Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Agreeing that he now represented a minority of the Transvaal Indians, Gandhi asked Ampthill to inform Botha that the satyagrahis would nonetheless continue to struggle; they wanted to honour their pledges and hoped that their self-suffering would soften General Botha’s heart (S 208-10).

  In October and November, after it was clear that he was getting nowhere with the British or the South African leadership, Gandhi reached out to the British public and press. This was done with the consent of Ampthill, who wrote a foreword for Doke’s biography of Gandhi, which was published in England.

  Many individual Britons responded to Gandhi and his accounts of the Transvaal satyagraha. At a meeting before the Emerson Club (8 October), he said that South Africa’s ‘grim prisons’ were the gateways to the ‘garden of God’ where the ‘flowers of self-restraint and gentleness’ grew ‘beneath the feet of those who accept but refuse to impose suffering’ (10: 159). But he announced his frontal opposition to the route of violence for national or racial rights. He had political assassinations too in mind when he said to the Emerson Club that war

  demoralizes those who are trained for it. It brutalizes men of naturally gentle character. It outrages every beautiful canon of morality. Its path of glory is foul with the passions of lust, and red with the blood of murder. This is not the pathway to our goal.

  Meeting Britain’s suffragist leaders again, Gandhi warmly described their struggle in Indian Opinion but added that the women’s cause suffered when supporters turned to violence.

  INDIAN SCHOOL OF VIOLENCE

  The killing of Wyllie, which had been accompanied by the death of Cowasji Lalkaka, a Parsi doctor who tried to interpose himself between the victim and the assassin, Madanlal Dhingra, had highlighted the question of violence.

  Many Indians studying in England seemed to support Dhingra’s deed. After writing in the Indian Sociologist that patriotic homicide was not murder, Krishnavarma, the editor, had slipped away to France. However, a cook at India House and other eyewitnesses gave evidence, and Dhingra was hanged on 17 August. Shocked by the killing and by its defence, Gandhi commented in the 14 August issue of Indian Opinion:

  It is being said in defence of Sir Curzon Wyllie’s assassination that… just as the British would kill every German if Germany invaded Britain, so too it is the right of any Indian to kill any Englishman… The analogy… is fallacious. If the Germans were to invade Britain, the British would kill only the invaders. They would not kill every German whom they met… They would not kill an unsuspecting German, or Germans who are guests.

  As Gandhi saw it, those who incited him were guiltier than Dhingra, who may have been courageous in inviting death, but the courage was the ‘result of intoxication’. He added:

  Even should the British leave in consequence of such murderous acts, who will rule in their place? Is the Englishman bad because he is an Englishman? Is it that everyone with an Indian skin is good? If that is so, there should be [no] angry protest against oppression by Indian princes. India can gain nothing from the rule of murderers—no matter whether they are black or white. Under such a rule, India will be utterly ruined and laid waste.

  Much later it would be revealed that Savarkar, whom Gandhi had met three years earlier in London, had encouraged Dhingra’s deed and written the defence found on Dhingra’s person. In 1909, however, Savarkar was concealing his involvement. On 24 October, he, Gandhi and Habib spoke together at a subscription dinner arranged by militant Indian students.

  Keen to win the students to satyagraha and nonviolence, Gandhi ‘accepted unhesitatingly’ their invitation to preside at the dinner.35 In fact he arrived hours before the dinner, helped cook it, and ‘with gusto’ prepared the tables for it before his identity was discovered. At least three of those at the dinner, V.V.S. Aiyar, Asaf Ali and T.S.S. Rajan, would later support Gandhi’s movements in India.

  Recalling the occasion in the late 1940s, Asaf Ali would say that the October 1909 gathering was more interested in Savarkar than in Gandhi, and that Gandhi’s words were ‘calm, unemotional and devoid of rhetoric’, while Rajan would claim that he ‘found greatness in the Mahatma before the world knew him’.36

  Before long, Savarkar would be captured by the British and sent to the Andamans for a long imprisonment. The hatred he would later reveal for Gandhi was probably engendered in 1909, when Gandhi called those inciting Wyllie’s murder guiltier than Dhingra.

  The Gandhi of 1909 knew the reality of armed conflict better than London’s young Indians. He had seen the Boer and Zulu wars from close quarters, studied the 1857 rebellion with care, and taken at least three violent attacks on his own person (from whites in Durban, Indians in Johannesburg, and African prison-mates). But after his encounter with the young men fascinated by the Wyllie murder, who reminded him of Mir Alam’s argumentations, he felt he had to forge a strategy for answering, as he put it, ‘the Indian school of violence and its prototype in South Africa’.37

  ‘HIND SWARAJ’

  He found clues for such a strategy in three texts he read while in England: a Letter to a Hindoo that Tolstoy had recently written, a comment in the Illustrated London News of September 1909 by G.K. Chesterton, and Edward Carpenter’s Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, which Gandhi read on 7 September.

  Tolstoy’s long Letter of 413 manuscript pages was written in response to a request for an article by Taraknath Das, then editing in Vancouver, Canada, an ‘insurrectionary monthly’38 called Free Hindustan. The monthly’s masthead quoted Herbert Spencer, as did Krishnavarma’s Indian Sociologist. Though written in 1908, Tolstoy’s Letter had for some reason not yet been published. Gandhi’s old friend Pranjivan Mehta (who characteristically came to England while Gandhi was there) had found a typed copy circulating in Indian circles in Europe and given it to Gandhi.

  While intrigued by what Tolstoy had written, Mehta too was tempted, at this point, by the idea of bombs for independence, and discussed the question at some length with Gandhi, who found Tolstoy’s epistle irresistible. Arguing that Indians should resist England nonviolently and reject her civilization, the Russian’s Letter added:

  A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising 200 million people!.. What does it mean that 30,000 people, not athletes but rather weak and ill-looking, have enslaved 200 millions of vigorous, clever, strong, freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that not the English but the Indians have enslaved themselves?

  Sending Tolstoy the copy that had reached him, Gandhi asked the Russian for permission to publish it, which came by return of post. Twenty thousand copies of the Letter were then printed in England by Gandhi, with Mehta providing the money. Later recalling his talks with Mehta at this time, Gandhi would say: ‘Although he loved me, he thought I was foolish and sentimental. But I did place my point of view before him. It appealed to his heart. His attitude changed.’39

  From Carpenter Gandhi received the notion of civilization as a disease though a curable one; Gandhi would set out to be its doctor, at any rate for Indians and India. He had found Carpenter’s book ‘very illuminating’, Gandhi wrote to Polak. (8 Sept.; 10: 75) Also welcome to Gandhi were these lines by Chesterton:

  When I see… the views of Indian nationalists, I get bored and feel dubious about them. What they want is not very Indian and not very national… Suppose an Indian said: ‘I wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Everything has its own faults and we prefer our own… I prefer dying in battle to dying in [a Western] hospital… If you (the British) do not like our way of living, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it.’

  Supposing an Indian said that, I should call him an Indian nationalist. He would be an authentic Indian… But the Indian nationalists whose works I have read go on saying: ‘Give me a ballot box. Give me the judge’s wig. I have a natural right to be Prime Minister. My soul is starved if I am excluded from the editorship of the Daily Mail.’ Even the most sympathetic person may say in reply: ‘What you say is very fine, my go
od Indian, but it is we who invented these things.’

  Added Chesterton: ‘The right of a people to express itself in action is a genuine right. Indians have a right to be and to live as Indians. But Herbert Spencer is not Indian; his philosophy is not Indian philosophy.’40

  These (varied) thoughts from Tolstoy, Carpenter and Chesterton were right up Gandhi’s alley. In fact he had felt and expressed them himself. Within a year of his arrival in South Africa he had written pejoratively (in the Natal Mercury) of ‘the dazzling and bright surface of modern civilization’ (3 Dec. 1894; 1: 185). The following year he had referred (in the Natal Advertiser) to ‘the utter inadequacy of materialism’ and of ‘a civilization [whose] greatest achievements are the invention of the most terrible weapons of destruction’ (1 Feb. 1895; 1: 206).

  On 20 August 1903 he had written in Indian Opinion of ‘the tinsel splendour of modern civilization’ (3: 209). Five years later, in 1908, he referred to Western civilization as a recent phenomenon (‘only a hundred years old, or, to be more precise, fifty’ (8: 459); and he knew that modern civilization and its weaponry had made colonialism possible. Gunpowder and Western civilization had merged in history and also, unashamedly, in the discourse of empire-builders.41

  Bolstered by Tolstoy, Carpenter and Chesterton, these old insights of his were assembled in 1909 into a sharply-defined theory and strategy. The theory was that violence and a diseased Western (or modern) civilization went together, as did satyagraha and Indian civilization, which though corrupted was sound at its core. The theory would strengthen Indians in their fight against Western domination, and the satyagrahis vis-à-vis the ‘Westernized’ agendas of the men who had inspired Mir Alam in South Africa and Madanlal Dhingra in England.

  The strategy was that he as an authentic Indian would ask India, in the name of her soul and her past, to reject the imported mix of violence and Western civilization. In its place India should pit soul force against brute force, for satyagraha was not only the right way; it was also the Indian way. When Gandhi found that the reasoning worked with Mehta, he said to himself, ‘Let me write down the argument’ (77: 357).

  This was the genesis of Hind Swaraj (‘Indian Self-Rule’), written in Gujarati by Gandhi between 13 and 22 November 1909 on the ‘good, strong, stamped stationery’ of the Kildonan Castle on which he was returning to South Africa.42 Very little in the 30,000-word manuscript, divided into twenty short chapters, was scratched out or written over. When the right hand needed rest, Gandhi wrote with his left hand (a recourse he would employ for the rest of his life).

  The swift and seemingly irresistible flow of the text onto the ship’s notepaper, and the confidence its words exhale, suggest a sense in the author of a thrilling and promising discovery. To Kallenbach he wrote that he had produced ‘an original work’, and in the foreword he said, ‘I have written because I could not restrain myself.’43 After finishing Hind Swaraj, Gandhi translated, while on the Kildonan Castle, Tolstoy’s Letter to a Hindoo into Gujarati.

  The argument of Hind Swaraj, addressed, interestingly enough, to India rather than to the Indians of South Africa, may be summarized as follows: At one level, swaraj or self-rule must mean an individual’s rule over himself or herself. At the political level, it means home rule or self-government. But if it is to satisfy, self-government must be grounded on the control that leaders and citizens exercise over themselves.

  Also, Hindus, Muslims and others all belong to the composite Indian nation, which is perfectly entitled to self-government. Rejecting Western/modern civilization and its inseparable component, brute force, Indians must embrace the simple life, swadeshi (what one’s own country makes), and satyagraha. Only nonviolence suits the genius of India; violence is futile, Western and destructive of India’s future.

  Anthony Parel points out that in Hind Swaraj Gandhi gives India a modern concept of dharma or religion—a strong force, he knows, in India. Clarifying that by dharma he means ‘that religion which underlies all religions’, he separates religion from its divisive role, e.g. in setting Hindus and Muslims against each other, and also from its conventional Indian roles (in rituals or for demonstrating social status). Instead he employs dharma (which he equates with ethics and also with true civilization) for citizenship, liberty and mutual assistance.44

  This, of course, was how Gandhi had invoked religion for the Transvaal satyagraha. Hind Swaraj theorized the practice.

  While attacking modern or Western civilization, Hind Swaraj values contact with it and praises individual Westerners; it steers clear of isolationism and rejects hate. In his preface to the English version, Gandhi writes that he has ‘endeavoured humbly to follow Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson and other writers, besides the masters of Indian philosophy’. He names the Westerners, not the Indians he refers to.45

  Also, in extolling the simple life and asking satyagrahis to embrace poverty, Gandhi’s goal is the end of Indian misery. It is for removing want in India that he wants satyagrahis to limit their wants. Hind Swaraj asks India’s Westernized elite—lawyers, doctors and the wealthy—to acknowledge their distance from the people and simplify their lives. In fifteen words, all of a single syllable, Gandhi writes:

  Those in whose name we speak we do not know, and they do not know us.

  The tract concludes by saying: ‘I bear no enmity towards the English, but I do towards their civilisation… I have endeavoured to explain [swaraj] as I understand it, and my conscience testifies that my life henceforth is dedicated to its attainment.’ Here Gandhi announces his life-mission, which is to attain India’s Swaraj through satyagraha and thereby present satyagraha to the world.

  The book’s ideas are presented via a dialogue between an ‘Editor’ and an unnamed ‘Reader’, the latter arguing along lines that Savarkar and London’s militant students (and also Mehta) had employed. Thus it is through the mouth of a modern newspaper editor that Gandhi excoriates Western civilization and elevates the Indian.46

  Published in December 1909 in two successive issues of Indian Opinion’s Gujarati edition, Hind Swaraj was printed as a book in January 1910. After the Bombay government confiscated copies of the book in March 1910, Indian Home Rule, an English translation that Gandhi himself had already dictated (to Kallenbach, at the latter’s request), was quickly produced. It appeared on 20 March 1910.

  Tolstoy’s Letter, with a preface by Gandhi, was also soon published in Indian Opinion, in both English and Gujarati. In the preface Gandhi calls Tolstoy ‘one of the clearest thinkers in the Western world, one of the greatest writers, [and] one who, as a soldier, has known what violence is’, and adds that India would ‘cease to be nationalist India’ if it yields to ‘reproduction on that sacred soil of gun factories and hateful industrialism’.47 Again, Gandhi amalgamates guns, industrialism and the West, and suggests the superiority of the alternative triad of satyagraha, the simple life and India.

  Tolstoy, to whom Gandhi sent a copy of Indian Home Rule, wrote back (10 May 1910) that the question of passive resistance raised in the book was ‘of the greatest importance not only for India but for the whole of humanity’ (10: 511).

  On 7 September 1910, when Tolstoy was ‘vividly feeling the nearness of death’, he wrote again to Gandhi. In what would be the Russian’s ‘last long letter’, Tolstoy, who ‘had noted in his diary how close Gandhi’s work was to his own’, said that the satyagraha in the Transvaal supplied ‘most weighty practical proof’ of what the two believed. Added Tolstoy:

  [Y]our work in Transvaal, which seems to be far away from the centre of our world, is yet the most fundamental and the most important to us (11: 474).48

  But Krishnavarma, in a sharp attack on Hind Swaraj, called Gandhi ‘an admirer of Jesus Christ’ who was trying to put into practice ‘the extreme Christian theory of suffering’.49 Gandhi’s identification of satyagraha with India, and of violence with the West, had clearly gone home, and Krishnavarma counter-attacked by linking Gandhi with a supposedly ‘Western’ religion.


  We can move forward in time and acknowledge that Gandhi’s strategy did succeed, in South Africa and India. Satyagraha baffled and frequently outwitted the British, and enabled Indians fighting under Gandhi to feel that they held the moral high ground. During Gandhi’s lifetime satyagraha also marginalized ‘the Indian school of violence’. Indians accepted Gandhi as the authentic Indian and satyagraha as the Indian method, with many also agreeing that pro-violence Indians were the West’s imitators.

  Yet Hind Swaraj was a warrior’s manifesto, not a scholar’s survey. Gandhi’s weapon for influencing India, it was less than pure truth. Alloyed with strategy, it did not hold the scales even between the East and the West, and Gandhi’s thesis reinforced an old self-righteous sense that India was wiser and more spiritual than the West. This was not Gandhi’s belief—we have seen and will see again that he was only too aware of Indian greed and cruelties, and there were aspects of the modern West that he admired. But Hind Swaraj’s reader is left with unquestioned Indian superiority.

  The reader also takes away a rejection of technology, for Hind Swaraj attacks materialism (or greed) and technology (called machinery in the text) in the same breath, and with the same intensity. We know that Gandhi was not blind to the relief that technology gave to humans. He did not hate new things, and he could hate old things if they were useless.

  But in Hind Swaraj Gandhi eschewed nuance and subtlety and sought stark contrasts. Its sweeping style was dictated by corroborated conviction and a compelling political instinct.

  The unqualified denunciation of Western civilization was also connected to Gandhi’s experience as an ignored leader from the East in the England of 1909. We may see Hind Swaraj as an assertion of Eastern identity in a world and an age dominated by the West, and Gandhi’s assertion of himself before an India that could only petition or throw a bomb here and there.