You gave us a lawyer, we gave you back the Mahatma," said a South African friend to the renowned scholar Ramachandra Guha in 2002. Canonising of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began in Africa, with his nemesis/admirer Jan Smuts saying in 1914 that "the saint has left our shores" albeit hoping that it was for good. Gandhi's South African idolater/critic P S Aiyar observed bitterly that he had attained sainthood all by himself! Rabindranath Tagore's appellation of Mahatma followed only in 1919.
The evolution of a leader who was to arouse universal admiration in the four decades after he left South Africa from a nearly-failed foppish barrister (who had come there some 20 years earlier to plead the cause of the not-so poor traders of Indian origin) is the subject of Guha's magnificent new book. Although the author claims that he has "reconstructed …Gandhi's less known and sometimes forgotten years in Porbandar, Rajkot, Bombay, London, Durban and Johannesburg," the focus is clearly on Gandhi's South African sojourn. India and England are mere introductions: Gandhi has already landed in Durban by page 80. But that is a mere trifling quibble.
The two decades from 1894 formed without any doubt the most significant period in the creation of the complex leader and the human being the Mahatma was. Guha meticulously documents major developments, events and personalities that had an influence on Gandhi during this period.
As Guha says, "South Africa of the early 1900s was a crucible of social inequality where individuals of one race or class learned very quickly to separate themselves from other races or classes." Gandhi himself initially went along with the pyramidal structure, with the European Whites on top and the vast African Black majority at the bottom. Indians occupied a somewhat ambiguous middle position. They chafed at being included among the kafars by the ruling elite who placed restrictions on their movements and habitats, yet had little sympathy for the far worse-off Africans. Gandhi himself appears to have paid only peripheral attention to the plight of Africans, save in his final years in Africa when he focused on the problems of indentured labour. While influential Indian leaders later made common cause with the African National Congress and received due acknowledgement in the form of four ministerships in Nelson Mandela's first cabinet, most Africans have not necessarily been great admirers of Gandhi's African avatar.
While Gandhi the barrister busied himself with the pursuit of courtroom remedies to the problems of Indians, Gandhi the thinker began realising that the system itself was based on inequitous tenets and the strictly legal route would end up nowhere. What was needed was a basic change in laws, which in turn required their defiance and facing the attendant consequences. Thus came the bonfire of humiliating passes, courting arrest, and not resisting the police as the agitationists were forcibly removed and led to gaols.
All this had a profound impact on Gandhi the person. He shed his European lifestyle, established farming communes (the Phoenix settlement outside Durban in 1905, the Tolstoy farm near Johannesburg in 1910) which practised self-reliance and abhorred any frills to life, founded Indian Opinion in 1903, which he initially produced almost single-handedly. Gandhi the three-piece suit clad barrister rode first class in a train only to be thrown out in Pietermaritzburg in 1893. Gandhi the ascetic leader travelled third class aboard the Kinfauns Castle in 1914, clad in Kathiawadi homespun clothes
Thus was the process of what that other chronicler of Gandhi in Africa, Joseph Lelyveld, calls "Gandhi's discovery of epiphanies" in his Great Soul (2011). Among these are satygraha, dignity of manual work, equality transcending castes and religion and finally, an all-consuming compassion for the poorest and the weakest. All these were interrelated. You could not have the satyagrahi Gandhi without the brahmachari-come-lately. His espousal of the downtrodden had the flipside of almost deliberate and wilful neglect of his own family, Kasturba being the worst sufferer, just as the idealist and the faddist were two sides of the same persona. All this culminated in Gandhi's espousal of militant non-violence as the ultimate weapon, a progression brilliantly analysed by Erik Erikson in Gandhi's Truth (1969).
Guha deftly weaves these and many more developments in a compelling if exhausting narrative. Space does not permit even a summary. Guha's scholarship is evident through his meticulous research and documentation of sources: the end-notes, references and index run to 118 pages. Yet nowhere does the book become pedantic. It remains a reader's delight all the way through.
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Gandhi has been dead 65 years. The word Gandhian occasionally causes derision. The life of Gandhi is also one of the most widely studied and written about. Biographies date back almost a hundred years and the list of biographers includes literature Nobelists, eminent psycho-analysts, political scientists, historians, economists and social thinkers. The man himself left an ocean of words, and generations of scholars can delve into them, de-constructing old theories and forming new ones.
So what can this addition to an already overflowing collection of Gandhiana, even if it is by so eminent a person as Guha, signify? Received wisdom sees a disconnect between Gandhi the influential leader of a small minority in South Africa in the early days of the last century and Gandhi the tallest leader of the Indian national movement from the mid-1920s onwards. Guha's contribution arises from his studies spanning the two sub-continents. He shows that there was indeed continuity and Gandhi's evolution had begun long before he returned to India for good in 1915. I had observed a couple of years ago, before reading either Lelyveld or Guha, Gandhi's "invocation of simple, self-sufficient, village communities embedded in the concept of Ram rajya... attracted alike the peasants and burgeoning middle castes.... Gandhi saw neither his life nor his struggles as being just parts or isolated activities. He led by example, practising first and preaching later. He saw economic, social and religious activities as mutually supporting and evoked the images of a virtuous man and society" ("Many Gandhis, One Mahatma", Financial Express, April 14, 2011). Gandhi was a work in progress when he landed in Durban in 1893.
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And that evolution continues, even to date, not in the person of Gandhi, but in our understanding of him.
Gandhi was as devout a Hindu as one could ever find. Yet he did not wear religion on his sleeve. He did not have to because it was evident to even the most casual acquaintance. He did, however, cajole Hindus to renounce untouchability and accord Muslims due dignity. He nursed no bitterness towards those who opposed him, who in turn accorded him deference, ranging from Jan Smuts in 1914 to Shaheed Suhrawardy in 1947. He was no orator, yet aroused a whole sub-continent like no one else before or since.
This rediscovery of the Mahatma's long-ago struggles against antipathy among races has been an elevating experience in these times of deeply embedded antipathies in all elements of our shrill political and social life.
GANDHI BEFORE INDIA
Author: Ramachandra Guha
Publisher: Allen Lane/Penguin
Pages: xiv + 673 pp
Price: Rs 899
