Gandhi's Moral Politics

Naren Nanda

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351237208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume explores the scope and limits of Mahatma Gandhi's moral politics and its implications for Indian and other freedom movements. It presents a set of enlightening essays based on lectures delivered in memory of the eminent historian B. R. Nanda along with a new introductory essay.

With contributions by leading historians and Gandhi scholars, the book provides new perspectives on the limits of Gandhi's moral reasoning, his role in the choice of destination by Indian Muslim refugees, his waning influence over political events, and his predicament amid the violence and turmoil in the years immediately preceding partition. The work brings together wide-ranging insights on Gandhi and revisits his religious views, which were the foundation of his morality in politics; his experience of civil disobedience and its nature, deployment and limits; Satyagraha and non-violence; and his struggle for civil rights. The volume also examines how Gandhi's South African phase contributed to his later ideas on private property and self-sacrifice.

This book will be of immense interest to researchers and scholars of modern Indian history, Gandhi studies, political science, peace and conflict studies, South Asian studies; to researchers and scholars of media and journalism; and to the informed general reader.

1
Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Nanda, and the historians

An introductory essay

T.N. Madan¹

You know, some people ask me to write on Gandhi, but

I can’t. If I were a poet I might be able to do so.

—Jawaharlal Nehru

This book comprises revised versions of the first six B.R. Nanda Memorial Lectures (2011–2016) delivered annually under the auspices of the B.R. Nanda Trust. Together, the distinguished lecturers have given an exemplary start to this laudable effort to honour the memory of the late Bal Ram Nanda (1917–2010) – civil servant, historian, biographer, and scholar extraordinaire, and the first Director (1965–1979), indeed the architect, of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML).

The primary concern of Nanda’s work as an author was the life and times of Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948). He authored five biographical studies, three historical works, and numerous essays, some of them collected in three volumes. It is appropriate therefore that all six lecturers should have chosen to speak about aspects of Gandhi’s political career and the widespread influence of his ideas during his lifetime and thereafter. Gandhi declared that engagement in the politics of liberation was his yuga dharma, and indeed of all people fighting for their legitimate rights, first in South Africa and then for three decades in India. Again appropriately, each speaker began with a tribute to B.R. Nanda. I am sure that in the coming years some of the lecturers will discuss the large body of published research work bequeathed to us by him.

In this introductory essay I shall, first, briefly recapitulate what the lecturers said about Nanda and, then, offer my own observations on Nanda’s life and work and my reminiscences of him over three decades of friendship. Although unlike the lecturers I am not a professional historian (I am a sociologist), I have throughout my academic career been deeply interested in biographical and historical works. It is this interest that led me to read all of Nanda’s books. Our personal relationship began as an acquaintance between two individuals which gradually matured into a friendship between two families.

In the third section of the essay I shall try to capture as well as I can, but briefly, the kind of historical figure that Gandhi emerges as from the reflections of the six lecturers. Finally, I shall offer some observations of my own about Gandhi’s conception of religious faith and its many manifestations.

B.R. Nanda, exemplary scholar

Rajmohan Gandhi, who gave the inaugural address of the series, observes that Nanda’s personality was defined by ‘restraint of speech’, letting his pen do the talking. He never was overbearing in his interaction with other scholars. As an author, his work bore testimony to his meticulousness in research, thoughtfulness in consideration of the available evidence, clarity of interpretative insights, and felicity in writing. These qualities of Nanda’s personality and of style of authorship are also referred to by the other lecturers, each in their own manner.

Thus, Judith Brown acclaims Nanda as ‘a scholar of distinction’, immersed in his ‘historical interests’, ‘meticulous’ in his research, ‘quiet and painstaking’, and disdainful of ‘flashiness’ in writing and kowtowing to ‘contemporary fad or fashion’. She pointedly refers to an admirable aspect of Nanda’s biographical studies, namely his avoidance of hagiography. In his very first biography, the classic on Gandhi,² she quotes him emphasizing the importance of treating Gandhi as what he was, an extraordinarily self-disciplined, open-minded, and thoughtful person, not as some kind of a Hindu divinity.

Ramchandra Guha pays tribute to Nanda as the author of ‘ground-breaking books’ and as the architect of ‘India’s only professionally run modern archive’. He also acknowledges his indebtedness to Nanda for ‘encouragement’ throughout his career as a scholar. Singling out the biography of Gopal Krishna Gokhale as his favourite Nanda book, he also writes that Gandhi and His Critics provided the inspiration for his essay.³

Sugata Bose recalls his extemporary introductory remarks on the occasion of the fourth B.R. Nanda Memorial Lecture in a short note (specially written at the request of the editor, Naren Nanda). He had first met Nanda when still ‘a school student’. His father, Sisir Kumar Bose, had taken him along on a visit to the NMML. The elder Bose, founder of the Netaji Research Bureau in Calcutta, and Nanda would have had much to tell each other about their respective fledgling institutions. Sugata Bose had in later years met Nanda on his own on several occasions.

‘B.R. Nanda’, writes Bose, ‘was a perfect gentleman and a liberal historian in the best sense of the adjective’. He considers Nanda’s books ‘thoroughly researched and beautifully crafted works of history and biography, especially his studies of Gandhi’. He says his lecture in Nanda’s ‘honour’ was inspired by the latter’s ‘poignant memoir’ of partition.⁴ ‘One cannot imagine a more humane account of a terrible human tragedy’.

Joya Chatterji refers to Nanda as a ‘foundational figure’ in the historiography of modern India. She applauds ‘his role as founder-director of one of our great institutions, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library for seventeen years’, which ‘now holds the world’s most impressive archive on the making of modern India’. She underscores the contemporary relevance of ‘the values that prompted Nanda to take up his pen’ – the values of free inquiry and tolerance – which are in critical need of reaffirmation today. Like Bose, she refers to Nanda’s first book as a work whose subject is in a particular manner the subject of her essay too – the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.

The last of the lecturers, Isabel Hofmeyr, draws attention to the widespread and lasting influence of Nanda as ‘a preeminent scholar of India’. She provides interesting numerical evidence of this influence: ‘133 editions and versions of his works, appearing in 601 publications in 4 languages with 9,580 library holdings across the world’. She also underscores the influence of Nanda’s work in academic circles in South Africa.

The foregoing summary of tributes by six distinguished scholars of three countries (although a Harvard professor, Bose is an Indian citizen) is a matter of great satisfaction and a testimony to the quality and lasting value of Nanda’s scholarly work. This is in a sense independent of his personal qualities and role as an institution builder, which also draw rich tributes from them. B.R. Nanda fully deserves to be remembered in the distinctive manner of the institution of an ongoing series of annual memorial lectures.

B.R. Nanda, scholar and friend

B.R. Nanda was born in 1917 in Rawalpindi (now in Pakistan) in an urban, educated, Punjabi Hindu family. The world of his parents was an amalgam of tradition and modernity, permeated with religion, and exposed to 19th century socio-religious reform movements, notably the Arya Samaj. While the women were homemakers, men pursued modern occupations. Nanda’s father and grandfather were both employees of the Public Works Department in the province of Punjab. After his early schooling in Rawalpindi, Nanda joined Government College, Lahore, from which he graduated in 1939 with distinction, obtaining a master’s degree in history. But he did not opt for a career in research and teaching, notwithstanding his scholarly bent of mind.

Like most educated young men of his time, the obvious career choice was civil service. He once told me that he even attempted to join the Indian Civil Service, the ‘steel frame of the Raj’, so-called, but did not succeed. Eventually, in 1942, he joined the Indian Railways in an administrative cadre. The revolutionary role of the railways in transforming a ‘stagnant India’ had been anticipated by Karl Marx. Jawaharlal Nehru was ambivalent about them, considering them, on the one hand, the networks that brought closer to one another the far flung regions of the country and, on the other, regarding them as chains binding India in colonial bondage.

Nanda had different postings from time to time, all in West Punjab. He married Janak Khosla, daughter of a distinguished officer of the state of Patiala, in 1946. Janak also had her school and collegiate education in Lahore. They raised their two sons, Naren and Biren, in Delhi. He kept busy with his official work, and, at the same time, keenly watched the course of political events in India. Gandhi had by then emerged as the most influential national leader, but Punjab had produced its own public figures of high stature and not only within the ranks of the Indian National Congress (INC). One of the more notable of these leaders had been Lala Lajpat Rai; in his later years Nanda undertook to edit his voluminous collected works.⁵

At home, Nanda was, as his elder son, Naren, once told me, a somewhat self-absorbed person, who, apart from being busy with his official duties, was an avid reader of books (including some on Indian philosophy), and came across as a thoughtful, rational person. There was religion at home in the form of devotional prayers and rituals, but these were organized by Nanda’s wife. Years later, it was at her initiative that the family went on a tirtha yatra (pilgrimage) to South India. Again, it was Janakji who took her husband to the Ramakrishna Mission in Delhi to listen to discourses on the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. Later, in 1966, she persuaded her husband to visit the spiritual leader Swami Muktananda, who gradually emerged as a major influence in their lives. Nanda dedicated his later books to this guru, but otherwise did not speak about their special relationship.

Nanda had not been put through the ‘holy thread’ initiation ceremony – Punjabi Kshatriyas did not observe this custom – which according to orthodox Hindu tradition, made one ‘twice born’ (dvija). But he did indeed have a second birth, as it were, in 1948, in a personally more significant sense, when he heard of the assassination of Gandhi. The previous year had seen the traumatic partition of the country in August, marked by unprecedented violence, involving mass killings and movement of refugees in both directions across the newly established boundaries between west and east Punjab. As late as December 1946, Nanda recalls in his first book,⁶ nobody in Punjab – Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh – had imagined that such intense mutual hatred could ever overwhelm the reasonable Punjabis. It did happen, however, much to every one’s shock and sorrow.

After partition, the Nandas migrated to India in 1947 itself. Nanda had postings mostly in Delhi, except one year in Ferozepore. He once told me that, as a railway officer, he expected that the trains would run as before on their tracks which cut across the newly established frontiers – that, for instance, the Frontier Mail would still go from Peshawar to Calcutta (Kolkata) and back. It was in a Ferozepore bookstore, which he would often visit after office hours, that he was told by the bookseller that Gandhi had been assassinated. The date was January 30. Nanda experienced an unexpected emotional trauma. He obviously spoke about this to not only me but many others also, including Rajmohan Gandhi, who recalls the conversation in his essay in this book.

The emotional turmoil that Nanda experienced left him not only shattered but also puzzled. Why did he experience Gandhi’s assassination as a deep personal loss? Nanda was of course familiar with Gandhi’s prominent position in the freedom struggle and the reverence in which masses and leaders alike held him. There are many references to Gandhi in Witness to Partition. But he never had earlier felt personally close to the Mahatma, and yet his death was a personal loss.

Straightaway Nanda started to read carefully everything about Gandhi and Gandhi’s own writings that he could find. Whatever disappointment the compulsion of leaving their ancestral home in Punjab he and his family must have experienced, being in India gave him much better access to published materials pertaining to Gandhi and the independence movement.

The materials he read, mainly books, including many by Gandhi himself, are listed in the ‘Select Bibliography’ at the end of his Gandhi biography.⁷ The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi only began to come out in the same year as his book, 1958.⁸ He does not seem to have drawn on any original or other archival materials in a big way, although he did visit the National Archives in New Delhi. He did not have the time or the resources to go to London and other places for his research. In the circumstances, Nanda’s achievement – a well-documented book – was truly remarkable, a result of his dedication to the chosen objective and of his meticulousness in study and writing. It certainly was the most comprehensive single volume biography of Gandhi published in the ten years since his death. Hundreds of books and research papers on Gandhi’s life and work have been published since then, and to the best of my knowledge no author has found fault with the factual basis of Nanda’s narrative.

With the Gandhi biography Nanda found his vocation as a biographical historian, although he continued to work for the railways and had no immediate plans to work on other biographies. He had taken ten years to find an answer to the question of Gandhi’s hold over him that had struck him like lightning in 1948, and was content.

Incidentally, the book gives us intimations of Nanda’s met...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Nanda, and the historians: an introductory essay
• 2 Gandhi and Punjab
• 3 Gandhi and civil disobedience: the limits of moral politics
• 4 Why Gandhi matters
• 5 Unity or partition: Mahatma Gandhi’s last stand, 1945–1948
• 6 Princes, subjects and Gandhi: alternatives to citizenship at the end of empire
• 7 Gandhi, customs and excise and the democracy of objects
• Index