Perhaps the two messages that would have meant the most to Gandhi (had he seen them) came from old, intimate friends with whom he had had political disagreements. The first was C. Rajagopalachari. Rajaji was one of Gandhi’s oldest political colleagues, and also his sambandi with whom he had shared grandchildren. It was he who rescued the Gandhi–Kasturba marriage when Gandhi’s infatuation with Saraladevi threatened to disrupt it. But Rajaji was also, more recently, a disputant and renegade, who was at liberty while his long-time comrades were in prison.
Rajaji’s letter, posted three days after Kasturba’s death, said that ‘Ba has found final release. If there be any truth in the Hindu Dharma she has lived up to it and fulfilled her earthly trial.’ There was, he continued, ‘no life-story in our generation where woman has stood her trial so much in the manner of our Hindu…traditions as Ba has triumphantly done’.30
The second tribute one hopes Gandhi saw came from Henry Polak. When Kasturba died, Polak (her former housemate) was in Orkney, lecturing to the troops on education. On hearing the news, Polak sent a short telegram to the India Office to forward to Gandhi, reading: ‘Deepest loving sympathy wish you all God’s blessings Henry [and] Millie Polak.’
Polak also composed a longer wire, sent as a statement to the press. This read:
death Mrs Gandhi — ba (mother) as she was generally known — not unexpected advanced age stop devoted wife mother in many ways independent personality stop but she was real martyr husbands causes learning uselessness beyond certain point resisting his firmly held principles austere practices stop Gandhi declared learnt first lessons passive resistance from her stop her first imprisonment occurred south african indian struggle 1913 thereafter several times later interned India during Gandhis civil disobedience movement stop death may have been expedited by anxiety for husbands many self imposed fasts during one of which she had saved his life by inducing him modify oath against use milk by taking goats milk stop her many friends grieving her death will rejoice her release.31
The contrast between the two telegrams sent by Polak is striking. A short private message of love to Gandhi, and a much longer statement to the press that was strongly pro-Kasturba, presenting her (not untruthfully) as a martyr to his many (and often mysterious) causes. Polak knew the marriage better (and longer) than any Indian associate of Gandhi, and therefore wished that the extent of Kasturba’s sacrifice be made known to the British public. It seems the wire was intended as an obituary in the press—it is not clear, however, if it was ever published.
VII
In October 1943, Lord Wavell had replaced Linlithgow as viceroy. A former commander-in-chief of the British Indian Army, Wavell knew the country well. His appointment was seen by some as a demotion. Churchill did not warm to Wavell, and wanted to shift him out of active military service. So, he sent him to oversee the administration of Indian civilians, about whose welfare the British prime minister had never greatly cared about. As Wavell wrote in his journal: ‘He [Churchill] has a curious complex about India and is always loth to hear good of it and apt to believe the worst.’ Leo Amery, the secretary of state for India, was even more blunt; as he put it (again, in private), Churchill knew ‘as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies’.32
The first argument that Wavell and Churchill had was about food aid to Bengal. When the viceroy asked for more supplies to be sent to the famine-stricken districts of eastern India, the prime minister ‘spoke scathingly of India’s economic efficiency’ and said the available stocks were better used within Europe. Wavell concluded that Churchill thought it ‘more important to save the Greeks and liberated countries from starvation than the Indians…’ The prime minister was hostile to Indians in general and to one Indian in particular, telling the viceroy ‘that only over his dead body would any approach to Gandhi take place’. Churchill joked to Wavell that he had ‘one great advantage over the last few Viceroys’. They ‘had to decide whether and when to lock up Gandhi’, whereas Wavell ‘should find him already locked up’.
When Wavell went to call on Linlithgow, he found his predecessor as sceptical of Indian aspirations as the prime minister. Linlithgow told Wavell that ‘he did not believe that any real progress is possible while G[andhi] lives’, adding that ‘we [the British] shall have to continue responsibility for India for at least another 30 years’.33
Gandhi, perhaps nursing bad memories of Wavell’s predecessor, did not write to the new viceroy for some time. Finally, on 17 February, he wrote to Wavell saying that though in some quarters he was considered the greatest enemy of the British, in fact he saw himself as their friend. That said, ‘the spirit of India demands complete freedom from all foreign dominance and would, therefore, resist [the] Japanese yoke equally with [the] British or any other’.34
Shortly after Kasturba’s death, Wavell sent a message of condolence. Gandhi, in reply, told the viceroy of what Kasturba meant to him. After his vow of celibacy in 1906, he wrote, ‘we ceased to be two different entities. Without my wishing it, she chose to lose herself in me. The result was that she became truly my better half.’
Gandhi had read reports of Wavell’s air travels across India, among them a visit to the victims of the terrible famine in Bengal, which had claimed more than a million lives. ‘May I,’ wrote Gandhi to the viceroy, ‘suggest an interruption in your scheduled flights and a descent upon Ahmednagar and the Aga Khan’s Palace in order to probe the hearts of your captives? We are all friends of the British, however much we may criticize the British Government and system in India.’ If Wavell met the Congress leaders, said Gandhi, ‘if you can but trust, you will find us to be the greatest helpers in the fight against Nazism, Fascism, Japanism and the like’.
Wavell wrote a long reply, polite but firm. He said he was committed to self-government for India, and only sought ‘the best means to implement it without delivering India to confusion and turmoil’. He did not accuse Gandhi or the Congress ‘of any wish deliberately to aid the Japanese’. He continued: ‘But you are much too intelligent a man, Mr. Gandhi, not to have realized that the effect of your [Quit India] resolution must be to hamper the prosecution of the war…’ Calling himself a ‘sincere friend’ of India, the new viceroy said he hoped to get ‘very considerable co-operation from the majority of Indians’.
Gandhi appreciated the desire for cooperation, yet told Wavell that this required ‘equality between the parties and mutual trust. But equality is absent and Government distrust of Congress can be seen at every turn’. As ‘I visualize India today’, remarked Gandhi, ‘it is one vast prison containing four hundred million souls. You are its sole custodian.’35
While neither side yielded much ground, at least the correspondence was courteous. Wavell was encouraged now to release Gandhi from jail. In mid-April, Gandhi had a bout of high fever, which persisted for almost a week. Medical reports showed that his blood pressure was high, his kidneys malfunctioning. The onset of coronary thrombosis was a worry. ‘Deterioration in Gandhi’s health,’ wrote Wavell to London on 4 May, ‘appears such that his further participation in active politics is improbable and I have no doubt that death in custody would intensify feeling against Government…’
Wavell issued orders for the prisoner’s discharge, and Gandhi left the Aga Khan Palace on the morning of 6 May. His first stop, as so often in the past, was the Thackerseys’ grand home on the hill, Parnakuti. On the way, he thought of his wife Kasturba and his secretary Mahadev: ‘She had been so eager to get out of prison, yet I know she could not have had a better death….Both she and Mahadev…have become immortal.’36
PART V
THE LAST YEARS (1944–1948)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Picking up the Pieces (Again)
I
Gandhi was released on 5 May 1944. The next day, the New York Times wrote in an editorial that ‘Mr. Gandhi passes from his prison and will pass into history as a m
an of many contradictions’. The accompanying news report was even less complimentary. It began: ‘Seventy-four-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose followers in 1942 proposed to yield India to the Japanese without a fight, will be released tomorrow from his luxury prison in the Aga Khan’s $100,000 palace of Poona.’ The report went on to compare Gandhi’s release with that of the British Fascist Oswald Mosley. Both events, said America’s paper of record, were ‘a happy sign of change in the fortunes of war’.1
From the early 1920s till the late 1930s, the New York Times had adopted a broadly sympathetic attitude towards the Indian national movement and its leader. However, the onset of the war, and Germany’s pounding by air of Britain, introduced a certain ambivalence. After Pearl Harbor and the entry into the war of the United States, the balance began to shift further. Once the Quit India movement was launched, mainstream American opinion decidedly took the side of Churchill against the Congress. Now, the New York Times was going so far as to suggest that Gandhi’s career had ended, that he had ‘passed into history’.
Gandhi is unlikely to have read this premature political obituary. After his discharge from jail, he spent a week in Poona before moving to Bombay, where—as in 1924—on his doctors’ advice he based himself in a seaside cottage in Juhu, recovering his strength and his health. Characteristically, he would also be his own doctor, his self-medication on this occasion being a voluntary vow of silence, for a full fifteen days, from 14 to 29 May. ‘Just now,’ he wrote to Rajaji, ‘I am passing the time reading some literature I have not read and the correspondence which Pyarelal chooses to show me.’2
From early June, Gandhi began writing some (short) letters himself, and also holding his daily prayer meetings. One evening, the rush of the crowd seeking to see and touch him was so frenzied that he was compelled to chastise them. ‘You have gate-crashed and broken in,’ he remarked, ‘if that is so, I do not wish to have your darshan, neither do I wish to give you my darshan.’ Gandhi retreated into the cottage, but not before asking the unruly crowd to contribute to the Harijan Fund to redeem themselves.
On 17 June, Gandhi wrote to Lord Wavell, asking for permission to see the CWC members in jail. He wished to call on the viceroy himself once his doctors gave him permission to travel. Wavell, in reply, declined both requests, saying: ‘If, after your convalescence and after further reflection, you have a definite and constructive policy to propose for the furtherance of India’s welfare, I shall be glad to consider it…’3
Meanwhile, the government posted Gandhi some eighty books that had been sent to him in jail but withheld by the authorities. They included works in Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati and English; on Christ, the Gita, the Gujarati poet Narmad, Theosophy, and Mahadev Desai (in Marathi); also a pamphlet called ‘Gandhi against Fascism’; and another entitled ‘A Dirty Little Rebel—That’s What You Are Little Man’.4
After Gandhi was released from prison he received thousands of letters from admirers from all parts of India, and from some public figures too, these written in English, Hindi and Gujarati, seeking advice, offering suggestions, recounting what happened to the Quit India movement in their district or state after Gandhi was jailed, offering prayers for his long life and good health, etc.
These letters lie buried in the archives. But one at least deserves to be exhumed. It came from Saraladevi Chaudhurani. Sarala had written to Gandhi soon after he was released but got no reply. Worried that her letter might have been lost, she wrote again, this time from her late uncle Tagore’s home, ‘Uttarayan’ in Santiniketan. ‘I had mentioned,’ said Sarala to Gandhi, ‘that I was free for a fortnight…to visit you at any place suitable to you for placing before you certain ideas.’5
What could have been these ‘certain ideas’ she wished to discuss? Political or personal? There is, alas, no reply to this letter in the Collected Works. It may be that Pyarelal did not show it to Gandhi. Back in 1919–20, when the Gandhi–Saraladevi relationship was at its most intense, Pyarelal had not joined Gandhi’s entourage. He must surely have heard later about the relationship, and how and why it was aborted. Despite his devotion, Pyarelal was by no means as close to, or as trusted by, Gandhi as his great predecessor Mahadev Desai. He was also more obsessively protective of his master’s reputation, whereas, for Mahadev, the interests of Truth generally predominated. Mahadev would have shown Saraladevi’s letter to Gandhi. But perhaps Pyarelal did not.
There is, of course, another possibility. This is that Gandhi saw this letter, and replied to it, but did not share his reply with Pyarelal (whereas he would certainly have done so with Mahadev), which is why there is no record of it in the Collected Works.
II
After a month by the sea in Juhu, Gandhi travelled to Poona, for two weeks of further recuperation at the clinic of his naturopath, Dinshaw Mehta. On 29 June, a group of local Congressmen came to see him. His doctors allowed him half an hour to meet them, which he spent on a speech underlining his core beliefs. He had heard of incidents of arson and sabotage during the Quit India movement, which distressed him deeply. He also made clear once more his opposition to Japan. ‘I do not want a change of masters,’ remarked Gandhi. ‘I want to be free of all foreign control.’6
From Poona, Gandhi proceeded up the Western Ghats to Panchgani, where he could escape the fierceness of the Indian summer. As his health recovered, he slowly began engaging once more in the political process. On 17 July, he wrote to M.A. Jinnah. The letter began somewhat patronizingly: ‘There was a time when I was able to persuade you to speak in our mother tongue [Gujarati]. Today I venture to write in the same.’ As he had done while he was in jail, Gandhi asked Jinnah for a meeting, at a time and place of his convenience. ‘Please do not regard me as an enemy of Islam and the Muslims here,’ he remarked. ‘I have always been a friend and servant of yours and of the whole world. Do not dismiss me.’
Knowing that Jinnah did not read Gujarati easily, Gandhi enclosed a translation in Urdu. In his reply (in English, of course), the Muslim League leader said he would be glad to receive him in his Bombay home any time after mid-August. Jinnah added: ‘I am very pleased to read in the Press that you are making very good progress, and I hope you will soon be all right.’7
A week later, Gandhi wrote to the viceroy, offering to withdraw that still active resolution of the Congress advocating civil disobedience. He proposed that ‘full co-operation in the war-effort should be given by the Congress, if a declaration of immediate Indian independence is made and a national government responsible to the Central Assembly be formed subject to the proviso that, during the pendency of the war, the military operations should continue at present but without involving any financial burden on India’.
This was at least half an olive branch, but the viceroy did not see it that way. In a stiff reply, Wavell characterized Gandhi’s proposal as ‘quite unacceptable’. So long as the war continued, a ‘national government’ of Indians was inconceivable. Wavell made it ‘quite clear that until the war is over, responsibility for defence and military operations cannot be divided from the other responsibilities of Government, and…His Majesty’s Government and the Governor-General must retain their responsibility over the field’.8
The viceroy’s coldness might have been amplified by his advisers, who had not forgiven Gandhi, or the Congress, for organizing the Quit India movement when the British had their backs to the wall fighting Hitler. On the last day of July 1944, Wavell’s private secretary wrote to his predecessor on Linlithgow’s staff: ‘Lots of political doings here since old Mr. G. came out of [the] jug in articulo mortis. The latest, as you know, is that Mr G. writes to Jinnah in Gujerati—copy in Urdu enclosed—calling him “brother” & suggesting a meeting. Jinnah replies agreeing to “receive” G. at his house. Aren’t they an astounding pair of humbugs? And what a disaster it is that they should have so much influence here just now.’9
On 3 August, with the doctors satisfied with his progress and the rains ha
ving set in, Gandhi returned to his ashram in Sevagram, almost exactly two years after he had left it for the momentous AICC meeting in Bombay. He found a letter from B.R. Ambedkar waiting for him. Ambedkar was then, as he had been since 1942, a member of the viceroy’s executive council. He now reminded Gandhi that, apart from the Hindu–Muslim question, there was ‘a communal problem between the Hindus and the untouchables, which is also awaiting solution’. If Gandhi was as ‘anxious to solve the Hindu–untouchable problem as you are to solve the Hindu–Muslim problem’, Ambedkar would be ‘glad to formulate points on which a settlement is necessary’.
Gandhi’s reply combined anxiety with hope, expectation with exasperation. He noted, as he had to, his own long struggle to end untouchability. ‘But I know to my cost,’ added Gandhi wistfully, ‘that you and I hold different views on this very important question….I know your great ability and I would love to own you as a colleague and co-worker. But I must admit my failure to come nearer to you. If you can show me a way to a common meeting ground between us I would like to see it. Meanwhile, I must reconcile myself to the present unfortunate difference.’10
III
Gandhi and Jinnah had planned to meet in mid-August. Writing to a Gujarati friend, Gandhi admitted that the Muslim League leader ‘has hated me since the day [in 1915] I asked him in a meeting to give up English and speak Gujarati’. But he still hoped to reach out to, if not convert, him. For, ‘nobody has ever told me that I have done anything in bad faith. Thus it was that I won over Motilal [Nehru], C.R. Das and others’ (in 1920, on the question of non-cooperation). Now he wished ‘to conquer even Jinnah with trust and love. I have no other weapons at all.’11
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