Stanley Wolpert, Gandhi’s Passion: The life and Legacy of Mahatama Gandhi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), PP. 308. Price $27.50 (Rs. 622 in Pakistan).
Stanley Wolpert has written about the lives of eminent South Asians some of whose names are household words in South Asia ---- Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, B.G Tilak, G.K Gokhale and now, finally, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi, indeed, is so widely known in the world as an apostle of peace and non-violence that one wonders why Wolpert has chosen to write on him so late in his career. But his explanation, that so many biographies of Gandhi had already been written that he thought he could add nothing new to scholarship in this area, is quite convincing.
Gandhi’s father was the prime minister of the small state of Porbandar in Gujrat. Thus young Mohandas, born on 02 October 1869, was brought up in comfort. His mother was very religious and often fasted which could have influenced Gandhi whose fasts-unto-death are very well known. Gandhi was married at age eleven and his wife Kasturba remained his mate till she died sixty two years later. In 1887, after finishing high school, he went to London to study law. In London he became an elegantly dressed Victorian young gentleman and, after being called to the Bar, sailed back home in 1891. After some unsuccessful attempts at establishing a legal practice he went to South Africa in 1893 and it was here than he entered politics. In common with other migrants from india Gandhi was discriminated against and insulted because he was not white. However, his reaction was different from the others. He immediately set up an organisation to protest against aspects of the discriminatory policies of the whites. It was during this protest that Gandhi came up with the concept of Satyagraha – peaceful resistance. He was jailed but eventually he met with a measure of success.
In 1915, when World War I was going on, Gandhi returned to India and plunged directly into social reform, linguistic policy-making, and politics. In 1919 he protested the Rowlatt Bills (Black Bills) and then joined the Muslims in the Khilafat Movement. Gandhi’s aim was to foster Muslim-Hindu unity to force the British into giving political concessions. However, when the movement became violent he withdrew from it so that it fizzled out. Gandhi was jailed and had to be jailed again and again for his defiance of the British raj. By now Gandhi had transformed himself from the fashionable barrister to the mystic Hindu holy man (the Mahatma). He advocated spining cotton cloth to everybody so as to attain self-sufficiency in the provision of cloth. He also preached non-violence (ahimsa) and Hindu-Muslim friendship. His simple, peasant attire made him popular and he became a moral and religious symbol among the Hindu masses. His popularity reached its height when he led the march to the Sea in Dandi on 6 April 1930, picked up a lump of sea salt that had dried on the beach, and showed it triumphantly to his followers. By doing this he had broken the British law that only the government could manufacture, acquire, possess and sell salt. All others had to pay a tax to deal in salt. After this triumph Gandhi started working for the uplift of the untouchables whom he called Harijans (children of God). Because he showed respect fpr the Muslims and attacked untouchability, which had became ingrained in Hindu culture, extremist Hindus started attacking Gandhi. The Muslims too did not take kindly to him because he regarded the Partition of India as a ‘sin’. Even his erstwhile admirers, like Pandit Nehru and Patel, started thinking of him as an idealist because they could not understand how Hindu-Muslim antagonism and other practical problems could be ended merely by fasting, love or non-violence. In the end, Gandhi had effectively been marginalized by the most powerful decision-makers of independent India, and he had also not gained the trust of the Pakistani leadership. However, when he was shot dead on 30 January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a member of the Hindu extremist party called the Rashtriya Swayamseveka Sangh (RSS), there was much outpouring of spontaneous grief and some of the most eminent people in the world, such as Einstein and the Pope, sent messages of condolence. His legacy lingers on both in India and abroad. In India Vinoba Bhave, his eminent disciple, collected land for distribution to peasants. In America Martin Luther King was inspired in his own struggle for equal rights for the African–Americans by Gandhi’s example. He was truly a charismatic personality.
The bare facts of Gandhi’s life have been well known since Louis Fischer’s biography The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950). Even more people know of Gandhi by the famous film of that title which has been on the screen since 1984. These early biographies emphasized the saintly aspect of Gandhi at the cost of aspects of his personality which cannot be reconciled with it. Wolpert refers to these other aspects too. For instance, he records Gandhi’s obsession with puritanism. Gandhi was so much against sexual pleasure that he even discouraged legal marriages. He opposed the marriage of his son Harilal to Mragarete Spiegel, one of Gandhi’s disciples, probably driving the young man to ruin. At the same time he slept with naked girls, some related to him like grand daughters, to test his steadfastness to the ideal of asceticism and sexual abstinence. Gandhi’s enemies merely called him a lecherous old man but it appears that Gandhi was too complicated a personality to be pigeonholed so easily. In his own way he might have really been fighting against libido. However, in this struggle he did produce unhappiness for his immediate family --- something which does not go easily with his saintly reputation. In the same way, Gandhi did impose his will on his wife, sons and disciples. He prevented his sons from getting lucrative employment which, however saintly it might appear on paper, could not have been very pleasant for them. Thirdly, and this has not been mentioned by Wolpert, Gandhi introduced the element of religion in politics. However benign and non-violent his interpretation of Hinduism might be, he popularized that idiom of Hindu belief which could potentially be used to dominate non-Hindus later. This, in a profound sense, was his political legacy to South Asian politics.
Gandhi is reviled in Pakistan. This is a product of years of misunderstanding and propaganda. Of course he was against the partition of India but, once Pakistan was created, he was the only Indian leader of any eminence who advocated peace and fair play rather than war. He said clearly, contrary to Congress policy, that the people are sovereign and Kashmiris, rather than the Maharaja of Kashmir, should be asked whether they want to join Pakistan or India. He opposed spending money on the army or sending troops to Kashmir. He achieved the near miracle of stopping the killing of Muslims in Calcutta and Dehli. And, finally, he fasted to make India release the 550 million rupees which was the share of Pakistan from the imperial balances. If the Indian leaders had listened to Gandhi in the matter of Kashmir we would not have had the threat of war and nuclear annihilation in South Asia now. Ironically, Gandhi is not appreciated in Pakistan at all. He is also not appreciated in India --- if one discounts the propaganda and the rhetoric – since none of his peaceful ideals are really followed. Indeed, the supreme irony was that soon after his assassination his body was taken in procession by the Indian army. As Wolpert notes : ‘a seventy-nine gun salute to the apostle of Ahimsa incongruously shattered Dehli’s mournful silence the next morning’. Such are the ironies of life.
As I have read only Gandhi’s own autobiography and Fischer’s biography of him it is not possible for me to compare this biography with all the others written about him. However, I am sure that with the author’s knowledge of South Asian history and access to sources, this must be a very valuable account. Its readable style and brevity will probably make it the most well known biography of Gandhi. However, somebody will have to look at Gandhi’s complexities and come up with a plausible explanation of them which Wolpert has not done. The biography must be read by people in both Pakistan and India to understand that peace is, indeed, an ideal in life worth aspiring for ---- if for nothing, then for survival itself!
Dr. Tariq Rahman-