Behind the good wife

Gandhi's great-grandson recreates Kasturba's life from her diary and presents a woman bound by a patriarchal society but hardly a doormat

With a towering personality like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Bapu) as her husband, it is no surprise that the pages of history seem to have reduced Kasturba Gandhi (Ba) to a loyal accomplice than a freedom fighter who took on the might of British colonial rule in India.
 

Located in the present, we could debate whether the man must be blamed for looming large or the wife held responsible for diminishing her own light to let him shine but there is no denying that her story needs to be heard, understood and retold in all its complexity.
 

Tushar Gandhi’s new book The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba is an excellent step in this direction. The author, who made his debut with the book Let’s Kill Gandhi!  (2007), is the great-grandson of Ba and Bapu, grandson of their second son Manilal and daughter-in-law Sushila, and son of Sunanda and Arun Gandhi. The author could not have written this book without insider access to people, institutions and documents. His parents wrote a book called The Forgotten Woman: The Untold Story of Kastur Gandhi (1998), and his own volume continues the task of recovering Ba’s story.
 

He writes, “A few years back, while searching the lofts and trunks at Kasturba Ashram, Indore, the staff of Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, came across a long-forgotten, handwritten diary. It was in a sorry condition and rapidly deteriorating.” A closer scrutiny of the artefact revealed that it was Ba’s diary, written in Gujarati. The author calls it “an almost day-to-day account of an extremely tumultuous nine-month period of her life, from January to September 1933.” When he informed his family about this discovery, they could not believe it. He was told that Ba was “unlettered”; someone else must have written it for her.
 

As a great-grandson delighted to be in possession of this hitherto unknown record of Ba’s life in her own words, the author decided to translate it into English. He clarifies, “The reason I reproduce it in book form is to dispel many myths about Kastur Kapadia Gandhi, my Ba.” This book is more than a translation; it is also a biography. The author uses the diary to reconstruct Ba’s life from her birth in 1869 to her death in 1944 before India became free.
 

We get to know her as a young bride, married at the age of 13 to a boy of the same age, struggling with loneliness in India when her husband was studying in England, feeling worried about their financial status when he had no income, and coping with distance when he went off to work in South Africa as a lawyer. We also get to know her as a daughter who grew up with material comforts but found herself with a spouse who constantly challenged her to forsake the pleasures that she craved. It must have been hard to live with him. The book highlights how annoyed she used to get when he took it upon himself to educate her.
 

She comes across as a woman who was bound by duty in a patriarchal society but she was hardly a doormat. She made her disagreements known, demanded that women be allowed to participate in the freedom struggle when her husband felt otherwise, became a satyagrahi and emerged as a leader. The author does not say that this book is a feminist reclaiming of Ba’s life but readers interested in the politics of silencing and erasure will find it engaging.
 

Going through Ba’s diary, he noticed her “limitations regarding the written language” and her use of “the colloquial, spoken dialect of Kathiyavad.” He writes, “This is how someone who was not conventionally educated, who was not a trained or dedicated diarist…could write.” What might come across to critics as lacking in literary sophistication is nevertheless quite significant because “it provides a tiny but intimate glimpse of a person time has ignored…It displays her rustic wisdom, her remarkable simplicity and her voluntary invisibility.”
 

That said, the author does not try to cover up less than flattering aspects of Ba’s life. She was steeped in the casteist conditioning that she inherited from her parents and also saw her in-laws practise. This book offers many examples of the taboos and customs that she upheld; among these is an instance of her pouring 11 buckets of water over Bapu’s head before allowing him to enter the house. He had just returned from visiting bastis that she considered unclean and impure because the people living there were lower in the caste hierarchy.
 

Read this book to find out how Ba was forced to give up her prejudices. Thankfully, the author does not sanitise what happened. Once, when Bapu asked Ba to clean the chamber pot of a guest, and do so with a smile, she flatly refused. Going by the author’s account, Bapu grabbed Ba by the elbow and dragged her out of their home. He told her, “Get out! There is no place for you in my home!” She was shocked to see him slam the door in her face.
 

Ba began to weep, and pleaded with him to take her back in because she had nowhere to go. Apparently, he was “full of remorse” and “begged her forgiveness” but the man we are used to placing on a pedestal as an apostle of non-violence did have a violent streak in him. Our heroes seem more real and relatable when we allow them to be humans instead of mahatmas.
 

It would be unfair, however, to not recognise the love that Ba and Bapu felt for each other. Instead of depicting them only as soulmates, the author writes about them as a couple that enjoyed passionate lovemaking, and took care of each other through illness and heartache. Prioritising the freedom struggle meant making sacrifices on the home front. The biggest casualty was their relationship with their son Harilal, which the book addresses sensitively. Ba met him before she died but even her love could not undo the damage that had been done.

BOOK DETAILS

Title of the book: The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba

Author: Tushar Gandhi

Publisher: HarperCollins India

Price: Rs  599

Pages: 312

The reviewer tweets @chintanwriting