While waiting to be escorted to prison, he had written to Gandhi that he hoped to find India free when he came out, and the Mahatma therefore pursuing his ‘normal vocation — research in dietetics.’1
Entered from a veranda, C.R.’s solitary cell was 11 ½ feet long and 8 ½ feet wide; at its highest point the arched roof was 10 feet from the floor. A 4 feet by 1 ½ feet barred opening in the rear wall, just below the roof, brought the smell of urine from a drain outside. Though the cell door had a barred portion through which light and air could enter, there was not ‘the least movement of air’ inside. Flies infested the cell by day and mosquitoes by night.
A brick platform was the bed; a straw mat and a blanket provided by the jail formed the ‘mattress’ over which C.R. spread his sheet. Four feet from the bed lay two uncovered mud vessels which served as chamber-pot and commode at night. The open pots did ‘not make the place sweet.’
Prisoners awaiting execution occupied neighbouring cells. They cursed, wailed, clanked their chains, and at times prayed through the bars.
To begin with, the cell was totally dark after sundown. On the fourth night, which was Christmas Eve, C.R. lit a candle from a packet given to him by a fresh arrival, Mahomed Ghouse. In the diary that he had started, the source of much of this chapter, C.R. noted, ‘Never did I see a candle give such quiet holy light before.’ The following morning he wrote: ‘It is Christmas day for our rulers. May the Spirit of Christ purify their souls and give them Light.’
His food, for some weeks, was rice gruel (of which he took only the liquid) at about 6.30 a.m. and rice and kolambu around 11.00 a.m. and again around 5.00 p.m. The kolambu, ‘unparalleled in horrid taste,’ contained radish root and leaves, chillies, tamarind, salt and oil, and also ‘dirt, grit, hair, wool and all sorts of things.’
Along with other prisoners C.R. was let out of his cell for meals and ate standing or sitting on his toes at a filthy spot under menacing crows; it was ‘like beggars being fed.’ After a while, however, the food improved, and C.R. was granted the option of eating in his cell.
On the fourth day, he had been given his ‘medal’: a disc bearing his number, 8398, and the dates of his entry and release. He wore it round his neck. No newspapers were allowed, but each month C.R. could write and receive a letter and have an interview. Though other imprisoned activists were not allowed to meet him, conversation was possible over a meal in the open or on the way to the privy or to a bath at the prison well — and when a violent eruption of boils sent C.R. to the foul-smelling prison ‘hospital.’
By the last week of December, more than 20,000 civil resisters were in jail, and Gandhi declared that Bardoli was ready to cease paying taxes. This would be the climax. The jailed C.R. was chosen as the Congress’ General Secretary for another year, and Gandhi gave his opinion in Young India that C.R. ‘knows the science of Satyagraha as no one else perhaps does’ (12.1.22).
On 14 January C.R. availed of his first interview. His son Krishnaswamy, his brother Srinivasa, and Dr T.S.S. Rajan of Trichy were allowed to meet him. C.R. learnt of his reappointment and of the effective though violent hartal observed in Madras when the Prince of Wales visited the city. A mob had damaged the Wellington Cinema, which hoisted ‘loyal’ flags, and another crowd had prevented Sir Thyagaraja Chetty, leader of the office-holding Justice Party, from leaving his house.
The Government was controlling the Press, C.R. was told, but Rajan added that even as they were meeting in jail an All Parties Conference for reconciling Congress and the Government was being held in Bombay. This news gave C.R. no joy. In his diary he wrote: ‘Cutting down our demands or suspending the Congress programmes would be unthinkably wrong just now, when victory is nigh.’
The Bombay conference urged the Mahatma to postpone his Bardoli step, and the Government to release those arrested, withdraw the bans, and convene a Round Table Conference. Gandhi put off Bardoli till 1 February but the Viceroy rejected the Bombay proposal.
On 29 January, 4,000 khadi-clad Bardoli resisters, some of them veterans of the South African struggle, pledged their readiness to stop paying taxes and ‘to face imprisonment, and even death . . . without resentment.’2
On 1 February the Mahatma sent Lord Reading an ultimatum: if in seven days there was no declaration that prisoners would be released and the Press freed, the Bardoli tax- strike would commence. The Viceroy replied, on 6 February, that the Government would stand firm; next day Gandhi sent a rejoinder. India was agog.
Though he did not know of these moves, the incarcerated C.R. shared his compatriots’ suspense and expectancy. His censored monthly letter could not contain ‘politics,’ and C.R. had to content himself with saying to the Mahatma on 24 January: ‘I guess you have not started for Bardoli and Anand yet’ (Young India, 9.2.22).
After informing Gandhi that his asthma was persisting and that his weight was down from 104 lbs. to 98 lbs., C.R. pulled the Mahatma’s leg:
Your eyes would flow with delight if you saw me here in my solitary cell spinning — spinning not as a task imposed by a tyrant faddist, but with pleasure.
C.R. also managed to convey his longing for a bigger entry into the Raj’s prisons:
This Ashram is very much less congested than yours at Sabarmati and I wish more people understood the real advantage of this retirement and discipline.
Gandhi published the letter in Young India under the heading, ‘From his Solitary Cell.’ In an accompanying note, he wrote:
When you are locked up in a cell, . . . the air in a short time becomes thick and foul with your own exhalations. And you are doomed to rebreathe your own emissions. The least that humanity demands is that C. Rajagopalachari should have, if he has not, all the fresh air he can get day and night.
Three weeks after the Mahatma’s remarks were published, the Raj moved C.R. to a general ward.
By then the climax had proved to be a stunning anti-climax. On 13 February, at his second interview, C.R. learnt from Ramaswami Naicker that the Mahatma had called off the Bardoli offensive.
A small police party with little ammunition had fired at a procession of non-cooperators in an obscure place called Chauri Chaura in eastern UP; when their ammunition was exhausted, the policemen had taken refuge in their outpost. Enraged, some in the procession set fire to the outpost; the fleeing constables were hacked to pieces. Twenty-two policemen were killed.
Learning of the incident the day after he had sent his rejoinder to the Viceroy, the Mahatma was struck dumb. He felt that through Chauri Chaura God had spoken. Though the number of arrests had gone up to 30,000, though Bardoli was eager, the action had to be cancelled.
‘Let the opponent glory in our humiliation or so-called defeat,’ said Gandhi, who was convinced that ‘the cause will prosper by this retreat’ (Young India, 16.2.22).
Thus ended a bid about which the Governor of Bombay at the time, Lord Lloyd, said: ‘He (Gandhi) gave us a scare. Gandhi’s was the most colossal experiment in world history, and it came within an inch of succeeding.’3
When he learned of the stoppage, C.R., for all his dislike of violence, was shocked and hurt. ‘Victory was nigh,’ he had said and believed. There was dark defeat instead. The Mahatma, he thought, had erred. In his diary C.R. wrote:
In spite of my tenderest and most complete attachment to my master and the ideal he stands for, I fail to see why there should be a call for stopping our struggle for birthrights [because of] every distant and unconnected outburst.
‘The opponent would glory in our humiliation,’ Gandhi had anticipated. Rousing C.R. before dawn on 15 February, the Jailor jubilantly told him that ‘noncooperation had gone to sleep’ and that Gandhi had ‘cried halt to civil disobedience.’ A stung C.R. counter-attacked about the Jailor’s treatment of prisoners.
Reflection brought some consolation. C.R. acknowledged that ‘in seclusion and without materials’ he could ‘not judge well.’ ‘With the mass mind a retreat’ was undoubtedly ‘a great handicap,’ yet ‘God leads us
right where logic may not.’ The news that in penance for Chauri Chaura Gandhi was fasting for five days turned C.R.’s unhappiness with the Mahatma into anxiety for his health.
Four months later, after he was free and had gathered facts and perspective, C.R. would laud the stoppage:
In February last, when the probability of violence stared us in the face, firmly believing in Nonviolence as the essential condition of liberation and progress, in spite of every temptation that urged us to advance and fully realising all the losses and risks which sudden halt involved, we deliberately chose to stop our aggressive activities.
In his fellow-prisoners and some of the servants C.R. found ‘devotion and brotherliness’ but ‘no love such as my heart wants.’ He treasured the interviews, to which one or more of his boys came, ‘chewed and consumed every line and word’ of the monthly letters from his children, and fought homesickness by comparing his ‘insignificant share of suffering’ with the deprivation of others.
He referred tenderly in his diary to Manga (without ever naming her) and to his mother:
Somehow my poor mother haunts my mind and sweetens my thought today. She could not imagine that her fond child, her pride and hope, would be in a common gaol, imprisoned and locked up under a 9 ft. arch.
Yet another soul there was who has now passed away from this earth, from whose mind too the idea was farthest, that I should ever be in prisons, a fate from which, to her delight and pride, I had saved so many of my clients.
On another occasion he wrote:
Today, as I was at my evening prayer, the sweet music of the village nagaswaram that came from some happy home in the hamlets lying outside the prison wall, brought with it such an irresistible rush of happy recollections that I could not for long get them out. The music of these pipes is to me, and I suppose to every man and woman in this land, a sound that brings on its back a world of sweet recollections, a vahana (vehicle) of happy youth, of joy and hope.
These thoughts render me weak. All my strength is needed for the battle, and I cannot afford to let my mind wander thus into the garden of sweet flowers that yield only tears. All that I shall say to my God is, if she is anywhere and is still subject to pleasure and pain, keep her happy and free from pain or sadness; and give me strength to endure and to perform my duties.
He daily rose at 5.30 a.m. and retired at about 8.30 p.m.; the time in between was consumed by spinning, reading, writing the diary, translating into Tamil the ‘Trial and Death of Socrates,’ cleaning his cell and the aluminium eating dishes, washing his thick khadi clothes, and praying.
Boils in the legs, a fever, and stomach disorders troubled him. Talkative warders filling ‘the night with noise,’ bugs, mosquitoes that stung ‘sharply through thick khaddar,’ and, above all, his asthma gave him sleepless nights. On 17 February he wrote:
Passed a night of real terror . . . Sat up like a ghost, and found some relief in lighting my candle and heating some water on it for sipping.
As the weeks passed, C.R.’s food improved. Every morning, a Sikh prisoner-cook, Nidhan Singh, was allowed to bring, along with a Vande Mataram greeting, two thin chapatis for C.R., instead of the rice porridge; bread and milk (at midday) and milk or buttermilk and sago (in the evening) replaced rice and the kolambu that had repelled him. On occasion he even had butter and raw tomatoes. ‘I don’t think a prince can enjoy a better breakfast,’ he wrote.
In the diary Major Anderson, the British Superintendent, is described bitterly as the Prison King. ‘None at all,’ was his reply when C.R. asked if newspapers would be allowed in, and interviews had to stop ‘at the exact minute.’ With time, however, the Major became ‘friendly and considerate’; on his pan, C.R. conceded that ‘any limitations in [Anderson’s] liberality of conduct are due to interference from above or absence of scope in the codes and rules.’ He also helped resolve confrontations between Anderson and other convicts.
Next in rank to Major Anderson was the Jailor. Without provocation he had hit a prisoner, Subba Rao. C.R. persuaded the Jailor to apologize to the victim in front of witnesses. When Subba Rao said that ‘Providence brought about the incident so that it may change the Jailor’s heart,’ a moved C.R. wrote:
How beautiful is the path of charity and love, once we gather wisdom and strength to walk on it . . .
An acting Jailor ‘came and made a long confessional history of his official and private life’ to C.R., and the junior doctor, of whom C.R. had written that he was ‘more a jailor than a doctor and more a tyrant than anything else,’ dropped entirely ‘the manner, which was so repulsive.’ ‘Insults of the grosser variety are gone,’ C.R. noted.
Shortly after C.R.’s arrival at Vellore, a poor Moplah, tears welling ‘from his manly eyes,’ had said: ‘We feel so cheerful and hopeful when we see big and rich people coming into jail like you.’ Other Moplah’s told C.R. that they would gladly serve four more years if that would remit his three months.
Vellore brought C.R. ‘in the closest contact with some of the best Andhra types,’ and he noted that Andhra had sent more prisoners, more recruits to the ‘National Army,’ than the Tamil country.
There were also the Sikhs, including Nidhan Singh, ‘the indefatigable, decorous, brave and patriotic Sikh prisoner’ who took seriously ill before C.R.’s release, and the ‘cheerful’ life- prisoner Hira Singh, who had tried to escape from Hazaribagh Jail where, ‘for six years, he says, he never saw the sun.’ C.R. ‘promised to write to Hira Singh’s brother Ram Singh.’
Occupants of neighbouring cells were described in the diary:
Just now there is a young Mussalman lad of Ambur, sturdy, bright, and handsome, as made by God, and condemned . . . for some outburst of animal spirits, some assault in company with friends, as he says, or it may be for a more serious deviation from the law . . . A heavy wooden door is drawn across the iron bars of his cell door amd bolted, so that God’s light and air may not reach him . . .
On the other side . . . are four young men awaiting death by the gallows . . . always sitting close against the cell door, for it is the nearest approach to freedom and light . . . They watch, and sometimes, I believe, jeer at me in natural jealousy, as I move about without a guard, enjoying comparative luxuries such as going to the tap for a bath, or wash my dish, or bring water, and pass in front of them, a Brahmin . . . clean, and in white clothes, as if to mock at their condition.
Four condemned prisoners, with whose ‘foul abuse and oft- repeated attempts at humour and . . . prayers of desperation’ C.R. had become familiar, were hanged during his term. For one of them C.R. had drafted an unsuccessful mercy petition, and all four had become part of his life:
Appadurai, the butler, is to be hanged tomorrow. Night after night, I used to hear the chatter of gallows friendship. ‘The Sepoy’ would cry, ‘Appavu, Appavu!, Nagiah, Nagiah!’ and they would carry on a conversation, each from his own cell . . . ‘Nagiah!’ ceased for some months past: for the poor fellow was hanged one fine morning. For some days, the leader in the conversation, the Sepoy, was talking of Nagiah being in Heaven and eating his full meal with God — eating is the chief event in prison . . . From tomorrow ‘Appavu!’ also will disappear . . .
The Sepoy too disappeared (facing death bravely, C.R. was told) but not before the jail authorities, prodded by C.R., had given him the food he wanted. Execution without notice and religious assistance outraged C.R.:
Without ministration of religion or prayer or any thoughts of God [the condemned prisoner] is seized one morning when he does not expect anything like it, and taken away, arms bound, and there at the gallows his legs are fettered and a cap put over his head and in a few minutes the platform goes down and he is despatched . . .
The jail authorities won’t give a single thought to whether Appadurai may not make peace with God before he yields up his life . . . They are only concerned with getting the execution done without any hitch on the day fixed.
In the solitude of prison, C.R. reaffirmed to himself his
view regarding non-cooperation with an alien government:
To refuse to cooperate in the process of reducing ourselves to foreign rule . . . is the natural law and instinct. We forgot this law of national life, and cast our minds into the terrible slough of unfelt slavery.
If non-cooperation was right, so was nonviolence and the elimination of hate:
The purest determination and freedom from all stain of anger on our part is necessary to produce the beautiful effect of suffering and love.
That C.R.’s own soul was generous to the antagonist comes across from the diary:
The music and din of the wedding in the Jailor’s house is sweetening the air as I sit praying in my cell . . . I fancy I see the busy crowd of men, women and children hurrying up and down and helping to make the noise and happiness of the wedding . . . Can’t we teach every man and woman and child to pray for more love and yet more love being sent down?
I regret many of the unkind and uncharitable thoughts that I have allowed myself about these unfortunate jail officials without giving them a sufficient chance to change their attitude or create a better understanding betweeen us.
Another entry reveals C.R.’s spiritual curiosity:
In spite of strenuous prayers the vision of the true God has not yet come to me. It is a hard task to keep the wandering mind steady, and even after that the mind does not find its real objective but dwells on family, self, friends and country, and formulates desires instead of purifying itself.
A passage in the diary was often to be quoted, for its foresight, after freedom:
We all ought to know that Swaraj will not at once or, I think, even for a long time to come, be better government or greater happiness for the people. Elections and their corruptions, injustice, and the power and tyranny of wealth and inefficiency of administration will make a hell of life as soon as freedom is given to us. Men will look regretfully back to the old regime of comparative justice, and efficient, peaceful, more or less honest administration. The only thing gained will be that as a race we will be saved from dishonour and subordination.
Rajaji Page 8
