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May 17 - May 25, 2020
Gandhi’s years in South Africa were important to him, personally, yet his years in India were of far greater historic import. In South Africa, he sought to represent the Indian diaspora, roughly 150,000 people in all. In his homeland, he strove to become the leader of its 300 million people.
These political groups and tendencies were resolutely urban as well as middle class. They had no roots in the villages. After his return to India in 1915, Gandhi took this city-based and elite-dominated opposition to British rule and made it into a mass movement, reaching deep into the countryside, bringing in millions of peasants, workers, artisans and women.
To deliver India from British rule was by no means Gandhi’s only preoccupation. The forging of harmonious relations between India’s often disputatious religious communities was a second. The desire to end the pernicious practice of untouchability in his own Hindu faith was a third. And the impulse to develop economic self-reliance for India and moral self-reliance for Indians was a fourth.
For Gandhi, political independence meant nothing at all unless it was accompanied by religious harmony, caste and gender equality, and the development of self-respect in every Indian. Other patriots had used the Hindi word swaraj to signify national independence; Gandhi made Indians aware of its true or original meaning, swa-raj, or self-rule.
In South Africa, Gandhi had evolved a method of protest distinct and different both from the polite pleading of the Moderates and the bomb-throwing of the revolutionaries. He called this satyagraha, or truth-force. This involved the deliberate violation of laws deemed to be unjust. Protesting individually or in batches, satyagrahis courted arrest, and courted it again, until the offending law was repealed.
Harilal’s criticisms were, on the whole, fair. For, Gandhi was the traditional overbearing Hindu patriarch: insensitive to the wishes and desires of his wife; demanding that his children obey his instructions even when they had reached adulthood.
Like St Augustine, Gandhi gave up sex in his thirties, when fully capable of enjoying its pleasures. Having once experienced it vigorously, and even fathered four children, he came to view sex with disgust. Gandhi was not a young virgin when he embraced celibacy (as was and often still is the case with many Buddhist, Christian, Jain as well as Hindu monks). Neither was he an old man. Yet Gandhi felt that he had arrived at brahmacharya too late. Now, those who came under his own influence were asked—or mandated—to take the vow as early as possible.
Comprising some 15 per cent of the Indian population, the ‘untouchables’ were confined to professions such as scavenging and leatherwork, which caste Hindus regarded as ‘unclean’. Though technically Hindus, they were not considered part of the varna system, and not allowed to worship in temples, nor allowed to draw water from the same wells as upper-caste Hindus. In some parts of India even the sight of an ‘untouchable’ was said to ‘pollute’ the Brahmins. The economic degradation and social humiliation that ‘untouchables’ in India experienced had no parallel elsewhere in the world.
While condemning untouchability outright, Gandhi was not prepared to criticize the caste system itself. He thought that by restricting oneself to a bride of one’s own caste, the predatory instincts of young men would be checked. But, for those who had already achieved a greater degree of ‘self-control’ (such as himself), mixing and mingling with other castes was permissible. The system, he seemed to be saying, would not be brought down; but heretics should not be persecuted either.
And yet, for all his empathy and concern for those outside his family, Gandhi was curiously blind to the pain of his own sons.
Gandhi now turned his attention away from politics and to the promotion of spinning and weaving. He had long believed that the decline of handicrafts was one of the causes of India’s poverty. In the past, weaving had been an important subsidiary occupation in villages, taking up the slack in the lean season. Machine-made goods had destroyed India’s hand-spun textile industry. Its rejuvenation was key to Gandhi’s plans for national renewal. In his ashram, he had set up looms, and made it mandatory for members to spin every day.
In South Africa, Gandhi’s first struggles against racial discrimination had largely been funded and staffed by Muslims. In the diaspora such trans-religious solidarity was easier, since Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis from India all faced the same disabilities. In the homeland, however, the different communities were established in their particular ways of life. To build a joint Hindu–Muslim union against colonial rule was more difficult, not least because the British were adept at playing off one community against another. But, for a movement to count as truly ‘national’, it could not
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It was customary to rank the four varnas as follows: the Brahmins, or priests, at the top; the Kshatriyas, or warriors, next; the Vaishyas, or merchants (Gandhi’s own caste), third; the Sudras, or peasants and labourers, fourth, with a fifth class, that of the ‘untouchables’, literally beyond the pale. However, in Gandhi’s (rather revisionist) view, ‘the caste system is not based on inequality, there is no question of inferiority, and so far as there is any such question arising…the tendency should undoubtedly be checked. But there appears to be no valid reason for ending the system because of
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One sign of this veneration of Gandhi was the title ‘Mahatma’, used unselfconsciously by both his friend Charlie Andrews and by the public of Kumbakonam (a town Gandhi had not yet visited). Loosely translated as ‘Great Soul’, it is an honorific rarely granted. It denotes great spiritual power as well as moral purity.
Moderates thought Gandhi too radical. Marxists thought him not radical enough.
Gandhi urged the protesters to cultivate a ‘detached state of mind’, adding that ‘three fourths of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world will disappear, if we step into the shoes of our adversaries and understand their standpoint’.
But perhaps 99 per cent (if not 99.99 per cent) of all marriages in India in 1927 were arranged by the respective families of the bride and bridegroom.
The newspaper had asked him to clarify his views on women. He answered that he believed ‘in complete equality for women and, in the India I seek to build, they would have it’. He wished to see ‘the opening of all offices, professions and employments to women; otherwise there can be no real equality’. Then he added a significant caveat: ‘But I must sincerely hope that women will retain and exercise her ancient prerogative as queen of the household.’ In Gandhi’s view of the world, ‘generally, it is the father who should be the bread-winner’, while ‘family life is the first and greatest thing.
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Two stories have long circulated about that meeting, both attributed to journalists who are said to have met Gandhi immediately afterwards. One has the reporter asking Gandhi whether he did not feel cold in his dhoti and sandals. Gandhi apparently answered: ‘The King had on enough for the two of us.’ The second story has the same question but a different answer, with Gandhi saying: ‘The King wears plus-fours; I wear minus-fours.’ I have not been able to find a contemporary source for the first story. The second remark was not entirely made up; except that Gandhi uttered it not to the king, but
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Do we need this much detail?
On 14 December, Gandhi and his party boarded the S.S. Pilsna at Brindisi, bound for Bombay. In a letter to Rolland, he wrote down his impressions of the Italy he so briefly saw. ‘Mussolini is a riddle to me. Many of his reforms attract me. He seems to have done much for the peasant class. I admit an iron hand is there. But as violence is the basis of Western society, Mussolini’s reforms deserve an impartial study. His care of the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about co-ordination between capital and labour, seem to me to demand special attention. I would like
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Gandhi was unconvinced. ‘Violence is impatience,’ he pointed out, adding: ‘and non-violence is patience. Great reforms cannot be introduced without great patience. In violence lies the germ of future failure.’
But Ambedkar would not be convinced, saying (in Mahadev’s recollection), ‘One swallow does not make a summer. You are highly optimistic. But you know the definition of an optimist? An optimist is one who takes the brightest view of other people’s sufferings.’44
In his reflections on the Jews, Gandhi was surely guilty of naivéte.
Gandhi was wrong to see the Jewish situation in Germany as akin to the Indian situation in South Africa. It was far, far worse.
Azad began his presidential address by referring to the weather. The fight for freedom, he said, must continue ‘through rain, flood and storm’. He then referred to the world crisis. ‘India cannot endure the prospect of Nazism and Fascism,’ said Azad, ‘but she is even more tired of British imperialism.’
Gandhi answered: ‘Do you think that the freedom of the body is obtained by resorting to contraceptives? Women should learn to resist their husbands. If contraceptives are resorted to as in the West, frightful results will follow. Men and women will be living for sex alone. They will become soft-brained, unhinged, in fact mental and moral wrecks…’ Gandhi, however, added that ‘though I am against the use of contraceptives in the case of women, I do not mind voluntary sterilisation in the case of man, since he is the aggressor’.2
Linlithgow and his advisers were temperamentally disinclined to abandon the British hold over India. In peacetime, they were happy to consider proposals for the (incrementally) greater involvement of Indians in government. But now, in the depths of this most bloody war, to be asked to promise India full independence was something they could never countenance.
Gandhi saw the war as an ‘unholy duel’ between two immoral antagonists. The British, naturally, saw it very differently. If many Indians distrusted their white rulers, they, in turn, were increasingly exasperated with the inability of Gandhi and the Congress to recognize the fight for life and death the British were engaged in.
Gandhi told Roosevelt that ‘the Allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow so long as India and, for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain and America has the Negro problem in her own home’. He proposed to Roosevelt that if India was made independent, then the Allies could keep their troops in the country, ‘not for keeping internal order but for preventing Japanese aggression and defending China’. Gandhi said while he personally abhorred war and violence, he recognized that not everyone had
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More anguished was a letter written by a Polish woman who had converted to Hinduism and joined Ramana Maharshi’s ashram in Tiruvannamalai. She charged Gandhi with betraying freedom and humanity by planning to launch his Quit India movement. Anything that hindered the Allied war effort, she argued, ‘prolongs the sufferings of 250 million people under the Nazis’ rule of whose moral and physical agonies you have not even the slightest idea; comparing [sic] with them Indians are till now in a heaven of peace and freedom…’
Gandhi had fasted many times, on occasion to atone for a lapse of one or more of his disciples, on other occasions to compel Indians to change their ways, so as to promote Hindu–Muslim harmony (as in Delhi in 1924), or to stop the practice of untouchability (as in Yerwada in 1932). But he had never, so far, actually fasted in opposition to British rule per se. His campaigns against colonialism had always taken the form of the breaking of what he considered unjust laws. And these breaches had always been collective, involving many other satyagrahis apart from himself.
Linlithgow, Churchill and company could not bring themselves to see the fundamental contradiction between their claim to be fighting the Nazis on behalf of democracy and freedom and their denial of democracy and freedom to the people of India.
Hundreds of thousands of Indians had come out in support of Gandhi’s call for the British to withdraw. They had expressed this support in many ways, not all of which would have been approved by the leader. This was no armed revolt; no protester carried a gun or used it. On the other hand, the storming of government offices, the cutting of telegraph wires, the defacement of railway stations—these were not acts of non-violence either. Gandhi, if he was a free man, would not have countenanced them.
He found Gandhi ‘passing through unprecedented mental agony’. It ‘distressed him beyond words’ that the government had falsely charged him, one who had dedicated his whole life to non-violence, with inciting violence. It ‘hurt him deeply’ that the government had given him no opportunity to refute the grave charges against him.
Before the Quit India movement had even begun, Churchill had convinced himself that Gandhi was intriguing with the Japanese. In February 1943, when Gandhi went on a fast in jail, Churchill convinced himself that Gandhi was secretly using energy supplements. On 13 February, Churchill wired Linlithgow: ‘I have heard that Gandhi usually has glucose in his water when doing his various fasting antics. Would it be possible to verify this.’
On 25 February, as the fast entered its third week, Churchill wired the viceroy: ‘Cannot help feeling very suspicious of bona fides of Gandhi’s fast. We were told fourth day would be the crisis and then well staged climax was set for eleventh day onwards. Now at fifteenth day bulletins look as if he might get through. Would be most valuable [if] fraud could be exposed. Surely with all those Congress Hindu doctors round him it is quite easy to slip glucose or other nourishment into his food.’
Leo Amery, the secretary of state for India, was even more blunt; as he put it (again, in private), Churchill knew ‘as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies’.
From the early 1920s till the late 1930s, the New York Times had adopted a broadly sympathetic attitude towards the Indian national movement and its leader. However, the onset of the war, and Germany’s pounding by air of Britain, introduced a certain ambivalence. After Pearl Harbor and the entry into the war of the United States, the balance began to shift further. Once the Quit India movement was launched, mainstream American opinion decidedly took the side of Churchill against the Congress. Now, the New York Times was going so far as to suggest that Gandhi’s career had ended, that he had
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More than a million people died in the Partition riots, and more than ten million were rendered homeless, with Hindus and Sikhs fleeing from Pakistan into India and Muslims fleeing from India into Pakistan.
The Maoist hostility to Gandhi has many sources. They oppose his political method, seeing non-violence as a diversionary tactic designed to suppress the revolutionary instincts of the masses and keep the ruling classes in power. Gandhi and his Congress Party claimed to have freed the country from British rule in 1947; the Maoists, however, still see India as a ‘semi-colony’ in thrall to Western capitalism and Western imperialism.
Although the practice of untouchability has been abolished by law, discrimination against Dalits still continues in many parts of India. To end it fully, one must draw upon the legacy of both Ambedkar and Gandhi.
Gandhi did not use the language of modern feminism. While strongly supportive of women’s education, and open to women working in offices and factories, he thought the burden of child-rearing and homemaking should be borne by women. By the standards of our time, therefore, Gandhi must be considered conservative. By the standards of his own time, however, he was undoubtedly progressive, proof of which is the involvement of women in Congress meetings, in his satyagrahas, and in his programmes of constructive work.
Many years later, after he was elected President of the United States, a journalist asked Obama which person in history, dead or alive, he would most like to have dinner with. Mahatma Gandhi, answered the President, wittily adding that it would have to be a frugal meal.
