Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Gandhi’s path to self-realization had several hurdles. The most notable was the struggle with his sexuality. His early mentor Raychandbhai had urged him to practise brahmacharya. It took him more than a decade to put his teacher’s precepts into practice. The path was arduous, for true brahmacharya ‘means control of the senses in thought, word and deed’. Writing twenty years after he took the vow of celibacy, Gandhi was ‘filled with pleasure and wonderment. The more or less successful practice of self-control had been going on since 1901. But the freedom and joy that came to me after taking the vow had never been experienced before 1906. Before the vow I had been open to being overcome by temptation at any moment. Now the vow was a sure shield against temptation.’17

  In the late summer of 1896, Gandhi returned to India to take his wife and children back with him to South Africa. Part III of his autobiography begins with the return journey, the growing hysteria among the whites at Indian emigration resulting in a mob attack on Gandhi (as the alleged leader or facilitator of this emigration). He was saved by a white policeman and his wife, confirming his view that even among the Europeans he could make friends and allies.

  Scattered throughout the book are episodes from his forty and more years of married life with Kasturba. Several misunderstandings are recalled, and retold from his point of view. Gandhi writes that his own experiences in three continents had led him to observe ‘no distinctions between relatives and strangers, countrymen and foreigners, white and coloured, Hindus and Indians of other faiths, whether Musalmans, Parsis, Christians or Jews’.

  Kasturba, however, remained bound within the conventions (and prejudices) of her religion and caste. When they were living in Durban in the late 1890s, a clerk of Gandhi’s, a Tamil Christian, lived with them in their house. Kasturba refused to clean his chamber pot on the twin grounds that this now Christianized Hindu had been born in an untouchable caste. Gandhi, in a fit of rage, almost pushed her out of the house, but recovered his senses just in time.

  Remembering the incident almost thirty years later, Gandhi remarked that he was then ‘a cruelly kind husband. I regarded myself as [Kasturba’s] teacher, and so harassed her out of my blind love for her.’ The phrase ‘cruelly kind’ is intriguing—was he at once cruel and kind, or cruel in a cause that was itself kindly? Probably the latter, since through his actions Gandhi hoped that he would make his wife elevate her moral self by acknowledging kinship with all humans, regardless of caste or colour. Back in 1898, Gandhi regarded his wife as ‘born to do her husband’s behest’, whereas now he saw her rather as ‘a helpmate, a comrade and a partner in the husband’s joys and sorrows’.18

  Gandhi also recounts arguments with his friend and housemate Henry Polak. Gandhi believed that ‘Indian parents who train their children to think and talk in English from their infancy betray their children and their country. They deprive them of the spiritual and social heritage of the nation, and render them to that extent unfit for the service of the country.’ Holding these views, Gandhi always spoke to his children in Gujarati. Polak thought that he was thus closing a window to them. ‘He contended,’ wrote Gandhi, ‘with all the love and vigour at his command, that, if children were to learn a universal language like English from their infancy, they would easily gain considerable advantage over others in the race of life. He failed to convince me.’19

  Later in the narrative, Gandhi returns to the significance of the mother tongue, while remembering the reception thrown for him by Bombay’s Gujarati community back in 1915. The principal speaker, M.A. Jinnah, ‘made a short and sweet little speech in English’. Most of the other speeches were also in the language of the conqueror. But, recalls Gandhi with a touch of pride, ‘when my turn came, I expressed my thanks in Gujarati explaining my partiality for Gujarati and Hindustani, and entering my humble protest against the use of English in a Gujarati gathering’.20

  Gandhi’s ever-changing diet is the subject of several chapters. An account of his giving up milk ends with this statement: ‘Those who make light of dietetic restrictions and fasting are as much in error as those who stake their all on them.’ The next chapter argues that ‘fasting can help to curb animal passion, only if it is undertaken with a view to self-restraint’. Later in the book, he insists that ‘my experiments in dietetics are dear to me as a part of my researches in Ahimsa. They give me recreation and joy.’21

  Part V of the book runs from 1915 to 1920, from his return to India to the special session of the Congress in Calcutta where he authoritatively established his control over the Congress. Gandhi rehearses his travels by train around the subcontinent, and revisits the death of Gokhale and his own decision not to join the Servants of India Society. He speaks of the setting up of the Sabarmati Ashram, and the controversy over admitting an ‘untouchable’ family. There is a fairly long account of his first satyagraha in Champaran, and shorter accounts of the peasant movement in Kheda and the millworkers’ strike in Ahmedabad.

  In describing his travels around India in 1918–19, Gandhi said he was ‘seeking the friendship of good Mussalmans, and was eager to understand the Mussalman mind through contact with their purest and most patriotic representatives’. His South African experiences had convinced him that ‘it would be on the question of Hindu–Muslim unity that my Ahimsa would be put to its severest test, and that the question presented the widest field for my experiments in Ahimsa. The conviction is still there. Every moment of my life I realize that God is putting me on my trial.’22

  The last chapter of the book, entitled ‘Farewell’, explains why the narrative ends in September 1920. For, his life since then ‘has been so public that there is hardly anything about it that people do not know’.

  IV

  As the two memoirs were being serialized in Young India and Navajivan, friends wrote in offering opinions. To his Indian colleagues, who knew almost nothing about his South African days, the books came as a revelation.

  The reactions of Gandhi’s South African colleagues were more ambivalent. Henry Polak wondered how he had left out Gabriel Isaacs, a South African jeweller (of Jewish extraction) who had wholeheartedly supported the Indians.23 Sonja Schlesin complained about the omission of Mrs Vogt, a Jewish lady who had formed an Indian women’s club in Johannesburg.24 Gandhi’s former secretary had other, and more serious, complaints. Thus, Miss Schlesin noticed that ‘again and again in your autobiography you mention conversations and incidents which one feels that the people concerned would not have liked mentioned’. She thought letters and private conversations should be regarded as confidential; to publish them without first taking permission from the writer or speaker was ‘a distinct breach of confidence’.25

  A month later, Miss Schlesin wrote Gandhi an eight-page, intensely felt letter on the serialization of the autobiography in Young India and the ‘misrepresentations’ about her and her work it contained, which she hoped Gandhi ‘will not perpetuate in book-form’. She listed these mistakes: Gandhi had got her age when she joined him wrong, misstated some facts about an educational loan she had taken, called her the principal of a girls’ school when she was merely one of the teachers, etc. She urged him to have these errors corrected, acidly commenting: ‘A Mahatma cannot lie; therefore, people reading your misrepresentations would naturally come to the conclusion that the unfortunate victim of the misrepresentation had been responsible for them.’26

  His son Manilal also asked his father about significant omissions in the two memoirs. Gandhi defensively answered that ‘my aim in giving certain names is that they should be remembered as long as the “Autobiography” is recognized as an important work’.27

  On the other hand, some correspondents in South Africa were impressed by the frankness with which Gandhi discussed his mistakes of judgement. One wrote in to compliment him on the revelations about his ill treatment of Kasturba. Gandhi wrote back: ‘Of course you have not imagined that I am in any way proud of recalling the brutality or that I am today c
apable of any such brutality. But I thought that if people recognize me as a gentle peace-loving man, they should know that at one time I could be a positive beast even though at the same time I claimed to be a loving husband. It was not without good cause that a friend described me as a combination of sacred cow and fierce tiger.’28

  Gandhi had been frank about his own marital problems. Yet, he had prudently left out another woman with whom he had a significant relationship. The omission of Saraladevi Chaudhurani both pleased and relieved his closest disciples. Thus, as Rajagopalachari wrote to Mahadev Desai, ‘as the story is proceeding I am afraid a certain lady is trembling in agonised fear as to the future chapters though I know there is no need to fear. For the “simplicity” that the Manchester Guardian admires in Bapu is tempered with an enormous amount of caution and moderation.’29

  Apart from these private letters, there were also some public responses to Gandhi’s autobiography. The pro-British Times of India claimed that the book showed its author to be a ‘supreme egotist’ and served merely as ‘a smug and self-complacent justification of his amazing experiments with human nature’. Of Gandhi’s injunctions to ashram inmates to give up their belongings and embrace celibacy, the newspaper observed that the desires for property and sex ‘are instinctive in the unregenerate but normal and natural human being’. The Bolsheviks in Russia had tried but failed to abolish private property, but apparently ‘Mr. Gandhi hopes to do what the Soviets have given up as hopeless’.30

  Gandhi almost certainly saw this attack in the Times of India, since the newspaper came into his ashram in Ahmedabad. And he almost certainly did not see a more nuanced assessment, published in an English journal out of Shanghai. This found the autobiography a book ‘of extreme interest to everybody’, for ‘few saints have exposed their souls so unflinchingly to the ordeal of publicity’. The reviewer acknowledged Gandhi was far from being a ‘profound and patient thinker’; rather, he was ‘half a mere faddist’, who inflicted on the reader ‘page after page full of his experiments in diet, medicine, and hand spinning’. Even so, the reviewer concluded, the book ‘is easy reading, and he keeps our sympathy partly because of his perfect courage, but still more because of the genuine spirit of candour and Christian charity which somehow manages to keep fresh and sweet the whole of this astonishing farrago’.31

  V

  As Gandhi’s memoirs appeared in instalments in Navajivan and Young India, letters began pouring into the Sabarmati Ashram asking for translation rights. The interest was naturally more keen in the autobiography per se than in the book about South Africa. There were queries about Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil and Bengali editions, and about French, German, Danish, Japanese and Norwegian editions too.

  Gandhi was happy for The Story of My Experiments with Truth to appear in Indian languages, ‘so long as nothing is omitted from the book’.32 He was also happy to see an English edition appear in India itself. But about other foreign rights he wished to wait and see. In 1926, his admirer, the New York clergyman John Haynes Holmes, had asked for permission to negotiate with Macmillan of New York for an English edition to be sold around the world. Gandhi asked him to go ahead, without committing himself.33

  The first instalment of the English version of Experiments appeared in India in 1927. A year later, a friend wrote about the possibility of a British edition. Gandhi told him the rights had been provisionally granted to Macmillan, adding: ‘The second volume of the book is not to be published just now. It will take some time, because I do not know how the chapters of Indian experience will run. I have no definite plan mapped out. I am, therefore, unable to say how many more chapters I shall have to write, and it is for that reason that publication of the second volume has been suspended.’34

  In the event, the narrative of the autobiography stopped in 1920. In explaining why this was so, Gandhi remarked that his ‘principal experiments during the past seven years’, had ‘all been made through the Congress. A reference to my relations with the leaders would therefore be unavoidable, if I set about describing my experiments further. And this I may not do so, any rate for the present, if only from a sense of propriety.’35

  In April 1928, the Observer of London printed excerpts from Gandhi’s autobiography as they had appeared in Young India. Entitled ‘Gandhi on Himself’, these dealt with his experiments with diet and celibacy as he sought to ‘subdue flesh to the spirit’. Reading this piece with interest across the Atlantic was an editor at the Baltimore Sun. As he commented in his column, even the brief excerpts offered by the newspaper ‘make clear the vastness of the difference between East and West. We in the West may admire Gandhi but we could not follow him….And that, I believe, is just as well.’ The article was unsigned, but the phrasing bears the signature of Baltimore’s most famous son, H.L. Mencken.36

  The article in the Observer was, of course, read more widely in Britain itself. A prominent literary agent, David Higham of Curtis Brown Associates, wrote to the newspaper asking it to put him in touch with Gandhi. Higham said that Curtis Brown ‘could be of real service to Mr. Gandhi for the publication arrangements for his autobiography. A very large number of separate rights in such a work ought to be valuable and I think we can reasonably claim to be in a better position than anyone else for securing the largest possible return from these.’ He added that the authors the agency represented included David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.37

  The letter reached Ahmedabad, for it now rests in the Sabarmati Ashram’s archives. Whether it was read by Gandhi himself is not clear. However, he seems to have trusted the work to his friends rather than a commercial agency. In January 1929, on the advice of John Haynes Holmes, Gandhi sold the American rights to his autobiography to Macmillan Company of New York, for about a lac of rupees (equivalent to about 7500 pounds sterling), the entire sum to be handed over by Gandhi for khadi work.38

  Meanwhile, C.F. Andrews had opened negotiations with George Allen and Unwin for a British edition of Gandhi’s autobiography. Andrews had been told that rather than a word-for-word reproduction, a thematic selection might be a better option. Indians were naturally interested in an exhaustive account of their Mahatma’s experiments. British and American readers, on the other hand, might welcome a truncated version omitting themes and subjects foreign to them.39

  VI

  Like all self-testimonies of famous men, these two books were pre-emptive strikes against future chroniclers of Gandhi’s life and influence. Gandhi wanted his version of the satyagraha in South Africa published before the events it described were subject to the dispassionate gaze of the academic historian; and he wanted his own account of his personal struggles with truth and morality out in the public domain before biographers set about critically scrutinizing his personality.

  At the same time, Gandhi’s memoirs are also meant to be instructional manuals. But whereas the pedagogic intent of Satyagraha in South Africa was political, with The Story of My Experiments with Truth it is personal. We learn of how the child Gandhi learnt not to tell lies or cheat in school examinations, how the young adult strove to simplify his diet and take control of his passions, how the husband learnt to respect his wife and school his children, how the upper-caste Hindu learnt to transcend the boundaries of identity and faith, how the successful lawyer chose to elevate community over career. Perhaps, by reading this frank self-testimony of their famous countryman, younger Indians battling their own personal, sexual, dietary, familial or professional problems would learn how to combat or overcome them.

  At the time Gandhi wrote his memoirs, autobiographies written in the West were broadly of two types: those written when the author was young, and those written when the author was old. Prominent in the first category were books by poets such as Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden, who, having fought in the First World War, were encouraged to tell their life’s story when still in their early thirties. At the other pole were men of science, who typically turned to autobiog
raphy when their real work was done. Among the great works of this kind that Gandhi may have known of were the autobiographies of Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin.

  Gandhi’s memoirs did not fit into either type (or stereotype). They were written in his fifties. Here, the autobiographer had a substantial reservoir of experience to draw upon, and more to look forward to. The tone was at once reflective and pedagogic. Gandhi’s hope—particularly with regard to Experiments—was that the reader would be inspired and educated by the experiences, errors, judgements and actions of the autobiographer. Yet, the teachings were addressed also to himself. The autobiographer knew that he was not done with life yet. Might he not, in the years that remained, implement with more certainty the credo that he had so strenuously worked out?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Once More into the Fray

  I

  On 27 January 1928, Gandhi’s third son, Ramdas Gandhi, was married in the Sabarmati Ashram. His bride, Nirmala, had been chosen for him by his father. Gandhi gifted the couple a copy of the Gita and two spinning wheels. In a speech to the gathering, he remarked that Ramdas and Devadas were the two sons ‘brought up exclusively’ by him and under his care, adding that neither had ever deceived him, nor hidden from him their faults or failings. The unspoken comparison was with the two elder sons, with whom Gandhi’s relations had been far more contentious.1

  One reason Gandhi was staying put in the ashram was his indifferent health. As he wrote to a Sindhi colleague, the ‘doctors’ instruments do give alarming readings, and therefore I have agreed to take full rest’.2 Elsewhere in India, protests were gathering ground against the Simon Commission that arrived in India in the first week of February 1928. While its mandate was to prescribe constitutional reforms for India, the commission was vitiated from the start by the fact that not one of its members was an Indian.