Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  At Mahatma Munshi Ram’s ashram near the Himalayas, Gandhi was pressed by a staunch Hindu to display Hindu symbols on his person. Refusing to don the ‘sacred thread’ because, Gandhi pointed out, it was denied to lower castes, he agreed, however, to tie again, in orthodox Hindu fashion, the shikha or hair-knot at the rear of his head. It was false shame, Gandhi now concluded, that had led him to discard the knot twenty-seven years earlier, on the eve of his first journey to London.

  If the absence of the thread signified his rejection of Hindu hierarchies, the shikha conveyed his Hinduness. Once more Gandhi was taking a well-thought-out position. This had also been the case when he spoke in Gujarati in Bombay, or spoke out in Calcutta, or met the Ali brothers, or chose a site for his ashram, or chose its vows, or selected what he would or would not wear.

  At the end of June Gandhi went again to Poona, the city of Gokhale, who was no more, and of Tilak. In this city, where British officers of the Bombay presidency (of which Ahmedabad was a part) spent the rainy season, Willingdon, the Bombay governor, invested Gandhi with an imperial award, the Kaiser-i-Hind, for his services in South Africa.

  NEITHER SLOW NOR FAST

  But his own ashramites, and his wife Kasturba, were restive, for into his ashram Gandhi had admitted a young untouchable couple, Dudabhai Dafda and his wife, who belonged to the Gujarati-speaking community of Dheds or Dhedhs that worked with hides. Evidently, Gandhi told Kasturba that if she was unable to live with the Dhed couple ‘she could leave me and we should part good friends’.6 Kasturba yielded and stayed, but not Santok, Maganlal’s wife, though she had been a satyagrahi in South Africa. Breaking conventions amidst kinsfolk in Ahmedabad was harder.

  ‘There was a flutter in the ashram.’ Santok fasted in opposition to the admission of Dudabhai and his wife; Gandhi fasted back; Santok and Maganlal packed their bags, said good-bye, and left (15: 46). Later, however, they returned, having, as Gandhi would say, ‘washed their hearts clean of untouchability’ (56: 178).

  But there was a flutter in the city as well, and in the ashram’s vicinity. Dudabhai and others in the ashram were roundly abused when they tried to take water from a neighbourhood well, and money ceased to flow to the ashram.

  Gandhi was thinking of moving the ashram into a Dhed settlement when a young industrialist in his twenties, Ambalal Sarabhai, quietly drove up with a wad of currency, handed Rs 13,000 to Gandhi, and went away (A 356-7). He and Gandhi had met only once before, in the Sarabhai home, to discuss prospects of an ashram in Ahmedabad, but Sarabhai had been impressed by Gandhi’s readiness to address caste inequalities, which young Sarabhai had always found offensive.7

  The tide soon turned, and Dudabhai and his wife, both showing forbearance, found increasing acceptance from neighbours, visitors and other ashramites. To Gandhi the incident showed ‘the efficacy of passive resistance in social questions’, as he wrote on 23 September to Gokhale’s friend and colleague, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri. In this letter Gandhi also said that he expected his satyagraha enterprise to embrace Swaraj and social questions together (15: 46).

  He expected, also, to embrace the Hindu-Muslim question. His interest in the Ali brothers, and their interest in him, proved that, as did a relationship he was cultivating with Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861-1946), an orthodox Brahmin from Allahabad espousing Hindu interests in the Indian National Congress.

  Unlike other politicians, Gandhi had seen (from the start of his South African days) the interconnectedness, practical and moral, of the three questions. Hindus would not desrve freedom from alien rule if they continued to treat a portion among them as untouchables; and caste Hindus were unlikely to obtain Swaraj if untouchables opposed it. And if they fought each other, Hindus and Muslims would neither merit nor attain independence.

  Gandhi understood, too, the necessity of discovering the right pace on the three battlefronts. Patient work would be needed to attract Muslims and the untouchables onto the road to Swaraj. Yet he could not afford to be outflanked by Hindu militants tempting the Hindu high castes with an early Swaraj won via the bomb, a Swaraj, moreover, that the high castes would dominate; or, on the other wing, by Muslim extremists offering a revival of Muslim supremacy; or by radical foes of caste presenting dreams of instant equality among Indians, if necessary under British auspices. His thrusts should not be premature, nor his caution excessive.

  As early as 20 February 1915, the day that Gokhale died, Andrews had asked Gandhi if he thought that satyagraha would soon come to India. ‘It is difficult to say,’ Gandhi had replied (A 342). Later in the year, a young man, Indulal Yagnik (1892-1972), asked Gandhi in Bombay whether he expected a following for civil disobedience in India. Replied Gandhi:

  I am not very much worried about securing a large following. That will come in due course. But I do anticipate that a time may come when my large following may throw me overboard on account of my strict adhesion to my principles—and it may be that I shall almost be turned out on the streets and have to beg for a piece of bread from door to door.8

  Confident about the short term and questioning about the long term, the 1915 Gandhi thus seemed aware that the palatable and the unpalatable would both issue from his lips. He also thought that Swaraj could coexist with India’s imperial connection. In April 1915 he said in Madras:

  I discovered that the British Empire had certain ideals with which I have fallen in love and one of those ideals is that every subject of the British Empire has the freest scope possible for his energy and honour and whatever he thinks is due to his conscience… Hence my loyalty to the British Empire (14: 417-8).

  Yet from the moment of his return to India he looked for opportunities to try out satyagraha.

  Harilal and Manilal. The eldest son, now twenty-seven, was in Bombay when his parents landed, and accompanied them on some of their travels, and there were long father-son talks. But the gulf was not bridged. After Gandhi reimbursed Laxmidas’s family in Rajkot for expenses incurred on Harilal, a formal separation occurred. On 14 March 1915 Gandhi wrote about it to Naraindas, brother of Chhaganlal and Maganlal and like them a close associate:

  [Harilal] has parted from me completely. He will receive no monetary help from me. Gave him Rs 45 and he parted at Calcutta. There was no bitterness. Let him take any books or clothes of mine that he may want (14: 382).

  At the end of March Gulab gave birth to her fourth child, Shanti. She and Harilal (who had given up the attempt to pass examinations) now had three boys and a girl. Shortly after Shanti’s birth, Harilal wrote a disparaging ‘Half-Open Letter’ to his father and had it printed and circulated ‘among a fairly wide circle’, including Gandhi. At the last minute he dropped a plan to send the letter to the press. It contained bitter charges:

  Our views about education are the main reason for the difference of opinion of the last ten years…You have suppressed us (sons) in a sophisticated manner…You have never encouraged us in any way…You always spoke to us with anger, not with love…You have made us remain ignorant… I asked to be sent to England. For a year I cried. I was bewildered. You did not lend me your ears… I am married… with four children. I cannot… become a recluse. Therefore I have separated from you with your permission.9

  Devadas, younger than Harilal by twelve years and the youngest of Gandhi’s sons, would say later that the letter was ‘a landmark in [Harilal’s] life and in his connection with the family’.10 Yet in September 1915 Harilal accompanied his father on a journey to Bombay, where Gandhi needed to be. From Bombay Harilal went to Calcutta, where a Gujarati businessman had given him an office job.

  In Calcutta Harilal’s fifth and last child, a daughter, Manu, was born, with Kasturba helping during delivery. After enjoying a whole year of hitherto-unknown contentment, Harilal lost his job on charges that he had misappropriated his firm’s funds and not repaid a loan.11

  Twenty-four-year-old Manilal paid a costly price in June 1916 for lending Harilal money from ashram funds and initially denying the fact to his father.
The son was expelled from the ashram, given a one-way ticket to Madras and a little money, and told to return only after earning the sum he had given Harilal plus the cost of the journey back. To Kallenbach, Gandhi wrote, ‘Manilal has deceived me again… [H]e is a very weak boy.’12

  Before leaving, Manilal begged his father not to fast again. Though Manilal did not know at the time, Gandhi did fast for three days. On his journey south Manilal cried at his punishment and also at the grief he had once more caused his father. After his son had spent several hard weeks in Madras, Gandhi put Manilal in touch with friends there who partially helped him out. In his seven-month stay in Madras Manilal learnt Tamil and also weaving, from which he earned a quarter-rupee a day.

  CONFRONTING AND RECRUITING

  When, at the end of December 1915, the Indian National Congress met in Bombay for its annual session, Gandhi joined the proceedings and moved a resolution on Indians in the colonies.

  In the year that followed, India heard a puzzling if also promising new voice. A country with numerous divides—rich/poor, high castes/untouchables, Hindu/Muslim, extremist/moderate, modernist-traditional, pro-British/anti-British, and so forth—could not at first make out where Gandhi stood. He seemed to tease each side while also offering his support to it.

  In at least three ways he was different from other politicians. One, he identified with the poor who seemed to accept him as their champion. Two, familiar with the British from his London and South African days, he approached them as an equal. Three, he appeared to regard every place in India as his home.

  If many saw him as a saint, others thought of him, to quote Sarojini Naidu’s words in 1917, as a

  fanciful dreamer of inconvenient and impossible dreams. For surely, the sudden appearance of Saint Francis of Assisi in his tattered robes in the fastidious purlieus of London or Milan, Paris or Petrograd today will be scarcely more disconcerting than the presence of this strange man with his bare feet and coarse garments, his tranquil eyes, and calm, gentle smile that disclaims, even while it acknowledges, the homage that emperors cannot buy.13

  He was at his provocative best (or worst) on 6 February 1916, when he spoke in Benares at the founding of the Hindu University for which Annie Besant had laboured hard. Invited to the occasion along with several aristocrats and dignitaries, Gandhi spoke of the filth he had seen in the city and also compared the ‘richly bedecked noblemen’ seated on the dais with ‘the millions of the poor’. There would be no salvation for India, he declared, unless the aristocrats stripped themselves of their jewellery.

  In any case, added Gandhi, India would be rescued not by ‘the lawyers, nor the doctors, nor the rich landlords’, but by ‘the farmer’. Referring, next, to the surfeit of police posted in the streets to protect the Viceroy who had opened the university, Gandhi said that life under such security would be a ‘living death’, to which assassination might be preferable (15: 148-55).

  Mrs Besant and the noblemen were all shocked, Gandhi was asked to stop and the meeting abruptly closed. Erikson comments that on this occasion Gandhi’s teasing may have turned into taunting, that he ‘over-identified’ himself with the potentially radical students who sat before him and whom he was aiming to attract, and that the students might have taken away anarchy rather than nonviolence from Gandhi’s words.14

  Others, however, picked up a different message. A young Marwari industrialist, Ghanshyam Das Birla (1894-1983), who had welcomed Gandhi the previous year in Calcutta and joined in pulling his carriage, was captured by the speech, which produced a similar reaction in a twenty-one-year-old scholar from Maharashtra, Vinoba Bhave (1895-1982).

  Bhave called on Gandhi in the Kochrab ashram in June 1916 and thought he saw in him both ‘shanti’ and ‘kranti’, the peace of the Himalayas and the fire of revolution. Two years later, Vinoba offered to serve Gandhi as a son. Impressed by the young man’s mind and spirit, Gandhi wrote to him (Feb. 1918):

  Your love and your character fascinate me and so also your self-examination. I am not fit to measure your worth… In my view a father is, in fact, a father only when he has a son who surpasses him in virtue… I accept the role you offer to me as a gift of love. I shall strive to be worthy of it; and, if ever I become another Hiranyakashipu, oppose me respectfully as Prahlad, who loved God, disobeyed him (16: 251).

  We should note Gandhi’s apprehension, stemming from awareness of his radical goals, strong will and popularity, that he could end up as a tyrant like Hiranyakashipu.

  Before Benares Gandhi had spoken to community meetings of Gujarat’s Patels, Jains and Muslims in Surat and Navsari. After Benares he went again to Madras, and then, north-west of Gujarat, to towns in Sindh, part of Bombay presidency at the time.

  Everywhere large numbers turned out to see and hear him, and he was often introduced in awed terms. He said in Karachi (29 Feb. 1916) that if ‘throughout India the hearts of the people [were] in a special degree drawn to [him]’, it was because of the struggles of ‘all those noble brothers and sisters of ours in South Africa’ (15: 193).

  But this was modesty. The truth was that from Gandhi’s presence amidst them many Indians drew hope. In him they sensed both empathy and force. They felt that this strange man ‘cared about them, understood their wretched plight and somehow had the power, even in the face of the rule of the great white sahibs in Delhi and the provincial capitals, to do something about it’.15

  Gandhi’s commitment was also drawing attention. When Lala Lajpat Rai of the Punjab expressed doubts about nonviolence, Gandhi asked him not to fear ‘the ahimsa of his father’s faith’. Asserting that nonviolence was the essence of Hinduism, Gandhi added (Oct. 1916) that his own loyalty to nonviolence would remain unaffected even ‘if I suddenly discovered that the religious books… bore a different interpretation’ (15: 253-4).

  As for untouchability, he said in Madras on 16 February 1916: ‘Every affliction that we labour under in this sacred land is a fit and proper punishment for this great and indelible crime that we are committing’ (15: 173).

  And at the end of April he declared in Belgaum that he ‘for one would oppose any part or class that wanted to set itself above the others’. If ‘one particular class would dominate… it would not be Home Rule’ (15: 219).

  His name and image were ‘resonat[ing] among the Indian masses in a manner that was unprecedented’,16 and many among the poor, the ‘untouchables’ and the tribals started thinking of him as a deliverer.

  Fought between competing European nationalisms, the World War was stoking Indian nationalism as well, and the Empire’s need for India’s men and resources presented an opportunity for political advance. In 1916 ‘Home Rule’ became a popular cry. Tilak, admiringly called Lokamanya (‘Honoured by the people’), started a Home Rule League in Poona; in September Mrs Besant launched her Home Rule League in Madras.

  Unity was another widespread desire, unity between the Congress and a Tilak-led extremist group that had been forced out of the body in 1907, and also between the Congress and the Muslim League. Tilak, Mrs Besant and Jinnah were the lead players in these Home Rule and unity efforts. Gandhi’s contribution was wholehearted but relatively small.

  However, he played a major role in the Bombay Provincial Conference held in Ahmedabad in October, attended by, among others, Tilak and Jinnah. Convened by the Gujarat Sabha (established in 1884 ‘to place the grievances and difficulties of the public before the government’), the conference brought extremists and moderates together. Gandhi proposed that Jinnah should preside, which he did, and Gandhi also moved political resolutions demanding the removal of the Viramgam customs cordon and of a bar on Mrs Besant’s entry into the Bombay presidency.

  At this conference Gandhi intrigued a man who would soon become a key ally, Vallabhbhai Patel (1875-1950), like Gandhi and Jinnah a London-trained barrister. The rugged, blunt and balding Patel, whose father was an impoverished peasant proprietor in Kheda district, had risen to become a brilliant criminal lawyer in Ahmedabad and the
Gujarat Club’s bridge champion. Vallabhbhai’s older brother Vithalbhai, also a barrister, was a Gujarat representative on the Bombay Legislative Council.

  Hitherto Vallabhbhai had always laughed whenever friends at the Club talked about Gandhi—the crank, Patel would say, who thought that grinding grain and cleaning lavatories would fetch Swaraj. At the conference, however, Patel liked the seriousness in Gandhi’s voice and the economy in his words.

  Patel saw Gandhi again when the Congress met in December in Lucknow in the United Provinces. The Muslim League also convened there, and the two bodies agreed to work jointly for ‘early self-government’ on the basis of direct elections, separate electorates for Muslims and Sikhs, and quotas for religious minorities in provincial and central legislatures.

  Tilak, Jinnah and Annie Besant were the architects of this notable Lucknow Pact, and Gandhi a supporter who looked for ways to involve the Indian peasant in the self-government call. Accordingly, he tried to address audiences in Lucknow and Allahabad in Hindi.

  Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), whom Gandhi would eventually call his heir and successor, saw him for the first time in Lucknow. The son of Motilal Nehru, a Kashmiri Brahmin who was a prominent Congress moderate and a leading lawyer in Allahabad, Jawaharlal had studied law in London, like Gandhi, Jinnah and Patel. Unlike these three, Jawaharlal had also gone to Harrow and Cambridge. To this thoughtful, sophisticated and good-looking twenty-seven-year-old, the Gandhi of December 1916 seemed ‘very distant and different and unpolitical’.17