Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  On the same day, an American journalist named Drew Pearson interviewed the governor of Bombay, Sir George Lloyd, in Poona. The governor spoke animatedly of the man he had put in jail. ‘Just a thin, spindly shrimp of a fellow he was,’ said His Excellency,

  but he swayed 319,000,000 people and held them at his beck and call. He didn’t care for material things, and preached nothing but the ideas and morals of India. You can’t govern a country with ideals. Still that was where he got his grip upon the people. He was their god. India must always have its god. First it was Tilak, then Gandhi now, then someone else tomorrow. He gave us a scare! His programme filled the jails, you can’t go arresting people forever, you know, not when there are 319,000,000 of them. And if they had taken the next step and refused to pay the taxes, God knows where we should have been!…Gandhi’s was the most colossal experiment in history, and he came within an inch of succeeding…

  Pearson then asked whether he could meet Gandhi in prison. ‘Absolutely impossible,’ answered the governor, adding: ‘If we allowed people to come here and make a fuss over him, he would become a martyr, and the gaol would be a Mecca for the world.’ The journalist next asked if there was any chance of Gandhi being released before his sentence of six years was over. ‘Not while I’m here,’ replied the governor. ‘Of course, my term expires in December. They can do whatever they like with him after I go back to England.’12

  Another American travelling in India in the cold season of 1922–23 was the Chicago social worker Jane Addams. She spent two months in the country, meeting women’s groups and sundry nationalists, but ‘found it impossible to see Gandhi, he is allowed but two visitors in…three months, naturally his wife is one and his followers [bargain] for the other chance’.13

  On 10 November 1922, in London, a ‘Bench Table’ meeting of the Inner Temple’s management ordered that ‘Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, having been convicted by a competent tribunal of an offence which, in the opinion of the Bench, disqualifies him from continuing as a member of the Inn, should have his name removed from the books’. The decision was to be communicated ‘to the judges of the Supreme Court of Judicature, to the other Inns of Court, to the General Council of the Bar and by registered letter to the said Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and be screened in the Hall’.14

  The news of Gandhi’s disbarment was reported in the Indian press. We do not know whether the letter sent to him by the Inner Temple was passed on to him by the authorities. Not that the news would have disturbed him. It had been more than a decade since he had functioned as a practising lawyer. His more recent appearances in court had been as someone charged with having broken the law.

  IV

  In their leader’s absence, the inmates of the Sabarmati Ashram doggedly went about their work. There were a series of stand-in editors who ran Young India: first, Shwaib Qureshi, and then, after his arrest, C. Rajagopalachari. The journal’s pages were filled with reports of khadi work from across the country, and with reprints of articles by the founder. A series Gandhi had written in 1908 on his jail experiences in South Africa was republished for the Indian reader; so also extracts from his 1910 book, Hind Swaraj.

  A new contributor to the pages of Young India was Kasturba Gandhi. Her husband and their eldest son, Harilal, were already in prison. In May 1922, when Devadas was also arrested, Kasturba issued a message asking students ‘to go on with the Khadi propaganda with all your youthful vigour and intensity and either release your brothers from the jails or fill up the jails to overflowing, thus showing to the world that India is determined to prove her self-respect to the last’.15

  Later that month, Kasturba gave the presidential address to a political conference in Ahmedabad. She urged the delegates to promote spinning and weaving, since ‘no Empire can detain Gandhiji in jail a minute more as soon as India has fully realized the significance of khadi’.16 In June, when Navajivan printed a special number on women, Kasturba told them to show the same ‘passionate love for the Motherland’ as the young men were doing. Recalling how, in South Africa, many Indian women came forward to court arrest, she asked, ‘Will the women here come out if a similar occasion arose? I have my doubts.’17

  In July, Navajivan printed a special number on the suppressed castes. Kasturba now called upon the upper castes to ‘purge yourselves of all your sins—and what sin is greater than your refusing to touch your brothers?’18 Then, on the occasion of Gandhi’s birthday, Kasturba sent a message via Young India suggesting that the best way to celebrate the day would be to ‘redouble our efforts for Swadeshi and recognise the claim of our untouchable brethren to our kinship in a practical manner’.19

  Ever since her return to India in 1915, Kasturba had stayed away from politics and public affairs. Now, with her husband in jail, she came forward to commend his programme to those still at large. Kasturba was a poor writer and indifferent speaker. The messages she put out were most likely drafted on her behalf by her nephew Maganlal Gandhi. Yet, the sentiments they conveyed were indisputably her own.

  V

  The annual December session of the Congress met in 1922 in the town of Gaya, in Bihar, near where the Buddha had achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. Presiding over the session was C.R. Das, who had recently been released from jail. Das praised Gandhi as ‘one of the greatest men that the world has ever seen’. The tribute paid, Das now sought to move the Congress away from the great Gandhi’s policies. He wanted the party to end its boycott of the legislative councils set up under the Montagu–Chelmsford scheme. The mass movement having exhausted itself, entering the councils seemed the pragmatic thing to do.

  Das’s resolution asking for the ending of the boycott of councils was defeated. The Calcutta barrister now resigned from the presidency of the Congress, and founded a new Swaraj Party, whose members included Motilal Nehru, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Vithalbhai Patel (elder brother of Vallabhbhai). This party would, however, still remain within the Congress. The other faction, which stood by the boycott and came to be known as the ‘No-Changers’ had as its prominent members Dr Ansari, Mrs Naidu, Maulana Azad and Rajagopalachari.20

  The AICC met in Bombay in the last week of May 1923. It had been five months since the Gaya Congress, and in this period, Das swayed more people to his side, among them his fellow Bengali, the dynamic young Congressman Subhas Chandra Bose. Hardcore devotees of the Mahatma such as Mahadev Desai and Rajagopalachari still held out, but in this meeting, Das was able to get majority support for his policy of council entry (with ninety-six AICC members voting for, seventy-one against).21

  With Gandhi in prison, the Congress had abandoned the boycott of the councils. The campaign against untouchability was also visibly slowing down. In a note to the AICC, the radical priest Swami Shraddhananda bitterly complained that ‘the question of raising the depressed classes has been relegated to an obscure corner’. Travelling through the Punjab and the United Provinces, the swami ‘found the question of removing the disability of the untouchables everywhere ignored or shelved’. What, he asked, had happened to all the pious resolutions committing the Congress and Congressmen to ending this pernicious practice?22

  Shraddhananda made his criticisms public. ‘People who oppress a section of their own community,’ he wrote in a widely circulated booklet, ‘do not have any right to complain about the oppressive measures of foreign rulers.’ So long as ‘the iniquities of untouchability’ persist, continued the swami, ‘so long is it impossible for the National Congress to be successful in any kind of programme of criticism or development’.23

  With Gandhi in prison, the question of inter-religious relations was also not getting the attention it deserved. Ten months after Gandhi had been sentenced, the viceroy wrote to the secretary of state for India: ‘The Hindu–Muslim entente, which has been fostered by Hindu politicians for their own reasons, is now visibly cracking.’24 The note of smug satisfaction, of schadenfreude, was palpable.


  VI

  Gandhi maintained his diary in 1923, again mostly a record of his reading. The books he read this year included Max Müller’s translation of the Upanishads, some works by Rabindranath Tagore, Patrick Geddes’s The Evolution of Cities, books on Sikh history, a biography of the medieval saint Ramanujacharya, George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.

  There was the odd entry on his health—thus on Saturday, 7 July, Gandhi ‘suffered great pains’. The ‘fault was entirely mine,’ the entry continued, ‘I ate more than I should have of the figs sent by Anasuyabehn.’25

  More important (from the public point of view) was the diary entry for Monday, 26 November, which noted that Gandhi had now ‘commenced writing the history of Satyagraha in South Africa’. During those extended periods of solitude, away from his Indian comrades and co-workers, Gandhi had been thinking a great deal about how and where the idea of satyagraha was born and first applied. These recollections were now finding their way on to paper.

  Every three months, Gandhi continued to be allowed one group of visitors, their names vetted by the authorities. His political associates—Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahadev Desai—were denied permission, but his wife Kasturba and their son Ramdas were allowed in. They found he had lost a couple of pounds in weight, but was (in his own words) ‘quite happy and feels free as a bird’.26

  Books, magazines and letters sent to Gandhi were also carefully screened. In December 1922, one E.H. James, a resident of Concord, Massachusetts, wrote to Gandhi. He had ‘with a certain thrill of pleasure’ read of the Indian’s admiration for Henry David Thoreau. He enclosed a copy of the essays of Emerson, Thoreau’s friend and fellow Concordian. The letter (re)told the story of Thoreau’s going to jail for not paying taxes when America was at war; and of Emerson going to visit him and saying, ‘Henry, why are you here?’, to be answered by the return query: ‘Ralph, why are you not here?’

  Neither the letter nor the book was passed on to the prisoner.

  In January 1923, Gandhi had asked for two Gujarati magazines, Vasant and Samalochak, to be supplied to him. When his request was refused, Gandhi asked for a reconsideration. Even prisoners had rights, he argued, among them the right to water and food, and ‘the right to have such mental nourishment given to me as I am used to’.27

  The matter was sent up to the inspector general of prisons, who ruled in favour of the jail authorities, since ‘any magazine allowed to Mr. Gandhi should be like Caesar’s wife’ (that is, above suspicion).

  In March, a friend sent Gandhi a Gujarati translation of Aurobindo Ghose’s Essays on the Gita. The jail authorities got a report prepared on the book by the Bombay government’s oriental translator. When he confirmed that it confined itself to spiritual matters, the book was passed on to the prisoner.

  Anything with a whiff of politics or social reform was withheld, but purely religious works were allowed to be read. A certain J. Lambert Disney of Philadelphia, who described himself as a ‘Healer-by-Faith and Drugless Physician’, sent Gandhi pamphlets on the Bible and faith healing; these were duly delivered to Prisoner Number 827. So were several works on the Buddha and Buddhism sent by one Dr A.L. Nair of Bombay. So also a study of the Chandogya Upanishad posted by Gandhi’s friend and follower Jamnalal Bajaj.28

  One of the more intriguing letters in the prison records was written by Gandhi in December 1922. For some reason, it escaped the editors of the Collected Works, although it appeared in print in an anthology of documents published as far back as 1968. Here is the letter in full:

  The Superintendent

  21st December 1922

  Yerwada Central Jail

  Sir,

  Shrimati Sarala Devi Chaudhrani (Mazang Road, Lahore) in her letter handed to me says that she sent about six months ago [a] certain manuscript and wishes it to be returned to her. I have not been given any manuscript from her. If it has been received from her at the Gaol, will you kindly return it to her. If it has not, will you kindly write to her to the effect that it was never received.

  I am

  Yours obediently

  M.K. Gandhi

  [Prisoner] No. 82729

  What was the nature of the manuscript sent by Saraladevi to Gandhi? Was it a memoir, a poetry collection, a novel? And what had she said in the letter recently handed over to Gandhi? Was it merely a polite or anxious inquiry about his health, or a larger meditation on Indian politics, or even a personal reflection on their relationship? We shall never know. But the fact that three years after their spiritual wedding had been aborted, Saraladevi still wrote to and thought of Gandhi is not without significance.

  VII

  During the Rowlatt satyagraha and the non-cooperation movement, Gandhi had lived his life in the public eye. From March 1919 to March 1922, there were daily reports in the press about his words and actions. But now, in prison, he was denied access to the newspapers. And they were denied access to him. There was little reliable public information about Gandhi and how he coped in prison. With no hard news available, speculation was rife.

  In the first week of April 1922, a rumour was abroad that Gandhi had been flogged in Yerwada jail. The home department issued a statement that ‘there is not a germ of truth in this rumour which is a sheer invention’. The origins of this rumour were traced to a clerk in Yerwada, who had overheard Gandhi asking the prison superintendent what the penalty for disobeying jail regulations was. The superintendent answered that they included flogging, which the clerk somehow assumed had been the fate of Gandhi himself.

  In September 1923, a nationalist periodical named the Voice of India said it was strongly rumoured that Gandhi would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that year. Surely, the British authorities would release him so that he could accept the prize in person? The paper commented that ‘as it stands, the news is too good to be true, and yet there is every indication to show it may be true. For of the fifteen hundred million living men of the earth, if it can be said of any one that he lives and suffers for the peace of the world and for the brotherhood of men, it can be said of one man alone, and that man is Mahatma Gandhi.’

  Voice of India contrasted Gandhi with the warmongering Europeans; for, if the news was indeed correct, it would mean that ‘in spite of the false lead given to humanity by the Lloyd Georges and the Clemenceaus of Europe, and in spite of the stupendous efforts made by the Curzons and Poincarés of today to keep [alive] the poisonous weeds of national hatred and domination, mankind has kept the kernel of its heart sound and known to look for true worth and true guidance…’30

  The story was without any foundation. No Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1923, a year that came and went with Gandhi still confined in prison.

  VIII

  The 1923 Congress was held in Kakinada, in the Andhra country. The president that year was Mohammad Ali. His presidential address dealt with a wide range of political subjects, while returning repeatedly to Gandhi, for whom ‘all eyes search in vain in this Pandal today’. Ever since he first attended a Congress in 1919, said Mohammad Ali, Gandhi had ‘been the one dominating personality’. ‘More than ever,’ he continued, ‘we need our great chief Mahatma Gandhi today.’

  Calling himself one of Gandhi’s ‘humblest followers’, the Congress president told the party’s members that ‘the only one who can lead you is the one who had led you at Amritsar, at Calcutta, at Nagpur and at Ahmedabad, though each session of the Congress has its own elected President. Our generalissimo is today a prisoner of war in the hands of the enemy, and none can fill the void that his absence from our midst has caused.’ In a strange and bitter irony, said Mohammad Ali feelingly, ‘it was reserved for a Christian government to treat as a felon the most Christ-like man of our times’.31

  In the first week of January 1924, Gandhi came down with high fever. This was followed by acute pain in the stomach. T
he jail doctor, unable to cope, sent for Colonel Maddox, the civil surgeon of Poona. After examining Gandhi, Maddox asked for his stools and blood to be tested. The doctor examined Gandhi again on Thursday, 10 January, when he seemed a little better.

  The next day, however, Gandhi developed acute pain. When he saw him again on the morning of Saturday, 12 January, Maddox had no doubt that Gandhi had appendicitis. With the jail superintendent’s permission, the civil surgeon conveyed the prisoner in his own car to Poona’s Sassoon Hospital. Gandhi said he did not want to be operated upon until he had seen Dr Dalal, who had operated on him for piles in 1919. Maddox tried calling Dalal in Bombay but could not get through. Gandhi was told that if the operation was delayed, he could develop peritonitis. He agreed to have the operation performed that night.

  Before taking him to the operating theatre, Maddox asked Gandhi whom he would like to see. The patient asked for his fellow Gokhale protégé V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, and a Poona doctor named V.D. Phatak. Both were called to meet Gandhi, with Dr Phatak being present during the operation as well. The lights failed during the procedure, so the doctors had to continue their work with the help of kerosene lamps.32

  By the morning of the 13th, word of Gandhi being moved out of jail had reached Bombay. A reporter was sent down to Poona, where he met Dr Phatak, who conveyed the reassuring news that Gandhi ‘had no fever and his pulse was all right. He was looking cheerful. He is taking sips of hot water now and then and some lemon juice. He is kept in a private special surgical ward under the care of a special European nurse. All the medical staff is looking after him with respectful attention.’33