Gandhi & Churchill (24 page)

Now, some ten years later, Polak gave him another New Age favorite, John Ruskin’s
Unto This Last
. Its effect on him was electric.

First published in 1860, the book was a stinging rejection of the laissez-faire free trade ideology that British liberals had been preaching since Adam Smith. A nation’s “true” wealth lay not in its capital or trade or industry, Ruskin proclaimed, but in the simple dignity of self-sacrificing labor.

A true political economy was not about working for profit, but working to benefit others: “Government and cooperation are in all things the Laws of Life; Anarchy and competition the Laws of Death.” Mankind’s future belonged to those who were willing to give up outward wealth for the sake of inner happiness, and to those who made “the first of possessions, self-possession.”

Luxury is indeed possible in the future…luxury for all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfolded…Raise the veil boldly; face the light…until the time come when Christ’s gift of bread and bequest of peace shall be Unto this last as unto thee.

Gandhi read this passage on the overnight train from Johannesburg to Durban, just as dawn was coming up over the veldt and filtering through the soot-covered windows. It was the authentic voice of the New Age liberal conscience. Gandhi was so gripped by it that he was unable to sleep. Ruskin’s words brought “an instantaneous and practical transformation in my life,” he wrote later. Ruskin had led him to conclude that the only life worth living was that of the simple craftsman or tiller of the soil and that “the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.” Certainly, Gandhi realized, he would never be able to change others until he had changed himself. “I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice.”
¹²

For other readers,
Unto This Last
had been a clarion call to socialism. But Gandhi found in it a different message: a call to a lifetime of selfless labor and service.
¹³
Together with Leo Tolstoy’s notion of the power and truth of universal love, it gave Gandhi a sudden vision of Indians forging a community dedicated to working for others and serving God. “Let us forget all thoughts of ‘I a Hindu, you a Muslim’ or ‘I a Gujarati, you a Madrasi,’” he would write. “Let us sink ‘I’ and ‘mine’ in a common Indian nationality” built on love, labor, and truth. By doing so, Indians would find not only God but themselves—and spiritually arm themselves to defeat their enemies.
¹⁴

In Russia Tolstoy had set up an ideal community dedicated to his religious principles at his farm at Yasnaya Polyana. Now Gandhi would do the same in South Africa. He found what he was looking for near Durban: a patch of land near the railway station and in the heart of sugarcane country, called Phoenix Farm. It had no lions or jackals, although plenty of snakes hung from the fruit trees during the spring. Phoenix Farm was on some of the most fertile soil in South Africa.
¹⁵
With Hermann Kallenbach’s money, Gandhi bought Phoenix Farm and, although it had no house or even a shed, he began recruiting friends and family to work and live on the land. By the end of the year he had moved
Indian Opinion
’s offices there.

Phoenix Farm set the new pattern of Gandhi’s life. From now on he would choose to live in a self-contained community modeled on Tolstoy’s farm or a Buddhist ashram, a semimonastic utopia that would embody his values of spiritual purity and hard work. These counterculture communes would be open to visitors (some, like Kasturbai, would say they had too many) but also removed from the world (or, some would say, insulated from reality). Gandhi served as organizer, spiritual teacher, and the driving ego of all the farm’s activities. Volunteers like his cousin Chaganlal, his son Harilal, his white secretary Sonja Schlesin (who was also a Theosophist), and for a time even Polak and Hermann Kallenbach came there to learn “the laws of health, and the exercise enjoined by them,” as Ruskin had put it. The Phoenix farmers built their own houses, grew their own food, ground their own flour, joined in calisthenics every morning, and read the
Bhagavad Gita
in Edwin Arnold’s translation every evening.

Phoenix Farm was a counterculture commune, Edwardian style, and here Gandhi continued to simplify his life, doing his own cooking and cleaning. He experimented with New Age diets of fruits, vegetables, and nuts; preached his opposition to evil Western habits like alcohol and tobacco. (One of his editorials from this period was entitled “On the Evils of Tea.”) He carried out his strictures about hygiene and cleanliness, which he felt ordinary Indians neglected. On the farm he also published
Indian Opinion
in four languages,
^*27
with the printing press clanging away every evening, and he rode his bicycle to the office every morning, a round-trip of fourteen miles.

Yet Gandhi himself did not live at Phoenix Farm. The change that had begun that night on the train to Durban was neither as sudden nor as drastic as Gandhi’s autobiography later implies. He still kept his large house in Johannesburg, and he still needed his substantial income as a lawyer to keep Phoenix Farm and the newspaper going. In 1905 he still wore his suit and tie, even during visits to the farm, which he ruled, as one biographer put it, “as benevolent despot” from a distance.
¹⁶

Gandhi had not completely broken with his past life, but certainly in his own mind he was moving forward to something new, without being exactly sure what it was. A revolution was under way, both in Gandhi’s thoughts and in his relationships with others. How it would finally turn out depended on others as much as on himself—and on a world that was itself on the verge of revolution.

In 1905 the old established order was being challenged everywhere and was cracking under the strain. The Boer War had been its prelude. Soon outdated imperial systems were under assault around the world. On January 22, 1905, demonstrators marched on the Russian czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Soldiers opened fire and killed five hundred, wounding many more. The riots soon spread to other parts of the Russian Empire, including Poland, Lithuania, and Georgia; in March Czar Nicholas II was forced to grant a parliamentary government for the first time in Russia’s history.

In Crete protesters demanded independence from the Ottoman Empire. Riots broke out in the Belgian Congo. In June sailors on the Russian battleship
Potemkin
raised the flag of revolt. Japan’s crushing victories over Russia at Mukden and Tsushima that spring had challenged conventional racial stereotypes and signaled the rise of the world’s first modern nonwhite empire. In China Sun Yat-Sen founded the Chinese Revolutionary League to promote a modernizing nationalist revolt against the Dragon Throne. That November Irish nationalists organized Sinn Fein. The following year clerics and liberals in Persia forced the shah to yield power to an elected assembly, or
majlis
.

The spirit of revolution, and nationalist freedom, also spread to India, with momentous consequences for Gandhi’s future. Only two years earlier India had witnessed the most massive display of the Raj’s splendor and power in its history. The imperial
durbar
in Delhi, held to celebrate the coronation of King Edward VII, had drawn more than one million spectators. More than 34,000 British and Indian soldiers had paraded to the music of 2,400 bandsmen, while hundreds of maharajas, princes, and lesser chieftains arrived by elephant, camel, and horse to show their loyalty to the King Emperor.

The great spectacle owed its origin to the most brilliant and able viceroy the Raj had ever known, Baron George Curzon of Kedleston. Curzon was attractive and energetic, sharing the same imperial confidence as his fellow Balliol College alumnus, Alfred Milner. Curzon cared deeply about India and its people. He traveled extensively across the subcontinent, as far north as Srinigar and as far west as Afghanistan, and devoted large sums to restoring India’s greatest monuments, including the Red Fort of Delhi and the Taj Mahal.
¹⁷
He had great contempt for the kind of crude racist stereotypes that had fueled the White Mutiny.

But Curzon also believed that he knew what Indians wanted better than Indians themselves did. That led him to make two fateful decisions. The first was to submit India’s universities to government regulation, thereby striking at the very institutions that India’s elite revered as their ticket to success.
¹⁸
The second was to divide Bengal into two new administrative provinces, partly because the old province and former kingdom was too large and heterogeneous to govern effectively, and partly to give the eastern half’s eighteen million Muslims their own civil administration and system of justice.

Bengal was the home of poets and writers and India’s Western-educated elite. It was also the epicenter of incipient Indian nationalism. Many jumped to the conclusion that Curzon’s partition was a blow against the nationalist movement and another example of the Raj’s old policy of divide and conquer, especially since Bengalis would now become a minority in their own province.
^*28
A furious backlash broke out in Bengal and quickly spread to other parts of India, particularly Bombay, the other hotbed of nationalist feeling.
¹⁹

Curzon dismissed the protests against partition as an “hysterical outcry” by “a small disloyal faction.” But protesters organized an effective boycott of imported British goods as a way to punish Curzon and the British. Crowds made spectacular bonfires of cotton cloth that came from Manchester and Liverpool. Even moderate Indian politicians called for a tax revolt and
swadeshi,
or economic independence from British imports. That soon led to calls for
political
independence, an Indian version of the Irish demand for Home Rule. Overnight Curzon inadvertently transformed the Indian National Congress from a sleepy club of loyalist graybeards into a vehicle for national protest. In August 1905 he left India, his policy and reputation in tatters.
²⁰
The anger aroused by his partition of Bengal, even among non-Bengalis, would outlive him. The bond of trust between the Raj and the educated Hindu elite, which had survived even the White Mutiny, was finally broken. In fact, Indian nationalists had found a new ally, India’s urban middle class, and the National Congress an active and growing constituency.

Gandhi observed the partition furor from afar in South Africa. The partition of Bengal had sown the discontent, and created the forms of mass protest, that he would mobilize later on. But for now his attention was diverted by the spread of unrest to this newest addition to the British Empire. The Boers were still protesting the British rule that was being imposed on them, when in February 1906 the Zulu tribes in northeastern Natal exploded in revolt.

“I bore no grudge against the Zulus, they had harmed no Indian,” he wrote later. Since they were rebelling against a poll tax they believed to be unjust, Gandhi claimed later that he secretly sympathized with their cause.
²¹
But he still believed that Indians should support the British Empire against its enemies, including the Zulus, and that military service would be good for his fellow countrymen. “Those who can take care of themselves and lead regular lives at the front can live in health and happiness,” he explained in
Indian Opinion
. “A man going to the battle front had to train himself to endure severe hardship” and develop the same toughness and self-sacrifice that Indians would need to build a new future.
²²

This time, in the campaign against the Zulus, Gandhi tried to convince authorities to actually arm his Indian volunteers, but he failed. Instead, he and they went in again as an ambulance unit, in a conflict far uglier than the Boer War. Gandhi watched as Zulus were mowed down by machine guns, flogged and hanged, or wounded and left for dead. White soldiers tried to stop Gandhi from treating them. Gandhi would remember later the constant crackle of gunfire as troops entered Zulu villages and shot anyone they found, including by mistake some black stretcher-bearers who were part of Gandhi’s unit. “This was no war but a man-hunt,” he said later. It was also a display of imperial power at its most brutal and savage.
²³

For the thirty-seven-year-old Gandhi, the Zulu rebellion marked another personal turning point—although once again he preferred to see things in moral, not political, terms. While he was marching across the bleak Natal landscape carrying a stretcher, or helping to bandage a wounded man, he realized “that I should have more and more occasions for service of the kind I was rendering,” but “I should find myself unequal to the task if I were engaged in the pleasures of family life and in the propagation and rearing of children.”
²⁴

Much ink has been spilled about Gandhi’s vow of
brahmacharya,
or sexual abstinence, which he announced to Kasturbai when he returned from the Zulu campaign. Certainly sexuality was always for Gandhi a kind of inner demon that had to be tamed or conquered, which he compared to a snake in one’s bed. “I vow to flee the serpent I know will bite me,” he wrote later. “I do not simply make an effort to flee him.”
²⁵
To his mind, formal celibacy marked a further step toward spiritual enlightenment and purity, which is why the traditional Hindu vow, like all forms of renunciation, appealed to him.

Yet his
brahmacharya
was also linked to his very un-Indian concern about clean latrines and drains and his obsessions with diet, even his insistence that Indians be strong and able soldiers. To paraphrase John Ruskin, Gandhi’s most important possession had become self-possession. It was an essential part of his belief in manliness. If he and other Indians were ever to control their own political destiny, Gandhi was convinced that they must start by controlling their minds and bodies—including the energies they normally spent on sex.