Gandhi Before India (100 page)

In 1998 I made my first visit to South Africa. I have been back four times. My greatest debts in that country are to three outstanding historians: Surenda Bhana, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, and Goolam Vahed. They have given generously of their time and their scholarship. I have raided their published works, of course, but also gained much from letters and conversations over the years.

Three other South Africans took me on journeys through places Gandhi lived or worked in. Sudeshan Reddy drove me through Johannesburg, ending up at the Hamidia Mosque, around which so much of the action described in this book takes place. The novelist Aziz Hassim took me on a wonderful walking tour of central Durban. Ela Gandhi, daughter of Manilal and an admired South African democrat herself, took me on a guided tour of the now reconstructed Phoenix Settlement.

As the ‘Note on Sources’ indicates, the research for this book was done in archives spread across five countries. In the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, both in New Delhi; at the old India Office collections in London, now housed in a wing of the British Library; at the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale; at Rhodes House in Oxford and at the New York Public Library; at the National Archives of the United Kingdom at Kew; at the Maharashtra State Archives in Mumbai and the Tamil Nadu State Archives in Chennai; and at the University of South Africa and the South African National Archives, both in Pretoria – in all these places, I was assisted by kindly and competent record-keepers.

I do, however, owe special thanks to four very special archivists. Jenni Mackenzie went through the Baptist archive in Johannesburg, digging out every scrap relevant in any way to Gandhi. At the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, Kinnari Bhatt guided me to (and through) the
news clippings and diaries of the South African years, rarely used and yet (or thus) staggeringly valuable. Kinnari
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also answered many queries about Gandhi’s Gujarati background, and helped select the photographs for this book. At the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi, the vastly experienced S. K. Bhatnagar guided me through the many volumes of letters to Gandhi.

Jenni, Kinnari and Bhatnagar
Saab
are all thorough professionals. A fourth benefactor, Isa Sarid, was acting out of an intensely personal interest. In her home, in the Israeli port town of Haifa, lay the papers of Gandhi’s friend and patron Hermann Kallenbach. I spent a most rewarding week among these papers, with dear Isa (then a sprightly and ever-smiling eighty-seven) at hand to provide clues and – when my hand tired from note-taking – a vegetarian lunch of the kind her uncle and Gandhi sometimes ate. I regret that Isa Sarid did not live long enough to see this book in print. Fortunately, before she died, she was able, as she had long wished, to supervise the transfer of her beloved uncle’s papers to the National Archives of India.

I should also mention four fine bookshops, where I obtained many old and out-of-print books and pamphlets that proved enormously helpful in my research. These are Clarke’s Bookshop in Cape Town; Ike’s Bookshop and Collectables in Durban; the Collectors Treasury in Johannesburg; and Prabhu Book Service in Gurgaon (the old town, not the new city).

The first full draft of this book was written while I held the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics. A few furlongs to the south of my office (in Columbia House, on the corner of Houghton Street and the Aldwych) lies the Inner Temple, where Gandhi studied. A few furlongs to the north runs High Holborn, the street on which there was once a vegetarian restaurant where Gandhi ate.

As I thought and wrote about Gandhi (writing, among other things, the three chapters set in London) I was fortunate to have at hand the extraordinarily capable staff at LSE IDEAS, where the Roman Chair is housed. I wish especially to thank Arne Westad, Emilia Knight and Tiha Franulovic for their friendship and their generosity. This, along with the friendship and generosity of Emmanuel (Manny) Roman, made my year in London the most enjoyable and productive of all my spells outside India.

A host of other friends contributed ideas, suggested sources, translated
letters from languages I do not know, and in other ways helped in the making of this book. They include N. Balakrishnan, Rakesh Basant, William Beinart, Deepa Bhatnagar, Sharad Chari, Rajesh Chopra, Varsha Das, V. N. Datta, Ashwin Desai, Keshav Desiraju, Richard Duguid, Patrick French, Supriya Gandhi, Stephen Gelb, Amitav Ghosh, Peter Heehs, Isabel Hofmeyr, Nasreen Munni Kabir, Prashant Kidambi, Shimon Low, John McLeod, Ashish Mitter, Rajendraprasad Narla, Anil Nauriya, Zac O’Yeah, Dina Patel, Dinyar Patel, Achal Prabala, Achintya Prasad, Tirthankar Roy, Usha Sahay, Navtej and Avina Sarna, Ornit Shahni, Hemali Sodhi, Neelima Shukla-Bhatt, Tridip Suhrud, Akhila Yechury, Geoffrey Ward, and my parents Visalakshi and (the late) Dr S. R. D. Guha. A special
salaam
to my friends Jagadev Gajare, M. V. Ravishankar and R. Ullagadi, all of Ray+Keshavan Design Associates, who lovingly restored and sequenced the photos for this book.

I would like to thank three individuals who read the entire manuscript in draft: Katherine Boo, Saul Dubow and David Gilmour. Distinguished writers all, they brought different but complementary perspectives, correcting errors, smoothing out my prose, alerting me to new lines of enquiry. David and Kate are old friends, whose assistance may in this case be (somewhat) taken for granted. Saul Dubow, on the other hand, I know only through email. That he agreed to read a book by a stranger, on short notice, and did so with such acuity and thoroughness, speaks of a collegiality absent among historians of many countries but not, it seems, among those of South Africa.

I also owe a large debt to two Indian scholars. The publisher and literary historian Rukun Advani read some early chapters and advised on how they might be improved; this book also draws on dozens of conversations we have had over the years on the technique(s) of biographical writing. Meanwhile, the veteran political historian S. R. Mehrotra alerted me to the crucial importance to the Gandhi story of Pranjivan Mehta. He selflessly guided me to the key sources, despite working on a life of Mehta himself. Professor Mehrotra’s zest and zeal (in his eighties, he thinks nothing of taking a night train from Shimla to Delhi, checking some documents in the archives, and taking a night train back home) provided nourishment and example when my own energies flagged.

As always, this book could not have been written without the solidarity and support of my family. My wife and son read some chapters and commented most helpfully on them. My daughter accompanied me
on a magical tour of Gandhi’s Kathiawar. But merely the fact of being with them is enough to keep me going.

It was my agent Gill Coleridge who first convinced me that I should write a biography of Gandhi. When I had accumulated too many materials to do this in one go, she suggested I make it two volumes instead. Meanwhile, Gill’s colleague, Melanie Jackson, has been quite superb at working out the North American end of things. I am also grateful to all Gill’s colleagues at Rogers, Coleridge and White for their assistance over the years, and particularly to the indispensable Cara Jones and to my old mentor Peter Straus.

Gill and Melanie helped place this book in the hands of some fantastic editors. My year in London was thus further enriched by many stimulating conversations with Simon Winder at Penguin Press. Simon read my drafts very closely, and was particularly helpful in making me think through the links between biography and history. Also at Penguin UK, Jane Birdsell has been an expert and extremely understanding copy-editor.

I carry warm memories of long lunches in New York with Sonny Mehta, the conversation mostly around Gandhi but not excluding the game of cricket. Sonny read several drafts, encouraging me especially to flesh out the secondary characters. His Knopf colleague Dan Frank also provided excellent comments. At Random House Canada, Anne Collins commented most valuably on an early draft, and was always available as a sounding board on matters of structure and style.

At Penguin India, my dear friend Nandini Mehta has been a solid source of support. She has worked with me through more drafts of this book than I (or she) care to remember. Like Sonny, Nandini insisted that I pay more attention to Gandhi’s friends and family. I am also grateful to Chiki Sarkar for her insightful comments on a late draft, and for her enthusiasm for all things connected with publishing, which makes her authors work harder than they might otherwise tend to do.

The person with whom I have discussed my subject longest is Gopalkrishna Gandhi. In the twenty (and more) years of our friendship, Gopal Gandhi has taught me much about Mohandas Gandhi, about Gujarati culture, and about Indian history. In the context of this particular book, however, his greatest gift was that he sent me to meet Enuga S. Reddy in New York in or around the year 1992. It was a cold and dark winter evening, and Mr Reddy then worked out of a small
(and dark) room somewhere near the UN headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Ever since, Mr Reddy has illuminated my path to Gandhi. All through the research and writing of this book, I have drawn regularly and repeatedly on his phenomenal knowledge of Gandhi and of South Africa. He has directed me to rare materials in archives around the world. He has provided many materials from his own collection. And, in between various hospital stints and family commitments (among them celebrating the birth of a great-grandchild), he has read and corrected my drafts. The dedication to
Gandhi Before India
inadequately expresses what I (and numerous other Gandhi scholars) owe this shy, gentle, greatly learned, and truly heroic man.