Last autumn I was asked to consider submitting a paper for presentation at the 3rd biennial conference of the GSA (then to be and since in fact held at SOAS earlier this month). I was a bit hesitant because the subject I had in mind was rather huge but in the end decided to go for it, even though I knew what it entailed. The idea had occurred to me in the light of the publicity surrounding Jaswant Singh`s new biography of Jinnah that had just come out, because I had always been fascinated by Jinnah, and while a lot was known about Gandhi, the thought of putting them together under a critical microscope was exciting, if daunting.
I spent the next few weeks just mulling over the project, thinking about how I was going to approach it and generally delving into my own memory bank to retrieve and refresh all that I could recall in outline. It was like revisiting old territory, looking anew at things one had known for a long time, that in my case I had grown up with - as part of the folklore and received wisdom during childhood - and what I had read in bits and pieces. That was to become the starting line - the mental compass pointing to the research and study that lay ahead. For me, a second generation Kenya Asian, born in 1941, the names Gandhi and Jinnah were inextricably linked with the Indian independence movement, which had cast a vicarious shadow over the evolution and standing of the Indian community in colonial British East Africa (and indeed which had also acted as a spur to an African nationalist consciousness that was just emerging).
I then had to decide on the scope of the study and how I was going to undertake it. I settled on a number of books and went about ordering them, made searches of other material that was available and set a tentative time-table for myself. It was clear that this was to be an exercise in reexamining and reappraising the character, personalities and achievements of the two giants, with the benefit of hindsight and from a distance in terms of time and space. It was also going to be a rediscovery of my own attitude to and relationship with the land of my ancestors. As it happened, I had only recently finished reading M G Vassanji`s `The Assassin`s Song` and was on the point of starting his `A Place Within: Rediscovering India` (see my Review of 2009, below). So not only were his writings to resonate as I progressed through my project, but it was an added bonus to meet and have informal conversations with him as a distinguished keynote speaker at the conference.
I began the research and reading in earnest just as 2010 dawned. I had read Gandhi`s autobiography as a child, and again three decades later, after seeing the film `Gandhi`. I had also read Wolpert`s biography of Jinnah and seen the movie of Jinnah`s life based on Akbar Ahmed`s script. And of course, as stated above, the story of Indian independence was part of one`s cultural inheritance, so to speak, and so I was familiar with the key dates and events associated with it, as well as the names of most of the principal characters involved therein - Jinnah, Nehru, Patel, Bose, the Aga Khan et al. But what I was now engaged in was documenting the history and the contribution and interactions of Gandhi and Jinnah vis-a-vis themselves and countless others who featured in that saga, and reducing all that into a readable narrative of reasonable length. So while not exactly starting from a blank page, it was nevertheless quite a challenge to weave all the mass of detail and characters into the frame.
I spent January and the first half of February in reading up, going to the British Library, cross-referencing, making notes and generally being thoroughly absorbed in forming a picture of the two men that could be translated into words, within a structured template. I listened to sound archival recordings of the voices of Gandhi, Aga Khan III, Jinnah, Mountbatten, Nehru and a host of other luminaries. These provided a vital missing link to complete the mental image of them that one had formed. I then started to write. A passage in the Aga Khan`s memoirs gave me the right opening into the main theme and the rest just followed. It took me about 7 weeks to finish the job and polish up the draft (though it still remains to be edited and revised) comfortably within my target date of a week before Easter. The final tally was a document of a little over 15,000 words, one of my longest pieces.
In the process, I gained some valuable insights about many other principal players whose lives or actions had interacted with those of Gandhi and Jinnah. For example, I learned that Nehru was both a smoker and a meat-eater (both of which habits were known to Gandhi, though he did not smoke in front of Gandhi) and according to one account at least he had a relationship, or an affair, with Padmaja Naidu (daughter of Sarojini Naidu) after his wife Kamala`s death in the mid-1930s, or how Churchill, whose visceral hatred of Gandhi was legendary, had reacted to a picture in the Daily Telegraph of Lord and Lady Mountbatten sitting ("squatting on the ground") cross-legged at the funeral of Gandhi, or indeed that he had given more than tacit support to Jinnah in his quest for Pakistan - and, more on Churchill, how after the trauma of partition and independence had died down, he and Nehru were to have civilised exchanges as diplomatic equals, as well as Old Harrovians, at Commonwealth summits but more than that how he was charmed by the social grace of Vijyalakshmi Pandit, sister of Nehru and India`s High Commissioner to London, who showed no bitterness towards the British for their imperialist excesses!
As Alex Tunzelmann however observes in a note on the Bibliography underpinning her book `Indian Summer`, "(t)here are two great problems facing any historian of the end of the British Empire in India and Pakistan: the sheer quantity of evidence, and the extreme nature of bias in it". And she adds that a huge amount of literature has been "written with the benefit of considerable hindsight, and with overwhelming political motives". Whether her own work is free from these influences is a matter of judgment, but there could be no doubt that one had to navigate this minefield with caution, even in the context of a limited and compact paper like mine. There was simply too much material to look at and a lot more that was available; one had to be selective.
Of two things however I could be sure: that what had stayed with me ever since I first read Gandhi`s autobiography (as a twelve or thirteen year old boy) - ie. about his struggles with his conscience (as a teenage husband, torn between his lust and duty to his parents; his early experience of being caught telling lies; his time in London and training as a barrister; how during his first voyage to South Africa he had had a narrow encounter with a prostitute as he passed through Mombasa and Zanzibar; and how he fought the authorities in South Africa for a better status for the settled Indian community there and above all his insistence on `truth` and `non-violence` - was well borne out all these years later through research and re-reading of the texts, and secondly that both he and Jinnah had been my subliminal role-models in inspiring me to also read law and train as a barrister at Lincoln`s Inn 10 years later (and some seven decades after they had done that).
As for my feelings towards the sub-continent however these have not changed. It is the land of my forebears to which I have a cultural and ethnic affinity, yes, but no legal or political allegiance. My sense of nationality does not extend to its people; I cannot relate to them on a civic or social level.
I did present my paper, entitled "Gandhi and Jinnah: a study in commonality and contrast" at the conference and have to say I was quite pleased with the outcome! Indeed it was because I was so engrossed in the project that I missed my own deadline of updating this blog at least once a month, for March, and so now I hasten to do that for April.
RAMNIK SHAH
Copyright
Surrey England
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