Two conflicts and a quest

Rajmohan Gandhi, a man of peace, has written a riveting account of two revolts mired in blood and butchery. Geeta Doctor met the author on his recent visit to Chennai.

The contrast between man and book could not be more striking. His neatly brushed hair is now silvery white, and his tall, ascetic frame is still draped in his trademark khadi whites and oatmeal browns — despite the fact that he spends most of his time in the US, teaching political science and history at the University of Illinois.

It could be that he is particularly at home in Chennai, where he used to live and where he has devoted admirers. This is partly because he is a grandson of the Mahatma, and also a descendant of the south Indian patriarch of purity of political purpose, C Rajagopalachari, or Rajaji.

 

We meet him at the famed Madras Book Club, where he has come to launch his latest book, A Tale of Two Revolts: India 1857 and the American Civil War. He looks at his younger brother Gopal Gandhi, newly returned after an action-packed innings as the governor of West Bengal, and remarks: “For all those who ask me ‘How was your time in West Bengal?’ and have appreciated my role there, I have to point out that it was my brother. If, before, I was always introduced as the grandson of Gandhiji, I am now introduced as the older brother of Shri Gopal Gandhi. I am always happy to be mistaken for my younger brother!”

As he describes it, the reason for linking the two movements that are the subject of his latest book is that all three countries involved — India, the USA and the UK — have a history of shared memories. Those memories were made vivid through trade links and historical events, which, even if they are not directly connected, helped shape the ideas of the two cultures, then and now.

Gandhi makes it clear that it was not the American war of independence that challenged him, but the 1861-1865 Civil War between the North and South over the question of slavery, and whether the South wanted to remain a part of the United States of America. It was not exactly contemporaneous with the Indian Mutiny of 1857, but both occurred within a few years of each other. What particularly fascinated him was the war of ideas that events inspired in thinking men and women.

Gandhi uses the account of one individual as a pivot for each tale. One is William Howard Russell, a British journalist (Irish, actually) who is sometimes described as the first ever war correspondent — for his brilliant despatches from the Crimean War, with which he was able to turn public opinion in England against the conflict, in moral terms. In much the same way, the reporting that resulted from Russell’s year-long sojourn in India after the first phase of the Mutiny was able to set some of the wilder stories of “native” barbarity towards the ruling race in a more truthful, balanced context.

It’s interesting to note the difference that one fearless, perhaps maverick reporter can make, compared to our own day and age — when the reporting on the Iraq war, in spite of a much more sophisticated system of conveying the news and in spite of competing interests, has thrown up more sand than sense in assigning blame for the deaths of so many innocents.

The use of alternate viewpoints, in the form of letters, poems and diaries kept by the British or Americans (as the case warrants), is what gives Gandhi’s re-telling a vastly different perspective. He anchors the India narrative by tracing the life stories of five outstanding individuals — Jyotiba Phule, Allan Octavian Hume, Bankimchandra Chatterji, Sayyid Ahmed Khan and Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar.

While citing the ideas of Leo Tolstoy writing about the Crimean war in the European context, and following the evolution of Karl Marx as an influential thinker, Gandhi places Abraham Lincoln at the centre stage of American history as it unfolds in the pages of his book. In a sense, therefore, the book is not just about the actual genesis and outcome of the two revolts, but also the moral logic that drove them. The two revolts, says Gandhi, were wars about ideas — freedom from foreign oppression in India, freeing of human beings from bondage in America — and a stirring reminder that, in the US, what the founding fathers had hoped for was a just society where all men would live as equals.

In reply to a pointed question, Gandhi says: “I am not going to comment on William Dalrymple’s remark, on whether I agree that Indian historians are lazy. I am sure that some historians are lazy and some others have worked harder than Dalrymple might have done. However, he is right when he says that there was this huge amount of information lying around and people had not bothered to access it. That is absolutely valid. Of course, William Dalrymple was supported by Mr [Mahmoud] Farooqi, who did an immense amount of research, so I think when we compliment him, we must simultaneously compliment Mr Farooqi, for the incredible amount of research that he did, which Dalrymple also acknowledges.

“Now, coming to the revisionist part, I can only speak for myself. I can truthfully and deliberately call my book ‘a tale of two revolts’. This is a tale. It is not a thesis. It is neither revisionist nor conventional, it does not confirm existing perspectives or offer consciously new ones. This is a tale of two riveting events. Yes, bad events, bloody events, sometimes horrendous acts of brutality on both sides, but nonetheless riveting events that have lured historians — in India, 1857, in America, the Civil War. [They] lured me. I wrote this principally for myself. To indulge my curiosity, my desire to revisit and re-tell these two amazing stories. Yes, there are connections, there are comparisons, there are some conclusions. But above all the author has indulged his own desire to revisit and re-tell these two amazing stories.”

One theme that emerges is about why the British in India were taken by surprise by the revolt. One observer wondered whether there would have been a mutiny at all without the immediate provocation of the infamous greased cartridges. Some south Indian historians wondered why, in the light of earlier but perhaps less successful revolts in the south — Tipu Sultan’s resistance comes to mind, as also that of a local chieftain called Kattoboman, who raised the flag of resistance against foreign rule — the British in India had not expected such an attack as happened in 1857. Mahatma Gandhi himself had ignored the South (as usual, according to some).

Gandhi’s reply was unequivocal. The rulers in India were so secure in their superiority, the India elites so divided among themselves — in many cases the local elites considered themselves the beneficiaries of new ideas and exposure to European science and education — that there was no universal desire to unite against a common enemy. In the case of the American Civil War, in contrast, there was not only the moral fight against slavery but also the powerful, unifying figure of Abraham Lincoln.

“If there is nothing else that you feel inspired to read from the book,” says Gandhi, “I urge you to read Lincoln’s second Gettysburg address which I have reproduced. It is the most remarkable piece of persuasion.” Gandhi’s book celebrates the power of ideas that reach across the abyss of the dark phases of history, and it’s aim seems to be to leave us with moments that redeem our humanity.

[A Tale of Two Revolts: India 1857 and the American Civil War by Rajmohan Gandhi is published by Penguin Viking; pp 424; Rs 599.]