Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age by Arthur Herman; Bantam Books; Price: $30; 609 pp
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Two icons — master spirits of the first half of the 20th century who changed the course of world history — are profiled by historian Arthur Herman who has conceptualised this book as a dual, comparative biography. As the evocative title indicates, irresistible force — tenacious World War II British prime minister Winston Churchill who master-minded the destruction of German dictator Adolf Hitler whose Nazi war machine had overrun most of Europe by 1941 — clashed with immoveable object — Mahatma (‘great soul’) Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi during India’s freedom movement. And even as Churchill triumphed in Europe, he lost India — a loss which marked the beginning of the end of the global British empire, upon which it was famously remarked, the sun never set.
Herman picks up the history of the subcontinent dramatically with a prologue that describes anti-British violence at Cawnpore, Meerut, Allahabad, during the 1857 Mutiny. It marked a significant watershed in which “the seeds of future violence had been sown” even as the power of empire prevailed. Against this political backdrop, Herman cuts to the sleepy port-town of Porbandar, unaffected by the uprising and ruled by a local prince. The birth of Mohandas Gandhi in 1869 into a devout Hindu family, was marked by local rituals rather than great fanfare.
On the other hand Winston Churchill descended from the glorious military heritage of the Duke of Marlborough and was born in 1874 in Blenheim Palace, sited on a 3,000 acre estate. The estate however, was bankrupt and prompted Winston’s father Randolph Churchill to enter politics. With the power and glory of the British empire at its zenith in the Victorian Age, Randolph embarked on a successful tour of India as a Conservative Party grandee in 1884, and was elected secretary of the colonial office soon after. Thus faith and belief in the ‘white man’s burden’ was infused into Winston’s early education and world view.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) was a fully qualified barrister-at-law of the Middle Temple, London, who was at best a successful failure in the Bombay high court upon his return to India. His inability to make an impression on the closed fraternity of the Bombay bar forced him to retreat to his native Saurashtra to practice law. And there (in Rajkot) Gandhi would have remained but for a lucky break, when he accepted a brief to represent a wealthy Muslim merchant of Indian origin who was embroiled in a legal dispute with a cousin in Natal, South Africa.
In unapologetically racist South Africa of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the evil doctrine of apartheid or strict segregation of races was being shaped by Dutch Boer settlers. After the famous incident on the train ride to Pretoria when Gandhi — a pucca barrister — was thrown out bag and baggage from a railway carriage claimed by a nondescript white man on the basis of race, the Mahatma cerebrated and developed his politics of satyagraha (passive resistance) and ahimsa(non-violence), which was tried and tested in South Africa and matured in India, to which he returned in 1915.
But while the Indian subcontinent was electrified and the world was entranced by the out-of-the-box responses (prayer, fasting, satyagraha, ahimsa) of Gandhi, who was popularly bestowed the honorific of Mahatma shortly after his return to India, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that the high Tory patrician, Harrow-educated Churchill was revolted by what he saw as the Machiavellian politics of this deliberately dressed-down London-trained barrister. “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace… to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor,” he said in 1930, while rejecting a proposal to confer dominion status upon India.
The book follows the career advancements of these larger-than-life rivals, maintaining a chronology. By 1940 Churchill had risen to the position of prime minister of Britain and became arguably the greatest war-time leader of the 20th century, while Gandhi was acknowledged leader of India’s unprecedented freedom movement. Churchill was amazed that even as a world war was being waged and evil Nazi philosophy threatened the entire civilised world, Gandhi called for the Quit India movement and went on a 21-day fast to protest his confinement. Churchill accused Gandhi of being a “spiritual quack” resorting to “meaningless street theatre” and even voiced suspicion that Gandhi took “glucose in his water when doing his various fasting antics”.
By this time (1943), the allied powers inspired and led by Churchill, were on the way to winning the war. But he was unable to defeat a “naked fakir” clad in loincloth and armed with a walking staff. Ironically, while by mid 1945 Churchill had humbled Hitler and his mighty German war machine, he was bested by the Mahatma. In 1945, in Britain’s first post-war general election, the Tory Party was roundly defeated and Churchill ousted from 10, Downing Street. India attained its independence in 1947.
Yet Gandhi’s assassination within a few months after India won independence could be interpreted as his failure to foresee the problems of propagating and establishing a free and united India. On the other hand, Churchill was clear-sighted enough to anticipate that caste, creed and language divisions would create turmoil and tensions that would plague the new nation.
Heroes to their countrymen, icons to the world, ironically both these great leaders saw their dreams — the British Raj and an unpartitioned India — crumble. Yet according to Herman, these towering figures were crusading for their own versions of a better world. They both “left an imperishable mark on their age and a lasting legacy for coming generations,” says Herman who has tracked their parallel lives to tell the “the great untold parable of the 20th century”.
Jayati Gupta
Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China by Pallavi Aiyar; HarperCollins; Price: Rs.395; 273 pp
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Although the super-human People’s Republic of China — the world’s most populous (1.3 billion) and fastest growing economy clocking annual GDP growth rates of 10 percent-plus per year since 1978 — is the most discussed and written-about country in recent times, it remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. In neighbouring India — the second most populous (1.2 billion) country worldwide — where dilettante post-independence leaders were hitherto given to proffering India’s large population as the excuse for non-performance, China’s huge national development effort which has lifted over 500 million people out of abject poverty during the past 60 years, raises embarrassing questions.
Why has high-potential, resource-rich independent India gifted with strong academic and entrepreneurial cultures, remained a laggard in the global development race? How has the PRC managed to attain 92 percent literacy, and particularly high women’s literacy, despite its disabling tradition of binding women’s feet? More significantly, how despite its late start, has this communist-propaganda suffused country managed to build great universities, four of which are ranked among the top 200 in the world, while only 63 percent of India’s adult population is literate, and our best university is ranked 274? And how come China where English, the global language of learning and knowledge is virtually unknown, has managed amazing engineering feats such as transforming ancient Shanghai into one of the world’s most modern cities and building the Beijing-Lhasa railway line which rises over 14,000 ft. above sea level, when India has barely any manufacturing or engineering innovation to show after six decades of detailed central planning?
The answers — perhaps not wholly satisfactory but honestly attempted — to all these and more questions are to be found in this intelligent account of the five years (2002-07) Pallavi Aiyar spent in Beijing, as a correspondent of the highly-respected Chennai-based daily The Hindu. A well-grounded alumna of St. Stephen’s Delhi, Oxford University (UK) and the London School of Economics, Aiyar arrived in China in 2002 (at the behest of her Spanish fiancé working with the European Commission in Beijing), to teach English at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. While teaching she also learned to speak and write Mandarin, a qualification which enabled her to become the “first and only Chinese speaking Indian foreign correspondent in China”, writing for the Indian Express and later for The Hindu.
Although essentially a diary of her China years, Smoke and Mirrors is also a compendium of intelligent observation and measured comment, mercifully shorn of the over-detailed trivia which characterise run-of-the-mill personal memoirs. Instead the author has made a determined and successful effort to translate the impact of the economic reforms initiated in 1978 by the late Chinese premier Deng Xiao Ping, which have transformed communist China into a global economic powerhouse, upon actual people with universal quirks and personality traits.
But communist China’s new-found prosperity, which the author makes plain, outdistances democratic India’s half-hearted efforts in that direction by a massive margin, has been bought at a heavy price which most middle class Indians are unlikely to be willing to pay. The reality, graphically illustrated through this insightful work, is that all 1.3 billion people of the PRC are pathetically dependent upon the mercy and goodwill of party functionaries and government officials. In China, unlike in India, there is no alternative grievance redressal machinery. Trade unions, independent media, opposition parties, and an indepen-dent judiciary are conspicuously missing.
Although Aiyar believes that having kept its promise to deliver material prosperity to the people, the communist regime in China is there to stay for the foreseeable future, this reviewer begs to differ. As China transforms into a middle class society, the thoughts of its historically intelligent, cooperative and hard-working people will incrementally turn to philosophical issues such as rule of law, freedom of expression and democracy. An appeal for democratic reform and protests against human-rights abuses among China’s fledgling middle class, whose support is crucial for the Communist Party, is inevitable.
Increasingly the eyes of the people of China are looking across the Strait of Formosa towards Chinese Taipei (aka Taiwan), where economic affluence has been demonstrably delivered under a democratic system of governance. The day is not far when Taiwan will conquer communist China with the force of its ideology, a denouement which will usher in a new era of global prosperity.
Dilip Thakore
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