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The Mahatma and the Ism

First published in August 2010
E-book published in September 2019

LeftWord Books

2254/2A Shadi Khampur

New Ranjit Nagar

New Delhi 110008

INDIA

LeftWord Books is the publishing division of Naya Rasta Publishers Pvt. Ltd.

Rights to this work rest with Communist Party of India (Marxist), and it is published under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 India license. For details of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/in/

leftword.com

Contents

by Prakash Karat

Prakash Karat

The Mahatma and the Ism by E.M.S. Namboodiripad was the first full-fledged attempt by an Indian Marxist to evaluate the role of Gandhi in the epochal struggle for Indian independence. The book was first published in January 1958. E.M.S. Namboodiripad had earlier written a series of 14 articles in New Age , the monthly journal of the Communist Party of India in 195556. EMS was at that time a member of the Polit Bureau stationed at the Party headquarters in Delhi. These articles were a review of and commentary on the monumental eight-volume biography of Gandhi by D.G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: The Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi . These articles, along with subsequent additions and revisions, constitute the kernel of the book.

The Mahatma and the Ism remains important not just for its pioneering effort to assess Gandhism, but also for its rich content and sensitive handling of a great personality, while also subjecting the ideology and politics of that personality to incisive critical appraisal.

A few months after Mahatma and the Ism was published , another book appeared on Gandhi by a Communist leader. Hiren Mukherjee, the Communist parliamentarian, wrote Gandhi: A Study . This book was wider in scope than EMSs, and dealt with Gandhis life and political activity in greater detail, but in its essentials, the assessment of Gandhi by Hiren Mukherjee closely parallels that of EMS.

I

EMS was uniquely positioned to analyse the various phases of the national movement and the role of Gandhi. He began his political life as an ardent Gandhian. Throughout his life, while adhering to the Marxist world outlook, he practised many of the Gandhian principles of simplicity and personal austerity that are cherished by Indians.

EMS was one of the young Congressmen who were radicalised after the 193031 civil disobedience movement was withdrawn. Jawaharlal Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan were the initial stimuli for the leftward move that led EMS to the Congress Socialist Party, of which he became one of the all-India joint secretaries. By the time EMS assumed the leadership of the Congress in Kerala in 1936, he had broken with Gandhism. In 1937, he joined the Communist Party, encouraged by the example of another former Gandhian Congressman, P. Sundarayya.

The organizational break with the Congress took place in 1939, when, under the guidance of Gandhi, the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee, of which EMS was General Secretary, was dissolved. The All India Congress Committee disbanded the Pradesh Congress Committee, which was dominated by Left Congressmen, for its persistence in militant actions against the War.

EMS became an organizer of the Communist Party and of the peasant movement in Kerala during the period of the War. From 1943, EMS was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, having been elected at its First Congress in 1943. He was also an office-bearer of the All India Kisan Sabha in the pre-independence period.

It is this experience of his work in the Congress and subsequent turn to the Communist Party that EMS drew upon when he set out to review Tendulkars biography of Gandhi, which appeared between 1951 and 1954. That EMS himself considered this work to be of some lasting value is clear from his autobiography, Reminiscences of an Indian Communist .

The merit of EMSs book is that it analyses the role of Gandhi in a way not done before. It does not underplay the individual role of Gandhi and the unique contribution made by him to developing the mass national movement against British rule. At the same time, it also fully takes into account the social and historical forces that shaped Gandhi and Gandhism. It sees Gandhi as a leader and his personality in the context of the class he represents; thus Gandhi as a historical figure and mass leader emerges in the context of the class relations that shaped the national movement.

Although EMS was critical of Gandhism, he did not share the early Communist sectarianism of the 1920s, which viewed Gandhi as nothing but the leader of the right-wing bourgeoisie. In that period, as EMS has pointed out elsewhere, the early Communist groups

engaged themselves in mainly exposing the policies and programmes of the bourgeois leaders including Gandhi without participating in these struggles and sharing their bitter experience. The result was that the bourgeois leadership and the people were getting closer to each other.

By contrast, EMS and a whole crop of Communists emerged subsequently from within the Congress-led national movement and went on to build the independent movement of workers and peasants and their political party.

However decisive his break from Gandhian politics, EMS, like many others of his generation, retained some Gandhian values, which in fact became deeply ingrained in him. In 1994, that is, nearly 40 years after writing The Mahatma and the Ism , EMS made his last intervention on this subject. In it, he admitted that

elements of Gandhism were by and large inherent in my lifestyle and mode of thinking even after I adopted Marxism. While expressing my ideological difference with Gandhism, I became a political activist who upheld the high values of Gandhism and tried to translate them in my personal lifestyle.

II

In this book, EMS seeks to answer the question: How did Gandhi become the undisputed leader of the biggest national political movement of the country? The fledgling bourgeoisies interests initially found expression in the moderate politics of the Indian National Congress. Gradually, however, the class represented by them outgrew the limits set by their moderate politics. The main difference between Gandhi and other Congress politicians of the day was that, unlike the latter, Gandhi associated himself with the masses of the people, their lives, problems, sentiments and aspirations. Through the Champaran struggle and the Ahmedabad textile workers strike, Gandhi deployed the techniques of satyagraha and hunger strike that were part of his creed of non-violent struggle. Referring to Gandhis fast in Ahmedabad, EMS remarks:

This was, of course, not the first time that Gandhi resorted to a fast. This, however, was the first time that he resorted to it in order to check the militancy of the fighting people.

This significance was not lost on the rising national bourgeoisie. His success in this experiment was an

invaluable lesson for the class of which he was the representative, the bourgeoisie. It showed them that here was a technique of struggle which could at once rally the masses and keep them away from militant actions.

While highlighting the historic role played by Gandhi in drawing the masses into the national movement, EMS also points out the class mould of the first national mass movement launched under Gandhis leadership, the non-cooperation movement in 1920:

It will be noticed that the resolution does not suggest such forms of militant mass action as the industrial workers general strike or peasants struggle like non-payment of rent and seizure of land forms of struggle which touch upon the profits of the Indian capitalists and landlords as much as the economic and political basis of the... rulers.

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