the real mahatma gandhi

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The Real Mahatm a Gand hiQ UES TI O NI NG T H E MO RAL H ERO I S M O F I NDI AS MO S T REV ERED FIGURE

By Christopher Hitchens

IMAGE CREDIT: GLUEKIT

JOSEPH LELYVELD SUBTLY tips his hand in his title. The word Mahatma (often employed in

ordinary journalistic usage without any definite article, as if it were Mohandas Gandhis first name) is

actually the Sanskrit word for Great Soul. It is a religio-spiritual honorific, to be assumed or awarded

only by acclaim, and it achieved most of its currency in the West by association with Madame

Blavatskys somewhat risible Theosophy movement, forerunner of many American and European

tendencies to be found in writers, as discrepant as Annie Besant and T. S. Eliot, who nurture

themselves on the supposedly holy character of the subcontinent. The repetition, unlikely to be

accidental in the case of a writer as scrupulous as Lelyveld, seems to amount to an endorsement. In a

different way , the subtitle reinforces the same idea. Not Gandhis struggle for India, butwith it: as ifthis vast and antique land was somehow too refractory and ungrateful (recalcitrant is a word to which

Lelyveld recurs) to be fully deserving of Gandhis sacrificial endeavors on its behalf.

But with perhaps equivalent subtletybecause he generally refrains from imposing any one

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interpretation upon the readerLelyveld furnishes us with the very material out of which one might

constitute a refutation of this common opinion. The belief that India fell short of, and continues to

disappoint, the ideals of one of its founding fathers is an extremely persistent one. The standard view of

Gandhi is that he cut his ethical teeth by opposing racial discrimination in South Africa, failed to dent

the intransigent system there but had greater success with nonviolent civil disobedience in British

India, broke his heart and ruined his health by opposing the Hindu caste system, strove to reconcile

Hindus and Muslims, failed to prevent a sanguinary partition, and was murdered just after attaining a

partial and mutilated independence that nonetheless endures: a monument not to his own shortcomings

but to those of others.

Lelyveld examines all these pious beliefs and finds, or permits us to conclude, that they belong in the

realm of the not-quite-true. Thus, Gandhi and his followers were not much exercised by the treatment

of black Africans in South Africa, alluding to them in print as kaffirs and even organizing medical

orderlies and other noncombatant contributors for a punitive war against the Zulus. Then, Gandhi did

fight quite tenaciously against the horrors of untouchability but for much of his life was less decided

about the need to challenge the caste system tout court. He was not above making sectarian deals with

(and against) Indias Muslims. And he considered Indias chief enemy to be modernity, arguing until

well into the 1940s that the new nation should abhor industry and technology and relocate its core

identity and practice in the ancient rhythms of village life and the spinning wheel. Indias salvation, he

wrote in 1909, consists in unlearning what she has learnt during the past fifty years. The railways,

telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors, and such like have all to go. The rather sinister concept of

unlearning, explicitly tied to the more ethereal notion of salvation, has more in common with

Wahhabism than with the figures of Mandela, King, or the other moral heroes with whom Gandhis

name is linked.

A related argument has to do with the moral texture and relevance of Gandhis concept of ahimsa, or

nonviolence, with its counterpart of satyagraha, best translated as civil disobedience. It is mostusually conceded that, without the declining and increasingly desperate British as his antagonist,

Gandhi and his tactics would have fared no better than they had in the face of the remorseless pioneers

of apartheid. This concession usually preserves intact the belief that Gandhis methods were pure in

heart. But it may be observed that the threat to starve himself to death involved him in the deliberate

and believable threat of violence, he himself once referring to this tactic as the worst form of coercion.

It could certainly be argued that launching a full-blown Quit India campaign against the British in

1942 amounted to letting Hirohito do his fighting for him.

And it is not disputable that Gandhi himself regarded his own versions of ahimsa and satyagraha as

universally applicable. By 1939, he was announcing that, if adopted by a single Jew standing up and

refusing to bow to Hitlers decrees, such methods might suffice to melt Hitlers heart. T his may read

like mere foolishness, but a personal letter to the Fhrer in the same year began with the words My

friend and went on, ingratiatingly, to ask: Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately

shunned the method of war not without considerable success? Apart from its conceit, this would

appear to be suggesting that Hitler, too, might hope to get more of what he wanted by adopting a more

herbivorous approach. Gandhi also instructed a Chinese visitor to shame some Japanese by passivity

in the face of invasion, and found time to lecture a member of the South African National Congress

about the vices of Western apparel. You must not feel ashamed of carrying an assagai, or of going

around with only a tiny clout round your loins. (One tries to picture Nelson Mandela taking this

homespun counsel, which draws upon the most clichd impression of African dress and tradition.)

Gandhi was forever nominating himself as a mediator: in 1937 in Palestine, for example, where he




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concluded that Jews could demand a state of their own only if all Arab opinion were to become

reconciled to it; and later unsolicitedly advising the peoples of Czechoslovakia to try what Lelyveld calls

satyagraha to combat storm troopers. The nullity of this needs no emphasis: what is more striking

in one venerated so widely for modest self-effacementis its arrogance. Recording these successive

efforts at quasi-diplomacy and peacemaking, Lelyveld lapses into near-euphemism. At one point he

calls Gandhis initiatives a mixed bag, full of trenchant moral insights, desperate appeals, and self-

deluding simplicities. The crawling letter to Hitler, he summarizes as a desperate, naive mix of

humility and ego and as one of a series of futile, well-intentioned missives. We can certainly detect

the influence of Saul Bellows Good Intentions Paving Company, but the trenchant moral insights and

the humility are distinctly less conspicuous.

When Mother Teresaanother denizen of that unworldly India of redemption by self-abnegationhad

her audience with Pope Paul VI, she reportedly took a bus to the Vatican and wore only her everyday

sari and sandals. I wrote at the time that, if true, this was not modesty but ostentation. Perhaps this

shows only my Eurocentric bias (thoughvide my point above about Nelson Mandela), yet whole

passages of this book are rendered oppressive to readand this is by no means Lelyvelds faultby the

necessity of recording every meager gram that Gandhi ingested on his dietary regimes, every square

inch of unclothed limb and torso that he felt it necessary for the whole world to see, every stitch of

painstakingly homemade cloth in which he draped the remainder, every act of abstention from sex, and

every exercise in physical self-mortification. In point of personality, these are more usually the

lineaments of the fanatic and martyrdom-seeker while, in point of ideology, they represent the highly

dubious idea that asceticism and austerityeven povertyare good for the soul.

Again, such reactionary ideas were supposed by Gandhi to be binding on others as well as himself. He

adopted the Hindu form of chastity known asbrahmacharya and thought it enough to merely inform

his wife of his decision. Talking with a visiting Margaret Sanger, advocate of female sexual emancipation

and birth control, he not only denied the importance of womens sexual health butaccording towitnesses of the conversationgave himself a blood-pressure attack while doing so. Lelyveld has

created a minor scandal in India by instancing some lapses on Gandhis partincluding one possibly

homosexual episodefrom this supposedly exalted standard. But given what we know about gurus in

general, this is fairly mild and, to be fair, it does not seem to have involved the exploitation of credulous

acolytes, or not all that much. (He did employ his grand-niece Manu for the furtive purpose of lying in

bed with him to test his ability to resist erections.) Nonetheless, one might take a moment to imagine

life in one of Gandhis often-vaunted 700,000 villages of India, beating heart of the traditional

society, if the spinning wheel had indeed remained the leading mode of production and the position of

women had been brought into accord with his teachings. If the main residue of that bucolic sentiment is

the ubiquitous spinning-wheel symbol, this situation may represent not the triumph of a vulgar

materialism that would have brought sorrow to the Mahatma, so much as the observably universal

ambition of Indians to urbanize as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

How did Gandhi confront the other salient tasks of a nation builder: the question of Hindu

fundamentalism and the directly related problem of relations with the large Muslim minority? Here one

is obliged to emphasize another word from the Gandhian thesaurus: the naming of the countrys

immiserated untouchables as Harijans, or children of god. Here, the euphemism is direct and

unvarnished. But as it happens, and as is very frequently forgotten, the millions of untouchables had

their own highly literate and articulate spokesman in the person of B. R. Ambedkar, who called on the

victims of the caste system to abandon outright the Hindu faith that codified and enshrined their status

as subhumans. (Ambedkar himself adopted Buddhism.) Untouchables also tended to reject the

condescension implicit in the Harijan designation, preferring to go under the title ofDalits, which




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modern India has adopted. Gandhi and Ambedkar quarreled repeatedly over the question of special

political representation for those at the despised bottom of the caste ladder; Ambedkar supported it,

suspecting that Congress Party rule would be another name under which high-caste Hindus would

become the successors of the British Raj.

Lelyveld offers in passing the startling observation that Gandhi, who loftily asserted, I claim myself in

my own person to represent the vast mass of the untouchables, had in point of fact done next to

nothing to organize and lead them. On his way back from the 1931 London conference on Indian

independence at which the differences with Ambedkar rev ealed themselves as insuperable, Gandhi

stopped in Rome for a meeting with Mussolini, after which he wrote effusively of Il Duces service to

the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about coordination between capital

and labor [and] his passionate love for his people. Imprisoned by the British on his return, he

threatened to starve himself to death if special political dispensation was granted to untouchables T o

my own alarm, I found myself sympathizing with Churchills tirade against this self-righteous

combination of half-naked fakir and seditious Middle Temple lawyer, and with the viceroys

exasperated staff who found themselves intercepting the correspondence between fakir and Fhrer.

If the Dalits had good reason to fear that they would be subordinated to Hindu-majority tyranny afterthe attainment of self-rule, the Muslims of the subcontinent equally dreaded a similar outcome.

Lelyvelds treatment of this still-inflamed subject is distinctive and original. I had not known that, in the

early 1920s, Gandhi reposed his whole political weight in favor of the Indian Muslim demand for the

restoration of the Ottoman caliphate as the guarantor of Muslim holy places. This so-called Khilafat

movement, while conveniently anti-British in its implications, was by definition taking place in the

realm of illusion, since by that time even the Turks themselves had rejected the rule of the sultan. But

it gave Gandhi a platform to address sectarian and traditionalist Muslim throngs, and in his own eyes,

this apparently trumped its quixotry. Whether the encouragement of Islamist ancien rgime tendencies

among Muslims was a useful path to overcoming communal divisions is a question on which Lelyveld ispolitely neutral. He does note that one Muslim leader who remained unimpressed by the Khilafat

agitation was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a relatively secular nationalist and modernist who at an early

session of the Congress Party pointedly referred to Mister rather than Mahatma Gandhi. He was

not the only one to see through Gandhis theatrical attempts to base reconciliation on ephemeral and

crowd-pleasing themes: Lelyveld records that as early as 1921, the impressive coalition Gandhi had

built and inspired was proving to be jerry-built. Jinnahs future as the founder of the state of Pakistan

could not then be imagined, but when it did become imaginable it was again as a consequence of a

moment of Gandhian opportunism: when the Mahatma called on all Congress Party officials to leave

their posts in 1942, the Muslim League had only to tell its own supporters to stay at work to guarantee

itself a much greater share of power after Japan had been defeated.

Gandhi cannot escape culpability for being the only major preacher of appeasement who never changed

his mind. The overused word is here fully applicable, as Gandhi entreated the British to let the Nazis

take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all

these but neither your souls, nor y our minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes,

you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself man,

woman and child, to be slaughtered

This passage is revealing, not so much for its metaphysical amorality as for its demonstration of what

was always latent in Gandhism: a highly dubious employment of the mind-body distinction. For him,

the material and physical world was gross and polluting and selfish, while all that pertained to the soul

was axiomatically ideal and altruistic. (Let Hitler have Britains beautiful buildings, while their




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expelled inhabitants, even as they submitted to extermination, meditated on the sublime.) This false

antithesis is the basis for all religious fundamentalism, even as its deliberate indifference permits and

even encourages sharp deterioration in the world of real conditions. Not entirely unlike his

contemporary fighter for independence Eamon De Valera, who yearned for an impossible Ireland that

spoke Gaelic, resisted modernity, and put its trust in a priestly caste, Gandhi had a vision of an

unpolluted India that owed a great deal to the ancient Hindu fear and prohibition of anything that

originated from across the black water.

Lelyvelds high standing as a reporter was earned largely by his work in South Africa, culminating in

the memorable bookMove Your Shadow, which anatomized the deep psychology of racism. And it

may well have been Gandhis years in that country that helped imbue him with a lifelong fear of a

distraught, occluded relationship between sexuality, violence, and hygiene. Originally projected onto

the sheer physicality of the threatening Zulus, this extreme fastidiousness lent him a certain

identification with essentially conservative ideas of purity and order and simplicity. Very cleverly,

Lelyveld connects this ethos to V. S. Naipauls shocked confrontation with Indian squaloror, to be

more precise, with Indian levels of public defecationin his first study of the country,An Area of

Darkness. It is not, perhaps, so surprising that the Brahmin-like Naipaul found so much to admire inthe prim ex-attorney who experienced such combined revulsion and exaltat ion at the sheer filth and

chaos of his own version of the beloved country. This complex ofodi et amo, which led Gandhi to handle

the night soil of beggars and sweepers as an act of restitution, also made him suspicious of passions and

repelled by thosenot by any means excluding untouchables and Muslimswho seemed to exhibit

them. The strenuous manner of his fasts and mortifications and personal sexual repressions found a

paradoxical counterpart in his attachment to passivity and acceptance.

Auden wrote of Y eats that he became his admirers, and Naipaul was to annex this line in tracing the

way that Gandhi became more powerless as he grew more revered. Lelyveld concludes his Authors

Note by saying, Even now, he doesnt let Indiansor, for that matter, the rest of usoff easy. But can

it be that the admirers are too inclined to return a lenient verdict on their own highly protean

Mahatma? This book provides the evidence for both readings, depending on whether you think Gandhi

was a friend of the poor or a friend of poverty, and whether or not you can notice something grotesque

even something conceitedin the notion that the meek should inherit the Earth.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-real-mahatma-gandhi/8550/

Copyright 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.



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