Speaking Ill of the Dead: Gandi’s Shortcomings

The question of Gandhi’s shortcomings is, for many, an unwelcome one. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) occupies a position in the global imagination normally reserved for figures who did not write letters to Adolf Hitler addressing him as “Dear Friend.” He did. Twice.

This is not, as his admirers suggest, a minor footnote. It is a data point. The historical Gandhi is a more complicated proposition than the icon: a man whose philosophy of nonviolent resistance was calibrated precisely for an opponent with a conscience and a reputation to protect. Against the British Empire, it worked. Gandhi understood, with considerable shrewdness, that the British could be shamed. He never tested the theory on Stalin.

In South Africa, where Gandhi spent twenty-one years developing his political philosophy, he petitioned strenuously for the rights of Indian immigrants while displaying, in his own published writings, frank contempt for black Africans. He had a hierarchy. Indians occupied it. Others did not.

At home, Gandhi managed his wife Kasturba (1869–1944) with an attentiveness Ozzie Nelson might have admired. He denied her medical treatment on philosophical grounds. When she lay dying of pneumonia, he refused penicillin as a violation of his principles. She died. He later accepted quinine for his own malaria.

Kasturba was married to Gandhi for more than sixty years, most of which involved a mixture of political partnership, domestic discipline, and the occasional moral experiment that probably did not appear in the original wedding vows.

Among Gandhi’s other moral experiments were the brahmacharya experiments—Gandhi’s practice, in his seventies, of sleeping naked beside young women, including his grandniece, to test his celibacy. He was testing his. Hers was not the variable under examination.

The spinning wheel, the loincloth, the Salt March (for which Time magazine named Gandhi “Man of the Year” in 1930): the theater was genuine and effective. The man inside the theater was not the saint the production required. He was strategic, controlling, and capable of a moral blind spot large enough to drive a lorry through.

Gandhi died in January 1948. He was assassinated in New Delhi by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who believed Gandhi had been too accommodating toward Muslims. The timing is historically tidy in a grim way. Gandhi helped lead India toward independence in 1947, and he was dead fewer than six months later. He was elevated immediately to legend (October 2,his birthday, is observed in India as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday). The inconvenient details were relegated to footnotes read by historians and ignored by everyone else. .

Memory apparently runs on the same software that cleans up cell phone images. The footnotes, as usual, are where the actual story lives.

For more character assassinations of those who have gone before, click Speaking Ill of the Dead