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Nearly nine decades later, Gandhi arrives in my political thought classes at the same college, having already been taught elsewhere. Before the formal syllabus, students often have already met him through an “unofficial curriculum”: Inherited polemics, decontextualised quotations and photographs, and increasingly derisive memes, reels, forwards and videos carrying ready-made verdicts. This “unofficial curriculum” lands well against a familiar, flattened moral portrait inherited from school, making the supposedly hidden or scandalous Gandhi feel like a revelation. The pattern is wider than the classroom.

The pedagogical difficulty is not criticism itself, but postponing the verdict long enough for understanding to begin. With Gandhi, more than with most thinkers, students often arrive with premature certainty. A student who says, “I know little about a thinker” gives the teacher considerable room. A student who has seen three reels, corroborated by another video, and thinks the case is closed presents a different challenge. The pre-judgment can extend to the teacher too. An attempt to explain an aspect is quickly read through the pro-or-anti binary.

True, the students of the 1930s and 1940s also had an unofficial curriculum of Gandhi, but it had a practical grammar around it. The two unofficial curricula are not simply positive and negative versions; they differ in how knowledge of Gandhi is produced and acquired. In the earlier mode, khadi was worn, spinning done, picketing undertaken, processions joined — or at least these were live possibilities in the world around. In significant measure, it asked students what Gandhi required of them. The contemporary one readily asks what judgment they should pass on him: The self moves outside the frame, while Gandhi becomes the object to be judged. The concepts remain in the formal syllabus, without much of the world of practice. The result is that Gandhi naturally looks artificial.

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Against this backdrop, a mischievously framed meme or reel finds fertile ground. It favours the visible over the conceptual, the incident over the context, the striking over the slow, and the person over the idea. As one is more a spectator than a participant, the direction of scrutiny also shifts from self-examination (“what does this demand of me?”) to other-examination (“what does this reveal about him?”). In this low-friction form of knowing, a fragment can be seen, judged and repeated with little resistance, and repetition itself passes for corroboration. This facilitates premature certainty.

So we get a peculiar contemporary split. The formal curriculum gives the student Gandhi’s thought without much of its practice; the “unofficial curriculum” gives her Gandhi the person without much of his thought. Gandhi is especially vulnerable to this split, because he made life itself a site of philosophical and political practice.


Perhaps nowhere is this split more visible than in the attention given to Gandhi’s experiments with brahmacharya. For many, this is among the most vivid things they know about him. One class was revealing. Students invoked a familiar photograph of Gandhi with young women, including his grandniece Manu, and presented it through the visible facts of age, gender and bodily proximity, within an already sexualised frame. Detached from its conceptual world, the episode is easily reduced, as in many online memes, to something like: Old man, young woman, bed. Once described that way, the verdict is almost built into the description.

When the photograph is placed back within the conceptual world that such a description leaves out (Manu’s own account of Gandhi as her “mother”; Gandhi’s attempt to think through motherhood and naritva, which Ashis Nandy reads as a challenge to conventional masculinity; brahmacharya as self-mastery tied to swaraj and self-purification; and the surrounding communal bloodshed of Noakhali), the frame shifts. This did not settle all ethical questions. But many questions receded, others grew more nuanced, and the impulse to deliver a verdict gave way, at least for a while, to self-reflection.

The writer teaches at Indraprastha College, Delhi University. Views are personal