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The Gandhi Nobody Knows

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Fellow reviewer Shashank Tripathi did an excellent job of summarizing some of the more surprising truths about Gandhi explosed here in Richard Grenier's book, "The Gandhi Nobody Knows". There's no need for me to be redundant in repeating them all, but I would like to add a bit about author Richard Grenier and the book itself.

A well-educated foreign correspondent, Richard Grenier was best known in later in his life for his work as a movie reviewer. This book was Grenier's response to and review of the Film "Gandhi", and originally appeared in the March 1983 issue of the neo-conservative American Jewish journal "Commentary". Grenier does a good job of explaining how the Indian government helped finace the film, and consequently reviewed and influenced the screenplay and the final product, adding "A friend of mine, highly sophisticated in political matters but innocent about film making, declared that "Gandhi" should be preceeded by the legend: [i]The following film is a paid political advertisement by the government of India[/i] (page 39).

The picture Grenier presents of Gandhi as a person and leader is of a tumultuous character who was quite driven, but also contradictory and often totalitarian and unyeilding. Gandhi was certainly no great bulwark of anti-racism, and his later pacifism is colored by his volunteering to fight for the British Empire in South Africa against the Zulu during an uprising.

Grenier also questions how the Gandhi of the British Empire evolved into the seemingly delusional man who wrote letters to Adolf Hitler during WWII, imploring him to recognize the brotherhood of humanity, and later suggesting that the Jews of Eurpoe could have died "more Significantly" had they simply committed suicide to protest Hitler's round up (thereby I suppose saving him the trouble and cost of having to do the work himself?!!).

While Grenier is clearly uncomfortable with Hindu beliefs, he singles out Gandhi's pretexts for urging his later brand of pacifist anti-industrial Hindu beliefs on his fellow countrymen. Gandhi's preaching of "Ahimsa", or non-violence, was rather a fair weather deal. At times Gandhi supported violence, for instance during riots in Calcutta. Grenier reminds readers that even in nations with majority Christian populations, for practical reasons no government has taken the sermon on the mount as its governing document. Pacifism is simply not a practical device, and Gandhi's later idealism was apparently an outgrowth of his later personal religious views. Is pacfism idealistic? Yes. Is is practical? in many situation, no.

The introduction to this 1983 book is by one-time b-movie producer and anti-abortion activist Franky A. Schaeffer, and dwells heavily on his belief that the Hindu religion is inferior to Christianity. Small surprise, as the publisher of this book is the well-known publisher of Christian religious and religion-themed books, Thomas Nelson. It fits the temper of the time, 1983, when the social conservative movement was beginning to gain momentum in the United States. That being out in the open, I didn't find enough overt bias on the part of author Richard Grenier to disqualify the facts he presents concerning Mahatma Gandhi as a leader, religious figure, husband and father.

This book dashes the myth and takes a good look at the man. For anyone who would like a fuller, more acurate view of the whole Mahatma Gandhi as a human being, and not as a mythical icon, this book is recommended.

It is generally easy to posthumously denounce a well-reputed personality. In the case of Gandhi, it is absolutely a breeze for anyone willing to look (*willing* being the operative word).

PERSONAL LIFE AND BELIEFS. Little do people know about his sheer disregard for his family amid his soaring popularity (the pretext of course being the usual: Nation comes first), a topic that has been discussed at length by his grandchildren in several plays over the last few years in India, all of which happened to be "controversial". This is a man who let Kasturba (his wife) die of pneumonia when she could have been saved with a shot of (British) penicillin, on the grounds of it being an "alien medicine". All this would have been high and exalted but it must be noted that when he himself contracted malaria shortly afterward he accepted for himself the alien medicine Quinine, and that when he had appendicitis he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien outrage of an appendectomy.

SOCIAL LIFE: Little do people know (ok, people in the know know of this one) of his sleeping with pretty teenage girl followers in the buff in the "ashram" who cuddled the nude septuagenarian in their arms. Pretext: he was "testing" his vow of chastity in order to gain moral strength for his mighty struggle with Jinnah. Meanwhile, his daily morning greeting to his women followers in the morning was "Have you had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?"

POLITICAL LIFE: Little needs to be said in this department. Try holding anyone else accountable for the morbid massacre of 20,000 or so innocent lives that occured during partition (and countless more since, as Pakistan and India remain at constant loggerheads). His nepotistic support for Nehru (who doted in return of course while being totally useless in any other manner) affected India even after his death as Sardar Vallabhai Patel was pretty much relegated to the backdrop of Nehru's cambridge-motivated Fabian ideas. And as far as the sublime message of non-violence goes, it is instructive to stop for a moment and think how Gandhi would have done under an antagonist like Hitler. He was lucky to be left alive, which speaks volumes about British rule. In the kind of civil disobedience he advocated, several people lost their lives haplessly facing a storm of bullets from the British hoping they were martyrs (e.g., Jallianwalla Bagh).

Anyway, whatever vein you wish to study Gandhi's persona/convictions in, and I mean study instead of reading the myriad paeans sung to the great Father Of The Nation, the one glaring defining feature of his character turns out to be his dogged obsession with his own preachings of simplicity (which are all great, unless imposed, as done under him) and his egregious notions of sanctity that came from renunciation of anything not indigenously produced in India (Civil Disobedience). This theorem was not much more than a gutless pandering to the agro-based masses of India, and arguably something that have long since affected India's wishes to stand back on its feet with global collaborations. He was a man who clearly revelled in the throes of his saintification at the expense of everything else, but to his credit and gain, sported topnotch interpersonal skills and a very smart agenda at a very right time. In short, "celebrity material".

If you find any of this inappropriate, you may want to keep away from the book, it will show you pages of history that are buried under the GreatGandhi rubble. It is sad, and somewhat symptomatic of the herd-belief systems that most people WISH to maintain, that this book is labeled "Out of print/Low availability".

This is an excellent critique of both the major motion picture, GANDHI, and the man, Gandhi.

In this vastly informative (and neglected) book, we are called to see the "real" Gandhi.

Now, while seeing the "real" anyone may be a very difficult task, the author's task is made much, much easier by contrasting his "real" Gandhi with the "movie" Gandhi. And Grenier rightly begins by noting that the "movie" was hardly impartial: it was financed by millions from the Government of India and (of course) produced by a fanatical British leftist.

Now, would you expect an impartial treatment from such sources?

Would you expect to learn that our "pacifist" Gandhi served in the British Army as a Sergeant-Major?

Would you expect to learn that Gandhi was a fanatical Hindu who believed that the Gujariti caste polluted at 70 meters?

Would you expect to learn that Our Divine Master Gandhi was in fact a political and economic idiot? (His advocacy of home spinning speaks volumes in itself.)

By the way, to be rude, have you ever read anything written by Gandhi, such as "Hind Swaraj?" In that book, compounding his usual stupidities, Gandhi tells us all that India will return to its original perfection once it carries out two simple tasks: get rid of the railroads, and banish the doctors.

That "banish the doctors" theme played an important part in Gandhi's own home life. When his wife fell ill, Gandhi refused to let her be "murdered" by those "doctors," with their penicillin shots and all.

She died.

A few years later, when Gandhi himself became seriously ill, what did he do?

Well, he checked himself into the best British hospital in town.

Now, aside from inciting his fellow Hindus to massacre Indian Muslims, I would have to admit that this was one helluva guy. I especially liked his practice of sleeping with naked teenage girls, and asking all of his disciples whether they had had a good bowel movement.

Truly, truly, a guiding light for humanity.

Very good and informative book. You will never look at the Gandhi legend in the same way.

I've just read through this little book and was able to see just how much my views of Gandhi and Jinnah had once been formed by the film "Gandhi," which we all swooned over throughout the 80s. Since then, I've matured a lot on how I see both these men, Hinduism, and Ahimsa.

What was dismaying about Grenier's book is his--how shall I call it?--Christian arrogance. He goes after Hinduism with a vengeance, all the while insisting Christianity is far superior. It's hard to stomach at times. I kept wishing he's sweep off the Christian doorstep first. To my mind his harping on and on about Hinduism's shortcomings amounted to a tarnish on his objectivity.

Yes, it is enlightening to learn that the Indian government financed the film in part, the extent of Gandhi's inconsistent thinking, and how the West may have become swept up in a myth. Still, the entire 20th Century change from the British Raj to Independence was far more complex than Grenier seemed to grasp. In fact, he strikes me as a lousy historian who has drawn on V.S. Naipaul's writing, on accounts of the film's production and on the some details of Gandhi's career, which he then used to compose a diatribe.

I'd highly recommend "Indian Summer" by Alex von Tunzelmann to anyone looking for an objective, in-depth picture of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, and the Mountbattens. Of course, Gandhi was no saint, but neither was he entirely the devil Grenier makes him out to be.