Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Still, Gandhi did not think that the rulers were beyond redemption. The English, he said, ‘rather deserve our sympathy … They are enterprising and industrious, and their mode of thought is not inherently immoral.’

  The book’s core consists of five chapters on ‘the condition of India’. These condemn railways, lawyers and doctors for spreading poverty and disease, and for intensifying social conflict. The railways, claimed Gandhi, had promoted famine (by encouraging a shift to cash crops), carried plague, and in general ‘accentuate[d] the evil nature of man’. Lawyers had stoked divisions, fomented quarrels from which they alone benefited (through client fees), and helped consolidate British rule by allowing law courts to act as arbiters of the destiny of Indians. For their part, doctors made patients dependent on pills, and encouraged them to take to alcohol and unhealthy foods.

  Gandhi made the case for an anterior Indian nationhood, existing from long before colonial rule. The presence of Muslim conquerors did not, he thought, invalidate his claim. For ‘India cannot cease to be a single nation because people belonging to different religions live in it. The introduction of foreigners does not necessarily destroy the nation, they merge in it.’

  Having defended the idea of India as a nation, Gandhi now exalted the Indian way of life. He insisted that ‘the civilization India has evolved is not to be beaten in the world.’ For

  the tendency of Indian civilization is to elevate the moral being, that of the Western civilization to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God. So understanding and so believing, it behooves every lover of India to cling to the old Indian civilization even as a child clings to its mother’s breast.

  This love of the old was coupled with a distaste for the new. ‘Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization,’ said Gandhi. ‘It represents a great sin.’ And, again: ‘I cannot recall a single good point in connection with machinery.’ Machines had impoverished India, by throwing craftsmen out of work and encouraging a division between capitalists and labourers. He thought ‘it would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than the American Rockefeller.’

  If such passages seem a direct engagement with G. K. Chesterton, other parts of the book answered other provocations – those represented, for example, by the recently executed Madan Lal Dhingra and the still active V. D. Savarkar, who believed that freedom from colonial subjection would come about only through armed struggle. To those who lived (and died) by the gun, Gandhi said the claim that ‘there is no connection between the means and the end is a great mistake’. He spoke of how the wrong means produced an escalating cycle of violence and counter-violence. He offered the example of a robber who came to one’s house. If one mobilized one’s neighbours, the robber would in turn call on his mates, and the two factions would fight and fight. If, on the other hand, one kept one’s windows open for his next visit, the robber might be confused and repent, and stop stealing altogether.

  Gandhi did not want to suggest that all robbers would act like this, but ‘only to show that only fair means can produce fair results, and that, at least in the majority of cases, if not, indeed, in all, the force of love and pity is infinitely greater than the force of arms’.

  For Gandhi, those who wrote history were preoccupied with wars and bloodshed. Thus, if two brothers quarrelled, their neighbours and the newspapers, and hence history, would take notice of it; but if they peaceably settled their dispute, it would remain unrecorded. Extrapolating, Gandhi said, in a striking passage, that ‘hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not, and cannot, take note of this fact. History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of love or of the soul.’ Contrary to what was popularly believed, non-violence had been a far more active force in human affairs than violence. The ‘greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of the success of this force is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the wars of the world, it still lives on’.

  Gandhi argued that non-violent resistance required greater courage than armed struggle. ‘Who is the true warrior,’ he asked: the person ‘who keeps death always as a bosom-friend or he who controls the death of others?’ He insisted that ‘passive resistance is an all-sided sword; it can be used anyhow; it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used. Without shedding a drop of blood, it produces far-reaching results.’

  Hind Swaraj is also notable for its advocacy of inter-faith harmony. The British claimed there existed an ‘inborn enmity between Hindus and Mahomedans’. Gandhi answered that ‘the Hindus flourished under Moslem sovereigns, and Moslems under the Hindu. Each party recognised that mutual fighting was suicidal, and that neither party would abandon its religion by force of arms. Both parties, therefore, decided to live in peace. With the English advent the quarrels recommenced.’ In Gandhi’s view, the different religions were merely ‘different roads converging to the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads, so long as we reach the same goal? Wherein is the cause of quarrelling?’

  In a chapter on education, Gandhi vigorously advocated the use, within India, of languages other than English. All Indians should know their mother-tongue. Hindi could be promoted as a link language, to be read in either the Devanagari or Persian script, thus forging closer relations between Hindus and Muslims. If this were done, ‘we can drive the English language out of the field in a short time’.

  The book ended with a list of nineteen prescriptions for the reader, the middle-class Indian who was Gandhi’s main audience. This, among other things, urged the value of suffering, deplored the tendency of blaming the British for everything, and asked lawyers, doctors and rich men in general to take to wearing and promoting cloth made with hand-looms.9

  At the time of the publication of Hind Swaraj, Gandhi had been seeing his work in print for two decades. However, this was his first published book, and also, more importantly, his first considered piece of writing on Indian politics and society. His earlier essays, abundant though they were, were on rather specialized, specific, themes – such as vegetarian diets, racial laws in Natal and the Transvaal, the origins and outcomes of a particular satyagraha, the pleasures and pains of a particular term in jail, the greatness and relevance of Mazzini, Lincoln, Florence Nightingale, Dadabhai Naoroji, etc. Hind Swaraj was Gandhi’s claim to a larger role for himself in the homeland to which he hoped one day to return. The book appeared at the end of a decade of intense political agitation in India. The Swadeshi movement of 1905–7 had seen the liberals in the Congress being overshadowed, and indeed overwhelmed, by the radicals. This Moderate/Extremist split was formalized in the Surat Congress of December 1907, when the fragile unity of the organization came apart amidst a barrage of shouting, sloganeering, and the throwing of shoes.10

  The Congress had previously confined itself to issuing appeals and writing petitions. Now, bonfires of foreign cloth and fiery speeches became the order of the day. And even Swadeshi was tame in comparison with the terrorist groups that had sprung up in Bengal and Maharashtra, composed of young men seeking to assassinate British officials and thereby further the glory of the Motherland.11

  One consequence of the Swadeshi movement was the polarization of religious sentiments. In Bengal, the movement had coalesced with a struggle to undo the partition of the province, which the British had promoted to separate the Muslim-majority districts of the east from the radicalizing influence of the intellectuals of Calcutta. But, as Gandhi’s mentor Gokhale noted, the ‘wild talk’ of the leaders of the Swadeshi movement, demanding ‘Swarajya without British control’, had set the rulers against the Hindus. They patronized a newly formed Muslim League, promising its grandees a greater share of public posts and government appointments. Gokhale now worried about the ‘fierce antagonism between Hindus and Mahomedans’. Some Hindu organizations were ‘frankly anti-Mahomedan, as the Moslem League is frankly anti-Hindu, and both are anti-national’.12

  Another consequence of the Swadeshi movement wa
s the marginalization of the Moderates. Young patriots were fired with the dream of freedom, to be achieved not by incremental, constitutional means, but by spectacular acts of violence against prominent officials and proconsuls. These revolutionaries thought – or hoped – that by murdering policemen or setting off bombs in government buildings they would awaken the masses, catalyzing their nascent, suppressed, anti-colonial sentiments.

  The Moderates believed that, in their own struggle against the oppressive aspects of colonial rule, they had the British people and British institutions on their side. Harsh laws and punitive taxes were ‘un-British’, to be lifted or withdrawn when their true nature was revealed to His Majesty’s distant but not necessarily unfeeling Government. The ultimate, long-term goal was Dominion Status, where India would have its own elected legislatures on the Westminster model, with the British tie kept alive by the King acting (as he did in Australia and Canada) as head of state.

  The Extremists, on the other hand, rejected British rule, British institutions and British exemplars. They saw the struggle in black-and-white, akin to battles in Hindu myth between gods and demons, devas and asuras. The British were all evil. Gokhale and his ilk liked to quote Mill and Burke (approvingly). On the other side, Gokhale’s great rival, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, idolized the medieval Maratha warrior Shivaji, who had conducted a series of guerrilla battles against Muslim rulers based in Delhi. Tilak had also started an annual festival in honour of Ganapati, the god whose invocation at the start of any task (or battle) was believed to aid in its success (or victory).

  Across the subcontinent, in Bengal, young radicals formed secret societies where they learned to assemble bombs and use guns. They were fired by the example of the Goddess Durga, wife of Shiva, known and revered for slaying the forces of evil. Shivaji and Durga, revenge and retribution – these were the models and methods of the Extremists in the Indian national movement. This invocation of Hindu gods and warriors inevitably disenchanted Muslims, who had recourse to their own holy texts, from which vantage point Hindus were seen as infidels and idolaters.13

  There was a muscular, masculine edge to the patriotism of the Extremists. British rule (and Muslim rule before it) had emasculated the Hindu. He needed now to recover his vigour and his virility, to renew it through daring acts of heroism and sacrifice. Once the British had been evicted through terror, the motherland would rebuild itself along classical Hindu lines. In imagining their post-colonial future, some revolutionaries put their faith in the ancient Indian village panchayat; others, in a pan-Indian Hindu Rashtra which would unite, in one solid, strong, centralized state, Hindus currently divided by language, caste and region.

  The mood in India at the time Gandhi composed and wrote Hind Swaraj was captured in two books by British journalists based in the subcontinent. Both noted the intensity and vigour of the new political movements, yet they had somewhat different understandings of it. The man from the pro-Establishment Times of London saw ‘an illusory “Nationalism” which appeals to nothing in Indian history, but which is calculated and meant to appeal with dangerous force to Western sentiment and ignorance.’ While professing democratic values and aspirations, this movement, claimed the Times man, appealed on the one hand to ‘the old tyranny of caste and to the worst superstitions of Hinduism’, and on the other to ‘the murderous methods of Western Anarchism’.14

  The man from the liberal Manchester Guardian was more sympathetic. He observed that the political upsurge was both deep and widespread. ‘It is the conviction of many,’ he remarked, that ‘India is now standing on the verge of a national renaissance – a new birth in intellect, social life, and the affairs of the state.’ This renaissance was inspired by the ‘example set to all Oriental nationalities by Japan’, but also by a keen understanding of the political heritage of the conquerors themselves. The Guardian man thus wrote that

  the visits of highly educated Indians to England, the use of English as a common tongue among educated people of all races and religions, the increasing knowledge of our history and our hard-won liberties, the increasing study of our great Liberal thinkers – all these admirable advantages we have ourselves contributed to the new spirit, and it is useless for startled reactionaries to think of withdrawing them now.15

  Gandhi, in South Africa, was keenly following political and social developments in his homeland. The pages of Indian Opinion were peppered with reports on Congress meetings and Swadeshi protests. Gandhi himself subscribed to a variety of English and Gujarati papers, which came to him through the post. Now, in his own little book, written with speed on the ship, he brought together his views on what ailed India and what might redeem it.

  As revealed in Hind Swaraj, Gandhi remained in some respects close to the Moderates. He deplored the savage criticisms of Gokhale by Savarkar and company. Like his mentor, he was deeply committed to Hindu–Muslim harmony. He saw the religious divide as a product of British rule (which, for its own interests, had set one community against the other), and not as an essential or perennial part of the Indian condition.

  In other respects, Gandhi appears in this book to be closer to the Extremists. His harsh words on the British Parliament distanced him from Gokhale and Naoroji. His exaltation of ancient Indian moral and civic virtues, his idealization of a past where Indians lived at peace with themselves, his insistence that education should be in the mother tongue alone – these all may have been congenial to the patriot who looked to indigenous rather than Western models of progress or redemption.

  Finally, in Hind Swaraj Gandhi set himself apart from both Extremists and Moderates in his advocacy of non-violent resistance. He was opposed to both petitioning and to bomb-throwing. He saw the former as ineffective and the latter as immoral. The rulers would not concede ground unless pressed to do so. But murdering officials would not scare the British into leaving either. Besides, violence tended to beget violence – once aimed at the foreigner, it would in time be aimed at Indians of rival views or backgrounds. The Transvaal protests of 1907–9 had convinced Gandhi of the efficacy and moral superiority of satyagraha, a method for whose application India offered a larger and more inviting stage.

  Hind Swaraj was a summation of Gandhi’s political views, and a statement of his political ambition. The Indian national movement had thus far been dominated by Bengalis and Maharashtrians. Valuable supporting parts had been played by Tamils, Punjabis and Hindi-speakers. Now, through the writing and publication of this book, a Gujarati based in South Africa sought to clear a space for himself, and to make his voice heard. His experiences in the diaspora, uniting and mobilizing Indians, gave him (he thought) a unique vantage point from which to illuminate and intervene in debates within the motherland.

  Gandhi had hoped that Hind Swaraj would be read and discussed in India, its parallels and departures with prevailing political trends noted and acted upon. In February 1910, a certain Chibba Prabhu arrived in Bombay from Durban with 415 copies of the original Gujarati edition of the book. However, these were seized by Customs and a copy passed on to the Oriental Translator of the Bombay Government. The book, reported this Translator, is ‘of a decidedly objectionable nature, especially considering the present disturbed political condition in the country’. He then provided a summary of Hind Swaraj’s contents in a single extended paragraph, this constituting (so far as we know) the first written response to a text that has attracted hundreds of thousands of readers down the decades:

  It purports to be a dialogue between the ‘Editor’ and a ‘Reader’, in which the former inculcates his peculiar views regarding the present political condition and the possible future, of India. The ‘Reader’, representing probably the average Indian ‘passive resister’ of the Transvaal, is represented as holding frankly Extremist views, and indeed speaks quite frankly of ‘driving out’ the British from India as a principal object of political agitation in this country. The ‘Editor’ is no less anxious to see the rule in India pass from the hands of the British to those of Indians. But
he holds views about the evils of armed resistance of any kind, peculiar to Tolstoy, whose follower the author Mohanchand [sic] Karamchand Gandhi, professes to be. He ascribes all the evils from which India is suffering, plague, famine, poverty, crime, etc., to the railways, education, reforms, lawyers, doctors, in fact everything introduced by Englishmen in this country. Indeed, in places the man seems to be crazy in his passionate desire to keep India and her life and ways unpolluted by the least contact with the West. The English have no place in India, says the ‘Editor’, if they want to bring their harmful civilisation with them into this country. On condition that this civilisation is kept out of India, the English may be allowed to live in the land. The ‘Reader’ is made to express revolutionary ideas and even to approve of political assassinations. ‘We will first terrorise (the British) by a few murders. Then a few of our people, who will have been trained up, will fight openly. Of course 20 or 25 lakhs of people will die in this fight. But ultimately we shall regain the country. We shall defeat the British by means of guerilla warfare’. The ‘Editor’ strongly condemns these ideas as borrowed from the West and says that bloodshed can never make India independent though by the way he calls Dhingra a true patriot, ‘but his patriotism was mad’. ‘But’, says the Reader, ‘you must admit that what little has been granted by Lord Morley is owing to these political murders’. ‘It is quite possible’, says the ‘Editor’, ‘that what Lord Morley has granted has been granted through fear. But what has been gained through fear can be retained only so long as that fear lasts.’ Therefore he advocates peaceful means, and among them ‘passive resistance’.16