“He remains the same wreck that he was before,” Gandhi writes, in an open letter “To My Numerous Muslim Friends,” prior to the re-conversion. “I do not mind whether he is called Abdullah or Harilal,” the letter says, “if, by adopting one name for the other, he becomes a true devotee of God which both the names mean.”
But, of course, he does mind. Harilal continues to disappoint, and so, it’s beginning to seem, will the village of Segaon, even though he has had the assistance of at least three additional workers there. Still, Gandhi seems to be back in command of his busy life, until April 14, 1938, when, just as he’s preparing for a crucial meeting in Bombay with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who has deflected a couple of invitations to rural Segaon, it all happens again—another erection, another wet dream. Nearing his seventieth year, not only is the Mahatma upset, but, as he later writes to Mirabehn, “That degrading, dirty, torturing experience of 14th April shook me to bits and made me feel as if I was hurled by God from an imaginary paradise where I had no right to be in my uncleanliness.”
A week after the ejaculation, he issues a troubled, less explicit statement to the press saying, “For the first time in my public and private life I seem to have lost self-confidence … I find myself for the first time during the past fifty years in a Slough of Despond. I do not consider myself fit for negotiations or any such thing for the moment.”
Are we dealing with one history in this relatively compact time frame or several? Even with some unraveling, the answer can never be obvious. Disappointments are piling up. Gandhi, it seems, has found it necessary to shoulder them all. Normally, he’s able to keep his disappointments—with himself, with Harilal, with the pace of reconstruction in Segaon, with the rising violence between Muslims and Hindus, with the meager returns on the work for Harijans—in separate compartments. On a daily basis, his demeanor remains cheerful. He’s as diligent as ever, writing his articles, keeping up his devotions and correspondence, offering advice to his wide family circle, his most devoted acolytes, and strangers, with all his usual firmness and assurance. He never used the word “sublimation,” but he was familiar with the concept. “The man who sits idle cannot control his passionate urge,” he said once. “The remedy, therefore, is to keep the body engaged in work.” So he fills his days with minutely scheduled tasks. Still, when he admits to feeling let down, a little depressed, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the feeling has a specific source or many, hard to trace the boundaries of the slough of despond he has now entered. Does his flawed brahmacharya really undermine the village strategy? Or could it be the other way round?
“I am after all a sinking ship,” he remarks to his faithful Mahadev in September 1938. “Who would want to sail in such a ship?”
Segaon represents his abiding commitment to the “dumb millions.” But the story of his involvement there turns out to be a sad one. Here is Gandhi coming to grips with the reality of the Indian village, which he has fervently idealized ever since Hind Swaraj, written nearly three decades earlier, before he’d left South Africa, before he’d even thought to test his ideas at Tolstoy Farm. He never breaks his tie to the village, but it takes less than a year before it becomes evident that he’s dis-appointed.
At the end of 1936, before his Travancore trip, he’s assailed by a politician there for sounding off on local conditions when he has never even succeeded in getting temples opened up in Ahmedabad, his base for his first sixteen years back in India, where he was on home ground as a Gujarati. Gandhi replies with touching Gandhian directness: “Not only have I not succeeded in having temples opened in Ahmedabad but I have not succeeded in having temples opened even in Wardha after my having established myself there. And what is even more damaging to my reputation is that I have not succeeded in having the only two caste temples in Segaon opened to the Harijans of the little village.”
Six months later Gandhi calls a meeting in Segaon to scold the villagers. He has two complaints. One is that they’ve shirked an obligation they’ve freely undertaken to supply labor and rocks for a road between his quarters on the outskirts and the village itself, which would connect to a wider road being put through to the town of Wardha. The other involves the old business of sanitation. Gandhi and his co-workers, it seems, are no longer scooping up the village’s turds, perhaps because doing so inevitably renders them untouchable in the villagers’ eyes and thus makes it harder for them to be accepted. In what appears to be a tactical retreat, therefore, the ashram has actually hired a scavenger for the village. Still the villagers don’t cooperate. They continue to defecate along the lanes and refuse to hire out their carts for the removal of human manure.
“I am told that you are indifferent to all that is happening,” the Mahatma says. “I cannot make your village neat and clean and sweet-smelling without your cooperation. We have engaged a scavenger here. We pay for his service, but it is for you to keep your streets and lanes clean … Nowhere do we come across such apathy.”
Gandhi has just returned from an interlude in Gujarat. From there he’d written to a co-worker in Segaon apologizing for his “failure” to spend more time in the village. He has other jobs, he pointed out. By speaking of failure, he said, he didn’t “mean that we have not been able to do anything at all. But whatever we have done cannot be said to be of much value.” The next day he wrote again, telling one correspondent that his “real work” is still in Segaon and another, “My heart is there.” These are reminiscent of letters, long years before, from the Transvaal to the Phoenix Settlement explaining his long absences.
Mahadev Desai sums up the situation in 1940, four years after Gandhi’s arrival in Segaon-Sevagram. “There is a hiatus between the villagers and us,” he acknowledges. “There is yet no living link between us … [We have] not succeeded in coming down to their level and becoming one with them.”
By then, various realities have come crashing in on Gandhi. Village reality is one, but also there are the unresolved political issues between Muslims and Hindus and the looming involvement of the colonial power in another world war. Gandhi never loses faith in the central importance of his “constructive program.” In his writings and pronouncements, he campaigns for its principles until the day of his death. But one by one, he has been forced to recognize that he has been checked on the causes he’d singled out as “pillars” of swaraj. Mainly these were Hindu-Muslim unity, the struggle against untouchability, and village industries as symbolized by the spinning wheel, each an ideal he brought home to India with him, shaped in large measure by his experience on another subcontinent.
On Hindu-Muslim unity he’d acknowledged feeling “helpless” as early as 1926. Eleven years later he repeats the word in a note to Jinnah: “I am utterly helpless. My faith in unity is as bright as ever; only I see no daylight out of the impenetrable darkness and, in such distress, I cry out to God for light.”
On untouchability, he writes after the end of his tour in 1934, “Unfortunately the higher castes have failed to identify themselves with their humbler fellows … I have no excuse to offer.”
On village work, he’s forced to acknowledge his failure to recruit the corps of self-sacrificing satyagrahis he’d counted on dispatching to the 700,000 villages. He even has doubts about the dozens drawn to his immediate ambit at Sevagram. Here too he speaks of feeling “helpless.” He cannot prevent the place from becoming a magnet for persons of uncertain dedication—in Mirabehn’s words, “a strange medley of various kinds of cranky people.” Sizing them up, the Mahatma himself says, “Quite a few are only temporary inhabitants and none of them will stay on after my death.” In 1940 he makes one of his service organizations, the Gandhi Seva Sangh, commit “hari-kari” because it has attracted unprincipled timeservers and job seekers. Five years later he acknowledges that the All India Village Industries Association, which he had started with such high hopes in 1934, didn’t “show the results it might have.”
“Whatever I do is for the poor,” Gandhi finally said with the same unflinching h
onesty, “but today I am unable to prove it in Sevagram.” As late as 1945, he’s still pondering plans to draw volunteers to Sevagram to give the village a good cleanup—a clear sign that a decade of Gandhian ministrations has failed to persuade the villagers to do it for themselves.
It’s not difficult to feel sorry for the Gandhi who carries on in his last decade after having been forced to acknowledge that many of his most cherished values and programs have not taken root, the Gandhi who recognizes a decade before it comes to pass that swaraj was now more likely to come as a result of a war that would exhaust the colonial power than as a “solid awakening” by a united people who’d achieved self-mastery. “Any extraneous event may put power into our hands,” he observed in 1937. “I would not call that swaraj of the people.”
It can also be argued that the aging Gandhi, carrying on in the face of such profound disappointments, is as true to himself as he had ever been when he allowed himself to imagine that India could be talked into a social transformation. Seldom does he give in to the politician’s usual temptation to blithely sweep away any sense of letdown, to proclaim victory at every juncture. This unsatisfied Gandhi, the one who doesn’t know how to pretend, is the one who still makes a claim on Indian social conscience, such as it is.
“We cannot command results,” he said. “We can only strive.” It’s in these years that he had to recognize that the movement that held his image aloft was now marching on without him. “Let no one say that he is a follower of Gandhi,” he then said. “It is enough that I should be my own follower.”
It’s also at this time that he’s finally reunited with the dearest of his early followers, Hermann Kallenbach. The Litvak architect from Johannesburg by way of East Prussia, who’d been barred from India and then interned by the British as an enemy alien after the outbreak of World War I, finally lands in Bombay in May 1937. He’d eventually been repatriated to Germany in a prisoner exchange. Adrift there after the armistice, he didn’t complete his interrupted journey to Gujarat and Gandhi but found his way back to Joburg instead, where he soon reestablished himself in the comfortable life of a big-time property developer that Gandhi had earlier persuaded him to give up.
Years passed, but the Mahatma never quite let go of his dream of having his old Jewish housemate again at his side, running his Indian ashrams the way he’d run Tolstoy Farm. When they resumed correspondence after the war, they were still Lower House and Upper House. “How I should love to hug you and see you face to face and have you by me during my travels!” Upper House wrote in 1921, when he was already the undisputed leader of the Indian national movement. Twelve years later, writing from South India in the midst of his crusade against untouchability, he still sounds ardent. “You are always before my mind’s eye,” he tells Lower House. “When are you coming?” These letters offer a glimpse of a loneliness Mahatma Gandhi continued to feel even in the midst of his ashrams, his inner circle of dedicated attendants and followers, and the huge throngs drawn to his public appearances. Maybe that’s what Pyarelal is getting at when, later, he’s moved to write in his diary, “There is something frightening in Bapu’s utter spiritual isolation.”
The moment of reunion between the Joburg architect and India’s leader was captured by Mahadev Desai in Harijan. Kallenbach lingered in Bombay only long enough to pick up an ample khadi wardrobe, then caught a train up the coast that stopped not far from a Gujarati village near the shore where Gandhi was taking a respite from Segaon. He arrived before dawn during morning prayers. “After how many years?” Gandhi asked when prayers were done. Kallenbach bowed at his feet. “Twenty-three,” he said as they embraced. “With childish delight,” according to Mahadev, Gandhi lifted up a lantern to examine his long-lost friend’s features, then pulled at his hair. “So the hair has all turned gray,” he said.
Upper House then asked whether Lower House had sailed in first or second class. It was a test to see how far he had lapsed back into his old materialist ways. “Tourist class,” the visitor said. “I knew that would be the first question you would ask me.”
Kallenbach wore a dhoti, sometimes went bare chested like his host, slept under the stars near Gandhi. It was almost as if twenty-three years had disappeared, he wrote to his brother. He’s “just like one of us,” said a gratified Gandhi. It doesn’t seem, however, that the architect was seriously tempted by the old idea of shutting down his practice and moving to the ashram. What’s clear is that his trip had a purpose beyond reconnecting with his old friend; he had a mission. He’d been recruited to make the case for the Zionist cause in Palestine to the Indian leader.
Gandhi and Kallenbach reunited, June 1937 (photo credit i10.2)
The impetus came from the head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency in Palestine. Under the British mandate, the agency was the de facto government for the small but growing community of Jewish settlers; the Political Department functioned as its foreign ministry. Its head was Moshe Shertok, who, as Moshe Sharett, would become Israel’s second prime minister, succeeding David Ben-Gurion. Shertok, seeking a connection to “the greatest of living Hindus,” had learned of Kallenbach’s existence from a recent visitor to South Africa. Instantly, it seems, he wrote a long letter to the architect. “There are few people whom circumstances have placed in a position enabling them to render service of an extraordinary character,” the letter said. “I am advised and believe that you are at the present moment such a person … You are in a unique position to help Zionism in a field where the resources of the Jewish people are so meager as to be practically non-existent.”
Kallenbach signed on. Two months before arriving in Bombay, he met Shertok in London and also Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist movement and future first president of Israel. Then he stopped in Palestine, where he was particularly impressed by the early kibbutzim, which reminded him, with their emphasis on hand labor and simple living, of the values Gandhi had inculcated at Tolstoy Farm. (After his death in Johannesburg in 1945, his ashes would be buried at Kibbutz Degania on the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s oldest kibbutz, where Tolstoy’s influence on the first settlers had been especially marked.) There is no sign that Lower House mentioned his briefings by prominent Zionists to Upper House. But he can hardly be said to have been acting undercover; he’d been openly a Zionist since the days when they lived together in Joburg, when he alternately studied Hebrew and Hindi as he tried to decide whether he’d be moving to Palestine or India.
Now, in the month they had together in 1937, Gandhi eagerly entered into a discussion of the rights and wrongs of Arab-Jewish strife in Palestine. He’d had a firm position on the subject since 1921, at the high tide of the Khilafat movement. Basically, his position was that Indian Hindus ought to support their seventy million Muslim brethren on what was for them an issue of religious principle. His friend urged him to pay sympathetic attention to the Zionist side of the argument. Gandhi promised he would. Kallenbach then had the Jewish Agency furnish the Mahatma with a twenty-five-page essay on the historic, spiritual, and political underpinnings of Zionism, prepared especially for him. “The sender’s name is not given,” Gandhi noted, but he found the piece “very impressive, deeply interesting.” So impressive that he was moved to consider proposing an effort to mediate between Arabs and Jews under his supervision, with Hermann Kallenbach, now back in Johannesburg, as his lead mediator. “I quite clearly see that if you are to play any part in bringing about an honorable settlement,” Gandhi writes the architect, “your place is in India.” Apparently concerned that his friend might suspect that pressure was being applied for personal reasons, Gandhi adds: “All this I say irrespective of the domestic arrangement between us.” Gandhi himself seems as ardent as ever. His wishes are unambiguous, but with what seems an effort, he practices restraint. “I must not force the pace,” he writes to his friend in Joburg a half year later. “You must come in your own good time.”
After Kallenbach’s return to South Africa, Gandhi had turned his hand to distillin
g his view of the problem in a draft he sends on to his Zionist friend for his approval. “In my opinion the Jews should disclaim any intention of realizing their aspiration under the protection of arms and should rely wholly on the goodwill of Arabs. No exception can possibly be taken to the natural desire of the Jews to found a home in Palestine. But they must wait for its fulfillment till Arab opinion is ripe for it.” Gandhi basically wants the Jews to become satyagrahis, the Arabs too. Kallenbach, half won over, sends the draft on to Chaim Weizmann. It’s never published.
His offer to mediate in Palestine is just a beginning. At a time when the Mahatma feels increasingly stymied in his efforts to reform India, he becomes increasingly inclined to issue encyclicals on international problems. Obviously, his frustration at home is not the only reason for his readiness to speak out. The world is hurtling toward catastrophe, and as the appointed keeper of the doctrine of nonviolence he feels a responsibility to make himself heard. A series of moral pronouncements flows from his humble quarters near Segaon. In all, they are a mixed bag, full of trenchant moral insights, desperate appeals, and self-deluding simplicities. A subsequent statement on Palestine draws an anguished rebuke from the theologian Martin Buber, a refugee from Hitler who has become prominent in the earliest version of a Jewish peace movement. Buber writes that he “has long known and honored” Gandhi’s voice, but what he hears on Palestine he finds “barren of all application to his circumstances.” He then goes on to dissect a pronouncement of the Mahatma’s on German Jews. Gandhi has prescribed satyagraha as the answer to Nazi barbarism. He has found “an exact parallel” between the plight of the Jews under Hitler and that of the Indians in his time in South Africa. Buber tells Gandhi he lived under Nazi rule before becoming a refugee and saw Jewish attempts at nonviolent resistance. The result was “ineffective, unobserved martyrdom, a martyrdom cast to the winds.”
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India Page 36