by Robert Payne
On the following day Gandhi and Kasturbhai sailed as second-class passengers on the S. S. Arabia, bound for Bombay. Most of the food they would eat on the journey they carried with them. There were canisters of wheat flour and banana flour which would be made into biscuits, and enough groundnuts, dates and dried fruit to last three weeks. Sometimes he despaired and wondered whether his life was over. “What shall I do with myself?” he wrote in a letter to a friend, and he found no answer except to place his trust in God.
He had no plans, no hopes, no certainties. He was a stranger returning to a strange land.
The Jungles and the Temples
See me please in the nakedness of
my working, and in my limitations, you
will then know me. I have to tread on
most delicate ground, and my path is
destined to be through jungles and temples.
An Apprentice to India
WHEN GANDHI returned to India he found a country that was strange to him. For twenty-eight years, except for brief intervals, he had lived abroad, seeing India through the eyes of an expatriate. From Durban or Johannesburg India appeared to be a calm and powerful country immersed in ageless dreams, with no violent storms brewing beneath the surface. She was always brighter, purer and more beautiful from afar. But when he arrived in India, he wondered what he had to offer her, for he had lost his roots and scarcely knew his way through the mental climate of the time. So, in those early years, he acted tentatively and cautiously, like a tiger pawing the earth before he springs.
India welcomed him as a hero, but did not know how to use him. Whenever he appeared in public, he was greeted with open arms as “the great Gandhi,” the man who had upheld the dignity of India in South Africa, the long-lost son, the man of destiny. But no one, least of all Gandhi, knew what kind of destiny was awaiting him. Gokhale, his political mentor, had sent him a message saying he should spend a year in India traveling around the whole country, gaining experience, expressing no opinions until he had completed the year of probation. He was not to enter into arguments or make any speeches on public questions. Gandhi promised to obey, but was quite incapable of keeping his promise, for he argued about everything and made at least forty speeches during that year, most of them on public questions. Yet there was always something tentative about those speeches, and he made no attempt to gather a great following like the army of Satyagrahis who followed him in South Africa; and he spoke rarely about non-violence and hardly at all about swaraj.
When he arrived in Bombay, he was granted the privilege of landing at the Apollo Bandur, a privilege usually reserved for kings, viceroys and the most distinguished of India’s sons. He was showered with presents and invited to an audience with Lord Willingdon, the Governor of Bengal, who said: “I would like you to come and see me whenever you propose to take any steps concerning Government.” Gandhi replied that he could easily give the promise, since a good Satyagrahi always announced his intentions beforehand. “You may come to me whenever you like,” Lord Willingdon went on, “and you will see that my Government do not wilfully do anything wrong.” “It is that faith which sustains me,” answered Gandhi, who was prepared to accept the governor’s verdict on the beneficence of British rule. It was one of those rare periods when India was lucky with her rulers; Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy, and Lord Willingdon were both ruling with a light hand.
From Bombay Gandhi journeyed to Rajkot and Porbandar to see his relatives, and there were more speeches, more presents and testimonials until he seemed to be crushed under their weight. He was the son of Rajkot and they had some claim on him. But Gokhale had an even greater claim on him, and he was soon traveling to Poona to pay him homage. Gokhale was ill, but he summoned all the members of the Servants of India Society to meet Gandhi, hoping they would agree to let him become a member. The society, founded in 1905, was dedicated to good works and the political education of India; the members were nearly always agnostics; they were concerned with moral uplift, patient investigations and minor sociological experiments, regarding themselves as secular monks in a world given over to moral laxity. Not all the members shared Gokhale’s judgment of Gandhi. Some thought him willful and uncompromising; he would no sooner have joined the society than he would be laying down new laws, announcing new goals, and taking full command. Gokhale threw his weight in Gandhi’s favor, but at the last moment Gandhi withdrew his candidacy. He had the good sense to realize that he would never rest content in another man’s organization. He must be in command, or perish.
Gokhale sweetened the pill by offering to provide funds from the society’s treasure chest whenever Gandhi decided to settle down and gather a small community around him. Most of the young Indians who had been at Phoenix Settlement were now in Bengal as guests of the school founded by Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan. Inevitably Gandhi would want to establish them elsewhere in an ashram of his own. It was a munificent offer, and Gandhi was grateful.
Since Gandhi was about to leave for Santiniketan, Gokhale gave a farewell party for him. Fruit, groundnuts and dates were heaped on the tables set up in one of the courtyards of Servants of India House, the guests arrived, but there was no sign of Gokhale, who was too ill to leave his bed. Suddenly, while the party was languishing, Gokhale was seen tottering across the courtyard, more like a ghost than a man, determined to offer his affectionate tribute to Gandhi. The effort was too much for him. He fainted and had to be carried back to his bed. When he recovered he sent word that the party must go on.
Santiniketan, meaning “the abode of peace,” had been founded by Rabindranath Tagore at the turn of the century as an experimental school for enlarging the creative gifts of the pupils. Originally there were five students; now there were a hundred and twenty-five. Originally the students had lived in great simplicity, like novices in a monastery. Gradually the small institution, set in the harsh, dusty plains of Bolpur north of Calcutta, had flowered into a thriving community, dedicated to the arts. Singing, dancing, and painting were encouraged, and Rabindranath Tagore moved among his pupils with something of the effect of a medieval emperor who by his mere presence stimulates craftsmen to become artists. A glory surrounded the place. A visitor would be greeted with painted banners, ornamental archways, processions of dancers, maidens, musicians and singers.
When Gandhi reach Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore was absent. Gandhi was welcomed by the poet’s eldest brother, Dwijendranath, a mathematician and philosopher. Andrews and Pearson, his old friends in South Africa, were teaching at the school, and there were about twenty boys and girls from the Phoenix Settlement living quietly and soberly in their own small compound, at once a part of Santiniketan and separate from it. In the eyes of Rabindranath Tagore they were a little too quiet, a little too sober, and he sometimes wished they were not so “completely nice.”
This was Gandhi’s first visit to Santiniketan, and for the moment he observed the rule that Gokhale had imposed on him. He would watch, observe, forbid himself the luxury of criticism. He was still pondering what changes he would make when a telegram arrived from Poona. Gokhale was dead. He felt it was his duty to pay tribute to his dead master, and therefore hurried across the width of the subcontinent in suffocating third-class railroad carriages to be close to him in spirit. Once more, among the members of the Servants of India Society, there arose the question of whether to admit him into the fold. He was, after all, the logical successor, and Gokhale had always hoped that Gandhi would follow in his footsteps. They wondered whether perhaps he might not be less uncompromising than they feared. But when Gandhi left Poona a few days later, having attended the memorial meeting in the company of Lord Willing-don, it was clear that the Servants of India did not want him and were a little afraid of him.
He returned to Santiniketan to find Rabindranath Tagore waiting for him. The poet had received the Nobel Prize two years earlier. Tall, white-bearded, majestic, in love with poetry and youth, he seemed to contain within himself all the legendary qua
lities possessed by the ancient Indian artists. He had a great admiration for Gandhi, but he was not uncritical; he was disturbed by the element of fanaticism that he detected in Gandhi, and a certain violence and intemperateness of speech. His brother Dwijendranath was less critical; he was convinced that Gandhi’s return to India had been ordained by God. The poet and the revolutionary lawyer were happy together, and they walked around the campus arm in arm, pausing to speak to the students and to discuss the future of India in those sweeping terms which they both delighted in.
The Indians are passionately addicted to giving complimentary titles to those they revere, and Tagore was already known as “Gurudev,” meaning “Celestial Teacher.” Andrews was known as “Deenabandhu,” meaning “the Friend of the Poor.” Gandhi was not yet “Mahatma,” though this title would soon be given to him by Tagore.
Two days after their meeting Tagore left for Calcutta, and Gandhi was therefore free to pursue his reforms. He felt that Santiniketan would be improved by being remodeled closer to Phoenix, and he therefore summoned a meeting to discuss the necessary changes. “I put it to the teachers that if they and the boys dispensed with the services of paid cooks and cooked their food themselves, it would enable the teachers to control the kitchen from the point of view of the boys’ physical and moral health, and it would afford to the students an object lesson in self-help,” Gandhi wrote in his autobiography. But this was only the beginning. He had examined the latrines: the entire system of sanitation must be renovated. Gandhi wanted all the students to take a vow that they would follow his instructions to the letter. Andrews protested at this high-handedness, and there were bitter arguments.
Gandhi was a persuasive speaker, and he was able to convince the students to do their own cooking and improve the sanitary facilities, to cut their own vegetables and wash their own dishes. On March 10, 1915, the experiment was launched. Henceforth Santiniketan would become another Phoenix full of quiet, dedicated students living in a monastic community. On the following day Gandhi took the night train to Calcutta, and the experiment came to an end. March 10, however, was remembered as an auspicious occasion, and during all the following years it was remembered as “Gandhi’s day,” and the servants were given a holiday.
In Calcutta there were more speeches and banquets. In those hospitable houses women sat up all night preparing fruits and nuts to grace Gandhi’s table: his asceticism, as he observed wryly, was sometimes expensive. Harilal and Ramdas, the third and gentlest of his sons, accompanied him. One day in Calcutta the inevitable explosion occurred. Harilal, who had been on reasonably good terms with his father at Santiniketan, even submitting to the new dispensation, decided he could no longer endure his father’s authoritarian ways. They quarreled violently. Gandhi wrote a laconic entry in his diary: “Harilal’s final decision to separate.” At rare intervals they would meet again, but the wounds would never be healed.
With his wife and Ramdas, Gandhi sailed for Rangoon to be the guest of Dr. Pranjivan Mehta, the man who had introduced him to Rajchandra. The doctor was sweet-tempered and learned, and very close to Gandhi. During the journey Gandhi was infuriated by the filth in the latrines and bathrooms, which were used as latrines. He raged against the unwashed decks, the appalling discomforts, the smells, and as soon as he landed in Rangoon he wrote a sharp letter to the steamship company, urging them to improve the quality of their accommodation before he returned. In Rangoon he rested, and shared his memories of Rajchandra with the doctor, who helped him to recover from the distressing psychological effects of the break with his eldest son. “Harilal will receive no monetary help from me,” Gandhi wrote firmly to one of his nephews. He added that there had been no bitterness, they had parted as friends, and he had given Harilal a gift of forty-five rupees.
From Rangoon he returned to Santiniketan, to learn that the Indian teachers suspected that Andrews and Pearson were spies sent by the British government to inform on the Indians. Gandhi spent less time on reforms than on persuading the teachers to be grateful that they had such devoted teachers among them. Gandhi himself was partly responsible for the uproar: he had put Pearson in charge of the reform movement with the inevitable result that the Indian teachers felt their authority assailed. The Poet attended the meetings of reconciliation, and it was decided that most of the Phoenix boys should accompany Gandhi in his travels in search of a place where he could found his own ashram.
In Hardwar, a city in the United Provinces in the foothills of the Himalayas, a great fair called the Kumbha Mela was held every twelve years. Gandhi decided to visit the fair not so much because he was attracted by the fair as because he knew that Mahatma Munshiram, a nationalist leader and a man of great sanctity, would be there. Andrews had spoken of his spiritual qualities, saying that he was one of the three men he must see in India, and Gandhi went to him in the hope of finding another Gokhale. He disliked the fair, where five-legged cows were displayed, and so shocked by the license he saw on the vast fairground that he made a vow that he would henceforth eat only five articles of food every day, and no food after sunset. When Gokhale died, he vowed that he would walk barefoot for a year. There were now very few vows left to him, for he had nearly exhausted the regimen of austerity.
Mahatma Munshiram, who was later known as Swami Shraddhananda, was a huge, heavily built man who had opened a school, called the Gurukul, in nearby Kangri, and there was some talk of enlarging it to include industrial training. Gandhi was so tempted by the beauty of the place that he sometimes spoke of remaining there. Everyone knew he wanted to found his own ashram, but where should it be? Hardwar was nearly as sacred as Benares, for here the young Ganges spurts out of the mountains and the god Vishnu has left his footprints on the rocks. But the roads were covered with filth, the banks of the Ganges had been despoiled by pilgrims; decidedly there were better places Rajkot, Vaidyanathad-ham, and Several other places were reviewed, and found wanting. Gandhi wanted a site near a river, a little off the beaten path, set amid fields and woods, with a large town less than a day’s journey away. The pattern would be Phoenix or Tolstoy Farm. He found what he wanted in Ahmeda-bad, the city in Gujarat where the Emperor Shah Jehan had spent the early years of his marriage with Mumtaz Mahal.
The decision to settle down on the outskirts of Ahmedabad came after much soul-searching and much traveling. From Hardwar he returned to Delhi, where he visited the Red Fort and the Qutab Minar—he had very little feeling for the architecture of the past, and such visits were sufficiently rare to deserve comment. The hot summer of India was coming on, and once more He was scorched and suffocated in third-class railroad carriages. Traveling like a poor peasant, indistinguishable from all the other poor peasants on the train, he would sometimes arrive at his destination unrecognized. When he came to Madras in April 1915 the welcoming committee searched through the first- and second-class carriages and found him at last at the very end of the train, looking thin and emaciated, wearing a loose shirt and trousers stained with the dust of four days’ traveling. There were cries of “Long live Mr. and Mrs. Gandhi!” and “Long live the hero!” and soon Gandhi and Kasturbai were being led to a waiting carriage only to have the horses unyoked, while the students pulled the carriage in triumph through the streets.
Madras opened its doors to him, for the indentured laborers in South Africa mostly came from South India. He was feted, interviewed, garlanded; he listened to long eulogies and paid the Madrasis back in their own coin, for when he spoke of the Indian laborers he had scarcely words enough to describe their heroism. On one memorable occasion he addressed the Madras Bar Association and offered a toast to the British Empire:
I discovered that the British Empire had certain ideals with which I have fallen in love, and one of those ideals is that every subject of the British Empire has the freest scope possible for his energies and efforts and whatever he thinks is due to his conscience. I think that is true of the British Empire as it is not true of any other Governments that we see. I feel as you have perha
ps known that I am no lover of any Government and I have more than once said that Government is best which governs least, and I have found that it is possible for me to be governed least under the British Empire.
When he returned to Ahmedabad from Madras, his mind was made up. His friend, Jivanlal Desai, a barrister, had offered him the use of a bungalow in the neighboring village of Kochrab. Soon with the help of the textile magnates of Ahmedabad he was able to raise two or three more bungalows to house his followers, consisting of about twenty Tamils and Telugus, most of them refugees from the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm. Handweaving was the principal industry, and there was some carpentry. No servants were employed; everyone worked, Gandhi drew up a draft constitution, which was formidable in the demands made on the ashram-ites, for all had to make the nine vows of truth-telling, non-violence, celibacy, control of the palate, non-stealing, non-possession, refusal to use foreign cloth, fearlessness, acceptance of untouchables. Those who took the vow of fearlessness had to promise that they would never show the slightest sign of fear before kings, robbers, tigers, or death, and would never resort to force, but would defend themselves always with soul-force. The vow to accept untouchables came last, but it was in the forefront of Gandhi’s thoughts.
In September the first untouchables came to the ashram. A Bombay teacher called Dudabhai, his wife Danibehn and baby daughter Lakshmi, belonging to the untouchable class of Dheds, were invited into the ashram. At once there was uproar. Kasturbai threatened to leave the ashram. Gandhi answered that it would be extremely painful to him if she left, but he would not prevent her. She must observe the rules, or leave. So the tempest subsided, but from time to time there would be explosions of temper. A few days after the arrival of the untouchables Gandhi wrote in his diary: “Got excited again and lost temper with Ba. I must find a medicine for this grave defect.”
