Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  XI

  Swadeshi and hand-spinning were interests of long-standing. Meanwhile, Gandhi had discovered a new cause, the protection of the Ottoman Caliphate. The sultan of Turkey had himself been the khalifa of Islam, the protector of the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. Now, with the defeat of the Ottomans in the War, Indian Muslims feared that Turkey would not get justice from the Allies (since it had sided with Germany). They worried that the Ottoman Empire would be dismembered, the sultanate itself abolished, and the status of Islam’s holiest shrines called into question.

  In theory, the caliph was both the spiritual and temporal head of the Sunni Muslims. After Mughal rule was finally extinguished in India in 1857, the Ottoman sultan was the only major Sunni potentate, and he began to be acknowledged as the true caliph in India. His name was read out in Friday prayers across the subcontinent. When the Ottomans fought against the Russians in 1877 and against the Greeks twenty years later, Indian Muslims raised funds for them.48

  Gandhi had long been aware of the respect the Muslims of India had for the caliph in Istanbul. In August 1900, when he was a lawyer in Durban, he was commissioned to draft an address on behalf of the Indian Muslims of Natal to ‘His Imperial Majesty Ghazi Abdul Hamid Khan, Sultan of Turkey, Ameer-ul-Momeneen, Lord of the Two Seas, Protector of the Holy Cities, and Defender of the Islamic Faith’. The caliph, bearer of even more titles than Queen Victoria, had just entered the twenty-fifth year of his reign. The Muslims of Natal wished to publicly ‘rejoice with the whole Mahomedan world in the advent of the auspicious and unique occasion’. They asked Gandhi to draft a letter conveying their congratulations and their hope that ‘Your Majesty [would] continue for many years to administer the sacred office of the Commander of the Faithful in health and peace, and may the faith of our Prophet (on whom be peace) thrive and be the solace of the millions of true believers is our earnest prayer to Allah-ul-malik.’49

  The war of 1914–18 had placed Indian Muslims in an uncomfortable position. They were traditionally loyal to the British Raj, but they also venerated the caliph. Some Muslim leaders sided with the Turks. They included the brothers Shaukat and Mohammad Ali, both educated in Aligarh, both powerful orators and writers. The Ali Brothers were detained in 1915 and interned in the remote town of Chhindwara lest they sway Indian Muslims away from loyalty to the British Empire and in favour of the Ottoman Empire instead.

  Gandhi had corresponded with the Ali Brothers, and was keen to meet them. He wrote several letters to the viceroy asking for permission to visit them in their internment home in Chhindwara, deep in the Central Provinces, but was denied each time.

  Gandhi did, however, meet with another influential Muslim leader. This was Maulana Abdul Bari, the senior cleric of Firangi Mahal, a famous Lucknow seminary established in the seventeenth century. Performing the hajj in 1910–11, Bari returned via Turkey, ‘entranced [by] the last vestige of Turkish greatness’. After the World War ended, he canvassed for the restoration of the Khilafat.50

  Gandhi and Abdul Bari first met in March 1918, at the home of a respected leader of the Congress, Dr M.A. Ansari. A year later, Gandhi visited Bari in Lucknow. They had long conversations, discussing Hindu–Muslim cooperation. Bari told Gandhi that a commission should be formed of ‘a few well-wishers of the motherland, Mussalmans and Hindu’. The commission would tour India and find out the reasons—economic, political, theological—which ‘initiate the disruption in the relation between the Mussalmans and the Hindus and should then think over the means of removing these reasons altogether. Means should be adopted which may place the Hindu–Moslem Unity on a stable foundation.’51

  Gandhi was moved by Bari’s patriotism and concern for religious harmony. The maulana from Lucknow had told him that ‘Islam will fall to pieces if it ever takes and never gives’; he had even asked his followers to refrain from killing cows since the animal was sacred to their Hindu neighbours. In September 1919, Bari sent Gandhi a telegraph saying, ‘In celebration of Hindu–Muslim unity no cow sacrifices in Firangi Mahal this Bakrid’, to which Gandhi wired back, ‘Delighted with your great act of renunciation. Pray, accept Id Mubarak.’52

  That same month, a conference of Muslim leaders was held in Lucknow on the Khilafat question. Gandhi now decided to lend his name to this movement. On 18 September, Gandhi told a predominantly Muslim meeting in Bombay that ‘you have the whole of the Hindus with you in this your just struggle’ (for the Turkish sultan to continue having control over Mecca and Medina).53

  Gandhi’s statement was a conceit. Why would the ordinary Hindu concern himself with an institution external to India, such as the caliphate? Gandhi was acting here largely on his own, hoping it would lead to a wider unity between Hindus and Muslims.

  Gandhi asked Muslims to make their case peacefully but firmly, and urged Hindus to support the demand of ‘their respected neighbours and brethren’. As he put it, ‘All those born in India have to live and die together. No community can rise at the cost of another, or preserve its rights if it permits those of others to be sacrificed.’54

  On 17 October an All India Khilafat Day was observed, with prayers, fasting and hartals. Gandhi asked Hindus to participate out of solidarity, and ‘thus put a sacred seal on the Hindu–Mohammedan bond’.55

  Back in April, some Muslims had observed a hartal against the Rowlatt Act in response to Gandhi, a Hindu; now, some Hindus were showing sympathy with what was essentially a Muslim question. The possibility of an entente between India’s two largest religious groupings alarmed the authorities. Shortly after the successful observance of the Khilafat Day, the governor of Bombay wrote to a colleague that

  It is maddening to see all the Moslems gradually leaving us to make common cause with the Brahmans whom they despise and hate because they can get no sympathy from us: it is more than alarming to see the measured skill with which the Brahmans are exploiting the Moslem unrest in order to tear from us our hitherto never failing prop of Moslem loyalty and military support.56

  XII

  Through the first nine months of 1919, Gandhi maintained a ferocious pace: travelling, speaking, planning campaigns, supervising the ashram, mentoring his disciples. He had now acquired two new platforms—Young India and a Gujarati magazine called Navajivan. This was started by the socialist activist Indulal Yagnik, as a monthly. After Gandhi took over, it began to appear every week.

  The two journals played different roles. Young India acted as a bridge between different parts of the country. Navajivan was specifically targeted at Gandhi’s own linguistic group. In his English newspaper, Gandhi wrote in measured tones, conveying news and providing context and analysis. In his own language he was more intimate: ‘In simple, easy Gujarati, he addressed the people directly, argued with them, coaxed and rebuked them as one of themselves.’57

  By the end of September 1919, Navajivan had as many as 12,000 subscribers, each copy read by four or five people. Gandhi was ‘proud to think that I have numerous readers among farmers and workers’. Young India, however, had only 1200 subscribers and, now without advertisements, needed to double its subscription base to pay its way. Gandhi appealed to his ‘Tamil friends’ in particular to come forward and meet the shortfall.58

  Along with eager subscribers, Gandhi’s Gujarati newspaper was also attracting a large volume of unsolicited submissions. In an essay entitled ‘Request to Contributors’, Gandhi offered some suggestions to those who wished to have their work published in Navajivan. They were advised to write on one side of each sheet only (out of ‘pity for the editor and poor compositors’), to write ‘in a clear and beautiful hand’ (since ‘some are under the impression that any kind of handwriting is good enough in Gujarati’), and to revise, rewrite and shorten their drafts before submitting an essay for publication (although ‘even after all this, you will find the editor so merciless that he will have to cut out something else’).59

  An excess of contributors and con
tributions—this was a pleasant dilemma for an editor to have, and so soon after beginning publication.

  XIII

  In October, the government finally allowed Gandhi to visit the Punjab. He left Ahmedabad on 22 October, reaching Lahore two days later. The crowd at the station to receive him was so large that it took Gandhi forty minutes to get from the platform to the car.

  In Lahore, Gandhi was staying at the home of Saraladevi Chaudhurani. Born in 1872, the daughter of one of Rabindranath Tagore’s sisters, Saraladevi was a gifted singer and writer herself. She was also striking-looking, with a lush head of hair that hung down to her shoulders. She liked dressing up; pearls were among her favourite jewels. She was what Bengalis call a bhadramahila: a well-born, well-dressed, well-spoken lady.

  The Tagore family held extremely progressive views on women, but even by their standards, Saraladevi was liberated and self-willed. Unlike other women of her class she was not content to make a good marriage and run a home. She took her first degree at the age of seventeen, in English literature. Then she studied physics, a subject in those days meant only for boys—she was the only girl in the class. Meanwhile, she pursued her interests in the creative arts. She was the first to set the great patriotic poem ‘Vande Mataram’ to music. She also wrote stories and poems of her own in Bengali. Sarala was particularly close to her uncle Rabindranath; the two discussing, among other things, the respective merits of Browning, Keats and Shelley, and of South Indian and North Indian classical music. A composition of hers in praise of the motherland, ‘Namo Hindustan’, was sung at the Calcutta Congress in December 1901.

  Among those greatly impressed by Saraladevi was the charismatic and influential spiritual leader, Swami Vivekananda. He wanted her to join his movement, and make it better known in India and abroad. ‘If bold and talented women like yourself,’ wrote Vivekananda to Sarala, ‘go to England to preach, I am sure that every year hundreds of men and women will be blessed by adopting the religion of the land of Bharata.’60

  Sarala did not join Vivekananda, instead moving south to Mysore to teach in a school, since (as she wrote) ‘to know oneself one must be away from the cloying atmosphere of one’s home’. After a spell in the south, she retraced her steps northwards, well beyond her native Bengal to the Kumaun hills. She was planning a pilgrimage to Mansarovar in Tibet when she got a telegram saying her mother was at death’s door, and her last wish was to get Sarala married.

  This was in 1905, when Sarala was already thirty-three. The groom chosen for her was a widower named Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri, who was a successful lawyer in Lahore. On moving to the Punjab, Saraladevi continued to write, sing and speak. In 1910 she founded a Bharat Stree Mahamandal (literally, the Great Circle of Indian Women), which aimed (in her words) to free them from ‘the shade of [the patriarchal lawmaker] Manu’ that had thus far kept Hindu women ‘under thraldom at every stage of their growth’.61

  Sarala’s husband, Rambhuj, had been active in the anti-Rowlatt Act protests of 1919, and made many fiery speeches. These landed him in jail, so when Gandhi reached their home he was received by the wife alone.

  Gandhi had briefly met Saraladevi in 1901, when she sang the opening song at the Calcutta Congress which he had attended. One does not know what impression she made then. But staying under her roof, with both their spouses absent, meant that they spoke long and often. In a ‘Punjab Letter’ for his Gujarati readers, Gandhi observed:

  In Lahore I am the guest of Smt. Sar[a]ladevi Choudhrani and have been bathing in her deep affection. I first met Sar[a]ladevi in 1901. She comes from the famous Tagore family. Of her learning and sincerity, too, I get evidence in ever so many ways.62

  The India of 1919 was conservative and deeply patriarchal. The women’s place was in the home, as Gandhi’s own wife Kasturba knew only too well. There were few women in India as variously gifted as Saraladevi, so active in so many public causes. And perhaps none so widely travelled. Those long conversations, possible only because the husband was away, left a profound impression on Gandhi. He would be back for more.

  After a week in Lahore, Gandhi left for Amritsar. With him was C.F. Andrews. The Englishman knew Amritsar well, but this was his friend’s first visit to the holy city of the Sikhs, the city where the massacre took place in April. To his Gujarati readers, Gandhi described his arrival thus:

  The entire area outside the station was packed with the citizens of Amritsar. Their cheers and shouts almost overwhelmed me. This huge procession proceeded towards the city. The people filled the car with flowers. I was taken to the mosque, which was thronged with Hindus and Muslims. With great difficulty I made my way from the mosque back to the car, and it was a long time before it reached the Golden Temple of the Sikhs.63

  Gandhi’s account of the spectacular reception he got is confirmed by a reporter on the spot. ‘Monday was a veritable Gandhi day for the whole of Amritsar,’ wrote the Bombay Chronicle, adding:

  Business houses and shops were decked with rich clothes and tapestries and every street and shop had laid its store of rose petals and garlands to shower on the distinguished guest of the city. Hours before the time, streams of humanity were moving to the railway station. Hindus, Mahommaddans and Sikhs had suspended business in honour of the event. In their determination to honour Mahatma Gandhi, women lined the roadsides, crowded windows and balconies and thousands of rupees worth [of] flowers were purchased and carried in cartfuls to the station and stocked en route.64

  It was, of course, not merely, in the Punjab that Gandhi now had admirers. The satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act made him an all-India figure, known in the major towns and cities of the subcontinent. Yet, this might never have been the case had the acknowledged leader of Congress’s radical wing, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, been around when the movement started. Tilak was in London for almost all of 1919. When he returned to India in the last week of November, he told a public meeting that ‘he wished he had been in Bombay when Mr. Gandhi began satyagraha. He would have borne the difficulties with him and undergone the hardships.’65 This was both gracious and generous; for, Gandhi was Tilak’s junior in age as well as length of service to the national cause. Indeed, had Tilak been in India in early 1919 it might have been he, and not Gandhi, who would have led and directed the protests against the Rowlatt Act.

  XIV

  The government had set up a committee to inquire into the Punjab disturbances. Chaired by Lord Hunter, a former solicitor general of Scotland, it had seven other members—four British and three Indian. Meanwhile, the Congress set up an inquiry committee of its own, with five members, among them Gandhi and the Allahabad lawyer Motilal Nehru.

  Through most of November and December, Gandhi travelled through the Punjab countryside, taking statements from people about martial law, the Jallianwala firing and other instances of state repression. He stayed on in the Punjab until the end of 1919, so as to attend the annual Congress meeting. This year it was being held, for both symbolic and political reasons, in Amritsar. The stars of the show were the Ali Brothers, who had recently been released as part of a general amnesty. They arrived in Amritsar ‘amid cheers, tears, embraces, and a veritable mountain of garlands’. The highlight of the Congress session was ‘an impromptu oration by Mohammad Ali, during which he proclaimed that he and all the other released leaders would rather return to prison indefinitely than see India in chains’.66

  Gandhi, for his part, struck a more conciliatory note. After Tilak and the Bengal leader C.R. Das had characterized the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms as ‘disappointing’, Gandhi argued that ‘these reforms can be used as a stepping-stone to full responsible government’. Besides, ‘Indian culture demands that we shall trust the man who extends the hand of fellowship. The King-Emperor has extended the hand of fellowship.’ Therefore, the Congress should offer cooperation under such conditions as it may see fit to lay down. Gandhi went on to say:

 
If I get a sour loaf, I reject it; I do not take it. But if I get a loaf which is not enough or which does not contain sufficient condiments in it, I shall see to it that I get condiments too at a later stage, but I take a bite; then it is not disappointing.67

  The metaphor that Gandhi used was much favoured by his one-time mentor, the English vegetarian Henry Salt, who likewise believed that ‘improvements never come in the mass, but always by instalment; and it is only reactionaries who deny that half a loaf is better than no bread’.68

  Gandhi was at this stage both an incrementalist and an Empire loyalist. His faith in British justice was shaken but not broken. Perhaps the Hunter Committee would properly punish those responsible for the Punjab atrocities; perhaps the Rowlatt Act would be withdrawn; perhaps the caliphate, so important to Indian Muslims, would be safeguarded. So long as these possibilities existed, the Congress could, he felt, work with the government in a spirit of constructive cooperation.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Personal and the Political

  I

  In South Africa, Gandhi’s first struggles against racial discrimination had largely been funded and staffed by Muslims. In the diaspora such trans-religious solidarity was easier, since Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis from India all faced the same disabilities. In the homeland, however, the different communities were established in their particular ways of life. To build a joint Hindu–Muslim union against colonial rule was more difficult, not least because the British were adept at playing off one community against another. But, for a movement to count as truly ‘national’, it could not be restricted to Hindus alone. Hence, Gandhi’s efforts to reach out to Muslims, first by supporting the restoration of the caliphate, and now by canvassing the support of the Ali Brothers. Since they were ‘the eyes of the Muslims’, Gandhi hoped that by befriending them he could cement Hindu–Muslim unity.1