•National Post (Nov. 24, 1999)

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Though centuries have passed since the Portuguese set out on colonial excursions that would see them establish a presence in both southern India and Brazil, the cultural connections forged between the two nations remain. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Brazilian city of Salvador, where the 9,000-strong Filhos de Gandhy, devotees of the late Indian pacifist, practice his teachings in the most Brazilian of ways: through music and carnival.

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BAHIA – I awoke early to a scratchy bhajan tape: Hindu devotional songs with frenzied finger-cymbals and raucous call-and-response. Tropical heat crept over the sill with the dawn light. My grandmother’s house in Madras: either you’re awakened by the aggressively pious priests next door, their stereo pirated into the neighbourhood PA system ,or by my aunts, accompanying their sunrise prayers with boom boxes from America-settled sons. Then the room came into focus and I remembered: this was not India. This was Brazil.

It didn’t happen often over my nine weeks in Bahia this spring, but when I did encounter a bit of India in Brazil, it was always surprising and delightful. I’m not just talking about he shy curiosity and quick affection, nor the bureaucracy and poverty, which I have encountered in numerous settings and which many a world-weary Nigerian/Mexican/Native-Canadian might also claim. I mean the déjà vu I experienced upon entering Salvador da Bahia’s historic quarter — yanking me back into the Portuguese port of Cochin, founded in the 16th century, on India’s southwest coast.

Colonial-era residential and commercial buildings, so like the manse where I stayed in Cochin, mounted around the Pelourinho district’s cobblestoned streets. They reminded me that the Portuguese brought mangoes to Brazil from India, and cashews to India from Brazil; that these two huge countries, which in many ways could not be more different, have some very specific cultural and historical experiences in common.

I was invited for tea with Cynthia Coelho, an emigrant from the former Portuguese colony of goa, and head of what she told me was the only Indian family living in the city of Salvador. The early morning bhajans were courtesy of Waldomiro Pereira, the father of some of my friends, 100% Brazilian, but also a life-long India aficionado and a devotee of the south Indian guru, Satya Sai Baba.

But without doubt, the best gift of India that Brazil gave me on this visit was an encounter with Mahatma Gandhi, live and in person.

I was at a free, outdoor concert in honour of the 450th anniversary of the founding of the city of Salvador. A number of Bahian musical greats were performing, including Margarethe Menezes, Tom Zé, and the silver-lunged Gilberto Gil, on a specially erected stage in a city park, the Dique de Tororó. I was in an airless crush 30 or 40 feet away from the stage, but bopping nonetheless.

When a chorus of male voices began singing and I couldn’t see the source, I figured they were standing on the ground in front of the stage, and started worming my way forward for a look. Halfway along my voyage, they launched into a familiar tune: Filhos de Gandhi, written by Edil Pacheco, immortalized by the celebrated samba singer, Clara Nunes. I realized this must be the famous carnival group, whose name (which they spell with a “y” at the end) means “Sons of Gandhi.”

Finally, I gained a glimpse: about 30 men, dressed in white, adorned with strings of blue and white beads, and wearing terrycloth turbans with a huge plastic sapphire in the centre of the forehead — the location of the third eye. It was then that the Mahatma came stately out on stage, supported by a walking stick — a bald, skinny, little brown man in wire-rimmed glasses and a loincloth. He held out his hand to bless the crowd.

Filhos de Gandhy is a Bahian carnival group. It was founded in 1949 beneath a mango tree by a number of stevedores who wanted to pay tribute to the recently assassinated Mohandas K. Gandhi. On this, everyone seems to agree. Accounts differ on a few other details: were there eight stevedores or 50? Were the stevedores on strike, as had been their tradition, in support of some leftist cause, or were they unemployed due to Brazil’s harsh post-war economic policies? When it was decided that their uniform would be made of white sheets, did or did not some especially penurious members parade in bed-clothes donated by prostitutes who stripped their own beds to support this noble initiative?

Really, none of these accounts are mutually exclusive. It just depends at which point you enter the story — with the stevedores’ tentative initial promenade under the suspicious eye of a police cordon, or this year, with the 50th anniversary of the organization, now 9,000 members strong, and a proud Bahian institution.

Filhos de Gandhy’s head office is in the Pelourinho, the old centre of Salvador, in a modest building whose front opens wide to the street. Most times, some members are hanging about in the foyer, watching soccer on a ceiling0mounted TV, in the company of a grinning stuffed camel and a white plaster elephant, trunk raised in cheerful alute. Portraits of Gandhi hang on the aquamarine walls; an altar for candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian syncretic religions, is set up against a pillar. Beyond a turnstile, at the end of a short corridor (where stands an almost life-sized statue of St. Anthony, perpetually offering a stray of sad-looking buns), are the offices from which the day-to-day operations of the group are conducted.

I was invited to join a small group on a caminhada — a promenade — being organized for a neighbourhood party. As one founder, Heondino Joaquim Ribeiro, said (in a book of collected narratives, Filhos de Gandhy: A história de um afoxé), if the group is invited, anywhere, by anyone, “...Gandhy goes, because Gandhy is a public utility.” The short form of the group’s name seems to refer to these 9,000 men as a single body: Gandhy.

It is not only the bony, bespectacled Gandhi look-alike, Raimundo Queiroz de Lima, who has reincarnated the famous pacifist. It is the entire corpus de carnaval. (But it was Raimundo who was chosen some years back to be the group’s Mahatma and, sometimes, in the heat of an event, he can actually believe he is Gandhi.)

On a hot Sunday morning, about 30 Filhos de Gandhy in semi-regalia (not sheets, for this less formal occasion, but white pants and T-shirts with Gandhi’s portrait on the chest) got on the bus with numerous musical instruments and a stuffed goat. Why the goat? The man carrying it told me it was because the goat is a sacred animal both in India and in candomblé. Most of the Filhos de Gandhy members are adepts, and members draw parallels with the pantheistic religions of India.

We dismounted in Cajazeiras 8, a distinctly impoverished quarter far from the city centre, and Gandhy did a 45 minute march, playing and singing songs, mostly songs of praise to the orixás, gods of candomblé. Girls from the neighbourhood, dressed in traditional Bahian head wraps and bustle skirts, danced and clapped ahead of the singers. The goat spun and dipped on its caretaker’s shoulder, in perfect time to the percussion section. Men on horses watched coolly from the sidelines; kids in ragged shorts ran to hug their mothers’ knees.

In may, six Filhos de Gandhy, including Gilberto Gil himself, traveled to India with a documentary film crew. From his home in Rio de Janeiro, Gil told me it had been his idea to organize a caminhada in India, just like th one I had witnessed in Cajazeira 8. “It would have been very expensive tot take a large group, but we took about 50 costumes. We went to a village near Udaipur (in Rajasthan, northwest India) and rehearsed for three days, with local musicians. We dressed up the young guys, teenagers. And we went on a walk, singing Filhos de Gandhy songs and singing their songs, peasant songs.”

Did Gil himself play one-on-one with any Indian musicians? “Well there was a sadhu (an itinerant holy man) we met at an ashram in Rishikesh, who had a flute. It wasn’t anything planned. I just happened to have my guitar with me, and so we jammed.”

Gil had developed an interest in Indian spiritual teachings, like many a young pop star, in the late 60’s. He began practicing yoga and meditation in jail — a brief incarceration courtesy o fthe Brazilian military dictatorship. Many of his song lyrics contain references to Indian philosophy and religion, as well as asocial justice commentaries.

An identification with Gandhi seems highly appropriate, and indeed, Gil has been active in Filhos de Gandhy for 25 years. “When we went to the Gandhi memorial in Delhi to interview the director about Gandhi and the commitment to peace, well, what he told us was...everything we already knew! Gandhi is Gandhi! But it was good to remember, that he was not only a religious man, but a political man.

“Many of the members see what we are doing as candomblé on the street.” The songs Gil and other members have written for the group frequently incorporate chants and devotional phrases from candomblé. “Gandhi was chosen as a godfather to this group to pay homage to his struggle against imperialism and violence.”

Bahia is popularly thought of as the cultural seat of black Brazil. It was here that runaway slaves set up ranches of resistance — self-sufficient farms in the interior, which the colonizers could not crush. Here Afro-Brazilian religions and rhythms are strongest; here, Brazilian black pride has flourished. Filhos de Gandhy is an extension of these traditions of pride. “I think the greatest accomplishment of the group in these 50 years is its nobility,” says Gil. “Filhos de Gandhy is a symbol of distinction, among carnival groups, for its noble reputation. Its music — very mild, in contrast to the electric music of most other groups — our religious side, our dress... It is an oasis, a refuge in the middle of carnival.”

But Gandhi died violently, at the hand of a Hindu who thought the peaceful one had conceded too much. Although Gandhi is still revered as an Indian hero, subsequent generations have at times criticized pacifism as inadequate to modern needs. Has the Brazilian Gandhi experienced such backlash? Over the phone, I can hear Gil raising his distinctive eyebrows: “Filhos de Gandhy, ultimately, is a carnival group. The product we offer is carnival. We are more cultural than political, with a focus on black culture, black religion. But...Filhos de Gandhy is trying to use peace as a weapon, to find the point of least resistance to break through in an easier way.”

Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s partner in crime and independent India’s first prime minister, wrote a book called The Discovery of India. In it, he conceived a metaphor for Indian history as a palimpsest, with each invading or emigrating people spreading a layer on the sub-continent’s canvas, which then hove and cracked. This is India’s beauty: All its separate layers, ancient and modern, show through at once. It is also India’s greatest ugliness: The caste system and other religious rigidities have forbidden the layers to mix. Hence, for example, Pakistan.

(Subversions of the metaphor have also been revealing: witness Salman Rushdie’s brilliant novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh. Coincidentally, the book starts in the spice warehouses of Cochin, in Goa, and takes potshots at bhajan songs Gandhi adapted to create pacifist ditties.)

By contrast, Brazil’s metaphor of the century has been a phrase coined in the 1920’s by poet Oswald de Andrade, “cultural cannibalism.” De Andrade exhorted Brazilian artists to absorb all influences. In a sense, this was an extension of Brazil’s official policy encouraging miscegenation: mix, so that race disappears by consuming itself.

So Brazilians do have a unique mandate for taking a foreign icon and making it their own, though Gandhi is also uniquely suited for adaptation to Brazil. He blended religions quite gleefully, and his political labours were not only directed at loosening the imperial yoke, but at breaking down caste and economic stratification within Indian society.

Gandhi’s term for his peaceful methods was satyagraha, often translated as “soul force.” In the Hindu concept of reincarnation, a soul slips from one body to another. Why should it surprise, then, that an Afro-Bahian movement would reincarnate the soul of Gandhi? Maybe it needn’t surprise, but only delight.

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Many thanks to everyone mentioned in this essay, as well as to Rafael Pereira, Sheila Ribeiro, and Antonio Saba.