16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A bit of a letdown..., July 18, 2007
This is an uneven and oddly structured biography of Mahatma Gandhi. The author is well-versed in Gandhi's letters, books and speeches, from which he quotes at length to tell the story of Gandhi's amazing personal life and political career. He is less successful, however, at painting in the background information needed to make sense of all the details. Readers unfamiliar with Hinduism, untouchability, Hindu/Muslim communal relations, Congress Party politics, or Britain's imperial system would have a hard time making sense of the narrative. For specialists only.
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35 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Passionate Life, July 2, 2001
This review is from: Gandhi's Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi (Hardcover)
Good biographies, especially the scholarly kind, invite us to reconstruct or at least revise our estimate of the subject of the biography. Stanley Wolpert, an eminent scholar of Indian history, who acquired quite a bit of notoriety in India by publishing what now sounds like an innocuous novel about Gandhi called Nine Hours to Rama (1966), has now revisited the Mahatma by writing a biography which is neither hagiographical like so many memoirs and the Government of India financed movie of Gandhi’s life by Attenborough nor dismissive like the estimate of the man and his message offered by the likes of Arthur Koestler. Wolpert looks at Gandhi as Hindu Indians would wish to see him, as a yogi whose accomplishments as a prophet of nonviolent revolution changed the world’s ways of looking at the discourse of power. The habit of automatically associating Gandhi with saintliness has kept most writers about him bound to the notion of glorifying him or glossing over his weaknesses which were many and substantial. Now fifty-three years after his death, being in possession of greater knowledge about the man, his strength, and many unwise and vain activities, we find it tempting, urged by Wolpert’s narrative to speculate on how things might have turned out for India in particular and the world in general had the Mahatma (the great souled one) possessed greater self-awareness or his nature were less paradoxical, the contradictions in his character preventing him from gaining the kind of influence on India, perhaps making it imperative for his country to adhere to most of his unquestionably valid basic moral principles. Wolpert is no happier than most other biographers of Gandhi when he draws our attention to the less admirable traits of Gandhi’s complex personality which made him cling to the world even as he rejected it because it had not reached the moral purity he was trying to envelope it in. Wolpert’s Gandhi is a man of action, his courses of action always dictated by God through a channel that only Gandhi had access to. Gandhi’s claim to an intense personal relationship with God made disagreement with him impossible for his educated followers. Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, found Gandhi’s apotheosis of poverty and his somewhat elementary understanding of political economy difficult to grasp. Gandhi was a gifted seer who intuitively knew that the end of imperialism was near and he knew better than anybody else how to bring it to its knees although in his twenties and early thirties he saw himself as a loyal subject of the empire. Yet he refused to see the inevitability of the world’s industrialization and considering industrialization a total evil, he failed to see how it could have been an ally in accomplishing many of the goals he was striving for: better sanitation, better health, physical and moral, and more food for India’s masses. Personal sacrifice was Gandhi’s mantra. Although he was, outwardly at least, a champion of self-rule, he denied self-rule to members of his own family. Thus his wife had no say in the matter when he embraced celibacy and the unfortunate story of his son Manilal is clearly indicative of Gandhi’s inflexibility in situations demanding a great deal of give and take. A man who preached universal forgiveness, Gandhi could not bring himself to forgive what he saw as the misdeeds of his hapless son. Wolpert does not go into detail about the son’s attempt to reconcile with the father, but the statements of Gandhi he quotes make it clear that Gandhi was not at all interested in letting his prodigal son return to the fold. A most haunting passage in the book is the one that describes a universally ignored Hari Lal, now a convert to Islam, furtively hanging around the site of his father’s cremation while his younger brother lights the funeral pyre. For a prophet of individual and national autonomy, Gandhi comes across a jealous, controlling figure in the book. Women for whom he definitely had a passionate physical attachment received letters from him which barely conceal the attachment. Some of these women were quite young when he conducted his experiments in maintaining his celibacy even as he slept next to them.... Trying to head off the inevitable partition of India, Gandhi annoyed millions of Muslims as well as Jinna by claiming to speak for Indian Muslims. He truly believed that it was in his power to persuade Jinna to abandon his idea of carving a Muslim nation out of India. Even more tragic was his assumption that he could sway the charismatic British Governor General of Free India, Louis Mountbatten, and the ambitious Jawaharlal Nehru to offer the highest administrative office in the country to Jinna in return for a promise to keep India undivided. Especially painful to him must have been the realization that he no longer owned a voice that could stop the murderous Hindu and Muslim masses vengefully mauling one another to death. The penultimate chapter of Wolpert’s book is devoted to how the post-Gandhi India has almost entirely rejected Gandhi’s legacy. Gandhi was a man of the present; he could take an enslaved country and set it free. But because his inner contradictions would not allow him to envision an independent India facing up to the inevitable challenges of nation building, Gandhi now resides in the minds of young Indians as a much revered figure who has little to say to them.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Yet an other political biography of Gandhi!, January 26, 2007
Overwhelmed by the hundreds of books already available scrutinizing, criticizing and or eulogizing the controversial life of Gandhi, Wolpert's dilemma when he thought of writing a book about Gandhi was what would he write that others have not written yet. Nevertheless, after so much introspection he has decided to write this book tempted by the significance of Gandhi's teachings in the wake of India's nuclear test of 1998. But, unfortunately, his attempt is falling woefully short of providing any new information on the life of Gandhi or is unable to challenge a critical mind on the life of one of the great and yet controversial figures of the 20th century.
In his work, Wolpert portrays a dutiful Gandhi of esteemed ideas and vision. But by often succumbing to Gandhi's saintly aura, Wolpert is unable to provide valuable insight from a historian's perspective on the circumstances and events leading to the spiritual development of Gandhi that we saw in him starting in South Africa, a topic that not many historians (may be except Judith Brown) tried their hands on and succeeded. Without any analysis of that sort, his work is nothing but yet another addition to the mundane category of political biography of Gandhi.
Contrary to the popular belief that Gandhi is the culprit for the partition, Wolpert has given many proofs from history for how the partition could not have been avoided despite Gandhi's many overtures and thus was absolving Gandhi completely from the crime. While that should be the right thing to do, Wolpert is also pointing out Gandhi's reluctance to listen to C.R. Das's (one of Gandhi's staunch supporters) candid and most plausible plea to Gandhi to accept Jinnah's proposal and work towards a peaceful partition. Gandhi who knew British's indifference to India's plea for political reforms after the First World War was not quite optimistic nor was he willing to sway from his stubborn position on the idea of unified India. Then at the end, Gandhi was completely sidelined by Nehru from the final politics of Mountbatten and was not even been consulted for his advice on partition. Wolpert could have done an excellent comparative study on the positive impacts of a partition with the whole Muslim population transmigrating leaving India's fate in the hands of its Hindu majority who nonetheless is the true denizen of the land. None of the historians I know have used this lost chance judiciously in repudiating Gandhi for not having taken that stance when Jinnah could not be budged from his insistence on partition. The partition should not had to be bloody had the leaders of both India and Britain shown more patience and done more planning. Though the freedom may have come late, the constitutional method for achieving India's freedom would have been less bloody.
Another `failure' that is blamed on Gandhi and which Wolpert roughly touched on is his handling of his family affairs. When he was trying to bring up a whole country in line with his principles, doing anything contrary for his children would be very un-Gandhian, and none can deny the fact that he loved all his kids and given basic education and support. One has to look into the details of the events leading to the alienation of some of his kids before putting blame on Gandhi. Wolpert having surely known some of these events has not attempted to put blame on Gandhi. In his wife's case, Gandhi had given complete liberty for her to break away from him if she chosen so. Kasturba, being an illiterate and having nothing to stand on her own, have nothing else to do than supporting her husband. It was too late by the time Gandhi realized that a man devoted to the service of people should never have a family or indulge in pleasures.
Gandhi had many qualms for western civilization but was not quite so for industrialization. What he against was machines stealing the jobs of millions of India's idle hands. He found imperative that these idle hands had to be employed first before bringing in machines. In fact Gandhi said that he was not against machines and would welcome it for anything that is beyond the capacity of people. He was wary about accepting a civilization, of which industrialization is a part of, that was (still is) in it's infancy in the place of a seasoned civilization that is thousands of years old. Gandhi's was a vision in which everything had its own time and place. For him one step at a time was good enough.
Even for freedom, Gandhi gave a proper time and place for its happening. He asked what difference it makes whether India is ruled by British or Indians as long as both have little knowledge of the real problems of India. Gandhi had a clear vision of India's future where both India and Britain work together as equal partners in a commonwealth enterprise not in a system of masters and slaves. Jalianwala Bagh massacre, Rowlatt act and the atrocities that followed in Punjab made him realize that British was not willing to see India on par and there started his opposition to the crown. Wolpert is unable to substantiate this most crucial transformation of Gandhi's political life that had had far reaching repercussions in the India's freedom struggle.
On the controversial topic of Gandhi's experiments with girls, Wolpert is groping in the dark unable to grasp the spiritual and psychological connotations of such experiments. One would have to believe that Gandhi never had any physical relations with any of his female disciples because none of the historians have made any indication on the contrary. In Manu's (one of the girls with whom he slept) book on Gandhi too she considered him only as her own `Mother'.
Wolpert's work is not devoid of blemishes either. He seems to have mistaken the meaning of Surendranath (in Hindu mythology it means king of all skies) as `Surrender Not' while referring to Surendranath Banerjea, a foremost political leader of British India. The fact is `Surrender Not' is the nickname that the British had given to Surendranath Banerjea (because Surendranath sounded more like `Surrender Not' when pronounced by the British) for his steadfast support for political reforms in British India. On another occasion Wolpert erroneously assumed Gandhi a true nationalist as early as in 1905 while referring him for indirectly supporting the British rule in the West Bengal by the statement Gandhi made in which he said it was the responsibility of British to quell the communal riots that broke out in Bengal in the wake of the partition, than blaming British for the partition itself. Gandhi considered himself as a true British loyalist as late as 1919 and on no account his loyalty to the crown had ever been questioned as early as in 1905.
Topics on Gandhi should not have to run out especially when our world is in such a sad state of affairs (I am not trying to be cynical here) in spite of all the `advancements' we made. What we need is a new generation of writers who have gone through the effects of modern wars, proliferations of nuclear weapons, impact of globalization, disintegration of morals, effects of depletion of natural resources, environmental pollution, economical imbalance, starvation of millions etc. to take a fresh look at his teachings and interpret them in the context of aforementioned impacts in the world. Gandhi said that so much advancement is made in the field of `violence' and equal amount of advancement could be made in the field of `non-violence' also. What Gandhi did was laying the foundation of that institute. Sadly, in the last 50 years since his death, not many studies have been conducted in that institute.
Despite its cerebral shortcomings, Wolpert's book on Gandhi could be recommended for anyone who is looking for a rudimentary introduction to Gandhi and the struggle in which he was part of during the early 20th century.
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