However human, a universal prophet
By BAPSI SIDHWA
(Forwarded by Lopa Tasneem : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/4559
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The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi.
By Stanley Wolpert.
Oxford University Press, $27.50.
THERE have been other biographies of Mohandas K. Gandhi, but in Gandhi's Passion, Stanley Wolpert, a professor emeritus in South Asian history at the University of California at Los Angeles, makes a significant contribution: He demystifies Gandhi. Although Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi was very moving, it was also simplistic and misleading.
As a husband Gandhi was despotic; as a father he was a bully whose eldest son turned to drink and as a gesture of defiance converted to Islam. Yet Wolpert manages to give a factual and comprehensive account of the life of the Mahatma ("Great Soul") in which Gandhi's spirituality and overarching compassion are reconciled with his dexterity as a politician and with his human frailties.
After acquiring his legal training at Inner Temple in London, Gandhi moved to South Africa in 1893. There, as a result of a series of racial humiliations, he initiated his particular brand of political activism based on satyagraha ("Hold fast to the truth") and ahimsa ("love and nonviolence"). Wolpert believes this was "Gandhi's most important contribution -- that violence can't be silenced by more violence."
In South Africa the young Gandhi galvanized the Indian minority into a viable political force against the Afrikaners and succeeded in wresting concessions for his community. Twenty years later he joined the much larger struggle against British rule in India. Drawing on his experience in South Africa, Gandhi spearheaded the "Quit India" movement and organized mass passive-resistance rallies and marches.
Early in his campaign, making it a symbol of the economic stranglehold of empire, Gandhi called for the boycott of British cloth. At the same time he adopted the spinning wheel (which is displayed on the Indian flag) as a means to Indian self-sufficiency. Gandhi preached that if each Indian household spun its own cloth, the British textile industry would collapse. His ability to inspire the adulation of the masses was phenomenal; each neighborhood stripped its closets and made a bonfire out of British fabric.
Shocked by the poverty of India's starving millions and the degradation of the untouchable castes, Gandhi reinvented himself into a near-saintly figure who mirrored their pain. Believing he could best serve India through self-sacrifice, he exchanged his Savile Row suits for a homespun loincloth, curtailed his sexual urges, gave up his possessions and moved to live among the untouchables, whom he renamed harijans (beloved of God). He set up ashrams in the slums and dispensed food and medicines.
Although Gandhi believed passionately in several precepts, chief among them nonviolence, love, truth, equality, abstinence and nature cures, the defining characteristic that shines off the pages of Wolpert's enthralling book was his all-embracing and uncompromising compassion, a compassion that in the end cost him his life.
While drawing his material from many sources, Wolpert relies also on Gandhi's voluminous writings -- which ran into 90 volumes -- and permits Gandhi to speak to us in his own voice. What struck me repeatedly was Gandhi's ability to cut through to the heart of any issue and his political foresight, which bordered on prophecy.
But the ultimate tragedy was that his political influence was undermined at the most crucial time. When Gandhi suggested that Congress appoint Mohammed Ali Jinnah (the Muslim founder of Pakistan) as the first prime minister of India after independence, in order to avoid partition, Nehru, who as Gandhi's heir coveted the position, told the British Lord Mountbatten that Gandhi's advice should be disregarded because he was "out of touch."
Nehru also opposed Mountbatten's suggestion to make Gandhi the governor general. Instead Nehru flattered the Brit by insisting that he, Mountbatten, should be the first governor general. The fact that a royal scion of empire was the first head of state of independent India must have been galling to Gandhi.
At this time the Mahatma wryly observed: "I am being told to retire to the Himalayas. Everybody is eager to garland my photos and statues. Nobody really wants to follow my advice." When he learned that even Nehru had accepted the partition plan, Gandhi warned: "Remember, if you divide India today, tomorrow ... generations to come will curse us at every step for the kind of Swaraj [self-rule] we shall have bequeathed to them."
"Gandhi alone among India's politicians accurately anticipated the tragic aftermath of partition and its murderous legacy of more than half a century of Indo-Pakistani wars and hatred," writes Wolpert in referring to Kashmir. Gandhi foresaw the danger that Kashmir, with its large Muslim majority, posed. He advised that Kashmir's "real rulers" were its people, not its maharajah. "If the people of Kashmir are in favor of opting for Pakistan, no power on earth can stop them from doing so. They should feel free to decide for themselves."
Nehru reneged on his promise to hold a United Nations-supervised plebiscite in Kashmir, and since then India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the fate of the beleaguered Kashmiri people.
In recounting Gandhi's life, Wolpert presents a transparent picture of the politics of partition, of Gandhi's helplessness in the face of power struggles and squabbling that went on behind the scenes, and of Gandhi's agony at his failure to bring about harmony between the Hindus and Muslims and prevent the breakup of India.
Wolpert's candor and integrity have earned him flak. His first book, Nine Hours to Rama, was banned in India. Initially Jinnah of Pakistan ran into trouble in Pakistan because of certain offending passages, but Wolpert eventually prevailed. Nehru: A Tryst With Destiny has been unofficially banned in India.
In 1998 India triggered five thermonuclear explosions in the Pokhran Desert -- "on the very day the birth of Buddha was celebrated in India," writes Wolpert, who happened to be there. In fact it was the euphoric reaction of Indian politicians to the blasts that shocked Wolpert into narrating the life and times of India's apostle of peace. "Two weeks after the Indian tests, Pakistan also carried out nuclear tests.
"The end of life was Gandhi's finest hour," Wolpert says. India and Pakistan gained independence in August 1947. On Jan. 12, 1948, saying, "I yearn for friendship between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. ... Today it is nonexistent," frail and in his 70s, Gandhi began his last fast.
In Delhi thousands stood outside Birla House shouting slogans of peace and unity. The leaders of every community promised Gandhi to love and trust one another and begged him to eat again. On Jan. 18 Gandhi broke his fast and announced he would go to Pakistan to protect the Hindu and Sikh minorities there. Ironically, while many Hindus berated Gandhi for taking up for the Muslims, the Muslims, recalling his earlier Hinduism-steeped rhetoric, continued to distrust him.
Twelve days later, as Gandhi walked through the crowd awaiting him in the Birla House garden, a young man pushed his way through and shot him. The assassin was Nathuram Godse, a "devout" Hindu who proudly insisted in court that he acted to "save India as well as Hinduism." Godse's ultra-Hindu fanaticism was unfortunately shared by thousands of orthodox Hindus.
Gandhi lived in the hearts and minds of millions, and one is grateful to Stanley Wolpert for introducing this extraordinary man to a new generation.
Born in Lahore in pre-partition India, novelist Bapsi Sidhwa now lives in Houston.
To know more about Bapsi Sidhwa, see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/4558
Source: The Houston Chronicle