TO YERAVDA JAIL in Poona Gandhi took a few books such as the Bhagavad Gita, a dictionary, a translation of the Koran and a Bible. He also took his spinning-wheel to which he had become increasingly attached, listening to its whirr as to a mantra, but it was taken away by his jailers. He said he would fast if he could not spin, and it was restored. On the first night in jail he said to Shankerlal Banker, the editor of Young India who had been imprisoned with him: ‘Take God’s name and go to sleep. The best way to overcome all difficulties is to recite Ramanama.’1
‘At last I am having a quiet time,’ he wrote to Charles Andrews from his ten-foot-square cell.2 He would rise at 4 a.m. and go to bed at 10 p.m., filling the day with activity; he devoted six hours a day to reading history, biography, theology and even some of Kipling’s verse. It was here that he wrote Satyagraha in South Africa and published it serially in Young India, dictating it to his devoted cousin and disciple Maganlal Gandhi. He would spin and do related tasks for four or more hours and walk outside for an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening; if it were raining he would walk around his cell. At dawn and at sunset he said prayers, recited texts and sang devotional songs. He devoted an hour a day to teaching Sanskrit to Shankerlal, who appointed himself Gandhi’s servant; he massaged his master’s head and feet in the evening before bed, cooked for him, cleaned his cell and washed his clothes. Gandhi later took to performing these last two tasks himself as he felt he could get the cell cleaner and use less soap when washing clothes than his friend. Shankerlal referred to other specifics of caring for Gandhi: his master would count the match-sticks in the match-box and work out how many should last for exactly seven days, and he insisted on exactly a hundred currants for breakfast and that the pieces of bread served to him should be of equal size.3
Intermittently Gandhi was suffering severe abdominal pains which intensified at the beginning of January 1924, and he was removed to Sassoon Hospital, Poona, under Colonel Maddock, the surgeon general of the area. On 12 January he was operated on for appendicitis. Although released unconditionally on 5 February, he stayed in hospital for another month, recovering his strength. In a typically Gandhian gesture he resolved not to attack the Empire until his six-year sentence was up in March 1928, thereby respecting the spirit of his term of imprisonment.
He used some of his time for literary activities: he resumed the editorship of Young India and Navajivan and published his two autobiographical pieces serially, first Satyagraha in South Africa and then, from 1925, An Autobiography or The Story of my Experiments with Truth. From 1926 he published his discourses on the Bhagavad Gita.
On the political front, Congress was in some disarray after Gandhi’s departure. They had boycotted the 1920 elections, but many now argued that they should fight elections and represent the ideas of independence in the councils of India. Eventually Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das and Vithalbhai Patel formed the Swaraj Party. Via this vehicle they returned to national politics: they were elected to the national assembly in November 1923, where they found themselves again in the company of Jinnah, who had been elected as an independent Muslim candidate. Jinnah’s expert political manoeuvring led to the creation of a pro-independence bloc consisting of his group of independents and the Swarajists, who outnumbered the imperial loyalists.
Gandhi was not happy that the Swarajists were cooperating with the legislature; he felt it diverted people’s minds from the regeneration of national life that he thought of as the ideal path to independence. He tried to exclude Swarajists from taking leading positions in Congress, but after narrowly winning a vote against them he relented. He gave in to them if they supported him on khadi: so they could stay on the councils to which they had been elected as Congress representatives as long as they accepted that Congress membership was now open only to those who used a spinning-wheel. His engagement with wider society now centred on khadi, Hindu-Muslim unity and opposition to untouchability.
Gandhi was not the only enemy of the British to be released, and not the only one claiming to be representative of the true culture of India. Vinayak Savarkar who had been involved in the assassination of several British officials, was released in 1924. He took part in the formation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—the RSS, or National Volunteer Association—in 1925 ‘to protect Hindu culture.’ They were a quasi-military body that practised drills and salutes and had their own flag; ideologically they were anti-Muslim and in favour of maintaining caste divisions and keeping the untouchables down. Some Hindus were clearly looking towards more martial interpretations of their faith. Gandhi had emphasised the spiritual, contemplative side of Arjuna’s advice to Krishna on the battlefield, seeing the battle in the Bhagavad Gita as a spiritual one. For many, a literal interpretation was the correct one: the battle Arjuna was enjoined to fight was real.
India had been aroused by the idea of non-cooperation in the hope and belief that it would lead to religious amity and towards a self-sufficient and peaceful nation. It was the arousal of a sleeping beast, however, and there was no certainty that the beast, when stirred, would be docile. Sarojini Naidu wrote to him, Gandhi recorded, that ‘speeches and homilies on peace would not do. I must find out an effective remedy. She was right in saddling the responsibility on me. Had I not been instrumental in bringing into being the vast energy of the people? I must find the remedy if the energy proved self-destructive.’4 He therefore in September 1924 took a fast for Hindu-Muslim unity in the North-West Frontier where there had been riots. He took the position that the fast was a personal penance for not being completely non-violent himself, a piece of reasoning whose logic evaded even his most devoted followers. Now experienced at this exercise, he fasted for twenty-one days, taking just water and having an enema twice daily. He undertook the fast at the home in Delhi of Muhammad Ali, who felt that he should at least have been consulted before his guest embarked on a procedure the requirements of which must have strained hospitality. Gandhi attracted both Hindu and Muslim leaders to his bedside and focused attention on Hindu-Muslim relations as a key national issue. Prayers were offered all over the country for his life; a unity conference for some two hundred national leaders of different interest groups was held in Delhi with Motilal Nehru presiding. They issued calls for the toleration of acknowledged differences while accepting, however, that nothing was going to stop Muslims slaughtering cows or Hindus playing music that might be heard from mosques—two of the most frequent triggers of communal unrest.
But Hindu-Muslim unity had its limits: Manilal Gandhi sent a message to his parents from South Africa in 1926 that he wanted to marry Fatima Gool, daughter of a Muslim merchant who was a long-term friend of the family. Gandhi senior responded, ‘Your marriage will have a powerful impact on the Hindu-Muslim question. Intercommunal marriages are no solution to this problem. You cannot forget nor will society forget that you are my son.’ Warnings were followed by threats—if he were to marry Fatima, ‘I fear you may no more be the right person to run Indian Opinion’—so he would lose his job. Manilal would also, Gandhi suggested, be cut off from his family: ‘It will be impossible for you, I think, after this to come and settle in India.’5 Manilal backed down, as he always did, and as a concession to family harmony Gandhi so far compromised with the idea of matrimony as to find a Gujarati Bania girl for Manilal. He begged a solemn assurance from his son: ‘that you shall treat her as your companion, never as a slave; that you shall take as much care of her person as of your own; that you shall not force her to surrender to your passion, but that you shall take your pleasure only with her consent. I would advise you to set certain limits on your enjoyment.’6
Respect for other cultures was, then, fine so far as the cultures kept their distance from one another. This was not unlike Gandhi’s, attitude to caste: ‘I have devoted much thought to the subject of the caste system and come to the conclusion that Hindu society cannot dispense with it, that it lives on because of the discipline of caste,’ he said in 1916.7 He was now opposed to reform: ‘The caste system is a perfectly natural institution... I am opposed to the movements which are being carried on for the destruction of the system... We do not associate with members of other communities for eating or enter into marriage relationships with them.’8 He thought the fewer women a man might legitimately feel lust for, the better; and if his lust were restricted only to members of his caste ‘You are benefiting spiritually by curtailing the extent of your choice of women.’9 As usual he failed to appreciate that sexual desire might equally originate with the woman.
A caste-based problem was presented when his son Devdas at twenty-seven wished to marry fifteen-year-old Lakshmi, daughter of a major political supporter of Gandhi’s, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (later to be Governor General of India). They were told to spend some years apart, to see if they still wanted to marry after not seeing or writing to each other. The reasons that have been given for withholding parental consent are that Lakshmi was a top Brahmin and the Gandhi’s lower-caste Banias; that Lakshmi was considered too young to know her own mind; and Rajagopalachari said that Gandhi and he ‘both felt that our political association should not be cemented by a marriage alliance.’10 The couple were married six years later.
A more congenial match for the families concerned was Gandhi’s third son Ramdas’s marriage to another Kathiawari Bania, Nirmala, an orphan who lived on Gandhi’s ashram with her aunt (many of Gandhi’s disciples were fatherless or orphans). Gandhi selected her as a wife for Ramdas when she was sixteen, but told them to wait; they married when she was eighteen and Ramdas thirty. Their early years of married life were spent working among the peasants in Bardoli, but Ramdas’s lifestyle showed that his father’s teaching could have the opposite effect to that desired. ‘Ramdasji took a large house for us and filled it with expensive English things—spoons, china, clocks—and he was always giving me beautiful clothes,’ Nirmala said. ‘He was earning only forty rupees a month as a volunteer worker. I would say, “We should live within our means. Anyway, what is the point of all this finery and good living? You may be sent to jail at any time.” And he would say, “This home may be our last home, so let’s be jolly, eat well, and be carefree. Let tomorrow take care of itself.”’ When he found her reading one of Gandhi’s tracts on celibacy he said, ‘What are you doing reading that stuff?’11
Romain Rolland, another admirer of Tolstoy, wrote a biography of Gandhi in 1924 that introduced him to a wide and sympathetic audience. The uncompromising title chosen by the 1915 Nobel laureate, Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One with the Universal Being, suggested a less than critical approach. The publication of this book was an important stage in the progress of Gandhi’s reputation as a world figure. Rolland’s first words give what was to become the universal image of Gandhi: ‘Soft dark eyes, a small frail man, with a thin face and rather large protruding eyes, his head covered with a little white cap, his body clothed in coarse white cloth, barefooted. He lives on rice and fruit and drinks only water. He sleeps on the floor—sleeps very little, and works incessantly.’12 Rolland introduced Gandhi’s back-to-nature ideas infused with Eastern mysticism to a northern hemisphere that was used to polarising into choices of political right or left. Spiritual people could look to Gandhi and see an alternative solution in a world of materialism: ‘If the spirit of India now surges forth from temples and forests, it is because it holds the message for which the world is sighing,’ Rolland wrote.13
Madeleine Slade was one seeker after truth who was influenced by the book: she travelled to India after reading it and writing to Gandhi. The daughter of an admiral, Sir Edmond Slade, she had been a solitary child, devoted to nature and to music. A meeting with Rolland when he was writing about Gandhi led her to transfer her adulation from Beethoven to the Mahatma. When she read Rolland’s book ‘the dawn in my heart glowed brighter and brighter, and by the time I had finished, the Sun of Truth was pouring his rays into my soul.’14 She was thirty-three when she first set eyes on Gandhi in 1925, and fell to her knees in front of him. ‘You shall be my daughter,’ said Gandhi, who had never had a daughter and seems to have nursed a longing for one. Madeleine, who insisted on cutting off her long dark hair as a sign of spiritual devotion (to the bewilderment of other women ashramites who saw no requirement to follow suit), was given the name Mira after a princess who had renounced everything for God, with the suffix—behn meaning sister, so was called Mirabehn—Sister Mira. She became invaluable as editor of Gandhi’s English when he was writing letters to imperial functionaries or producing English translations of Gujarati works, including his Autobiography,
She therefore for a time formed part of a secretarial triumvirate, along with Mahadev Desai as primary assistant and Pyarelal as a third (and less practical) one. In December 1925 Gandhi was writing, ‘You have been constantly in my thoughts. This three days’ separation is good discipline’—which gives some idea of the amount of time they were normally spending together.15 Back in England the concept of going to the East in search of spiritual knowledge was not foremost in the minds of the gossip columnists, and they considered it bizarre that an upper-class girl should forgo marriage prospects at home to consort with a half-naked Indian. There was also gossip in the ashram about their closeness—for all its spiritual pretensions, the ashram was always a hotbed of gossip. Gandhi found it increasingly difficult to deal with the highly strung woman, and his letters betray his frustration with her: ‘No one else would have felt like committing suicide over a simple innocent remark of mine... this disease is idolatry. If not, why hanker after my company! Why touch or kiss the feet that one day must be dead cold?’16 Eventually he was to send her away to work in other ashrams, though he wrote plaintive letters to her: ‘You are on the brain. I look about me and miss you... All the time you were squandering your love on me personally, I felt guilty of misappropriation. And I exploded on the slightest pretext. Now that you are not with me, my anger turns itself upon me for having given you all those terrible scoldings. But I was on a bed of hot ashes all the while I was accepting your service.’17 He once confided to a friend: ‘I have not made any man or woman weep as bitterly as I have made her.’18
Gandhi was to attract more and more Westerners to his way of life. By the late twentieth century other spiritual leaders had emerged from India to present the spiritual mysteries of the East in English—Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (‘Osho’) and Sathya Sai Baba—all with their ashrams and their unique message. Gandhi’s ashram may have been the first at which a successful attempt was made by Indians to package Indian beliefs in an internationally attractive form. His immediate predecessors, Annie Besant and her mentor Madame Blavatsky, were Europeans who developed an active interest in Indian religious thinking; Gandhi was the home-grown article.
Westerners found much that was familiar in the ashram; Gandhi’s prayer meetings incorporated Christian hymns and blessings, and evidence of Ruskin’s and Tolstoy’s thought was not difficult to detect. The value of divesting oneself of property and other material ties was rooted deep in the Indian notion of the spiritual life; but the work of one’s own hands and the dignity of labour were an import from European socialist thinking.
In a wholesale and stinging assault on Gandhi’s mode of operating his son Harilal attacked his insistence on petty regulations concerning salt or milk or any of the other things he would rule on—these had no bearing on character, Harilal said. There were other, more desirable, aspects of character to be encouraged: unselfishness, charity, courage. Instead of promoting these, Gandhi fostered acolytes who paid lip-service to the high principles of the ashram while in fact pleasing him merely by keeping to the minutiae of the dietary rule book and obeying his every word without question.19 One of the ashramites later talked of the pettiness of their reliance on Gandhi: ‘We became so dependent on him that we couldn’t make any decision without consulting him: “Bapu how much hair oil should I use?” “Bapu, should I get my head shaved?” “Bapu, should I have one or two spoonfuls of soybean paste?”’20
Enemas were a persistent part of ashram life, and had apparently been so since South Africa. Gandhi used to tell a story of a European girl who was close to him in South Africa and who suffered from persistent headaches. He said to her: ‘You must be constipated. I’ll give you an enema.’ As he was preparing the syringe she undressed and, presumably unable to withhold herself from a man she loved who was about to penetrate her in his own way, came up to him and embraced him. Gandhi said: ‘Do you take me to be your father or your paramour?’ She backed away, embarrassed; he gave her the enema and, true to form, made her confess her transgression to friends and family.21
Gandhi aside (for he suffered from chronic constipation), the question has to be asked whether the inhabitants of the ashram, living on their vegetarian diet, were in fact constipated or was Gandhi projecting his symptoms on to them—or was the preoccupation with enemas just a neurotic obsession with cleanliness within and without? He had a daily enema and prescribed the treatment widely; he told Kasturba to give one to his future daughter-in-law Nirmala, who said: ‘I felt very shy about taking an enema from my future mother-in-law, but Ba was gentle and motherly. After a couple of days, I learned to give myself an enema.’22 While he prescribed enemas to the ashramites, it is not apparent that he often participated in administering them. To have done so (particularly to Indian women, for whom modesty was an important cultural requirement) would have been extreme behaviour, even for Gandhi.
One of the great personal events of the ‘quiet years’ was the death in April 1928 of his right-hand man Maganlal in Bihar after a brief illness. Gandhi, at fifty-eight, was distraught to lose the man ‘whom I had singled out as heir to my all.’ In his obituary remarks he was particularly keen to praise Maganlal for his celibacy: ‘When I presented to my coworkers brahmacharya as a rule of life even for married men in search of Truth, he was the first to perceive the beauty and the necessity of the practice and, though it cost him to my knowledge a terrific struggle, he carried it through to success.’23
Failure, though, in whatever sphere, was punished by the withdrawal of the ashram’s love. Chaganlal Gandhi had been guilty of petty larcenies involving trivial sums of money over a number of years: he left the ashram. The ashramites felt it would be fair to give Chaganlal some or all of the 10,000 rupees’ worth of savings he had made over when joining the community, to help him and his family in life outside. Gandhi refused, to the disappointment of many ashramites who felt his principles could be better tempered with charity.
He also felt it necessary to expose the sins of Kasturba in an article in Gujarati in Navajivan: ‘I believe hers to have been an immaculate life. It is true that her renunciation has not been based on an intelligent appreciation of the fundamentals of life, but from a blind wifely devotion... But the white surface of these virtues is not without the glaringly dark spots.’24 Although impelled by a sense of wifely devotion to eschew worldly possessions, the longing for them persisted to the extent that she laid up a couple of hundred rupees for her own use out of the money presented to her by various people. This became known when the small sum was stolen from her room and she was upset about it.
When a widow and a young unmarried man had an affair, Gandhi put the future of the ashram in the hands of God. He embarked on another experiment with ‘vital foods’ that ‘had not been brought into contact with fire,’ meaning uncooked.25 Twenty-two people joined him in the experiment in an attempt to rein in unruly passions, but they suffered intestinal problems, Gandhi went down with dysentery, and they discontinued the experiment.
Gandhi was elected president of Congress for 1925; he now devoted little time to Hindu-Muslim relations, saying: ‘For the time being I have put away in my cupboard this Hindu-Muslim tangle. That does not mean that I have despaired of a solution... But I must confess to you today that I cannot present a workable solution that you will accept.’ It was a sad premonition of the future.26 Muslims such as Shaukat Ali were complaining that although they had subsidised the non-cooperation movement including Gandhi’s travels and Motilal Nehru’s Independent newspaper, their interests were not now being supported by Congress. Gandhi wrote a pained note saying that the Khilafat committee had paid for his expenses at their insistence, and he now felt inclined to return the whole sum, with interest.
During 1925–7 Gandhi travelled widely, taking a tour in eastern and northern India and then to southern India and Ceylon. In 1929 he visited the Himalayas, north India, Sind and Burma. A later follower of Gandhi, G. Ramachandran, explained how when he was seventeen he first saw his future leader: ‘In Travancore the lowly, downtrodden untouchables suddenly started walking on roads that for centuries had been reserved for high-caste Hindus. The maharaja arrested hundreds of them. Bapu [Gandhi] arrived, and the untouchables organised a rally to hear him speak’ Ramachandran’s parents would not allow him to attend but he slipped out of the house and watched Gandhi at a distance through a vast crowd, calling them to silence by merely raising his finger. He explained: ‘The crowd expected Bapu to attack the maharaja, but practically the first thing he said was “I’ve come here on a pilgrimage to help the Harijans gain their self-respect, but I’ve also come here to pay my respects to your great maharaja.”’ Gandhi knew the maharaja’s spies would carry this obeisance back to him. The crowd was beginning to turn hostile, but Gandhi controlled them with what Ramachandran called ‘his magic finger.’ Within a few days of the rally, Gandhi had persuaded the maharaja to allow the untouchables to walk on the roads.27
The British acted clumsily over Indian political reform, which proceeded along the lines of the 1919 Government of India Act. Stanley Baldwin’s conservative government set up a statutory commission led by Sir John Simon which was to tour India in 1928. They made the mistake of not appointing a single Indian to the seven-man commission, thus bringing about unity in the nationalist movement—all Indian politicians were equally offended. The previously quiescent country was now aroused, and the commission, which included future prime minister Clement Attlee, was met on its tour with demonstrations waving black flags calling ‘Simon, go back!’ The violence of anti-Simon Commission demonstrations led to serious injury and the death of a prominent leader, Lala Rajput Rai, which in turn led to bomb attacks by outraged Punjabi youth against the authorities. Gandhi was not actively involved in the boycott of Simon, fearing that that have would stimulated a national revolt, unprepared and with no clear goal except protest.
Congress politics was polarised around two camps: those calling for dominion status within the British Empire, mainly the older generation; and young radicals such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose who argued for complete independence. Bose was a militaristic young activist who liked to wear a uniform and thought of non-violence as an insufficient tool for gaining Indian independence. He was immune to Gandhi’s charm, and critical of his limited strategic thinking; he felt independence would be won through at least some level of armed struggle.
In response to the perceived insult of the Simon Commission and the implicit suggestion that Indians could not produce their own working constitution, Motilal Nehru chaired a working committee of politicians who worked on what would be called the Nehru Report, which was ultimately to form much of the basis of the constitution of independent India. Its most important provision was universal suffrage, enfranchising men and women equally, a democratic advance that was enacted in Britain only in 1928, the year the Nehru report was produced.
At the Calcutta Congress at the end of 1928 Gandhi proposed a compromise between those who wanted a campaign for complete independence and those who argued for dominion status. He proposed they should set a deadline for the British: dominion status with a constitution along the lines of the Nehru Report before 31 December 1929, in the absence of which they would fight for complete independence. Gandhi backed Jawaharlal Nehru in his candidature for Congress president over Bose. For some time he had been favouring the younger Nehru for leadership, despite Jawaharlal’s flirtation with socialism, a rival creed resisted by Gandhi as too materialistic. Nehru had the charm and ability to be a leader, but was short on ideas; those would be supplied by Gandhi. ‘May God spare you for many a long year to come, and make you His chosen instrument for freeing India from the yoke,’ he wrote.28 The triumvirate of Motilal, Jawaharlal and Gandhi dominated the independence movement: wits said it was being run by the father, son and holy ghost.
The Viceroy Lord Irwin announced that the natural outcome of India’s constitutional progress was the attainment of dominion status. But this was no more than had previously been stated—nationalists wanted a date. The British government, as well as parliament as a whole, were divided, however. Prime minister Baldwin said of dominion status that no one knows ‘whether that date be near or distant.’29 A round-table conference was to be held in London but Congress boycotted it. Congress moderates might well have wished to confer, but the radical wing, and those extremists outside Congress with their bombs and their incendiary language, forced the party to be radical or risk losing the initiative.
Britain refused to concede a timetable for dominion status; the two-volume report of the Simon Commission was still in preparation when the Congress deadline ran out. Jawaharlal Nehru raised the tricolour flag in Lahore at midnight on a very cold New Year’s Eve in 1929, dancing rather stiffly round the flagpole. Gandhi called on all patriots to meet on 26 January 1930, to pledge independence and their willingness to break the law to obtain it. The pledge declared British rule a ‘fourfold disaster’: economic, political, cultural and spiritual.
Gandhi had been preoccupied with how to bring about the national mobilisation he had promised; he decided that first only his trained supporters would perform acts of civil disobedience, to be followed by untrained satyagrahis. If any violence could be justifiably attributed to his movement, he would call a halt to the campaign. But over what would they campaign?
In February 1930 Gandhi hit upon his spectacularly simple plan. He would declare to the world that he was going to break the law, then would walk two hundred miles to the coast in order to do it. The law he would break was that preventing the manufacture and sale of salt without paying a tax to the British. Such an absurd law demanded an absurd act of law-breaking: he would process salt and urge others to do so.
He had taken an interest in salt even while a student in London in 1891, remarking that ‘there are thousands in India who have to live on one pice [one-hundred of a rupee] a day. These live on bread and salt, a heavily taxed article.’30 The law forbade the production of salt except taxed salt; the possession and sale of contraband salt was an offence. Of the £800 million raised annually in revenue from India the tax represented £25 million, but the money came disproportionately from the poorest. Everyone had to have some salt, but those doing physical work needed it most, and the cost of it formed a higher part of their meagre incomes. The tax was also an abomination because there was salt in abundance in India: it could be had for the taking on parts of the coast, but it was a government monopoly. As a campaigning symbol salt had another attraction: it was needed equally by Hindus and Muslims, so was a unifying factor between them.
Personally, Gandhi had little use for salt—he had in fact tried excluding it from his diet. He wrote to a friend: ‘By inducing an artificial appetite, it makes one eat more and arouses the senses gratuitously... I live on a saltless diet consisting mainly of fruit. It is not to mortify the body that I do this but so that the body, mind and atman [the soul] may be in fuller command of themselves and purer.’31
He wrote to the Viceroy (‘Dear Friend’) saying British rule was a curse that had impoverished the millions of India through an expensive military and civil administration, though he reassuringly asserted: ‘I do not... consider Englishmen in general to be worse than any other people on earth.’ He found the British administration of India the most expensive in the world, and cleverly invited Lord Irwin to compare his salary with that of the British prime minister: ‘You are getting much over five thousand times India’s average income. The British prime minister is getting only ninety times Britain’s average income. On bended knees I ask you to ponder over this phenomenon.’32 He declared: ‘My ambition is no less than to convert the British people through non-violence, and thus make them see the wrong they have done to India.’33 He would call a civil disobedience campaign unless the government conceded to a list of demands. He included in this the abolition of the salt tax, but did not emphasise it; others were alcohol prohibition, the reduction of official salaries and the right to bear arms.
Not for the first or last time, Jawaharlal Nehru was perplexed: ‘What was the point of making a list of some political and social reforms—good in themselves, no doubt—when we were talking in terms of independence? Did Gandhiji mean the same thing when he used the term as we did, or did we speak a different language?’34
Gandhi announced his intention to agitate over salt on 5 March 1930 at a meeting at the ashram. Such politicians as Vallabhbhai Patel, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru were unimpressed. The salt tax was a minor imposition, no one was currently up in arms about it, the educated classes thought nothing of it. It did not appear to provide the empire-crushing stratagem that had been promised. The British dismissed the campaign as childish posturing, and it so escaped their sternest attentions—which of course was the point. They decided not to take any action but to let the protest fizzle out.
On 12 March the sixty-year-old agitator along with seventy-eight satyagrahis set off at 6 a.m. from the Sabarmati Ashram (sometimes called the Satyagraha Ashram), heading for Dandi where the Arabian Sea’s tides had produced salt flats where the mineral could easily be garnered. Garlanded and accompanied by music, the marchers made their way through Ahmedabad saluted by tens of thousands who recalled great epic battles and many of whom wept, thinking, strangely, that the marchers were going to their deaths.
Gandhi wore a dhoti with a large watch pinned to it, and a shawl. He carried, as all the marchers did, a shoulder bag with a bedroll, a change of clothes, a hand-spindle for spinning, a diary and a mug. The plan was to march for twenty-five days along a carefully plotted path through the villages of the west coast. In order to maintain communication with the world, Gandhi was writing tens of letters a day and would sometimes be up at 3 a.m. to write his article for Young India before the day’s march started. They passed through villages that had been primed in advance to supply the simplest food, a place for sleeping and a site for them to dig latrines. Townspeople came out in their thousands to cheer the march, villages were festooned and roads sprinkled with water to damp down the dust.
Gandhi made the march the occasion for promoting the messages in favour of spinning and against untouchability. At the village of Dabhan he walked past the temple to the untouchables’ quarter, where he drew water from the ‘untouchable’ well and bathed. He then persuaded the high-caste Hindus of the welcoming committee to allow the untouchables to join the gathering. Most villages gave a warm welcome; others provided no reception committee and the marchers had to drum up interest on their arrival. A police officer reporting on the march informed his superiors: ‘Gandhi is becoming weaker and weaker every day. This is seen from his care-worn face. He now takes more time to accomplish his afternoon marches than he used to take at the commencement. He also now hurries through his speeches. At times, he himself says “I am tired.”’35
They covered 241 miles in the twenty-five days and reached Dandi on 5 April. Sarojini Naidu and other activists were there to receive them. For the last miles of the trek, the ashramites had been joined by thousands of supporters. The long build-up had allowed journalists from around the world to gather, to whom Gandhi issued the message: ‘I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might.’36 On 6 April he bathed in the ocean, breaking the salt laws by picking up a pinch of salt (in fact salty mud), the signal for people all over India to do the same. Along the coast, villagers waded into the sea or gathered salt from the saline earth; in the cities Congress volunteers sold illegally produced salt (of somewhat dubious quality) in the streets. Gandhi produced some salt, which was sold to the highest bidder and raised 1,600 rupees for the cause.
Thousands were arrested for producing and selling salt, or beaten for such offences as refusing to let go of salt they were holding in their hands. From the southern coast to Bengal and the North-West Frontier Province demonstrations took place that were mostly peaceful, but in Peshawar Indian soldiers refused to fire on unarmed demonstrators—for the British, a serious turn of events. In Bengal, long a hotbed of violent dissent, nationalists attacked an army depot in Chittagong and seized arms. The British banned nationalist newspapers including Young India and Navajivan and ruled by decree, bypassing the democratic legislatures.
Gandhi was planning to raise the stakes and lead a march on a government salt depot, but he was arrested after midnight in his hut on 5 May under an early-nineteenth-century law that allowed detention without trial. He collected his belongings, brushed his few teeth and obtained permission to have his leading cantor sing a prayer—the camp was already roused and waiting silently for his departure. He was taken by train and car back to Yeravda jail in Poona where he had previously been incarcerated. When he was examined he was found to weigh l00lbs and to be five feet five inches tall. He referred to the prison as Yeravda Pleasure House in the letters he wrote from there, as if he were glad of the tranquillity that imprisonment gave him.37
The proposed march on the government salt depot at Dharasana took place, led by Sarojini Naidu, with thousands of satyagrahis approaching the heavily fortified building and showing no resistance when they were beaten back with heavy sticks (lathis). The spectacular event was reported around the world; in the striking words of Webb Miller, the United Press correspondent: ‘From where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the sticks on unprotected skulls... Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious, or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders.’38 As the Viceroy Lord Irwin wrote to the king, ‘the whole business was propaganda and, as such, served its purpose admirably well.’39 The American media in particular found the image of Gandhi defying the British Empire to be irresistible, evoking the tea tax of 1776, with its iconic place in the history of the American Revolution.
Arrests continued at a fast pace, and as soon as leaders were led away more took their place. When Jawaharlal was arrested, Motilal Nehru became president of Congress in his place, followed by Vallabhbhai Patel, then Rajendra Prasad—a sequence of arrest and replacement that was duplicated at every level of Congress organisation. Some fifty thousand were jailed in all, but defying the government’s expectations, repression had the opposite effect: civil disobedience became more aggressive and violence escalated.
The round-table conference (later known as the first round-table conference) on India’s constitution called by Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald in London was opened on 12 November 1930 by George V. Despite such high-level support, it did not enjoy success as it was so clearly unrepresentative of the Hindu nationalist majority. Jinnah and the Aga Khan represented the Muslims and for the first time the princes were strongly represented at a political conference. Those who attended agreed on the principle of an Indian federation and on the desirability of immediate dominion status, the latter being close to what the Congress supporters had been demanding. It was the minimum the British could give, and much misery would have been avoided had they moved faster to make the concession. If the British were attempting to gather their forces in opposition to Congress, the ploy had failed. The Simon Report, when it was finally issued, proposed an All India Federation, which was to be an elusive goal for British constitution makers for the next seventeen years.
With such a level of agreement, the government of India was prepared to make a gesture towards a settlement with Congress, and on 26 January 1931 all leading protesters were released in order to make discussions possible. Gandhi gave a rather stiff statement to Associated Press on his release: ‘I have come out of jail with an absolutely open mind, unfettered by enmity, unbiased in argument and prepared to study the whole situation from every point of view.’40
Motilal Nehru died that February; when Gandhi visited him the sick man had asked for a drink. Gandhi said he should be reciting the Bhagavad Gita and thinking of spiritual things. ‘I leave unworldly things to you and my wife. While I’m still on earth, I will be earthy,’ the old lawyer said.41 With the wise cynic Motilal gone, the last restraining influence on Gandhi from the older generation was removed, for good or ill. Everything that followed from the Congress side, for perhaps the next ten years, was at his direction—its success or failure was in his hands.
Congress authorised Gandhi to negotiate a settlement of the civil disobedience campaign with the Viceroy, so he wrote to Lord Irwin and they met in February and March 1931. Winston Churchill was outraged, famously referring to Gandhi as a ‘malignant subversive fanatic’: it was ‘alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer [in fact, Inner Temple], now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.’42 Churchill had served in India and was well aware that the land swarmed with self-styled holy men in various states of undress, begging from already impoverished people and offering bogus panaceas. Gandhi was not such—he was entirely genuine; but it was not unreasonable for Churchill to confuse him with charlatans.
Churchill felt that for Britain to grant dominion status would be a ‘crime’ if it were attained ‘while India is a prey to fierce racial and religious dissensions and when the withdrawal of British protection would mean the immediate resumption of mediaeval wars.’ His view was that the political class represented a tiny self-interested fraction of the 350 million Indians and that no community could have the dignity of dominion status that ‘brands and treats sixty millions of its members, fellow human beings, toiling at their side, as “Untouchables”, whose approach is an affront and whose very presence is pollution.’43 Thus he agreed with Gandhi on the horror of widespread Hindu-Muslim conflict and on the offence of untouchability; but whereas Gandhi was taking practical steps against them, Churchill presented these negative aspects of Indian society as reasons to delay moves towards independence, perhaps indefinitely. Churchill resigned from the Conservative shadow cabinet over his party leader Baldwin’s support for Indian constitutional change—not the future war leader’s most far-sighted move. Churchill was correct, however, in pointing out that the real importance of the meeting of the two sides was the perceived equality it gave to Indian leaders and the British administration: Gandhi approached Irwin not as a supplicant, but as an equal.
Irwin, later Lord Halifax, was to become infamous as the Foreign Secretary of appeasement in the run-up to the Second World War. Of aristocratic bearing (at six feet five inches), he towered over the diminutive sage of India. On Gandhi’s ‘indeed unfavourable’ physical endowment he remarked in a letter: ‘Small, wizened, rather emaciated, no front teeth, it is a personality very poorly adorned with the world’s trimmings. And yet you cannot help feeling the force of character behind the sharp little eyes and immensely active and acutely working mind.’44 He was unabashed by Gandhi’s appearance in his loincloth and shawl, or the presence of Mirabehn (the former Madeleine Slade was a lady, after all) dancing attendance on Gandhi, bringing his dates and goat’s milk to the viceregal palace when the discussions ran on past his dinner time. A diplomat who was present remarked, ‘I remember Gandhi squatting on the floor and after a while a girl coming in with some filthy yellow stuff which he started eating without so much as a by your leave.’45
Irwin early assessed Gandhi’s character and decided to appeal to his ‘vanity of power and personality.’46 Irwin was to be given the nickname Holy Fox (a pun on his title) because he was both religious and devious, and should therefore have been a fair sparring partner for Gandhi. But progress was slow. Irwin wrote to his father:
I kept asking myself all the time ‘Was the man completely sincere?’ I think that as our conversation went on I came to feel about this in rather double fashion. I came to have no doubt whatever that, if Mr Gandhi gave me his word on any point, that word was absolutely secure, and that I could trust it implicitly. On the other hand, I found what had always been my impression being confirmed, namely, that though intentionally he was completely sincere, yet in some matters he was the victim of unconscious self-delusion.47
They met eight times, and reached agreement on 4 March 1931 with what became known as the Delhi Pact, or the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. Gandhi called off the civil disobedience campaign and agreed to join in the second round-table conference. The British wanted Indians to stop the boycott of Lancashire cotton goods, as it was causing hardship among workers in the cotton towns. This was accepted, though encouragement of Indian textiles was also part of the deal. The non-violent picketing of liquor shops would be permitted. The Viceroy did not agree to abolish the salt tax but to permit people in certain villages to produce salt for their own use and sell it individually. He refused to launch an inquiry into police excesses during the campaign. He released all non-violent prisoners but would not reprieve from hanging the men who had been involved in bomb attacks. This led for the first time to Gandhi’s having to face demonstrations against himself. Supporters of Bhagat Singh, who had thrown two bombs into the legislative assembly crowded with British and Indian members, and who later killed a young British policeman, greeted Gandhi when he arrived at the Karachi Congress in March 1931 with black flags and shouts of ‘Gandhi go back!’
Congress members again felt sold out by Gandhi. For the second time he had called off a campaign, and with no particular gains. It could be said, however, that he had cannily brought a halt to both civil disobedience movements when they were losing momentum, thereby retaining strength. Jawaharlal Nehru wept bitterly, and told Gandhi such a settlement would never have been reached had his father been alive: ‘Was it for this that our people behaved so gallantly for a year? Were all our brave words and deeds to end in this?’48 Seats at a round-table conference with no preconditions as to dominion status had been on offer, after all, since before the start of the ‘salt satyagraha.’
Thus ended the second campaign for Indian independence. Its only achievement, in the end, was the considerable one of the perception that Gandhi was now in a position to negotiate. He then tremendously enhanced his prestige by leaning on his Congress colleagues to allow him to be the sole representative, even though the government had allocated sixteen places. Gandhi knew that the divisions within Congress would not be apparent if he were at the table alone; and he knew all eyes would be on him. His appearances in 1930–1 set the seal on Gandhi as a world icon.