Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  The argument raged within the ashram, and without. Gandhi was able to persuade Kasturba that the step was necessary. However, their principal patron, Mangaldas Girdhardas, decided to withdraw his funding. He was an orthodox Hindu who, after visiting his factory and meeting workers of different castes, would have a purificatory bath before his meal. Gandhi’s decision to admit an ‘untouchable’ family was not something he could abide.

  Mangaldas was funding the ashram on a monthly basis. If the next cheque did not come, Gandhi’s experiment, barely three months old, faced extinction. Fortunately, another Ahmedabad industrialist stepped in. In his autobiography, Gandhi does not identify the man, referring to him simply as the ‘Sheth’ (merchant). But we know him to be Ambalal Sarabhai. Twenty-eight years younger than Mangaldas, he was of a more progressive cast of mind, and had travelled widely overseas.62

  Sarabhai and Gandhi had only met once. The businessman had not stepped inside the ashram. But on hearing that the experiment was in trouble, Sarabhai drove to Kochrab and sent word (through one of the schoolchildren) that he wanted to see the founder. Gandhi went outside, where the ‘Sheth’ was waiting in his car. He asked whether Gandhi needed any help. Gandhi replied: ‘Most certainly. And I confess I am at the present moment at the end of my resources.’

  Sarabhai told Gandhi that he would come again the following day. Twenty-four hours later, a car horn was heard outside the ashram. Once more, a child was sent to summon Gandhi. From within the car, the ‘Sheth’ handed over a large bundle of currency notes, and drove away.

  The notes were worth Rs 13,000, or two years’ expenses. The ashram had been saved, by a benefactor who had not so much as entered the premises.63 But the grumblings continued. Visiting the ashram in October 1915, the district magistrate of Ahmedabad found that ‘the Institution evidently still excites interest. I saw half a dozen students from Bombay, waiting to be shown round, or perhaps to see the great man. But it has come to grief on the matter of caste, and Mr. Gandhi prefers to have things as they are to giving in over what is to him a vital Principle.’64

  In the last week of December, Gandhi attended the annual session of the Indian National Congress in Bombay. He moved a resolution deploring the treatment of Indians in South Africa. Later, he heard G.A. Natesan praise him from the podium. ‘The problem of Indian nationality for the solution of which this Congress has been started,’ remarked Natesan, ‘seems to be very satisfactorily solved in South Africa with such brave leaders as Mr. Gandhi.’ Gandhi, said his Tamil admirer, had ‘returned to his motherland after winning a brave feat of arms with weapons unique and almost unparalleled in the history of the world’.65

  Gandhi’s travels in 1915 had exponentially expanded his knowledge of his homeland. He could now apply his mind and his methods to all problems of Indian nationality, whether social, political or religious.

  *1Poona is now Puné, just as Bombay is now Mumbai. However, in this book I use the place names current at the time Gandhi lived.

  *2The erstwhile ‘untouchables’ are now known as Dalits, a term which has come into common use only in recent decades. In this book, I use the terms current at the time Gandhi lived and worked, such as ‘Depressed Classes’, used widely in the official literature at the time, and also often used by Gandhi’s great contemporary B.R. Ambedkar; and ‘untouchables’, the inverted commas conveying the inhuman treatment that these people had to suffer at the hands of the Hindu caste order. In the early 1930s, Gandhi coined the term ‘Harijan’ (Children of God) as a substitute for ‘untouchables’; I use that term when specifically referring to his own activities and those of his followers.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Coming out in Banaras

  I

  The year’s probation mandated by Gokhale had ended. Gandhi was now free to speak out on political matters. Although he perhaps did not realize it, he was also freed by Gokhale’s premature death. Had his mentor been alive, Gandhi would have framed his utterances in the light of what Gokhale would make of them. Gokhale may also have tried to keep him within the Servants of India Society, a body that focused on social work and stayed out of political controversies.

  Gandhi spent the first month of 1916 in Gujarat. On 1 February, he travelled to Banaras. He had been invited to the founding ceremonies of the Banaras Hindu University, whose prime movers were the theosophist Annie Besant and the Allahabad scholar Madan Mohan Malaviya. A centre of learning and of pilgrimage, Banaras was probably the oldest and certainly the most storied of Indian cities. The creation of a modern university in an ancient town was originally Mrs Besant’s idea. Malaviya was instrumental in raising the money and in acquiring land for the campus. Among the patrons were some influential (and very rich) maharajas. They would be in attendance at the inaugural ceremony where the chief guest was the viceroy, Lord Hardinge.1

  A massive amphitheatre had been constructed for the opening. The spectators were seated in fifteen different stands, their cards of admission issued in five colours to help them find their place. The band in attendance struck up ‘God Save the King’ as the viceroy came and took his seat. Around him sat sundry maharajas, high officials of the Raj and Indians with knighthoods.

  The ceremony began at noon on 4 February, with a speech welcoming the viceroy by a major patron of the university, the maharaja of Darbhanga. The maharaja said they hoped to produce men of intellect and character ‘who love their Motherland, are loyal to the King and are in every way fit to be useful members of the community and worthy citizens of a great Empire’.2

  The viceroy then made a speech of his own, before laying the foundation stone amidst the chanting of Sanskrit hymns. After lunch he was driven off to the railway station on a shining metalled road specially built for the occasion. In his memoirs, the chief guest wrote of how it had been ‘a very big function and a very successful one….The Durbar at Benares was extraordinarily picturesque with the Ruling Chiefs and all the Indians in their smartest clothes, in bright colours and parti-coloured turbans…There were 6,000 people present and all very enthusiastic.’3

  The viceroy had stayed only for the first day, 4 February. From the 5th to the 8th, the ceremonies carried on, featuring dances, plays, cricket matches and lectures.

  Apart from scholars and scientists, some public figures had also been asked to deliver lectures. On the evening of 6 February, Annie Besant spoke on ‘The University as a Builder of Character’. Immediately after her, Gandhi was due to speak. The title of his talk was not listed on the programme; but it was assumed that he would speak about his experiences in South Africa.

  Gandhi’s autobiography does not mention this visit to Banaras. Whether the omission was deliberate one cannot say. (The book was written as a series of newspaper articles, and in any case, memoirists have the freedom to include or exclude memories as they please.) Nonetheless the omission is striking. For, Gandhi’s speech in Banaras was the first properly public statement he made after his return to the homeland. What he said created a stir; how the audience responded to what he said created a stir too.

  The text of Gandhi’s Banaras speech in the Collected Works is taken from an anthology of his writings published by G.A. Natesan in 1918. In sending his text to Natesan, Gandhi said he had ‘merely removed some of the verbiage which in cold print would make the speech bad reading’. The provincial archives in Lucknow contain the unexpurgated version, this based on the notes in shorthand of a reporter from the Leader newspaper.4

  Among the sections excised by Gandhi was a broadside against Lord Macaulay. In making English the language of instruction in India, Macaulay had hoped ‘to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern…a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’.5 Gandhi commented acidly that ‘Lord Macaulay made many blunders in his life, all unconsciously, but so far as India is concerned there was never a greater blunder made than
when he penned that minute on education’.

  Also excised by Gandhi was a paragraph suggesting that the new university was in danger of isolating itself from the masses. The salvation of the country, he had remarked, ‘is only going to come when the agriculturist, when the artisan of India is educated up to his sense of responsibility, when he finds that he has at least enough to feed himself on, to clothe himself. And you are not going to learn all these things in the university…’

  For all that it left out, the text that Gandhi sent to the printer was powerful and provocative enough. One section directly attacked the princes who were the new university’s main patrons. Was it necessary, asked Gandhi, ‘that in order to show the truest loyalty to our King-Emperor, it is necessary for us to ransack our jewellery-boxes and to appear bedecked from head to toe’? Gandhi told the invitees that ‘there is no salvation for India unless you strip yourself of this jewellery and hold it in trust for your countrymen in India (“Hear, hear” and applause)’. ‘There can be no spirit of self-government about us,’ he went on, ‘if we take away or allow others to take away from the peasants almost the whole of the results of their labour.’

  The previous day, Gandhi had visited the city’s most famous shrine, the Kashi Vishwanath temple. He found it filthy, the state of the temple symptomatic of the state of Indian society. As he told his audience in the university, ‘If a stranger dropped from above on to this great temple and he had to consider what we as Hindus were, would he not be justified in condemning us? Is not this great temple a reflection of our own character?…Is it right that the lanes of our sacred temple should be as dirty as they are?…If even our temples are not models of roominess and cleanliness, what can our self-government be?’

  Hearing Gandhi’s strictures against princely excess and Hindu custom were the princes themselves. One, the maharaja of Alwar, left the podium in protest. As he walked out, he passed the commissioner of Banaras, and said, ‘I am simply disgusted, the man must be mad.’ The commissioner replied, ‘Well Maharaja Sahib, this is no place for us.’6

  Gandhi carried on, asking why, when the viceroy came to Banaras, there were so many detectives on the streets and on rooftops. Was this a sign of fear? He then spoke of the anarchists of Bengal, who sought to throw bombs at high officials in the hope that they would be terrorized into fleeing India. Gandhi termed their zeal ‘misdirected, and wondered why they were so afraid to come into the open’. At this stage, Annie Besant, sitting behind Gandhi, intervened, saying: ‘Stop! Please Stop!’ More princes began leaving the stage. The students in the audience, on the other hand, shouted: ‘Go On! Go On!’ Gandhi asked the chairman (the maharaja of Darbhanga) what he should do. The chairman answered: ‘Please explain your object.’ Gandhi then said that ‘there is no room for anarchism in India’. He himself wished ‘to purge India of the atmosphere of suspicion on either side’ so as to create an empire ‘based on mutual love and mutual trust’.

  The caveat entered, Gandhi returned to the polemical mode. He deplored ‘the atmosphere of sycophancy and falsity’ that surrounded the high officials of the Raj. He characterized their behaviour as ‘overbearing’ and ‘tyrannical’. He then said that Indians would never be granted self-government; they had to take it for themselves, as the Boers had done in South Africa. The suggestion of a rebellion against the Raj led to more agitation on the stage. Mrs Besant asked Gandhi once more to stop; the chairman, an arch-loyalist like the rest of his ilk, declared the meeting closed.

  As the princes left the podium, Madan Mohan Malaviya walked over and addressed the crowd. He was sorry that Gandhi’s speech had ‘given offence in high quarters’. The references to anarchists had alarmed the chiefs; had they waited, they would have come to know that Gandhi was in fact deploring their methods. What Gandhi wanted to do, said Malaviya, was ‘to wean for all time our students from the evil influences of those who themselves hiding behind the screen, turn young men into the wrong part’.7

  A member of the audience later recalled that ‘everybody was offended’ by Gandhi’s speech: ‘the Ruling Princes because of his ungenerous attack on their jewellery, the University authorities because of the slight cast on them by his riling at their princely patrons, the C.I.D. officers because of his appreciation of sedition mongers, and lastly Mr. Gandhi himself, because the meeting terminated abruptly without even a “by your leave” to the speaker.’8

  II

  The day after his speech, Gandhi wrote a letter to the maharaja of Darbhanga, clarifying that he held ‘very strong views against all acts of violence and anarchy’. His mission was ‘securing the utmost freedom for my country but never by violence’. The maharaja was unpersuaded. On 7 February, when presiding over another public lecture, the maharaja of Darbhanga said that ‘they had heard with grief and pain the remarks of Mr. Gandhi [the previous day] and he was sure they all disapproved the attitude Mr. Gandhi had taken up’.9

  Gandhi had, meanwhile, left Banaras for Bombay. On 9 February, a correspondent from the Associated Press asked why his speech had become so controversial. Gandhi clarified that while he thought the anarchists had ‘patriotic motives’, their methods did great damage in the long run. He had never endorsed violence; indeed, it was his ‘firm belief that, but for Mrs. Besant’s hasty and ill-conceived interruption, nothing would have happened and my speech in its completed state would have left no room for any doubt as to its meaning’.10

  When a report of this interview reached Mrs Besant, she hastened to defend herself. She had, she said, heard a police officer sitting behind her say, ‘Everything he says is being taken down, and will be sent to the Commissioner.’ Since Gandhi’s remarks were ‘capable of a construction’ contrary to what he intended, she had told the chairman that ‘politics is out of place in that meeting’. ‘If the meeting had been called by Mr. Gandhi,’ said Mrs Besant, ‘it would have been no one’s business but his own what he chose to say.’ But as a member of the university committee, she was responsible to the invitees, to whom Gandhi’s remarks did seem a provocation.11

  Mrs Besant was correct on one count; the government was keenly following what Gandhi had to say. The superintendent of police in Banaras wired his bosses in Lucknow about the visitor’s ‘objectionable speech’. The copy of the speech prepared by the Leader was obtained; and the newspaper was prohibited from publishing it. In a long report on the incident, the commissioner of Banaras grimly noted that ‘the reception by the students of Gandhi’s address indicated the spirit which permeates them. The remarks which they cheered were those which referred to the giving up of English, and the turning of the English—bag and baggage—out of the country.’12

  The authorities were confused as to how to deal with the provocation. The police and the legal remembrancer to the United Provinces (UP) government both held Gandhi’s remarks to be ‘seditious and disloyal’, and recommended that he be arrested and prosecuted under the Indian Penal Code. The chief secretary disagreed; Gandhi, he noted, ‘is already a popular hero, and prosecution will only madden him still further and increase his influence with the students. Cold water seems better than the martyr’s stake.’13

  These notes and opinions went back and forth between the different departments of the UP government. On 17 March—a full five weeks after the speech—the lieutenant governor, James Meston, summed up the debate in magisterial terms:

  My own impression is that Gandhi started with the intention of talking against the use of violence in the nationalist campaign and the importance of cultivating higher qualities than brute force….But however well designed the outlines of his address might have been, Gandhi clearly got carried away by his own rhetoric and by the applause with which the students received some unguarded expressions which he used. In his growing excitement, he lost control of himself, and let out his real sentiments. Part of his speech was admirable; part was in thoroughly bad taste; the rest, though not a deliberate or intentional incitement to sedition, w
as in effect seditious and open to grave objection.

  The lieutenant governor also advised against prosecution, since ‘influential men in his own community’ had distanced themselves from Gandhi’s views, and since action against him would spoil the success of the university’s inauguration as a whole. The ‘wisest course’ therefore, would be for the government to let the matter drop, and allow the incident caused by Gandhi’s speech to ‘slip into obscurity and oblivion’.14

  III

  Although Gandhi disassociated himself from the methods of the anarchists, his suggestion that their motives were patriotic caused disquiet. No group of Indians was more loyal to the Empire than the maharajas. And Madan Mohan Malaviya himself belonged to the ‘Moderate’ wing of the Congress party, which believed in slow, incremental gains for Indians granted by Britons from above.

  The princes and the Moderates both had a horror of violent protest. That the viceroy had inaugurated the university was further evidence that this was an establishment affair. Gandhi’s mere mention of terror and assassination muddied the waters. Lord Hardinge had himself narrowly escaped an attempt on his life in December 1912, when a bomb had been thrown at him while he was on an elephant in a grand public procession in Delhi.15 The detectives who shadowed the viceroy as he drove through the streets of Banaras were there to forestall a second attack.

  The official commentary on Gandhi’s speech focused on whether the references to anarchism were ‘seditious’. But in fact, the speech was—and is—notable for far more than its treatment of violence and non-violence. In Banaras, Gandhi made four fundamental claims about how Indians should conduct their affairs.

  First, Gandhi argued in favour of instruction in the mother tongue. English, the foreign language imposed on India, should have no place in education or public affairs;