GANDHI HAD DEVOTED his practical efforts to the rights of Indians in the new Union of South Africa, but he had simultaneously pursued a parallel track in developing a theory of Indian independence. His eye was always on the horizon of emancipation for his home nation. In the first years of the twentieth century he diligently prepared for leadership in the Indian independence movement. He determined that the next time he mounted the political stage in the subcontinent he was not going to be patronised and allotted a minor role as he had been in 1901 at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress.
While in London in 1909 Gandhi had made a point of contacting and getting to understand the Indian expatriate community which, in its youthful manifestation, tended towards violence. He said he had come in contact with ‘every known Indian anarchist in London,’ whose bravery had impressed him but whom he thought misguided.1
Gandhi had arrived in London in the July; at the beginning of that month Sir Curzon Wyllie, an official at the office of the Secretary of State for India, had been shot by a student, Madanlal Dhingra, at a reception of the National Indian Association. A Parsi doctor who had tried to prevent the assassination was also killed. Dhingra insisted he had acted alone, and was hanged for his crime. In fact he was inspired by a coterie of nationalist revolutionaries gathered around Vinayak Savarkar, an incendiary who ran India House, a hostel for Indian students in Highgate, North London. Savarkar had trained Dhingra for the killing; an initial assassination attempt on Lord Curzon, who was responsible for the deeply resented partition of Bengal, had been unsuccessful.
Gandhi condemned the violence unequivocally: ‘No act of treachery can ever profit a nation. Even should the British leave in consequence of such murderous acts, who will then rule in their place? The only answer is: the murderers.’ He was thus intolerant both of violent acts in themselves and of their spiritual effect on those who committed them. Freedom could not result from evil deeds: ‘India can gain nothing from the rule of murderers.’2 The later ascendancy of Gandhi’s attitude via the Congress Party has obscured the fact that the violence of the likes of Savarkar was vying with passive resistance as a technique of the nationalists. Violence was also, significantly for the British, an ever present probability for the independence movement if a non-violent approach failed.
Gandhi made a point of meeting extremists. Dressed in a starched shirt and a swallow-tail coat, he gave a speech at a dinner organised by some of them. He explained to Lord Ampthill:
I have endeavoured specially to come into contact with the so-called extremists who may be better described as the party of violence. This I have done in order if possible to convince them of the error of their ways. I have noticed that some of the members of this party are earnest spirits, possessing a high degree of morality, great intellectual ability and lofty self-sacrifice. They wield an undoubted influence on the young Indians here.3
This was the background against which, on the voyage back to South Africa in late autumn 1909 aboard the Kildonan Castle, Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj (‘Indian Home Rule’) in Gujarati on the ship’s stationery. The original manuscript shows few deletions. This work, the most important of his life, came direct from the heart. It was written in just over a week, literally with both hands: when he developed writer’s cramp in his right hand, he switched to his left. In the foreword he said: I have written because I could not restrain myself.’4
It has been called ‘a rather incendiary manifesto for a man of peace.’5 Its thirty thousand words resist forms of Western struggle, including terrorism. Gandhi stated that he wrote it ‘in answer to the Indian school of violence.’6 He gives a brief history of the home rule movement, the partition of Bengal that caused an ‘awakening’ of Indian political life, and the swadeshi movement inaugurated by the leading nationalist Bal Gangadar Tilak that urged the boycott of foreign goods and the promotion of home produce.
Hind Swaraj contains everything that Gandhi had gathered from Ruskin, Tolstoy and Thoreau on the simple life well lived, with additions from Edward Carpenter. The book is a strong condemnation of what stood for progress in the West: ‘I feel that if India would discard “modern civilisation” she would only gain by doing so,’ he wrote, in describing its message. ‘I am not aiming at destroying railways or hospitals, though I would certainly welcome their natural destruction. Neither railways nor hospitals are a test of a high and pure civilisation. At best they are a necessary evil. Neither one adds one inch to the moral stature of a nation.’7 The destruction of these, along with the law courts, machinery and cloth mills, would take place in due course as the nation’s moral integrity was refined. Gandhi wanted a return to conditions before the industrial revolution that had made economic prosperity the main object of politics.
‘If India adopted the doctrine of love as an active part of her religion and introduced it in her politics, Swaraj would descend upon India from heaven... I bear no enmity towards the English but I do towards their civilisation.’8 He lauded the culture of India before the advent of the great cities and railway networks, the village India that still existed ‘where this cursed modern civilisation had not reached.’ He saw the spiritual legacy of India as having been corrupted by Western ideas and technology: ‘What you and I have hitherto considered beneficial for India no longer appears to me to be so... railways, lawyers and doctors have impoverished the country so much that if we do not wake up in time, we shall be ruined.’9 Railways spread the plague; lawyers were lazy and over-remunerated for questionable services; doctors encouraged illness by effectively treating conditions which would not arise were people’s lifestyles better. ‘I have indulged in vice, I contract a disease, a doctor cures me, the odds are that I shall repeat the vice.’10 Gandhi had once, he said, wished to be a doctor, an ambition he had no more. He wrote elsewhere: ‘I was entirely off track when I considered that I should receive a medical training. It would be sinful for me in any way whatsoever to take part in the abominations that go on in hospitals.’11 He also attacked factories, air transport and publishing.
The way to return to this blessed pre-industrial state was by ‘passive resistance,’ which was defined as ‘a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms... Those who want to become passive resisters for the service of the country have to observe perfect chastity, adopt poverty, follow truth and cultivate fearlessness.’ Gandhi warned: ‘A man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emasculated and cowardly. He whose mind is given over to animal passion is not capable of any great effort.’12
The immediate surprise of Hind Swaraj is the form in which the book is written—that of a Socratic dialogue, with which Gandhi had familiarised himself by reading Plato while in prison. The ‘Editor’ represents Gandhi, the ‘Reader’ his opponents who prefer more violent means of direct action. The authorities he cites are almost all Western: six books by Tolstoy, two each by Ruskin and Thoreau but also The White Slaves of England, R.H. Sherard’s book (1897) on the distress of industrial workers, and the homosexual Utopian socialist Edward Carpenter’s Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure which described civilisation as a disease of the communities of men. Carpenter was a vegetarian who ran his own small community near Sheffield. Gandhi’s use of him is particularly noteworthy, because Carpenter urged gender equality and greater openness about sex, a recognition of the decency and beauty of sexual relations as part of a general ‘liberation’ from civilisation’s yoke. Gandhi, selective as always, simply did not engage with this discourse.
Hind Swaraj was revolutionary in its rejection of modernity; other liberation movements had rejected their masters on the basis of Western liberalism in a call for national self-determination and the rights of man. Gandhi rejected everything for a purely Indian model with its elevation of farming and the village economy as ideals to be pursued, while the nation would turn its back on modernity. Gandhi did not want ‘English rule without the Englishmen.’ It was not British strength but Indian weakness and blind self-interest that kept the British in India, he argued.
He had previously read Annie Besant’s nationalist work and reprinted her essay ‘How to Build a Nation in Indian Opinion in 1907; he was also influenced by the conservative Catholic G.K. Chesterton’s reflections that Indian nationalism was not very Indian if it merely hankered after Western institutions. This was a time of revolutionary manifestos for the new century. Just a few years earlier, in 1902, Lenin had written his pamphlet What Is To Be Done? which adumbrated the way forward for communism, asserting that the working class could not be expected to carry forward the revolution spontaneously—that would produce only a trade-union consciousness. What they needed was a cadre of dedicated professional revolutionaries to lead and inspire them. Gandhi, with his ashram-trained satyagrahis and centralised theoretical base, was not so far from this ideal. He was remarkable, but he was also a man of his time: the influences that had acted on him had acted on others who also wished to remodel the world.
Unlike the communists, who embraced modernity and material progress (their underlying philosophy was dialectical materialism, after all), Gandhi thought a state of perfect harmony could only be reached by spiritual means. He was not blind to the achievements of other revolutionaries, however, and said of Bolshevism that ‘an ideal that is sanctified by the sacrifices of such master spirits as Lenin cannot go in vain.’13 And like the communists, Gandhi was mistrustful of what the Marxists would call ‘bourgeois democracy.’ He was uncomfortable with the swings of voters’ opinions and with control by political parties over the political process, which left little room for the Gandhian ascendancy of individual conscience. Though he always worked within organisations with a declared democratic aim, Gandhi did not want to commit himself as a fighter for democracy. When asked to define what sort of government he was fighting for in India he said: ‘I am not interested in words, and I never worry myself about the form of government.’14 There has to be a suspicion that a benevolent king presiding over a nation of villages would have suited Gandhi very well. He also believed in cooperation, not conflict, between labour and capital. He had no difficulty in accepting support from Ghanshyam Das Birla, a leading industrialist with interests in almost every industry, who was a benefactor and follower of Gandhi for thirty-two years, from soon after Gandhi’s return to India until his death.
Astute Indian observers noted the roots of Christian thinking in the redemption through suffering promoted in Hind Swaraj. Shyamji Krishnavarma, in his monthly journal The Indian Sociologist (‘an organ of freedom, and of political, social and religious reform’), described Gandhi as ‘an admirer of Jesus Christ’ and argued that he was trying to put into practice ‘the extreme Christian theory.’ He satirised the imperialists’ belief in Christianity: “They seem to think that Jesus Christ meant the Englishman to do all the smiting and his Indian victims all the turning of the cheek.’15 Krishnavarma, another English-educated barrister nationalist, criticised Gandhi’s ‘doctrine of self-sacrifice or voluntary surrender.’ He was right in his belief that Gandhi approved of the elevation of suffering in Christianity: he had his Indian followers learn the words of the hymn ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’; he was always moved to tears by such lines as ‘See from His head, His hands, His feet/ Sorrow and love flow mingling down.’16
Hind Swaraj was published serially in South Africa in Indian Opinion, then as a book in Gujarati. The Bombay government in March 1910 seized as seditious copies of Hind Swaraj, but also Gandhi’s Gujarati translations of Plato’s Defence of Socrates and of Ruskin’s Unto This Last. As Gandhi said: ‘They are in a state of panic and, wishing to do something, they intend to stop the circulation of literature that shows the slightest independence of spirit.’ He went on to offer a lesson to the Indian government in now to stop the spread of violence: ‘The only way we know to eradicate the disease is to popularise passive resistance of the right stamp. Any other way, especially repression, must fail in the long run.’17 Gandhi’s very Gandhian response to such repression was to repeat the offence: to publish his own English translation of Hind Swaraj.
After the completion of the South African campaign, Gandhi could take up the threads of his work on Indian independence. He left for London in July 1914, Kasturba and Kallenbach with him. Kallenbach took his prized pair of binoculars, which Gandhi threw out of a porthole to emphasise to his friend the necessity of divesting himself of worldly goods. It was probably just as well, since a German arriving in an English port in August 1914 with a powerful pair of binoculars would have been considered a spy. While the Gandhi’s and Kallenbach were at sea, Europe was moving towards war.
Gandhi again volunteered to serve in the ambulance corps, which was a less rewarding experience for him than such service had been previously as he became involved in challenging the discipline that the instructors, mere raw recruits, attempted to impose on the rest of them—he called it a ‘mini satyagraha. Gandhi contracted pleurisy and was not, in the event, engaged for nursing duties. His general health and his resistance to disease had been undermined by his fast over the ‘fall’ of Manilal and Jeki and by his excessive diets: he was at this time eating peanuts, bananas, lemons, olive oil, tomatoes and grapes, but no milk, cereals or pulses. He took a solemn vow not to take milk or ghee (clarified butter) again.
In London he was visited by the Under-Secretary of State for India Charles Roberts and his wife Lady Cecilia. Lady Cecilia was solicitous for his health and urged him to drink milk, even finding a substitute milk preparation for him, but Gandhi discerned it was in fact powdered milk and discarded it. To treat his illness with more sensitivity to his wishes, he called in his old colleague from the Vegetarian Society, Dr Allinson, who reassured him he need not drink milk and furthermore prescribed a fat-free diet, with a regime of fresh air and warm baths. But medical opinion was that Gandhi would never improve in the English climate and that he had better return to India, which had been his planned objective. Kallenbach had been going to accompany him, but as an enemy alien he could not be given free access to India, so he returned to South Africa.
Gandhi had been expecting to meet Gokhale in London to discuss his future political career, but his mentor had gone to France for a cure for his diabetes and was stranded there because of the war. Gokhale asked his friend the nationalist poet Sarojini Naidu to visit Gandhi, an encounter that started a long and affectionate relationship which was without the fawning on Gandhi that characterised his relations with many others who were close to him. Naidu, an educated and independent woman, always tempered her respect for him with humour aimed at his spiritual pride. When Naidu first met him he was ‘a living picture of a little man with a shaven head, seated on the floor on a black prison blanket and eating a messy meal of squashed tomatoes and olive oil out of a wooden prison bowl.’ She burst into laughter at this improbable vision of the great leader. Gandhi invited her to share his meal: ‘“No thanks,” I replied, sniffing. “What an abominable mess it is.’”18
A reception was held in his honour by British and Indian admirers at the Hotel Cecil. Among those present were Sarojini Naidu and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who was heading a Congress delegation that was in London lobbying parliament. Gandhi told the audience his impoverished labourers were ‘the salt of India; on them will be built the Indian nation that is to be.’19 This was news: the independent India of previous aspirations was going to be constructed by the lawyers and administrators of the Indian middle class—the introduction of the ignorant masses was Gandhi’s contribution.
As noted earlier, what to wear on different occasions was always a preoccupation with Gandhi. He had lately been defining dress as appropriate to climate rather than to anything else, decrying the popular notion ‘that it is best for us to put on European dress, that it is more impressive and wins us greater respect from people.’ He conceded that ‘the European costume is suitable for the cold countries of Europe, the Indian costume suits both Hindus and Muslims in India.’20 On the way to India on the Arabia at the end of 1914 Gandhi switched back from European dress to the clothes of an indentured labourer, thereby identifying himself with his greatest triumph, though he decided that in future he would wear the customary dress’ of his class in Gujarat—a turban, shirt, dhoti, cloak and scarf. Not for the first time he was on the one hand pondering a challenge to empire, and on the other fussing about his wardrobe. When he and his family arrived in Bombay on 9 January 1915 it was obvious his concern for his appearance was justified: a vast crowd was waiting to see the great leader return to his homeland. He was feted at receptions given in his honour, including one hosted by the Gujarati community and chaired by Jinnah, one of its leading politicians. Gandhi surprised his hosts with his simple Indian costume and his insistence on speaking in his native Gujarati rather than in English.
His response to Jinnah’s urbane welcoming speech was that he was ‘glad to find a Mahomedan not only belonging to his own region’s sabha [assembly] but chairing it.’21 He meant the remark positively, but it was the first time, though not by any means the last, that he completely failed to understand Jinnah, for whom his religion was a fact like his height or hair colour, not a path by which he should live his life, and certainly not a matter he wanted singled out for mention.
Raihana Tyabji, daughter of a wealthy family in Bombay, testified to Gandhi’s attractiveness despite his deliberately ordinary appearance: ‘I was in my teens. I caught a glimpse of him in the midst of silks and brocades, frills and sparkling jewels. He was dressed in a coarse khadi (hand-spun) dhoti and looked like a small-time tailor who’d wondered in by mistake. I lost my heart to him. He became my father, my mother, my girlfriend, my boyfriend, my daughter, my son, my teacher, my guru.’”22
His achievements had impressed the imperialists also: the Governor of Bombay Lord Willingdon wished to meet him. The Governor asked his guest to tell him if he intended any action against the government, a request to which Gandhi willingly consented. Willingdon continued: ‘You may come to me whenever you like, and you will see that my government does not wilfully do anything wrong.’23 He was later, in 1915, honoured by the government of India with the Kaiser-i-Hind gold medal for services to Indians in South Africa. The British thus tempered their political suspicion of Gandhi with praise for his undoubted qualities of leadership, in the hope that they could ease him into the role of a reformer like Gopal Krishna Gokhale rather than a firebrand such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak who had been released from jail the previous year.
Workers had approached Gandhi about an oppressive customs cordon at Viramgam station (between princely Kathiawar and British India); Gandhi spoke to Willingdon, who sympathised but said it was a matter for the national government. When Gandhi had occasion to meet the Viceroy in 1917 (by which time the position was held by Lord Chelmsford) he raised the matter and the cordon was removed. Gandhi represented it as a success for satyagraha—though objectively, it looked more like routine diplomacy forestalling civil disobedience over an unjustifiable procedure.
Laxmidas had died in March 1914, and his middle brother Karsandas the previous year, leaving Gandhi head of the family. He travelled to Rajkot and Porbandar to see his bereaved relatives; then, that business over with, he was eager to see his Phoenix family. The travelling community of Gandhi’s supporters had already arrived at Shantiniketan, an educational centre near Calcutta, founded by the poet and Bengali nationalist Rabindranath Tagore who in 1913 had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. There they were assisted by Charles Freer Andrews, a teacher at Shantiniketan. A former Anglican clergyman, Andrews had met Gandhi in South Africa during the final campaign when Gokhale had sent him from India to observe and assist. He became one of Gandhi’s keenest (though not uncritical) supporters, writing several books promoting his message to Western audiences.
The Phoenix party had been assigned separate quarters with Gandhi’s cousin Maganlal in charge, and he made it his business to see that all Gandhi’s rules were scrupulously observed. When he arrived, Gandhi attempted to extend his self-help message to the pupils at Shantiniketan, having them sack the cooks and take on all the kitchen duties themselves. This was not universally welcomed—they were at the centre to be educated, not to work in the kitchens. ‘There used to be daily discussions,’ he remarked laconically. The ‘experiment’ was dropped. Although Gandhi was eager to apply his satyagraha principles to India, Gokhale had advised him not to dive straight into activism but to observe and learn for a year. Gokhale had found Hind Swaraj so crude and hastily conceived that he thought Gandhi would destroy the book after spending a year in India. In fact, in 1921 Gandhi would commend it: ‘It teaches the gospel of love in place of that of hate. It replaces violence with self-sacrifice, it pits soul-force against brute-force.’24
When Gokhale died in Poona on 19 February 1915, Gandhi went there immediately. He thought it a good death: ‘He died in harness. He was in full possession of all his faculties to the last and he was working away.’25 Of Gokhale’s personal message for him he wrote: ‘[He] used to tell me that I was so harsh that people felt terrified of me and allowed themselves to be dragged against their will out of sheer fear or in the attempt to please me, and that those who found themselves too weak assumed an artificial pose in the end. I put far too heavy a burden on people.’26
Gandhi had never joined Gokhale’s Servants of India Society, feeling that merely to do Gokhale’s bidding was sufficient, without the constraint of an organisation. With Gokhale gone, Gandhi now applied for membership of the society, which meant that, given his experience and national standing, he would be in a position to take over the now leaderless organisation. Some members of the society, meeting at Poona, favoured his admission while others were strongly against it, doubtless fearing that within a short time of his joining, the society would be just a vehicle for Gandhi’s ideas. He withdrew his application for membership before it caused more dissent.
He attended the Kumbha Mela, a religious festival held once every twelve years, where he was introduced to the kind of life he could expect when he appeared in public: his entire time was taken up with sitting in a tent having religious discussions with pilgrims who called on him and being treated as an object of ‘darshan’—religious merit gained by observers gazing on an exalted person. Now that Gandhi was one such, he was never, for the rest of his life, to be left alone. He complained at the festival: ‘I was followed even to the bathing ghat by these darshan-seekers, nor did they leave me alone whilst I was having my meals.’ He wrote of their ‘blind love’ making him angry and ‘sore at heart.’27 Offended by the impiety of greedy holy men and by the hypocrisy and slovenliness of many of the pilgrims, Gandhi decided to impose an act of self-denial ‘in atonement for the iniquity prevailing there and [to] purify myself.’28 He therefore took a vow in April 1915 to eat only five articles of food a day, counting such items of flavouring as cardamoms as separate articles, and never to eat after dark.
In May 1915 Gandhi set up the Satyagraha Ashram at Kochrab near Ahmedabad where the Phoenix ashramites formed the core in a house on land rented to them by a local barrister. Gandhi had wanted to settle in Gujarat as his home province (and that of many of the ashramites), but also wanted to be close to Ahmedabad as it had long been a centre of hand-loom weaving and he had determined that weaving was going to be important in the independence movement. He also felt, unashamedly, that the necessary funds would be best obtained from well-wishers in such a wealthy city. It was important, too, to be in a British area not (like Rajkot) a princely one, as it was British power in India that Gandhi would challenge.
Whereas the first ashram, Phoenix, was set up to save money in order to ensure the success of Indian Opinion, and the second, Tolstoy Farm, to give a home to imprisoned passive resisters, now Gandhi declared to the Madras Mail that his objective was the ‘training [of] young men, and also women and children, for long service to the Motherland.’ Everyone should perform some work of manual labour; for the first time it was ‘proposed also to introduce hand weaving’ and, inevitably, vows of both poverty and chastity would be ‘strictly observed at the institution.’29
The discipline that Gandhi imposed was even more severe than that in the South African ashrams. He elaborated on his already stringent rules of conduct: ‘If I need only one shirt to cover myself with but use two, I am guilty of stealing one from another. For, a shirt which could have been of use to someone else does not belong to me. If five bananas are enough to keep me going, my eating a sixth one is a form of theft.’30 He compiled lists of tools and kitchen utensils for the ashram, to be paid for by the Servants of India Society, as pledged by Gokhale. This time the rules were written down well in advance. The inhabitants were divided into three classes: controllers, novitiates and students. The controllers were sworn to truthfulness, refusing to lie even for the good of the country; to non-violence; to celibacy, to ‘control of the palate’; to non-stealing (meaning both the obvious and not taking more from the community than one’s absolutely basic needs) and non-possession. They were also expected to use swadeshi (Indian-made produce), to be fearless, to use Indian languages rather than English, to do manual work and to weave cloth on hand-looms. The two lesser grades aspired to similar standards.
The rules were later refined to demand that the ashram inhabitants renounce Hindu beliefs on untouchability and that they act as though they were outside the caste system—though without undermining caste discipline. Gandhi maintained a delicate balance between the wholesale renunciation of Hindu beliefs, which would have alienated his vast potential constituency, and a rejection of such practices as untouchability which were incompatible with common decency.
One of Gandhi’s associates wisely suggested a vow of humility for the ashram, perhaps because he had observed the spiritual arrogance of the ashramites; but Gandhi rejected the suggestion, fearing ‘humility would cease to be humility the moment it became a matter of vow.’31 Charles Andrews also had qualms about the rules—he recalled: ‘I wrote out for him a long statement very earnestly asking him to withdraw the vow of celibacy, which appeared to me one of those short cuts, foreign to the Hindu religion, bringing inevitable evil in its train.’ Gandhi replied at length, stating amongst other things: ‘Those who want to perform national service, or those who want to have a glimpse of the real religious life, must lead a celibate life, no matter if married or unmarried.’32 His supporters, like his opponents, were to become familiar with this approach of his to criticism, which simply reiterated the initial proposition with greater emphasis. Andrews remained with Tagore’s settlement and did not join Gandhi’s group.
Gandhi had long been refining his proscription of sex to include married couples, and it was no longer obvious that he felt sex was permissible even for the purpose of procreation. He wrote that sexual indulgence ‘and the resultant loss do much physical harm. The vitality of both mind and body developed through many years is so much impaired by even one such occasion that it takes a long time to regain it and, even so, the original state is never restored wholly... I have vivid memories of the exalted state of mind before a lapse and the pitiable condition after it.’ His advice was that husbands should not be alone with their wives, that they should sleep in separate rooms, remain fully occupied with useful activity and pure thoughts, and when they felt passion they should take a cold bath.33
As time passed, even more severe discipline was imposed, so that by the late 1920s three infringements of the rules meant expulsion; frequent infringements included lateness at prayer meetings and not spinning the required daily quota of yarn. The many rules and the fixed regime may be said to have had a function in terms of discipline, much as army life involves many rules that independently have no great value but which encourage the habit of obedience. Celibacy had a function in addition to its contribution to blind discipline: the manipulation of sex by a cult leader such as Gandhi serves to increase devotion to himself, weakening bonds between couples and increasing attachment to the guru.34
The ashram day was to begin at 4 a.m. with prayers at 5, then breakfast and manual work from 7 to 8.30. School work followed for the children, then a midday meal, then more school work between 12 and 3, then manual work. The evening meal was between 5 and 6 with prayers at 6.30. From 7 p.m. the ashramites were free to study and receive visitors. No paid teachers were employed, but five people among the thirty-five ashramites were teachers and able to take on the task of educating the children, so at least this aspect of life was not as neglected as it had been in previous communities of Gandhi’s.
With plague raging in Kochrab in summer 1917, the ashram moved to a new site some four miles north of Ahmedabad. Gandhi was pleased with its proximity to Sabarmati Central Jail, the place of incarceration where satyagrahis expected to end up. Many were disappointed at the lack of political engagement in the ashram where time was taken up with tedious chores and prayers, but there was never any doubt that Gandhi was preparing his followers for a holy war in which some might die. One evening after prayers, when he was explaining the importance of ashram discipline and the role he envisaged for it in the national struggle for freedom, he said that
he looked forward to the day when he would call out all the inmates of the Ashram, who had been trained in those disciplines, to immolate themselves at the altar of non-violence. Unmoved, he would watch them fall one after another before a shower of bullets, without a trace of fear or hatred, but only love in their hearts. And then, when the last one of them had fallen, he would himself follow.35
Gandhi did not in the end command his followers to commit suicide, but in the light of the late-twentieth-century cults of Jim Jones at Jonestown, David Koresh at Waco and Marshall Applewhite at Rancho Santa Fe, Gandhi’s exhortations have an uncomfortably modern ring.
One challenging reform that Gandhi had to put into effect was to ban from the ashram ‘this miserable, wretched, enslaving spirit of “untouchableness”... an ineffaceable blot that Hinduism today carries with it.’36 The ashramites were sworn to oppose discrimination against untouchables, but this was an easy pledge to make when there were no untouchables in sight. This despised class were not expected ever to want to enter the ashram—they had internalised the disgust others felt towards them, and rarely even attempted to mix with the other castes. Then, a few months after the ashram was established in September 1915, Gandhi received a request via a trusted supporter for an untouchable family to join them. He had not expected that the pledge to oppose untouchability would be challenged so soon, but he welcomed Dudabhai, a Bombay teacher, his wife and daughter into the fold, so long as they kept to the rules as others did.
Now that the ashram was ‘contaminated,’ all financial support stopped. The man in charge of the well, which the ashram shared with other locals, considered that drops of water from buckets pulled up by Dudabhai would contaminate him and so he took to swearing at the ashramites and molesting Dudabhai. They were threatened with a social boycott—they would be ostracised and denied community facilities as a way of forcing them all to leave. Gandhi told Dudabhai to put up with the abuse and continue drawing water at any cost. This had a beneficial result: his bullying having no effect, the abusive well-keeper ‘became ashamed and ceased to bother us.’37
Gandhi reacted to the critics with characteristic courage: if they were forced out of the area, he would move the entire community to Ahmedabad’s untouchable quarter and set up there. He would not compromise with injustice. He soon discovered that the ashram was out of funds and that they had nothing for the next month. A short time afterwards, a car pulled up outside the ashram and a messenger sent for Gandhi. The car’s owner was Ambalal Sarabhai, who ran one of the biggest textile mills in Ahmedabad. He gave Gandhi enough money to secure the future of the ashram for a year—financially, they could now weather the storm.
However, there was also hostility within the ashram: the women were particularly offended by the presence of untouchables. Dudabhai’s wife and daughter were not allowed into the kitchen, and anything the child touched was washed. Kasturba and Maganlal’s wife Santokben were the worst offenders, scrupulously avoiding any contact with the untouchable family.
For the fledgling ashram this was a challenge of greater magnitude than its financial troubles. At the regular evening prayer meeting one day, Gandhi delivered an ultimatum: Dudabhai and his family must be completely accepted—anyone who did not want to accept them must leave. He had put it to Kasturba in person: ‘I have told Mrs Gandhi she could leave me and we should part good friends.’38 Kasturba stayed, moved by Gandhi’s paradoxical appeal to orthodoxy: ‘The argument that a woman in following in her husband’s footsteps incurs no sin appealed to her and she quieted down.’39 Several residents went to Gandhi’s room and begged his forgiveness, and some approached the untouchable family to apologise. Maganlal, however, Gandhi’s most trusted disciple, fasted in protest against the admission of untouchables. Gandhi fasted in response, and Maganlal left with his wife.
Gandhi’s position was thus borne out: his supporters were put on notice that opposition to untouchability was not a pious sentiment, but a fact. He was later to note that it was the most orthodox Hindus who went on to fund the ashram’s growing expenditure; his steadfastness on this point of principle had not driven them away.
Gandhi was actively seeking out people of ability who would be both useful to him, and obedient. This was a key combination. The problem was that the ashramites were dutiful but lacked the capacity for independent action, while the Congress activists had the opposite qualities—too much independence and not enough obedience to Gandhian thought.
One new disciple who would leave a lasting record was Mahadev Desai, a lawyer and member of Annie Besant’s Home Rule League. About a visit in August 1917 he wrote that Gandhi ‘created in me mixed feelings of love, dismay and joy.’ The twenty-five-year-old idealist had been told by Gandhi: ‘It is not without reason that I have asked you to visit my place every day. I want you to come and stay with me. I have seen your capacity during the last three days. I have found in you just the type of young man for whom I have been searching for the last two years.’ He said he had spoken in this way to only three persons before—Polak, Schlesin and Maganlal—but of the latter he said: ‘Let us, however, leave aside Maganlal. The intelligence I have found in you I did not see in him.’40 Desai became ‘my man,’ in Gandhi’s words. He and his wife joined him in Champaran on the forthcoming indigo campaign, and Desai was Gandhi’s constant companion and amanuensis till his death at Gandhi’s side twenty-five years later.
Gandhi’s dictatorial behaviour with his children continued at the ashram. In 1916 he cast Manilal out because he helped his destitute brother Harilal. Harilal needed assistance because he had lost money speculating with his employer’s funds and so had lost his job. ‘This letter will make you sick,’ Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach. ‘Yet I must give you the information. Manilal has deceived me again. He gave some money to Harilal and disowned all knowledge of it when I questioned him,’41 Manilal was sent from the ashram to Madras, where he was to rely on his own resources; he could return only after he had earned the sum he had given Harilal plus the cost of the journey. Gandhi went on a fast. He seemed unable to conceive that giving Manilal the choice of disobeying his father or abandoning his brother was putting an impossible moral burden on the young man. For Gandhi an action was right or wrong. He did, however, later send a letter to a publisher in Madras, recommending Manilal for a job in a printing company.
It may have been Kasturba’s silent reproaches that led Gandhi to have pity on Manilal; she would not criticise his decisions outright, but her displeasure was known. He said: I learned the lessons of non-violence from my wife. Her determined resistance to my will on the one hand, and her quiet submission to the suffering my stupidity involved on the other hand, ultimately made me ashamed of myself and cured me of my stupidity.’42 Later Gandhi was to complain that Manilal was ‘finding out ways of ease and luxury. The life of discipline is gone for him. That of indulgence has begun.’43 Harilal was unable to support his wife Gulab and she had to go back to her parents; she also visited the ashram, where Gandhi found it easier to enjoy the presence of his grandchildren than that of his children.
Gandhi now marked out his constituency. His great success in South Africa had been with the poor, and now he increasingly identified with them by his dress, his living standards in the ashram, his use of the vernacular rather than English, and his tireless travelling in vile third-class train compartments. Congress had ignored the masses, never claiming to be speaking for the poor and illiterate millions of India. The British had encouraged the restive middle class: their electoral rights were based on taxable income or education. Gandhi campaigned for self-improvement: he wanted his countrymen to pay more attention to personal cleanliness and sanitation, and he argued with the authorities for improved conditions for rail and boat passengers.
He also argued for a common language, originally promoting Hindi but then, feeling it was not sufficiently inclusive, he called for Hindustani to be adopted. Hindustani, a mixture of Hindi and Urdu, would as a national language in its written form replace written Urdu (a modified Arabic script) with Devanagari script (with the distinctive line running along the tops of the letters linking them together). This was therefore not a straightforward matter and was another potential source of disunity between Hindus, who wanted a pure form of Hindi to be the national language, and Muslims, who wanted to stay with Urdu. Gandhi eventually suggested that all pupils should learn forms of Hindustani written in both scripts. He was taken to task by those who charged him with insincerity over the language question because of the liberal use he made of English himself. He was also criticised by those who felt the charm and purity of Hindi were being sacrificed to please Muslims. One severe critic (and Hindu militant), Nathuram Godse, remarked: ‘Everybody in India knows that there is no language called Hindustani; it has no grammar, it has no vocabulary. It is a mere dialect, it is spoken, but not written. It is a bastard tongue and a cross-breed between Hindi and Urdu, and not even the Mahatma’s sophistry could make it popular.’44
At the opening of Benares Hindu University in February 1916 in what has been called one of the most incendiary speeches he would ever make, Gandhi’s address followed Annie Besant’s, who had argued for the constitutional development of India’s status within the British Empire. Gandhi, now having served more than the year of political silence demanded of him by Gokhale, was more radical. In the uneasy atmosphere following a recent bomb attempt on the life of the Viceroy Lord Hardinge (who, incidentally, was sympathetic to Gandhi and had acted to end the indentured labour system), he spoke against violence in the nationalist cause. His fine distinctions may have been lost, for he was talking about political violence and applauding the spirit, though not the actions, of the ‘anarchists.’ ‘Please stop it,’ said Annie Besant, and the princes who were on the platform got up and left in a body, perhaps under the misapprehension that he was condoning attacks on the political ruling class.
To applause, Gandhi continued: ‘I compare the richly bedecked noblemen with the millions of the poor. And I feel like saying to these noblemen: “There is no solution for India unless you strip yourselves of this jewellery and hold it in trust for our countrymen in India... Our salvation can only come through the farmer. Neither the lawyers, nor the doctors, nor the rich landlords are going to secure it.’”45 What seemed so inflammatory, akin to communism, even, was not quite that: he was not calling on the peasantry to overthrow their masters, but on the masters to realise their moral responsibilities to the poor.
In 1916 advances were being made in nationalist politics in India, with Gandhi playing no more than a minor role, if any. Since the moderates Pherozeshah Mehta and Gokhale had both died in 1915, the way was open for the radicals to make progress: Tilak and Besant both started Home Rule Leagues in 1916, in Poona and Madras respectively, and Jinnah later became chairman of a Home Rule League in Bombay. ‘Home rule’ at this time meant dominion status within the Empire as enjoyed by Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland and South Africa.
All nationalists were concerned about the unity of India after independence; great efforts were made to bring Muslims over to home rule. The Muslims, who constituted a fifth of the population of India, feared they would be swamped by the ‘Hinduisation’ of the nation if the British left. This was by no means without justification. The Muslims had conquered India in the sixteenth century, to be displaced in their turn by the British; for many Hindus home rule meant the restoration of a Hindu nation, and Gandhi’s profound Hinduism did nothing to dispel this notion. Such Western-looking secularists as Jinnah and the Nehru family were a better bet for a state in which citizenship would be more important than religion, but such a state would be anathema to Gandhi’s way of thinking.
Though Jinnah was known as the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, he was far from being a conventional Muslim. He was a sophisticated, westernised, secular Muslim who drank, ate pork, and had married a Parsi, the daughter of a friend, having fallen in love with her at first sight when she was sixteen. He felt no shame about enjoying the culture of the West as well as that of the East, and the good things of life. He was, therefore, as far removed from Gandhi as it was possible for a man to be while still sharing the same platform—at the Bombay Provincial Conference held in Ahmedabad in October 1916 Gandhi proposed—successfully—that Mohammad Ali Jinnah should preside.
Jinnah had not been a member of the Muslim League at its foundation in 1906, as the League had then been dedicated to loyalty to the concept of British government in India. In 1913, however, the League changed its platform to one of Indian independence. Jinnah then joined and became a leading figure of both the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress. It was his view that in an independent India Muslim safety would be guaranteed by their holding one-third of parliamentary seats.
Jinnah had become a member of the Imperial Legislative Council in 1910. Another member was Motilal Nehru, an immensely successful lawyer who was defiantly secular in his behaviour: he insisted on English being spoken in his lavish home, drank the finest wines, paid scant regard to religion and, as a gesture of his contempt for Hindu bigotry, though he was a Brahmin kept an ‘untouchable’ as his personal servant.
The Lucknow Pact was an agreement drawn up between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. At a meeting at the home of the Nehru family in Allahabad in the United Provinces, the Congress and the League, convening at the same time in Lucknow in December 1916, agreed to work together for early self-government on the basis of arrangements that would provide a constitutional system, with direct elections and separate electorates for religious minorities. Gandhi had no great role to play in these political manoeuvres. Indeed, the secular mind that conceived of India as having separate electorates to protect the interests of religious minorities was remote indeed from his notion of an India of self-sufficient villages out of the Ramayana, their peoples united by spiritual striving.
In 1916 Gandhi for the first time met Vallabhbhai Patel, a man from a farming background but by his own efforts a London-trained barrister; he was from Gujarat, as were Gandhi and Jinnah. Destined to become home minister and deputy prime minister in the first Indian government, Patel had regarded Gandhi with suspicion for his cranky ideas, once suggesting he would ‘ask you if you know how to sift pebbles from wheat. And that is supposed to bring independence.’46 When they renewed their acquaintance later that year in Lucknow when Congress and the Muslim League met, he fell under Gandhi’s spell. Gandhi later had Patel take command of a satyagraha of peasants who were resisting unjust tax demands in the Kheda district of Gujarat; it was here that Patel earned the right to be considered Gandhi’s first lieutenant in the campaign field.
Gandhi’s modus operandi, as usual, was via religion, not electoral machinery. He formed a relationship with the Ali brothers, two educated Muslims who had approached him after a speech he made to students in Calcutta. In common with many Muslims, the brothers were disturbed that India’s position in the British Empire meant they found themselves set against the Ottoman Empire in the war that had begun in 1914. Since the sixteenth century every Ottoman emperor declared himself Caliph, or head of the community of believers, thus bestowing on himself a religious as well as a state authority. As Turkey dominated Arabia, where the holy shrines of Islam were located, supporters of the Ottomans could claim an attack on their Empire was in fact an attack on their religion and on the heirs of the Prophet. This was the Caliphate, referred to as Khilafat in India. Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali had been imprisoned under the Defence of India Act for preaching opposition to the British war effort and support for the Khilafat.
Gandhi saw the Khilafat issue as one near to his heart, combining religion with anti-British feeling; he felt it was an issue about which he could unite Hindus and Muslims. He had felt it improper to benefit from Britain’s difficulties in the First World War, however, and at that time had moderated his anti-Britishness. Annie Besant, on the other hand, believed ‘England’s need is India’s opportunity’ and had set out to exploit the hard-pushed Empire. Incensed by the British reaction to the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, Besant rose to new heights of denunciation of the Empire. The new Viceroy Lord Chelmsford bowed to demands to have her silenced, and she was interned in 1917. Gandhi had considered mounting a satyagraha campaign over the issue but did not receive Congress support and thought better of it. Besant was released in September that year. Gandhi was prepared to promote local heroes, but it was not until he felt confident enough to back Jawaharlal Nehru that his campaigns backed any national figures. He also considered a satyagraha for the Ali brothers, but by the time he was able to proceed with it there were other more pressing demands on his time.
Gandhi made no great attempts to woo Congress leaders, as he had done on his previous attempts to enter national politics. His great achievement in his first years back in India was to mobilise industrial and farm workers. He had been pestered by a farmer called Rajkumar Shukla, who turned up first at Lucknow where he and Gandhi were both attending the Congress of December 1916. Shukla wanted Gandhi to turn his attention to the distress of the indigo planters in Champaran. Gandhi was ignorant of indigo and did not even know where Champaran was; and when he did, he was not inclined to travel to the Himalayan foothills in the province of Bihar. Shukla pursued him to another city, then returned to the ashram where he waited for Gandhi in order to repeat his request. When Gandhi went to Calcutta on an engagement, Shukla was there too. Finally Gandhi consented to visit Champaran, and travelled to Bihar on the train with Shukla, who was able to explain further.
In the indigo plantations subsistence farmers were obliged to cultivate three out of every twenty parts of their best land with the plant that produced the precious dye, to be delivered at fixed prices to their landlords. This was an unfair imposition, but the farmers had been further exploited and their rents manipulated by the greedy landlords as the world price of indigo changed. The farmers had become embroiled in legal battles in which their lawyers had impoverished them further without solving their problems. Shukla was a relatively well-off small farmer who had been involved in agitating against the landlords and briefly imprisoned because of his campaign. Realising he was out of his depth and making no progress, he turned to the inspirational abilities of Gandhi.
When they arrived at their destination, just before midnight, a crowd of students were waiting for the great man, but were at first disappointed they could not find him in either the first or the second-class carriages. They had ignored Shukla, an ill-educated peasant, until he revealed that Gandhi was with him. Shukla took them to him, saying: ‘Here is the Mahatma.’ This was perhaps the first time the honorific ‘great soul,’ commonly used in India of people who have attained a level of spiritual enlightenment, was used of Gandhi.47 The students were so overwhelmed by his presence that they uncoupled the beasts from the carriage that had been sent for him and pulled it themselves.
Gandhi’s first act of organisation was to call the lawyers who had been representing the farmers and tell them they must forget about the court cases—this situation had to be handled politically. They must take depositions from the farmers to demonstrate how bad the situation had become, and they must expect no fees for this work. Gandhi could not understand two of the local languages and had difficulty with the Hindi dialect spoken regionally, so he needed translators. Six lawyers agreed to work with him, perhaps startled by the novelty and audacity of Gandhi’s suggestion and by the sheer force of his personality. One of the helpers, a vakil (court pleader) and translator, was Rajendra Prasad, later to be India’s first president.
Gandhi called on the British Planters’ Association in April 1917 to inform them of what he was doing, and set off on a tour of the countryside to see the conditions for himself. He raised funds from wealthy Biharis and made public announcements in the newspapers so the nation knew what was happening in this remote corner of the subcontinent. He sent out volunteers to gather information around the villages, travelling on foot and by elephant to outlying areas. Among the villagers, who knew nothing of Congress or national politics, Gandhi assumed mythical status. He was seen as the fearless avenger of their woes, inheritor of the mantle of the heroes of the Ramayana. He was ordered to leave by the local government, which was in the pockets of the planters. Refusing to go, he was put on trial.
The Bihari government attempted to have the case against Gandhi postponed, but he was determined both to plead guilty of refusing on order to leave the province and to make a statement. He explained that he had come to study the problems between the farmers and the indigo planters ‘with the assistance, if possible, of the administration and the planters,’ whom he had contacted for their observations.48 Gandhi had also already written details of the situation to the Viceroy and other dignitaries. After a short delay, the case against him was withdrawn and he was assured of official assistance in his inquiry.
Gandhi set up with his helpers in a house to which the peasants came and told their stories, or just came to ‘have darshan’ of Gandhi. His commission tolerated government detectives being present when the statements were recorded, treating these uninvited guests with courtesy so that, far from intimidating the interviewees, they lent an official seal of approval to the proceedings. Some eight thousand statements were taken from 850 villages over a six-month period.
There was another story being played out in Bihar. The planters controlled the government there, but the more sophisticated officials of the national government knew Bihar was a benighted province and that its fraudulent behaviour would not stand up to the sort of international scrutiny that Gandhi could attract. Gandhi’s satyagraha was backed by the government of India—they would not allow the administration in Bihar to persecute his supporters for the sake of the planters’ corrupt gains.
Consequently, the Lieutenant Governor Sir Edward Gait asked to see Gandhi and told him he was willing to convene a government inquiry. Gandhi sat on the resulting committee, which produced a report unanimously in favour of the farmers, recommended the planters return some money to them and called on the government to forbid by law compulsory planting. Eventually the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1917 abolished the forced cultivation of indigo and reduced the rent increases imposed on the farmer. It did not end unrest in the region between the farmers and their landlords, but Gandhi’s organisational skills were widely praised.
With the Ahmedabad mill-hands’ dispute, a conflict on the ashram’s doorstep, Gandhi branched out into far more controversial territory. The mill owners were represented by Ambalal Sarabhai, who was a Gandhi sympathiser, as he had shown by his earlier donation of funds to the ailing ashram. He entertained at his home such associates of Gandhi as Rabindranath Tagore, Motilal Nehru, Harry and Millie Polak and C.F. Andrews. He was unconventional in other ways too: he treated his wife on terms of equality and she had been his choice of bride, not his parents’. He later said his friendship with Gandhi was based on a common passion for abolishing caste and other inequalities within Indian society, and a joint interest in ending British domination.49 Gandhi had backed the swadeshi movement to promote home-produced textiles, which had given a tremendous boost to Indian textile mills like that of Sarabhai; but Gandhi had now turned against factory methods and was soon to be promoting hand-spinning—though it had not yet become the obsession it was later to be.
The mill-hands were represented by Ambalal’s sister Anasuya. She had been married early but had renounced married life and went to England to study medicine, then social work. Back in India, she dedicated herself to social issues affecting industrial workers, earning the soubriquet Mother of the Labour Union. She campaigned for the rights of women workers and set up schools for factory children.
The present dispute had begun after a plague in Ahmedabad had led the factory owners to pay a ‘plague bonus,’ aimed at keeping the workers at their machines when many were fleeing the city. This could be up to 70 per cent of their basic pay. When the plague subsided, so did the bonus, and the workers called for an increase in their rates. Anasuya asked Gandhi to speak to them. Gandhi was pleased to enter labour relations—it was where he had made his only real success in South Africa, after all. He made a speech calling on the workers to put forward only just demands and to be clean, to rid themselves of their addictions and to ensure their children got an education.
In the face of agitation, the mill owners decided to pre-empt any industrial action by taking the initiative, and imposed a lock-out starting on 22 February 1918. As the representative of the mill owners, Ambalal Sarabhai now found himself opposing not only his sister but Gandhi too, the spiritual leader whose work he was funding. Under the terms of the lock-out, only those workers who were prepared to accept an unnegotiable 20 per cent increase on their basic pay would be allowed to work. The workers agreed amongst themselves to settle on a demand for 35 per cent.
Gandhi offered to arbitrate, and spent mornings and evenings in the workers’ districts in the company of Anasuya and some of his supporters, advising, giving them medical help and distributing leaflets which the few literate workers read to the others. Gandhi would sit under a babul tree and teach about the necessity of suffering and the fear of God. They would then drive back to Ambalal’s home for tea, where Ambalal would often join them and talk over the day’s events; or he would come to Gandhi’s and eat unappetising ashram food with the workers’ representatives and discuss the dispute.
The lock-out ended and a strike began on 11 March. The strikers’ conditions worsened and they became restive when Gandhi forbade them to picket the mills; this was clearly not an industrial dispute as they understood it. As the strike wore on the workers’ attendance at the large daily meetings was declining, and those who did attend were despondent. On 15 March, when Gandhi’s nephew and lieutenant Chaganlal went to call them to a meeting, he was rebuffed. Anasuya and Gandhi come and go in their car, they eat sumptuous food, but we are suffering death-agonies; attending meetings does not prevent starvation,’50 they protested.
At the next meeting Gandhi was pained, but his response was unequivocal: ‘Unbidden and all by themselves the words came to my lips: “Unless the strikers rally and continue the strike till a settlement is reached, or till they leave the mills altogether, I will not touch food.’” The workers were immediately struck by his sincerity and begged him to desist, but once he had made a pledge Gandhi was determined to keep to it. He explained later: ‘My pledge is directed to making the mill-hands honour theirs and teaching them what value to attach to a pledge... I saw that it was necessary to show them by example how, for the sake of one’s pledge, one had to undergo suffering.’51
Gandhi’s followers wanted to join him in the enterprise but he forbade them with: ‘Leave this to me, fasting is my business.’52 It was not the last time that he would use his own body in a struggle with which he was identified, but to resort to such a moral weapon for a mere industrial dispute centring on a pay rise was extreme. He had previously fasted for personal spiritual reasons, or (arguably) to punish those who disobeyed him. Now fasting had evolved from being a response to the behaviour of his family or ashram members into an attempt to influence outside events. He was using it to put pressure on the industrialists, though he explicitly rejected this obvious conclusion and focused on the fast as a means to compel the strikers to keep their word.
It would bode ill for Gandhi’s national prestige if he failed in this dispute on his own doorstep. He wanted the workers to stick to the 35 per cent that they had pledged, but the mill owners had also pledged not to give more than 20 per cent: why should one pledge be worth something and another nothing? Ambalal offered to accept the 35 per cent wage increase if Gandhi would promise to stay out of all labour disputes in Ahmedabad for ever. The psychologist Erik Erikson who studied this event in Gandhi’s life in detail and spoke to many of the people involved considers that at this time Gandhi underwent extreme mood swings, at one moment seeing the fast as a necessary step towards all-Indian leadership, at another as a betrayal of the principles of satyagraha. ‘In trying to use his homeland as a platform from which to ascend to national leadership, he suspected he might have slipped into the muck of Bania [merchants’] bickering.’53
The strike ended after three days of fasting, on 18 March, when the mill owners accepted arbitration and there was a compromise—35 per cent for the first day, then 20 per cent and a complicated formula for the interim thereafter until the arbitrator had come to a decision. Gandhi considered this satisfied the pledge that the mill workers would not return to work without securing a 35 per cent increase, though he acknowledged that such an increase for only one day fulfilled the letter rather than the spirit of the pledge. The mill owners and the strikers had accepted a compromise because neither wanted to have Gandhi’s death on their hands. This was the first of seventeen public fasts.
Notwithstanding the ongoing war, the British were continuing with proposals for the reform of Indian government that had begun with the Morley–Minto reforms introducing the direct election of Indians to legislative councils in 1909. The new Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu, a true lover of India, began his tenure at the India Office with a declaration that, though no longer the clear endorsement of self-government at first intended, nevertheless enshrined the principles of a continuing move towards independence: “The policy of His Majesty’s Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.’54
Montagu travelled to India in 1917 to investigate with the new Viceroy Lord Chelmsford means by which Indians could be given more political opportunities. Among others he met Gandhi, Annie Besant, now released from jail, and Jinnah. It was widely believed (and perhaps by Jinnah himself) that when the septuagenarians Besant and Tilak were dead or at least infirm, Jinnah was the one Indian with the experience and ability to become the nationalist leader. Montagu noted that Gandhi ‘dresses like a coolie’ and ‘lives practically on the air.’55
With the fair wind of a sympathetic Viceroy and an equally sympathetic Secretary of State, Gandhi felt they were sufficiently on the way to Indian independence for him to put into effect his radical beliefs about national reform. His goal was the change in society that could be brought about after independence; national self-rule was not for Gandhi, as it was for most politicians, in itself the goal.
The Secretary of State and the Viceroy produced the Montagu–Chelmsford Report in July 1918 proposing ‘nationhood within the Empire,’ in which elected representatives would take over all matters in India except those involving foreign relations, finance and law and order. Congress held a special session in Bombay at the end of August to discuss the proposals, which culminated in the Government of India Act of 1919: this extended the franchise and increased the powers of both the central and provincial legislative councils. It introduced the concept of ‘dyarchy,’ dual government, with power supposedly shared between the British imperial and the Indian democratic authorities. The concept had originally been proposed by Gandhi’s old nemesis from South Africa, Lionel Curtis, and his round-table group of political thinkers. These advanced imperialists felt that the Empire could only be preserved as a federation of self-governing parts.
Gandhi’s attitude to the British these days was cordial. He accepted an invitation to attend a war conference in April 1918 at which he again affirmed his support for the Empire. He wrote to the Viceroy that if it were within his power ‘I would make India offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the Empire at its critical moment; and I know that India, by this very act, would become the most favoured partner in the Empire and racial distinctions would become a thing of the past.’56 He argued with his Indian friends that it was their duty to assist the British, that Indians could not preserve the country so long as they had no military tradition, and that to receive military training was a stepping-stone to home rule. If they demanded a status with the British akin to that of Australia and Canada, they must ‘render all possible help to the government at the present juncture... Our hope lies in the survival of the Empire... Besides, we shall learn military discipline as we help the Empire, gain military experience and acquire the strength to defend ourselves.’57
He produced and widely circulated an enlistment leaflet: ‘We are regarded as a cowardly people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we should learn the use of arms.’58 In answer to a query from Andrews that this was a long way from his proclaimed non-violence, Gandhi remarked that you could not teach non-violence to someone who could not kill—they might just be a coward. It was an argument he was later to use about sex—that there was no virtue in an impotent man refraining from intercourse. Reverting to his long-standing admiration for the English, he said: ‘It is because every Englishman can stand on his legs and can defend his home and his village against any invader that the English village appears so incomparably superior to ours.’59
Recruiting was frustrating and lonely and he was without the support of many of his erstwhile admirers. Congress was against both unconditional support for the war and unconditional support for the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms which they felt did not go far enough; Gandhi was isolated except for his recent convert Vallabhbhai Patel, who walked as much as twenty miles a day with him in the Kheda region of Gujarat, where they had been campaigning against unfair taxes. Only a few recruits ever responded to their recruiting drive, however: many felt that the government had done little for them, and they failed to follow Gandhi’s complex spiritual logic and considered his requesting them to bear arms was a frank contradiction of his exhortation to non-violence.
His current limited diet had already been giving him difficulties, he wrote: ‘The skin has become too tender and delicate. A knife would tear it, much more easily than anybody else’s. Although I invariably walk barefoot, the soles of my feet refuse to become tough and hard, as would anybody else’s. My gums have become flabby and the few teeth I have left are more ornamental than useful.’60 Now on the recruiting campaign, receiving little practical support from the peasants in terms of transport or even food, and his gruelling days sustained only on peanut butter and lemons, Gandhi fell ill. Inevitably, he responded to his sickness by fasting. He returned to the ashram where Kasturba, seeing his weakened state, decided to feed him up, giving him favourite foods. He believed he then committed the sin of over-eating: “The devil had only been waiting for an opportunity. Instead of eating very little I had my fill of the meal. This was sufficient invitation to the angel of death. Within an hour the dysentery appeared in an acute form.’61 He went on to his next appointment but had to ask for a commode, and again succumbed to the illness. ‘I thought all along that I had an iron frame,’ he said, ‘but I found that my body had now become a lump of clay.’ He refused medical help, so his hosts called Ambalal Sarabhai who took him to his home and insisted on calling a doctor, whose diagnosis was that Gandhi was suffering from a nervous breakdown exacerbated by weakness because of his poor diet.
After nearly a month of illness he returned to the ashram, still believing he was going to die. He wrote valedictory letters to his children: ‘I feel that I am now going. It is only a question of a few days.’ He commended them to cherish the gift of character he had given them.62 He could speak only with difficulty, and would spend his time listening to members of the ashram reading aloud from the Bhagavad Gita. His friends and supporters begged him to take more nourishment, particularly milk. He was nursed by his wife but, he wrote to Maganlal, ‘I simply cannot bear to look at Ba’s face. The expression is often like that on a meek cow and gives one the feeling, as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she is saying something... her gentleness overpowers me.’63 Kasturba knew his ways and she pointed out to him in January 1919, after he had been ill for months, that his vow of abstinence related only to cow’s milk, so he could take goat’s. Thus the ethical dilemma was solved and the milk of a different ungulate brought him back to health—coupled with rest and relief from his onerous recruiting responsibilities when Germany and her allies were finally defeated in November 1918.
The influenza pandemic hit the ashram in 1918, killing Harilal’s third son and his wife Gulab who were staying there, and some of the ashramites. Gandhi’s words of comfort to his son were in his own curious style: ‘I fully realise that your state at present is like that of a man dreaming. Your responsibilities have increased, your trials have increased and your temptations will increase likewise. To a man with a family, the check of being such, that is, having a wife, is a great check. That check over you has now disappeared. Two paths branch out from where you stand now. You have to decide which you will take.’64 Harilal, now twenty-eight, rapidly declined into alcoholism.
Politically, Gandhi had been sidelined by the constitutionalists Motilal Nehru and Jinnah, who had turned religion into a matter of voting percentages and had spoken in language understandable to the imperial power. An attitude of progressive reform on the part of the British government underlined an intention to progress slowly towards an independent, democratic nation within the British Empire. This might have been the end of the story for Gandhi as a major political figure, had the British not now made the monumental error of judgement enshrined in the Rowlatt Act of March 1919.