A J Philip
First Published : 25 Apr 2011 10:58:00 PM IST
Last Updated : 25 Apr 2011 11:50:30 PM IST
There are thousands of books on Mahatma Gandhi and there would be thousands more on him, because he was a person about whom Albert Einstein had said that generations to come would scarcely believe that such a person existed on this earth. Though he was not a prolific author, he wrote and published so much that few can match him in his prodigious output, encased in over 100 thick volumes. He was a spontaneous writer who did not bother about consistency.
Gandhi is, therefore, open to interpretation. And that is what Pulitzer-winner Joseph Lelyveld did when he wrote Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India, which is biographical only in a limited sense. The iconic status Gandhi enjoys today is such that a reviewer’s comment that the author exposes him as a “gay” or “bisexual” and “racist” is enough for the Gujarat Assembly to demand and obtain a ban on the book.
On the Kindle device that I read the book, I did a search on the word ‘gay’ and it yielded only one result — it figures as part of the name ‘Gayatri’. On the word ‘bisexual’, the result was zero. The word ‘homosexual’ appears only once in the book, to rule it out about Gandhi’s intimate relationship with German “lifetime bachelor” and bodybuilder Hermann Kallenbach. He prefers a neutral word “homoerotic”. If Chief Minister Narendra Modi reads the book, he would be ashamed that he banned it.
Unlike most other Gandhi experts, Lelyveld has brought to bear upon his writing the insights he gained while being posted as a foreign correspondent in both South Africa and India and his visits to such places as Harippad in Kerala to meet Babu Vijayanath, son of T K Madhavan, the hero of the Vaikom satyagraha. As a result, he does not just mention the jail in Pretoria where he was first incarcerated, the Phoenix Settlement, outside Durban on the Indian Ocean coast where Gandhi first experimented with community living, and the Guruvayoor temple, which he failed to get opened to Dalits, but provides pen portraits of these places.
Since the book is by no means a biography but a story of Gandhi’s evolution as a leader, who mesmerised a whole subcontinent, the author skips the part till the 23-year-old briefless lawyer in Bombay leaves for South Africa on an assignment from a rich Gujarati Muslim businessman, engaged in a civil suit with a brethren, both of whom had their roots in Porbandar, Gandhi’s birthplace.
Gandhi’s visit to South Africa was to last just one year but he stayed on for 21 years, before he made his final departure on July 14, 1914. Self-righteous that he was, he began his career with a bang when he refused to remove his headgear while entering a court because, “Indians always keep the head-dress, and the English ladies and gentlemen seem to appreciate the regard which we show thereby”. When The Natal Advertiser published a small but sardonic report titled ‘An Unwelcome Visitor’, Gandhi shot off a protest letter, the first of hundreds he wrote on varying subjects.
This incident was far more revealing of his character, for it contained the seeds of “passive resistance” on which he built a whole career than the “character arousing (or deepening)” episode in which he was ejected from a train at Pietermaritzburg. In the thousands of renditions of the cataclysmic incident, including Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi, what is overlooked is that “the agitated young lawyer eventually got his way” when the next day he was allowed to re-board the same train and the same first-class compartment under the protection of the station master.
Of course, Gandhi himself has narrated the incident in his autobiography, written three decades after the event. Small wonder that some of his descriptions in the book do not stand historical scrutiny, reminding readers of what Mark Twain had once written: “The older one gets the more vivid the recollection of things that have not happened”. Gandhi’s righteous indignation was certainly not aroused by the rampant racism that existed in South Africa. The three-piece-suit-wearing lawyer saw four kinds of people on the continent — the “insolent” white, the rich, educated Indians like him, the indentured Indian labour and the blacks.
Gandhi often quoted Queen Victoria’s proclamation in the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny to argue that Indians had the same “protections and privileges as all her subjects” and they should not be treated like “kaffirs”, a term he used for the blacks and “coolies”, another derogatory expression he used for the Indian plantation labour. Little surprise, in the Anglo-Boer War, he was on the side of the British, though as a “stretcher-bearer”.
But as Gandhi got immersed in his campaign, a gradual transformation occurred in his life, whereby he was able to empathise with the underprivileged Indians and take up their causes, leaving lessons for the blacks in their subsequent fight against apartheid. By the time he leaves South Africa, he is totally changed, not just in his attire but in his outlook as well. It is this transformation that enabled Asia’s first Nobel-laureate Rabindranath Tagore to affix the spiritual honorific ‘Mahatma’ (Great Soul) to Gandhi’s name, four years after his return to India.
Call him whatever — a manipulator, a faddist, a dictator or a saint — Gandhi had his eyes clearly focussed on his goal, for which he was prepared to sacrifice familial and political relationships and pursue goals like establishing peace in riot-hit Noakhali, even when people were jeering at him. Many of his campaigns were total failures but in whatever he did, including sleeping in the nude and cuddling his nubile grandniece as part of his “experiment with truth”, Mahatma Gandhi did everything in full public glare. Lelyveld’s book fills a void in the sea of hagiographies like Romain Rolland’s and hatchet jobs like Arthur Koestler’s.
A J Philip is a
New Delhi-based
senior journalist.
E-mail: ajphilip@gmail.com
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