Ways of Gandhiji

A new biography paints the sunlight and the shadows of his life

The unexpected resurgence of interest in Gandhi in recent days thanks to the exposition of “Gandhigiri” by Bollywood has seen a rise in the sales of books on the Mahatma. There has also been a renaissance of sorts over the last year of books on Gandhi which are not ephemeral, but contribute to, modify and renew our knowledge of Gandhi and the forces that drove him. While most on a specific aspect of the man and his work, Kathryn Tidrick’s biography is the first, so far, to take an overview of his entire life.

The field of Gandhiana is so vast, and Gandhi’s life and ideas explored so minutely, that any new book needs to justify itself. Tidrick, with a doctorate in psychology, has staked out her territory with the subtitle A Political And Spiritual Life. She has taken Gandhi’s insistence that his life was his message by collapsing the divide not only between the private and the public, but also between the political and the religious. For this, she has Gandhi’s own authority: “My struggle is not merely political. It is religious and therefore quite pure.”

The appeal of writing about only a part of Gandhi’s life and ideas is that it spares the writer from having to explore those aspects of Gandhi with which they feel uncomfortable, usually dismissed as his fads — vegetarianism, nature therapy, religious outlook, fasts, goat’s milk — or that which they find embarrassing and unable to explicate — his comments on the Bihar earthquake, above all, his strange sexual experiments, which led even an admirer such as J.B. Kripalani to castigate him privately. In biographical writing, there is a thin line dividing hagiography and demonisation. The detachment that a biographer needs is difficult to achieve. Tidrick is critical, not hagiographical, but fair and balanced — and very readable. She has taken in her stride both the uncomfortable and the embarrassing, and the result is at times quite unexpected.

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The story in its outlines is a familiar one, but still with the capacity to surprise, not always pleasantly. Tidrick differs from most biographers by examining Gandhi’s formative life in England, the shock of failure on his return home, and his phenomenal transformation in South Africa. Disinclined to take Gandhi at his word that when he dropped his western dress for that of an Indian peasant, he also severed all ideational links with the West, she shows how deeply influenced he was by the theosophists, esoteric Christians, vegetarians, to name just a few, and how he carried their imprint to the end. She recreates the manner in which he controlled the Congress and led the nationalist movement, achieved huge triumphs and made equally big blunders, such the alienation of M.A. Jinnah. She is also the first biographer not just to make sense of Gandhi’s sexual experiments, but also to explore the damage they may have caused.

Every generation reexamines the past, trying to understand it anew. It may be a difference in perspective, or the knowledge of new facts which alter the picture — sometimes superficially, sometimes totally. India today is clearly reassessing the legacy of Gandhi, and his continuing relevance. That is as it should be. Tidrick’s biography is one of the markers in this undertaking, with both sunlight and shadow.