A Little Luxury to Honor India's Man of Modesty

Gandhi Loyalists Appalled by $23,000 Commemorative Pen

NEW DELHI, Oct. 2 -- Images of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the father of modern India and an icon of asceticism and nonviolence, have ended up in some unlikely places before, including in ads for Apple computers and on counterculture T-shirts.

But it's fair to say that the latest incarnation may be the most ironic: Gandhi, in his signature loincloth, hawking a $23,000 fountain pen named in his honor.

The limited-edition Montblanc fountain pen in 18-carat solid gold is engraved with Gandhi's image and tricked out with a saffron-colored mandarin garnet on the clip and a rhodium-plated nib. Unveiled in honor of what would have been Gandhi's 140th birthday on Friday, the pen has prompted howls from Hindu groups and Gandhians, who say the sticker price is the lifetime income of many of India's poor while the Center for Consumer Education in the southern state of Kerala has sued to stop sales of the pen, calling it "a mockery."

"This pen is really funny. Gandhiji would say it should be tossed in the trash or, better, sold off to pay for water and power for the poor," said Amit Modi, secretary of Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram, using the traditional Hindi honorific. "Gandhi would have been ashamed."

The man known across India as Bapu, or father, had fought against unbridled materialism and even eschewed imported luxuries, considering them harmful to India's mostly agrarian economy.

Perhaps aware of the potential for a backlash, Montblanc made a $145,666 donation to the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation even before selling a single pen, said Tushar Gandhi, the independence leader's great-grandson, from Amsterdam, where he visited a Montblanc boutique that had already sold three of the pens. The funds are to be used to build a school and home for rescued child workers. The foundation also gets as much as $1,000 for each pen sold.

A billboard put up this week overlooking Mumbai's teeming slums shows a gaunt Gandhi next to an image of the swanky pen, with golden threads woven around it to represent his spinning wheel.

"I consider the Montblanc pen their acknowledgment of the greatness of Gandhi. They are doing it the only way they know how," Tushar Gandhi said. "His writing implement was his greatest tool."

Montblanc is issuing 241 of the commemorative Gandhi pens, a number that highlights the amount of miles Gandhi walked in his famous 1930 "salt march" to the Arabian Sea, a successful act of civil disobedience against salt taxes levied by the British.

Neeraj Singh, a Montblanc representative for India, said many Indian clients had preordered the pen.

"We had a pen on Alexander the Great. We had a pen on Winston Churchill," he said. "If you want to do something on an Indian personality, then nobody is greater than Mahatma."

In India, the pens adorn the pockets of suits worn by business executives and political leaders as a sign of status. Some Montblanc store managers have said that most of the buyers so far have been Bollywood stars and government officials.

Some Gandhi loyalists say, however, that India's founding father would have questioned why a public servant would spend $23,000 on a pen in a country with a third of the world's malnourished children.

"Gandhi would have wanted to share such a pen with the entire country. But today in India affluence is not negative at all, " said Lydia Powell, an Indian economics fellow with the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation. India today sees itself as a rising economic power, with shiny call centers, glitzy software companies and young, Western-oriented professionals.

"Today, India's youth are more likely to look up to Bill Gates rather than Gandhi," Powell noted.

Special correspondent Ayesha Manocha contributed to this report.