Gandhi
Page 106
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Gandhi and his legacy also speak directly to the question of environmental sustainability. That quintessentially Gandhian question—How much should a person consume?—has never been more relevant than today, when the populous countries of Asia increasingly challenge the West’s monopoly on modern lifestyles. Back in 1928, Gandhi had warned about the unsustainability, on the global scale, of Western patterns of production and consumption. ‘God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West,’ he had said. ‘The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom [England] is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.’48
The key phrase here is after the manner of the West. Gandhi wished to free the people of India from poverty, ill health, illiteracy and the lack of dignified employment. He was keen to enhance human productivity, and was happy to use modern science towards that end. At the same time, Gandhi had an intuitive understanding of the global limits to resource-intensive, energy-intensive industrialization. As he put it in 1926, to ‘make India like England and America is to find some other races and places of the earth for exploitation’. Since the Western nations had already ‘divided all the known races outside Europe for exploitation and there are no new worlds to discover’, he pointedly asked: ‘What can be the fate of India trying to ape the West?’49
The advice was disregarded. Whether under state planning in the past or under the business-friendly regime now in place, India’s economic and technological policies have taken little (often no) account of the country’s resource endowments or of broader questions of environmental sustainability. As a result, India is an ecological disaster zone, marked by deforestation, species loss, chemical contamination of the soil, declining soil fertility, depleting groundwater aquifers, and massively high rates of atmospheric and river pollution. One recent study estimated that the annual cost of environmental degradation in India was equivalent to 5.7 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product.50 The costs are economic and they are social, for the burden of environmental abuse falls disproportionately on the poor. Fisherfolk are thrown out of work by polluted rivers, pastoralists by degraded grazing land, farmers by man-made droughts and tribal communities by unregulated mining, while the slum dwellers in the cities suffer much more—health-wise and work-wise—from air and water pollution than the rich who live in gated communities.
Not just India, but China too is aiming to ‘ape the West’, and perhaps they will together strip the world bare like locusts unless they stop, step back and forge policies that can eliminate poverty and destitution without destroying the earth that sustains us all. Notably, Gandhi himself had a keen interest in practical forms of conservation. He endorsed the ideas of Albert Howard, a pioneer of organic farming who had lived for many years in India. He set his disciple J.C. Kumarappa to work at rebuilding the village economy on sustainable lines, by promoting water conservation, community forest management and chemical agriculture.51
X
In his ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, George Orwell wrote that ‘regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!’52 This lack of odour around Gandhi was a product of the openness of his political (and personal) life. There were no security men posted outside Gandhi’s ashram; visitors of any creed and nationality could walk in when they chose. Those who could not visit sent their questions and criticisms in the mail; these were read by Gandhi, and often answered by him as well.
Perhaps no political leader in modern times knew his land and his people as intimately as Gandhi. He travelled around India by train, car, bullock cart and on foot, traversing thousands of miles of desert, mountain, valley, plain, plateau, delta and the coast, while spending the nights in towns and hamlets and sometimes in open fields as well.
There were no bodyguards with Gandhi in these journeys. In this age of terrorism, politicians may not be able to live the public life he did. But they might yet note that Gandhi’s politics was marked by an absence of dissemblance and an utter lack of reliance on ‘spin’ (as distinct from spinning). His campaigns of civil disobedience were always announced in advance. His social experiments were minutely dissected in the pages of his newspapers, the comments of his critics placed alongside his own.
Gandhi’s heightened self-awareness and openness to self-criticism stand in striking contrast to the arrogance of those in positions of power today. Gandhi once admitted to making a ‘Himalayan Blunder’; but contemporary activists, as much as contemporary politicians, are loath ever to admit to even a simple mistake.
The poet Paul Valéry once remarked that ‘in general the things that people hide from each other are of an emotional or physiological nature; defects, manias, lusts, passions, and superstitions’.53 Among all the public figures of his time (or ours), Gandhi was singular in that he exposed his defects, his manias, his lusts, his passions and his superstitions, to the whole world, through his writings in periodicals he himself edited and published. And the odd dark thought that he kept for correspondence with friends was posthumously (and unsentimentally) exposed by the editors of his Collected Works.
As an English Quaker who interacted with him over a period of twenty years pointed out, ‘Gandhiji had no private life, as we Westerners understand the expression.’54 God knows what we would think of other celebrated figures (whether in politics or business, sports, science or the arts) if we were so directly exposed to the intimacies of their lives and thoughts. Beyond satyagraha, interfaith harmony, environmental responsibility, the ending of the British Empire, and the delegitimizing of untouchability, the practice of, and the largely successful quest for, truth may in fact be Gandhi’s most remarkable achievement.
Acknowledgements
This book is the product of months and years in the archives, so it must be the keepers of the records I consulted who get pride of place here. I am grateful to the staff of the National Archives of India, New Delhi; of the Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai (as well as of its Vidarbha branch office in Nagpur); of the library of the University of Mumbai and of Mani Bhavan, also in Mumbai; of the Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow; of the British Library, the National Archives of the United Kingdom, Friends House, and the Bishopsgate Institute, all in London; of the University of Southampton: of the Cambridge South Asia Centre; of Rhodes House, Oxford; of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; of the New York Public Library, New York; of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore; of the Houghton Library of Harvard University; of the Watson Institute, Brown University, Providence; and of the Doe Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
Two archives and their keepers deserve special mention. These are the Sabarmati Ashram Archives in Ahmedabad, where I found hundreds of rare, and rarely seen, letters to Gandhi; and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in New Delhi, where—apart from dozens of other collections—I consulted the massive hoard of Gandhi Papers that for decades had remained unclassified and closed to scholars. My guides in Sabarmati were the terrific trilingual scholar Tridip Suhrud (the three languages he works in being the three that Gandhi wrote or spoke in) and the superbly skilled archivist Kinnari Bhatt.
The Sabarmati Ashram is a place I had only occasionally visited before starting research on Gandhi. On the other hand, the NMML has sustained me all my working life. For this, as for all my previous books, I have spent many joyous weeks and months in its manuscripts section, where I could count on the professionalism of Neelam Vatsa, Shazia Faridi, Jyoti Luthra, Soumya Mohanty, D.S. Rawat and Sanjeev Gautam. I owe a colossal debt to Deepa Bhatnagar, who supervised the indexing of the Gandhi Papers, and to Dr N. Balakrishnan, who took the courageous decision to open these papers, previously held in private hands, to the public. Both Deepa and Dr Bala have a thorough knowledge of the NMML’s wide
-ranging collections, and gave me (as they did other scholars) many tips on where I might find more, or more interesting, material on the person or themes I was exploring. Now that they have both retired, one can safely, and sadly, say that the NMML shall never know their like again.
In the research and writing of this book, I received advice and assistance from many other people, among whom I must especially mention Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Arpita Basu, Ajit Bhide, Rudra Chaudhuri, the late Mahendra Desai, the late Narayan Desai, Swati Ganguly, Jagadev Gajare, Ira Guha, Keshava Guha, Diva Gujral, Salima Hashmi, Kamu Iyer, Rajesh Joshi, Cara Jones, Gunjan Jhunjhunwala, Sunil Khilnani, Nirmala Lakshman, Mark Lindley, G.S. Mallikarjuna, J. Martinez Alier, the late Swapan Mazumdar, Nandini Mehta, Ramanuj Mukherjee, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Archana Nathan, Anil Nauriya, Prashant Panjiar, Aakar Patel, Dina Patel, Dinyar Patel, Vijay Prashad, Vikram Raghavan, M.V. Ravishankar, M.R. Sharan, Dilip Simeon, Hemali Sodhi, Taylor Stoehr, Peter Straus, the late Govind Talwalkar, R. Ullagadi, Saumya Vaishnava, and the doyenne of historians of the Dalit movement, the late Eleanor Zelliot. I owe a special debt to Vijay Jain of Prabhu Book Service, Gurgaon, and to K.K.S. Murthy of Select Bookshop, Bengaluru, for supplying me with numerous out-of-print and rare books and pamphlets relevant to this project.
The Hindi letters and reports cited in this book were translated by myself. However, the Gujarati letters I have drawn upon were translated by Urvish Kothari. My late father, Dr S.R.D. Guha, translated some extremely useful materials from French and German, while a key document in Spanish was translated by Aditya Balasubramanian.
The draft manuscript of this book had the benefit of close readings from two outstanding historians, David Gilmour and Srinath Raghavan; and from two great Gandhi scholars, E.S. Reddy and Gopalkrishna Gandhi. Gopal has saved me from many errors of fact and interpretation. Mr Reddy, ninety-three years young as I write, continues to inspire me with his example and nourish me with his knowledge.
My agents, Gill Coleridge in London and Melanie Jackson in New York, have provided critical support and encouragement through the long decade in which this biography of Gandhi was conceived, researched and written. Gill and Melanie placed me with a superb set of editors and publishers: Meru Gokhale and Tarini Uppal in New Delhi, Simon Winder in London, Anne Collins in Toronto, and Dan Frank and Sonny Mehta in New York, who have all provided extremely valuable comments that have helped me shape, cut, revise and reshape successive drafts of the book. I owe a special debt to Sonny Mehta for taking such a strong personal interest in the project. Over long lunches in New York and New Delhi, and through many phone conversations, Sonny has helped me seek to strike a balance between the man and his ideas, the leader and his followers, the politician and his rivals, the individual and his times.
I grieve that two of my early mentors, the sociologist Anjan Ghosh and the historian Basudev (Robi) Chatterji, are no longer alive to see this work in print. Anjan and Robi were Indian intellectuals remarkably unmarked by prejudice or dogmatism; and I was one of many scholars younger than them, who benefited from their generosity and open-mindedness. I wish they were here still; I hope the spirit of their teachings is not entirely absent from these pages.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES
ABP Amrita Bazar Patrika (newspaper published from Calcutta)
Autobiography M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with Truth, translated from the Gujarati by Mahadev Desai (first published in 1927; second edition: Ahmedabad, Navajivan Press, 1940—reprinted many times since). There are many print editions of Gandhi’s autobiography around the world, licensed by Navajivan; and there will be many more, especially since the work is now out of copyright. The pagination of these works varies enormously. Therefore, in my references to this book, I have cited Part and Chapter rather than page numbers. However, since the book originated from a series of newspaper articles, each chapter is only a few pages long, so my citations will be relatively easy to track down.
APAC/BL Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, London
BC Bombay Chronicle (newspaper published from Bombay)
CWMG Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1958–1994)
D Dawn (newspaper published from Delhi till 1947, and later from Karachi)
DTDG Mahadev H. Desai’s Day-to-Day with Gandhi, in six volumes, edited by Narhari D. Parikh, translated from the Gujarati by Hemantkumar G. Nilkanth (Varanasi: Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan, 1968)
FR Fortnightly Report
GBI Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)
GoI Government of India
H Harijan (weekly published from Ahmedabad)
HT Hindustan Times (newspaper published from Delhi)
IAR Indian Annual Register (edited by H.N. Mitra, and published from Calcutta from 1919 to 1947)
MSA Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai
MG Manchester Guardian (newspaper published from Manchester, predecessor of Guardian)
N Navajivan (weekly published from Ahmedabad)
NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi
NAUK National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew
NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi
NYPL New York Public Library, New York
PRMGMC Printed Record of the Mahatma Gandhi Murder Case (in the High Court of Judicature for the Province of East Punjab at Simla), eight volumes, in the Rare Book Collection, Law Library, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
PSV Private Secretary to Viceroy
SN Serial Number
SAAA Sabarmati Ashram Archives, Ahmedabad
Source Material N.R. Phatak, editor, Source Material for a History of the Freedom Movement in India, published in multiple volumes and parts (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1965)
ToI Times of India
ToP Nicholas Mansergh, editor, Constitutional Relations Between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power, 1942–47, published in twelve volumes (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970–1983).
TS The Statesman (newspaper published from Calcutta)
TT The Tribune (newspaper published from Lahore)
UP United Provinces
VAN Vidarbha Archives, Nagpur
YI Young India (weekly published from Ahmedabad)
Preface
1. Gandhi to C.F. Andrews, 15 June 1933, CWMG, LV, pp. 198–99.
2. Josiah Oldfield, quoted in ‘Victor French’ (pseudonym), Lord Willingdon in India (Bombay: Karnatak Printing Press, 1934). On Oldfield’s early friendship with Gandhi, see GBI, pp. 44–45, 216–17, etc.
3. CWMG, LXXXV, p. 151.
4. The most readily accessible biographical study by an Indian is by Rajmohan Gandhi, who was born in 1935; that by a non-Indian, by Joseph Lelyveld, who was born in 1937. I was born in 1958.
5. ‘Higher Education’, H, 9 July 1937, CWMG, LXVII, p. 159.
6. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, quoted in C.D. Narasimhaiah, The Writer’s Gandhi (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1967), pp. 54–55. To this, Narasimhaiah adds his own assessment, which was that Gandhi ‘broke the cumbrous, Victorian periods which had enslaved the Indian writer like his counterpart in England…and made us speak like men who had something to say, and not exhort like gods or rant like demons.’
7. See V.S. Naipaul, Letters between a Father and Son (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999), pp. 29–30.
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br /> 8. Quoted in Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 35.
Chapter One: The Returning Hero
1. Gandhi to G.A. Natesan, c. 29 October 1909, CWMG, IX, pp. 506–07.
2. CWMG, XII, pp. 507, 521.
3. On the friendship between Gandhi and Kallenbach in South Africa, see GBI, pp. 187–88, 418–19, 459–60, 600–01, etc. Cf. also Shimon Lev, Soulmates: The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2012).
4. Autobiography, Part IV, Chapter XXXVIII.
5. Sarojini Naidu to Lady Pherozeshah Mehta, undated letter reproduced in the Indian Review, January 1915. See also James Hunt, Gandhi in London (New Delhi: Promilla Books, 1993), p. 163, for a later (but equally colourful) recollection of Mrs Naidu’s.
6. See Autobiography, Part IV, Chapter XXXVIII, ‘My Part in the War’.
7. See GBI, pp. 135–37, 193–94.
8. CWMG, XII, pp. 523–25.
9. Olive Schreiner to Hermann Kallenbach, 2 October 1914, in Kallenbach Papers, NAI; Schreiner to Gandhi, 2 October 1914, letter quoted in Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner: A Biography (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), pp. 304–05, emphasis in the original. On Gandhi’s friendship with Olive Schreiner and her brother, the liberal politician W.P. Schreiner, see GBI, pp. 328, 433–34, 494–95, 527.
10. Gandhi to Maganlal, 18 September 1914, CWMG, XII, pp. 531–32.
11. Gandhi to Pragji Desai, 15 November 1914, CWMG, XII, pp. 554–55. During the Anglo-Zulu war of 1906, Gandhi, while officially on the British side, ministered to many Zulus as well. See GBI, p. 194.