Gandhi & Churchill (32 page)

Reinforcing Chesterton’s words was another recent pamphlet by the Russian novelist and Gandhi hero Leo Tolstoy, entitled “Letter to a Hindu.”
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It too was a sharp critique of revolutionary nationalism, but this time from the New Age Left. Tolstoy addressed himself directly to the strange paradox of India, where nearly 300 million people were held in subjection to an evil tyranny run by a “small clique” of white Britons “utterly alien in thought and aspiration and altogether inferior to those whom they enslave.”

Just imagine, Tolstoy wrote, if Indians in their millions simply refused to participate in that evil, if they refused to help “in the violent deeds of the administration, of the law courts, the collection of taxes, and what is most important, of the soldiers” who served, both Hindu and Muslim, in the Indian Army. They would not only break the power of the Raj, Tolstoy suggested; they would break the power of violence that enslaved their own hearts. Through passive resistance they would rediscover the law of love, and not only would hundreds of whites be unable to enslave millions of nonwhites, “but millions will be unable to enslave one individual.”
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As he read the Tolstoy text, Gandhi saw suddenly that that individual was himself. “Life cannot continue in the old ruts as before,” Tolstoy continued, in words that must have struck home. “The man must understand that the previous guidance for life is no longer applicable to him.” What was needed was to “formulate a new theory of life,” Tolstoy concluded, one fit for the individual as he embarks on a “new age.”

During his stay in London Gandhi had been reading and rereading the books that mattered most to him, in search of that new theory of life. Tolstoy’s
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
and
Confession of Faith;
Henry David Thoreau’s
Civil Disobedience;
classics like Ruskin’s
Unto This Last
and Edward Carpenter’s
Civilization: Its Cause and Cure
. He had picked up R. C. Dutt’s
Economic History of India,
which was deeply critical of British rule, and reread a favorite from law school days, Sir Henry Maine’s
Village Communities in the East and West,
which argued that India’s peasant villages had historically been self-sustaining and self-governing for centuries before the British came.
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Ideas were percolating furiously in his brain, and just before he left England, Gandhi drew up his own fifteen-point Confession of Faith. He sent a copy to Henry Polak, to serve as a crucial measure of his personal journey to that point and as the starting point for his next move.

Gandhi’s first point was that “there is no impassable barrier between East and West.” The second stated that Europeans had “had much in common with the people of the East” before modern civilization killed the West’s spiritual values and the simplicity of its rural life. Gandhi worried that the same modern blight was descending on India. “It is not the British who rule India,” his fourth point stated, “but modern civilization rules India through its railways, telegraphs, telephone etc.” As a result, “Bombay, Calcutta, and other chief cities are the real plague spots of Modern India” because they are the main conduits of civilization’s malign influence. Indeed, “if British rule were replaced tomorrow by Indian rule based on modern methods, India would be none the better.”

The final world-shattering conclusion came in point number twelve:

India’s salvation consists in unlearning what she has learned during the past fifty years. The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors, and such like have all to go, and the so-called upper classes have to live consciously, religiously, and deliberately the simple peasant life, knowing it to be a life giving true happiness.
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In some ways Gandhi’s complete rejection of modern medicine was the most shattering of all. “Hospitals are the instruments of the Devil,” he wrote. “Medical science is the concentrated essence of Black Magic…If there were no hospitals for venereal diseases, or even for consumptives, we should have less consumption, and less sexual vice amongst us.” Gandhi’s antipathy to modern comforts, not to mention sexual promiscuity, was nothing new. But his penchant for traditional medicine and his own vegetarian home cures (one experiment nearly killed his son Harilal, while another left Kasturbai ill for weeks even as Gandhi refused to allow her to see doctors), now fitted into a philosophical rejection of all aspects of Western culture, from science and machinery to armies, parliaments, and even laws.

He also wrote a long farewell letter to Lord Ampthill. “An awakening of the national consciousness is inevitable” in India, it read, but “I believe repression will be unavailing…I feel the British rulers will not give liberally and in time.” He told Ampthill that “I share in the national spirit” but not in the methods of either extremists or moderates, since each “relies ultimately on violence.” He blamed the British for the “blasting effect” of capitalism and materialism in India, the rise of cities like Bombay and Calcutta, and the decline of India’s villages. “I do think too much is made of the
Pax Britannica
…I have no quarrel with the rulers. I have every quarrel with their methods.”
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The question uppermost in his mind now was what should replace them.

After booking his passage back to South Africa, Gandhi’s mind churned on. “There is no end to the work I have put in on the steamer,” Gandhi confessed later in a letter.
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He began a Gujarati translation of “Letter to a Hindu.” But more important, over the course of nine days he composed his own manifesto, which he called
Hind Swaraj,
or “Indian Self-Rule.”
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It is Gandhi’s one original political and moral treatise. Virtually everything else published under his name is either a compilation of his speeches and newspaper articles or, like his autobiography and
Satyagraha in South Africa,
a flow of reminiscence. In a profound sense, everything Gandhi believed or did for the rest of his life sprang from
Hind Swaraj
. It marked the end of a journey that had begun on the Maritzburg rail platform in 1893 and reached a decisive turn in his encounter with Churchill at the Colonial Office in 1906. In every respect, the work signaled Gandhi’s point of no return.

Hind Swaraj
is a dialogue like the
Bhagavad Gita,
on which it is closely modeled. Its two interlocutors are, significantly, connected to the newspapers, reflecting Gandhi’s growing awareness of how the modern media was shaping cultural perceptions and public opinion. The “Reader” is an Indian nationalist, full of fire and confidence, a composite portrait of Savarkar and his followers. He happily describes how the partition of Bengal has transformed Indian nationalist organizations like the Congress from apologists for cooperation with the Raj into advocates of
swaraj
or independence. “For this,” he says, “we have to be grateful to Lord Curzon.”
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Since the British used force to conquer India, the Reader says, it will require force to drive them out. But once that is done, India will be free to organize itself as a modern nation, with an army and navy and an imperial splendor all its own. “Then will India’s voice ring through the world,” he concludes.
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The older wiser man, the Editor, replies along the lines of Chesterton and Tolstoy. “This is English rule without the English,” he warns the young Reader. It is “not the Swaraj I want.”
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He predicts that the Reader’s path to independence will only turn India into a country like England, full of greedy, dishonest people who cheat and exploit one another, with a Parliament that acts as a “prostitute” to special interests. Its workers in the factories and mines will live lives “worse than that of beasts.” Everyone will be ruled by machinery, including inhumane weapons that can kill thousands “at the touch of a trigger.” The Editor concludes sardonically, “
This
is civilization,” and if India goes that way, “she will be ruined.”
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However, he says, there is another path to freedom. This path leads backward as well as forward, back to India’s roots. It will bring self-rule or
swaraj
not just as political sovereignty but as self-knowledge and self-mastery. Its answers to man’s eternal questions, the Editor proclaims, lie in “the ancient civilization of India, which in my opinion, represents the best that the world has ever seen.”

India’s Hindu ancestors lived without the conveniences of modern life. They remained content with their “ancient villages and peaceful homes” and esteemed their spiritual leaders, their “
rishis
and fakirs,” over kings and soldiers, because they realized that wealth and power do not equal happiness.
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“It was not that we did not know how to invent machinery,” the Editor insisted, “but our forefathers knew that, if we set our hearts after such things, we would become slaves and lose our moral fiber.”
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What doomed this ancient and pure India was not the British conquest, the Editor explains, but Indians’ desire to be
like
the British and to cooperate in India’s enslavement. “We brought the English [to India],” he says, “and we keep them” there by using British courts and obeying their laws; by using their language and attending their schools; by riding their railways, which, by transporting local produce to distant markets, are “the carriers of plague germs” and of famine; and by turning to Western medicine in defiance of religious law. In all these respects Indians have allied themselves with “the evil nature of man.”
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Fortunately, India has a way back, Gandhi insists through the words of the Editor: literally a way back to the future. It is satyagraha, combining the ancient Hindu principle of nonviolence with the self-possessed detachment of the “man of steady mind” praised by the
Gita
. Trying to force the British out would be self-defeating, because “brute force is not natural to the Indian soul.” Instead, the key is “soul force” or satyagraha, “in other words love conquering hate.”
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Satyagraha brings its own unique “weapons” to the struggle against British rule, and its weapon of choice is passive resistance. “Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms. When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul force.”
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Through passive resistance, or civil disobedience, nonviolence will become an active principle rippling across the community, like ripples across a pond. The Editor says satyagraha will become an “all-sided sword” that “blesses him that uses it and him against whom it is used,” and that will topple unjust laws by making them impossible to enforce.

The Reader, in response, dismisses all this as naïve and, echoing V. B. Savarkar, says that no revolution in history has come without violence. The Editor admonishes him for his cynicism. The belief that what hasn’t happened before can’t happen now reveals a “disbelief in the dignity of man.” Gandhi then lays out a complete nineteen-point program for nonviolence and noncooperation, ranging from refusing to go to school and using English as seldom as possible, to closing Bombay’s textile mills and having everyone make their clothes at home.

In short, by refusing to play the cultural game by Western rules, the Editor suggests, Indians can force the British to make a choice. They can either become like the Indians themselves and give up modern civilization in exchange for their own spiritual roots in Christianity and Holy Scripture. Or they can pack up and leave.
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Whichever choice the British make, India will be finally, completely free. Indians will have true
swaraj,
self-rule, which is rule of the self. By following the path of nonviolence, self-sacrifice, and satyagraha “soul force,” they will reach the truth, which is ultimately the kingdom of God.

“The British government in India constitutes a struggle between the Modern Civilization, which is the kingdom of Satan,” Gandhi concluded, “and the Ancient Civilization which is the kingdom of God. The one is the God of War, the other the God of Love,” and Gandhi no longer had any doubt which would win.

This last passage comes from the preface Gandhi would write for the English translation, when it appeared in Johannesburg in March 1910. The publication of
Hind Swaraj
in the original Gujarati caused consternation and confusion across the political spectrum. Here was a resolute call for expelling the British from India, but also a condemnation of violence in all its forms. Here was a work that condemned Western civilization and all its works, yet quoted from the Bible and called for a reconciliation of Britain and India on a new spiritual basis.

Liberals, including Indian liberals, found Gandhi’s ideas hopelessly reactionary. His rejection of Western medicine and education, and his calls for dismantling textile mills and spinning cotton thread at home (“it is no easy task,” Gandhi’s Editor admits), seemed bizarre, even outrageous.
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And the condemnation of Western doctors seemed hypocritical from a man who would consult with doctors all his life (although not always take their advice).

The fact was that
Hind Swaraj
undercut assumptions shared across the spectrum of current Indian opinion, from moderates like his mentor Dadabhai Naoroji to violent extremists like Savarkar who wrote his own angry response.
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From London to Johannesburg to Madras, it left most readers puzzled, startled, and even amused. All readers, that is, except the British government.