Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Gandhi told the weavers that ‘he grieved at Lancashire’s distress, but could only promise this: that if India got self-government he would agree to the prohibition of all imports of cloth other than Lancashire in so far as imports were necessary’.22 In an interview to the Textile Mercury, Gandhi likewise said that if there was ‘a full-hearted’ political settlement between India and Britain, and supposing India had to buy foreign cloth to supplement indigenous production, whether homespun or mill-spun, ‘preference would be given to Lancashire over all other foreign cloth’.23

  Gandhi spent a weekend in October in Chichester, staying with the local bishop. ‘A large crowd assembled to cheer the Mahatma when his car arrived, and he drove into the Cathedral precincts bowing and smiling broadly to the crowd.’24 On the Sunday he drove to the nearby town of Bognor Regis, where he had lunch with the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, whose columns had been so hospitable to reports of Gandhi’s movement and to the effusive essays of C.F. Andrews in particular. Mahadev Desai, who was present, recalls Gandhi telling Scott that ‘for years your paper has been an oasis in a desert of misunderstanding and misrepresentation and I thought I must see you if only to express my gratefulness’.25

  Gandhi also spent a weekend in each of Britain’s two great university towns. In Oxford, he was a house guest of the Master of Balliol, A.D. Lindsay, a distinguished scholar as well as an active member of the Labour Party. (Balliol had contributed a disproportionate share of ICS officers, both Indian and British.) Gandhi attended several gatherings, where, without making formal speeches, he readily answered questions put to him by the students. ‘Mr. Gandhi,’ noted a reporter accompanying him, ‘evidently found himself very much at home with his undergraduate audiences, and gave the impression that he greatly enjoyed his visit.’26

  The master’s daughter later recalled some highlights of the visit. ‘The routine of Gandhi’s party,’ she wrote, ‘started early with baths at about 3 a.m. followed by prayers and morning walks which had also to be shadowed by the detective.’ Through the weekend, Mira ‘glided about in silent dignity looking after Gandhi’s needs as best as she could in these new surroundings’, while the old Yorkshire nurse who was living with the Lindsays ‘protested indignantly when she found Gandhi’s dhoti hanging to dry in front of her gas fire’.27

  Gandhi also visited Cambridge, the alma mater of his friend Charlie Andrews and his disciple Jawaharlal Nehru. Andrews accompanied him. The day they arrived, their talks with dons and students carried on into the late evening. At length Andrews told the callers they must leave, as it was the Mahatma’s bedtime. Then he added: ‘You know, Mr. Gandhi can go to sleep within three minutes any time he wants to.’ A lady who was one of the group asked gushingly, ‘Can you really?’, to which the Mahatma replied, quick as a flash, ‘Yes. Would you like a demonstration now?’28

  On some weekdays Gandhi made shorter excursions, within London or to its suburbs. One evening, he visited the Houses of Parliament to address Labour MPs. The meeting carried on too late for Gandhi and his party to return to Bow in time for their customary prayer meeting at 7 p.m. So, after the MPs had dispersed and Gandhi had signed a few autographs, his party decided to say their prayers in the Parliament itself. They chanted verses from the Gita and the Bible, against the background of a large picture on the wall of ‘The English Fleet pursuing the Spanish Fleet’. A Labour MP stayed behind, as per the rules of the House, which specified that all meetings in the building must have at least one MP present.29

  Another weekday, when the conference was not in session, Gandhi visited a dairy show in Islington, posing for a photograph with the animals. Later, the animal who won first prize in the ‘goats’ category was (re)named ‘Mahatma Gandhi’.30

  Gandhi also reached out to the British people through the press. On 28 September the Daily Herald published an article by Gandhi specially written for it. The paper gave the piece the title ‘Myself, My Spinning-Wheel, and Women’. Here, Gandhi said that the spinning wheel was ‘the symbol of salvation’ for the starving millions in India. The charkha, said Gandhi to the English, ‘would teach you a great deal more than I can—patience, industry, simplicity’.

  Gandhi came next to his mode of dress, which many in England found exotic and even offensive. His attire, he explained, was customary and common in India, and far better suited to the tropical climate than European clothing. Were Gandhi to come to England to work or seek citizenship rights, he would dress as the English did. But he was here ‘on a great and special mission, and my loin-cloth, if you choose so to describe it, is the dress of my principals, the people of India’.

  The newspaper had asked him to clarify his views on women. He answered that he believed ‘in complete equality for women and, in the India I seek to build, they would have it’. He wished to see ‘the opening of all offices, professions and employments to women; otherwise there can be no real equality’. Then he added a significant caveat: ‘But I must sincerely hope that women will retain and exercise her ancient prerogative as queen of the household.’ In Gandhi’s view of the world, ‘generally, it is the father who should be the bread-winner’, while ‘family life is the first and greatest thing. Its sanctity must remain.’31

  On 2 October, Gandhi’s birthday, the Jewish Chronicle printed an interview with him. He spoke of his many close Jewish friends and colleagues in South Africa. He praised the ‘wonderful spirit of cohesion’ displayed by Jews, and termed anti-Semitism ‘a remnant of barbarism’. While sympathetic to Jews, he was less enamoured of the Zionist project per se. He understood ‘the longing of a Jew to return to Palestine’, but asked them to go not under the protection of British bayonets, but ‘peacefully and in perfect friendliness with the Arabs’.

  For Gandhi, one’s faith was not necessarily tied to a specific shrine, city or territory. So, he now told his Jewish interlocutor, ‘Zion lies in one’s heart….The real Jerusalem is the spiritual Jerusalem. Thus he can realize his Zionism in any part of the world.’32

  V

  The weekends were pleasurable, which was perhaps just as well, for the weekdays were not going smoothly for Gandhi. In the conference, the debate over separate electorates for the Depressed Classes had intensified. Ambedkar would not be budged from his conviction that these were necessary. Asked about this by a reporter, Gandhi answered; ‘I do not mind Dr. Ambedkar. He has a right even to spit on me, as every untouchable has…But I may inform you that Dr. Ambedkar speaks for that particular part of the country where he comes from. He cannot speak for the rest of India…’

  Gandhi said he had received ‘numerous telegrams from the so-called “untouchables” in various parts of India assuring me that they have the fullest faith in the Congress and disowning Dr. Ambedkar’. In any case, the special and separate electorate that Ambedkar was demanding would do ‘immense harm’ to the interests of the ‘untouchables’ themselves. ‘It would divide the Hindu community into armed camps and provoke needless opposition.’

  The questioner was not entirely satisfied. He accepted that Gandhi cared for the plight of the ‘untouchables’, and had worked hard to protect their interests. But disadvantaged communities the world over insisted on being represented by their own people. The ‘devoted Liberals’ in England felt for the working class but were not workers themselves, which is why the Labour Party was born and thrived in working-class districts. Likewise, in the Indian context, ‘the great stubborn fact’ against Gandhi was that he was not an ‘untouchable’ himself.33

  The question of separate electorates also came up in an interview with the editor of the Spectator. Here, Gandhi accepted that ‘Dr. Ambedkar is undoubtedly clever and enthusiastic’. He added, however, that ‘I have spent the best part of my life in championing their cause, I have mixed with them east, west, north and south in India, I have many of them in my own Ashram…’34

  Gandhi had told the Indian students at Oxford that he had ‘the highest regar
d for Dr. Ambedkar. He has every right to be bitter. That he does not break our heads is an act of self-restraint on his part.’ Then he continued: ‘He is today so very much saturated with suspicion that he cannot see anything else. He sees in every Hindu a determined opponent of the untouchables, and it is quite natural.’

  For all his admiration for Dr Ambedkar, Gandhi insisted that ‘the separate electorates that he seeks will not give him social reform. He may himself mount to power and position, but nothing good will accrue to the untouchables.’35

  In a speech to the conference on 13 November, Gandhi said that ‘with all my regard for Dr. Ambedkar, and for his own desire to see the untouchables uplifted, with all my regard for his ability, I must say in all humility that here the great wrong under which he has laboured and perhaps the bitter experience that he has undergone have for the moment warped his judgment’. Gandhi himself was clear that separate electorates would make the problem worse rather than better; it would further the divisions in each village and lead to endemic conflict. Therefore, he told the conference ‘with all the emphasis that I can command that, if I was the only person to resist this thing, I would resist it with my life’.36

  VI

  On the defensive as regards the Depressed Classes, Gandhi was also at odds with the Muslim leaders at the conference. At a minorities committee meeting, he announced ‘with deep sorrow and deeper humiliation’ the ‘utter failure’ on his part ‘to secure an agreed solution of the communal question’. He blamed this on the composition of the conference, where, except for him, all delegates had been nominated by the Imperial Government. He thought religious divisions had ‘hardened’ under British rule; but he hoped that, as he put it, ‘the iceberg of communal differences will melt under the warmth of the sun of freedom’.37

  On the sidelines of the conference, Gandhi had several private meetings with Muslim leaders. These were unproductive. As Mahadev wrote to Nehru, their mutual master ‘had two most disappointing interviews with Shaukat Ali and the Aga Khan’. While ‘Jinnah was better’, he wondered why Gandhi was ‘adamant’ that any agreement on Muslims had to have the approval of Dr Ansari.38 For his part, Gandhi could not understand why ‘we have here today Mussalmans talking as ultra-loyalists who only a little while ago were intolerant even of British connection under any terms’.39

  The Hindu–Muslim question also came up at a meeting with Labour MPs. One Labour leader asked Gandhi whether there was a risk of sectarian strife if the British left India. He answered that this was indeed possible, but pointedly reminded them of their own history. ‘Did not the British people themselves run the maddest risks imaginable in order to retain their liberty?’ he asked. ‘Did they not have the terrible Wars of the Roses? Did they not fight, the English and the Scots?’40

  When he was in Oxford, a student had asked Gandhi: ‘How far is the British attitude towards the communal question an obstacle in your path?’ Gandhi answered: ‘Largely, or I should say half and half.’ The British had followed a policy of divide and rule in India, he said, wryly adding that ‘of course, if I were a British official, I would probably do the same and take advantage of dissensions to consolidate the rule. Our share of responsibility lies in the fact that we fall easy victims to the game.’41

  VII

  By coming to London as the sole representative of the Congress, Gandhi was offering to the British people the syllogism: INDIVIDUAL=PARTY=NATION. Gandhi was the Congress which was India. This presentation was flatly rejected by the other Indian participants at the Round Table Conference. And it was denied by the British government too.

  On the political front the trip to London was a failure. On the personal front it was a resounding success. The British public were charmed by Gandhi. He was warmly received in the mill districts of the north, and in the ancient universities in the south. In London itself, he was besieged by a series of visitors, famous as well as unknown. On many evenings, the children of the East End would come to see him at Kingsley Hall. Gandhi sat on the floor with kids around him, asking questions. One child asked about the language Gandhi spoke, to be told that the word pita in Hindi was allied to the word father in English, demonstrating that Indians and British people belonged to the same human family.42

  Among the visitors to Kingsley Hall was the sculptor Clare Sheridan, a cousin of Winston Churchill’s from his mother’s side. She asked Gandhi for a couple of sittings for a bust she wished to make. Gandhi told her to be at ease despite her connections, joking that she could tell Churchill that he was ‘not really so bad’. As she made her drawings, she noted the stream of callers on the great man: an Indian disciple, an Englishman who claimed to have known Gandhi in South Africa, a London doctor, a French woman lawyer, the editor of the New Statesman, and the wife of the actor and singer Paul Robeson (who wished to know Gandhi’s opinion on the Negro question in the United States).43

  Also among Gandhi’s visitors was his old admirer, the New York clergyman John Haynes Holmes. Holmes was in Berlin when he heard Gandhi was coming to London. He rushed there to meet him. Having long venerated Gandhi from afar, Holmes now had his first glimpse of him in person. ‘Where do people get the idea that Gandhi is ugly?’ he later wrote. Why had some westerners described him as a ‘dwarf’ and as a ‘little monkey of a man’? Holmes acknowledged that Gandhi’s limbs and body looked emaciated, for ‘his ascetic life produces no surplus flesh’. It was also true that his individual features were not especially appealing. Gandhi, wrote Holmes, ‘has a shaven head, protruding ears, thick lips, and a mouth that is minus many of its teeth’. That said, ‘his dark complexion is richly beautiful against the white background of his shawl, his eyes shine like candles in the night, and overall is the radiance of a smile like sunshine on a morning landscape’.44

  The most famous individual Gandhi met in London was Charlie Chaplin. Remarkably, Gandhi had never heard of the actor. Chaplin knew something about Gandhi’s fetish for the spinning wheel. He was in sympathy with India’s demand for freedom, but ‘somewhat confused’ about Gandhi’s own attitude towards machinery. The Indian answered that he was not opposed to machinery per se, but only to machines that rendered people jobless. He added that ‘in cloth and food every nation should be self-contained. We were [once] self-contained and want to be that again.’45

  The meeting (held at the home of an Indian doctor in Canning Town) was the subject of a newspaper editorial entitled ‘Mahatma and Clown’. This observed that Gandhi and Chaplin had ‘both established contact with larger numbers of their fellow human beings than, probably, anyone else in the history of the world’. Asking, ‘What is the common quality in Mahatma and clown?’, the newspaper answered: ‘Perhaps, more than anything, a capacity to sympathise and to understand mass emotions. Some people make us laugh and some people make us follow them; clowns and Mahatmas.’46

  While in London, Gandhi also heard from the great scientist Albert Einstein, who expressed admiration for his work, and hoped he might pass through Berlin on his way back. Gandhi—who certainly knew of Einstein—answered that he likewise hoped ‘that we could meet face to face and that too in India at my Ashram’.47

  A meeting that gave Gandhi great pleasure was with the animal rights activist Henry Salt. Back in 1888–89, as a young law student in London, Gandhi had read Salt’s works, and joined his Vegetarian Society, and contributed essays on Indian food to its journal.48 Now, forty-odd years later, the world-famous Mahatma addressed the society, with the octogenarian reformer in attendance. He remarked that while he had been brought up to eschew animal flesh, that was because of the caste and culture he was born into. It was only Henry Salt ‘who showed me why it was a moral duty incumbent on vegetarians not to live upon fellow-animals’.49

  A last luminary Gandhi encountered was another fellow vegetarian, George Bernard Shaw. They met at Kingsley Hall, with Mahadev Desai taking notes as Shaw interrogated Gandhi ‘on a bewildering variety of topics—ethnographical, reli
gious, social, political, economic—and his talk was illumined by his sparkling wit and sardonic humour’. Gandhi was sardonic too at times; when Shaw asked whether the Round Table Conference was trying his patience, he answered: ‘It requires more than the patience of Job. The whole thing is a huge camouflage and the harangues that we are treated to are meant only to mark time.’50

  As Shaw came out of Kingsley Hall, a reporter asked him what he thought of Gandhi. He replied in character: ‘The second greatest man in the world.’ This was not said entirely in jest, for it seems that he had told Gandhi that he felt in him something of ‘a kindred spirit’, adding: ‘We belong to a very small community on earth.’51 When he got into his car, a fellow passenger asked Shaw what he felt about the visit to Gandhi. ‘He is a phenomenon and I have hardly recovered from the shock of it,’ said Shaw.52

  Gandhi met many English people, but many more wished to meet him, besieging him with letters and requests for interviews. On a drive through London with his young Quaker friend Horace Alexander, Gandhi saw a hoarding which read: ‘Come and meet Gandhi at Madame Tussaud’s’. Alexander thought that being immortalized in wax among all those other famous and notorious people would please Gandhi. Instead, he heard the Mahatma wryly commenting: ‘I wish they would send all the letters there.’53

  VIII

  The most powerful person Gandhi met in London was the British monarch, King George the Fifth, one of whose titles was Emperor of India. On 5 November, the king hosted a reception for the delegates to the Round Table Conference. The invitation specified that those attending should wear ‘Morning Dress’; finally, after much to-ing and fro-ing between the palace officials and Mahadev Desai, they decided to make an exception for Gandhi.