by Robert Payne
Gandhi crossing bridge in Noakhali, with Manubehn leading the way.
Nehru and Gandhi, July 6, 1946.
Lord and Lady Mountbatten with Gandhi.
Gandhi lying in state, January 30,1948.
The cortege passing along the Rajpath, New Delhi.
Nathuram Godse.
The funeral pyre.
A Meeting with Romain Rolland
MIRABEHN HAD LONG possessed the desire to bring Gandhi and Romain Rolland together, for they were her two gurus, the two people before whom she bowed in unreserved admiration. As a young woman she had hoped to become a musician, and when she discovered to her horror that she had no talent for playing any instrument at all, she contented herself with admiring musicians from a distance. Beethoven was the special object of her veneration, and Romain Rolland’s brief Life of Beethoven tempted her to seek out the author in Switzerland. There were a few nervous and inconclusive meetings; she was too overwhelmed with fear and trepidation in the presence of the master to convey anything except her adoration; and when Romain Rolland told her casually that he was writing a life of Gandhi, she was dismayed, for she had never heard of him. “He is like Christ,” Romain Rolland said, and from that moment she became aware of her destiny. She would go to Gandhi and serve him with all the strength of her yearning desire to serve someone greater than herself.
When the Round Table Conference was coming to an end, she prevailed on Gandhi to meet Romain Rolland in Paris. It would be a brief meeting, and would not take much of his time. Later, when it became clear that Romain Rolland was too ill with bronchitis to leave Switzerland, Gandhi agreed to meet him at his villa near Villeneuve overlooking Lake Geneva. They had been in correspondence; they shared many friends in common, including Rabindranath Tagore and Charlie Andrews; they both regarded themselves as the spiritual descendants of Tolstoy. There were many other reasons for a meeting between them, and not the least of them was Gandhi’s desire to pay tribute to the author of Mahatma Gandhi, the book that had made his name a household word all over Europe. Nevertheless it was Mirabehn’s insistence that brought the meeting about, for she was the prime mover, the one person who could convince him to delay his journey when he was in a hurry to return to India.
On December 5 Gandhi left London with his small party which included his son Devadas, Mirabehn, Muriel Lester, his secretaries Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal, and the two British detectives who had guarded him throughout his stay in London and were now at Gandhi’s invitation accompanying him on the long journey across Europe. The plan was to spend the night in Paris, and then to proceed to Switzerland. After a few days in Switzerland he would go on to Rome, and after seeing Mussolini and the Pope he would take ship to India from Brindisi.
As usual Gandhi made careful preparations for the journey. His host in Paris was to be Madame Louise Guiyesse, a veteran pacifist and founder of the Association of Friends of Gandhi. She lived in a small apartment at 166 Boulevard Montparnasse, and Gandhi was determined to put her to the least possible trouble. He therefore brought along enough food in tiffin carriers to sustain the whole party until they reached Switzerland. In the tiffin carriers there was a plentiful supply of chapatis, curry, pickled lemons and almond paste.
Reaching Boulogne after the short sea voyage from Folkestone they were treated politely and respectfully by French officials, who showed no interest in seeing their passports and waived examination of their sixty-two unwieldy parcels tied up with string. They were escorted to a first-class compartment, and when Gandhi objected, saying that he had purchased third-class tickets, the stationmaster merely bowed politely. He seemed to think they should have some comfort before they reached Paris. He may have known the kind of reception waiting for them at the Gare du Nord.
They reached Paris at 3:30 P.M., and thereafter they were subjected to all the rigors reserved for visiting royalty. The crowds roared; the photographers jostled; workmen in blue blouses were standing on ladders with naphtha flares in their hands for the benefit of the cameramen; journalists kept running beside Gandhi demanding his views on France, Great Britain and India. Barelegged, wrapped in his shawl, Gandhi was carried away in the tide of people and for a few minutes he was lost to sight. The screaming pandemonium of the railroad station was to be repeated at intervals during his brief stay in Paris.
If Gandhi had hoped for rest, none was given to him. At six o’clock there was a reception at Madame Guiyesse’s apartment, with interminable speeches of welcome. In the midst of the speeches journalists stormed up the stairs and demanded entrance. A few were let in; the rest hammered on the doors and demanded to be admitted. Because there were so many people in the cluttered, old-fashioned apartment, and the air was used up, Gandhi fell into a fit of coughing. Among those who came to welcome him were Charles Gide, the economist, and Louis Massignon, the authority on the martyred Hallaj, one of the saints of Islam. Gandhi greeted them all with a namaskar, seated cross-legged on a divan, smiling faintly, serene in the midst of chaos.
Later in the evening he attended a public meeting organized in his honor at Magic City, a cinema converted into a lecture hall for the occasion. The hall was filled to capacity, and so many more people were trying to get in that an extra detail of police had to be rushed up. Jules Romains, the novelist, presided over the meeting. Gandhi delivered a speech in English, which was then laboriously translated into French.
Although it was the dead of winter, the hall was suffocatingly hot Collars wilted, sweat streamed down the faces of the audience. Gandhi spoke quietly about the world’s weariness of war and all the economic and moral disasters that follow wars. He spoke of non-violence as the sole remedy for the world’s ills, and explained how it was being practiced in India by men acting in defiance of brute force, without secrecy, and always truthfully. “There is no place for lies, for all that is not true, in these methods which we are using in India,” he said. “All is done openly and above board. Truth hates secrecy. The more you act openly, the greater are your chances of remaining truthful. There is no hatred, there is no place for fear or despair in the dictionary of the man who bases his life on truth and nonviolence.” He made an appeal for lasting friendship between France and India. “I hope through you and me a living contact is now established,” he declared. “May this contact be constant and the two nations understand and love each other and work as two companions for the good of humanity.
Though he spoke at length, he said very little, for he was out of his depth. He did not know what the French expected of him, and had little knowledge of the French character, with the result that he spoke like a professor when they had expected to hear a messiah. “He was at times very courageous and at times too prudent,” wrote the poet René Arco in a letter to Romain Rolland later in the month. “There was something of a diplomat in him and a shrewd one.”
His message of non-violence fell on deaf ears, for the French were obsessed by problems that could not be solved by non-violence. They worried about the Briand-Kellogg Pact, the growing power of Fascism in Italy, the waning power of the League of Nations: Indian independence was an irrelevance. The press paid little attention to his remarks, but the photographers had a field day, for the sight of Gandhi threading his way through the Paris streets wrapped in a shawl provided a pleasant diversion in a cold and rainy winter.
It was still cold and still raining when Gandhi arrived at Villeneuve by train from Paris. Because Romain Rolland had a severe cold in his chest and could not go down to the railroad station, the meeting took place on the threshold of the Villa Olga, one of the two villas he possessed on the lake shore. “The little man, bespectacled and toothless, was wrapped in his white burnous, but his legs, thin as a heron’s stilts, were bare,” Romain Rolland wrote later to a friend in America. “His shaven head with its few coarse hairs was uncovered and wet with rain. He came to me with a dry laugh, his mouth open like a good dog panting, and flinging an arm around me leaned his cheek against my shoulder. I felt his grizzled head agains
t my cheek. It was, I amuse myself thinking, the kiss of St. Dominic and St. Francis.”
But Romain Rolland no longer possessed the fire of St. Dominic. Old, sick and disillusioned, he was coming more and more under the influence of Communism, and almost his first words were to express his profound regret that Gandhi never met Lenin. “Lenin, like you, never compromised with the truth,” he exclaimed, and Gandhi, who had expected some other greeting, was nonplused, wondering why he should now be associated in his friend’s mind with a tyrannical dictator. Romain Rolland continued to speak about Communist Russia with the fervor of a convert to a new faith, praising Stalin for having imposed upon the Russian people a ferocious burden only because it was necessary to free them from exploitation and the evils of capitalism. Romain Rolland spoke approvingly about the dic-tatorship of the proletariat. “Money is not capital,” Gandhi replied. “The real capital lies in the capacity and the will to work.” The fight against the capitalists was therefore self-defeating. A dictatorship of the proletariat could come about only by force, and force was self-defeating. “I won’t accept a dictatorship based on violence,” he said firmly, and went on to relate how he had led a strike of textile workers in Ahmedabad in 1918, convincing the workers that nothing would be gained by violent means. As he saw it, industrial development was always a complex and delicate thing, and he was far from desiring to impede its progress. Romain Rolland was in no mood to consider the non-violent alternatives to Communism, and he passed quickly to the discussion of individuals consumed with violence against society. Since there were so many of them, and society must be protected from them, was Gandhi prepared to use non-violent means against them?
“Certainly,” Gandhi replied. “I would keep them under constraint, and I would not consider this to be violence. If my brother was mad, I would chain him up to prevent him from doing harm, but I would use no violence upon him, because there would be no reason to use it. My brother would not feel that I was using violence upon him in any way. On the contrary, when he had recovered his senses, he would thank me for having chained him up.”
The discussions were on safer ground when they disputed on the nature of art, measuring out their minute differences. Romain Rolland was an enthusiastic exponent of Sturm und Drang; the artist must suffer infinite pain in order to achieve his masterpiece. Gandhi, who shared with his friend an acute distaste for “art for art’s sake,” thought art should spring from truth, and truth was joyful. He wondered why the production of a work of art should necessarily be so painful. In that upper room of the Villa Olga, at once bedroom and study, Romain Rolland reached out for a book from the shelves and began to read from Goethe’s Faust, while his sister, Madeleine Rolland, translated into English as best she could. Gandhi said nothing, but smiled approvingly.
Meanwhile the rain came down, and the mountains lay hidden, and there were always crowds of people waiting to see Gandhi, who lived in the Villa Lionette nearby, rising at three o’clock every morning to say prayers and later walking to the Villa Olga to resume his conversations with Romain Rolland. In the evening prayers and hymns were chanted in the downstairs living room of the Villa Olga. Meanwhile the photographers hammered at the gates, the syndicate of milkmen of Lake Leman demanded the privilege of supplying Gandhi with dairy products; musicians took to serenading Gandhi below his window; and sometimes the waiting journalists would catch sight of a small thin figure wrapped in a white shawl making his way hurriedly down the muddy country lanes, for he regarded his daily walks as an essential part of his daily routine, even though they took place in the depths of a Swiss winter. During the last days of his stay the snow began to fall.
Two Swiss pacifists begged for the privilege of introducing him to audiences in Lausanne and Geneva, and he accepted readily. He refused the offer of an automobile to Lausanne and took the train, traveling third class according to his custom. When he arrived, he insisted on walking to the church where the meeting was being held, with the result that all traffic came to a standstill. He was given a standing ovation as he entered the church, and a violinist preceded him with music up the aisle.
He spoke of the moral and material bankruptcy brought about by the war, the years of bloodshed and horror which threatened to produce only more bloodshed and horror. He offered them the alternative of nonviolence, truth, self-sacrifice, which he regarded as India’s contribution to world peace. The West was sick; let them turn toward India for enlightenment:
I observe throughout the West a sickness of heart. You seem to be tired of the military burden under which Europe is groaning, and also tired of the prospect of shedding the blood of your fellowmen. The last war, falsely called great, has taught you and humanity many a rich lesson. It taught you some surprising things about human nature. You also found that no fraud, no lies, no deceit was considered too bad to use in order to win the war; no cruelty was considered too great; there were no unfair ways and means for encompassing the destruction of your so-called enemy. Suddenly, as in a flash, the friends of your youth became enemies, no home was safe, nothing spared. This civilization of the West was weighed in the balance and found wanting.
He had spoken in much the same way in Paris, where the verdict against the West was regarded as being justly deserved: the Swiss however thought of themselves as being untouched by the contagion of war and “above the conflict,” a phrase which Romain Rolland had made famous in his appeal to the warring nations in 1914. Gandhi wondered aloud what the Swiss would do if they were invaded. He continued:
If the rival powers had wanted a passage through Switzerland they would have fought Switzerland also. But it would be cowardly if you were to allow a foreign army to pass through your neutral country that it might attack another power. Had I been a citizen of Switzerland or President of the Federal State, I would have invited every citizen to refuse all supplies to invading armies, to reenact Thermopylae and build a living wall of women and children and invite the invading armies to walk over their bodies. Do you say that is beyond endurance? It is not. Last year we showed that such things can be done. Women stood in mass formation, breast forward, without flinching. In Peshawar thousands of men withstood a shower of bullets. Imagine such men and women standing in front of an army wanting a passage through your country. Perhaps the armies would have marched. Then you would have won your victory, for no army would be able to repeat that experiment. Non-violence is not and never has been the weapon of the weak. It is the weapon of the stoutest heart.
Throughout the speech Gandhi upheld the example of the Indians, as though he felt it was self-evident that the same weapons could be used by the Swiss. His speech was broadcast over the adio and was received with mixed feelings. People asked why he expected the Swiss to disarm when they had succeeded in defending their independence for so many generations by means of universal military training. “Non-violence is made of sterner stuff than armies,” Gandhi replied sternly. The Swiss were proud of the Red Cross. “They should cease to think of war and giving relief in war, and turn their thoughts to giving relief without war,” Gandhi insisted. The Swiss were also proud of the League of Nations with its headquarters in Geneva. “The League of Nations lacks the necessary sanctions,” Gandhi said. “Only non-violence offers the necessary sanctions.”
The Swiss are a mild people, but they found that their mildness was being put to the test. Non-violence, they felt sure, was not the answer to all the world’s ills; there were articles in the press suggesting that Gandhi should study Swiss history more carefully before offering his cure-alls. At the church meeting in Lausanne he was regarded with respectful admiration. The subsequent meeting in the Victoria Hall at Geneva was even more crowded, but the mood was querulous. Capitalists, socialists, pacifists, young students and elderly professors had come to see the Mahatma extricate himself from difficult questions. Unfortunately he came with simple answers, which infuriated those who found them inadequate. There were the inevitable questions about the class struggle. “Labor does not know its ow
n power,” Gandhi replied. “Did it know it, it would only have to rise to have capitalism crumble away. For Labor is the only power in the world.”
Such statements were not calculated to endear him to the bourgeoisie; nor, in India, would he find himself proclaiming this statement with any passion. Most of the audience applauded, but the bourgeois were reduced to silent fury.
Gandhi had warned against the journalists who deliberately misrepresented his words. He was asked whether he had said: “The masses will have to turn to terrorism if success does not follow their present nonviolent program.” He vehemently denied that he had ever said such a thing, but he had at least hinted that if non-violence failed he would employ the more terrible weapon of anarchy.
Gandhi the non-violent revolutionary and Gandhi the preacher seemed to be poles apart; the Swiss were happier when he talked about God than when he implored them to disband their army. At the Lausanne meeting he spoke about God very simply, saying that in his early youth he had chosen the word “truth” as the noblest attribute of God. He had then said: “God is Truth, above all.” “But,” he added, “two years ago I advanced a step further and said that Truth is God. For even the atheists do not doubt the necessity for the power of truth. In their passion for discovering the truth, the atheists have not hesitated to deny the existence of God, and, from their point of view, they are right.”
It was a strange and disturbing conclusion, and no one, not even Gandhi himself, ever succeeded in satisfactorily explaining what he meant by this inversion. “Truth is God” remains a deeply personal statement which no more lends itself to demonstrable proof than Keats’s “Beauty is truth.” The danger in Gandhi’s statement lay in the reduction of God to a moral abstraction, or in enlarging truth until it assumed the proportions of divinity. He did not mean that to be truthful is to be godlike; what he appears to have meant is that truth is supreme and all-pervasive and that it exists in its own divine right, perhaps independent of God. He was constantly attempting to enlarge the boundaries of thought and he regarded this new experiment with special favor since it appeared to open the way to new and unsuspected discoveries. But the more he toyed with Truth the more he became inextricably involved in his Vaishnava faith and his prayers continued to be addressed to Rama, the divine hero of the Ramayana, who was also Vishnu.
