Great Soul

Title: Great Soul – Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India

Author: Joseph Lelyveld

Publisher: Harper Collins India, 2011 (First)

ISBN: 9789350290583

Pages: 425

This is a book on Gandhi, but this is not just another book on the father of the nation. All other books treat the political narrative as an inalienable part of Gandhi’s personal life. Have you ever come across a book on Gandhi which does not mention the Simon Commission or the Cabinet Mission? That’s how this volume becomes special in biographical narrative. It aims to amplify his life’s account by dwelling on incidents and themes that have often been underplayed. It takes a fresh look to understand and gets fascinated by the long arc of his strenuous life. Through this effort, Gandhi is expressed in vivid colours with all the frailties of a human being rather than the demigod which most historians portray him as. Gandhi bhakts may get stung at first by the mild whiff of criticism they are not accustomed with, but this is a good read for them. Joseph Lelyveld is a Pulitzer prize-winning American journalist and author. This book is banned in Gujarat on account of a reference to Gandhi’s sexual preferences.

Lelyveld follows a nuanced approach to analyse Gandhi’s life in South Africa and comes to the conclusion that the leadership skills and strategy that he would develop later in India to perfection was honed there. When he arrived there in 1893 as a British-trained attorney, he aligned himself only with the well-to-do Indians. His initial protest movements against the local government were against racial laws that discomfited the entire Indian community. Majority of the Indians in South Africa were ‘indentured labourers’ who exclusively worked for a master – which could also be an enterprise or industry – and was in a state very near to slavery. In fact, this system was adopted by the whites to find a suitable workforce when slavery was made illegal. Gandhi kept them at arm’s length, refusing to associate with them. So, his movements lacked mass appeal. Slowly, he became aware that such storms in a teacup were not going to force the hand of the racist government. It was only in 1913, just a year before his permanent return to India that he identified the labourers as brothers and organized a mass satyagraha in protest against a racial law that fined labourers who continued to stay in South Africa after the lapse of their work contract. Also, the government revoked recognition to marriages conducted according to Hindu or Muslim rites. The labourers lined up behind Gandhi with great zeal. Coal mines, plantations, sanitation and all aspects of Natal’s economy ground to a halt. Even though many were killed and hundreds imprisoned or deported, the government had to concede both demands. The aristocrats among Indians opposed Gandhi for roping in the lowly labourers and expelled him from the Natal Indian Congress which was founded by Gandhi himself. However, the immense success of the strike convinced him of the way forward in India. Another curious fact noted in this book is Gandhi’s total disregard for native blacks. He often calls them by the local derogatory epithet of kaffirs. In the several thousands of pages Gandhi wrote in or about South Africa, the names of only three black natives are mentioned. Of these three, he had met only one – John Dube, a Zulu aristocrat. With this background, it is a little surprising that the native regime which came to power after apartheid recognized Gandhi as one of the architects of modern South Africa.

Hindu-Muslim unity, struggle against untouchability and village industries were the three pillars of the Hind Swaraj Gandhi dreamed of. Lelyveld gives a truly revealing account of his crusade against untouchability in particular. There is no doubt that Gandhi meant each word he uttered against this heinous practice found only in India. He practiced what he preached by freely interacting with untouchables and sharing in their burden to clean up society’s waste. Still, he always stopped short of going the whole hog. His double standard in the case of Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924 is especially jarring. The Shiva temple at Vaikom in Kerala, like the numerous temples in the state, had barred its doors to the lower castes. Not only that, use of the thoroughfare around the temple was denied to them. Blocking this crucial pathway in the centre of the town had put the untouchables to immense hardships. They rose up in protest and demanded that the roads be opened to all. Even though temple entry itself was not on the table, the Brahmins who administered the shrine refused to budge. Surprisingly, Gandhi demurred to intervene and even denied them permission to use satyagraha methods which had borne fruit elsewhere. The book devotes a considerable portion to describe the love-hate relationship between Gandhi and Ambedkar. Gandhi respected Ambedkar, but granted him no space to maneuver. His logic of attributing divine agency in human affairs infuriated Ambedkar. Gandhi’s constant effort to arrive at a solution acceptable to all parties on the untouchability issue irked and frequently tested the patience of Dalit leaders.

Gandhi is credited with the achievement of ensuring mass participation in the freedom struggle by replacing the debates and petitions of elite legal luminaries towards the British. There is only one way in which the masses can be mobilized in India – religion. The same thing applies now and did a century ago too. Lelyveld gives examples to prove that Gandhi was not averse to exploit religion in his work in South Africa. In the 1913 Indentured Labourers’ strike, the protestors chanted slogans such as ‘Victory to Ramchandra’ (Jai Shriram?), ‘Victory to Dwarkanath’ and ‘Vande Mataram’. Gandhi then wrote in newspaper articles that they were taking part in a religious war. Gandhi’s plan to opt for mass participation alienated Muslim professionals because of his inclination to pamper the highly religious among them. Also, in a legislative system where the representation would be a reflection of the numerical superiority of Hindus, they rightly apprehended trouble ahead. His advocacy of the cause of Khilafat is the foremost among them. This was an issue that took place in distant Turkey and had no direct political concerns in India. But the Indian Muslims, who thought they were part of a global Muslim brotherhood transcending national frontiers, considered the Ottoman sultans as their caliph. Gandhi supported this thoroughly divisive demand and for a short time it seemed that Hindu-Muslim unity had been achieved at the grass roots level. Swami Shraddhanand, the Arya Samaj leader, was allowed to address the faithful in Delhi’s renowned Jama Masjid. But it faded as quickly as its meteoric rise. Gross violence in the protests persuaded Gandhi to quietly backpedal on the issue. This drove the Muslims into a frenzy that resulted in nationwide communal clashes. On Gandhi’s attempt to communal amity in Noakhali after a pogrom on its Hindu minority, the author finds that ‘an impartial accounting of Gandhi’s four months in Noakhali would show no political or social gains’. The rupture he hoped to forestall had occurred. By June 1948, one million Hindu refugees fled to India and by 1970 that number had swelled to five million.

The book’s subtitle ‘Gandhi’s struggles with India’ amply justifies and provide a clear hint of the special perspective Lelyveld assumes throughout in the book. Usual versions of Gandhi’s life typically drip with reverence to him who can never be wrong and morally invincible. This book sheds the sheen around the semi-mythic personality projected on to the national mindscape. Here we see an individual who is rock solid on his convictions, but usually unable to produce the results he wanted. He strove for unity among Hindus and Muslims, but finally harvested a bitter communal violence that shocked the world. He declared a crusade against untouchability which remained a thorny issue even long after Gandhi succumbed to an assassin’s bullet. On village work, he acknowledged his failure to recruit the corps of self-sacrificing satyagrahis and doubted the potential of the few dozen he had drawn at Sevagram. 

Readers would be astonished at the magical pull Gandhi exerted on his adherents. We also learn about his weird experiments on celibacy and tests on his ability to ward off temptation by sleeping naked with his grand-niece. Lelyveld boldly examines other red herrings in Gandhi’s gigantic literary wealth. It was for suggesting a homosexual liaison with a South African architect named Hermann Kallenbach that the book was banned in some Indian states. The book is a must-read for students of Indian history and Gandhism by showing a lesser known aspect of Gandhi as a deeply fallible human being. It presents a critical narrative of the father of the nation in his experiments with truth. It includes a good collection of rare, early photographs of Gandhi, especially in South Africa. The chapter on Gandhi’s stay at Noakhali and his experiments on brahmacharya involving Manu Gandhi open up a vista which no Indian author dares to unveil.

The book is most highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star