by Robert Payne
Gandhi’s replies showed that he had not changed his belief that swaraj was within India’s grasp. The British could be pushed out altogether if one only knew where to apply the pressure. A small push at exactly the right place, and it would be all over. The trouble was that he could not find the exact place: the Achilles’ heel was well protected with armor.
Just as Gandhi was unable to discover the ultimate weakness of the British, so the Viceroy and the British establishment in India were unable to discover the ultimate weakness of Gandhi. He could not be destroyed; he could not be weakened. Every action against him recoiled on the actor. It was as though he lived in some enchanted and unassailable region remote from the ordinary practical everyday life of the British; and when they thought they had captured him, he was no longer in their grasp.
In prison Gandhi was even more powerful than when he was holding a pinch of salt in his cupped palm on the shores of Dandi. All over India there were disorders; the British-owned shops were closed, and the British-owned mills were closed down. In Bombay there were two rival governments, one loyal to the Viceroy in Delhi, the other loyal to the prisoner in Yeravda Jail. Women in orange saris picketed the shops, while men in white Gandhi caps ran the shadow government and marched against the police until they were arrested or mown down in lathi charges, only to be replaced by others. There was no possibility of bringing the nonviolent campaign to a halt, because Gandhi had left careful instructions on what should be done in the event of his arrest. As long as he was in prison the campaign would run its course.
Most of the important members of the Congress were under arrest, or about to be arrested. Old Motilal Nehru, the rich lawyer from Allahabad, who abandoned law to follow Gandhi, was now the president of the Congress. He was arrested on June 30, and with his arrest the government could congratulate itself that the Working Committee of the Congress could no longer operate. The government was wrong. The Congress still operated, still published newspapers, though they were now printed in cyclostyle, and still controlled Bombay. Desperate stratagems were needed to break the impasse. With the Viceroy’s approval two intermediaries, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru and J. M. Jayakar, sounded out Gandhi in jail. Would he consent to a peace settlement between the government and the Congress? He was prepared to discuss a settlement with the Nehrus and other leading members of the Congress, but only on certain conditions. These were: “The conference be restricted to a discussion of the safeguards that may be necessary in connection with the self-government during the period of transition; secondly, simultaneous calling off of civil disobedience and release of satyagraha and political prisoners.” In less formal language, Gandhi was saying there could be peace only when the British government vanished from the scene. At the end of July the mediators were able to arrange one of the most extraordinary political conferences on record. The Congress cabinet met in secret session inside Yeravda Jail with the full complicity of the government it was openly conspiring to destroy. Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Patel, and four or five other important Congress members were transported from their jails to meet Gandhi and to discuss whether there was any hope of a working accommodation with the British government. The conference lasted three days. In London Churchill thundered against the Viceroy. “The Government of India,” he declared, “has imprisoned Gandhi and they have been sitting outside his cell door, begging him to help them out of their difficulties.”
In fact, Gandhi had no intention of helping them out of their difficulties. The Congress leaders announced at the conclusion of the conference that “an unbridgeable gulf” separated them from the British position and there could be no satisfactory solution unless India was given the right to secede at will from the empire and was granted the right to form a government responsible to the people with full control over finance and defense. There matters rested until the end of the year. In January Lord Irwin decided that the time had come to break through the impasse, and the Congress leaders were unconditionally released. A few days later old Motilal Nehru died, worn out by his long imprisonment. His son watched over him. In the last days, according to his son, he was “like an old lion mortally wounded and with his physical strength almost gone, but still very leonine and kingly.” He was among the first of the Old Guard to go, and Gandhi was deeply distressed. Now more and more he came to rely on Jawaharlal Nehru, seeing in him the virtues of his father.
Lord Irwin had pondered the next move carefully and prayerfully. Though he had a limited understanding of the problems choking India, he realized that Gandhi, and Gandhi alone, held the keys to the mystery. On February 17, 1931, there began the long series of discussions which produced the Irwin-Gandhi Pact At half-past two in the afternoon, Gandhi walked up the steps of Viceroy’s House in the center of imperial Delhi and was ushered into the Viceroy’s study. It was a cold day, a fire was blazing in the study, and Gandhi, huddled in a long woolen shawl, sat on a sofa, wanning himself. The talks continued for three and a half hours. “They are being conducted in a friendly manner and with much sweetness,” Gandhi said later. Lord Irwin described his visitor in a letter to King George V: “I think that most people meeting him would be conscious, as I was conscious, of a very powerful personality, and this, independent of physical endowment, which indeed is unfavourable. Small, wizened, rather emaciated, no front teeth, it is a personality very poorly adorned with this world’s trimmings. And yet you cannot help feeling the force of character behind the sharp little eyes and immensely active and acutely working mind.”
It was, on the whole, a fair description of Gandhi by a man who had no particular reason to feel friendly toward him. A devout Anglican, heir to a vast estate, standing six feet five inches in his stockings, Lord Irwin was one of those men who wear imperial robes as though they were born to it. He could bend, but not very far. He could retreat, but only in order to advance. What they had in common was their sincerity, the knowledge that within certain recognizable limits they could trust one another, and their faith in God. At one of their last meetings the Viceroy, who was exhausted by the interminable debate and coming slowly to the conclusion that the talks were leading nowhere, accompanied his visitor to the door and said: “Good night, Mr. Gandhi, and my prayers go with you.”
From London Churchill thundered his contempt of Gandhi and the Viceroy alike. “It is alarming and also nauseating,” he said, “to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.” The rhetoric was devastating, but it had no relationship to anything that was taking place in the Viceroy’s study. Sarojini Naidu spoke of a conference between two Mahatmas, and this was closer to the truth.
Lord Irwin’s aim was to bring an end to civil disobedience. Gandhi’s aim was to advance the cause of complete independence. It was agreed that constitutional matters should be discussed at a Round Table Conference in London, and that the civil-disobedience campaign should be called off, that fines collected from the Satyagrahis should be refunded, and that no further attempts should be made to sow disaffection among the soldiers and the civil servants. Gandhi dictated in intricate detail a long summary of the measures to be taken, and this was written down by Mr. Emerson, the Viceroy’s secretary, who observed: “You are a remarkably good draughtsman, Mr. Gandhi.” Gandhi replied modestly: “I have that reputation.”
Essentially the pact took the form of a truce with both sides promising to use their best endeavors to bring about peace. Gandhi necessarily surrendered more than the Viceroy, but he had the satisfaction that his surrender was not final and it was in his power to launch even more terrible attacks on the British government if he thought it necessary. Their methods were pragmatic. One of the chief stumbling blocks was Gandhi’s insistence that there should be an inquiry into police brutality. The Viceroy refused,
on the grounds that such an inquiry would only aggravate feelings on both sides. The Viceroy reported: “That did not satisfy him at all, and we argued the point for two or three days. Finally, I said that I would tell him the main reason why I could not give him what he wanted.
I had no guarantee that he might not start civil disobedience again, and if and when he did, I wanted the police to have their tails up and not down. Whereupon his face lit up and he said, ‘Ah, now Your Excellency treats me like General Smuts treated me in South Africa. You do not deny that I have an equitable claim, but you advance unanswerable reasons from the point of view of the Government why you cannot meet it. I drop the demand.’ ”
In this way, in a long series of informal conversations, they hammered out an agreement which was unsatisfactory, but at the same time represented the very best that could be reached under the existing circumstances. Neither doubted the sincerity of the other, and they had taken each other’s measure. At the end of one of their discussions Gandhi was about to leave without his shawl, when the Viceroy picked it up and offered it to him. “Gandhi,” he said, “you haven’t so much on, you know, that you can afford to leave this behind.”
It remained for the Congress to ratify the truce at the end of March, during their annual meeting held in Karachi. Gandhi dominated the meeting, and the “Delhi Pact” became in all essentials a law to be obeyed by the Congress. There were many who believed that the pact was scarcely more than a gesture, like the salute of two ships passing in the night, but Gandhi believed that a solemn understanding had been reached. He was authorized to attend the Round Table Conference in London as the sole representative of Congress. In London he was to see the withering of all his hopes.
Round Table Conference
GANDHI SET OFF for London in a mood very close to gaiety, delighted at the thought that he would have no pressing problems on the ship. He spoke of prisons as rest homes where he could recuperate after grueling battles with the authorities, but ships offered a more tranquil environment, and he was always happy on them. Of his seven companions two, Sarojini Naidu and Pandit Malaviya, were official delegates, while the remaining five, Mahadev Desai, Pyarelal, Madeleine Slade, G. D. Birla, and Devadas Gandhi, came at his invitation. Kasturbhai was left behind, and the cameras caught a glimpse of her watching from a distance, beautiful in her silent misery, like a woman bereaved.
“I am a prisoner to you for a fortnight,” Gandhi told the captain of the P. O. liner Rajputana. But no one was less like a prisoner, and in an odd kind of way he was soon running the ship. He went up to the bridge and was photographed with his hands on the wheel and examining a sextant; he carried himself with the air of a man who is delighted with everything he sees and would willingly spend his life on shipboard. Second-class cabins had been reserved for his party. During an inspection tour he noticed that Mahadev Desai and all the rest had brought far too many leather suitcases and their cabins were heaped with expensive luggage. There was even a folding camp-bed made in America, which some enthusiastic follower had given him for reclining on deck. “What’s all this?” Gandhi asked, while Madeleine Slade explained as well as she could that they had collected them in the haste and confusion of their last moments in Bombay. “If you want to travel with such luggage you should live with those who live like that,” Gandhi said sternly, and he gave orders that all the expensive suitcases and the camp-bed should be put ashore at Aden and shipped back to Bombay. He was gentler than when he traveled with Hermann Kallenbach; in the old days he would have tossed it all overboard.
On the ship he lived exactly as he lived in the ashram, rising in the darkness of the early morning for prayers, and in the evening giving sermons. He chose a comer of the second-class deck for himself, received visitors, dictated letters, and invited children to listen to his stories or eat his fruit. “Grapes or dates?” he would say, and watch them closely as they made up their minds. He lived on fruit and goat’s milk, and thrived on them.
When they encountered a storm in the Arabian Sea, he seemed to be the only person unaffected; and when they steamed through the Red Sea, he seemed to be unaware of the heat, sitting on the deck with his spinning wheel at his side On the way to Port Said a telegram arrived from Nahas Pasha, the leader of the revolutionary Wafd Party, addressed to “The Great Leader A1 Mahatma Gandhi,” and welcoming him to the Land of the Pharaohs. It was a long, effusive telegram of a peculiarly syrupy kind, and he answered briefly and concisely, saying that he was pleased to be among the Egyptians and regretted only that he would be among them for so brief a time. Egyptian cameramen boarded the ship at Suez and took some of the most revealing photographs ever taken of him, for he was perfectly at ease and did not know he was being photographed. Most of the motion-picture photographs taken of him have a curiously two-dimensional character. Now at last he could be seen in the round, basking in the sunlight with children around him; and there comes, even now, from these old movies, an infectious gaiety.
The cameramen who would follow him around London were less lucky. They gathered outside St. James’s Palace and Miss Muriel Lester’s settlement in the East End of London where he spent his nights while attending the conference; they followed him through the streets of Lancashire, or when he attended the ceremonial planting of trees; and always the rain is falling, the silver screen is streaked with silver lights, and Gandhi moves through the crowds like some djinn arrived mysteriously in the wetness of an English autumn. The effect is oddly Chaplinesque. He seems to be always bobbing up and down, while someone holds an umbrella over his head, or splashing through puddles barefoot, while the crowds cheer, or smiling toothlessly into the eyes of the camera, a strange and disconcerting creature who has strayed into London from another universe.
The rain followed him like the furies. After the ship docked in Marseilles the entire party traveled across France to Boulogne and Folkestone. The Channel steamer reached England in the midst of a storm. Wearing only a loincloth and a shawl, his feet and thighs bare, his worn sandals slapping along the rain-soaked pier, he prepared himself for the inevitable tumultuous reception. Instead, police officers closed round him and whisked him off to a waiting automobile. He reached London by road, while the rest of his party went by train. The authorities were afraid that all traffic would be tied up at Victoria Station when he arrived, and they were in no mood to permit him a hero’s welcome.
It was still raining ferociously when he arrived that evening at the Friends’ Meeting House. About a thousand representatives from the churches, the Labour Party and women’s organizations were there to greet him. Laurence Housman, the playwright, author of many plays on the life of the Queen-Empress Victoria, welcomed him in the name of the British people. “You are strange to many, even in your own country,” he said. “You are stranger to the people of my country. You are so sincere that you make some of us suspicious, and you are so simple that you bewilder some of us.”
Gandhi was not simple, nor was he particularly strange; he spoke directly to the audience, and every word was charged with complex meanings, contradictions, ambiguities. “I represent, without any fear of contradiction, the dumb, semi-starved millions of my country, India,” he declared. He spoke of himself as an agent holding a power of attorney from the Congress, with a mandate to acquire freedom for India. “The Congress wants freedom, demands freedom for India and its starving millions.” But there were many in India who disputed his claim to be the sole representative of his country, with authority to demand freedom in her name. The issues were not so clearly defined; the time had not yet come when the problem could be solved cleanly.
The rain followed him to Kingsley Hall, where Muriel Lester attended to the needs of the poor and the unemployed in the working-class district of Bow. To Henry Polak, who was living in London, she explained that the air was purer in Bow than elsewhere, and this doubtful claim served to convince him that Gandhi would be happier in Bow than in a hotel near St. James’s Palace. Gandhi was therefore given a small room, sev
en or eight feet deep, with a table, a chair, and a thin pallet. The floor was of stone, and the walls were bare. In this room resembling a prison cell he felt at home.
Bow with its foul-smelling soap factories and fortress-like warehouses is not the most enchanting comer of London. Gandhi was enchanted with it. In the early hours of raw mornings he would walk to the Dock Gates and Blackwall Tunnel, and then along the dark shores of the river, where the barges melted into the November fogs. He walked fast, and sometimes children would follow him quietly, a little overawed by the spectacle of the dark man with the long thin legs and the immense white shawl, who resembled an exotic bird or the Pied Piper of Hamelin. And when he visited the dwellings of the poor, he would say: “Here I am, doing the real round table work, getting to know the people of England.”
But this was only a half-truth: his real purpose was to wrest India from the British. A few days before reaching England he said to a correspondent: “I shall strive for a constitution, which will release India from all thralldom and patronage and give her, if need be, the right to sin.” But it was precisely the right to sin which the British reserved for themselves. The Round Table Conference was loaded with nominees of the government, with the princely orders, the landlords, the titled gentry, the leaders of communal groups, businessmen, and millionaires. These delegates were divided among themselves, and made no effort to present a coherent program or a single point of view.