Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  He whom I had singled out as heir to my all is no more… Let not the reader imagine that he knew nothing of politics. He did, but he chose the path of silent, selfless constructive service. He was my hands, my feet and my eyes. The world knows so little of how much my so-called greatness depends upon the incessant toil and drudgery of silent, devoted, able and pure workers, men as well as women. And among them all Maganlal was to me the greatest, the best and the purest.

  As I am penning these lines, I hear the sobs of the widow bewailing the death of her dear husband. Little does she realize that I am more widowed than she. And but for a living faith in God, I should become a raving maniac for the loss of one who was dearer to me than my own sons… (Young India, 26 April 1928; 41: 450-52)

  As he neared and passed his sixtieth birthday, a Gandhi continuing to travel (north India and Sindh in the early months of 1929, Burma in March, Andhra in April, UP in October) seemed conscious both of an imminent struggle and of the flow of time.

  In February 1929, time claimed Gandhi’s seventeen-year-old grandson Rasik, Harilal’s second son, whom Gandhi had helped raise. A cheerful, outgoing lad, Rasik was in Delhi with his uncle Devadas, who was teaching Hindi and spinning to students of Jamia (which had moved from Aligarh to Delhi’s Karol Bagh). Rasik joined Devadas in teaching spinning but caught typhoid.

  Dr Ansari, who was also the Jamia chancellor, ‘wore himself down for Rasik’, as did Devadas, but the boy could not be saved. Harilal reached the scene just before the end, as also Kasturba. Gandhi underlined Rasik’s ‘noble sentiments’ of devotion and duty, and called his death ‘enviable’, but he admitted his deep grief in an article in Navajivan. He gave it the heading, ‘Sunset in the Morning’ (45: 108-110).

  ‘I see old age approaching me,’ he wrote shortly after he crossed sixty (Navajivan, 15 Dec. 1929; 48: 92).

  Controversies. Readers were kept informed of his latest dietetic experiments (he was again trying to subsist on uncooked food) and of what he thought of social customs, generally in response to questions. When a young woman wrote to him that she wanted to leave a cruel, already-wedded and much older man to whom her father had married her when she was a child, and to marry a younger man of her choice, Gandhi published his reply in the newly-started Hindi edition of Navajivan:

  The marriage that was forced on Lakshmi Devi cannot be considered a religious marriage. In a religious marriage, the girl should be told to whom she is getting married, her consent should be obtained for the marriage and if possible, she should be given an opportunity to see the prospective bridegroom. Nothing of the kind was done in Lakshmi Devi’s case. Secondly, she was too young for wedlock. Therefore she has a perfect right to refuse… to recognize it as marriage.

  The only heartening feature of this tragedy is that her mother is with her… I would request Lakshmi Devi’s father not to regard adharma as dharma and stand in her way. I hope Lakshmi Devi will remain steadfast in her resolution in the same brave and modest spirit that she has shown in writing this letter for publication, and will marry the young man who wishes to be bound to her in holy wedlock.25

  The ashram’s espousal of celibacy also raised issues. For instance, Prabhavati, daughter of the Bihar Congress leader, Brajkishore Prasad, and married in 1920 (at the age of fourteen) to Jayaprakash Narayan, had lived in the ashram from 1922, when her husband left to study in the USA.

  Close to both Kasturba and Gandhi and looked after by them, Prabhavati had become a wholehearted ashramite and taken the celibacy vow, as had some other ashram women. She had done so in her teens and in her husband’s absence, though Gandhi asked her not to confirm the vow until Jayaprakash approved. Yet a question-mark remained on the soundness of vows like hers.

  Freedom within families, and in the ashram. A man whose son and daughter-in-law had stayed for a while in the ashram, after which the daughter-in-law had given up the veil, complained that Gandhi’s advice to youth to differ from seniors if their conscience so demanded was damaging relations within the family. The man also took objection to women in the ashram sometimes touching Gandhi, and his touching girls in the ashram.

  In his reply, published in Navajivan, Gandhi said that he believed in teaching self-control to those joining him but also in giving them complete freedom. All his sons, and grandsons ‘who have come of age’, enjoyed ‘complete independence’, he said, adding:

  My eldest son openly goes against me. I am not unhappy over this… I keep up my relationship with him as a father… He signs his letters to me as ‘your obedient son’. I do not feel that he is insulting me by doing so… Obedience has its limits.

  Claiming that he did not ‘know of any other place in India’ where women enjoyed the degree of freedom they had in his ashram, he added that their relationship with him was of mothers, sisters or daughters. If they touched him, it was ‘in a motherly spirit’. His touching them was like ‘a father innocently touching his daughter in public’.

  I never enjoy privacy. When young girls come out for a walk with me daily I put my hands on their shoulders and walk. The girls are aware of the fact and everyone else also knows that that touch is an innocent one without any exception.

  He did not claim, Gandhi added, a ‘yogic’ exemption from human nature. ‘Like all others, I too am a creature made of earth, subject to the same sexual instinct.’ Still, just as other fathers safely touched their daughters, he touched the ashram girls. Moreover, not only was he ‘bound by the pledge of having only one wife’, even Kasturba ‘stays with me merely as a friend’.

  In short, Gandhi was asserting his right to practise and offer freedom on the basis of his and others’ vows, his of celibacy and theirs of celibacy or restraint. Indicating that he gave himself a latitude not available to others, Gandhi added: ‘Except me no other man touches young girls as no such occasion arises at all. A fatherly relationship cannot be established at will.’26

  Physically touching those he felt close to was one of Gandhi’s traits. Putting his hands on the shoulders of the ashram’s boys as he walked, at times lifting his feet off the ground and letting the youngsters carry him for a while,27 or resting his arms on the shoulders of the ashram’s girls and women while walking, or thumping young and old on their backs, or stroking a blessing on their heads, or embracing the grieving ‘as if he was absorbing their agony into his own heart’,28 he gave affection through contact and also, we must assume, received it back.

  This need for physical contact with an inner circle was part of his make-up. We saw earlier that at age twenty-two, after returning to Rajkot from London, he walked with his hands on the shoulders of nephews and nieces; and we will see that the practice would continue to attract questions. This tactile familiarity with some co-existed with a degree of reserve with others, and also, as we have seen, with a striving for perfect purity or chastity.

  With Mira, for instance, Gandhi seemed careful, perhaps because he was conscious of his love for her, which was nourished by her assistance, abilities (which included a sharp political sense) and a fine singing voice. It was also a response to her love for him, which seemed boundless. Gandhi’s feeling for her easily overcame his awareness of Mira’s possessive and imperious aspects, which put others off. However, to cure her dependence on him Gandhi often sent her away for spells, which she found hard.

  On her part Mira thought Gandhi’s singing attractive. In the evening of her life she would recall a pre-dawn moment in Sabarmati: ‘He was the first to arrive for the morning prayer and as it was time he started chanting it. His voice was beautiful.’29

  Earlier, in September 1928, Gandhi’s decision to put to sleep an ashram calf had invited sharp protests. Informed that the calf was beyond recovery, Gandhi consulted others at the ashram and then, in his words, ‘in all humility but with the clearest of convictions I got in my presence a doctor kindly to administer the calf a quietus by means of a poison injection’ (Young India, 30 Sept. 1928; 43: 58). Mira, who was present at the scene, noted that Gandhi ‘stooped
down and took the heifer’s front leg’ while the injection was being given.30

  Among the several who after this wrote him angry letters was a Jain who apparently said, ‘Gandhi, you killed that cow, and if I do not kill you in return, I am no Jain.’31

  POLITICAL SUCCESSION

  Though Gandhi had welcomed the awakening of the non-Brahmins and of the ‘untouchables’, he would not exclude Brahmins from leadership roles. When young anti-Brahmin activists in Karaikudi in the Tamil country gave Gandhi a pamphlet where Rajagopalachari was disparaged, Gandhi not only defended C.R.; he said, in September 1927, that Rajagopalachari would be his successor:

  You do not know the man. If Rajagopalachari is capable of telling lies, you must say that I am also capable of telling lies. I do say he is the only possible successor, and I repeat it today… The pamphlet shows how you are fed on lies… You may offer stubborn battle if you like, but build your foundation on truth (on or before 25 Sept. 1927; 40: 155).

  Gandhi’s poor health in 1927 had imparted urgency to the question of succession. Rajagopalachari was not the only candidate. There were at least four others: Vallabhbhai, three years older than Rajagopalachari, Jawaharlal, fourteen years younger than Vallabhbhai, Bihar’s Rajendra Prasad, five years older than Jawaharlal, and Bengal’s Abul Kalam Azad, four years younger than Prasad.

  Barring Azad, all were lawyers who had tossed away their practice (Vallabhbhai and Nehru were, in addition, London-trained barristers, like Gandhi) and all had refused to join the Swarajists. Of the five C.R. had been the first to understand satyagraha, and he had a flair for articulating it that surpassed that of the others.

  In 1922, after Gandhi was jailed, it was C.R. who successfully led the charge to defeat the Pro Changers, and on three issues critical to Gandhi—Hindu-Muslim unity, opposition to untouchability, and khadi—he stood solidly with Gandhi. But his prospects were not improved by Devadas’s proposal to his daughter: Gandhi would think several times before recommending a potential relative.

  The fifth candidate, Bengal’s Abul Kalam Azad, was a year older than Jawaharlal. An ideologue of political Islam and also of Hindu-Muslim unity, Azad, who had been close to Das, had tried to unite Swarajists and No Changers.

  We saw that from the 1924 fast Gandhi had turned his attention towards Jawaharlal, whom he identified as a passionate foe of intolerance. In April 1926 he wrote to Romain Rolland introducing Jawaharlal, who was in Europe with his ailing wife Kamala, as ‘one of my dearest friends and co-workers,’32 yet young Nehru’s fascination with aspects of Marxism and the Soviet experiment made Gandhi cautious for a while, and towards the end of 1927 there was a sharp difference between the two.

  At issue was a demand for the Congress to declare Complete Independence as its goal for India, ruling out Dominion Status. Led by Jawaharlal and Subhas Bose (recently released from incarceration in Mandalay in Burma), a radical wing succeeded in getting a resolution to this effect passed at the end-1927 Congress session, held in Madras.

  Gandhi, who was absent from discussions, was unimpressed. The Congress had not fought for some time and did not have the training or weapons to fight. In the circumstances, the resolution reminded Gandhi of ‘prisoners in chains spitting frothy oaths only to provide mirth for their gaolers’. Also, the resolution needlessly ruled out a possibly useful option.

  Dominion Status can easily become more than Independence, if we have the sanction to back it. Independence can easily become a farce, if its lacks sanction. What is in a name if we have the reality? A rose smells just as sweet… (Young India, 12 Jan. and 6 Sept. 1928)

  Jawaharlal defended his position in letters to Gandhi but backed away when Gandhi asked him to announce a parting of the ways. ‘Am I not your child in politics?’ he wrote to Gandhi.33

  LULL BREAKS

  In October 1927 a new Viceroy, Lord Irwin, who had taken over from Reading in April 1926, summoned Gandhi to Delhi. Gandhi, who was in the south, took a boat from Mangalore on the west coast to Bombay and thence a train to Delhi, where Irwin told him, and some other Indian politicians, that a statutory commission led by Sir John Simon would tour India early in 1928 and make constitutional proposals. Saying to the Viceroy that the information could have been sent in a one-anna envelope, Gandhi returned to his ashram.

  When it quickly transpired that the Simon Commission would be all-white, with no Indian associated, new life was breathed into what for four years had been a quiescent front against the Raj. The implication that Indians were incapable of contributing to an Indian constitution offended almost all politicians—No Changers, Swarajists, Liberals, and others, including Lajpat Rai, Jinnah and Muhammad Ali.

  Meeting in Madras at the end of 1927, the Congress asked Indians to boycott the Commission; with Gandhi’s full approval, it also asked a panel chaired by Motilal Nehru to draft, in consultation with all parties, an Indian constitutional scheme.

  The slogan ‘Simon Go Back’ was raised across India when the Commission toured India from February 1928. Crowds gathered in numerous places and were beaten back. In Lucknow a lifelong disability was inflicted on the Congress leader, Govind Ballabh Pant, who hurled himself against police lathis to shield Jawaharlal Nehru. Later in the year, in Lahore, Lajpat Rai, sixty-three and unwell, was seriously hurt when the police hit him during a demonstration. Eighteen days later he died.

  The passing of Lajpat Rai and Ajmal Khan (who had died in December 1927) removed two of Gandhi’s important allies, but as 1928 rolled on, and Gandhi’s personal deadline of March 1928 was crossed, not only did India seem ready to fight again; in a remarkable satyagraha in Gujarat, Vallabhbhai Patel led the peasants of Bardoli to victory.

  Bardoli. This taluka was where, but for Chauri Chaura, the 1922 attack on the Raj would have been launched. In 1925, when Gandhi and Vallabhbhai were touring Gujarat for khadi and against untouchability, Gandhi had said in Bardoli:

  I for one am never going to give up my hope for Bardoli… I have come here to say to Vallabhbhai also that if he wills it he can, by his power and influence, retrieve Bardoli’s glory… I am not asking people today to go to jail. We shall go to jail in future.34

  That year, 1925, Patel became president of a federation of four ashrams located in the taluka. Working from these ashrams, associates of Gandhi had taught spinning and weaving to all castes, and reading to many ‘untouchables’ and tribals, and weaned many villagers from liquor. In the process they had forged strong links with the populace, even though their work with the Dublas and other tribals and the ‘untouchables’ had led to occasional friction with the land-owning Patidar (Patel) and Anavil castes.

  The chance for a battle came in 1928, when land revenue in Bardoli taluka was enhanced by 22 per cent. Simultaneously, twenty-three Bardoli villages were placed in a higher tax category. The peasants wanted to defy what for many was a double blow and approached the ashramites, who in turn approached Gandhi and Patel. Gandhi gave the green light; and Patel agreed to lead the fight.

  This general was served by a gifted staff, including several who had enlisted with Gandhi soon after his return from South Africa (Mohanlal Pandya, Ravishanker Vyas, Jugatram Dave, Swami Anand, Darbar Gopaldas), a few (like Khushalbhai Patel) who had served in the South African battles, and leaders from the soil (like Kunverji and Kalyanji Mehta). He also had a seasoned adviser, Gandhi.

  But the battle was won because of Vallabhbhai’s leadership, which was confident, earthy, blunt and forceful, the solidarity of the peasants and the work over the years of the taluka’s ashrams.

  In August 1928, after four months of struggle during which lands and cattle were confiscated because the peasants did not pay the tax, the increase was virtually scrapped and much of the seized property returned. The peasants had neither yielded nor hit back nor lost (or taken) a single life—it was a victory for nonviolence.

  It was, too, a joint Hindu-Muslim fight, supported by the old judge from the region, Abbas Tyabji, and Imam Bawazir from Sabarmati.

 
Unlike the cancelled satyagraha of 1922, which aimed explicitly at Swaraj, the goal of the 1928 struggle was only economic. Even though Patel was the GPCC president, the Congress was kept out of it, as were its national leaders. But all of India followed the satyagraha’s ups and downs. The morale-boosting victory brought Patel nationwide fame and also a title the peasants of Bardoli had given him, Sardar (‘Chief’).

  Calcutta Congress, Dec. 1928. The aspiration of ‘Bardolizing’ all of India was expressed by many, and Motilal Nehru suggested to Gandhi that Patel should preside at the next Congress session. In the alternative, added Nehru, ‘Jawahar would be the best choice.’35 Gandhi’s response was to ask Motilal himself to chair the session—Motilal and his panel had consulted widely and worked painstakingly to produce a constitutional scheme, the Nehru Report as it came to be called, which was ready by August 1928.

  White horses pulled Motilal Nehru’s chariot in Calcutta, but a radical wind blew across the session, thanks to Jawaharlal and, even more, to Subhas Bose, who was six years younger than Jawaharlal and had emerged as Das’s heir and Bengal’s most popular figure.

  Designated ‘Commander’ of the Congress’s volunteer force, Bose wore a military officer’s uniform during the session. Opposing the Dominion Status spelt out by the Nehru Report, Subhas and Jawaharlal demanded a call for Complete Independence. Gandhi proposed a compromise: if within two years the British did not concede Dominion Status and the rest of the Nehru Report’s recommendations, the Congress would fight—and ask for Complete Independence.

  Two years? Jawaharlal replied that he could not wait for two minutes. Yet when Gandhi said that the waiting period could be reduced to one year, Jawaharlal and Bose agreed, in committee, to the modified compromise. However, when Gandhi’s resolution, mentioning a deadline of 31 December 1929 for Dominion Status, was presented at the open session, Bose moved an amendment asking for a complete break with the British, and Jawaharlal supported Bose. Gandhi’s reaction was blunt: