Gandhi’s Autobiographical Construction of Selfhood: The Story of His Experiments with Truth 3031227859, 9783031227851

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Gandhi’s Autobiographical Construction of Selfhood The Story of His Experiments with Truth

Clara Neary

Gandhi’s Autobiographical Construction of Selfhood

Clara Neary

Gandhi’s Autobiographical Construction of Selfhood The Story of His Experiments with Truth

Clara Neary School of Arts, English and Languages Queen’s University Belfast Belfast, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-22785-1    ISBN 978-3-031-22786-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22786-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Olive and Rowan

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks go to colleagues and friends at Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Chester. Worthy of special mention are Paul Simpson, Daniel Roberts, Sonja Lawrenson, Beth Rodgers, Clare Gill, Helen Ringrow, Jo Close, Matt Davies, Frank Herrmann and Derek Alsop. I am very grateful for funding received from the Department of Education and Learning (NI), without which this book would not have been possible. Finally, thank you to my family, especially to Mammy, Leonora and Keith for supporting me without the burden of taking me too seriously. Thank you to Tony and thank you especially to Rowan, our little time-­ thief, who has taught me the true value of time.

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Contents

1 “In  a word, I could not live both after the flesh and the spirit”  1 2 The Story of Gandhi’s “Experiments with Truth” 11 3 Gandhi and the Emergence of Autobiography in India 41 4 Gandhi the Writer 55 5 Gandhi Writing Gandhi: Autobiographical “Split Selves” 75 6 “Life is one indivisible whole”103 Index109

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CHAPTER 1

“In a word, I could not live both after the flesh and the spirit”

Abstract  Gandhi’s lifelong quest for ‘Truth’ led him to embark upon a series of ‘experiments with Truth’, which took the form of engagement with “principles of conduct” (An Auto, p. 47) such as non-violence, celibacy and vegetarianism. The entitling of the first English translation of his autobiography as The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927, 1929) is testament to how these experiments shaped Gandhi’s sense of identity. This book investigates how Gandhi is textually represented in the English translation of the Autobiography, a text which has remained consistently popular with a global audience since its initial publication almost a century ago. To do so, this book first traces the provenance and reception of Gandhi’s autobiography and the process of its translation into English. It then proceeds to engage with the status of autobiography in India, before moving on to consider Gandhi’s status as a writer. Finally, application of a cognitive stylistic framework of narrative “split selves” developed by Emmott (‘Split selves’ in Fiction and in Medical ‘life stories’: Cognitive Linguistic Theory and Narrative Practice. In E.  Semino & J.  Culpeper (Eds.), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (pp.  153–181). John Benjamins, 2002) reveals the multiple forms of Gandhi’s textual selfhood and explores their role in his experiments with Truth.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Neary, Gandhi’s Autobiographical Construction of Selfhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22786-8_1

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Keywords  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi • An Autography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth • Indian literature in English • Indian autobiography • Cognitive Stylistics • “Split selves”

Introduction “In a word, I could not live both after the flesh and the spirit” (An Auto, p. 496)

Since his death in 1948, countless books, documentaries and films have been written about the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and there has been much cultural, social and political commentary on his writings, the published versions of which run to almost 100 volumes.1 To quote one of his most respected biographers, “Gandhi either played a major role in or expressed trenchant and often radical views on nearly every aspect of his country’s diverse experience of change” (Brown, 1989, p. 2). Moreover, “his ideals, whether relating to politics, morals or even wholesome food and natural health care, seem to demand more serious attention, not less, as the years pass since his death” (Brown, 1989, p. 2). As Brown further remarks: “It took nearly half a century of harsh experience, of inner and exterior struggle to forge the public man known later as ‘Mahatma’ or Great Soul, the symbol of India, the father of a new nation” (1989, p. 7). Some of this ‘experience’ is captured by the man himself in his autobiography, An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. At the age of 56, Gandhi wrote his autobiography in serial form, publishing it near-simultaneously in both Gujarati and English. The first instalment of the Gujarati version was published in his Gujarati newspaper Navajivan on 29th November 1925 and ran until 3rd February 1929; the first instalment of its English counterpart appeared in Young India2 just four days later, on 3rd December 1925, and ran until 7th February 1929 (see CWMG 39, p. v). Although originally written in Gujarati, Gandhi, 1  The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (henceforth CWMG) is a collection of Gandhi’s writings published in chronological order by the Government of India and compiled between September 1956 and October 1994. There are 100 volumes: the first 97 are volumes of writing while the final 3 (volumes 98, 99 and 100) are indices. The CWMG is available in Gujarati, English and Hindi. 2  Young India was a weekly paper in which Gandhi published his burgeoning ideals, particularly on self-rule, from 1919 to 1931.

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proficient as he was in English, was greatly involved in the autobiography’s translation into English. It is also important to note that Gandhi “knew that anything he wrote or said, at least in later life, was liable to become public property” (Brown, 1989, p. 3), and this was particularly the case for the English version of his autobiography, which was and indeed still is likely to be the most widely read version both within and without India.3 Regarded as “one of the great autobiographies of modern times” (Mandel, 1980, p. 67), the English translation has been accorded canonical status within the field of autobiographical studies and is included in seminal anthologies of autobiographical writing, including Olney’s Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (1980). The words quoted at the opening of this chapter encapsulate the conflict that wrought Gandhi’s identity: “In a word, I could not live both after the flesh and the spirit” (An Auto, p. 496).4 Gandhi’s lifelong quest for ‘Truth’—through which he sought to achieve self-realisation and ultimate liberation (moksha) from the karmic cycle of reincarnation (samsara)— demanded the subjugation of his corporeal to his spiritual needs.5 To this end, Gandhi embarked upon a series of ‘experiments with Truth’. These “spiritual, or rather moral” experiments (An Auto, p. 47), took the form of engagement with “principles of conduct” (An Auto, p.  47) such as non-violence (ahimsa), self-restraint (brahmacharya)6 and vegetarianism. The experiments and the inner struggles they elicited came to define not only Gandhi’s “quest” for Truth (An Auto, p. 47) but his very selfhood. The entitling of the first English translation of his autobiography as The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927, 1929) demonstrates how 3  Gandhi’s autobiography has been translated into over 20 Indian languages and approximately 30 other global languages (G. Gandhi, 2008, p. 4). Given the autobiography’s original publication in Gujarati, a language restricted to the relatively small Indian state of Gujarat, and the continuing status of English as a ‘link language’ in India, it is probable that, of these two translations of Gandhi’s autobiography, the English translation is the most widely read in India. English’s continuing status as a global language also means it is most likely that the English translation is the most widely read translation of the autobiography in the world. 4  Interestingly, this metaphor was retranslated from the Gujarati by Tridip Suhrud (2018) as “I could not ride two horses” (p.  496 M2), though both figurative expressions deftly capture Gandhi’s internal conflict. 5  Moksha is release from the karmic cycle of birth, death and rebirth, resulting in ultimate enlightenment and unity with God. As such, it is the eschatological goal of all orthodox Hindus. 6  Brahmacharya refers to self-restraint, particularly sexual, which is thought to lead to divine communion.

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integral these experiments were to the formation of Gandhi’s identity, as well as illustrating the extent to which this identity was purposefully constructed. The autobiography was translated into English by Gandhi’s close friend and aide Mahadev Desai. As Gandhi himself was extremely proficient in English, it is thought that he handed over the task of translation to Desai due to constraints upon his time. There has been some debate about the faithfulness of the English translation to the original Gujarati text (see Chap. 2) and Suhrud (2018) recently carried out a new English translation in an attempt “to take the reader as close to the original as possible” (2018, p.  35). As such, Suhrud notes that his retranslation does “not necessarily” endeavour “to provide stylistic or literary improvement” and that the alternative translations he puts forward are, at times, “almost literal, disregarding the literary merit of Mahadev’s rendering” (Suhrud, 2018, p. 35). His inclusion of “Gujarati sayings, metaphors and colloquial terms” in the footnotes aims “to provide the reader access to the original” (Suhrud, 2018, p. 35) and is a welcome addition to readers of the English translation. The analysis carried out in this book draws upon Suhrud’s 2018 retranslation of the autobiography, and every utterance analysed here has also been cross-checked against a 2007 publication of the original translation by Mahadev Desai.7 This has enabled internal checking of the veracity of the language analysed, which in turn strengthens claims regarding the language used and its potential consequences. In addition, it has facilitated engagement with ongoing debate regarding the faithfulness of Desai’s original translation of the text into English. In his retranslation, Suhrud only notes those cases when retranslation yields a meaning substantively different from that of the original translation; however, the linguistic examples analysed in this book rarely differ meaningfully across the two translations of the autobiography, which goes some way towards verifying the fidelity of Desai’s original translation.8 Furthermore, we can be certain that Gandhi would have read and checked Desai’s translation thoroughly before allowing it into the public domain. Gandhi’s associate and friend Verrier Elwin asserts that “Gandhi read and checked everything that was recorded of him” (1945, p. 14), and this would most certainly extend to the publication of his autobiography in English, the medium through 7  Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. (1940) 2007. An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Trans. Mahadev Desai. London: Penguin. 8  However, where a retranslation adds in any way to meaning, it has been included here.

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which it would reach its largest audience. Surprisingly, however, there has been little detailed literary or linguistic investigation of the English translation of Gandhi’s autobiography, despite it being the most widely read version of the text both within India and across the world, with a recent exception being this author’s cognitive stylistic analysis of the text’s metaphor use (see Neary, 2017).

Analytical Approach This research seeks to interrogate links between the Autobiography’s textual and linguistic construction and resultant representations of Gandhi’s identity. It does so by first engaging with the nature of the autobiographical enterprise, being particularly mindful of autobiography’s characteristic conflation of writer, narrator and subject. As such, it considers the wider contextual factors which influenced the text’s production, including its origins and critical reception; its status as a translation; the place of autobiography in India at the time of writing; and Gandhi’s own background and experience as a writer. It then commences to a close reading of the text enabled by applying a methodology drawn from the linguistic sub-­ discipline of Cognitive Stylistics; the framework chosen particularly facilitates investigation of the linguistic construction of Gandhi’s selfhood evidenced in the autobiography. Following autobiographical theorists such as Bruss (1980), the autobiographical manuscript is viewed here as both the textual representation of a life story and an active participant in the narratorial process it represents. As such, Gandhi’s identity is understood as simultaneously constructed both within and by the autobiographical text. Such an interpretation of autobiography implicitly acknowledges the fractured nature of autobiographical writing, characterised as it is by the individual simultaneously performing the tripartite roles of writer, narrator and subject. Conflation of the writer and subject confers the text itself with additional semiotic potential. Hitherto, the small volume of scholarly criticism of the Autobiography has failed to engage with the text from a discourse analytical perspective, thereby overlooking the interpretive potential latent in its formal composition. This book departs from extant research in this regard, prioritising analysis of its formal construction over the approaches favoured by previous scholars of the text (see Chap. 2). Furthermore, given the continued relative dearth of stylistic investigation of non-fiction

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autobiographical texts, this research aims to provide a preliminary framework for subsequent similar analyses.9 As a linguistic study of literature, the field of Stylistics focuses on the linguistic choices made in the creation of a text, and the way in which these choices affect and influence interpretation. In particular, studies within Cognitive Stylistics endeavour to delve further into this relationship by specifically linking these linguistic choices to the cognitive processes which take place during literary interpretation.10 Semino and Culpeper point out that priority is given to explaining how interpretations are arrived at, rather than just putting forward new interpretations (2002, p. ix). This book considers how the reader interprets the character of Gandhi, as put forward by Gandhi. To do so, it focuses on the phenomenon of the “split self” in Gandhi’s text, having observed, with the aid of Emmott’s (2002) typology of “split selves” in narrative, the sheer number of ‘selves’ which Gandhi represents and their role in his experiments with Truth. Gandhi had a holistic approach to life, believing that “Life is one indivisible whole”11 and this is evidenced in the way he embedded and combined his ideals of ahimsa (non-violence), brahmacharya (restraint, particularly sexual, which leads one to God) and the pursuit of Truth (satya) into the overarching principle of satyagraha (‘soul force’). This “novel weapon” (An Auto, p. 702) and “sovereign remedy” (An Auto, p. 586), akin to passive resistance through civil disobedience, was credited with achieving independence for India. It is interesting to consider the holistic nature of Gandhi’s vision within the context of the number of textual ‘selves’ he portrays in his autobiography, as evidenced in his purposeful occupation of multiple social roles—from shoemaker to English gentleman, toilet-cleaner to spiritual leader. Such an exploration is carried 9  It should be noted that I am referring to the analysis of non-fiction autobiographical texts. Cognitive Stylistics has recently started to engage with autobiography more broadly; see, particularly, Gibbons on auto-fiction, a genre defined as “an explicitly hybrid form of life writing that merges autobiographical fact with fiction” (Gibbons, 2017, p. 120). 10  As Semino and Culpeper assert, traditional stylistic analysis “tends to make use of linguistic theories or frameworks in order to explain or predict interpretation” while the ‘novel’ quality of cognitive stylistics “is the way in which linguistic analysis is systematically based on theories that relate linguistic choices to cognitive structures and processes”, hence providing “more systematic and explicit accounts of the relationship between texts on the one hand and responses and interpretations on the other” (2002, p. ix). 11  Young India, 27 January 1927.

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out using Emmott’s (2002) cognitive stylistic typology of “split selves”, which originated from categorisation of the various representations of “split selves” that can be found in both fiction and non-fiction narratives. Emmott’s typology has been derived from intense consideration of the number and variety of ‘split-self’ manifestations found across a broad range of texts, particularly texts centring on medical life stories and instances of personal crisis and the fracturing of selfhood they can cause. However, the multitudinous nature of Gandhi’s autobiographical self-­ representation means that the application of Emmott’s whole typology to this single text is fruitful, enabling not only identification of the multiple selves represented in the autobiography but also analysis of their composition. Application of Emmott’s framework of “split selves” to the Autobiography reveals how Gandhi constructs his autobiographical self-­ representation and the textual origins of this iconic figure.

The Book’s Structure Focusing specifically on Gandhi’s autobiography, this book considers his spiritual and political ideology only insofar as it pertains to the autobiography and the self that is represented therein. As such, the focus is not on Gandhi as spiritual guru, political ideologue or India’s ‘Father of the Nation’, but on Gandhi as autobiographer, mindful throughout of the selfreflexivity characteristic of autobiographical self-representation. To rigorously analyse an autobiographical text, it is important to engage with its generic, linguistic and literary theoretical contexts. As such, Chap. 2 provides an overview of the autobiography, summarising its content; its structure; and how the autobiography has been received by its very wide readership, including a section summarising scholarly engagement with the text thus far. The chapter will conclude by engaging with the issues that can present themselves when linguistically analysing a translated text, though such issues are considerably mitigated in this case given Gandhi’s close involvement in the translation, which, we are told by its translator, had “the benefit of his own careful revision” (Desai [1927] 2018, p.  39). In any case, it is crucial to note that the Autobiography is accorded a privileged status by virtue of being the version through which most readers access the text; as such, it should not be seen as inferior to the Gujarati original, but rather an object worthy of textual investigation in its own right. Whilst biographical writing was comparatively common in India, autobiography, on the other hand, is notable for its sustained absence from

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Indian literature up to the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars believe this is because some of the ‘preconditions’ for autobiography were absent in India, particularly the emphasis on individuality which is not traditionally valued by Hindu society. Chapter 3 will situate Gandhi’s autobiography within the overall context of the emergence of autobiography as a genre in India. It will explore some of the ways in which Gandhi represents his autobiographical project to avoid accusations of Western egotism, and thereby produce a “morally innocent” (Parekh, 1999, p. 284) autobiography. An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth is “the most widely-read of Gandhiji’s works” (CWMG 39, p. v) but he was a prolific writer and the cumulative products of his pen—speeches, essays, articles, letters and books set down in his native Gujarati, Hindi and English—are barely contained within the 100 volumes that comprise the Government of India-sponsored Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. The myriad experiences and expertise gleaned through these literary endeavours were invaluable to Gandhi when producing his autobiography. As such, Chap. 4 offers an overview of Gandhi’s literary outputs, to provide necessary context for considering his autobiography. It also considers his own role as a translator and his views on the process of translation, as well as his somewhat ambivalent relationship with the English Language, whose use he volubly resisted while at the same time translating his own output, including the autobiography, into English to ensure it reached its maximum audience. Chapter 5 considers Gandhi’s textual representation in the English translation of his autobiography, drawing upon Emmott’s (2002) typology of “split selves” in narrative. Emmott has found that characters can be represented as divided in multiple ways in a text, and this is particularly interesting to consider in a non-fiction autobiographical text, given that writer and subject are the same entity. This analysis reveals some surprising aspects of Gandhi’s textual representation. For example, the sheer number of ‘selves’ he presents and their nature is noteworthy; also, analysis of the autobiography reveals that rather than depicting an ever-changing self, the narrating Gandhi consistently re-writes his past selves into versions of his present self; finally, Gandhi appears to resist the “salient contrast” (Emmott, 2002, p. 170) which the act of narration provides, in which the simultaneous presence of multiple versions of oneself on the page stimulates associations that construct new meanings. These findings will be discussed in more depth in Chap. 5 but, overall, they cast light upon two key issues that arise from the autobiography, namely, Gandhi’s role in the

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creation of his textual representation and the extent of his success in penning an autobiography of the spirit rather than the self. Finally, Chap. 6 situates the results of the ‘split self’ analysis within the various dimensions of context that have been discussed. Overall, this study illustrates the effectiveness of applying a typology like Emmott’s “split selves” model (2002)—gleaned from identifying the variety of textual representations of selfhood found in fiction and non-fiction—to a single text. Moreover, it illustrates the struggles wrought by Gandhi’s quest to be one who “looked at life as an entity, not in compartments” (N. Desai, 2009).

References Brown, J. M. (1989). Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. Yale University Press. Bruss, E. W. (1980). Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film. In J. Olney (Ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (pp. 296–320). Princeton University Press. Desai, M. ([1927] 2018). Translator’s Preface to the first edition. In M. K. Gandhi (Ed.), An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (p.  39, M.  Desai, Trans. and Introduced and annotated by T.  Suhrud). Yale University Press. Desai, N. (2009). Narayan Desai Recalls the Creation of the Mahatma’s Biography. DNA India, October 2. Retrieved June 15, 2022, from http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_narayan-­desai-­recalls-­the-­creation-­of-­the-­mahatma-­s-­ biography_1294446/ Elwin, V. (1945). Mahadev. In D.  G. Tendulkar, M.  C. Rau, M.  Sarabhai, & V. K. Jhaveri (Eds.), Gandhi: His Life and Work (pp. 14–19). B.G. Dhawale. Emmott, C. (2002). ‘Split selves’ in Fiction and in Medical ‘life stories’: Cognitive Linguistic Theory and Narrative Practice. In E. Semino & J. Culpeper (Eds.), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (pp. 153–181). John Benjamins. Gandhi, G. (2008). Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of Translators’ Experiments with the Text. A Talk at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, October 2008. Transcript Available in Fredsakademiet, October 1. Retrieved June 15, 2022, from http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/ library/autobiography%20%20translators%20experiments.pdf Gandhi, M. K. ([1940] 2018). An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Trans. Mahadev Desai. Introduced and annotated by Tridip Suhrud. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Gibbons, A. (2017). Contemporary Autofiction and Metamodern Affect. In R. van den Akker, A. Gibbons, & T. Vermeulen (Eds.), Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth (pp. 117–130). Rowman and Littlefield.

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Mandel, B. J. (1980). Full of Life Now. In J. Olney (Ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (pp. 49–72). Princeton University Press. Neary, C. (2017). “Truth is like a vast tree”: Metaphor Use in Gandhi’s Autobiographical Narration. Metaphor and the Social World, 7(1), 103–121. Olney, J. (Ed.). (1980). Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton University Press. Parekh, B. (1999). Colonialism, Tradition and Reform (Revised ed.). Sage. Semino, E., & Culpeper, J. (2002). Foreword. In E. Semino & J. Culpeper (Eds.), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (pp. ix–xvi). John Benjamins. Suhrud, T. (2018). Editor’s Introduction. In M.  K. Gandhi (Ed.), An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (pp.  1–35, Trans. M. Desai and Introduced and annotated by T. Suhrud). Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 2

The Story of Gandhi’s “Experiments with Truth”

Abstract  An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth is the best-known of Gandhi’s writings and its continued popularity testifies to the enduring interest in its writer/subject. Chapter 2 describes the immediate context in which the autobiography, and its English translation, were produced. It considers the impetus for the autobiography’s commencement and highlights some of the practical features of its construction, before summarising the autobiography’s structure and content. Next, the chapter considers Gandhi’s role in the autobiography’s translation alongside an exploration of his own views, as a translator himself, on the process of translation. The chapter concludes with an overview of extant critical responses to and scholarly engagement with the text. Keywords  Gandhi • An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth • Indian autobiography • Theories of translation • Theories of autobiography

Introduction Einstein famously said of Gandhi “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth” ([1939] 1988, p.  40). This quote aptly captures both the hagiographic tradition that has grown up around the Mahatma and the concomitant © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Neary, Gandhi’s Autobiographical Construction of Selfhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22786-8_2

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enigma which voluminous writings on him have largely failed to penetrate. As Murrell notes, “Gandhi’s life and work in nonviolent political activism for civil rights, freedom and peace in South Africa and India are prodigiously documented in almost a thousand articles, theses and books” (2008, p. 144). Yet, “arguably the most popular figure of the first half of the twentieth century” and certainly “one of the most eminent luminaries of our time”, Gandhi the individual remains “as much an enigma as a person of endless fascination” (Murrell, 2008, p. 144). Embodying as he did “a peculiar mixture of the oriental and the occidental, and of the ancient and the modern” (Sinha, 2008, p. ix), Gandhi’s personality mystified even those closest to him. Chatterjee notes how the word “charisma was bandied about freely in an attempt to explain the enigmatic attraction of this complex personality” (1983, p. 1). Einstein similarly noted that Gandhi was “[a] leader of his people unsupported by any outward authority; a politician whose success rests not upon craft nor the mastery of technical devices, but simply on the convincing power of his personality” ([1939] 1988, p. 40).1 Persistent interest in his psyche and his social, economic, religious, political and spiritual endeavours has generated countless volumes about the Mahatma; yet, as biographer and friend Narayan Desai notes, “no work on [Gandhi’s] life has portrayed him in totality” (2009). The same may be said of Gandhi’s intellectual life, which has been, especially given the volumes of writing on most other aspects of his life, relatively neglected. In his foreword to Suhrud’s 2018 retranslation of the autobiography into English, tellingly entitled “A desanctified, useable Gandhi”, Nandy notes how Gandhi’s status as a “serious thinker” had for many decades after his death been overlooked. This was, Nandy asserts, largely due to the two types of Gandhian admirer “who have played an important role in retailing Gandhi” (2018, p. xiii): “the first kind venerates him as a saint who must be shelved, because it will be unfair to drag him into the dirty, violent, corrupt world of everyday politics” (2018, p. xiii) and the second has tended to “consider any serious intellectual engagement with him either a waste of time or an attempt to mislead the current generations away from the real Gandhi” (2018, p. xiv). Although 1  Gandhi’s political adversaries were all too aware of his ability to “draw the masses like a magnet” (Nanda, 1985, p. 59). Suggesting Gandhi’s complicity in the circumstances surrounding the Jallianwala Bagh shootings of 1919, one British journalist controversially asked: “When a lot of people get killed in a riot, who is most to blame, a clumsy commander like Dyer, or a consummate sorcerer’s apprentice like Gandhi?” (as reported in Nanda, 1985, p. 34).

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Gandhi’s autobiography and, particularly, its English translation, has been studied by biographers, historians, political theorists and adherents of postcolonialism, as well as being engaged with within the fields of life-­ writing and Indian writing in English, the text has yet to be subjected to detailed literary or linguistic investigation (excepting Neary 2017). The stance taken by this book is that An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1940) rewards close textual analysis with much more than mere biographical data on its writer/subject. To this end, Chap. 2 initiates engagement with the English translation of Gandhi’s autobiography by considering the impetus behind the autobiography’s commencement; the practicalities underpinning its construction; and its structure and content. It then moves on to investigate the nature of Gandhi’s role in the translation process before concluding with a summary of the text’s critical reception.

An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1940) According to Gandhi, the impetus to commence the writing of his autobiography came, circa 1921, “at the instance of some of [his] nearest co-­ workers” (An Auto, p. 43). However, its production was beset by delays, largely because the year 1921 also marked Gandhi’s wholesale conversion from, in his own words, “staunch [British] loyalist” to “uncompromising disaffectionist and non-co-operator”.2 For the first five decades of his life Gandhi had, by his own admission, “vied with Englishmen in loyalty to the throne” (An Auto, p. 291). However, in the wake of the 1919 Amritsar shootings and Britain’s treatment of the Muslim Khilafah, Gandhi’s growing unease over the nature of British rule in India was finally and irrevocably supplanted by the anti-British sentiment which would define his later years.3 His consequent absorption in implementing his satyagraha  Published in Young India, 23 March 1922.  Commonly known as the ‘Amritsar Massacre’, in which the British Army killed an estimated 1000 unarmed Indians gathered in peaceful protest in the Jallianwala Bagh gardens in Amritsar in the Punjab in 1919, this event is largely considered the turning point in Gandhi’s attitude towards the British (see for example Green, 1993, p. 25, p. 34). Gandhi’s reaction to Sir Michael O’Dwyer’s report into the Jallianwala Bagh shootings, as voiced in his autobiography, evidences his newly vociferous anti-British sentiments. O’Dwyer’s report would, Gandhi maintained, “enable the reader to see to what lengths the British Government is capable of going, and what inhumanities and barbarities it is capable of perpetrating in order 2 3

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­campaign, a “total system” (Brown, 1989, p.  140) of non-cooperation dedicated to ending British rule in India, left him little time for matters such as writing an autobiography. Ironically, numerous indictments and arrests for inciting ‘disaffection’ towards the British administration through his satyagraha campaign enabled Gandhi to commence writing his autobiography during a period of incarceration in Yeravda Prison near Poona in 1922.4 However, his early release on health grounds, together with a campaign of violent agitation in Maharashtra, meant that he could not recommence the project until late 1925 whilst taking a year-long “sabbatical” in his Satyagraha Ashram in Sabarmati to “retreat within himself and search his soul” (Suhrud, 2010, p. 1). Even then, persistent restraints upon his time and attention caused Gandhi to effectively conflate his autobiographical writing with editorial duties for his journal Navajivan: “Something had to be written for Navajivan every week. Why should it not be the autobiography?” (An Auto, p. 44). These time constraints similarly prevented him from undertaking the translation of his manuscript into English, a task he assigned to his close friend and aide-de-camp Mahadev Desai, the result being the near-simultaneous serialisation of the autobiography in both Gujarati and English.5 The first instalment of the Gujarati version of his autobiography was published in Navajivan on 29th November 1925 and ran until 3rd February 1929, under the title Satyana Prayogo Athava Atmakatha. The Gujarati title’s translation into English is rather awkward, being “Experiments with Truth, or Autobiography”. Gopalkrishna Gandhi explores this further in his foreword to Suhrud (2010): “The Gujarati part-title, Satyana Prayogo translates itself literally to ‘Truth’s Experiments’ or ‘Experiments of Truth’ rather than ‘Experiments with Truth’. The preposition ‘of’ expresses the relationship or an association between ‘truth’ as a general category and ‘experimentation’ as something which that category, in self-activation, becomes engaged in. The original title, to maintain its power” (An Auto, p.  731). For a succinct summary of Gandhi’s complex involvement in what became known as the Khilafat Movement, see Brown (1989, pp. 140–143) while a more detailed treatment of the movement and Gandhi’s stance towards it can be found in Nanda (2002). 4  In March 2022, Gandhi had been arrested and charged with sedition. Having been sentenced to six years in prison, he was released after two years following an operation for appendicitis. 5  The complexities surrounding the emergence of autobiography in India will be further discussed in Chap. 3.

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therefore, suggests a field of narration in which the protagonist is ‘truth’, the author being an instrument used by it” (2010, p. xi). The Gujarati original and its English translation should, he continues, “be seen as twins (or can we say ‘should be seen as the reverse and obverse of one coin’). They came almost in tandem; intense political and public activity surrounded their appearance” (2010, p. ix). The first instalment of the autobiography’s English translation appeared in Young India just four days after its first publication in Gujarati, on 3rd December 1925, and it ran until 7th February 1929 (see CWMG 39, p. v). The English language instalments were subsequently compiled into a two-volume edition under the name The Story of My Experiments with Truth: Volume One was published in 1927 and comprised parts I–III of the original series, while Volume Two was published two years later and contained parts IV and V. The English translation was largely completed by Desai, with the exception of Chapters 29–43 of Part V which were translated by Desai’s then-secretary Pyarelal Nayar during Desai’s participation in the Bardoli Agrarian Inquiry of 1928–1929.6 The first edition of the autobiography was priced at Rs 1/-, sold more than 50,000 copies and ran through five printings; however, the price was “prohibitive for the Indian reader” and the need for a “cheap edition” (Desai, [1940] 2018b, p.  41) resulted in the text’s re-publication as a single volume in 1940. This re-publication is considered a revised edition of the text, and it was only then that the word ‘autobiography’ was appended to the original title—a change “in keeping with the original Gujarati title” (Suhrud 2010, p. 3).7 The single volume 1940 edition— the source text for this book—had, to quote Desai’s ‘Translator’s Preface’ in the second edition, “undergone careful revision, and from the point of view of language … had the benefit of careful revision by a revered friend, who, among many other things, has the reputation of being an eminent English scholar” ([1940] 2018b, p.  41). Whilst the identity of this ‘scholar’ was suppressed for some time at his own request, it was later revealed by the editors of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi to be the renowned orator, liberal statesman and one-time disciple of Gandhi’s political ­mentor Gokhale, the Rt. Hon. Sir V.S. Srinivasa Sastri (Suhrud,

6  This was an early incidence of civil disobedience in which farmers of the Bardoli area of Gujarat protested against the raising of taxes. 7  The title’s translation from the original Gujarati into English complicates the text’s status as autobiography, as is discussed in Chap. 3.

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2010, p. 4).8 Sastri’s “careful revision” of the text does not appear to have substantively altered its content. A detailed comparison of the first (1927, 1929) and second (1940) editions of the autobiography undertaken by Suhrud (2010) to decipher the nature, number and extent of Sastri’s revisions concludes that although Sastri suggested a total of 1740 changes (Suhrud, 2018, p. 31), the autobiography’s content was not significantly altered, as the corrections were primarily “of language and diction, with punctuation marks dominating Sastri’s corrections” (2010, p. 5). Sastri’s revisions are too minor to have made any significant impact upon the text’s re-­publication and hence he is not significantly implicated in the Autobiography authorially. The text itself was published in 166 instalments and is comprised of five parts which span Gandhi’s early years in his childhood home on the Kathiawar Peninsula in the Western state of Gujarat, three years spent studying for the bar in London and two decades dedicated to the cause of Indian civil rights in South Africa. The text’s termination in 1921—a mere 6 years after his return to India, 27 years before his death and some 26 years before the political campaign he spearheaded would secure independence from the British—is, as noted by Holden, a “peculiar” feature of the autobiography (2008, p. 74). At a total of 117, 296 words (454 pages), textual brevity was certainly not a concern. Gandhi himself declared that 1921 simply constituted a convenient endpoint, coinciding as it did with a burgeoning public profile which, he asserted, ensured that his “life from this point onward has been so public that there is hardly anything about it that people do not know” (An Auto, p.  767). Whilst, 20 years after its publication, Gandhi expressed regret that he had found “no time to bring the remainder of my experiments with truth up to date” (CWMG 90, p. 1), it is also likely that, as noted by Holden (2008, p. 74), the “sense of 8  The editors of the CWMG remark: “This friend was V.S. Srinivasa Sastri who, in a letter to Mahadev Desai, 28 March 1935, wrote; ‘I am at work on the Auto., and making good progress’” (Vol 39, p. 1 n1). In fact, as noted by Suhrud (2010), Sastri proceeded to emphasise to Desai the “tyrannies of punctuations”; he deemed it necessary to send Desai a “treatise on composition” and advised him to “read the great classics, say two to three, with special attention to punctuation. Journals like the Times or the Manchester Guardian will also be useful”. The latter replied: “I am not quite innocent of these but I do commit blunders” and pleaded the “extenuating circumstances” in which he worked as denying him the opportunity for an extended revision of any of his translations (qtd. in Suhrud, 2010, p. 5).

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propriety” (An Auto, p.  768) Gandhi tried to maintain in his relations with political leaders in the Indian National Congress Party would have been compromised if he had resumed his autobiography. The analytical aim of this book is to interrogate links between the textual construction of the English translation of Gandhi’s autobiography, and resultant representations of his selfhood. The English translation of the autobiography is the most widely read version of the autobiography and hence it, rather than the Gujarati original, is the primary site through which readers access Gandhi’s autobiographical representation. As such, despite its status as a translation, the English translation of Gandhi’s autobiography is a legitimate object of close textual study. It does not need to be compared to its ‘source’ text—or, inevitably, judged inferior—because it has afforded to itself the legitimacy of a source text. It is, nonetheless, useful to consider the process by which the text was translated, especially because, as will shortly be demonstrated, this reveals the intensely collaborative role undertaken by Gandhi in the crafting of the version he knew would be critical in securing global attention on him and his spiritual and political campaign. The extent to which Gandhi was involved in the translation of the English version of the autobiography also makes it easier to see the text as the product of a process of autobiographical self-reflexivity.

The Translation Process Gopalkrishna Gandhi asserts that, when the English translation of the autobiography was published, Mahadev Desai “was rightly hailed for his sensitive translation”, a product of the latter’s “extraordinary industry” (2010, p. ix). However, there has been much debate over the legitimacy of the English translation of the text. Parekh (1986), for example vehemently asserts the translation’s ‘inauthenticity’: When I read Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography in Gujarati and English both, I found the English translation was not authentic. I noticed that Gandhiji had said something in his original Gujarati version, and it was quoted differently in the English version. I talked about this to my friend and noted Gujarati literate the late Shri Umashankar Joshi way back in the 1980s. Later I sat with him and his neighbour Nagindas Parekh and we thoroughly studied both the versions for two and half hours. We concluded

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that there were many translation-related gaps in the preface itself. We couldn’t go ahead towards further chapters of the book. (Gandhi Marg, June 1986)9

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson made a study of Gandhi based upon the Autobiography and similarly remarks upon the stylistic deficiencies of Desai’s translation: He translated it, no doubt, faithfully, with a pedantic devotion such as Gandhi cultivated in his secretaries, although some later transcended it in their own literary work. I should make it quite clear that I do not doubt the factuality of either the Autobiography or the translation; yet I believe that, together, they manage to submerge the subdued passion, the significant poignancy, and the gentler humour which often characterize Gandhi’s Gujarati, as well as his use of English. (1969, p. 60)

However, in the “Translator’s Preface” to the 1927 edition (retained in the 1940 revision), Gandhi’s secretary and the text’s translator Mahadev Desai undermines the validity of both Parekh and Erikson’s assertions in his foregrounding of Gandhi’s collaborative role in the translation: “No one, perhaps, is more conscious of the blemishes in the translation than myself. But it might be some comfort to the reader to know, that the volume, in the form in which it now appears, has had, so far as the meaning of the author is concerned, the benefit of his own careful revision” (p. 39). In his response to Parekh, the most vociferous proponent of the text’s ‘inauthenticity’, Gopalkrishna Gandhi re-emphasises this collaborative relationship between author and translator: “Variations in a translation are not ‘defects’ and when, as in this particular work, the stamp of the author’s approval is implicit, the variations have to be taken to be revisions that can re-phrase the original for one or more reasons, with the re-phrasings being those of the author no less than of the translator” (2010, p. x). This epistemological conflation of author with translator is, in this instance, highly appropriate as the intimacy characteristic of Gandhi and Desai’s relationship—both personally and professionally—engendered a form of literary symbiosis suggestive more of co-authorship than that of writer and translator. Having entered Gandhi’s ashram in 1917, together with his wife and friend, Mahadev Desai was among the first to work with Gandhi, and 9  For more on this, see not only Parekh (1986) but also Suhrud’s engagement with both Parekh and Gopalkrishna Gandhi in Suhrud (2018, pp. 31–34).

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quickly became a valued and indispensable friend and colleague. By September of the same year, Gandhi had confided to his eager new disciple: “It takes me only a little while to judge people. I have found in you the person I have been looking for, the one person to whom I will one day be able to entrust my work. I need you for myself personally, not for the ashram or for any other work” (qtd. in Payne, 1969, p. 322). His invaluable presence as secretary was noted by English anthropologist and Gandhian acolyte Verrier Elwin, who writes of Desai: He was officially the secretary, but he was much more than that. He was in fact home and foreign secretary combined. He managed everything. He made all the arrangements. He was equally at home in the office, the guest-­ house and the kitchen. He looked after many guests and must have saved ten years of Gandhi’s time by diverting from him unwanted guests. (1945, p. 14)

There is much evidence to suggest a highly collaborative working relationship between Gandhi and Desai. Intellectually, Desai was considered “an original mind and a leading figure in his own right, a fact that has often been masked by his complete devotion to Gandhi” (Govindu, 2005). Like Gandhi, he too had trained as a lawyer, and had a deep affinity with Indian languages and literatures; he wrote and published in several languages, including English, Hindi and Gujarati, and had published Gujarati translations of Tagore’s Chitrangada, Bidai Abhishap and Prachin Sahitya prior to joining Gandhi (Suhrud, 2010, p. 2). He also translated Gandhi’s writings and wrote propagandist literature for the Gandhian cause.10 The two men maintained very close working relations and trusted one another’s ability to communicate both effectively and efficiently, and to offer an objective and detailed critique of the other’s work. Desai’s son Narayan Desai says of his father: “He used to show all his articles for Harijanbandhu or Harijan to Bapu [Gandhi] before sending them for printing. Gandhiji also showed his own articles to Mahadev. This prevented the repetition of any subject; the thoughts got clarified and there was no discordant note in 10  His publications include The Gospel of Selfless Action: or The Gita According to Gandhi (1946); The Story of Bardoli; Being a History of the Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928 and Its Sequel (1929) and A Righteous Struggle: a Chronicle of the Ahmedabad Textile Labourers’ Fight for Justice (1922). He also published a biography of Indian Congress leader Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the President of the Indian National Congress: a Biographical Memoir, 1941).

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the writing” (1995, p. 637). Interestingly, Narayan Desai even attests to Gandhi’s tendency to pass his father’s work off as his own: he recalls at least one incident where “Bapu wrote a M.K.G. [Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi] after scratching out M.D.!” (1995, p. 637). Desai, the devoted disciple, gladly acquiesced to such acts: “To merge his own name in Bapu’s name, even to wipe out his own name, was Mahadev’s greatest pleasure” (N. Desai, 1995, p. 637). In fact, and despite the constraints upon Gandhi’s time, the translation of his autobiography into English was destined to be a heavily collaborative project between the two men. Gandhi’s three years in London and subsequent life-long use of the English language as a means of communicating with all strata of British administration, both in India and London, ensured he was extremely proficient in the language. Indeed, Gandhi himself translated some of his key works from Gujarati into English: in the preface to the English translation of Hind Swaraj, he describes how he dictated the Gujarati text into English to an ‘amanuensis’, friend Hermann Kallenbach ([1910] 1997, p.  5). Furthermore, Gandhi was fastidious about material published in his name; Elwin states that Gandhi is known to have “read and checked everything that was recorded of him” (Elwin, 1945, p.  14). Similarly, Gandhi’s friend and author of an eight-volume biography on the Mahatma, D.G. Tendulkar, informs the reader that his subject, “keenly interested in what he realized was likely to remain the standard biography of himself”, ensured that “every detail of the book, type, illustrations, format, and standardization of spelling, were discussed and settled between them” in advance of publication (1951–1954, Intro, Vol. 6). When it came to the translation of his autobiography, Gandhi’s meticulousness meant that he made “some time from ‘no time’” (G. Gandhi, 2008, p. x) to provide what Desai described in his ‘Translator’s Preface’ to the text’s second edition as “the benefit of Gandhiji’s revision” ([1940] 2018b, p. 41). Gandhi would have ensured his ongoing involvement in the translation he knew would secure him a global audience.. Gopalkrishna Gandhi says “it is clear” why Gandhi had the text translated into English: both he and Mahadev Desai “were thinking of an international readership, with a publisher like Macmillan in their thoughts” (2010, p. xii). Indeed, as Elwin notes, Desai’s translation was “to make Gandhi real to millions. He made him perhaps the best-known man in the world, certainly the best loved” (Elwin, 1945, pp. 14–15).

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Suhrud (2018) points out the importance of remembering that “the Autobiography was neither written nor placed before the readers as a ‘book’” (p.  17), and its weekly serialisation meant that readers had the opportunity to respond to it, seek further information and clarification or appeal against any inaccuracies or perceived misrepresentations. One such incident recounted by Suhrud (2018, pp. 19–20) also serves to perfectly illustrate the closely collaborative working relationship shared by Gandhi and Desai. In July 1927, the Modern Review objected to the Autobiography’s choice of the word ‘volatile’ to describe Sister Nivedita, a disciple of Swami Vivekananda to whom Gandhi had been introduced, stating it had “wronged her memory”. Gandhi published this objection in Young India, alongside a note on the incident entitled “In Justice to Her Memory”. In this note, the fastidiousness of both men and the intensely collaborative nature of their relationship can be discerned: As to the use of the word ‘volatile’, though the translation is not mine, I cannot disassociate myself from its use, because as a rule I revise these translations, and I remember having discussed the adjective with Mahadev Desai. We both had doubts about the use of the adjective being correct. The choice lay between volatile, violent and fantastical. The last two were considered to be too strong. Mahadev had chosen volatile and I passed it. (CWMG 34, pp. 80–81)

As Suhrud notes, Gandhi “supervised and authenticated most translations of his work” (2009, p. 108) with which he was satisfied. In the Foreword to V.G. Desai’s translation of Satyagraha in South Africa, Gandhi wrote: “Shri Valji Desai’s translation has been revised by me, and I can assure the reader that the spirit of the original has been very faithfully kept by the translator” ([1928] 1968, p. vii). Similarly, in his Foreword to Mahadev Desai’s translation of the Anasakti Yoga (The Gospel of Selfless Action or The Gita According to Gandhi), Gandhi wrote: “Insofar as the translation part of the volume is concerned, I can vouch for its accuracy. He has carried out the meaning of the original translation” ([1946] 2007, p. v). His failure to similarly certify the autobiography’s English translation appears more an oversight than an indictment upon the translation he knew would be instrumental in the global dissemination of his experiments with Truth. Its absence certainly fails to counter the other evidence considered, all of which leads Gopalkrishna Gandhi to conclude on the authenticity of the English translation of the autobiography as follows: “The English

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Autobiography therefore stands beside the original work not just as an authorised and outstanding translation but also as its first recension, prepared under the author’s direct guidance by one who was his alter ego, whose mother-tongue was the same as his, and who was, like him, perfectly at home in English” (2010, p. x). The task of translation was, in all likelihood, granted to Desai as a timesaving exercise, a necessary delegation of work by a much sought-after public figure. This is attested by Parekh following his investigation into the ‘authenticity’ of Desai’s translation: I went into this issue further and found that Gandhiji had ordered Mahadevbhai Desai to translate his autobiography into English, but Gandhiji gave him a very little time to complete each chapter. When Mahadevbhai told Gandhiji about this, Gandhiji replied him [sic] to just summarize the chapters to get the work done faster. So, whatever Mahadevbhai just summarized went to print ultimately as a full [sic] fledged translation, and we got the English version of Gandhiji’s autobiography thus. (2009)

Contemporary theories in translation studies argue for the importance of translator ‘invisibility’ to ensure effective practice. According to Venuti, such “invisibility”—the degree to which a translator suppresses his literary and linguistic idiosyncrasies and adopts the discursive mode and style of another—is crucial to successful translation: A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text—the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the ‘original’. (2008, p. 1)

In this context, it is interesting to consider Gandhi’s appraisal of his secretary: “If I am asked what was Mahadev’s greatest quality, I would say his ability to reduce himself to Zero whenever the occasion demanded it”.11 Desai’s ability to suppress his own individuality effectively rendered him the ideal translator. In addition, Desai’s close relationship to the writer-­ subject of the text being translated no doubt further ensured the success  Quoted in the frontispiece of Narayan Desai’s biography of his father.

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of the translation. In his seminal work “On Translating Homer”, Matthew Arnold asserts that close personal knowledge of the author is a ­precondition of successful translation: “For the translator is to reproduce Homer, and the scholar alone has the means of knowing that Homer who is to be reproduced. He knows him but imperfectly, for he is separated from him by time, race, and language; but he alone knows him at all” (1861, p. 30). Desai has been described as “Gandhiji’s spare organ” and their closeness depicted as akin to “one soul in two bodies” (N. Desai, 1995, p. 635): for Gandhi to entrust the text’s translation to Desai was to stop just short of undertaking the entire translation himself.12 The personal and professional intimacy between Gandhi and Desai, coupled with Gandhi’s typically fastidious treatment of all work pertaining to him, and his awareness that this translation of his autobiography would have a global reach cumulatively suggests Gandhi’s heavy involvement in the translation of his autobiography into English. The fact that Gandhi was himself a translator—of both his own works and those of others—affords an irresistible opportunity to locate his thoughts on the process of translation and situate them within the wider context of translation theory. Paul de Man is perhaps the most vociferous of those translation theorists who question both the process and products of translation in their assertion of the inherent and inexorable superiority of an original over a translated text. To invoke Walter Benjamin’s rather dramatic metaphor, theorists such as de Man assert that by using language “destructively” and “nihilistically”, the process of translation “kills” the original text, so that meaning plunges “from abyss to abyss until it threatens to become lost in the bottomless depths of language” (Benjamin, [1923] 1969, p. 37). De Man further argues that in the process of translation “the translator, per definition, fails … The translator can never do what the original text did. Any translation is always second in relation to the original, and the translator as such is lost from the very beginning” (de Man, 1985, p. 33). On the contrary, in its emphasis on the linguistic and interpretive instability endemic to all texts, the application of Derridean deconstructionism to translation theory minimises the role of interpretive difference; rather, it 12  The close and subsuming nature of Gandhi’s relationship with Desai is poignantly evidenced in his son Narayan’s search to find mention of his birth—of which his father had been notified by telegram—in Mahadev’s diaries: “Exactly sixty-six years after this day the main character of that telegram repeatedly turned the pages of Mahadevbhai’s Diary of 24-12-1924 and a couple of days following it, out of curiosity and wonder. There was no mention at all of the birth of a son! Mahadev’s diary had fused in Gandhiji’s diary” (1995, p. 201).

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challenges the validity of de Man’s construction, asserting the authority of the translated text on the very basis of its difference from the original. The task of translation is posited as a regenerative one: “The translation will truly be a moment in the growth of the original, which will complete itself in enlarging itself” (Derrida, [1980] 1985, p. 214). As Bannet asserts: the duty of the translator is the duty of an inheritor, the debt that of a survivor, and the responsibility that of an agent of survival who is destined, enjoined, or called to ensure the Uberleben (survival), the Fortleben (living on) and the Nachreife or ‘post-maturation’ of the original. The Uberleben which the translator is engaged to give the original is not merely survival beyond the biological life and death of its author (survivance); it is a ‘surplus of life’ [un plus de vie]. (1993, p. 585)

Such theorists assert that the process of translation allows an original text to live longer and “live more [plus] and better, beyond the means of its author” (Derrida, [1980] 1985, p. 206). In his own translations, Gandhi evinces a Derridean approach to translation: he demonstrates sensitivity to the mediated nature of interpretive practice along with a respect for the end-product of translation. In 1908 Gandhi translated Plato’s Apology into Gujarati.13 His translation was not derived from the Greek source text but rather from the interim English version. As Majeed asserts, “there is no sense in Gandhi’s preface or his conclusion that this in any way compromises the ‘Truth’ of the text” (2007, p.  326). Gandhi defends his translation of the Apology on the grounds that Socrates’ speech had already “been translated into many languages… We, therefore, wish to translate it, but rather than render it literally, we print only a summary of it” (CWMG 8, p. 173). Similarly, in the preface to his version of Ruskin’s Unto This Last, Gandhi asserts: “The summary of his work which we offer here is not really a translation. If we translated it, the common reader might be unable to follow some of the Biblical allusions, etc. We present therefore only the substance of Ruskin’s work” (CWMG 8, pp.  317–318). Thus, Suhrud notes that “Gandhi’s translations or paraphrases of Western texts were largely motivated not by literary concerns but by philosophical and pragmatic considerations. This 13  Entitled Defence of Socrates or The Story of a True Warrior, it is described in Gandhi’s Collected Works as “a Gujarati rendering of Plato’s immortal work printed in order to illustrate the virtue and true nature of passive resistance” (CWMG 8, p. 172). For the full text see CWMG 8, pp. 172–174, 185–187, 196–199, 212–214, 217–221, and 227–229).

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was his way of engaging with those aspects of the Western philosophical tradition that echoed his own thoughts” (2009, p. 113).14 Gandhi’s refusal to value the source text over its translation does not presuppose their textual equivalence but rather their intractable difference. In Majeed’s words, Gandhi believes that a translation “cannot reproduce the meaning or sense of the original, nor can it read as though it were written in that language. It also cannot reproduce the unity between the content and language in the original, and so in no way does it attempt to displace the source text” (2007, pp. 328–329). Gandhi also demonstrates a Derridean awareness of the mediation intrinsic to all interpretive practice. Pre-empting complaints regarding his use of the English translation of the Apology as his source text, Gandhi posits the secondary nature of all interpretive practice, including that of the Apology. He points out that “Socrates’ speech in his own defence was committed to writing by his companion, the celebrated Plato” rather than by himself (Indian Opinion, 4 April 1908). Furthermore, as Majeed demonstrates, Gandhi’s manner of translating the Apology and Unto This Last constitutes a concomitant augmentation and prolonging of what Walter Benjamin refers to as the ‘afterlife’ of the text ([1923] 1969, p.  72) through transposition to another context. By labelling Socrates as a “great satyagrahai” Gandhi transposes him to an Indian context, reconfiguring him as a model for Indians struggling under the yoke of colonialism (Indian Opinion, 4 April 1908). Moreover, comparison of the geographically limited appeal of the Gujarati original with the global dissemination of the Autobiography suggests that, in this sense at least, the English translation of the autobiography is a simulacrum of its source text.15 Pursuing a stylistic analysis of a translated text, the current study necessarily aligns itself with Derridean-informed theories of translation which vouchsafe the authority of a translation on the grounds of its intractable difference from the original, its extension of the ‘afterlife’ of the source text, and the proviso that all textual interpretation necessitates some form of translation. However, the suitability of translated texts for stylistic analysis remains to be addressed. As noted by Malmkjær (2004), Leech and Short’s (1981, 2007) broad conception of Stylistics as the study of style in

14  See Suhrud (2009) for a consideration of how Gandhi negotiated the cultural and political subtleties of Gujarati and English in his own translations. 15  For more on this argument, see Johnston (1992, pp. 42–56).

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language requires differentiation depending on which of the categories of text, reader or writer a study is primarily concerned with. She asserts that although translated texts may be analysed using identical means to those available for the analysis of non-translated texts as part of studies primarily orientated towards the first two categories (text and reader), writer-oriented studies of translated texts cannot be carried out in the same way for non-­ translated and translated texts. (2004, p. 13, emphasis added)

This is due to the linguistic restrictions imposed upon the translator by the translation process itself: while literary texts are “the outcome of a process of exercising a series of [linguistic, conceptual, cognitive] choices which are free and unconstrained”, the translator “commits to a willing suspension of freedom to invent, … to creating a text that stands to its source text in a relationship of direct mediation as opposed to being subject to more general intertextual influences” (Malmkjær, 2004, p. 15). For effective writer-orientated stylistic textual analysis, Malmkjær advocates the use of “translational stylistics”, a comparative and self-developed methodology involving both source and translated texts. Chapter 5 of the current book investigates the linguistic manifestation of Gandhi’s identity in the Autobiography; however, throughout the primary focus is not the writer or reader of this autobiographical text, but the autobiographical subject— Gandhi’s experiencing-‘I’—and its textual representation. Autobiography’s conventional conflation of author with subject [and narrator] facilitates a text-orientated focus which, in its inclusion of the category of writer, countermands Malmkjær’s assertions: the autobiographical eye (the writer) is not simply superseded by the autobiographical ‘I’ (the subject, as represented by the text), but is, rather, consistently implicit. In the context of stylistic analysis of an autobiography, therefore, traditional boundaries between writer-, text-, and reader-orientated analyses are made porous by autobiographical self-reflexivity; this facilitates a text-orientated approach—such as is carried out here—which concomitantly engages with authorial issues.

Critical Reception An indubitable manifestation of the abiding interest in Gandhi, An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1940) remains “the most widely-read of Gandhiji’s works and a document of central

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importance in the study of his life-story” (CWMG 39, p. v). Opinion as to its merits varies widely, as indeed does its readership: as the autobiography of India’s ‘Father of the Nation’, the text has garnered scholarly attention from biographers, historians and political and postcolonial theorists, as well as those situated in the fields of life-writing and Indian writing in English.16 However, excepting Neary 2017, the text has not yet been subject to close and detailed literary criticism. As an autobiography, Gandhi’s is not wholly unproblematic. Its content and textual structure are determined by the text’s morally didactic purpose and tenacious adherence to ‘Truth’.17 Sinha notes that, unlike a “typical Victorian” who wrote only on what was pleasurable to remember—or, as Ruskin phrased it, “passing in total silence things which I have no pleasure in reviewing” ([1885–1889] 1949)—Gandhi’s commitment to truthfulness ensured he selected “only those incidents which throw light upon his moral development” for inclusion in his autobiography (Sinha, 1978, p. 128). In the preface to Volume 39 of the CWMG, in which the autobiography appears, its deficiencies are clearly delineated. According to the editors, the autobiography omits “the human side” (p. ix) of Gandhi’s story and treats personal relationships “as ethical problems to be solved by a votary of Truth” (p. ix); it fails to “describe Gandhiji’s fervent patriotism, the adoration of Mother India” (p. x); it neglects to tell of “the genesis and progress of this strong emotional bond between the Mahatma and the Indian masses” (p. x); and it fails to mention “Gandhiji’s deep and reverent love for nature’s beauty” (p. x). In sum, “The work is thus not a full or satisfying self-portrait” (CWMG 39, p. x). The “vast mass of fact and sentiment which the Autobiography could have included but omits” (CWMG 39, p. ix) results, as asserted by Brown, in a text that is “erratic and often confusing if the reader is seeking some 16  Seminal biographical works on Gandhi include Brown (1989); Fischer (1951); and Nanda (1958). Noteworthy historical and political analyses of Gandhi are carried out by, among others, Bondurant (1958) and Ashe (1968). Literary engagement with the autobiography includes Sodhi (1999) and Srinivasa Iyengar (1962), though analyses are quite perfunctory and focus mainly on the autobiography’s literary parallels. For more general treatments of the autobiography, see Tirumalesh (1996, 1998); Hay (1983); Waghorne (1981); Callewaert and Snell (1994); and Mishra (1996). 17  Gandhi’s conceptualisation of ‘Truth’ was unique, as signified by its capitalisation: to him it was a “sovereign principle, which includes numerous other principles” (An Auto, p. 47) and it extended beyond the ontological towards the epistemological. This Truth, as he notes in his autobiography, “is not only truthfulness in word, but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the relative truth of our conception, but the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God” (An Auto, p. 47).

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clear chronological development or reasoned analysis” (1989, p.  74).18 Naipaul concurs, though he applauds the purposeful narrative simplicity he perceives in the first half of the text: “For its first half Gandhi’s autobiography reads like a fairy-tale. He is dealing with the acknowledged marvels of his early life; and his dry, compressed method, reducing people to their functions and simplified characteristics, reducing places to names and action to a few lines of narrative, turns everything to legend ([1972] 1976, p.  61). In the latter half of the text, Naipaul asserts, narrative clarity becomes obfuscated by the complexities and intrigues of Gandhi’s politicisation, and “the book declines more obviously into what it always was: an obsession with vows, food experiments, recurring illness, an obsession with the self” ([1972] 1976, p. 61). Yet for other critics, such as Leela Gandhi, the text’s mutability and inherent inconsistencies distinguish it as “compelling and histrionic” (2006, p. 69). As Holden notes, it is “read internationally not so much as political or personal history [but] as an inspirational text concerning the triumph of the human spirit” (2008, p. 73). As aforementioned, An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth has never been rigorously analysed as a literary text (with the exception of earlier work done by this author). Critically, it has typically been approached in one of two ways. Firstly, it is treated as biography, suitable only for the mining of historical data.19 In particular, it remains the primary source of information on Gandhi’s childhood, of which little is otherwise known.20 Secondly, it is interpreted from a dualist perspective which privileges either the narrating-‘I’ or the experiencing-‘I’ [the ‘knower’ or the ‘known’] thereby failing to capitalise on the self-­reflexivity of autobiography which provides a window into the autobiographer’s view of him/herself. Both of these approaches may be considered interlinked: the first literally engages with the Autobiography as a biographical text; the second approach 18  This impression is compounded by some factual inaccuracies in the text which, when brought to his attention, Gandhi refused to correct (see Suhrud, 2018, pp. 17–21). 19  Codell concurs: “When it is cited, often very briefly, it is for historical and biographical content, rather than for its literary values” (2006, p. 123). 20  The use of the Autobiography as the primary source for biographical accounts of Gandhi’s childhood is evident in the seminal Gandhian biographies by Brown (1989) and Louis Fischer (1951) which often simply paraphrase material from the autobiography. For example, of his father’s previous marriages, Gandhi remarks in the autobiography: “Kaba Gandhi married four times in succession, having lost his wife each time by death” (An Auto, p. 54; emphasis added). Brown paraphrases this as “Karamchand Gandhi [was] married four times, … having lost each wife in turn through death” (1989, p. 15; emphasis added). The first part of Fischer’s biography deviates little from the first 12 chapters of the Autobiography.

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interpretively engages with it on the same basis, overlooking the subjectivity which typically distinguishes autobiography from its generic counterpart, biography.21 This book engages with An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth in two inter-related ways: firstly, as a literary text in its own right and, secondly, as a self-portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most enduring figures. More recent scholarly engagement with the Autobiography constitutes a departure from the hagiographic tradition which characterised earlier approaches to Gandhi’s autobiography. Codell (2006), for example, traces the sartorial transformations which, she asserts, mark the multiple identities which Gandhi adopted throughout the course of his life. Treating the autobiography as an adaptation of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored, 1937 [1833–1834]), Codell argues that Carlyle’s text “offered Gandhi ideals, themes and metaphors of clothes and wanderings with which to help him fashion an Indian national self as a transnational identity, beyond parochial regional and caste hierarchies inherent in traditional Indian identities” (2006, p.  123). Effectively, she asserts that Gandhi’s multi-­faceted identity was self-constructed as a means of transcending the socio-­religious boundaries of traditional Indian identities and instead forging a “bricolaged Indian and transnational identity without regional or religious attire” (2006, pp.  124–125, emphasis in original). Majeed (2007) asserts that, in writing their own autobiographies, Indian political leaders are exercising their right to [auto]biographically construct themselves, to “choose their own existence from a moral and political point of view”; in doing so, they ensure that “selfhood becomes an achievement rather than a sign ascribed by others” (2007, p.  1). For Gandhi, as for Nehru and Iqbal, “autobiography is that realm of writing in which the ‘I’ wins for itself an identity in a qualitative sense, as opposed to a numerical sense alone” (Majeed, 2007, p.  2).22 Holden (2008) maintains that 21  This distinction is based upon that put forward by Lejeune, who maintains that “[i]n order for there to be autobiography the author, the narrator and the protagonist must be identical” (1989, p.  5), a conflation Genette terms ‘autodiegetic’ narration. See Lejeune (1989, pp. 5–6) and Genette (1980). 22  Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), independent India’s first prime minister, were undoubtedly the most well-known statesmen in pre-independent India. Though they enjoyed a close personal and professional relationship, their socio-political ideals were largely divergent and loosely represented a clash between tradition and modernity, though this dialectic has rightly been problematised of late. Similarities in their Western education, political agenda and status in India, together with their often-disparate ideologies, render it useful to draw parallels between their autobiographical self-representations.

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Gandhi’s autobiography evidences his refusal to reconstruct “homologies between masculinity, modernity, and the state” (p. 62), instead privileging other “technologies of the self” founded upon gender, hygiene and economy (p.  73). Mandelbaum’s anthropologically based ‘life historical’ approach (1973) sees him structurally reorganise the Autobiography to foreground the psychological “turnings” or “major transitions” in Gandhi’s life (p. 181).23 Overlooking the text’s extant division into five parts, Mandelbaum reconfigures it into four to coincide with the four geographical locations and associated social roles which mark these “turnings”.24 Mandelbaum interprets these stages—and their requisite ‘turnings’—as evidence of Gandhi’s varying conformity to and rejection of a culturally defined Indian life plan which threatened his burgeoning sense of selfhood. While Mandelbaum focuses on the known—that is, the autobiographical subject of the text—in his psychoanalytical treatment of the Autobiography, Erikson is concerned with the knower, in particular, “how the knower shapes the known and … how the past shapes the growth and development of the individual” (1969, p.  71). Erikson assumes there is little formal significance in the autobiography’s structure, claiming it to be “casual and episodic” in nature (1969, p.  439). So, in attempting to recover “the revelations of hidden motivation” (1966, p.  636) in the Autobiography, Erikson significantly reconfigures its structure to give prominence to a single event—the 1918 Ahmedabad mill strike—he believed was integral to Gandhi’s constructions of satyagraha and ahimsa,25 23  Mandelbaum defines a “turning” as follows: “The principal periods of a life are marked by the main turnings, the major transitions, that the person has made. Such a turning is accomplished when the person takes on a new set of roles, enters into fresh relations with a new set of people, and acquires a new self-conception […] Once we understand the major transitions, we also know something about the main parts of his life, that is, about his salient roles, social relations, and self-conception from one transition to the next” (1973, p. 181). 24  These four “turnings” equate respectively with Gandhi’s childhood and early adulthood in Kathiawad; his 3-year sojourn studying law in London; the 20-year period spent as a lawyer and political activist in South Africa; and finally, his establishment as a political and spiritual leader upon his return to India. Mandelbaum notes that other minor turnings occurred across these periods but, with the possible exception of the overtures towards Hindu-Muslim unity made during the final months of his life, the majority are represented by the above four categories (1973, p. 183). 25  Satyagraha (literally ‘truth-force’ or ‘soul force’) was the “absolutely non-violent weapon” (An Auto, p.  586) by which Gandhi sought to gain political independence for India. Fundamental to its practice was non-violent protest (ahimsa) and civil disobedience,

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though Gandhi himself dismissed the strike as a “comparatively small affair” (An Auto, p. 656). In doing so, Erikson “reifie[s] a particular formulation of self and agency in which a fragmented or discontinuous narrative represents a developmentally fragmented and compartmentalized self” (1969, p. 71; see Erikson, 1969 for detail on his rationale and conclusions). Like Erikson, Leigh’s interrogation of how Gandhi’s spiritual journey is manifested in his autobiography also reconstructs the text. Leigh asserts that the Autobiography is structured around Gandhi’s endeavours to reconcile the “serious psychic tension between the values imparted to him by his father and those modelled for him by his mother” (2000, p. 103), and this structure, he maintains, is evidenced in the text’s adherence to “the pattern of a circular journey in three stages” roughly equivalent to Part I, Part II/III and IV/V respectively of the text (2000, p. 105). Despite this increase in scholarly attempts to engage with the complexities of Gandhi’s psyche as represented in the Autobiography, few demonstrate awareness of the increased signifying potential of autobiographical writing, as identified by autobiographical theorists such as Bruss. In Bruss’s discussion of the “intranslatability” of autobiography across semiotic modes, she successfully problematises long-held ideological assumptions about the nature of selfhood (1980, p. 297). She posits that “[w]e are apt to take autobiography […] as at least expressive of a common underlying reality—a self existing independently of any particular style of expression and logically prior to all literary genres and even to language itself” (1980, p.  298, emphasis added). However, Bruss’s finding that “the autobiographical ‘I’ cannot survive the move from text to film intact” (1980, p. 298) suggests that this ‘independent’ self is dependent upon the semiotic mode in which it is first constructed. Pondering the “implications for our notions of the self and of human subjectivity […] if there is no ‘eye’ for ‘I’ ”, Bruss concludes that the autobiographical text is not merely a narratorial rendering of an autonomous monolithic selfhood—a “state of being with its own metaphysical necessity”—but is complicit in the very but its constant evolution and mutation make it a difficult concept to define. To Gandhi it was “a process of self-purification” (An Auto, p. 706) which, when undertaken individually, would result in a societal and spiritual change leading to political independence. Of this “weapon” Gandhi remarked: “If I could popularize the use of soul-force, which is but another name for love-force, in place of brute-force, I know that I could present you with an India that could defy the whole world to do its worst” (An Auto, p. 692).

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creation of that autobiographical self (1980, p. 298).26 In the context of autobiographical writing, language is not a mere communicative vehicle: rather, selfhood itself “takes shape by and in its language” so that “[t]he discourse that had seemed a mere reflection or instrument of the self becomes its foundation and sine qua non” (Bruss, 1980, p.  298). Extrapolating on this basis, the Autobiography in fact occupies a dual position: it is both a passive textual representation of Gandhi’s life-story and an active contributor towards the crafting of the selfhood at the text’s centre. Gandhi’s identity as constructed within the text is also constructed by the text. Eder is among the few scholars to recognise the significance of the autobiography’s formal structure (in contrast to, for example, Erikson, as seen above), pointing out that exclusive focus on Gandhi the (auto)biographical figure means overlooking the importance of formal choices made by Gandhi as autobiographer: “an interpretive fixation on Gandhi the historical figure has obscured how Gandhi the autobiographer represented his own understanding of self and circumstance” (2000, p.  80). Eder aligns himself with Weintraub’s definition of successful autobiography as that which demonstrates the autobiographer’s ability to recognise and competently render their “necessary point of view” (see Weintraub, 1975) through narrative. Weintraub argues that “[a]utobiography cannot be read in a truthful manner if the reader cannot, or will not, recapture the standpoint, the point of view of the autobiographer as autobiographer” (1975, p.  827). Those critics who focus solely on Gandhi as autobiographical subject fail to consider his ‘necessary point of view’. Eder endeavours to address this by pointedly referring to the autobiography as “Gandhi’s story about his life”; as such, he prioritises consideration of how Gandhi’s conceptualisation of himself interacts with his surrounding context (2000, p. 66), or what Weintraub terms the “interplay between an ‘I’ and a world” (1978, p. 277). As Eder asserts, scholarly engagement with the Autobiography has indeed hitherto been somewhat reductive in nature, and that, “[r]ather than seek an archimedean viewpoint from which to see Gandhi’s life, we [should] seek the perspective(s) which 26  De Man also notes this ontological paradox: “We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of this medium?” (1985, p. 44).

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Gandhi develops for his reader to understand his life and its circumstances” (2000, p. 66, emphasis added). This issue has no doubt at least partially arisen from the complexities of the text’s generic form: Gandhi himself denied that the text was autobiography, asserting instead that by prioritising representation of the life of his soul over that of his self, he avoided the egotism characteristic of the traditionally Western genre of autobiography, an important facet of the autobiography’s construction which is engaged with further in Chap. 3. Gandhi’s ‘necessary point of view’ is therefore inextricably bound up with the generic distinction he repeatedly made: in denying the text’s generic status, Gandhi is simultaneously denying its self-reflexivity. The cognitive stylistic analysis undertaken in Chap. 5 interrogates the presence and nature of Gandhi’s selfhood in the text and finds that the text itself does portray a self as well as a soul. There are several conditions responsible for the dearth of scholarly investigation of the Autobiography’s formal aspects, particularly its literary and linguistic features. The hagiographic approaches which characterise much of Gandhian scholarship are implicated here, as no doubt is Gandhi’s denial of the text’s generic status, which is in turn tied up with his insistence that his sole intention in writing the text was “to propagate [his] ideas”27 rather than write about himself. Another condition is Gandhi’s consistent undermining of his own writing process. He conspicuously belittled his own literary abilities, at one stage insisting that “I am not built for academic writings. Action is my domain” (quoted in Nanda, 1985, p. 144). Similarly, he tended to represent his literary output as the product of an organic process generated by spiritual dictates: of the creation of his autobiography, he remarked: “When I began writing it, I had no definite plan before me. […] I write just as the Spirit28 moves me at the time of writing” (An Auto, p. 441). In particular, Gandhi foregrounded what he perceived as the stylistic simplicity of his own writing; he deemed such a “sharp departure” from the “ornateness and artistry” typical of contemporaneous Indian writing (Bhattacharya, 1969, p. 114) crucial for the successful dissemination of his ideals across all ranks of society. However, despite its obvious socio-political purpose, Gandhi’s characterisation of his own writing style as ‘simple’ has been largely accepted by scholars of the text, with critiques of the Autobiography largely focusing on its perceived literary simplicity. It is variously deemed an “artlessly told  Harijan, 18 June 1946.  Suhrud retranslates “the Spirit” as “the dweller within” (2018, p. 441 M1).

27 28

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story” (Tobin, 1949, p.  78) and “a work of […] simplicity and force” (Harcave, 1948, p.  509). Some reviewers remark upon the “[s]imple, straightforward English [which] characterizes this translation from the Gujerati [sic]” (Olcott, 1949, p.  192), while others perfunctorily state: “[r]arely has a story been so simply told” (Saunders, 1931, p. 202). In fact, one of the few critical voices to deviate from this dominant view of Gandhi’s writing style belongs to Khilnani, who remarks upon “the complexities which always surround the apparent simplicities of Gandhi’s writings: the way in which they are directed simultaneously at quite different audiences, their play with genre and language, their sly allusiveness” (1997, emphasis added). Khilnani, similarly, remarks that Gandhi “took great pains to avoid what he saw as the besetting sin of his compatriots’ manner of expression: exaggeration and melodrama. He ruthlessly excised this from his own writing and achieved striking effects” (2003, p. 141). The result, Khilnani maintains, is literature which, tellingly, “often reads like a lawyer’s brief, but without the obfuscations of legal language” (2003, p. 145). Many commentators on Gandhi’s literary output have chosen to interpret what Khilnani calls Gandhi’s “verbal parsimony” as reflective of the spiritual ‘simplicity’ or purity of the writer (2003, p.  145). Sinha, for example, asserts that “[t]he simplicity achieved in Gandhi’s style is born of a genuine humility of the soul” (1978, p. 193). Bhattacharya reverentially concludes that “whatever art there was in [Gandhi’s writing] was ‘artless’, that he simply expressed what he felt deep down in his heart, and the words took good care of themselves” (1969, p. 114, emphasis added). Similarly, a contemporaneous American admirer of Gandhi, J.H.  Holmes, attests: “Gandhi’s literary achievements are the more remarkable in view of the fact that he was never a literary man … Seldom, if ever, in his writings did he rise to heights of eloquence and beauty … Gandhi’s interests were never aesthetic, but rather pragmatic. He had no desire, no ambition, no time, to be an artist” (qtd. in Bhattacharya, 1969, p. 113). K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, a foremost scholar of Indian writing in English, has this to say about Gandhi’s writing style: “Gandhi had neither the time nor the inclination to cultivate the so-called art of writing … No straining after emphasis, no colour, no irradiating brilliance. Yet they are Gandhi’s words, and their very bareness constitutes their strength” (1962, p. 216). According to Gandhi himself, however, stylistic simplicity did not come naturally to

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him:29 “The reader can have no idea of the restraint I have to exercise… in the choice of topics and my vocabulary. It is a training for me. It enables me to peep into myself and to make discoveries of my weaknesses. Often my vanity dictates a smart expression or my anger a harsh adjective. It is a terrible ordeal but a fine exercise to remove these weeds”.30 Such a statement, coupled with the aforementioned assumptions commonly made by his readers, makes the paucity of scholarly scrutiny of the stylistic or linguistic construction of Gandhi’s literary output all the more surprising. In summary, previous scholarly engagement with Gandhi’s autobiography has stopped short of engaging with it as an autobiographical text, electing to approach it as a text written about rather than by Gandhi. Evidence has demonstrated the extent of Gandhi’s collaboration in the text: his careful selection of a translator with whom he was both personally and professionally intimate—one who, moreover, was happy to “merge” himself with “Bapu” (1995, p.  637)—ensured the resultant translation would be sensitive, not only to the original text, but to its author and autobiographical subject. Desai possessed an “exceptional” command of the English language (G. Gandhi, 2010, p. x), yet Gandhi’s fastidiousness regarding the textual translation which would secure him a “unique world readership” (G. Gandhi, 2008, p. 11) ensured he made “some time from ‘no time’” to supervise the project (G. Gandhi, 2010, p. x). Finally, his own experience as writer and translator provided him with linguistic, literary and editorial skills, all of which he contributed to a translation process remarkable for its heavily collaborative author-translator relationship.

References Arnold, M. (1861). On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford. Longman. Ashe, G. (1968). Gandhi: A Study in Revolution. William Heinemann Ltd. Bannet, E.  T. (1993). The Scene of Translation: After Jakobson, Benjamin, de Man, and Derrida. Textual Interrelations. Special issue of New Literary History, 24(3), 577–595. Benjamin, W. ([1923] 1969). The Task of the Translator. In H.  Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.). Schocken. 29  Gandhi’s assertion appears to contradict that of Chatterjee, who believes he possessed “the pedagogue’s natural gift for sensing the language that would be intelligible to his listeners” (1983, p. 2). 30  Young India, 2 July 1925.

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Bhattacharya, B. (1969). Gandhi the Writer: The Image as It Grew. National Book Trust. Bondurant, J. (1958). Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict. University of California Press. Brown, J. M. (1989). Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. Yale University Press. Bruss, E. W. (1980). Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film. In J. Olney (Ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (pp. 296–320). Princeton University Press. Callewaert, W.  M., & Snell, R. (Eds.). (1994). According to Tradition: Hagiographical Writing in India. Harrassowitz Verlag. Carlyle, T. (1937 [1833–1834]). Sartor Resartus (C.  F. Harrold, Ed.). Odyssey Press. Chatterjee, M. (1983). Gandhi’s Religious Thought. University of Notre Dame Press. Codell, J. F. (2006). Excursive Discursive in Gandhi’s Autobiography: Undressing and Redressing the Transnational Self. In D. Amigoni (Ed.), Life Writing and Victorian Culture (pp. 123–144). Aldershot. Derrida, J. ([1980] 1985). Des tours de Babel. In Joseph F.  Graham (Ed.), Difference in Translation (pp. 165–207). Cornell University Press. Desai, M. ([1927] 2018). Translator’s Preface to the First Edition. In M. K. Gandhi (Ed.), An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (p.  39, Trans. M.  Desai and Introduced and annotated by T.  Suhrud). Yale University Press. Desai, M. ([1940] 2018). Translator’s Preface to the Second Revised Edition. In M.  K. Gandhi (Ed.), An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (p. 41, M. Desai, Trans. and Introduced and annotated by T. Suhrud). Yale University Press. Desai, N. (1995). The Fire and the Rose (C. Desai, Trans.). Navajivan. Desai, N. (2009). Narayan Desai Recalls the Creation of the Mahatma’s Biography. DNA India, October 2. Retrieved June 15, 2022, from http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_narayan-­desai-­recalls-­the-­creation-­of-­the-­mahatma-­s-­ biography_1294446/ Eder, M. (2000). The Autobiographer in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth. In P. S. Gold & B. C. Sax (Eds.), Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture (pp. 63–90). Rodopi. Einstein, A. ([1939] 1988). Ideas and Opinions. Rupa. Elwin, V. (1945). Mahadev. In D. G. Tendulkar, M. Chalapathi Rau, M. Sarabhai, & V. K. Jhaveri (Eds.), Gandhi: His Life and Work (pp. 14–19). B.G. Dhawale. Erikson, E.  H. (1966). Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Leader as a Child. The American Scholar, 35, 632–646. Erikson, E. H. (1969). Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Non-violence. W.W. Norton and Co.

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Fischer, L. ([1951] 2006). The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. Harper Collins. Gandhi, G. (2008). Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of Translators’ Experiments with the Text. Fredsakademiet, October 1. Retrieved August 15, 2022, from http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/autobiography%20-­%20 translators%20experiments.pdf Gandhi, G. (2010). Foreword. In T. Suhrud (Ed.), An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth: A Table of Concordance (pp. i–xiv). Routledge. Gandhi, L. (2006). Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship. Permanent Black. Gandhi, M. K. ([1908] 1962). Defence of Socrates or The Story of a True Warrior. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 8: 172–174, 185–187, 196–199, 212–214, 217–221, and 227–229. The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Navajivan. Gandhi, M.  K. (1962). Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Vol. 8). The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Navajivan. Gandhi, M. K. ([1928] 1968). Satyagraha in South Africa (V. G. Desai, Trans.). Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Vol. 29, pp.  1–269). The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Navajivan. Gandhi, M. K. ([1910] 1997). Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (A. J. Parel, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. Gandhi, M. K. ([1946] 2007). Foreword. In The Gospel of Selfless Action or The Gita According to Gandhi (pp. i–vi., M. Desai, Trans.). Navajivan. Gandhi, M. K. ([1940] 2018). An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (M.  Desai, Trans. and Introduced and annotated by T.  Suhrud). Yale University Press. Gandhi, M.  K. (1969). Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Vol. 34). The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Navajivan. Gandhi, M.  K. (1970). Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Vol. 39). The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Ahmedabad: Navajivan. Gandhi, M.  K. (1984). Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Vol. 90). The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Navajivan. Genette, G. (1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (J. E. Lewin, Trans.). Cornell University Press. Govindu, V.  M. (2005). A Greatness of His Own. India Together, January 30. Retrieved June 15, 2022, from http://www.indiatogether.org/2005/jan/ rvw-­firerose.htm Green, M. (1993). Gandhi: Voice of a New Age. Continuum.

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Harcave, S. (1948). Gandhi’s ‘Confession.’ Review of Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, by Mohandas K. Gandhi. The Antioch Review, 8(4), 507–509. Hay, S. (1983). Digging Up Gandhi’s Psychological Roots. Biography, 6(3), 209–219. Holden, P. (2008). Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-state. University of Wisconsin Press. Holmes, J. H. (1950). Introduction. In M. K. Gandhi (Ed.), Gandhi’s Letters to a Disciple (pp. 3–5). Harper and Bros. Johnston, J. (1992). Translation as Simulacrum. In L. Venuti (Ed.), Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (pp. 42–56). Routledge. Khilnani, S. (1997). The Bodily Drama. Times Literary Supplement, August 8. Khilnani, S. (2003). Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English. In A.  Mehrotra (Ed.), History of Indian Literature in English (pp. 135–156). Hurst. Leech, G., & Short, M. (1981). Style in Fiction. Pearson Longman. Leech, G., & Short, M. (2007). Style in Fiction (2nd ed.). Routledge. Leigh, D.  J. (2000). Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography. Fordham University Press. Lejeune, P. (1989). On Autobiography (P.  J. Eakin, Ed. and K.  Leary, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Majeed, J. (2007). Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal. Palgrave. Malmkjær, K. (2004). Translational Stylistics: Dulcken’s Translations of Hans Christian Andersen. Language and Literature, 13(1), 13–24. Mandelbaum, D.  G. (1973). The Study of Life History: Gandhi. Current Anthropology, 14(3), 177–206. de Man, P. (1985). Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’. Messenger Lecture, Cornell University. (1983, March 4). The Lesson of Paul de Man. Special Issue of Yale French Studies, 69: 25–46. Mishra, V. (1996). Defining the Self in Indian Literary and Filmic Texts. In W. Dissanayake (Ed.), Narratives of Agency: Self-Making in China, India, and Japan (pp. 117–150). University of Minnesota Press. Murrell, N.  S. (2008). Mohandas K.  Gandhi: The Making of an Anti-colonial Satyagraha Prophet. Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 15(1), 143–161. Naipaul, V.  S. ([1972] 1976). Indian Autobiography. In The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles. Penguin. Nanda, B. R. (1958). Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography. Allen & Unwin. Nanda, B. R. (1985). Gandhi and His Critics. Oxford University Press. Nanda, B.  R. (2002). Gandhi: Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism in India. Oxford University Press.

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Nandy, A. (2018). Foreword. In M. K. Gandhi (Ed.), An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (pp. xiii–xv, M. Desai, Trans. and Introduced and annotated by T. Suhrud). Yale University Press. Neary, Clara. (2017). “Truth is like a vast tree”: Metaphor use in Gandhi’s autobiographical narration. Metaphor and the Social World, 7(1), 103 –121. Olcott, M. (1949). Review of Gandhi’s Autobiography, by M. K. Gandhi. Special Issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 261, 191–192. Parekh, B. (1986). Gandhi and His Translators. Gandhi Marg, June. Parekh, B. (2009). Speech at Ahmedabad, 25 July 2009. Qtd. in English Version of Gandhi’s Autobiography Is Not Authentic. DeshGujarat. July 26. Retrieved June 15, 2022, from http://deshgujarat.com/2009/07/25/english-­version­of-­gandhis-­autobiography-­is-­not-­authentic/ Payne, R. (1969). The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi. Dutton. Ruskin, J. (1949 [1885–1889]). Preface. In Praeterita: Autobiography. Rupert Hart-Davis. Saunders, K. (1931). Mahatma Gandhi Seen Through His Autobiography. Review of My Experiment with Truth: An Autobiography, by Mahatma Gandhi. Pacific Affairs, 4(3), 201–209. Sinha, R. C. P. (1978). The Indian Autobiographies in English. S. Chand. Sinha, R. K. (2008). M.K. Gandhi: Sources, Ideas and Actions. Ocean. Sodhi, M. (1999). Indian English Writing: The Autobiographical Mode. Creative Books. Srinivasa Iyengar, K. R. (1962). Indian Writing in English. Asia Publishing House. Suhrud, T. (2018). Editor’s Introduction. In M.  K. Gandhi (Ed.), An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (pp. 1–35, M. Desai, Trans. and Introduced and annotated by T. Suhrud). Yale University Press. Suhrud, T. (2009). Reading Gandhi in Two Tongues. In J.  Wakabayashi & R.  Kothari (Eds.), Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond (pp. 107–118). John Benjamins. Suhrud, T. (2010). An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth: A Table of Concordance. Routledge. Tendulkar, D. G. (1951–1954). Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Vithalbhai K. Jhaveri and D.G. Tendulkar. Tirumalesh, K.  V. (1996). Autobiography’s Search for Truth: Newman and Gandhi. The Centennial Review, 40, 99–123. Tirumalesh, K. V. (1998). Autobiography’s Moment of Truth: The Experiments of Mahatma Gandhi. Indian Journal of American Studies, 27(2), 15–20. Tobin, L. M. (1949). A Struggle for Sainthood: Review of Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by M. K. Gandhi. Phylon, 10(1), 76–78. Venuti, L. (2008). The Translators’ Invisibility: A History of Translation (2nd ed.). Routledge.

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Waghorne, J. P. (1981). The Case of the Missing Autobiography. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 49(4), 589–603. Weintraub, K.  J. (1975). Autobiography and Historical Consciousness. Critical Inquiry, 1(4), 821–848. Weintraub, K.  J. (1978). The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 3

Gandhi and the Emergence of Autobiography in India

Abstract  Scholars have noted that the ‘preconditions’ necessary for autobiography—most notably an emphasis on individuality at odds with the tenets of orthodox Hinduism—were largely absent in India up to the mid-­ nineteenth century and the genre’s status in India was still problematic at the time Gandhi commenced his autobiography. Chapter 3, therefore, considers the generic context of An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Firstly, it interrogates the status of autobiography in India at the time of the text’s production, tracing these preconditions and their effect on the genre’s emergence in India. Then, it traces how Gandhi endeavoured to negotiate the egocentricity associated with the genre by recasting his autobiographical project as one focused on the soul rather than the self. Keywords  Gandhi • An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth • Autobiography in India • Preconditions for autobiography

Introduction In the very first page of the introduction to his autobiography, Gandhi confronts two of the potentially most troublesome charges to which his autobiographical endeavour exposes him. Represented as the “doubts” of a “God-fearing friend”, Gandhi self-reflexively poses the following questions: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Neary, Gandhi’s Autobiographical Construction of Selfhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22786-8_3

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What has set you on this adventure? … Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West. I know of nobody in the East having written one, except amongst those who have come under Western influence. And what will you write? Supposing you reject tomorrow the things you hold as principles today, or supposing you revise in the future your plans of today, is it not likely that the men who shape their conduct on the authority of your word, spoken or written, may be misled? (An Auto, p. 44)1

Demonstrating an impressive awareness of the nature of future critical interest in him, Gandhi proceeds to provide an answering rationale that cleverly conflates these two apparently disparate issues. A harsh and vociferous critic of Western modernity—in particular, the materialism engendered by its industrial and economic progress—Gandhi was aware that ‘indulging’ in the traditionally Western genre of autobiographical writing exposed him to cynicism from friends and foes alike. As the above-­ mentioned objections were vocalised on one of Gandhi’s self-imposed days of silence, the “doubts” of this “God-fearing friend” went unaddressed; however, as Tirumalesh notes, they enter the autobiography “in a tacit manner and are answered throughout” (1996, p. 115). In questioning his motivations for engagement with a Western literary genre, Gandhi’s friend is not merely decrying Western cultural production. He is also, more importantly, exposing the cross-cultural tensions inherent in Indian autobiographical writing because the focus on the self which is required by the genre was anathema to orthodox Hindus, eschewing as they did any assertions of selfhood. In answer to these charges, Gandhi determined to pen his autobiography in what Parekh labels a “morally innocent manner” (1999, p. 284) which, by directing the text’s focus away from the self and redirecting it towards the soul would avoid the pitfalls of egotism. In his introduction to the autobiography, Gandhi states: “my purpose is to describe experiments in the science of satyagraha, not to say how good I am” (An Auto, p. 49). In doing so, Gandhi hoped to nullify potential accusations as to the cultural and religious appropriateness of his writing an autobiography. He writes that while his “experiments in the political field are now known, not 1  Parekh (1999) points out that Gandhi’s reputation for being an experimentalist who constantly revised his opinions, together with his Mahatma status, which decreed a moral authority to him, made for a dangerous combination when it came to life-writing because readers would treat his opinions as definitive when he himself would not mean them to be (p. 284).

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only to India, but to a certain extent to the ‘civilized’ world” (An Auto, p. 45), to him they “have not much value” (An Auto, p. 45) and he would like instead to “narrate my experiments in the spiritual field, from which I have derived such power as I possess for working in the political field” (An Auto, p. 45). This redirection of autobiographical focus from the self to the soul would, he believed, be most aptly achieved by focusing exclusively on these spiritual experiments and their surrounding circumstances. Such discussion would need to be supplemented with details of his personal history, but only those which directly pertained to the experiments themselves. As such, Gandhi endeavoured to avoid the egotism typical of the genre by giving his autobiography “the form of an objective record of his moral experiments in private and public life, narrated with scientific detachment” (CWMG 39, p. v); the fact that some commentators bemoan the absence of Gandhi’s “human side” (CWMG 39, p. x) from the autobiography suggests he was at least partially successful in this regard. The resultant autobiography would hence, as Parekh notes, “be concerned not with him but with his experiments; not with his psychological feelings and moods but with his spiritual struggles; not with the transient trivia of his life but with the abiding discoveries he had made in the laboratory of life; not with his self but with his soul” (1999, p. 284). However, as will be seen, Chap. 5’s cognitive stylistic analysis of the autobiography using Emmott’s (2002) typology of “split selves” problematises Gandhi’s contention. Emmott defines “split selves” as comprising “all cases of a character or real-life individual being divided and/or duplicated in any way in a narrative”, and her resultant typology derives from her recognition of the manifold ways in which “split selves” can be represented in narrative (2002, p. 154). While Emmott’s typology results from her analysis of multiple texts, so promising did it seem in the context of Gandhi’s autobiography, that here it is applied, with some modifications, to this single text. The finding that there are quite a number of autobiographical selves constructed by the text somewhat problematises Gandhi’s degree of success in fulfilling his intention to pen a “morally innocent” autobiography. Furthermore, the analysis reveals a psychological complexity captured by the inner conflicts Gandhi fought to resolve to achieve moksha. Moreover, it illustrates the extent to which Gandhi strove for self-­ realisation and ultimately became a product of his own creation. As intimated, the potential for cultural conflict renders consideration of the historical origins and development of this traditionally Western genre

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prudent in any engagement with Indian autobiography. As such, and prior to a consideration of Gandhi’s response to the “doubts” of his “God-­ fearing friend” (An Auto, p. 44), the following section will trace the autobiographical genre from its ancient origins in the West to its position in India at the time of Gandhi’s autobiographical endeavour.

The Emergence of Autobiography in India In its broad sense of a “self-produced, non-fiction text that tells the story of its writer’s life” (Gunzenhauser, 2001, p.  75), autobiography as a genre extends back several millennia to include the writings of Egyptian pharaohs, Roman politicians and Greek philosophers, historians and poets.2 However, it was early converts to Christianity who first began to write less about their achievements and more about their life itself, thereby ushering in the confessional mode of life-writing of which St. Augustine’s Confessions (c. 397–400 CE) is considered the most seminal, although there are, as Parekh points out, several others (1999, p. 273). The confessional mode  is characterised by some form of conversion experience;  the decisive rupturing of the autobiographical writer/subject’s life rendered it unsuitable for chronological narrative representation, thereby necessitating an alternate structure which “took the form of passionate and emotionally charged confessions suffused with the spirit of self-discovery and self-pity” (Parekh, 1999, p. 273). Their resultant “didactic and evangelical orientation” (Parekh, 1999, p.  273) ensured a glossing of personal detail in favour of disseminating a more general polemic on the need for spiritual enlightenment. Later Christian autobiographers became more reflective and disconnected in their narrative, and, as the late medieval period gave way to the Renaissance, confessional writings were replaced by more secular reflections in the form of memoirs, diaries and chronicles. De Montaigne’s Essais (1595) constitutes a classic example of this turn from “exemplum to singular individual” (Gunzenhauser, 2001, p. 5) which Weintraub asserts is a defining moment in the history of autobiographical writing (1978, pp. 166–195). De Montaigne’s remark that “nothing certain can be established about one thing by another” (qtd. in Weintraub, 1978, p.  188) signalled a  For a consideration of autobiography in ancient civilisations, see Misch (1951) A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Vols I and II. London: Routledge. 2

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desire for the relative epistemological certainty that only introspection could fulfil. The result was autobiography’s endeavour to detail human individuality and the struggle to “actualize the one mode of being which only [the author-subject] can be” (Weintraub, 1978, p. 188). The term ‘autobiography’ was first used in 1797 (Marcus, 1994, p. 12) and marked the origins of the ongoing debate on sub-generic distinctions. Remarking upon this nascent form of writing, Herder, as Parekh notes, differentiated between confession (Confessionen) and autobiography or ‘life-story’ (Lebensbeschreibungen) on the basis that the latter “was a new and autonomous form of writing not to be confused with its more familiar predecessor” (Parekh, 1999, p. 274). According to Spengemann’s much-­ lauded The Forms of Autobiography (1980), there have been three phases in the structural development of autobiography: the chronologically orientated “historical autobiography” of the medieval and early modern period; the philosophical writings of the Romantic era; and the “poetic autobiography” of the modern period in which issues of truth are typically subordinated to matters of “poetic self-expression, and poetic self-­ invention” (1980, p. 110). Ostensibly, Gandhi sought to distinguish his use of the genre from the ‘poetic autobiography’ typical of the modern era, not only prizing truth but elevating it to a spiritual level (‘Truth’). The confessional nature of Gandhi’s text aligns it with the Augustinian tradition of life-writing.3 However, as will be shown, the focus on individuality in the Autobiography is thoroughly modern. Gunzenhauser argues that the assertion that early autobiography typically represented an exemplary self while later autobiography represented the self as individual is overly simplistic: rather, it is more accurate to suggest that the genre of autobiography evinced a “unique capacity for registering changing cultural conceptions of the self” (2001, p.  76). The English Puritan John Bunyan, for example, focuses on the “vanity and inward wretchedness of my wicked heart” (Gunzenhauser, 2001, p.  24); eighteenth-century British philosophical historian Edward Gibbon asserts his autobiography’s “unblushing truth, the first virtue of more serious history” (Gunzenhauser, 2001, p.  1) while W.B.  Yeats exposes the alienation and fragmentation typical of modernism in his admission of an inability to portray anything 3  As Leigh notes, the “overall pattern of childhood directional images of a goal, followed by adolescent and adult wandering through illusory realizations of the directional image, and eventual achievement of the goal (often in a surprising place) fits most of these autobiographies within the Augustinian tradition” (2000, p. 3).

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but an inchoate selfhood: “It must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge” (cited in Gunzenhauser, 2001, p. 39). Similarly, Gandhi’s denial of the generic status of his text as autobiography evinces the conflicts inherent in the assertion of selfhood within a culture that eschewed the notion of individuality. Despite Gandhi’s protestations that the text was not an autobiography, its publication resulted in what Parekh refers to as the “indianisation” of autobiography (1999, pp.  272–293); indeed, Gunzenhauser goes so far as to assert that Gandhi’s autobiography concomitantly wrought a change in Indian “cultural conceptions of the self” (2001, p. 76). Whilst biographical writing was comparatively common in India and almost certainly preceded its appearance in the West, autobiography, on the other hand, is notable for its sustained absence from Indian literature up to the mid-nineteenth century (Parekh, 1999, p. 278). The global rise of autobiography in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries corresponded with the gradual alignment of several factors essential to its successful emergence. Parekh lists four such preconditions (1999, pp.  275–276). Firstly, a society must prize and nurture the concept of individuality; for a life-story to warrant both production and readerly consumption, its subject must be distinctly different from other persons. Secondly, as the genre presupposes that the self is neither a sole product of “transcendental” intervention nor of innate characteristics but rather of its “past choices and decisions, that it has a history and is only intelligible in historical terms”, autobiography can only flourish in societies which exhibit a relatively well-honed historical mode of thinking (1999, p. 275). Thirdly, the autobiography—as distinct from the “deeply subjective orientation” of a diary written primarily for oneself, and a memoir typically written for others—“is written for both oneself and others” (1999, p. 275, emphasis in original). It constitutes an exercise in self-discovery wrought through the writing process but also through its communication and representation to others. As such, effective autobiography presumes upon “both a body of commonly shared meanings and values, and a unique individual definition and articulation of them” (1999, p. 276). Finally, as autobiography typically constitutes a meditative and relatively detached depiction of one’s life, the genre “presupposes a self at peace with itself and its environment” (1999, p. 276); as noted by Parekh, the self-directed anger characteristic of Christian converts’ depictions of their debauched pasts, and the socially orientated anger exhibited by many eighteenth-­ century life-writers, such as Rousseau, lacked “the stability and detachment necessary for self-examination and reflection” (1999, p. 276).

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A number of these preconditions for autobiography were absent in India. Firstly, individuality, deemed by many “the distinguishing mark of the West” (Sinha, 1978, p. 11) is not traditionally valued within Hinduism; the “dominant Hindu metaphysic does not grant ontological dignity to individuality or uniqueness” (Parekh, 1999, p. 276). Rather, as Schweitzer notes, Hindu thought is fundamentally founded upon the concept of “world and life negation” (1954, p. 19). According to Hindu teaching, mind and body, those trappings of individuality, are but transient vessels for the a ̄tman, the eternal soul or universal life principle which, upon attainment of moksha—release from samsara, the karmic cycle of death and rebirth—unifies all humankind with Brahman (God). As only the a ̄tman is real, “[i]ndividuality, selfhood, ego-consciousness or particularity, the terms used interchangeably by them, are therefore ma ̄yā or inconsequential” (Parekh, 1999, p.  277). Hinduism’s de-emphasis of the individual is propounded by the restraints of its caste system (varna ̄shrmadharma) which stipulates the roles of individuals both within each caste (varna ̄) and across the prescribed four stages of Hindu life. As Parekh remarks: “Not individuality but plurality, not individual but group diversity, is the central feature of Hindu society” (1999, p. 277).4 In short, any means by which selfhood is asserted—including the writing of one’s life story—is traditionally frowned upon. Moreover, Indian tradition privileges society over the individual: as Mallik notes, “[t]o the Hindu the individual as bare individual never appealed apart from his relationships. He understood him, if at all, as only a member or constituent of a society or group, or organization” (1939, pp.  103–104). Furthermore, Indian thinking is traditionally ahistorical in nature.5 As transience and change were typically associated with illusion, historical truth failed to play a significant role in Hindu epistemology, valued only insofar as it epitomised universal moral truths. The specifics of an individual’s life, therefore, were deemed unworthy of documentation due to their inherent triviality. Hindu belief in karma—that “whatever happens to us in this life we have to submit to in meek resignation, for it is the result of our past doings” (Radhakrishnan, 1962, p. 249)—is indicative of the pervasive role the past 4  The four stages of Hindu life are Brahmachari (student), Grihasta (householder), Vanaprasta (forest dweller or hermit in semi-retirement) and Sannyasi (the renounced one in full retirement). The dharma or religious duty of each is different. These four stages may be said to represent periods of preparation, production, service and retirement. 5  This commonly held assumption regarding India’s lack of a historical consciousness has, however, recently been contested: see for example Thapar (2009).

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is seen to play in one’s present and future. However, the events of one’s previous lives are “totally incalculable” and therefore can have little relevance to the founding of historical self-understanding (Sinha, 1978, p.  10). In addition, and in opposition to Western temporal constructs, Indian philosophical tradition promulgates a non-linear concept of time— Hindus characteristically represent time as cyclical, with each cycle composed of four recurring epochs or yugas6—which precludes a historical mode of inquiry. This effective effacement of the self from all Indian cultural output is neatly summarised by Coomaraswamy: Anonymity is … in accordance with the truth; and it is one of the proudest distinctions of the Hindu culture. The names of the ‘authors’ of the epics are but shadows, and in later ages it was a constant practice of writers to suppress their own names and ascribe their work to a mythical or famous poet, thereby to gain a better attention for the truth that they would rather claim to have ‘heard’ than to have ‘made’. Similarly, scarcely a single Hindu painter or sculptor is known by name; and the entire range of Sanskrit literature cannot exhibit a single autobiography and but little history. (1982, p. 119)

Earliest examples of Indian autobiographical writings date back to the non-religious Danastutis (Praises of Gifts) in the Rigveda7 (c.1700–1100 BC), but their spasmodic appearance meant that it was only from the thirteenth century onwards that “quasi-autobiographical” writings began to emerge (Parekh, 1999, p. 279).8 The rise of Islam and the Moghul invasion of India brought with them the Persian proclivity for historical detail which generated the production of diaries, memoirs and written histories, and “the practice of life-writing [in India] gathered a fresh impetus” (Sinha, 1978, p. 27). However, it was only with the arrival of the colonising British that some of the cultural preconditions of autobiographical writing—particularly the historical mode of inquiry evidenced through British attempts to record the history of pre-Muslim

 Namely Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dwapar Yuga and Kali Yuga.  One of the four Vedas; the other three are the Sama Veda, Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda. 8  Included within this are Emperor Asoka’s inscriptions upon rocks and stone pillars, which provide a large amount of information on his life and activity; also included are the “few” Sanskrit dramatists who inserted autobiographical details into the prologue of plays (for further examples, see Sinha, 1978, pp. 14–24). 6 7

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India—actually took hold in India (Parekh, 1999, p.  279).9 At the same time, the cultural, psychological and national instability propagated by colonisation heightened personal insecurities and stimulated a need for selfreflection. As the afflicted sought refuge and comfort in shared experience, there emerged what Parekh terms “a new subculture conducive to autobiographical writing” (1999, p.  280). The a ̄tmacarit tradition of autobiographical writing that sprang up in the latter half of the nineteenth century is particularly noteworthy. Referring to the literary self-­representations of the most eminent men in colonial Bengal, then centre of British India, the title a ̄tmacarit constituted both a literal translation of the English term ‘autobiography’ and, more significantly, alluded to the voluminous canon of carit literature which eulogised the lives of kings and saints throughout classical and medieval India. As Chatterjee notes, “[w]hile the more obvious hagiographic conventions were quickly abandoned in the new biographical literature of the nineteenth century, the idea of the carit as the life of an illustrious man, told either by himself or by others, clearly persisted even in its modern sense” (1993, pp. 138–139).10 Parekh argues that by countermanding the traditional conditions of autobiography discussed above, Gandhi ‘indianised’ autobiography (1999, pp.  272–293). Certainly, Gandhi did not exhibit a ‘historic consciousness’: this failure was most likely premised upon his belief in acting in the present and obtaining his rewards in the future. Gandhi also maintained that his text was written, not for himself, but for the “benefit” (An Auto, p. 45) of others, to “proclaim to the reader that the only means for the realization of Truth is Ahimsa” (An Auto, p. 768). While he does appear at peace with himself and his environment, this peace is relative: in the very last page of the text, Gandhi acknowledges that he still has before him “a difficult path to traverse”, and his final line is a supplication to the reader to “join” with him “in prayer to the God of Truth that He may grant me the boon of Ahimsa in mind, word and deed” (An Auto, 9  Sinha concurs: “There has been in existence a distinct mode of autobiography-writing in India, but it has not been so prominent as to become a significant feature of the national taste. The full flowering of the genre could, however, take place only after the coming of the English to India” (1978, p. v). 10  Chatterjee further notes that contemporaneous women’s autobiographies were seldom granted the status of ātmacarit. Rather than being perceived as “variants on men’s autobiographical writings”, life-writing by females was categorised as an entirely distinct literary genre which focused not on “the life history of the narrator or the development of her ‘self’ but rather on the social history of the ‘times’” (1993, p. 139).

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p. 770).11 But it is Gandhi’s attempt to avoid the egotism that typically characterises the genre of autobiography that is of most relevance in the context of this study and the next section will engage with his attitude and intentions in this regard. Gandhi’s anti-Western sentiments propounded for him the cultural conflicts felt by most Indians who engaged in writing autobiographical literature; notwithstanding his writing of the Autobiography, he continued to view traditional [i.e. Western] autobiographical writing as a morally dubious undertaking. This is evidenced in his repeated denial of the text’s generic status as autobiography. In the introduction to the Autobiography he asserts: “But it is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography.12 I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography” (An Auto, p. 45). Gandhi’s persistence in this matter is evidenced in remarks made as late as 1946: “I never really wrote an autobiography. What I did write was a series of articles narrating my experiments with truth which were later published in book form”.13 Gandhi believed that the egotism typical of autobiographical endeavours was not necessarily a prerequisite of the genre itself: rather it was Western autobiography’s characteristic focus on the self as subject matter which ensured its vulnerability to egotism. As such, he endeavoured to only narrate his “experiments in the spiritual field” on the basis that, “[i]f the experiments are really spiritual, then there can be no room for self-praise” (An Auto, p. 45). The subtleties of the generic distinction that Gandhi insisted upon are perhaps best understood in the context of the original Gujarati version of the text. While the above-mentioned Indian (auto)biographical tradition of carit literature privileged the lives of “illustrious” men, Parekh (1999) presents evidence from both the preface and text of the Gujarati edition of the autobiography that illustrates that Gandhi perceived his life-writing as an ātmakathā, a story of the soul, as distinct from a jivanwritānta, the description of a life. A kathā is an “old and evocative term [which] connotes a story told with a view to drawing out and emphasising moral 11  While it does not substantively change the meaning, Suhrud retranslates Gandhi’s prayer for “the boon of Ahimsa in mind, word and deed” as a prayer for “humility” (An Auto, p. 770). 12  Suhrud retranslates this as “But, do I intend to write a real autobiography?” (2018, p. 45 M12). 13  Harijan, 25 February 1946.

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lessons” (Parekh, 1999, p. 285). A katha ̄ could be “selective and subjective”; it could involve “a didactic discussion” of Gandhi’s engagement with and the consequences of his experiments with Truth (Parekh, 1999, p.  287). As such, Gandhi’s “vision of the pattern and meaning of life” (Weintraub, 1975, p. 827) centred on the spiritual rather than the material, the soul as opposed to the self. Sudrud (2018), in fact, claims that it is for this reason that “[th]e Autobiography had to be written in Gujarati” (p. 15) because only Gujarati captures this crucial distinction between lifewriting’s narrative choice of chronicling one’s life or telling the story of one’s soul, a distinction which is lost in the English word ‘autobiography’. Similarly, Suhrud asserts that the Gujarati title Satya Na Prayogo athva Atmakatha gives primacy of place to the experiments with Truth which underpin the story of this soul, while the title’s translation into English results in a syntactic reordering which foregrounds the word ‘autobiography’, hence An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Suhrud, 2018, p. 16). In the Autobiography, Gandhi entreats the reader to be vigilant for instances in which his “quest” is touched with “pride”, in which case “the reader must take it that there is something wrong with my quest, and that my glimpses are no more than mirage” (An Auto, p.  48).14 Inevitably instances of egotism do intrude into his narrative: Gandhi tended to get “carried away” by the text’s momentum and was prone to the inclusion of superfluous details (Parekh, 1999, p. 290) and indeed there are innumerable examples of such superfluity in the text.15 Moreover, generic distinctions between autobiography and biography are problematised by the text given the persistent distancing of ‘subject speaking’ from ‘subject spoken’ in the Autobiography; this is typically characteristic of biography rather than autobiography. Parekh notes that as Gandhi’s title of Maha ̄tma ̄ was earned because of his experiments with Truth, the autobiography may be 14  The full quote reads: “If anything I write in these pages should strike the reader as being touched with pride, then he must take it that there is something wrong with my quest, and that my glimpses are no more than mirage. Let hundreds like me perish, but let truth prevail. Let us not reduce the standard of truth even by a hair’s breadth for judging erring mortals like myself” (An Auto, p. 48). 15  For example, when alluding to “little pamphlets” on marriage that were published when he was a young bridegroom, Gandhi includes extraneous information regarding their price: they cost “a pice, or a pie (I now forget how much)” (An Auto, p. 65). This is not to say, however, that such superfluity did not fulfil a subtle function, for example in this case to illustrate Gandhi’s consistent focus on economy.

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considered the story of how Mohandas Gandhi evolved into a Mahātmā (1999, p. 288). This is an interesting assertion given Gandhi’s claim in the autobiography’s introduction that his political experiments “have not much value” to him, “and the title of ‘Mahatma’ that they have won for me has, therefore, even less” (An Auto, p.  45). As such, the Mahātmā occupies the position of writer-narrator and Mohandas is the subject, a distinction which is further evidenced in several aspects of the linguistic analyses carried out in Chap. 5.16 The text may hence be more appropriately categorised as an “autobiographical biography”, as asserted by Parekh (1999, p. 289). Indeed, as previously noted, hitherto the predominant trend in critical approaches to the Autobiography has been to treat it as biography rather than autobiography. However, as stated  following consideration of Eder’s (2000) and Bruss’s (1980) theories of autobiography in Chap. 2, the present study privileges a similarly text-orientated approach to Gandhi’s autobiography. By “allow[ing] Gandhi’s own words to frame his role as the one who describes” (Eder, 2000, p. 83), it foregrounds the self-reflexivity inherent in the text and endeavours to engage with the figure of Gandhi as he represented himself. It does so by employing a cognitive stylistic model of analysis that interrogates the composition of the selfhood manifest in Gandhi’s linguistic construction, as is evidenced in Chap. 5.

References Bruss, E. W. (1980). Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film. In J. Olney (Ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (pp. 296–320). Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1993). The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton University Press. Coomaraswamy, A. (1982). The Dance of the Siva. Munshiram Manoharlal. de Montaigne, M. ([1595] 1993). The Complete Essays [Essais] (M.  A. Screech, Trans and ed.). Penguin. Eder, M. (2000). The Autobiographer in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth. In P. S. Gold & B. C. Sax (Eds.), Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture (pp. 63–90). Rodopi. Emmott, C. (2002). ‘Split selves’ in Fiction and in Medical ‘life stories’: Cognitive Linguistic Theory and Narrative Practice. In E. Semino & J. Culpeper (Eds.), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (pp. 153–181). John Benjamins.  See, in particular, the discussion of how “split selves” represent the ‘ever-changing self’.

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Gandhi, M. K. ([1940] 2018). An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (M.  Desai, Trans. and Introduced and annotated by T.  Suhrud). Yale University Press. Gunzenhauser, B. J. (2001). Autobiography: General Survey. In M. Jolly (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms (Vol. 1, pp. 75–78). Fitzroy Dearborn. Leigh, D.  J. (2000). Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography. Fordham University Press. Mallik, B. K. (1939). The Individual and the Group: An Indian Study in Conflict. Allen and Unwin. Marcus, L. (1994). Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester University Press. Misch, G. (1951). A History of Autobiography in Antiquity (Vol. I and II). Routledge. Parekh, B. (1999). Colonialism, Tradition and Reform (Revised ed.). Sage. Radhakrishnan, S. (1962). Indian Philosophy (Vol. 1). Oxford University Press. Schweitzer, A. (1954). Indian Thought and Its Development. Beacon Press. Sinha, R. C. P. (1978). The Indian Autobiographies in English. S. Chand. Spengemann, W. C. (1980). The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. Yale University Press. Suhrud, T. (2018). Editor’s Introduction. In M.  K. Gandhi (Ed.), An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (pp. 1–35, M. Desai, Trans. and Introduced and annotated by T. Suhrud). Yale University Press. Thapar, R. (2009). Perceptions of the Past in Early India. Lecture Delivered at the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 12th May 2009. Tirumalesh, K. V. (1996). Autobiography’s Moment of Truth: The Experiments of Mahatma Gandhi. Indian Journal of American Studies, 27(2), 15–20. Weintraub, K.  J. (1975). Autobiography and Historical Consciousness. Critical Inquiry, 1(4), 821–848. Weintraub, K.  J. (1978). The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 4

Gandhi the Writer

Abstract  While An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth constitutes Gandhi’s most widely read work, it is just one of many works produced by this prolific writer. This chapter explores the breadth and range of Gandhi’s literary pursuits and, in so doing, endeavours to provide further context for analysing his autobiography. It also aims to answer in some way the exhortation from Nandy for greater engagement with Gandhi as a “serious thinker” (2018, pp. xiii–xv). The chapter then considers the status of English in India at the time of the autobiography’s production, particularly given its simultaneous translation into English, and explores the nature of Gandhi’s relationship with the English Language, painfully aware as he was of both its origins and the diverse consequences of its use. Keywords  Gandhi the writer • Gandhi the intellectual • Gandhi and the English Language • Indian English • Status of English in India

Gandhi the Writer Whilst An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1940) constitutes Gandhi’s most widely read work, it should be considered more broadly within the context of his diverse literary endeavours. Gandhi ostensibly privileged deed over word, as evidenced in his request © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Neary, Gandhi’s Autobiographical Construction of Selfhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22786-8_4

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that “[m]y writings should be cremated with my body… What I have done will endure, not what I have said or written”.1 Such appeals have been taken at face value by the group of Gandhian followers identified by Nandy (see Chap. 2) as instrumental in discouraging intellectual engagement with Gandhi because “Gandhi was all about doing, not thinking or researching” (Nandy, 2018, p. xiv). However, the volume and generic breadth of Gandhi’s literary output considerably undermine such an assertion. Gandhi was a prolific writer: the cumulative products of his pen— essays, articles, letters and books set down in his native Gujarati, Hindi and English—are barely contained within the 97 volumes that comprise the Government of India-sponsored Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi [CWMG]. According to Anupam Mishra, director of the Gandhi Peace Foundation, Gandhi “wrote without stopping. When his right hand got tired, he would use his left. There is still so much of his work not in the public domain—as many as 30,000 pages are scattered in the form of letters and other writings” (cited in Srinivasan, 2009).2 The experience and expertise gleaned from these manifold literary endeavours would prove invaluable to Gandhi in the production, translation and dissemination of his autobiography. Gandhi’s earliest literary output was the London Diary, a 120-page personal chronicle written in 1888 when he was just 19.3 Part travelogue and part journal, it detailed “the difficulties which [he] had to withstand” as an Indian in England (London Diary; CWMG 1, p. 9). His membership of the Vegetarian Society of London subsequently prompted his contribution of a series of nine articles—on subjects including “Indian  Young India, 26 Aug 1937.  Furthermore, Gandhi destroyed much of his writing; referring in Satyagraha in South Africa to a document he had written on the central tenets of Hinduism, he remarked: “I have thrown away or burnt many such things in my life. I destroyed such papers as I felt it was not necessary to preserve or as the scope of my activities was extended. I am not sorry for this, as to have preserved all of them would have been burdensome and expensive. I should have been compelled to keep cabinets and boxes, which would have been an eyesore to one who has taken a vow of poverty” (CWMG 1, p. xvii). 3  Originally 120 pages long, only the first 20 pages of the London Diary are reproduced in CWMG. According to Pandiri (1995), Gandhi presented it to his London-bound nephew in 1909, who passed it to Mahadev Desai some ten years later. Desai, however, only typed up the first 20 pages, and the contents of the remainder of the manuscript are unknown. The London Diary can be found in CWMG Vol 1, pp. 2–16. 1 2

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Vegetarianism” and “Some Indian Festivals”—to the society’s associated journal The Vegetarian. The trajectory of Gandhi’s literary progression from diarist to article-writer is noteworthy.4 The London Diary focuses so exclusively on Gandhi’s psychological state and dietary concerns that any meaningful socio-cultural engagement with England is absent. The London Diary, therefore, somewhat anticipates the autobiography’s similarly brief treatment of Gandhi’s English sojourn. Bhattacharya remarks upon how the diary exposes Gandhi’s ignorance of the socio-political ideologies which pulsated throughout late nineteenth-century London where movements such as Marxism, Anarchism, Fabianism, Darwinism and Transcendentalism were revolutionising the metropole of the British Empire: “Yet young Gandhi, living at the epicentre of these movements, does not seem to have felt the heat of the new quest [and] showed no responsiveness to the great social and political ideas that were the current intellectual coinage in England at that time” (1969, pp. 19–20). Naipaul similarly notes the insularity and lack of external engagement with both domestic and alien cultures which characterised Gandhi’s formative years (2007, p.  118). Comparing the autobiographies of Gandhi and Nehru, Naipaul claims that, “in spite of the differences between them”, both men shared a nascent solipsism which blinded them to the material conditions in which others lived; as such, they “had to make a journey […] from not seeing to seeing” (2007, p. 118). Gandhi’s articles in The Vegetarian, on the other hand, are very fulsome and demonstrate an increasing engagement with fin de siècle metanarratives, particularly vegetarianism. Bhattacharya describes these articles as “almost wholly informative, seeking to throw light on aspects of India’s dietary ways” (1969, p. 18). As Leela Gandhi notes, the value of these “otherwise unremarkable articles” lies in “the clues they give us to the wide cultural sympathies of contemporary English vegetarians” (2006, p.  70). Gandhi had not, by that stage, engaged with vegetarianism on an ideological level; he continued to practise vegetarianism in London, despite the inconveniences it 4  Also worthy of note is Khilnani’s (2003, p. 138) remark on the “arch English” into which the young Gandhi translated his diary. Khilnani provides the following passage from the London Diary as an example: “Amidst thoughts, I came unconsciously in contact with a carriage. I received some injury. Yet I did not take the help of anybody in walking” (see CWMG 1, p. 4).

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caused. He notes in a chapter of the autobiography entitled “Experiments in Dietetics” that his dietary experiments in England “were conducted from the point of view of economy and hygiene” and that “the religious aspect of the question was not considered until I went to South Africa where I undertook strenuous experiments” (An Auto, p. 134). As such, it is likely that he entered English vegetarian circles because of its appeal to his religious and national heritage; it promised a sense of belonging and inclusion which, if the insularity characteristic of his London Diary is to be credited, had hitherto eluded him. Hence, Gandhi’s publication of this series of eight “otherwise unremarkable” (L. Gandhi, 2006, p. 70) journal articles marks both his burgeoning engagement with the world around him, and his growing desire to comment upon that world. Gandhi’s early experience in writing for journals had an obvious influence upon the ways in which he would later choose to disseminate his ideals. He launched Indian Opinion, a “foolscap-sized three-column” weekly periodical, in Durban on 4th June 1903, and it spanned the duration of his South African satyagraha campaign (Bhattacharya, 1969, p.  38). The periodical—originally published in Gujarati, English, Hindi and Tamil (though the latter two were soon discontinued)—was to be a vehicle for Gandhian ideology and Gandhi himself bore the chief burden of its production, both literary and financial: “though I was not avowedly the editor of Indian Opinion, I was virtually responsible for its conduct5” (An Auto, p. 450). Seeing it as “a mirror of part of my life” (An Auto, p. 450), Gandhi wrote of Indian Opinion: “Week after week, I poured out my soul in its columns and expounded the principles and practice of satyagraha as I understood it” (An Auto, p. 450); he “was practically sinking all my savings in it” but felt that “to stop it after it had once been launched would have been both a loss and a disgrace” (An Auto, p. 450) and concludes that as “it was never intended to be a commercial concern”, the journal “has served the community well” (An Auto, p. 450). The Indian Opinion, Bhattacharya remarks, helped Gandhi to “mould a business-like prose style: simple, straightforward, orderly, precise; well-­ reasoned, lucid, adequately condensed, and above all else, single-minded, [and] persuasive” (1969, p.  112). However, the tumultuous political

5  “Conduct” is retranslated by Suhrud into the more precise term “writings” (2018, p. 450, M2).

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events which occurred in the years following his return to India in 19156 provoked in Gandhi an impassioned literary voice which was noticeably at odds with the controlled objectivity characteristic of Indian Opinion. His increasing ire at the British treatment of Indian subjects was vented in the weekly English-language periodical Young India, of which he assumed editorial control in 1919 and filled almost exclusively “with the product of his own pen” (Bhattacharya, 1969, p. 3).7 In Chapter 34 of his autobiography, Gandhi contextualises his stewardship of Young India (and its twin publication Navajivan, mentioned below). He states that while his satyagraha movement “for the preservation of non-violence was making steady though slow progress on the one hand, Government’s policy of lawless repression was in full career on the other, and was manifesting itself in the Punjab in all its nakedness.8 Leaders were put under arrest, martial law, which in other words meant no law, was proclaimed” (An Auto, p. 722). Young India had previously been under the editorship of Shri Umar Sobani and Shri Shankerlal Banker, members of India’s Home Rule League. They became Gandhi’s acolytes and, following the government’s closure of publications which supported Indian independence, such as The Bombay Chronicle, the men offered Gandhi the use of Young India to support the burgeoning home rule movement. In his autobiography, Gandhi explains that by accepting their offer, “I was anxious to expound the inner meaning of satyagraha to the public, and also hoped that through this 6  The year 1919 was particularly turbulent in British India, and its events would prove formative for Gandhi. As mentioned in Chap. 2, these events of 1919 include what became known as the Amritsar Massacre, the Caliphate movement, and also Gandhi’s movement against the Rowlatt Act. Officially known as the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919, the Rowlatt Act arose from an investigation into “political terrorism in India, especially in Bengal and the Punjab” (Suhrud, 2018, p. 701 n418) and extended the emergency measures (in place since the Defence of India Act, 1915) which allowed arrest and detainment without reason. Gandhi saw the recommendations of the committee behind the act as “altogether unwarranted by the evidence published in its report, and were, I felt, such that no self-respecting people could submit to them” (An Auto, p. 701). As such, he started a movement against the act. 7  The following are examples of the increasingly impassioned diatribes against British rule in India which Gandhi published in Young India: “I can no longer retain affection for a Government so evilly manned … For me, it is humiliating to retain my freedom and be witness to the continuing wrong” [Young India, 28 July 1920) and “I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system” (Young India, 23 March 1922). 8  It is interesting to note that, according to Suhrud (2018, p. 722, n496, n497), the words “lawless” and “in all its nakedness” were only added to the English translation.

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effort I should at least be able to do justice to the Punjab situation. For, behind all I wrote, there was potential satyagraha, and the Government knew as much. I therefore readily accepted the suggestion made by these friends” (An Auto, p. 725). But Gandhi was concerned about the efficacy of publishing his ideals in a foreign tongue, asking himself “how could the general public be trained in satyagraha through the medium of English?” (An Auto, p. 725). The solution was for Gandhi to accept editorship of a Gujarati-language monthly called Navajivan Ane Satya in which he could expound his ideals in his native tongue; he changed the frequency of the periodical from monthly to weekly and renamed it Navajivan. Navajivan was soon twinned with Young India so that each was considered “virtually a counterpart of the other” (Bhattacharya, 1969, p. 3); the majority of Gandhi’s Gujarati writings for Navajivan were translated by Desai into English for near-simultaneous publication in Young India (Bhattacharya, 1969, p. 82). “Through these journals”, Gandhi notes, “I now commenced to the best of my ability the work of educating the reading public in satyagraha” (An Auto, p. 726). Looking back upon their legacy, he asserts: Incidentally these journals helped me also to some extent to remain at peace with myself for, whilst immediate resort to civil disobedience was out of the question, they enabled me freely to ventilate my views and to put heart into the people. Thus I feel that both journals rendered good service to the people in this hour of trial, and did their humble bit towards lightening the tyranny of martial law. (An Auto, p. 726)

Young India was suspended by the British Government in 1931, following Gandhi’s arrest as part of a clampdown on the satyagraha movement, but Gandhi founded another journal from his new prison cell.9 This replacement journal was named Harijan, or ‘children of God’, the (now disputed) term Gandhi used to refer to those Hindus whose ancestral position in society lay either outside or at the lowest level of orthodox Hinduism’s strictly hierarchical caste system.10 The journal was issued in English and several regional languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Urdu, Tamil, Oriya and Kannada. This journal, Gandhi determined, 9  Young India resumed sporadic publication in various forms but formally ceased publication the following year, in 1932. 10   The official term for this heterogenous group is now “Scheduled Castes” (see Constitution of India).

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would be “[s]olely devoted to the Harijan cause, it would scrupulously exclude all politics” (qtd. in Bhattacharya, 1969, p.  196). Both Young India and Harijan were hugely popular and widely disseminated: of the two million words that Gandhi published in English, the vast majority appeared in Young India, sales of which at one time reached 40,000 copies, then an enormous figure in Indian journalism (Bhattacharya, 1969, p.  4). Furthermore, as Bhattacharya notes, neither periodical was copyrighted, enabling reproduction of the material across the entire Indian press and free dissemination of Gandhian ideals (1969, p. 4). As a result, “Young India and Harijan commanded indirectly a varied, eager and truly massive readership all over the country” (Bhattacharya, 1969, p. 4). This is no doubt why Gandhi chose to serialise the Gujarati and English versions of his autobiography in these two periodicals. While undertaking these journalistic endeavours, which comprised a large part of his propaganda machine, Gandhi somehow also found time to both produce and consume a large quantity of literature.11 In particular, Gandhi’s epiphanic discovery of Ruskin’s socialist polemic Unto This Last (1860) was to weave a “magic spell” (An Auto, p. 467) over his subsequent lifelong campaign for spiritual and social reform. Having read the book over the course of a 24-hour train journey from Johannesburg to Durban in 1904, Gandhi asserts that its impact was such that “I could not get any sleep that night. I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book” (An Auto, p.  469). Impressions of the stylistic construction of Gandhi’s translation of Unto This Last mirror those of his other works, emphasising a stylistic simplicity which allows priority to be given to textual substance. Bhattacharya, for example, notes that it was “a shortened adaptation of the original work. Gandhi simplified passages. He dropped sentences that were, he felt, unwanted for his purpose. His sole concern was to render the true spirit of the book” (1969, p. 37). Indeed, Gandhi was to translate the text four years later into Gujarati under the 11  See Bhattacharya (1969), particularly Chapter 12, for a detailed consideration of Gandhi’s reading that illustrates its depth and breadth, particularly of the Western literary canon. Indeed, the considerable influence of Western literature on Gandhi’s ideals accords with Viswanathan’s contention in Masks of Conquest (1989). Here, Viswanathan traces the complex associations between English literary study and the British colonial agenda and concludes that “a policy of religious neutrality that paralyzed British officials in administering a religious curriculum to the Indians” meant that the canon of English literature effectively appropriated the role of “chief” disseminator of “value, tradition, and authority” previously held by religious institutions (Viswanathan, 1989, p. 7).

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title Sarvodaya, meaning ‘universal uplift’ or ‘the welfare of all’, a translation which was itself retranslated into English.12 Alongside Ruskin, Gandhi counted Tolstoy, as well as the poet and religious philosopher Shrimad Rajchandra,13 amongst the “[t]hree moderns [who] have left a deep impress on my life, and captivated me” (An Auto, p.  179). As Parel notes, “the influence of Tolstoy on Gandhi is widely recognised” (1997, p. xlviii), but nowhere is this more evident than in Gandhi’s writing of Hind Swaraj, or Indian Self-Rule (1909).14 Hind Swaraj has been described as “Gandhi’s seminal work” (Parel, 1997, p. xxv) and “the nearest he came to producing a sustained work of political theory” (Brown, 1989, p. 65). Parel tells us that “it is in Hind Swaraj that we find Gandhi first announcing his own life-mission. This is nothing other than showing the way for the moral regeneration of Indians and the political emancipation of India” (1997, p. xxvi). The book was written at a furious pace over the space of ten days, 13th to 22nd November 1909, onboard the SS Kildonan Castle from England to South Africa, following “what proved to be an abortive lobbying mission to London” (Parel, 1997, p. xxvi)15 and it was published by Gandhi’s own press in the Phoenix settlement in Natal. Hind Swaraj was to exert a resounding ideological  Publication details for the English translation are as follows: Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. 1951. Ruskin: Unto This Last: A Paraphrase. Trans. Valji G. Desai. Navajivan, Ahmedabad. This is just one, though probably the best-known, of a number of paraphrases of literary works that Gandhi wrote; others include Plato’s Apology and Thoreau’s On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Parel asserts that these paraphrases resulted from Gandhi’s attempts to read “more thoroughly” and that the notes Gandhi took effectively took the form of literary paraphrase (Parel, 1997, p. xxiv). 13  Gandhi met the poet and religious philosopher Shrimad Rajchandra upon his return to Bombay from London and Raychandbhai, as Gandhi called him, was to exert considerable influence upon Gandhi’s burgeoning religious beliefs; in his autobiography, Gandhi notes: “In my moments of spiritual crisis, therefore, he was my refuge” (An Auto, p. 178). 14  Of Tolstoy’s influence on Gandhi, Doctor (1970, p.  73) notes that Hind Swaraj advances many of the arguments put forward by Tolstoy in his Letter to a Hindu (1908) in which he rejects the subjection of millions of people by the British. Similarly, Raychaudhuri notes that the phrase “the huge sham of modern civilization” used throughout Hind Swaraj was in fact Tolstoy’s phrase (1999, p. 42). For book-length considerations of the effect of Tolstoy on Gandhian thinking, see Green (1978, 1983, 1986). 15  Gandhi was, he tells us, part of the “Transvaal Indian deputation” (‘Foreword’ Hind Swaraj, [1909] 1997, p.  9), comprising of Gandhi and one other, sent to lobby for the interests of Indians living in South Africa during the debate on a draft bill for the creation of the Union of South Africa (see Parel, 1997, p. 9 n7). 12

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influence upon the Indian independence struggle, outlining Gandhi’s “transformative vision of swaraj” or self-rule, and his proposed “recovery of a genuine Indian state, one that was not simply a political entity but built upon what Gandhi believed was the nearly lost legacy of his Indian heritage” (Koppedrayer, 2002, p.  54). Ostensibly written as a dialogue between “Editor” and “Reader”,16 Hind Swaraj can be summarised as “a series of sermons delivered by the Editor (who speaks for Gandhi), which seeks to alert Indians to the dangers of modern civilization, to warn them against the use of violence in their efforts to expel the British, and to provide them with principles of practical action” (Khilnani, 1997).17 Speaking of the book in his autobiography, Gandhi summarises Hind Swaraj as “a severe condemnation of ‘modern civilization’”, before continuing: “In my opinion it is a book which can be put into the hands of a child. It teaches the gospel of love in place of that of hate. It replaces violence with self-­ sacrifice. It pits soul force against brute force”.18 In March 1910, Gandhi himself was responsible for its translation from Gujarati into the English text Indian Home Rule; it is, as Parel notes, the only one of Gandhi’s writings that he translated himself, in its entirety, into English (1997, p. xxv). Alongside his autobiography and Hind Swaraj, Gandhi’s other primary work of note is Satyagraha in South Africa (1928), a history in Gujarati of his satyagraha campaign in that country. In many ways the text constitutes a companion piece to the Autobiography. Satyagraha in South Africa was written in Yeravda Prison in 1923–1924, prior to the premature release which had foiled his earliest attempts to write his autobiography. It was originally entitled Dakshina Africana Satyagrahano Itihas [which translates as ‘The History of Satyagraha in South Africa’] and was published serially in Navajivan between 13th April 1924 and 22nd November 1925. Gandhi himself revised the English translation, Satyagraha in South Africa, 16  Gandhi notes that the “dialogue, as it has been given, actually took place between several friends, mostly readers of Indian Opinion, and myself” ([1910] 1997, p. 6). 17  Naipaul is scathing about Hind Swaraj, denouncing its “nonsense and anti-modern simplicities”. Asserting that “[t]he book would not be read in India, not even by scholars (and still hasn’t been)”, he considers the reverence with which it has come to be treated—its cherishing as a “holy object”—to be a product both of the “oddly vacant” historical moment of its inception and of hagiographical retrospectives of Gandhi’s work undertaken during the heyday of the Indian independence struggle (2007, p. 120). 18  Young India, 26 January 1921.

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undertaken by V.G. Desai, approving the final translation as well as contributing the foreword. Indeed, with reference to Satyagraha in South Africa, Gandhi maintains that his autobiography only details those “few personal incidents of my life in South Africa which have not been covered by that history” (An Auto, p.  501); however, this is somewhat undermined by the fact that four-fifths of the autobiography are devoted entirely to these “few personal incidents” in South Africa. In the autobiographical descriptions of his South African sojourn, Gandhi frequently refers the reader to Satyagraha in South Africa: for example, with reference to the psychological turmoil experienced during his participation in the Boer War, he remarks: “I have minutely dealt with the inner struggle regarding this in my history of the satyagraha in South Africa, and I must not repeat the argument here. I invite the curious to turn to those pages” (An Auto, p. 352). Finally, just as the autobiography is largely described as ‘simple’ stylistically, so too is Satyagraha in South Africa; Khilnani remarks that the account is “told in the flattest, plainest prose” and that throughout Gandhi “took great pains to avoid what he saw as the besetting sin of his compatriots’ manner of expression: exaggeration and melodrama” (2003, p. 141). Having situated the Autobiography within the context of Gandhi’s voluminous and generically diverse literary output—and demonstrated the interplay between his writings and their influence on his autobiography— it is necessary to consider the linguistic context of the text’s production. The next section, therefore, comprises a discussion of the complexities of Gandhi’s relationship with the English language. In particular, it demonstrates that, for Gandhi, the English language was simultaneously a tool for Indian oppression and the means by which his campaigns for satyagraha and swaraj (self-rule) would capture the attention of the world but also, particularly, of the Indian people.

Attitude to the English Language Kachru has repeatedly addressed what he terms the “continued agonizing and schizophrenic debate about the status of English and its role in [India]”, painstakingly mapping and identifying the conditions a “transplanted colonial language” such as English must fulfil in order to be “accepted as part of the colonizees’ linguistic repertoire” (1998,

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pp. 90–91).19 Such a debate has, in fact, been extant since English was first employed by Indians as a creative medium in the late eighteenth century and it has continued into the twenty-first century. Gandhi’s relationship with the language of his colonial oppressors was ambiguous, as captured by Lelyveld: “it was Gandhi’s intention to break the spell of English on India […] even as he continued to use English for a significant portion of his own writings, publications and speeches” (2001, p.  68). An ardent Anglophile for the first five decades of his life, Gandhi was indebted to the language for both the cultural landscapes and life-altering texts it gave him access to. Yet his gratitude was countered by an increasing awareness that the British imperial project deployed English as a tool of socio-cultural hegemony; indeed, in Hind Swaraj (1910), Gandhi asserts that Indian independence without the rejection of the English language was tantamount to “English rule without the Englishman” or to having “the tiger’s nature but not the tiger” (Hind Swaraj; see CWMG 10, p. 16). However, Gandhi could not fail to overlook the obvious communicative advantages of English language use on both a national and international scale. His careful choice of translator together with his fastidious involvement in its subsequent revision—as discussed in Chap. 2—suggests his awareness of the importance of the English translation of his autobiography in the global dissemination of his ideology. Given the complex nature of Gandhi’s engagement with English, Lelyveld rightly asserts that “[i]t is remarkable that questions of language—speaking, listening, reading and writing—have hardly ever been taken up in any detail in all the vast literature on Gandhi” (2001, p. 68). Initially, the British colonial project sought to disseminate the English language among the indigenous peoples they colonised solely as a means of securing their political and domestic subservience. However, the teaching of the English language was quickly subsumed by “the dubious civilising mission of colonialism” (Talib, 2002, p. 7) which countered that the 19  Kachru’s research has led him to conclude that, by virtue of its functional nativeness—a dichotomous concept comprising both the range of functions for which English is used and the depth to which it has penetrated Indian society—English has become sufficiently ‘nativised’ to be considered an Indian language and part of the multi-faceted linguistic landscape of the sub-continent. See, for example, Kachru (1998). Whilst vehemently concurring with Kachruvian theories on the nativisation of English in India, D’Souza points out that much sociolinguistic research on English language use in India continues to defiantly ignore even the possibility of its assimilation into Indian life (see 2001). On long-running debates about English language use as a form of linguistic colonisation, see for example Bhabha (1984).

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‘natives’ could “scarce retain their Language, without a Tincture of other Savage Inclinations” (missionary Cotton Mather, qtd. in Bailey, 1992, p. 73). T.B. Macaulay’s infamous “Minute on Indian Education” of 1835 succeeded in planting the English language firmly in Indian soil. In its exhortation to the British Raj to educate Indian subjects both in and through the medium of English, it aimed to create “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” to act as “interpreters” between the British and the “millions” they governed ([1835] 1995, p. 7). The resultant English Education Act of 1835 decreed that Indian students must “submit” to the study of English literature (Viswanathan, 1998, p. 45) and be granted, in Macaulay’s words, “access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created” ([1835] 1995, p. 3). The expunging of indigenous languages from India’s education system ensued: from the fourth standard onwards (aged approximately 14), Gandhi’s native Gujarati no longer had a place in his formal education. When he set sail from Bombay on 4th September 1888, Gandhi was, in his own words, “quite unaccustomed to talking English” (An Auto, p. 108). He found the acquisition of all languages, particularly English, difficult; as Lelyveld notes, “one of the repeated refrains in his writings on language was how difficult, time consuming and ultimately frustrating it was to learn that language” (2001, p.  68). However, his discipline and persistence paid off and by the end of his three-year sojourn in London, his hard-won proficiency in English yielded immediate and immense personal rewards, affording him access to the Bible as well as to literary works by Tolstoy and Ruskin which, as mentioned earlier, would go on to exert a dominant and enduring influence upon him for the remainder of his life. Gandhi’s exposure to and eventual proficiency in English also had an ideological impact upon him. Bharati (1970), for example, asserts that without recourse to the English language, and its system of capitalisation in particular, Gandhi could not have conceptualised Truth in the manner he did. As Bharati notes, Gandhi’s conceptualisation of ‘Truth’ was not premised upon its objective or empirical facticity but rather ‘Truth’ as an aspirational mode of being: “For Gandhi, the problem of truth was not an epistemological, but an ontological problem” (1970, p. 62). Gandhi explained his understanding of Truth to his secretary Mahadev Desai as follows: “if you replace the word ‘God’ by the word ‘Truth’, wherever it occurs, you will have some idea of what I mean” (Desai, 1932, p. 60). By equating

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Truth with God, Gandhi elevated truth to a level of abstraction best represented through a process of capitalisation (Truth). As none of the Indian languages possess a system of capitalisation, Bharati doubts whether this idiosyncratic reconfiguration of Truth—integral to Gandhian ideology— “could have been what it was had [Gandhi] not had conscious or unconscious recourse to English, even when he spoke Hindi or Gujarati” (1970, p. 62). The Anglophilia that characterised Gandhi during and immediately following his three years in London dissipated in the face of the Boer and Zulu Wars before dissolving completely in the wake of the 1919 Amritsar Massacre and the Khilafat Movement, as mentioned in Chap. 2, and this growing disillusionment over the nature of British rule in India also prompted an eventual distaste for the linguistic politics of the colonial endeavour. Gandhi’s earlier engagements with the linguistic politics of India were quite egalitarian. In Chap. 5 of his autobiography (“At the High School”), he writes: “It is now my opinion that in all Indian curricula of higher education there should be a place for Hindi, Samskrit, Persian, Arabic and English, besides of course the vernacular” (An Auto, pp. 74–75).20 However, Gandhi became increasingly aware of the role of the English language in securing the affective disenfranchisement of Indian subjects from their cultural origins, and he began to advocate the rejection of English language use in India in the certainty that only an Indian language “could speak to the heart of the nation” (speech at Benares Hindu University, 6th Feb. 1916; see CWMG 13, p. 211). To this end, during a war conference to which he, and other Indian leaders, were invited by then-Viceroy Lord Chelmsford in 1917, Gandhi “asked for

20  Gandhi continues: “This big list need not frighten anyone. If our education were more systematic, and the boys free from the burden of having to learn their subjects through a foreign medium, I am sure learning all these languages would not be an irksome task, but a perfect pleasure. A scientific knowledge of one language makes a knowledge of other languages comparatively easy. In reality, Hindi, Gujarati and Samskrit may be regarded as one language, and Persian and Arabic also as one. Though Persian belongs to the Aryan, and Arabic to the Semitic family of languages, there is a close relationship between Persian and Arabic, because both claim their full growth through the rise of Islam. Urdu I have not regarded as a distinct language, because it has adopted the Hindi grammar and its vocabulary is mainly Persian and Arabic, and he who would learn good Urdu must learn Persian and Arabic, as one who would learn good Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali or Marathi must learn Samskrit” (An Auto, pp. 74–75).

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permission to speak in Hindi-Hindustani” (An Auto, p. 685);21 his request was granted and though he spoke only one sentence, he says that “[m]any congratulated me on my having spoken in Hindustani. That was, they said, the first instance within living memory of anyone having spoken in Hindustani at such a meeting” (An Auto, p. 685). But this realisation, he continues, “hurt my national pride. […] What a tragedy that the language of the country should be taboo in meetings held in the country, for work relating to the country, and that a speech in Hindustani by a stray individual like myself should be a matter for congratulation? Incidents like these are reminders of the low state to which we have been reduced” (An Auto, p. 685). In 1919, during a meeting as part of the Khilafat campaign, Gandhi was called upon to speak; this being his “first occasion for delivering an argumentative speech before an audience especially composed of Mussalmans of the North” (An Auto, p.  737), he floundered, finding himself “handicapped for want of suitable Hindi or Urdu words” (An Auto, p.  737). Yet, despite his imperfect Urdu and “broken Hindi”, Gandhi felt himself largely “successful” in explaining his viewpoint to what he describes as “a critical, if not hostile, audience” (An Auto, p. 737) which convinced him “that Hindi-Urdu could become the lingua franca of India” (An Auto, p. 737). Furthermore, he noted that the choice of language spoken was about much more than effective communication: “Had I spoken in English, I could not have produced the impression that I did on the audience” (An Auto, p. 737). Gandhi believed there was a cultural spirit endemic to Indian languages which separated them from English: “Our languages are a reflection of ourselves, and if you tell me that our languages are too poor to express the best thought, then I say that the sooner we are wiped out of existence, the better for us” (CWMG 13, p. 211).22 Yet Gandhi did not fail to recognise his own unwitting complicity, and that of other Western-educated men, in securing the social and cultural hegemony wrought by the English language: “It is we, the 21  Hindustani is a blend of Hindi and Urdu, sometimes referred to by Gandhi as ‘Hindi-­ Hindustani’. As Lelyveld notes, “Gandhi’s definition of Hindi, Hindustani and Urdu and their interrelatedness varied from time to time and from setting to setting, and is closely bound up with his abiding concern about the relationship of Muslims to the Indian nation” (2001, p. 72). 22  Here Gandhi is surely referring to Macaulay’s contention, in his “Minute”, that the “dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India” are too “poor and rude… to translate any valuable work into them” (Macaulay, 1835, p. 7).

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English-­ knowing Indians, who have enslaved India” (Gandhi, 1965b, p. 184; cited in Lelyveld, 2001, p. 67). In his 1942 book Our Language Problem, in which he outlined his views on Indian linguistic policy, Gandhi declared that English language use created “a permanent bar between the masses and the English-educated classes” ([1942] 1965a, p.  42). Furthermore, his assertion that “[w]e have been engaged during the last sixty years in memorizing strange words and their pronunciation instead of assimilating facts” (cited in Nanda, 1985, p. 58) can be deconstructed to reveal Gandhi’s astute understanding of both the cultural amnesia wrought by English language use and the attendant compulsive mimicry of the coloniser which is typically apportioned to the colonised.23 Gandhi increasingly insisted upon the use of what he termed ‘Hindi-Hindustani’ (the term ‘Hindustani’ being a commonly used amalgam of Hindi and Urdu) whenever possible during public and private engagements, and “complained when circumstances required him to speak or write to Indians in English” (Lelyveld, 2001, p.  69). To Gandhi’s mind, the linguistic order in India should ideally be “to use the language of the province in the province, to use Hindi for all-India purposes and to use English for international purposes” (Gandhi [1942] 1965a, p. 35). Though advocating its sole use for “international purposes”, Gandhi could not fail to also be aware of the advantages of English language use within India. India’s linguistic heterogeneity at the time of independence was such that the first Constitution of India, signed in 1949, granted official recognition to a further 14 Indian languages whilst instating Hindi and English as Parliamentary languages.24 However, despite his trenchant views on the linguistic politics of British India, Gandhi remained pragmatic. Though spoken by much of the population, consistent attempts to instate Hindi as India’s official language have been fraught with political debate.25 Due to its Aryan cultural origins, it is resisted by some South  See Bhabha (1984).  Following modifications made to the Constitution in December 2007, there are now a total of 22 official Indian languages: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu [The Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution; Articles 344 (1) and 351]. 25  Hindi (in the Devanagari script) is now the official language of government, but English can also be used (Official Language Policy of the Union. Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) official website). https://www.meity.gov.in/content/ official-­language-policy-union. Accessed 10 August 2022. 23 24

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Indian Dravidians who perceive its potential hegemony as a threat to their linguistic and cultural heritage, while disputes on the use of the Devanagari versus the Persian script threaten to alienate Indian Muslims.26 The centuries-­old complexities of India’s indigenous language debate have resulted in English language use in India arrogating to itself a degree of impartiality, despite its imperialist origins. Kachru notes that while Indian languages are often “functionally marked in terms of caste, religion, region, and so forth, English has no such ‘markers’, at least in the non-­ native context”; as a result, English in India “has acquired a neutrality in a linguistic context where native languages, dialects and styles sometimes have acquired undesirable connotations” (1990, pp.  8–9). English’s strong position as a lingua franca in India would not have escaped Gandhi.27 Under his leadership, the Indian National Congress continued to conduct their business in English, whilst, as mentioned earlier in this

26  Hindi is not understood in all regions of the country, particularly in Southern India where Dravidian languages such as Tamil and Telugu are spoken. As Lelyveld notes, “[t]he one exception to Gandhi’s notion of the unity of the Indian languages and the desirability of a common script was his consistent concession to the legitimacy of Urdu’s separate script and, to some extent, its Persian and Arabic vocabulary” (2001, p. 72). 27  The fact that English’s position as a link language in India has only been strengthened since Indian independence would be much to Gandhi’s chagrin. Remarkably, although the provision instating English as a co-official Parliamentary language (alongside Hindi) was to expire 15 years after the founding of the Constitution in 1948, over 70 subsequent amendments to the Constitution have failed to modify the appropriate clauses, an ‘oversight’ which may be perceived as implicit acknowledgement of English’s consistent presence on India’s linguistic landscape. As such, under ‘Official Language’, the May 2022 iteration of the Constitution of India reads:

Article 120. (1) Notwithstanding anything in Part XVII, but subject to the provisions of article 348, business in Parliament shall be transacted in Hindi or in English: 1) Provided that the Chairman of the Council of States or Speaker of the House of the People, or person acting as such, as the case may be, may permit any member who cannot adequately express himself in Hindi or in English to address the House in his mother-tongue (2) Unless Parliament by law otherwise provides, this article shall, after the expiration of a period of fifteen years from the commencement of this Constitution, have effect as if the words “or in English” were omitted therefrom. [The Constitution of India (Part V. The Union), p. 56]. https://legislative.gov.in/ sites/default/files/COI_English.pdf Accessed 10 August 2022.

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chapter, in 1919 Gandhi assumed control of the English language periodical Young India and issued an English version of Harijan.28 Gandhi’s attitude towards the English language was certainly ambiguous. He was both a prolific writer of English—his English language output alone exceeds two million words (Bhattacharya, 1969, p.  3)—and an excellent English speaker; Pyarelal asserts that commentators were frequently “struck by his exquisite English—as natural in flow as if he had never spoken another tongue and as mellifluous in diction as it was in inflection” (1986, p.  370). Gandhi’s resistance to the use of English in India was founded upon awareness of its colonial associations and its complicity in Indian de-culturation, yet his voluminous English publications demonstrate how his pragmatism overcame such qualms. Gandhi professes that his chief purpose in writing his autobiography was to provide “illustrations” of the path to Truth “in the light of which everyone may carry on his own experiments according to his own inclinations and capacity” (An Auto, p. 49). He clearly felt that the most efficacious means by which to “bring faith in Truth and Ahimsa to waverers29” (An Auto, p. 768) was publication of the text in English. Given the relatively diminutive population of Gujarat, the original Gujarati version of Gandhi’s autobiography would have had a relatively small readership. It was only upon translation of the autobiography into English, India’s lingua franca, that Gandhi’s autobiography was made accessible to his countrymen and women, as well as to the rest of the world.

References Bailey, R. (1992). Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language. Cambridge University Press. Bhabha, H. (1984). Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. October 28: 125–133. Retrieved August 8, 2022, from https://doi. org/10.2307/778467 Bharati, A. (1970). Gandhi’s Interpretation of the Gita: An Anthropological Analysis. In S.  Ray (Ed.), Gandhi, India and the World: An International Symposium (pp. 57–70). Temple University Press. Bhattacharya, B. (1969). Gandhi the Writer: The Image as It Grew. National Book Trust. Brown, J. M. (1989). Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. Yale University Press.  Harijan was issued in English as well as several regional languages.  Suhrud retranslates “waverers” as “readers” (2018, p. 768 M3).

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D’Souza, J. (2001). Contextualizing Range and Depth in Indian English. World Englishes, 20, 145–159. Desai, M. (1932). The Diary of Mahadev Desai. Navajivan. Doctor, A. H. (1970). Western Influence on Gandhian Thought. In S. Ray (Ed.), Gandhi, India and the World: An International Symposium (pp.  71–80). Temple University Press. Gandhi, L. (2006). Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship. Permanent Black. Gandhi, M. K. (1958). London Diary. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Vol. 1, 3–21. The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Navajivan. Gandhi, M.  K. (1963). Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 10. The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Navajivan. Gandhi, M.  K. (1964). Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 13. The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Navajivan. Gandhi, M. K. ([1942] 1965a). Our Language Problem (A. T. Hingorani, Ed.). Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Gandhi, M.  K. ([1928] 1968). Satyagraha in South Africa. Trans. V.G.  Desai. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Vol. 29: 1–269. The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Navajivan. Gandhi, M.  K. ([1910] 1997). Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) and Other Writings (A. J. Parel, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. Gandhi, M. K. ([1940] 2018). An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (M.  Desai, Trans. and Introduced and annotated by T.  Suhrud). Yale University Press. Gandhi, M. K. (1965b). Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Navajivan. Green, M. (1978). The Challenge of the Mahatmas. Basic Books. Green, M. (1983). Tolstoy and Gandhi: Men of Peace. Basic Books. Green, M. (1986). The Origins of Nonviolence: Tolstoy and Gandhi in Their Historical Setting. Pennsylvania State Press. Kachru, B. B. (1990). The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions and Models of Non-Native Englishes. Pergamon. Kachru, B. B. (1998). English as an Asian Language. Links and Letters, 5, 89–108. Khilnani, S. (1997). The Bodily Drama. Times Literary Supplement, August 8. Khilnani, S. (2003). Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English. In A.  Mehrotra (Ed.), History of Indian Literature in English (pp. 135–153). Hurst. Koppedrayer, K. (2002). Gandhi’s Autobiography as Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. International Journal of Hindu Studies, 6(1), 47–73. Lelyveld, D. (2001). Words as Deeds: Gandhi and Language. Annual of Urdu Studies, 16, 64–75.

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Macaulay, T.  B. ([1835] 1995). Minutes on Indian Education. In B.  Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Ed.), The Post-colonial Studies Reader (pp. 428–430). Routledge. Naipaul, V. S. (2007). Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way. In A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (pp. 100–119). Picador. Nanda, B. R. (1985). Gandhi and His Critics. Oxford University Press. Nandy, A. (2018). Foreword. In M. K. Gandhi (Ed.), An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (pp. xiii–xv and M.  Desai, Trans. and Introduced and Annotated by T. Suhrud). Yale University Press. Pandiri, A. (1995). A Comprehensive, Annotated Bibliography on Mahatma Gandhi (Vol. 1–2). Greenwood Press. Parel, A. (1997). Editor’s Introduction to the 1997 Edition. In A. J. Parel (Ed.), Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi [1910] 1997. Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) and Other Writings (pp. xxv–lxxv). Cambridge University Press. Pyarelal. (1986). Mahatma Gandhi Volume III: The Birth of Satyagraha: From Petitioning to Passive Resistance. Navajivan. Raychaudhuri, T. (1999). Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities: Essays on India’s Colonial and Post-colonial Experiences. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ruskin, J. ([1860] 1985). Unto This Last and Other Writings (C.  Wilmer, Ed.). Penguin. Srinivasan, S. (2009). Mahatma Gandhi’s Autobiography Still a Bestseller. The Economic Times, October 1. Retrieved August 6, 2022, from https://www. prokerala.com/news/articles/a82971.html Suhrud, T. (2018). Annotations. In Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (M. Desai, Trans. and Introduced and Annotated by T. Suhrud). Yale University Press. Talib, I.  S. (2002). The Language of Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction. Routledge. Viswanathan, G. (1989). Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India. Columbia University Press. Viswanathan, G. (1998). Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Gandhi Writing Gandhi: Autobiographical “Split Selves”

Abstract  Gandhi structures his life story around the conducting of a series of experiments with Truth through which he hopes to achieve moksha: ultimate spiritual salvation in the form of communion with God. His objective in documenting these experiments was to reveal to his readers the path to Truth; as his narrative was structured around these spiritual experiments, he asserted that it charted the journey of his soul rather than his self and was therefore devoid of the egotism typical of autobiographical writing. As discussed earlier, as autobiographical writer/narrator/subject, Gandhi’s construction of selfhood is concomitantly woven into and part of the very fabric of this autobiographical text. This chapter employs a cognitive stylistic typology—Emmott’s (2002) model of “split selves”— which facilitates analysis of the composition of the autobiographical identity linguistically represented in the text. Keywords  Gandhi • An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth • Indian autobiography • Cognitive Stylistics • “Split selves”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Neary, Gandhi’s Autobiographical Construction of Selfhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22786-8_5

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Methodology: Emmott’s “Split Selves” (2002) Emmott points out that “split selves” are pervasive in literature, and found in many different types of narrative text, both fiction and non-fiction. The phenomenon commonly occurs at times of “personal crisis” (Emmott, 2002, p. 153), and is seen as reflecting the fragmentary nature of human identity. In line with her usage, the term “split self” will be used here “very broadly to include all cases of a character or real-life individual being divided and/or duplicated in any way in a narrative” (2002, p. 154). The phenomenon of the “split self” in literature can take many forms and fulfil many purposes, exploring a range of issues around the nature of identity. It may represent the psychological fracturing of a character, the multitudinous nature of the psyche or more simply constitute the doppelgangers of sci-fi and fantasy literature. The phenomenon can be particularly evident in the case of autobiographical literature because, as Emmott tells us, “first-person narratives generally invoke a current self reporting on a past self and since breaks in narrative chronology (such as flashbacks) provide the means of juxtaposing different versions of an individual at different points in time” (2002, pp. 153–154). Emmott points out that cognitive linguistic theory has succeeded in coping with “the range of ‘split self’ phenomena found in narrative texts” (2002, p. 154) and that it has done so in several different ways. Most of these relate to Reference Theory, a linguistic theory which asserts that there is an inherent semantic association between a referring expression and its referent, that is, between a word, phrase or expression and the real-­ world entity to which it refers.1 Firstly, by referencing metaphors of self, Lakoff (1996) illustrated how humans conceptualise their consciousness as a multi-faceted entity, comprising many different and often-conflicting aspects. He posited that referring expressions such as ‘me’, ‘myself’ and ‘I’ do not constitute identical versions of the self, but rather denote the “different sets of properties” which comprise an individual’s sense of identity. According to Lakoff, as individuals we “sometimes conceptualise different aspects of ourselves or mental processes … as ‘people in conflict’” (1996, p. 105). This finding illustrates two things: that people’s self-perception is  According to Reference Theory, a reference can be defined as “a relation between an expression (the referring expression) and an entity (the referent), such that on one or more occasions of use (the referring act) a token of the expression picks out or stands for this entity” (Herman et al., 2004, p. 493). 1

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evidenced through their everyday language use, and that individuals perceive themselves as having “not one form of consciousness but many” (1996, p. 101). As Emmott points out (2002, p. 156), Lakoff’s assertion of the multitudinous nature of identity is in alignment with William James’s classic dual construction of selfhood as comprising the ‘self-as-­ knower’ and the ‘self-as-known’ (James, 1890, p. 332), constructs which Lakoff redefines as the ‘subject’ and the ‘self’ respectively. Neurological evidence gleaned from split-brain studies suggests there is a physiological basis to our conceptualisation of identity as a multifarious construct as, in such studies, the left (intellectual) and right (emotional) hemispheres of the brain demonstrate the capacity to act independently of each other.2 However, as Emmott states, while such metaphors are useful in informing as to how individuals conceptualise identity, Lakoff only looks at how these metaphors operate in language generally, failing to engage with their use in specific narrative contexts. Furthermore, Lakoff’s finding that individuals conceptualise their consciousness as a multitudinous and complex entity is premised upon the assumption that one’s identity is in some way ‘identifiable’. This is somewhat problematised by arguments advanced by psychologists such as Gazzaniga (1998) and Dennett (1991) who suggest that such a circumscriptive theory of identity is “a self-created fiction” (Emmott, 2002, p. 162); rather, identity is an amorphous psychological construct characterised by a ceaseless dynamism which precludes attempts at identification. Notwithstanding the above, humans are determined to hold to the notion of an identifiable ‘self’; this accounts for the persistence of the phenomenon of the “split self” in literature. Secondly, Fauconnier’s work on Mental Space Theory3 further engages with co-referentiality, and endeavours to explain why certain instances of co-referentiality may seem illogical but are comprehensible to the reader (see Fauconnier & Sweetser, 1996). Many of Fauconnier’s examples relate to entities and their corresponding counterparts in other realms, such as in paintings, the imagination etc., and as such have links to stylistic approaches such as Possible Worlds Theory (for an introduction to PWT, see Ryan, 1991). Though Fauconnier’s findings have thus far tended to be applied  ‘Split brain’ studies investigate the effects of a very rare condition in which the links between the left and right hemispheres of the brain have been completely severed. 3  Mental Space Theory posits that we create meaning through the construction of mental spaces. See Fauconnier (1985). 2

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only to artificial examples or very short passages of text, they can be extrapolated from to inform a consideration of “split selves” in narrative where multiple versions of a self are in evidence. Conceptual Blending Theory4 has also been used by cognitive linguists in investigations of co-­ referents in a text. 5 However, as Emmott notes, the interpretations arrived at through Conceptual Blending Theory are typically gleaned through the application of general world knowledge, rather than text-based knowledge (2002, pp. 159–160). In developing her theory, Emmott endeavours to contribute towards the ability of cognitive linguistics to address “how we gradually accumulate information about particular individuals over extended stretches of text” (2002, p. 160). However, application within the discipline of narratology has achieved a certain amount of success in this area; Text World Theory (Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007),6 for example, has been successful in explaining how narrative sub-  and modal  worlds, stimulated by “representation of the beliefs, dreams and fantasies of characters”, are created (Emmott, 2002, p. 160).

Analysis of “Split Selves” in An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1940) Emmott focuses on the occurrence of “split self” phenomena in both fiction and real-life medical stories and the examples she draws from such narratives shape her categorisation of “split self” representation in literature. As such, “split self” phenomena occur in literature to fulfil four distinct purposes (some of which are further sub-divided): to represent the complex, “multi-faceted” nature of the self (2002, p. 161); to portray an ever-changing selfhood; as a function of the act of narration itself; and,

4  Developed by Fauconnier and Turner (c.f. 1998, 2002), Conceptual Blending Theory (also known as Conceptual Integration Theory) investigates how we cognitively construct meaning when presented with parallels or counterparts in linguistic and non-linguistic communication. 5  See, for example, Dancygier (2006) and Canning (2008). 6  Drawing upon work on schemas, possible worlds and discourse worlds, Text World Theory traces how particular linguistic cues stimulate a process of co-constructed meaning via the creation of text worlds.

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finally, to represent “special effects” (2002, p. 172) in the text. 7 Given that “instances of splitting and/or of different versions of characters seem to arise naturally from the nature of the human self and from the nature of narrative” (Emmott, 2002, p. 161), it is not surprising that the phenomena can be particularly evident in the case of autobiographical literature and are at least partially inherent in the narrative form. The phenomenon of “split selves” occurs as a function of the act of narration because narrative structure can so easily accommodate a temporal fracturing of identity. For this reason, Emmott only considers the manifestation of “split selves” in the genre of autobiographical writing as occurring as a function of the act of narration. However, the multiple selves in Gandhi’s autobiography are not simply a result of the narrative juxtaposition of past and present. Rather, they also evince Gandhi’s multi-faceted identity and depict his ever-changing selfhood. In fact, the manifestation of “split selves” in the Autobiography constitutes much more than a narrative ‘accident’; as such, this study will apply all of Emmott’s categories to representations of “split selves” in the Autobiography (except for the fourth category of ‘special effects’;  see  Footnote 7). Though Emmott specifies that her research merely provides the “groundwork” for a “more comprehensive typology of ‘split selves’ to come” (2002, p.  154), its extant state is more than sufficient for effective application to other narrative types. Elucidation of Emmott’s theory of “split selves” in literature carried out alongside simultaneous application to the Autobiography enables the furnishing of textual examples to support her contentions whilst also informing upon the various manifestations of “split selves” evidenced in Gandhi’s autobiography. The identification and delineation of the specific representations of “split selves” in this autobiographical text in turn facilitate interrogation of the nature of Gandhi’s textual self-representation.

7  This final category applies specifically to instances where doppelgangers or alternative versions of a self appear simultaneously on the same spatio-temporal plain via the wizardry of film or television, for example, or in the pages of science fiction or fantasy literature in which the boundaries of our physical world are frequently transcended. As such, this category is not appropriate for application to Gandhi’s autobiography but it has been usefully applied by Harrison (2020) to Hulu’s recent TV adaptation of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

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The Complex, Multi-Faceted Self The multitudinous nature of selfhood is manifested and hence textually represented in several ways: as a fracturing between emotion and intellect, between body and mind, in terms of the often-conflicting social roles which individuals can adopt, in a schism between their private and public selves, and as various imaginary selves which a consciousness can project. Each of these will be considered and applied individually to Gandhi’s autobiography, though it is important to note that overlapping across these manifestations can and does occur. Emotion and Intellect The complexity of the human mind can be represented in several different ways, depending on the nature of the split that has occurred. Emmott finds evidence of what can be categorised as ‘mind-mind’ schisms, which involve a psychological conflict between the intellectual and the emotional sides of one’s identity, or head versus heart.8 Investigation of the presence of emotion-intellect fracturing in Gandhi’s autobiography reveals little evidence of such a divide, overtly occurring in only one context, that of his sexual relations with his wife. Having married young (aged 13), as was the custom in India at the time, the young Gandhi describes himself as a “jealous husband” (An Auto, p.  66) who was possessive and “passionately fond” (An Auto, p. 67) of his young wife Kasturba. Gandhi remarks that, though his suspicions were unfounded, he persisted in his behaviour towards her because “jealousy does not wait for reasons” (An Auto, p. 66); he is acknowledging that his emotions held sway over his intellect. But such moments, or at least such revelations, are extremely rare. Rather, the narrating Gandhi summarises his feelings on this emotion-intellect conflict when he says that, in everything he undertakes, “so long as my acts satisfy my reason and my heart” (An Auto, p. 47), he will be content. The mature middle-aged Gandhi has hence learned to satisfy both his intellect and his emotion, giving neither precedence over the other, but rather reconciling the two. He prizes both the heart, with its capacity for love and ­truth/ 8  Emmott discusses this example, among others, from Joe Simpson’s novel Touching the Void (London: Vintage, 1988, p. 120): “It was as if there were two minds within me arguing the toss. The voice was clean and sharp and commanding. It was always right, and I listened to it when it spoke and acted on its decisions. The other mind rambled out a disconnected series of images, and memories and hopes, which I attended to in a daydream state as I set about obeying the orders of the voice”.

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Truth, and the head, with its ability to impose the order and discipline necessary for the physical and mental state essential to the achievement of communion with God. It is interesting to note that, despite Gandhi’s comments on the equality of mind and heart, and the extent to which both are essential to him, his suspicion of his wife is not resolved through a resolution of the emotion-­intellect conflict. Rather, Gandhi somewhat displaces possessiveness and suspicion into a more tangible, and resolvable form, that of physical lust. As such he has replaced an emotion-intellect conflict with a body-mind conflict, which he finds easier to reconcile. Body and Mind Another potential “split” perceived in the self can be that between mind and body. Although, as Emmott contends, the “Cartesian dualism of mind and body” (2002, p.  163) has long been a contentious subject, people nevertheless continue to conceptualise their mind as being held inside or within their bodies, as is evident from Lakoff’s discussion of ‘container’ metaphors.9 There is much evidence of Gandhi’s lifelong struggle to reconcile the conflicts that his physical and mental demands placed upon him. In 1921, he admitted: Whether I want or no, I feel attachments and aversions, feel disturbed by desire; I try to control them with an effort of my mind and succeed in repressing their physical manifestation. If I could practice them to perfection, I would be in possession today of all the supernatural powers they speak of; humble myself, the world would be at my feet and no one would ever want to laugh me out or treat me with contempt.10

Gandhi’s body was to him “a prison” or “cage” for the soul whose “wings, therefore, have been clipped and it cannot fly as high as it would”.11 He had a very strong awareness of the inter-relatedness of body and mind, and the importance of both to one’s spiritual welfare, stating in his 9  Here Emmott considers autobiographical “paralysis narratives” (2002, p. 164) in which the narrator has suffered some form of physical trauma resulting in paralysis. Such narratives can elucidate the nature of the mind-body relationship, and somewhat validate Lakoff’s conceptualisation of the mind as being contained within the body, in this case a paralysed body. 10  Speech at a meeting in Vadtal; Navajivan, 23 January 1921. 11  Speech at Wardha ashram; Navajivan, 27 December 1925.

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autobiography that “physical training should have as much place (in one’s life) as mental training” (An Auto, p. 70). It is important to stress that the conflict between body and mind was felt by Gandhi as the chief obstacle to his achieving communion with God, known as brahmacharya. Ultimately, all of Gandhi’s endeavours, whether in the private or public domain, were undertaken to achieve moksha or divine communion, this “spiritual end which has always inspired every one of my actions” (An Auto, p. 431). Spiritual success involved total suppression of the demands of the body, through the application of the mind, or will. This mind-body conflict predominantly takes two forms in the text: the lustful desires which Gandhi admits still being vulnerable to at the time of writing, and his “experiments in dietetics” (An Auto, p. 130), as he liked to call them. Gandhi spoke openly of his “carnal desire” (An Auto, p.  92) for his young wife, and the internal conflict he felt between the temptations of the flesh and the strong sense of duty which his intellect imposed upon him is keenly felt as a mind-body fracturing. As a young bridegroom, Gandhi admits being “devoted to the passions that flesh is heir to”12 (An Auto, p.  64), speaking regretfully of the oversights resulting from such “desire for pleasures” (An Auto, p. 64). He wished to educate his illiterate young wife, but allowed his physical needs to take precedence, stating “I was very anxious to teach her but lustful love left me no time” (An Auto, p. 67); hence in the conflict of mind and body, the body was victor. His “carnal appetite” (An Auto, p. 440) also led him to neglect his filial duties to his parents, to whom he was “devoted” (An Auto, p. 64). He writes of his father’s last illness: “Every night I massaged his legs and retired only when he asked me to or after he had fallen asleep. I loved to do this service. I do not remember ever having neglected it” (An Auto, p.  89). However, he admits that while providing this physical service to his father, his mind was elsewhere: “Every night whilst my hands were busy massaging my father’s legs, my mind was hovering about the bed-room” (An Auto, p. 90, emphasis added). He “was always glad to be relieved from my duty, and went straight to the bed-room after doing obeisance to my father” (An Auto, p. 90). However, one fateful night, “blinded” by “animal passion” (An Auto, p. 92), Gandhi left his father’s service to go to his wife, only to learn moments later that his father had died. He speaks at  Suhrud notes that the “passions” alluded to here include all types of “cravings”, not just sexual (2018, p. 64 nM11). 12

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length of the “shame of my carnal desire” which “even at the critical hour of my father’s death […] demanded wakeful service” (An Auto, p. 92). His failure affected him deeply: It is a blot I have never been able to efface or forget, and I have always thought that, although my devotion to my parents knew no bounds and I would have given up anything for it, yet it was weighed and found unpardonably wanting because my mind was at the same moment in the grip of lust. (An Auto, pp. 92–93)13

Commentators have argued that this incident was responsible for Gandhi’s ambiguous attitudes towards sex, which culminated in his vow of celibacy aged 38. Parekh, however, maintains there is “little real evidence to support this view” and cites Gandhi’s continued “enjoyment of his wife’s company” and subsequent raising of four sons as proof that “although the sense of guilt played a part, his real reason [for celibacy] was a desire to conserve his physical and spiritual energies for the important political struggles on which he had then embarked” (Parekh, 2001, p. 3).14 In any case, Gandhi’s later abstinence from all forms of sexual pleasure can be interpreted as an attempt to subdue a powerful aspect of his physical self through an effort of the mind and assertion of his will. Turning to Gandhi’s ‘experiments with dietetics’ we encounter more evidence of the mind conquering the demands of the body. An excellent example occurs during what Gandhi describes as his “meat-eating period” (An Auto, p. 85). As Nandy points out, there was a common perception at the time that the British were a masculine, warrior-like race, superior both mentally and physically, and destined to conquer the world. Their masculinity, central to their superior military prowess and intellectual capacities, was seen by the elite cadre of Hindus with whom Gandhi associated as being encapsulated in their proclivity for meat-eating, which in turn gave them the physical strength and aggression necessary to conquer

13  This incident is recounted in Chap. 9 of the autobiography, entitled “My Father’s Death and My Double Shame”; it is interesting to note Suhrud’s assertion that the word “double”, which emphasises Gandhi’s emotional response to events, was only added to the English translation (see Suhrud, 2018, p. 89 n160). 14  As Mandelbaum notes, traditional Indian society believes that “[a] man is supposed to have only a limited amount of life-giving fluids and rapid loss is believed to weaken [him] drastically” (1970, p. 77).

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weaker, meat-abstaining peoples like themselves.15 Vegetarianism, as Leela Gandhi notes, “emerged slowly but surely as the baneful signifier of colonial vulnerability” (2006, p.  82). Such arguments were advanced by a childhood friend of Gandhi’s, in line with a “wave of ‘reform’” (An Auto, p. 77) sweeping over Rajkot at the time, where learned men and women began to take meat and wine as the first step towards Indian home rule. This “wave” Gandhi refers to may have been directed towards religious rather than political reform. The thinking of the time, as Walsh argues, had a distinctly religious edge: “Hinduism had decayed from an earlier and vital past; it had become caste-ridden and unegalitarian. Indians had grown weak and intolerant, idolatrous and superstitious […] [f]or the present, the way to that past clearly led through the adaptation of English customs” such as meat-eating (1983, p.  35). The young Gandhi conceded: “I certainly looked feeble-bodied by the side of my brother and this friend. They were both hardier, physically stronger, and more daring” (An Auto, p. 77). Gandhi succumbed, and for approximately a year afterwards, “became a relisher of meat-dishes” (An Auto, p. 81) and his physical self effectively operated in accordance with his patriotic self, but against his religious self. Thus, it may have been physical vanity, rather than burgeoning patriotism, which caused him to start eating meat, though the narrating Gandhi insists his youthful self was, even then, “bent on the [political] reform”16 (An Auto, p.  80). In his defence, he tenders that such arguments “were not advanced at a single sitting” but represented “the 15  Walsh (1983) offers fascinating insights into how this ‘reform’ manifested itself: “In Calcutta, students were reported to have thrown meat into the courtyard of a Brahmin; […] in Bombay young men of different castes joined together in secret to break caste restrictions” (p. 35). The linking of colonialism and gender has a long history: Macaulay referred to the “physical organisation of the Bengali” as “feeble even to effeminacy” (see Leela Gandhi, 2006, p.82 n53). Leela Gandhi notes that the advertising of “Briggs Muscle-forming Indian Food” in England at the time of Gandhi’s stay would have “struck a deep chord in him” (2006, p. 81). Nandy engages with Gandhi’s place within this dialectic at length, arguing that Gandhi’s socio-political reform constituted “a transcultural protest against the hypermasculine world view of colonialism” (1983, p. 48). Holden similarly notes that Gandhi’s autobiographical depiction of Lord Curzon’s durbar—in which he describes the Maharajas as “bedecked like women”, their costumes “insignia not of their royalty, but of their slavery” (An Auto, p. 374)—was a “touchstone” upon which to “meditate on the pomp of empire as a spectacle of degraded masculinity” (2008, p. 61). 16  It is interesting to note Gandhi’s use of language here: while he describes his brother as haven “fallen” (An Auto, p. 77) or, as retranslated by Suhrud, “been polluted” (2018, p. 77 n M6), by succumbing to meat-eating, Gandhi sees himself as merely “beginning [an] experiment” (An Auto, p. 79) in a quest for truth.

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s­ ubstance of a long and elaborate argument which my friend was trying to impress upon me from time to time” (An Auto, p. 77). Interestingly, it was neither his religious duties in that regard, nor his political aspirations which won out over his physical self, but rather his filial duties. He finally abjured meat for love for his parents and a desire not to continue lying to them: “deceiving and lying to one’s father and mother is worse than not eating meat. In their lifetime, therefore, meat-eating must be out of the question” (An Auto, p. 82). This preliminary excursion into meat-eating not only marked his first, though tenuous, engagement with home rule in India; it was equally significant in comprising his first experiment in dietetics. While in London and trying to keep the oath to vegetarianism he had sworn to his mother, Gandhi “came in contact with those who were regarded as pillars of vegetarianism, and began my own experiments in dietetics” (An Auto, p. 130). He visited vegetarian restaurants all around the capital city, discussing ideas with other vegetarians and reading heavily on the subject itself; as he notes “[t]he result of reading all this literature was that dietetic experiments came to take an important place in my life” (An Auto, p. 120). Gandhi admits that these experiments were initially motivated by the very practical problem of finding nutritious vegetarian food in a meat-eating country, but soon they assumed a spiritual patina: “Health was the principal consideration of these experiments to begin with. But later on religion became the supreme motive” (An Auto, p. 120).17 Gandhi believed that he “could not live both after the flesh and the spirit” (An Auto, p. 496), and the flesh had to succumb; abstaining from various types of food—such as milk, salt, spices and pulses—or indeed fasting altogether was a way of imposing restraint upon the self, and restraint, as already noted, is essential to achieving moksha. Social Roles Emmott notes that social psychologists and theorists have observed that people conceptualise the varying social roles they perform in their 17  Gandhi articulates his feelings clearly in this regard: “I know it is argued that the soul has nothing to do with what one eats or drinks, as the soul neither eats nor drinks; that it is not what you put inside from without, but what you express outwardly from within, that matters. There is no doubt some force in this. But rather than examine this reasoning, I shall content myself with merely declaring my firm conviction that, for the seeker who would live in fear of God and who would see Him face to face, restraint in diet both as to quantity and quality is as essential as restraint in thought and speech” (An Auto, p. 433).

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personal and professional lives as representing differing aspects of themselves.18 Here, the focus is solely on those social roles Gandhi defines for himself, not those applied to him by others, either at the time or later.19 A consideration of social roles in relation to the autobiography is particularly illuminating and will commence by considering the variety and range of these social roles, as well as the purpose Gandhi appears to assign to them. The number of social roles he adopts will first be considered, followed by explication of the nature of these roles, and, finally, Gandhi’s conceptualisation of these roles and their place in his quest for moksha. In his autobiography, Gandhi purposefully identifies himself with more than fifty social roles, with six being referred to on the very first page of the autobiography (see his ‘Introduction’): public worker, prisoner, intellectual, writer, spiritual being and social reformer. His purposefulness in this regard is further reflected by the way in which he often foregrounds his social roles by, for example, using them as chapter titles. The most obvious examples of this include “Playing the English Gentleman” (Part I, Chpt. 15); “As a Householder” (Part II, Chpt. 23); “Clerk and Bearer” (Part III, Chpt. 14) and “As Schoolmaster” (Part IV, Chpt. 32). There are also other chapter titles where the social role is strongly implied, especially as one becomes more familiar with the structure and narrative focus of the autobiography; these include the titles “Education of Children” (Part III, Chpt. V); “Sanitary Reform and Famine Relief” (Part III, Chpt. XI); and “In the Congress” Part III, Chpt. 15). Generally, these roles can be distinguished in accordance with their existence in the private or public domain, and they encompass both the long-term and the more transitory, with some inevitable overlapping. His ‘private’ roles include his familial roles—son, brother, husband, lover and father—together with more unorthodox domestic roles. He asserts that he acted as medical advisor and nurse to his pregnant wife and took sole care of his baby sons for the first two months of their lives, indeed contending “My children would not have enjoyed the general health that they do today, had I not studied the subject and turned my knowledge to 18  Emmott directs the reader to James (1910); Billington et  al. (1998, pp.  49–52) and Bosma and Kunnen (2001). 19  As such, the arguments of Mandelbaum (1973) or Leigh (2000) mentioned in Chap. 2 will not be engaged with here. This is because by restructuring the autobiography to suit their purposes both Mandelbaum and Leigh have ignored its self-reflexivity and, rather than considering Gandhi’s representation of his multiple social roles, they have instead imposed social roles upon him.

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account” (An Auto, p. 338). Due to “the difficulty of getting a trained Indian nurse in South Africa”, Gandhi also “studied the things necessary for safe labour” (An Auto, p. 337), acting as midwife and delivering his youngest son unassisted. He learned to bake bread (An Auto, p. 486); to cut his own hair (An Auto, p. 351);20 and to cobble (An Auto, p. 523). He also “became an expert washerman”;21 it is interesting to note here that Gandhi does not consider himself to have merely learned a new skill, but rather to have ‘become’ a professional practitioner of that skill. Gandhi often appears to view his social roles in such a way: his purposeful acquisition of new skills results in his acquisition of new social roles and, thereby, new selves. He adopted such roles for various reasons, and they sometimes fulfilled multiple purposes. While he took on the roles of washerman and baker for reasons of economy, in learning the skill of a lower caste Hindu, he was also identifying directly with those living in a social and religious sphere far below that of the Bania caste to which he belonged.22 Over time, as his zeal for public reform was directed at the plight of the lower castes, such self-identification became very useful to him. Gandhi was aware that the Indian masses constituted a potentially huge untapped political resource, hitherto ignored by the elite governing the country. His public identification with them—evidenced in the following extract from a speech made in 1925—secured their political allegiance: “As you know I am a labourer myself, I pride myself on calling myself a scavenger, weaver, spinner, farmer and what not, and I do not feel ashamed that some of these things I know but indifferently. It is a pleasure to me to identify myself with the labouring classes”.23 Gandhi’s decision to “thr(o)w off dependence on the barber” (An Auto, p. 351) was rather forced upon him, as he himself became a victim 20  After Gandhi “threw off dependence on the barber”, he “immediately purchased a pair of clippers and cut my hair before the mirror. I succeeded more or less in cutting the front hair, but I spoiled the back. The friends in the court shook with laughter”. To the English translation, Gandhi adds detail on his friends’ jibes: “‘What’s wrong with your hair, Gandhi? Rats have been at it?’” (An Auto, p. 351; see Suhrud 2018, p. 351 n175). 21  Gandhi continues: “… and my washing was by no means inferior to laundry washing. My collars were no less stiff and shiny than others” (An Auto, p. 350). 22  The Bania is a sub-caste (or jati) of the Vaishya caste (or varna). Vaishyas are traditionally the merchant and artisan class and are placed third in the hierarchical ordering of the four varnas of traditional Hinduism. 23  Speech at Indian Association, Jamshedpur, 8 August 1925; Young India 20 August 1925.

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of racial discrimination when an “English hair-cutter” in Pretoria “contemptuously refused” to cut his hair for fear of “losing his custom, if he should serve black men” (An Auto, p. 351). Gandhi then realised: “We do not allow our barbers to serve our untouchable brethren. I got the reward of this in South Africa, not once, but many times, and the conviction that it was the punishment for our own sins saved me from becoming angry” (An Auto, p. 352). His sympathy to the plight of the ‘Untouchables’24 led him to take on the role of sweeper (remover of human waste) firstly in his own house, and subsequently at public events such as a Congress conference in Calcutta in 1901.25 As can be seen from the latter example, some of these social roles simultaneously operate in both the private and public domain. Gandhi states that his experience as nurse to his father, wife, and infant sons “stood me in good stead” for his part in the Boer War, during which he “collected together as many comrades as possible, and with very great difficulty got their services accepted as an ambulance corps” (An Auto, p.  353). Likewise, his early attempts to act as teacher to his ill-educated wife, and later his young sons, prepared him for the role of schoolmaster on his settlement at Tolstoy Farm, the ashram he set up in 1910 as the headquarters of his satyagraha campaign against the mistreatment of Indians in South Africa’s Transvaal region. Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi maintained, “was a family, in which I occupied the place of the father, and that I should so far as possible shoulder the responsibility for the training of the young” (An Auto, p. 521). Gandhi differentiates his roles in the public domain as professional— referring to his career roles as student, then lawyer and barrister—or public, referring to his roles as agitator for social and political reform both in South Africa and in his native India. He tells us that “[p]ractice as a lawyer was and remained for me a subordinate occupation. It was necessary that I should concentrate on public work” (An Auto, p. 259). His role as public worker took many forms, and was divided into many sub-roles: supporter of the poor; inspector of sanitation (a role which was formalised 24  As mentioned in Chap. 4, those at the bottom or located outside of Hinduism’s traditional caste (varna) system are now officially known as ‘Scheduled Castes’. Gandhi referred to them as ‘Harijan’ or ‘children of God’. 25  He tells us: “The municipal sweeper removed the night-soil, but we personally attended to the cleaning of the closet instead of asking or expecting the servant to do it” (An Auto, p. 487). Indeed, he later came to believe that “the scavenger’s work would be our special function in India” (An Auto, p. 599).

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when the local municipality employed him during an outbreak of plague); ambulance crew member during both the Boer and Zulu wars (during which he was granted the rank of Sergeant-Major “to give me a status and to facilitate work” (An Auto, p. 493); “clerk and bearer” to an eminent politician during the Calcutta Congress meeting of 1901; journalist and publisher (he founded, wrote for, and published Indian Opinion from 1903–1914);26 fundraiser (having discovered his “capacity in this direction” (An Auto, p. 745); and draftsman (“My other aptitude … was as a draftsman” (An Auto, p.  745). Indeed, Gandhi had occupied all these roles prior to his “real entrance” into a political career (An Auto, p. 744) and many would prove very useful to him as a politician. Gandhi was also a confirmed Anglophile for much of his earlier life, admitting that at one time he “vied with Englishmen in loyalty to the throne” (An Auto, p. 291). In this latter role can be discerned one of the many internal and external conflicts which Gandhi’s various social roles inflicted upon him. In his autobiographical account of his three years studying at the bar in London, Gandhi recounts in considerable detail his experiments in “playing the English Gentleman”, an “all too impossible task” (An Auto, p. 121) for an Indian, and orthodox Hindu. He took lessons in elocution, French and dancing, “infatuation(s)” which lasted “about three months”, though he admits that his “punctiliousness in dress persisted for years” (An Auto, p. 124). He donned “a chimney-pot hat costing nineteen shillings”; “wasted ten pounds on an evening suit made in Bond Street”; learnt “the art” of tying a tie because it was “not correct to wear a ready-made tie”; and “wasted ten minutes every day before a huge mirror, watching myself arranging my tie and parting my hair in the correct fashion”, all in order to “look the thing” (An Auto, p.  122).27 Walsh points out that Gandhi was not unusual in this: “[f]or [an Indian] student to become a sahib was a project which united dress, language, education, and employment” (1983, p.  36). His abiding loyalty to the British Crown resulted in many conflicts with his fellow countrymen, for Gandhi assisted on the British side in the Boer and Zulu Wars and wished to do so again in the First World War, believing that “if I demanded rights as a British citizen, it was also my duty, as such, to participate in the defence  For more on his roles as journalist and publisher, see Chap. 4.  Much has been written on Gandhi’s sartorial transformations and their correspondence with his burgeoning identity. See for example Codell (2006); Mandelbaum (1973) and Becker (2006). 26 27

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of the British Empire” (An Auto, p. 353).28 It was only as he progressed into middle age that he began to “see to what lengths the British Government is capable of going, and what inhumanities and barbarities it is capable of perpetrating in order to maintain its power” (An Auto, p. 731). Other examples of the conflicts experienced by Gandhi in the social roles he adopted are evident from an earlier stage. It has already been shown that Gandhi’s role as husband and lover conflicted with those of teacher to his wife, and that the conflict between his filial duties and those of husband resulted in a “double shame” (An Auto, p. 89) he could never “efface or forget” (An Auto, p. 92).29 Similarly, he admits that I could not devote to the children all the time I had wanted to give them. My inability to give them enough attention and other unavoidable causes prevented me from providing them with the literary education I had desired, and all my sons have had complaints to make against me in this matter. (An Auto, pp. 332–333)

He also clashed with Kasturba, his wife, over his burgeoning beliefs, creating instances of conflict between his roles of husband/father and social reformer. For example, he made Kasturba give up the “costly ornaments” (An Auto, p.  360) given as gifts by his acquaintances in South Africa, remaining “unmoved” (An Auto, p. 361) by her appeals to consider their financial security and their sons’ marriage prospects. Likewise, his experiments with religious tolerance conflicted with her orthodox Hindu beliefs; for example, he insisted on lodging low-caste clerks and non-Hindus under their roof and once forced her to clean the toilet of a low-caste Panchama living in their house, despite “her eyes red with anger, and pearl drops streaming down her cheeks” (An Auto, p.  438).30 Regarding

28  Gandhi admits: “Hardly ever have I known anybody to cherish such loyalty as I did to the British Constitution” (An Auto, p. 290), though interestingly Suhrud notes that “to the British constitution” is found only in the English translation (2018, p. 290 n392). 29  It is interesting to note Mandelbaum’s assertion that, in traditional Indian society, nothing in one’s role as a husband should conflict openly with one’s devotion as a son (1970, p. 59). 30  A Panchama is a member of the fifth and lowest caste.

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himself as a “cruelly kind husband”,31 he believes he “harassed her out of my blind love for her” (An Auto, p. 438). Finally, an evident conflict exists in his role as orthodox Bania, a mid-­ caste Hindu, with that of public worker and social reformer. For a practising Bania caste-member, contact with human excrement, dead animals, human hair or unclean garments was inconceivable, resulting in high levels of ritual pollution and possible loss of caste. Yet Gandhi, as already seen, took on the role of sweeper, learned to make shoes, and cut his own hair. The conflict between Gandhi’s Hindu faith and his moral and socialist ideals resulted in a campaign for Hindu reform which called for the caste system to be dismantled and ‘untouchables’, or harijans, to be reintegrated into society. Whilst Gandhi remained “a Hindu of Hindus” (CWMG 35, p. 102) all his life, this lifelong conflict caused him to adopt some of the tenets of other religions such as Christianity and Buddhism, resulting in a syncretism that would define his religious ideology.32  rivate and Public Selves P In his childhood and early teens, Gandhi experienced the difficulties of negotiating between his private and public selves, effectively his internal beliefs and external actions. This is not a category included within Emmott’s typology, but will be considered here due to its relevance, though it does admit of some overlap with other categories. As discussed, the young Gandhi hid his meat-eating, torn as he was between his sense of duty to his parents and his desire to join other “reformers” in their nascent campaign for Indian independence. This is the first time in the autobiography that Gandhi identifies conflict between his outward appearance (of a dutiful vegetarian Hindu) and his inner desires. This behaviour, along with other ‘transgressions’ such as smoking, created a tension between his public and private selves. But his realisation of the importance of ‘Truth’ caused a desire to deceive no more, and marked a reconciliation between his inner and outer selves: “one thing took deep root in me—the 31  Suhrud’s retranslation of this phrase as “But I was a loving as also a cruel husband” (2018, p. 438 M5) is less ambiguous. 32  In 1927, Gandhi went on a speaking tour to decry the destructive effects of ‘untouchability’. During a speech in Quilon, for example, he said “You must remember that all the great religions of the world are at the present time in the melting pot. Let us not ostrich-like hide our faces, and ignore the danger that lies at the back of us. I have not a shadow of doubt that in the great turmoil now taking place either untouchability has to die or Hinduism has to disappear” (CWMG 35, p. 113). Gandhi’s religious syncreticism is outlined in Neary 2017.

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conviction that morality is the basis of things, and that truth is the substance of all morality. Truth became my sole objective” (An Auto, p. 98). The reconciliation of his private and public selves was the only means by which Gandhi could attain ‘Truth’, a complex concept, which he elevated above all else: “for me, truth is the sovereign principle … […] This truth is not only truthfulness in word, but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the relative truth of our conception, but the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God” (An Auto, p. 47). Excepting communication with God,33 Gandhi believed all action and thought should be transparent and suitable for the public domain; he wished to collapse the boundaries between the inner and outer selves to engender trust in people, and to encourage them to live as their conscience dictated. Gandhi prided himself on his pursuit of Truth in all aspects of life: he tells us “it went against the grain with me to do a thing in secret that I would not do in public” (An Auto, p. 181). It is interesting to briefly consider this application of ‘Truth’ to Gandhi’s construction of his autobiography. While at the opening of the text, he tells us that “I am not going either to conceal or understate any ugly things that must be told. I hope to acquaint the reader fully with all my faults and errors. My purpose is to describe experiments in the science of satyagraha, not to say how good I am” (An Auto, p. 49), there are, perhaps inevitably, a number of instances where he conceals his private self from the reader. For example, though he admits he was a slave to carnal pleasures, especially in the early days of his marriage, he confides “I propose to draw the curtain over my shame, except for a few details worth recording” (An Auto, p.  63). Likewise, certain other events are only vaguely alluded to; on more than one occasion, Gandhi assures the reader that “To these I shall come later” (An Auto, p. 63), and yet he seldom does.34 Indeed, his biographer Judith Brown notes that the autobiography is comprised of a “highly idiosyncratic choice of events stressed or lightly

33  He states: “There are some things which are known only to oneself and one’s Maker. These are clearly incommunicable” (An Auto, p. 46). 34  Other examples include “There are some amusing details of the preliminaries to the final drama—e.g., smearing our bodies all over with turmeric paste—but I must omit them” (An Auto, p. 63); “…an incident happened, …which I will relate later” (An Auto, p. 64); “But of these more in their proper place” (An Auto, p. 179); “I must skip many other experiences of the period between 1897 and 1899 and come straight to the Boer War”; and “I must needs skip over many a reminiscence of this memorable month” (An Auto, p. 385).

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touched on” (1989, p. 8). And yet Gandhi himself is acutely aware of the narrative gaps typical of autobiography: I understand more clearly today what I read long ago about the inadequacy of all autobiography as history. I know that I do not set down in this story all that I remember. Who can say how much I must give and how much omit in the interests of truth? And what would be the value in a court of law of the inadequate ex parte evidence being tendered by me of certain events in my life? If some busybody were to cross-examine me on the chapters already written, he could possibly shed much more light on them, and if it were a hostile critic’s cross-examination, he might even flatter himself for having shown up ‘the hollowness of many of my pretensions’. (An Auto, pp. 441–442)

However, he succeeds in quelling his fears in the latter regard by re-­ iterating: “I am not writing the autobiography to please critics. Writing it is itself one of the experiments with truth” (An Auto, p. 442). The importance of Gandhi’s reconciliation of his private and his public selves cannot be underestimated, for it is in the domestic sphere that he begins his experiments—in dietetics, healthcare, education, and the spiritual—which are then carried on in the public sphere. And it is upon these experiments that he based all his thoughts and teachings, and ultimately, his conception of satyagraha. Imaginary Selves Alternative selves can be created in the world of the imagination too, effectively juxtaposing the ‘real’ self with an ‘imaginary’ self “in line with fears, hopes, predictions, etc. about the future” (Emmott, 2002, p. 167). This can be an important narrative device for ensuring the forward momentum of narrative action. Emmott’s consideration of imagined selves is limited to social roles and their attendant alternate versions of the self, but Gandhi’s imagined self can be equated with that perfect spiritual self which, throughout his life’s journey and the autobiography’s narrative duration, he is aspiring to become: one who finally achieves ‘Truth’ and ultimate communion with God. At the time of writing his autobiography, aged 58, Gandhi had not yet achieved this state: “I know that I have not in me as yet that triple purity, in spite of constant ceaseless striving for it” (An Auto, p. 769). He continues to strive for it, however, acknowledging that he has “still before me a difficult path to traverse” (An Auto, p. 770).

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As such, his imagined self lies simultaneously in both the ‘actual’ world and the ‘imagined’ worlds, inspiring everything he does with the promise of things to come. His mission is to conflate his real and imagined selves into a single spiritual being, thereby attaining moksha (enlightenment). Gandhi’s ambition, of course, did not end with his own spiritual enlightenment, though this was paramount to him; it extended to the hopes and dreams he had for his country and its people. These can hence be considered ‘imaginary’ versions of their real selves. He strove for an imagined India, an independent country populated by people possessed of both inner and outer nobility, having gained spiritual strength through improved sanitation, diet, education, and ultimate adherence to satyagraha. The Ever-changing Self The ‘split self’ in literature can also be representative of the ever-changing nature of selfhood. Like the human self, the textual self is constantly evolving so that, as Emmott notes, on a “moment-by-moment basis […] in certain respects, a new version of the self is formed with every narrative action” (2002, p. 167). Readers may process these changes by creating a mental ‘file’ for each character which is constantly updated throughout the reading process (see Culpeper, 2001; Emmott, 1997). However, the sense of a character’s identity can be preserved by readers as they continue to recognise those personality traits that remain constant throughout the narrative; success in doing so is thought to be determined by readers’ cognitive recall together with their capacity to create “coherent narratives” of their own lives (Emmott, 2002, p.  168; see also Gazzaniga, 1998, pp. 25–26). As the narrative depiction of the physical and/or psychological evolution of a life, autobiographical writing typically represents the ever-­ changing selfhood of the autobiographical subject. Gandhi had some “transformative” experiences. These most notably include the moment he decided to fight for racial equality, made while shivering on a railway platform in Pietermaritzburg following ejection from a train for refusing to move to a non-white carriage, as well as the intellectual impact upon him of reading Ruskin’s Unto This Last. However, as Brown notes, there is no epiphanic self-discovery in Gandhi’s autobiography, no “moment of revelation” or “dramatic conversion” (2006, p. 157). Nonetheless, given that the overt function of Gandhi’s autobiography is to document the results of his lifelong ‘experiments with Truth’, a reader may reasonably expect to

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witness Gandhi’s psychological and spiritual evolution throughout the course of these experiments. George Orwell remarks that Gandhi’s autobiography demonstrates that Gandhi “was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards” ([1949] 2000, p. 461). Yet at the same time Orwell draws attention to how few childhood transgressions are to be found in the autobiography: [Gandhi] makes full confession of the misdeeds of his youth, but in fact there is not much to confess … A few cigarettes, a few mouthfuls of meat, a few annas pilfered in childhood from the maidservant, two visits to a brothel (on each occasion he got away without ‘doing anything’), one narrowly escaped lapse with his landlady in Plymouth, one outburst of temper—that is about the whole collection. ([1949] 2000, p. 461)

Interestingly, few as they are, the narrating Gandhi attempts to recast these youthful misdemeanours to ensure alignment with his present ideals. In so doing, he does not depict an ever-changing or evolving selfhood. He reconfigures these youthful, misguided past selves into psychological replicas of his narrating-‘I’, imposing his mature psycho-spiritual ideals upon his past, ‘experiencing-I’. Textual examples of this phenomenon abound: for instance, Gandhi insists that his childhood friendship with a mischievous youth was undertaken “in the spirit of a reformer” (An Auto, p. 75), assuring his parents: “I know he has the weaknesses you attribute to him, but […] he cannot lead me astray, as my association with him is meant to reform him” (An Auto, p.  76). Similarly, as noted above, he insists he broke his vow of vegetarianism because his “mind was bent on the [political] ‘reform’” (An Auto, p. 80). Furthermore, speaking of his treatment of his teenage wife, Gandhi insists: “Let not the reader think, however, that ours was a life of unrelieved bitterness. For my severities were all based on love” (An Auto, p. 67).35 He similarly attributes more mature motives to his young and impressionable Anglophile self: “Let no one imagine that my experiments in dancing and the like marked a stage of 35  Mandelbaum points out that Gandhi’s treatment of his new bride was commonplace in Indian society: “no matter how humble a man’s position in the village, he becomes a personage when he enters his own courtyard. His wife is ready to do his bidding with head bowed and voice subdued, as are other women junior to him. A young husband finds this most pleasant. He has been dependent on others, now he has a human being under his control” (1970, p. 76).

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indulgence in my life. The reader will have noticed that even then I had my wits about me. That period of infatuation was not unrelieved by a certain amount of self-introspection on my part” (An Auto, p. 124). Gandhi’s autobiography does not authentically represent a psycho-spiritual transformation or an ever-changing selfhood. Instead, Gandhi overwrites the motivations and rationales of his older, spiritually evolved self on to those of his younger, inexperienced self. The textual selfhood being constructed here is effectively a palimpsest upon which Gandhi (re)writes his younger self, creating an ‘experiencing-I’ possessed of the psychological maturity of the much older narrating-I. Gandhi effectively places the stamp of the Mahatma firmly over the youthful transgressions of Mohandas. The Act of Narration The phenomenon of “split selves” in literature can also be represented through the act of narration. Emmott focuses on two possible forms. Firstly, different versions of the ‘same’ self can be textually represented alongside each other to highlight a juxtaposition which performs a narrative function. Secondly, the ‘multiple selves’ of first-person narratives typically “intertwine[] different voices of an individual, since most first person narration involves a narrating self (Self1) looking back in time at events involving an earlier version of the self (Self2)” (2002, p. 171). The ‘multiple selves’ of first-person narratives are only considered by Emmott to manifest themselves through the act of narration. However, this study demonstrates that the “split selves” in Gandhi’s autobiography occur not only as a function of the act of narration, but also because of his textual representation of a complex multi-faceted identity, and, significantly, as a challenge to assumptions of his ever-changing selfhood, as has just been shown. As already mentioned, Gandhi often fails to textually represent his younger selves as distinct, past-tense versions of his present self, preferring instead to represent any youthful transgressions as early dabbling in the experiments in Truth upon which the autobiography is based. As a result, and because the narrative representation of multiple selves has already more fruitfully been considered within the other categories of Emmott’s typography, in the context of split-self formation via the act of narration a consideration of narrative juxtaposition in the autobiography proves most enlightening and will hence be carried out here.

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The form of written and televisual narrative enables simultaneous representation of different versions of a character, which encourages the reader / viewer to engage in a process of meaningful contrast which Emmott terms “narrative juxtaposition” (2002, p. 170). Textual analysis of the autobiography reveals that Gandhi is not always at ease with the “salient contrast” (Emmott, 2002, p. 170) which narrative juxtaposition provides. As noted above, the narrating Gandhi tends to overwrite the psychological ‘profile’ of his experiencing self. In addition, Gandhi often intervenes in those instances in which narrative juxtaposition threatens to highlight the contrast between his present and past selves too strongly. For example, he employs narrative devices which foreground transformations in his thinking: his frequent use of the phrase “I believed then….” constitutes one such example. Of his controversial involvement in the Boer War, he remarks: “my personal sympathies were all with the Boers, but I believed then that I had yet no right, in such cases, to enforce my individual convictions” (An Auto, p. 352; emphasis added). Of the sartorial transformation which coincided with his westernisation, he states: “I believed, at the time of which I am writing, that in order to look civilized, our dress and manners had as far as possible to approximate to the European standard” (An Auto, p. 311; emphasis added). However, he proceeds to state: “But I can see today that we feel all the freer and lighter for having cast off the tinsel of ‘civilization’” (An Auto, p. 312).36 At times he foregrounds revisions in his thinking too strongly: when portraying his youthful and impetuous decision to commit suicide—based on an adolescent resolution that a life without smoking was not worth living—he says: “I realized that it was not as easy to commit suicide as to contemplate it. And since then, whenever I have heard of someone threatening to commit suicide, it has had little or no effect on me” (An Auto, p. 86). Indeed, having admitted his indulgence in smoking as a youngster, Gandhi then declares: “Ever since I have grown up, I have never desired to smoke and have always regarded the habit of smoking as barbarous, dirty and harmful” (An Auto, p. 87). These examples effectively evidence Gandhi’s attempts to undermine the effects of the “salient contrast” (Emmott, 2002, p. 170) which narrative juxtaposition enables in case it provides too ‘salient’ a contrast between his present and past selves.

36  Suhrud retranslates “tinsel” as “worn-out skin”, which is particularly evocative (2018, p. 312 M3).

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Self and Circumstance Application of Emmott’s (2002) cognitive linguistic “split selves” typology to Gandhi’s autobiography has succeeded in both identifying and elucidating upon the multifarious nature of Gandhi’s selfhood. In doing so, it demonstrates the purposeful change his identity underwent in his quest to forge a holistic selfhood, a prerequisite for attaining moksha. Readers of Gandhi’s autobiography have long demonstrated their awareness of the multiplicity which characterises Gandhi’s selfhood. Reviewing the autobiography in 1931, Saunders notes the transitions in selfhood which comprise Gandhi’s autobiographical subjectivity: “the boy of ten, the young husband of fourteen, the young lawyer of twenty, the young champion of the poor of twenty-five, and the national leader in middle life” (Saunders, 1931, p. 209). Whilst recent scholarly research on the Autobiography has increasingly problematised long-held assumptions about various aspects of Gandhian identity, it has failed to engage with the self-reflexive character of the autobiographical genre. In so doing, it has neglected a fundamental dimension of the text and overlooked the interpretive advantages to be gained by considering how Gandhi perceived himself. Perhaps Gandhi’s contention that his was a “morally innocent” (Parekh, 1999, p. 284) autobiography is complicit in such neglect: by foregrounding his intention to write objectively about his experiments with Truth, he may have deflected subsequent readerly focus away from the self-reflexivity which is an inevitable feature of the autobiographical process. Analysis of the text at the linguistic level facilitates interrogation of Gandhi’s self-representation: it enables identification of the multiple selves which Gandhi—consciously or unconsciously—portrays himself as occupying and it examines their functions and potential consequences. It also illuminates the conflicts within his psyche which had to be acknowledged and reconciled if his quest for self-realisation was to be successful. Moreover, this analysis reveals the nature of Gandhi’s relationship with the world around him—with what Weintraub calls his circumstance, or “moment in time” (1978, p.  162)—which was often characterised by a tendency to reconfigure external events around the role he played in them. Eder recognises the semiotic potential inherent in the self-reflexivity of the autobiographical process, ‘reading’ Gandhi as “having purposively structured” his autobiography in order to depict “specific conceptions of and relationships between self and circumstance” (2000, p. 67). By emphasising the interaction between self and circumstance, Gandhi, Eder

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maintains, sought to understand himself and to express his own sense of individuality (2000, p. 64). Cognitive linguistic analysis has revealed the multiplicity of autobiographical selves represented in the text; the number and diversity of these multiple selves—representative of Gandhi’s multitudinous and ever-changing selfhood—suggests an emphasis on Gandhi’s selfhood which problematises his intention to write a “morally innocent” (Parekh, 1999, p.  284) autobiography. Naipaul remarked that the Autobiography evidenced “an obsession with the self” ([1972] 1976, p. 61). Rather than being devoid of the egotism which typically characterises this literary genre, Gandhi’s autobiography could be said to demonstrate a strong presence of multiple selves that have been constructed by conflicts between the head and the heart, the mind and the body, public and private concerns, real versus imaginary selves and varying social roles. These “split selves” also reveal the palimpsestic process by which Gandhi’s narrating-self interacts with and often overwrites his experiencing self. At all times in the text, Gandhi’s autobiographical selfhood is foregrounded. Textual analysis also demonstrates the ways in which circumstance has at times both activated and resolved this psychological process. Yet circumstance in the text is consistently orientated towards Gandhi: there is not a single event touched upon in which he does not have some level of involvement. Indeed, Gandhi consistently foregrounds his presence and involvement in or influence over the events he narrates. This egocentric tendency may be traced back to Gandhi’s formative years. In his essay “Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way”, Naipaul notes Gandhi’s failure to observe the world around him: “he didn’t ‘see’ India in his early years, barely ‘saw’ London” (2007, p.  118). Naipaul’s point is that Gandhi’s spiritual evolution marked a “journey … from not seeing to seeing” (2007, p. 118). Yet Gandhi’s insistence on reporting only upon those events he has observed first-hand no doubt adds to the purported veracity of the narrative. It also demonstrates the subjectivity which both informs and alters his perspective on external events. As Eder notes, “Gandhi’s experiments were not responses to an ‘objective world’ … but to the world as Gandhi experienced it. [He] relied upon experiences rather than brute external fact to represent civilization and to critique it and he developed experiments involving satyagraha and ahimsa to transform both self and circumstance” (2000, p. 87). Gandhi may have desired his autobiography to be a “scientist’s manual” (qtd. in Parekh, 1999, p. 286) offering objective instructions on the attainment of Truth; in reality, it is a subjective representation of events characterised by the particularity of its point of

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view. Gandhi’s critique of civilisation is founded not upon objective observation but upon introspective and subjective engagement with his experiments; in turn, his experiments stimulate further introspection as they “allow Gandhi to write about the possibilities of alternative ideas of self” (Eder, 2000, p. 76). Weintraub contends that there are two typical forms of autobiographical self-representation: the ‘pre-modern’ self identifies him/herself primarily with the community or society they inhabit, while the ‘modern’ self is an entirely individualistic construct (1978, p. xvii). Though Indians traditionally eschew representations of selfhood, Gandhi foregrounds his autobiographical subjectivity in this text. In so doing, he may not have wholly succeeded in his attempt to pen a “morally innocent” (Parekh, 1999, p.  284) autobiography. However, and perhaps more importantly, Gandhi instead demonstrates a thoroughly modern consciousness and paves the way for what Gunzenhauser terms a new Indian “cultural conception of the self” (2001, p. 76) (see Chap. 2).

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Eder, M. (2000). The Autobiographer in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth. In P. S. Gold & B. C. Sax (Eds.), Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture (pp. 63–90). Rodopi. Emmott, C. (1997). Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Clarendon. Emmott, C. (2002). ‘Split selves’ in Fiction and in Medical ‘life stories’: Cognitive Linguistic Theory and Narrative Practice. In E. Semino & J. Culpeper (Eds.), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (pp. 153–181). John Benjamins. Fauconnier, G. (1985). Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge University Press. Fauconnier, G., & Sweetser, E. (1996). Cognitive Links and Domains: Basic Aspects of Mental Space Theory. In G.  Fauconnier & E.  Sweetser (Eds.), Spaces, Worlds and Grammar (pp. 1–28). University of Chicago Press. Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (1998). Conceptual Integration Networks. Cognitive Science, 22(2), 133–187. Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. Basic Books. Gandhi, L. (2006). Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship. Permanent Black. Gandhi, M. K. ([1940] 2018). An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (M. Desai, Trans. and Introduced and Annotated by T. Suhrud). Yale University Press. Gavins, J. (2007). Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh University Press. Gazzaniga, M. S. (1998). The Mind’s Past. University of California Press. Gunzenhauser, B. J. (2001). Autobiography: General Survey. In M. Jolly (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms (Vol. 1, pp. 75–78). Fitzroy Dearborn. Harrison, C. (2020). ‘The truth is we’re watching each other’: Voiceover Narration as ‘split self’ Presentation in The Handmaid’s Tale TV Series. Language and Literature, 29(1), 22–38. Herman, D., Jahn, M., & Ryan, M.-L. (Eds.). (2004). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Routledge. Holden, P. (2008). Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-state. University of Wisconsin Press. James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. Holt. James, W. (1910). Psychology: The Briefer Course. Holt. Lakoff, G. (1996). ‘Sorry, I’m Not Myself Today’: The Metaphor System for Conceptualizing the Self. In G. Fauconnier & E. Sweetser (Eds.), Spaces, Worlds and Grammar (pp. 91–123). University of Chicago Press. Leigh, D.  J. (2000). Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography. Fordham University Press.

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Mandelbaum, D.  G. (1970). Society in India: Continuity and Change (Vol. 1). University of California Press. Mandelbaum, D.  G. (1973). The Study of Life History: Gandhi. Current Anthropology, 14(3), 177–206. Naipaul, V. S. (1972) 1976. Indian autobiography. In The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Naipaul, V. S. (2007). Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way. In A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (pp. 100–119). Picador. Nandy, A. (1983). The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford University Press. Orwell, G. ([1949] 2000]. Reflections on Gandhi. First Published in Partisan Review January 1949. Reprinted in George Orwell: Essays (pp. 459–466). Penguin. Parekh, B. (1999). Colonialism, Tradition and Reform (Revised ed.). Sage. Parekh, B. (2001). Gandhi: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Ryan, M.-L. (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. University of Indiana Press. Saunders, K. (1931). Mahatma Gandhi Seen Through His Autobiography. Review of My Experiment with Truth: An Autobiography, by Mahatma Gandhi. Pacific Affairs, 4(3), 201–209. Simpson, J. (1988). Touching the Void. Vintage. Suhrud, T. (2018). Annotations. In M. K. Gandhi (Ed.), An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (M.  Desai, Trans. and Introduced and Annotated by T. Suhrud). Yale University Press. Walsh, J.  E. (1983). Growing Up in British India: Indian Autobiographers on Childhood and Education under The Raj. Holmes and Meier. Weintraub, K.  J. (1978). The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. University of Chicago Press. Werth, P. (1999). Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Longman. Neary, Clara. (2017). “Truth is like a vast tree”: Metaphor use in Gandhi’s autobiographical narration. Metaphor and the Social World, 7(1), 103 –121. Naipaul, V.S. (1972) 1976. Indian autobiography. In The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

CHAPTER 6

“Life is one indivisible whole”

Abstract  Having placed the Autobiography within the various dimensions of its context, this final chapter concludes with an overview of the contributions of the project. These contextual dimensions have ranged from the specific and immediate circumstances of the text’s production to the generic context of the status of autobiographical writing in India, and have included consideration of the writer’s broad literary experience as well as his ambivalent attitudes to English language use in India. In this concluding chapter, the results of the “split selves” analysis of the Autobiography— which is one of the first close textual examinations of the English translation to be undertaken (see also Neary, “Truth is like a vast tree”: Metaphor Use in Gandhi’s Autobiographical Narration. Metaphor and the Social World, 7(1): 103–121, 2017)—are situated within the autobiography’s broader contexts. Overall, they suggest that Gandhi’s textual selfhood is comprised of multiple selves operating in a variety of ways across different narrative levels. Cumulatively, the results problematise assumptions of the Autobiography’s literary and linguistic simplicity, as well as revealing more about the workings of its writer/subject.

From a speech delivered by Gandhi in Sewan; Young India, 27 January 1927.

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Keywords  Gandhi • An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth • Indian literature in English • Indian autobiography • “Split selves” • Cognitive Stylistics

Conclusion Though literary appellations such as ‘simple’ and ‘artless’ are often pejorative in tone, few of the Autobiography’s reviewers intended their remarks as such. With the exception of Wheatley, who dismissed Gandhi the writer as “a man without art” whose “simplicity is often merely baldness” (1931, p. 120), readers of the Autobiography generally perceive simplicity as an admirable literary quality indicative of both the veracity of the narrative and the moral superiority of its author/subject. In his introduction to C.F. Andrews’s edition of some of Gandhi’s life-writing (1930), Holmes describes the text as characterised by “a simplicity that is almost naive, a frankness that is frequently startling, an integrity that is almost sublime” (cited in Woodburne, 1931, p. 269). Writing in 1949, Hocking remarks that, in his autobiography, Gandhi “is plainly, even baldly, disclosing his life and conscience with laboratory impartiality” (1949, p. 243); in doing so, Hocking similarly equates ‘plainness’ with objectivity and honesty. His contemporaries similarly hail the text as an “amazingly frank self-­revelation of the greatest and humblest modern man” (Olcott, 1949, p. 192) and a story told “simply and humbly without pride or boasting” (Tobin, 1949, p. 77). In October 2021, in his introduction to a new edition of the Autobiography, Gopalkrishna Gandhi ponders on the need for another new edition, almost a century after the text’s first publication. In doing so, he remarks upon the text’s “austere richness”, namely, The patent veracity of its self-descriptions. The utter honesty of its self-evaluations. The lucence of its introspections. The frank admission of the author’s vulnerabilities. The total absence of an intent to impress the reader, nowhere more tellingthan in the stark simplicity of its language. (2021; emphases added)

However, “awesome” as he finds these “five self-effacing features” to be, for Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the purported simplicity and transparency of the text and its language are not the primary reasons for reading it; he instead

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locates its “accomplishment” as coming “from another dimension, one that exists outside the book” (2021). While understandable, this tendency to see the Autobiography’s value as external to the text itself is one of a number of related conclusions about the text which have obfuscated its status as a literary work for much of the near century since its publication. The oft-made assumption that the text’s linguistic simplicity evidences its author’s psychological simplicity has also hindered meaningful engagement with Gandhi as writer/subject, despite recent and increasing endeavours by critics to debunk hagiographic myths of the Mahatma. Gandhi himself, however, is complicit in such myth-making. He strove for a linguistic simplicity which was not natural to him—“The reader can have no idea of the restraint I have to exercise… in the choice of topics and my vocabulary”1—and which resulted in the formation of simplistic and reductive views both of him and of the autobiography he constructed. This book has endeavoured to interrogate such myths by firstly situating the text in its broader contexts of production and reception, and secondly through close textual investigation using a model of cognitive stylistic analysis. This book’s close text-based approach to the Autobiography constitutes a departure from extant scholarship which has tended to overlook the semiotic potential of the autobiographical genre’s characteristic self-­ reflexivity. Following Bruss (1980), this book sees the autobiographical manuscript as complicit in the creation of the textual selfhood it depicts: the text is both passive representation and active constructor. Gandhi’s identity is hence constructed both within and by the autobiographical text itself, rendering analysis of its linguistic construction particularly valuable. Application of a cognitive stylistic framework of analysis has revealed some of the linguistic intricacies of the text and the complexities of its writer-­ subject. In so doing, this research challenges prevailing assumptions of the autobiography’s lack of literary or linguistic sophistication; it also builds upon nascent scholarship which investigates Gandhian conceptions of selfhood. Much of this book has been concerned with necessary considerations of the context of the Autobiography; these contextual factors include the immediate context of the text’s production; the status of autobiography as a genre in India; Gandhi’s other literary output; his attitudes towards the English Language; and, finally, the Autobiography’s role in constructing a 1

 Young India, 2 July 1925.

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particular type of textual identity. Without this deliberation upon the various layers of context, thorough investigation of a text is not possible; this is especially the case in the genre of autobiography, which is complicated by the explicit associations made between the text and the context of production in the form of its author. Awareness of the context of reception is also crucial; once again, this is especially the case with a text produced by one of the most-renowned figures of the twentieth century and one which, as Gopalkrishna Gandhi contends, “continues, ninety-five years later, today, to be among the world’s bestselling books” (2021). Yet scholarly engagement with the Autobiography has tended to shy away from considering the text as much more than a repository of biographical information. As such, the investigation into linguistic representations of “split selves” in the Autobiography, carried out in Chap. 5, constitutes something of a watershed (following Neary, 2017). The cognitive linguistic typology employed here, developed by Emmott (2002), arose from Emmott’s categorisation of the manifold textual representations of “split selves” found across literary discourse. The finding that each one of the manifestations of “split” identity in her typology could be found in the autobiography reveals a complexity to Gandhi’s selfhood which is inconsistent with prevailing assumptions of his psychological one-dimensionality. The textual presence of these multitudinous selves also problematises received opinion as to the text’s linguistic simplicity and lack of literary merit. Moreover, the multiplicity of selves somewhat problematises Gandhi’s contention that his was a “morally innocent” biography, devoid of the narcissistic trappings of this traditionally Western genre. The analysis carried out in Chap. 5 made it possible to illustrate that Gandhi, internationally renowned as one who “looked at life as an entity, not in compartments” (N. Desai, 2009), had to reconcile multiple “split selves” to achieve this holistic ideal. Such multiplicity of selfhood often occurred as a result of Gandhi’s experiments with Truth and can often be seen as a necessary part of the process of self-realisation Gandhi underwent in his quest to achieve moksha. This study also illustrates the effectiveness of applying a typology like Emmott’s—gleaned from categorical identification and analyses of textual representations of selfhood found across multiple examples of fiction and non-fiction—to a single text. Finally, analysis of the text’s linguistic construction has facilitated access to an autobiographical self-reflexivity which informs not only upon Gandhi as an autobiographical subject, but on Gandhi’s perception of this autobiographical subject—that is, on how Gandhi viewed himself.

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It has been asserted that “[a]mong the aspects of Gandhi’s nature that emerge most clearly from the Autobiography are his considerable talents as propagandist, pressman, and editor” (Choudhury, 2009, p. 211). These appellations jar with the image of the spiritual guru the world has come to know. Yet the juxtaposition set up between these contrasting images— though revealing but a fraction of the multitudinous nature of his identity—adequately reveals the multifarious psychological strands that Gandhi wove into the linguistic fabric of his self-portrait. In so doing, it belies assertions that Gandhi “used words solely as a pedestrian means of expressing himself” (Boyle, 1951, p. 343) and that the Autobiography is an “artlessly told story” (Tobin, 1949, p. 78). On the contrary, An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth is revealed to be the product of a craftsman skilled in both linguistic and textual self-representation. It is, as one contemporary critic acutely put it, “a work of such simplicity and force that the realization of the skill and art which went into its making are not clear until one has read it all” (Harcave, 1948, p. 509).

References Andrews, C. F. (Ed.). (1930). Gandhi of India: His Own Story; Introduction by John Haynes Holmes. New York, Macmillan Co. Boyle, D. (1951). Review of Gandhi’s Letters to a Disciple, by M.K. Gandhi. Times Literary Supplement, June 1: 343. Bruss, E. W. (1980). Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film. In J. Olney (Ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (pp. 296–320). Princeton University Press. Choudhury, C. (2009). Still Making Us Work: Gandhi’s Autobiography. Democratiya, 16, 210–214. Desai, N. (2009). Narayan Desai Recalls the Creation of the Mahatma’s Biography. DNA India, October 2. Retrieved June 15, 2022. Emmott, C. (2002). ‘Split selves’ in Fiction and in Medical ‘life stories’: Cognitive Linguistic Theory and Narrative Practice. In E. Semino & J. Culpeper (Eds.), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (pp. 153–181). John Benjamins. Gandhi, G. (2021). Introduction. In M. K. Gandhi (Ed.), An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Aleph. Gandhi, M. K. ([1940] 2018). An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (M. Desai, Trans. and Introduced and Annotated by T. Suhrud). Yale University Press.

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Harcave, S. (1948). Gandhi’s ‘Confession.’ Review of Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mohandas K. Gandhi. The Antioch Review, 8(4), 507–509. Hocking, R. (1949). Review of Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, by M. K. Gandhi. Journal of Religion, 29(3), 243–244. Neary, C. (2017). “Truth is like a vast tree”: Metaphor Use in Gandhi’s Autobiographical Narration. Metaphor and the Social World, 7(1), 103–121. Olcott, M. (1949). Review of Gandhi’s Autobiography, by M. K. Gandhi. Special Issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 261, 191–192. Tobin, L. M. (1949). A Struggle for Sainthood: Review of Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by M. K. Gandhi. Phylon, 10(1), 76–78. Wheatley, E. D. (1931). Gandhi and India. Review of Mahatma Gandhi, His Own Story, by C. F. Andrews; Prophets of the New India, by Romain Rolland; The Case for India, by Will Durant; India, the Land of the Black Pagoda, by Lowell Thomas; Disillusioned India, by Dhan Gopal Mukerji. The Sewanee Review, 39(1), 120–123. Woodburne, A. S. (1931). Gandhi of India: His Own Story. Review of Gandhi’s Autobiography, by M. K. Gandhi. The Journal of Religion, 11(2), 269–270.

Index1

A Ahimsa, 3, 6, 30, 30n25, 49, 50n11, 71, 99 See also Non-violence (ahimsa); Passive resistance; Satyagraha (‘soul force’) Amritsar Massacre, 13n3, 59n6, 67 Amritsar shootings, 13 See also Jallianwala Bagh shootings Andrews, C.F., 104 Arnold, Matthew, 23 ̄ Atmacarit, 49 ̄ Atman, 47 B Bannet, Eve Tavor, 24 Benjamin, Walter, 23 Bharati, Agehananda, 66 Bhattacharya, Bhabani, 33, 57 Boer Wars, 64, 67 Boyle, D., 107

Brown, Judith M., 2, 92 Bruss, Elizabeth W., 5, 31, 105 Buddhism, 91 C Caste, 29, 47, 60, 70, 84n15, 87, 87n22, 88n24, 90n30, 91 Caste system, 47 Chatterjee, Margaret, 12 Chatterjee, Partha, 49, 49n10 Choudhury, Chandrahas, 107 Christian, 44, 46 Christianity, 91 Civil disobedience, 6 Codell, Julie F., 29 Cognitive Stylistics, 5 Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 2, 2n1 Conceptual Blending Theory/ Conceptual Integration Theory, 78

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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Congress, 88 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 48 Culpeper, Jonathan, 6, 94 CWMG, see Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi D Defence of Socrates, 24n13 de Man, Paul, 23 de Montaigne, Michel, 44 Dennett, D.C., 77 Derrida, J, 24 See also Derridean Derridean, 24, 25 Desai, Mahadev, 4, 7, 14, 15, 16n8, 17–22, 56n3, 66 Translator’s Preface, 15 Desai, N., 9, 12, 15, 19, 106 Desai, V.G., 64 Durban, 61 E Eder, Milton, 32, 52 Einstein, Albert, 11 Elwin, Verrier, 4, 19 Erikson, Erik H., 18, 30 Experiments in dietetics, 58, 82 Experiments with dietetics, 83 F Fauconnier, Giles, 77 G Gandhi, Gopalkrishna, 14, 104 Gandhi, Kasturba, 80 Gandhi, Leela, 28 Gandhi, M.K., 2 Gavins, Joanna, 78

Gazzaniga, Michael S., 77 The Gita According to Gandhi, 19n10, 21 The Gospel of Selfless Action, 19n10, 21 Great Soul, 2 Green, Martin, 62n14 Gujarati, 2 Gunzenhauser, Bonnie J., 44 H Harcave, Sidney, 107 Harijan, 60 Hindi, 8 Hind Swaraj, 20 See also Indian Home Rule Hindu, 8, 47, 47n4, 48, 87, 89–91 See also Caste; Caste system; Hinduism Hinduism, 47 Hocking, Richard, 104 Holden, P., 16 Holmes, J. H., 104 I Indian Home Rule, 63 Indian Opinion, 25, 58 J Jallianwala Bagh shootings, 12n1 James, William, 77 Jivanwritānta, 50 Johannesburg, 61 K Kachru, Braj B., 64 Kallenbach, Hermann, 20 Karma, 47 Khilafat Movement, 14n3, 67

 INDEX 

Khilnani, Sunil, 34 Koppedrayer, Kay, 63 L Lakoff, George, 76 Leech, G., 25 Leigh, David J., 31 Lelyveld, David, 65 Lingua franca, 68 See also Link language Link language, 3n3 London, 20 London Diary, 56 M Macaulay, T.B., 66 Mahatma, 2, 11, 12, 17, 20, 27, 42n1, 52, 96, 105 See also Mahātmā Mahātmā, 51, 52 Majeed, Javeed, 24, 29 Mallik, B.K., 47 Malek, Kirsten, 25 Mandel, Barrett J., 3 Mandelbaum, David G., 30 Marcus, Laura, 45 Mental Space Theory, 77 Moksha, 3 Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel, 12 Muslim Khalifah, 13 See also Khilafat movement N Naipaul, V.S., 28 Nanda, B.R., 33, 69 Nandi, Ashis, 12 Natal, 62 Novatian, 14, 59 Nayyar, Pyarelal, 15, 71

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Neary, C., 5 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 29 Non-cooperation, 14 See also Civil disobedience; Passive resistance; Satyagraha (‘soul force’) Non-violence (ahimsa), 3 O Olcott, Mason, 104 Olney, J., 3 Orwell, G., 95 Our Language Problem, 69 P Parekh, Bhikkhu, 8, 17, 22 Parel, A., 62 Passive resistance, 6, 24n13 Pietermaritzburg, 94 Plato, 25 See also Plato’s Apology Plato’s Apology, 24 Possible World Theory (PWT), 77 R Radhakrishnan, S., 47 Ramchandra, Shrimad, 62 See also Ramchandani Ramchandani, 62n13 Reference Theory, 76 Rigveda, 48 Ruskin, J., 27 See also Unto This Last Ryan, Marie-Laure, 77 S St. Augustine’s Confessions, 44 Samsara, 3

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Sarvodaya, 62 Satyagraha (‘soul force’), 6 Satyagraha in South Africa, 21, 63 Satyana Prayogo Athava Atmakatha, 14 Saunders, Kenneth, 98 Schweitzer, Albert, 47 Self-restraint (brahmacharya), 3 Self-rule, 2n2, 63, 64 Semin, E., 6 Short, M., 25 Sinha, R.C.P., 47 Sinha, R.K., 12, 27 Socrates, 25 South Africa, 12 See also Durban; Johannesburg; Natal; Pietermaritzburg; Transvaal Stegeman, William C., 45 Srinivasa Iyengar, K.R., 34 Srinivasa Sastry, V.S., 15 The Story of a True Warrior, 24n13 Stylistics, 6 Suhrud, Tripid, 4 Swaraj (self-rule), 64 See also Self-rule Sweetser, Eve, 77

Tolstoy, L., 62 Tolstoy Farm, 88 Translational stylistics, 26 Transvaal, 88 Truth (satya), 6, 27

T Tagore, Rabindranath, 19 Talib, Ismail S., 65 Text World Theory, 78 Tirumalesh, 42 Tobin, Lucius M., 104, 107

Y Young India, 2

U Unto This Last, 61 Urdu, 68 V The Vegetarian, 57 Vegetarianism, 3 See also Experiments with dietetics Venuti, Lawrence, 22 W Weintraub, Karl J., 32, 44 Werth, Paul, 78 The West, 42, 44, 46, 47 See also Western Western, 42 Wheatley, Elizabeth D., 104 Woodburne, A.S., 104

Z Zulu Wars, 67, 89