Great Reputations: Gandhi | HistoryExtra
"'The relationship he has with his father and sex so I mean when his father is is dying, it's it's Hindu tradition that you ought to be, the male children should be at the the father's bedside when that's happening. He is caught going off with his then arranged married bride to have sex and his father then dies in the meantime so there, there's a lot of personal guilt that that goes through his entire life from that period and I'm sure we'll get on to how this might have affected his somewhat eccentric views about, about sex and sexuality'...
‘He married young, he was only 13 and that, that wasn't at all unusual in in India at the time but he was always angry about it later on, that his parents had forced him into this, these acts of carnal desire when he said he was too young to to be able to resist, didn't have the self-control. Also couldn't have made the spiritual decision which he so much wanted to do later to withhold himself from sexual activity. So that was one thing. There was a certain amount of resentment to to towards his family and and and he was always even aggressive about marriages, Hindu marriages are a complete waste of money. You get all these people together, you give them too much food, you have to throw it away and there's, there's waste and so so so some of the the ordinary aspects of family life that we would consider to be something which was warm and and encouraging and embracing he really resented'... 'When he's completed his studies he goes back to India and he's an absolutely dreadful lawyer. He he he knows an awful lot about British law and he studied Roman law to which is this the sort of academic apprenticeship that that you get in at the temples. but he doesn't know anything about Indian courts or how to plead. And his first appearance in an Indian court is just an embarrassment. He stands, he can't bring himself to speak, he sits down again, he returns the fee to the person who gave him the work...
His first appearance in an Indian court is just an embarrassment. He stands, he can't bring himself to speak, he sits down again, he returns the fee to the person who gave him the work. He's just dreadful. And so when he sees the opportunity being advertised to someone needed in South Africa, want an Indian lawyer in South Africa to to settle a particularly important dispute, it's really Gandhi's last chance at his profession. It's, I failed here, let's try somewhere else. And of course it is South Africa which really is the making of Gandhi... [On the Boer War] In some ways it's quite ironic for the the the sort of prophet of nonviolence, that the battlefield is the place where he kind of starts to work this stuff out, and I don't think he has a kind of deeply moralizing kind of prejudicial view of of violence in the way that often people think he does. I think he thinks that actually takes a great deal of courage to be a soldier. There's a step beyond that, which is being able to receive violence for a cause and not not meting it out but the worst thing you can be is someone who won't fight at all. So this sense of being a kind of I think sometimes people think of him as Quaker pacifist is is not really what nonviolence ends up being about. It's something a bit more activist in that sense...
He almost in a weird kind of way predicts the iPhone where in in Saraji says look one day you'll get to the point where you'll be able to press a button and a car will arrive. You'll be able to press a button and your food will be delivered and and all this kind of stuff. And what he's really getting, at I mean it's it's this kind of blanket, okay I don't like modern technological industrial civilization. But he's advocating for patience because he hates trains because they move people too quickly... He says if you want to understand proper politics in my view you have to be able to work out what your real relationship to your neighbour, not your interest. Your real relationship to your neighbor is is in terms of duty, in terms of self sacrifice, in terms of what you can give them. A sacrifice and what they might give you, a sacrifice. That might not be based on some sort of I pay my taxes so that you can have healthcare this very kind of transactional thing. Which is why he then focuses on things like cow protection which Hindu nationalists are very very keen about because the cow is holy in Hinduism and of course Muslims are perhaps slaughtering it at certain times for religious festivals and he says why are Hindus so hellbent on cow protection. I think the cow is holy as well but I'm willing to give it up even though I don't want to in order that Muslims might then give up something for us and what they might give up is asking for sort of excessive political safeguards or eventually asking for Pakistan...
One of the ideas that there should be an electorate for the Muslims and and for the Hindus and one for for The Untouchables and Gandhi thinks this is outrageous. He thinks the Untouchables are part of Hinduism, which Ambedkar The Untouchables leader says the only way we're part of Hinduism is because you've excluded us from it. So, but Gandhi goes on a long fast to prevent this from happening. The Prime Minister Ramsey McDonald is is absolutely appalled that that he should, but it clearly is forcing the government. And in the end even Ambedkar the Untouchables leader has to go to Gandhi to say, stop, we'll withdraw our request for a separate electorate because the alternative is not that Gandhi dies which yeah, okay, that would have happened, but then there would have been riots and many many thousands of Untouchables would have been massacred... If you want the Mass mobilization you've got to play The Prophet but with with playing The Prophet comes all of these very very problematic blind spots that that he has'...
‘One of the other things that we talked about right at the start was sexual hypocrisy and accusations of that. How founded do you think those accusations are and how important are they to this story?’
‘I mean if you're if you're being a kind of a traditional historian who takes their their method seriously and says well look you ought to judge the past by the values of the people at the time and not impose your own, I mean I have to say I don't fully subscribe to that view of history. But many many people if not the majority of figures within the Congress Party, Nehru included and so on thought he was out of his mind doing that and tried to get him to to stop, so clearly even by the standards of his own time and his closest friends he was, he was way off in the realm of eccentricity on that sort of thing. I think for them quite rightly as a political strategist, they didn't know what he was trying to achieve by it. So his point was that look if I can spend a night in bed alongside two younger women who are my nieces and so on and not not even become sexually aroused then what excuse does everyone else have for not being abstinent? It's it's a bizarre thing to to do I mean not least cuz they're family members. Not least also cuz it it doesn't really prove anything. I mean it has it tends to take a very sort of strangely narrow view of what what sex is and what sexuality is. I mean he was instrumentalizing those young girls to to make a political point which, I think we would say is is very very uh unethical now to say the least. And I think of all the things he's done, you can't fit it into a sort of well look his his opinion towards black South Africans at the time was within a certain intellectual framework, he was working within that was broadly liberal and the British and most other Indians shared and so on. I think this was just off-the-wall crazy for most people at at the time and and it's it's very difficult to to justify in any sort of way, I think’
‘The sex experiments didn't start with the girls of course. He he he was doing this kind of thing when he was a cult leader in his Ashrams and he would get women to try to stimulate hi. He would say I can resist whatever sexual inducement there is and so he would get a woman to take her clothes off or to to to lie near him him within an arm's reach but not actually close up to him, so there all sorts of different permutations and while we might say this seems a bit distasteful, that there was no shortage of women who wanted to to join in who wanted to help him in the things that he wished to do. And and it was criticized. It was also criticized that he just walked around a lot using women as what he called his walking sticks. So he'd have a couple of young women in front of him, and he would have a hand on on the shoulder of both of them. A lot of people in India felt that this was unacceptable. This wasn't a proper way of behaving, touching people in that way. And so when he started uh going to bed with younger women it didn't seem to matter that much when they were older women like Sushila who was his physician and Lady his biographer. It didn't seem to matter much, she was 40 something. But when he he he started going to bed with 19 year old and 18 year old niece and adopted grand niece, that became became very much criticized by people like Kripalani who was the Congress president so an incredibly important person you do not want to offend this man. But also a couple of people who worked with Gandhi, a couple of his uh people who one of them was an editor of his newspaper and another one was his translator, they they resigned from his service because they said they didn't want to be involved in this.’...
‘The prophet can never be wrong… he thinks semen has sort of almost magical powers, he blames an earthquake in Bihar in the 20s I think it was on on not having dealt with the issue of untouchability and and God's punish-, so I mean there's these aspects of his thinking that I think are just off the wall crazy to to people at the time. But you can see how that there seems to be a coherence in his own thinking about, self-denial is absolutely the thing that I mean, famously you know I think another event that we haven't talked about that reads very very strangely the letters to Hitler, about, okay, first you know uh you're being an immoral man, please don't hurt the Jews kind of thing, as if Hitler would you know take that seriously. Not least coming from a brown person but then Gandhi later says well look if the if the Jews practice civil disobedience yes a great many of them may well have died but they probably would have convinced the Germans of the error of their ways and and all that kind of stuff and therefore, which you know, one I don't think it would have and two it's rather missing the point that that several million people have to die in order to to do this, but I mean he would he would say that about India when people said well why don't you want India to have a standing army after Independence, well if someone invades we'll just practice civil disobedience, then many of us will die but we'll be truthful and just in our in our deaths. So I mean there's there's lots of detractors on these issues at the time and it goes to show that you know he's, yes he's a popular figure on one level but he's, people are always looking at him a bit strangely and going you know if we could compartmentalize this side of your your action and your thought that would be handy and and just ignore the rest. Sometimes he just doesn't see it. I mean I think he thinks he can bring the whole nation with him purely through fasting and so on’...
‘His strategy works incredibly well for a liberal set up, right… not going to work with the Nazis’...
‘This is the the the Dalit, Untouchable sort of criticism of it as well, that you're not going to civil disobedience your way out of Brahman dominance because that they simply do not see you as someone who who ought to be worthy of of kind of any sort of recognition as a human being’...
'The Quit India movement… there's lots of reports saying we haven't been this afraid since the 1857 Mutiny which was the the the last large scale violent uprising against against British rule... If the British just leave what what what do you think happens then? And he says oh there'll be a couple of days when a few heads will be knocked in but but then uh because we haven't been allowed arms the violence won't be severe uh and and uh and then everything will calm down. And he genuinely believed that there would be a churning of of the nation and out of that would come goodness. And of course what what actually happened in partition was because people didn't have arms they were attacking each other with farm implements'...
'The Muslims are a minority in a very superficial sense I mean in, to what extent can you call hundreds of millions of people who at one point ruled the subcontinent have a culture of equal weight to Hindus and so on demographically be called a minority? There's an emerging historiography now that says for all of the horror of, that you know the violence of that period, there's no way really that these states could govern themselves under liberal Democratic norms without real minorities being created on both sides... if you are going to have a a modern style nation state where the partition was just really the only way way forward’"