Gandhi Prisoner of Hope by Judith Brown

Book review by Julian Samuel

Yale University Press; New Haven and London, 1989; 430 Pages.

Montreal Gazette, 17 February, 1990

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869 in Porbander, India. He was educated as a lawyer in London. After a failed career in Bombay, he left for South Africa to work for a trading company where he organized Indians in their struggle against the Union Government of Jan Christiaan Smutts.

During the 20's he returned to his native India where, as the leader of Indian National Congress, he participated in and at times lead the drive for Swaraj (Home Rule.) He was famous for his sermons on religious truth, justice, Hindu Muslim unity and vegetarianism. His feelings were tragically hurt when British India underwent vivisection on midnight August 14, 1947.

During his experimental life he was jailed in 1922, 1930, 1933, and 1942. He was deleted from the Indian scene on 30 January 1948 by an assassin's bullet. Judith Brown's labour of love meticulously outlines the life of one of the fathers of Indian democracy: the task has not been an easy one. Brown had to wade through tons of newspaper articles, thousands of letters, and several biographies. Also, the interpretative problems of looking at the life of so enigmatic a figure must have proven overwhelming; historical complexities have been very difficult for her. The book is not exactly a scholarly success.

(It is littered with typos and some footnotes numbers don't even have details attached to them. But this is a small point.)

The emergence of a savior is phenomenon many countries have had to face. In our very immediate past such religio-political leaders have passed their message on to people in the throes of liberation struggles. Dr. Ali Shari'ati with his tyrannicidal reinterpretations of the Koran was to lay down an insurrectionary procedure for the people of Iran. However, the cotton spinning Gandhi, was a very different Messiah. For many in North America, Gandhi entered the contemporary public mind through Sir Richard Attenborough's malignantly flawed film "Gandhi." Also, many people may have come to Gandhi through his popularity among the less passionately driven leaders of the American Civil Rights movement. His repute spins out from the borders of the Indian sub-continent to every country that has been touched by the virtues of colonialism.

England's triumphal march of progress had systematically ravaged the pink areas on older world maps; hence Gandhiji was and is everywhere. He was

that important an anti-imperialist: though, for one reason or another many have questioned and dismissed outright the strategic credibility of his "non-violence" against the Raj. Was he a catalyst or a vegetarian hindrance?

Brown is laudatory. Those of us who need to analytically look through the 20s, 30s, 40s, right up to the 15 of August 1947, when the transfer of power from Churchill's chilly England to Jawaharlal Nehru's developing "socialist" India took place, will have to look elsewhere. Brown is not very prone to useful deconstruction. One can however, see the bright side of her hagiographical skills.

This is not a work of vast theoretical judgments. Nor is it sufficiently critical of Gandhi's role in the slow move for Home Rule. There is a not a satisfactory debate on the surrounding circumstances such as the development of the concept and genesis of Pakistan. True, she does discuss Mohammad Ali's Jinnah's role in the Muslim League, but it is done in a way that does not challenge conventional explanations of Partition of 1947.

Nor does Brown introduce the options that might have been available for the Quit India movement. (For example the violent potential of Subhas Chandra Bose's tin pot Indian National Army). Instead, we are introduced to Gandhi's personal hang-ups; his suicidal attachment to revolutionary avant-garde diet(s); his obsessions with brahmacharya (celibacy), his sometimes theatrical

self-punitory fasts, his days of silence and his 24 hour a day desire for inner peace.

Brown is not devoted to dismantling the myths orbiting Gandhi. Brown's reinforces and perpetuates lofty notions about his immaculate greatness. Gushy admiration   makes for old fashioned writing and dull reading. Other thinkers on this period such as Tariq Ali (An Indian Dynasty, 1985) have projected Gandhi as strategist who could not be ignored.

But because of Brown's inexorable bleating about the man's selfless devotion to landless peasants and his selfless work with the Harijans, (untouchables) his quest for inner peace, and the lot, we get an imbalanced view of the man. Brown makes him a total bore which he was not. Some think him a brilliant tactician which at times he was.

He made peasants aware of the concept of land reform but in critical moments countered with; "I shall throw the whole weight of my influence in preventing a class war. I shall be no party to dispossessing propertied classes of their property without just cause. Capitalists are fathers and workers their children." (David Selbourne: An Eye to India: Unmasking a Tyranny, 1977).

Gandhi did indeed have an effect on the politicization of peasants, just as did Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his daughter Benazir Bhutto. But Brown does not elaborate on Gandji's tactical duplicity, of which there are so many examples that the mind boggles. At times, he appears like a stubborn old anti-industrial-

pro-agrarian man in India and at others, a self absorbed saint. Brown's work is as flawed as Sir Richard Attenborough's. The book has aggrandizements enough to last until the second coming -- stinking to high heaven.

In South Africa we are introduced to a shy man who found it hard to confront the most powerful expansionist machine on the face of the earth. Back then,England was very powerful, very convincing. Then, the many nations living

under its august fluttering flags, roaring stony lions and dashing Viceroys wanted out, wanted independence.

In South Africa he organized Indians. There is a claim that he was deeply involved with the forging of links between Hindus and Muslims. However, when his son Manilal fell in love with a Muslim woman, "Gandhi argued that such a match was contrary to dharma (duty). He said, "Your marriage will have a powerful impact on the Hindu-Muslim question. Inter-communal marriages are no solution to this problem". He "rearranged" his son's marriage to a "suitable" Hindu girl (pp.201). Such was the initial formation of his early anti-racism and commitment to intercommunal peace.

It is cogent to note that in the scores of pages on his South African phase, not one word is spent on Gandhi's lack of connection with the Black struggle for freedom. If Brown can point out this characteristic attempt of Gandhi's Hindu-Muslim unity venture then why did she refrain from critically reflecting on his distance from the black drive for freedom?

As she puts it, "During the Boer War and Zulu Rebellion he volunteered his services as a non-combatant". To demonstrate Brown's skills of silence it is necessary to quote further: "Although his personal sympathies lay with the Boer's and the Zulus in each case he felt that if he demanded rights as a citizen of the empire so it was his duty to participate in its defense". Gandhi sided with empire.

At 38 years of age in 1907, was Gandhi not mature enough to take an articulate position on race and empire? His non-violent devotion to the latter is amply evident. Brown ought to have been clear on this question. Was the Mahatma (saint) disposed to side with Black Africans or not? If not, then what sort of predicative knowledge can we develop on Brown's kind of history?

There is frequent softness; she refers to the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre of 1919 as the Jallianwalla Bagh "firing". It is well known by now that this was General Dyer's very own cold blooded Massacre.

Despite Brown's extremely impressive fluency with the facts, she practices a delicate vice-regal shyness in indexing Gandhi's role in Quit India. In one chapter, "Non-Violence On Trial", where Brown is more critical than usual.

But it falls short of other definitive works on Partition. Hamza Alavi's essays for example. She spends little time on Gandhi's battles with Nehru, and she does not discuss Chandra Bose's attempt to free India from the British with his Indian National Army. Could Bose's bows-and-arrows approach have accelerated the fall of the Raj? His liberation army could have struck Delhi in

1939 when the empire was weakened by yet another European tribal war. What did Gandhi think of this? Brown does not really detail how was he going to handle a Japanese invasion. The list of analytical underdevelopment goes on.