Gandhi & Churchill (39 page)

Still, the experience had changed him physically, if not in spirit. As photographs show, the eager round-faced cherubic Winston was gone forever. His face was heavier and ruddier, his eyes puffier and sadder. His sandy red hair had almost thinned away. The world-famous face of Winston Churchill appears in the camera lens with qualities that also appear in Gandhi’s, at almost the same time.

Both faces were shaped by the experience of, and struggle with, great failure—already more failure, perhaps, than most human beings could have borne. At the close of 1915 Gandhi was forty-six, Churchill forty-one. By now both knew the pain of propelling human beings needlessly to their deaths; in one case for the sake of satyagraha, in the other, for the sake of Empire. It was a burden both would have to carry again before long.

For even as it brought disaster to Churchill, Gallipoli had sounded the death knell of the Turkish Empire. Soon a British-backed Arab revolt would sweep across the Arabian peninsula; the Indian Army would occupy Basra in Mesopotamia. The map of the Middle East predicted in Mark Sykes’s rash April Fool’s Day memo was about to take shape. And Churchill’s madcap scheme had set off a revolution not only in the Middle East but also in India. Indeed, he had inadvertently given Gandhi’s political career there a new and decisive boost.

Chapter Twelve

GANDHI’S WAR

1915–1918

You cannot teach non-violence to a man who cannot kill.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI
, 1918

O
N
J
ANUARY
9, 1915,
WHILE
W
INSTON
Churchill was dreaming of battleships steaming up the Dardanelles, Gandhi landed back in India. He had spent almost three-quarters of his life since 1888 outside his mother country, including two decades in South Africa. Except for a short trip to England in 1931, Gandhi would never again leave India. The years of wandering were over. He had returned home.

Gandhi had undergone a major spiritual transformation in the past decade and a half. He had found his life mission, as stated in
Hind Swaraj
: to transform the character of his fellow Indians by bringing them closer to God. By so doing, he intended to undercut the foundations of British rule in India and set his people free.

He also believed he had found the tool to achieve both these mammoth tasks: active nonviolence, or satyagraha. The satyagraha campaigns in South Africa, and the government’s final capitulation in 1914, had convinced him that through nonviolent mass resistance, the moral or “soul force” inherent in Indian civilization could prevail over the material force of British civilization. “India is fitted for the religious supremacy of the world,” he told an audience in Indore in 1918, “[and] can conquer all by soul force.”
¹

The South African campaigns had made him famous in India. In 1911, when Natal and Transvaal Indians were debating whether Gandhi was a blessing or a curse, India’s National Congress seriously considered making him their president.
²
His homecoming in January 1915 was triumphant, almost rapturous. He disembarked in Bombay at the famous Apollo Bunder quay, normally reserved for viceroys and royalty. For the next four months he traversed the country on a speaking tour. Leading Indian intellectuals and politicians hailed him as a conquering hero. Students in Madras pulled his carriage through the streets. Even Viceroy Lord Hardinge publicly thanked him for lightening the legal burden on Indian immigrants in South Africa. Shortly afterward the Nobel Prize–winning poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore gave Gandhi the title he would carry forever: that of Mahatma, or “great soul.”
³

Still, Indians were far from ready to follow Gandhi’s leadership, especially in politics. Educated Indians knew what Gandhi had done in South Africa, but they had little clue as to how he had done it—satyagraha as an idea and movement meant nothing to them.
Hind Swaraj
had been banned almost immediately after its publication in India and had made little impact.
⁴
Far from being able to build on his efforts in South Africa, Gandhi had to start over virtually from scratch. His mentor G. K. Gokhale advised him to take a year off to tour the country, to listen and learn. Following Gokhale’s suggestion, Gandhi vowed not to get involved in public affairs until he had educated himself about the new Indian scene and the personalities and forces shaping it.

For India was also changing. The subcontinent was entering the modern world. The grip of the past was still firm, especially for the vast rural majority, but new trends and directions had emerged. Gandhi the traditionalist and author of
Hind Swaraj
might deplore them, but Gandhi the aspiring leader could not afford to ignore them.

In 1915 the railroads, which Gandhi in his manifesto had so vociferously condemned, now crisscrossed the country like a great enclosing net. They had become essential to India’s economic life as well as to its sense of physical unity. From rice and cotton to British-made industrial goods, freight shipments by rail had almost doubled to more than 80 million tons since his stay fourteen years earlier.
⁵
Taking a train, like sending a telegram—both exotic rarities in Gandhi’s boyhood—had become part of normal everyday life even for poor Indians.

The new mobility allowed almost ten percent of India’s population to live and work in towns. Cities like Calcutta (now India’s largest city, with a population numbering more than a million), Bombay, Madras, and Ahmedabad had growing industrial centers; smokestacks rose up above the jute and cotton fields and rice paddies. These coal mines, steel mills (the first opened in 1914), and textile factories were not the fruits of colonialism. They were opened and operated by Indians themselves and were becoming as much a part of the scene as temples, maharajas’ palaces, and the rural villages inhabited by what Lord Curzon had called India’s “voiceless millions.” In 1914 India was the eighth largest manufacturing country in the world.
⁶
No amount of excoriation or execration was going to make the factories, or India’s rapidly growing industrial working class, go away.

In addition, a growing profusion of schools and universities had expanded India’s educated class, although it still constituted a tiny fraction of India’s 280 million people. Nonetheless, in 1915 there were nearly fifteen hundred newspapers in India, reaching perhaps two million readers.
⁷
Despite the Raj’s strict press censorship laws, a vigorous independent Indian public opinion was taking shape and being heard in a variety of languages, including English.

The new media were the sounding board of Indian politics. Indian public opinion had made itself felt in the struggle over the partition of Bengal. It had spoken out on the plight of Indian immigrants in South Africa. Now it would have to take stock of the strange-looking middle-aged man in traditional clothes, whose place in the new India was not very clear, least of all to himself.

India’s first impressions of Gandhi were not encouraging. “Queer food he eats,” wrote one observer, “only fruit and nuts.” The man also noted Gandhi’s lack of western clothes: “He had a big sandal mark on his forehead and a
kunkum
dot besides.”
⁸
A correspondent from the
Madras Mail
was stunned when Gandhi told him that “once people make themselves fit by their character and capacity, the grant of privileges [from the British] will follow as a matter of course—in fact there will be no need for people to ask for concessions.”
⁹
Gandhi’s vision of India gaining her spiritual independence one person at a time, before political independence, hardly fit the standard agenda of Indian nationalist politics. And that politics meant, above all, the politics of the Indian National Congress.

For the better part of two decades that organization had been dominated by twin competing giants, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Although both men were Chitpavan Brahmins, they were a study in contrasts. Both would influence Gandhi in strikingly different ways. Tilak was tough and acerbic, with a shaven head and bristling mustache, that symbol of masculine virility for traditional Hindus. He championed a militant version of Home Rule for India that looked back to the glory days of the Aryans and Hindu Mahratta princes—even to the Mutiny. Tilak refused to condemn terrorist groups like Abhinav Bharat and even praised their motives. They in turn saw him as their chief inspiration. (It was Tilak’s recommendation that had sent his fellow Chitpavan Vinayak Savarkar to England.)
¹⁰
Those terrorist links finally led to Tilak’s expulsion from the Congress in 1907 and landed him in prison in distant Mandalay the following year, from which he was finally released the year before Gandhi arrived home.

Tilak’s downfall left Gokhale and his Bombay associate Pherozeshah Mehta the uncrowned kings of Indian politics. As befitted the leader of the Congress’s self-proclaimed Moderates, Gokhale was placid, soft-spoken, and self-effacing, dressed in a Western suit and tie. In contrast to Tilak’s Extremists, Gokhale wanted India to gain self-rule in partnership with Britain, along with modern British ideas and institutions. Even as Tilak was going to prison, Gokhale declared, “I want India to take her proper place among the great nations of the world…within the Empire.”
¹¹

For the Raj too had changed with the times. In 1911 Churchill’s colleague and Secretary of State for India John Morley decided to reverse the partition of Bengal, thus bringing to an end one of the most contentious issues between Indians and the British government. Two years earlier the Liberal government and Viceroy Lord Minto had permitted the first election of Indian members to provincial councils and the Imperial Legislative Council. The council itself grew from twenty-five to sixty members, with just under half accountable to an Indian electorate.
¹²
The Morley-Minto reforms, as they were called, included a labyrinth of electoral colleges and indirect voting bodies, to prevent radical nationalists from taking over. But they were the Raj’s first real concession to Indian participation in their own governance and helped to deflect nationalist resentment for almost a decade.

Indeed, after the stormy years of partition and terrorism, things seemed to be calming down in India. December 1911 saw another magnificent durbar, presided over in person by the new King-Emperor George V, as well as the new viceroy, Lord Hardinge. There the king announced both the reunification of Bengal and the shift of the capital of the Raj from Calcutta to Delhi, the traditional capital of the Mughals. The move was immediately popular across India (except in Bengal). But to other Indians, “the view that Britain was moving to the heart of India,” as one distinguished historian has explained, “could be read to portend the taking over of the new regime by India.”
¹³

Only one ominous ripple disturbed the calm. A year after the great durbar, Viceroy Hardinge was making a formal state entry by elephant into Delhi when a Hindu terrorist suddenly threw a bomb into his palanquin. Hardinge suffered a severe back injury, while one of his assistants died in the blast. The police frantically combed the area looking for the killer but never found him. But they did find leaflets scattered on the ground and among the crowd, calling on Hindus and Muslims alike “to kill all the enemies of Motherland, irrespective of caste, creed, or color.”
¹⁴
Hardinge was not the man to make himself an unpopular target. He was a keen Liberal and committed to good relations with Indians. It was Hardinge who had asked Gokhale to go to South Africa to help Gandhi.
¹⁵
But the assassination attempt proved that the forces of discontent had not been dissipated, only submerged.

Still, with the Raj turning over a new leaf, and with Tilak in exile and the radicals in jail (where their notorious ringleader, Aurobindo Ghose, underwent a conversion to Hindu spirituality), Gokhale’s Moderates held sway in cooperation with the British. The Congress remained an overwhelmingly Hindu organization, largely Brahmin-led. Its annual meetings, where a new president was chosen every year, rarely showed a single lower-caste or Muslim face. In fact, India’s Muslims hardly participated in nationalist politics at all. The Muslim League, which was created on the Congress model in 1906, numbered less than a thousand members, out of a total Muslim population of seventy million.
¹⁶
When Muslims did participate, they disagreed bitterly among themselves, much as Hindus did. And India’s fifty million or so untouchables were complete nonpersons as far as India’s nationalist elite were concerned.

Gandhi’s outlook was very different. South Africa’s white oppression had taught him to think of all Indians—Hindu and Muslim, Brahmin and untouchable, Bengali and Punjabi—as forming a single nation, even a single race.
¹⁷
He had worked with them all and appealed to them all in his satyagraha campaigns. The poisonous splits that festered in Indian national politics in 1915 no longer made sense to him. “I do not recall having ever regarded them as anything but my kith and kin,” he wrote of the Hindus and Christians, Gujaratis and Tamils, and others who had frequented his law office in Durban.
¹⁸
It was this equalitarian spirit, born paradoxically of race consciousness, that he brought back with him from South Africa and that immediately set him apart from “normal” nationalist politicians.

However, this was not the most important difference. In 1915 Indian nationalists accepted that their path to freedom must be a self-consciously modern path. When they spoke of the future, they sounded very much like Gandhi’s Reader in
Hind Swaraj
. When, for example, Gokhale declared, “The greatest work of Western education in the present state of India is…the liberation of the Indian mind from the thralldom of old-world ideas and the assimilation of all that is highest and best in the life and thought of the West,” he expressed a consensus view among nationalist activists.
¹⁹