Nobuko Nagasaki, Gandhi \Han-Kindai no

Transcription

1 138 Review Article Writing Gandhi: Nobuko Nagasaki, Gandhi \Han-Kindai no Jikken (in Japanese) [Gandhi: An Experiment in Anti-Modernity] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996) Chiharu Takenaka I Who was Gandhi? Was he a saint? An influential religious leader? A wise political organizer of mass demonstrations? A powerful Indian nationalist? Simple questions, but hard to answer, especially if we attempt to reach beyond the stereotyped image of 'Gandhi.' In Indian historiography, the interwar era of nationalist movements has been called the Gandhian era. Certainly, it is impossible to write the last phase of the history of British India without mentioning the name of Gandhi. Gandhi led a nation-wide civil disobedience movement and remained one of the most influential leaders in the Indian National Congress. It is, therefore, natural to call him a nationally popular leader in India; he was, however, much more. Ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha (literally, to grasp the force of truth, and used to mean civil disobedience) are both fundamental ideas of so-called Gandhian philosophy, and have exerted a great impact on citizens' movements in this century, not only in India but throughout the world. It is the common understanding that those ideas are rooted in the religious traditions of India, which Gandhi reinterpreted in his unique way. He dressed like a sadhu (a Hindu holyman), rejected luxurious western goods, and lived in his ashram (spiritual community) with his followers. He spoke and behaved like a Chiharu Takenaka, Meiji Gakuin University.

2 Review Article 139 rather than a westernized lawyer. But, why? In the hundreds of studies on Gandhi and Gandhi-related issues, Gandhi, who lived from 1869 to 1948, appears to have had multiple personalities, depending on the interests, methods or disciplines of the authors. Though we have many `Gandhis,' we do not know who he was. Nobuko Nagasaki, a leading Japanese authority on Indian history, has challenged this Himalayan tackle in her new biography, Gandhi: An Experiment in Anti-Modernity. In this article, I would like to do two things: review Nagasaki's book and inquire both into the relevance of Gan- present state of Gandhi studies and the contemporary dhian ideas and practice. In the introductory part, Nagasaki discusses Gandhi's rejection of materialism and his control of physical desires, and proceeds to question why Gandhi did that. What was his idea? His purpose? India has been washed by the wave of a liberalizing economy in the 1990s, which makes a Gandhian retrospective all the more imperative.1) Nagasaki uses the first two chapters, the 'Birth of Gandhi' and the `Establishment of Satyagraha in South Africa' to describe the life of Gandhi in a biographical format. She argues strongly that the syncretistic religious environment surrounding the young Gandhi was the origin of Gandhian tolerance. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born and brought up in a Hindu baniya (a merchant caste) family, with a father who served a small princely state and a mother who earnestly performed religious duties. Gandhi learned the ideas of non-violence and strict vegetarianism from his mother. He lived in a neighborhood where Hindus and Muslims lived together. The problem in writing about the young Gandhi is that we tend to rely heavily on his Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, published in 1927, written when he was in his late fifties. This autobiography might well have been entitled How I Became a Leader of Civil Disobedience and an Indian Nationalist. The boy in Porbandar, Gujarat, the young anxious Indian student in London, the unsuccessful lawyer in Bombay, and later the lawyer fighting for Indian immigrants in South Africa-he was all of these. Ignorant and parochial Mohandas encountered many people, books and events

3 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 11, 1999 through which he learned about the problems of the world, discovered India in himself, and became the thoughtful and universal Mahatma (great soul). As a scholar of Indian nationalism, Nagasaki is not satisfied with a simple biography. Chapter 3, 'Colonization of India,' and chapter 4, `Establishment of the Indian National Congress,' explain the political and economic conditions which underlay Gandhi's ideas and Gandhian movements. Chapter 5, 'Hind Swaraj Gandhi's Plan for Indian Independence,' is the cornerstone that offers an integral and continuous understanding of Gandhi's life. Nagasaki focuses on Gandhi's political pamphlet, entitled Hind Swaraj, published in 1910 in English, as the text that shaped his ideas not only on the nationhood of India, but also on modern civilization.2) Hind Swaraj was called Gandhi's Sermon on the Sea, because he wrote it aboard a ship from England to South Africa and because it was reminiscent of the Christ's Sermon on the Mount.3) Although Gandhi's writings are numerous, he left few well-structured essays on Indian independence, and Hind Swaraj is exceptional in its logical integrity and clarity. Students of civil disobedience and Indian nationalism have treated Hind Swaraj as a bible of Gandhian philosophy. Recent editions of selected works of Mahatma Gandhi also place Hind Swaraj at the center of Gandhian thought.4) In his article, 'Gandhi as a Critique of Civil Society,' for example, Partha Chatterjee referred to Hind Swaraj as a book which condensed Gandhian ideas on modern civilization and non-violent civil disobedience.51 He is careful, though, to mention that Gandhi revised his original ideas to adjust them to his later development. Nevertheless, there might be the danger of assuming an unchanging truth of Gandhian ideas in Hind Swaraj, for, according to many scholarly works, it seems as if Gandhi and Gandhian ideas stopped growing and changing after its publica tion. I will come back to this point later. The rest of Nagasaki's Gandhi covers Gandhian leadership and experiments in chronological order. The turning point was , when the Gandhian era started in India. Gandhi intervened in a rural dispute caused by a peasants' revolt in Champaran; he solved a labor dispute in Ahmedabad; and he led civil disobedience among peasants

4 in Kheda. Nagasaki characterizes those movements as 'Gandhian models,' for as a result of them, Gandhi became one of the most important popular leaders in India. In becoming the Mahatma he inevitably lost his private life. Writing about Gandhi, therefore, became more or less equivalent to writing about the development of Indian nationalism. Gandhi, the modern prophet, is a public figure whose activities have been recorded in various forms. He was a historical figure, not one beyond the human realm. The elder Gandhi, as he appears in the latter half of Nagasaki's book, was public enough to be recorded in many materials, unlike the young private Gandhi of the earlier chapters. It is much easier to trace what he did place by place, day by day, or even hour by hour, than to trace the lives of ordinary people who draw no public attention to themselves, and so remain unrecorded. One hundred volumes of The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi [hereafter, CWMG] have been published by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the Government of India. We have numerous memoirs, letters and other modes of writing left by his friends, followers and enemies, both published and unpublished. Documents, such as the political files of the Government of India, judicial documents and the papers of the Indian National Congress, have been deposited in archives and libraries both in India and the U.K. Newspapers and magazines of Gandhi's time reported his speeches and activities. Such a surplus of material, however, still left a Gandhi that was idealized, symbolized, simplified, and stereotyped. The documents edited in the CWMG leaves a picture of Gandhi as an efficient and practical leader, not a man confused with human dilemma. He sent letters giving orders to local leaders, gave advice to friends and young activists, argued with influential politicians and British officials, prepared speeches and articles, and traveled by train or on foot to attend meetings. Let us recall then Oscar-winning British film, Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough, which used detailed documentation. It saw Gandhi as a great leader, who thought rationally, worked energetically and walked fast, just as Attenborough's other film, Cry Freedom, visual-

5 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 11, 1999 ized Steve Biko, the powerful anti-apartheid leader in South Africa. Attenborough drew the attention of his audience to the life of the wellknown Great Soul, but not to anything that complicates or juxtaposes upon that image of his life. Public expectations about the Mahatma are so strong that stories which contradict that image have no place. Fragmentary records are arranged to match the main story-line, and, as a result, anecdotes are buried in footnotes. Interesting episodes that tell the other side of the Mahatma will never challenge the story of the Great Soul. Shahid Amin gives us a good example of 'an imaginative crafting of the figure of Mahatma Gandhi' in the discourse of discipline. When Gandhi went to Gorakhpur, Eastern U.P., in February 1921, he saw a shivering boy who wanted to have darshan (ritualized viewing of a god or a god-like person) of the Mahatma at the station. When Gandhi came to know that a high-caste woman refused a wrapper for the poor lad, he completely lost his temper, beat his forehead thrice in anger and frightened the people into leaving him alone. There was a local rumor that 'shit [sic] was raining all over the house of that mean, anti-gandhian woman, and only when she kept a fast and did ritual praying to the Mahatma did peace finally return to her.' Some documents in the CWMG legitimized this sudden anger of Gandhi. Even his burst of temper and odd behavior, witnessed by many people, could not be written as they were. Rather, they were made to contribute to a discourse of the adoration of the Mahatma and to provide moral lessons for ordinary people.6) Sometime last year, I was reading an article written by Salman Rushdie on Gandhi, fifty years after Indian independence (Time, April 13, 1998),7) with a few students in a seminar at the Tokyo University of Foreign Languages. Many famous pictures of Gandhi were reprinted there. One of the students asked, 'When did he shave his mustache, take off a western suit and put on this Indian white gown?' A good question. In 1910, when he published Hind Swaraj, Gandhi still looked like a westernized Indian lawyer in a dark suit with a neat mustache. He still looked like that when, in 1912, he was photographed with Gokhare,

6 Review Article 143 the great moderate Congress leader, who was visiting South Africa. Though he had already started the Tolstoy Farm, his outlook represented a typical colored colonial gentleman in the British Empire. Looking at this picture, it is not strange to believe that he helped the British in the Boer War and the First World War as a decent citizen of the Empire. In 1915, however, when he landed at the port of Bombay and was welcomed as a hero of Indian national awareness, he was wearing the white gown. He was photographed with his wife, Kasturba, in sari, and there his costume represented an indigenous, traditional and popular India. It was an impressive performance if we consider that he had lived a westernized life as an immigrant professional in South Africa for more than twenty years. Gandhi changed his appearance a short time before returning to India. This is not only a matter of Gandhi's taste in clothing. The Gandhian dress was a powerful weapon of swadeshi (literally, one's own country; historically a term used for a campaign to boycott foreign goods and to use Indian ones for economic self-sufficiency) in his campaign for khadi (fabric made of hand-spun yarn). It symbolized Gandhi's simple, anti-western and anti-modern life. Therefore, this change was essential at the start of Gandhian movements in India. The well-known image of Gandhi was created a little ahead of the time he landed India, and after that, Gandhi was always seen as the sadhu-like leader of poor, ordinary people in Indian villages. When he led the non-cooperation movement, he showed himself as this `Gandhi,' and it was with this Mahatma that people became familiar. In short, Gandhi became a truer Indian than anyone else, and so was well prepared to take the role of being the heart of common people in India. This 'Gandhi' was spread among the people through various media: pictures, drawings and cartoons in newspapers, pamphlets, books, and film news; of course, through speeches, talks and rumors. Hundreds of thousands of people imitated Gandhian way of dress to show their commitment to the cause of the Indian nation. The interwar Gandhian era established the hegemony of the Indian National Congress as a leading nationalist organization. According to the mainstream of nationalist argument, Gandhi had many sincere followers and friends in the party and effectively united national movements against the British. The leftists, on the other hand, have

7 144 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 11, 1999 argued that Gandhi was used by Congress politicians, capitalists and large landowners to mobilize and/or stabilize the mass movements, despite his own idealism: that is, Gandhi functioned as a puppet of bourgeois interests. Either way, in order to cultivate a wide range of popular support, nationalist campaigns appropriated the charismatic image of Gandhi as a god-like human being that we all know very well. In this sense, the private Gandhi was not necessary at all, and had to be suppressed and removed from the public scene. Much myth surrounded Gandhi, intentionally or unintentionally. For people who lived far enough from Gandhi, he appeared almost god-like one who would make dreams come true. The historiography in general, even the more critical type, has often echoed this pattern of idealization of Gandhi under academic disguise. V In the last two decades, a number of works, specifically the Subaltern Studies series, have contributed to reveal the gap, dilemma and contradiction between Gandhi, the Congress as a political organization, and popular perception and activities. For example, as Nagasaki mentions, Gyanendra Pandey in his first book, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh : A Study in Imperfect Mobilization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), gave a brilliant analysis and then proceeded to write ' Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in Awadh, '8) In ' Gandhi as Mahatma,' Shahid Amin described how the peasants talked about Gandhi's visit to their villages. 'Gandhi, the person, was in this particular locality for less than a day, but the 'Mahatma' as an ' idea' was thought out and reworked in popular imagination in subsequent months. Even in the eyes of some local Congressmen, this ' deification'...assumed dangerously distended proportions by April-May 1921.' 9) Another example is a recent book written by Thomas Weber, On the Salt March (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 1997). One day, in the course of a conversation between Weber and his colleague, Robin Jeffrey, Jeffrey complained that his lecture on the Salt March was always boring. How could he get interesting information to make the event 'live' for his students? Louis Fischer, Tendulkar and Judith Brown were found to be of no help here. 10) This question drove Weber

8 Review Article 145 to begin a research to find out what the Salt March really was, and to inquire how to proceed in that research. Weber walked the same route as Gandhi's march and asked people what they remembered about this event. He began his book with Salman Rushdie's words:'sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts,' and concluded again with Rushdie's lines: people are telling a true story but it is 'Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimises, glorifies, and vilifies also, but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events, and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.'11) For many older people in the region, the Mahatma was the truth in their memories telling of their own youth and lives. To look back, Sumit Sarkar was one of the earliest historians to analyze the contradiction between Gandhian leadership and the class interests of the poor people. As a translator of his Modern India (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983) into Japanese,12) Nagasaki is well aware of the discrepancy between the popular image of Gandhi and Gandhi as a real person, and this is reflected in her analysis of the Salt March and Gandhi-Irwin Pact. Why did Gandhi stop the movements? Why did he agree to negotiate with the Viceroy? Why did he choose eleven specific points about which to demand concessions from the Government of India? Why did he attend the Round Table Conference in London in vain? In short, why did Gandhi seem to have betrayed the people's civil disobedience in ? Nagasaki tries to explain a similar dilemma in the Communal Award of 1932 and the Second World War. Why did Gandhi seem to have betrayed the outcaste people, fighting with their leader, Ambedkar?13) Why didn't he demand immediate independence when he called for the Quit India campaign? Why did he discard Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army?14) From these studies, it is clear that not only manipulation from above, i.e. the elite, but also the appropriation of nationalist charisma from below, i.e. the subaltern leaders and people, transformed Gandhi into a Mahatma, a great Indian soul. Gandhi was unique enough to make himself a popular leader, and the Congress clever enough to use his influence, but the common people also had a hand in creating

9 146 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 11, 1999 struction of the popular and national imagination. In the process of nationalism and politicization in general, people joined together to attach their own meanings to leaders, a common phenomenon today in many countries that have experienced democratization. VI When we deconstruct the mystified Gandhi, Gandhi ceases to be a simple Mahatma. He emerges as a complicated person within a huge social transformation. After all, he was a human with many troubles. He changed himself continually, as new needs and problems arose. In this view, Hind Swaraj appears not as the ultimate form of Gandhian ideas, but as one of his trial and error attempts to bring his ideas together regarding the future of his country during his late thirties and early forties. Hind Swaraj reminds me of Sansuijin Keirin Mondou [Three Drunken Men Discuss Politics and Life] by Chomin Nakae, published in 1887 in Japan. Both books share not only the topic of an emerging Asian nation, but also the style of writing: an elder editor as a type of guru (spritual guide) discusses the problems of India with a young reader as a radical nationalist, and gradually persuades the latter to his views. Gandhi added an educational appendix, recommending readers to 'follow up study of the foregoing.' This includes, not surprisingly, Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You, Edward Carpenter's Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, Thoreau's On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, and Ruskin's Unto This Last. It also recommends, however, Mazzini's Duties of Man, Plato's Defence and Death of Socrates, as well as famous nationalist writings such as Dadabhai Naoroji's Poverty and Un-British Rule in India and R.C. Dutt's The Economic History of India, and a colonial observation on India, Village Communities by Henry Maine.15) Nagasaki focuses on the first half of Hind Swaraj to explain the significance of Gandhi's criticism of modern western civilization. I will therefore shift my attention to the latter part, which discusses independence and non-violence. In Chapter XV 'Italy and India.' Gandhi wrote as follows:

10 Review Article 147 Mazzini was a great and good man; Garibaldi was a great warrior. Both are adorable; from their lives we can learn much... The difference between Mazzini and Garibaldi is worth noting. Mazzini's ambition was not, and has not yet been, realised regarding Italy. Mazzini has shown in his writings on the duty of man that every man must learn how to rule himself. This has not happened in Italy. Garibaldi did not hold this view of Mazzini's. Garibaldi gave, and every Italian took arms... The machinations of Minister Cavour disgrace that portion of the history of Italy. And what has been the result? If you believe that, because Italians rule Italy, the Italian nation is happy, you are groping in darkness. Mazzini has shown conclusively that Italy did not become free. Victor Emanuel gave one meaning to the expression; Mazzini gave another. According to Emanuel, Cavour, and even Garibaldi, Italy meant the King of Italy and his henchmen. According to Mazzini, it meant the whole of the Italian people, that is, its agriculturists. Emanuel was only its servant. The Italy of Mazzini still remains in a state of slavery.16) In this quotation, Gandhi sounds 'live' and young. Here, he appears not as an old man sitting and spinning cotton on the floor, but as a lawyer in a suit, busy as the leader of the Indian Congress in South Africa. In fact, Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj around the time of his first satyagraha and imprisonment over legislation to force Asians to have their finger-prints registered. According to Parel's footnote, in early 1909 Gandhi was reading Mazzini in jail, and challenged the view posed by V. D. Savarkar, an ideologue of militant Hinduism, that took Mazzini as a violent revolutionary.17) As Socrates tried in Athens, Gandhi was struggling to find a truthful answer when he wrote Hind Swaraj. Gandhi's interpretation of Italy gave a logical foundation to chapter XIV 'How Can India Become Free?,' chapter XVI 'Brute Force,' and chapter XVII 'Passive Resistance.' More than twenty years later, Antonio Gramsci critically conceptualized the history of the integration of modern Italy as a 'passive revolution,' agruing that 'Gandhism

11 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 11, 1999 and Tolstoyism are naive theorisations of the "passive revolution" with religious overtones.'18) Nehru would not have agreed with Gandhi's view, either. Gandhi sounds too moderate, compared with Gramsci and Nehru. The latter were, however, one generation younger than the former and belonged to the twentieth century world of total war, socialist revolution and self-determination. Gandhi definitely belonged to the nineteenth century world of Pax Britannica and European industrialization. Gandhi received his love for the Indian nation through nineteenth century liberalism and his knowledge of English civil society, not through his witnessing of the First World War, the October Revolution in Russia and Wilson's Fourteen Points. VII In her last four chapters, Nagasaki mostly discusses the dilemmas, or even failures, that Gandhi was forced to face after he became the national leader in India. His biography could never have a happy ending. Eventually, he was to witness bloody communal wars and the partition of the country into India and Pakistan, and was finally shot dead in 1948 by a Hindu right-winger. The speed and nature of change after the First World War went far ahead of Gandhi's original ideas. In the spotlight of national politics and responsible for the destiny of his nation, he often found himself against the prevailing current. How could the idealism of Tolstoy and Thoreau have survived at a time when Huxley and Orwell were writing their horrifying disutopias? In fact, writing about Gandhi in his later years can only be a study of failure, in that the Gandhian ideas were not fully realized in India in the form of swadeshi and swaraj. In this sense it echoes Ranajit Guha's words that writing the history of Indian nationalism is 'the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its own.'19) Despite the personal tragedy of Gandhi and the unaccomplished nonviolent revolution, however, 'Gandhi as Mahatma' was needed in the history of making India. The publicly forged 'Gandhi' constantly supplied the heart and soul for both the elite and the subaltern people. `Gandhi as Mahatma' had to be a stable, integral, self-sufficient and natural conscience providing the fundamental core of the imagined community of the emerging nation.

12 Review Article 149 Nagasaki writes that 'Gandhian ideas were defeated and divided into two paths after the 1930s. One was Nehru's path to construct a socialist state to solve the contradictions in capitalism. The other was Patel's one to build up a strong nation-state, with violence monopolized by the state. These two combined to form Independent India.' Today, India has as prime minister A. Vajpayee, the ideological successor of Savarkar as well as the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Though he personally adores Gandhi and wrote a poem to mourn Hiroshima, at the same time Vajpayee decided to go nuclear and to force Hinduization on society. Nagasaki deplores this. 'The BJP follows the path of Patel to gain power, by denying Gandhi.' Just as Buddha was once extinguished in India, 'Gandhi as Mahatma' and his non-violent philosophy have been miserably shattered in his own country. The nuclearization of India is the logical outcome of that history. 20) Poor priests and peasants carefully read the words of Christ at the time of the Reformation, more than a millennium after the death of Jesus. In this century, the Dalits (outcaste people) found the ideas of Buddha a powerful force in liberating themselves from the harsh caste society. The name of Gandhi empowered the civil rights movement of the United States, the Polish Solidarity movement, the Filipino Yellow Revolution, the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa, and other civic actions all over the world. As long as 'Gandhi as Mahatma' suggests the vision of an alternative way of life and society, as long as Gandhi's words and deeds keep encouraging people, conscientious scholars, such as Nobuko Nagasaki, will continue to attempt to write about Gandhi. 21) As she points out, 'It is not possible to criticize [today's nuclearized] India in the name of Gandhi, unless we find ourselves a way out of the structural contradictions of the modernity that he criticized so severely. Gandhi's problematics are still unanswered not only in India but also in Europe, the United States, Japan and other countries.' 22) Gandhi's unfinished experiment to overcome the west and the modern remains our aporia. Notes 1) Nagasaki, Gandhi, pp. 2-3, ) Ibid., pp The text was originally written in Gujarati and printed in the Indian Opinion in ) Nagasaki, Gandhi, pp

13 150 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, 11, ) Rudrangshu Mukherjee ed., The Penguin Gandhi Reader (New Delhi: Penguin,1993); Anthony J. Parel ed., Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in Modern Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5) Ranajit Guha ed., Subaltern Studies, vol. 3 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984). 6) Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp ) This article is included in the cover story, "Leaders and Revolutionaries of the 20th Century." 8) Ranajit Guha ed., Subaltern Studies, vol. 1(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981). 9) Subaltern Studies, vol. 3, p ) Those authors are well known for their works on Gandhi. See, Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Harper, 1950); D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma, 8 vols. (New Delhi: Government of India Publications Division, ). Judith Brown has three major books on Gandhi: Gandhi's Rise to Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Gandhi and Civil Disobedience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Gandhi: A Prisoner of Hope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 11) On the Salt March, pp. xix-xxi. 12) Atarashii Indo Kindai-shi (Kenbun Shuppan, 1993), translated by Nobuko Nagasaki, Masayuki Usuda, Shigeaki Nakazato and Toshie Awaya. 13) Nagasaki, Gandhi, pp ) Ibid., pp On this issue, she wrote previously, Indo Dokuritsu \ Gyakko no naka-no Chandora Bosu (in Japanese) [Indian Independence: Chandra Bose against the Light] (Asahi Simbunsha, 1989). 15) Parel ed., op. cit., p ) Ibid., p ) Ibid. Also, Masao Naito made the related point in his Gandhi wo-meguru Seinen Gunzo (in Japanese) [Young People around Gandhi] (Sanseido, 1987), pp ) Antonio Gramsci, 'Notes on Italian History,' in Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith ed. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p ) 'On Some Aspects of Historiography of Colonial India,' in Subaltern Studies, vol. 1, p ) Asahi Shimbun, May 21, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel worked with Gandhi for long time, and after independence shared power with Nehru by serving as the vice prime minister and home secretary of Nehru's cabinet. 21) In this respect, a good example is Dennis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 22) Asahi Shimbun, op. cit.