Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  He also said, in response to a question, that after repeating for years that God was love and truth, he now preferred to say that truth was God. ‘What is truth?’ he was asked. Gandhi replied: ‘A difficult question, but I have solved it for myself by saying that it is what the voice within tells one.’ But did not different inner voices speak differently? Apparently they did; hence, said Gandhi, the need for nonviolence in pressing your version (54: 269-70).

  In Rome he stayed with friends of Rolland, declining to be hosted by the state. Weapons displayed outside Mussolini’s office repelled him and he noticed Mussolini’s ‘catlike’ eyes,82 but he enjoyed the Vatican paintings and wished he had the time to study them. He was glad too to meet Tolstoy’s oldest daughter in Rome. Princess Maria, daughter of Italy’s King, called on him.

  As Desai and Mira both noticed, Gandhi was deeply moved, in the Sistine Chapel, by a crucifix on the altar. In Young India he wrote (31 Dec. 1931):

  It was not without a wrench that I could tear myself away… I saw there at once that nations like individuals could only be made through the agony of the Cross and in no other way (54: 304).

  CRACKDOWN

  On 14 December, at Brindisi, he boarded the Pilsna, which reached Bombay on 28 December. By this time Jawaharlal and the Khan brothers had been arrested. Kasturba, a grim-looking Patel and Rajagopalachari went up to the ship to meet Gandhi and gave him the news. He called it the Viceroy’s Christmas present.

  That evening he told a mammoth gathering at Azad Maidan that he was ready for either cooperation or struggle with the Raj. Then, authorized by the Working Committee, he asked for an interview with Willingdon. Simultaneously, Gandhi informed the Viceroy that while the Congress condemned ‘assassination’ and ‘methods of terrorism’ in ‘unmeasured terms’, it would also have to resist ‘measures of legalized Government terrorism’ (54: 349).

  Willingdon took this as impudence. In the pre-dawn hours of 4 January, Gandhi and Patel were arrested. Other blows quickly followed. Not only all Working Committee members but leaders in every city and large village were put behind bars. Congress units were banned. Assemblies were prohibited. Meetings and processions were lathi-charged or fired upon or broken up by mounted policemen.

  Promising ‘peace’ in six weeks, Willingdon assured his admirers that the very name of the Congress would be finished. All offices and ashrams linked to the Congress were raided. Defying peasants lost more lands. Press censorship was imposed, and all of India came under ordinance rule.

  India hit back. Thousands defied the ordinance and the bans. In two months Willingdon had more political prisoners than Irwin at the height of the 1930 fight. The ordeal was as fiery as Gandhi had feared. Faced with overcrowded jails, officers of the Raj thought of the lash. Though the whip was not widely employed, the lathi was freely swung. According to the Congress historian, about 75,000 were arrested in January and February 1932, and about 300,000 to 400,000 beaten by lathis.83

  Yeravda again. Between return and arrest Gandhi had managed to do a few necessary things in Bombay. He sent two English watches to Sergeants Evans and Rogers—the watches had to be English, he had said to his aides. Also, after consulting Rajagopalachari and Kasturba, he told Devadas that the son had proved himself and could now marry Lakshmi. But marriage remained distant, for soon Devadas too would be behind bars.

  In the early hours of 4 January, when the police came for Gandhi, it was Devadas who roused his father at Mani Bhuvan, where they were staying—the house belonged to relatives of Pranjivan Mehta.

  There was a farewell from Kasturba, who had been without her husband for the four months of his trip to England and was again losing him, seven days after his return. She told him, with tears in her eyes, ‘Please pardon me if I have offended you in any way.’ Recalling the remark later to Patel and Desai, his prison companions, Gandhi would say, ‘She was afraid we might never meet again on this side of the grave.’84 After the parting with Kasturba, Gandhi and his son walked arm in arm to the police vehicle.

  Once more Regulation 25 of 1827 was invoked and there was no trial. Gandhi and Patel were driven to Yeravda where they were joined, two months later, by Desai, who was transferred from another prison. From newspapers made available to them, the three learnt that Kasturba too had been arrested, released after a few weeks, rearrested, and sentenced for six months.

  Gandhi thought he would be in jail for five years this time. Even so, every hour was put to use. There were walks morning and evening, and prayers twice a day, and spinning. Patel started on a course of Sanskrit, cut twigs for brushing teeth (for Gandhi, Desai and himself), and made envelopes from waste paper.

  The Raj permitting non-political correspondence, Gandhi daily wrote or dictated numerous letters, with Desai and at times Patel taking down the dictation.

  Letters he wrote to Kasturba, who was kept in Sabarmati jail, were not delivered to her, and some of her letters were not given to him. In his prison in Gorakhpur in eastern UP, Devadas fell dangerously ill with typhoid, but letters the worried father wrote to his son were held up for days by censors who did not know Gujarati.

  Manilal, who was back in South Africa, was also unwell, and Harilal was quarrelling with the sisters of his late wife over the affairs of his children. Gandhi was thus living with deep, if mostly suppressed, anxieties. A hurtful letter from Harilal elicited this response:

  27 April 1932. [C]ontrary to my usual practice, I am preserving your letter so that, when you have awakened, you may see the insolence of your letter and weep over it and laugh at your folly… not to throw it in your face then but only that I may laugh at it…85

  To Devadas, the father wrote (23 June 1932):

  Harilal’s glass is always red. When he was conceived, I lived in ignorance. The years when he grew up were a time of self-indulgence. I certainly did not drink, but Harilal has made up for that. I sought my pleasure only with one woman. Harilal seeks his with many. It is only a difference of degree, not of kind.86

  In another letter to Devadas (17 July 1932), he said: ‘All those who form or keep connections with me must pay a heavy price. It can be said that Ba has to pay the heaviest’ (56: 205). A month later, writing to Ramdas, Gandhi again reflected on Kasturba’s hardships:

  I would not like any of you to behave towards his wife as I did towards Ba… [S]he could not be angry with me, whereas I could with her. I did not give her the same freedom of action which I enjoyed… (11 Aug. 1932; 56: 316-7)

  Studying the stars. Gandhi practised his Urdu in Yeravda and studied the stars with the aid of a telescope loaned by Lady Thackersey. ‘The stars address silent discourses to us,’ he said (1 July 1932). ‘It is holy companionship.’ In a letter to Kalelkar he imagined humans landing on planets and stars:

  It may perhaps be that on being able to reach the planets and the stars one will get the same experience of good and evil that one gets here on earth. But truly divine is the peaceful influence of their beauty and coolness at this great distance… All these thoughts have made me a keen watcher of the infinite skies… (56: 232)

  In August he heard that Pranjivan Mehta had died in Rangoon. His inability to assist the Mehta family in its hour of need tormented him. To Mehta’s nephew he wrote:

  4 Aug. 1932: A beautiful nest is in danger of being ruined… I had no greater friend than Doctor in this whole world, and for me he is still alive. But I am unable to do anything from here to keep his nest whole, and that makes me unhappy (56: 286).

  Desai’s diary. Thanks to Desai’s diary, we have a record of life and conversations in this Yeravda confinement. The three prison-mates befriended a jail cat and its kittens, with Patel at times also teasing them. Appreciating Patel’s commitment to envelope-making and Sanskrit, Gandhi commented that Vallabhbhai went after useless paper (14 June 1932) with ‘the intentness in a cat’s mind for a mouse’ and learnt Sanskrit ‘with the speed of an Arab horse’ (28 Aug.).

  Put away by the Raj, Gandhi had to find a way of regaining initi
ative, but not knowing when he would be released made this hard. He and his companions tried to gauge British intentions from the talk of Raj’s officers visiting them. After the commissioner of Poona called, Desai jotted down Gandhi’s comment (27 March) that his remarks were an ‘echo of the table-talk of the ruling class’.

  Gandhi was clear, however, about one move he would make: if His Majesty’s Government separated the ‘untouchables’ in elections for the new legislatures that were being proposed, he would fast unto death. He had said as much in London. Two months after his arrest, he repeated the warning in a letter to secretary of state Hoare.

  The Yeravda three smarted on learning of Hoare’s comment on the Indian stir: ‘Dogs may bark but the caravan passes.’ In October the trio heard the noise of a propeller above them—Willingdon was landing in Poona for a race. ‘Thousands of rupees for one race meeting!’ Gandhi said. Patel thought the Viceroy wanted ‘to show that he is the ruler and Gandhi only a prisoner’.

  Letters that outwitted censors sometimes gave news of the struggle outside. Winning his jailors’ permission to meet some new prisoners, Gandhi learnt that places like Kheda seemed to be giving a good fight, but there were reports of fatigue as well.

  On its part the Raj tried to read the minds of its Yeravda guests. On 26 May the jailor, a Major Mehta, probed the three about Mussolini. Was he not ‘remarkable’ and ‘a beautiful personality’? ‘As beautiful as a tiger,’ said Mahadev. ‘A cruel man,’ said Gandhi. The next day Patel showed Gandhi a newspaper picture of Italian boys of eight to ten years receiving military training. ‘When they grow up,’ Patel remarked, ‘they will help Mussolini to destroy the world’.

  ‘You are right,’ Gandhi replied. ‘And Winston Churchill is a great admirer of Mussolini’s… What powerful opponents we have! But resist them we must, till the end of time.’ In Yeravda in the summer of 1932, that last phrase held an ominous meaning.

  The oft-sarcastic Patel would speak (11 April) of Gandhi’s time in England as ‘the months you wasted in that country’. When the papers reported that Irwin had made a speech defending Willingdon’s policy, Patel said (30 April), ‘See how your friend is behaving himself.’

  Some of this was banter, and there were other ways too in which Vallabhbhai made his companions laugh. Usually reserved before Gandhi, Patel had become sparklingly spontaneous as a prison-mate. On 24 November, Desai recorded this conversation:

  Today there was an open letter (to Gandhi) from a correspondent who signed himself as ‘one who had the misfortune of living in your age’.

  Bapu: Tell me, what sort of reply should I send him?

  Patel: Tell him to poison himself.

  Bapu: Would it not be better to say that he should poison me?

  Patel: I am afraid that will not help him. If he poisons you and you die, he would be sentenced to death. Then he would take his chance of rebirth along with you. It is much better that he poisons himself.

  ‘Sardar Vallabhbhai is with me. His jokes make me laugh until I can laugh no more, not once but several times a day.’ So wrote Gandhi in reply to Srinivasa Sastri, who had asked if solitude did not lead to depression.87

  If his companions eased his time, Gandhi did his bit for them, instructing Desai, for example, to ‘place orders’ with the jailor ‘for a cooker, rice and dal’ for the benefit of Patel and Desai. Finding (27 March) that mosquitoes were harassing Vallabhbhai, Gandhi ‘wrote a note to the jailor suggesting that he get a mosquito net at once’; it being a Sunday, he asked a warder to take the note forthwith to the jailor’s house.

  Ever the reformer, Gandhi tackled Patel on his manner of preparing a drink of ‘lemon juice with a little soda bicarb’. He told Vallabhbhai (26 April): ‘You are holding the spoon wrongly. It should be held only with the handle. The other end is for stirring the drink. Again, you wiped the spoon with your handkerchief with which you wipe your mouth.’ Yet Gandhi was deeply moved by Patel’s care of him. He would later say, ‘His affection and love overwhelmed me and reminded me of my Mother.’88

  Thoughts of mortality were natural in Yeravda. On 11 June Gandhi spoke of death ‘some day or the other’, whereupon Patel chastised him: ‘No, no. Don’t leave us in the lurch. Bring the ship to the shore and then go where you like. And I will go with you.’ You are not to go before independence. After that we would leave together. Such was the ‘understanding’ Patel reached with Gandhi in Yeravda.

  Vallabhbhai was making envelopes on 25 May when Gandhi abruptly asked him: ‘Which portfolio in the Swaraj cabinet would you like reserved for you?’ ‘I will take the beggar’s bowl’ was the alert Patel’s instant response.

  Gandhi rejoined: ‘Das and Motilal used to discuss what posts they would occupy. Muhammad Ali thought he should become education minister and Shaukat Ali wanted to be the commander-in-chief.’ ‘Well,’ added Gandhi, ‘Swaraj is still to come.’ Das, Nehru and Muhammad Ali being dead, and Shaukat Ali no longer a comrade, Patel would surely find a top portfolio in any Swaraj cabinet, but Gandhi’s question to him indicated that he saw another as Prime Minister.

  Talk of ministries, however, was not entirely wild, for by now Gandhi had made a significant decision. If ‘real power’ was transferred to provinces by the new constitution for India that London was working on, then, said Gandhi to Patel on 28 March (within three months of their arrest), ‘we should capture the legislatures’.

  A Congress government in Bombay, the UP or another province might be able to restore lands lost by rebelling peasants. Three months later, Gandhi repeated the thought to Patel, who agreed. Thus far the two had been wary of the Raj’s councils. Now, in altered conditions, they were willing to see in the councils a possible response to Willingdon’s repression.

  MISSILE FROM PRISON

  Aware that the final decision on separate electorates lay with the Prime Minister, the Yeravda trio wondered where MacDonald would come down.

  6 July 1932:

  Patel: MacDonald’s award (on electorates) is sure to go against us.

  Gandhi: I still have hope that MacDonald will stand up against the Tories.

  Patel: You are wrong. They are all birds of the same feather.

  Gandhi: Still I think he has his own convictions.

  Patel: If he really had them would he have sold himself to the Tories? He does not wish to get off our backs.

  Gandhi: [I agree] no Englishman would like to give up control over India…

  Desai: Is [MacDonald] going to oppose separate electorates for Muslims?

  Gandhi: No, but he cannot gulp down such electorates for the ‘untouchables’.

  Six weeks after this conversation, on 17 August, HMG’s Award was announced: the ‘untouchables’, or the Depressed Classes as they were formally described, would have a separate electorate. The next day Gandhi wrote to the Prime Minister that he would ‘resist your decision with my life’. Unless the decision was revised, he said, he would cease taking ‘food of any kind save water with or without salt and soda’ from noontime on 20 September.

  He had thought out his tactics in detail. Asking the jail authorities to cable his letter to London, Gandhi also asked the Prime Minister to have the letter published, arguing that he wanted ‘public opinion to be affected’. At the same time he bound Patel and Desai to secrecy. When they protested, Gandhi answered: ‘It is far better that this should come upon everybody suddenly… Sudden shock is the treatment required.’

  Gandhi told Patel and Desai that it was necessary, in particular, ‘to give a shock’ to two men: Malaviya, the country’s most respected orthodox Hindu, and Rajagopalachari, the acting Congress president who was also a champion of Hindu reform. Scholarly Brahmins both, and arrested for defying the 1932 bans, they were now out of prison. They could summon gestures of caste Hindu repentance that would persuade men like Ambedkar to forgo a separate electorate.

  He wanted, said Gandhi, to ‘sting the Hindu conscience’. If Hindus were not prepared to banish untouchability, they should sacrifice hi
m ‘without the slightest hesitation’. From behind thick walls a prisoner was forcing the Congress, Hindu society, the ‘untouchables’ and HMG to think again.

  To save Gandhi’s life, would India’s Hindus abandon practices of untouchability? If they did, would Ambedkar soften his position? If he did, would MacDonald revise his award? These were the questions of September 1932.

  To win Ambedkar’s agreement, Gandhi said he would not only accept reserved legislature seats for the ‘untouchables’, he would give them twice as many seats as had been offered in HMG’s award. (Gandhi’s figures were closer to population ratios.) But ‘untouchable’ legislators should be elected by a general, not separate, electorate.

  On 12 September, when Gandhi’s correspondence with MacDonald and Hoare was released to the press, the impact was electric. Telegrams piled up at Yeravda, Downing Street and the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi. Malaviya summoned Hindu leaders to an urgent conference in Bombay.

  Mass meetings throughout India asked Gandhi to withdraw his fast and MacDonald to change his award. Replying to Rajagopalachari’s telegraphed plea against the fast, Gandhi said:

  I expect you to rejoice that a comrade has a God-given opportunity for a final act of satyagraha in the cause of the downtrodden (57:33).

  In other messages to caste Hindus, Gandhi said this was but the beginning. Henceforth ‘an increasing army of reformers’ would resist ‘social, civic and political persecution of the Depressed Classes’. The issue was of ‘transcendental value, far surpassing Swaraj’. He believed, Gandhi said, that his ‘cry will rise to the throne of Almighty God’ (57: 97).

  A day before the fast was to start, a historic commitment was made. The Bombay meeting of caste Hindu leaders resolved that ‘one of the earliest Acts of the Swaraj Parliament’ would be to assure to ‘untouchables’ equal access to ‘public wells, public schools, public roads and all other public institutions’ (57: 118).