Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age | Arthur Herman | Interesting for another reason

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Gandhi & Churchill...

	Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age Arthur Herman Bantam, 2008 - 736 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In this fascinating and meticulously researched book, bestselling historian Arthur Herman sheds new light on two of the most universally recognizable icons of the twentieth century, and reveals how their forty-year rivalry sealed the fate of India and the British Empire.

They were born worlds apart: Winston Churchill to Britain?s most glamorous aristocratic family, Mohandas Gandhi to a pious middle-class household in a provincial town in India. Yet Arthur Herman reveals how their lives and careers became intertwined as the twentieth century unfolded. Both men would go on to lead their nations through harrowing trials and two world wars?and become locked in a fierce contest of wills that would decide the fate of countries, continents, and ultimately an empire.

Gandhi & Churchill reveals how both men were more alike than different, and yet became bitter enemies over the future of India, a land of 250 million people with 147 languages and dialects and 15 distinct religions?the jewel in the crown of Britain?s overseas empire for 200 years.

Over the course of a long career, Churchill would do whatever was necessary to ensure that India remain British?including a fateful redrawing of the entire map of the Middle East and even risking his alliance with the United States during World War Two.

Mohandas Gandhi, by contrast, would dedicate his life to India?s liberation, defy death and imprisonment, and create an entirely new kind of political movement: satyagraha, or civil disobedience. His campaigns of nonviolence in defiance of Churchill and the British, including his famous Salt March, would become the blueprint not only for the independence of India but for the civil rights movement in the U.S. and struggles for freedom across the world.

Now master storyteller Arthur Herman cuts through the legends and myths about these two powerful, charismatic figures and reveals their flaws as well as their strengths. The result is a sweeping epic of empire and insurrection, war and political intrigue, with a fascinating supporting cast, including General Kitchener, Rabindranath Tagore, Franklin Roosevelt, Lord Mountbatten, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. It is also a brilliant narrative parable of two men whose great successes were always haunted by personal failure, and whose final moments of triumph were overshadowed by the loss of what they held most dear.

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"An Epic That Must Be Read"

"Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age", Arthur Herman, Bantam Books, NY 2008. ISBN 978-0-553-80463-8, HC 609/722. Notes 50 pgs., Ref., 12 pgs., Index 34 pgs., Glossary 3 pgs., Dates 3 pgs., 9 ¼" x 6 ¼". Inveiglements include 35 glossy B/W photos and 3 schema maps of Africa & India.

This detailed, lengthy chronicle, thoughtfully divided into 31 chapters, is brilliantly written in fast-moving style by best-selling author Arthur Herman. It's a narrative journal about two legendary worldly figures - Gandhi and Churchill whose lives and life forces entwined as both struggled relentlessly against one another, ...so much sound and fury wont to evoke primal screams of differing secular humanisms. We learn about their early years, of their accomplices or sidekicks, of their rise in worldly stature via victories and losses, where sophistication can be triumphed by naivety, and where melancholy necessitates time out, and about a blood-bath too frequently skipped over unequalled in history.

We generally think of fiction as attention-getting and if its really good, something hard to put down -- but this is so true of Herman's book, which is basically recent history - much of which most of us likely experienced dispassionately, unless we served overseas in military combat.

Did you ever think reading history could be exciting, that experiencing history as it is written and told is all but invariably propagandized whereby accounts by third parties sounds distantly foreign but can be verified by reliable sources? Well, "Gandhi & Churchill" is a tremendous read and you'll wonder why so much passed you by - you'll discover the personages in detail and understand better why Rommel and British Army were in Africa, of the racial-ethnic caste mix in India, of India's division into Bangledesh, Pakistan and India, locations Japanese invaded India, parental forces which drove Churchill, whether Winston truly drank whiskey in the morning, and if Gandhi enjoyed sex? and what he really died from - and so much, much more.

Author Herman could have written separate books on these two personages, but combining them was grandiose. Do not miss this book!

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Interesting for another reason

Most people will read "Gandhi and Churchill" for the author's detailed study of how the two men compared and contrasted with each other. Remember the exam papers that asked you to compare and contrast two historical periods or two--whatever? Arthur Herman uses the compare and contrast framework to anchor his view that under the skin, Gandhi and Churchill were more alike than you would expect if you put the skinny, bare-chested man and his rotund, English-dressed adversary side by side. Both men were products of the Victorian Age. Both highly esteemed the "manly" virtues. Both were ruthless on occasion. And both, more often than we like to think, could be wrong, even disastrously wrong. To add to the mix, both men's lives had a series of successes and failures.

For many decades Gandhi and Churchill (but they were not the only players, as the author makes clear in great detail) struggled over what India was and what India would become. In the end, according to Herman, neither man's vision prevailed.

This is a very critical dual portrait, not easy on either man, and if both emerge, from time to time, as large sized, it is not because the author intends to spare them. On occasionI found myself wrestling with the author's judgments, not completely satisfied with the interpretations, not sure that there isn't more to be said on one side or the other. Interpretive histories can be more or less persuasive, and I found this one very useful, with lots of new information, but--well, we are allowed to reserve judgment. The author seems to suggest that each man, in his own way, scuttled the possibility of a united India containing Hindus and Moslems together, an India emerging without the birth pangs of massacre and attrocity. He almost seems to be saying that absent these men the bloodbaths would have or could have been avoided. Maybe.

However, the book is interesting for another quite unexpected reason: its portrait of what happened in and around India during the Second World War. My guess is most Americans think of WWll in terms of the blitzkreig in Europe, men and machinery trudging in the snow in endless areas of Russia, naval battles in the Pacific, with some fierce island-hopping fighting going on as you got closer to Japan. Sure there was something called "over the hump" and of course Singapore fell, and something should be said about Burma, but that part is hazy. For those not aware how deeply and intimately India and Indian soldiers were involved in the war, this book is something of a revelation. For that reason alone some readers might well want to pick up the book quite aside from the book's two-peas-in-a-pod argument.

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Good on facts but poor on repercussions

This is a fascinating account of the relationship between India and Britain for the first half of the twentieth century through the lives of these two countries greatest men. However, it failed to hit the mark in terms of truly explaining Gandhi's role in India's independence and on Indian psyche and also Churchill's imperialist legacy in our modern world.

The author has certainly done a good job in reconstructing the trials and tribulations of both men. He has proved without doubt that these men were built of extraordinary stuff. I think this is the best part of the book. Now, where the book falls short is in its attempt to analyze the repercussions of their lives.

It is definitely true that all of Gandhi's satyagraha movements eventually fizzled out without any apparent gain, or resulted in uncontrolled mob violence. But one can't really infer from these that Gandhi's message of ahimsa (non-violence) was lost on the Indian public, and that it was the threat of violence rather than non-violence which forced the British to leave India.

What the author failed to understand, even though he presented all the necessary evidence, was that Gandhi united a wide segment of India's society behind the Independence movement which earlier had been the monopoly of the elites in India's society. It was this mass mobilization which got stronger over time even after every failed satyagraha that eventually forced the British to leave.

Also, it is incorrect to state that the message of non-violence didn't leave its mark on the Indian public. It is definitely true that India erupted into mass communal violence in 1947, and even to the present day similar violence is quite common. However, at the same time there is a very strong under-current of non-violent civil disobedience in modern Indian politics. For example, when Indira Gandhi and her son attempted to grab power unlawfully, they were forced out of power by large-scale non-violent protests. More recently, similar public action has become common-place in deciding various political issues.

The British didn't leave India simply because they were afraid of violence in 1946. After all they had weathered a lot more violence in the prior century. What was different in 1946 was that the British belief of racial superiority had vanished and with it any justification for ruling India. Now, the author does talk about this change in British beliefs, but he doesn't go into its reasons. It was surprising that even though the author presented a lot of evidence of Gandhi's strong image in the west, almost fairy-tale like, he failed to draw a connection between this and the changed racial perceptions in Britain.

Finally, on the matter of Churchill, the author conveniently sweeps under the rug his misadventures in Iran. As has been written in other prominent historical works, Churchill tried unsuccessfully to force a coup in Iran, and then instigated Eisenhower to have the CIA do the dirty job. This was America's first real taste of imperialism and it was really taken up by Kissinger in his many coups and guerrilla wars in the Latin American countries. Churchill essentially handed the torch of imperialism to the Americans. Of course, we can all feel the repercussions of this legacy in the form of Islamic terrorism and Hugo Chavez.

Still, despite its shortcomings in understanding the significance of its subject, I have given the book 4 stars because its very readable history.

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Churchill, the racist and imperialist and Gadhi, the humanist

I know that Churchill has been voted the man of century (20th century) and the savior of western civilization. All this may be true but it is also true-and this book confirms it-that he was a racist and an imperialist of the first order. He did not think that the oriental races,as he called them, were capable of self-governance. His attitude seems somewhat similar to American slave owners. The author tries to draw parallels between lives and goals of Churchill and Gandhi. Parallels that do not always work. Churchill called Gandhi names-naked fakir of India-and wanted him shot but Gandhi never once reciprocated. That itself shows to some extent who was the bigger man. Mr. Herman also has some poppy-cock notions about Mountbatten and Nehru conspiring to partition India-mostly to the advantage of India and depriving Pakistan of Kashmir. The only evidence he offers is a book by Andrew Roberts I am not familiar with. He insinuates that Mountbatten collaborated with Nehru because Nehru was a fellow socialist having an affair with Edwina. I think Mountbatten was more likely to murder Nehru if he indeed suspected him of having an affair with his wife. Perhaps, Mr. Herman's dislike for socialists is so great that he is inspired to write utter nonsense. Mr. Jinnah, contrary to all accounts that I have read, is portrayed as a reluctant convert to partition after arm-twisting by Mr. Churchill. What a fantasy Mr. Herman has created!

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Herman's whitewashing of the British record on famine

Ignore my rating--I didn't want to rate the entire book, but comment on one aspect of it that bothered me--the astonishingly benign attitude the author displays towards the record of famine under British rule during the late 1800's. That, of course, is not the subject of the book, but he does touch on it as he must.

First, I am comparing Herman's account to that of Mike Davis in "Late Victorian Holocausts". Davis paints a convincing and harrowing portrait of British callousness and blind adherence to free market ideology that led to the deaths of millions of Indians, first in the famines of the late 70's and then again 20 years later.

How does Mr. Herman treat these two famines? On page 32, he mentions the 70's famine in a few sentences, and then tells us that Lord Lytton, "conscientious and hardworking", "set in motion a famine program that would, with only a single exception, prevent another major outbreak for nearly seventy years." If you've read Davis, that summary will leave you speechless. Lord Lytton's policies during the 70's famine helped kill millions of people, and that "single exception" that Mr. Herman mentions, the famine 20 years later, killed millions more. Both were comparable in scale to what happened under Stalin in the 30's. Later, on page 66, Mr. Herman speaks approvingly of British famine relief policies.

I am no expert on India or famines, but Amartya Sen, who does know something about the subject, endorsed the accuracy of Mr. Davis's account in his review in the NYT. So assuming they are correct, Mr. Herman's version of events is shockingly inaccurate.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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