Of all the figures through whom India has come to recognise itself, none is as instantly identifiable as the bald, bespectacled man with a gentle smile and a staff, wrapped in khadi. Mahatma Gandhi is part of the national imagination before he’s ever part of any syllabus — from the national currency to street names, statues and government schemes to a national holiday on his birthday. But cultural visibility can be a treacherous guide. Gandhi is ubiquitous in contemporary India, but he has largely slipped out of lived memory, and he now reaches the young pre-packaged, a figure already interpreted, framed and filed away. 

"The education system has reduced him to merely a textbook lesson, which, like every other lesson, you just mug up and regurgitate during the exam, and then it's forgotten," says Tushar Gandhi, activist, writer and great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. "So the realisation of the real-life person never comes."

But while Gandhi's place in the consciousness of the young may have become faint and ceremonial, his educational philosophies and aspirations continue to reach the new generation of Indians, decades after he first articulated his vision. Chief among these was Nai Talim, or Basic Education, Gandhi’s vision of education through life, for life and throughout life, bringing the head, the hand and the heart, as a unified approach to learning. Simple in conception yet radical in its implications, and deeply rooted in his understanding of Indian society, Gandhi saw education as something far removed from the mere accumulation of knowledge or preparation for an examination or profession. It was meant to draw out the fullest capacities of the individual, intellectual, physical and moral, while anchoring the pursuit of knowledge in socially productive work, community and everyday life. 

“The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is a Xerox copy of Gandhi's Nai Talim,” says Tushar Gandhi. Gandhian thought is visible throughout NEP 2020, from its call to replace rote memorisation with inquiry, discovery and learning by doing, to its insistence on the holistic development of the child rather than the narrow pursuit of marks. It recommends teaching children in their mother tongue in the early years and seeks to dismantle the old hierarchy between academic and vocational education by bringing arts, crafts and practical skills into the mainstream curriculum.

The resemblance, however, has its limits. "It is what Bapu said would be the ideal education. The basic difference between Bapu's idea and the NEP is that the NEP is a top-down enforcement that does not take regional requirements into consideration," Tushar Gandhi added. "Bapu said there cannot be an education policy that is standard and uniform for the whole country. It has to be evolved in the region, and it has to serve the requirements of that region."

Education, in Gandhi's view, was ultimately a moral undertaking. A school that sharpened the mind and trained the hand but left the heart untouched had done only two-thirds of its job, and the heart, for Gandhi, included a person's sense of duty towards their community and their country. “The Gandhian framework was not simply about making knowledgeable children, but about making them conscious of the world around them and of their place within it. That sense of responsibility had to grow alongside knowledge. Take patriotism, for example. Like Gandhi himself, patriotism reaches the young through symbolic and inherited narratives, perhaps before they have the opportunity to examine what the ideas mean,” says Manikanthan, high school History teacher. 

It is the way patriotism is institutionalised and inherited, rather than examined, that makes Gandhi's own understanding of it worth revisiting. The rituals through which schools teach patriotism are easy to learn and easier to perform, giving children a shared sense of belonging, but Gandhi's attachment to the country did not require looking away from its shortcomings. Recognising them, and assuming responsibility for them, was part of that attachment itself. “Patriotism cannot be reduced to rituals. One cannot just sing Vande Mataram or say they love India and then go around spitting on the roads and littering civic spaces. That is not patriotism. Bapu's patriotism was love for one's nation, the act of patriotism is also to admit, 'This is what is wrong with my nation, my people, my country, and this is how we will take responsibility for changing it,'" added Tushar Gandhi.

And so to the man most visible in the country's visual identity, recognised by all, understood by fewer. If the young have lost touch with Gandhi, the remedy may not be another chapter in the textbook or another contest on October 2, but a return to the life that has long been reduced to chapters. "I really believe that Gandhi cannot be taught. Gandhi has to be discovered," Tushar Gandhi concludes. "He has written so much about himself, his own life and his ideology. Studying him in his own words is the best way to discover Gandhi, and then through work, through the service he emphasised throughout his life."