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

by Robert Payne

  “Isn’t it simply a question of Indian honor?” he said.

  “Yes,” Gandhi said vehemently. “That is it, that is it! That is the real point at issue.”

  “Then,” said Andrews, “I am sure you are right to stand out. There must be no sacrifice of honor.”

  Within two or three days they were “Mohan” and “Charlie” to one another, and this was how they addressed each other through all the years of their friendship.

  Although he had no official status, Andrews was one of those quiet men who wear authority like an invisible garment. He had entry into places rarely entered by missionaries. He would sit down over a teacup with a prime minister, and the next day, without any warning, there would be an official proclamation, or an order in council, signed by the prime minister and written with the stub of Andrews’ pencil.

  While waiting for an appointment with General Smuts, Andrews was having quiet discussions with Lord Gladstone, the scholarly son of William Ewart Gladstone. Lord Gladstone was the Governor General of South Africa. His sister, Mrs. Drew, lived in Pretoria and knew all the members of the government. Andrews had known the Gladstone family in England, and with their help he was able to infiltrate the entire government of South Africa. General Smuts was busy trying to put an end to a railroad strike, and Gandhi was asked whether the Indians would join the strikers. He had no intention of embarrassing the government further—the grievances of the Indians and of the railroadmen had little in common —and he said as much to the reporters, adding that there was no need to publish the fact. Andrews thought there were good reasons for publishing the fact. “Of course you are right to suspend the struggle,” he said, “but if no one knows till afterwards, all the good effect will be lost—people will say you did it out of fear.” The news that Gandhi refused to take advantage of the government’s plight was received favorably. Lord Ampthill telegraphed his congratulations. English friends in South Africa gave their approval. Gandhi had learned a lesson from Andrews on the subtleties of non-violence.

  When negotiations between General Smuts and Gandhi opened in the middle of January, the atmosphere was unexpectedly friendly. Lord Gladstone and Andrews had cleared the way. General Smuts was heard to say that he retained a sympathetic interest in Mr. Gandhi “as an unusual type of humanity, whose peculiarities, however inconvenient they may be to a minister, are not devoid of attraction to the student.” It was his way of saying that he had grown to respect his adversary. As the days passed, the injustices that had infuriated Gandhi for so many years began to vanish one by one. General Smuts agreed to abolish the £3 tax, all the monogamous marriages of Indians would be recognized, domicile certificates were to be regarded as sufficient evidence of the right to enter the Union of South Africa, and educated Indians were to be permitted to enter Cape Province. Gandhi did not press for an inquiry into the brutality of the police toward the Indians, nor did he raise the all-important question of the “locations” (ghettos) in which the Indians were forced to live. He felt that a substantial victory had been won, and this was not the time to press his advantages. The Satyagraha campaign, which had occupied his attention for eight years, was called off. Among the Indians Gandhi was the hero of the hour.

  Just as the negotiations were coming to an end, they heard that Kasturbai was seriously ill in Durban. Gandhi’s joy in his triumph was dimmed. She had been in prison, had lost weight, and was often hysterical. He cared for her as well as he could, and made plans for returning to India with or without her, for he doubted whether she would survive her illness. She had to be supported when she sat up in bed, and lived on neem juice with occasional sips of orange juice. In the midst of conducting the continuing negotiations, he sat by her bed and pondered gloomily the state of his own soul and the unknown future.

  When a man has worked at extreme tension over a long period of time and finally accomplishes his purpose—a long and exhausting book, an intricate piece of research, the conquest of an empire—then he is often in grave danger. The tension suddenly snaps, the links that bind him to the outside world vanish, and he is thrown back on his own resources with faltering judgment and a sense of deepening insecurity. Success, which had seemed so desirable, begins to taste like ashes in the mouth. So it was with Gandhi during the months while he sat by his wife’s bedside and waited for the passing of the laws which would give a little more freedom to the Indians of South Africa.

  There were dark spaces in his mind, unfathomable abysses of horror. He knew himself well: harsh, demanding, cruel, a lawless and desperate spirit close to suicide more often than he knew, determined to conquer Heaven by storm. When one of the young pupils at Phoenix twice committed a moral lapse, he fell into a violent depression and thought of stabbing himself in the stomach and offering his life as a penitential sacrifice. He wrote to an unknown correspondent toward the end of April 1914:

  Never before have I spent such days of agony as I am doing now. I talk and I smile, I walk and eat and work, all mechanically these days. I can do no writing whatever. The heart seems to have gone dry. The agony I am going through is unspeakable. I have often wanted to take out the knife from my pocket and put it through the stomach. Sometimes I have felt like striking my head against the wall opposite, and at other times I have thought of running away from the world.

  He was well aware of his own cruelty, his determination to dominate others against their will. He wrote in the same letter:

  I do not know what evil there is in me. I have a strain of cruelty in me, as others say, such that people force themselves to do things, even to attempt impossible things, in order to please me. Lacking the necessary strength, they put on a false show and deceive me. Even Gokhale used to tell me that I was so harsh that people felt terrified of me and allowed themselves to be dragged against their will out of sheer fear or in the attempt to please me, and that those who found themselves too weak assumed an artificial pose in the end. I put far too heavy burdens on people.

  In this mood he raged more violently than ever against his sons, especially Harilal, who did not deserve his love and showed no love for his parents. His mother was hanging between life and death, little more than a skeleton, and he had the temerity to write a letter apologizing for not writing before. Did he not know that forgiveness was granted only for the first error? The father wanted complete domination over the son and was prepared to go to any lengths to obtain it. Use your own judgment, but obey me! It was the familiar complaint, and he said the same to his other sons.

  The old perplexities and doubts remained; terror lay a little below the surface. Oversexed and vowed to continence, he was given to lecturing his friends on the absolute necessity to quench desire. “We have heard of men who, passionate in their convictions, cut off their organs when they found it impossible to control their minds,” he wrote to a friend at this time. “Supposing my mind becomes a prey to desire and I cast an evil eye on my sister. I am burning with lust but have not been totally blinded by it. In such a situation, I think cutting off one’s organ would be a sacred duty if there is no other remedy.”

  Fantasies, often of sexual origin, crowded into his mind, and no amount of fasting and mortification of the body and the reading of edifying books could put an end to them. Kasturbhai had a liking for ginger roots, and he came to share her liking for them. One day he looked at ginger roots with something of the same terror with which Blake watched a knot in wood, for they had come alive and their shapes tormented him. Here he describes the nightmare:

  One day Ba collected a quantity of ginger roots from Mrs. Gool’s basket and placed them in our room. I was struck with horror to see them. The night passed. I sprang out of bed in a fright, early in the morning. How could one eat ginger? This thing, a single joint of which proliferated into so many shoots, must indeed be full of lives. Moreover, to eat fresh shoots was as good as killing delicate babies. I felt extremely disgusted with myself. I resolved that I would never eat ginger, not in this life. But the real fun comes now. Ba saw that
I would not take ginger. She asked me the reason. I told her. She also caught my point. She carried away the very tender shoots and pressed me to take something from the rest. I declined. The vow holds, but the tongue and the eye are like dogs. The desire to eat ginger comes over me whenever I see a piece of it. The tongue starts licking.

  In this strange mood, in great torment, Gandhi spent his last weeks in South Africa at odds with his sons, and with himself, and with the world. Sometimes he felt that all his work was done, and there was nothing left for him to do. Then he would think of Gokhale, the one man who had the power to mold and discipline him, to change him into a more reasonable being. “I know I made a bad secretary in South Africa,” he wrote to Gokhale. “I hope to do better in the Motherland if I am accepted.” And then he would ask himself whether he would be accepted and whether, having spent so much of his life in South Africa, he would ever find a firm footing in India, a country where he was a stranger.

  There were many other things which oppressed him during those last weeks in South Africa. Quite suddenly in March there came the news that Laxmidas, his eldest brother, had died in Porbandar. Karsandas had died the previous year. Gandhi was now head of a large family, and according to the Indian family system his brothers’ widows and his widowed sister and all their children could look to him for support. He had never wanted to become head of the family, never wanted the responsibility. In one of his letters to Laxmidas he had announced that he proposed to dedicate his life to public service and therefore could do nothing to support his family. Now, whether he wanted to or not, he would have to fulfill his obligations. Sometimes he thought of gathering all the remnants of his family around him and setting them to work as farmers or weavers, and he was certain that if he died there could be no salvation for them except in work.

  Death weighed heavily on him, and he thought often of his own death. He had hoped to destroy the fear of it in himself, but the fear remained. Kasturbai was still more frightened, and he would gaze down at her in the bed and wonder what attached her to life, when she was so ill, so close to death. A laborer called Nepal, who lived near the Phoenix Settlement, had burned to death in a fire. His wife, a coarse ill-tempered woman, had probably set the hut on fire. Gandhi took some coinfort from the thought that a man does not suffer excessively when he is burned to death, for the pain quickly becomes unbearable and he loses consciousness. From the death of Nepal he drew three conclusions. First, we must have compassion for ourselves as for all other creatures. Secondly, we should cherish no attachment to the body. Thirdly, we should strive at once, now, before it is too late, for moksha, the vision of God. It was the first time he had ever spoken of the need of men to have compassion for themselves.

  But while he thought of death and made careful inventories of family responsibilities in the event of his death—Harilal would have responsibility for Kasturbai and for the widow of Laxmidas, and other children would also have their responsibilities—another part of his mind was dealing with the final negotiations which brought about the Indians’ Relief bill. On June 2 the bill was formally presented to the House of Assembly in Cape Town and after the usual three readings by the Senate it passed into law a month later after receiving the assent of the Governor General. To the very end Gandhi was busy sending letters and telegrams to the ministers, offering them advice which was always sensible and to the point. He made no special claims. He was content that the bill was being passed largely in the form in which he had originally conceived it, in an atmosphere of peace and friendliness.

  In Bloemfontein Jail Gandhi had made a pair of sandals, which he now presented to General Smuts as a token of affection. For a quarter of a century the general continued to wear them when working around his farm. Finally, in 1939, the sandals were returned to Gandhi as a keepsake on his seventieth birthday.

  The relations between Gandhi and General Smuts were never close. They had fought one another from a distance, and their meetings were usually brief and chilly. Toward the end they had come to know one another better. Many years later General Smuts spoke of the prolonged struggle between them:

  His method was deliberately to break the law, and to organize his followers into a mass movement of passive resistance in disobedience to the law objected to. In both provinces a wild and disconcerting commotion was created, large numbers of Indians had to be imprisoned for lawless behaviour, and Gandhi himself received—what no doubt he desired—a short period of rest and quiet in gaol. For him everything went according to plan. For me—the defender of law and order—there was the usual trying situation, the odium of carrying out a law which had not strong public support, and finally the discomfiture when the law had to be repealed. For him it was a successful coup. Nor was the personal touch wanting, for nothing in Gandhi’s procedure is without a peculiar personal touch. In gaol he had prepared for me a very useful pair of sandals which he presented to me when he was set free! I have worn these sandals for many a summer since then, even though I may feel that I am not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man!

  Anyhow it was in this spirit that we fought out our quarrels in South Africa. There was no hatred or personal ill-feeling, the spirit of humanity was never absent, and when the fight was over there was the atmosphere in which a decent peace could be concluded. Gandhi and I made a settlement which Parliament ratified, and which kept the peace between the races for many years.

  But that was General Smuts speaking long after the event. What he felt at the time was more accurately stated in a letter to a friend: “The saint has left our shores, I hope for ever.”

  Meanwhile Gandhi’s work in South Africa was over. For a few more days he traveled across the country to say farewell to his friends among the Indian communities. Kasturbai’s health had improved, and she accompanied him in this triumphal tour. They were garlanded and feasted and presented with addresses of welcome wherever they went. At Kimberley, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Phoenix, Bloemfontein, Durban, and at least ten other places the crowds came to cheer them, and Gandhi would speak about his own efforts and say that they were incomparably smaller than the efforts of the young people who had died for the cause and quickened the conscience of South Africa. The eight-year struggle was at an end, the Indians had behaved courageously, but so too had the Europeans, and the time had come to let the wounds heal over.

  He had made his own plans. Almost up to the end he had thought of returning to India, but now he decided to take the first steamship to London, where Gokhale was staying. Kasturbai and Kallenbach would accompany him. Once more he spoke to the crowds at the railroad station in Cape Town, and then he boarded the R.M.S. Kilfauns Castle. It was winter in South Africa, and a cold wind was blowing. He stood by the rail for a while, waving at the Indians gathered on the dockside, and then he disappeared from sight.

  He never saw South Africa again.

  The War Comes

  THE WAR CLOUDS were racing across the skies of Europe, but Gandhi knew nothing of their coming. In his third-class cabin he spent his days quietly putting his papers in order and tending Kasturbai, who had not completely recovered her health. Two weeks of banquets and speeches had exhausted him, and sometimes he seemed strangely remote. He had lost weight, and sometimes when Kallenbach least expected it there would appear a strange strained look on his face, as of a man who does not know where he is going and is almost past caring.

  He did little serious work on the ship: a few letters, a few pages summarizing the last months of the Satyagraha campaign, and occasionally he would enter into a small notebook the expenses he incurred during the journey. Since Kallenbach spoke of accompanying him to India, Gandhi decided that the sea voyage provided a suitable opportunity for teaching him Gujarati, and so one hour of every day was set aside for a Gujarati lesson. Another hour was set aside for teaching Kasturbai the Bhagavad Gita, but she was not a good pupil, and she was happier when he recited tales from the Ramayana. Special arrangements had been made in Cape Town to provide them with enough fruit,
raw bananas, boiled groundnuts and milk for the journey. On his trip to South Africa Gokhale, though suffering from diabetes and other ailments, showed a quite astonishing proficiency at deck quoits, but Gandhi had no intention of playing quoits. The three of them lived apart from the other passengers, and presented a rather forbidding appearance to anyone who engaged them in conversation. “That,” Gandhi commented, “saves us plenty of time.”

  One reason for his lack of conviviality was that he was still suffering from the effects of his last fast and walked with such difficulty that it was completely impossible for him to take a stroll around the deck. All he could do was to hobble around the deck for a little while, hoping that the sea air and exercise would improve his appetite and digestion. What especially troubled him was a sharp pain in the calves which made walking agonizingly painful.

  Much of the time was therefore spent in his cabin in earnest discussion with Kallenbach on moral principles, with Gandhi doing most of the talking, for Kallenbach was a willing listener. The subject of truth and its opposites, anger, selfishness, hatred, were debated at length, and since Gandhi liked to employ concrete examples to illustrate abstract ideas, they inevitably discussed Kallenbach’s expensive binoculars, his most prized possession. Never a day passed without a lecture on the binoculars, which infuriated Gandhi because they were expensive and lacked the fundamental simplicity required of all objects in one’s personal possession. Kallenbach must have had the patience of Job to endure these lectures. The endless debate on the binoculars was unfair, because Gandhi had a lawyer’s gift for argument and Kallenbach was often tongue-tied in his presence. If he presented a good case for the binoculars one day, Gandhi would destroy it the next day. Finally the debate became so serious that Gandhi decided on extreme measures.

  “Rather than allow them to be a bone of contention between us,” he said, “why not throw them into the sea and be done with them?”