‘There is no doubt that Gandhi was the greatest man of the 20th century,’ said author and journalist Graham Turner, speaking in London about Mahatma Gandhi. Turner was addressing a Greencoat Forum in the London centre of Initiatives of Change on 19 April 2011, on the theme of his new book, Catching up with Gandhi. The book takes a fresh look at the life of the Indian freedom fighter, and has been published by Penguin Books in India.
Turner, one of Britain’s leading feature writers, introduced his book with humour and lively anecdotes. The idea for the book, his seventh, had come in an ‘early morning time of quiet’, he said, while Gandhi’s grandson, Rajmohan, and his wife Usha were staying with him and his wife in Oxford. Turner wanted to come up with an easy-to-read book shedding new light on Gandhi’s life.
He travelled to India, visiting the significant places of Gandhi’s life with Rajmohan. Among these were the town centre house in Porbandar where Gandhi was born, descended from a family of courtiers; the court room where he was tried by the British, and the jails he was sent to. Turner also went to South Africa where Ela Gandhi, Rajmohan’s cousin, took him in the footsteps of her grandfather.
Gandhi was a man of weaknesses as well as strengths, Turner found. He was not a good father or husband; and after studying law in England, he became class conscious and ‘something of a snob’, according to Ela. In South Africa, he rented a big house and had his children dress in western style. And though committed to brahmachariya,or celibacy, he was highly sexed, Turner said, which lead him into unwise experiments in testing his commitment. This blurred his message in some of his followers’ minds.
But he also had a great sense of humour. ‘Gandhi was always laughing, chuckling,’ Turner said. His origins in a family of courtiers gave him both beautiful manners and supreme self- confidence which served him well in defending his cause.
His commitment to non-violence has its roots in the formative years he spent in South Africa from 1893 to 1915. Here he underwent a ‘mighty spiritual transformation’, Turner said, a process started by two elements: the violence of the Zulu war which shocked Gandhi, and his discovery of the life of Jesus Christ through Christian contacts, which touched him deeply.
Little by little, Gandhi became committed to non-violence, non-possession, chastity, and giving his life to God. Turner said: ‘He was more than ready to go to jail for his cause, hand back beautiful presents received and dress as a peasant.’ And, to his wife’s horror at first, he brought Untouchables, members of the lowest Hindu caste, into their home.
Returning to India in 1915, Gandhi started the long fight for Indian independence but his vision for his country went beyond independence. He could see a united India ‘doing a great deal for the world’. This ideal came out in two key moments which Turner emphasized.
The first was Gandhi’s speech in 1916 at the opening of a new Hindu University in Benares, attended by rich princes and the British Viceroy. Gandhi told the princes to give their jewels to the poor but also pointed out where all Indians needed to change. He wondered if Indians were ‘fit to rule themselves’. Beyond a call for independence, this was a call for a deep change within Indian society to earn the independence they longed for. ‘This was the greatest speech by any freedom fighter in the 20th century,’ Turner said. From that moment, politicians such as Nehru and Patel began to realise who Gandhi was.
The second moment, which Turner highlighted as ‘Gandhi’s finest hour’, was the walk he undertook barefoot over two months to 47 villages in what is now Bangladesh. There, Muslims had slaughtered Hindus after the partition of India in 1947. While longing for independence, he had also fought for a united India where Muslims and Hindus would live together in peace. He had predicted that partition could lead to bloodshed but, Turner explained, he did not want his presence to ‘muddy the waters’ for Nehru and Patel and other politicians. Instead Gandhi went through the villages, telling the Muslims they had done bad, and comforting the Hindus but also asking them to forgive and forget.
Turning to Gandhi’s legacy in today’s world, Turner said: ‘In India there are tons of people who try to live the kind of life Gandhi would have liked them to live. The warmth of these humble homes was far greater than in nicer houses.’ He found it interesting that Gandhi’s message in South Africa, limited then to the Indian population, had inspired people such as Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King.
Turner said that Gandhi’s failed legacy would have been India’s greater influence over the entire Muslim world. If India had not been partitioned into three countries, it would have had to make space for the rights of its Muslim population and could have had a greater influence, maybe avoiding the disastrous situation in Afghanistan that followed.
Asked about Gandhi’s economic vision, Turner said it was biased towards the poor and not for pure profit-making. He was all for the majority who lived in the villages; therefore industrialisation was not his goal, as it was for Nehru.
Turner concluded on a note of irony: ‘You find Gandhi’s face on Indian bank notes when he is known as the man who espoused poverty.’
‘Catching up with Gandhi’ by Graham Turner, Penguin Books India, 2010, ISBN 978-0-143-41569-5, available from Books, Initiatives of Change UK, 24 Greencoat Place, London SW1P 1RD, email; £10 plus p&p.
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