Gandhi: A Sublime Failure

By S.S. Gill Rupa & Co: Review by Renuka Narayanan

THE INDIAN EXPRESS Flair, September 23, 2001

His previous two books: The Dynasty was a political biography of the Nehru-Gandhi family, while The Pathology of Corruption was an acclaimed analysis of the social crime that has eaten into our entrails. Now, with his latest oeuvre, Gill has attempted to understand the most complex personality of that entire pantheon of modern historical figures, the man whose writ changed the world and reinvented the word: Mahatma Gandhi.

The public has barely digested Stanley Wolpert’s book on Gandhi, so it is inevitable that comparisons occur. But they need to be firmly squashed, for each writer has his own angle on things. But one point may interest readers as highlighting a contrast in societies: Unlike Wolpert’s book, this biography by Gill, a Punjabi raised on Partition, is a matter-of-fact detailing of the violence that Gandhi endured through most of his active life. Whereas Wolpert, with cries of horror, grasps the reader’s chin and forces her to look at just how much physical terror and assault was directed at the ‘‘naked fakir’’: bombs, beatings, bricks, stones, shoes, lathis, whips, abuse. Even one of those experiences might have scared any one of us away for good. But Bapu stuck it out, brought the world’s greatest empire to its knees and became the Father of the Nation.

It is with the basic love and reverence due to such a colossus that Gill examines the Mahatma’s life and work in ten chapters. Between the Backdrop and Overview are chapters focused on all the thorny issues of Gandhian history and discourse: the Freedom Struggle, Ahimsa and Satyagraha, the removal of untouchability, Gandhi’s Brahmacharya and Swaraj, Gandhi and Daridranarayan and Hindu-Muslim unity. Gill examines each of these aspects and critiques Gandhi’s actions and reactions at each step. But his voice breathes of a balanced mind, in which Gandhi’s heroic nature is properly acknowledged even as his views on sex are rued as mistaken, his sudden, emotional swings are critiqued for the harm they effect.

Gill underlines the central Gandhian failures with feeling and skill: Hindu-Muslim unity topped his list, but he was never acknowledged by the Muslims as their spokesman. Untouchability was another core issue, but again, he was a ladder that was kicked after climbing. As for Independence: Partition was the final great failure of everything that Bapu had striven for since that fateful train journey in South Africa. With so much grief, violence, hatred and betrayal to work into this tortured passage in human history, Gill stays remarkably level-headed and objective about acts and opinions of unreason.

Towards the end, the reader feels a certain sense of catharsis. Famous foreigners and famous Gandhian scholars (and relatives) have said their say about the Mahatma. It is more comforting, however, to hear Bapu assessed so rationally by an Indian with no apparent agenda. For he writes simply as one citizen to another, from the perspective of a longer life and greater experience of the events and entities that shaped our nation’s destiny. As one goes from chapter to chapter, one’s throat constricts at the fall of yet another grand project, patiently and painstakingly laboured for, gently but inexorably detailed by Gill, with rueful clucks at some particularly bad blunder or fallout. It is impossible to close this book unmoved.