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Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas
Canadian Journal of History, Aug 2005 by Fahey, David M
Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas, by David Hardiman. New York, Columbia University Press, 2003. xiv, 338 pp. $32.50 US (cloth).
Gandhi's story has been told countless times, but David Hardiman shows that there is much more to be said. According to a dust jacket blurb, the anthropologist Ramachandra Guha praised Gandhi in His Time and Ours as "one of the five best books ever written about the Mahatma." Guha suggested to Hardiman that he write this book, so he is not an unprejudiced critic, but he is correct in saying that it is an outstanding contribution to Gandhian studies. It probably is more useful for a Western reader than an Indian one. Sympathetic but honest, it explores Gandhi's principles, practice, and heritage. Subtle but mostly accessible, it will appeal both to the specialist and the general reader. A few passages may cause puzzlement. A Marxist as well as a Gandhian, Hardiman cites littleknown Marxist theorists such as Volosinov to little practical purpose.
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Like Guha, Hardiman is one of the founders of the "subaltern school" of Indian history. He has spent his life studying ordinary people in Gujarat, Gandhi's birthplace. This helps explain the non-elite perspectives that he offers. For instance, the index provides more references for the Untouchable leader Ambedkar than for Jinnah and Nehru combined. As a pioneering historian of India's tribals or adivasi, a miscellaneous people who interested Gandhi much less than the dalits or harijan, it is no surprise that "Dalit and Adivasi Assertion" is among the book's most original chapters.
Gandhi always had critics. Gandhi was alleged to be "an irresponsible trouble-maker by his colonial masters, a destroyer of social harmony by Indian traditionalists, a backward-looking crank by modernizers and progressives, an authoritarian leader by those within the movement who resented his style of leadership, a Hindu chauvinist by many Muslims, and a defender of high-case elitism by lower-caste activists" (p. 4). Marxists and other socialists deplored Gandhi's alliance with landlords and industrialists and the high priority that he afforded to what they considered as an irrelevant demand for prohibition of the sale of alcoholic drink. Hardiman points out other limitations, such as Gandhi's patriarchal outlook that survived his daring call to women to join satyagraha. And, alas, Gandhi preferred myth to history!
Gandhi's admirers do not claim that he was perfect or even consistent. They do argue that what he did right was remarkable. Almost alone, Gandhi rejected divisive politics, bitter polarities, and the creation of a despised and feared "other." He insisted on dialogue, a dialogue with friends, a dialogue with enemies, and a dialogue between certain Indian traditions and the West's own critique of imperialism and capitalism. Dialogue is at the centre of Hardiman's book: Gandhi's ideal of dialogue and his practice of it (often not matching the ideal) and the dialogue between Gandhi, his principles and practices, and various people inside and outside India after his assassination. Hardiman also acknowledges his own thirty-year dialogue with the Mahatma: "strong emotional commitment" was followed by "profound disillusion" and finally the "emergence of greater appreciation of what he stood for" (p. 11). Outbreaks of religious hatred in India, such as the Hindu attacks on Muslims in Gandhi's own Gujarat in 1992 and 2002, and terrible inhumanity elsewhere in the world helped Hardiman recognize Gandhi's virtues. For all his flaws, Gandhi has much to teach us. Rather than being out of date, Gandhi may be styled as post-modern. This is a book both scholarly and engaged.
Whether Gandhi even has a legacy is controversial. High tech industries, nuclear weapons, and a privileged middle class characterize India today. In an appraisal of the contemporary status of Gandhian symbols, Bombay's Indian Express sardonically observed: "non-violence is now a university course" (30 September 2001). Hardiman provides a detailed discussion of post-independence Gandhianism in India, self-consciously Gandhian leaders Vinoba Bhave and J.P Narayan, and also popular agitations, such as women protesting the liquor evil, that may loosely be labeled as Gandhian. For Westerners, such information is otherwise hard to find. Hardiman also analyzes figures outside India, ranging from a leader of the German Greens, Petra Kelly, to Steve Biko in South Africa, and Martin Luther King in the United States. (Hardiman does not cite Dennis Dalton's powerful essay, "Mohandas, Malcolm and Martin.") Hardiman points out that the Gandhian legacy could take forms other than non-violence, as for example, his modeling of the charismatic moral activist. Hardiman is a historian of India, so it is probable that specialists for other parts of the world may question his emphasis on Gandhi's influence.
Hardiman's may not be one of the five most important books on Gandhi, but it certainly ranks among the most useful books on Gandhi published in the last decade.
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