Making of Gandhi

Ramachandra Guha’s monumental work ‘Gandhi Before India’ gives a rare glimpse of the Mahatma’s life and work in South Africa. The book stands apart from other biographies by delving into lesser known facts about Gandhi as a person, writes M K Chandra bose.

A Gujarati merchant Pranjivan Mehta is the first person who, in a letter to Gopal Krishna Gokhale, describes Gandhi as a Mahatma. He had funded Gandhi all through his stay in South Africa. Mehta finds Gandhi a sage and moral figure who will unite the whole of India. Then there is feminist Millie Polak who inspires Gandhi on women’s rights.

Fifty years before Independence, Gandhi and fellow Gujarati lawyer M A Jinnah were in correspondence. In 1908, he was planning to go to London to study medicine. Historian Ramachandra Guha ferrets out these little known facts in his latest work Gandhi before India.

In a striking departure from Gandhi’s biographers, Guha delves into the largely overlooked phase of Gandhi’s life — the 21 years he spent in South Africa. The result is an outstanding work providing a wealth of information on how Gandhi’s ideas, beliefs and political thoughts had evolved during his career as a crusading lawyer and community leader.

Guha has managed to cull out hitherto unknown but fascinating materials on Gandhi’s early life from the colonial archives of South Africa inaccessible to Indians during the Apartheid era. Gandhi before India covers Mahatma’s life up to his final return to India at the age of 46.

When Gandhi reached South Africa in 1893, the racial divisions were sharp with the whites unwilling to grant basic rights to Indians and the native South Africans. Oppressive laws put severe restrictions on Indian traders and professionals, while the indentured labour toiled in inhuman conditions.

By taking up the cases of Indians facing racial discrimination, Gandhi gradually morphed into a community leader. Being the first coloured person to challenge the European domination in Natal, he became a thorn in the flesh of colonists, inviting intense hostility from the white press.

Guha follows Gandhi’s roots in Kathiawar, where he was born in an orthodox Bania family. Mohan Das had been a mediocre student at school. When he set sail to England at the age of 19 to become a barrister, he incurred the wrath of his community for daring to cross the seas. The days in Victorian England were marked by his association with the London Vegetarian Society, making him a vegetarian by conviction.

After returning to India as a barrister, he set up practice in Rajkot but couldn’t make much headway. When he tried his hands as a lawyer in the Bombay High Court, the result was no different. So the offer from a Gujarati merchant from South Africa was a godsend. But the briefless lawyer quickly found his feet in South Africa.

Guha argues that if he had succeeded as a lawyer in India, Gandhi would have maintained the habits and the prejudices of a Gujarati merchant family and would not have grown into a Mahatma.

In South Africa, he emerged as the leader of all Indians. Gandhi’s core ideas on religious pluralism, ending caste discrimination and non-violence were shaped during these years. He invented satyagraha, which was to become the most powerful weapon against the British in India. One reason for the broadening of his vision was the close friendship he had forged with many Europeans, including Henry Polak and Hermann Kallenbach.

In his spiritual pursuit, Gandhi had gained by close interactions with rebel Jews and non-conformist Christians. His political style was tuned to reconciliation and compromise. Guha traces Gandhi’s evolution as a campaigning ascetic influenced by Bhagavad Gita, Sermon of the Mount and Tolstoy, experiments with community living, metamorphosis from an admirer of the empire to an inveterate critic, and an influential editor and writer, his penchant for attracting friends and disciples who influenced his thoughts and methods. All these made him the man he was, an inspiration for civil rights movements across the globe.

The volume gives a portrait of Gandhi as a fallible human being. Gandhi’s relations with wife Kasturba got tested often due to his tendency to place career and cause above family. Elder son Harilal, who tried to move out of the father’s shadow, was “blamed for not living up to the ideals of the father.” Guha finds: “With his children, Gandhi was the traditional overbearing Hindu patriarch.” This was Harilal’s reproach: “You did not allow me to measure my capabilities; you measured them for me.” When his second son Manilal was involved in an incident of sexual transgression, the father was outraged. He wanted Manilal to be trained as a Brahmachari!

Gandhi before India is a narrative through character portraits in flawless prose that enlivens reader’s interest. The outcome of extensive research across four continents over eight years, the seminal work helps the reader get a deeper understanding of the Mahatma. One flaw that a discernible reader may notice is Guha’s reluctance to go deeper into Gandhi’s limited engagements with the black majority in South Africa.