Gandhi Before India

Gandhi & Tolstoy

“Gandhi and Tolstoy were akin in good ways and bad. Both were indifferent fathers and less than solicitous husbands.” - Ramchandra Guha

Ramchandra Guha was in Toronto recently to launch his latest offering – Gandhi Before India – the first part of a two part biography of the Mahatma. The volume deals with Gandhi’s life from birth to 1915 – the year he returned from South Africa. It is a chronicle of his transformation from a failed lawyer to a leader of people. 

Guha is an erudite scholar who speaks as well as he writes. He had his audience spellbound for the better part of an hour as he narrated the highlights of the Mahatma’s life in South Africa.

Guha spoke about Leo Tolstoy’s influence on Gandhi.  In the book Guha says, “Leo Tolstoy (at this time) was certainly the most famous writer in the world. (He was) admired for his novels and stories, and in some quarters, even for his attempts at simplifying his life. In his early fifties he had a conversion experience, following which he gave up alcohol, tobacco and meat. His vegetarianism became so well known that he was asked to write an introduction to a book of Henry Salt’s. He took up working in the fields, and splitting wood and making shoes in a bid to empathize with his serfs. From a martial background, he now began to preach the virtues of pacifism. Although born and raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, he developed a deep interest in Hinduism and Buddhism.

“Of the many transitions, the most painful was his embrace of celibacy. In his youth he had been (in his own words), a ‘radical chaser after women.’ His wife went through more than a dozen pregnancies. He had affairs with peasant women on his estate. A man of ‘wild passion,’ he sought in middle age to give up sex along with the other pleasures he had forsaken.”

The Russian writer was Gandhi’s intellectual mentor. His was the most decisive intellectual and philosophical influence on Gandhi. Although Gandhi hadn’t read War and Peace, and Anna Karenina, he had minutely read and re-read Tolstoy’s religious and philosophical texts.

He read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You in 1893 in Johannesburg. The title of the book is a line from the Bible and Tolstoy used it to make an eloquent case for interfaith dialogue and for individuals to reach their personal, conscience-driven path to God.

Tolstoy claims in the book that the spiritual truth or the essence of Christianity is not what the archbishop or the pope says; the essence of Islam is not what the grand mufti tells you what it is; and the meaning of Hinduism is not what the Shankaracharya tells you. You must find your own path to God.

Tolstoy’s The First Step (translated into English in 1906) also influenced Gandhi immensely. In this book, Tolstoy says that any person who wants to contribute socially and politically to the society’s transformation, and who wants to devote his life to the service of society must abstain from idleness, gluttony and carnal desire – the three cardinal sins of the Russian aristocrats.

In Gandhi’s case, idleness and gluttony were not a problem. He was always hardworking, and he was a vegetarian. The real problem was carnal desire and he adopted a vow of celibacy, detached himself from his family and his children to simplify his life.

Tolstoy’s pacifism has played a significant role in formulating Gandhi’s ideas for non-violent struggle in Transvaal in South Africa. After reading, understanding and interpreting Tolstoy nearly two decades, Gandhi finally is inspired to write directly to Tolstoy in 1909 – a year before Tolstoy died.

Gandhi wrote to Tolstoy about what he was doing in South Africa, and Tolstoy was delighted to find an Indian disciple in South Africa. He replied immediately. During the course of this correspondence Gandhi  in an extraordinary display of self-confidence tells Tolstoy that what he and his group is doing in Transvaal (which is partly inspired by Tolstoy’s ideas of pacifism) is going to have a positive impact on the whole world. Guha observed, “It is an extraordinary confident claim to make of a nebulous movement that involves just a few thousand people – that it is going to transform the whole world.”

Of Tagore, Tolstoy & translations - II

continued from the entry above...

Earlier this week, I got Leo Tolstoy’s How much land does a man need published by Calypso Editions. The publishing venture established in 2010 describes itself thus: “An artist-run, not-for-profit press dedicated to publishing quality literary books of poetry and fiction with a global perspective.”

Boris Dralyuk has translated Tolstoy’s short story. I learnt from author Brian Evenson’s Introduction to the new translation that James Joyce described it as “the greatest short story the literature of the world knows.”

Evenson explains that the story is written in skaz tradition – a Russian oral folktale tradition. Skaz is a literary mode inclined towards the informal expressions of oral speech by a simple rural narrator, which creates potential distance between the narrator and the author (Boris Eikhenbaum, a Russian literary scholar and historian).

Dralyuk’s translation retains the skaz tradition that the earlier translations didn’t.

Evenson says, “Tolstoy offers a complex and irregular narrative texture, one that seems much close to modernist impulses than to the realism of Tolstoy’s novels...Earlier translations have generally smoothed out these deliberate irregularities, de-skazifying the skaz, making the story less oral and less informal, making it more deliberately literary, “correcting” the way in which the narrator’s voice from time to time infects the language of the characters themselves and even occasionally just out, disrupting the surface of the prose like a spine of jagged rocks zigzagging brokenly but sublimely through an otherwise placid lake.

"(Boris) Dralyuk’s translation of the character’s speech is deliberately a little more frenetic and disconnected, more like the rhythms of natural speech. It gives the impression that Pakhom (the protagonist) has just arrived at this particular thought and said it without thinking it through. In the (earlier) translation, on the other hand, Pakhom feels like a courtly stage actor trying to mine a peasant. We are already experiencing the tale at a distance, are already firmly ensconced in the realm of the ‘literary’ and the ‘significant,’ a realm that is hostile to the quickness and lightness (in Italo Calvino’s sense of the words) of the skaz tradition...These aspects of the story are precisely what separate it from Tolstoy’s work, making it distinct and powerful. Yet these aspects are precisely what have been minimised or effaced in earlier English translations. And that is why Dralyuk’s new translations is so important.”

Click here to buy the book: Calyspo Editions

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Philosophy is almost always boring especially when it exceeds a few hundred words. I have not been successful in reading books on philosophy because of the dense nature of the subject.

Yes, I have enjoyed reading the history of philosophy, and am particularly fond of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. But serious philosophy is an obstacle to reading.

Meghnad forced me (in a friendly sort of way) to read at least one book by the existential philosophers Sartre and Camus. He choose the books for me: Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Camus’s The Outsider (The Stranger). Meghnad’s fascination for the existential was a classic mid-20^th century affliction shared by many of his contemporaries.

I found Sartre unbearable, and did not complete Being and Nothingness. Camus was absolutely riveting. The novel begins with a sentence that has is perhaps the most famous line of fiction written in the last century: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.” My other favourite line is from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

By the time I began to read books with a greater degree of seriousness, and my aversion to philosophy subsided a bit, I borrowed Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values.

The title of the book is what attracted me to it. As I began to read it, I began to enjoy it. The book works on several levels. The most basic level is of course as a travelogue of the author's 17-day road trip on his motorbike, accompanied by his son. The other (and the more meaningful level) is as a philosophical treatise on quality. Perhaps because I was young when I first read it, or because it was the first such book that I read with interest, I read it twice.

The concept of quality that Phaedrus – the book’s main character – introduces to the reader and analyzed in this book is further developed into a full-fledged theory (Metaphysics of Quality) in the second book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was first published in 1974. It has become an institution. The Wikipedia site on the book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance) informs me that it was rejected by 121 publishers before it was published. And then went on to become one of the most widely read philosophy book ever.

The reason for its amazing popularity is quite obvious: It’s written in a non-academic, story-telling style. Most serious students of philosophy have found the book seriously wanting in philosophical content, and have found the basic premise of the book questionable if not laughable.

More people from my generation – those in their teens in the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s – have read Pirsig’s book than any other book on philosophy. That perhaps only means that most of those who are middle-aged right now are quite stupid, or that Pirsig had something to offer.

The jury's out on that one.
(Pirsig's illustration is by Siegfried Woldhek and taken from http://woldhek.nl/files/cv-siegfried-oldhek-mrt06.pdf)