ABSTRACT
There are three Gandhis that appear to have emerged in India during the freedom struggle. First, the Gandhi of South Africa, who rose to prominence after his successful satyagraha campaign in Natal and Transvaal against the racist Asiatic Registration Act. Not only did he articulate satyagraha, his personality took shape in South Africa. There is no doubt that Indian freedom struggle was conducted on a much larger scale and on much bigger issues, but his South African experiment contributed immensely to his ideas that gradually evolved in the context of his struggle against colonialism in India. The second Gandhi was crystallized during and after the 1919-21 NonCooperation Movement in India. What he learnt in South Africa was applied on a wider scale, involving Hindus and Muslims in his satyagraha campaign. Although what brought the Muslims to the nationalist campaign was largely the Khilafat cause, there is no doubt that this was perhaps the most significant mass movement where the centre of gravity shifted to the villages, unlike in the past when the anti-British movements were confined mostly to the urban centres of Calcutta and Bombay. For whatever reasons, the strength of the Non-Cooperation lay in the Hindu-Muslim amity. The third Gandhi, perhaps the most complex and thus theoretically innovative, was shaped by the events and socio-economic and political processes of the period following the withdrawal of the Non-Cooperation Movement in the wake of the Chauri Chaura incident. Muslims rose as a distinct political group demanding their share by virtue of their demographic preponderance in Bengal and Punjab. The Harijans or the untouchables had found in B.R. Ambedkar an able leader who could confront the leading nationalist forces, including the Congress and the British, demanding a legitimate place in society and politics. The Congress was not as united as it was before; it was fractured due to ideological incompatibility among those who remained loyal to Gandhi in the past. The 1939 Tripuri Congress in which Subhas Chandra Bose, a bête noire of Gandhi, defeated the official Congress candidate for presidency, brought out the rivalry between the left and right wings in the Congress. Gandhi was placed in peculiar circumstances where he appeared to have lost control of the organization. Despite the temporary hiccups that undoubtedly affected the Congress adversely, Gandhi regained
control with the support of the right-wingers, who gradually shifted their loyalty away from the Mahatma as India’s freedom struggle drew to a close. This is a phase when Gandhi, so far the supreme leader of India’s freedom struggle, spoke in a vocabulary that redefined some of his basic precepts concerning, for example, non-violence. Furthermore, he upheld views that ran counter to those he had espoused in the past, especially before the 1930-4 Civil Disobedience Movement.1 Apart from the transformed nature of the imperial power, one possible explanation for the changes in Gandhi’s social and political ideas may have been his interaction with colleagues who held views contrary to his own. Not only did he negotiate with the ruling authority with his reformed political agenda, he engaged in regular dialogues with those who, while appreciating Gandhi’s contribution to the nationalist struggle, critiqued his conceptual framework to analyze India’s complex socio-economic reality. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to study all those who expressed views on Gandhi. Hence the aim of this chapter is to identify and critically evaluate the major trends in critiques of Gandhi by those leading personalities with different perspectives on nationalism and other relevant socio-economic and political issues with a strong bearing on the former.
