Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Two stories have long circulated about that meeting, both attributed to journalists who are said to have met Gandhi immediately afterwards. One has the reporter asking Gandhi whether he did not feel cold in his dhoti and sandals. Gandhi apparently answered: ‘The King had on enough for the two of us.’ The second story has the same question but a different answer, with Gandhi saying: ‘The King wears plus-fours; I wear minus-fours.’

  I have not been able to find a contemporary source for the first story. The second remark was not entirely made up; except that Gandhi uttered it not to the king, but to a journalist in Marseille who asked whether he would continue to wear the loincloth in England (with Gandhi’s precise words being: ‘In your country you put on plus-fours; I prefer minus-fours’).54

  And how did the king himself respond to Gandhi and his mode of attire? As it turns out, we do have an eyewitness account. At the palace reception, the guests lined up, and the king and queen shook hands with them, one by one. ‘When Gandhi’s turn came neither of Their Majesties showed any distinction or batted an eyelid but shook hands with the incongruously garbed leader just as with any one else.’ Later, as the king chatted informally with the guests, our eyewitness (the British businessman E.C. Benthall) saw him ‘wagging his finger at Gandhi and obviously expressing displeasure’. Gandhi ‘smilingly but awkwardly answered back’, and ‘eventually the conversation appeared to go amicably’. A member of the royal family told Benthall that the king had asked Gandhi: ‘What have I done that you should be so hostile to me nowadays? There was a time when you led an ambulance in South Africa in support of the British troops.’55

  Put on the spot, Gandhi deftly answered: ‘I must not be drawn into a political argument in Your Majesty’s Palace after receiving Your Majesty’s hospitality.’ Overhearing the conversation was Samuel Hoare, the King’s secretary of state for India. Hoare was greatly impressed by Gandhi’s quickness of mind, later writing: ‘What exquisite worldly manners the unworldly possess!’56

  IX

  In early October, Gandhi got a long letter from Jawaharlal Nehru, alerting him to the situation in India. ‘There is a great deal of repression going on here,’ wrote Nehru, ‘and large numbers of young men are being proceeded against. Some are being charged under Sec 302 (the murder section) for a speech, which is extraordinary.’

  Another letter from Nehru followed a week later. This spoke of how, in the United Provinces, ‘the tenantry have lost hope to a large extent of any real relief being given to them’. The remissions promised them due to the failure of the rains had been withheld. Meanwhile, ‘stray reports of beatings of kisans [peasants] continue to come’.57

  On 16 October, Gandhi received a further update from Nehru about the forcible collection of rents in the United Provinces. Lands and cattle were being confiscated. The kisans were facing ‘continual harassment’, the situation was ‘critical’. Should the local Congress start a satyagraha, asked Nehru? Or should it wait for the Round Table Conference to end?

  Gandhi had been in London for a full month. The conference was going nowhere. The Hindu–Muslim question and the debate on special electorates for Depressed Classes were unresolved. The Labour Party had split in August, and Ramsay MacDonald was now being propped up by the Conservatives, who were far less sympathetic to self-government for Indians, as well as more inclined to set the Muslim League against the Congress. So, Gandhi told Nehru to ‘unhesitatingly’ take such steps as the situation in the countryside warranted. ‘Expect nothing here,’ he added.58

  Gandhi continued to attend meetings of the conference, but without much hope that they would achieve anything. At a conference session in the last week of November, the Liberal politician Sir Hubert Carr offered this consolation: ‘Without their work Mahatma Gandhi might have remained for many people in this country a more or less mythical figure, making salt in forbidden places or weaving all kinds of yarns.’ Gandhi at once interjected: ‘You mean spinning all kinds of yarns.’59

  Three days later, Gandhi spoke for nearly an hour at the conference’s plenary session. Once more, he argued that whereas the other parties at this meeting represented one section or another, the ‘Congress alone claims to represent the whole of India, all interests’. He wished he ‘could convince all the British public men, the British Ministers, that the Congress is capable of delivering the goods. The Congress is the only all-India wide national organization, bereft of any communal bias…’

  With the conference having failed to arrive at a satisfactory agreement among its parties, Gandhi contemplated having to start civil disobedience when he returned home. The thought gave him ‘no joy and comfort’, but if it had to be done, it would be, with Indians having the ‘satisfaction of knowing that it was not at least taking lives, it was giving lives; it was not making the British people directly suffer, it was suffering’.

  Gandhi ended by saying that he would return ‘carrying with me thousands upon thousands of English friendships. I do not know them, but I read that affection in their eyes as early in the morning I walk through your streets. All this hospitality, all this kindness will never be effaced from my memory no matter what befalls my unhappy land.’60

  For his part, Gandhi had made a considerable impression on the British people. As he prepared to leave, the Manchester Guardian organized a competition asking for submissions, in verse or prose, bidding farewell to Gandhi, with a prize of two guineas for the best entry.

  Submissions poured in from across the country. Some were outright hostile, as in the entry from a lady from Winchester, which began: ‘We extend to you an iron hand in a velvet glove. Shake it, but remember; for we shall meet again in your own country,’ and continued: ‘It is a pity the temperate climate of this hated land has had no calming effect upon your fevered brain, but a distorted imagination to a sick body. A diet of British beef would have cured both ills.’

  The Manchester Guardian very reasonably concluded that this lady was ‘an admirer of Mr. Churchill’. Other submissions, however, were more sympathetic to Gandhi, as in this verse from a K.V. Bailey from Nottingham:

  Another runner passes through the night,

  Bearing a light

  Tireless the hastening feet; held high the flame

  But in whose name

  And on what mission has he touched our shore

  Lo! Evermore

  The age-old voice replies, ‘For Truth I run’

  God speed him on!

  This entry won the second prize, of one guinea. The first prize went to a Reverend J.A. Wurtleburg from Harrogate, whose entry started thus:

  Farewell, Mr. Gandhi! Farewell to your figure, familiar at least in the Illustrated Papers! How they will miss your loin-cloth, blanket, goggles, and the inscrutable smile! You are going back to your native land, but what you are going to do there only that ovular head knows, and perhaps even it is a little vague. We are none of us quite sure whether you are a fanatical seer with no real constructive policy, or whether you will prove a statesman who can well and truly lay the foundations of a building which might startle the ages.61

  As befitting a prize-winning entry, this was suitably even-handed, as well as open-minded; unsure whether Gandhi was saint or charlatan, statesman or fanatic, it left it to the future to decide.

  X

  Gandhi left London on Saturday, 5 December, exactly twelve weeks after he arrived. Among those seeing him off at Victoria station were his Quaker hosts from Bow, the Labour leader George Lansbury (bearing a bouquet of chrysanthemums), and many students, English as well as Indian. Gandhi was placed in a second-class carriage, ‘and seemed much amused to find that it was a smoker’. As the train pulled out of the station, the Eastern sage was bid Godspeed by his admirers on the platform singing, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’.62

  The Salt March had made Gandhi extremely well known in Europe. Through 1930 and 193
1, he received a stream of correspondence from admirers in Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and other countries. While he was in London, invitations poured in from these places to visit them, and speak on such topics as Indian independence, non-violence and vegetarianism.63

  In quieter times, Gandhi may have taken up some of these offers. But he had to get back soon to India, where the conflict with the government was once more intensifying. Even so, he could not leave Europe without at least seeing his friend and biographer, Romain Rolland. To get to the latter’s home in the Swiss town of Villeneuve he had to go via France. To get from there to catch a ship to India, he had to pass through Italy. So he did at least manage to visit three countries in Europe.

  Gandhi’s first stop in Europe was Paris. He was already moderately well known in the French capital. A Paris restaurant was now using salt cellars made in the image of Gandhi, bare-chested, and with glasses.64

  On the evening of 5 December, Gandhi spoke in a dance hall on Paris’s Left Bank. The audience, some two thousand-strong, were ushered into their seats by women dressed in bright-red skirts and wearing leather boots. Gandhi spoke to them on peace and non-violence. The man and the message did not entirely resonate with the venue; for, as a journalist present observed: ‘The atmosphere, part circus, part dancing hall, the overheated room, the massive columns of red marble, the flashes of magnesium from here and there, and the floodlights ready to be lit into action were not on the same level as this leader of men.’65

  After a day in Paris, Gandhi travelled to Villeneuve to meet Romain Rolland. They had corresponded for many years; and several times in the past Gandhi had been tempted to accept invitations to visit Europe merely to see Rolland. Gandhi spent five days in Villeneuve, staying in a villa close to the writer’s house, and walking there every morning and evening for a chat.

  The first day of Gandhi’s visit was his day of silence. Rolland spoke or lectured about the ghastly national rivalries of Europe, which had led to one World War and now threatened another. On the second day, they discussed the situation in Italy, with Rolland warning Gandhi against being taken in by the apparent order and stability of the fascist regime. If, when he visited Italy, the Indian appeared sympathetic to Mussolini, warned the writer, people would wonder why ‘the great saint is with the oppressors against the oppressed’. ‘Your voice must break the cordon for the people of Italy,’ said Rolland to Gandhi.

  On the third day of their conversations, Gandhi did most of the talking. He told Rolland about the evils of British rule in India, of the exactions of the tax collector, of the harshness of the police, and of how the colonial civil service was ‘like a snake holding the whole nation in its coils’. The next day, they spoke largely of spiritual matters, of the competing claims of truth and love.

  On the morning of Friday, 11 December, Gandhi came for one last time to Rolland’s villa, to say goodbye. They had their last conversation, as ‘rich, affectionate and varied’ as the others. At one stage, Rolland’s sister told Gandhi of her love for the city and university of Oxford. Gandhi conceded that the students were ‘fine young men’, adding, however, that for him the beauty of Oxford’s buildings and grounds (and cellars) was marred ‘by thoughts of the world-wide exploitation which caused these riches to flourish’.66

  In a letter to an American friend, Rolland penned an indelible portrait of his visitor, this ‘little man, bespectacled and toothless, wrapped in his white burnoose, his legs, thin as a heron’s stilts, bare’. Rolland found their conversations both absorbing and exhausting. ‘This little man, so frail in appearance, is tireless, and fatigue is a word which does not exist in his vocabulary.’

  Rolland was less impressed with ‘the hurricane of intruders, loiterers and half-wits’ which Gandhi’s visit brought to his house. The ‘telephone never ceased ringing, photographers in ambuscades let fly their fusillades from behind every bush’. Letters were received from Italians beseeching the Mahatma to tell them the lucky numbers for the next national lottery.

  On their last evening together, Gandhi asked Rolland to play him some Beethoven on the gramophone. The composer (or his work) had brought Mira to Rolland, then Mira to Gandhi, and, finally, Gandhi to Rolland. The writer played for his visitor the Andante of the Fifth Symphony.67

  From Villeneuve Gandhi proceeded to Geneva, and from there to Rome via Milan. At several stations on the way, crowds gathered to see him. Gandhi spent two days in Rome, 12 and 13 December. On the first day he called on the educationist Maria Montessori, and also visited the Vatican museum.

  While planning the trip, Mahadev Desai had written to the Italian consul general in Bombay, suggesting that Gandhi speak to the students of the University of Rome ‘on the spiritual message of non-violence’. This was deemed too controversial; and the Italians instead arranged a meeting with their own resident prophet of violence, Benito Mussolini.68

  On the evening of 13 December, Gandhi visited Mussolini in the Palazzo Venezia. Let the Rome correspondent of the Manchester Guardian take up the story:

  It was a strange picture when the Indian leader, wearing only his self-woven toga of white wool, below which his thin child’s legs were to be seen, and with coarse sandals on his feet, stopped in front of the monumental porch of the Palazzo Venezia, where the two Blackshirts on guard presented arms. He went up the ceremonial staircase to the Duce’s official apartments, which in taste and magnificence resemble the dwelling of a Renaissance condottiere, and at length appeared before the uncrowned king of Italy, the semi-naked Oriental ascetic face to face with the prophet of the new Imperium Romanum. The conversation, in English, lasted twenty minutes: the only witness was General Moris, Mr. Gandhi’s host. It was significant that on coming away the general, who knew no English, had understood nothing but the frequently repeated word ‘India’.

  The next day, the Guardian correspondent asked Gandhi about what had transpired in his conversation with the Duce. In the reporter’s paraphrase, Gandhi answered ‘that it would not be correct for him to speak about it; then, like a new St. Francis from the East, he added: “But why not talk about Italy’s domestic animals, or her vegetables, or her radiant sunlight?”’69

  Gandhi had also wished to see the Pope, Pius XI, but the pontiff did not grant him an audience. The reason officially stated was ‘other pressing engagements’, but in truth it was ‘the Indian leader’s scant raiment’ that put him off. The king of England had relented in this matter, but the Bishop of Rome would not.70

  XI

  On 14 December, Gandhi and his party boarded the S.S. Pilsna at Brindisi, bound for Bombay. In a letter to Rolland, he wrote down his impressions of the Italy he so briefly saw. ‘Mussolini is a riddle to me. Many of his reforms attract me. He seems to have done much for the peasant class. I admit an iron hand is there. But as violence is the basis of Western society, Mussolini’s reforms deserve an impartial study. His care of the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about co-ordination between capital and labour, seem to me to demand special attention. I would like you to enlighten me on these matters. My own fundamental objection is that these reforms are compulsory.’

  Gandhi thought he detected in Mussolini’s speeches a ‘passionate love for his people’, while, on the other side, it seemed to him that ‘the majority of Italian people love the iron government of Mussolini’. He wanted to know Rolland’s opinions on all this, as one ‘who knows infinitely more than I do about the subject’.71

  To rush to conclusions after a fleeting visit was precisely what Rolland had warned Gandhi against. The novelist knew that the apparent order and stability of Mussolini’s Italy rested on coercion. And he worried, too, about the personality cult built around Mussolini. This must have been the burden of Rolland’s reply to Gandhi’s letter, which, sadly, is lost.

  On board S.S. Pilsna, Gandhi caught up on his sleep, and his corresponde
nce. He also resumed writing for Young India and Navajivan, providing their readers with impressions of his London visit. Of his experiences at the Round Table Conference itself, Gandhi remarked that while the British politicians were ‘honest’, they laboured under ‘a heavy handicap’; namely, their being ‘spoon-fed on one-sided and often hopelessly false statements and anti-nationalist opinions received by them from their agents in India ever since the commencement of the British Raj’. The British establishment thought Indians were ‘incapable of handling our own Defence and Finance, they believe that the presence of British troops and British civilians is necessary for the well-being of India’. Indeed, ‘perhaps, there is no nation on earth equal to the British in the capacity for self-deception’.72

  PART III

  REFORM AND RENEWAL (1931–1937)

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Arguments with Ambedkar

  I

  The ship carrying Gandhi back to India reached Bombay on 28 December 1931. At a press conference the same day, he was asked if he agreed with a recent statement of M.R. Jayakar that he should have taken a larger Congress delegation to the Round Table Conference. (The viceroy’s home secretary had suggested that he take fourteen colleagues, since even a Mahatma could not be in several places at once.) Gandhi answered that ‘it would have been a first-class tragedy, if 14 or 15 good servants of the nation had been sent out instead of keeping them here….When the mandate was absolutely clear, there was no occasion for sending more than one agent unless, of course, the Congress had distrusted its agent.’1

  One notes in this reply a tone of defensiveness, if not self-deception. The truth is that Gandhi did miss having other senior Congress leaders at hand in London. In fact, back in late August, the day before he sailed from Bombay for the conference, Gandhi had written to C. Rajagopalachari that ‘there are two men whom I would like by my side in London, you and Jawaharlal. But I feel that even if both of you were available I must not have you by me….Only your presence with me will have lightened my burden. But I must bear the Cross alone and to the fullest extent.’2