Empire: World History - 7. Mahatma Gandhi

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

In the latest episode of Empire, William and Anita are joined by Ram Guha to explore the incredible life and story of Mahatma Gandhi. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @EmpirePodUK Twitter: @EmpirePodUK goalhangerpodcasts.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnden. And me, William Duremberg. Are you doing it on purpose? I'm not. That was absolutely up to the minute. I came straight in there.

Without a pause, without even a hesitation. The thing is, William, people are sending us mail now. Dear Anita, in brackets, pause, and William. Most unjust. You are making it a thing. No one is more awake than me on this one. When are you awake? So I think you've just, anyway, we're here, we're delighted to be here.

And we are, can I just say, absolutely overwhelmed, the pair of us, with the response, particularly to last podcast, with David Orsuga, because, you know, you have been writing in your hundreds. It has been rather amazing. He was so good. We were both of us very anxious how we were going to pitch last week's one, because it was absolutely at the centre of what we're trying to do at this podcast, and yet it's very difficult to reconcile these two diverging worlds.

And David did it like a ballet dancer, dancing Swan Lake through the middle of a minefield, I thought. I thought he was extraordinary. Yeah, and people have very much responded. I'll tell you what, you know, you're never going to please everybody in that. We know, and we're prepared for that. But we weren't prepared for just the sheer volume of love and affection that came for last weeks. This one here, let me just read a few of the messages that have come through.

Thank you so much. And we are going through everything. William and I read everything that you send. And so we're very grateful. And I know a lot of you are sending suggestions for future podcasts. But Peter Bale speaks for many when he said, I was appalled. to listen to your superb Empire podcast. But appalled, because I heard the historian,

David Olens Suga now needs a bodyguard. Empire is excellent and it is informative. Another one here, this is fascinating and sometimes disturbing listening in a time that's devoid of intelligent and critical conversation. I wish it had been twice as long as there's Andrew McNeely Jones. We have found another one here.

We're going all over the world. I don't know whether you've seen the geographic spread of this, William, but Simon Payne and Tracy Campbell are both listening in Australia. Simon says it was a really excellent podcast. As an Australian, I had no idea. There'd been a recent chogam, let alone that our Prime Minister hadn't attended. And I don't recall it being mentioned at all, which rather supports David's point. And this one here, Tracy Campbell, saying, really great episode as usual, I just wanted to point out that the Australian Prime Minister was pushing for indigenous recognition in our Constitution before the Republic question. The Prime Minister created an assistant minister for the Republic this term, it will happen, exclamation mark. We do have some people who didn't like it, though. Shall we address that as well, William? So let me just see this one here.

It says, why oh, why are you again talking Britain down? Are you ever going to talk about other empires because they did terrible things too? That one is from Jonathan Berwick. What do we say to that? Well, the short answer is we are going to do other empires too, and that's the point of this podcast. But at the moment we're talking about the British and India, and I think it's very important we do so. Yeah, and so, I mean, just to echo that, I know a lot of you are wanting us to go into different territories, and we will. But first of all, we've been promising you that we would talk about Gandhi, and that moment has now come.

Gandhi, who is just such an enormous figure in the pantheon, if you like, of excellent. sports from the subcontinent. I think there are very few people on planet Earth who have as much face recognition. He's everywhere in India. We talked about how one of the reasons I think that so many people are so shaken by the death of the Queen was that her face is on every currency note and on every stamp. Well, the same is true of Gandhi in India. He is the father of the nation. He's on every rupee. Every city has a Mahatma Gandhi road. He's absolutely the back. background of everyone's life there. But certainly the way that Indian politics is going at the moment, there is definitely a rediscovery of those who did not embrace nonviolence like Gandhi did.

And you mentioned last week Anita Subast Chandraboz, whose tattoo has just gone up in the centre of Delhi. And he was appalled by Gandhi's approach of nonviolence. And he is now, in a sense, the freedom fighter with whom the current government of Narendra Modi, most identifies. Well, and that's also, you know, sort of germane to the conversation that we were having with David Olashuga. And I think he put it really well, which is, you know, whatever Britain wants to think about the way in which the world regards it, it's not a monologue. I think that's the way he put it. He said it's a dialogue, except, you know, one side hasn't been listening to the other. And if you wanted any more articulate or, you know, loud

voicing of where the current Indian establishment stands in this relationship, I think a lot of have picked up on what we were talking about in the last podcast, William, about more the wanting to distance himself from the colonial past and talking about it, renaming things that once had British names, taking down things that have British connections. And there are certain issues which are swirling around now the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of King Charles III. And predictably, and we said this, didn't we, last week, one of those things that comes up time and again when you talk about the British royal family

and its relationship with India is the Coenor Diamond. Now, how many times, as your phone rung in the last week, from people wanting you to talk about the Coenor? Because I know, I mean, it has gone slightly crazy on my telephone and in my emails. It has. It's become a major issue. It's been trending on Indian Twitter every day since the Queen died. And I think a lot of people in India expect that the Coenol is coming back imminently. But at the moment, as things stand, it is not.

It is sitting waiting in the Queen's constantly. consorts crown, which means conceivably at a time of coronation, it will be on Camilla's head. And there will be yet another round of requests for it back from India. Again, it's part of this very different view. I don't think people in Britain even are aware that it's a particularly contentious thing, most people here. If they've heard of the Coenor at all, they've probably heard of it. It's the name of the local Indian restaurant, or it's the name of a brand of pencil. They're vaguely aware that there is of Coenol diamond.

But that it's a huge bone of issue between India and Britain. And that Indians passionately want it back. I don't think that's widely known here. No, I think, I mean, I've described it on numerous occasions as a diplomatic grenade. I think you'd agree that's what it is. I mean, to see that flaunted it before the world's eyes is going to be difficult for many Indians to see. It's the thing that brought us professionally first together. we worked on this book on the Coenorme.

And I think it's something which we're definitely going to do a podcast on imminently. It's clearly a moment to start talking about it again. We will. We will do that. But let's talk about Garnley because that's why we're here this week. So, you know, it's the Ben Kingsley version that most people know here in a loincloth, you know, sort of like canute against the waves or David and Goliath, very much how the Atomperian presents it.

But this is a complicated man and it's a human being that we're talking about at the end of the day. Let's just talk about his origins because where did his story start? He was born 2nd of October 1869. He was born into a Gujarati Hindu family in a place called Porabunder. And what kind of background did he have? Was he rich? Was he poor? What was his background, William? He was a middle class boy who managed to make it to London to study law in 1888, following a rather unremarkable childhood in Gujarat. And some of his biographers maintained that he had actually very little formal knowledge of Hinduism beyond the rituals taught to him as a child before he arrived in London.

And being a strict vegetarian, he found himself ushered into this world of Edwardian spiritualism and Edwardian Orientalism that associated with vegetarian restaurants. in London at that time. And with a kind of strange world of sort of Edwardian cranks and idealists and table-tappers, particularly the theosophists and people like Annie Besant and Madame Blavatsky,

Madame Blavatsky, who claimed to receive destruction in occult knowledge from Himalayan masters and radiant astral figures and Mahatma's, the word Mahatma is first brought into prominence by Madame Blavatsky. And she believed that they were immortal beings

who, though principally resident in Tibet had materialised here and were the authors of Madame Blavski's books. Right, right. So it's a very unorthodox world that Gandhi enters into London. But sort of, and this is the complexity of the man, because yes, that is. And Mahatma, by the way, just for those of you who... Great soul. Don't know. Great soul. It translates exactly as a great soul.

But it's not a traditional Hindu appellation. It's one that comes to Gandhi through the very odd source of Madame Brouski's. So there is that which is unconventional. There's the sort of the the theosophists and the table-tappers, as you say. Also, I must say he was greatly affected when he came to Britain by looking at the way the suffragettes protested. So the suffragettes who were involved in non-cooperation, blockading roads, and then using the hunger strike, greatly affected Gandhi. And he writes about it at length about how these women who are, you. are willing to starve their bodies for a cause has inspired him. And I don't think that it is, I mean, it is no coincidence that that is his, one of the biggest weapons in his arsenal later on when he becomes the Gandhi of the loincloth. But before we talk about that, you know, you say that there's this very unconventional side, you're quite right.

But there's also this incredibly conservative conventional side, because let's not forget. At the age of 13, he was married off and arranged marriage to 14-year-old Kusurba. who, you know, again, they were children at the time of their marriage. And it was a very conservative, from the outward look, at least, it looked terribly conservative. And I think before he went to London, he was famously made promised by his mother that he would abstain completely from meat, alcohol and women. I think you have in Gandhi all these very different worlds meeting. On the other hand, remember, of course, he's also studying law in London. So as well as kind of mixing with Edwardian spiritualists and so on and meeting all sorts of strange people in London vegetarian restaurants, he's also very much hanging out in the law courts and learning law.

And you see all these different elements coming together in this man in a way that an earlier generation of Indians, you know, the world we were talking about the East India Company, the world of Ghalib and the mogul court, the world of. of Maratha merchants and so on, they would not have had access to any of these diverse influence, which are forming Gandhi. This is very much a new world, and Gandhi is forming the world around him. At the age of 22, he's called to the bar in London. And then he is sort of thinking that he's going to go back to India.

He's going to practice in India. That's where his life is. But it is actually a legal case that diverts his journey. and instead he's called to represent a merchant in South Africa. And that is how the South African chapter of his life begins, which is so fascinating, but is so often forgotten and glossed over. He's just a little 23-year-old slip of a man.

If you look at him, he's like a little sparrow, isn't he, William? And he's such a small bone. Actually, you know, his face reminds me of those books of young Kafka, you know, you're sort of very intense-eyed, gaunt-looking, you know, that sort of very neatly parted hair. That's a very interesting comparison and same sort of period of history too. Yeah. So he goes off to South Africa and he goes and he sort of thinks he's going to do this great legal case. He's going to be working for this merchant. But then something happens to him almost immediately after he arrives in South Africa.

He is discriminated against because of the colour of his. skin. It's a very Rosa Parks type story. He's not allowed to sit with European passengers on a stagecoach. And then when he refuses to get up and move, he's taken by the guard and beaten and thrown into the gutter. And this is sort of an awakening in him of, I don't know what it is that sets him apart here from many people, most people, maybe even me and I don't know about you, but, you know, we get knocked down. Do we necessarily, we probably get up again. But then do we think, right, I'm going to change all of this, root and branch? Then, of course, there's the famous incident in Peter Maritzburg when he's thrown off a train by a conductor.

And I've actually been to that waiting room in Peter Maritzburg in South Africa, where he got thrown out of and thrown out into. And he then fights very hard for the rights specifically of the Indian community in South Africa. but he's also in touch with the theosophist once he moves South Africa and he's drawn into the world of something called the esoteric Christian Union, which to our years sounds as dot as anything that was existing in the ward in London. It's a sect founded by somebody called Edward Maitland and his collaborator, Anna Kingsford. They, through their various spiritualisms and table tilting, they discovered that they were, respectively, the reincarnation of St. John the Evangelist and St. Mary. Magdalene. And to our years, this sounds completely dotty. But according to Gandhi's faithful secretary, Peiriel Naya, their writings had, he said, a profound and specific and lasting influence

on Gandhi's thought. So there he is. He's in South Africa. He's got some slightly interesting friends. But he also does some really, again, surprising things. So the war war is going on. And in 1900, Gandhi volunteers to be a stretcher-bearer in the Natal Indian ambulance corps. So he has at this point still got this idea that I won't fight, but he doesn't have this idea that I won't take part in a war. He wholeheartedly takes part as somebody who goes to the front line and who helps the British war effort. Again, this is, I think something would be very surprising to people that haven't read his biography,

that he was initially a great believer in the justice of the British Empire. And this is something that survives right up until the First World War. And he becomes a major drum-beater for British recruitment in the First World War. And we'll come to that, but just still in South Africa, because these are the years that people often skip over, but they are so formative, I think, in the man he becomes. In 1906, so he's been this, you know, more loyal than the king subject. who is putting his sort of body on the line to bring home broken British soldiers from the front line, if you like.

So in 1906, the Transvile brings out these laws which are racist. I mean, there's no other way of putting it, where Indians and Chinese will have to carry pass cards, which they will have to produce every time a police officer stops them in the street and demands them. And if they don't, they can get beaten up or arrested. And a police officer has every right to burst into the homes of these people, overturning everything, dragging them out, again demanding to see these pass cards. And this is an absolute affront, particularly to conservative Indians who are living in South Africa, who think their homes are sacred and their women should not be touched. So that actually lights a fire under Gandhi. And William, that is the start of something we then recognize later in his life, right?

Absolutely. This is where he develops the beginnings of what will become satiagraha, truth force or devotion to truth, which, as you say, develops in many ways the forms of non-violent, resistance employed by the suffragettes in Britain. But he also gives it a more sort of spiritual backing. The suffragettes were not looking to religion or to spirituality in their protests. Gandhi ties always his political protest to a form of spirituality. And in that sense, he's marrying the suffragettes with the theosophists. Actually, it should be said, sort of later on, he divorces the suffragettes. He really repudiates. them when they start using violence, when they start breaking windows and when they start setting fire to pillar boxes, he says he wants nothing more to do with them. Anyway, he starts to say, right, we don't

want to carry these cards anymore. We're not going to carry these cards anymore. And he somehow manages to inspire a great number of Indian people to just refuse, just to say no. And they set fire to their past cards and they are arrested and they are beaten. And he comes sort of, you know, toe to toe with Jan Smuts. You know, there isn't enough time in just this one podcast to talk about that particular relationship, but it is a really fascinating one. It is one of attrition and one of, you know, on Smuts' side anyway, just complete frustration at Gandhi.

But it ends with almost a grudging respect at first and then a real warm respect, I think, because, you know, he manages to get those past laws changed. Gandhi does. and when he does do this, you know, you sort of think, okay, here's a life in South Africa that's beckoning, but he has a call from an Indian called Gopar Krishna Gorkhali, who is sort of a mild-mannered member of the Indian National Congress, a nascent political organisation that is agitating for not freedom from British rule, but some more control to be wrested away for Indian people in their own country. And Gorkle is really enchanted with the way in which Gandhi has stood up against the South African racist past laws,

without using violence and wants him to come to India where he thinks it can be used. What's really lovely about the end of this story in South Africa, the South African chapter, is that Jan Smuts,

when he says, he calls him to see him and to say, right, you're off then. Good. And Gandhi presents him with a pair of handmade sandals and says,

look, I've made these with my own hands. They're for you. Smuts at the time. Imagine his confusion. We're wearing knee-led leather boots and military jobpers. In his jodpers and he's presented with these sort of, you know, beautifully handmade,

but very sort of crude leather sandals. And he accepts them. Well, what I find really very, very touching is the way in which Smuts returns those sandals decades later. So this is the, it's called the Essential Gandhi by Louis Fisher, who's a journalist who followed and interviewed Gandhi extensively, I think, in the 40s. But Fisher says, you know, his work in South Africa. was finished. Gandhi left South Africa, but before he departed, he sent General Smuts a pair of

sandals as a gift. And Smuts wore the sandals every summer at his farm and then returned the sandals to Gandhi on Gandhi's 70th birthday. Smuts remarked, I have worn these sandals for many a summer, even though I may feel that I'm not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man. It was my fate to be the antagonist of a man for whom even then I had the highest respect. I never heard that story. Goodness, I've never heard that. If you know Smuts and many of you listening to this podcast will know Smuts, that is an extraordinary thing. I mean, it's in the Fisher biography. But there we are. It's a nice story. But anyway, look, to take up the reins of this story as Gandhi returns to India, we have an extraordinary guest, don't we, William? Tell us about our guest today. We have the great Ramachandra Guha, who is not only the greatest living biographer of Gandhi, but arguably the greatest chronicler of the history of post-independence India. His great India after Gandhi

is regarded universally as the most important text on the subject it studied and read all over the world. And he is also an extraordinary influential political commentator, 2.2 million Twitter followers, which I don't think many of his historian competitors anywhere in the world would even begin to be able to match. And he's kind of the rock star of Indian history. And you can find out why he's such a superstar after this break. So a very, very warm welcome from India, from Bangalore to Professor Ramachandra Gha.

Thank you very much for spending the time to speak to us. Thank you. When people say Gandhi here in Britain, they often can't get past Ben Kingsley. I mean, that is the knowledge that they have. How much is the Kingsley, Garn. a help or a hindrance to you when you go out and you talk about the man himself. So, Adita, Kingsley acted wonderfully.

I mean, he was a standout role in that film. And that film itself played an important role in bringing Gandhi back into the conversation. So I'm grateful for that film and for Kingsley for making it so memorable. However, the film itself is more than 40 years old, exactly 40 years old this year, came out in 1982. too. So younger people haven't really seen it. Some of them may have seen it in school. So they have very mixed perceptions of Gandhi and maybe you can talk about it later. But in India today, there's a whole amount of historical revisionism about Gandhi. Not so much in academic circles, but in WhatsApp history circles. And he's often accused of not doing enough or of doing the wrong things.

So clearly when you take someone as significant as Gandhi, you have to wait through all kinds of preconceptions. I mean, I've written biographies before, as Willie knows, but those were of interesting, eccentric, relatively minor figures where you don't have this problem, that people have preconceived notions often firmly held of what they think Gandhi believed in and what he was all about. So you have to cut through the underbrush. That will be fascinating and I think hard to believe for British audiences, that there actually is a two-track approach to Gandhi, one here in Britain, which is something akin to reverence. Well, statues for the first time are being put up to Canada.

I mean, we have one in Tavistock Square to Gandhi, in Westminster, I beg your pardon. And then in India, where it is unfashionable these days to say you respect and love Gandhi. I mean, I read something, I don't know whether you read it in the papers from a very renowned Indian publisher we know very well, who said history has become sexy under the BJP because now we can talk about men who will not mean anything here. men like Savaka or Bose, people who were involved in violent struggle against British rule. But Gandhi's style of struggle is not popular in India these days. That's true. So there are two reasons why there's this revisionism about Gandhi.

One is under the BJP, there's an exaltation of masculinity. And masculinity involves violence. Non-violence is seen as feminine. That's one reason. and people like Boas and Saverker, particularly, are seen as embodying that aggressive masculinity, which their proponents believe would have got out the British Empire, enter the British Empire quicker,

even if in a more bloody way, quicker. The second reason this is revisionism of Gandhi is that Gandhi lived and died for Hindu-Muslim harmony. So Gandhi felt Muslims but also Christians and Sikhs and Jains and Parsis were as responsible reliable citizens, bona fide citizens of India as Hindus, whereas the BJP and its allies think of India as a Hindu first country. And the fact that Gandhi not only preached tolerance and respect for Muslims, he was willing to go on fast for it, willing to sacrifice his life for interfaith harmony

is something which Hindu radicals cannot abide. That's the second reason for their dislike. And yet it's a complicated relationship, isn't it? Because he's on the notes, he's He's the father of the nation, so they can't quite disown him. But we're seeing a lot more of Godseh around. Yes, yes, absolutely. Because Godse killed him, and according to the hardline Hindu-Tas follower, he saved India further suffering by ending Gandhi's life. So he's on the loads.

But actually, in a ruling party, it's only Narendra Modi, the prime minister, who praises Gandhi. And I think, in my view, not really out of conviction or sincerity. But because he recognizes what you said, Anita, that in the rest of the world, Gandhi's a man, I mean, Gandhi's the only an Indian figure. You talked about the statue in Westminster, which is among 13 or 14 such people. I think there's Churchill and a medicine faucet and I think some of your generals and so on. But I had a British visitor come to Bangal last week who hadn't seen for many years,

a friend I hadn't seen from before COVID. And she said, I have a present for you. And I said, what's that? She said, here is a five-pound coin minted for Gandhi. And it is the only coin minted for a non-British person. And that's an explanation of what Gandhi meant and so on. So I think Nareemori understands this, that he as Prime Minister can't openly debunk Gandhi, whatever his party men think of Gandhi, whatever his voters, however much his voters

detest Gandhi. So it's a complicated business. And it's principally to do, I think even more than violence, is principally to do. with Gandhi's commitment to interfaith harmony and the equality of all citizens regardless of religion. I think that's what they really can't get. That's what they don't like about Gandhi. Well, I think actually we ought to then do a great service to the people listening and talk about the real man himself because there's been so much myth-making on both sides from those who love him and those who detest him. But right at the bottom of this is a real-life human being.

What was it about this man that meant, because by all accounts, quite mild-mannered, quite humble in the way he spoke and presented himself, certainly in later life? The three of us are all writers. He recognises the word, the power of the word, the written and printed words. So he starts newspapers in South Africa, which he carries on in India, which are printed not just in English, but in Hindi and Gujarati and Tamil and so on. So he understands that the message is to go across. He also appreciates the virtue of patience. So he comes back in 1915, but he takes several years to travel around India and to understand a country he's been away from for two decades before asserting himself as a, before putting himself forward as a candidate for the leadership of the freedom of.

So then of course the fact that he was a prosperous lawyer, he sacrificed his profession to work with the people and so on. So there are many, many reasons. Do you think it was Gandhi who really made the Congress reach out from a kind of old boys club and, you know, returned Cambridge and so on to a nationwide movement that was talking to ordinary people? Very much so. So the Congress before him, you're absolutely right, really right, meaning. The Congress before him was composed of really brilliant and articulate people, but all men, all largely based in big cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Delhi, Lahore, and all largely operational. in English. So Gandhi made it vernacular and he made it a mass movement. He brought in workers and

peasants and artisans and also women. You know, one of his achievements was to make women part of the Congress and even in 1925 Saroani, Naidu, at Gandhi's insistence, becomes president of the Congress Party at a time where there was no question of a conservative or labor or liberal even, you know, a female leader. So all of this, I think, he's, he's, he, he's, he, he, he, He's inclusive. I've already talked about religion and his work in promoting Hindu Muslim harmony, but he also attacks untouchability, which is a cornerstone of the Hindu caste system. And he says we have to stop discriminating against lower caste. He says Hindus who practice upper caste Hindus who practice untouchability are the general diaries of Hinduism.

What is wonderful and startling and humbling about your work is that it is almost as if you're a pirate buccaneer going into. archives that nobody has touched before. So Gandhi has written so much. You've just said he did newspapers, he did letters. How many volumes are his collected works? 97. 97 volumes. But what was always missing was the other side of the conversation. And that's what I think is really fascinating about what you've done is you've found the other half of those letters. And they, more than anything, show that this is a man who undergoes a real, I hate the word, it's so psycho-nutty in this context. but he went on a journey. He really did go on a journey. First of all, being very pro-British, pro the war, asking men to sign up and fight for Britain during World War I, being the chief

recruiting officer in many ways, to then standing up and saying, you know what, these people cannot be trusted and they need to get out. It wasn't the only journey, because you've mentioned the cast system. People know that he had problems with Jinnah. People know that it was a very personal, visceral problem that he had with Jinnah. But he also had problems, and that is amplified in your work, with Ambedka, who was a father of the Dalit or untouchable movement. So can you speak to that a little bit and why nobody really talks about that very much? Yeah, so interestingly, since you started by mentioning Attenborough's film,

in which Kingsley Pair Gandhi, Jinnah is represented in the film as a kind of caricature played by Alec Padamsi, the scheming wicked guy, Ambedkar is missing. And I think he's missing for cinematic reasons because it's easy in that kind of narrative to present Gandhi as the good guy and Jin as the bad guy.

But Ambethkar complicates his story because he's as committed to the emancipation of the untouchables. He has a more radical plan for liberating them. He's a great scholar and legal expert. He's completely self-made. Gina's a prosperous lawyer, so you can see him as a rich man

dabbling in politics. Ambideka absolutely comes from the bottom up. And their debate is about how quickly you should go and ending caste discrimination. Gandhi is going slowly, incrementally, because he wants to take the upper caste Hindus along. Ambaitkar wants to attack the system frontly. So he writes a famous pamphlet called annihilation of caste, which he says, the only way to unhighlate caste is to promote intercast marriage. And Gandhi is not prepared to do that at once. Gandhi also has a larger cost which is freedom of India. But as Ambikar says, what's the point of freeing India if the Congress party, which is dominated by Brahmins and merchants, comes to dominate us? We'll just exchange the British for a new set

of rulers. So it's a debate and an argument of great poignancy. As a biographer, I admire both men. I mean, I won't say whom I admire more. But their circumstances necessarily make them, Yeah, but Baba Sabah Mbedka, as he's known in India, I mean, was a massive figure in the freedom struggle and also father of the constitution. So those of you who don't know who are listening and hearing this name for the very first time, he is a huge figure who has left a lasting imprint on what is now India. What is Gandhi's response to the massacre at Janem Wallabag? Because this, many people, the Neroos, for example, have their views of the British Empire completely overturned by the. this heartlessness of the bloodshed and the support for Daya that's voiced in many quarters following the massacre. Gandhi is like that with this difference. So Tagore, for example, the great poet Raminanatagor, returns his knighthood.

You know, the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in his future. He's knighted by the British, has many close British friends. And then after Jalalabakh, you know, returns his knight. Gandhi has a similar kind of reaction, but he actually travels to the Punjab. in 19, 1920, he travels to the Punjab and he meets people and he understands their suffering and he realizes it's not just a one-off event that took place in that garden outside the Golden Temple in Umbudsia that villagers are, you know, there's punitive harassment of them, they're being sent to jail, their fines levied on them for taxes they are allegedly not paid.

So there's a real amount of discontent, and that visit through the Punjab disabuses him of any loyalty to the Raj, you know, which he had before. So it is very transformative in his understanding of empire, for sure. And with Jinnock, if we could just talk about that really rancorous relationship for a little longer. Because, you know, some people feel that if these two men could have and should have got along a lot better. Both Gujarati's, both lawyers. In many sort of worlds, you know, one could have been. I don't imagine the big allies. You know, and if it was a dating website, they too would have had a match.

I mean, but in real life, is it really as mundane as these two personalities just didn't get on? There's one story of Gandhi making a flippant comment about sort of Jinnah's doing an address in English, and he says, oh, you should speak in Gujarati? And it's that, can it be the seeds of resentment on that banal that somebody said something to someone and then it just all spiraled? So, I think Jinnah was Gandhi senior in Indian public life. When Gandhi was a struggling lawyer in South Africa, Gina was already a member of the Imperial Council.

He was an established lawyer. And he sort of felt overshadowed by Gandhi. When Gandhi comes in and captures the Congress Party during the non-cooperation movement, there's a famous session in Nagpur in 1920, where Jinnah gets up to make some criticisms of the non-cooperation. cooperation campaign, and he shouted down by Gandhi's supporters. And he walks away and takes a train and returns to Bombay.

So there is an element of personal rivalry, probably on both sides. But I would not put too much into this. Back to the non-cooperation movement. So how does that unfold during the 1920s? So it's the first real mass movement, hundreds of thousands of people are arrested peacefully and of all kinds. You know, so lawyers, doctors, workers, artisans, farmers, all caught arrest across India. And as the movement is speaking, there's an act of violence where nine policemen in a police who are in a police station in a village in Uttar Pradesh in North India are burnt alive by a nationalist bomb.

And Gandhi is outraged by that and calls off the movement. So that is not enough, of course, for him to go. He goes to jail. He's arrested shortly after. after that. But the British Empire was of its knees. And it's really Gandhi's commitment to nonviolence because, and his horror of, horror of mob anger, that what would happen if Hindus and Muslims turned on each other? His reservations about violence were partly moral, but they were also partly tactical. You know, the conviction that if you take up arms to remove the oppressor,

once freedom comes, you will use the same arms to turn on your fellow countrymen. So non-cooperation movement, which is a really major movement of protest, in which hundreds of thousands of people are jailed, including Gandhi and Nehru and Boas and many other people, is called off because of one solitary act of violence which Gandhi felt besmirch the cause and the movement. Is that belief in himself and his own voice, which time and time again turns tides of violence and also political flow?

I mean, his use of the hunger strike is extraordinary. I mean, you would think that actually one man saying, I'm not going to eat until you put down your arms and sort yourselves out wouldn't make a difference in obeying mob. But it did. And why did it? No, I think he had that kind of transformative part. I mean, again, to use a word one does not like charisma, you know.

And but in a moral cause, I mean, his most famous hunger fast, which actually led to a cessation of violence, who were conducted in the last six months of his life. In the aftermath of partition valley who had this bloodshed in the flight of refugees and a million people died, Gandhi goes on fast in Calcutta in September 1947 and stops the violence.

And then he goes to on fast in Delhi in January 1948. Two large cities full of anger and animals, you know, mobs seeding with anger and animosity, a very large Muslim minority in both cities. And Gandhi, by the power is an example, brings about peace. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. There are two or three other, I mean, epoch-changing actions, which bring an empire, one of the mightiest empires, the world is known, to its knees.

And they're so improbable. So the salt march, that salt could be such a political weapon. You will need to explain this to people here because it makes very little sense. What happens with the salt marches? So essentially in 1929, the Congress met in Lahore, the banks of the Reba Ravi, and decided that they wanted to launch a fresh strike for freedom. And it was left to Gandhi to devise the means and, you know, and think of the tactics. And Gandhi goes back to his ashtam and thinks of salt. Now, salt is a commodity used by every Indian, but making it is a monopoly of the Raj.

So you can't make your own salt. You have to buy it at an enhanced price paying a tax to the colonial state. So Gandhi says, I'm going to make my own salt, symbolically so that every Indian will make their own salt. And he marches from his ashthram in Ahmedabad. And from there, he barges to the sea. It takes him three weeks. He has seven key eight companions. And the viceroy is mystified.

I mean, Lord Irvin is mystified. He said, what is this mad old man doing? Supposing, I mean, as a counterfactual, if Lord Irvin has arrested Gandhi as soon as he left the ashram, that would have been the end of the story. We would not be discussing the salt march today. But he thinks this guy's crazy and let him go and he marches day by day and more and more reporters come to cover him, including American reporters. And I think the American reporting of the short march is very significant in making Gandhi a global figure.

Because America's emerging as a large economic power. You know, Time magazine is just about becoming hugely popular and actually makes Gandhi man of the year, that year 1930. And of course, America has a close kinship with Britain. So American public opinion influences British opinion. And these reporters come and then he goes to the sea and breaks the salt law. And simultaneously in many different parts of India, other people break the salt law. So it's symbolically, it's hugely significant because it shows the empire as unfeeling, greedy, monopolistic and not really not even allowing.

an ordinary Indian to have sold in his or her knife. So, I mean, as a piece of political theatre, it's quite remarkable. But is he aware of all this? Because as, you're right, I mean, the revolution will be televised. This is one of the first episodes where you have photographers on the scene, people recording this in real time and then reporting it to the rest of the world. Is he that canny that he knows that, you know, by cultivating these relationships with people at his archery,

by taking them along to a place where he knows he's going to have Lartis broken on his head, that this is actually this is his power? I think he does. But I think he knew the power. He always knew the power of publicity in the press. There's no question. And of messaging, of reaching out, of answering letters from correspondence, and so on. I think I read somewhere that you said he wrote 100 letters a day or 90 letters a day or something.

Sometimes more than that. He had a fantastic secretary with you. I mean, he had an extraordinary. he had a secretary Mahadeh Desai, who was a scholar in many languages, and whose role in the Indian freedom struggle and in Gandhi's life is really underappreciate. Can we talk about some of those people who actually are in Gandhi's life? Before we get to the 40s, which I think, again, is another pivotal moment in Gandhi's ascendancy. But let's just talk about, so he's married.

He's married at a very, very young age to Kastur Baba. I mean, he's, what, 13 and she's even younger. when they get married. And she's incredibly loyal, but sort of almost silent figure in the background, but always supportive. But he has passion as well. I mean, he's a, he's not,

he may dress like an ascetic, but he has a fiery heart. And you see that because he writes these beautiful love letters to another revolutionary woman, who I think is fabulous and very underwritten about, Salah Devi Chaudhari, who is also married. Now, just, no, people don't know about this at all, that there is a romantic life

with Gandhi. It's not the image. It's not. It wasn't in Attenborough. Ben Kingsley doesn't write to any women. So tell us what is this relationship because it is very important and it tells us a little bit about his internal life as well. Well, first of all, it is very moving and, as you say, quite charged, charged with love and passion and so on. Because in 1990, the massacre happens that winter, Gandhi goes to look at what's happening in the Punjab.

And he stays at the home of Zalada, who lives in Lahore. whose husband is actually in jail. So Gandhi and this, you know, this writer, poet, activist are, you know, just chatting together and getting to know each other. And essentially they'll fall in love. And over the next year, year and a half, they exchanged these incredibly passionate letters. And Gandhi calls her, my spiritual wife. And which is a very interesting literary in phrase, my spiritual wife,

which means I can emotionally and intellectually and otherwise bond with her. but I've taken a vow of celibacy, so I can't go any further, and I've already married to Kasturva. But then he is told by his colleagues that this relationship will hurt the freedom struggle. It's embarrassing for you to devote so much of your time and attention to this friendship when you have a larger cause, which is freeing India from British government rules. But later on, Gandhi, many years later, Gandhi talks without mentioning Sarnara Devi, He says I nearly fell,

which means I nearly, you know, flipped. That is the word he reads. Not felt. Perhaps he was, she was very enchanted by her. She was amazing. I mean, I'm complete, I'm in love with her.

She would, in Lahore, she would train men to fight. You know, she would, she would have these underground little lessons where she would give them sticks or whatever and drill them in fighting martial arts. I'll tell you something which will interest you, because I know your,

you're married to a writer on science. She was Stogor's niece. And she came from a family of writers and poetry. She said, I'm going to study science. She was the first female graduate in science in Calcutta University. I did not know that. That's amazing. It kind of conservative, patriarchal, late 19th century Begole.

She said, I'm going to study science. There's a mother says, I want to marry you off. She said, sorry, I'm going to my so to teach. And I'll find my own partner. And I'll teach science in myself. You know, and then the mother is dying and on a debt that says, please get married. So then she has an intercast marriage with a Punjabi lawyer and moves there. I mean, she writes, uh, Togor really likes her.

You know, he thinks of her as, in a sense of literary air because of her poetry. So, yeah, in many ways, because of the kind of her exuberance, her personality, her intelligence, her charm. You could see her words very different with Kasturba, who's a quiet, you know, uncharismatic homemaker. I mean, I mean, what else could she be? I mean, in a relationship with Gandhi, it's very hard not to be eclipsed. What else can you do?

Against his image, you know, the Attenborough image is very much of the saintly figure. But Gandhi also remains throughout his life, you know, the lawyer is still there beneath the doughty, a ruthlessly sharp negotiator and a brilliant mind. Could you talk a little about that? Yeah, I think he's obviously very smart, politically, intellectually, in terms of policy.

But there's one aspect which I think is often ignored when we talk about his characteristics, which is his ability to build a team. You know, he identifies Nehru, he identifies Patel, he identifies Boas. He identifies the great Indian feminist Kamala Devi Chetapadha. So, you know, it's not all about himself, unlike very charismatic leader.

You know, so unlike, say, Johnson or Trump or Modi or Orban or Mao, or whatever else. They are larger than life. I mean, they represent everything. Gandhi knows that to sustain a freedom movement, a reform movement in a country as large and diverse and complicated and divided as India, you need many people to work alongside.

And these are people quite often with very different views to him. And younger than him, and in different parts of India. So when I talked earlier about, he travels in different parts of India, wherever he goes, he's looking for bright young people to join him.

And part of his correspondences with these people, mentoring them, answering their queries, you know, dealing with their anxieties. And there are many people, Rajah Gopalachari, who the great statesman of the 20th century, India. Jayaprakash Narayan, as extraordinary social worker who played a very important role in restoring democracy during the emergency in the 1970s. All these people are trained by Gandhi. I mean, I know no other major political leader who mentored so many remarkable figures. And I think that's an underappreciated aspect of his legacy. We ought to look at the war years. So war breaks out and the viceroy doesn't consult the Indians at all about it.

He declares war on behalf of India. What's Gandhi's response? And it's not the same as Nairu and Jinners. And everybody has a different response to what happens here. The viceroy in 1939 was a dour, unimaginative, rather stupid, plodding Scotsman, called Lillithgow. Even if I mean anyone else, I mean, it had been. born very close to where I was born. I mean, you're very close.

I don't know why you bring that up. It's okay. As a Dahr, Scotsman myself, I feel a great sympathy for him. If Irvin had been there or Butler, you know, R.A. Butler had been there. It would be more sensitive Indian aspirations. Situation might have been different, but he was a diehard imperialist. He did not consult anyone, any Indian before announcing India's support for the war. the congressman gandhi went and met him the congressman met him and said we will support the war

and he will abandon our doctrinal commitment and non-violence on condition that you assure us that we'll have freedom after the war age and he of course would not do that and sadly sad to say was backed up by churchill in britain who was for all his other great achievements not someone during the war as a war leader not someone who wanted to give up the empire right so gandhi then They pre-varicates, continues the conversation, and finally, after three years, launches his final struggle, the Quite India Movement. And what happens then? Well, lots and lots of people are arrested. It motivates huge numbers of young people, including women.

He's one of my favorite activists of the Quid India movement is a young student in Mumbai called Usha Mehta, who runs the underground radio. You know, after Gandhi's and Neroa arrested, she runs an underground. radio, which has a very moving broadcast, there's been a book on it recently, really moving broadcasts about India's place in the world and what India can peace the world, what India can learn from the world and so on. So it's the last great struggle against the Raj, which clearly inspires hundreds of thousands of people, but it comes at a cost because Gandhi is at Nehru and Patel and all the Congress leaders are imprisoned from August 1942 onwards. And in this period, 42 to 45, the British, of course, are very angry with Gandhi.

They see him as having stabbed them in the back that while they are fighting for their own survival against the Germans, Gandhi has launched this movement and they cultivate the Muslim League who are free to expand their constituency and their membership and take their message across all of northern and Western India and Eastern India while Gandhi is in prison. So in retrospect, it may have been a political mistake. It may have, you know, enabled political polarization because essentially you offended the British by launching this movement in their darkest style, as it were, and of course being jailed all this while your political rivals

have an open field to cultivate their consequences. Tell us about the assassination realm. What actually happens? Who does it? One of the differences between Gandhi and the politicians of today, which is also a difference in time and context, is that he had no security. Anyone could walk into his home, into his ashton, and have a conversation with him, or indeed, as happened on 30th January, he's suited.

So there's this young Hindu radical who is mentored by a politician called Savarkar, who has detested Gandhi from 1909, who has Savarkar is a very brilliant Marathi writer and intellectual, who becomes steadily more fond. fanatical and, you know, hits Muslims more and more and thinks of India as a Hindu country and sees Gandhi as a personal and ideological rival. One of his mentees, Goethe, is inspired to kill Gandhi and goes with some colleagues to Delhi and walks into this prayer meeting and shoots him dead. Can you, I'm not sure by heart, remember the incredibly moving Nehru?

Nehru goes on radio and says, you know, the light has gone out of our lives. But he also says that the killer was a Hindu, which is very crucial because, you know, it may be assumed that since Gandhi is a Hindu leader, he'd be killed by Muslim. And of course, he preaches for peace. And in many ways, Gandhi's death brings an end to the violence. And the Hindus are horrified that they've killed a great leader. And I think had Gandhi, even Gandhi could not have, however many fasts he held in different parts of India, could not have stemmed the flow of writing,

I think, as effectively as his depth and his market. I mean, clearly your admiration for him is immense, and you've written these two beautiful volumes about his life, one, the early part where he's in South Africa, the other, second part, the years that changed the world. There is one thing that comes up again and again, and I find it problematic also. We talked about his love life,

but there is also in his later years, an eccentricity you could call it, or some may call it something much more sinister, where he experiments or tries to push his own tolerance of celibacy by sleeping in the same bed with his niece, who is how old at the time? She's very young at the time. 18 or 19, and he's an old man in his 70s. Now, what do we do with that knowledge?

Because I find, you know, all of this, I'm carried along on the wave of all of this. And then I hit this rock. And it hurts. I mean, I don't know what to do with that. It is hugely problematic. I mean, the chapter in, you know, Gandhi's autobiography is called my experiment with truth. And the chapter on this experiment in my biography is called the strangest experiment, you know, because it's inexplicable. It's true that he had this obsession with ceremony. Somebody felt that his failure to control his urges was responsible for Hindus and Muslims being unable to control their passions.

So it was kind of a colossal act of egotism that he felt his personal failure and led to a collective national failure. It's also true that his niece, Manu, was being pursued by a, was being sexually pursued by a man in the arts room and she wanted to test her own telebacy. But these are not exterinating circumstances. You know, he was exercising his psychological power over his niece to make her participate in that experiment. And some of his closest associates, including a remarkable Bengali anthropologist called Mineral Kumar Boast, left him. And Boas's letter I quote in my biography, he says that

this is wrong. I mean, what you're imposing on your niece is wrong, and he should not be doing it. Now, you can't really explain or defend it. But he was an old, confused, complicated, lonely man. his wife was dead, his closest friend, CF Andrews was dead, Mahadeh Desai was dead. He had no one to turn two for counsel and advice. And he thought that somehow his control over celibacy for him was crucial to showing himself as pure and transparent and committed. So it's a leap of faith that he made that can't be explained or justified. The only thing that can be said is that it was conducted in the open and, you know, God knows what other people do or what other powerful people do, which is hidden from us. But it is, it is, it is, I mean, I think it was essentially an act of vanity of egotism.

He felt because I have not controlled my passions, my fellow Indians have not been able to control their religious passion. Because I have not been able to control by sexual passions, my fellow Indians have yielded to their religious passions. If I can re-avise, emphasize, emphasize my personal control, maybe that will bring about peace. So it's not very logical or rational, but I think that's probably the most plausible explanation. You've referred in some of your writings to him to being the most important figure in 300 years. If you look at the positive aspects of his legacy, you know, what of course is non-violence, that if you have a dispute with your oppressor, a personal or individual or collective dispute, I think non-violence is always a better, more effective, more morally robust way of dealing with resisting oppression.

The second is interfaith harmony, which I've talked about. I think that's crucial in today's world. Third is the transparency of his life. And the fourth which we've not talked about really, which would require a separate whole separate discussion, is this precocious environmentalism. You know, Gandhi's, in one of his most remarkable statement, which I quote in my biography, he says in like, God forbid that India take to industrialization in the manner of the West. If it does, it will strip the world bear like locust. And I think India and China are stripping the world bare like locust.

So Gandhi advocated an attitude of respect, restraint and responsibility towards nature. You know, live along with your felt non-human species. Limit your means. Don't be greedy. Don't be acquisitive. And also he had colleagues with him. For example, some colleagues who are really full-blooded environmentalists who are experimenting, working in villages with water conservation, with biodiversity, with sustainable agriculture. So he was an early environmental profit.

And I think that's increasingly an aspect of his legacy that we're beginning to recognize. Globally, though, I mean, many followers, Martin Luther King, Barack Obama. Yes. Of course. Talking about the solidarity. The Pliama, Nelson Mandela. Sure, sure. I mean, he's had many, many admirers. And I think in many ways, to go back to something we said at the early beginning of our conversation,

even if India rejects him, he will live on outside. Professor Ramachandra, it's been an absolute pleasure. We're going to have to get you on again. Thank you. It's just not long enough. We might even get you on your book, Rebels Against the Roads. That would be amazing because that is an extraordinary read. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, both of you. I've enjoyed it very much. Thank you.

So that is all we have time for, our enormous. Thanks to Ram Gouva. What are we doing next, William? I mean, I think it's just got to be. There's only one thing, isn't it? There's only one rock star subject. Where are we going? Well, I had in my inbox this morning a headline for the New York Post saying,

this is the co-in-or, the diamond everyone is talking about, which you and I have certainly been talking about for 10 years now. And we've been banging on about it forever. Maybe we should bang on about it in this podcast. Okay, we promise. We will do that. A lot of people are honest when already. Next one, because this is the diamond which is in the Queen Consort's Crown, last scene on the coffin of the Queen Mother, because she was the last to wear it. It is a diamond which is said to carry a curse. No man can wear it without having his entire life reduced to ashes. That is the curse supposedly attached to this diamond. And interestingly enough, in this kind of, country, Queen Victoria is the only reigning monarch who has worn it. But the context for this and why in a sense we are talking about it is that it has come for modern India to symbolise colonial loot. This small stone, which actually is no larger now than the size of an egg, bears the entire weight of everything Indians feel was taken from them by imperialism and by colonialism.

and they want it back. Oh, we're quite excited about talking about this. Can you tell? I mean, do join us. We look forward to it. Till then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Drupal.