Early evolution

Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha; Penguin India; Price: Rs.899; 673 pp

Arguably contemporary India’s most eminent historian who has sparked a renaissance in the study of history in the subcontinent, Ramachandra Guha is evidently certain that Mohandas Karamchand (aka Mahatma) Gandhi’s enlightened ideals continue to inspire people to fight against injustice and promote world peace. Nobel laureates Barack Obama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Martin Luther King Jr. have publicly confessed to having learnt their political lessons and skills of resisting unjust authority from the Mahatma. Yet the starting point of this first of a two-volume biography is Gandhi’s “less known and sometimes forgotten years in Porbandar, Rajkot, Bombay, London, Durban and Johannesburg”, the formative years during which the uncertain, diffident young barrister transformed into a master political strategist, philosopher and saint who began the process of unravelling the mighty British empire.

Eschewing the soft option of tracing the early growth of the young Gandhi solely through ‘the prism of his own writings’, Guha draws on hitherto unexplored archives and sources, reports in newspapers of the time ranging from the regional Kathiawar Times of 1888 to local dailies like the Natal Mercury and Johannesburg Star in South Africa, and later international print media such as The Times, London and the New York Times.

The biographer’s deep research led him to government intelligence reports and unpublished letters written by Gandhi himself, his friends, family and acquaintances, even his adversaries. This broadening of perspective places Gandhi in transnational contexts outside India — in heterogeneous societies in Europe and Africa which helped to shape the young Gandhi and profoundly impacted his character and future conduct.

The later Gandhi — crusader for freedom, fearless satyagrahi, prophet of communal harmony — is reconstructed by Guha through these diasporic experiences, primarily in South Africa where he developed strong and lasting friendships with several strong individuals. Among them: the English radical Henry Polak, a Jew, and his Christian feminist wife, Millie, with whom Gandhi and Kasturba shared a home and learned liberal values and tolerance; Jewish architect Henry Kallenbach who gave Gandhi an opportunity to initiate inter-religious dialogues; Sonja Schlesin, his Russian-Jewish secretary who taught him that women were capable of independent-minded decisions and introduced him to the women’s suffragette movement. In South Africa, Gandhi conducted experiments in community living in Natal’s Phoenix and Tolstoy settlements cutting across boundaries of caste, religion, race and culture. Nevertheless while praising the young Gandhi’s “capaciousness”, Guha doesn’t fudge the issue that during his long and formative sojourn in South Africa, he forged no real professional or personal relationships with the majority community of Africans.

Gandhi’s work among the Indian migrants in South Africa built a socially inclusive movement at a time when lives of Indians in India were circumscribed by narrow distinctions of caste and creed. The period of over 20 years after Gandhi first arrived in South Africa as a London-trained barrister with full faith in British justice and institutions, to his evolution in dress and thought into a true Indian after the satyagraha of 1913 and the writing of Hind Swaraj, is carefully documented by Guha. These years “were crucial to Gandhi, and to the distinctive form of political protest that is his most enduring legacy to India and the world,” writes Guha.

Gandhi’s non-violent political activism was an innovative strategy which, combined with civil disobedience, steered a middle-path between pacifist petitions to authorities and the violent politics of armed conflict. The new experiment of satyagraha subsumed many forms of resistance, from breaking unjust laws and courting arrest to burning registration certificates and refusal to carry permits to cross colonial boundaries. Passive resistance acquired momentum when thousands joined Gandhi, convinced of the moral basis of his struggle for individual rights, justice and equality.

As the epigraph of his book, Guha uses his subject’s own words to cite the “inadequacy of autobiography as history”. The biographer has written an eminently readable and balanced account of the Mahatma, which is neither  hagiography nor a critique, but a documented, anecdotal portrait of a man — fallible, eccentric, and obsessive — whose “experiments with truth” spelt disaster in personal relationships with his wife and sons, especially Harilal. Gandhi is viewed in specific contexts to demonstrate how several accidents and failures transformed M.K. Gandhi, barrister-at-law, into the Mahatma.

For example, the death of his father facilitated his passage to England and his friendships with members of the Vegetarian and Theosophical societies. A faltering if not failed practice as a lawyer in India prompted him to seek an opportunity in Durban, where he became successful not only as a lawyer but as leader of the Indian community. He drew his clients from Indian immigrant labourers and merchants and as their legal adviser, became acutely aware of the inequalities of taxation and representation that oppressed them.

The formation of the Natal Indian Congress and his hands-on organisational initiation into mobilising resources and funds were Gandhi’s preliminary lessons in challenging colonial power. A hesitant speaker, polite journalist and courteous conversationalist, Gandhi flowered in hostile soil to grow into a leader of exceptional endurance and courage after he suffered a racial attack in Pietermaritzburg, and when white mob fury was let loose against Indian indentured labour in Durban in 1897.

In this biography, Guha has modified the one-dimensional, India-centred history of the Mahatma by focussing on his formative years between 1893-1914. In the process, he fills an important lacuna by unveiling how a shy and stumbling provincial lawyer developed into the iconic individual who forced the mighty British empire to its knees, catalysed the liberation of millions from the yoke of colonial rule, and who continues to inspire people around the world with the exemplary message of his life.

Jayati Gupta

Essential reading

The Siege: The Attack on the Taj by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark; Penguin Books; Price: Rs.499; 318 pp

After reading this riveting and comprehensive narrative of the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Bombay, one question rankled the mind of your reviewer: Why couldn’t an Indian have written such a book? After all, the theatre of the dastardly attack was India and therefore it should have been of greatest concern to Indians, bearing in mind that barring the 9/11 (2001) attack on New York’s Twin Towers, it was the worst terrorist outrage of our times.

British writers Levy and Scott-Clark, former foreign correspondents of the Sunday Times, London, started researching for this book soon after the sea-borne attack on Bombay by ten fully-armed Pakistani terrorists five years ago. They interviewed hundreds of people across four continents and ten countries. They also examined audio-files, transcripts of cell phones of the gunmen and their Pakistan-based ‘handlers’, viewed thousands of photographic stills of the attack and watched “hundreds of hours of TV footage from Indian and international cable news channels”.

The reason why this account of the vicious attack on Mumbai’s landmark Victoria Terminus and the Taj and Oberoi hotels had to be written by foreign journalists is that such meticulous and time-consuming research is beyond the capabilities of Indian journalists, who also tend to be reluctant to raise uncomfortable questions about the performance — or lack of it — of our security forces, based on the erroneous premise that it’s anti-national to do so. In their earlier book The Meadow (reviewed in EducationWorld), which investigated the murder of foreign trekkers in the Kashmir Valley in 1995, Levy and Scott-Clark exhibited no such inhibitions. The disturbing questions they raised in it have never been satisfactorily answered by the Indian authorities. Uncomfortable questions raised by them in The Siege won’t be answered either.

Returning to 26/11, ten heavily armed, ideologically motivated and intensively-trained Pakistani terrorists set off from Karachi harbour, hijacking an Indian fishing trawler en route, and made landfall in a fishing village at south Bombay’s Badhwar Park. There, they split up into pairs, to attack the Chhatrapati Shivaji station (formerly Victoria Terminus), a Jewish centre, the Oberoi Trident Hotel, Leopold Cafe and the Taj Mahal Hotel (where two pairs linked up). At these carefully chosen target sites, they created mayhem, slaughtering 166 people and injuring over 300. For over two days and nights, the terrorists held India’s commercial capital hostage.

Poorly armed policemen and naval commandos were no match for the AK-47, grenade and RDX explosives-equipped terrorists. It was only when the National Security Guard (NSG) belatedly arrived from Delhi that the tide was turned and the gunmen killed. Describing “the fiasco of the NSG’s mobilisation”, the authors reveal the shocking lack of coordination which delayed the NSG airlift to Bombay. Although the NSG task force was unofficially mobilised just 22 minutes after the first shots were fired in Leopold Cafe, the first batch of commandos arrived in Bombay some five hours after the first burst of firing by the terrorists.

Almost as bad was the cover-up after the two-day terrorist siege of Bombay claimed 166 lives. “While the 9/11 commission of inquiry in the United States enlisted a ten-man bi-partisan board of politicians to probe every facet of the attacks, and the 7/7 inquests in London spent six months recording every detail and witness statement, 26/11 received only a cursory investigation from the Pradhan Commission, a two-man panel formed in Bombay on December 30 to explore the ‘war-like’ attacks on the city. Precluded from cross-examining the intelligence services, politicians or the NSG, the commission produced a 64-page inquiry report, which was widely lambasted for lacking depth,” write Levy and Scott-Clark. Clearly, many embarrassing facts have been hidden from the public.

Nevertheless the background material the authors provide about Kasab and the intriguing half-American and half-Pakistani David Headley (earlier Dawood Gilani) is illuminating. Headley was clearly a double-agent, working for both the CIA and ISI. The Americans, who have much to answer for, did not arrest him earlier, even though they knew he was a drug-smuggler and sympathiser of jihad, because they thought he would lead them to Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, who was killed two years later in Abbotabad, Pakistan.

The Siege should be essential reading for all Indian and Pakistani security officials. But whether they will derive any lessons from it is doubtful.

Rahul Singh