Gorakhpur lay in the northernmost part of the United Provinces. Meanwhile in the central UP districts of Rae Bareilly and Faizabad, a preacher named Baba Ram Chandra had catalysed a vigorous movement of peasants demanding lower rents and an end to arbitrary eviction. In a massive gathering of peasants in the temple town of Ayodhya, ‘Mr. Gandhi’s name was freely used.’ The peasants, ‘while taking no interest in the schemes of the non-co-operators were moved by the agitators to advance the more forcible expression of their own grievances’.12
To show their discontent, peasants burnt the crops of their landlords, and let loose the landlords’ cattle in the sugar cane fields. In January 1921, the chief secretary described the situation in these districts as ‘extremely serious’. The peasants, he wrote,
had been persuaded by perambulating agitators that not only the Taluqdars [landlords] but the British Raj would shortly cease to exist and that under the beneficent rule of Mr. Gandhi they would enter on a golden age of prosperity in which they would be able to buy good cloth at 0-4-0 [four annas] and other necessaries of life at similar cheap rates.13
The situation in the Indo-Gangetic plains was reproduced in the Eastern Himalaya. In January 1922, the Government of Assam sent the Government of India a ‘note on the meanings assigned to swaraj by various sections of the population’. Thus the peasants of the Kamrup District believed that when swaraj came,
the revenue will be largely reduced, and that most of the forest taxes, including the grazing tax will be abolished, the royalty on timber will remain, but like the land revenue will only be a fraction of what it is now….[N]o tolls would be levied either on hats [local markets] or on people who fish. Those who wish to do so will be allowed to grow the poppy and to manufacture opium and ganja for their own use.
Such was the peasant understanding of, or expectations for, the dawn of political freedom. The note continued: ‘In a vague sort of way, it is thought that Gandhi will be raja; but the real point of the movement is the reduction and abolition of taxation and the cheapening of commodities which in some mysterious ways is to accompany swaraj.’
It was further noted that ‘a European passing along the Trunk Road to Polasbari is assailed with cries of Mahatma Gandhi ki jai by all the cowherds’.14
In Assam, Gandhi’s appeal was not restricted to the peasants alone. In May 1921, there was a series of strikes in the tea gardens of the province. Some 6000 coolies left work, telling the managers that Gandhi had ordered them to do so. A local newspaper reported that ‘Mahatma’s name is in their mouths. Mahatma’s image is in their hearts.’15
V
Gandhi had visited some of the sites of the protests narrated earlier. But his visits were always fleeting, a speech on the stump before moving on to the next town. Even those who attended his talks didn’t always hear or understand his words. He spoke softly, and microphones were not yet in common use.
Yet he had a presence. This was communicated by his dress, the ordinary loincloth that denoted a life of simplicity and sacrifice. His words—when they were heard—were clear and direct, addressing the everyday life of Indians, in an idiom derived from their own myths and traditions.
The Congress leaders of the past had an elitist air about them. They dressed formally, whether in a Western suit and tie or in an Indian tunic and turban. They were most comfortable speaking in university senate houses and city clubs. Some were more daring—Bal Gangadhar Tilak had reached out to the workers of Bombay, Lajpat Rai to the peasants of the Punjab. But none had the audacity to make theirs a genuinely all-India and all-class campaign.
Gandhi’s clothes were homespun. His manner of speaking was homespun as well. Both helped him reach out to a far wider public than his predecessors. Yet, even more critical was the scale of his political ambition. Tilak was a mass leader in western Maharashtra alone. If he ventured outside his province, it was to address city audiences in English. But Gandhi travelled everywhere. UP, Bihar, Bengal, Assam, the Tamil and Telugu country, Maharashtra, Punjab—Gandhi went to all these places, visiting cities and towns small and even smaller. He spoke not in English but in Hindustani, the lingua franca of much of northern and eastern India, with interpreters at hand to render his words into Tamil or Bengali or Marathi or Telugu or whatever the local language would have been.
Those who attended Gandhi’s meetings conveyed their wonder to their fellows, and the word passed on, and on. The restructuring of the Congress had made it a decentralized and truly democratic party. The flourishing of nationalist newspapers, printed in all the languages of the subcontinent, their contents often read aloud to groups in villages and small towns, took the Gandhian message to all corners of the land.
In every district, sometimes in every taluk, there were now young men who had taken aboard Gandhi’s four pillars of swaraj—non-violence, Hindu–Muslim harmony, swadeshi and the abolition of untouchability—and preached their necessity to the people of their own taluk or district. Although these activists were mostly or exclusively men, their audiences, like Gandhi’s own, often included women as well. The sage-like nature of his personality, the simplicity and directness of his message, his relentless and near-continuous travels, the commitment of his followers—these all help explain the extent of Gandhi’s reach and influence during the days of the non-cooperation movement. That he was so widely known and revered was truly astonishing, when we consider that in 1920–21 the radio had not yet arrived in India, and television and the Internet had not been invented. Compared to the technologies of communication available to the political leaders of today, those that Gandhi had to make use of seem very primitive indeed.
By 1921, Gandhi was admired by men and women; doctors, lawyers, teachers; workers, peasants, pastoralists; Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs; high castes and low castes. And even by convicts. My personal favourite among all the stories from the years of non-cooperation relates to an incident that took place in the late summer of 1921 in the southern town of Trichy. Here, a group of prisoners escaped from the local jail. An official inquiry into the jailbreak revealed ‘that there are some grounds for believing it to be political and based upon the belief that the British rule was on the point of yielding to Gandhi’s swaraj’.16
VI
Gandhi had his Indian admirers, and he had his Indian critics, among them the Moderate politicians whom he had relegated to the sidelines. The Moderates were constitutionalists, who abhorred street protest, preferring earnest petitions to the government. They were extremely trusting of the British. As they saw it, the Raj had brought order and stability to a divided and desperately poor land; it would bring progress and welfare; and, in time, freedom and liberty as well. On the other hand, Gandhi’s movement of militant non-cooperation was a direct challenge to the Raj, and through methods radically opposed to those favoured by the Moderates.
The most famous Moderate attack on Gandhi was C. Sankaran Nair’s Gandhi and Anarchy, published in 1922. Nair was a considerable public figure in India. Born in Malabar in 1857, he moved to Madras and established a successful law practice. Visiting England in 1893, he was confirmed in his belief that the country ‘was the home of freedom’.
Nair served as president of the (then extremely loyalist) Congress party in 1897. He later became advocate general of Madras, and, in 1915, a member of the viceroy’s executive council, the highest post to which an Indian could aspire (he was only the third Indian to be elevated in this manner). He resigned from the council in protest after the Amritsar massacre in 1919.17
Sankaran Nair vehemently disliked Gandhi. This may have been in part a product of jealousy, for when Nair was already Congress president, Gandhi was a relatively unknown lawyer in Durban. His book reeks of personal bitterness, at being put in the shadows by a man much younger than himself. But beyond the animosity, there was also a larger political argument that Nair was making and that we must not lose sight of.
Afte
r years of trying, wrote Nair in Gandhi and Anarchy, the Moderates at last ‘obtained a Reform scheme which brought India directly on to the path leading to Home Rule’. But ‘Mr. Gandhi is standing right athwart their path, thus preventing or at least retarding and dangerously imperilling the indispensable reforms’.
As Nair saw it, ‘the violent section led by Mr. Gandhi’ sought ‘the expulsion of the British Government from India’. ‘What is Mr. Gandhi doing?’ he asked, before providing this answer: ‘He is doing everything possible to increase racial and class hatred.’
As a Hindu from Malabar, Nair was horrified by the Moplah revolt. ‘For sheer brutality on women, I cannot remember anything in history to match the Moplah rebellion,’ he remarked. The uprising was at least in part a product of the Khilafat movement. And yet, ‘Gandhi and his dupes have led Khilafatists to understand that the Hindus will stand by them in any contingency’. Nair then offered this dire prediction: ‘Gandhi and his followers have greatly encouraged the growth of Indian Pan Islamism which will in future always be opposed to other Religions and civilizations.’18
Nair’s attack on Gandhi attracted much attention at the time, largely because of his reputation and the high posts he had occupied. However, a more wide-ranging Moderate critique came from a Tamil named M. Ruthnaswamy. His book, also published in 1922, was (so far as I know) the first careful and considered, if in the end critical, analysis of Gandhi’s political philosophy.
Born in 1885, Ruthnaswamy studied in India before taking a history tripos at Cambridge and qualifying as a barrister in London. After his return home he became principal of Pachaiyappa’s College and a nominated member of the Madras legislative council. He does not seem to have ever been a member of the Congress, although he briefly joined the Justice Party, which sought to represent the non-Brahmins of the presidency.
Ruthnaswamy began by acknowledging the distinctiveness of Gandhi’s method. ‘We may not accept Mr. Gandhi as the pre-destined guide to the Promised Land of political emancipation,’ he remarked, ‘but we cannot deny that he has brought politics from the clouds to the earth of rural India.’ Gandhi had ‘knocked out of popular esteem’ both the timid Moderates as well as the bomb-throwing revolutionaries. His philosophy was ‘popular not because it ministers to the prejudices or tickles the palate of the people, but because it appeals to something in their soul’.
Ruthnaswamy praised Gandhi for drawing attention to the problem of ‘over-government’, for making the people ‘themselves responsible for their political and social government’, for insisting that social reform must go hand in hand with political reform (in contrast to other nationalists who claimed that ‘once political reform was secured in India, social reform would follow immediately and certainly’).
Finally, and most significantly, Gandhi had
brought politics from the Congress platforms to the beach and the maidan. He has interested the common people, the masses, in politics, that is in matters concerning national well-being. This in itself is a great achievement. For, the misfortune in India has been not that people have taken up the wrong brand of politics but that they have not taken to politics at all.
Gandhi had taken politics to the masses, but in ways that did not resonate with modern needs and values. Gandhi’s criticisms of modern civilization, wrote Ruthnaswamy, were ‘not the product of an occasion, the passing phase of an irritated mind, or an argument ad hoc. It was the conviction of his soul and revealed itself long before he began to think ill of British rule.’
Despite taking politics to the people, argued Ruthnaswamy, Gandhi’s ideas were out of date, and perhaps also his methods. Collective boycotts, practised in the past by a caste or a village, required unanimity among the members of a small, well-defined community. They were unfeasible ‘in the divided society of modern India’. Gandhi had attempted to make satyagraha ‘a general movement when, to succeed, it has to be local. A village expedient, he has tried to apply it to urban areas. Non-Co-operation in the form of social boycott was a caste device; he has tried to convert it into a national process.’
For the Madras critic, Gandhi was a ‘protagonist of the past’ who ‘wants to bring back the village civilisation of ancient India’. Ironically, while he disliked modern civilization, Gandhi sought to introduce two modern, Western ideas into India—those of liberty and equality. Yet these modern ideas required modern institutions to make them a reality. For, ‘you cannot fight an institution with an idea, however great and sublime it may be. The idea of untouchability is embodied in an institution which is Caste. If you want to destroy untouchability you must attack the institution of Caste. If you want to establish the ideas of liberty and equality you must introduce institutions embodying those ideas.’
Ruthnaswamy came to ‘the melancholy conclusion’ that Gandhi had ‘put his character, the tremendous influence he wields over his people and the political truths which he has seized hold of to the service of reaction’. The last paragraph of his unjustly forgotten book suggests that while
Mr. Gandhi might have been the saviour of India, he is content to be the saviour of Hinduism. He might have been a second Buddha, leading his people to social freedom, as that other led them to religious freedom. But he is content to be a second Tilak….He might have saved his country, but he is anxious only to save his theories. With regret and with despondency—for this seems to be the fate of almost all the great men that have been given to India—we must set Mr. Gandhi down as one of the great Might-Have-Beens of Indian history.19
This last judgement was premature. With Gandhi in jail, Ruthnaswamy may have thought that his political career was declining, or even at an end. That said, his was a courageous and often perceptive critique of a man so widely hailed as the nation’s redeemer.
VII
Moderates thought Gandhi too radical. Marxists thought him not radical enough. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution had attracted some intelligent and idealistic young Indians to communism. One was Sripad Amrit Dange, a trade union activist based in Bombay. In 1920, when he was still in his early twenties, Dange published a slim book called Gandhi vs. Lenin. This acknowledged some parallels between the two thinkers and their systems. Like Leninism, Gandhism accepted that ‘all the vices from which society’ was suffering emanated from ‘the rule of capitalism’. Notwithstanding his sincerity, argued Dange, Gandhi was a reactionary thinker obsessed with religion and the individual conscience. On the other hand, Lenin had identified the structural roots of economic oppression and sought to end it through collective mass action. While Gandhi looked to recreate the past, Lenin would preserve the ‘existing achievements’ of modern civilization, further building upon them by organizing the proletariat in a revolutionary transformation of society.20
Dange was based in Bombay. The most famous Indian Marxist of the day was in exile. This was M.N. Roy, a widely travelled polymath who had helped set up the Mexican Communist Party as well as the Communist International. Dange knew Lenin only through his writings, but Roy knew Lenin in person.
Roy had been out of India since 1915. However, he keenly followed developments in his homeland. He published a Marxist journal from Zurich, copies of which were smuggled into the subcontinent. In an essay in his journal, Roy declared that ‘the cult of non-violence is inseparable from an anti-revolutionary spirit. Those who do not want a revolution in India, can pin their hope on non-violent methods. Strictly non-violent methods are hardly distinguishable from constitutional agitation, and no people on the face of the earth has ever made a revolution by constitutional methods.’
Having spoken of (and dismissed) the principle, Roy then came to the person. ‘The greatness of Mahatma Gandhi,’ he remarked,
is to be found in his ability to discover before any other [Indian] the potentiality of mass agitation. But a vast social upheaval is greater than the greatest of men. The Mahatmaji did not fail to take ‘fullest advantage�
� of the situation, but he was not capable, he was not bold enough to identify himself with the mass movement as soon as it began to assume proportions of revolutionary violence. His failure proved the non-revolutionary nature of his ideal, which was the cult of non-violence.21
VIII
Dange and Roy, Nair and Ruthnaswamy, may all be largely forgotten now, but at the time they were all public figures. The last Indian critic of Gandhi I shall consider was unknown even while he lived. His name was Kantilal Amratlal, and his criticisms are contained in a Gujarati letter he wrote Gandhi on the last day of 1920, a copy of which is in the archives of the Sabarmati Ashram.
The critic began by challenging Gandhi’s claim to the title ‘Mahatma’. He conceded that ‘it is well known that your mental strength is very strong’. But, he added, Gandhi would ‘not claim to be free of human weaknesses—all types of weaknesses. Christ was a Mahatma. Buddha was a Mahatma. Lord Krishna was a Mahatma. Ramchandra was a Mahatma. Can you be placed among them? Surely not. Then why do you introduce yourself as a Mahatma?’
Gandhi had not coined the term for himself, but surely he should not encourage its use, said the critic. Yet, even the magazines edited by him, such as Navajivan, referred to Gandhi as ‘Mahatma’. ‘Is it fine for a cultured man like you to allow such things?’ asked Amratlal.
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