An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth

by M K Gandhi

  XXXIX. A Spiritual Dilemma

  XL. Miniature Satyagraha

  XLI. Gokhale’s Charity

  XLII. Treatment of Pleurisy

  XLIII. Homeward

  XLIV. Some Reminiscences of the Bar

  XLV. Sharp Practice?

  XLVI. Clients Turned Co-Workers

  XLVII. How a Client Was Saved

  I. The First Experience

  II. With Gokhale in Poona

  III. Was It a Threat?

  IV. Shantiniketan

  V. Woes of Third-Class Passengers

  VI. Wooing

  VII. Kumbha Mela

  VIII. Lakshman Jhula

  IX. Founding of the Ashram

  X. On the Anvil

  XI. Abolition of Indentured Emigration

  XII. The Stain of Indigo

  XIII. The Gentle Bihari

  XIV. Face to Face with Ahimsa

  XV. Case Withdrawn

  XVI. Methods of Work

  XVII. Companions

  XVIII. Penetrating the Villages

  XIX. When a Governor Is Good

  XX. In Touch with Labour

  XXI. A Peep into the Ashram

  XXII. The Fast

  XXIII. The Kheda Satyagraha

  XXIV. ‘The Onion Thief’

  XXV. End of Kheda Satyagraha

  XXVI. Passion for Unity

  XXVII. Recruiting Campaign

  XXVIII. Near Death’s Door

  XXIX. The Rowlatt Bills and My Dilemma

  XXX. That Wonderful Spectacle!

  XXXI. That Memorable Week!–I

  XXXII. That Memorable Week!–II

  XXXIII. ‘A Himalayan Miscalculation’

  XXXIV. ‘Navajivan’ and ‘Young India’

  XXXV. In the Punjab

  XXXVI. The Khilafat Against Cow-Protection?

  XXXVII. The Amritsar Congress

  XXXVIII. Congress Initiation

  XXXIX. The Birth of Khadi

  XL. Found at Last!

  XLI. An Instructive Dialogue

  XLII. Its Rising Tide

  XLIII. At Nagpur

  Farewell

  Editor’s Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OR THE STORY OF MY EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH

  Tridip Suhrud is a scholar, writer and translator who works on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Gujarat and the Gandhian intellectual tradition. As the director and chief editor of the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust (2012–17), Ahmedabad, he was responsible for creating a digital archive—the Gandhi Heritage Portal—of all of M.K. Gandhi’s works. Apart from a number of books on Gandhi’s life, Tridip Suhrud has co-edited the critical annotated edition of Hind Swaraj, and translated Narayan Desai’s four-volume biography of Gandhi, My Life Is My Message, and the four-volume epic Gujarati novel Sarasvatichandra.

  Tridip Suhrud is presently translating the diaries of Manu Gandhi, covering the period between 1942 and 1948, compiling a series ‘Letters to Gandhi’—of unpublished correspondence to Gandhi—and working on an eight-volume compendium of testimonies of the indigo cultivators of Champaran. He is professor and director, Archives, at CEPT University, Ahmedabad.

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

  ‘Gandhi’s autobiography is probably the most important book ever published in India; in part because of the stature of the author, in part because of the nature of the work. In The Story of My Experiments with Truth, the Future Father of the Nation provided an astonishingly frank and revelatory account of his moral evolution and his personal struggles. In this superb critical edition, Tridip Suhrud explains how and why the book was written, provides detailed notes on the characters and situations mentioned, and subtly analyses the evolution of the English translation from the Gujarati original. Suhrud’s work is a colossal contribution to Gandhi scholarship; as well as a vital aid to all readers, present and future, of Gandhi’s remarkable autobiography. This edition will be read and discussed for generations to come’—Ramachandra Guha, author of Gandhi Before India

  ‘This pioneering critical edition subtly and invaluably expands our understanding of one of Gandhi’s key texts—and our sense of the man himself’—Sunil Khilnani, author of The Idea of India

  ‘Gandhi’s Autobiography is an important document for understanding both the Mahatma and the nature of the Self. This edition is unlikely to be surpassed in value. It will authoritatively guide the lay reader through the textures of Gandhi’s prose and references. But even the most accomplished Gandhi scholars will learn new things about this text. Tridip Suhrud is the gold standard in scholarship. This meticulous and powerful textual engagement will only enhance his reputation’—Pratap Bhanu Mehta, vice-chancellor of Ashoka University and former president of the Centre for Policy Research

  ‘Written in his incomparably limpid English, M.K. Gandhi’s Autobiography is comparable, as great literature, to Augustine’s and Rousseau’s Confessions. The invaluable new Introduction by Tridip Suhrud, arguably the finest interpreter and editor of Gandhi’s writings and correspondence in our times, alerts our attention to the tensions between Gandhi’s zest for living in and building an Ashramic community and his willingness to die for Truth—that is, ahimsa—between fasting to expiate others’ impurity and marching with the masses to make salt to break unjust colonial laws, between spinning cotton thread in large groups and meditating alone to listen for the “still, small voice within”. If we let Suhrud teach us how to read Gandhi, then Gandhi’s life-writing can teach us how to seek the Self’s Truth instead of self-seeking’—Arindam Chakrabarti, director, EPOCH Project, University of Hawaii

  ‘An Autobiography by one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable figures, this hugely influential book continues to be read widely around the world. This first critical edition allows us to understand the context and concerns that animated Gandhi’s writing as never before’—Faisal Devji, author of The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

  ‘Gandhi’s Autobiography is a seminal work for understanding Gandhi’s vision and work, and is a classic twentieth-century spiritual and political text. Suhrud provides in this critical edition abundant notes for the contemporary reader, alternative translations where the Desai translation is obscure, and a significant Introduction which situates the Autobiography in Gandhi’s life and thinking. A most welcome addition to serious Gandhi scholarship’—Judith M. Brown, University of Oxford

  Foreword

  A Desanctified, Usable Gandhi

  During the last two decades, Tridip Suhrud has emerged as a vital bridge between the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century world of Gujarati literature and culture—from within which Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi emerged—and the global fraternity of scholars who find in Gandhi a voice that defies the seductive mix of the Enlightenment values and a utopic, urban-industrial world to project an altogether different vision of a desirable society.

  In that alternative vision, there is a built-in admission that the Enlightenment might have made some significant contributions to human civilization but the utopic vision, which the Enlightenment projects, has little or nothing to say about the central problem humanity faces today—­­­massive, organized, structural and, one might add, ‘scientized’ violence—towards fellow humans, living nature and future generations that are supposed to inherit the earth.

  That quasi-nihilistic violence, which in the twentieth century took a toll of roughly 225 million lives in only genocides, has two crucial components. First, the brutalization that in many societies have taken an epidemic form and, second, the cultivation of political terror without which—one of the protagonists of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre, believed—virtue was helpless.

  Like many others, Suhrud rediscovered Gandhi after the Emergency and the suspension of civil rights in India in the 1970s. That discovery is part of a larger movement that sees Gandhi as a ser
ious thinker, whose heritage can no longer be left at the mercy of two kinds of admirers who have played an important role in retailing Gandhi earlier. The first kind venerates him as a saint who must be shelved, because it will be unfair to drag him into the dirty, violent, corrupt world of everyday politics. Talking of this Gandhi, poet Umashankar Joshi once rather sharply reminded philosopher and thinker Ramchandra Gandhi at a seminar that saints in India were a dime a dozen; Gandhi was unique in that he was one saint who was willing to live in the ‘slum of politics’. Joshi added that he had borrowed his words from historian Arnold Toynbee who, after the assassination of Gandhi, had said in an homage, ‘Henceforth mankind will ask its prophets, “Are you willing to live in the slum of politics?”‘

  Second, there are those who see Gandhi as only a practical visionary whose political and social interventions were either from Indian traditions or ex nihilo, that is, from nowhere. Hence, these admirers consider any serious intellectual engagement with him either a waste of time or an attempt to mislead the present generation of Indians away from the real Gandhi. There is a touch of vulgarity in this stereotype of Gandhi, and it has become now a political ploy to say that Gandhi was all about doing, not thinking or researching. Such a stance has helped the likes of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar to claim that not only was Gandhi anti-science and superstitious, but ignorant of modern European political theory.

  My sporadic encounters with Gandhi over the last fifty years prompts me to propose that, among the great freedom fighters and political and social reformers of twentieth-century India, Gandhi was arguably the best acquainted with the dissenting political thinkers and scholars of the West who tried to break radically with the Dionysian self of the European civilization. The three persons Gandhi called his intellectual gurus were all Western—Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, John Ruskin—and, perhaps we may now add, Ralph Waldo Emerson as the fourth. And Gandhi was in excellent touch with movements that were fighting racism, colonialism and for what we now might call feminism, human-scale technology and environmental justice in other parts of the world.

  Not surprisingly, the Sri Lankan Gandhian, T.K. Mahadevan, whose book Dvija was rediscovered during the Emergency, claimed that Gandhi seriously took to the street only twice in his life; the rest of the time he was thinking and writing. Gandhi’s ninety-seven-volume Collected Works endorses Mahadevan, not his critics.

  ~

  It is in this context that we must judge Tridip Suhrud’s efforts to bring the power and the complexity of Gandhi’s thought to this generation of Indian intellectuals. Probably Suhrud’s first majestic effort along these lines was his much-acclaimed, four-volume English translation of Narayan Desai’s massive four-volume Gujarati biography of Gandhi, My Life Is My Message, later to become the basis of Desai’s moving series of storytelling, Gandhikatha, in riot-ravaged Gujarat in the first decade of this century. Desai took Gandhikatha not only to small towns and villages of Gujarat but to different parts of India and even to the United States and was invited to take it to Bangladesh when death intervened.

  Suhrud’s second major venture was the translation of Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal’s perhaps unintentionally moving biography of Harilal, Gandhi’s prodigal eldest son. It was published as Harilal Gandhi: A Life, with a marvellous brief foreword by Ramchandra Gandhi, which in two pages provides a brilliant, refreshingly new perspective on the critical role Harilal unwittingly played in his father’s life as both a seductive anti-self and an unacknowledged critical-moral presence. This book and its suggestive foreword must be read by anyone trying to enter the inner life of Mohandas Gandhi.

  The predecessor of the present book was a joint venture of Suresh Sharma and Tridip Suhrud—an annotated, critical edition of Hind Swaraj. It can be considered a companion volume to this, an annotated, critical edition of Gandhi’s autobiography. The reader will be able to read the autobiography not only as it stands in English but also get some flavour of the Gujarati version and should be able to make a fair guess about the author’s intentions, the translator’s hesitations and ambivalences and, perhaps, even about the tonal differences between the Gujarati and English versions. Suhrud is an excellent, non-intrusive guide, but he also keeps more than enough space for you to draw your own conclusions and differ violently with his version of truth. (Indeed, this foreword, too, differs at some points from Suhrud’s more diffident reading of his own project, as reflected in his less-known book, Reading Gandhi in Two Tongues and Other Essays.)

  On second thoughts, the present book is one that mediates between not merely Gandhi’s time and ours, but also indirectly between Gandhi’s global vision and an over-Indianized, venerated but de-radicalized Gandhi—caught in a spider’s net called Indian politics.

  New Delhi

  Ashis Nandy

  11 September 2017

  A Note on the Annotations

  There are two kinds of annotations in this Critical Edition. The notes on the margins of the page, denoted by ‘M’ before the reference number, offer alternative translations to certain words, phrases and sentences, which have been marked in italics in Gandhi’s text. These alternative renderings intend to bring readers closer to the original Gujarati and to enable them to discover some more instances of Gandhi’s unique use of language.

  The footnotes, numbered by section, contextualize the Autobiography by providing details of the persons, institutions or organizations, dates, places and events mentioned by Gandhi. There are also explanations and comments on the text itself, corrections of some inadvertent errors, as well as a comparison between the two editions of the Autobiography.

  A note on the cover image

  The photograph on the front cover is of a section of a mural at Gandhi Smriti, New Delhi, painted by Padma Shree awardee Kripal Singh Shekhawat (1922–2008). The mural is an artistic rendering of scenes from M.K. Gandhi’s life and, according to art historian R. Siva Kumar, carries echoes of the Shantiniketan paintings.

  Gandhi had lived in Birla House from 9 September 1947 until the day of his assassination on 30 January 1948. The place was converted into a memorial, now known as Gandhi Smriti, which houses a museum of articles associated with Gandhi’s life.

  Editor’s Introduction

  On 23 November 1925, after two days of agony M.K. Gandhi decided to go on a fast for seven days. There was a ‘moral lapse’ among the young boys and some girls at the Satyagraha Ashram at Sabarmati. This fast was to commence on 24 November and last up to the 30th.

  On the day of the decision Gandhi had a talk with the boys and girls of the Ashram and had told them, rather ominously, ‘Do not become the cause of my death.’1 This had led to a series of confessions—not private but public confessions. Two of the principal ashramites, Mahadev Desai and Kishorelal Mashruwala, objected to the public nature of these confessions and argued that they and by extension none of the other ashramites, with the exception of the founder of the ashramic community, Gandhi, had a right and more crucially the necessary spiritual attainment to hear the confessions. Gandhi argued and demonstrated the inherent beauty in the act of confession, but did not insist upon the public admission of wrongdoing and attendant guilt, nor did he share with anyone that which was shared with him. Gandhi, even if he wanted, could not have fasted for more than seven days. Maganlal Gandhi, the person who held the ashramic routine and organization together during Gandhi’s long absences—sometimes enforced by a prison sentence—from the Ashram at Sabarmati, had bound Gandhi to a promise that in the event of a fast he would not undertake one that exceeded seven days.

  This decision was taken neither in haste nor without the awareness of its consequences, both on his body and on the boys and girls whose moral lapse had prompted it. It would have reminded Gandhi and many of his associates from South Africa of a similar incident. In July 1913, a moral lapse involving his son Manilal and Jaykuvar Doctor, the daughter of his close associate Dr. Pranjivandas Mehta had prompted Gandhi to go on a fast for seven days and a vow to have one meal a day f
or a period of four and a half months. Gandhi later said that he was moved by ‘the purest pity for them’. And yet, there was a reoccurrence of the lapse that had forced him to undertake a fourteen-day fast and continue with one meal a day vow till June 1914. In effect, Gandhi had fasted from 12 July 1913 till 26 June 1914, which involved both complete fast and the one-meal-a-day observance. This prolonged fast and his ignorance about the method of resting the body during and immediately after the fast broke his general health, otherwise described as ‘excellent’. He recalled this at the conclusion of the 1926 fast. ‘It was as a result of the strain I ignorantly put upon my body that I had to suffer from a violent attack of pleurisy which permanently injured a constitution that was fairly sound.’2

  The Phoenix Settlement in South Africa had an ‘ashramic character’ especially after the advent of satyagraha in 1906. The community at Sabarmati was ashramic, in the full sense. That is, each member was aware of the Ashram observances and the ideal conduct that they were expected to strive towards, if not attain in every instance.

  What was it about this community that its moral lapse prompted Gandhi on several occasions to undertake a purificatory penance? In his account of the lapse at the Phoenix Settlement, Gandhi said, ‘News of an apparent failure in the great satyagraha struggle never shocked me, but this incident came upon me like a thunderbolt. I was wounded.’3

  The Ashram and its community were Gandhi’s greatest experiment and also the site for his experiments. It was a community that had its foundations in Truth. Truth is not merely that which we are expected to speak and follow. It is that which alone is, it is that of which all things are made, it is that which subsists by its own power, which alone is eternal. Gandhi’s intense yearning was that such Truth should illuminate his heart. In the absence of Truth, or even in case of violation of it, the Ashram could not be. It was simultaneously a community that aspired to ahimsa, not only as a negation, as non-violence, but as an active working of love. This community sought to lead a life of ‘non-stealing’, which included in its understanding ‘bread-labour’ and non-acquisition. This community sought to cultivate equability or samabhava, with regard to religion and on the practice of untouchability. Samabhava, Gandhi knew, is possible only when the sense of mamabhava, of ‘mine-ness’, of possession, disappears. Gandhi had hoped that his Ashram would be like the sthitaprajna, a person of ‘equi-poise’, a person whose intellect is ‘secure’—both lodged firmly and unwavering in its processes—as described in the Bhagvad Gita. ‘When it is night for all other beings, the disciplined soul is awake! When all other beings are awake it is the night for the seeing ascetic.’4 Such an Ashram Gandhi believed was his only creation, the only measure by which he would be judged and would like to be judged. Writing at the conclusion of the 1925 fast he said of the Ashram, ‘It is my best and only creation. The world will judge me by its results.’5