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Book Review
Gandhiji in his own words
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Selection of Gandhiji’s writings completing his story from where he had left it in his autobiography
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THE OXFORD INDIA GANDHI— Essential Writings: Edited by Gopalkrishna Gandhi; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 850.
Parvathi Menon
The life and achievements of Mahatma Gandhi, arguably the most influential Indian of the last century, has been the subject of a vast and ever-growing body of literature. The literature encompasses the writings of a diverse group and covers many genres. It ranges from the devotional to the critical, and has engaged with the personal and the political (both difficult to separate in the life of one as Gandhiji). We have memoirs, tributes and histories by friends, disciples a
nd political associates; innumerable biographies — over 400 by one count — from people who wrote during and after his lifetime; a large corpus of academic scholarship from social scientists and political thinkers; and of course the writings of Gandhiji himself. He was as many great political leaders were, a compulsive writer, who besides his autobiography has left a mass of journalistic articles, books, tracts, commentary, and hundreds upon hundreds of letters.
To this corpus has been added this yet another significant new book Oxford India Gandhi: Essential Writings, compiled and edited by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, which is rather more than just a representative compilation of Gandhiji’s writings. The selection, carefully sieved from the mass of Gandhiji’s writings, and presented chronologically with a discussion by the editor on the historical context of each section, offers the flavour of autobiography yet has strong biographical direction as well.
‘Posthumous autobiography’
This anthology can be read as “Gandhi’s posthumous autobiography”, writes Gopalkrishna Gandhi in his Introduction: “I hope it will help complete his story in his own words from where he had left it in The Story Of My Experiments With Truth.”
From this exhaustive selection emerges a mass of interesting and hitherto unknown biographical detail on Gandhiji. The reader gets a full taste of Gandhiji’s use of language with its lawyerly precision and ring of honesty. Many commentators have noted how the most dramatic and transforming moments of his life are rendered in the most prosaic language (“The constable came. He took me by the hand and pushed me out,” is for example how he describes the life-changing episode of being thrown out of a carriage in South Africa by a racist policeman). Many such examples are to be found in the selection.
The book opens up to the reader the core of Gandhiji’s thought and action, namely his ongoing and lifelong engagement with what he perceived to be the truth, and his obsession with the means of its attainment. Satyagraha, non-violent agitations, and fasting were his instruments of enforcing truth. At a personal level he experimented with vegetarianism, veganism and other dietary experiments, sexual abstention (which started in 1906), when he was 37, nature therapy, extreme bodily asceticism and other forms of self-purification as ways of attaining his goal of truth.
Insights
The selections offer insights into the evolution of the theories and practices that began from his early student years in England, evolved in South Africa, and reached their fruition in India where he used them to either unleash or rein in a mass movement of which he became the supreme leader.
The selections light up many facets of Gandhiji’s personal relationships. His intense relationship with his son, Harilal Gandhi, for example, now the subject of books and visual dramatisation, is one of them. Gandhiji’s innumerable letters to Harilal and to others about him convey his complex feelings of guilt and love as he watches Harilal’s tortured descent into a lifestyle that he finds abhorrent. From pride in his eldest son (“I want every Indian to do what Harilal has done,” he wrote in 1908 of his son’s decision as a Satyagrahi to go to jail), Gandhiji’s tone swings to resignation and, typically, he recommends self-atonement for Harilal’s slide (“Harilal’s glass is always red,” he writes to his son Devdas in 1932. “…the years he grew up were a time of self-indulgence…I should, therefore, atone for my sinful life, and that means self-purification.”)
Essentialities
The selections offer a view of his changing relationship with his wife Kasturba, and also build an independent picture of this courageous woman, who stayed the course, devoting herself to his cause and putting up from an early age with his behavioural oddities and impositions. Gandhiji could claim in a letter to Lord Wavell in 1944 after Kasturba’s death, “We were a couple outside the ordinary.” “My wife I made the orbit of all women,” he wrote in 1935. Outside that orbit, as the selection shows, Gandhiji had an independent relationship with a large circle of women friends and followers — Millie Graham Polak, Prema Kantak, Sarladevi Choudhurani, Sarojini Naidu, and Madeleine Slade amongst others —with whom he conducted a brisk correspondence, and with some of whom he could discuss the most intimate of personal matters.
There are many other such “essentialities”, to quote the book’s editor, brought out in the selection, of Gandhiji’s thought and practice. These define his stature and mark his unique leadership. An important lesson from one such essentiality, namely, Gandhiji’s political contribution and legacy, is his steadfast opposition to communalism. This opposition was exemplified by his actions in the last two years of his life, when he used the personal force of his weapon of satyagraha to bring respite to the communal madness that engulfed Bengal and Bihar.
Criticisms
However, that Gandhiji’s leadership failed the national movement at critical points, that satyagraha was often used as a weapon against the interests of the peasantry and the people at large to blunt the zeal and militancy of the struggle, that he compromised in practice with imperialism at crucial junctures when the movement looked to him for leadership, are criticisms that were raised in his time and later. A sharper presentation in the book of these critical assessments and of how Gandhiji responded to them would have enlarged our understanding of his role. One such event was of course the famous decision in February 1922 to call off a civil disobedience movement that had reached its peak because he felt his order of non-violence had been disregarded by the peasants of the village of Chauri Chaura (“the fetid smell of violence is still powerful…” he wrote to Nehru soon after). The Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931, when Civil Disobedience was withdrawn by Gandhiji in return for virtually nothing, was another instance of compromise, criticised within and outside the Congress. How did Gandhiji respond specifically to the widespread criticism of his actions? From the selections, it would appear that the moral victory was his after these controversial junctures: his radical critics, then and now, have maintained that the historical record holds him accountable.
This volume of over 800 pages of carefully edited and annotated writings, with its notes and bibliography, a collection of Gandhiji quotes (further distilled from the selected writings), a separate index of persons associated with him, and listings of his fasts and imprisonments, is an invaluable contribution to scholarship on Gandhiji.
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