Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

Gandhi was used to being abused by white colonists in Natal. But this piece of invective he did not see, since it was delivered in French. The memories he carried back from Mauritius were of the generosity of the Indians. At a farewell reception, the main speaker, a Muslim merchant, compared Gandhi to a modern-day Pharaoh who guided his countrymen ‘in the rough sea far away from the rock-under-water where there may be every chance of being dashed’.

One striking feature of the book is its extraordinarily positive portrait of ancient Indian culture and civilization. This was perhaps not unrelated to the fact that Gandhi had lived for so many years out of India. For diasporic nationalism tends to be uncritical, eulogizing the faraway homeland, its hallowed and mostly unsullied past, and its pristine and ageless culture.

Reporting the event, Indian Opinion said the committee chaired by Hosken represented the effective individual support that hundreds of Europeans on the Rand gave to the passive resistance hawkers; the few warders and other gaol officials who, out of sympathy, made the lives of passive resisters in the Transvaal prisons as free from difficulty as possible, whilst the hand of perhaps the majority of them was against these prisoners. It represents Miss Schlesin, at the mention of whose name at the banquet an enthusiastic applause rang through the hall and who has been working for the cause as no other man or woman, European or Asiatic, has worked. It represents an unknown railway refreshment waitress who was glad to serve bread and cheese for a passive resister, who was being taken under custody to Volksrust, for which she would not accept payment. It represents Mrs. Vogl who, as a direct result of the struggle, has, as a labour of love, established a sewing class for Indian women and girls.72 These words do not appear in the Collected Works, but they must surely have been written by Gandhi. The language is his, as are the sentiments, nurtured through twenty and more years of friendship with Europeans (from the vegetarians of London onwards), friendships that survived his social objections to their laws and his moral objections to their civilization.

Pranjivan Mehta was to Mohandas Gandhi what Friedrich Engels was to Karl Marx: at once a disciple and a patron, who saw, very early, that the friend of his youth had the makings of the heroic, world-transforming figure he was to later become. Their friendship was consolidated by a shared language and culture – it mattered that Engels and Marx were both Germans, and that Mehta and Gandhi were both Gujaratis. There were differences: Engels believed Marx would redeem a class (the proletariat); Mehta believed Gandhi would save a nation, India. Both, however, had a deep, almost unquestioning faith in their compatriot’s genius. Both were prepared to reach deep into their pockets to activate and enable it.