Moulding of the Mahatma

Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, his People and an Empire by Rajmohan Gandhi; Viking, Penguin Books India; Price: Rs.650; 600 pp Perhaps, no other individual of the 19th and 20th centuries has been the subject matter of as many biographies as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) aka Mahatma Gandhi. Among the monumental and greatly acclaimed biographies written on the Mahatma are Louis Fischer’s The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950); Martin Green’s Voice of a New Age Revolution (1993); Erik Erickson’s Gandhi’s Truth (1969); G. D. Birla’s three-volume In the Shadow of the Mahatma (1968); Pyarelal Nayar’s multi-volume Mahatma Gandhi: The Early Phase and Suresh Tendulkar’s eight volume Mahatma. According to the bibliography of Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, his People and an Empire, the latest biography of this savant and extraordinary leader of men, over 50 volumes featuring his life, history and philosophy have been written to date. Yet despite the profusion of words, there’s a lot that we don’t know about this great leader of whom Albert Einstein remarked: “Generations to come may scarcely believe that ever such a man in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.” The disbelief has already begun in the country of his birth where Gandhi has been deified and idealised into an icon whose example and teachings are impossible to follow, except in the jokey Bollywood Munnabhai style. The merit of this book written by his grandson Rajmohan Gandhi, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is that it’s a detailed insider’s account of the formative influences and events which transformed a shy and gawky second son born in the small town of Porbandar (Gujarat), into the Mahatma. “There seemed a need for a chronological, complete and candid portrayal attempted here. Studies written shortly after his assassination naturally stressed Gandhi’s final decades and some aspects of his personality, excluding other areas. Moreover the early biographers produced their works without access to the vast amount of illuminating material now available to scholars,” writes the author explaining the rationale of yet another Gandhi biography. The outcome of Rajmohan’s labour of love is a highly readable and remarkably objective narrative which nails many popular myths and misconceptions about the life and tumultuous times of the Mahatma. The first of these myths is that Gandhi was born into poverty or near poverty. Not so. His father and forebears were diwans or wazirs to the princes who ruled various states and satrapies of the Saurashtra region of present day Gujarat. Therefore while the young Mohandas was raised in the frugal, puritan culture of the region, his father had the foresight to enroll him in the English-medium Alfred High School when he was 11 years of age. Yet for the past half century the Gujarat state government has enforced Gujarati medium instruction in all government schools, and has officially discouraged English language learning on the false premise that the Mahatma wanted it that way. As a consequence the lives and employment prospects of millions of Gujaratis were ruined. Further detailing the three years that the young 19-year-old Mohandas spent in London to qualify…