Mahatma's magic

GEOFFREY ASHE

The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi Robert Payne (Bodley Head 84s) The Trial of Mr Gandhi Francis Watson (Macmillan 63s) This week marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Gandhi. The events which have been occasioned by his centenary year in England are an odd mixture. They do not by any means add up to the mere official takeover which some Establishment- baiters anticipated and sneered at. What- ever the intentions, Gandhi has turned out to be too big for anyone to annex. He starts hares; he refuses to be embalmed.

One of these centenary books is American. It confirms my thesis, but back- handedly. The fact that Gandhi survives Robert Payne's professed admiration is proof that he can survive anything.

Mr Payne's volume could justify its bulk (703 large pages) if it added something solid and definitive. It doesn't. Indeed it omits much that is crucial, while heaping up picturesque minutiae instead. Some of these are quite interesting. But they are a smoke- screen covering constant mismanagement of the main themes.

To begin with, the treatment is distorted. Gandhi's youth and South African career are traced in immense detail. In 1915 he gets back to India, and the tempo begins changing exactly when it shouldn't. The entire history of the clash with the British Raj is skimped and botched. Extreme slow- ness returns in the final few years. Even after the assassination we • get fifty-six further anticlimactic pages, first about the obsequies, then about revelations at the assassin's trial. This aftermath does have novelty, but here it is too much to digest.

I wish I could merely say that Mr Payne adds nothing to the record of Gandhi's life. Alas, he subtracts. His book is a retreat from its predecessors. For instance, recent biographers have shown how far Gandhi's mind was formed by English contacts. Such influences partly explain why he was so intractably unlike other Hindu holy men. Mr Payne virtually ignores this research, reviving the legend that Gandhi was purely Indian and learned almost nothing in England.

Then there is the greater matter of his non-violent technique, 1Satyagraha' or Truth-Force. On some aspects, Mr Payne is sound; on others, he is miles out. Thus, noting that Gandhi stressed the value of brahmacharya or complete self-control, he equates this with sexual continence—a vulgarisation which Gandhi, despite his sexual concerns, explicitly warned against.

A further point about the Mahatma's technique was that he cautioned his followers never to put their trust in civil disobedience alone. 'The constructive pro- gramme', he said, 'is the key to success'— meaning his village programme of hand-

spinning and cottage industry and basic education. This was the swords-into-plough- shares aspect, and the ploughshares were weapons of progress when swords were sheathed. Mr Payne glances cursorily at some of it, but he never shows how it fitted in, or how it was oriented towards the ideal of a non-violent society, and a do-it- yourself social revolution more profound' than any mere transfer of power.

Gandhi is placed in a near-void. We are told little of India or the national revival before he assumed leadership. We are in- troduced to Congress without -a clue as to how it started or how it became a mass patriotic movement. Important characters and motifs enter suddenly, late, without background. There is amazingly little about the British; Gandhi's opponents are phan- toms, and the story limps even as drama.

These and other defects might be over- looked if Mr Payne had faced a question which most biographers have evaded. How far did Gandhi's methods succeed? Did the Raj end because of him? Mr Payne offers us a cliché: 'he brought freedom and independence to India'. This is nearer the truth than the assorted hostile portraits as an irrelevance, a betrayer, or a British agent. But not very near.

Politically the Mahatma's achievement was -surely twofold. First, he mobilised the masses as no one else could. By his religious appeal, his reverence for the poor, his untiring work at their own level, he gave national politics a meaning for them.

Secondly, while he certainly did not `conquer' the British, he gained the vital minimum of what he was trying for. The aim of non-violence was not conquest but conversion—a change of mind; and it did produce the change which was the pre- requisite of all others. In 1927 Lord Birken- head, as Secretary of State for India, seriously envisaged holding out for ever. Then came the years of Gandhi's major onslaughts, political and moral. The govern- ment of India Act of 1935 did not concede anything like independence, but it showed that the corner had been turned. Neither the Indian moderates nor the terrorists.,sould have accomplished as much. These con- clusions do not emerge from Mr Payne's story. What is worse, no reasoned alterna- tives do, either.

As a narrator he does better with the heroic tragedy of the last phase, when Gandhi reproached himself as a failure because India's spiritual and social trans- formation, which mattered more to him than independence, had not happened. After partition, his astounding personal magic could, and did, check the bloodshed. Yet Mr Payne hardly seems to feel it himself. Indeed, his whole approach strikes me as perfunctory. Does Gandhi's personality interest him much? Here is someone who, rightly or wrongly, was hailed as a Messiah; who could charm people, alter their lines. command their devotion. He had hi, delusions and his off-putting qualities: the magic remains the basic datum.

Gandhi's personality is the focus of the smaller and far superior study by Francis Watson. The British authorities put Gandhi on trial only once, in 1922 (later they im- prisoned him without trial). Centring on the problems which faced the prosecution. Mr Watson works outward. In a sense Gandhi was on trial not only then but ever afterwards. What picture emerges from a fair appraisal through contemporary wit- nesses?

Mr Watson does not leave us with a would-be conclusive view of Gandhi, but with much excellent material for forming our own views. He reveals somebody who breaks the mould of the stock legends and is far more interesting. Several of his facts are welcome surprises. Thus, he refutes the tale that when Cripps flew over in 1942 with a plan for Indian self-rule after the war. Gandhi dismissed the offer as 'a post-dated cheque on a crashing bank'. This phrase has kept on reappearing with variants. But here at last is the confirmed truth: Gandhi didn't say it.

More notable, however, is the dis- closure of the real source. This was the historian K. M. Panikkar. Seemingly he did not mean that the offer was worthless be- cause Japan would conquer India. He meant that any British offer was bluff because the Raj was soon ending anyhow. The top-level decision to abdicate had been taken as far back as 1935. This belief—for which he later produced evidence—fully ,accords with the natural assessment of the Mahatma's achievement.

Books on Gandhi are increasingly rele- vant now. In 1968 the wave of radical violence was thought by many to have swept him into limbo. The subsidence of that wave during 1969 is reopening questions.

One reason is strictly Gandhian. So far. the most marked retreat from overt violence has been in black America. Martin Luther King, though a disciple of Gandhi, never undertook what his master said was essential, a constructive social programme. His death left a gap which militants filled. The relative calm of 1969 has been largely due to Negroes at last beginning concerted efforts for the building up of their own communities.

I doubt if the trend of radical direct action is towards either renewed violence or explicit non-violence. Rather, it may be toward a sort of neo-Gandhism without Gandhi. As he foretold himself, American Negroes show signs of leading the way. Meanwhile the best of London's squatters (I emphasise the qualification) are not only more effective than Grosvenor Square rioters, they are closer to the Mahatma than CND ever was.