Few figures in modern history have been so universally commemorated and so persistently contested as Mahatma Gandhi. His portrait adorns India’s currency, his birthday is a national holiday, and his name is invoked by admirers and detractors alike. This is now Ramachandra Guha’s fourth book with “Gandhi” in the title. Yet the reverence accorded to Gandhi has never guaranteed agreement with his ideas. Indeed, the arguments he provoked during his lifetime have proved as enduring as his achievements. In Arguments with Gandhi, Guha restores the Mahatma to the arena of intellectual contention, rescuing him both from the unquestioning devotion of his disciples and the sweeping denunciations of his critics.
Guha is particularly well-equipped for this undertaking. Having devoted two monumental volumes to Gandhi’s life, he now turns from biography to the disputes that shaped, challenged and outlived his subject. The book’s immediate inspiration was a curious incident at Delhi University in 2019, when student activists installed busts of V.D. Savarkar, Bhagat Singh and Subhas Chandra Bose together. Their ideological differences were considerable, but Guha discerned a common adversary: the absent Gandhi. Each had challenged him, albeit for profoundly different reasons. From this intriguing observation emerges a book organised around four enduring questions: violence, justice, faith and progress.
The first concerns Gandhi’s most celebrated contribution to political action: satyagraha. Guha traces its emergence in South Africa, where Gandhi transformed resistance from polite petitioning into organised civil disobedience, demanding that protesters accept suffering rather than inflict it. The distinction was revolutionary, but hardly uncontested. Marxists and militant nationalists questioned whether moral persuasion could overcome entrenched oppression. Gandhi, conversely, feared that violent means would corrupt even the noblest ends. Guha is sympathetic to this argument, while following its remarkable international afterlife through the American civil rights movement and the struggle against apartheid. Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated the possibilities of non-violent resistance; Nelson Mandela’s eventual acceptance of armed struggle exposed its limitations. The lesson is not that Gandhi supplied an infallible political formula, but that he fundamentally enlarged humanity’s repertoire of principled resistance.
The disagreements become more uncomfortable when Guha turns to social justice. Gandhi’s confrontation with Ambedkar over caste remains among the most consequential intellectual disputes in modern India. Gandhi sought to reform Hindu society by awakening the conscience of caste Hindus; Ambedkar insisted that the oppressed required enforceable rights, independent political self-representation and the dismantling of caste itself. Their confrontation over separate electorates, culminating in Ambedkar’s conceding to the Poona Pact of 1932, revealed differences that no sentimental invocation of national unity can erase. Guha acknowledges Gandhi’s gradual movement towards more radical positions, while recognising how profoundly Ambedkar’s criticism helped propel that evolution. The two men were not merely proposing different remedies; they disagreed over the nature of the disease.
Guha applies comparable scrutiny to Gandhi’s attitudes towards women and race. Gandhi mobilised women politically and challenged oppressive social customs, yet retained patriarchal assumptions, particularly concerning sexuality and women’s domestic responsibilities. His early remarks about Black Africans were undeniably prejudiced, notwithstanding his subsequent movement towards a more inclusive understanding of racial equality. Guha neither suppresses these uncomfortable facts nor permits them to exhaust his judgement. This is among the book’s strengths, though it raises a question worth pursuing: does a reformer’s eventual enlightenment diminish the significance of those whose criticisms made that enlightenment necessary? Gandhi’s capacity for change deserves recognition, but so does the moral clarity of his critics.
On religious pluralism, however, Gandhi’s convictions proved remarkably steadfast. Guha illuminates the fundamental incompatibility between Gandhi’s inclusive understanding of Hinduism and Savarkar’s conception of Hindutva, which privileged religious identity in defining national belonging. Gandhi’s faith was profound without being exclusionary; his India belonged equally to citizens of every religion. Partition represented a devastating defeat for his aspirations, but not an abandonment of his principles. His final fasts, his defence of vulnerable Muslims and ultimately his assassination revealed the extraordinary personal cost of that commitment. Guha’s treatment is especially compelling because he recognises that Gandhi’s political failure does not necessarily invalidate his moral argument. Indeed, the continuing contest over India’s religious identity makes that argument impossible to consign to history.
Perhaps the book’s most unexpectedly contemporary discussion concerns Gandhi’s suspicion of industrial civilisation. His advocacy of village industries, economic self-sufficiency and restraint in consumption can appear hopelessly inadequate to the requirements of a modern, populous nation. Guha does not disguise these limitations, nor does he advocate a wholesale return to Gandhian economics. Indeed, he dismisses Hind Swaraj as practically useless as a guide to environmentalism, locating Gandhi’s ecological insights instead in his later writings and practices. Climate change, environmental degradation and the exhaustion of natural resources have lent renewed force to questions once dismissed as the eccentricities of an opponent of modernity. Gandhi may have misunderstood the indispensable benefits of industrialisation without being entirely mistaken about its costs.
Guha’s achievement lies in making these disputes illuminate one another. His formidable scholarship is deployed not to establish Gandhi’s infallibility, but to reveal an intellect repeatedly tested by opponents, circumstances and its own contradictions. Guha is unsparing in acknowledging Gandhi’s earlier prejudices, though his sympathy for Gandhi’s subsequent evolution raises the question of how much weight those prejudices should carry in our final judgement. Similarly, while he engages seriously with the arguments for violent resistance, his defence of non-violence cannot entirely resolve the dilemmas faced by those confronting regimes impervious to moral persuasion. (I had the great privilege of having a detailed conversation with Nelson Mandela himself soon after he relinquished the presidency, at which he made it clear to me that he found Gandhi’s approach less relevant to his struggle than Nehru’s). These reservations do not diminish Guha’s achievement; rather, they underscore the complexity of the questions he has so skilfully brought to life.
The result is a work that is at once historical and contemporary. Gandhi emerges neither as an immaculate saint nor as an irredeemable fount of outdated predilections and prejudices, but as a courageous political and moral thinker whose significance survives his mistakes.
Guha reminds us that intellectual legacies are not preserved by insulating them from criticism. They endure because succeeding generations find them worth disputing. Nearly eight decades after his death, the most fitting tribute to Gandhi may well be to continue the argument.
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(Shashi Tharoor is an author, politician and former international diplomat)
