The idea of Jawaharlal presiding has an irresistible appeal for me. But I wonder whether it would be proper in the present atmosphere to saddle the responsibility on him. It seems to me to be a thankless task. All discipline has vanished. Communalism is at its height. Intrigue is triumphant everywhere. Good and true men are finding it difficult to hold on to their position in the Congress. Jawahar’s time will be simply taken away in keeping the Congress tolerably pure and he will simply sicken.29
To Jawaharlal himself, Gandhi wrote that ‘I do not myself see the way so clear as to make me force the crown on you and plead with you to work it’. He also pointed out that were he to become Congress president, with all the attendant committee work, Jawaharlal would not be able to continue the mass contact programme he had so far energetically pursued, taking the Congress message to students, peasants and workers.30
Despite Gandhi’s hesitation, Motilal Nehru continued to press his son’s case. To be fair to Jawaharlal, he was less keen to become president than was his father on his behalf. In fact, when the idea was first mooted in April, he had written to Gandhi that ‘I do not feel inclined to welcome the proposal about the presidentship’. He believed that the respected Delhi doctor M.A. Ansari, and not himself, would be ‘the best choice’ to lead the Congress come December.31
Gandhi too wanted Dr Ansari to become president, since as a Muslim he could help ‘solve the almost insoluble problem’ of inter-communal relations.32 But Ansari himself was hesitant to assume the presidency. The Congress was ridden with factions; and as a man of science, he had no talent for political intrigue. Gandhi assured him that he could keep his distance from debates on council entry and constitution-making, and focus on the Hindu–Muslim question. ‘You owe it to the country,’ wrote the Mahatma to the doctor, ‘as a Mussalman and a staunch nationalist to vindicate the religion of the Prophet and the honour of the country by giving all the talents you have for securing a domestic peace honourable to all parties.’33
IX
In the summer of 1927, the American writer Katherine Mayo—who had visited Gandhi in Sabarmati the previous year—published a searing critique of Hindu society in a book titled Mother India. Miss Mayo said she was writing this book since all that the average American knew about India was ‘that Mr. Gandhi lives there; also tigers’.34
Mother India began with a description of the Kalighat temple in Calcutta, whose goddess was ‘black of face’ with ‘a monstrous lolling tongue, dripping blood’, and whose worshippers sacrificed hundreds of goats daily to placate the deity.35 This set the tone for a consistently disparaging account of Indian and, more particularly, Hindu customs. Miss Mayo wrote at length about the ubiquity of child marriage, of the shocking conditions under which girls were made to have sex and bear children at the ages of twelve and thirteen, of the lack of medical care for pregnant women, of the prohibitions against widow remarriage, of the pernicious practice of purdah, of the oppressions of the caste system, and much else.
The practices described by Miss Mayo undoubtedly existed in India. What was tendentious was her presentation: she minimized the efforts of Indian reformers to end these evils (there were several sneering remarks about Gandhi himself), and she completely exonerated the British colonial authorities from any responsibility. As she squarely stated:
The British administration of India, be it good, bad, or indifferent, has nothing whatever to do with the conditions above indicated. Inertia, helplessness, lack of initiative and originality, lack of staying power and of sustained loyalties, sterility of enthusiasm, weakness of life-vigor itself—all are traits that truly characterize the Indian not only of today, but of long-past history.36
Or, as she continued, now substituting ‘Hindu’ for ‘Indian’:
The whole pyramid of the Hindu’s woes, material and spiritual—poverty, sickness, ignorance…melancholy, ineffectiveness, not forgetting that subconscious conviction of inferiority which he forever bares and advertises by his gnawing and imaginative alertness for social affronts—rests upon a rock-bottom physical base. The base is, simply, his manner of getting into the world and his sex-life thereafter.37
Katherine Mayo contrasted the ‘honesty, sincerity and devotion’ of British colonial officials with the ‘utter apathy of the Indian peoples, based on their fatalistic creed’.38 The India Office was delighted with the book—according to one report, it bought 5000 copies of Mother India to distribute to the British public. A free copy was presented to every member of Parliament, and the book was widely and generously reviewed in the British press.39
The reception in India was very different. The veteran nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai wrote a book-length rejoinder entitled Unhappy India, where he called the book ‘a jumble of truths, half-truths and lies’, describing the author as an ‘apologist for British rule’.40 Annie Besant called Miss Mayo’s book ‘most mischievous’ and worthy of being prosecuted ‘for stirring up bad feeling and for being obscene’.41 Rabindranath Tagore charged Miss Mayo of having grossly misrepresented him—as allegedly being in favour of sex before puberty, among other calumnies. Yet, Tagore urged Indians not to reply in kind, for that would play into ‘the malignant contagion of race-hatred’ and lead to an ‘endless vicious cycle of mutual recrimination and ever-accumulating misunderstanding that are perilous for the peace of the world’.42
Tagore’s advice went unheeded—more than fifty books and pamphlets were published by Indians in response to Mother India.43 Gandhi himself wrote a long assessment of the book in his journal Young India, describing it as ‘the report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening the drains of the country to be reported upon, or to give a graphic description of the stench exuded by the open drains’.
Gandhi charged Miss Mayo with a selective representation of the facts, the selection done with a view to praising British rule and criticizing Indian culture. The author of Mother India had claimed ‘for the British Government merits which cannot be sustained and which many an honest British officer would blush to see the Government credited with’.
Katherine Mayo’s book presented the case to ‘perpetuate white domination in India on the plea of India’s unfitness to rule herself’. Yet, Gandhi would not dismiss it out of hand, characteristically arguing that the ‘indignation which we are bound to express against the slanderous book must not blind us to our obvious imperfections and our great limitations’. Indians, he insisted, must ‘not resent being made aware of the dark side of the picture wherever it exists. Overdrawn her pictures of our insanitation, child marriages, etc., undoubtedly are. But let them serve as a spur to much greater effort than we have hitherto put forth in order to rid [Indian] society of all cause of reproach.’44
X
In the last week of August 1927, his health fully restored, Gandhi began a tour of the Tamil country, his itinerary chosen by C. Rajagopalachari. He visited and spoke at, among other places, Vellore, Madras, Chidambaram, Tanjore, Kumbakonam, Coimbatore, Madurai and Trichy. Everywhere, the meetings ended with a box passed from hand to hand in the audience, gathering donations for a fund to promote spinning.
From the Tamil country, Gandhi moved on to Travancore, where he spent two weeks touring and speaking. Gandhi pressed home the importance of ending untouchability regardless of whether or not it had scriptural sanction. At one town, Nagercoil, he told his audience that not everything written in Sanskrit had a binding effect on social behaviour. ‘That which is opposed to the fundamental maxims of morality,’ he remarked, ‘that which is opposed to trained reason, cannot be claimed as Shastras no matter how ancient it may be.’ At another town, Quilon, he said that ‘untouchability poisons Hinduism as a drop of arsenic poisons milk’. He himself had ‘not a shadow of doubt that in the great turmoil now taking place either untouchability has to die or Hinduism has to disappear’.45
While touring in the south, Gandhi had received an invit
ation from the new viceroy, Lord Irwin, to come see him in New Delhi. A former Cabinet minister and Fellow of All Souls, Irwin was a devout Anglo-Catholic. Gandhi met the viceroy alone, on 31 October, and again the next day, this time with a larger group of Indian leaders. Afterwards, Gandhi wrote to a Gujarati friend that ‘the Viceroy did not wish to know others’ views; he wished only to express his own’. To Charlie Andrews, Gandhi described Irwin as ‘a good man with no power’ (presumably to overrule the officials who ran the Raj). He had particularly wanted to discuss khaddar, but the viceroy was more keen to talk about politics and the Hindu–Muslim question.46
The viceroy himself wrote to his father that he found Gandhi ‘an interesting personality’, albeit one ‘singularly remote from practical politics’. Gandhi had suggested that India should be accorded Dominion Status, without (in Irwin’s view) recognizing the institutional constraints and parliamentary procedures which stood in the way of such a declaration. Irwin remarked to his father that ‘it was rather like talking to someone who had stepped off another planet on to this for a short visit of a fortnight and whose mental outlook was quite other to that which was regulating most of the affairs on the planet to which he had descended’.47
From Delhi, Gandhi proceeded to Ahmedabad, his first visit home since March. He stayed merely two days, before returning south, travelling by rail to Tuticorin, on the tip of the peninsula, and then by boat to Colombo.
Gandhi had been invited to Ceylon by three young students from Jaffna, who had met him in Bangalore back in June. A month later, they renewed their invitation, adding as an inducement that they were ‘quite hopeful that we can raise in Ceylon a large purse for khadi work’.48
Gandhi arrived in Colombo by boat on the evening of Saturday, 12 November. Several thousand people had gathered to receive him, with the jetty festooned with flags and pot palms. On 15 November, Gandhi was given a public reception in Colombo’s town hall, the first coloured man ever to be so honoured by the municipality. Also notable was a reception thrown for him by the Buddhist priests of Vidyodaya College, with 500 monks in yellow robes chanting their benediction on the visitor.
In Colombo, Gandhi was besieged by autograph hunters. He signed his name for them, asking in return that they take a promise to wear khadi. A well-born lady was taken aback at the condition, presenting to Gandhi ‘her various difficulties—parties, official invitations, this thing and that thing. How could she wear Khadi on all occasions?’ Eventually, she withdrew her request for an autograph, murmuring that she would not hastily make a promise she could not keep.49
In the southern part of the island, dominated by Sinhala Buddhists, Gandhi suggested a kinship between his faith and their own. As he put it in a speech in Colombo, ‘Buddha never rejected Hinduism, but he broadened its base. He gave it a new life and a new interpretation.’ The same day, Gandhi spoke to the Young Men’s Christian Association of Colombo, offering them a revisionist view of their faith. Had ‘I to face only the Sermon on the Mount and my own interpretation of it,’ he observed, ‘I should not hesitate to say, “Oh yes, I am a Christian.”’ Then he continued: ‘But negatively I have to say that in my humble opinion, much of what passes as Christianity is a negation of the Sermon on the Mount.’
Gandhi now made his way towards the north of the island, where Tamil-speaking Hindus were in the majority. On the day Gandhi arrived in the main Tamil town, Jaffna, ‘the avenues to the [train] station were impassable’. A large police contingent was in place to manage the crowd, which yet resorted to ‘promiscuous charging’ when the train carrying their hero arrived. With much difficulty, the police cleared a passage for Gandhi to walk to the car that was waiting to receive him.50
Gandhi’s programme in Jaffna was crowded even by his standards. For Sunday, 27 November 1927, it went like this:
9 to 10 a.m.: Visits Jaffna Hindu, Parameshwara and Manipay Hindu colleges
3 to 5 p.m.: Visits [the localities of] Puttur, Achveli, Velvettiturai, Tondaimannar, Point Pedro, Chavakachcheri and Chiviateru
6 to 6.15 p.m.: Ladies’ meeting at Ridgeway Hall
6.15 to 6.30 p.m.: Cigar Factory Workers’ Meeting
6.30 to 7 p.m.: General Public meeting51
Gandhi was dismayed to find that among Ceylon’s Tamils, caste distinctions were as rigid as in India. ‘Living in a country over which the spirit of Buddha is brooding,’ he told his audience, ‘I had felt you would be free from this taint of untouchability.’ Here, as in India, ‘ancient traditions and ancient laws have been dragged almost out of the tomb to justify the hideous doctrine of untouchability’.52
Gandhi spent two and a half weeks in Ceylon, speaking to an impressively wide range of audiences. He also collected a great deal of money for his khaddar work. The students of Jaffna were most active in raising funds, while among the largest donors were the Chettiar merchants of the island. But others chipped in too. Even the barbers of Colombo contributed a purse of Rs 400. The total collections amounted to Rs 105,000 and 2 annas, the name of each contributor and the amount he/she contributed detailed in a chart extending over five pages of Mahadev Desai’s book on his master’s travels in Ceylon.53
XI
While travelling within India, Gandhi usually had Mahadev Desai as his main companion. But, for this trip to Ceylon he also took his wife Kasturba along. In one speech, at Matale, he referred to their relationship in part-serious, part-jocular terms. After his own parents died, he remarked, Kasturba had ‘been my mother, friend, nurse, cook, bottle-washer and all these things’. And they had ‘come to a reasonable understanding that I should have all the honours and she should have all the drudgery’.54
Gandhi and Kasturba had now been married forty-five years. In the first decade of their marriage, they were often separated, with Gandhi in London and Durban and his wife in Rajkot. In 1897, Kasturba joined him in South Africa. They had some sharp disagreements, these largely dealing with the patriarch’s desire to put the demands of his public work above the claims of his family. Over time, Kasturba came to see the strength of Gandhi’s convictions, and even joined the struggle herself.
By 1927, Gandhi and Kasturba had been back in India for more than a decade. Once more, Kasturba was often left alone while Gandhi was on the road. However, in the ashram at Ahmedabad, with her sons and nephews around her, and with the language of the home as well as of the street being her mother tongue, Gujarati, she was far less lonely than in South Africa. To be sure, she’d rather her husband stayed more at home. Their relationship had also been tested by the coming into Gandhi’s life of Saraladevi. But now that Sarala had been kept at arm’s length, the marriage was more or less on an even keel. Gandhi and Kasturba, as he told the audience in Matale, had come to a ‘reasonable understanding’.
What, however, of Gandhi and his sons? The eldest, Harilal, was still estranged. The second, Manilal, had at times felt suppressed and suffocated by the father. Now they were reconciled, with Gandhi agreeing to the son not being a brahmachari, and Manilal accepting the father’s choice of bride. The third son, Ramdas, always the most docile, had meanwhile been betrothed to a Gujarati Bania girl named Nirmala, chosen for him by Gandhi. The marriage had been fixed for January 1928.
The son still single and still a brahmachari was Devadas. He was greatly beloved of the mother, and of the father too—indeed, it was only with his youngest son that Gandhi had something like a normal relationship. Now, however, Devadas had fallen in love with Lakshmi, the daughter of C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji). While his parents were in Ceylon, they had received a letter from a family friend about how Devadas was pining for Lakshmi, and was determined to marry her. Gandhi wrote back that
Dev[a]das’s state is extremely pitiable. Rajaji is not likely at all to let him marry Lakshmi, and rightly so. Lakshmi will not take one step without his consent. She is happy and cheerful, whereas Dev[a]das has gone mad after her and is pining for her and sufferin
g. If he had such love for God, he would have been revered as a saintly man and become a great dedicated worker.
But how can even Dev[a]das act against his very nature? He wishes to obey me, but his soul rebels against him. He seems to believe that I stand in the way of his marriage with Lakshmi and so feels angry with me. I do not know at present [how] he can be brought out of this condition. Try and see if you can help him recover peace of mind and explain to him his dharma. It is possible that I have not understood him and am, therefore, doing him injustice.55
In the India of the 1920s, ‘love’ marriages were almost unknown. Whether one was Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Jain, whether working class or middle class or aristocratic, one’s spouse was chosen by one’s parents or guardians. To be sure, with growing urbanization and the growth of university education, young men and women were occasionally falling in love, and, still more occasionally, persuading their parents to let them marry the person of their choice. But perhaps 99 per cent (if not 99.99 per cent) of all marriages in India in 1927 were arranged by the respective families of the bride and bridegroom.
Gandhi’s eldest son, Harilal, was one of the rare transgressors. When his parents were away in South Africa, he had fallen in love. He chose the girl; even so, her father was a friend of Gandhi’s, and likewise a Gujarati-speaking Bania. Because of these extenuating factors, Gandhi had acquiesced. But he had forbidden Manilal from marrying Fatima Gool, in part because the boy had chosen the girl himself, and in larger part because his own son marrying a Muslim would have serious and perhaps unmanageable repercussions on his public career.
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