassassinationof the Mahatma Gandhi, a copper urn containing part of his ashes--which were supposed to have been emptied into the Bay of Bengal in 1948--was found in a bank vault in theOriyancity of Cuttack. Gandhi's great-grandsonTushar Gandhiwon a custody battle for his ancestor's remains, and brought the urn to Allahabad--the city built at the confluence of theGangesandYamunarivers--for a scattering ceremony.Aussie journoChristopher Kremmer, a foreign correspondent from Sydney, attended the ceremony and found himself a prime vantage point for photography as Tushar, standing in the Ganges River, opened the urn to release the cloud of ashes. Wrote Kremmer:"Clicking away with my camera, I didn't realise that the amorphous cloud was creeping close to me, pushed along by wayward zephyrs. The first thing I noticed was a strange, metallic taste in my mouth. Then, a peppery sensation infiltrated my nose, like that preceding a sneeze. Suddenly, shockingly, I realised that I wasinhaling the Mahatma."Kremmer covered Indian news for international media for much of the period between 1991-2004, and collected his professional memoirs in this excellent travelogue.India's slow emergence, after the Cold War, as a burgeoning global power buoyed by a shift toward free-market capitalism and privatization parallels the latent development of contemporary identity politics in a country whose people and regions are almost as diverse as they are numerous. And Kremmer saw and wrote about much of it, from the assassination of Prime MinisterRajiv Gandhiin 1991 to theGujurat riotsof 2002.In addition to inhaling the Mahatma, Kremmer was also caught smack in the middle of theAyodhya affair--the destruction of the Babri Mosque by Hindu fundamentalists--perhaps the single most illustrative event of the new Indian era.Along the way, Kremmer explored the softer sides of Hindu political, historical and cultural identity, in ashrams and ancient temples; he also married an Indian woman and established a life for himself as an expat wallah.The book is an able companion to the traveller's discovery of modern India; an informed and compassionate catch-up on the last twenty years of Indian current events.Inhaling the MahatmaBy Christopher KremmerHarperCollins, 2006419 pages