The temptation to pin your two-bit comment to another’s life that’s otherwise out of reach, that’s monumental is humongous. It’s tough is to keep yourself out, especially out of a book on a man everyone has an opinion on — Mahatma Gandhi.
Of course no work is completely pure, but Ramachandra Guha manages to stay out of Gandhi’s life in his first volume of the Mahatma’s biography. Gandhi Before India is the story of Gandhi’s years in London and South Africa. The next book will begin where this ends — in 1915, when Gandhi returned to India.
Guha says that he followed at least two of the great Goethe scholar Nicholas Boyle’s laws of biography: never anticipate; a life is only as good as the
portrayal of its secondary characters.
Since he couldn’t anticipate — a flaw he’s quick to spot in other books and even name and shame (he quotes what he calls a “particularly ridiculous quote” from Arun and Sunanda Gandhi’s The Untold Story Of Kasturba: Wife Of Mahatma Gandhi) — for over a decade he chased letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, the Empire’s dispatches, intelligence reports in India, England, South Africa, America, even Israel.
He had to, because he found the reliance of most Gandhi scholars on The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi very limiting.
So forgotten, depressed chapters and characters from Gandhi’s life come to life. South Africa was Gandhi’s first protest studio — small and contained, but not easy. Gandhi was 25, and the first challenger to European domination in Natal and Transvaal.
He was not just fighting for the rights of Indians to do business, to stay, to travel, but was also fighting the white man’s deep-rooted prejudice against brown skin.
Gandhi, the eternal protester, travelled to India and London, to recruit support, to petition. He argued cases in court, wrote articles, letters, printed a newspaper, and kept trying to engage with the adversary, sometimes to the strains of songs like We’ll hang old Gandhi on a sour apple tree.
As Guha tells the story of the “imperial loyalist who thought flattery and persuasion would end discrimination,” who later shifted “from conciliation to confrontation”, we also meet Gandhi the friend, the roommate, the husband, the father. Guha’s Gandhi is three-dimensional — he experiments with vegetarianism, takes the oath of celibacy, is obsessed with his bowel movements, is allergic and alert to what he considers wasteful expenditure. So no raw onions and milk because, apparently, “they excited the passions”. No sugar because it was made through the exploitation of indentured labourers. And quibbles with his housemate Millie Polack over the need for curtains.
The impossible Mr Gandhi. Or endearing. Guha doesn’t say. He lets us decide.
Edited excerpts from an interview with Ramachandra Guha
Why another book, and that too a two-part book, on Mahatma Gandhi?
All through my working life I have been shadowed by Gandhi. I met him when I started as an environmental historian, and later when I wrote a book on the social history of cricket. I could also see how profoundly detested he was. The Naxalites detested Gandhi openly, the Hindutvawadis detested him secretly.
So I was able to see Gandhi alive, as a figure of admiration, affirmation and also ridicule and detestation. So I thought let me engage with him, let me write about him… over a period of time it’s become two volumes.
And maybe a third?
Well, we’ll see. Certainly a second and probably a third. Partly because of my own personal research on different subjects in which Gandhi played an important role, and of course then followed by the recognition as a scholar that there was a serious limitation in earlier studies of Gandhi. There’s so much unpublished material in archives all over the world. That’s really the reason why, over a period of time, I decided that I must write a major two-volume book on Gandhi.
And of course the break is logical because it’s geographical. It is South Africa and India. I mean it’s London, South Africa and India.
Say you wanted to write a two-volume work on Tagore, it’s not the same kind of thing. Tagore, despite his greatness, is just a writer. But Gandhi had a profound impact on politics, society, reform movements, religion. So a life of Gandhi is a life of an entire society. So this is partly Gandhi, partly the history of South Africa in a very important period in its history. The next volume will be Gandhi, but also the history of India in the last decades of colonial rule.
You obviously have a certain affinity with Gandhi.
I do admire him, but not unreservedly. There are aspects of his ideas, his thought, his personal life I find slightly problematic. But, of course, I see him as a great moral and political figure, with flaws because he’s human and every human being is flawed in one way or the other.
Gandhi is like the Holy Grail, in a sense, of Indian history. So is this something you needed to do, as a historian?
Of course. In historical 20th century India, he’s the most important figure. I had to settle my accounts with him. But he’s more than an Indian. Gandhi is a genuinely global figure, because his ideas are universal — whether it’s on non-violence, inter-faith harmony, on social reform… And because he led such an open, transparent life we know his failings too. He told you about his experiments with diet, with celibacy and we can savage him. That is also part of his appeal. You can identify with him in a way which you can’t with a politician who lives behind a barricade, who has you know an armed guard and struts around in private planes and Mercedes and so on.
Over the years how has your relationship with this character, this shadow changed...
I don’t like talking about my own relationship per se, but of course I have a deeper understanding of the man and the context in which he lived, and the relationships he forged, particularly the fascinating cast of secondary characters who shaped and formed him in the South African period about whom very little is known. I think my book is the first book to give proper importance to people like Pranjivan Mehta, Thambi Naidoo, Henry and Millie Polack, Sonja Schlesin… it also talks at great length about his great physical courage, the attacks on his life, how he met them. So it’s a work of history based on research in many, many different archives. I’m insignificant. I’m just a scholar who does the research and tells the story of this extraordinary figure.
In the introduction to the book you’ve talked about the significance of secondary characters. Explain their significance in Gandhi’s context.
I’d put the secondary characters in Gandhi’s South African life into five distinct categories. There are the mentors — Henry Salt of the Vegetarian Society, Raychand the Jain thinker, Gokhale whose importance comes later in the book, and Tolstoy. These are people who are older, whom he regards as kind of morally superior or wiser and more experienced. Of course, Gandhi is a very creative disciple. So he takes some things and doesn’t take some, and makes his own kind of amalgam.
Then you have disciples: Parsee Rustomjee and Thambi Naidoo among others.
Then friends. The difference between disciples and friends is that friends have relationships of partial equality. They admire Gandhi but they argue and debate with him and change his views. Friends would be Henry and Millie Polak, Sonja Schlesin and Pranjivan Mehta.
Then you have rivals and antagonists. There’s a guy called Montford Chamney the protector of the Asiatic Society who implements the law. Later on, when Gandhi starts his satyagraha, it’s Smutts, the minister in-charge. Also there’s a very interesting character, one who is my complete new discovery, rarely written about in the past, an Indian journalist called P.S. Aiyar, a Tamil in Natal who is a rival to Gandhi and keeps on debunking Gandhi in incredibly vituperative, quite well-written polemic.
And finally the family — four children, his wife, and his brothers, like Lakshminath with whom he had a complicated relationship.
To flesh out a person’s life, I think his relationships, the people in his life in different times are equally important — you must develop their character too, and why were they important in this person’s life.
In the epilogue I say, they are more important than the Patels, Nehrus, Ambedkars and the Jinnahs in Gandhi’s life because they form, shape, orient, influence him in the formative years… I wanted my book to be as much about these relationships as much as about Gandhi himself.
When you are researching all this and came across a poem like Goosie, Goosie, Gandhi, Oh!, or read about deeply distressing events of discrimination and his struggle — does it hit you, did it enrage you?
You know, I’ve never faced discrimination in my life, period. I come from a very privileged background — I was born in a middle-class family, I’m upper caste, I am a man. I don’t believe in false indignation on behalf of… because I’ve never felt it.
But reading about all this did deepen my admiration of Gandhi — here is a young lawyer, 26, facing the collective wrath of a hundred-thousand whites of Natal… every single one of them, barring the odd one or two exceptions who sympathised with him, it’s an orchestrated a mass campaign… he’s detained, gets beaten, still says I won’t press charges.
I am 55. I get endless abuse on Twitter and my email everyday. How does it matter? I’m established, but at 25-26, in a strange country and facing a collective mob, and you are demonised — “Mr Gandhi is bringing all these Indians, Mr Gandhi has to be kicked out, throw him in the gutter, that’s where he belongs…” Seeing all of this and yet not running away — it deepens your admiration for him, of his extraordinary moral and physical courage, it but also deepens your understanding of the context he was working in, the enormous hurdles Gandhi had to fight against. But for me to feel indignation on his behalf because I’m also brown or an Indian is fully forced.
In your introduction, you’ve equated Gandhi with Ram.
I’ve drawn a parallel, ya.
Drawing a parallel, you write about Ram — “He is also a man of high moral character, who occasionally entertains dark and dangerous thoughts”. What are these dark and dangerous thoughts in the context of both the men?
(Laughs) I don’t want to talk about Ram. I don’t want to talk about Ram. But dark, maybe dangerous means his obsession with celibacy, his suspicions of his son. I mean thoughts that are not befitting of a person of such greatness and moral stature. He’s also prone to vulnerability. He himself talks about possessiveness with regard to his wife.
Ram… It was just to show a parallel… They worked in different contexts, they had great moral courage but had problematic relationships with their wives and so on and so forth.
You also write about sexual guilt and abstinence… you think this is common to the two men.
I don’t want to talk about Ram. I’m not really an expert.
Just in the context of Gandhi, do you think this sexual guilt...
I think celibacy is more important than sexual guilt. In his autobiography he has emphasised sexual guilt. In my book I emphasise more the celibacy, self-denial — that to become a social activist you can deny yourself the pleasures of the flesh and there’s a long quote actually, from Tolstoy (opens the book to read it)… which was translated just before Gandhi took the vow, and it is quite likely that he read it. Tolstoy says, “Abstinence is a man’s liberation from the lusts…” He talks about basal passions — gluttony, idleness and carnal love; and complex passions — adorning yourself, games, amusement, gossip… and says that in the struggle with passions, begin with the basal ones.
Gandhi was never idle, always had a very simple diet, so it was really carnal love that he had to conquer. It was not so much guilt as a sense of simplifying your life, living a pure, austere life of self-denial, of abstinence to serve society, as Tolstoy and Raychand seem to have said — it’s the right way to go for an exemplary figure who wants to lead a movement. I’ve tried to look at it in a slightly different, more plausible way of understanding why he took a vow of celibacy.
In this episode, in what you call abstinence and celibacy, the secondary character would of course be the wife.
I say in the book something which I don’t know if you’ll agree with. You see, it’s very important for any work of history not to be anachronistic, not to judge someone from the point of view of 2013.
In the West people think that Kasturba must have been pissed off that he denied her sexual relations. But I think that is completely mistaken. Kasturba was upset that his vow of Brahmacharya involved separating himself from the family. He took the vow of Brahmacharya and sent Kasturba and the children to live in Phoenix while he organised the Indians in Transvaal. Today you may think that a happy relationship is partly emotional, partly sexual. But in my view that’s a contemporary reading of how Kasturba would have felt. I may be wrong. No one knows. But whatever one knows about Kasturba, I don’t think the fact that Gandhi had abandoned sexual relations had an impact on her.
What had an impact on her was that corollary of Brahmacharya, which means to live alone and basically relegate your entire family, including your young, growing children, to a kind of secondary place.
What do you find most problematic about Gandhi.
I don’t believe in judging people anachronistically… so I don’t like to say from the point of view of 2013.
Gandhi had eccentricities — his dietary fads which later on became an obsession, celibacy was absolutely important for his moral world view and maybe he took it too far. But still, we know about his failings and eccentricities because he told us about them and was willing for us to sit in judgment on it.
How relevant is Gandhi today, to India?
Well, the first thing is that Gandhi is relevant not just to India but to the whole world. Gandhi is a universal figure. And his relevance lies in three or four different dimensions.
The first is the cultivation of religious pluralism. The idea that in any multi-faith society you cannot have a single sect dominate, can’t have the majority dominate and you must go at the level of everyday interaction of human beings, and to the level of state policy to promote tolerance, understanding, dialogue, empathy between people of different faiths. Now here clearly India has failed, or is failing. So that’s one area of his work that’s of universal relevance.
The second area which is only now being recognised is that he had very uncanny anticipations of the environmental limits of modern industrial society and about what consumer greed could do to the living world.
The third is the transparency of his personal life. As a major public figure, his life was open. Anyone could go and meet him. He was always open to dialogue, argument. You wrote him a letter, he replied to you.
I don’t want to single out one person, but there’s such amazing contrast with Mr Narendra Modi. He goes on and on, he can’t listen. He’s never listened all his life and now he’s listening less and less.
Fourth and the most enduring of Gandhi’s legacies to the world is the philosophy of non-violent resistance to oppression and unjust laws. If there is injustice, there are unjust laws, obnoxious social practices, you oppose it.
But you don’t oppose it violently. So if Kashmiris have been shafted by the Indian government, you don’t acquiesce it, but you don’t pick up the gun either. Likewise with the Naxalites. The tribals are being displaced because of government development projects… You know, Naxalites and jihadis could learn a lesson from Gandhi.
One of the things that drew people, disciples to Gandhi was his moral force. Why do you think Narendra Modi attracts such huge crowds?
Firstly, he’s clearly a great beneficiary of the revulsion towards the current regime. I think it’s been incompetent beyond words.
Then, of course, he is right — that he is a self-made man and Rahul Gandhi is a prince who will inherit the family business. The third thing is that he is a brilliant speaker. He has the gift of rhetoric, of clever lines. This is what attracts people to him, and people want a saviour. Of course when he comes to power we will find out exactly what kind of a saviour he is. I can sense from whatever I have studied and learnt about him, and I have no illusions on this, he’s a deeply autocratic and intolerant man with a bigoted, warped world view.
But what about substance.
Yes, well, he’s a trade merchant. Young people, young men particularly, want dreams. They want dreams, they want hope, they want jobs. They want someone who says I’ll make you a superpower. Of course it’s completely fraudulent, it’s a claim that will never be realised.
There’s despair at the current regime. When you have an incompetent, corrupt regime and a charismatic leader comes and captures your imagination in that way, for some time Anna Hazare also, and Narendra Modi has a much more solid organisation backing him and he is of course much better speaker than Anna Hazare. So I can understand why he’s attractive, why he appeals to young people. But at the same time I feel obliged to warn them that this is really a very dangerous and possibly even a very evil man.
Evil?
Possibly even a very evil man.
Does it scare you, 2014 election?
It doesn’t scare me because we will see him off. And by we I mean the people of India and the institutional structure of India. It doesn’t scare me in that he will come to power and in six or nine months either he changes dramatically or he’ll have to leave. He’ll have to become what so far he has no sign of becoming — a reconciling, accommodating leader who takes different people on board, different points of view.
We have an electoral system that’s fair. Sometimes it throws up a result you don’t like it but we have to respect it.
If Narendra Modi becomes the Prime Minister of India, I will stay in India and I will fight it because I know exactly what kind of a person he is.