Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  If the course of events in India should make it possible for the Government to reduce the period and release you, no one will be better pleased than I.

  Remarking that the sentence was ‘as light as any judge would inflict on me,’ Gandhi added, ‘I must say that I could not have expected greater courtesy.’

  ‘Then,’ reported Young India, ‘the friends of Mr Gandhi crowded round him as the Judge left the court, and fell at his feet. There was much sobbing on the part of both men and women. But all the while Mr Gandhi was smiling and cool and giving encouragement to everybody who came to him’ (23 March 1922; 26: 377-86).

  Maniben Patel, the daughter of Vallabhbhai, present along with her father, observed Gandhi’s ‘peaceful, sombre and sweet face’ as he heard the sentence, the complete silence prevailing in and around the packed courtroom—‘it was as if the birds and animals too were still, and people had stopped breathing’—and the sadness that followed. ‘When asked why they were looking sad, people broke down and wept’ (Navajivan, 18 March 1923).

  Summing up. In 1920, the fates appeared to bring Indian liberty and Hindu-Muslim partnership within reach, and all that seemed needed was the application of Indian will. Surfacing all across India, Gandhi looked capable of mobilizing that will. In February 1922, Lajpat Rai, by no means an unquestioning ally, said:

  Never before in the experience of living men did a leader so successfully and unfailingly appreciate the genius of his people and feel their pulse as Mahatma Gandhi has done over the last three years. I wonder if ever in the history of India a single person has had so much influence over the masses of India…37

  However, as Chauri Chaura revealed, that influence was not deep enough. Moreover, Gandhi’s charisma was joined to what seemed, at first sight at any rate, a great contradiction. For many Indians, Gandhi’s position—‘I cannot and will not hate Englishmen; nor will I bear their yoke’38—was hard to comprehend. For them fighting and hating went together.

  And yet Gandhi had come pretty close. As Lord Lloyd, who was the governor of Bombay when, in his province, Bardoli was planned and abandoned, would say to a British journalist in November 1923:

  He gave us a scare. His programme filled our gaols. You can’t go on arresting people for ever, you know, not when there are 320 million of them, and if they had taken the next step and refused to pay our taxes, God knows where we should have been. Gandhi’s was the most colossal experiment in the world’s history, and it came within an inch of succeeding. But he couldn’t control men’s passions. They became violent, and he called off the programme.39

  From his prison and later as a free man, Chitta Ranjan Das criticized Gandhi’s ‘bungling’. In Das’s view, Gandhi blundered in rejecting the deal offered in November 1921 and again, three months later, in calling off Bardoli. Young Subhas Bose, gifted with a solemn, driven personality, joined in these criticisms, as did others, but it was beyond Gandhi, given his life-goals, to abandon the Ali brothers in November or nonviolence in February.

  If Indians unable to refrain from violence let Gandhi down inside India, and Mustafa Kamal destroyed Khilafat outside, the struggle was also weakened by the unwillingness of the bulk of India’s educated classes to risk their Empire-linked careers. Thousands showed great courage, but tens of thousands of others did not. Their reluctance to defy the Empire’s pole was as human as the demonstrators’ difficulty in remaining nonviolent.

  But many middle-class Indians, and those at the upper rungs of India’s hierarchies, were also afraid of the wider consequences of Gandhi’s non-cooperation call—of likely challenges to their domination over land, the lower castes and the poorer classes. ‘The present awakening is affecting all classes,’ Gandhi had observed while reacting to the Moplah rebellion. Many Indians feared the awakening and doubted Gandhi’s capacity to control it.40

  Though Gandhi’s call did not strike deep roots everywhere, it stirred (as we saw) the aggrieved or suppressed in far corners of India. These included ‘untouchables’, tribals, tea garden-workers, low and peasant castes, Sikhs, and subjects of India’s princes.41 It also affected many of the Raj’s employees, Indian as well as British, one result of which was that Indians entering prison were at times treated with courtesy and even respect.

  Many on Gandhi’s team realized that though the battle was lost, the war was not over. As Rajagopalachari reflected in prison, ‘The nation is too weak; too far gone in economic misery to be able to fight and win in one campaign. We have to carry on many campaigns before we can reach our goal.’42

  Tagore, on his part, regretted that Gandhi fought for India rather than for humanity as a whole, but Gandhi thought he had to stand on a rock of national self-respect for waging any wider battle. Making an opposite complaint, others said that Gandhi was too broad and too Indian, and not focused enough on what their India needed, on what was most wanted by Hindus, or Muslims, or Sikhs, or Dalits, or some other section of Indians.

  Hindu-Muslim trust would drop conspicuously in the period following Gandhi’s arrest, yet the deterioration occurred not because of his Khilafat-linked non-cooperation call but in spite of it. While his summons for abandoning the Raj’s offices clashed with material interests, his plea for Hindu-Muslim partnership often ran counter to deeply held (and constantly fuelled) prejudices in both communities.

  The Ali brothers would slowly drift away from Gandhi, and so would Hindu leaders like his 1915 host, Swami Shraddhanand. Yet for people to switch from a common struggle to separate Hindu or Muslim campaigns was not a new event in Indian history. It had happened earlier, immediately after the 1857 rebellion. What was new was the continuing commitment of many Hindus and Muslims to a united struggle for Indian independence.

  Even those who did not remain connected, or joined the Muslim League or an exclusively Hindu body, acknowledged the import of what had happened in 1920-22. As Afzal Iqbal, the future biographer of Muhammad Ali, would write:

  These events formed a psychological watershed in the development of modern India… For the first time India witnessed a mass movement which shook the country and nearly paralysed the British rule. For the first time India realized a new pride and discovered a sense of unity… For the first time, in a rare manifestation of amity and accord, Hindus and Muslims drank from the same cup…43

  For all the shock and demoralization caused by the suspension, other emotions too were engendered, including pride in Indian hearts and respect in British ones. As Geoffrey Ashe would mark, India’s leader had refused to ‘lead his people along the old paths of bloodshed and terror and cheated hope’.44

  Elsewhere in the world (the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, would point out) violent wars for independence had often become ‘breeding grounds for warlords’ and for ‘militarism, coups, uprisings, and civil wars’.45 Gandhi, who had waged another sort of war for another sort of outcome, was now in prison and in fact happy to be there. But he was not done.

  Chapter 9

  Building Anew

  India, 1922-30

  At midnight on 20-21 March 1922, he and Banker were removed from Sabarmati prison and put on a special train to Poona, where they were lodged in Yeravda Jail.

  Gandhi had taken with him his charkha and a few books: the Gita, the ashram’s book of prayer-songs, the Ramayana, a dictionary, a translation of the Qur’an, and a Bible sent by American students. The Yeravda jailor seized the spinning-wheel, whereupon Gandhi said he would not eat if he could not spin. The charkha was restored.

  On 1 April Devadas and Rajagopalachari (who was released on 20 March) were allowed to meet Gandhi in the jail superintendent’s office on the first floor of the prison tower, with the superintendent and the jailor supervising the interview.

  Following instructions left by Gandhi, C.R. had taken over as Young India’s editor. He wrote in the journal that his ‘heart leapt’ when he sighted ‘the old and familiar source of inspiration and joy’ (6 April 1922). But Devadas burst out crying when his father was made to stand on a slab of ston
e while the superintendent and the jailor sat in comfortable chairs.

  Also, of course, standing at the interview, Rajagopalachari and Devadas learnt that Gandhi was sleeping on a flimsy blanket in a solitary cell, locked in at night, using some of his books as a pillow, and denied newspapers and periodicals. After the interview Rajagopalachari wrote in Young India (6 April 1922) that India’s rulers were unaware of their ‘privilege of being custodians of a man greater than the Kaiser, greater than Napoleon… greater than the biggest prisoners of war’.

  Two years later Gandhi himself would say: ‘Man is nothing. Napoleon planned much and found himself a prisoner in St Helena. The mighty Kaiser aimed at the crown of Europe and is reduced to the status of a private gentleman. God had so willed it. Let us contemplate such examples and be humble’ (Young India, 9 Oct. 1924; 29: 236).

  LIFE IN PRISON

  Gandhi thus matched his experience against history’s great confrontations. After advancing to topple the Raj, he was now, like Napoleon, in prison. Like the Kaiser, he too had aimed at the crown, if only to remove it. Humility was indeed called for, as was acceptance of bitter results.

  But he was not accepting defeat. One day, God willing, he would resume his fight. Meanwhile he would read, reflect—and spin. Newman’s truth, ‘One step enough for me,’ had become Gandhi’s own. For now the clear next step—for him and, in his view, for the country outside—was constructive work, and his favourite form of it was spinning.

  He and Banker practised it in Yeravda, and he also kept periods of silence, sometimes for a week at a time. A few restrictions were removed after newspapers reproduced Rajagopalachari’s findings. Gandhi was given a pillow and allowed to take some steps in a jail yard and read books sent by friends or available in the jail library.

  The last time he had read uninterruptedly was more than eight years earlier, in a South African prison. In Yeravda, giving six hours a day to books, he went through scores: Gibbon’s volumes on the decline and fall of Rome, Kipling’s songs of Empire, the Mahabharata, Plato, Jules Verne, Macaulay, Shaw, Walter Scott, Faust, Tagore, Wells, Woodroffe, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde; histories of Scotland, of the Sikhs, of India, of birds, of cities; biographies of Pitt, Columbus, Wilberforce, Paul of Tarsus, Kabir; several Christian, Muslim and Buddhist books and a series of Hindu texts; writings of Vivekananda, Dayananda Saraswati, Aurobindo and Tilak, and of his own younger colleagues including Kalelkar and Mashruwala; and much else.

  The menu is rich, large, varied. The Empire’s challenger is thus also, in his mid-fifties, a scholar with an appetite. At times he copies lines into a notebook, including these from Goethe’s Faust:

  My poor sick brain is crazed with pain/And my poor sick heart is torn in twain.

  For all his cheerfulness in Yeravda, Gandhi’s brain surely asked difficult questions and his heart too felt wounded.

  Writer. In Yeravda Gandhi hoped also to write, and there are hints that from the time he expected his arrest—from the Chauri Chaura moment, that is—Gandhi’s mind turned to the possibility of working on at least three projects: a history of his South African battles, his autobiography, and an interpretation, in support of nonviolence, of the Mahabharata and the Gita.

  For the next five years or more, writing in fact would vie with spinning for first place in Gandhi’s personal agenda of constructive work. Two years after his arrest, when a critical turn in his health forced the government to release Gandhi, he would publicly announce that he had made considerable progress with the South African story and that he hoped in addition to write his autobiography and interpret the Mahabharata (27: 6).

  Much earlier, in March 1922—before he was brought to Yeravda—Gandhi had asked his son Manilal, now editing Indian Opinion in South Africa, to send to India the manuscript papers, correspondence files, sets of press clippings, and books the father had left behind in South Africa. Gandhi did not receive this material in Yeravda, but we can infer that he was thinking of the history of satyagraha in South Africa (Letter of 17 March 1922; 26: 368-9).

  He had ‘long entertained a desire to write a history of that struggle,’ for as its general he knew things no one else did. 1 Moreover, the story of that struggle might help in understanding what the non-cooperation struggle lacked and what a future struggle would need.

  While broad, his reading in Yeravda was controlled. Since there were no lamps in his cell, it had to be done by day, and he would not give it more than six hours. Four clear hours were daily given to spinning and carding, and at dawn and sunset he performed his prayers, reciting texts and singing bhajans, most of the time to himself.

  He saw the spinning too as a spiritual exercise. In a letter he wrote in April to Ajmal Khan, the acting Congress president, Gandhi said that while his mind at times wandered when he read the Gita, the Qur’an and the Ramayana, ‘not an impure thought enters my mind during the four hours [of spinning]’ (23: 134).

  A diary into which he regularly though not daily entered a few lines mentions the books he read and the visitors permitted to see him or Banker. One entry states that he wrote an apology to Banker—we do not know for what.

  While cherishing his seclusion, Gandhi longed at times for company. He enjoyed the diffident Banker’s for portions of most days but wished for more. Asked to name relatives who might qualify for visiting him, Gandhi provided a list of nine, most of whom were not his kin by blood. Kasturba’s name was mentioned last, as ‘Mrs Gandhi’.

  Their son Ramdas and Lakshmi Dudabhai, the ‘untouchable’ girl, were named, as also Ameena Bawazir, a Muslim girl in the ashram, and another girl, fifteen-year-old Moti Lakshmidas, who had been ailing—Gandhi would not miss any chance to make a statement about inclusiveness (26 April 1923; 26: 429).

  Told that he could send a letter every three months, he chose to write the first one, in mid-April 1922, to Hakim Ajmal Khan, the acting Congress president but also (Gandhi explained to the jail chiefs) a personal friend. The letter contained no politics but several messages to family and friends, including Das and Motilal Nehru, that Gandhi hoped would be forwarded. Through the letter Kasturba was requested not to worry or attempt to visit him in jail—Gandhi feared that, like Devadas, she too would cry.

  The letter was withheld by the Raj. He could write, Gandhi was told, to a family member, not to others. In that case he would prefer not to write the quarterly letters, he replied. But, obtaining permission, he did write a couple of times, including, once, to Jamnalal Bajaj.

  This was soon after a visit by Kasturba and Ramdas, their third son. Now twenty-four and recently back from South Africa, Ramdas had spoken of his wish to marry. Through Bajaj Gandhi advised Ramdas that if he had to marry he should find a virtuous girl from a poor family, not look for a rich girl (5 Oct. 1922; 23: 139-40).

  Before Gandhi’s arrest, Manilal too, now over thirty, had communicated his keenness to marry. Gandhi had discouraged him. ‘The day you marry you will lose your lustre,’ the father wrote, adding, ‘My relation with Ba today is that of brother and sister, and the fame I have is due to it.’ ‘However,’ said Gandhi at the end of the letter, ‘do what you wish, but not what I wish. If you simply cannot do without marrying, do think of marriage by all means’ (17 March 1922; 23: 101-2).

  Bajaj had sought the imprisoned Gandhi’s advice on keeping the mind free of lustful thoughts. Recommending bland food, prayer and a passion against the wandering eye, Gandhi also asked Bajaj to recognize the difference between a thought straying into the mind and the will’s response to it. ‘If I were to allow all my thoughts to rule my actions, I should be undone. At the same time, we must not fret about these evil thoughts’ (5 Oct. 1922; 23: 139-41).

  At Yeravda he composed, in Gujarati, a short ‘primer’ for children. Two of its twelve chapters reproduced bhajans—Vaishnava Jana and another song praising God as the universe’s loving creator. In other chapters a rural mother and her daughter and son converse about playing, exercising, studying, brushing teeth, cleaning the body, tending flowers and
trees, and doing house work, where the son too is expected to join. Admitting that the conversations were somewhat ‘artificial’, and not drawn from the typical village home, Gandhi thought they might be found useful nonetheless.

  In prison he also prepared a short concordance of the Gita, with an index, giving fifteen minutes daily—no more and no less—to this exercise.

  He was daily frisked for weapons or other banned material, at times roughly. During one such exercise a European warder touched Gandhi in the groin. At first Gandhi thought of speaking about the misconduct to the superintendent, whose respect he had quickly won, but he chose instead to talk directly to the warder, whose ways evidently improved.

  When other warders were harsh to him or to other prisoners, Gandhi again sought to correct them without involving the jail chiefs. Indulal Yagnik, a fellow-prisoner permitted to see Gandhi from time to time, recorded an incident involving Adan, a Somali convict who had become a warder:

  One evening our Negro warder from Somaliland was bitten by a scorpion on his hand. He gave a shout. Mr Gandhi was quickly on the spot… He first asked for a knife to cut the wound… But he found the knife dirty. So missing no moment he quickly washed the area round the wound and applying his lips to the wound began to suck out the poison. He went on spitting after sucking and eventually stopped when Adan felt relief.2

  But Gandhi protested strongly when some satyagrahi fellow-prisoners were flogged for refusing to work as prescribed. When Gandhi’s request to meet them was denied, he threatened to fast. Yielding, the jail officials restricted flogging to those who assaulted prison staff.