(Note: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was one of the most prolific writers in history. His collected works run into 100 volumes, around 50,000 pages, and nearly 15 million words. Only a scholar of Gandhi’s life would have the patience and effort to study all of them. For a general reader, we need something more handy and concise that contains the essence of Gandhi’s thought without diluting the breadth and depth of his personal, civic, and political activities. Recently, I found a book called ” The Gandhi Reader,” a sourcebook on Gandhi’s life through his writing published in 1956, eight years after he was assassinated. The book is edited by Homer.A. Jack, a Christian social activist who had great admiration for Gandhi. This book has a Judicious selection of Gandhi’s works from his earliest days to the thick of India’s freedom struggle and gives a good sense of the evolution of Gandhi’s thoughts and actions. This essay is based on a connection that occurred to me when I was reading the book. Its premise is purely speculative and not backed by any scholar, as far as I know. Sometimes, it is interesting to muse on a what-if in history. Think of this essay as one such.)
There is a common trend among nations today to reclaim their native identities while continuing to benefit from global participation. Countries that achieved independence in the last hundred years, after spending a few decades stabilizing the nation – culturally, socially, and economically – have begun to rethink and restructure the fabric of their society on cultural and social identities that were lost during the process of gaining their national freedoms. Even Trump’s “America First” rhetoric ( though not for the same reasons as other nations) is part of such a shift in thinking, reflecting a push to prioritize national interests. After seventy-five years, India is going down the same path. Since the BJP assumed leadership, India has seen a significant transformation in many spheres, but undergirding this change is a deliberate design to return to India’s “roots” and reassert native identities. This reassertion of cultural identity was precisely what Gandhi had envisioned when he chartered the philosophical principles of India’s freedom struggle, focusing not just on political independence but on reclaiming the essence of being Indian. Though Gandhi had evolved his brand of non-violence in South Africa, his demonstrations and protests there were still within the social and civic structures of the British. But the Gandhi, who returned from South Africa to lead the Indian freedom movement, brought with him a transformed vision of what India’s independence should look like. How did that happen?
Gandhi’s transformation from a suit-clad, aspiring lawyer in London and South Africa to a loincloth-draped leader of India’s freedom struggle is a story deeply etched in the Indian psyche. The twentieth century has turned him into a cult figure, an international icon. Statues of him sporting his toothless and uninhibited smile, long aquiline nose, cane in hand, and confident stride are found in most parts of the world as symbols of Indigenous resistance without violence and dignity. His tragic death cemented his place in the collective imagination of people around the world. This legendary status of Gandhi sometimes complicates understanding the real man behind the image. Numerous books and research papers since the time Gandhi passed away have tried to unwrap the real Gandhi and understand the roots of his beliefs and principles, yet his life remains elusive. His autobiography, written with a candor rarely seen, only shows the development of the moral Gandhi and not the shrewd political acumen he displayed in resisting the British.
Gandhi’s vision of India’s independence was rooted in his firm belief that Indians did not need Western social structures to govern themselves. This was different position from what he had in South Africa. Non-violence was always his credo, but Gandhi’s resistance to Western impositions on non-Western societies happened before he arrived in India, a change and stance that he articulated clearly in Hind Swaraj. It is interesting to speculate what caused this change, what made this man who loved Western institutions suddenly turn around and question them. The catalyst could have been an unlikely English writer, one of the greatest essayists and storytellers in the English language, a thinker who smoked cigars, drank beer, and composed many of his essays while sitting in an offbeat pub on Fleet Street. Because we have edified Gandhi in our hearts, we like to believe that Gandhi’s vision for India’s freedom movement rooted in Indianness was his own, born out of his deep spiritual leanings. However, that may not have been the case. An essay by an Englishman could have precipitated the change he brought home.
What is generally known about Gandhi, as a seminal moment in his life, is the story of him being physically thrown out of a first-class train compartment in South Africa. It was, for sure, Gandhi’s first real taste of discrimination on a personal level—an experience that provoked and formed his struggle against white rule. This incident occurred in 1893. However, it was not until 1909, nearly fifteen years later, that Gandhi wrote his seminal treatise, a short book titled “Hind Swaraj,” outlining his vision for the Indian freedom struggle and the institutions needed to govern India. During that year, Gandhi’s vision for the independence movement took a distinctly “Indian” turn. The book, “Hind Swaraj,” or “Home Rule,” was written during a November 1909 sea journey between London and South Africa. In a flurry of inspired writing, Gandhi completed this slim volume in seven days in Gujarati, later translated into English and French. For the first time in that book, Gandhi articulated a comprehensive vision of the Indian freedom struggle rooted in Indian values rather than principles borrowed from the West. The book, when read as part of Gandhi’s voluminous writings, reveals a startling transformation of his vision. Until then, Gandhi had merely wanted the British to leave India and relinquish control. His idea of freedom was framed in the idioms of Western thought and institutions, as enunciated by his beloved philosophers David Hume and Herbert Spencer. However, in “Hind Swaraj,” we see a distinct change in tone. In its hundred-odd pages, Gandhi lays out a new charter: that the Indian freedom struggle must be based on its history, civilization, and values, not on anyone else’s terms.
But what triggered this change? What prompted Gandhi to write “Hind Swaraj” feverishly during that journey? The answer may lie elsewhere. In October 1909 – exactly a month before Gandhi’s sea journey – G.K. Chesterton wrote a column for the London News while sitting in a bar. It was titled “India for Indians.” Chesterton wrote it out of frustration (and because he had a deadline to meet) with what Indians were demanding in the name of independence. He was annoyed with the well-educated Indian civil servants who formed the dominant force in India’s freedom struggle, drawn from the country’s elite. They were merely asking for old wine in new bottles. It seemed to Chesterton that Indians wanted the British to leave, but they wished to preserve everything British—a position he found absurd and ironic at the same time.
Chesterton, let us be clear, was no great enthusiast of Hinduism or Indian values. He carried his own biases, but he was wise enough to intuit that true national freedom for any country, not just India, could only be attained on a nation’s own terms. Anything less, he argued, was a shame. In his forceful and incisive style, Chesterton criticized the current crop of Indian patriotism as misplaced and misdirected. In his article “India for Indians,” he argued that the demands made by Indian leaders were simply for the British to leave while maintaining the same institutions and structures, which he found counterproductive to true independence. In a striking passage, Chesterton writes:
“When all is said, there is a national distinction between a people asking for its own ancient life and a people asking for things that have been wholly invented by somebody else. There is a difference between a conquered people demanding its own institutions and the same people demanding the institutions of the conqueror.”
Or again, in one of his finest observations on how the Indian freedom struggle should evolve, Chesterton writes (and I request readers to indulge me in quoting this lengthy passage):
“…Suppose an Indian said: ‘I heartily wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Every system has its sins: and we prefer our own. There would have been dynastic wars; but I prefer dying in battle to dying in hospital. There would have been despotism; but I prefer one king whom I hardly ever see to a hundred kings regulating my diet and my children. There would have been pestilence; but I would sooner die of the plague than die of toil and vexation in order to avoid the plague. There would have been religious differences dangerous to public peace; but I think religion more important than peace. Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere; the amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your best Republic is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it.’ Suppose an Indian said that, I should call him an Indian Nationalist, or, at least, an authentic Indian, and I think it would be very hard to answer him. But the Indian Nationalists whose works I have read simply say with ever-increasing excitability, ‘Give me a ballot-box. Provide me with a Ministerial dispatch-box. Hand me over the Lord Chancellor’s wig. I have a natural right to be Prime Minister. I have a heaven-born claim to introduce a Budget. My soul is starved if I am excluded from the Editorship of the Daily Mail,’ or words to that effect…”
This is Chesterton at his best—writing with wit, acuity, and brilliant prose.
Chesterton’s article was published in the Illustrated London News on September 18th, 1909—a month before Gandhi’s pivotal journey. Gandhi never missed reading the London news, and Gandhi had likely read this article. “Hind Swaraj,” when read in the light of Chesterton’s essay, appears to crystallize Chesterton’s arguments. Chesterton’s brilliant synopsis might have acted as a catalyst for the ideas that were slowly forming in Gandhi’s mind. Hind Swaraj could have been the result of the timely clarity that Chesterton’s article provided. When Gandhi eventually arrived in India to lead the Freedom movement, almost every member of the struggle had read the “Hind Swaraj.” It was his most famous book during that period. No one asked Gandhi where his ideas had come from. Gandhi arrived in India with a resounding welcome; no one questioned him about anything. Whether Chesterton’s article served as the catalyst or Gandhi’s independently developed ideas became less significant in comparison to the impact these ideas had. It was enough that what he had written in Hind Swaraj had lit the pyre of colonial rule.
None of the above takes anything away from Gandhi’s leadership and role during the freedom struggle. His vision was staggering in its nonviolent audacity and perplexing in its demands of the colonial rulers. It was a unique blend of ideas that had never been tried before. Chesterton could have played a role in forming that vision. We will never know for sure. History is full of what-ifs. We select what we like to believe and interpret it as truth. That a relatively obscure essay by an Englishman, written for money, could have influenced the thinking of one of the most remarkable men who ever lived may seem blasphemous to many.
But who knows, it could have happened !!