Number of words: 571

Gandhi lived too long. Returning to India from South Africa in 1915, at the age of 45, holding himself aloof from the established politicians of the time, involving himself with communities and groups hitherto untouched by politics, taking on purely local forces here and there. He then went on very quickly, from 1919 to 1930, to drawing all India together in a new kind of politics.

Not everyone approved of Gandhi’s methods. Many were dismayed by the apparently arbitrary dictates of his ‘inner voice’. And in the political stalemate of the 1930s – for which some Indians still blame him: Gandhi’s unpredictable politics, they say, his inability to manage the forces he released, needlessly lengthened the independence struggle, delayed self-government by 25 years, and wasted the lives and talents of many good men – in the 1930s the management of Indian politics passed into other hands.

Gandhi himself declined into a long and ever more private Mahatmahood. His obsessions were always made public, but they were personal. This period of decline was the period of his greatest fame; so that even when he lived, ‘he became his admirers’. He became his emblems, his holy caricature, the object of competitive piety. Knowledge of the man as a man was lost; Mahatmahood submerged all the ambiguities and the political creativity of his early years, the modernity of so much of his thought. He was claimed In the end by old India, the very India whose political deficiencies he had seen so clearly with South African eye.

What was new about him then was not the semi religious nature of his politics; that was in the Indian tradition. What made him new was the nature of the battles he had fought in South Africa. And what was the most revolutionary and un-Indian about him was what he left unexpressed in what perhaps, as an Indian, he had no means of expressing: his racial sense, the sense of belonging to a people specifically of the Indian subcontinent, that the 20 years in South Africa had taught him.

The racial sense is alien to Indians. Race is something they detect about others, but among themselves they know only the subcaste, the caste, the clan, the language group. Beyond that they cannot go; they do not not see themselves as belonging to an Indian race; the words have no meaning. Historically, this absence of cohesiveness has been the calamity of India. In South Africa, as Gandhi soon saw, it was the great weakness of the small Indian community, embattled but fragmented, the wealthy Gujarati Muslim merchants calling themselves Arabs, the Indian Christians claiming only their Christianity, both separating themselves from the indentured labourers of Madras and Bihar, all subjected as Indians to the same racial laws.

If it was in London as a law student that Gandhi decided that he was Hindu by conviction, it was in South Africa that he added to this the development of racial consciousness, that consciousness without which the disadvantage of persecuted minority can be utterly destroyed and which with Gandhi in South Africa was like an extension of his religious sense: teaching responsibility and compassion, that no man is an island, and that the dignity of the high was bound up with the dignity of the low.

Excerpted from Pages 153 to 154 of ‘India: A wounded civilization’ by VS Naipaul