By Kohinoor Dasgupta
Gandhi The Years That Changed the World (2018), by Ramachandra Guha, is for everyone interested in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, I think, not just for historians and political and social scientists.
The book gave me a vivid sense of India’s unique struggle for freedom. Those years broke out of the stranglehold of dates and dull summaries (made quite lifeless by repeated memorization up to Class X) of my distant schooldays.
Inevitably, as "history”, it is incomplete, because it’s impossible to write a full and true history. There we get into "life” territory, which is complicated. Firstly, we’d have to have a Ballabhbhai Patel biographer, a Jinnah biographer, an Ambedkar biographer, a Bose biographer, a Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan biographer, a Dr. Ansari biographer, and so forth, to present unbiased accounts of their subjects’ views and activities in relation to Gandhi and the struggle. Then all the biographers, if still living, would have to, through countless unpaid hours, debate and collate and compare. Even then, almost nothing would be known about the millions of anonymous (to History) Indians who participated in various movements.
Adroitly, the biography incorporates quotes from Gandhi’s articles, letters, replies to letters, as well as conversations memorialized by Mahadev Desai. We get ringside seats, as if able to watch Gandhi in his time. Had his real contemporaries been able to watch him as closely, perhaps there would have been more unity among them.
From time to time, Guha also provides proof of what the imperialists were thinking. The record-keeping British did not burn after reading a good many private and official exchanges of the Raj actors. We get quotes from, for example, District Magistrates and Provincial Governors, from Intelligence gatherers, from Secretaries of State for India, the Viceroys, and the British Prime Ministers. When I was in school, I knew the names of all the Viceroys. Sometimes there was a photograph too in the textbook. The Viceroys figured in those summaries we memorized, for things they did and for things they didn't do. Guha has combed through the letters and memos of the Viceroys who headed up the Raj during 1915-1948, and included a few excerpts. Thus, names become people, and we get a fuller understanding of their calculated tactics of cutting Gandhi down to size.
And so, we are brought face-to-face with Gandhi, a man whom free India beatified and then put away, as if in cold storage, in sparkling shrines that put him at a great distance in every way from those ordinary people who are still waiting for Gandhi.
TIME AS A BRITISH ASSET
Patience was a key virtue in Gandhi’s ahimsa-satyagraha construct. After all, if you signed up to oppose imperialism without entertaining a single hostile thought, let alone violent action, against the oppressor, you must wait until shame and contriteness take hold on the other side. It was a daring experiment in politics, a mass movement based on humanity and morality, against an imperialist government. Even so, so deep was Gandhi’s faith in the people of India and in the Christian values of the British people that he once (in 1920) promised swaraj within a year. We know how that turned out. To cite one (well-memorized) incident, Gandhi suspended the highly successful civil disobedience movement after 23 policemen died in an arson attack by "Gandhian” protestors on February 4, 1922, at Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces. He was now going to "think 50 times before embarking upon mass civil disobedience”.
In Gandhi, oppressed and invisible people saw an effective leader who thought about them. Sometimes, anger overpowered them. But no excuse was good enough for Gandhi who, more than anyone, understood the desperate sadness of such people. Gandhi now dug in his heels, waiting for the day when all his God-fearing and God-denying countrymen would unite in perfect ahimsa. At various times after Chaura Chaura, Gandhi’s patience frustrated other Congress leaders and young people smarting under some fresh and specific assault on their dignity or livelihood.
Far from being shamed into leaving, the imperialists made full use of the bonus time. Many cans of worms could be opened to throw at Gandhi’s Congress Party, and finish its potential to be the single juggernaut against the Raj.
Guha writes (about the first few months of 1925):
“The deteriorating relations between Hindus and Muslims depressed Gandhi but cheered British imperialists. Lord Birkenhead, the secretary of state for India, wrote in glee to the Viceroy, Lord Reading, that "I have always placed my highest and most permanent hopes upon the eternity of the communal situation"."
Penderel Moon, a senior Indian Civil Service man who was serving in March 1940 as private secretary to the Governor of Punjab, had this to say after the Congress and the Muslim League held separate annual sessions at Lahore:
"Muslims will accept something less than partition, but the longer time that elapses, without any concrete alternative being put forward, the more the support and favour partition proposals are likely to gain."
At one of their meetings of 1940, Gandhi said, Viceroy Lord Linlithgow told him:
"In spite of everything we may say, we shall be in India a long time, a very long time.”
In April 1941, secretary of state Leo Amery noted that (British) Prime Minister Churchill "just dislikes the idea of anything being done in India at all … and just hopes that we can sit back and do nothing indefinitely”.
What Gandhi’s patience did not tolerate, however, was idleness or procrastination. He usually rose at 4.30 a.m., though what he did between that time and 10 p.m., when he usually slept, depended on his location and the ongoing mission. There seems to have been a short phase towards the end of his life when he rose at 6.30 a.m. On January 30, 1948, when he was seventy-nine, he rose at 3.30 in the morning.
Herbert Fischer, a German interested in vegetarianism and organic farming, arrived in Sevagram in late 1936. For one-and-a-half years, he lived at Manganwadi, 7 miles away from Sevagram, and worked for the All-India Village Industries Association (AIVIA), set up at Gandhi’s insistence. Fischer made this entry after observing Gandhi on a Sunday at Sevagram:
"(Gandhi) sat on the floor on a grass mat covered with a khadi sheet, with a white cushion at the back. On his thigh he held a board which served as writing support. Next to him was a desk barely half-a-metre high, in which he kept paper and writing material. If his secretary or a visitor came, they sat before him. To save time he shaved while talking – naturally without a mirror – or did his spinning. Only during very important conversations did he content himself with just listening and speaking.”
DATA SCIENTIST
In Mission Joy (2021), a documentary on the friendship between the Dalai Lama and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama (b. 1935) says: "I’m still learning!” Gandhi, too, was obsessed with specifics all his life. Though Gandhi concentrated on social and political ills, whereas science is the big pull for the Dalai Lama, spiritual healing and community development may be assigned to both as the ultimate objective.
Guha does his best to acquaint us with this aspect of Gandhi’s personality. Gandhi really saw people. He collected data about the villages that he stopped at or passed through. It was the starting point to finding solutions to problems. Had India gained freedom twenty years before 1947, he would have been fifty-eight years old, and he would have hit the ground running.
Gandhi got an early opportunity to learn in 1917, at the indigo plantations of Champaran. Happily, he also made a difference, as the tinkathia became a voluntary system for the farmers.
New Secretary of State for India, Edwin S. Montagu (he was a rarity who pushed for self-government for Indians) met Gandhi in late 1917 and noted:
"He is a social reformer; he has a real desire to find grievances and to cure them, not for any reason of self-advertisement, but to improve the conditions of his fellow men… He dresses like a coolie, forswears all personal advancement, lives practically on the air, and is a pure visionary. He does not understand details of schemes; all he wants is that we should get India on our side.”
The "details of schemes” would certainly have caught Gandhi’s attention if they outlined self-government and improving "the conditions of his fellow men”. Unfortunately for India, Montagu’s liberal ideas were not permitted to become official policy.
While mediating in a management-labour standoff in Ahmedabad in 1918, Gandhi sought data on the living conditions of the mill workers and a wage comparison with other cities.
Travelling by train in October and November 1920, Gandhi made stops in 48 towns, explaining "non-cooperation” to the public and to Congress workers. Younger leaders took his cue. Jawaharlal Nehru, for years, carried out a mass contact programme with students, peasants and workers. Under Gandhi's guidance, the Congress Party ceased to be mostly urban and became more representative of a vast and diverse country.
In March 1930, Gandhi planned a march to the sea to break salt laws. The march started from Sabarmati Ashram on March 12 and ended at Dandi on April 6. Every night, en route, the marchers rested at a previously identified village. Before the march began, even though he expected to be taken into custody by the British authorities, Gandhi had communicated to those villagers through his Gujarati newspaper Navajivan. Apart from giving the villagers specific instructions on "the simplest food" to be provided to himself and his companions (the marchers), writes Guha, Gandhi "also asked them to compile information on the religious composition of their village, the number of 'untouchables’, the number of spinning wheels, the number of cows and buffaloes, and its educational facilities”.
On November 7, 1933, Gandhi embarked on his 'Harijan tour'. For five weeks, he travelled through the Central Provinces. Thereon, he went to Delhi, Madras, Andhra, Malabar, Tirunelvel and Devakottai, to name a few places. Gandhi spent a week in the Nilgiri Hills. He went to Srirangam and Tanjore. He advocated for the integration of "Harijans” into "caste-Hindu” society. He was speaking at five meetings a day, at least. He was sixty-five years old. Everywhere, he studied the social divide.
In March 1934, Gandhi made his way to Bihar. A massive earthquake had devastated parts of the province in January. Gandhi spent a month there, meeting with people who had lost their homes, and with social workers and Congressmen. His very presence inspired unity and fairness in relief work. People thronged to his meetings, warmed by his genuine empathy.
After Bihar, Gandhi went to Assam. In May, he was in Orissa, where, Guha writes, "he comfortably walked eight to ten miles a day”. He wrote to Kasturba: "One cannot propagate dharma by travelling in trains or cars, nor in bullock carts.” On to Bombay (presumably by train!) and in June, to Poona, where the car in which he was being driven to the venue of a public meeting missed, by three minutes, a bomb hurled, most probably, by right-wing Hindus who loathed Gandhi for upsetting the caste applecart. (Gandhi had also been criticized for several years by orthodox Hindus, most of whom were not in favour of murdering him, for supporting the Sarda Bill, which proposed to raise the age at which Hindu girls could be married.)
Gandhi was not afraid of dying for any cause. Just as he had planned, he went on to Banaras to deliver his message of equality and reform. Banaras was the last stop of his 'Harijan tour'.
Now, he moved base from Ahmedabad to Wardha, and retired from the Congress Party. He had learned voraciously from the 'Harijan tour'. From November 1934 onwards, he wrote a series of articles devoted to dealing with various problems faced by villagers. He communicated his ideas on the ways in which rural communities could be revitalized. What is not generally understood, is that Gandhi’s ideas were meant to alleviate people’s suffering right away. He did not have patience in this regard, and no hope of immediate redress from the British government. As such, the villagers had to be self-reliant, without much money or support. It was 1934. That does not mean that Gandhi would have been a misfit in 1974. We made him a misfit because we were unable to understand him. If he lived in free India, a younger man, he would have found solutions depending on the villagers’ current problems and the science and funds available.
Among the essays that Gandhi wrote on revitalizing rural India was one on sanitation. Guha writes that the essay “asked for the periodic cleaning and desilting of wells and tanks, and especially for the recycling of human waste as manure”. I recalled V.S. Naipaul’s acknowledgement (in An Area of Darkness) of Gandhi’s unwillingness to ignore careless and unhygienic habits, and his finicky instructions on the disposal of night soil.
Gandhi’s desire to hear people in their own voices led him to learn Urdu. In 1932, he would write in Urdu to Raihana Tyabji, from Yerwada jail. She corrected his errors. The day he was assassinated, January 30, 1948, Gandhi had made time for a Bengali lesson.
SYMBOLS IN THE TIME OF CENSORSHIP & PROPAGANDA
Gandhi left South Africa for good on July 18, 1914. He was bound for London, where he meant to seek advice from Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He and Kasturba landed in Southampton on August 6. World War I had erupted. Britain was at war with Germany. The Gandhis spent a few months in London and arrived in India on January 9, 1915.
Gandhi was aware of his own charisma as a mass communicator, and of the power of satyagraha as a tool of political protest. Gokhale advised him to take a year to familiarize himself with the Indian reality, and so he did. The more he saw India, the more he understood that if any people could be taken by storm by symbols, they'd be the Indians. For a large swath of people, happiness or even the hope of it was a mirage. Symbolic. For multitudes, living with self-respect had to be a personal, inner activity, to be hidden in public. Symbolic.
Masses of people, including women, were illiterate. That was because some were not permitted to read by their religion and also because there were not enough schools. The British government’s Education budget mostly came from the sales tax on liquor. There was an insidiousness to that taxation. Caste and creed did not matter when it came to customers at a liquor shop. Therefore, the addictions of the lowest class and caste strata were also funding schools that those folks or their children would never attend if the vicious cycle was not broken. Eventually, when women wanted to participate in Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, he asked them to picket liquor shops. Kasturba was one of their leaders and was jailed for it.
Illiteracy did not bar anyone from being a satyagrahi, provided Gandhi’s message reached everyone. Gandhi’s writings appeared in the weeklies Young India and Navajivan, and they quickly became popular, yet how many of the poorest of the poor, whom Gandhi considered his moral constituency, knew of them or their message? For them, Gandhi gradually made himself the message. He did not live in a house. He was a minimalist who lived in an ashram with a band of followers. He travelled to villages across India, talking to people, and asking for unity and courage and ahimsa in return for freedom from imperialistic rules and regulations.
Back in 1917, during the Champaran protest, the sub-divisional magistrate of Bettiah, W.H. Lewis, had observed: "(to the raiyats he (Gandhi) is their liberator, and they credit him with extraordinary powers. He moves about in the villages, asking them to lay their grievances before him, and he is daily transfiguring the imagination of masses of ignorant men with visions of an early millennium.”
"Transfiguring the imagination”! Indeed, with symbols. The British government could jail editors, withdraw advertisements from newspapers and periodicals, stop the distribution of pamphlets carrying Gandhi’s message of unity and instructions for peaceful protest; they could lock up thousands of satyagrahis, jail Gandhi and Kasturba and Congress leaders, but they could not exile Gandhi from the free domain of symbols.
The charkha was the symbol of Gandhi’s swadeshi programme. Throughout the British Raj, the impoverishment of Indian weavers occurred as steadily as the cotton mills of Britain became job hubs. Famine regularly stalked rural India. Gandhi was averse to the import of cloth. He picked up on the 1905 rallying idea of swadeshi as a means of replanting self-belief and self-reliance in the villagers. No doubt, Gandhi was a political thinker and he needed the masses to stand behind him. However, he did not want a hateful, angry army to achieve his own ends. He wanted people to thrive as well as participate in the freedom struggle. The charkha connected him to rural India. Gandhi was not a remote god, but one of them. I spin, you spin. We must do something different to stave off pauperism. You think for yourself too. Meanwhile, here’s a way out, as per your current circumstances. Here’s an insurance against famine.
The idea of stripping away clothing to a loincloth occurred to Gandhi while he was in Barisal. He finally took the decision in Madurai in September 1921.
As a true believer in ahimsa, Gandhi bore no grudges. Some people reciprocated. In September 1931, during the Round Table Conference, Gandhi went to Lancashire. Guha writes:
"Gandhi stayed at Spring Vale, a garden village near Darwen built by the Davies family for the millworkers. He went on long walks, his loincloth and sandals attracting excited comment (especially among the children). He had several meetings with workers and their representatives. The Lancashire constabulary was out in full force, lining, at fifty-yard intervals, the roads he drove or walked on. They feared a hostile demonstration by unemployed workers. In fact, the people of Lancashire, rich and poor, were disarmed by Gandhi’s gesture of coming into their midst. Wherever he went, 'the crowds behaved with the greatest good humour, and even the local Conservative Associations, in all the circumstances, with admirable restraint’.
"Gandhi told the weavers that 'he grieved at Lancashire’s distress but could only promise this: if India got self-government, he would agree to the prohibition of all imports of cloth other than Lancashire in so far as imports were necessary’.”
FOUNDER, FUND RAISER
Gandhi was an indefatigable fund-raiser for his causes and whenever he could, he founded institutions that would educate, promote village industries, and provide health care, all without discrimination on the basis of caste and creed. Guha provides many examples of Gandhi’s efforts to raise money for the benefit of causes and people not supported by the imperialists.
In 1920 Gandhi started Gujarat Vidyapeeth in Ahmedabad. It was to be a "nationalistic” institution, with a curriculum relevant to Indian students, and it would be run with voluntary donations.
Gandhi set up the Tilak Swaraj Fund, for which, even in that time, he set a target of Rs 1 crore. He actively canvassed for donations. In 1921, Gandhi and Kasturba held a public meeting in Jharia, where there was a large Gujarati community. He collected Rs 60,000 in cash and jewellery. He put his popularity to the test in Kathiawar and Bombay and was handsomely vindicated. Even Gandhi’s friend from South Africa, Parsi Rustomji, sent Rs 52,000.
Gandhi’s idea of "nationalistic Muslim” educational institutions resulted in the founding of the Jamia Milia University in Delhi. His youngest son, Devadas, worked there.
After the death of Calcutta’s beloved leader C.R. Das on June 16, 1925, Gandhi started a public fund in his memory to set up a "hospital for women irrespective of caste and creed” and a nurses’ training school.
In November 1927, Gandhi was in Ceylon for more than a fortnight, at the invitation of three students from Jaffna who had met him in Bangalore earlier. He was able to raise Rs 105,000 and 2 annas for his Khadi spinning programme.
During his 'Harijan tour', after each public talk, voluntary donations to the Harijan Sewak Sangh were solicited. Not content with that, Gandhi would then auction signed photographs of himself. For the younger folk, Jawaharlal Nehru’s photos were next, and those of Dr. M.A. Ansari. Gandhi also auctioned gifts he had received. The tour in all collected more than Rs 400,000. Gandhi’s new weekly, 'Harijan’ in its edition dated March 2, 1934, detailed how the monies were to be used. 'Harijan’ itself was not free. Nor was Congress membership free anymore.
Gandhi’s Navajivan Trust is funded even now mainly by royalties from Gandhi’s writings.
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A moving paragraph in the book records the death of Kasturba, who had once, in court, described her occupation as "desh seva”, service to the country.
Guha has succeeded in not excluding from the biography the anonymous multitudes and little-remembered local heroes like Jatin Das. (Das, while incarcerated by the British, fasted unto death to bring attention to the conditions in prison.) In a chapter titled 'Shaming the Hindus' Guha writes:
"An Andhra journalist who covered the ['Harijan'] tour wrote of how it had consolidated Gandhi's place in the affections of the ordinary Indian who 'ran after him in crowds on foot out of the cities and sought just to touch the hem of his garments. Whether it was in the forest regions of Betul in biting winter, or on the parched, dreary waste of Bellary in the hottest part of the day, whether it was in the populous cities on the plains, or in the quiet hamlets hanging on the heights of the Western Ghats - unbounded was the enthusiasm of men, women, and children to catch a glimpse of him who had sworn to fast unto death to uplift the seventy million people who are depressed and made lowly and humble by age-old oppression.'"
Gandhi cannot be separated either from those people, or from the people who waited for hours by the railway tracks for his train to pass by, or the rioters whom he pacified by fasting. Gujarati industrialists supported Gandhi’s ashrams. How many, many Indians repeatedly and secretly, donated to the causes! Every donor was not a Pranjivan Mehta, Jamnalal Bajaj or a Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. Tens of thousands of people, like Bibi Amtus Salam, gave up comfortable lives to carry out Gandhi’s reform programmes, and to participate in the struggle for freedom. Gandhi's satyagrahis included farmers, peasants, mill workers, women, Dalits, students, tribals, lawyers, teachers, and government employees who quit.
What happened to all those families that took great risks and gave up their livelihood for the sake of freedom and dignity? What happened, for instance, to the village headmen and petty officials on Gandhi’s Dandi route who resigned? And to the 6000 "coolies” who quit work in Assam’s tea gardens, telling the managers that they were following Gandhi’s call?
Many died. Many did not live to see freedom. Many could not enjoy freedom after the bloodbath of Partition.
A million people died in the man-made famine of Bengal in 1943. Millions died crossing borders after Partition.
Guha, as he says in the Preface to Gandhi The Years That Changed The World, is the first biographer of M.K. Gandhi to have accessed the newly opened (in 2018) Gandhi Papers at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML).
The biography may be read as a standalone work by people interested in the years 1914 to 1948. For those who want more, or for folks who might remember the South African connection from the film Gandhi (1982) there is also Guha’s Gandhi Before India.
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