Troubled Soul

Being a book reviewer is not really a glamorous occupation. Few of us are stopped in public places and gazed upon admiringly, particularly in India. However, over the past 10-odd days, we experienced a different world, one in which the book reviewer is deeply cool. Carrying Pulitzer-prize winner Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul in a way that kept either the cover or the book’s spine visible led to us being stopped by strangers in public places. All of them wanted to touch the book. Distressingly, one dislodged our bookmark and another tried to slip the book into their bag. Everyone wanted to know how we’d got our hands on a copy and upon hearing the words “book reviewer” and “advance copy”, every pair of eyes lit up with admiration. Clearly, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Mahatma and Father of the Nation, continues to affect change even 63 years after his death.

Great Soul is perhaps the most talked-about book of the year so far, thanks to Lelyveld’s discovery that there was a cotton-wool and Vaseline-based friendship that Gandhi shared with a Jewish architect, Herman Kallenbach. It’s a curious fact that a possible homosexual romance is more important a revelation to most of us (despite knowing Gandhi’s bizarre views on sex and experiments like cuddling with his niece in an effort to exercise control over sudden hard-ons) than Lelyveld’s larger argument that despite his stature, Gandhi failed at realising the goals he had set for himself.

Lelyveld makes it clear in his author’s note at the start of Great Soul that the book is not a biography in the traditional sense. It skips many episodes, including Gandhi’s early years in Gujarat, many of his encounters with British officials in South Africa and India, as well as details of numerous political dealings and fasts. His wife Kasturba’s death is mentioned in passing but the few letters Gandhi wrote to Hitler (with the hope of converting the Fuhrer to the idea of non-violence) are referred to repeatedly. The Indian independence movement isn’t of great importance to Lelyveld, which may seem surprising to the casual reader expecting a biography of the father of the nation. Lelyveld is interested in Gandhi as a social reformer and Great Soul maintains a tight focus on how Gandhi developed his ideas about social change and tactics to effect the same.

As Lelyveld shows candidly, despite his enormous popularity, Gandhi struggled to convince Indians to follow his lead. Crowds gathered to see him but few shared his vision. He was taken for a ride by the officials with whom he negotiated in South Africa and the political leverage of Indians barely improved as a result of Gandhi’s manoeuvres. In India, he campaigned against untouchability but the hero of that movement is generally acknowledged to be Ambedkar, who was more of an adversary to him than an ally. Gandhi’s vision of a self-sustaining Indian village that promotes and survives upon local arts and agriculture has proven to be impractical. His attempts to quieten post-Partition violence seemed to have made little impact. From Lelyveld’s research, there emerges a Gandhi who was very aware of his failures, constantly tried to adjust himself to his context and was disturbed by defeat. He wasn’t convinced of his Mahatma-hood, even though he did wield it shrewdly at all opportunities. He is usually seen as a leader of a huge mass of people but the reality seems to be that Gandhi was constantly trying to manage a movement that had an agenda different from his own. You wouldn’t think of the bespectacled bald man on our currency as a tragic hero, but ultimately, that’s the Gandhi that emerges at the end of Great Soul.

The book has all the research and reportage you would expect from someone who worked for nearly 40 years with The New York Times and has won the Pulitzer for non-fiction writing. Lelyveld has sourced information from the solid canon of writing on and by Gandhi, as well as books on Gandhi’s contemporaries and adversaries like Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and Mohammad Ali Jinnah. He has interviewed five of Gandhi’s descendants and numerous historians. Lelyveld also visited most of the places he has written about, including tiny South African towns and the remote district of Noakhali in present-day Bangladesh where Gandhi stayed for months after the Great Calcutta Killing in 1946. All of this comes together in a book that may be less salacious than The Daily Mail suggested but it’s a lot more thought-provoking. Gandhi emerges as a complicated, wily man whose brilliance lies in the fact that he was able to give a fragmented colony a certain idealism, a sense of nationhood and dreams that even today continue to inspire people all around the world.

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India by Joseph Lelyveld, Harper Collins, Rs699. Buy it from Flipkart.com.