Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Admittedly, they had differing views on violence. Unlike Gandhi, Shaukat Ali ‘believes one can kill an enemy and, for doing so, even deceit can be employed’. But for the present, Ali had accepted Gandhi’s methods: ‘He tells the people frankly that, at the present time, my way is the best for them.’6

  During his tour of Madras, Saraladevi wrote several letters to Gandhi. A bare but most intriguing summary of their contents is provided by Mahadev Desai. Here is his diary entry for 23 August 1920:

  Bezwada. Seven or eight letters were received from Saraladevi during the Madras tour. They indicate her suspicion about…her charge that Bapu is dazzled by him and her complaint that Bapu’s letters betray ‘mental exhaustion’. She says that for Bapu’s sake she made such an inordinate sacrifice. She put in one pan all the joys of life and pleasures of the world and in the other ‘Bapu and his laws’ and committed the folly of choosing the latter!7

  The person denoted by those ellipses was almost certainly Shaukat Ali. Sarala was unhappy with Gandhi’s enchantment with him; whether out of possessiveness or reservations regarding Khilafat we cannot say. And Sarala was clearly tired of being told what to wear, what to eat, how to cook and clean. She was not an ashramite who had voluntarily taken a series of vows—asked by Gandhi to live like one, she was resisting.

  Like many lawgivers, Gandhi failed to see the signs of rebellion. In one of her letters, Sarala had said she wished to visit her family in Calcutta. Gandhi, writing from Bezwada on 23 August (the same day as Mahadev’s diary entry above) told her to do so only ‘after you have perfected your spinning-wheel and Hindi and put our Lahore work on a sound footing’. The next day, he wrote again: ‘Your letters have caused me distress. You do not like my sermons….I do not at all like your doubting the necessity of the life adopted by you or the life you are trying to adopt….If I am your Law-giver and if I do not always lay down the law, surely I must at least reason with you on things of eternity or supreme importance for the country for which we live and which we love so well.’8

  III

  Gandhi had taken his message of non-cooperation to the Punjab, Sindh and the United Provinces; to Bombay and Ahmedabad; to the large and small towns of the Madras Presidency. The north, the west and the south of the country had been reasonably well covered. Only the east remained.

  Gandhi now proceeded to Calcutta, the venue for the special session of the Congress, held in the first week of September. Calcutta in 1920 was the greatest city in India, the former capital of the British Raj, and—not least—an epicentre of the national movement. Many early leaders of the Congress had been Bengalis from Calcutta. The revolutionary terrorists had also been most active in this city and province.

  One suspects Gandhi might have approached his journey east with some trepidation. His earlier visits to Calcutta had not always been happy or productive. He first went there in 1896, seeking support for his campaign for Indian rights in South Africa. Every newspaper editor he met showed him the door. In the twenty-four years since that first visit, Gandhi had become much better known in Bengal. No editor in Calcutta—or anywhere else in India—could afford to ignore him. But he was keenly aware of the Bengali bhadralok’s sense of superiority. They had been the first to take to English education, the first to ask for rights for women, the first to articulate the demand for political freedom.

  Gokhale had once said that what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow. This was extremely generous, for Gokhale’s native Maharashtra had produced its precocious social reformers too. Bengal and Bengalis might allow that Maharashtrians were also politically sophisticated and culturally emancipated. But they were less willing to acknowledge a mere Gujarati as an equal. Gandhi’s asceticism also grated on the epicurean Bengalis, themselves fond of good food and wine, and of music and art, tastes which Gandhi had conspicuously failed to cultivate.9

  Gandhi arrived at Calcutta’s Howrah station on the night of 3 September. He was received by his son Harilal, to whose home in Pollock Street he then proceeded. The next morning he visited the venue of the Congress. The pandal was adorned with flags and slogans saying ‘Nations by Themselves are Made’, ‘Remember Jallianwala Bagh’, ‘Home Rule is our Birthright’ and ‘Hindu–Mussalman ki jai’.10

  At a session on the first day, Annie Besant was shouted down by the delegates, because of her opposition to the policy of non-cooperation. Gandhi stood up on a chair and with folded hands asked the hecklers to quieten down. Every speaker, he said, must be given a patient hearing. This was a handsome gesture, since, back in 1916, Mrs Besant had demanded that he stop speaking in Banaras when his words offended her.11

  On 5 September, Gandhi circulated a note he had freshly drafted on non-cooperation. This asked for seven forms of action: surrender of titles and honorary posts; refusal to attend government functions; ‘gradual withdrawal’ of children from government schools and colleges, and establishment of national schools and colleges in their place; ‘gradual boycott’ of British courts by lawyers and litigants, and establishment of private arbitration courts in their place; refusal by Indians to serve as soldiers, labourers or clerks in the new British government in Mesopotamia; boycott of legislative councils; and boycott of foreign goods.12

  On 8 September, Gandhi formally moved his resolution on non-cooperation. Speeches and the ‘mere expression of angry feeling’, he said, had proved inadequate ‘to bend the Government to our will’. Carried away by the moment, Gandhi now made what (even at the time) must have seemed an extremely reckless promise. ‘If there is a sufficient response to my scheme,’ he proclaimed, ‘I make bold to reiterate my statement that you can gain swarajya in the course of a year.’

  Gandhi’s resolution was seconded by Motilal Nehru, who, pressed by his radical son Jawaharlal, had come around to the virtues of non-cooperation. On the other side, Jinnah, Malaviya and Mrs Besant spoke vigorously against the motion. After the speeches, the votes were cast and counted—1855 delegates voted for Gandhi’s resolution, 873 against. The provincial break-up was revealing: Bombay (243 yes, 93 no), UP (259 vs 28) and Punjab (254 vs 92) most strongly supported Gandhi, while Madras (161 to 135) and Bengal (551 to 395) were more divided. In the Central Provinces, Gandhi’s supporters were actually in a minority (30 to 33).13

  In terms of numbers, Gandhi had won the day. But the debates had been prolonged, and many long-serving Congressmen had opposed the motion. The Bengal leaders B.C. Pal and C.R. Das now worked to effect a compromise. The annual session of the Congress was due to meet in Nagpur in December. Why not wait until then to have the decision ratified? The meeting ended with the acceptance of non-cooperation in principle, but a deferral of the decision to put it into practice.14

  IV

  From Calcutta, Gandhi returned to Ahmedabad for a week’s rest, and then resumed his travels. In October, he spent two weeks in the United Provinces, speaking in ten different towns. By far the most important of these was Aligarh. The town was home to the great Muslim University, alma mater of both Shaukat and Mohammad Ali, but also a bastion of Empire loyalism. Gandhi and the Ali Brothers arrived in Aligarh on 11 October, hoping to win its students over to the cause of non-cooperation.15 They gave a series of speeches in Aligarh that had mixed results; the students finding it difficult to follow Gandhi’s still imperfect Hindustani.16

  Even less impressed were the trustees of the university. They refused outright the request of Gandhi and the Ali Brothers that they return their government grant and become a ‘National University’. Writing to Gandhi, the trustees said they would ‘firmly adhere to our old established policy’ of staying away from politics, which, in effect, meant taking the side of the authorities.17

  Accompanying Gandhi on this trip was Mahadev Desai. He did not entirely share his master’s enchantment with the Ali Brothers. ‘This Shaukat Ali is becoming intolerable now,’ wrote Mahadev to Devadas Gandhi, ‘he is fond of pomp [and] there was nothing but tamasha in
Mathura yesterday.’ At Aligarh, Mahadev wanted Gandhi to meet with groups of students, but they were overruled by Shaukat and his programme of ‘endless hustle and processions and public meetings’.18

  Gandhi and the Ali Brothers now decided to start their own ‘National University’ in Aligarh. Their hope was that the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, a man comparable in stature to Tagore, would agree to be its vice chancellor. Gandhi wrote to Iqbal in Lahore urging him to accept the post. ‘I am sure it [the National University] will prosper under your cultured leadership,’ he said, adding, ‘Hakimji Ajmal Khan and Dr. Ansari and of course the Ali Brothers desire it. I wish you could see your way to respond. Your expenses on a scale suited to the new awakening can be easily guaranteed.’19

  Iqbal wrote back declining the offer. The poet, understandably, did not want to be diverted by academic politics and the raising of funds. But he did have an important suggestion to make. Iqbal observed that ‘the Muslims of India are far behind the other communities of this country. Their principal need is not Literature and Philosophy but technical Education which would make them Economically independent.’ Therefore, he said, those who were behind the new university ‘will be well advised if they make it an institution devoted mainly to the technical side of Natural Sciences supplemented by such religious Education as may be considered necessary’.20

  Having failed with Iqbal, Gandhi then persuaded the educationist Zakir Husain to take up the assignment. The university itself was shifted from Aligarh to Delhi. Named the Jamia Millia Islamia, it would function as a ‘Nationalist Muslim’ alternative to the solidly pro-British university at Aligarh.

  V

  In the last week of October, Gandhi published a letter addressed ‘To Every Englishman in India’, signed by ‘Your faithful friend, M.K. Gandhi’. The letter began by recalling his ‘free and voluntary co-operation’ with the British government for three decades, and the services he had rendered them during their wars with the Zulus, Boers and Germans. However, said Gandhi, the unwillingness to restore the Khilafat and the ‘atrocities in the Punjab’ had ‘completely shattered my faith in the good intentions of the Government and the nation which is supporting it’.

  Gandhi listed other grievances: such as the exploitation of India’s economic resources for the benefit of England; the high salaries, high military expenditure and other official extravagances ‘in utter disregard of India’s poverty’; the ‘repressive legislation’ to silence the voices ‘seeking to give expression to a nation’s agony’; and the ‘degrading treatment’ of Indians in British dominions.

  Gandhi urged the English to ‘repent of the wrong done to Indians’, and to abandon repression in favour of an ‘honourable solution’. He ended by asking the rulers to ‘make common cause with the people of India whose salt you are eating. To seek to thwart their aspirations is disloyalty to the country.’21

  Gandhi’s letter evoked some interesting responses from Englishmen in India. Two schoolteachers in Bangalore praised the ‘generous tone’ of the letter. Acknowledging the ‘arrogant attitude to Indians’ among many Englishmen, they themselves believed the Empire should be ‘a commonwealth of free peoples voluntarily linked together by the ties of common experience in the past and common aspirations for the future, a commonwealth which may hope to spread liberty and progress through the whole earth’.22

  Another letter, by a certain Edward Foy of Ambala Cantonment, was less measured. This called Gandhi ‘the ungratefulest of men’. ‘After all that the British Government has done,’ wrote this man angrily, ‘you have no good word for it! Where would you have been today but for the British Government which saved India from the iron grip of Germany?’ Gandhi claimed to be a ‘peace-maker’, but in the eyes of Mr Foy he was in fact a ‘peace-breaker’, ‘manufacturing worse and worse forms of agitation which threaten the lives and property of all others and of your own countrymen also’.23

  Even more intemperate was a letter sent under the pseudonym ‘Pro Bono Publico’. The letter began by calling Gandhi a ‘Prince of Liars, Son of Seven Prostitutes and Father of a thousand criminal bastards’. How can ‘an idolatrous farting Hindu’, it asked, ‘side with a pharaisical Mahomeddan’? ‘What sympathy or thought,’ the letter continued, ‘you miserable swine, can pretend to have for the lecherous, murdering Turk, he would not piss on you or the Muslims of this country.’ Had Gandhi lived ‘under the German Govt. the first time you acted the “nimakharam” and uttered a crooked word against them, you would have been hung like the dog you are’. Yet the ‘benign and benevolent [British] government has most stupidly given you no end of rope…’24

  Amidst this barrage of criticism and abuse, Gandhi received a letter from an Irishman who wrote ‘to wish you success in trying to obtain Swaraj. India belongs to your people and not to the English…’ The writer spoke of how the ‘English have oppressed Ireland, my own dear country, for hundreds of years but we Irish never gave in and always strived for freedom and although we are not yet a Republic we shall go on doing our very best to obtain it’. With the Irish example before him, Gandhi was urged to ‘fight on for liberty’ himself.25

  VI

  As he travelled through India, Gandhi continued to be reminded that what all parts of the country had in common was the treatment of certain castes as ‘untouchable’. He was appalled by this stigmatization by his fellow Hindus of their co-religionists. In May 1920, he emphatically declared that

  We cannot compare the sufferings of the untouchables with those of any other section in India. It passes my understanding how we consider it dharma to treat the depressed classes as untouchables; I shudder at the very thought of this. My conscience tells me that untouchability can never be a part of Hinduism. I do not think it too much to dedicate my whole life to removing the thick crust of sin with which Hindu society has covered itself for so long by stupidly regarding these people as untouchables. I am only sorry that I am unable to devote myself wholly to that work.26

  Gandhi had now started a college in Ahmedabad to go with the school he had already founded. Called the Gujarat Vidyapith, this would be autonomous of the government and avail of no state funds. It was run as a ‘national’ college, supported by voluntary donations, and with a curriculum more suited to Indian needs than the state-run colleges that sought to train clerks for the civil service.

  In October 1920, the Gujarat Vidyapith passed a resolution that no school which refused to admit ‘Antyaja’, or untouchable children, would be given approval by it. This provoked uproar among upper-caste Gujaratis, with articles and statements attacking Gandhi for undermining Hindu dharma. To these criticisms, Gandhi pointedly asked: ‘Do we hope to win swaraj while reviving the practice of untouchability at the same time?’27

  In his own ashram, of course, no caste distinctions were observed at all. Visiting Sabarmati, the Moderate politician M.R. Jayakar saw Gandhi ‘ready to eat a boiled potato with a Harijan [untouchable] girl although it had been half bitten by her’. Jayakar himself lived in Bombay, professedly a cosmopolitan city, albeit one where his fellow lawyers would not break bread with people of other castes. ‘I have,’ he wrote later, ‘never found a man so free from caste aversion as Gandhi.’ Jayakar was impressed that Gandhi, ‘the foremost leader of India’, had ‘practically rooted out caste sense from his daily concerns’.28

  In early December, Gandhi wrote a long essay in Young India outlining his understanding of caste. He said that while he accepted the traditional fourfold division known as varnashramadharma, he condemned the practice of untouchability. ‘I believe that caste has saved Hinduism from disintegration,’ he remarked. ‘But like every other institution it has suffered from excrescences.’

  It was customary to rank the four varnas as follows: the Brahmins, or priests, at the top; the Kshatriyas, or warriors, next; the Vaishyas, or merchants (Gandhi’s own caste), third; the Sudras, or peasants and labourers, fourth, with a fifth class, tha
t of the ‘untouchables’, literally beyond the pale. However, in Gandhi’s (rather revisionist) view, ‘the caste system is not based on inequality, there is no question of inferiority, and so far as there is any such question arising…the tendency should undoubtedly be checked. But there appears to be no valid reason for ending the system because of its abuse. It lends itself easily to reformation. The spirit of democracy, which is fast spreading through India and the rest of the world will, without a shadow of doubt, purge the institution of the idea of predominance and subordination.’

  Each of these four varnas had hundreds of jatis, or sub-castes. Traditionally, a member of a particular jati would not mix, marry or eat with the member of a jati other than his own. These prohibitions Gandhi did not as yet challenge, claiming that ‘interdrinking, interdining, intermarrying, I hold, are not essential for the promotion of the spirit of democracy’. He did not ‘contemplate under a most democratic constitution a universality of manners and customs about eating, drinking and marrying. We shall ever have to seek unity in diversity, and I decline to consider it a sin for a man not to drink or eat with anybody and everybody.’

  Gandhi now added a crucial caveat:

  Thus whilst I am prepared to defend, as I have always done, the division of Hindus into four castes…I consider untouchability to be a heinous crime against humanity. It is not a sign of self-restraint but an arrogant assumption of superiority. It has served no useful purpose and it has suppressed, as nothing else in Hinduism has, vast numbers of the human race who are not only every bit as good as ourselves, but are rendering in many walks of life an essential service to the country.29