Gandhi, Page 2

  Reading the Collected Works was instructive in terms of both content and style. Gandhi was a wonderfully clear writer, who (as one contemporary remarked) had developed a prose style ‘all his own, composed of short sentences shot-out like shrapnel in a feu de joie at a new-year parade, dynamic in force and devastating in effect’.6 The Trinidadian writer Seepersad Naipaul told his son (the future Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul) that good literature boiled down to ‘writing from the belly rather than from the cheek’. While most people wrote from the cheek, added Naipaul père, ‘Gandhi’s writing is great’ because he wrote from the belly.7

  I studied Gandhi’s own writings, but I had to go beyond them, to juxtapose what Gandhi himself said with what others wrote to him or said about him, whether in public or in private. This involved research on the vast collection of letters to Gandhi housed in the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad; in the private papers of his friends, contemporaries, colleagues and rivals; in the institutional collections of organizations that impinged on his work; in the archival records of the British Raj, these located in London and New Delhi, as well as in provincial archives in Bombay, Lucknow and Nagpur; and in runs of contemporary newspapers, in English and in Hindi. I also consulted printed secondary sources such as memoirs and biographies, but used them sparingly, since retrospective accounts are often less credible, and always less vivid, than those written at the time the events they describe actually occurred.

  In reconstructing Gandhi’s life and struggles, this book draws upon more than sixty different archival collections, located in repositories around the world. These include a colossal hoard of papers belonging to Mohandas K. Gandhi himself, which have only recently been placed in the public domain, and whose significance is explained below.

  In or about the year 1920, a young man from the Punjab named Pyarelal Nayar joined Gandhi. He served him devotedly for the next three decades, first as the assistant to Gandhi’s secretary Mahadev Desai, and then, after Mahadev’s death in 1942, as his main and often only secretary. In the 1930s, Pyarelal’s younger sister, Sushila Nayar, a medical doctor, also joined Gandhi’s entourage.

  Shortly after Gandhi’s death in New Delhi in January 1948, Pyarelal visited Sevagram, the rural settlement Gandhi had founded in central India. He collected the papers kept there, and took them back to Delhi. Over the next thirty years, Pyarelal sought to write a multivolume life of Gandhi. By the time he died, in 1982, several volumes had appeared, albeit not in a chronological order. The task now devolved on his sister, Sushila Nayar. Dr Nayar sought to complete the project, unsuccessfully. She herself died in 2000.

  Despite their closeness to Gandhi, neither Pyarelal nor Dr Nayar were scholars (or indeed writers). The volumes they published have some interesting details, but the narrative is often disconnected and rambling. When, during the 1960s and 1970s, the project to compile Gandhi’s Collected Works was under way, its legendary chief editor, Professor K. Swaminathan, sought unavailingly to have Pyarelal allow full access to the collection under his control. This he would not do, instead offering the editors of the Collected Works letters by Gandhi himself in dribs and drabs, while withholding other relevant material which would have placed these letters in context. (‘When it came to his material on Gandhi’, remarked K. Swaminathan once, Pyarelal was ‘like Othello guarding Desdemona’.8)

  Why Pyarelal was so possessive about these papers must remain a matter of speculation. Perhaps he had resolved, as someone who had been with Gandhi for the better part of three decades, to be to him what Boswell had been to Dr Johnson. Perhaps he was jealous of D.G. Tendulkar, the independent-minded Bombay scholar who—before the Collected Works had got off the ground—produced an eight-volume chronological account of Gandhi’s life, based on newspaper reports, Gandhi’s own printed statements and writings, and books. Pyarelal may have felt even more determined to publish a more authoritative account, which meant keeping other Gandhi scholars away from the materials he had.

  After Pyarelal died in 1982, a far-sighted archivist, Dr Hari Dev Sharma, persuaded Sushila Nayar to transfer the papers to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), of which he was then deputy director. Until Dr Nayar’s own death, she had the right to withhold permission to use them, which she usually did, since she still hoped—despite her own infirmity and advanced age—to complete her brother’s task. Although the NMML knew that these were in effect the personal papers of the greatest modern Indian, given the closeness of the brother-and-sister duo to Gandhi himself they did not broach the matter of making them available to the larger scholarly community while they were alive. But then Dr Nayar herself died. Neither she nor her brother had any children. So, the NMML made the wise and undeniably public-spirited decision to have these papers made open to researchers.

  However, this could not be done overnight. For, Pyarelal was not a trained historian, still less a trained archivist. The papers he had collected from Sevagram were kept in hundreds of boxes, these very loosely categorized according to subject, year or correspondent. The size of the collection and the haphazard state it was in meant that its sorting, classification, preservation and indexing took several years. One massive chunk of the collection was made available for consultation in 2007; a second and almost as substantial a chunk, five years later.

  Containing thousands of files, many of which are several hundred pages in extent, this recently opened collection covers all the major themes in Gandhi’s wide-ranging and often controversial career from the 1920s till his death. The files include numerous petitions and pamphlets sent to Gandhi, a great deal of correspondence concerning Gandhi, thousands of fascinating and often important letters to Gandhi, and even some key letters written by Gandhi which were accidentally or deliberately kept out of the Collected Works. The newly opened Gandhi Papers at the NMML have been an absolutely indispensable source for this book (as the references to them scattered through the endnotes reveal), and I feel deeply privileged to be the first Gandhi biographer to have used them.

  Apart from Pyarelal, of course. Possessiveness is not an unusual trait among historians, and it is very nearly ubiquitous among biographers. For all his quirkiness when alive, I think one must be extremely grateful to Pyarelal for having preserved the papers of his master for so long. We Indians have an appalling record when it comes to preserving or maintaining historical records. Family papers are sold as raddi, government papers are incinerated. And what man cannot destroy, nature—in the form of dust, fungus and the monsoon—takes care of. Scholars much younger than myself, and of many nationalities, shall have reason to be grateful for Pyarelal’s possessive devotion and devoted possessiveness.

  PART I

  CLAIMING A NATION (1915–1922)

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Returning Hero

  I

  On 18 July 1914, Mohandas Gandhi sailed from Cape Town for London. With him were his wife, Kasturba, and his closest friend, a Jewish architect named Hermann Kallenbach. Gandhi was leaving South Africa for good, after two decades spent there in various roles: lawyer, editor, food faddist, activist and prisoner. He had been the unquestioned leader of the small Indian community in South Africa. Now he wished to work with, and for, the several hundred million people of his homeland.

  One of the Gandhis’ four children was already in India; the others were on their way, part of a larger group of students from Phoenix, the settlement that Gandhi had established in rural Natal. The patriarch wished to go to London first, because his mentor, the great Poona*1 educationist and politician Gopal Krishna Gokhale, was there. Ever since they first met in 1896, Gokhale had been the Indian whom Gandhi most admired. In his years in the diaspora he wrote to him regularly, consulting him on matters of politics and social reform. Gokhale, in turn, visited Gandhi in South Africa in 1912, and raised money from wealthy Indians for the causes that Gandhi was fighting for.

  Gandhi had first gone to South Africa in May 1893, as a legal adviser to a Gujarati mer
chant fighting a court case. After the dispute was resolved, he stayed on to build a successful law practice. Over time, he moved from lawyering to activism, leading campaigns in Natal and the Transvaal against racial laws that bore down heavily on Indians. He went to jail several times; his wife Kasturba too courted arrest. In between campaigns he read and thought deeply on religious matters, practised and advocated the simple life, and ran a weekly newspaper, Indian Opinion (much of which he wrote himself).

  Gandhi’s desire to consult Gokhale was born as much out of respect (for the older man) as ignorance (about his own country). At this stage he probably knew South Africa better than he knew India. He was intimately familiar with the peninsula of Kathiawar, where he was born and raised. He had lived briefly in Bombay, and visited Madras, Calcutta and Banaras. But vast areas of the subcontinent were unknown to him. Peasants constituted the majority of Indians; Gandhi had no knowledge of how they lived and laboured.

  Gokhale was a leader of the Moderate wing of the Congress party. He believed in debate and dialogue, and in appealing to reason and justice. By these methods he hoped to persuade the colonial government to grant self-rule to his people. At the other end of the spectrum was a group of young Indian revolutionaries, some of whom Gandhi had met (and argued with) in London in 1909. These radicals believed that armed struggle was the only way to win freedom for India.

  In South Africa, Gandhi had evolved a method of protest distinct and different both from the polite pleading of the Moderates and the bomb-throwing of the revolutionaries. He called this satyagraha, or truth-force. This involved the deliberate violation of laws deemed to be unjust. Protesting individually or in batches, satyagrahis courted arrest, and courted it again, until the offending law was repealed. In 1909, Gandhi asked the Congress to apply his method to India too. Satyagraha, he said, ‘is the only weapon suited to the genius of our people and our land’. For ‘the many ills we suffer from in India it is an infallible panacea’.1

  There were other ideas about India that Gandhi developed in South Africa. Himself a Hindu, he worked closely with Muslims. Himself a native Gujarati speaker, in South Africa he came into contact with Indians speaking Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. He saw that the sustenance of religious and linguistic pluralism was central to the nurturing of nationhood. Living in London and Johannesburg, he became disenchanted with industrialism; he hoped that India would base its economic future on its peasant and craft traditions rather than mindlessly emulate the West.

  Though largely unfamiliar with life in India, Gandhi had a reasonably clear idea of what he could contribute to his country. What he was not clear about was where he would base himself, what organizational affiliation he would seek, and what activities he would undertake. That is why he thought it prudent to first visit Gokhale in London. He needed to consult his guru and seek his guidance before embarking on a career in a land where he was, in political and social terms, an outsider.

  II

  Gandhi had first gone to England in 1888, to qualify as a lawyer. He went again in 1906 and 1909, representing to the Imperial Government the case for humane treatment of Indians in South Africa. This was his fourth visit, but the first time he was travelling in third class. On board, the Gandhis and Kallenbach lived mostly on fruits, nuts and milk. Every day, Gandhi spent an hour reading the Gita or the Ramayana to his wife, and another hour teaching Gujarati to his companion.2

  Gandhi and Kallenbach had first met in Johannesburg in 1904. The lawyer and the architect shared a common hero in Leo Tolstoy, under whose influence they abandoned their professions in favour of social work. Kallenbach was devoted to Gandhi, so devoted that the Indians in South Africa called him ‘Hanuman’ (after the monkey god who had served Lord Rama). When the Gandhis decided to return to India, he said he would also come with them.3

  The simplicity that Tolstoy prescribed was harder for Kallenbach than for Gandhi. In Johannesburg he had liked going to the best barbers. He owned one of the first automobiles in the city. Gandhi was able to wean him off these luxuries, but the enchantment with modern technology remained. Now, on board the S.S. Kinfaus, the two argued about a pair of expensive binoculars that the architect owned—and cherished. Kallenbach (out of a mixture of genuine respect and blind reverence) gave way, and the field glasses were flung into the sea.4

  These private arguments were soon overshadowed by the onset of war in Europe. On 28 June—when the Gandhis were still in South Africa—Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated by a Bosnian Serb. The S.S. Kinfaus sailed on 18 July towards a Europe still at peace. Ten days into the journey, Austria declared war on Serbia. Russia started mobilizing in defence of the Serbs, prompting the Germans to do the same on behalf of the Austrians. On 1 August, Germany and Russia were officially at war. Two days later, Germany invaded Belgium. Now France also stood threatened; on 4 August, Britain declared war on Germany. Underwater mines had been laid in the English Channel; negotiating them carefully, the ship Gandhi was on docked in Southampton on 6 August.

  III

  When Gandhi arrived in London, Gokhale himself was stranded in France. He had gone to Vichy to rest; with the war, ships had temporarily been suspended between Paris and London. So Gokhale asked a friend, the poet Sarojini Naidu—then holidaying in London—to welcome the visitors on his behalf.

  The Gandhis were staying with a Gujarati friend in Bayswater. It was raining when Mrs Naidu called on them, climbing (as she later wrote) ‘the staircase of an ordinary London dwelling home to find myself confronted with a true Hindu idyll of radiant and domestic simplicity’. Gandhi, the ‘great South African leader’, was ‘reclining, a little ill and weary, on the floor eating his frugal meals of nuts and fruits (which I shared) and his wife was busy and content as though she were a mere modest housewife absorbed in a hundred details of household service, and not the world-famed heroine of a hundred noble sufferings in a nation’s cause’.

  From their first meeting, Mrs Naidu got the sense that ‘Mrs. Gandhi was like a bird with eager outstretched wings longing to annihilate the time and distance that lay before her and her far-off India, and impatient of the brief and necessary interruption in her homeward flight. The woman’s heart within her was full of yearning for the accustomed sounds and scenes of her own land and the mother’s heart within her full of passionate hunger for the beloved faces of her children.’5

  Kasturba’s yearning could not yet be realized, for her husband had decided that he must stay on in England to help with the War effort. In 1914, Gandhi was still an Empire loyalist. He believed that the racial laws in South Africa were an aberration, a departure from the equality of all subjects that Queen Victoria had promised. In his struggles against discrimination he had sometimes found support among English officials and politicians. Now that Britain was at war, the Empire’s subjects must—regardless of their race—rally round to defend it.6

  In 1899, Gandhi had raised an ambulance corps during the Anglo-Boer war, and done so again in 1906, when the Natal government suppressed a Zulu rebellion.7 On both occasions, Gandhi had taken the side of the ruler, without bearing arms himself. Now, for the third time in fifteen years, he would lead his fellow Indians in nursing the wounded.

  IV

  Ten days after landing in London, Gandhi and Kasturba were guests of honour at a reception in Hotel Cecil. Sarojini Naidu was present, as were the nationalist politicians Lala Lajpat Rai and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Gandhi gave a speech, mostly on the South African satyagraha of 1913–14, in which his wife and he, as well as several thousand others, had gone to jail. Praising the courage and sacrifice of the Tamil satyagrahis in Natal, he said: ‘These men and women are the salt of India; on them will be built the Indian nation that is to be.’8

  The long sea journey had exhausted Gandhi. He was suffering from pain in his legs. A doctor he saw suspected pleurisy. But he carried on with his work; by the end of August, close t
o a hundred Indians had signed up for a training class in nursing.

  Gandhi’s decision to help in the war effort attracted criticism. Henry Polak, a radical Jew who had been his political lieutenant in South Africa, told him it was a departure from his professions of ahimsa, or non-violence. So did Gandhi’s nephew Maganlal. The novelist Olive Schreiner—a white South African passionately opposed to racism and imperialism—wrote to Gandhi an anguished letter of protest. War, she said, ‘was against my religion—whether it is Englishmen travelling thousands of miles to kill Indians in India, or Indians travelling thousands of miles to kill white men whom they have never seen in Europe’. She was ‘struck to the heart with sorrow’ to read that Gandhi and the ‘beautiful and beloved Indian poetess’ (Sarojini Naidu) had offered to serve the British Government ‘in any way they might demand of you’. She continued: ‘Surely you, who would not take up arms even in the cause of your own oppressed people cannot be willing to shed blood in this wicked cause.’9

  Gandhi’s reply to Olive Schreiner is unrecorded. To his nephew Maganlal, he said that since London owed its food and supplies to the protection of the navy, merely by living there he was participating in the conflict. Attending to the war wounded was his way of repayment for this protection. Otherwise, he wrote, ‘there was only one right course left, which was to go away to live in some mountain or cave in England itself and subsist on whatever food or shelter Nature might provide…I do not yet possess the spiritual strength necessary for this.’10