Gandhi & Churchill (15 page)

Gandhi listened intently as Blavatsky told her white European audience that their path to enlightenment lay in finding the hidden truths of Hinduism and Buddhism, the world’s oldest spiritual systems. Indeed, “Pre-Vedic Brahmanism and Buddhism are the double source from which all religions sprung,” including Christianity, she had written at the conclusion of her massive two-volume manifesto,
Isis Unveiled.
Blavatsky insisted that Brahmanism and Buddhism also set the spiritual standard for all other faiths, adding that, “Nirvana is the ocean to which all [religions] tend.”
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Gandhi was not alone in being impressed. Blavatsky’s thesis that religion represented a higher form of knowledge than science, indeed that science was only an offshoot of religion, attracted some of the most intelligent minds of the age. Annie Besant became a Theosophist convert, as did the poet William Butler Yeats. Both James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence read her works with admiration. Throughout his life Albert Einstein kept a copy of
Isis Unveiled
on his desk.
²⁷

To the young Gandhi, however, Blavatsky’s message was a double revelation. He was never comfortable with the more esoteric side of her Theosophist system, and her experiments with contacting the dead left him cold. But the chain-smoking Russian spiritualist “disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition” and lifted a burden of shame that had weighed on him since he first started school. His native culture was suddenly revealed to him as offering a set of radiant truths relevant to all humanity. Finally he was ready to sit down to read the
Bhagavad Gita
for the first time, in the translation by the famed British Orientalist Edwin Arnold.

This experience, too, would change him forever, and once again it was a Westerner, Edwin Arnold, who sparked his spiritual awakening to one of the great texts of Indian culture.
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It is no exaggeration to call the
Gita
the most important book in Gandhi’s life. Reading Arnold’s verse translation cannot have been easy for Gandhi. In fact, he mentions having to use an English dictionary to struggle through its pseudo-archaic and allusive poetic stanzas heavily modeled on Lord Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
. Yet the
Bhagavad Gita
itself is short and its story simple, almost deceptively so.

It describes the eve of the climactic battle in the sprawling Vedic epic poem the
Mahabharata
. As the hero Arjuna prepares for battle, he suddenly realizes he no longer has the stomach for the fight. Martial glory and the endless cycle of kill or be killed, which is celebrated in mainstream Vedic culture, have lost their savor for him. Furthermore, fighting this battle will mean having to kill warriors on the other side who are friends and even relatives. Why should he even bother to show up? he asks his chariot driver, the blue-skinned Krishna. What Arjuna does not realize is that his driver is actually the god Vishnu.

Krishna proceeds to give him not one but three reasons to fight the battle. Do it for your own sake, he tells Arjuna, and your honor as a soldier and warrior. Fight the battle also for its own sake, Krishna says, as a task that, like every task in life, deserves to be done well, regardless of what it is or what the consequences might be. And then, Krishna adds, do it for
my
sake, as he reveals himself to be the incarnation of Vishnu in all his power and glory—in short, do it as an act of obedience and homage to God.

Arjuna discovers the truth that every reader learns by reading the
Bhagavad Gita
. By acting fearlessly and doing what we know is right, and without worrying about any reward, we can achieve holiness and oneness with God:

Do thine allotted task!

Work is more excellent than idleness…

There is a task of holiness to do,

Unlike world-binding toil, which bindeth not

the faithful soul; such earthly duty do

Free from desire and thou shalt perform

Thy heavenly purpose.

The
Gita
marked a turning point in Indian thought and also for Gandhi. It became his “infallible guide of conduct,” as he tells us in his autobiography, and a “daily reference” for the rest of his life. He spent time every day committing its verses to memory. Later he even published his own translation and commentary in Gujarati, although the Arnold translation, for all its Late Victorian fussiness, always remained his favorite version.

Gandhi came to believe that the
Gita
’s “cardinal teaching” was that human beings must resolve to do the right thing without thinking about or considering its fruits or rewards. “He who broods over results,” Gandhi would later write, “is ever distracted, he says goodbye to all scruples, everything is right in his estimation and he therefore resorts to means fair and foul to attain his end.” In Gandhi’s mind, detaching ourselves from results was an act of renunciation as spiritually powerful as any form of self-denial, the moral equivalent of renouncing worldly possessions or sexual desire. It brought holiness to man and peace to his soul. “Man is not at peace with himself til he has become like unto God” in renouncing worldly reward for his actions.

Bhagavad Gita
literally means “The Song of God.” It celebrates the active life as a form of worship of a particular god, Vishnu. Madame Blavatsky had shown Gandhi that the Hindu concept of God had first revealed the face of divinity to mankind. But was that face now too limited to serve the needs of the modern age and the New Age to come? The Esoteric Christian Union’s Edward Maitland argued that Christianity did that job best. He had given Gandhi his first look at the Sermon on the Mount, and Gandhi was deeply impressed by what he read. We also know Gandhi attended Christian services in various London churches, including the City Temple Congregationalist Church (where another attendee at almost the same time was David Lloyd George). He attended marches by the Salvation Army. He had even met the Roman Catholic Cardinal Manning.
²⁸

Gandhi admitted he was strongly drawn to Christianity, especially to the figure of Jesus Christ. The principles of turning the other cheek and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, Gandhi confessed later, “went straight to my heart.”
²⁹
But this attraction was tempered by his encounters with organized Christianity. His run-ins with missionaries and their zealous push to convert him to their message left him unmoved, no less than Madame Blavatsky’s séances. Still, the sense that believing Christians had unlocked a door that was still closed to him, and that they found a peace and inner strength he still lacked, haunted him.

“But beyond this,” Gandhi recalled later, “I could not go, as reading for the examination left me scarcely any time for outside subjects.” After months of intense study he took his final law exam in June 1890. It was not until the following January that he learned he had passed, placing thirty-fourth out of 109 candidates. He was now a barrister, authorized to plead cases in British courts, including the High Court in Bombay.
³⁰
His great task was over. He could now go home—regretfully so, since he was just becoming comfortable with his New Age circle.

The Vegetarian Society hosted a farewell dinner for Gandhi on June 11, 1891. Guests expressed regret that he was leaving but also confidence that his return to India would mean “even greater work for vegetarianism.” In a “very graceful though somewhat nervous speech” Gandhi thanked the members and said how happy he was to see “the abstinence from animal flesh progressing in England.” It was a bittersweet occasion, everyone agreed, but all felt that congratulating Gandhi on his professional success “should take the place of personal wailings.”
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The voyage home was a sad one, and his homecoming even more dismal. The Bombay docks were bathed in a misting monsoon rain as he landed on July 5, 1891.
³²
Not even the reunion with Kasturbai and his family could lift the gloom—or a growing “sense of helplessness and fear.” Within a few months of trying to start his own law practice in Rajkot, he confesses in his autobiography, “I had serious doubts as to whether I should be able even to earn a living.”

Things had changed at home. His mother had died, although his brothers did not tell him until he landed in Bombay. The family now drank coffee and cocoa and used Western-style plates for dinner. Kasturbai had even begun wearing some Western clothes.
³³
The Gandhi family had high hopes for his success as a barrister. He went through a ritual cleansing ceremony in the holy Godavari River in order to restore good relations with his Modh Bania caste. Some, however, including his own sister, continued to shun him as an outcaste.

Gandhi took it all in with indifference. Even his beloved mother’s death left him dry-eyed. He carried on, as he tells us, “as if nothing had happened.”
³⁴
For Gandhi, it was like seeing life through the wrong end of a telescope. It was not just that he knew little about Indian law (although he read whatever books he could get his hands on) or about how to plead or present a case in court. He had just spent three years in the capital of the British Empire, meeting people who were dealing with momentous spiritual and cultural issues. The old routines of home seemed unbearably restricting and dull. Everything, including his first law cases, seeming small and petty compared to the life he had left behind in London.

For almost two years he endured this routine with a sour peevishness. At one point he quarreled with Kasturbai and sent her packing home to her father, “not letting her come home until I made her thoroughly miserable,” he confessed years later. But then in March 1893 an offer crossed his desk that woke him out of his depression.

A Kathiawar merchant named Dada Abdullah owned a large and successful shipping business in South Africa. A distant cousin in Johannesburg owed Abdullah £40,000; he needed a lawyer to plead his case there. So Abdullah’s partner came to see Gandhi. The two partners were Muslims. Still, they preferred having a fellow Kathiawari handle the case, albeit a Hindu. For Gandhi it meant going to South Africa for at least a year.

“It won’t be a difficult job,” Abdullah’s partner reassured him. “We have big Europeans as our friends, whose acquaintance you will make.”

Gandhi asked him about pay. The partner told him they would pay for his expenses and a first-class ticket, plus a fee of £105.

“This was not going as a barrister,” Gandhi remembered thinking to himself, “it was going as a servant of the firm.”
³⁵
But he knew he had to leave India and escape the boredom of his normal life. South Africa would be just the respite he needed.

So Gandhi accepted the offer virtually on the spot. He did feel a pang of regret on leaving Kasturbai and their two tiny children, but he told her they would certainly meet again in a year. (In fact, it would be more than three years.) And so in April 1893 he set sail from Bombay again. It never occurred to him that he was setting off on a personal and political journey that would consume nearly a quarter-century of his life and make him famous. Or that it would also lead to his first and only meeting with Winston Churchill.

In 1893 South Africa lay divided in four parts. North of the Vaal River were the independent Transvaal Republic and Orange Free State, both ruled by the Dutch-descended Boers. To the south were the Cape Colony and Natal, ruled by the British. Durban was Natal’s capital and principal port. As the ship arrived there, Gandhi and the other passengers could see red sand hills streaked by vivid green foliage, dotted by the gray thatched huts of native villages and the occasional white house.
³⁶

Durban numbered twenty-seven thousand inhabitants. Its streets were lined with large resort bungalows belonging to European whites and with rows of shanties where black Africans lived, as well as the trim brick and clapboard houses of Durban’s Indian merchant community. Many of Natal’s Indian merchants came from Gujarat. They were renowned businessmen, considered shrewd and frugal, and like Gandhi’s employers, many were Muslims. Gujaratis enjoyed wealth as well as political connections to the colonial governor’s mansion, and most had acquired a Western-style education from schools in India. They were as respectable and bourgeois a Victorian business class as their white counterparts in Manchester or Sydney or Ottawa, and they were standing on the Durban wharf in their suits and turbans, with white whiskers and grave miens, in order to greet their new barrister as he disembarked.

Gandhi would be staying in Durban. For most of his fellow European passengers, however, this was just a brief overnight stop en route to the Vaal River, where seven years earlier there had been a huge gold strike. Now thousands of immigrants were heading for the Transvaal, looking for instant wealth and in the process rapidly changing the character of South Africa and British rule there.

For decades South Africa’s Cape Colony had been important to the British largely as a stopover on the passage to India. But the discovery of diamonds in 1872, and then gold in 1886, forced huge changes in Britain’s dealings both with the native black Africans and with the white settlers of Dutch descent, the Boers. British business interests, led by Cecil Rhodes and his Rothschild investors in London, were keen to expand their reach into the Boer-controlled gold fields, especially in the Republic of the Transvaal. British political interests, also led from London, were eager to halt Boer depredations against the native tribes and saw the gold rush in the Transvaal as an excuse for intervention.