Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Muslims, added Gandhi, should go beyond ‘verbal disapproval’ and ‘feel the shame and humiliation of the Moplah conduct about forcible conversions and looting’. Whether Hindus or Muslims, the vulnerable ‘must be taught the art of self-defence’. Fighting was better than fleeing. Finally, Gandhi drew a wider, prophetic lesson:

  Young India, 20 Oct. 1921: We… have neglected our ignorant countrymen all these long centuries. We have not felt the call of love to see that no one was left ignorant of the necessity of humaneness or remained in want of food or clothing for no fault of his own. If we do not wake up betimes, we shall find a similar tragedy enacted by all the submerged classes. The present awakening is affecting all classes. The ‘untouchables’ and all the so-called semi-savage tribes will presently bear witness to our wrongs against them if we do not do penance and render tardy justice to them (24: 447-9).

  The Moplah tragedy not only gave the Raj a powerful handle for discrediting the Khilafat movement and breaking the Hindu-Muslim alliance; it sparked off mutually hostile movements for protecting the two communities from each other. But in August 1921 its impact seemed confined to Malabar, and the non-cooperation train continued to roll.

  DEBATE WITH TAGORE

  It rolled despite serious questioning by Tagore. Indians were treated to an absorbing debate between him and Gandhi, with Tagore using the columns of Calcutta’s Modern Review, Gandhi replying in Young India, and other journals discussing the debate. In an article in May 1921 Tagore urged Gandhi to strive to unite East with West, not merely Indians with one another, and expressed disapproval of ‘the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others’.

  Gandhi replied that the aim of non-cooperation was not ‘to create a Chinese wall between India and the West’ but to ‘pave the way to real, honorable and voluntary cooperation’. Tagore said he was disappointed with ‘non’ as the first syllable of a great movement. Answering that weeding was as important as sowing, Gandhi pointed out that the Upanishads described God first of all as ‘Neti’—‘Not this’. Added Gandhi:

  Young India, 1 June 1921: I hope I am as great a believer in free air as the great Poet. I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any (23: 215).

  In October Tagore rejoined the debate with ‘The Call of Truth’ in Modern Review. The coercion that some non-cooperators were employing troubled him, as also Gandhi’s focus on spinning and weaving, but the poet seemed most concerned at a new item in the non-cooperation programme, introduced from 1 August 1921: the burning of foreign cloth.

  Saying that in Gandhi ‘divine providence has given us a burning thunderbolt of truth’ and that ‘the Mahatma has won the heart of India with his love’, and asking Gandhi to go beyond merely asking India to ‘spin and weave, spin and weave’, Tagore added:

  Consider the burning of cloth, heaped before the very eyes of our motherland shivering and ashamed in her nakedness… How can we expiate the sin of the forcible destruction of clothes which might have gone to women whose nakedness is actually keeping them prisoners, unable to stir out of the privacy of their homes?

  Tagore’s challenge evoked an eloquent response, ‘The Great Sentinel’, that also spelt out Gandhi’s understanding of the Indian scene. After welcoming the Poet’s warning against bigotry and intolerance, Gandhi added lines that reveal a writer’s enjoyment of his writing, a rare occurrence for one who had chosen fighting over writing as a career.

  Young India, 13 Oct. 1921: When there is war the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books.

  To a people famishing and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work and promise of food as wages. God created man to work for his food and said that those who ate without work were thieves. Eighty per cent of India are compulsory thieves half the year. Is it any wonder if India has become one vast prison?

  Why should I who have no need to work for food spin? Because I am eating what does not belong to me. I am living… on my countrymen. In burning my foreign clothes I burn my shame. I must refuse to insult the naked by giving them clothes they do not need instead of giving them work which they sorely need. I would give them neither crumbs nor cast-off clothing but work.

  True to his poetical instinct the Poet lives for the morrow and would have us do likewise. He presents to our admiring gaze the beautiful picture of the birds early in the morning singing hymns of praise as they soar into the sky. These birds had their day’s food and soared with rested wings in whose veins new blood had flowed the previous night. But I have had the pain of watching birds who for want of strength could not be coaxed even into a flutter of their wings.

  The human being under the Indian sky gets up weaker than when he pretended to retire. The hungry millions ask for one poem—invigorating food. They cannot be given it. They must earn it. And they can earn it only by the sweat of their brow (24: 412-17).

  Andrews shared Tagore’s distaste for cloth-burning and thought it smacked of violence and racialism. Gandhi’s defence was that all foreign objects were not being boycotted or destroyed. That would have been ‘racial, parochial, and wicked’. Non-cooperation was ‘not anti-British’, he insisted. Had he not unveiled portraits (in February 1921) of Lord Hardinge and Lady Hardinge while opening a national medical college started in Delhi by Hakim Ajmal Khan?24

  The targeting of foreign cloth, Gandhi argued, was a response to the reality of racialism. Indians were undoubtedly ‘filled with ill-will’ to the British, but he sought to transfer ‘the ill-will from men to things’. Where Tagore and Andrews feared that Gandhi was abetting ill-will, he claimed he was deflecting it.

  Empire shrinks. The Empire’s authority shrank as villagers settled cases out of court. Its revenues shrank as liquor sales went down. And its prestige shrank when in city after city influential persons threw foreign hats, caps, suits and shawls into a blaze. The Congress’s strength rose as gold, silver and cash were contributed to the Tilak Swaraj fund. Thousands of women, including many Muslim women emerging from burqas, flocked to give jewels, or yarn spun by them, to Gandhi and the Ali brothers.

  The two poles were clashing in dignified style. In May Gandhi had six meetings with Reading and talks for thirteen hours in all. Reading recorded his reactions:

  He is convinced to a point almost bordering on fanaticism that nonviolence and love will give India its independence and enable it to withstand the British government… Our conversations were of the frankest; he was supremely courteous with manners of distinction.25

  But an Indian visit that the Prince of Wales was to make in November set limits to seditious talk. In July these limits were crossed when, at a meeting in Karachi, the Ali brothers (who continued to hug the illusion that Mustafa Kamal and the Sultan would come together) said that Muslims could not serve or enlist with British armies in the event of hostilities between Britain and the forces of Kamal.

  On 14 September, when Gandhi and Muhammad Ali were together on a south-bound train, vainly hoping to visit Malabar, Muhammad Ali was arrested in Waltair in the Telugu country. Elsewhere, the older brother too was apprehended. Offered immediately in his utterances and later in Young India, Gandhi’s response was strong:

  Young India, 29 Oct. 1921: The Ali brothers were charged with having tampered with the loyalty of the sepoy and with having uttered sedition… But sedition has become the creed of the Congress… Every non-cooperator is pledged to preach disaffection towards the Government… But this is no new discovery. Lord Chelmsford knew it. Lord Reading knows it. We ask for no quarter; we expect none from Government (24: 347).

  Meeting in Bombay in early October, Gandhi and several close colleagues (including Das, the Nehrus, Lajpat Rai, Patel, C.R. and Sarojini Naidu) issued a manifesto that declared that it was ‘the duty of every Indian solder and civilian to sever his connection w
ith the Government’. The November tour of the Prince of Wales would be peacefully and courteously boycotted, and the climax would be mass civil disobedience a refusal—to pay taxes—in an area to be named later.

  Vallabhbhai and his brother Vithalbhai were asked to select a region in Gujarat that possessed firm and nonviolent satyagrahis. In early November, the Ali brothers were sentenced for two years, and Gandhi announced that a reply would be given in the Bardoli taluka of Surat district, recommended by the Patel brothers. Scores of national schools functioned in this taluka, which also had a large number of spinners and khadi-wearers.

  Moreover, several in Bardoli were returnees from South Africa, where they had taken part in satyagrahas. But about half of the population were tribals, and only a few in the Congress or among Gandhi’s associates had worked with them. Gandhi asked ‘that this be rectified’.26

  Since Surat was one of Britain’s first outposts on the subcontinent, it was fitting to challenge the Empire in a Surat taluka. Confident that Bardoli would mount a successful battle, Gandhi wrote in Young India of talukas ‘throughout the length and breadth of India’ seeking ‘to plant the flag of swaraj’ after ‘it floats victoriously at Bardoli’.27

  He was imagining the sort of dramatic expansion that had occurred in South Africa in 1913.

  The general’s rules and strange uniform. This general kept himself in communication with his officers and soldiers and also travelled on a prodigious scale. In October he claimed:

  Hardly anyone could have toured India as I have done in the last thirteen months… I covered the country from Karachi in the west to Dibrugarh in the east and from Rawalpindi in the north to Tuticorin in the south (Navajivan, 9 Oct. 1921; 24: 393).

  Indians thronged railway stations at all hours of day and night to see the passing Gandhi. At times his usually admirable patience snapped. While travelling one night between Gorakhpur and Benares, he first pleaded with and then shouted at a crowd that would not allow him or Kasturba or Mahadev to sleep. Finally, Gandhi slapped himself hard three times. After the second slap, a passenger said to him, ‘What will be our plight if you yield to anger?’ A humbled Gandhi related the incident in Navajivan, which is how we know of it (20 Feb. 1921; 22: 358).

  The mounting pressures of each day drew from him the device of a weekly day of silence. ‘Perfect truth is in silence alone,’ he had written in December 1920 (22:11). By April 1921 he had decided that he would not speak on Mondays, unless there was an emergency. The silent Monday would last for the rest of his life.

  Altering his uniform, the general announced on 22 September that he was reducing the size of his lower garment. Instead of a dhoti going down to his ankles, he would now wear only a waist-to-knee dhoti, or loin-cloth, as it would be called, keeping it as neat and clean as he could. He said his encounter with the misery of the famine-stricken of East Bengal had led to the decision, as also the arrest of Muhammad Ali, plus the criticism of many that khadi was too expensive for them. A shorter khadi dhoti would compete in price with an imported standard-length dhoti.

  In any case, ‘the dress of the millions of agriculturists in India is really only the loin-cloth, and nothing more’. He was aware, he wrote, that he might be called ‘a lunatic’. But he said he felt helpless. It was the only response he could make to an India ‘where millions have to go naked’ (The Hindu, 15 Oct. 1921; 24: 349-50).

  Rajagopalachari, who was with him when Gandhi first appeared in the shortened dress, conveyed his disapproval, as did a few other colleagues, while the governor of Madras, Lord Willingdon, expressed a private hope that Gandhi ‘would not die of pneumonia as a result!’28 Yet Gandhi was firm about his latest sartorial change, once more made, he would say, with ‘deep deliberation’ (24: 349-50).

  The man. Glimpses of Gandhi amidst the heat and lulls of the non-cooperation struggle were jotted down by Krishnadas from Bengal, who had joined Gandhi because Mahadev Desai had been deputed to assist Motilal Nehru with the Allahabad newspaper, the Independent.

  Krishnadas saw (Oct. 1921) that at the end of the ashram’s evening prayers, Gandhi ‘made friendly enquiries of each inmate… present’ and ‘in course of conversation he made such humorous hits that he set the whole audience roar with laughter’.29 When Lajpat Rai arrived for talks with Gandhi and sat down for lunch, the host used to receiving ‘almost royal honours’ from Indian crowds was ‘engaged in the task of driving away’ noisy dogs who disturbed the guest (Krishnadas, Seven Months with Mahatma Gandhi, p. 93).

  When reverting to generalship, Gandhi was ‘firm with the meddlesome’ and gave instructions ‘so fast’ that it was only ‘with difficulty’ that he could be followed (109). Who should defy a ban and who should not, and when, where, and how defiance should occur were questions that Gandhi tackled through letters and telegrams and in his journals. And he focused on details, including the care of the families of those entering prison.

  Krishnadas also thought that Gandhi’s appearance changed from one moment to another. ‘Sometimes he has appeared to me like a young man of twenty-five, pursuing his work with infinite and indomitable energy. At other times, again, his look has been that of an octogenarian, a shrivelled figure bent with the weight of years’ (92).

  Reading aloud Gandhi’s mail to him, Krishnadas noticed that while eulogies left Gandhi ‘cold and indifferent’, he listened to ‘criticism or condemnation’ with ‘rapt attention’. He heard Gandhi speak of Pyarelal, the secretary who had joined from 1919, as a ‘scholar’ and an ‘encyclopaedia’ (83-4), and felt that Gandhi protected the ‘independence, self-respect and individuality’ of aides like Swami Anand, who helped edit Navajivan, and Valji Desai, who played a similar role with Young India (93).

  However, while Gandhi’s ‘best wishes were unremittingly showered upon his devoted followers, as between opponents and friends, his love and tenderness were reserved more for the former than for the latter’ (74-5).

  According to Krishnadas, Kasturba loyally and uncomplainingly cooked for Gandhi’s guests and had an instinctive understanding of Gandhi’s needs. But her health suffered if she had to cook for guests for a length of time. Gandhi said to Krishnadas, ‘When she feels thoroughly worn out by hard work, she, poor thing, neither grumbles nor protests, but simply weeps’ (81).

  Discovering, at the post-prayer conversation one day, that Kasturba was unaware of the illness of an ashramite, Gandhi said to her, in front of the gathering: ‘If Devadas had fallen ill, you would have known of it long ago; but how is it that you do not keep yourself informed when others fall ill?’ (81) He had upheld equality but she, humiliated in public, must have wept later in private.

  Devadas’s ‘courtesy, readiness to oblige others and… cheerful and calm exterior’ impressed Krishnadas, who thought that Gandhi was developing his twenty-one-year-old son ‘by slow, imperceptible degrees’. Gandhi apparently said to Krishnadas: ‘There is not an iota of fear in Devadas’s composition. Where other people would think thrice before venturing… Devadas without the least hesitation would… enter’ (82).

  According to Krishnadas, Gandhi’s ‘tenderest’ feelings were directed towards his five-year-old granddaughter, Manu, the youngest of Harilal’s motherless children, and Lakshmi, the seven-year-old daughter of Dudabhai, the ‘untouchable’. Like a ‘rock’ much of the time, conveying ‘imperturbable gravity’, Gandhi would however unbend and relax whenever Lakshmi or Manu engaged him (84).

  Setback. The Bardoli plan was upset when riots occurred in Bombay during the visit of the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII), who landed there on 17 November. Those joining the ceremonies of welcome—mostly Parsis, Anglo-Indians and Jews—became targets of Hindu-Muslim mobs. The saris of a few Parsi women were pulled at. Foreign caps donned by some men were forcibly removed and burnt. Some Parsi-owned liquor shops were smashed. Five constables were murdered, and in five days of riots and police firing, fifty-three Hindus and Muslims were killed.

  Gandhi was in Bombay at the time. Confronting the r
ioters in the streets, he declared that the Swaraj he had witnessed ‘stank in his nostrils’ and that ‘Hindu-Muslim unity has been a menace to the handful of Parsis, Christians and Jews’ (25: 129). A fast by him ended the rioting, but a shaken Gandhi postponed the Bardoli rebellion, saying that the Congress would decide on it at the end of December. In a ‘special word’ to his Muslim ‘brothers’, he asked them to recognize that Muslims had played the leading part in the rioting (25: 139).

  He also summoned Devadas, earlier deputed to help prepare Bardoli, and announced that should a fresh violence occur in or near Bombay, he would send Devadas into its centre. He was ready, he said, to sacrifice a loved son. In another move, he asked the Congress Working Committee to form an All-India Volunteer Corps, the Hindustani Seva Dal, for controlling demonstrations.

  Bombay had come in the way of Bardoli, and ‘how to maintain peace in India’ became the ‘primary object of his activities’ (K 164). But he could not call off India’s great stir, could he? The momentum of India’s energy was clashing with the momentum of Gandhi’s truth. On 8 December he spelt out his thinking in Young India:

  I believe in loving my enemies. I believe in nonviolence as the only remedy open to the Hindus, Mussalmans, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Jews of India… We must by our conduct demonstrate to every Englishman that he is as safe in the remotest corner of India as he professes to feel behind the machine gun… In our strength must we humble ourselves before our Maker (25: 218-9).

  Yet when, following the riots, the Raj curbed the press and banned meetings, Gandhi’s response was to encourage non-cooperators across the land to court imprisonment by defying the bans. One by one at first, then by the tens and soon, by the hundreds and the thousands, Indians embraced imprisonment. They included Das, the Nehrus, Lajpat Rai, C.R. and Azad.