Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948

by Ramachandra Guha

What would happen to the Muslims of India after Gandhi was assassinated? The fears for their safety were genuine. However, it was not the case that he was their only protector, the only politician who had ‘their interests at heart’. So did Jawaharlal Nehru. No sooner had

he heard the news, and confirmed the identity of the assassin, Nehru was quick-witted enough to say on the radio that it was a Hindu who had murdered Gandhi. Later, in public speeches and letters to chief ministers, he repeatedly emphasized the need to treat Muslims

(and Christians) as equal citizens of the land. Meanwhile, the government quickly banned the RSS, whose cadres had actively spread hatred against Mu...

As early as 1915, Gandhi said it was ‘no part of real Hinduism to have in its hold a mass of people whom I would call “untouchables”. If it was proved to me that this is an essential part of

Hinduism, I for one would declare myself an open rebel against Hinduism itself.’ And in 1920, he stated: We cannot compare the sufferings of the untouchables with those of any other section in India. It passes my understanding how we consider

it dharma to treat the depressed classes as untouchables; I shudder at the very thought of this. My conscience tells me that untouchability can never be a part of Hinduism. I do not think it too much to dedicate my whole life to...

covered itself for so long by stupidly regarding these people as untouchables. I am only sorry that I am unable to d...

In her critique of Gandhi, Arundhati Roy did not cite these remarks—or others like them. Instea...

thoroughgoing apologist for caste, further arguing that this was in line with his views on race. Gandhi, she suggested, was casteist in India because he had been racist in South Africa. Roy claimed that Gandhi ‘feared and despised Africans’; this he certainly did in his twenties, but just as certainly did not in his forties and fifties. Reading Roy, one would not know that Gandhi decisively outgrew the racism of his youth, a fac...

from African Americans ‘keenly and sympathetically’ following what they called his ‘great battle for righteous adjustment’, fought in ‘the common cause of the lowly’. And documented in the Collected Works are n...

to Sevagram to seek Gandhi’s counsel. Why, if Gandhi was a racist, were black intellectuals and activists so keen to meet him, befriend him, and, in their own battles aga...

Both Arun Shourie and Arundhati Ro...

in terms of heroes and villains. Neither seeks to place the choices made by Gandhi and Ambedkar in context, seeking only to elevate one by disparaging the other. Roy has all of Ambedkar’s polemical zeal but n...

meanwhile, perhaps loves India as much as Gandhi did, but he loves it in the abstract, without empathy for those Indians who suffer discrimination at the hands of their compatriots. Both seek—by the technique of ...

down the ages—to prove a verdict they have arrived at beforehand: that Gandhi was the Enemy of the Dalits, for Roy; that Ambedkar was...

In her essay, Arundhati Roy made the astonishing charge that Gandhi was a ‘Saint of the Status Quo’. In truth, the Hindu leaders of his own time saw Gandhi as a dangerous revolutionary who sought to destroy the traditional social order. His campaign to abolish

untouchability struck at the very core of Hindu orthodoxy. The Sankaracharyas were enraged that a mere Bania who knew little Sanskrit dared challenge scriptural injunctions that mandated untouchability. During Gandhi’s anti-untouchability tour of

1933–34, Hindu Mahasabha activists showed him black flags, threw faeces at him, and in Pune in June 1934 eve...

Perhaps the most subtle scholarly assessment of the Gandhi–Ambedkar relationship is contained

in the social theorist D.R. Nagaraj’s book The Flaming Feet. Nagaraj argued that the narrative of Indian nationalism was akin to the Ramayana in that it had place for only one Great Hero, with everyone else asked to support, even revere, this central and defining character. But

Ambedkar was too proud a man, too conscious of his abilities and his own historic role, to wish to play the role of Sugreeva to Gandhi’s Ram. Thus, he charted his own path, autonomous of and often antagonistic to ...

showed, their exchanges and debates changed both men, with Gandhi increasingly more willing to acknowledge the material roots of discrimination, and Ambedkar, in turn, appreciating that moral tr...

Gandhi’s greatest contribution to the emancipation of women,

however, was to make them part of social and political movements. In his South Africa satyagrahas, Indian women (including his wife Kasturba) had courted arrest. When he returned to India, however, he at first kept women out of his civil disobedience campaigns.

Except for a few wives of Congressmen arrested for selling khadi on the road, women were largely absent during the non-cooperation movement. However, after his release from prison, Gandhi worked actively to ...

While Gandhi asked women to lead the picketing of liquor shops, he was initially not keen to have them participate in the Salt March; Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay persuaded him to reconsider, whereupon many wome...

women participated in large numbers in the Quit...

India today is a flawed and fault-ridden democracy. Its many failures include widespread poverty, the malfunctioning of public institutions, political corruption and crony capitalism. On the other side, unlike so many ex-colonial countries, India regularly conducts

free and fair elections; women have equal rights under the Constitution; it has successfully nurtured linguistic diversity; the state is not (or not yet) identified with a particular religion; and it has extensive programmes of affirmative action for those of underprivileged

background. These achievements are owed to a generation of visionary nation builders, among whom Gandhi ...

The social base of the Congress was far deeper than that of the Muslim League, one reason why democracy has established itself more solidly in India than in Pakistan, a point that some Pakistani scholars themselves

acknowledge.33 Another key difference between Gandhi and his great rival Muhammad Ali Jinnah was that the former assiduously nurtured leaders for the future, whereas Jinnah was verily the Great and Only Leader. There were no analogues in his party of Nehru,

Patel, Rajaji, Azad a...

Gandhi also profoundly influenced anti-colonial movements elsewhere. Gandhi was admired by such (widely different) African nationalists as the Kenyans Jomo Kenyatta and Tom Mboya, the Zambian Kenneth Kaunda, the Tanzanian Julius Nyerere, and the Ghanaian Kwame

Nkrumah.35 In Botswana, when the British exiled the extremely popular king, Seretse Khama, chiefs and headmen refused to elect a new leader, and said they would not pay taxes unless Seretse returned with his honour and position intact.

Their movement ...

disobedience was inspired by their knowledge of the satyagrahas led by Gandhi in ...

Even professedly ‘global’ magazines are not immune to nationalist sentiment, and doubtless Time’s choice of Einstein as the Person of the Century was influenced by the fact that he was an

American, and a naturalized American at that, thus further feeding into the myth of the Lady of Liberty who always provides refuge to the worthy and the needy. But Einstein himself would have been embarrassed at being so anointed. For, he absolutely venerated

Gandhi, as the first of the three epigraphs to this book demonstrates. An authoritative recent study of the scientist’s political views states unambiguously that ‘for Einstein it is c...

As a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama had a photo of Gandhi in his office, alongside portraits of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall. Many years later, after he was elected President of the

United States, a journalist asked Obama which person in history, dead or alive, he would most like to have dinner with. Mahatma Gandhi, answered the President, wittily adding that it would have to be a frugal meal.

Early in Obama’s second term as President, I was visiting his country, to promote my book Gandhi Before India. A waiter who brought me tea in my New York hotel room saw the book lying on the table. Not knowing that

I was the author, he saw the cover photo and asked: ‘That’s the young Mr. Gandhi, isn’t it?’ I answered in the affirmative. ‘In my country we admire him a great deal,’ said the waiter. ‘And which country are you from?’ I asked. The surprising answer was the Dominican Republic.

Gandhi probably did not know of the Dominican Republic. But, long after he was dead, one of its citizens knew about him and admired him; they could even identify him in a rare photo where he was clad ...

This post...

worldwide praise for Gandhi would have amazed the men who jailed him in British India. Successive viceroys dismissed him as a humbug, a hypocrite, a back number. Their insolence towards him could be extreme: during the Second World War, Gandhi was reduced to corresponding with, and being reviled by, an additional secretary in the home department, who reported to the home secretary who reported to the home member who reported in turn to the viceroy. But who now remembers that arrogant ...

This revenge of history is a mark of the greatness of Gandhi the man, and of the profound political changes he helped br...

of the British Empire and the institutional and ideological edifice t...

Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize