Gandhi 1915-1948 Quotes

“In his speeches on Azad Hind Radio, Subhas Bose referred to Gandhi as the ‘Father of the Nation’. This seems to be the first time Gandhi was called this. The usage soon became ubiquitous.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World

“One day, the physicist Sir C.V. Raman came up from Bangalore to see Gandhi. Raman’s conceit was legendary. In the summer of 1930, he booked a passage for his wife and himself on a boat leaving for Europe in October, so confident was he of winning the Nobel Prize for physics that year (which he did). Now, meeting an Indian even more celebrated than himself, Raman told him: ‘Mahatmaji, religions cannot unite. Science offers the best opportunity for a complete fellowship. All men of science are brothers.’ ‘What about the converse?’ responded Gandhi. ‘All who are not men of science are not brothers?’ Raman had the last word, noting that ‘all can become men of science’.

Raman had come with a Swiss biologist who wished to have a darshan of the Indian leader. Introducing his colleague, Raman said he had discovered an insect that could live without food and water for as long as twelve years. ‘When you discover the secret at the back of it,’ joked Gandhi to the Swiss scientist, ‘please pass it on to me.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“After the Poona Pact, Gandhi had begun referring to the ‘untouchables’ as ‘Harijans’, a term meaning ‘Children of God’. He thought it less pejorative than ‘untouchable’ or its equivalent in Indian languages, less patronizing than the colonial coinage, ‘Depressed Classes’, and more indigenous-sounding than his own earlier alternative, ‘suppressed classes’.

The term ‘Harijan’ had first been used by the medieval poet-saint Narasinha Mehta, whom Gandhi had long admired. ‘Not that the change of name brings about any change of status,’ he remarked, ‘but one may at least be spared the use of a term which is itself one of reproach'.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“Gandhi, claimed Ambedkar, had orally promised him that the Congress would encourage candidates from the Depressed Classes who contested in general seats, but in the absence of constitutional safeguards such promises meant nothing. Ambedkar thus wrote that he could not

'accept the assurances of the Mahatma that he and his Congress will do the needful. I cannot leave so important a question as the protection of my people to conventions and misunderstandings.'

'The Mahatma is not an immortal person....There have been many Mahatmas in India whose sole object was to remove untouchability and to elevate and absorb the Depressed Classes but every one of them have failed in their mission. Mahatmas have come and Mahatmas have gone. But untouchables have remained as untouchables'.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“Both Arun Shourie and Arundhati Roy see history in terms of heroes and villains. Neither seeks to place the choices made by Gandhi and Ambedkar in context, seeking only to elevate one by disparaging the other. Roy has all of Ambedkar’s polemical zeal but none of his scholarship or sociological insight. Shourie, meanwhile, perhaps loves India as much as Gandhi did, but he loves it in the abstract, without empathy for those Indians who suffer discrimination at the hands of their compatriots. Both seek—by the technique of suppressio veri, suggestio falsi so beloved of ideologues down the ages—to prove a verdict they have arrived at beforehand: that Gandhi was the Enemy of the Dalits, for Roy; that Ambedkar was the Enemy of the Nation, for Shourie.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World

“Gandhi urged the protesters to cultivate a ‘detached state of mind”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World

“There were, of course, plenty of tributes in the popular press, a particularly fine one appearing in the News Chronicle. ‘The hand that killed the Mahatma,’ said this newspaper, ‘is the same hand that nailed the Cross; it is the hand that fired the faggots; it is the hand that through the ages has been growing ever more mightily in war and less sure in the pursuit of peace. It is your hand and mine.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“Speaking on All India Radio on the evening of the 30th, Jawaharlal Nehru said ‘the light has gone out of our lives’, and then immediately corrected himself, saying, ‘No, the light shines and will continue to shine thousands of years hence'.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“On 2 October 1947, Gandhi turned seventy-eight. From the morning a stream of visitors came to wish him. They included his close lieutenants Nehru and Patel, now prime minister and home minister respectively in the Government of India.

Gandhi was not displeased to see his old friends and comrades. But his overall frame of mind was bleak. ‘What sin have I committed,’ he told Patel in Gujarati, 'that He should have kept me alive to witness all these horrors?’ As he told the audience at that evening’s prayer meeting: ‘I am surprised and also ashamed that I am still alive. I am the same person whose word was honoured by the millions of the country. But today nobody listens to me. You want only the Hindus to remain in India and say that none else should be left behind. You may kill the Muslims today; but what will you do tomorrow? What will happen to the Parsis and the Christians and then to the British? After all, they are also Christians.’

Ever since his release from jail in 1944, Gandhi had spoken often of wanting to live for 125 years. Now, in the face of the barbarism around him, he had givenup that ambition. ‘In such a situation,’ he asked, ‘what place do I have in India and what is the point of my being alive?’ Gandhi told the crowd who had gathered to wish him at Birla House that ‘if you really want to celebrate my birthday, it is your duty not to let anyone be possessed by madness and if there is any anger in your hearts you must remove it’.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“Visiting a village where many Muslims were reported to have been killed, he was told by the local magistrate and police officers that the reports were false. But Gandhi saw some wells had been filled up; he had them excavated, to find many decaying corpses within.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“A week later, Gandhi wrote to his long-time disciple Vinoba Bhave, a man he valued highly for his scriptural learning, and for being a more thoroughgoing ascetic than himself. Bhave had never married, never had a relationship with a woman. Even in matters of diet, clothing and transport, he was far more abstemious than his master. Gandhi now told Bhave that ‘the friends in our circle have been very much upset because of Manu’s sleeping with me’. These friends included Narhari Parikh, who had been with Gandhi as long as Bhave, and K.G.Mashruwala and Swami Anand, who had also been in the ashram for decades. But these criticisms notwithstanding, Gandhi said ‘my own mind, however, is becoming firmer than ever, for it has been my belief for a long time that that alone is true brahmacharya which requires no hedges’.

Should his grand-niece Manu, Gandhi asked Bhave, stop sleeping in his bed ‘out of deference to custom or to please co-workers’? If she did stop, would Gandhi ‘not be a hypocrite of the type described in chapter III [of the Gita]? If I do not appear to people exactly as I am within, wouldn’t that be a blot on my non-violence?’ Gandhi asked Bhave, as a man more learned than him in these spiritual matters, to let him have his view on them.

Bhave replied two weeks later. ‘For the sake of achieving brahmacharya,’ he remarked, the experiment conducted by Gandhi was irrelevant. ‘Even if we do this for the sake of consolation,’ he continued, ‘sleeping naked is unnecessary. A father never does it with his daughter even innocently.’

In Vinoba’s view, to be self-conscious about the difference between man and woman was contrary to brahmacharya. As he put it: ‘If I don’t think of sleeping with a man, what is the purpose of sleeping with a woman?’ If Gandhi had indeed become a proper or true brahmachari, if he had indeed achieved that ‘passionless state’, he wouldn’t need to sleep with a woman to confirm or prove it.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“Some of Gandhi’s oldest disciples were also opposed to his sharing a bed with Manu. These dissenters included Narhari Parikh, who had joined Gandhi as farback as 1917. The criticisms of those close to him prompted a remarkable letter written by Gandhi to Satish Chandra Mukerji, a patriot who was one of the pioneers of the national education movement in Bengal. Mukerji was several years older than Gandhi; and, perhaps more significantly, had renounced worldly pursuits to become a sanyasi, taking renunciation so far as to discard his clothes altogether (earning him the affectionate appellation, ‘Nanga Baba’, or naked saint). Now, writing to Mukerji on 1 February, Gandhi said:

'I put before you a poser. A young girl (19) who is in the place of granddaughter to me by relation shares the same bed with me, not for any animal satisfaction but for (to me) valid moral reasons. She claims to be free from the passion that a girl of her age generally has and I claim to be a practised brahmachari. Do you see anything bad or unjustifiable in this juxtaposition? I ask the question because some of my intimate associates hold it to be wholly unjustifiable and even a breach of brahmacharya. I hold a totally opposite view. As you are an experienced man and as I have regard for your opinion, I put the question. You may take your own time to answer the question. You are in no way bound to answer it if you don’t wish to.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“In the midst of this heroic, saintly pilgrimage for peace, Gandhi was conducting the strangest of his experiments with (as he had it) ‘truth’. The goal of the experiment was his old, continuing, obsession with brahmacharya—the instrument, his grand-niece Manu.

Sometime in late December 1946, Gandhi asked Manu to join him in the bed he slept in. He was seeking to test, or perhaps further test, his conquest of sexual desire. Somehow, the idea had entered his mind that the rise of religious violence was connected to his own failure to become a perfect brahmachari. The connection was a leap of faith, an abdication of reason, and perhaps also an expression of egotism. He had come round to the view that the violence around him was in part a product or consequence of the imperfections within him.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“The letter was redirected to Gandhi in Srirampur. In his reply (which is not in the Collected Works), Gandhi told Heath that Ambedkar

'represents a good cause but he is a bad advocate for the simple reason that his passion had made him bitter and made him depart from the straight and narrow path. As I know to my cost, he is a believer in questionable means so long as the end is considered to be good. With him and men like him the end justifies the means. Have you read his book [What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables]? It is packed with untruths almost from beginning to end'.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“Ambedkar’s dislike for Gandhi was intense. In 1946, his Bombay publishers,Thackers and Co. brought out a book by the Gandhi-worshipping journalist Krishnalal Shridharani, entitled The Mahatma and the World. Climbing the stairs to his publisher’s office, Ambedkar was outraged to see a poster advertising this book. ‘The number of books that people write on this old man takes my breath away,’ he grumbled, pointing at the display board. Not long afterwards, he met the journalist Vincent Sheen, and told him that if Americans loved Gandhi so much, they should import him to the United States so that Indians would at last be rid of him.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“In July 1945, B.R. Ambedkar published a book called "What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables". This argued that Gandhi’s campaign to lift the Depressed Classes had failed, and for three reasons. First, ‘Gandhi’s sermons on Untouchability have completely failed to move the Hindus’, who ‘hear his after-prayer sermons for few minutes and then go to the comic opera’. Second, that while Gandhi claimed to be against untouchability, he had himself never launched a concerted political (as distinct from social) campaign for its abolition. Third, that (as Ambedkar saw it) ‘Gandhi does not want the Untouchables to organize and be strong. For he fears that they might thereby become independent of the Hindus and weaken the ranks of Hindus.’

Ambedkar argued that ‘it is to kill this spirit of independence among the Untouchables that Mr. Gandhi started the Harijan Sevak Sangh’. He claimed that ‘the whole object of the sangh is to create a slave mentality among the untouchables towards their Hindu masters. Examine the Sangh from any angle one may like and the creation of slave mentality will appear to be its dominant purpose.’

When asked why there were no Harijans in the governing body of the Harijan Sewak Sangh, Gandhi had answered that it was an institution that asked caste Hindus to make reparations for the sins of the past. The exploiters had to make amends themselves. Ambedkar saw this as a cunning ploy to keep the ‘untouchables’ forever subservient. He claimed that ‘if the Sangh was handed over to the Untouchables Mr. Gandhi and the Congress will have no means of control over the Untouchables. The Untouchables will cease to be dependent on the Hindus.... [T]he Untouchables having become independent will cease to be grateful to the Hindus'.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“In May 1945, some Gujarati colleagues decided to reprint an old pamphlet of Gandhi’s on the caste system. They asked him for a fresh foreword, which he disarmingly began by saying: ‘I do not have the time to read this book again. I do not even wish to.’ He then outlined his current thinking on caste. While the Hindu scriptures spoke of four varnas, in his view ‘there prevails only one varna today, that of Shudras’, or, you may call it, Ati-Shudras’, or Harijans’ or untouchables.... Just as it is not dharma but adharma to believe in the distinctions of high and low, so also colour prejudice is adharma. If a scripture is found to sanction distinctions of high and low, or distinctions of colour, it does not deserve the name of scripture.’ Given how far he had moved on in this regard, Gandhi requested the reader ‘to discard anything in this [older] book which may appear to him incompatible with my views given above’.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“He no longer had time even for the caste system itself. In Bombay, in answer to a question about whether caste was ‘consistent with democracy and democratic organizations’, Gandhi replied: ‘I do not need to refer to my past writings to say what I believe today, because only what I believe today counts. I wish to say that the caste system as it exists to-day in Hinduism is an anachronism. It is one of those ugly things which will certainly hinder the growth of true religion. It must go if both Hinduism and India are to live and grow... The way to do [this] is for all Hindus to become their own scavengers, and treat the so-called hereditary Bhangis as their own brothers.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“As the Chronicle had predicted, Ambedkar spoke out against the Gandhi–Jinnah talks at the meeting of his followers in Madras. ‘The Hindu–Moslem problem,’ he remarked here, ‘was not the only one confronting the country. Christians, Scheduled Castes and other minorities were involved . . .’ He warned Gandhi not to ‘give more to Jinnah’ at the expense of the Scheduled Castes. He then launched a furious broadside against Gandhi, calling him ‘a man who has no vision, who has no knowledge, and who has no judgment, a man who has been a failure all his life . . .’ This prompted a puzzled editorial in a local newspaper. ‘Dr Ambedkar’s is undoubtedly one of the best causes in the world today', remarked the Indian Express. ‘Why is he then so keen on spoiling it by intemperate attacks on others, who have at least as much claim as he has to their own viewpoints?’.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“In September 1942, a month after Gandhi was jailed, Winston Churchill wrote to the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery: ‘Please let me have a note on Mr.Gandhi’s intrigues with Japan and the documents the Government of India published, or any other they possessed before on this topic.’ Three days later, Amery sent Churchill the note he asked for, which began: ‘The India Office has no evidence to show, or suggest, that Gandhi has intrigued with Japan.’ The ‘only evidence of Japanese contacts [with Gandhi] during the war’, the note continued, ‘relates to the presence in Wardha of two Japanese Buddhist priests who lived for part of 1940 in Gandhi’s Ashram’.

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.’

Two days later, the viceroy wired back: ‘This may be the case but those who have been in attendance on him doubt it, and present Surgeon-General Bombay (a European) says that on a previous fast G. was particularly careful to guard against possibility of glucose being used. I am told that his present medical attendants tried to persuade him to take glucose yesterday and again today, and that he refused absolutely.’

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.’

By this time, the viceroy was himself increasingly exasperated with Gandhi. But there was no evidence that the fasting man had actually taken any glucose. So, he now replied to Churchill in a manner that stoked both men’s prejudices. ‘I have long known Gandhi as the world’s most successful humbug,’ fumed Linlithgow, ‘and have not the least doubt that his physical condition and the bulletins reporting it from day to day have been deliberately cooked so as to produce the maximum effect on public opinion.’ Then, going against his own previous statement, the viceroy claimed that ‘there would be no difficulty in his entourage administering glucose or any other food without the knowledge of the Government doctors’ (this when the same government doctors had told him exactly the reverse). ‘If I can discover any firm of evidence of fraud I will let you hear,’ said Linlithgow to Churchill, adding, somewhat sadly, ‘but I am not hopeful of this.’

This prompted an equally disappointed reply from Churchill: ‘It now seems certain that the old rascal will emerge all the better from his so-called fast'.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“On 10 March, a week after the fast had ended, the home member of the viceroy’s executive council told the Bombay government that ‘Dr Ambedkar has asked me whether we have received reports of Gandhi’s weight from day to day during his fast’. If this information was available, Ambedkar wanted to see it.

Why did Ambedkar want this information? Why did he wish to know how his great political opponent had fared during his fast? The possibilities are intriguing. But we must resist speculation, and stick here to the facts. Ambedkar’s request resulted in the following table, compiled by the Bombay government:

Weight at commencement of fast 109 lbs
On 17/2 105 lbs
On 19/2 97 lbs
On 24/2 90 lbs
On 02/3 91 lbs

Always spindly and spare, Gandhi had become utterly emaciated during his ordeal. He had lost close to 20 percent of his body weight in the three weeks he went without food. For a man now well into his seventies, to undertake such a long fast was an act of bravado; to see it through safely must be reckoned some kind of medical marvel.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“By December 1940, several thousand satyagrahis were in prison, arrested one by one, as each shouted slogans against the war and thereby breached the law. Now, as a gesture of goodwill, Gandhi announced that there would be no courting of arrest between 24 December 1940 and 4 January 1941, so as to allow theofficials to celebrate Christmas and New Year with their families.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“Bose was correct in identifying Vallabhbhai Patel as his main opponent within the party. The two had an old rivalry, at once personal and political. Their relationship rapidly deteriorated after the death of Vallabhbhai’s elder brother Vithalbhai in 1933. Bose had nursed Vithalbhai during his last illness. In his will, the elder Patel left three-fourths of his estate to Bose, to be used ‘preferably for publicity work on behalf of India’s cause in other countries’. Vallabhbhai now cast aspersions on the authenticity of the will. A long legal battle ensued, which ended in a triumph for Vallabhbhai, with Vithalbhai’s next of kin getting the money instead of Subhas.

This familial history apart, Patel was also opposed to Bose’s militant socialism. When, in 1938, Gandhi decided to propose Bose’s name for the presidency of the Congress, Patel opposed it. Gandhi overruled his objection. In 1939, when Bose sought a second term, Patel opposed him again, unsuccessfully. ‘I never dreamt,’ wrote Patel to Rajendra Prasad, ‘that he [Subhas] will stoop to such dirty mean tactics for re-election.’ In another letter, he told Prasad that ‘it is impossible for us to work with Subhas’. The resignation of the working committee members in February, and Pant’s resolution at Tripuri in March, were both approved of—if not instigated by—Patel.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“Gandhi wrote: ‘I seem to have detected a flaw in me which is unworthy of a votary of truth and ahimsa. I am going through a process of self-introspection, the results of which I cannot foresee. I find myself for the first time during the past 50 years in a Slough of Despond.’

One wonders what readers of the press statement made of this decidedly odd interpolation. To them, the cause, manifestation and the precise nature of this flaw was left unelaborated. Gandhi’s close disciples knew the details; and the labours of the editors of his Collected Works have since made them public for us to examine it.

Here is what happened. On 14 April 1938, Gandhi awoke with an erection; and despite efforts to contain his excitement, had a masturbatory experience. He was sleeping alone, and it was decades since he had been aroused in such a way.

The details of the incident were kept from his ‘political’ followers such as Jawaharlal Nehru, but discussed with the spiritual followers who had stayed with him in Sabarmati and Segaon. To one Gujarati ashramite he wrote that ‘I was in such a wretched and pitiable condition that in spite of my utmost efforts I could not stop the discharge though I was fully awake.... After the event, restlessness has become acute beyond words. Where am I, where is my place, and how can a person subject to passion represent non-violence and truth?’

To Mira, Gandhi wrote in a language even more vivid in its self-abasement: ‘That dirty, degrading, torturing experience of 14th April shook me to bits and made me feel as if I was hurled by God from an imaginary paradise where I had no right to be in my uncleanliness.’

To his other close woman disciple, Amrit Kaur, Gandhi spoke of ‘an unaccountable dissatisfaction with myself’. But he had not lost faith, and was resolved to overcome the memory of his failure. ‘The sexual sense is the hardest to overcome in my case,’ he remarked. ‘It has been an incessant struggle. It is for me a miracle how I have survived it. The one I am engaged in may be, ought to be, the final struggle.’

Gandhi had taken a vow of brahmacharya, as far back as 1906. He thought sex was necessary only for procreation, and rejected the idea that sex might be pleasurable in and of itself. In his writings and speeches, he had often spoken of the importance of the preservation and husbanding of sperm, which he termed ‘the vital fluid’.

After this (to him) shocking experience, how could Gandhi best control his passions, best preserve and husband that vital fluid? Several ashramites (Amrit Kaur among them) thought he should avoid close physical contact with women, especially younger women. He should abandon ashram girls as supports while walking (he rested his hands on their shoulders to propel his frail frame along), and discontinue the practice of having his nails cut or his body massaged by women disciples. Gandhi was not convinced of the sagacity of this advice. He had, he reminded one disciple, not ‘advocated total avoidance of innocent contact between the two sexes and I have had a certain measure of success in this’. To Amrit Kaur, he insisted that ‘it is not the woman who is to blame. I am the culprit. I must attain the required purity.’

Gandhi had wanted to write about the experience of 14 April in Harijan, baring to the world his failure and lack of self-control. He discussed this with Rajagopalachari, who was then in Segaon. Rajaji dissuaded him from making his experience public. Afterwards, Rajaji wrote to his son-in-law Devadas, who was also Gandhi’s son. The Mahatma, he said, was deeply worried ‘that he was still unable to overcome the reflex action of his flesh. He discovered, it seems, one day and he was so shocked and felt so unworthy that he was deceiving people and he wrote an article about it for publication in Harijan, which, thank God, I have stopped, after a very quarrelsome hour'.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“Fortunately, Gandhi did not cut, from the printed version, a quatrain that captured Mahadev’s
feelings, a quatrain that was perhaps imperfect in grammar yet remains immortal in essence:

To live with the saints in heaven
Is a bliss and a glory
But to live with a saint on earth
Is a different story.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“Jinnah had, among other things, criticized the singing in government schools of the patriotic hymn ‘Vande Mataram’. Composed by the great Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the poem invoked Hindu temples, praised the Hindu goddess Durga, and spoke of seventy million Indians, each carrying a sword, ready to defend their motherland against invaders, who could be interpreted as being the British, or Muslims, or both.

‘Vande Mataram’ first became popular during the swadeshi movement of1905–07. The revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose named his political journal after it. Rabindranath Tagore was among the first to set it to music. His version was sung by his niece Saraladevi Chaudhurani at the Banaras Congress of 1905. The same year, the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati rendered it into his language. In Bengali and Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, Hindi and Gujarati, the song had long been sung at nationalist meetings and processions.

After the Congress governments took power in 1937, the song was sometimes sung at official functions. The Muslim League objected vigorously. One of its legislators called it ‘anti-Muslim’, another, ‘an insult to Islam’. Jinnah himself claimed the song was ‘not only idolatrous but in its origins and substance [was] a hymn to spread hatred for the Musalmans’.

Nationalists in Bengal were adamant that the song was not aimed at Muslims.The prominent Calcutta Congressman Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to Gandhi that ‘the province (or at least the Hindu portion of it) is greatly perturbed over the controversy raised in certain Muslim circles over the song “Bande Mataram”. As far as I can judge, all shades of Hindu opinion are unanimous in opposing any attempts to ban the song in Congress meetings and conferences.’ Bose himself thought that ‘we should think a hundred times before we take any steps in the direction of banning the song’.

The social worker Satis Dasgupta told Gandhi that ‘Vande Mataram’ was ‘out and out a patriotic song—a song in which all the children of the mother[land] can participate, be they Hindu or Mussalman’. It did use Hindu images, but such imagery was common in Bengal, where even Muslim poets like Nazrul Islam often referred to Hindu gods and legends. ‘Vande Mataram’, argued Dasgupta, was ‘never a provincial cry and never surely a communal cry’.

Faced with Jinnah’s complaints on the one side and this defence by Bengali patriots on the other, Gandhi suggested a compromise: that Congress governments should have only the first two verses sung. These evoked the motherland without specifying any religious identity. But this concession made many Bengalis ‘sore at heart’; they wanted the whole song sung. On the other side, Muslims were not satisfied either; for, the ascription of a mother-like status to India was dangerously close to idol worship.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“Now, in Lucknow, itself a great centre of Islamic learning and culture, the president of the Muslim League accused ‘the present leadership of the Congress’ of ‘alienating the Mussalmans of India more and more by pursuing a policy which is exclusively Hindu’. Jinnah claimed that in the six provinces where the Congress was in power, Gandhi’s party had ‘by their words, deeds and programmes shown that the Mussalmans cannot expect any justice or fair play at their hands’.

When a report of this speech reached Gandhi in Segaon, he was moved to protest. The ‘whole of your speech’, he wrote to Jinnah, ‘is a declaration of war’. He added: ‘Only it takes two to make a quarrel. You won’t find me one, even if I cannot become a peace-maker'.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“the installation of Congress ministries in six large provinces of British India was a major milestone in the constitutional history of the subcontinent. Much more power had devolved on to the shoulder of Indians than at any previous time in the history of the Raj. Indeed, since precolonial regimes were themselves devoid of democratic representation, and were run by unelected kings who nominated their ministers, this was the furthest that Indians had thus far got in the direction of self-rule, swaraj. Surely it was now only a matter of years before the Congress, and India, achieved the next step, of Dominion Status, thus to place themselves on par with Canada, Australiaand South Africa.

A sign of how much of a departure from colonial practice these elections were is underlined in a humble office order issued by the Central Provinces government after their own Congress ministry was installed. It was signed by an Indian ICS officer, C.M. Trivedi, then serving as the secretary to the general administration department. The order was sent to all commissioners and deputy commissioners, the chief conservator of forests, the inspector general of police, all secretaries to government, and a host of other senior officials (including the military secretary and the governor), almost all of whom were, of course, British. The text of the order was short and simple, albeit, in the eyes of its recipients, not altogether sweet. It read: ‘In future Mr. Gandhi should be referred to in all correspondence as “Mahatma Gandhi”.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“This time, among the letters waiting for Gandhi on his return from his travels was one from a Muslim friend. This man, a liberal and sceptic, wondered why, when referring to the Prophet Muhammad or the Koran, Gandhi never analysed them critically. ‘I am at a loss to understand how a person like you,’ this correspondent told Gandhi, ‘with all your passion for truth and justice, who has never failed to gloss over a single fault in Hinduism or to repudiate as unauthentic the numerous corruptions that masquerade under it, can.... accept all that is in the Koran. I am not aware of your ever having called into question or denounced any iniquitous injunction of Islam. Against some of these I learned to revolt when I was scarcely 18 or 20 years old and time has since only strengthened that first feeling.’

Reproducing and then answering this letter in Harijan, Gandhi remarked that ‘I have nowhere said that I believe literally in every word of the Koran, or for that matter of any scripture in the world. But it is no business of mine to criticize the scriptures of other faiths or to point out their defects. It should be, however, my privilege to proclaim and practise the truths that there may be in them.’

Gandhi held the view that only adherents of a particular faith had the right to criticize its precepts or sanctions. By that token, it was both his ‘right and duty to point out the defects in Hinduism in order to purify it and to keep it pure. But when non-Hindu critics set about criticizing Hinduism and cataloguing its faults they can only blazon their own ignorance of Hinduism and their incapacity to regard it from the Hindu viewpoint... Thus my own experience of the non-Hindu critics of Hinduism brings home to me my limitations and teaches me to be wary of launching on a criticism of Islam or Christianity and their founders'.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World

“One ashramite (whom Mahadev unfortunately does not name) had the boldness to tell Gandhi that instead of ‘burying himself in this village’, he should undertake an all-India tour to promote rural reconstruction, just as he had done for the abolition of untouchability. Gandhi answered that the comparison was invalid. ‘I have been talking theory all these days,’ remarked Gandhi, ‘talking and giving advice on village work, without having personally come to grips with the difficulties of village work. If I undertook the tour say after passing three seasons in a village... I would be able to talk with knowledge and experience which I have not got today'.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World