Doing History Wrong

Neoconservative historian Andrew Roberts has written a thoroughly dickish profile of Mahatma Gandhi in the Wall Street Journal, entitled Among the Hagiographers. Under the thin guise of a review of Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography, Great Soul, Mr. Roberts unleashes an unprovoked, relentlessly cruel smear-piece on Gandhi-ji. The essay bristles with the sort of raw enmity one might expect from a man whose professional career has revolved around the lionization of Winston Churchill and who has unreservedly adopted the venomous loathings of the man he idolizes.

The facile way to read Mr. Roberts’s offensively negative presentation is as a smoking condemnation of Gandhi-ji: the father of satyagraha was a creep and a pervert. Indeed, the essay catalogs many of Gandhi-ji’s personal shortcomings and reversals of position; and Mr. Roberts’s project is to spin these into an unflattering portrait of hypocrisy, if not outright depravity. Roberts presents precisely the opposite portrait from that assembled in the usual, beatifying hagiography; and the true object of Roberts’s loathing may be as much the Gandhian canon as Gandhi-ji himself. But, in this detail, I see a shred of subtle value in Mr. Roberts’s malicious piece. It illustrates the absurdity and ruthlessness of a bizarrely one-dimensional mining of the historical record.

Mr. Roberts’s hatchet-job feels nasty because it is nasty, not because it is inaccurate. The characterizations he paints from the historical record are certainly gross caricatures; but they are effective in making an underlying point: we can parse the factual record in the service of whichever point-of-view we choose to advocate. As Shakespeare famously wrote, “The devil can cite scripture for his own purpose.” I know this as well as anyone, having made my career persuading civil juries why the facts of a lawsuit compel my favored result, rather than that urged by my adversary.

If Mr. Roberts’s true motivation was to make a general historiographical argument — intending the reader to find his own mean-spirited synthesis as ridiculously dumbass as the fawning portrayals favored in the Gandhian literature — rather than to draw specific historical conclusions, I would have to confess some appreciation for his aggressive presentation. (Those who know me will recognize my fondness for provocation as a literary tactic.) I am often annoyed by the deification and worshipful reconstruction of narrative employed by hagiographers of all stripes, from the biographers of Ronald Reagan of the American right to those of Gandhi-ji within the international community of his admirers. If I find the latter group marginally more frustrating, it is only because I fall within their camp; and I believe that nothing has done as much damage to Gandhi-ji’s legacy as the well-meaning, but tone-deaf messaging of Gandhians ourselves. The power and magic of Gandhi-ji’s ideas have been eviscerated by association with an absurd, god-like portrayal that effectively removes them from the realm in which people of ordinary human capacity might find them to be instructive.

The self-seriousness of Gandhian hagiography is extremely unforgiving. I have drawn withering, if generally incoherent criticism for a suggestion I find to be obvious: that Gandhi-ji intended a subtly confessional, comedic irony in the title of his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Gandhians seem to have a rough time with the idea that Gandhi-ji, a consummate politician and immense wit, might have been poking a little fun at himself and at the complicated exigencies of the political process, as well as delivering his more resonant, philosophical lessons. It doesn’t fit the righteous narrative.

The saintly whitewash of Gandhi-ji reached a cartoonish apogee in the popular Munnabhai films a few years back. Making-up in hipness what they lack in nuance, the idiotic movies have probably done more to popularize “Gandhigiri” within his homeland than any of the serious (and self-serious) discourse of the preceding half century. It is not a bad thing that the public received a minor civics lesson in the popular cinema; but it’s a bit like learning communitarian values through re-runs of Gilligan’s Island. It represents a trivial success of the superficial and highlights the failure of the appropriately rigorous to engender significant social transformation.

There is a tendency and desire among Gandhians to spiritualize Gandhianism. While this is not my approach, I certainly recognize the easy affinity and compatibility between Gandhi-ji’s profound and reference-shifting ideas and whatever-the-heck spiritualism turns-out to be. Gandhi-ji himself was not shy about urging the connection between the political and ethical, on the one hand, and the spiritual, on the other. The avoidable – but seldom avoided – hazard in this attitude is falling into a state of blind reverence.

Reverence is broadly considered a virtue. Its practitioners adopt their worshipfulness with a feel-good, self-righteous sanctimony that finds full support in many of our oldest and deepest cultural traditions. Still, I find its social utility, humility, and joy-producing self-sublimation utterly outweighed by the pernicious, willful ignorance it imposes.

One might think that the astigmatism of the deferential gaze would be at complete odds with the admiration of truth professed by Gandhians; and yet, we apply ourselves to reverence with a thoroughgoing stubbornness. This was perfectly illustrated by the formidable Gandhian, Nirmala Deshpande, both in her life’s work and in the glowing eulogies penned in the wake of her recent passing. She was a complicated figure, whose actions were often as brainless and deplorable as they were commendable and inspiring. Yet, she was remembered in uniformly saintly terms, depriving future generations of the opportunity to correct or to learn from the many profound errors she made.

The problems posed by reverence in both the writing and reading of history is not unique to Gandhians. For example, devotees of Sri Aurobindo from around the world are currently twisting themselves into painful contortions of outrage at perceived slights found in the largely innocent biography, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. The sad irony of the ideological battle, which scars this once-tight-knit community, is that the author, Peter Hees, has penned nothing short of an adoring hagiography. His principal sin was the ham-handed inclusion of rather lame, easily rejected, straw-man counterpoints to lend the book the veneer of even-handed objectivity. Reverence brooks no dissent – or even the implication that dissent might exist elsewhere.

This is the ultimate value of Mr. Roberts’s obnoxiously poisonous tirade. It demonstrates, by putrid example, the dishonesty and danger of selectively reducing depth and complexity to flatness and over-simplification. This is just as often a vice of those with whom we concur as those with whom we disagree, of those who admire as those who detest.

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