Knowing Gandhi

Understanding Gandhi Through Different Lenses

Historians reconstruct the political career of Mahatma Gandhi and the nationalist movement using many different kinds of sources. Each type of source has its own strengths and limitations, and each requires a careful, critical reading.

Public Voice and Private Scripts

One important category of sources is the writings and speeches of Gandhi and his contemporaries — both his associates and his political adversaries. Within these writings, we must distinguish between material meant for the public and material that was private.

Speeches give us the public voice of an individual. They are crafted for an audience and shaped by the occasion. Private letters, on the other hand, offer a glimpse into a person's private thoughts — their anger, pain, dismay, anxiety, hopes, and frustrations — expressed in ways they might never use in a public statement.

However, the line between public and private often breaks down. Many letters are written to individuals and are therefore personal, but the writer may also intend them for a wider public. The language of letters is often shaped by the awareness that they might one day be published. Conversely, the fear that a letter might get into print can prevent people from expressing their opinions freely in personal correspondence.

Mahatma Gandhi regularly published letters others wrote to him in his journal, Harijan. Jawaharlal Nehru edited a collection of letters written to him during the national movement and published it as A Bunch of Old Letters (1958).

The letters show Nehru's distress at being seen as a "nuisance" whose socialist views were "dangerous." Rajendra Prasad's letter complains that Nehru was acting as the mouthpiece of a socialist minority rather than the Congress majority. Gandhi's response is remarkable for its frankness: he tells Nehru that his colleagues "have dreaded you, because of your irritability and impatience with them" and that they "chafed under your rebukes and magisterial manner and above all your arrogation of what has appeared to them your infallibility and superior knowledge." Gandhi advises Nehru to see the whole affair "in a lighter vein" and to "resume your humour at the committee meetings."

These letters give us special insight into the working of the Congress — the ideological tensions between socialists and conservatives, the role of Gandhi as a mediator, and the personal dynamics among leaders.

Framing a Picture: Autobiographies

Autobiographies are another rich source, full of human detail. But they must be read with caution. They are retrospective accounts, written from memory. They tell us what the author could recollect, what he or she saw as important, what they were keen on recounting, or how they wanted their life to be viewed by others.

Writing an autobiography is a way of framing a picture of yourself. So when reading these accounts, we must try to see what the author does not tell us. We need to understand the reasons for that silence — those wilful or unwitting acts of forgetting.

Through Police Eyes: Government Records

The colonial rulers kept close tabs on those they regarded as critical of the government. The letters and reports written by policemen and other officials were secret at the time, but can now be accessed in archives.

One key source is the fortnightly reports prepared by the Home Department from the early twentieth century. These reports were based on police information from the localities, but often expressed what the higher officials saw, or wanted to believe. While noticing the possibility of sedition and rebellion, they liked to assure themselves that these fears were unwarranted.

The reports from different provinces paint a mixed picture. From the Central Provinces: "The peasantry is for the moment engaged in harvesting a good rabi; students are pre-occupied with their impending examinations." From Bengal: "The reports from the districts show that the meetings that have been held excite little or no interest and leave no profound impression on the general population." From Madras: "General opinion inclines to regard his march as theatrical and his programme as impracticable."

Yet even within these dismissive reports, there are hints of the movement's real impact. The same Bengal report notes that "ladies are attending these meetings in increasing numbers." The Madras report admits that Gandhi "is held in such personal reverence by the Hindu public generally" and that the possibility of his arrest is "viewed with considerable misgiving." By the second half of March, the United Provinces report notes that "political activity has undoubtedly intensified" and that preparations for breaking the salt laws are reported from many districts. By April, the Salt Act was being openly defied in multiple cities across the United Provinces.

The reports also reveal the colonial state's anxieties. Officials did not know whether to arrest Gandhi or what an arrest would mean. The more the colonial state kept a watch on the public and its activities, the more it worried about the basis of its own rule.

From Newspapers …