By John Plowright
(Photo: CNN)
Gandhi, who already graces the rupee, is apparently set to be the first non-white person to feature on British legal tender. Symbols matter and this symbolic change should be welcomed by all those wishing to celebrate diversity. Vegetarians and those advocating civil disobedience have additional reasons to rejoice. Moreover, at a time in which we’re re-calibrating our position on the world stage we can flatter ourselves that in honouring Gandhi we’re embracing an individual of indisputably world-historical significance.
The choice of Gandhi will also please those critical of Churchill, whose disobliging remarks about the Mahātmā were second in virulence only to his references to that other vegetarian teetotaller, Der Führer. I wonder, though, how many realise that George Orwell could be equally disparaging of the saintly Indian.
Thus in the course of reviewing his autobiography in 1949, the anti-imperialist Orwell not only observed that Gandhi’s “medievalist programme was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, overpopulated country” but claimed that “since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence — which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever” Gandhi was in a sense “our man”: useful to the British for damping down more dangerous forms of resistance, at least until 1942, when his ‘Quit India’ campaign for a time looked as though it might result in Japanese rule replacing that of Britain.
Gandhi is also a good choice for British currency, not least for a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, insofar as Gandhi, according to Orwell, called upon millionaires to repent rather than advocating the more practical step of redistributing their wealth through taxation. Thus although he may have been born a subject of the Queen-Empress Victoria rather than British-born, Gandhi, for Rishi Sunak, is clearly still “our man”.