Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Strug - By Joseph Lelyveld Page 0,1

failure on the other: whether, that is, there were clues to the end of his journey as leader in its beginning.

I’m hardly the first to raise such questions and won’t be the last. But it seemed to me there was still a story to be uncovered and told, themes that could be traced from the beginning of Gandhi’s political life in one country to its flourishing in another, with all the ambiguity of his legacy in each place. The temptation to retrace my own steps while retracing Gandhi’s finally proved irresistible.

This isn’t intended to be a retelling of the standard Gandhi narrative. I merely touch on or leave out crucial periods and episodes—Gandhi’s childhood in the feudal Kathiawad region of Gujarat, his coming-of-age in nearly three formative years in London, his later interactions with British officials on three continents, the political ins and outs of the movement, the details and context of his seventeen fasts—in order to hew in this essay to specific narrative lines I’ve chosen. These have to do with Gandhi the social reformer, with his evolving sense of his constituency and social vision, a narrative that’s usually subordinated to that of the struggle for independence. The Gandhi I’ve pursued is the one who claimed once to “have been trying all my life to identify myself with the most illiterate and downtrodden.” At the risk of slighting his role as a political tactician, a field marshal of nonviolent resistance, or as a religious thinker and exemplar, I’ve tried to follow him at ground level as he struggled to impose his vision on an often recalcitrant India—especially recalcitrant, he found, when he tried not just its patience but its reverence for him with his harangues on the “crime” and “curse” of untouchability, or the need for the majority Hindus to accommodate the large Muslim minority.

Neither theme, it turns out, can be explained without reference to his long apprenticeship in South Africa, where he eventually defined himself as leader of a mass movement. My aim is to amplify rather than replace the standard narrative of the life Gandhi led on two subcontinents by dwelling on incidents and themes that have often been underplayed. It isn’t to diminish a compelling figure now generally exalted as a spiritual pilgrim and secular saint. It’s to take a fresh look, in an attempt to understand his life as he lived it. I’m more fascinated by the man himself, the long arc of his strenuous life, than by anything that can be distilled as doctrine.

Gandhi offered many overlapping and open-ended definitions of his highest goal, which he sometimes defined as poorna swaraj.* He wasn’t the one who’d introduced swaraj into the political lexicon, a term usually translated as “self-rule” while Gandhi still lived in South Africa. Later it would be expanded to mean “independence.” As used by Gandhi, poorna swaraj put the goal on yet a higher plane. At his most utopian, it was a goal not just for India but for each individual Indian; only then could it be poorna, or complete. It meant a sloughing not only of British rule but of British ways, a rejection of modern industrial society in favor of a bottom-up renewal of India, starting in its villages, 700,000 of them, according to the count he used for the country as it existed before its partition in 1947. Gandhi was thus a revivalist as much as a political figure, in the sense that he wanted to instill values in India’s most recalcitrant, impoverished precincts—values of social justice, self-reliance, and public hygiene—that nurtured together would flower as a material and spiritual renewal on a national scale.

Swaraj, said this man of many causes, was like a banyan tree, having “innumerable trunks each of which is as important to the tree as the original trunk.” He meant it was bigger than the struggle for mere independence.

“He increasingly ceased to be a serious political leader,” a prominent British scholar has commented. Gandhi, who formally resigned from the Indian National Congress as early as 1934 and never rejoined it, might have agreed. If the leader succeeded in driving the colonists out but his revival failed, he’d have to count himself a failure. Swaraj had to be for all Indians, but in his most challenging formulations he said it would be especially for “the starving toiling millions.”

It meant, he said once, speaking in this vein, “the emancipation of India’s skeletons.” Or again: “Poorna swaraj denotes a state of things in which the dumb begin to