On Gandhi: Mishra v. Desai

What interests me is the structure of the book review. I want to compare two reviews of Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India: Pankaj Mishra’s “The Inner Voice” (The New Yorker, May 2, 2011) and Anita Desai’s “A Different Gandhi” (The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011). I want to explore the way they’re written. Mishra begins his piece with a shocking question:

Mohandas Gandhi was the twentieth century’s most famous advocate of nonviolent politics. But was he also its most spectacular political failure?

Desai’s opener is more equable:

Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi has grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him.

Both writers establish their themes in their opening paragraphs. Mishra’s focus is on Gandhi’s failure; Desai’s is on the man behind the legend. In choosing to dwell on failure, Mishra takes the low road. He makes sweeping accusations against Gandhi, such as “And yet the Indian leader failed to achieve his most important aims and was widely disliked and resented during his lifetime.” It’s difficult to square such charges with Desai’s observation that,

He would start to fast in prison and the nation would hold its breath till he agreed to suspend it. As his body dwindled, Lelyveld observes, his political and spiritual power increased. The fast joined the spinning wheel as a distinctly Gandhian symbol of protest. In 1930 his genius for the inspired and inspiring gesture made him lead a march of two hundred miles from his ashram to Dandi on the Arabian Sea, crowds lining the road to cheer him. With “the beauty and simplicity of a fresh artistic vision,” Lelyveld writes, he bent to pick a handful of salt on the beach in defiance of British taxation of even so lowly and indispensable commodity.

You’ll not find much reference to Gandhi’s “genius for the inspired and inspiring gesture” in Mishra’s piece, so intent is he in making his case of failure. Note, in the above quote, the way Desai inserts “Lelyveld observes” and “Lelyveld writes.” Mishra doesn’t credit Lelyveld this way. Except for a couple of brief snippets of quotation, he hardly mentions Lelyveld at all, even though it’s Lelyveld’s book, along with The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, that’s supposedly under review. The lack of quotation in Mishra’s piece is a major flaw. As Martin Amis said in the foreword to his brilliant book review collection The War Against Cliché, “You proceed by quotation. Quotation is the reviewer’s only hard evidence. Or semi-hard evidence. Without it, in any case, criticism is a shop-queue monologue.”

Another off-putting aspect of Mishra’s piece is its repeated use of that slippery, open-textured word “moral”: “moral persuasion,” “higher morality,” “moral and psychological effects,” “moral cover,” “moral self-knowledge,” “moral sanction,” “moral superiority,” “moral choices,” “moral authority,” “moral or normative demands,” “the difficulty of being moral men and women.” That’s a lot of "moral" to stomach in one piece. What’s it all about? We are in the presence of a moralist, obviously. I’m referring to Mishra, not Gandhi. Mishra even defines Gandhi’s satyagraha principle in terms of morality. He says it’s “a mode of political activism based on moral persuasion.” Interestingly, Desai, in her review, says satyagraha translates literally as “truth force” or “firmness in truth.” What if the first act of morality is to acknowledge that, as Osgood memorably says, in Some Like It Hot, “Nobody’s perfect”? George Orwell, in his great essay, “Reflections on Gandhi,” says:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

The judging of a human being, any human being, as a failure is a rotten business. Yet, Mishra appears to have no qualms engaging in it. He might counter that, in his focus on Gandhi’s "many failures,” he’s merely reflecting Lelyveld’s findings in Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. But if you look at Desai’s piece, you’ll see a much more balanced interpretation of Lelyveld’s book. Desai says,

One might think that Gandhi’s legacy on the whole has been depicted negatively and yet there is no denying Lelyveld’s deep sympathy with the man. The picture that emerges is of someone intensely human, with all the defects and weaknesses that suggests, but also a visionary with a profound social conscience and courage who gave the world a model for nonviolent revolution that is still inspiring.

I much prefer Desai’s humanistic approach. Mishra, in his piece, can’t even credit Gandhi for his advocacy of non-violent politics without, in the same breath, mentioning his “many failures” (“It is what young Egyptians and Tunisians feel today, and their Yemeni counterparts may experience tomorrow: the ever renewable power of cooperative action, which is a truer measure of Gandhi’s legacy than his many failures”).

In conclusion, I submit that Pankaj Mishra’s New Yorker review is flawed in three respects: (1) it lacks quotation; (2) it lacks balance; (3) it’s too moralistic.