Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  From Bombay, Saraladevi proceeded to Lahore to arrange the marriage of her stepson, Jagdish (the child of her husband by his first wife), while Gandhi returned to Kasturba and the ashram in Ahmedabad. Then he proceeded, via Bombay, for a five-day retreat in the fort of Sinhagad, close to Poona. His pleurisy had recurred, with pain in his chest and legs, and his doctor had advised a period of rest in the hills.

  From Sinhagad, Gandhi wrote to Saraladevi every day. A letter posted on 30 April began:

  I have just got up with two dreams, one about you and [the] other about Khilafat. To my great joy, you returned within two days. I asked, ‘How so quickly?’ You replied, ‘Oh it was Panditji’s [her husband] trick to have me by him. Jagdish’s marriage is as far off as ever. I have therefore returned.’ I discovered that it was a dream. I fell off again to sleep in disgust…25

  The next day, Gandhi wrote again. He had ‘a most torturing headache’ the previous night, and his leg still ached. Then he continued: ‘I ask you however not to worry about me. I thought you should know my condition, if only to keep you to the fortnight’s limit if Jagdish’s marriage is then over or if it is postponed. If you would persuade Panditji too to come so much the better. He must see and live the Ashram life.’

  Despite the prefatory ‘I ask you not to worry about me…’ the letter is redolent of emotional blackmail. He seems to have extracted a promise from Sarala that she would return from Lahore in a fortnight; he would hold her to it, even if it meant parading his physical (and mental) pain.

  This second letter from Sinhagad ended with a very telling paragraph:

  And now for a boon. I know you have granted many. The appetite has grown with the receiving. You said you were shy over working at the Ashram. Will you not get rid of your shyness by commencing household work there?…Great and good though you are, you are not a complete woman without achieving the ability to do household work. You have preached it to others. Your preaching will be more effective when people know that even at your time of life and in your station you do not mind doing it.26

  Gandhi wanted Sarala near him, for her charm and her conversation. But he also wanted to mould her in his image. In her own home, Sarala would have left housework to the servants, leaving her free to paint, write, sing and converse. Gandhi wanted her words and her songs, but he also wished to make her a model ashramite who cooked, cleaned and span too.

  On 2 May, Gandhi wrote his third letter to Sarala in as many days. He was missing her terribly. He wrote:

  You still continue to haunt me even in my sleep. No wonder Panditji calls you the greatest shakti of India. You may have cast that spell over him. You are performing the trick over me now.

  Gandhi continued:

  I was certain of a letter from you yesterday. But none came. Today too there is a blank. I wonder, however. I know you have not failed me. It is the wretched post.27

  We owe the existence of these letters to Mahadev Desai, who noted them in his diary, from where they finally found their way to the Collected Works. Almost all of Sarala’s own letters to Gandhi were destroyed by Gandhi’s family. But even from one side of the correspondence we can see how intimate the friendship was.

  Gandhi was besotted by his new friend, and she, most certainly, by him. Sarala was loyal to her husband—but he was no Mahatma, merely a minor provincial leader rather than a major national leader. Gandhi was loyal to Kasturba—but she was merely a homemaker, no poet, singer or political activist.

  The relationship was intense, but not equal. Gandhi had taken to signing his letters ‘Law Giver’, a self-regarding appellation that reveals his desire to have Sarala conform to his ways, to modify or change her lifestyle so that it might more closely approximate his own. The aristocratic bhadramahila would, under his close and direct supervision, become a simple servant of the nation.

  IV

  In the India in which Gandhi was born and raised, friendship between boys and girls, men and women, was impermissible. Education was strictly segregated. Working-class and peasant women ventured out alone into factory, field or street; but middle-class women did not. Apart from his wife, the only women an Indian man of Gandhi’s generation and class would have had any intimacy with were his mother, sisters, daughters, grandmothers, aunts, nieces and (at a stretch) servants.

  By living outside India, Gandhi had been able to free himself from custom and convention, and forge friendships across the gender divide. In his years in the diaspora he was close to three women in particular: his long-time secretary in South Africa, Sonja Schlesin; Henry Polak’s wife, Millie, since the Polaks and the Gandhis shared a home in Johannesburg; and Polak’s sister, Maud, whom he had met in London.

  Maud Polak was in love with Gandhi—this was not reciprocated. With Millie and Sonja the friendship was entirely platonic. He liked and respected them—indeed, they were among the few colleagues who dared challenge or criticize him.

  Saraladevi was Gandhi’s first woman friend in India, and also his first Indian woman friend. Their relationship was shot through with passion and romance. He found her stimulating, interesting, even glamorous. He was possessive about her, he wished to be with her as much as possible.

  The relationship between Gandhi and Saraladevi was never consummated sexually. But it seems it came very close to doing so. Years later, in an exchange with a Gujarati colleague about the merits of brahmacharya, Gandhi remarked: ‘I myself am a proof before you that sex does not discriminate between the young and the old. Even today I have to erect all sorts of walls around me for the sake of safety.’ Then he continued: ‘Despite this, I was in danger of succumbing a few years ago.’28

  Notably, Gandhi wished to share the intensity of his feelings for Saraladevi with his closest male friends. Some months after he first met Saraladevi, Gandhi was finally able to discover the whereabouts of his old Johannesburg companion Hermann Kallenbach. He had, he told Kallenbach, got his address ‘after the greatest search’. He had feared that Kallenbach was dead. ‘How I wish I could go over to see you and hug you,’ he wrote.

  The friends had not been in contact for five years—since Kallenbach had been denied permission to come to India. Gandhi filled him in on the news. ‘Dev[a]das is with me, ever growing in every way and in every direction. Mrs. Gandhi is at [the] Ashram. She has aged considerably but is as brave as ever. She is the same woman you know with her faults and virtues. Manilal and Ramdas are at Phoenix looking after Indian Opinion. Harilal is at Calcutta doing his business.’

  Gandhi mentioned that he was ‘engaged in a fierce struggle with the Government’. He told Kallenbach that ‘my life is simpler than ever. My food is not now fruit and nuts. I am living on goat’s milk and bread and raisins.’

  Amidst the news, familial and dietary, Gandhi did not fail to tell Kallenbach about his newest friend: ‘I have come in close touch with a lady who often travels with me. Our relationship is indefinable. I call her my spiritual wife. A friend has called it an intellectual wedding. I want you to see her. It was under her roof that I passed several months at Lahore in the Punjab.’29

  The friend who had called it ‘an intellectual wedding’ was almost certainly Mahadev Desai, who had transcribed Gandhi’s letters, opened Saraladevi’s letters, and been somewhere in the background in Ahmedabad, Bombay, Lahore, Sinhagad and all the other places Gandhi went with or without his new companion.

  Apart from Kallenbach, Gandhi had also written about his new friend to his Tamil protégé C. Rajagopalachari (popularly known as Rajaji). Gandhi’s letter has been lost, but we do have fragments of Rajaji’s reply. Where Mahadev was approving of, or at least acquiescent in, the development of the relationship, Rajaji was dismayed. In his letter, Gandhi seems to have suggested that Sarala and he were thinking of taking the friendship a step further. What this was is not clear—perhaps a public proclamation of their ‘spiritual marriage’? Rajaji wrote
back that this would bring ‘unutterable shame and ruin’ to Gandhi, and destroy ‘all saintliness, all purity, all asceticism, all India’s hope’.

  That Gandhi had even contemplated such a step filled his protégé with horror. ‘How could you venture out,’ wrote Rajaji agitatedly, ‘when in your boat was the faith and fate of millions of simple souls who if the boat had capsized would have seen neither beauty nor love nor grandeur, but unspeakable shame and death.’

  Rajaji had met Saraladevi briefly, and been unimpressed. ‘I fail to see any “greatness” in the lady,’ he wrote to Gandhi. ‘She is like a hundred other women, whom a little education makes very attractive. I have seen scores of bigger-minded [and] better-souled women.’ Rajaji thought Saraladevi was ‘not worthy to unloose the latchet of Miss Faring [a Danish missionary who admired Gandhi and joined the ashram] and as to Mrs Gandhi, it would be like comparing a kerosene oil Ditmar lamp to the morning sun…’

  Rajaji chastised Gandhi, but blamed Saraladevi too. ‘It is difficult to forgive her reckless indifference to consequences,’ he remarked. He advised Gandhi to ‘pray disengage yourself at once completely: No delay is allowable when you hold such great trusts’ (namely, the fate of the nation itself).30

  This was a brave and necessary letter: brave because few of Gandhi’s Indian admirers ever criticized him directly; necessary because Gandhi does not seem to have recognized the enormous risks of the step he was contemplating. Gandhi’s asceticism was a vital part of his mass appeal. Although polygamy was allowed under Hindu law, Hindu myths and Hindu social custom were both strongly in favour of monogamous marriages. Had Gandhi publicly taken another wife, albeit even a ‘spiritual’ one, it might have massively eroded his standing among his fellow Hindus, endangering the wider movement for political and social change that he was leading.

  Gandhi was taken aback by Rajaji’s forthrightness, and he did heed his advice—in part. He would not publicly take Saraladevi as his spiritual wife, but he would not—or not yet—disengage from her completely.

  V

  In the first week of June 1920, the Khilafat Committee met with major Congress leaders in Allahabad. The meeting began with Motilal Nehru and Madan Mohan Malaviya saying that they would wait and watch for some time before committing themselves to a policy of non-cooperation with the government. At this Shaukat Ali said angrily that ‘they had already enough time to make up their minds’. Maulana Abdul Bari was equally upset; the Khilafat, he said, was ‘a matter in which the very life of the Mussalmans was at stake and still the Hindus thought it proper to play with it’.

  Gandhi now stepped in to calm tempers. He had, he reminded Bari and Shaukat Ali, pledged his own support to the Khilafat movement, but they must, in return, commit themselves to non-violence. He then outlined his four-stage approach to non-cooperation. It was decided that a decision as to whether to implement these stages would be taken at a special session of the Congress, to be held in Calcutta in September.

  Saraladevi Chaudhurani attended this meeting in Allahabad, although she does not appear to have spoken. Another silent participant was a mole of the intelligence department. He later reported that the striking feature of the meeting was ‘Gandhi’s astounding assumption of dictatorship’, and the Muslim leaders’ acquiescence in it. Shaukat Ali said ‘the Mahmomedans were quite prepared to leave themselves under the guidance of Gandhi’.31

  In the third week of June, Gandhi wrote a long letter to the viceroy on Khilafat. ‘The whole of Mussalman India’, he said, had ‘behaved in a singularly restrained manner during the past five years’. The reward for their loyalty and restraint was a ‘cruel’ settlement imposed on Turkey by the Allies. Indian Muslims now had three alternatives: violence, emigration and non-cooperation, with the last being the ‘only dignified and constitutional’ option. ‘But there is yet an escape from non-co-operation,’ said Gandhi—the viceroy could identify with the Indian Muslims and pressure London to revise the settlement.32

  In July, Gandhi toured the Punjab and Sindh, speaking on the importance of non-cooperation. If the programme was implemented, it would consist of the renouncing of titles, the boycotting of legislatures, the withdrawal of children from government schools, the giving up of practice by lawyers, and the refusal of invitations to all government functions. Gandhi expressed his ‘firm belief’ that the British could be made to yield under the pressure of a non-violent struggle. For, ‘no European nation is more amenable to the pressure of moral force than the British’.33

  The 1st of August was to be observed as Khilafat Day. Gandhi wished to be in Bombay to lead the hartal there. He returned to Ahmedabad from Sindh on 26 July, spent two days in the ashram, and on the 28th, took the night train to Bombay. He spent the morning in preparatory meetings. In the afternoon he heard that Bal Gangadhar Tilak was seriously ill, having just suffered two heart attacks. When Gandhi reached the home where Tilak was staying, a massive crowd had collected. Gandhi made his way into the house to see the patient. Tilak was delirious, so no words were exchanged.34

  Tilak died in the early hours of 1 August. The news spread through the city, bringing thousands to the home where he lay. People of all ages and from all communities came to pay their respects. A dense ‘mass of humanity’ accompanied the body to the cremation grounds.35

  In the vanguard of this crowd of worshippers was Gandhi. He acted as one of the pall-bearers. Later, at the Khilafat meeting scheduled for that day, rich tributes were paid to Tilak by Hindu and Muslim leaders. The main speech was made by Gandhi, who stressed the renouncing of posts and titles, non-violence in word and deed, and ‘a vigorous prosecution of swadeshi’.36

  On the same day, Gandhi wrote to the viceroy returning the three medals the king-emperor had awarded him, for services rendered in the Boer, Zulu and World Wars. ‘Valuable as these honours have been to me,’ said Gandhi, ‘I cannot wear them with an easy conscience so long as my Mussulman countrymen have to labour under a wrong done to their religious sentiments.’37

  That Gandhi returned the medals on the day Tilak died was a striking coincidence. For, of all the Congress leaders of the previous generation, Tilak was the most uncompromising in his opposition to colonial rule. Swaraj was his birthright and he would have it. By being in Bombay on the day Tilak died, and helping carry his body to the bier, Gandhi had further signalled that he would inherit the mantle of the departed leader. If Gokhale’s death in 1915 freed Gandhi from the confines of social service, Tilak’s death in 1920 allowed Gandhi to emerge as the leader of the militant tendency in the Congress-led national movement.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Capturing the Congress

  I

  Gandhi’s growing militancy through the first half of 1920 alarmed the British authorities. There had been questions in Parliament about his threatened programme of non-cooperation. Conservative MPs, as well as the Conservative press, were pressing the secretary of state and the viceroy to arrest him.

  In July 1920, Montagu had hinted in the House of Commons that if non-cooperation was carried out, Gandhi would be arrested. Gandhi immediately wrote an article in response to Montagu’s threat. He listed three aims the government might have in arresting him:

  ‘To frighten me into changing my views.

  To separate me from the people and thus weaken public opinion.

  By removing me from their midst, to test the people and see whether they are really agitated over the subject.’

  If he was indeed arrested, Gandhi hoped that ‘the people will go ahead with non-co-operation with still greater vigour’.1

  On 4 August, Chelmsford wrote to Montagu that they did not intend to arrest the chief troublemaker, since ‘once you have made a martyr you do not know where his martyrdom may land you’. Besides, the viceroy was confident that the programme of non-cooperation would be ‘a fiasco, since it runs counter to the common sense of the community at large’. If the lead
er’s campaign was going to fizzle out anyway, why bother to arrest him?2

  II

  Gandhi spent most of August in the Madras Presidency, speaking on non-cooperation. He started his tour in Madras city, with a speech to a massive crowd assembled on the beach opposite Presidency College.

  Gandhi began by speaking of his ‘boundless faith’ in the Tamil people, whom he had known since 1893. He then answered the question on people’s minds: ‘What is this non-co-operation about which you have heard much, and why do we want to offer this non-co-operation?’ The two key issues were Khilafat and the Punjab. On the first, Gandhi believed the Hindus must ‘perform a neighbourly duty’, since ‘they have an opportunity of a lifetime which will not occur for another hundred years, to show their goodwill, fellowship and friendship and to prove what they have been saying for all these long years that the Mussulman is the brother of the Hindu’. On the second, he insisted that ‘the Punjab has wounded the heart of India as no other question has for the past century. I do not exclude from my calculation the Mutiny of 1857.’3

  During his tour, Gandhi was joined by Shaukat Ali. The two addressed meetings in Kumbakonam, Nagore, Madurai, Trichy, Calicut, Kasargod and Mangalore, speaking to mixed audiences of Hindus and Muslims, often with women also present. For most of their journey, they were accompanied by C. Rajagopalachari, who translated their speeches into Tamil.

  Gandhi and Shaukat Ali presented a striking contrast. The Muslim dressed stylishly, in a great green cloak and a cap with a crescent on it. And he had a booming voice. Gandhi was clothed more modestly, in a homespun dhoti, and shirt, and spoke softly.4 Yet the travelling companions got on famously. Their joint tour in the Madras Presidency, Gandhi told C.F. Andrews, ‘has confirmed…my belief in the greatness and goodness of Shaukat Ali. He is really one of the most sincere of men I have met. He is generous, frank, brave and gentle.’5