Indian Summer
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Despite the many failures of his brahmacharya policy, Gandhi persisted in enforcing it at his ashrams, and broke up several marriages by persuading the women to renounce sex.39 It was a field in which he and Nehru could never be reconciled. Nehru wrote that Gandhi’s sex ban ‘can only lead to frustration, inhibition, neurosis, and all manner of physical and nervous ills’.40 As for Gandhi’s decree that birth control was a particular sin, for it allowed a person ‘to indulge his animal passions and escape the consequences of his acts’, Nehru considered it to be outrageous. ‘Personally I find this attitude unnatural and shocking, and if he is right, then I am a criminal on the verge of imbecility and nervous prostration.’41
Nehru was aware that the gulf between Gandhi and himself was deep. Much of his autobiography chronicled their differences. And yet the two continued to be the closest of friends. ‘People who do not know Gandhiji personally and have only read his writings are apt to think that he is a priestly type, extremely puritanical, long-faced, Calvinistic, and a kill-joy,’ Nehru wrote. ‘He is the very opposite … His smile is delightful, his laughter infectious, and he radiates light-heartedness. There is something childlike about him which is full of charm.’42
Whatever his moral eccentricities and political failures, Gandhi’s charm and charisma ensured that he remained popular both within Congress and in the nation at large. The millions of admirers he attracted from among the general public greeted him not as a politician, but as a spiritual guru. They cannot be accused of misconstruction. Nehru went around the United Provinces with Gandhi during 1929, and was struck by the masses of ordinary people who turned up – amounting to tens of thousands every few miles. Gandhi’s tour was a basic affair. He brought no means of amplification and, consequently, these heaving throngs had little chance of making out what he was saying. ‘Probably they did not expect to hear anything,’ Nehru observed; ‘they were satisfied if they saw the Mahatma.’43 He was right, and it went further than that. An American correspondent watched in awe as people surged forward towards Gandhi at the end of one of these meetings, desperate to touch the hem of his garment.44 Sanskrit has a useful word which Nehru used to describe Gandhi’s appearances: darshan, meaning the act of seeing or being seen by a divinity.
Among those who found Gandhi inspirational was Kamala Nehru. ‘Close contact with Gandhiji opened up a new world to her,’ remembered her daughter, Indira.45 Kamala, like many Hindu girls, had been taught that the highest accomplishment at which a woman could aim was the emulation of Sita – the legendary wife of Rama, whose obedience and chastity were rewarded with rejection and slander, and whose achievement was to bring up twin sons alone, deliver them unto the husband who had rejected her, and then roll over and be swallowed up by the earth.46 But Kamala had married Jawaharlal Nehru, who thought little of meek obedience and still less of pretty ignorance. She had been only seventeen when they married, and barely educated – but she became a brave, spirited and politically active woman. Visits to Europe with her husband strengthened both her notions of racial identity and her feminist tendencies. She wrote from London: ‘When I think of the plight of my sisters my heart bleeds for they are indifferent to the question of their own rights. Day by day I am getting more and more determined that on my return home I shall take my sisters along with me, I shall urge them to place their trust in God and fight for their own freedom, educate their daughters so that they are not in trouble like us and join the struggle for independence so that we do not have to spend our lives in shame.’47 Yet, despite her increasing interest in politics, she and her husband were barely happier together than they had been on their disjointed honeymoon. Jawahar was struck to see paintings for sale at bazaars, depicting Kamala and him with the caption ‘Adarsha jori’ – ‘The ideal couple’.48
Kamala was never in good health after the birth of the couple’s daughter, Indira, in 1917. In 1924, she and Jawahar had a premature baby boy, who soon perished. The experience further ruined her constitution, and she developed tuberculosis. Jawahar was obliged to take her to Europe for long periods so that she might recuperate in Alpine sanatoria. Even outside India, Jawahar took no rest from Congress activities, travelling tirelessly around the European capitals, followed, somewhat to his pride, by the British secret service, which he described as ‘the best in the world’.49
Lonely and bored, Kamala struck up a correspondence with Syed Mahmud, a Muslim friend of Nehru’s from his Cambridge days. She encouraged him to correct her Urdu, and debated with him her new-found interest in women’s rights.50 She urged him to educate his daughters and to remove the women of his family from the strictures of purdah. ‘I want you men to be put in purdah for some years, and then I should ask you what it is like.’51
She was able to confide to Mahmud her innermost feelings, which at that time could be dark and unhappy. ‘I am of no use to the world and am making it heavier every day by doing nothing: only eating and sleeping,’ she confessed. ‘I cannot earn my living and am a burden to everybody. I wish that my end will come soon. Your brother [Jawahar] cannot do his work owing to me. There is no other way to free him of his burden.’52 Mahmud later described her as ‘an angel of the house’, ‘goodness personified’, and confessed that she was ‘like a sister to me’.53 But, for all that her friends could see Kamala’s virtues, her own husband remained distant, and only intermittently affectionate.
In the summer of 1927, Motilal arrived at Kamala’s Swiss sanatorium, and with his entrance the austerity of Jawahar’s household vanished. Kamala, Betty, Indira and Jawahar went all around Europe with him first-class, staying in luxury hotels and driving in limousines. In Berlin, Jawahar and Motilal received an invitation from the Soviet government to go to Moscow for the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Russian Revolution. Jawahar was thrilled by Moscow, and by his perceptions of comradely idealism, though he was horrified by the brutality of the Stalinist regime. Motilal felt the horror, but not the thrill. The suite in the Grand Hotel was filled with gold and velvet furniture covered up with coarse cloth: its tsarist opulence did not fit with communist tastes. It was freezing, and Betty was alarmed to discover that there was no hot water to bathe in – ‘though Father succeeded by making a tremendous fuss’.54
When Jawahar finally returned to India, he was driven by a new confidence. His fellow Congressmen began to joke that ‘vodka has gone to his head’.55 ‘In a hundred fiery speeches all over India he preached the doctrine of complete independence’, wrote Betty. ‘So radical was he that even Gandhiji protested that he was moving too fast, and Father was terribly worried.’56 Motilal’s concern was that his son on the left, and Subhas Chandra Bose on the right, would split Congress. Towards the late 1920s, the independence movement had lost much of its vitality. Nehru had been in Europe; Gandhi’s focus had been on his two personal campaigns, swadeshi – self-sufficiency, or the campaign to buy Indian-made goods – and khadi, or hand-spinning of cloth. It came as something of a surprise to all sides when, in March 1927, the British government announced that it was appointing a commission to look into India’s future.57
The Simon Commission, led by Sir John Simon and including a junior Labour MP called Clement Attlee, arrived in India in February 1928, to investigate possible changes to the Indian constitution. Indian politicians were outraged: every single man on the Commission was British, and they had had enough of Britons imposing constitutions upon them. Immediately, Congress and the Muslim League came together to organize protests. ‘Once again, by lack of elementary tact, the British did for us what we could not seem to do ourselves,’ wrote Betty, wryly, ‘they unified India.’58 The protests would give Jawaharlal Nehru his first experience of violence at the hands of the state.
Sixteen people with a flag had been defined as constituting an illegal procession, and so Nehru led a group of exactly that description through the back streets of Lucknow. They had not gone more than a couple of hundred yards when mounted policemen rode them down and let fly with their lathis, bamboo sticks wi
th metal tips. As he saw his fellow demonstrators being thrashed, Jawahar’s instinct was to hide – but he forced himself instead to face the aggression. A policeman approached him on horseback, and Jawahar simply asked him to go ahead, before turning his head away. From high atop his horse the policeman struck two blows on Jawahar’s body. Jawahar did not fall, and was saved from further injury by the intervention of local officials.59
The next day, when the Simon Commission actually arrived, a few thousand assembled for a protest on the maidan. They were charged by mounted policemen, who galloped their horses right up to the crowd, trampling innocent bystanders as they went. Once again, the policemen hit out with batons and lathis. Nehru had to fight down the urge to strike back.60
Nehru and his compatriots emerged from their beating with their flesh thoroughly mortified. He himself had received a serious injury to his arm, which would trouble him for the rest of his life, though he was too proud to admit it in his autobiography. ‘Injuries severe but not serious’, he telegraphed to friends in London. ‘Hope survive the British Empire.’61
It looked like he might, for the British general election of May 1929 returned a minority Labour government: weak, but determined to move on Indian policy. Lord Irwin was summoned back to London in June; he returned to Delhi in October, and made a proclamation:
In view of the doubts which have been expressed both in Great Britain and India regarding the interpretation to be placed on the intentions of the British Government in enacting the Statute of 1919, I am authorised on behalf of His Majesty’s Government to state clearly that in their judgment it is implicit in the declaration of 1917 that the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress as there contemplated is the attainment of Dominion Status.62
It had taken twelve years to clear up that misunderstanding; an incredible amount of time during which many opportunities had been lost. It would take a further eighteen years before India actually achieved dominion status. A great many more opportunities, a very large amount of money, and hundreds of thousands of human lives would be sacrificed along the way.
CHAPTER 6
WE WANT NO CAESARS
IN INDIA, THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT HAD LONG ENFORCED A monopoly on salt. It was illegal to go to the beach and collect it, and more illegal still to sell it on. When salt was sold legitimately, a tax went directly to the British government, providing a total of three per cent of its revenue from India.1 This gave Gandhi the cue for the most iconic of all his campaigns, the one which sealed his international fame: the Salt March.
In 1930, Gandhi announced that he would organize his first civil disobedience campaign against the British for eight years. To Nehru’s great satisfaction, he also declared – perhaps as a sign of lessons learned from the debacle after Chauri Chaura – that Congress should not desist if the protest turned violent.2
Gandhi’s choice of the salt tax as a target for his protest was inspired, though it was met with a bemusement verging on disdain when he first presented it to Congress.3 British taxes had never been a major target of the nationalist campaign, perhaps because they were so low: in peacetime, the raj never took more than 7 per cent of India’s income.4 But the salt tax hit the poor disproportionately hard. It had particular resonance because salt was a product of nature, freely given up by the sea. Gandhi planned to go and collect it. As an ascetic, he himself had not eaten salt for six years – but was prepared to start again for a good cause.5 This was a brilliantly simple protest, which could involve men, women and children of all ages, castes and creeds. With the ageing Gandhi in humble garb, walking with a staff and leading his people to freedom, its symbolism was exquisitely pitched for a Western audience as well as for the Indian masses.6 In March 1930, Patricia Kendall was among the many American journalists who interviewed this strange and mystical Indian, who was fast becoming a celebrity in world politics. ‘It is always delightful to talk to Americans,’ Gandhi greeted her. ‘Unfortunately I have little time just now, as I am preparing to march to the sea and break the salt laws of this satanic Government.’7 On 12 March, he strode out of the Sabarmarti ashram, followed by seventy-eight men. ‘Let nobody assume that after I am arrested there will be no one left to guide you,’ he announced. ‘It is not I, but Pandit Jawaharlal who will be your guide. He has the capacity to lead.’8
Gandhi and his fellow satyagrahis marched 241 miles to the shores of the Arabian Sea, attracting many more marchers as they went. A crowd of thousands, waited upon by the international media, arrived at the coastal village of Dandi on 5 April. They prayed all night and, the next morning, Gandhi led them down to the ocean, and picked up a handful of salt from the shore. The marchers immediately crowded into the sea and filled all manner of kettles and pans, boiling them over fires to evaporate the water, leaving behind in each a few muddy crystals of contraband.
The effect across India was sensational. Along 5000 miles of coastline, many thousands of Indians went to the shore and simply picked up or boiled down their own salt. The British administration in Delhi, aware that it was being made to look foolish, started making the situation worse by arresting people. These included Nehru and Gandhi, the latter’s detention provoking a demonstration by 100,000 people in Bombay. And 25,000 others followed their leaders into British prisons. The American journalist Webb Miller made his way with some difficulty past the British authorities to watch a satyagraha protest at the salt pans north of Bombay. His eyewitness report shocked the world. Around 2500 satyagrahis clad in white khadi, led by Gandhi’s son Manilal and the poet Sarojini Naidu, marched towards the salt deposits. Indian police guards, commanded by a handful of British officers, ran forward to meet the first column of marchers and struck at them brutally with their steel-tipped lathis. ‘Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows’, Miller wrote.9 The air filled with the grisly thud of steel against undefended skull. The first line fell in pools of their own blood, many struck unconscious. The rest marched on until they, too, were beaten down. Then a second column formed, and the same thing happened again. Hundreds of bodies piled up, bones broken, flesh slashed open, white clothes spattered and soaked with crimson. But not a single satyagrahi fought back. Frustrated, the police began harassing the casualties, beating them brutally, kicking them in their stomachs and groins, and throwing their bruised bodies into ditches. That afternoon, Miller counted 320 injured and 2 dead in the shed that served as a field hospital.
Later that year, the British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, convened a Round Table Conference to address India’s future. He had invited representatives of ‘every community’ to London: maharajas, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Anglo-Indians, Untouchables, trades unions, the Burmese, and women – who could not really be said to constitute a community, but certainly had plenty of grievances. Congress had been invited, but did not participate. To Nehru’s disgust, the most visible Indian figure was the passionate but divisive Aga Khan, the super-rich hereditary leader of Shia Ismaili Muslims.10
The first session of the Round Table Conference opened in London on 12 November 1930, to an interminable chorus of partisan speeches by the dozens of representatives. As the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge acidly put it, the invitation of so many delegates ensured that ‘everything under the sun [was] represented except the 25,000 in gaol and the 300,000,000 cultivating their small patches of overworked soil.’11 MacDonald’s optimism soon wilted: ‘Hindu-Moslem not coming together,’ he wrote despondently in his diary on 18 December. ‘They have no mutual confidence & Hindu too nimble for Mosl: brethren.’12 The only agreement which could be made by the end was to plan for an All-India Federation.
In January 1931, Gandhi, Nehru and other leaders were released by the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, probably the most sympathetic Viceroy India had yet seen. He invited Gandhi to the Viceroy’s House, and did not even object when the old man brought his own illegal salt to consume pointedly in front of him. In London, Churchill launched into an outraged condemnation of the spectacle of ‘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 Vice-regal palace’, but Irwin ignored him.13 He was later asked whether Gandhi had been very tiresome, to which he replied sharply: ‘Some people found Our Lord very tiresome.’14
From 15 February to 5 March, Irwin and Gandhi prepared a pact. Congress would discontinue its campaign of civil disobedience, lift the boycott on British goods, and send a delegate to the second Round Table Conference. In return, political prisoners would be freed, the swadeshi campaign would be approved, and those Indians who lived near the sea would be allowed to make salt unhindered. India as a whole saw its Bapu (‘Father’) being welcomed into the Viceroy’s House, and was jubilant. But Nehru wept when news reached him of the pact, which he saw as a betrayal of Congress principles. The pact reserved British control over defence, foreign policy, finance and the position of minorities. It did not challenge the extortionate tax rates on peasants; salt could be made, but not sold; and there would be no investigation into allegations of police brutality.15
The sympathetic Lord Irwin was replaced, in a most untimely move, by the far more hostile Lord Willingdon. Under much pressure from Willingdon, who wanted him out of the way, Gandhi eventually agreed to go to the Round Table Conference as Congress’s sole delegate – to the further dismay of Nehru.16
Gandhi arrived in Folkestone on 12 September aboard SS Rajputana, which was mischievously reported to be carrying a ton of holy Ganges mud for some idolatrous purpose.17 It had already become obvious that Gandhi’s celebrity would overshadow any political interest in the conference. London was also playing host to a Hollywood celebrity at that time, in the form of Charlie Chaplin, and someone with a keener sense of publicity than judgement hit upon the idea of introducing the two.18