Atlantic Gandhi: The Mahatma Overseas by Nalini Natarajan (review)

Abstract

Nalini Natarajan. Atlantic Gandhi: The Mahatma Overseas. New Delhi: Sage, 2013. Pp. x, 248. Rp 695. In Atlantic Gandhi: The Mahatma Overseas, Nalini Natarjan focuses on diasporic nationalism as it applies to Mahatma Gandhi. Through scrutinizing Gandhi's writing in Autobiography (1927), Hind Swaraj (1909), Satyagraha in South Africa (1928), as well as many of his letters, travel essays, and journalistic writings, Natarjan demonstrates that Gandhi's diasporic experiences in South Africa led him to develop a view of that he later used in his nationalist campaign. She links Gandhi's diasporic experience with the diasporic experiences of different castes and hypothesizes that the nationalist doctrine that Gandhi constructed was in part inspired by the experience of the Indian diaspora in places like South Africa and the Caribbean. Despite its biographical qualities, Atlantic Gandhi is not a biography; it is an excellent interdisciplinary study that investigates how Gandhi understood the different worlds he had seen and experienced and how those experiences helped him form his conception of India and Indianness. In the first chapter, From Kathiavar, Natarajan explores the life of the young Gandhi, a student and traveller for whom, like many others, Indianness as a modern notion of identity did not exist. She points out the importance of Hindu narratives as threads that stitched social groups and communities together in the young Gandhi's mind and, arguably, in the Indian collective consciousness. The second chapter, Sailing the High Seas, traces the roots of Gandhi's diasporic consciousness on board the ships that took him to England and then to South Africa. Natarajan stresses Gandhi's diasporic individualism against the passive discourse of indentured voyages and his courage in crossing the Black Sea in defiance of his community. In the third chapter, Deconstructing the Coolie, Natarajan focuses on the homogenizing construction of the as an abject figure that denotes Chinese, Indian, or any tropical laborers that worked in the Caribbean and on African/American plantations. She argues that they played an integral part in Gandhis ideological formation of the diaspora and his later notion of Indianness. Natarajan succinctly and clearly explains what it meant to be a coolie in 1893 and moves on to explore how Gandhi came to deconstruct the coolie and reject the caste system. I believe this chapters detailed investigation of the coolie would be valuable reading in subaltern studies courses. In Plotting a Diasporic Nation, Natarajan argues that Gandhi's position as a lawyer, a firm servant, framed his first experiences with subaltern diasporic populations. She draws on Benedict Anderson's definition of nationalism to explain how Gandhi's travels across South Africa affected his initial subscription to colonialist race theories. Natarajan believes that travelling across South Africa was a necessity for Gandhi's understanding of the nation. She submits that these journeys taught Gandhi that he needed to travel in India and experience it geographically before he could see Indian nationality as a political reality. In chapter five, Local Cosmopolitan and Modern Anti-Modern, Natarajan reads Hind Swaraj and Satyagraha in South Africa to elaborate the contradictory ideologies that structures Gandhi's activism. …