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

by Robert Payne

  He had known Gulab when she was a babe in arms, and he would sometimes remind her that he had dandled her on his knees. He told her that he regarded her as his daughter, and therefore he was all the more stem with her. What he demanded of her was that she should become a heroine by her continence; she must never complain; her husband’s absence was her triumph. He reminded her that many women in the Hindu legends had abandoned their husbands, thus giving them the perfect freedom necessary for their salvation. Sometimes the husband had abandoned the wife, and both had thereupon achieved sainthood. “Lord Buddha left his wife and became immortal, and so did his wife,” he announced, explaining that he only wanted to show her that separation could do her no harm. If she suffered from mental anguish, this was understandable, but it would not last forever. Although he was careful to point out that he was acting only for her welfare and did not insist that she should accept his ideas, he was determined to dominate her completely.

  He was also determined to dominate the Indians in the Transvaal in their struggle against the restrictive laws. They would do what he told them to do, he would tolerate no opinions but his own, he would arrange that all the negotiations were conducted by himself alone, and he was sometimes less than candid in reporting his conversations with high officials to the members of the British Indian Association. He made serious strategic mistakes, which might not have been made if he had taken other members into his confidence. He delivered free-wheeling accusations against the government, accusations which were not calculated to make the government more tolerant or more understanding. When Mrs. Thambi Naidoo, the wife of the chief picket, suffered a miscarriage after her husband went to prison, Gandhi called General Smuts “a murderer,” and refused to retract the accusation even when it was pointed out to him that people who were not unsympathetic to his cause would inevitably wonder whether he was trustworthy in questions of fact. When an Indian at Vereeniging refused to pay a fine, the magistrate ordered the seizure of his property to the amount of the fine. Gandhi called this “legalized robbery.” Yusuf Mian was attacked by Pathan hooligans, and his nose was broken. Gandhi argued that his nose was broken because he “stood up for the government.” This vehement facility with words led him along dangerous paths, and sometimes he came to believe his own rhetoric.

  Gandhi liked to say that all his acts in South Africa grew out of the logic of political events. But in fact they often grew out of deep-seated personal needs, desires and frustrations. After he was attacked by Mir Alam, he became more unyielding in his demands and more violent in speech, and for the first time there can be detected a forced histrionic note. He was enlarging his power over the Indians, and at the same time compen-sating for his own hurts and failures.

  On Sunday, August 16,1908, a few days after Harilal had been brought to trial, Gandhi organized a memorable act of defiance against the government. About three thousand Indians were gathered outside the Hamidia Mosque to watch the solemn burning of registration certificates. On a platform there had been erected a large, three-legged caldron. The scenario was well-prepared. A message was sent to the government saying that the burning of the certificates would be called off if the government would stop the passage of the Asiatic Act in its new and revised form. At four o’clock, shortly after the meeting opened, a dispatch rider on a bicycle arrived with a telegram from the government announcing that the Act would be passed. The news was greeted with loud cheers. Gandhi presided over the ceremony and delivered a long fighting speech. He told them that the burning of the certificates would probably bring “untold suffering” upon their shoulders, but no other method of protest was open to them. Had they not all taken a solemn oath not to submit to the Asiatic Act? He had prayed, and he had come as a result of his prayers to an irrevocable decision that the dignity of the Indians must be upheld at whatever the cost in suffering. He said:

  I did not come out of the gaol before my time was up in order that I might leave the hardships that I was suffering there—personally, I was not undergoing any hardships whatever. It would be a far greater hardship to me to have to submit to indignity or to see a fellow-countryman trampled underfoot or his bread, to which he is justly entitled, taken away from him. I would pass the whole of my lifetime in gaol, and I say that in the House of God, the House of Prayer, and I repeat it that I would far rather pass the whole of my lifetime in gaol and be perfectly happy than to see my fellow-countrymen subjected to indignity and I should come out of gaol.

  No, gentlemen, the servant who stands before you this afternoon is not made of that stuff, and it is because I ask you to suffer everything that may be necessary than break your oath, it is because I expect this of my countrymen, that they will be, above all, true to their God, that I ask you this afternoon to bum all these certificates.

  It was a very long speech, and he repeated it again in Gujarati. Long before the speeches were over, it was growing dark, and then amid wild cheering he called upon the Indians to surrender their certificates to Yusuf Mian, who would heap them all in the caldron and then set fire to them. About 1,300 certificates were handed up to the platform. Finally kerosene was poured into the caldron, a match was dropped in, and a blue flame shot out. The crowds roared themselves hoarse, flung caps into the air, whistled, and continued to cheer long after the flames had died down. At the last moment some latecomers came running up to the platform, brandishing their certificates and dropping them into the flames.

  It was a satisfying act of defiance, but it did not lead to any notable gains. Gandhi had hoped for many more certificates, and even after a second public burning he could claim only 2,300 certificates reduced to ashes. The Indian community was still divided. Some merchants had returned to India, to avoid prosecution from the government and from Gandhi’s khaki-clad pickets. Yusuf Mian, the chairman of the British Indian Association, suddenly decided to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Sometimes Gandhi found himself wondering why the movement was not gaining momentum, and General Smuts wondered what Gandhi hoped to gain by inciting the Indians to near-rebellion. He stood firm; Gandhi stood firm; and the deadlock continued.

  On October 7,1908, while returning from a visit to Durban, Gandhi was arrested for the second time that year. The charge was a familiar one: he was not carrying a registration card and refused to give his thumb and finger impressions on demand. The arrest took place at Volksrust, just inside the Transvaal border, and he was at once brought before a magistrate, and since he refused to go on bail he was remanded for a week. The trial was brief. He asked for the sternest possible punishment, which was three months’ hard labor, but the magistrate ordered him to pay a fine of £25 or go to jail with hard labor for two months. In handing down the sentence the magistrate said: “I very much regret to see Mr. Gandhi, an officer of the Court and of the Supreme Court, in his present position. Mr. Gandhi may feel otherwise, looking at the situation in the light that he is suffering for his country. But I can only view it from another point of view.” On the same day Gandhi sent a message to Indian Opinion. “Keep absolutely firm to the end,” he wrote. “Suffering is our only remedy. Victory is certain.”

  His first taste of prison pleased him; the second was far more disturbing. He approved of the cleanliness of the cells, the whitewashed walls, the excellent lighting and ventilation, but the hard labor appalled him. For nine hours a day he was forced to break stones, dig pits, and work with road gangs. He was sent out to work in the market square at Volksrust, and the European warder kept urging him to work harder, shouting: “Come on, Gandhi! Come on, Gandhi!” Sometimes an Indian prisoner would faint with exhaustion in the heat. Gandhi would return to the prison at the end of a day’s work with stiff limbs and swollen wrists, which he cured with a mud plaster. He helped to dig a municipal tank, piling up the earth and carrying it away in a barrow. He did not complain, although once when the warder shouted at him, Gandhi answered that there was no reason to shout because he was working at the limit of his endurance. To bear suffering is itself a kind of happiness, h
e thought, and as a true Satyagrahi he was content to suffer.

  The real horror came two weeks later when he was taken to Johannesburg Jail in order to testify in a case coming up before the courts. He had to walk in broad daylight from the railroad station to the prison wearing convict clothes, with his hands manacled. The Indians who saw him being marched under guard through the streets wondered why a famous political prisoner should be treated in this way. Gandhi was less perturbed, for it was no hardship to wear convict clothes and he enjoyed the walk. But that night in his cell he knew fear as he had never known it before. All round him were Kaffirs and Chinese, the dregs of Johannesburg society, haggard and murderous. He was afraid for his life, and because they were all staring at him, he took up the Bhagavad Gita and began to read the passages that provide solace at times of danger. A Kaffir came up to him and asked him in broken English what he was doing there, and he answered briefly and then lapsed into silence. A Chinese came and peered closely at him, then went away. When Gandhi saw the Chinese again, he was exchanging obscene jokes with a Kaffir lying in bed, and they were exposing each other’s genitals.

  He did not know a word of the Kaffir language, and could not tell what they were saying and whispering. Terror came out of the night, and he felt lost without the presence of familiar Indian faces. He managed to sleep a little before dawn, and in the morning he took courage from his experience, realizing that other Indians must have suffered in the same way.

  He spent altogether ten days in the Johannesburg Jail because he had to make frequent appearances in court. There was one more unpleasant incident. He was removed to another cell full of Indians, and this comforted him; but both the Indians and the Kaffirs shared the same open lavatories. As soon as he occupied one of these doorless lavatories a huge and ferocious Kaffir advanced on him and told him to get out. He answered that he would be out very soon, but this reply did not please the Kaffir, who seized him, lifted him high in the air, and would have dashed him to the ground if he had not clung to the doorframe, thus saving himself from a fall. “I was not in the least frightened by this,” he related in his notes on his prison experiences. “I smiled and walked away; but one or two Indian prisoners who saw what had happened started weeping.”

  When he pondered his own death, he knew it would not come from the Chinese and Kaffir prisoners, or from the white-clad native warders swaggering with their naked assegais. On January 29, 1909, he wrote from Volksrust Jail: “My enthusiasm is such that I may have to meet death in South Africa at the hands of my own countrymen.” He regarded his death as perhaps necessary in order to unite the Hindus and the Muslims. “In this struggle,” he went on, “a twofold inner struggle is going on. One of them is to bring the Hindus and the Muslims together.” Throughout his life, at intervals, he would find himself returning to the theme that his own murder would serve to unite the Hindus and the Muslims.

  When he returned to Volksrust Jail, he breathed more easily. Although sentenced to nine hours of hard labor a day, there was still time for reading and meditation. He read “the great Ruskin” and “the great Thoreau,” whose Civil Disobedience he now read for the first time. He read a life of Garibaldi, and borrowing a Bible from the prison library he was impressed by The Book of Daniel, with its vision of the prophet saved from the power of the lions. Nearly every day he read from the small pocket edition of the Bhagavad Gita, which was always with him.

  Bad news came very early during his second prison term. Albert West telegraphed from Phoenix that Kasturbai was severely ill and hemorrhaging. Gandhi felt that his political duty was far greater than his duty to his wife, and resisted the temptation to post bail and walk out of the prison. Instead, he asked West to keep him informed and wrote to Kasturbai a letter which was strangely cold and self-regarding, for he imagined her dying and was concerned to prevent her death from interfering with the movement. He wrote:

  I love you so dearly that even if you are dead, you will be alive to me. Your soul is deathless. I repeat what I have frequently told you and assure you that if you do succumb to your illness, I will not marry again. Time and again I have told you that you may quietly breathe your last with faith in God. If you die, even that death of yours will be a sacrifice to the cause of Satyagraha. My struggle is not merely political. It is religious and therefore quite pure. It does not matter much whether one dies in it or lives. I hope and expect that you will also think likewise and not be unhappy.

  Gandhi aged fourteen.

  Karamchand Gandhi, with inscription by Gandhi in Gujarati, reading: “Mohandas falls at his feet.”

  Gandhi (right) aged seventeen, with his brother Laxmidas.

  Gandhi as a law student, 1888.

  Gandhi as a barrister in Johannesburg, January, 1906.

  Kasturbai Gandhi in 1915.

  Gandhi in 1915.

  Gandhi outside his Johannesburg office in 1913. Sonja Schlesin is at the right.

  Charlie Andrews, Gandhi, and Willion Pearson, 1914.

  Rajchandra.

  Gandhi during Satyagraha struggle, 1914.

  Gandhi and Sarojini Naidu at Dandi, April 5,1930.

  Gandhi, the Agha Khan, and Sarojini Naidu outside Ritz Hotel, London, 1931.

  Round Table Conference, 1931. To Gandhi’s right: Lord Sankey, Sir Samuel Hoare, Ramsay MacDonald.

  No doubt Kasturbhai would have preferred a fonder letter, but it was not in him to expose his feelings to his wife. He came out of prison on December 12, but did not hurry to her bedside until two weeks later. She was very ill, perhaps dying; the doctor insisted on surgery, and Gandhi reluctantly agreed, staying for a few days in Durban until she seemed to be on the road to recovery, although weak and emaciated. Then he returned to Johannesburg where from time to time he received news of her progress by telephone. On February 4 the doctor telephoned and asked whether Kasturbai could be permitted to have beef tea. Gandhi was so alarmed that he took the first train for Durban and confronted the doctor, who told him calmly that he had already given her beef tea. There was an angry exchange. The doctor insisted that as long as Kasturbai was under his care, he had the right to give her whatever food or medicines she needed. Gandhi had a simple solution to this problem: he immediately removed her to Phoenix, although she was too ill to be moved. It was a terrible journey in the rain to the railroad station, but at Phoenix, Albert West was waiting with a hammock, six bearers to carry her the two miles to the settlement, and a bottle of hot milk. Then there were more hemorrhages; she failed to respond to hydropathic cures; and he advised her to give up salt and pulses, saying that he would willingly give them up too, if that would help her. She knew then that he could not be dissuaded. “You are too obstinate,” she said. “You will listen to no one.” Gokhale had said the same thing.

  He was still courting arrest, and when he returned to Johannesburg a few days later he was put on trial and sentenced to a fine of £50 or three months’ imprisonment with hard labor for failure to produce a registration certificate.

  This third experience of jail was even more unpleasant than the second, for he was placed in solitary confinement in Pretoria Jail, and the hard labor consisted of endlessly polishing the black asphalt floor and the iron door. The cell was ten feet long and seven feet broad; there was almost no ventilation; and the light was so feeble that he was able to read large type only if he stood directly under it. In the neighboring cells were a Kaffir convicted of attempted murder, another convicted of bestiality, and two more convicted of sodomy.

  He paced his cell until the warder accused him of spoiling the fine polish. He suffered from severe headaches, and felt he was suffocating. After ten days of polishing the floor and the iron door, he was ordered to sew blankets together, a task which necessitated squatting on the floor and bending down in a posture which brought on severe backache. No bench or chair was permitted, and he was given neither a bedboard nor a mattress. To a visitor he said there could be no doubt that General Smuts intended to break his spirit, but he was determined no
t to succumb.

  On Saturdays and Sundays he was given more leisure and spent the time reading omnivorously. Rajchandra’s poems had been published in a slim volume and he proceeded to learn them by heart. He read the Upan-ishads and Carlyle’s French Revolution and some Emerson and Tolstoy, and studied Tamil, a language that fascinated him, though he never came to know it well. He would say later that he made “desperate efforts” to learn the language, and always failed.

  But it was Rajchandra’s poetry that kept his spirits soaring. In those verses he found the nourishment which his soul needed, and sitting on the polished asphalt floor he would recite in the half-darkness:

  The sky rings with the name of the Invisible,

  I sit rapt in the temple, my heart filled with gladness.

  Taking up a Yogic posture, the face immovable,

  I have pitched my tent in the abode of the Inscrutable.

  He would repeat the verses when he woke up at night, and every morning he would spend half an hour meditating on them; and if he gave way to despair, the memory of Rajchandra’s poetry was enough to restore him. He contemplated writing at length about his friend, but except for a rather perfunctory speech delivered many years later on the anniversary of Rajchandra’s birth, he wrote nothing at all, perhaps because he felt too close to him. In spiritual affairs be trusted Rajchandra above all men, just as he trusted Gokhale in political affairs. Rajchandra showed the way to God: