Gandhi & Churchill (107 page)

But in later years Churchill and Nehru had become warily reconciled. “He has a feeling the Communists are against him,” Winston joked after the Commonwealth Conference in 1955, “and that is apt to change people’s opinions.”
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Churchill, however, had managed to outlive his fellow Old Harrovian. So another era had been closed, and the bitterness with it.

“When I was subaltern the Indian did not seem to me equal to the white man,” Churchill recalled in 1952. It was an attitude that, he had belatedly come to realize, had hurt the Raj. Later he said that if he had been reelected in 1945, he would have tried once more to establish a constituent assembly for India. “Of course they might have got rid of us anyway,” he said, referring to the Indian people, “but I’d have liked to try.”

Then he had said something unlike anything he had ever said about India: “If we had made friends with them and taken them into our lives instead of restricting our intercourse to the political field, things might have been very different.” That regretful musing was a final landmark on a long journey. The opening that Gandhi had wanted had finally appeared—but too late for either of them.
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Now the honorary pall-bearers began coming up the stairs. They included distinguished figures from Churchill’s wartime years: Eden, now Lord Avon, Lord Ismay, and Lord Slim. There were also Lords Mountbatten and Attlee, the two men who, whatever their mistakes, had done what Churchill could not bring himself to do: give India its freedom. Finally the queen, queen mother, and Duke of Edinburgh arrived and led the congregation in singing Churchill’s favorite hymns, including “Fight the Good Fight” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” while the Union Jack–draped coffin stood still and silent hard by the tombs of Nelson and Wellington.

Afterward a long file of Yeomen of the Guard in red and gold coats and Grenadier Guardsmen in black bearskins and gray-blue greatcoats escorted the casket to a Port Authority barge at Festival Pier, while sixty pipers from various Highland regiments blared a lament. The great mechanical cranes of London’s dockyards dipped their heads in silent tribute as Winston’s body moved down London River to Waterloo Station. There it began its final trip by train to Bladon, where Winston was to be buried beside Blenheim Castle—the place where his journey had begun.

Meanwhile the hymns were over, the tributes finished, and the last trumpet notes of Last Post and Reveille were echoing away in the Whispering Gallery. The crowd in St. Paul’s Cathedral dispersed. The royal family waited until Churchill’s own family had left before departing. At their head was Randolph, gray-faced, prematurely aged. He would outlive his father by only three years.

Then the other dignitaries and presidents, including Charles de Gaulle, and the array of prime ministers present and past slowly filed out. One of the latter was Lord Attlee, now aging and frail. He had stumbled and nearly fallen while mounting the cathedral steps before the ceremony. Some even worried they might have to deal with two funerals for old premiers, not one. However, Attlee recovered, although he was almost too weak to last through the memorial service and needed help leaving after it was over.

Once the rest of the crowd had left, a chair was found for him as he waited for his car. Resting on his cane, he sat alone, head bowed, thinking and remembering. Then the car pulled up. Attlee stepped in and was gone.

It was seventeen years to the day since Gandhi’s assassination.

CONCLUSION:

Triumph and Tragedy

T
WO MEN, BORN FIVE YEARS AND
four thousand miles apart, meet once when both are unknown. Then they go their separate ways and become two of the most revered figures of the twentieth century. From time to time they pass each other as they pass through history, each bent on his own course. Otherwise they find very different destinies. One saves his country and secures victory in the greatest war the world has ever known. The other cajoles a mighty nation into giving up its most prestigious possession and founds the most populous democracy on earth.

That is the usual story of Gandhi and Churchill as portrayed by historians, biographers, and even filmmakers. But it is not the whole story. Both men at the end of their lives got what they most wanted, but at the cost of what they most treasured. Gandhi and Churchill both died as heroes to their fellow countrymen and as icons to the rest of the world. But what they are celebrated for achieving is not what they had set out to do.

Winston Churchill spent his life trying to re-create the imperial grandeur that had been the touchstone of his father’s generation. He discovered that grandeur as a young officer in India, and in the pages of Gibbon and Macaulay he uncovered the dream that underlay it: of a European civilization that could harmonize mankind’s conflicting impulses and create a world of progress and “bright uplands.” Churchill’s identity as a Briton was founded on that dream, just as he cherished the empire that went with it.

When Churchill was young, the dream had been shared by others. Then it slowly evaporated, first among intellectuals, then among politicians, and finally among the British public. Among everyone, that is, except Churchill, who nurtured it and kept it alive during years of frustration and failure. He used it to inspire his nation to victory in World War II, but afterward it lost its value to others if not to him. Britons preferred to remain human beings rather than become heroes. To his sorrow Churchill was left with the fragments of his broken dream, including the dream of the Raj in India.

Gandhi too lived a dream. He had conceived that dream in London as a law student: of India as the spiritual home of mankind, of an ancient Hindu civilization that could overcome mankind’s conflicting impulses and create a world of spiritual harmony and growth, of ahimsa and satyagraha or soul force.

That dream too sustained him through years of frustration and failure. He used it to inspire his nation to reach out for freedom from Britain and for independence. Then, when the goal was in sight, his vision lost its value to others if not to him. Gandhi too was left with a dream’s broken fragments, while India dissolved into chaos and violence.

Gandhi’s death did more to end the violence than anything he had done when he was alive. But the disaster that engulfed post-independence India did not come to a halt after 1948. The Raj was over and India was free, but it was no longer the India he—or Churchill—would recognize. It had become two countries, and then eventually three: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. More years of bloodshed and fighting lay ahead. Under Nehru’s disastrous economic policies, India’s poverty remained. Only years of retrenchment, and a trend of thinking far different from Gandhi’s notion of a nation of charkhas and self-sufficient villages, would put India on the path to becoming a stable, prosperous nation.

Meanwhile military coups and the rise of anti-Western Islamic fanaticism would punctuate the sad history of Pakistan. It would fight two more savage wars with its larger rival for control of Kashmir. At one point in 1999 Pakistan and India even approached a nuclear showdown. And today, thanks to al-Qaeda, the old Northwest Frontier, or Waziristan, is as dangerous and violent a place as it was when Churchill first served there 110 years ago.

All this may have fulfilled Churchill’s worst predictions of what would happen if the British left India. But he would have had no satisfaction at being proven right. His dream had been shattered, too. Despite his best efforts, Churchill could not restore Britain’s pride and self-confidence in the world any more than Gandhi was able to build upon India’s pre-British roots. And in striking ways, identities have been reversed. Today’s democratic, modernizing, globalizing Indians seem more like Americans, Australians, and the other “English-speaking peoples” than Churchill could ever have imagined. Bangalore, the sleepy outpost where he spent a year reading and playing polo, is today a stronghold of a thriving capitalist economy, while Indian Navy aircraft carriers and warships dominate the waters of South Asia just as Churchill’s Royal Navy once did.

At the same time Gandhi’s New Age spirituality has found a more receptive home in the West than the Mahatma could ever have imagined. From the Beatles and the Hare Krishnas to vegetarianism and civil rights and peace studies, the impact of Gandhi’s image and example has been huge. Indeed, his name may be more revered today in England and America than it is in his own home country, where, as one commentator has put it, Gandhi “continues both to divide Indians and to haunt their dreams.”
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These cultural shifts reflect the complex realities of the modern world. It is a world that Gandhi and Churchill did so much to shape but for which their late Victorian education gave them an instinctive revulsion. They had little time to waste enjoying nuance. They both believed that the fate of civilization depended on the assertion of timeless values against the ebb and flux of the present. They believed there were higher values than getting and spending. They believed that bravery and courage were the ultimate keys to human character, whether for a man of war like Churchill or for an apostle of nonviolence like Gandhi.

But above all they believed that the personal and the political were inseparable. Gandhi spent his life insisting that Indian self-rule and rule of the self were the same thing: that people who could not do the one were incapable of the other. He may not have been far wrong. Likewise, Churchill believed that a strong nation was the necessary product of a strong people, whether as individuals like the great heroes of English history he revered (including the conquerors of India like Clive and Hastings) or as a nation or “race.” To late Victorians like Gandhi and Churchill, those terms meant the same thing.

Both men lived their late Victorian creeds to the hilt. They saw the political arena as the place where their moral visions could be realized and their personal courage put to the test. Both believed that by sheer force of will and example they could redirect the course of events in India and in the world. The experience of defeat only seemed to intensify their drive and ambition. Ultimately, both men convinced themselves that their lives would have meaning only if they could secure the support of the masses for their dreams, even if the elites of their societies, Britain and India, remained suspicious and resentful, even scornful.

And to a powerful degree, they succeeded in securing that support. But both men also failed to realize that sheer will alone could not change how
others
saw the world and reacted to it. Millions would rally to both their causes; both men would earn the respect and admiration, even adulation of a generation of Britons and Indians, respectively. Each would see an essential part of their vision triumph. Both earned the permanent gratitude of their nations, as a result.

But at the end of the day those millions rallied to Gandhi and Churchill for their own reasons, as had their own closest followers. Few if any were willing to be what Churchill or Gandhi wanted them to be. Britons wanted to win the war against Hitler and Japan, but not in order to become an imperial race again. Indians wanted independence, but not in order to transcend ancient rivalries and modern national identities. In the end everyone remained true to themselves as ordinary human beings, while Gandhi’s and Churchill’s rivals and followers (Nehru, Jinnah, and Patel on the one side, Attlee, Mountbatten, and Eden on the other) looked ahead to their own political futures.

In short, the world refused to be reshaped in either Churchill’s or Gandhi’s image. It was an outcome that at first bewildered, then enraged, and finally overwhelmed them both. That was their tragedy, to set beside their triumph. The world remained obdurate in the face of their personal crusades to change it. History stayed on its steady oblivious course, despite their efforts to propel it toward horizons where it preferred not to go: in Gandhi’s case, to a world without violence or exploitation, in Churchill’s, to a British Empire blossoming into a robust union of English-speaking peoples.

Still, both men had left an imperishable mark on their age and a lasting legacy for coming generations. They had fought each other for the sake not only of an empire but of the future of humanity. In their forty-year rivalry, both men tasted glorious triumph and humiliating defeat. They inspired millions of devoted followers and alienated millions more. Taken together, their story is an inspiring tribute to the power of human beings to shape their own destiny, and a warning of the dangers of self-delusion and pride.

Their story is the great untold parable of the twentieth century.

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