From 1891 until 1914, with a short break back in India in 1902, Gandhi practised law in South Africa, concentrating on fighting for a fairer deal for the large Indian settler population there. He was at this stage strongly supportive of the British, positioning himself as a defender of Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation, which had promised impartiality regardless of race and creed throughout the Empire. In South Africa, Indians were regarded by the Boers as a sub-class, required to register under a ‘pass’ system, subject to discriminatory immigration acts and, from 1913, only having their marriages recognised if they had been conducted with Christian rites. Gandhi’s line was clever. He portrayed Indians as the civilised, rational equals of the white citizens of the empire. He learnt to understand how to manipulate the media, starting his own paper, and the value of engaging directly with senior politicians. He also came to realise that even in South Africa the Indian community was divided along religious lines and just what a massive task bringing Hindus and Muslims together would be; in 1908 he was beaten senseless by a group of Muslims who thought he had betrayed them to the government.
He also developed his own very individual way of living that was to become his hallmark. In 1906 he announced to the long-suffering Kasturbai that he was becoming celibate and they should abandon their comfortable lawyers’ lifestyle to live in a commune. His eldest son, Harilal, did not like that at all and took himself back to school in India, but for the last of the Gandhis’ eight years in Africa they lived this very public life as Gandhi’s spiritual pilgrimage progressed, embracing a lifestyle based on an idealised version of a rural Indian village where people were supposed to live as an unselfish community, sharing what they had. Gandhi was much influenced by Tolstoy, with whom he briefly corresponded, and particularly by his belief that man should conduct daily manual labour before he has the right to eat. He was also a follower of John Ruskin, who had argued that a labourer with a spade served society as fully as a lawyer with a brief and that riches were ‘just a tool to secure power over men’.6 Turning from Western civilisation, which had meant so much to him in his London days, he harked back to a simpler, older Indian civilisation that probably never existed. He started wearing homespun cotton and spent many hours at his spinning wheel; the spinning wheel would become a totemic element of his life.
Life in Gandhi’s ashrams, as the communities where he lived were called, were not to everyone’s taste. ‘My heart sank when I first saw the place’, wrote Motilal Nehru’s eldest daughter, Nan, sent there to get over an elopement with a Muslim journalist. ‘Everything was so utterly drab and unpleasing to the eye. Rising at 4 am for prayers, we went to the chores of the day, which consisted of cleaning and sweeping our living quarters and washing our clothes in the river.’ The food was awful. ‘Several vegetables grown in the garden were thrown together into a steam cooker without salt, spice or butter and eaten with home-ground chapattis or unpolished rice’, which she thought was specifically designed to ‘kill one’s desire for food.’ The only entertainment was listening to long readings from the Bhagavad Gita and the Holy Qu’ran. When Gandhi discovered that a young couple had been sleeping together, he sent for them and made the beautiful girl cut all her hair off. He then went on a fast for several days as a way of making his displeasure known. No wonder Nan was desperate to escape back to the comforts of her father’s house in Allahabad.7
Gandhi’s religious beliefs also developed in these South African years. Although the Hindu holy books and particularly the Bhagavad Gita would remain important to him, he rejected some of Hinduism’s basic tenets and waged a lifelong struggle against the caste system, which he described as an ‘excrescence’. He studied other religions widely, reading both the Bible and in 1907 began studying the Holy Qur’an. He took much inspiration from Islam, and although many Muslims believed that he promoted Hindu/Muslim unity as a way of opposing Pakistan, it was, in fact, based on a deep affinity for what Islam taught. Essentially Gandhi came to believe that God is to be found in each one of us and he would quote the Sufi poet’s lines ‘At last I looked into my heart and found Him there, only there and nowhere else’.8 He was also very attracted to the Jain concept of the many-sidedness of truth.
Alongside this profound change in lifestyle and strengthening belief in God, Gandhi developed a political creed that would provide the guiding principles that drove India’s campaign for independence. He was essentially a socialist, albeit a religious one, but he led a movement very different from the more violent socialist models and one that emphasised the moral correctness of what they were fighting for. His creed was based on the concept of swadeshi, or belonging to one’s own country and people. This meant that home rule, Swaraj, was both natural and correct. Yet he believed that it was both ineffective and morally wrong to use violence to achieve it, particularly against a British Raj that spent over a quarter of India’s revenue on its armed forces and police. Instead the campaign for Swaraj should be non-violent, practising ahimsa, and emphasise the hypocrisy and illogicality of British rule, pointing out that Indians were merely asking for the very freedoms that Britain was so fond of telling the world it extolled. Coupled with his absolute rejection of material reward, this made Gandhi a most effective campaigner, arguably the greatest in the modern world. He was not just the Mahatma, the great soul, but also Bapu, or father. He was also an attractive and witty character with wide and diverse interests. When criticised for going to see George V in Buckingham Palace wearing only a dhoti and a loincloth he replied that he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about as ‘The King was wearing enough for both of us’,9 and he amazed Lord Irwin’s ADCs while waiting once to see the viceroy by going through the form of the Derby field in intricate detail.
Working alongside Gandhi, his heir and to some extent his disciple, was Jawaharlal Nehru. The Nehru family were Kashmiri Brahmins with a history of government service. Jawaharlal’s grandfather had been chief of police in Delhi during the Mutiny. Moving to Allahabad, the family continued their prosperous life under the Raj with Jawaharlal’s father, Motilal, pursuing a highly successful career as a lawyer. Motilal was typical of Gokhale’s followers, an enthusiast for British culture and someone who believed that self-government would come through working with the Raj rather than opposing it. He sent the young Jawaharlal to Harrow and Cambridge before he, like Gandhi, qualified as a barrister in London.
In 1914 Gandhi returned to India. He was still pro the Empire at that stage, and supported the British war effort. However, he gradually came to associate the alleviation of India’s real problems, her poverty and disease, her ignorance and the unequal division of power, directly with Swaraj. In 1916 he took up the case of indentured labourers and in 1917 campaigned for workers on the Bihar indigo plantations against their landlords; the government appointed a commission of enquiry and many of Gandhi’s recommendations were adopted. Back in Gujarat he next took up the case of the patidars, small farmers with considerable influence in their local communities who were being asked to pay unreasonable rates of land tax. The government this time refused to back down and Gandhi started his first of what would be many satyagraha campaigns, which effectively were civil disobedience. This was followed by a campaign to persuade the mill owners of Ahmedabad, the large industrial mill town, the Manchester of India, to restore the plague bonuses they had been paying to their workers to stop them returning to their villages when plague had struck in the city. As the threat of plague receded, the mill owners had cut these payments, which made up three-quarters of workers’ daily pay.
These campaigns brought him into contact with the leaders of both Congress and Tilak’s Home Rule League. Through his campaign in Bihar he got to know Rajendra Prasad, later president of Congress and the first President of India, and Vallabhbhai Patel, his main lieutenant in Gujarat, who played such a major part in the events of 1947. Patel was yet another Gujarati lawyer trained in London and who practised in Ahmedabad. He was to become the ‘tough, determined party boss, attractive in his
own way but ruthless and a communalist’10 according to Wavell, while Mountbatten much enjoyed his company and found he had a ‘considerable sense of humour’.11 Gandhi also got to know the Nehru family, Motilal being a considerable force in Congress in the United Provinces.
Gandhi was also acquiring a considerable public profile as someone who saw India’s problems move from the perspective of the peasant and the villager rather than the landowner or the lawyer, the classes from which Congress largely drew its support. He came to be seen as the natural leader of the independence movement. However, Gokhale remained influential and by the time he died in 1915 his policy of working with the British to achieve peaceful self-government within the Empire was still accepted by the major nationalist leaders. India was not only supportive of the British war effort but the Montagu declaration followed after the war by the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms seemed to promise an early realisation of what Gokhale had preached. The greatest opportunity for a peaceful transition came in 1918, but it was a historic moment that a muddled, bitter, post-war Raj would quickly squander.
The lack of any real progress towards self-government after the reforms, the Rowlatt Acts and finally the Amritsar Massacre, and the British reaction to it, would convince Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Congress that Gokhale’s approach was now flawed. At the 1920 Congress meeting at Nagpur, Gandhi persuaded the party that their goal must change to become complete independence rather than self-government within the British Empire; this was the same meeting at which Jinnah, still convinced of the benefits of working with the British, left. The next three decades of Gandhi’s life would be dedicated to Swaraj. Although Tilak died in 1920 it was to be his legacy, not Gokhale’s, which now guided the independence movement and although Gandhi’s insistence on non-violence would prevail, more or less, it was Tilak’s more extreme form of nationalism that would define the Congress agenda. Together with the Nehrus and Patel, Gandhi determined to achieve Swaraj through active opposition to the Raj, not through violence but by civil disobedience. It would be, he wrote, ‘the greatest battle of my life’.12 A Congress Party that had habitually started its early meetings by singing ‘God Save the King’ now sang a very different tune.
The next fifteen years, from the Nagpur Congress to the 1935 Government of India Act, were marked by the gradual establishment through satyagraha, or ‘fighting with peace’, of the moral case for independence, and by the reaction of successive British governments that failed to appreciate the strength of opposition the Raj faced. Britain continued to offer too little too late. Some in Congress were initially sceptical of satyagraha, including Motilal Nehru and men like C. R. Das, the Congress leader in Bengal, who disliked Gandhi’s support for social change and his opposition to Western education. Das and many of the Congress old school did not want to threaten what they saw as hard-won reforms, such as the Legislative Councils, nor break Congress’ support from the middle classes. Satyagraha also got off to a bad start. There was rioting in Bombay during the visit by the Prince of Wales and in 1921 twenty-two policemen were massacred in the United Provinces, something which affected Gandhi deeply. In 1922 he was jailed for six years and started the first of what would turn out to be frequent periods in Yeravada jail near Bombay, which would almost become many of the senior Congress’ leaders second home in the 1920s and during the Second World War. Overall Gandhi would spend nearly seven years in jail – he was arrested thirteen times – before his final release in 1944.
Out of jail in 1924 Gandhi gradually honed the weapons of satyagraha, and a pattern emerged of a civil disobedience campaign, a period in jail, followed by his release and then talks with the British government. His most effective campaigns were those that caught the public’s imagination rather than causing any great material problem for the Raj. The Salt March was perhaps his most successful. The government held a monopoly on the production of salt, an essential substance for everybody in India’s climate, and also taxed its sale. It wasn’t an onerous tax, but it formed a significant part of indirect revenue and, as with the land tax, fell hardest on the poorest. Opposition to it fulfilled all Gandhi’s requirements. Salt was a native product, taxed by a foreign government, which was denying the basics of life to India’s poor and should be resisted. The salt tax, like the Raj who collected it, was morally indefensible. In March 1930 Gandhi announced that he would walk from Ahmedabad to the sea at Dandi to gather free sea salt in protest. With a group of followers he covered 240 miles in nearly a month arriving on the beach where he duly proceeded to do so. The march had no effect on the salt tax but it did act as the catalyst for mass civil disobedience, and attracted huge international publicity. Nearly 60,000 people were arrested across India. Gandhi was, predictably, arrested again and returned to Yeravada. Another campaign that was highly successful emotionally, although again it had little practical effect, was the 1930 campaign to boycott English cloth. Spinning, and the production of native cloth, was portrayed as wholesome and good, with Gandhi himself still spending a period of every day at his spinning wheel. Indians should buy and wear their own produce rather than support the Lancashire mills and hence British imperialism. It was a simple and obvious message that neatly summarised Gandhi’s creed.
At the same time as he was pursuing satyagraha Gandhi was reforming Congress. Visionary and publicist as he undoubtedly was, he also had a good head for business and was helped by strong-minded organisers like Patel. Congress was becoming a mass movement and needed structure. Congress District Committees were formed, each with about 1 million people, all paying a small subscription, and not unlike the British administrative districts. However, above district level Congress ignored the Raj’s provinces, organising itself instead around twenty of its own ‘provinces’ based on linguistic areas. The provincial committees sent delegates to the roughly 400-strong All India Congress Committee. Once a year the full Congress would meet in different towns across the subcontinent, a ‘vast and remarkable gathering in an atmosphere that was part gipsy camp, part bank-holiday fair’.13 At these sessions the president was chosen along with a fifteen-strong Congress Working Committee, the CWC, which directed policy. Alongside Patel, Nehru and Prasad on the CWC were men who would also play a major role in 1947, people like Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, the intellectual from the south, and the mild-mannered and charming Muslim Maulana Azad. Azad’s presence pointed to Congress’ claim to represent all Indians although in practice Muslim membership never rose above 15 per cent.
While Gandhi was reorganising, fasting and tramping the villages from his ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati river near Ahmedabad, Jawaharlal Nehru was pursuing a rather different course. Although a devotee of the older man, and from an early stage seen as his natural successor, Nehru was subject to a different set of influences. He had gone through a sort of double Damascene moment after Amritsar, hardening in his attitude to full independence but also, from his privileged background, now seeing ‘a new picture of India’ which ‘seemed to rise up before me naked, skinny, crushed and utterly miserable’.14 Yet while he was in sympathy with Gandhi’s vision, which he would later draw on to some extent as India’s first prime minister, he had a broader interest in international socialism.
The Nehrus were rich, and despite experimenting with rejecting his wealth for a brief period in 1924, Jawaharlal soon came round to his father’s sensible advice that to be an effective campaigner you should be free of money worries. In 1926 he went back to Europe, taking his wife, Kamala, who had just lost a son and was also suffering from TB. While Kamala was treated in Switzerland, Nehru attended the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Brussels. Here he met Einstein and, among others, Ho Chi Minh. Importantly he developed links with the British Labour Party and in the spring of 1927 he visited Russia. He flirted with Marxism and, although he was never converted to it, he was certainly a socialist and saw in Russia a direct parallel to India not just as a nation that had thrown out its Tsarist government but one grappling with mass rural poverty. Returning to In
dia in late 1927, when Congress was going through one of its periodic periods of gloom, he became president of the All India Trades Union Congress, which gave him a useful platform, and when the manifest unfairness of the Simon Commission revived Congress’ fortunes, he was at the centre of the ensuing protest. In 1928 his father was asked by Congress to draw up a draft constitution for a new India. Motilal produced a successful draft but it contained two controversial elements. First, it recommended India should retain Dominion status within the British Empire, by now an anathema to Jawaharlal and the socialists in Congress; and secondly, although it recommended abolishing separate electorates for minorities per se, it allowed for distinct communal representation.
Nehru’s problem, as a highly educated, well-travelled socialist, was that he thought religion was irrelevant. To him India’s problems were economic and social, with religion merely an excuse used by various groups to further their own economic position. In 1931 he produced his ‘Fundamental Rights and Economic and Social Changes’ paper, which Gandhi accepted; although not particularly influential at the time, the ideas would later become core to Congress policy. It focused heavily on issues such as state ownership and an equitable tax structure. Gandhi also, although deeply religious, was largely agnostic as to creed and believed that much of India was a like-minded community of small farmers and peasants, meaning that Congress was becoming dangerously ignorant of how deeply religion actually mattered to the vast majority of people. In particular, it meant that they failed to appreciate the depth of belief that Islam engenders, the strong communalism of groups such as the Sikhs and the strength of the Hindu Mahasabha.
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