Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Word that Gandhi should not be pushed too hard went from Delhi to Bombay and from there to Pratt in Ahmedabad. On 6 June 1918 Gandhi and Patel were able to announce victory and an end to the fight.

  Though the Kheda exercise was over, Vallabhbhai Patel did not return to his practice. He would remain available to Gandhi, to whom Patel’s decision was ‘by itself’ sufficient recompense for the Kheda exertions (A 397). The Kheda experience and Gandhi’s company had changed Vallabhbhai. The change in him in 1918 was recorded by Kripalani who, along with Rajendra Prasad, had travelled from Bihar to be with Gandhi in Ahmedabad and Kheda:

  When I first met [Patel] he had just come under the spell of the personality of Gandhiji. He was living in a style then considered appropriate for a fashionable and young barrister. He soon left Ahmedabad to participate in the peasant satyagraha in Kheda. After some time I followed [Patel] there.

  What I saw of his life then was a revelation to me! He had cast off his foreign dress and along with it the comfortable life he had led before. He lived with the workers, sharing the plain food, sleeping on the ground, doing everything for himself, including the daily washing of his clothes, and walking long distances in the villages… [But he] was his usual self, full of fun and laughter.

  The same phenomenon I witnessed again and again in the life of many of our leaders. As soon as they had joined the fight for freedom, they seemed to have left their old life behind, never to be resumed. They were, as it were, born again as Indians.30

  By the summer of 1918, that change had occurred in Kripalani himself, and in Rajendra Prasad, Mahadev Desai, and several others. These allies and recruits were captured as much by Gandhi’s weapon, satyagraha, as by his personality. The weapon seemed an appealing alternative to the hazardous course of planting bombs and the humiliating course of petitioning; and the man himself seemed ‘capable of turning the cowardly into the bravest of persons’, as Patel remarked in Nadiad on 30 March 1918.31

  As they moved and worked at Gandhi’s side, these new colleagues also observed that he seemed to know when to start or end a battle, treated peasants and commissioners with the same courtesy, patiently wrote (or, now, dictated to Mahadev) numerous letters a day, and involved himself in virtually every aspect of a village’s life: its sanitation, the condition of its women and untouchables, its educational needs, and how villagers ‘used their spare time’.32

  Textile workers, a fast & a mythical dimension. Alongside the Kheda effort, Gandhi was engaged in a shorter if more dramatic satyagraha on behalf of Ahmedabad’s textile workers. He was in Champaran when he heard of their problems from the England-educated Anasuyaben Sarabhai, sister of Ambalal Sarabhai, the young industrialist who had quietly left money for Gandhi’s ashram and was the city’s leading mill-owner. Ambalal’s unusual sister, however, was assisting the workers, who for long had been asking for an overdue increase in wages.

  On returning to Ahmedabad Gandhi found that the workers’ case was indeed strong. They had asked for a 35 per cent increase; the mill-owners had declared that 20 per cent was the maximum they would accept. Gandhi asked the mill-owners to refer the dispute to arbitration. When they refused, Gandhi advised the workers to go on strike if they were willing to abide by his conditions: no violence, no molestation of blacklegs, no begging for alms and no yielding.

  ‘The leaders of the strike understood and accepted the conditions’ and at a general meeting the workers pledged themselves to strike work and not resume it until arbitration or their wage demand was accepted. It was the first strike in Ahmedabad’s history. The owners announced a lockout.

  By this time the Satyagraha Ashram had moved from its location in plague-affected Kochrab to a larger, airier site on the banks of the Sabarmati. Daily, the strikers met under the shade of a babul tree near the ashram to be advised by Gandhi and Anasuyaben, who on occasion gave Gandhi a ride in her car.

  From time to time Gandhi met Ambalal and other mill-owners and asked for justice for the workers, only to be told that the workers were ‘like our children’ and that in family matters arbitrators had no place. Though on occasion Ambalal would come to the ashram for a meal (with a chuckle Gandhi would have Anasuyaben serve her brother), the young industrialist did not budge.

  For two weeks the workers were steadfast. Through daily leaflets Gandhi coached them in unity, or pointed out that they had the opportunity now to clean or repair their homes, or learn to read, or learn new skills. But there were signs of flagging after the owners lifted the lockout and declared that workers accepting a 20 per cent rise were welcome. Several workers returned to work; some strikers seemed to threaten those returning; and Chhaganlal passed on to Gandhi a remark by a striking worker that Gandhi and Anasuyaben, who ‘come and go in their car’ and ‘eat elegant food’, could not understand the agonies of the starving.

  On 15 March, when Gandhi sat again under the babul tree, he looked at ‘a thousand disappointed faces’ rather than ‘the five thousand or more, beaming with self-determination’ he had earlier seen. Realizing that he had to save a rapidly deteriorating situation, Gandhi quietly said, ‘I cannot tolerate for a minute that you break your pledge. I shall not take any food nor use a car till you get a 35 per cent increase’ (16: 364).

  ‘Unbidden and all by themselves the words came to my lips,’ he would write seven years later in the Autobiography (A 388). Unbidden perhaps, but surely not unconsidered. Five years earlier, in South Africa, he had twice deprived himself of food: first in response to his son’s transgression, when he fasted for a whole week, and then in mourning for strikers killed by repressive officers, when for several weeks he lived on one meal a day.

  As Millie Polak had observed, the fast triggered by Manilal’s indiscretion had transformed Gandhi’s spirits. Now, in the context of another strike and a fall in morale, the thought of another fast was not unnatural.

  Shaken and stirred, the workers swore that they would keep their pledge and do menial substitute work to survive, but Ambalal went to Gandhi and burst out, ‘This is between the owners and the workers. Where does your life come in?’ Yet the owners could not ignore the fasting Gandhi if they wanted to face their relatives. ‘For your sake and for this time’ Gandhi was offered anything he wanted, but he insisted on a ‘just’ settlement.

  An ingenious four-step formula was found after four days of negotiations. First the owners would accept arbitration by Principal Anandshankar Dhruva. Then the workers would resume work and get a 35 per cent increase for that day. On the following day, to help the owners keep their pledge, the workers would accept a 20 per cent increase. Thereafter they would get a 27½ per cent increase to be adjusted against Dhruva’s award. Some days after the four steps were taken, principal Dhruva awarded 35 per cent.

  On 19 March 1918 Gandhi broke his fast—his first political fast—before a hushed crowd. Commissioner Pratt asked to speak and said that as long as the workers ‘followed Gandhi Saheb’s advice, they would fare well and secure justice’.33

  Later Gandhi admitted that the fast had coerced the owners, including Ambalal (whose ‘resolute will and transparent sincerity’ he acknowledged), and also that he ‘could not bear to see’ the anguish, ‘on account of my action’, on the face of Ambalal’s wife Sarladevi, who was ‘attached to me with the affection of a blood-sister’ (A 389). Yet the gains were solid: there was little ill will or bitterness during the struggle, the owners agreed to a standing mechanism for arbitration, and the workers formed the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association, Gujarat’s first union.

  Gandhi also understood that the fast had raised to a mythical level his relationship with the Indian people. Across the seas, Gilbert Murray wrote in the Hibbert Journal (in July 1918, after Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda had happened) of ‘a battle between a soul and a government’. Murray predicted that Gandhi would be ‘a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy, because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you so little purchase upon his soul’.34

  Audacious bids. Keen
to forge a Hindu-Muslim alliance, Gandhi pressed ‘his friend’ the Viceroy to release the Ali brothers, who had been interned from 1915. The internment had enhanced the brothers’ prestige in an India made increasingly resentful by the forced loans, coercive recruitment and rising prices entailed by the World War. In December 1917 the younger brother, Muhammad Ali, India’s most popular Muslim of the time, was named president in absentia of the Muslim League; his portrait occupied the chair in a League session in Calcutta that Gandhi took care to attend.

  Called by the Viceroy to a War Conference in Delhi in April 1918, Gandhi repeated his plea for the brothers’ release. At the conference Gandhi said in a one-sentence speech that he supported recruitment for the war. His words were spoken in Hindustani, which was unprecedented in Viceroy’s House. Gandhi had converted a gesture towards the Empire into a stroke for national pride.

  Intensely aware of great Hindu-Muslim, India-Empire and Muslim-British gulfs, Gandhi dreamed of bridging all three. A month before the conference he confessed candidly (and privately) to Mahadev Desai: ‘My mind refuses to be loyal to the British Empire and I have to make a strenuous effort to stem the tide of rebellion.’ ‘But,’ added Gandhi, ‘a feeling deep down in me persists that India’s good lies in [the] British connection, and so I force myself to love them.’

  He also told Desai that while he saw that Hindus and Muslims did not ‘today’ see one another as brothers, there was ‘no other course open to them’, for they lived next to one another. Four months later, in another remark to Desai, he described the Muslims’ anti-British anger, adding, ‘I wonder how I am going to be able to win [the Muslims] over to love and nonviolence.’35

  At the Delhi conference Gandhi thought he could be accepted as the Empire’s ally even while he championed the release of the Ali brothers and despite his Champaran and Kheda satyagrahas. The Kheda stir was then at its peak, but Gandhi went out of his way to tell Chelmsford that he could not suspend it. The Viceroy seemed ready to consider Gandhi’s unusual definition of an ally, but Sir William Vincent, the home member, told Gandhi, ‘So far as I know, you have given a lot of trouble to the local authorities,’ and added: ‘Well, what have you done for the war? Have you brought a single recruit?’36

  Vincent’s question propelled Gandhi into a recruitment drive in Kheda—he thought the district’s hardy peasantry might offer soldiers. Also, he urged Tilak, Annie Besant and Jinnah to ‘help the government with sepoys’, arguing that unconditional support would fetch political advance.37

  In July the political reforms on which secretary of state Montagu and Viceroy Chelmsford had worked were announced. Gandhi said that the ‘Montford’ scheme, as it came to be called, was ‘a strenuous effort to satisfy India’ and ‘should be accepted’. Amendments for improving it could be secured, he told Jinnah, if Indians helped with recruitment—or, as he said in a letter to Tilak, through satyagraha.38

  If Indians recruited and the British responded, satyagraha could stay sheathed. Otherwise, he knew, he might rise against the Empire. In June, when he was recruiting with ardour, he told Desai: ‘We stand on the threshold of a twilight—whether morning or evening we do not know. One is followed by the night, the other heralds the dawn.’39

  Failure and breakdown. Some of Gandhi’s ashram colleagues told him (as Polak had done earlier) that recruiting soldiers did not seem like ahimsa to them. Gandhi’s reply was that an Indian’s ahimsa was often a mask for cowardice. Roundly declaring that Banias could not practise nonviolence, he asked Kheda to display the Kshatriya spirit.

  Discipline—even military discipline—would be a step towards true nonviolence and yield the strength with which ‘we may even fight the Empire should it play foul with us’. If Kheda provided soldiers, it could help India move to the status of ‘the Dominions overseas’ and an Indian peasant could ‘aspire to the viceregal office’.40

  National interest was clashing with nonviolence in his mind, yet the ethical dilemma too was real. The dilemma was similar, Gandhi argued, to the ‘contradiction’ over brahmacharya or celibacy, a quality that shone, he wrote to Maganlal on 28 July, only when displayed by those ‘possessed of the highest virility’, not when displayed by the impotent (17: 150). A letter to a British friend, Florence Winterbottom, bared Gandhi’s conflict:

  I am going through perhaps the severest trials of my life… I want to raise men to fight, to deal death to men who, for all they know, are as innocent as they. And I fancy that through this sea of blood I shall find my haven… I find men who are incapable through cowardice of killing. How shall I preach to them the virtue of non-killing? And so I want them to learn the art of killing! This is all awful… Sometimes my heart sinks within me.41

  Vallabhbhai joined Gandhi in a village-to-village recruiting effort in his district. Others in the party in Kheda included Mahadev Desai, Indulal Yagnik (who had invited Gandhi to Bombay in 1915 and helped with the Kheda tax stir) and Mohanlal Pandya. They looked like soldiers on the march, or like Gandhi’s ambulance units in South Africa.

  But the bid flopped. The struggle of Kheda’s peasants against the land tax had reduced their warmth for the Raj, which had never been great. Risking their lives for the Empire was the last thing on their minds. Often the peasants hid themselves in homes or fields when Gandhi and Patel arrived to discuss the war, and hesitated to offer accommodation or food.

  After ten weeks in a baking countryside, Gandhi was able to give a hundred names to Commissioner Pratt, who was asked to find a location for training the hundred. His own name was at the top of the list; he was willing, Gandhi said, to stride up to German guns in France or wherever, but he would not carry a weapon. Patel figured next. Many of the others listed were from the ashram.

  However, on 11 August, when he was in Nadiad, Gandhi collapsed. The heat, his failure with the peasants and, above all, the clash between the recruiting activity and the nonviolence that he and close associates felt to be the message of his life, contributed to a breakdown. Rajendra Prasad, visiting from Bihar and introduced by Gandhi to Gujarat as a ‘brother’ who helped him forget the death of Laxmidas and Karsandas, noticed that at this time Gandhi ‘often wept’ and said, ‘I do not know what God’s will is’ (16: 387).42

  Exhausted in body, mind and soul, he had reached extremity. Ambalal and his wife Sarladevi came to Nadiad from Ahmedabad and took Gandhi to their comfortable home. A month with the Sarabhais and another in the ashram at Sabarmati led to a slow recovery, but there were moments in between when Gandhi thought he was dying, and when he did not wish even to talk or read.

  Germany’s defeat ended his ordeal. The Empire did not want any more soldiers, and Gandhi could forget recruiting.

  Associates, friends, family. Among his friends, Andrews (‘Charlie’ to Gandhi) was the only one to call Gandhi ‘Mohan’. Kallenbach, who was not only prevented from joining Gandhi in India but also detained in England for a spell, was never ‘Hermann’, but to him Gandhi had written a letter every two weeks since returning to India. These were addressed to ‘My dear Friend’ and signed, ‘Old Friend’. Gandhi would ask the German Jew if he was keeping up with his carpentry and diary-writing and the readings, as evidently promised, of the New Testament, Imitation of Christ, and Edwin Arnold’s rendering of the Gita, and also seek Kallenbach’a advice on a strong new interest—simple devices that a poor Indian could use for weaving cloth and spinning yarn.

  Gandhi would give Kallenbach an account of how Kasturba and the boys were faring. Kasturba’s temper or cooperation or illness or recovery would find mention, as also her opposition to the ‘untouchable’ family’s entry into the ashram. In some of these letters to Kallenbach, Gandhi was at his tenderest.

  22 July 1915: I have unpacked our goods and as a perpetual reminder I am using your favourite wooden pillow… In trying to reduce things to order, I ever think of you, I ever miss you… But for better or worse we must live for some time in physical separation (15: 32).

  21 Dec. 1917: We may wither, but the
eternal in us lives on. Thus musing… my thoughts went to you and I sighed, but I regained self-possession and said to myself, ‘I know my friend not for his form but for that which informs him.’43

  On 15 November, the date that marked the Hindu New Year in 1917, Gandhi, writing from Champaran, said to Maganlal in the ashram that the gift he wished to send ‘on this bright and happy day’ was the gift of love or charity, which was lacking ‘in you, in me, in many others’. After quoting the passage on love from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Gandhi added:

  Read this, chew the end, digest it. Read the original in English; translate it into Hindi. Do all you can, stain your neck and eye, but get a glimpse of this love or charity. Mira was stabbed with the dagger of love and she really felt the wound. If we too can get at this dagger… we can shake the world to its foundations.44

  In July 1918, in a blow to the Indian struggle in South Africa, Barrister Sorabji Adajania died at the young age of thirty-five. In India, however, Gandhi had gathered several new helpers, including Jamnalal Bajaj, a Marwari businessman in Wardha in the Marathi-speaking country, and Kishorelal Mashruwala, a Gujarati intellectual also from Maharashtra.

  After his spell in Madras, Manilal went back to South Africa, as did Ramdas. Gandhi hoped that Manilal would take on Indian Opinion, which was struggling in Phoenix. Ramdas sold cloth and worked for a tailor in Johannesburg—there was art and beauty in tailoring, Gandhi said. To Manilal, not content with life in Phoenix or with what his father had done for him, Gandhi wrote a long letter in July 1918: