The politics of biography: Ram Guha’s concluding Gandhi bio is a familiar exercise in deifying him, reinforcing inequality — A book review
The celebrity Indian historian’s refusal to triangulate Gandhi’s own recollections and memoirs and the sources contemporaneous to his times with more recent scholarship leaves us with a biography intellectually thin and long on anecdote. Gandhi’s uncritical internalization of the separation between the political and the social on which the book rests impoverishes Guha’s analysis of both Gandhi and his foremost intellectual and political adversaries like Jinnah and Ambedkar. In the end, an adroit strategy of guilt-by-association clears the space for Guha the moderate biographer to consolidate Gandhi’s towering place in history.
At the time of signing the Puna Pact in 1932 at Yerwada Central Prison, Pune. In Guha’s biography, Ambedkar is shown as a prickly personality who resented Gandhi’s popularity and was unwilling to kowtow to his leadership, as distinct from someone whose understanding of caste and democracy was of a different order—not degree—from most nationalists. Jinnah, on the other hand, comes across as vain, ambitious, and obstreperous rather than someone with a different vantage on nationalism from Gandhi or the Congress. Every conservative Hindu house is a South Africa (a domain of apartheid) for a poor untouchable who is still being crushed under the heels of Hindu imperialism. —Balwant Singh, An untouchable in the IAS.[efn_note] Balwant Singh, An Untouchable in the IAS (Saharanpur, n.d.) page 224-227, quoted in Gyanendra Pandey, A History of Prejudice (Cambridge University Press, 2013), page 70. … even after sixty years of constitutional and legal…
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