Gandhi’s Gift: The Markings of an Outsider--
The Migrant in Oceania
--Satendra Nandan*
*A talk given at the National University of Samoa at the SPACLALS conference.
‘Culture, Crisis and Change in Oceania’ is a vital topic for many of us at the beginning of a new millennium. Often we’ve to go back to the past to understand the present and illuminate the future. Writers often provide us both the archives and the architecture. In the presence of so many writers here today, I want to talk about a person who is not generally regarded as a writer. Yet, no man or woman, to my knowledge wrote more than Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s hand. Not even Marx could beat the Mahatma in that creative act.
It is in the acts of writing that Gandhi, a man of deepest contemplation and thoughtful action, attained some of his most remarkable insights and perceptions.
Let me begin with chapter eight in John’s Gospel:
Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.
And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.
And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,
They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.
Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?
This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?
She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.
Until I had read that passage, I had assumed that like many prophetic religious leaders, Jesus was illiterate. While reading that passage, I began to realise that it is in the acts of writing, those marks on the ground, not commandments carved on stone, that impelled Christ to come up with the most compassionate judgement I can think of: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’. That is the precise quote, not ‘cast the first stone’.
This threshold of truth is vital to our understanding, I feel, of Gandhi’s truth: a threshold constantly approached and constantly departed from: to hold in a single thought reality and justice. Richard Ellmann’s statement about Yeatsian idea of a poet:
He wishes to show how brute force may be transmogrified, how we can sacrifice ourselves…to our imagined selves which offer far higher standards than anything offered by social convention. If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer, and this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men (and women) do in their degree.
Gandhi not only alchemised all these in a single personality, he showed, by his words and actions, the possibilities in every person.
In this conversation with you, I want to talk about Gandhi and writing; how the act of writing, in the very act so to speak, may provide us with insights into our lives and life around us that no other human activity of the mind does with the same imaginative force, that grows out of the most creative piece of earth beneath our feet, whether we live on islands or continents. Admittedly so much of human civilisation is based on orality not literacy. I give my students an example: if we assume that human beings have been on this wounded planet for say 500,000 years, reduce that to the life of a single individual aged 50, then this person began writing only after 49 years and 364 days – that is, on the last day of his fiftieth year!
Imagine the implications of that on an island-continent of Australia, and the islands of the South Pacific. Nothing is written in Australia until the last 220 years. Yet how deeply writing has changed, shaped, and represented our structures of reality, both within us and without. Terra nullius is not the only problem; it is the idea of a tabula rasa on which we have inscribed whole civilisations, the marks of homicidal cultures. This awareness challenges our ways of thinking and writing both aesthetically and ethically. One can, of course, extend its manifold implications to the smallest islands of the largest ocean, the Pacific.
But let me return to Mohandas Gandhi. ‘His words’, someone said, ‘flow like a river’: his collected works fill more than 100 volumes but only one of these, Satyagraha in South Africa, was written as a book: virtually all the rest comprise speeches, letters, conversations, columns, pamphlets, leaflets, petitions and prayers. He seems to have advised Mulk Raj Anand, the novelist who died recently aged 98, to write pamphlets, not novels.
Gandhi’s writings fit in well with what Ronald Barthes saw as unnumbered narratives around us:
The narratives of this world are numberless . . . Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting . . . stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.
As for Gandhi’s narrativity, here is Louis Fischer:
No man knows himself or can describe himself with fidelity. But he can reveal himself. This is especially true of Gandhi. He believed in revealing himself. He regarded secrecy as the enemy of freedom – not only the freedom of India but the freedom of man (or woman). He exposed even the innermost personal thoughts which individuals regard as private. In nearly fifty years of prolific writing, speaking and subjecting his ideas to the test of actions, he painted a detailed self-portrait of his mind, heart and soul.
Gandhi’s writings may not be “literature” or even philosophical treatises, as many understand these, but they are deeply creative acts of self-awareness and reflexivity. It is, I believe in the processes of writing, in these individual acts of meditation, that his deepest values and his most passionate vision evolved, and continued to develop as ‘experiments in truth’: writing for him was moksha, his term; love was action and his acts in words defined his deepest sense of humanity, often not without a touch of humour. ‘Faced with the brutality of historical onslaught’, most of us perceive the futility of our acts – but words can lead us to discover ‘the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life’. They may verify our singularity and create a consciousness through what Elias Cannetti has called ‘the conscience of words’. They gave value and breath to an inner reality.
This air of freedom was Gandhi’s vital breath, his prana, to which his silence and words gave meaning, value and vision: his desperate holiness of life. Canetti writes:
To nothing is man so open as to air…Air is the last common property. It belongs to all people collectively…even the poorest may partake of it. And if a man should starve to death, then at least he has breathed until the end…
Human breath is a dangerous thing: it can shake empires, as Gandhi showed..
Patrick White, our own Nobel laureate in literature, used a quote from Gandhi’s 1922 essay as an epigraph to his first novel Happy Valley (1939). In 1958, after the publication of the Tree of man (1955) and Voss (1957), White wrote that he began writing to discover ‘the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry which alone make bearable the lives of ordinary men and women’. White goes on to say, ‘There’s always the possibility the book lent, a record played, may lead to communication between human beings. There’s the possibility that one may be helping to people a barely inhabited country with a race possessed of understanding’. In 1982 in his “A Letter to Humanity’ read to 40,000 people on Palm Sunday in Hyde Park, Sydney, he quotes a marvellous passage from Gandhi, ‘this great human being’s words’.
This understanding and human decency that White, as an artist, was struggling towards is also part of Gandhi’s quest. And like White, Gandhi was an outsider. Historians and biographers, such as Anthony J. Perel and Judith M. Brown, have written about Gandhi’s exile and how this exilic existence, especially in South Africa, moulded him into a very different kind of an Indian leader; indeed a unique individual with passionately universal concerns. They are concerned with the makings of an outsider; I wish to add the markings to that perception. As Edward Said, said so much ‘modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees’. And Gandhi, when asked what he thought of western civilisation, had remarked: it would be a good idea!
When Gandhi left for England, at the age of 19, he was excommunicated by the elders of his caste and clan; when he returned as a dandy lawyer, he was a professional failure. Fortunately he got a small assignment in Natal where the so-called ‘Arab merchants’ from India were making money amongst the indentured labourers and Africans. It is among these people, against overwhelming power, of a racial political culture that young Gandhi shaped and sharpened his unassailable weapon of satyagraha. .
Gandhi entered the world historical stage not in India but in South Africa. . . . In the first place, it was in South Africa, not in India, that he acquired his vision of Indian nationalism, a fact which differentiates his nationalism, from that of other Indian nationalists. His idea of nationalism does not start with the locality and then gradually extend itself to the province and finally the nation. Quite the reverse. He was an Indian, then a Gujarati, and only then a Kathiavadi. . . . Secondly, it is in the politics of Transvaal, not Champaran, or Bardoli, that he first developed his unique political philosophy and political techniques.
Or again Antoinette Burton writes:
Gandhi’s peripatetic youth, and the impact it had on creating, sustaining, and popularising a nationalist consciousness, would seem to suggest that being a displaced subject of imperial rule was consequential to political action – that there was something about being in temporary or permanent exile that nurtured resistance by changing the terms, the very grounds, upon which the violence of colonialism was enacted.
Vidia Naipaul, that trenchant observer of the Indian scene and psyche, has written in India: A Wounded Civilisation that South Africa gave Gandhi a racial sense. Coming as Naipaul does from Trinidad, the grandson of an indentured labourer, educated in Oxford, and who began his literary career at the BBC in Langham House in London, one can understand how this racial sense is so vital to a novelist’s perceptions. I, however, do not think that Gandhi developed a racial sense, living though he was in a most brutal racist regime. He acquired in South Africa a sense of being an Indian - and his ‘Indian’ does not refer to a race: its origins are in a river; there’s a whole ocean called the Indian Ocean. One can talk about an Indian culture or civilisation made of multitudinous streams.
Sunil Khilnani in his splendid book, The Idea of India (1997), says that at the end of the nineteenth century no one in India considered himself an Indian: most were obsessed with caste and clan, region and religious affiliations, identities and identifications:
…before the nineteenth century, no residents of the subcontinent would have identified themselves as Indian. There existed intricate, ramified vocabularies of common understanding, which classified people by commonalities of lineage, locality and sect; but ‘Indian’ would not have figured among its terms’ (p 154).
Nehru, too, wrote: ‘Four hundred million separate individual men and women, each differing from the other, each living in a private universe of thought and feeling.’
So South Africa gave Gandhi a different sense of Indianness: not the Indianness of India oppressively camouflaged by caste and subjugated by the Raj. This amazing insight of double oppression he acquired pre-eminently among the indentured Indians. In his autobiography, he has a remarkable chapter entitled ‘Balasundaram’. Let me quote the first paragraph:
The heart’s earnest and pure desire is always fulfilled. In my own experience I have often seen this rule verified. Service of the poor has been my heart’s desire, and it has always thrown me amongst the poor and enabled me to identify myself with them.
Then in the last paragraph he writes something quite magnificent – I am not aware of any Indian before him who could have written about a coolie in this mode; the quality that is so distinctive of a truly transfiguring imagination: how one imagines the Other: this essential ingredient of an ethical stance: ‘to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own’:
I have said that Balasundaram entered my office, head-gear in hand. There was a particular pathos about the situation which also showed our humiliation. I have already narrated the incident when I was asked to take off my turban. A practice had been forced on every indentured labourer and every Indian stranger to take off his head-gear when visiting a European, whether the head-gear was a cap, a turban, a scarf wrapped around the head, a salute even with both hands was not sufficient. Balasundaram thought that he should follow the practice even with me. This was the first case in my experience. I felt humiliated and asked him to tie up his scarf. He did so not without a certain hesitation, but I could perceive the pleasure on his face.
It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings.
Here, for the first time, an indentured labourer is written about by his name: normally he was known only by his left thumb mark and a number. Then you see how humiliated Gandhi feels when Balasundram takes off his headgear – Gandhi had already experienced this in Durban when he refused to take off his turban in the magistrate’s court – the incident became known as ‘A Turban in Durban!’ This recognition of the dignity – human not racial or communal – of the Other became his fundamental belief – as if in respecting the self-respect of the Other, his own self-respect was enhanced. He gave feature, voice and identity to a voiceless community, to a people often defined as helots of Empire. This is a thought as radical as life itself: because in his writing the voiceless become audible, the injustices visible, lives legible, lines readable. New accents are introduced in humanity’s conversation.
And finally the extraordinary perception of the final sentence: ‘It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings’. Richard Attenborough in his In Search of Gandhi, written after the film Gandhi was made, says that he carried that single sentence for 20 years before he was able to make the film: he is reading Louis Fischer’s book on Gandhi: Then I read something which knocked me for six:
Gandhi was walking along the pavement in South Africa with a fellow Indian and two white South Africans were walking towards them. As was expected in those days, the early 1890s, the two Indians stepped into the gutter and the whites continued on the sidewalk. After they had passed, Gandhi turned to his companion and said, ‘It has always been a mystery to me’ – he wasn’t angry, he was expressing surprise – ‘it has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.’
I was thunderstruck by the extraordinary perception of this remark, made by a young Indian in South Africa at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three. And that was only on the forty-eighth page of a 505-page book. There was no doubt whatsoever that I was going to finish that book while my eyes remained open. The book was going to be revelation. Through Fischer I was going to learn about a fellow human being who had shaken the world . . . (pp 44-45)