SVARAJ: A JOURNEY WITH TYEB MEHTA'S SHANTINIKETAN TRIPTYCH By Ramchandra Gandhi Vadehra Art Gallery Price: Not Listed Pages: 240

Anguish takes many forms. It can be contained in the quiet meditative mode of the artist and thinker as in the more flamboyant actions of those who take to the streets in an ecstasy of self-flagellation.

Ramchandra Gandhi unfurls his angst against a canvas of epic proportions and manages to touch both these extremes. As a distinguished philosopher, culture commentator, bearer of the Gandhi name and custodian of the sage's message of "action-filled" pacifism, he can do no less. Contradictions are of the essence. Plurality of vision or viewpoints is to be celebrated just as ardently as the gopis embraced the multiple personalities of Krishna as he appeared, holographically enhanced, perhaps to dance in their midst.

Gandhi is also astute. He pre-empts the suggestion of intimacy by creating his own pliant milkmaid-like figure to whom he addresses his concerns. He proceeds-in the best traditions of philosophical inquiry-to carry out his explorations into the nature of Svaraj, freedom that can also mean self-realisation, through a series of impromptu questions and answers addressed to the real-life Anjali Sen, who was, at a certain point in time, the director of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. He addresses her with a certain tenderness. And as she morphs into the various images he chooses for her from the vaguely Modiglianiesque figures that he finds in the real-life work of art-a three-piece panel painted by Tyeb Mehta that forms the leitmotif of the book-we too share in the process of becoming "Anjali".

SECULAR CANVAS: Mehta and his Shantiniketan Triptych

It would seem that there are two main sources of his anxiety. The state of the nation and the botched entry into Indian nationhood. It is not just the reminder of the two million dead during the Partition riots that Gandhi has spoken about in the past, it is also the thought that neither India nor Pakistan has atoned for what he calls the murders. Or as he has been quoted as saying, "However, we in India and Pakistan cannot claim to have performed the last rites for two million brothers and sisters of ours, because we are responsible for their murders." The result is a failure of selfhood, the perversion of Svaraj to serve the ever-narrowing sectarian ends that have led to a periodic replay of the riots that took place during Partition.

The Tyeb panels that are described as the "Shantiniketan Triptych" serve as a background for this ritual of expiation and redemption. They form a kind of secular backdrop that allows Gandhi to make the connections to Mehta's other emblematic figures-the diagonal gash that slices through many of his paintings, the trussed Bull, tied and fettered and incapable of breaking free, the rickshaw puller of Kolkata, unable to stand on his own feet, the basic symbol of a free person. At the simplest level, it allows him to find a correspondence with Picasso's Guernica and its image of a small flower that he sees sprouting next to the severed hand of a soldier. At another level, the multiplicity of images that he finds in his reading of the Shantiniketan Triptych allows him to have an intuitive understanding of the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, the saint of Arunachala, and of an interpretation of Advaita, not as a doctrine or a formula but as a state of being that could be called Svaraj.

In a coda to his arguments, Gandhi reminds the ever patient Anjali of the Mahatma's own touchstone for right action: think, he says, of the most miserable person you can imagine and decide what you can do to make his life more meaningful. The author's response to this remark is to behave like Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations: "The most miserable person I know is the person I see when I look in the mirror, the person I take to be myself, exclusively; my favoured self-identity."

We do not question either Gandhi's despair or his honesty. But it makes you wonder whether the liberal point of view has failed precisely because it has spent too much time staring into the mirror of its own precious vanity, while all around "Swaraj", as the common multitudes spell the word, has become the Bull force that has mutated and set itself free of all its intellectual pretensions.