It must be common cause between the two communities that neither party shall take the law into its own hands, but that all points in dispute, wherever and whenever they arise, shall be decided by reference either to private arbitration or to the law courts if they wish. This is the whole meaning of nonviolence [in]… communal matters…
If attacked, Hindus should of course fight to protect loved ones. A rabbit fleeing a terrier and a muscular Zulu cowering before English lads were examples of cowardice, not of nonviolence. He had heard, Gandhi wrote, that Hindu homes had been looted in Saharanpur in western UP, and a housewife assaulted, but the locality’s Hindus had not put up a fight. ‘As a Hindu I am more ashamed of Hindu cowardice than I am angry at the Mussulman bullying,’ he said. Added Gandhi:
There is no doubt in my mind that in the majority of quarrels the Hindus come out second best. My own experience but confirms the opinion that the Mussulman as a rule is a bully, and the Hindu as a rule is a coward. I have noticed this in railway trains, on public roads and in the quarrels which I had the privilege of settling… Where there are cowards, there will always be bullies.
The essay made other points. Reviling the other religion in the name of shuddhi and tabligh should be publicly condemned. The facts of each reported riot should be dug out. Goondas alone could not be blamed; respectable Hindus and Muslims too were accountable, for they created the climate where goondas flourished.
Middle-class Hindus eager to play religious music near a mosque should not enlist ‘untouchables’ who ‘feared not death’ as a shield. Such exploitation of ‘our “untouchable” brothers can serve neither Hinduism in general nor the suppressed classes in particular’.
As for the cow, over which riots had occurred, its protection should start with better treatment of cattle by the Hindus, not with attacks on Muslims over the cow. ‘The half-starved condition of the majority of our cattle is a disgrace to us.’
The essay asked Muslims not to think of Hindu leaders like Malaviya, Lajpat Rai and Shraddhanand as enemies. While not perfect, these leaders were certainly ‘not past praying for’. Hindus were given identical advice.
True, Maulana Abdul Bari, the Lucknow-based preceptor of the Ali brothers, had made hurtful remarks. But he had been quick to apologize. The Ali brothers were ‘not faultless’. Yet, ‘being full of faults myself, I have not hesitated to seek and cherish their friendship’. Their ‘pan-Islamism [was] not anti-Hindu’.
He was not going to forsake his friends, whether Hindu or Muslim, Gandhi declared. ‘We have to discover points of contact and with faith in God work away for the common good.’ Quoting a recent remark by Jinnah, ‘Hindu-Muslim unity means Swaraj’, Gandhi said he agreed with it. His conclusion was that ‘a lasting heart unity’—‘so necessary for both’ communities—was natural and possible (Young India, 29 May 1924; 28: 43-62).
Except for the sweeping generalization about Muslims being bullies and Hindus cowards, the essay was notable for its balance, clarity, frankness and common sense. What it said about ‘the coming wave of violence’, the centrality of the Punjab, and the exploitation of Dalits for violent clashes was prophetic as well.
But the generalization, easily removable from its context, was found unfair and damaging by Muslims and handy by the Hindu section that wished to stereotype Muslims. Unusually for him, Gandhi had been carried away. He did not check himself because he sensed a contest for the Hindu heart between two visions of the future, his own and that of a growing anti-Muslim school of Hinduism, and wished his strength of feeling for fellow-Hindus to come across.
We do not know whether (or how much) Gandhi knew in May 1924 of the ideas and plans of Savarkar, or of preparations for the 1925 birth of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Nagpur. That Gandhi was aware of communal riots in Nagpur in 1924 is known—he tried to send Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad to Nagpur to investigate. In any case, the remarks in the essay about ‘the scornful’ rejection of his interpretation of the Gita and the current of violence he could feel coming disclose Gandhi’s live consciousness of the hostility that threatened his bond with the Hindus.
All the same, Gandhi’s bullies-and-cowards remark did not meet the standard of caution included in a set of norms for writers and journalists that he would spell out a year later:
I may not write in anger or malice. I may not write idly. I may not write merely to excite passion… Often my vanity dictates a smart expression or my anger a harsh adjective. It is… a fine exercise to remove these weeds. The reader sees the pages of Young India fairly well dressed-up and is inclined to say, ‘What a fine old man this must be!’ Well, let the world understand that the fineness is carefully and prayerfully cultivated (Emphasis added. Young India, 2 July 1925).
Let us also mark that Gandhi, now nearing his fifty-fifth birthday, calls himself, for the first time, an old man.
In November 1924, in a challenging remark that again revealed his alertness to a possible ‘wave of violence’, Gandhi equated violent nationalism with imperialism. ‘Violent nationalism, otherwise known as imperialism, is the curse. Nonviolent nationalism is a necessary condition of corporate or civilized life’ (Young India, 27 Nov. 24; 29: 385).
A RIOT AND A FAST
Though Gandhi had said that Hindu-Muslim unity was natural and possible, the climate was against it. Yet he made a notable bid for it, occasioned by violence in September 1924 in Kohat in the North-West Frontier. Inflamed by a poem derogatory of the Prophet, a crowd of Kohat’s Muslims had surrounded a building where many Hindu families lived. Shots fired from the building produced Muslim casualties and further enraged the Muslims, who were also angered by a local Sikh’s alleged liaison with the wife of his Muslim gardener.
A number of Hindus were killed in the violent reaction that ensued, and there was an allegation that three Hindu housewives were abducted, forcibly converted and remarried. Professing conversion to save their lives, some Hindu males shaved off their tufts and recited the kalima, declaring their supposed Islamic belief. The offending poem was withdrawn but Muslim anger did not subside. With the Raj’s support, Kohat’s Hindus and Sikhs removed themselves to Rawalpindi.
In unconfirmed bits and pieces, the news of Kohat reached a Gandhi already bitten by a sense of helplessness. What he had said or written had not brought the two communities together. His national pride too had been hurt. ‘The world is watching,’ he wrote, ‘—some with glee and some with sorrow—the dogfight that is proceeding in our midst’ (Young India, 25 Sept. 1924; 29: 211). There was a sense, also, of guilt. If Hindus seemed to think that nonviolence was cowardice, perhaps he was partially responsible.
As he would say to Mahadev Desai on 18 September, the Hindus ‘could charge him with breach of faith’, for he had asked them to believe in the Ali brothers who, most Hindus thought, had let Gandhi down. On 19 September he told Shaukat Ali: ‘I cannot bear to hear people accusing you and your brother of having broken your promises to me’ (29: 193).
As Gandhi admitted (Young India, 25 Sept. 1924), ‘[H]andling large masses of men, dealing with them, speaking and acting for them [was] no joke for a man whose capacity God has so circumscribed’ (29: 198). Yet persons like the Ali brothers had not done more to ease his burden; they had not made Hindus feel that Gandhi’s trust in them was vindicated. In Young India he would write (4 Dec. 1924):
I am in the world feeling my way to light ‘amid the encircling gloom’. I often err and miscalculate. My trust is solely in God. And I trust men only because I trust God. If I had no God to rely upon, I should be like Timon, a hater of my species (29: 408).
Helplessness above all, but also hurt, guilt and blame had turned Gandhi into a ‘smouldering mass’, to use his phrase. The news of Kohat ‘lit [the mass] aflame’ (29: 211). His response was to announce a twenty-one-day fast as ‘a penance and a prayer’. At first thinking of a forty-day fast, he later settled on a shorter period of trial and told a few friends that he would end the fast even earlier if he
found that death was the only alternative (29: 228).
When he decided on the fast, Gandhi was a house-guest in Muhammad Ali’s home in Delhi, en route to Kohat—along with, he hoped, the Ali brothers. He consulted no one about the fast, not his family, nor close co-workers like Desai, nor his host.
Ali criticized the decision, protesting that as Gandhi’s host and as the Congress president he should have been consulted, and that if Gandhi did not survive the fast, Hindus would attack Muslims. From her sickbed Ali’s old mother, Bi Amman, who wore khadi, implored Gandhi not to fast. Journeying from Bombay, Shaukat Ali tried to dissuade Gandhi, as did many others.
An unmoved Gandhi’s reply to Bi Amman was that he would have carried out her command as coming from his own long-deceased mother, but he had to obey a call from God. The many Hindus who pressed him to reconsider (Saraladevi was one of them) were reminded that Rama had gone to the forest despite his mother’s entreaties.
Also journeying to Delhi, and fearing that a Gandhi yet to recover fully would not survive twenty-one days of hunger, Rajagopalachari speculated that the fast was born of Gandhi’s grief at the failure of Muslim leaders to appreciate Hindu suffering or return his gestures.
Gandhi’s own explanation was broader. ‘To revile one another’s religion, to make reckless statements, to utter untruths, to break the heads of innocent men and to desecrate temples or mosques’ had become the order of the day. As the author of an energy that had become self-destructive, he had to respond, he said (29: 211).
Yet a more personal impulse, too, was indicated when Gandhi said: ‘I cried out to God even like Draupadi when she seemed abandoned by her five brave protectors. And her cry [was not] in vain. “Rock of Ages, cleft for me; Let me hide myself in Thee”’ (29: 198).
Muhammad Ali’s home, where the fast began on 17 September, stood on the Ridge, on Delhi’s outskirts, from where in 1857 the British had begun their recapture of Delhi. Nearby rose a memorial marking the mutiny.
The scene inside Muhammad Ali’s home was also powerfully symbolic: Gandhi fasting, surrounded by prominent Hindu and Muslim leaders (Swami Shraddhanand, Motilal Nehru, Das, Rajagopalachari, the Ali brothers, Ajmal Khan, Ansari, Abul Kalam Azad and others) and also by two Britons, Andrews, who came at once, and Foss Westcott, the Bishop of Calcutta.
Across the land people were stirred and also anxious. A practised faster who well understood his body, Gandhi however fully expected to survive and said as much to all enquirers.
Among other things he was making amends to the Hindus and strengthening his bond with them. This was indicated by the references to Rama and Draupadi, and confirmed by a ‘personal’ letter to readers of Navajivan , signed, ‘Your servant, Mohandas Gandhi,’ that he wrote in Gujarati soon after the fast began (28 Sept. 1924).
In this letter he said that while he himself would always practise complete nonviolence, that could not be everyone’s response. ‘The sword indeed has a place in the world, but not cowardice.’ His readers had the duty to ‘protect [their] wards by using the sword if necessary’.
Saying that he had always ‘put his soul’ into Navajivan and written not ‘even one word there without God as witness’, Gandhi added that he had nonetheless been ‘tortured’ by the thought that he may perhaps have harmed his readers by unwittingly suggesting that cowardice was nonviolence. After starting to fast in penance, he felt better (29: 218-19).
If the fast’s ‘penance’ was a signal to the Hindus, its ‘prayer’ seemed meant, firstly, for Congress leaders. He wanted them to burn for Hindu-Muslim unity. ‘Divided, we must ever remain slaves,’ he had said to Ajmal Khan in a letter written as far back as in March 1922, just after he was arrested, adding that if ‘a sufficient number’ of Hindu and Muslim leaders preserved an unbreakable faith in unity, it would ‘permeate the masses’ (26: 356).
The prayer was also addressed to the Muslim community. On 19 September he told Shaukat Ali: ‘I would ask Muslims to befriend the Hindus if they think it is not contrary to their religion. [If they feel it is contrary,] then I am sure I should have no cause to live any more. I should die’ (29: 194). During the first week of the fast he spoke in a similar vein:
I have not a shadow of doubt that Islam has sufficient in itself to become purged of illiberalism and intolerance (Young India, 25 Sept. 1924; 29: 189).
The Ali brothers responded with gracious gestures. Both plied the charkha and showed Gandhi their yarn. Again and again Shaukat Ali called Gandhi ‘my chief’ and spoke sadly of Gandhi’s ‘bed of sorrow’ in his younger brother’s house, where the entire household had turned vegetarian during Gandhi’s stay. Gandhi said he had not received ‘warmer or better treatment than under Muhammad Ali’s roof’, and added: ‘I am experiencing here the richest love. It is more than bread for me’ (29: 212).
Towards the end of the fast, in his symbolic gesture, Muhammad Ali purchased a cow from a butcher and asked Gandhi to gift it to a Hindu cow-shelter. But we must assume that the brothers felt targeted by the fast, and we know that over the Kohat violence they did not see eye-to-eye with Gandhi.
The fast exposed Gandhi’s vulnerable if also creative face. The self-possessed general of 1921, one whom Hindus and Muslims had fervently and unquestioningly followed, was revealed in 1924 as somebody who could also feel weak, guilty and abandoned. And when Gandhi starved himself, he was also—despite all the confidence he expressed about his body’s capacity—struggling, and entirely dependent on the water he had allowed himself, on Kasturba and others joining him to assist, on doctors, on his God.
The dependence increased his humility and warmth, and he wrote or dictated affectionate, caring letters to Jawaharlal, Rajagopalachari, Vallabhbhai and his daughter Maniben, Bajaj, Birla, Lakshmi Dudabhai and several others.
Referring, just before the fast, to ‘my own dearest relations’, Gandhi had said (Young India, 4 Sept. 1924): ‘Sometimes love’s anguish left deep scars on the loved ones, but it let much deeper ones on the lover’s bosom’ (29: 75). Aware that he had often hurt those dearest to him, he agonized, most of the time secretly.
He wrote warmly to Devadas, who while translating for Navajivan a typed English text of Gandhi’s explanation of his fast, where it was stated that the fast arose from ‘hopelessness’, had rectified the word to ‘helplessness’. ‘[Y]ou have, as it were,’ the father wrote, ‘proved your title to be my heir. May God give you long life and may He advance your beautiful character and proficiency’ (21 Sept. 1924; 29: 207).
On the twentieth day of the fast, Gandhi made the remark (quoted at the start of this chapter) about the humility taught by the fates of Napoleon and the Kaiser. Added Gandhi: ‘During these days of grace, privilege and peace, I have hummed to myself a hymn we often sing at the Satyagraha Ashram, “Raghuvar tum ko meri laaj”’ (29: 236).
The hymn was by Tulsidas, the sixteenth-century poet who had popularized the name of Rama, the prince-hero of the classical epic Ramayana, as a path to the divine and a force greater than the prince; and the lines that Gandhi was humming were entreaties from ‘a sinner of old’ to One who ‘protects the weak’ and ‘removes the sin and misery of mankind’. A similar sentiment was contained in the plea to the Rock of Ages that, as we saw, Gandhi had spontaneously recited (and perhaps inwardly sung as well).
At the end of the twenty-first day, Gandhi asked for full, unhindered freedom of worship in temples and mosques, and put it to his friends present to be willing to lay down their lives for Hindu-Muslim friendship.
Ajmal Khan and Abul Kalam Azad promised their total commitment. At Gandhi’s request, Vinoba Bhave recited from the Upanishads; Imam Bawazir, who like Bhave had travelled from the Sabarmati Ashram, recited the Fateha; and Andrews sang, ‘When I survey the wondrous Cross’.
To his host, Gandhi said, ‘You are more than a brother to me.’ Adding, ‘God is great and merciful,’ he broke his fast, sipping orange juice handed to him by Dr Ansari.
Andrews stayed at Gandhi’s side throughout the
fast and was deeply affected. He thought his friend had taken upon himself the sins of his Hindu and Muslim compatriots. Long after the fast Andrews would say: ‘No more impressive event has happened in India’s recent history.’11
For a while at least, many others in India also seemed touched, but perhaps the fast’s most significant impact was on the leaders gathered around the starving Gandhi, who saw that Hindu-Muslim unity would not come without a price.
Gandhi recognized that one man willing to pay that price was Motilal’s son, Jawaharlal, whose active cultivation and grooming by Gandhi dates from this time. When the fast started, Gandhi wrote to a ‘stunned’ Jawaharlal asking him not to be anxious, but Jawahar ran to Gandhi’s bedside, taking his seven-year-old daughter Indira with him.
A month after the fast ended, Gandhi proposed to Jawaharlal the formation of a ‘flying Hindu-Muslim column’ that would quickly reach any riot area and investigate (29: 323). This message was soon followed, in the middle of November, by a greeting to Jawaharlal for his thirty-fifth birthday, and days later, by a telegram sent when Jawaharlal and his wife Kamala lost a new-born child. While a host of others also received similar messages at this time from Gandhi, his interest in Jawaharlal, swelling in the crucible of the fast, was exceptional.
POLARIZATION
Yet polarization was proceeding apace. In 1925, a group of Maharashtrian Brahmins, led by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (a doctor who had taken part in the non-cooperation movement but concluded that ‘yavan-snakes* reared on the milk of non-cooperation were provoking riots in the nation with their poisonous hissing’12) and backed by Savarkar, formed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Nagpur.
Declaring that the strengthening of Hindu Dharma, Hindu Culture, and the Hindu Nation was its aim, the RSS equated Hindu interests with Indian interests. Towards its goal the RSS would organize, across India, shakhas (branches) of Hindu young men of all castes. The youths would be asked to wear khaki shorts and taught to sing Hindu nationalist verses, to drill, to practise the use of sticks and, at times, daggers, and to salute the ‘bhagwa’ or the saffron banner reportedly used by Brahmin Peshwas during their assaults on Muslim chieftains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 39
