No one who studies Gandhi should defend his views on race and caste, but that doesn’t make him less of an important figure.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is taking quite a beating of late. A book from South Africa accuses him of racism. His statue has been brought down in Ghana. The internet is aflame with debate over Gandhi’s attitude towards Africa and the African people.
Years ago, I wrote a historical essay called ‘Black Gandhi‘ – about Gandhi’s sojourn in South Africa and what ‘Gandhi’ meant for the Black struggle in the Americas and in Africa.
As early as 1929, the pan-Africanist intellectual and militant W.E.B. Du Bois asked Gandhi to contribute some thoughts for his pan-Africanist magazine, The Crisis. In a note that appeared with Gandhi’s comments, Du Bois wrote, “Agitation, non-violence, refusal to cooperate with the oppressor, became Gandhi’s watchword and with it he is leading all India to freedom. Here and today he stretches his hand in fellowship to his coloured friends of the West.”
It was a time when several young radical African-American civil rights fighters yearned for their own Black Gandhi.
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It was this Gandhi – with his insistence on non-violence – who captured the imagination of colonised people from one end of the world to another. It was this Gandhi who enthused a young Martin Luther King, Jr. in the United States to adopt techniques borrowed from India, and it was this method that inspired the 1952 Defiance Campaign in South Africa.
But much of this contradicts recent scholarship. The issue now is Gandhi’s use of the word ‘kaffir’ and his derogatory comments against Black Africans that are scattered through his voluminous Collected Works. Serial quotations are produced that show that his views were vile. The rubble of his fallen statue in Ghana is seen as a first salvo in a protracted struggle to rub his reputation into the dust.
A victim of racism himself (“Half-naked fakir”, Churchill called him), Gandhi had no clear vocabulary to attack British racism. In fact, bourgeois Indian nationalism had no such vocabulary.
However, this wasn’t the first challenge to Gandhi.
For Indians, Gandhi’s limitations on the issue of caste have been apparent for long and well documented. Even towards the end of his life, he was not keen to smash the hierarchy of caste, as I wrote in my book Untouchable Freedom – on the Balmiki community, amongst whom Gandhi lived when he was in Delhi. The silence on caste and race runs the gamut across the leaders and intellectuals of bourgeois Indian nationalism.
Apart from the writings of Ambedkar and Periyar and a host of others who are less well-known, no major bourgeois Indian nationalist wrote a text that eviscerated caste hierarchies. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946) is mute on caste, although it was Nehru who invited the author of Annihilation of Caste – Dr B.R. Ambedkar – to draft the Indian Constitution. That was a sign that he grasped the problem, something utterly alien to the Hindutva tradition that valorised the caste system even more than Gandhi did.
But on race, their silence is virtually complete. In 1950, Humayun Kabir joined the UNESCO panel to smash the idea of race – “All men belong to the same species,” the panel wrote. But there was no version of Aimé Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950), nor was there a version of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Anti-racist consciousness was simply not well-developed in India. It remains a problem.
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No one who studies Gandhi should defend his views on race and caste. It is not enough to say that Gandhi was a man of his times. Many people in his times took strong, public positions against both race and caste hierarchies. Gandhi’s temperament was conservative. Overthrowing social hierarchies troubled him.
And yet…
This does not make Gandhi any less of an important figure in the anti-colonial movement. It was Gandhi who turned bourgeois nationalism in India towards the peasantry and helped build the basis for a protracted mass struggle (1917-1947) that broke the back of British imperialism.
Gandhi the real man disappears into Gandhi the myth. This took place not after Gandhi’s death, but during his life. He inspired people from one end of Asia to the other end of the Americas to fight against colonialism and all that it stood for. It is impossible to take that away from the historical record, that feat of inspiring the world with a simple message: We refuse to listen to you. But myths are always dangerous. Beneath them are real people, and real people are prone to be disappointing. For years now, biographers have pulled out all kinds of elements in Gandhi’s life that make the sensitive person uneasy. Scrutiny of the kind given to Gandhi will necessarily tarnish the myth.
Also read: Gandhi does not need statues and Ghana does not need advice on what to do with them
All these debates are important. No person is saintly. No one should be worshipped. More important than Gandhi were the freedom movement in India and the freedom movement in South Africa and the freedom movement in the United States and elsewhere. Leaders – such as Gandhi – play a key role in these movements, but they do not define them. It would be a pity if in this auto-da-fé of Gandhi’s’ reputation, the complexity of his role is forgotten and the movements that he inspired are set aside. The myth is dangerous if it obscures the important voices that tried to be heard during Gandhi’s lifetime, notably the people who were not content with ‘flag nationalism’, with the replacement of the British flag with the flag of the Indian bourgeoisie.
The author is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi, India). His essay Black Gandhi was first published in the Marxist journal ‘Social Scientist’ and then elaborated for a book on ‘Black Internationalism’.