Some years ago, British writer Patrick French visited the Sabarmati ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, the site from which Mahatma Gandhi led his salt march to the sea in 1930. French was so appalled by the noisome state of the latrines that he asked the ashram secretary whose job it was to clean them. A sweeper woman stopped by for an hour a day, the functionary explained, but afterward things inevitably became filthy again.
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But wasn't it a central tenet of the Mahatma's teachings that his followers clean up after themselves?
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"We all clean the toilets together, on Gandhiji's birthday,"the secretary answered, "as a symbol to show that we understand his message."
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Gandhi had many messages, some ignored, some misunderstood, some as relevant today as when first enunciated. Most Americans - many middle-class Indians, for that matter - know what they know about the Mahatma from Ben Kingsley's Academy Award-winning screen portrayal. His was a mesmerizing performance, but the script barely hinted at the bewildering complexity of the real man. Who was at the same time an earnest pilgrim and a wily politician, an advocate of celibacy and the architect of satyagraha, a revivalist, a revolutionary and a social reformer.
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It is this last avatar that interest Joseph Lelyveld most. Great Soul concentrates on what he calls Gandhi's "evolving sense of his constituency and social vision", and his subsequent struggle to impose that vision on an India at once "worshipful and obdurate".
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This is not a full-scale biography. Nor is it for beginners. Lelyveld assumes his readers are familiar with the basic outlines of Gandhi's life, and while the book includes a bare-bones chronology and is helpfully divided into South African and Indian sections, it moves backward and forward so often, it's sometimes harder than it should be to follow the shifting course of Gandhi's thought.
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But Great Soul is a noteworthy book, nonetheless, vivid, naunced and clear-eyed. The two decades Gandhi spent in South Aftrica are too often seen merely as prelude. Lelyveld treats them with seriousness they deserve.
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"I believe implicitly that all men are born equal", Gandhi once wrote in the midst of one of his campaigns against untouchability. " I have fought this doctrine of superiority in South Africa inch by inch".
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It actually took a long time for the Mahatma to turn that implicit belief into explicit action, lelyveld reminds us. When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Durban from Bombay in 1893, he was a natty 23-year-0\old British-trained lawyer, hired to help represent one wealthy Muslim Indian trader in a dreary civil suit against another, and primarily interested in matters of religion and diet, not politics.
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Initially, Gandhi was simply affronted that discriminatory laws and bigoted custom lumped educated well-to-do Indians like him with "coolies", that impoverished mine, plantation and railroad workers who made up the bulk of the region's immigrant Indian population. The non-violent campaigns he waged to bring about equality between Indians and whites over the next 20 years would lead him to advocate equality between Indian and Indian, first across caste and religious lines and then between rich and poor.
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Soon after returning to India in 1915, Gandhi set forth what he called the "four pillars on which the structure of swaraj would ever rest": An unshakable alliance between Hindus and Muslims; universal acceptance of the doctrine of non-violence, as tenet, not tactic; the transformation of India's approximately 650,000 villages by spinning and other self-sustaining handicrafts; and an end to the the evil concept of untouchability. Lelyveld shrewdly examines Gandhi's noble but doomed battles to achieve them all.
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He made a host of enemies along the way - orthodox Hindus who believed him overly sympathetic to Muslims, Muslims who saw his calls for religious unity as part of a Hindu plot, Britons who thought him a charlatan, radical revolutionaries who believed him a reactionary. But no antagonist was more implacable than Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the brilliant, quick-tempered untouchable leader who saw the Mahatma's non-violent efforts to eradicate untouchability as a sideshow at best. He even objected to the word - Gandhi coined for his people - "Harijans" or "children of God" - as patronizing; he preferred "dalits", from the Sanskrit for "Crushed", "broken".
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Sometimes, Gandhi said Indian freedom would never come until untouchablility was expunged; sometimes he argued that untouchability could be eliminated only after Independence was won. He was unapologetic about that kind of inconsistency.
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As lelyveld has written in Move Your Shadow, "Gandhi had hoped to bring about India's freedom as the moral achievement of millions of individual Indians, as the result of a social revolution in which the collapse of alien rule would be little more than a byproduct of a struggle for self-reliance and economic equality". Foreign rule did collapse, in the end, "but strife and inequality among Indians worsened".
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Gandhi is still routinely called "the father of the nation" in India, but it is hard to see what reamins of him beyond what Lelyveld calls his "nimbus". His notions about sex and spinning and simple living have long since been abandoned. Hindu-Muslim tension still smoulders just beneath the uneasy surface. Untouchability survives, too, and stand-issue polychrome statues of Ambedkar in red tie and double-breasted suit now outnumber those of the sparsely clothes Mahatma wherever dalits are still crowded together.
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Gandhi saw most of this coming and sometimes despaired. The real tragedy of his life, lelyveld argues, was "not because he was assassinated, nor becuse his noblest qualities inflamed the hatred in his killer's heart. The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his worlds."
......................... GEOFFREY C. WARD, a biographer and a screenwriter for documentary films, spent part of his boyhood in India and is currently writing a book about Partition....
GREAT SOUL CONCENTRATES ON WHAT HE CALLS GANDHI'S 'EVOLVING SENSE OF HIS CONSTITUENCY AND SOCIAL VISION', AND HIS SUBSEQUENT STRUGGLE TO IMPOSE THAT VISION ON AN INDIA AT ONCE 'WORSHIPFUL AND OBDURATE... IT IS A NOTEWORTHY BOOK... VIVID AND NAUNCED...........
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