Underground Railroad: Slavery in America and Colson Whitehead's Searing Fiction

Steven Spielberg's chose to depict the Allied Army landing on D-Day for a gut wrenching and blood soaked 30 minutes only so viewers cannot but escape the gore by looking away for a minute or two. Colson Whitehead's much acclaimed 'The Underground Railroad', a fictional narrative of a slave trying to escape to freedom, is riveting and from the get go assaults the reader in unremitting prose the horrors of slavery until the last page. Whitehead pulls no punches in his depictions of the physical and moral cruelty of Slavery as an institution.

From Amazon.com

The book opens with the story of Ajarry, grandmother of the protagonist Cora. The price Ajarry was sold for in an African town to slave buyers could not be determined because she was part of a 'bulk purchase, eighty-eight human souls for sixty crates of rum and gun powder'. 'Able bodied men and children bearing women fetched more than juveniles, making an individual accounting difficult'. Whitehead is relentless in depicting the horrific fact that slaves were looked at as commodities and sometimes less respectful than furniture and sometimes valued more, especially when they disobey or worse, runaway, only so that they can learn that had they behaved no wiser than a stool they may not have suffered the unspeakable tortures or grisly death. Seen as property the slaves were subject to the vicissitudes of commodities trading. When the ship carrying Ajarry reaches America she is sold for $226 because of the "season's glut in young girls". Being sold repetitively Ajarry is taught the lesson's life by life. "She learned to quickly adjust to the new plantations, sorting the nigger breakers from the merely cruel, the layabouts from the hardworking, the informers from secret keepers". 

Ajarrys granddaughter Cora was born in a Georgia plantation and abandoned by her mother Mabel, who went in search of freedom, when Cora was just 10. We raise our children today in a cloistered environment and cannot even begin to fathom how a mother could abandon a child and go in search of her own freedom and how a child would even survive in horrendous conditions, all alone. From holocaust to civil war torn areas of today we see this time and again. Whether it is a teenage Anne Frank in Bergen-Belsen or a blood soaked and shell shocked toddler in Syria the life of Cora echoes across the ages and different horrors. In bringing that horror home Whitehead succeeds. Whitehead's book is not just about the darkest chapter of American history but a retelling of how wicked human soul can be and how the story can be taken as metaphor for current events. Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz, recalled how young sons abandoned their parents to survive. Once torn asunder each member of the Frank family then focuses on just his or her survival alone with probably wistful thinking, like Ajarry thinks of her cousins, that their other family members would've somehow survived the tragedy better.

During a party a boy spills "a single drop of wine staining the cuff of" the brother of a slave owner at the Georgia plantation. Terrence, whose cuff was stained, rains blows at the boy's head with his cane. "One drop" think Cora and rushes to defend the boy. Cora is no stranger to slaves being brutalized. "She had seen men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows. Women carved open to the bones with cat-o'-nine tails. Bodies alive and dead roasted on pyres". The boy and Cora are flogged by Terrence. Terrence's bother James is annoyed only that his brother infringed upon his own property rights by overstepping and punishing his slaves. The slave overseer is incensed at the carelessness of the boy and the impudence of Cora. Both are stripped and flogged to their bones and washed with pepper water. 

Colson Whitehead - From www.colsonwhitehead.com

Big Anthony, a runaway slave who gets caught, is barbarically brutalized and Whitehead spares no details. Big Anthony's punishment is arranged as a spectacle and guests, other slave owners, were invited to watch. "Big Anthony was whipped for the duration of their meal and they ate slow". "Visitors sipped spiced rum as Big Anthony was doused with oil and roasted. The witnesses were spared his screams, as his manhood had been cut off on the first day, stuffed in his mouth, and sewn in". The brutal murder and disfigurement of Emmett Till, a 14 year old boy, comes to mind. Till's murder in 1955 and the open casket funeral held by his mother set off the Civil Rights struggle just a few decades ago.

Emmett Till's brutalized face. Courtesy Wikipedia

Whitehead's novel is not just a gory retelling of a past but it connects, a tad subtly but explicitly, with current events. Black Americans are too frequently stopped while driving and checked by police in today's America. Slave catching patrolmen in Whitehead's novel "stopped any niggers they saw and demanded their passes. They stopped niggers they knew to be free, for their amusement but also to remind the Africans of the forces arrayed against them, whether they were owned by a white man or not".

The Underground Railroad that existed in the ante-bellum era was a metaphorical references to a loose network of abolitionists and slaves who had escaped who took it upon themselves to help others escape. Harriet Tubman, herself an escapee, was a 'conductor' on one such railroad. Whitehead takes the metaphor and makes it a Gabriel Garcia Marquess-like realism with a fictional but physical underground railroad that snakes from Georgia to the North Eastern states. Slaves are approached by station masters who then conduct them to a train that runs underground and accessed by a trap door. The trapdoor is a multi-layered symbolism. 

Slavery was not a monolithic uniform institution but varied across the states. While Georgia and the south were drenched in blood states like the Carolinas had their own hypocrisies and brutality, albeit more refined, like sterilization of blacks by stealth. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the most notorious experiment in American medical history where blacks afflicted by syphilis were given placebos and studied for the effects of progression of disease, finds a mention. Till today the experiment affects how blacks perceive medical professionals in America and a chastised medical fraternity is aware of the deep distrust of African-Americans towards them. 

Cora escapes from the Georgia plantation and reaches South Carolina where a doctor gently suggests to her that she should get sterilized. One night Cora hears a woman scream that her child was stolen. She at first thinks the woman is having nightmares remembering of perhaps a child stolen from her and sold off and only later learns that having been sterilized by stealth the woman had gone mad realizing what was stolen from her. 

Slavery was justified by one too many that it was Biblically sanctioned. While Cora convalesces at a safe house in South Carolina the white lady taking care of her recites Bible verses to her and gently tells her that if God had not intended for slavery to exist they'd be free. Cora bitterly remembers the overseer at the Georgia plantation reciting those verses punctuating them by lashing the slaves with a cat-o'-nine tails. 

Cora had even heard the 'Declaration of Independence'. A slave boy, Michael, used to recite the Declaration and it was an amusement to the Whites who marveled at a slave boy narrating it. "Michael's ability never amounted to more than a parlor trick, delighting visitors before the discussion turned as it always did to the diminished faculties of niggers".

Hearing Michael's recitation of the Declaration Cora "didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom". The jab at slave owning Thomas Jefferson is all too explicit. George Washington freed his slaves in his will but while he lived he hunted anyone who escaped from his clutches. The US constitution included what is now shamefully called one-fifths compromise whereby slaves were counted as property.

Benjamin Franklin had famously cautioned that "people who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety  deserve neither liberty nor safety". South Carolina, not wanting to be a safe haven for slaves fleeing southern states, instituted slave patrols that would barge into homes of whites and inspect for slaves who might be harbored by abolitionists. "Cora thought that the whites would be loath to give up their freedoms even in the name of security" but was shocked to learn that those desirous of being seen as patriots "boasted of how often they'd been searched and given a clean bill". It was common for neighbors, servants and even children  to inform on those who harbored slaves. The perils of nationalism could not be more tellingly illustrated. From the slave holding south to Stalinist Russia to today's 'see something, say something' America one can hear the echoes of that. In Stalin's Russia it was common of husbands to denounce wives and children informed on their parents.  

Cora is hidden in an attic by a family in South Carolina until the maid, tempted by reward, informs on the family. Cora is dragged away by a slave catcher engaged by the Randall family in Georgia while the family that sheltered her are hung from a tree. The story of Anne Frank comes to mind. Again and again the story that Whitehead tells is not just about slavery but of how people behave in circumstances not too different. This is a story of humanity at large told with slavery as central theme but one could see the stories of Holocaust, the horrors of Stalinism, the grotesqueness of India's caste system and more.

Nothing is black and white in the story. The pun is unintended. While there are whites who inflict such brutalities there are the white abolitionists who put their lives in harms way to liberate slaves and there were slaves who cooperate with the white man. Whether it is the Judenraat, the Jewish councils, in the concentration camps or the vast hundreds of thousands of Indians who served the British Raj or the groveling communists in the Stalin era or the members of the Vichy France the stain of collaborating with the oppressor is a human history not all too unique.

Having captured Cora the slave catcher Ridgeway lectures her on the 'American imperative': I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old world to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription - the American imperative.

Having indicted the 'American imperative' through the slave catcher Whitehead then gives voice through Elijah Lander, a mulatto abolitionist, about what Freedom is: Work needn't be suffering, it could unite folks...Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.

Controlling access to education from those seen as unworthy of wisdom by those who think they've a god given right to wisdom is seen across cultures with sickening regularity. From an ancient Indian treatise that forbade knowledge to those called Shudras to white plantation owners who thought "the only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun was a nigger with a book" it is a common thread. A slave being seen reading a pamphlet, not even a book, could suffer an agonizing death.

Colson Whitehead's book is an urgent read in a year where a racist and xenophobic demagogue is within striking distance of the American presidency. After I visited the 'Topology of terror" museum in Berlin I wrote that America too needs such a museum to teach Americans of the nation's darkest chapter. It so happens that the Smithsonian museums just opened up a museum about African-Americans in Washington DC, thanks to the ceaseless efforts of Civil Rights icon and Congressman John Lewis. It is worth noting that Lewis had to prevail over a racist congressman, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who time and again was resolutely against such a museum. The museum fulfills an urgent need. 

Whitehead wrote a column titled "Rules for Writing" in New York Times. Reading his book one could say that Whitehead has diligently followed the rules he had set forth. His very first rule was 'Show and Tell'. He disagrees with the "Show, don't tell" school of writing and calls for 'show and tell' because "when writers put their work out into the world they're like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do". Whitehead strikes the delicate balance in 'show and tell' where the telling could degenerate into total lack of nuances or subtleties. Referring to a dead dog of a slave owner he writes "the mutt was loved by man and nigger". The subtleties are packed into the sentences.

Rule 2 is "don't go searching for a subject, let the subject find you". 16 years in the making the subject had indeed found the author.

Saul Bellow, Whitehead quotes in Rule 3, said "fiction is higher autobiography". Whitehead lays down as dictum and adheres to "write what you know". 

Rule 4 is "never use three words when one will do" and rule 11 is "revise, revise, revise". Again, Whitehead practices what he preaches. The prose is sparse and completely shorn of unnecessary ornate phrases or metaphors. 

Having told writers to 'show and tell' he cautions in rule 6 that "what isn't said is as important as what is said. In many classic short stories the real action occurs in the silences". While he gives graphic details of the physical nature of the violence inflicted upon the slaves he  only implies the lurking moral corruption. No one, neither the slave owner or the slave, escapes the moral corruption of a society plagued by such violence. When Cora becomes a woman her fellow slaves gang rape her. Nudity is no sacred secret offered as token of intimacy because Cora is whipped naked in full view of her fellow slaves and others. Musing about sex with Ceasar, who had hatched the plan  to escape, Cora thinks to the day she was whipped naked and how Ceasar had looked at her unflinchingly even when other slaves, shuddering at the prospect that one day they certainly would be in her place, avert their eyes. After Cora's mother escapes scheming slaves make the 10 year old abandoned child's life miserable. The moral corruption of a violent system is hinted at. Again, the moral corruption of Stalinism and socialism in India came to my mind. 

'Underground Railroad' deserves to be read, re-read, re-read and reflected upon. The book is about the past but it shows how the past is never truly past and the present not only is an echo but is a progeny. This is not a story of one country's dark past but the story of humankind that even today murders and pillages in the name of race.

Whitehead's 'Underground Railroad' should become required reading in schools. I wish the book gets a Pulitzer next April.

References:

1. 6 Questions for Colson Whitehead - Time Magazine interview http://time.com/4447972/colson-whitehead-the-underground-railroad/
2. The Real Underground Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad
3. Michiko Kakutani's review of the book in NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/books/review-the-underground-railroad-colson-whitehead.html?action=click&contentCollection=Book%20Review&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article
4. Colson Whitehead interview with NYT on writing the book http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/books/colson-whitehead-on-slavery-success-and-writing-the-novel-that-really-scared-him.html
5. Colson Whitehead's rules for writing in NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/books/review/colson-whiteheads-rules-for-writing.html?_r=0
6. Emmett Till https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till
7. Civil Rights icon and Congressman John Lewis on the opening of Smithsonian museum about African Americans https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/john-lewis-spent-15-years-fighting-for-the-museum--now-the-dream-is-realized/2016/09/14/eeb0ca10-64bb-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html

American Civil War, Two Museums and Two Perspectives

America was willed into existence, as Americans are fond of saying, with the 'Declaration' that 'all men are created equal'. A nation, so born, was also mired in hypocrisy by not just refusing to end slavery but by enshrining it in the constitution. It is mild to call it hypocrisy, it is America's shame and America's original sin. However we might dress it up as "expedient arrangement" or that "the promise was what enabled the country to end slavery, eventually", it remains a dark chapter that continues to cast a shadow, two centuries later, on America.

Nearly a century after America went to war with itself, and nearly two centuries after the founding, Martin Luther King Jr scolded the country that the promise of equality, a promissory note, came returned,"marked insufficient funds".

Last year as I toured the Nazi museums of Berlin I wondered why does America not have a single museum that would match Germany's 'Topography of terror' museum. That museum is constructed right where the Gestapo headquarters used to stand. The museum not only bares the horrors of the Nazi regime but also puts to rest myths about the Nazi regime such as Hitler resurrecting German economy and the lies about lack of direct involvement of Nazi higher officials in Holocaust. Several of Berlin's museums were constructed solely to cleanse a nation of its sin. The goal is to ensure 'never again'. America should learn this lesson from Germany and learn it with urgency.

As Hillary Clinton saw her hopes to be President evaporate in wintry Iowa and New Hampshire her husband Bill Clinton became unhinged. After a brutal, ill advised, contest in South Carlina where Obama defeated Hillary handily Bill Clinton told a reporter "well, Jesse Jackson won South Carolina when he ran". The entire black community erupted in anger. That remark was interpreted, unfairly, as suggesting that Barack Obama, like, Jesse Jackson, another black aspirant to the Oval office, cannot go beyond a traditional stronghold like South Carolina. When rumors surfaced that Bill Clinton wanted Obama to 'wait' his turn the resentment in black community crossed boundary. Black voters interpreted the 'wait your turn' comment as "the time has not yet come for a black President". Racial politics still tears into America.

The pivotal moment of 2008 primaries was when news of Obama's pastor cursing 'God damn America' emerged. Obama's campaign went into a tail spin. A largely sympathetic press then helped Obama tamp that story down aided by a mediocre speech on race relations. Commentators helpfully quoted MLK Jr that "sunday morning 10 AM is the most segregated hour in America". MLK Jr was talking about the fact that black and white churches where, well, 'black' and 'white'.

I visited "The Museum of the Confederacy" and "Civil War Museum" in Richmond recently. The Confederacy Museum, thankfully, was not outright racist but it showed a remarkable blindness to America's shame. We have to note that both museums only deal with the war as their central theme. Slavery is an incidental topic in one and a side note in the other.

The first exhibit in the Confederacy Museum was titled "Why Secession, Why War". The exhibit explains that the leaders of the Confederacy acted because "they believed that the election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S.President threatened the South's interests. Lincoln's Republican Party championed a high tariff and federally subsidized internal improvements-economic policies that the South had long resisted-and opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories". The exhibit concluded saying that Abraham Lincoln wanted the South to fire the first shot and start the war. A third exhibit speaking about the firing at Fort Sumter ends with "Abraham Lincoln had succeeded in maneuvering the Confederacy into firing the first shot of the war".

The exhibit "Why did they fight" said the South thought it was embarking on a second revolution to protect constitutional rights and that 'among these rights was the right to own slaves-a right sanctioned by Constitution and by custom-even though the vast majority of Confederate soldiers did not own slaves".

The most curious exhibit was about refuting the rumor that Jefferson Davies, President of the Confederacy, tried to escape wearing his wife's clothing. The museum carefully and most emphatically disproves that rumor.

The museum hews close to a typical narrative in the South that the war was all about rights, that slavery was not the prime mover, that after all slavery was indeed a right under the constitution (and sanctified by subsequent Supreme Court ruling as in Dred Scott). The museum is titled "The museum of the Confederacy". But it has nothing about life in the Confederacy and is only about the Confederate view point regarding the Civil War.

A sad exhibit was the one titled 'Fraternization' that spoke of how soldiers of the Union and Confederacy who were butchering each other would still get together to relax, share food and even trade. It reminded of a poem by T.Hood that speaks for a soldier who remembers his opponents and wonders if they had met in bar that they would have shared a drink. Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust in 'Republic of suffering' estimated the US lost nearly 1/6th of its population.

My next museum was the 'Civil War Museum' at Tredegar near Richmond. This is a more intellectually honest museum. This museum traces the history of the conflict through the two key issues of slavery and economic structures. The agrarian South was dependent on slavery for its labor. Industrialized North, by virtue of industrialization, needed free men. As a college student I had read Nehru's 'Glimpses of World History' wherein Nehru quotes Lincoln showing that freeing slaves was not the primary aim of the war. Lincoln only desired to keep the union. Emancipation was a by product of the war. In fact if Lincoln had declared Emancipation as the goal, it can be fairly said, many in the Union army would not have gone to war.

Through out the war slaves were defined as property by both the Union and the Confederacy. Wartime customs of confiscating enemy 'property' was used to liberate slaves in conquered territory. Lincoln hated slavery but never believed that blacks and whites were equal.

At a place where visitors could write their thoughts on a stickie paper a visitor wrote "African kings helped white traders in getting slaves. Where would those slaves be in life if they had lived in Africa". Pre-eminent Afro-American Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr wrote an oped in New York Times about a much less spoken part of slavery. White slave traders would dock their ships in the port and wait for slaves to be brought by local kings from the inland. This is a controversial part in the slavery debate akin to the role of the 'Judenrat' (Jewish Councils) in Holocaust. But that a person in 2013 America could ask indirectly "did they not have a better life by being brought to USA, albeit as slaves" is what is appalling.

I read Margaret Mitchell's 'Gone with the wind' when I had not yet read much about slavery in USA. I did not think much about the glorification of the South's way of life much. Only when I read Malcolm X's biography by Alex Haley the political angle of the book struck me. Malcolm X, a vagabond when the movie was released, watched it in Harlem (of all places). Not knowing much about the movie he went to the theater and he was startled that he was the only person in a Harlem theater watching 'Gone with the wind". Mitchell glorifies the South and makes it appear that slaves were treated like human beings, even almost equals, with great care and concern by their masters.

Henry Louis Gates edited a nice collection of writings by slaves titled 'Slave narratives'. It is a moving collection of writing. When children are torn from their parents and sold into slavery it is hard not to shed a tear. Young girl children were abused. Education was denied. Even unto the modern era the lynchings, Jim Crow, KKK all tell a very sordid saga. KKK was born out of the civil war.

Both museums concentrate mostly on just how the war went. Neither museum delve into any aftermath in considerable measure. Drew Gilpin Faust in her book would focus on how the war completely remade gender relationships and redefined role of women in society. The museums barely scrape such an effect.

On civil rights I've a note to add. It is a misconception that racism is only by whites against blacks. Racism is usually intertwined with what a race feels perceives as threats to its economic prospects. Black mayor of Washington DC recently made very objectionable comments about stores owned by Asians in DC. When Asian basketball player Jeremy Lin became a sensation he was mocked by blacks chanting 'go back to your books'. During the recent 50th anniversary of MLK Jr's immortal 'March on Washington' a columnist recalled the pivotal role played by Bayard Rustin, a little spoken of civil rights hero. MLK Jr shunned him because Bayard Rustin was a homo-sexual. When Obama made the decision to support gays in military he had to placate Afro-American pastors. Black churches are stridently anti-gay rights. Ever since the formation of Israel Jewish Americans and Blacks have parted way with anti-semitism taking roots among black churches. When Obama's estranged, disavowed, pastor Jeremiah wright was asked if he made peace with the President he said "them Jews will not allow me". Obama's then chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, was a Jew.

America, on tax payer money, has to construct two museums. One for slavery and another to tell the story of civil rights. This will be America's atonement. This should be Barack Obama's calling. I wish he undertakes it as his first post-Presidential task. This will go a long way in educating millions about the basic decency to respect all as human beings. America needs to face up to its shameful past unflinchingly as Germany does. Only such an honesty will make this great country greater still.

Gandhi and Lincoln: A Life of Evolving Ideas.

Joseph Lelyveld's, just released, "Great Soul:Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle with India" created a furore in India. Gujarat government immediately banned it before anyone had read it. The furore centered around two issues. First, and the most inflaming, was Lelyveld's imputation that Gandhi might have had bi-sexual impulses. Second was Lelyveld delving deep into how Gandhi, the one who became Mahatma, was forged in South Africa. A recent sad trend in India is for Dalit leaders and Dalit opinion makers to trash Gandhi as racist while uncritically praising Ambedkar. Everyone can choose whom they want to idolize but when we choose to trash someone we need some justification. Meena Kandasamy, a Dalit activist, ruffled a few feathers by quoting Gandhi from his days in South Africa, about blacks. A post office used to have two entrances, one for whites and another for the rest. Gandhi had written that "Kaffirs" (referring to blacks) should not be clubbed with Indians, the latter being superior to blacks. The quotes supplied by Meena Kandasamy were accurate. The online edition of Gandhi's "Collected Works" has them verbatim. [“Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized - the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.” ~ CWMG, Vol. VIII, pp. 135-136] So shall we label Gandhi as 'racist'?

The 2011 Pulitzer for the best book on an American historical subject went to Eric Foner's "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and Slavery". Just as Indian kids learn about how Gandhi was a Mahatma, American kids learn how Lincoln ended slavery, though a tad little less hagiographic.  Lincoln, as anyone with a little deeper knowledge of history would know, had very jaded opinions on blacks. While he was strongly anti-slavery he did not believe that all men were 'created equal' as Jefferson, the slave owner, wrote in "Declaration of Independence". Foner, writes, "while his racial views changed during the Civil War, he never became a principled egalitarian.."

A little perspective helps us to appreciate Gandhi better. The institution of slavery remains America's 'original sin'. George Washington who decreed that his slaves are to be free men after his wife's death in his lifetime would go to great lengths to recapture a slave who had escaped. Thomas Jefferson famously sired an illegitimate child with a slave while declaring that all men are created equal. It would be childish to  decry all of them as arrogant hypocrites. Far from it they were struggling between what they knew was right versus what was possible when a country was being willed into becoming. Abraham Lincoln became president fully aware of the slavery issue and knew full well that as President he would have to address either wholly or in part. In a sort of historical passing of baton Lincoln was killed 4 years before Gandhi was born in 1869. Unlike Lincoln Gandhi was born into a society that was steeped into racism for centuries and lacked an intellectual framework that challenged such evil. Anti-Slavery abolitionism, intellectual opposition to slavery were rigorous in America for a long time, in fact ever since its birth. Slavery in America did not gain the religious sanction, or at least to the level that casteism enjoyed in India. Gandhi's stay in London was not a period of intellectual fermentation. In fact he went to great lengths to keep his famous promises to his mother. It is this man who came to South Africa.

Eric Foner admirably cautions, "the problem is that we tend too often to read Lincoln's growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end. This enables scholars t ignore or downplay aspects of Lincoln's beliefs with which they are uncomfortable- his long association with the idea of colonization, for example- while fastening on that which is most admirable at each stage of his career, especially his deep hatred of slavery". Foner then invites the reader to trace lIncoln's "growth, as it were, forward, as it unfolded, with sideways and even backward steps along the way".

Thanks to the movie Gandhi is even more sanitized and fossilized. Most Indians who have never read a full length biography of Gandhi are shocked and swayed when Meena and others fling accusation from selections that lend heft to their personal agendas. The same Gandhi who wanted separate doors for Indians was also one who would later slap his wife for not cleaning the toilets of a low caste ashram inmate. This was the same Gandhi who would choose to stay in the huts of outcaste when he toured. He would eat their food.

Lelyveld has done a signal service to Gandhi in fleshing out the evolution of Gandhi. Every schoolboy in India knows how Gandhi was thrown out of a train because he was brown skinned. Lelyveld adds a little known fact. Gandhi wrote about that incident to the train company and got a free ticket to travel first class again, which he did complete. In a long life like that of Gandhi's there are always new events that can be teased to throw some new light. Gandhi, Churchill, Lincoln, Napoleon, Einstein are all a biographer's delight.

Gandhi lived through a very tumultuous era. He judged appropriately within his time. Malcolm X is a firebrand Afro-American leader who was famous for his violent speeches that, unlike Martin Luther King Jr, decried any pacifist approach towards white America. In Malcolm's view both races could never co-exist. Till last month the most famous biography of Malcolm X was the one by Alex Haley. Manning Marable's recently published biography had a shocker. Malcolm X had met with the violence prone white racist group KKK (Ku Klux Khan) to negotiate separate living spaces. Its akin to a Jewish leader negotiating with the Nazis. Marable goes on to write that after Malcolm X parted ways with "Nation of Islam" his views on racial reconciliation started to mellow and mirror King's approach. Lives like that of Gandhi, Malcolm X, Abraham Lincoln etc were all lived amidst very turbulent times, they were involved in redrawing centuries old social boundaries. Their lives caused tectonic shifts and they themselves had to first undergo such shifts within themselves.

It is one thing to call Hitler an anti-semite but to call Gandhi anti-Dalit only portrays an amateurish attitude towards a very complex life. Anyone is free to disagree with his convoluted, at time nonsensical too, logic of preserving components of Hindu religious structure but to attribute malicious intentions is sheer injustice. Let us learn to appreciate lives in their rich spectrum. Very rarely in life do we come across sheer evil like we saw in Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Even rarer, or shall we say never, is to see complete unsullied good.

A short note on Lelyveld's biography. Leyveld is no cheap sensationalist. He is a Pulitzer awarded writer who has worked in South Africa for decades. When evidence emerged that Jefferson had a child through a slave within hours that information was incorprated in the guided official tours at his residence in Monticello. Annette Gordon-Reed who wrote a biography of that episode was awarded a Pulitzer and to cap it was also selected as a "MacArthur Genius". Jeyamohan, a noted contemporary writer in Tamil, chides America for indulging in such tabloidism and slyly imputes a Christian conspiracy behind such maligning of a historical figure loved by Hindus. He forgets that America is the country where "The Last Temptation of Christ" was screened. Also see my earlier blog on free expression in USA http://contrarianworld.blogspot.com/2011/03/protecting-speech-we-do-not-like.html .