37 “The leaders of the movement”: “Progress of the Strike: The Durban Conference,” Indian Opinion, Oct. 29, 1913.
38 Nevertheless, Vahed and Desai: Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 384.
39 The plantation to which the food: In the apartheid era, a black township was laid out on lands that had belonged to the old Campbell estate. It was called KwaMashu. Few of its inhabitants were likely to know that “Mashu” was a Zulu rendering of “Marshall,” a tribute to the white planter who introduced Gandhi to Dube.
40 He’d told his supporters: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 298.
41 “carnival of violence”: The full text of Marshall Campbell’s letter to Gandhi dated Dec. 30, 1913, can be found at the Killie Campbell Library in Durban in a file that also contains a letter from Colin Campbell to his brother William and a subsequent letter from William to his father. None of these letters shed any light on the question of what the supposed ballistic examination showed about who fired the bullet that killed the indentured laborer Patchappen, if it was not the planter’s son.
42 “In all our struggles”: Ibid., pp. 298–99.
43 By his own testimony: Transvaal Leader, Nov. 28 and 29 and Dec. 19 and 23, 1913.
44 If he’d not been in jail: Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 394.
45 The Indians had refused: On November 14, according to Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 382.
46 A detachment of police: Ibid., p. 383.
47 These themes are regularly: Transvaal Leader, Nov. 19, 1913.
48 “The Indians were very excited”: Indian Enquiry Commission Report, presented to Parliament April 1914, p. 8 (available at House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, accessible through ProQuest).
49 “overwhelmed in numbers”: Transvaal Leader, Nov. 28, 1913.
50 The commission that looked: Indian Enquiry Commission Report, p. 10.
51 A witness told Reuters: Clipping on file in the National Archives, Pretoria.
52 An indentured laborer: Indian Opinion, Dec. 12, 1913.
53 The British governor-general: Lord Gladstone’s cable is on file at the National Archives, Pretoria. Contending that Botha and Smuts had reacted to the Indian strikes “with great forbearance,” the governor-general declared: “I deprecate official credence being given to outrageous charges telegraphed to India by those who were responsible for the strikes here.”
54 Most of his spare time: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 270.
55 He said he’d miss the solitude: Ibid., p. 272.
56 Gandhi used it to prepare: Ibid., p. 276.
57 “How glorious”: Ibid., p. 274.
58 “I saw that it was no matter for grief”: Ibid., p. 320.
59 But fresh out of jail: Ibid., p. 315.
60 “I explained that they had come out, not as indentured laborers”: Bhana and Pachai, Documentary History of Indian South Africans, p. 142.
61 In assigning to the strikers: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 660.
62 “Mr. Gandhi’s performance”: African Chronicle, Dec. 27, 1913, and Jan. 10, 1914. Aiyar was still at his old Durban address in Sept. 1944 when a wartime censorship office intercepted a letter, now on file at the National Archive in Pretoria, that he wrote to the New York office of the Indian National Congress seeking help on the publication of a book on race conflict in South Africa.
63 “a charter of our freedom”: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 483.
64 “a final settlement”: Ibid., p. 442.
65 These could be achieved: Ibid., p. 478.
66 “We need not fight for votes”: Ibid., p. 479.
67 Finally, he had to concede: Ibid., p. 477.
68 Between 1914 and 1940: Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian South African Life (Cape Town, 2000), pp. 16–17.
69 They had an understanding: Nanda, Three Statesmen, p. 467.
70 She’d not been consulted: Interview with Prema Naidoo, Johannesburg, Nov. 2007.
71 Gandhi thanked: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 474.
72 “I am, as ever”: Ibid., p. 486.
73 “I am under indenture”: Ibid., p. 472.
74 “The Atlantic”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 173.
75 “I have no Kallenbach”: CWMG, vol. 15, p. 341, cited in Sarid and Bartolf, Hermann Kallenbach, p. 64.
CHAPTER 6: WAKING INDIA
1 He was more “at home”: CWMG, vol. 13, p. 5.
2 “teach them why India”: Ibid., p. 195.
3 He makes a point: Hindustani, the spoken language of the North Indian street (and Bollywood), derives its vocabulary from both Sanskrit and Persian, through Hindi and Urdu.
4 “I should have thought”: CWMG, vol. 21, p. 14.
5 “In India, what we want”: Ibid., p. 73.
6 “I do not believe”: Ibid., vol. 16, p. 282.
7 “the malady of foot-touching”: Ibid., vol. 20, p. 511.
8 “In the mere touch”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 3, p. 286.
9 “At night”: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 233.
10 Later, his devoted English follower: News Chronicle (London), Sept. 7, 1930.
11 Gandhi’s first Indian Boswell: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 3, p. 265.
12 “We have come for the darshan”: Ibid., p. 264.
13 “the people got frightened”: CWMG, vol. 19, p. 374.
14 “the four pillars”: Ibid., vol. 23, p. 53.
15 The throngs that turned: See Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma,” pp. 290–340.
16 “No Indian who aspires”: CWMG, vol. 14, p. 201.
17 “morality in action”: Brown, Gandhi, p. 82.
18 Those Gandhi called: CWMG, vol. 14, pp. 80, 201.
19 Fewer than 1 million: Ibid., vol. 14, p. 203.
20 Seen that way: Ibid., vol. 13, p. 200.
21 Writing to Hermann Kallenbach: Ibid., vol. 96, p. 212.
22 “I am an outsider”: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 165.
23 But Gandhi had large ambitions: CWMG, vol. 13, p. 33.
24 At Gokhale’s death: Nanda, Three Statesmen, p. 170; also Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform, pp. 241–43.
25 They took seven vows: CWMG, vol. 13, p. 91.
26 About half its original intake: A thumbnail sketch of Imam Abdul Kader Salim Bawazir, originally of Johannesburg’s Hamidia Mosque, is provided by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, A Frank Friendship, p. 75.
27 “The object of the Ashram”: CWMG, vol. 13, p. 91.
28 “I cannot imagine”: Ibid., vol. 23, p. 102.
29 “an instrument for the revival”: As quoted by Rajmohan Gandhi in Eight Lives, p. 150.
30 “I believe that Hindus”: Cited in Rajaram, Gandhi, Khilafat, and the National Movement, p. 8.
31 Muhammad Ali, a polished: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 202.
32 “I came to observe”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 349.
33 Soon he drafted: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 1, p. 162; Pyarelal and Nayar, In Gandhiji’s Mirror, p. 101.
34 “A humble and honest”: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 2, Satyagraha, p. 17.
35 “I have taken in a Pariah”: CWMG, vol. 96, p. 223.
36 “I have told Mrs. Gandhi”: Ibid., vol. 13, pp. 127–28.
37 “she’s making my life hell”: Ibid., vol. 96, p. 225.
38 “I had to undertake”: Ibid., p. 227.
39 “I have been deserted”: Ibid., p. 225.
40 Most will trickle back: Pyarelal and Nayar, In Gandhiji’s Mirror, p. 102.
41 “Your not being with me”: CWMG, vol. 14, p. 190.
42 He speaks of moving: Ibid., vol. 13, p. 128.
43 “She has beautifully resigned”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 1, p. 153.
44 “She cannot bring herself”: CWMG, vol. 25, p. 514.
45 “wall of prejudice”: Ibid., vol. 26, p. 295.
46 “This great and indelible crime”: Ibid., vol. 13, p. 233.
47 “Not a chest of indigo”: Pouchepadass, Champaran and Gandhi, p. 6.
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48 “We have begun to convince”: CWMG, vol. 14, p. 538.
49 “All of us who worked”: Prasad, At the Feet of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 148. In recent years, a Swiss journalist with deep experience of India revisited the Champaran district to see how the initiatives Gandhi and his colleagues began decades earlier had developed. He found virtually no trace of them; instead, a climate of rampant political corruption and oppression. See Imhasly, Goodbye to Gandhi? pp. 57–86.
50 By one estimate: Shankar Dayal Singh, Gandhi’s First Step, p. 5.
51 Later he would call it: CWMG, vol. 19, p. 88.
52 Referring back to the Natal strikes: Ibid., vol. 13, p. 210.
53 India needed to adopt: Ibid., p. 232.
54 “The essence of his teaching”: Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 23, a passage taken from Nehru’s Discovery of India.
55 “This voice was somehow different”: Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 12, a passage taken from Nehru’s Glimpses of World History.
56 Elsewhere he acknowledges: CWMG, vol. 14, p. 392.
57 “I have traveled much”: Ibid., p. 298.
58 “Without any impertinence”: Ibid., vol. 19, p. 104.
59 “did not descend”: Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 23.
60 The political bargain: CWMG, vol. 14, pp. 377–82.
61 “I love the English nation”: Ibid., p. 380.
62 The recruiting agent in chief: Ibid., p. 443.
63 What better means: Ibid., p. 476.
64 “They will be yours”: Ibid., p. 454.
65 Fighting for the empire: Ibid., p. 440.
66 “It is clear”: Ibid., p. 485.
67 Finally, in August 1918: Ibid., p. 473.
68 He would later describe himself: Ibid., vol. 23, p. 4.
69 “My failure so far”: Ibid., vol. 14, p. 480.
70 Eventually, he goes through: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 202.
71 “How can twenty-two crore Hindus”: CWMG, vol. 16, p. 306.
72 One of these was a movement: Kepel, Jihad, pp. 44–45.
73 a complex religious: A sworn enemy of the Saudi royal family—the last caliph’s eventual successors as keepers of the holy places—bin Laden wasn’t fixated on Turks. A Saudi with family roots in Yemen, he held to the ideal of spiritual and temporal authority combined in one potentate and one theocratic state representing all believers. In a videotape made after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden said what Americans were finally experiencing was what “our Islamic nation has been tasting for more than eighty years of humiliation and disgrace.” The eighty years refer to the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, undermining the caliphate. In other words, he’s reviving the Khilafat cause, for which Gandhi campaigned. Faisal Devji has a provocative discussion of these connections in The Terrorist in Search of Humanity, in particular on pp. 120–30. “The Mahatma,” he writes, “was undoubtedly the most important propagator of the caliphate in modern times.”
74 “Bhai sahib!”: Jordens, Swami Shraddhananda, p. 114.
75 the month after the first Khilafat: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 439.
76 “cheers, tears, embraces”: Minault, Khilafat Movement, p. 82.
77 In June the Central Khilafat Committee: CWMG, vol. 17, p. 543.
78 “It is the duty”: Ibid., vol. 18, p. 230.
79 Three months later: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 238.
80 Mohammed Ali Jinnah: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 234.
81 He left the Congress: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 242.
82 “After the Prophet”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 237.
83 “We laid the foundation”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 3, pp. 290–91.
84 Ultimately, the maulana: CWMG, vol. 23, p. 567.
85 By August 1921: Ibid., vol. 21, p. 10.
86 That was hardly an excuse: Minault, Khilafat Movement, pp. 145–49; Nanda, Gandhi, pp. 311–20.
87 Gandhi was pointing: CWMG, vol. 21, pp. 180–81.
88 “I wish to be in touch”: Ibid., vol. 24, pp. 456–57.
89 “It is against our scriptures”: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 289.
90 “I can wield no influence”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Eight Lives, p. 111.
91 For him, it was less: CWMG, vol. 20, p. 90.
92 It was a cause: Ibid., vol. 19, p. 92.
93 While it had nothing: Ibid., vol. 25, p. 200.
94 “I am striving”: Ibid., p. 202.
95 “the rest of the letter”: Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner? p. 175.
96 Shortly after the Mahatma: Payne, Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 355.
97 “Consider the burning”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 241. The economist Amartya Sen offers a contemporary view of the debate between the Mahatma and the poet over homespun versus manufactured cloth. “Except for the rather small specialized market for high-quality spun cloth,” he writes, “it is hard to make economic sense of hand-spinning, even with wheels less primitive than Gandhi’s charkha.” But Gandhi’s central point had as much to do with social justice, Sen recognizes, as economics. Sen’s discussion is in The Argumentative Indian, pp. 100–101.
98 “To a people famishing”: CWMG, vol. 21, p. 289.
99 “I got the votes”: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 347.
100 “Our defeat is in proportion”: Quoted in ibid., p. 346.
101 “Gandhi is like a paralytic”: Quoted in Minault, Khilafat Movement, p. 185.
102 “I personally can never”: CWMG, vol. 23, pp. 350–51, cited in Nanda, Gandhi, p. 344.
CHAPTER 7: UNAPPROACHABILITY
1 When he intoned: Jaswant Singh, Jinnah, p. 111.
2 “My heart refuses”: CWMG, vol. 32, pp. 452, 473–74.
3 The Times of India spread: Jaswant Singh, Jinnah, p. 113.
4 His covering letter: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 9, p. 304.
5 In his view, Gandhi: Jordens, Swami Shraddhananda, p. 110.
6 The start of the noncooperation: Tinker, Ordeal of Love, p. 151.
7 So, in December 1919: Jordens, Swami Shraddhananda, p. 117.
8 “Is it not true”: Ibid.
9 “That was a grave mistake”: Ibid., p. 119.
10 “it is a bigger problem”: CWMG, vol. 19, p. 289.
11 “While Mahatmaji stood”: Jordens, Swami Shraddhananda, p. 119.
12 “If all untouchables”: Ibid., p. 144.
13 This led to a public exchange: CWMG, vol. 23, pp. 567–69.
14 “No propaganda can be allowed”: Ibid., vol. 24, pp. 145, 148–49.
15 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar: B. R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, p. 23.
16 “greatest and most sincere champion”: Ibid.
17 Although Gandhi had called: CWMG, vol. 19, p. 289.
18 “I am trying to make”: Ibid., vol. 25, p. 228.
19 Due to his many years: Ibid., vol. 26, p. 408.
20 “To endure or bear hardships”: Ibid., pp. 264–65.
21 “One caste, one religion”: Mendelsohn and Vicziany, Untouchables, p. 97.
22 at first ambivalent: Interview with M. K. Sanoo, Ernakulam, Jan. 18, 2009.
23 rename the boy: Interview with Dr. Babu Vijayanath, Harippad, Jan. 17, 2009. Malayala Manorama article of Oct. 15, 1927, describes naming ceremony.
24 an untouchable leader: Interview with K. K. Kochu, near Kottayam, Jan. 19, 2009. T. K. Ravindran suggests that this blinding may have been temporary in his book Eight Furlongs of Freedom, p. 108.
25 “I think you should let”: CWMG, vol. 23, p. 391.
26 The letter didn’t reach: Joseph, George Joseph, pp. 166–69. Gandhi’s version of these events can be found in Removal of Untouchability, a collection of his writings on that theme, pp. 107–14.
27 Despite the Congress support: CWMG, vol. 23, p. 471.
28 “I personally believe”: Ibid., p. 519.
29 The villages were divided: Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ed., Penguin Gandhi Reader, p. 221.
30 He would also argue: M. K. Gandhi, Selected Political Writ
ings, pp. 124–25.
31 “I spoke to Gandhi repeatedly”: Mende, Conversations with Mr. Nehru, pp. 27–28.
32 “The caste system, as it exists”: CWMG, vol. 59, p. 45.
33 “If untouchability goes”: Chandrashanker Shukla, Conversations of Ganhiji (Bombay, 1949), p. 59.
34 harmful both to spiritual and national growth: Harijan, July 18, 1936, also in Gandhi, Removal of Untouchability, p. 36.
35 “no interest left in life”: Quoted in Coward, Indian Critiques of Gandhi, p. 61.
36 only remaining varna: CWMG, vol. 80, pp. 222–24, cited by Martin Green in Gandhi in India: In His Own Words (Hanover, N.H., 1987), pp. 324–26.
37 “the deep black ignorance”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, p. 86.
38 The meeting took place: CWMG, vol. 24, pp. 90–94. Quotations in these paragraphs are all drawn from a document summarizing conversations with two Vaikom emissaries.
39 On their return: Ravindran, Eight Furlongs of Freedom, p. 86.
40 The meeting sent: Ibid., p. 95.
41 The freed leaders threw: Ibid., p. 99.
42 On his release from jail: CWMG, vol. 24, pp. 268–69.
43 By the end of the year: Ibid., vol. 25, p. 349.
44 Standing on their sense: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, p. 58.
45 But it’s Indanturuttil Nambiatiri: Ravindran, Eight Furlongs of Freedom, pp. 164–91.
46 “I am not ashamed”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, p. 84.
47 The likelier explanation: CWMG, vol. 19, p. 571.
48 Perhaps Nehru’s summing-up: Mende, Conversations with Mr. Nehru, pp. 28–29.
49 “I am trying myself”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, p. 83.
50 “I have come here to create peace”: Malayala Manorama, March 14, 1925.
51 To break the impasse: Ravindran, Eight Furlongs of Freedom, pp. 187–90.
52 “We will forsake”: Raimon, Selected Documents on the Vaikom Satyagraha, p. 112.
53 accommodate to change: Interview with Krishnan Nambuthiri, Vaikom, Jan. 14, 2009.
54 a crowd of twenty thousand: Malayala Manorama, March 14, 1925.
55 “I claim to be a sanatani”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, pp. 68–70.
56 “A few days or forever”: Ibid., pp. 77, 81.
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India Page 48
