Book review: Mahatma Gandhi, the over-ambitious saint

Book: Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India
Joseph Lelyveld
HarperCollins
426 pages
Rs699

Gandhiji is a goldmine for any thinker who engages India. He is the ultimate in merging the personal with the political, an experimenter with truth who can be seen through the prism of contemporary events (the USA’s war on terrorism, for instance, or Mayawati’s coalition-building) and who can still provide an insight or even a path forward. If you’re Indian and you’re an intellectual then you must, at some point of your life, deal with Gandhiji. But this is not easy, for with regard to the father of the nation, Indians are a bit handicapped: how do you write about your father without feeling guilty or disrespectful or even treacherous? That reticence is why it is good when a non-Indian comes along and reflects on Gandhiji, as Pulitzer-winner and former New York Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld has done in Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India.

The welcome thing about Western writers is that they try to see Gandhiji’s life as a mosaic in which one part neatly fits alongside another and in the end provides a big picture; we Indians (ironically) tend to take a more linear view in which causation plays as big a role sometimes as the party line. As in his lifetime, we Indians continue to revere Gandhiji as a saint, and given our revulsion to our current crop of politicians it seems almost heresy to see Gandhiji for what he essentially was: a deep politician who was also successful. After all, he’s the only Indian politician who was able to mobilise the masses up and down the country on his own, in stark contrast to the continuing fragmentation of our polity today.

Lelyveld uses relaxed prose and a subtle determination not to be distracted by the details of the larger Congress and independence narratives to take a closer look at Gandhiji’s political apprenticeship in South Africa. What strikes you is that one, there were failures; two, that the strands of the personal, the spiritual and the political that would later intertwine to form Gandhiji’s DNA were loose and disparate; and three, Gandhiji’s learning curve on mass mobilisation was not gradual but came as a late spurt during his 20-year stay in “the other sub-continent”. Indeed, if Gandhiji hadn’t been as intelligent as he was, he might have ended up in India not as someone who could shake the conscience of the world, but perhaps as a Baba Ramdev type — as Lelyveld notes, maybe with an ashram and a devoted following, but not the political tsunami that he would eventually become.

Of course, for most of us the source-book to Gandhiji is his autobiography which actually is a cleaned-up version of his stay in Africa. In this work, Gandhiji compressed time, events and characters to provide a crisp narrative which demonstrated that by the time he landed in India in 1914 he had reached the last of life’s four stages, that of a sanyasi. If Gandhiji was working towards an end, his aim was always noble; and this is why Lelyveld often sees Gandhiji’s life as a tragedy: “(He) was ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake the world.” If Gandhiji can be guilty of anything in his life, it is of having been too ambitious in his vision of India.

In fact, two of those ambitions could not occupy the same space at the same time: his aim of Hindu-Muslim unity and that of eradicating untouchability. The former he was able to pursue in South Africa, and in India through the 1921 Khilafat movement, which earned him temporary goodwill from Muslim leaders.

In tackling untouchability, however, his first test was a tense dispute in 1924 over temple entry in Vaikom, Kerala. Negotiating Vaikom required having equity with the priests, and that required demonstrative Hindu-ness. This would naturally alienate Muslims (and ultimately did not get him purchase with Dr BR Ambedkar, who ironically switched positions with Gandhiji later in their lives on the primacy of the national cause over the reform of Hinduism), but Gandhiji decided that societal reform was more urgent; he even codified it in his declaration of Swaraj. It secured him mass support for independence but as he was perhaps the only thread to India’s Muslims, it came at a price.

In both South Africa and India, whenever Gandhiji found events spiralling out of hand and violence taking over, he retreated to his ashram, be it Phoenix or Sevagram, and he punished himself through fasting. Somehow he seemed to link his body to the larger project around him, and in that, he tried to control his body as tightly as he controlled Satyagrahis or the Congress. This meant not only the precise measurement of his food, but also his sexual instinct.

This is why he chastises his son for producing babies; this is why he dumps his wife at Phoenix and lives in Transvaal for five years, residing (perhaps in Platonic love) with the Lithuanian Jewish architect Hermann Kallenbach; and even sleeping, as a septuagenarian, in close embrace with his grandniece Manu, an act that costs him some of his closest followers.

aIn the end, India proved too enormous for control. The Congress party ignored him as it busied itself with the transfer of power; the Muslim League taunted him during the riots that surrounded Partition; and even today, Gandhiji is easily kicked around by Dalit politicians as a patronising “forward”, even though he was always happy to clean up other Indians’ shit. Lelyveld closes his book by noting that “in India today, the term ‘Gandhian’ is ultimately synonymous with social conscience” and that he “still has a power to inspire”. So even if he could not live up to his own ideals, even if he had to limit his ambitions, and even if he often wrung his hands muttering “Kya karun? Kya karun?”, Gandhiji was able to set ideals and ambitions for the rest of us, descendants of the nation. In that regard, his wasn’t a Lear-like tragedy at all.