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Book Review
Reflections on Gandhiji
IN SEARCH OF GANDHI — Essays and reflections: B.R. Nanda; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 595.
MAHATMA GANDHI had "a strangely rational and sceptical streak which enabled him to fashion for himself a religious philosophy which, though grounded in Hinduism, acquired a deeply humanist and cosmopolitan complexion." As his religious stance holds the key to the understanding of his life and thought, this book, carrying 29 assorted, highly readable, thematic essays on Gandhiji, written by the learned author, begins with a long and penetrating chapter on "Gandhi and religion".
In this and other chapters he projects convincing arguments against many misconceptions and misrepresentation of Gandhiji's mix of religion and politics, Khilafat Movement, pan-Islamism, his relations with capitalists, his identity crisis and the tragedy of the Partition of India.
In the chapter "Gandhi and Vivekananda", he finds remarkable similarities between the two who never met. Both were advocates of religious tolerance and antagonists of untouchability. "Religion transformed both, but they also transformed religion." But in one vital respect they differed. Vivekananda rejected politics. "Man-making," he said, was his task. But for Gandhiji religion could not be separated from politics. By religion he meant "not the Hindu religion which I certainly prize above all other religions, but the religion which transcends Hinduism, which changes one's very nature, which binds one indissolubly to the truth within and which purifies" (Young India, 12-5-1920); or, as he put it in a nutshell decades later: "The ultimate definition of religion may be set to be obedience to the law of God. God and His law are synonymous terms. Therefore God signifies an unchanging and living law" (Harijan, 25-8-1940).
The short article titled "Quit India" concludes with the author's umpirage: "Events of 1942 were the first large-scale outbreak in which wrecking and burning were indulged in a spirit of, what to the Mahatma was, misconceived patriotism. It lowered the standards of mass behaviour, and set a dangerous precedent when in 1946-47 communal feeling replaced patriotism as the principal ingredient in popular ferment."
In "Tragedy and triumph," he inter alia answers later-day commentators' question why Gandhiji did not undertake a fast, the ultimate weapon in his armoury of Satyagraha, to stall the Partition of the country: "To prevent Partition, there was no point in Gandhi's fasting or starting civil disobedience against the British, who were not susceptible to such moral pressure and were in any case leaving the country... The leaders of the Muslim League were proof against the nuances of Satyagraha; they would at once have denounced Gandhi's fast as a trick to cheat them of the prize of Pakistan which lay within their grasp."
In part III of the book, 13 essays are grouped under the title "Towards understanding Gandhi" that deal with Gandhiji vis-a-vis Nehru, Jamnalal Bajaj, Pyarelal, C.F. Andrews, the West, the Jews, not leaving out Attenborough's "Gandhi" film. In the essay "Three disciples", Nanda pen-portrays Gandhiji's secretary, Mahadev Desai (1892-1942), Gandhian economist J. C. Kumarappa (1892-1960) and the English woman, Miss Madeleine Slade nee Mirabehn (1892-1982). Here, he has chosen to gloss over the last phase of Mirabehn's stay in India when she literally turned against her guru.
It is a little known fact (nor narrated in the book) that suddenly in June 1944 she "went down" in Gandhiji's esteem when she demanded return of the moneys she had been giving him and the Ashram from time to time during the past 20 years (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume 94, Pages 116-7). Gandhiji also disapproved of her newfangled Pashulok project near Rishikesh. Mirabehn, in her accusing long letter of 12th June 1944, feared that Gandhiji might "broadcast public or semi-public disapproval" of her work, "which statement I should feel fully obliged equally publicly to answer " (CWMG Vol. 94, pp 401-2) Gandhiji, in his last letter to Mirabehn, which he wrote two weeks before his assassination, plainly rebuked her: "I seem to see a vital defect in you. You are unable to cling to anything finally. You are a gipsy, never happy unless you are wandering. You will not become an expert in anything, and your mother (i.e., cow with reference to her Pashulok project) is also likely to perish in your lap... " (CWMG Vol. 90, P.431). The project did perish by 1959 when she left India in a huff, never to return.
The essay on Pyarelal is about what he wrote about others, and next to nothing about him.
Of course, being a collection of published and unpublished articles written over a period to respond to the needs of specific audiences, one cannot expect the author to reshape them with fresh facts. To the extent, therefore, that these essays provide a composite picture of Gandhiji's personality and thought as well as his relations with his colleagues, the book is a significant addition to the body of literature on Gandhiji.
LA. SU. RENGARAJAN
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