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

by Robert Payne

  There was however no medicine for this defect. His authoritarian temper remained with him for the rest of his life. There were more quarrels with his wife, and they always ended in her submission, her quiet acceptance of his role of absolute master in the household. Gandhi was delighted to have brought a family of untouchables into the ashram, even though by doing so he offended the textile magnates who had helped to finance it. One by one they withdrew their support, until the time came when the ashram had no money at all. Gandhi was not in the least dismayed. God in His infinite goodness would provide, and if not, then they could always go and live in the untouchable quarter of Ahmedabad. One day an automobile drove up to the ashram and paused long enough for someone to pass an envelope into Gandhi’s hands. When the mysterious visitor left, Gandhi opened the envelope to discover thirteen thousand rupees in banknotes. Such miracles were not uncommon and in time Gandhi came to depend on them.

  He was never the prisoner of his ashram. It was his home, and he would wander across India and return to it at leisure. He was continually being invited to make speeches, to open schools, and to attend conferences. Often he would make the same speech: calling upon his audience to live virtuously and to practice heroism. Sometimes, when praises were heaped upon him, he would rebel, and say that it would be better if public figures felt they were in greater danger of being stoned to death than of being praised. Sometimes, too, he would find himself thinking aloud about the unknown future, the strange destiny which he knew was reserved for him. One day in Bangalore, after the students had drawn his carriage through the streets and he had been welcomed like a conqueror, he said very simply and poetically: “See me please in the nakedness of my working, and in my limitations, you will then know me. I have to tread on most delicate ground, and my path is destined to be through jungles and temples.”

  A Speech in Benares

  GANDHI had not yet found a firm footing in India, and though he would sometimes speak of himself as a public figure, a man with a great following among the people, he was still on probation. His triumphs in South Africa were remembered, but they seemed to belong to another era, another dispensation of time. No great movement had caught him in its toils, and he stood on the wings, watching the actors in silence. He had promised Gokhale that he would remain silent, and though he had made many speeches and offered many opinions he had not yet made a memorable pronouncement on the confused issues of the time.

  Congress was still divided between the liberal wing and the revolutionary wing. Mrs. Annie Besant had raised the cry: “The moment of England’s difficulty is the moment of India’s opportunity,” and her Home Rule League, dedicated to Indian self-government, was having a powerful influence on the country, while New India, the newspaper she edited from Madras, was being eagerly read by the people she described as “tomorrows” as distinguished from the “yesterdays.” At the age of sixty-seven, she still possessed an incisive mind, offering her political ideas with youthful enthusiasm. She had become more Indian than the Indians, a woman of formidable courage and profound insights, feared by the British authorities, who found her ideas of Home Rule less palatable than the long-promised self-determination which tended to dissolve into empty speeches uttered by the Secretary of State. When Mrs. Besant spoke about Home Rule and England’s difficulties, she meant what she said.

  In those days she was far more widely known and respected than Gandhi. With Tilak, she dominated the stage. In 1917 she would be arrested for three months and in the same year she would preside over Congress when it met in Calcutta. Meanwhile there were even greater honors closer at hand. In 1892 she had founded almost single-handedly the Central Hindu College in Benares. Year after year she had presided over the fortunes of the college, and now at last, nearly a quarter of a century later, it was officially granted the status of a university. In February 1916 Benares Hindu University was solemnly opened by the Viceroy in the presence of great dignitaries of state, maharajahs and educators from all over India. A smiling Mrs. Besant, white-haired, wearing white clothes, white stockings and white shoes, looked down from the platform at crowds of admiring students who honored her as both a revolutionary and an educator. That she should have received the foundation deeds for her university from the hands of the Viceroy was the crowning irony.

  At the foundation of a new university it is inevitable that many speeches should be delivered. So it was at Benares, and Gandhi was among the many eminent men who were invited. He arrived after the ceremonial functions were over without a prepared speech, in a somewhat truculent mood, determined to bring some home-truths to the attention of the students and the princes who sat with Mrs. Besant on the dais. The speech, which he delivered on the evening of February 6, 1916, was to end in an uproar.

  The Maharajah of Darbhanga, Sir Rameshwar Singh, took the chair. Like the other princes he wore a resplendent uniform bedecked with jewels. Gandhi, striding across the dais in a white cloak and a short white dhoti, was clearly made from another mold. Speaking in English, in a rasping voice that carried across the entire hall, he began by attacking the folly of speechmaking, especially in English, the language of a foreign race. All the speeches delivered in the university had been in English, and he was appalled and ashamed that no one had spoken in the vernacular languages of India. He looked forward to a time when courses would be given in the Indian languages. “Our language is the reflection of ourselves,” he declared, “and if you tell me that our languages are too poor to express the best thoughts, then I say that the sooner we are wiped out of existence the better for us!”

  As always, he spoke in a clear, carefully enunciated voice, but there was an unexpected bluntness in the words. He explained that he had not come with a prepared text and asked the indulgence of his audience for thinking aloud and perhaps transgressing the limits of courtesy. He wanted action, not speeches. He spoke of the dirt and squalor he had seen in Benares when visiting the Vishwanath temple, the great Golden Temple in the middle of the city surrounded by a huddle of filthy streets, and asked dramatically:

  If a stranger dropped from above on to this great temple and he had to consider what we as Hindus were, would he not be justified in condemning us? Is not this great temple a reflection of our own character? I speak feelingly as a Hindu. Is it right that the lanes of our sacred temple should be as dirty as they are? The houses round about are built anyhow. The lanes are tortuous and narrow. If even our temples are not models of cleanliness, what can our self-government be? Shall our temples be abodes of holiness, cleanliness and peace as soon as the English have retired from India, either of their own pleasure or by compulsion, bag and baggage?

  These were unpalatable home-truths spoken with undisguised bitterness, and there were more to come. Having damned the English language and the Hindu temples, he turned his attention to the behavior of the Indians on the railroads, always spitting and reducing the third-class compartments to a state of indescribable filth, and from the subject of spitting he went on to discuss the bejeweled maharajahs sitting on the dais, admonishing them for their wealth. Turning toward them, he asserted that even the King-Emperor would not want to see them appareled in all their panoply; and his rasping voice grew harsher as he insisted that they had stolen their wealth from the poor:

  I compare with the richly bedecked noblemen the millions of the poor. And I feel like saying to these noblemen: “There is no salvation for India unless you strip yourselves of this jewelry and hold it in trust for your countrymen in India.” I am sure it is not the desire of the King-Emperor or Lord Hardinge that in order to show the truest loyalty to our King-Emperor, it is necessary for us to ransack our jewelry-boxes and to appear bedecked from top to toe. I would undertake at the peril of my life to bring to you a message from King George himself that he expects nothing of the kind. Sir, whenever I hear of a great palace rising in any great city of India, be it in British India or be it in India which is ruled by our great chiefs, I become jealous at once and I say: “Oh, it is the money that ha
s come from the agriculturists.”

  The maharajahs, who had made large donations to the university, had expected to be treated with decorum, but Gandhi was deliberately needling them. Instead of demonstrating the gratitude they expected, he was commanding them to sell their jewels and give the money to the peasants. The atmosphere was electric. In three days of ceremonial speeches no one had ever spoken like this. Some of the students were shouting their approval, but there were also murmurs of protest. Gandhi knew exactly what he was doing, for he had a long experience of speechmaking and could hold an audience in the palm of his hand. When Lord Hardinge arrived in Benares, extraordinary measures were taken by the police to ensure his safety; plainclothes policemen were posted on the roofs of the houses along his route; people were ordered out of their own houses; detectives were everywhere; the police seemed to have taken over the entire city. The government was in deadly fear of a bomb-thrower. Gandhi claimed to be in sympathy with the Viceroy, but he was also half in sympathy with the bomb-throwers. Why should the Viceroy be surrounded with a wall of distrust? “Is it not better that even Lord Hardinge should die than live a living death?” he asked, and there was at least the hint that a dead Viceroy had advantages over a living one. The tension in the hall was mounting, for it was a free-wheeling speech and no one knew in which direction he would turn next. In a guarded fashion he went on to praise the bomb-throwers:

  We may foam, we may fret, we may resent, but let us not forget that India of today in her impatience has produced an army of anarchists. I am myself an anarchist, but of another type. But there is a class of anarchists amongst us, and if I was able to reach this class, I would say to them that their anarchism has no room in India if India is to conquer the conqueror. It is a sign of fear. If we trust and fear God, we shall have to fear no one, not Maharajahs, not Viceroys, not the detectives, not even King George.

  I honour the anarchist for his love of the country. I honour him for his bravery in being willing to die for his country; but I ask him: Is killing honourable? Is the dagger of an assassin a fit precursor of an honourable death? I deny it. There is no warrant for such measures in any scriptures. If I found it necessary for the salvation of India that the English should retire, that they should be driven out, I would not hesitate to declare that they would have to go, and I hope I would be prepared to die in defence of that belief. That would, in my opinion, be an honourable death. The bomb-thrower creates secret plots, is afraid to come into the open, and when caught pays the penalty of misdirected zeal.

  As Gandhi well knew from his study of the psychology of crowds, the mere repetition of an idea can have an extraordinary effect on them. He was playing variations on the theme of assassination, now praising the assassins, now blaming them, fixing the idea firmly in the mind of his audience. Only a few weeks before there had been an attempted assassination of the Viceroy, a fact vividly known to everyone present. The audience was spellbound, wondering where the argument would lead, for Gandhi was obviously entering dangerous pathways.

  Mrs. Besant was growing restive, and she could be seen whispering to her neighbors. The Maharajah of Darbhanga, the chairman, was turning restlessly in his chair. Suddenly Mrs. Besant was heard saying: “Please stop it!” Gandhi turned toward her and explained that he had said the same thing in Bengal only a few days previously, that it was necessary to say these things, but if she felt that he was not serving his country and the empire, he would stop at once. The Maharajah of Darbhanga said: “Please explain your object,” and Gandhi went on lamely to explain that he was merely attempting to purge India of the atmosphere of suspicion which had descended on her, and he went on to tell how he had recently encountered an Englishman in the Indian Civil Service, who complained that the Indians regarded him as an oppressor. He answered that not all of them were oppressors, but the atmosphere of sycophancy and falsity that surrounded them in India demoralized them, and the Indians by not taking power in their own hands had become the willing victims of oppression. There were cries of “No! No!” Some of the princes were already leaving the dais. A young lawyer called Sri Prakasa, who was present, remembered that pandemonium broke loose, people were shouting to Gandhi to go on while others shouted to him to leave the platform, and in the midst of the uproar he was saying that he would go on only if he had the permission of the chair. Suddenly the Maharajah of Darbhanga rose and left the hall. There was no chairman, and the meeting ended in confusion.

  In retrospect Gandhi was inclined to blame Mrs. Besant for preventing him from speaking. He thought he had overheard her telling the princes they should leave, and but for her hasty and ill-conceived interruption he would have been able to complete his speech in peace. Mrs. Besant denied she had told anyone to leave and she defended Gandhi against the charge that he was deliberately inciting the students to rebellion. Gandhi wrote to the Maharajah of Darbhanga to explain that his only object had been to express his abhorrence of “acts of violence and so-called anarchy” and his sense of deep humiliation at the extraordinary precautions thought necessary for the protection of Lord Hardinge, whom he described as “one of the noblest of Viceroys” and “our honored guest in this sacred city.” He later published the speech with some revisions designed to make it more palatable in cold print, the published version presumably being based on a stenographic report, but even this version crackles with the sound of a blazing brush fire. He was speaking violently about violence, alternately praising and damning it, summoning it out of the air, presenting it as something to be adored and condemned; and it was perhaps this ambivalent attitude toward violence which Mrs. Besant found so disturbing.

  In the minds of the students who formed the greater part of the audience there was little doubt that Gandhi had delivered a memorable and inflammatory speech. Vinoba Bhave, then a student studying Sanskrit and the Vedic scriptures, remembered that Gandhi had told the Viceroy to go home: “If for such plain speaking we are sentenced to death, let us go cheerfully to the gallows!” Deeply impressed by the courage and determination of a man who dared to order a Viceroy out of India, Vinoba Bhave wrote to Gandhi, asked some philosophical questions, and received an invitation to stay in the ashram at Ahmedabad. There he became a devoted disciple, much loved by Gandhi for his asceticism and his high spirits, his absolute devotion to the cause of non-violence and his proficiency in spinning—Gandhi thought he had no rival for perfect spinning. Later, for participating in various civil disobedience campaigns, Vinoba Bhave spent five and a half years in prison. Finally, Gandhi adopted him as his spiritual heir, as he adopted Nehru as his political heir, and long after Gandhi’s death Vinoba Bhave continued to be the most powerful advocate of his ideas.

  Vinoba Bhave was not alone in being shocked and delighted by Gandhi’s outspokenness. From all over India there came invitations to speak. Missionary colleges, social service leagues, the Young Men’s Christian Association, colleges and schools sent pressing invitations, but though he spoke often and spent a large part of his days traveling from one speaking engagement to another, and believed that he had a mission to awaken India from her lethargy, he rarely discussed political issues. He preferred to discuss the dangers of coffee and tea-drinking, which he described as “that pernicious drug which now bids fair to overwhelm the nation,” or the appalling discomforts of railroad travel, or the necessity of character building, a subject which usually brought applause and permitted him to indulge in rhetorical flourishes:

  I feel and I have felt during the whole of my public life that what we need, what any nation needs, but we perhaps of all the nations of the world need just now, is nothing else and nothing less than character building.

  At such moments the fire and fury of the speech at Benares seemed to be lost beyond recovery, and there was little to distinguish him from the headmasters who spoke about character building with the same fervor.

  Benares indeed had been relegated to the past, forgotten until the inevitable moment when someone would pass him a slip of paper asking him to
give his own version of the strange incident, and he would reply that he had not the least intention of discussing something of so little importance. Instead he would talk about the ashram, the pursuit of truth and ahimsa, the rewards of handweaving and meditation, and the dangers of spicy foods. He would protest vigorously against stimulating condiments and the sensual abuse of the palate. “Have you ever seen a horse or a cow indulging in the abuse of the palate as we do?” he asked the students of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Madras. Again and again he would return to the dangers of tea-drinking, insisting that the habit had been imposed upon the Indians by Lord Curzon, an inveterate tea-drinker, who never dreamed of the harm he was doing. But there were worse evils than tea-drinking, and he would go on to castigate the avarice of temple officials, the pride of the English, the intolerance of the Hindus. He spoke in generalities, but he was searching for a single cause, a single hard-edged task to which he would devote the remaining years of his life. He wanted to repeat his triumph in South Africa on Indian soil. He dreamed of assembling a small army of dedicated men around him, issuing stem commands and leading them to some almost unobtainable goal.

  He found what he wanted in the fields of indigo in northern Bihar.

  The Fields of Indigo

  FROM THE early days of the East India Company the cultivation of the indigo plant had been immensely profitable. The plant was delicate, needed great care, and could be grown only on marshy soil. Armies of peasants were employed, often forcibly, to cultivate it. The wages of the peasants were microscopically small, the conditions of land tenure were arranged by the British factory owners in such a way that the peasants were compelled by law to plant three-twentieths of their holdings with indigo and the indigo harvest was handed over to the factory owners in part payment of rent. Indigo was so profitable that the planters with the aid of the government took over large areas of land and dictated their own terms to the cultivators. The factory ruled; indigo was king; and everyone had to bow to the will of the landowners.