Girish Karnad explores Tughlaq's character

Girish Karnad’s play Tughlaq explores the character of one of the most fascinating kings to occupy the throne in Delhi, namely, Mohammed-bin-Tughlaq. He ruled for 26 years, a period of unparalleled cruelty and agonising existence for his subjects.

He’s fascinating because though he was one of the most learned monarchs of Delhi, and had great ideas and a grand vision, his reign was also an abject failure. He started his rule with great ideals — of a unified India, of Hindus and Muslims being equal in the eyes of the state (he abolished the onerous tax Jaziya on the Hindus) and the Sultan being the first among equals.

He understood the value of money as not deriving from its intrinsic worth but from the promise behind it: and introduced copper coins. Yet in 20 years his reign had degenerated into an anarchy and his kingdom had become a “kitchen of death”. Girish Karnad’s play explores why this happened.

The play was immensely popular at the time it was produced (1964). India had, within the same span of nearly 20 years (a mere coincidence?), descended from a state of idealism to disillusionment and cynicism, and hence the play found a chord that resonated in the minds of many people at that time. The issues posed by the play remain relevant even today, not only in a political sense, but also for organisations.

The play recaptures the significant events starting shortly after Tughlaq’s ascension to the throne: his proclamations of idealism, his calling upon his people to be a part of the building of a new empire, of prosperity, peace and amity.

But he ascended the throne by dubious means — killing his father and brother during prayer time, though no one was sure. This led to a lack of credibility among his followers from the time he ascended the throne — no one believed what he professed.

The play outlines his clever plots to eliminate his opponents and his surviving an assassination attempt by his own courtiers. This was a turning point in his life: he decided to shift his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad, ordered every single subject to move from Delhi, banned prayer altogether, and imposed unspeakable cruelties on his subjects.

The miseries of the people during the journey, the corruption that was huge and endemic, and Tughlaq’s progressive alienation and isolation from his people are dramatically portrayed. The play ends with scenes of utter chaos and misery in the kingdom, and Tughlaq being left alone, having been abandoned by those who survived him, that is.

Building credibility and authenticity

The play dramatically highlights the importance of credibility and authenticity for a leader. Tughlaq’s vision, like that of Joan of Arc, was great — he thought a country based on religious division was unsustainable; he grasped the importance of token currency and introduced copper coins; his idea of a capital at the centre of India was sound.

But, unlike Joan, the problem with Tughlaq was that when he articulated this vision, no one believed him; everyone was sceptical of his true intentions. His cleverness in dealing with his opponents — he is often shown in the play as playing chess — only worsened his credibility. No one would trust him and he could never trust anyone. On the other hand, Joan was so transparent that what she said gained instant credibility.

There’s a difference between being clever and being credible, something many leaders fail to grasp. They forget that as with the ‘common man’ in Laxman’s cartoons, people aren’t so readily fooled as the clever ones think: though they may say nothing but they listen, watch and understand what’s going on.

The play highlights this point through two characters, Aziz and Azam, who represent a section of people who are even cleverer and who take advantage of every law to enrich themselves.

The irony comes when Aziz tells Tughlaq that among all his subjects, he was the one who fitted “every act, deed and thought to Your Majesty’s words”. When leaders lose credibility, and as a consequence lose touch with reality, these characters rule the roost. Readers will readily recognise the existence of Aziz-like characters in all organisations.

Leaders, in such situations, lose all control. Lacking a clear direction and an authentic message, organisations start drifting and eventually lose their path.

Legitimacy in leadership

The play also highlights the issue of means and ends. The legitimacy of the means influences the ends. Gandhi felt that there could be no such thing as right ends pursued through foul means.

Ends retain the foul odour of the means used to reach them. Tughlaq’s perceived role in the assassination of his father, and that too at prayer time, led to great doubts about his proclamation of ideals and the nobility of prayer. Leaders can come to power through foul means, and they can command positional power. But they can never command moral power.

Ultimately, inspiration comes through conviction, through superior moral power. This is true as much in organisations as in statesmanship, but is often forgotten.

Aren’t much of the problems of leadership today problems of credibility, authenticity and legitimacy? How many employees take the company credo, mission and code of ethics seriously? How many can trust their CEOs fully?

Often top positions in organisations are reached after a power struggle, in which dubious means are used to outwit the other contenders. So long as this struggle is within accepted norms, there’s no problem but often it violates even basic norms of decency. Leaders coming to power after such actions cannot escape the constant scrutiny of their followers and the question constantly whispered: “Does he mean it?” Soon the whispers become screams, and only the leaders don’t hear them. At this stage, the organisations become kitchens of death, and the leaders are all alone.

Women of substance

Ancient India produced two epics that must undoubtedly rank among the greatest epics of the world: Valmiki’s Ramayana and Ved Vyasa’s Mahabharata. These two epics are vastly different in their tenor, messages and portrayal of characters.

Ramayana is described in literature as a Kavya or poem, while Mahabharata is described as itihas or history.

Ramayana is an idealistic poem, full of idealistic characters, and its concept of duty is simple and straightforward. Mahabharata, on the other hand, is a very different story: complex, and full of difficult and ambiguous situations.

No character in the Mahabharata is an ideal person, and no one comes out clean in the end.

The epic seems to be a song of despair, for its characters all suffer, and the great war leads to the wholesale destruction of nearly an entire clan, and to the establishment of a kingdom of widows and orphans. Thus life seems to be ultimately a futile effort.

But it also seems to teach us that life has to be lived and the present is to be faced, and one cannot run away from difficult choices. It’s thus an existentialist approach to life.

Life has to be lived not on the basis of what happened in the past or for an ideal future alone; its essence is to do the “right” action here and now.

The present takes precedence over the past and the future, and the resolution of the conflicts in the present, with the facts on hand, and seen through the coloured spectacles of one’s own world view and prejudices — is also shown to be enormously complex.

This is what makes Mahabharata so useful as a leadership classic, and its characters so fascinating: It’s full of lessons on how to make the difficult choices that leaders, and indeed all of us, have to face.

We shall present four of the most fascinating characters: Draupadi and Kunti in this article, and Karna and Bhishma in next week’s.

Women in the Mahabharata are never the decision makers, reflecting the highly male dominated social order of the day, but they have to undergo great suffering resulting from decisions made by the menfolk.

But remarkably, it’s the women who come out of their ordeals far better than most male characters, notably Draupadi and Kunti.

Draupadi was made to marry all the five Pandavas, though it was Arjuna who had won her, and it was Arjuna she loved. When Yudhishtira lost his kingdom in the game of dice, and when she was dragged into the hall and humiliated, Draupadi showed her mettle.

In reply to Dritarashtra’s asking for forgiveness for what happened, and asking her to make three demands, she made only two: one, that her husbands be set free, and two, that their kingdom returned.

Remarkably, she refrained from making the third wish, and asked for nothing for herself. Nor did she demand retribution to the perpetrators of the crime of her humiliation (though she vowed not to tie her hair until it was drenched with the blood of Dushasana).

When the Pandavas lost their kingdom in a second game of dice and had to go to the forest, Draupadi accompanied her husbands and during the 12 years of forest life, she was the epitome of fortitude.

After the war, she got her revenge against Dushasana, but she also lost all her sons.

It seemed that Draupadi was simply not destined to be happy. Even at the every end, Draupadi had to suffer alone, or nearly all alone, when during their last journey, the Pandavas fell one by one by the wayside.

In the end, it was Yudhishtira going his own way to heaven, and Draupadi left to herself, to complete the final moments of her life on earth. She died, as she lived, with dignity.

Draupadi has fascinated numerous writers, playwrights and so on, and she is ranked among the greatest women of India.

What was remarkable was her stoic strength in the face of all the difficulties, adversities and even humiliation life brought her. What stood her in good stead was her inner strength.

The other character who is an example of fortitude in the face of continuous suffering, though not much written about, is Kunti. Her life had been one of practically unmitigated sorrow, even more than that of Draupadi.

She had to disown her first child, her husband was impotent and died young. She had to live in the Kaurava palace when her sons were in the forest, had to escort her sons to safety and live incognito after the burning of the Lac palace by the Kauravas, and had to coax and even taunt Yudhishtira to finally fight the war to claim his kingdom.

Yet she displayed a steely determination to face these situations as they unfolded. Through all this, she didn’t complain or give vent to her anger; she simply was determined to get what was due to her and her sons.

Amazingly, she nursed no bitterness towards Dritharashtra, the root cause of her sufferings, and his wife Gandhari, and in fact waited on them and served them with devotion after their retirement to the forest.

When at last the forest fire was advancing towards them, she, instead of fleeing to safety, stood by Dhritarashtra and Gandharai, simply and calmly awaiting the fire, sitting in a yogic pose, unbending in her will, in death as she had been throughout her life.

Ability to ride the vicissitudes of life with fortitude and courage, yet without bitterness is a highly desirable quality in a leader. Adopting such a position enables one to see things clearly and take cool decisions.

It’s not easy to maintain such a composure especially when things are going badly wrong, but one has to develop the needed detachment. Gandhi had this strength in abundant degree.

How does one acquire this strength? First, by knowing oneself; second, by acting in accordance with what you are; third, by recognising that vicissitudes are a part of life and are unevenly distributed; and fourth, doing one’s duty as per one’s definition and conscience.

This is what Krishna taught in the Geethopadesha. Reflecting on the meaning of the epic and by going through the lengthy dialogues in Mahabharata is a great experience in preparing oneself to be a stronger person.

Windmills of the mind

Organisations are today, more than ever, trying to ‘develop’ leaders. They are aware that in the coming years, the most critical and strategic resource will be not technology, not even managerial talent, but leadership.

They seem to leave no stone unturned.

While recruiting, they administer questionnaires that are supposed to tell them of their prospective recruits’ leadership potential; once they recruit, they assess how well their new recruits are functioning as leaders, they send them to training programmes, subject them to numerous lectures by leadership gurus (who, in terms of numbers, might be fast approaching the number of managers in whom the magic potion of leadership is sought to be administered) and initiate sophisticated mentorship programmes.

The result is still a feeling of some disappointment.

Why are the leaders not developing despite all our efforts, they ask?

The answer is simple: because leaders cannot be developed. People can only develop themselves to become leaders. And organisations do precious little to help people in self development.

Leaders live life as if they were acting, playing different roles. In this great drama, they need to understand the roles they are playing, and enact them convincingly.

They have to take stock of a situation, write the script impromptu, decide on their role, and the way they must play the role, all on the fly. Life is thus play acting in a continuous manner with no rehearsals, no retakes.

Traditional methods of leadership training and education give limited scope for this play acting. In this sense, Konstantin Stanislavki’s book An Actor Prepares may be a better reading in a course on leadership than a case study or even a book on a great leader.

Literature is an interpretation of human nature by the writer, just as a painting is an interpretation of reality by an artist.

Great pieces of literature present the complexity of human relations, to enable the reader to interpret and come to his or her own conclusions. It’s this interpretation that is the key to personal growth.

Great characters like Macbeth or Chanakya appeal to us because they tell us something, and also because we see a reflection of our own personality and aspirations in these characters. The same scene is seen in life by everybody, but interpretations differ.

So how does the study of literature help in preparing for this role as leaders? We believe that it helps leaders learn to interpret life — of themselves, of others.

A serious study of great works of literature broadens one’s viewpoint and helps in self development.

It helps in attaining greater breadth and capacity to respect others’ opinions, and ability to put things in perspective and see a holistic picture.

It also helps in attaining the versatility that allows one to switch from one subject to another and deal concurrently with many subjects. And finally, it gives greater ability to perceive, conceptually interpret and judge.

The essence of leadership is not merely setting goals, measuring performance, and giving rewards. We think it’s really about creating a charged atmosphere; one of excitement and inspiration where followers rise to heights they never dreamt were possible.

It’s to connect emotionally to people, and get people emotionally connected to one another.

It’s to get people to work not for rewards, but for causes, these causes being seen as valuable ends in themselves. Organisations stress decisions taken ‘coolly’ and without getting emotionally involved.

But can any truly important decisions be taken without emotional involvement? Can there be leadership without emotions? Emotions aren’t an undesirable side effect, they are the main driver in good decisions.

Once this point is grasped, it’s easy to see why training programmes based on the traditional methodologies fail.

They try to apply techniques based on logic, techniques that demand usage of head rather than heart, techniques that are consequentialist and instrumentalist in their approach (So what? What is the increase in profit?).

These techniques are valuable in training and developing managers, but they fail when applied to leadership development because they fail to address the core issue of how to arouse and sustain emotions.

Great writers, poets and playwrights create an interpretation of human life that strikes the chords in the hearts of readers because there is some truth in them, but not the whole truth.

The whole truth is to be interpreted and understood by each reader in his or her own way.

Facts are there, but meaning has to be imputed to them. It’s this possibility of interpretation that make great classics — works that have never finished telling all they have to tell.

Literature provides anchors to understand issues and opportunity to creatively interpret — create numerous circuits — and arrive at one’s own picture.

This is the world view of an individual. We have tried to teach leadership through this method at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, for more than a decade.

Through exposing students to great works of literature, supplemented by some films, we have tried to provoke discussions on a wide variety of issues.

Examples of the works used include Ceravantes’ Don Quixote, Shaw’s Saint Joan, Karnad’s Tughlaq, Visakhadatta’s Mudra Rakshasa, Achibe’s Things Fall Apart, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Irawati Karve’s Yuganthar and so on.

The response has been highly satisfying. Last year 146 students out of 170 took this course. Not bad, considering that it was declared at the outset that the course had no teaching objectives, and students must set their own learning objectives!

What we are planning to do, through a series of articles to be presented in Corporate Dossier in the coming weeks, is to present an entirely different approach to leadership.

The essence of the approach is to show how humanities can be used as a powerful way to understand human emotions, and how one can develop a better understanding of leadership in the process.

We plan to show how your heart can be developed, to enable you to grow, hopefully into a better leader, but grow in any case.

It will be a spur to self development, and hence it would be our endeavour to spur the readers to read further on their own, discover new works, new ideas and new roads.

For as Don Quixote famously remarked, “The pleasure is not when we reach the inn, the pleasure is on the road”!

The Don Quixote guide to leadership

In our MBA course and executive education programmes on leadership , the first piece of literature participants are introduced is Miguel Cervantes’ immortal classic, Don Quixote.

“Don Quixote? What can be learnt from this silly story of a foolish self-styled knight?” ask many participants.

“But he’s no leader!” exclaim some. Yet after class discussions, most see the vital messages this book has for leadership.

Don Quixote isn’t an ordinary book. Don Quixote, and his squire, Sancho Panza aren’t ordinary characters.

The book is one of the most widely read pieces of literature ever produced, translated into virtually every major language in the world, abridged for students at all levels, discussed and debated.

Numerous movies have been made based on this novel, and painters, including Picaso, have produced paintings seeking to capture the essence of Don Quixote.

The French cabinet room in Paris is adorned with a painting of Don Quixote. Surely, the book must be more than a mere silly story of a silly man.

Many readers may be familiar with the basic story. It is about a Spanish land owner, Alonso Quixano, who reads many books on knights, their adventures and chivalrous deeds, and gets so influenced by them that he himself decides to go out as a knight.

He is accompanied by Sancho Panza, a labourer, who is told that he may be given good rewards, and indeed may be made the governor of an island (“it’s not unheard of in stories of knights”).

The key point in the story is that Quixano isn’t allured by promises of riches and rewards, but is attracted by the joy of pursuing an ideal: fighting wrongs in society and helping the weak and oppressed.

Armed with these ideals and his vision of a more just world, Quixano assumes for himself the knightly name of Don Quixote de la Mancha.

His imagination sees beauty only he can see — his old skeletal horse is Roçinante, the best horse in the world; a village girl is his lady love, and is given the name of Dulcinea de Toboso.

The most famous of his exploits is his encounter with the windmills. To him, they are evil giants to be vanquished.

Sancho Panza, a pragmatist, doesn’t see any giants, and exclaims, “But master, they are only windmills”. Don Quixote is not dissuaded — his duty as a knight is clear.

He isn’t to be deterred by the challenge; he must go straight ahead, fearless, head held high.

As luck would have it, no sooner does he thrust his lance at one of the arms of the windmill, than a gust of wind moves the arm, knocking him down. He is down, but not out.

He rises, his dignity intact. These are mere setbacks to be expected; the wounds suffered are wounds of honour.

There are many more adventures; he sees a flock of sheep and imagines them to be an army, and charges at them. He finds a group of people with a lady and imagines her to be a damsel in distress.

He sees a group of chained convicts being taken to the galley, and sees them as an example of oppression of the poor and releases them after a fight with the guards.

In all these adventures, Don Quixote interprets the world in his own terms. We may laugh at his antics but not scorn him. To the end he remains a lovable and admirable character.

Dreams vs reality; madness vs sanity

Don Quixote dreams a fabulous dream. He symbolises the ability of mankind to dream, pursue ideals and venture into the unknown.

Leadership starts with dreams that can inspire. Contrast Don Quixote’s dream and imagination to the “practicality” of Sancho Panza.

Sancho looks carefully at risks and sets out on his journey only because he expects a reward. At the end of a day, he looks forward to nothing but some good food, wine and a soft bed.

He represents the mundane and earthy in us. To Don Quixote, the reward is inconsequential; the reward is the pursuit of the ideal itself.

He is less interested in the food and wine at the end of the journey than the challenges and perils of the journey itself. He lives every moment, Sancho simply lives through every moment.

Possible dreams

Leadership is about living, not living through, not only for the leader, but also the followers.

As the noted psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp notes in the chapter on Don Quixote in his book If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him, “Life is very dull for those who are too mild, too unimaginative, too sane to bring to it a sense of personal style, of individual purpose, a colour, a verve, fun and excitement”.

Don Quixote’s message is: Do not always lead life as it is; lead it also as it should be.

This is, of course, to be tempered with realism. Don Quixote is totally divorced from reality. In this sense, he can be considered mad. But is he really mad, any more than many other leaders who define life on their own terms and change the course of history forever?

After Gandhi was thrown out from a train on that fateful night at Pieter-Maritzberg in South Africa, he decided to fight the giants of evil — racism, discrimination, oppression and exploitation, much against the advice of the “practical” Indians there.

Take one of India’s greatest industrial visionaries of the twentieth century: JN Tata. Was he sensible when he pursued his dream of a steel mill in India in the late nineteenth century?

There were so many experts who told him why India cannot produce steel. One worthy Englishmen even vowed to eat every pound of rail produced in India. But JN Tata pursued his dream, armed only with his confidence.

But some may say: “Don’t compare Tata with Don Quixote. Don Quixote is plain mad.” But what is madness? Is it not merely seeing things differently from the others? Madness, in some forms can be more exciting than reality.

Would we not, as Sheldon Kopp says, prefer the madness of Don Quixote to the sanity of Sancho Panza any day? And say: “If this be the wine of madness, come, fill my cup!”
“I Know Who I am”

At one point in the story, the local worthies — a priest, a barber and Don Quixote’s niece — tell him that he is no knight; he must know that. To this, Don Quixote gives a reply: “I know who I am.”

Don Quixote knows who exactly he is, and what exactly he wants to do. He defines the world to be congruent with himself and his identity.

Don Quixote may lack congruence with his environment, but he is fully congruent with his identity. He says: “A knight I am, and a knight I shall die”.

Without a clear concept of self, leaders cannot weave a credible vision. Joan of Arc’s vision was consistent with her own concept of self — she was totally convinced that she was the messenger of God.

Gandhi developed his unique ideas of non-violence in thought and deed, to be congruent with his personality. It was this congruence that made these leaders so different — so unique, so credible.

Passion and Discipline

James March of the Stanford University has just released a DVD on Don Quixote titled “Passion and Discipline”.

Don Quixote combines these two essential ingredients of leadership. He is passionate about his pursuits, but he is also governed always by the knightly code of honour.

Don Quixote’s message is the ideas of idealism, courage to define one’s own vision, faith in oneself, and courage to move against all odds.

That is why James March says that the story of Don Quixote is the story of eternal triumph of human spirit.

Reason in living and reason for living are two different things. The Don Quixote story ends with his regaining “sanity” and returning to his village.

He has regained reason in his life. But he has lost the reason for living — and dies soon thereafter.

The Arc of leadership

Like Don Quixote, Joan of Arc has inspired numerous creations in the form of plays, movies, stories, paintings, statues and interpretations. For a leader who roused an entire nation from despondency and defeatism, spurred it on to fight and eventually drive away a foreign presence, and united a nation, there are few parallels in history to Joan. She is a pure leader, par excellence.

We have adopted Bernard Shaw’s masterpiece play Saint Joan for our interpretation. In this play, we are taken through the main events of her life: her meeting Charles, the Dauphin (the uncrowned King), leading an army to lift the siege of Orleans, crowning Charles as the King of France, the betrayal of Joan by the King and others, her trial and eventually her being burnt at the stake. There is a delightful epilogue that beautifully sums up many aspects of Joan’s character.

Power of vision

Joan’s tryst with her destiny starts from a very young age, where she witnessed the brutality of English occupiers against the villagers in her village of Domrimi. She combined great pity that gave her passion and conviction, and a great intellect that gave her clarity of reason.

She seems to have had some spiritual experiences that led her to believe that God was communicating to her to lead France, throw out the English and crown the Dauphin as the King. She also wondered why France was always losing, and concluded that they had no cause to fight for, nor did they have a proper, trained, disciplined army. She saw herself as a unifier of all France under one King, and God had chosen her to accomplish this mission.

Passion as an engine of leadership

Joan’s passion is in evidence throughout the play. As a peasant girl, she gains an audience with the commander of a local castle, and then the Dauphin himself, and convinces the latter that it’s possible to lift the siege of Orleans. The Dauphin’s scepticism is brusquely brushed aside by her.

“I will put courage into thee,” she says, and the Dauphin, left with no better choice, decides to back Joan. She is given the overall control of the army, and she infuses the army with a new hope, a new courage and a new confidence.

“Who is for God and His Maid? Who is for Orleans with me?” says Joan, and the entire assembly of knights shout back: “To Orleans!” She lives among the soldiers, dressing as they do, eating what they eat, and always leading from the front, an exemplar par excellence.

When wounded badly by an arrow, she gets the arrow pulled out and is back at the front, leading a newly inspired French army. The English are defeated and the siege of Orleans is lifted. It’s a miracle.

But what is a miracle? Miracles are events that create faith. Joan’s story is an example of what faith in one’s mission, once generated, and an unbridled passion to achieve it against all odds, can accomplish. Like Don Quixote, she has a noble vision, and great discipline. But unlike Quixote, she has her foot firmly on the ground.

Role of faith

Faith, it is said, can move mountains. After all, what Joan accomplished could have technically been accomplished by any of the military commanders. The army was there; so were the weapons. What she put in was faith: faith in one’s cause, confidence in one’s success.

Creating faith is a hallmark of a leader. How does one create it? Writers have attributed this ability to that intangible, indefinable “charisma”. But in reality it may be simpler than that: it may be total conviction of one’s own cause and position.

Confidence and enthusiasm are contagious. Joan could as well have said: “I know who I am”. To herself, and to the Frenchmen at that time, she was the Messenger of God, nothing short of it, and she wouldn’t compromise her position in her trial. The same was the case with Jesus, as so movingly portrayed in the recent movie The Passion of Christ.

If Joan’s success shows one aspect of faith, her trial brings out another aspect. She failed to see the opposition from vested interests she was fuelling: the Church whose authority as the sole interpreter of God, and the feudal chiefs for whom the King was merely the first among equals.

Passion and vision also bring about cataclysmic changes in the established order. That was why she had to burn, and though after death, she could be rehabilitated, “if you could bring her back to life, they would burn her again within six months” — such are the perils of leadership.

There wasn’t any doubt that the trial was an entirely political one, steeped in religious terms. Yet the Church was on the whole fair, given its own articles of faith and gave her a reprieve — by asking her to confess.

Which she did, perhaps hoping that once free, she can complete her mission, only to learn that she wasn’t to be set free, but would remain a prisoner of the Church for life. Now her mission was in danger. She tore up her confession, and virtually forced the Church to burn her. If she had lived, perhaps France wouldn’t have been united.

Her martyrdom shows a leadership dilemma to choose between oneself and one’s ideals. Joan perished, but “her heart would not burn”. Her death infused a fresh spirit among the French, who succeeded in driving out the English. She became “the soul of France”. True leadership sometimes requires sacrifice of oneself so that the ideal may survive.

As is given in the epilogue of the play, what won was always the Maid’s way. The Messenger could never be silenced. True leaders leave behind legacies of ideals and ideas — some accomplished and some not so. But the accomplishment itself is immaterial. “It’s the memory and the salvation that sanctify the cross, not the cross that sanctifies the memory and the salvation.”

(All quotes are from the play Saint Joan)

Starry Starry Nights

Being confronted with the unenviable situation of having to choose between one wrong and another is by no means unfamiliar to leaders.

Damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, the leader has to find the delicate line separating a compromise from a sell out. He faces what Joseph Badaracco, a Harvard guru on ethics, calls “defining moments”.

Bertolt Brecht examines this dilemma in his play, The Life of Galileo. Brecht highlights the key aspects of Galileo’s personality: his dedication to his students (he would rather purchase books for his students than pay his milkman), his great faith in the scientific method (“truth is the child of time, not of authority”) and his dedication to research and pursuit of knowledge, if necessary, bending his ethics a little (he claims to have invented the telescope and sells many telescopes, whereas it has already been invented). Finding that the pay he receives at Venice isn’t enough to keep his research going, Galileo moves to Florence, where the pay is better, but gives him less freedom to pursue research.

Florence is also much more under the influence of Rome and the Inquisition than Venice, and he soon reaches the dividing line between new ideas and heresy.

He propounds the theory of a heliocentric universe and infinite heavens and makes it available to not only his peers, but also to the public, by writing in Italian rather than Latin, the language of the Church. “The smell of flesh burning” is pervasive, Galileo is arrested, shown the instruments of torture, and tried by the Inquisition.

His students and society look up to Galileo not merely as a teacher but as a leader pioneering a revolution in the approach to knowledge. They expect him to be true to his own teaching that “he who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a criminal”. But Galileo lets them down — he recants, and loses the respect of his students. “So much is gained when one man stands up and says, “No!” and Galileo misses this opportunity. He is kept a prisoner of the Church for life and permitted to do only “approved research”.

There is a twist in the play in the last scene. After many years, his student Andrea visits Galileo, who is close to death. Galileo tells Andrea that he has been secretly writing his forbidden theories and stashing them away.

He hands over the manuscript to Andrea, requesting him to smuggle the book and publish it outside Italy. Andrea realises that his judgement of Galileo was unfair — in fact, Galileo has served society by recanting and living on.

Galileo had a difficult choice. As an intellectual leader, he could have stood up for his belief in the methods of science and risked death, like Joan of Arc. But he was also a genius who had much to contribute to science (and did) by living on, unlike Joan, who created a blinding halo at her stake.

By being burnt, she left a legacy that was larger than what she could have left had she recanted and stayed in prison. Martyrdom is heroic, but is the only worthwhile outcome in society the production of heroes? Immediately after the recantation, Andrea exclaims within hearing of Galileo: “Unhappy the land that has no heroes!” to which Galileo responds, “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.”

Heroism is the driver of leadership in the Carlylean view, but this view has its limitations, as has the Tolstoyean view of leaders being mere passive products of history.

Can a leader achieve more by refusing martyrdom? Galileo himself is unsparing in his condemnation of himself: “A man who has done what I have done cannot be tolerated in the ranks of science.” He tells Andrea: “You are yourself a teacher now. Can you bring yourself to take a hand such as mine?” Andrea has no hesitation in doing so.

The play also raises the issue of responsibility of science for the consequences of its research. It was written at a time when the atomic bomb had just been exploded and the horrors of the “advancements” of science were brought home. There were raging arguments, on just how much scientists were to be held accountable to society.

Brecht’s view is that knowledge generation and dissemination cannot be separate — science must be available to all. By writing in Italian, Galileo created a wider awareness of the possibilities of science, but this also generated conflict between faith and reason.

Scientific methodology, like “rational” management has its place. But so has emotion-based concepts such as faith and trust. Leadership is about evoking faith, and if reason enables an organisation to advance, faith enables it to do so coherently.

The binding force of organisations (like a society itself) can never be reason; it can only be faith. In the words of Galileo in the play, “The aim of science isn’t to open a door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error”.

Organisations and societies based on faith alone degenerate into superstition and dogmatism. Those that stand on reason alone (where everyone doubts everything) may degenerate into a collection of disparate, self-seeking individuals. Reason can limit infinite error, but cannot bring about wisdom. True leaders understand the distinction between reason and faith and arrive at a balance.

Master of the game

For understanding leadership and decision-making, Gandhi is a very powerful case study. Did he rely entirely on spirituality and morality?

What was the inspiration of his dreams? How did he shape them? He can be understood in terms of multiple images: a hero, a saint, an exemplar, a knight and also as a martyr. People worked for him without fear of punishment or for some reward. They worked for something that was meaningfully related to a chosen set of beliefs and values, which had been made part of their lives.

It’s really remarkable how lying in a small cottage in an isolated village in India, he could communicate silently with millions of people all over India and the world simply by resorting to a fast. It has been reported that on such occasions, people in London walking in the morning from the railway station to their offices would talk about “Mr Gandhi’s body temperature today”.

For studying Gandhi, Richard Attenborough’s Oscar winning film is very useful. The book by John Briley: Gandhi — A Screenplay, is also available. Some comments by Alyque Padamsee who played the role of Jinnah in the film are also available in his book: A Double Life.

The film starts with the scene in which Gandhi as a young barrister practising law in South Africa is thrown out of a train compartment, with his baggage, in which only the whites could travel.

Attenborough shows him lying on the railway platform on his knees and elbows like a quadruped looking at the train as it moves out of the platform leaving him behind. This is an event, which proved to be his crucible. As the movie proceeds, Gandhi finally reaches his dream of “Quit India Movement” gradually in stages as shown in it.

Leadership as Playacting

There’s another interesting portrayal in the film. Right in the beginning Gandhi is shown as a western educated barrister in a proper Saville suit.

In contrast, in the end he’s shown in bare loincloth. The film shows how gradually Gandhi managed to change his dress and, with it, his image gradually in stages. Perhaps, it wouldn’t be fair to say that he does it unconsciously. He was a shrewd manager of human feelings and deserves credit for projecting his image so meticulously to suit the changing situation.

Artful communication makes an impact. Alyque Padamsee, who himself has been a successful man in theatre and in the advertising world says: “It’ll seem like heresy if I say that Mahatma Gandhi was the greatest communications guru who ever lived, but it’s true.” Gandhi’s genius was evident in his staging events and through them — to dramatise situations.

He was one of the greatest event marketing man the world has ever seen and personally a great actor in a dramatic sense.

The greatest event staged by him was his salt march to Dandi. It’s really this event which really galvanised India into believing that the British were cruel taskmasters and they had imposed a draconian tax called the salt tax. He didn’t do it instantly. He let it all build up like a Hitchcockian suspense.

Slowly, he sent out a word that on a certain day he would be picking up a handful of salt on the deserted beach at Dandi. In addition to the technique of staging events, he proved to be a brilliant innovator of interaction.

He could easily have taken a train to Dandi, walked a few furlongs and got to the beach. Instead, he announced that he would start from Sabarmati Ashram on foot. He wanted to dramatise the event and interact with people on the way.

It took him several days to reach Dandi, and as he walked from village to village, the word spread that he was coming. Many of the villagers joined him in his march. Representatives from all over India and media persons from all over the world also joined him in his march.

The whole process was one of transformation of an act of defiance by an individual to a participatory movement of the people. As the march continued for days, the suspense kept on building up. Would Gandhi reach Dandi? Or would the government prevent him from reaching the beach? He did reach and proved successful.

Some Critical Comments

When one criticises Gandhi he has to first accept that he was a genius and one of the greatest leaders in world history. His puritanical approach of mahatmahood was his asset as well as his liability. It brought him his great victory: political independence, and, also his worst defeat: partition of India, which completely shattered him in the end.

VS Naipaul in his India: A Wounded Civilisation, has a section titled: Not Ideas, But Obsessions. He writes: Gandhi’s self-absorption was his strength. Without it he would have done nothing and might have been destroyed. But with this self-absorption, there was a kind of blindness.

For him the “outer world matters only in so far as it affects the inner. Gandhi swept through India, but he has left it without an ideology. He awakened the holy land: his mahatmahood returned it to archaism; he made his worshippers vain.”

Leaders have to look beyond family

Leaders have to reconcile between the responsibilities they have to discharge towards multiple constituents: towards themselves; their families; their colleagues and their shareholders.

The Chicago School, led by Milton Friedman, treats shareholders as the only stakeholder group managers are answerable to. In his famous essay, Friedman argued that the sole responsibility of a company’s management is to maximise shareholder profits; nothing else matters, so long as they play by the rules of free competition.

There aren’t ethical or moral issues of relevance to the leader; only economic issues. On the other hand, Joel Bakan, in the new book “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,” argues that this position leads to corporations being not merely greedy, but downright pathological.

Arthur Miller’s play All My Sons is an examination of the contradictions involved in discharging these multiple responsibilities. Arthur Miller, with his Leftist leanings, has been a long-time critic of what he called the “dog eat dog society” of capitalism, so passionately brought out in his celebrated play, Death of a Salesman.

All My Sons, is based on a real life story involving supply of defective equipment to the US Army during the Second World War, is about a businessman, Joe Keller. He has a junior partner, Steve, and their firm supplies the US Air Force with cylinder heads for the engines of fighter planes.

One night, the cylinder heads coming out of the production in the factory are found to be defective and Steve, who is in the factory, informs Keller about this on phone. Under pressure to keep up supplies, Keller orders the defective heads to be welded, dressed up and despatched.

These defective parts ultimately lead to plane crashes and the firm is hauled up a court, where Keller flatly denies that he instructed Steve to pass on the defective parts. Keller and Steve are found guilty but Keller escapes conviction on appeal, while Steve goes to jail.

Keller protests his innocence before his family and Steve’s and they believe him. Steve’s son George and daughter Ann are so incensed with what their father did that they don’t even visit him in jail.

Keller has two sons, Larry and Chris, both in the armed forces during the war. Larry, who was engaged to Anne, has gone missing in action. The play drives to a climax when George, having just met his father and learnt of what actually transpired, tells the facts — and of Keller’s duplicity.

Keller continues to deny his guilt, until Chris wrenches the truth out of him. But Keller cannot understand why Chris should be worked up: this is how the world works, and besides, “I did it all for you!”

Joe Keller was under great pressure to supply the cylinder heads that the army desperately needed, the sort of pressure that is only too familiar to executives, and failure to supply may have led to cancellation of orders, now and in the future.

“You lay 40 years into a business and they knock you out in five minutes, what could I do, let them take 40 years, let them take my life away?” So he took a shortcut decision, hoping they wouldn’t install the heads so fast, and may be he could replace them with good ones quietly.

Thus his subsequent denial at the trial, shows not so much his villainy as his weakness: he simply couldn’t bear the thought of going to jail.

Ann has a letter from Larry written just before he went on his last mission, saying that he cannot bear to live any longer in light of what his father did. Clearly, Larry has deliberately crashed his own plane.

All My Sons essentially takes the view that business leaders cannot escape the consequences of their actions by taking recourse to legal loopholes. There’s still a distinction between right and wrong that’s relevant in business, as compared to what is legal and illegal.

The play also looks at the linkage between private and public life. “I did it all for you”, sounds like rationalisation, but if Keller had gone to jail, his entire family would have shared in the ignominy.

In this sense he did it for his family, for his sons who would inherit his business. But does that make Keller less guilty? Business leaders may not see their own family getting directly affected by the bad decisions they take in the way Keller does.

But they must realise, as Keller finally does, that those who suffer as a consequence of their decisions are flesh and blood people. Managers need to look at the dichotomies between their public and private life, their value systems at home and at work.

There’s a need for an integral system of ethics and values, for the very word “integrity” has its origin in the word “integral”. To quote Warren Bennis, in his book Managing the Dream, “There is no difference between becoming an effective leader and becoming a fully integrated human being”.

It’s also interesting to ask: why did Larry kill himself? In times of war, an entirely different value system comes into existence. People risk their lives for their fellow soldiers; they are not “practical”.

For Larry, his colleagues were something more than mere colleagues; it made no sense for him to live when his friends were getting killed due to his father’s action. “I can’t face anybody”, says Larry in his letter.

To him, as Joe Keller realises, “they were all my sons”. Thus the point is made by Miller, “There is a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to them, and unless you know that, you threw away your son because that was why he died.”