The Spectre of Gandhi | Atul V. Nair

Review: Ramachandra Guha. Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom. Penguin Allen Lane, 2022.

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat”

Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West”

Less than four years after Kipling’s poem first appeared in The Pioneer on 2 December, 1889,[1] the first of Ramachandra Guha’s “rebels” arrived in Tuticorin in South India (7). This was the Irish theosophist and educationist Annie Besant, who in 1917 would go on to become the first woman president of the Indian National Congress. Guha’s latest book Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom (2022) is an account of seven such individuals who transgressed national boundaries and racial prejudices to identify with and participate in the Indian struggle for independence. It is an eclectic mix of some well- known (like Besant and Madeleine Slade/Mira Behn) and some lesser known (like Philip Spratt and R.R. Keithahn) but equally remarkable individuals that he brings together. Of the seven, four are British (B.G. Horniman, Madeleine Slade, Philip Spratt, and Catherine Heilemann/Sarala Behn), two are Americans (Samuel Stokes, R.R. Keithahn), and Besant the sole Irishwoman, highlighting the diversity within this group of western “rebels”. While Stokes and Keithahn came out to India as Christian missionaries, the former converts to Hinduism (adopting the name Satyanand), much like Philip Spratt’s transformation from a radical Communist to a bitter critic of Communism (and also of the Congress). One of the merits of Guha’s book is that he has successfully captured such shifts in the religious and political convictions of his protagonists.

However, in his prologue, explaining the rationale behind his selection, Guha states that “detention in British India (or externment from British India) is a sine quo non for inclusion here. Imprisonment or banishment signified the depth of their commitment to the cause” (xvii). Imprisonment or banishment as a necessary condition for selection seems rather arbitrary, as does the presumption that it is a faithful measure of their “commitment” to India’s freedom. An acknowledgement of the fairly large number of foreigners in the freedom struggle would have been a plausible justification for focussing on just seven. The issue of selection points to a larger structural limitation of the book. By restricting himself predominantly to the freedom struggle of the first half of the twentieth century, Guha excludes a much older history of the Raj being questioned by the British themselves, as well a series of anti-colonial struggles that punctuated (even defined) the British presence in India: these include the Anglo-Mysore Wars (1767-99), the Vellore Mutiny (1806), the Santhal Rebellion (1855), and the 1857 Uprising, leading up to the final sustained political struggle in the twentieth century of which Guha’s seven “rebels” were participants. The conduct of the East India Company (the predecessor of the Raj) was being intensely scrutinised by the British public as far back as the 1780s during the impeachment proceedings of Warren Hastings, the first Governor General. Throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the writings of well-known English authors such as Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and Leonard Woolf expressed a sense of discomfort with the Raj (even though none of them actively rebelled against it).[2] Benjamin Guy Horniman, one of Guha’s “rebels” and the editor of the Bombay Chronicle who was deported from India in 1919 for his criticism of the Rowlatt Act, has a forerunner in James Augustus Hicky, the editor of India’s first English newspaper, Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780-82), who was arrested for his criticism of Warren Hastings. Further, the active role played by Anglo-Indian journalism in national politics and public affairs can be traced back to the reportage of the 1857 Uprising in the burgeoning mid nineteenth-century English language press in India.[3]

This intellectual tradition of the western critique of the Raj is not treated with sufficient detail in Guha’s rather inadequate prologue. A more comprehensive introduction would have foregrounded this historical background to the exploits of the seven “rebels” in India. Instead, Guha resorts to a biographical method which serves his purpose till the narrative deals with Indian independence. However, in the third and final section titled “Independent Indians”, which is set in independent India, each chapter reads like a disparate account in the absence of the freedom struggle as a grand narrative to unite them.

Guha’s biographical method is often hampered by an over-reliance on the relationship that these western individuals shared with Gandhi. It is as if a close association with Gandhi is (like imprisonment or deportation) a necessary condition to be included in this narrative. While it is inevitable that an account of the Indian freedom struggle will have Gandhi as a protagonist, representing these individuals almost as his satellites (or shadows), seen most clearly in the case of Mira Behn (118-19), does not quite fulfil the extraordinary potential of the book’s central theme: “western fighters for India’s freedom,” which is the subtitle. In the final section, Gandhi remains the figure who unites these biographical accounts, since the freedom struggle is no longer a central concern—so, while Mira Behn was instrumental in the making of Richard Attenborough’s 1982 movie Gandhi (392), Keithahn helped establish a centre for rural education near Dindigul named “Gandhigram” in 1947 (365). Instead of letting the accounts of the seven “rebels” be overshadowed by the towering presence of Gandhi, Guha could have emphasised the connections and the contrasts among them. There are two instances in the book where he achieves this with considerable narrative effect—the first is the contrasting yet equally poignant love stories of Philip Spratt and Seetha (151-59), and that of Mira and Prithvi Singh (239-45); the second is the contrast that Guha draws between the personalities of Mira and Sarala (355). Despite offering parallel histories of seven different individuals, the book suffers from the risk of these biographies being subsumed under the overarching and ubiquitous spectre of Gandhi.

By dedicating this book to Jean Drèze Guha honours someone who is not just one of the world’s leading economists, but also someone who, like the “rebels” in this book, defied national and cultural borders and continues to work resolutely and self-effacingly with the people of rural Jharkhand. Such is Guha’s ability of weaving an engaging narrative around lesser-known figures and making unlikely heroes in the process, much like he did with Palwankar Baloo in A Corner of a Foreign Field (2002), where it was Baloo’s story that shone through despite sharing narrative space with such illustrious contemporaries as Maharaja Ranjitsinhji and B.R. Ambedkar. By relying on archival sources, personal correspondence, and early twentieth century print media, Guha reconstructs the tumultuous and eventful lives of these seven individuals in what is, despite its shortcomings, for the most part an eminently readable narrative.

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Works Cited:

Guha, Ramachandra. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport. Picador, 2002.

—, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. Picador, 2007.

—, Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom. Penguin Allen Lane, 2022.

Joshi, Priti. Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India. SUNY Press, 2021.

Kipling, Rudyard. “The Ballad of East and West.” The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling, vol. xxv, AMS Press, 1970, pp. 217-22.

—, “The Man Who Would be King.” The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling, vol. iii, AMS Press, 1970, pp. 189-233.

Orwell, George. “Shooting an Elephant.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. i, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Secker and Warburg, 1969, pp. 235-42.

—, “Reflections on Gandhi.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. iv, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Secker and Warburg, 1969, pp. 463-470.

Woolf, Leonard. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939. 1967. The Hogarth Press, 1975.

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[1] For a publication history of the poem, see https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/readers-guide/rg_eastwest1.htm

[2] Kipling’s short story “The Man Who Would be King” (1888) can very well be read as a cautionary tale against imperial ambitions. Also see Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) and “Reflections on Gandhi” (1949) as well as Woolf’s Downhill All the Way (1967), pp. 223-32. Interestingly, Guha quotes Woolf in an epigraph in India After Gandhi (2007, 3).

[3] See Priti Joshi’s recent book Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India (2021).

Atul V. Nair is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad, and a Project Assistant at IWE Online. He works on Anglo-Indian periodicals of the long nineteenth century.