Indian Summer
Page 11
They met at a house just off the East India Dock Road, surrounded by a formidable battalion of the world’s media and crowds of curious East End folk. Chaplin arrived first, and went straight to the upstairs front room, where he waited and tried to think of things to say to the Mahatma. A cheer from the crowd heralded Gandhi’s arrival. He followed Chaplin upstairs, and the two men waved to their public from a first-floor window. They made an odd couple, each so exceptionally famous in so different a context that their simultaneous appearance on one sofa was almost a cosmological event. ‘Now came that uneasy, terrifying moment,’ Chaplin remembered, ‘when I should say something astutely intelligent upon a subject I knew little about.’19 Bravely, he ventured to declare himself sympathetic to India’s freedom struggle, and asked Gandhi about his opposition to machinery. Gandhi gave his usual answer, about the real meaning of independence being the shedding of unnecessary things, while the photographers snapped away, flashbulbs popping.20 Perhaps the experience did not leave Chaplin entirely untouched. Five years later, he released Modern Times – a film in which he starred as a factory worker struggling against the oppressions of the machine age.
Invited to Buckingham Palace, Gandhi turned up in his loin-cloth, delighting the world’s media all over again. In India, Lord Willingdon was tickled to imagine the scene. ‘I wonder what Your Majesty thought of the curious little man,’ he wrote, ‘and whether you could realise, from the few words that you spoke to him, what a terribly difficult little person he is.’21 It was the King rather than Gandhi who chose to be difficult. He made a point of saying that Britain would have no truck with Indian terrorism, and that he was going to see that a stop was put to it. ‘Gandhi spluttered some excuse,’ remembered the King’s secretary, ‘but H.M. said he held him responsible.’22 As Gandhi was about to leave, the King was heard to collar him again: ‘Remember, Mr Gandhi, I won’t have any attacks on my Empire.’ Gandhi replied, with deft courtesy: ‘I must not be drawn into political argument in Your Majesty’s Palace after receiving Your Majesty’s hospitality.’23 David, the Prince of Wales, had been chatting with some Indian princes, when he noticed Gandhi shaking hands with his father. One of the other princes murmured to David, ‘This will cost you India.’24
At the conference itself, nothing much was achieved. For two months, discussions circled pointlessly, with snipes about precedence and protocol both reflecting and exacerbating a lack of trust all round. Thousands of miles away, Nehru asserted that the scales were loaded against Congress. He was right: but this situation had not been helped by Congress sending Gandhi as its sole delegate.25 For all his fame, the Mahatma was one man, and therefore appeared to be in a minority. B.R. Ambedkar for the Untouchables, Tara Singh for the Sikhs, and the Aga Khan and Mohammad Ali Jinnah for the Muslims, all demanded separate concessions for their communities – and were more than able to shout Gandhi down. The whole performance was looking increasingly like a flop. On 8 November, Congress wired Gandhi to summon him home; he ignored the wire, and stayed on, to no advantage whatever.
Gandhi eventually departed from Victoria Station on 5 December, to choruses of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ and the Indian nationalist anthem, ‘Vande mataram’ (‘Hail motherland’). When Gandhi eventually arrived back at Bombay, it was to a chorus of boos and the waving of black flags by 2000 Untouchable protesters, who viewed his insistence that they should not be given a separate electorate from caste-Hindus as an act of repression.26
The Round Table Conference had been a failure for everyone involved. A third session at the end of 1932, ungraced by celebrity, troubled neither the press nor the populace.
By the early 1930s, even the British Prime Minister supported the idea of Indian self-rule. And yet independence would take until 1947. To a considerable extent the delay may be attributed to the actions of three men: Winston Churchill, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and Mohandas Gandhi.27
One of the great faults of the British attitude to India was simply that it was pigheaded. It preferred the illusion of imperial might to the admission of imperial failure; it put prestige before common sense. And the most pig-headed of all British politicians when it came to India was Winston Churchill who, following the defeat of his party, had returned to the back-benches as an opposition MP. ‘I hate Indians,’ he declared. ‘They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’28 Churchill was fond of quoting his father, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Randolph Churchill. ‘Our rule in India is as it were a sheet of oil spread out over and keeping free from storms a vast and profound ocean of humanity,’ the elder Churchill had said.29 As a metaphor, it was apt, though for different reasons than he intended. An oil slick does not protect the sea from storms, but stifles all life beneath it. Winston Churchill made it his business to incapacitate any attempt to move the Indian nation towards self-government. Clement Attlee remembered of the Simon Commission recommendations that ‘it took a very long time to get through and a great deal of harm was done during the debates by Winston and his die-hards. Halifax [formerly Lord Irwin], who was Viceroy, believed that there was a good chance that we might have got it accepted and had an all-Indian Government but for Churchill and his die-hards. That is one of the things one has to chalk down against the old boy.’30
But within Indian division, Churchill saw an opportunity. An argument continually repeated saw the large Muslim and Untouchable minorities as being under serious threat in Hindu-majority India. The British, in their role as paternalistic rulers, had a moral duty to protect them. If the British left, it would be a dereliction of that duty; therefore the British could not leave India. The existence of the Muslim League served to strengthen this argument. Meanwhile, it suited the Muslim League to have friends in the British establishment.
Despite the cultural and religious differences in India in 1931, there was not yet a mainstream demand for partition. Muslims, Sikhs and Untouchables may have requested separate electorates, to safeguard their representation among the caste-Hindu majority; but they did not demand separate nations. The call for Pakistan would only come to prominence as a result of the alienation of India’s ablest Muslim politician, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who had walked out of the second Round Table Conference in disgust and, at that point, appeared to be politically finished. The opposite was true. Jinnah would soon emerge as one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century: creating his own country, leading it, and almost single-handedly reviving Islam as a modern political force.
Jinnah was a successful barrister, born in Karachi and called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn. Tall and slender, he hardly ate, and smoked fifty Craven A cigarettes a day.31 He was often described as looking cadaverous, but this description does no justice to his dynamism. With his smooth coiffure and glittering stare he looked more like a cobra than a corpse. Margaret Bourke-White described at length ‘the Oxford-educated Jinnah’ with his ‘razor-sharp mind and hypnotic, smoldering eyes’.32 Jinnah had not, in fact, been educated at Oxford: he had attended a madrassa in Karachi and a local mission school. But it was easy to believe that this urbane gentleman, described by the New York Times as ‘undoubtedly one of the best dressed men in the British Empire’, his public speaking rich with quotations from Shakespeare, was part of the British elite.33
Jinnah had begun his political career in Congress. He made himself a figurehead for Hindu–Muslim unity, and was acclaimed as such by Hindu Congress luminaries. He had joined the Muslim League in 1913, confident that he could act as a bridge between the political parties. But it was the emergence of Gandhi as the spiritual leader of Congress in 1920 that began to elbow Jinnah out. ‘I will have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach to politics,’ Jinnah had said, rejecting the call for satyagraha. ‘I part company with the Congress and Gandhi. I do not believe in working up mob hysteria. Politics is a gentleman’s game.’34 But politics is rarely gentlemanly, and as if to prove it there was a profound and deadly clash of personality between Jinnah and the other English gentleman of C
ongress, Jawaharlal Nehru. Like his compatriot and friend, the poet Muhammad Iqbal, Jinnah disdained ‘the atheistic socialism of Jawaharlal’. ‘We do not want any flag excepting the League flag of the Crescent and Star,’ he would declare. ‘Islam is our guide and the complete code of our life.’35
Despite his position as one of the key figures in the rise of twentieth-century Islam, Jinnah was no fundamentalist. His Islam was liberal, moderate and tolerant. It was said that he could recite none of the Koran, rarely went to a mosque, and spoke little Urdu. Much has been made of his reluctance to don Muslim outfits, his fondness for whisky, and his rumoured willingness to eat ham sandwiches.36 In fact, he never pretended to be anything other than a progressive Muslim, influenced by the intellectual and economic aspects of European culture as well as by the teachings of Mohammed.37 The game he played was carefully considered: here was a Muslim who understood the British sufficiently to parley on equal terms, but asserted his Islamic identity strongly enough that he could never be seen to grovel. His refusal of a knighthood was significant; so, too, was his demurral in the face of Muslim attempts to call him ‘Maulana’ Jinnah, denoting a religious teacher.38 Some historians go so far as to describe him as a ‘bad’ Muslim, revealing more about their own ideas of what a Muslim should be than about Jinnah’s faith. In any case, the Muslim League suffered from no shortage of good Muslims. What it had lacked was a good politician. And Jinnah was without question one of the most brilliant politicians of his day.
Jinnah had married Rattanbai ‘Ruttie’ Petit, the daughter of a prominent Parsi banker, when he was forty-two and she just eighteen. Rebellious and beautiful, Ruttie had been a close friend of Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister, Nan Pandit; she was closer still, indeed almost passionately so, to Padmaja Naidu, who would later become Jawahar’s lover.39 The deeply personal and incestuous nature of Indian politics is plain from these relationships.
Jinnah’s marriage was not an easy one. After the birth of their daughter, Dina, he and Ruttie separated. Ruttie died on her thirtieth birthday in 1929, following a long affliction with a digestive disorder.40 Jinnah was devastated at her death, and moved to London with Dina. He took a large house in Hampstead, was chauffeured around in a Bentley, played billiards, lunched at Simpson’s and went to the theatre. He considered standing for parliament in the Labour interest, but was rejected by a Yorkshire constituency, allegedly with the verdict that it would not be represented by ‘a toff like that’.41 His sister Fatima gave up a career as a dentist to become, in effect, his hostess, though that title belies her full significance. Fatima Jinnah was a woman of intelligence and drive, and was influential in her brother’s move towards Islamic nationalism.
Jinnah had returned to politics to fight the Muslim League’s corner at the Round Table Conference, which pitted him directly against Gandhi. ‘I had the distinct feeling that unity was hopeless, that Gandhi did not want it,’ he told a journalist in the 1940s.42 After the conference, he returned to private life – until a friend reported to him a comment made by his arch-rival, Jawaharlal Nehru. In conversation at a private dinner party, Jawahar had remarked that Jinnah was ‘finished’. Jinnah was so furious that he packed up and headed back to India immediately, with the stated intent to ‘show Nehru’.43 He returned ready to fire up the Muslim League, which he would transform from a scattered band of eccentrics into the second most powerful political party in India.
But probably the most surprising obstacle to Indian independence was the man who was widely supposed to be leading the campaign for it – Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi’s need for spotless moral perfection hamstrung his party’s progress. His principal object was to make the Indian people worthy of freedom in the eyes of God. The object of actually achieving freedom from the British was secondary. Gandhi’s most influential work, Hind Swaraj, published in 1908, set out very clearly his point of view: that European civilization was corrupt, atheist and destructive, but that merely driving the British out of India would not serve to make India free. To be free, Indians needed to relinquish violence, material possessions, machinery, railways, lawyers, doctors, formal education, the English language, discord between Hindu and Muslim, alcohol, and sex. It is for this reason that his campaigns so often faltered. Gandhi stood for virtue in a form purer than politics usually allows. Whenever he had to make a choice between virtue and politics, he always chose virtue. He strove for universal piety, continence and humility, regardless of the consequences. Even if a person were faced with death, or a group with obliteration, he would sanction no compromise of moral integrity. It is impossible to assess how the Indian nationalist struggle might have proceeded without Gandhi, but there are ample grounds for thinking that a more earthly campaign led by a united Congress, perhaps under the joint leadership of Motilal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, could have brought dominion status to India in the 1920s.44 Gandhi’s spiritual style of leadership was a source of inspiration to millions but, politically speaking, it was erratic. Within Congress, too, it created divisions. Congress was not a church, and Gandhi’s mystical judgements were often difficult even for his closest followers to accept.
A year after his appearance at the Round Table Conference, Gandhi started a new campaign on caste. There were already tensions about his direction among his colleagues, and this religiously and politically fraught issue would exacerbate them. Gandhi’s own attitude to caste, which he had long accepted as the ‘natural’ order of society, was complex.45 His renaming of the Untouchables as ‘Harijans’ (children of God) was, for him, a way of showing respect for their role. This brought up one of the most fundamental divisions between Nehru and Gandhi. Nehru saw social and economic hardship as a cause of suffering, and therefore wanted to end it; Gandhi saw hardship as noble and righteous, and therefore wanted to spread the blessings of poverty and humility to all people.
In September 1932, Gandhi announced that he was going to embark on a ‘Fast Unto Death’ until the British government withdrew its plan to give separate electorates to the Untouchables under the new Indian constitution. The British were surprised. They had presumed he would be in favour of a measure intended to improve the representation of outcaste Hindus in government. But Gandhi was adamant. Separate electorates would put a permanent bar between the Untouchables and other Hindus. It was not division he wanted, but respect for the Untouchables within Hinduism.
Nehru was horrified that Gandhi had chosen ‘a side-issue for his final sacrifice’.46 It was not that he considered caste unimportant. The Nehru family had been demonstrably opposed to Untouchability for longer than Gandhi – Motilal Nehru had appalled his more devout friends by employing an Untouchable to work as his valet and, even more shockingly, another as his cook.47 But Jawahar worried that Gandhi was losing focus on the larger issue of independence. It also upset him that Gandhi would opt for a ‘religious and sentimental approach to a political question’.48
Meanwhile, the remarkable B. R. Ambedkar, who had already clashed with Gandhi at the Round Table Conference, moved in for an open attack on the Mahatma. Ambedkar had been born an Untouchable but, thanks to his brilliance and hard work, instead of cleaning up feculence he had studied law in London and earned a doctorate from Columbia University in New York. Ambedkar was outraged that Gandhi was fasting against the granting of separate electorates to Untouchables, while apparently not objecting to the same concession being given to Muslims or Sikhs.49 He found the Mahatma’s glorification of humble village life and lowly self-sacrifice patronizing, and swiftly realized that Congress had good reason to fear his people, who numbered millions of potential voters, being removed from its fold.50 In late September, Ambedkar went to Poona, where Gandhi was languishing in Yeravda Jail, being fussed over by nine doctors.51 After almost a week of hot debate, both men compromised to sign the Poona Pact. The pact gave Untouchables a guaranteed number of seats, but not a wholly separate electorate. In return, wells, schools, roads, temples and institutions which had previously been closed to Untouchables would be opened to
them.
Ambedkar claimed victory. ‘There was nothing noble in the fast’, he wrote. ‘It was a foul and filthy act. The fast was not for the benefit of the Untouchables. It was against them and was the worst form of coercion against a helpless people to give up the constitutional safeguards of which they had become possessed … It was a vile and wicked act.’52 Gandhi’s supporters claimed victory, too, but a serious blow had been struck against the Mahatma’s image. The ‘Father of the Nation’ had been brought into direct conflict with that nation’s most downtrodden people. Among many Untouchable groups, his reputation would never recover.53
There was a sad epilogue to the story. On 15 January 1934, a colossal earthquake hit Bihar, a rural province on the Gangetic plain beneath the Himalayas of Nepal. The devastated area stretched from Allahabad to Darjeeling, and from Kathmandu to Patna. The death toll was estimated at 20,000.54 Gandhi visited Bihar in March, and spoke to the bereaved, destitute and homeless people. The earthquake, he told them, ‘is a chastisement for your sins’. And the particular sin that he had in mind was the enforcement of Untouchability.55
Even Gandhi’s closest supporters were horrified. The victims of the earthquake had included poor as well as rich; Untouchables, Muslims and Buddhists as well as caste-Hindus. But Gandhi was explicitly blaming the victims, appropriating a terrible disaster to promote his own religious ideas. Nehru, who had been helping the relief effort in Bihar, read Gandhi’s remarks ‘with a great shock’.56 But the most effective refutation came from Rabindranath Tagore, long one of the Mahatma’s greatest advocates. Tagore argued caustically that this supposedly ‘divine’ justice, if such it was, constituted the least just form of punishment imaginable.57