Book review. Gandhi, through his writings

A statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Accra was pulled down last year after some Ghanaians protested that he was a racist, no matter that amongst Gandhi’s most ardent admirers were Martin Luther King Jr. and one of Africa’s greatest sons, the late Nelson Mandela, both perfectly capable of spotting a racist from afar. At the end of the day however, Mahatma Gandhi sails through history, widely acknowledged as the most sensible and forward-thinking leader of the 20th century, and for good reason.

His belief in minimalism, his solidarity with the poor and the marginalised as well as women are hallmarks of a Gandhian philosophy of fair play and justice. Gandhi’s concept of trusteeship was far ahead of his time, and perhaps even ours. Schumacher, in Small is Beautiful , makes an economist’s case validating a Gandhian axiom that there is enough for all humans on earth if only greed did not trump need.

Gandhi was India’s first mass leader with a following that cut across the country’s many divides. How did he achieve this? The story has been the subject of an eponymous movie by Richard Attenborough as well as numerous biographies, most recently, a brilliant one by Ramachandra Guha in two volumes, arguably the most detailed and well researched so far.

But reading even the best about Gandhi by others leaves a void in anyone seeking to understand the man and his mission. It is important therefore to get to know Gandhi through his own writings. However, few can go through all that he wrote and his collected works, massive as they are, remain largely on the shelves. But help is at hand. On the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth, the Oxford University Press has come out with an updated version of a representative selection of Gandhi’s writings. ‘The Oxford India Gandhi - Essential Writings,’ compiled and edited by his grandson and scholar- bureaucrat Gopalakrishna Gandhi, is the subject of this review.

One could carp about the heft of the volume. But only by reading it through can one appreciate the value of having a large body of Gandhi’s writings arranged chronologically in 14 parts in one large volume covering all phases of his life. Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s introduction to each part is brief, but not sketchy, and prepares the reader well to make sense of what follows.

The selection included in this volume flows smoothly to almost read as a candid autobiography, giving us an insight into many aspects of the Mahatma in his own words — from his sexuality to his sense of honour, personal dignity and in his enduring trust in the human being.

Well networked

It is astonishing how in an age without the internet Gandhi could build and sustain social connections, often intimate, across India and the world. No other leader networked as much as Gandhi did and this volume brings out the range of his relationships amongst them CF Andrew, Dadhabhai Naoroji, Gokhale, Tolstoy, Romain Rolland, Tagore, CV Raman, Ambalal Sarabhai, Einstein, and Verrier Erwin. Several women also gravitated to Gandhi. Madeline Slade, the daughter of a British admiral was one of them. Gandhi grew so fond of her that he practically adopted her as his daughter.

Gandhi’s greatest achievement was in making Satyagraha an effective force for the successful conduct of a unique non-violent freedom struggle. This comes through reasonably well in this volume, but not so his spectacular achievement in making the Congress a mass-based Party or the manner in which he leveraged the unity brought about by British rule to meld much of the British Indian Empire into an Indian nation.

Was Gandhi a fanatic Hindu? There is enough in this volume to convince even the most hardened sceptic that he was not, no more than that he was against the untouchables.

Was Gandhi racist? The manner in which he empathised with the Zulus and his outrage at the punishments inflicted on them clearly show that he was anything but that. But this volume also brings out — more by omission — how little Africa and Africans interested or mattered to him.

The austere egalitarianism of Gandhi’s ashrams, in South Africa and India, is well captured in this volume as also how they also doubled up as non-intimidating platforms where all classes of people, including those who were considered untouchable, could meet, live, interact, dine and clean up on equal terms.

Was his later life celibacy bizarre, as many have made it out to be? Not at all, if one considers the circumstances that led Gandhi to it. Was Gandhi a closet homosexual as Joseph Lelyveld hints in his book on Gandhi? There is nothing that Gandhi said or did that suggests so. There was nothing more to his deep affection for his acolyte, Kallenbach than a strong and enduring friendship. If it was otherwise, we can surely have expected Gandhi to have owned up to it, as he did, his bizarre sexual experiment to test the durability of his ‘bramachariness’ in the face of temptation, and that too in the middle of his humanitarian mission to Noakhali in what is now Bangladesh..

For all that has been said about him, Gandhi was a loving husband and, notwithstanding his failure to make a success of his first born, a loving, if quirky, father as well. Gandhi’s sometimes turbulent marriage to Kasturba was played out in full public view and is well covered in this selection of Gandhi’s writings.

The volume is rather economical when it comes to Gandhi’s acrimonious relationship with an Ambedkar who, to the end of his life, never trusted him. It also comes short on Bose whose ways he did not approve, whose popularity he quietly dreaded and whose Presidency of the Congress Party he demolished.

The volume is nowhere as good as ‘Mahatma Gandhi – The Essential Writings,’ edited by the historian Judith Brown, lacking as it does her crisp and incisive introduction and notes. But for the lay reader who wishes to gain a quick understanding of Gandhi, the chronologically organised ‘ The Oxford India Gandhi – Essential Writings ,’ compiled and edited by Gopalakrishna Gandhi, is the one to go for.

The reviewer taught public policy and contemporary history at IISc Bengaluru.

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