Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  From London, his even older friend Henry Polak provided a ringing endorsement of Gandhi’s drive to abolish untouchability. Polak knew ‘that there will be all kinds of people to tell you that the political movement is entitled to your direct leadership and guidance’. ‘I do not feel that way myself’, said this British Jew, since ‘from all I can see and know of this great social stain (please remember that if I were in Germany I, too, would belong to an untouchable community) it is of such proportions and so vital in its nature and its demands to require the full one-hundred per cent of your capacity for public work’. Polak told Gandhi that ‘it would seem that you are self-dedicated and given by God to the great task of the removal of untouchability’.21

  V

  While Gandhi was in jail in Poona, his wife Kasturba was in jail in Ahmedabad, serving a sentence for illegal picketing. In March–April 1933 she wrote him several letters, which exist, not in their original Gujarati, but in the English translations of the censor. There are all too few letters from Kasturba to Gandhi that have survived, so we must be grateful for these that do.

  These letters are datelined ‘Sabarmati Mandir’, a reference to Gandhi himself writing and speaking of his place of incarceration as ‘Yeravda [sic] Mandir’. To the satyagrahi a prison was indeed a sacred shrine, a mandir. In her letters Kasturba told Gandhi of her visitors, who included Henry Polak, with whom they had once shared a home in Johannesburg, and their relatively new companion Mira, whom she praised as ‘a simple lady’.

  Matters of health and diet—his and hers—naturally figured in these letters. Kasturba said she was fine, except that she suffered from constipation. On the advice of the prison doctor, she was taking liquid paraffin for her digestion. Mira, meanwhile, was making bhakri bread for her.

  Kasturba knew that her husband would be interested in her continuing education. So she told him that she read the Gujarati edition of his magazine Harijan, and read Hindi books with Mira. According to the translation, she also (mysteriously or mischievously) wrote: ‘I read Gujarati and Hindi and can write also but forget it also.’ Kasturba updated Gandhi on their ashram, which was adjacent to her prison in Ahmedabad. Some sons and daughters of veteran ashramites were planning to leave; conveying the news, Kasturba urged her husband to put this rebellion in perspective. ‘It is common knowledge that boys want everything when they grow up,’ she wrote, adding: ‘We had enjoyed [ourselves] also [when young]. The people do not like the habits and manners of the Ashram.’22

  VI

  In prison, Gandhi had developed a new hobby: looking at the stars. A rich admirer in Poona, Lady Premlila Thackersey (widow of the textile magnate Vithaldas Thackersey), had lent him two large telescopes. When night fell in Yerwada, Gandhi would place the telescopes in the courtyard and look through them at the sky above. As he told a visiting journalist, astronomy ‘has become a passion with me. Every free minute I get I devote myself to it. It is a wonderful subject, and more than anything else impresses upon me the mystery of God and the majesty of the universe.’23

  On 23 April, Ambedkar came again to see Gandhi in jail. He wanted an amendment in the Poona Pact, whereby the Depressed Classes candidates for the legislatures would need a minimum percentage of the ‘untouchable’ vote to be elected. Gandhi said he would think over the matter. He did—writing in the next issue of Harijan, he discussed the proposal and why he opposed it. ‘Dr. Ambedkar’s alternative,’ he wrote, ‘may well deprive the caste Hindus of any say whatsoever in the election of Harijan candidates and thus create an effectual bar between caste Hindus and Harijan Hindus.’24

  Both Ambedkar and Gandhi were justified, from their respective points of view. Ambedkar worried that if this clause was not introduced, only candidates beholden to the upper castes would be elected. Gandhi, on the other hand, was concerned about furthering the cleavages between Harijans and caste Hindus.

  In late April, disappointed by the waning of the anti-untouchability campaign, and the reports he was receiving of lack of enthusiasm among Congress workers, Gandhi decided to go on a fresh fast. This would be of a specified duration, namely three weeks, and commence on 8 May. In a statement issued on 30 April, Gandhi remarked: ‘Let there be no misunderstanding about the impending fast. I have no desire to die. I want to live for the cause, though I am equally prepared to die for it. But I need for me and my fellow-workers greater purity, greater application and dedication.’25

  On 2 May, Gandhi wired Tagore asking for his approval of the fast. Tagore wrote back in distinctly ambiguous terms. While the poet had endorsed the fast against Ramsay MacDonald’s ‘Communal Award’, he worried that in this fresh self-purificatory exercise there was ‘a grave risk of its fatal termination’. He beseeched Gandhi ‘not to offer such an ultimation of mortification to God’.

  Gandhi’s wife Kasturba was also upset. She sent her husband a three-page letter expressing her sadness and anguish. She reminded him of how frail and weak he had felt after other (and shorter) fasts. Besides, ‘penance [for past mistreatment of Harijans] is taking place under Rajagopalacharyaji at several places. He convinces people. It will have an impact…’

  Kasturba also got Mira to send Gandhi a telegram which read: ‘Ba wishes me [to] say greatly shocked feels decision [to fast] very wrong but you have not listened to any others so will not hear her she sends her heartfelt prayers.’

  Gandhi replied: ‘Tell Ba her father imposed on her a companion whose weight would have killed any other woman. I treasure her love. She must remain courageous to end.’

  The most moving letter, however, came from Gandhi’s estranged son Harilal. ‘I am ready to fast on your behalf,’ he wrote to his father. ‘And I am ready to offer whatever this body can to you. My offer is unconditional. If we can find a way to prevent your fast, I will be very happy.’ Gandhi answered that while the letter had ‘touched’ him, ‘if this fast means your return to pure life it would be doubly blessed’. He asked Harilal to come visit him. ‘I shall try [and] guide you,’ wrote the father, ending, ‘God Bless You.’26

  Gandhi claimed he had been asked to fast by what he called his ‘Inner Voice’. The night the idea came to him, he had ‘a terrible inner struggle’. He was restless, and ‘could see no way’. The ‘burden of responsibility was crushing’ him. Then, ‘suddenly the Voice came upon me. I listened, made certain that it was the Voice, and the struggle ceased. I was calm. The determination was made accordingly, the date and the hour of the fast were fixed. Joy came over me.’27

  Gandhi began his fast as planned on 8 May. He had a meal of papaya and lime juice at 11 a.m., with the fast commencing an hour later. Mahadev and Devadas were at his side. At noon, Gandhi shut his eyes for a few minutes of personal prayer, after which visitors were allowed in. Watching his father, Devadas was, as he wrote to a friend, struck by an ‘intense mental agony….I am really angry, and what’s more very angry with Bapu’ (for starting a fresh fast).28

  At a quarter to seven the same evening, the government released Gandhi from jail, since they did not want to risk having his death on their hands. Gandhi now shifted to the Poona residence of Lady Thackersey, whose mansion, ‘Parnakuti’, was on a hill overlooking the Yerwada prison.

  Before he went to bed in Delhi that night, the viceroy wrote to his sister that ‘we have released that intolerable man Gandhi’, whose new fast was aimed not at the government but at ‘the impurities he finds all around him’. Willingdon thought ‘his purpose in doing this is to restore his waning influence by doing something spectacular. His vanity is quite his worst quality and he can’t bear being out of the picture.’

  The viceroy ended his letter by plaintively asking: ‘But why Providence has troubled the British Empire with two people like Gandhi and de Valera I can’t think.’29

  VII

  After moving out of jail, Gandhi issued a statement announcing the temporary suspension of the civil disobedience movement for the duration of the fast. H
e wanted to make it clear that the yajna he was undertaking was wholly non-political. He did not want embarrassment to the government or himself from activists breaking laws in different parts of the country.

  Three days after beginning his fast, Gandhi received what their son Devadas called ‘a heart rending telegram’ from Kasturba, asking to come to his side. Gandhi told her ‘not to weaken or yield to nervousness’.30

  Despite the fears of friends and family, Gandhi bore the fast well. He spent the days on Lady Thackersey’s spacious veranda, looking at the countryside beyond, and often taking short naps. The fast was broken at noon on 29 May, with Gandhi accepting a glass of orange juice from Lady Thackersey. A garland was also offered to Gandhi by a Harijan boy, its sequence coupling young and old, rich and poor, high caste and low caste, male and female. Dr Ansari read from the Koran, Mahadev Desai sang a Christian hymn (‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’), and all present sang Narasinha Mehta’s hymn ‘Vaishnava Jana To’. Gandhi then thanked the doctors and friends who had attended on him during the fast.31

  On 16 June 1933, Gandhi’s youngest son, Devadas, got married to C. Rajagopalachari’s daughter Lakshmi in Poona. Back in 1928, the two had been asked not to speak or write to one another by their respective fathers. Five years had now passed; the young couple had satisfied their parents of the depth and durability of their love.

  Speaking at the ceremony, Gandhi told Devadas that he had ‘today robbed Rajagopalachari of a cherished gem. May you be worthy of it! May you treasure it!’ As for Lakshmi, Gandhi knew her to have ‘justified’ her name, that of the goddess of the good and beautiful. He hoped the marriage would further strengthen ‘the bond of affection that has ever been growing between Rajagopalachari and me’.

  Notably, Gandhi prefaced his remarks to the bridal couple by saying: ‘I do not think that in celebrating this marriage anything has been done against the practice of dharma.’ This was a veiled reference to the fact that this was an inter-caste marriage, specifically a union between a boy of a lower caste with a girl of a higher caste, a union frowned upon by most Shastras and Shastris. Gandhi had for some time past come around to accepting inter-caste marriages; now, indeed, to blessing one within his own family. In so doing, he explicitly set his word and reputation against that of the orthodoxy.32

  The orthodoxy was indeed appalled by this inter-caste marriage within Gandhi’s family. At a meeting of Sanatanists held in Poona’s Tulsi Baug temple, one speaker said that by sanctioning this union, ‘Gandhi had come out in his true colours, and asked the audience whether Gandhi could really be called a religious man’. A second speaker argued that inter-caste unions were ‘the outcome of the struggle of the two civilizations, Eastern and Western, and such marriages would result in demolishing the whole fabric of the ancient Hindu civilization’. A third speaker said that ‘Gandhi had deluded them thus far, because he promised to lead us to Swaraj….People submitted to many of his whimsicalities, because he became a political leader….But now they found that Gandhi had really betrayed their trust and he had now begun to crush their religion.’ A fourth ‘condemned Gandhi as a Christian in disguise, who wants to spread the gospel of Christianity and [whose] plea for his devout faith in [the Hindu] religion was false’. Gandhi, added this speaker, was not a ‘Mahatma’ but a ‘Duratma’ (wicked soul).33

  In the third week of July, a conference of Congress leaders was held in Poona. This authorized Gandhi to resume negotiations with the government. Gandhi accordingly wired the viceroy to ‘grant [an] interview with a view to exploring possibilities of peace’. Lord Willingdon stiffly replied that since the Congress had not formally and unequivocally withdrawn civil disobedience, he saw no point in talks. Gandhi now told the press that since the ‘door was banged’ in his face, he would not withdraw the suspension of civil disobedience. However, there would be no mass protests; rather, individuals would on their own offer satyagraha.34

  The viceroy’s refusal to meet Gandhi was vigorously debated in the House of Commons. The secretary of state for India, Samuel Hoare, claimed public opinion was behind the viceroy. George Lansbury, the leader of the Opposition, disagreed. He praised Gandhi for reaching out to Willingdon, and criticized the latter for stifling dissent. ‘Mr. Gandhi’s telegram is unconditional and he sincerely wants peace,’ said Lansbury. ‘Why not grant the interview?’ To his own question the Labour leader provided this answer: ‘Prestige demands that he [Gandhi] should come in a white sheet’ (signifying surrender).35

  On 26 July, Gandhi wrote to the Government of Bombay saying he was disbanding the Sabarmati Ashram and wished to hand it over to the government. The stand-off between state and subject, wrote Gandhi, demanded ‘the greatest measure of sacrifice’ from him, ‘the author of the movement’. So he was offering his most precious possession, the ashram he had built over eighteen years, where ‘every head of cattle and every tree has its history and sacred association’.

  Receiving no reply, Gandhi then announced that he would leave the ashram anyway, and march to Ras, a village that he had visited en route to Dandi in 1930. His intention, he wired the government, was ‘to view [with] tender sympathy [the] villages most hit’ by forcible collections of land revenue.

  Gandhi’s new march was to begin on 1 August. This time the government arrested him the morning he proposed to set off, and transported him to Yerwada jail. ‘We have had to jug that little wretch Gandhi once more,’ wrote Willingdon to his sister. ‘Really, he is impossible…’36

  This fresh arrest of Gandhi prompted a searing critique by H.N. Brailsford, a British journalist deeply committed to Indian independence. Having just toured India and met many leaders and ordinary folk, Brailsford took apart Samuel Hoare’s boast in the House of Commons that ‘passive resistance’ had failed. The success of the Raj in vanquishing Gandhi and his movement, he said, had

  been won partly by beating; partly by the imprisonment in overcrowded gaols under harsh conditions of tens of thousands of men and women who had committed no actual offence; partly by the suppression of the chief party of the Opposition and the confiscation of its funds.

  These methods are as effective in India as in Germany. The efficacy of a stout stick with a brass tip to it, as a political argument has long been understood in India. Hitler may have improved upon it by using a rubber truncheon; there is no other important difference in method. He is perhaps a little prompter over his arrests. Socialists, Communists, and Pacifists are rounded up; the door bangs upon them, and that is all.

  In India, there is more red tape.

  The viceroy, Lord Willingdon, had said he would not meet Gandhi since the Indian leader believed in ‘unconstitutional methods’. To this Brailsford sarcastically responded:

  Lord Willingdon is doubtless right on the point of fact.

  Mr. Gandhi’s methods must be unconstitutional since they in no way resemble the model of constitutional behaviour, which the Indian Government has set.

  They make no use of force. One cannot expect a Viceroy to shake hands with—pacificism.

  Compared with how Willingdon and the Raj had treated Gandhi and the Congress, wrote Brailsford, ‘Hitler’s way with Socialists is prompter and less expensive. Above all, it is less hypocritical.’37

  In these weeks, while Gandhi disbanded the Sabarmati Ashram and courted arrest afresh, his trusted aide Mahadev Desai was not at his side. The government had separated them, by shifting Mahadev to a jail in the southern town of Belgaum, from where he followed his master’s movements as best he could. The ‘renunciation of the Ashram’, now wrote Mahadev to Mira, ‘has a poignancy which crushes me’.

  Mahadev had himself given the best years of his life to the Sabarmati Ashram. He would not hide his sadness at its possible closure. But he would not lose hope, telling Mira that ‘I look forward to a greater future for this resurrected Ashram’ (wherever Gandhi might shift it). Nor would he lose his sense of humour. He
had recently read, with delight, a poem in a British-owned newspaper satirizing Gandhi and his movements, which he copied out by hand and sent to Mira, to be shared with others in Ahmedabad and beyond. The (untitled and anonymous) poem went:

  The Press, in spite of vast ‘Improvements’

  Cannot keep pace with Gandhi’s movements.

  At least I always have my doubts

  As to the martyr’s whereabouts.

  One day I am told he is in jail.

  The next that he is out on bail.

  And when I hear he is free at last

  He’s back again and fasting fast.

  Then when I hear he is nearly dead

  He’s out and eating grapes instead.

  But long before these are digested

  The illusive man is rearrested,

  And ten to one—poor wandering soul—

  He will be released upon parole.

  But whether he is free today

  Or not, I simply cannot say.

  I wish one of the morning Papers

  Would feature the Mahatma’s capers

  An ‘inset’ called the ‘Daily Gandhi’

  Would be, I am sure, extremely handy.38

  VIII

  On 14 August 1933—a mere ten days into his new sentence—Gandhi wrote to the government asking that, as in his last term, he be allowed to have visitors and write articles connected with the anti-untouchability movement. ‘Life ceases to interest me,’ he remarked, ‘if I may not do Harijan service without let or hindrance.’