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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
Unfinished Symphony
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| A stellar new biography captures the storm and stress of Gandhi’s operatic struggles, with himself and with India |
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COURTESY DAYANITA SINGH |
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| ‘Untitled’ / ‘Being of Darkness’, from House of
Love by Dayanita Singh.
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| T |
HE LIFE OF MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
seems to have had four themes, and the
Mahatma dwelt on each of these, throughout
his life, for different lengths of time and
with varying amounts of emphasis. The four
themes were Hindu-Muslim unity, the eradication of untouchability,
the ideal of social service and the cultivation
of non-violence |
(ahimsa). Seen as a structure with these themes, the political biography of Gandhi becomes a sort of opera—integrated, majestic, complex, extended, dramatic and with an overwhelming mood of pathos, even tragedy. It is important to keep in mind the operatic nature of this life, because only then do individual episodes in it make sense, and only then can we appreciate the astonishing extent to which its protagonist (Gandhi, the political actor), who was also its author (Gandhi, the tireless teller of his own story), had a composite vision of how he was to live and how his goals were to be realised.
In his new biography, Joseph Lelyveld reads the political
career of Gandhi as though it were a piece of music. Gandhi’s
life-history became, through his own unique genius—at once historical and artistic—a historic life and a work of
art. Lelyveld sets himself the task, not of mere narration,
not even of reconstruction, but of composition, in the musical
sense: creating the complete notation of the opera that
was the life of Mahatma Gandhi. Not everyone can read music,
and not everyone can hear the music as it would sound
if all the notes on the page were played aloud. Great Soul:
Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India demands as
much effort from the reader as it has clearly taken from its
writer. By the time we put down this deeply resonant, even
sonorous book, we can only begin to appreciate how difficult it must have been for Gandhi to live out his character,
his persona and his destiny.
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Great Soul:
Mahatma Gandhi
and His Struggle with India
Joseph Lelyveld
HarperCollins India,
452 pages,  699 |
Ramachandra Guha, who is currently working on his
own two-part biography of Gandhi, some years ago wrote an essay titled, ‘Why South Asians Don’t Write Good Biographies,
and Why They Should’. They write plenty of history,
literature and hagiography, argued Guha, but somehow
miss the genre that lies at the intersection of these three
forms. Gandhi—like his peer Rabindranath Tagore—has
been the subject of numerous biographies in the six decades
since his death in 1948, by Indians, Britons and Americans.
The Frenchman Romain Rolland wrote a biography as early
as 1924, when Gandhi was only 55 years old. But it is Lelyveld
who I think produces the most effective Gandhi biography
thus far (we will have to wait another three or four
years, at least, for Guha’s version to appear). And the reason
for this, I suspect, is not only that Lelyveld has lived and
worked as a journalist in India and South Africa, the two
countries where Gandhi spent most of his life; not only that
Lelyveld has a personal connection with India through his
brother David Lelyveld, a scholar of Urdu, and his sister-in-law Meena Alexander, a poet; not only that Lelyveld has
trawled the archives, mastered the vast Gandhi literature,
and travelled to every big and small place that Gandhi visited
on what Lelyveld calls “both subcontinents”.
A big factor in Lelyveld hitting all the right notes, in my
view—to continue the musical metaphor—is the peculiarly American mastery of the genre of the biography of a founding
father. Lelyveld brings to his study of Gandhi a long-standing
scholarly tradition in his own country: the ability
to grasp, as a compelling whole, the life and work of the
makers of the American Revolution, the American Constitution
and American democracy. Led by Guha—and his
friend and fellow historian, Sunil Khilnani, who has been
working for the past few years on the life of Nehru—perhaps
Indians too, are beginning to examine their own founders
as individuals, as a group and as the authors of the nation-state
as well as the unprecedented political experiment that
we call India. Lelyveld is not an Indian, and thus does not
think of Gandhi as the father of his nation; he is not a Briton,
and thus does not see Gandhi as the one who vanquished
the British Empire. He is American, coming from a culture
where the founders have been remembered, analysed, lauded
and criticised for over two centuries. By getting behind
the eyes and underneath the skin of Gandhi, but also recognising at every moment that he was a great man and seen as
such even within his own lifetime, Lelyveld has set the bar
for future biographers very high indeed.
| G |
REAT SOUL DESCRIBES Gandhi’s life as a musical
structure composed of four themes. Another way
to understand the book is as an attempt to prise
open the prison-house of mahatma-hood in which Gandhi
lived out most of his political career, especially its second
act, in India (1915-1948). The injunction to ever keep on becoming
and to always try to be |
a ‘great soul’ was partially of Gandhi’s own making, partially foisted upon him by the expectations of others, and partially the verdict of history that any account of Gandhi’s life must retrospectively justify. This injunction itself—over and above the contingent dictates and terrible demands of historical circumstances as they unfolded—drove Gandhi’s decisions and shaped Gandhi’s personality to a degree not commonly seen even in the lives of other famous men and women who might have loomed large in the histories of their nations.
The elusive formula of ‘how to be a mahatma’ provides
much of the script, the template, and the peculiarly intense
conflict that characterised Gandhi’s trajectory. It is the title
of “Mahatma”—or its curse—that lifts Gandhi’s life far
beyond that of your run-of-the-mill politician, mass leader,
sovereign ruler or social reformer, and takes it to the level
of a saint—an Augustine or a Francis of Assisi, perhaps. Indians
sensed this saintly quality from the very get-go, and
never stopped turning up in their millions just to see Gandhi,
to touch the dust of his feet, to be in his presence as they
would want to be near a person with religious charisma, a
spiritual aura. Gandhi himself, as we gather through Lelyveld’s
relentless probing, experienced his mahatma-hood
as both a burden and an aspiration. We may read his life between
his arrival in South Africa in 1893 and his bloody end
from the bullets of an assassin in New Delhi 45 years later,
as an unremitting striving to achieve this self-dictated, or
externally imposed, steady state of greatness, nobility, purity,
responsibility and ultimately, immortality.
The four themes that Gandhi kept dwelling on and returning
to encompassed such disparate compulsions
as communal harmony, public sanitation, spinning the
charkha and non-violent satyagraha. Uniting them, in my
view, is “the self”, the central pillar of the entire Gandhian
edifice. The “self” appears in both “mahatma” (as -atma,
which is “soul” or “self”) and “swaraj” (as swa-, which is again, “self”). The categories “mahatma” and “swaraj” are
the warp and the weft of Gandhi’s life: in the fabric of that
life are woven both a personal striving—to be, in himself,
a great soul (mahatma)—and a political quest—for India to
achieve self-rule (swaraj).
Gandhi’s was the quintessential search for the self in
modern India: he saw clearly, I believe, that neither individual
greatness (mahanata), nor political sovereignty (raj)
could be coherently defined without a strong, stable and
unitary self at the centre. Both Gandhi the man and India
the nation had to discover the selfhood that would unify,
stabilise, rationalise and drive the historic transformation
that we now recognize as the Indian “independence movement”
or “freedom struggle”. Lelyveld does not discuss
Gandhi’s 1909 tract Hind Swaraj in any detail, but it was in
this small, epiphanic work that Gandhi’s theory about the
all-important relationship between self (swa) and sovereignty
(raj) was most precisely—and prophetically—spelled
out. Gandhi states there, in no uncertain terms, that political
sovereignty and the mastery of the self are for him not
just mutually enabling but indeed mutually constitutive
ends, and can only ever be achieved in concert with one another.
The hyphenation of elements in “self-rule” does not
do justice to the compounding of them in swaraj—in the
Gandhian metaphysics, the connection between “self” and
“sovereignty” is not a mere ligature, but an alchemy.
The conflicts between different aspects of the Indian
self—between Hindus and Muslims, say, or caste Hindus
and untouchables, or rural and urban populations, or traditional
knowledge and modern science—were often so
shearing and so prolonged as to rent the nation asunder,
even before it came into existence. These conflicts, in fact,
continue to pull India apart in painful ways even today, long
after independence. Gandhi’s entire struggle, with India
and not for India or on behalf of India (as Lelyveld’s subtitle
spells out), was to find and articulate its unbroken, whole,
complete self—a self at peace with itself. With Partition,
military-industrial modernity, Western economic models
and the bio-political state that emerged upon India’s decolonisation
in 1947, Gandhi, in Lelyveld’s telling, failed to
realise the integral and reconciled Indian selfhood that he
had continuously sought.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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r n padhi
14 November 2011
01:32 PM
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i feel disgusted with ideas of this kind where we discuss sexual activities of public figures,politcal leaders,statesmen,cine-artists and religious gurus
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