I did not really think that I would pick up the book but once it was released, and the news covered in the papers, it was hard to resist. A Ram Guha book, and one on Gandhi at that. I have been growingly critical of Guha's newspaper columns for some time now. In particular, the distinction he has tended to draw between an undefined 'creative' capitalism and crony capitalism, the former writted of in approving terms, has appeared not only unconvincing but also difficult to reconcile with his earlier works on Third World environmentalism and environmental history, which manifest a greater sensitivity towards the politics and predicament of the peasant and the forest-dweller.
So what got me reading Gandhi before India? In the second half of September, I purchased, after much dilly-dallying, JTF Jordens’s Gandhi’s Religion: A Home-spun Shawl. It had to be returned because several pages in the copy I received remained blank. Yet I managed to consume a good 75-odd pages before it was returned, and it proved to be a perfect celebration of Gandhi Jayanti even if unwittingly so. The Indian edition, published by OUP, carries a lively and insightful foreword by Ram Guha. The singular point that Guha made in his foreword, and which Jordens eloquently seemed to articulate in the early chapters, was that Gandhi’s politics was imbued in his religion, the one being inseparable from the other. And the religion that he practised as a self-proclaimed Hindu, was quite sui generis, a unique and unprecedented interpretation based not only on a catholic exploration of faiths other than those of his own Vaishnavism but also his praxis as a lawyer and activist. So, although the book remained unfinished (I have, since, ordered a fresh copy that lies on my table waiting to be read), the sparks were ignited, the fire lit, and the old dalliance with Gandhi and Gandhiana revived in good measure. In such a climate, the release of Gandhi before India came as a flame of camphor in front of the wavering once-devotee. I succumbed to the temptation.
A few pages into the book and no further convincing was required. This was surely vintage Ramachandra Guha, the hard-working and gifted biographer at work. As the pages flipped by and the endnotes were devoured, the tentative Gandhi grew up in Kathiawar, crossed the seas for a barrister’s education to London and back, and more than once folded up brief and undistinguished practices in India before commencing a career in law and activism in South Africa where he matured into a competent attorney, interrogating and building his own religious beliefs, making wide friendships transcending race and class, and eventually transforming into a principled and confidently idiosyncratic leader of the Indian community. The prose got my own creative juices flowing (although only in the mind!) and fed my own need for a break from turgid academic writing.
In ample measure, the biography lends life not only to Gandhi but also to his lesser-known associates in South Africa and India, many of whom deserve to be better known for they made Gandhi what he turned out to be. Of these, Raychandbhai, the precocious but short-lived jeweller-philosopher, was an early and seminal influence when Gandhi was crafting his own religious beliefs in the face of self-doubt. The biographer’s attention has been keenly bestowed upon Pranjivan Mehta, intimate friend and ardent admirer who preceded Tagore in conferring upon Gandhi the title Mahatma. The author’s attention has equally keenly been taken up by the Jewish triumvirate of Henry Polak, Hermann Kallenbach, and Sonja Schlesin, possibly among Gandhi’s closest friends, intellectual companions, and compatriots in their passion for the Indian cause. It remains little-known that European Jews, the first English and the last two Lithuanian, should have had such a profound role to play in the making of Mohandas Gandhi. If Henry Polak was Gandhi’s lieutenant, Kallenbach was the devout younger brother (the suggestion by a previous biographer that Kallenback may have been Gandhi’s gay lover is effectively dispelled by fresh archival evidence).
The relatively younger Sonja Schlesin asserted an independent mind even as she blossomed from diligent secretary into zealous community organiser. Another key woman associate, Polak’s wife, Millie, contested and argued with Gandhi, forcing him to revisit and re-examine the servility that Indian men, Gandhi being no exception, subjected their wives to. Both Sonja and Millie were precocious feminists, and it is quite heart-rending to read about the rejection of the intelligent and ambitious Sonja Schlesin’s application to the Bar. The author suggests that Sonja was preparing for a change in profession by cutting her hair short and wearing a tie. However, the rebuff from the Transvaal Law Society cruelly noted that ‘[T]he articling of women is entirely without precedent in South Africa and was never contemplated by the Law’. With uncharacteristic understatement, Guha describes the end of the episode in a single, terse sentence: ‘Miss Schlesin suppressed her disappointment and returned to her regular duties in Gandhi’s office.’
As the work of a widely-read author, Gandhi before India will perhaps widen the awareness, not least among Gandhi’s present-day countrymen, of the links that his life helped forge between India and unexpected parts of the world. If these associates of Gandhi have found their own lives richly described en passant, also coming to life are the doughty satyagrahis Thambi Naidoo and Parsee Rustomjee, and the Nonconformist Christian and Gandhi’s first biographer, Joseph Doke. It is perhaps testimony to the biographer’s skill that one yearns to know more of these lives from the tantalising glimpses that are served up to the reader. It may have been more satisfying for the reader to know what became of these women and men, towering in their own way, in the aftermath of Gandhi’s departure to India. The few clues that are offered remain in the endnotes: Kallenbach apparently gave up celibacy and had several affairs with women while Schlesin became a school headmistress, her ambition to practise law remaining poignantly unfulfilled. At any rate, the clues that are provided and the clues that are not, provide paths of enquiry laden with promise for future biographers of these remarkable men and women.
Biographers’ fascination with Gandhi is an open secret, and an internet search will show this up in ample measure. To attempt a biography of Gandhi that covers the span of his entire eventful life rather than just portions of it, is a task calling for exceptional courage. From a reader’s point of view, a justification for this first volume lies not only in the opulent breadth of reading that the biographer brings to his subject, and the richly enlivening prose that resurrects events and people, but also the archival troves that have been disinterred – in Haifa, Israel; the Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad, the Gandhi Memorial Museum and Library, and the National Archives of India, Delhi; and amongst newspaper records of fin-de-siecle South Africa - to provide a more penetrating and enriching gaze into the events of the first forty-five years of Gandhi’s life.
The new material also makes for a more critical biography. The biographer’s sympathies towards his subject shine through; yet he shows that Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian community was a contested one. His most vocal critic was CP Aiyar, editor of the African Chronicle (more Tamil than African) and apparently the only print companion to Gandhi’s own journal, Indian Opinion. The Gujarati community, largely composed of traders, whose serendipity and liberal purse-strings launched Gandhi’s career as petitioner and agitator, grew relatively more equivocal with the passage of time. They prevaricated on his more radical methods of protest that embraced jail-going, and on causes that addressed more directly the interests of poorer Indians. The aims of Gandhi’s last satyagraha caused heartburn among Muslim Gujarati traders. The satyagraha’s demand for the lawful recognition of one wife only, they felt, was in conflict with the Quranic injunction allowing Muslims to take up to four wives. There were friends-turned-foes but also foes-turned-friends, the categories often overlapping. By giving the readers a generous taste of the flavour of the times, the chronicle records the progression of the Indian struggle without overlooking the dissenters and blacklegs. The biographer himself turns critic when it comes to Gandhi’s personal life: the rising community leader’s bursts of impatience with his wife as a frequently overassertive husband are recorded, but more carefully and sensitively detailed is his inability to countenance the career aspirations of his eldest son, Harilal. As a father of his four sons, Gandhi veers on the authoritarian, and as the chief of the Phoenix Settlement, he demonstrates incapacity in comprehending young inmates’ sexual needs.
The important and heroic role played by the Tamils, largely indentured and ex-indentured labourers, is an evocative highlight of the narrative. Successive chapters chronologically trace the changing class character of the struggle in South Africa, from one that represented mercantile and relatively elite Indian interests over the question of franchise to the relatively more plebeian but sensitive question of dignity and survival of Indian labourers and miners. A greater surprise is the finding that the Indian struggle encompassed the Chinese immigrants in South Africa. Fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with their Indian counterparts, the Chinese community was smaller but was equal to the hardship of passive resistance, patiently suffering jail, and even deportment. The Cantonese-Chinese leader, Leung Quinn, of which one wishes to learn more, was deported to Madras, where he made a sterling contribution to the publicity of events in South Africa with his speeches and meetings with Indian supporters in the province.
The value of the book lies in the quality of its narrative, walking as it does the tightrope between describing an intense flurry of events, and ensuring that the reader’s own comprehension does not run aground in interest-sapping waters of excessive detail. Eventually it helps weave events together in an account that demonstrates the gradual evolution of Gandhi’s political philosophy and methods of agitation. If the injustices in South Africa moved him to action, global events weighed on his inventive mind; these included the movement for women’s suffrage in Britain, anti-colonial politics in India and England, and Japan’s defeat of Russia in war. Nonetheless, Gandhi’s politics was hewed as much out of his own religious beliefs as from an astute understanding of politically achievable goals in a climate of racial hostility. His religious beliefs, in turn, were surely shaped by the encounters with vegetarians in England, the introduction to Edwin Arnold’s translation of The Gita, the correspondence with Raychandbhai in Bombay, and the hours of debate and discussion spend among Theosophists, Christians, Jews, Muslims and Zoroastrians in South Africa. These diasporic experiences were quickly absorbed since they were in keeping with the ecumenical religiosity and austere food habits of his own boyhood family home.
The biographer may have chosen to overlook it but his narrative makes clear the role of privileged caste and social status in moulding his subject. Gandhi came from a caste, if not family, of traders. This provides a context to his close association with Gujarati merchants and staunch defence of their business practices in South Africa, which were a source of much European heartburn and anger (one wishes that the latter’s grievances against the Indian merchants, especially that of undercutting, were probed by the biographer). Gandhi’s proclivity for businessmen and his successful enlistment of their support remained till the end of his life - he died a guest of the Birlas at their Delhi home. This also perhaps partly explains why he remained singularly unimpressed by communism or anarchist philosophy, both probably too destabilising and unappealing to the inherently cautious and incremental Bania mind. The moral emphasis on vegetarianism came naturally to him given his Vaishnava faith, and the gravitation towards asceticism was in keeping with the memory of visiting Jain monks in Kathiawar.
Yet many choices that Gandhi made on the back of circumstances created by birth were actively his own. In South Africa, Gandhi displayed a keenness to engage with people different from his own stock and race, a tendency that perhaps remains unusual among first generation emigrant Indians to this day. He displayed the willingness to explore teachings of other religions and came to acknowledge the appeal of the precepts of Tolstoy and Ruskin. At the same time, he used these explorations to closely examine the tenets his own faith, independently fashion a unique, more inclusive creed, and boldly reject those instructions of his religion that he found militating against his own developing sense of rectitude. As the years in South Africa progressed his political philosophy grew more radical and so did the pacifist (but ethically demanding) bent of his action. Nowhere is this more evident in the 1909 tract, Hind Swaraj, which combines a caustic rejection of Western civilization in the same breath as an emphatic prescription of passive resistance, or satyagraha, for praxis.
Gandhi's quest was best embodied in the Phoenix Settlement, which represented an experiment in multicultural, intercaste communal living, and simultaneously played a critical role in shaping the Indian struggle. The singularity of Gandhi’s life in South Africa lay in his tenacious, ecumenical pursuit of the spiritual through the practice of a politics of scruple. This was a mission that remained as un-understood in his own lifetime as in ours. His invocations of faith as well as his political ends attracted to him admirers and collaborators. But few of them embraced his faith and his politics in equal measure; the attachment to one probably impelled them to a tentative, possibly short-lived, acceptance of the other. His opponents were bewildered and less trusting. One is in sympathy with the bafflement of the perplexed South African Governor-General, Lord Gladstone, who complained that:
…It is no easy task for a European to conduct negotiations with Mr. Gandhi. The workings of his conscience are inscrutable to the occidental mind and produce complications in wholly unexpected places. His ethical and intellectual attitude, based as it appears to be on a curious compound of mysticism and astuteness, baffles the ordinary processes of thought… (p. 504-05).
Lord Gladstone's puzzlement was not strictly European. Many of the protestors who willingly accepted Gandhi's command and followed him into prison may have done so of a sense of strong trust and veneration and less through an independent consideration of the logic of the proposed action. When they did exercise their own mind, as the Gujarati merchants did in later years, their reactions were less than whole-hearted and more ambivalent. Gandhi's closer intellectual friendships with Europeans rather than Indians suggest that either there were few - or no - Indians with whom he shared an intellectual meeting ground (which is not hard to understand given the small size of the Indian community and the stark absence of the professions in its composition) or that he was more tolerant of dissent and criticism from Europeans than from Indians. (It may, of course, have been some combination of both.) In his dealings with his own family he came across as being overbearing, expecting his sons and wife to implicitly follow him in his capacity as father and husband. This also appears likely, albeit to a lesser extent, in the case of his nephews and trusted lieutenants, Maganlal and Chhaganlal. It is possible, therefore, that Gandhi applied varying yardsticks of behaviour to Indians and Europeans.
The relative neglect of Blacks remains a deeply poignant void in Gandhi’s precept and practice in South Africa, an absence that does not escape the biographer. In his early days Gandhi and his colleagues referred to the Blacks as Kaffirs (the prevalent usage at the time) but chafed at the pejorative European appellation of Indians as coolies. The Indian struggle repeatedly endorsed the theory of Indian superiority over African Blacks even as it frequently drew attention to the theoretical parity between Europeans and Indians as subjects of the British Empire. But this position matured as Gandhi’s mind broadened to visualise the equality of all humankind. In later years, references to Africans were to be found more often in Indian Opinion. A particularly epiphanic mention of their predicament is pointed out by the biographer; in a 1910 issue, the Blacks were adopted as a point of reference by Gandhi to distinguish between the position of the Indians and the Europeans in South Africa. He stated that the Blacks
alone are the original inhabitants of this land. We have not seized the land from them by force; we live here with their goodwill. The whites, on the other hand, have occupied the country forcibly and appropriated it to themselves… (p. 395)
To be sure, Gandhi corresponded with Black leaders of the day and met with them. Even so, as the author tellingly asserts, the absence of Blacks remains the one shortcoming in the long and abundant roll of friendships that Gandhi cultivated in South Africa across race, religion, caste, and creed.
Having begun with what I hoped would be a short review of the book I have meandered much. Given the distance in time and location, the Gandhi before India can be studied as much with a dilettante’s delight as with scholarly dispassion. This will be less possible with the second volume, which will bring under its lens his later life and career in India. Given the import of the latter period of his life for our own times, it is evident that the second volume will be greeted with greater scrutiny. Be that as it may, Gandhi’s life and work in South Africa were as outstanding in their time and context as they seem in the rather more complex world of today. India before Gandhi was hardly the preserve of ethical conduct and moral uprightness that romantics are wont to believe. The brief glimpses in the book of the courtly intrigues of nineteenth century Kathiawad indicate the moral dissoluteness of that and earlier times. I do think that Gandhi before India deserves to be read, not for Guha, not for Gandhi, but for nothing if not to boldly imagine that a politics of principle remains as possible today as it was a hundred years ago, and ever in the course of human existence.
So what got me reading Gandhi before India? In the second half of September, I purchased, after much dilly-dallying, JTF Jordens’s Gandhi’s Religion: A Home-spun Shawl. It had to be returned because several pages in the copy I received remained blank. Yet I managed to consume a good 75-odd pages before it was returned, and it proved to be a perfect celebration of Gandhi Jayanti even if unwittingly so. The Indian edition, published by OUP, carries a lively and insightful foreword by Ram Guha. The singular point that Guha made in his foreword, and which Jordens eloquently seemed to articulate in the early chapters, was that Gandhi’s politics was imbued in his religion, the one being inseparable from the other. And the religion that he practised as a self-proclaimed Hindu, was quite sui generis, a unique and unprecedented interpretation based not only on a catholic exploration of faiths other than those of his own Vaishnavism but also his praxis as a lawyer and activist. So, although the book remained unfinished (I have, since, ordered a fresh copy that lies on my table waiting to be read), the sparks were ignited, the fire lit, and the old dalliance with Gandhi and Gandhiana revived in good measure. In such a climate, the release of Gandhi before India came as a flame of camphor in front of the wavering once-devotee. I succumbed to the temptation.
A few pages into the book and no further convincing was required. This was surely vintage Ramachandra Guha, the hard-working and gifted biographer at work. As the pages flipped by and the endnotes were devoured, the tentative Gandhi grew up in Kathiawar, crossed the seas for a barrister’s education to London and back, and more than once folded up brief and undistinguished practices in India before commencing a career in law and activism in South Africa where he matured into a competent attorney, interrogating and building his own religious beliefs, making wide friendships transcending race and class, and eventually transforming into a principled and confidently idiosyncratic leader of the Indian community. The prose got my own creative juices flowing (although only in the mind!) and fed my own need for a break from turgid academic writing.
In ample measure, the biography lends life not only to Gandhi but also to his lesser-known associates in South Africa and India, many of whom deserve to be better known for they made Gandhi what he turned out to be. Of these, Raychandbhai, the precocious but short-lived jeweller-philosopher, was an early and seminal influence when Gandhi was crafting his own religious beliefs in the face of self-doubt. The biographer’s attention has been keenly bestowed upon Pranjivan Mehta, intimate friend and ardent admirer who preceded Tagore in conferring upon Gandhi the title Mahatma. The author’s attention has equally keenly been taken up by the Jewish triumvirate of Henry Polak, Hermann Kallenbach, and Sonja Schlesin, possibly among Gandhi’s closest friends, intellectual companions, and compatriots in their passion for the Indian cause. It remains little-known that European Jews, the first English and the last two Lithuanian, should have had such a profound role to play in the making of Mohandas Gandhi. If Henry Polak was Gandhi’s lieutenant, Kallenbach was the devout younger brother (the suggestion by a previous biographer that Kallenback may have been Gandhi’s gay lover is effectively dispelled by fresh archival evidence).
The relatively younger Sonja Schlesin asserted an independent mind even as she blossomed from diligent secretary into zealous community organiser. Another key woman associate, Polak’s wife, Millie, contested and argued with Gandhi, forcing him to revisit and re-examine the servility that Indian men, Gandhi being no exception, subjected their wives to. Both Sonja and Millie were precocious feminists, and it is quite heart-rending to read about the rejection of the intelligent and ambitious Sonja Schlesin’s application to the Bar. The author suggests that Sonja was preparing for a change in profession by cutting her hair short and wearing a tie. However, the rebuff from the Transvaal Law Society cruelly noted that ‘[T]he articling of women is entirely without precedent in South Africa and was never contemplated by the Law’. With uncharacteristic understatement, Guha describes the end of the episode in a single, terse sentence: ‘Miss Schlesin suppressed her disappointment and returned to her regular duties in Gandhi’s office.’
As the work of a widely-read author, Gandhi before India will perhaps widen the awareness, not least among Gandhi’s present-day countrymen, of the links that his life helped forge between India and unexpected parts of the world. If these associates of Gandhi have found their own lives richly described en passant, also coming to life are the doughty satyagrahis Thambi Naidoo and Parsee Rustomjee, and the Nonconformist Christian and Gandhi’s first biographer, Joseph Doke. It is perhaps testimony to the biographer’s skill that one yearns to know more of these lives from the tantalising glimpses that are served up to the reader. It may have been more satisfying for the reader to know what became of these women and men, towering in their own way, in the aftermath of Gandhi’s departure to India. The few clues that are offered remain in the endnotes: Kallenbach apparently gave up celibacy and had several affairs with women while Schlesin became a school headmistress, her ambition to practise law remaining poignantly unfulfilled. At any rate, the clues that are provided and the clues that are not, provide paths of enquiry laden with promise for future biographers of these remarkable men and women.
Biographers’ fascination with Gandhi is an open secret, and an internet search will show this up in ample measure. To attempt a biography of Gandhi that covers the span of his entire eventful life rather than just portions of it, is a task calling for exceptional courage. From a reader’s point of view, a justification for this first volume lies not only in the opulent breadth of reading that the biographer brings to his subject, and the richly enlivening prose that resurrects events and people, but also the archival troves that have been disinterred – in Haifa, Israel; the Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad, the Gandhi Memorial Museum and Library, and the National Archives of India, Delhi; and amongst newspaper records of fin-de-siecle South Africa - to provide a more penetrating and enriching gaze into the events of the first forty-five years of Gandhi’s life.
The new material also makes for a more critical biography. The biographer’s sympathies towards his subject shine through; yet he shows that Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian community was a contested one. His most vocal critic was CP Aiyar, editor of the African Chronicle (more Tamil than African) and apparently the only print companion to Gandhi’s own journal, Indian Opinion. The Gujarati community, largely composed of traders, whose serendipity and liberal purse-strings launched Gandhi’s career as petitioner and agitator, grew relatively more equivocal with the passage of time. They prevaricated on his more radical methods of protest that embraced jail-going, and on causes that addressed more directly the interests of poorer Indians. The aims of Gandhi’s last satyagraha caused heartburn among Muslim Gujarati traders. The satyagraha’s demand for the lawful recognition of one wife only, they felt, was in conflict with the Quranic injunction allowing Muslims to take up to four wives. There were friends-turned-foes but also foes-turned-friends, the categories often overlapping. By giving the readers a generous taste of the flavour of the times, the chronicle records the progression of the Indian struggle without overlooking the dissenters and blacklegs. The biographer himself turns critic when it comes to Gandhi’s personal life: the rising community leader’s bursts of impatience with his wife as a frequently overassertive husband are recorded, but more carefully and sensitively detailed is his inability to countenance the career aspirations of his eldest son, Harilal. As a father of his four sons, Gandhi veers on the authoritarian, and as the chief of the Phoenix Settlement, he demonstrates incapacity in comprehending young inmates’ sexual needs.
The important and heroic role played by the Tamils, largely indentured and ex-indentured labourers, is an evocative highlight of the narrative. Successive chapters chronologically trace the changing class character of the struggle in South Africa, from one that represented mercantile and relatively elite Indian interests over the question of franchise to the relatively more plebeian but sensitive question of dignity and survival of Indian labourers and miners. A greater surprise is the finding that the Indian struggle encompassed the Chinese immigrants in South Africa. Fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with their Indian counterparts, the Chinese community was smaller but was equal to the hardship of passive resistance, patiently suffering jail, and even deportment. The Cantonese-Chinese leader, Leung Quinn, of which one wishes to learn more, was deported to Madras, where he made a sterling contribution to the publicity of events in South Africa with his speeches and meetings with Indian supporters in the province.
The value of the book lies in the quality of its narrative, walking as it does the tightrope between describing an intense flurry of events, and ensuring that the reader’s own comprehension does not run aground in interest-sapping waters of excessive detail. Eventually it helps weave events together in an account that demonstrates the gradual evolution of Gandhi’s political philosophy and methods of agitation. If the injustices in South Africa moved him to action, global events weighed on his inventive mind; these included the movement for women’s suffrage in Britain, anti-colonial politics in India and England, and Japan’s defeat of Russia in war. Nonetheless, Gandhi’s politics was hewed as much out of his own religious beliefs as from an astute understanding of politically achievable goals in a climate of racial hostility. His religious beliefs, in turn, were surely shaped by the encounters with vegetarians in England, the introduction to Edwin Arnold’s translation of The Gita, the correspondence with Raychandbhai in Bombay, and the hours of debate and discussion spend among Theosophists, Christians, Jews, Muslims and Zoroastrians in South Africa. These diasporic experiences were quickly absorbed since they were in keeping with the ecumenical religiosity and austere food habits of his own boyhood family home.
The biographer may have chosen to overlook it but his narrative makes clear the role of privileged caste and social status in moulding his subject. Gandhi came from a caste, if not family, of traders. This provides a context to his close association with Gujarati merchants and staunch defence of their business practices in South Africa, which were a source of much European heartburn and anger (one wishes that the latter’s grievances against the Indian merchants, especially that of undercutting, were probed by the biographer). Gandhi’s proclivity for businessmen and his successful enlistment of their support remained till the end of his life - he died a guest of the Birlas at their Delhi home. This also perhaps partly explains why he remained singularly unimpressed by communism or anarchist philosophy, both probably too destabilising and unappealing to the inherently cautious and incremental Bania mind. The moral emphasis on vegetarianism came naturally to him given his Vaishnava faith, and the gravitation towards asceticism was in keeping with the memory of visiting Jain monks in Kathiawar.
Yet many choices that Gandhi made on the back of circumstances created by birth were actively his own. In South Africa, Gandhi displayed a keenness to engage with people different from his own stock and race, a tendency that perhaps remains unusual among first generation emigrant Indians to this day. He displayed the willingness to explore teachings of other religions and came to acknowledge the appeal of the precepts of Tolstoy and Ruskin. At the same time, he used these explorations to closely examine the tenets his own faith, independently fashion a unique, more inclusive creed, and boldly reject those instructions of his religion that he found militating against his own developing sense of rectitude. As the years in South Africa progressed his political philosophy grew more radical and so did the pacifist (but ethically demanding) bent of his action. Nowhere is this more evident in the 1909 tract, Hind Swaraj, which combines a caustic rejection of Western civilization in the same breath as an emphatic prescription of passive resistance, or satyagraha, for praxis.
Gandhi's quest was best embodied in the Phoenix Settlement, which represented an experiment in multicultural, intercaste communal living, and simultaneously played a critical role in shaping the Indian struggle. The singularity of Gandhi’s life in South Africa lay in his tenacious, ecumenical pursuit of the spiritual through the practice of a politics of scruple. This was a mission that remained as un-understood in his own lifetime as in ours. His invocations of faith as well as his political ends attracted to him admirers and collaborators. But few of them embraced his faith and his politics in equal measure; the attachment to one probably impelled them to a tentative, possibly short-lived, acceptance of the other. His opponents were bewildered and less trusting. One is in sympathy with the bafflement of the perplexed South African Governor-General, Lord Gladstone, who complained that:
…It is no easy task for a European to conduct negotiations with Mr. Gandhi. The workings of his conscience are inscrutable to the occidental mind and produce complications in wholly unexpected places. His ethical and intellectual attitude, based as it appears to be on a curious compound of mysticism and astuteness, baffles the ordinary processes of thought… (p. 504-05).
Lord Gladstone's puzzlement was not strictly European. Many of the protestors who willingly accepted Gandhi's command and followed him into prison may have done so of a sense of strong trust and veneration and less through an independent consideration of the logic of the proposed action. When they did exercise their own mind, as the Gujarati merchants did in later years, their reactions were less than whole-hearted and more ambivalent. Gandhi's closer intellectual friendships with Europeans rather than Indians suggest that either there were few - or no - Indians with whom he shared an intellectual meeting ground (which is not hard to understand given the small size of the Indian community and the stark absence of the professions in its composition) or that he was more tolerant of dissent and criticism from Europeans than from Indians. (It may, of course, have been some combination of both.) In his dealings with his own family he came across as being overbearing, expecting his sons and wife to implicitly follow him in his capacity as father and husband. This also appears likely, albeit to a lesser extent, in the case of his nephews and trusted lieutenants, Maganlal and Chhaganlal. It is possible, therefore, that Gandhi applied varying yardsticks of behaviour to Indians and Europeans.
The relative neglect of Blacks remains a deeply poignant void in Gandhi’s precept and practice in South Africa, an absence that does not escape the biographer. In his early days Gandhi and his colleagues referred to the Blacks as Kaffirs (the prevalent usage at the time) but chafed at the pejorative European appellation of Indians as coolies. The Indian struggle repeatedly endorsed the theory of Indian superiority over African Blacks even as it frequently drew attention to the theoretical parity between Europeans and Indians as subjects of the British Empire. But this position matured as Gandhi’s mind broadened to visualise the equality of all humankind. In later years, references to Africans were to be found more often in Indian Opinion. A particularly epiphanic mention of their predicament is pointed out by the biographer; in a 1910 issue, the Blacks were adopted as a point of reference by Gandhi to distinguish between the position of the Indians and the Europeans in South Africa. He stated that the Blacks
alone are the original inhabitants of this land. We have not seized the land from them by force; we live here with their goodwill. The whites, on the other hand, have occupied the country forcibly and appropriated it to themselves… (p. 395)
To be sure, Gandhi corresponded with Black leaders of the day and met with them. Even so, as the author tellingly asserts, the absence of Blacks remains the one shortcoming in the long and abundant roll of friendships that Gandhi cultivated in South Africa across race, religion, caste, and creed.
Having begun with what I hoped would be a short review of the book I have meandered much. Given the distance in time and location, the Gandhi before India can be studied as much with a dilettante’s delight as with scholarly dispassion. This will be less possible with the second volume, which will bring under its lens his later life and career in India. Given the import of the latter period of his life for our own times, it is evident that the second volume will be greeted with greater scrutiny. Be that as it may, Gandhi’s life and work in South Africa were as outstanding in their time and context as they seem in the rather more complex world of today. India before Gandhi was hardly the preserve of ethical conduct and moral uprightness that romantics are wont to believe. The brief glimpses in the book of the courtly intrigues of nineteenth century Kathiawad indicate the moral dissoluteness of that and earlier times. I do think that Gandhi before India deserves to be read, not for Guha, not for Gandhi, but for nothing if not to boldly imagine that a politics of principle remains as possible today as it was a hundred years ago, and ever in the course of human existence.
