Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948

Chapter One

The Returning Hero

I.

On 18 July 1914, Mohandas Gandhi sailed from Cape Town for London. With him were his wife, Kasturba, and his closest friend, a Jewish architect named Hermann Kallenbach. Gandhi was leaving South Africa for good, after two decades spent there in various roles: lawyer, editor, food faddist, activist and prisoner. He had been the unquestioned leader of the small Indian community in South Africa. Now he wished to work with, and for, the several hundred million people of his homeland.

One of the Gandhis’ four children was already in India; the others were on their way, part of a larger group of students from Phoenix, the settlement that Gandhi had established in rural Natal. The patriarch wished to go to London first, because his mentor, the great Poona* educationist and politician Gopal Krishna Gokhale, was there. Ever since they first met in 1896, Gokhale had been the Indian whom Gandhi most admired. In his years in the diaspora he wrote to him regularly, consulting him on matters of politics and social reform. Gokhale, in turn, visited Gandhi in South Africa in 1912, and raised money from wealthy Indians for the causes that Gandhi was fighting for.

Gandhi had first gone to South Africa in May 1893, as a legal adviser to a Gujarati merchant fighting a court case. After the dispute was resolved, he stayed on to build a successful law practice. Over time, he moved from lawyering to activism, leading campaigns in Natal and the Transvaal against racial laws that bore down heavily on Indians. He went to jail several times; his wife Kasturba too courted arrest. In between campaigns he read and thought deeply on religious matters, practised and advocated the simple life, and ran a weekly newspaper, Indian Opinion (much of which he wrote himself).

Gandhi’s desire to consult Gokhale was born as much out of respect (for the older man) as ignorance (about his own country). At this stage he probably knew South Africa better than he knew India. He was intimately familiar with the peninsula of Kathiawar, where he was born and raised. He had lived briefly in Bombay, and visited Madras, Calcutta and Banaras. But vast areas of the subcontinent were unknown to him. Peasants constituted the majority of Indians; Gandhi had no knowledge of how they lived and laboured.

Gokhale was a leader of the Moderate wing of the Congress party. He believed in debate and dialogue, and in appealing to reason and justice. By these methods he hoped to persuade the colonial government to grant self-rule to his people. At the other end of the spectrum was a group of young Indian revolutionaries, some of whom Gandhi had met (and argued with) in London in 1909. These radicals believed that armed struggle was the only way to win freedom for India.

In South Africa, Gandhi had evolved a method of protest distinct and different both from the polite pleading of the Moderates and the bomb-throwing of the revolutionaries. He called this satyagraha, or truth-force. This involved the deliberate violation of laws deemed to be unjust. Protesting individually or in batches, satyagrahis courted arrest, and courted it again, until the offending law was repealed. In 1909, Gandhi asked the Congress to apply his method to India too. Satyagraha, he said, ‘is the only weapon suited to the genius of our people and our land’. For ‘the many ills we suffer from in India it is an infallible panacea’.

There were other ideas about India that Gandhi developed in South Africa. Himself a Hindu, he worked closely with Muslims. Himself a native Gujarati speaker, in South Africa he came into contact with Indians speaking Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. He saw that the sustenance of religious and linguistic pluralism was central to the nurturing of nationhood. Living in London and Johannesburg, he became disenchanted with industrialism; he hoped that India would base its economic future on its peasant and craft traditions rather than mindlessly emulate the West.

Though largely unfamiliar with life in India, Gandhi had a reasonably clear idea of what he could contribute to his country. What he was not clear about was where he would base himself, what organizational affiliation he would seek, and what activities he would undertake. That is why he thought it prudent to first visit Gokhale in London. He needed to consult his guru and seek his guidance before embarking on a career in a land where he was, in political and social terms, an outsider.
 
II.

Gandhi had first gone to England in 1888, to qualify as a lawyer. He went again in 1906 and 1909, representing to the Imperial Government the case for humane treatment of Indians in South Africa. This was his fourth visit, but the first time he was travelling in third class. On board, the Gandhis and Kallenbach lived mostly on fruits, nuts and milk. Every day, Gandhi spent an hour reading the Gita or the Ramayana to his wife, and another hour teaching Gujarati to his companion.

Gandhi and Kallenbach had first met in Johannesburg in 1904. The lawyer and the architect shared a common hero in Leo Tolstoy, under whose influence they abandoned their professions in favour of social work. Kallenbach was devoted to Gandhi, so devoted that the Indians in South Africa called him ‘Hanuman’ (after the monkey god who had served Lord Rama). When the Gandhis decided to return to India, he said he would also come with them.

The simplicity that Tolstoy prescribed was harder for Kallenbach than for Gandhi. In Johannesburg he had liked going to the best barbers. He owned one of the first automobiles in the city. Gandhi was able to wean him off these luxuries, but the enchantment with modern technology remained. Now, on board the S.S. Kinfaus, the two argued about a pair of expensive binoculars that the architect owned—and cherished. Kallenbach (out of a mixture of genuine respect and blind reverence) gave way, and the field glasses were flung into the sea.

These private arguments were soon overshadowed by the onset of war in Europe. On 28 June—when the Gandhis were still in South Africa—Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated by a Bosnian Serb. The S.S. Kinfaus sailed on 18 July towards a Europe still at peace. Ten days into the journey, Austria declared war on Serbia. Russia started mobilizing in defence of the Serbs, prompting the Germans to do the same on behalf of the Austrians. On 1 August, Germany and Russia were officially at war. Two days later, Germany invaded Belgium. Now France also stood threatened; on 4 August, Britain declared war on Germany. Underwater mines had been laid in the English Channel; negotiating them carefully, the ship Gandhi was on docked in Southampton on 6 August.
 
III.

When Gandhi arrived in London, Gokhale himself was stranded in France. He had gone to Vichy to rest; with the war, ships had temporarily been suspended between Paris and London. So Gokhale asked a friend, the poet Sarojini Naidu—then holidaying in London— to welcome the visitors on his behalf.

The Gandhis were staying with a Gujarati friend in Bayswater. It was raining when Mrs Naidu called on them, climbing (as she later wrote) ‘the staircase of an ordinary London dwelling home to find myself confronted with a true Hindu idyll of radiant and domestic simplicity’. Gandhi, the ‘great South African leader’, was ‘reclining, a little ill and weary, on the floor eating his frugal meals of nuts and fruits (which I shared) and his wife was busy and content as though she were a mere modest housewife absorbed in a hundred details of household service, and not the world-famed heroine of a hundred noble sufferings in a nation’s cause’.

From their first meeting, Mrs Naidu got the sense that ‘Mrs. Gandhi was like a bird with eager outstretched wings longing to annihilate the time and distance that lay before her and her far-off India, and impatient of the brief and necessary interruption in her homeward flight. The woman’s heart within her was full of yearning for the accustomed sounds and scenes of her own land and the mother’s heart within her full of passionate hunger for the beloved faces of her children.’

Kasturba’s yearning could not yet be realized, for her husband had decided that he must stay on in England to help with the War effort. In 1914, Gandhi was still an Empire loyalist. He believed that the racial laws in South Africa were an aberration, a departure from the equality of all subjects that Queen Victoria had promised. In his struggles against discrimination he had sometimes found support among English officials and politicians. Now that Britain was at war, the Empire’s subjects must—regardless of their race—rally round to defend it.

In 1899, Gandhi had raised an ambulance corps during the Anglo-Boer war, and done so again in 1906, when the Natal government suppressed a Zulu rebellion. On both occasions, Gandhi had taken the side of the ruler, without bearing arms himself. Now, for the third time in fifteen years, he would lead his fellow Indians in nursing the wounded.
 
IV.

Ten days after landing in London, Gandhi and Kasturba were guests of honour at a reception in Hotel Cecil. Sarojini Naidu was present, as were the nationalist politicians Lala Lajpat Rai and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Gandhi gave a speech, mostly on the South African satyagraha of 1913–14, in which his wife and he, as well as several thousand others, had gone to jail. Praising the courage and sacrifice of the Tamil satyagrahis in Natal, he said: ‘These men and women are the salt of India; on them will be built the Indian nation that is to be.’

The long sea journey had exhausted Gandhi. He was suffering from pain in his legs. A doctor he saw suspected pleurisy. But he carried on with his work; by the end of August, close to a hundred Indians had signed up for a training class in nursing.

Gandhi’s decision to help in the war effort attracted criticism. Henry Polak, a radical Jew who had been his political lieutenant in South Africa, told him it was a departure from his professions of ahimsa, or non-violence. So did Gandhi’s nephew Maganlal. The novelist Olive Schreiner—a white South African passionately opposed to racism and imperialism—wrote to Gandhi an anguished letter of protest. War, she said, ‘was against my religion—whether it is Englishmen travelling thousands of miles to kill Indians in India, or Indians travelling thousands of miles to kill white men whom they have never seen in Europe’. She was ‘struck to the heart with sorrow’ to read that Gandhi and the ‘beautiful and beloved Indian poetess’ (Sarojini Naidu) had offered to serve the British Government ‘in any way they might demand of you’. She continued: ‘Surely you, who would not take up arms even in the cause of your own oppressed people cannot be willing to shed blood in this wicked cause.’

Gandhi’s reply to Olive Schreiner is unrecorded. To his nephew Maganlal, he said that since London owed its food and supplies to the protection of the navy, merely by living there he was participating in the conflict. Attending to the war wounded was his way of repayment for this protection. Otherwise, he wrote, ‘there was only one right course left, which was to go away to live in some mountain or cave in England itself and subsist on whatever food or shelter Nature might provide . . . I do not yet possess the spiritual strength necessary for this.’

When another Gujarati friend complained that Gandhi’s war work was an abdication of ahimsa, he answered that he was not shooting, merely nursing. He hoped to get a chance to attend to wounded Germans so that he ‘could nurse them without any partisan spirit’.
 
V.

Gokhale had now returned to London and had long conversations with Gandhi. Each was anxious about the other person’s health. Gandhi worried that his mentor was overweight and did not exercise enough. Gokhale, on his part, thought Gandhi’s pleurisy a consequence of his fruit-and-nut diet.

Gokhale was keen that Gandhi join his Servants of India Society, which focused on education and social reform. Perhaps he could start a chapter of the society in his home province of Gujarat. However, he advised Gandhi to refrain from public work for a year after his return. He should use this period of ‘probation’ to travel around a country he scarcely knew.

Gokhale sailed for Bombay on 24 October 1914. The Gandhis would have followed him immediately, except that the British government had refused to grant permission to Kallenbach to accompany them to India, for he was technically a German citizen, and now an ‘enemy alien’. Gandhi made several representations, saying that since he had lived for many years in South Africa, Kallenbach considered himself a naturalized Briton. Influential Englishmen whom Gandhi knew were asked to plead on behalf of Kallenbach. The Colonial Office was unmoved; Gandhi’s ‘German’ friend could not go to India; he was shipped off to an internment camp on the Isle of Man instead. The Gandhis had to return home without Kallenbach.

What would Gandhi do on his return to India after two decades in exile? An interesting prediction was offered by C.F. Andrews, an English priest and friend of Gokhale’s who had taught for many years at St Stephen’s College in Delhi. In January 1914, Andrews had worked closely with Gandhi in mediating a settlement with the South African authorities, which abolished a poll tax levied on Indians and also lifted some other restrictions on them. In December of that year, Andrews wrote to Gokhale that

“I have been thinking a great deal about what Mr. Gandhi will do on his return. Perhaps it is no use thinking as he is bound to take his own course, whatever it may be. He is not one who can be bound. I do feel positive about one thing, that he could not for long [fit] in with the general work of the Servants of India [Society]. He might take up some special sphere, such as work among the depressed classes [i.e. the ‘untouchables’], but he would need to be quite independent.”