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

by Robert Payne

  The laborers were thunderstruck. Tears began to pour down Anasuyabehn’s cheeks. The laborers broke out: “Not you, but we shall feist. It would be monstrous if you were to fast. Please forgive us for our lapse, we shall now remain faithful to our pledge to the end.”

  Gandhi asked them not to fast: it was enough if they would simply hold out for their just demands. The employers had by this time offered a 20 per cent increase in salary, but Gandhi, well aware of the profits being made by the millowners, regarded this as inadequate. It was important to hold out for a little longer and also to keep the workers occupied. Someone suggested that the laborers could be employed in the ashram. They could help to lay the foundations of the new weaving school, and soon there were long columns of men carrying on their heads baskets of sand scooped up from the riverbank, climbing the steps to the ashram and solemnly pouring the sand into the place where the foundations were being laid. Gandhi appears to have been well aware of the irony of getting the laborers to work for him while refusing their services to the millowners.

  Yet the fast had one grave defect, for it was not, as Gandhi recognized, entirely innocent in intent. He knew the millowners so well that he could quite properly be accused of taking advantage of their affection for him. Fasting against them therefore might appear to be deliberate coercion. He begged them to act according to their own lights; they must not give charity; they should not submit to the workers’ demands unless they were convinced they were acting justly. He felt an overwhelming obligation to undertake the defense of the strikers and an equally overwhelming obligation to put the millowners at their ease. The millowners suspected that the two obligations were incompatible.

  After two days of fasting, Gandhi addressed the mill hands in a state of euphoria. “I am at present overflowing with joy,” he declared. “My mind is filled with profound peace. I feel like pouring forth my soul to you all, but I am beside myself with joy.” He told them he wanted them to go to the millowners and say that they would return to work if they received a 35 per cent increase in pay. They did so, and the strike ended on the following day.

  To celebrate the ending of the strike, the millowners offered sweets to the laborers. The distribution took place under the babul tree, where Gandhi had so often spoken to them about the virtues of discipline. This time there was no discipline: only a mad rush for the sweets. It transpired that the beggars of Ahmedabad had infiltrated among the laborers and brought about a wild stampede. In the struggle the sweets were trodden underfoot.

  For the first time Gandhi had fasted for a public cause, identifying himself with the strikers. Private penance became public penance; rarely would he fast for some minor sin committed by one of the inmates of his ashram. Over the years the weapon of fasting would be refined, tempered, and given new forms. In the course of his life there would be fourteen more fasts directed against abuses which he found intolerable, and with each new fast he would be confronted with new incongruities and contradictions. All these fasts involved grave defects, and he was the first to acknowledge them. Nevertheless, the weapon was so powerful, so simple, so effective and so dramatic that he came to regard it as an essential part of his armory.

  More subtle techniques were necessary to deal with the peasants in Kheda. Since petitions to the government and statements in the press failed to have any effect, Gandhi felt that only civil disobedience on a massive scale would induce the government to reduce the taxes. The peasants were not exaggerating their plight, as Gandhi observed when he traveled through the villages. His advice was that they should simply refuse to pay their taxes, come what may. The government sent its attachment officers out into the villages; they sold the people’s cattle and whatever movables they could lay their hands on, sometimes they attached standing crops, with the result that Gandhi was confronted with delicate problems of morality. If an official attached a crop of onions, could a good Satyagrahi go out at night and remove the onions? The answer was: It was permissible only if the attachment had been wrongly made. A lawyer, Hohanlal Pandya, was therefore deputed to remove the onions in the name of the peasants. For this crime he was arrested and brought to trial, being sentenced to ten days’ simple imprisonment.

  There was little scope for drama in the Kheda affair. Vallabhbhai Patel emerged as the chief organizer of the movement. Discarding his Western dress, he wore a shirt and a dhoti as he walked from village to village, exhorting, encouraging, bullying good-humoredly when necessary. He sat down with the peasants and shared their meals, happy to be away from the courtroom. Gandhi, watching him closely, found so much to admire in him that he was marked out for a leading role in the Satyagraha movement. At first Gandhi thought him “stiff-looking.” Later he would say he was “unbending.” Still later he would speak of his “wonderful toughness.” But to the end Patel remained a strangely forbidding character: ambitious, resolute, a magnificent organizer, but with little human warmth in him. Just as Mahadev Desai was all warmth and delicacy, Vallabhbhai Patel was cold and rough. Yet both of them in their different ways served Gandhi well.

  The Kheda affair was never properly resolved. After four months of agitation, the peasants were rewarded with an unsatisfactory compromise. The rich peasants were taxed to the hilt, and the government simply abandoned all attempts to tax the poor peasants. Gandhi was distressed by his failure, for in theory a Satyagraha campaign should have a cleancut ending.

  The war in Europe was now entering its final phase. More than ever, during these critical months, the Allies needed help. Britain turned toward India, hoping to harness her manpower to the war effort. Large forces had been sent by the princely states, but few had come from the areas under British administration. The Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, organized a War Conference to be held in Delhi at the end of April, and Gandhi was invited to attend. He attended with some misgivings, having already convinced himself that if India offered to send her young men to fight in the war, she would obtain swaraj in less time and with less effort. For himself, he hoped to be sent to France or Mesopotamia. Meanwhile he proposed to act as a recruiting agent. To the Viceroy’s private secretary he wrote: “I have an idea that if I became your recruiting agent-in-chief, I might rain men on you.”

  Gandhi’s views on the British Empire had suffered no change. He would fight the government with every available weapon whenever he felt it was oppressive, but he remained a loyal subject of the Crown. The empire was a stabilizing force, capable of great acts of generosity to the subject peoples, essentially democratic. “They love justice; they have shielded men against oppression,” he declared in a speech to the peasants of Kheda. “The liberty of the individual is very dear to them. Why, then, should we think of breaking off our connection with them altogether?” To the Viceroy he wrote: “I would make India offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the Empire at this critical moment, and I know that India, by this very act, would become the most favored partner in the Empire, and racial distinctions would become a thing of the past.”

  The peasants of Kheda did not flock to the colors. When Gandhi was traveling among them while campaigning against taxes, they fed him, provided bullock carts, arranged sleeping quarters, helped him in every way, but they could not understand why an apostle of non-violence should want them to join the Army and sacrifice their lives in France or Mesopotamia. They listened sullenly to his speeches and made him walk from village to village. Gandhi and his followers slept in the open fields.

  In his own mind Gandhi saw no contradiction between his belief in nonviolence and his desire to recruit peasants to fight for the British. He argued that swaraj was the most desirable of all things, and it was likely to be granted only as a reward for defending the empire. There was nothing inherently wrong in a standing army; if the Indians wanted to learn the use of arms, it was their duty to enlist. In time the mercenary army would become a national army and could be turned against the British if they still refused to grant swaraj. But these were political arguments. Charlie Andrews regarded th
em as arguments of expediency without any moral foundation, and he wrote an anguished letter demanding an explanation.

  Gandhi replied by appealing to the Bhagavad Gita and the endless wars described in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. “The Indians have always repudiated blood lust and stood on the side of humanity,” Andrews said. “On the contrary,” Gandhi replied, “they have always been warlike, and the finest hymn composed by Tulsidas in praise of Rama gives the first place to his ability to strike down the enemy.” Buddhism had failed precisely because it advocated forbearance; and during the Mohamedan invasions the Indians were not less eager than their enemies to fight. Under the British there had been a compulsory renunciation of arms, but the fighting spirit had not died down. “All then that could be said of India is that individuals have made serious attempts, with greater success than elsewhere, to popularize the doctrine [of ahimsa]. But there is no warrant for the belief that it has taken deep root among the people.”

  Andrews was saddened by an explanation which left so much unsaid and was in direct contradiction with views often expressed by Gandhi, who held that the Bhagavad Gita described a spiritual struggle, not one which took place on a real battlefield. Yet Gandhi never proclaimed that war was always evil: there were exceptions to the general rule, fighting was not in itself evil, and the way of the Kshatriya was sanctified by divine blessing. “I do not say, ‘Let us go and kill the Germans,’ ” Gandhi explained. “I say, ‘Let us go and die for the sake of India and the Empire.’ ” In a revealing sentence, Gandhi said: “It comes to this, that under exceptional circumstances, war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil, even as the body is.”

  Early in July he was writing that so far he had not been able to obtain a single recruit, and although he claimed at the end of the month that he had succeeded in finding a hundred, it was clear that he felt the response was deplorably inadequate. He had spent a month walking from village to village; he had made innumerable speeches; and there was little to show for it. As a result of his exertions and an absurdly inadequate diet—he was living on groundnut butter and lemons—he came down with dysentery and was ill for seven weeks. Since he regarded himself as an authority on diet, he could not understand why he was so weak. He had thought he had an iron frame; instead, he was like soft clay, helpless and nearly delirious. And once more he discovered that he was his own worst doctor, for in his obstinacy he rejected all medical treatment, refused all the usual restoratives, milk, brandy and beef tea, and was at death’s door. The millowner, Ambalal Sarabhai, was summoned, and Gandhi was removed to a house in the outskirts of Ahmedabad. The verdict of the doctors was that he was suffering from dysentery, starvation and a nervous breakdown.

  He came back to life slowly and painfully, hating himself for his weakness and lethargy, ashamed of being nursed, unable to build up his broken body. It was the worst illness he had ever had. To survive, he broke his vow that he would never drink milk, and began to drink goat’s milk ravenously. A new doctor came, and he submitted to a treatment involving ice packs, massage and deep breathing. Another doctor injected him with arsenic, strychnine and iron, while a third ordered him to submit to an operation for removing his piles. Although the acute dysentery was over in a few weeks, he was bedridden for the rest of the year. He was a bad patient and complained bitterly against his fate; and when Kasturbai came to watch over him, he was appalled and horrified by her look of brooding. “I simply cannot bear to look at Ba’s face,” he wrote. “The expression is often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling, as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she was saying something. I see, too, that there is selfishness in this suffering of hers; even so her gentleness overpowers me.”

  Like most men when they are ill, he found his chief joy in children. Harilal’s sons and daughters were allowed to play around his bed. Rasik, Harilal’s eldest son, was now six years old and his grandfather’s special joy. He was growing up well, with a strong body. When the boy’s mother died of malaria in 1918, he was too young to feel the full weight of grief. Gandhi liked the boy so much that he wrote a poem in his honor:

  Rasiklal Harilal Mohandas Karamchand

  Gandhi Had a goat in his keeping;

  The goat would not be milked,

  And Gandhi would not stop weeping.

  This poem has some significance as being the only one known to have been written by Gandhi, though he ascribed its authorship to “Rasik, Poet of Poets.”

  Kasturbai, too, doted on her four grandchildren and took complete charge of them. Manu had grown so plump that she would have made an admirable Ganesh, the elephant god, if someone could find an elephant trunk to put against her face. “Her radiance is ever growing brighter,” Gandhi wrote of her, but he had little to say of his granddaughter Rami, who was ailing. Kanti, Harilal’s other son, seems to have been the most affected by his mother’s death and his father’s absence. Harilal wanted his children to be raised by his wife’s sisters, perhaps because he would then be able to see them without having to confront his father, but Gandhi rethan Chinese crackers; the hartal, as he knew, would be an explosion.

  In Delhi the explosion occurred prematurely on March 30. There were riots, parades, speeches in the mosques and temples. Swami Shradd-hanand, the venerable teacher whose Gurukul near Hardwar was as famous as Tagore’s school at Santiniketan, was asked to speak in the Jumma Masjid mosque, and this invitation was a revolutionary one, for no Hindu scholar had been invited to speak in a mosque within living memory. He was a tall and impressive man, clothed in the orange robe of a sunyasi, and later he headed the mammoth procession which marched along the Chandni Chowk, the main street in Old Delhi. Gurkha troops attempted to break up the procession. Swami Shraddhanand bared his breast and dared them to shoot him. Instead, they shot nine others, five Hindus and four Muslims. What Gandhi had not foreseen was that the hartal by its very nature was bound to produce violence, and even if there had been no Gurkha troops in the streets, there would have been bloodshed.

  On April 6, when Gandhi himself led the hartal in Bombay, the violence was under control. Vast crowds assembled on Chowpati beach, wading into the sea. The shops were closed, the ordinary life of the city came to a standstill, and in the evening, driving in a slow-moving automobile with Sarojini Naidu by his side, he sold copies of his own works, Hind Swaraj and Sarvodaya, which was Ruskin’s Unto This Last in its Gujarati dress, because they had been banned and were therefore distributed illegally, rendering the distributor liable to punishment under the Rowlatt Act. The purchase price was four annas, but people paid ten rupees for their copies. The authorities turned a blind eye to this deliberate flouting of the law.

  On the invitation of Swami Shraddhanand, Gandhi left Bombay for Delhi. During the journey he was pulled off the train, set down in the little railroad station of Palwal, where he lay on a cot guarded by four Sepoys, while the local officials, who had been ordered to arrest him, wondered what to do with him. Later, he was sent back to Bombay under guard and there released unconditionally. The authorities did not want him in New Delhi but were prepared to tolerate him in Bombay.

  In Bombay he was greeted by crowds gone wild with joy, for the grapevine had reported that he was under arrest and had been removed to an unknown destination. He addressed the crowds, and he had spoken only a few words when the mounted police charged, swinging iron-tipped lathis which resembled lances. The lancers cut their way blindly through the crowd, until finally the people dispersed. Gandhi hurried to the police commissioner’s office to complain. The commissioner explained that the police were determined to use drastic measures to prevent the crowds from getting out of control. “I have no doubt about your intentions,” he said, “but the people will not understand them.” Gandhi replied: “The people are not by nature violent, but peaceful.” The commissioner disabused him. All over India people hearing about his arrest had rioted. In Ahmedabad the commissioner’s office had been burned down, the telegraph wires had been cut
, and the mill hands were rioting through the streets. Gandhi might say: “Satyagraha is pledged to non-violence,” but the violent always took advantage of the Satyagraha campaigns. He traveled to Ahmedabad, which was under martial law, to find the people terror-stricken because the soldiers were marching through the streets. He learned, too, that the railroad lines had been tom up, that Europeans had been murdered in cold blood, and that the authorities proposed to levy a huge fine on the city.

  The word that came to him in a dream in Madras was echoing across the whole of India, drowning out every other word. He had galvanized the people into action against the government, but as he admitted sadly when he called off the Satyagraha campaign, it was the wrong action. He had committed what he called “a Himalayan blunder.” He was not the only one to commit Himalayan blunders. In Amritsar, in the north, an English officer in command of a small detachment of Gurkhas committed an even more intolerable blunder with even more disastrous consequences.

  The Satanic Kingdom

  The British Empire today

  represents Satanism, and they

  who love God can afford to have

  no love for Satan.

  Amritsar

  ON APRIL 13, 1919, in the holy city of Amritsar, there occurred a massacre which the Indians, who have suffered many massacres, were never able to forget It came like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky. It was all over within a few minutes, but the relations between the Indians and the British would never be the same. Future historians would say that the massacre at Amritsar showed the first wide cracks in the structure of imperial power. It was not only that the Indians and the British would never again be able to trust each other, but something of even greater consequence had taken place. From that moment, consciously or unconsciously, the Indians knew that the British Empire was mortal and freedom was in their grasp.