GANDHI, THE JOURNALIST:
WHEN, WHERE, HOW, AND WHAT HE WROTE
By Dr. David W. Bulla, associate professor
Zayed University
P.O. Box 144534
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
[email protected]
971-55-451-8799)
Writing As Spaces 4:
Fourth Global Meeting of the Writing Project
2 July-4 July 2016
Mansfield College
Oxford, England (UK)
1 Abstract
As part of a book project on the advocacy journalism career of Mohandas K. Gandhi,
the author is exploring how Gandhi wrote—where he wrote (often at home, which
usually meant in a communal atmosphere), when he wrote, what he wrote about, how
he saw writing, what it meant to his life in its entirety, particularly the place it had
both in his spiritual quests, as well as being a practical tool for advancing his various
political and religious causes. Indeed, Gandhi was a journalist for forty-four years;
i.e., most of his adult life. The Mahatma owned six newspapers during that span,
starting with Indian Opinion in 1903 when he was in South Africa and with Young
India when he returned to his native land in 1915. These enterprises were largely
family-oriented, and the father served as editor and leader, though never officially as
publisher (and his papers were never subject to copyright). For Gandhi, writing was
central to not just his causes but his entire being. Writing was not only a habit of
being; it was also Gandhi’s way of expressing himself to the masses, especially since
he was never fond of his skills as an orator. As an attorney, he felt more comfortable
with the precision of writing. And his roots in writing go back to the renaissance in
printing that occurred on the West Coast of India in the late nineteenth century when
publishing took off and the young Gandhi feasted on the available literature before
going off to London to study law. We can see how important writing was to Gandhi
by taking an brief audit of his material possessions at his final residence, Birla House,
in New Delhi. In the room he lived in during the final months of his life, one sees a
spinning wheel, a mattress, wire-framed eyeglasses, a glasses case, eating utensils, a
walking stick, and a writing desk. Eating, walking, spinning, sleeping, and writing:
These were the essential activities of his highly ritualistic life.
Key words: England, Gandhi, India, journalism, newspaper, pamphlet, satyagraha,
South Africa.
2 Writing Roots of an Advocacy Journalist
Mohandas K. Gandhi was an extraordinary writer. No, he was not a literary
stylist, and the Indian had no pretense to be a novelist, playwright, or poet. Rather,
writing for Gandhi, a trained attorney, was a practical matter, and for Gandhi practical
matters always had an urgency—a weight—to them. Writing was a weapon for
Gandhi within his political philosophy of satyagraha; that is, putting pen to paper—
and often publishing what he wrote in his newspapers and books—was a nonviolent
political tool. Like burning a pass card in a cauldron, refusing to sit in third class on a
train, or choosing to jail rather than paying a tax, Gandhi used writing as a way to
protest the injustices he encountered in South Africa and India. Indeed, writing was a
way of convincing people that the evidence he had accumulated told a particular
story, and that those people not only needed to be aware of said evidence, but they
ought to act upon the facts he presented. In many ways, the Mahatma used writing as
a substitute for courtroom argumentation. Even if he was not a literary genius, he was
a practical genius and left behind a massive record of his written thoughts.
What follows is an examination of Gandhi as a writer, especially as a
journalist, in terms of where, when, and how he wrote, as well as an examination of
what he wrote (letters, legal papers, newspaper articles, essays, political tracts,
books). For Gandhi, writing was not only about finding time each day to
communicate with those outside his entourage and family, it was about exploring the
space of his intellectual and spiritual life. That is, writing was not only a way to
persuade people to his perspective on various political, and social issues, but it was
also part of his entire personhood—which always came back to his search for truth, a
religious and personal quest. As much as it was a technological tool for
communicating his ideas and political will, writing also was an explorative apparatus
3 that helped him understand his world and himself. Gandhi explored world and self by
writing about education, equality, independence, nonviolence, religion, and
vegetarianism.
Mohandas K. Gandhi was a public man. He was photographed often—by
some of the most photographers of his time—and many times the photographs show a
man with a pen or pencil posed between his right index and middle finger. It was if
the Mahatma was always poised to have at the verbal battle that was part and parcel
of his various political campaigns. For the advocacy journalism that he practiced was
always about argumentation. While his newspaper is full of informative articles, the
editor himself felt a strong need, in addition to bringing attention to the critical issues
of the day, to persuade his audience on what stances to take on these issues. His brain
and pen worked together to analyze and interpret whatever issue he happened to be
focusing on at any given time in his adult life. And, generally speaking, these
photographs of Gandhi show a man in contemplative action. He is actively engaged,
but while he may have been a soldier in his political campaigns, he is clearly not a
man of violence. He looks on hindsight to be painfully vulnerable.
Reading is the constant companion of writing, and Gandhi’s childhood reading
included religious books—most importantly, the Ramayana—and his school
textbooks. He also enjoyed Gujarati drama and the Manusmriti, an ancient legal text.1
It was in reading the Ramayana as a child that Gandhi began to equate God and truth
as synonymous terms. This would be very important in his journalism where factual
evidence would be critical to both his informative and argumentative writing.
In 1888, at age nineteen, he landed in London, where he studied law. Gandhi’s
law reading included a Roman law textbook (in Latin), Herbert Broom’s
Commentaries on the Common Law, and William Douglas Edwards’ The Law of
4 Property in Land. Gandhi consistently read two British newspapers, the Daily
Telegraph and the Pall Mall Gazette. In London, Gandhi also began to read the
Edwin Arnold English translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which emphasized doing
right without considering later rewards. Even though the Gita was his father’s favorite
book, Gandhi had ignored it as a child. From the Gita, he also took away the idea of
maintaining an active life as a form of worship itself.2
Two important books he read in his London years was Jeremy Bentham’s
Theory of Utility, Henry Salt’s Plea for Vegetarianism, and Howard Williams’ Ethics
of Diet. He came under the influence of Annie Besant, a member of the Social
Democratic Federation who had led a mass protest in opposition to British rule of
Ireland at London’s Trafalgar Square in 1887, and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the
founder of the Theosophical Society. At this time, he joined the English Vegetarian
Society and began to read its London-based journal, The Vegetarian, in 1889. He also
read The Vegetarian Messenger, which was published in Manchester. Later, Gandhi
would write publicly for the first time, in The Vegetarian, which Josiah Oldfield
edited.
First Published Work, in London
Gandhi’s first article in The Vegetarian, published on 7 February 1891,
concerned vegetarianism back in India. It was the first of a five-installment series on
the subject. That first article discusses how only certain castes in India have to be
vegetarian, and that vegetarians and meat-eaters are also divided on religious grounds.
Due to India’s extreme poverty, Gandhi wrote that most Indians could not afford or
even find meat if they were disposed to eat animal flesh. He also commented that
Indian vegetarians did not eat eggs, for “to eat an egg is equivalent to killing life,” he
noted.3 Also, at this time, he began to write against inebriation. He certainly felt
5 alcohol intake was poor for one’s health and contradictory to the kind of diet he
followed. In the second article, the writer described typical Indian meals. Gandhi
wrote that for most Indians, due the heat, there were only two meals per day, one at
10 a.m. and the other at 8 p.m. He remarked that the morning meal consisted of bread
(“cakes”), rice, vegetables, and milk. The evening meal would be similar, “but the
quantity is less and the vegetables fewer at this meal.”4 Sweets are not included,
except for the upper classes. In third installment, he described the bread as being
wheat cakes. The wheat was ground in a hand mill and then “passed through a sieve
with large holes, so that the coarsest bran is left out.” Flour and butter are combined,
needed, and made into balls “each as big as a tangerine” before being rolled into
circular pieces and baked on flatware. He added that Indian wheat bread was “far
superior” than that used in England—which he termed “much abused white bread.”
He concluded: “What meat is to the ordinary Englishman, cake is to the Indian, be he
a Vegetarian or a meat-eater, for in India a meat-eater does not in the writer’s opinion
regard his meat as an absolute necessity, but takes it rather as a side dish to help him,
so to speak, in eating the cakes.”5
In one of his last articles in The Vegetarian, the Indian writer moved into the
overtly political realm. Titled “English Misrule in India,” Gandhi’s piece praises the
British government for being “one of the most civilised in the world” and does not
tolerate injustice, but then he gets to his main point: a new rule is in the place that all
attorneys currently practicing law in Gandhi’s home district in Gujarat (Kathiawar)
have had their licenses canceled and would only regain their right to practice law by
paying an annual fee of 30 rupees. Gandhi argued in the article: “It seems that the
notification indirectly aims at destroying the independence of every member of the
Bar, for it becomes entirely impracticable for the legal practitioners to go on with
6 their work, as they are meant to be at the mercy of the Political Agent (British
governor of the area) for renewing their licenses every year.” He added: “In no
civilised government the independence of lawyers is not respected. When the freedom
of press and freedom of debate are the true birthrights and privileges of the English
people, why should not a small portion of them be liberally extended to Indians who
are really in need of it and who have every right to claim a fair share of them from the
British Government?”6 This would become the template for future persuasive writing
by Gandhi: Praise the British political system with its rights and privileges while
detailing contradictions that unfairly impacted a portion of her subjects.
Gandhi also kept notes about his time in England. This he would call his
London Diary, or, later, the Guide to London. It was handwritten and intended to be a
kind of tour guide for future family and friends who would visit the British capital.
Some of it was written later in South Africa. According to one biographer, Gandhi’s
prose at this time was “frank, unpretentious, and rich in detailed information.”7 That
would become the template for Gandhi’s verbal style for his entire career as a
journalist: an emphasis on clearly, simply written detail to convince the reader of his
main point.
South African Writer
Then Gandhi was off to South Africa, where he began to write for public
consumption in earnest. First there were letters to the editors of newspapers in
Durban. Next, there were the pamphlets. The first pamphlets came in 1895: (1) An
Appeal to Every Briton in South Africa and (2) The Indian Franchise. These were
followed by his first mass publication, the1896 pamphlet titled The Grievances of the
British Indians in South Africa. He had this so-called Green Pamphlet published in
India, and the first edition went to ten thousand. It detailed incidents of mistreatment
7 of Indians by white South Africans. Gandhi toured India promoting it, giving
speeches to the public and interviews to newspapers. In the Green Pamphlet, he
describes the symptoms of mistreatment and the effect such mistreatment had on
Indians both legally and psychologically. For instance, Gandhi writes that the
policies, laws, and customs of racial hatred created an atmosphere of “deep-seated
hatred towards the Indians” that was “reproduced all over South Africa.”8
His granddaughter Ela Gandhi, former member of the South African
Parliament, activist, and a resident of Durban, said that her grandfather focused on his
audience when he determined what was worth writing about and how he should write
about it: “He always said we should keep in mind what effect it would have on a
person, on society when we determined what would go into the paper—into our
paper—and what’s the kind of news we do put into our paper; what did you want to
promote. Don’t just write. We have to think about the consequences of that particular
sentence,” she said. “An article should have a positive outcome for the reader. If it
doesn’t, then that story is not worth telling.”9 In other words, her grandfather saw the
words he wrote as being educational, as being uplifting, as inspirational. The purpose
of his journalistic writing was to improve the community Gandhi served. It was
service-oriented journalism, and his newspaper would eventually have no copyright
and no commercial advertising.
At a high school in Madras (now Chennai), in 1896, the young lawyer and
editor from South Africa told his audience that his main goal with the Green
Pamphlet was to educate Indians about the conditions their countrymen faced in
South Africa. He also wanted to reach the English public, to appeal to their good
nature and sense of fairness. Gandhi reported that the Times of London had written
eight articles about the pamphlet. “That alone has raised us a step higher in the
8 estimation of the Europeans in South Africa and has considerably affected for the
better the tone of newspapers there,” he wrote.10
Thus, audience was essential in his thinking about how writing functioned. He
almost certainly learned this from his days in London as a law student preparing to
argue in open court.
Gandhi wanted to persuade his readers to his viewpoint, but who was his
audience? In 1903, he started his first newspaper, Indian Opinion, which established
an agenda of issues of importance to Natal’s Indian population. He envisioned most
of his readers at this time to be the merchant class. Indian Opinion would take up
issues such as unfair taxes, the pass laws, and the plight of Indian indentured servants
in South Africa. Yet the Indians of South Africa were divided by caste, by religion,
and by language. When his satyagraha campaigns began, Gandhi would begin to lose
his merchant readers, who could afford to adhere to his nonviolent direct action ethos
because it would run them out of business. He also printed Indian Opinion initially in
four different languages: English, Gujarti, Hindi, and Tamil. He would drop the Hindi
and Tamil versions because of the practical issues involving having so many different
kinds of types to set at his Durban newspaper printing operation. That left the English
and Gujarati sections of the weekly Indian Opinion, and over time a very different
editor emerged in each of those two sections of the paper. South African literature
professor Isabel Hofmeyr points out that in the English section of the Durban
newspaper, the editor signed off as M.K. Gandhi, and in the Gujarati he was
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. In the former, the tone of writing is “polite” and
formal, but in the latter he is “outspoken, sometimes hectoring, emotional, passionate,
truth-telling and personal.”11 Furthermore, with the Gujarati reader, Hofmeyr
9 comments, he is much more instructional, much more insistent on maintaining the
political struggle of satyagraha.
Home to India: Writing as Routine
When he went back to Indian in 1914, he would start several more
newspapers, including Young India, Harijan, and Navajivan. All would have
informative and persuasive functions. Thus, the style of writing, observes Gandhi
biographer Bhabani Bhattacharya, was “simple, straightforward, orderly, precise;
well-reasoned, lucid, adequately condensed; and above all else, single-minded,
persuasive.” All of the newspapers delved into the issues Gandhi felt passionate
about. Indeed, they were advocacy journals, espousing various causes, and, of course,
the greatest cause would be Indian independence from Great Britain. By this time, his
audience would be much wider. It would be those Indians who failed to benefit from
British rule, and in this estimation, his imagined audience would have been millions
of Indians—although clearly none of his newspapers ever had circulations of more
than a few thousand.
Gandhi slept very little, and in terms of his routine as a writer, Gandhi usually
rose at 3 of 4 o’clock each morning. Probably his restless mind was most alert then,
and his hand most rested. The writer would start his day with work on articles he was
writing for one of his newspapers or correspondence to fellow letter writers around
the world. He usually wrote with fountain pen and paper—not a typewriter and the
personal computer would not be invented for decades after his death—and he sat with
his knees folding under him with the paper on top of his legs. He does not look
particularly comfort, and one wonders how many writers in the twenty-first century
could fold themselves up on the floor and still write. Gandhi wore his eyeglasses and
put pen to paper with the right thumb and index finger doing all the action while the
10 side of that right hand rests on the paper. His lips look like they are pouting, and the
journalist writes with an intense look on his face. Gandhi tended to write in the same
place he slept—for example, when he lived with Herman Kellanbach in
Johannesburg, Gandhi wrote in his bed in a loft that he reached by a steep, narrow
ladder. He wrote in a similar place in his ashram in Gujarat and the same at Birla
House in Delhi, his last residence before his assassination. You see a stand next to his
mattress, so that he can quickly move from sleep to writing. You see him writing
while he is talking dignitaries, such as his colleague Jawaharal Nehru, but you often
see him writing alone, concentrating on the task at hand. He was right-handed and
held the tablet on which his paper rested with his left hand.
In the photographs of Gandhi that implicate his literacy, we usually see
fountain pens and paper, but also newspapers or newspaper clippings. Most of the
time, the setting is on a floor or a bed (Indian beds are often just mats on a floor). The
rooms where his writing occurs are spare. The walls are unadorned. The room at Birla
House where he spends the last days of his life is white with a floor bed. Gandhi’s
eyeglasses and paper are there. That’s about it. Everything bespeaks a monastic life,
and that too is the theme of Gandhi as a writer. The spaces where he wrote were
purely minimalistic, and his worldview seems so horizontal since where he reads and
writes is not standing up like, say, Hemingway, but lying prostrate. His mind—
indeed, his whole being—is set on the task of communicating with the world or with
individuals through the written world. But writing lying down somehow seems so
passive. Yet Gandhi’s passive resistance is anything but passive. It is in-your-face,
confrontational. His writing, we must remember, starts what is tantamount to a
revolution.
11 Most photographs that actually show him in the act of being literate have him
reading, not writing. He is read letters, newspaper clippings, or a full folio-sized
newspaper. If he is writing, these photographs are more likely to show him editing
than actually drafting. Indeed, there seems to be little photographic record of him as
writer, even though he spent four and a half decades as a journalist. And there is never
really an indication of how his penned work turned into type that could be set in his
various newspapers, but we know he worked on all phases of each of those journals—
even, of course, participating in distribution. In Gandhi’s view, nobody in the
operation should be above doing even the most menial task.
His handwriting, in English, is jagged, as if there is a sort of tension. Perhaps
he is in a hurry. Gandhi is not just a writer, but he feels that recording, chronicling,
arguing must be done. In order to get down all that he wants to record requires him to
write without a great deal of attentiveness to good penmanship. Let’s also not forget
that we write entirely today on keyboards. His millions of words all came from the
pen. The art of writing can be physically grueling. It’s not just where he wrote, but
when he wrote.
Conclusion
Why did Mohandas K. Gandhi write? The simplest answer is to spread his
ideas. The more accurate answer is to search for truths—and the truth. He said: “I
write to propagate my ideas” and “to peep into myself and make discoveries of my
weaknesses.” Yet, in another sense, Gandhi saw his writing as a kind of partnership
between writer and reader. The newspapers were not just a medium for his various
causes, whether he was advocating for independence, human rights, celibacy,
vegetarianism, or equality. Gandhi wanted engaged, active readers. They would not
only promote and maintain those causes, as well as gain knowledge of their world and
12 the world beyond (read India); in a real sense they would ensure the newspapers were
living, organic entities. The Gandhian reader was to read the newspaper, share the
newspaper in the community, and to write letters to the editor to make a community
dialogue. His reader had to make a major commitment as a reader. As Hofmyer notes,
Gandhi’s readers “were tasked with almost the same responsibility as the managers of
the paper.”12 Reading, say, Indian Opinion was an obligation; yet it also was a
deliberate, time-consuming, and inwardly directed activity. It was like studying a
discipline, or even meditating or praying. Indeed, when the author of this paper
interviewed the granddaughter, Ela Gandhi, he could not help but come away with the
feeling that working for Indian Opinion was a higher calling—that indeed it was part
and parcel of being a satyagrahi.
Perhaps no work better exemplifies Gandhi as writer than Hind Swaraj or
Indian Home Rule. It came out in 1908, initially in serial form in Indian Opinion.
Later, it was published as a twenty-chapter book. It is a dialogue between a teacher
and student; or, rather, between a “Reader” and an “Editor.” Of course, Gandhi is the
Editor. The Reader is a zealously patriotic Indian living in London.
Hind Swaraj is never straightforward; rather, it operates on a paradoxical
level. It posits a free and independent India as being no different than a dependent
India as part of the British Empire and its commercial enterprises. Indeed, the Editor
wants no part of “English rule without the Englishman.”13 He does not want a modern
state with an industrial economy, individuals serving it as drones, and a strong,
violent military underpinning the government. For Gandhi, Europe is no longer
civilised. Instead, it is debased, and materialism is the root problem for the Europeans.
Progress is superficial. Rather, modernism is destroying Europe. He writes: “It is a
civilization only in name. Under it the nations of Europe are becoming degraded and
13 ruined day by day.”14 Is that what Indians want? Brute force had made the British
Empire. Is this what Indians would want on that day in the future when they would
certainly gain their independence?
Yet what makes Hind Swaraj so powerful is Gandhi’s rhetorical flourishes and
his plain language. For example, in the “Word of Explanation” at the beginning of the
book, Gandhi writes: “In my opinion it is a book which can be put in the hands of a
child. It teaches the gospel of love in place of that of hate. It replaces violence with
self-sacrifice. It pits soul force against brute force.”15
How much did Mohandas K. Gandhi write over the course of his nearly eight
decades on Earth? More than two million words in English alone, but he also wrote in
Gujarati and Hindi. Of course, this total does not include all of the letters and
speeches, although a good portion of them have been preserved. Writing was a habit,
an everyday activity for the Mahatma. Just before he took those final steps of his life
there at Birla House in New Delhi, he had been writing. The great irony of his end is
that his assassin was also a newspaper editor, a man using a radically different palette
of words—a man who saw writing as a violent weapon.
Notes
1
Bhanbani Bhattacharya, Gandhi the Writer (New Delhi, India: National Book Trust, 2002), 8-9.
Arthur Herman, Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our
Age (London, UK: Arrow Books, 2009), 79.
3
Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Indian Vegetarians,” The Vegetarian, London, UK, 7 February 1891.
4
Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Indian Vegetarians,” The Vegetarian, London, UK, 14 February 1891.
5
Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Indian Vegetarians,” The Vegetarian, London, UK, 21 February 1891.
6
Mohandas K. Gandhi, “English Misrule in India,” The Vegetarian, London, UK, 29 July 1893.
7
Bhattacharya, 17.
8
Mohandas K. Gandhi, “The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa,” self-published,
Madras, India, August 14, 1896, 5. Hereafter, “The Green Pamphlet.”
9
Ela Gandhi, interview by David W. Bulla, Durban, South Africa, 2 July 2014. Ela Gandhi’s father,
Manilal Gandhi, would edit and publish Indian Opinion for several decades after his father returned to
India.
10
Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume Two, 1896-1897 (New
Delhi, India: Government of India, Publications Division, 1959), 155.
11
Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013), 80.
12
Ibid., 133.
2
14 13
Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan Publishing
House, 1938), 26.
14
Ibid., 30.
15
Ibid., 15.
15