Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  Based on this report, the Bombay Government formally ‘forfeited to his Majesty’ the book, Hind Swaraj, ‘purporting to be printed at the International Press, Phoenix, Natal’. The book, said the order, contained ‘words which are likely to bring into hatred and contempt the Government established by law in British India and to excite disaffection to the said Government’. The circulation of the book was banned under the Press Act, and its import prohibited under the Sea Customs Act. The Government of India endorsed the ban, noting – on the basis of materials sent it from Bombay – that from the contents of this ‘clearly seditious’ book ‘it may be fairly concluded that Mr M. K. Gandhi is not the innocent martyr as which he poses to be’.17

  The Oriental Translator of the Bombay Government had written what in effect was the first review of Hind Swaraj. Gandhi did not of course read the review, nor the glosses on it by other officials. All he knew was that copies of the Gujarati edition had been seized. He immediately wrote a letter of complaint, which is worth reproducing for its intrinsic value and because it escaped the attention of the editors of his Collected Works. Dated 16 April 1910, and written from Johannesburg, it was addressed to the Home Secretary of the Government of India. Enclosing the English edition of the book, then just out in Durban, Gandhi said:

  I do not know why the Gujarati copies have been confiscated. If the Government will kindly favour me with their views and their advice, I shall endeavour, so far as possible, to carry them out. In writing ‘Hind Swaraj’ it has not been my intention to embarrass the Government in so far as any writing of mine could do so, but entirely to assist it. This in no way means that I necessarily approve of any or all the actions of the Government or the methods on which it is based. In my humble opinion, every man has a right to hold any opinion he chooses, and to give effect to it also, so long as, in doing so, he does not use physical violence against anybody. Being connected with a newspaper which commands some influence and attention, and knowing that methods of violence among my countrymen may become popular even in South Africa, and feeling assured that the adoption of passive resistance as I have ventured to do in ‘Indian Home Rule’ was the surest preventative of physical violence, I did not hesitate to publish [the book] in Gujarati. The English edition has not been circulated by me in India except among officials and the leading newspapers. At the same time, I am aware that some buyers have sent it on their own account to India also.

  I need hardly say that the views expressed in ‘Indian Home Rule’ have nothing to do with the struggle that is going on in the Transvaal and in other parts of South Africa, intimately connected though I am with it; and I am not in a position to know how many of my countrymen share those views. At the same time, no matter where I am placed, I consider it my duty to popularize them to the best of my ability as being in the best interests of India and the Empire.18

  Gandhi is here acting as both loyalist and rebel: suggesting that his advocacy of non-violence may come to the aid of the Raj, but reserving to himself the right to say what he wished about the Raj’s policies and actions. The letter held out an offer of compromise; that he might consider revising passages considered excessively provocative. Gandhi was extremely keen that his book (and his ideas) be discussed and debated within India, and by Indians. He was willing to make some changes to his text to make this possible.

  Meanwhile, the Government had commissioned its own English translation of Hind Swaraj, undertaken by the Gujarati interpreter of the Madras High Court.19 Comparing their version with Gandhi’s, the Home Department found them very similar – and equally dangerous. The distinction made by the author between words and deeds, and between passive resistance and armed violence, was characterized as ‘curious’ and dismissed as unsustainable. ‘Preaching and disseminating sedition’, remarked a senior official in the Home Department, was as offensive and dangerous to public order as actual physical violence.20 For, as the Director of the Criminal Intelligence Branch wrote on the file, ‘we must, I think, aim at destroying the open market for imported seditious publications of all kinds: we cannot afford to pick and choose very much according to the degree and quantity of the sedition.’ He continued, tellingly, ‘More real perversion of ideas in the direction of sedition is effected by moderate seditious publications than by those breathing violence and revolution in every line.’21

  The Government of India’s decision to ban the book was the subject of a scathing editorial in P. S. Aiyar’s African Chronicle. ‘No wonder,’ said the paper, that ‘sedition is ripening day by day, and discontent is growing abroad.’ For

  if the Viceroy and his colleagues were to be frightened at such a simple booklet as [Hind] Swaraj, and if they could not tolerate the expression of opinion of even men of Mr Gandhi’s stamp, we do not know what else the Indian Government would tolerate. Under the most provocating circumstances we have not seen Mr Gandhi using a single cross word to any one, and as a leader in politics, no country could find a better man than Mr Gandhi. Should his production be unfit for circulation, we believe, few men could be found in India who could give expression to the popular will in a sober and adequate language.22

  The Government’s argument was here being turned on its head. Paranoid policemen claimed that allowing moderates like Gandhi to openly criticize aspects of Government policy would provide wanton encouragement to the extremists. P. S. Aiyar argued exactly the opposite: if even moderates such as Gandhi could not be heard, then ordinary Indians would completely lose faith in the rulers, and seek redemption by the methods of the extremists.

  In May 1910, some copies of the printed English edition of Hind Swaraj reached the shores of the Madras Presidency. An early reader was the Province’s Home Secretary. He concluded that while the author ‘affects to treat the English with forbearance’, the argument of the book was ‘calculated to lessen the esteem in which they have been held, and the writer’s whole ideal is by implication at any rate, inconsistent with the continuance of British rule, or indeed of any settled administration in India’. The critic highlighted four contentious claims made by the author:

  (i) English politicians are dishonest and unscrupulous, and English newspapers are imbued with a partisan spirit.

  (ii) English administration in India rests upon the Courts, and then again upon lawyers, who are corrupt from top to bottom.

  (iii) The members of the English nation who have settled in India are of an inferior stamp to their countrymen at home.

  (iv) The continuation of the English in India depends entirely upon their adoption of Oriental languages and civilisation. If they fail to conform to this condition, India will be made too hot to hold them.

  The Home Secretary in Madras recommended a ban on the English edition of the book as well. The Secretary of the Judicial Department concurred. Then, against point (i) above, he quoted Adam Smith: ‘That corrupt and insidious animal called a politician.’ He also expressed his ‘regret that extracts from this work cannot be more widely known. The advice to lawyers to give up law and take to a handloom would, for instance, be worth communicating to the Legislative Council.’23

  The Government of India had made sure that Hind Swaraj was not circulated within the subcontinent, in either its Gujarati or English versions. There were thus no printed, public reviews of the book within Gandhi’s homeland. But it was reviewed by some newspapers in South Africa, where the book circulated freely. In the first week of May 1910, the Transvaal Leader published a critical assessment of the book by an acquaintance of Gandhi named Edward Dallow. An accountant of British stock, a Nonconformist by faith, Dallow had been sympathetic to the claims of the Indians in the Transvaal. He was a signatory to the letter written by Europeans to The Times in January 1909. Later that same year, he wrote to the Colonial Secretary urging him to ‘receive the Indian deputation [led by Gandhi] with sympathetic regard’, and to use ‘the influence of your high office to procure for them the amelioration of the law which they demand.’24

  Dallow opposed laws that di
scriminated on the basis of colour. However, he was a defender of Empire, and in this capacity thought the banning of Hind Swaraj in India both prudent and necessary. For ‘under cover of a dissertation on modern civilisation this little booklet of 104 pages is in reality written in support of the political propaganda to free India from English rule, and as such the Indian Government were acting wisely in endeavouring to prevent its circulation in India.’ Gandhi might have kept his argument impersonal, distinguishing between modern civilization (which he abominated) and the English people (whom he tolerated). Nonetheless, the fact

  that all his illustrations of the degrading effects of modern civilisation are taken from English government, from English life, from English Ministers, Parliament and people, makes it highly improbable that any but a cultivated man and a scholar will keep the subtle distinction in mind. To the ordinary reader … the effect will be to raise a hatred not only of modern civilisation, but of the English people in India as its particular exponents.

  Dallow chastised Gandhi for his narrow range of reading. The lawyer had consulted the works of novelists and critics, and exalted the ‘masters of Indian philosophy’. At the same time, he had overlooked ‘masters of modern philosophy’ such as Mill, Spencer, Goethe, Kant, Hegel and de Tocqueville. Dallow ended the review with his own vision of the past and possible future of the author’s homeland:

  India is not so immovable as Mr Gandhi would have us believe; the caste system, which is the basis – the evil basis – of her civilisation is showing signs of weakening under the influence of modern thought and experience acquired by Indians visiting other lands. The discoveries of modern science, which show the plant to be as truly alive as the animal, have undermined one of the chief dogmas of their religion. Under the guidance of English rule, India is gradually adopting representative institutions, and her rulers look forward to the time, as yet still far distant, when India will take upon her own shoulders the burden of government as an independent and loyal appanage of the Imperial Crown.25

  The review stung Gandhi, who immediately sent a reply. He began by saying that he too was a ‘lover of the Empire to which Mr Dallow and I belong’. This love, he clarified,

  proceeds from my faith in the individuals who compose it, whether they be European, Kaffir, or Indian, but I decline to bow in idolatrous homage to the term. To me it simply means this: Whether the English and the Indians intend it or not, they have been thrown together by the Divine will for their mutual good; but, as free agents, they may turn the connection to evil. This latter activity of ours I call Satanic. In common with many Englishmen, after eighteen years’ close observation and, shall I say, practical life, I have come to believe that for the English people to Anglicise India, even if they could do so, would be a tragedy.

  Dallow had condemned the caste system; in Gandhi’s view, however, it had ‘saved India from the ruinous and brutal effect of the competitive system which has been exalted to the dignity of a science by modern civilisation’. To the charge that he was poorly read in modern philosophy, Gandhi answered that he was acquainted with the works of Mill and Spencer, but saw no reason to read more glosses of modern civilization when he saw the thing itself unfold before his eyes. ‘Must I read a critique of “Hamlet”,’ he said with some asperity, ‘when I have only to pay a shilling and see the play?’

  Gandhi said that his tract was aimed at two different audiences: the party of violence within India, to whom he said that ‘whatever evils India is suffering from are mainly to our own defects and to our having worshipped the golden calf’; and to the English, to whom his appeal was ‘not necessarily to discard modern civilisation themselves, but to help India to retain her own civilisation’. On both parties he pressed the immorality of violence. To the British he said that ‘methods of repression … are absolutely useless’. To the revolutionaries he said that ‘violence cannot be rooted out of India or anywhere else by violence’. It was thus that he had ‘commended in all humility passive resistance, that is, soul force, both to the Governors and to the Governed. It is not necessary that both the sides should take it up. Either may adopt it to the advantage of both.’26

  Meanwhile, Gandhi was carrying on a private, if equally instructive, debate with his friend W. J. Wybergh. As Transvaal’s Commissioner of Mines in the early 1900s, and later as a Member of the Legislative Assembly, Wybergh had vigorously promoted the segregation of Asians.27 But he made an exception for Gandhi, the English-educated lawyer. The two met regularly at meetings of Johannesburg’s Theosophical Society. Sent Hind Swaraj by Gandhi, Wybergh commented that he did not think that ‘on the whole your argument is coherent or that the various statements and opinions you express have any real dependence upon one another’. He was not surprised that the pamphlet was seen as disloyal, since (and he seems to have been reading Dallow here)

  the average plain ignorant man without intellectual subtlety would suppose that you were preaching against British rule in India. On the far more important general principle underlying your book, I must say definitely that I think you are going wrong. European civilisation has many defects and I agree with many of your criticisms, but I do not believe that it is ‘the Kingdom of Satan’ or that it should be abolished. It appears to me a necessary step in the evolution of mankind, especially manifested in and suitable for Western nations. While I recognise that the highest ideals of India (and Europe too) are in advance of this civilisation, yet I think also, with all modesty, that the bulk of the Indian population require to be roused by the lash of competition and the other material and sensuous as well as intellectual stimuli which ‘civilisation’ supplies.

  Wybergh conceded that not

  all forms of Western civilisation are suitable for India, and I don’t doubt that we British have erred (in all good faith) in trying to introduce British institutions indiscriminately. But Western ideals are necessary to India, not to supersede but to modify and develop her own. India ought, I think, to be governed on Indian lines, (whether by Indians or Englishmen is another question) but ‘civilisation’ is both necessary and useful, if it grows naturally and is not forced and it cannot be avoided.

  The critic turned next to the question of passive resistance. One might have no objection to its adoption by an individual saint, but

  as a practical political principle suitable for adoption by ordinary men living the ordinary life of citizens, it seems to be altogether pernicious, and utterly disastrous to the public welfare. It is mere anarchy, and I have always regarded Tolstoy, its principal apostle, as very likely a saint personally, but when he preaches his doctrines as political propaganda and recommends them for indiscriminate adoption, as the most dangerous enemy of humanity. I have no manner of doubt that Governments and laws and police and physical force are absolutely essential to average humanity, and are as truly ‘natural’ in their stage of development and as truly moral as eating and drinking and propagating the species … When all humanity has reached sainthood Governments will become unnecessary but not until then. Meanwhile civilisation must be mended, not ended.

  Gandhi, characteristically, printed Wybergh’s critical assessment in full in Indian Opinion and then sought courteously to answer it. He was, he said, ‘painfully conscious of the imperfections and defects’ in presentation that Wybergh pointed to. These might make a superficial reader conclude that the book was ‘a disloyal production’. However, he had ‘the position of a publicist practically forced upon me by circumstances’. Both the tone and content of the pamphlet had their genesis in the fact that it was written with a view to drawing Indians away from ‘the insane violence that is now going on in India.’

  As for modern civilization, Gandhi argued those who were outside its ambit and

  have a well-tried civilisation to guide them, should be helped to remain where they are, if only as a measure of prudence … I cannot help most strongly contesting the idea that the Indian population requires to be roused by ‘the lash of competition and the other material and se
nsuous as well as intellectual stimuli’; I cannot admit that these will add a single inch to its moral stature.

  Finally, he said that his own reading of Tolstoy’s works

  has never led me to consider that, in spite of his merciless analysis of institutions organised and based upon force, that is governments, he in any way anticipates or contemplates that the whole world will be able to live in a state of philosophical anarchy. What he has preached, as, in my opinion, have all world-teachers, is that every man has to obey the voice of his own conscience, and be his own master, and seek the Kingdom of God from within. For him there is no government that can control him without his sanction.28

  Some of Gandhi’s British friends had profound reservations about Hind Swaraj. There are hints that even some Indians in South Africa did not entirely identify with the book’s contents. Maganlal Gandhi wrote his uncle a letter asking why he had so sharply attacked railways, doctors, and elected Parliaments. Meanwhile, Gandhi wrote to Gokhale (who would certainly have taken even stronger exception to the dismissal of modern professions and modern institutions) clarifying that the book represented his personal views. He hoped his mentor would ‘be able, should any prejudice arise against me personally or the pamphlet, to keep the merits of the struggle [in the Transvaal] entirely separate from me.’29

  There were, of course, responses to Hind Swaraj that required no answer at all. One such came from Isabella Fyvie Mayo, a Scottish writer and disciple of Tolstoy who worked (in her own words) for ‘the brotherhood of all races of men, the cause of international peace, and the recognition of the rights of animals’.30 In a letter to Hermann Kallenbach, Miss Mayo said she was ‘lost in admiration of Mr Gandhi’s “Home Rule for India”’. When she heard it had been banned in India, her first reaction was that the Bible itself might be proscribed, since ‘Mr Gandhi only makes practical application of the precepts of the “Sermon on the Mount”.’ The central thesis of the book Miss Mayo unreservedly endorsed. For