Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 448 pp., $28.95.

[amazon 9780307269584 full]IF CELEBRITY is a mask that eats into the face, posthumous fame is more like an accretion of silt and barnacles that can leave the face unrecognizable, or recognizable only as something it is not. We might feel we know Mohandas Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Joan of Arc or Martin Luther King Jr., but, rather, we know their iconic value: their portraits or statues, their famous deeds and sayings. We have trouble seeing them as their contemporaries did—as people. Jawaharlal Nehru, writing in the 1930s when he was in a British prison and some distance from becoming India’s prime minister, said that Gandhi’s views on marital relationships were “abnormal and unnatural” and “can only lead to frustration, inhibition, neurosis, and all manner of physical and nervous ills. . . . I do not know why he is so obsessed by this problem of sex.” Nehru was writing publicly, in his autobiography, but it is fair to say that few Indian politicians today would speak of the Father of the Nation in this unfettered way. Gandhi has become, in India and across the world, a simplified character: a celibate, cheerful saint who wore a white loincloth and round spectacles, ate small meals and succeeded in bringing down an empire through nonviolent civil disobedience. Barack Obama, who kept a portrait of Gandhi hanging on the wall of his Senate office, is fond of citing him.

Joseph Lelyveld has already found himself in some trouble over Great Soul, not for what he wrote, but for what other people say he wrote. In a contemporary morality tale of high-speed information transfer and deliberate misconstruction, his book has been identified as something it is not. The Daily Mail, one of London’s lively and vituperative tabloids, ran a story saying Great Soul claimed Gandhi “was bisexual and left his wife to live with a German-Jewish bodybuilder.” The paper took its lead from a review written by the historian Andrew Roberts, who had suggested Gandhi was, among other things, “a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist.” When the Mail’s story was recast in India, Narendra Modi, the combative chief minister of Gandhi’s home state of Gujarat, banned Great Soul saying it was “perverse in nature. It has hurt the sentiments of those with capacity for sane and logical thinking. Mahatma Gandhi is an idol not only in India but in the entire world.”

Modi, who is unable to obtain a visa to enter the United States because of his complicity in anti-Muslim pogroms in 2002, was seeking to redeem his own damaged reputation by appropriating Gandhi—a project he has been engaged in for some time—so as to soften his image. Modi knew this move would appeal to his constituents, who admire his muscular nationalism as well as his efficiency as chief minister. As usual, a politician was laying claim to Gandhi’s retrospective endorsement. The ban was almost enforced nationally by India’s law minister, Veerappa Moily, until some Gandhi scholars and descendants dissuaded him. Great Soul rose up the best-seller lists. As Andrew Roberts told me, “Banning books is a fail-safe way of giving them huge free publicity. The Gujarat government has just spectacularly shot itself in the foot.” In India, however, a book ban is not really a book ban: it is a way for politicians to gain credence. Anyone who wishes to read Great Soul can still do so, in any part of the country, and it remains freely available in Gujarat’s high-end bookshops. If India’s frequent book bans were genuine curtailments of free speech, it might be assumed that New Delhi’s literary types would make a more serious effort to overturn them.

RATHER THAN a work of sensation, Lelyveld’s book is a measured, judicious attempt to understand Gandhi’s career as a social thinker and activist. It looks forensically at crucial moves and legends that are part of his accepted life story. Instead of focusing on the constitutional machinations that led to Indian independence from British rule in 1947, the author devotes much of his attention to Mohandas Gandhi’s time in South Africa, during which he laid down the principles of direct action and personal sacrifice that could be used to promote social or political change. Lelyveld is well placed to do this: before he became executive editor of the New York Times, he was a correspondent in both India and South Africa, and is also the author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning study of apartheid, Move Your Shadow. He situates the formation of Gandhi’s creative ideas of protest in the rough, churning, ethnically diverse South Africa of the two decades leading up to the First World War.

The starting point is, of course, the episode when the newly arrived Gandhi was ejected from a first-class railway carriage at Pietermaritzburg after a white passenger objected to sharing space with a “coolie” (an Indian indentured laborer). According to a plaque at the railway station, the experience “changed the course of his life” and his “fight against racial oppression” commenced that day. Letter writing was one of his early methods of protest, pursuing righteous causes on behalf of educated Indians in the amalgam of colonies, kingdoms and territories that then made up South Africa. Although he had come to fight a legal case for an Indian Muslim merchant, most of the friends he made were European, and they were often members of ecumenical religious sects. In a newspaper advertisement that went along with a letter to the editor written in 1894, Gandhi described himself as an “Agent for the Esoteric Christian Union and the London Vegetarian Society.” Much of his time was spent trying to work out new ways for people to live, which involved escaping his family and moving to rural communes. In his thirties he took a vow of lifelong celibacy, without first consulting his wife, Kasturba. Lelyveld gently shows that many of Gandhi’s later tales about these days were exaggerated, such as a story of helping countless Indian indentured laborers with their legal problems. In fact, writes Lelyveld: “Initially, his goal was social equality within the empire for his benefactors and clients, the higher-class Indian merchants.”

Like other Indians of his generation who had traveled to Britain—the “home country”—to study, he had what today seems a surprisingly benevolent view of the empire. He took seriously Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858, which had formally extended British sovereignty and legal protection in India. In the monarch’s words:

We disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects. We declare it to be our royal will and pleasure that none be in any wise favored, none molested or disquieted by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law.

(The influence of this statement can be seen in postwar Britain’s policy of separatist multiculturalism, where each immigrant community was encouraged to pursue its traditional customs rather than to integrate.) It would take Gandhi several decades and much heartache to realize that, for most nonwhite colonials, British promises of partnership and equality of opportunity were meaningless in practice.

By 1910, when the new Union of South Africa came into being as an imperial dominion, people like Gandhi were left with no defined status. As Lelyveld writes, South Africa was now “firmly under indigenous white control, with the result that a lawyerly spokesman for a nonwhite immigrant community, which was what Gandhi had become, could no longer expect to get anywhere by addressing petitions or leading missions to Whitehall.” Gandhi may have been a loyal subject who had worked as an overseer for Indian stretcher-bearers in the Boer War, carrying wounded British soldiers away from the front, but now he was discriminated against by racial laws. He reacted by engaging in a campaign of nonviolent resistance (this was to be critical in the development of the techniques he would later use in India). Deploying flying columns of women and thousands of indentured laborers who chanted Hindu slogans as they marched, he brought the mines and plantations of eastern South Africa to a standstill. Lelyveld has a lovely description of Gandhi “serving as quartermaster, cutting the [bread] loaves into three-inch hunks, then . . . digging with his thumb a small hole into each hunk, which he then filled with coarse sugar as the men filed by in successive batches of a dozen strikers each.” Mobilization and direct action were accompanied by tactical letters to people in power, and by extensive, manipulative self-promotion.

Despite violent repression, many of the strikers’ demands were conceded, with the British viceroy across the sea in India praising their “resistance to invidious and unjust laws” in South Africa. The revolt was, according to Gandhi, “a religious struggle”—and as it unfolded, he happily lectured the strikers against evils like smoking and drinking. Lelyveld remarks that by “assuming for himself sole authority” over the campaign, “Gandhi was short-circuiting normal politics, including protest politics.” It was this understanding of the power of unarmed mass movements to challenge injustice that was to be his greatest legacy. He had a genius for “reading” social protests, for taking their temperature and deciding when to step back the efforts and when to march them forward—often for reasons that were unfathomable to those around him, relying simply on his own intuition.

WHEN HE moved back to India at the start of the First World War, he took the sense of national cohesion he had developed in South Africa—joining himself to the cause of the masses he had initially spurned—and gradually turned the previously staid Indian National Congress into a popular movement. Gandhi became the figurehead—or incarnation—of India’s demand for self-rule. He wore the clothes of the poor and lived in the style of an ascetic, using the mode of Hindu renunciation in which a believer forsakes worldly and materialistic pursuits in favor of spiritual development. Disciples arrived. The daughter of a British admiral, renamed by him “Mirabehn,” shampooed his legs each night to soothe the marks left by those who had touched his feet in homage. His return to his homeland coincided with a change of tack in Whitehall, as “the gradual development of self-governing institutions” became government policy in India. At first, Gandhi put the same faith in this promise as he had in Queen Victoria’s proclamation and tried to recruit soldiers to fight in the war, arguing that helping the British in a time of need was “the straightest way” to self-rule. But it became clear that his opponents were thinking in terms of decades or even centuries before India would be ready to govern itself, while Gandhi and his colleagues were thinking in years.

In the succeeding period, one of his key methods was to alter the focus of his campaigns as he went along: spinning, cow protection, caste reform, village living, the reestablishment of the recently abolished Islamic caliphate—any of these might be presented as his chief objective, working on the precept that true self-rule was impossible without social change. Underlying this was a pragmatic need to bridge contradictions and to appeal to as many interest groups as possible. His backing for the thugs who ran the caliphate movement in India seems in retrospect to have been a cynical way of attracting mass Muslim support. In several cases, he would appropriate a minority and sideline its own leaders. When faced in negotiation with Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, arguably an equally iconic social activist, who spoke for India’s 60 million “untouchables,” Gandhi simply announced: “I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast mass of the untouchables.” His ability to change the rules as he went along and to play on ambiguity was consistent; sometimes he would disappear when he reached an impasse, only to reappear with a fresh mission. Obsessed throughout his life with control of the body, diet and the need to eliminate sexual desire, Gandhi became in his later years—after he had formally retired from the Indian National Congress—increasingly troubled and eccentric, a spiritual or moral figure rather than a political actor. A new generation made the proximate decisions which led to Indian independence, and he fell to a Hindu assassin’s bullet soon afterward.

THE VICTORS write history, and although Lelyveld offers sharp rewrites, he cleaves broadly to the iconic version of Gandhi’s life propagated by the Indian National Congress—namely that he was a mahatma, or “great soul.” Instead of being seen as a particularly brilliant political maneuverer, he is examined and interrogated more as a unicorn, a one-off, a man who must be judged by a different standard than other nationalist leaders. But if you look at Mohandas Gandhi dispassionately, the important constituent parts of his creation myth do not hold together.

Take the episode at Pietermaritzburg. As Lelyveld observes, it is often forgotten that Gandhi’s demand to be allowed to travel in a first-class carriage was accepted by the railway company, and he boarded the same train the following night under the protection of the stationmaster. The privilege was essentially financial; aged twenty-four, he was rich enough to place himself in a category separate from the indentured “coolie.” Rather than marking the start of a campaign against racial oppression, as the legend has it, this episode was in fact the start of a campaign to extend racial segregation. Throughout his time in South Africa, Gandhi was adamant that “respectable Indians” should not be obliged to use the same facilities as Africans. He petitioned the authorities in the port city of Durban, where he practiced law, to end the indignity of making Indians use the same entrance to the post office as blacks, and counted it as a victory when three doors were introduced: one for Europeans, one for Asiatics and one for Natives. Whichever way you parse it, Gandhi’s views on Africans do not make happy reading. His writings contain references to “raw Kaffirs” and their “indolence” and to the fact that he thinks they are “troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.” But perhaps more important than the words of abuse—which might have been written in haste, or in a particular context—is that however hard you hunt in the archives, Africans remain invisible in Gandhi’s writings about Africa. As Lelyveld concludes, reluctantly, “In the several thousand pages Gandhi wrote in South Africa . . . the names of only three Africans are mentioned. Of the three, he acknowledges having met only one.” The explanation for this may be quite simple: antiblack prejudice was and is endemic in India.

If, as a privileged Gujarati born in 1869, Gandhi harbored the bias of his background and generation, we should hardly be surprised. He was not, contrary to later reworkings of his story, a liberal: he liked to lay down rules, was often undemocratic and his ideas were in certain respects traditionally Hindu. Lelyveld describes him traveling to the Godavari River in central India after his return from England in order to go through purification rituals, to rid himself of the pollution. His views on caste were malleable, and his campaigns against untouchability were tempered by circumstance. He never accepted Ambedkar’s demand for constitutional protection and distinct civic rights for those outside the caste system; instead Gandhi insisted the Hindu majority would bestow favors upon them. When a deputation of “untouchables” wanted to join his organization the Harijan Sevak Sangh, dedicated to uplifting the Harijans (meaning “children of god”—a phrase now rejected as patronizing), Gandhi told them it would not be permitted:

The Board has been formed to enable savarna [upper-caste] Hindus to do repentance and reparation to you. It is thus a Board of debtors, and you are the creditors. You owe nothing to the debtors, and therefore, so far as this Board is concerned, the initiative has to come from the debtors.

It was typical Gandhian logic, and the Harijans went away defeated. Ambedkar suggested angrily that the whole purpose of Gandhi’s board was “to create a slave mentality among the Untouchables towards their Hindu masters.” It is not insignificant that former untouchables in India today often have great hostility toward Gandhi and the way in which he treated their emerging community leaders. In his approach to Indian Muslims, he had something of the same attitude. Although at times of bloodshed he would use public fasts and marches effectively to promote communal harmony, Gandhi’s underlying precept was majoritarian, believing that Hindu compassion and goodwill rather than structural safeguards would bring India’s large Muslim minority into a wider national fold. As an idea it was imaginative, but many followers of Islam found the Indian National Congress before independence to be, in practice, redolent of Hindu culture—and upper-caste culture at that. Gandhi combined orthodoxy and radicalism. If he had not been, in many respects, an identifiable Indian type—the Hindu renunciate—it is unlikely he would have gathered such extensive support for his cause in an ethnically and linguistically varied land like India. By the 1930s, most Muslim politicians of national stature were migrating to other parties, and the demand for a separate homeland grew, leading finally to the creation of Pakistan.

GANDHI’S GREATEST achievement was to invent a new form of public assertion that could, under the right circumstances, change history. His method depended ultimately on the existence of a democratically responsive government. He figured, from what he knew of Britain, that the House of Commons would only be willing to suppress uprisings in India to a limited degree before conceding. And so he launched a vast movement of noncooperation to push for Indian independence—the British responded with violent crackdowns; they arrested Gandhi and tens of thousands of protesters, even throwing most of the Indian National Congress leadership in jail during the Second World War. By 1947, nearly bankrupt and dependent upon American loans, the British caved. Had Gandhi been up against a different opponent, he would have had a different fate. When the former viceroy of India, Lord Halifax, went to see Adolf Hitler in 1938, the German leader suggested he should have Gandhi shot; if nationalist protests continued, members of the Indian National Congress should be killed in increments of two hundred until the problem went away.

During the British general election last year, the outgoing prime minister, Gordon Brown, had a pavement encounter with an angry voter, Gillian Duffy, who berated him about pensions and taxes. It was the sort of televised public humiliation that is now obligatory every few years in a democracy, as the leader is shouted down by a “normal” person and obliged to pretend to listen politely while the cameras are rolling. Unfortunately for Mr. Brown, he was still wearing a radio microphone when he got in his car to escape and was heard to say of his tormentor: “Och, she’s just this sort of bigoted woman.” For several days afterward, Brown’s groveling apology to Mrs. Duffy, first to the media and later in person, became the main topic on the news.

The Egyptian writer Alaa al-Aswany commented in an essay that:

If Gordon Brown ruled Britain by fraud and by emergency law, he would not have apologized to Gillian Duffy. In fact he would probably have had her arrested and sent to the nearest State Security office, where she would have been beaten, strung up by her legs, and electrocuted in sensitive parts of her body. Maybe Duffy would be tried in a State Security emergency court on charges of causing trouble, insulting a symbol of the state, and endangering social peace in Britain.

His point was that any response to political events is conditioned wholly by circumstance. We can see this now in the unfurling events in west Asia: the initially successful protests in Egypt, the civil war in Libya, the killings in Bahrain. In each case, the protests carried out by those who wish to see change are a mortally dangerous gamble—literally a matter of life or death. If you judge the government correctly, mass protests may overwhelm the state. The security forces may switch sides and join the crowd. Perhaps a few hundred people will be killed, but you will have changed history in your country—and overthrown a tyrant. If you judge it wrongly, protesters may end up being killed in very large numbers, and your children or your parents may be rounded up and killed too, or taken to prison to be tortured. In the terrible balance between inertia and protest, between acceptance and revolution, Gandhi’s legacy is central to the decisions that are now being made. The idea of sit-ins, occupying public spaces, peaceful marches, refusing to be moved, and facing down guns with slogans and flags stems from the methods he created. No single figure in the last two hundred years has done more to create a transferable idiom of protest.

Pullquote: Gandhi was not, contrary to later reworkings of his story, a liberal: he liked to lay down rules, was often undemocratic and his ideas were in certain respects traditionally Hindu.Image: Essay Types: Book Review