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GANDHI’S TRUTH: On the Origin of Militant Nonviolence by Erik H. Erikson, W.W. Norton, New York, 1969.

IN a ‘letter’ addressed to the dead Gandhi and included in the book, Erikson explains the purpose his book. ‘My task in this book,’ he writes, ‘is to confront the spiritual truth as you have formulated and lived it with the psychological truth which I have learned and practised. This truth, I believe, must supplement your work as it spreads, in many unforeseen ways, beyond India and into the future. To do this, I will first apply clinical insights to your work, then compare your kind of insight to ours – a task which I can complete only at the end of the book.’ Beyond a clinical study, the book is an attempt at rearticulation in secular language of the lessons of Gandhi’s experiments with truth.

Erikson is Freud’s messenger to Gandhi. An original contribution of his work is the occasional juxtaposition of events from Freud’s life, as told by him in Interpretation of Dreams, with those of Gandhi’s life as narrated in the autobiographical writings and supplemented by research conducted by Erikson in India, particularly Ahmedabad. Less original but clearly more successful is the author’s reconstruction of Gandhi’s early life, from childhood to middle age. This takes us to what he considers the culminating event of Gandhi’s political life – his leadership of the Ahmedabad textile workers’ strike in March, 1918. Gandhi was then in his forty-ninth year. What intrigued Erikson was that the strike, which he terms ‘the Event’, is played down in Gandhi’s autobiographical writings as in those of his biographers. A conviction took shape gradually in Erikson’s mind that ‘what was described by him (Gandhi) and by some biographers as a mere episode in his life – and in Indian history – was, in fact, an event of vital importance in his advent as a national leader and as the originator of militant non-violence.’

The psychoanalyst sensed that the Event was a traumatic experience repressed by Gandhi and the others involved in it, for a certain embarrassment seems to govern later accounts – as though the Event itself had not proved quite worthy of the Mahatma’s subsequent career. Records of the day-to-day progress of the strike seem mostly to have been lost. For these very reasons unravelling the Event may be a key to understanding Gandhi’s later public life and elaboration of satyagraha.

‘The year 1918, important in Gandhi’s life and in Indian history, was also the year of massive mechanized slaughter on the (battle) front in France, the year when empires collapsed and new world alliances were formed, the year of Wilson and above all of Lenin.’ It was a psycho-historical conjuncture which shaped social and political patterns (or traumata) that dominate our lives to this day. Erikson seems to assume that an important source of our present afflictions as well as of their cure is to be found by returning to that period of time in the closing year of the First World War ‘when historical actuality had quickened to a rare intensity and pace’ (61). There is a hint in Erikson’s writing that the political problems which the leaders who gathered in Versailles failed to meet, and probably aggravated, might be resolved by methods that Gandhi was developing at about the same time in Ahmedabad.

To history, as to analysis of personality development, Erikson applies the psychoanalytical method to traumatology. As he explains, ‘The psychiatric origins of our approach have trained us to think in traumatological terms, that is, to discern not only origins but traumatic ones at that – trauma meaning an experience characterized by impressions so sudden, or so powerful, or strange that they cannot be assimilated at the time and, therefore, persist stage to stage as a foreign body seeking outlet or absorption and imposing on all development a certain irritation causing stereotype and repetitiveness’ (98). We may expect then that psychoanalytical historiography (‘psychohistory’ as Erikson terms it) would analyse the interrelation of social and historic ‘traumata’ and the psychological ones. There are only hints of this more complex analysis in Erikson’s book, as when he writes that ‘with all his mood swings and confessions, Mahatma Gandhi could, for a moment, in history, make his inner voice consonant with the trend of human history and evolution’ (401).

The trauma that Gandhi sought to overcome throughout his life, according to Erikson, was compounded of two encounters with his father. The first was when young Gandhi confessed to his father that he had stolen some gold from his brother’s armband to pay for ‘a small debt of the latter.’ Gandhi wrote out the confession in the form of a letter in which ‘not only did I confess my guilt, but I asked adequate punishment for it, and closed with a request to him not to punish himself for my offence. I also pledged myself never to steal in future.’ The father, as Gandhi recalled, ‘read it through and pearl drops trickled down his cheeks, wetting the paper. For a moment he closed his eyes in thought and then tore up the note. He had sat up to read it. He again lay down. I also cried. I could see my father’s agony. If I were a painter, I could draw a picture of the whole scene today. This encounter, as Erikson sees it, ‘has a certain typical ring – a resonance with the lives of other leading individuals with a premature conscience development and an early assumption of moral responsibility for a parent –a responsibility which they subsequently extended to mankind itself’ (125).

There were echoes of this event in Gandhi’s later life, as when he dreamt that his son had stolen something. This could mean not the fear that his sons might be thieves (as Erikson interprets it) but his yearning that they would be as frank and open with him as he was with his father. Gandhi repeatedly implored his children to open up to him. To his eldest son he wrote: ‘If you cannot give vent to your feelings before me, before whom else can you do so? I shall be a true friend to you. What would it matter if there could be any difference of opinion between us about any scheme of yours? We shall have a quiet talk. The final decision will rest with you.’ Undoubtedly, Gandhi was disappointed that none of his sons confided in him.

A more haunting encounter between Gandhi and his father occurred when the latter lay on his death bed. Gandhi was nursing him but left for a while to spend time with his pregnant wife. Where he returned, the father was dead. To have forsaken the father at the moment of his death in order to spend time with his wife turned into a blot on his life which Gandhi was ‘never…able to efface or forget.’ Erikson compares this blot ‘in Gandhi’s life (to) what following Kierkegaard I have come to call "the curse" in the lives of spiritual innovators with a similarly precocious and relentless conscience’ (128).

The central problem of Gandhi’s moral self may thus be formulated in Erikson’s language as follows: ‘This curse, clinical theory would suggest, must be heir to the Oedipus conflict. In Gandhi’s case the "feminine" service to his father would have served to deny the boyish wish to replace the (aging) father in the possession of the (young) mother and the youthful intention to outdo him as a leader in later life. Thus, the pattern would be set for a style of leadership which can defeat a superior adversary only non-violently and with the express intent of saving him as well as those whom he oppressed…The question is…why certain men of genius can do no less than take upon themselves an evolutionary curse shared by all, and why other men will be only too eager to ascribe to such a man a god-given greatness surpassing that of all others’ (12).

Erikson adds: ‘But I believe that just because Mohandas [Gandhi] was early (if only darkly) aware of the unlimited horizon of his aspiration, his failure to preside mercifully over his father’s death and thus to receive a lasting sanction for his superior gifts was, indeed, the curse of his life. But this, as we saw, is (typically) a shared curse, for if "carnal weakness" was to blame, it was the father’s weakness which had become the son’s.’ That this was the central trauma of Gandhi’s life or, in psychoanalytical terminology, the ‘ontogenetic version of his childhood curse…the theme of nursing a stricken (and ambivalently loved) superior adversary reappears in Gandhi’s later life both literally and symbolically… One would not wish to overdo the parallel, but it is thought-provoking that in Freud’s reported dreams the conviction of having been of medical assistance to his dying father looms large as a dream-wish counteracting his medical ambitions’ (130).

The difference between neurotic ‘repetition compulsion’ of childhood trauma in ordinary patients and ‘creative re-enactment of a curse’ is that in the latter case ‘its communal experience becomes a liberating event for each member of an awestricken audience’ (133). In common language, the specific trauma or ‘curse’ of the individual gives expression to the common experience of a society or people: the individual’s curse becomes congruent with the society’s curse. In seeking to liberate himself from his private curse, the patient-hero finds himself helping the people to liberate themselves from the collective curse. In this coincidence he finds the strength and meaning to complete his task, the psychic ordeal merges into social or political drama.

The Oedipus complex was altered in Gandhi’s case because of his bisexual identification. In Erikson’s analysis, Gandhi internalized his mother and, as a result, ‘the very hope nourished in the infant by his mother must become faith in the possibility of not being reborn, of overcoming the necessity for rebirth through a love which is non-destructive because it transcends bodily existence and with it sexual differentiation…In identification with this woman, Gandhi obviously learned to value the abstention from any but the most elementary food intake… rarely matched in the abstainer’s capacity to feel nourished and vitalized by the smallest amount of the most selected food (as will as by short, but well-spaced, periods of sleep). And if the freedom from desiring meat also meant the freedom from any voracious and destructive oral attachment, then young Gandhi could count on a secret agreement with his mother which united them both…[bringing him] loving self-denial and self-denying love…’

Here lies perhaps the fundamental difference between Freudian psychomorphology and Gandhi’s personal development, which may be archetypally Indian. For the Freudian goal of the individual is achievement of manhood or womanhood. Sexual identity is crucial in the process of maturation and to sort out and articulate the confused drives and relations in the sexual matrix becomes the prime task in psychotherapy.

In Freudian psychology, health is primarily sexual health, and the concept of libido, or sexual energy, or eros, is the fundamental concept. Obviously, it was not so in the psychomorphology of Gandhi or of other Indians. What is at stake for the Indian is not the sexual identity of the individual for it is not visualized or projected in psycho-sexual terms. Erikson points to ‘an ancient and stubborn trend to preserve the India of the mother goddesses against all the conquerors, their father gods and their historical logic. The power of the mother goddesses probably has also given India that basic bisexuality which, at least to her British conquerors, appeared contemptible and yet also uncanny and irresistible in every sense of the word. Gandhi, so it seems, tried to make himself the representative of that bisexuality in a combination of autocratic malehood and enveloping maternalism.’ It may be appropriate to add here that not only the British were baffled by Indian bisexuality but psychoanalysis has no means to comprehend it.

This will emerge more clearly as we proceed, for Erikson returns repeatedly to the Indian bisexual pattern. Towards the close of the study Erikson re-emphasizes: ‘…I wonder whether there has been another political leader who almost prided himself on being half man and half woman, and who so blatantly aspired to be more motherly than women born to the job, as Gandhi did. This, too, resulted from a confluence of a deeply personal need and a national trend, for a primitive mother religion is probably the deepest, the most pervasive, and the most unifying stratum of Indian religiosity…He undoubtedly saw a kind of sublimated maternalism as part of the positive identity of a whole man, and certainly of a homo religiosus’ (402f.).

Erikson hopes that Gandhi’s example of ‘sexual self-disarmament’ might displace ‘the age-old male propensity for considering the renunciation of disarmament an abandonment of malehood… for in a mechanized future the relative devaluation of the martial model of masculinity (connected perhaps with "the inner and outer consequences of having assumed the life of an armed hunter, and all the practical and emotional dead ends into which this has led") (142) may well lead to a freer mutual identification of the two sexes’ (403). But the psychoanalytical apparatus may be inappropriate to explain Gandhi’s life and work even though here it helps in elucidating a systematic account of the major incidents (the psychoanalyst may well retort that this is the main purpose of discipline).

The crucial identity crisis in Gandhi’s life occurred ‘way back in the railroad station of Maritzburg in South Africa when he, the ineffectual and yet stubborn young barrister-made-in-England, was ejected from a train because he insisted on travelling first class although he was a "coolie", that is, "coloured". There, instead of effecting his plans to go home (to India) to the hated practice of law, he abandoned his shy self literally overnight and committed himself to his political and religious destiny as a leader’ (47). Indian merchants residing in South Africa told him, as he recalled it later: ‘Only we can live in a land like this because for making money we do not mind pocketing insults…This country is not for men like you.’ Yet, ‘It was during that wintry night that he resolved that South Africa was, indeed, a country for him – if only he could learn to be the man for that country’ (166).

Why did Gandhi, who thus far had proved ineffectual in India, and who had escaped to South Africa – a more ‘congenial’ place to work – decide to dig in his heels in that alien land when he had failed to do it in his own country? This is a central question, but Erikson fails to do justice to it. The blatant injustice of the treatment meted out to Indians and to him in South Africa was indefensible – the weak case of his opponents gave him confidence that he would win. He may have sensed also the moral and political insecurity of the South African government.

Similarly, he may have recognized intuitively that the Indian community would follow him. He found himself confronted with a specific manifestation of the historic task which was to root out ‘the deep disease of colour prejudice’ and he found the tools at hand. Given these conditions, he could not run away without losing his self-respect as a moral individual, an Indian and a lawyer.

Gandhi’s achievement in meeting the challenge consisted in welding the Indians together and inspiring them rather than securing them political rights. His personal success lay in rising to the status of a successful barrister who was also the leader of his community. In 1896 he came to India to take his family to South Africa. In India he made speeches critical of conditions in his adopted country. These received wide publicity and, when he returned to South Africa with his family, he was nearly lynched by a howling mob of enraged South African whites. Gandhi was forced back into the political role. The culmination of the long drawn out struggle in South Africa was the great march organized by Gandhi in 1913. It resulted in partial or moral success, the Indian Relief Bill. The next year Gandhi went to England and in 1915 returned to India.

What Erikson regards as the crucial experience of Gandhi’s career occurred in 1917, when Gandhi had been in India for two years and after he had successfully represented the peasant’s grievances in Champaran. The labour dispute followed the outbreak of plague in Ahmedabad in 1917, when mill workers were offered a bonus to induce them to stay on their jobs. But some five hundred relatively skilled workmen were excluded from the benefit. They threatened to strike and were joined by the other workers whose bonus was threatened when the plague subsided. In response, most textile mill owners declared a lockout. Workers demanded a 35 per cent bonus whereas the mill owners offered 20 per cent.

The version of a worker of the reason for striking was less clear-cut: ‘I still do not know exactly why we struck – was it too long hours (they certainly were too long) or too small pay? The pay certainly would have been too small, even if we had ever seen it except for the brief moments between receiving it on pay day and handing it over again in bribes to jobbers inside the mill and to the Moslem money lenders at the gate! I fancy it was more our general misery that made us strike, and the fact that we all knew ourselves getting deeper and deeper into debt’ (‘I Saw What He Did About Industrial Exploitation’, in John S. Hoyland, They Saw Gandhi. Washington, D.C., 1953, p. 31).

The crisis occurred on the thirteenth day of the strike, when Gandhi and some other strike leaders went to participate in another public function and missed the workers’ meetings. This seemed to the workers a betrayal or, what could be even more demoralizing, an incomplete commitment on Gandhi’s and others’ part to the cause of the workers. As the workers put it, ‘They come and go in their car, they eat elegant food, while we suffer death agonies. To attend meetings does not keep us from starving.’ At the same time, the mill owners ended the lockout, inviting all workers who accepted their offer of 20 per cent bonus to return to work, with hints that the 35 per cent wage increase would be granted in due course.

At this point Gandhi decided to undertake the first of his seventeen fasts unto death. According to mill owners, the purpose of the fast was to coerce them. Erikson does not provide any explanation of his for the fast, merely attributing to Gandhi the feeling that ‘by fasting he had blackmailed the employers as he had kept the weakening workers in line, so that the relative success of the strike was marred by a failure of moral nerve’ (47).

But the events present a different construction. Gandhi’s fast served in the first place its traditional purpose in India, namely self-purification. The workers’ accusation that Gandhi and his co-workers ‘come and go in their car, they eat elegant food…’ was correct. The implication that there was a fundamental social, emotional and moral alienation between Gandhi and the workers must have dawned upon Gandhi. This is clear from the pledge that Gandhi took not to eat food ‘nor use a car’ until the workers’ demand was met.

If Gandhi was annoyed with the workers for weakening in their strike pledge, apparently he was equally annoyed with himself for having encouraged them to take the pledge which as he later discovered they could not keep. As Gandhi admitted ‘…this lockout, prolonged in an unforeseen manner, had tested them beyond their capacity’ (Desai, op. cit. p. 25). At the same time he found that he could keep their pledge for them. When Gandhi announced that he would redeem their pledge, the ‘thousands of men present there shed tears from their eyes. They awoke to the reality of their soul, a new consciousness stirred in them and they got strength to stand by their pledge.’

Or, as he put it on another occasion: ‘I felt that it was a sacred moment for me, my faith was on the anvil, and I had no hesitation to rising and declaring to the men that a breach of their vow so solemnly taken was unendurable by me and that I would not take any food… A meeting that was up to now unlike the former meetings, totally unresponsive, woke up as if by magic.’ In short, Gandhi accepted and the workers acclaimed his role as their moral representative. He would from now on have to enact moral roles on behalf of the masses. This spelt failure for him individually and for the people. For, in Brecht’s words, pity the people who lack a hero but even more a people that need one. At the beginning of the strike Gandhi told the workers: ‘Whether you seek my advice or that of somebody else, you can succeed without any help from me or anyone else. I and a hundred thousand more cannot bring you success. Your success depends on yourselves, upon your sincerity, upon your faith in God and upon your courage. We are merely your helpers. You have to stand on your own strength. Stand by the pledge you have taken without any writing or speech, and success is yours’ (Mahadev Haribhai Desai, A Righteous Struggle, Ahmedabad, 1951, p. 11).

Similarly, Gandhi had turned down any financial assistance to the strikers, holding that, ‘The real secret of satyagraha lies in bearing cheerfully the difficulties it may entail’ (ibid., p. 20). Or, ‘You have earned money till now by your own effort. Do not, therefore, now ask for financial aid from anybody. It is beneath you to do so; the others would ridicule you by saying that you fought on the strength of others’ money’ (ibid., p. 20).

The role of moral hero would be singular and lonely, as Gandhi pointed out repeatedly. He told the workers in Ahmedabad: ‘After twenty years’ experience, I have come to the conclusion that I am qualified to take a pledge; I see that you are not yet so qualified. Do not, therefore, take an oath without consulting your seniors. If the occasion demands, come to us, assured that we shall be prepared to die for you, as are now.’ No wonder then that henceforward he would be called Mahatma, a great soul (among smaller ones). He would have no equals but demand and accept higher responsibilities than anyone else. Erikson is justified in treating the Ahmedabad strike as the turning point of Gandhi’s carrier in India but he has not focused his analysis on the crucial issue, which in our estimation is Gandhi’s moral and social alienation from the masses and his transformation into the Mahatma, moral hero, or prophet and the subsequent return.

If ‘a certain embarrassment seems to govern later accounts’ of Gandhi’s part in the workers’ struggle in Ahmedabad, even as it was a crucial formative experience in the development of satyagraha, the reason may be that his emergence as Mahatma was blighted by an original sin – the moral alienation. This itself may have arisen from mismanagement of the strike, including taking vows without knowing the capacity of the workers to fulfil them, less than wholehearted commitment on Gandhi’s part, his divided loyalty between workers and mill owners. Thus Gandhi’s career as saint-politician commenced with an inner and incurable flaw, which was not the less gnawing because it bespoke Gandhi as finite and fallible, even though it may have provided the demonic driving force of his later moral and political exertions.

When Gandhi took it upon himself to redeem the pledges of the workers, he experienced the sense of moral elevation but the audience was also electrified – he emerged as the perfect satyagrahi but all else became by definition or necessity imperfect. Eventually he became the exemplar and guarantor of moral purity of the Indian nation. A statement to the press issued by Gandhi to explain his fast included the declaration: ‘It is my firm conviction that so long as people are not as hard as steel, and the world does not consider men’s oaths as unbreakable and immovable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, they cannot be a nation. Friends may differ from me but I feel convinced that if in future such an occasion arises, I would not hesitate to act in the same way I have done in the present case’ (Desai, op. cit., p. 97).

There is an indication here that the ‘hard as steel’ morality required to make India a nation would have to be provided mainly by Gandhi who would not hesitate to fast to death again. He would make up for the moral weakness of the people but would he increase their own strength? Shortly afterwards Gandhi was to claim: ‘I am the one man who can today preserve the peace in India as no other man can...’ – which, as we know, is the prerogative of the sovereign.

If the moral energy concentrated in Gandhi’s self is to circulate in less extraordinary individuals and groups, it must be returned to a different intensity. This is the task for which Erikson is pre-eminently well equipped. Yet success has eluded him. He may have misconceived the task, and he is trapped by his own brilliance. For all that, the book records a notable encounter between a gifted scholar and a great man. We should be thankful for it.

If in the end Erikson’s book conveys a sense of failure it stems from his inability to grasp the essence of Gandhi’s ‘truth’. What is the role of the social ethic based on truth? As Albert Schweitzer recognized, truth is asocial for it transcends social bonds and moral commitments. He who commits himself to truth therewith abandons (or places in abeyance) bonds such as those of family, friendship, social obligation, dependence upon or dominance over one’s fellows. In adopting truth as his supreme value (‘truth is God’, Gandhi said), he is creating a social or clinical distance between himself and his social environment.

His renunciation of sex, limitation of food or other consumption, loosening of social ties bespeak this motive. Hence, Gandhi’s emphasis on the sanctity of the vow. In so far as the ideal of steadfastness in truth (satyagraha) is accepted by the society, it renders its values and social relationships as liable to suspension. Tradition is placed in crucible to be melted and purified in the fire of truth.

The importance of the Ahmedabad strike lies in subjecting the traditional and passively accepted patterns of relationship between workers and employers to the dissolving power of truth. Workers able to keep the vow they had taken to stay away from their jobs, even at the cost of starving to death (thereby demonstrating their steadfastness to truth) would be capable of entering into genuinely voluntary social relationships. Such individuals only could form a nation. Thus, if we are to extract a lesson of Gandhian satyagraha for a civilization of peace, it would be this: only nations formed by truly voluntary men and women (or satyagrahis) might constitute a world community.

Gandhi’s failure in the Ahmedabad workers’ struggle emerges clearly in this perspective. His hope, nurtured from his experiences in South Africa, that men and women may be transmuted into satyagrahis, was jolted. And he faced the choice of giving up his faith and mission or demonstrate that there was at least one individual genuinely voluntary – he himself. His life as the unique satyagrahi was, however, a makeshift one. He proved by his example that it was possible for a man to be a true satyagrahi. But the unique withholds the promise of renewal. Moreover, there are occasions when a lone satyagrahi or a small group of them does not suffice, as Gandhi was to learn bitterly.

In Ahmedabad, it dawned upon Gandhi that he faced an arduous task of training millions of satyagrahis without hope of success. His own part became that of stand-in for the Indian nation-in-the-making. But it might well provide an alibi for the people, turning Gandhi’s labours into self-defeat. His painful self-education in this task commenced with the labour struggle he guided in Ahmedabad but more dramatic lessons lay ahead. Erikson facilitates our understanding of these matters but his analysis is lost in poetic effusions, when it is not trapped in psychoanalytic metaphors.

Surindar Suri

 

* From Seminar 122; ‘Gandhi’, October 1969, pp. 34-39.

 

GANDHI : A Study in Revolution by Jeoffrey Ashe. Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1968.

‘My chief object’, writes Geoffrey Ashe in his preface, ‘is to interpret, to trace the growth of the working of the Mahatma’s mind in its intensively active context… to define, what he was aiming at and how far his inspiration possessed permanent value.’ The author acknowledges that he has drawn on writings and researches, hardly known outside India, nor have these been given proper weightage, in understanding Gandhi. (The extensive bibliography at the end gives us some indication of his painstaking effort).

To this clearly defined aim, the author remains faithful from the beginning of his charming narrative – ‘He was born in Porbandar on 2nd October 1869’ until the last page which concludes with Sarojini Naidu’s moving prayer whose words matched the profound gloom of the final hour – 30 January 1948.

Gandhi’s life offers an exciting theme to the historian, to the biographer, to the philosopher, indeed to anyone who is intrigued by the meaning of ‘greatness’ among human beings. Ashe sketches this life with care, great knowledge and with an unwavering sympathy and imaginative understanding that we seldom find in books by foreign authors. He indulges in no false adulation, nor carping comments, but maintains a judicious balance, keeping close to the ‘intensely active context’, and the vast galaxy of personages involved in the grand drama of the voluntary liquidation of the once mighty British empire, of which Gandhi was undesirably the chief actor, using and fashioning a technique and a weapon unique in the annals of mankind, and the world of organized politics. We are given a glimpse of the moments of grave doubt, of overwhelming despair, when the masses failed to comprehend both the meaning and purpose of satyagraha and resorted to violence, compelling Gandhi to call it off and seek renewal of his spiritual strength; the ‘heart-searching’ which was the source of his inexhaustible patience and determination. Success as well as failure tested him throughout the three decades of modern Indian history since he appeared on its distracted political scene.

To lend coherence and to give direction to a slowly swelling national movement, and further to endow it with a moral content at a time when it was being stretched in all direction, and in the process sensitizing a foreign purblind bureaucracy was a contribution for which he would be remembered in the centuries to come. Politics, Machiavelli had argued (an argument that has acquired the dignity of an established theory of politics in our times) is a bland struggle for power in which the moral element is a purposeless intruder, weak, inept and wanting in relevance. For Mahatma Gandhi, morals were a significant and inseparable denunciation of politics whose admission will always have a chastening effect on the rigorous and evils of this power struggle.

Apartheid and Alien Rule (whatever form it might assume) were evil, for they were a denial of a universal moral principle. Therefore, racial and political subjugation were to be opposed and corrected. But how? The means must be consistent with the good that is to be achieved. Evil cannot be eliminated by evil but by good itself. Satyagraha is the means of this elimination. Gandhi was a martyr to his unwavering faith that parties at all levels of communal living must be informed and guided by universal moral principles. His whole life was a symbol of this simple, yet over charged faith in which all frontiers of caste, of colour, of creed, of national self interest, stood dissolved. He opposed racialism and imperialism with unwilting courage, but fascism, as Geoffrey Ashe observes, baffled him. But one can be reasonable sure that if he had found himself in its terrifying grip, it would have strengthened his faith. This vision of politics helped him to transcend all fear of political oppression, no matter how tyrannical and brutal it be. His moral vision encompassed the entire human situation; and his concern existentialist sub specie actruatatis.

This moral concern and persuasion of Gandhi, the author concludes, is of distinctive and enduring value, which had its impact on the obduracy of the British rulers, shocking them into the recognition of some thing that their writers had always emphasized. It should also be heartening to those whose faith in the positive role of religion in human progress has been shaken. And finally, to contemporary Indians who though their numerous ‘protests’ have perverted the Gandhian notion of satyagraha, forgetting its emphasis on non-violence of the mind, without which truth is lost.

To call a biography ‘a study in Revolution’, as Ashe does, is surely straining the meaning of words. However, in reading this balanced and charmingly written biography one would have wished for some reference to Gandhi’s baffling silence on the dawn of the India’s independence. Was there a betrayal somewhere along the line? Was the idea of a divided India – now a historic reality – shattering to his great hopes and illusion? Or what? This indeed is the great puzzle for which the future might find an answer. Ashe has hesitated in making a comment and rightly so.

Frank Thakurdas

 

* From Seminar 122; ‘Gandhi’, October 1969, p. 41.

 

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OR THE STORY OF MY EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH by M.K. Gandhi. Critical Edition, Introduced with Notes by Tridip Suhrud. Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2018.

THEORIES of autobiography generally recognize its differences from biography, rooted in the fact that whereas the latter might usually well be a portrait, any exquisite specimen of the former has to go substantially beyond being merely an engaging personal story, and illustrate a system or world of values that the subject has discovered for oneself. Roy Pascal’s Design and Truth in Autobiography, for instance, focuses on this argument in its decipherment of autobiography. In the life of an individual, this discovery of a value system is hardly ever simple. It is fraught equally with alienation and bliss, and frequently the accompaniment of anxiety and psychological apprehension. But the discovery, once it occurs, is a polar opposite of inner fragmentation when, in the evocative phrase of James Olney, the self has been battered into being ‘little more than a bewildered animal’.

In his Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, Olney contrasts these two experiences of order and disorder, describing the fragility of self as compelling the angularity of perception where the self can only imitate the disarray of temporary situations, rendering inner disorder and making coherence impossible. Olney describes the other opposite: ‘Moments of completion, on the other hand, of ecstasy and of seeming transcendence – those highest peaks of selfhood that arise out of the foothills and lowlands indiscernible to memory or to the bare rationalizing intellect – such moments people have called experience of God.’ For illustration, Olney refers to Gandhi – ‘For this experience in wholeness and completion a number of men have given a number of names. Gandhi’s phrase, describing what his entire life was about, may be as pertinent as any: "What I want to achieve," he says in his Story of My Experiments with Truth, "– what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years – is self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain Moksha." For the realized self, life is a unitary and unifying thing, present totally in every part of the living being.’ In his superlatively perceptive study of the genre, Olney however parts with Gandhi with the reference just mentioned. A detailed depiction of the coherence of Gandhi’s life, as reflected in his autobiography, remained so far unattended.

In compiling the first Critical Edition of the Autobiography of M.K. Gandhi, and thus filling this much needed gap, Tridip Suhrud has rendered, as with many of his past writings, yeoman service not only to Gandhian scholarship but also to the realm of intellectual history. The masterly Introduction by Suhrud, with his characteristically quiet scholarship, unveils the mind of Gandhi and his translator, Mahadev Desai, offers insight into the process of its writing and translation, informs of its historical and linguistic context, carefully traces the development of Gandhi’s awareness of atman and antaryami (the self and the dweller of the amalgamate of the mind, intellect and consciousness), perceives Gandhi’s torment at transgression and his urgent need of expiation, and provides entry into that crucially significant institution for Gandhi’s concept of both the private and public – the ashram. Suhrud does not at the same time neglect to discuss the contestation regarding fact and misrepresentation that followed the publication of the Autobiography. Regarding the Autobiography as a ‘recension’ and ‘twin’ of the original Gujarati Atmakatha, and open to the possibility of a porous relationship between the two versions, Suhrud describes his preparation of the definitive edition as involving a simultaneous, ‘close textual reading of both the texts and [marking] the differences, additions, deletion and changes in the meaning introduced in the act of translation.’

It can be said that while writing of Gandhi’s engagement with the Bhagavadgita in his Introduction to the Autobiography, Suhrud has at one level undertaken to explain the dynamics of the metaphysical self and the physical social in the life of Gandhi – and by extension the true nature of his politics – which Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan indicates in his commentary to his English translation of the Bhagavadgita. Radhakrishnan states that the ‘elect’, who are by virtue of their knowledge and wisdom liberated from the mundane world, merge themselves in the creative energy of matter (become prakritilina) and do not desist from ceaseless activity to serve the larger interests of the world. Such individuals are the ‘natural leaders of mankind’. This kind of leader would lead an individual life, but never lose sight of the universality of living – ‘Whatever action he does, his constant communion with the Supreme is undisturbed.’

First published in 1948, Radhakrishnan’s book was dedicated to Gandhi. It is difficult to miss the clear allusion to Gandhi as an elect and natural leader. Gandhi was too humble ever to claim that he had the fortune to attend on the ‘Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God.’ The progress of his experiments with truth, he likened to a man stumbling on a path he nevertheless never swerved from because they provided him with assurance that he could hope to one day realize his maker. Relating the story was valuable as a kind of pilgrim’s progress. He stated: ‘I hope to acquaint the reader fully with all my faults and errors. My purpose is to describe experiments in the science of satyagraha, not to say how good I am. In judging myself I shall try to be as harsh as truth, as I want others also to be.’ It was arguably the second such auto-biography written in modern India. Devendranath Tagore’s Atmajivani was perhaps the first autobiographical work on the realization of one’s self, although its tenor is very different from that of Gandhi.

Some of the harshest criticism of Gandhi has been aimed at the motivation of his fasts. Suhrud writes very sensitively about their significance in Gandhi’s pursuit of truth. Gandhi himself described them as his eyes for the ‘inner being’. The coevality of the commencement of writing the Autobiography and a seven day fast was hardly a coincidence, as pointed out by Suhrud. What lays itself open to debate was Gandhi’s, variously reported, dealing with the reason of the fast, and hence its psychological interest. The cause was tersely described by Mahadev Desai as ‘some sexual uncleanliness of the ashram boys and girls’, and by Robert Payne as ‘homosexual activity’ of some of the ashram boys. A startlingly different description of the incident is offered in Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit’s, The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir, in her recollection of her stay at Sabarmati Ashram. No dates are however mentioned. ‘A very pretty young girl living in the ashram but not part of it, fell in love with a young man there. They slept together and this reached Gandhiji’s ears. It pained him greatly as he attached the highest importance to chastity. He sent for the young people. I do not remember how the boy was dealt with but the girl, whose beauty was her long, silky hair, had it cut off and Gandhiji went on a fast for several days to atone for the "sin" that had been committed. It was a time of strain and not a little fear for everyone.’ Although she came to ‘love him beyond words’ and ‘understood better this way of satyagraha’, Pandit acknowledges to being at that time bewildered at Gandhi’s ‘bizarre and primeval’ response. One dare say that many today would tend to hold to her initial reaction. This is part of the conundrum of Gandhi’s life.

Gandhi’s discerning appraisal of people and extraordinary feel for language commends a keen reading of his writings. Sister Nivedita had been described as ‘volatile’ in the Autobiography. In spite of an angry remonstrance by Ramananda Chatterjee, among others, Gandhi declined to concede any change in what was the English translation of the word tej used in the Gujarati original. This excerpt from Vivekanada’s letter to Nivedita, clearly implying the inherent volatility of her nature, adduces the accuracy of Gandhi’s observation: ‘I never had any jealousy about what friends you made. I never criticized my brethren for mixing up in anything. Only I do believe the western people have the peculiarity of trying to force upon others whatever seems good to them, forgetting that what is good for you may not be good for others. As such I am afraid you might try to force upon others whatever turn your mind might take in contact with new friends. That was the only reason I sometimes tried to stop any particular influence and nothing else.’ It needs to be pointed out that the publication of the Autobiography preceded this letter’s availability in the public domain by some three decades.

Bhikhu Parekh had years ago argued that translations of Gandhi’s writings suffered from grave inaccuracies and Gandhian scholarship would be well served with new, more accurate translations attuned to subtle connotations, and, by definitive editions, for instance of the Autobiography. Diligently prepared, paying careful attention to even slight variations of language as well as to the nuance of meaning, and the outcome of almost a lifetime of engagement, Tridip Suhrud’s Critical Edition of the Autobiography is immensely valuable both as a scholarly study and an archive.

Gangeya Mukherji

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