by Robert Payne
The twenty-year-old student from Santiniketan opened up a comer of Gandhi’s mind that no one else succeeded in entering. Thereafter Gandhi would discuss art only at rare intervals, usually without any real interest, perfunctorily, as though he saw no particular reason for art’s existence. Govindas Ramachandran was converted to Gandhi’s faith, and went to live at Sabarmati ashram.
Once the fast was over, Gandhi became reconciled to the fact that swaraj, which once seemed within his grasp, was still far away, and Hindu-Muslim unity would have to be built again from new foundations; and there began a long, slow process of withdrawal from politics. He held fast to the charkha, the spinning wheel. He traveled across India, addressing immense crowds, stressing the importance of the spinning wheel and the necessity of non-violent actions, and he would add a homily on the untouchables. Once, as he sat spinning in public, he said: “It is my certain conviction that with every thread that I draw, I am spinning the destiny of India.” It was a breathtaking claim, and he would make many others even more breathtaking in the years to come. But no one doubted that even when he was quietly spinning, no longer leading a revolutionary movement, he was a power to be reckoned with.
Again and again he claimed that the wheel was central to his philosophy. It was the magic talisman that infused new life into the dying body of India. Speaking to some students at Jalpaiguri in the extreme north of India, he said:
India is dying. She is on death-bed. Have you ever watched a dying man? Have you ever felt his feet? You find that they are cold and benumbed, though you still feel some warmth on the head and comfort yourselves that the life is not yet gone out of him. But it is ebbing away. Even so the masses of India— the feet of the Mother—are cold and palsied. If you want to save India, do it by doing the little that I ask for. I warn you. Take up the wheel betimes or perish.
Such rhetorical flights were not rare, and there were innumerable variations on the same theme. It was as though in despair of people he found contentment only in the disciplined revolutions of the wheel.
In these speeches he rarely attacked the British Raj, and seemed almost oblivious of its existence. Except when he was traveling, he lived quietly in the Sabarmati ashram, and to this period of his life we owe his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, an erratic and disturbing work begun just before the November riots in 1921 and then abandoned, to be resumed briefly in Yeravda Jail and then abandoned again. Gandhi was aware of the trumpet notes that resound at intervals through the quiet recital of events. “If anything I wrote in these articles strike the reader as smacking of pride,” he wrote, “then he must take it that there is something wrong with my quest, and my glimpses are no more than mirages. Let hundreds like me perish, but let truth prevail.” Though he affected to find fault with his autobiography, he was pleased with it. He told as much about himself as he dared, and sometimes he told more than we have a right to know. Yet the title remained a misnomer, for it was less an account of his experiments with truth than a desperate attempt to see himself in historical perspective, to catch himself on the wing, the young caterpillar emerging into the many-colored butterfly. Inevitably, he omits much that is important, and the account of the later years is sketchy and disorderly. He occupies the center of the stage, and has no gift for bringing any other characters to life.
As though to redress the balance, he went on to write a long account of his experiences in South Africa called Satyagraha in South Africa, of which some thirty chapters were sketched out in Yeravda Jail. In the autobiography he paints himself as the hero; in the second book Satyagraha is the heroine, and he is her chief companion-in-arms.
In June, while he was writing his autobiography, there came the news that Harilal’s affairs were doing badly. He was one of the directors of the All-India Stores with headquarters at Calcutta, and his name was used in soliciting money on behalf of the company. When one of the investors wrote to the company to inquire about his investments, the letter was returned through the dead-letter office. The company had vanished, and the investor, a Muslim, wrote to Gandhi, explaining that he had invested in the company because he valued the name of Gandhi.
There was no way for Gandhi to return the lost investment. He wrote in Young India on June 18,1925, a long account of the affair, concluding with a warning to anyone who might want to invest in his son’s companies. He wrote:
I do indeed happen to be the father of Harilal M. Gandhi. He is my eldest boy, is over thirty-six years old and is father of four children, the eldest being nineteen years old. His ideals and mine having been discovered over fifteen years ago to be different, he has been living separately from me and has not been supported by or through me. It has been my invariable rule to regard my boys as my friends and equals as soon as they completed their sixteen years. . . . I do not know Harilal’s affairs. He meets me occasionally, but I never pry into his affairs. I do not know how his affairs stand at present except that they are in a bad way. . . . There is much in Harilal’s life that I dislike. He knows that, but I love him in spite of his faults. The bosom of a father will take him in as soon as he seeks entrance. . . . Let the client’s example be a warning against people being guided by big names in their transactions. Men may be good, not necessarily their children.
Gandhi’s confessional utterances rarely pleased his more intelligent followers, who detected a note of self-praise even when he humbled himself. When Gandhi wrote: “Men may be good, not necessarily their children,” he was proclaiming a general law based on his own experiences and assuming a virtue that was denied to his son. G. D. Birla, the millionaire who supported Gandhi’s activities with large donations, appears to have questioned the need for these confessions, for we find Gandhi writing to him later in the year: “I doubt if anyone else in our society has tested to the extent I have the sweet joy of a public confession of one’s own guilt. My only surprise is that you have been unable to appreciate this.”
The unhappy story of Harilal would end only with his death. Gandhi had disowned him long ago, and would disown him again and again. He had wanted a perfect son; instead he found only perfect daughters, whom he adopted and took into his ashram.
In November 1925 there arrived at the Sabarmati ashram a thirty-three-year-old Englishwoman, Madeleine Slade. Her father was an admiral, and she had been brought up in a nest of gentlefolk. She was tall, handsome, a good horsewoman. A passion for music had led her to Romain Rolland, who had written a life of Beethoven, and Romain Rolland led her to Gandhi. She wrote him a letter so patently sincere that he invited her to India, to live and study by his side. She reached Ahmedabad early one morning and hurried to the ashram to kneel before Gandhi, who lifted her up and said: “You shall be my daughter.” He gave her the Indian name of Mirabehn.
She had hardly settled into the life of the ashram when it was convulsed with scandal. Some boys had been caught in homosexual practices. Gandhi accepted responsibility for the crime and went on a seven-day fast. Unlike the longer fast the previous year, this one proved to be painful and exhausting, for by the fourth day he was suffering from nausea. Twelve days after the fast he published a report on his health: weight 103 pounds, bowel movements regular, average intake of milk 48 ounces, with milk and fruit juices as his principal food, though he would sometimes take light home-made chapatis. He had no difficulty walking on level ground, but felt some strain when ascending or descending steps.
There followed a year of silence and withdrawal, of meditation and consolidation. Sabarmati became his life; he had no new ideas to offer the public; he was in a mood to search within himself. He would travel a little and break the silence long enough to deliver a speech which offended no one, for he usually spoke about the charkha. He was “the old man with the spinning wheel.” People were saying that a new generation would arise to snatch freedom from the British.
Visitors came, the old and the young, the rich and the poor, but he spent little time with them. One of his visitors was Swami Shraddhanand, the foun
der of the Gurukul in the shadow of the Himalayas, who had welcomed Gandhi after his return to India. He was a powerfully built man who looked all the more powerful because he wore the yellow robe of a monk. Nationalist, reformer, educator, he was loved by the Hindus and feared by the Muslims for his biting tongue. He mentioned casually that he had been receiving letters threatening his life. Gandhi, who had received similar letters, replied that a man in public life must expect to be threatened. In Gandhi’s view a man died well if he died at the hands of an assassin.
Six months later, when he was ill and lying in bed at Delhi, Swami Shraddhanand received a strange visitor. He was a young, excitable Muslim called Abdul Rashid, who announced that he had come to deliver a discourse on Islam. He was asked to leave, but insisted that it was most important that the swami should listen to him, that he had been sent by God to bring this message, and that he needed water to quench his thirst Accordingly, the servant was sent out to fetch some water. A moment later Swami Shraddhanand was dead from two stab wounds in the chest Mira-behn, who was staying nearby, saw the body lying in state, the chest bared, the two livid wounds, the swami looking even larger in death than he did in life. She knew now that she had come to India at a time of crisis.
“Watch everything. Mend where you can. Be still where you are helpless.” So Gandhi had written to her; and he felt no grief when he learned from her the details of the assassination. “I cannot mourn over his death,” he wrote. “He and his are to be envied.”
There were however lessons to be learned from the assassination. One of these lessons was that the Muslims were becoming increasingly free with knives and guns, and the gap between Hindus and Muslims was widening. Another was that it was becoming increasingly likely that Gandhi would be assassinated. He took no precautions, for he welcomed death—“the truest of friends, who delivers us from agony, helps us against ourselves, and gives us new hopes.”
His health was failing, for he suffered from high blood pressure, bleeding gums, bouts of dysentery which he would attempt to cure with a change of diet He made light of his ailments, but late in March 1927, while traveling from Bombay to Poona, he suffered a slight stroke. There was a numbness on the left side of his body and his vision was temporarily blurred. Doctors were summoned; they forbade him to continue his tour and ordered him to bed. Characteristically, he refused. A few days later, after making more speeches, there was another slight stroke brought on by overwork and exhaustion. This time he obeyed the doctors to the extent of promising to rest and to make no more speeches for ten weeks. “Well, my cart has stuck in the mire,” he wrote, and to everyone except the doctors it was obvious that he would soon be making more speeches. By June he was sufficiently well to continue his tour on a limited scale, making only one or at most two speeches a day.
Though he continued to make speeches, he had very little to say. There were the familiar sermons on the charkha and untouchability, and to these he now added a sermon on the necessity of somehow fusing together the Hindi and Urdu languages, thus bridging the gap between Hindus and Muslims. They listened to him politely. He had once claimed that he was “the generator of Indian energies,” but he was a tired and sick man with little energy left in him.
Lord Reading had retired from the scene in April 1926, to be replaced by Lord Irwin, the future Viscount Halifax, a man of an entirely different stamp. Deeply religious, gentle and even diffident in manner, he saw himself as a mediator rather than an autocrat. He had shown his sympathies for the oppressed in 1916 when, on leave from France, he entreated the House of Commons to grant independence to Ireland after the Easter Rebellion. In October 1927 he invited the Indian leaders to meet him in Delhi to discuss the parliamentary committee, known as the Simon Commission, which would soon be visiting India. He had a long talk with Gandhi, who struck him as being strangely remote, like a visitor from another planet, but friendly and without any notable bitterness. Louis Fischer and Gandhi’s Indian biographers have related that Lord Irwin simply summoned the Indians into his presence, gave them a report on the proposed terms of reference of the Simon Commission, and then abruptly dismissed them. But Lord Irwin was totally incapable of this kind of conduct. Louis Fischer was writing long after the event, while Lord Irwin, writing at the time, describes his conversations with the leaders and especially with Gandhi at considerable length. Both the Muslims and the Hindus boycotted the Simon Commission when it arrived in India early in the following year, and once more the Raj was at loggerheads with its Indian subjects.
At the end of January 1928, after months of traveling, Gandhi returned to Sabarmati for a year-long rest. Almost immediately he was caught up in the celebrations for the marriage of Ramdas, his third son, who had long ago returned from South Africa to live under the family roof. He was now thirty, a shy and retiring man, so dominated by his father that he seemed not to possess a will of his own. He had repeatedly asked for permission to marry, but this had been refused to him, for Gandhi would have been happier if all his sons practiced brahmacharya. Now at last, with a suitable seventeen-year-old bride, Ramdas was permitted to enter the state of matrimony.
The celebrations were conducted in accordance with the rules of the ashram. The bride and groom spent part of the morning cleaning out the well and the cowshed, watering the trees, bathing, hand-spinning, reading the Bhagavad Gita, and putting on the spotless, unornamented clothes of khadi they would wear during the ceremony before the sacrificial fire. The usual rituals of a Hindu marriage were carefully avoided, and the marriage gifts consisted of a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and a spinning wheel. Gandhi addressed them in a solemn speech during the afternoon, urging upon them the advantages of perpetual poverty and self-restraint, prayer and simplicity. On the subject of self-restraint he dwelt at some length, and confessed his sorrow at the thought that the bride was only seventeen, when it was a matter of common knowledge that he disapproved of girls marrying before the age of twenty. Nor did he want anyone to believe that he approved of marriage in principle; it would have been better if Ramdas had vowed himself to celibacy. Nevertheless, since they had taken this step, he could not refuse them his blessing. He was close to tears when he remembered that Ramdas and Devadas had been obedient to him all their lives, and they were the best of his sons.
The problems of the ashram absorbed his attention. Sometimes these problems involved sharp moral questions which could be decided only with the utmost difficulty. A calf had been maimed and lay in agony, while the whole ashram was summoned to decide what action should be taken. Should they kill it? Then they would be transgressing the law by which all living animals must be protected and never harmed, much less killed. Vallabhbhai Patel said the calf would not live more than a day or two: let nature take its course Besides, they were about to collect money in Bombay on behalf of the ashram, and no one would give a penny if it was learned that the calf had been killed. Gandhi said: “We cannot sit still and do nothing while the calf writhes away its last moments in agony. I believe that it would be sheer wickedness to deny to a fellow-creature the last and most solemn service we can render it.” The calf was making terrible sounds and kicking out its legs in paroxysms of pain. Gandhi’s will prevailed, and he asked that someone should come with a gun to put it out of its agony. He was told that there were simpler methods, and soon a Parsi doctor arrived with a hypodermic needle. Poison was injected into the calf’s veins, and it died immediately.
The incident has some significance because it shows Gandhi turning away from the doctrine of absolute ahimsa, which he had absorbed with his mother’s milk. In his view there were occasions when killing was necessary, and he seriously contemplated shooting rabid dogs and the monkeys who stole the fruit from his orchard. He now saw no harm in killing snakes, when they could not otherwise be rendered harmless, and he pointed out that he was accustomed to using kerosene to kill mosquitoes. He published a long account of the killing of the calf and all the attendant problems associated with killing in an article called “The Fiery Or
deal,” and thus raised a whirlwind of controversy. All over India people wrote to the newspapers, attacking him for abandoning ahimsa. “I felt that humanity demanded that the agony should be ended by ending life itself,” he wrote; and there were some who thought that this new attitude to killing foreshadowed a fiercer determination to use the weapons of Satyagraha. Non-resistance, as he well knew, could be very violent indeed.
But the year passed quietly, while he reviewed the old themes, examining them closely and sometimes clarifying them. “Youth,” he wrote, “is given to us to conquer passions,” and at that moment many ideas seemed to come to a focus. Yet he had very little conception of the urgencies of youth. When the New Year opened, he was still remote from the conflict.
For Gandhi it was a sad year. His grandson Rasik, Harilal’s son, died early in February, leaving him heartbroken. The boy took a long time to die, and was brave and gentle to the end. Devadas nursed him and sent off regular reports, but Gandhi seems to have guessed from the beginning of the illness that he would not recover. “Deep in my heart there is no sorrow for the death of Rasik,” he wrote. Grief, he told himself, was only an infatuation, and he would have nothing to do with it. All men die; then why should they fear death? A man is reborn after death, or else he enters into the eternal light, and there are only these two possibilities. Therefore he must not weep for Rasik. So he goes on in those letters about the death of the boy who was quiet and handsome and might have followed in his footsteps; and the more he pretends he is without the least particle of grief, the more he weeps.