On August 27, the American media organization PBS aired on television an excellent documentary The March, which details "the compelling and dramatic story of the 1963 March on Washington,
where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his stirring 'I Have a Dream' speech". The full documentary can be viewed for free on the PBS website (I hope that is true for those outside of North America too).
I was moved to see Jawaharlal Nehru appear briefly in the documentary. He was
not mentioned by name in the narrative, but I felt he symbolically
represented so many things: the fact that mass nonviolence first
emerged not among the global core but among the periphery; that he
was bearing witness to these political struggles on behalf of
hundreds of millions of brown people who had been colonized for
centuries; that like Pres. Kennedy, he was born into immense wealth and
privilege, while the people who needed equal rights and freedom the
most were the very poor, the hungry, and the physically violated;
and that he, Pres. Kennedy, King and Bayard Rustin were
men whose lives public and private cannot be understood as somehow
separate from their sexual lives. I cannot help but think of an
Indian friend who proudly told me of Nehru's alleged affair with Edwina
Mountbatten. Perhaps in my friend's mind at that moment
Mountbatten, herself symbolic of the elite white woman's power, was
reduced into a mere object of the brown man's sexual conquest.
I
mention this because although all these men are symbols of various
kinds, and rightly so, they like Gandhi and so many other leaders
were complex, multidimensional people, as are we. Among the great
nonviolent leaders, we almost always see not preordained purity but
spiritual struggle, all-too-real failings and the attempt to harness
powerful human drives for good. We cannot understand their lives and
how they are understood by their admirers and detractors without
understanding this complexity and how they dealt with it. There is
the integrity and dignity of nonviolence that most of us aspire so
fervently for, and there is the reality of our lives, which are
typically colored by countless struggles personal and public. We
cannot conceptualize one without the other. While I often reflect on
how miraculous a life like that of Abdul
Ghaffar Khan was, at this moment I am moved to reflect that it
is a miracle that nonviolence is more often practiced by
all-too-real people whose lives are our lives too, no matter their
station in life.
