Monthly Archives: November 2008

by | 9 November 2008 · 12:04 pm

Gandhi: Obstacle to National Independence?

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 96-97:

But probably the most surprising obstacle to Indian independence was the man who was widely supposed to be leading the campaign for it: Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi’s need for spotless moral perfection hamstrung his party’s progress. His principal object was to make the Indian people worthy of freedom in the eyes of God. The object of actually achieving freedom from the British was secondary. Gandhi’s most influential work, Hind swaraj, published in 1908, set out very clearly his point of view: that European civilization was corrupt, atheist and destructive, but that merely driving the British out of India would not serve to make India free. To be free, Indians needed to relinquish violence, material possessions, machinery, railways, lawyers, doctors, formal education, the English language, discord between Hindu and Muslim, alcohol and sex. It is for this reason that his campaigns so often faltered. Gandhi stood for virtue in a form purer than politics usually allows. Whenever he had to make a choice between virtue and politics, he always chose virtue. He strove for universal piety, continence and humility, regardless of the consequences. Even if a person were faced with death, or a group with obliteration, he would sanction no compromise of moral integrity. It is impossible to assess how the Indian nationalist struggle might have proceeded without Gandhi, but there are ample grounds for thinking that a more earthly campaign led by a united Congress, perhaps under the joint leadership of Motilal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, could have brought dominion status to India in the 1920s. Gandhi ‘s spiritual style of leadership was a source of inspiration to millions, but, politically speaking, it was erratic. Within Congress, too, it created divisions. Congress was not a church, and Gandhi’s mystical judgments were often difficult even for his closest followers to accept.

1 Comment

Filed under India, nationalism, religion

by | 9 November 2008 · 11:25 am

Gandhi: Too Saintly for the Good of Others?

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 40-41:

Few political figures have been so widely misunderstood as Gandhi, in his own time or today. He emerged at a time when monarchies were falling and communism loomed; he was contemporary with Lenin. To many listeners, aware of the march of events in Russia, Gandhi’s speech sounded like a rallying cry to Indian socialism, with its talk of the casting off of jewels and the power of the workers. This was, indeed, the reason that young radicals like Jawahar [Nehru] were so attracted to him. But a closer examination of Gandhi’s words reveals something different, and much more profoundly religious. He had confronted the moral behavior of society, not its structure. Gandhi called for the princes to stop wearing their finery and instead “hold it in trust” for their subjects. This is not the same thing at all as telling the masses to rise up and seize it. Gandhi was not challenging the princes’ right to hold wealth, nor even their right to reign. He was asking for a change of heart.

Gandhi’s condemnation of princely luxury was part of a much broader preoccupation with returning India to what he supposed had been a prehistoric “golden age” of godliness, simplicity and humility. He had begun to reject Western ideals of progress and technology, and insisted that India’s future lay in a return to simple village life, not industrialization. As a symbol of this, he adopted hand-spinning on a wooden wheel and used only khadi—hand-spun—textiles. He developed a distaste for the synthesized drugs and surgery which he associated with Western medicine, describing them as “black magic.” Doctors, he believed, “violate our religious instinct” by prioritizing the body over the mind and curing diseases that people had deserved by their conduct. Lawyers, meanwhile, had propped up British rule by espousing British law and were like “leeches” on the people, their profession “just as degrading as prostitution.”

This position had fueled continual conflict in his own family life. Unsurprisingly, he was far from supportive of his sons’ ambitions to pursue careers in medicine or law. “I know too that you have sometimes felt that your education was being neglected,” Mohandas wrote to his third son, Manilal. But, he contended, “education does not mean a knowledge of letters but it means character building. It means a knowledge of duty.” His eldest son, Harilal, fared worse. After Mohandas denied him a legal scholarship to London, he ran away from home, married a woman without his father’s consent, was disinherited and ended up unemployed, destitute and bitter. When Manilal tried to lend Harilal money, Mohandas was so furious that he banished Manilal from his presence for a year. Manilal ended up homeless, sleeping on a beach.

It is not easy being a saint, and it is perhaps even less so to live with one. “All of us brothers have been treated as a ringmaster would treat his trained animals,” Harilal wrote to his father in the course of a twelve-page letter deploring Mohandas’s treatment of his wife and sons. And yet, to a wider audience beyond his immediate family, Gandhi’s charisma, determination and fearlessness were inspiring.

Leave a comment

Filed under democracy, economics, education, India, religion

by | 7 November 2008 · 5:33 pm

Cho “Gandhi” Man Sik vs. Kim “Stalin” Il Sung, 1945-?

From: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam (Hyperion, 2007), pp. 78-79:

KIM MIGHT BE their man, but he was quite an unfinished politician, and he cut a disappointing figure to those Koreans who hungered for someone with more obvious credentials to lead them, and did not want any foreign power, no matter how welcome initially for replacing the Japanese, to bestow a leader on them. The Russians apparently chose to unveil Kim Il Sung first at a small dinner party held at a Pyongyang restaurant in early October 1945. Kim was, one Russian general told the assemblage, a great Korean patriot who had fought valiantly against the Japanese. Among others attending was the far better known Cho Man Sik, a nonviolent nationalist, known as the Gandhi of Korea. Aware of just how vulnerable he was, Cho was moving as deftly as he could in a political situation that, once again, the Koreans themselves did not control. He appeared at the dinner as a show of accommodation to the Russians. Part of his job was to welcome Kim. Though he was a figure with a far larger constituency, Cho arrived—in Russian eyes—with too much baggage from the past and was not ideologically trustworthy to the newest occupiers of Korea. Bourgeois nationalist was the category the Russians put him into, and it was not an enviable pigeonhole. A bourgeois nationalist was someone who did not understand that all the important decisions were going to be made in Moscow. Perhaps if he had played it right and been genuinely subservient, Cho might have had some brief value to them as a figurehead at the top, carefully isolated from the real levers of power. But as an independent politician, Cho had no chance. General Terenti Shtykov, Stalin’s man on location, the Tsar of Korea as he was then known in Pyongyang, thought Cho too anti-Soviet and anti-Stalin, and reported as much to Moscow.

The dinner in early October was hardly a success. The other Korean politicians present were underwhelmed by Kim’s youth and lack of grace. The more crucial introduction—the public one—came in mid-October, at a mass rally in the Northern capital, and the day proved something of a disappointment to a large crowd eager for the introduction of an important Korean nationalist. The people had apparently expected to see and hear a venerable leader, who had served their cause for many years, and who would reflect their own passion for a country now officially free from foreign domination. But it was a Russian show. Kim spoke flatly, in a monotone, in words written by the Russians, and what the crowd heard was a young, rather inarticulate politician with a “plain, duck-like voice.” One witness thought his suit too small and his haircut too much like that of “a Chinese waiter.” But what really bothered many in the crowd was his adulation of Stalin and the Soviet Union. All praise went to the mighty and wondrous Red Army. Here they were, hoping for distinctly Korean words of freedom, and his words were reflecting a new kind of political obedience, Korean words bent to Russian needs, too much of “the monotonous repetitions which had [already] worn the people out.” There are two very different photos, each of which tells its own truth about that occasion. In the first, Kim, looking young and anxious, is flanked by at least three senior Soviet generals; in the second, doctored version, produced later as Kim was re-creating his own mythic story, one of greater personal independence, he is on the same podium, the angle is slightly different, and the three Russian generals have magically disappeared. Cho Man Sik’s days were already numbered. By early 1946 he had disagreed with the Russians on a number of things important to a Korean nationalist, and had thus become in their eyes even more of a reactionary. General Shtykov had sought and gotten Stalin’s permission to purge him. Soon after, he was put under what was ever so gently called protective custody, in a hotel in Pyongyang. No one was allowed to see him. In fact, no one ever saw him again.

India’s Gandhi would certainly have had a rather different career trajectory if he had been up against Stalin.

Leave a comment

Filed under Korea, nationalism, USSR, war

by | 5 November 2008 · 9:10 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Hodohodo, Czechia, Kanakysaurus

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal about a “shocking” new slacker attitude among Japanese workers referred to such workers as the hodohodo-zoku ‘so-so folks’. By itself, the word hodo (程) translates into ‘degree, limit, distance, status, amount’, and its reduplication, 程程, suggests ‘moderation’ or ‘judiciousness’. Grammatically, hodohodo behaves like an ideophone, but then ideophones in Japanese generally behave like nouns. To make it into a verb, you have to add -suru ‘do, be’, to make it into an adverbial you add the postposition ni, and so on. But I suspect hodohodo fails one test for onomatopoeic ideophones in Japanese: the ability to occur before -to ‘with’, in the equivalent of English ‘with a [plop-plop, fizz-fizz, etc.]’. I await correction from Matt of No-sword.

Last weekend, I also had the opportunity to meet a scholar visiting from the Czech Republic, who repeatedly referred to her nation as Czechia—a most sensible formulation which I subsequently found to have had official sanction since 1993 (along with Česko, the Czech equivalent), but which seems to be very slow to spread among English speakers, who perhaps still feel guilty about agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia in 1938 and want to compensate by resisting any attempt to shorten the fuller form of its current name. However, feeling no guilt on that score despite my English heritage, I henceforth resolve to refer to that glorious center of historic dissidence as Czechia, plain and simple. In fact, I’ve just added Czechia to my list of country categories for this blog. I had already added Bohemia before, but that does no justice to Moravia, which has, if anything, an even greater tradition of religious dissidence.

Finally, I see that the latest issue of Pacific Science (vol. 63, no. 1, 2009, but already online at BioOne) reports the discovery of a new species of a lizard genus indigenous to New Caledonia, a viviparous skink genus with the wonderfully appropriate name, Kanakysaurus.

1 Comment

Filed under Czechia, Japan, language, nationalism, Pacific, scholarship, science

by | 1 November 2008 · 8:22 am

Hindustani for British Royalty, 1921

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 58-59:

On 26 October 1921, Dickie [Mountbatten] and David [Windsor] left Portsmouth on the battle cruiser HMS Renown. On 12 November, they came ashore at Aden on the south coast of Arabia, the westernmost British colony ruled from Delhi. The pair of them drove past large gatherings of black spectators hemmed in by the occasional white man in a pith helmet. Union Jacks fluttered in the sky, and a huge banner was unfurled. It addressed the Prince of Wales with a loyal exhortation: “Tell Daddy we are all happy under British rule.” And it was from this acceptably loyal outpost of his future empire that David embarked finally for the Jewel itself….

The prince’s itinerary had been planned according to long-established royal tradition. He was to progress around India attending interminable parties, opening buildings, killing as much wildlife as possible and only interacting with the common people by waving at them from a parade. The sentiments of the royal party were made plain in the booklet of Hindustani phrases produced by Dickie and Sir Geoffrey de Montmorency and circulated on board HMS Renown. It comprised a list of basic numbers and verbs, plus a few everyday expressions. These included:

    Ghoosul teeyar kurro—Make ready the bath
    Yeh boot sarf kurro—Make clean these boots
    Peg do—Give me a whisky and soda
    Ghora lao—Bring round the horse
    Yeh miler hai; leyjao—This is dirty; take it away
    Tum Kootch Angrezi bolte hai?—Do you speak any English?
    Mai neigh sumujhta—I don’t understand

The words for please and thank you are nowhere to be found.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, India, language

by | 1 November 2008 · 7:26 am

Rebranding British Royalty, 1914-1917

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 43-45:

ON 28 JUNE 1914, AN AUSTRIAN ARCHDUKE AND HIS WIFE were shot in Sarajevo by a nineteen-year-old terrorist. Assassinations were not unusual at the time. Victims in recent years had included the presidents of Mexico, France and the United States, the empresses of Korea and Austria, a Persian shah and the kings of Italy, Greece and Serbia. Portugal had two kings assassinated on the same day in 1908. But the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would swiftly assume its legendary status as the trigger for the Great War. Swift to feel its tremors was the fourteen-year-old great-grandson of Queen Victoria, His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg….

Four months to the day after Franz Ferdinand’s death, the elder Prince Louis of Battenberg was removed from his position as First Sea Lord. Prince Louis had been British since 1868 and had served in the Royal Navy since he was fourteen years old. But by October 1914 Britain was at war with Germany, and there were far too many Germans visible in high places. For King George V, of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the public tide of anti-German feeling was alarming. He was largely German; his wife, the former Princess May of Teck, was wholly German; his recently deceased father, King Edward VII, had even spoken English with a strong German accent. It was uncomfortably obvious where all this might lead, and a high-profile sacrifice was required to satisfy the public. Prince Louis was at the top of the list.

And so the king and his First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, agreed to throw one of their most senior military experts onto the pyre at the beginning of the war, because his name was foreign….

But the humiliation of the Battenbergs was not complete. On 17 July 1917, a mass rebranding of royalty was ordered by George V. The king led by example this time, dropping Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (which was, in any case, a title — nobody knew what his surname was, though they suspected without enthusiasm that it might be Wettin or Wipper), and adopting the British-sounding Windsor. Much against their will, the rest of the in-laws were de-Germanized. Prince Alexander of Battenberg became the Marquess of Carisbrooke; Prince Alexander of Teck became the Earl of Athlone; Adolphus, Duke of Teck, became the Marquess of Cambridge. The unfortunate princesses of Schleswig-Holstein were demoted, in the king’s words, to “Helena Victoria and Marie Louise of Nothing.” And the unemployed Prince Louis of Battenberg would be Louis Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven…. Henceforth, Prince Louis would be a marquess, and Battenberg a cake.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Europe, Germany, language, nationalism, war