In the criticisms of the Ali Brothers there was perhaps more than a hint of jealousy. Back in 1920 and 1921, they had formed a trinity with Gandhi. Now, a decade later, they were denied any leadership role whatsoever. That said, it was clear that, outside of Gandhi’s native Gujarat, Muslims had not participated in the Salt Satyagraha in large numbers. The reasons were several. The absence of a mobilizing motif such as the Khilafat was one. The emphasis on wearing handmade clothes was another. Thus, as one ordinary Muslim in Bombay wrote to Gandhi, ‘Mahatmaji, your insistence on khaddar is noble, but under the present critical circumstances you must relax your conditions a little and allow all and sundry to join your movement for freedom.’ Many people in Bombay who ‘are dying to participate in the national struggle’ were too poor to afford the price at which khaddar was being sold in the cities.77
XII
Gandhi had now decided to go from village to village, persuading people to break the salt laws and court arrest. Meanwhile, through the columns of his newspaper, he asked women not to take part in the movement against the salt laws, where ‘they will be lost among the men’. Rather, for them to ‘leave a stamp…on the history of India’, they should ‘find an exclusive field for themselves’. This was in promoting prohibition, whereby women could picket liquor booths and thus bring about a ‘change of heart’ in those addicted to drink.78
Some women did not heed the advice. They included Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Perin Captain (Dadabhai Naoroji’s granddaughter), who led a satyagraha in the Dholera salt bed in Gujarat. Gandhi congratulated Perin and Kamaladevi for their ‘courage and calmness’ but added that ‘they would have done better to remain outside the venue of the men’s fight’. He reminded the women that ‘in all humility’, he had ‘suggested to them an exclusive field [prohibition] in which they are at liberty and are expected to show their best qualities’.79
Kamaladevi was undeterred. On Saturday, 12 April, she arrived at the Bombay Stock Exchange to sell the contraband salt made by her over the past week. ‘She was immediately conveyed to the Trading Ring where she was cheered with cries of “Mahatmaji-ki-jai”. The brokers and their clerks flocked around her to purchase the Satyagrahi salt with the result that the salt packets had to be sold by auction.’ The auction lasted half an hour, realizing some Rs 4000 in all. The next day, the Bombay Chronicle carried a large photo of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, described as ‘the leading lady law-breaker’.80
Gandhi’s son Ramdas was arrested in the first week of April, as were many other satyagrahis in Gujarat. In the second week of April, Jamnalal Bajaj, Jawaharlal Nehru and Devadas Gandhi were also arrested. In response to these arrests, Vithalbhai Patel resigned from his post as president of the Legislative Assembly. Vithalbhai wrote to the viceroy on 20 April that he had always made it clear that ‘Congress and Gandhi alone were in a position to deliver goods to any appreciable extent, and a Round Table Conference in which Congress leaders could not be persuaded to participate was not worth much, if anything at all’.81
On the same day, M.A. Jinnah also wrote to the viceroy, urging him to make a public statement on constitutional advance. At present, noted Jinnah, ‘the country had got before it only one side of the question [i.e. the Congress side], which has received the greatest publicity and ex parte propaganda, and has gone on so long that at present it has reached fever heat, but the Government alone can put the alternative before the people and sooner it is done the better’. Irwin had asked Jinnah to make a public statement against Gandhi’s movement. Jinnah said his disapproval of civil disobedience was well known, but any statement he would now make would be effective only if ‘there is a definite and clear alternative’ to the Congress credo. ‘I have great faith in you,’ wrote Jinnah to the viceroy, adding, ‘but you must move faster than you are doing at present.’82
Gandhi was in Navsari when news reached him of a daring raid on an armoury in the Bengali port town of Chittagong. This distressed him, for, as he told the Associated Press, this showed ‘that there is a large or small body of men in Bengal who do not believe in non-violence whether as a policy or as a creed. That there were such people all over India I knew but I had hoped that they would give non-violence a chance.’83
On 26 April, Gandhi told a meeting that what he had done in Dandi was merely to pick ‘a seer or two of salt from here and there’. The time had come to go beyond this ‘childish game’, and raid the major government salt-making works in Dharasana. When that satyagraha commenced, he would invite the residents of Dharasana ‘to join the fun’; he hoped they would join, even if it meant braving police beatings.84
In the third week of April, Mahadev Desai and his ashram colleague Swami Anand were arrested. So were hundreds of other Congressmen in other parts of the country. Gandhi, however, was still left free to move about.
XIII
Why had the Raj waited so long to arrest Gandhi? The day after Gandhi broke the law in Dandi, Lord Irwin wrote privately to the editor of The Times insisting that his policy of non-interference had been justified. He claimed that Gandhi himself hoped to be arrested early in his march, for two reasons: it would have (a) led to ‘the shedding of a great lustre about his name and cause’; and (b) spared ‘an elderly man the disagreeable duty of walking twelve miles a day for three weeks through dust in order to get to a hot sea-side in the end’.85
The view from the ground was very different. In the districts that Gandhi passed through, and in Bombay city itself, there was very clearly a ‘wave of anti-Government feeling’, which ‘Gandhi’s march is doing so much to stimulate’. Thus remarked the governor of Bombay Presidency in a letter to the viceroy ten days after the march commenced. A week later, meeting the viceroy in Delhi, the governor again pressed the importance of acting early.86
Meanwhile, Gandhi broke the law in Dandi, spurring similar actions across the Presidency and in other parts of India. On 15 April, the Bombay governor told the viceroy that ‘there is no doubt that Gandhi has a great emotional hold as evidenced by the numerical support of his demonstrations and the popular enthusiasm, largely among the younger generation, and, increasingly, amongst women and girls, which has been more than expected’. He added that ‘Gandhi has scored a certain degree of success in attaining his objective—viz. to teach the masses…that the law can be defied if sufficient concerted action is brought’.87
The importance of punitive action finally began to dawn on Irwin. To the Bombay governor he somewhat ponderously wrote that ‘my own mind is moving rather steadily in the direction of feeling that we incur graver dangers than we avoid by continuing our reluctance to arrest Gandhi’.88 To the India Office, Irwin defensively remarked that while they ‘were right to let him [Gandhi] reach the sea’, they would have to arrest him soon, since the ‘effect has been definitely bad in Gujerat, and I suspect in Bombay and in Calcutta….I think we are reaching the time when the legend of the irresistibility of Gandhi is assuming dangerous proportions.’89
Knowing the viceroy’s tendency to prevaricate, the Bombay government pressed him to sanction arrest. On 26 April, they wired him that ‘Gandhi’s exemption from arrest is having an important effect in strengthening the civil disobedience movement. His arrest would tend to check it by removing [the] brain which guides it.’ Delhi answered back that Bombay should not, must not, arrest Gandhi without explicit orders from them, the central government.90
Gandhi had announced that he would now march towards the Dharasana Salt Works, some fifty miles south of Surat. On 30 April, Bombay wired Delhi that these works were open and not protected by fencing. The salt workers in Dharasana might either resist Gandhi’s party, in which case violence would occur, and the police have to be called in. On the other hand, if the salt workers were persuaded or intimidated to join the protesters, and ‘Gandhi enters into peaceable possession of large salt’, then the ‘news will spread like wildfire’, and ‘the belief already prevalent that Gandhi has beaten Government an
d that Government dare not arrest him will receive corroboration which no man can doubt’.
This assessment, at once alarmist and realistic, finally persuaded Irwin to act. Delhi now instructed Bombay to go ahead and detain Gandhi. However, in one last show of prevarication, they were asked to wait until 4 May so that there was enough notice to alert other provincial governments.91
XIV
On the evening of 4 May, Gandhi drafted a letter to the viceroy announcing that he would lead a party to raid the Dharasana Salt Works. Before the letter could be sent, he was arrested, at forty-five minutes past midnight on the morning of the 5th. He was then asleep at his camp in the village of Karadi, in Surat district. When the magistrate sent to arrest him woke Gandhi, he asked for half an hour to wash and clean his teeth. His companions said their prayers while the policemen watched. Then he was taken away, transported by train and car to the same jail in Yerwada, near Poona, where he had been incarcerated between March 1922 and January 1924.
Curiously, Gandhi was not arrested under the Salt Act, under which an offender could be sent to jail for illegal possession of salt, but under an ordinance of the Bombay government first drafted in 1827, which permitted the authorities to detain anyone deemed to be ‘a menace to public order’.92
Once sceptical of Gandhi’s challenge, Irwin now recognized the force of popular sentiment that had consolidated and crystallized. A week after Gandhi’s arrest, he wrote to the former (and future) Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, that ‘there is no question that the movement has caught on among the Hindus, largely out of a mistaken veneration for Gandhi and largely as the expression of a sub-conscious nationalist and self-determination movement of thought’.93
Irwin was not the only one to change his mind about the significance of Gandhi and his march. So did the American magazine, Time. As the march progressed, Time saluted Gandhi as a ‘Saint’ and ‘Statesman’, who was using ‘Christian acts as a weapon against men with Christian beliefs’. Later issues spoke of the ‘spreading ripples of St. Gandhi’s movement for independence’, with ‘unrest seething hotter and hotter all over India’. Time’s report on Gandhi’s arrest in early May praised the dignity and composure with which he received the news, merely asking the police officer for a few minutes in which he could brush his teeth (with contraband salt).94
Gandhi was arrested a full eight weeks after he first set out from the Sabarmati Ashram. In these days and weeks, the details of his march, whom he met and what he said, how he was perceived and praised (and occasionally criticized), were intensively covered in the Indian press (in both English and the vernacular) and in the foreign press as well. The image of an elderly, emaciated man walking with a staff on a hot and dusty road, day after day, in a single (and singular) challenge to the greatest empire on earth, captivated the national and global imagination.
Eighty-eight years later, the Dandi March remains the best-known event of a remarkably eventful life. Yet, it could so easily have been otherwise. In a private letter written while Gandhi was on the road, the governor of the United Provinces, Malcolm Hailey, deplored the fact that Irwin was not a strong viceroy, who had shown his weakness by not arresting Gandhi before he set out on his Salt March. Drawing on three decades of life and work in India, Hailey observed that ‘the East has far more respect for a ruler who misuses his powers than for one who allows his authority to be flouted’.95
Had the viceroy sanctioned the arrest of Gandhi before he left the Sabarmati Ashram, or shortly after the march commenced, Dandi would have remained an obscure village on the Gujarat coast, unloved by any but its few hundred inhabitants.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Prison and the World
I
Gandhi’s cell in Yerwada was quite large compared to the one he had used in 1922–24—two rooms with a yard to which he had access. It had furniture and electricity as well. Shortly after he was incarcerated, Gandhi was visited by the inspector general of prisons. They discussed what newspapers he could get, and how many visitors he could receive (two family members a week was what the government suggested). Gandhi asked that he be allowed to see all prisoners in Yerwada serving sentences in connection with the civil disobedience movement. The inspector general said this would not be possible, but if Gandhi wanted a companion in the same yard that could be arranged.
The inspector general then suggested to his superiors that D.B. (Kaka) Kalelkar be transferred from Ahmedabad jail to be with Gandhi. Kalelkar was a veteran of the Sabarmati Ashram, a scholar and writer who (when not in prison) taught at the Gujarat Vidyapith. The Bombay government was happy for him to be the Mahatma’s jail companion, since, as they put it, Kalelkar was ‘already as “good” or as “bad” as Gandhi can make him’, and sending him to Yerwada would ‘prevent Gandhi getting hold of a new recruit’ to his cause.1
Gandhi spent his first weeks in jail spinning and reading the Gita. He was, as he wrote to Mira, ‘resting after many days of fatigue’ brought on by his march to the sea. He took two naps during the day, one at 8 a.m. and the other at noon.
Gandhi also occupied himself by translating the Ashram Bhajnavali, the collection of devotional songs sung during the morning and evening prayers in Sabarmati. There were more than two hundred hymns in all, these composed in Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi and Sanskrit. Gandhi began rendering them into English, a task initially begun for Mira’s benefit, but soon acquiring a rationale of its own.2
The government had allowed Gandhi to see his ‘blood relations’ twice a week, and others only by special permission. This was relatively lenient compared to his last term in prison, when he was allowed visitors only once in three months. Yet, the prisoner rejected these terms, writing to the jail superintendent that he had ‘in the Ashram and outside many widows, girls, boys and men, who are perhaps more to me than many a blood relative. If they may not see me on the same terms as relatives, to be just to the former, I must not see the latter.’
In the ashram, as well as in the wider community of Congress nationalists, Gandhi was known as ‘Bapu’, Father. Now, in jail, he provided the jail authorities a list of some 160 people who, he said, ‘are like blood relations to me’. He wanted them to come meet him, in groups, on the same terms as he was allowed to see Kasturba and their sons. The government rejected this appeal, so Gandhi chose to have no visitors at all.3
Denied access to his family, both spiritual and biological, Gandhi kept in close and almost continuous contact with them through the post. In some weeks the number of letters he wrote exceeded seventy or even eighty. The letters were scrupulously non-political, offering advice or answering queries about diet, health, prayer, reading and general conduct. This was not merely because the prison authorities would have censored letters dealing with politics. For Gandhi, the moral and spiritual health of his ashram was always as important as the social or political condition of his nation.
A representative letter was written to his adopted English daughter eight weeks into his jail term. This began by expressing relief that Mira’s mother’s operation in London was successful. ‘The West,’ Gandhi remarked, ‘has always commanded my admiration [for] its surgical inventions and all-round progress in that direction.’
Gandhi came next to the vital question of diet. ‘You do not tell me,’ he wrote to Mira, ‘how much ghee you are taking and whether you are taking oranges or not.’ He then moved on to the even more vital question of spinning. ‘I find the doing of 375 rounds somewhat of a strain nowadays,’ he told Mira. ‘I am trying to prove the cause.’4
Gandhi liked to refer to himself, only partly in jest, as a ‘quack doctor’. He had a lifelong interest—not to say fascination—in home remedies. Queries from ashramites about health were answered with zest. A letter to Valji Desai read: ‘If it is only your gums which bleed, you should gargle with salt water three or four times a day and in the morning massage them with a finger using pure, finely-powdere
d salt, taking care not to spit out the saliva meanwhile. You may use cocoanut oil instead of salt. You should also gargle with some potassium permanganate solution. If the bleeding does not stop with this, you should consult a dentist. Sometimes such bleeding is brought about even by indigestion. You should eat daily a little quantity of uncooked green vegetables.’5
In jail, Gandhi wrote many letters to individuals in the ashram, as well as a weekly collective letter to them. From July, this collective letter ended with a discourse on a specific subject—first Truth, then Ahimsa, next Brahmacharya. Other topics dealt with included fearlessness, non-possession, the removal of untouchability, and the importance of vows as regards celibacy, non-possession, truth-telling, and the like.
The letter on vows elicited a strong reaction from J.C. Kumarappa, a Columbia-educated economist who had left a flourishing career to join Gandhi. Kumarappa thought the taking of vows a tacit acknowledgement of moral weakness. ‘The strong man needs no such help,’ he wrote to Gandhi in October 1930. ‘His ideals, determination and will-power will see him through any situation.’ On the other hand, a person compelled to take vows ‘ceases sooner or later—and often sooner than later—to appeal to his ideals every time a situation arises; and he acts in a particular way, not because his ideals dictate that course, but because he has taken a vow to act so’.
Gandhi answered that he was not thinking of ‘vows publicly administered to audiences’, but ‘of a promise made to oneself’. Every human had within him Ram and Ravan, God and Satan, and vows helped in heeding the former rather than the latter. To Kumarappa, a Christian, Gandhi wrote that ‘Jesus was preeminently a man of unshakeable resolution, i.e. vows. His yea was yea for ever.’6
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