Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Living in a one-room hut close to the cottage of the Gandhis, Mira became a helper, ally—and disciple, despite Gandhi’s word to Rolland.

  Not all his allies were disciples or followers. Some (like Motilal Nehru, Das, Ajmal Khan, Ansari, Lajpat Rai, Rajagopalachari, Vallabhbhai Patel, Abul Kalam Azad, Rajendra Prasad and Jawaharlal) were political associates though Patel, Rajagopalachari and Prasad were also followers in that they always adhered to Gandhi’s line. Jawaharlal was in a category of his own, remaining a loyal follower despite often expressing disagreement. Some allies (Bajaj, Birla, Sarabhai, Pranjivan Mehta) were financial supporters; of these Bajaj saw himself as a follower as well, in fact as Gandhi’s fifth son.

  Other non-political colleagues who enjoyed proximity with Gandhi were thinkers, or persons of the spirit, or of literature or journalism, or social activists: people like Vinoba Bhave, Kaka Kalelkar, Kishorelal Mashruwala, Swami Anand, Ravishanker Vyas, Mohanlal Pandya, Narhari Parikh, Jugatram Dave, Amritlal Thakkar, Valji Desai, Narayan Khare, Shankerlal Banker, Anasuya Sarabhai and others.

  Some in this category were Gandhi’s associates on Young India and Navajivan or in the ashram or in work with ‘untouchables’ or tribals or peasants or industrial workers. Many in this group called themselves disciples but to Gandhi they were colleagues. Most (like Gandhi’s political colleagues) had circles of influence of their own. Their work and links brought Gandhi strength, and he also enjoyed the stimulating and often frank companionship that many in this group, and his political associates, offered.

  We can think of another small category of—simply or above everything else—friends: Andrews, Pranjivan Mehta, and a few others like Mathuradas Trikamji, who was a relative as well.

  Another small group (Mahadev Desai, Maganlal, Pyarelal, Krishnadas, Devadas, Kasturba, Mira) were allies/followers/aides who spent much of their time with him, and who sought to serve his person as well as his causes. Persons in this category had a more intimate relationship with Gandhi. This was not of course a constant or unchanging group (the other categories too were changing ones).

  The ones named include his wife as well as one of his sons: we have seen that neither Kasturba nor Devadas could claim an exclusive relationship with Gandhi, who thought of and addressed Mahadev, Maganlal, or Pyarelal as a son, and Mira as a daughter. They in turn called him Bapu, which is how most in every category addressed him. Not everyone; we have seen that Andrews called him ‘Mohan’.

  Visiting Sabarmati in 1925, Andrews thought he saw a ‘combination of discipline and love’ there. Children ‘came flocking around [Gandhi]’, there was ‘no feeling of fear or awe within his environment’ and ‘any aloofness or assumption of superiority’ in Gandhi was ‘unthinkable’.16

  When she visited the Sabarmati ashram in the Twenties, Pyarelal’s young sister Sushila found Kasturba doing ‘more than her full quota of work’ in the kitchen and ‘extraordinarily active’. Noticing ‘amazing agility’ and ‘neatness’ in Kasturba, Sushila ‘hardly ever saw her sitting near Bapu’. Yet Kasturba’s ‘watchful eyes followed him all the time’ and she ‘saw to it that all his needs were supplied’.17

  A picture of Kasturba would also be provided by another resident of the ashram at this time, Prabhavati Narayan:

  At Ba and Bapu’s lodgings… there was a kitchen which served the guests of the Ashram as well. It had gradually become a common mess serving fifteen to twenty persons. A few Ashramites helped Ba in her culinary chores. But most of the work was done by Ba herself, and she took great delight in serving her guests.18

  Sons and marriage. In 1926 Manilal, sending a message through Ramdas, sprang a surprise: he wished, he said, to marry Fatima or Timmie Gool, daughter of Yusuf Gool, a Cape Town merchant who had migrated from near Surat, and of Gool’s Cape Malay wife, Wahieda. Timmie was willing. Manilal had known the large Gool family from 1914 when, on the eve of their return to India, all the Gandhis had stayed with the Gools in Cape Town. The father’s response was clear. Marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim was fraught with difficulty. Would one of the two convert? To what religion would offspring belong? Moreover,

  your marriage will have a powerful impact on the Hindu-Muslim question… You cannot forget nor will society forget that you are my son. If you enter into this relationship… I fear you may no more be the right person to run Indian Opinion. It will be impossible for you, I think, after this to come and settle in India (3 Apr. 1926; 35: 12).

  ‘You are a free man’, Gandhi added, ‘so I cannot force you to do anything’. But we have seen that stark warnings, explicit or implicit, accompanied this reminder of freedom: an end to an editorship that meant everything to Manilal, and the probability that father-son relations would break. A father who had himself shut a hazardous door in 1920 was six years later asking his thirty-four-year-old son to close a similar opening.

  Manilal had entertained hopes that his father would approve: after all Gandhi was committed to Hindu-Muslim friendship and had consciously nurtured a multi-faith life in Phoenix, Tolstoy Farm and Sabarmati.

  But the son was mistaken. The father was not willing to jeopardize his work in South Africa and India by blessing Manilal’s marriage to a Muslim girl. As Manilal’s granddaughter and biographer, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie puts it, ‘Ever the obedient son, Manilal once again bowed to his father’s wishes.’19 Intervening at this point, Kasturba asked Gandhi to find another bride for Manilal.

  If differences of opinion meant hostility, Gandhi would write in Young India (17 March 1927), ‘my wife and I should be sworn enemies of one another’. Yet on this occasion he agreed with his wife. After associates, including Jamnalal Bajaj, were consulted, Manilal’s parents settled on a nineteen-year-old Gujarati girl living in Akola in Maharashtra: Sushila, a Bania like the Gandhis though not a Kathiawari, and a niece of Kishorelal Mashruwala, Gandhi’s Young India and Navajivan colleague.

  The marriage took place in Akola in March 1927. Gandhi having urged his son to start ‘the marriage with honesty’, Manilal informed Sushila of his ‘abandoned plans to marry Timmie’ and of the earlier Phoenix episode as well. (Timmie, who remained single, eventually forgave Manilal, it appears.20) In a letter to Manilal, who would return to South Africa with his bride, the father wrote:

  8 Feb. 1927: I want a solemn assurance from you that…you shall honour Sushila’s freedom; that you shall treat her as your companion, never as your slave… that you shall take your pleasure only with her consent (38: 96-7).

  Sushila’s father was well off but at Gandhi’s instance the wedding was kept utterly simple. All gifts for the bridal pair were transferred to nationalist funds. From Manilal’s parents the couple received a copy of the Gita, another of ashram prayer-songs, a ‘takli’ or spindle for spinning, and two rosaries made of yarn spun by Gandhi.

  Some months before this marriage, a Gandhi continuing to think of possible death had written a will declaring he owned no property and bequeathing anything found to be his to the Satyagraha Ashram. For much of the first half of 1927 Gandhi was again quite weak and ill. Doctors having asked him to avoid the heat, he spent several months in Bangalore (where a giant khadi exhibition was mounted) and in the Nandi Hills nearby, with Rajagopalachari serving as host, companion and door-guard, keeping out unwanted callers.

  A surprise was in store for guest and host both: twenty-seven-year-old Devadas, who had been close to Rajagopalachari for about nine years, proposed marriage to his youngest daughter, Lakshmi, who was only fifteen. She accepted, but the two also agreed not to marry without parental consent. Though not common, a marriage between a Bania and a Brahmin was different from a Hindu-Muslim wedding, and neither Gandhi nor Rajagopalachari cited the caste issue while asking Devadas and Lakshmi to wait. The girl’s ability, at her age, to know what she wanted was the question.

  The two were told that parental permission was possible if after a few years spent without seeing or writing to each other they still wanted to marry. Devadas returned to north India, while Lakshmi w
ent with her father and a recovering Gandhi to Ceylon, where, as in the Karnataka country, khadi was vigorously sold and advocated, and untouchability attacked.

  In January 1928 Ramdas, older than Devadas by two years, married Nirmala Vora at the ashram. Like Manilal’s, this too was a marriage arranged by parents, and the couple received the same gifts that were given to Manilal and Sushila. Also Kathiawari Banias, the Voras had made several marriage connections with the Gandhis—Harilal’s wife had been a Vora too, as also the wife of Samaldas, son of Laxmidas.

  After a short religious ceremony Gandhi addressed Ramdas and Nirmala, the families and ashramites. He was ‘nearly moved to tears’ while speaking of the poverty he had imposed on his sons. Ramdas was asked to be the bride’s ‘true friend’ and ‘not her master’. ‘You will both earn your bread by the sweat of your brow as poor people do… Let the Gita be to you a mine of diamonds.’21

  As for Harilal, he continued a life of wandering and indebtedness, with his parents or the sisters of his late wife looking after his four surviving children. In 1927 he published criticisms of his father. Gandhi wrote to his friend from South Africa, Ritch, that Harilal was ‘a brave boy in one sense’. His was ‘an open rebellion’.22

  EXPRESSIONS

  In 1925 Gandhi travelled widely in eastern and northern India and in Gujarat, and in 1927 in southern India and in Ceylon, but, unusually for him, the year in between, 1926, was almost wholly spent in the ashram, though he briefly toyed with, but declined, invitations to visit Finland and the USA.

  To the Americans inviting him he wrote, ‘If I can say so without arrogance and with due humility, my message and methods are indeed in their essentials for the whole world.’ However, results in India would speak more to America than any talks by him:

  [I]f the movement that I seek to represent has vitality in it and has divine blessing upon it, it will permeate the whole world without my physical presence in its different parts… (Young India, 17 Sept. 1925).

  Writing and speaking remained part of his life, and there were revealing or robust expressions of what he stood for. One was a review in 1927 of Katherine Mayo’s controversial book, Mother India, in which the American author exposed India’s insanitation and other defects, with the aid, at times, of Gandhi’s comments, while praising the efforts of British rulers and Indian princes.

  Conceding that the book was ‘cleverly and powerfully written’, Gandhi called it the report of an ‘inspector of open drains and their stench’ and added, ‘She says in effect with a certain amount of triumph, “The drains are India.”’ Yet he also said:

  Whilst I consider the book to be unfit to be placed before Americans and Englishmen (for it can do no good to them), it is a book that every Indian can read with some degree of profit. We may… not repudiate the substance underlying the many allegations she has made. It is a good thing to see ourselves as others see us. We need not even examine the motive with which the book is written (Young India 15 Sept. 1927; 40: 105-14).

  Rejecting the option of whipping up hatred against the British, he wrote, ‘I cannot love Muslims or Hindus and hate Englishmen,’ and added, ‘By a long course of prayerful discipline I have ceased for over forty years to hate anybody’ (Young India, 6 Aug. 1925). A year later he repeated the thought:

  15 July 1926: We cannot love one another if we hate Englishmen. We cannot love the Japanese and hate Englishmen. We must either let the law of love rule us through and through or not at all. Love among ourselves based on hatred of others breaks down under the slightest pressure… (36: 46)

  At Kanadukathan in the Tamil country, where he was welcomed by Chettiars, a trading community whose members had prospered in Malaya and Burma, Gandhi spoke with refreshing if brutal frankness on the clutter of objects in his hosts’ homes:

  When I saw your houses choked… I felt oppressed with this inordinate furniture. There is… hardly any room to sit or to breathe… Some of your pictures are hideous and not worth looking at… [T]his lavish display… obstructs the free flow of pure air and it harbours dust and so many million germs that float in the air.

  If you give me a contract for furnishing all these palaces of Chettinad I would furnish them with one tenth of the money but give you a much better accommodation and comfort than you enjoy today and procure for myself a certificate from the artists of India that I had furnished your houses in a much more artistic fashion than you have done (22 Sept. 1927; 40: 141-5).

  The Gandhi speaking thus was after all a colleague of the architect and decorator, Kallenbach. He was responsive, too, to nature’s patterns. Travelling with him in eastern India and to Ceylon, Kalelkar found that Gandhi ‘at times drew my attention to nature’s beautiful scenes, especially to the glories of dawn and the dipping sun’. Kalelkar was struck too by the ‘tidiness with which he conversed with others, did his work, washed his face, chopped vegetables, folded clothes…’23

  Untouchables and Hinduism. In Chettinad and elsewhere, Gandhi denounced untouchability, dowry and Hindu-Muslim suspicion, and presented the charkha as a weapon against multiple wrongs. Though not ‘political’, his travelling replenished his bond with the masses. An incident occurring in December 1927 illustrates both the interest that Gandhi aroused among ‘untouchables’ in remote areas and his approach to reform.

  He and Andrews were in Bolgarh in Orissa, thirty-one miles from the nearest railway station, when, as Gandhi would report in Young India,

  a pariah with a half-bent back, wearing only a dirty loincloth, came crouching in front of us. He picked up a straw and put it in his mouth and then lay flat on his face with his arms outstretched. He then raised himself, folded his hands, bowed, took up the straw, arranged it in his hair…

  The man was about to leave when Gandhi asked him to wait. Answering Gandhi’s questions, he said he was an ‘an “untouchable” living in a village six miles away, and being in Bolgarh for the sale of his load of faggots and having heard of me, he had come to see me. Asked why he had taken the straw in his mouth, he said that this was to honour me.’

  Placing a straw in the mouth and chewing it was a gesture that ‘superiors’ had long required from ‘inferiors’ in different places, including, across the subcontinent, in the North-West Frontier. At times the ‘inferior’ was also expected to utter, ‘I am your ox.’24

  Gandhi, who wrote that he was ‘writhing in agony’ while witnessing the scene of self-humiliation, obtained from the man a pledge ‘never again to take that straw in your mouth for any person on earth; it reduces a man’s dignity’, and two other promises: he would not consume liquor or what ‘untouchables’ across India were often required to eat, carrion (Young India, 22 Dec. 1927; 41: 51-2).

  Three months earlier, Gandhi had stopped the mouths of Brahmin priests in Kumbakonam who wanted to read out Hindu texts in defence of untouchability and child-marriage:

  The proper way of upholding Hinduism [is] not by quoting isolated texts but by acting through the inner voice of conscience. Nothing that was opposed to truth and love could be dharma according to Hindu shastras (Bombay Chronicle, 16 Sept. 1927; 40: 105).

  Himalayan peaks, an inner cave. In the summer of 1929, after spending several days in Kausani in the Himalayas, when he wrote an introduction to the Gujarati original of his Gita translation and commentary, Gandhi shared with his readers—in Gujarati—‘the thoughts that overpowered me again and again’ as he looked ‘at the row of snow-capped Himalayan heights glittering in the sunlight’, but for which ‘there would be no Ganga, Jamuna, Brahmaputra and Indus; if the Himalayas were not there… there would be no rainfall… and… India would become a desert like the Sahara’.

  The quiet days in the Himalayas constituted an exceptional break for one who lived and moved with multitudes and could almost never merely commune with nature. Added the reflecting Gandhi (tr. from Gujarati):

  If children were to see that sight, they would say to themselves that that was a mountain made of [their favourite milk-sweet], that they would li
ke to run up to it and, sitting on top of it, go on eating that sweet. Anyone who is as crazy about the spinning-wheel as I am would say that someone has… made a mountain of cotton like an inexhaustible stock of silk…

  If a devout Parsi happened to come across this sight, he would bow down to the Sun-God and say: ‘Look at these mountains which resemble our [priests] clad in milk-white puggrees just taken out of boxes and in gowns which are equally clean and freshly-laundered and ironed, who look handsome as they stand motionless and still with folded hands, engrossed in having the darshan of the sun.’

  A devout Hindu, looking at these glittering peaks which collect upon themselves water from distant dense clouds would say: ‘This is God Siva Himself, the Ocean of Compassion… who by holding the waters of the Ganga within His own white matted hair saves India from a deluge.’

  Yet there was something even more life-sustaining:

  Oh, reader! The true Himalayas exist within our hearts. True pilgrimage… consists in taking shelter in that cave and having darshan of Siva there (Navajivan, 14 July 1929; 46: 267-9).

  His Gita commentary and the introduction he wrote for it in Kausani were weapons in Gandhi’s battle to identify a Hinduism that was moral rather than racial or national, related more to the soul than to India’s soil.

  THE PERSON AND HIS ASHRAM

  Maganlal dies. In April 1928 Maganlal unexpectedly died in Patna, after contracting an illness, and Gandhi was heart-broken. He wrote to Maganlal’s father Khushalchand and wife Santok that his loss was greater than theirs, and his grief equal. In Young India he referred to Maganlal’s numerous skills—in carpentry, gardening, weaving, printing, engineering, management and more—and added: