Gandhi & Churchill (55 page)

The trip put the final seal on his sense of foreboding about the future and reminded him how fragile the civilization he loved and believed in really was. He was in New York the week the stock market crashed. The run started on Monday, October 21. The next day, “Black Tuesday,” as prices plunged, an unheard-of sixteen million shares changed hands. On Thursday he attended a dinner party with his friend the financier Bernard Baruch. The mood was somber and uncertain. One dinner guest jocularly raised a toast to his “friends and former millionaires.”
⁷⁷

On Friday morning, while Churchill was having breakfast at his hotel, the Savoy-Plaza, he heard shrieks on the street outside. He looked out the window. A man had jumped from the fifteenth story of the hotel, the first of eleven suicides that day triggered by the stock market collapse. Winston’s own position can hardly have been reassuring. He was heavily invested in the American market; like more than half a million other investors he had been buying on margin “about ten times my usual scale,” as he had told Clementine in September.
⁷⁸

Later he walked down Wall Street, where someone invited him to look in on the stock exchange floor. Churchill expected to see chaos but saw only subdued resignation. The investors, he later remembered, were “walking to and fro like a slow-motion picture of a disturbed ant heap, offering each other enormous blocks of securities at a third of their old prices and half their present value.” Those included Churchill’s own shares. When he returned home, he had to tell Clementine that their American investments had been completely wiped out.
⁷⁹

It was an experience that would shake anyone’s confidence. “What a disappointment the twentieth century has been,” Winston declared afterward. Thus far it had been a century of total war on an unimaginable scale, of violent revolution and steady socialist advance, of class conflict and industrial strife. Now came financial collapse. On October 30 Churchill sailed back to England. In a few months the financial panic would spread to Europe; soon Britain would be in the grip of the Great Depression.

“We are entering a period when the struggle for self-preservation is going to present itself with great intenseness to thickly populated countries,” Churchill wrote to the viceroy of India, Lord Irwin.
⁸⁰
The brittle prosperity and stability of the 1920s was coming to an abrupt end. World events, including events in India, were about to rise up like a tsunami around a beleaguered Britain.

Chapter Sixteen

EVE OF BATTLE

1929

Pray to God to relieve us from the curse of disunity.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI, NOVEMBER
1929

T
HE
1920
S HAD BEEN THE
calm before the storm. For a short time the Bolshevik threat to Europe had receded.
^*79
The Allies had still been united, and Germany still disarmed. The League of Nations had reigned supreme in international affairs. The bomb of class warfare, which the Great Strike had hoped to detonate, failed to explode. For the first time in more than a generation, British politicians had time to turn their attention to India.

The ground had been prepared in 1925 by Churchill’s friend and Chartwell stalwart F. E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead and secretary of state for India. “F.E.” to his friends, his tall ungainly frame and sallow mournful face hid a mordant wit and a restless appetite for power (as well as for alcohol, which eventually killed him). Like Churchill, he loved the reality as well as the ideal of the British Empire, and like Churchill he considered Edwin Montagu’s earlier concessions to Indian national sentiment a failure. Birkenhead considered the Raj an important part of the British Empire and saw no one reason to change that. “I am not able,” he told the House of Lords in May 1925, “in any discernible future, to discern a moment when we may safely, either to ourselves or to India,” give up control over the subcontinent.
¹

With exquisite cunning, Birkenhead decided that the way to cement that control was, paradoxically, to speed up the next step toward Indian self-rule. The 1919 Government of India Act had authorized a statutory commission to assess the outlook for self-rule after ten years. Birkenhead had worried that by then a Labour government might be in power, one that was “soft” on India. (Both predictions turned out to be correct.) So four years ahead of schedule, in 1925, Birkenhead moved to assemble the commission. He figured he could appoint enough like-minded members who would blanch at the prospect of devolving power to native Indians and would be happy to slow down the process or even halt it altogether.
²

The commission, formed in November 1927, was led by a Liberal and old Birkenhead classmate from Oxford, Sir John Simon. The rest of the members were undistinguished: a pair of peers and four backbench MPs. With the same exquisite cunning, Birkenhead even offered their ignorance about India as a selling point to members of Parliament who were more sympathetic to the Indian cause, since most Britons who had any experience there were fiercely opposed to making steps toward self-rule.

It was a brilliant scheme. It had only one flaw: not a single Indian was named to the commission that would decide the fate of India for the next generation. When Indians learned this fact, public opinion erupted in rage. It did not care that by statute members of the commission were supposed to be members of Parliament. (There were two Indians in Parliament, including one in the House of Lords, who could have been invited.)
³
Birkenhead had told Viceroy Lord Irwin that he had “no delusions as to the howls of rage with which our proposals will be received by the Indian Press,”
⁴
but neither man anticipated the firestorm they set off.

Gandhi, still in semiretirement at Sabarmati, did not join in the gales of protest. Instead, the man of the hour in political terms was Gandhi’s sometime disciple, Jawaharlal Nehru. Brilliant, articulate, and educated at Harrow, slim and movie-star handsome, he was part of the rising generation of Congress leadership. Yet even with all his gifts, Nehru might never have succeeded in mobilizing the forces of resentment against the Simon Commission without the unintentional help of an American journalist and author.

Her name was Katherine Mayo, and her book was
Mother India.
The title was meant to be ironic. In fact, the book was a startling exposé of the exploitation of Indian women by Hindu as well as Muslim society. Mayo described in ugly detail the customs of child marriage, of widow murder or suttee, of untouchability and caste prejudice, as well as the rampant disease and poor hygiene of what was, despite the changes since the turn of the century, still a desperately poor country.

The result, Mayo claimed, was that the fate of Indian womanhood was “early to marriage, early to die.” More than three million women died in childbirth every year. Thanks to malnutrition, most were “too small-boned, or too internally misshapen and diseased to give normal birth to a child” and were left to the mercies of ignorant midwives or a crude surgeon’s knife.
⁵

Mayo’s picture of the average Indian male was equally damning. He was, she concluded, “a feeble creature at best, bankrupt in bone-stuff and vitality, often venereally poisoned.” In addition, he was emotionally corrupted by a cultural atmosphere that worshipped the male phallus (the
lingam
of the god Shiva) and that encouraged sexual incontinence, sodomy, and “ultra indecent” practices of every kind. The result was, she claimed, that seven to eight out of ten Hindu males under thirty were impotent, at the same age when Anglo-Saxon males were “just coming into the full glory of manhood.”
⁶

According to Mayo, this situation had political consequences. The physically and emotionally inferior Indian male, she wrote, never developed into a real or lasting leader. Those who “from time to time aspire to that rank are able only for a brief interval to hold the flitting minds of their followers.” This included Gandhi, whom she had visited at Sabarmati Ashram. She found him to be a not-unsympathetic figure and quoted his criticisms of traditional Hinduism and untouchability at length. However, his solutions promised to be nothing more than a “drag on the wheels of progress,” and his vision of a society without modern technology, industry, or medicine would be a disaster for India.
⁷
“Disease, dirt, and ignorance are the characteristics of my country,” she quoted one Indian schoolteacher as saying. Nothing Gandhi proposed, including expulsion of the British, would change that.
⁸

Mother India
should have been titled
Unmanly India
. It offered a picture of Gandhi and India that was the exact opposite of Romain Rolland’s worshipful New Age tract—and just as misleading. However, to British hard-liners it came as confirmation of what they had always believed: that left to themselves, Indians would destroy their own country. Winston Churchill in particular was delighted. He sent copies of
Mother India
to friends, including Birkenhead. In the summer of 1927 Victor Cazalet noted that Churchill “admires the book
Mother India
and would have no mercy with the Hindus who marry little girls aged ten.”
⁹

Gandhi, reviewing Mayo’s book in the pages of
Young India,
dismissed it as “The Drain Inspector’s Report” and suggested it had been financed by pro-British interests. Mayo’s recitation of his criticisms of his fellow Indians quoted out of context were certainly painful, and her conclusion that India was actually more decadent, materialistic, and “egocentric” than the West must have galled. But he saw the book for what it was, a sensational piece of fluff, and never gave it a second thought.
¹⁰

The outrage among other educated Indians ran deeper. They could tolerate criticism of the caste system (many had doubts themselves); even exposure of India’s poverty and its treatment of women and untouchables. But the suggestion that Indian males were unhealthy, oversexed degenerates drove them to fury. More than sixty years later the grand old man of Bengali letters, Nirad Chaudhuri, could write, “Even now it is impossible to say whether it was an infinite capacity for self-deception or brazen hypocrisy which made her maintain her position.”
¹¹

Mother India
appeared in July 1927; four months later the all-white Simon Commission was announced. Many Indians suspected this timing was no coincidence. Their paranoia was understandable, given their sense of betrayal over Amritsar and the Hunter Commission. Fear that the British considered Indians physically and emotionally unfit to rule themselves, and were about to reassert their supremacy over India, encouraged the Indian National Congress to take its next step.

A month after the appointment of the Simon Commission, it endorsed a resolution from thirty-eight-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru declaring that India would never accept anything less than “complete independence” from Britain. When the Simon Commission visited India the following spring, even the Congress’s Moderates voted to boycott it. The Muslim League, whose members were more fearful of a Hindu Raj than of a British one, split on the issue.
¹²
Nonetheless the skirmish lines were drawn. The question in everyone’s mind was which way Gandhi would lean, and whether the Simon Commission issue would tempt him out of his self-imposed isolation.

Certainly to Gandhi, the all-white Simon Commission was “an organized insult to a whole people.”
¹³
All the same he disliked Congress’s resolution rejecting Dominion status in favor of straight independence, and he saw little point to the boycott. He also confessed to the British editor of the Indian edition of the
Statesman
that “neither the [Simon] Statutory Commission nor constitution-making processes interest me very much.” He still believed in following his own separate path to Swaraj. He would certainly welcome Sir John if he wanted to visit the ashram, he said. Otherwise, he washed his hands of the whole matter.
¹⁴

Gandhi had learned long ago not to reveal his true feelings to journalists, European journalists above all. He was not as detached from Indian politics as he pretended. Indeed, his long period of intellectual incubation and self-examination was almost over. In January 1928 his beloved son Ramdas married. A month later his cousin Maganlal died, the man who had coined the phrase “satyagraha” and had been Gandhi’s intellectual conscience since his earliest days in South Africa. The loss of Maganlal “is well nigh unbearable,” he told Jawaharlal Nehru; he said his cousin had been his hands, feet, and eyes for twenty-four years. “However I am putting on a brave front.”
¹⁵

Gandhi did not attend the Congress in December 1927 but was in constant contact with its leadership. What he learned alarmed him. Although the British government was steadily losing legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Indians, the Congress offered no better alternative. It had become a teeming anthill of rivalries and conflicting ideologies. Hindu nationalists, Bengali nationalists, Sikh separatists, old-line loyalists, and cutting-edge socialists all vied for power in its sessions. The Nehru family was split between a father who admired Gandhi and a son who admired the Soviet Union. Muslims were completely estranged from the organization, even as orthodox Hindu organizations like the Mahasabha became furious whenever concessions to Muslim opinion were even mentioned. Gandhi realized that unless he stepped forward to take the helm, the whole Indian nationalist movement would shatter into splinters.