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

by Robert Payne

  He was one of the witnesses at the Disorders Inquiry Committee which sat in Delhi and later in Lahore and Ahmedabad. Cross-examined by Sir Chimanlal Setalvad, he defended his doctrines spiritedly but not always convincingly:

  SETALVAD: With regard to your Satyagraha doctrine, as far as I am able to understand it, it involves a pursuit of truth?

  GANDHI: Yes.

  SETALVAD: And in the pursuit of truth to invite suffering on oneself and not to cause violence to anybody else?

  GANDHI: Yes.

  SETALVAD: That I understand is the main principle underlying?

  GANDHI: That is so.

  SETALVAD: Now in that doctrine, who is to determine the truth? That individual himself?

  GANDHI: Yes, that individual himself.

  SETALVAD: So each one that adopts this doctrine has to determine for himself what is the truth that he will pursue?

  GANDHI: Most decidedly.

  SETALVAD: And in doing that different individuals will take very different views as to what is the truth to be pursued?

  GANDHI: Certainly.

  SETALVAD: It might, on that footing, cause considerable confusion?

  GANDHI: I won’t accept that. It need not lead to arty confusion if you accept the proposition that a man is honestly in search after truth and that he will never inflict violence upon him who holds to truth. Then there is no possibility of confusion.

  Gandhi must have known that there were infinite possibilities of confusion, yet he held fast to the idea that truth was invincible. He spoke of absolute truth, when others could only envisage relative truth, and this was his strength, but it was also his weakness. The cross-examination extends over nearly a hundred pages of printed text, but at no point was Gandhi able to resolve the problem of the violence generated by the movement he had called into being. “I could not restrain the mob,” he admitted. “I underrated the forces of evil and I must now pause and consider how best to meet the situation.”

  He wandered about India, addressed schools, attended conferences, interviewed high officials, spoke with peasants and schoolmasters and anyone who would listen to him, and all the time he was concerned with this problem. The Satyagrahis must be disciplined; there must be no bloodshed; the massed power of non-violent resistance must be capable of breaking through all opposition, as water breaks through rock; and if a single opponent was harmed, then in theory the entire movement lost its validity. This was the problem which had occupied his attention in South Africa, and it would continue to occupy his attention through all his remaining years in India. In the end he seems to have come to the conclusion that there was no complete and satisfactory solution to the problem, and it was enough if a single Satyagrahi or a small group of them upheld the truth and suffered the consequences.

  The Storm Breaks

  IN THOSE DAYS the Muslims of India were preoccupied with the Khilafat movement. “Khilafat” was the Muslim rendering of the word “Caliphate,” and the movement came into existence to protest the fate of the Sultan of Turkey, who bore the title of Caliph and was regarded as the supreme head of the Muslim community and the successor or vice-regent of the Prophet Muhammed. World War I had come to an end, and the Turkish Empire, which had once stretched from Arabia to the Black Sea, was in ruins. The Caliph was a prisoner in his palace in Constantinople, deprived of all political and religious authority. The Khilafat movement was designed to restore his religious authority.

  The movement was oddly unreal, for the Muslims in India had not previously felt any great bond with the Caliph, nor was there any concerted movement in Iraq, Palestine, Turkey, the Hedjaz, Egypt, Tripoli or Morocco—all of them Muslim countries—to restore the authority of the Caliph. It was essentially an Indian Muslim movement, and drew its strength from imaginary grievances. Muslims believed that the British, having conquered or assumed power over yast areas of Muslim territory, wanted no other authority but their own, and therefore they had dethroned the Sultan and reduced him to impotence. In fact, the Turks had no desire to retain the Caliphate. The Hindus usually believed that the British had a partiality for the Muslims, and there were very few Hindus who showed any interest in the Khilafat movement.

  Gandhi was one of the few Hindus who were deeply interested. His association with Muslims had been a happy one; his ancestors for five generations had served in the courts of Muslim princes; his grandfather’s life had been saved by a Muslim bodyguard. He was genuinely convinced that the Koran was divinely inspired, and he had read it attentively and with profit. “Hindu-Mohammedan unity is an unalterable article of faith,” he wrote, and in speeches before Khilafat conferences he urged the Hindus to march side by side with their Muslim brethren. The chief propagandists in the Khilafat movement were the two brothers, Shaukat Ali and Mohamed Ali, and Maulana Azad. Shaukat Ali was a heavy, rather ponderous man, a former theological student, with astonishing eloquence. He was known as “big brother,” to differentiate him from the small and slender Mohamed Ali. Maulana Azad—“Maulana” means “a scholar of religion”—was a slight, friendly man with an intricate brain and great charm, whose ancestors had served in the court of Shah Jehan. All three were journalists.

  The treaty between the victorious Allies and the government of Turkey had not yet been signed, and no one yet knew the fate reserved for the Sultan. Gandhi, Maulana Azad and Shaukat Ali formed a committee to bring pressure on the Viceroy, who was in no position to put together the dismembered Turkish Empire. He was especially puzzled by the vehemence of the attacks on British policy toward the Sultan, since the British had no policy toward him. His prestige and influence had reached the vanishing point, and nothing could be done by the British or the Turks to shore up the ruins. Hindus and Muslims all over India were uniting against the British on behalf of a non-existent Caliphate. They wanted him restored to his throne, possessing spiritual and temporal power over the holy cities of Arabia, and they wanted the original boundaries of the Turkish Empire to be restored. Above all, the Caliph must not be punished for siding with Germany in the war. In May 1920 the terms of the Turkish Peace Treaty were published in India in the Gazette of India Extraordinary. Nothing at all was said about the Caliph, but it was clear that the Turks would be shorn of their empire. There would be no army, air force, or navy worth the name, for they were permitted only a gendarmerie of about 50,000 men and a navy consisting of a few sloops and torpedo boats. The Sultan would be given a small bodyguard. The Muslims in India were incensed.

  Gandhi spent a good deal of his time writing letters in defense of his position on the Caliphate, and though he claimed to have been a close observer of the Khilafat problem since 1914, it is abundantly clear that his chief interest lay in establishing a bond between the Muslims and the Hindus. At the meeting of the Congress at Amritsar in November, he had called for non-cooperation with the government, but the exact form noncooperation would take was not yet established. Clearly, if the Muslims and the Hindus could unite—if, for example, they could form a single political party with the same ends—then the government would have to pay considerably more attention to the aspirations of the Indian people. There was no limit to the possibilities once the Hindus and Muslims were in agreement. If they could combine on non-cooperation, then the government would be reduced to impotence and the independence and freedom of India could be assured.

  In the early part of the year Gandhi was ill. His left leg pained him, and he suffered from trembling fits; sometimes he gave way to despair. “The steel-like strength of my body has given way to softness,” he complained, and he felt sure the fire had died in him. The power to make everyone listen to him and follow him had disappeared, or so he thought. “My best time is over,” he wrote. “People may take now what they can from my ideas. I have ceased to be ‘the ideal man of action that I used to be.”

  But the best time was far from over, and when he emerged from his bouts of despair, it was to lead an audacious revolutionary movement against the British Raj.

  Non-violent no
n-cooperation with the government was, of course, Satyagraha under another name. Once more he would call on the Indians to endure suffering in order to achieve their aims. This time it was not simply a question of courting arrest and choking the jails to the point of suffocation. He planned a four-stage war against the government. First, all honors and titles, all medals and dignities conferred by the British were to be surrendered. This was a harmless gesture, merely the hors d’æuvres before the full dinner. The second step was to ask all lawyers to suspend their practices, all government officials to leave their offices, and all parents to recall their children from government-supported schools and colleges. The third step was to call upon the soldiers to lay down their arms. The fourth step was to bring about a massive refusal to pay taxes. The last two steps were the most serious, and they would be introduced only as a last resort.

  In Gandhi’s eyes the plan had a beautiful simplicity, and the more he thought about it the more enticing it became. None of these steps involved crowds of non-violent resisters who might be provoked into violence. But if the four steps were carried out, the machinery of government would gradually grind to a halt, and the Indians would be free. In the summer and early autumn he traveled across India, usually with Shaukat Ali, advancing these ideas wherever he found himself addressing an audience, all the time hammering away at the British for their betrayal of Islam and the massacre at Amritsar. And sometimes, carried away by his theme, he would speak with a new and uncharacteristic violence:

  Proclaim to the Government: “You may hang us on the gallows, you may send us to prison, but you will get no cooperation from us. You will get it in jail or on the gallows, but not in the regiments of the army. You will not get it in legislatures or in any departments of the Government service.”

  The British Empire today represents Satanism, and they who love God can afford to have no love for Satan.

  This Empire has been guilty of such terrible atrocities that, if it did not apologize for them to God and to the country, it would certainly perish. I will go further and say that, unless it so apologized, it was the duty of every Indian to destroy it.

  Perhaps this vehemence arose from sickness and the haunting consciousness of failure, for he continued to complain that the fire had gone from him, there was no strength in his words, and his mission was over. Huge crowds greeted him; when his train stopped at a village station, villagers from miles around would be there to greet him; and if he dismissed them, they would clamber onto the train, storm into his compartment, and insist on the right of having his darshan. “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai” was their war-cry, and he had little success when he asked them to shout instead: “Hindu-Mussulman ki jai.” At these railroad stations the noise was deafening. “It tore me to pieces,” Gandhi said bitterly; and yet he was glad. He knew now that he had an immense following, even though he realized that the peasants were more engrossed in seeing his face than studying his message.

  On August 1, 1920, he threw down the gauntlet. In a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, he called for a conference of Indian leaders and high government officials to deal with the crisis brought about by the massacre in Amritsar and the unresolved problem of the Caliphate, and at the same time he announced his intention to launch the non-cooperation movement. The letter was an ultimatum. “The ordinary method of agitating by way of petitions, deputations and the like, is no remedy for moving to repentance a Government so hopelessly indifferent to the welfare of its charges as the Government of India has proved to be.”

  The carefully worded letter was the first clap of thunder announcing the coming storm. At a special meeting of the Congress held in Calcutta in September, Gandhi’s battle cry of “Khilafat and Amritsar” won the day. The old-guard Congress members, always protesting their loyalty to the reigning King-Emperor, no longer commanded the votes, and Gandhi’s call for non-cooperation—the complete boycott of the government with all its unpredictable consequences—was accepted by the Congress as the program to be followed. In December there came the long-awaited, long-hoped-for, and most audacious cry of all: “Swaraj within a year.”

  The Viceroy watched and waited. He was about to retire from the scene, and was therefore content to parry the first weak thrusts of Gandhi’s followers. The massive boycott, with the lawyers, educators and government officials walking off their jobs, did not take place. Here and there highly paid lawyers connected with the Congress, like Motilal Nehru and Rajagopalachari, threw up their practices and as a result suffered financial hardship; but there was no broad movement among the middle and lower classes to follow Gandhi’s lead. In his speeches he thundered against “the Satanic Empire,” which had betrayed Islam in Turkey and the Indians in India, and held out the promise of swaraj through non-cooperation, but it was beyond his power to find the magic word which would bring all Indians to their feet.

  Among those who were perturbed by Gandhi’s call for non-cooperation was the poet Rabindranath Tagore. It seemed to him that Gandhi in rejecting British rule was deliberately attempting to turn the Indians against the West. To reject foreign domination was laudable; to reject Western civilization, as he had done in Hind Swaraj, was not only not laudable but dangerous and futile. What was swaraj? It was “a mist that will vanish, leaving no stain on the radiance of the Eternal.” There were more important things to fight for. “Our fight is a spiritual fight—it is for Man,” Tagore wrote. “We are to emancipate Man from the meshes that he himself has woven round him.” At a time when Tagore was preaching cooperation between East and West, Gandhi was preaching non-cooperation. Gandhi was against Western education; Tagore saw no harm in it. Gandhi was against science, and Tagore saw its manifold advantages. What he especially feared was the strain of nihilism which he had long ago detected in Gandhi, and he saw that “the fierce joy of annihilation,” which is perhaps essential to the mystic, would lead on a national scale to orgies of frightfulness and senseless devastation. In his eyes Gandhi was a man unloosing forces over which he had no control, and there was no end to the possibilities of error.

  Gandhi answered these arguments by disclaiming any intention except to counter evil with truth. “Non-cooperation is a protest against an unwitting and unwilling participation in evil,” he wrote, and went on to excoriate the poet for his “fetish of literary training.” “My experience has proved to my satisfaction that literary training by itself adds not an inch to one’s moral height and that character-building is independent of literary training.” Since Tagore was desperately attempting to train a whole generation of Bengalis in literature, Gandhi was well aware that he was striking a hard blow. Tagore had faith in schools, and Gandhi despised them, just as he despised the arts which Tagore taught in his school at Santiniketan. There could be no common ground between them.

  Tagore was not prepared to admit defeat. He had reverence for the Mahatma, but he was less than reverent toward the political strategist who “dangles before the country the bait of getting a thing of inestimable value dirt-cheap and in double quick time.” He compared Gandhi to a conjuror who makes gold out of a stone. Gandhi had found the magic mantra which unlocked the doors of freedom. Lo and behold, the words were: “Spin and weave, spin and weave.” How many times had Gandhi stated, like an oracle affirming a truth received from God, that swaraj would come about when the people learned to spin and weave. “If nothing but oracles will serve to move us, oracles will have to be manufactured morning, noon and night for the sake of urgent needs, and all other voices would be defeated,” Tagore commented with more than a hint of bitterness. He wanted men to behave with reason, not according to the laws of oracles. He intensely disliked Gandhi’s assumption of a kind of dictatorship over the minds of young Indians, for when he attempted to argue with some of Gandhi’s followers he found himself accused of treason, and wondered what the world was coming to.

  There was no doubt that an unhealthy atmosphere existed among many of his followers. There were fanatics who believed that all his words were divinely inspired
, and Gandhi’s habit of carrying his thoughts to the edge of violence and then subtly retreating was imitated by less resourceful men. To the charge that he was a dictator, Gandhi answered publicly that he would be extremely sorry to learn that his countrymen had unthinkingly and blindly followed him. Privately, he would admit the charge, and on rare occasions he would admit it publicly as when in January 1921 he wrote in Navajivan: “In matters of conscience I am uncompromising. Nobody can make me yield. I, therefore, tolerate the charge of being a dictator.” Tagore wondered whether Gandhi was not “growing enamored of his own doctrines, which is a dangerous form of egotism that even great people suffer from at times.”

  The two giants were at war with one another, but there was no doubt who would win the war. Tagore, with his exquisite refinement, was no match for Gandhi with his intricate brain and magical appeal. Gandhi could announce that henceforth every Indian must make a journey to the Himalayas, and millions of Indians would immediately do his bidding. He wrote to Tagore that he had a perfect right to demand that poets put away their lyres, lawyers put away their lawbooks, and schoolboys put away their schoolbooks, because India was on fire; non-cooperation alone would put out the flames. Why had he introduced the spinning wheel? “Because the spinning wheel is the call of love, and love is swaraj.” The oracle was speaking again. “The attainment of swaraj is possible within a short time, and it is possible only by the revival of the spinning wheel.” By repeating the words often enough, Gandhi was able to convince himself of their truth.

  Tagore’s attitude to Gandhi was therefore ambivalent: he loved the man, reverenced the Mahatma, and detested the politician whose solutions were nearly always so close to violence that it seemed disingenuous to call them “non-violent.” In a play called Mukta-Dhara, written in 1921, he drew a portrait of Gandhi in the guise of the wandering ascetic Dhananjaya, who comes to the court of the cruel maharajah: