Search

On Pietermaritzburg station in 1893, a young Indian lawyer, newly arrived in South Africa, was ejected from a train to Pretoria for insisting on his right to travel first class. It was to the cold night hours spent in the waiting-room that Gandhi himself traced the genesis of his great resolve - to fight injustice by non-violent means. Crucial as this episode was, it was but one of the manifold influences which shaped the Gandhi-to-be during his sojourn in South Africa. This title arose from a conference held a century later, in 1993, at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, to reaffirm the South African Gandhi. It traces some of the influences which effected his transformation from an unsuccessful and insecure young man to a mature political and spiritual leader ready to carve his niche in history after his return to India in 1914. The Mahatma's moral vision, of a way to resolve conflict and right injustice without resorting to violence, remains relevant to post-apartheid South Africa and to the world. It also remains a difficult vision to grasp; but a better understanding of his vital formative years will perhaps help to make it more accessible.

THE Raj still has a peculiar fascination for the British public, judging by the stream of popular books, radio and television programmes whose constant themes are the panoply of empire and the life-style of imperial rulers. Among English-speaking historians, however, approaches to Britain's Indian empire have changed markedly in the last twenty years. By the 1950s ‘Imperial history’ was a thing of the past. Gone was its admiring concentration on the men who ruled India and their measures as a way of understanding political change in the subcontinent. Attention shifted to indigenous initiatives and growth points. At first the emphasis was on India's western educated as organizers and spokesmen of a new kind of overtly nationalist politics. In the late 1960s the focus altered to whole localities within the subcontinent as it became clear that the western educated were not elites divorced from local, more traditional societies, but were still subject to its pressures, influenced by its perceptions and involved in its webs of patronage and alliance. In such an environment apparently nationalist politics were shot through with conflicts and contraditions: they were only one aspect of diverse manoeuvres for influence in society and the state structure. In the present decade the wheel has almost come full circle. Imperial overlords again receive attention: not now as architects and guardians, but as elements essential in the analysis of the changing style and content of Indian politics to the extent to which they created the framework of political life, defined its categories, means and ends.

Centenary celebrations of the birth of any prominent man attract assessments of his character, career and influence. Nothing could be more understandable, particularly in the case of M. K. Gandhi, who was by common consent one of the greatest leaders Asia has produced in an era of colonial nationalisms and decolonization, who in his own life time was called a saint and a machiavellian politician, and who has become in independent India both a national myth and an embarrassment. Accounts of the importance of Gandhi in modern India tend to fall into two main categories. There are those who dismiss him, often regretfully, as an idealist whose Utopian plans for a democracy of village commonwealths and a non-violent society have collapsed in the face of economic and political necessity and the machinations of unscrupulous politicians. In the words of Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘If you consider the political ideologies attaining in India today, you would find that somehow one who is called the Father of the Nation is completely missing from all of them’. Such pessimism assesses Gandhi as if he had been solely a dispenser of blue-prints for a brave new world, and fails to see him as a dynamic leader whose greatest influence flowed from the type of movement he led and the techniques he used, rather than from the peculiarly personal ideals he held. On the other hand, there are those who hail him as the Father of India and try to draw direct causal connexions between his ideals and many of the major changes which have occurred in India since 1947, particularly the official abolition of Untouchability and the institution ofpanchayat raj.But this is the perspective of the biographer. It underrates the complexities of politics and society and their interaction, and turns a blind eye to the innumerable cross currents which make up the main stream of Indian social and political activity.