The all-too-familiar Mahatma

“The life of [Mahatma] Gandhi… is …one of the most widely studied and written about… . The man himself left an ocean of words, and generations of scholars can delve into them, de-constructing old theories and forming new ones,” I had observed in my review of Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial Gandhi before India in 2013. So why should this addition to Gandhiana be of interest to this reviewer? First, it claims to be a (reconstructed) autobiography of the early years of a man now dead for close to three-quarters of a century. The second is the pedigree and the credentials of the person who has “edited” it. Gopalkrishna Gandhi is the grandson of the Mahatma and C Rajgopalachari. He has been a civil servant, secretary to the President of India, High Commissioner to South Africa, Governor of West Bengal, candidate for vice president of India, besides being a man of letters. They don’t come more blue-blooded and qualified than this luminary of liberalism in India.

Any serious student of Indian political history would not be unaware of My Experiments with Truth, the Mahatma’s true autobiography. The idea of using some of the Mahatma’s words from other sources and those of his biographers to flesh this out might sound intriguing (as it did to the publishers) at a first hearing, but turns out to be not quite so upon reflection. Experiments ends in 1921 and the present volume a little earlier, in July 1914, when the Mahatma left South Africa for the last time. So we have no greater coverage in time. The main reason this volume ends in 1914 is that after his return to India, the Mahatma’s life was virtually the stuff of newspaper headlines and many interviews and representations. He had practically no existence that transcended these very public stages.

Further, the list of sources that Gopal Gandhi provides — Prabhudas Chhagandas Gandhi, who ran a journal called Honeycomb from the Sabarmati Ashram, the Mahatma’s two early non-Indian biographers, Joseph J Doke and Millie Polak, and his two secretaries, Mahadevbhai Desai and Pyarelal — all obviously so in awe of the Mahatma that their accounts and interpretations are hardly likely to be different from the non-official “Mahatma” line. In today’s terminology, they could be considered bhakts.

The futility of this project lies, therefore, in both the absence of alternative sources and the time period. I am sure I was not alone in checking whether there were different versions of the two most critical and interesting events of this time: The Mahatma being with his wife Kastur as his father lay dying and his unceremonious disembarkation from the first class compartment at Maritzburg. This volume treats these events with the same taciturnity as Experiments, as the other sources had no independent knowledge of them.

Eighty per cent of the book covers the Mahatma’s sojourn in South Africa. Here his own account is embellished by those in other sources, not different but stretched out, sometimes to the point of being boring. Thus, we have what, say, C F Andrews drafted, how the Mahatma summarised it in his various cables and representations, how the final wording emerged, all pretty much the same with minor variations, of little interest to the reader more than a century later. The same is the case with the many speeches and addresses.

This regurgitation is to be compared to several independent studies, most notably two: Guha’s Gandhi Before India and Joseph Lelyveld’s excellently researched Great Soul. Both provide incomparable insights, not mere narratives and are eminently readable.

Thus, Gopal Gandhi failed to select sources as well as time periods that would have held the reader’s interest and provided material for other analysts. One area where this does not happen, at least in part, is the Mahat­ma’s relations with his family and those with whom they stayed. In July 1913, Jaykunvar Mehta, who stayed at the Phoenix farm, had “des­troyed her chastity”, and Mani­lal, the Mahatma’s third son, was the partner in that “crime”. The Maha­tma put up a show that would surp­ass any Victorian mother and Millie Polak recorded it in all its teary details. The Mahatma punished himself with his now customary fasts. Manilal did the same (though he did not marry the maiden). A few weeks later, Kastur chastised her husband for ransacking the drawers containing the girl’s belongings. There are also graphic details of meat on Dr Gool’s table (the Mahatma’s hosts then) which forced him to change his meal hours. I rather think the good editor inserted these scenes to bring some hilarity to his account.

The Mahatma clearly played favourites among his sons. The second, Ramdas, was the best and Harilal, the eldest, the worst. There is a long excerpt of a letter from the Mahatma to Harilal, which reads him the riot act over a letter he has written, but we never know its contents. In all, Gopal Gandhi confirms that his grandfather was among the worst of autocrats in dealing with his immediate family.

One aspect of the book should cause wonderment to the generation growing up on tweets and WhatsApp messages. The main actors had incredible written outputs, without the benefit of any speed-writing devices or on-line references. And they seemed to have time left over to take care of other worldly matters such as managing farms and ashrams, as also settling family disputes, their own and those of the others. A clear case of work expanding to occupy available time?

In the preface, Gopal Gandhi likens his effort to collecting “original footage” of a film, graininess and all. I rather think this is an exercise in collecting and presenting the rushes, outtakes and all, and with no clear indication of criteria used. Even a neophyte film-maker would hesitate to display in public the results of such an exercise.