A Writer's People (19 page)

It might seem that satire is outside rhetoric, but, as with the other kind of poetry, the matter of satire was more or less fixed by the early satirists: it could be erotic, or it could deal with the life of the city, or it could rail against the degeneracy that came with Roman wealth. This, absurdly, was the very note struck three hundred years later, near the end of empire, by the soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus, when he wrote about the life of the city of Rome. Ammianus had witnessed the Roman defeat at Adrianople, which finally let in the barbarians. But when he came to write about the city of Rome it was as though in spite of the upheavals, the endless bloodlettings, the disappearance of the great families, the tyrannies, the Illyrian emperors, the general remaking of Rome, nothing had changed: so strong was the idea of old literary form, and so pleased was Ammianus at being able to do the approved thing.

The art historian Bernard Berenson was said to be working in his last years on the “deformation of form,” the decay of the classical ideal (or the talent to render it in painting or sculpture) in the Dark Ages, and its replacement by Byzantine angularity or worse. Nothing came out of Berenson's interest. It was said that the subject was too big. But it may be that the survey of bad art and the picking out of debased motifs was too repetitive. A rise to achievement makes a better narrative than random decay. Perhaps it was enough for Berenson to
raise the subject, which could so easily have been ignored, taken for granted.

The loss of literature in the same period is of comparable interest, and is easier to study in the texts that survive. In the second century Latin prose writing would have seemed alive and developing, able to deal with ever new subjects; yet it very soon was to exhaust itself. Four hundred and twenty years after Caesar there is a reference in Ammianus to an execution in the “old Roman way”; as with Caesar, now deified, there is no explanation. So little has the world moved on. There is still, as in the beginning, the need to use words to hide from reality. In four hundred years language hasn't illuminated a great deal that is new. In the brutality and now the hideous uncertainty of the Roman world—“madness” is the word Ammianus often uses, not only of wild animals in the arena, but also of men, tormenting and tormented—in this world without balance people need more than ever the classical half view, the ability to see and not see.

W
E GO BACK
to India, to the town of Kanpur, to the Indian National Congress conference of 1925. The conference tent was very big. It was more than a hundred yards long and sixty yards wide, and there were seven or eight thousand people sitting on matting on the ground. At the far end was the raised rostrum for speakers and distinguished visitors; they too were sitting on matting.

The fifty-six-year-old mahatma was there, in his strange garb: the tightly tied dhoti, like a diaper, around his waist and upper legs, with a shawl (a concession to the Kanpur winter) over his shoulders. The writer Aldous Huxley, only thirty-one, also on the rostrum (at one session “all but dead of fatigue” after sitting on the floor for six hours), was a witness of the occasion. He mentions the dhoti and the shawl, but he doesn't comment on them; he seems to take them on trust as the scant clothing to be expected of an Indian saint. He doesn't know (he seems to have begun reading Gandhi's autobiography
only later) that that excessive simplicity of dress was Gandhi's own idea and would at first have been strange, perhaps outlandish, to many Indians, who looked for greater formality in their politicians.

It was in South Africa, before he became a mahatma, that he began adjusting his costume. In the beginning in South Africa, in the 1890s, in his dealings with the Indian merchants who had called him to South Africa, and with European officials, he had been particular about his dignity as a lawyer (that would have been his London training). Now he thought he should look less like a lawyer and more like the Indian labourers for whom he had become the spokesman. The costume he worked out for himself was a shirt (perhaps a long one), the dhoti, a cotton cloak, and a scarf (which could also serve as a fast-drying towel). It was all of cheap Indian mill cotton, but when he came to India and began to travel third class on the crowded Indian railways he grew to think his many-pieced costume was too fussy and troublesome, and he gave up the scarf and the cloak. The man who appeared raw, so to speak, before Huxley had a history Huxley would not have suspected. Huxley saw him as complete, a Peter the Hermit figure.

In fact, there was no completeness to him. He was full of bits and pieces he had picked up here and there: his mother's love of fasting and austerities, the English common law, Ruskin's idea of labour, Tolstoy's Russian religious dream (Tolstoy who had fathered twenty-five children, twelve of them by serf women), the South African jail code, the Manchester No Breakfast Association. His strong political cause—in South Africa and India—gave an apparent unity to all these impulses,
but there was no real unity; the pieces did not fit together; no piece was indispensable. The simple life did not serve the cause of Indians in South Africa. Nor did the school at Tolstoy Farm, where Gandhi played Mr. Squeers and everyone had to do gardening and where, as it turned out, the children had to do most of the hard work, felling timber and digging and carrying. The children didn't like it. “Of course some of them, and sometimes all of them, malingered and shirked.” And when Gandhi left South Africa and went back to India, what happened to the farm and the school? Many of Gandhi's smaller and now forgotten experiments, involving the labour of others, were like this, not thought out, unachieved and abandoned, serving no cause, good for the famous man and not for the people who for various reasons had come (or sent their children) to lend a hand.

(And this idea occurs. If, as was more than likely, Gandhi had failed to graft himself on to the Indian political scene when he went back to India in 1915, what would have happened to his famous costume? Would he have stuck to it as a man unknown and would he, out of simple stubbornness, have kept on doing his latrine-cleaning? For how long?)

His intellectual confusion wasn't obvious to Aldous Huxley, but it was there. Take away his political cause and you see it, all the unrelated impulses. It is not easy to enter the culturally denuded mind of the Gandhi who went to England in 1888. He had the most basic idea, a village idea, of Indian religion and the epics, but he didn't know the history of India, not even a school version; he didn't know geography, hardly had a map of the world in his head. He didn't know about books and
modern plays, hardly had an idea of news and newspapers. Busy, modern London would have been a horrible shock. He didn't know how to keep his footing; he must have felt he was drowning. The few dancing lessons he took, his violin lessons, and the horrible prospect of his elocution course must have depressed him more than he says. He would have seen how culturally far away he was, and with something like desperation he would then have lost himself in the abstractions of his law studies, cramming, reading right through the English common law and studying Roman law in Latin.

South Africa a few years later showed him that this new world, barely understood, was exceedingly hostile, and even full of physical threat. The shock, the wound, would have been many times greater than the shock of London. He had the law now; it was better than nothing. But he needed more, and so he held on to all the pieces of comfort he could get from European well-wishers and people who came within his orbit, and soon he was a man of many small causes.

These causes, disguising his wound and his primary, Indian cause, attracted many different people, who saw in him their own personal cause. (Though Tolstoy, Russian nationalist though he was, thought that Gandhi's Indian nationalism “spoiled everything.”) So Gandhi's many causes made him appear more universal than he was. He came at the right time; the world was oddly vacant; there was room for him; and in 1909 he could get away with the nonsense and anti-modern simplicities of his first book,
Hind Swaraj
(“Indian Home Rule”). The book would not be read in India, not even by scholars (and still hasn't been), but its name would often be taken as a milestone
in the independence struggle, and it would be cherished as a holy object. Twenty-five years later, after the Russian revolution, after Hitler, with a world waiting for war, he might have had a harder ride.

And when, forty years or so later, the main cause had been won, and India had become independent, it was those “outside” causes that made it hard for people to know what Gandhianism was. Was it the dhoti, the spinning wheel, the homespun, the Thoreau, the Ruskin (what was there for Indians in
Walden
or
Fors Clavigera?
), the sexual abstinence, the vegetarianism, the Christian hymns, the refusal to drink cow's milk, the latrine-cleaning? It was impossible for anyone to be a complete Gandhian; no one could make that pioneer journey again; people had to take the one or two things they liked from the menu. In the main they took the homespun; that was the easiest and most stylish item.

Not many years ago an Indian woman parliamentarian, concerned about Indian cruelty to animals (as Gandhi had been, though only in passing), said that people should stop drinking cow's milk; the animals were dreadfully tormented to produce milk. The newspapers ridiculed the parliamentarian; there were cartoons. But what she was saying was only what Gandhi had said seventy years before. Gandhi drank goat's milk; this was generally known; what wasn't known, or had been forgotten almost as soon as it had been said, was why he didn't drink cow's milk. Gandhi also spoke about the peasant's cruelty towards his bullocks. But this again is something no one in India remembers.

The saintly half-clad figure Aldous Huxley saw on the rostrum
in Kanpur in 1925 was not wholly Indian, as Huxley thought. The best part of Gandhi in 1925 had really been made in London and South Africa. And just twenty-five years later he would be out of date, the various pieces of his thought irrecoverable.

T
HERE WAS A FOOLISH MAN
, Vinoba Bhave, who in the early 1950s tried to do a Gandhi repeat. He had been brought up in Gandhi's various ashrams. The mental idleness of those places had softened his brain and entered what might be called his soul. He worked in the kitchen and did the latrines and then sat for so long at his spinning wheel that Gandhi noticed and worried about it. He thought that Vinoba, who was still a young man, should go away and study somewhere. If he didn't he was going to fall ill at the ashram spinning wheel. Vinoba went to the holy city of Banaras, and there he was thought by the devout to have developed fantastic yogic powers.

He had lived for so long as a parasite, and away from the world, that he had become a kind of half-man, and he thought that Gandhi had been like that too. Vinoba had no means of knowing that Gandhi was a man of appetite, and his sexual abstinence hadn't come easily. One idle day in the ashram, some time after Gandhi's death, Vinoba had the idea (or it had been put to him: he had his admirers) that he should take over from the great man. There were the clothes—he could do that. There was the spinning wheel—he could more than do that; he had practised under the master's eye; and it would help pass the time. There was the ashram routine, with even a little (but not
too much) latrine-cleaning—that was in his blood. Up to there it was easy.

But even Vinoba could see that he was only an ashram fellow, hidden away, and that Gandhi had been a public man, a national figure, a master of simple but big political gestures (like the spinning wheel itself) that could light up the country. Now, casting about for some big public gesture he might make, Vinoba remembered that Gandhi had done some big walks. In 1946, at the age of seventy-seven, he had done a walk in Bengal during the communal riots just before independence. That hadn't been a successful walk; in fact, it was full of bitterness. But fifteen years before there had been a stupendous and historical two-hundred-mile walk from the ashram in Ahmedabad to the sea. The independence movement had been becalmed for some time, and Gandhi in his Ahmedabad ashram (but not idle) had thought hard and long about what he might do to revivify it. He had arrived at this idea: doing a march to the sea in stages, with the world press looking on, and at the end symbolically making salt, in practice only defying the salt laws (salt was a government monopoly), but at the same time making a big political point and exciting the country afresh.

The full symbolism of the salt march would have eluded Vinoba. He would have known only that the mahatma had walked to the sea and made a little salt. It occurred to him that as the mahatma's successor he should do a little walking himself, or a lot of walking. And, since he couldn't do salt, the cause he chose was land reform. There was actually no need, since the government of independent India had decided to
limit the ownership of land to a few acres per person. Vinoba's idea was that he should walk with his crowd in those rural areas where there was distress. India was the land of the mahatma, and Vinoba thought that people with land would be moved by his walk and by the religious frenzy around it to give a little of what they had.

But land couldn't be given just like that; it wasn't like a cup of rice or wheat or flour that could be poured into the mendicant's sack. A gift of land required deeds and surveyors and lawyers. Vinoba hadn't thought of that. He wasn't Gandhi; he had no legal organisation that could deal with that side of his walk; he had only a devout mob with him, gaining merit by being with the holy man. And so it happened that after the ecstasy created by his passage through an area, with the promises of so many acres for the landless, nothing was done when the procession moved on and blood cooled.

The walk and the camps were a riot, according to a simple-minded Italian priest who, looking for illumination in India, went and walked with Vinoba. It wasn't quite the white-clad choric procession he might have expected, classically draped, grave and mute behind the great man, and at a respectful distance from him. There was a noisy rustic mob at Vinoba's heels. The Italian had to dig deep into his reserves of forbearance, and he came up with the idea that there was “the innocence of the fart” in the country people running after Vinoba. The racket in the camp in the evening was hard to endure, with many shouted conversations going on at once and much farting and belching. But
Time
was impressed. It put Vinoba on its cover (“I have come to loot you with love”).