Manilal seems to have asked his father to speak to his mother on his behalf. ‘I cannot ask for Ba’s permission,’ said Gandhi. ‘She will not give it. Her life will be embittered for ever.’
Looking at this correspondence through the lens of the twenty-first century, it may seem that the father was a bullying busybody, interfering with choices freely and voluntarily made by two adults. One might conclude that this was, as it were, an example of Hindu patriarchy at its most oppressive. Looked at from the perspective of its own time, one might view Gandhi’s intervention less harshly. For, he was trying desperately to build a modus vivendi between India’s two largest religious communities. There could be no united front against colonialism unless Hindus and Muslims came together. There would be no end to riots and clashes about cow slaughter and music before mosques unless Hindus and Muslims came together. In this delicate, fraught social and political environment, the Mahatma’s son marrying a Muslim girl—and, even worse, allowing her to convert to Hinduism—would at a stroke ruin Gandhi’s attempts to bring about unity and harmony. Had Manilal married Fatima, and had she then changed her name to Lakshmi or Parvati, there would be sermons in a thousand mosques across India about how Gandhi’s call for Hindus and Muslims to work together was merely a devious camouflage to kill Islam by capturing its women.
Gandhi’s principal reason for opposing the marriage was political. But there was also a personal element, the sense that his son had let him down by abandoning brahmacharya. He insinuated that in contemplating marriage, Manilal’s ‘main urge [was] carnal pleasure’; this an unfair and unfeeling charge whether read in his time or ours. He urged his son to ‘get out of your infatuation’, added that his brothers Ramdas and Devadas ‘also have arrived independently at the same conclusion, as mine’, and ended by reiterating that ‘I could not embolden myself to discuss this with Ba.’8
IV
In September 1926, a group of nationalists—Hindu, Muslim and Christian—signed a public appeal to Gandhi, urging him, ‘the unquestioned leader of the Indian people’, to come out of his ‘self-imposed seclusion’ and ‘resume the reins’ of the national movement.9 Gandhi was unmoved, writing to his friend, the Calcutta entrepreneur G.D. Birla, that ‘I know that I have served the country through my silence; however, I am not confident that I can unite the various parties. My heart shrinks from the idea of going to Gauhati [for the annual Congress].’10
In 1915, his mentor Gokhale had made him take a vow not to speak on public matters for a year. This new vow, applicable through the year 1926, was, however, self-imposed. By now, Gandhi had also decided to observe a weekly day of silence. Every Monday, he would not speak at all, communicating through signs or, if necessary, through writing notes on chits of paper.
Although Gandhi had not appeared in public for almost a year, his name and fame still resonated across India. In December 1926, a new nationalist newspaper in Bombay organized a readers’ poll to choose the ‘Ten Greatest Living Indians’. Such contests had come into vogue in the United States, but this may well have been the first such exercise in India. When the votes were counted, the list of people selected was as follows:
Person
Votes Polled
Gandhi
9308
Tagore
7391
Bose, Jagdish Chandra
5954
Nehru, Motilal
4035
Ghose, Aurobindo
3907
Ray, P.C.
3524
Naidu, Sarojini
3519
Malaviya, M.M.
2618
Lajpat Rai
2568
Srinivasa Sastri, V.S.
1516
The chart was accompanied by an essay interpreting these choices. This noted that ‘every sphere of life has received its meed’, with poets, philosophers and scientists all represented, as also politicians of different ideological tendencies.11 The commentary however missed the biases: there was one woman (perhaps par for the times), but as many as five Bengalis, this a reflection not merely of that province’s leading contribution to public life but also of the intense patriotism of its middle class, which may have prompted them to vote in larger numbers than their compatriots elsewhere in India. Even more remarkably, all ten of these ‘Greatest Living Indians’ were Hindu. The readers, and the newspaper, did not see fit to choose or nominate a single Muslim or Sikh or Christian or Parsi.
V
In the second week of December, Gandhi went for his usual week’s retreat in Wardha. The annual meeting of the All India Spinners Association (AISA) was held to coincide with his visit. The AISA now had on its rolls 110 carders, 42,959 spinners and 3407 weavers, working in some 150 production centres across the country.12
Despite his reluctance, Gandhi could not really afford to absent himself from that year’s Congress, held in the Assamese town of Gauhati. While he was on the train to Gauhati, a telegram was delivered to Gandhi at a wayside station. It was from Lala Lajpat Rai, and it contained the news of the murder in Delhi of the Arya Samaj leader Swami Shraddhananda.
The swami had been ill and was resting at home, when a young man named Abdul Rashid came to visit him. The servant told the visitor that his master was too sick to receive guests, but the man insisted. Hearing the argument, the swami told the servant to allow the visitor into his room. The guest asked for a glass of water, and while the servant went to get it, pulled out a revolver and shot and killed the swami.13
Despite his reservations about the proselytizing methods of the Arya Samaj, Gandhi admired Swami Shraddhananda for his fearlessness and his commitment to the extirpation of untouchability. On the evening of the 24 December, he spoke movingly of his late colleague at a meeting of the AICC in Gauhati. With the murder of a famous Hindu swami at the hands of a Muslim, this was, said Gandhi, ‘a testing time for [both] Hindus and Muslims. Let the Hindus remain peaceful and refrain from seeking revenge for this murder. Let them not think that the two communities are now enemies of each other and that unity is not possible….And, in my opinion, if a Mussalman thinks that Abdul Rashid did well he will be disgracing his religion….May God give us faith and wisdom to survive this test and to behave towards each other, after this deed, in such a way that God can say that the two communities did what they ought to have done.’14
In Gauhati, Gandhi was staying in a hut on the banks of the great river Brahmaputra. His dwelling, specially erected for the Congress, was made of bamboo and thatch. The mattress was on a bed of straw, and the bed sheet made in khadi—all from materials locally available in Assam. Gandhi was impressed by his temporary home, since ‘it costs very little, takes only a day or two to put up, and requires no great skill. This is so with all true art. It is always simple and natural.’15
VI
His sabbatical over, Gandhi now resumed his typically hectic pace of travel. From Gauhati, he journeyed to Calcutta, and from there to the eastern districts of Bengal. A brief visit to Banaras followed—to allow him to attend a meeting of homage to Swami Shraddhananda—before he carried on to the mining districts of Bihar, and from there to the north of the province, to the towns of Bettiah and Motihari which had been his base during his first satyagraha on Indian soil a decade previously.16
Travelling through eastern and central India, Gandhi found the purdah system far more prevalent than in other parts of the country. In western and southern India, women were attending schools and colleges and even participating in public life. The Tamil women he knew in South Africa had raised money for his struggle and even courted a
rrest. But in Bihar and the United Provinces the situation was altogether different. The women who attended his meetings were dressed in purdah, and sat behind a screen segregating them from the rest of the crowd.
In an article for Young India, Gandhi wrote of how the treatment of women had ‘pained and humiliated’ him. ‘Why do not our women enjoy the same freedom we do?’ he asked. ‘Why should they not be able to walk out and have fresh air?’ Purdah was a ‘barbarous custom which, whatever use it might have had when it was first introduced, had now become totally useless and [was] doing incalculable harm to the country’.17
The rights of women also figured in a letter Gandhi wrote to his son Manilal. Gandhi had not allowed Manilal to marry the girl of his choice (Fatima Gool, of Cape Town), but he had finally reconciled himself to the boy not remaining a lifelong brahmachari. Manilal had consented to an arranged marriage; once it was finalized, he would sail from South Africa to claim his wife.
The girl chosen for Manilal by his father was Sushila Mashruwala, a relative of Kishore Mashruwala, a member of the Ahmedabad Ashram. Sushila was an accomplished artist and musician, and spoke Gujarati, Marathi and Hindi fluently, and English adequately. The wedding was scheduled for the first week of March 1927, in Sushila’s home town, Akola.
Writing to Manilal, Gandhi asked for a ‘solemn assurance that you shall honour Sushila’s freedom; that you shall treat her as your companion, never as a slave; that you shall take as much care of her person as your own; that you shall not force her to surrender to your passion…’ The father continued: ‘You know my attitude towards women. Men have not been treating them well. I have proposed this alliance assuming you to be capable of coming up to my ideals.’
To Sushila, Gandhi wrote that ‘God alone would know how fortunate you are but Manilal, I think, has certainly been lucky in getting you’.18
The wedding was held on 6 March. Gandhi gifted his new daughter-in-law a copy of the Gita and a spinning wheel. At his request, it was a simple ceremony, with only close relatives present. The next day was Gandhi’s day of silence. The newly wedded couple, who had only set sight on one another the previous day, were too shy to talk amidst the family gathered around them. Noticing this, Gandhi wrote a note for his son which read:
Now that I have got you married and introduced you [to your wife] it is for you to take the initiative and run your own house. Go and sit near Sushila. See what clothes she has got, find out her wishes and then make a note of what she needs. This will break the ice and things will get moving. Or you may try another approach. Or shall I ask her to come near you and tell the others to move away?19
This is a sweet note, displaying a tenderness absent in Gandhi’s letters to Harilal, and in many of his previous letters to Manilal as well. The father was growing softer, and about time, too.
VII
In the years after he had left Yerwada prison, Gandhi’s most important political disagreements had been with the swarajists. He had urged a continuation of the boycott of the councils; whereas C.R. Das, Motilal Nehru and others wanted an active engagement with the institutions set up by the colonial state. Interestingly, whereas the swarajists considered Gandhi too radical, a group of militants on the Left thought him too reformist. Their own preferred path was to use bombs and bullets to throw the British out of India.
In February 1925, Gandhi had reproduced in Young India an exchange he had with one of these young revolutionaries. Gandhi’s programme, argued this critic, ‘was not in keeping with Indian culture and traditions’. He claimed that ‘India will not hesitate to shed blood just in the same way as a surgical operation necessitates the shedding of blood. To an ideal Indian, violence or non-violence has the same significance provided they ultimately do good to humanity.’
Gandhi, in response, characterized his own philosophy as a ‘mixture of Tolstoy and Buddha’. ‘I hold that the world is sick of armed revolutions,’ he remarked. He was, he said, ‘not ashamed to stand erect before the heroic and self-sacrificing revolutionary because I am able to pit an equal measure of non-violent men’s heroism and sacrifice untarnished by the blood of the innocent’.20
Two years later, Gandhi was once more engaged in a public defence of ahimsa against the votaries of revolutionary struggle. His critic this time was Shapurji Saklatvala, a former director of the House of Tatas who had embraced communism while living in England. Known as ‘Comrade Sak’, in 1922 Saklatvala became one of the first two communists to be elected a member of the British Parliament.21
Saklatvala visited India in the spring of 1927. He met Gandhi, later publishing an ‘Open Letter’ in the Indian newspapers accusing Gandhi of ‘misguided sentimentality’, and—through his charkha movement—of launching ‘an attack upon machinery, upon physical sciences, upon material progress’. Saklatvala compared Gandhi unfavourably to Kemal Atatürk, Sun Yat-sen and, above all, Lenin. Whereas those other leaders had ‘express[ed] boldly and fearlessly the unexpressed voice of the people’, Gandhi, claimed the communist, had prepared Indians ‘for servile obedience and for a belief that there are superior persons on earth’.22
Gandhi replied to his critic in the columns of Young India. The ‘impatient communist’, he pointed out, focused only on the cities and ignored altogether the real India that lived in the villages. Here, the charkha that Saklatvala so deplored could become ‘the centre’ of rural renewal.
Unlike the communist, Gandhi did not think that the interests of capital and labour were always antagonistic. As he put it, ‘bloody revolutions just do not appeal to me. I never wish to kill even a venomous snake, not to speak of a venomous man.’
Beyond these political differences, there was a fundamental philosophical difference, this relating to the ends of human life. Thus, Gandhi wrote that
unlike ‘Comrade’ Saklatvala, I do not believe that multiplication of wants and machinery contrived to supply them is taking the world a single step nearer its goal. ‘Comrade’ Saklatvala swears by the modern rush. I whole-heartedly detest this mad desire to destroy distance and time, to increase animal appetites and go to the ends of the earth in search of their satisfaction.23
VIII
In the first week of April 1927, Gandhi fell ill. He was then touring the princely state of Savantvadi, adjoining Goa. A doctor friend, Jivraj Mehta, came down from Bombay to examine him. They had first met in London in 1915, when Mehta had treated Gandhi for pleurisy. Now, twelve years later, the patient was diagnosed as having high blood pressure and apoplexy, brought on by excessive travel and overwork. ‘The strain you were putting yourself to,’ said Dr Mehta to Gandhi, ‘was abnormal.’ He was advised to stop seeing visitors, but allowed to do ‘light reading’ and continue writing his autobiography, instalments of which had begun appearing in both Young India and Navajivan.
Dr Mehta thought Gandhi needed several months of continuous rest to recoup his strength. Summer was approaching; in Ahmedabad, temperatures would soon approach forty degrees Centigrade. So the doctor suggested that Gandhi go to Nandidurg, a hill station close to the city of Bangalore, and at an elevation of 4800 feet.24
Gandhi spent six weeks in Nandidurg, from 20 April to 5 June. He worked on his autobiography, attended to his correspondence, and (disregarding his doctor’s advice) continued to write for his periodicals. His devoted disciple Rajagopalachari had arranged for goat’s milk to be sent every day on the Madras–Bangalore train; it was collected at Tumkur station, and ferried up the hill to Nandi.25
While Gandhi was in Nandi, he received a letter from a friend in the western Indian town of Mahad, where a clash had broken out between upper castes and ‘untouchables’, over the latter’s drinking of water from a public tank. The ‘untouchables’ were led by a brilliant young scholar named B.R. Ambedkar, who had taken doctoral degrees from Columbia and the London School of Economics and also qualified as a barrister.26
Gandhi wrote an essay on t
he controversy in Mahar, under the telling title ‘Untouchability and Unreason’. The Bombay Legislative Council and the Mahad municipality had both passed resolutions permitting ‘untouchables’ access to public water sources. Gandhi felt that Dr Ambedkar was therefore ‘fully justified’ in ‘advising the so-called untouchables to go to the tank to quench their thirst’. For, continued Gandhi, ‘untouchability has no reason behind it. It is an inhuman institution. It is tottering and it is…supported by the so-called orthodox party by sheer force.’27
In Nandi, Gandhi received a letter from Motilal Nehru suggesting that his son Jawaharlal be made the next Congress president. The father had always had large ambitions for his only son. When Jawaharlal was at Harrow, Motilal wrote to him:
I think I can without vanity say that I am the founder of the Nehru family. I look upon you, my dear son, as the man who will build upon the foundations I have laid and have the satisfaction of seeing a noble structure of renown rearing up its head to the skies.
Then, when Jawaharlal had finished school and gained admission into Trinity College, Cambridge, Motilal assured him:
It would be something for any man to speak about his connections with these great institutions, but in your case it will be the institutions who will own you with pride as one of their brightest jewels.28
In 1927, Jawaharlal Nehru had been active in the Congress for a little less than a decade. He had a wide interest in international affairs, and strongly socialist inclinations. Despite Jawaharlal’s intelligence and energy, and his own personal feelings of affection for him, Gandhi considered the younger Nehru too inexperienced to be made president. So he wrote delicately to the pushy father:
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