Harilal Gandhi: A Life

"This was a book written in Gujarati by a scholar called Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal and translated into English by one of the preeminent Indian Gandhian scholars of the day, Tridip Suhrud, who was, for many years, the curator of Gandhi’s own personal archive in Ahmedabad. Suhrud has provided a very detailed introduction and notes, so it’s a very good edition of this biography. To, again, put things in context, Gandhi married very young. He was married in his teens and he had his first child, Harilal, in 1888 when he was not even 20. Shortly after his Harilal is born, Gandhi goes to London to get a law degree. So he’s absent for the first two years of his son’s life. Then he comes back and spends a year and a bit in India and then goes off again, to South Africa, to make a living and leaves his wife and children behind. Then, after some years, his wife and children join him in South Africa. But then Harilal, the eldest son, is sent back to India, to matriculate. So for many of the formative years of Harilal growing up, his father is absent. Also, because Gandhi has his son so early, by the time Harilal comes to maturity and is thinking about his own career and his own future, Gandhi is himself only in his thirties. Gandhi is having his midlife crisis. He is abandoning his career as a prosperous lawyer to become a full-time social activist. At the same time, Harilal is having his adolescent crisis. Now, I don’t want to bring the biographer into it, but if I was to look at myself, like many people, I also had a midlife crisis. When I was 36 or 37 I gave up a university job and became a freelance writer. I said to hell with institutions and tutorials—I just want to be on my own. When that happened, my son was four years old, because I’d had him in my early 30s. In Gandhi’s case, unfortunately, his own midlife crisis and change of career coincided with his son’s adolescent crisis. And this, partly, was responsible for the clash. Gandhi is telling his son, Go to jail. Follow me, become a social worker, give up everything for the community like I have done. And the son is saying, Hey, but when you were my age you went to London to become a lawyer. Why can’t I go to London and become a lawyer too? And Gandhi is profoundly unsympathetic to his son’s hopes, his desires. It’s also the case that the son has a love marriage, which Gandhi doesn’t really approve of. The son is devoted to his wife but the wife dies leaving him bereft of his emotional anchor. Gandhi turns increasingly angry, judgmental and frustrated at his son not doing what he wants him to do. And Harilal is broken by this. At one level he resents his father’s overbearing, authoritarian manner and at another level he craves his father’s attention. So Harilal goes to jail several times in South Africa and several times in India too because he wants his father to know that he’s as much of a patriot as anybody else. The son tries several times to matriculate, but fails. His wife dies. Then he tries several times to become a businessman, but all his business ventures fail. Then he becomes an alcoholic, then he becomes a lapsed alcoholic, then he goes back to the bottle again. Then, because he’s so angry with his father, he converts to Islam merely to spite Gandhi. This leads to a very anguished letter by his mother, Kasturba Gandhi. She’s very rarely in the public domain but is so angry at her son’s spiteful act, that she writes in the press saying, Why are you doing this just to shame your father? So it’s a very tragic and complicated relationship and of course it’s not unusual. Many driven, successful people are not very good husbands or fathers. Modern history is replete with such examples. But in Gandhi’s case, because we have this book by Dalal, we can read all their letters. We can see the exchanges between father and son, the pervasive lack of comprehension and the progressive anger and exasperation at Gandhi’s end and the anger and resentment at the son’s end. It all comes out very vividly in this account. Again, it’s a factual account. It’s written by a scholar who wants to tell you the truth in an unadorned, factual, dispassionate way. But I think it’s very effective for not being overwritten or overblown or excessively hyperbolic or judgmental. He wanted to go to the funeral, actually. There’s one version that the news came too late, and that he went to Delhi. But it’s a very sad story. We talked earlier about the Attenborough movie. There is also a very nice film based on this book called Gandhi, My Fathe r. It’s a feature film, made in English, by the Indian director Feroz Abbas Khan. It started as a play. So it was a play and then a film on this very complicated, tormented relationship between the father of the nation and his own son. I would urge readers to watch the film because it’s very good. Gandhi’s autobiography is indispensable, but it’s so well known. It’s available in hundreds of editions, and in dozens of languages. Every major publisher has published it and you can get it anywhere. I wanted readers of Five Books to get some fresher, more vivid, less-known perspectives on Gandhi. But certainly, they should read the autobiography too. It’s now available in a new annotated edition by the scholar I mentioned, Tridip Suhrud. It’s a first rate edition brought out by Yale University Press. Yes, Gandhi was a master of English and Gujarati prose. He transformed Gujarati writing. He wrote beautiful, economical, clear prose with no affectation and no pomposity. He was a marvellous writer. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In the course of my research for my first volume about Gandhi, one of my most pleasurable discoveries was an obscure book published in the 1960s that had compiled Gandhi’s school marksheets. Someone found out that when Gandhi matriculated from school, he got 44% in English and more or less the same in Gujarati. So I always use this example when I speak at colleges in India: here is a master of Gujarati and English who got a mere 44% in his examinations. The autobiography was written in Gujarati but then translated by Gandhi’s secretary Mahadev Desai, who was quite a remarkable man himself. But since the autobiography is so well known and so easily and widely available, I thought I should recommend some other books."