Review of Biography Jad Adams: Gandhi
Warmed up scraps—nothing important, April 15, 2011Jad Adams' sources are mostly Gandhi's papers (100 vols now!) and a couple of books by Gandhi) not included in the 'papers', presumably). There's a bibliography—books on Jinna, partition, Wavell, Nehru, Curzon etc.
Unfortunately the spirit of 'revisionism' has left Adams untouched. Gandhi was a media figure, and the motives of those who controlled the media are unmentioned. His activities cannot have been entirely autonomous; Adams provides no useful clues as to what forces were at work. Thus the 'salt tax' protest and the Lancashire visit and the Indian style clothing—all of little importance—get space in this book.
As examples:-
[1] Adams has no clue as to what the British did in India. For instance there's no mentions of the Thugs. I don't think suttee (the self-burning of widows) is mentioned, either. He realises the British built some infrastructure, but the purposes are unknown to Adams. Was the railway system designed for exports, and of little use to Indians? I don't know, nor does Adams. A popular claim made often is that the British 'stole' things from India—Adams says its attraction was 'great wealth and manpower'—now usually an excuse for immigration and continued 'aid' sixty years later. Adams has no summary of the net effect, even just economically, of Britain. This means he has no way to judge whether things in fact didn't change much, after Partition. The word is the thing; India as cheap labour and with an 'elite' may in effect be Gandhi's work.
[2] Adams has no idea of the fanatical and tribal nature of Islam—he seems to imagine it's just another religion. He also isn't much good on Hinduism; he's aware of the caste system, and aware that Gandhi campaigned against it, or said he did, but doesn't castigate the 'racism' which would seem logically consistent. This is Adams, but Gandhi himself seems to have no idea, either. The problem, which I take it was and is immense, of population growth causing ever-increasing stress, was obvious to some observers at the time, but Adams says nothing about it. The vast mass killings at Partition—far larger than the Bengal famine, possibly as large as anything during the second world war—must have had seeds planted throughout the 20th century, and politicians must be partly to blame. But Adams, in his interminable accounts of Gandhi going here or there, gives little information as to how Gandhi addressed these issues, if he did at all. It's not even clear why Gandhi disliked industrialisation: air transport—then of course tiny compared with now—and publishing, railways, and factories are four things referred to—probably he didn't care for Lancashire mill towns or the Indian equivalents, but would he really have objected to tractors and metal ploughs, Henry Ford style factories, industrial cutlery and crockery?
[3] Adams of course puts quite a lot of emphasis on sex, and Gandhi's rather futile attempts to rise above it (live in a state of 'brahmacharya'). He would sleep with nubile young girls—literally sleep, not in the modern idiom. Mountbatten has been accused of buggering young boys, which seems equally worth mentioning in a history of that time, but of course there's no such reference.
[4] The whole process of altering countries, both from inside and outside, is a blank to Adams, who incidentally has no grasp of the nature of the USSR or the forces that converged to create the disaster of the Second World War. This is relevant to Gandhi in South Africa, where he practised as a lawyer (he trained, and 'trained' seems the right word, in London). Gandhi was unimpressed by black Africans, one gathers, though not from this book. Adams simply has no idea of the forces behind the various pretences which have culminated in the present day violent and dangerous South Africa, its resources of course still in the control of foreign owners.
[5] Adams accepts without the remotest reservation the views on both 20th century world wars. He of course has no estimates of the costs in human or any other terms of India being 'automatically' on the side of Britain after Churchill declared war on Germany. Gandhi was 70 at the time and one would guess somewhat out of it—the pronouncements quoted here simply suggest he thought it just another war against just another country.
A lightweight superficial rehash which reads almost like a black and white newsreel of the 1930s.
Here's an online burrowing by 'Josh G' into the truth about Gandhi and his family's wealth and background. And a new (or at least new to me!) overview of his politics and the uses that were made of him. All this includes a well-written account of the 'Inner Temple', which the Indian leaders all attended, and the City of London as a financial area of extraordinary longevity. And an account of the LSE and Harold Laski. And Allan Hume, of the Indian Civil Service, and the 'Theosophy' movement, or project, and opium, and the Indian 'Intelligence Bureau' and attitudes influenced by the 'Indian Mutiny'. And the Partition. And the possibilities of multiple Gandhis.