Ram Guha on Jon Stewart: How Gandhi's failure led to his greatest success

Ramachanda Guha, the author of India After Gandhi, appeared on the show Daily Show with Jon Stewart to discuss his new book Gandhi Before India. You can watch the full video here.

Guha’s new book deals with Gandhi before he moved back to India from South Africa and how he led the struggle against racially discriminatory laws against Indians in South Africa.

“Has Gandhi succeeded as a barrister as the bar in Bombay, you and I would not be having this conversation. If this man had succeeded as a lawyer, then he would not have changed India as he did,” points out Guha in the course of the interview.

Guha says that his book tries to place Gandhi, based on the opinions that were written about him.  “Never to trust your subject’s autobiography, even a guy as famous as Gandhi. Other people have written about Gandhi based on his biography, but I have tried to do is write on perspectives based around him, for example the white newspapers in South Africa. They wrote satirical poems about him, " he says.

“Letters, documents can illuminate Gandhi’s life better,” he adds, than the ‘mis-remembered memories’ that Gandhi had from his earlier life.

More importantly Guha points out that Gandhi’s experiences in South Africa moulded him in an important way and this also affected his ability to lead the freedom struggle in India.

“I’ve tried to humanise Gandhi. He was an orthodox Hindu patriarch. But in South Africa, he understood the ethnic-diversity of his country, when he led the struggle against the laws against Indians”, says Guha.

Where Tolstoy and Gandhi are concerned, Guha says Gandhi had no interest in Tolstoy the novelist but in Tolstoy philosopher and the activist.

As Jon Stewart says Guha’s book puts Gandhi in a context, something that is often overlooked given that Gandhi is ‘lionised’ and seen as a important figure in history.

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