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

by Robert Payne

  While the preparations for the marriage were taking place in Porbandar, Karamchand remained at Rajkot. The ruler of Rajkot was determined not to lose his services until the last possible moment, and therefore Karamchand, instead of making the leisurely five-day journey by bullock cart between the two towns, made the journey by stagecoach especially ordered by the ruler. The coach drove so fast that when it was nearing Porbandar it overturned. The dewan was thrown clear, but sustained serious injuries in his fall There could be no postponement of the triple wedding, and he attended wrapped in bandages. It was an ominous beginning to his youngest son’s marriage.

  The wedding took place amidst surging crowds of well-wishers, with the usual intricate rites and ceremonies. Mohandas rode to Kasturbai’s house on horseback and for the first time officially presented himself to her family, though he had known them for many years. He had in fact been betrothed to Kasturbai for nearly six years, half of his life. A special wedding platform had been erected, and the bride and bridegroom sat there in solitary splendor, while the priests intoned hymns and the relatives feasted. There came a time when they rose and walked seven steps together, performing in this way a brief preliminary recital of their devotion to each other through all the ensuing years. They offered one another kansar, which are sweetened wheat-cakes, symbolizing their joy. Then they feasted and entered the nuptial chamber.

  Of their first night together Mohandas later spoke ambiguously. Like his bride he had been coached in the proper performance of his duties, but being unusually shy, he had little to say to her and appears to have spent the night sleeping. During the following nights he made up for lost time. “The impressions of the former birth are potent enough to make all coaching superfluous,” he wrote. From this time onward he was an eager and demanding husband, asserting his marital authority and insisting that she accept him as her master.

  In many of the photographs taken of her in middle age she appears as an overworked, father harassed woman, very small and subdued, scarcely to be distinguished from a peasant woman encountered along a village road. But there exist some photographs taken in profile which show another aspect of her altogether. In these she possesses a clear and delicate beauty, the features suggesting refinement and nobility of character, while there is more than a suggestion of will-power in the sweeping curve of the jawbone. These rare photographs show that she may have been beautiful when she was thirteen.

  Child marriages have taken place in India since time immemorial, and there was nothing unusual in children marrying at a very early age. In later years Mohandas would speak of child marriage with horror and loathing, saying that it was the cause of India’s weakness and degeneracy, filling children with lustful thoughts and wasting their strength, keeping them away from their schoolwork and permitting them to surrender to a debilitating life of the senses. In fact his own marriage was one of the happiest on record. When the family returned to Rajkot he kept his wife with him, continued to sleep with her when he returned to the Kathiawar High School, and rarely allowed her to return to her own parents.

  In 1882, the year of his marriage, his schoolwork suffered. His attendance record shows that he missed 148 days in the school year of 222 days and failed to appear at the final examination. On his promise to work especially hard the following year he was allowed to enter a higher grade. He fulfilled his promise, worked exceptionally hard, and the marks he secured during the final examination were the highest he ever got throughout his career. He came fourth in his class. His English had vastly improved, for he received 74/100 in the examination, and he was even better at arithmetic, where he secured 80/100. He did not spend all his time on his studies, for he had to spend many evenings with his father, who was ailing as a result of his fall, and with his young wife, who was settling down into domesticity, and with his new-found friend Sheikh Mehtab, who was a Muslim, three years his senior, warm and outgoing, superbly built, and famous in the Kathiawar High School as a star athlete.

  Mohandas was one of those boys who live intensely within themselves and make friends with difficulty. Outside his own family he had no friends and scarcely any acquaintances. If he wanted companionship, he could always go to his cousins, who formed a numerous tribe. Sheikh Mehtab was the first friend he ever had, the first Muslim he had ever encountered, and the first and last person who ever made him eat meat. Their friendship was to have lasting consequences.

  Significantly Mohandas made no overtures to secure the boy’s friendship; he merely inherited him from his brother Karsandas. Soon he was basking in an experience which was at once wholly delightful and profoundly disturbing, for Sheikh Mehtab was far more than a handsome athlete and a convivial companion: he was completely without fear, while Mohandas was so timid that he had to keep a night-light in his bedroom all night, wept on the slightest provocation, and was abysmally aware of his vulnerability. He was also desperately afraid of snakes.

  Sheikh Mehtab had no fear of snakes, thus proving that he was not only possessed of physical courage and complete control over his own emotions, but that in some mysterious way he could impose his will on nature. These were powers which Mohandas wanted to possess not only in his youth but in later years, and the question whether he would dare to confront poisonous serpents was often in his mind. If a man was absolutely pure and absolutely devoted to God’s will, then he would walk harmlessly among snakes and tigers. It was a supreme test, and he sometimes wondered whether he would pass it.

  Being a Muslim, Sheikh Mehtab ate meat and ascribed his strength and fearlessness to meat-eating. He suggested that Mohandas should follow the example of the Muslims and the English, who were described in some doggerel verses by the Gujarati poet Narmadashankar as being five cubits tall simply because they ate meat:

  Behold the mighty Englishman,

  He rules the Indian small,

  Because being a meat-eater

  He is five cubits tall,

  A host to himself,

  A match for five hundred.

  Mohandas was impressed by the possibility that he would grow taller, stronger and more daring if he ate meat, and accordingly he searched for some secret place where he could undertake the experiment, aided by his Muslim friend, who promised to supply the feast, consisting of goat-meat and baker’s bread. The experiment was conducted in a secluded place by the riverbank, and proved to be a failure. Mohandas intensely disliked the baker’s bread and he was revolted by the meat, which was tough as leather and made him sick. That night he had nightmares of a live goat bleating in his stomach; the nightmares were so vivid that they woke him up. He was full of a feeling of guilt, in an agony of remorse. But the remorse passed when he reminded himself that he had a duty to grow tall and powerful like his friend. And so, regarding meat-eating as a duty, he grew more cheerful.

  Sheikh Mehtab was not one to surrender easily. He insisted that the experiment should be continued publicly in a restaurant, and he was sufficiently interested and amused to pay for the experiments, which were often repeated, out of his own pocket. The only result was to increase the boy’s formidable feelings of guilt, still further increased when Sheikh Mehtab decided to introduce him to the joys of the brothel, again at his own expense. Mohandas sat near the woman on the bed, scared out of his wits, until the woman grew weary of him and showed him the door. Then there rose another fear—the fear that he had somehow injured his manhood.

  In many different ways Sheikh Mehtab attempted to provoke and intimidate him, usually in an amused and good-natured fashion, but sometimes maliciously, as when he tried to poison the mind of Mohandas against the guileless Kasturbhai till she was driven to desperation. Sheikh Mehtab represented guile, physical strength, domination, and in the eyes of the young Mohandas these were enviable qualities, to be imitated or at the very least regarded with respect. The boy had his own crowd of obedient followers who could be thrown into whatever battle he was engaged in. This too was enviable, and Mohandas sought to imitate him in this as in other things. Such relat
ionships are common among schoolboys and especially common among Indian schoolboys. For a year or more Mohandas was a willing victim.

  In course of time the spell of Sheikh Mehtab began to evaporate. His faults gradually became more obvious. His marks were unimpressive, he was lazy, opinionated, careless in his friendships, and everything he stood for was in total variance with the beliefs of the Vaishnavite religion, which counseled modesty, gentleness and continence. Matters came to a head when Karsandas, the close friend of Sheikh Mehtab, fell into debt. A sum of about twenty-five rupees had to be found immediately. Sheikh Mehtab and Karsandas persuaded Mohandas to carve out a small piece of the thick, solid gold armlet worn by Karsandas and sell it. This was not a difficult task; Mohandas accomplished it with ease; later there came pangs of guilt. Finally he wrote out a confession, gave it to his father, and waited for the inevitable punishment which would, he thought, consist of a long sermon more unendurable than any blows. In the confession he pleaded for punishment, and knowing his father well he expressed the hope that his father would not take the guilt upon himself.

  The old dewan had not fully recovered from the accident, and in addition he was suffering from a fistula. He was lying on a plank bed, and after giving him the note Mohandas sat down beside him to await developments. His father read the confession carefully, sitting up in bed, and suddenly his cheeks were wet and tears were falling on the page. Then he closed his eyes in thought, and after a while he tore up the page and lay down again, still weeping. Mohandas had imagined he would be angry, say hard things, strike his forehead. Instead there was only that quiet weeping, the father taking the guilt upon himself, silently rebuking his son.

  Mohandas learned many lessons from this incident. Above all he learned the power of compassion and the purity of repentance. What astonished him was that his father, after weeping, grew so wonderfully peaceful and so close to him. There was an immediate understanding between them, which could never be broken. In that silence the generations met and loved one another. In later years Mohandas would say that he had been provided with an example of ahimsa, non-violence, in an all-embracing degree, so powerful that it transformed everything it touched, but at the time he was aware only of the depths of a father’s love.

  Meanwhile there was the continual struggle with his schoolbooks and the exhausting efforts to come to terms with his schoolmates dominated by Sheikh Mehtab. After the theft of the gold and his father’s silent rebuke he seems to have broken relations with Sheikh Mehtab and settled down to a lonely existence at school, without friends, for he had cast his few friends aside when he came under the influence of the Muslim boy.

  The learning of English continued to be a torment to him, making him sick with anxiety because entire courses were taught in that language which is rarely pronounced as it is spelled. To the Indian the word “taught” presented insuperable difficulties. His father knew no English; no one in his family could help him, and Kasturbhai by her mere presence made the task of learning more difficult. “I was fast becoming a stranger in my own home,” he wrote later, remembering how the teachers cultivated English manners and ways of thinking, and the learning of English subtly and imperceptibly transformed him into an English Indian, one of those superior beings who were destined to be the inheritors of an alien tradition. More than fifty years later, writing in Harijan, he could still remember the anguish of learning English:

  Everything had to be learned through English—geometry, algebra, chemistry, astronomy, history, geography. The tyranny of English was so great that even Sanskrit or Persian had to be learned through English, not through the mother-tongue. If any boy spoke in the class in Gujarati which he understood, he was punished. It did not matter to the teacher if the boy spoke bad English which he could neither pronounce correctly nor understand fully. Why should the teacher worry? His own English was by no means without blemish. It could not be otherwise. English was as much a foreign language to him as to his pupils. The result was chaos.

  We the boys had to learn many things by heart, though we could not understand them fully and often not at all. My head used to reel as the teacher was struggling to make his exposition on geometry understood by us. I could make neither head nor tail of geometry till we reached the thirteenth theorem of the first book of Euclid. I do not to this day know the Gujarati equivalents of the technical terms of geometry, algebra and the like. I know now that what I took four years to learn of arithmetic, geometry, algebra, chemistry and astronomy, I should have learned easily in one year, if I had not to learn them through English but Gujarati.

  Gandhi’s impatience with English was to grow with the years, and he never quite reconciled himself to its dominance in Indian education. It was senseless for an Indian schoolboy to learn long passages of Milton by heart. Why, he asked, were there so few translations of English into Gujarati? What was wrong with translations? One did not have to learn Bengali to appreciate the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, for it had been translated into other Indian languages; nor did one have to learn Russian in order to appreciate Tolstoy’s short stories. “High schools were schools for cultural conquest by the English,” he observed bitterly, and prayed for the day when Indians would be taught in the Indian languages.

  Nevertheless he was learning to master the language, and he came out third in a class of forty boys at the Inspector’s examination in March 1885. His best marks were in Sanskrit, English and mathematics, and as usual he was weak in history and geography. For his success he was awarded a small scholarship valued at a little more than four rupees a month. It was not a princely sum, but it would pay for most of his living expenses.

  His father’s illness was causing anxiety; he seemed to be wasting away before their eyes. In the evenings Mohandas compounded the drugs for his ailing father, massaged his legs, dressed the wound, and sometimes when his father was feeling unusually well, he would take a long solitary walk and ponder the approaching birth of his first child, for the schoolboy would soon become a father. Doctors of all kinds were coming to the house. Ayurvedic doctors came with their ointments, Muslim doctors with plasters, the local quacks with their nostrums, and there was even a lengthy discussion with an English surgeon in Bombay about an operation on the fistula. Nothing came of the operation, for the dewan’s private physician disapproved of it, saying it could not possibly succeed when the patient was of such an advanced age. The dewan returned from Bombay in worse health than before.

  In the life of Mohandas there were many traumatic moments. Fasts, beatings, arrests, desperate adventures followed one another throughout his life, but nothing he ever lived through shocked him so much as his father’s death in November 1885. He had spent the evening massaging his father’s legs, and now, late at night, between 10:30 and 11:00 P.M., he went to his bedroom while one of his uncles continued to keep watch at the bedside, ministering to the needs of the dying man. Everyone expected him to live a few days longer.

  Mohandas crept into bed and awakened his pregnant wife, annoyed because she was sleeping while he was wide awake. “How could she sleep while I was there?” he asked himself, proud of his mastery over her. While he was having sexual intercourse with her, a servant knocked on the door, saying: “Get up! Father is very ill!” Mohandas knew exactly what this meant. He expected to find his father in extremis, but he was already dead. In the five or six minutes he had spent in the bedroom the end came with only a few seconds of warning. Speechless, the old man had made a sign indicating that he wanted pen and paper. He was able to write the words: “Prepare for the last rites,” and then he snapped the amulet off his arm, tore off his golden necklace of sacred tulasi beads, and dropped dead.

  Mohandas blamed himself bitterly for his absence at the moment of his father’s death. If he had been anywhere else, he could have pardoned himself. Instead of offering wakeful service to his father, he had been luxuriating in carnal desire. “It is a blot I have never been able to efface or forget,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and I have always
thought that, although my devotion to my parents knew no bounds and I would have given up anything for it, yet I was weighed and found unpardonably wanting because my mind was at the same moment in the grip of lust.”

  Henceforth he would never be able to think of his father without remembering his own crime. Sexual guilt, his own negligence, his own absence, all these contributed to an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. He felt that in some mysterious way he was responsible for his father’s death. He argued that if he had truly loved his father, then love itself would have dragged him into the bedroom of the dying man and ‘given him the last and most precious darshan.

  A few weeks later Kasturbai bore him his first child, who lived only three or four days. This, too, seemed to be the sign of God’s displeasure with him, a punishment for his sins. Death had entered his life, and for the remaining years of his life he would be haunted by its presence.

  Growing Pains

  DURING THE FOLLOWING year Mohandas was photo-graphed sitting with his brother Laxmidas against a painted background of barren rocks and sky. In the photographer’s studio, amid the heavy ornate Victorian furniture, the brothers are a study in contrasts. Laxmidas, who is beginning to grow a mustache like his late father, has a look of resignation and even of defeat; he was to spend his life in a succession of small plodding jobs connected with the princely court. Mohandas is alert, determined, conscious of his power, his hands clenched. Both wear the heavy Kathiawar turban, the sign that they have grown to man’s estate, and long dark coats reaching to their knees, their legs hidden in the white swirl of their dhotis. There is only a faint family resemblance between them. One wears the heavy, brooding look that will continue into middle age; the other is all youth and eagerness.