Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) dominated the Indian National Congress from Tilak’s death in 1920 until the eve of independence in 1947. Distinguished as a political leader by his signature theme of non-violence, he believed he had a mission to keep the national movement from degenerating into anti-British violence and internecine warfare. Like the early Moderate leaders (among whom he most admired Gokhale), he worked for greater social and economic reforms, as well as for political progress toward national self-government. His spiritual strength, austere lifestyle, and dedicated service to the poorest and most humiliated of his countrymen won him the popular title of Mahatma (“Great Soul”). His powerful leadership of mass movements, inventive common sense, and courageous firmness in opposing and negotiating with India’s British rulers made him his country’s chief guide during the final decades of foreign rule.
Gandhi’s homeland of Gujarat was one of the country’s most prosperous regions, its many rivers welcoming merchant ships from ports along the Arabian Sea. When British forces entered Gujarat in the early nineteenth century, they left most of this remote and turbulent peninsula under the control of its many warring chieftains, but froze their warfare with one another by forcing them to sign treaties placing themselves under British protection. The Gandhi family, many of whom were merchants, thrived under this new peace. Gandhi’s paternal grandfather, a skilled customs collector and diplomat, rose to the office of diwan (chief minister) to the Rajput king of the tiny coastal state of Porbandar. Gandhi’s father inherited the post in turn, and then he passed it on to his younger brother after receiving a better diwan-ship at Rajkot, an inland principality the British were using as the center of their post-1857 efforts to improve the lot and enlighten the minds of the people in this rugged frontier area.
Mohandas was seven when his family moved to Rajkot, and he at once began what would be eleven years of study in the school system created by the Bombay Department of Public Instruction, with classes conducted in a mix of Gujarati and English. But the education that made the deepest impression on him emanated from his parents. He was their youngest child, and their favorite. Some of his father’s character seems to have entered into Gandhi’s own, in the form of a stubborn persistence in doing what he believed was right. It was his mother, though, who influenced him most deeply, through her saintly self-denial, her frequent fasting, and her readiness to serve others, including the sick and the poor. Western secular influences were weak and Jain non-violence strong among the merchant castes of peninsular Gujarat, and, although young Gandhi secretly experimented with meat-eating in his early teens, he quickly discontinued the practice because of both an innate horror at such a breach of non-violence to living creatures, and a reluctance to lie to his parents.
When Mohandas was sixteen his father died, having named him as heir to the position of diwan. Six months later the British deposed Porbandar’s king for misgovernment, took over the management of the kingdom, and purged many members of the extended Gandhi family from the administration. A wise brahman friend of the family suggested that they send young Mohandas to London to earn a law degree (which at that time could be done with only a high school degree). At first his mother refused to let him go, fearing that English habits would corrupt him. She agreed only when he took a triple vow, suggested and administered by a learned Jain monk of their own caste. Mohandas vowed not to touch meat, wine, or women. Although in Rajkot his adventurous voyage was approved by his caste fellows, in Bombay the caste’s headman declared him outcaste for making this allegedly polluting voyage across the ocean.
London made a twofold impact on this impressionable youth from one of India’s most tradition-bound regions. One effect was to anglicize his appearance, speech, and social conduct, turning him into a nattily dressed barrister-at-law. Another effect was to bring him into close contact with English men and women holding ideas similar to those of his parents on subjects such as vegetarianism, reincarnation, the law of karma, and the immortality of the soul. Gandhi also sought out Christian churches in order to hear some of the best preachers of the day. After nearly three years in the capital of Britain’s empire, he was admitted to the bar and boarded a steamship for home, feeling “deep regret” at leaving “dear London.”1
Now twenty-one, Gandhi found it difficult to reenter his own society and culture after his English experiences. First, he found that his beloved mother had died a few months earlier. “Most of my cherished hopes were shattered,” he recalled later in his Autobiography.2 Next he failed in his attempt to set up a law practice in Bombay, India’s most Westernized city, and was forced to join his eldest brother in doing petty legal work in their hometown. Deracinated from the culture of his family (he insisted that his wife, Kasturbai, and his children wear shoes and socks and eat oatmeal), he was also treated as socially inferior by the English, whose company he had enjoyed in London. His restlessness increased after he clashed with the chief British official in the region, on whom his hopes for a more prestigious job depended. In 1893, less than two years after his return, he decided to leave India again, this time for South Africa, where his brother had found him a job with a Muslim trading firm from Gujarat.
A series of racist actions by white South Africans impressed Gandhi with the need to do something to defend the human rights of the 40,000 Indian settlers there. Within a month of landing he had been shoved out of a first-class train compartment, beaten on a stagecoach for not giving up his seat to a white man, and kicked off the sidewalk—all because of the color of his skin. In response, he used British methods of political agitation: writing letters to the newspapers, leading a petition drive, and founding a political organization. With this organization’s support, he then wrote two pamphlets to describe the injustices his countrymen were suffering and to appeal for redress. “All this activity resulted in winning the Indians numerous friends in South Africa and in obtaining the active sympathy of all parties in India. It also opened up and placed before the South African Indians a definite line of action.”3
Thus, at twenty-four, Gandhi the political leader was born. At twenty-seven he toured India to enlist further support for his South African cause; he met Surendranath Banerjea, Mahadev Govind Ranade, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and adopted Gokhale as his “political guru.” He was nearly killed by a white mob when he returned to South Africa, but refused to press charges; two years later, in 1899, when war broke out between the Dutch-descended Boers of the interior and the coastally based British, he volunteered to lead an ambulance corps. Gandhi believed then, and up until 1919, that India was benefiting from being governed under the British constitution, and he repeatedly pointed out that arbitrary and racist legislation violated the principles of that constitution. When in 1906 a law was passed requiring every South African Indian to carry an identification pass, he led the community in a mass refusal to obey it. Shortly before his first jail term in 1906, he and a cousin coined the term “satyagraha” (“holding firmly to truth”) to indicate the nature of this non-violent fight against unjust laws, waged primarily by disobeying them and willingly suffering the hardships of imprisonment. By 1914 Gandhi’s expanding movement had produced the repeal of some repressive laws, and after laboring twenty years for justice and human dignity in South Africa Gandhi felt free to return to India.
Paralleling and reinforcing his growing experience in serving his community, Gandhi evolved in these years his own system of spiritual ideals and moral practices. Its roots lay in his mother’s influence, childhood training in Vaishnava devotional prayer, exposure to Jain non-violence, and struggles to serve his parents while married to Kasturbai, his child bride, to whom he was married when they were both thirteen. Christian friends in London and South Africa had acquainted him with Jesus’s teachings on non-violence, forgiveness, faith in God, and the need to love and serve others, as expressed especially in the “Sermon on the Mount.” Tolstoy’s writing and expression of these ideals, culminating in actual correspondence between the two men, impressed Gandhi greatly, as did his continuing study of the Gītā and other religious writings sent to him by friends in India and England. The deeper became his involvement in serving others, the more he felt the need to simplify his life. This need was reinforced by reading John Ruskin’s Unto This Last. The circumstances of his involvement in the Zulu rebellion of 1906 prompted a vow of chastity. Letters and books sent from Bombay by his Jain friend Raychand strengthened his resolve to adopt these self-restraints, so as to hasten his soul’s liberation from further rebirths. Thus the two paths of service and progress toward moksha began to converge.
Gandhi was forty-five when he returned to India, where he spent his remaining thirty-three years. His efforts to help the downtrodden in his society convinced him that it was only through identifying with and serving others that he could come closer to God. The villagers of India were his first love, for he believed that the “curse” of modern materialism was spreading outward from the coastal cities, contaminating India’s great heritage of spiritual striving and simple living. He quickly responded to opportunities to lead villagers in opposing excessive taxes, but he also helped Ahmedabad urban workers in their 1918 strike against a wage reduction.
1919 was a difficult year. The Rowlatt Bills, announced early in the year, authorized harsh and sweeping powers for the colonial regime: trial without jury or right of appeal; preventive detention of anyone “threatening public safety,” while “dangerous persons may be continuously detained.” Possession of any “seditious document” was punishable by two years in prison, followed by another two years at the government’s discretion. This arbitrariness shocked the country. Then, in April 1919, General Reginald Dyer, wishing to make an example of citizens who were disobeying the injunction against public assemblies, ordered his troops to fire at close range on a crowd enclosed in a public square, Jallianwala Bagh, in Amritsar. He killed 400 and wounded at least 1,200. This event, more than any other, caused the loss of the Raj’s legitimacy in Gandhi’s eyes and spurred him and the Congress to direct action.
Having formed an alliance with Mohamed and Shaukat Ali and other Muslim leaders, and convinced that pan-Indian grievances could be solved by the same means he had used in South Africa, Gandhi persuaded the Congress in 1919 to start a movement of non-cooperation with British rule and commerce. He hoped that his bringing together of national and Islamic issues would result in a Hindu–Muslim alliance that would hasten the end of British rule. The secularist Muslim leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah (see chapter 7)—who with Tilak had worked out in 1916 a united constitutional demand for India’s self-government—condemned Gandhi for his “extreme programme,” which “struck the imagination mostly of the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate.” “All this,” Jinnah wrote, “means complete disorganization and chaos.”4 Gandhi nevertheless persisted in his plan, and insisted on strict discipline and non-violence within the first non-cooperation movement. When in 1922 villagers attacked and killed a group of Indian police officers, he held himself personally responsible. Against the advice of his closest advisers in the Congress, he called an immediate halt to the movement, and fasted for five days as penance for his failure to control it.
Although his dramatic program had won widespread support, awakened national pride, and checked the growth of terrorist methods, his plan to unify Hindus and Muslims collapsed with the non-cooperation movement. A rising tide of riots and killings between the two communities followed in the mid- and late 1920s. By 1930, Muslim support had notably declined; but a significant exception to this generalization emerged among Muslims who had joined the organization of the Khudai Khidmatgar (“Servants of God,” but commonly called the Surkh Posh, or “Red Shirts”). Led by Abdul Ghaffar “Badshah” (“King”) Khan (1890–1988), and coming from the Northwest Frontier Province, this surprising brigade of satyagrahis brought more than one hundred thousand fresh Muslim recruits to the civil disobedience campaign in 1930. Badshah Khan was born in Peshawar, an area the British characterized as replete with violent cultural traditions; but this charismatic leader remained devoted to Islam and to Gandhi, as a principled practitioner of satyagraha. The intimate connection between these two dissimilar leaders, who came from such radically different regions and traditions of India, centered on their faith in non-violence. Whereas others who called themselves Gandhians employed satyagraha merely as a tactic of non-cooperation, Badshah Khan adopted it as his creed. When asked decades later to reflect on why he had embraced the independence movement so enthusiastically, he emphasized that it alone joined trustworthy political leadership with a force far more powerful than violence.5 Another exception to separatist trends among Muslims was the support given to the Congress by Deoband ulema led by Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani (see the introduction to chapter 7).
Opposition to Gandhi came not only from among unhappy minority communities, but also from Hindu revivalists, many of whom joined the Hindu Mahasabha (formed in 1915) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (founded in 1925). Although the former did not immediately enter electoral politics and the latter has long held back from direct political involvement, both were shaped by V. D. Savarkar’s formulation of Hindutva (presented in chapter 7 and mentioned in selections from Godse below); both maintained that Hindus must organize and develop physical and military prowess in order to show themselves equal, if not superior, to other Indian communities.
When Gandhi called for a mass satyagraha campaign to protest a new tax on salt, he received considerable support from women, students, and the peasantry in general. More than sixty thousand satyagrahis filled the jails to overflowing. A truce resulted in unprecedented face-to-face talks between Gandhi and the British viceroy. The Conservative M. P. Winston Churchill called these meetings a “nauseating and humiliating spectacle”—that this “seditious fakir” should go “striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy’s palace, there to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”6
Nine months later a new and harsher viceroy jailed the Congress activists again, but Gandhi declared that he would fast to death in prison rather than accept the British plan to separate the voters and candidates of the lowest social group, the Untouchables, from the rest of the caste Hindus in future elections (as the Muslims had been separated since 1909). The news of Gandhi’s resistance stirred sympathy throughout India and the world, and moved some higher-caste Hindus to drop a few of their barriers against the supposedly polluting contact with those whom Gandhi termed harijans (“children of God”). On the fifth day of the fast the British gave in: they accepted a compromise worked out between Gandhi and the Untouchable leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, whose criticisms of Gandhi’s position on caste are presented in this chapter.
All through these years Gandhi was writing articles and letters. Although it was fashionable among some nationalists to denounce the media as imperialist propaganda, Gandhi made use of the press: he published ceaselessly, and attracted Indian and foreign journalists to publicize his cause. He delivered speeches on tours all over India in an effort to educate his countrymen on how to remedy their social, economic, political, and moral ills. Like Rammohan Roy and Sayyid Ahmad Khan, he cherished and made good use of the printing press and the relative freedom from censorship that Britain had brought to India; he founded, raised funds for, and was the main contributor to one weekly newspaper in South Africa (from 1903 to 1915) and four in India (from 1919 to 1948, with interruptions)—two in English and two in Gujarati.
In this sea of writings—now available in the hundred-volume Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi—Gandhi’s favorite words are “truth” and “non-violence.” The latter is clear, but the former complex. “Truth” meant not only factual knowledge but also what Thoreau suggested when he urged living life as a “pilgrimage to truth.” For Gandhi truth was a supreme being toward which every religious or political thought, word, and deed should be oriented. Moreover, he insisted that in this pursuit of truth, means and ends are inextricably interwoven. Selecting traditional values about the power of love and compassion, and combining them with the goal of freedom with justice, he forged an original synthesis of thought from Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Judaic, and Muslim sources. His overriding aim was to attain not merely Indian independence, but also the personal goal of liberation (moksha). The genius of his political thought appeared in his creation of concepts like satyagraha and swaraj (self-rule) to describe emancipation of the self as well as the ideal system of government.7
Gandhi’s political vision was not without challenges, nor was his life free from tragedy. In the 1930s Bengal’s Subhas Chandra Bose and the communist M. N. Roy (both discussed below) argued for their distinctive alternatives to satyagraha. From 1940 to 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his Muslim League pressed successfully for separate states in those areas of British India where Muslims were in the majority. There were severe personal losses as well. In 1942 his chief secretary and closest friend, Mahadev Desai died, just after the British again jailed the entire Congress leadership (which had planned to mount another civil disobedience movement when Japan seemed about to invade India); in 1944, Kasturbai, his wife of sixty-two years, died in prison. After his release from prison, from 1944 to 1947 he tried desperately (though vainly) to halt the division of the subcontinent into the two nations of India and Pakistan. These personal and political crises culminated in 1946 and 1947 when he saw his lifelong dream of harmony between Hindus and Muslims drown in the blood of massive riots and street violence between the two religious communities throughout northern India.
On August 15, 1947, the day a truncated British India finally gained its independence, Gandhi refused to join the ceremonies in New Delhi, remaining instead in Calcutta to continue his efforts to persuade the Muslims and Hindus there to live peacefully together. Two weeks later, as violence revived, an angry Hindu mob smashed its way into the Muslim house where he was staying; Gandhi started fasting the next day, saying “either there will be peace or I shall be dead.”8 Peace came in three days. In January 1948 he fasted successfully again in Delhi to stop Hindu attacks on Muslims and to coerce his own Indian government into payment of large sums of money that were due to Pakistan. He prevailed, extracting both government payment and pledges of peace by leaders of all groups. This enabled him to end his fast; but on January 30, as he was en route to his regular evening prayer meeting, he was shot by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist who believed him too lenient toward India’s Muslims and Pakistan. Godse’s speech at his trial, forcefully defending the assassination by expounding its essential rationale, is excerpted below.
“The light has gone out of our lives,” said Jawaharlal Nehru to the nation. Sarojini Naidu—the distinguished poet who had been Gandhi’s close associate since 1914, had led the salt march after his arrest in 1930, and had served as president of the Indian National Congress—reacted as Gandhi himself might have. When she saw millions mourning his cremation in Delhi, she cried: “What is all this snivelling about? Would you rather he died of decrepit old age or indigestion? This was the only death great enough for him.” Later she reminisced, “Every speaker that spoke about him said, ‘May his spirit rest in peace.’ I said: ‘O my father, do not curse him. Do not let his spirit rest in peace. Let every ash from the funeral pyre be dynamic and create in us a power to fulfill his orders with vigour and follow his example.’”9
In 1909, as Gandhi turned forty, he wrote the first cohesive statement of his thought, entitled Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule. It established his status as a highly original political thinker. He drew unprecedented conceptual connections between the theory of means and ends, power (satyagraha), and freedom (swaraj). The following segments from Hind Swaraj show the importance he attached to the issue of religious harmony: even at this time in South Africa, he deemed urgent the problem of tension between religious communities. From the beginning of his political career, therefore, he made religious freedom and mutual respect central principles. Hind Swaraj is written in the form of a Socratic dialogue between a READER, representing the school of Indian terrorism, and an EDITOR, presenting his own ideas.
READER: But I am impatient to hear your answer to my question. Has the introduction of Mahomedanism not unmade the nation?
EDITOR: India cannot cease to be one nation because people belonging to different religions live in it. The introduction of foreigners does not necessarily destroy the nation, they merge in it. A country is one nation only when such a condition obtains in it. That country must have a faculty for assimilation. India has ever been such a country. In reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals, but those who are conscious of the spirit of nationality do not interfere with one another’s religion. If they do, they are not fit to be considered a nation. If the Hindus believe that India should be peopled only by Hindus, they are living in dreamland. The Hindus, the Mahomedans, the Parsees and the Christians who have made India their country are fellow countrymen and they will have to live in unity if only for their own interest. In no part of the world are one nationality and one religion synonymous terms: nor has it ever been so in India.
[From Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 51–53.]
Gandhi then argued that achieving a truly emancipated India (swaraj in the fullest sense) depended entirely on adopting the right means (satyagraha) to that end:
HOW CAN INDIA BECOME FREE?
READER: I appreciate your views about civilization. I will have to think over them. I cannot take in all at once. What, then, holding the views you do, would you suggest for freeing India?
EDITOR: I do not expect my views to be accepted all of a sudden. My duty is to place them before readers like yourself. Time can be trusted to do the rest. We have already examined the conditions for freeing India, but we have done so indirectly; we will now do so directly. It is a world-known maxim that the removal of the cause of a disease results in the removal of the disease itself. Similarly, if the cause of India’s slavery be removed, India can become free.
READER: If Indian civilization is, as you say, the best of all, how do you account for India’s slavery?
EDITOR: This civilization is unquestionably the best, but it is to be observed that all civilizations have been on their trial. That civilization which is permanent outlives it. Because the sons of India were found wanting, its civilization has been placed in jeopardy. But its strength is to be seen in its ability to survive the shock. Moreover, the whole of India is not touched. Those alone who have been affected by western civilization have become enslaved. We measure the universe by our own miserable foot-rule. When we are slaves, we think that the whole universe is enslaved. Because we are in abject condition, we think that the whole of India is in that condition. As a matter of fact, it is not so, but it is as well to impute our slavery to the whole of India. But if we bear in mind the above fact, we can see that, if we become free, India is free. And in this thought you have a definition of Swaraj. It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands. Do not consider this Swaraj to be like a dream. Here there is no idea of sitting still. The Swaraj that I wish to picture before you and me is such that, after we have once realized it, we will endeavour to the end of our lifetime to persuade others to do likewise. But such Swaraj has to be experienced by each one for himself. One drowning man will never save another. Slaves ourselves, it would be a mere pretension to think of freeing others. Now you will have seen that it is not necessary for us to have as our goal the expulsion of the English. If the English become Indianised, we can accommodate them. If they wish to remain in India along with their civilization, there is no room for them. It lies with us to bring about such a state of things.
READER: It is impossible that Englishmen should ever become Indianised.
EDITOR: To say that is equivalent to saying that the English have no humanity in them. And it is really beside the point whether they become so or not. If we keep our own house in order, only those who are fit to live in it will remain, others will leave of their own accord. Such things occur within the experience of all of us.
READER: But it has not occurred in history.
EDITOR: To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man. At any rate, it behooves us to try what appeals to our reason. All countries are not similarly conditioned. The condition of India is unique. Its strength is immeasurable. We need not, therefore, refer to the history of other countries. I have drawn attention to the fact that, when other civilizations have succumbed the Indian has survived many a shock.
READER: I cannot follow this. There seems little doubt that we shall have to expel the English by force of arms. So long as they are in the country, we cannot rest. One of our poets says that slaves cannot even dream of happiness. We are day by day becoming weakened owing to the presence of the English. Our greatness is gone; our people look like terrified men. The English are in the country like a blight which we must remove by every means.
EDITOR: In your excitement, you have forgotten all we have been considering. We brought the English, and we keep them. Why do you forget that our adoption of their civilization makes their presence in India at all possible? Your hatred against them ought to be transferred to their civilisation. But let us assume that we have to drive away the English by fighting, how is that to be done?
READER: In the same way as Italy did it. …
ITALY AND INDIA
EDITOR: India can fight like Italy only when she has arms. You have not considered this problem at all. The English are splendidly armed; that does not frighten me, but it is clear that, to pit ourselves against them in arms, thousands of Indians must be armed. If such a thing be possible, how many years will it take? Moreover, to arm India on a large scale is to Europeanise it. Then her condition will be just as pitiable as that of Europe. This means, in short, that India must accept European civilization, and, if that is what we want, the best thing is that we have among us those who are so well trained in that civilization. We will then fight for a few rights, will get what we can, and so pass our days. But the fact is that the Indian nation will not adopt arms, and it is well that it does not.
READER: You are over-assuming facts. All need not be armed. At f rst, we will assassinate a few Englishmen and strike terror; then, a few men who will have been armed will fight openly. We may have to lose a quarter of a million men, more or less, but we will regain our land. We will undertake guerrilla warfare, and defeat the English.
EDITOR: That is to say, you want to make the holy land of India unholy. Do you not tremble to think of freeing India by assassination? What we need to do is sacrifice ourselves. It is a cowardly thought, that of killing others. Whom do you suppose to free by assassination? The millions of India do not desire it. Those who are intoxicated by the wretched modern civilization think these things. Those who will rise to power by murder will certainly not make the nation happy. Those who believe that India has gained by Dhingra’s10 act and such other acts in India make a serious mistake. Dhingra was a patriot, but his love was blind. He gave his body in a wrong way; its ultimate result can only be mischievous.
READER: But you will admit that the English have been frightened by these murders, and that Lord Morley’s reforms are due to fear.
EDITOR: The English are both a timid and a brave nation. She is, I believe, easily influenced by the use of gunpowder. It is possible that Lord Morley has granted the reforms through fear but what is granted under fear can be retained only so long as the fear lasts.
BRUTE FORCE
READER: This is a new doctrine: that what is gained through fear is retained only while the fear lasts. Surely, what is given will not be withdrawn?
EDITOR: Not so. The Proclamation of 1857 was given at the end of a revolt, and for the purpose of preserving peace. When peace was secured and people became simple-minded, its full effect was toned down. If I ceased stealing for fear of punishment, I would recommence the operation as soon as the fear is withdrawn from me. This is almost a universal experience. We have assumed that we can get men to do things by force and, therefore, we use force.
READER: Will you not admit that you are arguing against yourself? You know that what the English obtained in their own country they have obtained by using brute force. I know you have argued that what they have obtained is useless, but that does not affect my argument. They wanted useless things, and they got them. My point is that their desire was fulfilled. What does it matter what means they adopted? Why should we not obtain our goal, which is good, by any means whatsoever, even by using violence? Shall I think of the means when I have to deal with a thief in the house? My duty is to drive him out anyhow. You seem to admit that we have received nothing, and that we shall receive nothing by petitioning. Why, then, may we not do so by using brute force? And, to retain what we may receive, we shall keep up the fear by using the same force to the extent that it may be necessary. You will not find fault with a continuance of force to prevent a child from thrusting its foot into fire? Somehow or other, we have to gain our end.
EDITOR: Your reasoning is plausible. It has deluded many. I have used similar arguments before now. But I think I know better now, and I shall endeavor to undeceive you. Let us first take the argument that we are justified in gaining our end by using brute force, because the English gained theirs by using similar means. It is perfectly true that they used brute force, and that it is possible for us to do likewise, but, by using similar means, we can get only the same thing that they got. You will admit that we do not want that. Your belief that there is no connection between the means and the end is a great mistake. Through that mistake even men who have been considered religious have committed grievous crimes. Your reasoning is the same as saying that we can get a rose through planting a noxious weed. If I want to cross the ocean, I can do so only by means of a vessel; if I were to use a cart for that purpose, both the cart and I would soon find the bottom. “As is the God, so is the votary” is a maxim worth considering. Its meaning has been distorted, and men have gone astray. The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. I am not likely to obtain the result flowing from the worship of God by laying myself prostrate before Satan. If, therefore, anyone were to say: “I want to worship God, it does not matter that I do so by means of Satan” it would be set down as ignorant folly. We reap exactly as we sow.
[From Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, 66–81.]
Once Gandhi returned to India and, after 1919, climbed to political power, he kept his principle of purity of means prominent, as evidenced in this exchange with his chief rival, B. G. Tilak (see chapter 5).
For as [Indian National Congress] party formation progresses, we suppose it would be considered quite the proper thing for party leaders to use others as tools. … L. [=Lokamanya, “admired by the people”] Tilak represents a definite school of thought of which he makes no secret. He considers that everything is fair in politics. We have joined issue with him in that conception of political life. We consider that political life of the country will become thoroughly corrupt if we import Western tactics and methods. We believe that nothing but the strictest adherence to honesty, fairplay and charity can advance the true interests of the country.
[Complete Works of Mahatma Gandhi [CWMG] (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1961), 6:484.]
On January 18, 1920, Tilak replied from Poona in a letter which Gandhi duly published.
I am sorry to see that in your article on “Reforms Resolution” in the last issue, you have represented me as holding that I considered “everything fair in politics.” I write this to you to say that my view is not correctly represented therein. Politics is a game of worldly people and not of sadhus, and instead of the maxim “Overcome anger by loving kindness, evil by good” as preached by Buddha, I prefer to rely on the maxim of Shri Krishna “In whatsoever way any come to me, in that same way I grant them favor.” That explains the whole difference and also the meaning of my phrase “responsive cooperation.” Both methods are equally honest and righteous but the one is more suited to this world than the other. Any further explanation about the difference will be found in my Gita Rahasya.
[CWMG 16:490–491.]
Gandhi then concluded the correspondence with this rejoinder.
I naturally feel the greatest diffidence about joining issue with the Lokamanya in matters involving questions of interpretation of religious works. But there are things in or about which instinct transcends even interpretation. For me there is no conflict between the two texts quoted by the Lokamanya. The Buddhist text lays down an eternal principle. The text from the Bhagavad Gita shows to me how the principle of conquering hate by love, untruth by truth, can and must be applied. If it be true that God metes out the same measure to us that we mete out to others, it follows that if we would escape condign [appropriate] punishment, we may not return anger but gentleness even against anger. And this is the law not for the unworldly but essentially for the worldly. With deference to the Lokamanya, I venture to say that it betrays mental laziness to think that the world is not for sadhus. The epitome of all religions is to promote purushartha, and purushartha is nothing but a desperate attempt to become sadhu, i.e., to become a gentleman in every sense of the term.
Finally, when I wrote the sentence about “everything being fair in politics” according to Lokamanya’s creed, I had in mind his oft-repeated quotation “evil unto evil.”
To me it enunciates bad law. And I shall not despair of the Lokamanya with all his acumen agreeably surprising India one day with a philosophical dissertation proving the falsity of the doctrine. In any case I pit the experience of a third of a century against the doctrine underlying “evil unto evil.” The true law is “truth even unto evil.”
[CWMG 16:490–491.]
Still later, in July 1921—shortly after Tilak died and the Mahatma’s leadership of the Congress was secure—Gandhi was at pains to emphasize, “I am conscious that my method is not Mr. Tilak’s method.”11
The country’s condition was dramatically transformed in the spring of 1919 when, under Gandhi’s leadership, a mass movement was born. From April 6, 1919, when “Satyagraha Day” was observed throughout India to initiate non-violent action, to August 1, 1920, when a second stage of non-cooperation began with his announcing a systematic and more prolonged attack, Gandhi’s method was tested. Most surprising was how the villages of India were mobilized through an unprecedented combination of leadership, ideology, and organization. Gandhi’s achievement at the helm of the Congress understandably alarmed the British authorities, both in England and in India. A committee chaired by Lord Hunter was appointed to investigate the “disorders.” Included here is a sampling of Gandhi’s testimony before this committee, which he gave on January 8, 1920, two years before he was arrested for sedition and imprisoned in March 1922. His defense indicates how firmly he feels that he has captured the moral high ground of the struggle. His critique of passive resistance probably refers to the disobedience strategy of Aurobindo Ghose (see chapter 5, above); Gandhi associated passive resistance with internal violence—what he called duragraha (holding on to one’s selfish, narrow interest rather than to truth and the common interest).
By the President [Lord Hunter presiding]:
Q. Mr. Gandhi, we have been informed that you are the author of the satyagraha movement?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. I would like you to give us an explanation of what that movement is.
[A.] It is a movement intended to replace methods of violence. It is a movement based entirely on truth. It is, as I have conceived it, an extension of the domestic law on the political field, and my own experience has led me to the conclusion that that movement and that movement alone can rid India of the possibilities of violence spreading throughout the length and breadth of the land for the redress of grievances, supposed or real. …
For the past thirty years I have been preaching and practicing satyagraha. The principles of satyagraha, as I know it today, constitute a gradual evolution.
Satyagraha differs from passive resistance [e.g., duragraha] as North Pole from South. The latter has been conceived as a weapon of the weak and does not exclude the use of physical force or violence for the purpose of gaining one’s end, whereas the former has been conceived as a weapon of the strongest and excludes the use of violence in any shape or form.
The term “satyagraha” was coined by me in South Africa to express the force that the Indians there used for full eight years and it was coined in order to distinguish it from the movement then going on in the United Kingdom and South Africa under the name of passive resistance.
Its root meaning is holding on to truth, hence truth-force. I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self.
But on the political field, the struggle on behalf of the people mostly consists in opposing error in the shape of unjust laws. When you have failed to bring the error home to the law-giver by way of petitions and the like, the only remedy open to you, if you do not wish to submit to error, is to compel him by physical force to yield to you or by suffering in your own person by inviting the penalty for the breach of the law. Hence satyagraha largely appears to the public as civil disobedience or civil resistance. It is civil in the sense that it is not criminal.
The law-breaker breaks the law surreptitiously and tries to avoid the penalty; not so the civil resister. He ever obeys the laws of the State to which he belongs not out of fear of the sanctions but because he considers them to be good for the welfare of society. But there come occasions, generally rare, when he considers certain laws to be so unjust as to render obedience to them a dishonour. He then openly and civilly breaks them and quietly suffers the penalty for their breach. And in order to register his protest against the action of the law-givers, it is open to him to withdraw his cooperation from the State by disobeying such other laws whose breach does not involve moral turpitude.
In my opinion, the beauty and efficacy of satyagraha are so great and the doctrine so simple that it can be preached even to children. It was preached by me to thousands of men, women and children commonly called indentured Indians, with excellent results.
When the Rowlatt Bills were published I felt that they were so restrictive of human liberty that they must be resisted to the utmost. I observed too that the opposition to them was universal among Indians. I submit that no State however despotic has the right to enact laws which are repugnant to the whole body of the people, much less a government guided by constitutional usage and precedent such as the Indian Government. I felt too that the oncoming agitation needed a definite direction if it was neither to collapse nor to run into violent channels.
I ventured therefore to present satyagraha to the country emphasizing its civil resistance aspect. And as it is purely an inward and purifying movement, I suggested the observance of fast, prayer and suspension of all work for one day—the 6th of April. There was a magnificent response throughout the length and breadth of India, even in little villages, although there was no organization and no great previous preparation. The idea was given to the public as soon as it was conceived. On the 6th April there was no violence used by the people and no collision with the police worth naming. The hartal [strike] was purely voluntary and spontaneous. I attach hereto the letter in which the idea was announced. [ Gandhi submits his letter of March 23, 1919, as evidence.]
[CWMG 16:368–370, 378.]
Lord Hunter continued his questioning.
Q. I do not wish to give you advice Mr. Gandhi, I know that you would not take it, if I did. But this satyagraha is a rather dangerous campaign.
[A.] I wish I could disabuse the Committee really of this attitude that it is a dangerous campaign. If you will conceive the campaign as designed in order to rid the country of the school of violence, then you will share the same concern that I have that, at any cost, a movement of this character should remain in the country and purify it certainly. …
Q. If an honest opponent differs from your view, you cannot expect to satisfy him of the rightness of your cause all of a sudden. You must do so by degrees?
[A.] Yes.
Q. Is not refusing to obey that or any other law you choose to select a rather drastic way of attempting to do that?
[A.] I respectfully differ. When I find that even my father has imposed upon me a law which is repugnant to my conscience, I think it is the least drastic course that I adopt by respectfully telling him, “Father, I cannot obey this.” I do nothing but justice to my father when I do that. … If it is not wrong for me to say so to my father, there is nothing wrong for me to say so to a friend or to a Government. …
Q. Do you not create a condition of very great danger to peace and order?
[A.] On the contrary, I promote peace. And I have done it myself on the 6th of April, because I was there in Bombay, and there was some fear of people themselves offering violence. And I am here to tell you that no violence, no real violence was offered by the people, because people were being told the true nature of satyagraha. It was an amazing sight for me to see thousands of people behaving in a perfectly peaceful manner. That would not have been the case if the satyagraha doctrine had not been preached in the right key. It all depends on the doctrine of satyagraha or the doctrine of hate in the form of satyagraha.12 But to enforce satyagraha and call upon those who are engaged in hartal to break the law is a different application and it is that which I am trying to distinguish. …
Q. Subsequently to your arrest, very unfortunately serious incidents occurred in Delhi and the Punjab and also in Ahmedabad here? The only matter we have got to deal with here is as regards Ahmedabad itself. …
[A.] I would venture to present this thing in connection with these riots. I consider that the action of this mob, whether in Ahmedabad or in Viramgam, was totally unjustified, and I have thought that it was a very sad thing that they lost self-control.13 I do not wish to offer the slightest defense for the acts of the mob, but at the same time I would like to say that the people amongst whom, rightly or wrongly, I was popular were put to such severe stress by Government who should have known better. I think the Government committed an unpardonable error of judgment and the mob committed a similar unpardonable error, but more unpardonable on the part of the mob than on the part of the Government. I wish to say that also as a satyagrahi, I cannot find a single thing done by the mob which I can defend or justify. No amount of provocation, however great, could justify people from doing as they have done. It has been suggested to me that all those who did it were not satyagrahis. That is true. But they chose to take part in the satyagraha movement and came under the satyagraha discipline. These were the terms in which I have spoken to the people; and it gives me the greatest pleasure and also pain to declare my settled conviction before this Committee also. I have said this elsewhere. I would proceed further with what I have come to know. …
As soon as I came here I endeavoured to do what I was capable of doing in order to repair the mischief and the error, as I sensed at the time. …
Q. With regard to your satyagraha doctrine, as far as I am able to understand it, it involves a pursuit of truth?
[A.] Yes.
Q. And in the pursuit of truth to invite suffering on oneself and not to cause violence to anybody else?
[A.] Yes.
Q. That I understand is the main principle underlying?
[A.] That is so.
Q. Now in that doctrine, who is to determine the truth? That individual himself?
[A.] Yes, that individual himself.
Q. So each one that adopts this doctrine has to determine for himself what is the truth that he will pursue?
[A.] Most decidedly.
Q. And in doing that different individuals will take very different views as to what is the truth to be pursued?
[A.] Certainly.
Q. It might, on that footing, cause considerable confusion?
[A.] I won’t accept that. It need not lead to any confusion if you accept the proposition that a man is honestly in search after truth and that he will never inflict violence upon him who holds to truth. Then there is no possibility of confusion.
Q. A man may honestly strive after truth, but however honestly a man may strive, his notions of truth will be quite different from the notions of truth of some other people or his intellectual equipment may be of such a character that his conclusion as regards truth may be entirely opposite to the conclusion of somebody else?
[A.] That was precisely the reason why in answer to Lord Hunter I suggested that non-violence was the necessary corollary to the acceptance of satyagraha doctrine. …
Had the Government, in an unwise manner, not prevented me from entering Delhi and so compelled me to disobey their orders, I feel certain that Ahmedabad and Viramgam would have remained free from the horrors of the last week. In other words, satyagraha has neither been the cause nor the occasion of the upheaval. If anything, the presence of satyagrahis has acted as a check, ever so light, upon the previously existing lawless elements. … I would be untrue to satyagraha if I allowed it, by any action of mine, to be used as an occasion for feeding violence, for embittering the relations between the English and the Indians. Our satyagraha must, therefore, now consist in ceaselessly helping the authorities in all the ways available to us as satyagrahis to restore order and to curb lawlessness. We can turn the tragedies going on before us to good account, if we could but succeed in gaining the adherence of the masses to the fundamental principles of satyagraha.
Satyagraha is like a banian-tree with innumerable branches. Civil disobedience is one such branch. Satya (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence) together make the parent trunk from which all the innumerable branches shoot out. We have found by bitter experience that, whilst in an atmosphere of lawlessness, civil disobedience found ready acceptance. Satya (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence), from which alone civil disobedience can worthily spring, have commanded little or no respect. Ours then is a Herculean task, but we may not shirk it. We must fearlessly spread the doctrine of satya and ahimsa, and then and not till then shall we be able to undertake mass-satyagraha. My attitude towards the Rowlatt legislation remains unchanged.
[CWMG 16:381, 383, 387, 389–390, 408–409, 426–427.]
In February 1922, after a group claiming to be Gandhians burned and hacked to death a group of Indian police officers in a small town named Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh, Gandhi suspended the movement, judging that India was not yet ready to meet the standards of satyagraha he imposed. He immediately explained his reasons to the country.
God has been abundantly kind to me. He has warned me [again] that there is not as yet in India that truthful and non-violent atmosphere which and which alone can justify mass disobedience which can be at all described as civil, which means gentle, truthful, humble, knowing, wilful yet loving, never criminal and hateful. …
God spoke clearly through Chauri Chaura. I understand that the constables who were so brutally hacked to death had given much provocation. They had even gone back upon the word just given by the Inspector that [protestors] would not be molested, but when the procession had passed the stragglers were interfered with and abused by the constables. The former cried out for help. The mob returned. The constables opened fire. The little ammunition they had was exhausted and they retired to the Thana [police station] for safety. The mob, my informant tells me, therefore set fire to the Thana. The self-imprisoned constables had to come out for dear life and as they did so, they were hacked to pieces and the mangled remains were thrown into the raging flames.
It is claimed that no non-co-operation volunteer had a hand in the brutality and that the mob had not only the immediate provocation but they had also general knowledge of the high-handed tyranny of the police in that district. No provocation can possibly justify the brutal murder of men who had been rendered defenseless and who had virtually thrown themselves on the mercy of the mob. And when India claims to be non-violent and hopes to mount the throne of Liberty through non-violent means, mob-violence even in answer to grave provocation is a bad augury. … Non-violent attainment of self-government presupposes a non-violent control over the violent elements in the country. Non-violent non-co-operators can only succeed when they have succeeded in attaining control over the hooligans of India, in other words, when the latter also have learned patriotically or religiously to refrain from their violent activities at least whilst the campaign of non-co-operation is going on. The tragedy of Chauri Chaura, therefore, roused me thoroughly. …
I put my doubts and troubles before the Working Committee and other associates whom I found near me. They did not all agree with me at first. Some of them probably do not even now agree with me. But never has a man been blessed, perhaps, with colleagues and associates so considerate and forgiving as I have. They understood my difficulty and patiently followed my argument. The result is before the public in the shape of the resolutions of the Working Committee. The drastic reversal of practically the whole of the aggressive programme may be politically unsound and unwise, but there is no doubt that it is religiously sound, and I venture to assure the doubters that the country will have gained by my humiliation and confession of error.
The only virtue I want to claim is Truth and Non-Violence. I lay no claim to superhuman powers. I want none. I wear the same corruptible flesh that the weakest of my fellow beings wears and am therefore as liable to err as any. My services have many limitations, but God has up to now blessed them in spite of the imperfections.
For, confession of error is like a broom that sweeps away dirt and leaves the surface cleaner than before, I feel stronger for my confession. And the cause must prosper for the retracing. Never has man reached his destination by persistence in deviation from the straight path. …
I am in the unhappy position of a surgeon proved skill-less to deal with an admittedly dangerous case. I must either abdicate or acquire greater skill. …
All fasting and all penance must as far as possible be secret. But my fasting is both a penance and a punishment, and a punishment has to be public. It is penance for me and punishment for those whom I try to serve, for whom I love to live and would equally love to die. They have unintentionally sinned against the laws of the Congress though they were sympathizers if not actually connected with it. Probably they hacked the constables—their countrymen and fellow beings—with my name on their lips. The only way love punishes is by suffering. I cannot even wish them to be arrested. But I would let them know that I would suffer for their breach of the Congress creed. I would advise those who feel guilty and repentant to hand themselves voluntarily to the Government for punishment and make a clean confession. I hope that the workers in the Gorakhpur district will leave no stone unturned to find out the evil-doers and urge them to deliver themselves into custody. But whether the murderers accept my advice or not, I would like them to know that they have seriously interfered with swaraj operations, that in being the cause of the postponement of the movement in Bardoli, they have injured the very cause they probably intended to serve. I would like them to know, too, that this movement is not a cloak or a preparation for violence. I would, at any rate, suffer every humiliation, every torture, absolute ostracism and death itself to prevent the movement from becoming violent or a precursor of violence. I make my penance public also because I am now denying myself the opportunity of sharing their lot with the prisoners. The immediate issue has again shifted. We can no longer press for the withdrawal of notifications or discharge of prisoners. They and we must suffer for the crime of Chauri Chaura. The incident proves, whether we wish it or no, the unity of life. … By strict discipline and purification we regain the moral confidence required. …
[CWMG 22:415, 416–417, 419, 420–421.]
On March 18, 1922, Gandhi was formally charged in a British court with exciting or attempting to excite disaffection toward His Majesty’s Government through his satyagraha movement. To this Gandhi readily pleaded guilty; he gave the following testimony to his support his position.
It is the most painful duty with me, but I have to discharge that duty knowing the responsibility that rests upon me, and I wish to endorse all the blame that the learned Advocate-General has thrown on my shoulders in connection with the Bombay, the Madras and the Chauri Chaura occurrences. Thinking over these deeply and sleeping over them night after night, it is impossible to dissociate myself from the diabolical crimes of Chauri Chaura or the mad outrages in Bombay and Madras. He is quite right when he says that, as a man of responsibility, a man having received a fair share of education, having had a fair share of experience of this world, I should know the consequences of every one of my acts. I knew that I was playing with fire. I ran the risk and, if I was set free, I would still do the same. I know that I was feeling it so every day and I have felt it also this morning that I would have failed in my duty if I did not say what I said here just now.
I wanted to avoid violence. I want to avoid violence. Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered had done an irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad; I am deeply sorry for it. I am, therefore, here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not ask for any extenuating act of clemency. I am here to invite and cheerfully submit 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. The only course open to you, the Judge, is as I am just going to say in my statement, either to resign your post, or inflict on me the severest penalty, if you believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this country and that my activity is therefore injurious to the public weal. I do not expect that kind of conversion, but by the time I have finished with my statement, you will, perhaps, have a glimpse of what is raging within my breast to run this maddest risk that a sane man can run.
STATEMENT
I owe it perhaps to the Indian public and to the public in England, to placate which this prosecution is mainly taken up, that I should explain why, from a staunch loyalist and co-operator, I have become an uncompromising disaffectionist and non-co-operator. To the Court, too, I should say why I plead guilty to the charge of promoting disaffection towards the Government established by law in India.
My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and an Indian I had no rights. More correctly, I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian.
But I was not baffled. I thought that this treatment of Indians was an excrescence upon a system that was intrinsically and mainly good. I gave the Government my voluntary and hearty co-operation, criticizing it freely where I felt it was faulty, but never wishing its destruction. Consequently, when the existence of the Empire was threatened in 1899 by the Boer challenge, I offered my services to it, raised a volunteer ambulance corps and served at several actions that took place for the relief of Ladysmith. Similarly in 1906, at the time of the Zulu revolt, I raised a stretcher-bearer party and served till the end of the rebellion. …
In all these efforts at service, I was actuated by the belief that it was possible by such services to gain a status of full equality in the Empire of my countrymen.
The first shock came in the shape of the Rowlatt Act, a law designed to rob the people of all real freedom. I felt called upon to lead an intensive agitation against it. Then followed the Punjab horrors beginning with the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh [on April 13, 1919 in Amritsar] and culminating in crawling orders, public floggings and other indescribable humiliations. …
I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection had made India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and economically. …
Little do town-dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of India are slowly sinking to lifelessness. Little do they know that their miserable comfort represents the brokerage they get for the work they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and the brokerage are sucked from the masses. Little do they realize that the Government established by law in British India is carried on for this exploitation of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye. I have no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town-dwellers of India will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against humanity which is perhaps unequalled in history. The law itself in this country has been used to serve the foreign exploiter. My unbiassed examination of the Punjab Martial Law cases has led me to believe that at least ninety-five per cent of convictions were wholly bad. My experience of political cases in India leads one to the conclusion that in nine out of every ten cases the condemned men were totally innocent. Their crime consisted in the love of their country. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, justice has been denied to Indians as against Europeans in the Courts of India. This is not an exaggerated picture. It is the experience of almost every Indian who has had anything to do with such cases. In my opinion, the administration of the law is thus prostituted consciously or unconsciously for the benefit of the exploiter.
The greatest misfortune is that Englishmen and their Indian associates in the administration of the country do not know that they are engaged in the crime I have attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many English and Indian officials honestly believe that they are administering one of the best systems devised in the world and that India is making steady though slow progress. They do not know that a subtle but effective system of terrorism and an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all powers of retaliation or self-defence on the other, have emasculated the people and induced in them the habit of simulation. This awful habit has added to the ignorance and the self-deception of the administration. Section 124A under which I am happily charged is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. … I have no personal ill will against any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection towards the King’s person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system. …
In fact, I believe that I have rendered a service to India and England by showing in non-co-operation the way out of the unnatural state in which both are living. In my humble opinion, non-co-operation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with good. But, in the past, non-co-operation has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evil-doer. I am endeavouring to show to my countrymen that violent non-co-operation only multiplies evil and that, as evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence. Non-violence implies voluntary submission to the penalty for non-co-operation with evil. I am here, therefore, 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.
[CWMG 23:114–115, 116, 117–119.]
What follows are first the judgment by Justice R. S. Broomfield, and then Gandhi’s response.
Justice Broomfield: Mr. Gandhi, you have made my task easy in one way by pleading guilty to the charge. Nevertheless what remains, namely, the determination of a just sentence, is perhaps as difficult a proposition as a judge in this country could have to face. The law is no respecter of persons. Nevertheless, it will be impossible to ignore the fact that you are in a different category from any person I have ever tried or am likely to have to try. It would be impossible to ignore the fact that, in the eyes of millions of your countrymen, you are a great patriot and a great leader. Even those who differ from you in politics look upon you as a man of high ideals and of noble and of even saintly life. I have to deal with you in one character only. It is not my duty and I do not presume to judge or criticize you in any other character. It is my duty to judge you as a man subject to the law, who has by his own admission broken the law and committed what to an ordinary man must appear to be grave offences against the State. I do not forget that you have constantly preached against violence and that you have on many occasions, as I am willing to believe, done much to prevent violence, but having regard to the nature of your political teaching and the nature of many of those to whom it is addressed, how you could have continued to believe that violence would not be the inevitable consequence it passes my capacity to understand. …
Gandhi: … So far as the sentence itself is concerned, I certainly consider that it is as light as any judge would inflict on me, and so far as the whole proceedings are concerned, I must say that I could not have expected greater courtesy.
[CWMG 23:119, 120.]
Gandhi was in prison from 1922 to 1924. After his release, he concentrated on the program of social reforms that he called “constructive work” and swadeshi. This “constructive work” sought to achieve Hindu–Muslim unity, the abolition of Untouchability, women’s equality, and the uplift of villages, especially through the improvement of handicraft industries like spinning and weaving of cotton cloth (khadi). These social reforms, he insisted, were prerequisites for swaraj.
Two years ago, a Mussalman friend said to me in all sincerity, “I do not believe [in] your non-violence. At least, I would not have my Mussalmans to learn it. Violence is the law of life. I would not have swaraj by non-violence as you define the latter. I must hate my enemy.” This friend is an honest man. I entertain great regard for him. Much the same has been reported of another very great Mussalman friend of mine. The report may be untrue, but the reporter himself is not an untrue man. …
Nor is this repugnance to non-violence confined to Mussalmans. Hindu friends have said the same thing, if possible, with greater vehemence. My claim to Hinduism has been rejected by some, because I believe [in] and advance non-violence in its extreme form. They say that I am a Christian in disguise. I have been even seriously told that I am distorting the meaning of the Gita when I ascribe to that great poem the teaching of unadulterated non-violence. Some of my Hindu friends tell me that killing is a duty enjoined by the Gita under certain circumstances. A very learned Shastri only the other day scornfully rejected my interpretation of the Gita and said that there was no warrant for the opinion held by some commentators that the Gita represented the eternal duel between forces of evil and good, and inculcated the duty of eradicating evil within us without hesitation, without tenderness.
I state these opinions against non-violence in detail, because it is necessary to understand them if we would understand the solution I have to offer. What I see around me today is, therefore, a reaction against the spread of non-violence. I feel the wave of violence coming. The Hindu–Muslim tension is an acute phase of this tiredness. …
My religion is a matter solely between my Maker and myself. If I am a Hindu, I cannot cease to be one even though I may be disowned by the whole of the Hindu population. I do, however, suggest that non-violence is the end of all religions. …
But I have never presented to India that extreme form of non-violence, if only because I do not regard myself fit enough to re-deliver that ancient message. Though my intellect has fully understood and grasped it, it has not as yet become part of my whole being. My strength lies in my asking people to do nothing that I have not tried repeatedly in my own life. I am then asking my countrymen today to adopt non-violence as their final creed, only for the purpose of regulating the relations between the different races, and for purpose of attaining swaraj. Hindus and Mussalmans, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis must not settle their differences by resort to violence, and the means for the attainment of swaraj must be non-violent. This I venture to place before India, not as a weapon of the weak, but of the strong. Hindus and Mussalmans prate about no compulsion in religion. What is it but compulsion if Hindus will kill a Mussalman for saving a cow? It is like wanting to convert a Mussalman to Hinduism by force. And similarly, what is it but compulsion if Mussalmans seek to prevent by force Hindus from playing music before mosques? Virtue lies in being absorbed in one’s prayers in the presence of din and noise. We shall both be voted irreligious savages by posterity if we continue to make a futile attempt to compel one another to respect our religious wishes. Again, a nation of three hundred million people should be ashamed to have to resort to force to bring to book one hundred thousand Englishmen. To convert them or, if you will, even to drive them out of the country, we need, not force of arms, but force of will. If we have not the latter, we shall never get the former. If we develop the force of will, we shall find that we do not need the force of arms. …
It must be common cause between the two communities that neither party shall take the law into its own hands, but that all points in dispute, wherever and whenever they arise, shall be decided by reference either to private arbitration, or to the law courts if they wish. This is the whole meaning of non-violence, so far as communal matters are concerned. To put it another way, just as we do not break one another’s heads in respect of civil matters, so may we not do even in respect of religious matters. This is the only pact that is immediately necessary between the parties, and I am sure that everything else will follow.
[CWMG 24:139–141.]
On June 12, 1924, Gandhi was asked to explain why he felt there to be a necessarily inverse relationship between the evil of Untouchability and the establishment of political independence, or swaraj, and why he was adamant that without the removal of Untouchability there would be no freedom.
I abhor with my whole soul the system which has reduced a large number of Hindus to a level less than that of beasts. The vexed problem would be solved if the poor Panchama, not to use the word “untouchable,” was allowed to mind his own business. Unfortunately, he has no mind or business he can call his own. Has a beast any mind or business but that of his master’s? Has a Panchama a place he can call his own? He may not walk on the very roads he cleans and pays for by the sweat of his brow. He may not even dress as the others do. The correspondent talks of toleration. It is an abuse of language to say that we Hindus extend any toleration towards our Panchama brothers. We have degraded them and then have the audacity to use their very degradation against their rise.
Swaraj for me means freedom for the meanest of our countrymen. If the lot of the Panchama is not improved when we are all suffering, it is not likely to be better under the intoxication of swaraj. If it is necessary for us to buy peace with the Mussalmans as a condition of swaraj, it is equally necessary for us to give peace to the Panchama before we can, with any show of justice or self-respect, talk of swaraj. I am not interested in freeing India merely from the English yoke. I am bent upon freeing India from any yoke whatsoever. I have no desire to exchange King Log for King Stork. Hence for me the movement of swaraj is a movement of self-purification.
[CWMG 24:226–227.]
Three years earlier, on January 19, 1921, Gandhi had spoken on the same theme.
It is well that the National [A]ssembly passed the resolution stating that the removal of this blot on Hinduism was necessary for the attainment of swaraj. The devil succeeds only by receiving help from his fellows. He always takes advantage of the weakest spots in our natures in order to gain mastery over us. Even so does the Government retain its control over us through our weaknesses or vices. And if we would render ourselves proof against its machinations we must remove our weaknesses. It is for that reason that I have called non-co-operation a process of purification. As soon as that process is completed, this Government must fall to pieces for want of the necessary environment, just as mosquitoes cease to haunt a place whose cesspools are filled up and dried.
Has not a just Nemesis overtaken us for the crime of untouchability? Have we not reaped as we have sown? Have we not practised Dyerism and O’Dwyerism on our own kith and kin? We have segregated the “pariah” and we are in turn segregated in the British Colonies. We deny him the use of public wells; we throw the leavings of our plates at him. His very shadow pollutes us. Indeed there is no charge that the “pariah” cannot fling in our faces and which we do not fling in the faces of Englishmen.
How is this blot on Hinduism to be removed? “Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you.” I have often told English officials that, if they are friends and servants of India, they should come down from their pedestal, cease to be patrons, demonstrate by their loving deeds that they are in every respect our friends, and believe us to be equals in the same sense they believe fellow-Englishmen to be their equals. After the experiences of the Punjab and the Khilafat, I have gone a step further and asked them to repent and to change their hearts. Even so it is necessary for us Hindus to repent of the wrong we have done, to alter our behaviour towards those whom we have “suppressed” by a system as devilish as we believe the English system of the Government of India to be. We must not throw a few miserable schools at them: we must not adopt the air of superiority towards them. We must treat them as our blood-brothers as they are in fact. We must return to them the inheritance of which we have robbed them. And this must not be the act of a few English-knowing reformers merely, but it must be a conscious voluntary effort on the part of the masses. We may not wait till eternity for this much belated reformation. We must aim at bringing it about within this year of grace, probation, preparation and tapasya [discipline]. It is a reform not to follow swaraj but to precede it.
Untouchability is not a sanction of religion, it is a device of Satan. The devil has always quoted scriptures. But scriptures cannot transcend reason and truth. They are intended to purify reason and illuminate truth. I am not going to burn a spotless horse because the Vedas are reported to have advised, tolerated, or sanctioned the sacrifice. For me the Vedas are divine and unwritten. “The letter killeth.” It is the spirit that giveth the light. And the spirit of the Vedas is purity, truth, innocence, chastity, humility, simplicity, forgiveness, godliness, and all that makes a man or woman noble and brave. There is neither nobility nor bravery in treating the great and uncomplaining scavengers of the nation as worse than dogs to be despised and spat upon. Would that God gave us the strength and the wisdom to become voluntary scavengers of the nation as the “suppressed” classes are forced to be. There are Augean stables enough and to spare for us to clean.
[CWMG 19:242–243.]
Gandhi consistently featured the “uplift of women” in his program of social reforms. The political advantages of this emphasis became painfully obvious to the British government when women began to participate actively in civil disobedience campaigns. But the aim of women’s emancipation was part of a broader effort that went beyond politics. Gandhi believed that at every level of national development, the country must draw on the energy and ability of its female population. He had begun his cause in South Africa, arguing as early as 1907 for women’s education. “Indian men,” he declared then, “have deliberately kept their women backward,” and “if this state of affairs continues, India will remain in its present abominable condition even if she were to secure all her rights from the British Government”14. Thirty years later, after mobilizing millions of women as non-violent resisters in successive satyagrahas, Gandhi spoke before the All-India Women’s Conference, declaring that swaraj and “the progress of India in all directions [are] impossible” without the advancement of women: “When woman whom we call abala [weak] becomes sabala [strong], all those who are helpless will become powerful.”15 The first entry that follows, “Untouchability, Women, and Swaraj,” indicates the connections in Gandhi’s thought among essential social reforms and the dependence of swaraj on “inward growth.” The second passage is an excerpt of a speech delivered at the Bhagini Society of Bombay, in February 1918.
The question of breaking down the feminine prejudice is most difficult. It is in reality a question of female education. And in this it is a question not merely of education of girls but it is one of the education of married women. I have therefore repeatedly suggested that every patriotic husband should become the wife’s own teacher and prepare her for work among her less fortunate sisters. I have also drawn attention to the implications of the suggestion. One of them is for husbands to cease to treat their wives as objects of their enjoyment but to regard them as co-partners in their work of nation-building. …
That freedom which is associated with the term swaraj in the popular mind is no doubt unattainable without not only the removal of untouchability and the promotion of heart unity between the different sections but also without removing many other social evils that can be easily named. That inward growth which must never stop we have come to understand by the comprehensive term swaraj. And that swaraj cannot be had so long as walls of prejudice, passion and superstition continue to stifle the growth of that stately oak.
[CWMG 33:148–149.]
Dear Sisters and Brothers of Bhagini Samaj,
… The Samaj is dedicated to the noble aim of women’s regeneration and, in the same way that another’s tapascharya [self-sacrifice] does not help one to ascend to heaven, men cannot bring about the regeneration of women. I don’t mean to suggest that men do not desire it, or that women would not want to have it through men’s help; I merely wish to place before you the principle that it is only through self-help that an individual or race can rise. This is not a new principle, but we often forget to act upon it. …
I have close associations, as you know, with both men and women, but I find that I can do nothing in the way of service to women without help from women workers. That is why I take every occasion to protest in no uncertain terms that, so long as women in India remain ever so little suppressed or do not have the same rights [as men], India will not make real progress.
[CWMG 14:202–203.]
In 1928 a local tax-resistance campaign in the western Indian district of Bardoli, Gujarat, proved successful. Gandhi found in this small-scale movement the key to his next national campaign, which in 1930 took the long-planned leap into mass civil disobedience. This historic action, easily the largest movement of civil disobedience ever undertaken, became known as the “salt satyagraha” because it was a campaign aimed at the duty, or tax, charged by the government on salt.
Gandhi’s letter to Lord Irwin, the viceroy of India, dated March 2, 1930, dwells on the economic burden that the salt tax imposed on the poor, but Gandhi knew that the real force of the salt satyagraha came from its symbolic meaning. Once again he had found a way to seize the moral high ground by evoking the image of a heroic struggle against a cruelly exploitative foreign system that, as he says in his letter to Irwin, “seems to be designed to crush the very life” out of its victims.
This letter to Irwin represents Gandhi at his best, informing his adversary in advance of his intentions and reasons, and even the details of his battle plans. Beginning in Gandhi’s classic style with “Dear friend,” it sets the tone of congeniality and trust that served to create ambivalence in the British and make them hesitate, for them a fatal concession to the campaign. It is noteworthy that Gandhi’s letter opens with a humble plea that the viceroy help him “find a way out” so that disobedience would not be necessary. But there is of course power behind this plea—the power of what he calls the “intensely active force” of non-violence. His careful explanation in the bulk of the letter of precisely why he regards “British rule to be a curse” gives eloquent justification for civil disobedience.
The salt satyagraha began on March 12, 1930. Gandhi, age sixty, commenced his march with eighty followers from his ashram near Ahmedabad, traveling on foot through his home state of Gujarat. He was bound for the village of Dandi, over two hundred miles away on the western seacoast of India. He reached his destination twenty-four days later, unhindered by the government. At 6:30 a.m. on April 6, he collected a handful of natural sea salt, its use prohibited by law because it was untaxed. Press reports and film crews from the United States, Britain, and Europe, who had realized that the Mahatma was newsworthy, crowded around to record the event. He did not disappoint them, proclaiming to all the world: “With this I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire. … I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might.”16
The response was electric: mass civil disobedience throughout India followed as millions broke the salt laws, filling prisons and paralyzing the government. The viceroy had clearly been mistaken in not arresting Gandhi at once, because the delay permitted the movement to escalate quickly. By the time Gandhi was finally arrested on May 5, the movement was unstoppable; it continued unabated until February–March 1931, when Gandhi was released and concluded talks with Irwin.
Dear friend,
Before embarking on civil disobedience and taking the risk I have dreaded to take all these years, I would fain approach you and find a way out.
My personal faith is absolutely clear. I cannot intentionally hurt anything that lives, much less fellow human beings, even though they may do the greatest wrong to me and mine. Whilst, therefore, I hold the British rule to be a curse, I do not intend harm to a single Englishman or to any legitimate interest he may have in India.
I must not be misunderstood. Though I hold the British rule in India to be a curse, I do not, therefore, consider Englishmen in general to be worse than any other people on earth. I have the privilege of claiming many Englishmen as dearest friends. Indeed much that I have learnt of the evil of British rule is due to the writings of frank and courageous Englishmen who have not hesitated to tell the unpalatable truth about that rule.
And why do I regard the British rule as a curse? It has impoverished the dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation and by ruinously expensive military and civil administration which the country can never afford.
It has reduced us politically to serfdom. It has sapped the foundations of our culture. And, by the policy of cruel disarmament, it has degraded us spiritually. Lacking the inward strength, we have been reduced, by all but universal disarmament, to a state bordering on cowardly helplessness. …
It seems as clear as daylight that responsible British statesmen do not contemplate any alteration in British policy that might adversely affect Britain’s commerce with India or require an impartial and close scrutiny of Britain’s transactions with India. If nothing is done to end the process of exploitation India must be bled with an ever increasing speed. The Finance Member regards as a settled fact the 1/6 ratio which by a stroke of the pen drains India of a few crores. And when a serious attempt is being made through a civil form of direct action, to unsettle this fact, among many others, even you cannot help appealing to the wealthy landed classes to help you to crush that attempt in the name of an order that grinds India to atoms.
Unless those who work in the name of the nation understand and keep before all concerned the motive that lies behind the craving for independence, there is every danger of independence coming to us so changed as to be of no value to those toiling voiceless millions for whom it is sought and for whom it is worth taking. It is for that reason that I have been recently telling the public what independence should really mean.
Let me put before you some of the salient points.
The terrific pressure of land revenue, which furnishes a large part of the total, must undergo considerable modification in an independent India. Even the much vaunted permanent settlement benefits the few rich zamindars [landlords], not the ryots [poor peasants]. The ryot has remained as helpless as ever. He is a mere tenant at will. Not only, then, has the land revenue to be considerably reduced, but the whole revenue system has to be so revised as to make the ryot’s good its primary concern. But the British system seems to be designed to crush the very life out of him. Even the salt he must use to live is so taxed as to make the burden fall heaviest on him, if only because of the heartless impartiality of its incidence. The tax shows itself still more burdensome on the poor man when it is remembered that salt is the one thing he must eat more than the rich man both individually and collectively. …
The iniquities sampled above are maintained in order to carry on a foreign administration, demonstrably the most expensive in the world. Take your own salary. It is over Rs. 21,000 per month, besides many other indirect additions. The British Prime Minister gets £5,000 per year, i.e., over Rs. 5,400 per month at the present rate of exchange. You are getting over Rs. 700 per day against India’s average income of less than annas 2 per day. The prime minister gets Rs. 180 per day against Great Britain’s average income of nearly Rs. 2 per day. Thus 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. …
A radical cutting down of the revenue, therefore, depends upon an equally radical reduction in the expenses of the administration. This means a transformation of the scheme of government. This transformation is impossible without independence. Hence, in my opinion, the spontaneous demonstration of 26th of January, in which hundreds of thousands of villagers instinctively participated. To them independence means deliverance from the killing weight.
Not one of the great British political parties, it seems to me, is prepared to give up the Indian spoils to which Great Britain helps herself from day to day, often, in spite of the unanimous opposition of Indian opinion.
Nevertheless, if India is to live as a nation, if the slow death by starvation of her people is to stop, some remedy must be found for immediate relief. The proposed Conference is certainly not the remedy. It is not a matter of carrying conviction by argument. The matter resolves itself into one of matching forces. Conviction or no conviction, Great Britain would defend her Indian commerce and interests by all the forces at her command. India must consequently evolve force enough to free herself from that embrace of death.
It is common cause that, however disorganized and, for the time being, insignificant it may be, the party of violence is gaining ground and making itself felt. Its end is the same as mine. But I am convinced that it cannot bring the desired relief to the dumb millions. And the conviction is growing deeper and deeper in me that nothing but unadulterated nonviolence can check the organized violence of the British Government. Many think that non-violence is not an active force. My experience, limited though it undoubtedly is, shows that non-violence can be an intensely active force. It is my purpose to set in motion that force as well against the organized violent force of the British rule as [against] the unorganized violent force of the growing party of violence. To sit still would be to give rein to both the forces above mentioned. Having unquestioning and immovable faith in the efficacy of non-violence as I know it, it would be sinful on my part to wait any longer.
This non-violence will be expressed through civil disobedience, for the moment confined to the inmates of the Satyagraha Ashram, but ultimately designed to cover all those who choose to join the movement with its obvious limitations.
I know that in embarking on non-violence I shall be running what might fairly be termed a mad risk. But the victories of truth have never been won without risks, often of the gravest character. Conversion of a nation that has consciously or unconsciously preyed upon another, far more numerous, far more ancient and no less cultured than itself, is worth any amount of risk. …
The plan through civil disobedience will be to combat such evils as I have sampled out. If we want to sever the British connection it is because of such evils. When they are removed the path becomes easy. Then the way to friendly negotiation will be open. If the British commerce with India is purified of greed, you will have no difficulty in recognizing our independence. I respectfully invite you then to pave the way for immediate removal of those evils, and thus open a way for a real conference between equals, interested only in promoting the common good of mankind through voluntary fellowship and in arranging terms of mutual help and commerce equally suited to both…
This letter is not in any way intended as a threat but is a simple and sacred duty peremptory on a civil resister. Therefore I am having it specially delivered by a young English friend who believes in the Indian cause and is a full believer in non-violence and whom Providence seems to have sent to me, as it were, for the very purpose.17
I remain, Your sincere friend, M. K. Gandhi
[CWMG 43:2–3, 4, 5–8.]
Gandhi’s negotiations with Lord Irwin led to the Gandhi-Irwin Pact and the suspension of the civil disobedience campaign set off by the Salt March. Many, but not all, political prisoners were released, and Gandhi agreed to attend the Second Round Table Conference in late 1931 in London. At his own insistence, Gandhi was the sole official Congress representative at these talks. Although his stay in London earned him considerable good will among segments of the British public and he made many personal contacts, the talks failed to produce agreement on steps of political advance for India.
Upon his return to India, Gandhi moved to resume the civil disobedience campaign, and he and hundreds of other congressmen were jailed. This period was marked by Gandhi’s fast against the government’s Communal Award, which granted separate electorates to the Untouchables. Gandhi’s fast pressured Dr. Ambedkar to agree to an alteration of the Communal Award called “The Poona Pact,” which gave the Untouchables more reserved seats but with joint electorates (see Ambedkar-Gandhi selections).
After passage of the Government of India Act of 1935, Gandhi agreed to the participation of the Congress in the elections of 1936–37. After the first of these, the Congress formed ministries in seven provinces. Gandhi was against the Congress entering into coalitions and so prevented any Congress-Muslim League alliance in Bengal. Once the Second World War began in 1939, the Congress resigned from all ministries, since it had not been consulted on India’s joining the war. Lord Linlith-gow, on behalf of the British government, had brought India into the war against Germany.
Gandhi led the individual satyagraha campaign of 1940 and then inspired the August 1942 movement of non-violent resistance to the Raj, called the “Quit India Movement.” In between these campaigns Gandhi met the Cripps Mission, but the Congress and Gandhi declined its terms. The 1940 individual satyagraha efforts led to a modest number of arrests. But “Quit India” was a mass protest movement which, though it started non-violently, soon resulted in many acts of violence. This violence was led in some areas by members of the Congress Socialist Party (notably Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia, and Aruna Asaf Ali) who had gone underground when threatened with arrest. They aimed to attack property, not people, in an effort to weaken the Raj. But the movement also involved mass and spontaneous demonstrations by students, peasants, and workers, especially in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Midnapore district in Bengal, and quite a few other local areas across northern and central India. It was met with fierce repression by the Raj, and at least 90,000 people were jailed and probably more than a thousand killed. The rebellion was crushed by the end of 1942, but pockets of resistance held out into 1944.
Gandhi issued many statements following the failure of the Cripps Mission, and wrote in the “Harijan” of April 26, 1942, “Whatever the consequences, therefore, to India, her real safety and of Britain’s too lie in orderly and timely British withdrawal from India. All talk of treaties with the princes and obligations towards minorities are a British creation designed for the preservation of British rule and British interests. It must melt before the stern reality that faces all of us. … The fiction of majority and minority will vanish like the mist before the morning sun of liberty. Truth to tell, there will be neither majority nor minority in the absence of the paralyzing British arms. The millions of India would then be an undefined but one mass of humanity. I have no doubt that at that time the natural leaders will have wisdom enough to evolve an honourable solution to their difficulties.”18
The Congress moved ahead with its plans for civil disobedience on a wide scale with the resolution of August 7, 1942, calling for the British to withdraw immediately from India. Gandhi spoke supportively and at length on the resolution. On August 9 he conveyed his last instructions through his secretary, Pyarelal: “Let every non-violent solider of freedom write out the slogan ‘Do or Die’ on a piece of paper or cloth, and stick it on his clothes, so that in case he died in the course of offering satyagraha, he might be distinguished by that sign from other elements who do not subscribe to non-violence.”19 Gandhi also suggested that each participant in the cause was “free to interpret ahimsa in your own way.”20 The same day Gandhi was arrested along with all of the top Congress leaders.
Gandhi was in jail during the war until he was released in 1944 to afford him the opportunity to negotiate with Mr. Jinnah and the Muslim League. These discussions led nowhere, and Gandhi agreed to Congress participation in the postwar elections. Lord Wavell arranged talks after the elections, and then the Cabinet Mission visited India in 1946, offering proposals for the transfer of power into Indian hands. (There is further discussion of these moves and their consequences in the introduction to chapter 7.)
Although Gandhi gave primacy to his “constructive program” of social reforms to attain swaraj, history will remember him for his salt march of 1930, and then for his heroic fasts in Calcutta and Delhi to contain the communal violence of India’s civil war in 1947–48.
In terms of India’s escalating communal problems, even after Independence, Gandhi insisted that it was the clear and present obligation of the Hindu majority to protect India’s Muslim minority. Hindus justified oppression of Muslims by arguing that in their new-found democracy, a majority had the right to prevail, and this was what popular sovereignty meant. Gandhi countered with a liberal affirmation of minority rights, and then went further by contending that majority rights should be earned through fulfillment of civic responsibility. Excerpted below are two speeches, of June 29 and December 20, 1947, given in the great public squares of New Delhi, outside the chambers where India’s new federal constitution was being written, and finally one statement dictated during his last fast, in January 1948.
June 29, 1947
Brothers and Sisters,
Yesterday I talked to you about duty. However, I was not able to say all that I had intended to say. Whenever a person goes anywhere certain duties come to devolve on him. The man who neglects his duty and cares only to safeguard his rights does not know that rights that do not spring from duties done cannot be safeguarded. This applies also to the Hindu–Muslim relations. Whether it is the Hindus living in a place or Muslims or both, they will come to acquire rights if they do their duty. Then they do not have to demand rights. …
This is a paramount law and no one can change it. If Hindus consider Muslims their brothers and treat them well, Muslims too will return friendship for friendship. Take a village for example. If there are in it five hundred Hindus and five Muslims, then the five hundred Hindus come to have certain obligations towards the five Muslims which ipso facto gives the Hindus certain rights. In their arrogance they should not think that they can crush the Muslims and kill them for it cannot be anyone’s right to kill. There is no bravery in killing. It is cowardice and a disgrace. The duty of the Hindus is to share with the Muslims in their joys and sorrows even if they wear beards and face towards the West during namaaz. They should see whether they are getting enough food and water and whether their own needs are being satisfied. When the five hundred Hindus do their duty, then they earn the right to expect that the five Muslims also would do theirs. If the village catches fire and the Muslims think that they should let it burn and do everything to see that it spreads, then they will not be doing their duty. …
But supposing the five Muslims are bent on mischief, supposing you give them food and water and treat them well and they still abuse you, what then will be the duty of the five hundred Hindus? It certainly is not their duty to cut them down. It would be bestial, not human, to do so. If a brother of mine has gone mad, shall I then start beating him up? I shall not do so. I shall confine him in a room and stop others from treating him roughly. This is the human way. Similarly if the Muslims in question do not want to behave in a friendly manner and keep on saying that they are a separate nation, that though they are only five, they can summon five crores of Muslims from outside, the Hindus should not let themselves be frightened by such a threat. They should tell the Muslims outside that they want to be friends with the five Muslims, but that they don’t reciprocate. That if they want to help them it is their affair, but the Hindus would not be frightened or subdued by force. The world will understand that the five hundred Hindus are good people and want to do their duty. The same thing applies to a village where there are five hundred Muslims and only five Hindus. There are many such villages in Pakistan. Some people from the Jhelam area had been to see me. They were concerned about their future in their home country. I told them that if the Muslims there were good people, could exercise self-control in doing their duty, then they would have nothing to fear. But if the few Hindus there were wicked, then even if Hindus from all over India went to help them nothing would be gained.
[CWMG 88:236–238.]
I get many letters full of abuse. The abuse has no effect on me for I take the abuse as praise. But people hurl abuses at me not because I take it as praise but because in their eyes I am not what I ought to be. There was a time when these same people used to sing my praises. I have selected two questions contained in a letter I have received today which I shall answer here. The first questions is: “You have become so used to the British army. What will happen to you after the British army withdraws from here?” …
We have no use for the British army. It does not increase our strength but reduces it. I am of course a votary of non-violence but this applies even to those who do not believe in non-violence. …
We do not want the British army or any other army either to suppress us or to defend us.
But the riots in Amritsar, Lahore and other places have made us lose faith in ourselves. We have become so wicked that we have begun to fear each other. The idea has begun to take root in our hearts that if the army is not there people will eat each other up. But the fact is that so long as there is a third party ready to suppress us we cannot hope to be strong ourselves. Swaraj is not for cowards.
The second question is: “What a silly old man you are that you cannot see how your ahimsa stinks. Your ahimsa can save neither the Hindus nor the Muslims. If we suffer you to live it is not for your ahimsa but in consideration of the services you have rendered to the country.”
What stinks in my nostrils is not my ahimsa but the blood that is flowing everywhere around me. My ahimsa smells sweet to me. A man who drinks nectar every day does not find it so sweet as when he drinks it after having swallowed a draught of poison. Ahimsa did not always smell so sweet as it does now. For then the atmosphere was permeated with ahimsa. But today when violence is giving out so much stench it is only my ahimsa which acts as an antidote. The letter also asks me why I am repeatedly meeting Mr. Jinnah. He is our enemy and we ought to keep away from him. The Baluchis similarly are our enemies and the Congress ought to have nothing to do with them. How can the Congress do so? Its mission is to serve all. I agree that Mr. Jinnah has done a disservice to the country in denouncing Hindus, especially savarna Hindus as his enemies. If a man acts wickedly one feels sorry but after all he is our brother. Hindus cannot go mad. Although Mr. Jinnah has got Pakistan it does not mean that we should cease to associate with him. There are many disputes which can be settled only if we meet together.
[CWMG 88:214–215.]
New Delhi, December 20, 1947
Brothers and Sisters,
It is a matter of grief that there has been rioting again in Delhi. It has been of a minor nature, but still it is regrettable. If it is our wish that Muslims should leave India, we should say so clearly or the Government may declare that it will not be safe for Muslims to continue to live in India. Or we should all tell them that rather than be killed off slowly in riots, it would be better for them to go. But if we do so I see in it the doom of Hinduism and Sikhism. Likewise it will be the doom of Islam if Pakistan decides that no Hindus and Sikhs may live there. There are not very many Muslims left in India. We have already expelled a large number. They did not go voluntarily. They were compelled to leave. I wish we could become brave and noble and courageous. It is only a coward who will say that a Muslim may not stay in India. Why can’t a Muslim stay in India? If he is bad he must be reformed—not through violence but by persuasion. Why have we come to this pass that Hindus and Sikhs should live in fear in Pakistan and Muslims should live in fear in India? And yet we make the tall claims that everyone can live in our country in peace. I tell the Government that they must see that our promises are fulfilled. The army, the police and the officials have all to become good. If we behave decently we can make progress. If not, the reins of power that have come into our hands will slip away. …
If we want true democracy to be established in India, we must all cooperate in furthering that work. It is only the people who can make a success of any work. The people provide the foundation on which alone we can raise a structure of any height. But if we only continue our internecine strife we shall meet with the [worst] fate.
[CWMG 90:266–267.]
New Delhi, January 14, 1948
I am dictating this from my bed early on Wednesday morning. It is the second day of the fast. …
I do not consider this an ordinary fast. I have undertaken it after much reflection. …
Delhi is the capital of India. If we do not accept partition in our hearts, that is, if we do not consider Hindus and Muslims separate peoples, we shall have to admit that Delhi is no longer the capital of India as we have visualized it. Delhi has always been the capital. It is this city which was Indraprastha, which was Hastinapur. We see the ruins standing today. It is the heart of India. It would be the limit of foolishness to regard it as belonging only to the Hindus or the Sikhs. It may sound harsh but there is no exaggeration in it. It is the literal truth. All Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Jews who people this country from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and from Karachi to Dibrugarh in Assam and who have lovingly and in a spirit of service adopted it as their dear motherland, have an equal right to it. No one can say that it has place only for the majority and the minority should be dishonoured. Whoever serves it with the purest devotion must have the first right over it. Therefore, anyone who seeks to drive out the Muslims is Delhi’s enemy number one. We are heading towards the catastrophe. Every Indian must do his bit to ward it off.
What should we do then? If we would see Panchayat Raj,21 i.e., democracy established, we would regard the humblest and the lowliest Indian as being equally the ruler of India and the tallest in the land. For this everyone should be pure. If they are not they should become so. He who is pure will also be wise. He will observe no distinctions between caste and caste, between touchable and untouchable, but will consider everyone equal with himself. He will bind others to himself with love. To him no one would be an untouchable. He would treat the labourers the same as he would the capitalists. He will, like the millions of toilers, earn his living from service of others and will make no distinction between intellectual and manual work. To hasten this desirable consummation, we should voluntarily turn ourselves into scavengers. He who is wise will never touch opium, liquor or any intoxicants. He will observe the vow of swadeshi and regard every woman who is not his wife as his mother, sister or daughter according to her age, and never see anyone with eyes of lust. He will concede to woman the same rights he claims for himself. If need be he will sacrifice his own life but never kill another.
[CWMG 90:419–420.]
While Gandhi emphasized India’s independence, and social reforms as a prerequisite for it, his essential message was decidedly individualistic: he focused on personal transformation as an essential first step to the practice of satyagraha. In response to a letter from his nephew, he gave advice characteristic of his theory and practice of non-violence.
I hope I have replied to all your questions. Please do not carry unnecessarily on your head the burden of emancipating India. Emancipate your own self. Even that burden is very great. Apply everything to yourself. Nobility of soul consists in realizing that you are yourself India. In your emancipation is the emancipation of India. All else is make-believe. If you feel interested, do persevere. You and I need not worry about others. If we bother about others, we shall forget our own task and lose everything. Please ponder over this from the point of view of altruism, not of selfishness.
[CWMG 10:206–207.]
Gandhi’s idiosyncratic thought and leadership provoked an extraordinary outburst of ideas. These ranged from the appreciative analysis offered by his close associate Jawaharlal Nehru to the unflinching condemnation he received from his assassin, Nathuram Godse. The representative responses that follow include in some cases Gandhi’s own direct replies.
Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) was born in Allahabad, the son of Motilal Nehru, a wealthy Brahman lawyer whose family had originally come from Kashmir, and of Swa-rup Rani Nehru. After private tutoring, Nehru continued his education at the Harrow School and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied science. After studying law at the Inner Temple in London, he returned to India in 1912 and practiced law for several years without enthusiasm. In 1916 he married Kamala Kaul, and in 1917 they had a daughter, Indira.
In 1919 Nehru joined the Congress and became devoted to Gandhi, now its unofficial leader. Gandhi had reorganized the Congress by this time and recruited able lieutenants throughout India; Nehru was among them.
Nehru brought his father into active cooperation with Gandhi, and father and son worked together in the nationalist cause during the 1920s. Nehru was also active in the Allahabad municipal government. Guided by Gandhi, he gradually learned about rural India and became an effective speaker to both Western-educated sophisticates and Indian peasants. In time, Nehru’s popularity became second only to Gandhi’s.
During this period Nehru was imprisoned many times for civil disobedience. His longest detentions occurred between 1932 and 1935, and 1942 and 1945. While in prison, he wrote his major books, Toward Freedom (1936), an autobiography; The Discovery of India (1946); and Glimpses of World History (1934), a series of letters to his daughter, Indira. He was a talented and expressive writer in English; both he and India’s freedom struggle became more widely known through the circulation of his writings in the West.
By the end of World War II, Nehru was recognized as Gandhi’s heir apparent in the Congress. When the British formed an interim Indian government in 1946 preliminary to full independence, by Gandhi’s choice Nehru became its prime minister. As head of the interim government, Nehru participated in negotiations for a united and federated India that were held in 1946 among the British rulers, the Congress, and the Muslim League. Nehru opposed the division of India on the basis of religion. His perspective was secular and democratic: he believed that all Indians, regardless of religious affiliation, should be equal citizens of the new nation. The parties were unable to agree on a structure for federation, but the British government through its last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, worked out a procedure for the transfer of power and the partition of the subcontinent. Nehru reluctantly agreed to the partition.
Nehru greatly helped in revising and implementing Mountbatten’s plan, and became personally close to Mountbatten and to his wife, Edwina. At Mountbatten’s urging, Nehru agreed to maintain India’s membership in the British-sponsored Commonwealth of Nations, setting a precedent for other former British colonies. Nehru became independent India’s first prime minister on August 15, 1947, and remained its leader until his death in 1964. He also served as India’s foreign minister, and dominated the Indian political scene during those seventeen years.
Devotion to the cause of India’s freedom and compassion for the lot of their nation’s poor created an indissoluble bond between Gandhi and Nehru. In their attitudes toward other questions, however, Nehru and Gandhi were poles apart. Religion held no meaning for Nehru, but for his guru it was all-important. Gandhi held non-violence and simple living to be ends in themselves, but Nehru considered them merely as practical expedients in the political struggle. Gandhi’s ideal India was a decentralized family of self-sufficient villages; Nehru’s ideal India was a centralized modern state with a planned industrial economy. Despite their intellectual differences, however, Nehru found in Gandhi India’s most effective mass mobilizer. The following passages from Nehru’s writings offer an eloquent analysis of the sources of Gandhi’s charismatic leadership.
World War I came. Politics were at a low ebb, chiefly because of the split in the Congress between the two sections, the so-called Extremists and the Moderates, and because of wartime restrictions and regulations. Yet one tendency was marked: the rising middle class among the Moslems was growing more nationally minded and was pushing the Moslem League toward the Congress. They even joined hands.
Industry developed during the war and produced enormous dividends—100 to 200 per cent—from the jute mills of Bengal and the cotton mills of Bombay, Ahmedabad, and elsewhere. Some of these dividends flowed to the owners of foreign capital in Dundee and London; some went to swell the riches of Indian millionaires. And yet the workers who had created these dividends lived at an incredibly low level of existence—in “filthy, disease-ridden hovels” with no window or chimney, no light or water supply, no sanitary arrangements. This, near that so-called city of palaces, Calcutta, dominated by British capital. In Bombay, where Indian capital was more in evidence, an inquiry commission found in one room, 15 feet by 12, six families, in all thirty adults and children, living together. Three of these women were expecting a confinement soon, and each family had a separate oven in that one room. These are special cases, but they are not very exceptional. They describe conditions in the twenties and thirties of this century when some improvements had already been made. What these conditions were like previous to these improvements staggers the imagination.
I remember visiting some of these slums and hovels of industrial workers, gasping for breath there, and coming out dazed and full of horror and anger. I remember also going down a coal mine in Jharia and seeing the conditions in which our womenfolk worked there. I can never forget that picture or the shock that came to me that human beings should labour thus. …
World War I ended at last and the peace, instead of bringing us relief and progress, brought us repressive legislation and martial law in the Punjab. A bitter sense of humiliation and a passionate anger filled our people. All the unending talk of constitutional reform and Indianization of the services was a mockery and an insult when the manhood of our country was being crushed and the inexorable and continuous process of exploitation was deepening our poverty and sapping our vitality. We had become a derelict nation.
Yet what could we do, how change this vicious process? We seemed to be helpless in the grip of some all-powerful monster; our limbs were paralyzed, our minds deadened. The peasantry were servile and fear-ridden; the industrial workers were no better. The middle class, the intelligentsia who might have been beacon lights in the enveloping darkness, were themselves submerged in this all-pervading gloom. In some ways their condition was even more pitiful than that of the peasantry. Large numbers of the déclassé intellectuals, cut off from the land and incapable of any kind of manual or technical work, joined the swelling army of the unemployed, and helpless, hopeless, sank ever deeper into the morass. A few successful lawyers or doctors or engineers or clerks made little difference to the mass. The peasant starved; yet centuries of an unequal struggle against his environment had taught him to endure, and even in poverty and starvation he had a certain calm dignity, a feeling of submission to an all-powerful fate. Not so the middle classes, more especially the new petty bourgeoisie, who had no such background. …
What could we do? How could we pull India out of this quagmire of poverty and defeatism which sucked her in? …
And then Gandhi came. He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths, like a beam of light that pierced the darkness and removed the scales from our eyes, like a whirlwind that upset many things but most of all the working of people’s minds. He did not descend from the top; he seemed to emerge from the millions of India, speaking their language and incessantly drawing attention to them and their appalling condition. Get off the backs of these peasants and workers, he told us, all you who live by their exploitation; get rid of the system that produces this poverty and misery.
Political freedom took new shape then and acquired a new content. Much that he said we only partially accepted or sometimes did not accept at all. But all this was secondary. The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth and action allied to these, always keeping the welfare of the masses in view. The greatest gift for an individual or a nation, so we had been told in our ancient books, was abhaya, fearlessness, not merely bodily courage but the absence of fear from the mind. Chanakya and Yagnavalka had said, at the dawn of our history, that it was the function of the leaders of a people to make them fearless. But the dominant impulse in India under British rule was that of fear, pervasive, oppressing, strangling fear; fear of the army, the police, the widespread secret service; fear of the official class; fear of laws meant to suppress, and of prison; fear of the landlord’s agent; fear of the moneylender; fear of unemployment and starvation, which were always on the threshold. It was against this all-pervading fear that Gandhi’s quiet and determined voice was raised: Be not afraid. …
So, suddenly as it were, that black pall of fear was lifted from the people’s shoulders, not wholly, of course, but to an amazing degree. As fear is close companion to falsehood, so truth follows fearlessness. The Indian people did not become much more truthful than they were, nor did they change their essential nature overnight; nevertheless a sea change was visible as the need for falsehood and furtive behavior lessened. It was a psychological change, almost as some expert in the psychoanalytical method had probed deep into the patient’s past, found out the origins of his complexes, exposed them to his view, and thus rid him of that burden.
There was that psychological reaction also, a feeling of shame at our long submission to an alien rule that had degraded and humiliated us, and a desire to submit no longer, whatever the consequences might be. We did not grow much more truthful, perhaps, than we had been previously, but Gandhi was always there as a symbol of uncompromising truth to pull us up and shame us into truth. …
Gandhi for the first time entered the Congress organization and immediately brought about a complete change in its constitution. He made it democratic and a mass organization. Democratic it had been previously also, but it had so far been limited in franchise and restricted to the upper classes. Now the peasants rolled in, and in its new garb it began to assume the look of a vast agrarian organization with a strong sprinkling of the middle classes. This agrarian character was to grow. Industrial workers also came in, but as individuals and not in their separate, organized capacity.
Action was to be the basis and objective of this organization, action based on peaceful methods. Thus far, the alternatives had been: just talking and passing resolutions, or terroristic activity. Both of these were set aside, and terrorism was especially condemned as opposed to the basic policy of the Congress. A new technique of action was evolved which, though perfectly peaceful, yet involved nonsubmission to what was considered wrong, and as a consequence, a willing acceptance of the pain and suffering involved in this. Gandhi was an odd kind of pacifist, for he was an activist full of dynamic energy. There was no submission in him to fate or anything that he considered evil; he was full of resistance, though this was peaceful and courteous.
The call of action was twofold. There was of course the action involved in challenging and resisting foreign rules; there was also the action which led us to fight our own social evils. Apart from the fundamental objective of the Congress—the freedom of India—and the method of peaceful action, the principal planks of the Congress were national unity, which involved the solution of the minority problems, and the raising of the depressed classes and the ending of the curse of untouchability.
Realizing that the main props of British rule were fear, prestige, the cooperation, willing or unwilling, of the people, and certain classes whose vested interests were centered in British rule, Gandhi attacked these foundations. Titles were to be given up, and though the titleholders responded to this only in small measure, the popular respect for these British-given titles disappeared and they became symbols of degradation. New standards and values were set up, and the pomp and splendor of the viceregal court and the princes, which used to impress so much, suddenly appeared supremely ridiculous and vulgar and rather shameful, surrounded as they were by the poverty and misery of the people. Rich men were not so anxious to flaunt their riches; outwardly at least many of them adopted simpler ways, and in their dress became almost indistinguishable from humbler folk.
The older leaders of the Congress, nurtured in a different and more quiescent tradition, did not take easily to these new ways and were disturbed by the upsurge of the masses. Yet so powerful was the wave of feeling and sentiment that swept through the country that some of that intoxication filled them also. …
[Gandhi] sent us to the villages, and the countryside hummed with the activity of innumerable messages of the new gospel of action. The peasant was shaken up and he began to emerge from his quiescent shell. The effect on us was different but equally far reaching, for we saw, for the first time as it were, the villager in the intimacy of his mud hut and with the stark shadow of hunger always pursuing him. We learned our Indian economics more from these visits than from books and learned discourses. The emotional experience we had already undergone was emphasized and confirmed, and henceforward there could be no going back for us to our old life or our old standards, howsoever much our views might change subsequently. … In two respects the background of his thoughts had a vague but considerable influence: the fundamental test of everything was how far it benefited the masses, and the means were always important and could not be ignored even though the end in view was right, for the means governed the end and varied it. …
It is not surprising that this astonishingly vital man, full of self-confidence and an unusual kind of power, standing for equality and freedom for each individual, but measuring all this in terms of the poorest, fascinated the masses of India and attracted them like a magnet. He seemed to them to link up the past with the future and to make the dismal present appear just as a steppingstone to that future of life and hope. And not the masses only, but intellectuals and others also, though their minds were often troubled and confused and the changeover for them from the habits of lifetimes was more difficult. Thus he effected a vast psychological revolution not only among those who followed his lead but also among his opponents and those many neutrals who could not make up their minds what to think and what to do.
[Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946), 358–365, 367.]
The Indian National Congress, led by Gandhi and Nehru, publicly issued the Declaration of Independence, or Purna (Complete) Swaraj, on January 26, 1930. Gandhi was given the responsibility for organizing the first act of civil disobedience. On February 6 he announced that he would march in defiance of the British salt tax, beginning on March 12 (see “The Salt Satyagraha of 1930,” above). Wanting the strictest discipline to be maintained during the twenty-four-day march, he recruited marchers not from the Congress Party but from his own Sabarmati Ashrama members. Congress members like Nehru were to stand by to take charge if Gandhi was arrested.
Independence day came, January 26, 1930, and it revealed to us, as if in a flash, the earnest and enthusiastic mood of the country. There was something vastly impressive about the great gatherings everywhere, peacefully and solemnly taking the pledge of independence without any speeches or exhortation. This celebration gave the necessary impetus to Gandhiji,22 and he felt, with his sure touch on the pulse of the people, that the time was ripe for action. Events followed then in quick succession, like a drama working up to its climax.
As civil disobedience approached and electrified the atmosphere, our thoughts went back to the movement of 1921–22 and the manner of its sudden suspension after Chauri Chaura. The country was more disciplined now, and there was a clearer appreciation of the nature of the struggle. The technique was understood to some extent, but more important still from Gandhiji’s point of view, it was fully realized by everyone that he was terribly in earnest about non-violence. There could be no doubt about that now, as there probably was in the minds of some people ten years before. Despite all this, how could we possibly be certain that an outbreak of violence might not occur in some locality either spontaneously or as a result of an intrigue? And, if such an incident occurred, what would be its effect on our civil disobedience movement? Would it be suddenly wound up as before? That prospect was most disconcerting. …
The great question that hung in the air now was—how? How were we to begin? What form of civil disobedience should we take up that would be effective, suited to the circumstances, and popular with the masses? And then the Mahatma gave the hint.
Salt suddenly became a mysterious word, a word of power. The salt tax was to be attacked, the salt laws were to be broken. We were bewildered and could not quite fit in a national struggle with common salt. …
Then came Gandhiji’s correspondence with the Viceroy and the beginning of the Dandi Salt March from the Ashrama at Sabarmati. As people followed the fortunes of this marching column of pilgrims from day to day, the temperature of the country went up. A meeting of the All-India Congress Committee was held at Ahmedabad to make final arrangements for the struggle that was now almost upon us. The leader in the struggle was not present, for he was already tramping with his pilgrim band to the sea, and he refused to return. The All-India Congress Committee planned what should be done in case of arrests, and large powers were given to the president to act on behalf of the Committee, in case it could not meet, to nominate members of the Working Committee in place of those arrested, and to nominate a successor for himself with the same powers. Similar powers were given by provincial and local Congress committees to their presidents. … We hastened back to our posts to give the finishing touches to our local arrangements, in accordance with the new directions of the All-India Congress Committee, and, as Sarojini Naidu said, to pack up our toothbrushes for the journey to prison.
On our way back, father and I went to see Gandhiji. He was at Jambusar with his pilgrim band, and we spent a few hours with him there and then saw him stride away with his party to the next stage in the journey to the salt sea. That was my last glimpse of him then as I saw him, staff in hand, marching along at the head of his followers, with firm step and a peaceful but undaunted look. It was a moving sight.
April came and Gandhiji drew near to the sea, and we waited for the word to begin civil disobedience by an attack on the salt laws. For months past we had been drilling our volunteers, and Kamala and Krishna (my wife and sister) had both joined them and donned male attire for the purpose. The volunteers had, of course, no arms or even sticks. The object of training them was to make them more efficient in their work and capable of dealing with large crowds. The 6th of April was the first day of the National Week, which is celebrated annually in memory of the happenings in 1919, from Satyagraha Day to Jallianwala Bagh. On that day Gandhiji began the breach of the salt laws at Dandi beach, and three or four days later permission was given to all Congress organizations to do likewise and begin civil disobedience in their own areas.
It seemed as though a spring had been suddenly released; all over the country, in town and village, salt manufacture was the topic of the day, and many curious expedients were adopted to produce salt. We knew precious little about it, and so we read it up where we could and issued leaflets giving directions; we collected pots and pans and ultimately succeeded in producing some unwholesome stuff, which we waved about in triumph and often auctioned for fancy prices. It was really immaterial whether the stuff was good or bad; the main thing was to commit a breach of the obnoxious salt law, and we were successful in that, even though the quality of our salt was poor. As we saw the abounding enthusiasm of the people and the way salt-making was spreading like a prairie fire, we felt a little abashed and ashamed for having questioned the efficacy of this method when it was first proposed by Gandhiji. And we marveled at the amazing knack of the man to impress the multitude and make it act in an organized way.
I was arrested on the 14th of April as I was entraining for Raipur in the Central Provinces, where I was going to attend a conference. That very day I was tried in prison and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment under the Salt Act. In anticipation of arrest I had nominated (under the new powers given to me by the All-India Congress Committee) Gandhiji to act as Congress president in my absence, but, fearing his refusal, my second nomination was for father. As I expected, Gandhiji would not agree, and so father became the acting president of the Congress. He was in poor health; nevertheless he threw himself into the campaign with great energy; and, during those early months, his strong guidance and enforcement of discipline was of tremendous benefit to the movement. The movement benefited greatly, but it was at the cost of such health and physical fitness as had remained in him.
Those were days of stirring news—processions and lathee [stick] charges and firing, frequent hartals [mass strikes] to celebrate noted arrests, and special observances, like Peshawar Day, Garhwali Day, etc. For the time being the boycott of foreign cloth and all British goods was almost complete. When I heard that my aged mother and, of course, my sisters used to stand under the hot summer sun picketing before foreign cloth shops, I was greatly moved. Kamala did so also, but she did something more. She threw herself into the movement in Allahabad city and district with an energy and determination which amazed me, who thought I had known her so well for so many years. …
Many strange things happened in those days, but undoubtedly the most striking was the part of women in the national struggle. They came out in large numbers from the seclusion of their homes and, though unused to public activity, threw themselves into the heart of the struggle. The picketing of foreign cloth and liquor shops they made their preserve. Enormous processions consisting of women alone were taken out in all the cities; and, generally, the attitude of the women was more unyielding than that of the men. Often they became Congress “dictators” in provinces and in local areas.
The breach of the Salt Act soon became just one activity and civil resistance spread to other fields. This was facilitated by the promulgation of various ordinances by the Viceroy prohibiting a number of activities. As these ordinances and prohibitions grew, the opportunities for breaking them also grew, and civil resistance took the form of doing the very thing that the ordinance was intended to stop. The initiative definitely remained with the Congress and the people; and, as each ordinance law failed to control the situation from the point of view of government, fresh ordinances were issued by the Viceroy. Many of the Congress Working Committee members had been arrested, but it continued to function with new members added on to it, and each official ordinance was countered by a resolution of the Working Committee giving directions as to how to meet it.
[Jawaharlal Nehru, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 156–157, 159–162.]
Gandhi drew to him a remarkable assemblage of uniquely distinguished women, each of whom played a vital role in the Indian nationalist movement. They were as varied as Madeleine Slade (Mirabehn) and Muriel Lester, who joined him from Britain in the late 1920s; dedicated Indian workers such as Sushila Nayyar and Gangabehn; and, of course, his spouse, Kasturbai. Perhaps the most internationally distinguished of all was Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), who was introduced in chapter 4 above. Her association with Gandhi began in 1914, and lasted a lifetime. She shared with him a passion for Hindu–Muslim unity and joined him in his acts of satyagraha.
Naidu’s attraction to Gandhi as a mentor and friend was kindled as soon as Gandhi had left South Africa—before, even, he had returned to India.
My first meeting with Mahatma Gandhi took place in London on the eve of the great European War of 1914 when he arrived fresh from his triumphs in South Africa. … I went wandering round in search of his lodging in an obscure part of Kensington and climbed the steep stairs of an old, unfashionable house, to find an open door framing a living picture of a little man with a shaven head, seated on the floor on a black prison blanket and eating a mess made of squashed tomatoes and olive oil out of [a] wooden prison bowl. Around him were ranged some battered tins of parched groundnuts and tasteless biscuits of dried plant in flour. I burst instinctively into happy laughter at this amusing and unexpected vision of a famous leader, whose name had already become a household word in our country. He lifted his eyes and laughed back at me, saying: “Ah, you must be Mrs. Naidu! Who else dare be so irreverent? Come in,” said he, “and share my meal.” “No thanks,” I replied, “what an abominable mess it is!” In this way and at that instant commenced our friendship, which flowered into real comradeship and bore fruit in a long, loving, loyal discipleship, which never wavered for a single hour through more than thirty years of common service in the cause of India’s freedom.
[Vernier Grover and Ranjana Arora, eds., Great Women of Modern India, vol. 3: Sarojini Naidu (New Delhi: Deep and Deep Publications, 1993), 182.]
Naidu delivered the following speech at a Satyagraha Meeting at Ahmedabad on March 25, 1919, prior to the implementation of Gandhi’s first satyagraha campaign, which was designed to inspire a national day of fasting.
I am ill and yet why am I standing before you? Why have our hearts been stirred to the inmost depths? Why don’t we get refreshing sleep? It is because we are face to face with a hideous nightmare and the trouble is that unless it is laid at rest you and I are done for in perpetuity. What has become of the Congress-League Scheme? Where are the vaunted Montagu-Chelmsford Reform Proposals? They have receded into the background to make room for the Rowlatt Bills, better known as the Black Bills. We looked forward to receiving responsible positions at the conclusion of the war, now that besides giving unmistakable proofs of Hindu–Moslem entente we proved our fitness for self-government by acquitting ourselves so worthily in the war. The visit of Mr. Montagu to India, his sentimental journey through the length and breadth of the land in the company of Lord Chelmsford, and their expressions of sympathy bore no fruit, for in one hand they held the sword and a cup of poison in the other. …
REMEDY FOR POISON
There is one remedy for poison or physical force, and it is known as Satyagraha. Some one told me “Why are you following Mahatma Gandhi in a nerveless campaign?” He forgets that people had lost faith in the efficacy of constitutional agitation. If the Black Bills had any substratum of Justice in them why did the non-official members vote against them? The only misfortune is that the hearts of officials do not beat true to the united voice of the people. Now that the Rowlatt Bills are passed into law there are two ways of bringing about their abolition, ready at hand; rebellion or penance. It is not our nature to precipitate a struggle like the European war. We take our stand on righteousness that exalteth a nation. We do not believe that machine guns will add a cubit to our greatness. We will not set fire to cornfields, magnificent bungalows or children. Let Europe hug these delusions. India will never swerve from the path of rectitude. We must perceive truth and follow it as a religious duty. To speak truth is good, but to live truth is better. Let truth guide us in all our doings—even in our dealings with our enemies. We have to make use of this weapon in our dealings with one who holds a sword in one hand and a cup of poison in the other. We have to hold fast to Dharma. The German missed the path of rectitude and cast internal law governing warfare to the winds—we know now, with what results. India took up arms against Germany to vindicate her loyalty to truth and to the British Raj, in the well-founded conviction that she would have her reward. We are sorely disappointed to find that instead of loyalty begetting loyalty, the official classes have seen fit to mistrust our intentions. Never mind. We are not going to submit to the Black Bills which deprive us of everything we hold dear in life, sever the family-bond in twain, and dash all delight out of existence. We will never submit to what makes helots of us all. The Satyagrahi contingents will spring to Satyagraha battle in order to protect our prestige against gratuitous invasion. Now that the Black Bills have become the law of the land we never can tell when the sword will fall over our devoted heads. It is better to swell the ranks of Satyagrahis and to know no fear than meekly to submit [to] the Black Bills and to rush into danger. Mahatma Gandhi who slights the blandishments of wealth or honours, who is indifferent to the smiles of the Viceroy or to the fear of death is constrained to employ this weapon for these very reasons. Join those who dare. Those who cannot need not hide their diminished heads in shame, since their spontaneous sympathy with the movement will be no small satisfaction to us. …
The fast suggested by Mahatma Gandhi is twice blessed. It will enable you to realise the privations to which many men and beasts are at present condemned and will thus be an impetus to religious sentiment. It will likewise teach you self-denial born of voluntary penance. Opportunity for vindicating our national greatness by means of Satyagraha should not be missed.
THE VERDICT OF HAFIZ
Sings [the great Persian poet] Hafiz in one of his inimitable poems: “The sea is swayed by a terrific storm. Our barge is tossed to and fro by the swelling waves. But alas! What conception can they on the shore have of our agonies?” True it is that the wearer only knows where the shoe pinches. Those of us who have been aroused from dogmatic slumber by unique love of truth will cheerfully undergo incarceration, if necessary, and will return thanks to the Lord even in a jail, praying to him to awaken the somnolent masses to a realisation of truth. Nor is Satyagraha meant for the Hindus alone. Let me remind my Moslem brothers of the significant story of Imam Hussain, who was kept without water for three days for refusal to bow his head down. When estimable friends asked him to yield, Imam Hussain said, “I hold life cheap when truth is at stake. Never shall I submit to coercion.” From the depths of my soul I believe that the birth of the Messiah spoken of in the Bhagwad Gita is discernible in the stout heart of Mahatma Gandhi.
[Grover and Arora, Great Women of Modern India: Sarojini Naidu, 103–105.]
Naidu was present at the court when Mahatma Gandhi was tried and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, in 1922. Describing the scene of the great trial, she wrote this passage below. A convict and a criminal in the eyes of the Law! Nevertheless the entire Court rose in an act of spontaneous homage when Mahatma Gandhi entered—a frail, serene, indomitable figure in a coarse and scanty loin cloth, accompanied by his devoted disciple and fellow-prisoner, Shankerlal Banker.
“So you are seated near me to give me your support in case I break down,” he jested, with that happy laugh of his which seems to hold all the undimmed radiance of the world’s childhood in its depths. And looking round at the hosts of familiar faces of men and women who had travelled far to offer him a token of their love, he added, “This is like a family gathering and not a law-court.”
A thrill of mingled fear, pride, hope and anguish ran through the crowded hall when the Judge took his seat—an admirable Judge deserving of our praise alike for his brave and resolute sense of duty, his flawless courtesy, his just perception of a unique occasion and his fine tribute to a unique personality.
The strange trial proceeded and as I listened to the immortal words that flowed with prophetic fervour from the lips of my beloved master, my thoughts sped across the centuries to a different land and different age when a similar drama was enacted and another divine and gentle teacher was crucified, for spreading a kindred gospel with a kindred courage. I realised now that the lowly Jesus of Nazareth cradled in a manger furnished the only true parallel in history to this sweet invincible apostle of Indian liberty who loved humanity with surpassing compassion and to use his own beautiful phrase, “approached the poor with the mind of the poor.”
The most epic event of modern times ended quickly.
The pent-up emotion of the people burst in a storm of sorrow as a long slow procession moved towards him in a mournful pilgrimage of farewell, clinging to the hands that had toiled so incessantly, bowing over the feet that had journeyed so continuously, in the service of his country.
In the midst of all this poignant scene of many-voiced and myriad-hearted grief he stood, untroubled, in all his transcendent simplicity, the embodied symbol of the Indian Nation—its living sacrifice and sacrament in one.
They might take him to the utmost ends of the earth, but his destination remains unchanged in the hearts of his people who are both the heirs and the stewards of his matchless dreams and his matchless deeds.
[Grover and Arora, Great Women of Modern India: Sarojini Naidu, 12–13.]
Not all Indians were as appreciative of Gandhi’s power as Nehru and Naidu, as the following examples show. As noted in chapter 5, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and remained throughout his life a formidable presence on the Indian scene. In 1921 Gandhi took account of Tagore’s criticisms, and replied—as we read below—with all the deference due to India’s poet laureate: “I regard the Poet as a sentinel warning us against the approach of enemies called bigotry, lethargy, intolerance, ignorance, inertia and other members of that brood.”
Tagore, however, would not be mollified. “The Poet” chose to challenge the dominant political belief of his age and of modern Indian politics, the gospel of nationalism. Gandhi had extolled the ideal of universal harmony, but he had not singled out Indian nationalism as a threat to that ideal. His criticism was directed at the Western nation-state system. Tagore asserted that in principle there was no distinction: nationalism is in all cases a great menace.
Tagore was most distressed not by the prevalence of nationalism in the West, but by its infection of India. The idea was a Western importation, but Tagore realized that his own countrymen had developed it into a peculiar Indian type. The greatest disservice nationalism had rendered India, Tagore argued, was to have directed the country’s attention away from its primary needs, which were social, not political. Nationalism could not prompt a social and moral reform of the nature that was needed; rather, it would only whet the popular appetite for increased political warfare. The real task before India was that of building a good society.
As Gandhi’s power grew, so did Tagore’s suspicion of it. On March 5, 1921, he wrote from England to Charles Andrews, a Christian missionary who became a close associate of both Gandhi and Tagore.
Dear friend, lately I have been receiving more and more news and newspaper cuttings from India giving rise in my mind to a painful struggle that presages a period of suffering which is waiting for me. I am striving with all my power to tune my mood of mind to be in accord with the great feeling of excitement sweeping across my country. But deep in my being why is there this spirit of resistance maintaining its place in spite of my strong desire to remove it? …
The idea of non-cooperation is political asceticism. Our students are bringing their offering of sacrifices to what? Not to a fuller education but to non-education. It has at its back a fierce joy of annihilation which in its best form is asceticism and in its worst form is that orgy of frightfulness in which human nature, losing faith in the basic reality of normal life, finds a disinterested delight in unmeaning devastation, as has been shown in the late war and on other occasions which came nearer home to us. No in its passive moral form is asceticism and in its active moral form is violence. The desert is as much a form of himsa as is the raging sea in storm, they both are against life.
I remember the day during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, when a crowd of young students came to see me in the first floor of our Vichitra house. They said to me that if I ordered them to leave their schools and colleges they would instantly obey me. I was emphatic in my refusal to do so, and they went away angry, doubting the sincerity of my love for my motherland. Long before this ebullition of excitement, I myself had given a thousand rupees, when I had not five rupees to call my own, to open a swadeshi store and courted banter and bankruptcy. The reason for my refusing to advise those students to leave their schools was because the anarchy of a mere emptiness never tempts me, even when it is resorted to as a temporary shelter. I am frightened of an abstraction which is ready to ignore living reality. These students were no mere phantoms to me; their life was a great fact to them and to the All. I could not lightly take upon myself the tremendous responsibility of a mere negative programme for them which would uproot them from their soil, however thin and poor that soil might be. The great injury and injustice which had been done to those boys who were tempted away from their career before any real provision was made, could never be made good to them. Of course that is nothing from the point of view of an abstraction which can ignore the infinite value even of the smallest fraction of reality. But the throb of life in the heart of the most insignificant of men beats in the unison of love with the heart-throb of the infinite. I wish I were the little creature Jack whose one mission was to kill the giant abstraction which is claiming the sacrifice of individuals all over the world under highly painted masks of delusion.
I say again and again that I am a poet, that I am not a fighter by nature. I would give everything to be one with my surroundings. I love my fellow beings and I prize their love. Yet I have been chosen by destiny to ply my boat there where the current is against me. What irony of fate is this, that I should be preaching cooperation of cultures between East and West on this side of the sea just at the moment when the doctrine of non-cooperation is preached on the other side? You know that I do not believe in the material civilization of the West, just as I do not believe the physical body to be the highest truth in man. But I still less believe in the destruction of the physical body. What is needed is the establishment of harmony between the physical and the spiritual nature of man, maintaining the balance between the foundation and the superstructure. I believe in the true meeting of the East and the West. Love is the ultimate truth of the soul; we should do all we can not to outrage that truth, to carry its banner against all opposition. The idea of non-cooperation unnecessarily hurts that truth. It is not our hearth fire, but the fire that burns out our hearth. …
With love, Ever yours, Rabindranath Tagore [Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, eds., Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 168, 170–173.]
On August 29, 1921, with Gandhi’s power at its height, Tagore delivered at a Calcutta public meeting an address entitled “The Call of Truth.” A remarkable commentary, it offered both a trenchant criticism of Gandhi’s leadership—including his insistence on universal Congressite use of the spinning wheel (charkha), as a means of dignifying the labor of the poor, and on the burning of foreign-made cloth—and an eloquent defense of individual freedom.
To make the country our own by means of our creative power is indeed a great call. It cannot be a mere summons to some mechanical exercise. For, man does not limit himself in the manner of the bee building endless replicas of cells, or the spider weaving webs of one pattern. His greatest strength is within him, and it is up to him to draw on that strength and not on blind habit. To tell him, “Do not think but act,” is to help prolong the age-old delusion that has held this country in its deadly grip. …
Then, at the crucial moment, Mahatma Gandhi came and stood at the door of India’s destitute millions, clad as one of themselves, speaking to them in their own language. It was a real happening, not a tale of the printed page. That is why he has been so aptly named Mahatma, Great Soul. Who else has so unreservedly accepted the vast masses of the Indian people as his own flesh and blood? At the touch of truth the pent-up forces of the spirit are set free. As soon as love stood at India’s door, it flew open. All inward niggardliness was gone. Truth awakened truth.
Stratagem in politics is a barren policy—that was a lesson of which we were sorely in need. All honour to the Mahatma, who wakened us to the power of truth. But the cowardly and the weak take easily to cheap tactics. Even today our worldly-wise ones have not been rid of the idea of using the Mahatma as a disguised and ingenious move in their political gamble. Minds corrupted by untruth cannot grasp the meaning of the great love kindled in the people’s heart by the Mahatma’s love.
This, indeed, is the birth of freedom, nothing less. It is the country’s discovery of itself. It has little to do with the alien occupation of India. This love is pure affirmation. It does not involve itself in arguments with the negative attitude. …
So, in the excited expectation of breathing the air of a new-found freedom, I hurried back to my homeland. But what I have seen and felt troubles me. Something seems to be weighing on the people’s spirit; a stern pressure is at work; it makes everyone talk in the same voice and make the same gestures.
When I wanted to ask questions and decide for myself, my well-wishers clapped anxious hands to my mouth: “Pray be silent.” There is a tyranny in the air—even if intangible, it is worse than open violence. Let anyone who doubts the wisdom of the proclaimed policy speak his mind in a bare whisper, and he will have to face disciplinary action. One of our newspapers dared give a mere hint of disapproval of the burning of foreign cloth, and the readers’ agitated protest came menacingly; the flames which had consumed the bales of mill cloth could quickly reduce this paper to ashes!
I see a section of the people fanatically engaged in their assigned task, and another section struck with alarm and dumbfounded. The idea prevails that all questioning must stop; there should be nothing but blind obedience. Obedience to whom? To some charmed words of incantation, to some reasonless creed! …
To make matters worse, the gain which is envisaged has a name but it is not defined. Even as a fear which is vague is all the more terrifying, the haziness of a lure makes it all the more tempting. Left to the imagination, everyone can give it a form according to his preference. An attempt to inquire into the real nature is of no avail, for it can easily camouflage itself. Thus, while the temptation has been magnified by its indefiniteness, the means of attainment and the hour have been precisely indicated. Many people are convinced that self-government will be won on a certain date of a certain month close ahead. Having given up their freedom of mind, they deprive others of that freedom. It is as if we have been seeking an exorcist to drive out a ghost, and then the ghost itself turns up in the guise of the exorcist.
The Mahatma has captured the heart of India with his love; we all bow down to him on that account. He has revealed to us the full power of truth and for that we are beholden. We read about eternal truth in books, we talk about them, but it is a propitious moment when we encounter truth face to face. Such an opportunity is rare in one’s life. It is easy enough to go from province to province making political speeches, and even to make and break National Congresses. But the golden wand of true love that has wakened us out of age-long slumber is not to be easily found. To the possessor of that rare wand, our profound salutation.
But then, what is the good of it all if, even after we have seen the face of truth, our faith in it is not firm enough? Our minds must accept the truth of the intellect just as the heart accepts the truth of love. Till now, neither the Congress nor any other institution made a strong impression on the heart of India—it needed the touch of love. Now that we have the truth of love, are we to withdraw our trust in the other truth—just where swaraj is concerned? …
Let our faith in the Mahatma’s capacity for love never diminish; but swaraj is not a matter of a stick and a single string. It is a vast enterprise involving complex processes and needing as much study and clear thinking as impulse and emotion. Economists and educationists and mechanical engineers must contribute their ideas and exertions to the pool of this many sided endeavour. The intellect of the people must be fully awake, so that the spirit of inquiry is untra-melled; minds must not be overawed or made inactive by compulsions, open or secret. …
The true vision of that ancient age lives on; its voice flings echoes. Then, why should not our supreme leader of today … say, “Let all who hear me come from every direction?” Freedom lies in the complete arousal of the people. God has given the Mahatma the voice that can call. Why should this not be our supreme moment?
His call has come, but only to a restricted field. To one and all he has simply said, “Spin and weave, spin and weave.” Is this the strident call of the new age for a vast striving? When nature summoned the bee to a narrow hive-life, millions of bees responded and made themselves sexless for the sake of efficiency. But this sacrifice by way of self-atrophy led to the opposite of freedom. People who do not hesitate to neutralize their power in answer to some command carry within them their prison-cell. The call to the easy way is for the bee, not for man. Man reveals himself in all his strength only when his utmost capacity is demanded. …
I hear the voice of protest: “We do not propose to curb the mind for ever, but only for a short while.” Why, even for a short while? Is it because that brief period will be enough for us to gain swaraj? That does not make sense. Swaraj is not a matter of mere self-sufficiency in the production of cloth. Its real place is within us—the mind with its diverse power goes on building swaraj for itself. Nowhere in the world has this work been completed; in some part of the body-politic a lingering greed or delusion keeps up the bondage. And that bondage is always within the mind itself. …
There is the bonfire of heaped mill cloth, before the very eyes of the Mother deep in shame because of her nakedness. I see no urgency for such waste except in the power of a superstition. The question of using or boycotting British-made cloth is one for economists to decide. In discussing it, the language of economists must be employed. If people cannot think scientifically, our very first battle should be against that sad state of mind. Such incapacity is the original sin out of which all other ills flow. That original sin finds support when it is proclaimed that foreign cloth is “impure” and deserves to be destroyed. Economics is tossed aside for the falsehood passing as a moral dictum. …
We have been ordered to burn foreign cloth. I, for one, am unable to obey. First, because I believe it to be my duty to fight the habit of blind obedience. Secondly, I feel that the cloth to be burnt is not mine, it belongs to people who are sorely in need of it. We who seem to be doing an act of sacrifice through this incendiarism have other sources of supply; but those who are really hit cannot stir out of doors because of their nakedness. Forced atonement will not wash off our sins; nor will the gain of some apparent benefits make up for the loss of the reasoned will.
The Mahatma has declared war against the tyranny of the machine which is oppressing the world. Here we are all under his banner. But we cannot accept as our ally in the fight the slave mentality that is at the root of all the misery and indignity in our national life. That, indeed, is our real enemy and through its defeat alone can swaraj within and without come to us. …
Henceforth, any nation which seeks isolation for itself must come into conflict with the time-spirit and find no peace. From now onward the plane of thinking of every nation will have to be international. It is the striving of the new age to develop in the mind this faculty of universality.
[Rabindranath Tagore, Towards Universal Man (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), 260–271.]
The Gandhi–Tagore controversy thus focused on two aspects of the meaning of swaraj, or freedom, in its fullest sense. Tagore argued, first, that on a domestic level, Indians had placed themselves in bondage through their unthinking acceptance of dogma. They idolized a leader who, however saintly, had harnessed their blind allegiance to a gospel of retardation rather than growth. A second and related problem in Gandhi’s teaching involved its implications on an international level. Gandhi’s ideas, Tagore argued, had fostered, for the most part, an unhealthy sense of separateness that foolishly spurned the knowledge and advances of the Western world. Each of these attitudes inhibited India’s growth, and thus restricted her freedom.
To the first of Tagore’s charges, Gandhi responded that he did not wish to produce a “deathlike sameness in the nation,” but rather to use the spinning wheel to “realize the essential and living oneness of interest among India’s myriads.” Spinning was not intended to replace all other forms of activity, but rather to symbolize “sacrifice for the whole nation.”
The Bard of Shantiniketan has contributed to The Modern Review a brilliant essay on the present movement. It is a series of word pictures which he alone can paint. It is an eloquent protest against authority, slave-mentality or whatever description one gives of blind acceptance of a passing mania whether out of fear or hope. It is a welcome and wholesome reminder to all workers that we must not be impatient, we must not impose authority no matter how great. The Poet tells us summarily to reject anything and everything that does not appeal to our reason or heart. If we would gain swaraj, we must stand for truth as we know it at any cost. A reformer who is enraged because his message is not accepted must retire to the forest to learn how to watch, wait and pray. With all this one must heartily agree, and the Poet deserves the thanks of his countrymen for standing up for truth and reason. There is no doubt that our last state will be worse than our first, if we surrender our reason into somebody’s keeping. And I would feel extremely sorry to discover, that the country had unthinkingly and blindly followed all I had said or done. I am quite conscious of the fact that blind surrender to love is often more mischievous than a forced surrender to the lash of the tyrant. There is hope for the slave of the brute, none for that of love. Love is needed to strengthen the weak, love becomes tyrannical when it exacts obedience from an unbeliever. To mutter a mantra without knowing its value is unmanly. It is good, therefore, that the Poet has invited all who are slavishly mimicking the call of the charkha [spinning wheel] boldly to declare their revolt. His essay serves as a warning to us all who in our impatience are betrayed into intolerance or even violence against those who differ from us. I regard the Poet as a sentinel warning us against the approach of enemies called bigotry, lethargy, intolerance, ignorance, inertia and other members of that brood.
But whilst I agree with all that the Poet has said as to the necessity of watchfulness lest we cease to think, I must not be understood to endorse the proposition that there is any such blind obedience on a large scale in the country today. I have again and again appealed to reason, and let me assure him, that if happily the country has come to believe in the spinning-wheel as the giver of plenty, it has done so after laborious thinking, after great hesitation. I am not sure, that even now educated India has assimilated the truth underlying the charkha. He must not mistake the surface dirt for the substance underneath. Let him go deeper and see for himself whether the charkha has been accepted from blind faith or from reasoned necessity.
I do indeed ask the Poet and the page to spin the wheel as a sacrament. When there is war, the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books. The Poet will sing the true note after the war is over, the lawyer will have occasion to go to his law books when people have time to fight among themselves. When a house is on fire, all the inmates go out, and each one takes up a bucket to quench the fire. When all about me are dying for want of food, the only occupation permissible to me is to feed the hungry. It is my conviction that India is a house on fire, because its manhood is being daily scorched, it is dying of hunger because it has no work to buy food with. Khulna is starving not because the people cannot work, but because they have no work. The Ceded Districts are passing successively through a fourth famine, Orissa is a land suffering from chronic famines. Our cities are not India. India lives in her seven and a half lakhs of villages, and the cities live upon the villages. They do not bring their wealth from other countries. The city people are brokers and commission agents for the big houses of Europe, America and Japan. The cities have co-operated with the latter in the bleeding process that has gone on for the past two hundred years. It is my belief based on experience, that India is daily growing poorer. The circulation about her feet and legs has almost stopped. And if we do not take care, she will collapse altogether.
To a people famishing and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work and promise of food as wages. God created man to work for his food, and said that those who ate without work were thieves. Eighty per cent of India are compulsorily thieves half the year. Is it any wonder if India has become one vast prison? Hunger is the argument that is driving India to the spinning-wheel. The call of the spinning-wheel is the noblest of all. Because it is the call of love. And love is swaraj. The spinning-wheel will “curb the mind” when the time spent on necessary physical labour can be said to do so. We must think of millions who are today less than animals, who are almost in a dying state. The spinning-wheel is the reviving draught for the millions of our dying countrymen and countrywomen. “Why should I, who have no need to work for food, spin?” may be the question asked. Because I am eating what does not belong to me. I am living on the spoliation of my countrymen. Trace the course of every pice that finds its way into your pocket, and you will realize the truth of what I write. Swaraj has no meaning for the millions if they do not know how to employ their enforced idleness. The attainment of this swaraj is possible within a short time, and it is so possible only by the revival of the spinning-wheel. … A plea for the spinning-wheel is a plea for recognizing the dignity of labour. …
It was our love of foreign cloth that ousted the wheel from its position of dignity. Therefore I consider it a sin to wear foreign cloth. I must confess that I do not draw a sharp or any distinction between economics and ethics. Economics that hurt the moral well-being of an individual or a nation are immoral and therefore sinful. Thus the economics that permit one country to prey upon another are immoral. It is sinful to buy and use articles made by sweated labour. It is sinful to eat American wheat and let my neighbour the grain-dealer starve for want of custom. Similarly it is sinful for me to wear the latest finery of Regent Street, when I know that if I had but worn the things woven by the neighbouring spinners and weavers, that would have clothed me, and fed and clothed them. On the knowledge of my sin bursting upon me, I must consign the foreign garments to the flames and thus purify myself, and thenceforth rest content with the rough khadi made by my neighbours. On knowing that my neighbours may not, having given up the occupation, take kindly to the spinning-wheel, I must take it up myself and thus make it popular.
I venture to suggest to the Poet, that the clothes I ask him to burn must be and are his. If they had to his knowledge belonged to the poor or the ill-clad, he would long ago have restored to the poor what was theirs. In burning my foreign clothes I burn my shame. I must refuse to insult the naked by giving them clothes they do not need, instead of giving them work which they sorely need. I will not commit the sin of becoming their patron, but on learning that I had assisted in impoverishing them, I would give them a privileged position and give them neither crumbs nor cast-off clothing, but the best of my food and clothes and associate myself with them in work. …
True to his poetical instinct the Poet lives for the morrow and would have us do likewise. He presents to our admiring gaze the beautiful picture of the birds early in the morning singing hymns of praise as they soar into the sky. These birds had their day’s food and soared with rested wings in whose veins new blood had flown during the previous night. But I have had the pain of watching birds who for want of strength could not be coaxed even into a flutter of their wings. The human bird under the Indian sky gets up weaker than when he pretended to retire. For millions it is an eternal vigil or an eternal trance. It is an indescribably painful state which has to be experienced to be realized. I have found it impossible to soothe suffering patients with a song from Kabir. The hungry millions ask for one poem—invigorating food. They cannot be given it. They must earn it. And they can earn only by the sweat of their brow. …
In these verses is contained for me the whole truth of the spinning-wheel as an indispensable sacrament for the India of today. If we will take care of today, God will take care of the morrow.
[CWMG 21:287–291.]
Karl Marx and his partner, Friedrich Engels, did not write an organized analysis of Indian political economy or give a coherent account of what they referred to the Asiatic mode of production, but Marx wrote two series of articles on India, the first at the time of the renewal of the India Act in 1853, and the second at the time of the Rebellion in 1857. Marx accepted the idea of the “Oriental despotic state”20 and described what he understood to be small, self-contained village communities in the Indian past that had depended on agriculture and “manufactures,” i.e., the production of textiles. However, he insisted, since such communities involved caste and slavery, they represented no golden age.
The coming of the British, he believed, marked a great shift, a revolutionary change for India. The old system of small communities and a flourishing textile industry were destroyed. Out of that destruction the British bourgeoisie were in the process of creating a monster: an Indian economy and society that they would not be able to control. This would be the case, Marx said, because the Indians were intelligent and hard-working: they would learn all the British had to teach, and then move on beyond them. Crucial in this new age was the system of railways, which the British were building for their own purposes but which would also be used by Indians.
Although neither M. N. Roy nor R. Palme Dutt refers directly to Marx’s writings on India, both were affiliated with the Third Communist International, which was the successor to the First International founded by Marx in the nineteenth century, and both made use of Marxist concepts. Indeed, the impact of Marxism—as we see throughout this volume, not only here but also in the selections by the Naxalites and the subaltern historians in chapter 8—is an important ingredient in the modern history of India.
Manabendra Nath Roy was born in 1887 into a Bengali Brahman family in a village outside of Calcutta. Twenty-eight years later, as a terrorist revolutionary, he left India for an adventurous career in the communist international movement.
The year 1915 is a key one in the Gandhi–Roy story. In that year, Roy, as a terrorist schooled under the revolutionary Jatin Mukherjee and inspired by Aurobindo Ghose, left Calcutta on a revolutionary mission to obtain German arms for the struggle against the Raj. In that same year, Gandhi returned to India after twenty-one years in South Africa. As Gandhi achieved his extraordinary rise to power in the Congress during the 1920s, Roy acquired his reputation of being “undoubtedly the most colorful of all non-Russian communists in the era of Lenin and Stalin.”24 From 1915 to 1930, Roy moved about on various revolutionary missions, from Mexico to Berlin, and then on to Paris, Zurich, Tashkent, and Moscow. In Mexico, Roy was converted to communism and reputedly helped form the first Communist Party there. In Moscow, he contributed to revolutionary strategy for communist activity in the colonial areas. In Europe, he rose to a position of authority in the Comintern, published a series of books and pamphlets on Marxist theory, and edited a communist newspaper. The achievements of both Gandhi and Roy during this period were spectacular, but in complete contrast.
Rajani Palme Dutt (1896–1974) was born in Cambridge, England, the younger son of Upendra Krishna Dutt, a Bengali physician; his mother, Anna Palme, was Swedish. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, earning a first in classics. A near-contemporary of M. N. Roy and of Jawaharlal Nehru, he chose to remain in Great Britain through his lengthy political career. While Roy was virtually self-taught, Dutt, like Nehru and Aurobindo Ghose, had a British education.
Dutt served the cause of international communism and Indian independence in Britain, where, thanks to his politically active father, his home was a forum for English Labor politics. Early on, he became rooted in British Marxism, and his main focus was on furthering the work of the Comintern and the British Communist Party; his was a faith that never wavered. His biographer, John Callaghan, aptly subtitles his book, “A Study in British Stalinism.”25
A notable historical anomaly is that even by age twenty, Dutt’s anti-imperialist communism was so firm that he went to jail for resistance to conscription in the war, while Gandhi, advocate of non-violence, nonetheless supported the World War enthusiastically, recruiting Indian troops for Britain, in the misguided belief that this action would eventually win concessions for India. Dutt had none of Gandhi’s naïve faith in the goodwill of the British Empire. His steady allegiance to Lenin’s theory of imperialism guided all his foreign policy, first when he was the international secretary for the British Labor Research Department, and then when he became a founding member of the British Communist Party in 1920. He remained its chief analyst of Indian affairs, but also wrote extensively on international politics.
At this point, communism brought Dutt and Roy together. Although their connection lasted for less than a decade, until the latter fled from the USSR and then was expelled from the Comintern in 1929, many of their most systematic and piercing insights into Indian politics found expression in the 1920s. In the forum of the Comintern, they often differed. Dutt wanted the British communists to shape the communist party in India, while Roy criticized this proposal as imperialism in another guise. Roy’s first and best critique, India in Transition (1922, quoted above) came at the same time as Dutt’s groundbreaking report on the organization of the Labour Party along Leninist lines. In 1923 he commenced his extremely influential “Notes of the Month” in issues of the Labour Monthly that he continued writing as its editor for fifty years. Equally important were Dutt’s books that paralleled Roy’s publications: Modern India (1926), appearing the same year as Roy’s The Future of Indian Politics; and Socialism and the Living Wage (1927). Roy’s expulsion then led him to the Communist International Opposition and later to radical shifts of ideology, but Dutt stayed consistently with the Comintern party line in Fascism and Social Revolution (1935), World Politics (1936), and India Today (1940).
The first detailed Marxist critique of Gandhi appeared in Roy’s early book, India in Transition, written in Moscow in 1922. The book grew out of discussions that Roy had with Lenin and other communist figures at the Second Congress of the Communist International. At this congress, Roy had argued, contrary to Lenin, that communist policy in the colonial areas must be to support proletarian rather than bourgeois movements. Lenin contended that bourgeois nationalist organizations like the Indian Congress could be considered revolutionary, and since no viable communist parties existed, these organizations deserved support. Roy replied that the Indian Congress and similar agencies could only betray the revolution: an Indian proletariat existed, and must be mobilized behind a communist vanguard. Liberation from imperialism could come only under communist leadership. The Roy–Lenin controversy was clearly over fundamental issues and would have implications for communist strategy in the future.
Roy later reflected upon his differences with Lenin and concluded, “The role of Gandhi was the crucial point of difference. Lenin believed that, as the inspirer and leader of a mass movement, he was a revolutionary. I maintained that, [as] a religious and cultural revivalist, he was bound to be a reactionary socially, however revolutionary he might appear politically.” In Roy’s view, “The religious ideology preached by him [Gandhi] also appealed to the medieval mentality of the masses. But the same ideology discouraged any revolutionary mass action. The quintessence of the situation, as I analyzed and understood it, was a potentially revolutionary movement restrained by a reactionary ideology.” Moreover, “I reminded Lenin of the dictum that I had learnt from him: that without a revolutionary ideology, there could be no revolution.”26
These arguments formed the basis of the position on Gandhi that was developed by Roy in India in Transition.
The movement for national liberation is a struggle of the native middle-class against the economic and political monopoly of the imperialist bourgeoisie. But the former cannot succeed in the struggle, nor even threaten its opponent to make substantial concessions, without the support of the masses of the people. Because the Indian middle-class is still weak numerically, economically, and socially, hence the necessity of the nationalism in the name of which the people can be led to fight; the victory gained in this fight, however, will not change very much the condition of those whose blood it will cost.
The discontent and growing unrest among the masses, brought about by economic exploitation intensified during the war, was seized by the Congress under the leadership of the Extremists, and turned into a popular demonstration demanding national liberation. But in spite of their religious idiosyncrasies and orthodox inclinations, the social affiliation of the Extremists is identical with that of the Moderates. In the spontaneous mass-upheavals, they discovered the force which could be utilized for the triumph of the native bourgeoisie. But they could not develop the potentiality of the mass movement by leading it in accordance with its economic and social tendencies. Their tactics were to strengthen the nationalist movement by the questionable method of exploiting the ignorance of the masses. And the best way of exploiting the ignorance of the masses was to make a religion of nationalism. These tactics led to the appearance of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on the political horizon, and the temporary eclipse of all other politico-social tendencies in the shade of Gandhism, which has reached a crisis after having swept the country for two years.
In Gandhism culminate all the social tendencies that have always differentiated the two principles of Indian nationalism. In fact, Gandhism is the acutest and most desperate manifestation of the forces of reaction, trying to hold their own against the objectively revolutionary tendencies contained in the liberal bourgeois nationalism. The impending wane of Gandhism signifies the collapse of the reactionary forces and their total elimination from the political movement. …
The Indian national movement is not a struggle of the commercial and industrial middle-class against decrepit feudalism. The Indian bourgeoisie is not engaged in a class struggle. The basis of the national movement is the rivalry of a weak and suppressed bourgeoisie against its immensely stronger imperialist prototype controlling the state power. …
The present awakening is a reaction against the age-long resignation, created by religious teachings and the tenets of spiritual culture. Therefore, it cannot be used for a national movement tending towards the revival of the spiritual civilization of India. Here lies the contradiction in the orthodox nationalism as expressed of late in the cult of Gandhism. It endeavours to utilize the mass energy for the perpetuation or revival of that heritage of national culture which has been made untenable by the awakening of this energy. The orthodox Extremists in control of the Congress, freed from all Moderate influence, assumed the leadership of a popular mass movement national in appearance which contains, nevertheless, a challenge to all the fundamental doctrines of orthodox nationalism. Therefore, the intention of the present Congress, which has acquired the status of a political party, to unite the people of all classes in a struggle for national liberation to be carried on under the banner of Gandhism, is bound to be defeated. The signs of the impending defeat are already perceptible.
Gandhism will fall victim to its own contradictions. By Gandhism is meant the school of nationalism which has been reigning supreme in the Indian movement during the last three years. It can be put in another way: The Indian national movement, actuated by the spirit of Gandhism, cannot succeed because in that case it would defeat its own end. In spite of the pious desire of its leaders, post-British India cannot and will not become pre-British India. The Indian people will not be able to overthrow foreign domination until and unless all that is cherished by orthodox nationalists have become things of the past, of venerable memory. Sanctimonious antagonism to the “satanic Western civilization,” a tendency which in spite of its pathetic impotency, smacks of reaction, cannot be the life of a movement whose success will be marked by the crowning of the native bourgeoisie, who will prove to be as disruptive as the British ruler in so far as the social and religious ideals of orthodox nationalism are concerned. The victory of Indian nationalism will be the victory of the progressive middle-class, which may build a monument to the memory of the Mahatma for the valuable services he rendered them involuntarily, but which will never share his pious indignation against Western civilization, which is after all only a certain stage of social development through which every human community has to pass. This victory will be won, not through “suffering and soul-force,” but with blood and tears and will be maintained by blood and iron. But it must come. The introduction of “Western civilization” so heartily hated by Gandhi is the reward of the fierce fight for national independence to which he seeks to lead the people. He is working for something which is mortally antagonistic to the reactionary forces operating through him, and whose standard bearer he unconsciously is.
Before proceeding to review the happenings in the Indian movement since the beginning of the world war from the point of view stated above, it will be worth while to analyse Gandhism, because in it is ample expression of all the ebbing vitality contained in orthodox nationalism. The imminent collapse of Gandhism will close a romantic and exciting chapter of the Indian national movement. It will demonstrate that a socially revolutionary movement cannot be influenced by reactionary forces. It will disclose the incompatibility between the national struggle having for its object the aggrandizement of the bourgeoisie and the revolt of the working masses against class exploitation—a revolt which nevertheless has contributed strength to the Congress in the last years of its activities. …
Gandhism is nothing but petty-bourgeois humanitarianism hopelessly bewildered in the clashes of the staggering forces of human progress. The crocodile tears of this humanitarianism are shed ostensibly for the undeniable sufferings of the majority in capitalist society, but they are really caused by grief over the end of the old order, already destroyed or about to be so. It pines for that ancient golden age when the majority were kept in blissful ignorance in order that a few could roll in idle luxury, undisturbed by the revolt of the discontented; the spiritual culture of which was based on the barbarism of the people at large; the simplicity of which was the sign of its backwardness. This longing glance backward is due, in some cases, to the consummate intrigues of the forces of reaction, and in others, to involuntary subordination to the influence of the same agency. Its tendency towards a sort of religious or utopian socialism proves that Gandhism, as well as its source, Tolstoyism, belongs to the latter category. Or in other words, the services rendered by it to reaction are involuntary. …
Gandhi’s criticism of modern civilization, that is, capitalist society, is correct. But the remedy he prescribes is not only wrong but impossible. One need not be a sentimental humanitarian, nor a religious fanatic in order to denounce the present order of society in the countries where capitalism rules. But the knowledge of material and social sciences makes one see through the Christian piety of Gandhism, not only Indian, but international (there are Gandhis in every country) and discover the sinister forces of reaction busy in its depths. Its true social character no longer remains unknown on finding such tenets in its philosophy:
“The more we indulge our passions, the more unbridled they become. Our ancestors, therefore, set a limit to our indulgences. They saw that happiness was largely a mental condition. A man is not necessarily happy because he is rich, or unhappy because he is poor. The rich are often seen to be unhappy, the poor to be happy. Millions will always remain poor. Observing all this, our ancestors dissuaded us from luxuries and pleasures.”
This sanctimonious philosophy of poverty is not unfamiliar. It has been preached by many prophets who have not only been proved false by history, but the questionableness of their humanitarianism has also been revealed. Such philosophy serves but one object—to guarantee the safety of the vested interests whose character may differ in different epochs but which essentially is always the same, being based on the right of exploitation of man by man.
Capitalist civilization is rotten; but it cannot be avoided. Neither is it permanent. It must pass away in due course of evolution, giving place to a higher order of society, as the ones preceding it were replaced by it. But it will not collapse because sentimental humanitarians find it full of cruelty and injustice. It will break down under the pressure of its own contradictions. Whether we want it or not, it must be lived through somehow. It must be lived through in order that the fetters of moral and material ignorance that kept the human race bound hitherto can be broken, and mankind in all countries may have the facilities to strive for a higher stage of civilization. National freedom will not enable the people of India to go back, but to surge ahead.
In itself capitalist society has many defects; but it is undoubtedly an improvement on the patriarchal or feudal civilization for which Gandhi and his kind pine. Indian society is inevitably heading toward capitalist civilization, in spite of the premonitions of Gandhi, among many other prophets of similar creed. The desire to see it hark back is as futile as to expect a river to rush back to its source. Caught in the morass of such hopeless contradictions, Gandhism cannot supply the ideology of Indian nationalism. The revolutionary character of the latter is contrary to it. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Gandhism, better said, the personality of Gandhi, exercised a considerable influence on the Indian movement in the last three years. Or in other words, just about the time that the National Congress was finding the first response among the ranks of the working masses, it came under the domination of a spirit which is essentially reactionary and non-revolutionary in a very frank way.
[M. N. Roy, India in Transition (Bombay: Nanchiketa, 1971), 202, 203–204, 205–208, 209–210.]
Like Roy, Dutt viewed Gandhi in familiar Marxist terms as a tool of the Indian bourgeoisie, collaborating with the capitalist structure established by British colonialism, and thus restraining the revolutionary will of the Indian masses. More than Roy, Dutt appreciated Gandhi’s hold on the people and the Congress; but they both emphasized his predominant role as a reactionary. Their participation in this grand intellectual debate over India’s history and future gave Marxism its critical force on the subcontinent.
While Roy became a peripheral player in left politics in India, Dutt remained a central ideologue for the Communist Party of India for half a century. Disputes and questions were often referred for resolution to “RPD.” A prominent communist historian of premodern India said in the 1960s that when he wanted to know about the twentieth century in India he turned to the works of Palme Dutt.
In 1965 Leonard Gordon interviewed Palme Dutt at the headquarters of the British Communist Party. Dutt asked, “Are you a communist?” Gordon said “No.” “Then,” Dutt replied, “you won’t be able to understand anything that I have to say.”
The following excerpts from Dutt’s India Today contain a trenchant analysis of Gandhi’s leadership. Having already surveyed the events of 1919 to 1922 that led up to Gandhi’s first non-cooperation movement, Dutt takes issue with the ostensible reasons for which Gandhi called it off after Chauri Chaura, in 1922.
The dominant leadership of the Congress associated with Gandhi called off the movement because they were afraid of the awakening mass activity; and they were afraid of the mass activity because it was beginning to threaten those propertied class interests with which they themselves were still in fact closely linked.
Not the question of “violence” or “non-violence,” but the question of class interest in opposition to the mass movement, was the breaking-point of the national struggle in 1922. This was the rock on which the movement broke. This was the real meaning of “Non-Violence.”
The new factor which developed for the first time in the middle years of the nineteen-twenties, and gave the decisive impetus to the new wave of struggle, though not yet its leadership, was the emergence of the industrial working class as an independent force, conducting its own struggle with unexampled energy and heroism, and beginning to develop its own leadership. With this advance the new ideology of the working class, or socialism, began to develop for the first time as a political factor in India, and the influence of its ideas began to penetrate the youth and the left sections of Indian Nationalism, bringing new life and energy and wider horizons. …
In this critical balance of forces, with the certainty of big new struggles ahead in a far more advanced situation than a decade previously, the right-wing leadership once again turned to Gandhi, whom they had previously thrust aside, and whose star now once again rose. At the Calcutta session at the end of 1928 Gandhi returned to active leadership of the Congress. Whatever the views of the moderate leaders might be with regard to his personal idiosyncrasies, there was no question that he was the most subtle and experienced politician of the older group, with unrivalled mass prestige which world publicity had now enhanced as the greatest Indian figure; the ascetic defender of property in the name of the most religious and idealist principles of humility and love of poverty; the invincible metaphysical-theological casuist who could justify and reconcile anything and everything in an astounding tangle of explanations and arguments which in a man of common clay might have been called dishonest quibbling, but in the great ones of the earth like MacDonald or Gandhi is recognised as a higher plane of spiritual reasoning; the prophet who by his personal saintliness and selflessness could unlock the door to the hearts of the masses where the moderate bourgeois leaders could not hope for a hearing—and the best guarantee of the shipwreck of any mass movement which had the blessing of his association.27 This Jonah of revolution, this general of unbroken disasters was the mascot of the bourgeoisie in each wave of the developing Indian struggle. So appeared once again the characteristic feature of modern Indian politics, the unwritten article of every successive Indian constitution—the indispensability of Gandhi (actually the expression of the precarious balance of class forces). All the hopes of the bourgeoisie (the hostile might say, the hopes of imperialism) were fixed on Gandhi as the man to ride the waves, to unleash just enough of the mass movement in order to drive a successful bargain, and at the same time to save India from revolution. …
Thus on the eve of rising mass struggle Gandhi proclaimed the fight on two fronts, not only against British rule, but against the internal enemy in India. This conception of the fight on two fronts corresponds to the role of the Indian bourgeoisie, alarmed as it sees the ground sinking beneath its feet with the growing conflict of imperialism and the mass movement, compelled to undertake leadership of the struggle, despite the “mad risk” (in Gandhi’s phrase in his letter to the Viceroy), in order to hold it within bounds (“to sit still would be to give rein to both the forces above mentioned”), and seeking to conciliate both with the magic wand of “non-violence.” However, “non-violence,” like the notorious “non-intervention” of later days practised by the democratic Powers in relation to Spain, was “one-way non-violence.” It was “non-violence” for the Indian masses, but not for imperialism, which practised violence to its heart’s content—and won the battle.
Gandhi’s strategy corresponded to this conception of the struggle. Given this understanding, that it was not a strategy intended to lead to the victory of independence, but to find the means in the midst of a formidable revolutionary wave to maintain leadership of the mass movement and yet place the maximum bounds and restraints upon it, it was a skilful and able strategy. This was shown already in his brilliant choice of the first objective of the campaign and the method of conducting it. He decided to lead the fight against the salt monopoly of the Government. This diverted the fight from the possibility of participation by the industrial working class, the one force which Gandhi has made clear in every utterance that he fears in India; it was capable of enlisting the support and popular interest of the peasantry, while diverting them from any struggle against the landlords. …
So followed the march to Dandi, on the seashore, by Gandhi and his seventy-eight hand-picked followers, dragging on through three precious weeks, with the news-reel cameras of the world clicking away, while the masses were called on to wait expectant. The enormous publicity which was given to this Salt March through the Press, the cinema and every other device, was regarded by the Congress leadership as a triumph of strategy for awakening and mobilising the masses; but, while it is undoubtedly true that it did help to perform this function for the more backward elements among the masses, the free encouragement and permission given by the imperialist authorities for this publicity, in striking contrast to their later attitude (and to their very alert arrest of Subhas Bose, the leading left nationalist, even before Independence Day, before the struggle opened), was evidently not simple naivete and failure to understand its significance, but, on the contrary, very sharp understanding of its significance and direct help to ensure the diversion of the mass movement into the channels which were being prepared for it by Gandhi.
Nevertheless, the moment the three weeks were completed with the ceremonial boiling of salt by Gandhi on the seashore on April 6 (not followed by arrest), the overwhelming mass movement which broke loose throughout the country took the leadership on both sides by surprise. The official instructions given were confined to the most limited and relatively harmless forms of civil disobedience: violation of the Salt Law, boycott of foreign cloth, picketing of the foreign cloth shops and Government liquor shops. …
The mass movement which developed already in April went considerably beyond these simple limits, with rising strikes, powerful mass demonstrations, the Chittagong Armoury Raid in Bengal, the incidents at Peshawar, which was in the hands of the people for ten days, and the beginnings of spontaneous norent movements by the peasants in a number of localities, especially in the United Provinces, where the Congress vainly sought to mediate on a basis of 50 per cent payment of rents. …
When it became clear that the power of the mass movement was exceeding the limits set it, and that the authority of Gandhi, who had been left at liberty, was in danger of waning, on May 5 the Government arrested Gandhi. The response to the arrest was shown in the wave of hartals and mass strikes all over India. In the industrial town of Sholapur in the Bombay Presidency, with 140,000 inhabitants, of whom 50,000 were textile operatives, the workers held possession of the town for a week, replacing the police and establishing their own administration, until martial law was proclaimed on May 12. …
Imperialist repression was limitless. Ordinances followed one another in rapid succession, creating a situation comparable to martial law. In June the Congress and all its organisations were declared illegal. Official figures recorded 60,000 civil resisters sentenced in less than a year up to the Irwin–Gandhi Agreement in the spring of 1931. …
Imprisonment was the least of the forms of repression. The jails were filled to overflowing, and it was clear that wholesale imprisonment was powerless to check the movement. Therefore the principal weapon employed was physical terrorism. The records of indiscriminate lathi charges, beating up, firing on unarmed crowds, killing and wounding of men and women, and punitive expeditions made an ugly picture. The strictest measures were employed to cast a veil of censorship over the whole proceedings; but the careful records of the Congress provide volumes of certified and attested facts and incidents which throw some light on the brutality employed.
Nevertheless, the power of the movement during 1930, exceeding every calculation of the authorities, and growing in spite of repression, began to raise the most serious alarm in the imperialist camp, which already found open expression by the summer of 1930, especially in the British trading community, who were hard hit by the boycott. This was especially noticeable in Bombay, where was the centre of strength of the industrial working class, where repression was most severe, but where the movement was strongest, and again and again held possession of the streets, despite repeated police charges, in mass demonstrations which the Congress leaders vainly begged to disperse, and in which the red flags were conspicuous beside the Congress flags, or even predominated. …
Thus the alarm grew on both sides; and on the basis of this mutual alarm there was the possibility of a settlement—against the Indian people. …
The bait was thus held out in a rotund phrase which in hard practice committed the Government to nothing, as subsequent events were to show. The Round Table Conference was then adjourned to enable the Congress to attend.
On January 26 Gandhi and the Congress Working Committee were released unconditionally and given freedom to meet. Gandhi declared that he left prison with “an absolutely open mind.” Prolonged negotiations followed. On March 4 the Irwin–Gandhi Agreement was signed, and the struggle was declared provisionally suspended.
The Irwin–Gandhi Agreement secured not a single aim of the Congress struggle (not even the repeal of the Salt Tax). Civil Disobedience was to be withdrawn. Congress was to participate in the Round Table Conference, which it had sworn to boycott. Not a single concrete step to self-government was granted. The basis of discussion at the Round Table Conference was to be a Federal Constitution with “Indian responsibility”—but there were to be “reservations of safeguards in the interests of India.” The Ordinances were to be withdrawn and political prisoners released—but not prisoners guilty of “violence” or “incitement to violence” or soldiers guilty of disobeying orders. Freedom of boycott of foreign goods was to be allowed—but not “exclusively against British goods,” not “for political ends,” not with any picketing that might be regarded as involving “coercion, intimidation, restraint, hostile demonstration, obstruction to the public.” And so on with the clauses, which gave with one hand and took away with another. The maximum gain was the right of peaceful boycott of foreign cloth—the one positive element which very clearly pointed to the decisive interests on the Indian side behind the agreement. …
Three main tendencies or types of general social outlook exist to-day in the national movement.
The first is the conservative (in the social sense, not necessarily in the political sense or relation to imperialism) or backward-looking tendency, which seeks to build its programme on the basis of an idealised ancient Indian civilisation, purged of its grosser evils, but retaining the essential tenets and institutions of Hinduism; looks with horror on modern industrialism (equally identified, without distinction, as capitalism or communism); and believes itself, with its hand-spinning and advocacy of a primitive agricultural life as the ideal, to represent the aspirations of the peasantry.
The second is the powerful tendency of the industrial bourgeoisie, which seeks to build a modernised capitalist India after the Western model, but at the same time fears the inevitable accompanying growth in strength and rising demands of the industrial working class and of peasant discontent, and sometimes consequently attempts to idealise its aims under general phrases of a semi-socialist character, “socialism without class struggle” or “Indian socialism,” used to denote a vague humanitarianism and class-conciliation.
The third is the rising tendency of socialism, which in its clearest form represents the conscious expression of the aim of the industrial working class and of the basic transformation of Indian society, and with very varying degrees of clearness is winning wide and increasing support within the national movement, especially among the younger generation.
The still-continuing importance of the first of these tendencies in the present period should by no means be under-estimated, although it has no firm social basis, nor any practical possibility of the realisation of its aims. …
The positive programme put forward by the representatives of this tendency is one of village reconstruction and opposition to industrialism. …
Here the familiar bourgeois essence shows through the idealistic cover.
The immediate practical expression of this programme is found in the propagation of the Charkha or spinning-wheel, the Takli or distaff, the promotion of the use of Khadi or Indian hand-made cloth as a national symbol, and the development of village craft industries. …
The propaganda of a primitive economy as a solution for India’s problems is reactionary, not only because it leads in the opposite direction to that in which the solution must be sought (for the existing evils of poverty and misery are rooted in primitive technique, which is itself rooted in the social system of exploitation under imperialism), but because it serves as a diversion from the basic social tasks confronting the peasantry and the masses of the people. Agricultural development is impossible without tackling the question of the land, of landlordism and the re-division of the land. But here the voice of the agricultural idealists and worshippers of the vanished village community becomes weak and falters, and disappears into a vague and shame-faced defence of landlordism. …
Herein lies the practical significance of this preaching from the standpoint of the big bourgeoisie, who tolerate and even encourage its Utopian yearnings and naive fantasies with a smile, because they know its business value for protecting their class interests and assisting to hold in the masses and maintain class peace. The social significance of Gandhi’s historical role as the chosen representative and ablest leader of bourgeois nationalism in the critical transitions of the modern period has in practice coincided with his political role, despite the superficial contradiction between his social philosophy and the bourgeois outlook. The glaring contradictions and inadequacies in his many utterances and teaching, which can be easily picked out and exposed by the most elementary critic, are in fact the key to his unique significance and achievement. No other leader could have bridged the gap, during this transitional period, between the actual bourgeois direction of the national movement and the awakening, but not yet conscious masses. Both for good and for evil Gandhi achieved this, and led the movement, even appearing to create it. This role only comes to an end in proportion as the masses begin to reach clear consciousness of their own interests, and the actual class forces and class relations begin to stand out clear in the Indian scene, without need of mythological concealments.
[From R. Palme Dutt, India Today, 3rd ed. (1940; Lahore: Book Traders, 1979), 353, 357–359 365–371, 373–374, 622–624, 626, 628–629.]
Like Subhas and Sarat Chandra Bose, slightly younger contemporaries who appeared a little later on the scene, Mohamed Ali (1878–1931) and Shaukat Ali (1873–1938) were brothers implacably opposed to the Raj; like the Boses, they initially allied themselves with Gandhi but finally became disillusioned with him and the Congress. A difference from the Bose brothers, though, was that the Alis were Muslim.
Shaukat and his younger brother Mohamed were born into a highly respected family in the Muslim-ruled principality of Rampur, about 100 miles east of Delhi. They were raised in a conservative social, cultural, and political world that was just beginning to be influenced by the Western ways of the British. Both brothers broke with family tradition by studying English at local schools, then absorbing the advanced amalgam of modern Western and Islamic learning offered by the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental School and College in Aligarh. Here Mohamed so excelled in his studies that Shaukat raised funds to send him to London, where he graduated with honors in history in 1902, having taken a special interest in early Muslim conquests and empires.
Eventually, however, these thoroughly Anglicized brothers found it increasingly difficult to remain faithful to Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s policy of loyal support to their rulers. This was because of the quickening spirit of nationalism in other parts of the Islamic world, as well as in India, that accompanied the progressive dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by European nations, and the consequent Ottoman decision in October 1914 to enter World War I on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Growing sympathy among Indian Muslims for the Ottoman sultan was based on a traditional idea that the head of the strongest Islamic state was also the head of Muslims everywhere. Thus, nascent national feeling among Muslims in India for a time took the form of looking abroad for their symbolic leader. In this period, which ended in 1924 when the new Turkish government abolished the institution of the caliphate, the most vigorous English-speaking defenders in India of the rights of the Ottoman caliph were the Ali brothers.
Indian political developments awakened the brothers’ attention early: they joined the Muslim League on its founding in 1906, and helped in drawing up its constitution. The anguish felt by many Indian Muslims over the conquest of Ottoman territory in the Balkans prompted Mohamed to organize a medical mission for the beleaguered Turks. The news that the Ottoman Empire had joined Germany and Austria-Hungary, thus becoming Britain’s enemy in World War I, drove the brothers to despair. The British, suspicious of their pan-Islamic sentiments, sent them to a small town in central India and interned them there until the war was over.
Even before World War I ended, Gandhi made efforts to secure the brothers’ release from internment. But not until the Ottoman Empire surrendered were they set free—only to find the realms of the caliph further diminished by the loss of all non-Turkish territory. They soon became the leaders of the Khilāfat movement, which called for the preservation of the Ottoman caliph’s sovereignty over the holy places of Islam—Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. Motivated in part by a romantic attachment to the last great Islamic empire, in part by suspicion that the new Arab rulers of the homelands of Islam were puppets of the British, and above all by fears that Islam itself was in grave danger, many Indian Muslims quickly responded to the calls for action made by Mohamed and Shaukat Ali and other leaders. The Ali brothers accepted Gandhi’s plan that they join with the Congress in a non-violent movement of non-cooperation with British institutions in India. Hopes were high in 1920 and 1921 that this alliance would grow into a solid and permanent unity between Hindus and Muslims, but outbreaks of violence caused Gandhi to cancel the movement, and led to the breakdown of the alliance.
To the end, the Ali brothers wanted a united and independent India, but they could not find a practical way to reconcile the differences that divided Muslims and Hindus. Muslims were infuriated, for example, when Hindu religious processions with loudly beating drums passed mosques during the times of prayer, and Hindus were outraged at Muslim killings of cows. In the long history of conflict and (sometimes willing, sometimes reluctant) coexistence between the two communities, Mohamed and Shaukat Ali created with Gandhi a moment of heartfelt cooperation; but in the process religious passions were awakened that drove the wedge of division ever deeper.
In his 1923 presidential address to the Indian National Congress, Mohamed Ali voiced the aspirations that had led him to join the Congress and work with Gandhi in the 1920–1922 non-cooperation movement.
I had long been convinced that here in this country of hundreds of millions of human beings, intensely attached to religions, and yet infinitely split up into communities, sects and denominations, Providence had created for us the mission of solving a unique problem and working out a new synthesis, which was nothing less than a Federation of Faiths. As early as 1904, when I had been only two years in India after my return from Oxford, I had given to this ideal a clear, if still somewhat hesitating expression, in an address delivered at Ahmedabad on the “Proposed Mohammedan University.” “Unless some new force”—this is what I had said on that occasion—”unless some new force, other than the misleading unity of opposition, unites this vast continent of India, it will either remain a geographical misnomer, or what I think it will ultimately do, become a Federation of Religions.” … For more than twenty years I have dreamed the dream of a federation, grander, nobler and infinitely more spiritual than the United States of America, and to-day when many a political Cassandra prophesies a return to the bad old days of Hindu–Muslim dissensions, I still dream that old dream of “United Faiths of India.” It was in order to translate this dream into reality that I had launched my weekly newspaper, and had significantly called it The Comrade—”comrade of all and partisan of none.” …
