PARTISAN REVIEW
attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon
them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and
Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their
money away. How reliable such calculations are in the long run is
doubtful; as Gandhi himself says, "in the end deceivers deceive only
themselves"; but at any rate the gentleness with which he was nearly
always handled was due partly to the feeling that he was useful. The
British Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in
1942, he was in effect turning his non-violence against a different con–
queror.
But I could see even then that the British officials who spoke of
him with a mixture of amusement and disapproval also genuinely liked
and admired him, after a fashion. Nobody ever suggested that he was cor–
rupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuat–
ed by fear or malice. In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctive–
ly to apply high standards, so that some of his virtues have passed almost
unnoticed. For instance, it is clear even from the autobiography that his
natural physical courage was quite outstanding: the manner of his death
was a later illustration of this, for a public man who attached any value
to his own skin would have been more adequately guarded. Again, he
seems to have been quite free from that maniacal suspiciousness which,
as E. M. Forster rightly says in
A Passage to India,
is the besetting
Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice. Although no doubt he was
shrewd enough in detecting dishonesty, he seems wherever possible to
have believed that other people were acting in good faith and had a
better nature through which they could be approached. And though he
came of a poor middle-class family, started life rather unfavorably, and
was probably of unimpressive physical appearance, he was not afflicted
by envy or by the feeling of inferiority. Color feeling, when he first
met it in its worst form in South Africa, seems rather to have astonished
him. Even when he was fighting what was in effect a color war, he
did not think of people in terms of race or status. The governor of a
province, a cotton millionaire, a half-starved Dravidian cooly, a British
private soldier, were all equally human beings, to be approached in much
the same way.
It
is noticeable that even in the worst possible circum–
stances, as in South Africa when he was making himself unpopular as
the champion of the Indian community, he did not lack European
friends.
Written in short lengths for newspaper serialization, the autobio–
graphy is not a literary masterpiece, but it is the more impressive because
of the commonplaceness of much of its material.
It
is well to be re-
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