Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  To Mira, Gandhi wrote in a language even more vivid in its self-abasement: ‘That dirty, degrading, torturing experience of 14th April shook me to bits and made me feel as if I was hurled by God from an imaginary paradise where I had no right to be in my uncleanliness.’

  To his other close woman disciple, Amrit Kaur, Gandhi spoke of ‘an unaccountable dissatisfaction with myself’. But he had not lost faith, and was resolved to overcome the memory of his failure. ‘The sexual sense is the hardest to overcome in my case,’ he remarked. ‘It has been an incessant struggle. It is for me a miracle how I have survived it. The one I am engaged in may be, ought to be, the final struggle.’24

  Gandhi had taken a vow of brahmacharya, as far back as 1906. He thought sex was necessary only for procreation, and rejected the idea that sex might be pleasurable in and of itself. In his writings and speeches, he had often spoken of the importance of the preservation and husbanding of sperm, which he termed ‘the vital fluid’. As he told the readers of Harijan: ‘All power comes from the preservation and sublimation of the vitality that is responsible for creation of life. If the vitality is husbanded instead of being dissipated, it is transmuted into creative energy of the highest order.’25

  After this (to him) shocking experience, how could Gandhi best control his passions, best preserve and husband that vital fluid? Several ashramites (Amrit Kaur among them) thought he should avoid close physical contact with women, especially younger women. He should abandon ashram girls as supports while walking (he rested his hands on their shoulders to propel his frail frame along), and discontinue the practice of having his nails cut or his body massaged by women disciples. Gandhi was not convinced of the sagacity of this advice. He had, he reminded one disciple, not ‘advocated total avoidance of innocent contact between the two sexes and I have had a certain measure of success in this’. To Amrit Kaur, he insisted that ‘it is not the woman who is to blame. I am the culprit. I must attain the required purity.’26

  Gandhi had wanted to write about the experience of 14 April in Harijan, baring to the world his failure and lack of self-control. He discussed this with Rajagopalachari, who was then in Segaon. Rajaji dissuaded him from making his experience public. Afterwards, Rajaji wrote to his son-in-law Devadas, who was also Gandhi’s son. The Mahatma, he said, was deeply worried ‘that he was still unable to overcome the reflex action of his flesh. He discovered, it seems, one day and he was so shocked and felt so unworthy that he was deceiving people and he wrote an article about it for publication in Harijan, which, thank God, I have stopped, after a very quarrelsome hour.’27

  Gandhi had once called Rajagopalachari ‘the keeper of my conscience’. Back in 1921, Rajaji had saved Gandhi from public embarrassment, and possibly political humiliation too, when he prevailed upon him to not go ahead with his ‘spiritual marriage’ to Saraladevi Chaudhurani. Now, seventeen years later, he had sensibly urged Gandhi to keep his private obsessions private.

  V

  On 28 April, Jinnah and Gandhi had their long-delayed meeting in Bombay. After it ended, Gandhi issued a terse public statement, saying merely that they had ‘three hours friendly conversation over the Hindu–Muslim question’. The same night, Gandhi caught the Frontier Mail to Peshawar, in the NWFP, to which his follower Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan had recently been allowed to return, and to which he had himself finally been granted permission to visit.28

  Gandhi was close to Ghaffar Khan; but his visit was as much political as personal. The 1930s had seen a steady movement of the Muslims away from the Congress. There were some outstanding Muslim scholars in the party, such as Maulana Azad and Dr Zakir Husain, but few mass leaders. Ghaffar Khan was an exception; by identifying with him and his movement, Gandhi hoped to show afresh that the Congress was more than a ‘Hindu’ party.

  An Urdu newspaper claimed Gandhi had come to emasculate the mighty and warlike Pathans; in fact, he had come to see at first-hand the work of the Khudai Khidmatgars, which had demonstrated that ‘true non-violence is mightier than the mightiest violence’.

  Not all Pathans were convinced. One, an educated and learned professor, asked Gandhi if pacifism had its limits. Could Mussolini’s invading army have been effectively resisted through non-violence by the Abyssinians? Gandhi thought it not inconceivable. If the Italians had been met with ‘quiet, dignified and non-violent defiance’, they would have had to retreat. To the objection that ‘human nature has not been known to rise to such heights’, Gandhi replied: ‘But if we have made unexpected progress in physical sciences, why may we do less in the science of the soul?’

  From the Frontier, Gandhi returned to Bombay, where he once more met Jinnah. Their talks, he told Rajagopalachari later, were ‘cordial but not hopeful, yet not without hope’.29 To Amrit Kaur, he was more gloomy. Describing Jinnah as ‘a very tough customer’, he observed that ‘if the other members of the League are of the same type a settlement is an impossibility’.30

  The other members of the Muslim League did indeed seem to be ‘of the same type’. In late March 1938, less than a year after the provincial elections, the League had appointed a committee to report on the ‘hardship, ill-treatment and injustice that is meted out to the Muslims in various Congress Governments and particularly to those who are workers and members of the Muslim League’. The six-member committee submitted its report in November 1938. It listed a number of grievances of Muslims in the Congress-ruled provinces, among them:

  (1) Forcing children in schools to sing ‘Vande Mataram’ despite it being ‘positively anti-Islamic and idolatrous in inspiration’;

  (2) Hoisting at school and office functions the Congress flag which was ‘purely a party flag and nothing more’;

  (3) Exclusion of Muslims from local bodies;

  (4) Demanding a ban on cow slaughter and intimidating Muslims to give up eating beef, and attacking Muslim butchers—this, claimed the report, was inspired by Gandhi, ‘whose fundamental motives are religious’, and whose religion was ‘based on the fundamental Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita’;

  (5) Discrimination against the Urdu language, by promoting Hindi in the Nāgarī script and foisting languages such as Marathi and Oriya on Urdu-speaking Muslims.31

  All over the world democratically elected governments have been accused of betraying their mandate within a year or two of coming to power. Here, in the India of the late 1930s, the Muslim League adroitly seized on this mood of anti-incumbency against the Congress. Some of their grievances were real; for, unlike Gandhi, Nehru or Bose, many lesser Congressmen saw themselves as Hindus first, and in the arrogance that followed their electoral triumph sought to encode their ideas (and prejudices) in policy and in practice. On the other hand, the Muslim League was not above embellishing or exaggerating reports of alleged ‘discrimination’.

  Who or what was responsible for this growing atmosphere of distrust is still a matter of keen historical debate.32 But that the distrust intensified in this period no one disputes. Before the elections of 1937, the Congress and the Muslim League were rivals; now, they were adversaries.

  VI

  The one part of India where the Muslims had stood solidly behind the Congress was the NWFP. In October 1938, Gandhi set off for a second, and longer, trip to the Frontier. This time he spent a full five weeks there, being escorted by Ghaffar Khan to towns and villages, through hilltops and valleys. He enjoyed the air, the scenery and the fresh fruit, writing to a disciple that ‘the climate is excellent. The peace is beyond description. One will not get such peace anywhere else.’33

  Ghaffar Khan told Gandhi that ‘violence has been the real bane of us Pathans’. The ‘entire strength of the Pathan’, he added, ‘is today spent in thinking how to cut the throat of his brother’. This cult of violence and revenge split brother from brother, village from village, clan from clan. If his and Gandhi’s campaign to wean the Pathan away from the gun and sword succeeded, said Ghaffar Khan,
‘this land, so rich in fruit and grain, might well [become] a smiling little Eden…’34

  While Gandhi and Ghaffar Khan discussed the redemptive potential of non-violence, in distant Europe war clouds were gathering. Touring the Continent in the autumn of 1938, Jawaharlal Nehru sent regular reports about what he saw and heard. In late August, Nehru wrote to Gandhi from Budapest that there was a ‘fever of anxiety’ across Europe. ‘It is extraordinary how much today depends,’ he remarked, ‘on the will of one man and that man a semi-neurotic like Hitler.’ If war came, said Nehru to Gandhi, ‘very vital decisions will have to be taken by us. I earnestly trust that we shall act wisely…’

  Two weeks later, Nehru wrote to Gandhi from Geneva. He was ‘feeling very unhappy at the way Chamberlain and Co. are preparing to abandon Czechoslovakia’. A month later still, now in London, Nehru wrote in dismay of Britain’s betrayal of the Czechs through the pact between the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and the German chancellor, Adolf Hitler. ‘Whatever happens to the world or to Europe,’ he predicted, ‘the British Empire is doomed.’35

  Reading the press reports alongside Nehru’s letters, Gandhi decided to make his first major statement on world affairs. It took the form of a long essay called ‘If I Were a Czech’. At Munich, Chamberlain had effectively told Hitler that he could invade Czechoslovakia at a time of his choosing. Gandhi thought this was because ‘democracy [only] threatens to spill blood’, whereas ‘the philosophy for which the two dictators [Hitler and Mussolini] stand calls it cowardice to shrink from carnage. They exhaust the resources of poetic art to glorify organized murder.’

  Gandhi advised the hapless Czechs to offer satyagraha to Hitler’s army when they came. ‘If I were a Czech,’ he wrote, ‘I would not be a vassal to any nation or body. I must have absolute independence or perish. To seek to win in a clash of arms would be pure bravado. Not so, if in defying the might of one who would deprive me of my independence I refuse to obey his will and perish unarmed in the attempt. In doing so, though I lose the body, I save my soul, i.e., my honour.’

  Gandhi had been told by a colleague (unnamed, but probably Jawaharlal Nehru) that since ‘Hitler knows no pity’, his philosophy of satyagraha ‘will avail nothing before him’. Gandhi answered that ‘my honour is the only thing worth preserving. That is independent of his pity.’ Thus, his advocacy of satyagraha to the Czechs, ‘a weapon not of the weak but of the brave. There is no bravery greater than a resolute refusal to bend the knee to an earthly power, no matter how great, and that without bitterness of spirit and in the fulness of faith that the spirit alone lives, nothing else does.’36

  Another (and also unnamed) friend told Gandhi that satyagraha might work with the British because they were lovers of liberty, whose democratic instinct ‘restrains them from lengths to which autocrats will go’. Gandhi refused to accept that his doctrine was limited in scope. ‘If we can succeed with the English,’ he argued, ‘surely it is an extension of faith to believe that we are likely to succeed with less cultured or less liberally-minded nations.’37

  The article on the Czechs written and dispatched, Gandhi’s tour of the Frontier continued. It was the holy month of Ramzan, with many Pathans observing the dawn-to-dusk fast it mandated. As an expert in fasting himself, Gandhi was troubled to see Pathan men ‘losing temper over trifles or indulging in abuse during the sacred month of Ramzan. If there is the slightest delay in serving the repast at the time of the breaking of the fast, the poor wife is hauled over live coals.’ This was both a travesty of faith and of their political credo. ‘If you really want to cultivate non-violence,’ Gandhi told the Pathans, ‘you should take a pledge that come what may, you will not give way to anger or order about members of your household or lord it over them.’38

  VII

  Gandhi had chastised the Pathans for being harsh and cruel to their wives. He had by now reached a comfortable modus vivendi with his own wife. While he was unquestionably the dominant partner, no longer did he order Kasturba about. In their letters and one presumes in their conversations, there were moments of deep love and companionship. Yet, in his wider dealings with Indian women, Gandhi could be condescending and patronizing.

  Consider thus an article he wrote in Harijan in December 1938, entitled ‘Students’ Shame’. This excerpted a letter from a college girl in the Punjab, complaining about the teasing and harassment she and her companion experienced at the hands of prowling young men. ‘First of all,’ this young lady asked Gandhi, ‘tell me how, in the circumstances mentioned above, can girls apply the principle of ahimsa and save themselves. Secondly, what is the remedy for curing youth of the abominable habit of insulting womenfolk?’

  Replying in Harijan, Gandhi recognized that such molestation by men was a ‘growing evil’ in India. He recommended that ‘all such cases should be published in the newspapers. Names of the offenders should be published when they are traced.’ For, ‘there is nothing like public opinion for castigating public misconduct’. Indeed, he argued, ‘crime and vice generally require darkness for prowling. They disappear when light plays upon them.’

  Gandhi urged well-behaved young men to chastise the deviants among them. They should, ‘as a class, be jealous of their reputation and deal with every case of impropriety occurring among their mates’. Gandhi also accepted the need for young women themselves to ‘learn the art of ordinary self-defence and protect themselves from indecent behaviour of unchivalrous youth’.

  Gandhi spoilt his case by launching an unprovoked attack on the modern woman. For all the evil that males did and do, he wrote, ‘I have a fear that the modern girl loves to be Juliet to half a dozen Romeos. She loves adventure. My correspondent seems to represent the unusual type. The modern girl dresses not to protect herself from wind, rain and sun but to attract attention. She improves upon nature by painting herself and looking extraordinary. The non-violent way is not for such girls.’39

  Gandhi’s article was read by a group of young women in Calcutta. They sent in a spirited response, addressed to their ‘Most revered Mahatmaji’, which began by observing that Gandhi’s remarks were ‘not very inspiring’, since they seem to ‘put the whole slur upon the injured female who suffers most due to the malevolent social custom’.

  The letter continued: ‘Some may find modern girls’ dresses and deportments a bit different than they wish them to be but to brand them as exhibitionistic generally is a positive insult to her sex as a whole. Strength of character and chaste behaviour are necessary not only for modern girls but for men as well. There may be a few girls playing Juliets to a dozen Romeos. But such cases presuppose the existence of half a dozen Romeos, moving around the streets in quest of a Juliet, thereby pointing out where the proper correction lies.’

  Since the root of the problem was the deportment of men, not women, Gandhi’s remarks in Harijan were unfortunate, wrote these young Bengalis. For, ‘a statement like this once again holds brief for that worn-out and un-becoming saying—“woman is the gate of Hell”. And naturally clouds of doubt gather over the much-vaunted progress that man has made since the birth of that saying.’ These women told Gandhi that ‘a Gokhale, a Tilak, a Deshbandhu [C.R. Das] would have surely hesitated to come out with such an ungenerous statement as you have done. Woman has been called a boa-constrictor, but that is in a different land and by a different man. What befits a Bernard Shaw with his hands touching the ground and legs kicking the air does not befit a Mahatma.’

  This passionate, intensely felt letter ended with this moving passage:

  Lastly, from the foregoing remarks, it should never be concluded that modern girls have no respect for you. They hold you in as much respect as every mother’s son does. To be hated or pitied is what they resent most. They are ready to amend their ways if they are really guilty. Their guilt, if any, must be conclusively proved before they are anathematized. In this respect they would neither desire to take shelter under the covering o
f ‘ladies, please’ nor they would silently stand and allow the judge to condemn them in his own way. Truth must be faced, the modern girl or Juliet as you have called her, has courage enough to face it.40

  Gandhi printed large chunks of the letter in Harijan, leaving out, however, the references to Gokhale, Bernard Shaw et al., as well as the (even more telling) sentence pointing out that to dress differently was not necessarily to be exhibitionist. Then, as was his wont, he set out to respond. His tone was notably defensive. ‘My correspondents do not perhaps know,’ he remarked, ‘that I began service of India’s women in South Africa more than forty years ago when perhaps none of them were born.’ He continued: ‘I hold myself to be incapable of writing anything derogatory to womanhood.’ His original article, he explained, ‘was written to expose students’ shame, not to advertise the frailties of girls. But in giving the diagnosis of the disease, I was bound, if I was to prescribe the right remedy, to mention all the factors which induced the disease.’

  In conclusion, Gandhi invited his correspondents ‘to initiate a crusade against the rude behavior of students. God helps only those who help themselves. The girls must learn the art of protecting themselves against the ruffianly behaviour of man.’41

  VIII

  In Europe, many Jews had begun to join the exodus to Palestine, where, from the late nineteenth century, Zionists had hoped to create a state that would save Jews from the savage persecution they faced in the nations, large and small, of Europe.

  Gandhi received several letters asking him to comment on the Arab–Zionist question in Palestine and the situation of the Jews in Germany. In November 1938, he answered his correspondents collectively via an article in Harijan. This began by saying that his ‘sympathies are all with the Jews’. They were ‘the untouchables of Christianity….Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them.’