by Jan Morris
This was true: at least since 1858, the British had seldom behaved murderously towards their subjects, except in battle. But then the situation in India in the years after the Great War was itself without precedent or parallel. The truth was dawning on the British rulers of the sub-continent that their dominion, still absolute after so many generations, was foreseeably coming to an end. India was not like any other British possession, not a casual acquisition, or a hazily conceived name in a statistical chart, or a colony settled in by cousins, or even a fashionably recommended investment. India was part of the British truth, the other half of a mirror, ‘the stern step-mother of our race’. So long as anyone remembered Britons had been coming and going between the two countries, noblemen to be Viceroys, vicars’ sons to be civil servants, Army officers, missionaries, poor cousin Ethel off to find a husband, young Tom from the Queen’s Arms going to sweat it out in Poona or Bangalore, and good riddance to ’un.
India had long since filtered back to Britain, too. Maharajahs were common figures of London society. Indian cricketers and polo players were popular performers. There had been Indian Members of Parliament, Indian university professors, even an Indian peer—Lord Sinha of Raipur, Privy Councillor and Freeman of the City of London.1 Monuments of the Indian connection were scattered across Britain, from war memorials to the country houses of nabobs, from village wells donated by benevolent Maharajahs to the cemetery, high on the Sussex hills, of the Indian soldiers who had died at their hospital in Brighton during the Great War. India was more than Empire. In an illogical way it was, to the British and to many Indians too, a part of England, a distant part that only a minority knew, but so interwoven with English destinies that the association seemed indivisible.
There was profit in it, even now. India was one of the most valuable fields of British investment—in 1914 some £800 million of capital was invested there. Rubber, coffee, indigo, tea, coal, jute, railways—all these Indian industries were very profitable to British financiers: jute mills in the 1920s were said to be making an annual profit of 90 per cent. India provided a sizeable army for the imperial defence (paid for out of Indian revenues), not to speak of the prestige and authority which accrued from the mastery of this vast possession in the east, and generations of Englishmen had benefited directly from the Indian link.
But the relationship went much deeper. Most men entering the Indian services now had some family connection with the country, and families like the Rivett-Carnacs, the Maynes, the Ogilvies, the Birdwoods, the Lawrences or the Cottons felt themselves to be almost of dual nationality, so old were their links with India. The Anglo-Indians had long since idealized their purposes in the east, and evolved folk-myths of their own.2 They looked at the affairs of the sub-continent with a vision peculiar to themselves, part paternal, part loving, part contemptuous. They were selective in their affections. The simpler and more martial the Indian the better, and the more rural the countryside. Many of them went through life in a profound condition of love-hate, detesting the filth, disease and corruption of India as a whole, passionately devoted to their own chosen aspects of it. Nobody pleased an Anglo-Indian more than an upright Rajasthani soldier of the old school: nobody repelled him more absolutely than some young law graduate of Bengal, with his progressive ideas and his never quite perfect English. In fact the British were still strangers in the land, for their knowledge of Indian culture was seldom profound, even after generations in the country, and they saw the great sub-continent only through their own experiences. The Indian totality was as baffling to them as to anyone else—‘I felt’, wrote one more than usually frank British District Officer, describing his relationship with his subjects, ‘like a man wandering about with a dim lantern in the dark.’
By the 1920s the ancient association was changing. The British were losing interest in their Empire, and there was a falling-off of recruitment for the Indian services. The Indians were restive and disillusioned, and joined the nationalist movement in their hundreds of thousands. A million Indians had served the British during the Great War, and everybody expected concessions of independence in return. The moderates wanted Dominion status, like the white settler colonies, the extremists wanted to be quit of the Empire altogether. They were angry and disappointed when all the British conceded was the system called dyarchy, which certainly gave Indians a far greater share in government, but was a long way from liberty. The British genuinely thought dyarchy a great step forward—‘the war had compelled England’, wrote Lionel Curtis of it, ‘to recognize that the principles for which she was fighting … must be extended to Asia and Africa.’ The Indians thought it a miserable reward for their loyalty, or alternatively an inadequate concession to their demands.
So a sense of impending change came over India, in the years after the Great War, not unlike the rumours and superstitions that had swept through the country before the Indian Mutiny. ‘The people are restless’, reported a percipient Deputy Commissioner to his superiors in 1918, ‘and discontented and ripe for the revolution’: and in that very year the revolution had begun. The Rowlatt Acts, giving the British Government almost unlimited powers against Indian subversives, were its spark. Mahatma Gandhi was its prophet.
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We last saw Gandhi toiling down the slopes of Spion Kop as a humble and loyal stretcher-bearer, but since then he had become a celebrity. The son of a palace official in the minuscule Gujarati princedom of Porbandar, on the shore of the Arabian Sea, he had been trained as a lawyer in London, and had briefly Anglicized himself, dressing in high white collar and dark suit, cultivating the art of small talk, even learning the violin, before gravitating to South Africa as legal adviser to an Indian firm in Durban. There he had taken to politics, by way of the grievances of the Indian community, and had become well known as a champion of Indian rights and self-respect. Returning to India in 1914, he plunged at once into the furious world of nationalism, arguing first for Indian Home Rule, later for complete independence, and reverted to his Indian origins. Now he dressed altogether Indian style, professed a frugal vegetarianism, and year by year prepared himself for the vatic role he was to play in the struggle for Indian liberty.
Nobody then, nobody later, knew quite what to make of Gandhi—Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi the Pure Soul, Gandhi of the round disarming spectacles and the toothless smile. He shared with T. E. Lawrence the quality of enigma, so that he seemed to one man a saint, to another a hypocrite, and sometimes seemed to exchange the roles from one day to the next. A very small man, 5 foot 4 inches, and slight to the point of emaciation, he had vivid black eyes, spoke very pure English with a vestigial South African accent, and enthralled nearly everyone with his suggestion of almost unearthly wisdom. ‘The unknown looked out at us through his eyes’, said the most worldly of his disciples, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Lloyd George reported that when Gandhi visited him at his home in Surrey, an unknown black cat bounded through the window to settle on Gandhi’s lap—it left when the Mahatma left, and was never seen again.
Gandhi was sweet-natured, but sly. He was truly innocent in some ways, calculating and self-conscious in others. Like Lawrence again, he well understood the value of publicity. Like many another Indian guru, he veiled his shrewdness in platitudes and truisms, and sometimes cheapened it with opportunism. There was something sterile about him. Not only did he forswear, in middle life, all sexual activities, but he had no eye for nature, and his equipoise was essentially uncreative. His repeated political fasts to the death never were to the death, as the British wryly noted, and there was to him an irritating element of crankiness and faddism, not to mention sanctimony—‘I cannot free myself from that subtlest of temptations,’ he once wrote in all solemnity, ‘the desire to serve.’ ‘The saint has left our shores’, General Smuts wrote when Gandhi left South Africa for the last time, ‘I sincerely hope for ever’: yet Smuts fell beneath his charm too, for even at his most contumacious Gandhi remained a being of consummate serenity and appeal—‘like a good night’s sleep’, is
how one contemporary described the effect of his presence.
Though Gandhi came to command a universal audience, he was specifically a man of his time, place and opportunity. His time was the first half of the twentieth century, the century of disillusionment; his place was an India still primitive and illiterate, but given new cohesion by modern communications and political ideas; his opportunity was the waning confidence of a generally kindly, certainly not sadistic Empire. ‘We all feel’, Lord Minto the Viceroy had written in 1907, ‘that we are mere sojourners in the land, that we are only camping, and on the march.’ Gandhi’s time had come.
He was an Anglophile. ‘Hardly ever have I known anybody’, he wrote of himself in his youth, ‘to cherish such loyalty as I did to the British Constitution…. I vied with Englishmen in loyalty to the throne.’ He was decorated for his courage in the Boer War, and for years continued to declare his devotion, if not to the British Empire, at least to the British: ‘The Emperorship must go, but I should love to be an equal partner with Britain, sharing her joys and sorrows.’ In many ways indeed his ideas were those, orientally tempered, of an English gentleman, and he often Anglicized Indian philosophical techniques. One of his favourite poems was Kipling’s ‘If’, one of his favourite hymns was Newman’s ‘Lead, Kindly Light’. Even politically, he was often attuned to the public school spirit. ‘True democracy’, he once wrote, ‘is not inconsistent with a few persons representing the spirit, the hope and the aspirations of those whom they claim to represent’—Lord Milner’s views exactly.
Over the years his ideas of national independence became fused with thoughts about human dignity, raising the struggle for Indian emancipation to a level beyond the vision of the Easter Rising heroes, or the groping patriots of Nyasaland. For Gandhi Indian nationhood was only an aspect of human fulfilment, applicable to all, and it was lucky for him that the British in India were, by and large, tolerant and sympathetic rulers, so that he was able to work out his moralities on a political stage, without being shot on the spot.
Gandhi’s revolutionary formula was a conglomeration of foibles, dogmas and contradictions—political ambition, social theory, religious precept, racial pride, personal intuition. He rationalized it all into a single metaphysic, and called it satyagraha—truth-force. If imperialism was essentially a glorification of force, satyagraha was just the opposite—it postulated, Gandhi said, ‘the conquest of an adversary by suffering in one’s own person’. It was indiscriminate in application. By its means Gandhi pulled together all the separate threads of Indian discontent, social, economic, political, historical, and wove them into a radical movement of incalculable power. Satyagraha was the means: the end was swaraj, independence, which was as much a personal as a national condition. India could not be herself while aliens ruled her, and Indians could not be altogether themselves.
To the Indian masses Gandhi became semi-divine. They believed him capable of miraculous feats, flying or vanishing, and at the peak of his powers his hold over their emotions was absolute. Women of all ranks became passionate nationalists; an army of children, the Monkey Army, became the couriers and scavengers of the movement, like the Fianna Boys in Ireland. The people did not understand him, though, and he did not always understand them. He was repeatedly warned, by friends as by enemies, that satyagraha, hazily grasped by a vast illiterate populace, would inevitably lead to violence: nevertheless, when the Rowlatt Acts were announced, he launched a nation-wide protest against them. The result was savagery all over India. Everywhere the mob came out in Gandhi’s name, breaking windows in Calcutta, destroying offices in Bombay, molesting the missionary in Amritsar.
The British seriously thought they might have a second Mutiny on their hands, and responded with massive troop movements, arrests, curfews and prohibitions. ‘I have made a Himalayan miscalculation’, Gandhi said, surveying the bloodshed and misery that swept across the country: and in Amritsar General Dyer gave the order to fire.
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Gandhi recognized that force as such could not expel the Raj. British firepower was still overwhelming in India, and there were many more Dyers ready to obey their inherited instincts of command. Other revolutionary methods were needed. Most Indian rebels appealed to the past—Gandhi looked to the future. ‘He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths’, wrote Nehru. Until Gandhi, Nehru said, fear was dominant in India—fear of the army, of the police, of prison, of unemployment, of starvation, of usury, of landlords and agents. Fear kept things as they were, and allowed the British to retain control. Gandhi changed all that. He deliberately made use of India’s disadvantages, her poverty and backwardness, to reinforce his own methods, and so very soon became master of the Indian political scene. The Indian National Congress closed its ranks behind him, and the constitutionalists who wished to progress more sedately towards more limited goals were left impotent and discredited.
Though his own misjudgement had caused it, Amritsar convinced Gandhi that compromise with the British was now impossible—sinful, he said at the time. General Dyer could not have guessed it, but his prompt action in the Bagh that day was a signal of retreat. So horrified was the world by the massacre, so shaken and even remorseful were the British themselves, so infuriated were the Indians, that swaraj immediately assumed a new force, and from that movement until the end of the Empire, the true initiative was always with the Indians. In a moral sense, thanks to the sacrifice in the Jallianwalla Bagh, they were free already.
It was to prove a muddled and ambiguous progress. Sometimes the impetus seemed to wane, and the British thought the worst was over. Sometimes Gandhi withdrew from politics, devoting his energies to more eccentric causes—his movement for the spinning of cloth, for instance, which, with its preposterous cameos of plump financiers and bony politicians sitting ungainly at their spinning-wheels, struck even the devoted Nehru as ludicrous. Sometimes non-violence failed, and the Indian masses burst into riot again. They were convulsive times in India, not because anything solid was achieved, but perhaps because both sides were beginning to sense their own strengths and weaknesses—the Indians riding the tide of history, but weakened by their own feuds and rivalries, the British gradually relinquishing the will to rule. The balance was changing, and if people did not always realize it consciously, unknowingly they responded, British and Indians alike.
Once in the 1920s Gandhi was arrested, to be charged with subversion, and the puzzled, almost pained sensitivity of the presiding magistrate, Robert Broomfield, exactly reflects the bewilderment of the time. The case was heard in the Circuit House at Ahmedabad, in Gandhi’s own province of Gujarat. This was not a court-room, but a house used by visiting judges and officials, and was chosen because it stood on the outskirts of the city, away from the mob and close to the British cantonment. The court was simply a room, and though European policemen guarded the door, and a clutch of British officials sat in the front seats, and Sir Thomas Strangman the Advocate-General had come especially from Bombay to conduct the prosecution, still the atmosphere. was informal. There was no dock or witness-box. Most of the spectators wore the white homespun of the patriotic movement, and when Gandhi entered the room, wearing only a loin-cloth himself, they stood to their feet in his honour.
Case No 45 of the Ahmedabad Sessions, Rex Imperator v Gandhi, opened at noon, March 18, 1922. Gandhi was charged with sedition, because of articles he had written in his political journal Young India, and he admitted his guilt at once—indeed, he urged it. He had come to the conclusion, he said, that the British connection with India was fatal to the welfare of the country, so that it had been a privilege to write articles demanding its end. ‘To preach disaffection towards the existing system of government has become almost a passion with me…. I am here therefore to invite and submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me, for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.’
These were confusing submissions
, to a conventionally educated official of the Indian Civil Service. Broomfield was thirty-nine then, a slight man but of some presence, the son of a London barrister. He had been in India for fourteen years, but nothing in his training and experience could have prepared him for the peculiar accused who now stood before him, surrounded by his friends and supporters, looking spindly, saintly and almost demure. Gandhi made a very long statement to the court, and in the course of it suggested, not very seriously perhaps, that only two courses were open to the judge—to resign his post on the grounds that the law was bad, or to hand down the severest possible sentence. Gandhi spoke gently, and everyone was impressed, even the policemen and the sceptical Strangman, who thought the courtesies rather overdone. Broomfield himself was clearly touched by the occasion, and he produced a judgement that would be quoted always, when the manners and values of the British Raj were later to be debated.
‘Mr Gandhi,’ he said, ‘you have made my task easy in one way by pleading guilty to the charge. Nevertheless what remains, namely the determination of a just sentence, is perhaps as difficult a proposition as a judge in this country could have to face. The law is no respecter of persons. Nevertheless it will be impossible to ignore the fact that you are in a different category from any person I have ever tried or am likely to have to try. It would be impossible to ignore the fact that, in the eyes of millions of your countrymen, you are a great patriot and a great leader. Even those who differ from you in politics look upon you as a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life.’
