Guha Brings New Insights In 'Gandhi before India'

Gandhi has been the subject of intense biographical and critical commentary over the last century and one would think that nothing new could possibly be said about his life. Ramachandra Guha boldly challenges this assumption in his new book “Gandhi before India”, which is part of a two-volume work on the life of India’s greatest political leader. Guha has written a very readable and intriguing account of post-independence Indian history in the past, called “India after Gandhi” and the cheeky play on the words in the title of his new book is not lost on the discerning reader. The present work is supposed to chronicle the life and times of Gandhi before his much publicized entry into Indian politics, covering his early youth and his time in South Africa.

Guha tells us about the early life of Gandhi, his family’s traditional Gujarati caste-Hindu upbringing and the political machinations in the Kathiawad state which often involved his father. Gandhi graduated with decent but unremarkable results in his matriculation exam and then makes the fateful decision to go to England to get a barrister’s degree. Guha spends quite a lot of time elaborating on Gandhi’s stay in London. He uncovers facets of Gandhi’s life which were unfamiliar to this reader, esp. the fact that Gandhi became some sort of a food-Nazi and a strong advocate for vegetarianism. Gandhi’s time in London was highly influential as it reinforced many of his ideas about religion and self-abnegation while also giving him the requisite confidence to speak at public gatherings, address strangers and write with an agenda to convince others. England was the first step in the development of heterodox religious ideas, a process which continued throughout his life.

On his return, he tried to work as a young lawyer at the bar in Bombay but failed to get enough briefs and did not make enough impact. Fortune however smiled on Gandhi and he got an opportunity to go to South Africa to represent some of the Gujarati Indian settlers in that colony. Guha has discovered a number of writings by Gandhi at this time that are absent from the one-hundred odd tomes in Gandhi’s collected works(though he is careful to praise the diligence and scholarship of their first editors). Gandhi’s legal practice in the 1890s comes alive in a new way. Much of his work involved the issuing and renewal of permits and licences. It was not, Guha observes, a particularly interesting branch of law. Initially, he was the only Indian barrister practising in Natal, and he was consequently kept very busy. Gandhi’s first passive resistance campaign was against the Asiatic Ordinance in the Transvaal that began in 1906. Guha shows well how Gandhi’s standing in the Transvaal was enhanced considerably by this protest. Previously, he had been merely a permit-seeking lawyer who dealt with a permit-giving bureaucrat called Montford Chamney. Now he was a political leader.

There is a lot of attention on personal relations in the text – whether it is Gandhi and his wife Kasturba, the tensions between Gandhi and his first son, his spiritual mentor-student relationship with a Jain savant called Raychandbhai or his experiences while living with the Polak family. There is also an illuminating discussion of Gandhi and feminism – with Guha suggesting that he was probably influenced by not only by the suffragettes who he observed on his trips to London, but also in his everyday experience by the strong feminist Millie Polak – as she and her husband Henry for a time shared a dwelling with Gandhi in Johannesburg. Guha argues that due to the suffragettes and Millie Polak, Gandhi embraced a new understanding about the appropriate role for women in political protest. Previously, the idea of a woman going to jail had been unthinkable for male, upper-caste Indian nationalists. It was soon to become a commonplace of the movements led by Gandhi. The book also brings out well Gandhi’s religious and racial inclusiveness. He had Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Parsi friends and co-workers, who were both Indian (of various linguistic regions) and white. He sought the best in all, even the most virulently racist Boer. In this, Gandhi transcended his own narrow and exclusive background as a member of a privileged upper caste of Kathiawad. He rejected narrow creeds in favour of a universal religious spirit. This was a contrary (though not unique) position in a climate of Christian fundamentalism, as seen in the global evangelical missionary work that peaked in the closing years of the 19th and early years of the 20th centuries, a dogma that bred many counter-fundamentalisms by those of different faith.

We are also made aware of the evolving nature of Gandhi’s beliefs regarding the African people. The social milieu, which Gandhi inhabited, was obnoxiously racist and Africans were generally pejoratively termed as kaffirs. Gandhi shared many of these racist predilections but it is to his credit that he began to see the inherent violence in the use of such language and was transformed over the course of his experience in South Africa.

In recapitulation, this book sheds a very novel light on Gandhi’s early days and we are no longer forced to rely on Gandhi’s own (sometimes fallible and retrospective) account of events. We are introduced to a young man, who makes mistakes, who has his pet obsessions, but is also intelligent and extremely committed to his convictions. He is a man of action, transcending the inequities of his time and leading a subjugated people in an alien country. Gandhi before India is impressive.

Book details:

Guha, R. (2013), Gandhi Before India, Penguin India.

Ashish Kashyap graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from IIT Madras. He spends his time wishing he could write like Milan Kundera.