The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (The Robert Payne Library)

by Robert Payne

  Putlibai rarely attended the Pranami temple, for the temple dedicated to Krishna stood next door. She was a deeply religious woman, given to austerities and fasting, and according to her son she was never known to recite any other mantra than the words: “Krishna, the Lord, is my only refuge.” She was the first to rise in the morning, the last to go to sleep. From time to time, dressed in a plain sari, she would accompany her husband to receptions given in the palace of the Rana, and it was said that her advice on political matters was eagerly sought. She lived deeply and intensely in her faith, and her third son inherited his profoundly religious nature from her.

  Gandhi once described his family as “a notorious band of robbers.” There was some truth in the statement. As far back as one can trace, they were courtiers, always occupying high positions in the princely courts of Kathiawar. About the year 1670 Lal Gandhi, from the town of Kutiyana, became the assistant to the dewan of Porbandar. Thereafter, for generation after generation, there were Gandhis in high administrative positions in the state, deriving their wealth and influence from their privileged position. Although they received no titles, they were aristocrats who handed down their powers to their sons. For three generations they were merely assistants to the dewan. Then Gandhi’s grandfather, Uttamchand, became the dewan, a post which was inherited by his son Karamchand. Speaking of his privileged ancestors, Gandhi wrote: “Judged by common standards, it would seem that they have acted with a fair measure of justice. That is, they treated people to a smaller measure of oppression.” Oppressors they were, for they were in league with princes whose chief occupation was to extract as much wealth as possible from their subjects.

  To be the dewan in a princely court was not always a safe occupation. During the reign of the Queen-Regent Rani Rupali, who came to the throne on the death of her husband in 1831, Uttamchand Gandhi very nearly lost his life. The state treasurer, an honest man, had refused to satisfy the Rani’s vast appetite for money, and the ladies-in-waiting had therefore concocted a story about the treasurer’s contempt for the Rani. She ordered the treasurer to present himself at her court to answer the allegations, and no one doubted that he would be immediately executed. He ran to Uttamchand Gandhi’s house for protection. The dewan was absent, but his wife let him hide in the house. When the dewan learned what had happened, he went to the Rani and promised to produce the treasurer if he was guaranteed a fair trial. The Rani answered that she could do as she pleased, and threatened Uttamchand with punishment unless he produced the treasurer at once. Uttamchand thereupon returned to his house, smuggled the treasurer outside the city, and waited for the wrath of the Rani to fall upon him.

  It was an astonishing, a heroic decision, but he was made in a heroic mold. He was a heavy, rather ponderous man, with a bulging forehead, deep-set eyes, and extraordinarily long arms. He told his whole family that they were in danger of being massacred by the Rani, and then he quietly went about fortifying his fortress-like house. He had a small bodyguard led by a Muslim named Ghulam Muhammed Makrani, and these soldiers were placed in strategic positions. Soon the Rani sent her troops against the house. They were thrown back. Cannon were brought up, and the Rani gave orders that they should blast their way into the house. The cannon-balls, however, merely bounced off the stone walls. In the nick of time the British agent in Rajkot, who was responsible for peace and order in the Kathiawar peninsula, heard about the affair and issued a peremptory command forbidding the Rani to lay siege to the dewan’s house. In the fighting, Ghulam Muhammed Makrani was killed, and the small army of the Rani succeeded in breaching the walls in two places. With his wife and his five children Uttamchand Gandhi fled to the city of Junagadh and took service under the local prince, known as the Nawab of Junagadh. The story was told that when Uttamchand Gandhi came into the presence of the Nawab, he saluted him with his left hand.

  “Why do you salute me in this way?” the Nawab asked.

  “Because my right hand is still pledged to Porbandar,” Uttamchand answered.

  This incident occurred about 1840. It was a time when feudal gestures still possessed meaning, and a peculiarly feudal violence was practiced by the princes.

  In 1869, when Uttamchand was dead and his son Karamchand was the dewan of Porbandar, an extraordinary event took place in Porbandar. The ruling prince was the Rana Vikmatji, notable for his violent temper and his miserliness toward his dependents, who almost starved. He was a strange mixture of virtues and vices, like many princes of his time. He was chaste, kindly, cruel, intelligent, stubborn, and so independent that he dared to quarrel with the all-powerful British agent. At one time civil war raged in the principality, for the warrior caste was determined to get rid of him, but he was popular with his subjects and won the war.

  The event which made the year memorable in the annals of the court concerned the heir to the throne, Prince Madhavsinh, who had been slowly drinking himself to death with the help of his boon companion called Lakshman. When the Prince was found dead, the Rana flew into a violent rage, ordered Lakshman to appear before him, and sentenced him to having his nose and ears cut off. This was done, and the unhappy man thereupon threw himself from the palace terrace into the garden below, and quickly died of his injuries. The Rana turned to the comforts of religion and abandoned the principality to his dewan. Karamchand therefore ruled the principality in his name, protesting bitterly over the intolerable habits of princes, and as soon as possible left Porbandar and took service under the Prince of Rajkot, known as the Thakore Saheb.

  Although Karamchand Gandhi was the dewan of a princely state, it must not be supposed that he lived in great state. When he was at Porbandar, he would be found day after day sitting in the courtyard of the Krishna temple next to his home, conducting the affairs of the principality while peeling the vegetables for his wife’s kitchen. In his view the peeling of vegetables was just as important as affairs of state. He would sit in judgment, adjudicate legal questions, fix the boundaries of property, settle family quarrels, and all the time he would be filling baskets with vegetables. In later years, when the dewan’s son became the master of a large monastic community, he would always insist that everyone from the highest to the lowest should spend part of the day preparing food in the kitchen; and sometimes when he was seen peeling vegetables, it was thought to be an affectation of simplicity. In fact, Gandhi was merely following the habits of his father, whom he revered and whose example he half-consciously imitated. In him the authoritarian father and the saintly mother were always present.

  Although there was much feudal violence, life in the small city moved at a calm leisurely pace, unchanging over the centuries. The rumors of the outside world rarely reached the narrow alleyways between the white houses, and the visits of British political officers were rare. For some time the British had maintained a political adviser at Rajkot, a hundred miles away in the interior, but he usually contented himself with supervising the affairs of Porbandar from a distance. Porbandar was too hot, too unimportant to be worth a visit. Gandhi grew up in a city which had never felt the full weight of British power.

  For centuries the people of Kathiawar had been ruled by Muslim princes and their Hindu advisers. Hindus and Mohammedans lived side by side, tolerant of each other’s foibles, speaking a language, Gujarati, which was a strange mingling of Arabic, Persian and Hindi words. Since Mahmud of Ghazni conquered Kathiawar in the eleventh century, there had been no great upheavals, and though there were occasional battles between the princely states, a man could expect to live long enough to see his great-grandsons, and never fear they would be cut down in wars. The fertile peninsula was untouched by the great wars and cultural movements continually sweeping across India. Almost Kathiawar had been forgotten by history.

  In this enviable land all religions flourished. Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Zoroastrians, Sufi mystics and twenty other cults existed side by side, and in Porbandar, a seaport trading with Arabia, Africa and the East Indies, there were about a hundred temples to serve the in
habitants and the foreign sailors. Eclecticism had become a way of life, and men worshiped as they pleased without any interference from others.

  The Gandhi family was devoted to the god Krishna, the enchanting blue-faced god who was counted among the twelve incarnations of the great Vishnu, one of the three supreme gods of the Hindu pantheon. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the worship of Vishnu had received a strong impetus from the poetic works of Ramanuja and Jayadeva, encouraging an exquisite gentleness and affection for all living things. Tenderness and humility were the watchwords; the Vaishnava, or follower of Vishnu, was characterized by his ecstatic joy in the presence of the god, whose name he continually repeated, and whose cult objects were a small round black stone and the sacred tulasi plant, a herb which he grew in his windowsill. In the fifteenth century Narsimha Mehta, a Kathiawar poet born in Junagadh, had sung the glories of Vishnu and the Vaishnavas in a song which Gandhi heard in his childhood and repeated throughout his life:

  He is the true Vaishnava who knows and feels another’s woes as his own. Ever ready to serve, he never boasts.

  He bows to everyone and despises no one, keeping his thought, word and deed pure. Blessed is the mother of such a one.

  He looks upon all with an equal eye. He has rid himself of lust, and reveres every woman as his mother. His tongue would fail him if he attempted to utter an untruth. He covets not another’s wealth.

  The bonds of earthly attachment hold him not. His mind is deeply rooted in renunciation. Every moment he is intent on reciting the name of God. All the holy places are ever present in his body.

  He has conquered greed, hypocrisy, passion and anger. A sight of such a Vaishnava, says Narsimha, saves a family through seventy-one generations.

  In this faith the Vaishnavas lived and had their being; for them life was a festival, and they were quietly content. The white city on the seacoast looked like paradise, and was inhabited by people who believed that God walked by their sides.

  An Enchanted Childhood

  ALL FOUR children of Karamchand and Putliba Gandhi were born in the sixties during a period of seven years. First came Raliat-behn, the daughter, who was born in 1862 and died nearly a hundred years later. Then came Laxmidas, the eldest son, who was born in the following year. Karsandas, the second son, was born in 1866, and Mohandas, the last child, came in 1869. He was lucky to be the youngest, for inevitably he became the spoiled darling of the family.

  As a child he was allowed to do very much as he pleased. He was quiet and withdrawn, a little secretive, rarely playing with other boys, enjoying being alone. “I roamed about the villages in a bullock cart,” he told a friend many years later. “As I was the son of a dewan, people fed me on the way with juwar roti and curds and gave me eight anna pieces.” He was treated as a young prince by the villagers and in his own house he was treated with a cautious respect even when he was quite young. It was not that anyone had observed any particular qualities in him; it was simply that he went his own way.

  The center of his life was his mother, whom he adored. He was very close to her, and he used to imitate her. She liked to spin yarn and wore coarse cloth. She liked the Jain priests who came every day and stopped in the courtyard to receive her offerings. She was a courageous woman, and the boy remembered watching a scorpion crawling over his mother’s bare feet, and suddenly her hand swooped down, she picked up the scorpion, and dropped it out of the window. She had carefully preserved its life, and her own. This was the kind of courage that appealed to Mohandas, who would sometimes wonder whether he would be brave when confronted with a scorpion or a cobra. It was a subject which haunted him: surely, if a completely fearless man went up to a lion, he would be safe! It was not an entirely academic question, for Kathiawar is one of the few places on the face of the earth where lions and panthers roam.

  Mohandas was a sweet-tempered, rather timid child, easily frightened. He had a special dislike for the dark Krishna temple next door with its dark images, the smell of rancid oil and decaying flowers, the interminable chanting of the priest. He deliberately tried to avoid the place, and would enter it only in the company of his mother or father. Putlibai had no fear of the darkness or of the gods, and she liked to please them by fasting during the four rainy months and by other acts of austerity. Rambha, the boy’s nurse, did not believe in austerities. When Mohandas confessed that he was afraid of ghosts, Rambha answered: “There are no ghosts, but if you are afraid, repeat the name of Rama.” Rama was one of the innumerable names of Vishnu. More than seventy years later he would repeat this name with his last dying breath.

  Mohandas was very fond of Rambha, who became his nurse when he was three years old, but she had difficulty in catching up with him. He liked to hide from her, and he especially liked to slip away to the temple courtyard, where there were trees he could climb and a well he could peer into. Rambha would object, saying that he was too young to climb trees and it was dangerous to peer over the mouth of a well, but he was strong-willed and refused to obey her, insisting that it was not her task to follow him wherever he went. The quarrel was serious enough to be brought to the attention of his father. “There is nothing we can do about it,” Karamchand told the nurse. “The best you can do is to try to follow him unobserved.”

  The boy was growing up among women, his constant companions being his sister, who was seven years older, his nurse, and his mother. When he was very young, his sister was in charge of him. She, too, had suffered from his habit of always slipping away to hide somewhere or to run about in the street, returning home only when he felt hungry, and she was relieved when Rambha took over her duties. One day, during a carnival of dancing and singing in the streets, the boy slipped out of the house and vanished. A search was made for him without success. He had followed a group of young girls dressed up in ceremonial costumes, with flowers in their hair, to a lonely temple on the outskirts of the town, and spent the day with them. When dusk came, one of the girls brought him home. He said he had eaten nothing all day except some flowers, and they left him with a burning throat. His mother, imagining that he had been eating poisonous berries, was almost out of her mind. A doctor was summoned, an antidote was given, and the throat was painted with an antiseptic, and soon there was no more pain. Such incidents were not rare, for he was likely to wander away at the slightest provocation and he enjoyed his independence.

  Although he was sweet-tempered, he was more than usually mischievous. Long before he had learned to write, he liked to scribble on the floor with chalks. When told to stop, he simply disobeyed, explaining that other people were allowed to write and therefore they should not prohibit him from doing it. So he went on writing his strange, unformed letters until the whole floor was covered with them. He liked turning things upside down, and it amused him to scatter his father’s prayer utensils and remove the statue of the god from its little throne so that he could himself take his place on the throne. For a child he could be oddly irreverent. From the beginning he seems to have felt that the statues of gods possessed no inherent magic of their own and it mattered little what happened to them.

  Yet he enjoyed making clay images of the gods, sitting quietly in the courtyard of his house, absorbed in the task. One day, when he was playing with his cousins, they decided to collect all their clay gods and goddesses, place them on a swing, and rock them to and fro in an improvised rendition of a ceremony which took place on a more massive scale every year, with life-sized gods and goddesses sitting on swings. Since the children were always imitating the ceremonies which took place in the temples, there was nothing unusual in this, and Mohandas was delighted with the game. Suddenly one of his companions decided that it would be more amusing if they used the small bronze temple images instead, and they agreed to send a raiding party to the temple of Vishnu and Lakshmi, who was the wife of Vishnu, not far away. It was early in the afternoon, the priest was taking a siesta, and they had no difficulty in creeping into the temple and stealthily removing the bronze images. They wer
e about to run off with their loot when there was a sudden loud clanging noise as one of the images was dropped, and the priest’s wife awoke and shouted to her husband. The boys, still carrying the images, took to their heels, hotly pursued by the priest. The boys were faster than the priest and they were able to abandon the images in another temple before returning to their own homes. The priest, however, had recognized the boys, all of them belonging to the large Gandhi clan, and he was determined to punish them.

  At this time Karamchand Gandhi was no longer the dewan of Porbandar, having left the town to become chief karbhari of the neighboring principality of Rajkot, taking his eldest son Laxmidas with him and temporarily leaving the rest of his family behind. There was therefore no question of asking him to judge the affair, and the priest turned to one of Karamchand’s brothers, a short-tempered, choleric, deeply religious man who was not inclined to regard the theft of the gods with any pleasure. All the boys were rounded up and cross-examined. All except one denied that they had anything to do with the affair. The exception was Mohandas, then about six years old, who quite simply and without fear explained exactly what had happened.