The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (The Robert Payne Library)

by Robert Payne

  An advance party of stretcher-bearers under Sergeant Major Gandhi was sent up the line to Otimati, where an engagement was thought to be imminent. But there was no engagement. A trooper had crushed his toe under a wagon wheel and another had been accidentally shot in the thigh. Gandhi was ordered to carry them on stretchers to the base hospital. The terrain was rugged, the men were heavy, and the Zulus were watching from the hills. An officer sent word later that there was no need for both men to be carried on stretchers, since the Zulus would probably think they had succeeded in wounding them. The trooper with a crushed toe was lifted into the ambulance wagon, and the bearers heaved a sigh of relief.

  A more important task was given to the Indian volunteers a few days later when they were ordered to accompany a flying column of mixed cavalry and infantry. This time there was no ambulance wagon to carry the heavy equipment, and they had difficulty in keeping up with the column and during the night lost contact. When dawn came, they were wandering in the hills. They had no idea where they were. A Zulu armed with an assegai appeared from the bushes, and for a while they were terrified that they would be slaughtered. But the danger passed, or perhaps there were no other Zulus in the hills. Later they caught up with the column and soon they were busy tending the wounds of the Zulu “friendlies” accidentally shot by the troops.

  It was a strange little war with the enemy melting into the landscape and the British troops, all volunteers, behaving like amateurs, scarcely knowing what they were doing. Duncan McKenzie, who commanded the troops, was a gentleman farmer in private life. Colonel Wylie was a well-known Durban lawyer, and Colonel Sparks was a butcher. Gandhi had known both of these men in 1897, for they had been members of the committee protesting against the invasion of Indian laborers on the S.S. Courland. But they were more gentle now, and went out of their way to say good things about the Indian stretcher-bearers.

  What Gandhi remembered most about the war were the endless marches, the thirst, the cold nights, the flogging of the Zulus at the orders of Duncan McKenzie, and how they sometimes marched forty miles a day and seemed to be continually crossing and recrossing the winding Umvoti River. Sometimes Zulus were ordered to assist them, and Gandhi was puzzled to discover that these friendly Zulus took no interest in their wounded brothers. “The Natives in our hands proved to be most unreliable and obstinate,” he wrote sternly. “Without constant attention, they would as soon have dropped the wounded man as not, and they seemed to bestow no care on their suffering countrymen.”

  He would remember things like these, but there were more important matters to ponder during the long night marches. For the first time in years he was able to give himself up to uninterrupted contemplation concerning his own future, his spiritual life, his hopes and fears. He had abandoned the large house in Johannesburg and settled his family in Phoenix. As he marched with his stretcher-bearers, he had no attachments, nothing he could call his own. He thought of Kasturbai, who was far away and could no longer tempt him. She was thirty-seven, but looked older, and yet from time to time he still lusted after her. Now at last he decided that the time had come to abandon sex altogether.

  As he tells the story in his autobiography, the idea came to him in a flash during those difficult marches in the hills of Natal. It had come to him many times before, but this time it was final and there was no turning back.

  Sometimes in later years, whenever he examined himself, there would come faint stirrings of doubt. He would ask himself why he made this decision, and he would answer that there was nothing very laudable in it. At the lowest level it arose from his desire to have no more children. But how to avoid having children when he was oversexed and possessed a wife who placed no obstacles in his path? He refused to use contraceptives, and suffered torments of frustration. Will-power alone could not save him. They slept in separate beds, but this in itself was not a solution. He had made it a habit not to go to bed until he was exhausted by long hours of work, drained of energy, but sometimes even now he would find himself slipping into Kasturbai’s bed, and the danger remained.

  In attempting to rationalize the decision, he came upon a helpful formula: “Procreation and the consequent care of children are inconsistent with public service.” Why this should be so he never made clear. In the Indian family system a father has little enough to do with his infant children, and usually the children are sent to school at an early age, the teachers assuming full responsibility over them. Gandhi had refused to send his sons to school, had taught them haphazardly in his own way, and was un-happy with the results. The vow of chastity appears to have arisen at least partly from his long-standing dissatisfaction with their education. He should have spent more time with them; he was aware that he had failed to educate them from lack of time; and the fact that another child might come and take possession of his time only dismayed him. Above all, he wanted to be free of family burdens.

  Sometimes, too, he wondered whether he would be able to keep his vow of chastity. His ideas would inevitably change, different circumstances would arise, there was always the possibility that Kasturbai, who was in weak health, might die and he would then be forced to take another wife to look after the children. His argument now was that he was a public servant and must therefore devote himself wholly to the public, not to his family. Later, the arguments would grow more complex and answer different needs. He would say, for example, that by remaining chaste he retained within himself the seminal fluid which was in some way intimately connected with mental vigor; if the seminal fluid was wasted, he would be unable to maintain his mental faculties at their highest level. Later still he would maintain that he could live a long life—he spoke quite seriously about living for 125 years—only by maintaining the most perfect chastity. Life could be prolonged only by retaining every last drop of seminal fluid. The seed was life, and the spilling of the seed was death.

  Inevitably, such complete self-restraint involved him in terrible doubts and hesitations. From time to time he would be assailed by agonizing conflicts, sudden inexplicable rages, sexual nightmares. Nocturnal emissions terrified him and paralyzed his will. He could never escape entirely from the bondage of sexuality, and for the rest of his life he would discuss the sexual instinct with unconcealed horror; and the more horrified he became, the more obvious it was that he was still unsure of himself. Sometimes sex seemed to drive him to the edge of madness.

  Gandhi’s attitude toward the physical body was stem and unforgiving. He raged against its demands, fought against it, and seems never to have been completely at peace with it. The body, he wrote in a series of articles on health, “is a filthy mass of bones, flesh and blood, and the breath and water that exude from it are full of poison.” He shared with the early Fathers of the Church the belief that it was capable of every conceivable harm, and very rarely did any good. “By means of the body we practice a thousand things which we would do better to avoid, cunning, self-indulgence, deceit, stealing, adultery, etc.” What he objected to was that the body’s desires were endless and almost untamable, and sometimes when he describes the body’s insatiable needs, there can be heard a scream of anguish:

  God is striving for mastery over the body, and so is Satan engaged in a desperate struggle for it. When it is under the control of God, it is like a jewel. When it passes into the control of the Devil, it is a pit of filth. If engrossed in pleasure, gorging itself the whole day with all variety of putrifying food, exuding evil odours, with limbs employed in thieving, the tongue uttering unworthy words, and taking in unwholesome things, the ears hearing, the eyes seeing and the nose smelling what they ought not to, the body is worse than hell.

  In much the same way St. Jerome raged against his crowded envelope of flesh. Sometimes, too, like St. Jerome, Gandhi can be heard praying for a puritanical fire which will burn the flesh away, leaving only spirit behind. He had scarcely any visual imagination, and it seems never to have occurred to him that the body could be satisfying and beautiful in its own right.

  Me
anwhile, he was determined to destroy his own sexuality. It was not enough simply to make an effort to be chaste. There must be a vow, a solemn compact. Sex was the serpent that threatened to kill him, or at least to put an end to his effectiveness as a leader of men. Therefore the serpent must be overcome, and nothing less than a sacred vow would help him to overcome it.

  Gandhi discussed these matters with his stretcher-bearers, and they appear to have listened sympathetically, though none of them was converted. He had hoped to bring others to his way of thinking, but was not unduly alarmed when he failed. When the ambulance unit was disbanded on July 19, after less than a month’s service in the field, his mind was made up. When he returned to Phoenix, he told Kasturbai that he was henceforth irrevocably determined to live in perfect chastity. An obedient wife, she accepted this decision as she accepted all the other demands he had made on her.

  A Deputation to London

  IT SOMETIMES HAPPENS that a man will make a decision which profoundly alters and colors his inner life, but the outer man appears to be unchanged. He goes to his office, conducts business, sees his friends, attends meetings and makes speeches exactly as he did before, and there is no indication that he has passed through a spiritual crisis. He makes the same gestures that he made before, and speaks in exactly the same tone of voice, and wears the same clothes. But for him everything has changed. He sees life in new colors and is sustained by a new urgency and a new excitement. In his own eyes he has been reborn.

  The vow which Gandhi made early in July 1906 was to color the remaining years of his life. His theories of non-violence, ahimsa, would spring out of his vow of chastity, brahmacharya. The vow signified a return to his religious roots, a deliberate cleansing of himself in preparation for the hard tasks ahead. With this vow he accomplished the transformation which would lead him to becoming known as a mahatma, a great soul, one of those half-legendary beings who can influence events by their mere presence, by their sanctity.

  Having put away his khaki uniform, he left Durban and returned to Johannesburg. Once more he was the successful lawyer wearing a dark business suit and a high starched collar, frequenting the circles of theosophists and vegetarians. Once more he was busy writing petitions and memorials on behalf of the Indians. The battle with the government of the Transvaal was now reaching a critical stage, and new methods would be needed to prevent them from passing even more restrictive laws than those already on the statute books.

  A draft law called “the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance” had already been worked out by government officers headed by Lionel Curtis. It was published in the Government Gazette on August 22, and Gandhi, who had suspected the worst, shuddered when he discovered that all his fears were realized. The new law required that all Indian men and women and children over eight years of age must submit to being fingerprinted and receive a certificate of registration which they must carry with them at all times and produce on demand. Every Indian who failed to be fingerprinted and refused to receive a certificate would automatically forfeit his right of residence in the Transvaal: he could be fined, sent to prison or deported. Any policeman could arrest an Indian who failed to produce his certificate, and the police could enter any Indian house without a warrant and demand to see the certificate. If any Indian made any request in a government office, he must first produce his certificate to prove that he was a bona-fide resident. If he wanted a trading license or even a bicycle license, or if he wanted to register a complaint, no government official would pay any attention to him until he produced the certificate. Gandhi was particularly incensed by the stipulation that all Indians above eight years of age must be fingerprinted. He read a book on fingerprinting and learned that it was compulsory only for criminals.

  The Indians in Johannesburg were incensed by the draft law, but doubted whether they possessed the means to fight it. They held meetings and debated it clause by clause. Gandhi explained that the ordinance was a deliberate attempt by the government to humiliate the ten or fifteen thousand Indians living in the Transvaal, and if it was passed into law it would almost certainly be imitated and enforced by all the other governments in South Africa. “The law is designed to strike at the very roots of our existence in South Africa,” he declared. “It is not the last step, but the first step with a view to hound us out of the country.” He pleaded for cool heads and carefully laid plans. Wisdom lay in devising “measures of resistance.” He did not spell out what those measures were, but he had decided on them while reading the ordinance.

  There was nothing in the laws of the Transvaal to prevent the Indians from hiring a theater and holding a mass meeting to discuss the issues. The Empire Theatre was rented for the afternoon of September 11, 1906. Gandhi had expected that perhaps a thousand people would attend, but three thousand filled the seats or stood in the aisles while hundreds more stood patiently outside. There had never been a mass meeting like this in Johannesburg. Abdul Gani, the chairman of the Transvaal British Indian Association, presided. He was a rich and influential businessman, and so too was Seth Haji Habib, who delivered the main speech. Altogether about twenty speeches were delivered in a variety of Indian languages, and Gandhi was the last speaker. But no one had any doubt that the strategy had been worked out by Gandhi and that he was entirely responsible for the mass meeting.

  Abdul Gani opened the meeting at three o’clock. After reviewing the circumstances that led to the meeting, he announced that he would refuse to be registered, and if necessary he would go to jail. The modern movement of passive resistance had its beginning in the Empire Theatre at Johannesburg at about 3:15 P.M. on September 11,1906, and there is perhaps some irony in the fact that it was first announced by one of the richest Muslim merchants in South Africa.

  The theme of passive resistance was repeated by all the subsequent speakers. Whenever anyone spoke of going to jail on behalf of the cause, there were vociferous cheers from the crowded balconies and these would be taken up by the sedate and turbaned merchants sitting in the stalls. The audience was at fever pitch, and sometimes the speeches were held up by long bursts of tumultuous applause. Gandhi, who had recently taken a vow of chastity and had pondered the psychological implications of vows, finally rose to speak and demanded, as Seth Haji Habib had done before him, that all the Indians in South Africa should take a pledge that they would refuse under any conditions to submit to fingerprinting or to carry registration cards on their persons. He spoke of the sanctity of pledges: they must be pondered carefully, for they were easy to make in moments of excitement and enthusiasm, but would they be able to keep them? They were about to pledge themselves in a body, but did they realize how deeply personal a pledge was? Could everyone say he would keep his pledge at the risk of his life? Gandhi proclaimed that even if they all deserted him, he would keep the pledge and never flinch whatever punishment was inflicted on him. “There is only one course open to someone like me—to die, but not to submit to the law!”

  He liked to speak in this way, and sometimes he would find himself making even more self-regarding remarks, with fervor and exaltation. These remarks were clearly intended to set him apart from the rest and to present him as a leader and as a potential martyr.

  He was under no illusions about the risks the Indians would be running if they kept to the pledges, and in the same speech he described what would probably happen to them:

  We may have to go to jail, where we may be insulted. We may have to go hungry and suffer extreme heat or cold. Hard labour may be imposed upon us. We may be flogged by rude warders. We may be fined heavily and our property may be attached and held up to auction if there are only a few resisters left. Opulent today, we may be reduced to abject poverty tomorrow. We may be deported. Suffering from starvation and similar hardships in jail, some of us may fall ill and die. In short, therefore, it is not at all impossible that we may have to endure every hardship that we can imagine, and wisdom lies in pledging ourselves on the understanding that we shall have to suffer all that and worse.
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  A few moments after Gandhi concluded his speech, the entire audience rose and pledged themselves by acclamation to go to jail rather than obey the new laws. Then they gave three cheers to the King-Emperor Edward VII and sang “God Save the King.” A few hours later the Empire Theatre caught fire, and in the morning there were only charred timbers to show where the Indians had met in solemn concourse and decided to invoke the weapon of peaceful disobedience.

  In those days the concept was so new that there was no name for it; it was more than disobedience, more than passive resistance. Since he could not find a satisfactory name, Gandhi invited the readers of Indian Opinion to suggest one, offering a prize. His cousin Maganlal Gandhi suggested Sadagraha, meaning “firmness in a good cause.” Gandhi changed this to Satyagraha, meaning “firmness for truth” or “truth-force.” When William Hosken, a rich Johannesburg merchant, a friend both of Gandhi and of members of the government, suggested that the Indians were having recourse to passive resistance, “which is the weapon of the weak,” Gandhi indignantly denied that he was practicing passive resistance. On the contrary, Satyagraha was positive force, a projection of spiritual energy against the enemy. “Satyagraha postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one’s own person,” he wrote later, but this was not his original conception. Originally it was an outpouring of soul force, a simple brandishing of spiritual weapons against violence and injustice.