Who among the following is the author of ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’ ?

Correct — B, (b) Shahid Amin.

‘Gandhi as Mahatma’ is the work of Shahid Amin, a historian of the Subaltern Studies group. The full title of the study is ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2’, and the booklet prints the short title in italic inside single quotation marks.

The NCERT Class XII history textbook describes what the study does: ‘In a fascinating study, the historian Shahid Amin has traced the image of Mahatma Gandhi among the peasants of eastern Uttar Pradesh, as conveyed by reports and rumours in the local press. When he travelled through the region in February 1921, Gandhiji was received by adoring crowds everywhere.’

The subject of the work is not Gandhi. It is what the peasants of one district MADE of Gandhi — the stories that circulated ahead of and behind his tour, the powers attributed to him, the miracles credited to his name in the local press, and the way ordinary people fitted a distant political leader into an existing religious vocabulary. The title carries that argument in three words: the man was Gandhi, and ‘Mahatma’ was something the crowds conferred on him and understood in their own terms. Read that way, the title itself is the clue to the school of history the author belongs to.

That school is what the option set is really testing. Subaltern Studies, founded by Ranajit Guha with the first volume in 1982, set out to write the history of the Indian people from below — of peasants, workers and tribal communities as agents in their own right rather than as followers of a nationalist elite. Amin belongs to that collective and later co-edited the ninth volume of the series, in 1996, with Dipesh Chakrabarty.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)Mahadev Desai — Mahadev Desai was Gandhi’s personal secretary, and the association is exactly what makes the option tempting — the man closest to Gandhi looks like the natural author of a book with Gandhi’s name on it. But Desai was a participant and a recorder, not a historian writing about the making of a public image. His best-known contribution in this line is as the English translator of Gandhi’s autobiography, which Gandhi wrote in Gujarati. A study analysing how peasants in a particular district received and reimagined Gandhi in 1921 and 1922 belongs to a much later kind of scholarship, written at a distance from the events and out of local press reports and archives.
• (c)Louis Fischer — Louis Fischer was the American journalist who wrote ‘The Life of Mahatma Gandhi’, published in 1950. That is a biography in the conventional sense — the life of one man told from beginning to end, written for a Western readership shortly after Gandhi’s death. Its title is close enough to the one in the stem to catch a candidate who is matching on the word ‘Mahatma’ alone, which is why noticing the whole title matters. ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’ is not a life of Gandhi at all; the preposition ‘as’ signals a study of how he was perceived, and the subtitle names a district and two years rather than a lifetime.
• (d)David Arnold — David Arnold is the sharpest distractor on this list, because he is not from a different world of scholarship but from the same one. He is a British historian of modern India who co-edited the eighth volume of Subaltern Studies, in 1994, with David Hardiman, and he has also written a short study of Gandhi. So both Amin and Arnold are Subaltern Studies editors who have written on Gandhi, and a candidate who has correctly narrowed the field to that collective still has a choice to make. The particular work named in the stem — the Gorakhpur study of 1921 and 1922, tracing the image of the Mahatma among peasants through the local press — is Amin’s.

The question is really about historiography — not what happened, but who writes about it and from which vantage point. Four broad approaches to the national movement recur in examination questions, and it helps to be able to place a title in one of them.

The IMPERIALIST or Cambridge approach reads Indian nationalism as the competition of elites for the offices and patronage the colonial state had to distribute. The NATIONALIST approach reads it as a people united behind its leaders against foreign rule. The MARXIST approach reads it through class, treating the movement as led by the bourgeoisie and constrained by its interests. SUBALTERN STUDIES, founded by Ranajit Guha with the first volume in 1982, rejected the elite focus common to the first three and set out to recover the autonomous politics of the ‘subaltern’ — the peasant, the worker, the tribal, the woman — as agents rather than as followers. Its characteristic sources are police files, court records, local newspapers, rumour and song, because the people it studies left few documents of their own.

‘Gandhi as Mahatma’ is a textbook example of the method. Instead of asking what Gandhi did in eastern Uttar Pradesh in 1921, Amin asks what the peasants of Gorakhpur believed he was doing, and reconstructs it from what the local press reported and what the countryside repeated. The distance between the two — between the leader’s programme and the meanings a district attached to it — is the historical finding.

The other names on the list are worth fixing as a set, since they recur. Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary and the English translator of his Gujarati autobiography. Louis Fischer, the American journalist whose ‘The Life of Mahatma Gandhi’ appeared in 1950. David Arnold, the British historian, co-editor of the eighth Subaltern Studies volume in 1994 and author of a short study of Gandhi.

Key facts

• ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2’ was written by Shahid Amin.
• The study traces the image of Gandhi among the peasants of eastern Uttar Pradesh through reports and rumours in the local press.
• NCERT records that when Gandhi travelled through the region in February 1921 he was received by adoring crowds everywhere.
• Subaltern Studies was founded by Ranajit Guha, the first volume appearing in 1982, and Guha edited the first six volumes.
• Shahid Amin co-edited the ninth volume of Subaltern Studies, in 1996, with Dipesh Chakrabarty.
• David Arnold co-edited the eighth volume of Subaltern Studies, in 1994, with David Hardiman, and has written a short study of Gandhi.
• Mahadev Desai was Gandhi’s personal secretary and the English translator of Gandhi’s autobiography, which Gandhi wrote in Gujarati.
• Louis Fischer, an American journalist, wrote ‘The Life of Mahatma Gandhi’, published in 1950.

Common traps

• Matching on the single word ‘Mahatma’ and picking a conventional biography such as Louis Fischer’s ‘The Life of Mahatma Gandhi’.
• Assuming that a book about Gandhi must have been written by someone who knew him, which is what makes Mahadev Desai attractive.
• Stopping once the field has been narrowed to the Subaltern Studies collective. Two of the four names belong to it.
• Reading the title as a biography rather than as a study of perception. The word ‘as’ is doing the work.
• Confusing Shahid Amin with the other historians of the collective — Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman, Gyanendra Pandey.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who among the following founded the Subaltern Studies series, the first volume of which appeared in 1982 ?

  • (a)Partha Chatterjee
  • (b)Ranajit Guha
  • (c)Dipesh Chakrabarty
  • (d)Shahid Amin

  Answer(b) Ranajit Guha — he founded the series and edited its first six volumes. Chakrabarty and Amin jointly edited the ninth volume, in 1996, and Chatterjee is another historian associated with the collective.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Shahid Amin’s study ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’ examines the image of Gandhi among the peasants of which region ?

  • (a)Kheda district, Gujarat
  • (b)Champaran, Bihar
  • (c)Gorakhpur district, eastern Uttar Pradesh
  • (d)Bardoli taluka, Gujarat

  Answer(c) Gorakhpur district, eastern Uttar Pradesh — the full title of the study is ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2’, and it reconstructs the peasants’ image of Gandhi from reports and rumours in the local press.