Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Now Devadas too had fallen in love, with the daughter of one of Gandhi’s closest friends. But Rajagopalachari was a Brahmin, not a Bania, and a Tamil, not a Gujarati. An inter-caste and inter-regional marriage had its own complications. Would the orthodoxy seize on this Brahmin–Bania union to represent Gandhi as a dangerous radical, thus undermining his still unfolding campaign against untouchability?

  The patriarch had however got one salient fact wrong. The boy’s love was reciprocated. Lakshmi too was pining for Devadas. The two had first met in June 1924, when Gandhi was visiting Bangalore, and Rajagopalachari had come with his daughter to meet him. Family lore has it that it was on a park bench in Bangalore that Devadas first declared his love for Lakshmi. Later, he formally approached her father to grant permission to marry her.

  Rajaji himself was extremely fond of Devadas. He had known the boy from 1918, when Gandhi sent his youngest son to Madras to promote Hindi in South India. Despite his affection for Devadas, Rajaji was not sure he wanted his own daughter to marry him. He conferred with Gandhi, and they decided to put the couple on probation. They would have no meetings, no letters, so as to test their love for one another. If, after some years had passed, they still wanted to get married, their fathers would not stand in the way.56

  XII

  Through the 1920s, relations between Hindus and Muslims continued to deteriorate. In the Punjab, a major controversy broke out over the publication of a pamphlet called ‘Rangila Rasul’, which may be loosely translated as ‘Colourful Prophet’. This anonymous pamphlet, which focused on the polygamous tendencies of the Prophet Muhammad, was published in Lahore by a Hindu named Rajpal. Aggrieved Muslims filed a case under Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code (‘Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony’). Rajpal was at first found guilty, and sentenced to ten months in prison. He went on appeal, and succeeded in getting the conviction overturned by the Lahore High Court, which judged that the defendant had not wantonly set out to cause offence.

  The acquittal of the publisher of ‘Rangila Rasul’ sparked outrage among the Muslims of northern India. The judgment was announced on 4 May 1927; two days later, speaking at Delhi’s Jama Masjid, Mohammad Ali said the verdict ‘had opened the floodgates of mischief, much greater than Hindu–Muslim quarrels over cow-slaughter and music before mosques’. The younger of the Ali Brothers asked for a change in the law to make such public insults of the Prophet impermissible.57

  Meanwhile, the older Ali brother, Shaukat, wrote Gandhi a series of sorrowful letters on the deepening religious divide. He complained about the ‘rabid if not wicked’ outpourings of Arya Samajist newspapers, expressing a ‘mad desire for revenge’ for the killing of Swami Shraddhananda. This ‘wild talk’ had ‘wiped out all the good effect which swamiji’s unfortunate murder had brought about in sobering down the Moslems’. With Hindus and Muslims ‘being led astray by mischievous [and] greedy wire-pullers’, Shaukat Ali could ‘see nothing but grief for both’ communities.58

  As Hindu–Muslim relations deteriorated, several ‘Unity Conferences’ were held. The first, in Simla in the third week of September 1927, was attended by Jinnah, Azad and the Hindu Mahasabha leaders Madan Mohan Malaviya and B.S. Moonje. It discussed the cow slaughter and music before mosque questions, without arriving at any agreement.59

  A second ‘Unity Conference’ was held in Calcutta in the last week of October. Among those attending were Ansari, Azad, Motilal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu and Subhas Chandra Bose. Once more, the questions of cow slaughter and the playing of music before mosques were discussed. Militant Hindus were angry at the two issues being placed on a par, saying it showed ‘a regrettable disregard of the deep seated Hindu sentiment regarding the cow and is not likely to lead to unity and peace, but on the contrary, is calculated to lead to greater discord and strife’.60

  Gandhi did not attend either conference. But he was briefed on their discussions. In the first week of December 1927, he published a long essay on the subject. He said here that while his ‘interest and faith in Hindu–Muslim unity’ was as ‘strong as ever’, his approach had changed. While previously he pursued the path of meetings and joint resolutions, now, ‘in an atmosphere which is surcharged with distrust, fear and hopelessness’, those older methods ‘rather hinder than help heart-unity. I therefore rely upon prayer and such individual acts of friendship as are possible.’61

  Later in December, the annual Congress met in Madras. The day before the Congress began, Gandhi wrote to the president-elect, M.A. Ansari, that he hoped a pact would be put in place, whereby Muslims eschewed cow slaughter and Hindus stopped playing music before mosques. In the event, though there was no formal pact, a resolution was passed asking Muslims to ‘spare Hindu feelings as much as possible in the matter of the cow’, and Hindus, in return, ‘to spare Mussalman feelings as much as possible in the matter of music before mosques’.62

  The Congress also resolved to boycott a statutory commission appointed by the British government to report ‘into the working of the system of government, the growth of education, and the development of representative institutions, in British India’. In both character and composition, the commission was a noticeable regress from the Indianization that Edwin Montagu had once hoped for. The commission had seven members: all were MPs (four Tory, two Labour, one Liberal) and, more crucially, all were white. It was to be chaired by Sir John Simon, a Liberal politician and former attorney general of Great Britain.

  The absence of Indian representation on a body discussing Indian reforms outraged both Moderate and Radical opinion. So did the absence of any reference in the commission’s terms of reference to the granting of ‘Dominion Status’, which would place India on par with other self-governing units of the Empire such as Canada and Australia. Jinnah and the Muslim League, Tej Bahadur Sapru and the Indian Liberal Federation, Sir Purushottamdas Thakurdas and the Mill-owners’ Association, all signed a joint petition of protest. The weighty Congress party now chipped in, resolving in Madras that ‘the only self-respecting course for India is to boycott the Commission in every form’.63

  At the Madras Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru was appointed working secretary of the party, an important post, if not quite the presidency his father desired for him. Earlier that year, Jawaharlal had toured Soviet Russia, a trip that reinforced his leftward turn.64 Gandhi was unhappy with his protégé’s growing radicalism. When the younger Nehru had an ‘Independence Resolution’ passed at the Madras Congress, Gandhi wrote to him that ‘you are going too fast….Most of the resolutions you framed and got carried could have been delayed for one year….But I do not mind these acts of yours so much as I mind your encouraging mischief-makers and hooligans. I do not know whether you still believe in unadulterated non-violence.’65

  Nehru, in reply, defended the Independence Resolution, saying it was drafted ‘after prolonged and careful thought’. He then outlined his growing disenchantment with Gandhi’s leadership. During the non-cooperation movement, wrote Jawaharlal to Gandhi,

  you were supreme; you were in your element and automatically you took the right step. But since you came out of prison something seems to have gone wrong and you have been very obviously ill at ease….All you have said is that within a year or eighteen months you expected the khadi movement to spread rapidly and in a geometric ratio and then some direct action in the political field might be indulged in. Several years and eighteen months have passed since then and the miracle has not happened. It was difficult to believe it would happen but faith in your amazing capacity to bring off the impossible kept us in an expectant mood. But such faith for an irreligious person like me is a poor reed to rely on and I am beginning to think if we are to wait for freedom till khadi becomes universal in India we shall have to wait till the Greek Kalends.66

  Gandhi wrote back in hurt tones. �
�The differences between you and me appear to be so vast,’ he remarked, ‘that there seems to be no meeting-ground between us. I can’t conceal from you my grief that I should lose a comrade so valiant, so faithful, so able and so honest as you always have been…’67

  Jawaharlal’s letter worried Gandhi, for he knew the younger Nehru spoke not merely for himself. His views were representative of the younger generation of Congressmen as a whole. How long would Gandhi persist with spinning and his call to end untouchability? When would he call once more for a direct confrontation with colonial rule? The patriarch was being pressured from below, and he sensed it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Moralist

  I

  This book thus far has focused on the public Gandhi, the social reformer who preached and struggled against untouchability; the bridge-builder who sought to reconcile India’s two largest communities, Hindus and Muslims; the constructive worker who energetically promoted hand-spinning across India as a means of combating rural poverty and unemployment; the partyman who, despite the long stretches he spent in his ashram in Sabarmati, always found time to attend the annual meetings of the Congress while playing a key role in choosing who, each year, would be the party’s president; the anti-colonial activist who mobilized his compatriots across caste, class and religious lines to seek to win political freedom for India.

  This chapter by contrast, turns the gaze inwards, examining key aspects of Gandhi’s personal faith, his personal morality, as expressed in his words and actions in this decade of the 1920s. The next chapter examines the intent of Gandhi’s two memoirs, also written in the 1920s, which are his enduring literary legacy. From Chapter 14, we pick up the story of Gandhi the public man once more.

  Gandhi was born and raised a Hindu, albeit a heterodox one. His mother was a follower of a sect called the Pranamis, whose temples had verses of the Gita as well as the Koran on their walls. An early mentor was the Jain sage Raychandbhai, who Gandhi met in 1891 on his return from his law studies in London, and with whom he maintained a regular correspondence until Raychand’s death a decade later.1

  As a boy, growing up in Rajkot, Gandhi’s understanding of religion was experiential. He went with his mother to the temple, and observed her during her fasts at home. His textual understanding of Hinduism, however, really began in London, when he read the Bhagavad Gita with some English friends. Ever since, the Gita remained his favourite text, to which he regularly returned.

  Gandhi’s considered views on the Gita found expression through a series of discourses that he delivered to inmates of the Sabarmati Ashram in the spring and summer of 1926. In his sabbatical year from public life, he chose to distil the essence of those readings for a close and select audience.

  Gandhi argued that the Gita should be read metaphorically, not as a work of history. In the text, ‘the physical body is only an occasion for describing the battle-field of the human body. In this view the names mentioned are not of persons but the qualities they represent. What is described is the conflict within the human body between opposing moral tendencies imagined as distinct figures.’2

  In the Gita, Krishna asked Arjuna to ‘give up all thought of acquiring, holding and defending possessions’, and to ‘cultivate detachment in that respect’. Likewise, argued Gandhi, the ashramites should give up possessiveness: ‘We should think that the things we keep in the Ashram belong to others as much as to us, and so remain indifferent towards them.’ That was how one could become what the Gita calls a sthitaprajna, ‘a person who has become completely free from attachments and aversions’.3

  In his lectures at the ashram, Gandhi spoke repeatedly of the Gita’s emphasis on work without expectation of reward. Thus, ‘karma means work which circumstances make it necessary for us to undertake, not that which we do of our own choice’. Again: ‘The Gita’s karma is not karma done under compulsion; it must be prompted by some little measure at any rate of knowledge’ (as well as self-knowledge).4

  In these talks, delivered daily during morning prayers, Gandhi ranged widely beyond the Gita itself. Among the people he referred to were Buddha, Jesus, Prophet Muhammad, Tolstoy, the Bengali saint Chaitanya, the Gujarati poet Narasinha Mehta and the British antivivisectionist Anna Kingsford. He told his audience of how a lump of sugar placed on the tongue of Chaitanya stayed undissolved, like a piece of stone, since for the saint ‘pleasure…had completely died away’; that to Prophet Muhammad, ‘fasting brought happiness, for it was an occasion when he could live constantly in the presence of God’; that Jesus fasted for forty days in solitude, after which ‘he felt that he heard a mysterious voice, that God was talking to him and that the veil which hid God from him had lifted’.5

  One discourse glossed the term yajna, or ritual sacrifice, which in the period the Gita was composed, often involved the sacrifice of animals, a practice which still prevailed in parts of India. In the past, it was thought that sacrificing a buffalo would bring rainfall and help the crops, but now ‘we serve the good of the world by refraining from causing suffering to other creatures’. Gandhi argued that the term was metaphorical, and that ‘we can perform a yajna with the mind as much as with the body. Of these two meanings of yajna, we should accept that which suits the context every time’. ‘There is no harm,’ continued Gandhi, ‘in our enlarging the meaning of the word yajna, even if the new meaning we attach to the term was never in Vyasa’s mind. We shall do no injustice to Vyasa by expanding the meaning of his words. Sons should enrich the legacy of their fathers.’

  In Gandhi’s view, ‘the original intention behind the idea of yajna was that people should do physical work’. At the time the Gita was written, cutting trees to clear the land for agriculture was a form of yajna. Gandhi claimed that ‘at the present time, spinning has become a yajna’. Likewise, ‘if water was scarce and we had to fetch it from a distance of two miles, fetching water would be a yajna’.6

  On 6 April 1926, Gandhi started his morning discourse by recalling that on that day in 1919, Hindus ‘had kept a fast, bathed in a river and gone to temples; Muslims had offered prayers in mosques and Parsis in their fire-temples’. That was a day both of ‘religious awakening’ and of ‘political significance’. At the time, recalled Gandhi nostalgically, ‘everyone seemed to be sincere’.

  Returning to the (politically quiescent) present, Gandhi argued that Indians could still get ‘swaraj through the spinning-wheel’. Since ‘the Bhagavad Gita says that women, Vaisyas and Sudras, all classes of people, can win freedom’, Gandhi remarked that ‘in the same way, all of us can do this [spin to win swaraj]’.7

  In his last discourse, Gandhi described the Gita as ‘a valuable provision for the mind in one’s life-journey, as the spinning-wheel is for the body’. The Gita, he continued, ‘is a big knowledge feast, as it is the very amrita [nectar] of knowledge’.8

  In his own commentary on Gandhi’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Mahadev Desai remarked that ‘there is nothing exclusive about the Gita which should make it a gospel only for the Brahmana or the Hindu. Having all the light and colour of the Indian atmosphere, it naturally must have the greatest fascination for the Hindu, but the central teaching should not have any the less appeal for a non-Hindu as the central teaching of the Bible or the Koran should not have any the less appeal for a non-Christian or a non-Muslim.’ This was, theologically speaking, perhaps a stretch; but it did represent Mahadev’s own ecumenism, his moral conviction (akin to, indeed derived from, Gandhi’s own) that ‘in the deepest things of life, the Hindu and the Mussalman and the Christian, the Indian and the European, in fact all who have cared and endeavoured to read the truth of things, are so spiritually akin’.9

  II

  The Gita was Gandhi’s favourite text. A close second was the Bible. This eclecticism drew hostility from the orthodoxy. In August 1926, a controversy broke out regarding Gandhi’s attempts to interpret the Bible to the students of the Gujarat Vidyapith. ‘Is there n
othing useful in our literature?’ wrote one angry correspondent. ‘Is the Gita less to you than the Bible? You are never tired of saying that you are a staunch sanatani Hindu. Have you not now been found out as a Christian in secret?’

  In an extended reply, Gandhi explained why he chose the text he did. When he decided to spend an hour a week with the students, he offered them three alternatives: sessions based on the Gita, Tulsidas’s Ramayana, or the New Testament. The students, thinking that they could read the Ramayana and the Gita with other teachers, themselves decided by ‘a majority of votes’ to read the New Testament with Gandhi as they knew he had ‘made a fair study of it’.

  Gandhi told his critics that ‘it is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world’. Then he continued: ‘For myself, I regard my study of and reverence for the Bible, the Koran, and the other scriptures to be wholly consistent with my claim to be a staunch sanatani Hindu. He is no sanatani Hindu who is narrow, bigoted and considers evil to be good if it has the sanction of antiquity and is to be found supported in any Sanskrit book.’

  Gandhi insisted that his study of other faiths had ‘broadened my view of life. They have enabled me to understand more clearly many an obscure passage in the Hindu scriptures.’ In ‘the other world’, he continued, ‘there are neither Hindus, nor Christians, nor Mussalmans’. But in this world it was impossible to escape such labels. Gandhi therefore chose ‘to retain the label of my forefathers so long as it does not cramp my growth and does not debar me from assimilating all that is good anywhere else’.

  The unspoken corollary was that Muslims and Christians should likewise stick with the religion of their forefathers, but also broaden and deepen it by sympathetically studying the scriptures of other religions and, where necessary, ‘assimilating all that is good’ in them.10