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

by Robert Payne

  When, smiling and playing my way through life,

  I see Him revealed to me, a visible presence,

  Then shall I consider my life to have attained its true end;

  He who has seen Him even in a dream

  Will cease chasing the shadows in vain.

  “Let the mind be always rapt with joy,” Rajchandra had said, and as often as he could, in his well-polished cell, Gandhi would surrender to joy.

  Letters came infrequently: he was in fact allowed to receive only one letter a month and to write one letter a month. He solved the problem by writing to his son Manilal at Phoenix at vast length, telling him exactly how everyone should behave under all conceivable circumstances. Copies of the letter were to be distributed; all should know that he was thinking about them.

  He was released from jail at 7:30 A.M. on May 24, 1909, having completed his three-month sentence. Usually prisoners were released at 9:00 A.M., but the government hoped to prevent a demonstration. To the crowd of about a hundred Indians waiting outside, he said he found no pleasure in being released; his greatest pleasure was to suffer imprisonment for the sake of the cause.

  The cause, however, had reached the stage where it seemed impossible to move backward or forward; the deadlock remained. In despair the British Indian Association decided to make one last appeal to London. Gandhi and Haji Habib were accordingly given first-class tickets on the R.M.S. Kenilworth Castle, which sailed from Cape Town on June 23. They were under order to use their influence and connections to press for an immediate change in the Asiatic Law.

  This time Gandhi came to London with far more impressive credentials than before. Previously he had been the leader of a movement of protest, which had not been tempered in battle with the police. This time he came as the leader of a movement which had shown its determination by letting its members court arrest; and the jails of the Transvaal were filled with Indian militants. Previously he was scarcely known; now he was well known, for Reuter’s had published accounts of his arrests. Previously he came as a lawyer and a patriot; now he came as a man who had suffered for his opinions, a jailbird from one of the black cells of Pretoria Jail.

  A Passage to London

  The true remedy lies,

  in my humble opinion,

  in England discarding civilization . . .

  The Terrorists

  THE WESTMINSTER PALACE HOTEL, opposite Westminster Abbey, was the most sumptuous of the London hotels constructed in the Victorian era. Because it was close to the Houses of Parliament, Whitehall and the law courts, it was well-suited for anyone having dealings with the government and the law. Members of Parliament often had their apartments in the hotel, ambassadors and visiting proconsuls would stay there for a few days before finding more opulent accommodation, and government officers would gather in the conference rooms to debate the precise wording of laws. In one of the conference rooms the Act of Union founding the Dominion of Canada was finally worked out after months of negotiation. The hotel was an anteroom to the Houses of Parliament, and in a single day a visitor might meet fifty Members of Parliament and twenty lords in the grand vestibule. The men sitting in the comfortable armchairs provided with antimacassars were deciding the destinies of an empire.

  Gandhi stayed at the Westminster Palace Hotel because it was the obvious place to stay. Here he could entertain his distinguished visitors, hold conferences, or quietly debate issues in the palm court. He would have preferred a cheap lodging, but a man cannot write to the Secretary of State for India and expect an immediate answer addressed to a lodginghouse in Bloomsbury. The hotel gave dignity to his cause, and the impressive letterhead ensured a prompt reply to his letters.

  He was given a small suite overlooking Westminster Abbey: a bedroom and a private sitting-room where he entertained. With his friends in the government he behaved with decorum; with Indian friends he was inclined to unbend, inviting them to a vegetarian lunch. At such times the books and papers littering the table would be removed and stacked on the floor, and after spreading newspapers on the table he served a meal consisting of oranges, apples, bananas, grapes, and a huge bag of unshelled peanuts. With this feast in front of him he rang for the waiter, who would appear a few moments later in frock coat and starched shirt to await his orders. Grandly he would ask for tea, toast and some plates, and then wave the waiter away. Tea, toast and plates would appear on a silver tray carried by a waiter as stiff and solemn as a soldier on parade. By this time orange juice was running all over The Times and peanut shells were flying across the room, while there was no telling where the banana skins and apple cores had got to. Millie Polak, who sometimes shared these meals, reported that “at the end of the meal the room looked rather as if an ill-bred party of schoolboys had been let loose in it.” Finally Gandhi rang the bell, and the stern waiter was requested to clear away the rubbish.

  Day after day, month after month, Gandhi occupied these two rooms at the Westminster Palace Hotel until he seemed to have taken up permanent residence. The cost was staggering, but in his view, if he could bring his efforts to a satisfactory conclusion, the rooms were well worth the price. Later he would come to regret the cost as an exorbitant drain on his supporters, concluding that no political activity was worth while unless it could be carried out without funds. “Money very often spoils a righteous fight,” he wrote, “and God never gives a Satyagrahi anything beyond his strict needs.”

  He was on excellent terms with men in high positions. Arthur Oliver Russell, the second Baron Ampthill, was one of those Victorian dignitaries who possessed a stem moral conscience. His father was an outstanding Ambassador to Berlin, his mother a beauty much admired by Disraeli. He was born in the same year as Gandhi, and at thirty was appointed Governor of Madras. He was only thirty-five when he became the acting Viceroy of India. During this period, much against his will, he signed the executive order bringing about the partition of Bengal, which shocked the Indians and caused widespread rioting. In 1909, when Gandhi came to know him well, he had retired from India and was leading the life of a wealthy landowner and member of the House of Lords. There was illness in his family and he spent most of his time on his estate in Bedfordshire, but from time to time he would come to London. On these occasions he acted as Gandhi’s intermediary with the powerful men who sat in the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office. He was prepared to go to great lengths to help Gandhi. When Joseph Doke’s biography of Gandhi was about to appear—it was largely dictated by Gandhi himself—there arose the question of finding a suitable person to write an introduction. The choice inevitably fell on Lord Ampthill, who was approached and readily agreed. Politicians, asked to introduce a book, usually write brief and perfunctory recommendations, often without reading it. Lord Ampthill had obviously read the book in manuscript with great care and his long introduction has some significance as the first considered estimate of Gandhi written by an Englishman of power and prestige. He wrote:

  The subject of the sketch, Mr. Gandhi, has been denounced in this country, even by responsible persons, as an ordinary agitator; his acts have been misrepresented as mere vulgar defiance of the law; there have not even been wanting suggestions that his motives are those of self-interest and pecuniary profit.

  A perusal of these pages ought to dispel any such notions from the mind of any fair man who has been misled into entertaining them. And with a better knowledge of the man there must come a better knowledge of the matter.

  But although Gandhi possessed allies in high places, the “better knowledge of the matter” was slow in coming about. Lord Ampthill advised caution: no pronunciamentos, no newspaper articles, no public discussions. Instead, he suggested that there should be a private settlement with General Botha and General Smuts, with the British government and the Viceroy holding watching briefs.

  At first Gandhi was prepared to follow Lord Ampthill’s advice. There was thus no attempt to send formal deputations to the British government; and when Haji Habib and Gandhi called on John Morle
y, the Secretary of State for India, it was a purely private meeting. Lord Ampthill argued that such meetings conducted in complete privacy permitted greater scope for diplomacy, but in Gandhi’s eyes they suffered from one overwhelming fault: nothing concrete ever came from them. He spent half an hour with John Morley, and Lord Ampthill spent similar short periods with Lord Curzon, Lord Selborne, and Lord Crewe. General Smuts was in London, and Lord Ampthill reported that he had met the general, who needed more time to consider the problem. Every attempt to come to concrete issues failed, and Gandhi was left with the feeling that he had come on a wild goose chase. A month, two months passed, and there was little to show for his continued presence in London.

  Henry Polak had been sent to India to organize mass meetings on behalf of the Indians in South Africa. Every week Gandhi wrote him long and informative letters, but the information was chiefly about Polak’s relatives in London and the small progress being made in the deputation. “We will be having a brief meeting with Lord Crewe; Lord Ampthill is still at work; a question is being raised in the House of Lords; there is nothing to report; I am tired of repeating that there is nothing to report.” So Gandhi wrote in despair and humiliation, knowing that ultimately everything depended upon the whim of General Smuts and that private diplomacy was rarely rewarding.

  Gandhi’s arrival in London coincided with a period when the British government was deeply concerned with the problems of India. A new generation of Indian nationalists had arisen, demands for swaraj, or self-government, were being heard with greater frequency, and small, well-organized bands of terrorists were at work to enforce these demands. There were terrorists among the young Indian students living in London. Gandhi knew their leader well, but for obvious reasons had no sympathy with his methods.

  On July 10, when Gandhi arrived in London, the newspapers were still discussing the assassination of Sir Curzon Wyllie eight days before. The murdered man was the political secretary of the Secretary of State for India, and he was shot to death by a young Indian at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington. The murder was regarded as particularly shocking because it took place in the presence of Lady Wyllie, who was standing at the top of a staircase when she saw her husband shot down. She ran down the stairs and hurled herself on her husband’s body, trying to revive him. He had died instantly. So, too, had a Parsi doctor who had flung himself between the assassin and his victim.

  The murderer was arrested on the spot and found to be in possession of two pistols, a knife and a dagger. His name was Madanlal Dhingra, and he was a tall, gangling Mahratta with thick curly hair and a square chin, with something languidly Byronic in his manner. He represented himself as an Indian patriot who had killed Sir Curzon Wyllie to avenge the crimes committed by the British in India, and he claimed to have acted alone.

  In fact he belonged to a conspiratorial group led by Vinayak Savarkar, a dedicated revolutionary who managed a private hostel for Indian students in Highgate, in the northern suburbs of London. Savarkar was a short, slender, rather precise man, with broad cheekbones and a thin aquiline nose, and his skin had a remarkable ivory pallor. He was then twenty-six years old, a student at Gray’s Inn, with an extraordinary talent for gathering idealistic youths around him and making them do his bidding. The hostel in Highgate was called India House, and most of the students who lived there were under his domination.

  Gandhi knew India House well, for he had visited it on several occasions in 1906. It was a large house set back from the road with a garden and a view over Hampstead Heath. About thirty Indian students were living there on the bounty of a man called Shyamji Krishna varma, a Master of Arts of Oxford University, a scholar of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, formerly the dewan of several princely states, later the editor of The Indian Sociologist, a revolutionary magazine published monthly in London. Gandhi regularly read the magazine, and in the pages of Indian Opinion advised others to read it. Though wealthy, Shyamji Krishnavarma lived like an ascetic, spending his money on scholarships, supporting his revolutionary magazine, and obtaining weapons for terrorists. One of the conditions of his scholarships was that the student should spend at least two years in a European university and promise that on his return to India he would never take service in the government.

  Shyamji Krishnavarma is a somewhat perplexing character, for he was both the complete scholar and the complete terrorist. He wrote learned monographs, lectured before Orientalists, and was devoted to the principles of Herbert Spencer. The Indian Sociologist was described on the masthead as “An Organ of Freedom, and of Political, Social, and Religious Reform.” Gandhi genuinely liked and admired him, and he had a good deal of sympathy for Madanlal Dhingra. In an article written for Indian Opinion he expressed the view that the murderer had acted under the overwhelming pressure of an idea. He wrote:

  In my view, Mr. Dhingra himself is innocent. The murder was committed in a state of intoxication. It is not merely wine or bhang that makes one drunk; a mad idea can also do so. That was the case with Mr. Dhingra. . . . It may be said that what Mr. Dhingra did, publicly and knowing full well that he himself would have 16 die, argues courage of no mean order on his part. But as I have said above, men can do these things in a state of intoxication, and can also banish the fear of death. Whatever courage there is in this is the result of intoxication, not a quality of the man himself. A man’s own courage consists in suffering deeply and over a long period. That alone is a brave act which is preceded by careful reflection.

  Gandhi was fascinated by political murder, and some years later in an address to the students of Benares University he would return to the theme with that curious mingling of horror and admiration for the assassin.

  Many years passed before the full story of Madanlal Dhingra became known. There was some truth in Gandhi’s statement that he was innocent. He had fallen completely under the domination of Savarkar and scarcely knew what he was doing. Savarkar had been training him for many months, preparing him for the day when he would become a martyr to the cause of India. To test his courage, a needle was driven through the palm of his hand; he remained unperturbed. One day he asked when his day of martyrdom would come, and Savarkar replied: “When a martyr is determined and ready, that fact by itself generally implies that the time for martyrdom must have come.” Dhingra joined a rifle club, and became a familiar presence at the gatherings where British officials and well-wishers met Indians. The immediate target was Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy who, by partitioning Bengal and superintending the great imperial durbar in 1903, had become the symbol of British grandeur. The attempt on Lord Curzon failed, for he slipped through a door just at the moment when Dhingra was about to fire. Then, for having failed, Dhingra became all the more the creature of Savarkar, who continually taunted him for missing a perfect opportunity. On the morning of the assassination of Sir Curzon Wyllie, Savarkar gave Dhingra a nickel-plated revolver and said: “Don’t show me your face if you fail this time.”

  After being taken to Brixton Prison, Dhingra was given a preliminary hearing at Westminster and committed for trial at the Old Bailey. Savarkar was being closely watched by the police, and he took to living in obscure lodginghouses, staying only a few days in each before moving on to the next. He was a man who inspired loyalty among his English friends, and the young David Garnett, the son of Constance Garnett, the translator of many Russian works, was summoned to his hiding place to receive what purported to be a proclamation written by Dhingra while in prison. Would David Garnett please see that the proclamation received the widest publicity? Garnett was a friend of Robert Lynd, one of the editors of the Daily News, and the text of Dhingra’s proclamation appeared in the newspaper the following day. It was a violent and threatening denunciation of the British administration of India, and it sealed Dhingra’s fate, for there had been a movement to commute the death sentence to one of life imprisonment, but after the publication of this document he was doomed. He evidently wanted to die a martyr’s death. In his speech from the dock he said:
“The only lesson required for India at present is to learn how to die, and the only way to teach it is by dying ourselves. Therefore I die, and glory in my martyrdom.” He was sentenced to death and hanged in Brix-ton Prison on August 17.

  Gandhi felt that Dhingra’s zeal was misguided. “Those who believe that India has gained by Dhingra’s act and other similar acts in India make a serious mistake,” he wrote. “Dhingra was a patriot, but his love was blind. He gave his body in a wrong way, its results can only be mischievous.”

  On October 24 there came the feast day of Dassara, which celebrates the triumph of the hero-god Rama over the evil King Ravana. This year, for the first time, the Indians in London decided to celebrate the occasion with a feast, and they invited Gandhi to preside over it. He accepted on condition that there should be no political overtones in the speeches. Savarkar was also invited to speak. About seventy guests attended, among them a few English friends. In spite of the promise not to make political speeches, both Gandhi and Savarkar succeeded in conveying their political ideas to their small audience.

  To save cost, the cooking was done by students of law and medicine. They were untrained, the food was inadequate, the meal started late, and the service left much to be desired. Gandhi observed mildly: “Those in charge of the service did not know their jobs well.”

  Resplendent in starched shirt and swallowtail coat, Gandhi welcomed the guests and made a rousing speech on the significance of Rama, for whom he possessed a special devotion. Rama, originally the heroic conqueror in the great epic called the Ramayana, had long since been elevated to the rank of a god, being regarded as the seventh incarnation of Vishnu. Once more, he said, the Indians were summoned to conquer the evil King Ravana under the banner of Rama. Where would they find the future conquerors? Only among those who, like Rama’s companions, observed the laws of celibacy and lived lives of perfect virtue. Gandhi was saying that to oppose the British Raj it was necessary to model oneself on Rama and to imitate his peaceful courage and devotion to duty, his chivalry and quiet serenity. Under the banner of Rama all the Indian races would march together.