History & realpolitik, from the mouth of the Mahatma

When an extraordinary man like Mahatma Gandhi claims to be an “ordinary man”, one is tempted to ask: “Is he fooling himself or is he fooling you”? This autobiographical volume edited by Gandhiji’s grandson appears to answer the conundrum by showing that in an extraordinary man’s life, moments that are extraordinary come but rarely. For the rest, life is lived out as for the rest of us.

Although I have described this volume as “autobiographical”, it is, in fact, made up of not only Gandhiji’s own voluminous writings but also of extracts from commentaries or narratives of others rendered, however, in the first person. This is literary innovation of a very imaginative kind that keeps the reader glued to an account written for the most part in the present tense, thereby making the reader a virtual participant in a story that is, in every sense, historic but filled with personal quotidian problems that enterall our lives.

Thus, while we discover that after wrestling with himself for weeks over the theme of the 1930 satyagraha regarding which he“had not a ghost of suspicion”, it came to him “like a flash” to base the satyagraha on disobeying  the Salt Laws as the tax on salt, “the only condiment of the poor”, constituted “the most inhuman poll tax that the ingenuity of man could devise”. He therefore launched a movement of “non-violence of the activest type” (sic). The rest is history and told in fascinating detail from the mouth of the great leader.

But in the run up to, and in the aftermath of, this momentous movement of civil disobedience that shook the Empire as never before, Gandhi’s principal concerns were his diet (how many oranges? only raw milk? etc); his deteriorating relationship with his wayward eldest son, Harilal; his concern over his other son, Manilal, falling in love with a Muslim girl, Fatima Gool; fussing over another son, Ramdas, wanting to marry; doting over his youngest, Devdas, who come closest to his ideal; the health of his life companion, Ba; the death of his cousin, Maganlal and, even more poignantly, his nephew Rasiklal at a tender age; the shock of Deshbandhu’s sudden passing a few days after Gandhi had stayed with him in Darjeeling; the petty problems of running the Sabarmati Ashram, combined with “shock” at discovering unspecified “immoral” activities going on at the Ashram; and his horror at finding himself having an erection in his waking hours after he has mortified himself over his occasional night emissions. These and other such mundane matters, as for any ordinary man, take  on a life of their own through what would otherwise be the ups and downs of an extraordinary political life.     

The enduring theme of the Mahatma’s concerns is the imperative of Hindu-Muslim unity. Reading voraciously and writing copiously from prison, where he reveled in the “solitude”, his eclectic study included Gibbons and even “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” and extends more seriously to numerous books on comparative religion covering Hinduism, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, and  Zoroastrianism. Most  intensively, he reads all he can on Islam, a full range from the Koran itself and commentaries thereon to Mirza Ghulam Ahmed’s “Ethics of Islam”, Husain Sayani’s “Saints of Islam”, Syed Ameer Ali’s “Spirit of Islam”, R.A. Nicholson’s “Mystics of Islam”, ASA Wadia’s “The Message of the Prophet”, Maulana Shibli’s Life of the Prophet, and “Usva-e-Sahaba”, the reminiscences of the Prophet’s closest companions in several volumes. Some of this is even in Urdu, a language he taught himself (with some help from fellow prisoners), right up to “Urdu Book IV”.

In addition to such symbols of fraternity as staying frequently with Muslim hosts, such as Dr. Ansari, and his companions from Khilafat days, the Maulana brothers Mohammed and  Shaukat Ali and acting as a pallbearer when their remarkable mother, Bi-Amma, dies,he spent his last night before he famously picked up a fistful of salt mixed with mud to defy the colonial regime at the Dandi home of Shiraz Abdullahbhai. In the event of his being arrested, he entrusted the leadership of the Salt Satyagraha to Abbas Tyabji. But he does not appear to notice the larger implications of the fact that Tyabji is one of only two Muslims in his entourage of 72 persons who set out from Sabarmati Ashram on the Salt Satyagraha.

While individuals like Dr. Zakir Hussain, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Maulana Azad, follow his lead, the Muslim community as a whole does not take to him for he talks in an idiom redolent of Hindu mythology. And in the end, not only does Partition come but even the Calcutta “miracle” of fasting to stop communal strife ends in just nine days as bloodletting resumes, as Gopalkrishna Gandhi, his grandson and editor, underlines. His fast to protest separate electorates for Scheduled Castes so that the Hindu community is not split raises the disturbing question of why he did not resort to the same kind of fast to prevent the partition of India after having earlier asserted that he would allow partition only over his dead body. Yet, it is also evident that he chose Jawaharlal over Patel principally because in Nehru he saw a principled, steadfast secularist who talked the same language of communal amity.

So, great men struggle over ordinary problems of living and trying to do the “right” thing. The extraordinary thing about Mahatma Gandhi as an ordinary man is that he never flinched from presenting himself as he was, warts and all.

Mani Shankar Aiyar is a former Indian diplomat and a member of the Indian National Congress Party

I Am an Ordinary Man

Edited by Gopalkrishna Gandhi

Aleph

pp. 456; Rs 999