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

by Robert Payne

  Reformers like myself, who have no other axe to grind but that of reform they are handling for the time being, specialize and create a force which the Government must reckon with. Reformers may go wrong by being over-zealous, indiscreet or indolent and ignorant. The Government may go wrong by being impatient of them or over-confident of their ability to do without them. I hope, in this case, neither catastrophejwill take place and the grievances, which I have already submitted and which are mostly admitted, will be effectively redressed.

  When Gandhi wrote that reformers “specialize and create a force which the Government must reckon with,” he was perfectly aware that this force was sometimes uncontrollable. He made no pretense that he was an impartial investigator. About this time, speaking with one of the government officers, he explained that he regarded all governments as governments of expediency and they always took the line of least resistance. Molding his plan accordingly, he had decided to present the case for the peasants so strongly that the government would be bound to act on it. “I do not think that Mr. Gandhi has any ideas of real co-operation with the Government,” wrote the officer. “Success, to his mind, is to be obtained not by co-operation with the Government, which only ties his hands, but by pressure on it, to force it in deference to expediency to take the action he indicates. I believe this truly expresses his view, and he thinks himself strong enough to carry through his project.”

  This was a remarkably accurate summary of Gandhi’s intentions. The method, which was being worked out step by step in Champaran, was to remain virtually unchanged during the remaining years of his life.

  In spite of continual harassments—the grass hut in which Kasturbhai was living was burned down, peasants were prevented from seeing him and threatened with punishment—Gandhi was successfully accomplishing everything he set out to accomplish. He was turning the mistakes of the planters to the advantage of the peasants. Threats, recriminations, protests, leading articles in the newspapers, left him unmoved. He had achieved the loyalty of the peasants and the unwilling respect of the planters. The government dared not arrest him, and dared not interfere with his plans. A new element had entered the scene, and it was one which the government was powerless to change, because it was incapable of understanding what was taking place: Gandhi was being recognized as a liberator, almost a savior, by the peasants; he was believed to possess extraordinary powers. Mr. W. A. Lewis, the young Indian Civil Service officer attached to Bettiah, was among the first to observe the strange transformation from man to Mahatma. He wrote on April 29, after his first meeting with Gandhi:

  We may look on Mr. Gandhi as an idealist, a fanatic, or a revolutionary according to our particular opinions. But to the raiyats he is their liberator, and they credit him with extraordinary powers. He moves about in the villages asking them to lay their grievances before him, and he is transfiguring the imaginations of masses of ignorant men with visions of an early millennium. I put the danger of this before Mr. Gandhi, and he assured me that his utterances are so carefully guarded that they could not be construed as an incitement to revolt. I am willing to believe Mr. Gandhi, whose sincerity is, I think, above suspicion, but he cannot control the tongues of all his followers.

  At that early date Mr. Lewis had suggested that the best solution might well be for Gandhi to lay his plans before the Lieutenant Governor at his headquarters in Ranchi. The idea was dropped when it became clear that the planters hoped to use their influence to run him out of Champaran. They regarded themselves as the natural allies of the government. In this they were wrong. For many years reports on the exactions of the planters had been reaching the Lieutenant Governor, and there was no simple way to deal with them. Now, at last, as a result of Gandhi’s campaign, the matter had been brought to a head. On May 29 Gandhi received an unexpected summons to meet the Lieutenant Governor at Ranchi.

  Sir Edward Gait was one of those cautious British proconsuls who inspire respect because they are scrupulously concerned with facts and not with opinions. Since the facts were in Gandhi’s favor, he was disposed to discount the opinions of the planters. Gandhi accepted the summons, although warned by some of his associates that he was probably falling into a trap and might find himself under arrest at the end of his meeting with the Lieutenant Governor. Gandhi took the warnings sufficiently seriously to make arrangements for a successor if he was removed from the scene. Mazharul Haq or Madan Mohan Malaviya were deputed to take charge of the work in Champaran.

  The first meeting with Sir Edward Gait lasted six hours, and was fol-lowed by three more meetings. From the beginning there was an atmosphere of tolerance and respect. There were no speeches: they were two men grappling with a difficult and burdensome problem, determined to reach a solution. Sir Edward Gait came to the conclusion that a commission of inquiry, with Gandhi as one of the members, should be appointed. The idea that Gandhi should be included in the commission had been originally proposed by the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford. Gandhi objected that as a member of the commission he would not be in a position to lead evidence on behalf of the tenants. Sir Edward Gait did not agree. Gandhi could act as a member of a board of judges while simultaneously acting as counsel for the prosecution. It was an odd situation, but in the circumstances it worked very well. The only stipulations made by the Lieutenant Governor were that Gandhi should leave the Champaran area and make no more collections of affidavits. Gandhi objected to the first, thinking that the peasants would feel he had deserted them. They reached a compromise: Gandhi would pay a short visit to them, and then leave for Bombay before returning to take his seat on the commission. As for the collection of affidavits, Gandhi already had thousands and was quite prepared to stop collecting any more. He already had far more than he needed. They were in safe hands, and would be used effectively when the commission met.

  Sir Frank Sly, the Commissioner of the Central Provinces, and an experienced negotiator, was made chairman of the commission.

  At intervals during the summer and autumn the commission met at Bettiah, Motihari and other places, cross-examined witnesses, took depositions, and discussed at vast length the innumerable taxes and exactions imposed on the peasants in the indigo fields. The result was a foregone conclusion. Gandhi proved his case. The question of indemnifying the peasants arose, and the commission recommended a 25 per cent refund of the illegal exactions. When he was asked why he had not held out for a full 100 per cent, he replied that by making the planters pay back even a quarter of the money they had stolen from the tenants, he had destroyed their prestige.

  Though suffering from a severe attack of malaria, which infuriated him, he continued to work at Ranchi on the final report. Finally on October 3, the report was signed unanimously by the commissioners. “The report of the Committee was unanimously signed yesterday,” Gandhi wrote in a letter. “I am off again on the tramp.”

  He had won his first battle on Indian soil.

  Sabarmati

  DURING THE following years Gandhi’s “tramps” took him to nearly every state and principality in India, but he always returned to his ashram near Ahmedabad. This was his home, his refuge, the place where he gathered his disciples around him, kept his library and documents, and organized the non-violent war against his enemies: poverty, untouchabil-ity, the British Raj. This was the third of his ashrams, for Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm followed the same principles.

  The small community at Kochrab was about to develop into a much larger one when plague swept through the village. Gandhi, who had made a special study of plague and had watched it sweeping across the Indian locations of Johannesburg, decided it was due to the lack of sanitation in the village. The villagers were too ill or too obstinate to accept his offer to organize the sanitation, and he decided to move elsewhere, choosing a new site on the banks of the Sabarmati River about four miles north of the city. The Sabarmati ashram was not buried in the country like the earlier ashrams, but in full view of the chimneys and smokestacks of a great industrial city.

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p; Gandhi bought the land with the help of an Ahmedabad merchant and pitched a tent in the middle of it. Then gradually, as the weeks passed, some small houses went up, trees were planted, brick roads and pathways were laid. The place was infested with snakes, but Gandhi seemed to thrive on their presence. His own house faced the river, and a little to the right of it there was an open space where prayer meetings were held an hour before sunrise and again after sunset. He slept in an open verandah in front of the house, which had five small rooms. One of these rooms, facing south, was his study. This was his headquarters for the next fifteen years.

  A year passed before the Sabarmati ashram began to look like an organized community. A cowshed, a library, a school, a spinning shed, kitchens, houses for the ashramites, a flight of steps leading down the steep bank of the river, all these were built piecemeal, with exasperating delays. Tamarind trees were planted, the surrounding fields were put under cotton, and then the spinning wheel became the symbol of this new social experiment. Perhaps his sudden interest in the spinning wheel arose from the proximity of Ahmedabad, one of the largest textile centers in all India. He knew nothing about spinning, and had some trouble finding a simple portable wheel and someone to show him how to use it. Finally, toward the end of 1917, a widow, Gangabehn Majmundar, possessing means of her own and accustomed to riding from one village to another on horseback, found an ancient wheel in a lumber room in Vijapur in Baroda. It was dusted off and presented to Gandhi, who set about finding slivers and yam. The first slivers were obtained from a mill, and the first spinning wheel was set up in Gandhi’s study, the humming of the wheel serving as the background music of his thoughts.

  The khadi (homespun) movement had begun. In time, there would be hundreds and thousands of spinning wheels, but the beginnings were slow. The original wheel was carefully studied, taken apart, adapted and simplified so that it could be used by untutored peasants, and all this was done in the shadow of the Ahmedabad mills. By reviving the spinning wheel Gandhi hoped to encourage village industry and to reduce imports of British cloth, but it was even more effective in providing an easily recognizable uniform for the followers of Gandhi, who wore caps, shirts and dhotis of homespun cloth and gloried in its rough texture. Later, the spinning wheel was painted on the Congress flag. When the time came to design the flag of independent India, the spinning wheel became, by a subtle transformation, the wheel of the law.

  About the time that Gandhi was discovering the virtues of the spinning wheel, he came into contact with two young lawyers in Ahmedabad. They were Mahadev Desai and Vallabhbhai Patel, and they were so completely different in character that it was as though they were made of different substances. Mahadev Desai, who became Gandhi’s secretary, slight of build, with delicate almost feminine features, was the son of a village schoolteacher, and grew up in poverty. He became a translator, and then a lawyer, but made so little money at law that he was glad to become a bank inspector of farming cooperatives. This led him into all the villages around Ahmedabad; he liked the villagers, collected their songs, and learned their dialects. Gandhi, meeting him in September 1917, felt that he had found his long-lost son. “It takes me only a little while to judge people,” Gandhi said. “I have found in you the person I have been looking for, the one person to whom I will one day be able to entrust my work. I need you for myself personally, not for the ashram or for any other work.” Gandhi was forty-eight; Mahadev Desai was twenty-five.

  During the course of his life Gandhi made many close attachments and rarely regretted them. His instincts were accurate, and he knew precisely what he wanted from people. What he wanted, of course, was loyalty, intelligence, unswerving devotion, and he found all these in Mahadev Desai, on whom he showered all the affection he had denied to his sons. To Harilal, who was then setting himself up in business in Calcutta, he wrote that he had found “the perfect secretary” and it was a pity that Harilal had rejected the post. In fact Harilal had never seriously been offered the post. In Mahadev Desai, Gandhi found “the perfect son.”

  Scholars who work on Gandhi’s papers have a special affection for Mahadev Desai, because he was a skillful translator from Gujarati, kept a careful diary, and wrote a beautiful hand. His handwriting is like a portrait of the man, clear, swift, upright. Gandhi’s handwriting is an ugly scrawl wandering in a thoroughly undisciplined manner across the page, clumsy and good-humored, not easily legible. Mahadev Desai wrote thousands of letters in that elegant handwriting, and Gandhi’s signature at the bottom always looks oddly out of place.

  Vallabhbhai Patel, the son of a poor farmer, was a rich lawyer when Gandhi met him. He had studied law at the Middle Temple and had settled down to a flourishing practice in Ahmedabad. A thickset, stocky, gruff man, rarely speaking unless spoken to, a brutal and brilliant crossexaminer in court, he had lost his wife and was in need of a cause into which he could pour his accumulated energies. The cause came early in 1918 when there was a crop failure, due to heavy rains, in the nearby district of Kheda. The law entitled the farmers to exemption of payment of land tax when the yield was less than 25 per cent of the normal. The government demanded its full quota of tax as though there had been no crop failure, and only a hundred and three villages out of five hundred were given any relief at all. The villagers asked Vallabhbhai Patel to intercede for them. They were desperate, for the government possessed full powers to seize the property and lands of people who refused to pay their taxes.

  Gandhi was in Champaran when he heard the news about the Kheda disturbances, and when he returned to Ahmedabad he found the peasants in a state of revolt. At the same time the mill hands in the Ahmedabad textile mills were full of grievances, demanding a 50 per cent increase in their wages. Gandhi knew the most prominent millowners and he was especially friendly with Ambalal Sarabhai, who owned the largest mills, and his sister Anasuyabehn, who spent a good deal of her time in the ashram and was well-known for her charities. Gandhi studied the demands of the mill hands and came to the conclusion that they were justified. When they came out on strike late in February 1918, Gandhi was well aware that the consequences might be disastrous. “I am handling a most dangerous situation,” he wrote to a friend, “and am preparing to go on to a still more dangerous.”

  The danger lay in the poverty of the mill hands, who could not afford to strike. They were men from the rural areas, volatile, undisciplined, alienated, crowded into their ghettos, living on the edge of starvation. Although he wrote and printed a series of handbills urging the strikers to act peacefully and to endure their sufferings honorably, there was always the possibility of violence. Processions of workers marched through the streets daily; the mills were under armed guards; the millowners refused arbitration.

  Gandhi exacted from the mill hands a solemn pledge that they would not go back to work unless their wages were increased. There must be no blacklegs. At all costs they must be united, otherwise it would be impossible to exert pressure. Every day there were meetings under a babul tree near the Sabarmati River, with Gandhi addressing the workers and calling for discipline, determination, and the acceptance of suffering. Perfect discipline prevailed at these meetings, and no one was permitted to make any disparaging remarks about the millowners, who were represented as honorable but mistaken men genuinely attempting to do their best for the workers. A peculiar feature of these meetings was the air of disinterested politeness. No voices were raised, no extreme charges were made. Gandhi calmly discussed the issues with reference to Ruskin’s Unto This Last and the strike of the miners in Natal, praising the miners for their absolute determination and Ruskin for having outlined an economic policy based on mutual trust between the worker and his employer.

  In Ahmedabad the millowners were distributing their own handbills and busily organizing their own strike-breakers. Much of their work was undermined by Anasuyabehn Sarabhai, who went from house to house urging the workers to stand firm, giving money where it was desperately needed, and finding employment for those who were facing starvation.
There was a small group of quietly determined women with her. The handbills written by Gandhi were signed with her name—this was perhaps the only underhand thing he did during this exhausting and long-drawn campaign.

  For Anasuyabehn Sarabhai it was a question of justice; for the millowners it was a question of profits; for Gandhi it was a question of testing the resources of Satyagraha. The experiment in Champaran was not, strictly speaking, based on Satyagraha principles; the battle was won by compiling voluminous reports and by demonstrating to the government that these reports described an intolerable condition. In Ahmedabad every-thing depended on the will to suffer. If the strikers could hold out long enough, they were sure to win. But could they hold out?

  On March 15, 1918, he saw that only a small crowd had come to the usual meeting place under the babul tree. The workers were wavering, and some were resentful. One of Gandhi’s closest friends reported that they were muttering: “After all, Gandhi Saheb and Anasuyabehn have nothing to lose. They move about in cars, and they are well fed.” Gandhi was certain that the strike would collapse unless some new element was interjected into the scene. It was necessary to discover an entirely new approach. Here he explains why he went on the first of his political fasts:

  One morning—it was at a mill-hands’ meeting—while I was still groping and unable to see my way clearly, the light came to me. Unbidden and all by themselves the words came to my lips: “Unless the strikers rally,” I declared to the meeting, “and continue the strike until a settlement is reached, or until they leave the mills altogether, I will not touch any food.”