Mohandas Gandhi or Mahatma Gandhi is one of the most iconic figures in modern history and arguably needs little introduction. A key protagonist in the anti-imperial struggles in South Africa and India from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, his advocacy of non-violent civil disobedience and adherence to truth has influenced generations around the globe. Far from diminishing with the passage of time, as Markovits notes, “his message to the world appears uniquely relevant.”1
Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869, in Porbandar, Gujarat, on India’s western seaboard. In 1888 he left for London to train as a barrister and returned home to practice law in 1891. After an unsuccessful few years trying to establish himself professionally, he eventually relocated to the Colony of Natal in South Africa in 1893. Though Gandhi considered himself a loyal subject of the British empire, he took up the fight against racial discrimination—what he called “the disease of colour prejudice”—to support the immigrant Indian communities in the South African colonies and in the Dominion of South Africa from 1907. Though remaining a loyalist after his return to India in 1915, he came to disavow any sympathy with the British Raj, considering it “satanic,” after its failure to atone fully for the largest massacre in the history of its modern empire perpetrated in Amritsar on 13 April 1919. Over a long career, Gandhi launched numerous small and large-scale satyagrahas—truth force—campaigns against imperial and indigenous oppression and inequalities. As part of the Indian National Congress, he led three national non-co-operation and civil disobedience movements in 1920–22, 1930–34 and 1942 and was indefatigable in promoting inter alia rural economic development, social equality and communal amity. Despite enjoying immense political and personal esteem and popularity throughout his life, nevertheless Gandhi also served to divide opinion at home and overseas, a trend that has continued since his murder in 1948. He could be inconsistent and contradictory in speech and action and has been accused of social dogmatism, cultural conservatism and political naiveté.
However, through it all there was one outstanding aspect of Gandhi’s persona and praxis: his faith in, and engagement with, the press and publicity. He both made the news and was the news. Gandhi referred to himself as a “newspaperman,” edited four periodicals over his lifetime, two of which he established—Indian Opinion in South Africa (1903) and Harijan in India (1933)—and contributed regularly to several others. He was multilingual, writing fluently in English, his mother tongue, Gujarati, as well as in Hindi or Hindustani. Nevertheless, Gandhi was not universally lauded or routinely supported by the Fourth Estate. He was also prone to bouts of anger and disappointment at what he considered lies and distortions in the media, as well as accusing journalists, for instance, during 1946–47, of fomenting communal and sectarian discord.
There exist numerous works exploring this multi-faceted man and leader, and the purpose of this short edited collection is not to engage in depth with Gandhi’s life or evaluate his place in the history of modern India. What the essays aim to do is to centre-stage the media, broadly defined, and explore Gandhi in national and international settings, drawing inspiration from several disciplinary fields including history, politics, literary and religious studies, media and popular culture. The authors analyse Gandhi’s discourse and engagement with various media technologies as well as how advocacy groups, politicians, journalists, intellectuals and media organisations interpreted his rhetoric, methodology and image. The timeframe of the book extends from the late nineteenth century up to the present.
Some broad themes have emerged in this process. Chapters 2 and 6 consider Gandhi and electronic media. Amelia Bonea in Chap. 2 examines Gandhi’s interaction with the electric telegraph in South Africa during the late nineteenth century and the corresponding debate about machines and technology. Bonea argues that far from being a techno-sceptic, he had an extraordinary ability to use the telegraph as a tool for political communication, whether in the form of telegraphic petitions sent to colonial authorities, interacting with his collaborators or the perusal of telegraphic news for journalistic purposes. She also situates Gandhi’s discourse and use of telegraphy within the longue duree and a tradition of petitioning in the British empire that can be traced back to the Great Rebellion of 1857–58. The inter-war years of the twentieth century is when Gandhi strode the global stage and was transformed into an international icon. Chandrika Kaul discusses Gandhi from the late 1920s till his murder in 1948, through the prism of the media and specifically the medium of broadcasting (Chap. 6). These years were a watershed in international communications due in large part to the efflorescence of radio. Gandhi’s relationship with radio and with broadcasters, including employees of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) who came to work for All India Radio (AIR), highlights a fascinating though neglected aspect of his oeuvre. Examining both the institution and the individuals involved in broadcasting, Kaul also allocates a critical role to the American media in the Gandhi narrative. His live broadcasts are analysed against the backdrop of the entangled histories of media and imperialism under the Raj. She concludes by discussing how Gandhi’s interaction with radio evolved after Independence, and questions whether radio was the media-savvy Mahatma’s blind spot.
A significant dimension of Gandhi as a social reformer was his use of the press to champion myriad causes over his lifetime. Leprosy was one of these and it forms the subject of Chap. 3 by Sanjiv Kakar. Setting himself up as effectively a health correspondent in his papers Indian Opinion , Young India and Harijan , Gandhi took an abiding interest in new treatments and made numerous site visits to hospitals and asylums. Though there were shifts in Gandhi’s media advocacy, which evolved over time, Kakar suggests that overall it was cautious, secular and carefully constructed, reflecting the latest medical opinions and representing leprosy as a public health issue. This runs counter to a large number of studies, Kakar claims, which argue that Gandhi was unequivocally opposed to modern medicine.
Political unification and the rise of nationalism have been attributed to the impact of print which “turned each vernacular into an extensive mass medium.”2 Gandhi stressed the key role of vernacular literacy and print in the anti-imperial struggle and cultural awakening. In addition to those in English mentioned above, Gandhi also edited and contributed to journals in Gujarati and Hindi. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the role of the vernacular press as a platform for debating the Mahatma and as a means of employing his rhetoric and image for furthering their own agendas. Timothy Dobe in Chap. 4 examines the Urdu writer Khwaja Hasan Nizami’s popular writings on Gandhi, which he claims have been ignored. He focuses on the most creative of these self-published, hand-illustrated, vernacular texts, Gandhinama, situating it within Nizami’s journalistic role among leading Urdu press figures of the 1910s and 1920s such as Abul Kalam Azad. The chapter offers a literary and religious studies reading of this imagined tale of Nizami’s own future world tour that assesses Gandhi’s global, rather than only his South Asian, legacies and reputation. Dobe argues that an understanding of Nizami’s work goes beyond current scholarship by contributing particular Sufi and internationalist pan-Islamist perspectives that challenged nationalist versions of an emergent “Mahatma.” In Chap. 5, Sarvani Gooptu considers the debate over Gandhi and his ideas as conducted via journals in Bengali. She evaluates the literary discourse of leading Bengali intellectuals including women, in over forty articles and poems published in Bangabani , Bharati , Bharatvarsha, Bichitra and Prabashi , in the period 1916–40. Despite the so-called complicated relationship between Bengal and the Mahatma, Gooptu argues that a careful study of such popular literary periodicals reveals how Gandhi’s personality and his proposals for constructive nationalism through khadi and charkha had a deep impact.
The endgame of empire inevitably looms large with Chapters 7 and 8 focusing on the climactic months of 1947 but from differing perspectives. In Chap. 7, Gopa Sabharwal offers a micro-study of the coverage of Gandhi in the Dawn newspaper, owned by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, President of the Muslim League. The Dawn , published from New Delhi, presented itself as the official and only authentic voice of Muslims and was hostile to the idea of Indian nationalism as set out in the mainstream media. She argues that the portrayal of Gandhi makes for interesting reading both on account of what the paper chose to cover and for what it left out. Gandhi’s work among refugees and victims of communal violence is reported, but the Mahatma is accused of being inconsistent, unfair, partisan and a master strategist. His prayer meetings are viewed as vehicles for propaganda calculated to jeopardise Muslim interests. Anjana Sharma’s chapter is concerned with how Gandhi was fashioned, circulated and consumed during 1947 by the largely urban readers of English-language newspapers, particularly the Hindustan Times in New Delhi and the Statesman in Calcutta (Chap. 8). In the case of the former, Sharma examines how a centrist, nationalist newspaper with strong familial connections in the shape of the editor, Devdas Gandhi, historicised and represented the Mahatma. How did the Statesman , a British-owned newspaper—struggling with its own complicity with imperial power in a city that was far removed from its glory days—respond to the phenomenon that was Gandhi at a time of seismic change, violence and incendiary politics?
The final chapter, Chap. 9, offers insights into contemporary popular culture and how Gandhi’s image has become simultaneously both unique and commonplace in the twenty-first century. Mei Li Badecker, herself a young student, offers a wide selection of representations of Gandhi from graffiti and street art to the song “Venom” by American rapper Eminem and the song “Gandhi” by the Italian singer/songwriter Mannarino, to television shows such as NBC’s The Good Place and Netflix’s Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. She examines public murals in Delhi, Mumbai, New York City and Pittsburgh and offers insights into why Gandhi’s iconography helped further a particular message. Badecker contends that the way Gandhi is portrayed in popular culture, while making him accessible to a new generation across the world, nevertheless often serves also to misrepresent his actual beliefs.