Ramachandra Guha interviewed by Sophie Roell

[This is an edited version of the interview. The full interview can be read on Janata blog. The five books recommended by Guha are: 1. Nirmal Kumar Bose, “My Days With Gandhi”; 2. Louis Fischer, “A Week with Gandhi”; 3. Dennis Dalton, “Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action”; 4. J.T.F. Jordens, “Gandhi’s Religion: A Homespun Shawl”; 5. Chandulal Bhagubhai, “Harilal Gandhi: A Life”.]

Sophie Roell (SR): We’re talking about books to read about Gandhi, but it’s hard to do that without mentioning your own biography. There’s the volume that covers Gandhi’s years in South Africa, “Gandhi Before India”, and then there’s another 900+ page volume, “Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World”, covering the period from 1914 until his death in 1948. Can you tell us why he’s so important and why we need to know about him?

Ramachandra Guha (RG): We need to know about him for many reasons. One is that he is regarded as the father of the Indian nation, and India is the world’s largest democracy and its second most populous country. He is the major national figure in India, comparable to, say, Lincoln and Jefferson in the United States, De Gaulle in France, Churchill in the UK, Mao in China, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and so on. He was the preeminent nationalist leader of one of the world’s most important and largest countries.

But he was much more than merely a political leader. He was also a moral philosopher who gave the world a particular technique for combating injustice, namely nonviolent protest. He called this technique ‘satyagraha’, or ‘truth force’, and it has been followed and adopted in many countries across the world since his death, including in the United States.

Gandhi was also a very interesting thinker on matters of religion. He lived, and indeed died, for harmony between India’s two major religious communities, Hindus and Muslims. At a time when the world is riven with discord and disharmony between faith communities, I think Gandhi is relevant.

He lived a long life, almost 80 years, during which time he studied and worked in three countries, three continents—in the United Kingdom and South Africa as well as India. He wrote a great deal: his collected works run to 90 volumes. His autobiography was translated into more than 40 languages. An early political text he wrote, called Hind Swaraj, is still taught in universities around the world. So he was a thinker and writer as well as being an activist, which is not that common.

And he was also controversial. There were people who debated with him in India and outside it. There were people who took issue with his political views, his views on religion, his views on social reform.

He was a person who touched many aspects of social and political life in the 20th century. The issues he was grappling with are still alive with us today, not just in India, but across the world. That’s why he is so interesting and important. I wanted to write about him all my life.

SR: Your biography of Gandhi … gives a much more comprehensive picture of him, but it’s also trying to give a balanced picture, I got the sense. You’re an admirer of Gandhi, but you’re also trying very hard to give the other side, is that right?

RG: Very much so, because the job of a scholar, and a biographer in particular, is to suppress nothing. Whatever you find that is of interest or importance must be included, even if it makes you uncomfortable or makes your story less compelling or newsworthy.

Of course, I do largely admire Gandhi—I wouldn’t want to spend so many years of my life working on someone I was ambivalent about—but I can see that in his debates with the aforementioned Ambedkar he was not always right. He could be patronising towards this younger, radical opponent of his.

I can also see the ways in which he manipulated control over the Congress Party. He was a consummate politician, and did not want his main political vehicle to slip out of his grasp. He was a political manager, in that sense. He was also not a very good husband and an absolutely disastrous father…. When it came to his personal life, his political life, and his ideological views, there were times when I was profoundly out of sympathy with Gandhi and profoundly in sympathy with those who argued with him. All this also had to be part of the story.

It’s a book that suppresses nothing and that shirks nothing. There will be some people who will read this book and come out admiring Gandhi much more, and there will be others who will have a sense of disquiet and maybe even anguish at the new things they have found out about Gandhi.

SR: Let’s go through the five books you’ve chosen. They’re not ranked in any particular order, but let’s start with the first one on your list, which is “My Days with Gandhi”, by his secretary and companion Nirmal Kumar Bose. This book deals with the last phase of his life. Could you tell me about it, and explain why it’s on your list of important books to read about Gandhi?

RG: I put this book by Nirmal Kumar Bose on my list because I wanted a firsthand account of Gandhi. Bose was a considerable scholar. He wrote books, edited a scholarly journal and taught at universities. Although he’s not that well-known outside India, he was among the country’s most influential anthropologists, writing on caste and India’s tribal regions.

He was interested in Gandhi too. He joined the freedom movement in the 1930s, went to jail, and prepared an anthology of Gandhi’s writings. Then, in the winter of 1946–7, Gandhi was in the field in Bengal trying to bring about peace. This was a time when religious rioting was particularly savage in eastern Bengal and Gandhi needed an interpreter. Bose was a Bengali speaker and Gandhi knew of him and his writings. So Bose went with him.

This was a time which, at one level, saw Gandhi at his most heroic. Here is a 77-year-old man walking through the villages of eastern Bengal. Communication is awful; there’s malaria and dysentery and all kinds of other problems. He’s trying to bring Hindus and Muslims together, undertaking these heroic experiments to promote peace….

I think the book is useful in that it provides a firsthand account of Gandhi by someone who is a scholar and a writer. Bose is not just a starry-eyed naïve disciple, but someone who is himself a thinker and has an analytical mind. He wants to probe deeply into his subject’s moods and anxieties.

SR: It’s also a picture of Gandhi at a point in his life when he’s a bit isolated and disillusioned because the country is going in the direction of Partition, isn’t it?

RG: Yes, that’s also very important. Gandhi struggled his whole life to keep a united India. From his time in South Africa onwards, he promoted Hindu–Muslim harmony. He was a Hindu himself, a deep believer and also deeply immersed in Hindu traditions. But in South Africa, his closest associates were Muslims.

In India, he tried to bring about a compact between these two large and sometimes disputatious communities. Ultimately, he failed—because Partition happened and Hindus and Muslims turned on each other. It was an effort of will, at his age, to compose himself, get himself back on track and then undertake this foot march through eastern Bengal….

Some people may feel Bose’s book is rather clinical and scholarly, but it’s an actual firsthand account and that’s its value.

SR: Let’s turn to the next book you’ve chosen, which is “A Week with Gandhi” by Louis Fischer. He was an American journalist who visited Gandhi at his ashram in 1942. Tell me more.

RG: Louis Fischer wrote more than one book on Gandhi. He also wrote a biography of Gandhi called The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, which was published after Gandhi’s death. That book was the basis for Attenborough’s film. I didn’t want that book; I wanted something else by Fischer. This book is set in 1942, again, a time of great political turmoil and anxiety. The Second World War was on.

The British had their backs to the wall. This is a time—1939, 1940, 1941—when the Americans hadn’t yet entered the war, and the British were fighting alone. Even the Soviets didn’t enter until 1941.

Gandhi and the Congress were confronted with a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, for all his political differences with Imperial rule, Gandhi had enormous personal sympathy with the British people.

Gandhi was willing to abandon his doctrinal commitment to non-violence and to tell the British ‘Hitler is evil, he must be defeated, we will help you defeat him.’ So he said to the British, ‘We will work with you, but you must assure us that you will grant us independence once the war is over.’ This was, in my view, a very reasonable condition—because if the British were fighting for freedom, then surely that meant freedom for Indians, too?

This was rejected by the then prime minister, Winston Churchill, who was a diehard imperialist—and whose viceroy in India, Linlithgow, was as reactionary as Churchill was.

So here is Gandhi in India wondering, ‘What do I do? I want to help the British, but I want my people to be free.’ The Americans are sympathetic to his predicament. Fischer goes to India in 1942, at a time when Gandhi is telling the British, ‘If you don’t assure us freedom, I will launch another countrywide protest movement against your rule.’ This was to become the Quit India Movement of August 1942; Fischer visits just before that.

He goes to Gandhi’s ashram in central India…. Fischer describes Gandhi’s entourage, the men and women around him, his wife, his disciples and then he talks to Gandhi. It’s an unusually frank and open conversation. As Fischer says later on in the book, one of the joys of talking to Gandhi is that it’s not pre-scripted, it’s a conversation. You’re opening up new lines of thought, and Gandhi himself is so open and transparent and reacting so spontaneously that he sometimes says things that he’s surprised at himself.

The book conveys the essential humanity of Gandhi and his down-to-earth character. He lived in this simple village community, with bad food and no modern conveniences at all.

SR: One thing that comes up in this book quite a bit is Gandhi’s emphasis on spinning. He’s always trying to get people to do more spinning. Could you explain what that’s all about?

RG: There are three major aspects to this. One is that spinning is a way of breaking down the boundaries between mental labour and manual labour and dissolving caste distinctions. In the Indian caste system, it’s only the Shudras and the Untouchables, the fourth and fifth strata, who do manual labour. Manual labour is despised in the Indian caste system, and Gandhi wanted to say that everyone should work with their hands.

The second aspect is that Gandhi believed in economic self-reliance. A major factor in India’s underdevelopment was that its indigenous industries had been destroyed under British colonial rule. So this was a way of saying, ‘We will spin our own cloth and we’ll do it ourselves using decentralised methods. Each of us will spin something.’

The third aspect of it is that he is cultivating a spirit of solidarity among his fellow freedom fighters, and spinning is a way of doing that constructively and non-violently. How do fascists inculcate solidarity among the community? By marching up and down to show their enemies how menacing they can be. Consider spinning the Gandhian alternative to a fascist marchpast.

This is how you should read Gandhi’s interest in spinning. It was at once a program of social equality, of breaking down caste distinctions, of economic self-renewal and of nationalist unity: everyone will do the same thing.

SR: Let’s go on to the third book on your list, which is by Dennis Dalton.

RG: Dennis Dalton is a retired American professor who is now in his eighties. He did a PhD in England in the 1960s and later on taught at Columbia. In the 1970s and 1980s he wrote a series of pioneering articles on Gandhi. Those articles then became the basis of this book, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action, the third of the five that I’ve recommended.

I want to say a little bit about the hallmarks of Dalton’s work and why it’s particularly important. The first thing is that it is absolutely grounded in primary research. Unlike other Gandhi scholars, Dalton does not restrict himself to the collected works. Dalton, while he knows Gandhi’s collected writings very well, also looks at contemporary newspapers and what they were saying about Gandhi.

He also looks at what Gandhi’s political rivals and adversaries were writing. In his book, he has a very interesting account of the Indian revolutionaries who disparaged nonviolence and thought armed struggle would be more effective and quicker in getting the British out. He talks about Ambedkar, the great low caste revolutionary who disagreed with Gandhi.

The other interesting thing about Dalton’s work—and this is very, very important—is that he looks at the evolution of Gandhi’s thought. Because a life is lived day to day. Whether Gandhi or Marx or Hobbes or Mill, any great political thinker is living his or her life day to day and adapting and changing his or her views. Those who don’t look at the evolution of a life, who don’t have a historical or chronological or developmental understanding of a life, are forced to cherry-pick. They want consistencies that don’t exist.

So I think as an account of the development of Gandhi’s political philosophy and as an analysis of Gandhi’s Indian critics—who had serious, profound and sometimes telling political disagreements with Gandhi—Dalton’s book is particularly valuable.

SR: Shall we talk about Gandhi’s religion next? This is a book called Gandhi’s “Religion: A Homespun Shawl”, written by a Belgian Jesuit, J.T.F. Jordens. His point is that it’s impossible to understand Gandhi without his religion.

RG: First, a small factual correction: the author, J.T.F. Jordens, is more accurately described as a lapsed Belgian Jesuit. He started as a Jesuit, came to India, joined a church and then left the church. He got interested in Gandhi, became a scholar and ended up a professor in Australia….

Coming to Jordens and Gandhi’s Religion: Gandhi was a person of faith, but he had a highly idiosyncratic, individual, eccentric attitude to faith. He called himself a Sanatanist Hindu—which means a devout or orthodox Hindu—but didn’t go into temples. He was a Hindu, but he radically challenged some of the prejudices of the Hindu tradition, particularly the practice of untouchability. He was a Hindu whose closest friend was an English Christian priest, C.F. Andrews. He was a Hindu whose political program was that Hindus should not oppress Muslims and Muslims must have equal rights in an independent India….

We live in a time of intellectuals disparaging religion, with an arrogant atheism on one side and religious fundamentalism on the other. Gandhi gives us a way out of this false choice. Gandhi tells us that you can be religious, that there is a wonder and mystery to life which cold-blooded rationality and science can’t completely explain.

But, at the same time, there is no one true path to God. Gandhi says, Accept your fate. You’re born a Hindu, fine. Your parents, your grandparents were Hindus for many generations. But think about what you can learn from other faiths. Cultivate friendships with Christians and Muslims and Jews and Parsis. If you see your faith in the mirror of another, you may find out its imperfections. It’s a very interesting, heterodox approach to religion….

I think Jordens’s book is the most scrupulous, fair-minded and persuasive account of why faith is so central to Gandhi and what makes Gandhi’s faith so distinctive. That is why it is on my list.

SR: The last book on your list is a life of his son Harilal. It’s called “Harilal Gandhi: A Life”. Some quotes from his son that appear in the book: “No attention was paid to us” and “You have spoken to us not in love, but always in anger.” It’s very sad, isn’t it? Tell me about his son and this book.

RG: This was a book written in Gujarati by a scholar called Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal and translated into English by one of the preeminent Indian Gandhian scholars of the day, Tridip Suhrud, who was, for many years, the curator of Gandhi’s own personal archive in Ahmedabad. Suhrud has provided a very detailed introduction and notes, so it’s a very good edition of this biography.

Gandhi is profoundly unsympathetic to his son’s hopes, his desires. He is telling his son… follow me, become a social worker, give up everything for the community like I have done…. Gandhi turns increasingly angry, judgmental and frustrated at his son not doing what he wants him to do. And Harilal is broken by this. At one level he resents his father’s overbearing, authoritarian manner and at another level he craves his father’s attention. So Harilal goes to jail several times in South Africa and several times in India too because he wants his father to know that he’s as much of a patriot as anybody else.

The son tries several times to matriculate, but fails. His wife dies. Then he tries several times to become a businessman, but all his business ventures fail. Then he becomes an alcoholic, then he becomes a lapsed alcoholic, then he goes back to the bottle again. Then, because he’s so angry with his father, he converts to Islam merely to spite Gandhi. This leads to a very anguished letter by his mother, Kasturba Gandhi. She’s very rarely in the public domain but is so angry at her son’s spiteful act, that she writes in the press saying, Why are you doing this just to shame your father?

So it’s a very tragic and complicated relationship and of course it’s not unusual….

Again, it’s a factual account. It’s written by a scholar who wants to tell you the truth in an unadorned, factual, dispassionate way. But I think it’s very effective for not being overwritten or overblown or excessively hyperbolic or judgmental.

SR: One last question: you didn’t include Gandhi’s autobiography on this list of books. Is that because you wanted them to be books about him rather than by him or was there a more fundamental reason?

RG: Gandhi’s autobiography is indispensable, but it’s so well known. It’s available in hundreds of editions, and in dozens of languages. Every major publisher has published it and you can get it anywhere. I wanted readers of Five Books to get some fresher, more vivid, less-known perspectives on Gandhi.

But certainly, they should read the autobiography too. It’s now available in a new annotated edition by the scholar I mentioned, Tridip Suhrud. It’s a first rate edition brought out by Yale University Press.

(Ramachandra Guha is a historian based in Bengaluru.)