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Correspondence as a collector’s item

Overall, the three correspondents enable us to look at the Indian nationalist movement ‘differently’ and to find in them some of the seminal ideas that went into the making of the modern Indian nation… A review

Correspondence as a collector’s item

Friendships of ‘Largeness and Freedom’: Andrews, Tagore, and Gandhi ~ An Epistolary Account, 1920-1940 Edited and introduced by Uma Dasgupta Oxford University Press, 2018

Trying to learn the history of the rise and growth of Indian nationalism between 1912 and 1940 through numerous letters that three friends wrote to each other is a unique way of studying the phenomenon.

The three are Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) and the Church of England missionary, Charles Freer Andrews (1871 – 1940).

Through the letters of these three remarkable individuals the present volume under review explores two closely related themes — their friendship and principles for pursuing the freedom of India from colonial rule.

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Andrews, Gandhi and Tagore all worked for Indian freedom with the spirit to challenge the racism that the empire had spread and legitimised. In this struggle they worked against all odds to show the way to an ideal for humanity at large.

They were themselves eminently suited for this ideal from their readiness to undertake the self-suffering that such transcendence required, each in his own sphere of activity as well as collectively.

The letters take us to the conversations between the friends themselves and their mental impulses. The contents were always personal and emotional but also addressed their concern for “change”.

They wanted to restore national honour and what they saw as White racism. Incidentally, earlier we have come across published volumes of letters between Tagore and Gandhi and between Tagore and Andrews but there has been no work till now on the three correspondents together as in this one.

Moreover, we have to keep in mind that this monograph is not a systematic study of the Indian freedom movement, nor is it meant to be. Here the sources speak for themselves and we can remain non-judgmental and glean a lot of information of that significant era through their letters written sometimes from different corners of the world.

Also from the outset we have to keep in mind that this volume does not include their entire correspondence. The archived letters of Andrews, Gandhi and Tagore run into hundreds and their physical pages run into thousands.

As the editor informs us, there are over six hundred letters and telegrams from Andrews to Tagore, over two hundred letters from Tagore to Andrews, over two hundred from Andrews to Gandhi, and over a hundred from Gandhi to Andrews.

Besides the principal correspondents, the editor has also included correspondence they exchanged with others, though very little, such as some cables exchanged between Gandhi and Gokhale and some letters between Gandhi and the Viceroys or the Viceroy’s Secretaries, merely to connect the story.

The campaigns during the increasingly turbulent political environment of the years 1912-40 were drawn from two important historical events that occurred during those years. These were, first, Gandhi’s encounter with the racially unjust treatment of the Indian community in South Africa, which became the inspiration for his phenomenal satyagraha movement, and, second, Gandhi’s leadership of an all-India nationalist movement.

The correspondence of the three friends helps us to understand that it was not until they were completely convinced of a failure of justice on the part of the government that their attitude changed to resistance. From Gandhi’s letters we get to know how his mind would turn every time to “Gurudev” and Santiniketan throughout the political struggle, particularly when he awaited imprisonment from one fast to another.

In Andrews’ case it was also fighting a fierce but selfless battle against Christian dogma, which he saw as the root of White racism. As he went on shunting between Santiniketan, Delhi, Shimla, Sabarmati, South Africa, Fiji, East Africa, Australia and Britain, he remained Gandhi’s confidante and a trusted mediator between the highly placed colonial establishment and the nationalist circle.

From 1914 onwards, when he withdrew from missionary service, Andrews made it his lifelong duty to work with Gandhi in resisting the disenfranchisement of the Indian settlers in South Africa and to put an end to the evil of indentured labour in the colonies. He also tried to change the South African people’s notion of India as a country of “coolies”.

His relationship with Tagore and Santiniketan is also expressed through various letters. There are descriptions in the letters of how he stayed awake and wrote verses which he sent to Tagore, who was away from Santiniketan at that time. He also longed to study the “great heritage” of Indian religious thought at Tagore’s feet.

Tagore was also deeply impressed and he expressed his hope that this would open their hearts and make them ready to receive the “best” that humanity could give them. Despite such closeness, the friends were lonely in their friendship for a number of reasons.

Apart from those times of physical separation, the friends, according to the editor, could have been lonely because there were occasional differences between them in their approaches to their collective goal.

Tagore once wrote of his “moral loneliness” because he could not always agree with Gandhi’s political methods. He differed over the Non-cooperation Movement, the charkha movement, and burning of foreign cloth about which both Tagore and Andrews were unhappy with Gandhi.

Thus despite his deep and great admiration for Gandhi, there was no denying, as Tagore frankly wrote, that they were “radically different” in their “apprehension and pursuit of truth”. He recalled how he had failed to channel the political excitement over swadeshi into a path of constructive self-determination.

Another cause for loneliness for the three friends was in the realisation that their ideals of passive resistance and non-violence had no appeal in their own social milieu. But it was in their religious ideals that the three friends were deeply close. All three of them believed that the relationship between Britain and India could be transformed into a partnership of equals only if the government would take the path to “enlightened policies”.

Over the years, given the seriousness of their concerns, the three friends continued to debate over their political and moral intuitions. Some of their disagreements were perhaps more stressful.

As the thirties came with even more turmoil, the country’s mood was nowhere that deep and pure. There was a rising tone of violence and nationalist impatience in the country. All this is amply reflected through the correspondence of the three friends.

The 90-page-long introduction by the editor is very erudite and significant and it helps us to understand the relationships and epistolary exchanges better. As she rightly points out, besides their love and concern for one another, which was surely the mainstay of their friendships, their letters have confirmed that they were deeply and spiritually driven to find a national ideology in which politics and religion were inseparable.

She concludes by stating that it must also be said that in fulfilling their ideal of largeness and freedom the three friends were living and working with an exhausting “loss of shanti”.

Though the length of the book is almost a daunting 600 pages, nevertheless the manner in which the editor has selected and divided the letters chronologically into 14 sections brings out a method in the madness and offers interesting reading.

Though there is some overlap in the themes, they were unavoidable. Without such judicious selection the monograph would have become unwieldy and out of proportion to the related inquiry on Santiniketan’s place in India’s national history, which this epistolary volume also certainly conveys.

Overall, the three correspondents enable us to look at the Indian nationalist movement “differently” and to find in them some of the seminal ideas that went into the making of the modern Indian nation. The volume is surely a collector’s item.

The reviewer is professor of English, Visva-Bharati University

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