Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948

by Ramachandra Guha

A Bombay editor wrote to complain about Gandhi’s strident criticisms of modern life, since despite its many faults, ‘Western civilization, taken as a whole, tends more strongly to justice for all than any older

civilization.’

In June 1918, Gandhi sent Devadas, then aged eighteen, to Madras to teach Hindi to South Indians, since they were unfamiliar with what would one day become an independent nation’s lingua franca.

In May 1920, he emphatically declared that We cannot compare the sufferings of the untouchables with those of any other section in India. It passes my understanding how we consider it dharma to treat the

depressed classes as untouchables; I shudder at the very thought of this. My conscience tells me that untouchability can never be a part of Hinduism. I do not think it too much to dedicate my whole life to removing the thick crust of sin with which Hindu society has covered itself for so long

by stupidly regarding these people as untouchables. I am only sorry that I am unable to devote m...

Gandhi now added a crucial caveat: Thus whilst I am prepared to defend, as I have always done, the division of Hindus into four castes…I consider untouchability to be a heinous crime against humanity. It is not a sign of self-restraint but an arrogant assumption of superiority. It has served no useful purpose and it has suppressed, as nothing else in Hinduism has, vast numbers of the human race who are not only every bit as good as ourselves, but are rendering in many walks of life an essential service to the country.29

have been analysing my love for you. I have reached a definite meaning of spiritual wife. It is a partnership between two persons of the opposite sex where the physical is wholly absent…. It is

possible only between two brahmacharis in thought, word and deed. I have felt drawn to you, because I have recognized in you an identity of ideals and aspirations and a complete self-surrender. You have been ‘wife’ because you have recognized in me a fuller fruition of the common ideal than

in yourself…. It follows from what I have stated that spiritual partners can never be physically wedded either in this life or a future, for it is possible only when there is no carnality, latent or patent. Are you spiritual wife to me o...

coincidence, that perfect merging, that identity of ideals, that self-forgetfulness, that fixity of purpose, that trustfulness? For me I can answer plainly that it is only an aspiration. I am unworthy to have that companionship with you...

thought. I am too physically attached to you to be worthy of enjoying that sacred association with you. By physical attachment I here mean I am too much affected by your weaknesses. I must not be teacher to you, if I am your spiritual hu...

are sharp differences between you and me so often. So far as I can see our relationship, it is one of brother and sister. I must lay down the law for you, and thus ruffle you. I must plead gently like a brother ever taking care to use the ri...

husband, friend, teacher all rolled into one. This is the big letter I promised. With dearest love I still sub...

In the town of Madurai he took a decision to simplify his dress even further. He would now discard the shirt, and wear a loincloth only.

Gandhi was born and raised a Hindu, albeit a heterodox one. His mother was a follower of a sect called the Pranamis, whose temples had verses of the Gita as well as the Koran on their walls. An

understanding of religion was experiential. He went with his mother to the temple, and observed her during her fasts at home. His textual understanding of Hinduism, however, really began in London, when he read the Bhagavad Gita with some English friends.

Ever since,

the Gita remained his favourite text, to which he re...

Here, directly and crisply stated, is the essence of

Gandhi’s philosophy of religion. This consisted of five, interconnected, propositions. First, the claim that no religion is perfect, with all religions being a mixture of truth and error. Second, the assumption that all religions are in a process of evolving, of ridding themselves

of error and groping towards the truth. Third, the argument that it was through interfaith dialogue, by seeing one’s faith in the mirror of another, that one could rid it of imperfections. Fourth, the convictio...

the so-called ‘authorized’ interpreters to give the correct interpretation. Fifth, the belief that when interpreting or judging a religion, one must trust its best...

Just as Gandhi rejected the Christia...

the Muslim imam’s claim to certitude and absolute religious authority, so too he would reject the claim of the Sankaracharyas to give...

Gandhi compared the Bardoli struggle to a great ‘yajna’, or sacrifice. The government was using a fourfold method to crush the satyagraha: namely, sama (appeasement), dama (bribery), danda (punishment) and bheda (promotion of divisiveness).

But the peasants

of Bardoli, led by ‘their beloved Sardar’, had thus far resisted all attempts to appease, bri...

His speech at Kanpur had two purposes, said Shaukat Ali: ‘One to warn the Hindus and stop them from creating an

atmosphere for civil war or family quarrel or any thing of that kind whatsoever we may call it. The second object was to drag out even the reactionary Mussalmans from playing into the hands of the English, and bring them more in line with ourselves. Frankly I wanted and do

want Mussalmans not to depend for their future either on the English or on the Hindus. I want them to stand on their own legs and think and act for themselves, doing what was bes...

In this twin declaration of loyalty, Islam preceded the motherland. Shaukat Ali had a deep love of country, but a prior...

It is also notable that his letters to Gandhi were written on the letterhead of ‘The ...

(India), Khilafat House, Bombay’. Although it was now several years since the Caliphate had been abolished by Kemal Atatürk, in the minds of this Indian Mus...

The American newsmagazine Time shared this low estimation of Gandhi and his march. It spoke with disdain of Gandhi’s ‘spindly frame’ and his ‘spidery loins’. The magazine was even less impressed by his wife

Kasturba, ‘a shriveled, little middle-aged Hindu’. The crowd that sent off Gandhi from the ashram was described by Time as ‘swirling [and] jabbering’, the incoherence of the event captured in a volunteer band that ‘raised their horns and blared a few bars of “God Save the

King” before they realized their mistake and subsided in ...

On the first day of the march, claimed Time, ‘Mr. Gandhi’s head and legs began to ache’ as, ‘haggard and drooping’, he reached that night’s destination. The next morning, as the walk continued, apparently ‘not a single cheer resounded’ in the villages they passed. Yet, ‘Saint Gandhi called his lovely procession to a halt, gazed up and down the silent, empty street, addressed the blan...

At this stage, the magazine did not believe that ‘the emaciated saint would be physically ...

An anonymous versifier in the United Provinces compared Gandhi to Lord Krishna, drinking the milk of goats rather than cows, stealing salt rather than butter, plying the charkha rather than playing the flute.61 The entrepreneur Prafulla Chandra Ray likened the salt march to the exodus of the Israelites under Moses, while Motilal Nehru compared it to the march of Lord Ram to Lanka.62 IX

He said he would commence civil disobedience at 6.30 a.m. the next morning. Explaining the significance of the date, he remarked that ‘6th April has been to us, since its culmination in [the] Jallianwala [Bagh] massacre, a day for penance and

purification’. The reference was to the first hartal against the Rowlatt Act, held on 6 April 1919, an event which first brought Gandhi to countrywide attention.67

Irwin was not the only one to change his mind about the significance of Gandhi and his march. So did the American magazine, Time. As the march progressed, Time saluted

Gandhi as a ‘Saint’ and ‘Statesman’, who was using ‘Christian acts as a weapon against men with Christian beliefs’. Later issues spoke of the ‘spreading ripples of St. Gandhi’s movement for independence’, with ‘unrest seething hotter and hotter all over India’.

Time’s report on Gandhi’s arrest in early May praised the dignity and composure with which he received the news, merely asking the police officer for a few minutes in which he...

The image of an elderly, emaciated man walking with a staff on a hot and dusty road, day after day, in a single (and singular) challenge to the greatest empire on earth,

captivated the national and global imagination.

Back in October 1929, when Lord Irwin had suggested Dominion Status for India, Churchill called the idea ‘criminally mischievous’. He thought it necessary to marshal ‘the sober and resolute forces of the British Empire’ against the granting of self-government to India.26 Over the next two years, Churchill delivered dozens of speeches where he worked up, in most unsober form, forces hostile to the Indian independence movement. Thus, speaking to an audience at the city of London in December 1930, Churchill claimed that if the British left the subcontinent, then ‘an army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany, will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindu’.

In the last week of January 1931, Churchill made two major speeches demanding the Raj stand firm against the nationalists. First, in the House of Commons, he expressed his confidence that even if British politicians conceded ground, ‘I do not believe our

people will consent to be edged, pushed, talked and cozened out of India’. Then, at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he urged his fellow Tory, Viceroy Lord Irwin, to resist the pressures of the Labour...