GANDHI AT FIRST SIGHT
Thomas Weber
Roli Books; 279 pages; Rs 350
It was in a little house in a slum district of London in 1931 that two little men, who were clearly among the most famous people in the world, met. One of them was leading the struggle for India's independence through his unconventional ways. The other was using the medium of films to become the silent voice of the underdog and the working class. But apart from that, there wasn't really much that the two - Mahatma Gandhi and Charlie Chaplin - knew about each other. Some accounts, in fact, suggest that Gandhi hadn't even heard of Chaplin, while others say he wasn't really interested in meeting him.
So then what did these two men talk about when they met? And how did this meeting change them, if at all it did? Sitting in the pages of Thomas Weber's Gandhi at First Sight is a first-hand account of that curious meeting in the words of Chaplin.
Gandhi at First Sight is a delightful compilation of 49 such first-person accounts of first meetings with - and first impressions of - the Mahatma. Among the writers are scientists, artists, journalists, politicians, poets, fellow freedom fighters, sculptors and historians from across the world recounting that moment when they sought Gandhi out in flesh and blood. Sarojini Naidu, for example, was 35 when she first met Gandhi in London, "on the eve of the great European War of 1914", she wrote. She saw this "little man with a shaven head, seated on the floor on a black prison blanket and eating a messy meal of squashed tomatoes and olive oil out of a wooden prison bowl". She burst out into laughter at this "amusing" sight of a famous leader. As Gandhi saw her, he laughed right back at her and thus started a long, endearing relationship of which humour was an inherent part.
Unlike Naidu, Rajendra Prasad wrote that his first meeting with Gandhi didn't make any significant impression on his mind. And yet this lawyer who would become the first president of India could not fathom what made him accept, "without thought", Gandhi's suggestion of voluntarily going to jail when, as a lawyer, his core instinct was about how to avoid going to jail.
Mr Weber has, in this book, taken an interesting approach to show how the first meeting sometimes changed the course of people's lives. But he has done more than just compile the accounts. Through the narratives, most of which are not more than two-and-a-half pages long, he has also given an insight into Gandhi's views on beauty, art and hygiene, and brought out some rarely seen sides to the Mahatma. In 1928, British teacher and writer Horace Gundry Alexander, who would be awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1984 for his work in India, had visited Gandhi at Sabarmati. When he was leaving the ashram, he told Gandhi that he would be returning to England soon and asked him what he should say at public meetings back home. This, wrote Alexander, was Gandhi's sharp, unexpected, but unforgettable, reply: "First," he said, "we want you to get off our backs." It wasn't often that Gandhi, a man of immense patience, was this stinging.
Also, it wasn't just the British who got a taste of Gandhi's policy of non-cooperation. American sculptor Jo Davidson, too, found himself at its receiving end after Gandhi had promised that if the opportunity presented itself, he would sit for him. What a task it proved to be, shows Davidson's account. Gandhi allowed himself to be sculpted but wouldn't "sit" for the sculptor. Instead, he ignored him, went about his business meeting people, his face very mobile and with every feature quivering and constantly changing. It clearly took a lot out of Davidson to create the bust. Later in a letter, which is also part of the book, Davidson recounted: "He [Gandhi] merely allowed himself to be 'done'. And in the end it is I who was 'done'."
Before every account, Mr Weber offers a one-page introduction of the person whose meeting with Gandhi he has reproduced. And after every account is a postscript that tells us what came of that meeting or gives some interesting information related to it. For example, after meeting Chaplin, did Gandhi change his views about cinema "which he regarded as little better than race courses, drinking booths, brothels, opium, and gambling dens"? Alas, no. Towards the end of his life though he did see about two feature films; in a letter to his grandson, he wrote, "... nobody has lost anything by not witnessing the show. On the contrary, I have lost something after having seen the picture".
For Mr Weber, selecting the accounts couldn't have been easy. First, there aren't very many accounts written before Gandhi became famous. Second, well-known accounts are already all too familiar. The challenge was to get the rare diary entries. Third - and the trickiest - was how true to the actual first meeting were the memories of that event? Many of the accounts were, after all, written decades after the first meeting, by which time Gandhi had become well known and was revered by many. Mr Weber acknowledges this when he says, "... history does throw its shadow backwards, and has surely coloured the eventually published account". So he has placed the accounts in the order in which the meetings took place, starting with lawyer Henry S L Polak, who first met Gandhi in Johannesburg in 1904, and ending with American journalist-novelist Vincent Sheean, who sought Gandhi out at the end of January 1948, days before the Mahatma was assassinated. In doing so, he has also brought out, through intimate accounts, the trajectory of Gandhi's life.
