On the coffee table — Gandhi and Churchill

It has been said of French president Clemenceau that he had one illusion, France, and one disillusion, mankind, including Frenchmen.

Arthur Herman, in his magisterial Gandhi & Churchill, five-starred by me at Amazon, shows how the same could be said of his twin protagonists over India and Indians.

Churchill’s illusion was that Britain could continue to hold on to the old British Raj, even after World War II and a bankrupt British treasury. His disillusion was rather a cynicism about Indian capacity for self-government, lumping Gandhi in with millions of other religious fakirs.

Gandhi’s illusion was multiple, but basically of two parts. The second was that a medieval-age India, with 300 million people all picking up Gandhi’s spinning wheel, was possible, was the best way for India to go, and was desired by most Indians. His second, more tragic illusion was that India without Muslim-Hindu partition was the only way to go, and that it could only be done on his terms.

Herman documents how Gandhi, not Churchill, not Viceroy Archibald Wavell, not Muhammad Ali Jinnah or anybody else, wrecked the last reasonable shot at an unpartioned India because it wasn’t done his way.

Gandhi’s illusion? That Indians wanted to follow his way of satyagraha, or “soul force,” in its nonviolence, as well as to become peasant-based, rather than Nehru’s vision of technology-driven socialism. Herman shows that British actions in Gandhi’s years of the Raj were NOT driven by nonviolence but rather, the fear of violence that accompanied most of Gandhi’s arrests, fasts from prison, etc.

In short, Gandhi comes off badly in this book, and deservedly so.

The mythical Gandhi of Ben Kingsley’s acting and of previous bios of the Mahatma is just that — a myth. Herman rightfully shows that Gandhi impeded India’s independence (at the times he wasn’t irrelevant). And the myth already gets shattered in his South Africa years.

Churchill, meanwhile, was Gandhi’s tar baby. His 1930s “years in the wilderness” were all due to India, ultimately. His irrationality on the subject had some influence on some of his wilder military tactics proposals during World War II, as well.

But Herman doesn’t stop there. He gets deeper into the personages of both, what drove them, and how neither could understand the other’s drives. Churchill, who was a secularist his adult life, could never understand, let alone accept, Gandhi’s religious revitalization. Gandhi, meanwhile, could understand Churchill more but would never lower himself from his hyper-idealist pinnacle enough to translate that into action.

If not for these two, India would have been independent earlier, and likely would have remained in the British Commonwealth.

An excellent book. And one of which this long review only scratches the surface.

And Herman, who helped his dad with galley proofs of a new translation of the Bhagavad-Gita when he was a child, has the academic and personal background to make this book excellent.