4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
It later seemed to me while re-reading R.P. Dutt that even within R.P. Dutt's attack on Gandhi there were extremely important concessions - the admission, for example, that Gandhi alone could enter the house and hearts of the Indian poor, where the Indian bourgeoisie could never gain entrance. How and why did he have this particular quality? Any explanation of how Gandhi achieved this rapport with the Indian poor and with the Indian people as a whole was missing inR.P. Dutt's analysis. I think that subsequent assessments of Gandhip became difficultbecause of a particular misconception of its own position in the National Movement by the Left. The Left not only decried the bourgeois leadership of the National Movement and its various limitations, but tried to suggest as if the Left movement was parallel to the National Movement, R.P. Dutt, indeed, thought of the working class movement and the communist movement, as essentially part of the National Movement, in which it was contesting with the bourgeoisie for leadership. But in certain writings of E.M.S. Namboodiripad, for example, notably his latest collection of articles on the freedom struggle which are built upon a reading of Tarachand's History of the, Freedom Movement and certain other writings, it seems in fact as if there were three parties to the struggle - imperialism, bourgeois nationalism, and Marx-ism.or working class movement. The subalterns take this to its logical extreme in which the whole National Movement is seen as an elitist movement. The 'subaltern' classes, according to this theory, consisting of the zamindars and other iliral strata, had an autonomy, and based on this autonomy they contested for power with imperialism, whereas the national elite merely benefited from their struggle, and instead of transferring power to the subalterns they transferred power to themselves. Therefore, in a sense, imperialism and nationalism were of the same category, or belonged to the same class more or less, viz., westernized elite, while the subalterns who carried out the autonomous struggles, would, as was almost fatally inevitable, lose out. It was on the basis of their autonomous struggles that the national leadership or NationalMovement took power from Britain. This puts the Marxist movement also along with the elitist nationalist leadership. Then, because you have the term subaltern on one side, you don't have the bourgeoisie on the other side, yoahave elites - and whether they are imperialist elites or nationalist elites, it doesn't apparently matter.
The subalterns are so satisfied with their theology that Gandhi is not very relevant to them, and although we are told by some scholars that subaltern studies have opened a new vision on Gandhi, I've not been blessed with receiving that kind of insight from them. It seems to me that lumping everyone in one basket of undifferentiated elites, or very thinly differentiated elites, and treating the subalterns as autonomous, which means denying the influence of Gandhi on those vast classes of the Indian poor, is a position no serious historian can adopt. And if-you start with this denial, then, of course, you cannot offer any real perception of Gandhi.
Imperialist historians, or British Government officials during the British period, and post-Independence Britishhistorians thereafter, have always tried to argue that Gandhi was only a Mahatma to look at from outside; otherwise he was a very clever politician, a master of manipulation, and that the British