I think I have given you many reasons to be angry with me. Please forgive me for this. I have pushed you about a good deal and that has interrupted your regular education. You can, however, forgive me only if you realize that this was inevitable…
Just as I have had to pay for my experiments, so have you and Ba… If you can somehow manage to be contented, you will also have peace. I have not harmed you intentionally. All I have done I did in the belief that it was for your good. Is not this enough to bring down your anger against me? (17: 165-168)
To twenty-year-old Ramdas he wrote a similar, and warmer, letter:
27 February 1918. If only you were with me, I would take you on my lap and comfort you. In the measure in which I fail to make you happy, I think I must be wanting in something… Please think of any wrongs I may have done as unintended and forgive me. I want you to come over to me after your experiments there are over. I shall do my part to see you married. If you want to study, I shall help you…
At the moment we are scattered wide apart. You there, Manilal in Phoenix, Deva in Badharwa (Champaran), Ba in Bhitiharwa (Champaran), Harilal in Calcutta and myself ever on the move from place to place (16: 291-2).
After his stint in Champaran, Devadas, eighteen in 1918, was also sent to Madras to teach Hindi there and seek thereby to bridge the gulf between south and north India. We may note here that Gandhi did not ask his sons to recruit in the Great War, even though Devadas for one seemed willing to enlist.
Truth, India and his family exerted different and at times conflicting pulls on Gandhi, whose responses to the pulls were not always predictable, though Kasturba and the boys felt that the family always came last. Gandhi could not always separate one tug from another, or understand just what it was that was tugging at him.
Poor Harilal was leading a sad and isolated life when—in the summer of 1918—his wife Gulab went down with influenza in the home of her family in Rajkot. Learning that Harilal was on his way to see her in Rajkot, Gandhi met up with his son at a station en route, and when Harilal passed through Nadiad on his way back from Rajkot, the father again located him in a rail compartment after searching for him in more than one train. But there was not much by way of conversation between the father and the son, whose pallor shook Gandhi.
Yet it was Gulab who was now critically ill, as also her three-year-old son Shanti. In October, first Shanti and then, a week later, Gulab died. Harilal and Kasturba reached Rajkot after the deaths, and in Sabarmati Gandhi broke down. Gulab had been his unhappy son’s sole bulwark.
For a period after this, the ill Gandhi sent a letter a day to Harilal. On 26 November he wrote to his son that he was ‘often ashamed of the meanness of my mind’ and offered to give Harilal ‘the fullest benefit of my experiences’ if he joined the father.45 But the son could not bring himself to do that.
The following February Gandhi wrote a rare breezy and descriptive letter about Harilal’s four surviving children, who were now in the ashram in the care of their grandparents. The letter was addressed to ‘The Satyagrahis’ Firm’, a title that Harilal and some of his companions had acquired in South Africa.
To Harilal, 23 Feb. 1919: Just as I was beginning this letter, I had to make my room a court of justice. The accused was Rasik, the complainant an innocent dog. Through its howls it had loudly complained that somebody had soundly thrashed it.
My inquiry revealed that Rasik seemed to be the culprit. The accused confessed his crime and, on further questioning, his previous offences. The judge (myself) pardoned all his crimes, but he was warned…
As I am writing this, Kanti is holding the inkpot. He and Rami are reading the letter as it is being written and trying to improve upon it. The accused also is crouching behind one of the legs of the four-poster. Little Manu was giving out her shrieks of laughter at regular intervals, but now she is crying to be lifted to her bed.
The scene reminded him, Gandhi added, of Harilal’s childhood, and a short playful verse ended the letter.46 His condition had given Gandhi the time to write such a letter, but its mood was perhaps linked to an incident that found Gandhi going back on a vow, taken in South Africa and observed since then, not to drink milk.
Kasturba to the rescue. After surgery in Bombay on boils afflicting him, the doctors told Gandhi in January 1919 that he had no chance of recovery unless he took milk. Gandhi, who remembered that his father had died following boils, wanted to live.
Some months earlier, on 2 October, his forty-ninth birthday, he had no doubt dictated letters to Harilal and Devadas, the eldest and youngest sons, that they should be ready for his death. But that was when he still felt knocked out by the recruiting exercise. Now, in January 1919, there was so much he wanted to do.
It was Kasturba who brilliantly found a way out, reminding Gandhi that when he took the vow he had cows, not goats, in mind. Wasn’t he troubled by how cows were being treated, and wasn’t that behind the vow? Surely the vow left him free to drink the milk of a goat? Thus spoke Kasturba. After hesitating for twenty-four hours, Gandhi accepted his wife’s ingenious if problematic solution, and began sipping goat’s milk.
In so doing he came down, in his own mind and in the minds of some associates (including Polak), to soiled earth, but the fall also made him more forgiving of human weakness, and more admiring of his wife. According to Millie Polak, who visited India shortly after Kasturba’s intervention, Gandhi said to her: ‘You women are very persistent and clever’, with ‘a twinkle in his eye and an intonation in the voice as though he almost admired Mrs Gandhi for the subtle distinction’ that restored his health.47 It helped recovery, though the months of breakdown and weakness left a lasting disability: henceforth he would find it difficult to speak while standing.
‘A WONDERFUL SPECTACLE’
Gandhi did not know it, but his extremity in August 1918 had concealed an opportunity, and the inner conflict that produced the August crisis in Nadiad was but a prelude and a preparation, for February 1919 would see a remarkable nationwide intervention by him.
That was the month when two anti-sedition ‘Rowlatt’ Bills, named after the judge heading the committee that recommended them, were introduced in the Imperial Legislative Council. The Bills authorized arrests without trial and trials without appeal for suspected seditionists and a two-year sentence for an Indian with a seditious leaflet in his pocket.
As had happened after the Ollivant incident in 1892 and over similar incidents in South Africa, Gandhi ‘shook with rage’.48 The Bills revealed a disrespect, contempt even, of Indians that was more real than the courtesies he had personally received from the Viceroy and from officials in Bihar and Gujarat. Indians were suspected ‘subjects’ when dignity demanded that the Raj ‘remain in India only as India’s trustee and servant’.49
Thus far Gandhi had pondered a future satyagraha to obtain what Montford lacked. Now he was certain that the ‘deadly’ Rowlatt Bills demanded an immediate response.50
He asked Vallabhbhai Patel for help. ‘For what?’ Patel asked. For satyagraha, Gandhi replied. When Patel said he was willing, Gandhi convened a gathering at the ashram of about twenty persons including Patel, B.G. Horniman, the British editor of the Bombay Chronicle, Sarojini Naidu, the poetess, Umar Sobhani, a Muslim mill-owner from Bombay, Anasuyaben Sarabhai, Yagnik and Shankerlal Banker, a Home Rule activist from Bombay who had helped Gandhi and Anasuyaben during the textile strike. All signed a pledge that Gandhi had drafted:
We solemnly affirm that in the event of these Bills becoming law and until they are withdrawn we shall refuse civilly to obey these laws and such other laws as a Committee to be hereafter appointed may think fit, and we further affirm that we will be faithful to truth and refrain from violence to life, person and property.51
Gandhi called the signatories ‘the Indian covenanters’ and their step ‘most momentous’. For the first time after 1857, prominent Indians had publicly proclaimed their defiance of British laws. Kheda’s peasants had also done so the previous year, but the
British had dismissed them as a quarrelsome or insignificant lot. Now eminent Indians were openly pledging defiance. Gandhi correctly perceived a watershed in the Raj’s history.
Knowing that the Gujarat Sabha or the Congress was far from ready to organize any disobedience, Gandhi formed a new body, the Satyagraha Sabha, with himself as its president and Patel as secretary. Then he went to Delhi, plainly informed the Viceroy of his intentions, and heard Jinnah and Srinivasa Sastri powerfully attack the Bills in the Imperial Legislative Council. But ‘strength’ against ‘sedition’ seemed the Raj’s priority, and the words of Gandhi, Sastri and Jinnah, who resigned in protest from the Council, were ignored.
Madras, at the other end of the country, was the ill Gandhi’s next stop. He had been invited there by a forty-year-old lawyer, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (1878-1972), who had sent Gandhi money for the South African struggle. In a 1916 paper, C.R., as Rajagopalachari was also known, had argued that satyagraha could work in India as well. Shortly before Gandhi’s arrival, this bespectacled and brainy Brahmin had moved to Madras from the town of Salem. He became Gandhi’s latest recruit and secretary of the Madras Satyagraha Sabha.
Gandhi asked C.R. (a widower like Patel) if he had met Vallabhbhai, and added, ‘I have found in him a most trustworthy man, staunch and brave.’52 Inviting Rajendra Prasad and Kripalani to Gujarat and asking C.R. to link up with Patel were Gandhi’s ways of building an all-India network. And he befriended Rajagopalachari’s children even as he had befriended Patel’s.
It was while staying in C.R.’s home in Madras that Gandhi learnt that the Viceroy had signed one of the Bills into the Rowlatt Act. In ‘the small hours’ of the following morning, 23 March, when Gandhi was ‘still in that twilight condition between sleep and consciousness’, it occurred to him that as a protest against Rowlatt all of India should be invited to suspend work, fast, and pray on the approaching Sunday (A 414).
He shared the idea with C.R., adding that he was sure of a positive response at least in Bombay, Madras, Bihar and Sindh. Rajagopalachari fell in at once, and Gandhi drafted an appeal for an all-India hartal to be observed on 30 March. For wider participation the date was later changed to Sunday 6 April, but supporters in Delhi felt they should stick to the earlier date.
No section of the Congress endorsed Gandhi’s call. By now many moderates had left the Congress to form a new Liberal party that seemed to have more leaders than followers, and most of the Congress’s ‘extremists’ or nationalists had been put off by Gandhi’s recruiting effort.
Yet India responded magnificently. In Delhi on 30 March and a week later elsewhere, Hindus and Muslims joined hands as they observed a Black Sunday against the Black Act. It was the first nationwide political demonstration in India’s long history.
In a typical report, an intelligence officer called Moore informed the Madras government that the rally that day on the beach was ‘unanimously considered to have been the largest gathering… on such an occasion in Madras’. Moore noted that the humblest obeyed the call: ‘Vendors of curd were not seen and even the women who sell rice cakes in the morning did not do so today.’53
In Calcutta, 2,00,000 gathered. In the North-West Frontier Province, twenty-eight-year-old Abdul Ghaffar Khan organized a rally in Utmanzai, about twenty-five miles east of the Khyber Pass. As Gandhi would later write, ‘The whole of India, from one end to the other, towns as well as villages, observed a complete hartal that day. It was a most wonderful spectacle’ (A 415).
Answering Gandhi’s appeal, a number of men and women fasted in Ahmedabad, Bombay, Madras, Karachi and elsewhere. Banned books (including Hind Swaraj, Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, and, interestingly enough, a biography of Mustafa Kemal of Turkey) were illegally sold; and an unregistered ‘newspaper’ called Satyagrahi was produced and illicitly sold in a number of places, Patel litho-copying it in his home in Ahmedabad and C.R. doing likewise in his Madras home.
Gandhi, who instructed that no one should be compelled to fast or suspend work, himself spent the day in Bombay, where he was invited to speak in a mosque to over 5,000 people. Nothing would have encouraged him more.
At first the Raj chose to ignore the satyagrahis. Arresting them would enlarge their profile, and Gandhi’s. But his pull was strong, and many across India were drawn into Gandhi’s orbit. One of them was twenty-nine-year-old Jawaharlal, Motilal Nehru’s son, who two years earlier had thought Gandhi unpractical. He now joined the Satyagraha Sabha in Allahabad.
The success of 6 April, including the joint participation of Hindus and Muslims, the rich and the poor, was aided by the national mood. Eighteen months after Montagu recognized it, Indian anger had grown along with the shortages and inflation left by the war. Soldiers returning from fronts where they were lauded returned to racial inequality at home. Resenting the British attitude to Turkey, India’s Muslims welcomed Gandhi’s call against Rowlatt and the opposition of most Congress leaders to Montford.
In an unprecedented gesture, Gandhi’s friend Mahatma Munshi Ram, now called Swami Shraddhanand, was invited to speak in Delhi’s Jama Masjid, the mosque that Shahjahan had built in the seventeenth century. But a procession led by the Swami was fired at, and a few were killed. There was an angry reaction, and the Swami and Hakim Ajmal Khan jointly summoned Gandhi to Delhi to restore peace.
No province was more restive than the Punjab, which had supplied the bulk of India’s wartime soldiery. In March and early April the province was tense, and several of its leaders, including Satyapal and Saifuddin Kitchlew in Amritsar and Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri in Lahore, pressed Gandhi to visit the province and cool things down. Since Delhi, too, wanted him, Gandhi, accompanied by Mahadev Desai, boarded a train for Delhi and the Punjab on the night of 8 April.
The next day, shortly before the train reached Palwal station, which lay in the Punjab, Gandhi was served with a written notice to detrain and not enter the Punjab. He was told that his arrival would disturb the Punjab’s peace. Asserting that he was proceeding to Delhi and the Punjab to allay unrest, not foment it, and believing that calming the Punjab was as much his task as the Raj’s, Gandhi did not detrain.
At Palwal he was forcibly removed, taken to Mathura for a short night, and sent back to Bombay (by a goods train for part of the journey), but not before he had instructed Desai to convey to all concerned that they should not resent his arrest or commit violence. In the Punjab, meanwhile, the men who had invited Gandhi—Kitchlew, Satyapal and Chaudhuri—were arrested.
Violence. On 11 April Gandhi was released upon arrival in Bombay, where he ran into the Raj’s mounted police who were charging with lances a seething, stone-throwing crowd. There, right before Gandhi’s eyes, were two sequences to his satyagraha: rioting by angry Indians, and unrestrained use of force by the Raj. Going straight to Griffith, Bombay’s police commissioner, he complained about the police’s conduct.
‘Do you know what has happened in Ahmedabad and Amritsar?’ Griffith countered. Gandhi did not, and even Griffith did not know clearly, for telegraph wires had been cut. But serious violence had occurred, for which Griffith held Gandhi responsible. Gandhi answered that if he had been allowed to proceed to the Punjab there would have been peace there and also in Gujarat, but he also indicated that he was willing to consider suspending his campaign.
Gandhi was told that two or three Europeans had been killed in Ahmedabad, where the telegraph office, the collector’s office, and parts of the rail station had been burnt down, and several Indians had died in police firing. The news of his arrest, and a false story that Anasuyaben had also been arrested, had inflamed the city, which was placed under martial law.
In the Punjab, five or six Europeans had been killed in Amritsar by a mob angered by the arrests of Satyapal and Kitchlew, an Englishwoman, Miss Sherwood, had been assaulted, and General Sir Reginald Dyer had assumed military command over the city.
That night Gandhi declared, in Bombay, that violence would spell the end of mass satyagraha. On 13 April, when he rea
ched Ahmedabad, he went first to Pratt and found the commissioner ‘in a state of rage’. Expressing regret for the violence, Gandhi added that martial law was not necessary and that he would cooperate with Pratt to restore peace. Pratt calmed down, agreed that Gandhi could address, the next day, a public meeting at the ashram, and agreed also to withdraw martial law (A 422-3).
His recent illness and subsequent events had left Gandhi very weak, but that by itself was not why he asked Vallabhbhai to read out his speech at the ashram meeting. Gandhi wanted British officials as well as the people of Gujarat to know that Patel shared his remorse over the violence. Said Gandhi, via Patel’s deep yet unemotional voice, on 14 April, to an audience of more than 10,000:
Brothers, I am ashamed of the events of the last few days. Those responsible have disgraced me. In the name of satyagraha, we burnt down buildings, forcibly captured weapons, extorted money, stopped trains, cut off telegraph wires, killed innocent people, and plundered shops and homes.
A most brutal rumour was set afloat that Anasuyaben was arrested… Under the cloak of her arrest, heinous deeds have been done.
We should repent and do penance. I would also advise you, if it is possible for you, to fast for twenty-four hours in slight expiation of these sins… My responsibility is a million times greater than yours… I will therefore fast for seventy-two hours.
If a redress of grievances is only possible by means of ill-will for, and slaughter of Englishmen, I for one would do without Swaraj and without redress.54
On 15 April, in a letter to Chatfield, the Ahmedabad collector, Gandhi sought particulars for sending help to the families of the British victims, and on 18 April he announced a temporary suspension of satyagraha.
JALLIANWALLA
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 30