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

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007 INDIA

hands’ – he rejected Sir Stafford Cripps’s offer of a national representative government with independence to follow and initiated the infamous (in British eyes) ‘Quit India!’ campaign with the declaration that an inner voice was telling him that ‘even if the whole of India tries to persuade me that I am wrong, even then I will go ahead ... I cannot wait any longer for Indian freedom.’ In his handling of the episode Rajmohan omits this and other published statements that show his grandfather in a less than favourable light and seemingly at odds with his principles. Fortunately for India, the Quit India movement failed, the Indian Army stood firm, and the Japanese were repulsed. Indians can rightly point with pride to the Gandhian

SANKARSHANTHAKUR

A FUNCTIONING ANARCHY

INDIAAFTERGANDHI

★

By Ramachandra Guha (Macmillan 900pp £25)

HOLYWARRIORS: A JOURNEYINTOTHE HEARTOFINDIANFUNDAMENTALISM

★By Edna Fernandes (Portobello 334pp £15.99)

INDIACONFOUNDS MOSTIndians. None, for instance, can even hope to read the banknotes they use daily; there are eighteen scripts embossed on each one and more linguistic constituencies are agitating to be represented. Differences of caste, creed and class mean that most Indians are unfamiliar with the lives of most other Indians. Imperial eminences – John Strachey, Winston Churchill, et al – weren’t the last ones to flag the impossibility of India or to predict the collapse of the entity that emerged from colonial rule in 1947, sundered and bloodied: as recently as the 1980s, Indira Gandhi was trotting out the threat of ‘Balkanisation’ to rally support. Ramachandra Guha is, wisely, wary of reaching conclusions about India, but he is probably right when, towards the end of his elaborate exploration of her coming of age, he says: Secessionist movements are active here and there, but there is no longer any fear that India will follow the former Yugoslavia and break up into a dozen fratricidal parts. The powers of the state are sometimes grossly abused, but no one seriously thinks that India will emulate neighbouring Pakistan. However, India’s journey has been neither facile nor ordinary. Until recently, V S Naipaul wrote only darkly

legacy, not least as applied by the civil rights movements in the United States and – initially, at least – in Northern Ireland; but the central question that every history involving M K Gandhi, and certainly every biography, must answer is this: what did satyagraha as applied by M K Gandhi in India actually achieve? Rajmohan Gandhi makes a brave stab at an answer, concluding that M K Gandhi simply could not square the circle: ‘There was an incurable contradiction in Gandhi’s great goals. As long as Indians harboured rage at the British, Swaraj and non-violence were bound to clash. As long as Hindus and Muslims distrusted one another, Swaraj and Indian unity would clash.’ To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 37

about India, and most of what he had to say was prescient. M J Akbar’s India: The Siege Withinwas written in a volatile phase that seemed, two decades ago when it was published, about to crack – Sikh separatism in Punjab, the renewed clamour for self-determination in Kashmir, the spew of religious fundamentalism, Indira’s assassination and the consequent street mayhem. India would earn just concessions in Naipaul’s later work, though. And Akbar might want to update his pulsating report of alarm from the trenches with calmer analysis. India After Gandhi is a work of immense sweep and scholarship, but its real merit lies in its lucidity, and in the liberal attitude of its author: this is not a hectoring history, this is a charming invitation to understand the making of a complex nation. To Ramachandra Guha, and to millions of other Indians, at the heart of the country’s endurance against odds lies the liberal–democratic ethic wrought deep into the nation’s political consciousness during the Nehru era – so deep that his daughter Indira was shamed into calling elections within two years of declaring the Emergency, during which all rights and freedoms were suspended. She was cast out in the 1977 elections, then she rode back to power on a huge mandate in 1980. Indians felt, justifiably, that their mammoth, often unwieldy country was fairly a creature of their will. Indians are wont to dispose of emergencies, big ‘E’ or small. Neither the demolition of Ayodhya’s Babri mosque by Hindu zealots in 1992, nor the state-sponsored slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat a decade later, has driven the country’s most populous minority east or west into Bangladesh or Pakistan. Balasaheb Thackeray is a virulent, Hitler-loving bigot but his appeal remains contained within a precinct of Mumbai. Secession remains a live cry in India’s North East and in Kashmir, but both sets of separatists are negotiating with the government, even if they have not forsaken arms and terror. Edna Fernandes’s Holy Warriorsis a journey of discovery into some of the tensions that regularly stretch India. Religious fundamentalism is as much a part of India today as it is of the rest of the world, but India is troubled by

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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