Excerpts from Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India
Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India
I’ve been reading this book over the last year and just finished it. Published in 2014, it is worth picking up for understanding not only Gandhi and his own personal development and early life but what actual liberalism, moderation, toleration and temperance look like in an age of Twitter battles, anti-reason, mobs and conformists.
Excerpts from Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India
“London, where Gandhi had lived as a student, was a great cosmopolitan city, home to people of all races and nationalities.”
“A Tamil journalist visiting London in the 1890s noticed that ‘the English are generous by nature and are anxious to please foreigners. I appreciate their hospitality all the more when I find that colour does not influence them a bit in their treatment of Indians.’”
“Gandhi’s involvement with the vegetarians of London was far more important to him than is commonly recognized. Had he not joined their Society, he would have kept to his compatriots, as Indian students were wont to do at the time (and sometimes still are). These first close friendships with English people expanded his mind and his personality. He learnt to relate to people of different races and religious beliefs, to mix, mingle and eat with them, and even to share a home with them.”
During an attack in Durban, South Africa, by white sailors in 1897:
“Gandhi was beaten, but not bowed. Blood was flowing down his neck, but ‘eye-witnesses state that he bore himself stolidly and pluckily through the trying ordeal.’ He was rescued from the mob by a white lady, who used her parasol to keep away the attackers. She was the wife of the long-serving Superintendent of Police, R.C. Alexander. Alerted by some Indians, a posse of constables arrived to relieve Gandhi—and Mrs. Alexander. Superintendent Alexander himself followed soon after.”
On expulsions from South Africa by the government:
“From Ritch’s account, it appeared the authorities had picked on the poorest and most vulnerable. Those deported included Gulam Mahomed, a mine worker who had served with the British in the Anglo-Boer War; Kathia a washerman who had originally come to Natal under indenture; Narajana Apanna, a bottle-seller who had lost an arm during the war; and Ramsamy Moddlia, a hawker who had lived in the Transvaal since 1888.”
On arriving at Cape Town in 1898:
“Disembarking at Cape Town, he found at once that he ‘was in a place where the colour of skin counted for everything and [the] man nothing.’”
On radicals who wished to tear down all that preceded them or that was considered non-native in India:
“The partisanship of the radicals distressed him; it was, he remarked, ‘a bad habit to say that another man’s thoughts are bad and only ours are good, and that those holding different views from ours are the enemies of the country.”