Gandhi & Churchill (17 page)

WINSTON CHURCHILL
, 1897

G
ANDHI RETURNED TO
I
NDIA ON
J
ULY
4, 1896, to collect his family from Rajkot. He had not seen his wife Kasturbai in almost three years, nor his sons Manilal and Harilal. But his real focus was on drumming up support against the Natal Franchise Adjustment Bill among India’s leading native politicians.

At this point Gandhi was not a major player in the South Africa protest movement, let alone its leader. But his fellow members of the Natal Indian Congress, which he had helped to found in 1894, had decided that the twenty-seven-year-old barrister was the right person to reach out to Indian public opinion, especially to the nine-year-old Indian National Congress, and mobilize it behind their cause. Their strategy was not radical but imperial: they intended to stir up one part of the British Empire in order to induce London to bring pressure on another part. Gandhi made that point clear when he composed his so-called Green Pamphlet that summer (so called because of the color of its cover). Give us our rights as Indians and as Britons, ran its theme. Do not let South African whites treat us like ignorant coolies, let alone like blacks.
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On September 26 Gandhi was in Bombay speaking to a public meeting organized by Congress stalwart and fellow barrister Pherozeshah Mehta. Six days later, not far from where Gandhi was planning his trip to Poona to meet other Congress heavyweights, a ship pulled into the harbor. It was the troopship
Britannia
carrying the Fourth Hussars cavalry regiment to their camp in Bangalore, including a twenty-one-year-old subaltern who had joined them the previous year after graduating from Sandhurst: Lieutenant Winston Churchill.

He was arriving in India just as he had predicted to his doctor five years before. He would stay for three years, longer than Gandhi had stayed in London. India would change his life almost as decisively as London had changed Gandhi’s. Some historians claim that Churchill disliked India. Of this there is no evidence in either his writings or his letters. Biographer John Charmley is closer to the mark when he says India represented Churchill’s lost youth.
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However, Churchill’s connection to India ran deeper. His years there were an intellectual, even spiritual, awakening for Churchill, as much as Gandhi’s years in New Age London had been. It was in India that Winston Churchill first discovered who he was, what he could do, and who he wanted to be.

Here too he absorbed an ideal of the British Empire that he would carry with him the rest of his life: the idea of empire as a moral force, an institution of order and civilization, as well as national and racial supremacy. Churchill’s experiences gave him “the keenest realization of the great work which England was doing in India,” he wrote later, “and of her high mission to rule these primitive but agreeable races for their welfare and our own.”
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Astonishingly, it was a sentiment with which the Gandhi of 1896 would largely have agreed.

In a few short years, however, Gandhi’s perspective on empire and on India would drastically change. Churchill’s never would. His memories of India as a young officer remained with him until his death. They became his window on the non-Western world, and the scale by which he weighed Gandhi and all he represented. Ultimately, they even formed the scale in which Churchill would weigh his own life.

His very first view of India was from the deck of the
Britannia
. It “pulled up a curtain,” he would write, on a world that “might well have been a different planet.” Twenty-one days earlier the Fourth Hussars had left Southampton. Their commanding officer, Colonel Brabazon, had told them in his peculiar upper-class lisp that they were bound for “India, that famous apanage of the Bwitish Cwown.” Brabazon, a distinguished soldier and friend to the Prince of Wales, had taken the young Sandhurst graduate into the regiment as a favor to Winston’s mother. From the start Winston loved the life in the cavalry: the regiment’s barracks comradeship and subaltern antics, the disciplined drill and maneuver on horseback, “the stir of the horses, the clank of their equipment, the thrill of motion, the tossing plumes, the sense of incorporation in a living machine, the suave dignity” of their blue and gold uniforms.
⁴

But he also knew something was missing: serving in action. Colonel Brabazon had fought in Africa and Afghanistan in the 1870s and had the chestful of decorations to prove it. But then peace had descended on even the empire’s remotest outposts. Randolph Churchill’s war with Burma in 1885 barely rippled its tranquil surface. When his son joined the Fourth Hussars, “scarcely a captain, hardly ever a subaltern, could be found throughout Her Majesty’s forces who had fought even the smallest kind of war.”

Young Winston took more than a professional interest in the experience of battle. “From very early youth,” he wrote later, “I had brooded about soldiers and war, and often I had imagined in dreams and daydreams the sensations attendant upon being under fire for the first time.”
⁵
Battle was an ultimate test of manhood for Winston, one that his late father, for all his pride and swagger, had never undergone. In fact, Winston was so desperate for it that one summer he and a friend got leave to go to Cuba, where Spanish troops were fighting guerrilla insurgents. It gave Winston his first chance to observe troops in battle, and he even got shot at “without result,” the experience he would later describe as one of life’s most exhilarating. But it was still not the real thing. There was one place where he might get the chance. That was India.

So it was with a sense of excitement and expectation that Winston disembarked in Bombay harbor. But his arrival was less than propitious. As Lieutenant Churchill got out of the landing skiff and reached for a handhold on the seawall, he lost his footing and wrenched his shoulder. The injury haunted him for the rest of his life.
⁶
He refused to let it stop him from performing his regimental duties or anything else, but years later, when he was swimming or taking a book off the shelf or even making a sudden gesture in the House of Commons, it would suddenly go out of joint. The conquest of pain, like the conquest of everything else, became another test of his growing confidence in his own self-will. As he told his fellow officers, when they had playfully tried to hogpile him on shipboard and he triumphantly crawled out, “You can’t keep me down like
that
!”
⁷

The shoulder gave him a sleepless night when they made camp at Poona. But daylight brought “suave, ceremonious, turbaned applicants for the offices of butler, dressing boy, and head groom,” and “after brief formalities and salaams [they] laid hold of one’s worldly possessions and assumed absolute responsibility for one’s whole domestic life.” This was the white man’s India, where “obsequious native servants” were “cheap and plentiful,” as he told his brother Jack. He saw more of it when they arrived at Bangalore, two hundred miles due west of Madras and three thousand feet above sea level, where even in summer the days were warm with a “not unbearable” sun and evenings “fresh and cool.” There he found “flowers, flowering shrubs and creepers” in profusion, and “brilliant butterflies dancing in the sunshine, and nautch-girls by the light of the moon.”

Winston and two other subalterns set up in a pink and white stucco bungalow, with a spacious veranda and a large garden tended by two groundskeepers, three water-carriers, and a night watchman. “If you liked to be waited on and relieved of home worries,” Churchill would write later, India of the 1890s “was perfection…Princes could live no better than we.” After forty-eight hours in country, “I formed a highly favorable opinion of India.”
⁸

Every day began before dawn with a shave given by yet another servant, followed by parade at six a.m. for an hour and a half before breakfast in the mess, and then a bath. Then came the daily tour of the stables and paperwork in the orderly room until the growing tropical sun sent Winston and his fellow officers back to their bungalow. “Long before eleven o’clock,” he remembered, “all white men were in shelter.”

After luncheon everyone retired for a two-hour siesta—a habit Churchill would retain for the rest of his life. Dinner was at eight-thirty, “to the strains of the regimental band and the clinking of ice in well-filled glasses,” followed by card games or sitting and smoking on the veranda in the moonlight. “Such was the ‘long, long Indian day’ as I knew it for three years,” Churchill would write in his autobiography, “and not such a bad day either.”
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Nor was it an inactive one, because the hours between four o’clock in the afternoon and dinner were devoted to the sport that almost became an obsession for Churchill: polo.

Polo in India was far more than just excellent extracurricular training for budding cavalry officers, or a favorite sport for Britain’s upper classes. India had been one of the original homes of polo. It remained a passion among the Indian princes who had taught the game to the British. It became one of the principal bonds between the Raj and India’s traditional ruling class. Churchill had played polo in England but had never seen anything like the enthusiastic crowds who turned out for every match to cheer the native team against their European opponents. “Polo in this country attracts the interest and attention of the whole community,” Winston wrote to his mother in November. “The entire population turns out to watch and betting runs not infrequently into thousands of rupees.”
¹⁰

Despite his injured shoulder, Churchill became a proficient, even brilliant player. He chased the ball headlong with “complete absorption” past the yelling crowds, “the tents and canopied stand thronged with the British community and the Indian rank and fashion,” to the sound of thundering horses and shouts of tumbling riders, with victory celebrated and defeat and injuries soothed in the regimental tent with bumpers of brandy and champagne. The game would fascinate him all his life. It had everything he loved: speed, strategy, aggressive competition, and emotional exhilaration combined with physical danger, as well as ancient rituals and aristocratic tradition. He would dub it “the emperor of games” and play his last match in Malta when he was fifty-two. The young Churchill was as inseparable from his polo mallet as the older Churchill from his whiskey and cigar.

A cousin of Aga Khan who met him in Poona said of all the hussar officers he met, “none had a keener, more discriminating eye, none was a better judge of a horse, than a young subaltern by the name of Winston Churchill.” His drive and energy amazed everyone. “Mr. Churchill was a live one,” the sergeant-major later remembered. “He was busier than half the others put together…Once when I went into his bungalow I could scarcely get in what with all the books and papers and foolscap all over the place.”
¹¹

Polo at Bangalore represented one kind of education for Winston Churchill; his readings in the hours after luncheon were another. “I began to feel myself wanting in even the vaguest knowledge about many large spheres of thought,” he said later. Casual references to history and literature during dinner sailed clear over his head. So “the desire for learning came upon me.” Until now he had shown no interest in books. Those he read at school had seemed the dullest his teachers and schoolmasters could find.

Now, over the winter of 1896, Winston set off on a crash reading program. He started with one of his father’s favorite books, Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. “All through the long glistening middle hours of the Indian day,” he remembered later, “from when we quitted stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of Polo, I devoured Gibbon,” frantically scribbling comments in the margins.
¹²

What Winston found was a powerful cautionary tale about the fate of empires, ancient or modern. He read how a great empire had been built on “ancient renown and disciplined valour” and had given the world stability, peace, and prosperity, but then was destroyed by barbarians from without and by superstition and fanaticism from within.

He learned how, for one hundred years, the Pax Romana had maintained “the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.” But unfortunately “this long peace” also introduced “a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire,” which sapped “a love of independence, a sense of national honor and physical danger…and the habit of command” necessary to maintain it. Eventually, Gibbon concluded, “the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated,” leaving Rome vulnerable to the barbarian Germanic tribes and a fanatically intolerant Christian Church. Together they dissolved the empire, wiped away ancient civilization, and left the Dark Ages in its place.
¹³

From Gibbon he moved on to that paragon of Whig liberalism and elegist of British rule in India, Thomas Babington Macaulay. Winston read Macaulay’s
History of England,
which taught him that liberty and self-government like Britain’s were an achievement, not a right, as well as Macaulay’s brilliant essays on Clive and Hastings. These too had a personal resonance. In the life of Clive he could read how “the valour and genius of an obscure English youth suddenly turned the tide of fortune” at the siege of Arcot, and how Clive’s family, especially his father, “seem to have been hardly able to comprehend how their naughty idle Bobby had become so great a man” before he was thirty.
¹⁴
“The old gentleman [was] heard to growl out that, after all, the booby had something in him”—words Churchill had yearned to hear from his own father but never did.

Winston could also learn how Clive at Plassey had “scattered an army of near sixty thousand men, and subdued an empire larger and more populous than Great Britain,” thanks to Western weapons and discipline. Macaulay described for the young subaltern the steps by which Warren Hastings, for all his ruthlessness, managed to create “a rude and imperfect order” out of an India locked in chaos and anarchy, and set the stage for making “the young minds of Bengal familiar with Milton and Adam Smith” and the other blessings of Western civilization. And finally Macaulay taught Churchill how the history of India proved that “neither tenfold odds, nor the martial ardor of the boldest Asiatic nations, could avail aught against English science and resolution” or “the unconquerable British courage which is never so sedate and stubborn as towards the close of a doubtful and murderous day.”
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