Gandhi & Churchill (40 page)

Tilak, the Hindu reactionary, was the exception. His antipathy to Western science and schools matched Gandhi’s. But Tilak’s aggressive embrace of violence and armed struggle made him an unacceptable model for Gandhi, as did Tilak’s disdain for Muslims. Gandhi still looked to Gokhale as his political guru. He always found being with the older man “a joy.” In a profound sense, he owed his career to him. It was Gokhale’s tour of South Africa, at the viceroy’s but also Gandhi’s request, that revived Gandhi’s standing there, and Gokhale who first proposed using the £3 poll tax issue to reach out to indentured laborers.

Likewise, it was at Gokhale’s request that Gandhi had stopped in England in 1914 before returning to India. Later Gandhi said, “The place that Gokhale occupied in my heart…was and is unique.”
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Gokhale’s quietism, his sense of humanity and proportion, not to mention his British loyalism, had all appealed to his younger disciple—despite their differences over the modern world. But on February 20, 1915, the Grand Old Man of Indian politics died. Gokhale’s death created a vacuum in Indian politics and in Gandhi’s life. In July Gandhi spoke about him at a political gathering in Poona, Gokhale’s hometown. “Whatever [Gokhale] did, he did with a religious zeal,” he declared. “That was the secret of his success. He did not wear his religion on his sleeve; he lived it.” Gandhi was still spending his year on the political sidelines, as he promised Gokhale he would. But he did not have to be silent. At Poona he quoted Gokhale’s words: “‘We lack in India character, we want religious zeal in the political field.’”
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Gandhi set out to turn what he saw as Gokhale’s last wish into reality.

To do so, he set up his base in the village of Kochrab, outside Ahmedabad in the heart of Gujarat, where a barrister friend lent him his summer bungalow. Here in May 1915 Gandhi launched his Indian version of Tolstoy Farm: an experimental community where he could create the future of India, one soul at a time. But an outbreak of plague forced Gandhi to move four miles north to the west bank of the Sabarmati River, where he established his most famous ashram.

Sabarmati Ashram (which remains a living monument to Gandhi to this day) would be the center of his domestic and political life for the next eighteen years. Ironically, the money to pay for it came from Ahmedabad’s well-to-do industrialists, whom Gandhi intended to put out of business in his new India. Their factory smokestacks loomed in plain sight over the Sabarmati compound. Gandhi brought along several refugees from the earlier Tolstoy and Phoenix farms, as well as members of his extended family. He had promised his older brothers that he would look after their families when they died. In the end, no fewer than five of his brothers’ widows, and their children, were living under his ashram roof, as well as his sons Manilal and Harilal and their wives.
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Kasturbai had to bear the brunt of shame and humiliation when Gandhi announced that he was about to make another addition to the Sabarmati family: an untouchable husband and wife. It set off a domestic pitched battle, and Kasturbai threatened to leave home completely.

However, Gandhi’s will prevailed. He had deliberately broken the greatest Hindu taboo of all, the prohibition against any contact with
dalits
or untouchables. It was part of his war against the India he detested most: the India hidebound by ceremony and meaningless tradition, split by ancient religious feuds, festering in its own filth; the India without compassion or pity. His stated goal was make India “a holy land, aye, a purified country,” which implied that it was currently not.
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In 1916, the year of Verdun and the Somme, Gandhi had not forgotten the other larger war raging in Europe or India’s place in it. But for now the war at home consumed all his attention. His speech at Benares Hindu University on February 6, 1916, was its opening salvo.

Annie Besant, his erstwhile New Age friend from London, had invited him to speak. Now sixty-seven years old, since her arrival in India in 1892 she had made a steady transition from disciple of Madame Blavatsky to uncompromising advocate of Indian Home Rule.
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With her short white hair, piercing eyes, and mellifluous voice (“the most beautiful voice I have ever heard,” Secretary of State Edwin Montagu declared), Besant was a striking figure.
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She had single-handedly founded Hindu College, to create the kind of modern leaders a free India would need, and when Viceroy Lord Hardinge offered to turn the college into a full-fledged university, she assumed that Gandhi would make a suitable speaker for its opening.

Gandhi arrived without a prepared speech and in a censorious mood. He started with a rambling diatribe against using English for official speeches and expressed his regret that more educated Indians could not speak the myriad vernaculars of their mother country. “If you tell me that our languages are too poor to express our thoughts,” he said, “then I say the sooner we are wiped out of existence the better.”

The distinguished listeners, including the viceroy and the maharaja of Darbhanga, shifted uneasily in their seats. But Gandhi plunged ahead. “Is it right,” he said bitterly, “that the lanes of our sacred temples [in Benares] should be as dirty as they are? The houses around about are built anyhow…If even our temples are not models of cleanliness, what can our self-government be?”

Then Gandhi rounded on his princely audience in their bejeweled splendor and blasted the pomp and ceremony that were hallmarks of the Raj. “I am sure,” he said, “it is not the desire of the King-Emperor or Lord Hardinge that in order to show the truest loyalty to our King-Emperor, it is necessary for us to ransack our jewelry boxes.” Those jewels might be better used to feed and help India’s peasants, Gandhi said. Besides, “is it not better that even Lord Hardinge should die than live a living death” surrounded by bodyguards to protect him from assassination—assassination by men, Gandhi added, whose methods were ignoble but whose aims were not?

Trembling with shame and anger, Besant rose to her feet and asked Gandhi to stop. But Gandhi squeezed in his last words as the audience was scrambling for the exit. He loudly condemned his fellow countrymen for their physical cowardice. Although he deplored violence, he cried out, he deplored his nation’s abject surrender to British rule even more: “If we are to receive self-government, we shall have to take it.”
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Minutes later the dais was empty. The maharaja and other princes left in a rage; the viceroy as well. Annie Besant refused to speak to Gandhi again. He had stirred some in the audience (including a young student and a future disciple, Vinova Bhave).
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But he had mortally offended many more. Gandhi had wanted to point out the contrast between India’s “richly bedecked noblemen” and “the millions of the poor.” He had wanted to show how hopeless it was to try to forge a nation where rich and poor felt no sense of shared community, and where no one was prepared to die for his country, as the British were, by the tens of thousands, in the war overseas. For Gandhi, the Benares speech had been a Ruskin moment: speaking truth to power. But it only sidelined Gandhi even more from the growing trend of Indian politics, which involved a sudden upsurge of nationalist sentiment.

In 1914 Tilak was finally released from prison. He and Besant immediately forged an unlikely alliance. They created a series of Home Rule Leagues around the country, to force the British to concede independence as the price for Indian support for the war in Europe. “The moment of England’s difficulty is the moment of India’s opportunity,” the firebrand Besant proclaimed, and Tilak and his supporters fiercely agreed.

In little more than a year their Home Rule Leagues grew to more than sixty thousand full-time members, at a time when the Indian National Congress’s annual conference typically drew fewer than twenty thousand.
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When a Muslim nationalist lawyer named Muhammad Ali Jinnah jumped on board the Home Rule bandwagon, it became the first Indian political movement to cross sectarian lines. By the end of 1916 the league had managed to build an incipient national popular base that reached out beyond the three British presidencies to the Indian heartland, including Gandhi’s Gujarat.

To this effort Gandhi had nothing to contribute. He had become yesterday’s news. When Indian National Congress delegates gathered at Lucknow in December 1916, all their attention was focused on the Home Rule Leagues and their glamorous rising star, M. A. Jinnah. Tilak was cheered as a triumphant hero. The Congress agreed to the principle of separate electorates for Muslims and Hindus in any future representative Indian body, and Jinnah agreed to a merger of the Muslim League and the Congress, in what became known as the Lucknow Pact.

Muslims and Hindus, everyone assumed, would now present a united front to the British in their demands for independence. “I think I break no secret,” Congress president A. C. Mazumdar announced at the end, “when I announce to you that the Hindu-Moslem question has been settled.”
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Gandhi attended the Lucknow conference, a forlorn figure wearing a large white turban and a long black mustache, but no one paid him much attention.

No one, that is, except a young man named Raj Kumar Shukla. Shukla owned an indigo farm in Bihar, the region north of Bengal. He had tried speaking to several of the VIPs at the Congress, including Tilak, but they did not have time to listen to his grievances.
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Finally in desperation he cornered Gandhi. Gandhi could scarcely understand the young man’s rough dialect, but finally with the help of a Bihari lawyer named Prasad, Shukla told him his story. It was about indigo farmers, destitute Bihari peasants and their families, and their sufferings at the hands of white landlords. It was a story familiar to Gandhi from South Africa and his dealings with Indian indentured laborers. All Shukla wanted Gandhi to do, he said, was to come and see for himself.

“It’s very close,” the young man said, as Gandhi hesitated and thought up reasons not to go. “Please spend a day there.”

The name of the place, Shukla said, was Champaran.

Champaran was in North Bihar, not far from the Nepalese border. The original home of both Buddhism and Jainism, it was a backward province even by Indian standards. Its dismally poor peasants clustered in tiny hamlets and were almost entirely dependent on the local harvest for food. In some ways Champaran was also a unique province. Hindu-Muslim tensions were unknown, although many of the poorest peasants were Muslim; and there was no trace of a Westernized elite.
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Shukla’s own tiny village was more than seven miles, along a single dirt track, from the nearest railway stop. Every major change in India since the Mutiny seemed to have passed Champaran by.

But it had a visibly oppressive white European presence, thanks to the planting of indigo. For years Champaran peasants
(raiyats)
had agreed to grow this important cash crop for the local land leaseholder, under what was known as the
tinkathia
system. The price planters paid to cultivators was fixed; that meant peasant families never benefited from rising indigo prices. Falling prices, by contrast, led planters to cut back on production, leaving cultivators in the lurch—even as the coming of war caused the price of everything else in India to jump.
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The majority of Champaran’s indigo planters were white. This too was unusual, but it helped make the local district commissioner reluctant to intervene. Riots broke out in the district in 1908, as more prosperous
raiyats
like Shukla felt the squeeze from the iron law of cash-crop feudalism, but even after three months of violence the commissioner refused to help.
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However, the racial component also made the problems in Champaran a conspicuous symbol of the power imbalance under the Raj: just what Gandhi needed to get his first satyagraha campaign in India off the ground.

In the first week of April 1917 Gandhi and Shukla arrived at the railway station at Patna, the capital of Bihar. Thousands of miles away the United States was entering the war in Europe; Vladimir Lenin had arrived in Petrograd to launch a Bolshevik revolution; in London, a parliamentary commission was about to issue its final report exonerating Winston Churchill from any blame for the failures of the Gallipoli campaign (public opinion’s verdict was another matter); and at Passchendaele in Flanders the British Army was preparing for the last disastrous Allied offensive on the Western Front.

Meanwhile, in the dusty windswept streets of Patna, Gandhi felt as if he had stepped off the edge of the world. He knew no one in the town; it turned out Shukla did not either. The two men could barely understand each other, let alone the Bihari dialect of the people in whose sprawling ancient city they found themselves.

Passersby stared at their peasant clothes and assumed they were beggars. Gandhi and Shukla finally found lodging in a stranger’s house, but since no one knew their caste, even the servants shunned them. The maids refused to draw water from the garden well when Gandhi used it, for fear that even a drop of water from Gandhi’s bucket might pollute them.

Later, in his
Experiments with Truth,
Gandhi implied that he took these indignities in stoic good humor, “for I was inured to such things.”
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But at the time he concluded that the whole trip was a mistake and that his host Shukla was an idiot. He wrote a furious letter to Maganlal, complaining, “The man who brought me here doesn’t know anything. He has dumped me in some obscure place…If things go on this way I am not likely to see Champaran.” But Gandhi the good soldier added, “As for the self, this helps it to grow.”
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