Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India - Joseph Lelyveld | Asia Society

Joseph Lelyveld has written a ­generally admiring book about ­Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet "Great Soul" also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive ­intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually ­despising people as individuals.

ln his lifelong campaign for Swaraj ("self-rule"), India could have achieved it many years earlier if ­Gandhi had not continually abandoned his civil-disobedience campaigns just as they were beginning to be successful. With 300 million Indians ruled over by 0.1% of that number of Britons, the subcontinent could have ended the Raj with barely a shrug if it had been politically united. Yet Gandhi's uncanny ability to irritate and frustrate the leader of India's 90 million Muslims, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (whom he called "a maniac"), wrecked any hope of early independence. He equally alienated B.R. Ambedkar, who spoke for the country's 55 million Untouchables (the lowest caste of Hindus, whose very touch was thought to defile the four higher classes). Ambedkar pronounced Gandhi "devious and untrustworthy." Between 1900 and 1922, Gandhi ­suspended his efforts no fewer than three times, leaving in the lurch more than 15,000 supporters who had gone to jail for the cause.

A ceaseless self-promoter, Gandhi bought up the entire first edition of his first, hagiographical biography to send to people and ensure a reprint. Yet we cannot be certain that he really made all the pronouncements attributed to him, since, according to Mr. Lelyveld, Gandhi insisted that journalists file "not the words that had actually come from his mouth but a version he ­authorized after his sometimes heavy editing of the transcripts."

We do know for certain that he ­advised the Czechs and Jews to adopt nonviolence toward the Nazis, saying that "a single Jew standing up and ­refusing to bow to Hitler's decrees" might be enough "to melt Hitler's heart." (Nonviolence, in Gandhi's view, would apparently have also worked for the Chinese against the Japanese ­invaders.) Starting a letter to Adolf ­Hitler with the words "My friend," Gandhi egotistically asked: "Will you listen to the appeal of one who has ­deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?" He advised the Jews of Palestine to "rely on the goodwill of the Arabs" and wait for a Jewish state "till Arab ­opinion is ripe for it."

In August 1942, with the Japanese at the gates of India, having captured most of Burma, Gandhi initiated a ­campaign designed to hinder the war effort and force the British to "Quit ­India." Had the genocidal Tokyo regime captured northeastern India, as it ­almost certainly would have succeeded in doing without British troops to halt it, the results for the Indian population would have been catastrophic. No fewer than 17% of Filipinos perished under Japanese occupation, and there is no reason to suppose that Indians would have fared any better. Fortunately, the British viceroy, Lord Wavell, simply imprisoned Gandhi and 60,000 of his followers and got on with the business of fighting the Japanese.

Gandhi claimed that there was "an exact parallel" between the British ­Empire and the Third Reich, yet while the British imprisoned him in luxury in the Aga Khan's palace for 21 months ­until the Japanese tide had receded in 1944, Hitler stated that he would simply have had Gandhi and his supporters shot. (Gandhi and Mussolini got on well when they met in December 1931, with the Great Soul praising the Duce's "service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about a coordination between Capital and ­Labour, his passionate love for his people.") During his 21 years in South Africa (1893-1914), Gandhi had not opposed the Boer War or the Zulu War of 1906—he raised a battalion of stretcher-bearers in both cases—and after his return to India during World War I he offered to be Britain's "recruiting agent-in-chief." Yet he was comfortable opposing the war against fascism.

Although Gandhi's nonviolence made him an icon to the American civil-rights movement, Mr. Lelyveld shows how ­implacably racist he was toward the blacks of South Africa. "We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs," Gandhi complained during one of his campaigns for the rights of ­Indians settled there. "We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the ­Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals."

Gandhi outside of his house on the Sevagram ashram, which he founded in Maharashtra in 1936.

In an open letter to the legislature of South Africa's Natal province, ­Gandhi wrote of how "the Indian is ­being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir," someone, he later stated, "whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and ­nakedness." Of white Afrikaaners and Indians, he wrote: "We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they do." That was possibly why he refused to allow his son Manilal to marry ­Fatima Gool, a Muslim, despite publicly promoting Muslim-Hindu unity.

Gandhi's pejorative reference to ­nakedness is ironic considering that, as Mr. Lelyveld details, when he was in his 70s and close to leading India to ­independence, he encouraged his ­17-year-old great-niece, Manu, to be naked during her "nightly cuddles" with him. After sacking several long-standing and loyal members of his 100-strong ­personal entourage who might disapprove of this part of his spiritual quest, Gandhi began sleeping naked with Manu and other young women. He told a woman on one occasion: "Despite my best efforts, the organ remained aroused. It was an altogether strange and shameful experience."

Yet he could also be vicious to Manu, whom he on one occasion forced to walk through a thick jungle where sexual assaults had occurred in order for her to retrieve a pumice stone that he liked to use on his feet. When she returned in tears, Gandhi "cackled" with laughter at her and said: "If some ruffian had carried you off and you had met your death courageously, my heart would have danced with joy."

Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some ­reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might ­relate to the enemas Gandhi gave ­himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.

Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about "how completely you have taken ­possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."

They were parted when Gandhi ­returned to India in 1914, since the German national could not get permission to travel to India during ­wartime—though Gandhi never gave up the dream of having him back, writing him in 1933 that "you are always ­before my mind's eye." Later, on his ashram, where even married "inmates" had to swear celibacy, Gandhi said: "I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of men and women." You could even be thrown off the ashram for "excessive tickling." (Salt was also forbidden, because it "arouses the senses.")

In his tract "Hind Swaraj" ("India's Freedom"), Gandhi denounced lawyers, railways and parliamentary politics, even though he was a professional lawyer who constantly used railways to get to meetings to argue that India ­deserved its own parliament. After ­taking a vow against milk for its ­supposed aphrodisiac properties, he ­contracted hemorrhoids, so he said that it was only cow's milk that he had ­forsworn, not goat's. His absolute ­opposition to any birth control except sexual abstinence, in a country that ­today has more people living on less than $1.25 a day than there were Indians in his lifetime, was more dangerous.

Telling the Muslims who had been responsible for the massacres of thousands of Hindus in East Bengal in 1946 that Islam "was a religion of peace," Gandhi nonetheless said to three of his workers who preceded him into its ­villages: "There will be no tears but only joy if tomorrow I get the news that all three of you were killed." To a Hindu who asked how his co-religionists could ever return to villages from which they had been ethnically cleansed, Gandhi blithely replied: "I do not mind if each and every one of the 500 families in your area is done to death." What mattered for him was the principle of nonviolence, and anyhow, as he told an orthodox Brahmin, he believed in re­incarnation.

Gandhi's support for the Muslim ­caliphate in the 1920s—for which he said he was "ready today to sacrifice my sons, my wife and my friends"—Mr. Lelyveld shows to have been merely a cynical maneuver to keep the Muslim League in his coalition for as long as possible. When his campaign for unity failed, he blamed a higher power, ­saying in 1927: "I toiled for it here, I did penance for it, but God was not ­satisfied. God did not want me to take any credit for the work."

Gandhi was willing to stand up for the Untouchables, just not at the ­crucial moment when they were ­demanding the right to pray in temples in 1924-25. He was worried about alienating high-caste Hindus. "Would you teach the Gospel to a cow?" he asked a visiting missionary in 1936. "Well, some of the Untouchables are worse than cows in their understanding."

first Great Fast—undertaken despite his belief that hunger strikes were "the worst form of coercion, which militates against the fundamental principles of non-violence"—was launched in 1932 to prevent Untouchables from ­having their own reserved seats in any future Indian parliament. Because he said that it was "a religious, not a political question," he accepted no debate on the matter. He elsewhere stated that "the abolition of Untouchability would not entail caste Hindus having to dine with former Untouchables." At his ­monster rallies against Untouchability in the 1930s, which tens of thousands of people attended, the Untouchables themselves were kept in holding pens well away from the caste Hindus.

Of course, any coalition movement ­involves a certain degree of compromise and occasional hypocrisy. But Gandhi's saintly image, his martyrdom at the hands of a Hindu fanatic in 1948 and Martin Luther King Jr.'s adoption of him as a role model for the American civil-rights movement have largely protected him from critical scrutiny. The French man of letters Romain Rolland called Gandhi "a mortal demi-god" in a 1924 hagiography, catching the tone of most writing about him. People used to take away the sand that had touched his feet as relics—one relation kept Gandhi's ­fingernail clippings—and modern biographers seem to treat him with much the same reverence today. Mr. Lelyveld is not immune, making labored excuses for him at every turn of this nonetheless well-researched and well-written book.

Yet of the four great campaigns of Gandhi's life—for Hindu-Muslim unity, against importing British textiles, for ending Untouchability and for getting the British off the subcontinent—only the last succeeded, and that simply ­because the near-bankrupt British led by the anti-imperialist Clement Attlee desperately wanted to leave India anyhow after a debilitating world war.

It was not much of a record for someone who had been invested with "sole ­executive authority" over the Indian ­National Congress as early as in December 1921. But then, unlike any other ­politician, Gandhi cannot be judged by ­actual results, because he was the "Great Soul."

ANDREW ROBERTS WSJ review

Post-colonial town called Deoria

S H A H I D A M I N

.....Post-independence, a few new district towns came into being, and somehow even these began to matter. Deoria, tucked away in the north-eastern corner of the province,was one such Sadr station of a new district carved out from the sprawling Gorakhpur, if memory serves me right, in 1949; as children we were told that both electricity and the Collector came to Deoria in the same year. Strange and predictable are the ways of memory: our new district was officially sawed off from Gorakhpur in 1946, but it took some time to take shape. The town received its power supply very definitely in 1949, and it is the difference made to quotidian and civic life by the 60-watt GEC bulb that cast its shadow on the remembered inexactitude that of us Deoria-born midnight child

Even in the mid-50's, a minion of the municipality would routinely clamber up a portable ladder, the sort that paid electoral publicists carry on bicycles for high-density poster warfare, to replenish and light the glass - encased oil-lamps stuck on bamboo poles at the head of the smaller lanes. We associated these light (battis) with the word 'public': such was our adolescent 'municipal' consciousness in an inadequately lit Deoria of the 1950s.The other sign of the early maturity of Deoria town was the well-swept, red brick-and-tiled K. E. Higher Secondary School; the initials originally stood for King Edward VII, but by the early 1950s King Emperor had been reduced to his initials by a linguistic artifice of post-coloniality. The abbreviation, when rendered into the local language was meaningless, unless one chose to indigenise it as the Hindi word kaee, meaning not one but several. The singularity of that imperial school, one each for every dusty district, was lost on us first generation post colonials, as we subordinated an historic nomenclature to the freedoms of juvenile word-play.The town electrified, the Indian Collector moved into his official residence on Kachahri (Court) Road on a highway that made its way to Barhaj, the important riverine mart, and teertha on the banks of the river Saryu-Ghaghra. It was on and off this pakki (metalled) road that the Courts and the Magistrate's offices came up, giving rise to a nai (new) colony where the Police Lines, the District Hospital and bungalows for the bureaucrats were to get sited.The much older tahsil building, further away from the highway and towards the old town,faced the railway station. Outside the Collector Sahib's Bungalow, the sprawling compound carefully tended with wheat and cauliflowers, stood a whitewashed angular pillar which listed the exact distance to Calcutta and Madras, Delhi and Lucknow. Litigants making their way to the courts further down the road took as much notice of this long-distance milestone, as Mauryan peasants would have done of the Prakrit homiletics of Devanampriya Priyadarshi, King Ashoka, bill boarded on ancient Indian trade routes.

The district distance-marker stood for the fact that a large-sized tahsil town had attained administrative puberty. It was telling us - but we schoolchildren did not care - how far our Collector's bungalow was from each of the several significant towns and cities of independent India. A second-class sadr station loathed by the bureaucracy for its insalubrious climate was in the moment of its birth being imbricated with the nation and the state.

The meter gauge railway track however meant that Deoria did not have a direct line of access to those distant places which were on the broad gauge. Delhi or Aligarh meant a change at Lucknow's Charbagh station; Howrah and Bombay a switch at Banaras andAllahabad. For long, I, a Deoria-born, remained envious of a Sultanpur or a Bara Banki, which had higher platforms and king-size rail carriages. Our premier super-fast train - the Awadh-Tirhut Mail - which curled all the way up to Siliguri in distant Assam - was poor substitute, I felt, for the inadequate width of our railway track! It was only in the 80's when Deoria station got an uplift and a new set of broad rails that my sense of having been worsted personally in the 'battle of the gauges' diminished slowly. Even now, when I am told that my hometown is connected directly to Delhi-Bombay-Cochin, I am not quite prepared to believe it . Deoria Sadr has come a long way from the day that the PWD (Public Works Department) stuck that all-India phallic milestone outside the District Magistrate's bungalow.

As an old tahsil town, Deoria had a rudimentary armature of the colonial state well before it became the headquarters of a new district on the eve of Partition-Independence. Selected as the headquarters of a new administrative subdivision in 1905,5 this small-time centre place with a population of 2000+, well below the average big village, had already a specialized bureaucratic and mercantile leavening. “In addition to the tahsil buildings, Deoria contains the court-house and lock-up of the sub-divisional officer, the munsif's court, a registration office, a combined post and telegraph office, a dispensary, an inspection bungalow, an Anglo-vernacular school, an upper primary school, a school for girls and a cattle pound”, noted the District Gazetteer in 1909. The tahsil and the sub-divisional courts had attracted a fair sprinkling of mukhtars and pleaders from the qasba of Machlishahr in Jaunpur, the long-settled locale of an important regional kingdom during the 14th-16th centuries. In its initial stages this was a forced migration to virgin areas in the same cultural zone in the aftermath of the Great Revolt of 1857. The locally dominant Brahmins and Thakurs supplied the bulk of the lawyers once the district courts became functional from the early 1950s.

The town was a leading retail centre of Manchester cloth; the advent of the railways in 1885 added further to the number and strength of mercantile-Marwari traders of Deoria.

The older metalled road connecting the productive Kasia-Padrauna area in the northeast to the entrepot town Barhaj on the Ghaghra passed through the older bazaar and was “flanked by the shops of wealthy Marwari merchants” who had built a dharamshala in the town and a fine masonry tank - Lacchi Ram ka Pokhra - named after the main benefactor. The railway line while pushing the Marwari masonry tank on to the wrong side of the track, brought the traders in closer proximity to warehouse at the station. The modern bazaar now beganliterally at the mouth of the railway godown at the crossroads called Rameshwar Lal ka Chauraha, named after a prominent Marwari cloth merchant. By 1900s Deoria had emerged as the centre of the wholesale trade in cloth and cotton stuffs on the eastern section of the BNW railway line, between Banaras and Gorakhpur.Marwaris provided an important financial and social support to the cultural, linguistic and communitarian initiates that reached Deoria from Banaras and Allahabad in the 1890s and early 1910s. The militant Cow Protection Leagues, the concerted (and successful)attempts to win for Devnagari Hindi the status of a language of the courts, the Sewa Samitis of the 1910s which ran Sanskrit Pathshalas, organized discourses on the Bhagavad Geeta, streamlined the organization of Hindu fairs and festivals - were funded largely by the Marwaris.Marwari wealth and charity both came wrapped in bolts of fine and coarse cloth.“Eh Marwari, khola kewari, tohre ghar mein lugga sari” (“Oh Marwari, open up, there are dhotis and saris stacked in your house”) was an old rhyme that was perhaps thought up by those knocking at the doors of cloth-bound charity.

Manufacturing was marginal to the generation of wealth in Deoria. A major centre of indigenous sugar production, a qasba called Rampur, was just five miles away across the railway tracks on the Little Gandak that had connected it via the Ghaghra to the riverine corridor of upper India all the way down to Calcutta. Deoria town was host neither to cotton weaving nor to the boiling down of cane juice into desi or indigenously made sugar.

The early 1930s saw the hurried erection of two sugar mills, one opposite the railway station, to the home market that the colonial government had created by slapping prohibitively high protective duties on foreign, notably Javan sugar. The station sugar factory, the Sindhi mill as it was called after those who had floated it, buying up second hand machinery, it was said, from a Java factory forced into liquidation by the loss of the India market, was well and truly 'sick'-and-dead by the late 1950s.

The violence of Partition sent a few Punjabi refugees even to our part of India, 750 miles distant from the new-and-permanent western borders of 1947. Not that this was the first contact between purabiyas (easterners) and Punjabis. Another historic convulsion - the Great Rebellion of 1857 and its suppression - had brought east-U.P. peasants face to face with Sikh landholders from the Amritsar village of Majitha, on a sprawling estate which included the famous riot-torn town of Chauri Chaura, 15 miles west from Deoria.The Majithias turned out to be the improving landlords that Cornwallis (buried in Ghazipur) had dreamt of in Calcutta in 1793. They improved drainage and irrigation, cultivated sugarcane and set up a large sugar mill and a rum distillery.

The Punjabi partition refugees that came to Deoria - the Nandas who graduated from selling bread and butter to a profitable photography business, Iqbal Singh who fast emerged as the most important 'general merchant', the Chopras who made their mark at the far end of the modern or nauki bazaar as fruiterers, and most importantly the Aroras, who by the 1960s had set up a cold storage and a truck transport network - all these migrants from and into a new nation impinged very directly on our district town. We bought our fruit from the Chopras, the youngest of whom gave private tuition to schoolboys of K.E., the Sewa Samiti and the Marwari School.

Iqbal Singh's store was the source of Eveready batteries for that novel contraption of the early 1960s - the National Panasonic two-band transistor that someone had gifted to me from America, and which was well worth it even if it could not catch Radio Ceylon on 25metre band quite as well as that durable piece of acoustic furniture, the multi-valve, full-size Philips radio. Popular Hindi film music and catchy ad-jingles were banned on the austere All India Radio, and it was the Trade Department of Radio Ceylon, barely outside the 12 mile territorial waters of the Union of India, that had stepped into the breach to provide us first generation post-colonials with the short-wave joys of 'hit' Bombay film songs.

After the assassination of Indira Gandhi in late October 1984, the cane fields of the Majithias were set afire, and the shop of Iqbal Singh in Deoria bazaar looted. Both these Sikhs, one a notable agro-industrialist, the other a hard seller of Knight Queen mosquito repellent, Clinic anti-dandruff shampoo, Maggie 2-minute-noodles and TV-friendly Uncle Chips, suffered their losses and went back to their businesses, acutely aware of the violent pedagogy of majoritarian nationalism, ‘Teach these minority bastards a lesson’. After ‘the incidents of December 6 1992’, or the ‘martyrdom of the Babri mosque’ (as the other perspective hasit), the killings in Ayodhya, Surat and Bombay were to teach the same lesson to the puta-tive descendants of the first Mughal emperor Babur in Deoria - through Distance Education,so to speak.In November 1984 Deoria was as much a part of a hideous national vendetta as was Trilokpuri in trans-Jamuna Delhi. One wonders whether it was the transmission of the stilled visage of Indira Gandhi from Teen Murti House, the residence of independent India's first Prime Minister, that was solely responsible for that macabre unification of India, linking Patparganj where I live to Deoria Sadr, 520 miles distant, on a direct route over the Nizamuddin railway bridge to New Delhi, the capital of the nation.

(S H A H I D A M I N: Post-colonial towns called Deoria)

Amitabh Bachhan reciting Madhushala

मदिरालय जाने को घर से चलता है पीनेवला,
'किस पथ से जाऊँ?' असमंजस में है वह भोलाभाला,
अलग-अलग पथ बतलाते सब पर मैं यह बतलाता हूँ -
'राह पकड़ तू एक चला चल, पा जाएगा मधुशाला।'

सुन, कलकल़ , छलछल़ मधुघट से गिरती प्यालों में हाला,
सुन, रूनझुन रूनझुन चल वितरण करती मधु साकीबाला,
बस आ पहुंचे, दुर नहीं कुछ, चार कदम अब चलना है,
चहक रहे, सुन, पीनेवाले, महक रही, ले, मधुशाला।

हाथों में आने से पहले नाज़ दिखाएगा प्याला,
अधरों पर आने से पहले अदा दिखाएगी हाला,
बहुतेरे इनकार करेगा साकी आने से पहले,
पथिक, न घबरा जाना, पहले मान करेगी मधुशाला।

लाल सुरा की धार लपट सी कह न इसे देना ज्वाला,
फेनिल मदिरा है, मत इसको कह देना उर का छाला,
दर्द नशा है इस मदिरा का विगत स्मृतियाँ साकी हैं,
पीड़ा में आनंद जिसे हो, आए मेरी मधुशाला।

धर्मग्रन्थ सब जला चुकी है, जिसके अंतर की ज्वाला

बने पुजारी प्रेमी साकी, गंगाजल पावन हाला,
रहे फेरता अविरत गति से मधु के प्यालों की माला'
'और लिये जा, और पीये जा', इसी मंत्र का जाप करे'

एक बरस में, एक बार ही जगती होली की ज्वाला,
एक बार ही लगती बाज़ी, जलती दीपों की माला,
दुनियावालों, किन्तु, किसी दिन आ मदिरालय में देखो,

दिन को होली, रात दिवाली, रोज़ मनाती मधुशाला।

मैं शिव की प्रतिमा बन बैठूं, मंदिर हो यह मधुशाला।
मंदिर, मसजिद, गिरिजे, सब को तोड़ चुका जो मतवाला,
पंडित, मोमिन, पादिरयों के फंदों को जो काट चुका,
कर सकती है आज उसी का स्वागत मेरी मधुशाला।

- बच्चन