Durban -
Ashwin Desai is no stranger to taking on giants, whether it is at the front of a picket line outside a multinational oil corporation, demanding clean air for poor communities of Durban’s South basin or going eyeball to eyeball with riot police during mass protests.
As an academic, Desai – currently a professor of sociology of the University of Johannesburg – has riled university management by siding with students over a host of issues and has taken on the battles of the disenfranchised.
His latest biography, co-authored with Associate Professor Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, Desai has taken on a true giant of history.
The biography was launched in Durban recently.
Chief among the assertions the biography makes is that Mahatma Gandhi was a racist who believed that the English and the Indians sprang from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan.
The authors show Gandhi never missed a chance to demonstrate his loyalty to the empire. He was a stretcher-bearer in the South African War, demanded Indians be allowed to carry firearms and recruited volunteers for the imperial army in England and India during World War I.
The book, according to Desai, unmasks the true Gandhi and presents him for who he was and not the sanitised version given to the world.
Desai said they did not set out to portray Gandhi in that light and initially began researching him in an effort to trace his South African journey in the hope of understanding the politics that unfolded on the cusp of the 20th century.
“It was a vitally important time because whites had achieved dominance over much of South Africa but, in between, the Boers and the Brits had a fall-out that led to the South African War. It was in this period of incredible turmoil that Gandhi began to make his mark.
“The book follows in the footsteps of Gandhi through the SA War, the Bhambatha Rebellion, the campaign in the then Transvaal and the epic 1913 strike,” Desai said.
Desai said he and Vahed’s working hypothesis when researching the book was based on the adage that “India gave us a Mohandas and we gave them a Mahatma”. When they probed it, it led them down a “sobering” path about a man millions revere for his fight against white domination.
“It is in reading Gandhi’s collected works and Indian Opinion, his newspaper, that we slowly began to uncover a Gandhi that is a more complex figure than the cardboard cut-out figure he has been made out to be. He was imbued with many of the prejudices and common sense racisms of the time as well as an incredible loyalty to the empire.
“By not glossing over these shortcomings, but seeking to situate and understand them in the context of the unfolding struggles for political and economic power in South Africa... At the same time we begin to question a liberation narrative that simply writes Gandhi into the pantheon of South African heroes, anti-colonial and anti-racist fighter,” he said.
“Why has much of what the book uncovers been erased from many history books?”
Desai said it was this issue that “animated” them while writing the book.
“Just recently a massive tome of a book on the South African Gandhi was published by Ramachandra Guha, a high-profile Indian historian. In this book he writes Gandhi as one of the very first anti-apartheid fighters, this despite Gandhi’s consistent position that he wanted nothing to do with the struggles of Africans,” he said.
Desai and Vahed’s book has had a mixed reaction, particularly from Ela Gandhi, who denied her grandfather was a racist. “One wonders how much of Gandhi she has really read,” Desai said of Ela’s denial.
Asked if this rewriting of Gandhi’s history would fuel tensions between African and Indian people in South Africa, he said it would not and hoped that it would spur on a meaningful conversation about race relations as much as how history came to be written.
One of the lessons learnt from writing the biography came from sifting through the mass of information on Gandhi and his own writings and views, Desai said.
“One of the guiding lights in our research was the words of George Orwell: ‘Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent…’ It proved to be incredibly good advice in the writing of our book. Unfortunately many biographers start by wanting to prove their subjects saints, they go out and find the material to prove their thesis, while ignoring facts that might negate it.
“This is especially the case in post-liberation societies where one is keen to have heroes who are all-knowing and infallible,” he said.