The boat was in the English Channel when the World War was announced. Gandhi’s response was entirely in line with what he had done during the Boer and Zulu Wars: he offered to assist the Empire with an ambulance corps. This time it would consist of Indians studying or living in the UK. Some Indians complained that Gandhi was asking slaves to cooperate with their masters, but Gandhi was certain that an offer to assist would help the Indian cause.
Hearing of Gandhi’s offer, Henry Polak cabled his protest from South Africa: how could the nonviolent Gandhi even indirectly support a war? Gandhi’s answer was that in a world where life lived upon life, and all humans were inextricably caught in the conflagration of violence, some compromise with it was inescapable. This was a moral justification for Gandhi’s political decision as an Indian leader.
Officials in London accepted Gandhi’s offer, and a number of Indians signed up. Among them was Sorabji Adajania, now studying law in England with the help of the second Pranjivan Mehta scholarship. About eighty received training for six weeks. But Adajania was indignant because the commanding officer did not consult any Indian, even Gandhi, in his decisions, and because Oxford University undergraduates were ordering the Indians about. A mini-satyagraha was initiated, and a compromise reached.
In London Gandhi noticed that the city’s ‘the little [Muslim] world’ was ‘deeply moved’ when ‘Turkey decided to throw in her lot with Germany’, presenting the Muslims with an almost impossible choice between the Empire, whose protection the Muslims claimed, and Turkey, the world’s premier Muslim state whose Sultan was seen as the Khalifa or chief of the world’s Sunni Muslims.40
At least two of the Indians Gandhi met in London (Sarojini Naidu, the poetess, and Jivaraj Mehta, a medical doctor) would become future colleagues. There were talks with Gokhale, who probed Kallenbach’s detailed knowledge of German maps. And in a speech in August in which Gandhi evaluated the steadfastness of South Africa’s Indian workers, he also revealed a noteworthy vision:
These men and women are the salt of India; on them will be built the Indian nation that is to be.41
That is, he would seek to build an Indian nation (it remains to be built, he thinks) not around a religion or a race but on men and women (he takes care to refer specifically to women) ready to struggle, irrespective of their background.
However, pleurisy and a damaged leg handicapped Gandhi in London. The troubles flowed from his exertions and fasts before leaving South Africa, and from a diet restricted to fruits and nuts. Roberts, under-secretary of state, and his wife Lady Cecilia called on Gandhi and tried to look after him, but in the end Roberts pronounced that in the English weather Gandhi was unlikely to improve or be able to do any ambulance work. Unable to cope with fogs, Gokhale had left for India, and Gandhi decided that he and Kasturba should do likewise.
He tried hard to secure an Indian visa for Kallenbach, who held a German passport, but Viceroy Hardinge sent word that all German nationals were barred from India and an exception could not be made. ‘It was a great wrench for me to part from Mr Kallenbach, and I could see that his pang was greater’ (A 322).
On 19 December 1914 the Gandhis sailed for Bombay by the Arabia.
Chapter 7
Engaging India
Ahmedabad-Bihar, Madras-Amritsar, 1915-20
He was forty-five and had not seen the land of his birth for twelve years. His brothers were dead, but that was not the only reason for knowing that he was not returning to Rajkot. All of the Indian land towards which his steamer was making its way would be his battlefield and so his home—his karmabhoomi, as Indian tradition would call it—and all living there his people.
However, the people he was returning to felt that rather than Indian, they were this or that, Punjabi or Bengali or Bohra or Meman or Patidar or Brahmin or Dalit or whatever.
Four years earlier, Rudyard Kipling, poet of Empire, had published, along with C.L.R. Fletcher, a history book aimed at British ‘boys and girls interested in the story of Great Britain and her Empire’. In that book Kipling underlined India’s divisions:
The extension of our rule over the whole Indian peninsula was made possible, first by the exclusion of any other European power, and secondly by the fact that the weaker states and princes continually called in our help against the stronger. From our three starting-points of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, we have gradually swallowed the whole country.1
Stating that the 1857 rebels were suppressed with the help of ‘the gallant Sikhs and the Ghoorkas’, Kipling added that three factors blocked Indian ‘nationalism’ in the post-1857 period: Muslim fear of Hindu rule; opposition by ‘the native Princes’; and the ‘complete indifference of the vast majority of the agricultural populations’.2
An Indian returning to India as a whole—to Indians in their entirety—Gandhi would answer Kipling by bidding to make all in India Indians. He would do this through personal example and, as he had indicated in that London utterance, through satyagraha.
Swaraj through satyagraha, independence through nonviolent resistance, would be his objective. And he would aim to enlist support for satyagraha from a variety of oft-quarrelling communities. He would need a base, of course, an Indian equivalent of Phoenix or Tolstoy Farm. And a staff—he would have to work assiduously to recruit it. As in South Africa, he would need money, and perhaps a journal like Indian Opinion.
And he would need to spot the issues that move a people, and on which satyagraha could be offered. If possible, he would need also to create a link between himself and the common Indian people, even as he had managed to do with South Africa’s Indian workers. For advice on all this, there was, fortunately, Gokhale, but he also had his own ideas.
One he had expressed in Hind Swaraj. Not the Indian elites (the ‘lawyers and doctors’ whom he linked in that manifesto to British hegemony) but peasants and ordinary Indians would be his chief partners. He had seen the symbiosis between himself and the poor in South Africa, and would aim for its replication in India.
The Indian politicians he knew or knew about were focused either on British officers, or on their castes or communities in their regions, for whose political leadership they strove, not on the ordinary Indian. When they said that Indians must rule India, they meant that they rather than their elite rivals should replace the Britons. He would focus not on the ‘enemy’ (the British) nor on ‘natural allies’ (Gujaratis of his caste), but on the common people of all of India, and tap their power.
‘While the other Indian politicians in their bid to inherit power from the British were directing their “correct grammatical whine” towards their foreign rulers [and] their rhetoric towards their own small class within their sub-regions’,3 Gandhi hoped to strengthen, somehow, the common Indian everywhere in the land.
It is hardly surprising, then, that during the voyage he tried to learn Bengali, the language spoken in and around Santiniketan, where the Phoenix party had arrived in November.
He and Kasturba were enjoying the voyage, even though neither was fit and the weather en route was either cold or stormy. For almost the first time since their marriage Kasturba had her husband wholly to herself—their children had left earlier with the Phoenix party, and there were no co-workers on board.
The two, however, missed Kallenbach, to whom Gandhi wrote (23 Dec. 1914): ‘The only thing to complete our happiness would be your presence. We always talk about you…’ (14: 326)
He informed Kallenbach that he had switched back that day—‘somewhat to Mrs Gandhi’s disgust’—from European-style clothes to the dress of the indentured of South Africa; but he had also decided, as he wrote to Chhaganlal, that in India he would ‘wear only our customary dress’, i.e. the clothes of a Gujarati of their background (3 Jan. 1915; 14:333).
The concern over clothes was part of the reflection on strategies in India. He did not feel he could revert to the European clothes he had given up, or appear in Bombay in the dress of an indentured coolie. His happiness on the voyage was in fact
crossed by anxiety, the anxiety of one who sensed being on the threshold of a great undertaking. To West, who was editing Indian Opinion in Phoenix, he wrote:
23 Dec. 1914: I have been so often prevented from reaching India that it seems hardly real that I am sitting in a ship bound for India. And having reached [India] what shall I do with myself? However, ‘Lead Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, lead Thou me on.’ That thought is my solace…(14: 325)
‘Before retiring I invariably read the Bhagavad Gita [and the] Ramayana and sing one hymn,’ he wrote to Kallenbach (14: 326). Clearly he was seeking all the strength he could get. And he was being honest:
To Kallenbach, 30 Dec. 1914: My mind wavers and longs for things which I had thought it had laid aside. How we are deceived! We fancy that we have got rid of particular desires but suddenly we discover that they were only asleep in us and not dead (14: 329-30).
It is interesting nonetheless to imagine the Gandhis aboard the Arabia, she having him all to herself, and he, always a good sailor, finding pleasure in the voyage and singing each night a prayer song as the ship ploughed its way across the waters.
The Arabia landed in Bombay on 9 January 1915. Many went to the dock to welcome the couple, for the South African struggle had made news in India, and some insisted on pulling the vehicle in which the Gandhis rode after arrival. (One of the pullers, Valji Govindji Desai, who had been gripped by Hind Swaraj, became a lifelong co-worker.) Asked by reporters about his plans, Gandhi said he would follow Gokhale’s advice and pass some time as an ‘observer and a student’ (14: 335).
Though unwell, Gokhale travelled from Poona to greet Gandhi, and there were several receptions in the big city, including one at which Pherozeshah Mehta presided, another attended by the greatly popular Bal Gangadhar Tilak, released only the previous year after a six-year incarceration, and a third given by Gujaratis. This last reception was chaired by Barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
A Kathiawari like Gandhi, Jinnah, a thin Anglicized Muslim and a brilliant advocate, belonged to the Ismaili or Khoja branch of Shia Muslims. Seven years younger than the man he was welcoming, Jinnah was a figure of influence in both the Congress and the Muslim League, like Gandhi a friend of Gokhale, and like Gokhale a member of the Imperial Legislative Council.
Off the ship and at these receptions Gandhi wore the plain if cumbersome clothes of a middle-class, conservative Hindu male from Kathiawar: a long cloak, a shirt under the cloak, a dhoti down to his ankles, and a heavy turban. The political and social leaders welcoming Gandhi turned out either in European dress or in ornate Indian costumes. Gandhi’s appearance was odd in comparison, and so was his use of Gujarati in responding to the speeches of welcome.
Through language and dress Gandhi was inviting a direct, personal link with non-elite Indians. On their part the embarrassed, shocked or amused elite leaders thought that the strange man they were welcoming would soon disappear into the Indian wilderness.
Calling, at Gokhale’s urging, on Willingdon, the governor of Bombay, Gandhi gave a promise that Willingdon asked for: he would see the governor before taking any step against the government—the Raj at any rate was taking Gandhi seriously. A lot of travelling (and observing), much of it by train in third-class coaches, marked the months that followed. Gandhi went to
Poona to talk with Gokhale (who assured funds for any base that Gandhi might set up);
Kathiawar to meet friends and relatives, including the widow of Laxmidas, and Kathiawaris who wished to honour him (some addressed him as ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi);
Bolpur near Calcutta to join his sons and the rest of the Phoenix party in Santiniketan (where Tagore too used the ‘Mahatma’ prefix);
Rangoon to meet Pranjivan Mehta, who had set up a jewellery business there;
Kangri in the Himalayan foothills to meet and thank Mahatma Munshi Ram;
Delhi, India’s new (and ancient) capital, where Andrews’s friend Sushil Rudra, principal of St Stephen’s College, introduced Gandhi to the city’s leaders, including Hakim Ajmal Khan and Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari; and to
South India to thank the Tamil and Telugu regions that had supplied the bulk of South Africa’s marchers.
His long cloak and the turban proved a handicap for third-class train travel and were soon discarded. Footwear too was given up—in mourning, he said, for his deceased brothers. With a cheap Kashmiri cap replacing the turban, he brought himself a notch closer to the Indian poor.
Travelling third in overcrowded and dirty compartments was hard but also instructive for Gandhi and Kasturba, and led to lifelong attempts by Gandhi to educate travellers as well as rail authorities. It also separated him from other politicians. Fellow-passengers who had been impolite towards Gandhi, or for whom Gandhi had made space, would find out who he was and express embarrassment, astonishment and admiration.
On one of his journeys he met Motilal, a tailor in Wadhwan in Kathiawar, who pleaded for a satyagraha against a customs cordon at Viramgam railway station where passengers were harassed and delayed. After Motilal affirmed that he was ready to go to prison, Gandhi spoke publicly of the Viramgam cordon and of the possibility of a satyagraha against it.
When he complained to Governor Willingdon about the cordon, Gandhi was told that only Delhi, not Bombay, could provide relief. Two years later, approached by Gandhi, the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, ordered the cordon’s removal. Viramgam thus marked ‘the advent of satyagraha in India’ (A 339).
An ashram & its vows. Motilal, who earned his keep from an hour a day of stitching clothes and gave the rest of his time to public work, became one of Gandhi’s first recruits in India, spending several days each month in the ashram that Gandhi started in Ahmedabad in May 1915, a little more than four months after arriving in India.
To most Indians an ashram was a selfless and usually religious retreat. By calling his base an ashram Gandhi revealed twin goals, making politics selfless and religion just. And he did not mind the ‘Hindu’ connotation of ‘ashram’, for he intended to enter, capture and change the Hindu platform, not to avoid it.
Discovering that Gandhi was more an Indian than a Gujarati, Mahatma Munshi Ram had asked him to open an ashram in Hardwar. Others wanted him to work out of Bengal. However, Gandhi chose Ahmedabad, the capital of British Gujarat, because of its accessibility, its wealth (he hoped for donations), its past as a centre of handloom weaving (he hoped for a revival of hand-spinning and hand-weaving), and because many in his party were Gujarati-speaking. All-Indian that he was, to be rooted in his Gujarat made sense.
The claims of Rajkot, strongly urged by some (perhaps including Maganlal), were however rejected. Apart from being parochial and harder to get to, Rajkot was ‘yellow’ or princely. Expecting to confront the British, Gandhi desired a ‘red’ base, a ‘red’ city, moreover, that Indians themselves had created over the centuries, unlike Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, which had all been made by the British.
An Ahmedabad-based barrister, Jivanji Desai, offered on rent his large house in Kochrab, and Gandhi accepted the offer. It would be called an ashram, but of what sort? The names ‘Sevashram’ (‘Abode of Service’) and ‘Tapovan’ (‘Abode of Austerity’) were proposed, but Gandhi was in no doubt about what he wished to convey. His would be the Satyagraha ashram.
Those joining it would pledge themselves to eleven vows: nonviolence, truth, non-stealing, chastity, non-possession, bread-labour, control of the palate, fearlessness, respect for all religions, swadeshi (India-made things), and the abolition of untouchability. The first five of these vows continued a well-established Hindu (and also Buddhist and Jain) tradition, but Gandhi intended to give each of the five a new meaning.
The other vows were novel, radical even, and to Gandhi crucial. To Andrews, Gandhi wrote of the ‘miserable, wretched, enslaving spirit of untouchability’. In respect of the vow of fearlessness, Gandhi said: ‘My country is seized with a paralyzing fear. We may not open our lips in public, we may only talk about our opinions secretly.’4 Those
who ate without toiling were thieves to him; and there was no hope for India without swadeshi or religious tolerance. Armed with its unusual vows, this ‘religious’ ashram clearly harboured social and political goals as well.
Considered positions. He had been back in India only for six weeks when a telegram informed him that Gokhale had died. Gandhi ‘had approached India’, he writes in the Autobiography, ‘in the ardent hope of merging myself in [Gokhale], and thereby feeling free’ (A 323). Suddenly, this influential figure who believed in him and had offered a political and financial umbrella was no more.
The meeting with Tagore, eight years Gandhi’s senior, was warm and encouraging, and at Santiniketan (where the Phoenix party created a stir by doing its own cleaning, scavenging and cooking), Gandhi intrigued several talented individuals who would soon join him.
One was Jivatram Kripalani of Sindh (1888-1982), who introduced himself as an instructor of history. Gandhi invited Kripalani to join him and make history. Another was the scholarly Maharashtrian, Dattatreya (‘Kakasaheb’) Kalelkar (1885-1981), who enrolled in the Kochrab ashram. Kalelkar had been a teacher in a Baroda school, Ganganath Vidyalaya, started by one who had studied in London at the same time as Mohandas, Keshavarao Deshpande. In the next two or three years, a migration from Ganganath Vidyalaya to Satyagraha ashram gave Gandhi gifted associates.
Gokhale’s death freed Gandhi from the promise to merely listen and watch. Addressing (on 31 March, in Calcutta) a ‘stupendously large gathering’ of militant students, he described assassinations as ‘absolutely a foreign growth’ and said that those wanting to terrorize India should know that he, Gandhi, would ‘rise against them’. On the other hand, if ever he chose sedition, he would openly advocate it; if the students were prepared to die, he would die with them (14: 396).
This speech created quite a stir. Among those impacted were the colourful Ali brothers, the Oxford-educated Muhammad, who wrote powerfully in English and Urdu, and his older brother Shaukat. Like many Muslims in India and elsewhere, the brothers were troubled about Britain’s attitude to Turkey, which had sided with Germany in the War but remained the world’s leading Muslim state. The two met Gandhi and formed a bond with him.5 Soon afterwards they were interned by the British.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 26