Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  A certain ‘R.B.T.’ of Banaras had also written to Gandhi about similar anxieties. Gandhi offered his sympathies, while suggesting that he should stop ‘excessive self-abuse. The vital fluid is evidently now passed even without stimulation. My advice to you is not to go to your wife at all for at least for one year and not till you have acquired mastery of yourself…’

  The advice Gandhi offered went beyond the practice of sexual restraint. The young man in Banaras was told to wake up early, take regular walks, read the Gita and chant the name of Ram. Advice on diet was also forthcoming; fresh milk was recommended (without sugar), green rather than starchy vegetables, plenty of fruits and nuts and raisins if they weren’t too expensive. Finally, the correspondent was told to ‘keep your bowels in good order. And at the time of retiring at night take an earth bandage.’22

  To contemporary eyes these exchanges might seem strange, even bizarre. The condemnation of masturbation was, of course, widespread at the time; here Gandhi was sharing in a more general prejudice. The other suggestions originated in his own personal experience. The Gita was always at his side; the name of Ram often on his lips. Since they had given him moral purpose and self-control, might they not do likewise to younger Indians? Early nights, long walks and a fruit-and-nut diet had kept him in good health; and they might do so for others too.

  To my mind, what is truly remarkable is the fact that Gandhi engaged in such exchanges at all. One can more easily appreciate his interest in who would, each year, be best suited to be president of the Congress, which, after all, was the premier political organization in British India. His concern for Hindu–Muslim harmony, his stress on the importance of spinning, his continuing attacks on the practice of untouchability—these too we can comprehend, for they represented the necessary preconditions for Indians to be capable of self-rule.

  It is those other, idiosyncratic and deeply personal concerns, that mark Gandhi out from the major political leaders of his time. Gandhi differed from men such as Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, V.I. Lenin and Sun Yat-sen in substantive matters of political theory and practice. His belief in non-violence and his scepticism about industrial society was not shared by them. But in terms of his interest in matters outside politics, he differed even more radically. One can scarcely imagine Wilson or Lenin receiving unsolicited letters from unknown young men on dietary or sexual matters—and, even if they did, answering them at such length.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Memoirist

  I

  In November 1923, during his first term in Yerwada prison, Gandhi had begun to write a history of the struggles he had led in South Africa. Time hung heavily on his hands; writing helped fill the hours (and days). The natural outlets for his literary ambitions, his own journals Young India and Navajivan, were temporarily unavailable to him. And he had now reached middle age, a time when one begins to reflect on the years left behind.

  Gandhi wrote thirty chapters of his South African memoir in Yerwada, many of them dictated to his fellow prisoner Indulal Yagnik. After his release, he completed the book while recuperating in Juhu.

  The serial publication of Dakshina Africana Satyagrahano Itihas, as it was called in Gujarati, began with Navajivan’s issue of 13 April 1924. Further instalments appeared, week by week, the last episode being printed in Navajivan’s issue of 22 November 1925. The English translation, undertaken by the long-time ashramite (and former English teacher) Valji Desai, was published in quarterly instalments in the Madras journal Current Thought, brought out by the nationalist publisher S. Ganesan and Co.

  The serial publication of Gandhi’s South African experiences was immediately followed by the serial publication of a more intimate memoir, carrying the Gujarati title Satyana Prayogo Athava Atmakatha. This appeared in weekly instalments in Navajivan from 29 November 1925 to 3 February 1929. The English version appeared more or less simultaneously, every week in Young India, from 3 December 1925 to 7 February 1929. The translator this time was the other and even more loyal ashramite Desai, namely, Mahadev, his English drafts improved and refined by Mira. A few chapters, written while Mahadev was away from the ashram, were translated by Pyarelal.

  Dakshina Africana Satyagrahano Itihas was also published as a book in Gujarati, but in two parts, these appearing in 1924 and 1925 respectively. The English version, under the straightforward title Satyagraha in South Africa, was published by S. Ganesan in 1928. The book was dedicated to his lately deceased nephew, Maganlal Gandhi.

  The second memoir was likewise published in Gujarati and English. Both versions appeared under the imprint of the newly started Navajivan Publishing House, based in the ashram. The autobiography originally appeared in two volumes, these published in 1926 and 1928 in Gujarati, and in 1927 and 1929 in English. The English edition was printed at the Karnatak Press, Bombay, and bound in khadi cloth. It was called The Story of My Experiments with Truth, although a more accurate rendition of the Gujarati might have been Truth’s Experiments, Or an Autobiography, since the original suggests that the protagonist is ‘truth’, with the author, Gandhi, being merely an instrument used by it.1

  There is inevitably some overlap between the memoirs. Yet, the tone of the second is markedly different from the first. Thus, while describing the early years of the struggle in South Africa in his autobiography, Gandhi writes: ‘If I found myself entirely absorbed in the service of the community, the reason behind it was my desire for self-realization. I had made the religion of service my own, as I felt that God could only be realized through service.’

  These were not Gandhi’s first books. Back in 1909, while on a ship between London and Cape Town, he had written a spirited polemic against industrial civilization called Hind Swaraj.2 In 1921, he had published a pamphlet called A Guide to Health. But Satyagraha in South Africa and My Experiments with Truth were his first excursions in autobiography, lending them a special poignancy, as well as significance. Gandhi himself was not unaware of their importance. In October 1926—shortly after finishing his South African memoir and while he was writing Experiments—Gandhi executed a new will. This stated that he owned no property, while bequeathing to the Navajivan Trust that ran the ashram ‘all my rights in whatever books and whatever articles I have written or I may write thereafter’, the income from these to be used ‘for carrying out the objects of the Satyagraha Ashram according to their discretion’.3

  Gandhi had no estate except a literary one, but this, as he sensed in 1926, was likely to be invaluable. The books he wrote have been continuously in print, with the autobiography in particular appearing in many editions and many translations.4 For ninety years now, the Navajivan Trust has been almost entirely sustained by the royalties from Gandhi’s writings.

  In the 1920s, in between one jail term and the next, while campaigning against untouchability and for Hindu–Muslim harmony, while seeking ways to launch a fresh political challenge to the Raj, while monitoring the moral and sexual habits of his family and his disciples, Gandhi yet found time to write two memoirs. What do these two books tell us about the man, the writer, the thinker, the propagandist?

  II

  The preface to the first book notes that the idea of satyagraha was invented in South Africa. Gandhi remarks here that he had ‘long entertained a desire to write a history of that struggle myself. Some things only I could write. Only the general who conducts a campaign can know the objective of each particular move. And as this was the first attempt to apply the principle of Satyagraha to politics on a large scale, it is necessary…that the public should have an idea of its development.’

  Satyagraha in South Africa starts with the geographical and historical setting, the rivalry between the two main groups of European colonists in South Africa, the Dutch and the British. Of the boom town of Johannesburg, built on the extraction of gold, a city where he spent almost a decade, and where satyagraha itself was born, Gandhi writes: ‘It would be no exaggeration to say that the
citizens of Johannesburg do not walk but seem as if they ran. No one has the leisure to look at any one else, and every one is apparently engrossed in thinking how to amass the maximum wealth in the minimum of time!’5

  When Gandhi first went to South Africa, in 1893, he was prone to think of Africans as backward and uncivilized. At the time, he believed in a hierarchy of civilizations, with Europeans at the top, Indians slightly below them, and Africans at the very bottom. He shed some of these prejudices in the two decades he lived in South Africa. Now, in this book written many years after he had left Africa, he revealed a further maturation. He praised the beauty of the Zulu language, and the Africans’ moral sense (writing that they are more honest than Europeans or Indians), while condemning the economic and political exploitation they were subject to.

  By the time he published Satyagraha in South Africa, Gandhi had moved decisively from parochialism to universalism. ‘In my opinion,’ he wrote here, ‘there is no place on earth and no race, which is not capable of producing the finest types of humanity, given suitable opportunities and education.’6

  The main subject of the book, however, was the condition of the Indians in South Africa. Gandhi distinguished between two sets of migrants: indentured labourers for sugar plantations and coal mines, these mostly from South India; and a smaller group of Gujarati traders, both Muslim and Hindu, who had set up shops in the towns of Natal and the Transvaal, initially catering to Indian workers but over time servicing Africans as well.

  Successive chapters detailed the laws and practices that discriminated against Indians, province by province. Indians were restricted from owning property in the Transvaal. In Natal, labourers who wished to stay on after the expiry of their indenture had to pay a hefty annual tax. There were stringent curbs on Indians crossing provincial boundaries.

  The narrative then moved on to the first protests against racial laws that bore down heavily on Indians. These took the form of petitions written to the government, and lobbying with legislators. Gandhi spoke of the founding, in 1894, of the Natal Indian Congress, as an organizational platform to campaign for Indian rights.

  In 1899 the Anglo-Boer war broke out. Gandhi analysed the fallout of the war on the Indians, and why, after the warring sides signed a peace treaty, he based himself in Johannesburg. It was here, in September 1906, that a famous meeting was held where Indians vowed to court arrest unless a particularly noxious ordinance was withdrawn. Gandhi, imbuing the meeting with a retrospective glow of patriotism, claimed that ‘the Ordinance [sought] to humiliate not only ourselves but also the motherland’. Discriminations against, and restrictions on, individual Indians were ‘tantamount to insulting the [Indian] nation as a whole’.7

  Later chapters marked the major milestones in the satyagraha: the bonfire of certificates in 1908; the march across provincial borders in 1913; the arrests and jail terms of the leaders and the rank and file; the deportation to India of many brave satyagrahis; and the eventual compromise forged between General Smuts and Gandhi in 1914.

  In his account of these satyagrahas, Gandhi was at pains to stress that the participation cut across religious and linguistic boundaries. Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and Christians, as well as Tamil speakers, Telugu speakers, Hindi speakers, and Gujarati speakers, all came forward to court arrest. A separate chapter was devoted to Ahmad Muhammad Kachhalia, a Muslim merchant from Johannesburg who was one of the heroes of the campaign. ‘I have never, whether in South Africa or in India,’ writes Gandhi, ‘come across a man who could surpass Mr Kachhalia in courage and steadfastness. He sacrificed all for the community’s sake….Perfectly fearless and impartial as he was, he never hesitated to point out their faults to Hindus as well as Musalmans whenever he found it necessary.’8

  One chapter dealt with the role of Indian Opinion, the multilingual journal Gandhi founded in South Africa. He remarked that ‘we could not perhaps have educated the local Indian community, nor kept Indians all over the world in touch with the course of events in South Africa in any other way, with the same ease and success as through Indian Opinion, which therefore was certainly a most useful and potent weapon in our struggle’.9

  There was also a chapter on the (mostly Tamil) women who joined the satyagraha of 1913–14, whose ‘bravery was beyond words’.10 Another chapter detailed the contributions of sympathetic Europeans. Gandhi paid tribute to Albert West, who helped run Indian Opinion and the Phoenix settlement; Henry Polak, who often mediated between Gandhi and the authorities; and Hermann Kallenbach, who donated his farm to house satyagrahis and sustain the movement. ‘One of my objects in enumerating the names of European helpers,’ remarked Gandhi, ‘is to mark the Satyagrahis’ gratefulness to them.’11

  A brief conclusion pointed to the larger implications of the struggles led by Gandhi in South Africa. The concessions wrought by the Indians in that colony, he argued, ‘more or less served as a shield for Indian emigrants in other parts of the Empire, who, if they are suppressed, will be suppressed thanks to the absence of Satyagraha among themselves…’ More broadly, Gandhi hoped that the book had ‘demonstrated with some success that Satyagraha is a priceless and matchless weapon, and that those who wield it are strangers to disappointment or defeat’.12

  At one level, the book can be read as a straightforward narrative of the satyagrahas in South Africa, as told by the man—or General—who both conceived and led them. At another level, the book can be read as a handbook of political techniques, instructing potential satyagrahis (whether in India or elsewhere) on what methods to use and which to eschew. At once descriptive and didactic, the book was written to educate, but also to instruct.

  But there may be a third way to read the book: as an extended thank you note to the community he had left behind. Gandhi came to India fully formed, his social philosophy and his political repertoire in place, to be now applied to a much wider theatre of action. Satyagraha in South Africa is a grateful backward look at the men and women, Indian as well as European, who sustained and supported him in those formative years in the diaspora.

  III

  The tone of the narrative of Satyagraha in South Africa may be described as ‘author-inflected’. The personal note is by no means absent, but it is not dominant either. On the other hand, the narrative of The Story of My Experiments with Truth is ‘author-saturated’, if not ‘author-supersaturated’.13 The difference in tone is deliberate, as indicated by Gandhi himself in the introduction to the latter book:

  My experiments in the political field are now known, not only in India, but to a certain extent to the ‘civilized’ world. For me, they have not much value; and the title of Mahatma that they have won for me has, therefore, even less. Often the title has pained me; and there is not a moment I can recall when it may be said to have tickled me. But I should certainly like to narrate my experiments in the spiritual field which are known only to myself, and from which I have derived such power as I possess for working in the political field.

  Gandhi’s autobiography begins with his birth and upbringing in a Bania family of Kathiawar that was steeped in piety and food restrictions. He was, he recalled, ‘very shy and avoided all company’. He also remembered, some fifty years after the event, how he disgraced himself in the eyes of his teacher by failing to spell ‘kettle’ accurately.14

  The narrative then moves on to his marriage at the age of thirteen, and his early possessiveness about his wife Kasturba, who became the object of his ‘carnal appetite’. A friend he made in school subjected him to various temptations—eating meat and visiting a brothel, among them. A key chapter (still much cited and discussed) describes how, at the precise moment his father was dying, he was having sex with his wife and could not attend to his filial duties.

  A dozen short chapters at the end of Part I deal with his years in London as a law student, where he took dancing lessons in a bid to play the English gentleman, before finding succour in the Vegetarian Society of
London. It was in London that Gandhi made his first Christian friends, the beginning of a lifelong engagement with people of religious faiths other than his own. This outer quest was accompanied by the (continuing) search for inner perfection. Thus, he relates, not without pride, how he successfully adhered to the three vows he had made to his mother before leaving India—that he would not eat meat, drink alcohol, or have sex with a woman who was not his wife.

  Part II begins with Gandhi’s return to India, and his failure to establish himself at the Bombay Bar. In and from this failure he learnt a lesson, here conveyed to the ‘briefless barristers’ of the generations after his. Since he was short of money, he walked to the court and back from his house several miles away. This walk, remarked Gandhi, ‘saved a fair amount of money, and when many of my friends in Bombay used to fall ill, I do not remember having once had an illness. Even when I began to earn money, I kept up the practice of walking to and from the office, and I am still reaping the benefits of that practice.’15

  Gandhi was rescued from professional mediocrity by an invitation from South Africa. His arrival in that country, his first clients, and the racial slurs and insults he was victim to, are all narrated, but also, perhaps more notably, his discussions with Christians whose faith he sought to understand but who were uncomprehending, and even occasionally contemptuous, of his own faith. We learn how he first read the works of Tolstoy and Ruskin, two thinkers who were to profoundly influence him. Other chapters outline his personal and moral debts to his pre-eminent Indian mentors, the Jain mystic Raychandbhai and the Poona statesman Gopal Krishna Gokhale.16