Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha – review

The young Gandhi: the bulk of his philosophy was shaped by his experiences as a lawyer in South Africa. Photograph: Mondadori/ Getty Images

For a man born into the obscurity of a remote village in western India in 1869, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who died at the hand of an assassin in 1948, still enjoys a remarkable and vigorous posthumous reputation. He has inspired Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and even the Dalai Lama. His techniques of nonviolent resistance have been widely copied across the world. During the Arab spring, the radical opposition in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia often displayed Gandhi's photograph during their protests, as a symbol of their methods and aspirations. His famous contemporaries – notably Mao Zedong, Roosevelt and Churchill – enjoy nothing like the same afterlife.

As with many great revolutionaries, Gandhi expressed his ideas in print throughout his career. Between 1903 and 1948, he published his opinions in a weekly newspaper, in Gujarati and English. Accordingly, his Collected Works, published by the Indian government in a series of about a hundred volumes, an accumulation of speeches, essays, editorials and interviews, provide an extraordinarily intimate picture of the man – but from an Indian point of view.

In Gandhi Before India, Ramachandra Guha, one of the subcontinent's most influential historians, has set himself the revisionist task of challenging this Indo-centric self-portrait of the Mahatma, not merely cleaning the family portrait, but uncovering a new backdrop and giving the whole restoration a new frame. Guha's impressive monograph, the first of two volumes, challenges the Gandhi legend as it was portrayed in, for instance, Richard Attenborough's Oscar-winning film starring Ben Kingsley.

As well as the childhood in Gujarat and his two years as a student in London, Guha focuses on the now almost forgotten chapter in Gandhi's career, his two decades as a lawyer and community organiser in imperial South Africa before and after the Boer war. Guha is at pains to demonstrate that, up to his final return, aged 46, Gandhi had almost no knowledge of India in the wider sense. When he first went to London, at 19, MK Gandhi had never travelled outside his native Kathiawar. Later, in 1892 and 1902, he spent months in Bombay but, despite visits to Calcutta and Madras in 1896, had never actually "spoken to a single Indian peasant worker living or working in India itself". Rather, Gandhi's ideas, beliefs and deepest political instincts had been shaped by his remarkable career as a crusading lawyer in South Africa.

When Guha lists Gandhi's four major callings – freedom fighter, social reformer, religious pluralist and prophet – he clearly identifies each of these as having their roots in Natal and the Transvaal. Gandhi's most famous contribution to the 20th century, satyagraha (or "truth force"), the technique of mass civil disobedience, was also invented in South Africa. Gandhi's non-Indian side becomes even more distinct when Guha describes the minutiae of his African life and work. The big surprise is the degree to which the future Mahatma was so completely in tune with the wider ethos of the British empire, emerging, somewhat bizarrely, as an empire loyalist.

Indeed, when the Boer war broke out, Gandhi expressed hope for "a British victory". He had, meanwhile, become "the champion of the Indian cause in Natal", although this, as Guha shows, was less to do with his sympathy for the rights of his fellow Indians than the failure of his legal career during a return to Bombay in 1902.

When the call came to return to South Africa, Gandhi saw it as a way out of a professional impasse. Identifying his luck, he moved fast. Soon after his return to the Transvaal, he set up the newspaper, Indian Opinion, that would become the bridgehead for the battle on behalf of his people.

At this moment in the early 1900s, the many competing strands in Gandhi's life were almost wholly focused on South Africa. He was a lawyer working for clients in Johannesburg and Durban, and also campaigning for the rights of Indians in the Transvaal. He was a newspaper propagandist. Finally, he was becoming obsessed with the simple life, by solitude, diet, meditation and celibacy. In 1906, he took the vow of brahmacharya, curtailing all sexual relations with his long-suffering wife. If Guha's work has a weakness it is that, in focusing so intently on its new portrait, it neglects the human toll inflicted on those around the incipient Mahatma.

1906 marked the turning point. Gandhi returned to London briefly, and began to realise – not least through his meeting with the young Winston Churchill – that he and his fellows were irredeemably "alien". Much later, he was asked what he thought of modern civilisation. "I think it would be a good idea," came the reply. No accident, then, that soon after his return home, passive resistance landed him in prison.

As the lawyer morphed into the campaigning ascetic, he decided that "we would all profit from the kind of simplicity and solitude we find in gaol". While the future Gandhi begins to emerge, his contemporaries were already recognising his genius. Guha takes scholarly pride in tracking down the 1909 letter which first describes Gandhi as "a Mahatma" (a great and holy soul), the title bestowed on him by Rabindranath Tagore in 1919.

But this is to run ahead. Guha still wants to nail an Anglocentric Gandhi before his final return to India and now does so with the intriguing revelation that it was none other than GK Chesterton who helped inspire the text, Hind Swaraj (or Indian Home Rule) with which Gandhi would make the transition to his role as the father of Indian independence.

It's a truism of this genre that the closer the biographer comes to his subject, the more elusive they become. In the end, with or without South Africa, Gandhi was a remarkable man, for some a secular saint, with an extraordinary capacity to transcend issues of race, class, religion and even politics. Exactly what this amazing man was really like is rather missing from this volume. No doubt Professor Guha will put that straight in the second half of this ground-breaking study.

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INDIA: A Sacred Geography

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Apr 13, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

INDIA: A Sacred GeographyDiana Eck
Harmony
ISBN 978-0385531900
559 pages
$27

INDIA BECOMING: A Portrait of Life in Modern IndiaAkash Kapur
Riverhead
ISBN 978-1594488191
292 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Chandrahas Choudhury

It's most unusual to see geography as primarily a construct of the human imagination, but that is precisely what ithe scholar of Hinduism Diana L. Eck attempts in her massive new book, "India." Thousands of years before India was a nation-state (1947), a colony of Britain (the 18th century), or a cartographic vision circulated on a map (1782), it was, in Eck's view, still conceived as a geographical unit in the hearts and minds of the faithful, and particularly in the religious imagination of Hinduism.

Pilgrims thought of India as the land of the seven great rivers, as a space marked by the benediction and caprice of the gods who resided in the great northern peaks of the Himalayas, as woven into a unity by the great centers of pilgrimage, or dhams, in the north, south, east and west of the land. Seeking out the marks and manifestations of the sacred, they fashioned with their own footprints a map of a vast subcontinent suffused with the presence of the gods and stories of their appearances in different incarnations.

Eck's perspective, of course, has significant political implications. It arguably refutes the widely held notion that India was merely a confusion of diverse kingdoms, cultures and languages until it was politically integrated by the British Empire. Some scholars hold that the idea of Hinduism too, is the modern tracing of a circle around a diversity of ancient religious beliefs never self-consciously systematized into a whole. This idea struggles to hold itself up against the layered evidence supplied by Eck's book, the synthesis of three decades of work on the myths, rituals, cosmology and everyday life of Hinduism.

But the appeal of the book lies in the fact that its emphasis is not primarily political, but aggregative and connective, making a clearly spied forest out of a mass of trees. Eck offers an exceptionally rich account of how, throughout India, the cosmic is mapped onto the local in a tradition formed, revised and renewed over the centuries by thousands of discrete phenomena and often anonymous actors.

This map of myth, as it were, radiates a worldview very different from the assumptions of modern cartography. Cartography invests each place on a map with a name and an unassailable specificity. But sacral maps, Eck notes, are marked continuously by "patterns of duplication and condensation," demonstrating an ability "to see a world in a grain of sand" in William Blake's unforgettable formulation. For instance, thousands of rivers and water bodies across the country are said by people to be linked to or fed by the holiest river of Hinduism, the Ganga. The Ganga is, depending on what lens one brings to it, both somewhere and everywhere.

"As arcane as (BEGIN ITAL)lingas (pillars) of light ... and sacred rivers falling from heaven may seem to those who wish to get on with the real politics of today's world," Eck writes, "these very patterns of sanctification continue to anchor millions of people in the imagined landscape of their country." She devotes entire chapters to regional variations in the worship of the great generative god Shiva, the creator of the universe, or the myth of the Mother Goddess, who is then consecrated and remembered in thousands of local incarnations as "the goddesses of earth and village, glade and river, hilltop and mountaintop." In doing so Eck demonstrates how, just as novels are fully realized only in the minds of their readers, so God is made present in the world by the stories and footsteps of the faithful.

The two main currents of contemporary nonfiction about India might be said to the broadbrush view of the whole animated by strong particulars (such as Patrick French's recent "India: A Portrait") and the attempt to fully realize a fascinating local world (such as two recent books about discrete universes in the megapolis of Mumbai, Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" and Sonia Faleiro's "Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars"). Eck's book might be said to stand at the sangam, or junction (a site of great religious power in Hinduism), of these currents. Its ideas reverberate forcefully, too, against other recent works about geography as informed by the human imagination, such as Rebecca Solnit's book about San Francisco, "Infinite City," or Graham Robb's "The Discovery of France" (Robb and Eck also resemble each other in never writing an uninteresting or flat sentence). All these writers would be fundamentally in agreement with Eck's assertion that "Every story has a place and every place a story."

Eck's book is so dense with detail that one might think of its 500 pages as being a distillation of a world. In Akash Kapur's "India Becoming," on the other hand, an idea that might be written up in a few sentences is stretched out, through the conceit of an autobiographical narrative, into an entire book.

In 2003 Kapur returns, after many years in America, to India, the country of his childhood, and finds the sleepy, unmoving world of old dramatically refashioned by new energies - especially the energies of capital - and ambitions. Fascinated by "that sense of newness, of perpetual reinvention and forward momentum that I had felt when I first moved to America," Kapur beds down in Auroville, a small south Indian town, to take stock of this dramatic historical moment.

Kapur explores the new India through a variety of conversations, with, among others, a landlord who sees the old feudal world falling away around him, a young gay man riding the wave of the IT revolution, an activist in Mumbai fighting for the rights of those who have been marginalized or dispossessed by ruthlessness of the new economy. The Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis slowly emerges from his narration, but only as clich, reverse clich, and all-encompassing clich.

Dazzled in the beginning by the rumbling of a society of a billion people ("India, I felt, had started to dream"), Kapur soon begins to feel disillusionment with the spectacle of rising crime, pollution, and impoverishment, and a "culture of not caring." Finally he decides that he has been too hasty in both his elation and his despair, and settles for the comfort of realizing that "the central fact ... of modern India was change" and the mystification of recognizing "ineluctably, if at times haltingly, a new world was rising."

If this were a novel, one might surmise that the writer was deliberately setting the narrator up as a naif. Anyone who Reads it as straight-up reportage, though, will likely find the banality and contrivance of this self-indulgent "journey" exasperating. It is not just that Kapur does not take any strong positions ("I welcomed the progress. But all the destruction seemed a heavy price to pay"). What is worse is that his language groans with superfluity ("It was evening, a time between night and day, and the lights of the city were starting to come on") and with lazy allusion ("India, the author Nirad Chaudhuri reportedly once wrote, is a nation of a million exceptions"). If Eck's book reveals the relevance of the local, the unfamiliar and the seemingly obscure to the deep structure of a civilization, Kapur's proves conversely the great gulf between taking up a relevant subject and writing a relevant book.

Chandrahas Choudhury is a novelist and literary critic based in Delhi, and editor of the anthology "India: A Traveler's Literary Companion."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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Review-a-Day for Fri, Jun 10: India: A Portrait

by Patrick French A review by Isaac Chotiner

Visiting New Delhi and Calcutta not long after the smashing international success of Slumdog Millionaire I was surprised by the number of Indians who wanted to hear my opinion of Danny Boyle's film. This was a nice inversion of the clichéd traveler's narrative, wherein the visitor solemnly asks the locals about the most recent artistic depiction of their homeland. ("American tourists," a British friend recently informed me, "inquire about The King's Speech and nothing else.") But when I turned the question back on my interlocutors, I was surprised less by the vehemence of the criticisms than by the opposing viewpoints on offer. For every person who described the movie as only the latest Western attempt to sugarcoat the realities of Indian life, there was someone else who admitted to feeling shame that the world had embraced a movie which presented the country as nothing more than a poverty-stricken wasteland. While these two points of view might have contradicted one another, each stemmed from the understanding that India was being intensely examined on the world's stage.

Patrick French's India: A Portrait, which the author calls an "intimate biography of 1.2 billion people," has received a number of hostile notices in the Indian press. As in the case of Slumdog Millionaire, many of the reviews seem concerned with the ways in which India is being interpreted. And a number of the criticisms lend credence to the notion that outsiders describing a foreign country are bound to be reprimanded. Pankaj Mishra, the first-rate novelist and essayist, has slammed French in two separate reviews, accusing him of ignoring India's agricultural sector, minimizing the country's widespread poverty, and making excuses for a new collection of oligarchs who seem completely uninterested in the welfare of the populace. French's best chapter, on the nepotistic character of Indian politics, is dismissed by Mishra as being "blindingly plain" to any "sentient" observer. By this standard, French should not have written about impoverished Indians: Indian poverty is also blindingly plain to anyone who spends a day in the country.

But French's book does exhibit some of the tendencies that have greeted the arrival of a "new" India with rose-tinted glasses. French, whose last effort was an astounding biography of V.S. Naipaul, is certainly aware of the dangers of writing about India, but he has trouble avoiding them. "Nearly everyone has a reaction to India, even if they have never been there," he writes in his introduction.

They hate it or love it, think it mystical or profane; find it extravagant or ascetic; consider the food the best or the worst in the world. For East Asians, it is a competitor and a source of some of their own spiritual traditions. For Americans, it is a challenge, a potential hub of cooperation or economic rivalry -- both countries are diverse and hulking, their national identities strong and to an extent constructed, their populations loquacious and outgoing and admiring of entrepreneurial success.

This cliché-ridden, Manichean passage begs several questions. For example, how many countries have unconstructed national identities? And how many travelers actually think the food in India is really the best or the worst in the world? French admits that these are "old" ways of looking at India, but it is clear from his writing that he finds such categories helpful. He ends the chapter by claiming that "With its overlap of extreme wealth and lavish poverty, its mix of the educated and ignorant, its competing ideologies, its lack of uniformity, its kindness and profound cruelty, its complex relationships with religion, its parallel realities and the rapid speed of social change -- India is a macrocosm, and may be the world's default setting for the future." Almost all of the observations above could be made about nearly every country on earth. Even when French is not consciously romanticizing India, he cannot help but view it as larger-than-life, which is another form of mythmaking. This is a pity, because French is a fine stylist and an excellent reporter, with an eye for the telling detail.

French subscribes to the relatively common view that the country's founding fathers, while heroically dedicated to the idea of secularism, ended up papering over religious differences, therefore ensuring the rise of sectarian Hindu politics. And he tends to support the now mainstream opinion that the centralized state apparatus, whose implementation helped guarantee the country's unity after the arbitrary gashes of partition, was eventually subject to diminishing returns thanks to the creakiness of socialist planning. The problem is that French seems so enraptured by India that his analysis is never quite convincing.

He is certainly not blind, for example, to the awful disparities of wealth that continue to shame the economically expanding nation, but he puts too much faith in the wisdom of India's new class of wealthy businessmen. His account of time spent with Sunil Mittal, the mobile phone service mogul, is embarrassingly gushing. It is certainly true, as Mittal argues, that philanthropy will be an important aspect of India's development going forward. Recent statistics suggest, moreover, that growing inequality in the country may be partially offset by slowly declining poverty rates, and employment opportunities that allow people to transition out of the agricultural sector, and bring in their wake rising levels of self-worth. But when set beside the country's hideous corruption, and increasingly close ties between government and industry, the picture is significantly less sanguine than French's narrative implies. In his interview with Mittal, he raises issues of poverty, but then appears enraptured by the idea of creating an Indian Carnegie Endowment, or something similar. This is one of the sections of his book that, given the scope of the challenges facing the country, feels untethered from reality.

But French's romanticization of the country is conveyed primarily by the grandiosity with which so many of his judgments are rendered. Everything in this account is big or new. It is refreshing that French seems unencumbered by political correctness, and appears willing to engage in observations about what makes something "specifically Indian," but the result is too often observations such as this: "To use a phrase now forbidden to historians, some traits seem like an expression of national character, and are specifically Indian. Reading the country's often vivid press, it feels as if some things only happen in India."

No doubt some things do happen only in India, but then French goes on to tell the story of a quirky taxicab driver, which is a rather universal platitude. Of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, he writes: "Tamils usually have a wide sprawl of a face, in keeping with the southern lushness. The land is rich with vegetation, paddy fields and mango trees, and the view from the coast is filled with fishing boats, long painted skiffs with curved prows, catching kingfish. Young men dive low for stone fruit -- giant blue green mussels, which they pluck off the rocks." This is nicely written, but it is a parody of an island paradise. French no doubt experienced Tamil Nadu, much of which is lovely, in this manner, but the reader wonders how true and complete a picture he is being given as these ravishing scenes pile up.

French shifts skillfully between the micro and the macro, between descriptions of the individual and accounts of historical or political events; and on some of the larger issues he is more reliable than the subject of his previous book. With French one never feels, as one does in Naipaul's excursions to India or Argentina, that the author's biases and prejudices have kept him from setting out on his journey in good faith. If anything, the reverse is true -- and it leads to a somewhat duller and less incisive trip. French's biography of Naipaul achieved a fine balance between the critical and the admiring, but it never slighted Naipaul's astonishing powers of observation. Here the balance is somewhat less measured, and the powers of observation significantly less acute.

Isaac Chotiner is the executive editor of The Book. Since 1914, The New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American culture and politics. At TNR, books, art, film, architecture, theater, dance, and poetry all invite the reader to indulge in the highest levels of aesthetic experience. Subscribe to TNR today for access to literary reviews, pop-culture essays, and nearly a century of writing from the best minds in culture and the arts. Powell's Books customers can save 70% off the newsstand price!

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