Growing up in India, one saw the image of Gandhi everywhere. Gandhi was Mahatma (“great soul”), whose aura soared above the martyrs of struggle for Independence. Gandhi’s bespectacled visage is still a universal presence on rural committees, on non-profit logos, in drawing competitions, and in children’s “fancy dress” parades on his birthday celebrations. He is etched on the Indian currency bills and sketched in collective memories, but always with the same imagery: the charkha (the wheel), the round spectacled bald head, the walking stick on which his spindly weight rested, the white khaddar fabric and time-piece, and the ever-present smile. Even as Gandhian lifestyle fades into the distant past, with memories being re-layered in celluloid hues of Kingsley’s face, Gandhi’s round spectacles and shaven head remain the unchanging constants.
The ubiquitous commercial edifications (think of Apple ads) and caricatures (Seinfeld jokes) of Gandhi’s audacious minimalism fog his earlier life.
What was Gandhi without the white dhoti like? How did he transition from a lawyer in a tailored suit trying to earn his living in South Africa to the “fakir” of Churchill’s arrant derision?
In high school texts, the history of Gandhi before what he became eventually, remains a quiet vacuum. Even in the 1982 Attenborough film, the transition from him being thrown on to the platform in Pietermaritzburg train station, to India, happens almost abruptly.
Gandhi changed to his now-known white attire in late 1913, when he was already well into his forties while mourning the deaths of strikers in a police firing. This change must have taken a journey of extraordinary courage and determination.
The author-historian Ramachandra Guha explores the very remarkable journey in Gandhi Before India: a complicated history of Gandhi’s heroic transition from a lawyer in a suit, to how we know him now. This is an excellent book that brought various aspects of his life, previously unknown to me, to light.
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1. A search for better economic livelihood.
Gandhi reached South Africa in the first place because he couldn’t, for a variety of reasons, establish his legal career in Porbhander or in Bombay. When he reached Natal in 1893, the first elections were held (it appears that the franchise was open to everyone). In a statement, eerily reminiscent of current-day political kerfuffles, the elected premier Robinson claimed that the presence of immigrants was,
pernicious on social grounds, commercial, financial and especially on sanitary ground.
Gandhi spent at least three trips going back and forth between India and South Africa, trying to figure out his life and livelihood. An experience in Durban where he was at the receiving end of violence, in a changing nation, may have precipitated his change in outlook.
Guha points to an incident on Gandhi’s arrival in Durban, where he was set upon and became “the object of kicks and cuffs, while mud and stale fish were thrown at him.” A riding-whip was produced and lashed out, and blood was flowing from his neck. He was eventually rescued from the mob by a white South African woman, Mrs. Alexander, the wife of the police commissioner, who used her parasol and her stead to keep away the attackers.
Guha argues that while the more famous Pietermaritzburg incident shines effulgent, Gandhi faced a greater peril to his life and bore more physical injuries in the Durban attack. His helplessness may have inured him to future troubles, with stoicism.
2. Hierarchy of Struggles.
Gandhi was harbored very little ill will even to his opposing British and Boer negotiators such as JC Smuts. Unfortunately, on the other hand, although sympathetic, Gandhi paid significantly less attention to the struggles of native South Africans in Natal and Orange.
3. It’s all on the family.
Due to his philosophy on education, Gandhi did not provide to his sons the same educational training, that helped him immeasurably in his livelihood, in his accumulation of knowledge and development of an informed world view. In fact, his sons yearned for such an education, but followed his footsteps, even as they were learning of the cause. In the case of his son, Harilal, the educational pursuits were often gently argued against or over-ruled by Gandhi, so that they could focus his attention on supporting his political struggles in South African provinces. Here’s his son Harilal in a letter to Gandhi (a statement Guha terms as “accurate”),
You did not allow me to measure my capabilities; you measured them for me.
A couple of incidents that stood out from the book are the affair of his second son, Manilal, who was made to swear into a vow of celibacy for several years, and the case of prolonged illness of his wife, Kasturba, who was moved from a doctor’s home, as Gandhi and the doctor disagreed on the need for natural treatment. Gandhi himself has poignantly reflected on the sacrifices his family had to make to accommodate his struggle against the British.
4. The world influenced Gandhi before he influenced the world.
Although Gandhi is often thought of as a product of Indic traditions, his ideas were also highly influenced by his cosmopolitan experiences. His worldview seems to have developed and refined by diverse people from around the world across the social strata: Jews (Henry Pollak, Herman Kallenbach, Sonya Schlesin), Christian preachers and theologians (GK Chesterton), Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, British vegetarians (Henry Salt), Suffragist women (Millie Pollak and others), Chinese workers (Leung Quinn) and Tamil workers in South Africa (particularly, Thambi Naidu). The pivotal role of all these personalities was new to me.
It is astonishing that Gandhi had never lived a day in an Indian village before he decided to return to India and become a voice for the rural hinterland. In the absence of social media, in the years of the glacial pace of news and rumors, his fame and example spread ablaze everywhere. In his call, many saw their calling, and Gandhi became the de facto center of the movement of aspiration, on his return to India.
Gandhi’s non-violent struggle (satyagraha) has undeniably exerted historic influence on many luminaries of world politics, from Martin Luther King to Nelson Mandela, Dalai Lama to Liu Xiabao, Malala Yousfzai to Waangi Maathai, and even on erstwhile heroes who have since faltered from the principle (e.g. Aung San Suu Kyi).
It is intellectually unnerving to think of how a man could propose resisting the British Empire, one of the foremost economic and military forces of the last century, not by fighting, but by coalescing thousands who did not share the same language, religion or culture into laying their lives and limbs at the mercy of the rulers’ hypothetical sense of fairness and freedom.
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This book is a truly delightful and heartfelt endeavor of research (for e.g., Guha unearths a treasured letter that addresses Gandhi as Mahatma for the first time, several years before Rabindranath Tagore), on the formative years of a personality who is so well known, and yet so less understood.