Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  The correspondent then argued that morality and politics were incompatible. ‘The burden of sin is increasing in Hindustan and in the world,’ he remarked. ‘People don’t hesitate in lying. Thousands of evil deeds are done.’ Rather than engage in politics, he asked Gandhi, ‘Why don’t you take up the best of all missions to stop people and lead them on the path of morality?’

  The third charge the critic laid at Gandhi’s door was hypocrisy. Gandhi had called for the boycott of government grants, schools and offices. Yet, he accepted the ‘money of those Mill owners who exploit their labourers mercilessly and the traders who do lots of malpractices’.

  The fourth charge Gandhi was accused of was chauvinism. ‘How can it be a sin not to use swadeshi goods?’ asked the critic. ‘Pride in one’s nation [swadeshabhiman] is not the ultimate sentiment.’ Gandhi’s was a ‘narrow vision’, since ‘country and life are transient’, not eternal.22

  His letter tells us that the critic lived in Ahmedabad—in the locality of Shahpur—and that he had written several times to Gandhi in the past. Perhaps he belonged to the segment of Ahmedabad’s merchant class that was resolutely hostile to the Sabarmati Ashram and its founder. This may be why the letter elicited no reply. Motivated though it may have been, this letter echoed criticisms made by people Gandhi knew and respected, such as Rabindranath Tagore. Notably, it was written, and received, at the moment of Gandhi’s greatest political triumph, the Nagpur Congress.

  IX

  Gandhi also attracted a range of responses from British officials who had to deal with him and his movement. Some were irritated by Gandhi—one member of the viceroy’s executive council, W.S. Marris, describing him as a ‘self-constituted redresser of wrongs’.23 Others were simply confused, such as the home secretary who wrote that ‘Gandhi is a follower of Tolstoi and Thoreau; and I am under the impression that there is a good deal in common—not in practice but in theory—between their doctrines and Bolshevism’.24

  Non-official Englishmen in India were also hostile to Gandhi. An early critic was the planter W.S. Irwin, whom we met in Chapter 3. In a series of articles in pro-Raj papers, he argued that the European planters had converted dangerous jungle into prosperous farmland. The peasants of Champaran, he claimed, were quite contented until the agitator Gandhi came along. In a splendid piece of vituperation, Irwin said that

  the genuineness of Mr. Gandhi’s ‘mission’ would have been much in doubt if his methods had been less theatrical. Notwithstanding [his] familiarity in England and elsewhere with the minor amenities of Western civilization, he (in Champaran at least) discards the use of head covering or shoes, sits on the floor, cooks his own food, and affects to follow the footsteps of the much greater philanthropist of 2,000 years ago [i.e. the Buddha]…Firmly dealt with, this agitation would have died a natural death, the sole purpose of it being to get the non-official portion of the European Community out of the district and to hand over to the tender mercies of the lawyer and mahajan the ryot for whose welfare so much solicitude is being advertised.25

  In 1917, Gandhi was making trouble merely in one district. Four years later, when the non-cooperation movement had made him a national leader, the Anglican bishops of India issued a pamphlet whose language was more elevated than W.S. Irwin’s, but whose intent was the same—the delegitimizing of Gandhi and his methods. The Indian leader had long claimed that he admired Jesus. In their response, the bishops noted that in Jesus’s time there ‘was a violent Nationalist party among the Jews and also a moderate party which was content with the Roman sway’. A malignant group of Jews, wrote the bishops, ‘tried to carry Him off to head a Nationalist revolt. But He would have none of it. His ideal was both broader and deeper, and His method of winning acceptance for His ideal was very different from that of political rebellion.’

  The Anglican bishops were convinced that the British had ‘conferred great benefits on India. They have protected her against foreign foes. They have protected her people against themselves.’ However, with the emergence of Gandhi’s movement, ‘it is race hatred which now in India threatens to submerge all that has been laboriously built of social order, economic prosperity, political progress and even religion’.

  The bishops professed admiration for Gandhi’s campaign against untouchability. Yet, they claimed that the practice ‘will never be removed till the clear light of the knowledge of God as universal King and impartially loving Father has penetrated the hearts of the people of this land’—that is, till all Hindus in India—and perhaps all Muslims and Sikhs too—had converted to Christianity.26

  Confusion, anger, paranoia, racial and theological arrogance—these were the ways in which the British in India met Gandhi’s challenge. Yet, there were exceptions, of Englishmen who provided more subtle understandings of the man and his movement. One such Englishman was W.B. Heycock, the district magistrate of Champaran at the time of Gandhi’s campaign there in the summer of 1917. In the weeks and months that Gandhi had been in his district, Heycock had become increasingly fascinated by the man. He spoke with him, he spoke to others about him. He even procured pamphlets about and by Gandhi, dating from his South African period. This was how the magistrate summed up his adversary:

  Gandhi seems a curious mixture of the East and West. He owes a large part of his belief to Ruskin and Tolstoi, particularly the latter; and couples these to the asceticism of a Jogi. Were his ideas only those of the East, he would have been content to have applied them to his personal existence in a life of meditative seclusion. It is only the teachings of the West that have made him an active social reformer.27

  This was written in June 1917. Exactly four years later, another insightful assessment was provided by the home secretary of the Government of India, H.D. Craik. No one else in India—not even Gandhi—knew as much about the political situation in the country as he did. For, it was to the home secretary that came the fortnightly reports, province by province and district by district, of the progress and impact of the political campaigns of 1920 and 1921.

  In Gandhi’s mind, Khilafat and non-cooperation were complementary and conjoined. The home secretary, on the other hand, argued that ‘the two movements are in origin and character distinct’. Non-cooperation was ‘in its essence political and social in character’; and its leaders had urged that ‘it must disassociate itself from violence of any kind’. On the other hand, Khilafat was essentially a religious question, and its leaders, far from being always wedded to non-violence, ‘have openly preached the doctrine that it may become necessary at any moment to declare jehad, or, in their phrase, to draw the sword’.

  Gandhi felt that by supporting Khilafat, he would cement the unity between Hindus and Muslims. The home secretary, on the other hand, believed that there was ‘no guarantee’ that the unity was ‘anything but temporary’. For,

  those who make much of it do so largely to promote political aims. They deliberately overlook the lessons of history, the ignorance of the masses and the essential differences which divide the two great religions—differences due to conflicting ethical standards as much as to political jealousy.28

  X

  How was Gandhi received in Britain itself? The first assessment of Gandhi in the British press after his return to India was an article published in January 1918 by the Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray. At this time, Gandhi’s reputation still rested largely on his work in South Africa. Murray thus provided a summary of Gandhi’s early life, his abandonment of a lucrative legal career for activism, and his leadership of the struggles of Indians against racially exclusive laws, this a ‘battle of the unaided human soul against overwhelming material force’. Noting how the South African satyagrahas of 1913–14 had compelled the government to amend its laws, Murray remarked:

  Persons in power should be very careful how they deal with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasure, nothing for riches, nothing for comfort o
r praise or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy—because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you so little purchase upon his soul.29

  Murray was not unsympathetic to pacifism, and came from a colonial background (he was born and raised in Australia). The empathy he showed with Gandhi and his methods was not reproduced by other British writers. They were largely sceptical of a man whose leadership of the Rowlatt satyagraha and the non-cooperation movement had thrown a direct challenge to British rule in India.

  One British journalist who had made many visits to India was Valentine Chirol, foreign editor of The Times. In a book published in 1910, he had characterized Bal Gangadhar Tilak as ‘the father of Indian unrest’, claiming he was a man ‘impatient of all restraint’ who held reactionary social and religious views.30 A decade later, when Chirol wrote a second book on the subcontinent, the title of ‘father of Indian unrest’ had passed on to Gandhi. The Times man saw him as a ‘strange and incalculable figure…who, favoured by an extraordinary combination of untoward circumstances, was to rally around him some of the most and many of the least reputable forces’ in India. For all ‘his visionary idealism’, wrote Chirol, Gandhi was ‘letting loose dangerous forces which reeked naught of ahimsa [non-violence]’.31

  Chirol’s strictures were relatively mild compared to British journalists who knew India (and Gandhi) only at second-hand. In early 1922, a popular London monthly published a blistering attack on Gandhi, calling him an ‘arch-agitator’, the ‘leader of sedition, incessantly fomenting unrest, and though deprecating violence and preaching peace, really inciting to riot and bloodshed’. The writer, a high Tory imperialist, claimed that in Gandhi ‘all the distillation of the East against the West is incarnate’. He spoke disparagingly of ‘the illiterate mobs, stuck in ignorance, whose racial passions [Gandhi] stirred to frenzy’.

  The article ended with this unequivocal denunciation: ‘It would be difficult to discover a more perfect example of fanaticism and utter self-deception, for the evil [Gandhi] has wrought, the wicked unrest and misery he [brought] across India like a black shadow.’32

  Meanwhile, an influential London magazine had opened its columns to Michael O’Dwyer, the recently retired lieutenant governor of the Punjab. O’Dwyer was unrepentant of his martial law administration, arguing that Indians responded only to tough rules and tough-minded rulers. The spread of Gandhi’s movement, he believed, had been enabled and encouraged by the feebleness of the viceroy and (especially) the secretary of state. He accused Montagu of a policy of ‘placating your enemies at all costs’, and of displaying ‘an almost Oriental obsequiousness’ towards Gandhi and company.

  As for Gandhi himself, O’Dwyer called him an ‘unctuous hypocrite’ who, through a mixture of ‘threats or money’, had mobilized a traditionally loyalist population to support his ‘seditious’ activities. Gandhi was, in fact, ‘a most dangerous criminal [who] has set himself up, while an impotent Government was looking on, to disrupt society and subvert authority under the hypocritical guise of a religious and social reformer’.33

  Amidst the abuse and scepticism there were a few dissonant notes. The Glasgow Herald, run by a liberal editor named Robert Bruce, printed a long and thoughtful piece called ‘Gandhi Sahib’. This began by asking ‘Who is this “egregious Mr. Gandhi”’ (the adjective favoured by some Tories and Tory papers), and then providing this answer: ‘He is the soul of India in revolt, the spirit of Indian discontent, the assertion of the East’s equality with the West, the most powerful and at the same time the most puzzling personality in India today.’ Gandhi, said the Scottish journal, ‘is not to be dismissed by the fine sarcasm of an editorial in an English newspaper nor rendered ridiculous by the foolish worship of admiring disciples’.

  The unsigned piece was written by someone who had travelled widely in India and spoken to many Indians. He called Gandhi a ‘patriot’, who is ‘human enough to break through the conventions of caste and custom to eat with pariahs’. While ‘a partisan in politics, Gandhi is no bigot in religion. He calls himself a Hindu but that is a term exceedingly broad, and in many matters he shares common ground with Christians and Mahomedans.’ The journalist further added that ‘he is singularly free from race prejudice’.

  This unusually sympathetic piece ended with a prediction: ‘When in course of time the “United States of India” come into existence, I hazard the opinion that history will regard the spectacle as an outcome of the work and worth of the “egregious Mr. Gandhi”, as well as the crowning triumph of British statesmanship in India.’34

  XI

  Gandhi was being noticed across the Atlantic too. The American President, Woodrow Wilson, was an internationalist, whose famous Fourteen Points had included a commitment to national self-determination. And although America had acquired its own colonial possessions, the self-image of Americans was that they were an anti-colonial people. Their origin myth had them wresting freedom from the British, which made them sympathetic to others who too wished the British to get off their backs.

  In October 1920, the New York Tribune published an article by its London correspondent on Gandhi and the non-cooperation movement. The writer, an American, had not been to India himself. Basing his piece on conversations with Indians in London and with British officials, he wrote that the non-violent movement led by Gandhi ‘appears a greater menace to the British Empire than all the revolutionists, Bolshevik agitators, Indian fanatics and other troublemakers of the last fifty years’. To his countrymen, Gandhi apparently combined ‘the wisdom of a statesman, the cleverness of a politician, [and] the simplicity of a peasant’.35

  Six months later, the Tribune’s main competitor, the New York Times, printed a five-column, full-page laudatory article on Gandhi. It was not clear whether the author (Clare Price) had met the man or visited his country. The article rehearsed his career thus far, the influence on his thought of Tolstoy and Ruskin, his work in South Africa and his struggles in India. ‘Not even the British are able to cast the slightest aspersion on the high sincerity of the man,’ wrote Price. Although Gandhi was ‘a dark little wisp of a man’ who looked as if he could be cradled like a child, ‘in point of personal following he is far and away the greatest man living in the world today’.36

  This last sentence, or judgement, was not original. It seems to have been cribbed from a New York clergyman named John Haynes Holmes. Holmes had discovered Gandhi through reading Gilbert Murray’s article in the Hibbert Journal. He looked for more material on Gandhi; the more he read, the more he was convinced that he was ‘a great and wonderful man’. Finally, on Sunday, 10 April 1921, he chose as the topic for his sermon the question, ‘Who is the Greatest Man in the World?’ The answer was Gandhi, who, of all those then living, reminded the clergyman most of Jesus. Like Jesus, ‘he lives his life; he speaks his word, he suffers, strives, and will some day nobly die, for his kingdom upon earth’.37

  British Anglicans thought Gandhi’s methods to be opposed to Jesus’s methods. Radical American priests saw them as akin and even identical. After that first sermon, Holmes returned to the subject at regular intervals. When Gandhi was arrested in February 1922, he preached on his ‘world significance’. Comparing him to Garibaldi and George Washington, Holmes added that unlike those other patriots and makers of nations, ‘Gandhi is far more, infinitely greater, than a nationalistic leader. At bottom, he is a great religious leader…His movement in this respect is a movement for world redemption. Gandhi is thus undertaking to do exactly what Jesus did when he proclaimed the kingdom of God on earth.’38

  Some well-known African Americans were also impressed by the Indian freedom struggle and its leader. ‘White Christianity stood before Gandhi,’ wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in 1922, ‘and, let us face it, it cut a sorry figure.’ A year previously, the socialist bishop Reverdy C. Ransom called Gandhi ‘a messiah and saint’, ‘the new “Light of Asia”, [who] wo
uld deliver his countrymen from the rule of British imperialism, not by violent resistance, but through the peaceful method of non-co-operation’.

  Some black intellectuals were more sceptical. The sociologist E. Franklin Frazier thought non-violence would not work in the barbarous conditions of the American South. ‘Suppose there should arise a Gandhi to lead Negroes without hate in their hearts,’ he wrote, ‘I fear we would witness an unprecedented massacre of defenseless black men and women in the name of Law and Order…’

  In fact, Frazier’s own intervention showed how actively Gandhi was being discussed in the black press. It was because black newspapers from Chicago to New York and down into the Deep South were writing so appreciatively about Gandhi’s relevance to America that the sociologist sought to temper their enthusiasm.39

  These African-American commentators had not met or seen Gandhi. Nor, as yet, had John Haynes Holmes. Those Americans who had, wrote about him in only slightly less fulsome tones. A couple who had spent two years teaching in India praised Gandhi’s ‘mental alertness’, his ‘charm’ and his ‘wonderful courage’, his work in forging Hindu–Muslim unity, but worried that his message of non-violence was too complex for the ‘average Indian peasant to understand’.40 A young Quaker who visited Gandhi found him a ‘wonderful little man’, with compassion towards people of other faiths and towards animals too.41 A journalist who travelled with Gandhi marvelled at the manifest love of the people for him, while deploring the British colonialist’s lack of understanding of what he really stood for.42

  These gushing tributes attracted the hostile attentions of a former member of the Indian Civil Service named Maurice Joachim, who put forward the British point of view in a series of articles in the American press. ‘Americans, beware!’ he wrote. ‘Do not lend an atom of support to Gandhism, which is nothing more nor less than the most formidable menace to Western culture and a cleverly devised conspiracy against the progress of civilization.’