Requiem for the Gandhi Topi

EARLIER THIS YEAR, the gang­ster Arun Gawli, who has been serving a sentence for life imprisonment, appeared to be running into a stretch of good luck. It began in April when the Bombay High Court (HC), citing a policy for remission, directed the state to con­sider his appeal for early release, and it extended into the following month, when he, along with six others, was acquitted in a case involving ex­tortion. This patch of good fortune however ran out last month, when the Supreme Court, unconvinced that he would lead the rest of his life in quiet reflection, stayed the HC order that had put in motion his release from prison.

While no one can be certain about Gawli’s return to his past life of crime, what will be in little doubt, had the former crime lord made his way out, would be his choice of headgear. In one of the most remarkable attempts at rein­vention, the former don has been trying to per­suade the public for nearly three decades now that he has turned into a Gandhian. And the tool he deploys primarily to make this point has been a Gandhi topi. Gawli began wearing the cap, along with white kurta pyjamas, some­time in the mid-1990s when he first floated his political party. He has since rarely been spotted without it, not even during his appearances at court or the few times he has managed to come out on bail. Occasionally, he will put in a little more effort. Like the time in 2018, when he sat for and topped an exam for Gandhian thought in jail, with jail authorities telling amused journalists that he had scored 92.5 per cent.

It is easy to explain why the Gandhi topi has become inseparable from Gawli’s head. Wear­ing the cap conveys the idea—albeit with little success—that he has reformed, and helps in giving some legitimacy to his party that still exists. His failure at that enterprise of course has less to do with the cap and more with the antecedents of its wearer.

Regardless of his motives, Gawli remains today one of the rare few individuals in public life who still habitually wears the cap. Consider for a moment the heads of politicians today, whose ranks Gawli once aspired to join. Run your eyes through the ruling and Opposition benches in the Indian Parliament, and you will find that amidst the dissension, discord, and animus even, the quiet absence of the Gandhi topi today unites them all.

Designed by Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi himself, although he is said to have rarely worn it, this cap that be­came an assertion of swadeshi and non-cooperation during the colonial era, and that for decades after Independence, remained inseparable from the heads of any individual aspir­ing to political office, is today nowhere to be seen. It continued to sprout from decade to decade, mostly on the heads of Congress leaders, until it suddenly disap­peared from there too. There was a brief re­vival about a decade-and-a-half ago, when it appeared on the head of Anna Hazare during his India Against Corruption protests in Delhi, and was then carried forward, with a few tweaks, by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), but it has dropped off from the scene yet again.

It will be worthwhile at first to recall how this cap, that looks something like a child’s upturned paper boat, came into be­ing in the first place. Its origins are some­what disputed. Some claim that Gandhi brought the idea of such a cap to India from his experience in the jails in South Africa, where a version of it was part of the uni­form for Black inmates; while others have suggested it might have stemmed from his interest in designing something that projected an idea of Hindu-Muslim unity.

What we do know is that Gandhi was looking to come up with a cap that could have national appeal, and which was both affordable and easy to wear. Scholar Emma Tarlo, citing a letter Gandhi wrote to a friend, in her book Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, writes that Gandhi began by considering the many traditional hats that are worn across India. “The Punjabi phenta looks fine, but it takes up too much cloth. The pugree is a dirty thing. It goes on absorbing perspiration …and seldom gets washed. Our Gujarati conical Bangalore caps look hideous to me. The Maharashtrian Hungarian caps are a little better, but they are made of felt. As for the UP and Bihari caps, they are so thin and useless that they can hardly be considered caps at all. . . . [and] the Kash­miri cap is made from wool,” Tarlo quotes from Gandhi’s letter.

Gandhi eventually came up with a de­sign that was similar in shape to a Kashmiri hat, made of khadi, and both affordable and suited to hotter climates. The cap was a huge success at asserting a pan-Indian iden­tity and as a symbol of swadeshi and non-cooperation, and history books are replete with attempts by the British at banning it, only to trigger more protests and draw more prominence to the cap. Gandhi how­ever had so masterfully woven the idea of nationalism and morality into the fabric of this cap that even after Independence, no politician could afford to discard it. “Af­ter fighting for freedom under the banner of khadi, politicians could not just turn around and forget about it once the British had left,” Tarlo writes in her book. Nehru wore the cap, so too did Rajendra Prasad, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and many other leaders in that generation and the ones that fol­lowed. It was also an easy symbol to co-opt, and no political party was better poised to make it part of their essential getup than Congress. Even Rajiv Gandhi, who usually dressed in modern clothes, readily ditched them, along with his aviator’s uniform, in favour of clothes spun from khadi, topped with a Gandhi topi, when he entered the political fray.

THE CAP HOWEVER disappeared from the scene until Hazare resur­rected it during the anti-corruption protests in 2011. He may not have been purposefully channelling Gandhi when he wore the cap. The Gandhi topi after all continues to remain a popular choice of headgear among elderly men in some rural parts of Maharashtra even today. But coupled with his propensity to go on hunger strikes, it was enough to con­vey the image of a man unspoiled by the rough and tumble of modern politics. Arvind Kejriwal and AAP took to this cap, with the party’s symbol of the broom emblazoned on one side and the initials of the party on the other, with much vigour, but they too gave up on it after a few years. Their cap was of course not made of khadi, but by the cheaper mesh fabric that is often known as ‘China net’. By 2017, when Punjab’s then Deputy Chief Minister and Shiromani Akali Dal President Sukhbir Singh Badal would de­clare to voters that “Punjabis won’t allow topiwalas to rule in Punjab”, Kejriwal and his party members had already all but given up on the cap.

While the cap has now vanished, it has left its imprint behind. There are many more caps that various po­litical and social groups continue to wear today. There is the red cap of the Samajwadi Party that, in shape, looks exactly like the Gandhi topi, except for its colour. Its spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary told the Indian Express that the red cap was adopted by socialist lead­ers in their first convention in Patna in 1934. “The leaders subsequently went their separate ways, but they and the members of their organisations and parties continued to wear the red cap,” he told the newspaper. Samajwadi Party is believed to have adopted this red cap in its early days, although it is Akhilesh Yadav who has made its use more wide­spread across the party. There is also a saffron version of the Gandhi cap that many Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lead­ers and supporters have given to wear­ing in recent years, especially at political rallies. Then there is the black cap of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which was originally khaki in colour (along with khaki shirt and shorts) before the switch in colour was made in 1930. Some have suggested that the uniform, including the cap, traces its ancestry to Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, while others have pointed its inspiration clos­er home, to the Congress Seva Dal uni­form of khaki shorts, white shirt and the Gandhi topi. While these caps might have originated in their own peculiar circumstances, it is quite likely that their designers might have had the image of a cap that could become as distinctive and symbolic as the Gandhi topi in mind.

It is tempting to pin the blame for the cap’s disappearance on the politician, and his (or her) fall from Gandhian values. But the truth is that the cap was originally worn both by the leaders of the freedom movement and the larger public. After Independence, it was the public that moved away from it quite rapidly. Every election thus presented us with the amusing image of the politician trapped in the pre-Independence image of the khadi-clad Gandhi topi-wearing leader addressing a crowd that was modernising quickly, trading its Gandhi topi and khadi for modern shirts and trousers.

With its near complete disappearance today, the political class too has finally moved on from it.

Anna HazareArvind Kejriwaldressfreedom issue 2025Gandhian topiJawaharlal NehruLal Bahadur ShastriRajendra Prasad