Gandhi

David Arnold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317882343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Gandhi's is an extraordinary and compelling story. Few individuals in history have made so great a mark upon their times. And yet Gandhi never held high political office, commanded no armies and was not even a compelling orator. His 'power' therefore makes a particularly fascinating subject for investigation. David Arnold explains how and why the shy student and affluent lawyer became one of the most powerful anti-colonial figures Western empires in Asia ever faced and why he aroused such intense affection, loyalty (and at times much bitter hatred) among Indians and Westerners alike. Attaching as much influence to the idea and image of Gandhi as to the man himself, Arnold sees Gandhi not just as a Hindu saint but as a colonial subject, whose attitudes and experiences expressed much that was common to countless others in India and elsewhere who sought to grapple with the overwhelming power and cultural authority of the West.A vivid and highly readable introducation to Gandhi's life and times, Arnold's book opens up fascinating insights into one of the twentieth century's most remarkable men.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF GANDHI

The life and legacy of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) are full of irony and fraught with contradiction. It is not just that Gandhi, a renowned man of peace, an exponent of non-violent action for more than forty years, died a violent death, felled by an assassin’s bullets, nor that his greatest aim and achievement, India’s independence from colonial rule, was marred by the bloody episode of Partition that left perhaps a million people dead and sparked one of the largest mass migrations of modern times. It was also expressive of his contradictory presence in Indian politics and on the international stage that Gandhi, one of the most influential and powerful figures of the twentieth century, never served as a prime minister or president, or even as a member of government. Within the Indian National Congress, the nationalist party he helped to lead and inspire over several decades, he only briefly held the office of president. Gandhi, as one biographer has put it, was ‘a completely unofficial man’.¹

And yet, without holding high office, Gandhi was in many respects a remarkably public individual. He spent more than fifty years of his life in political activity in South Africa and India. Apart from Hind Swaraj, a short tract on Indian nationalism published at the height of the South African struggle in 1909, Gandhi made little attempt to present his political ideas systematically in print. But he did write an often revealingly intimate autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, which remains the principal source for his early life and characteristically merges his public life with his personal experiences, and his letters, newspaper articles and speeches fill the ninety volumes of his Collected Works. In many respects his life is extraordinarily well documented. Apart from all the speeches and writings, Gandhi’s personal and political evolution is recorded through the large number of photographs of him, spanning his life from the age of 7 to his death at the age of 78. Gandhi must surely be one of the most photographed, as well as one of the most written about, individuals in history. It is ironic (but an irony not untypical of the man) that Gandhi, in many ways a traditionalist, sceptical of the need for industrial technology, should in this sense have lived such a modern life, so fully in the eye of the camera – and, further, that his life should have become more widely known to millions around the world through Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi. But the many photographs of Gandhi, which seem to make his life so open and accessible, should also alert us to the fact that Gandhi became, even in his own middle age, a kind of icon, an image that might conceal as much as it revealed of the inner man and that might acquire a power and meaning beyond that of Gandhi himself to command and control. The idea of Gandhi, though so differently construed by so many different people, has ever been as powerful as the man himself.

Gandhi remains an enigma, but the wealth of different interpretations of his life, work and legacy is only one factor in this, for his own personality remains, despite all the photographs, the speeches and the biographies, surprisingly difficult to pin down. As one of his Western biographers, George Woodcock, observed, Gandhi revealed himself in action, in speech, in print, even on radio, and yet ‘as incessantly his inmost self eludes one and perhaps eluded him’.² Or, as another biographer remarked, Gandhi ‘wore many public masks and many private ones’.³ It can even be asked how far his mahatmaship was itself a kind of mask, a saintly persona he consciously constructed the better to communicate his message to others, to efface the contradictions and inconsistencies in his own thinking, or simply in order to protect his own intense inner vulnerability. But, if this were the case, Gandhi also experienced the difficulties and frustrations involved in being a mahatma, a saintly figure more commonly revered rather than understood.

In seeking to analyse Gandhi’s power it is necessary to look beyond many of the conventional notions of political power. Not only did he shun high office, he never contested an election or sat in a parliament and after his early years in South Africa was generally averse to constitutional politics. Although his language was singularly full, for a man of peace, of the rhetoric of combat, the only battles he ever fought were of a non-violent kind. Gandhi was never a commanding orator, even when he began to speak through another modern invention, the microphone, and yet many thousands of people would turn out at railway stations or flock to beaches, fairgrounds and other open spaces to see and hear him. While Gandhi was a tough campaigner, an astute political organiser and a shrewd publicist, his appeal in India and internationally relied far more upon his perceived spirituality, his saintliness, and his apparent ability to represent India’s masses. Many of those closest to Gandhi were unimpressed by his formal writings: some had not read Hind Swaraj, the nearest Gandhi came to a political manifesto, or, like Jawaharlal Nehru, his long-term lieutenant and India’s first Prime Minister, shared few of its sentiments. And yet they were captivated by Gandhi’s charisma, swayed by his charm, inspired by his courage, awed by his capacity for self-sacrifice and self-denial, touched by his impish sense of humour. Personality counted for much in the constitution and exercise of Gandhi’s power and it is often only through the eyes of his associates and followers – Krishnadas, his secretary during the heady days of the Non-Cooperation Movement, Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade), the daughter of an English admiral who joined Gandhi at his ashram in Ahmedabad in the 1920s, and Nehru himself, the impetuous prince and heir apparent of India’s nationalist movement⁴ – that one can get a real sense of the power Gandhi held over others.

It is also all too easy (in India as in the West) to see Gandhi as a timeless figure, an individual whose saintliness elevated him above the petty politics and mundane concerns of his age. The reality is rather different, and indeed to understand Gandhi’s importance, it is essential to understand how he was moulded by the times and the places in which he lived and how he reacted to (and brought his influence to bear upon) the politics, the moral issues, the economic and technological challenges of his day. It is worth noting that while Gandhi lived to see the end of the Second World War, the beginning of the dissolution of the British Empire (in which India’s independence was a vital first step) and the dawning of the nuclear age, he was, in terms of chronology if not of outlook, a Victorian. He was born in the same year, 1869, that the opening of the Suez Canal brought colonial India measurably closer to imperial Britain, and was already well into middle age at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

Gandhi is naturally thought of mainly in terms of his contribution to India’s nationalist struggle and his adversarial role in Britain’s imperial politics, but it should be recognised that, especially by the 1930s, he was a figure of international significance, aware of, and responding to the spread of communism and the rise of Soviet Russia, the global spread and growing influence of American technology and culture, as well as the emergence of fascism in Europe and East Asia. It should be borne in mind that Gandhi was a close contemporary of Lenin (born a year after him in 1870) and of two British prime ministers, the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), whose ‘Communal Award’ in 1932 sparked Gandhi’s most momentous fast, and the Conservative Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965), who over several decades was among Gandhi’s leading imperial antagonists. Gandhi was already 50 in 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles cast its long and fateful shadow over Europe, and over the next twenty-five years, when his power was at its zenith, Gandhi shared world attention with men younger than himself – Josef Stalin (1879–1953), Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1884–1945), and Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), whose violent credo Mein Kampf was published the same year, 1925, that Gandhi embarked on his autobiographical ‘experiments with truth’. Was the Mahatma, the ‘Great Soul’, out of place in the age of the ‘Great Dictators’, or was his advocacy of non-violence in the troubled years between two cataclysmic world wars remarkably timely?

Opinions about Gandhi have always been divided, often sharply so, and it is not surprising that his ideas about the state, about class, gender and religion should recently have been subjected to fresh and more exacting examination. For many of his critics, Gandhi’s saintly image is a fraud, even a calculated illusion. He has been branded an agent of class domination, the prophet of non-violence who became a ‘mascot of the bourgeoisie’, the man of religion who subverted India’s search for secularism and modernity and who, however unwittingly, helped to precipitate India’s holocaust, the Partition of 1947. His standing as a social reformer is increasingly challenged, not least his role as the supposed champion of India’s most oppressed people, the dalits, the untouchables, or as he called them (patronisingly some would say) the Harijans or ‘Children of God’. On a more personal level (though with Gandhi public and private life are not easily separated), his sexual attitudes and practices continue to arouse controversy, fuelled by a new readiness to question Gandhi’s credentials as a liberator of India’s women. And yet, Gandhi, execrated or exalted, refuses to go away. Each generation finds something new in Gandhi, to rediscover or to recreate for itself the Mahatma – as the inspiration for the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King in the United States, as a source of inspiration and courage for Nelson Mandela in a South African prison, for nationalist movements and non-violent agitations across the globe, or as the pioneer and prophet of the ‘green’ movement and ‘sustainable’ development.

Interpretations of Gandhi have varied widely but they have followed three main lines of discussion. Firstly, Gandhi is represented as a saint in politics, a man who exercised the power of a saint rather more than that of a politician. For some Gandhi belongs so self-evidently to the category of saint that he remains almost beyond the bounds of historical scrutiny. As the scientist Albert Einstein remarked in 1944, ‘Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.’⁵ Gandhi is seen not only to have had a deep spirituality, but to have possessed great moral and physical courage and an unwavering commitment to non-violence that transformed the lives of those around him. It is this saintly idea of Gandhi that has proved the most enduring image of him in India, as in the West, and although his saintliness might seem in some ways peculiarly Indian and Hindu, it has served as a bridge between cultures, making his methods and ideals accessible to others outside the Hindu fold, especially Christians. Particularly in the 1920s and 30s, comparisons were frequently made in the Western world between Gandhi and St Paul, St Francis of Assisi or even Christ.⁶ His saintly adherence to non-violence and self-suffering is seen as having enabled Gandhi to transform India’s nationalist struggle from a narrowly focused and elitist political campaign into a mass-based moral crusade, enabling him to take on, and ultimately undermine, the authority of the British Empire, still in the interwar years one of the most powerful empires the world had ever seen.

It has been pointed out, though, that Gandhi was by no means unique in the context of modern India in adopting and utilising a ‘saintly idiom’, even in political life.⁷ Indeed, since the middle of the nineteenth century, it has been one of the most common and influential roles taken up by (or bestowed upon) not just religious teachers, but by a wide variety of peasant leaders, politicians and social reformers. Gandhi both inherited a saintly tradition and, through his own influence and eccentricity, gave it new credibility in the modern world. Whether the aura of saintliness arose as it were naturally from Gandhi’s spirituality and his unique blend of ideals and actions, or whether Gandhi in the course of his struggle for Indian rights in South Africa deliberately assumed the mantle of saintliness the better to advance his cause and consolidate his leadership, remains a source of controversy, and we will return to the issue in Chapter 3.

The idea of Gandhi as a saint in politics is, however, more ambivalent than might at first appear. Saints, many of his critics have argued, have no place in politics. As Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a prominent nationalist from an earlier generation of leaders, advised Gandhi before he embarked on his career in Indian politics, ‘Politics is a game of worldly people, and not of sadhus [holy men]’.⁸ The converse of this was the view, expressed thirty years later by Lord Wavell, the penultimate Viceroy of India and no admirer of the Mahatma, that Gandhi was ‘a very tough politician and not a saint’.⁹ His sainthood could further be seen as having a distinctly Hindu flavour and as such alienating (among others) the Muslims of India, who feared that the swaraj, the self-rule or independence that Gandhi advocated, and sometimes called Ram Rajya (God’s rule), in effect meant a Hindu Raj (state). Penderel Moon, a former civil servant in India and at the more critical end of the spectrum of Gandhi’s biographers, dubbed him ‘a Hindu to the depth of his being’. In remodelling the Congress Party, Gandhi ‘imparted to it his own Hindu bias’. Even though Gandhi personally ‘failed to see the danger’, Moon believed, this ‘Hinduising of the national movement, which Gandhi’s leadership promoted and symbolised, was injurious and ultimately fatal to Hindu-Muslim unity’.¹⁰ Others have argued that to be a saint was to be naive, peddling an idealised vision of the pre-colonial past and of village society, a golden age which had never existed and to which modern India could not possibly return, or it meant misjudging the masses and their ability to adhere to a rigorous programme of non-violence. One Indian historian, R. C. Majumdar, thus argued that Gandhi was ‘lacking in both political wisdom and political strategy’. Far from being infallible, he ‘committed serious blunders, one after another, in pursuit of some utopian ideals and methods which had no basis in reality’.¹¹ At times, too, to the fury and bewilderment of Nehru and others, Gandhi invoked God in support of his own actions and beliefs, but would provide no rational explanation. Especially in later life, he was prone to acting according to the dictates of his ‘inner voice’ or conscience, declining to explain his reasons even to his closest associates and verging on the frankly dictatorial. Saints seldom make good democrats.

Second only to the saintly image of Gandhi is his reputation as the ‘father’ or ‘maker’ of modern India. Such an idea was common during the later stages of the Indian nationalist movement and has been widely held in India and elsewhere since Independence. Jawaharlal Nehru was one of those who, despite his own personal and political differences with Gandhi, did much to promote this idea, but it has been taken up by many Western writers, historians and journalists as well. Such an idea rests on Gandhi’s perceived centrality and dominant role in the anti-colonial struggle from 1919 onwards, the unique style of his leadership and especially the manner in which he was seen to give the nationalist movement a mass (essentially peasant) base, and the attribution of India’s independence to the several non-violent civil disobedience (satyagraha) campaigns that Gandhi led against British rule between 1919 and 1942. Perhaps even more than his political leadership, Gandhi’s wide-ranging programme of social reform might be said to have stamped an indelible mark on modern India. His campaigns against untouchability, his pursuit of gender equality, his efforts to revitalise India’s villages and encourage hand-spinning, his opposition to the coercive power of the state – in these, as in many other respects, Gandhi would seem to have set the social and economic agenda for India for decades to come.

And yet here, too, Gandhi’s reputation seems increasingly in jeopardy. Not all Gandhi’s ideas and activities are now seen to have promoted national unity or to have advanced the cause of national independence. Other political leaders, reformers and intellectuals have been seen as having a clearer and worthier vision of what modern India might be. Nehru, for instance, with his ideal of a modern state and secular society, in which the benefits of science, technology and education were to be available to all, might equally be regarded as a ‘maker of modern India’. Recent historical scholarship has also raised considerable doubts about some of the more sweeping claims for Gandhi’s foundational role and inspiring leadership. We now know much more about the peasant and other popular struggles that preceded Gandhi’s ‘rise to power’ and can see how Gandhi was able to lat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of plates
• List of maps
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1 Introduction: The Idea of Gandhi
• CHAPTER 2 A Diwan’s Son
• CHAPTER 3 South Africa and Self-Rule
• CHAPTER 4 Peasant Power
• CHAPTER 5 Power to the Nation
• CHAPTER 6 ‘Half-Naked Fakir’
• CHAPTER 7 The Lone Satyagrahi: Gandhi, Religion and Society
• CHAPTER 8 Gandhi in Old Age: Triumph or Nemesis?
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Guide to Further Reading
• Chronology
• Maps
• Index