Is the first impression the lasting one? Well, Thomas Weber convinces you that it is in his erudite and well-researched work. His book makes one wonder how much stronger would be the experience of those who had met Gandhi in flesh and blood at the peak of his fame. These are accounts of the experiences of personalities whose first meeting was profound and even life-altering.
This collection of writings on the first meetings of Gandhi speaks for itself. The author presents the Mahatma in an unusual way that would provide new insights for a more experienced audience.
The nearly 50 accounts presented here are first hand, biographical ones, but the author warns us that these early accounts were written well after Gandhi had become famous and many who wrote them then had the clout to get it published; and that these pen portraits were written years after that first meeting. “History thus throws its shadow backwards and surely colours the published account”.
Nehru and Patel wrote very little about their first meetings with the Mahatma. To Nehru, Gandhi is well recounted in his books and conversations. Others have recounted Patel’s colourful encounter and how it changed the lawyer into a pre-eminent fighter in Gandhi’s causes.
Several other heavyweights of the Indian national movement, for example, Annie Besant, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, B.R. Ambedkar and Jai Prakash Narayan, say nothing much about their first meeting with Gandhi and even some of his closest friends and confidants seem not to have written about their first encounter.
Often, there is little more than a passing reference to “I first saw Gandhiji at such-and-such Congress Session” and later we learn how they worked with Gandhi. Surprisingly, we get very little from his secretaries Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal, from his backers J. Bajaj and G.D. Birla or his close friends Rabindranath Tagore or Kaka Kelkar.
The book contains the recollections of various personalities such as Sarojini Naidu, J.B. Kripalani, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Rajendra Prasad and Lord Mountbatten; celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, Paramahamsa Yogananda, Margaret Sanger and Margaret Bourke-White; some of his closest devotees such as Joseph Doke, E. Stanley Jones and John Haynes Holmes; internationally renowned writers and journalists such as Webb Miller, Louis Fischer, Vincent Sheean, Halide Edib, Negley Falson, Yone Naguchi, Katharine Mayo, Edgar Snow and William Shirer; and well known pacifists such as Romain Rolland, Muriel Lester, Lanza Del Vasto, Horace Alexander and Reginald Reynolds; and an assortment of others who captured their first sighting of Gandhi in memorable prose in a way that added to our knowledge of the Mahatma. And the ‘flavour’ of their prose of the journalists was quite different from that of the religious seekers or the merely curious.
Henry. S. Pollack writes in 1904, “He was a pleasant looking man sitting alone apart from his black lawyers’ turban and his rather dark complexion there was nothing specially to mark him out. I could not guess that I was then gazing at the man who was to become the best known oriental of his time”. Joseph J. Doke wrote in 1907: “There was a quiet strength about him, a greatness of heart, and a transparent honesty that attracted me at once to the Indian leader”.
Charlie Chaplin in 1931 recounts the question he put about India’s struggle for freedom and Gandhi’s abhorrence of machinery. Gandhi told him that if machinery was used in the altruistic sense, it should help release man from the bondage of slavery and give him shorter hours of labour and time to improve his mind and enjoy life. “Machinery in the past has made India dependent on England and the only way we rid ourselves of that dependence is to boycott all goods made by machinery. That is why we had made it the patriotic duty of every Indian to spin his own cotton and weave his own cloth”.
Vincent Sheean in 1948 had met Gandhi for the first time walking on the blue carpet with him and three days later he had the written the most memorable piece of writing on the slaying of the Mahatma, “We were perhaps were ten feet away from the steps — but the clump of people cut off our view of the Mahatma now; he was so small. Then I heard four small, dull, dark explosions. “What was that?” I said to Bob in a sudden horror. “I don’t know” he said. Then I knew.
The writings here portray Gandhi in the early African days as an impressive local political activist and the others seeking spiritual guidance or even as a master who met him after the First World War. After the empire-shaking salt march and Civil Disobedience Movement, meeting him meant meeting the most famous person on the planet. Amidst all this the author tries to look for what changes and at what remains constant in Gandhi.
The author’s precise recounting of various viewpoints sums up Gandhi’s character. It is obvious that regardless of his fame or the pressure on his time, he gave every visitor, high or low, the gift of his full attention and they felt it.
Gandhi at First Sight: Thomas Weber; The Lotus Collection, M-75, Greater Kailash II Market, New Delhi-110048. Rs. 350.
