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

by Robert Payne

  Gandhi had no qualms about offering up his son as a sacrifice to the authorities in the Transvaal. Harilal was arrested on four separate occasions and spent Over a year in jail. The first two sentences were for brief terms of a week, and did little harm. On February 10, 1909, he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment at Volksrust Jail. His wife collapsed, sores appeared all over her body, she coughed alarmingly, and suffered from excruciating earache. Gandhi imagined that her nervous prostration could be cured by a suitable diet. He had himself been sentenced to three months* imprisonment about the same time. From prison he wrote that she should take milk and sago regularly, breast-feed her new baby, and get a lot of fresh air. He was in no mood to stand any nonsense from her. “The change made in your diet must be adhered to as an order from me,” he wrote. He was annoyed because she had produced a second baby: it showed that she had not been practicing brahmacharya. He was accustomed to command, and he was just as commanding in jail as he was when he directed the affairs of the British Indian Association. He added a disturbing postscript: “Harilal and I are quite well. Be sure that we are happier than you.”

  Harilal’s wife could well believe that Gandhi was happier than she would ever be, though she had some reservations about her husband’s happiness. She had been brought up in comfort as the daughter of a prominent Kathiawar lawyer, and now she was alone with her two children, penniless, suffering from nervous prostration. She did not reply to Gandhi’s letters, for she had nothing to say. From time to time Gandhi would ask about her and wonder why she was silent.

  In August 1909 Harilal was released from jail after serving his full sentence. He spent less than three months with his family. On November 1, he was again arrested, and once more there was a sentence of six months’ imprisonment. Gandhi was overjoyed when he heard the news. “Though I know that the boy, poor child, will suffer, I welcome the news all the same,” he said. “It will do him good to suffer, and me too; he will be doing a service to the community.”

  There was however a great difference between their sufferings. Gandhi received the adulation of the Indian community; Harilal was merely an instrument employed by his father. In prison he brooded over his wife and his two children, knowing that his father would always call him a “poor child.”

  This time he did not complete his full sentence; he was released in January and rejoined his family. Imprisonment had changed him. He had brooded long and hard in his prison cell. A friend, Pragji Desai, who went to jail with him, remembered that he would sometimes rage against his fate, saying that his father was deliberately refusing to give him an education so that he would be a pliant tool in his father’s hands. There had been many arguments between father and son, according to Desai. Gandhi would say that people became educated simply to obtain a livelihood, and what was a livelihood? It was to become dependent on other people, to push a pen in an office, to be the victim of business and industry. To be uneducated is to be free.

  Neither Harilal nor his brothers could understand the logic of these arguments, for they all wanted an education, and were refused it. Harilal argued that Gandhi would never have been able to accomplish his work in South Africa if he had not become a lawyer. In return Gandhi said that.it was not necessary to become a lawyer, or a doctor, or a professional man in order to perform service for the people, and he reeled off a list of names of great warriors and saints who had never gone to a university. Harilal replied by reeling off a list of contemporary figures who had served India well in spite of their university education, mentioning Tilak and Gokhale among others as examples of men well-known to his father. The arguments came to nothing. From time to time they would be resumed in letters, with Harilal pleading for a chance for an education and Gandhi consistently rejecting his son’s wishes, and sometimes he gave the impression that he was disturbed beyond measure by the sons impatience and deliberately misunderstood the arguments. When Harilal spoke about the practical knowledge to be acquired in a school in India, Gandhi answered: “The practical knowledge boys in India possess is not due to the education they receive in schools, but is due to the unique Indian way of life.” Following his own inveterate practice, he would always reduce the argument to nonexistence by insisting that his only concern was with morality, and since Harilal had not introduced morality into his argument, it was clearly defective. Gandhi equated education with immorality. “I will not stand in the way of your studies or other ambitions that you may have, provided there is nothing positively immoral about them,” he wrote in the same letter. “You may therefore cast off all fear and pursue your studies as long as you like.”

  Harilal wanted to study in England, like his father; Gandhi reminded him that the Satyagrahis were dedicated to poverty. When a friend offered to pay for Harilal’s studies, there were so many stipulations that he felt it necessary to reject the offer. He was left to his own resources, without help from his family. The estrangement with the father had already begun. Harilal objected violently against the treatment of his mother at Gandhi’s hands, and he was always on his mother’s side. Gandhi argued that Kasturbai was an old woman who had to have her decisions made for her. “She does not know her own mind,” he wrote, adding that he had no objection to his son pleading her case.

  Gandhi’s letter to his son permitting him to continue his studies was written in March 1911. A month later the storm broke. Harilal now felt that he could no longer endure the domination of his father. He had been reading a Gujarati novel about a young man who ran away from his family, leaving behind a long and romantic letter of farewell. Harilal, writing in the style of this letter, explained that the time had come when he must break all ties with his father. He would go to the Punjab and study until he had acquired enough knowledge to practice a profession. After mailing the letter, he vanished from Johannesburg. His friends went in search of him, but there was no trace of him. A Parsi friend related that Harilal had come to him and borrowed twenty pounds. Harilal’s friends invaded Gandhi’s office; they demanded an explanation, for they were fearful that Harilal had killed himself. Muslim merchants told Gandhi: “You should have sent him to England for further studies. We would have paid all the expenses.” That afternoon Gandhi returned early from his office to Tolstoy Farm. Pragji Desai accompanied him on the train.

  “You mustn’t say anything to Ba about this,” Gandhi said. “I’ll tell her in my own way.”

  When they reached the farm, it was a long time before Gandhi could bring himself to tell his wife that the search for Harilal had failed. Kasturbai collapsed when she heard the news.

  Harilal’s friends were stunned. They had never expected him to be anything but the docile son of an authoritarian father. Three days later it was learned that he was living under an assumed name at Delagoa Bay, preparing to return to India. In Johannesburg there were long and heated discussions about what should be done, and he was regarded as an escaped prisoner who must be captured and brought back to stand trial. Mr. Kallenbach offered to go to Delagoa Bay and bring him back to Johannesburg. Writing to a friend shortly after he learned where Harilal was hiding, Gandhi still suffered from a sense of outrage. “His letter is all ignorance,” Gandhi wrote. “He did a lot of thinking in gaol. Moreover, he witnessed a great transformation in my life and saw my will as well.” It was a curiously self-regarding explanation; and it is certain that the escape to Delagoa Bay had nothing to do with the great transformation in Gandhi’s life. For the first time Harilal was on his own.

  He returned to Johannesburg on the morning of May 15, but it was not until late in the evening that Gandhi was able to discuss his son’s affairs. He spent the day drafting a long memorandum addressed to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. That evening at Tolstoy Farm father and son began a long leisurely stroll across the fields, which lasted all night Politely and courteously, always controlling his anger, Harilal accused his father of deliberately making the lives of his four sons unendurable, suppressing them at every turn, treating them as though they were m
erely the instruments of his will, savagely indifferent to them unless he could use them.

  As they walked across the dark fields, they were aware that the argument was being fought on unequal terms. Sometimes Harilal spoke haltingly and hesitantly, but his mind was made up—he would escape once and for all from his father’s tutelage. Harilal repeated that unlike other fathers Gandhi had never loved his sons, never performed any special actions for them, and had always placed them last in the line, in the ultimate chamber of his thought. Then, when his son calmed down, Gandhi mounted his counterattack. Had not everything been done for the children’s benefit? Had he not loved and cherished them in his own way? Had he not shown them the true path to perfection? Harilal was not interested in perfection. He said he was determined to possess some scholarship, and he was especially anxious to learn Sanskrit. Gandhi suggested it would be better to learn Gujarati properly, since he came from Gujarat, and to study at Ahmedabad, which had several colleges.

  The storm blew over. As long as it lasted, it shook them, so that they resembled trees bending in a high wind. The night-long argument ended in a truce, with father and son both determined to go their own way. “I have left him free,” Gandhi wrote, and there was at least the implied recognition that he was not free before.

  At the age of twenty-three Harilal set out for India to resume his high school education. When the ship put in at Zanzibar he was well received by the Indians who knew him as a doughty fighter for Satyagraha, and there were the inevitable speeches in his honor. Harilal made a suitable reply, and Gandhi printed a brief passage about the event in Indian Opinion. He appeared to be pleased with his son, who had been entertained lavishly in Zanzibar and spoken about the formidable power of the Satyagraha movement.

  But in the high school at Ahmedabad, Harilal was at a disadvantage, for he was a man among boys. He missed his wife, who remained in South Africa, and he had some difficulty in settling down in a new environment. For some reason he decided to abandon the study of Sanskrit and to learn French instead. Gandhi wrote that he was ill-advised. “How can I convince you,” he said, “how worthwhile it would be for you to spend the valuable time you are now giving to French on Sanskrit?” But he was no longer the determined father uncompromisingly insisting on his own ideas. He believed that Harilal’s desire to learn French was due to “the vitiated atmosphere” of the school, but he no longer stood in his son’s way. “Do what you really feel like,” Gandhi said in concluding the letter. “Consider this as the advice of a close friend.”

  From time to time Harilal would send reports about his successes and failures in the examinations, and he seems to have failed more often than he succeeded. But the bond between father and son had been broken. Now at last he was a free man. Some months later his wife came to join him, and three more children were born. Until Gulab died in 1918, Harilal remained out of politics, being scarcely to be distinguished from all the other millions of family men living out their obscure lives in India. He lived quietly in the backwaters, happy to be forgotten.

  The Coming of Gokhale

  FOR MANY YEARS Gandhi had dreamed of welcoming Gokhale to South Africa. There would be triumphant processions, speeches, garlands; Gokhale would come to know the great Muslim merchants and the indentured laborers; he would come as an ambassador from India and perhaps by his very presence he would be able to bring about peace between the Indians and the government. He was a close friend of Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy, president of the Servants of India Society, a skilled negotiator, a superbly cultivated man. When he was younger he had been at various times a professor of history, of the social sciences, of English literature and of mathematics: the range of his interests was wide, but he had a great capacity to see deeply into things. His mind was clear, quick, trenchant; he spoke with a kind of machine-gun delivery. Three years older than Gandhi, he looked like an old man, and there was something about his proud and melancholy face which suggested an old peasant wanning himself by the fireside.

  Gokhale had been keeping his eye on Gandhi for a long time, and there had been streams of letters between them. As a member of the Viceroy’s Council, Gokhale came with full powers to negotiate. He arrived in October 1912, as a ranking minister of state, and the Union government was sufficiently impressed by his credentials to place the State railroad car at his disposal. Gandhi and Kallenbach had framed an exhausting itinerary, forgetting that he was in failing health. In their enthusiasm they had arranged that his train should stop at all the places where Indians were living in South Africa, and that there should be welcoming speeches at each stop, with the mayors and local dignitaries in attendance. Gokhale submitted to their demands with good grace. He was suffering from diabetes, and seems to have been in pain throughout the month-long journey.

  Gandhi and Kallenbach met him at the ship in Cape Town and acted as his secretaries and nurses throughout the tour. From Cape Town they took the train to Johannesburg, making frequent stops, so that the Indians could have Gokhale’s darshan. In Johannesburg there were gala celebrations, with the mayor of the city receiving his distinguished visitor on a raised dais strewn with carpets at the railroad station. Since Johannesburg was famous for its gold, he was presented with an elaborate gold plate showing a map of India and the Taj Mahal to commemorate his visit, and was then taken to Kallenbach’s fine hilltop house five miles away. There were mass meetings, banquets and continual celebrations. Since Gokhale spoke only Marathi and English, there was some discussion about the language he would speak when addressing the Indians. Gandhi suggested he should speak in Marathi, and Gandhi would then translate his words into Hindustani. Gokhale, who had no high opinion of Gandhi’s Hindustani and even less of his Marathi, objected on the grounds that his speech might be completely misunderstood. Gandhi was proud of his Hindustani and knew just enough Marathi to follow the gist of a sentence; he therefore regarded himself as a perfect translator. Gokhale was unable to argue with him.

  “You will always have your way,” he murmured pleasantly. “And there is no help for me as I am here at your mercy.”

  The words were spoken affectionately, but there was the faintest suggestion that he would have been better pleased if Gandhi were not so unyielding on matters he knew very little about.

  Gokhale was long-suffering, kind, gentle and trusting. He placed himself entirely in Gandhi’s hands, with consequences which were not always pleasant, for when he was invited to stay on Tolstoy Farm and was told that it was only a mile and a half from the Lawley railroad station, he readily agreed to make the journey on foot. It pleased Gandhi to have the old man walking beside him, and it never occurred to him that it might rain, that Gokhale in his weak health should not be asked to walk, and that it would have been a simple matter to arrange for him to make the journey in a covered bullock cart. Gandhi sometimes walked fifty-five miles in a day and thought nothing of it: surely Gokhale could walk a mile and a half.

  It rained. Gokhale was drenched and caught a bad cold. No special arrangements had been made for him on the farm, and he insisted on sleeping on the floor like everyone else. He was accustomed to having his own servant attending him, and did not like to be attended by anyone else. Kallenbach and Gandhi fussed over him, offering to find a commode for him, to massage his feet and perform any service he required, until he was almost out of his wits. Finally he exploded, unable to endure any longer their puritanical pride and insufferable humility. Half-smiling, half-angry, he delivered himself of a sharp homily:

  “You all seem to think you have been born to suffer hardships and discomforts, and people like myself have been born to be pampered by you. You must suffer today the punishment for this extremism of yours. I will not let you even touch me. Do you think that you will go out to attend to nature’s needs and at the same time keep a commode for me? I will bear any amount of hardship, but I will humble your pride!”

  Gandhi was not accustomed to receiving tongue-lashings, for in any situation he was always the master, the man who punishes
, the man who gives orders. “These words were to us like a thunderbolt,” he wrote later, “and they deeply grieved Mr. Kallenbach and me.” He was utterly contrite, without quite knowing what sin he had committed, for it seems never to have occurred to him that Gokhale was warning him against the sin of spiritual pride, the pride that willfully commands others to obey and incessantly interferes with their lives. Gandhi was deeply puzzled. “Gokhale remembered only our will to serve,” he wrote, “though he did not accord us the high privilege of serving him.” But this was not what Gokhale had been talking about. He had been talking about the high privilege of being left alone.

  There were other homilies, and there is some question whether Gandhi took them to heart. Gokhale set out to write a letter the next morning in his usual fashion. This involved considerable pacing up and down the room, and Gandhi, with his quick mind and headlong pace of composition, wondered why his friend took so much pains over a short letter. Gokhale replied gravely:

  “You do not know my way of life. I will not do even the least little thing in a hurry. I will think about it and consider the central idea. I will next deliberate as to the language suited to the subject and then set to write. If everyone did as I did, what a huge saving of time there would be! And the nation would be saved from the avalanche of half-baked ideas which now threaten to overwhelm her!”

  Gandhi did not take this lesson to heart; he continued to write his letters impulsively, catching the thought on the wing, never at a loss for a word, never pacing up and down the carpet. For him it was very nearly inconceivable that anyone should have the slightest difficulty in writing a letter.

  After a brief stay at Tolstoy Farm Gokhale continued his triumphal procession through South Africa. There were triumphal archways, presentation scrolls and caskets, interminable addresses of welcome. Railroad stations were illuminated, and the Indians of many creeds greeted him in many languages, in long speeches, while he looked nervously away or gazed uncomfortably at the ground—he had no liking for these speeches and genuinely disliked hearing himself praised. Most of these welcoming speeches covered familiar ground, and a good many of them were written by Gandhi. Gokhale would have been happier if he had been permitted to take a vow of silence. What he especially liked was to get things done in his own quiet, systematic way.