Rewriting history

Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul reintroduces Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, one of the most iconic personalities in history, to a new generation of readers. One would think that not much more could be written about a personage whose influential philosophy of satyagraha (forceful truth) and ahimsa (non-violent struggle) collided with British rule and centuries old Indian tradition. But Lelyveld manages to defy the odds and produces a surgical account of Gandhi—the man.Lelyveld, a Pulitzer prize winner, is revisionistic, unwilling to be intimidated by Gandhi’s monumental feats. He probes, questions and analyses. His research is exhaustive, and by the end of this bildungsroman, the reader encounters a far more human and complex figure, far removed from the lionised image projected in hagiographic films and books.

The author sensibly avoids didactics, leaving readers to ponder and draw their own conclusions. But he raises serious issues. He explores Gandhi’s life in South Africa and how his experiences fashioned his struggle in India. We are introduced to a Gandhi who, like the black civil rights notable, Rosa Parks, refused to surrender his seat to a white man. But Gandhi was far from a revolutionary or a defender of the untouchables, the unlettered, uncivilised and indentured Indians. He was a lawyer of the privileged Modh Banias subcaste, who was quick to educate whites (in the Transavaal Advertiser) on the difference between a coolie and an Indian. Gandhi, it seemed was caught up in a vortex of caste, subcaste, colour and class, that he both accepted and rejected.

In his gestational years in South Africa, Gandhi wore Western suites and socialised with those of his intellectual ilk. He was a defender of the polished Indian, be they Hindu or Muslim. To suggest otherwise is to be guilty of what the author calls “heritage myth-making.” In a racially charged South Africa, Gandhi even with the British in a bloody crackdown on Zulus. In fact, blacks or “kaffirs” as they were derogatorily called, were hardly his concern. Lelyveld writes: “No reprisals materialised, but signs of Zulu resentment over Gandhi’s decision to side with the whites were not lacking.” He quotes the Zulu newspaper Izwi Labantu: “African would not forget that Indian had volunteered to serve with the English savages in Natal who massacred thousands of Zulus in order to steal their land.”

Interestingly, it took Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi (then Nehru), not the “Mahatma,” to voice that “Indians and Africans must act together...” Through these provocative revelations, Lelyveld’s style is engaging. He is persistent: “There is more to Gandhi that meets the eye,” he seems to be saying. Long before India’s struggle for swaraj (self rule) erupts, the reader sees a Gandhi who dabbled in Christian philosophy, with the thought of converting, only to change his mind. The author cites Gandhi himself: “I was tremendously attracted to Christianity but eventually I came to the conclusion that there was nothing really in your scriptures that we had not got in ours...” Is the author suggesting that Gandhi was viewing Christianity as a means to social mobility and acceptance in a brutally unjust society? Did Gandhi’s populist fervour emerge when a new reality dawned on him? That, as much as he tried, he was no better than an untouchable in the eyes of white South Africa? To what extent was the “new” Gandhi influenced by Leo Tolstoy and John Ruskin?

Indeed, Gandhi is as complex and unnerving as the circumstances of his time. On a personal level, he remains a paragon of ambivalence, “many-sided,” according to VS Niapaul. Amid his vow of brahmacharya (celibacy) we are ushered into Gandhi’s world of homo-eroticism with German born Hermann Kallenbach and his strange fascination with his relative Manu Gandhi. In the end though, Gandhi’s historical stature isn’t really uprooted, but the reader is well counselled that he was very human. The Great Soul soars. It is written with virtuoso and imagination, raising issues that are as relevant today as they were a century ago. Lelyveld’s masterpiece forces us to confront a social albatross, that every society has its version of the caste system, characterised by racial, religious, colour and economic barriers. In this cesspool of misguided values, Gandhi emerged, a philosopher and “master political alchemist.” He painstakingly transcended his provincial ways, finally managing to awaken the conscience of a stained nation.

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld Alfred A Knopf, New York, 2011 ISBN 978-0-307-26958-4.

• Dr Glenville Ashby is a T&TG New York Foreign correspondent. glenvilleashby@gmail.com