Ramachandra Guha - ‘Gandhi Is Alive Because He Still Makes People Angry’
The indefatigable Ramachandra Guha has written the first of his two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi. There might even be a third. Recognising the extent of Gandhi’s own prose, stuffed into just the 100 volumes of the Collected Works, Guha looked to find the stories of secondary characters, the people who lived with Gandhi, argued with him, fought alongside and against him. Guha’s discoveries resulted in Gandhi Before India (a titular nod to arguably his most famous book,India After Gandhi), an entire book devoted to Gandhi’s formative years in a turbulent South Africa. He makes a spirited case for Gandhi’s continued relevance, for the challenges his ideas still present to us as a nation, as a people.
..I knew that the way to write something new on Gandhi was to use sources other than the Collected Works. I started with that premise but the secondary characters were a discovery for me. Polak, say, was barely a name. I didn’t know about his literary eloquence, his polemical style, his passion for Gandhi, his disagreements with Gandhi. I knew nothing about his wife, Millie, and how she provoked Gandhi to be less of a patriarch. There’s Pranjivan Mehta, who I describe as the Engels to Gandhi’s Marx. I was surprised by the depth of the relationships Gandhi had with these people, how strong and robust and influential they were. Whether with Polak, or Mehta, or Thambi Naidoo, the Tamil radical who brings the Tamils into the movement after the Gujarati merchants back out. Gandhi even tried to learn Tamil, exhorted his nephew to learn Tamil, as a gesture towards repaying the debt he felt he owed to Naidoo. I was surprised by how interested I became in these secondary characters and how they began to take up more and more space in the book...
..I knew that the way to write something new on Gandhi was to use sources other than the Collected Works. I started with that premise but the secondary characters were a discovery for me. Polak, say, was barely a name. I didn’t know about his literary eloquence, his polemical style, his passion for Gandhi, his disagreements with Gandhi. I knew nothing about his wife, Millie, and how she provoked Gandhi to be less of a patriarch. There’s Pranjivan Mehta, who I describe as the Engels to Gandhi’s Marx. I was surprised by the depth of the relationships Gandhi had with these people, how strong and robust and influential they were. Whether with Polak, or Mehta, or Thambi Naidoo, the Tamil radical who brings the Tamils into the movement after the Gujarati merchants back out. Gandhi even tried to learn Tamil, exhorted his nephew to learn Tamil, as a gesture towards repaying the debt he felt he owed to Naidoo. I was surprised by how interested I became in these secondary characters and how they began to take up more and more space in the book...
Gandhi, you write, remains the only “authentically global” statesman. What is it about him that transcends borders and cultures?
First, he did multiple things: he was a politician, a social reformer, a religious thinker, and a kind of early environmentalist. Then, he operated on three continents. He wrote a great deal. Pre-eminent among his contributions is the theory and practice of non-violent resistance to unjust authority. Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, some of the Eastern European dissidents, protesters against authority in China or more recently in the Middle East, all were inspired, at least partly, by ideas and techniques Gandhi pioneered in the Transvaal nearly a century ago now.
Apart from all his achievements, his undoubted greatness, there are also two elements of good fortune from which he benefits. Unlike Churchill, or Roosevelt, or de Gaulle, or even Nehru, Gandhi never held office. And when you hold office, your record is mixed. Churchill, for instance, was a great wartime leader but incompetent peacetime prime minister; Roosevelt was handicapped by his illness and so on. The second piece of good luck — in retrospect, it’s not as if Gandhi sought it out — was that he was martyred, killed for his beliefs.
Of course, Gandhi’s reputation would have been considerable even if he had slunk into old age. But the manner of his death, the last weeks of fasting for Hindu-Muslim unity only to be killed by a fanatic, shook even the sceptics. The best example is George Orwell who was put off by Gandhi’s fads, vegetarianism, celibacy, that sort of thing, and even suspicious of his non-violence. Remember Orwell was a man who picked up a gun himself to fight General Franco in Spain. But after Gandhi died, Orwell wrote a wonderful essay, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, in homage. Famously, he compared Gandhi to other political figures and statesmen of the time and concluded, “how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!”
But I don’t want to overplay the ‘luck’. Gandhi’s achievements are enormous.
On Gandhi’s martyrdom though, it’s part of his elevation to sainthood. And by making Gandhi a saint we can pay lip service to his ideas without ever having to take them seriously. So in that sense, maybe not so lucky?
Perhaps. But I think in India Gandhi still presents a challenge. He makes people uncomfortable. Proof that he is still relevant, still alive, is in how vigorously he continues to be denounced. Indian Marxists, Naxalites particularly, detest him. The BJP has an ambivalent attitude towards him; secretly the RSS does not like him but publicly they’re forced to pretend. This kind of animosity means that people continue to be disturbed by his ideas. Even outside India, look at Perry Anderson’s extraordinary 40,000-word attack [in the London Review of Books]. It tells you that somewhere, Gandhi continues to shake assumptions, continues to shake your outlook on the world.
Perhaps. But I think in India Gandhi still presents a challenge. He makes people uncomfortable. Proof that he is still relevant, still alive, is in how vigorously he continues to be denounced. Indian Marxists, Naxalites particularly, detest him. The BJP has an ambivalent attitude towards him; secretly the RSS does not like him but publicly they’re forced to pretend. This kind of animosity means that people continue to be disturbed by his ideas. Even outside India, look at Perry Anderson’s extraordinary 40,000-word attack [in the London Review of Books]. It tells you that somewhere, Gandhi continues to shake assumptions, continues to shake your outlook on the world.
Anderson is of the left, but it seems in Britain, on the right, in newspapers like the Daily Telegraph, with all the recent books about Gandhi, there is a renewed interest in debunking the myth, if you like…Yes, yes, of course. A good example of that is Andrew Roberts who has often attacked Gandhi in The Telegraph or The Wall Street Journal, wildly over-interpreting selective writings, calling Gandhi a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent. Both the left and the right have their issues with Gandhi.
Much of the criticism seems focused on his eccentricities. But are his political ideas only for dissidents and protestors, or can a powerful state be ‘Gandhian’?I think his methods and ideas are largely for those protesting power. Of course, even as a state it’s vital to use violence with discretion, scrupulously, only as a last resort. And there is much to learn from him about transparency. But another aspect of Gandhi is his work as a community organiser, how good he was at building coalitions, at building teams.
The aspect of my book that I hope gets some attention is the network of people around Gandhi. We know about his colleagues and collaborators in India. We know about Patel and Nehru and Azad and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Mirabehn. But here are the people who shaped him in South Africa, at a much more important time. We know about his Indian rivals, Ambedkar and Jinnah. What about his enemies in South Africa? There were a whole host of very interesting secondary characters around him in those early years — Tamils, Gujaratis, Jews, Christians and, of course, his great adversary General Smuts.
It’s in South Africa that Gandhi learns how to build an organisation. He runs a journal in four languages — Tamil, Hindi, Gujarati and English — because he wants to reach out to all parts of the community. It’s there that he first develops the ability to inspire people to work for him. So Henry Polak, with whom Gandhi shared a house, finds himself at Gandhi’s behest travelling all over India to raise money for the South African campaign... read more:
