‘Let’s kill Gandhi!’ By Tushar A. Gandhi,
Rupa,
Rs 995

Harilal Gandhi: A Life By Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal, Orient Longman,
Rs 690

Tushar A. Gandhi’s monumental “chronicle” of the Mahatma’s “last days, the conspiracy, murder, investigation and trial” is a product of satyagraha, the philosophy that has become synonymous with his great-grandfather. Ever since January 30, 1948, the day Nathuram Godse, an orthodox Hindu Brahmin from Poona, assassinated Gandhi, “half-truths” and “lies” have been offered to explain away the murder. The most pernicious of these was propagated by the Hindu far-Right during the turbulent years following the Independence, when communal riots devastated the subcontinent, to valorize the killer: “He did it from a sense of outrage at Gandhi’s pro-Pakistani stance to the detriment of Hindus”. Tushar Gandhi (henceforth TG) shows, by exhuming some intriguing “facts”, how skewered this sense of an ending was. There were five recorded attempts on Gandhi’s life, the last one ten days before his death, and Godse had been caught in two of these. Both Sardar Patel and Morarji Desai had prevaricated about acting decisively on sensitive information they had regarding the conspiracy. Madanlal Pahwa, who tried to kill Gandhi on January 20, had led the Delhi police to the other members of the gang headed by Godse and Narayan Apte. Surprisingly, the Poona police wasn’t informed, and the emissary to Bombay took the train because he was afraid of flying. By the time he reached Bombay, the murderers had already left for Delhi.

“This book puts the facts straight. Lest we forget,” TG writes in the forward. Yet, the “truth” that he aspires towards — his satyagraha — is not just derived from facts. Rather than articulating the “whole truth”, these facts deepen its mystery. TG captures startling details (combining the precision of an archivist with the sensitivity of a novelist), questions the easy conclusions and dares to disturb what history has chosen to retain. He probes relentlessly, with a Hamletian compulsion to remember, into the narrative that has become maligned by prejudice. This urgency to revive, and revise, the past is as much the signature of a conscientious historian, as it is the price of being born into a mythologized family.

The burden of carrying the name of an illustrious forefather — a legacy that is almost inimical to leading an autonomous, ‘normal’ life in India — cannot be overemphasized. TG’s quest for truth evolves directly out of this uneasy heritage, responsible for the invasion of the private life of a family by the political life of a nation. He grew up “witnessing the bewilderment of Gandhi’s loved ones”, exasperated by the fact that “Godse was allowed to give vent to his anger in court twice”, unable to understand why his grandmother had insisted on visiting Gopal Godse, Nathuram’s brother. His satyagraha is unflinching, but devoid of forgiveness for “the philosophy that created Nathuram Godse”. TG’s neo-Gandhianism is an antidote to the way our modernity has been threatened by the far-Right.

This philosophical revisionism — as also the portrait of a ‘human’ Gandhi, not just of the ‘man of god’ — lends originality to TG’s work. However, this composite vision of Gandhi — as a man who was a superman — has its own inescapable problems. Chief among them is the easy temptation to turn the “Mahatma” into an empty signifier that can be invested with various interpretations by interested parties: Gandhi as saint, martyr, seeker of truth, or arbiter of the Partition. One way of by-passing this problem is to look at Gandhi with “clinical detachment” (Auden’s phrase), something that C.B. Dalal tries to achieve in his biography of Gandhi’s eldest son, Harilal.

Dalal’s work (translated admirably by Tridip Suhrud from the Gujarati) is also “deeply Gandhian”. He is “moved by an acute desire to undo a wrong, to rescue a life from a world of perpetual rumours, shadows and darkness”, and reveals the Mahatma not as the father of a nation, but rather as pater familias. Since he was neither Gandhi’s associate nor an ashramite, Dalal’s account is impersonal, disinterested. He is excited by the obscure and threatening presence of Harilal on the pristine orb of the ‘Gandhi’ myth.

Harilal appeared in Gandhi’s life as his nemesis. He remained an insoluble conundrum in the Gandhian scheme of justice, a figure inspiring pity, fear, love and pathos. Like a classic tragic protagonist, he was an eminently upright man — a loving husband, a doting father and, in his early years, a devoted son. As a young man, he had been incarcerated in South Africa for his involvement in satyagraha, though how far it was self-motivated is unclear. Young Gandhi, as he was known in South Africa, had been deeply influenced by his father. He too wanted to study in England, become a barrister, and be respected. But he was never sent to school, he failed the matric examinations thrice, became a vagabond and increasingly addicted to drink and women.

Harilal was the prodigal son, a steadfast rebel, sometimes even abjectly so, who had refused to accept his father’s greatness unconditionally. His father’s selfless benevolence towards strangers, even at the cost of appearing uncharitable towards his own sons, had intrigued Harilal. When Gandhi elected a distant nephew for a scholarship to study in England instead of one of his own sons (for whom it had been originally offered), Harilal was shattered, his sense of fairness was irreparably hurt, and, soon after, he left home forever. Since then, it was the story of a decline and fall: unsuccessful business ventures, failed attempts at self-education, the early death of a beloved wife, and hefty debts. He was mercenary enough to exploit his ‘credentials’ as the Mahatma’s son, as well as a brazen iconoclast who wrote a ‘semi-public’ letter to his father (another doomed melancholic, Franz Kafka, had done something similar), exposing the several injustices that the patriarch had inflicted upon him, his brothers and mother. He ran away from the life of temperance and prudence that Gandhi upheld, and underwent the most un-Gandhian metamorphosis. He had the temperament of a Falstaff and the will of a Kafka.

One of the invaluable appendices to this book is an extract from Vanmala Parikh’s life of Kasturba. Around 1941, during the winter of the patriarch, Harilal emerged out of thin mist on the platform of Katni station, as the Jabalpur Mail arrived with Bapu and Ba. “Kasturba Mata ki Jai”, he called out, coming up to the window and holding out an orange to his mother. He was “feeble and weak...all the front teeth were missing”. With his mother he pleaded, “Ba, you have to eat this orange...only you must eat the orange”, while for his father he had one chilling message, “I want to tell you that you have achieved greatness because of Ba.” Before the train moved away, Harilal retorted to Kasturba never to remind him whose son he was: “There is no redemption from my condition.” If Tushar’s work is a grand memorial to his celebrated forefather, Harilal’s life is an elegy to the persistence of memory.