Kasturba and Devadas had rushed from Ahmedabad to be with him, as had Mahadev Desai and Anasuya Sarabhai. A steady stream of Congress workers and leaders were demanding admission. This placed some strain on Colonel Maddox, who found Gandhi ‘a bit upset about the restriction of visitors and…a terribly difficult bird to handle’.34 The doctor would, however, have been comforted by praise from the nationalist Bombay Chronicle, which remarked that his ‘bold and unconventional step of removing the Mahatma to the Hospital in his own car, and his scrupulous care and treatment—all have preserved a life that is held in the highest esteem by millions of Indians’.35
On 15 January—three days after Gandhi’s operation—the home secretary of Bombay noted that his illness ‘has redoubled popular interest and concern in him and we may expect strong, if not intensive, feeling to be aroused if he is sent back to prison when he is well again. The question is: is it worth keeping him in prison any longer; is Gandhi in prison, in the circumstance and in view of the general situation, a greater force than when at large?’ The official thought that ‘Gandhi at large will be a restraining force against the adoption of violent methods which the more extreme sections are beginning to coquette with’. There would, he argued, be ‘much political advantage’ in the government releasing him now as an act of clemency.36
On 18 January, there was a mass meeting of all communities at Bombay’s Chowpatty beach, held to pray for the good health of Gandhi and ask for his immediate release. Meanwhile, prominent public figures in the Bombay Presidency, including the lawyers M.A. Jinnah and M.R. Jayakar, and the industrial magnates Sir Purushottamdas Thakurdas and Sir Dinshaw Petit, urged the government not to send Gandhi back to jail after he had recovered from his operation, but set him free instead. Jinnah spoke for many when he hoped the government would remit the remaining period of Gandhi’s sentence, and have him ‘restored to his family, friends and countrymen’.37
The Government of India was reluctant to release Gandhi. However, there was now a new governor of Bombay, Leslie Wilson, who was more sympathetic to the popular sentiment. His officials told him that, if he was set free, Gandhi would exercise a ‘restraining influence’ on the Ali Brothers. Besides, sending Gandhi back to prison ‘might easily lead to outbreaks of violence, which, in view of the present industrial situation in Bombay, would very probably lead to a more serious position’. This was a reference to the growing communist influence among the textile millworkers in Bombay, whose philosophy of violent revolution Gandhi was known to oppose and abhor.38
Pressing their case, the Bombay government added that Colonel Maddox could get an undertaking from Gandhi not to take part in politics till he had fully recovered, which the doctor had estimated would take at least six months. Maddox and Gandhi had talked about where he might best recoup his strength. The doctor thought that what he needed most of all was some months of continuous exposure to cool and fresh winds from the sea. A couple of possible locations in Surat district were discussed.39
Meanwhile, visitors continued to pour into the hospital ward. Mohammad Ali came on 28 January; the next day his brother, Shaukat, joined him. They spent a long time chatting with Gandhi. As they were leaving, Shaukat told Gandhi: ‘Take plenty of food now. Don’t you starve yourself!’ Gandhi replied: ‘But if I grow fat, how will you find it possible to thrust me into the pocket’ (this a reference to their joint tours of 1920–21, when the elder Ali had said he always kept his little Hindu friend with him, in his pocket).
Later, speaking to C. Rajagopalachari, Gandhi expressed his worries about the growing rift between Hindus and Muslims. The Arya Samaj and the Mahasabha-ites were urging Hindus to ‘get as strong as the Muslims’, and enrol in gymnasia and akharas. Gandhi found this talk ‘absurd’. As he told Rajagopalachari, ‘admit the use of armed force and you will make the country an armed camp in no time’. Gandhi also deprecated the Muslim belief that the Word of God as passed on to Muhammad was eternal and infallible. He admired the Prophet’s simplicity and spirit of sacrifice, but did not think that his ‘message was final and for all time’.
There were political colleagues who came to see Gandhi, and also some trophy hunters. Two American journalists turned up with cameras, begging the nurses to allow them to take photographs of the great man in his hospital bed. ‘This is a hospital,’ said one nurse angrily. ‘Gandhi is a patient here. It is not a museum, nor is Gandhi a specimen. Get away!’40
On 4 February 1924, the government chose to release Gandhi unconditionally. Two Englishmen were at his bedside when the release order reached Gandhi. These were his old friend Charlie Andrews, and the doctor who had recently operated on him, Colonel Maddox. It fell to the doctor to read the text out loud; he was, an eyewitness wrote, ‘most enthusiastic in congratulating’ his patient. As the news spread, a crowd of people from all over Poona came to offer their congratulations in person; which they could not do, since the doctor did not want to take any chances with a still weak and recovering patient. Telegrams from all over India also came pouring in; these were selectively read to Gandhi by his son Devadas.41
Three days after he was officially set free, but while he was still convalescing in the Sassoon Hospital, Gandhi wrote a long letter to Mohammad Ali, the serving president of the Congress. This assessed the changes in the Indian political scene in the time he had been incarcerated. ‘It is clear,’ wrote Gandhi to the younger of the Ali Brothers,
that without unity between Hindus, Mahomedans, Sikhs, Parsis and Christians and other Indians, all talk of swaraj is idle. The unity which I fondly believed, in 1922, had been nearly achieved has, so far as Hindus and Mussalmans are concerned, I observe, suffered a severe check. Mutual trust has given place to distrust….When I heard in the jail of the tensions between Hindus and Mussalmans in certain places, my heart sank within me.
Gandhi then moved on to the promotion of spinning and the abolition of untouchability, two other projects in urgent need of renewal. Finally, he raised the ‘vexed question’ of whether Congressmen should resume entering legislative councils, a growing demand within the party, for which he had ‘no data for coming to a judgment’ just yet.42
In early March, Gandhi read in the newspapers of the abolition of the Khilafat. This act had been undertaken not by the conquering Europeans, but by the Turks themselves, directed by their new and aggressively secularizing leader Kemal Atatürk. Gandhi wrote at once to Mohammad Ali to console him. While ‘the decision must cause deep grief and distress to you’, he remarked, his friend should remember that ‘the future of Islam lies in the hand of the Mussulmans of India’.43
On 11 March, Gandhi was finally discharged from the Sassoon Hospital. He caught a train to Bombay, where—on the advice of his doctors—he would stay at a seaside cottage in Juhu owned by the Gujarati industrialist Narottam Morarjee. This was on the outskirts of Bombay, so Gandhi would have access to good medical care, and could also easily consult Colonel Maddox in Poona if need be.
The cottage in Juhu faced the sea, and at high tide, the waves came right up to its boundary wall. Here, a man born on the coast and who had spent so much of his early life in ports and ships, would recover his health while planning his, and his country’s, future.
CHAPTER TEN
Picking up the Pieces
I
Once he was out of jail, Gandhi’s daily schedule was modified. He still woke up at 4.30 a.m. and said his prayers. At six he had a light breakfast, then took a short walk within the compound of the cottage. From then until midday he attended to his correspondence in English and in Gujarati, dictating letters and articles to a shorthand typist. He rested in the afternoon, saw visitors, and then took a forty-minute walk on the seashore. On his doctor’s advice, he had not yet resumed spinning.
Juhu, the suburb where Gandhi was recovering, was easily accessible from the city by rail and road. A stream of visitors, mostly uninvited and unannounced, descended daily from Bombay. Gandhi w
as finally forced to issue a public appeal, asking people to come see him between five and six in the evening only. ‘The capital of energy at my disposal is very small,’ he wrote, ‘and I want to utilize it only in service. I wish to resume editorship of Navajivan and Young India from next week. And I need absolute quiet for that work. If all my time and energy are taken up in seeing and entertaining you, it will not be possible for me to edit the weeklies in the way I desire.’1
Among those keen to see Gandhi was M.A. Jinnah’s young wife, Ruttie. She sent a basket of strawberries, with a note saying she wanted to come too, but was nervous lest it interfere with his health. ‘I should hate to think,’ wrote Ruttie Jinnah, ‘that what to me is a source of pleasure must to you inevitably prolong the struggle for recovery.’ Then she hopefully added: ‘But you must know, that like the rest of the world, I too am dying to see you, so when I can legitimately do so, I shall expect a line or a word of permission.’2
It is not clear whether Mrs Jinnah in fact visited Gandhi. But plenty of other admirers descended on the cottage in Juhu. ‘I understand that Juhu has become another general hospital,’ sarcastically wrote C. Rajagopalachari to Mahadev Desai, adding: ‘At Poona it was a special ward; but it is now a general ward of all consumptives and melancholics—and a ward without divisions for sexes.’3
In the last week of March, Gandhi’s old comrade in South Africa, Henry Polak, now based in London, cabled him with a request: the prestigious Spectator magazine wanted an exclusive article ‘giving summarily your present programme’.4 Gandhi was not up to writing the piece. However, he gave an interview to a visiting British journalist. Here he said, among other things, that ‘if Britain is unwilling to give us complete independence, I would welcome and accept Home Rule’. When asked how India could rule itself amidst ‘the irreconcilable differences of her castes, religions and tribes’, Gandhi answered:
Of course there are differences. No nation is without them. The United Kingdom was born amidst the Wars of the Roses. Probably we, too, shall fight. But, when we are tired of breaking each other’s heads, we shall discover that, despite the disparities of our races and religions, we can live together, just as the Scotch and Welsh manage to live together.5
Even as Gandhi spoke these words, a bitter conflict was brewing between different castes in the southern princely state of Travancore. In the forefront of this struggle was T.K. Madhavan, a journalist and follower of the social reformer Narayana Guru. Born in a lowly caste of toddy tappers known as Ezhavas, Narayana Guru had started a social movement to remove caste distinctions altogether. He believed that all humans were the same, hence his slogan, ‘One Caste, One Religion, One God’.6
T.K. Madhavan had first met Gandhi in Tirunelveli in September 1921. The follower of Narayana Guru told the reformer from Gujarat that he was keen on promoting inter-caste marriages, and temple entry for ‘untouchables’. Gandhi, however, urged Madhavan to begin with opening wells and schools to ‘untouchables’ rather than roads or temples.7
Clearly, the Ezhava reformers were several steps ahead of Gandhi in their critique of caste. By the end of 1923, Madhavan had identified, as the first target of their movement, roads in the town of Vaikom that were barred to lower castes and ‘untouchables’. These roads ringed a famous shrine to Siva, administered and patronized by Nairs and Namboodiris, the two dominant castes in this part of South India.
Like Narayana Guru, Madhavan was an Ezhava, from the caste of toddy tappers that were ritually considered to be on the border that divided the ‘touchables’ from the ‘untouchables’. His strongest local ally was K.P. Kesava Menon, an upper-caste Nair who served as secretary of the Kottayam District Congress Committee. In the last week of January 1924—when Gandhi was at the Sassoon Hospital and still officially a prisoner—Madhavan and Kesava Menon formed an ‘Anti-Untouchability Committee’. A month later, this committee held a large public meeting in Vaikom, where it was decided that the rule barring the temple roads to low castes would be defied by a group of satyagrahis. The 30th of March was fixed as the date when this defiance would take place.8
On 12 March, Kesava Menon wrote to Gandhi of the satyagraha, saying: ‘A message from you would instil fresh courage in us.’ Three years previously, Gandhi had been lukewarm about temple entry. However, now that a movement was actually under way, he supported it, asking only that it be non-violent. Writing to Kesava Menon, Gandhi said that ‘there should be no show of force if any of our people oppose their progress. You should meekly submit and take all the beating, if any.’9
On 30 March, volunteers arrived in Vaikom from different parts of Travancore. Some came from Malabar, the Malayalam-speaking district of the Madras Presidency. The atmosphere in the satyagrahis’ camp ‘was charged with the austere serenity of Gandhian idealism and the burning odour of nationalist sentiment’. After the Mahatma’s message was read out to them, three men—a Pulaya (a caste considered not just ‘untouchable’, but also ‘unapproachable’), an Ezhava and a Nair—were garlanded, before marching hand in hand towards the prohibited road. When they were stopped by the police, the satyagrahis refused to turn back, but squatted on the road. A further batch of three men from different castes then came forward to break the law. The six protesters were arrested and taken off to court—one apologized, but the others stayed firm, and were sentenced to six months in prison.
A week later, both Madhavan and Kesava Menon courted arrest. More volunteers came forward to take their place. The authorities now changed their tactics, in part because the jails of Travancore were not capacious enough to house many more protesters. They had a large barricade erected across the road and placed a police guard next to it.
As the satyagraha proceeded, songs were composed in Malayalam juxtaposing admiration for Gandhi with denunciations of the caste system. Gandhi was praised as ‘the fountain of humaneness and sympathy’, who had invented the art of satyagraha ‘with a view to rescu[ing] his mother country’.10
The roads to the temple remained barred to the lower castes. The satyagrahis responded by sitting outside the barricade and refusing to eat or drink. This part of India is always hot and humid—and the men were unaccustomed to fasting anyway. Several fainted, and were rushed to hospital.11
When Gandhi heard of these new developments, he sent a wire to the satyagrahis asking them to ‘QUIT FASTING BUT STAND OR SQUAT IN RELAYS WITH QUIET SUBMISSION TILL ARRESTED’. The next day, a letter followed, where Gandhi elaborated on his advice. ‘You cannot fast against a tyrant,’ said Gandhi. ‘Fasting can only be resorted to against a lover [by which Gandhi meant ‘one you love’], not to extort rights but to reform him, as when a son fasts for a parent who drinks. My fast at Bombay, and then at Bardoli, was of that character. I fasted to reform those who loved me. But I will not fast to reform, say, General Dyer, who not only does not love me, but who regards himself as my enemy.’12
After Madhavan and Kesava Menon were arrested, the leadership of the satyagraha was assumed by George Joseph, a London-educated barrister and devoted Congressman. Joseph had edited Young India in 1923–24, stepping in for Rajagopalachari who, in turn, was stepping in for Gandhi.
Gandhi admired Joseph, but thought a Christian should not play a prominent role in a struggle within and for the soul of Hinduism. ‘You should let the Hindus do the work,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘It is they who have to purify themselves. You can help by your sympathy and your pen, but not by organizing the movement and certainly not by offering satyagraha.’ As a Christian, Joseph had ‘nothing to expiate’. Untouchability, insisted Gandhi, was ‘the sin of the Hindus’, and it is they who must ‘suffer for it’, and ‘pay the debt they owe their suppressed brothers and sisters’.13
In a long, reflective article in Young India, Gandhi took up the larger meaning of the Vaikom satyagraha. He had been criticized for suggesting that while the satyagraha continued, the organizers should simultaneously send petitions and deputations to
the authorities. His critics claimed Gandhi was ‘partial to the [Travancore] State authorities because they represent[ed] Indian rule’, whereas he was ‘hostile to the British authorities because they represent an alien rule’. In reply, Gandhi noted that even in South Africa, he had carried on negotiations with the authorities while the satyagraha proceeded.
In advocating an approach of determined incrementalism, Gandhi remarked that ‘in Travancore, the satyagrahis are not attacking a whole system….They are fighting sacerdotal prejudice….Satyagrahis would, therefore, be deviating from their path if they did not try to court junction with the authorities and cultivate public support by means of deputations, meetings, etc. Direct action does not always preclude other consistent methods. Nor is petitioning, etc., in every case a sign of weakness on the part of a satyagrahi. Indeed, he is no satyagrahi who is not humble.’14
In the third week of May, a group of volunteers from Vaikom arrived to meet Gandhi in Juhu. When asked what their future course of struggle might be, Gandhi suggested that caste Hindus who supported reform should march peacefully from Vaikom to the state capital, Trivandrum. They should ask the ruler for an audience, and urge him to have removed the disabilities of the ‘untouchables’. Gandhi told the deputation that ‘the caste Hindus comprising the procession must be prepared to suffer the inconveniences incidental to a slow march on foot. They must camp in places away from villages and towns and make their own arrangements for food.’15
Here too, Gandhi must certainly have had his South African experience in mind. In November 1913, he had led a slow, peaceful and yet spectacular march of several thousand Indians in Natal, who defied racial laws by crossing provincial boundaries into the Transvaal and courting arrest.16 By marching and sleeping in the open, and cooking their own food, and thus voluntarily inflicting suffering on themselves, the satyagrahis could draw attention to, and garner support for, their cause.
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