Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Though denied office in the Punjab, the Muslim League emerged as the largest party there, and it headed coalition ministries in Bengal and Sindh. For Gandhi and others saddened by the polarization, a silver lining was provided by the Muslim-majority NWFP, where the Khan brothers defeated the League in an election fought on the issue of Pakistan. Dr Khan Sahib again headed the ministry.

  In Madras, C.R., now back in the Congress, was willing to lead once more. He was publicly endorsed by Gandhi and Patel but—in another sign that Gandhi’s word was no longer law—the province’s Congress legislators punished Rajagopalachari for staying out of Quit India and chose T. Prakasam as chief minister.

  Bose’s death. Reports reached India towards the end of August 1945, right after Japan’s surrender, that Subhas Bose had been killed in a crash of a Japanese plane in Taiwan. ‘It is just what would be given out if he meant to go underground,’ Wavell wrote in his diary.53 Gandhi too remained unconvinced of Subhas’s death until the following year, when Colonel Habib-ur-Rahman, a Bose aide who survived the crash, gave him, in New Delhi, an eye-witness account of Bose’s final, stoic moments.

  Gandhi had last met Bose in 1940, a year after their big split and seven months before Subhas escaped from detention and went on to lead the Indian National Army (INA) alongside the forces, now defeated, of Imperial Japan. As we have seen, Quit India had brought the two closer to each other in their thoughts. Cripps (in 1942) and Azad (in 1942 and later) expressed surprise that Gandhi should laud the champion of a strategy conflicting sharply with his own, but Gandhi said that Bose should be judged no differently from heroes in other lands.

  NAVAL MUTINY

  Unexpected angles to Gandhi’s nonviolence were revealed in his reaction to a brief mutiny in February 1946 in the Royal Indian Navy (RIN). The mutiny’s initiators, a group of young naval ratings—Hindu and Muslim—had been thrilled by the INA’s exploits and in particular by the release, prompted by the Raj’s political calculations, of three INA officers earlier sentenced for life—a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh. The rebels rallied support around two issues: the discriminatory attitude of some white RIN officers and the quality of food issued to the ratings.

  None of the large number of RIN’s Indian officers joined the revolt but many ratings did. On 19 February a shore-based signal school in Bombay, HMIS Talwar, was captured and its Union Jack brought down. A Naval Central Strike Committee (NCSC) was formed, shore-to-ship and ship-to-ship communications were set up, several ships taken over, and flags of the Congress and the Muslim League flown over them.

  As one of the protagonists, B.C. Dutt, has related in Mutiny of the Innocents, the young rebels imagined that they were in a position to ‘offer the Royal Indian Navy on a platter’ to any Indian leaders willing to grab it.54 Impressed by stories of her Quit India role, they went first to Aruna Asaf Ali, who was visiting Bombay. Her disappointing advice was that they should discuss their service demands with the naval authorities and their political dreams with Patel and Jinnah, both living in Bombay.

  The next day the mutineers sent negotiators to Vice-Admiral J.H. Godfrey, the flag officer commanding the RIN, who wanted all ratings to surrender. This was unacceptable to the mutiny’s leaders, and 21 February saw an exchange of fire between shore-based mutineers and loyal troops trying to confine them to barracks. Several ratings were killed.

  Angered by the troops’ firing, Aruna, her socialist colleague Achyut Patwardhan and some Communist leaders in Bombay called upon Bombay’s workers and students to strike in sympathy with the ratings. On 22 February many mill-hands and students took to the streets. Public buildings and railway stations were burnt and shops, including grain-shops, looted. There was ‘a regular fury against Englishmen and English dress’, and firing by the police and the troops.55 The ports of Karachi and Calcutta also saw incidents.

  That day Patel told mutineers calling on him that he agreed with the RIN chief that they should surrender. He would however press, Patel added, for the ratings’ legitimate demands. Approached by Muslim ratings, Jinnah gave an identical response. On 23 February an exhausted NCSC, headed by a young Muslim called M.S. Khan, called off the mutiny, which along with related disturbances had resulted, over a four-day period, in 236 deaths and injuries to 1,156.

  Before word of the mutiny’s end reached him, Gandhi commented on the disturbances in a statement from Poona. To compel ‘a single person’ to ‘shout “Jai Hind”’ was to drive a nail ‘into the coffin of Swaraj in terms of the dumb millions of India’. The violence in the streets was ‘unbecoming’ and anti-poor, and the violence of the mutineers was thoughtless. ‘For there is such a thing,’ he added, ‘as thoughtful violent action.’

  Unimpressed that Hindus and Muslims had come together ‘for the purpose of violent action’, Gandhi in fact saw the combination as ‘unholy’ and ‘probably… a preparation for mutual violence’.56 Criticizing Gandhi’s statement, Aruna claimed that popular violence had helped the 1942 movement. As for the communal question, she said she would ‘rather unite Hindus and Muslims at the barricade than on the constitutional front’.

  When, on 26 February, Gandhi answered Aruna, whom he likened to a daughter, the end of the mutiny was known to all:

  I do not read the 1942 events as does the brave lady. It was good that the people rose spontaneously. It was bad that some or many resorted to violence…

  India has become a pattern for all exploited races of the earth, because India’s has been an open, unarmed effort which demands sacrifice from all without inflicting injury on the usurper. The millions in India would not have been awakened but for the open, unarmed struggle…

  Aruna would ‘rather unite Hindus and Muslims at the barricade than on the constitutional front’. Even in terms of violence, this is a misleading proposition… Fighters do not always live at the barricade. They are too wise to commit suicide. The barricade life has always to be followed by the constitutional. That front is not taboo for ever…

  It is a matter of great relief that the ratings have listened to Sardar Patel’s advice to surrender. They have not surrendered their honour. So far as I can see, in resorting to mutiny they were badly advised. If it was for grievance, fancied or real, they should have waited for the guidance and intervention of political leaders of their choice.

  If they mutinied for the freedom of India, they were doubly wrong. They could not do so without a call from a prepared revolutionary party…

  Aruna is entitled to say that the people ‘are not interested in the ethics of violence or non-violence’, but the people are very much interested in knowing the way which will bring freedom to the masses—violence or non-violence (90: 4-6).

  Later, Dutt would acknowledge that the mutiny was ‘immature’ and ‘a great futility’.57 On his part, a Gandhi disapproving of violence was nonetheless ready, we have seen, to examine violence from the standpoint of its effectiveness—to distinguish between thoughtless and thoughtful violence, between foolhardiness and a mutiny that answered a ‘call from a revolutionary party’.

  ‘Britain will quit.’ On 24 January 1946—a month before the mutiny—a private telegram from London informed Wavell that three British ministers would visit in the near future to ‘negotiate a settlement of the Indian problem’. On 19 February this was publicly announced, and on 15 March Premier Attlee told the House of Commons that Britain had indeed decided to quit. To figure out how, and to whom, the Empire would leave India, three ministers would arrive in New Delhi on 24 March. ‘If India elects for independence,’ said Attlee, ‘she has a right to do so’.

  Friends in England had indicated to Gandhi that a declaration like this was in the offing. It was what he had waited and worked for, but the Gandhi of early 1946 was older and less in command than the 1942 initiator of Quit India, not wholly clear on his role in negotiations with the British ministers, and not sure of how Nehru, Patel, Azad and company would deal with them. Also, he did not know how the British ministers would deal with Jinnah and his
Pakistan demand.

  On 10 February 1946, following a withdrawal of the ban against it, Harijan was able to resume publication. ‘A newspaper man myself,’ as he described himself in April, Gandhi was glad (90: 187). On 11 March he made his first public statement about the British ministers:

  As brave people it is our duty to take at its face value the declaration of the British Ministers that they are coming to restore to India what is her due. If a debtor came to your house in contrition to repay his debt, would it not be your duty to welcome him? (90: 65)

  The person. At seventy-six Gandhi was nursing personal challenges. For one thing, he was running into signs of a weakening memory.

  To Maniben Nanavati, 2 March 1946. Kishorelalbhai writes to tell me that I have not replied to your letter. If so, it is a matter of shame for me. It is, however, clear that I tend to forget (90: 25).

  And in the first quarter of 1946 he seemed unclear about where he should be. By this time he had travelled to Bengal, Assam, Orissa and south India, making punishing journeys that reconnected him to his far-flung people.

  A proposed visit to Bardoli was cancelled because Vallabhbhai, who had offered to take Gandhi there, was needed in Bombay to calm that city. In a letter written on 26 February, Gandhi had asked Vallabhbhai to make plans not with ‘my convenience in view’ but according to ‘what the circumstances of the nation demanded of us’ (90: 7).

  He spent some weeks in Poona and a village south of Poona, Uruli-Kanchan, with nature-cure as his focus. For a while he thought that he and Dinshaw Mehta, the nature-cure expert, might establish a health centre in Poona. But Mehta seemed unable to impart his skills to others and in any case Poona was too big and distant for poor villagers. Others had earlier said as much, but Gandhi had not heeded them.

  It is plain to me as it has become to some of my friends that I am incorrigible. I can learn only by my mistakes. I do not know why I could not learn through objections or warnings from others. I can learn only when I stumble and fall and feel the pain (Harijan, 17 March 1946; 90: 38).

  He moved to a clinic at Uruli-Kanchan, where he practised nature-cure, prescribing treatment to numerous poor villagers. Surviving notes make it clear that ‘Doctor’ Gandhi was in his element while recommending (to women and men) hip-baths, mud-poultices, sun-baths in the nude ‘in a solitary place’ and fruit-juices. Thus he said about a sick little boy brought to him at the village clinic:

  Can he see at the moment? If he takes a diet free from chillies, takes fruit, and hip-bath and friction-bath, he is likely to be all right. Does he pass stools? What is he fed? How come breast-feeding at this age? How old is he? How can a two-year-old child be allowed to suckle? He should be given only fruit-juice. He needs an enema, which can be done only here (90: 159).

  For problems like cataract and hernia he prescribed surgery: ‘Shripad: He must get himself admitted to the hospital. If he is willing and wants to have a note, he may go with one. There is no other remedy for hernia. A strap-belt can also be worn’ (90: 158-9).

  His time at Uruli-Kanchan, where he asked his Hindu patients to recite the word Rama, seemed to inject new life into Gandhi’s old faith—first learnt from Rambha, his childhood nurse—in the sound of God’s name:

  Uruli-Kanchan, 23 March 1946. Ramanama cannot perform the miracle of restoring to you a lost limb. But it can perform the still greater miracle of helping you to enjoy an ineffable peace in spite of the loss while you live and rob death of its sting and the grave its victory at the journey’s end (90: 134).

  Though having to work at his own health as well, Gandhi at times surprised callers by looking fitter than expected. Meeting Gandhi on 17 March 1946 in Poona, the British journalist Henry Brailsford thought he ‘looked well and very much less than his age… His manner was never solemn and often he relaxed in a humorous chuckle’ (90: 99-100).

  When Brailsford raised the Pakistan question, Gandhi said that in the absence of an agreed solution ‘he was prepared to submit the whole issue to international arbitration’ (90: 102). ‘In a way hard to define,’ wrote Brailsford, ‘this man was speaking for India’. Some days earlier Gandhi had told a Gujarati caller: ‘I want to live for 125 years and, if God fulfils my wish, I want to create a new world in India’ (Gujarat Samachar, 10 March 1946; 90: 54).

  He hoped to be useful—in action. Urged to write a treatise on nonviolence and satyagraha, Gandhi replied in Harijan (3 March 1946): ‘I am not built for academic writings. Action is my domain’ (90: 1).

  Companions. But with Kasturba and Mahadev gone for ever, Mira proceeding to the Himalayan foothills, and Sushila needing to support a cousin in Quetta, Gandhi’s in-house team had weakened. Pyarelal continued as a secretary and someone to bounce ideas off. While Amrit Kaur provided additional secretarial help, Abha Gandhi, the young Bengali wife of Gandhi’s grand-nephew Kanu, and Sushila Pai of Poona attended to Gandhi’s personal needs. But he missed Mahadev’s sparkle and the stability that Kasturba used to bring.

  Joining his father in Bengal and Assam at the end of 1945, Manilal, now fifty-three, reminded Gandhi that he had failed ‘to take care of his real family’. To another short-term companion, a young Bengali named Sudhir Ghosh, Gandhi said: ‘Why don’t you take Manilal to Shillong tomorrow for a trip? It is a pretty place… [E]njoy yourselves. It must be boring for you to spend all your time with an old man.’

  Ghosh and Manilal went up for a day to the beautiful hill town where the Indian manager of a hotel told them that only white guests could be served. While Manilal commented to his father that South Africa was more enlightened than Shillong, Ghosh saw that ‘Gandhiji looked sad… because our fun was spoilt by some hotel manager.’58

  Amtus Salaam from Rajpura in Patiala state was eager to be with him as he travelled but Gandhi asked her to be in Sevagram or near her mother in Rajpura. ‘I have not been able to write to you, but I think of you every day,’ he wrote to her on 20 March (90: 115).

  When some women working for the Kasturba Trust met him in Uruli-Kanchan and said they wanted ‘women alone to run the show’, Gandhi assented but added: ‘I am the only [male] whom you may find it hard to get rid of, for I have always counted myself as a woman. I believe I know your sex and your needs better than you do yourselves’ (90: 155-6).

  Earlier in 1945, in Sevagram, he had resumed the practice of letting women sleep right next to him. Shivering was once more part of the story, and no doubt he again relaxed amidst his sorority, but now he also clearly claimed that the exercise was integral to strengthening his brahmacharya and that of the women, who at different times may have included Amrit Kaur, Sushila, Prabhavati, Amtus Salaam, Manu, Abha and Kanchan (whose husband Munnalal Shah helped manage the ashram).

  Unhappiness was voiced by associates led by Kishorelal Mashruwala, and Gandhi halted the practice, but he insisted (March 1945) that it was only a postponement. He had not yielded, he said, when his stand against untouchability or for nonviolence had been attacked; he would not permanently yield now over his brahmacharya exercise (86: 8-11).

  Caste and communal hate. A new weapon against untouchability and caste was Gandhi’s decision, expressed in a letter he wrote in April 1946, to bless a marriage ‘only when one of the parties to the marriage is a Harijan’.59 Just when he arrived at this decision is not clear: in April 1947 he would say it was ‘long ago’.60 With this decision Gandhi had taken an explicit position against caste and in favour of inter-caste marriages.

  Shaken on being told, in early 1946, that ‘in Gujarat only one well and one temple is shared with Harijans and this in Karadi (near Dandi),’ Gandhi said he would seek henceforth to reside amidst the untouchables.

  So when a letter from Viceroy Wavell arrived in Uruli-Kanchan inviting Gandhi to meet the British ministers in New Delhi on 3 April, Gandhi asked friends in the capital, including Ghanshyamdas Birla and Brij Krishna, to arrange his stay in the sweepers’ colony on Reading Road (now Mandir Marg), not far from a temple the Birlas had built, and right next to St Thomas�
�s High School for Girls.

  Uruli-Kanchan, 25 March 1946. If I live apart from Harijans, what right have I to question the action of others who go further in their adherence to untouchability?.. It goes without saying that I must not impose myself on Harijans anywhere (90: 138-9).

  Reminding himself of the centrality of the Dalit question, Gandhi also smelt preparations for communal violence among Hindus and Muslims. Working in ‘unholy combination’, extremists from the two sides, he felt, were fuelling one another’s fires. On 23 March a deeply perturbed Gandhi told an unnamed English friend: ‘I would not want to live up to 125 to witness that consummation. I would rather perish in the flames’ (90: 126).

  Atom bomb. The revival of Harijan enabled him to comment on a range of issues. On Palestine he said that Jews had been ‘cruelly wronged’ in many places and their condition was ‘a blot on the Christian world’, but they had ‘erred grievously in seeking to impose themselves on Palestine with the aid of America and Britain’ and with the use of violence.61

  Noting with regret that Russia, ‘which stood for the people’, had ‘turned into an imperialist power’ (Harijan, 29 Sept. 1946), he disputed the view that the atom bomb had helped the cause of peace:

  Often does good come out of evil. But that is God’s, not man’s plan. Man knows that only evil can come out of evil, as good out of good.

  Conceding that ‘atomic energy, though harnessed by American scientists and army men for destructive purposes, may be utilized by other scientists for humanitarian purposes’, he added:

  So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages. There used to be the so-called laws of war which made it tolerable. Now we know the naked truth. War knows no law except that of might…