The early Gandhi as a work in progress

Gandhi Before India

By Ramachandra Guha

Alfred A. Knopf. 672 pp. $35

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Reviewed by Vikram Johri

The one image that burns into the viewer's memory on watching Gandhi, the multiple Oscar-winning film by Richard Attenborough, is the scene where a young Gandhi is thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg in South Africa after refusing to move from the first-class car reserved for whites.

What the viewer does not register, given the shocking racism of the scene, is the victim's protest at the action, which entitles him to use the first class in subsequent journeys. This incident tells us something about the character of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the one Indian who is well and truly recognized all over the world.

So enduring is his legacy that the honorific "Mahatma," which means "great soul," is commonly prefixed to his name. How did a shy boy from a small city in India's western state of Gujarat become the global epitome of nonviolent struggle? What were the formative influences of the man who in turn influenced the likes of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela? Historian Ramachandra Guha sets out to seek these answers.

Born to a Bania (merchant) family in Porbandar, Gandhi had an unremarkable childhood. He grew up in a conservative family that strictly followed dietary restrictions. When Gandhi went to London to study law, his mother exacted a promise from him not to eat meat, drink, or have sex (he was already married by then). Gandhi complied on all fronts. His training in law complete, he returned to India in the last decade of the 19th century only to meet with little success as a lawyer. In frustration, he took up an offer to practice in Natal, a British colony in South Africa.

This period of Gandhi's life forms the backdrop of Guha's book. In highly readable chapters, the historian discusses how the methods Gandhi was to later employ in India's struggle for independence from the British were first tried in South Africa. In that country, Gandhi became a public figure, enjoying the trust of the local Indian community. Besides his law practice, he came to represent the views and struggles of the Indians in Natal. It helped that he was a British-trained lawyer and therefore commanded the grudging respect of those on the other side of the table.

In spite of being from a traditional background, Gandhi established a sort of ecumenical commune at his residence in Phoenix. There were the German architect Hermann Kallenbach, the British lawyer Henry Polak and his wife Millie, and Gandhi's Russian secretary, Sonja Schlesin, living together in the sort of easy domesticity that would have raised eyebrows in Gandhi's native country. Gandhi also counted several prominent Muslims among his friends. In London, he had been an active member of the vegetarian society and brought the same passion for its "austere aesthetic" to bear on his South African stay.

The Mahatma in India, with his hardened views on colonialism, was still a work in progress in South Africa. What is curious is his reaction to the reality of racism. Tellingly, Gandhi sided with the British. When, in 1906, a Zulu revolt broke out in Natal, Gandhi wrote in Indian Opinion, a newspaper he had started: "It is not for me to say whether the revolt of the [Zulus] is justified or not. We are in Natal by virtue of British power. Our very existence depends upon it. It is therefore our duty to render whatever help we can."

In the event, Gandhi helped raise an ambulance corps that came to the assistance of the British effort. In India, much recent discussion in the press has heaped scorn on Gandhi's ambivalent attitude toward racism. There are also his problematic views on caste. Nearly 70 years after Gandhi's death, his legacy is hotly debated by ideological groups in India, everyone clamoring to define itself in consonance or opposition to him.

To the Dalits, the lower castes in India's sticky hierarchy, he is a figure of derision. In his lifetime, even as he derided its abysmal features such as untouchability, Gandhi continued to propagate the merits of a caste system. For that reason, the Dalit population looks upon B.R. Ambedkar, chairman of India's constitution-drafting committee, as its ideological leader. Ambedkar, himself a Dalit, propagated a complete overthrow of the caste system if the Dalits were to live in dignity.

Be that as it may, Guha's book makes clear that Gandhi was forever willing to acknowledge the error of his ways. The man who sought separate jails for Indians and Zulus in South Africa in 1906 wrote in 1928: "Indians have too much in common with Africans to think of isolating themselves from them."

Guha, by giving Gandhi the benefit of the doubt, humanizes him, and pays rich tribute to the impressive distance this Indian traveled in his lifetime, both physically and ideologically.