Ramachandra Guha is one of India’s foremost public intellectuals and historians. “Gandhi Before India,” his first volume of a two-part biography of Mohandas K. Gandhi, was published in India earlier this month. India Ink spoke to Mr. Guha about his decision to work on a biography of Mr. Gandhi, his choice to make Mr. Gandhi’s years in South Africa as the first volume of the biography, and Mr. Gandhi’s journey from a boy in the western state of Gujarat to his return to India as a major political figure.
How did you choose to focus on Gandhi’s South African years as a book?
I found that most of the academic literature on Gandhi is based on his own writings. It is very important for a biographer to work with multiple sources. I went around researching Gandhi, I found a lot of interesting writings about Gandhi scattered in the archives around the world.
I was struck that Gandhi’s years in South Africa were under-researched, little known, a whole host of fascinating material about the secondary characters I have written about in this book, the larger historical context, how Indians were placed between the Africans and the British. One of the reasons that the South African period was not covered was that Indian scholars were not allowed there during the apartheid. When I went to South Africa and looked at the colonial archives there, I found an immense amount of material about Gandhi’s early life. It is really half his life. He lived in South Africa till he was 45. That was when I decided to write a whole book about Gandhi’s time in South Africa.
“Gandhi Before India” deals with his life till 45?
It deals with his growing up in Gujarat, his legal education in London, and his life in South Africa. It also looks at the Indian reception of Gandhi before he has come back to India. One of the interesting things I found was that his satyagrahas in South Africa were extensively covered in the Indian vernacular press. This was completely new to me. There is something called Report on Native Newspapers, which the British started in about 1905 to translate all the seditious stuff going on. It has reports on Gandhi from the Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, and Urdu press. I found a play in Telugu written about him using Hindu mythological imagery to describe how he was fighting for Indians in South Africa. That there was such attention paid to Gandhi’s diasporic struggle was entirely new to me. It helps understand why there was such a big reception for Gandhi and why major leaders such as Sarojini Naidu and Jinnah spoke at his reception.
When did his political evolution begin? What shaped him into the man he became?
It happened slowly. I found an obscure book published in the 1960s by a Gujarati schoolteacher who found Gandhi’s high school mark sheets. It turns out that he was an utterly mediocre student. In his early life, possibly his mother had a huge influence on him. She was from a sect known as Pranamis, whose founder had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Their shrines had verses from the Koran in Arabic and Gita in Sanskrit. It seems that the roots of Gandhi’s religious pluralism lie there.
And afterward he goes to London for his higher education. What happens there?
His years with the Vegetarian Society of London are extremely important. He was lonely, studying law, and came across the Vegetarian Society run by a man called Henry Salt, who proselytized against killing of animals, vivisection in medical research, promoted vegetarianism. Gandhi was culturally a vegetarian, but he became vegetarian by conviction after meeting Salt. I think it was important because it furthers his ecumenism. He befriends Englishmen, Christians, Theosophists; he befriends a man called Josiah Oldfield, they set up a home together, an interracial home in 1890s London. His first essays are published in the Vegetarian Society of London journal. He learns how to write, how to work as a part of an organization, he learns how to befriend people of other religions and races, getting members, getting subscriptions. Among other things, Gandhi is a writer, an editor, a propagandist through the written word and he learns the elements of this at the vegetarian society. When he goes to South Africa, what he had learned with the vegetarians was formative for him as an organizer and a writer.
How did his political life begin in South Africa?
He worked as a lawyer and his first clients were Gujaratis. His political education begins in Natal where the bulk of the Indians were. They had arrived in South Africa as indentured labourers but after serving their indenture they turn to market gardening and petty trade. There are working class Indians and mercantile Indians. Gandhi is with the mercantile Indians to begin with but he slowly engages with plantation workers and petty hawkers. What was striking was the hatred in South African white press in 1894-95 when he began organizing the Indians and started the Natal Indian Congress against certain discriminatory laws. The white press described him in editorials, reports, even satirical poems as a scheming, manipulative agitator who was out to mess things up for the whites.
Was it an unusual thing for a nonwhite person to do?
Yes, very unusual. In Natal, the Africans weren’t organized. Essentially, there were three major provinces in South Africa. There was Natal in the east and Cape in the south controlled by the British, and Transvaal in the center controlled by the Afrikaners. Cape was the most liberal province and it even allowed educated Indians and Africans to vote. There were African lawyers and teachers talking about native rights in Cape but in Natal the Africans were scattered throughout the countryside and not organized. Gandhi was the first colored organizer and agitator in Natal and that is why he evokes this intense hatred in the white press. And he is very young, just 26-27. It was quite striking, but some Englishmen stood behind him even when he was physically attacked. It consolidates his world view developed in London that while a system can be bad there are some good men in each race, each system.
Did he stay in Natal? Or move elsewhere?
After eight years, there he moved to Transvaal after the Boer War where there were fewer Indians but the laws were harsher. In his eight years in Johannesburg, he starts his first magazine and launches his first satyagraha.
How does he come upon the idea of Satyagraha?
It happened very slowly. Gandhi starts petitions for greater rights. He writes letters, meets the authorities.
In September 1906, there is a public meeting against the new Asiatic Ordinance and about 3,000 Indians gather. Some radical Indians make impassioned speeches talking about what Bal Gangadhar Tilak had done in India in the Swadeshi movement and suggest that the Indians in South Africa should court arrests. Gandhi is swayed and agrees.
Then he goes to England to lobby with the Imperial government, arguing that if the government withdraws the ordinance then we don’t have to go to jail. While he is in London, Gandhi sees suffragettes fighting for the voting rights. These women are taking on water canons and marching on the streets.
Also he has some Baptist friends in South Africa and England. They had done a kind of Satyagraha. In South Africa, the Church of England is the official state faith. In about 1902, the British government ordered that in all public schools, the Church of England creed would be taught. The dissenting churches oppose it with passive resistance by withdrawing their children from schools.
Around that time he also reads Tolstoy, who advocates passive resistance. Tolstoy is against compulsory military service and tells the Russians not to enroll into the army.
And the radicals within the Indian movement are urging him to move beyond just writing letters. They are quoting what Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal are doing. We will court arrest. All of these things feed into making Gandhi arrive at Satyagraha as a political tactic.
Gandhi’s first major satyagraha was the 1906 Satyagraha in Transvaal against the Asiatic Ordinance. What did he learn from that first experience?
In the first phase of the movement in Transvaal, the Gujarati merchants support him but they back out. Then the Tamil working class saves him and saves the movement. That is very important in making Gandhi conscious of the linguistic diversity of India. It de-classes Gandhi. He had earlier been working mostly with middle class English vegetarians and middle class Gujaratis in South Africa. When the Tamils join the movement, it deepens his understanding of many other questions in India, including caste.
What are the other landmarks of his South African life?
South Africa is important to the development of the core elements of his political and moral philosophy — interfaith pluralism, nonviolent resistance, important for his role as an editor and organizer. There he runs a journal, “Indian Opinion,” which he runs as a multilingual journal in four languages. Then there he meets a couple Henry and Millie Polack, whom he shares a house with. Millie Polack is a feminist and although Gandhi doesn’t become a through-going feminist he understands the origins of discrimination against women through the Polacks. He has a Jewish secretary, who is a feminist. It opens his mind from being a conservative Hindu patriarch. These characters are important secondary characters, who fashion him. We know very little about these people.
Are there any crucial Indian characters in his life before returning to India?
There is a Gujarati merchant called Pranjivan Mehta, who Gandhi met while he was a student in London. Mehta moves to Burma and sets up a jewelry business there. I call Pranjivan Mehta the Engels to Gandhi’s Marx. He funds Gandhi throughout these years. Mehta is the first man who anticipates Gandhi’s world-historical role. Mehta is the first person who, in a letter to [Indian nationalist leader] Gopal Krishna Gokhale, describes Gandhi as a Mahatma. Mehta writes that Gandhi is a great sage and moral figure and when he returns to India, he will unite the whole country.
Do you deal with Gandhi’s personal life?
I have written a lot about Gandhi’s failures as a husband and father. That is very striking. His obsession with brahmacharya (celibacy) is very important. It is part of his obsession with worldly pleasures. He is inspired by Tolstoy, who wrote an essay in 1905 about conquering basal passions, which are idleness, gluttony, and carnal love. Gandhi read everything Tolstoy wrote (except his novels!). I think he may have read this Tolstoy essay and took his vow of celibacy in 1906. I think there is a link. Gandhi’s wife Kasturba struggles with his vows but eventually she understands.
How does it affect his children?
The eldest son, Harilal, pays the highest price for it. When Harilal turns 18, Gandhi is changing from a legal profession to searching activist who has turned his back on the Western tradition. When Harilal wants to get an education, Gandhi can’t understand why he wants a western education. Harilal falls in love and has an intense romantic marriage but Gandhi can’t understand it. Gandhi can’t understand why Harilal wants to accompany his wife to India. He places absurd, unrealistic demands on his sons to be a perfect brahmachari, to be the perfect satyagrahi. Harilal was broken, devastated. The younger son, Manilal was left confused as well.
Finally, what prompts Gandhi to return to India?
My view is that he always saw his South African journey as temporary. He goes to South Africa in 1893 but he returns after eight years in 1901. He is elusive in his autobiography about why he returned. I think for several reasons. Kasturba wants to come back, they need to send children to school, and he wants to join the social reform movement with Gokhale. He tries to establish himself as a lawyer in Bombay but doesn’t succeed. Around the same time, the Boer War has ended, a peace treaty is being forged and the Indians there need a lawyer. He returns.
After the Boer War, there is a union of the Afrikaners and the British and the Afrikaners say that all Indians should be kicked out. Gandhi offers a compromise to the British governor asking just safeguard their rights of residence and trade and a limited number of immigrants everywhere. The British governor rejected it out of hand. His family has stayed in Bombay. It is clear that he wants to return to India. And all along, Pranjilal Mehta is asking him to return to India. Eventually after 1913-14 when he gets Indians some rights, he makes his final journey home. His delayed return also established him as a credible, major figure when he eventually returns.
The interview was lightly edited and condensed.