Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  At the same time, Gandhi’s decision dismayed his closest political allies. ‘Your retirement from the Congress will be a suicidal step,’ wrote Rajagopalachari. ‘That will complete the triumph of the Government over the Congress, and that of the Viceroy over you. An intense and irrevocable feeling of defeatism will spread over the whole nation, and kill political hope and enterprise…’13

  These responses were in character. Far more interesting was the reaction of Henry Polak, who had known Gandhi longer than anyone living in India, whether Indian or British. In a letter to Srinivasa Sastri, Polak remarked that Gandhi had

  a temperament of restless energy, and it seems to me that he has alternations between the political mood and the social and economic reform mood. Sometimes they almost merge and blur each other. I should not at all be surprised if in the not very distant future he will feel a call to jump back into the Congress leadership once he has put his village organisation upon a proper footing.14

  The Congress session began on 20 October in Bombay. The previous week, from Wardha, Gandhi clarified that his retirement ‘was neither a threat nor an ultimatum’ to his partymen to follow his diktats. Rather, he wished to focus on village work, and proposed to start an All India Village Industries Association.

  Gandhi attended the Congress in Bombay, speaking at several committee meetings on Harijan work and swadeshi. The AICC passed a unanimous resolution expressing ‘the country’s confidence’ in his leadership, and urging him not to retire. Gandhi asked them to withdraw the resolution, noting that as and when it became necessary to come back to the Congress, he would do so.15

  After the Congress had ended, Gandhi publicly refuted the rumours that he had left the party ‘in disgust’. He retained the ‘highest regard for the Congress’, and had ‘retired not to weaken the national organization, but to strengthen it’. When India achieved its goal of swaraj, he added, ‘as we will and must, the Congress will be found to have contributed the largest share in the attainment’.16

  IV

  On his return to Wardha, Gandhi wrote to the viceroy, saying he wished to visit the NWFP, to study at first-hand ‘how far the teaching of non-violence by Khan Saheb Abdul Ghaffar Khan has permeated his followers’. Although ‘there is no legal bar against my entering the Frontier Province’, he remarked, ‘I have no desire to do anything that may bring me in conflict with the Government’.

  The viceroy wrote back, saying he had consulted with his council, who were ‘unanimously of [the] opinion that it was not desirable for you to pay a visit to the Frontier Province at the present time’.17

  After his Harijan tour, Gandhi had begun to take a keen interest in the revival of the village economy. Travelling in different parts of the countryside, he noticed the widespread poverty, and the large-scale underemployment too. He thought that promoting crafts and small production units would make the rural economy self-sufficient and vigorous. Beginning in November 1934, he published a series of articles on the invigoration of the agrarian economy. Industries such as spinning and weaving, milling and grinding, could be profitably utilized to augment rural incomes, and renew social and cooperative life.

  In December 1934, the All India Village Industries Association (AIVIA) formally came into being. Its president was a nationalist lawyer named Shrikrishnadas Jajooji; its secretary and chief organizer the economist J.C. Kumarappa. The AIVIA’s board of advisers included Rabindranath Tagore, the chemist P.C. Ray and the Nobel Prize–winning physicist C.V. Raman.

  The AIVIA’s aim was defined as ‘the revival, encouragement and improvement of village industries, and the moral and physical advancement of the villages of India’. Wardha had been chosen as its headquarters, ‘because of being centrally situated, being a junction station and being rather a glorified village than a city’.

  Meanwhile, Gandhi’s series on the renewal of rural life continued. One essay focused on village sanitation, ‘perhaps the most difficult task’ confronting the AIVIA. Gandhi asked for the periodic cleaning and desilting of wells and tanks, and especially, for the recycling of human waste as manure (a practice not followed in India, unlike in China, where it helped to cheaply and effectively restore soil fertility).18

  V

  In January 1935, Gandhi’s daughter-disciple Mira told him of her wish to start a ‘real Village Ashram’. She asked whether he would join her. He told her he would, once she had created such a place. So, she began surveying the villages near Wardha for a suitable site to move to. She told Devadas Gandhi that there was, all around the town, ‘fine air, good water, hills, woods, little villages—but it is difficult to get just the right place’.19

  In mid-May, Gandhi briefly left Wardha for Bombay. The city had been an epicentre of the Rowlatt satyagraha, the non-cooperation movement and the Salt March. Congress volunteers were itching for some more direct action. Speaking to them, Gandhi said he had been told that ‘there is despair and depression everywhere, that there is disappointment all around as the gateway to jail is closed’. He wondered why, when there was ‘the whole of the constructive programme of work to do’.

  Gandhi told the Congress radicals that while swaraj was their ‘birthright’, it did not depend only on jail-going. He asked the impatient activists to ‘go to the villages, identify yourselves with villagers, befriend the untouchables, make Hindu–Muslim unity a concrete fact’.20

  One Congresswoman keen to identify with village life was a princess from North India. Born in 1889 (the same year as Jawaharlal Nehru), Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was from the royal family of Kapurthala. While her ancestors were Sikh, she had herself been raised a Christian. Educated in England, a great beauty as well as a superb tennis player in her youth, she lived in Simla, and was a fixture at its games and parties.

  As she entered her thirties, Amrit Kaur became dissatisfied with a life of leisure and luxury, while becoming increasingly attracted to Gandhi and the national movement. She turned her back on the court, as well as the Court, engaging instead with the All-India Women’s Conference, among whose leading lights were Sarojini Naidu and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay.21

  In the summer of 1935, Kasturba Gandhi went to Simla to escape the searing summer of Wardha. She stayed as the guest of Amrit Kaur, in the spacious family bungalow, suitably named ‘Manorville’. Kasturba returned to Wardha once the monsoon had set in. She was followed by a series of letters from Amrit Kaur to Gandhi, accompanied by a box of apples from the family orchard. The rajkumari was desperately keen to abandon her aristocratic lifestyle to come closer to the Mahatma. She expressed her desire for disciplehood in perfervid prose. ‘My loyalty to your ideals,’ wrote Amrit Kaur, ‘and a real desire to serve the lowliest and the down-trodden with such poor capacity as is mine you will, I pray, always have—God helping me, with my shortcomings you will, I know, always exercise the utmost forbearance.’22

  VI

  In October 1935, a village in Gujarat named Kavitha became the centre of a nationwide controversy. The ‘untouchables’ had asked for their children to be admitted to the village school. The caste Hindus, enraged, asked for a complete boycott of the Harijans. When A.V. Thakkar brought this incident to the attention of Gandhi, he suggested that the Harijans leave the village in protest. ‘If people migrate in search of employment,’ he remarked, ‘how much more should they do so in search of self-respect?’

  When Ambedkar heard of the Kavitha incident, he said that they were treated like this because ‘we have the misfortune to call ourselves Hindu’. He added: ‘If we were members of another faith none dare treat us so….Choose any religion which gives you equality of status and treatment.’ Ambedkar urged the ‘untouchables’ to leave Hinduism and embrace any other religion that gave them equal status with its other members.

  When Ambedkar’s statement was brought to Gandhi’s attention, he said he could ‘understand the anger of a high-souled and highly educated person’ over what had happened
at Kavitha. But, he went on: ‘Religion is not like a house or a cloak that can be changed at will. It is more an integral part of one’s self than of one’s body.’ The lives of the Harijans, continued Gandhi, were, for good and for ill, intertwined with caste Hindus. Thus, reform of Hinduism rather than its rejection was the way forward.23

  Gandhi argued that the outcry over the Kavitha incident in fact showed that the battle against untouchability was showing results. As he pointed out: ‘Only a few years ago the Kavitha incident would have attracted no notice. There were very few reformers then.’ Now, as it turned out, ‘it was savarna reformers [like A.V. Thakkar] who advertised the Kavitha incident and gave it an all-India importance’. ‘Let not Dr. Ambedkar’s just wrath deject the reformer,’ remarked Gandhi, ‘let it spur him to greater effort.’24

  In November, Gandhi published an article with the telling title ‘Caste Has to Go’. This reiterated his acceptance of inter-dining and intermarriage. He argued that ‘the most effective, quickest, and the most unobtrusive way to destroy caste is for reformers to begin the practice with themselves and where necessary take the consequences of social boycott’.25

  Meanwhile, a deputation of progressive Hindus called on Ambedkar. They asked him to reconsider his decision to leave his ancestral faith. In reply, Ambedkar distinguished between the metaphysical basis of Hinduism and its social practice. As he put it: ‘Though Hinduism is based on the conception of Absolute Brahma, the practices of the Hindu community as a whole are founded on the doctrines of inequality as pronounced in “Manusmriti”.’

  On his wish to convert to another religion, Ambedkar remarked: ‘It is not a personal question and I desire to carry with me the whole untouchable community—at all events the majority of that community. I do not want it to be split up by some joining one religion or sect and others another.’

  On his own political agenda, Ambedkar said: ‘Being born in the untouchable community, I deem it my first duty to strive for its interests and my duty to India as a whole is secondary.’

  The most striking part of the conversation was Ambedkar’s hope or wish for a strong leader for India. He is reported to have said:

  Democracy is not suitable for India and popular government will not do for her. India wants a dictator, a Kemal Pasha or a Mussolini. I had hoped that Mr. Gandhi would attain the position of a dictator, but I am disappointed. My complaint is not that Mr. Gandhi is a dictator but that he is not. I feel the greatest respect for Kemal Pasha. It is he who has made Turkey into a powerful nation. If there are any people with whose religious sentiments and practice it is extremely risky to interfere, it is the Muslims. But Kemal Pasha has done it with success.26

  This statement, even if true, should be taken as a mark of Ambedkar’s desperate desire for real, rapid change in the status of ‘untouchables’, and not as a statement in favour of dictatorship per se.

  The differences between Ambedkar and Gandhi, temporarily papered over by the Poona Pact, were once more coming to the fore. Commenting on the debate, a letter writer to the Times of India argued that had it not been for Gandhi’s ‘strenuous efforts’, the ‘problem of untouchability would not have attained its present importance’. Gandhi had ‘set people thinking seriously’, pointing them ‘to the right conclusion—that untouchability is a terrible disease eating into the vitals of Hindu society’. The correspondent argued that Dr Ambedkar’s decision to change his religion was inspired ‘by a spirit of despondency and desperation’—it ‘lacks the farsightedness of the politician that he is’. What if the Sikhs or Christians accepted Ambedkar and his followers but did not mete out equal treatment? Would he change his religion once more? ‘If he has no objection to doing so,’ remarked the letter writer, ‘his conception of religion must necessarily be poor or inadequate for a man of his learning.’27

  This writer was right about the limits of conversion as a means of conquering oppression. For, Sikhs and Christians in India themselves discriminated against low-caste converts. On the other hand, he was perhaps optimistic about Gandhi’s campaign. For, in 1935—a full twenty years after Gandhi returned to India—untouchability was still rigorously defended by the majority of Hindu priests and scholars, and extensively practised by the Hindu laity.

  VII

  In 1934 and 1935, as he sought to bridge the gap between himself and his most unyielding political opponent, B.R. Ambedkar, Gandhi also sought to heal the breach with his eldest and long-estranged son, Harilal. In September 1934, Harilal wrote to Gandhi saying he had stopped drinking and wandering. He wanted to settle down, marry once more, and perhaps start a store in their native Porbandar.

  Gandhi was not keen on the idea of a store. His son had failed in several business ventures before. He suggested that Harilal join the khadi or Harijan programmes instead, where he could work under the direction of Narandas Gandhi. But, he wrote to his son, ‘I understand about marrying. If what you want is a companion and that must be a wife, I would not regard it as in the least blameworthy provided you find a suitable widow.’28

  Before giving the go-ahead, however, Gandhi wanted ‘independent proof’ that Harilal had reformed himself. He asked his son a series of sharp questions. Was he still drinking or smoking, and did he still indulge ‘in sexual pleasure through mind, speech or body’?29

  Harilal answered that he now abstained from alcohol and sex, but hadn’t yet given up smoking. Gandhi said that it ‘was not in the least difficult to give up smoking’ provided he adopted a prescribed diet. Meanwhile, he wrote to Devadas: ‘I receive letters from Harilal. At present I am meeting his expenses. He is holding out great hopes and I too am hoping.’30

  In the third week of February 1935, Harilal arrived in Wardha to spend some time with his father. The visit did not go well. The son still ‘crave[d] for sex pleasure’. Gandhi chastised him: ‘How can I, who have always advocated renunciation of sex, encourage you to gratify it.’31

  Harilal returned to Kathiawar, then came back to Wardha to try again. He stayed a fortnight; after he returned to Rajkot, Gandhi wrote to his nephew Narandas: ‘I liked his staying here. He did whatever work he could and was friendly with everybody. He says his passion for drinks has completely died out. And I understand that he has no carnal passion left, apart from the desire to marry.’

  Gandhi told Narandas that if Harilal found a ‘suitable wife’, he would marry. ‘This is Harilal’s story,’ remarked Gandhi philosophically. ‘Let us see how fate shapes his life now. I will be content even if the treasure I have got back is not lost again, and thank God for His mercy.’32

  Once more, the reconciliation between father and son was short-lived. ‘It seems Harilal is off the rails again,’ wrote Gandhi to Narandas. ‘You have promised to give him some work, but if he is in the habit of telling downright lies then are you sure you have done well? How will he prove useful to you? Of late, his letters do not satisfy me at all.’33

  Things now went swiftly downhill. On 11 July 1935, Gandhi wrote to Narandas: ‘For the present Harilal may be considered as lost to us.’ And, again four days later: ‘Forget Harilal completely now. I have almost forgotten him.’34

  Harilal’s letters to his father now turned more truculent. Independent inquiries into what he was doing in Rajkot confirmed that the regression was complete. ‘Harilal spends the whole day immersed in a tub of liquor,’ wrote Gandhi to his second son Manilal in August, adding: ‘All our hopes about his having been reformed are falsified. He is now worse than he was. But one keeps on hoping as long as one breathes. Accordingly, let us hope that, if he lives, some day he will reform himself.’

  Six weeks later, giving his son in South Africa news of the family, he provided this single sarcastic sentence about the elder brother: ‘Harilal is sanctifying his anatomy in the holy Ganga of liquor.’35

  Reading these letters, it is impossible not to feel sympathy for Harilal. He was now in his mid-forties. He had tried several profess
ions and failed in all. He was cut off from his children, and still missed his long-dead wife. Lonely and confused, he was desperate for companionship and for social and financial stability. Yet, the only person he could turn to for advice was his father, who, as always, wanted still to mould this now middle-aged man in his own image.

  VIII

  In August 1935, the British Parliament had passed an Act devolving further powers to Indians. Based on the round table conferences, and influenced by the groundswell of the national movement, in most respects this went further than the preceding Act of 1919. The franchise had been greatly expanded. The number of European representatives in provincial assemblies had been substantially reduced. In each province, the government would be formed on the basis of an elected majority; which would then choose ministers to run the various departments of home, education, health, finance, public works, etc. The ICS officers would report to these Indian ministers.

  The Act went some distance in meeting Indian aspirations, but not quite far enough. For one thing, the governors would still be British, and they retained substantial reserve powers to overrule decisions taken by ministers, and to dismiss an elected government in case of a perceived threat to law and order. For another, there was no provision for a popular government at the Centre. There would be a central legislative assembly with elected members, but the real administrative powers would still be exercised by the viceroy and an executive council whose members were nominated by him.

  The Congress was disappointed that the Act did not specifically promise a further evolution to Dominion Status. In the House of Commons, both Liberal and Labour MPs fought hard for an explicit commitment to this effect so that India would one day soon be placed on par with Canada and Australia, self-governing dominions with a far greater degree of autonomy than this 1935 Act would provide. However, there was a Conservative government in Britain, and many Tory MPs were unhappy even with the limited powers that the Act had devolved to Indians. So no such promise was given.36