There, he befriended Muslims and Parsis, European Jews and Christians; worked with Chinese, Tamils, lower castes, and indentured laborers; and emerged as the leader of Indian immigrants who used political lobbying and peaceful resistance to fight racially discriminatory laws. He came to believe that he could see the world from the bottom up, that he understood the oppressed and could speak for them. This became a powerful source of his self-belief, though it was never as well founded as he liked to put about.
Throughout his time in South Africa, he never made common cause with Africans, who were subject to far worse discrimination than any Indian. His own racism was to blame, compounded perhaps by caste-derived reflexes that he never escaped, however long or far away he was from India. His efforts went into getting Indians classified and treated differently from Africans—to improve their position within the racial hierarchy, not to do away with the hierarchy altogether. If that required showing loyalty to the British Empire, he didn’t shirk from it. Signing up as a stretcher bearer when the British crushed a Zulu uprising in 1906, he wrote, “It is not for me to say whether the revolt of the Kaffirs is justified or not.” It’s an instance of the limits of Gandhi’s vision, a sign of how his convictions could slide into dogmatism and prejudice. In India, that dogmatism would alienate some of his interlocutors, notably Muhammad Ali Jinnah (39) and Bhimrao Ambedkar (41), with immense consequences for the country’s history.
Far more radical than his public politics were his experiments in living, which led him to dispense with that bedrock of Indian society, the family. Gandhi loved domesticity, but despised the family. It’s not just that he didn’t much care for his own. He came to see the family in general as a carrier of caste and religious bigotry and as the progenitor of material acquisitiveness. So he set up communal farms that became laboratories for new types of domestic relations, and tried other inventive ménages, including some with men only.
Gandhi had tried several times, from South Africa, to join Indian public life. When he was finally able to return to India in 1915, he pledged to his mentor, the liberal congressman Gopal Krishna Gokhale, that he would observe a year’s political silence as he reacquainted himself with the country. Traveling across India, he saw how distant the power of the state was from the lives of most Indians, and also how divided the society was by caste, language, and religion. He began to search for ways to bridge divides in a society saturated with signs of discrimination—to find causes and symbols that could unify Indians.
He started with clothing, an immediate marker of community identity. (The politician who described Gandhi immediately after his arrival in 1915, before he began his dress experiments, went on to tell his brother that Gandhi was “dressed quite like a bania.”) Gandhi spent months pondering his headgear, trying turbans in all styles, before inventing the Gandhi cap; he rid himself of garments down to the bare minimum, thereby conveying asceticism, but even more important, communicating a social neutrality, a degree-zero of caste, religious, or regional belonging.
This was a new way of being Indian, and he combined it with new ways of doing politics. Gandhi, in the early years of his return, tested his methods of boycotts and peaceful resistance in the Indian countryside, leading agrarian protest movements in Gujarat and Bihar. He recruited to his cause local politicians who later served him well in his effort to control the Congress party. He conciliated a textile workers’ strike, which gained him the trust of industrialists and businessmen such as Ambalal Sarabhai, who began to subsidize him. With these resources, he built himself up in the Congress, coming to dominate the fractious party, and reorganized its structure and membership to expand it beyond its core of English-speaking elites.
For all his radicalism, Gandhi remained loyal to the empire for the duration of the First World War. Yet that loyalty was shattered in 1919 by the shooting in Amritsar of unarmed men, women, and children who had gathered there to protest the continuation of draconian wartime detention powers. What particularly outraged Gandhi and others was the refusal by the British authorities to punish the officer who ordered the killings. Gandhi was ready now to take the battle to the British.
As it happened, in order to build his first national campaign of civil disobedience, he seized upon an issue quite remote to India. Victorious in the First World War, the Allies were negotiating the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, which would end the Ottoman sultan’s rule over Mecca and Medina and bring about the collapse of his caliphate. Muslims in India and across the world were outraged. Gandhi decided to pledge Congress support to the movement, led by conservative Muslim maulvis, to preserve the caliphate. He convinced Hindus across the country to unite with their Muslim brethren, to the horror of liberals within the Congress, including Jinnah, who feared that Gandhi was releasing religious passions that would be impossible to retire. Nevertheless, Gandhi managed, for a brief moment, to bring together Hindus and Muslims. He had begun to unnerve the Raj—and he was doing it through nonviolent confrontation.
* * *
In 1897 in Durban, Gandhi was beaten bloody by a white mob that had planned to lynch him. In 1908, in Johannesburg, he was assaulted by a group of Pathans. During the decade between these attacks, he read Tolstoy on passive resistance and began his experiments with the practice he later called satyagraha, or “truth force.” But he really started to think deeply about violence after encounters with young Indian terrorists and revolutionaries.
In 1909, Gandhi traveled to London on one of several visits to lobby the cause of South Africa’s Indians. The city had become a way station for disaffected young Indians. (Just before Gandhi’s arrival, an Indian student had shot dead a British Indian Army officer in South Kensington.) Gandhi made it a point to speak with these radical nationalists—he met “every known Indian anarchist” in London, he later said—including the Hindu nationalist ideologue V. D. Savarkar. He became fascinated by their schemes and plots, and admired their willingness to die for the cause of India’s freedom, but was troubled by their readiness to kill. He began to muster arguments against what he later called this “Indian school of violence.” That, in turn, led him to a critique of modern society and civilization, which he articulated in a short, burning text written in an eye blink on the boat back from Britain to South Africa, in 1909—Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule.
The book took the form of a dialogue between an Editor, representing Gandhi’s views, and a Reader, representing the views of a nationalist warrior. “We will assassinate a few Englishmen … we will undertake guerrilla warfare, and defeat the English,” says the Reader, who argues at another point, “As is Japan, so must India be—we must own our own navy, our army … then will India’s voice ring through the world.”
This was exactly the path that so many twentieth-century anticolonial and nationalist movements would take, exactly the ambition that would animate so many new nations and their peak-capped leaders. Gandhi resisted it. “What is granted under fear can be retained only so long as the fear lasts,” he told the advocates of violence. What they were fighting for was a free India in the pale image of other nations—not true swaraj, merely “English rule without the Englishmen.”
“What we need to do,” Gandhi went on to say, “is kill ourselves.” He liked to argue by inversions and reversals of commonplaces; this is one of his most puzzling and provocative. In a counter to the terrorists, eager to kill in order to challenge the state’s sovereign power over life and death, Gandhi proposed the figure of the satyagrahi, the trained nonviolent resister, who, by his or her willingness to die, subverted that power. By asserting control over his own life and death, the satyagrahi was able to possess a different, more intimate kind of sovereignty: over his own person.
Violent rebellion could always be easily suppressed in India, as it was during the uprising of 1857. The balance of coercive power lay with the British. But Gandhi’s conception of nonviolent action was not merely a tactical one. He was making a fundamental point about power’s dependence on legitimacy. I
t’s not just that the more powerful could retaliate against the less powerful by use of force, and do so more effectively; it’s that they were always in a position to justify the use of retaliatory force. “The show of violence always gives the privileged group, the holder of power, the opportunity of using a much more potent weapon than any military force,” the German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted in a perceptive essay on Gandhi in 1931. “That force is the identification of its own interests with the necessities of law and order.” Niebuhr recognized that Gandhi was waging a battle over beliefs, the ultimate source of power. Gandhi was delegitimating power—robbing “the privileged group of its moral pretensions,” as Niebuhr put it.
* * *
Niebuhr’s essay was written in the wake of Gandhi’s most famous act of nonviolent resistance, the Salt Satyagraha of 1930. It’s often held up as an exemplary instance of Gandhi’s spontaneous, even naïve style—a testimony to his sheer determination. Yet Gandhi didn’t just lead the campaign. He managed it down to its minutest detail, making brilliant use of a new instrument for shaping belief: the global media.
In the spring of that year, Gandhi came to Dandi, a small village on the Gujarat coast. He had walked at the head of a band of followers for twenty-four days, traveling some two hundred miles from his ashram near Ahmedabad. The reason for the march? To pick up a handful of salt from the seashore, so defying a British tax on the substance. Gandhi would later say that the decision to make salt the focus of his agitation was a flash of inspiration.
Perhaps. Gandhi recognized that the British Empire, and especially the Raj, was, in the words of nineteenth-century British observers, an “empire of opinion.” In weeks of meticulous planning for the campaign, he set about reinventing an ancient practice, the pilgrimage, for the modern media age.
The seventy-nine marchers who accompanied him were each chosen and vetted by Gandhi himself. He wanted a small enough number for him to manage the procession personally; a representative from each part of the country; and marchers who were dedicated but relatively unknown—no political colleagues who might dilute the attention centered on him. He carefully designed their outfits (no political insignia or markings were allowed: he wanted his satyagrahis to convey a timeless, elemental quality) and made sure that he was the only one to carry a stick. To secure the vocal support of townspeople and villagers along the route, he dispatched his lieutenants to visit stopping points in advance and rustle up excitement.
He did all this because he had also arranged for the world’s press to come along, and he wanted to minimize the unexpected. In the weeks before the march, he invited journalists, both Indian and foreign, to his ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati River. He allowed them to write up what he said at his public prayer meetings, and also in his private conversations with visitors and ashram members. Gandhi used the prayer meetings to build the drama, telling his listeners that for the marchers this would be their last fight. Meanwhile, in the audience, mill owners mingled with the poor and lower castes so that Gandhi could convey the breadth and unity of his supporters. The journalists dutifully took all this down, then published it internationally.
Most important, Gandhi invited photographers and film crews to accompany him on the trek to Dandi. They did so, in motor cars. The jiggly footage they shot of Gandhi’s fast-paced walk—he quickened his stride at certain strategic points—was seen across the world. The image of the Mahatma striding across the dusty plains ahead of his band of followers was now burned into the imaginations of millions: the tiny stick man with teapot ears, showing up the imperial blimps. Some months later, Time magazine drew him for its cover. He was cleverly shown studying a newspaper, reading perhaps of his own exploits.
* * *
Swaraj, Gandhi had written in his 1909 book, lay “in the palm of our hands.” It was another of his arresting inversions. For those committed to using violence, freedom lies in the capture or destruction of a distant object, the state. Yet Gandhi challenges us to shift our attention away from the state. That’s not because he is essentially an antipolitical thinker, a moralist, as many think. It’s because his view of politics was expansive.
Gandhi saw the modern state as a usurper of duties that we as individuals should rightfully retain. We had lost the capacity to restrain and control our own desires; we were no longer masters of ourselves. That breakdown created the necessity for an external apparatus of control: the state, with its concentrated powers of coercion, its calculus of law and punishment.
According to Gandhi, terrorist revolutionaries and constitutional nationalists labored under too narrow a conception of politics, obsessed as both groups were with the state. For them, freedom was a goal in the future, achieved either through the violent capture of state power or by gradual entry into government through electoral means. Instead, Gandhi wanted us to see freedom as something there to be seized in the present moment, through everyday activities that had nothing to do with the state—by spinning thread to make your own cloth, gathering your own salt, tending your own health, resolving your own conflicts. These were fundamentally political acts that could restore Indians to mastery over their habits of mind and body, and so give them freedom.
There’s something solipsistic about this conception of freedom, but it’s also a challenging one. It asks us to think of a politics beyond the imaginative confines of the state. Politics had become all-pervasive and inescapable, entrapping us “like the coil of a snake,” Gandhi said. If politics pervaded every aspect of our lives, it also meant that our most intimate acts had political significance. Gandhi didn’t renounce politics; he redefined it.
* * *
To make politics intimate was a form of power against an empire built on distant majesty and intimidating impersonality. The march to Dandi to pick up a handful of salt showed that it was possible for an individual to stand up to power by a simple act. It was an act of political enchantment that made politics personal again.
But it was also an act of provocation—and not only to the British. Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, a Brahmin from the Pune region of Maharashtra, was directly inspired by the ideas of Savarkar, the young terrorist and ideologue of Hindu nationalism with whom Gandhi had argued in 1909. Godse was angered that Gandhi, with his “eccentricities, whimsicality, metaphysics and primitive vision,” his “childish insanities and obstinacies,” was nevertheless able, as if by magic, to mobilize hundreds of millions of people. Gandhi’s movement might succeed or fail, Godse said, “but that could make no difference to the Mahatma’s infallibility”; Gandhi had become “formidable and irresistible.” And his actions, Godse believed, had fed the demands of India’s Muslims, leading to India’s holy territory being split in two.
In the weeks before Godse pulled his gun, there were several attempts on Gandhi’s life—including, just ten days earlier, a bomb attack at one of his Delhi prayer meetings. Gandhi knew there was a conspiracy, yet he refused extra precautions. He told those assembled at his prayer meetings that, even if a bomb were thrown into their midst, they must not budge. I want to keep saying the name of Rama, he said, even if there is shooting around me. And that is exactly what he did when, on the evening of January 30, 1948, Godse shot him dead.
39
JINNAH
The Chess Player
1876–1948
In his lonely teenage years in London, apprenticed at a trading firm while precociously reading for the Bar, Muhammad Ali Jinnah steeped himself in British liberal democracy. Days off from the office were spent at Hyde Park listening to the soapbox speechifiers, or to Gladstone at the House of Commons. It was cheaper than his other favorite diversion: Romeo, Hamlet, and the Shakespearean lot at the Old Vic. Still, had some prophetess informed this anglicized budding lawyer, a person with no religious convictions whatsoever, that he’d spend the final years of his life creating the world’s first and largest Islamic state and becoming its Quaid-i-Azam, or Great Leader, he might not have laughed. He was fashioning himself fo
r political achievement.
As a young man, Jinnah vaguely shared the idea that would be an article of faith to Gandhi, Nehru, and the national movement: that India was a single civilization containing within it many varieties of belief. Yet by the late 1930s, as president of the All-India Muslim League, he had come to fear for the prospects of minorities—like his own—in a postimperial and democratic India. British India’s Muslims made up a quarter of the subcontinent’s population, forming the largest body of their coreligionists anywhere in the world, and dominated five of the country’s eleven provinces. Yet Jinnah doubted that they would share equally in the new freedoms of an independent India.
In 1939, Jinnah told the Manchester Guardian that it was “impossible to work a democratic parliamentary government in India,” where the bulk of voters were “totally ignorant, illiterate and untutored, living in centuries-old superstitions of the worst type, and thoroughly antagonistic to each other, culturally and socially.” The following year, he went further. India isn’t really a country, he wrote to the man he saw as his rival, Gandhi. “It is a sub-continent composed of nationalities, Hindus and Muslims being the two major nations.” A few months later, he unfurled that view at the Muslim League’s general session in Lahore, in a speech that electrified Muslims across the subcontinent and would build to the most momentous decision taken in three hundred years of British rule over India.
On the morning of June 3, 1947, before a phalanx of photographers, Jinnah, in a white linen suit and striped tie, posed around a table with Nehru, the Sikh leader Baldev Singh, and the Viceroy of India, Louis Mountbatten; behind them was a map of India, shortly to be divided. The photo opportunity had come after months of bargaining. Now they publicly assented to a partition that, carried out in haste, would give roughly half of India’s Muslims political autonomy, cause around a million deaths, displace some fourteen million people, and transform the geopolitics of the world—a decision that has, in the opinion of the historian Perry Anderson, “a good claim to be the most contemptible single act in the annals of the Empire.”
Incarnations Page 35
