Every year so many books come out on Mahatma Gandhi. And yet most of them fail to discover the real Gandhi. Ramachandra Guha joins the list
Not a year goes by when a prominent book is not written on Mahatma Gandhi. From his sexual orientations to his experiments with truth, Gandhi evokes as much admiration as he courts derision and contempt. Yet, the appetite remains as insatiable as ever. Here comes Ramachandra Guha with Gandhi Before India. The book definitely has a few new things to say: That Gandhi was in touch with Mohammed Ali Jinnah more than a decade before it was previously thought to be; that he almost threw his wife Kasturba Gandhi out of his house in South Africa just because she refused to part with a gift the Mahatma had received; that Gandhi could evolve as father, learning lessons from his failure to take care of his eldest son, Harilal.
But then that’s where the book falters. It squanders its energy in resurrecting Gandhi as Mahatma. In the process, it says that he never had sex with anyone other than his wife. That he should be “recognised as being among apartheid’s first opponents”. But why do we need to make Gandhi Mahatma-likeIJ Why do we need to turn him into a 21st century anti-apartheid leader when the fact is that he was a Baniya (a trading class) of the 19th century with its pride and prejudice intactIJ He agitated about discrimination being meted to his fellow Indians, but kept quiet about the plight of the natives whom he disdainfully called Kafirs. Even after the Pietermaritzburg episode, wherein he was thrown out of a first-class railway carriage for sharing his seat with a White passenger, Gandhi did not start a campaign against racial oppression per se, as we are often told; the incident provoked him to start a campaign urging the authorities that “respectable Indians” should not be clubbed with the natives while denying basic human rights.
Gandhi was a product of his time, class and society. Why should we, therefore, in our desperation to make a Mahatma out of him, transplant him from his 19th century milieu to the 21st century ethosIJ Why can’t we accept him with all his strengths and weaknessesIJ Will he be less relevant if he had sex with women other than his wifeIJ Will he be less significant if he is seen as “cunning as a cartload of monkeys”, as one provincial British governor would call him repeatedly, rather than a sage-like figure he is made out to beIJ Guha seems to have missed this point. Or, maybe he himself is the prisoner of Indian perception wherein a politician is seen to be predominantly wily, deceptive and dirty.
So, who exactly was GandhiIJ The crux of Guha’s argument is that Gandhi would not have become what he ultimately became had he not gone to South Africa. This is hardly a revelation. VS Naipaul has said the same long back while analysing the “Indian way of looking and not seeing”. However, what Guha doesn’t say is that Gandhi, to use Naipaul’s terminology, was a bits-and-pieces man, picking up things from his mother’s love of fasting, Ruskin’s idea of labour, Tolstoy’s religious belief, South Africa’s jail code and even the Manchester No Breakfast Association. So, when one looks at Gandhi, he never appears as a single man; he is sum of many Gandhis, sometimes in contradiction with one another.
Just look at the diaries of Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s long-time secretary. There one finds the real Gandhi, who would one day condemn inter-caste ties, only to change his mind the next day. He would one day promote non-violence to the extent of getting slapped without getting provoked. The next day he would call the victims of Jallianwala Bagh anything but heroic martyrs for refusing to unsheathe the sword, or use at least their sticks. He would condemn the capitalist order, but never mind using the resources of the Birlas. He would denounce the railways, but no Indian leader has appropriated the medium better than he did to forward his cause. Gandhi preferred a third-class berth but that would be expensive than Jinnah’s first-class ticket, for the former would never move around without a motley crowd around him. Even his “half-naked fakir” image would cost the Congress more than what Jinnah would ever have spent on his Savile Row suits.
Margaret Bourke-White recalls in one of her writings how she had to go through several secretaries to get permission to photograph Gandhi. Pyarelal, one of the secretaries, asked her whether she knew how to spin. “Oh I didn’t come to spin. I came to take pictures of the Mahatma spinning,” she said. To this, she was rebuked: “How can you photograph Mahatmaji spinning until first you understand the spinning wheel, a most delicate, intricate and marvellous instrumentIJ”
Gandhians had by then confined Gandhi to charkha. Soon others followed the suit: For socialists he became khadi; for the RSS a cow protector; and, for left-leaning liberals, he became a Mahatma cast in the secular values they uphold. In the process, the real Gandhi got lost. Guha, too, fails to discover him. But this is hardly a surprise.