Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Gandhi had always seen the Congress as representing all the castes, communities, linguistic groups and provinces of India. The Congress’s fine showing in the 1937 elections seemed to confirm this wider representativeness of his party. Now Jinnah had come along to challenge this deeply cherished and long-held claim. There were two major parties in India, argued Jinnah, not just one. He led one party, representing the Muslims; Gandhi led the other party, representing the Hindus. Any long-term settlement of the communal question would have to be based on this premise.

  In 1918, Sarojini Naidu had edited a collection of Jinnah’s speeches, which she gave the title, ‘Ambassador of Hindu–Muslim Unity’. That was then; now, twenty years later, Jinnah had become the leading advocate of Muslim separatism. The move was in part prompted by a sense of personal affront (the cold-shouldering by Gandhi and the Congress at the time of the non-cooperation movement); in part, a product of a genuine change of mind. Jinnah had come increasingly to believe that in a Hindu-majority India, Muslims would need substantial safeguards to protect their interests.

  In moving from unity to separation, Jinnah was also influenced by the poet Muhammad Iqbal, who urged him to seriously consider the creation of distinct Muslim provinces or states. In letters written shortly after the 1937 elections, Iqbal told Jinnah that ‘the new constitution with its idea of a single Indian federation is completely hopeless. A separate federation of Muslim provinces…is the only course by which we can secure a peaceful India and save Muslims from the domination of non-Muslims. Why would not we Muslims of North-West India and Bengal be considered as nations entitled to self-determination just as other nations in India and outside India are?’

  Back in 1930, Iqbal had proposed a separate Muslim state in his presidential address to the Muslim League. But that was a single state, in the north-west. Now he had added a Muslim state in Bengal as well. His views made a powerful impression on Jinnah, not least because Iqbal was to him what Tagore was to Gandhi—a poet-philosopher whom this politician deeply and genuinely admired. As with Tagore and Gandhi, the admiration was mutual, with Iqbal writing to Jinnah in June 1937 that ‘you are the only Muslim in India today to whom the community has the right to look up for sage guidance through the storm which is coming…’10

  Jinnah’s political career was once more on the rise. Opposition to the (real or perceived) ‘anti-Muslim’ actions of the Congress governments had provided a powerful focus for his activities. His flock of supporters and admirers grew every day. One example must stand out for what was now a much wider trend. In June 1938, Jinnah addressed a meeting of the Memon Merchants Association, Bombay. The hosts welcomed him with an address and also presented him with a purse of Rs 2154. Jinnah was exultant, remarking that while he had been ‘serving the public’ of Bombay for the last forty years, this was ‘the first opportunity when a business community has honoured me with an address of welcome or encouraged me by eulogising my services’.11

  Back in the days of the non-cooperation movement, Bombay’s merchants, both Hindu and Muslim, saw Gandhi as their saviour, for his inherent charisma and for his programme of swadeshi. Back in 1921, the Memons of Bombay had handsomely funded Gandhi’s activities. But now, with the Congress in power in the Presidency, they were anxious that a party dominated by Hindus would perhaps favour traders who were Hindus. Thus the approach to Jinnah and the League.

  III

  In February 1938, Gandhi attended the Congress session, held that year in Haripura, a village close to Bardoli. He had wanted the veteran Andhra leader Pattabhi Sitaramayya to be president. The mood among the delegates however decidedly favoured Subhas Bose, who appealed to the youth and the left wing, and of course to Congressmen from his own influential and populous province. It had been several years since Bengal had a president. Gandhi, who had previously told Vallabhbhai Patel that ‘Subhas is not at all dependable’, bowed to the wind, and endorsed Bose.12

  On the sidelines of the Congress, ordinary folks from all over India paid their respects to Gandhi. An old man from the Punjab had come to Haripura just to have his darshan. When Mahadev Desai took him to the great man, he handed over a postal envelope with 100 rupees in it. The Punjabi had heard there were many pickpockets at the Congress, and the first thing he wanted to do was ‘to relieve myself of the burden before my pocket was picked!’ Then a peasant from Rajasthan came to Gandhi’s hut with a huge sack of the fruit he had grown on his land. Gandhi asked how much he had spent on his train fare. Seven rupees was the answer, a not insubstantial sum, but, said the peasant: ‘That was nothing, he was thankful that God had enabled him to offer fruit from his garden to Gandhiji.’ A third devotee, meanwhile, had come to Haripura with his offering, this a big bundle of yarn he had spun himself, an impressive 125,000 yards in all.13

  In the last week of March, Gandhi travelled to Orissa. He began his tour by opening a village industries exhibition in Delang. In his speech, he spoke sorrowfully of how the priests of the province’s greatest temple, the Jagannatha shrine in Puri, did not admit low-caste Hindus. ‘So long as the doors of the Jagannatha temple are closed to the Harijans,’ insisted Gandhi, ‘they are closed to me as well.’14

  With Gandhi on this tour was Mahadev Desai, as well as their wives. Earlier in the year, a Western journalist had visited the ashram in Segaon, spending a week with Gandhi and his entourage. The visitor was greatly impressed by Mahadev, who was ‘too arresting a figure to be missed, though he is a most self-effacing and modest man’. Yet, the ashram evidently revolved around him. Gandhi’s secretary, noted the visitor, ‘edits the “Harijan”, [the] Mahatma’s weekly paper. He does all the secretarial work and every other kind of work including cleaning, dish-washing etc. To be able to do only his intellectual job amid the perpetual va-et-vient of all India, of Europe and even of America and the Far East, all of them hammering Mahatma Gandhi with questions, is more difficult than can be realised by those not given to intellectual occupations. It means a greater self-discipline than is easily imagined.’15

  At this time, Gandhi and Mahadev Desai had been together for twenty-one years. They had had their occasional disagreement, the odd argument even. But on this Orissa trip, their relationship met its first serious test, to pass which Mahadev required greater self-discipline than he had himself ever imagined. One day, while the men were in a meeting with social workers, Kasturba Gandhi and Durga Desai chose to make a sightseeing trip to Puri, which was a mere fifteen miles away from their camp. When they came to the gates of the Jagannatha shrine, the ladies hesitated, then stepped inside. The temple was one of the four great dhams set up by the legendary Hindu missionary Adi Shankara in the eighth century—Badrinath in the north, Dwarka in the west, Sringeri in the south, and Puri in the east.

  Kasturba and Durga were both devout Hindus. And the Jagannatha temple was one of the holiest temples of their faith. We can, and perhaps should, sympathize with the women for wishing to see the deity from close-up. But one who didn’t see it this way was Mahadev’s twelve-year-old son, Narayan, who was with the ladies that day. The precocious Narayan had heard Gandhi speak disparagingly about the shrine in several speeches. Now he urged his mother and (adoptive) aunt not to go inside. Bapu would be cross with them, he said. The temple was not holy, because it refused to admit Harijans.

  Kasturba and Durga disregarded the boy. He stayed outside, while they paid their respects to Lord Jagannatha. After they came out, and went back to the men and their camp, the twelve-year-old Narayan told Gandhi about what had happened.16

  Gandhi was, according to one account, ‘almost prostrate with grief over the carelessness of his wife and Mahadev Desai’s wife’.17 His grief—perhaps we should say ‘anger’—was compounded when he learnt that Mahadev had known the women were going to Puri, but had not alerted them as to what they could, and could not, do there. His mental agitation aggravated his blood pressure, which rose to an alarmingly high level.

  Gandhi said that t
he women who entered the Puri temple were not to blame, but Mahadev and he were. Clearly, his own teaching had not been sound enough. How could Kasturba, he asked, ‘at all go there after having lived with me for fifty years’? And ‘Mahadev was more to blame in that he did not tell them what their dharma was and how any breach would shake me’.

  Mahadev had been chastised by his master before, but never on an issue at once so sensitive and substantial. He began a fast of atonement, and also told Gandhi he could relieve him of his services. Gandhi answered that while fasting was ‘no remedy for thoughtlessness or wrong-thinking’, there was ‘no question of your leaving’. The advice he gave Mahadev was ‘to read less, but think more’.18

  Mahadev Desai wrote about the controversy in Harijan, recounting his wife’s transgression and his own indirect aiding of it. This mea culpa was drafted by Mahadev, and it appeared under his name in Harijan. But as the original manuscript held in the archives of the Sabarmati Ashram shows, it had been heavily edited by Gandhi. Several lines had been rewritten, several words changed (thus Mahadev referred to the pandas of the Puri temple as ‘potbellied’, which Gandhi changed to ‘unscrupulous’). Also changed was the title of the article itself—with Mahadev’s ‘A Blunder—and an Expiation’, becoming, under Gandhi’s direction, ‘A Tragedy’.

  Gandhi also excised an entire paragraph from Mahadev’s original draft. This read:

  I narrate these facts in order that the bare narration may serve somewhat to expiate me for my wrongs. Better expiation it is not in my power to do at the present moment. I am not a hot crusader to the extent of believing that service of the Harijans in the shape of befriending them, having them in your homes, feeding them and clothing them, counts as naught before service of them in the shape of boycotting temples not open to them. I wish I was guilty of the blind love of my wife. She does not credit me with it. She is an obstinate person, but she has more purity than I can ever attain. Ba, inspite of her intellectual limitations, is perhaps the purest specimen of womanhood that one can hope to come across. Both Ba and my wife do their humble best for the service of Harijans, and to think that their having gone to the Puri temple was something in the nature of adharma seems to me to carry the emphasis on creed rather than on works too far.

  Here, Mahadev was noticeably sympathetic to the women concerned, pointing to the dignity and decency in their general conduct. Striking, too, was the refusal to make a fetish of temple entry; befriending Harijans and treating them as equals in everyday life, was in his eyes, as important as permitting them to worship idols they had previously not been allowed to see. Treating Harijans as equals was what Kasturba and Durga did every day in the ashram; to so severely scold them now for entering the Puri temple was surely, as Mahadev put it, ‘to carry the emphasis on creed rather than on works too far’.

  This telling paragraph did not pass Harijan’s in-house censor. Fortunately, Gandhi did not cut, from the printed version, a quatrain that captured Mahadev’s feelings, a quatrain that was perhaps imperfect in grammar yet remains immortal in essence:

  To live with the saints in heaven

  Is a bliss and a glory

  But to live with a saint on earth

  Is a different story.19

  IV

  After his Orissa trip, Gandhi stopped in Calcutta, where he met the governor of Bengal, Lord Brabourne. The governor reported Gandhi as saying that the aim of the Congress was ‘bringing the British people to realise that the present Act must, fairly soon, be replaced by a much more liberal one…that if we did this voluntarily and graciously the Congress would also act graciously but that if we did not he could see nothing for it but, sooner or later, a mass civil disobedience movement.’

  The governor’s notes of the meeting continued:

  I asked him what his real aim was—was it to sever the connection with the British as quickly as possible? His reply was emphatic—he wishes to see a complete break of all ties with the Empire but that the break should come, not as a result of a revolt or mass movement in India but as a gesture from us. His view is that were we to make such a gesture India would, eventually, be only too ready to cooperate with us as partners, though not as members of the British Empire.20

  A week later, Gandhi met the viceroy himself. With Congress ministries in power, a sort of truce was in existence. Gandhi did most of the talking, and began by asking for the release of all political prisoners. He then said that in several cases, governors were refusing to be guided by the advice of their ministers even in matters ‘entirely domestic to the province’ concerned. Next, speaking about the prospects for an all-India federation, he urged the viceroy to lean on the princes to send representatives who represented the popular will of their subjects rather than being nominees of the rulers themselves. Finally, Gandhi touched on the still unfinished task of restoring lands to peasants in Gujarat seized during the satyagrahas of the early 1930s.21

  On returning from his travels, Gandhi set about finding a mutually convenient time to meet Jinnah. Harmonizing their extremely busy calendars was not the only problem. Gandhi asked if Maulana Azad could accompany him to the meeting; Jinnah wired back that he ‘would prefer to see you alone’. Both leaders were acutely aware of the symbolism at stake; Gandhi wanted to take along a Muslim Congressman, Jinnah determined to convey that he alone represented Muslims while the Congress and Gandhi represented Hindus alone.

  Jinnah had recently had an acrimonious correspondence with Jawaharlal Nehru. Jinnah charged the Congress press with printing canards and falsehoods about him and the League; Nehru answered that there was no such thing as the ‘Congress Press’, and in any case the Urdu press printed ‘astounding falsehoods’ about the Congress and its leaders. The two men also debated specific matters, such as cow slaughter, the protection of Islamic culture, Urdu versus Hindi, Muslim representation in administration, etc., with Nehru striving hard but unavailingly to convince Jinnah that the Congress had and would behave responsibly on all these questions.

  Nehru’s reading of the Indian problem emphasized the importance of economics. He invited Jinnah and the Muslim League to join the Congress in ‘our anti-imperialism…our attempt to remove the exploitation of the masses, agrarian and labour protests, and the like’. Jinnah saw the problem more in cultural terms; the key question, he told Nehru, ‘is of safeguarding the rights and the interests of the Mussalmans with regard to their religion, culture, language, personal laws and political rights in the national life, the government and the administration of the country’.

  The crucial, and irreconcilable, difference, however, remained the question of representativeness. Writing to Jinnah on 6 April 1938, Nehru somewhat loftily remarked: ‘I do not understand what is meant by our [the Congress] recognition of the Muslim League as the one and only organization of Indian Muslims. Obviously the Muslim League is an important communal organisation and we deal with it as such. But we have to deal with all organisations and individuals that come within our ken. We do not determine the measure or importance or distinction they possess.’ Nehru went on to note that the Congress itself had 100,000 Muslim members.

  In his reply, dated 12 April, Jinnah stated:

  Your tone and language again display the same arrogance and militant spirit, as if the Congress is the sovereign power and, as an indication you extend your patronage by saying that ‘obviously the Muslim League is an important communal organisation and we deal with it as such, as we have to deal with all organisations and individuals that come within our ken…’ Here I may add that in my opinion, as I have publicly stated so often, that unless the Congress recognises the Muslim League on a footing of complete equality and is prepared as such to negotiate for a Hindu–Muslim settlement, we shall have to wait and depend upon our inherent strength which will ‘determine the measure of importance and distinction it possesses’.22

  Seeking to heal the breach, Gandhi had now reach
ed out to Jinnah himself. A meeting was fixed for 28 April 1938. It would be held in Bombay. A week prior, Gandhi issued a press statement saying that he would ‘not leave a single stone unturned to achieve Hindu–Muslim unity’. He asked ‘all lovers of communal peace’ to pray that Jinnah and he could find the right means to achieve that ever more elusive end.

  This public plea for communal peace was prefaced by a strange, intriguing admission of personal frailty. Thus Gandhi wrote: ‘I seem to have detected a flaw in me which is unworthy of a votary of truth and ahimsa. I am going through a process of self-introspection, the results of which I cannot foresee. I find myself for the first time during the past 50 years in a Slough of Despond.’23

  One wonders what readers of the press statement made of this decidedly odd interpolation. To them, the cause, manifestation and the precise nature of this flaw was left unelaborated. Gandhi’s close disciples knew the details; and the labours of the editors of his Collected Works have since made them public for us to examine it.

  Here is what happened. On 14 April 1938, Gandhi awoke with an erection; and despite efforts to contain his excitement, had a masturbatory experience. He was sleeping alone, and it was decades since he had been aroused in such a way.

  The details of the incident were kept from his ‘political’ followers such as Jawaharlal Nehru, but discussed with the spiritual followers who had stayed with him in Sabarmati and Segaon. To one Gujarati ashramite he wrote that ‘I was in such a wretched and pitiable condition that in spite of my utmost efforts I could not stop the discharge though I was fully awake….After the event, restlessness has become acute beyond words. Where am I, where is my place, and how can a person subject to passion represent non-violence and truth?’