INDIA COULD BE justifiably proud of her contribution to victory in the Great War: more than 1,400,000 Indians had volunteered for service—one of the reasons for Gandhi’s lack of success in recruiting was that those who were able and willing to go to war for the Empire had already done so. Their contribution had been impressive, the more so because, unlike military service in Britain after 1916, it had been voluntary, not conscripted. If Britain were true to her word, Indians could expect rewards for their loyalty.
British legislators, however, brought up on an old-fashioned view of rulers and ruled and suspicious of democracy, were unwilling to relinquish the powers they had adopted during the war under the Defence of India Act. The government of India appointed a Sedition Committee in 1917 with Justice Sidney Rowlatt as president, to investigate revolutionary activity in India. The committee sat in camera, so the details of its deliberations were not known or subject to day-to-day scrutiny. Reporting in April 1918, it presented India’s political problems as the result of nationalists who were all seen as violent and anarchistic. The only solution the report had to offer was to create new laws to curtail political freedoms, to extend wartime restrictions to a nation that had contributed so much to the war effort.
The Rowlatt Bills were informed by principles exactly the opposite of those enshrined in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, which stressed citizenship not subjecthood, A stronger Secretary of State than Montagu or a more courageous Viceroy than Chelmsford would have noted the Rowlatt Committee’s findings and moved on. The Rowlatt report gave ammunition to hawkish enemies of political reform in India, and its authors were more determined than Montagu and Chelmsford.
The Rowlatt legislation was the greatest mistake the British made in regard to India in the whole period of their rule: the repression of their opponents marked the beginning of the end of the British administration. The proposals, introduced on 6 February 1919, had been roundly denounced by the Indian National Congress and the Home Rule League and were attacked by all the Indian members of the Imperial Legislative Council, including Vithalbhai Patel, brother of Gandhi’s supporter Vallabhbhai.
Gandhi attended the proceedings of the government’s legislative chamber for the only time in his life to hear the debate on the Bills (his general non-attendance demonstrating something of a lack of interest in the functioning of democracy). He was impressed by the Liberal Srinivasa Sastri’s eloquence, but not so the Viceroy. Sastri and Jinnah resigned from the Legislative Council in protest at the government’s intransigence.
Gandhi was still unwell. He wrote to Sastri that he could:
no longer watch the progress of the Bills lying in bed. To me the Bills are aggravated symptoms of the deep-seated disease. They are a striking demonstration of the determination of the civil service to retain its grip of our necks... I consider the Bills to be an open challenge to us. If we succumb we are done for... If the Bills were but a stray example of lapse of righteousness and justice, I should not mind them but when they are clearly an evidence of a determined policy of repression, civil disobedience seems to be a duty imposed upon every lover of personal and public liberty.1
He determined he must be active, despite the advice of his doctors. On 24 February he summoned to the ashram some of the home rule leaders from Bombay—Sarojini Naidu, the Bombay Chronicle editor B.G. Horniman, Vallabhbhai Patel and Anasuya Sarabhai. Then he drafted a satyagraha pledge that if the Bills became law, and until they were withdrawn, ‘we shall refuse civilly to obey these laws and such other laws as a committee to be hereafter appointed may think fit.’ So if the government could make all-inclusive laws, Gandhi could equally offer all-inclusive opposition to them. He considered those making the pledge to be ‘Indian covenanters’ who for the first time were openly defying the British.
The Indian members of the Imperial Legislative Council, though unanimously against the proposed Acts, refused to support civil disobedience. Congress leaders did not want to see a mass movement. Nor did either Annie Besant or Jinnah think satyagraha was a viable option. Besant felt that to urge the indiscriminate disobedience of laws was a dangerous thing; Jinnah believed that it was suave politicians who made the weather—he did not consider mobilising the masses. Undaunted, Gandhi set up the Satyagraha Sabha (the Satyagraha Society) on 7 March 1919 despite the disdain of those he called the ‘intelligentsia,’ who questioned his methods of working and his insistence on the use of Gujarati in the Sabha (which, as it was spoken by a regional minority of Indians, was indeed a peculiar choice for a national movement).
Gandhi was uncertain how to start the agitation until, he said, he fell asleep thinking about it and the answer came to him. He rushed to explain: “The idea came to me last night in a dream that we should call upon the country to observe a general hartal [strike]. Satyagraha is a process of self-purification, and ours is a sacred fight, and it seems to me in the fitness of things that it should be commenced with an act of self-purification. Let all the people of India, therefore, suspend their business on that day and observe the day as one of fasting and prayer.’2
Gandhi had had an operation for piles in January 1919 and was addressing meetings sitting down in May, still too weak to stand. He was cheered to find the middle ranks of the home rulers avidly supporting him, and his protest developed into a nationwide campaign with fasting, prayer, strikes and mass meetings. Many more came forward to sign the satyagraha pledge. He later told supporters that this was one of the occasions when he saw God: ‘He ascribed the success in getting people’s response to God’s intervention.’ 3 He suggested laws that could be non-violently disobeyed by, for example, distributing his proscribed books, Hind Swaraj and his translation of Ruskin’s Unto This Last, but the government declined to prosecute. He sent a letter to the police commissioner in Bombay: ‘Dear Mr Griffith, May I send you a copy of the unregistered newspaper issued today by me as its editor? Yours sincerely M.K. Gandhi,’ but even this provocation failed to result in an arrest for sedition.4
The date for the national strike was fixed for 30 March, then changed to 6 April, though in some places, notably Delhi, the earlier date prevailed because of confusion in the messages. Cities stopped work as people swarmed into the streets shouting: ‘Mahatma Gandhi kijai!’ (Victory to Mahatma Gandhi). It seemed that all India had only been waiting for the word. Hindus and Muslims, with their separate grievances, joined in the protest. There were parades and speeches in mosques and temples, but the protests quickly descended into violence, starting with a riot in Delhi when the satyagrahis confronted the Indians tea-sellers outside the railway station who were unwilling to join the hartal, presumably because they could not afford the loss of a day’s earnings. Lahore and Amritsar experienced violence, too. Telegraph wires were cut and railway bridges sabotaged, shops and homes were plundered, government buildings destroyed.
Gandhi was arrested when he tried to get to Delhi, was then released and returned to Bombay, where he witnessed mounted police charging a crowd. He returned to Ahmedabad, which was under martial law after violence from mill-hands. He then held a meeting, promised a three-day fast, called on those responsible for the violence to confess their guilt, and temporarily suspended the campaign—his supply of volunteers had dwindled, and those who did volunteer were undisciplined and would accept no systematic training. This was not Gandhi’s vision of satyagraha. He was quickly realising that the protests were getting out of hand and had already, before he knew of the events in Amritsar, confessed that the call for civil disobedience in an untrained population was a ‘Himalayan miscalculation.’
The authorities in Amritsar, concerned at the political implications of Hindu-Muslim amity, arrested two Congress leaders, one from each religious community. Protests in response to this led to troops firing on the crowds, and rioting. Buildings were set on fire, British officials were killed and a woman missionary brutally attacked. Brigadier General Reginald Dyer took military control and forbade all public meetings. When a meeting was called in Jallianwala Bagh (Garden) on 13 April 1919 about ten thousand people gathered there. General Dyer stationed his Gurkha and Baluchi troops on high ground and had them fire into the crowd until their ammunition was exhausted: 379 were killed and 1,137 injured. Dyer went on to issue a series of orders aimed at humiliating the Amritsar population, such as ordering Indians to walk on all fours when they passed down the lane where the English missionary had been assaulted. The ‘crawling order’ may never have been put into effect, but there were floggings for petty offences such as disregarding the curfew order and refusing to salaam to British officers.
The censorship that was in force meant it was some time before the news was out. India, the Empire and then the rest of the world reacted with predictable disgust. It was as if in ten minutes of precisely orchestrated butchery the British had relinquished all pretence of moral authority. Gandhi, true to form, was not as disgusted by the deaths (for death could always be conceived of as heroism in the cause) as he was by the abnegation of the rule of law in the arbitrary punishments meted out, in the ‘lawless repression’ under martial law: ‘These tribunals were not courts of justice but instruments for carrying out the arbitrary will of an autocrat. Sentences were passed unwarranted by the evidence and in flagrant violation of justice.’5
Among the outrages was the arrest and deportation of B.G. Horniman, the editor of the Bombay Chronicle and a supporter of Gandhi, along with the suppression of the newspaper. The nationalists who controlled the Chronicle also owned an English weekly, Young India, which they now suggested should be published more frequently to replace the Chronicle, and with Gandhi editing it. Thus he was supplied with what he had previously lacked in India—the mouthpiece of a regular national publication which he had not enjoyed since the days of Indian Opinion in South Africa. He also took editorial control of Navajivan, a Gujarati newspaper. Though he did not remain as editor of Young India, citing pressure of other business, he continued to use it to voice his opinions.
Public opinion in Britain was also stirred, and an official commission was eventually set up by the government of India which censured General Dyer and he was relieved of his command. The Secretary of State Edwin Montagu criticised Dyer’s behaviour but came under attack from Conservative back-benchers: Dyer had enthusiastic supporters in Britain. A combination of factors that had nothing to do with India had weakened Montagu: his friends were few, his political alliances weak, and the anti-Semitism of some fellow MPs had undermined him.
The most striking effect of the Rowlatt Acts and of the massacre at Amritsar was to wipe out moderate opinion among Indian nationalists. Any belief in gradual progress, even among such westernised members of the middle class as the Nehrus, was gone. Motilal Nehru’s son Jawaharlal had been to Harrow and Cambridge and had been called to the Bar at the Middle Temple. Back home in Allahabad in 1916, he had undergone an arranged marriage to a conventional Kashmiri Brahmin girl, and the following year their daughter Indira, the future prime minister, was born. Annie Besant was a Nehru family friend and Jawaharlal Nehru became secretary of the local branch of the Home Rule League. On his return from education in England, Jawaharlal had entered the legal profession and taken an interest in nationalist politics. He had met Gandhi at the 1916 Lucknow Congress, having admired him from afar because of his work in South Africa, ‘but he seemed very distant and different and apolitical to many of us young men.’6
Nehru had read about Gandhi’s satyagraha pledge against the Rowlatt Acts and wanted to join in the campaign, but Motilal, a leading lawyer and constitutional politician, could not countenance his son’s breaking the law and going to jail. Out of respect for his father, Jawaharlal restricted himself to provocative gestures like eating his dinner, which he insisted should be only bread and milk, from a steel bowl which sat incongruously with the family’s silver and crystal. Motilal practised sleeping on the floor, so that he would experience some of the hardship his beloved son would undergo if he went to jail.
Divisions within the Nehru family reached such a pitch that to defuse the tension Motilal invited Gandhi to stay in his opulent house, which now became a home for him when he was in Allahabad. Motilal once commented: ‘I do not agree with anything that Gandhiji says, and he knows it, but he still has more respect for me than for those half-witted disciples of his.’7 Gandhi wisely advised Jawaharlal to be patient and not to upset his father. When he left, he took with him Motilal’s daughter Sarup, who had taken Hindu-Muslim unity a little too far and fallen in love with a Muslim employee of her father. He was encouraged to leave the country; she was sent to Gandhi’s ashram, which she found ‘austere beyond belief, the day starting at 4 a.m., dreadful food, no tea or coffee, and romantic attachments not encouraged.’8 Motilal quickly found a wealthy Brahmin husband for his eldest daughter, who now took the name Vijaya Lakshmi. The couple went to Gandhi for his blessing after the wedding and he gave them a lecture on sacrifice for the national cause and urged them to take a vow of chastity. Vijaya, a future Indian ambassador to the United Nations, was up to the challenge. ‘Why did you give your permission to our marriage if you thought it was wrong for us to live together as husband and wife?’ she demanded. ‘I want a normal married life.’9 Gandhi backed down.
Motilal was more affected by the Amritsar massacre than was Jawaharlal, as the older man had trusted to British decency, fair play and steady progress towards independence. Motilal Nehru had been active in Congress since 1888 and was president of the Congress in Amritsar during December 1919 to January 1920 at which the Government of India Act was grudgingly accepted but condemned as inadequate, and which called for further reforms and for the repeal of the Rowlatt Acts. The Rowlatt provisions were in fact never used, and the Acts were repealed in 1922. Never has an imperial power sacrificed so much for so little.
Jawaharlal described the Congress in Amritsar as ‘the first Gandhi Congress... the majority of the delegates, and even more so the great crowds outside, looked to Gandhi for leadership.’ Gandhi was asked to modernise the Congress constitution, which he did in a form that made the membership requirement so minimal that, it was open to everyone in India. Nehru later described Gandhi talking to a group of erstwhile supporters:
He was humble, but also clear-cut and hard as a diamond, pleasant and soft-spoken but inflexible and terribly earnest. His eyes were mild and deep, yet out of them blazed a fierce energy and determination. This was going to be a great struggle, he said, with a very powerful adversary. If you want to take it up, you must be prepared to lose everything, and you must subject yourself to the strictest non-violence and discipline. When war is declared, martial law prevails, and in our non-violent struggle there will also have to be dictatorship and martial law on our side, if we are to win.10
Jawaharlal Nehru vividly described the widespread excitement that he first witnessed at home in Allahabad, when a delegation of peasants came looking for Gandhi. Jawaharlal went out to see them, then on to their villages where they were complaining of the oppression of vicious landlordism. The visit to the places where most Indians lived was a revelation to Nehru: he found the whole countryside afire with enthusiasm, enormous gatherings would form by word of mouth, ‘people would come streaming out or even running as fast as they could. They were in miserable rags, men and women, but their faces were full of excitement and their eyes glistened and they seemed to expect strange happenings which would, as if by a miracle, put an end to their long misery.’11 Nehru thus grasped the reality of India, as had Gandhi: the masses were ready to be mobilised.
By mid-1919 they were well on the way at the ashram not only to weaving cloth (as they long since had, using mill yarn) but to spinning their own yarn. Gandhi first emphasised the use of spinning and weaving for economic reasons: villages could be self-sufficient in cloth, and India would not have to import it from other countries—notably from Britain, where India had been a strong market for the Lancashire cotton mills. Gandhi was later to expound on the spiritual benefits of spinning, and urge a vow of swadeshi: that people should swear to confine themselves to cloth manufactured in India and to destroy foreign cloth. He described the ‘tiny wheels of God’ that ‘spin slowly, but most effectively.’12
Curiously, Gandhi came to dominate the Muslim movement for the Khilafat. After the Ali brothers were released from jail, they joined the Congress and Gandhi joined the Khilafat committee. This was a problem for Gandhi’s more sober supporters, who wondered why he was so keen to defend the rights of the Ottoman Empire while attacking the British Empire, when he had always claimed to be against imperialism, not against the British. He wrote condescendingly to Harry Polak: ‘You cannot understand the religious viewpoint which guides me in this matter.’13 Even the loyal Maganlal suggested he was backing the Khilafat out of expediency, to which charge he responded explicitly, if cynically, using the image of churning a spiritual sea into butter: ‘Khilafat is the great churning process of the ocean that India is. Why should we worry as to what will come out (poison or nectar) from the movement? It is enough that we are certain that the activity is pure and righteous.’14
There was in fact no religious core to this matter—the people of Arabia, who had been fighting to throw off Turkish rule, were perfectly capable of caring for the holy sites of Islam. The Khilafat movement was an opportunistic means of stirring up Muslim opinion in India; the rest of the Muslim world, preoccupied with their own problems, had little interest in the sultan of Turkey. Gandhi’s support for the Khilafat meant he had to exaggerate the ability of the Turks to maintain their Empire, and minimise their misrule. Among recent incidents was the genocide of perhaps one and a quarter million Armenians during the 1914-18 War, an atrocity far in excess of anything perpetrated by the British Empire. Gandhi refused to acknowledge the massacre: ‘I distrust the Armenian case,’ he said.15 It was an instance of moral neglect that would be mirrored by his later failure to appreciate the enormity of the Holocaust. He was blinded by his spiritual light into thinking that the only important thing was individual experience of God, ignoring the bigger picture.
Jawaharlal Nehru found in his peregrinations in the Indian countryside that peasants in most rural areas thought the word ‘khilafat’ came from khilaf, an Urdu word meaning ‘against,’ and just took it to mean opposition to the government for the many woes they suffered at the hands of authority.
Nationalists attempted to encourage Hindu support for Muslims over the question of the Khilafat by attempting to overcome animosity between Hindus and Muslims over such issues as cow slaughter. Hindus were infuriated by the Muslim use of beef, and though Gandhi too was offended by cow slaughter he made a point of reminding them that the cruelty shown to bullocks who were kept in harness was an evil which it was in their power to address; and it was no contribution to righteousness to kill a Muslim for killing a cow. He was not fetishistic about cows, but he rationalised their position in Hinduism, telling Andrews: ‘The worship of the cow is the Hindu’s unique contribution to the evolution of humanitarianism. It is a practical application of the belief in the oneness, and therefore the sacredness, of all life. The great doctrine of transmigration, or rebirth, is a direct consequence of that belief.’16 He resisted an offer from the Muslims officially to link Hindu support for the Khilafat with their own refraining from the practice of cow slaughter, feeling they should do it as a matter of goodwill.
Gandhi decided, without the agreement of Congress, that non-cooperation with the government would start on 1 August 1920. By chance, this was the day Tilak died, so that Gandhi was now even more clearly identified as the major nationalist leader—the others were either dead or had been outmanoeuvred.
Non-cooperation entailed the refusal to attend government functions, withdrawal of children from government schools and colleges, the boycott of British courts, withdrawal from elections, the boycott of foreign goods and the adoption of swadeshi on a large scale. The strategy included the surrender of titles and honorary offices bestowed by the British; in keeping with this, Gandhi returned his Kaiser-i-Hind, Zulu War and Boer War medals to the Viceroy—‘not without a pang,’ he noted.17
In his appeal to pupils to leave their schools and colleges, Gandhi was addressing the young over the heads of their parents for the sake of national revolution, an appeal Mao Tse Tung was later to make in China. The radical nature of his call led to conflict with liberal educationalists who saw the promotion of education as a positive element of British rule. As evident in his attitude to his children’s education (though not to his own), Gandhi mistrusted the influence of education. If he had convinced them of the disloyalty to India inherent in receiving education from the British Empire, he commanded the students of Benares Hindu University, ‘Do not remain in the university for a moment longer, do not even breathe its air.’18 Two hundred students took a pledge not to pursue their education. Many erstwhile supporters, notably Tagore, opposed Gandhi in this campaign.
A special session of Congress was held in Calcutta during 4–9 September 1920 to consider the issues of the Khilafat and of non-cooperation. Gandhi was opposed by Jinnah and by Annie Besant, but with the Ali brothers and Motilal Nehru on his side and the trainloads of Khilafat supporters packing the conference hall, he had a clear majority. In the end the vote was 1,855 for Gandhi’s policies and 873 against.
Gandhi went on to a Home Rule League meeting in Bombay and insisted on changing its programme to that of complete home rule, while Jinnah argued that ‘self-government within the British Commonwealth’ was still the most realistic goal. Jinnah and others resigned; it was the beginning the bitter rivalry between them. Gandhi invited Jinnah back, but he responded that he was fully convinced that Gandhi’s programme ‘must lead to disaster.’ He declared, ‘Your methods have already caused split and division in almost every institution that you have approached hitherto, and in the public life of the country not only amongst Hindus and Muslims but between Hindus and Hindus and Muslims and Muslims and even between fathers and sons.’ Gandhi’s extreme programme had been successful because it had ‘for the moment, struck the imagination mostly of the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate.’19
At the annual session of Congress held in December that year at Nagpur, Jinnah appeared immaculately attired in Western fashion as usual. He stood before the Congress delegates who were dressed in khadi and opposed the non-cooperation programme, which he referred to as ‘Mr Gandhi’s.’ The conference hall erupted with cries of ‘Mahatma Gandhi!’ Jinnah’s speech was howled down with boos, hisses and catcalls until he was finally driven from the platform, humiliated in front of his pretty young wife. He later resigned from the Congress and devoted himself to his lucrative legal practice and an independent political career. Gandhi’s acquiescence in this political humiliation was a major mistake that would yield bitter fruit twenty-five years later.
Outside the conference people were lighting bonfires of foreign cloth, picketing liquor shops and fraternising with untouchables—for the first time Congress included a campaign against untouchability as part of its programme. Within a year it had six million new members. Congress adopted a flag to represent free India: a tricolour with orange for the Hindus, green for the Muslims and white for the others (along the lines of the flag of Eire: green for the Catholics, orange for the Protestants and white for peace between them). Gandhi also proposed that the spinning-wheel (charkha) should appear in the centre of the flag.
The promotion of spinning was now a major preoccupation, fuelled by Gandhi’s belief that before the British came all India used to be self-sufficient, with every family spinning its own yarn. This was not true: there were many places in India that did no spinning before the arrival of the British; but after Gandhi there was no such dearth of spinners. Spinning became an essential activity not only for the poor, giving them work when planting and harvesting were not possible, but for all nationalists. Rabindranath Tagore criticised the ‘cult of the chakra[sic]’ arguing that ‘while creating man’s mind, God did not have for his model the spider mentality doomed to a perpetual conformity in its production of web... it is an outrage upon human nature to force it through a mill and reduce it to some standardised commodity of uniform size and shape and purpose.’20
Gandhi said that when he first suggested hand-making cloth as a panacea for India in Hind Swaraj, he had not even seen a hand-loom or a spinning-wheel. Now he was promoting hand-spinning as not only economically desirable but as spiritually necessary. He began to devote an hour a day to spinning on a wheel, and the ashram residents had to overcome technical difficulties in order to spin and then weave their own cloth. Soon they were all dressed in rough white khadi. It was to become a symbol throughout India of the nation’s call for independence and self-reliance. Gandhi’s recognition of the importance of clothes had led him to dressing his army of national liberators in a way that signified unmistakeably his defiance of the Empire and its produce.
Making the coarse cloth was one thing—ensuring people wore it, another. His ally in this was Saraladevi Choudhurani, a Bengali nationalist activist who had married a nationalist from Lahore, Rambhuj Dutt Choudhuri. When Gandhi was finally, with the ending of restrictions relating to the Amritsar massacre, given official permission to visit the Punjab, Choudhuri was in prison and Saraladevi was his host. She was nationalist royalty, a niece of Rabindranath Tagore, and had long been active in Congress; in 1920 when Gandhi first stayed at her home she was forty-seven and he fifty. She represented all the intellectual ability, the female companionship that Kasturba had never supplied. ‘I call her my spiritual wife,’ he wrote to Kallenbach. ‘A friend has called it an intellectual wedding.’21
She could also do what his male followers could not—act as a khadi fashion model by wearing the homespun garments in rich colours, thus opening up the way for the adoption of khadi by women for whom nationalist passion was not enough to influence their clothing choices. Saraladevi accompanied Gandhi on his journeys round the Punjab, speaking at his meetings or singing nationalist songs, promoting the merits of homespun.
In March 1920 he was staying with her and writing in his usual affectionate terms: ‘Saraladevi has been showering her love on me in every possible way.’22 He wrote warmly to her when he felt unwell: ‘I am no better today. I must confine myself to bed. You still continue to haunt me even in my sleep.’23 When she visited the ashram there was jealous criticism from other residents of the amount of time he spent alone with her, and of the way he allowed her to escape chores—no emptying chamber pots for her. He chided her on her lack of ambition in the domestic sphere, however: ‘Great and good though you are, you are not a complete woman without achieving the ability to do household work.’ He signed it ‘LG’ for Law-Giver, a teasing name she used for him.24
He even discussed polygamy with Saraladevi, recounting the event later as
[an] argument I had with a woman with whom I almost fell. It is so personal that I did not put it in my autobiography. We have considered if there can be this spiritual companionship. The marriage relationship is a matter of contract. Your parents arrange it in your childhood and you have nothing to do with it. I come into contact with an illiterate woman. Then I meet a woman with a broad, cultural education. Could we not develop a close contact? I said to myself. This was a plausible argument, and I nearly slipped.25
At the end of 1920 when he was wanting the relationship to cool off, he emphasised the condescending nature of his affection for her in a way that could not but irritate a mature woman who had been active on the Congress stage for twenty years: ‘So far as I can see our relationship, it is one of brother and sister. I must lay down the laws for you, and thus ruffle you. I must plead gently like a brother ever taking care to use the right word even as I do to my oldest sister.’26 The end of the relationship was precipitated by other people, including his son Devdas and his amanuensis Mahadev Desai, who warned him of the danger he was in. It may have been that such warnings of his excessive closeness to her came when he was in a receptive mood as Saraladevi was becoming demanding and he felt he could do without her.
Despite his unprepossessing physique, Gandhi was always attractive to women and he enjoyed their attention. Saraladevi was just the most serious of his encounters. Normally these concerned single women who lived at the ashram, such as the pretty Danish missionary Esther Faering who was the recipient of many affectionate letters from him. Millie Polak gave her interpretation of Gandhi’s attractiveness: ‘Most women love men for such attributes as are usually considered masculine. Yet Mahatma Gandhi has been given the love of many women for his womanliness: for all those qualities that are associated with women—great faith, great fortitude, great devotion, great patience, great tenderness, and great sympathy.’27
The Gandhi magic also worked on men. Gandhi met Pyarelal, who was to be one of his most faithful disciples, his constant companion and biographer, in the aftermath of the Amritsar massacre. Pyarelal Nayar (who was always known by his first name alone) was then a student and part of a deputation that approached Gandhi when Congress was held in Amritsar at the end of 1919. The deputation had come to ask his advice on behalf of a person implicated in the trials concerning martial law then in progress. Could he recommend an amnesty? they wanted to know. Pyarelal described his first impression of Gandhi:
He had just had his bath and was on his way to midday dinner. Wrapped in a white Kashmir pashmina shawl, he sat bolt upright looking a picture of dignity and repose. There was majesty in his simplicity. The deep mellifluous voice held one spellbound. The eyes reflected an infinity of kindliness, compassion and peace. The body was thin to the point of emaciation but the prominent barrel chest gave a sense of tremendous power. The broad, smooth brow showed not a wrinkle. The countenance was radiant, the skin silken smooth and the complexion clear.28
The students asked him what hope they could have, in that atmosphere, for a person confessing to political murder? Gandhi said: ‘I would not let even the worst murderer go to the gallows. In my Ashram there are several persons who were implicated in cases of political murder. They made a clean breast of it. Converted to non-violence, they are today among my most trusted workers’ Pyarelal, who had lost his father, an officer of the judiciary, when he was young, saw everything to admire in Gandhi:
In his voice there was a calm assurance, and boundless compassion joined to an unearthly detachment that was strangely soothing; a quiet dignity and sense of kingliness, suggestive of an access to some hidden reservoir of power which recked [recognised] no obstacle, knew no defeat and could find a way, as it were, even through an impenetrable granite wall... One felt it. It was the deep calling unto the deep. Here was what I had been looking for—a glimpse of the power of the spirit which is its own seal and sanction, which no power on earth can subdue and that never fails.29
In autumn 1920 Pyaralel gave up his studies in response to the call to non-cooperation and joined the ashram at Sabarmati. He was soon, with Mahadev Desai, devoting all this time to Gandhi. He described how Gandhi could go on day after day, week after week with only three or four hours’ sleep, and how he expected others to maintain his own high levels of performance. ‘One had to be ready for any emergency at a moment’s notice. Difficulty of an assignment or lack of resources was never accepted as an excuse for non-performance.’30 Gandhi insisted on doing everything, so far as possible, for himself. ‘If he wanted a paper to be looked up or his spittoon to be brought to him, he went for it himself instead of ordering anyone; he even mended his own clothes. He preferred writing to dictating.’ Pyarelal one day counted fifty letters written by Gandhi in his own hand at the end of which he was so exhausted that he pressed his temples between his hands and ‘slumped on the floor just where he was sitting, without even spreading the bedding against which he was leaning. He simply pushed it aside.’31
He used a piece of red khadi as a satchel for keeping files and papers, he wrote with a steel nib and insisted on his desk always being clear: ‘Woe to anyone of his staff who referred to him a letter more than forty-eight hours old.’32 When others drafted letters for him, he liked short replies—more than five or ten lines he threw away. His diet now consisted of goat’s milk, raisins and other fruit that were measured out with care. Pyarelal once increased his number of raisins from nineteen to twenty-three, but ‘he detected it and gave me a discourse on the danger of “blind affection.’”33 The menu for each meal was adjusted carefully according to how his system had responded to the previous meal, the amount of sleep he had had or expected to have, and the physical and mental strain already undergone or in prospect.
By 1921 Gandhi had all the elements of his unique enterprise in place: a secure base in the ashram; a talented retinue of disciples, of whom Desai and Pyarelal were only the most accomplished; a national party obedient to his wishes in Congress; in khadi, a uniform for his army; an economic programme in spinning and self-sufficiency, a newspaper for his weekly pronouncements, and a philosophy in satyagraha to inspire and embolden his followers.
The new Viceroy, the lawyer Lord Reading (formerly Rufus Isaacs), met Gandhi six times in 1921 and found nothing striking about the appearance of this bare-legged man in white dhoti and cap:
I should have passed him in the street without a second look at him. When he talks the impression is different. He is direct and expresses himself well in English with a fine appreciation of the value of the words he uses. There is no hesitation about him and there is a ring of sincerity in all that he utters, save when discussing some political questions... his religious and moral views are admirable and indeed on a remarkably high altitude but I must confess that I find it difficult to understand his practice of them in politics.34
Gandhi promised that home rule could be secured within a year, to be achieved by non-cooperation with the British and in the context of a constructive programme consisting of the abolition of untouchability, Hindu-Muslim unity, the promotion of hand-spinning and hand-weaving, and the prohibition of alcohol and drugs. He travelled relentlessly throughout India talking of non-cooperation and non-violence to vast crowds, many of whom could not hear him but were satisfied just to have sight of the living saint dressed in his white khadi.
He called for a complete boycott of foreign cloth by 1 August 1921, which led to huge bonfires on 31 July. The pile of doomed fabric in Bombay was about a mile in diameter. Gandhi himself applied a lighted match to it, thereby feeding into the notion of the symbolic value of destruction and renewal in Hindu mythology. Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions would abhor the waste; Gandhi’s supporter Charles Andrews protested at ‘destroying in the fire the noble handiwork of one’s fellow men and women abroad.’35 Why not give the cloth to the poor, at home or in other countries? Gandhi was asked. He replied that foreign cloth was ‘sinful’—‘We should look upon foreign cloth as so much dirt and, just as we would not pass on to others the dirt on our person, so we should not pass on this dirt of foreign cloth to others.’36 At the end of the piece in which he wrote this, however, he relented, noting that Muslims were sending foreign cloth to help Turkish refugees from Smyrna.
He continued with his spiritual disciplines, having decided in spring 1921 that he would have a silent day a week—he would not speak on Mondays except in an emergency—and it was a discipline he maintained to the end of his life. Later in 1921 he took a vow to spin every day for half an hour. He also decided to further refine his clothes. He discarded the long dhoti, sleeveless jacket and cap he had been wearing and on 23 September that year he went clad only in a loincloth to a meeting of weavers. He represented this as an act of solidarity with the poor who could not afford enough khadi to replace the foreign cloth that he was insisting they burn. He also argued that there was currently too little khadi to go round, so ‘if most of the men could do with as little cloth as he, then there would be enough khadi for the women’—though he never urged others to dress as skimpily as he did (and this argument was obviously valid only in the short term, if at all).37 There was never any question of Muslims voluntarily wearing nothing but a loincloth—sharia law requires modesty in dress from men as well as from women—so amid the talk of unity here was another clear sign of difference.
In going almost naked he was imitating the clothing—or lack of it—of the sadhus, the mendicant holy men who populate India begging for alms and offering such spiritual boons as the impregnation of barren women. In future he would go bare-chested, with naked legs and a loincloth, plus a shawl, or not, as the temperature dictated. It was as if, having got his Congress supporters to adopt his mode of khadi dress, he now had to go one better. Thirty years earlier in London he had been wearing a wing collar and a top-hat. When Sonja Schlesin wrote from South Africa that taking to this state of undress was just spectacle, all show and no spiritual substance, he countered that it was just a natural progression of the way his thinking had been taking him. ‘Believe me there is nothing spectacular in the loin-cloth.’38
The next stage in the home rule (or swaraj) programme, if non-cooperation by the public were not successful, would be for Gandhi to call on government officials to leave their posts and soldiers to lay down their arms, and for a tax strike to start in a selected area. He had to achieve independence before the end of 1921 if the pledge of ‘swaraj within a year’ were to be fulfilled. His pronouncements became increasingly desperate: ‘We must not drink or gamble,’ ‘We should control our animal passions. If we do this, surely then we could have swaraj .’39
Now he was presenting British rule as Satanic—Ravena Raj not Rama Raj, rule by a demon, not by a god—and as having to be ended. He presented his movement as one straddling ‘religion and irreligion, powers of light and powers of darkness.’ It was the Muslims and Hindus who had ‘religion and honour as their motive’ as against European civilisation representing ‘the spirit of Satan.’40
The visit of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII (attended by the young Louis Mountbatten, among others) was boycotted and the royal retinue encountered empty streets. Violence broke out in Bombay on 21 November 1921 when the self-sacrificing element of non-cooperation showed its ugly side. The violence was not an attack on the British but the bullying of those Indians who did not maintain the boycott. Liquor shops were wrecked, trams stopped and passengers molested, their Western clothes forcibly removed: Parsis, Christians and Jews were attacked. Five police and fifty-three demonstrators were killed. Gandhi witnessed the violence of crowds looting shops and shouting: ‘Victory to Mahatma Gandhi!’ After the riots C.E Andrews describes him as ‘haggard and emaciated, as one who had just passed through the valley of the shadow of death.’41 He declared he would fast until Hindus and Muslims made peace with the other communities whose members had been assaulted. He broke the fast after two days on assurances of good behaviour from the various groups.
Meetings were banned in response to the violence surrounding the prince’s visit, and Gandhi reacted by calling on his troops to defy the bans, hold meetings and be prepared to be imprisoned. Many were, including Nehru father and son. Before the end of January 1922 thirty thousand had been arrested. Non-cooperation having taken the movement so far, on 1 February Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy to tell him that he proposed to launch a mass civil disobedience movement against the government. As a first step towards national civil disobedience he settled on the area of Bardoli in Gujarat, again picking the province he knew best for a trial run.
On 4 February his plans were to be disrupted: a procession shouting ‘Victory to Mahatma Gandhi!’ in the village of Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces broke into taunts and then scuffles with the police, who became frightened and opened fire. Their ammunition soon gave out and they took shelter in the police station, which the mob attacked then set fire to, burning or hacking to death twenty-two policemen. On 12 February Gandhi persuaded the Congress working committee to suspend the civil disobedience: non-cooperation was to be replaced by a programme of spinning, temperance, educational improvement and working with local untouchables to ameliorate their lot. He refused, he said, to lead a movement ‘half-violent and half non-violent, even though it might result in the attainment of so-called swaraj.’42 Thus he retained the moral high ground, refusing to excuse, or compromise with, violence.
Jawaharlal Nehru recalled that he and other prisoners learned of this latest development ‘to our amazement and consternation... were a remote village and a mob of excited peasants in an out-of-the-way place going to put an end, for some time at least, to our national struggle for freedom?’43 Nehru and others were released in March. He was later to reflect that Gandhi had acted almost by instinct, gradually developing a sense of how the masses were behaving: ‘All organisation and discipline were disappearing; almost all our good men were in prison, and the masses had so far received little training to carry on by themselves.’44
The movement had been running out of steam, and what momentum there now was had been taken over by anarchistic elements. Impressive though Gandhi’s rousing of the country was, its success was limited. Courts, schools and colleges continued to function, the police and the army remained loyal to the Empire. The Khilafat movement had already begun to be recognised as the absurdity it always was. Secular Turks in 1922 deposed the sultan, supposedly the great caliph for whom the Indians were agitating, and Islam was not shaken to its foundations. The Turks announced a secular republic and the Caliphate was declared defunct in 1924 by Kemal Ataturk, a very modern leader, more in the mould of Jawaharlal Nehru than Gandhi. Thus died the Khilafat, the last significant indicator of popular Hindu-Muslim unity in the Indian nationalist campaign.
On 10 March 1922 Gandhi was arrested at the ashram. When asked, he gave his age as fifty-three and his profession as ‘farmer and weaver.’ He was tried eight days later for inciting disaffection against His Majesty’s Government via three articles in Young India. He pleaded guilty, declaring that he did not ask for mercy: ‘I am here to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.’45 He was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, but the judge showed such sympathy as to express the hope that the course of events in India would make it easier for the government to reduce the term and release him. The first great campaign for Indian independence was over.