Reading Gandhi Reading

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Reading Gandhi Reading

By Amit Chaudhuri
ab v g f d
AUGUST 8, 2019
It’s generally foolhardy to write about Gandhi.
— Akeel Bilgrami
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SOMETIMES IT SEEMS THAT Gandhi, Nehru,
Bose, and Ambedkar are India’s greatest novelists.
RELIGION
In using the word “novelist,” I’m referring to a
POLITICS
gure who gives our world back to us, a world
whose signi cance we then spend years trying to BIOGRAPHY &
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/reading-gandhi-reading/ 1/24
grasp and measure. I mean someone who has an

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impact in both serious and popular domains. In
that sense, the novelist is partly a gure of the
imagination, produced by a mix of canonical
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judgment and contingent forces. The novelist is

“My Life Is My Message”:
also, today, by de nition global, and supremely Ramachandra Guha’s
exportable. “Gandhi: The Years That
Changed the World,
1914–1948”
Just as other cultures have thrilled to artists of By Yugank Goyal
such disparate gi s as Dostoyevsky and Melville
On Gravity and Play: In
and Haruki Murakami, the educated Indian
Conversation with Amit
middle classes — especially the academic elite and Chaudhuri
the English-language news channels in Delhi — By Sumana Roy
have devoted, in the last two decades, recurring
Modernism and Mimesis
spasms of attention to Gandhi, Nehru, By Amit Chaudhuri
occasionally to Subhas Chandra Bose, and more
Destroyed by Truth
recently to B. R. Ambedkar. It’s as if they weren’t
By Faisal Devji
just political gures but imaginers of worlds. No
novelist can compare with the urry of A Nobel Tradition:
Rabindranath Tagore —
excitement — and, o en, controversy — they
the First Songwriter to
carry in their wake. Although, being dead, they Win the Prize
can’t attend literary festivals, they visit them more By Caroline Eden
than any living Indian author, in the form of What King Learned from
books and discussions. Sometimes you feel that Gandhi
the literary festival — being a microcosm of a By Priyanka Kumar
ee-market global utopia — is their true home. Unusual Politics: Ramin

Jahanbegloo’s “The
Of course, real novelists (whoever they might be) Gandhian Moment”
By Karuna Mantena
get no biographies or critical studies in
Anglophone India. While one can’t help noticing
that the present combination of mythologizing
and hermeneutics directed at Gandhi-Nehru-
Ambedkar springs om a mutation of the literary
imagination, it’s a mutation for which the literary
is largely redundant. This becomes even more

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apparent when we realize that the literary
achievement of the one writer sometimes added
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to this pantheon — Rabindranath Tagore — is
beside the point to the Anglophone class. Tagore’s
biography embodies certain qualities that can be
celebrated; his actual writing, with the exception
of the national anthem and one anguished
patriotic song, stays out of view.
Of the four political gures I’ve mentioned, three

— Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar — were writers. (The
fourth, Subhas Chandra Bose, who died
mysteriously before Independence while trying to
make a futile deal with the Axis powers, is
remembered mainly for his militant opposition to
British rule, and a life of courage and tragic
misdirection.) Nehru, because of his prose style, is
identi ed with sonority. His principal works as an
author include the speech he made in 1947
(“when the world sleeps, India will awake to life
and eedom,” a beautifully expressed thought
whose meaning remains vague), which Rushdie
and Elizabeth West included in their 1997
anthology of largely Anglophone ction,
Mirrorwork; and there is the account he wrote in
prison of his nation’s uniqueness, The Discovery of
India (published in 1946). Ambedkar, the
perspicacious leader of the “untouchables,” whose
legacy has had an academic resurgence in the last
decade, was the chief dra er of what for
Anglophone Indians is a literary/moral text about
whose signi cance they’re all in consensus — the
Indian constitution, a work they invoke almost

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daily, and which very few of them have read.
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Gandhi di ers om these two in that he wrote
originally in Gujarati, which might be why his
works possess a certain unpredictability and
idiosyncrasy, the second being a quality that’s
almost entirely absent om a fundamentally
homogeneous, high-minded Indian Anglophone
discourse. Still, all three, in the eyes of the Indian
intelligentsia, are engaged in the production of an
overarching work that has had more value than
any other for a quarter of a century now: India.
What novelist can compete with those who have
authored a text of such overwhelming
importance?
The consequence of being trans xed by this work,

“India,” is that several books on Gandhi come out
every year. The reading of the Anglophone Indian
middle class today consists at rst of textbooks
and guides to exam success; then, as its members
approach maturity, of self-help books,
newspapers, and (if they’re of an academic bent)
lots of stu on Gandhi and some of the others on
the Indian Mount Rushmore I’ve already named.
One of the positive o shoots of this ongoing
trend, however, has been the recent publication of
a “critical edition” of Gandhi’s An Autobiography or
The Story of My Experiments with Truth, in the
original, excellent translation by Mahadev Desai,
with a new introduction and notes by Tridip
Suhrud. The annotations provide alternative, more
literal translations of Gandhi’s prose, where Desai
may have changed the character of a sentence

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without necessarily wishing to alter its meaning.
These sporadic interventions are good to have;
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occasionally, one wishes the original Gujarati
word had been provided when a concept is being
discussed passionately — for instance, the word
“sacri ce,” to which Suhrud suggests
“renunciation” as an alternative. (One wonders if
tyag is the word Gandhi used.)
This book is still possibly the best place to

encounter Gandhi. It contains, vividly, the record
of a man working things out for himself. For one
thing, Gandhi — unlike the inheritors of his
legacy — didn’t have to deal with books about
Gandhi. He had other things to think about. His
reading, in contrast to today’s Indians, was
liberated and creative, while his future (and the
future of his country) was a conundrum. Nothing
was a given for Gandhi; his progress was di dent,
but his curiosity was voracious, his approach
questioning and sometimes comically
unimpressed (the last a characteristic he would
put to memorable use in his mockery of King and
Empire).
In Prime Movers (2018), a book on “twelve great

political thinkers” om Pericles to Gandhi “and
what’s wrong with each of them,” Ferdinand
Mount describes Gandhi’s method: “[Y]ou found
out truth as you went through life — or as
Gandhi’s critics liked to put it, he makes it up as
he goes along. Gandhi does not dispute this:
‘Truth is what everyone for the moment feels it to
be.’” Presumably to distinguish this statement

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om the eeting but ferocious convictions that
lead to mob violence, Mount quotes the
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philosopher Akeel Bilgrami: “Truth for Gandhi is
not a cognitive notion. It is an experiential notion.
It is not propositions purporting to describe the
world of which truth is predicated, it is only our
own moral experience which is capable of being
true.” As for Gandhi’s curiosity and reading
(which are an integral part of this “moral
experience”): as a student at the Bar in London, he
was interested in religion both experientially and
as a way of understanding culture, but he knew
little about either his own or others’. Throughout,
Gandhi is good at portraying how a consciousness
of one’s own ignorance is not incompatible with
intellectual excitement:
Towards the end of my second year in England

I came across two Theosophists, brothers, and
both unmarried. They talked to me about the
Gita. They were reading Sir Edwin Arnold’s
translation — The Song Celestial — and they
invited me to read the original with them. I felt
ashamed, as I had read the divine poem neither
in Samskrit nor in Gujarati. I was constrained
to tell them that I had not read the Gita, but
that I would gladly read it with them, and that
though my knowledge of Samskrit was
meagre, still I hoped to be able to understand
the original to the extent of telling where the
translation failed to bring out the meaning. I
began reading the Gita with them.

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Gandhi then quotes lines om Arnold’s version
that “made a deep impression” on him and “still
ring in my ears”: MENU
If one
Ponders on objects of the sense, there springs
Attraction; om attraction grows desire,
Desire ames to erce passion, passion breeds
Recklessness; then the memory — all betrayed
—
Lets noble purpose go, and saps the mind,
Till purpose, mind, and man are all undone.
“It has a orded me invaluable help in my

moments of gloom,” he goes on to say about the
Gita. “I have read almost all the English
translations of it, and I regard Sir Edwin Arnold’s
as the best.”
What’s striking here — as it is in every page of My

Autobiography — is Gandhi’s ability to give us the
transitions in his reading and thinking (his
discovery of the Gita through the English
language, for instance) without adornment or too
much commentary, to not rehearse what he
thinks the reader values already but rather to test
ways in which it might be possible to convey how
things — books, people, events — begin to matter
to oneself. A few paragraphs later he mentions the
fact that he “met a good Christian om
Manchester in a vegetarian boarding house,”
evidently one of the many productive
acquaintanceships he made in his quest for
vegetarian food in London. This man points
Gandhi in a di erent direction

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Arnold:
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“Do please read the Bible.” I accepted his
advice, and he got me a copy. I have a faint
recollection that he himself used to sell copies
of the Bible, and I purchased om him an
edition containing maps, concordance, and
other aids. I began reading it, but I could not
possibly read through the Old Testament. I
read the Book of Genesis, and the chapters
that followed invariably sent me to sleep. But
just for the sake of being able to say that I had
read it, I plodded through the other books
with much di culty and without the least
interest or understanding. I disliked reading
the Book of Numbers.
But the New Testament produced a di erent

impression, especially the Sermon on the
Mount which went straight to my heart. I
compared it with the Gita. The verses, “But I
say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but
whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek,
turn to him the other also” […] delighted me
beyond measure and put me in mind of
Shamal Bhatt’s “For a bowl of water, give a
goodly meal,” etc.
Gandhi gives us a picture here of a world being

created on the hoof. The man om Manchester
comes across as both a Samaritan and a spiritual
entrepreneur: a man om an industrial city in an
industrial age, for whom Christianity is not just a
faith but an enthusiasm. Gandhi’s own sentences

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move unexpectedly in response to the lack of
xity in his life and his iend’s: “I have a faint
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recollection that he himself used to sell copies of
the Bible,” he writes; but, in the second part of the
sentence, the “faint recollection” has, without
adequate explanation, become fact: “and I
purchased om him an edition containing maps,
concordance, and other aids.” No sentence is
pious: “I read the Book of Genesis, and the
chapters that followed invariably sent me to
sleep.” The compression in that “invariably” is
telling: it means he tried reading the Old
Testament more than once. Gandhi repeatedly
points out that he knows little, and yet he always
seems to know enough to be a comparativist: lines
om the Sermon on the Mount remind him of
the Gita (which he rst read in English in
England) and a song by a Gujarati poet. Everything
is in con uence, but there’s no clear point of
origin to the various streams.
How di erent it is to read Gandhi writing about

his reading than it is to read most books about
Gandhi, where we have a familiar teleology, a
beginning and end we’re already aware of ! There
are few readymade contexts in An Autobiography,
few con rmations of what a life and the making
of an Indian political leader should look like.
Many of the moments described in it — his
attempt to become a meat-eater; his admiration
for the Gita and the Sermon on the Mount; other
tful developments — have long been canonical,
like episodes in the life of a saint. But Gandhi’s
own accounts of them remain provisional, like the

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time he lived in, and like the intellectual ethos
that produced him and others like him.
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What kind of ethos? The key lies in the term

prayog, which Gandhi used in the title when the
autobiography — a collection of the installments
he’d written in the periodical Navjivan om 1925
to 1929 — was published in 1930. The term is
translated as “experiments” in Desai’s 1940
translation. This word, more than any other,
describes the world of Indians om the
beginnings of the colonial project to well a er it
ended, and it implies why that period in India is
most signi cant or memorable not because of the
achievements and depredations of that project, or
even the triumph of the eedom movement, but
for these experiments Indians undertook. By
“experiment” I think Gandhi means an openness
to formative encounters (“truth”), whether they
occur as texts, events, or people. The encounter is
accompanied by an acknowledgment of the nature
and implications of its impact. Gandhi’s readings,
and discovery of, the Bible, the Gita, Ruskin,
Tolstoy, even law books, are each encounters
comprising this ongoing experiment, encounters
that can’t be reduced, as we see om the language
of the Autobiography, to remarks like: “He learnt
such and such om Tolstoy and the Gita,” or “He
admired Ruskin because…”
Tagore, temperamentally di erent om Gandhi

and o en in disagreement with him, is also
shaped by this experimental ethos, this openness
to the encounter. In his case, the encounters

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include his unsettling acquaintanceship with his
sister-in-law Kadambari Devi’s acuity of
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perspective; his discovery of the English poet
Thomas Chatterton converging with his discovery
of the 15th-century devotional poets Chandidas
and Vidyapati ( just as there’s a simultaneity to
Gandhi’s reading of Arnold’s translation of the
Gita and the Sermon on the Mount); and his
transformative revaluation of the fourth-century
Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, who was being discussed
in educated circles in India and Europe in the 19th
century because of William Jones’s 1789
translation of Shakuntala. According to Tagore
himself, he knew little Sanskrit until he turned
14, and began to learn the language when he
found the 12th-century poet Jayadeva’s Gita
Govinda among his father’s books, puzzling over a
form of poetry that seemed to have no stanzas. He
claims he was later electri ed on rst
encountering these lines in Kalidasa:
“Mandakininirjharashikharanam / bodha muhu
kampitadevadaru” (“the breeze, moist with drops of
the Mandakini, / makes leaves fall om the deodar
trees”).
Tagore’s biographer Prashantakumar Pal says

Tagore was actually taught Kalidasa by his tutor
when he was 13, but the terms in which Tagore
chooses to ame his memory in My Reminiscences
is important. Tagore’s father, Debendranath, had
his own accidental encounter in the early 19th
century with a page om the Upanishads that had
come loose and was ying about in the breeze, a
text that would come

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Debendranath and others (including Eliot) as they
tried to formulate terms for the nature of the
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modern. These episodes parody, and are the
opposite of, the “books that changed your life”
paradigm we see in the weekend papers. Nor are
they related to a passive imbibing of a colonial
education (Tagore hated school; Gandhi was no
lover of the classroom) or hard-headed nativist
revisionism, which depends on already knowing
what you must value in your heritage. What links
all three — Gandhi and the Bible and the Gita;
Tagore, the Vaishnav poets, Chatterton, and
Kalidasa; Debendranath and the Upanishads — is
an alertness to chance. A temperament for
accidentality governs the “experiment.”
An important part of this experiment had to do

with what they wore. Those who look to the
cultural con uences of the 1960s, to what the
hippies and “ ower power” set began to wear
amid the eruption of East-West psychedelia, in
order to determine what a generation driven by
romantic ideas of liberation might dress like,
could go further back to Indians at the turn of the
19th century and the beginning of the 20th:
Swami Vivekananda switching om the Western
clothes he wore when he was the student
Narendranath Dutta to sa on turban and Indian
jacket or, o en, to loose Bengali dhuti and bare-
torsoed simplicity; the Mughal-inspired sherwanis
and especially the round-collared jacket that
Nehru adopted, later named the “Nehru jacket”;
Tagore’s loose, owing, shapeless, body-covering
garment (the Tagore family spent tortuous

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moments trying to imagine what the appropriate
dress for a modern Bengali might be); Ambedkar’s
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strategic black suit; the sari’s extraordinary
evolution; the educated Bengali re ning what was
essentially rural clothing — the dhuti — into
legitimate bourgeois attire; Gandhi’s abandoning
of the barrister’s suit for the peasant’s white dhoti,
which earned him Churchill’s irritable and
elaborate sobriquet, “a seditious Middle Temple
lawyer […] posing as a fakir […] striding about half-
naked.” There is no binary, as between the 20th-
century Japanese’s predominantly suited
appearance and his “authentic” dress.
One is reminded, by this strange compulsiveness

and heterogeneity, of what Arvind Krishna
Mehrotra said of writing poetry in English in
India in the ’70s: “We wanted to escape the
language of skylarks and nightingales.” But this
desire to “escape” didn’t take Mehrotra either to
Hindi or to a more Indian-sounding diction in
English; it made him look, as he created a
language suitable for his poetry, to the Beats and
Surrealists. Something equally defamiliarizing,
rather than expectedly unconventional, was
happening earlier with clothing. If one thing
connected the various attempts at rede ning what
a modern Indian might wear, it wasn’t
nationalism or a utopian idea of Indian dress, but
relative austerity — in some cases, a pronounced
austerity and simplicity that derived not just om
the secular middle class’s renewed interest in
idiosyncratic religious gures on the one hand
and its engagement with socialism and Marxism

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on the other, but also om its imagining of a
spiritual temper for modernity.
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Gandhi recognized this temper in his encounter

with the Gujarati writer Narayan Hemchandra
when he was studying law in London. “He did not
know English. His dress was queer — a clumsy
pair of trousers, a wrinkled, dirty, brown coat
a er the Parsi fashion, no necktie or collar, and a
tasselled woollen cap. […] Such a queer-looking
and queerly dressed person was bound to be
singled out in fashionable society.” Hemchandra
isn’t a displaced provincial: “He had a boundless
ambition for learning languages and for foreign
travel,” and wants to visit America next. “But
where will you nd the money?” Gandhi asks
him, to which Hemchandra says: “What do I need
money for? I am not a fashionable fellow like you.
The minimum amount of food and the minimum
amount of clothing su ce for me.” Later, both
Gandhi and Hemchandra are invited to meet
Cardinal Manning, the archbishop of Westminster,
whom Gandhi admired for the work he did to end
the dock workers’ strike in 1889.
So we both called on the Cardinal. I put on the

usual visiting suit. Narayan Hemchandra was
the same as ever, in the same coat and the
same trousers. I tried to make fun of this but
he laughed me out and said:
“You civilised fellows are all cowards. Great

men never look at a person’s exterior. They
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In what kind of context should we place this

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accommodation of austerity (“never look at a
person’s exterior”) that’s so de nitive of Indian
modernity, and how should we trace its legacy?
(Gandhi, of course, takes a cue om Hemchandra
when he revises Jesus’s “Give unto Caesar” riposte
upon being asked, a er his meeting with King
Edward VII, whether he could have dressed
di erently: “The King was wearing enough for
both of us.”) But let’s look at where Gandhi places
himself: “The Gandhis belong to the Bania caste
and seem to have been originally grocers. But for
three generations, om my grandfather, they have
been Prime Ministers in several Kathiawad States.”
That is, they were administrators. Two pages later,
Gandhi adds: “My father never had any ambition
to accumulate riches and le us very little
property. He had no education, save that of
experience. At best, he might be said to have read
up to the h standard.” Of his mother: “The
outstanding impression my mother has le on my
memory is that of saintliness. She was deeply
religious. She would not think of taking her meals
without her daily prayers.” And: “My mother had
strong common sense. She was well informed
about all matters of State, and ladies of the court
thought highly of her intelligence.”
The statement, “My father never had any ambition

to accumulate riches and le us very little
property,” is telling. It points to a signi cant
aspect of the experiment of Indian modernity that
Gandhi was part of, and which millions a er him

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would be: the coming into existence of an
educated — sometimes highly educated — middle
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class that wasn’t a class of landowners. Quite a
few members of this class may have, in one sense
or another, lost caste, as Gandhi had by crossing
the “black water.” But this non-landowning class
was marked not by caste or loss of caste alone (the
“black water” episode is a turning point but also,
eventually, an irrelevance in Gandhi’s life), but by
education, self-critique, and the sort of
“experiment” we nd recorded in An
Autobiography.
The creation by Indians of a non-propertied

middle class has had far greater implications for
the country’s history than Macaulay’s ambition to
create “a class of persons Indian in blood and
colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in
morals and in intellect.” Its legacy becomes
clearer a er Independence, when the place of this
class, in India and among Indians across the
world, continues to consolidate itself, and has a
particular tone and appearance di erent om, say,
the educated elite in Pakistan, which was
invariably landowning. The non-landowning
educated class in India for decades maintained a
Narayan Hemchandra–like position, until
economic deregulation arrived in 1991: “What do I
need money for? I am not a fashionable fellow
like you. The minimum amount of food and the
minimum amount of clothing su ce for me.” At
the same time, it inculcated a cosmopolitanism
and curiosity about the world it didn’t always have
the means to act on (until the 1990s, the Foreign

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Exchange Regulation Act [FERA] only allowed
Indians a tiny amount of foreign exchange when
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traveling abroad): “He had a boundless ambition
for learning languages and for foreign travel.”
These predilections and o en self-imposed

restrictions gave to Indian modernity, especially to
its domains of culture and education, an air of
shabbiness. Gandhi is an early example, and an
extreme one, of this moral ethos: for him, being a
Middle Temple lawyer and “striding about half-
naked” can’t be put down to political strategy
alone. It’s part of a critical self-consciousness,
once pervasive in India, that constantly
questioned the nature of civility and civilization.
It was as important as satyagraha or “non-violence”
in overturning the values of a small set of
imperialists as well as of native landowners.
Then there’s the “saintly” mother, who isn’t

spoken about in terms of her educational
achievements but of her “strong common sense,”
and the fact that she was “highly thought of” for
her “intelligence.” Through her, too, Gandhi
establishes a practical and intellectual context that
goes beyond recognized, institutional “colonial
education.” This also comprises a legacy. It
reminds me that, while my mother received no
further education a er her school-leaving
matriculation certi cate (she was haunted by this,
and blamed it on her family as well as the bad
times they’d fallen into), she had read perhaps
more widely in Bengali literature than my father,
and had an extraordinary capacity for acute

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literary criticism. Gandhi’s portrayal of his
mother’s intelligence also made me think of my
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own mother saying of the woman who worked
for years as a maid in our house, and who, besides
her, brought me up: “She has a wonderful sense of
humor and is more cultured than the women I
meet at parties.”
No doubt these remarks — both Gandhi’s and my

mother’s — risk being called naïve or
condescending, but they are also political. They
are part of the experiment of overturning the
expectations of “colonial modernity.” It’s a politics
that led to that other unprecedented experiment
in democracy that’s been remarked on by Ranajit
Guha and others, and, as Ferdinand Mount points
out, is reiterated by Perry Anderson: “In India
alone, the poor form not just the overwhelming
majority of the electorate, they vote in larger
numbers than the better o .” Not just the poor, as
Ranajit Guha noted, but the illiterate, bringing
into play value systems that are di erent but
inextricable om ours. This is one part of the
legacy that’s still at work, mainly because
governments — including BJP-led ones — change
periodically due to the exercise of the anchise
by, and the so-called “wisdom” of, the poor and
o en the unlettered. (For the rst time a er
Independence, this “wisdom” came into question
on May 23, unless what’s at work is a God-like
wisdom whose purpose isn’t immediately
decipherable.)
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The knowledge of the limits of colonial education
always informed Indian writers and thinkers as a
living force: Gandhi’s trouble with English, his MENU
account of his parents, Tagore’s hatred of school
and education at home, his inability to nish his
degree at University College London, Narayan
Hemchandra’s de ciencies in the English language
— all these are interconnected developments and
choices, at once political and imaginative. The
politics constitutes a paradox, so that a woman
like Gandhi’s mother could stand as both a
precursor and a counterpart to Chandramukhi
Basu and Kadambini Ganguly (an exact
contemporary of the degree-less Tagore), the rst
women graduates — om Calcutta University —
of the British Empire, including Britain itself.
To the lay observer, it seems as if Gandhi’s

reputation mutates subtly, in phases. The
chameleon-like shi s between saint and charlatan,
holy man, crank, and astute politician, existed
om the start. A er Independence, he began to be
seen by some Indian intellectuals as a critic of
modernity, a proponent of the homespun, the (in
contrast to Nehru) anti-industrial, and the
ecologically sound. Khadi, the form of cotton he
urged Indians to produce for themselves, in a
quest for self-subsistence (thus, the swadeshi or
“made at home” movement), became the apparel
in the 1960s and ’70s of intellectuals, artists, and
politicized undergraduates, a sort of hallmark, in
its rough texture, of both austerity and modernity.
Curiously, at around the same time, the Indian
government largely closed India to all but a small
percentage of foreign investment, seeking to

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develop its own industry and market (something
that, critics say in retrospect, stood it in good
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stead when, 17 years a er deregulation, the world
markets crashed in 2008 and the Indian economy
seemed relatively una ected).
Gandhi’s Luddite proclivities, as well as the le ’s

animosity toward the West (besides Nehru’s
project of industrialization), marked India for 44
years a er Independence, slowed down
“development” to the “Hindu rate of growth,” and,
some would say, protected India, its democracy,
and its poor om the vagaries of the market. A er
globalization, when the very contradictions that
made India both ustrating and sometimes
comical became an integral part of its astonishing
economic “miracle,” new metaphors were thrown
up for the Indian boom, for its irreducibility and
exuberance. The English-language magic realist
novel was one of them; Bollywood was another.
Gandhi as metaphor, too, was subtly energized by

India’s boom, moving om saint and eccentric to
a species of the sort of life-force that seemed to
characterize India’s new success. Ramachandra
Guha, who has undertaken a large-hearted project
whose aim is to give us a portrait of Gandhi that’s
both exhaustive and a ectionate, spans, himself,
both post-Independence khadi-wearing India and
the post-globalization ferment in his engagement
with a gure who is now the subject of a
considerable two-part biography. Guha began as an
environmentalist, a discipline whose non-
grandiose tone, in the decades before global

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warming, owed much in India to Gandhi, as he
points out in Gandhi: The Years that Changed the
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World, 1914–1948 (2018): “I spent the rst een
years of my career working on the history of
Indian environmentalism, whose main actors
were in uenced by Gandhian methods of analysis,
critique, struggle and construction.” Guha is now
a historian; his Gandhi today is an arresting
agglomeration of inconsistencies that, like India
a er globalization, is its own form of logic and
persuasion:
A iend om his London days, who had

followed his subsequent career closely,
remarked in 1934 that “Gandhi is a problem.
To Rulers and Governors he is a thorn in their
side. To logicians he is a fool. To economists
he is a hopeless ignoramus. To materialists he
is a dreamer. To communists he is a drag on
the wheel. To constitutionalists he represents
rank revolution.” To this list we might add:
“To Muslim leaders he was a communal
Hindu. To Hindu extremists he was a
notorious appeaser of Muslims. To the
‘untouchables’ he appeared a defender of high-
caste orthodoxy. To the Brahmin he was a
reformer in too much of a hurry.”
Guha here is rephrasing, in the way he puts this

account together, an observation of E. P.
Thompson’s about India that he once cherished:
“[A]ll the convergent in uences of the world run
through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian,
secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic

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socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is
being thought in the West or East that is not
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active in some Indian mind.” But there’s a
di erence in tone between Thompson’s
statements, which are an attempt to characterize
and acknowledge the kind of “experiment” that
produced, and was embraced by, Gandhi, Tagore,
and Narayan Hemchandra, and Guha’s elaborate
ri on Gandhi’s “ iend’s” remark om 1934,
which has an odd triumphalism about it that
comes close to what Perry Anderson named “the
Indian ideology”: a point of view that is
unvanquishable simply because it encompasses
everything and can’t be pinned down, a way of
thinking that (and this is something Anderson
didn’t discuss) isn’t engendered by Hinduism or
the ideals of the eedom movement as much as it
is by India’s jubilant self-assessment a er
deregulation.
Guha o sets triumphalism with diligence, detail,

and, as I said earlier, a ection. He also reminds us
in his preface that, while “previous biographies
had relied largely on the ninety-seven volumes of
Gandhi’s Collected Works […,] [a]s a biographer, I
knew that one must go beyond the works or
writings of one’s subject.” But Guha is aware of,
and not immune to, the attractions of Gandhi’s
prose, and he quotes the Indian critic Pattabhi
Sitaramayya’s characterization of his style: “[S]hort
sentences shot out like shrapnel in a feu de joie at a
new-year parade.” Despite mention of the New
Year parade, Gandhi’s prose doesn’t really
celebrate anything: either himself, or India. The

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“shrapnel” analogy is apt, because it suggests
dispersal rather than a wish to add things up; it
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hints at the makeshi nature of the experiment.
Although biographers before Guha may have
consulted Gandhi’s works exclusively, too few
readers have. Publishers may have reached a
consensus that it’s time to read books about
Gandhi; but, even more, it’s time to read Gandhi.
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, the latest of

which is Friend of My Youth, published in the United
States in February by New York Review Books. He is also
a poet, a critic, a musician, and a composer. He is a
fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and professor of
contemporary literature at the University of East
Anglia. His new book of essays is called The Origins of
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Sharmishta Zen • 3 days ago

Go away you upper caste people. Go away!
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8/13/2019 Reading Gandhi Reading - Los Angeles Review of Books

reviews essays interviews sections shorts blarb quarterly books

Reading Gandhi Reading

It’s generally foolhardy to write about Gandhi.

BUY THIS BOOK

grasp and measure. I mean someone who has an

judgment and contingent forces. The novelist is

ee-market global utopia — is their true home. Unusual Politics: Ramin

is largely redundant. This becomes even more

Of the four political gures I’ve mentioned, three

Indian constitution, a work they invoke almost

The consequence of being trans xed by this work,

may have changed the character of a sentence

This book is still possibly the best place to

In Prime Movers (2018), a book on “twelve great

be.’” Presumably to distinguish this statement

Towards the end of my second year in England

reviews essays interviews sections shorts blarb quarterly books

“It has a orded me invaluable help in my

What’s striking here — as it is in every page of My

Gandhi in a di erent direction

But the New Testament produced a di erent

Gandhi gives us a picture here of a world being

faith but an enthusiasm. Gandhi’s own sentences

How di erent it is to read Gandhi writing about

own accounts of them remain provisional, like the

What kind of ethos? The key lies in the term

Tagore, temperamentally di erent om Gandhi

to the encounter. In his case, the encounters

Tagore’s biographer Prashantakumar Pal says

text that would come

An important part of this experiment had to do

garment (the Tagore family spent tortuous

One is reminded, by this strange compulsiveness

and its engagement with socialism and Marxism

Gandhi recognized this temper in his encounter

So we both called on the Cardinal. I put on the

“You civilised fellows are all cowards. Great

In what kind of context should we place this

The statement, “My father never had any ambition

Gandhi was part of, and which millions a er him

The creation by Indians of a non-propertied

the means to act on (until the 1990s, the Foreign

These predilections and o en self-imposed

Then there’s the “saintly” mother, who isn’t

and had an extraordinary capacity for acute

No doubt these remarks — both Gandhi’s and my

reviewsessays interviews sections shorts blarb quarterly books

To the lay observer, it seems as if Gandhi’s

percentage of foreign investment, seeking to

Gandhi’s Luddite proclivities, as well as the le ’s

Gandhi as metaphor, too, was subtly energized by

grandiose tone, in the decades before global

A iend om his London days, who had

Guha here is rephrasing, in the way he puts this

secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic

Guha o sets triumphalism with diligence, detail,

celebrate anything: either himself, or India. The

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, the latest of

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Sharmishta Zen • 3 days ago

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