by Robert Payne
All this was, of course, in the highest degree reactionary, for Gandhi permitted no change in the relationship between the feudal lord and his peasant servants, the rich and the poor. In the past the rich had always been kindly to the poor and the feudal lords were gentle to their peasants. It was untrue, and he probably knew it was untrue, but he was not concerned with factual truth. He was focusing his thoughts and energy on the immemorial Indian village with its traditional way of life, and he was saying that in comparison with the fate of these villagers the fate of the townsmen was as nothing. In this sense the argument remained valid, for India was not its great industrial towns; it was 700,000 villages and the land between them.
Gandhi comes back again and again to the concept of the village as the center of Indian life. Western civilization is meaningless, chiefly because it cannot add anything to village life. He identifies the village peasant with the exponent of non-violence, for has he not defied the king through all the centuries?
Kings will always use their kingly weapons. To use force is bred in them. . . . Peasants have never been subdued by the sword, and never will be. They do not know the use of the sword, and they are not frightened by the use of it by others. That nation is great which rests its head upon death as a pillow.
Death enters the scene, and we suspect that it has been present all along. The kingly weapons were not made for decoration, and are often used. But against the kingly weapons the peasants have weapons of their own, and he mentions the villagers of a small principality who were offended by a command issued by their prince. They simply abandoned the village and refused to return until they had received an apology. This was the way of non-resistance, and he deduced that “real home rule is possible only where passive resistance is the guiding force of the people.”
Gandhi’s arguments tend to dissolve into moralities. The edges are blurred, and sometimes it is difficult to know whether he really believes them. He heaps curses on lawyers, and dreams of the ancient times when no one applied for their assistance and there were no touts acting as middlemen between the people and the law, but he appears to take some comfort from their enduring presence, for they help to write the petitions which enable good princes to learn where they have gone wrong. A good lawyer will abandon his profession, and take up a hand-loom. Similarly good doctors will take up hand-looms because “it is better that bodies remain diseased rather than that they are cured by the instrumentality of the diabolical vivisection that is practiced in European schools of medicine.” As for wealthy men, they will devote their money to establishing hand-looms and encourage others to use handmade goods. As he speaks of the hand-loom, Gandhi gives the impression of a man straining toward a symbol to characterize the India he admired. Many years would pass before he learned how to manage his first spinning wheel.
Inevitably, because he was dealing with morality, Gandhi was led into paradoxes. He was never more paradoxical than when he argued that the English should be permitted to remain in India as administrators and po-licemen, but they must abandon their commercial ventures:
I have no objection to your remaining in my country, but although you are the rulers, you will have to remain as servants of the people. It is not we who have to do as you wish, but it is you who have to do as we wish. You may keep the riches which you have drained away from this land, but you may not drain riches henceforth. Your function will be, if you so wish, to police India; you must abandon the idea of deriving any commercial benefit from us.
We hold the civilization that you support to be the reverse of civilization. We consider our civilization to be far superior to yours. If you realize this truth, it will be to your advantage and, if you do not, according to your own proverb, you should only live in our country in the same manner as we do. You must not do anything that is contrary to our religion. It is your duty as rulers that for the sake of the Hindus you should eschew beef, and for the sake of Mahomedans you should avoid bacon and ham.
This was perhaps to demand more of the English than they were prepared to grant, but Gandhi’s logic, once his own axioms were accepted, was unassailable. The English assumed the roles of the princes and maharajahs; they held positions of trust in a hierarchical, paternalistic society. He wanted them to behave less like Englishmen than like Indian princes, neither Muslim nor Hindu, but cherishing the beliefs of both. If they did this, they could remain in India for ever.
Such an attitude derived from Gandhi’s experience of the ordered, hierarchical society at Rajkot, where everyone had his established place in the community. He was not prepared to surrender the advantages of hierarchy. The ancient ways were good enough for India. In much the same spirit he attacked compulsory education—what good was education to a peasant?—and democracy, which he regarded as a superstitious rite by which a minority was placed at the mercy of a majority. Everyone knew that all the greatest inventions of life, all the philosophies and laws and poems had been composed by minorities.
There are occasions in the dialogue when Reader is permitted to defend his ideas of mass terrorism, but they are rare. Almost Hind Swaraj becomes a monologue, with Gandhi taking all the best lines for himself. When Reader proclaims that the Indians should follow the path of Japan, and build up an army and navy, so that “we may have our own splendour, and then will India’s voice ring through the world,” Gandhi answers: “You want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger.” It is a good argument, but beside the point, for it leaves no room for the splendor or the ringing voice.
As the argument develops, it becomes clear that Gandhi was more concerned with duties than with rights, with morality than with human justice, with religion than with life. He believed strongly that non-violence and suffering were weapons by which men broke away from slavery, but he could give no logical reason for this belief. He knew that violence defeated its own ends, but it was still too early for him to see how non-violent resistance when brilliantly organized can be more intimidating than guns. Of non-violence he speaks with passion, but it is still a tentative passion. Of one thing he was certain: “The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree.”
Hind Swaraj is a strange and disturbing work, revealing Gandhi’s weaknesses more often than it reveals his strength. When Gokhale saw the book he was horrified and pronounced it the work of a fool, and prophesied that Gandhi would destroy it after he had spent a year in India. But what was strange and disturbing in the work was not its reactionary theories concerning the unchangeable hierarchies of India and the necessity of upholding Indian village life against the threatening presence of civilization, but the imaginative passion, the vigorous marshaling of arguments in favor of non-violent resistance. Savarkar’s terror campaign had provided the spur. Now more than ever he was determined to wage war against violence.
When he finished the book, there was still another week to go before the Kildonan Castle reached Cape Town, and he turned his attention to Tolstoy’s Letter to a Hindu. It is quite short, and he finished translating it in three or four days. He was in good spirits, for the winter was over and he was now entering the summer of the southern latitudes. As the ship was approaching the shores of South Africa, he picked up a letter from one of his co-workers at the Phoenix Settlement. It was a rather odd letter, for it contained the suggestion that the time had come for Phoenix Settlement to change its name. It should be called Gandhi Settlement. The idea gave him no pleasure. “I desire that my name be forgotten, and that only my work endures. The work will endure only if the name is forgotten.” So he wrote, as an emperor might write about a city he had built and named after a goddess. No, he would keep the word Phoenix, which was pleasant and rolled well on the tongue. It was an English word, which served to pay homage to an English land, and was wonderfully relevant. The phoenix was a bird which perished in the flames and arose from its own ashes. He expected
to suffer the same fate.
The Triumph of the Will
I do not know what evil there is in me.
I have a strain of cruelty in me,
as others say, such that people
force themselves to do things,
even to attempt impossible things,
in order to please me.
Tolstoy Farm
WHEN GANDHI stepped off the ship at Cape Town, he was only too well aware that his mission to London had been fruitless and that he had nothing to offer the South African Satyagrahis except desperate hopes. He was heavily in debt, his faith in his British friends was shaken, and he was in need of a long period of rest and seclusion in which he could work out the necessary strategies to be followed in future campaigns. He had lost all interest in his law practice, and wanted to give it up entirely. He had no settled home, and no source of income. The funds of the Satyagraha Association were running out, and it was inconceivable that Indians would continue to court imprisonment unless some money was available to support their families above the starvation level while they were in prison.
In this crisis, a few minutes after leaving the ship, Gandhi received a totally unexpected telegram. It came from Gokhale and said that Ratan Jamshed Tata, the industrialist and philanthropist, had earmarked the sum of twenty-five thousand rupees for the Satyagraha movement in the Transvaal. There was some irony in the gift from the multimillionaire, who owed his wealth to the Indian steel mills with their thousands of underpaid laborers and whose entire attitude toward life was directly opposed to everything that Gandhi stood for, but Gandhi was supremely unconcerned about the origin of the money. It was a stupendous, an unhoped-for gift, amounting to about $7,000 in the currency of the time, and it had come at the moment when it was most needed, for the Satyagraha campaign was still continuing and there was need for a place where the wives and children of imprisoned Satyagrahis could take refuge. The Phoenix Settlement was in Natal; sooner or later it would be necessary to find another settlement in the Transvaal. Gandhi sent off an immediate triumphant telegram to Gokhale: “Pray thank Mr. Tata for munificent timely help, distress great, prisoners’ lot hard, religious scruples disregarded, rations short, prisoners carry sloppails, for refusing put on spare diet, solitary confinement, prominent Moslems, Hindus, Parsis in jail.” In those days munificence was still rare enough to call for a sufficient explanation of what the money would be spent on.
Gokhale had promised to aid the Satyagraha movement to the full extent of his ability, and he was as good as his word. More contributions followed. A thousand rupees came from the Maharajah of Bikanir, two thousand from the Maharajah of Mysore, and two thousand five hundred from the Nizam of Hyderabad. Since Gokhale was a member of the Viceregal Council, he had easy access to these dignitaries, and a request from him was tantamount to a command. Gandhi had as little sympathy for maharajahs as for millionaire industrialists, but he accepted their gifts gratefully.
A more important gift came from his friend Hermann Kallenbach, who bought a 1,100 acre farm at Lawley, twenty miles from Johannesburg, and gave it to him free of any charge for the use of the Satyagrahis. There were about a thousand orange, apricot and plum trees on the farm, there was a good-sized house with two wells and a spring, and it was good land, lying in the valley beneath the low hills. Since Kallenbach was an architect by training, there was no difficulty in building more houses for the Indians who took refuge there. Gandhi decided to call it Tolstoy Farm, and he took more pleasure in managing and operating the farm than in his law practice.
The beauty of the farm lay in its simplicity. Everything was clear-cut, stripped of inessentials, as far removed as possible from the artificialities of the Westminster Palace Hotel. It was close enough to Johannesburg for a man to walk there and back in a day, and at the same time it gave the impression of being untouched by modern civilization. People could live there contentedly on almost no money at all, for the earth was fertile, the orchards supplied all the fruit they could want and still leave a surplus, and every man’s skill could be put to use. For Gandhi there was the added joy of being able to rule over a small community of people prepared to devote themselves selflessly to whatever plans he made for them. He enjoyed being in total command, a trait which he appears to have inherited from his ancestors. Yet he was not only the prime minister of Tolstoy Farm; he was the chief judge, the chief sanitary inspector, the chief teacher in the childrens school, the chief baker and marmalade maker. Kallenbach, who stayed on the farm, was put in charge of architectural designs, carpentry and cobbling. Since he was one of those enthusiastic men who delight in serving their fellow men he showed no disposition to assume leadership and was quietly content to obey Gandhi’s orders.
Gandhi threw himself into the work with astonishing energy. He was working on a large number of problems concerning the relationship between individuals, the creation of an ideal community, the proper education of man, and the nature of society, and all these came to a focus at Tolstoy Farm. In the ideal community everyone ate the same kind of food at the same time, and so he arranged that the meat-eaters should abandon meat-eating and everyone had to eat simple vegetarian food from a single kitchen, sitting down at table in a single row, with different groups cleaning the pots in turn. As a further refinement he insisted that the Hindus observe pradosha, fasting until evening, whenever there were religious reasons for such a fast. He had observed that fasting effectively reduced sexual impulses only when the man fasting consciously desired to reduce them. Too often fasting had the opposite effect of violently increasing the sexual appetite and the pleasures of the palate.
In Gandhi’s ideal community the body would be under the permanent control of the mind devoted to God, and to God alone. He despised the body, saying that it was “simple earth, dross and objectionable.” He did not explain why it was objectionable, for this was an article of faith. The Satyagrahis at Tolstoy Farm were therefore encouraged to live out their lives in purity and prayer, working cheerfully for the common good, obeying the commands of the master, never stepping out of line and betraying the slightest sign of individuality. He seemed to be determined to make his entire captive audience of Satyagrahis into saints.
It did not, of course, always happen as Gandhi intended. There were troublesome moments when the flesh intruded, when the eyes of the boys were found straying toward the eyes of the girls, thus threatening the peace of the community. There were no dormitories: everyone slept at night on the open veranda with the beds only three feet apart. Since Gandhi was a light sleeper, not very much harm could be done at night, for he would be instantly awake at the first sign of any unaccustomed movement. “My eyes followed the girls as a mother’s eye follows a daughter,” he wrote, and they were all aware of his all-seeing eye, just as they were aware from his countless talks on the virtues of self-restraint that they must remain quietly in bed and not even dream about their neighbors. For some reason it never occurred to Gandhi to separate the boys from the girls, thus placing temptation out of reach.
One day he learned that some of the youngsters on the farm were making lighthearted advances to two girls. There was nothing in the least serious about these advances, for Gandhi described them later as “jokes.” But when he heard about the incident, he trembled. He knew what these “jokes” led to, and he was determined that there should be no more of them. The youngsters were therefore summoned to his presence and reprimanded. The girls, too, were summoned and reprimanded, but this was evidently not a sufficient punishment. After a sleepless night he decided that some exemplary form of punishment must be devised; the girls must be made to wear some badge which would warn off their admirers and protect their purity. When morning came, he again summoned the girls and told them that there was only one proper punishment: he must be permitted to cut off their fine, long hair. The girls objected firmly; so too did the older women at the farm. But when Gandhi was roused, he could produce such a plethora of arguments for a course he intended to pursue that everyo
ne was compelled to bow down to him. Finally the girls agreed to have their heads shaved, and Gandhi commented dryly: “I never heard of a joke again.”
He was high-handed, summary in his judgments, absolutely determined to dominate his flock of Satyagrahis. Puritanical and authoritarian, he ruled with an iron hand. What saved him was an underlying good humor, an essential gaiety. His charm broke through all defenses, and Kallenbach, watching from the shadows, could only wonder and marvel at the strangeness of this man who dominated the entire community with an enchanting smile and boundless enthusiasm.
There were problems everywhere, and many of them were nearly insoluble. There was, for example, the problem of supplies. Gandhi had dreamed of a completely self-supporting community living on its own produce, building its own huts, making its own clothes. Very soon he realized that it would be necessary to import many things from the towns. In Indian Opinion he therefore broadcast an appeal for the essential supplies that were lacking. He appealed for blankets, cotton mattresses, wooden planks, empty kerosene tins, hoes, spades, schoolbooks, coarse cloth, cooking utensils, needles, sewing thread, even for vegetables and fruit. The coarse cloth was to be used for making clothes. Gandhi was slightly disgusted when in response to his appeal some fine shirts, handkerchiefs and pillowcases arrived. They were quality goods, and therefore must not be used by the Satyagrahis. He therefore arranged to sell them off and use the proceeds for better things.