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159 pages

English

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Ved Mehta s book on Gandhi (1977) is one of the great portraits of the political leader. Travelling the world to talk to Gandhi s family, friends and followers, drawing his daily life in exacting detail, Mehta gives us a nuanced and complex picture of the great man and brings him vividly alive.

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Lettres et linguistique

Memoir

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	15 décembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9789351185772
Langue	English

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VED MEHTA

Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles
Contents
About the Author
Praise for the Book
Foreword
Subtler and More Lasting Shapes
Bapu
Relics and Monuments
Editors, Biographers, and Bibliographers
Family
Benefactors
In the Steps of the Autobiographer and His Biographers
Banya Origins
Kathiawari Boy
Rajkot Student in England
Barrister
Community Servant
Satyagrahi in South Africa
Satyagrahi in India
Constructive Worker
Martyr
The Company They Keep
Nonviolence: Brahmacharya and Goat s Milk
Revolution: The Constructive Programme and Its Mahatmas
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles
VED MEHTA is the author of twenty-seven acclaimed books of fiction and non-fiction. He was born in 1934 in Lahore and educated largely in the USA. A staff writer on the New Yorker from 1960 to 1993, he has won many awards and is a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and the Royal Society of Literature. Mehta lives in New York.
Praise for the Book
Ved Mehta has done a service to those who know India by extricating the man from the mythology - Guardian
A very readable account dotted with sharply-etched portraits of the many Gandhi disciples and experts he interviewed. Where he is at his best is dealing with Gandhi as a person - New York Times
Mr Mehta is refreshingly fair about the British Raj and, though he treats Gandhi with the utmost sympathy, sees him clearly. The book should enhance admiration among those who truly love Gandhi and should persuade many what a wonderful whole man he was. Gandhi, who had an immense sense of humour, would have liked the book very much - Sunday Times (London)
A remarkable book . . . which contains more truth about the Mahatma than . . . ever heard or read - Times of India
A refreshing portrayal of the Mahatma, historically accurate, yet pushing beyond history to enquire into the fate of Gandhi s ideas and disciples in independent India - Economist
Mehta s work touches much more than the personality of Gandhi, for it deals with the more general issue of the evolution and maintenance of a cultural symbol. [He] has given us a sensitive view of India and a personalized experience of the meaning of Mahatma Gandhi. His contribution will be useful for those who want to learn more about Gandhi but will be even more valuable for those who strive toward an understanding of India - American Historical Review
Mehta, as we have come to expect, writes with fluency and elegance. His presentation of the historical background to Gandhi s career is capable. . . The main strength of the book lies in the fascination and power of the oral testimony painstakingly collected by Mehta - New Society
The problem which Mehta has faced and solved is to write of a great man in such a way that we see his warts and yet also see his greatness; and not merely as two odd facts, not really related to each other but happening to be true of the same man . . . but on the contrary as two essentially connected sides of the complex unity of an extraordinary man. This patient and humane book shows the author s understanding and wisdom - Balliol Annual Record
Ved Mehta has sifted an enormous amount of evidence . . . to illuminate his [Gandhi s] life. The book makes for fascinating reading - Freethinker
Foreword
The life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma, meaning great soul, was an honorific title) is abundantly documented; perhaps no life in any period has been more so. Certainly it was an extraordinary life, fusing, as it did, ancient Hindu religion and culture and modern revolutionary ideas about politics and society-from any viewpoint, a strange combination of perceptions and values. There are at present about four hundred biographies of Gandhi, yet, as Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in the foreword to one of the weightiest of them, D. G. Tendulkar s eight volume work Mahatma , no man can write a real life of Gandhi, unless he is as big as Gandhi. In Nehru s view, the best that anyone could hope to do was to conjure up some pictures of that life: Many pictures rise in my mind of this man, whose eyes were often full of laughter and yet were pools of infinite sadness. But the picture that is dominant and most significant is as I saw him marching, staff in hand, to Dandi on the Salt March in 1930. Here was the pilgrim on his quest of Truth, quiet, peaceful, determined, and fearless, who would continue that quest and pilgrimage, regardless of consequences. Leaving aside the riddle of who but Gandhi could write his real life, the writer s task would have to be to discover and truthfully portray the heroic but human pilgrim amid the myths that began proliferating around him when he started his quest and that have inevitably become more numerous because the quest ended in martyrdom. In fact, the very core of Gandhi s thought, presented and developed in tens of thousands of his writings and speeches-his search for God through celibacy and cleanliness, through mastery of all human needs and functions, mental and bodily, and through insistence on personal hygiene and public sanitation-has been obscured by mythologizers fearful of debasing and sensationalizing their martyred hero. Perhaps because Indians rely for information more on the spoken than on the written word, and because they still live close to the soil, with an awareness of the mystery of the land, myths can become established in India as truths, sometimes within only a few years. In A Passage to India , E. M. Forster touched on this aspect of Indian reality when he described how in India the death of a character took subtler and more lasting shapes than the actual facts warranted:
A legend sprang up that an Englishman had killed his mother for trying to save an Indian s life-and there was just enough truth in this to cause annoyance to the authorities. . . . Nonsense of this type is more difficult to combat than a solid lie. . . . At one period two distinct tombs containing Esmiss Esmoor s remains were reported. . . . Mr McBryde visited them both and saw signs of the beginning of a cult. . . . There s propaganda behind all this, he said, forgetting that a hundred years ago, when Europeans still made their home in the country-side and appealed to its imagination, they occasionally became local demons after death.
Forster s Esmiss Esmoor and his demons were only local manifestations. Gandhi was a national manifestation. He himself invested many of his gestures with special symbolic meaning, and at one point or another somebody has sanctified his every action and utterance, so that today in India-and elsewhere-there exists not one Gandhi but hundreds of Gandhis. An eyewitness on the BBC once recalled a day when he and Gandhi and some friends were out for a walk and suddenly a tree sprang into bloom out of season and a cobra bent its hood at Gandhi s feet as if in salutation.
Because I was interested in exploring the subtler and more lasting shapes that Gandhi has assumed, and because it is in the memories of his closest followers that the pictures live, the myths take their shape, and his message is propagated, I travelled through India, beginning in 1971, and I visited Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Japan, England, and Austria, in order to collect the views of various specialists and the oral testimony of Gandhians in a cross-section of society. I have also made use of recordings, memoirs, and press clippings, and of Gandhi s own writings and speeches, in an effort both to demythologize Gandhi and to capture something of the nature of his influence on his followers and the nature of the influence of their interpretations of his life on India. Indeed, the use of the facts and myths of Gandhi s life may help to determine the future not only of India but of numerous countries that have a stake either in India s well-being or in Gandhi s thought; in a time of widespread corruption and of ruthless political opportunism and repression, people have increasingly been turning to Gandhi for inspiration and an understanding of the role of principles in democratic government. His ideas have application wherever there are poor, oppressed people-even in the richest country in the world, as has been demonstrated by, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez. What follows, therefore, is as much about how Gandhi affected and animated others, how his ideas are now understood and applied, how he is enshrined and remembered, how he lives on, as it is about Mahatma Gandhi himself. It necessarily portrays at the same time his closest disciples and relatives, who are now mostly very old men and women, and in some cases are quite eccentric and enfeebled by their age. For a number of these people who had the opportunity of knowing him and of living in his presence, Gandhi was Christ, and they themselves are now his apostles, trying to spread his word through an indifferent world.

Subtler and More Lasting Shapes
Bapu
Here are the recollections of an apostle who conversed with me for several days as she travelled through the villages of Central India doing Gandhi s work:
It is said that the Taj Mahal looks different to different people, depending on where they re standing and particularly on what time of day it is. I feel rather like that about Bapu. [Gandhi was affectionately called Bapu, which means father. ] Sometimes I remember him as small and unimpressive-looking, other times as a tall silhouette. Sometimes I think he must have had rickets as a child, because in my mind I picture him as crooked-his bones crooked, his head crooked, his mouth crooked, his shoulders crooked. He even sat a little crooked, with his head slightly tilted to one side. But other times I remember him as having perfect posture, and wonder if I ever saw his shoulders stoop. Then, again, I think he had weak muscles in the back of his neck and he might have been a little self-conscious about it and