How Gandhi became Gandhi

Some years ago, British writer Patrick French visited the Sabarmati ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, the site from which Mahatma Gandhi led his salt march to the sea in 1930. French was so appalled by the noisome state of the latrines that he asked the ashram secretary whose job it was to clean them.

A sweeper woman stopped by for an hour a day, the functionary explained, but afterward things inevitably became filthy again.

But wasn’t it a central tenet of the Mahatma’s teachings that his followers clean up after themselves?

“We all clean the toilets together, on Gandhiji’s birthday,” the secretary answered, “to show that we understand his message.”

Gandhi had many messages, some ignored, some misunderstood, some as relevant today as when first enunciated. Most Americans — many middle-class Indians, for that matter — know what they know about the Mahatma from Ben Kingsley’s Academy Award-winning screen portrayal. His was a mesmerising performance, but the script barely hinted at the bewildering complexity of the real man, who was at the same time an earnest pilgrim and a wily politician, an advocate of celibacy and the architect of satyagraha (truth force), a revivalist, a revolutionary and a social reformer.

It is this last avatar that interests Joseph Lelyveld most. Great Soul concentrates on what he calls Gandhi’s “evolving sense of his constituency and social vision,” and his struggle to impose that vision on an India at once “worshipful and obdurate.” Lelyveld is especially qualified to write about Gandhi’s career on both sides of the Indian Ocean: he covered South Africa for The New York Times (winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his book about apartheid, Move Your Shadow, and spent several years in the late 1960s reporting from India. He brings to his subject a reporter’s healthy scepticism and an old India hand’s stubborn fascination with the subcontinent and its people.

This is not a full-scale biography. Nor is it for beginners. Lelyveld assumes his readers are familiar with the basic outlines of Gandhi’s life, and while the book includes a bare-bones chronology and is divided into South African and Indian sections, it moves backward and forward so often, it’s sometimes hard to follow the shifting course of Gandhi’s thought.

But Great Soul is a noteworthy book, nonetheless, vivid, nuanced and clear-eyed. The two decades Gandhi spent in South Africa are too often seen merely as prelude. “I believe implicitly that all men are born equal,” Gandhi once wrote in the midst of one of his campaigns against untouchability. “I have fought this doctrine of superiority in South Africa inch by inch.”

It took a long time for the Mahatma to turn that implicit belief into explicit action, Lelyveld reminds us. When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Durban from Bombay in 1893, he was a natty 23-year-old British-trained lawyer, hired to represent one wealthy Muslim Indian trader in a dreary civil suit against another, and primarily interested in matters of religion and diet, not politics: in an early advertisement he proclaimed himself an “Agent for the Esoteric Christian Union and the London Vegetarian Society.” But, Lelyveld writes, “South Africa challenged him to explain what he thought he was doing there in his brown skin.”

As Lelyveld shows, the outcomes of Gandhi’s campaigns in South Africa were not long-lasting: after one, his own supporters beat him bloody because they thought he’d settled too quickly for a compromise with the government. But they taught him how to move the masses. He had, as he once said, found his “vocation in life.”

Soon after returning to India in 1915, Gandhi set forth what he called the “four pillars on which the structure of swaraj” — self-rule — “would ever rest”: an unshakable alliance between Hindus and Muslims; universal acceptance of the doctrine of nonviolence, as tenet, not tactic; the transformation of India’s about 650,000 villages by spinning and other self-sustaining handicrafts; and an end to untouchability. Lelyveld shrewdly examines Gandhi’s noble but doomed battles to achieve them all.

He made a host of enemies along the way — orthodox Hindus who believed him overly sympathetic to Muslims, Muslims who saw his calls for religious unity as part of a Hindu plot, Britons who thought him a charlatan, radical revolutionaries who believed him a reactionary. But no antagonist was more implacable than Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the brilliant, quick-tempered untouchable leader — who saw the Mahatma’s nonviolent efforts to eradicate untouchability as a sideshow at best. He even objected to the word Gandhi coined for his people — “Harijans” or “children of God” — as patronising; he preferred “Dalits,” from the Sanskrit for “crushed,” “broken.”

Sometimes, Gandhi said freedom would never come until untouchability was expunged; sometimes he argued that untouchability could be eliminated only after independence was won. He was unapologetic about that kind of inconsistency. “I can’t devote myself entirely to untouchability and say, ‘Neglect Hindu-Muslim unity or swaraj’,” he told a friend. “All these things run into one another and are interdependent. You will find at one time in my life an emphasis on one thing, at another time on [an]other. But that is just like a pianist, now emphasising one note and now [an]other.”

Gandhi is still called “the father of the nation” in India, but it is hard to see what remains of him beyond what Lelyveld calls his “nimbus.” His notions about sex and spinning and simple living have long since been abandoned. Hindu-Muslim tension still smoulders just beneath the uneasy surface. Untouchability survives, too, and standard-issue polychrome statues of Ambedkar in red tie and double-breasted electric-blue suit outnumber those of the sparsely-clothed Mahatma wherever Dalits are crowded together.

Gandhi saw most of this coming and sometimes despaired. The real tragedy of his life, Lelyveld argues, was “not because he was assassinated, nor because his noblest qualities inflamed the hatred in his killer’s heart. The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his world.”

GREAT SOUL
Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India
Joseph Lelyveld
Alfred A. Knopf
425 pages; $28.95

The New York Times