Gandhi & Churchill (72 page)

To an ordinary man, the passage of the Government of India Bill would have seemed an incredible victory. Thanks to his tireless efforts and acts of satyagraha, even risking his life, the Mahatma had forced the British to do what they had never seriously imagined they would do. Against their will, they had put 300 million Indians on the road to self-rule.

But was it Gandhi’s victory? Gandhi was not so sure. He had the sense to realize that the British had given in not because they were swayed by his gospel of nonviolence but because they feared
more
violence if they did not. The Irish had won their freedom from Britain because they were willing to fight a bloody civil war. The Indians had won theirs (at least in a technical sense) because the British had wanted to avoid something similar.

This was not what Gandhi had wanted. No British politician, not even Lord Irwin, had truly grasped Gandhi’s fundamental message. They had marked him down as a clever bargainer with a gift for mesmerizing the masses; they would soon be saying much the same about Adolf Hitler. The dream that Gandhi had offered up twenty-six years before in
Hind Swaraj,
of Britons and Indians finding common spiritual ground through satyagraha, remained unfulfilled.

Equally uncomprehending of his message, he was realizing to his sorrow, were the Indians themselves. The rising generation of Indian leaders did not share his late Victorian New Age outlook. Their priorities were very different. His former inner circle, onetime disciples like Rajendra Prasad, V. Patel, and lean, hook-nosed Rajagopalachari or “Rajaji,” were now political powers in their own right, with their own regional bases and often sycophantic followers.

The journalist Nirad Chaudhuri met them all when Gandhi came to Calcutta for a meeting of the All-India Congress Committee in 1937. Later Chaudhuri described the anxious hustle and bustle before Gandhi’s arrival at his employer Sarat Bose’s house: the “formidably long” list of foods Gandhi needed to have on hand at all times of day or night, the search for a goat in order to provide the Mahatma with his milk, and the ceaseless stream of visitors and the throngs of ordinary Indians in the streets around the house hoping for a glance of the great man. Meanwhile middle-class Anglo-Indians in the block of flats opposite peered out of their windows “with clearly discernible expressions of disgust and anger.”
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But above all Chaudhuri remembered the physical appearance of the men in Gandhi’s inner circle and the heavyweights on the Working Committee. “I had never before seen such impassive hardness of countenance,” Chaudhuri wrote, “nor such cold hauteur on the faces of men.” They had “an overweening expression of arrogance” that exceeded even that of the most hidebound British officials; it “coated their faces and seemed to lie like make-up on their cheeks and foreheads.” Gandhi’s expression, by contrast, “was one of extraordinary innocence and benignity, with two soft beams streaming out of his eyes…I must say I looked on spellbound in spite of my dislike for Gandhi’s ideas.” As for his followers, “all of them were silent, husky, and dry men, with eyes of steel.”
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Even the man who groomed himself as Gandhi’s newest protégé and presumptive successor, Jawaharlal Nehru, remained impervious to Gandhi’s message. Nehru saw India’s future more in terms of Western-style socialism and industrial planning than renunciation and the spinning wheel. Winston Churchill had warned about Nehru: “Already he is planning to supersede [Gandhi] the moment he has squeezed the last drop from the British lemon.”
⁴
This harsh prediction was largely correct.

In 1935 Gandhi’s dream of Swaraj faced two more immediate challenges. Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League had been in politics longer than Gandhi and was a former ally. But every step in the process toward self-government fortified Jinnah’s belief that India’s Muslims could find justice only in their own separate state. No issue filled Gandhi with more anguish than the danger of a Hindu-Muslim split: “My whole soul rebels at the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines.”
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But by insisting that the Congress he had created was the sole voice for all Indians, and by embracing his role as a Hindu religious figure as well as political sage, Gandhi was alienating Jinnah and other Muslim nationalists even as the goal they had worked for together since 1916 drew near.

The Bengali nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose fought Gandhi from the opposite direction. Young, outspoken, and charismatic, he would twice be elected president of the Indian National Congress—the second time against Gandhi’s wishes. He was Hotspur to Nehru’s Prince Hal: the hot-tempered rival for the mantle of Gandhi’s successor. Along with Jinnah and the untouchable leader Ambedkar, Bose made the 1930s into a torment for the Mahatma, as his vision of a spiritually free and politically united India threatened to dissolve before his eyes.

But probably no one caused Gandhi more disappointment than his own followers in the Indian National Congress. The salt satyagraha and previous campaigns had brought literally thousands of men and women into the public scene for the first time. They found participating in civil disobedience an exhilarating and unifying experience, but few outside his ashram circle saw Gandhi’s satyagraha as a form of self-purification or as the path to the truth.
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Most saw it in purely utilitarian terms. If it worked in forcing the British to make concessions, they would join in and organize their neighbors to help. If it did not, they would stop.

The Government of India Act seemed to prove it
had
worked. Now Congressmen wanted to reap the rewards of political activism: offices, status, influence, the ability to help friends and injure enemies—in a word, power. Especially after the India Act these rewards became the primary focus of discussion for successive Congresses. In the spring of 1934 Gandhi had had to accept a compromise whereby Congress members could stand for office in the upcoming legislative elections. Their ostensible reason was to better express their opposition to the government’s Communal Award. The truth was they just wanted to win seats.
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Over the next four years Gandhi would learn to his sorrow that Indian politicians, even his hand-picked disciples, were much like politicians everywhere. He gave way in part because he was too tired to fight anymore. After fourteen years he felt it was time to take his leave of the Indian National Congress. In October 1934 he formally severed his ties in order to continue his work alone. “I shall better influence the Congress being outside,” he insisted to his worried disciples. He had worked outside in 1919 and again in 1928. But this time he knew that he and India’s politicians had reached the fork in the road.

The surest sign that Gandhi was looking for a new path was his creation in 1936 of a new ashram, outside Wardha in the heart of the Central Provinces. Sabarmati remained up and running, and Gandhi remained Sabarmati’s spiritual guide, firing off memos and directives that sometimes bewildered his disciples. But he had vowed in 1931 that he would not return there until India had independence.
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After his release from prison he stayed with relatives and friends. But he still needed a place where he could think, spin, meditate, and conduct business, including his new organization, the All-India Village Industries Association; and where Kasturbai and his inner circle could join him. So at the end of April 1936 he and Mirabehn strolled through some barren fields north of Segaon village and picked out building sites for a new ashram that he called Sevagram or “Service Village.”
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Sevagram was a real village, or at least Segaon was, in one of the poorest parts of India. Gandhi was launching a campaign of what he called village work, to uplift the lives of India’s destitute rural masses hamlet by hamlet. It was a natural extension of his Harijan campaign: India’s poorest came almost exclusively from its lowest castes. It also meshed with his hopes that the charkha would remake India’s political economy, since he saw the production of khadi as essential to making villages strong and self-sufficient.

By 1936 the peasant village had become the focus of all Gandhi’s hopes for India—one could even say his last hope. “India lives in her seven hundred thousand villages,” Gandhi told his followers. “You cannot build non-violence on a factory civilization, but it can be built on self-contained villages.”
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Therefore he decided, at age sixty-six, like Tolstoy before him, to live like a peasant. His first house at Sevagram was only a mud-wall hut, 14 by 29 feet. The compound soon grew, however, as devotees and family members moved in, including Kasturbai (who was appalled by the lack of privacy and insisted that Gandhi’s patron, cotton merchant Jamnalal Bajaj, build her a separate house).
¹¹
Eventually there was a road and even telegraph wires.

But Sevagram never brought the spiritual serenity of Sabarmati to its founder or his followers. Virtually everyone, including Gandhi, came down with malaria or dysentery. The thick grass around the compound was infested with kraits, whose bite was sixteen times deadlier than a cobra’s. Gandhi’s own bout with malaria put him in Wardha’s hospital, while his high blood pressure made any sustained physical labor almost impossible. A visitor told Nehru he found the Mahatma looking tired and depressed.
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In fact, these were years of personal as well as physical pain.

The personal pain started with the unexpected reappearance of his eldest son Harilal, now forty-seven. For three decades Harilal had tried by turns to either please or horrify his father into noticing him. He had almost destroyed his physical health with bouts in prison during the South Africa satyagrahas. The sudden death of his wife in 1918 and then the death of his son of typhoid fever at Sabarmati in 1929 helped to wreck what was left of Harilal’s mental health. He became a shambling alcoholic, with a reputation for consorting with loose women and embezzling from employers. He wrote ugly letters to his brothers Manilal, Devadas, and Ramdas, denouncing them as charlatans for trying to emulate their father.

In 1934 he appeared on Gandhi’s doorstep like the Prodigal Son. Despite the years of bitterness, Gandhi was pleased to have him back. He blamed himself for Harilal’s failures. The boy had been conceived when Gandhi was at his most self-indulgent, he confessed to others. Clearly his own sinfulness had made Harilal the way he was. But even in his father’s presence Harilal refused to change. He became a living reproach to Gandhi’s temperance campaign. “He goes about drunk and begs from people,” Gandhi wrote matter-of-factly. He hoped his eldest son might remarry, but the one likely prospect, an alliance with European Gandhi devotee Margarette Spiegel, soon fell through.
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Eventually Harilal wandered back to Rajkot, where he tried selling wristwatches for a living. Gandhi strongly disapproved but was most concerned about his son’s drinking, which became steadily worse. Finally Harilal wrote a string of angry reproachful letters to his father. None survive, but Gandhi himself wrote: “This chapter is becoming more and more painful.” Soon afterward Harilal dropped out of sight. Gandhi wrote to his cousin Narandas: “Leave him to his fate.” Occasionally news reached him that Harilal was destitute and homeless, traveling from one big city to another in third-class rail carriages.
¹⁴

Almost two years later Gandhi and Kasturbai were passing through the town of Katni in their usual third-class railway compartment. A toothless figure in rags with matted hair hanging down to his shoulders halted them on the train platform. They suddenly realized it was Harilal—looking for all the world like a caricature of the Hindu
sadhu
his father had become. Harilal gave a trembling greeting to Kasturbai but not his father. From a tattered dirty pocket he pulled out an orange, which he presented to his mother.

“Have you nothing for me?” Gandhi asked.

“No, I have brought the orange only for Ba,” Harilal stammered. “I have only one thing to say to you. If you are so great, you owe it to Ba.” A tearful Kasturbai begged Harilal to come back with them, but he refused. As they pulled out of the station, they heard him calling in a high-pitched voice:
“Mata Kasturbai ki jai!”

She never saw their son again.
¹⁵

Less than a month after he founded Sevagram, Gandhi received the bitterest blow. On May 29, 1936, Harilal stood in one of Delhi’s major mosques, the Jamma Masjid, and formally converted to Islam. He took a new name, Abdullah, and made a speech to a large cheering crowd. A Muslim brotherhood sent the story to Gandhi and mockingly asked him whether he was thinking of converting as well.
¹⁶

Gandhi was deeply wounded, but not because Harilal had become a Muslim. Harilal had told his father he owed money to Muslim creditors and that missionaries of various faiths were hounding him to convert. He had openly said he considered yielding to the highest bidder.
¹⁷
To Gandhi, for whom nothing mattered as much as religious faith, the news of his son’s sellout was a personal humiliation.

“I must confess that all this has hurt me,” he wrote in a long letter. “Conversion without cleanness of heart can only be a matter for sorrow, not joy, to a godly person.”
¹⁸
True to form, Harilal did not remain a Muslim for very long. But the incident helped to strain Gandhi’s relations not only with his wayward son, but with India’s largest minority community. Those relations were already tense, thanks to the man who would emerge as Gandhi’s Muslim nemesis, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

A stranger might have taken Jinnah for Gandhi’s taller younger brother. They had much in common. Lean and long-boned, like Gandhi he came from Gujarat, although he had been born in Karachi. His grandfather and grandmother had lived only thirty miles from Gandhi’s home in Rajkot. Like the Mahatma, Jinnah was a London-trained barrister and protégé of both D. Naoroji and G. K. Gokhale. Ironically, he had even been a champion of Muslim-Hindu unity. His membership in the Indian National Congress (he joined in 1896) and support for the 1916 Lucknow Pact had earned Jinnah many enemies in more radical pan-Islamic circles.