Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Gandhi then read out a statement he had prepared. He spoke of his work in South Africa, his belief that the treatment of Indians there was an aberration and that British rule was ‘intrinsically and mainly good’. He mentioned his work raising ambulance corps in 1899, 1906 and 1914, these ‘actuated by the belief that it was possible by such services to gain a status of full equality in the Empire for my countrymen’.

  The ‘first shock’ to Gandhi’s faith in the British Empire was the Rowlatt Act, ‘a law designed to rob the people of all freedom’. Then ‘followed the Punjab horrors’, and finally, the going back on the promise regarding the Khilafat. His ‘hope shattered’, Gandhi ‘came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection had made India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and economically’. Hence the movement which he had started, based on the belief that ‘non-co-operation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with the good’.

  It was time now for the judge, R.S. Broomfield, to deliver his judgment. The son of a London barrister, he had spent almost two decades in the Indian Civil Service. After saying that Gandhi had made it easy for him by pleading guilty, Broomfield remarked that it was

  impossible to ignore the fact that you are in a different category from any person I have ever tried or am likely to have to try. It would be impossible to ignore the fact that in the eyes of millions of your countrymen, you are a great patriot and a great leader. Even those who differ from you in politics look upon you as a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life.

  The law, however, was ‘no respector of persons’. Gandhi had by his own admission broken the law. The judge had agonized as to what would be a just sentence, and—addressing the accused directly—said he had finally decided on a jail term of six years, which he hoped Gandhi would not consider ‘unreasonable’, since Bal Gangadhar Tilak had once got the same sentence under the same section of the law. Then, in what must surely be among the most unusual wishes offered by a judge anywhere at any time, Justice Broomfield remarked that ‘if the course of events in India should make it possible for the Government to reduce the period and release you, no one will be better pleased than I’.

  Since Shankarlal Banker’s offence was less serious, he was sentenced to a year and a half in jail.69

  When I first read Judge Broomfield’s words some three decades ago, I was moved almost to tears. In rereading them now, my response is only slightly less emotional. The judge himself saw the matter in more detached terms. In his diary for 18 March, he had pencilled the following entries:

  Golf before breakfast

  Try Gandhi70

  In the evening, the judgment delivered, Broomfield most likely went for a drink in the club. A day later, the men he had sentenced were taken in a special train bound for Poona, where they would be lodged in the Yerwada Jail.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Mahatma from Above and Below

  I

  After Gandhi had called off the non-cooperation movement and himself gone to jail, the Government of India commissioned a history of the struggles that he had led. Khilafat and non-cooperation together constituted the most widespread resistance to British authority since the great rebellion of 1857. They had also displayed a comparable level of Hindu–Muslim solidarity. The Government wished therefore to understand their origins and causes, to be better able to handle such movements when they next occurred.

  This official history was written by a senior officer of the Intelligence Bureau. The book starts with these prefatory words:

  The success which attended the Non-co-operation and Khilafat Movements in India is undoubtedly attributable to the Great War, for neither agitation could have attained the dimensions which it did but for the economic pressure to which the people were subjected in consequence of the prolonged and wide-spread hostilities. The pressure aggravated and magnified local grievances and spread the spirit of unrest, thus making, for a time, the work of agitators easy.1

  The analysis was not incorrect. The War led to high inflation, caused by the printing of currency to finance it. There was a scarcity of essential commodities across India. The million-plus Indians who went to serve under the British flag were often heads of households; in their absence, the family profession (most often farming) seriously suffered.

  While economics played a role, so did individuals, and one individual in particular. The official history underestimated the personal charisma of Mohandas K. Gandhi. His name, and his methods, fired the popular imagination. It was he who conceived of and led the campaign against the Rowlatt Act, he who conceived and led non-cooperation, he, who, by making common cause with the Muslims on the Khilafat, brought India’s two major communities together against the Raj.

  This chapter steps back from the chronological narrative to consider how Gandhi was perceived at home and abroad in these years, as he so adeptly moved from a position of relative marginality to the very centre of public life. Why did so many Indians respond so positively to him, his leadership and his movement? Why did some Indians criticize him? And how did Gandhi and his ideas become known in Europe and America?

  II

  The merchants of Bombay were among Gandhi’s earliest and most consistent supporters. Their support was based in part on the camaraderie of caste; Gandhi too was a Bania by birth, indeed the first major political leader from that background. (Tilak and Gokhale were both Brahmins, as were many other Congressmen.) Then there was the linguistic affinity; for, successful traders in Bombay tended to be Gujarati speakers. Gandhi’s asceticism and personal integrity also appealed to the merchants. Finally, even among this traditionally cautious and risk-averse community, who put family, faith and finances above all else, there was a residual patriotism. Here was a direct challenge to foreign rule, and it was led by one of their own.

  In July 1921, when the non-cooperation movement was at its height, the finance secretary of the Government of Bombay met with the president of the Bombay Piece-goods Dealers Association. Reporting the conversation to the Government of India, the official reproduced what were ‘more or less’ the merchant’s ‘actual words’, namely:

  Here at last is a National leader, who, whatever may be the merits and demerits of his practical policy, has devoted his life to uplifting us as a country, and who, unlike other leaders, is not out for any personal gain. It is up to us, therefore, not to let him down, or at any rate to do what we can to save his face.2

  Bombay was a city where Gandhi had once practised as a lawyer, and which he visited often. It was also a hub of nationalist activity. Yet Gandhi was known and admired in towns in many other parts of India too.

  In the last months of 1919, Gandhi made his first-ever visit to the Punjab. With Gandhi on this trip was C.F. Andrews. Andrews had already spent a decade in the subcontinent, based at St Stephen’s College in Delhi. He knew the Punjab particularly well, and wrote often for its leading English newspaper, the Tribune.

  Gandhi and Andrews reached Amritsar on 4 November. In an article written soon afterwards, the Englishman described it as

  one of the most remarkable days that I have ever spent in India. It revealed in a light I had not seen before, the psychology of the Indian crowd during a time of intense devotional fervour and excitement. The procession through the city, which occupied altogether nearly five hours, was altogether transformed by the multitude into a religious ceremony. No one had instructed them. From first to last it was spontaneous, to the fullest sense of the word.

  Andrews had been to the Punjab shortly after the tragedies of April 1919. Then, when he passed down those same streets, ‘the fear caused by martial law and punitive police was still fresh in people’s minds’. On some faces he had noticed a ‘sullen gloom’, on others, a ‘cowed submission’. But now, wrote Andrews, ‘the coming of Mahatma Gandhi has effectively broken this evil spell…Indeed his vict
ory has been so great that it has extended over the police themselves. Joyful news was spread from street to street, that the police were joining with the multitude on that day of universal rejoicing.’3

  Andrews was a close friend of Gandhi’s, and missionaries (even lapsed missionaries) are prone to hyperbole anyway. Even so, it seems clear that Gandhi received a rapturous reception on this, his first trip to Amritsar. His activities elsewhere in India had been published in the local press, and conveyed by word of mouth. Like the Bombay merchant, the citizen of Amritsar understood that here was a leader who worked not for himself but for the nation-in-the-making.

  From the far north let us move to the deep south. We have noted, in Chapter 4, the countrywide observance of 6 April 1919 as Satyagraha Day. In the temple town of Kumbakonam there was a total hartal, with all shops, schools and colleges being closed. In the evening there was a public meeting attended by more than 10,000 people. Among the resolutions passed by the gathering was this one:

  This Meeting offers its humble prayer to the All Wise Providence for sending Mahathma Gandhi to advise and organise this and other meetings and to infuse into them the spirit of Love and Charity.4

  One sign of this veneration of Gandhi was the title ‘Mahatma’, used unselfconsciously by both his friend Charlie Andrews and by the public of Kumbakonam (a town Gandhi had not yet visited). Loosely translated as ‘Great Soul’, it is an honorific rarely granted. It denotes great spiritual power as well as moral purity.

  It is conventionally believed that it was the poet Rabindranath Tagore who first called Gandhi ‘Mahatma’. But the ascription is incorrect. As early as 1910, Gandhi’s friend Pranjivan Mehta referred to him as a ‘Mahatma’ in a letter he wrote to Gopal Krishna Gokhale.5

  Mehta’s was a private declaration. The first public occasion on which the title may have been used was in the Kathiawari town of Gondal, which Gandhi and Kasturba visited shortly after their return to India. On 27 January 1915, the citizens of Gondal organized a reception for the Gandhis, to mark their return to the homeland and to honour their work in South Africa. At this reception, a locally respected priest named Jivram Kalidas Shastri presented Gandhi with a scroll which referred to him as a ‘Mahatma’.6

  By the time of the Rowlatt satyagraha of 1919, the honorific ‘Mahatma’ was being widely used by Gandhi’s admirers across India. And sometimes misused. In January 1921, the bearer of the title was told that a brand of ‘Mahatma Gandhi Cigarettes’ was being marketed and sold. Gandhi was appalled, for in his view smoking was an ‘expensive vice’ which ‘fouls the breath, discolours the teeth and sometimes even causes cancer’. Through the columns of Young India, he urged the errant firm to withdraw the labels bearing his name from the market.7

  III

  In 1919, Gandhi turned fifty. His birthday by the Western calendar fell on 2 October. However, going by the traditional Indian calendar, his fiftieth birthday was marked on 21 September 1919.

  The occasion was widely celebrated. In Bombay, a women’s group named the Bhagini Samaj held a public meeting, where ‘the proceedings began with music. The soul stirring song of “Bharat Hamara Desh Hai” was sung by Mrs. Avantibai Gokhale’, a follower of Gandhi who had worked with him in Champaran.

  Meanwhile, in the inland town of Satara, a photo of the Mahatma was carried in a procession through the streets, ending in a public meeting where ‘speeches were made about the life and doings of Gandhi’. Further south, in a meeting in Belgaum, one speaker said that ‘since the Mutiny [of 1857], Mr. Gandhi was the first man to prove that Government could be made to yield to Satyagraha. The audience, he hoped, would be infected by [a] hundredth part of Gandhi’s brilliant character.’ Another speaker claimed that ‘whatever Tilak and others did in words, Gandhi had done in deeds’.

  A most remarkable tribute to Gandhi on his fiftieth birthday came in the form of an epic poem, almost 400 lines long. Entitled ‘The Ascetic of Gujarat’, it was written in Gujarati by one Nanalal D. Kavi. The Bombay government’s hard-working police department had it translated in its entirety. A few select verses follow:

  A Brahmin seer in investigating rules of life

  A valiant Kshatriya hero in battleplay,

  A wise great Vaishya in determining policy

  A thorough-going Shudra in service of man,

  All the Varnas are well concentrated in him…

  Newest of the new,

  He is the oldest of the old.

  Truth is his motto.

  Asceticism is his armour,

  His banner is of Brahmacharya, his saint’s bowl,

  Inexhaustible waters of forgiveness are in,

  His skin is of forbearance,

  An heir to the Yoga of the eternal Yogi family,

  Above storm-winds of passions,

  The great living teacher of Bharata,

  He is the ascetic of Gujarat,

  The great-souled Mahatma Gandhi.8

  To this Hindu male’s very public profession of admiration, let me juxtapose a private declaration by a Muslim woman. This was Raihana Tyabji, whose father, Abbas Tyabji, was a former chief justice of Baroda state who had abandoned power and position to join the non-cooperation movement. Gandhi and Abbas Tyabji were extremely fond of one another, addressing each other in their correspondence with the peculiar greeting ‘BHRR’, apparently an abbreviation of ‘Brother’.

  Tyabji’s daughter, Raihana, was a gifted singer, specializing in the devotional songs of Mirabai, the medieval poet-mystic, born of royal blood, who had worshipped Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu. Gandhi liked conversing with Abbas, and liked hearing Raihana sing Mira bhajans even more. From 1919, she began visiting the Sabarmati Ashram regularly, often staying for long periods of time.

  When Gandhi was arrested in March 1922, Raihana Tyabji was at her father’s home in Baroda. She wrote Gandhi an impassioned letter of love and loyalty. ‘What you have done for us, words may not express,’ she began. Then she continued in words none the less:

  We were slaves, and you have freed us. Our hearts were empty, you have filled them with love of country and firm resolve. Our minds were empty, you have filled them with the one great idea—service of the motherland. We were bound hand and foot with a desolating sense of our own inferiority and worthlessness. I remember the time when I envied English girls—for they were free—and they had white skins. You have made us see that we are in no way inferior to any people, you have made us men and women again. Our bodies may be in thrall, but our souls are the souls of free Indians.

  Raihana ended her letter by declaring Gandhi to be ‘today the freest man in the world’. The British might have put him in jail, ‘but from your new Ashram your soul will guide us and keep us to the straight path’. For, Gandhi had given all Indians ‘a new ideal. You have given us new life. You have given us freedom. You have given us truth and love.’9

  IV

  In February 1921, Gandhi had toured the district of Gorakhpur in the United Provinces, bordering Nepal. From there he took a train to Banaras. Mahadev Desai’s diary contains an arresting description of how the villagers en route showed their affection for Gandhi. He writes that ‘at every station peasants with long lathis and torches in their hands would come to us and raise cries loud enough to split the very drums of our ears’. They would go from compartment to compartment, asking, ‘Who is Mahatma Gandhi?’ At one station an exasperated Desai, seeking to protect his master, identified his bald and bespectacled self as Gandhi. Then he felt guilty at having told a lie.

  The train proceeded, haltingly, till

  We reached Bhatni and the craze for Gandhiji’s darshan reached its climax. As it was, owing to the previous invasions, the train reached there at 12 midnight instead of the scheduled 11 p.m. As the people could not have the darshan [Gandhi was trying to sleep, and Mahadev did not want to disturb
him], they got furious and stood, in spite of all our earnest pleading, between the railway lines in front of the engine. Cries of, ‘We won’t allow the train to start till we have the darshan’ came out from many lips. I got down again and fell at their feet—all to no purpose. I grew wild…I warned them that, as a result of this tumult, Gandhiji might stop travelling altogether…But they were stone-deaf to all my frantic appeals. On the contrary, they tried to put us to shame by repeatedly asserting, ‘We have come for darshan of the Lord. How ever can we feel ashamed of it.’10

  After Gandhi left Gorakhpur, all kinds of rumours circulated about the Mahatma and his magic touch. These were published in a local Hindi newspaper, Sandesh. There were tales of a lawyer who went back on his promise to give up his practice and had his house filled with faeces; of a sadhu who abused Gandhi and whose body then began to stink awfully; of a milkman whose entire stock of ghee went bad after he had made sarcastic remarks about the Mahatma; of a mango tree bent badly in a storm that straightened itself because, it was said, it had the grace of Gandhi; of a follower of Gandhi who went around telling his fellow villagers to stop gambling—all obeyed him except one, whose goats were then bitten by his own dogs.

  One of the most vivid of these stories concerned an Anglo-Indian engine driver, who had a nightmare and ran towards the railway colony

  shouting ‘Man, run, man! Gandhi is marching at the head of several strong Indians decimating the English’. This caused a panic and all the local white population emerged from their bedrooms in a state of undress and ran towards the station. The key to the armoury at the station was asked for, but could not be found as the officer-in-charge was away. English women were locked up in boxes and almirahs, and some Englishmen were heard saying, ‘Man! The cries of “jai jai” are still reaching our ears. We shall not go back to our bungalows.’11