42 THE WEEK • JUNE 30, 2019
messengers—between the marchers and the ashram
headquarters, as well as the conduit for the media
covering the march.”EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
How did Gandhi come to acquire the simple, clean,
pared-to-the-bone prose style? Much of it can be traced
to his textual and printing experiments in South Africa.
Gandhi helped set up the International Printing Press,
which started producing the weekly Indian Opinion
in 1903. Gandhi’s Printing Press, a book by Isabel
Hofmeyr, gives an account of how he “experimented
with an anti-commodity, copyright-free, slow-motion
newspaper” called the Indian Opinion, which shunned
bylines and dateline-driven reporting. Apparently,
like other commercial enterprises, Gandhi also hired
cheap African labour on printing days to handle the
machines.
In this periodical, the staple format was that of the
summary which was an everyday activity for Gandhi
in order to espouse his radical ideas and concepts. He
mastered the “art of condensation” where he con-
stantly abridged stories from other papers, whittled
down laws, statutes and policy documents, and crafted
neat petitions and memorandums. More importantly,he interwove ethical extracts from writers and
thinkers in between clippings and summaries
from major papers. Gandhi intended this format
to engender more contemplative reading.
It is interesting to see how Gandhi dealt with
racism and hatred from the white-run press by
embedding his ever-evolving ethos of nonvio-
lence and non-cooperation in print. In the July 8,
1911, edition of Indian Opinion, an article from
Th e Rand Daily Mail titled ‘Th e Sons of South
Africa: A New Society’ referred to an organisation
with discriminatory membership policies favour-
ing people of “pure European descent”. Gandhi
refrained from commenting on the story, but he
created a “border of silence” around it that made
the reader think about the racial colour of such
an organisation.BOSE KRISHNAMACHARI
TITLE SHANTI
MEDIUM GRAPHITE, MIRROR AND
WATERCOLOUR ON KENT PAPER
SIZE 30x66 INCHES
YEAR 2002