A lawyer doing the cooking, a barber dressed in khadi, a chief medical officer and his wife clad likewise — sights such as these fed the Mahatma’s spirits. C.R. ushered in visitors: the Right Honourable V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, Iyengar the Congress President, Sir M. Visvesvaraya, ex-Dewan of Mysore, Sir Mirza Ismail, the Dewan, and so forth.
From Sir Mirza, the Mahatma and C.R. obtained the assurance that the state’s officials and employees were free to wear khadi.
Despite the number of callers, it was a relaxing, enjoyable time. When the Mahatma protested at the restrictions on his walks, talks and writing, C.R. replied: ‘I am the jailor, but the prisoner can dismiss me at any moment. Yet so long as I am the jailor, I must take the necessary precautions’ (Young India, 12.5.27).
In Nandi, C.R. did a bit of writing — a short story and a dialogue, both on the theme of khadi. A pessimist predicting that khadi would die because it was expensive was told that patriotism would sustain it (Young India, 26.5.27):
Don’t you abstain from meat as a Brahmin, though beef is cheap and nourishing? Is it economy? You marry your girl at 12. Is it wisdom? Do you not yield to custom, good or bad? You spend money on useless ceremonies and on poor relations . . . Is it economics or only sentiment?
Thomas Hood was quoted by C.R. in aid of khadi:
No alms I ask, give me my task;/Here are the arms, the leg,/ The strength, the sinews of a man/To work, and not to beg.
Commenting on Tagore’s ‘Jana Gana Mana,’ C.R. said to Devadas in Nandi, ‘I find the poem limited. Why victory only to India? Why not to humanity?’5
Early in June, they moved to Bangalore, where Gandhi, Kasturba, C.R. and the rest — nearly 50 in all — were looked after at the Maharaja’s Kumara Park estate by his employees — ‘my brothers and sisters, not servants,’ as Gandhi said of them.
Hundreds attended Gandhi’s daily prayers, and others called on him. Continuing to function as Gandhi’s jailor, C.R. had the Kumara Park mains switched off when, despite several polite hints, a distinguished visitor did not get up to leave.
C.R. did a brisk trade in khadi. Ladies came, absorbed the khadi message and ‘came in again, but entirely changed, in the new khaddar sarees they had purchased’ (Young India, 30.6.27).
A milestone in the khadi story was the South India Khadi Exhibition, conceived by C.R., that opened in Bangalore at the end of June. Women spinners from Karnataka, Andhra and Tamil Nadu demonstrated their art. The progress of khadi was demonstrated through maps and charts, and spinners competed before the thousands of visitors. They scanned the charts, made notes, watched the khadi being made, and purchased the fabric and the charkha that created it.
Khadi-clad South Indian actors rendered on stage the story of Kabir, the saintly weaver-poet, in what Gandhi said was ‘exquisitely pronounced’ Hindi. It was the first time in years that he or C.R. had seen a play.
The response to the Exhibition delighted Gandhi, but he made a significant remark about his plans to K. Srinivasan, editor of The Hindu, ‘If I am spared, I shall certainly enter again the political arena. It will then be a fight to the finish’ (Young India, 16.6.27).
As C.R. put it to Mahadev Desai, Mysore’s ruler, Krishnaraja Wodeyar, ‘wished to have the privilege of doing all he [could]’ for Gandhi,6 yet the Maharaja, dependent on the Raj that Gandhi was committed to fighting, could not afford to meet him. In a signal of support, however, the Maharaja sanctioned a khadi centre in Badanval village near the city of Mysore. Six men for the centre were sent for training at C.R.’s Ashram, and the state’s Industries Department made 1,500 charkhas.
The area around Badanval was dry and needed a source of income besides farming. Its women could spin. The Pudupalayam story was repeated, and khadi took off in Mysore. The state’s example was followed a year later by Hyderabad.
For four months, a recovered Gandhi, supported by C.R., stumped much of South India and Ceylon, bringing to every stop the gospel of khadi. Crowds, eager and large, were instructed and often uplifted. On occasion the travellers were touched — in Arni, a few ‘untouchables’, almost completely naked, gave C.R. a five-rupee note for khadi, and in Madras, cobblers who had heard that Gandhi’s sandals were tattered, made a new pair for him.
A few of the Mahatma’s interviewers in the South told him that C.R. could not be trusted, for he was a Brahmin. Gandhi’s response went beyond defending C.R. In Karaikudi he said that C.R. was his ‘only possible successor.’7
Meanwhile, there was a development which took both C.R. and the Mahatma by surprise. Devadas and Lakshmi fell in love and wanted to marry. In Bangalore Devadas gave C.R. a letter requesting his daughter’s hand.
C.R.’s closeness with Devadas, as we have seen, went back to early in 1920, when he travelled with C.R. from Amritsar to the U.P. and Bihar. He was not quite twenty then. Devadas had first met C.R., and presumably Lakshmi, ten months earlier in Madras, where he was teaching Hindi, just after C.R. had moved to Madras from Salem. Lakshmi was just seven then.
C.R., as we have found, often confided in young Devadas and at times communicated with Gandhi through him, as at other times he did through Mahadev Desai. When Gandhi was jailed in Poona, C.R. and Devadas had visited him together. Clearly, there was warmth and trust between the two.
But when Devadas’s feelings towards C.R. grew into, or helped kindle, or were joined by, love for Lakshmi, C.R. at first did not know what to think. He liked Devadas greatly, and the idea of an alliance between his daughter and Gandhi’s son must have thrilled him. Yet, arranged rather than love-marriages were the norm around him.
Moreover, Devadas was not a Brahmin. Even more importantly, in the autumn of 1927 Lakshmi was only fifteen. C.R. discussed the matter with his daughter and also with Gandhi. Lakshmi told her father, as C.R. would later relate to the author, that while she would not marry Devadas without her father’s permission, he should not expect her to marry anyone else.
Caste was not a serious issue with either C.R. or Gandhi, but Lakshmi’s age was. The two fathers wanted to be sure that it was true love rather than infatuation. Lakshmi was told by her father and also by Gandhi that she should test the truth of her love. No doubt most Indian girls were married by the time they were her age, but she should wait. And while she waited, there should be no contact — no meetings and no letters.
Devadas, twenty-seven, was similarly adjured. He returned to North India. Obeying the injunctions, he and Lakshmi were to wait for four years for parental permission and another two years for marriage.
C.R. called Gandhi’s 15-day Ceylon tour ‘an unprecedented triumphal march’ (The Hindu, 28.11.27). Welcomed with devotion and affection by the Ceylonese, the Mahatma did not lose his frankness. To Indian businessmen in Colombo he said:
Let your scales be absolutely correct, your accounts accurate. I hope you regard every woman in this land as your own sister, daughter, or your mother.
Sophisticated Sinhalese women gathered in a stately drawing- room were addressed thus:
My hungry eyes rest upon the ornaments of sisters whenever I see them heavily bedecked . . . Do you know the hideous condition of your sisters on plantations? . . . Their service will deck you more than the fineries you are wearing.8
Tamil plantation workers ‘poured in,’ wrote C.R., ‘to see Mahatmaji in their thousands and made many a hillside alive with men and women’ (The Hindu, 28.11.27). Gandhi warned them against liquor.
Raising money for khadi was one of C.R.’s aims in Ceylon. At Jaffna, the last halt on the island, he crossed his target of Rs 1 lakh. He had also collected numerous orders for khadi.
After returning to India on 30 November 1927, the Mahatma went to Andhra and Orissa, and C.R. to his Ashram. The Bania and the Brahmin, master and disciple and yet comrades, had been with each other for seven months. It was, and would remain, their longest spell together.
For three years after the Ashram’s opening, the front against the Raj had been quiescent. Suddenly, and unwittingly, the Raj breathed
life into it.
Summoned to Delhi in November 1927 from the deep South, the Mahatma was told by Lord Irwin, the Viceroy, that a statutory commission led by Sir John Simon would tour India and make constitutional recommendations. Gandhi told the Viceroy that this piece of news could have been sent to him in a one-anna envelope.
He also noted, as did most Indians, that the Simon Commission was going to be all-white. The Empire was willing to inform Indians but unwilling to trust them. Political India boycotted the Commission. Across the land the cry was raised, ‘Simon Go Back.’
C.R. attended Congress’s annual session held in Madras in December 1927 but took no part in the deliberations of what still was a Swarajist Congress. He was present because the Mahatma was. Gandhi spoke on khadi; C.R. translated him into Tamil. For two more years C.R. was content to remain off-stage politically, but in March 1928 he momentarily appeared on the stage.
Jawaharlal Nehru, recently returned from a trip to Europe and Russia, was advocating ‘foreign propaganda.’ Writing in Young India (1.3.28), C.R. urged realism. ‘The Indian fight against Britain,’ he wrote, ‘if it is to be by nonviolent means, depends entirely on its own strength and can never be converted into an international affair.’ What was needed was not ‘propaganda, foreign or domestic,’ but ‘solid constructive work and internal strength.’
Internal strength was soon demonstrated by the peasants of Bardoli in Gujarat, where the 1921 struggle would have climaxed but for the Mahatma’s abrupt cancellation of it. Refusing to pay an enhanced land tax, the peasants and their families saw their lands and cattle confiscated but did not give in. In August 1928, after five months of struggle, the increase was virtually scrapped and much of the seized property returned. The Raj had yielded.
The hero of Bardoli was Vallabhbhai Patel, who had organized the peasants. C.R. had offered to join Patel on the battlefield but Gandhi wanted the struggle to remain a local one. Hailing ‘a wonderful victory,’ C.R. said that ‘Vallabhbhai’s pan in Indian history has been great.’9
Gandhi meanwhile experimented with his diet and pondered a European invitation. C.R. wrote to him: ‘I did get very angry when I read your last letter about almond paste and coconut milk. Knick-knacks like these are totally inadequate substitutes for bread and milk.’10
As for Gandhi visiting Europe — the Mahatma wanted C.R. to ‘say without fear or favour what you will have me do’ — C.R. advised against it. He thought that morale in India would be hurt.
Stories from C.R.’s pen continued. Gandhi found them ‘touching’ and published them. They generally involved ‘untouchables’ and Gandhi hoped they would ‘melt some stony “touchable” heart’ (Young India, 12.1.28). C.R.’s translations of verses from the Tamil saint-poetess, Avvai, and Subramania Bharati, the poet laureate of the Tamil country who had died in 1921, also appeared in Young India. The Bharati translations were C.R.’s retort to the Madras police seizing 2,000 copies of a collection of Bharati’s patriotic songs.
The contributor C.R. and the editor Gandhi did not always see eye to eye. The Mahatma turned down a piece by C.R., now untraceable, on the Hindu-Muslim question on the ground that the views expressed were ‘entirely unseasonable.’ C.R. was advised to ‘keep them under lock and key for the time being.’ Replied C.R.:
I fully expected that you would put an embargo on such stuff. That is why I called the article ‘Unsold Stock’; and unsold it is and you advise that it should not even be exposed for sale.11
There were phases in 1928 when C.R. seemed depressed. He felt ‘dilapidated,’ he once wrote to Gandhi, and in another letter in May he said:
Your letter has not helped me to attain the peace which you intended it should do. I see your love and your reasonableness. But peace must come from within. As yet it is like a parched throat only causing pain if you try to find moisture and swallow.12
The parched area around the Ashram did not give any cheer; there was a continuous drought. Nor was C.R. satisfied with the pace of the khadi movement, though he noted, objectively, that a lost industry had been revived in the neighbourhood, and that ‘a number of half-starved families were getting a few more mouthfuls of food’ (Young India, 23.8.28).
The Mahatma hoped that C.R. would have the ‘patience to
wait for a century . . . and the desire to succeed tomorrow.’13 In fact, C.R. wondered whether the future would see selfless workers to sustain khadi, and whether the Ashram was not ‘like a foreign mission among the people’ (Young India, 23.8.28). Yet it is a fair surmise that C.R.’s depression was linked to his absence from the political stage.
As for khadi, C.R. himself pointed out in May that while the textile industry had given employment, after a long innings and a huge investment, to four lakh people, khadi, in four years and with a tiny fraction of the investment, had given supplementary work to one lakh in their own homes (Young India, 24.5.28).
Not limited to khadi, his Ashram gave impromptu medical relief, in a 19-month period, to 28,095 patients, and fought the drought that had sent women to the bottom of wells from where they tried to scoop water with coconut shells. Jowar bought in Mysore state was sold at half the cost to about 250 worst-hit families (all of whom were ‘untouchables’) within a three-mile radius from the Ashram.
The freight for this grain was high, and the railways refused a concession, but donations sought through Young India sustained relief for 35 weeks.
The Congress session held in Calcutta at the end of 1928 heralded a return to Gandhian ways. At the Mahatma’s instance Motilal Nehru presided, though some had desired Vallabhbhai’s chairmanship in recognition of his Bardoli feat. Unable to mount a struggle without Gandhi, the politicians were asking the. Mahatma to return to the helm.
In turn, Gandhi summoned C.R. On his part C.R. tried to enlist Annie Besant’s cooperation for the struggle of civil disobedience that now seemed possible. She had kept out of the 1920-1 defiance. C.R. assured her that violence would be prevented by restricting civil disobedience this time to trained volunteers. For a moment it looked as if Mrs Besant would enter the fray but the moment went and she chose to stay out.
In Calcutta, where C.R. and the Mahatma stayed together, a younger set of leaders led by Subhas Bose and Jawaharlal criticized the willingness of a committee headed by Jawaharlal’s father Motilal to tolerate Dominion Status for India.
Gandhi proposed a compromise: Congress would ask for complete independence if London did not commit itself within a year to freedom for an Indian Dominion. After accepting the compromise in committee, Bose and Jawaharlal opposed it at the open session, an about-turn that elicited blunt words from the Mahatma:
You may take the name of independence on your lips but all your muttering will be an empty formula if there is no honour behind it. If you are not prepared to stand by your words, where will independence be?14
As C.R. saw it, Dominion Status versus complete independence was an ‘issue which nobody takes as real.’15 He agreed with Gandhi’s appraisal:
Dominion status can easily become more than Independence, if we have the sanction to back it. Independence can easily become a farce, if it lacks sanction. What is in a name if we have the reality? A rose smells just as sweet whether you know it by that name or by any other (Young India, 6.9.28).
Endorsing the Gandhi formula, Calcutta proclaimed that non- violent non-cooperation would be revived at the end of 1929 unless the Raj satisfied the Congress demand by then.
Could a sanction be forged in a year? Congress set out to enroll and train cadres through a burst of constructive activity. Prohibition was settled upon as a principal form of this activity and placed, by a Working Committee resolution, in C.R.’s charge.
Yet, to C.R., prohibition was more than a means to an end. He persuaded the All Parties’ Conference (APC) convened in Calcutta alongside the Congress to accept it as an end in itself. A prohibition clause was inserted in the constitution the APC proposed for India.
Gandhi generated fervour for khadi
and against foreign cloth. In March 1929 there was a ten-minute shower of foreign cloth before him in Calcutta: the mountain of fabric was then set ablaze. As in 1921, the Mahatma argued that he was transferring the nation’s resentment from ‘men to things’ — to foreign cloth.
But some of his compatriots had other ideas. Saunders, the Assistant Police Superintendent of Lahore, had been shot dead in December 1928. Two bombs and a heap of pamphlets were thrown in April 1929 at the Central Assembly floor, without injury to anybody, from the visitors’ gallery.
Two prisoners of the Raj, Wiziya, a Buddhist monk in Burma, which, at the time, was administratively linked with India, and Jatin Das, arrested over Saunders’ murder, died following marathon hunger-strikes against prison conditions. Gandhi’s letter on the subject to C.R. showed his desire for the latter’s approval:
I am wholly against hunger-strikes for matters such as Wiziya and Jatin died for. Any expression of such opinion would be distorted and misused by the Government. I therefore feel that my silence is more serviceable than my criticism. Do you not agree with my judgment of the hunger-strikes and with my consequent silence?16
C.R.’s reply is not traceable but we may infer that he supported Gandhi on both counts.
The Mahatma’s return to the centre of national affairs was a signal for Madras to seek C.R.’s leadership. There was keenness for battle in Vedaranyam in Tanjore district, where a Madras provincial conference was held in the first week of September 1929, but C.R. and Vallabhbhai, who together toured South India for a fortnight after the conference, counselled patience till the end of the year.
C.R.’s mood became brighter. In a letter he wrote in February, the Mahatma could read ‘unrestrained joy.’17 While not referring to his spirits, an English participant at a conference C.R. attended at Red Hills near Madras noted ‘the soundness and brilliance of his exposition and the courage and simplicity of his life.’18
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