The government declined to grant the request. So, on the 16th, Gandhi began a fresh fast. So many fasts in such a short period of time took their toll, and within a few days the prisoner’s condition had rapidly deteriorated. On the 21st he was removed to the Sassoon Hospital. He was suffering from acute nausea, and for the first time in all his experiments with fasting felt close to death, so much so that he began distributing his personal articles to the hospital staff attending on him.39
Seeing the prisoner’s precarious condition, the government capitulated. ‘Gandhi is starving again,’ wrote the viceroy to his sister, ‘and last night I heard that he had collapsed in prison, and we have had to release him and send him to hospital. He may insist on continuing to starve there in which case his blood will be on his own head….Really he is quite abnormal now and has a megalomania for power and notoriety.’40
On the morning of 23 August, Gandhi was released unconditionally. He broke his fast with the usual glass of orange juice, and removed himself to Lady Thackersey’s villa to recover. Meeting the press on the 25th, he said he would ‘again use this unexpected freedom from imprisonment for the sake of exploring avenues of peace’.
Gandhi spent three weeks at Parnakuti, recovering his strength. On 14 September, he told the press that since his aborted prison sentence had been due to last until 3 August 1934, till that date he would not take the path of confrontation but devote himself exclusively to Harijan service.41
Following Gandhi’s movements from afar was his American disciple Richard Gregg. Gregg had spent several years in India; he was deeply interested in khadi, agriculture and nature cure. He had been a frequent visitor to the Sabarmati Ashram, where Gandhi had given him the Indian name ‘Govind’. Now, back in his homeland, he read about his master’s to-and-fro journeys from prison to Parnakuti, and back again. Writing that Gandhi’s address ‘changes so often these days’, Gregg said he was reminded of the story of the Irish boss of a tramway repair gang, called on to fix a tram that had gone off the rails three times in quick succession. The Irishman’s report to his boss ran: ‘Off again, on again, away again—Finnigan.’42
IX
Some Congressmen were impatient to launch a fresh campaign against the Raj. Their leader had other ideas. In the face of Ambedkar’s challenge, social reform had to take precedence over politics. Gandhi now decided to go on an all-India tour to campaign against untouchability. He would begin at Wardha, and then move northwards to the Punjab, Sindh, Rajputana and the United Provinces. However, he was persuaded by Rajagopalachari to start in South India instead, and cover Andhra, Tamil Nadu, Mysore and Kerala in the cold weather, before returning north to complete the tour.
Gandhi’s ‘Harijan tour’ formally began on 7 November, when, at a village near Wardha named Selu, he opened a temple to ‘untouchables’. It was, he remarked, ‘good fortune for me that my tour begins at Wardha, which is the geographical centre of India. I want it also to be the centre of the movement.’ Jamnalal Bajaj was based in Wardha; he had already opened his family temple to Harijans. Another long-standing disciple of Gandhi’s, Vinoba Bhave, had made Wardha the base for his own social work. Gandhi hoped that the commitment of Bajaj and Bhave to ending untouchability would ‘prove infectious and spread through the whole of the country’.
Gandhi was heartened by the early response to his Harijan tour. As he wrote to an English friend, in the first week ‘no less than 1,50,000 people must have taken part in the numerous meetings and demonstrations. If they did not want to endorse the movement, one would think that they could not possibly [have] attended in such large numbers.’43
Gandhi used his tour both to spread the message and to collect money for the cause. After each talk, he would ask for voluntary donations to the Harijan Sewak Sangh. Men would offer cash; women, jewellery. Next, Gandhi would pull out signed photographs of himself, and have them auctioned. ‘Do rupiya ek bar’, he would say, the floor price is two rupees. One member would bid higher, another still higher. Ultimately, each photo would go for ten rupees or more.
Next, photographs of Jawaharlal Nehru would be sold, in case the young men present admired him more than the Mahatma. In some places, photos of the Muslim nationalist M.A. Ansari were sold.
Apart from photographs, gifts received by Gandhi were also auctioned. At many places, he was offered a written address on embossed paper, handsomely framed. This would be put under the hammer, the selling price often exceeding 100 rupees. In one place, an oil painting of Gandhi was offered to him; this was then auctioned for 600 rupees. Occasionally, the shaving stick used by Gandhi that morning would also be bid for. By these varied means, Gandhi gathered an ever-increasing sum for his work.44
Gandhi’s meetings were attracting critics as well as supporters. A group of orthodox Hindus from Banaras, led by one Swami Lalnath, had come south to try and stop his tour. They followed Gandhi from village to village, lying down in front of the car that conveyed him. Lifted up and taken out of the way by Congress volunteers, they then turned up at the meetings, heckling the speaker and showing black flags. Sometimes they went so far as to burn Gandhi’s effigy.45
As was his wont, Gandhi sought out the critics. He sent for Swami Lalnath, and tried to talk him out of his opposition. The swami told Gandhi that he was paying him back in his own coin, offering satyagraha to the originator of satyagraha. As he frankly admitted: ‘We want to be hurt by the police or by your volunteers. When this happens I know you would give up the tour.’
To seek ‘to provoke the public to violence’, said Gandhi to the swami, was the very antithesis of satyagraha. Whatever happened, he would not call the police, and had instructed his colleagues to eschew violence. He told the swami to ‘go back to Benares and ask the Lord of the Universe to wean me from my error’ (in opposing untouchability). Or the swami should fast to uphold his beliefs, as Gandhi had himself done. Swami Lalnath, put on the spot, shamefacedly answered: ‘That we have not the ability to do.’46
Despite Gandhi’s attempt to reach out to them, the swami and his men continued their counter-campaign. Everywhere Gandhi went, he was met by black flag demonstrations by the Sanatanists. Reporting these protests, the Bombay Chronicle commented that while ‘the mere sight of Mahatma Gandhi being greeted with black flags anywhere in India must scandalise the vast majority of the public’, the opposition could be construed as ‘a healthy sign that even the most orthodox have at last been stirred out of their comfortable lethargy into action by the war that Gandhiji has declared upon an abominable ancient custom. It is a tribute to the efficacy of his campaign.’47
In the town of Akola, some of Ambedkar’s followers came to meet Gandhi. The questions and criticisms they put to him, and the answers and explanations he gave, were noted down by a journalist:
Ambedkarites: You posed at the Round Table Conference as a Harijan leader and denied the leadership of Dr. Ambedkar.
Gandhi: No, I said there that I was the representative of millions of people of India. I said I shared along with Dr. Ambedkar the responsibility of looking after the Harijans’ interests.
Ambedkarites: Dr. Ambedkar opposed you at the Round Table Conference. By doing so did he do justice or injustice to the country?
Gandhi: He thought he did justice, but I was of [the] opinion that he did injustice.
Ambedkarites: People have pictures of Lokmanya Tilak with four hands. They worship it. Do you have any objection if we had a picture of Ambedkar with four hands and worshipped it? We believe he has done us good.
Gandhi: You have a right to do that. Whenever the conversation between me and Vallabhbhai in the Yerwada Jail turned upon the Poona Pact, I used to picture in my mind’s eye Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, whom I wanted to please. I regularly read the Janata, the weekly of his party. I admire him. I may differ from his views, but admit he is a brave man. Brave men also err. I consider myself a brave man and I confess I have commit
ted many mistakes.
The disputants parted amicably, with the Akola Ambedkarites offering Gandhi a garland, which he gratefully accepted.48
The government did not believe that Gandhi’s anti-untouchability tour would focus on social reform alone. They worried that he might launch a fresh campaign of civil disobedience. So, they had spies clad in civilian clothes follow him everywhere, taking notes of what he did and did not say. The Raj was worried that since Gandhi had ‘not yet abandoned his creed of hostility to Government’, there was ‘no guarantee that subscriptions given to the Harijan movement will not be used for subversive purposes’.
Based on this (mis)reading of Gandhi’s intentions, a series of instructions were issued to officials in the districts the tour would pass through. First, that government property and buildings could not be used for the anti-untouchability movement. Second, that government servants were forbidden from contributing to Gandhi’s Harijan fund. Third, that government servants must not be part of any reception committee for Gandhi. Fourth, that while it would be better for government servants not to attend Gandhi’s meetings at all, if they did go they must make it clear that they were doing so in their private capacity.49
X
Gandhi had given his word that until August 1934 he would stay away from politics. But his wife had made no such commitment. On 25 November 1933, Kasturba Gandhi wrote to the home secretary of the Government of Bombay a remarkable letter which read:
Dear Sir,
When in August last my husband (M. K. Gandhi) went on a fast in prison, I was serving my own term of imprisonment as a civil resister; and in order to enable me to attend upon and nurse him, the Government, as is their wont on such occasions, did me the courtesy to discharge me from prison.
My husband having now fairly recouped his health, and having resumed Harijan work in pursuance of his vow, I feel that I do not require to attend upon him further and that as a civil resister I may not stay away from duty any longer. I propose, therefore, to resume my work, and, to begin with, I intend to proceed to the village of Ras in the district of Kaira in order to associate myself with the civil resister sufferers in their woes and share their privations to the best of my abilities.
I hope to leave Ahmedabad for Ras on 28th November 1933.
Yours faithfully
Kasturba Gandhi
The letter was in English, but Kasturba had signed her name in Devanagari, in a not very steady hand. She knew little English and only a little more Hindi. Who drafted the letter? Perhaps it was Mahadev Desai, perhaps her son Devadas, perhaps Gandhi himself.
Kasturba left Ahmedabad for Ras on 28 November, accompanied by Vallabhbhai Patel’s daughter Manibehn. They intended to preach individual civil disobedience. They were detained at Nadiad, and presented before the district magistrate, an Indian named M.S. Jayakar.
In court, Kasturba answered questions in her native Gujarati. The archival record has the English translations, these made by the magistrate for his superiors in Bombay. Kasturba gave her caste as ‘Bania’, her occupation as ‘Deshseva’, this accurately rendered in English as ‘in the service of the nation’ (no doubt to the embarrassment, or anger, of the British officials who were to read it). She wanted, she said, to go to Ras to study at first-hand the condition of the agriculturists there, whom she had heard were being ‘greatly harassed’ by officials.
Asked whether she intended to preach civil disobedience in Ras, Kasturba answered that the breaking of unjust laws was her dharma. As her husband had recovered his health, she wished, she told the magistrate, ‘to undergo the remaining period of my former sentence which had remained unexpired’.
Back in August, Kasturba had been sentenced to six months in prison. She was, however, released two weeks later to attend on her husband. The government now cancelled the order suspending the earlier sentence, and removed her to the Sabarmati prison, where she would serve the remaining five and a half months of her sentence.50
XI
Gandhi’s ‘Harijan tour’ continued. After five gruelling weeks in the Central Provinces, he travelled to Delhi to attend a meeting of the Harijan Sewak Sangh. With him was Mira, who, writing to Devadas Gandhi, described the past month with her master on the road:
I have been continually packing, unpacking and packing up again—preparing quarters only to vacate them again in a few hours—rushing 100 or even 150 miles in the day in a car, and sometimes finishing up heavy days with nights or half nights in the train. How Bapu has stood it has been marvellous. Anyone else would have broken down—but God gives him a special strength. But that does not mean we should abuse that strength. If Bapu is to fulfil the 9 months Tour it will be impossible for him to go on at this pace.51
Aside from meeting colleagues, Gandhi also made speeches and collected money on this visit to Delhi. The list of collections, as printed in Harijan, makes for interesting reading. The workers and managers of Birla Mills contributed a handsome Rs 2000. A general collection among the citizens of Delhi yielded almost three times as much. The staff and students of St Stephen’s College where C.F. Andrews had taught donated Rs 152. The staff and students of the rival institution, Hindu College, gave as much as Rs 400, inspired perhaps by the fact that their long-serving principal, N.V. Thadani, was a great admirer of Gandhi.52
From Delhi, Gandhi and his party took a train to Madras, to commence the next stage of their Harijan tour. A Tamil Brahmin critic had claimed that 95 per cent of Harijans did not want ‘the Gandhian creed’. When a journalist quoted these words to Gandhi, he answered in exasperation: ‘There is no such thing as “Gandhian creed” so far as I know. I know only this. I am engaged in giving Harijans clean water. I am engaged in giving them facilities for education. I am engaged in finding accommodation for them…I am engaged in weaning them from drink and carrion. Do they not like all these?’53
Gandhi now entered the Andhra country. At the city of Vijayawada, a play was staged for him, featuring a Pariah hero. The devotion of the townsmen to the visiting saint disgusted the district magistrate, who commented that the speeches welcoming Gandhi ‘were in fulsome terms which might by some people be considered nauseating, even according to the standards of what in this country is considered to be suitable flattery for an address’.54
Gandhi now retraced his steps southwards. In Malabar, he was once more met by black flag demonstrators. Later, at a public meeting, he remarked: ‘What if those who had black flags had smeared himself as Brahmins do?…Brahminhood is not known by external marks….He is a Brahmin who is a living treasure of scriptures, but not he who makes a demonstration of untruth by carrying a black flag.’
In the village of Badagara, a sixteen-year-old girl named Kaumudi was so moved by Gandhi’s speech that she took off all her jewellery and offered it to the Harijan cause. Bangles on her hands, earrings, anklets, a gold necklace—all came off one by one and were handed over to Gandhi. He too was moved; later writing an article on how ‘Kaumudi’s Renunciation’ had been one of the ‘most touching and soul-stirring scenes’ of his long and busy life.55
Gandhi’s Quaker friend Muriel Lester (his host in London in 1931) was in India, and spent some time with Gandhi on his Harijan tour through the Madras Presidency. Miss Lester provided Charlie Andrews with a description of two days with their hero on the road:
Well, my niece Dorothy Hogg calls Bapu ‘the Speed King of Asia’. He has the secret of perpetual motion. We rarely eat 2 meals in the same place—we arrive at some Dharmshalla or Ashram at 9 pm—sleep, prayers at 4.20 (B[apu] gets up and writes at 3) we pack, have breakfast, and set off at 6.30, have perhaps 10 meetings in the day. The first day I was w[ith] him he had 50,000 people at the meetings and not counting the crowds who line the streets 16 deep—or swarm on the railway station. R[upees] 20,000 were given in…2 days…
I’ve never seen him look so well—he seems radiant—tirele
ss—jokey and all the things that endear him to people.56
Later in her tour, Muriel Lester was in Delhi, where she met Lord Willingdon, an old family friend. She found him ‘quite hardened up…in the crust of his own self-righteousness’. She tried but failed to convince him of Gandhi’s sincerity. The viceroy complained that Gandhi had ‘given him a lot of trouble’. He accused him of ‘raising a hornet’s nest by asking for Temple Entry’, claiming that ‘the Sanatanists would do more harm now that [Gandhi] had attacked them than they would have done if left alone’.
Miss Lester told Gandhi that Willingdon had ‘a grudge against you for the trouble you have given him in the past [over his fasts in jail in 1932 and 1933, among other things]. He thinks you are utterly conceited—and as that is his own weakness—he naturally dislikes it wherever he thinks he sees it in others.’57
Willingdon’s dislike of Gandhi was intense. In late 1933, he visited the princely state of Mysore, whose diwan, Mirza Ismail, had much sympathy for Gandhi. In a recent address to the Mysore Assembly, Ismail had praised the Mahatma as ‘an ardent patriot’ and ‘a far-seeing, sagacious statesman’, who was ‘qualified far better than anyone else to reconcile the conflicting elements in the country and to induce them all to march together a further stage along the road that leads to self-government’. The speech came to the attention of the viceroy, who would not countenance any talk of self-government, or indeed praise of Gandhi. ‘Look here Mirza, what have you been doing?’ said Willingdon to Ismail when they met, adding, ‘Don’t do it again.’
On his return to Delhi, the viceroy wrote to Mirza Ismail urging him to ‘give up the idea of Gandhi as a leader of political thought in this country for, believe me, he is temperamentally a bad politician…’58
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