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Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India by Loseph Lelyveld (2010)

Gandhi challenges biographers. The author must confront Gandhi’s prodigious writings, six decades of work as a political activist and social reformer, and importantly, his consecration as “Father of India” and international stature as Mahatma (Great Soul). Perhaps aware of this difficulty, Joseph Lelyveld sets himself a modest goal to “amplify rather than replace the standard narrative” of Gandhi’s life. The author, a former correspondent and Executive Editor of the New York Times, reported for nearly four decades on both India and South Africa. Thus, he brings a unique perspective to the project. In the book’s first part, Lelyveld revisits the oft-repeated tale of Gandhi’s transformation in South Africa between 1893 and 1914 from an unknown lawyer to a social reformer and a political organizer. The second part presents the well-known story of Gandhi’s trials and tribulations in his attempts to impose his ideas, developed during his South African experience, on a “recalcitrant India.” Throughout, Lelyveld focuses on Gandhi’s social reform efforts rather than his involvement in India’s nationalist movement for independence from British rule. His choice could have been influenced by the recent decline in public enthusiasm in India for Gandhi’s ideas of non-violence. Today, the term “Gandhian,” as Lelyveld notes, implies little more than “social conscience.”

Despite its conventional conclusions, Lelyveld’s biography acquired notoriety following a review in the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that the author depicts Gandhi as a bisexual and a racist during his stay in South Africa, a bald misrepresentation of the book. Lelyveld compares Gandhi’s pronouncements on black South Africans on different occasions and concludes that they remained “contradictory and unsettled.” The second instance of controversy relates to Gandhi’s relationship with an East Prussian Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach. The two lived together for about three years in Transvaal and, in one letter, Gandhi pledges “more love, and yet more love… such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.” But Lelyveld never implies that Gandhi and Kallenbach had a homosexual relationship. Rather, he indicates that Gandhi only expected love, devotion, and unquestioning support from Kallenbach. The unfortunate controversy overshadows some crucial points raised in the book.

Significantly, at several points, Lelyveld questions the historical construction of the myth about Gandhi. He points to the current South African government’s appropriation of Gandhi into its national history and he presents evidence that Gandhi actually supported South African whites’ suppression of the Zulus in the 1906 Bhambatha Rebellion. Similarly, he questions Gandhi’s saintly status as a champion of India’s lower-caste untouchables. Lelyveld illustrates Gandhi’s limited enthusiasm for a struggle by untouchables in Kerala (South India) to gain entry into temples since he believed that such conflicts could weaken the unity among Hindus in the larger struggle for Indian independence.

In his discussion of Gandhi’s successes and failures in India, Lelyveld treads on well- traveled ground and breaks no new turf. But, his discussion of Gandhi’s attitudes towards blacks and the absence of any sustained relationship between Gandhi and black South African leaders raises interesting questions about the role of race in the three-way contest between white settlers, black South Africans, and Indians. The book, therefore, promises to initiate further debate on Gandhi’s views on race as well as on racial relations among non-white populations in the British empire.

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918)

by Joseph Parrott

Almost a century after its publication, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians remains a landmark work in the field of biography. The author chooses four notable personalities – Henry Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and Charles George Gordon – and uses their lives to illuminate the broader history of Victorian England. Unlike previous biographers of the time, Strachey consciously rejects romanticized images of these figures. Instead, he presents the facts of their lives “dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions.” These mythic characters take on human proportions and they prove all the more interesting for their ambition, pettiness, hypocrisy, and peculiarity. Cardinal Manning, the leader of the Catholic Church in England, becomes a merciless if conflicted self-promoter. The Crimean War nurse Nightingale is a hard-bitten health advocate haunted by memories of dying young men. Arnold appears less the champion of public school reform than an intellectual theocrat. Finally, Strachey calls into question the heroism of General Gordon’s death during the Mahdist Revolt in the Sudan; far from seeming a great strategist, the military commander parades across the pages as a tempestuous zealot, “a fighter, an enthusiast, a bold adventurer.” Strachey’s critical accounts shocked his Edwardian audience, but contemporary readers will find them fascinating for their candid portrayals of the eccentricities and passions that motivated four remarkable figures.

The brief biographical sketches also offer glimpses into the history of the era. The Oxford Movement’s introduction of ritual and ceremony into the Anglican tradition frames Manning’s conversion to Catholicism, while Gordon represents a microcosm of European imperialism in Africa and Asia. The remaining subjects provide Strachey with the opportunity to investigate restrictive upper-class mores and the evolution of reform movements in British society. The interactions of these four distinguished Victorians with characters like the influential theologian John Henry Newman and Prime Minister William Gladstone go still further and elevate the biographies to the level of high politics. As such, the author provides an accessible narrative that emphasizes the role of individuals in shaping the recent history of Great Britain.

Strachey’s book heralded a new age of biographical study, but his fluid prose and charming style account for the work’s ability to transcend its time and still speak to us today.

More detailed and scandalous investigations of nineteenth century Britain and its most famous citizens have since appeared, and many delve deeper into the historical record than does Eminent Victorians, which relies almost exclusively on earlier histories and collected letters. Yet Strachey’s vivid prose, artless erudition, and eye for detail move the stories along at a fast pace, simultaneously educating and entertaining in equal doses. A somewhat sardonic tone pervades the book, but the critical distance and the wry allusions recall the feeling of a conversation with an especially learned friend. As much a literary experience as a lesson in history, Strachey’s Eminent Victorians continues to attract new readers simply because it offers such a pleasurable and increasingly rare integration of scholarship, writing, and wit.

Portrait of Lytton Strachey by Dora Carrington, via Wikicommons

The Rebel’s Hour by Lieve Joris (2008)

by Charles Thomas

Lieve Joris recounts the true story of Assani, a student, rebel, soldier, and statesman, in a genre she refers to as literary reportage. Joris begins Assani’s story in Kinshasa during the fragile peace of 2003, when he is serving in the disparate forces that constitute the Congolese military. From this touchstone Joris recounts Assani’s life through a series of biographical flashbacks — from his youth as a cowherd in the turbulent Eastern Congo of the 1960s to his rise to generalship in a new Congolese state. Throughout, the reader is given a passionate and often disarming portrayal of the book’s scarred but loyal subject as he struggles with the complex ethnic and political dynamics at work in the frail but enduring Congolese state.

It would be doing this work a disservice, however, to view it simply as a biography. While Assani’s story itself is fascinating, it serves a far more vital service as a guide through the turbulent history of the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. The vast majority of Western readers are unaware that in the late 1990s two horrific wars originated in the Great Lakes region, with the Second Congo War (1998-2003) involving eight separate African nations and claiming the lives of 5.4 million people. As a descendant of the Tutsis who settled in the Eastern Congo, Assani’s story traces these wars from their earliest rumbling to their conclusion in the peace agreement of 2003. From its origins in the 1960s Tutsi resistance to the Mobutu government, to the violence between the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda that reignited the conflict; from the war waged by Laurent Kabila to seize power from Mobutu in 1996, to the horrific and confused regional struggle of 1998 to 2003, Joris uses Assani’s life to tell the history of what is now known as “Africa’s World War.” With so little otherwise written on the subject, this serves as a necessary narrative of what is certain to be a defining period in Central African history.

Overall, Joris has created a masterful work. In Assani the reader is given a sympathetic but controversial figure, through which they can absorb the history of one of the world’s most conflict-riven regions. By the end of the work even readers new to the subject will have a solid understanding of the complexity of the region, the harrowing prosecution of the region’s wars, and the fragile peace that even now appears to be unraveling. This understanding is facilitated by an excellent glossary and index of historical figures provided by Joris at the end of the book. Given the continued difficulties of the region and yet the almost complete silence of the media on the topic, The Rebel’s Hour is a necessity for any reader interested in the tides of conflict and renewal in Central Africa.

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