Abstract
This philosophical meditation, which deals with death as question, presence, and even teacher, begins with Ramchandra Gandhi’s (RCG’s) penetrating essay ‘On Meriting Death.’ What does it mean ‘to merit’ death? To provide an answer, I travel through RCG’s corpus, in dialog with contemporary theorists such as Sri Aurobindo, Daya Krishna, and Mukund Lath. RCG implies that the question about ‘meriting’ death, and life, is not and cannot be ‘personal’ or ‘isolated’. For X to die, is for his close and distant samāj a matter of losing him and living without him. Hence meriting death, as also life, is a joint venture which involves deep understanding regarding non-isolation as the heart of the human situation. RCG’s creative thinking, or svarāj in ideas, reaches its peak when he dares to offer an answer of his own to the piercing question kim āścaryam, ‘what is amazing?’ raised in the Yakṣa-praśna episode of the Mahābhārata. For RCG, the heart of the matter is not the ‘ungraspability’ of one’s unavoidable death, or the perennial search for ‘permanence’ in vain, but our failure to perceive ‘that in the martyā which is amṛta,’ i.e., a sense of solidarity in the face of death, connecting ‘I and Thou,’ which he derives from the icchā mṛtyu of his grandfather, the famous Mahatma.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
1 The quote comes from Sri Aurobindo (1950) Part 3, Book 9: The Book of Eternal Night, Canto Two: The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness.
pratijñā-vākya: ‘preliminary statement’ pronounced by a speaker at the beginning of a philosophical debate.
Gandhi’s article, and the letters sent to him by Magnes and Buber are published in Arvind Sharma (2002), as appendix to the chapter on M. K. Gandhi.
In the following lines, Sāvitrī is the epic character; Savitri (without diacritical marks) is Aurobindo’s protagonist; and Savitri (in italics) is the title of Aurobindo’s poem.
Qutb Ud-Din-Aibak, founder of the Sultanate, built the first story in 1192; Ilutmish, Aibak’s successor built the next three stories in 1220; in 1369, a lightening-strike destroyed the top story, and Firoz Shah Tughlaq replaced the damaged story, and added the fifth one.
References
Aurobindo, S. (1950). Savitri: A legend and a symbol. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department.
Aurobindo, S. (1997). Indian literature. In Sri Aurobindo, The renaissance in India and other essays on Indian culture (pp. 314–383). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department.
Buber, M. (1923). Ich und du. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag.
Chakrabarti, A. (2011). I AM THOU: Meditations on the truth of India by Ramchandra Gandhi. Review article. http://www.india-seminar.com/2012/636/636_books.htm. Accessed 24 May 2018.
Chakrabarti, A. (2013). Now, Kālī, I shall eat you up!—On the logic of the vocative. In A. Raghuramaraju (Ed.), Ramchandra Gandhi: The man and his philosophy (pp. 194–208). New Delhi [U.A]: Routledge.
Chakrabarti, A. (2014). Whether anyone deserves to die? The Telegraph, India, Tuesday, July 1, 2014, https://www.telegraphindia.com/1140701/jsp/opinion/story_18568791.jsp.
Chandra, V. (1995). Red earth and pouring rain. Boston, New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Daya Krishna (1952). An attempted analysis of the concept of freedom. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 12(4), 550–556.
Daya Krishna (1999). Thinking creatively about the creative act. Punjab University Research Bulletin, 30(1&2), 18–26.
Daya Krishna (2006). Bondages of birth and death: emerging technologies of freedom on the horizon and the hope of final release from the foundational bondage of mankind. In Daya Krishna, Indian philosophy: A counter perspective (Rev. & enl. ed.) (pp. 509–528). New Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications.
Gandhi, R. (1981). On meriting death. Philosophy East and West, 31(3), 337–353.
Gandhi, R. (2002). Svarāj: A journey with Tyeb Mehta’s ‘Shantiniketan triptych’. New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery.
Gandhi, R. (2003). Mokṣa and martyrdom. Lecture delivered at the National Institute of advanced studies, Bangalore, 14 November 2003. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPYb3BsoCI0.
Gandhi, R. (2005). Muniya’s light: a narrative of truth and myth. New Delhi: Roli Books, IndiaInk.
Gandhi, R. (2011 [1984]). I am thou: meditations on the truth of India, Delhi: Academy of Fine Arts and Literature.
Jagadānanda, Swāmi (Ed. & Trans.). (1949). Upadeśasāhasrī, gadyapadyabhāgadvayam: A thousand teachings, in two parts—prose and poetry—of Srī Śaṅkarāchārya. Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math.
Lath, M. (2016). Thoughts on svara and rasa: music as thinking/thinking as music. In A. Chakrabarti (Ed.), The Bloomsbury research handbook of Indian aesthetics and the philosophy of art (pp. 93–106). New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Paranjape, M. (2013). Ramchandra Gandhi’s ‘truth’: non-dual mediations and meditations. In A. Raghuramaraju (Ed.), Ramchandra Gandhi: The man and his philosophy (pp. 25–59). New Delhi [U.A.]: Routledge.
Patañjali (2012). Patañjali’s Yogasūtra and Vyāsa’s Yogasūtra-bhāṣya. In Swāmi Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali. Calcutta: University of Calcutta.
Radhakrishnan, S. (2005). The principal Upaniṣads. New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India.
Raghuramaraju, A. (2013). Ramchandra Gandhi: The man and his philosophy. New Delhi [U.A]: Routledge.
Sartre, J.-P. (1947). No exit. New York: Knopf.
Sharma, A. (2002). Modern Hindu thought: the essential texts. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Shulman, D. (1996). The Yakṣa’s questions. In G. Hasan-Rokem & D. Shulman (Eds.), Untying the knot: On riddles and other enigmatic modes (pp. 151–167). New York: Oxford University Press.
Suhrud, T. (2013). Emptied of all love: Gandhiji on 30 January 1948. New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library http://125.22.40.134:8082/jspui/bitstream/123456789/811/1/18_tridip_suhrud.pdf.
Śaṅkarācārya. (1998). Śrīmadbhagavadgītā with Śāṅkarabhāşya. Works of Śaṅkarācārya in original Sanskrit (Vol. 2). Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This paper is dedicated to Mukund Lath.
‘That in death which is deathless,’ or: ‘The deathlessness concealed within death’. Nephrology - Neonatal AKI
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Raveh, D. That in the Martyā Which is Amṛta: a Dialog with Ramchandra Gandhi. SOPHIA 57, 389–404 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0680-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0680-7