A Concise History of Modern India by Barbara D. Metcalf

Author:Barbara D. Metcalf [Metcalf, Barbara D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2006-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

The Advent of Gandhi

The massacre, together with the government’s failure wholly to repudiate it - Gandhi described the investigative report as ‘thinly disguised whitewash’ - precipitated a wrenching loss of faith in Britain’s good intentions. As Gandhi wrote in 1920, ‘I can no longer retain affection for a Government so evilly manned as it is nowadays.’ Until 1919 a minor figure on the Indian stage, Gandhi took upon himself the task of devising a way out of this impasse. In so doing he emerged not only as a principal architect of India’s independence, but as one of the most original and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in 1869 into a trading family in princely Saurashtra, on the remote western coast of Gujarat, Gandhi grew up awkward, shy, and yet ambitious. Leaving a young wife behind, and defying attempts to outcaste him, Gandhi at the age of eighteen sailed to England to study for the bar. Upon his return, he found himself unable to compete as a barrister in the crowded legal world of Bombay, and so he set forth once again, this time to South Africa, in 1893. There, as the only Indian lawyer, he soon grew wealthy defending the local Indian business community; but, moved by his experience of racial prejudice in this white-settler dominated colony, he went on to organize Indian opinion against the colonial, and then after 1910 the Afrikaner, rulers of South Africa. Gandhi’s South African experience proved crucial to his subsequent leadership of India’s freedom struggle. Above all, in South Africa, a colonial society where a small Indian community was ranged against whites and blacks, an identity as ‘Indian’ inevitably took precedence over those of region, religion, and caste that mattered so much at home. Often, from Gandhi’s time up to the present, whether for political figures or for writers like V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, the experience of living abroad has provided insights into the complexity and coherence of their homeland.

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