Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Joachim went on to suggest that Gandhi’s movement was aimed not merely at the West, but at America in particular. The party of ‘Nationalists led by Mohandas K. Gandhi’, he claimed, was

  slowly but surely paving the way to make his brother American a pariah in the East; is unconsciously helping to drive out every American from India; is aiding and abetting the abolishment of American enterprise in the East; is contributing [its] time and money to uproot and disrupt all the good work that American missionaries, the American Salvation Army and the American YMCA have performed after years and years of self-sacrifice; in short, is cooperating in a movement to turn back the clock of civilization.43

  The first mention of Gandhi in the American press actually dates to as far back as 1897, when the Nation carried an article on racial discrimination in Natal, and the young lawyer’s attempts to combat it.44 Twenty-four years later, this still radical, anti-imperialist paper carried a glowing assessment of Gandhi’s struggle in India, published under the tell-all title, ‘The New Light of Asia’. In a ‘cynical, materialistic, and disillusioned’ age, wrote the Nation, there had emerged a man ‘whose singular devotion, unselfishness and spiritual power have won him the almost superstitious reverence of his own people and the respect of the sceptical critics’. At a time when the Western world had just concluded an extended and very bloody war, Gandhi had committed himself and his people to a credo of non-violence. Thus, through all the strikes and boycotts, ‘Gandhi has kept his own soul free from hate. The literature of revolution contains no documents so uncompromising, yet so reasonable and sweet-spirited, as his “Letter to Every Englishman”…’

  The Nation’s editorial was admittedly written on the basis of ‘meagre and often contradictory despatches from British sources’. Yet, it was insightful, and perhaps the first serious American appreciation of Gandhi and his movement. It ended with this remarkable passage:

  The complete verdict on the course of Indian nationalism can only be written by time. But even now it is possible to say that British, or rather Western imperialism is doomed. We are witnessing one of the great historic movements of our time in the awakening of Asia. However that awakening manifests within India, whether in the slow or constitutional progress of the Moderates, the spontaneous revolt, half blind and often violent, of exploited workers and hungry peasants; or the ordered resistance, spiritual and economic, of the non-co-operators, the struggle of the long-oppressed deserves the sympathetic understanding of every man who waits for a new birth of freedom in every land. But if the triumph of India should mean the triumph of the spirit and method of Gandhi, then, indeed, would a new day dawn for all mankind. For war would be shown to be as unnecessary for the outer semblance of freedom, as it is destructive to the realisation of its inner spirit.45

  XII

  Gandhi’s movement was also being noticed in Europe. In April 1922, a French literary journal published an extended analysis which began with this vivid description of the man:

  A shy flame burning from deep eye sockets; a hooked nose between emaciated cheeks; a colour which overshadows the black mass of the moustache and hair; under a puny appearance an intense impression of nervous force and concentrated power: thus appears to us the agitator, the prophet, the apostle, the Messiah of contemporary India, an India which depends on him from day to day for its salvation and liberty—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

  The rest of the article was written in a more detached tone. It summarized Gandhi’s education in London, his political apprenticeship in South Africa, and the course of the movements he led in India. While appreciative of his ability to move and mobilize people, the writer wished Gandhi had unleashed that power more fully instead of restraining it after the first episodes of violence. ‘Ascetic and saint which he was in the eyes of the masses and perhaps in reality,’ wrote the critic, ‘in condemning the violence does he not try to turn away from himself the power of lightning?’46

  The interest in France was perhaps unexpected. Not so the interest in Africa, a continent Gandhi had spent close to two decades in. His son Manilal was now based in Natal, running Indian Opinion, the journal his father had founded in 1903. That journal, as well as other periodicals published by the community, dutifully reported the protests against the Rowlatt Act and the progress of the non-cooperation movement.

  In Kenya too, expatriate Indians were reading Gandhi and, in their own way, seeking to apply his techniques. A Gujarati immigrant named Manibhai Desai was a close colleague of a Kenyan labour leader named Harry Thuku. When Thuku was arrested and deported following a strike, Desai pressed C.F. Andrews to intervene. The priest did his ‘very best at the time to make his voice heard in England, but without effect’. He then wrote to Gandhi about Thuku’s troubles. Gandhi publicized the matter through his newspaper, Young India. Contemporary accounts suggest that Thuku saw himself as a Kenyan analogue of the Mahatma. A British settler wrote in disgust that ‘this lad Harry Thuku…likens himself to [Gandhi] in India’. When, after a successful strike, some Indians in Kenya threw a party for Thuku, he is reported to have said; ‘Gandhi is going to be King in India and I’m going to be King here.’47

  XIII

  Although formally based in Ahmedabad, Gandhi’s real home was not so much the ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati as a third-class railway compartment. In and through his journeys by train, Gandhi saw a great deal of India and Indians, and they saw a great deal of him in return.

  The folklore and rumours about Gandhi’s personality among peasants and tribals were a product of these travels. So were the printed appreciations and denunciations by middle-class Indians, although these additionally drew on his own writings.

  The non-cooperation movement was the first real challenge to British rule since the great uprising of 1857. In 1857, the Indian press was primitive and undeveloped. The message of the rebels was largely transmitted by word of mouth. By Gandhi’s day, however, there was a flourishing newspaper industry, with hundreds of titles published in many languages. The spread of the railway network facilitated the distribution of these papers between and within provinces. Each issue of every paper was usually read by more than one person, and also often read out to those who were illiterate.

  The Indian press of 1919–22 did not speak with one voice. There were newspapers that saw British rule as beneficent, and were resolutely opposed to self-government. There were papers that were run by Moderates, which advocated political reform, to be achieved in slow, incremental stages. There were papers run by various religious sects. And there were papers that presented the Congress, or more particularly, the Gandhian point of view.

  We do not have firm data on the relative reach and influence of these different kinds of periodicals. But we do know that there were enough in the last category, that these were present in all provinces and published in all languages, and that they conveyed the zest and vigour of the political movement they had linked themselves with.48

  That Gandhi and his ideas were so actively debated within India was not therefore surprising. What was more noteworthy was the interest in the man across the globe. At this time, Gandhi had little interest in world affairs. He did not even comment on such vital matters as the Treaty of Versailles or the Paris Peace Conference.

  Gandhi was not interested in the politics and social life in Europe, North America or even Africa. But writers and thinkers in those countries were interested in him. No political leader before Gandhi had so radically simplified his life. The clothes he wore, the food he ate, the homes he lived in, all brought Gandhi far closer to the masses than professedly socialist leaders like Lenin. While ‘passive resistance’ had been practised by particular groups (such as suffragettes and Non-Conformists in England, and by the Doukhobors in Russia), it had never before been made part of a wider national struggle. That both man and movement had set themselves up against the great British Empire was a further marvel.


  Between 1919 and 1922, Gandhi and Gandhism were actively discussed within India. And they did not pass unnoticed outside India. The debates of these years foreshadowed the greater and more intense debates of later years, when the world came to know Gandhi better, and when Gandhi himself, reluctantly but inevitably, came to know more about the world.

  PART II

  REACHING OUT TO THE WORLD (1922–1931)

  CHAPTER NINE

  Prisoner Number 827

  I

  Gandhi had been arrested, tried and sentenced in Ahmedabad itself. But the state thought it prudent not to imprison him in the same city where his family and close disciples resided. Escorted by a posse of police, he was taken by train to Poona, where, on the evening of 21 March 1922, he was placed in the custody of the superintendent of the Yerwada jail.1

  Shortly after Gandhi reached Yerwada, his name was entered into the prison roll. He was given the serial number 827, his health described as ‘fair’, his crime defined as violation of Section 124(A) of the Indian Penal Code (uttering or writing words exciting disaffection towards the government established by law). Under the column ‘Previous Convictions’ was entered ‘Nil’, an entry that was not strictly accurate, if one included countries other than India.

  As a satyagrahi in South Africa, Gandhi had been to jail on four separate occasions. The terms ranged from three weeks to three months. He was thus a fairly experienced prisoner, who knew how to occupy himself when separated from his family, how to deal with whimsical or bullying jail authorities, how to spend his time reading and writing.

  In Yerwada, Gandhi was allowed one group of visitors every three months, their names vetted beforehand by the jail authorities. He first availed himself of this privilege a mere ten days after he was jailed. On 1 April, his son Devadas, his protégé C. Rajagopalachari, and his friend A.V. Thakkar came to see Gandhi. In an article published in Young India, Rajagopalachari shared with a wider audience the life their leader was now obliged to lead. Gandhi was kept in solitary confinement and his cell locked up at night. The cell had two small ventilators to let in light and air. During the day, Gandhi was allowed to walk on the veranda.

  The chamber pot was in the cell. At the visitors’ request, the superintendent had it replaced with a commode. Gandhi had been given two blankets but no pillow. He was allowed writing paper which he was using to learn Urdu.2

  Gandhi spent his first weeks in Yerwada writing a Gujarati primer for the students of the ashram school in Ahmedabad. Presented in the form of a dialogue between a mother and child, this stressed the significance of cleanliness, regular exercises, the importance of spinning, and the knowledge of the seasons and of crops grown in the region. A son was told to ‘help with the housework, just as your sister Shanta does’.3

  Gandhi was permitted to write one letter every three months. He wrote the first on 14 April, to Hakim Ajmal Khan, latterly the president of the Ahmedabad Congress and one of the few important nationalists still at large. The letter described his prison routine in some detail. Gandhi was allowed to retain the seven books he brought with him, among them the Gita, the Koran, the Ramayana, a presentation copy of the Sermon on the Mount (sent him ‘by schoolboys of a high school in California with the hope that [he] would always carry it with [him]’), and an Urdu guide gifted by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He was also allowed to borrow books from the jail library. He asked to be supplied with a newspaper; knowing that the nationalist Bombay Chronicle would be verboten, he requested the establishment-oriented Times of India instead. The request was refused.

  Another request was granted—permission to sleep in the open. Gandhi rose at 4 a.m., said his prayers, and when light dawned, commenced his studies. There was no electric light in his cell. He read the whole day, the reading interrupted by walks in the veranda outside his cell (beyond which he could not go). Here he often met a prisoner from the Gulf, who spoke only Arabic, so they merely exchanged greetings.

  Gandhi’s spinning wheel was confiscated when he first arrived, but after persistent pleas, it was returned. Now the routine became slightly more varied: reading and walking, interspersed with spinning.

  The superintendent of the prison had ‘pleasant manners’, noted Gandhi, but otherwise ‘the human element is largely, if not entirely, absent in the jail system’.

  Gandhi ended the letter by asking his friend to ‘please persuade Mrs. Gandhi not to think of visiting me. Dev[a]das created a scene when he visited me. He could not brook the idea of my standing in the Superintendent’s office while he was brought in. This proud and sensitive boy burst out weeping aloud and it was with difficulty that I could restrain him. He should have realized that I was a prisoner and as such I had no right to sit in the presence of the Superintendent.’4

  The letter to Hakim Ajmal Khan was deemed by the censor to be insufficiently non-political. It was retained in Yerwada, to be returned to the prisoner on the completion of his term. Then, a week later, the superintendent yielded to Gandhi’s request to be given more space for exercise. The veranda he was presently given access to measured a mere seventy feet. The official, noting that Gandhi was ‘not a man who would assault another prisoner in the same yard’, recommended that he be allowed to walk in the prison yard escorted by a constable.5

  In July 1922, on Kasturba’s request, Gandhi sent some ten pounds of yarn he had spun in the jail via the prison authorities to Sabarmati. Hearing of this, the Kesari newspaper (founded by Bal Gangadhar Tilak) ran a story suggesting that the yarn, which ‘ought to fetch more than its weight in gold’, be auctioned in public. The material spun by Gandhi, said the newspaper, ‘will occupy an honoured position in any swadeshi exhibition and the person who purchases it and his descendant will be highly respected by the public’.

  This report alarmed the authorities. As the inspector general of prisons commented: ‘We cannot permit Mr. Gandhi’s followers to go wild over Mr. Gandhi’s yarn.’ Kasturba was told that it was a keepsake for her only, while further supplies were to be stopped.6

  II

  In jail, with time on his hands, Gandhi kept a diary, which mostly contained a list of books he read, borrowed from the prison library. In his first months in Yerwada, Gandhi read A History of Scotland, Stories from the History of Rome, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (he found ‘some portions of it beautiful’), the Gujarati translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana, Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Equality, R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, Tilak’s book on the Gita, Govardhanram Tripathi’s great multivolumed Gujarati novel Saraswatichandra (which he had read several times before), some volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and a translation of Goethe’s Faust.7

  Gandhi set aside several hours a day for reading Urdu, the lingua franca of much of northern India, and a language identified with Muslim aspirations. Once he had become reasonably fluent, he read a life of the Prophet and of his companions. From this he reached two conclusions. The first was that Urdu and Hindi, once closely allied under the composite rubric of ‘Hindustani’, were becoming separate and distinct languages, with the former relying more on Arabic and Persian grammar, and the Hindi writers turning to classical Sanskrit. Gandhi now saw that ‘if we are to have a common national language being a mixture of Hindi and Urdu, special and prolonged effort will have to be made to effect a juncture between the two streams which seem at present to be diverging more and more one from the other’.

  The second conclusion was more cheering. Reading about the early history of the faith, he became convinced ‘that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the Prophet, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and his own mission.’8

  While he read, spun, walked or wrote, Gandhi was
under the watch of ‘convict warders’, the prisoners who had been in Yerwada for a long time and whose good behaviour allowed them to supervise new entrants. The first warder assigned to look after Gandhi was a Punjabi Hindu called Harkaran, who had been convicted of murder, and already served nine years of a fourteen-year sentence. Harkaran was a master of stealing and hiding trifles, as indeed were many other prisoners in Yerwada. As Gandhi was to wryly write later: ‘If the whole of the jail yard were to be dug up twelve inches deep, it would yield up many a secret in the shape of spoons, knives, pots, cigarettes, soaps, and such like.’ Harkaran, ‘being one of the oldest inmates of Yerwada, was a sort of purveyor-general to the prisoners’. If an inmate wanted a knife, spoon, pot or pan, he knew where and how to get one.

  Harkaran watched over Gandhi during the day. At night, he was replaced by a powerful Baloch named Shabaskhan, also convicted of murder. Gandhi thought the authorities had deliberately chosen a Muslim to balance the Hindu. Not that he minded, for Shabaskhan’s build reminded him of his friend Shaukat Ali, while he told Gandhi on the very first day: ‘I am not going to watch you at all. Treat me as your friend and do exactly as you like.’9

  III

  Gandhi was sentenced on 18 March 1922. In early April, the Congress decided that so long as their leader was behind bars, they would observe the 18th of every month as ‘Gandhi Day’, where prayers would be ‘offered in all the temples, mosques and churches for Mahatmaji’s health in prison, and for the speedy success of the Cause’.10 On 2 October, Gandhi’s birthday, a group of about a hundred women from Bombay took the train to Poona and then hired a bus to ferry them to Yerwada jail. The superintendent refused the ladies permission to meet their hero, but promised to take him the flowers and garlands they had brought with them.11