Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  Not yet a mahatma, 1906 (photo credit ifm.1)

  Twenty-five years later, 1931 (photo credit ifm.2)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by Joseph Lelyveld

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.: Lyrics from “You’re the Top” (from Anything Goes), words and music from Cole Porter, copyright © 1934 (Renewed) by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.

  Navajivan Trust: Excerpts from works by M.K. Gandhi and Pyarelal, reprinted by permission of the Navajivan Trust.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lelyveld, Joseph.

  Great soul : Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle with India / Joseph Lelyveld.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59536-2

  1. Gandhi, Mahatma, 1869–1948. 2. Statesmen—India—Biography. 3. Nationalists—India—Biography. 4. India—Politics and government—1919–1947. 5. South Africa—Politics and government—1836–1909. I. Title.

  DS481.G3L337 2011

  954.03’5092—dc22

  2010034252

  Jacket illustration:

  Haynes Archive/Popperfoto/Getty Images

  v3.1

  FOR JANNY

  I do not know whether you have seen the world as it really is. For myself I can say I perceive the world in its grim reality every moment. (1918)

  I deny being a visionary. I do not accept the claim of saintliness. I am of the earth, earthy … I am prone to as many weaknesses as you are. But I have seen the world. I have lived in the world with my eyes open. (1920)

  I am not a quick despairer. (1922)

  For men like me, you have to measure them not by the rare moments of greatness in their lives, but by the amount of dust they collect on their feet in the course of life’s journey. (1947)

  —MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI, 1869–1948

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  PART I

  SOUTH AFRICA

  1. Prologue: An Unwelcome Visitor

  2. No-Touchism

  3. Among Zulus

  4. Upper House

  5. Leading the Indentured

  PART II

  INDIA

  6. Waking India

  7. Unapproachability

  8. Hail, Deliverer

  9. Fast unto Death

  10. Village of Service

  11. Mass Mayhem

  12. Do or Die

  Glossary

  Chronology

  Notes

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE MAHATMA had been gone for half a century, but there were still Gandhis at the Phoenix Settlement, outside Durban on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, when I visited there the first time in 1965. A little boy, identified as a great-grandson, toddled across the room. He was living with his grandmother, widow of Manilal Gandhi, second of Gandhi’s four sons, who’d stayed on in South Africa to edit Indian Opinion, the weekly paper his father had started, and thereby keep alive the settlement and its values. The patriarch had chosen to be father to a whole community, so he turned the farm into a kind of commune where he could gather an extended family of followers, European as well as Indian, nephews and cousins, and, finally, with no special status, his own wife and sons.

  I was not a pilgrim, just a reporter looking for a story. By the time of my visit, Gandhi had been dead for nearly eighteen years, Manilal for nine, and Indian Opinion for five. There wasn’t a lot to see besides the simple buildings they’d inhabited. On one of them, the brass nameplate still read “M. K. Gandhi.” The great work of racial separation—what the white authorities called apartheid—had already begun. Small Indian plot holders, who’d once lived and farmed among Zulus, now crowded onto the settlement’s one hundred acres. I wrote about the visit in a mournful vein, noting that Indians and other South Africans no longer believed that Gandhian passive resistance could accomplish anything in their land. “Passive resistance doesn’t stand a chance against this government,” a trustee of the settlement said. “It’s too brutal and persevering.”

  If my next assignment as a foreign correspondent hadn’t been India, where I lived for a few years in the late 1960s, that afternoon might not have stuck in my mind as a reminder of a subject to which I’d need to return. For me the South African Gandhi would always be more than an antecedent, an extended footnote to the fully fledged Mahatma. Having looked at the green hills of Africa from his front porch, I thought, in the simplifying way reporters think, that he was the story.

  The maelstroms of India could obscure but never dislodge that intuition. The more I delved into Indian politics, the more I found myself pondering the seeming disconnect between Gandhi’s teachings on social issues and the priorities of the next generation of leaders who reverentially invoked his name. Often, in those days, these were people who’d actually encountered the Mahatma, who’d come into the national struggle fired by his example. So more than a patriotic ritual was involved when they claimed to be his heirs. Yet it was hard to say what remained of him beyond his nimbus.

  An occasion for asking such questions occurred with the approach of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1969. Setting out to report on the remnants of Gandhi’s movement, I followed Vinoba Bhave, his last full-time apostle, as he trudged through the most impoverished parts of Bihar, then as now among the poorest of Indian states, trying to persuade landlords to cede some of their holdings to the landless. Vinoba collected deeds to thousands of acres of barren, untilled, and untillable land. The Mahatma’s aging protégé seemed stoic, if not tragic, as he saw his doomed mission through to its largely inconsequential end.

  “He became his admirers.” That’s Auden on Yeats. Three decades ago V. S. Naipaul used the line to characterize the decline of Gandhi’s influence in his last years, when he was most revered. The combination of piety and disregard—hardly unique to India—lasted as a cultural reflex, surviving the explosion of India’s first nuclear bomb.

  Over time and at a distance, my experiences of South Africa and India ran together in my mind. Gandhi was an obvious link. I found myself thinking again about the Phoenix Settlement, to which I returned twice, the second time after it had been burned down in factional black-on-black violence accompanying the death throes of white supremacy, only to be restored with the blessing of a democratically chosen government eager to canonize Gandhi as a founding father of the new South Africa. I then found myself thinking about Gandhi himself, wondering how South Africa helped to form the man he became, how the man he became in South Africa struggled with the reality of India, how his initiation as a political leader on one side of the Indian Ocean foreshadowed his larger disappointments and occasional sense of failure on the other: whether, that is, there were clues to the e
nd of his journey as leader in its beginning.

  I’m hardly the first to raise such questions and won’t be the last. But it seemed to me there was still a story to be uncovered and told, themes that could be traced from the beginning of Gandhi’s political life in one country to its flourishing in another, with all the ambiguity of his legacy in each place. The temptation to retrace my own steps while retracing Gandhi’s finally proved irresistible.

  This isn’t intended to be a retelling of the standard Gandhi narrative. I merely touch on or leave out crucial periods and episodes—Gandhi’s childhood in the feudal Kathiawad region of Gujarat, his coming-of-age in nearly three formative years in London, his later interactions with British officials on three continents, the political ins and outs of the movement, the details and context of his seventeen fasts—in order to hew in this essay to specific narrative lines I’ve chosen. These have to do with Gandhi the social reformer, with his evolving sense of his constituency and social vision, a narrative that’s usually subordinated to that of the struggle for independence. The Gandhi I’ve pursued is the one who claimed once to “have been trying all my life to identify myself with the most illiterate and downtrodden.” At the risk of slighting his role as a political tactician, a field marshal of nonviolent resistance, or as a religious thinker and exemplar, I’ve tried to follow him at ground level as he struggled to impose his vision on an often recalcitrant India—especially recalcitrant, he found, when he tried not just its patience but its reverence for him with his harangues on the “crime” and “curse” of untouchability, or the need for the majority Hindus to accommodate the large Muslim minority.

  Neither theme, it turns out, can be explained without reference to his long apprenticeship in South Africa, where he eventually defined himself as leader of a mass movement. My aim is to amplify rather than replace the standard narrative of the life Gandhi led on two subcontinents by dwelling on incidents and themes that have often been underplayed. It isn’t to diminish a compelling figure now generally exalted as a spiritual pilgrim and secular saint. It’s to take a fresh look, in an attempt to understand his life as he lived it. I’m more fascinated by the man himself, the long arc of his strenuous life, than by anything that can be distilled as doctrine.

  Gandhi offered many overlapping and open-ended definitions of his highest goal, which he sometimes defined as poorna swaraj.* He wasn’t the one who’d introduced swaraj into the political lexicon, a term usually translated as “self-rule” while Gandhi still lived in South Africa. Later it would be expanded to mean “independence.” As used by Gandhi, poorna swaraj put the goal on yet a higher plane. At his most utopian, it was a goal not just for India but for each individual Indian; only then could it be poorna, or complete. It meant a sloughing not only of British rule but of British ways, a rejection of modern industrial society in favor of a bottom-up renewal of India, starting in its villages, 700,000 of them, according to the count he used for the country as it existed before its partition in 1947. Gandhi was thus a revivalist as much as a political figure, in the sense that he wanted to instill values in India’s most recalcitrant, impoverished precincts—values of social justice, self-reliance, and public hygiene—that nurtured together would flower as a material and spiritual renewal on a national scale.

  Swaraj, said this man of many causes, was like a banyan tree, having “innumerable trunks each of which is as important to the tree as the original trunk.” He meant it was bigger than the struggle for mere independence.

  “He increasingly ceased to be a serious political leader,” a prominent British scholar has commented. Gandhi, who formally resigned from the Indian National Congress as early as 1934 and never rejoined it, might have agreed. If the leader succeeded in driving the colonists out but his revival failed, he’d have to count himself a failure. Swaraj had to be for all Indians, but in his most challenging formulations he said it would be especially for “the starving toiling millions.”

  It meant, he said once, speaking in this vein, “the emancipation of India’s skeletons.” Or again: “Poorna swaraj denotes a state of things in which the dumb begin to speak and the lame begin to walk.”

  The Gandhi who held up this particular standard of social justice as an ultimate goal wasn’t always consistent or easy to follow in his discourse, let alone his campaigns. But this is the Gandhi whose words still have a power to resonate in India. And this vision, always with him a work in progress, first shows up in South Africa.

  Today most South Africans and Indians profess reverence for the Mahatma, as do many others across the world. But like the restored Phoenix Settlement, our various Gandhis tend to be replicas fenced off from our surroundings and his times. The original, with all his quirkiness, elusiveness, and genius for reinvention, his occasional cruelty and deep humanity, will always be worth pursuing. He never worshipped idols himself and generally seemed indifferent to the clouds of reverence that swirled around him. Always he demanded a response in the form of life changes. Even now, he doesn’t let Indians—or, for that matter, the rest of us—off easy.

  * * *

  * Indian and other foreign terms are italicized on their first appearance and defined in a glossary starting on this page.

  PART I

  SOUTH AFRICA

  (photo credit ip1.1)

  1

  PROLOGUE: AN UNWELCOME VISITOR

  IT WAS A BRIEF only a briefless lawyer might have accepted. Mohandas Gandhi landed in South Africa as an untested, unknown twenty-three-year-old law clerk brought over from Bombay, where his effort to launch a legal career had been stalled for more than a year. His stay in the country was expected to be temporary, a year at most. Instead, a full twenty-one years elapsed before he made his final departure on July 14, 1914. By then, he was forty-four, a seasoned politician and negotiator, recently leader of a mass movement, author of a doctrine for such struggles, a pithy and prolific political pamphleteer, and more—a self-taught evangelist on matters spiritual, nutritional, even medical. That’s to say, he was well on his way to becoming the Gandhi India would come to revere and, sporadically, follow.

  None of that was part of the original job description. His only mission at the outset was to assist in a bitter civil suit between two Muslim trading firms with roots of their own in Porbandar, the small port on the Arabian Sea, in the northwest corner of today’s India, where he was born. All the young lawyer brought to the case were his fluency in English and Gujarati, his first language, and his recent legal training at the Inner Temple in London; his lowly task was to function as an interpreter, culturally as well as linguistically, between the merchant who engaged him and the merchant’s English attorney.

  Up to this point there was no evidence of his ever having had a spontaneous political thought. During three years in London—and the nearly two years of trying to find his feet in India that followed—his causes were dietary and religious: vegetarianism and the mystical cult known as Theosophy, which claimed to have absorbed the wisdom of the East, in particular of Hinduism, about which Gandhi, looking for footholds on a foreign shore, had more curiosity then than scriptural knowledge himself. Never a mystic, he found fellowship in London with other seekers on what amounted, metaphorically speaking, to a small weedy fringe, which he took to be common ground between two cultures.

  South Africa, by contrast, challenged him from the start to explain what he thought he was doing there in his brown skin. Or, more precisely, in his brown skin, natty frock coat, striped pants, and black turban, flattened in the style of his native Kathiawad region, which he wore into a magistrate’s court in Durban on May 23, 1893, the day after his arrival. The magistrate took the headgear as a sign of disrespect and ordered the unknown lawyer to remove it; instead, Gandhi stalked out of the courtroom. The small confrontation was written up the next day in The Natal Advertiser in a sardonic little article titled “An Unwelcome Visitor.” Gandhi immediately shot off a letter to the newspaper, the first of dozens he’d write to deflect or defla
te white sentiments. “Just as it is a mark of respect amongst Europeans to take off their hats,” he wrote, an Indian shows respect by keeping his head covered. “In England, on attending drawing-room meetings and evening parties, Indians always keep the head-dress, and the English ladies and gentlemen seem to appreciate the regard which we show thereby.”

  The letter saw print on what was only the fourth day the young nonentity had been in the land. It’s noteworthy because it comes nearly two weeks before a jarring experience of racial insult, on a train heading inland from the coast, that’s generally held to have fired his spirit of resistance. The letter to the Advertiser would seem to demonstrate that Gandhi’s spirit didn’t need igniting; its undertone of teasing, of playful jousting, would turn out to be characteristic. Yet it’s the train incident that’s certified as transformative not only in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi or Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha but in Gandhi’s own Autobiography, written three decades after the event.

  If it wasn’t character forming, it must have been character arousing (or deepening) to be ejected, as Gandhi was at Pietermaritzburg, from a first-class compartment because a white passenger objected to having to share the space with a “coolie.” What’s regularly underplayed in the countless renditions of the train incident is the fact that the agitated young lawyer eventually got his way. The next morning he fired off telegrams to the general manager of the railway and his sponsor in Durban. He raised enough of a commotion that he finally was allowed to reboard the same train from the same station the next night under the protection of the stationmaster, occupying a first-class berth.