Even 78 years after he was shot dead, Mohandas Karamch and Gandhi, the Mahatma, still speaks. Here is why.
Hailed as the best biographer of Mahatma Gandhi, eminent historian Ramachandra Guha’s Arguments with Gandhi is not another conventional biography of Mahatma Gandhi. Instead, it is an intellectual engagement with Gandhi’s ideas, his disagreements with contemporaries and critics, and the continuing debates that his legacy generates nearly eight decades after his death.
Published by Fourth Estate India, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, earlier this year, the 432-page book uses Gandhi as a central figure through whom Guha examines some of the most enduring moral, political and social questions of the modern world. Guha is particularly well placed to undertake such a project.
His two-volume biography of Gandhi – Gandhi Before India and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948 – established him as one of the major contemporary scholars of Gandhi. In the present work, he moves away from the chronological structure of biography and instead places Gandhi’s ideas in conversation with people who agreed, disagreed or wrestled with them.
The title itself is revealing. These are not merely arguments about Gandhi; they are, in Guha’s formulation, ‘arguments with Gandhi’.
The distinction allows the author to treat Gandhi neither as an unquestionable Mahatma nor simply as a historical figure whose ideas belong to the past. Gandhi has become a participant in an ongoing conversation.
The book brings together an extraordinary range of interlocutors. , Nelson Mandela, Lenin and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay are among the figures whose encounters with, or responses to, Gandhi’s ideas receive attention.
Their disagreements illuminate different dimensions of Gandhi’s thinking – nonviolence, caste, religion, political freedom, social justice, economics and the relationship between human beings and Nature. Perhaps the most important feature of Guha’s approach is that he does not present Gandhi’s philosophy as a finished or internally uncomplicated system.
Gandhi’s views developed through experience, debate and self-questioning. His position on caste and untouchability, for example, underwent significant changes over time.
His disagreements with Ambedkar reveal the profound differences between two approaches to social reform, even while both were deeply concerned with the condition of India’s oppressed communities. Historians have also noted how Gandhi’s position on caste evolved considerably between the 1920s and 1930s.
