What I Read in October 2011

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnim. Timofey Pnim is a Russian emigre instructor at an American college. He is very, very funny, but also somewhat sad. I did not want this book to end.

Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. Yes, that’s the struggle with India, not for India. Lelyveld’s careful analysis of key incidents in Gandhi’s life shows how often he failed to achieve his goals for his people.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. He has talent, that Charles Dickens. This novel is a sentimental, dramatic, improbable tale that marches right into your brain.

Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here. Novel by the sister of the recently-deceased Steve Jobs. Four women tell the stories of their relationships: a grandmother, two sisters, a granddaughter.

I am still reading less while we adjust to the move. The move part of “the move” is the easy part. Some strong men come with a truck and pick everything up and move it. It’s the preparation — what to take? — and the afterwards — where to put it? — which eat up your time and emotional energy. Now that I have found my kitchen knives and my alarm clock, life resumes a normal flow. I even went to a book sale and brought home some promising reads.

Great Soul – Joseph Lelyveld on Gandhi

Mohandas K. Gandhi (the Mahatma) has interested me for a long time, and I have led a course devoted to him. Some of the things about Gandhi that disturbed me — his extreme views on celibacy, his weird dietary and medical notions, his need to completely control his followers — I dismissed as my own misunderstanding of a different culture and his place in it. In fact, he was often not in agreement with his own people.

Joseph Lelyveld, in Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, explores a number of important events in Gandhi’s history and shows us a man somewhat different from the one I thought I knew. Single minded in his desire to shape the India he desired, Gandhi tick-tocked back and forth between political activism and social reform.They are mixed in his “four pillars” of Swaraj (self-rule).

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 handwoven fabrics as self-sustaining cottage industries….

His views had grown out of his only partially-successful years in South Africa. There, he initially identified with the problems of the Indian traders and middle class, only coming later to assist the mass of poor and indentured Indian workers. The problems of the black natives he resolutely turned away from.

Trying to identify with India’s impoverished villagers, especially its mass of untouchables, Gandhi became a prisoner of the expectations he has raised. In 1921,

But the crowd at that one, now nameless, rail siding on the Gangetic plain hadn’t stayed on by the thousands through a long night to express its enthusiasm for Gandhi’s four pillars or its fellow feeling for Muslims or untouchables or even to enlist in his next nonviolent campaign. It had come to pay homage to the man, more than that, to a saint. The idea that he cared for them in a new an unusual manner had been communicated only too well. The idea that he had demands to make on them had gotten across in a wispy, vague, and incidental way, if at all.

One can read Lelyveld’s book as an account of repeated failures: failure to create a unified India of Hindus and Muslims, failure to bring self sufficiency to the villages, failure to shift cultural attitudes about untouchability. For all that, the man still moves us and the Indians who turned away from him 60 years ago.

In India today, the term “Gandhian” is ultimately synonymous with social conscience; his example — of courage, persistence, identification with the poorest, striving for selflessness — still has the power to inspire, more so even than his doctrines of nonviolence and techniques of resistance, certainly more than his assorted dogmas and pronouncements on subjects like spinning, diet and sex.

Hinduism and Gandhi

R. C. Zaehner’s Hinduism starts with detailed descriptions of the Hindu scriptures, emphasizing the development of the concept of dharma over the centuries. (See Abraham’s Dharma below.) It ends with heartfelt tributes to Gandhi and Tagore.

Mohandas K. Gandhi was not a Sanskrit scholar or well read in the Vedas. Although he came to love the Bhagavad-Gita, he didn’t read it until he was a law student in London. At home his family observed the conventional  Hindu rites, and Gandhi admired his mother’s self-denying spirit. His innate understanding of Hindu beliefs and the place of its rituals in daily life was his bond with the Indian masses during the decades-long struggle for independence.

Zaehner views Gandhi as a great reformer, comparable to Luther. Gandhi himself saw all religions as imperfect, including his own:

My belief in the Hindu Scriptures does not require me to accept every word and every verse as divinely inspired. Nor do I claim to have any first-hand knowledge of these wonderful books. But I do claim to know and feel the truths of the essential teaching of the Scriptures. I decline to be bound by any interpretation, however learned it may be, if it is repugnant to reason and moral sense.

Individual conscience decides, but the central drama of each person’s life is the need to reconcile this individual conscience with universal truth. Thus Gandhi titled his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth and often conflated “Truth” with “God.” Zaehner thinks Gandhi’s role as a religious reformer was more important than his role as a political activist.

For Gandhi the struggle against British imperialism and the struggle against untouchability went hand in hand, for both kept India enslaved, the British politically, untouchability morally, for by treating the untouchables as unclean the caste Hindus made themselves doubly unclean.

Many economists have pointed out that Gandhi’s advocacy of the spinning wheel was a poor basis for future mass production. Gandhi’s purpose, however, was not just a rejection of British economic dominance, but also the creation of a path to Indian self respect through individual action. It was a moral stand. In modern, industrialized India the spinning wheel keeps its position as a symbol on the flag.