Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

The worst single incident in the annals of British rule over India, the Amritsar massacre, had occurred the day before Gandhi’s Sabarmati speech, but he did not learn of it right away. Martial law, censorship and the cutting (or switching off) of telegraph and phone lines kept most of India in the dark for days.

  After taking over in Amritsar, General Dyer prohibited public meetings, but not everyone knew of the ban. On the afternoon of 13 April, which was a Sunday and also the day of Baisakhi—significant to Sikhs and Hindus—over 10,000 people, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, most of them unaware of Dyer’s ban and all of them unarmed, gathered at Jallianwalla Bagh, an open ground enclosed on three sides by five-foot-high walls.

  The meeting had barely started when Dyer and fifty soldiers with rifles appeared and took possession of the entrance to the ground, which was also the sole exit. Without a single call for dispersal, Dyer ordered fire. For ten horrific minutes, the Raj’s Indian soldiers from the Gurkha and Balochi regiments carried out the order. Almost every bullet got a victim. Official estimates said that 379 were killed and over 1,000 injured. Unofficial figures were higher.

  Subsequent events were equally unbelievable. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the governor of the Punjab, imposed martial law throughout the province. In Amritsar, Dyer ordered every Indian walking on the street where Miss Sherwood had been attacked to crawl, and every Indian seeing a British officer to offer a salute. Violators of Dyer’s regulations were flogged at a public whipping post. There was police firing in Lahore; elsewhere in the province two groups of peasants were bombed from the air. A revolutionary plot that did not exist was crushed.

  Influential figures in the Empire shared Gandhi’s view (and that of many Indians) that he could have calmed the Punjab. In a private cable sent in September from London, Montagu said to the Viceroy:

  I have never heard of a case in which the appearance of Gandhi has not had a tranquillizing effect. It certainly had in Ahmedabad and Bombay during the recent riots… So far as I can hear, Gandhi is a man who has always kept his word.55

  Others saw differently. Lord Willingdon, now the governor of Madras, called Gandhi a ‘Bolshevik’.56 Men like Willingdon asked for the stick. Colleagues who had doubts ‘stiffened into amoral solidarity’ and ‘Englishmen backed each other right or wrong’.57

  Gandhi believed that it was the Raj’s short temper that caused the Jallianwalla killings, and he also felt that to order ‘innocent men and women’ to ‘crawl like worms on their bellies’ was worse than the massacre (A 426). On 21 April he cabled the Viceroy sharply protesting the flogging orders. But he did not absolve his countrymen. Like the British, they too, he said, had gone ‘mad’.58

  And he did not absolve himself. Launching a satyagraha before training a cadre that could keep it nonviolent was, he said in July in Nadiad, a ‘Himalayan miscalculation’ on his part.59 Yet he was not going to abandon satyagraha, even though, in a letter written on 12 April, Tagore had cautioned him about it (17: 464-5).

  ‘Young India’ & ‘Navajivan’. Three of the Sabarmati ‘covenanters’, Umar Sobhani, Shankerlal Banker and Indulal Yagnik, were between them bringing out two journals, Young India, a weekly in English from Bombay, and Navajivan, a monthly in Gujarati from Ahmedabad, and were also associated with the nationalist daily, the Bombay Chronicle. At the end of April, in one of the Raj’s drastic measures, Horniman, the British editor of the Chronicle, was deported, and the paper’s publication had to be suspended.

  In response, Sobhani, Banker and Yagnik requested Gandhi to take over the editorship of Young India and Navajivan and with their help bring out Young India twice a week and Navajivan every week. Gandhi agreed, and on 7 May 1919 the first number of Young India, New Series, came out. When, soon, the Chronicle resumed publication, Young India reverted to being a weekly but now published, for Gandhi’s convenience, in Ahmedabad, along with Navajivan, which first appeared as a weekly on 7 September.

  Gandhi now possessed what he had hoped for from the moment of his return to India: vehicles to communicate his message.

  The spinning wheel. Linking India’s poverty to the destruction of Indian weaving and to British rule, Gandhi in Hind Swaraj had asked India’s intellectuals to ‘take up the handloom’. When he wrote this in 1909, he had seen neither a loom for weaving nor a wheel for spinning, yet he imagined energy—economic, political and psychological—flowing from ‘looms’ plying in a number of homes.

  Much later, in 1938, after the charkha (spinning wheel) and khadi (hand-spun and hand-woven cloth) had become popular across India, Gandhi would say (in Bannu, in the North-West Frontier Province):

  The charkha is not my invention. It was there before… God whispered into my ear: ‘If you want to work through nonviolence, you have to proceed with small things, not big’ (74: 160-1).

  Practical necessity forced Gandhi to find the charkha soon after the ashram was founded in 1915. Gandhi and his associates had resolved (1) to wear only hand-woven cloth made from Indian yarn and (2) to make the cloth they needed. A few handlooms were accordingly set up in the ashram, and Maganlal and some others learnt weaving.

  But Indian spinning mills wanted to turn all their yarn into mill-made cloth, not sell it to hand-weavers. Gandhi therefore asked associates to search for spinning wheels that could make yarn. At the Godhra conference of November 1917, a woman called Gangaben Majmudar, who had ‘already got rid of the curse of untouchability and fearlessly moved among and served the suppressed classes’ (A 442), promised him that she would locate a wheel.

  She found not one but hundreds in Vijapur in the princely state of Baroda, all lying in attics as ‘useless lumber’ (A 443). Women who in the past plied the charkhas told Gangaben that they would spin again if someone supplied slivers of cotton and bought their yarn.

  Gandhi said he would meet the conditions, his friend Umar Sobhani supplied slivers from his Bombay mill, and the ashram received more hand-spun yarn than it could cope with. Maganlal now organized the production in the ashram of improved spinning wheels.

  An increasing number in and around the ashram and elsewhere in Gujarat learnt the art of spinning, including Gandhi. Gangaben found carders who made slivers by hand, eliminating dependence on mills. And before long, khadi or khaddar, cloth made from start to finish by hand, was seen again in shops, homes and streets in one Indian town after another.

  Khadi was rougher, thicker, heavier and more expensive than mill-made cloth, and tore more easily. But it brought precious coppers to all willing to spin or weave, including poor landless labourers, the unemployed, the underemployed and the malnourished. For others the ancient and yet very new cloth offered proof of honest, patriotic labour. Quickly it became a symbol of dignity and of a bond between lowly and well-off Indians.

  It was a symbol, moreover, that could be touched, felt, seen and displayed. Every man or woman who wore khadi, or carded, span, or wove for it, felt tied by its threads to Mahatma Gandhi, to the poor, to Swaraj, to satyagraha. Gandhi himself became deeply attached to the hum of the charkha, which, he would say, ‘had no small share in restoring [him] to health’ in Bombay in the latter part of 1918 (A 444).

  He was staying at the time in Mani Bhuvan, the home of Pranjivan Mehta and his relatives. Women who had become his allies plied the charkha in his room. By the summer of 1919 Gandhi was entitled to feel that his Hind Swaraj instincts regarding what he had erroneously called the ‘loom’ were being confirmed.

  The charkha and khadi connect Gandhi to Kabir, the fifteenth-century weaver and north Indian poet who, like Gandhi, sought to bridge the Hindu-Muslim divide, and to Thiruvalluvar, the earlier weaver-poet, possibly from the sixth century, who preached compassion and equality in south India.

  The Punjab and Saraladevi Chaudhurani. Still barred from entering the Punjab, Gandhi demanded a full investigation into the Amritsar massacre and the punishments that had followed. In September the Raj announced that the Hunter Commission would conduct an inquiry, and in October he was told that he could enter the
Punjab.

  On 24 October 1919, three weeks after he had turned fifty, Gandhi arrived in Lahore for the first time in his life. ‘The railway station was from end to end one seething mass of humanity,’ he would later recall. ‘The entire populace had turned out of doors in eager expectation, as if to meet a dear relation after a long separation, and was delirious with joy’ (A 430).

  Many of the Punjab’s political leaders were still in detention, including Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri, in whose house Gandhi was put up. Pandit Malaviya, the Congress president, Swami Shraddhanand from Delhi, and Motilal Nehru from Allahabad were also in Lahore. So was Charlie Andrews.

  Dissatisfied with the Hunter Commission’s terms of inquiry, Malaviya, Gandhi, and the others decided to organize a parallel investigation, to be conducted by a Congress committee comprising Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, Calcutta’s brilliant lawyer Chitta Ranjan Das (1870-1925), Barrister M.R. Jayakar from Bombay, and the jurist Abbas Tyabji of Gujarat.

  It was Gandhi, primarily, who shouldered the committee’s burden, spending about three months in different parts of the Punjab and interviewing numerous witnesses on the inhumanities perpetrated. And in the end it was he who wrote the committee’s report, claiming that all statements about which ‘there was the slightest doubt’ were excluded from it (A 431).

  On his Punjab tour Gandhi promoted khadi and the charkha and found the Punjab’s women responsive. He also sought funds for a Jallianwalla memorial, not, Gandhi underlined, to engender ‘ill-will or hostility to anyone’, but as ‘a symbol of the people’s grief’ and a reminder of ‘the sacrifices, through death, of the innocent’ (19: 307). Donations seemed slow in coming until Gandhi declared that he would, if necessary, sell his ashram in Ahmedabad to finance the memorial.

  This declaration was a factor in the decision of a young man, Pyarelal Nayar (1900-1982), to join Gandhi. Encountering him during his Punjab tour, Pyarelal thought that Gandhi conveyed ‘a calm assurance of strength’ and ‘an access to some hidden reservoir of power which could find a way even through an impenetrable granite wall’.60

  But something now happened to Gandhi that he had not bargained for. He felt powerfully drawn to Saraladevi, the forty-seven-year-old Bengali wife of Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri, his Lahore host who was in jail at this time. A niece of Tagore (her mother, Swarnakumari, was one of the poet’s two sisters), Saraladevi was the editor in her husband’s absence of his journal, Hindustan.

  Gandhi would have seen her first eighteen years earlier, in December 1901, when Saraladevi conducted the orchestra for the opening song at the Calcutta Congress session that Gandhi attended. She had composed the song, and fifty-eight singers joined in presenting it. We have no record of any comment about her at that time by Gandhi, but a book that Saraladevi wrote in the 1940s suggests that they may have met during the 1901 session. She thought of Gandhi at the time, she would say, ‘as a possible South African contributor’ to a journal she was editing, Bharati.61

  She was twenty-nine then. While there is no evidence of anything passing between them at that time, we know from Gandhi’s Autobiography (written between 1925 and 1929) that in 1901 he spent some hours with her father, Janakinath Ghosal, one of the Congress secretaries. Evidently Gandhi answered correspondence for which Ghosal had no time, and the secretary ‘insisted on [Gandhi] having lunch with him’. Gandhi found Ghosal ‘talkative’ and also (after discovering Gandhi’s history) embarrassed that he had given Gandhi ‘clerical work’ (A 199).

  Gandhi’s 1901 meeting with Saraladevi may have been cursory, but it is likely that he remembered her. A photograph of her at graduation (published in Green’s book) suggests an impressive appearance. An unusually talented singer and writer, Saraladevi went on to train Bengali youth in militant patriotism, thereby attracting the police’s attention. Earlier she was a Vivekananda disciple, and the Swami is said to have wanted her to accompany him to the West.

  In 1905, in Bengal a year of tension over its partition, she married Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri of the Punjab, already twice a widower, and an Arya Samajist. This she did at the instance of her parents, who may have felt that in Lahore their daughter would be safe from the arm of Calcutta’s police. At thirty-three Saraladevi was older than most brides of her time, and her husband apparently called her ‘the greatest shakti in India’.62

  How much of her career between 1901 and 1919 was known to Gandhi is unclear. When visiting Lahore in 1909 Polak stayed in the home of Saraladevi and her husband (where many a visitor to Lahore was put up), but we do not know that Gandhi suggested this arrangement.

  On 27 October 1919, within days of his arrival in Lahore, Gandhi would write to Anasyuaben in Ahmedabad: ‘Saraladevi’s company is very endearing. She looks after me very well’ (19: 84). The following months saw a special relationship that Gandhi called ‘indefinable’ after its character changed in June 1920.63 In between he had not only overcome his caution regarding exclusive relationships but even thought of a ‘spiritual marriage’, whatever that may have meant, with Saraladevi.

  Though at forty-seven her frame held no lure, to Gandhi she conveyed an aesthetic and political appeal around which Eros too might have lurked. Cultured in both Indian and Western terms, she wrote and spoke well and had, in Gandhi’s view, a ‘melodious’ singing voice (95:271). Politically, she could be imagined as embodying not only the prestige of a Tagore connection but also the spirit of the presidency of Bengal, and, in addition, the strand of violence in India’s freedom effort. A merger with her might bring him closer to winning all of India to satyagraha.

  Whether or not he consciously toyed with such considerations, they probably influenced him. In 1933 he would also say (to Father William Lash and E. Stanley Jones) that he had been prevented from ‘rushing into hellfire’ by the thought of Kasturba and because of interventions by his son Devadas, Mahadev Desai and another young relative, Mathuradas Trikamji, grandson of his half-sister, Muliben (59: 196 & 227).

  In 1935 he would say to Margaret Sanger, after referring to Kasturba’s illiteracy, that he had ‘nearly slipped’ after meeting ‘a woman with a broad, cultural education’ but had fortunately been freed from a ‘trance’. He was speaking of the 1919-20 pull.64 The remark in the last page of the Autobiography about his experiences (after ‘returning to India’) of ‘the dormant passions lying hidden within me’ seems also to recall the 1919-20 period (A 454).

  Another element may also have been at work: perhaps this ‘endearing’ woman and aesthete who ‘looked after’ him ‘very well’ gave Gandhi an emotional support that he, a man who in his world was always on the give, seldom received but always needed, whether or not he or others in his circle of followers and associates recognized the need. The supremely self-assured founder and general of satyagraha carried more aches in his bosom than he or those around him realized, and if India and truth spoke to him, so did his very human, if also greatly subjugated, self.

  Martin Green, who more than others has researched this relationship and the career of Saraladevi, speaks of Gandhi ‘closing the door that had opened before him’ and adds: ‘He and she together would certainly have made an extraordinary political combination.’

  Yet Green also notes the unstable nature of the relationship, and of Saraladevi’s personality, which apparently included a ‘sense of being unappreciated’ and contradictory elements of strength and indecisiveness, drive and inertia, feminism and male appeasement. While in some ways a ‘headstrong feminist’, she also supported polygamy if the first wife was infertile. Gandhi seems to have opposed her; he ‘argued’ with Saraladevi on this question, he would tell Sanger.65

  Between the end of October 1919 and the middle of February 1920, Gandhi spent some weeks in Delhi but the bulk of the time in the Punjab, travelling to conduct his inquiry (and promote khadi) or working on his report in the Lahore home of the Chaudhuris. Saraladevi often accompanied Gandhi on his travels in the Punjab, spoke or sang at his meetings, wore and championed khadi, and asked the Punjab to absorb the m
eaning of satyagraha. Both she and Gandhi spoke of their disappointment that many in the province had taken repression lying down.

  By the end of December Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri was released. Gandhi would say, in a report for Navajivan written on 23 January: ‘Where earlier I had seen a woman, separated from her husband and living all alone, the image of a lioness, I saw today a happy couple… I saw a new glow on Smt. Saraladevi’s face. The face which had been lined with care was today bright with joy’ (19: 358).

  By this time the couple’s teenage son Dipak had been sent to Sabarmati, where ashramites questioned the relaxations that Gandhi seemed to propose for the boy. And when, in March 1920, Saraladevi was herself at the ashram, there was criticism of the time Gandhi spent talking with her.

  For four to five months—between January and May 1920—Gandhi was clearly dazzled by her personality and seemed to fantasize that Providence desired them together to shape India to a new design. He wrote to her that he often dreamt of her, and that she was a great shakti. In February 1920 Young India carried a song by Saraladevi on the front page, and Navajivan another poem by her, along with Gandhi’s comment that it was ‘perfect’.66

  But his son Devadas and others (Desai, Mathuradas and C.R. were among them) questioned Gandhi and asked him to think of the consequences for Kasturba, people like them and Gandhi himself if he continued the special relationship with Saraladevi. ‘It was their love which chained me so tightly and strongly’ and saved him, Gandhi would say to Father Lash (59: 196).

  An autobiography that Saraladevi later wrote makes no reference to the relationship. Nor does Gandhi’s, though a few letters and recorded conversations reveal his thoughts on it. ‘It was so personal I did not put it into my autobiography,’ he said to Sanger. Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhuri had died in 1923, but Saraladevi and her son Dipak were very much alive when the Autobiography was written and Gandhi could not have referred to the episode without hurting her again.