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Before you listen to this episode of The Scene and the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
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Do check out Pulya Baazi, hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kutasane, two really good
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Kick ass podcast in Hindi, it's amazing.
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At what point did Mohandas Gandhi become Mahatma Gandhi?
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Could Mohandas have played the role in India's independence that Mahatma did?
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How much of what Mahatma Gandhi achieved was just dumb luck and not his strategic genius?
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And finally, if Mahatma Gandhi was around today, what would he have made the world we
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
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Please welcome your host, Amit Padma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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This is the second of my two-part mini-series on Mahatma Gandhi, and my guest is the great
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historian Ramachandra Guha.
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The previous episode dealt with Gandhi's years in Porbandar, Rajkot, London and South
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Africa, and this one takes the story forward.
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Without further ado, let's get straight to a quick commercial break.
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My conversation with Ram begins right after that.
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Ram, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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Ram, in the last episode, we spoke about Gandhi before India.
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Before we really get further into today's episode, I'd like to speak a little bit about
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How did you become a historian?
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Well, there is a chapter of accidents.
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So you know, I grew up wanting to play cricket and I did science in school, but I knew that
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if you do science in college, you have practicals in the afternoon, you can't get into the college
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So I registered for economics.
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I was interested in writing.
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I did it in a school magazine, my high school magazine, and if I'd had guts, I'd have gone
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and done my BA in English literature, but I didn't have the guts because I came from
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a family of scientists and literature was a stretch too far, because economics being
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a kind of pseudoscience.
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Let me tell you a joke about economics as a pseudoscience, which is told by the great
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historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis.
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And he says that in the history of humankind, science has often emerged out of magic.
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From astrology came astronomy, from alchemy came chemistry.
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What will come out of economics?
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Okay, so it's at least a pseudoscience and it sort of placated my parents and my grandparents.
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But I was spectacularly useless at economics.
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I did a BA, did an MA, I took a gap, what's now called a gap year, looked around, and
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in that gap year I discovered the works of the anthropologist Verrier Elvin and was lucky
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enough to get a PhD admission in sociology.
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So economics was moving me.
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So essentially economics is really abstract and analytical and mathematical.
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History is about human beings, but in society and with kind of an overlay of structures
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And then from there I moved to history, which is process, and then finally to biography,
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which is actually a single individual life.
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But my degrees are really in economics and sociology, and it was in the course of my
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research on really environmental subjects that I got interested in the history of forests
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and then I fell in love with the archives and the joy of discovering old documents nobody
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has ever seen before and poring over them sort of consumed me.
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And I kind of became an accidental historian.
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And you've written somewhere about how, you know, in 1998, I think it was, and you were
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really known as someone who's written books on environmental history and so on.
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And I think it was in New York where you were asked, would you give a class on something?
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And instead of choosing environmentalism as your subject, you picked Gandhi.
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So I'd been, I started reading around Gandhi a bit.
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You know, as, what happened was, I'd been working on the environment and my first book
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was a history of the Chipko movement and the two great leaders of the Chipko movement,
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both fortunately alive, both in the late eighties, Tandeep Prasad Bhatt and Sundar Lal Bhagwana,
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kind of exemplified the best kind of living Gandhianism.
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They were men of transparency, integrity, moral courage, nonviolent, you know, innovatively
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using Gandhian methods to protect the Himalayan forests.
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And so I started reading about Gandhi.
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I mean, those days when I, I'm talking about the seventies and the eighties, I don't travel
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much by train anymore, so it's probably, but I'm sure it's not the case.
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In the seventies and the eighties, you had these railway bookstores with A.H. Wheeler
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and they often had books published by Navjivan.
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And just in the eighties and nineties, I picked up a large number of books on or about Gandhi
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and there were two books that profoundly struck me.
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One was a book edited by an anthologist called R.K. Prabhu, it's called Truth Called Them
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Differently, which is about the correspondence between Tagore and Gandhi over a long period.
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And the other is a book called An Atheist with Gandhi, which was by a Andhra social
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reformer who worked on the emancipation of Dalits called Gora Ramchandra Rao, G Ramchandra
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And I got more interested in Gandhi outside the environment, you know, Gandhi as a thinker
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on religion, morality, civilization.
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And then I read Ambedkar's great book, Annihilation of Caste, which is of course also a fantastic
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polemic against Gandhi.
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And then I came up against some of the limitations of Gandhi's whole social reform movement.
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And it was really these three tracks, Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste, Gora's book An Atheist
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with Gandhi and this collection of the letters between Tagore and Gandhi, that moved me towards
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thinking maybe I should teach a course on Gandhi, I'm bored with the environment, I
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That course worked out incredibly well, and with our students of very different backgrounds,
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different nationalities, there was a Burmese student, a Japanese student, an African American
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And ever since I've been kind of consumed with Gandhi.
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And you know, since you initially got attracted to Gandhianism, which of course is a distillation
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of his best ideas and values that survive, and you actually wrote these books on the
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man himself with all his complexities and you know, all the dark sides and so on, how
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did you come to look at Gandhi and Gandhianism differently?
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So, I mean, I think we discussed some of this in the, you know, in the first episode.
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I think Gandhi, if you look at Gandhi, the context of the India of today, I think clearly
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interfaith harmony, relations of mutual respect, accommodation between Hindus and Muslims are
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of yet of still of crucial importance.
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So, you know, the ruling classes today kind of denied and want to move us more and more
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in the direction of a Hindu state.
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I mean, today's newspaper talks about the citizenship bill, which will give, you know,
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citizenship rights to anyone who's a Hindu from anywhere, basically, is what it says,
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Which is kind of a denial of Gandhi's more universalistic philosophy.
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We're recording on Jan 8th, by the way, I should say.
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The other thing, I mean, it is that, look, for Gandhi, Hinduism was fallible.
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So, every religion, every national tradition was fallible.
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You looked in the mirror of the other and improved yourself.
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Hinduism was fallible because we treated our untouchables and our women badly, right?
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India was fallible because, you know, our institutions didn't work well.
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Of course, in those days, there wasn't that much corruption.
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I think this understanding of Gandhi, that individuals are fallible, cultures are fallible,
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communities are fallible, religious traditions are fallible, nations are fallible, I think
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is vitally important today, where there's a kind of an absolute lack of respect for
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criticisms of religions or communities or individuals, I mean, Modi is infallible, Hinduism
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is infallible, Bharat Mata is infallible, you know, that is completely contrary to Gandhi's
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In fact, we think in absolutes today, but you know, as we'll probably discuss later
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in the episode, to some extent, Gandhi also did, he was dogmatic about a lot of things,
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but we'll kind of come to that.
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So your book, Gandhi The Years That Changed the World, really takes us, begins where your
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Gandhi Before India, where he's arrived back in India, and he's just chatted with his mentor
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and someone he really admired, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Gokhale told him that, look,
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for a year, I just want you to go around the country, don't open your mouth, don't give
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opinions and so on and so forth.
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Why do you think Gokhale gave him this advice?
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I think Gokhale gave him that advice because he'd been away for so long.
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You know, he'd been away from India for 22 years, and he didn't understand the landscape.
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Even when he was in India, all he knew was Gujarat and Bombay.
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I mean, he'd been to Calcutta once for a congress, he'd been to Madras once to address a meeting,
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he'd been to Pune once, but I think Gokhale thought that he must understand the country
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he's going to spend the rest of his life in.
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The other reason, though, it's probably not spelled out by Gokhale, was Gokhale, we again
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discussed in the first episode, Hind Swaraj.
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Gandhi was profoundly ambivalent about Hind Swaraj.
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He thought it an ideological utopian fact, and he perhaps felt that if Gandhi was to
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come be confronted with ground realities in India, he would nuance and modify some of
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the extreme positions he took in Hind Swaraj.
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In fact, that's exactly what happened.
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And I think it was very wise advice for him, and he traveled all over, I mean, he would
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just track his journeys in those days, and train travel was incredibly arduous in those
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He often went with Kasturba.
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Many of those journeys were with Kasturba, some were alone, but he went north, south,
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east, west, you know, he went to Shantiniketan, he went to Banaras, he went to Gurukul, Kangdi,
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he came to Madras, he went deep south to places like Mayavaram and Tirunelveli, where he was
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confronted with the horrors of untouchability for the first time in a direct way.
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He traveled through his native Kathiawar, up and down, you know, Gondal, Porbandar,
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Rajkot, Vadavan, and so on, and I think he came to understand this country.
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He had come back to any whose politics he wanted to immerse himself in.
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And in fact, in your book, you mentioned that he was also asked to give opinions on something
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or speak about something during this period, but even though Gokhale had died a month into
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this journey, he respected the promise he had made.
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It was only his, you know, voluntary vow of silence on political and social matters was
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in January 1916, that vow was no longer valid, and it's only then that he started speaking,
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and of course the most, his coming out speeches in Banaras when he attacks the Indian elite
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for their luxurious lifestyles, their jewelry, their craven worship of the colonial ethos,
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But it's a full year before he speaks out.
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And it's interesting that in a sense, he is now faced with the challenge of making, once
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again, a particular journey that he had already made, in the sense when he went to South Africa
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when he began campaigning for the Indians there, he was a representative of the elites,
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which is the Gujarati merchants and the Parsis and not the laborers at that point in time.
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But then he turned it into, within the limited scope of the Indians that were in South Africa,
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what you could call a bit of a mass movement, where all the Tamilians came on board, and
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And now, as you point out at the start of this book, he shifted from an arena where
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there are 150,000 Indians to an arena where there are 300 million Indians, and the movement
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as it was in his early days in South Africa is really an elite movement still.
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Can you lay out the landscape for me at the time?
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Like, what is the freedom movement like?
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So there is the Indian National Congress, which is now 30 years old by the time Gandhi
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It's clearly grown quite substantially in numbers.
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It's had a meeting every year.
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Its membership has expanded.
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Several years before Gandhi comes in 1907, there's a major split in the Congress between
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the extremists and the moderates, the extremists led by Tilak, who want militant action now,
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the moderates led by Gokhale, who feel not only that you can appeal to the better instincts
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of the British through reasonable argument, but also that social reform is crucial, whereas
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the extremists led by Tilak feel that social reform will come after political independence.
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And when Gandhi comes back, there's an attempt to heal this split.
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He was in jail in Mandalay.
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He's come back, and there's an attempt to heal this split and bring the moderates and
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extremists on one platform.
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The other split that has happened in the Congress from the time it started is that when it started,
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it was both Hindu and Muslim intellectuals and aristocrats were in it.
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It was an elite organization, but it had both Hindu and Muslim elites.
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I mean, Syed Ahmed Khan moved away from the Congress, many Muslims moved away.
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In 1906, the Muslim League was formed, and there's an attempt in Gandhi's first years
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in India to bring Muslims back.
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So in 1916, which is a year after Gandhi comes back, there's a meeting in Lucknow of the
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Congress, which Gandhi attends, where Jinnah and Tilak forge a kind of compact in the Congress
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Now, what is interesting is that Gandhi attends the 1915 Congress in Bombay, the Congress
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in those days, the annual Congress was held in December in those days.
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End of his first year, he attends that Congress.
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End of the second year, he attends the Lucknow Congress, and in both places, he's a marginal
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All he's allowed to speak on is indentured labor in South Africa.
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He can't speak on political reform, constitutional change, Hindu-Muslim collaboration, none of
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He's really a marginal figure who's in some small hall somewhere in an obscure part of
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The great leaders are Annie Besant, Malaviya, Tilak, Jinnah, and so on and so forth.
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Gokhale, of course, dies shortly after Gandhi comes back.
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And Bipin Chandra Pal, Lajpat Rai, and they are the kind of leaders of the Congress at
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And he really is a very marginal figure.
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But he knows, he's looking for his chance.
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I mean, I think Gandhi is a person of great ambition.
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I mean, we briefly alluded to this in our first episode.
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He comes back from South Africa because he wants to claim a larger stage.
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He wants for himself a greater historic role.
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He has proved to himself that he can lead 150,000 diasporic Indians in South Africa.
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And at some level, he is bored or disenchanted with this.
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Move on to bigger things, and he comes back.
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But clearly, he's patient.
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Gokhale has told him to understand the country.
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He starts speaking briefly on these issues.
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1915, 16 is on the margins.
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And the first major opportunity comes in 1917, when he goes to Champaran and gets involved
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in the struggle of the indigo tenants there.
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And he comes face to face with agrarian distress, what we would today call agrarian distress.
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And in a way in which neither Tilak, nor Gokhale, nor Jinnah, nor any Besant, nor any of the
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leaders of Congress had ever had a clue of how the peasants lived and labored.
#
And Gandhi, in those three months in Champaran, understands that the real problem of India
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lies outside the cities.
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And if India is to really...
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If political action in India must bring in peasants, which the Congress, till that stage,
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has not been able to do.
#
So before we talk further about Champaran, which I want to do, just a thought that struck
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me when you spoke about Gandhi's ambition, and it's probably an outrageous question,
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but do you think that self-delusion is a necessary condition to attain greatness?
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What I mean by that is no one starts out great, you know, and people always imagine themselves
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to be more than they are at the time.
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And some people overreach and fall flat, but some people just keep going, driven by their
#
delusion till they actually achieve greatness.
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Well, I would rather call it self-belief.
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I mean, the belief may be delusory.
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In many cases, it may be delusory, you know, that actually you may get nowhere in your
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I mean, he had it from an early age.
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It was confirmed by his associates in South Africa, his friend, Pranjeevan Mehta, who
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announced him a Mahatma well before Tagore does, and so on.
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But I think the only explanation for Gandhi leaving South Africa and coming back to India
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is that he wants to be the leader of all of India.
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He's not content with being the leader of a small expatriate community.
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But in some sense, much as the death of Gokhale is a shock to him, does it also free him
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So I think Gokhale was the kind of person he enormously venerated.
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So Gokhale wasn't that much older than him.
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He was only three years older than Gandhi in terms of calendar years.
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But in terms of political career, he had achieved eminence far before Gandhi.
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And his death does free him, because Gokhale would probably have wanted him to stay within
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the servants of Indian society, focus on social reform, not really go out and work among the
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peasantry, let alone, you know, craft programs of all India, Satyagraha.
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I mean, it's hard to say.
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But Gokhale was just sort of 50 when he died.
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So you know, if he lived another 10 years, I think Gandhi's career may not have blossomed
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And in the last episode, we discussed how so often consequential events are contingent.
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You know, lucky things happen.
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Like in this case, while reading your book, what struck me is you talk about someone from
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Champaran, Rajkumar Shukla, who went to the Congress meetings and he tried to speak to
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the big leaders and get them to come to Champaran.
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They showed absolutely no interest.
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And as you point out, Gandhi was kind of marginal.
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And he approached Gandhi once and Gandhi said, no, I'm not interested.
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He approached Gandhi twice, Gandhi said no.
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And then he followed Gandhi all the way to Ahmedabad.
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And then finally, Gandhi like, okay, whatever, you know, let's check it out.
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It kind of happened like that, that he, you know, it wasn't as if he was seeking to discover
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what a gradient crisis is like.
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He just gave in to the persistent demands of the gentleman and went along to Champaran.
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And then he saw what was happening and got involved.
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And then once he got involved, he was incredibly excited.
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I mean, there's some letter I quote, I think it's to Pollack, where he says, I'm reliving
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the excitement of my South African days, you know, I have my kachalia, I have my so-and-so,
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I'm looking for my Palak and my and so on.
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And because he'd been three years away from political action.
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And Champaran gave him this opportunity to craft a movement, to represent people, to
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become their spokesman, to mediate between them and the ruling authorities.
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You know, he became a hero in his native Gujarat because he disobeyed the deportation order
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that was issued to him, and so on and so forth.
#
So I think Champaran is that way very important.
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You know, people in Champaran make today have this criticism of Gandhi, which is a legitimate
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criticism, that we launched him on his political career, and then he abandoned us.
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You know, he didn't really come back to Champaran and find out what was going on.
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But in the larger history of Indian nationalism, Champaran is a very important milestone because
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of the role it played in Gandhi's life.
#
And just to fill my listeners in, what was happening in Champaran was there was basically
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an agitation by indigo farmers because of the World War, demand for indigo had shot
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So, you know, the British wanted much more indigo.
#
And one of the particularly problematic clauses was that they insisted that poor peasants
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had to devote a certain percentage, I think, 10% of their land to, you know, planting indigo,
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among various other clauses, which were coercive and just flat out wrong.
#
And what Gandhi did when he got there was that he essentially travelled around the place
#
and collected tens of thousands of signatures and then petitioned the government successfully,
#
and he won that particular battle.
#
Yeah, yeah, I mean, substantially he won that battle, that the onerous restrictions were
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And it also gave him a chance to understand the colonial state and its function, apart
#
from coming face to face with agrarian distress and how peasants lived and laboured.
#
It gave him this understanding of the mechanics of the colonial regime, which of course he
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was later to use to good effect.
#
And also, like you mentioned that letter where he writes to Pollack, where he says that I
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will find my tambe naidu here and I will find so and so here.
#
And it's very interesting that during this period of time, Champaran and the year that
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follows, he finds a lot of people who were his close associates through the years that
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follow, like in Champaran, JB Kripalani, then Rajinder Prasad, then as news of it got back
#
to Gujarat, you know, Vallabhbhai Patel approached him there.
#
And you can see this group of people now building around him, recognizing him as a leader through
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the sheer moral force of his actions.
#
Absolutely, absolutely.
#
And the moral force and the moral courage, I mean, apart from the names you mentioned,
#
I think Mahadev Desai, who was to be his lifelong companion, secretary, interlocutor, advisor,
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right-hand man, left-hand man, also joins in the same year, 1917.
#
So 1917 is really very important in that respect.
#
And tactically, how did the British approach Gandhi?
#
Did they take him seriously?
#
I think they were puzzled.
#
I mean, the British were intrigued and puzzled.
#
Some clearly saw him as an unscrupulous agitator out there to create mischief.
#
But there are several others.
#
There's a, I think he's called Haycock, he's a district magistrate, who says he's a yogi
#
of the type, not unknown in the East, who through his asceticism and his simple lifestyle
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impresses and moves people.
#
So clearly, some of them were very impressed.
#
Some of them were hostile and angry.
#
And this stroke of ambivalence runs right through the British reaction to Gandhi in
#
There are people who detest him, who demonize him, British officials from the Viceroy downwards.
#
And there's some who quietly respect and admire him.
#
I mean, a little later in the story is 1922, when he's tried for sedition and comes up
#
before Judge Broomfield, who says, you know, you're altogether different from any other
#
You know, in the eyes of the law, you may be a criminal.
#
But in the eyes of many of your countrymen, you're a great hero.
#
And no one would be happier than I if your sentence is kind of curtailed or just reduced
#
Now, I think, you know, this is, of course, a theme for a separate podcast.
#
And I mean, the British state was also composed of human beings.
#
You know, it was not just one abstract, unified, homogeneous entity out purely to do evil and
#
oppress and brutalize the Indians.
#
There were people there who empathized with Indian aspirations.
#
There were people there who recognized the extraordinary person that Gandhi was.
#
And on the other hand, there were people who were unfeeling, unreasoning, dismissive, arrogant,
#
And I think the variety of British reactions to Gandhi in India, let alone the variety
#
of British reactions to Gandhi in Britain, which is also an interesting parallel story,
#
in these decades is, I think, is quite fascinating to the historians, because there's no single
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British reaction to Gandhi.
#
And it's interesting that in the beginning, they sort of underestimate him, like you point
#
out how after that first speech he gave, you quote the chief secretary when they are debating
#
And he says, quote, cold water seems better than the martyr's stake.
#
And they sort of decide to ignore him, because they don't think he'll have much impact.
#
And you see this play out over the next 30 years, like even the salt march, for example,
#
they actually allowed him to reach Dandi, which was, again, much debated at the time.
#
Yeah, it's a spectacular act of misjudgment by Irwin, who thought that, you know, what
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is this salt business and what is this old man going on a march?
#
Not realizing the enormous symbolic significance of what Gandhi was trying to do and the way
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in which with every successive day of the march, he would capture the imagination and
#
the loyalty and affection of more and more Indians.
#
Now, shortly after Champaran, another sort of seminal event happens, which is that labor
#
dispute where he, you know, takes the side of some laborers against a factory owner,
#
Ambalal Sarabhai, who had actually donated money for his ashram and helped him to kind
#
And the labor leaders are led by Ambalal Sarabhai's sister, Anusia Ben.
#
And he gets together with her and, you know, one interesting, again, you know, speaking
#
of contingency and luck, how things sometimes happen is that after a few days of the agitation,
#
the workers pointed out that, how can you empathize with us?
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You are going to your fancy house every day and eating a meal.
#
And then Gandhi said, okay, I will fast.
#
And that's how his whole tradition of fasting begins with Gandhi as a response, as a tactical
#
response to the criticism rather than...
#
So he had, Gandhi had fasted before, but that was against the disciples in his ashram for
#
violating the code of the ashram.
#
You know, his son fell in love, one of his sons, Manilal fell in love in South Africa,
#
you know, was having some kind of relationship that Gandhi felt was illicit and breaking
#
the code of the ashram, Brahmacharya code of the ashram, and he went on fast and so
#
This was his first quasi-social or political fast, and he was stung by the criticism.
#
I think there's Anasuya Ben, who was Ambalal's sister, but on the other side with the workers,
#
and Gandhi to travel in a car with the splendid name of an overland roadster, you know.
#
So cars were very rare in the Ambalal, and cars really denoted privilege, only the Maharajas
#
So here is this so-called fakir leader, the people, you know, going in a car, and the
#
worker said, hey, what is going on?
#
Clearly, he was stung by that.
#
But taking off from there, how did the spiritual persona that he later came to adopt, like
#
how did being called the Mahatma in terms of optics, the way he dressed and, you know,
#
the simplicity with which he essentially portrayed himself and mostly lived, how did that help
#
him in becoming the sort of political superstar he became?
#
I think very much, Amit, because to go back to our earlier discussion a few minutes ago
#
about the Congress party, I mean, the Congress party, whether it was Gokhale, who was reason
#
and moderation, or Tilak, who was fire and brimstone and angry rhetoric, they were really
#
divorced from the life of the ordinary people.
#
I mean, Tilak had a following among the workers of Bombay, but he didn't live in the Cholts.
#
I mean, he still lived with middle-class people, and occasionally went to the Cholts to give
#
I think Gandhi's completely declassified lifestyle, you know, he declassified himself totally
#
in terms of his lifestyle, right?
#
Again, Champaran is very important there, because he lives with peasants, he travels
#
with them, and that kind of asceticism, the willingness to do away with all luxuries,
#
and which is why it was pointed out to him that he was traveling in a car, he abandoned
#
that while the strike was only number one, but it marked him out from all other political
#
The other political leaders of the time were really elitist and disconnected from the everyday
#
lives of peasants, workers, tribals, Dalits, Adivasis, you know, pastoralists, artisans,
#
and Gandhi at least had some connection to how those people lived.
#
And, you know, you also point out how Gandhi in a short span of time achieved this mass
#
popularity, almost like, you know, the way memes spread today, achieved this mass popularity
#
and became a huge figure in days when there was not only no internet or social media,
#
but no television even, no radio even, so how did this man just become a national figure
#
in the span of a few months without all of this?
#
Few years, I mean, more few years than few months, I think there was already a press
#
and a burgeoning vernacular press, not just in English, but in different Indian languages,
#
and each, you know, the press was often, issues of newspapers were often read out, you know,
#
that under a tree in a village, you know, the one little person would read out the news.
#
But it is, even then it is quite extraordinary, I mean, I'd say by 1920, Gandhi was known
#
in every part of India, except the Northeast.
#
I mean, in Assam, yes, but not in Nagaland and Meghalaya and Mizoram and Manipur, but
#
except the Northeast, he was known in every part of India, and he was known in every part
#
of India, or the impression or the perception of him in every part of India was, this is
#
a man who is transparent, honest, courageous, simple, and is here to fight for our rights.
#
And that is quite extraordinary.
#
I mean, that is essentially from 1917, which is his first movement in Champaran.
#
In three years, that's how far his fame spreads.
#
And whereas Tilak would have been known in the cities, Tilak would have been known in
#
Bombay, in Calcutta, probably in Lahore, but not in the countryside.
#
And how much did it help Gandhi that in, you know, during the Champaran thing, and then
#
during the, the passive resistance that took place against the Rollit Act, that Tilak was
#
out of the country for some of this period, so Gandhi almost became a de facto leader
#
Again, it goes back to just luck, pure luck.
#
Gokhale's early death freed Gandhi for a life of radical action rather than, you know,
#
confining him or confining him within the realm of social reform.
#
And Tilak's absence, you know, allowed Gandhi to become the undisputed leader of the Roller
#
I mean, Tilak was, the Roller Satyagraha, which was Gandhi's first all-India campaign,
#
was launched when Tilak was in London fighting a court case.
#
And Tilak, who was the leader of the militant tendency in the Congress, as we've already
#
discussed, would have become the default front of this movement had he not had to go to London.
#
By the time he returns, Gandhi has already captured, you know, the national imagination,
#
and Tilak is generous enough to praise him.
#
And indeed, a year later, Tilak himself dies.
#
And Gandhi is lucky to be in Bombay at the time of Tilak's funeral, and he can, you know,
#
he can cremation, and he can be one of the pallbearers.
#
So there's a kind of symbolic transference from Tilak to Gandhi.
#
So Tilak's absence in 1919, Tilak's death in 1920, again, in retrospect, very fortunate
#
And, you know, one of the sort of big moves that happens not just for Gandhi, but for
#
the Congress and for India itself is what seems on the surface this almost bizarre alliance
#
that Gandhi gets into with the Ali brothers, who are in the Khilafat movement.
#
At this point, the World War I has ended, Turkey's lost, the Caliphate is gone, basically.
#
And you know, the Ali brothers and people around them are starting this Khilafat movement,
#
demanding from the empire that they sort of bring the Caliphate back.
#
Now, through this entire period of time, which we now forget, the Muslims of India are also
#
facing in a sense a crisis of dual identity, that they feel that they are part of this
#
larger, calm, this greater Muslim nation.
#
And at the same time, there is a fight on for Indian nationhood.
#
You know, and how does this conflict sort of play out?
#
How has it played out until that point?
#
You know, the Khilafat is abolished during the World War and Turkey is opposing the allies.
#
And the Ali brothers, Mohammed and Shaukat Ali, both whom study at Aligarh Muslim University
#
and are charismatic orators and so on, are interned in Chindawara, which is incidentally
#
the place where Kamal Nath comes from, where he has his pocket burrow.
#
He has his pocket burrow.
#
I didn't expect to hear that name during this episode.
#
But that's the curious, you know, resonances that places have.
#
So they were interned and then Gandhi come out of jail.
#
Gandhi says they must be freed from house arrest.
#
And Gandhi is looking for a way to build bridges with ordinary Muslims, you know, not just
#
And here, of course, what Gandhi does, I mean, it's been subject to great debate and it was
#
arguably a tactical mistake for him to bring religion so centrally Muslim.
#
The Islamic loyalties of Indian Muslims so centrally into Indian politics was in retrospect
#
a mistake because, you know, it led to all kinds of problems later on.
#
But I think the most plausible explanation for what Gandhi did lies in a classic essay
#
written by a British scholar of India called Philip Spratt, who had studied Gandhi's life
#
He actually lived in Bangalore, married a Tamil girl and lived here.
#
And he says that, look, what Gandhi was able to do in South Africa was to build bridges
#
with the Muslims through personal friendship.
#
So he befriended Kachalya.
#
He befriended, you know, Dada Abdullah.
#
And through that, he was able to bring Muslims and Hindus together.
#
I mean, he had close Muslim friends.
#
And these close Muslim friends in South Africa allowed him to build a kind of trans-religious
#
Now, Spratt says that was easier in South Africa because the community was smaller,
#
When in the diaspora, your religious identities are relatively less important.
#
But in India, which is much larger, and where the Muslims themselves are so diverse and
#
composed of so many different sects, this strategy of befriending two people to bring
#
a whole community on board failed.
#
And you know, I think it's a very plausible kind of interpretation.
#
But Gandhi felt that to bring Muslims into the fold of the freedom struggle, en masse,
#
not just a few leaders, but en masse, was very important, that the Ali brothers could
#
And if, you know, the Khilafat had a very important sentimental and symbolic place in
#
the Muslim imagination, the Indian Muslim imagination, so the Hindus should support
#
And in exchange, the Muslims would come on board in freedom struggle, they would respect
#
Hindu sentiments, for example, on issues such as playing music before mosque, and cow slaughter,
#
and so on and so forth.
#
So he did it tactically and instrumentally, I think, and may not have been aware of the
#
But Gandhi was the time, I mean, I quote there, the warnings issued by Jadhunal Sarkar, who
#
was a right-wing historian, and Gandhi's own friend, C.F.
#
Andrews, he said, don't do this.
#
They both said, don't do this, don't support the Khilafat movement.
#
And it just causes great dissonance in me when I read about it, Alliance, because on
#
one hand, it's philosophically incoherent, because Gandhi's demand is for a free India,
#
and the Ali brothers are demanding for a free caliphate, which is something completely different,
#
and India doesn't figure in that, it's a wider nation.
#
But on the other hand, in the proximate term, it feels like a tactical masterstroke, because
#
getting the Muslims with him allows him to take control of the Congress party, and which
#
is therefore changed forever.
#
But just think of a counterfactual, I don't express it in the book, I mean, but to give
#
some context to it, and maybe present this alliance, in a way, we can understand why
#
Gandhi reached out to the Ali brothers.
#
Let's assume that in 1917, the Bolshevik revolution happened, not in Russia, but in Italy.
#
And the Vatican and the institution of the Pope was abolished.
#
Now, it's similar to the caliphate, in that there are Catholics in India, there are Catholics
#
in Spain, there are Catholics in Philippines, there are Catholics in Thailand, all of whom
#
can be great and loyal and patriotic Thai and Spanish and Mozambican citizens, but yet
#
have allegiance to the institution of the Pope, who is the head of the church in the
#
Now, what if Lenin had said, I'm in control of Italy, and there's no Pope, because, I
#
mean, the Bolsheviks were vigorously atheistic people, right?
#
Now, what do you say in India to a Catholic who comes to you and says, if there was a
#
Catholic community in India, as there was, the smaller numbers come at them, much smaller,
#
but let's say they come to Gandhi and say, you're the leader of our freedom struggle,
#
this is a matter of great sentiment and symbolic importance to us, please agitate for the restoration
#
of the office of the Pope.
#
I know what Amit Shah would say to them, he would say, come back and become Hindu.
#
So that's the kind of analogy, you know, so to make it more understandable, and Muslims
#
are much larger than Catholics, they were much more numerous, much more important.
#
And do you say that, you know, an Indian Catholic who goes to Rome is once in his or her lifetime
#
is anti patriotic, well, the rest of the life is spent, I mean, it's kind of a symbolic,
#
Okay, now, come closer to Rome.
#
I mean, a Nepali who goes to Badrinath, right, what do you say to that, you know, or a Hindu
#
in Guyana who wants to go to Badrinath, right?
#
And is that Hindu in Guyana disloyal to the Guyanese state or is he an anti-national from
#
the eyes of Guyana because he feels that Badrinath is a theist and he would like to visit?
#
So these are complicated matters and I think one should not take a black and white approach
#
Yeah, I'm talking about sort of how it might have been seen by the British Empire or how
#
it might have felt in terms of what they were asking for.
#
I mean, obviously, people contain multitudes and you can be a Hindu and an Indian and a
#
Broadwayite and so on at the same time.
#
Another thing that strikes me is at this point in time in the earlier years, you know, after
#
Gandhi comes back and the two or three years after that, he's sort of a marginal figure
#
And at that point, Jinnah is like the next great leader in waiting.
#
And you know, Tilak and Annie Besanta kind of aging the extremist leaders, Tilak is a
#
great moderate leader who is expecting to sort of be Gokhale's successor and take over.
#
And then suddenly this black swan event called Mahatma Gandhi just bursts into the scene
#
and knocks him off the perch and suddenly he's kind of marginalized.
#
And does that personal hurt and his change in direction after that point change history
#
Yes, I think it does and it predates it.
#
I mean, I go back, I mean, most historians would talk about, of course, Gandhi's leadership
#
of the rural Satyagraha, which established him an all India figure.
#
And then the next year, the non-cooperation movement and the meeting in Nagpur where Jinnah
#
is shouted down by the mob of Gandhi bhakts.
#
I mean, they were really Gandhi bhakts, you know, who were then running the Congress party.
#
But I would predate this to 1915.
#
I mean, I'd say early in an early chapter that when Gandhi comes back and there's a
#
reception to Gandhi in Bombay by the Gujarati community of Bombay and K. M. Munshi, later
#
to be the founder of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, but at that time a rising lawyer and scholar
#
welcomes Gandhi and says, you're the greatest person ever from Gujarat.
#
And Jinnah must have been really stung by this because Jinnah was a Gujarati who was
#
in conventional terms, had a far more successful political career than Gandhi.
#
I mean, he was already a member of the imperial council, he was a great success in the Bombay
#
bar which Gandhi had conspicuously failed to be and so on.
#
So I think there is an element of personal rivalry at being overshadowed, overtaken,
#
sidelined, marginalized by a person who's a Johnny-come-lately and whom Jinnah clearly
#
sees in professional terms as inferior.
#
And in an aside in both your books, you mentioned that they could have been business partners.
#
In 1897, they could have been business partners in South Africa.
#
I mean, they always had a partnership because, you know, Gandhi was in South Africa.
#
We have discussed this in the first episode, he was the only Indian lawyer.
#
He wanted a partner since a large proportion of the diasporic communities of Africa was
#
It made sense to have a Muslim partner.
#
And there is some very strong speculative evidence to suggest that he had approached
#
Jinnah to join him in a partnership.
#
That would have been a fun counterfactual.
#
We'll take a quick commercial break and then we'll come back and move away from the
#
chronology for just a little bit to talk about caste.
#
Welcome to another awesome week on the IVM Podcast Network, where IVM Podcasts on Twitter,
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to or you could go to our website and there'll be a link over there.
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The first episode featuring Rohan Joshi is out now.
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On the scene in The Unseen is part two of Amit Verma's conversation with historian and
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author Ramchandra Guha.
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They discuss the return of Mahatma Gandhi to India and his involvement in the freedom
#
On the Filter Coffee podcast, Kartik Nagarajan talks to Ramki as founder of Sports Mechanics
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They talk about how video analysis changed the face of Indian cricket and why Virendra
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Sehwag dedicated his Multan Triple Hundred to Ramki.
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On Cinemaya, our Hindi film show filmmaker Aruna Rajay Patil shares one of the most dramatic
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human stories of love, loss and hope with host Swati Bakshi.
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On Varta Lab, Naveen and Aakash talk to fellow comic Aadhar Malik about his background in
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law and parting ways with the comedy collective S&G.
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And with that, let's get you back to your show.
#
Welcome back to the scene in The Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Ram Guha about Mahatma Gandhi's years in India and for a moment, I want to
#
take a break from the chronology of what he did and how he rose to greatness and tackle
#
one of the big themes in the book and in Gandhi's journey and in all of India, in fact, which
#
And it's really interesting because through the years, you see Gandhi sort of trying to
#
And I'm not convinced he ever did.
#
And there are these different sort of contradictory quotes which like, you know, there is one
#
quote which he gives in Mayavaran, quote, if it was proof to me that caste is an essential
#
part of Hinduism, I for one would declare myself an open rebel against Hinduism itself,
#
stop quote, which seems like a strong stand, but there's an if at the start of it.
#
And Gandhi sort of had this, it almost seemed to me that he was in denial of how pervasive
#
caste was that, you know, while, you know, Ambedkar later on would talk about the annihilation
#
of caste and that it was hard coded into Hinduism itself, Gandhi sort of seemed to believe in
#
something called Varnashram Dharma, which he cited when there was talk of an untouchable
#
family entering his ashram.
#
And he said that according to Varnashram Dharma, which he held to be valid, people of different
#
castes can't stay under the same roof and eat at the same table.
#
And he said, I'll make an exception for my ashram because we are not functioning under
#
the same rules, but I'm not going to ask other people to sort of follow these rules.
#
And he had a view where like the four, like he once said, quote, he wanted to improve
#
the caste system rather than uproot it.
#
And his view seemed to be that the caste system isn't bad per se, untouchability is bad, but
#
the four Varnash can exist.
#
I mean, that's the question he starts with.
#
I think it's important to recognize that Gandhi's feeling is way around India.
#
I mean, he's, you know, he's an outsider.
#
He has to establish his authority of the political movement.
#
He has to prove his credentials as a social reformer.
#
Caste is, you know, caste divisions, boundaries are very pervasive in Hindu society.
#
He is someone who does not know Sanskrit, he is not a Brahmin.
#
So there'll be questions about how he interprets tradition.
#
And he started to several things at the same time.
#
I mean, he's leading a movement for political freedom.
#
He is forging a compact between Hindus and Muslims, and he's trying to abolish untouchability.
#
And clearly he, if he has to move on all fronts, he has to move slowly.
#
And I think the depth of hostility to even his limited attempts to attack untouchability
#
early on, from the time in 1915, when he admits a Dalit family and his funding collapses,
#
right, and is even a possibility the whole of upper caste society in Ahmedabad, ostracize
#
After all, through the 20s and 30s, when the most vicious and vehement attacks on him are
#
not from Dalit radicals, but from upper caste orthodox people, including attempts on his
#
So I think it's in that context that one has to understand why he moves slowly.
#
You know, so among the people who radicalized him, well before Ambedkar, is a man called
#
Madhavan, who is a follower of the great Malayali social reformer, Narayan Guru, who visits
#
Gandhi in Tirunelveli in 1921, when Gandhi is doing non-cooperation work, and he comes
#
up from Kerala and says, you know, you're against untouchability, that's good.
#
But why can't Dalits enter temples?
#
And Gandhi says, no, no, no, I'm not sure, you know, at the moment, you know, that may
#
not be such a good idea.
#
But in three or four years, he changes his mind, and he blesses the Vaikam Satyagraha,
#
which is the start of the struggle to make Dalits equal in the eyes of God.
#
And if Dalits and upper caste Hindus are rubbing bodies going together for the temple, that
#
is a major blow against untouchability.
#
But Gandhi is moved along that path by people more radical than him, to begin with Narayan
#
Guru and his followers, and later on Ambedkar.
#
Of course, and of course, from advocating temple entry, he then advocates later on intermarriage
#
from the early 30s when his own son, his youngest son, marries outside the caste, and then further
#
down the decade where he solemnized a series of marriages between Dalits and non-Dalits.
#
And once you advocate intermarriage, you've effectively undermined the whole caste system.
#
So I think the evolution of Gandhi's views is very important, that he's moving in a more
#
egalitarian, more progressive, more radical direction.
#
And one must not cherry-pick him, pick quotes from earlier period of life and claim that
#
he stood by those views all through.
#
And is it sort of complicated to look at the utterances of a public intellectual who's
#
Because a public intellectual's imperatives are just to be true to his thoughts.
#
You're quite right, because he was trying to move society in certain ways.
#
Can a lot of his utterances also be a sort of hedging, that while he's saying that yes,
#
caste is bad, he at the same time doesn't want to piss off the orthodoxy too much, so
#
he hedges by saying that no...
#
Because he wants to build a broad-based coalition against the British at the same time.
#
I mean, in the old days, the Marxists attacked him for not advocating revolutionary violence
#
against Zabindars, their expropriation of property.
#
That's because he wanted Zabindars and landless laborers both to be in the struggle for freedom.
#
And he would have wanted, of course, a more equal distribution of land.
#
That could come, you know, in time and through more gradualist methods.
#
Now, there remains a major difference between him and Ambedkar, which you pointed to in
#
your initial remarks and questions, Ambedkar, which is that it's a major philosophical difference.
#
Ambedkar thought that untouchability and caste distinctions were integral to Hinduism.
#
And hence, the Dalits had to move away.
#
You know, in 1935, he says, I was born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu.
#
He considers Islam, he considers Christianity, he considers Sikhism.
#
And very late in life, in 1956, long after Gandhi is dead, he embraces Buddhism but tragically
#
Now, so Ambedkar's position from 1935 was, Hinduism is incapable of root and branch reform.
#
It can do cosmetic reform, but not root and branch reform.
#
Whereas Gandhi thought, I can save Hinduism by abolishing untouchability, you know.
#
So in that sense, Gandhi both lived and died a Hindu, whereas Ambedkar felt that for his
#
people, they had to escape the Hindu fold.
#
And that is the other philosophical differences between the two, which are in some ways equally
#
One is that Ambedkar came from a modernist, statist, quasi-socialist tradition and felt
#
the state is the agency of reform.
#
You need laws, you need policies.
#
And Gandhi felt that social reform comes from within, from individuals reforming themselves,
#
from collective community action.
#
That is the difference that can be reconciled between Gandhi and Ambedkar, because clearly,
#
if you want to end caste discrimination totally, you need both community renewal and purpose
#
But the first philosophical difference, which is that, can Dalits live a life of absolute
#
equality and self-respect within the Hindu fold, or do they have to go somewhere else?
#
It's still an open question.
#
I mean, one can't really answer that, definitively, either on the side of Gandhi or Ambedkar.
#
In fact, there's an excellent quote I picked up from your book where Ambedkar says, quote,
#
the outcast is a byproduct of the caste system.
#
There will be outcasts as long as there is caste.
#
And of course, caste is inextricably tied to Hinduism in his notion.
#
And Gandhi sort of had this approach that, listen, you know, don't worry about it.
#
It's, you know, the upper caste will reform through, you know, you appeal to their conscience
#
and they will reform on their own.
#
And there almost seems something condescending sometimes about his approach to Ambedkar.
#
Like, at one point, you quote him much later on, referring to praising Ambedkar as, quote,
#
intellectually superior to thousands of intelligent and educated caste Hindus.
#
And this is outrageously condescending.
#
It could be condescending towards the community too, more generally.
#
For example, when Ambedkar says, why doesn't the Harijan Sehwaksam have Harijan?
#
It's the upper caste Hindus who have to repent.
#
You know, but I think if the Harijan Sehwaksam had upper caste and Dalits together, and together
#
they would have presented a joint front.
#
I think that, like the Khilafat movement, that would have been more effective.
#
So they are clearly, you know, decisions he takes, statements he makes that are patronizing.
#
But having said that, I think it must be put on record that Gandhi did more than any other
#
upper caste Hindu in the history of modern India to delegitimize untouchability.
#
I mean, he frequently amended his political career to launch, you know, to go on a march
#
against untouchability.
#
He risked his own, you know, status and career by taking on this question.
#
He, as I said, there were attempts on his life.
#
From 1915 onwards, he's preaching the abolition of untouchability.
#
So you could say he did more.
#
He did more than anyone else in his position.
#
I mean, so Patel, Nehru, Bose, Madan Mulya Amalya, Dange, Nambu Dripad, Srinivas Shastri,
#
all the other Hindu leaders of the time, whether in the Congress, to the left of the Congress,
#
right of Lohia, Jayaprakash, none of them talked about untouchability or attacked it
#
so seriously and systematically as Gandhi.
#
The only leader in the Congress party from 1915 to 1948 in Gandhi's death, the only major
#
leader in the Congress party who understood the significance of Gandhi's campaign was
#
And in fact, it's telling that not only did he let in those, the Dalit families wanted
#
to be in his ashram, but visitors to his ashram, as you've cited in your book, describe him
#
eating out of the same plate, like someone had half a fruit and then shared it with Gandhi
#
MR Jekkar and others talk about this.
#
And what also happens later on is that he starts his magazine called Harijan.
#
And he starts a society called Harijan Sevak Sangh.
#
And both of these, it seemed to me as I was following the chronology in the book, it happened
#
sort of after or in the middle of his heated debates with Ambedkar and it almost seemed
#
in one sense that he is like, you know, I have been fighting for caste for so many years
#
and now I am being challenged in this way and I will show my loyalty to the cause and
#
I will call my magazine Harijan.
#
But at the same time, and Rajaji saw this, that there is also a touch of condescension
#
in his calling the organization Harijan Sevak Sangh.
#
Yeah, and Rajaji says call it anti-untouchability league or untouchability abolition league
#
because the idea is to abolish untouchability.
#
And there's a bureaucratic objection saying we've already printed the stationary, you
#
know, so we can't change the name.
#
But in retrospect, Rajaji was absolutely far sighted on this because the name Harijan has
#
a condescending ring to it and has been rightly rejected and repudiated by Dalit study.
#
And you know, Ambedkar's battles against, you know, Gandhi were always sort of civil
#
but very heated and strident, like he spoke about how Gandhi wants to play a double role,
#
quote unquote, that of a Mahatma and a politician.
#
And he wrote this book in July 1945, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables,
#
which was a scathing diatribe, it disturbed Gandhi, he asked Rajaji to write a rejoinder
#
to it, which Rajaji eventually did.
#
And you know, Ambedkar, in a sense, also, therefore, threw doubts on the whole independence
#
project, where he said that Dalits and untouchables in India have the same status as Negroes in
#
How will independence help us?
#
But I think together, I mean, as a historian, you know, you look at it in context and you
#
depict their battles and their struggles and their arguments and their...
#
But in retrospect, I think India needed both Gandhi and Ambedkar.
#
It needed, you know, a radical reformer from below and a guilt-ridden, you know, upper
#
caste reformer from above to together delegitimize the caste system.
#
The real tragedy, I mean, this is something beyond the scope of my book, which ends with
#
The real tragedy of the struggle against caste discrimination is that after Gandhi's death,
#
the Gandhians abandoned it.
#
Someone like Vinod Bhave never took it up.
#
You know, it had to be an ongoing struggle, it had to be taken up by upper caste social
#
farmers in a completely selfless and systematic way and they really didn't do it.
#
So they abandoned Gandhi.
#
I mean, the Gandhians abandoned Gandhi in this respect after 1948.
#
And even during the struggle, what was the attitude of the other office fellow leaders,
#
so to say, like Nehru Patel?
#
They said they were not really very...
#
They thought that it was a deviation from the struggle for political freedom.
#
That's essentially how they saw it.
#
And how do you personally...
#
How do you view Ambedkar?
#
I mean, I view him as an extraordinary figure, a person of great courage.
#
I mean, to take on the Mahatma, who was that much older than him, a brilliant scholar.
#
But at the same time, a polemicist, someone who maybe found it hard to get along with
#
people because he was, you know, a person who was so brilliant, you know, he essentially
#
He had people whom he disagreed with and people who followed him, you know, he does not seem
#
I mean, there are some indications that he may have had an emotional relationship with
#
an English woman to whom he dedicates one of his books, but that's not been fleshed
#
And later on, he had some kind of companionship with his second wife.
#
Maybe he was lonely because that's how he still thrust him in that role.
#
He still thrust him in the role of someone who was too independent-minded to loyally
#
And because he was too independent-minded to loyally follow Gandhi, he had to make common
#
calls with the British, which alienated him from his fellow Indians.
#
So he's an extraordinary figure, but it's the element of both great heroism and some
#
tragedy in, you know, in his life.
#
You know, I obviously, you know, admire both people enormously.
#
And one of the interesting aspects of my book, I mean, now that I look back on it, is that
#
Ambedkar is much more important than Jinnah.
#
You know, so if you look at... compare my biography, Amit, with biographies of Gandhi
#
10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, you will find
#
in those older biographies, Jinnah looms much larger than Ambedkar.
#
And I realized this only when I finished the book, you know, and Jinnah is there.
#
Jinnah is an important figure, but Ambedkar is much more important because Jinnah was
#
merely posing a political challenge to Gandhi, whereas Ambedkar was posing a political and
#
a moral challenge to Gandhi.
#
And the debate between Gandhi and Jinnah ended in 1947 because Pakistan was created.
#
Debate between Gandhi and Ambedkar continues.
#
So long as there's caste discrimination, that debate continues.
#
I mean, someone should do a kind of analysis of my biography versus previous biographies,
#
purely in terms of the number of index entries that Ambedkar and Jinnah have here.
#
I mean, most notoriously, Attenborough wrote Ambedkar out of his film totally.
#
Ambedkar doesn't figure...
#
And Jinnah is the fall guy.
#
But I'm sure if you look at Walpert's book on Gandhi or Ajmohan Gandhi's book on Gandhi
#
or Judith Browne's book on Gandhi or B. R. Nanda's book on Gandhi, all very good books.
#
So Jeffrey Asch's book on Gandhi, Louis Fisher's book on Gandhi.
#
I have a photo of Louis Fisher and Ambedkar in my book, you know, so they knew each other.
#
But I suspect Louis Fisher's, sometimes since I read it, you know, Jinnah will be much more
#
important than Ambedkar in the narrative.
#
So I think he was Gandhi's greatest, most insightful, most persistent and most courageous
#
That's what Ambedkar was in Gandhi's life.
#
He was many other things besides.
#
I mean, he was a constitutionalist, a scholar, an economist.
#
But in Gandhi's life, I think he was Gandhi's most important interlocutor.
#
And like Gandhi, he actually contained multitudes in terms of he wrote so much and he changed
#
his mind so often that it's very hard to sort of get a grip of the man.
#
And I haven't read much Ambedkar.
#
So I'll throw to you a question a friend asked me recently, and I don't have an answer to
#
it, which is if one wants to discover Ambedkar's thought, what is the best place to start?
#
What are the best books?
#
You know, you see the best place to start is Baratheon Rodrigues, who's a very fine
#
scholar, political theorist from Mangalore, did a book called Essential Writings of B.
#
R. Ambedkar, which he edited and which has a 50 page introduction and which is a selection
#
of Ambedkar's writings.
#
That is one book I would recommend.
#
The other book I would recommend is by the late D. R. Nagaraj, who was again, I'm sorry
#
to recommend two books by residents of Karnataka, fellow citizens of Karnataka, but that's
#
how they're both first aid books.
#
D. R. Nagaraj was a brilliant intellectual, biolinguist, English intellectual who died
#
And he wrote a book called The Flaming Feet, which first appeared in 1993.
#
And his student Prithvi Datta Chandrashobhi has revised and expanded it in a new edition
#
with Permanent Black Publish, which is an account of the Dalit movement in Karnataka
#
and Ambedkar's place in it.
#
I'd say those are two very important books.
#
There's a lot of hagiographic, worshipful writing on Ambedkar, including by scholars,
#
which I don't take very seriously.
#
There's a reasonably good book by Eleanor Zelliot published 50 years ago, or the Bahaar
#
movement, per se, with Ambedkar, led Dhananjay Q's biography of Ambedkar is unequaled for
#
factual information, but very badly written and put together.
#
And the world awaits a good critical biography of Ambedkar.
#
I mean, that's, I think he's a figure who has just not been written about with a kind
#
of analytical robustness that he deserves.
#
I know you must be exhausted after these Gandhi books, but is that something you'd ever do?
#
It has been suggested to me, Amit, but I won't do it for a few years, if at all.
#
Some younger scholars should do it.
#
Again, there's room for many books on Ambedkar.
#
You know, you need one, there's some writings on Marathi, I don't read Marathi, so I don't
#
know how good they are.
#
You need a really good proper biography.
#
And then you need several good thematic books on him, you know, which take up his constitutional
#
thinking and so on and so forth.
#
And likewise, the Rajaji, you know, Rajaji is another great figure whom the last good
#
book Vasanthi Srinivasan wrote a short book on his political thought, but he again awaits
#
There's too much written on Gandhi and Patel and Nehru and not enough on people like Rajaji
#
and Ambedkar, of quality.
#
So getting back to the subject of our episode, which is Gandhi, another sort of area he had,
#
you know, where one can have conflicting views about what Gandhi thought about it and how
#
And you know, early on in your book, you quote him as saying that in a nation where sort
#
of women are not part of active political and social life, quote, the nation walks on
#
one leg only, stop quote, which is a very eloquent way of putting it.
#
But his view of women was always sort of very paternalistic, not just, not just in the way
#
he treated Kasurba and his own family in that Hindu patriarch way as he described.
#
But he was just paternalistic, like much later when he's responding to a letter by a correspondent
#
who's written to him, he writes about his, his view of the modern girl.
#
And that goes, quote, I have a fear that the modern girl loves to be Juliet to half a dozen
#
My correspondent seems to represent the unusual type.
#
The modern girl dresses not to protect herself from wind, rain or sun, but to attract attention.
#
She improves upon nature by painting herself and looking extraordinary, stop quote.
#
And obviously this, this got a heated response from the young ladies who, you know, nice
#
And then he kind of responded to this with, you know, what, what reminded me recently
#
of another name I didn't think I would take in this episode of Rani Mukherjee, where he
#
seems to do a bit of victim blaming later, where he says, stop quote, the girls must
#
learn the art of protecting themselves against the ruffianly behavior of man, stop quote.
#
So he's, you know, while he does pay lip service to women being equal to men and being an equal
#
It's this kind of very paternalistic.
#
You know, one of the, that episode you, that you described, you know, this is one of the
#
highlights of doing archival research.
#
So Gandhi writes on women, where he says that, you know, they're looking for, that Juliet's
#
looking for Romeos and, you know, they should dress more modestly and so on.
#
There's, there's a response from these women of Bengal.
#
Gandhi then writes a follow-up where he quotes a little bit of that response and addresses
#
Now, in the Sabarmati archives, I found the entire response, the handwritten response,
#
the wonderful letter, you know, and it said 11 women of Bengal, and I quote much more
#
And it is a brilliant feminist, you know, critique of male voyeurism, victim shaming,
#
all the things that we talk about now, you know, and it's superbly written, with a great
#
deal of intellectual rigor and self-confidence.
#
And it's there in the Sabarmati archives, the whole thing, which is a jelly joyous to
#
discover this, that in 1937, there were these women, you know, writing this kind of thing.
#
Yeah, I mean, it's, his attitude to women is complicated.
#
You know, he is again evolving, but again, I think he is, he must be given credit for
#
bringing women into public life.
#
You know, Madhu Kishwar, which is another name you may be surprised to have me quote
#
in this context, but I'll quote her positively and affirmatively, because there was a Madhu
#
Kishwar before, there is today's Madhu Kishwar.
#
I wrote a, many years ago, she wrote a very good piece, you know, in her more sober scholarly
#
avatar, which is what she was then, she wrote a first straight piece in the EPW called Gandhi
#
and Women, which kind of analyzed the contradictions in Gandhi's worldview.
#
And while pointing to his patronizing attitude towards women, also says something quite striking.
#
She said, Gandhi brought more women into public life than Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Churchill,
#
de Gaulle, Roosevelt, which is absolutely true, I mean, in 1924, Gandhi comes out of jail.
#
The Congress wants him as president.
#
He says, no, Sarojini Naidu should be president.
#
They said, no, you have to come be president because you have to reconcile the parties split
#
between Swarajis and no changers.
#
But next year, he insists that Sarojini Naidu has made president.
#
The first Indian born woman in 1925, it was inconceivable, there were no democratic women
#
Now you have Elizabeth Warren.
#
I mean, now, of course, the USA is far ahead of us, but back in those days, you may not
#
even have a city council president who was a woman, right, and here you have the president
#
of the major national party.
#
You know, women participate in the salt march and quit India movement.
#
You know, they're in the Congress Working Committee.
#
So which is, whereas, you know, the Bolshevik revolution is largely almost all male, Chinese
#
communist movement is totally male.
#
You know, de Gaulle, Churchill and so on are much more contemptuous of woman power and
#
woman autonomy and dignity.
#
This is not to defend Gandhi, but to contextualize that, you know, by the standards of today,
#
he was wanting, but the standards of his time, he was in advance of other political leaders
#
who were his contemporaries.
#
I think that's something which must be placed on record.
#
Now I want to move on to, you know, what I've labeled over here as obsessions.
#
And you know, my Gandhi's obsessions in a sense, and my favorite sentence in your whole
#
book, excuse me for saying this, but I'll have to quote it, my favorite sentence in
#
your whole book, which made me LOL, so to say was, start quote, on 14th April, 1938,
#
Gandhi awoke with an erection and despite efforts to control his excitement, had a masturbatory
#
experience, stop quote.
#
And this is a very funny passage because then obviously the obsession in question, which
#
I'm talking about a celibacy, and he's deeply disturbed by this.
#
And he thinks of even going public with it till, you know, Rajaji and all and Allah managed
#
to stop him and because he would of course be the butt of jokes if he went public with
#
And, and celibacy was one of his sort of personal improvement obsessions throughout his life.
#
He insisted that his children be celibate, he didn't let them marry.
#
And he would write editorials in the various magazines he did talking about the importance
#
of preserving the vital fluids.
#
I mean, this goes back to volume one where I talk about how he became a brahmachari
#
and you know, how he learned from Tolstoy and Raichand Bhai, or how he followed them,
#
not learned, was, you know, convinced by the argument that brahmacharya was crucial and
#
preserving the vital fluids was also, and of course he carries on in India.
#
I mean, I quote earlier, well before this episode of 1938, I quote some lectures he
#
gave to his ashramites in the early 20s where he said, you know, you have to preserve the
#
semen and all of that and very important.
#
So there is some, some kind of irrational mumbo jumbo about all of this.
#
Now there was a paragraph in my book which I cut out about that 1938 masturbatory experience,
#
which I can recall now because it's quite amusing.
#
We know it was in Delhi.
#
Now we don't know, but it's very likely it was in Gandhi's son's house.
#
So he was having this experience in the house of his son where there were three of his grandchildren
#
Now which may have shaped him even more, you know, that here is a elderly grandfather,
#
you know, having this kind of experience, right?
#
Now I didn't have evidence that it was the son's house, he could have been staying in
#
But it is something that of course, much later in 1946, when he has the desire to test himself
#
and know Akhali because he feels that his world is crumbling around him and he has this
#
extraordinary, this is really self-delusion because this is the greatest self-delusion
#
of Gandhi's life that if he controls his sexual urges, Hindus and Muslims will stop butchering
#
one another, which is how he feels in 1946.
#
I mean, the reason he does those last experiments in Brahmacharya is that he feels that somehow
#
And because he has failed, Hindus and Muslims are butchering one another.
#
That is completely deluded.
#
But it is an extraordinary obsession, you know, this desire to control his sexuality.
#
And when they appear to be unbeating failures, as in this masturbatory experience, the sense
#
of guilt, self-remorse, self-flagellation that overcomes him, you know, he is…
#
No, when you talk about 1946, I mean, it's a stunning episode because he calls his grandniece
#
Manu with her father over and he says that, listen, I want to test myself by sleeping
#
on the same bed as you.
#
And the reason for this is that Hindus and Muslims need to stop killing each other and
#
And that just seems very bizarre.
#
And in the 40s, there are a lot of bizarre things happening in the sense, another of
#
I don't know if it's fair to call it an obsession because it's also one of his great contributions
#
It's the obsession with non-violence.
#
And he actually, you know, before that in the 30s, he advises the Jews of Germany not
#
to resist Hitler, to fight him with passive resistance.
#
When the war starts, he wants the British to…
#
Abandon their glorious homes and let Hitler occupy them.
#
Yeah, and do the whole passive resistance things.
#
He says the same kind of thing to Chiang Kai-shek.
#
And you know, by this time where he's in his 70s and the 40s have begun, first he's telling
#
everyone to be non-violent, you know, be non-violent against Hitler, be non-violent against Germany,
#
On the other hand, all these experiments are going on.
#
And if it was anyone else without his enormous stature, you'd just be regarded as completely
#
But I think, you know, to return to the celibacy experiments, I think he is desperately lonely
#
You know, he has no one to speak to.
#
C.F. Andrews is dead, Tagore is dead, Mahadev is dead, Kasturba is dead, Jamnalal Bajaj,
#
who is his adopted son, to whom he was close to the end of his own sons, is dead.
#
And he's alone and lonely and confused in Bengal and does this completely nutty thing.
#
Now, I'm sure Mahadev could have told him, you're crazy, don't do this.
#
You know, Hindus and Muslims are butchering one another in spite of all you've done to
#
You know, it's got nothing to do with your personal sexuality.
#
But I think in that, he was lonely, confused and he succumbs to this bizarre delusion.
#
So we need to wind up in 20 minutes.
#
So what I'll do is I won't go back to the narrative of the book.
#
Instead, I'll urge all the listeners to just buy it and read it because it's a fascinating
#
story and it's obviously all the spoilers are done because it's history and you know
#
what happened, but it's incredibly fascinating anyway.
#
I just want to end with a bunch of sort of bigger questions about Gandhi and about India.
#
Question number one, you quote a conversation he has with Meenu Masani, who's then a socialist,
#
later becomes classical liberal, but then a socialist, where he tells Meenu Masani that
#
my objection to your socialism is coercion, right, which seems very enlightened and makes
#
It seems almost libertarian, but and which he doesn't entirely follow in his own life
#
or prescriptions or whatever, because a lot of his, but one of the things that does stand
#
out about Gandhi from a lot of big leaders is that he privileges the means over the end.
#
You know, he's, is that something that made its mark in Indian life and Indian thought?
#
I think he's that sets him apart from, you know, political leaders everywhere, not just
#
But before I come to just go back to Meenu Masani, there's a line that would have gladdened
#
you when you read it was when Meenu Masani, who's then a fervent socialist, presents him
#
the Manifesto of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, and it says, when we come to power,
#
we will nationalize all instruments of production.
#
And Gandhi says, Rabindranath Tagore is a marvelous instrument of production, will you
#
That is absolutely brilliant.
#
That is totally brilliant.
#
So, you know, all freedom of all kinds, including a study of expression is going to be subject
#
to sterilized control and nationalization.
#
You know, Amit, I mean, there are kind of, there are three kinds of politicians.
#
One is kind of divided, you know, and I think Modi and Indira Gandhi fall into that divided
#
category of people who want power for its own sake, but also by their own likes think
#
Another category is who just want power and want to exercise it ruthlessly and amorally.
#
And, you know, Amit Shah would fall in that category and probably many African dictators
#
and so on and so forth.
#
Now, Gandhi is someone who, of course, has a great capacity to be pragmatic, to compromise,
#
but at some issues he will not compromise, on some moral issues.
#
And we discussed this again in the first episode.
#
Nonviolence and Hindu-Muslim harmony are for him absolutely, you know, sacrosanct.
#
And also, finally, he would want, before launching a nonviolent movement, to keep all the avenues
#
of communication, of conciliation, of negotiation open, so till the last moment he would want
#
to discuss with the Viceroy.
#
And I think this is all with Ambedkar, all with Jinnah, you know, he would keep channels
#
And I think these are ways in which he really defers from people who take more hard lines.
#
My second question, and this is often raised, is that do you think that these individuals
#
were really so consequential, or would India have gotten independence anyway?
#
I mean, the British were practically bankrupt after the war and so on.
#
No, we would have gotten a different kind of independence.
#
And I think that several respects in which, I mean, I think many aspects of the constitution,
#
though people claim it's borrowed from, you know, the 35 constitution and so on, or many
#
aspects of political practice.
#
And again, we discussed this in our first episode.
#
So federalism, you know, there's this whole, I have, for the last five years, from before
#
Narendra Modi came to power, telling warning against apocalyptic talk about fascism, because
#
I believe that federalism will save India, you know, from authoritarian rule, you know.
#
So we owe federalism, including linguistic federalism, to Gandhi.
#
Now, so I think the sense of debate, dialogue, pluralism, we would have had, and also social
#
reform, equality for women and Dalits, at least under the law, not in everyday life.
#
I mean, it's still denied in everyday life.
#
We don't have equal rights in everyday life.
#
Dalits in outside the cities, and sometimes not even in the cities, have equal rights
#
But I think these are ways in which Gandhi prepared us for a much more meaningful freedom
#
than Aurobindo Ghosh or Subhash Chandra Bose or Bhagat Singh or Veer Savarkar or any of
#
the other currently fashionable icons could have brought us.
#
So my final question, which is a slightly complicated question, and it's a three-part
#
question, which is the basic big question is, how would Gandhi have reacted to India
#
And I'll break it up into three parts.
#
One is, would he have seen a resonance between the British Empire that he fought against
#
and the modern Indian state?
#
For example, many of the laws under which he was arrested, 124A, which is sedition,
#
153A, 295A, still exist and are still regularly used for political purposes.
#
He protested the salt tax in Gandhi famously, but the salt tax today is many times more
#
In fact, you could argue that taxation as a whole is far more oppressive and so on.
#
So one is, at the level, how would he have thought about a parallel between the oppression
#
that you got from the British Empire and the oppression that you got from your own rulers?
#
So I think 124A and those other acts, he clearly says, in Young India, 1929, I think, if memory
#
serves, he says, when we come to power, we will remove 124A.
#
In many ways, it's become more arbitrary, you know, the misuse of those laws.
#
I mean, the recent arrest of a journalist in Manipur and many other examples of that
#
Now, economics, it's more complicated.
#
You know, I think Gandhi is to be trusted in many ways, but perhaps not so much as an
#
I think his suspicion of the excessive powers accruing to the state, whether in regulating
#
everyday life or in regulating the economy, I think are salutary.
#
Even Rajaji takes those forward in his own formation of the Sahasradhara party.
#
But Siddishwari explicitly says that when we come to power, 124 and 124A will go and
#
they haven't gone 70 years later.
#
The second part of the three-part question is a thought experiment.
#
If he was a young Kashmiri today, would he fight for Kashmir's independence?
#
Because you could make the same case for Kashmir's independence against people they see as a
#
foreign occupying power and behave pretty brutally as an Indian would in those days
#
against the British Empire, which was an occupying power and which didn't even always behave
#
Look, it's hard to say.
#
I can only say that when Gandhi died in 1948, the first Kashmir war had just begun and he
#
took the side of the Indian army.
#
In fact, unlike in the case of his advice to the Jews to resist Hitler non-violently,
#
in 1948, he said, this is an unfair incursion by the Pakistanis and we must resist it.
#
So he supported the Indian army.
#
Much has changed since then.
#
I mean, that was a different Kashmir with Sheikh Abdullah, who was generally secular
#
and so on and so forth.
#
Today, you know, I think the position of Rajaji, which I've described at great length in India
#
after Gandhi, the peace proposal that he held out, which Nehru accepted just before Nehru
#
died and then Sheikh Abdullah was released under that peace proposal in 1964 and went
#
to meet Ayub Khan and so on, which is a kind of confederation, India-Pakistan-Kashmir confederation,
#
you know, soft borders.
#
You know, the kind of Banwoon Singh line of soft borders, no change in line of control,
#
greater autonomy to Kashmiris on either side of the border.
#
I don't think he would have advocated independence.
#
I think independence opens a Pandora's box of all different kinds.
#
He would have said, we must as Indians, certainly he would have opposed pellet guns, pellet
#
guns to the Kashmiris when the Jats and the Gujars and the Patidars are treated, you know,
#
with water cannons, you know.
#
Maybe he would have begun as he begun in South Africa anyway as a moderate petitioning and
#
trying to work within the system.
#
Because Kashmir is very complicated and, you know, Kashmir is a situation in which I thought
#
about very deeply and, you know, I've written about also at some length.
#
And you know, the Indian state has much to answer for, the Pakistani state has much to
#
answer for, but so do the Jihadis of Kashmir.
#
I mean, what happened to the Kashmiri pundits is unconscionable.
#
They were purged and expelled and no amount of, you know, euphemism can, you know, excuse
#
I mean, the Indian left is in denial about, forget the, the Indian left is in denial,
#
the Kashmiris are in denial about how they treated the pundits.
#
And I think the moral case for Kashmiri independence absolutely evaporated once they kicked out
#
So I think Gandhi would have recognized that.
#
I mean, the treatment of everywhere else in India, Muslims are insecure, vulnerable, occasionally
#
But in one state of the union, Kashmir, it's the Hindus who are insecure, persecuted, marginalized
#
So I think the moral case for Kashmiri independence absolutely disappeared when not only were they
#
thrown out, not a single leader of the Kashmiri freedom struggle atoned for it.
#
They were, in 1989, they fled.
#
It took 15 years for the so-called moderate among the Kashmiri, like the Malvi Farooq,
#
to go and to a pundit camp in Jammu and he probably only went once and God knows that
#
he's ever gone back again.
#
So I think the moral case for Kashmiri independence disappeared once the pundits were expelled
#
and the way in which they were expelled.
#
That's fascinating and we should do an episode on that sometime, if you're willing.
#
The last part of the last question is that if Gandhi was in this modern world and he
#
was notoriously suspicious of modernity with technology, medicine, machinery, all of those
#
things, and if he was alive today in the world of Twitter, say he had a Twitter account,
#
What would he be fighting for?
#
Well, let me answer that very elliptically and cryptically in the words of Shiv Vishwanathan.
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Shiv Vishwanathan once wrote, Gandhi famously said when he visited England in 1931, what
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would you think of Western civilization?
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And he said, I think it would be a good idea.
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Now, if he came back to India and was asked, what do you think of Indian civilization?
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He would say that too would be a good idea.
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Ram, thank you so much.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do pick up Ram Guha's fantastic books on Gandhi,
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Before India and his new book, Gandhi, The Years to Change the World at Amazon or your
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You can follow Ram on Twitter at Ram underscore Guha.
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You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in and thinkpragati.com.
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Thank you for listening.
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How aware do you think you are of your laws and rights?
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Do you know what your rights are when you're stuck somewhere bad?
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Well, here's a show that can help you move an inch closer to being aware of what your
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Tune into Know Your Kanun with me, Amar Rana.
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This is a podcast meant to answer all your law related queries.
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Catch Know Your Kanun every week on the IVM website or the app or anywhere you get your
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Family businesses get a bad rap and one time they were looked down on for getting rich
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or being too ambitious.
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Today, they're still looked down on, but for not being ambitious enough, not agile enough,
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not modern enough, too traditional in their mindset.
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The biggest brands and business houses in the country started out as humble family businesses.
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It's the way India has done business.
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Join Sonu Basin in conversation with stalwarts of Indian family businesses on the Inheritors
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Discuss the highs and lows, the needs and pressure points of building a business legacy
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that spans generations.
