Timely biography – Gandhi: The years that changed the world

Gandhi: The years that changed the world – Ramachandra Guha,  Penguin random house, Rs.980, Pages 1109 Surprisingly, this monumental 1,109-page biography of Mahatma Gandhi covering the years 1914 — when after having tried and tested the principles of ahimsa and satyagraha to attain political ends in South Africa, he returned to India — and 1948, the year of his martyrdom in the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity, has been sparsely reviewed and/or debated in the media or in public forums. Yet on October 2, the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre is set to pull out all stops to launch year-long celebrations to hosanna Gandhi’s sesquicentennial birth anniversary. There is a palpable tinge of hypocrisy in the imminent BJP-led national celebrations of the Mahatma’s 150th birth anniversary. It’s pertinent to note that the man who assassinated Gandhi on January 30, 1948, five months after India and Pakistan became politically independent nations, was a card-carrying member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), proudly acknowledged by the BJP as its ideological mentor organisation. It’s also noteworthy that prime minister Narendra Modi is a proud, self-proclaimed pracharak (soldier) of the para-military RSS, which played a negligible role in the national independence movement. Therefore, there is a clear and present danger that the Mahatma’s government-orchestrated sesquicentennial celebrations will focus on his peripheral messages — civic cleanliness and hygiene, cow protection, national language — rather than his core objectives, viz non-violence, self-sacrifice, eradication of caste discrimination, Hindu-Muslim harmony, gender equality, rural development and anti-consumerism. The distinguishing feature of celebrated historian Ramachandra Guha’s latest Gandhi biography — he has authored two others — India after Gandhi — the History of the World’s Largest Democracy (2007) and Gandhi Before India (2013) — is that it is an almost day-to-day account of the Mahatma’s life from the time he returned to India from South Africa in 1914, to the day he was felled by three bullets fired by RSS pracharak and propagandist Nathuram Godse. While most biographies of Gandhi centre on the milestone events of India’s freedom struggle and the critical role Gandhi played in them, Guha’s latest oeuvre is a detailed recitation of Gandhi’s political and personal life of 34 years after his return from the diaspora, India’s independence on August 15, 1947, and his assassination five months later. As such, it offers a history of India’s unique freedom struggle from the perspective of the ‘peace room’ of its mastermind and generalissimo. The original intent of your reviewer was to read the most important of the 38 chapters of this tome, but once started it was impossible to skip any portions because the chapters meld into a fascinating step-by-step narrative of the evolution of M.K. Gandhi into Mahatma Gandhi, an unparalleled, inspirational leader about whom the scientist Albert Einstein famously wrote that “generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth”. The first deep insight your correspondent has derived from this extensively researched and absorbing…