Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age by Arthur Herman; Bantam Books; Price: $30; 609 pp
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Two icons — master spirits of the first half of the 20th century who changed the course of world history — are profiled by historian Arthur Herman who has conceptualised this book as a dual, comparative biography. As the evocative title indicates, irresistible force — tenacious World War II British prime minister Winston Churchill who master-minded the destruction of German dictator Adolf Hitler whose Nazi war machine had overrun most of Europe by 1941 — clashed with immoveable object — Mahatma (‘great soul’) Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi during India’s freedom movement. And even as Churchill triumphed in Europe, he lost India — a loss which marked the beginning of the end of the global British empire, upon which it was famously remarked, the sun never set.
Herman picks up the history of the subcontinent dramatically with a prologue that describes anti-British violence at Cawnpore, Meerut, Allahabad, during the 1857 Mutiny. It marked a significant watershed in which “the seeds of future violence had been sown” even as the power of empire prevailed. Against this political backdrop, Herman cuts to the sleepy port-town of Porbandar, unaffected by the uprising and ruled by a local prince. The birth of Mohandas Gandhi in 1869 into a devout Hindu family, was marked by local rituals rather than great fanfare.
On the other hand Winston Churchill descended from the glorious military heritage of the Duke of Marlborough and was born in 1874 in Blenheim Palace, sited on a 3,000 acre estate. The estate however, was bankrupt and prompted Winston’s father Randolph Churchill to enter politics. With the power and glory of the British empire at its zenith in the Victorian Age, Randolph embarked on a successful tour of India as a Conservative Party grandee in 1884, and was elected secretary of the colonial office soon after. Thus faith and belief in the ‘white man’s burden’ was infused into Winston’s early education and world view.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) was a fully qualified barrister-at-law of the Middle Temple, London, who was at best a successful failure in the Bombay high court upon his return to India. His inability to make an impression on the closed fraternity of the Bombay bar forced him to retreat to his native Saurashtra to practice law. And there (in Rajkot) Gandhi would have remained but for a lucky break, when he accepted a brief to represent a wealthy Muslim merchant of Indian origin who was embroiled in a legal dispute with a cousin in Natal, South Africa.
In unapologetically racist South Africa of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the evil doctrine of apartheid or strict segregation of races was being shaped by Dutch Boer settlers. After the famous incident on the train ride to Pretoria when Gandhi — a pucca barrister — was thrown out bag and baggage from a railway carriage claimed by a nondescript white man on the basis of race, the Mahatma cerebrated and developed his politics of satyagraha (passive resistance) and ahimsa (non-violence), which was tried and tested in South Africa and matured in India, to which he returned in 1915.
But while the Indian subcontinent was electrified and the world was entranced by the out-of-the-box responses (prayer, fasting, satyagraha, ahimsa) of Gandhi, who was popularly bestowed the honorific of Mahatma shortly after his return to India, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that the high Tory patrician, Harrow-educated Churchill was revolted by what he saw as the Machiavellian politics of this deliberately dressed-down London-trained barrister. “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace... to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor,” he said in 1930, while rejecting a proposal to confer dominion status upon India.
The book follows the career advancements of these larger-than-life rivals, maintaining a chronology. By 1940 Churchill had risen to the position of prime minister of Britain and became arguably the greatest war-time leader of the 20th century, while Gandhi was acknowledged leader of India’s unprecedented freedom movement. Churchill was amazed that even as a world war was being waged and evil Nazi philosophy threatened the entire civilised world, Gandhi called for the Quit India movement and went on a 21-day fast to protest his confinement. Churchill accused Gandhi of being a “spiritual quack” resorting to “meaningless street theatre” and even voiced suspicion that Gandhi took “glucose in his water when doing his various fasting antics”.
By this time (1943), the allied powers inspired and led by Churchill, were on the way to winning the war. But he was unable to defeat a “naked fakir” clad in loincloth and armed with a walking staff. Ironically, while by mid 1945 Churchill had humbled Hitler and his mighty German war machine, he was bested by the Mahatma. In 1945, in Britain’s first post-war general election, the Tory Party was roundly defeated and Churchill ousted from 10, Downing Street. India attained its independence in 1947.
Yet Gandhi’s assassination within a few months after India won independence could be interpreted as his failure to foresee the problems of propagating and establishing a free and united India. On the other hand, Churchill was clear-sighted enough to anticipate that caste, creed and language divisions would create turmoil and tensions that would plague the new nation.
Heroes to their countrymen, icons to the world, ironically both these great leaders saw their dreams — the British Raj and an unpartitioned India — crumble. Yet according to Herman, these towering figures were crusading for their own versions of a better world. They both “left an imperishable mark on their age and a lasting legacy for coming generations,” says Herman who has tracked their parallel lives to tell the “the great untold parable of the 20th century”.
Jayati Gupta