title: 7. Mahatma Gandhi
author: Empire
contenttype: podcast
publication: Empire
published: 2022-09-19T21:00:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR6770778770.mp3?updated=1703674424
word_count: 10572
If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of MPa, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to MPaClub at www.mpaPoduk.com This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills, fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate seat. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored Jobs. So go build your dream team today. With Indeed, get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast, Terms and Conditions Apply. On December 12, Disney Plus invites you to go behind the scenes with Taylor Swift in an exclusive six episode docu-series. I wanted to give something to the fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close the book. The end of an era. Add, don't miss Taylor Swift, the era's tour, the final show featuring for the first time at Torture Poets to Farmed. On December 12, only on Disney Plus. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnand. And me, William Drupal. Are you doing on purpose? I'm not. That was absolutely out to the minute. I came straight in there. With that of pause, with that even a hesitation. The thing is, William, people are sending a mail now, dear Anita, in brackets, pause and William. Most unjust. Most unjust. You will meet with it. No one is more awake than me on this one. When are you awake? I think you've just, anyway, we're here and we'd like 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, it has been rather amazing. He was so good. 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 center of what we're trying to do at this podcast. 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 it 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 sending suggestions for future podcasts. 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 Ollstein and I need a bodyguard. Empire is excellent and it is informative. Another one here, this is fascinating and sometimes disturbing listening. In a time that he's devoid of intelligent and critical conversation, I wish it had been twice as long as Andrew McNally Jones. We have found another one here. You were 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 chogum. 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 is usual. We 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. It 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, 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 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 exports 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 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 non-violence like Gandhi did. And you mentioned last week Anita Subhash Chandraboz, who's tattoo has just gone up in the center of Delhi. And he was appalled by Gandhi's approach of non-violence. And he is now in a sense the freedom fighter with whom the current government of Narendra Modi most identifies. Well, that's also sort of a germane to the conversation that we were having with David Olochuga. And I think he put it really well, which is, 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 one side hasn't been listening to the other. And if you wanted any more articulate or allowed voicing of where the current Indian establishment stands in this relationship. I think a lot of papers have picked up on what we were talking about and the last podcast we're near about. Modi 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, it's the Coenaw Diamond. Now, how many times has your phone rang in the last week from people wanting you to talk about the Coenaw? Because I know it has gone slightly crazy on my telephone and in my emails. It has. It's become a major issue. It's been trending only into it every day since the Queen died. And I think a lot of people in India expect that the Coenaw is becoming back emilently. But at the moment, as things stand, it is not. It is sitting waiting in the Queen Consorts crown, which means conceivably at a time of coronation. It will be on Camilla's head. And there'll be yet another round of requests for a fact for India. Again, it's part of this very different view. I don't think people in Britain even know where that it's particularly contentious thing. Most people here, if they've heard of the Coenaw at all, they've probably heard of it. You know, 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 a Coenaw Diamond. But that it's a huge bone of issue between India and Britain. And that Indian's passionately wanted 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 Coenaw. And I think it's something which we're definitely going to do podcast on emilently. It's clearly a moment to start talking about it again. We will. We will do that. But let's talk about Garm because that's why we're here this week. So, you know, it's the Ben King's version that most people know here in a loincloth, sort of like canoeed against the waves or David and Goliath, very much how the Attenborough version presented. But this is a complicated man. And it's a human being that we're talking about at the end of the day. But let's just talk about his origins because where did his story start? He was born 2nd of October 1869. It 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 when he? 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 the vegetarian with vegetarian restaurants in London at that time. And with a kind of strange world of sort of Edwardian cranks and idealists and table tapers, particularly the Theosophists and people like Annie Besant to Madden Blavatsky. Madden Blavatsky, who claimed to receive destruction in a cult knowledge from Himalayan masters and radiant astral figures and Mahatma. The word Mahatma is first brought into prominence by Madden Blavatsky. And she believed that they were immortal beings who, though principally resident and Tibet, had materialized here and were the authors of Madden Blavatsky's books. So it's a very unorthodox world that Gandhi enters into London. But it's sort of, and this is the complexity of the man because yes, that is. And Mahatma, by the way, just for those who don't know, great soul is it translates exactly as great soul. But it's not a traditional Hindu appellation. It's one that comes to Gandhi through the very odd source of Madden Blavatsky. So there is that which is unconventional as the sort of the Theosophists and the table tapers, 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 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 Lawing cloth. 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 that's not forget. At the age of 13, he was married off in a range marriage to 14-year-old Kusuribaba 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. And 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, we were talking about the East India Company, the world of Galeb and the Mogul Court, the world of Marata 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 of random. 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 it's so often forgotten and glossed over. He's just a little 23-year-old sort of slip of a man. If you look at him, he's very, he's like a little sparrow, isn't he, William? And he's such a small bone. Actually, his face reminds me of those books of young Kafka, you know, he's sort of a very intense side, gaunt looking, 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 color of his skin. And it's a very Rosa Parks type story. It's not allowed to sit with European passengers on a stagecage. 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 got knocked down, we probably get up again. But then do we think, right, I'm going to change all of this, root and branch. And then of course, 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 theosophists once he moves to South Africa. And he's drawn into the world, there's something called the esoteric Christian Union, which to our ears sounds as docks anything that was existing in the water in London. It's a sec founded by somebody called Edward Maeteland and his collaborator Anna Kingsford. They threw their various spiritualisms and table tilting. They discovered that they were respectively the reincarnation of St John the Evangelist and St Mary Magdalene. And you know, to our ears, this sounds completely dodgy. But according to Gandhi's faithful secretary, Piri La 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 is going on. And in 1900, Gandhi volunteers to be a stretcher bearer in the Natal Indian ambulance course. 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 something to 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, he's been this 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 front, 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 Satyagraha, truthful, so devotion to truth, which, as you said, develops in many ways the forms of non-violent resistance employed by the suffragettes in Britain, but it 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. So, 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 pillboxes, 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. 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's 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 Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who is sort of a mild, manned member of the Indian National Congress, a nascent political organization that is agitating for, not freedom from British rule, but some more control to be arrested away for Indian people in their own country. And Gokhale 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, South Africa, 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. And Smuts at the time, imagine his confusion. This is wearing knee-led leather boots and a military job. In his job, and he's presented with these beautifully handmade, but very crude leather sandals. And he accepts them. But 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 you know, 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. We will him tell us about our guest today. We have the great Ramachandra Guhar, 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's 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 is many of his historian competitors anywhere in the world would 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 Guhar. 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 Gandhi? A help or a hindrance to you when you go out and you talk about the man himself? So, Rita, 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. So, younger people haven't really seen it. Some may have seen it in school. So, they have very mixed perceptions of Gandhi. And maybe you can talk about it later, but India today there's a whole amount of historical revisionism about Gandhi. Not so much in academic circles, but in what sat history circles. And he's often accused of not doing enough for being 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 by, which is before, as really knows. But those were of interesting eccentric, relatively minor figures, where you don't have this problem, that people have preconceived notions for often firmly held on what they think Gandhi believed in and what he was all about. So, you have to cut through the other Bruce. I mean, 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. And then- For the first time a big put up to get in London. I mean, we have one in Tava Stock Square, two 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 read something, I don't know whether you read it in the papers from a very renowned Indian publisher, Weenow 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 violence at struggle against British rule. But Gandhi's style of struggle is not popular in India these days. That's true. So the two reasons why there's this revisionism of Gandhi. One is under the BJP there's an exaltation of masculinity and masculinity involves violence. Nonviolence is in this feminine, that's one reason. And people like Bose and Savaka particularly are seen as embodying that aggressive masculinity, which their proponents believe would have got out the British empire, end of the British empire quicker, even if it a more bloody way quicker. The second reason this revisionism of Gandhi is that Gandhi lived and died for Hindu-Muslim harmony. So Gandhi felt Muslims were also Christians and Sikhs and Jans and Parsis, as responsible, reliable citizens, bonafide citizens of India's Hindus, whereas the BJP as a cellist think of India as a Hindu for a 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 the father's relations so they can't quite disown them but they but we're seeing a lot more of God's say around. Yes, absolutely because God secured him and according to the hard line Hindu-plus-Fanahar, he saved India further suffering by ending on this path. 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, Rita, that in the rest of the world, Gandhi is admired and Gandhi is the only panicking figure. You talked about the statue in Westminster which is among 13 or 14 sat people, I think this church, children, and medicine for set and I think some of your generals and so on but I had a British visitor come to Bangalore last week who had 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-pity person and exploration of what Gandhi meant and so on. So I think Narendra Modi 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 detect Gandhi. So it's a complicated business and it's principally to do I think even more than violence is principally to know with Gandhi's commitment to interfaith harmony and the equality of all citizens regardless of religion. I think that's what he really can't get that's what he 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 you know by all accounts quite mild manned, quite humble in the way he spoke and presented himself certainly in later life? The three of us are all writers. He recognizes the word, at the power of the word, the return and printed words. So he starts newspapers in South Africa which he carries on in India which are printed not adjusted in least 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 the country he came away from for two decades before asserting himself as a before putting him herself forward as a candidate for the leadership of the freedom self. So there's of course the fact that he was a prosperous lawyer he sacrifices professionally to work with the people and so on. So there's 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 nation wide movement that was talking to ordinary people? Very but so. So the Congress before him absolutely right with him. The Congress before him was composed of really brilliant and articulate people but all men all largely based in big cities like Bombay, Calcana, Madras, Delhi, Lahore as all largely operating 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 all of his achievements was to make women part of the Congress and even in 1925 Saludni Nairu 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 and you know he made a leader. So all of this I think he is he is he is inclusive. I've only 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 dares of Hindus. What is wonderful and startling and humbling about your work is that it is almost as if you're a pirate bachaniya going into archives that nobody has touched before. So Gandhi has written so much. He 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. I mean he really did go on a 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 caste system it's 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 Ambedkar 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 very much. So it is simply since you started by mentioning Akindoora's film in which Kinsley Payagandhi Jinnah is represented in the film as a kind of caricature played by Alek 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 Jinnah as the bad guy but Ambedkar complicates the 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. Jinnah's a prosperous lawyer so you can see him as a you know a rich man, a devilian politics. Ambedkar absolutely comes from the bottom up and the debate is about how quickly you should go and end in caste discrimination. Gandhi is doing slowly, incrementally because he wants to take the uppercase into his along. Ambedkar wants to attack the system frontally so he writes a famous pamphlet called annihilation of caste which he says the only way to annihilate caste is to promote intercast marriage and Gandhi is not prepared to get advanced. Gandhi also has a larger cause which is freedom of India. Ambedkar says what's the point of freeing India if the Congress party which is dominated by Brahmins and merchants it comes to dominate us which just extends the British for a new set of rulers. So it's a debate and an argument of great poignancy you know as a as a biographer I admire both men I mean I won't say who might buy but there are circumstances that make them right. But Babasabha and Baitkar 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's a huge figure who has left a lasting imprint on what is now India. What is Gandhi's response to the massacre at Jalimwala Bagh because this this this many people the Neruz for example have their views of the British Empire completely overturned by this heartless at heartlessness and the bloodshed and the and the support for Daya that's voiced in many quarters following the massacre. Gandhi is like that with this difference that so Tagore for example the great poet Ravindran Tagore returns his knighthood you know with the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in literature his knighthood by the British has many close British friends and then after Jalimwala Bagh returns his knighthood. Gandhi has a similar kind of reaction but he actually travels to the Punjab in 1990-20 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 and numbers that villagers are you know there's unity of harassment of them they're being sent to jail they're fine we'll slay be down them for taxes they're like you have allegedly not paid so there's a real about a distant end and that visits to the Punjab disabuses him of any loyalty to the rats you know which he had before so it is very transformative he's understanding your empire for sure. And with with China okay we can just just talk about that really rancorous relationship. Yeah very interesting 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, they in many many sort of worlds they should have been friends on paper you know if it was a dating website they too would have had a match I mean but but in real life is it really as mundane as these two personalities just didn't get on though there's one story of Gandhi making a flippant comment about sort of Jinna'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 or that banal that somebody said something to someone and it's just all spiral. So I think China was Gandhi's senior Indian public life when Gandhi was a struggling lawyer in South Africa. Dina was already a member of Imperial Council he was the established lawyer and he sort of felt overshadowed by Ghandi. When Gandhi comes in and captures the congress party during the non-cooperation movement there's a famous session in in Nakhbor in 1920 where Dina gets up to make some criticisms of the non-cooperation campaign and he's shouted down by Gandhi supporters and he walks away and takes her 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 under the 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 a nine policemen who are in a police station in a village in Uttar Pagation, North India are burnt alive by a nationalist bomb and Gandhi's outraged by that and caused off the movement so that is not enough of course for him to go he goes to jail he's arrested so quickly after that but the British empire was of its needs and it's really Gandhi's commitment to non-violence because it is horror of horror of love anger that what would happen in Hindus and Muslims turned on each other his reservations about violence were partly moral but they were also part of technical you know the conviction that if you take up arms to remove the oppressor one 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 Nero and both and many other people it's called off because one solitary act of violence which Gandhi felt be smurred to cause in a movement it's that 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 yourself out wouldn't make a difference in a being mob but it did and why did it so 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 where you had this bloodshed in the flight of refugees and a million people died Gandhi goes on fast in Chalkada in September 1947 and stops the violence and then he goes to on fast and Delhi in January 1948 to large cities full of anger and animals you know mob searing with anger and animosity 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 has known to its knees and they are they're so improbable so the salt march that salt could be such a political weapon and you will need to explain this to people here because it makes very little sense what actually happens what happens with the salt marches so essentially in 1929 the congress met in Lahore or the banks of the river R.E. and decided that they wanted to launch a fresh strike of 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 ashram and thinks of salt now salt is a commodity used by every Indian but making it is the monopoly is a monopoly of the Raj so you can make your own salt you have to bite at an enhanced price paying the tax to the colonial state so Gandhi says I've got to make my own salt symbolically so every Indian will make their own salt and he marches from his ashram in Ahmedabad and from there he marches to the sea it takes him three weeks he has 78 companions and the vice-choice mystify I mean Lord Irwin is mystify to say what is this mad old man doing supposing I mean as a counterfactual if Lord Irwin 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 is crazy and let him go and he marches day by day and more and more reporters come to cover him he could have American reporters letting the American reporting of the salt march is very significant in making Gandhi a global figure because America is emerging as a large economic power you know time magazine is just about becoming hugely popular and actually makes Gandhi mad at the air that year 1930 and of course America has a close kinship with Britain so American public opinion influences British opinion and the reporters come and then he goes to the sea and breaks the salt law and civil taillessly in many different parts of India other people break the salt law so it's symbolically it's huge this is significant because it shows the empire as unsealing greedy monopolistic and not even allowing an ordinary Indian to have salt in his or her diet so it's as a piece of political theater it's quite remarkable and does it 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 of people in his arshram by taking them along to a place where he knows he's going to have Latis 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 past there's no question and of messaging of reaching out of unsealing letters from correspondence of you know and so on yeah I think I read somewhere that you said he wrote a hundred letters a day or 90 letters a day or something sometimes more than that he had a fantastic security I mean he had an extraordinary here I mean he had a security Mahadev Desai who was a scholar in many languages and who really whose role in the Indian freedom settlement in Gandhi's life is really under at the scene. Can we talk about some of those people who actually are in Gandhi's life before we get to the forties 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 Kasturabhavai I mean he's what 13 and she's even younger when they get married and she's incredibly loyal but it's sort of almost silent figure in the background but always supportive but he has passion as well I mean he's a he's a he's not he may dress like an aesthetic 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 Sadala Devi Chawdharani who is also married now just no people don't know about this at all that there is a romantic life with Gandhi is it's not the image it's not it's not it wasn't in Attenborough Ben Kingsley doesn't write to any women no but so tell us what is this relationship because it is it's very important and it tells us a little bit about his internal life as well well first of all it's it is very moving and as I you say quite charged in charged with love and passion so on because in 1919 the massacre happens that winter Gandhi goes to look at what's happening in the Punjab and he stays at the home of Sadala Devi who lives in the hall whose husband is actually in jail so Gandhi and this you know this writer poet activist are just chatting together and getting to know each other and essentially they're falling in love and over the next year year and a half they exchange these incredibly passionate letters and Gandhi calls her my spiritual wife and which is a very interesting undertaking in France 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 customer but then he 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 free India from political rules but later on Gandhi many years later Gandhi talks without mentioning just Sadala Devi he says has nearly fell he means are nearly you know flipped he's there is the body beads not fast you know right perhaps he was she was very enchanted by her she was she was amazing I mean I'm complete I'm in love with her she is extra 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 it's just you because I know your you know your marriage writer on science she was she was she was Tagos Nis and she came from a family of writers and she said I've got to study science she was the first female graduate in science in Calcutta University I did not know that that's amazing okay it kind of conservative patriarchal late 19th century begotal she said I want to study science there's a mother says I want to marry you off to say sorry I'm going to my show to teach and I'll find my own partner and I'll teach science in my show you know and then the mother is dying and on a dead match as please get married so then she has an intercast marriage with the Punjabi lawyer and Mouset and she writes to go ready likes her you know he thinks of her as in a central Italy because of a poetry so yeah it really is because of the kind of her exuberance her personality her intelligence her charm you could see her very different look Asturba who's a quiet you know uncannishmatic homemaker I mean I mean I mean what what else could she be you're I mean in a relationship with Gandhi sorry not to be eclipse what else what else can you do against his image you know we we 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 doaty ruthlessly sharp negotiated an abriant mind can you talk a little about that yeah I think I think he's obviously very very smart politically intellectually in terms of policy but there's one ask him which I think is often ignored when we talk about his he's his his his his characteristics which is his ability to build a team you know he identifies Nero he identifies Patel he identifies both he identifies the great Indian feminist Kamala Devi Chattapa there so you know he it's not all about himself unlike Meri Karisma Degira you know so unlike say Johnson or Trump or Modi or Parvand or Mao or whatever else but it's they are largely in 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 you know and these are people quite often with very different views to him at younger than him and in different parts of India so when I talk about his travels in different parts of India wherever he goes he's looking for bright young people to join him and then he at part of his correspondences with these people mentoring them answering their queries you know you know dealing with their anxieties and there many people Rajya Gopal Achari you look at statesman of 20th century India, Debra Karnarayan as extraordinary social worker who played a very important role in restoring democracy during the emergency the 1970s all these people are taking by the 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 we we ought to to look at the the war years. So war breaks out and the viceroid doesn't consult the the Indians at all about about it he declares war on behalf of India what's Gandhi's response and it's and it's not the same as Nairu and Jinnas and everybody has a different response to what happens here. The viceroid 1939 was a dual unimaginative rather stupid plotting Scotsman called Lillith Goh you know even I mean anyone else I mean it means very close to where I was born. I mean you you you you you you I don't know why you bring that up. Okay. As a dower Scotsman myself feel a great sympathy for him. If Erwin 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 tired 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 and met him and said we will support the war and he will abandon our doctrinal commitment and nonviolence or in condition that you assure us that we will have freedom after the war ends and he of course would not do that and sadly sad to say he was back up by church in between 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 the pre-wedded pre-varicates continues the conversation and finally after three years launches his final struggle the Kutinya movement. And what happens then? Well lots of lots of people are arrested it motivates huge numbers of young people including women. There's one of my favorite activists of the Kutinya movement is a young student in Mumbai called Ushameta who runs underground radio. You know after Gandhi's and Nero are arrested she runs underground radio which has a very moving broadcast this has been a book on it recently. Really moving broadcast about India's place in the world and what India can piece the world what India can learn from the world and so on. So it's the last great struggle against the riots which clearly inspires hundreds of thousands of people but it comes at a cost because Gandhi is a Nero 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 you know Gandhi's launches 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 at East India while Gandhi's in prison. So 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 while your political rivals have an open field to cultivate their constituency. Tell us about the assassination ram what actually happens who does it. One of the differences between Gandhi and the politician today it's also a difference in time and context is that he had no security anyone could walk into his home into his artism and have a conversation with him or indeed has happened on 30th January in Suttan. So there's this young Hindu radical who is mentored by a politician called Savarkar who has detested Gandhi from 1909 who as Savarkar is a very brilliant marathi writer and intellectual who turns who he becomes steadily more fanatical and you know Hicks Muslim more and more I think India is a Hindu country as sees Gandhi as a personal and ideological rival one of his mentees go to say is inspired to kill Gandhi and goes with some colleagues to Delhi and walks into this prayer meeting and shoots him there. Can you show by heart the incredibly moving Nero. Nero 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 such as Gandhi's Hindu leader he killed Babuskin and of course he reaches for peace and in many ways Gandhi's debt brings a rent to the violence and Hindus are horrified that they killed a great leader and I think had Gandhi even Gandhi could not have to however very fast he held different parts in India could not have stemmed the flow of writing I think as effectively as his debt and his markable. Well 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 I find it problematic also you know 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 I all of this I'm carried along on the on the wave of all of this and then I and then I hit this rock and it hurts I mean I don't know what to do with that it is usually problematic I mean I the chapter in your Gandhi's autobiography is called my experiment two 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 celibacy 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 I liked you a collective natural yeah it's also true that his niece Manu was being pursued by a man in the art school and she wanted to test her own celibacy but these are not extra-enemitting 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 Nenbar Kumar Boast left him and Boast's letter I quote in my biography says that this is wrong I mean what you're imposing on your niece is wrong and you should not be doing it no you can't really explain or defend it but he was an old confused complicated lonely man his wife was dead his closest friend she of Andrews was dead Margaret Desai was dead he had no one to turn to for counsel and advice and he thought that somehow he is that control of a 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 reason I can be said is that he was conducted in the open and you know God knows what other people do about other powerful people do which is hidden from us but it is it is it is I mean it's essentially an act of vanity of ecotism we 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 my sexual passions my fellow Indians have yielded to their religious passions so if I can re-evised emphasize my personal control maybe that will bring about peace so it's it's not very logical or rational but I think that's probably the most possible explanation you 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 what of course is known violence that if you have a dispute with your oppressor 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 a third is the transparency of his life at the fork which we've not talked about really which will require a separate whole separate discussion is this pre-cocious environmentalism you know Gandhi's in one of his most remarkable statements which I quote in my biography he says in 1938 God forbid that India take to industrialization in the manner of the West if it does it will strip the world bare like locusts and I think India and China are stripping the world bare like locusts so Gandhi advocated and attitude of respect restraint and responsibility towards nature you know live along with your fellow 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 virises with water conservation with biodiversity with sustainable agriculture so he was an early environmental prophet I think that's increasingly a aspect of his legacy that we're beginning to recognize globally though I mean many followers Martin Luther King Barakubama of course talking about the solidarity I'm Nelson Mandela so I mean he said he said many many admirers and I think in many ways to go back to something we said the early video conversation even if India rejection he will live on outside Professor Ramachandhu ago 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 road that would be amazing because that is an extraordinary thank you thank you thank you thank you but you enjoyed it very much thank you so that is all we have time for our enormous thanks to Ram Guga what are we doing next William I think I think it's just got to be there's only one thing isn't it there's only one I think we have to go where are we going well I had in my inbox this morning a headline for the New York Post saying this is the coenore the diamond everyone is talking about which you and I have certainly been talking about for for 10 years now but maybe we should bang on about it in this podcast well okay we promise we will do that a lot of people are honest when it 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 ashes that is the the curse supposedly attached to this diamond and interestingly enough in this country queen Victoria is the only reigning monarch who has worn it but the the context for this and why in a sense we are talking about it is it has come for modern India to symbolize colonial loot this small stone which actually is no larger now than the size of an egg is 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 till then it's goodbye from me Anita Arnon and me William Dremple