GANDHI'S ENGLISH PROSE AND STYLE By Chandra shekhar Dubey

Gandhi was a  multi faceted personalty.Gandhi created his own idiom of polity and literature. Whatever he did ,his works bore the imprint of his originality and style. And why not ? After all every man is style. Undoubtedly, Gandhi was innovative and experimental in his style of functioning. He was original to his core. His political movements against the  British government: social  reform programmes , methods of mass mobilization , tools of protest and agitation  reflected the originality and straightforwardness of his personality. His words  were simple, ideas were comprehensible and the consequent effect was mass appeal. Like his life ,his writings were  crystal clear and coherent  and  systematic. Gandhi as a prose writer had all these ingredients of the person that e was. He was a powerful  prose writer. He had clarity of thought and vision, strange power of fusing thought with emotion, integrating words with pictures and creating a deep and lasting impact on his readers. His descriptive skill has been revealed in most of his prose writings. Now the question rises,  what makes his prose so powerful. The answer lies in the originality  of the content, honesty of purpose and truth of mind and heart. Truth and statement of truth in itself is powerful. Gandhi didn’t speak like Jesus and Confucius in parables and anecdotes but in a narrative which were loaded with true stories scattered around him and his works which he chose to narrate or write. He talked of commonplace things and  commonly shared realities evoking a sense of community feeling and social cohesiveness. Thus the impact was overwhelming.

Gandhi’s style was never ornamental nor did he write vaulting prose. He mixed high style with low with profound wit and maturity. Gandhi used English as his medium of  expression  as a tool of defiance .He experimented with the language by using an idiom closer to Indian languages. Barely a fortnight before his death he wrote “English and English scholars in India think that there is something special about my English .” It is difficult to understand the nuances of his prose style but one can see the richness of his prose, his frequent use of  Indianism. He used  neologism , code mixing and some of the words of the source language. Gandhi was known for precision and economy of words. His description of Mertizberg ,where he was thrown out of  first class compartment is remarkable for brevity in style. He used words like  ‘Himalayan mistake’, coined the word ‘QUIT INDIA’ and popularised the word ‘fast’. Gandhi freely mixed flinched clichés and and new coinages. Gandhi’s unornamented  style diverged entirely from the mauve prose of earlier autobiographies and political writing. Undoubtedly,  Gandhi was gifted with strange alchemical writing.

Chandra Shekhar Dubey

----------------------------oooo-------------------------------