Gandhi & Churchill (123 page)
Read Gandhi & Churchill Online
Authors: Arthur Herman
*13
Small did not necessarily mean dull. When Mohandas’s grandfather Uttamchand sheltered a clerk from the wrath of his rana’s widow, she ordered cannon wheeled down the Porbandar streets and had her troops fire on the Gandhi house. The cracks in the wall from the cannonballs are still visible today. Meanwhile Uttamchand fled to a neighboring Muslim principality until things were smoothed over. This defiance of princely authority on principle later became part of the Gandhi legacy for Mohandas.
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*14
These Gymnosophs, as the Greeks called them (literally “naked philosophers”), were unclothed and expounded their teachings sitting on the floor, like prototype Mahatmas. What they said made little sense to their Greek listeners. But at least one intellectual in Alexander’s entourage, Pyrrho, went home to Greece greatly disturbed. Seeing and listening to the Gymnosophs (probably Jains), he had realized that “men disagree on the nature of the good”—and a new Western philosophy, Pyrrhonism or skepticism, was born.
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*15
Bell was father of the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell.
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*16
Salt even wrote a biography of Thoreau, and some scholars suspect it was Salt who first introduced Gandhi to Thoreau’s writings, especially his
Civil Disobedience
.
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*17
Edwin Arnold had been a schoolteacher in India and wrote two best sellers that proved hugely popular with New Agers on both sides of the Atlantic. One was a biography of Gautama Buddha, called
The Light of Asia
; the other was his verse translation of the
Gita,
under the title
The Song Celestial
.
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*18
In the 1920s Gandhi would also take up the plight of Indians of East Africa, especially Kenya. He would thereby create another source of conflict and friction with Churchill, who firmly believed in the right of British colonies to run their affairs as their white residents saw fit.
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*19
Ironically, this was precisely the same argument Hitler and others would mobilize for their “Aryan” nation; and allowed them to appropriate the Indian swastika as the emblem of the Third Reich.
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*20
Prem Singh’s heroism even led Winston to wonder whether awards of the Victoria Cross should not be extended to native soldiers, adding: “In sport, in courage, and in the sight of heaven, all men meet on equal terms.” However, that reform had to wait until 1911.
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*21
He also left behind an unpaid bill at the Bangalore Club, which until recently still hung in its frame on the club’s wall. The sum is not small.
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*22
The other two influences were Leo Tolstoy and John Ruskin.
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*23
That respect for masculine virtue made them both admirers of the Boers, and what Gandhi himself called their “pluck, determination, and bravery” and Churchill the Boer farmer’s willingness to “fight bravely in defense of the soil on which he lived”—although both men were also repelled by the Boers’ rampant racism.
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*24
By his own admission, his efforts to educate his sons were “inadequate.” Harilal and Manilal would deeply resent their father’s neglect of their formal schooling. His later excuse would be that he had kept them free from the “shackles” of a formal European education. The truth was that he was too busy to make time for them.
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*25
Churchill was a poor sailor, unlike Gandhi, who was never seasick even in the roughest weather.
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*26
There were no Indian regiments in the campaign for the same reason. When General Roberts tried to put an Indian officer on his staff, a nervous colonial government vetoed the idea, in spite of the queen’s personal intervention on the officer’s behalf.
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*27
English, Hindi, Gujarati, and Tamil.
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*28
The 48 million Bengalis were outnumbered by the inhabitants of Bihar and Orissa, the other parts of the old province.
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*29
He was George Cornwallis-West, and they married at St. Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge on June 2, 1900. He soon deserted Jennie, who would marry a third time (to another younger man) shortly before her death at age sixty-seven in 1921.
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*30
His plan excluded India, just as the proposal for imperial federation had. But Chamberlain’s idea was important for India’s future nonetheless, because the need for imperial restructuring would spur the granting of Canada’s Dominion status to other former colonies, including eventually India.
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*31
Seebohm Rowntree’s
Poverty: A Study of Town Life,
published in 1901, used data on employment, wages, and food and alcohol consumption to argue that laissez-faire capitalism was failing and that new government measures were needed to end poverty. Rowntree had a huge impact on leading Liberals and was later dubbed “the Einstein of the Welfare State.” A Quaker, Rowntree’s views on temperance and pacifism were strikingly similar to Gandhi’s.
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†32
The figure included Labour and Irish MPs.
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*33
These measures would end, in 1910, in the merger of all four colonies into the Union of South Africa.
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*34
The rest were Parsis like Naoroji or Muslims like Ali.
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*35
Churchill was viscerally opposed to votes for women and was a frequent target of suffragette protests in Manchester. “I am not going to be henpecked,” he stiffly replied, “on a question of such grave importance.”
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*36
If Gandhi had any real-life model in mind, it was probably the Salvation Army. Their military discipline, their use of music and banners, their belief in hygiene and the social virtues of soap, and their moral forthrightness (including abstaining from tobacco and drink) were just the kind of qualities he hoped to instill in his own satyagrahis. In 1925 he would remember the Army’s courage in entering the sleaziest bars in underworld London to preach their message. And Gandhi’s vision of satyagraha as moral uplift closely parallels the movement founded by another admirer of the Salvation Army and Boer War hero: Colonel Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts.
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*37
In fact, free trade had been part of the British Radical tradition dating back to Richard Cobden and John Bright, as a way to batter down social barriers through material prosperity.
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*38
One eugenics-inspired measure that did pass was his Trade Boards Law of 1909, which included a national minimum wage. This was no gift to the downtrodden. Radicals like the Webbs saw a minimum wage as necessary in order to push “the sick and the crippled,” as Sidney Webb described them, “the incorrigibly idle, deficient in strength, speed, and skill,” and other “parasites” out of the labor market—thus clearing the way for organized labor.
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*39
Today only the 287-foot tower survives, as part of Imperial College, London.
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*40
During his stay in prison he had begun reading Plato and was even writing a Gujarati biography of Socrates, the first philosopher to say that it was preferable to suffer than to wrong others. The title was
The Story of a True Warrior
—precisely the description Gandhi would have liked for himself.
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*41
Arthur O.V. Russell, Lord Ampthill, had been interim viceroy between Curzon’s two terms. Like the late Lepel Griffin, Ampthill was no supporter of either Indian nationalism or the National Congress: he would die fighting the 1935 India Bill alongside Churchill. However, like Griffin he sincerely believed the Indians in South Africa were getting a raw deal. Ampthill recruited Lord Curzon to help Gandhi and wrote the introduction to the first biography of Gandhi when it appeared in 1910.
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*42
Certainly Gandhi’s views on the pernicious effects of railways were wildly off the mark—India’s railway system had actually helped to diminish the spread of famine, by quickly moving rice and grain supplies to areas that sorely needed them.
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*43
The English “divine” was John Milton, who has Satan remark in
Paradise Lost
: “Better to rule in hell than to serve in Heaven.”
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*44
One of them was a young East End social worker named Clement Attlee.
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*45
When war came in 1914, its decoding section, known in the Admiralty as Room 40, would crack the German naval code, an inestimable advantage and probably Churchill’s single most decisive contribution to winning the First World War.
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*46
In the 1908 satyagraha campaign, the wife of Thambai Naidu had suffered a miscarriage following her husband’s arrest. Gandhi had publicly accused Smuts of being “a murderer.” The rash remark had hurt the movement, and Gandhi came to regret it—and to revise his opinion of Smuts.
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*47
He even wrote this extraordinary passage as he was leaving South Africa: “Though empires have gone and fallen, this Empire may perhaps be an exception…it is an Empire founded not on material but spiritual foundations…the British constitution. Tear away those ideals and you tear away my loyalty to the British constitution; keep those ideals and I am ever a bondsman.” In August 1914, despite his
Hind Swaraj
manifesto, the bondsman in Gandhi was still strong.
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*48
The offer was declined.
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*49
One of the volunteers’ officers was Winston’s legal father-in-law, George Cornwallis-West. The volunteers also included Brooke and the prime minister’s son Arthur.
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†50
Later Brooke would be the most famous fatality of another botched Churchill operation, at Gallipoli.
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*51
The challenge of U-boat warfare had not yet begun, despite the sinking of
Cressy, Aboukir,
and
Hogue
by U 23 in August 1914.
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*52
Lord Roberts, who had fought in the Mutiny, was still alive until November 14, 1914.
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*53
The Greeks occupied Smyrna briefly after the war, although the Turks forced them to evacuate in 1922. One of the refugees driven out by the Turkish reoccupation was the young Aristotle Onassis.
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*54
The strain of carrying out a plan in which he did not believe forced Carden on the sick list on March 16. He was replaced by his second in command, de Robeck.
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*55
Later this brilliant officer would change his name to Kemal Ataturk and become the father of modern Turkey. He would earn the undying enmity of India’s Muslims by abolishing the Caliphate in 1924.
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*56
She even designed a flag for an independent India, which some insist influenced Gandhi’s own later design for the Indian Congress.
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*57
For example, police reports suggested that his Ahmedabad fast was “a typical theatrical finale” and that Gandhi knew all along that the owners and strikers would settle. About this time the Bombay police began keeping track of visitors to and from the Sabarmati Ashram.
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*58
The rumor was untrue. But it was an example of how Churchill’s attack on Gallipoli directly impinged on Indian politics—as Gandhi was quick to realize and exploit.
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*59
In fact, the government never implemented any provisions of the Rowlatt Acts, then or later.
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†60
The governor of the Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, had wanted Gandhi arrested outright. Delhi worried that that would set off riots and ordered him merely detained and sent home—which set off the riots anyway.
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*61
Few were paid even that. To add insult to injury, O’Dwyer’s Punjab government also imposed a 1.85 million–rupee impost on the province to cover the costs of military operations and martial law.
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*62
As prime minister Lloyd George tried but failed to pass Prohibition in Britain—a cause Gandhi would have wholeheartedly supported. But in 1915, as minister of munitions, he did manage to push through the Licensing Act, which closed Britain’s pubs during the afternoons in order to promote sobriety in war industry workplaces. The war ended but the law remained, right down to 2001.
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