Literary Review - August 2007

Page 35

INDIA

CHARLESALLEN A GREAT SOUL

GANDHI: THEMAN, HISPEOPLEANDTHEEMPIRE

★By Rajmohan Gandhi (Haus Books 738pp £25)

I REMEMBERQUITEclearly the moment when I heard that Bapu had been shot, and I remember being comforted by one of my parents’ servants, who assured me that he was now seated beside Vishnu on a lotus in heaven. Nothing better illustrates M K Gandhi’s unique hold over the popular imagination in India in January 1948 than the fact that even a little white boy not yet in school should have been so distressed. Biographies of saints should always be approached with caution – and when a saint’s biography is written by his grandson, who in his earlier days was a politician, the reader has every right to be doubly, if not trebly, suspicious. But then ‘saint’ might not quite be the right word to describe Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Very early in his political career his admirers took to calling him a mahatmaor ‘great soul’, and that seems as fair a summation as we are ever likely to get of a man who came far closer than most mortals do to practising what he preached. Rajmohan Gandhi clearly has no doubts that his grandfather was a mahatma, but it is a measure of his soundness as a biographer that he does not shy away from enumerating his subject’s flaws, ranging from shortcomings as husband and father to a headstrong conviction – one he shared with Joan of Arc – that the voices in his head were always right and all others wrong. But the flaws are almost beside the point. The fact is that M K Gandhi did something quite extraordinary: he recognised British colonial rule in South Africa and India for what it was – a moral wrong – and then set about constructing a political mechanism for putting that wrong to rights, not by the conventional means of physical opposition but by the application of moral superiority, pure and simple. This was not a reworking of ancient Vedic philosophies drawn from such texts as the Bhagavad Gita (as many Gandhians have convinced themselves it was), nor the ‘civil disobedience’ envisaged by Thoreau, but a genuinely novel political philosophy arrived at by trial and error – by what Gandhi himself called his ‘experiments with truth’. Beginning with his discovery, as a 21-year-old law student in ‘dear London’, of Henry Salt’s Plea for Vegetarianism, he developed over the course of two decades spent mostly in South Africa a form of political protest which the American philosopher William James termed ‘the moral equivalent of

war’. Gandhi called it satyagraha, meaning ‘firmness for the truth’ but which he redefined as ‘soul force’ or ‘truth force’. Far and away the most engaging part of Rajmohan Gandhi’s exhaustive biography concerns itself with the evolution of this political philosophy. The process spanned some twenty-five years, from 1888, when the ‘nowtimid-now-audacious’ Hindu boy from the mercantile banya caste defied family, custom and orthodoxy in his determination to be educated in England, to December 1915, when the 45year-old veteran of numerous political confrontations with the British authorities in South Africa landed in Bombay to apply his political philosophy to the liberation of India: Swaraj or ‘self rule’. The ‘freedom struggle’ that followed was an immensely chaotic process, complicated by the war years, factionalism within the Congress Party, Muslim fears of Hindu domination, and the determination of Jinnah to break away and form the new nation of Pakistan. The tendency is to reduce the period to absolutes of black and white, best exemplified by Richard Attenborough’s brave but simplistic biopic Gandhi (1982), which is how most people outside India perceive M K Gandhi and his role in the division of British India into independent India and Pakistan. For historians and biographers, too, the temptation to cut a clear path through the jungle by oversimplification is enormous, just as it is for historians with ties to the Indian subcontinent to respond to the siren call of cultural loyalties. It is enormously to Rajmohan Gandhi’s credit that he resists both temptations as he leads us painstakingly through the welter of secondary growth that surrounds every issue at every stage, drawing extensively on documents and letters. For older British readers the real test has to be Rajmohan Gandhi’s explanation of his grandfather’s actions in 1942, when Japanese bombs began to fall on Indian cities. Earlier, M K Gandhi had announced that on moral grounds it was ‘wrong to help the British war effort with men or money’ and had initiated a campaign of civil disobedience, even while acknowledging that Britain’s ‘very existence hung in the balance’. Then in April 1942 – believing that Britain now had no option but to pull out immediately, leaving India ‘in God’s

Gandhi: hear no evil

35

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007