Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Harilal’s version of the conversations is shorter, and written some years after the event. It diverges on some crucial points of detail and interpretation. ‘I was delayed at Delagoa Bay’, recalled the son,

  you came to know of my whereabouts and caught up with me. Obeying your orders I returned. I remained steadfast in my views. Therefore, instead of giving me a patient hearing you mutilated my thoughts and clipped my wings. You made me give up the idea of going to Lahore and instead made me stay in Ahmedabad. You promised to give me thirty rupees for monthly expenditure. You did not allow me to measure my capabilities; you measured them for me.11

  ‘You did not allow me to measure my capabilities; you measured them for me.’ This is a harsh but accurate judgement, confirmed – albeit in gentler and more euphemistic language – by a close observer of the Gandhi household, Millie Polak. At Phoenix and at Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi was often found cradling a baby while talking politics with an adult. Juxtaposing this with his treatment of Harilal, Millie concluded that it was easier for Gandhi

  to deal with the needs of young children than those of adolescence, with its warring emotions, its struggle for liberty and self-expression, and its developing mind. During that period in the life of the developing individual, he did not so easily realise the strength of the storms that can sweep reason aside.12

  The clash between father and son was intensified by their closeness in age. Harilal was born when Gandhi was only eighteen. His adolescent crisis thus coincided with his father’s midlife crisis. As Harilal sought a career and education path of his own, Gandhi was moving away from the law towards social service and political activism. The desires of the one clashed with the convictions of the other. Gandhi would not, could not, recognize that there were two sides to the story. He blamed Harilal’s rebellion on his recent reading of Sarasvatichandra, a Gujarati novel by Govardhanram Tripathi whose hero, disenchanted with his father, leaves the parental home to discover himself.13

  There is little question that Gandhi bore down heavily on his eldest son. He did not recognize his good fortune in being allowed to follow his own path independent of his parents’ wishes. Had his father Kaba Gandhi been alive when Mohandas finished his Matriculation, he might never have allowed the boy to proceed across the kala pani to London. Had his mother been alive in 1893, she might not have permitted him to make another perilous overseas journey to South Africa. Once in the diaspora, Gandhi was able to carve out a professional and activist career of his choice, without interference from family elders.

  With his children, Gandhi was the traditional overbearing Hindu patriarch – making them do what he intended for them. Because he had now become disenchanted with modern professions, his sons must not be permitted a modern education. Because he had himself embraced brahmacharya they must do likewise. Harilal and Manilal, as the two elder boys, were expected to be perfect and exemplary satyagrahis, courting arrest or labouring on the land as per their father’s whims and desires.

  When the Hindu priest Ram Sundar Pandit had abandoned the struggle, Gandhi dryly dismissed him as a ‘bad coin’. That detachment was not possible as regards his sons. The more they disagreed with him, the more intense and impatient he became with them. Those who secretly signed permits or failed to court arrest were not worthy of redemption. But his own sons could never be permitted to become ‘bad coins’. That what was bad in terms of their conduct and what good was a matter of opinion, bias and prejudice, rather than parental fiat, was something that Gandhi – in common, it must be said, with most or all Indian fathers of his generation – did not or could not understand.

  Gandhi’s harsh response to Harilal may have had a deeper basis – the fact that, in South Africa, he was accustomed to enmity and suppression, but not, really, to rebellion or disagreement. The white reactionaries of Durban and the militant Pathans of Johannesburg had both physically attacked him. The regime of the Boers had several times put him in jail. But among his own flock and his own friends he was accustomed to being the leader. The mentors he recognized – Gokhale, Raychandbhai, Tolstoy – had all lived in other continents.

  Gandhi had a real gift for friendship – for making connections and conveying affection across racial, linguistic, religious and gender boundaries. The love he had for, and the intimacy he shared with, Henry and Millie Polak, Kallenbach, Sonja Schlesin, Ritch, the Dokes, Leung Quinn, Thambi Naidoo, A. M. Cachalia and Parsee Rustomjee was visible proof of this. But all these friends (and others like them) were ultimately in a position of deference to him. Their love for Gandhi had strong elements of reverence and adoration. Only the Polaks had the intellectual independence to argue with Gandhi on major or minor matters – and even they, in the end, recognized him as their leader.

  Here lay the deeper significance of Harilal’s self-assertion (‘defiance’ would be too strong a word). His cardinal mistake was in not going all the way down the road marked out for him by his father. Harilal had, several times, bravely and unselfishly courted arrest. But the desire to study, to make a career of his own, remained with him. Gandhi was, by now, accustomed to the loyal, unquestioning support of many Indians in South Africa. (And of more than a few Europeans too.) That one of his own sons would choose to rebel was both unexpected and, for him, inexplicable.

  Harilal knew this, which is why he had left in the first place without telling his father directly. He was too frightened to face Gandhi. He was brought back to Johannesburg, but remained truculent. When Gandhi failed, in that all-night conversation, to persuade Harilal to abandon his plans to return to India, he reluctantly agreed not to stand in his way. But he was never really reconciled to his son’s going.

  When Harilal finally left, on 16 May, some students from Tolstoy Farm accompanied Gandhi to Johannesburg Station to wish the boy good-bye. One student recalled that ‘when the train was about to start, Bapu kissed Harilal, gave a gentle slap on his cheek, and said: “Forgive your father, if you think he has done you wrong”.’14

  Ten days after Harilal left for India, Gandhi wrote urging him to read Indian Opinion ‘carefully’. He was sent a list of Gujarati books to study – among them the works of Narmadashanker and Raychandbhai. He was advised to ‘make it a regular practice to read Tulsidas’s Ramayana’. Gandhi added that ‘most of the books I have listed at the end of Indian Home Rule are worth going through’, and ended by saying, ‘please write to me in detail and regularly’.15

  Harilal was going back to India to break free of his father. Following him by the next boat was this letter of instruction and command. The barrage continued: in the first months of his return, Harilal was dissuaded by his father from learning French, told to give up his ‘infatuation’ with the matriculation exam, and chastised for having ‘again succumbed to passion in regard to [his wife] Chanchal’.16

  Through the middle months of 1911, Gandhi was based at Tolstoy Farm. The day began with several hours of physical labour. He taught at the school from ten-thirty to four. The students, like their master, did not eat salt, vegetables and pulses between Monday and Saturday. They lived on fruits (especially apples and bananas), bread with olive oil, and rice and sago porridge. The community had dinner early, at five-thirty, and Gandhi attended to his correspondence before going to bed. He went into Johannesburg only once a week. L. W. Ritch was taking care of his clients, to Gandhi’s relief; he ‘fervently’ hoped he never had to practise law again.17

  Gandhi was now increasingly thinking of returning to India. That country presented a far wider canvas for the kind of work he was doing. He was keen to go back; even keener to see him return was his friend Pranjivan Mehta. Gandhi, thought Mehta, was the ‘Mahatma’ their country so desperately needed. Mehta was Gandhi’s oldest and – Polak and Kallenbach notwithstanding – closest friend. They had become intimate as students in London. Mehta spent several weeks with Gandhi in Durban in 1898; some years later, Gandhi had visited the doctor-turned-jeweller in Rangoon, where he was a leading light of the Indian community.

&nb
sp; In 1908, Pranjivan Mehta started the Burma Provincial Congress Committee, as a branch of the Indian National Congress. This was the first political organization in that territory, bringing together Indian migrants of all classes under one umbrella, and encouraging the native Burmese to found their own representative associations.18 However, the jeweller’s political ambitions were not so much for himself as for his friend Gandhi, and for their country. In the autumn of 1909 he spent several weeks in London, arguing with Gandhi late into the night as to the most plausible route to self-government for India. Those conversations were to find their way into Hind Swaraj, written as a dialogue between the oracular Editor (Gandhi) and the questioning Reader (Mehta).

  Pranjivan Mehta was to Mohandas Gandhi what Friedrich Engels was to Karl Marx: at once a disciple and a patron, who saw, very early, that the friend of his youth had the makings of the heroic, world-transforming figure he was to later become. Their friendship was consolidated by a shared language and culture – it mattered that Engels and Marx were both Germans, and that Mehta and Gandhi were both Gujaratis. There were differences: Engels believed Marx would redeem a class (the proletariat); Mehta believed Gandhi would save a nation, India. Both, however, had a deep, almost unquestioning faith in their compatriot’s genius. Both were prepared to reach deep into their pockets to activate and enable it.19

  Mehta venerated Gandhi. His veneration was communicated in private letters to mutual friends, and in public through a series of articles he published in 1911 in the Indian Review of Madras, later published as a book. Here Mehta reprised the main outlines of the struggle in the Transvaal. Gandhi, he argued, had endowed his comrades with the three cardinal virtues of ‘Truthfulness, Fearlessness, and Poverty’. The sacrifices of the satyagrahis were ‘a good augury for the high destiny’ of India itself. ‘No Indian in modern times,’ he pointed out, ‘has succeeded so well in bringing the Hindus and Mahomedans together on a common platform as Mr Gandhi.’

  Of more interest to us are Mehta’s observations on Gandhi the person. ‘The one virtue which distinguishes Mr Gandhi from all others,’ he remarked, ‘is that he never puts forward an idea or extols an action, which he himself would not be prepared to act upon when circumstances required him to do so. In fact, he practises himself first what he desires to preach to others.’ Once Gandhi had decided upon a particular line of conduct, wrote his friend, ‘no risk, nothing, will deter him from going on, on that path without in the least caring whether anyone else believes in it at all, or is prepared to follow him in his footsteps.’

  ‘No earthly temptations,’ continued Mehta, were ‘too strong’ for Gandhi, and ‘none of them can make him swerve from the noble path that he has chalked out for himself. It is no exaggeration to say that in this age of materialism it is not possible to come across another man who lives the Ideal life he preaches.’20

  Gandhi and Pranjivan Mehta corresponded regularly, and while we mostly have one side of the correspondence, it is revealing enough. Gandhi thus wrote to Mehta on 1 July 1911 that ‘it would be a mistake if you imagined that we would get the young men we wanted the moment I got to India. As I understand it, we shall have the same difficulties we had to face in this country. It will do us credit if we leave for India only after the work we have begun here has been put on a firm footing.’21

  In August 1911 Mehta was in London, and so was Henry Polak. The two had an acrimonious argument, an account of which was passed on by Mehta. Gandhi answered that ‘I do not think Polak will become an Anglo-Indian out and out’ (Mehta must have implied he would). Mehta had called Polak ‘hot-tempered’; Gandhi agreed, but added that ‘his heart is absolutely frank and he is unswerving in his duty’. Mehta had suggested that Polak was developing a swollen head; Gandhi answered that ‘praise is everyone’s enemy; how, then, can it be otherwise with him? But I do not so much as suspect that he would be corrupted by praise. He is as honest as he is frank.’22

  Among the things Mehta and Polak had argued about was Gandhi’s future. The doctor wanted his friend and hero to return to India soon – very soon – to revive and lead the nationalist movement there. Polak thought Gandhi still had much work to do in South Africa. Mehta answered that Polak himself could take on the responsibility of representing the Indians in Natal and the Transvaal. He seems to have accused Polak of shirking his duties. Polak replied angrily that no one could keep Gandhi from doing what he wanted; Gandhi’s conscience was his own, and for the moment it told him that he was to remain in South Africa rather than return to India.23

  As it happens, Hermann Kallenbach was also in Europe at this time. Before he left, Gandhi made him take a vow that while he was away, he would not get married, would not ‘look lustfully upon any woman’, would not ‘spend any money beyond necessaries befitting the position of a simple-living poor farmer’, and would only travel third class by land or on sea. Kallenbach was enjoined not to eat meat either. The vow was uncannily similar to that extracted by his mother from young Mohandas when he left for London in 1888. To soften the blow, Gandhi and Kasturba baked their friend several tins’ worth of biscuits and cake for the journey.24

  In Europe Kallenbach met Dr Mehta, and spent a day walking with him in the Ardennes.25 They got along well enough, but when he returned to England, Kallenbach, like Mehta, seems to have quarrelled with Henry Polak. He wrote to Gandhi giving his version of the disagreement. Gandhi replied that ‘your analysis of Polak is in the main true. I would only add that his virtues far outbalance his weaknesses and that not one of us is without weaknesses. I know that you know this. Still it bears repetition in order to enable us to exercise the virtue of charity.’26

  Mehta, Polak and Kallenbach were all competing for Gandhi’s friendship – and benediction. That they would be rivalrous was not surprising. Mehta was congenitally suspicious of white men, perhaps because he lived in Rangoon, where a small group of Britons controlled the natives with an iron hand. Characteristically, after criticizing Polak, Mehta then commented adversely on L. W. Ritch. He thought Gandhi excessive in his praise of his European associates. Gandhi agreed that

  it is likely that whites entertain more hatred towards us than we do towards them. If, however, we make a great show of love in return for the little that they show us, there is another reason. It is that we fear them. Otherwise, so far as my experience goes, many Indians do not even distinguish between good and bad and take all whites to be bad. On the one hand, this needless fear must go; on the other, one must learn to distinguish between good and bad …

  I do not look upon Ritch, Polak or anyone else as my disciples. They will all work with us as long as they think fit. There is no reason to believe that, after my death, people would imagine that their actions would necessarily have my approval. Those who have come in contact with me know that differences of opinion do exist among us on subjects other than satyagraha. However, I shall not dismiss your suggestions from my mind.

  He concluded by asking Mehta to read Tolstoy’s ‘Ivan the Fool’.27

  In October Gandhi wrote to Mehta, ‘I know you are very keen that I should leave for India at an early date, and stay there for good. The idea appeals to me and I shall go the moment I can become free here.’ Mehta seems to have complained that, by staying on for the time being in South Africa, his friend was neglecting their homeland. ‘Please do not think,’ answered Gandhi, ‘that I shall incur the sin of falling into the delusion that I should serve the entire world. I well realize that my work can only be in India.’28

  Mehta, meanwhile, had sent a journalist named Manilal Doctor to work with Gandhi. Doctor had once run a newspaper in Mauritius; the hope was that he would take over Indian Opinion when Gandhi returned to India. He was also Mehta’s son-in-law, married to his daughter Jayakunwar (Jeki). Gandhi thought the young man ‘pleasant and good-natured’, but complained that he shirked physical labour. Jeki, who followed some months later, was more useful; she was, wrote Gandhi to his daughter-in-law Chanchi, ‘a great help to me in teaching the childre
n’.29

  Gandhi’s verdict was endorsed by Kallenbach, who wrote to Pranjivan Mehta that ‘your daughter has indeed been a very desirable addition at the farm. We all feel that she has fallen in with our ideas and ways, as if she had been one of us for years.’ The architect now hoped that her father, his fellow Gandhi worshipper, would come visit them soon. Mehta visited Europe almost every year, and it was not, as Kallenbach reminded him, ‘much of a detour’ to go there via South Africa. ‘We are all very anxious to see you here, and so many matters which we all have in common, could then be thoroughly thrashed out’.30

  With Gandhi based in the Transvaal, the Durban journalist P. S. Aiyar offered himself as a stand-in leader for the Indians of Natal. His ambitions were, at first, delicately worded. ‘Since Mr Gandhi left Natal,’ wrote the African Chronicle in June 1910, ‘the Indian public work in this colony has not been conducted in that steady manner which predominates in him as one of the excellent qualities.’31

  Slowly, however, the language became more bold. Gandhi was still praised, but his policies questioned. In March 1911, Aiyar called Gandhi ‘our great leader’, ‘that noble soul’, the ‘originator and architect’ of the Indian struggle, yet wondered why he asked only for the form rather than the substance of theoretical equality. The fight, thought Aiyar, should be for the free movement of all Indians throughout the Union, not merely for the entry of a few educated professionals into the Transvaal. Gandhi was urged to ‘fight for our birthright of British citizenship to a finish in honour and glory of our motherland.’32