Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (70 page)

As part of my attempt to find a fresh way of looking at the ever-evolving Gandhi who traveled home to India after two decades in South Africa, I found it necessary to visit most of the places that were important in his long life, from his birthplace in Porbandar to the site of his assassination in a New Delhi garden. In all, I logged three trips to India and two to South Africa in three years. Even now I find it hard to offer a simple explanation of what these journeys were about. It’s true they gave me a chance to delve into archives in Durban, Pretoria, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, and New Delhi—London too—but that was never their primary purpose. I could go through the motions of scholarship, sometimes experience the excitement of a small discovery, but I’m not a scholar. There was also the chance to chat with old men and women who had come into contact with the Mahatma as children or, more often, with descendants of Gandhi and people who mattered in his life. Such conversations were more in my line as a reporter, but, given the passage of generations, they could seldom be more than suggestive. Still, the reporter in me felt a compulsion to journey to places to which Gandhi had trekked, from Volksrust on the border of what was once the Transvaal to Noakhali district in what became Bangladesh, in order to view his past as it was refracted through our present. I felt I needed to set foot in such places if I was to come to any real understanding of the flow of his life, the contours of his struggle.

Whatever I was seeking, these excursions spun off an added dividend. They brought me into contact, however fleeting, with an international community of scholars on four continents who have pondered Gandhi’s life, times, and contradictions, the influences he imbibed and the values he embraced, more deeply and systematically than I ever could. The exchange of information and insight in these encounters was mostly one way, especially at the outset. Essentially, these were tutorials in which one meeting and reference, personal or scholarly, or both, led to another. It should be obvious that none of my tutors bear any responsibility for my readings of basic Gandhi texts or the direction my inquiry took. What they provided were useful insights, references, and cautions.
As he traveled from place to place, the tutee piled up debts that now need to be declared.

The Gandhi descendants I met, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, have been active keepers of his legacy. These were the biographer Rajmohan Gandhi; his brother Gopalkrishna Gandhi who, among his other posts as a civil servant, became India’s first ambassador to post-apartheid South Africa; their South African cousin Ela Gandhi of Durban, a member of the first democratically chosen South African parliament; and her nieces, Kirti Menon of Johannesburg and the scholar Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie of Cape Town, each of whom dealt patiently with my queries. Others in South Africa who offered guidance or constructively challenged my thinking included Keith Breckenridge and Isabel Hofmeyr, who participated in a seminar at Witwatersrand University that gently critiqued my chapter on Gandhi’s sparse relations with Africans. I received invaluable assistance from Mwele Cele of the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban, who scanned the pages of the Zulu-language newspaper
Ilanga lase Natal
for mentions of Gandhi and also introduced me to the Reverend Scott Couper, an American missionary-scholar who was my guide to Inanda, where he lives. Jeff Guy and Goolam Vahed of the University of KwaZulu-Natal put me in touch with references I’d never have found on my own. At the start of my plunge into the literature on Indian indentured labor in South Africa, Surendra Bhana of the University of Kansas, a pioneering researcher on that subject, was generous with scholarly citations and guidance. The writers Aziz Hassim and Ronnie Govender had stimulating thoughts on the popular memory of Gandhi as it has been handed down over the generations of South African Indians. Eric Itzkin spent an afternoon showing me Johannesburg’s Gandhi sites. Firoz Cachalia and Jonathan Hyslop each had thought deeply about Gandhi’s place in the South Africa of his times and its history as it has since been told. Heather Hughes, author of a forthcoming biography of John Dube, proved a generous and spirited interlocutor on e-mail. Professor Donald Fanger of Harvard kindly checked the translations of a couple of Tolstoy passages against the original Russian.

Before the first of my excursions to India, I had dinner in Westminster at the House of Lords with Bhikhu Parekh, one of its members and an eminent interpreter of Gandhi’s thought. In Gujarat, I had the privilege of meeting Narayan Desai, son of Gandhi’s longtime secretary and diarist, and Tridip Suhrud, a Gandhi scholar and translator of Narayan Desai’s four-volume biography of the Mahatma; also, Achyut Yagnik, a
political scientist, and Sudarshan Iyenger, vice chancellor of the Gujarat Vidyapith, a university founded by the Mahatma with the aim of training generations of committed field-workers in his methods and values. I gained valuable suggestions and impressions from contemporary social activists in Gujarat, notably Mirai Chatterjee of the Self Employed Women’s Association (known as SEWA) and Martin Macwan, a Dalit organizer and educator, founder of the Dalit Shakti Kendra (or Dalit Empowerment Center). In Nagpur, I met Pradip Algrave, an Ambedkar scholar; Shreenivas Khadewale, a Gandhian economist; and Jogendra Kawade, leader of an Ambedkerite political faction. In New Delhi, I was helped by Varsha Das of the National Gandhi Museum and Uttam Sinha, its librarian, who made available a translation of portions of Mahadev Desai’s Gujarati-language diary that have yet to be published in English.

My trip through Kerala was facilitated at every turn by the boundless generosity of my friends Mammen and Prema Matthew. The Matthew family’s newspaper,
Malayala Manorama
, served as my magic carpet, meeting all my transportation, scheduling, and research needs, to the point of presenting me with a custom-bound volume of all the paper’s coverage of Gandhi’s four tours through the old kingdoms of Travancore and Cochin, later merged into the modern state, all skillfully translated into English for my sake.
Malayala Manorama
—in the person of one its editors, A. V. Harisankar, who became my traveling companion and friend—also arranged meetings for me with Kerala writers and scholars including N. K. Joshi, a popular historian and crusader for Dalit rights; P. J. Cherian of the Kerala Council for Historical Research; Rajan Gurukkal, vice chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University at Kottayam; M. K. Sanu, a biographer of Narayan Guru; T. K. Ravindran, author of a history of the Vaikom satyagraha; and the Dalit intellectual K. K. Kochu.