RAMACHANDRA GUHA--BIOGRAPHY OF GANDHI

Ramachandra Guha has completed his most ambitious project—on which he has worked for three decades—the biography of Mahatma Gandhi. There are two volumes of forbidding size. Volume I  ‘Gandhi Before India “ is  688 pages long and the second volume  “  Gandhi—the years that changed the world  1914—1948” is  1129 pages long .

The first volume  traces Gandhi’s activities up to 1914, when he returned permanently to India. The  book affirmed that  the South African saga —the first half of Gandhi’s life—is fundamental  to Gandhi’s future  career. 

Guha has patiently studied  hitherto unused private papers belonging to Gandhi’s  close friends and colleagues. This with the volume under review is destined to become the most definitive biography of Gandhi.

  Ramachandra Guha has taught at Yale and Stanford Universities, the University of Oslo, the Indian Institute of Science, and the London School of Economics. His books include the award-winning India After Gandhi and the first volume of this biography, Gandhi Before India, which was a 2014 New York Times Notable Book, and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. Guha trained as an economist and his early work was on environmental issues and cricket, subjects he wrote about with elegance and originality. Turning to India’s political past in more recent years, his lucid writing has ensured him a niche in the world of historians.

Gandhi inspired and enraged,challenged and delighted 

many million men and women round the world.

He lived almost entirely in the shadow of the British Raj,

which for much of his life seemed a permanent fact,but

which he did more than anyone else to destroy,using

revolutionary and inspirational tactics.In a world defined

by violence on a scale never imagined before and by

ferocious Fascist and Communist dictatorship,he was

armed  with nothing more than his arguments and 

example.

This magnificent book enables us to see Gandhi as he

was understood by his contemporaries and the vast

unbelievably varied Indian societies and landscapes

which he travelled through and changed beyond measure.Drawing on many new sources and animated by it's author's wonderful sense of drama and politics,the publication of Gandhi is a major event.

 Biographers like  Tendulkar and Pyarelal  aimed at making material on Gandhi  available for the first time. Guha uses  Gandhi’s life story as a battle against both imperialism  and religious fanaticism .

Gandhi spoke of protecting truth at the cost of life, and made its sacrifice the very essence of non-violence. For Gandhi,  truth was the ultimate value and life only its indirect consequence. He spoke of protecting truth at the cost of life, and made its sacrifice the very essence of non-violence.

The volume has  three parts. We have  a summary of Gandhi’s  ; a second element – stories from his private life. Of these, Gandhi’s never-quite-erotic relationship with a married woman, Sarala Devi Chaudhrani, takes pride of place.  Guha brings her into the story often. The more salacious story about Gandhi involves his experiments, late in life, of sleeping naked with young women in order to test his chastity. Apart from provoking jealousy among his ‘bed partners’, these experiments do not seem to have been traumatic. Yet they were a scandal even at the time, with a few of the Mahatma’s male disciples leaving him over the issue. One of them, the anthropologist NK Bose, would later write that Gandhi’s wife and close friends having died, he no longer enjoyed any intimate human relationships. This was the only way he could shake off the solitude of his saintliness to become human and so fallible again.

The third part is  contemporary judgement. The impressions of westerners. There is no serious consideration of the Mahatma’s reception in other colonised societies.

Guha  devotes nearly two pages to Time magazine’s choice of the Mahatma for its 1930 cover. Guha is deeply affected by  his attitude towards the west’s relationship with his subject and with India. Of all the  events in Gandhi’s life, he is “moved almost to tears”  by the good manners of an English judge sentencing the Mahatma for sedition in 1922.

Guha admits in the epilogue that we have forgotten the lessons Gandhi taught us: the value of religious pluralism, and the virtues of non-violence and civil disobedience.

At the end of the story we have to ask what the source of Gandhi’s magic was. Was it, as Guha suggests, his readiness to adopt a simple lifestyle, wear coarse cloth, and come, thereby, nearer to the people? Or was it his ability to discover and hold fast to the Indian tradition of pluralism and respect for all religions. He certainly paid heavily for his commitments. The saddest part of the story is told in the penultimate chapter — Martyrdom. Guha chronicles the vicious insistence of the Hindu right: that all Muslims should leave India after Partition. But there was Gandhi, agonising over the safety of Muslims in independent India, fasting for communal harmony, and speaking of love and brotherhood. On January 18, 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru remarked aptly at a large public meeting in Subzi Mandi, Delhi, that “there is only one frail old man in our country who has all along stuck to the right path.”

Guha deals  with Gandhi’s failure to counter Jinnah, who defeated Gandhi’s attempt to ensure Hindu-Muslim unity. The partition, a collective failure of several generations, was a personal setback for Gandhi. Guha brings forth a crucial historical perspective. Gandhi’s decision to support the Khilafat movement drew opposition from several quarters, including Jinnah, who, until then, had no affiliation with religious causes of Muslims.

 The book has many interesting anecdotes, charts political and social debates during the freedom movement, discusses Gandhi’s bond with Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, CF Andrews, etc.

Guha covers him in a variety of shades. A human, a moralist, a politician, a tactician, a guardian, a deeply passionate and idiosyncratic man. Guha ends his book with Gandhi’s most remarkable achievement—the pursuit of truth. He bared every aspect of his life before the public, wrote about his lust, mistakes and manias. The few bits that he chose not to write about were part of his correspondence with friends (like the exchanges with colleagues about Saraladevi) and were published posthumously. “God knows what we would think of other celebrated figures…if we were so directly exposed to the intimacies of their lives and thoughts,” Guha writes.

What makes the book wonderful are the details that take you by surprise, especially those from his vibrant, intense and hectic correspondence with “friends, political colleagues and often with strangers”.

So, there is an unanswered letter requesting him to write on author Arthur Conan Doyle, as their paths would have crossed. Then there are the letters to Kasturba and to those in his ashrams. In one, he offers advice on how to treat bleeding gums (“gargle with salt water three or four times a day’’ and massage with finely-powdered salt, taking care not to “spit out the saliva’’). There is a compassionate letter to a sub-judge in Muzaffarnagar, Pyare Lal Govil, after Govil lost his only child. “It is exceptional that he was able to maintain so many relationships in so many different ways,’’ says Guha. “He often expressed himself in very intimate ways.”

There are other gems in the book—details of his hobby of stargazing, which began after Lady Premlila Thackersey, a rich patron, lent him two large telescopes when he was in prison. Or how he never had a bath in cold water and how he sold his autographed pictures to raise money for his untouchability campaign—subtly encouraging the making of the ‘myth of the Mahatma’, an image of a man who would almost become a monument.

P.P.Ramachandran.

27/01/2019.