Abstract
Gandhi and the academia seem to be getting relatively free from the Rudolph’s Christianisation of the former as ‘postmodern’. However recently for a short period Gandhi figured in not so expected, accounts of Joseph Lelyveld which appeared to be an inexplicit but interesting sequel to some of the postmodern notions itself. It proves the fact that he still continues to offer surprising contours of his life that too religiously available for endless scholarly probes. Therefore Gandhi, even beats the mythical figures as far as the number of incarnations, of course as contributed by number of scholars, are concerned. Nalini Natrajan’s attempt in ‘Atlantic Gandhi: The Mahatma Overseas’, however, does not slip into such a hagiographic endeavour instead it throws open a rich corpus worth engaging with even if we deduct the central theme ‘Gandhi’ from it. The book in author’s own words ‘traces Gandhi’s life as a cosmopolitan diasporic subject whose life abroad connects provocatively with the ferment of ideas around the Atlantic rim’ (p. ix). The nine comprehensive chapters try to establish the constant engagement of Gandhi with: processes of journey, social and political setting of indentured coolie and women in exile and the Atlantic modernity.
Natarajan begins to argue that it is this engagement of Gandhi that moulded the very notion of ‘Indianess’ in him later, which was not an available category nor ‘invented’ during 1893 when he landed the port of Natal in south Africa. Therefore the author initially attempts to read the early sections of Gandhi’s autobiography, where he details the accounts of his journey, as tracking subjectivities that are not ‘national’ but that are spurred on by diasporic experiences to become so. Relying heavily on Benedict Anderson and Sudipta Kaviraj, she puts forth the central hypothesis of the book that it is in part from the experience of the scattered migrants of the Indian diaspora, in South Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere that Gandhi constructed the nationalist doctrine and his initially ephemeral and fleeting perception of migrant nationality is consolidated by modern technology of exile.
A frame is one that is being simultaneously defined by its interior as well as the external. Though the latter undergoes a process of othering its inevitability lies in the very fact that there is no other reference to validate the existence of the former. Once a frame is in place it not only creates the exterior but also its margins. Similarly, drawing territorial boundaries and state cartographic exercises not only define the body politic of those within a territory but also of those at the margins and outside the map. This has acquired a dominant discursive space especially in studies on formation of colonial and postcolonial state in India.
‘Atlantic Gandhi’ progresses in similar direction and tools of cognising such an attempt are intertwined with categories such as voyage, caste identity, migrant identity, hierarchies of migrants, diasporic fraternity initially uninformed by nationalism etc. The second chapter ‘sailing the high seas’ is a close reading of Gandhi’s (writings of and on the) voyages who initially chose to adhere to a caste subjectivity that is more migrant (p. 25). The reader will also come across few nuanced explanations eliciting author’s relentless interest in metaphoric reading especially when she theorises the space of ship and the voyage. For instance, the storm symbolises (as appeared in the accounts of Gandhi as a first time voyager) the loss of jati (p. 27) and the author continuously connects the outer turmoil of sea with the inner conflicts of Gandhi. However one wonders how far such an psychological reading can take Gandhi a first time voyager to see a strong socio political ship or in author’s own words a ‘ship as a discursive category’? (p. 37).
In ‘Deconstructing the Coolie’ the author constructs a fair foundation to understand many forms of coolie (indentured manual labour), its etymology and epistemology around race and labour. Her account becomes more precise when she notes that ‘the invisibility of the coolie also dominates the Gandhian Studies and the denigration of coolie was seeped not only into the minds of South African Authorities but also the upper class Indian traders and Gandhi himself (p. 45). This should not be a surprising factor as the degree of Indianness is, even now, directly proportionate to the distance from the motherland as one proceeds to cross its territory. However, later the author denotes coolie as an important factor in Atlantic modernity by which Gandhi also formulated his timely engagements with the modern. For Natarajan, the indentured diasporic experience, violent and traumatic is modern in that it suddenly and abruptly brings its subjects into a new frame of reference and one intimately connected to processes of world capitalism in its brutal form, that is, plantation capitalism which she further argues that unlike industrial capitalism, made no attempt at ‘enbourgeoisement of its colonised subjects’ (p. 59).
In subsequent chapters, the author actively places Gandhi as to throw light on circumstances leading to his ‘national’ cognitive formation per se. Employing Anderson, considerably, Natarajan marks Gandhi’s use of print in forging out new political communities from the dispersed creolite, which might have erased the potential linguistic unity underlying the indentured workers as a defining tactics along with his tireless physical movement across South Africa (p. 81). One cannot but note some remarks of the author like ‘making of an unusual Gujrati, cosmopolitan Gandhi, etc. which seem to be befitting at a time when nation state is constantly under the threat of an ultraconservative backlash making state and individual bigger than ‘the state’.
When encountered with the notions of modernity Gandhi is seemed to be casted in manifold definitions by the author. She makes a subtle observation that Gandhi was only concerned with the question of rights rather than cultural compositeness of the indentured, while detailing his struggles in South Africa for the coolies and women. Here the ‘modern’ denotes his resort to the means to cherish a fruitful socio-economic life for the indentured. Gandhian advent of modernity especially, the Atlantic version, as espied by the author ‘works not by denying principles of civil society but by working out a mode of civil fashioning which imposes (emphasis supplied) his private vision on the public sphere (p. 117). This Kantian notion of public use of private reason is one that Gandhi steadfastly adhered to conceptualize a nation in India with a pastoral authority. Therefore Natarajan’s resort to Nancy Fraser to employ ‘counter-publics’ (p. 103) again to place Gandhian tactics, would have better suited to those who argued against his notions of community, varnashrama and anti-modernity during the colonial/post-colonial period of nation formation in India. The subaltern and Dalit critique of Gandhian nationalism is relatively less problematised though there are cross references of his subaltern cosmopolitanism, modern anti-modern stands in the diasporic setting which relate to the frame of power abroad/elsewhere. One cannot, however stretch the criticism to question the authors’ takes on Hind Swaraj as a site of both modern and anti-modern techniques of Gandhi in two different territorial and political conditions. The space out of the frame, nevertheless, refashions the voyager/indenture more concerned and connected to his identity not only as an individual bearing rights but also as a subject of a nation in anvil. This has been one of the important contributions of this volume. The chapters on Tamil women of the Transvaal and C. F. Andrews provide a historical overview of the gendered history of the indenture and the campaign of the chief associate of Gandhi respectively.
Methodologically, this work cannot but be interdisciplinary as the ‘protagonist’ is of myriad possibilities of interpretation and it surely acknowledges a reading population out of the informed university spaces too. Therefore, the reader comes across explanations of few theoretical terms and phrases, without which also the volume would have been intact as such. However few editing errors seemingly baffle the reader (for instance first sentence of the last paragraph of page 135 and footnote errors in page 220). The author’s appreciable effort is visible from the corpus of reference used to etch the volume; nevertheless one would not love to read many quotations in the conclusion of such a comprehensive good volume.