Gandhi’s Gift: The Markings of an Outsider--The Migrant in Oceania

--Satendra Nandan*

*A talk given at the National University of Samoa at the SPACLALS conference.

‘Culture, Crisis and Change in Oceania’ is a vital topic for many of us at the beginning of a new millennium. Often we’ve to go back to the past to understand the present and illuminate the future. Writers often provide us both the archives and the architecture. In the presence of so many writers here today, I want to talk about a person who is not generally regarded as a writer. Yet, no man or woman, to my knowledge wrote more than Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s hand. Not even Marx could beat the Mahatma in that creative act.

It is in the acts of writing that Gandhi, a man of deepest contemplation and thoughtful action, attained some of his most remarkable insights and perceptions.

Let me begin with chapter eight in John’s Gospel:

Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

Until I had read that passage, I had assumed that like many prophetic religious leaders, Jesus was illiterate. While reading that passage, I began to realise that it is in the acts of writing, those marks on the ground, not commandments carved on stone, that impelled Christ to come up with the most compassionate judgement I can think of: ‘He that is

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without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’. That is the precise quote, not ‘cast the first stone’.

This threshold of truth is vital to our understanding, I feel, of Gandhi’s truth: a threshold constantly approached and constantly departed from: to hold in a single thought reality and justice. Richard Ellmann’s statement about Yeatsian idea of a poet:

He wishes to show how brute force may be transmogrified, how we can sacrifice ourselves…to our imagined selves which offer far higher standards than anything offered by social convention. If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer, and this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men (and women) do in their degree.

Gandhi not only alchemised all these in a single personality, he showed, by his words and actions, the possibilities in every person.

In this conversation with you, I want to talk about Gandhi and writing; how the act of writing, in the very act so to speak, may provide us with insights into our lives and life around us that no other human activity of the mind does with the same imaginative force, that grows out of the most creative piece of earth beneath our feet, whether we live on islands or continents. Admittedly so much of human civilisation is based on orality not literacy. I give my students an example: if we assume that human beings have been on this wounded planet for say 500,000 years, reduce that to the life of a single individual aged 50, then this person began writing only after 49 years and 364 days – that is, on the last day of his fiftieth year!

Imagine the implications of that on an island-continent of Australia, and the islands of the South Pacific. Nothing is written in Australia until the last 220 years. Yet how deeply writing has changed, shaped, and represented our structures of reality, both within us and without. Terra nullius is not the only problem; it is the idea of a tabula rasa on which we have inscribed whole civilisations, the marks of homicidal cultures. This awareness challenges our ways of thinking and writing both aesthetically and ethically. One can, of course, extend its manifold implications to the smallest islands of the largest ocean, the Pacific.

But let me return to Mohandas Gandhi. ‘His words’, someone said, ‘flow like a river’: his collected works fill more than 100 volumes but only one of these, Satyagraha in South Africa, was written as a book: virtually all the rest comprise speeches, letters, conversations, columns, pamphlets, leaflets, petitions and prayers. He seems to have advised Mulk Raj Anand, the novelist who died recently aged 98, to write pamphlets, not novels.

Gandhi’s writings fit in well with what Ronald Barthes saw as unnumbered narratives around us:

The narratives of this world are numberless . . . Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is

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present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting . . . stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.

As for Gandhi’s narrativity, here is Louis Fischer:

No man knows himself or can describe himself with fidelity. But he can reveal himself. This is especially true of Gandhi. He believed in revealing himself. He regarded secrecy as the enemy of freedom – not only the freedom of India but the freedom of man (or woman). He exposed even the innermost personal thoughts which individuals regard as private. In nearly fifty years of prolific writing, speaking and subjecting his ideas to the test of actions, he painted a detailed self-portrait of his mind, heart and soul.

Gandhi’s writings may not be “literature” or even philosophical treatises, as many understand these, but they are deeply creative acts of self-awareness and reflexivity. It is, I believe in the processes of writing, in these individual acts of meditation, that his deepest values and his most passionate vision evolved, and continued to develop as ‘experiments in truth’: writing for him was moksha, his term; love was action and his acts in words defined his deepest sense of humanity, often not without a touch of humour. ‘Faced with the brutality of historical onslaught’, most of us perceive the futility of our acts – but words can lead us to discover ‘the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life’. They may verify our singularity and create a consciousness through what Elias Cannetti has called ‘the conscience of words’. They gave value and breath to an inner reality.

This air of freedom was Gandhi’s vital breath, his prana, to which his silence and words gave meaning, value and vision: his desperate holiness of life. Canetti writes:

To nothing is man so open as to air…Air is the last common property. It belongs to all people collectively…even the poorest may partake of it. And if a man should starve to death, then at least he has breathed until the end…

Human breath is a dangerous thing: it can shake empires, as Gandhi showed..

Patrick White, our own Nobel laureate in literature, used a quote from Gandhi’s 1922 essay as an epigraph to his first novel Happy Valley (1939). In 1958, after the publication of the Tree of man (1955) and Voss (1957), White wrote that he began writing to discover ‘the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry which alone make

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bearable the lives of ordinary men and women’. White goes on to say, ‘There’s always the possibility the book lent, a record played, may lead to communication between human beings. There’s the possibility that one may be helping to people a barely inhabited country with a race possessed of understanding’. In 1982 in his “A Letter to Humanity’ read to 40,000 people on Palm Sunday in Hyde Park, Sydney, he quotes a marvellous passage from Gandhi, ‘this great human being’s words’.

This understanding and human decency that White, as an artist, was struggling towards is also part of Gandhi’s quest. And like White, Gandhi was an outsider. Historians and biographers, such as Anthony J. Perel and Judith M. Brown, have written about Gandhi’s exile and how this exilic existence, especially in South Africa, moulded him into a very different kind of an Indian leader; indeed a unique individual with passionately universal concerns. They are concerned with the makings of an outsider; I wish to add the markings to that perception. As Edward Said, said so much ‘modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees’. And Gandhi, when asked what he thought of western civilisation, had remarked: it would be a good idea!

When Gandhi left for England, at the age of 19, he was excommunicated by the elders of his caste and clan; when he returned as a dandy lawyer, he was a professional failure. Fortunately he got a small assignment in Natal where the so-called ‘Arab merchants’ from India were making money amongst the indentured labourers and Africans. It is among these people, against overwhelming power, of a racial political culture that young Gandhi shaped and sharpened his unassailable weapon of satyagraha. .

Gandhi entered the world historical stage not in India but in South Africa. . . . In the first place, it was in South Africa, not in India, that he acquired his vision of Indian nationalism, a fact which differentiates his nationalism, from that of other Indian nationalists. His idea of nationalism does not start with the locality and then gradually extend itself to the province and finally the nation. Quite the reverse. He was an Indian, then a Gujarati, and only then a Kathiavadi. . . . Secondly, it is in the politics of Transvaal, not Champaran, or Bardoli, that he first developed his unique political philosophy and political techniques.

Or again Antoinette Burton writes:Gandhi’s peripatetic youth, and the impact it had on creating, sustaining, and popularising a nationalist consciousness, would seem to suggest that being a displaced subject of imperial rule was consequential to political action – that there was something about being in temporary or permanent exile that nurtured resistance by changing the terms, the very grounds, upon which the violence of colonialism was enacted.

Vidia Naipaul, that trenchant observer of the Indian scene and psyche, has written in India: A Wounded Civilisation that South Africa gave Gandhi a racial sense. Coming as Naipaul does from Trinidad, the grandson of an indentured labourer, educated in Oxford, and who began his literary career at the BBC in Langham House in London, one can understand how this racial sense is so vital to a novelist’s perceptions. I, however, do not think that Gandhi developed a racial sense, living though he was in a most brutal

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racist regime. He acquired in South Africa a sense of being an Indian - and his ‘Indian’ does not refer to a race: its origins are in a river; there’s a whole ocean called the Indian Ocean. One can talk about an Indian culture or civilisation made of multitudinous streams.

Sunil Khilnani in his splendid book, The Idea of India (1997), says that at the end of the nineteenth century no one in India considered himself an Indian: most were obsessed with caste and clan, region and religious affiliations, identities and identifications:

…before the nineteenth century, no residents of the subcontinent would have identified themselves as Indian. There existed intricate, ramified vocabularies of common understanding, which classified people by commonalities of lineage, locality and sect; but ‘Indian’ would not have figured among its terms’ (p 154).

Nehru, too, wrote: ‘Four hundred million separate individual men and women, each differing from the other, each living in a private universe of thought and feeling.’

So South Africa gave Gandhi a different sense of Indianness: not the Indianness of India oppressively camouflaged by caste and subjugated by the Raj. This amazing insight of double oppression he acquired pre-eminently among the indentured Indians. In his autobiography, he has a remarkable chapter entitled ‘Balasundaram’. Let me quote the first paragraph:

The heart’s earnest and pure desire is always fulfilled. In my own experience I have often seen this rule verified. Service of the poor has been my heart’s desire, and it has always thrown me amongst the poor and enabled me to identify myself with them.

Then in the last paragraph he writes something quite magnificent – I am not aware of any Indian before him who could have written about a coolie in this mode; the quality that is so distinctive of a truly transfiguring imagination: how one imagines the Other: this essential ingredient of an ethical stance: ‘to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own’:

I have said that Balasundaram entered my office, head-gear in hand. There was a particular pathos about the situation which also showed our humiliation. I have already narrated the incident when I was asked to take off my turban. A practice had been forced on every indentured labourer and every Indian stranger to take off his head-gear when visiting a European, whether the head-gear was a cap, a turban, a scarf wrapped around the head, a salute even with both hands was not sufficient. Balasundaram thought that he should follow the practice even with me. This was the first case in my experience. I felt humiliated and asked him to tie up his scarf. He did so not without a certain hesitation, but I could perceive the pleasure on his face.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings.

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Here, for the first time, an indentured labourer is written about by his name: normally he was known only by his left thumb mark and a number. Then you see how humiliated Gandhi feels when Balasundram takes off his headgear – Gandhi had already experienced this in Durban when he refused to take off his turban in the magistrate’s court – the incident became known as ‘A Turban in Durban!’ This recognition of the dignity – human not racial or communal – of the Other became his fundamental belief – as if in respecting the self-respect of the Other, his own self-respect was enhanced. He gave feature, voice and identity to a voiceless community, to a people often defined as helots of Empire. This is a thought as radical as life itself: because in his writing the voiceless become audible, the injustices visible, lives legible, lines readable. New accents are introduced in humanity’s conversation.

And finally the extraordinary perception of the final sentence: ‘It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings’. Richard Attenborough in his In Search of Gandhi, written after the film Gandhi was made, says that he carried that single sentence for 20 years before he was able to make the film: he is reading Louis Fischer’s book on Gandhi: Then I read something which knocked me for six:

Gandhi was walking along the pavement in South Africa with a fellow Indian and two white South Africans were walking towards them. As was expected in those days, the early 1890s, the two Indians stepped into the gutter and the whites continued on the sidewalk. After they had passed, Gandhi turned to his companion and said, ‘It has always been a mystery to me’ – he wasn’t angry, he was expressing surprise – ‘it has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.’

I was thunderstruck by the extraordinary perception of this remark, made by a young Indian in South Africa at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three. And that was only on the forty-eighth page of a 505-page book. There was no doubt whatsoever that I was going to finish that book while my eyes remained open. The book was going to be revelation. Through Fischer I was going to learn about a fellow human being who had shaken the world . . . (pp 44-45)

But I want to return to the Naipaulian perceptions. It is important to me. Few writers have written more poignantly about Gandhi as Vidia Naipaul; as a descendant of the girmit people, I think, he brings a certain perspicacity and a writer’s sagacity that is rare in Gandhi literature. The fact that he’s part of the indenture experience is central to Naipaul’s creative psyche; the fact that Gandhi lived and loved and carried out so many of his initial experiments among the indentured coolies of South Africa made him see the empire and India radically differently. Indeed his creative radicalism itself was so much at odds with the political and social radicalism espoused by many of his contemporaries, both in India and Europe. Indeed Gandhi’s first victory against the laws of the Raj was the abolition of the Indenture System in 1917 which was defined by Lord Russell in 1940 as ‘a new system of slavery’.

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Fiji played a small role in that battle: Gandhi sent two of his disciples to Fiji – a lawyer Manilal Doctor and C.F. Andrews. Manilal’s agitation made him persona non grata in Fiji; he appealed to join the Bar in New Zealand but was refused entry. He was deported with colonial connivance. Two schools are named after C. F. Andrews in Fiji – and it is Andrews’ report on the conditions of indentured labourers that finally persuaded the imperial Government to abolish this degrading system. One can mention two facts in passing: that the system was practised in Fiji to serve the communal interests of the indigenous people and the economic interests of the Australian CSR company. That neither is much concerned, after 125 years, about the fate of the descendants of these labourers is another story but the struggle between justice and injustice continues with Gandhian patience and hope.

There’s another little footnote to the story: it was, I was told only recently, that because of the uncertain fate of Fiji Indians the constitution of India never barred someone born outside India, as is the case in the US, from holding the highest elected office. Both Sonia Gandhi and I continue to hope! And as far as I know the only constitution in which the citizens of a country are defined as ‘Indians’ is the Fiji constitution.

But let me return to the theme of the outsider. Naipaul is the outsider par excellence. No one I know in the colonial-postcolonial world has made a longer journey as a writer in exile with such distinction, with a single-minded passion and commitment to writing with such sustained intimacy about the art itself. He’s to me the Gandhi of the Indian Diasporic literary culture. In an interview after he received David Cohen award for British Literature in 1993, he says:

The great novels of the nineteenth century still have the quality of truth; . . . the tradition that does come from the nineteenth century, is a moral one. It is striving after truth . . . the great original writers of the nineteenth century . . . helped to underline and remake their civilisation. The ideal of truth and revolution – truth as revolution. The idea inevitably spread out of Great Britain. It did so in at least one extraordinary way.

Then he mentions Gandhi.

Gandhi’s friend Henry Polak, gives him Ruskin’s Unto This Last which he reads in 24 hours on his journey from Johannesburg to Durban. At the end of the night’s journey he’s a transformed man. One of the things you realise is what a fabulous reader Gandhi was. Like any great artist, Gandhi was damaged and wounded. Gandhi, Naipaul has said, in another interview, is a man, whose life, when I contemplate it, makes me cry. I am moved to tears. And Naipaul is not easily moved to tears.

Again it is in South Africa that he lived amongst Hindus, Jews, Jains, Christians, Muslims, Parsis in the same house, on the same Farms. And he often writes with the brilliance of a multifaceted South African diamond. It is ‘the transforming experience of South Africa which imbued him with a vision of the nature of public work unprecedented in Indian public life. What South Africa gave him was a vision of public work, including political activism as the service of all humanity, rather than as a path to personal, or

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group advancement…In his ripening understanding of the nature of ultimate truth, and the essential nature of humanity, there emerged a powerful sense of the interconnection of all beings – the sense that action of one affects all in some mysterious alchemy, either for good or ill; and also the belief that ultimate truth, the divine (by whatever name one calls this Mystery), was to be found in the outcast, the poor and the afflicted…for a seeker after truth the religious quest could never be a purely private one. The compulsions of a real religion would drive any seeker after God into the service of his fellows. In this service politics might well become an incurable commitment.’ One had to be entangled in snake’s coils even for one’s spiritual salvation. Without the Snake salvation is impossible. These distilled thoughts come only through a lifetime’s contemplation and action: writing combined for Gandhi both the act of contemplation and action – a truly creative act. It has an ascetic strictness about it. As Gerard M. Hopkins put it:

Shape nothing lips; be lovely-dumb:It is the shut, the curfew sentFrom there where all surrenders comeWhich only makes you eloquent.

It strengthened him inside of his being. The journey was always inward although there were many outward manifestations. As an outsider, the markings he made on numerous pages remain, to me, his finest legacy. In them he heard the still, sad music of humanity. And when Wordsworth wrote, after his loss and grief, solitude and pain, and witness to persecution in the French Revolution, or the dreary intercourse of daily life, that he felt a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused when you begin to see into the life of things, I feel he was thinking of that poetic act. That still, sad music of humanity, Gandhi transmuted into ‘the still, small voice within’. Gandhi’s writings show us glimpses of those moments which make us human but also show us the immense possibilities within each of us - ‘As man of his time who asked the deepest questions, he became a man of all times and all places’.

I want to conclude this piece on a personal note: In November 1999 I’d gone to Durban to attend the Commonwealth NGOs meeting, during CHOGM, which was quite a huge, enthusiastic affair. But more importantly, I had gone to see Durban, to visit Pietermaritzburg, where Gandhi, aged 23, was ejected from the train on June 7, 1893, on a bitterly cold winter’s night. For some reason, I felt, it was a sacred site, as if so many journeys had begun from there, an obscure, desolate, decrepit railway station, by an unknown Indian. It had become a place of pilgrimage in my imagination. I’m still contemplating the significance of that incident and a man’s response to man’s inhumanity to man. Two months later, I made a trip to Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. It’s here that Gandhi had crystallised his experience of Satyagraha in South Africa and extended it towards India’s road to freedom. In a fifty-year struggle, the largest colonial empire had collapsed and more people were freed than ever in human history.

At Sabarmati Ashram, in an untidy bookstall I found a copy of John Briley’s Gandhi, The Screen Play, a book for which I’d been searching, for its distillation of many of the most

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profound thoughts of Gandhi in lines of dialogue for the famous film. After desperately searching for Gandhi, Briley writes:

I took the plunge into Gandhi . . . My image of the old man on the rug was wrong. Gandhi’s long life was filled with action, conflict, personal tragedy and joy.

And then, almost in desperation, I turned to Gandhi’s own writings. Gandhi was not a writer . . . But he wrote almost daily – articles for a newspaper he started in South Africa, and others he later edited in India. And he wrote letters. Hundreds of them.

None of it was “literature,” but gradually the personality of this open, questing, unpretentious man began to unfold for me. The well-springs of his courage, his humility, the humour, the compelling power of his sense of the human dilemma – a power which when allied to his striving for decency (and he would put it no higher) made devoted disciples of men as diverse as the cultured, literate Nehru, the cynical Patel . . . and the village peasant who had never been five miles from the mud-brick house where he was born.

And gradually I saw too that Gandhi was not “impractical,” not “idealistic.” His ideas were forged in painful experience, a growth of perception earned from a life far harsher than anything I have ever known.

In writing “Gandhi” I have tried to make real the brave, determined man I discovered and to show his unsentimental honesty about the complexity of men and his unshakeable belief that on balance they are marginally more inclined to good than evil . . . and that on that slight imbalance they can build and achieve and perhaps survive – even in a nuclear age.

Gandhi lived . . . the most fundamental drama of all: the war in our hearts between love and hate. He knew it was a war, a war with many defeats, but he believed in only one victor.

That is what Gandhi has given me.

More than most writers Gandhi understood that human creativity is most wonderfully rooted in substance, in the human body, in stone, in pigment, in the twanging of gut or the weight of wind on reeds, to paraphrase George Steiner. All good writing begins in immanence. But it does not stop there – the aesthetic and ethics quicken the continuum between temporality and eternity, between matter and spirit, between man and the other. Gandhi often wrote about the smallest issues at a time of major upheavals, where our versions of God and ideologies clashed for he understood that these physical details were integral to our metaphysical dreams and desires. Just think who his contemporaries were: Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, to name a few.

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I would like to believe that this gift of Gandhi was a writer’s gift – the markings of an outsider indelibly imprinted on the pages of our mind with the pencil of memory that tells us of the grief and glory of being human. For he believed that the force which threatens to blow our universe asunder resides not in the clouds or mountains but in the invisible heart of the atom. Our inner forces, too, which like the power of the atom, can either remake or shatter civilisations, reside in the atom of the smallest unit of society, the individual, rather in the irreducible infinity of the individual’s creative self. This life force, Gandhi showed, was true freedom through truth in words. That, to me, remains his noblest gift to every child, woman and man.

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I now turn briefly to Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj. Written between 13 and 22 November, 1909, on a ship, Hind Swaraj is Gandhi’s seminal work. Gandhi had been sent to London by the Indians in South Africa to plead for their rights as British subjects. He failed in his mission: but that sense of failure, his meetings with imperial officials, and revolutionary Indians in London, lit a new fire of thinking in him. On his return journey by ship he wrote the book in barely nine days.

Having experienced the hubris of an imperial civilisation, its global empire and reach, its indifference to the children of the lesser gods, Gandhi wrote, first in his mother tongue, then he translated the book into English ‘to use the British race’ for transmitting his ‘mighty message of ahimsa to the rest of the world’. Whatever other flaws young Gandhi might have had, he never thought small. With his usual shrewdness, he had used the most powerful creative weapon of the West: the English language.

The book, in the form of a dialogue between an editor and a reader, has been described as an ‘incendiary manifesto’ and compared to many radical publications including Rousseau’s Social Contract. It is in essence a severe critique of the ideology of modernity as espoused and practised by imperial powers. In modern parlance, modernity was as protean a movement as globalisation is today.

Significantly, Gandhi does not criticise the Christian civilisation: indeed he found a great deal in the Christian faith which resonated with his own spiritual beginnings and pursuits. It is the godless modernity that he analyses and attempts, through a critique of accepted ideas, a moral regeneration of Indians and the political emancipation of India.

Gandhi is barely 40 years old; five years after the book is published, Europe plunges into the first Great War. So while we might not agree with Gandhi’s critique of many aspects of modern civilisation – he is especially severe on doctors, lawyers and railways – he was right on one issue: that the force on which so much of the western civilisation was built, would one day explode in Europe. How right he turned out to be in his own life-time.

But perhaps his most notable contribution in the book is his idea of swaraj: freedom. He warned the Indians that independence doesn’t necessarily lead to freedom: swaraj, he argued, was self-government and self-independence. And violence to achieve either was self-immolation. The destruction of the self to him was to destroy the most sacred gift of

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God. So he deployed a different weapon: a weapon that required greater courage and deeper awareness of the powers within each one of us. And gave life the highest value through ahimsa.

For modern civilisation, like globalisation for many today, was then a greater danger than colonisation. He believed that colonialism was a product of modern civilisation. It created a dependence mentality – he said it is not the British who are responsible for the misfortunes of India but we who have succumbed to the temptations of a mercantile, mercenary civilisation. And that modernity posed enormous threat to Europe and Britain in particular than to the Indians. He delved into the Indian epics especially the Ramayana to discover the dharma – the ethical means and values of our being and becoming – by which we must learn to live. And the means were as important as the end: the seed and the tree was his simple but telling metaphor.

And so much of this remarkable book contains western intellectual sources. He knew Ruskin, Tolstoy, Thoreau, had critiqued the same imperial civilisation that was taking the world towards a holocaust. In Gandhi’s book there’s no narrow nationalism or superficial anti-colonial posturings. The civilisational values are part of every culture, East and west, islands and continents. When intellectuals were cut off from ordinary humanity, they could become monsters. Some of his contemporaries were monsters alright: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao.

So when we have a theme like Culture, Crisis and change in Oceania, we might consider how Mahatma Gandhi faced these fundamental issues almost a century ago. That he was able to shift and transform the battleground in India is his great achievement. That he failed to keep India undivided or free of nuclear weapons is his failure. But what a magnificent failure he is. Today far more relevant than in his own time. His thinking on politics and education is especially pertinent to us: from South Africa to the South Pacific, from Australia to Zimbabwe, to mention regions of our mind.

IIII have been thinking about these issues while writing this paper in Canberra: a quintessentially migrant city. Salman Rushdie says:

A full migrant suffers, traditionally, a triple disruption: he loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behaviour and code is very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to, his own. And this is what makes migrants such important figures: because roots, language and social norms have been three of the most important parts of the definition of what it is to be a human being. The migrant, denied all three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human. . . .

Indeed the myths for which we have fought and killed, crusaded and crucified, conquered and colonised, these were and are part of the process of migration. You will see the arguments in Midnight’s Children as well as in The Satanic Verses: the grime of colonial civilisation has fertilised the roots of our identity.

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The migrant, uprooted, forces us to take a radical view of tradition to take us beyond the gap to more exciting, creative ways of thinking critically. Edward Said has argued urgently for a more secular critical consciousness. The anglocentric or eurocentric or monocentric or monocultural or monotheistic approaches posit grave limitations to our apprehension of the ever-changing world of infinite variations and subtleties, of literature and culture. He says:

Humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that you can read classy fiction as well as kill and maim because the cultural world is available for that particular sort of camouflaging, and because cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not certified them.

. . .It is not practising criticism either to validate the status quo or to join up with a priestly caste of acolytes and dogmatic metaphysicians. Each essay in this book affirms the connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies and events. The realities of power and authority – as well as resistances offered by men, women, and social movements and institutions, authorities, orthodoxies – are realities that make texts possible, that deliver them to their readers, that solicit the attention of their critics.

‘Our philosophical home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation.’ ‘One Earth or none’ is the current slogan of the conservationists. Possibly once more the asthmatic earth may remind us of our inseparable and unfinished humanity through its membrane of life: the environment.

This also demands a shift in our definition of identity and nationality, even a separation from our exclusive heritage. The concepts of national identity so common in postcolonial literature now seem inadequate: they served their purpose when the reaction was a rediscovery, and an assertion of meaning against the meaninglessness and denigration created by the conquistadors and colonials. The vase was broken but the writer’s mirror cannot be merely for reflections: the fate of the Lady of Shallot is a warning.

Secular critical consciousness demands a knowledge of and active understanding of multiculturalism. It is here that the emerging Australian experience may be of some value to us. Not only is multiculturalism a political philosophy of increasing significance within the nation, it is, I feel, becoming a way of perceiving the world. Having been displaced from their ancestral hemisphere – unlike the Canadians and the Americans – the white Australians were more profoundly dislocated in Terra Australis. But within less than fifty years, Australian mindscape has undergone a permanent change. As John Hardy comments:

From the time of British colonisation, Australian society developed as predominantly Anglo-Celtic, and this tended to determine what defined an Australian. Today, however, Australian society is made up of people from many diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and the large influx of migrants from many countries, especially sice the

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Second World War, has led to a revised or expanded conception of what constitutes an Australian. Yet this has not happened without some measure of resistance.

But the challenge remains: a challenge vividly described in novelist C.J. Koch’s essay ‘Crossing the Gap’ subtitled ‘Asia and the Australian Imagination.’ At the end of the essay he writes: ‘And so that trail that had been found in India wound back through Java to the shores of Australis, where it is waiting for all of us, if we take an interest in the broader indo-European heritage that is ours.’ Of course, it needs to go beyond the ‘Indo-European heritage that is ours.’ Our heritage, like our world, is much larger: we gain knowledge of only some of its facets.

It requires the leap of the imagination for in Australia the great experiment is on:

One Australian in a hundred can claim a local ancestry of over two hundred years. The majority cannot trace more than four generations in the country, two-fifths are only first or second generation and one in five were born elsewhere. Immigration has been a consitent theme in Australian history since 1788, but has often been curiously overlooked or understressed by historians. Constant immigration and renewal makes Australia unique. Language, institutions, attitudes and practices have nearly all been brought from elsewhere, often within living memory. The interplay between an ancient Aboriginal culture, new arrivals and even newer arrivals is just as important a central theme as the struggle between the pioneers and the environment.

But personally more important to me is the fact that when I came out of my six nights’ detention, the first book my librarian brother gave me from the University of the South Pacific Library was The Enigma of Arrival. Reading then I felt I understood the book better than ever. The anguished distance of art makes life more real and bearable. Towards the end of the book Naipaul writes:

Our sacred world – the sanctities that had been handed down to us as children by our families, the sacred places of our childhood, sacred because we had seen them as children and had filled them with wonder, places doubly and trebly sacred to me because far away in England I had lived in them imaginatively over many books and had in my fantasy set in those places the very beginning of things, had constructed out of them a fantasy of home, though I was to learn that the ground was bloody, that there had been aboriginal people there once, who had been killed or made to die away – our sacred world had vanished. Every generation now was to take us further away from those sanctities. But we remade the world for ourselves; every generation does that, as we found when we came together for the death of this sister and felt the need to honour and remember. It forced us to look on death. It forced me to face the death I had been contemplating at night, in my sleep; it fitted a real grief where melancholy had created a vacancy, as if to prepare me for the moment. It showed me life and man as the mystery,

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the true religion of men, the grief and the glory. And that was when, faced with a real death, and with this new wonder about men, I laid aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack and his garden.

Facing death and decay then becomes the sharp edge of creativity and affirmation of existence. But long before Jack’s garden, Naipaul had given us the indelible symbol of the flawed house that Jack had built. Only the name was different and Biswas meant ‘faith’.

In the final understanding it is our folly to imagine that things and life have a permanence; that our way of life is exclusive and better. The migrant forces us to think deeply and differently. The migrant is more than a metaphor of our times; indeed he or she may mirror our lives in ways we remember and imagine: the essential elements in perpetual change.

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