by Robert Payne
Savarkar shared with Gandhi the belief that it was perfectly possible for Muslims and Hindus to live together peacefully. It was perhaps the only belief they held in common. When he rose to speak, he therefore repeated this belief in a manner which would please the audience, which consisted of both Muslims and Hindus. “Hindus are the heart of Hindustan,” he declared. “Nevertheless, just as the beauty of the rainbow is not impaired but enhanced by its varied hues, so also Hindustan will appear all the more beautiful across the sky of the future by assimilating all that is best in the Muslim, Parsi, Jewish and other civilizations.” Like Gandhi, he lived long enough to know that the Hindus and Muslims could not live together peacefully.
But all this was decoration: he had more serious things to say. Gandhi had concentrated on the figure of Rama; Savarkar now concentrated on the terrible ten-armed goddess Durga, the bringer of sudden death. He reminded his listeners that the feast they were celebrating was indeed sacred to Rama, but they should not forget that the nine days before the feast were sacred to Durga. On those days pious Hindus fasted and prayed to the ten-armed goddess of death.
While Gandhi and Savarkar appeared to be celebrating ancient Indian mysteries, they were delivering speeches heavily burdened with politics. Gandhi was demanding that the Indian people should place themselves under the protection of Rama, and the war against the British should be waged chivalrously by non-violent means. Savarkar was proclaiming the way of Durga. Gandhi was to die with the name of Rama on his lips, and Savarkar was to remain an exponent of terrorism to the end of his days.
The subsequent career of Savarkar should be described briefly. He remained in England and continued to organize his conspiratorial society, though always in hiding. Through friendly sailors on ships traveling to India, he was able to send weapons to his fellow conspirators who were planning to assassinate important officials. On December 29, 1909, Mr. A. M. T. Jackson, the district magistrate at Nasik, was shot down while attending a farewell party given in his honor. The assailant was arrested, and a number of other conspirators were rounded up. Letters from Savarkar were found in their possession, and the Browning pistol used to assassinate Mr. Jackson was traced to him. The government of Bombay thereupon issued a warrant for his arrest on the charge of aiding and abetting the murder of the magistrate, conspiring against the King-Emperor, and waging war against his dominions.
When the warrant was presented at Bow Street Court on February 22, 1910, Savarkar had already left England and was staying with Shyamji Krishnavarma in Paris. Three weeks, later, for reasons he never made clear, he decided to give himself up to the British authorities, sent Scotland Yard advance notice of his coming, and was arrested the moment he stepped off the boat-train at Victoria Station.
The arrest of Savarkar presented serious problems in international law, for it was scarcely conceivable that he could be tried in London for crimes committed in Nasik. The lawyers debated, and long messages were exchanged between the Viceroy and the Secretary of State for India. It was decided that he should be extradited and sent under guard to Bombay. On July 1,1910, he was taken on board the S.S. Morea under heavy guard.
Seven days later, when the ship was anchored off Marseilles, Savarkar made a daring escape through a porthole. He had already made preparations for the escape; two Indians with an automobile would be waiting for him on the quay. The ship was half a mile from shore, and he swam strongly. The alarm was sounded, a boat was lowered, and the detectives in the boat fired warning shots over his head. It was a race between Savarkar and the boat. Savarkar won. He climbed onto the quay, a free man, and began to look for the Indians with the automobile. There was no sign of them. He went running up and down the quay, naked and penniless, shouting incoherently. He asked a policeman in broken French to take him to a magistrate, but the policeman refused. By this time the detectives in the boat had caught up with him. They explained to the policeman that Savarkar was a thief who had escaped from the ship, and he was then thrown into the boat and carried back to the ship. The French were mildly disturbed by the arrest of an Indian by British detectives on their own soil, and a small deputation of officials set out to discuss the matter with the ship’s captain. A few minutes later they apologized and withdrew. Savarkar was kept in chains during the remainder of the voyage to Bombay.
But his escape and arrest had been observed by many people on the quay, newspaper reporters interviewed witnesses, and the affair became a cause célèbre, with headlines in the French and English newspapers. Jean Jaurès, the fiery Socialist deputy, raised the question in the Chamber of Deputies, and the French government demanded the restitution of the prisoner. Finally it was agreed that the matter should be placed before the Hague Tribunal.
Meanwhile in Bombay the trial of Savarkar and thirty-seven co-conspira-tors began in an atmosphere of fierce tension and violence. It was clear that the heaviest possible punishment would be meted out to Savarkar, who presided over a revolutionary party with the avowed purpose of killing British officials. Pamphlets written by Savarkar calling for widespread assassinations were introduced as evidence. There was not the least doubt that he had sent the Browning pistols to Nasik. One of the revolutionaries, a cook at India House, had turned King’s evidence, and the authorities came to learn all the ramifications of the plot which led to the murder of Mr. Jackson. All over the world newspapers carried lengthy accounts of the Nasik Conspiracy Trial and the arch-conspirator Savarkar, who claimed that he had been illegally arrested in Marseilles and was therefore not amenable to Indian courts of law. The Government of India replied that the legality of his arrest was sub judice and they would abide by the decision of the Hague Tribunal. If the arrest was illegal, he would be sent back to France a free man; otherwise he must suffer the punishment due to him. The Hague Tribunal decided that since the French government raised no protest at the time of his arrest, any subsequent protest could only be regarded as ultra vires. The judges at The Hague had no sympathy for terrorists.
On December 23, 1910, the sixty-eight-day trial came to an end. Savarkar was sentenced to transportation for life in the Andaman Islands and forfeiture of all his property. By the terms of the sentence he could expect to be released in 1960. On the island he was a model prisoner, possessing a happy facility to imagine that he was elsewhere. These long daydreams sustained him as he worked on the oil mill, pushing a stone wheel hour after hour, day after day. He wrote poems, read the books in the prison library, and was sometimes able to smuggle letters to India. Thin and haggard, reduced to scarcely more than a skeleton, he lived in hopes of an eventual release. On the whitewashed walls of his cell he scratched out an entire treatise on the nature of Hindu nationalism, which he committed to memory and later published. He was determined to survive his punishment.
In 1924, when the British Labour Party came to power, Sydney Olivier became Secretary of State for India, and a new policy was inaugurated. Olivier was a Fabian Socialist, a gentle and sensitive man who had learned his politics from Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw. Savarkar was released from his prison in the Andaman Islands and permitted to live in India under the close watch of the police. Prison had aged him rapidly; at forty-one he looked sixty, and resembled a lean and hungry hawk, with a bitter mouth and eyes that seemed hooded. In the thirties he became the leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, a party of militant Hindu nationalists bitterly opposed to the ideas of Gandhi. He died on February 26,1966, at the age of eighty-three, having outlived all his contemporaries.
It has been necessary to speak of Savarkar at some length, because he represented a little-known aspect of the Indian struggle for freedom and independence. Although at one time he possessed a vast following running into the millions, his determination to wrest power from the British by force of arms was blunted by the growing power of the Congress Party, dominated by Gandhi and dedicated to peaceful change. He had it in his power, if the proper occasion arose, to let loose thunderbolts. An intense, tight-lipped, fanatical man, commanding many secret store
s of weapons and a devoted army of conspirators, he led the Hindu Mahasabha without ever daring to throw it into battle. Long before he died, he knew that he had been like a man waiting in the wings for the call to occupy the center of the stage, but the call never came.
We shall meet him again in the last pages of this book, for his shadow looms heavy over the death of Gandhi.
A Confession of Faith
WHILE SAVARKAR waged war with pistols, Gandhi chose to wage war with lawyer’s briefs, arguments and endless discussions. When these failed, he would have recourse to the weapons of nonviolence. He would burn registration cards, fill the streets with pickets and the jails with prisoners. He was equally relentless and equally determined.
But as the long summer advanced, he found himself more and more at the mercy of forces over which he had no control. His mind was no longer working with its usual rapidity; his prison experiences had exhausted him; his vitality was low. “I am creeping,” he wrote in one of those long rambling letters to Henry Polak in India. He was growing disillusioned with Western society, and from time to time there would come the old temptation to abandon it altogether. He spoke of returning to India and living in a small village, with no more lawyer’s briefs to attend to. He was conducting negotiations with great officers of state in England, South Africa and India, and they were leading nowhere.
Modem inventions infuriated him, and when Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel from Calais to Dover, he wondered why people acclaimed a man who had done so little worth doing. Soon there would be more airplanes, the sky would be full of them, and they would kill people. “No one points out what good it will do to mankind if planes fly in the air,” he complained, and went on to complain of the other besetting evils of modem industrialism—he especially disliked telegraph wires, the deafening noise of trains, and the underground railroad. It was not clear why he should have disliked the telegraph, for he was sending long and expensive cables to India and South Africa. As for the underground railroads, he rarely traveled on them, preferring to walk.
His dislike of modem industrialism may have arisen from his reading of Tolstoy, who detested machines and continually advocated a return to the simple, primitive life of the Russian peasant. Like Tolstoy, Gandhi was prepared to accept machines useful to him—he had no objection to electric generators and printing presses—while refusing to accept machines for which he had no use. But his dissatisfaction with industrialism went deeper, for it was inextricably bound up with his vision of a peaceful and idyllic village community in India. Always there was the vision of the Indian village with its buffaloes and cows, the peasants working in the fields, the women suckling their babies in the shade of the neem trees, the ancient religious ceremonies.
He dreamed of the Indian villages and the small community he had founded in Phoenix, while conducting negotiations with great dignitaries who had no interest in village life. Lord Ampthill would arrange meetings with high officers of state, who would inevitably promise to use their good offices to impress upon General Smuts the soundness of Gandhi’s views, and in the course of time reports would filter back that General Smuts was considering the problem and could be expected to give a favorable answer. Lord Ampthill acted as the permanent intermediary. He was continually hopeful, made excellent contacts, spoke on the subject of the grievances of the Indians in South Africa in the House of Lords, and seemed to believe that General Smuts was capable, as he expressed it, of performing “a conspicuous act of grace to put an end to the difficulty.” He had, of course, entirely misunderstood the character of the Boer general.
General Smuts was in London to discuss the unification of the Transvaal, Cape Province, Natal and the Orange Free State into a single Union of South Africa. The problems of the Indians in South Africa rarely occupied his thoughts. On August 28, when he sailed for South Africa, he told a correspondent from Reuters: “The vast majority of Transvaal Indians are sick to death of the agitation carried on by some of their extreme representatives, and have quietly submitted to the law.” He added that he had discussed the problem with Lord Crewe and he expected to find a solution to the problem.
In spite of this clear warning Gandhi continued to believe that the British government could influence General Smuts, and continued to press his case. He had a private meeting with Lord Crewe in the middle of September. It was brief and perfunctory. Once more there were promises of intervention, and Lord Crewe promised to send a dispatch to General Smuts. We have been here a long time,” Gandhi said. “Could you not send a cable?”
In this way the negotiations continued, intermittently and haphazardly, with no end in sight. As Gandhi wrote in a letter to Henry Polak: “The agony is now again prolonged.” From India Dadabhai Naoroji sent a message complimenting him on his perseverance and persistence, but Gandhi could take no comfort from compliments. He was buoyed up only by the knowledge that a Satyagrahi must suffer all things uncomplainingly. A Satyagrahi “mashed into a pulp with a mortar and pestle” would shine all the brighter and grow more courageous the more he was crushed.
In this mood of disillusionment and determination he came upon an article written by G. K. Chesterton in The Illustrated London News of September 18. Chesterton was already established as a brilliant critic and wit, with an unusual capacity for writing epigrams. He was in love with the Middle Ages, and accepted the existence of the Edwardian era without enthusiasm. A formidable debater, he would make his points with a directness that was the envy of other debaters, but his wit was so deft that it always interfered with his arguments. Few took him seriously as a political commentator, and fewer still took him seriously as a politician. He was loved, admired, and read for his style, his gusto, his essential goodness, and especially for his coruscating wit. One could scarcely expect from him a weighty and closely reasoned argument against the British presence in India.
It was a long article, and Gandhi read it with extreme pleasure, for Chesterton seemed to be giving expression to his own unspoken thoughts. The article attacked the attitude of mind that produced The Indian Sociologist, and went on to declare that the Indians had a perfect right to live their own lives, even if they led themselves to ruin. Some passages from the article should be quoted to show how they uplifted Gandhi’s spirits at a time of depression:
When young Indians talk of independence for India, I get a feeling that they do not understand what they are talking about. I admit that they who demand swarajya are fine fellows; most young idealists are fine fellows. I do not doubt that many of our officials are stupid and oppressive. Most of such officials are stupid and oppressive. But when I see the actual papers and know the views of Indian nationalists, I get bored and feel dubious about them. What they want is not very Indian and not very national. They talk about Herbert Spencers philosophy and other similar matters. What is the good of the Indian national spirit if they cannot protect themselves from Herbert Spencer? I am not fond of the philosophy of Buddhism, but it is not as shallow as Spencer’s philosophy. It has some noble ideals, unlike the latter. One of their papers is called The Indian Sociologist. Do the Indian youths want to pollute their ancient villages and poison their kindly homes by introducing Spencers philosophy into them? . . .
Suppose an Indian said: “I wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Everything has its own faults and we prefer our own. Had we our own institutions, there would have been dynastic wars; but I prefer dying in battle to dying in hospital. There would have been despotism; but I prefer one king whom I hardly even see to a hundred kings regulating my diet and my children. There would have been pestilence; but I would sooner die of the plague than live like a dead man, in constant fear of the plague. There would have been religious differences dangerous to public peace; but I think religion more important than peace. Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere; the amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your way of living is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our way of living, we never
asked you to do so. Go, and leave us with it.”
These were strong words, and Gandhi agreed with all of them, finding hope in the knowledge that Chesterton could speak of swaraj more lucidly than any Indian. He translated the entire article into Gujarati and had it printed in Indian Opinion.
Baffled by the British government, he decided to appeal to an even higher authority. For many years he had been debating whether he could summon up the courage to write to Count Tolstoy, who had just celebrated his eighty-first birthday. He revered the man this side of idolatry, and was continually reading his writings. He had presented a copy of The Kingdom of God Is Within You to the superintendent of Volksrust Jail: in Gandhi’s eyes this was a proper gift for a jailer. He pressed copies on anyone who would promise to read it. His own conception of non-violent resistance had sprung from ideas long nurtured in India, but they were reinforced by Tolstoy’s example. In his letter, written on October 1,1909, he described his campaign in South Africa at some length and asked for the master’s blessing. He also asked for permission to publish and distribute 20,000 copies of a tract written by Tolstoy called Letter to a Hindu. This tract was written in reply to a young Indian revolutionary, Tara-kuatta Das, who had asked Tolstoy whether the Indian people had not the right to throw off the yoke of British rule by force and by terrorism. Tarakuatta Das was living in Vancouver, where he edited Free Hinduston, a revolutionary magazine, and commanded a pathetically small revolutionary organization.