Maps
‘My life is its own message.’1
THE WORLD-CHANGING EVENT of 1930 was recorded in every national newspaper and newsreel: in an act of defiance Gandhi had challenged the British Empire by taking untaxed, contraband salt from his own land.2 Accounts report how he then cleansed himself in the sea, pictures of the time showing the tiny white-clad individual against the pure-white salt flats, a symbol of purity challenging the greatest empire the world had known. As he held up the white crystals for all to see, the nationalist poet Sarojini Naidu cried out, to the acclamation of the crowds: ‘Hail, deliverer!’
The iconic image is, as usual in these cases, a fake, a concoction of journalists, film-makers and adulatory biographers. Gandhi did go to Dandi, but the images and accounts of it are a carefully thought out, stage-managed set-piece. The famous picture shows Gandhi three days after he arrived, picking up salt at nearby Bhimrad, ten kilometres from the coast and twenty-five from Dandi. Sarojini Naidu was present when he reached Dandi but she did not utter the often reported cry (which would have been a disappointingly trite utterance, for her).3 The great photographic moment was a re-enactment for the cameras of the event that had taken place on a muddy beach where the salt was not visible and the act therefore less apparently symbolic.
Gandhi’s achievement was not in defying the law to gather salt (peasants did that with impunity all the time): it was in announcing that he was going to break the law, then marching for twenty-four days to do it, giving the media plenty of time to comment and orchestrate their coverage.
His political colleagues had been bemused, never considering salt in the slightest bit important; likewise the British authorities, who made no show of strength because of the pettiness of the act. But Gandhi knew the importance of symbolism. He was the most spiritual of men, praying twice daily and incessantly murmuring the name of God, and his attention to diet extended to counting the number of raisins he ate. But more significant than any of his spiritual knowledge was his awareness of image. His oddly assorted clothing reflected the way he had striven to make himself the message: the top-hat and spats of a London barrister, the plain shirt and dhoti of an indentured labourer, the homespun clothes of those who rejected British cloth imports. Finally, when he had an army of supporters clad in homespun yarn, he appeared wearing almost nothing, nude but for a loincloth. This was the image that went around the world—one near-naked holy man against an empire. He became an icon. At that time only Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler had achieved such worldwide recognition for their image, such that everyone knew exactly what they stood for.
Gandhi’s life is the ultimate challenge for a biographer: it was so multi-faceted, and there is so much surviving contemporary information about it. Many people demonstrate two aspects of interest in their lives. A national leader may have an incandescent political career and a lurid sex life, but nothing else worthy of comment. It is not unusual to encounter social reformers who have a complex relationship with food, or with religion; many people famous for their achievements have a tumultuous family life. Gandhi’s political life, spiritual life, family life and sex life were all fascinating; his relationship to food could fill a volume in itself.
In all these areas, Gandhi’s own testimony survives, his collected works run to one hundred volumes: books, articles, letters and speeches. For some world figures such as Homer there is no reliable biographical information, for some such as Abraham there is little, for Gandhi there is a superabundance. Gandhi knew what use would be made of this material, and he was not encouraging: ‘My writings should be cremated with my body. What I have done will endure, not what I have said or written.’4
Notwithstanding his warning, this biography is based on primary sources, on his own writing and that of people who were close to him. Chief of these were his secretary between 1917 and 1942, Mahadev Desai, who wrote a nine-volume diary, and Desai’s assistant and later the principal secretary, Pyarelal, who was with Gandhi from 1920 until his death. With his sister Sushila Nayar, Gandhi’s doctor, Pyarelal wrote a ten-volume biography. Of all the other material used here the work of eyewitnesses, particularly in diaries or near-contemporary accounts, is taken as paramount, in preference to later interpretations.
Gandhi’s own two autobiographies, one on his life to the 1920s and the other on his South African experiences, are a guide not so much to the events (though sometimes they are the only record) but to the relative importance he placed on the various aspects of his life. Thus much less emphasis needs to be given to the law and politics when Gandhi was a student in London than to his vegetarian diet, because that was what obsessed him. In South Africa the life of the ideal communities he set up and his own celibacy were to him the most important part of his work. The battle with the government over Indian rights was what he did, the struggle with his sex drive was what he was. Like many very ambitious men, Gandhi was highly sexed: the interest for the biographer is how he tried to contain this sexuality, and how rivetingly candid he could be about it in his own writing.
Any reliance on Gandhi’s own writing immediately opens up question of trust: did he tell the truth? His autobiography is subtitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth, but what kind of truth was it that he believed in? Any politician could say they experimented with the truth, which would be a euphemism for lying.
There is some evidence that the incompetence Gandhi showed in his early public life has been exaggerated, giving a more dramatic impression of his later resounding successes. Later historians have found his contribution to South African politics greatly overstated. His followers were certainly left disappointed after his supposed agreements with the South African government unravelled. It is not over such matters or their interpretation that the real question of Gandhi’s veracity emerges, however. In terms of mere fact, Gandhi’s truth is a selective one not so much for what he wants to conceal as for what he wants to explore in his past: his moral development. The Autobiography started as a series of instructive articles in his newspaper Young India, where each separatechapter had to stand alone with its own moral. The work is therefore fashioned as a series of lessons, as ‘the trials of Gandhi’ or ‘Gandhi’s progress’ after one of his favourite books, Bunyan’s spiritual biography The Pilgrim’s Progress. Gandhi is less concerned with the factual accuracy of an incident than with its spiritual meaning.
For Gandhi the striving for truth was not an attempt to reach unquestioned factual accuracy, but a stretching out towards spiritual perfection. For him, truth was eternal and, conversely, if something were transient it could not be true. ‘Often in my progress I have found faint glimpses of the Absolute Truth, God, and the daily conviction is growing on me that He alone is real and all else is unreal,’ he wrote.5 Gandhi’s truth was the divinity: ‘Truth is God, or God is nothing but Truth.’6 He explained the steps by which he had reached this position: ‘Instead of saying “God is Truth” I now say “Truth is God”... There was a time when I doubted the existence of God. Even at that time I did not doubt the existence of Truth. This Truth is not a material quality; it is pure consciousness. Since it orders the whole universe it is God.’7
The truth, as it functioned in everyday life, was not immutable, even when religious questions were under consideration. Gandhi pronounced on the vexed question of intercaste relationships in the 1920s: ‘Prohibition against intermarriage and inter-dining is essential for a rapid evolution of the soul.’8 The following decade he had modified his view: ‘Restriction on inter-caste dining and inter-caste marriage is no part of the Hindu religion. It is a social custom which crept into Hinduism when perhaps it was in its decline.’9 By the 1940s he was saying: ‘I do not at all approve of marriages within the same caste, and began actively discriminating against caste marriages in the most forthright manner.10 He blessed a marriage between a Brahmin professor and an untouchable woman, ‘and further declared that thereafter his blessings would not be available to any wedding couple unless one of the parties was a Harijan [untouchable].’11
He explained to those bemused by his positions: ‘I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my search after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things... What I am concerned with is my readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, and therefore, when anybody finds any inconsistency between any two writings of mine, if he has still faith in my sanity, he would do well to choose the later of the two on the same subject.’12 More straightforwardly, he explained: ‘My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth, as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.’13 Hence the biographer’s dilemma in interpreting Gandhi’s writing about his own life.
Even non-violence was qualified—he was willing to call off civil disobedience in 1930 in return for acquiescence to a list of demands including the right of Indians to bear arms. He explained at the start of the Second World War: ‘If Poland has [the] utmost bravery and an equal measure of selflessness, history will forget that she defended herself with violence. Her violence will be counted almost as non-violence.’14 His willingness to see civil war in India in the 1940s horrified the British with whom he was negotiating.
He stated clearly that he had learned from the great religions ‘that we should remain passive about worldly pursuits and active about godly pursuits, that we should see a limit to our worldly ambition and that our religious ambition should be illimitable.’15 He made daily references to other religions, sang Christian hymns and was subjected to public abuse for using quotations from the Koran in his prayer meetings, but his core beliefs remained entirely Hindu. It is apparent that he did not find the cosmological systems of other religions at all satisfactory—only Hinduism had the answer to spiritual oneness. He took reincarnation as a factual matter; writing to Tolstoy in 1909 he said: ‘Reincarnation or transmigration is a cherished belief with millions in India, indeed in China also. With many, one might almost say, it is a matter of experience, no longer a matter of academic acceptance. It explains reasonably many mysteries of life.’16
The personal part of the cosmology, for Gandhi as for other devout Hindus, was a movement of the spirit through seemingly limitless refinements to reach perfection. Gandhi described it as ‘self-realisation, to see God face to face, to attain moksha. I live and move and have my being in pursuit of this goal.’17 Moksha is the term for freedom from the cycle of rebirth and death; release from it was hardly a modest aim, but one which Gandhi saw within his reach: ‘I am impatient to realise myself, to attain moksha in this very existence. My national service is part of my training for freeing my soul from the bondage of flesh. Thus considered, my service may be regarded as purely selfish. I have no desire for the perishable kingdom of earth. I am striving for the Kingdom of Heaven which is moksha.’18
This is the clue to Gandhi’s sometimes contradictory behaviour: he was an intensely ambitious man, but this was no ordinary ambition. He did not personally care about salt, and was trying to eliminate it from his diet; he campaigned for the indigo workers when he did not approve of dyeing cloth; he supported the mill workers when he was opposing the use of mill-produced cloth; he wanted Indians to rule India but had no time for elections and assemblies; he enjoyed the fulsome support of the rich while promoting the values of poverty. None of it really mattered; the aim was not in the achievement of these transient things, but in accruing spiritual power. As he said, it was the life itself that was the message. The ambition was not for fairness for labourers or Indian independence—these were transitory demands. Gandhi’s objective was nothing short of spiritual perfection.