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Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India (2011)

by Joseph Lelyveld(Favorite Author)

3.63 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0307269582 (ISBN13: 9780307269584)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: A day before he was assassinated, Mahatma Gandhi told Manu Gandhi, his grandniece – “If someone shot at me and I received his bullet on my bare chest, without a sigh, with a smile and Rama's name on my lips, only then you should say that I was a true mahatma”.Next day he was shot by a Hindu extremist in chest and died with Rama’s name (allegedly) thus fulfilling the final act of his mahatma-ship. Mahatma Gandhi as he was called respectfully throughout the country and beyond fought all his life and by his account died a failure. His basic principles and the changes he wanted to bring across – Hindu-Muslim unity, removal of untouchability, village industries, he could not live to see them fulfilled. Even if he had a life of 150 years he’d not be able to see it as... more the sub-continent is in the same mess or perhaps greater as was in 1948. Gandhi was not an easy person to understand, his value is system is more or less rigid but his ideas and goals keep on changing, at times he seems overtly religious, but unlike Hindus he never goes to temples though he always refers to his struggle and thought process as religious. He says – “The struggle for human liberty was a religious struggle”. In view of Joseph Lelyveld, “He called it a religious struggle because of the sacrifice of his followers, his satyagrahis, were prepared to make. It was another way of insisting that their motives were pure and disinterested, that they rose up not for themselves but for a future in which they might or might not have a share. Satyagraha was self-sacrifice, in his view, and not self-advancement” He would often make inscrutable connections between his various ideas. Like connecting homespun yard to untouchability “Swaraj would come when India solidified an unbreakable alliance between Muslims and Hindus; wiped out untouchability; accepted the discipline of nonviolence as more than a tactic, as a way of life; and promoted homespun yarn and hand-woven fabric as self-sustaining cottage industries in its numberless villages”To Gandhi means dictated the end, so he’d pull out of the civil disobedience when it was going full steam because of the violence much to the chagrin of the other congress leaders. Lala Lajpat Rai would say - "Our defeat is in proportion to the greatness of our leader"One can go on and on about Gandhi, but this is not a review of his life, it is a review of the book. The book shines in two aspects – Gandhi’s period in South Africa and his struggles with untouchability. Lelyveld is very detailed, objective and confident when he is talking about Gandhi of that pre-1914 period. His struggles, his formative thinking, his Tolstoy farm, his relationship with Hermann Kallenbach, I think one must read the book even if just for this part. The author is bit fuzzy when it comes to India and Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement, or even ‘Quit India’. There are scant details on it, even though they were possibly the two biggest movements in colonial India. Where Lelyveld shines again is in outlining the conflict between Gandhi and Ambedkar. Ambedkar, who proclaimed that “I was born a Hindu I will not die a Hindu” (and did convert to Buddhism) is always at loggerheads with Gandhi over the supposed steps to be taken for removal of untouchability. Gandhi, for the majority of his life had been equivocal about caste system, (ostensibly because he had other agendas like Hindu-Muslim unity, swaraj as well) is confronted many times by Ambedkar. “Sin and immortality cannot become tolerable because a majority is addicted to them or because majority chooses to practice them” – Ambedkar would declare his stand on caste system.However, it is Gandhi who lives among the untouchables and travels from village to villages, fasts for abolition of untouchability, opening of temples. It is because of Gandhi that Ambedkar gets the law ministry and abolishes untouchability once and for all by law. If there is one poignant scene which can be taken out of the entire book to represent Gandhi, his life and his struggle, it is towards the end when near Independence the entire country is torn apart in riots with Hindus and Muslims killing each other like madmen, Gandhi is out walking from village to village asking people not to kill people – their own countrymen, their neighbours. He is walking bare foot all the way and people have thrown shit all over the path to block him. Gandhi, who has taught sanitation all his life, seeing this coolly picks up dry leaves and scoops the feaces out of the path. Manu Gandhi, his grandniece is about to cry when he tells her, “you do not know how much pleasure it gives me.”He is not feigning. He never was.
review 2: As an admirer of Mahaatma Gandhi I looked forward to reading this book but when I finished it I felt that perhaps I had learned more about Gandhi than I wanted to know. Lelyveld acknowledges Gandhi's weaknesses as well as his strengths and makes very clear that he was a flawed human being although his achievements have influenced India and the world. I'm glad I read the book, but a little sad about losing some of my illusions too. less

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