If there is something one can take away from author-historian Ramachandra Guha’s second biographical volume, Gandhi: The Years That Changed The World (1914-1948) , it is that men — especially men of significance — are not made alone. They are carefully brought into being by a cast of supporting, often obscure, characters who rarely get written about in history textbooks. Through the biography, Guha gently displaces the notion that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi could have been who he was without the relationships that nurtured as well as challenged him.

With the 150th birth anniversary of the father of the nation around the corner, Guha explains what makes Gandhi such a compelling figure for a biographer in modern India. “Gandhi has such an extraordinary influence on our political and social life. In books that I wrote on different subjects, he kept popping up over and over again, so I thought I must settle my accounts with him,” he tells BLi nk in an interview in New Delhi.

“But it’s not just that — what makes him so interesting is that he worked across three continents, he did a lot of extraordinary and peculiar experiments on himself, he had a great capacity for friendship, he was an eloquent and direct writer; and just look at the canvas of that life — all those years set against such tumultuous historical events,” Guha (60) says.

In the book, the Padma Bhushan awardee describes being “stalked by the shadow (and the substance)” of Gandhi throughout his illustrious career. His book India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2011. His extensive scholarship on the history of environmentalism in India was marked by figures who drew on Gandhian ideals of how much one ought to consume and how one may articulate resistance. Even his books on the social history of cricket — something Gandhi wouldn’t ordinarily be associated with — found the leader’s name being repeatedly invoked.

And yet, there was a time when Guha was unsure about embarking on the project. It was, after all, not easy to write two hefty volumes about a man on whom reams and reams had already been printed. “I was inhibited from writing on Gandhi for a long time because I thought there are already so many books on this subject. Is there anything new I could say?”

Evidently, yes.

Person of Interest

In July 1914, Gandhi — described by Guha as “lawyer, editor, food faddist, activist and prisoner [and] the unquestioned leader of the small Indian community in South Africa” — began his voyage to India and, indeed, towards his own destiny as one of the most towering political figures of the 20th century.

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Gandhi: The Years That Changed The World (1914-1948); Ramachandra Guha; Penguin; Non-fiction; ₹999

 

Guha’s latest book begins with this homeward journey. Written as a sequel to his earlier book Gandhi Before India (2013), which expanded on Gandhi’s childhood in Rajkot and early law career in London, as well as his two decades in South Africa, the new volume focuses on the making of the ‘Mahatma’ alongside the making of the Indian nation.

The preface mentions that the book “tracks Gandhi’s arguments in the fields of politics, social reform, religious relations, and self improvement”, sourced from over 60 archival collections from across the world as well as a vast tranche of biographical material that is informally referred to as the Pyarelal Papers. Pyarelal Nayar had started out in the 1920s as assistant to Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary, and took over Desai’s position after the latter’s death in 1942.

Over three decades, Nayar compiled a few hundred boxes of valuable archival material. This cache of documents was transferred to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, and a substantial part of it was made available for consultation for the first time in 2012. Guha was the first Gandhi biographer to have accessed them.

Making history

Explaining in detail how Gandhi has been constructed as a biographical subject over the decades, Guha says, “Biographers must not rely exclusively on what their subjects say. What did people say about him, what did they say directly to him, what were the controversies he engaged in?” Likening a biography to a novel, he states, “It’s not just about the subject — but about a cast of characters.”

Guha points out that historians had largely confined themselves to the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi , compiled by eminent scholar Krishnaswami Swaminathan and his team of editors from 1958-94. The Collected Works , spanning 100 volumes, is an exhaustive assemblage of Gandhi’s words — in the form of his letters, articles, petitions and speeches.

“But when I was writing Gandhi Before India , I found letters written to Gandhi in the National Gandhi Museum in Delhi. These letters were unpublished, even though Gandhi’s responses were in the Collected Works . But if you’re reading his published letters, you need to know what people were writing to him about, what the context of his response was,” says Guha.

So he drew on several scattered sources of documentation — for instance, he found personal letters belonging to Hermann Kallenbach, Gandhi’s closest associate in South Africa, in Israel.

He also expanded his enquiry to include another important, yet neglected archival source — newspapers. Analysing the coverage of the events Gandhi was associated with, such as the Salt March (1930) and his Poona Fast (1932), in both pro- and anti-Congress newspapers, yielded important perspectives about how Gandhi was received and how he was framed as a leader of national standing.

When the Pyarelal Papers were made available, Guha was able to flesh out the context of every relationship Gandhi ever had, as well as understand the larger motivations behind his programmes and protests. “You get a fuller, deeper and richer sense of the different dimensions of his life than you would get if you only read the Collected Works, ” he says.

Arguments with Ambedkar

The book reflects the breadth as well as depth of the painstaking research that underpins it. A tome of over 1,100 pages, the narrative spans not just Gandhi’s life but also the lives of those who were tied to him in one way or another. In the chapter ‘Arguments with Ambedkar’, Guha describes in engrossing detail the developments leading up to the signing of the contentious Poona Pact in 1932, which blocked the proposal to create separate electorates for Depressed Classes. The Pact proved to be among the ideological battlegrounds between Gandhi and the other titan of the time — BR Ambedkar. Gandhi began a fast-unto-death to protest separate electorates since, according to him, “if [the untouchables] were ever to rise, it will not be by reservation of seats but will be by the strenuous work of Hindu reformers in their midst”.

As Gandhi’s health began to deteriorate, Ambedkar felt the pressure to reach a consensus. The question of separate electorates was modified to the number of seats reserved for the Depressed Classes in the central and provincial legislatures. At the end of it, Ambedkar is quoted as saying, “I believe it is no exaggeration for me to say that no man a few days ago was placed in a greater dilemma than I was.”

“I think that Gandhi and Ambedkar are complementary as seen from the 21st century. In their lifetime, they were adversaries, even rivals. The Gandhi-Ambedkar relationship is absolutely central in my book, and I have documented it systematically, as it occurred, without any retrospective judgement,” Guha says.

Cast of characters

When asked if there was any surprising discovery in the tranche of documents he went through for months, Guha says, “It’s the small details that surprised me. For instance, it’s through these papers that I realised how close Gandhi was to Mahadev Desai. I would say that if there was a death that hurt Gandhi, it was Mahadev’s.”

Desai — though referred to as Gandhi’s secretary — performed a role far more invaluable. Guha quotes Gandhi as telling Desai, “If you became bed-ridden, I would have to wind up three-fourths of my activities.”

“Mahadev was basically Gandhi’s conscience. He enabled Gandhi to become what he was,” says Guha. The chapter ‘A Bereavement And A Fast’ movingly recreates the sweeping grief that clouded the freedom movement in the wake of Desai’s sudden death. Over 300 condolence telegrams and letters flooded in from across the country.

Other aspects of Gandhi’s long and extraordinary life come under Guha’s microscope. In the chapter ‘The Strangest Experiment’, he examines Gandhi’s obsession with brahmacharya or celibacy. “Why did he think his sexual control was a precondition to Hindu-Muslim unity? It’s bizarre. It’s a leap of faith! I’d say it was a mark of his vanity,” Guha says with a laugh. The chapter details Gandhi’s quest to conquer sexual desire, which convinced him to ask his grand-niece Manu to join him in his bed, much to the objection of many of his disciples as well as luminaries such as JB Kripalani and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. But Gandhi persisted with the experiment in order to demonstrate that “men and women could so purify themselves in mind and spirit that they could share a bed without either being put to shame”.

Even otherwise, Gandhi — as far as being a father and a husband goes — has been documented to be less than perfect. The book cites Desai, who was closer to him than his own children: “To be with a saint in heaven is bliss and glory, but to be with a saint on earth is a different story.”

“In many ways he was a typical Hindu patriarch of his time. He could be a harsh and unforgiving father; he imposed his will on his wife. This is true of many famous people: their families have paid the price,” Guha says.

Of his four sons, Gandhi had a relatively healthy relationship only with his youngest, Devdas. “And even there, Gandhi says to Devdas — you have to make up for the failures of the others. I mean, what an unfeeling thing to say to a son,” Guha exclaims.

Nevertheless, Guha says, “In the book, I have tried to integrate all of this. I have tried to give space to each facet of his life without any one facet overwhelming the narrative. You have to take the life as a whole, in all its complexity .”

The book concludes with Gandhi’s assassination and the epilogue attempts to summarise the magnitude of his influence. “Gandhi doesn’t belong to India alone. He is the one figure after the Buddha who has a truly global reach,” Guha concludes.

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