Faith and Freedom: Gandhi in History
Author: Mushirul Hasan
Publisher: Niyogi, Rs450
Mushirul Hasan, through this book, helps the readers get a deeper understanding of Mahatma Gandhi's attitude towards Islam and his dealings with the Muslim community, says Rajesh Singh
The life and times of Mahatma Gandhi have spawned an entire industry of writers — scholars and historians who have studied the enigma from various angles in a bid to try and make sense of his contribution to free India’s geography and soul. He has become a fountainhead of ideas and interpretations, sometimes similar and at times confrontational. He came to be the epicentre of cinematic works too, with Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi being the most prominent one to date. On many occasions, authors (and filmmakers like Attenborough) have taken simplistic positions on the subject, preferring to see Gandhi in black and white. But there have also been others like HM Seervai who broke from the mould in his book, Partition: legend and Reality, and presented him as a human being — committed and sincere no doubt, but with the fallibilities that led to less than desired consequences in the country’s march to independence.
And now, we have historian Mushirul Hasan’s Faith and Freedom: Gandhi in History, which helps the readers get a deeper understanding of the Mahatma’s attitude towards Islam and his dealings with the Muslim community. The author delves into loads of historical material and tries to make sense of them with the avowed desire to get a firm, if fresh, perspective on why really the ‘Father of the Nation’ steadfastly opposed the two-nation theory, and why he stuck to the stand despite evidence that many important Muslim leaders from both the Congress and the Muslim league had nothing but contempt for his dream. It’s not that they were necessarily communal-minded; their opposition was based on ground realities too. In tackling this confrontation, Hasan provides insights into the interactions that Gandhi had with Muslim leaders across the political spectrum, and more specifically Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
It will remain the greatest irony of history that Gandhi, who was avowedly religious and possessive about being a Hindu, should end up as the father of a secular country, while Jinnah, who had as much closeness with Islam as an Arab would have with a Jew, should campaign for and eventually lead an Islamic nation. Such contradictions make for interesting history which can be best grasped by understanding the contexts in which those attitudes formed and grew in shape and size. Hasan’s book offers us that possibility.
As one would expect from a work by the well-know historian, the book is generously dotted with references and cross-references, giving it a somewhat brainy texture. But lay readers should not be put off by the scholarly heaviness; once they overcome their initial fear they will discover a fairly fast-paced narrative that sucks in a host of personalities ranging from Jawaharlal Nehru to Jinnah to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and more. All of them, in their own different ways, shaped the Mahatma’s socio-political thinking. Just as the many scholarly books, written by the likes of Judith M Brown and Rajmohan Gandhi, among others, have helped Hasan in his quest. But Hasan believes that these works did not pay adequate attention to the Mahatma’s religious thoughts. He says in the very beginning of the book, “They have not always treated Gandhi’s intimate understanding and interpretation of Islam and the Muslim communities in South Asia clearly and intelligently.” Hasan offers us an interesting overreach when he refers to ‘Muslim communities in South Asia’, because Mahatma Gandhi was from all accounts preoccupied with the pulls and pressures of the politics of religion within then undivided India to really bother with the larger issue of South Asia.
‘Gandhi versus Jinnah’ remains the most riveting clash in Indian history, and there have been many versions which historians and sundry other writers have dealt with. But all of them agree on the point that on matters religious, Gandhi was more giving than Jinnah, who, once fixated on an Islamic exclusivity, refused to budge. These differences had far-reaching impact. Hasan says, “The Gandhi-Jinnah rift extended to the Congress Muslims, who painted Jinnah in the lurid colours of ‘betrayal’, ‘sell-out’ and ‘renegade’. The dispute went further, as the author adds from sources he delved into: “The Muslim Conference in Kashmir, an adjunct of the Muslim league, tried to break up the procession in honour of Azad and Jawaharlal... Over and above Azad and other Congress Muslims, the league workers portrayed Badshah Khan as a Hindu stooge. It was said that he had replaced his turban with a Gandhi cap, the crescent and star with a charkha, and that the wily Gandhi had captivated the simple-minded Pathan.”
While Hasan explores Gandhi’s tryst with religious co-existence — not just in the cultural sense but politically too, given Jinnah’s strident call for an Islamic nation — he is careful not to gloss over the quirky nature of this ‘fakir’ which, in some ways, did contribute to the distancing between him and many of his followers. His unorthodox views on inter-caste and inter-religious marriages (he opposed them on various occasions, for reasons personal or as part of a principled stand) and his outlook on Indian womanhood (he seemed to have not treated his wife with the compassions and consideration that he showered on the rest of his fellowmen) have come to be criticised by many writers in the decades past, and with reason. And then there were his rather quaint views on health, matched much later by only Moraji Desai, who ended up as a short-term Prime Minister of the country.
Gandhi’s quest for religious-political coexistence led him to get engaged in a balancing act which turned into a Sisyphean task and took him to his deathbed. Hasan quotes from a source which states, “When it came to discussing the imminent dangers of mixing religion with politics, Gandhi juggled with words, which were by and large too abstract to be understood by laypersons.” Many would argue today that his intentions, noble without doubt, were simply too outlandish to succeed, because they were rooted in idealism and not reality. But then, Gandhi lived and breathed unrealistic idealism, which frustrated even his closest advisers and admirers.
It can be said that the Mahatma has had the last word, decades after his death and the demise of his bete noire Jinnah. The glue of religion has not worked for Pakistan; it too got partitioned and is now facing all sorts of sectarian violence. On the other hand, India, with all its fault lines and failures, remains a robust secular nation. Even the fiercest critics of Gandhi have to give him some credit for that.