Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Among the influential Muslims at the conference was the nawab of Bhopal. Writing to the viceroy on 19 December, he blamed the failure to reach a Hindu–Muslim settlement on ‘the extremists among the Hindus, who, saturated as they are by the Congress mentality of destruction and chaos, would not have a solution except on their own terms’. Despite this failure, added the nawab, ‘it is a matter of great satisfaction that the Muslim solidly stands as a great Imperial asset, a powerful force for peace and order’. His own ‘anxiety’ was that ‘nothing should happen at this stage which would drive the Muslims in a body, or even a portion of them, into the arms of the Congress…’27

  This was a letter striking in its candour. The nawab did not want the British rule to end, did not want Muslims and Hindus to find a common cause, did not, in fact, want devolution of power from the British to Indians or from the princes to their subjects.

  In the last week of December 1930, the annual conference of the Muslim League was held in Allahabad. With many of the League’s leaders away in the United Kingdom, Muhammad Iqbal was asked to be president. An acclaimed poet in Persian and Urdu, Iqbal had taken a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Munich. Influenced by European philosophers such as Nietzsche in his youth, he became increasingly interested in the history and philosophy of Islam as he grew older.

  In addressing the Muslim League, Iqbal had chosen to speak in English, his preferred language of scholarly discourse. He began by deploring the ‘mistaken separation’ of the spiritual and temporal realms in modern Europe, which had ‘resulted practically in the total exclusion of Christianity from the life of European states’. Iqbal believed that ‘religion is a power of the utmost importance in the life of individuals as well as states’.

  Iqbal argued that the ‘principle of European democracy cannot be applied to India without recognising the fact of communal groups’. As a major group in British India, the Muslims deserved and should demand their own political unit, whose geographical boundaries he went on to sketch. ‘I would like,’ said the poet, ‘to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state. Self-Government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim state appears to be the final destiny of the Muslims at least of North-west India.’28

  A large crowd had gathered to hear Iqbal speak in Allahabad. But they had come to listen to his poetry, not his political prescriptions. The speech went over their heads, not least because it was in English. After he had finished, the audience shouted in Urdu for Iqbal to recite poetry. At first he declined, but as the clamour grew louder, he recited a few short verses ‘in a subdued voice and without any interest’, and sat down again.29

  In jail, Gandhi had been permitted to receive newspapers. It is likely that they printed at least an abbreviated account of Iqbal’s presidential address, and that he read this. Since he wasn’t allowed to comment on political matters, there is no reference to it in his letters from prison. If he did indeed read it (albeit in a condensed version), it is likely that he was struck, perhaps even shaken, by it. For more than two decades now, the leaders of the Muslim League had been asking for a greater share of political power. However, their demands had been couched in terms of a greater reservation of seats in legislatures, more jobs in government, the protection of Urdu and of personal laws. Never before had they gone so far as to demand a separate state or nation. Although little noticed at the time, Muhammad Iqbal’s Allahabad address marked a major turning point in the history of Hindu–Muslim relations in British India.

  VII

  While Gandhi was in jail, his autobiography finally appeared in the West. The Indian edition had been abridged by its editor, C.F. Andrews. He left out, among other things, the chapters on brahmacharya and fasting from My Experiments with Truth, while adding some material from Gandhi’s South African memoir and his essays in Young India. This amended, reworked, autobiography was published in September 1930 under the title Mahatma Gandhi: His Own Story, by George Allen and Unwin in the United Kingdom (priced at 12s 6d), and by Macmillan in the United States (priced at $2.50).

  In his introduction to the volume, Andrews remarked: ‘One may search the pages of history in vain to find any man in any age—religious teacher, military conqueror, political statesman—who has held at one time so vast a power over so many human beings during his own lifetime. The man who sees no power in Gandhi is the man who knows no power save that of the ballot box and the battlefield.’30

  An early, and critical, review of the book was by the Oxford scholar Quintin Hogg. Hogg’s main charge was that Gandhi was

  unable to rest in a moderate opinion in any subject in which he is interested. He becomes a violent partisan of meat-eating, and again an extreme vegetarian…He seems to see no alternative between treating a wife ‘as the object of her husband’s lust’ and vowing a vow of permanent abstinence….Either he must regard the British Empire as so beneficent as to render it his duty to oppose even righteous rebellion (his attitude towards the Zulu revolt) or else British Government is entirely satanic. There is no alternative between active assistance and ‘non-cooperation’.31

  Somewhat more sympathetic to the book (and the author) was another Oxford scholar, Edward Thompson, who had spent some years as a college teacher in Bengal. Thompson remarked that Gandhi was ‘devastatingly frank about his home, his father’s courage, integrity and moral weakness; he is no less frank about his own faults and slips’. He presciently added that ‘the subject himself has set on record all the materials for the inevitable “debunking” process which time will bring’.

  Thompson thought Gandhi’s economic ideas out of date and his political programme inconsistent. Nonetheless, ‘his thinking matters because it has an elemental quality; he has so identified himself with his poorer fellow-countrymen that it is communal, not personal. In him centuries of oppression and weakness have found their voice. The reason for his overwhelming influence—so much greater than that of other Indian politicians with superior qualities of intellect or expository skill—emerges from his own story. There has hardly been a man who trusted his own intellect so absolutely, unless it was Socrates. This has simplified his life as nothing else could have done, and enabled him to sweep aside the opinions of subtler men and make them act upon his own.’32

  The anonymous reviewer of the London Times likewise found Gandhi’s account of his life ‘exceptionally frank, even after the torrent of self-revelation by Great War veterans, actresses, and politicians’. The reader, he added, ‘will experience many sensations—astonishment, sympathy, disgust, admiration—but the last will survive when he remembers how few writers of autobiography would have made no attempt to gloss over their own baser episodes…’33

  The candidness of Gandhi’s exposition was also admired on the other side of the Atlantic. A New York reviewer remarked that the book was ‘an almost incredible autobiography, so remote is it from our competitive world in its philosophy, so overwhelming in its simplicity, so discerning in its confession of blunders…’34 A Methodist journal was impressed by ‘Mr. Gandhi’s ability to make and to hold friends of all sorts and conditions, Hindus, Christians, Moslems, and irrespective of race’.35

  One last American appreciation must be noticed. This was not of Gandhi’s autobiography but of his political career as a whole. It was printed in the newsmagazine Time, which, in the early months of 1930, had been so witheringly contemptuous of Gandhi and his march to the sea.

  In December 1930, Time’s editors sat down to choose their Man of the Year. The contenders included the golfer Bobby Jones, who had won all four major championships; Sinclair Lewis, who in the year just ended had become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature; Joseph Stalin, who by purging his politburo of all rivals was now ‘absolute master of some 150,000,000 people’; and the ‘world’s most potent criminal’, Al C
apone, who had in 1930 been freed from prison.

  While acknowledging the achievements (admirable or despicable) of Jones and Lewis, Stalin and Capone, Time concluded that ‘curiously, it was in a jail that the year’s end found the little half naked brown man whose 1930 mark on world history will undoubtedly loom largest of all’. The magazine recalled the Congress’s declaration of independence in January 1930, the Salt March two months later, and Gandhi’s arrest in May. As Time’s first issue for 1931 went to press, Gandhi was still in jail, ‘and some 30,000 members of his Independence movement were caged elsewhere. The British Empire was still wondering fearfully what to do with them all, the Empire’s most staggering problem.’ Outside the prisons, ‘for Mr. Gandhi, for the Mahatma, for St. Gandhi, for Jailbird Gandhi not thousands but millions of Indians are taking individual beatings which they could escape by paying what His Majesty’s Government calls, quite accurately, “normal taxes”’.36

  And so Mohandas K. Gandhi was chosen Time’s Man of the Year for 1930. Himself in jail at the time, Gandhi did not read this mea culpa, but perhaps his foremost American admirer did, and felt suitably vindicated. Back in May, when Gandhi was arrested, John Haynes Holmes had written to Romain Rolland, his co-chairman as it were of the Global Gandhi Fan Club: ‘I know that you are feeling as I do about the Indian situation. I can think of little else, and wish that I were more free of all my routine responsibilities that I might give all my thought and work to the support of Gandhi’s cause. The Mahatma looms today a more sublime figure than ever, and justifies anew our firm conviction that he is the “greatest man in the world”.’37

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Parleys with Proconsuls

  I

  The year 1931 began with Gandhi still in prison. In the months he had been in jail, he had spun a good amount of yarn, which he wanted to send to Ahmedabad to be woven into saris for his wife. The government, somewhat pettily, declined to do so.1

  On 25 January, Kasturba addressed a meeting of women in Borsad, who had gathered to protest police excesses. She also visited some villages. Afterwards, she issued a press statement, in whose drafting perhaps her son Devadas had a hand. The statement read:

  Wherever I went, I saw marks of lathi blows on chest, back, head, waist, and leg…I was doubly grieved on hearing that police caned children, pulled women by the hair, dealt fist blows on breasts of women, and uttered indecent abuses to women. The fact that there are such policemen in India, points out the black spot of our society.

  This is the first occasion in my life, when I have seen such inhuman treatment meted out to ladies in Gujarat. Nowhere in India have I seen such brutalities perpetrated on women by the police.2

  The day after Kasturba issued this statement, her husband was released. After the failure of the Round Table Conference, Ramsay MacDonald had urged Irwin to begin talks with Gandhi. The release order was issued from Delhi; and at 11 a.m. on 26 January, Gandhi came out of Yerwada a free man.3

  Speaking to the Associated Press, Gandhi said he had ‘come out of jail with an absolutely open mind, unfettered by enmity, unbiased in argument and prepared to study the whole situation from every point of view…’ He added, however, that all prisoners connected with the civil disobedience movement ‘should be liberated immediately’.4

  Gandhi took the train from Poona to Bombay. On his arrival in India’s urbs prima, he was met by a large crowd, who took him in a procession to Dhobitalao. Gandhi then went on to Mani Bhavan (the home of his friend Revashankar Jagjivan), where he usually stayed when in the city. Here, too, ‘large crowds besieged the building throughout the day to receive his “darshan”’.5

  After a day in Bombay, Gandhi left for Allahabad, to attend a meeting of the CWC. On 1 February, he wrote to the viceroy saying that he ‘was simply waiting for a sign in order to enable me to respond to your appeal’ (for talks). But the signs he currently saw were ‘highly ominous’. He gave several examples from around India of unprovoked police attacks on ‘wholly defenceless and innocent women’. (The viceroy’s secretary, replying on his behalf, said he saw ‘no profit in the general exploration of charges and counter-charges’.)6

  While her husband was closeted with his colleagues in Allahabad, Kasturba arrived in Bombay, to participate in a public meeting to protest the police brutalities in Gujarat. The meeting was held on 4 February. In attendance were wives of three men knighted by the British—one Muslim, one Hindu, one Parsi—as well as ‘women of all classes and communities’. The report in the Bombay Chronicle said that ‘Shrimati Kasturba Gandhi presided but owing to some trouble in the throat she could not speak’. This sounds like it must have been an alibi—always an unwilling and indifferent public speaker, Kasturba might have been intimidated by the presence of the bejewelled women around her.

  Kasturba’s speech was read out for her by one Kusumben Desai. It said their struggle was based on truth and non-violence, and thanked the women of Bombay for so spontaneously sympathizing with ‘their village sisters’ by raising a ‘united protest against the atrocities of [the] police in a distant place like Borsad’.7

  During the Rowlatt satyagraha and the non-cooperation movement, Kasturba Gandhi had stayed out of the public eye. So had women in general, with exceptions such as the emancipated and very westernized Sarojini Naidu. But in this new round of civil disobedience, women had energetically come forward to participate. Seeing college girls shout slogans and court arrest, Kasturba had decided she must play her part too.

  II

  Gandhi, meanwhile, was still in Allahabad, where Motilal Nehru had fallen seriously ill. On 4 February, the family decided to take Motilal to Lucknow, a city with more advanced medical facilities. Gandhi accompanied them. The journey by road, however, had been too much for the patient to take. On the morning of the 6th, Motilal died, his son and his wife at his side. He was sixty-nine.8

  Motilal’s death affected Gandhi deeply. In the next few days he spoke at several memorial meetings in Allahabad, and spent time with the bereaved family. On the 14th—a week after Motilal’s death—he wrote to the viceroy asking for an interview. ‘I am aware of the responsibility resting on my shoulders,’ remarked Gandhi. ‘It is heightened by the death of Pandit Motilal Nehru. I feel that without personal contact and heart to heart talk with you, the advice I give my co-workers may not be right.’

  In the course of his life, Motilal Nehru had moved from working in assemblies and committees to courting arrest under Gandhi’s direction; his death prompted his friend in turn to learn lessons from him. Now that Motilal was gone, Gandhi found it prudent to eschew struggle and return to the path of dialogue and reconciliation.9

  Gandhi’s decision to sue for peace may also have been influenced by a letter from Henry Polak. Shortly after Gandhi’s release from prison, Polak wrote to him that ‘you have no conception of the enormous change that has occurred in public opinion here since the Round Table Conference opened’. An optimistic Polak believed that ‘the imperialists and reactionaries are thoroughly discredited’. He thought there would soon be a consensus on the creation of ‘Indian legislatures to which Indian Cabinets will be responsible’. As he wrote to Gandhi: ‘If what you wanted when you set out upon your recent programme was a change of heart on the part of the British people, there can, in my opinion, be no doubt that you have got it.’10

  When Gandhi wired the viceroy saying he would like to meet, Irwin wired back asking him to come the following week. So on 27 February—just short of a year since he began his march to the sea—Gandhi visited the Viceregal Palace, where, for three consecutive days, he spoke for several hours with Lord Irwin. The discussion ranged widely. Among the topics covered were the suspension of civil disobedience, the release of satyagrahis, the status of princely states, and the next Round Table Conference, due to be held towards the end of 1931, and at which the viceroy hoped the Congress would send a large delegation, led by Gandhi himself.

/>   Gandhi told Mahadev Desai that ‘the Viceroy desires peace because he has been touched by the struggle’. For his part, he told the viceroy: ‘How can I sever my connection with you? I have so many English friends. Take for instance Mirabehn. I don’t know her family and her father and yet she has completely lost herself in me. Andrews keeps sending me cables from Cape Town asking me to arrive at a settlement. How can I give up this Andrews?’

  On their next meeting, Gandhi said any settlement would depend on the release of satyagrahis, the repeal or relaxation of the salt laws, and the government’s recognition that peaceful picketing of shops stocking liquor and foreign goods would continue. When Gandhi assured the viceroy that picketing would be peaceful, Irwin answered that ‘people were in too excitable a temper for so simple and speedy a transition as he contemplated from one sort of picketing to another to be possible’.

  On salt, Irwin noted that Gandhi ‘attached far greater importance to it than I had expected, and I imagine that it is mostly vanity’. The viceroy said the government could not publicly condone the breaking of the salt law, but might extend certain privileges. He asked Gandhi to suggest means whereby this compromise could be effected. Later, the viceroy noted: ‘I think it may be necessary to do something to meet him on Salt.’

  Gandhi also raised the question of Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary sentenced to death for his participation in acts of violence. Bhagat Singh’s writings were then widely in circulation; they showed him to be a young man of uncommon intelligence and patriotism. Public sympathy for him was very high. Gandhi told the viceroy that if he postponed or retracted the execution, ‘it would have an influence for peace’. Irwin was impressed that ‘the apostle of non-violence should so earnestly be pleading the cause of a creed so fundamentally opposite to his own’.11