A Child Groom
The word Mahatma means great soul. This name was not given
Gandhi at birth by his parents, but many years later by the Indian
people when they discovered they had a Mahatma in their midst.
Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, a small state in
western India. He was named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The word Gandhi
means grocer, and generations earlier that had been the family
occupation. But Gandhi’s grandfather, father, and uncle had served as
prime ministers to the princes of Porbandar and other tiny Indian
states, and though lower caste, the Gandhis were middle-class, cultured,
and deeply religious Hindus.
Gandhi remembered his father as truthful, brave, incorruptible, and
short-tempered, but he remembered his mother as a saint. She often
fasted for long periods, and once, during the four months of the rainy
season, ate only on the rare days that the sun shone.
At the age of six Gandhi went to school in Porbandar and had
difficulty learning to multiply. The following year his family moved to
Rajkot where he remained a mediocre student, so sensitive that he ran
home from school for fear the other boys might make fun of him.
When Gandhi was thirteen, he was married to Kasturbai, a girl of the
same age. Child marriages, arranged by the parents, were then common in
India, and since Hindu weddings were elegant, expensive affairs, the
Gandhi family decided to marry off Gandhi, his older brother, and a
cousin all at one time to spare the cost of three separate celebrations.
At first the thirteen-year-old couple were almost too shy to speak to
each other, but Gandhi soon became bossy and jealous. Kasturbai could
not even play with her friends without his permission and often he would
refuse it. But she was not easily cowed, and when she disobeyed him the
two children would quarrel and not talk for days. Yet while Gandhi was
desperately trying to assert his authority as a husband he remained a
boy, so afraid of the dark that he had to sleep with a light on in his
room though he was ashamed to explain this to Kasturbai.
The young bridegroom was still in high school, where his scholarship
had improved, and he won several small prizes. Indian independence was
the dream of every student, and a Moslem friend convinced Gandhi that
the British were able to rule India only because they ate meat and the
Hindus did not. In meat lay strength and in strength lay freedom.
Gandhi’s family was sternly vegetarian, but the boy’s patriotism
vanquished his scruples. One day, in a hidden place by a river, his
friend gave him some cooked goat’s meat. To Gandhi it tasted like
leather and he immediately became ill. That night he dreamed a live goat
was bleating in his stomach, but he ate meat another half-dozen times,
until he decided it was not worth the sin of lying to his parents. After
they died, he thought, he would turn carnivorous and build up the
strength to fight for freedom. Actually, he never ate meat again, and
freed India with a strength that was moral rather than physical.
But Gandhi was still a rebellious teenager, and once, when he needed
money, stole a bit of gold from his brother’s jewelry. The crime haunted
him so that he finally confessed to his father, expecting him to be
angry and violent. Instead the old man wept.
“Those pearl drops of love cleansed my heart,” Gandhi later wrote,
“and washed my sin away.” It was his first insight into the impressive
psychological power of ahimsa, or nonviolence.
Gandhi was sixteen when his father died. Two years later the youth
graduated from high school and enrolled in a small Indian college. But
he disliked it and returned home after one term.
A friend of the family then advised him to go to England where he
could earn a law degree in three years and equip himself for eventual
succession to his father’s post as prime minister. Though he would have
preferred to study medicine, the idea of going to England excited
Gandhi. After he vowed he would not touch liquor, meat, or women, his
mother gave him her blessing and his brother gave him the money.
Leaving his wife and their infant son with his family in Rajkot, he
went to Bombay. There he purchased some English-style clothing and
sailed for England on September 4, 1888, just one month short of his
nineteenth birthday.
Education in England
During the three-week voyage, Gandhi was too unsure of his English to
speak to the other passengers and shunned the dining room because he
did not know how to use a knife and fork. He survived on fruits and
sweets he had brought with him from home.
When he finally arrived in London, some Indian friends took charge of
him and found him a place to stay. But he was homesick, and at night he
wept, not for his wife, but for his mother.
Since he had vowed he would not touch meat, he tried living on bread
and spinach, but this diet did not satisfy him. When Indian friends
advised him to eat meat as they did, he replied simply, “A vow is a vow.
It cannot be broken.” Instead, he set about hunting for a vegetarian
restaurant, walking ten or twelve miles each day until he was finally
hungry enough to enter the cheapest restaurant in sight and stuff
himself on bread.
One day he finally found a vegetarian restaurant and enjoyed his
first hearty meal since he had left home. “God had come to my aid,” he
wrote.
Freed from fear of starvation, young Gandhi next set about becoming
an English dandy. He bought costly new clothes and spent ten minutes in
front of a huge mirror each morning brushing back his thick black hair,
though there was nothing he could do about his ears, which thrust out
from the sides of his head like jug handles. For further refinement he
arranged for dancing and elocution lessons, bought a violin, and hired a
music teacher.
After about three months of this Gandhi decided that “If my character
made a gentleman of me, so much the better. Otherwise I should forego
the ambition.” He cancelled his lessons, sold the violin, and got down
to the serious business of studying law.
Gandhi was an earnest student, taking on more work than was required,
and the more he studied, the more austere he became. He trimmed his
expenses by walking ten miles to school each day to save carfare, moving
into a cheaper room, and preparing his own breakfasts of oatmeal and
cocoa and dinners of bread and cocoa. He continued to eat lunch in
vegetarian restaurants.
All of his life, experiments with food were to be part of Gandhi’s
experiments with truth. While in England, where food is sometimes
tasteless anyway, he decided he could do without condiments, for “the
real seat of taste [is] not the tongue but the mind.” He was an
aggressive vegetarian and was elected to the executive committee of the
local vegetarian society, which he founded. But he was so shy that he
froze when he attempted to speak at meetings, and others had to read his
speeches for him.
During Gandhi’s second year in England, two English brothers asked
him to study the Bhagavad Gita, a part of the sacred Hindu scriptures,
with them. A long poem of some seven hundred stanzas, written several
hundred years before Christ was born, the Gita is a dialogue between the
Hindu god Krishna and Arjuna, a warrior about to go into battle.
Gandhi had never before studied the Gita, either in English, or in
its original Sanskrit, or in Gujarati, his own dialect. It glorifies
action, renunciation, and worldly detachment, and its message seared
Gandhi’s soul. He later called the Gita his “dictionary of conduct” and
turned to it for “a ready solution of all my troubles and trials.”
At about the same time he was searching through the Gita, a Christian
friend persuaded Gandhi to read the Bible. The Old Testament set him
dozing, but the New Testament, particularly Christ’s Sermon on the
Mount, evoked a spiritual recognition. “‘”Whosoever shall smite thee on
thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man take away
thy coat let him have thy cloak too.” The seeds of Gandhi’s philosophy
of renunciation and nonviolence were thus planted almost simultaneously
by sacred Hindu and Christian texts.
Gandhi easily passed his law examinations, was called to the bar on
June 10, 1891, enrolled to practice in the High Court on the 11th, and
sailed for home on the 12th. He did not spend a day more in England than
he had to.
On the choppy passage back to India, twenty-one-year-old Gandhi was
sick with doubt. He had learned some laws, but he had not learned how to
be a lawyer. Besides, the laws he had learned were English; he still
knew nothing of the Hindu or Moslem law of his own country. The despair
he felt was doubled when his brother met him at the dock with the news
that his adored mother had died while he was away. Gandhi returned to
his family at Rajkot. He quarreled with his wife and played with his
son, but he was unable to earn money to support them. Friends advised
him to go to Bombay to study Indian law, but when he finally got his
first case there he was too shy to cross-examine the opposing witnesses.
He returned the fee and told his client to find another lawyer.
Desperate, he tried to get a job teaching English in a high school,
but he was rejected as unqualified. Defeated, he left Bombay and
returned to Rajkot. Gandhi’s brother, who was also a lawyer, routed
enough paperwork to him to pay for his keep, but Gandhi hated the petty
tasks, the local political intrigues, and the arrogance of the ruling
British. Bitter and bewildered, he longed to escape from India. His
opportunity unexpectedly came when a large Indian firm in Porbandar
asked him to go to South Africa to assist in a long and complex legal
case in the courts there. It would take about a year and he would be
paid all his expenses plus a salary. Gandhi accepted with joy.
A second son had been born to Kasturbai since Gandhi’s return from
England almost two years earlier. Gandhi bade his growing family
farewell and in April, 1893, not yet twenty-four years old, he set sail
“to try my luck in South Africa.” He found more than luck; he found
himself, his philosophy, and his following.
South Africa: The First Crusade
South Africa at that time was divided into four areas. Natal and the
Cape Colony were British possessions. The Orange Free State and the
Transvaal were held by the Dutch, who were known as Boers, the Dutch
word for farmer. Then as now South Africa was overwhelmingly nonwhite,
and then as now the white minority ruled the colored majority by means
of terror and abuse.
There were approximately sixty-five thousand Indians in South Africa
at the end of the nineteenth century. The first had come as serfs bound
to five years of plantation labor. When their term of bondage ended they
were either shipped back to India or permitted to stay as free
laborers. There were also thousands of free Indians of all classes, who
had emigrated to South Africa. Some of them became wealthy and powerful.
This outraged and frightened the Europeans, who would not consider
colored men equals, and who contemptuously referred to the Indians as
“coolies.”
About a week after Gandhi arrived at Durban, in Natal, his business
took him to Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal. His journey was an
odyssey of discrimination and it set the direction of his life. He
bought a first-class ticket and dressed, as he did then, in impeccable
European clothing, traveled first-class until the train reached
Maritzburg, the capital of Natal. There, a white passenger protested to
railroad officials, and Gandhi was ordered to a lower-class compartment.
He pointed to his first-class ticket and refused to move.
A policeman threw Gandhi and his luggage off the train, which
continued its journey without him. He spent the night in the station’s
unlit, unheated waiting room. It was bitterly cold, but Gandhi’s
overcoat was in his luggage and his luggage was in the hands of the
railroad authorities. Gandhi dared not request it for fear of being
insulted again.
Instead, he sat shivering through the endless night, asking himself
one question: Shall I fight for my rights or go back to India? By dawn
he had made his decision. He would fight for his rights and the rights
of all people.
He sent telegrams of protest to railroad officials and to his
employer. The following evening he was permitted to take the train to
the end of the line. The next portion of the journey, to Johannesburg,
was by stagecoach, and the man in charge refused to permit Gandhi to sit
inside with the white passengers. Gandhi agreed to sit beside the
driver, but that night he wrote to the company’s agent, firmly insisting
he be seated inside the coach the following day. He was.
When he finally reached Johannesburg he was refused a hotel room. He
spent the night with Indians who warned him he would have to ride to
Pretoria as a third-class passenger, because better tickets were not
issued to colored people. But Gandhi was adamant. He wrote the station
master requesting a first-class ticket and received it only because the
man was not a local Boer but a Dutchman from Holland.
When an astonished train guard found Gandhi in a first-class
compartment with a first-class ticket he ordered him out. But the other
occupant, an Englishman, told the guard to leave Gandhi alone. The Boer
was astonished. “If you want to travel with a coolie, what do I care?”
he muttered.
Gandhi reached Pretoria that evening, but no one met him and he knew
he would be unable to get a hotel room. An American Negro helped him by
taking him to a small hotel run by an American who offered to let him
stay for the night if he would agree to eat in his room. The proprietor
later relented and, after polling his guests, permitted Gandhi to eat
his vegetarian dinner in the public dining room.
Gandhi never forgot any of the details of his humiliating journey.
Within a week after he arrived in Pretoria he summoned the local Indians
to a meeting to discuss their wretched condition. He made his first
public speech that night; indignation had finally freed his tongue.
He told the Indians that before they could expect to reform the Boers
and the British they would have to reform themselves. He urged them to
be honest in business, sanitary in their personal habits, and tolerant
of their own many religious differences. If they did this, and banded
together to fight for their rights, he would give them as much time as
he could.
More meetings were held, and Gandhi soon knew the problems of the
Indians in Pretoria. They could not vote, own homes, go out at night
without a permit, or walk along a public path. Gandhi himself was once
kicked from a path into the street by a policeman.
While Gandhi was learning, often first-hand, the indignities of
discrimination, he was also hard at work on the case that had brought
him to South Africa. After studying the complex charges and
countercharges, he suggested to the opposing parties that they select an
arbitrator and settle the case out of court. They agreed, and when the
arbitrator found for Gandhi’s client, the young lawyer saved the loser
from humiliation and bankruptcy by persuading the victor to accept
payment in moderate installments.
Gandhi was delighted with the outcome. He had learned “the true
function of a lawyer was to unite parties driven asunder.” From then on,
in hundreds of cases, it was Gandhi’s practice to try to bring about a
reasonable compromise outside of court rather than to drive for a
crushing victory.
Having concluded his case, Gandhi retulmed to Durban to prepare to
sail home to India. But at a farewell party in his honor he noticed a
newspaper item about a bill which would deprive Natal Indians of the
right to vote for members of the legislative assembly. Gandhi knew
nothing about the bill and neither did any of the guests.
“What can we understand in these matters?” asked his host bitterly.
“If it passes … it strikes at the root of our self-respect,” said
Gandhi. The guests agreed. Then one spoke up. “Stay here a month longer,
and we will fight as you direct us,” he said.
Gandhi said he would stay. He would take no fees, but money would be
needed for telegrams, for literature, for traveling, for law books. And
he would need men willing to work with him.
“Money will come in,” said a merchant. “Men there are, as many as you
may need.” Thus the farewell party was transformed into a planning
session for a crusade for civil rights. It would last twenty years and
evolve and test the essential weapons of every nonviolent freedom
movement of the twentieth century.
“Hang Old Gandhi!”
Gandhi immediately mobilized the Indian community to work against the
anti-democracy bill that would take away their right to vote. It was
passed in spite of their opposition, but this was only the beginning. A
monster petition was drawn up; ten thousand signatures were obtained in
two weeks. The petition was sent to the British Secretary of State for
the Colonies, while a thousand copies of it were circulated in South
Africa, India, and England. Gandhi knew the value of publicity. Soon the
leading newspapers of India and England were backing his cause.
By then Gandhi’s month was up, but he knew he could not leave Natal.
He agreed to stay and lead the fight for civil rights without a fee, if
the local merchants would guarantee him enough legal work to pay for a
household. The Indians offered to pay him directly for his public work,
but he replied, “My work would be mainly to make you all work, and how
could I charge you for that?”
To direct the agitation for Indian rights, Gandhi formed an
organization called the Natal Indian Congress. All members paid fees,
although the wealthier ones gave contributions as well.
Only one class of Indian did not belong to the Congress, the serfs,
who could not afford the fees. Then one day an Indian laborer stumbled
into Gandhi’s office, bleeding and weeping. Having just been beaten by
his employer, he ran to the only person he could think of — Gandhi.
Gandhi took him to a doctor and then to the courts. Since the man was a
serf, the best Gandhi could do was get him transferred to a kinder
employer. But the news of this small achievement spread widely among the
serfs. Here was a man who would help even them.
The serfs badly needed help, for that year, 1894, the Natal
government decided to discourage them from becoming free men by putting
an exorbitant annual tax on any serf who did not return to India or
renew his indenture at the end of his bondage. Gandhi instigated a
tenacious campaign to have this tax repealed, and soon word of his
efforts spread not only through Natal but echoed all the way back to
India.
In 1896, with victory nowhere in sight, Gandhi returned to Rajkot to
bring his wife and children to Natal to live. While in India he traveled
extensively, drumming up sympathy for the plight of the South African
Indians. Outrage conquered shyness, and he gave newspaper interviews,
made speeches, and wrote a pamphlet which was widely distributed. A
summary of the pamphlet was sent to England by the press, and a
summarized summary was cabled to Natal, where the Europeans raged
because Gandhi had attacked them outside of the country.
In December, Gandhi sailed for South Africa. With him, their toes
squirming in unaccustomed shoes and stockings, were his wife, two sons,
and an orphaned nephew. Another ship left Bombay for South Africa at the
same time. Together, the two vessels carried some eight hundred Indian
passengers. They reached Durban on December 18, but no one was permitted
ashore. The ships were put in quarantine, not for fear of disease, but
for fear of Gandhi. The whites in Durban were incensed by exaggerated
reports of what he had said in India and they accused him of bringing in
the eight hundred passengers to Hood Natal with free Indians.
Gandhi had said nothing abroad he had not already said in Durban, and
he knew none of the passengers except for his own family. But the
whites would not be calmed. Finally, after twenty-three days in the
harbor, the passengers were allowed ashore. Gandhi’s pregnant wife and
the three boys were driven in a carriage to an Indian’s house. Gandhi
and an English attorney were to follow on foot.
As soon as Gandhi stepped ashore, some boys shouted his name and a
menacing crowd surrounded him, separating him from his English
protector. They threw stones, bricks, and rotten eggs at Gandhi. Growing
bolder, they tore off his turban and kicked and beat him. Gandhi, who
was five feet, five inches tall and never weighed much more than a
hundred pounds, clung to a railing to keep himself from falling.
Just then the wife of the police superintendent came up and stood
beside him, shielding him from the mob with her umbrella until the
police came and took him to his friend’s house.
In the evening a lynch mob gathered at the building and demanded
Gandhi’s life. The police superintendent, who was a friend of Gandhi’s,
stood at the front door cheerfully leading the crowd in singing “Hang
old Gandhi on the sour apple tree” while two of his men took the Indian,
disguised as a policeman, out the rear door to the safety of the police
station.
When passions calmed several days later, the Natal authorities asked
Gandhi to identify his assailants so they could be prosecuted. Gandhi
refused, saying, “I am sure that, when the truth becomes known, they
will be sorry for their conduct.” His refusal to defend himself or to
prosecute shamed the whites and won some of them to his side. It was one
of the first victories for Gandhi’s policy of nonviolence.
“To Serve is My Religion”
No matter what Gandhi did for humanity he felt it was not enough. “To
serve is my religion,” he once said. He wanted to free men politically,
restore them spiritually, and heal them physically. When plague erupted
in India during his brief visit there; he inspected the quarters of the
poor and sick for cleanliness and nursed his dying brother-in-law. When
a leper came to his door in Natal he dressed the man’s sores. He worked
in a hospital for two hours every morning, and when his third son was
born in South Africa he cared for the infant himself. He even delivered
his fourth and last son because the midwife was late.
Gandhi liked to live simply and independently, eating mostly fresh
fruits and nuts and starching his own shirts. After a white barber
refused to give him a haircut, he bought barber’s shears and cut his
hair himself.
When the Boer War exploded in 1899, Gandhi’s sympathy lay with the
Boers, but he remained loyal to the British. He felt that since he
demanded rights as a British subject he was obliged to participate in
the war on behalf of the Empire.
He organized eleven hundred Indians into a British ambulance corps.
Frequently they had to haul the wounded off the field in the direct line
of fire, and it was not unusual to carry casualties twenty or
twenty-five miles a day in stretchers. Gandhi’s ambulance corps won
begrudging admiration from the British. When the corps was disbanded and
replaced by British units, Gandhi and some of the other leaders
received medals.
In 1901 Gandhi decided that if he remained in South Africa he would
simply become a prosperous attorney and so the time had come for him to
go home to work for India. He left Natal promising that if the Indians
needed him within a year he would come back. He was showered with costly
jewels and ornaments as farewell gifts but he put them in a bank to be
used as a trust fund to meet community needs.
Back in India, Gandhi traveled a great deal and attended the annual
meeting of the Indian National Congress, the only national political
party in the country. He found the delegates indifferent, the sanitation
insufferable, and the movement lacking vision or direction.
Nevertheless, he had decided to settle in Bombay, practice law, and
enter politics when a cablegram came from South Africa. “Chamberlain
expected here,” it said. “Please return immediately.” Gandhi left his
wife and children in Bombay and returned to South Africa to resume his
crusade.
Joseph Chamberlain was the British Colonial Secretary. His mission in
South Africa was to collect a gift of thirty-five million pounds and
try to heal the rift between the victorious British and the defeated
Boers. Nothing could persuade him to aggravate the whites on behalf of
the Indians. “Your grievances seem to be genuine,” he told Gandhi, who
represented the Natal Indians, “but you must try your best to placate
the Europeans if you wish to live in their midst.”
Though he failed to move Chamberlain in Natal, Gandhi followed him to
the Transvaal to present the complaints of the Indians there. This time
the authorities would not even permit him to see Chamberlain, and
Gandhi soon realized that the condition of the thirteen thousand Indians
in the Transvaal was worse than in any other part of South Africa.
Gandhi decided to remain there and set up a law office in Johannesburg
to work for his people.
While he worked, his political aims continued to fuse with his
spiritual and emotional life. He studied the Bhagavad Gita to the marrow
and, by pasting portions of it on a wall, memorized verse after verse
as he stood brushing his teeth for fifteen minutes every morning. The
Gita became his guide to living and he embraced its teaching that truth
could be gained only through renunciation of all possessions and all
pleasures.
In 1904 Gandhi helped found a weekly newspaper called Indian Opinion.
It was the first of several publications which he edited or wrote for
most of his life, and which allowed him to express his views on all
issues, from politics to birth control, and to gauge his readers’
reactions from numerous letters to the editor.
Though Indian Opinion was published in Durban, Natal, Gandhi spent
most of his time in Johannesburg. When local officials tried to
dispossess Indians from their land without compensation, Gandhi sued
seventy times and won all but one case. Then plague broke out in the
Indian ghetto and Gandhi set up a hospital in an empty building and
nursed the victims himself. When the authorities decided to fire the
hovels to burn out the disease, it was Gandhi who persuaded the Indians
to move to a campsite near the city. They would obey no one else. Still
in his thirties, he had become their leader and they called him bhai, which means brother.
Gandhi often shuttled back and forth between Johannesburg and Durban.
On one of his long train journeys he read a book called Unto This Last
by John Ruskin, English author and critic. Gandhi said the book
transformed his life by teaching him that the good of the individual is
contained in the good of the group, that manual occupations are as
valuable as intellectual ones, and that the life of the laborer–the man
who works with his hands–is the only life worth living.
Immediately, Gandhi translated principle into action. He moved Indian
Opinion, its staff, and its presses to a farm at Phoenix, near Durban.
When not working on the paper, the men could work the soil. Gandhi,
however, remained in Johannesburg, where his family again joined him.
They lived as close to Ruskin’s ideal as they could, grinding the meal
and baking their bread by hand.
In 1906, when the Zulus in Natal rebelled, Gandhi again stood with
the British Empire. He formed another Indian ambulance corps and was
delighted to be assigned the task of nursing wounded Zulus, a duty no
white man would accept.
During the solitude of the Zulu campaign in the bush, Gandhi had much
time for contemplation, and he committed himself to a course he had
long considered. “I could not live both after the flesh and the spirit,”
he wrote. If all humanity was to be his family, he could spare no
special attention to his own; if he was to serve the world he could not
serve his senses as well. In 1906, not quite thirty-seven years old, he
took a vow of celibacy which he never broke, and the bride of his
childhood, Kasturbai, became not so much a wife as the most devoted of
his followers.
Truth-Force is Born
Even while Gandhi was with the ambulance corps he began to receive
pleas to return to Johannesburg where an ordinance had been proposed
requiring Indians to be fingerprinted, regis- tered, and to carry
identification cards at all times. Failure to do so was to be punishable
by prison, heavy fines, or deportation.
The purpose of the ordinance was to prevent more Indians from
entering the country by having the present residents clearly identified.
But Gandhi’s reaction was, “Better die than submit.” Back in
Johannesburg, he summoned the Indian leaders and explained that the
proposed ordinance was degrading and only a first step toward driving
all Indians out of the Transvaal. The Indians had to fight back, Gandhi
said, but as yet he did not know how.
A mass meeting was held in an old theater on September 11, 1906. By
then Gandhi had helped frame several resolutions containing the essence
of his resistance movement. The critical proposal stated the Indians
would not submit to the ordinance if it became law, and would suffer all
the penalties.
Gandhi warned the Indians they would be jailed, beaten, fined,
deported. “But. ..so long as there is even a handful of men true to
their pledge, there can be only one end to the struggle, and that is
victory,” he said. Every man at the meeting pledged before God he would
never submit.
In this photo, Gandhi is seated (center) in front of his law office in Johannesburg, South Africa, about 1902.
Having spawned a movement, Gandhi now sought a name for it. He
disliked the term “passive resistance.” To him it signified a weak and
defenseless minority which would use arms if they were available. At the
suggestion of a cousin he finally called his campaign satyagraha,
a combination of two words meaning truth and force. Gandhi’s battle was
to be fought with force born of truth and love. His soldiers were to be
known as satyagrahis.
The ordinance, which the Indians called the Black Act, was passed and
went into effect in July, 1907. Indians picketed the offices at which
they were supposed to register, and when only about five hundred of the
thirteen thousand Indians in the Transvaal complied with the new law,
the authorities decided to act. They arrested one Indian as an example
to the others. To their amazement he instantly became a hero and others
clamored to join him in jail.
The authorities obliged by arresting the leaders of the satyagraha
movement, including Gandhi, thinking this would intimidate and disperse
his followers. But Gandhi, pleading guilty in the same court where he
had often appeared as counsel, asked for the maximum sentence; the
others followed his example.
Gandhi’s first jail term was brief. He was soon summoned by
distraught officials to a conference with the Boer leader, General Jan
Christian Smuts. Since there had been no time to change his clothes,
Gandhi faced Smuts in his prison uniform.
Smuts offered Gandhi a compromise. If the local Indians registered
voluntarily to prevent more immigrants from “flooding” the country,
Smuts would repeal the offensive Black Act. Gandhi agreed, and he and
the other political prisoners were released.
At a mass meeting in Johannesburg, Gandhi was asked what would happen
if Smuts betrayed him. “A satyagrahi bids good-bye to fear,” he
replied. “Even if the opponent plays him false twenty times, the
satyagrahi is ready to trust him for the twenty-first time, for an
implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of his creed.”
To set the example, Gandhi wanted to be the first to register
voluntarily, but on the way he was severely beaten by Moslems who felt
he had betrayed them. But he asked that his assailants not be punished
and that the blood he shed help bind the Moslems and Hindus closer
together. It was a prayer he offered often and in vain.
A more painful blow awaited Gandhi, however, for Smuts went back on
his word and refused to repeal the Black Act. In reply, the Indians met
in the Hamidia mosque in Johannesburg on August 16, 1908, and burned
over two thousand registration certificates in a giant cauldron. British
reporters who were present compared the event to the Boston Tea Party.
Nearly thirteen thousand unarmed Indians were boldly defying the
government of the Transvaal.
The next step in Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign was to
challenge legislation barring Indian immigration. He had a group of
Indians cross from Natal to the Transvaal. When they were jailed,
sympathizers in both colonies tried to get arrested with them. Gandhi
was imprisoned for the second time and served as cook for seventy-five
prisoners, for whom it was a special hardship since he cooked without
condiments. “Thanks to their love for me my companions took without a
murmur the half-cooked porridge I prepared without sugar,” he wrote.
Gandhi was freed in December, 1908, and rearrested for a three-month
term beginning in February, 1909. He spent most of his time in prison
reading, and Smuts generously sent him two religious books.
However the volumes that greatly influenced Gandhi at this time were Henry David Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience, which Thoreau had written after being jailed for refusing to pay taxes to a government he would not support, and The Kingdom of God Is Within You
by Leo Tolstoy, in which the great Russian writer demanded that men
live as Christ directed. Gandhi and Tolstoy corresponded until the
Russian died in 1910. In his last letter Tolstoy wrote the Indian
leader, “That which is called passive resistance is nothing else than
the teaching of love…”
The Boers were less lyrical about it, however, and when the jails
overflowed with satyagrahis, they began to deport the Indians. At one
time twenty-five hundred of the Transvaal Indians were in prison and
another six thousand had fled or been expelled.
The arrests and the agitation began to attract the eye of the world,
and the British Empire squirmed uncomfortably. Gandhi, out of jail
again, used his newspaper, Indian Opinion, to further press his cause.
When he realized that the four colonies were going to be fused into the
Union of South Africa, he went directly to London to lobby for Indian
rights.
He won publicity and sympathy but little else. The British who tried
to mediate between him and the Boers reported that the whites felt “to
maintain the racial bar is a matter of principle…” While he was in
England, Gandhi found time to explore Britain’s relationship with
another colony, India, and on the long voyage back to South Africa he
wrote a booklet called Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, which foreshadowed the campaign that would make him immortal.
Seeing no end to his struggle in South Africa, however, he searched
for a home for his disciples when they were not in prison. His movement
was generously financed by wealthy Indians, but one of the most faithful
of his followers was a German industrialist named Hermann Kallenbach.
Kallenbach bought eleven hundred acres of land near Johannesburg and
gave them to Gandhi, who founded a settlement called Tolstoy Farm.
Men, women, and children, Hindus, Moslems, Christians, and Jews,
lived at the farm with equal rights and equal responsibilities. Smoking
and liquor were banned, and the few meat-eaters voluntarily became
vegetarians. Anyone who had to go to Johannesburg walked over twenty
miles each way. This saved a fortune in train fares and provided ample
exercise, which pleased Gandhi, who in his medical views was a
self-confessed quack. He believed a light diet, plenty of exercise, and a
mud pack would heal anything.
In 1912 Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a prominent Indian leader, came to
South Africa to investigate Indian grievances. He was graciously
received by the Boers, who were lavish with their promises. “Everything
has been settled,” Gokhale told Gandhi. “The Black Act will be repealed.
The racial bar will be removed from the emigration law.” Smuts had even
promised Gokhale that the annual tax on serfs who became free laborers
would be lifted.
This time it was Gandhi who said, “I doubt it very much,” and this
time it was Gandhi who was right. The Boers again went back on their
word. The following year insult was added to oppression when a judge
ruled that only Christian marriages would be recognized as legal,
thereby invalidating every Hindu or Moslem wedding ceremony.
The satyagraha campaign, which had been dormant, suddenly revived.
Women had never before participated; now they insisted on challenging a
ruling which dishonored almost every Indian wife. Gandhi examined his
armies and his weapons carefully and then laid his plans.
Victory in South Africa
First, a group of women from Tolstoy Farm courted arrest by crossing
from the Transvaal into Natal. Although this was illegal, they were not
halted. Soon after, a group of women from the Phoenix settlement in
Natal crossed the opposite way, into the Transvaal, and were arrested.
Among them was Gandhi’s wife Kasturbai. At first he had been unwilling
to ask her to sacrifice herself, but she complained, “What defect is
there in me which disqualifies me for jail?” and so Gandhi relented.
Then the women who had crossed into Natal without having been
arrested followed Gandhi’s instructions and marched to the coal mInes at
Newcastle. There they incited the Indian miners to strike against the
annual tax on free laborers. At this point the women were imprisoned,
and the cauldron started bubbling.
Free Indians were outraged at the sight of the women they so
carefully protected being tossed into jail. Serfs sympathized with the
miners. Gandhi hurried to Newcastle to organize the strike. He suggested
the men abandon the mines and return with him to the Transvaal and to
prison. They agreed.
In one day, about five thousand men, with Gandhi in the lead, marched
to Charlestown, the Natal village nearest the Transvaal border. Fed and
sheltered by local Indians, they camped for several weeks as strikers
came and went and Gandhi plotted his next move. He tried to arrange a
peaceful settlement and called Smuts’ office, telling the General’s
secretary, “If he promises to abolish the tax I will stop the march.
Will not the General accede to such a small request?” The secretary
checked with Smuts and replied, “General Smuts will have nothing to do
with you. You may do as you please.”
At 6:30 on the morning of November 6, 1913, Gandhi set out with 2,037
men, 127 women, and 57 children. One mile from Charlestown they crossed
the Transvaal border and headed in the direction of Tolstoy Farm.
Earlier, some white men had threatened to shoot them on sight but while
many stared at the strange army, no one attacked. After they had set up
camp the first night and Gandhi was preparing for bed, a police officer
approached. “I have a warrant of arrest for you,” he said.
“When?” asked Gandhi.
“Immediately.”
Gandhi roused one of his aides and told him to continue the march
without him. But he was freed on bail and returned to the miners the
following day. On November 8, as he was distributing bread and marmalade
to the marchers, he was again arrested, this time by a magistrate. “It
seems I have been promoted,” he said wryly.
Again he was released on bail and returned to the march. The
authorities in the Transvaal began to grow uneasy. They had expected
Gandhi’s arrests to disorganize his followers, but no one panicked. The
police waited for violence which they could return with violence, but
under Gandhi’s teaching, the men remained determinedly peaceful. “How
long can you harass a peaceful man?” wrote Gandhi. “How can you kill the
voluntarily dead?”
On November 9, Gandhi was arrested for the third time in four days.
The following day the marchers were halted, put aboard trains, and
shipped back to Natal. On November 11, Gandhi was sentenced to nine
months at hard labor. Three days later he was found guilty on another
charge and sentenced to another three months. His chief aides were
imprisoned with him.
The miners, however, were not jailed, for their labor was needed in
the mines. They were imprisoned behind wire-enclosed stockades at the
mines, and their supervisors became their guards. But neither orders,
threats, nor floggings could force them to return to work.
The news of Gandhi’s jail terms and the vicious treatment of the
miners rebounded around the world. The chief British representative in
India, the Viceroy, attacked the South African government and demanded
an inquiry. All over South Africa Indian serfs struck in sympathy with
the miners. At one time there were fifty thousand men on strike and
thousands more in jail. Soldiers who were sent to force the strikers
back to work fired on the mobs, killing and maiming. The world watched
with horror, and money and help for the oppressed Indians began to flow
in.
The South African government, observed Gandhi, was in the position of
“a snake which has taken a rat in its mouth but can neither gulp it
down nor cast it out.” A thoroughly discomfited Jan Christian Smuts
appointed a commission of inquiry. The Indian community demanded that
the satyagraha prisoners be released, and Gandhi and some of the others
were freed. But when the Indian leaders asked that the commission
include at least one Indian or pro-Indian member, Smuts refused.
In reply, Gandhi announced he would lead a massive protest march from
Durban on January 1, 1914. By coincidence, however, there was a major
railroad strike that paralyzed the nation. Gandhi refused to take
advantage of it. He postponed the march and by his forbearance won more
than by continued pressure. One of Smuts’ secretaries said to Gandhi,
“You help us in our days of need. How can we lay hands upon you? I often
wish you took to violence … and then we would know how to dispose of
you. But you desire victory by self-suffering alone … and that is what
reduces us to sheer helplessness.”
Smuts now agreed to see Gandhi. There were several meetings and
several letters were exchanged. The satyagraha campaign was suspended as
the major Indian grievances were eliminated. The annual tax was
abolished and non-Christian marriages were recognized. Other minor
matters were also resolved. Gandhi had won his crusade.
The Indians in South Africa wanted Gandhi to stay until all their
demands were met, but Gandhi felt he had done all he could. After twenty
years in South Africa it was time to return to India.
He had gained specific relief for the Indians, but more important, he
had evolved a new means for dealing with evil. He had proved that under
certain circumstances the force of truth, or satyagraha, was a
priceless and matchless weapon. In South Africa it had eliminated the
worst of the anti-Indian abuses. In India it was to crumble an empire
and create a new nation.
Just before Gandhi left South Africa he gave Jan Christian Smuts a
pair of sandals he had made while in prison. Years later Smuts said, “I
have worn these sandals for many a summer … even though I may feel that I
am not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man.”
India: “And then Gandhi Came”
In July, 1914 Gandhi and Kasturbai sailed for England, on their way
home to India. They arrived two days after England entered World War I.
Again Gandhi offered to organize an ambulance corps. Many Indians
opposed this plan, arguing that a slave should not cooperate with his
master, but make his master’s need his own opportunity. Now was the time
to demand home rule, they said. But Gandhi had demonstrated in South
Africa that he would not exploit his enemies. Cooperate with the English
first, he said, and then convert them by love. The ambulance corps was
formed, but Gandhi was unable to serve because of a severe attack of
pleurisy. When the illness persisted, Gandhi’s doctors advised him to
leave England’s chilling climate and return to the warmth of India.
Gandhi and Kasturbai arrived in Bombay on January 9, 1915. He was
forty-five years old, and in some parts of the country he was already
spoken of as Mahatma for the work he had done in South Africa. It was a
title often bestowed on exceptional men but Gandhi disliked it. “The
woes of Mahatmas are known to Mahatmas alone,” he once wrote.
When Gandhi returned to India the drive for independence had an end
but no means. Tiny Britain ruled a giant two thousand miles long and
seventeen hundred miles wide, with a population of 275 million that
swelled another five million annually in spite of unabated disease and
famine. Most Indians were Hindus, but there was a large Moslem minority,
as well as Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Christians, and countless other
religious groups.
Over the centuries the Indians had known many foreign rulers, and the
British, who came in the seventeenth century to trade and stayed to
conquer, were only the last in a long series of oppressors. They ruled
through colonial administrators who could never accept the Indians as
equals, or through local princes who were British puppets. The nation’s
wealth flowed toward Britain or to a few favored Indians, and the
distance between indecent poverty and indecent opulence was as high and
as insurmountable as the Himalayas.
As early as 1906, India’s only political voice, the Indian National
Congress, demanded self-government but the words did not carry all the
way back to London. Oppressed peoples often turn to terrorism, and in
1912 an Indian tried to assassinate the Viceroy. But terrorism, wrote
Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru, “was a bankrupt’s creed.” Yet how was
freedom to be gained? “History … showed us,” Nehru said, “that peoples
and classes who were enslaved had won their freedom through violent
rebellion … [but] unarmed people could not rebel and face armed forces…
“There seemed to be no way out of the intolerable conditions of a degrading servitude … And then Gandhi came.”
Gandhi first spent time reacquainting himself with his homeland,
where he had not lived for two decades. He established his followers at
Sabarmati, near the city of Ahmedabad. In India a religious retreat is
called an ashram, and Gandhi’s cooperative community came to be known as
the satyagraha ashram. But it was as political as it was religious.
“Men say I am a saint losing myself in politics,” Gandhi once commented.
“The fact is that I am a politician trying my hardest to be a saint.”
The independence campaign had thus far been waged by a small clique
of upper-class intellectuals who aped the British in manners and
aloofness. Gandhi saw this was a path that led nowhere. Until that time
he had worn European dress; now he discarded it for the simple trousers
of the peasant. Some eighty percent of his countrymen were peasants;
freedom could not be won without their support. For Gandhi freedom meant
not the substitution of select Hindu rulers for the Viceroy but a truly
representative government. It also meant freedom from poverty,
ignorance, and discrimination.
To the horror of orthodox Hindus he admitted into his ashram a family
of untouchables, who by implacable Hindu tradition are condemned from
birth as unclean and outcaste. “We can infer from our past experience
that the privileged and powerful are more unclean at heart than the
downtrodden and despised,” Gandhi observed.
Reforming India was as much a part of Gandhi’s program as was home
rule. Asked to speak at ceremonies opening a Hindu university in Benares
he told the elegant Indian nobles, “There is no salvation for India
unless you strip yourselves of this jewelry and hold it in trust for
your countrymen.” The pompous politicians were warned that “No amount of
speeches will ever make us fit for self-government. It is only our
conduct that will fit us for it.” The audience was outraged at the
unexpected challenge to India rather than England. Gandhi was told to
shut up and sit down.
His first Indian campaign of any significance was in 1917 in behalf
of the sharecroppers of Champaran, a remote area at the foothills of the
Himalayas. Deceived and oppressed by theit British landlords, the
sharecroppers needed a champion. They found Gandhi. He went to Champaran
to investigate their complaints and was advised by the British
commissioner to leave. When he ignored the warning, he received an
official notice ordering him out of the district. He refused to go and
was summoned to court.
On the day of the trial masses of peasants appeared in town in a
spontaneous demonstration of sympathy and solidarity. The officials were
bewildered and a little frightened. They were even more perplexed when
Gandhi pleaded guilty. Judgment was postponed, and in a few days the
case was withdrawn. It was the first victory for civil disobedience in
India.
Gandhi and several of his associates remained in Champaran for seven
months putting together a case against the landlords. While he was there
he established schools and brought in volunteer teachers. Kasturbai
came to teach the women cleanliness and sanitation.
Finally the local authorities set up an investigating commission
which found the sharecroppers’ claims were just. The landlords were
ordered to return part of the money dishonestly gained. But Gandhi later
said the most important thing about Champaran was that he had proved
the British could not push him around in his own country.
From Champaran Gandhi went to Ahmedabad, where textile workers were
fighting for more pay and shorter hours. Gandhi argued their case before
the mill owners, some of whom were his friends and supporters. He
suggested the issues be submitted to an arbitrator, but the owners
refused and he advised the men to strike.
After two weeks the strikers began to weaken and talked of going back
to the mills. Encouraging them to hold out longer, Gandhi spontaneously
said, “Unless [you] rally and continue the strike … I will not touch
any food.” To make his intentions unmistakable he added, “My fast … will
be broken only after the strike is settled.”
Fasting was not new to Gandhi. During his youth, under the influence
of his ascetic mother, he had sometimes fasted. At Tolstoy Farm in South
Africa he continually experimented with eating and not eating and each
fast meant another victory for self-restraint. When his followers at the
farm failed to maintain the high standards he set for them he took
their penance on himself, fasting once for seven and once for fourteen
days.
This time he fasted to pressure the mill owners to agree to his
terms. Unwilling to allow him to suffer, they accepted arbitration after
three days. Gandhi had discovered another potent weapon which could be
used against men of conscience.
His next campaign was in behalf of the peasants in the Kheda district
of western India. Their crops had failed and, facing famine, the people
had asked the government to suspend their taxes. Gandhi won a
compromise by which the rich farmers paid taxes and the poor ones
didn’t. His larger victory, however, was in awakening the peasants to
their rights and in lining up liberals and intellectuals to support the
peasants they had once disdained.
Throughout this period, the butchery of World War I continued
indecisively. In July, 1918, Gandhi attempted to recruit Indian soldiers
for the British army. “If we serve to save the Empire,” he argued
unconvincingly, “we have in that very act secured home rule.” But he won
few recruits and instead was stricken with a protracted case of
dysentery. Certain he was dying, he had verses of the Gita read to him.
Doctors recommended milk to restore his strength but it would have
violated an anti-milk vow he had taken.
Then Kasturbai, his wife, shrewdly observed he had directed his vow
only against the milk of cows and buffaloes. “You cannot have any
objection to goat’s milk,” she argued.
Gandhi knew he was betraying the spirit if not the letter of his
intentions, but he conceded and drank goat’s milk for the rest of his
life. “The will to live proved to be stronger than the devotion to
truth,” he wrote sadly.
During Gandhi’s slow recovery, World War I ended and a fresh chapter
in English oppression began. During the war, many Indian nationalists
had been jailed for criticizing the British, and the Indian press had
been censored. The Indian people expected to have their civil liberties
restored at the end of the war; instead, a British commission headed by
Sir Sidney Rowlatt went to India to study the situation and recommended
that measures suppressing free speech, free press, and the right of
assembly be continued.
The Rowlatt proposals became law on March 18, 1919. The following
morning Gandhi said to a friend, “The idea came to me last night in a
dream that we should call upon the country to observe a general hartal.”
A hartal is a strike. An epic satyagraha campaign was about to begin
with Gandhi as its undisputed leader and freedom from Britain as its
inevitable consequence.
Noncooperation with Evil
The date of the hartal was April 6, 1919. “It was a most wonderful
spectacle,” Gandhi wrote. “The whole of India from one end to the other,
towns as well as villages, observed a complete hartal on that day.”
To the astonishment of the British, India was paralyzed for
twenty-four hours. Millions of Indians marched in the streets and many,
including Gandhi, courted arrest by selling books banned by the
government.
They were not imprisoned, but Gandhi had unloosed forces he could not
contain. He never understood that all men were not as saintly as he,
and was horrified when the Indians followed the hartal with violence,
looting, and murder.
Gandhi headed for the province known as the Punjab to quiet disorders
there, but on the way he was arrested and sent back to Bombay. From
there he returned to his ashram at Sabarmati and listened in horror as
the reports of violence flowed in. “A rapier run through my body could
hardly have pained me more,” he said. He fasted three days in penance
and called off the satyagraha campaign. He had made a “Himalayan
miscalculation” he explained candidly. “I had called on the people to
launch upon civil disobedience before they had qualified themselves for
it.”
Gandhi set about training a band of volunteers in the stern
disciplines of satyagraha. He hoped they would help him educate the
people, but most of them soon drifted away. The life of a satyagrahi was
best suited for a Mahatma.
Meanwhile, agitation continued in the Punjab, and martial law was
proclaimed. In spite of this, a meeting was held at about 4 P.M. on
April 13 in the city of Amritsar. Between ten and twenty thousand
persons were packed into a square almost entirely enclosed by buildings.
While the meeting was in progress, a British officer, Brigadier General
Reginald Dyer, entered with fifty armed native soldiers. He stationed
them on either side of the main entrance and without warning ordered
them to fire.
They fired 1,650 rounds of ammunition and struck over fifteen hundred
persons; almost four hundred died. The event became known as the
Amritsar massacre. General Dyer epitomized the colonial mind at its
thickest when he explained, “I thought I would be doing a jolly lot of
good.”
Refused permission to go to the Punjab, Gandhi spent most of his time working at two weekly newspapers, Young India, which was published in English, and Navajivan,
which was published in his own dialect, Gujarati. He used both to edu-
cate the people to the ideals and sacrifices of satyagraha.
He was finally permitted to visit the Punjab in the autumn of 1919.
The crowds which received him were “delirious with joy.” He conducted
his own inquiry into the massacre, and as the people came before him
their trust turned to worship. With no official title or office he had
become the most important man in India.
In November he was invited to a Moslem conference, where he used the
term “noncooperation” to describe the next phase of his campaign. The
movement was temporarily stayed by reforms offered by the British, but
when they resulted in no worthwhile improvement in the Indian condition
Gandhi politely advised the Viceroy, in June, 1920, of the new policy.
The Viceroy called it a “foolish scheme.”
A special session of the Indian National Congress was held in
September to reaffirm Gandhi’s plan. The plan was again approved in
December at the annual Congress convention, where Gandhi was
unquestioned leader. He framed a new constitution for the party,
broadening its base of support in the cities and villages; he offered
the resolution which proclaimed the goal of Congress as home rule; and
he announced the means of achieving this goal would be noncooperation.
The Congress at this time also affirmed two other Gandhi ideals: it
condemned the laws of untouchability and supported the use of homespun
clothing.
In Gandhi’s first pamphlet on home rule, written ten years earlier,
he said the spinning wheel could solve the problem of India’s
dehumanizing poverty. At Sabarmati he obtained a wheel, and he and his
disciples began to wear homespun cloth called khadi. Its value was
twofold. If everyone wore khadi, the half-starved, unemployed women of
India would have an occupation; and Indians would no longer be forced to
wear foreign-made clothing.
Not buying British goods was a form of noncooperation; so was not
attending British schools, not paying British taxes, and not serving the
British colonial government. “The government rested very largely on the
cooperation … of Indians themselves,” Nehru wrote, “and if this
cooperation were withdrawn … it was quite possible, in theory, to bring
down the whole structure of government.
“It was, in effect, a peaceful rebellion, a most civilized form of
warfare … There was a strange mixture of nationalism and politics and
religion and mysticism and fanaticism … A demoralized, backward, and
broken-up people suddenly straightened their backs and lifted their
heads and took part in disciplined, joint action on a countrywide
scale.”
Gandhi and his followers, both Hindu and Moslem, spent months
crossing India’s vast expanses carrying their pleas for noncooperation
to the people. In some villages the peasants came out not so much to
hear Gandhi as to be blessed by his presence.
Often Gandhi asked his listeners to remove the foreign clothing they
wore. With religious fervor they stripped off the garments and piled
them at Gandhi’s feet. Gandhi would light a match to the mound and, as
they burned, tell the people not to buy new foreign clothes but rather
to spin and weave and make their own, as he did. By September, 1921, he
had adopted as his permanent costume the simple loincloth worn by most
of India’s peasants.
The British responded to Gandhi’s campaign, first with a carrot and
then with a stick. They sent the heir to the throne on a ceremonial
visit which was greeted with such rioting that Gandhi had to fast for
five days before it ceased. Then the government began arresting in bulk.
By December twenty thousand Indians were in jail. When the Congress
Party held its annual meeting that month Gandhi was elected “sole
executive authority.” The following month another ten thousand Indians
were imprisoned.
The people became explosive. Instead of winning home rule they were
receiving further repression. They wanted to move beyond noncooperation,
and since Gandhi would not consider violence a massive national civil
disobedience campaign was urged. Fearing it would get out of hand,
Gandhi agreed to try civil disobedience, or civil resistance as he
called it, if it were confined to one small area where he could control
it. He chose the county of Bardoli, near Bombay.
But before the campaign began, a crazed Indian mob in a town eight
hundred miles away hacked a group of policemen to death. To Gandhi it
meant the people were still not ready for satyagraha. He cancelled the
campaign in Bardoli as well as all civil disobedience movements in
India. Freedom was not worth such a cost.
The British concluded that Gandhi was defeated and on March 10, 1922,
he was arrested at the satyagraha ashram. Brought to trial the
following week, he pleaded guilty to the charge of writing seditious
articles and said, “In my opinion noncooperation with evil is as much a
duty as cooperation with good.”
He was sentenced to six years in prison as spectators wept and threw
themselves at his feet. He was then fifty-three years old, and those who
did not call him Mahatma called him bapu, which means father.
Nonviolent War is Declared
Gandhi was permitted to take his spinning wheel to jail with him. He
contentedly spun, read, and worked on his autobiography. In January,
1924, he suffered an attack of acute appendicitis, and the British
feared that if he died in their hands India would revolt. They summoned
Indian surgeons, but Gandhi was too sick to wait. A British doctor
operated but only after Gandhi signed a statement saying he had no
objections.
The operation was successful, but Gandhi recovered slowly. He was
released from prison on February 5, after serving not quite two years of
his term. But during that time his movement had collapsed. He himself
had forbidden civil disobedience, and the people had abandoned
noncooperation.
Worse than this, however, the Hindus and Moslems were no longer
working together but had turned daggers toward each other. This was a
great blow to Gandhi who wrote, “Hindu-Moslem unity means home rule.
There is no question more important and more pressing than this.”
Dismayed and heartsick, Gandhi withdrew from politics and set about
cleansing India of her sins. “My belief,” he said, “is that the instant
India is purified India becomes free, and not a moment earlier.”
To purify India and to ease the growing animosity between Hindus and
Moslems, Gandhi announced he would fast for twenty-one days, beginning
September 18. He reserved the right to drink water, with or without
salt. “It is both a penance and a prayer,” he said. “I respectfully
invite the heads of all communities, including Englishmen, to meet and
end this quarrel which is a disgrace to religion and to humanity.”
To dramatize his own goodwill he fasted in a Moslem household. While
the fast lasted millions of Hindus and Moslems pledged to love each
other eternally, but when the fast ended the spell ended as well.
Gandhi’s suffering was meaningless, for the great religious bloodbath
was yet to come.
For the next few years Gandhi concentrated on uplifting India rather
than exacerbating the British. His aims remained constant — Hindu-Moslem
unity, the abolition of untouchability, and the use of homespun cloth
to build village industries and employ India’s poor.
He remained in the Congress party but without enthusiasm for it had
returned to the control of the intellectuals who scorned the masses and
were primarily concerned with substituting themselves for the British.
Nevertheless, he was elected President of the Congress for 1925. He
spent the year traveling through India, preaching his gospel and raising
money for his cause. He was an enthusiastic fund raiser who charmed and
wheedled the wealthy into parting with jewels and gold to support his
programs. “It costs a great deal of money to keep Gandhi living in
poverty,” one of his followers said affectionately.
Wherever he went he was adored by the crowds who often heard not a
word he said but huddled close to receive his blessing. To his horror
one sect began to worship him as a god, and an old man, with a
photograph of Gandhi around his neck, came before him to thank him for a
miraculous cure. “It is not I but God who made you whole,” Gandhi
replied testily. “Will you not oblige me by taking that photograph off?”
In 1926, weary with traveling and speeches, Gandhi retired to his
ashram for a year of silence. Actually he was silent only on Mondays;
the rest of the week he chatted with disciples and visitors. But most of
the time he wrote for his newspapers, using them to spread the gospel
of truth-force.
In 1927 Gandhi again toured India. To his platform of nonviolence,
homespun, unity, and equality for untouchables he added equality for
women and abstinence from alcohol and drugs. He suffered a slight stroke
that year, but after a few months he resumed his mission. Then, in
November, he was summoned by the Viceroy and informed that a British
commission was coming to investigate conditions in India and offer
recommendations for reform. The commission would be all British and all
white.
The Indians were incensed. Once again their fate was to be cast for
them by their conquerors. They decided to boycott the commission. When
it arrived in February, 1928, the streets were hung with black flags and
people shouted, “Go back!”
Gandhi decided the time had come to resume satyagraha. Suspended in
Bardoli six years earlier, it was resumed in the same place the month
the commissioners came. The taxes of the peasants of Bardoli had been
increased twenty-two percent. They were told not to pay.
The government confiscated their animals, equipment, and farms, and
jailed hundreds, but the peasants remained both adamant and nonviolent.
On June 12 a sympathy strike was observed throughout India and
contributions poured in from all parts of the country. The British
gnashed their teeth and shook their fists, but in August they cancelled
the tax increase and returned the confiscated land and property.
Satyagraha had finally won in India.
Now everyone awaited Gandhi’s next move. At the annual Congress
meeting in December, 1928, he agreed that if India did not receive
dominion status in one year, he would lead the fight for independence.
Most members of the Congress and most Indians believed the final
struggle would be violent, but Gandhi would not agree. “If India attains
what will be to me so-called freedom by violent means she will cease to
be the country of my pride,” he said.
Gandhi spent 1929 crisscrossing the country, preparing the masses for
the great struggle. When the Congress party met in December, with
Jawaharlal Nehru as its president, the year was up. A resolution was
passed calling for total independence and secession from the Empire. War
had been declared with civil disobedience the sole weapon and Mahatma
Gandhi the general of the armies. It was he who would decide how and
when the first battle would be fought.
The Salt March
Gandhi said he had an inner voice which counseled him. For more than a
month he searched for the way to begin his campaign, and then in
February, 1930, his voice spoke. He began to attack the salt laws. The
British government had a monopoly on salt; no one could make it or
purchase it from any other source. It was a cardinal example of colonial
exploitation and the sort of oppression understood by every Indian,
from the intellectual who objected to the principle to the peasant who
objected to the price.
On March 2, Gandhi wrote the Viceroy politely indicting the British
for their crimes against India and warning that unless some of the
wrongs were righted he would begin his civil disobedience campaign in
nine days. The Viceroy’s secretary acknowledged the letter coldly; the
British conceded nothing. Gandhi commented, “On bended knee I asked for
bread and I received stone instead.”
A fever mounted in India and around the world as everyone wondered
what Gandhi would do. Local and foreign newspapermen clustered at the
ashram and cables flashed to an audience of curious or concerned
observers.
On March 12, after prayers, Gandhi and seventy-eight disciples, both
men and women, left the satyagraha ashram and headed south on foot. “We
are marching in the name of God,” said Gandhi.
Along the way peasants prostrated themselves in the dust to receive
the blessing of the Mahatma’s presence and kiss his footprints. Each day
more volunteers joined the small army until it swelled to several
thousand. Leaning on a long staff, sixty-one-year-old Gandhi led the
marchers to a place on the seashore called Dandi. It was a
two-hundred-mile trek, and Gandhi, a superb dramatist, covered it in
twenty-four days in an atmosphere of mounting veneration and
excruciating suspense.
Gandhi reached Dandi on April 5. He and his followers prayed all that
night. At dawn he walked into the sea. Then he returned to the shore
and picked up a pinch of salt. This was the signal all India had
awaited. Gandhi had defied the salt laws and was telling his countrymen
to do the same. This was his chosen path of civil disobedience without
violence.
“It seemed as though a spring had been suddenly released,” wrote
Nehru. All over India the war of independence began. The armor of the
Indians was the teaching of Gandhi and their weapon was common salt. On
the coast they produced it illegally; in the interior they bought and
sold it illegally. The exasperated British responded with mass arrests
and beatings, but they could not rewind the spring.
The Indians also resumed noncooperation. They quit their government
jobs, boycotted English goods, and refused to pay taxes. India was
nearly paralyzed, and all the British could think of was to pack the
jails. Within a month after Gandhi held his pinch of salt aloft nearly
one hundred thousand Indians, including most of the leaders of the
Congress party, were political prisoners. But the Indians continued to
wage their war fearlessly and nonviolently.
Gandhi and his disciples remained camped near Dandi and there, on the
night of May 4, thirty armed policemen, two officers, and a magistrate
came to arrest the gentle old pacifist.
Gandhi asked for and received permission to brush his few remaining
teeth. He was then taken directly to jail. There was no accusation, no
trial, and no sentence; he was simply imprisoned. Before his arrest he
had planned to lead a march against the Dharasana Salt Works. In his
place a woman nationalist, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, addressed the
twenty-five hundred volunteers. “You must not resist,” she warned them.
“You must not even raise a hand to ward off a blow.”
One of Gandhi’s sons led the marchers to the salt works, which were
guarded by four hundred native policemen commanded by six British
officers. An American correspondent who was present wrote, “… at a word
of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing
marchers and rained blows on their heads … Not one of the marchers even
raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins …
sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken
shoulders … Hour after hour stretcher-bearers carried back a stream of
inert, bleeding bodies.”
The world observed in horror. The conquering British were not morally
superior to the subjugated Indians after all. Even the British were
shaken. No civilized person continues to strike a man who won’t strike
back. It was apparent that if the British weren’t violent they would
lose and if they were violent, they would lose anyway. Though seventeen
years were to pass before India became formally independent, Gandhi and
satyagraha — the force of truth — had broken the chains.
Purifying India
The harried British had to relent. They had neither enough jails to
hold all of India nor enough functionaries to keep the country operating
while the rebellion was on. Gandhi and other Congress leaders were
freed, and on February 17, 1931, Gandhi met with the Viceroy. A
Conservative member of Parliament named Winston Churchill announced it
was “nauseating” to see Gandhi negotiating “on equal terms with the
representative of the King-Emperor.” He argued that “Gandhi-ism and all
it stands for will have to be … crushed.”
But Gandhi was far from crushed. After many discussions he agreed to
cancel the civil disobedience campaign while the British agreed to
permit Indians on the coast to make their own salt, to release political
prisoners, and to arrange a conference in London to resolve the central
issue of Indian independence.
In the autumn of 1931, with several aides, a goat to provide his
milk, and a collapsible spinning wheel, Gandhi attended the London
conference. In his declaration to the customs officer he said, “I am a
poor mendicant. My earthly possessions consist of six spinning wheels,
prison dishes, a can of goat’s milk, six home-spun loincloths and
towels, and my reputation which cannot be worth much.”
He traveled widely in England, calling for an “honorable partnership”
for the two nations. His compassion, warmth, and wit won the hearts of
the poor, the young, and the press, who reported with glee such remarks
about his loincloth as, “You wear plus-fours; I prefer minus-fours.”
Invited to tea with the King and Queen he wore only his loincloth and a
shawl. When someone asked if he had enough on he replied, “The King had
enough on for both of us.”
Though Gandhi made many friends during his stay in England, the
conference was a failure. Most of the delegates the Viceroy had sent to
represent India were there to preserve or extend the rights and
privileges of specific minorities. By the end of the meeting India
seemed more divided than ever and independence more remote.
Gandhi spent some time on the continent before returning to India.
When he finally arrived in December, a new and harsher cabinet was in
power in London. A number of Congress leaders, including Nehru, were
again under arrest; in one area where a civil disobedience campaign was
underway all civil liberties had been suspended.
Gandhi tried to negotiate with the country whose King had sipped tea
with him several months earlier; it reacted by arresting him on January
4, 1932. By February, twenty thousand political prisoners were again in
custody.
Meanwhile, the British were constructing a new constitution for
India. In addition to providing that Hindus vote only for Hindus and
Moslems for Moslems in the provincial legislatures, it was decided that
untouchables could vote only for untouchables. Gandhi had always striven
to make untouchables acceptable to Hindus; he knew that separate
electorates would only drive the two groups further apart.
On September 13 Gandhi announced that “to sting Hindu conscience” and
end the separate electorates he would “fast unto death,” beginning on
September 20. The British, who always feared that his death would signal
a bloody revolt, announced that if the Hindus and untouchables reached a
more satisfactory electoral agreement they would accept it.
At 11:30 A.M. on September 20, still in prison, Gandhi drank lemon
juice and honey in hot water and began his fast. His close friend, the
poet Rabindranath Tagore said, “A shadow is darkening today over India…”
India watched the shadow with dread. Millions fasted along with
Gandhi the first twenty-four hours, while politicians worked feverishly
to reach a compromise. Gandhi was a living god, and no one wanted to
bear the guilt for his crucifixion.
Although Gandhi usually fasted as easily as other persons ate, this
ordeal was especially agonizing. By the fourth day doctors feared he was
dying. At last a compromise was reached. Hindus and untouchables would
vote together, and a certain number of seats would be set aside for
untouchables to guarantee them representation.
It took six days for the plan to be approved by everyone, including
the British and Gandhi. Then he broke his fast with a sip of orange
juice. He had forced Hindus to accept untouchables not only as citizens
with equal rights but as human beings. For as he lay dying, homes and
temples were opened to the untouchables for the first time in three
thousand years.
In May of 1933 Gandhi fasted twenty-one days for personal reasons.
The British, still nervous about his dying in their custody, released
him from prison. On August 1, however, he was rearrested for a civil
disobedience act. He was released three days later, rearrested for
disobeying a court order, and finally freed again when he began another
fast.
For the next six years Gandhi stayed out of jail and out of politics,
though his influence with the Congress party was so great that it did
nothing without his approval and all the members religiously wore
homespun.
He was in his late sixties now, slender, toothless, half-naked, with a
toothbrush moustache, large round spectacles, jutting ears, and a
shaved head. He once protested that a cartoonist had made his ears too
big, then admitted he didn’t know how big they were because he no longer
looked at himself in a mirror. Still seeking to purify India, Gandhi
toured the country tirelessly, denouncing untouchability and trying to
restore the peasants’ faith in themselves. He objected to extremes of
wealth and poverty and wanted to make every village self-sufficient,
producing its own food and clothing its own people. The peasants came to
him for his blessings and his advice on food, health, and sex. When he
passed, they kissed the roads he trod upon.
But as Gandhi’s shadow glided gently over the dusty paths of India a
more brutal image seized the world’s attention. Adolf Hitler was
igniting the second great war. Still Gandhi preached ahimsa, or
nonviolence. He would rather be killed than kill, he declared.
When the Nazis began to exterminate the Jews, Gandhi advised
nonviolence and voluntary sacrifice. “I can conceive the necessity of
the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of
dictators,” he said. For reasons that had nothing to do with Gandhi but
were graven in their own heritage most Jews did respond nonviolently.
Not hundreds or thousands were murdered, but six million, and the
slaughter ceased only when the Nazis were destroyed. If Gandhi had
earlier proved that nonviolence is sometimes an effective weapon, the
Nazis proved it is effective only against a civilized opponent.
“Don’t Cut India in Two”
When England went to war in September, 1939, she included India in
the declaration without consulting her. This undiplomatic reminder of
their subjection offended the Indians. Gandhi and most of the Congress
leaders, however, sympathized with the Allies, and when Nehru issued a
statement saying “a free India” would willingly associate with other
free nations, Gandhi supported it even though it was not entirely
consistent with his total faith in nonviolence. “My aim is not to be
consistent with my previous statements,” he observed, “but to be
consistent with the truth.”
But England refused to take the hint and offered India nothing.
Congress then decided not to aid Britain in the war. Some Indian leaders
wanted to turn on Britain while she was under assault by the Nazis, but
Gandhi said, “We do not seek our independence out of Britain’s ruin.”
In 1940 Congress again offered to support England if India were
granted freedom. But the Prime Minister, the same Winston Churchill who
earlier had said that Gandhi had to be crushed, was adamantly opposed to
such a trade. One of the reasons he offered was that he would not turn
over power to an Indian government unacceptable to the Moslems.
Congress now threatened a campaign of civil disobedience, but Gandhi,
unwilling to weaken England while she was under heavy attack, confined
it to having Congress leaders speak out against the war and go to jail.
Congress cooperated, as did the British, and over twenty-three thousand
persons were arrested.
When Japan joined the Nazi cause in December, 1941, the situation
changed dramatically. India’s cooperation or noncooperation could now
seriously affect the war in the Pacific. Britain immediately freed some
of the political prisoners, while Gandhi advised the greatest nonviolent
resistance campaign in history if Japan attacked.
This photo shows Gandhi with Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, July 6, 1946.
America wanted India’s assistance in the war against the Japanese
and, as a former British colony, was sympathetic to India’s desire for
independence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt began to press Churchill
to yield on the Indian issue. China and some British politicians added
their weight. Churchill grumbled, “I have not become the King’s First
Minister in order to preside at the liquidation of the British Empire,”
but in March, 1942, he finally sent Sir Stafford Cripps to India with a
series of proposals. Although the proposals offered India dominion
status, they were rejected by Gandhi and the Congress because they
provided special treatment for the wealthy Indian princes, made it
possible for any province to reject the constitution and become a
separate nation, and put the British in control of India’s role in the
war.
Cripps returned to London, leaving the Indians angry, frustrated, and
disappointed. Congress renewed its plea for independence on acceptable
terms and threatened a civil disobedience campaign led by Gandhi. The
night the decision was approved, Gandhi and most of the Congress
hierarchy were arrested.
India had been tasting independence for about twenty years; she had
felt free ever since the war began. When news of the arrests became
known, the Indians erupted against the British in acts of violence,
murder, and rebellion across the country.
The British blamed Gandhi, who was powerless to do anything because
they held him in prison. If he had not been arrested he would have
sought a nonviolent outlet for his people similar to the Salt March.
Imprisoned, he could do nothing but pray. For a time he was not even
aware of the turmoil, because he was not permitted to read any
newspapers.
Pained by British accusations that he was somehow responsible for the
thing he hated most, Gandhi announced he would fast twenty-one days.
The Viceroy dismissed the announcement as “a form of political
blackmail.” Nevertheless the British offered to free him. He refused and
fasted in jail.
He was seventy-two years old and everyone, including his wife
Kasturbai, who was in prison with him, expected him to die. But somehow
he survived, and before he was released it was Kasturbai who died, on
February 22, 1944, her head resting in her husband’s lap. They had been
married over sixty years, and Gandhi wrote, “I feel the loss more than I
had thought I should.”
Not long after, Gandhi was struck down by malaria, followed by a
severe intestinal disease. The British, still fearful of the
consequences of his dying in their custody, freed him on May 6, 1944. As
soon as he was well, Gandhi began a series of frustrating, fruitless
conferences with the Moslem leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who, now that
India was on the threshold of independence, was insisting that a
separate Moslem state of Pakistan be carved out of it.
Hindus in India outnumbered Moslems three to one. Most of the Moslems
were, in fact, Hindus who had been converted to Islam by various
conquerors. But the Moslems felt themselves to be an oppressed minority;
they feared that an India ruled by Hindus would deny them equal
opportunities in employment, education, and basic liberties. Their
solution was to establish a separate Moslem state and their spokesman
was Jinnah.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah was as different from Gandhi as Satan is from
God. Where Gandhi’s weapon was love, Jinnah’s was hate. Years before,
Jinnah had been a leader of the Congress party but he had abandoned it
in disdain when Gandhi took control and tried to make it more
democratic. Hating Gandhi and believing himself the victim of countless
slights, he became leader of a party called the Moslem League, which was
anti-Gandhi, anti-Congress, and anti-India.
To win peasant support for a separate Moslem state, Jinnah enflamed
the Hindu-Moslem religious hatred that always simmered beneath India’s
surface. Gandhi, who usually spoke kindly even of his enemies, called
Jinnah “an evil genius” and a “maniac.” For the Mahatma there could be
no Hindu nation or Moslem nation, but only an Indian nation. “I find no
parallel in history for a body of converts and their descendants
claiming to be a nation apart from the parent stock,” he wrote. On
another occasion he told Jinnah, “You can cut me in two if you wish but
don’t cut India in two.” Jinnah would have been happy to do both.
World War II ended during the summer of 1945, and the Labour Party
replaced Churchill’s Conservatives in office. The new government made it
clear it wanted “an early realization of self-government in India.”
In March, 1946, a British mission went to India to work out the terms
of independence. After hearing Moslem demands for a separate state,
they advised against partition and recommended a united country with a
federal government and special safeguards for the Moslem minority. A
provisional government would be established and then a constituent
assembly elected to draft a constitution for the new land.
Because he was refused the right to veto Congress appointments to the
provisional government, Jinnah refused to participate in it. On August
12, 1946, the Viceroy told Jawaharlal Nehru to form the government.
Nehru offered Jinnah a choice of positions for the Moslem League, but he
was rebuffed. Taking their lead from the Hindu-Moslem disputes at the
parliamentary level, the Hindus and Moslems unsheathed their blades in
the cities. At least five thousand persons were slaughtered in religious
rioting in Calcutta.
Nehru became India’s first Prime Minister on September 2, and Jinnah
proclaimed it a day of mourning. “We are not yet in the midst of civil
war,” said Gandhi, “but we are nearing it.”
“The Light Has Gone Out”
The battle between Hindus and Moslems moved swiftly from the
conference rooms to the streets. Gandhi, who cared more for peace than
for politics, decided to make a pilgrimage to the most remote and
primitive areas of east Bengal, where the religious war had spread to
the villages. “I am not going to leave Bengal until the last embers of
the trouble are stamped out,” he said. “If necessary, I will die here.”
He was seventy-seven years old, yet he undertook a laborious trek
through forty-nine villages, walking barefoot as a penitent for miles
each day over roads strewn by his enemies with filth or glass. He stayed
in each village long enough to restore calm, and then moved on. But
this was one small area and all of India was afire.
In February, 1947, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced
that England would leave India no later than June of 1948, and that he
was appointing Lord Louis Mountbatten as the last British Viceroy, to
prepare for the departure. Mountbatten conferr:ed with Gandhi, Jinnah,
and the Congress leaders. Jinnah insisted on partition and threatened
civil war if it were denied. The Congress leaders, anxious to avoid a
war and hungry for independence, bowed to Jinnah’s demands. Only Gandhi
was adamant. He would rather postpone independence than divide India.
Though he was overruled, fate was to prove him right. Jinnah, Pakistan’s
angry champion, died the following year. If the Congress and the
British had waited a little longer, Jinnah’s death would have eliminated
the vivisection of India and the bloodshed that followed.
On June 3, 1947, Mountbatten announced a partition plan that had been
approved by the Congress and the Moslem League. Jinnah and violence had
won. It was Gandhi’s supreme humiliation. He had fought for
independence for thirty-two years and had, essentially, won it in 1930
with his satyagraha campaign against the salt laws. But when
independence finally materialized, truth-force had crumbled before brute
force. Gandhi’s friends had no more accepted the principle of
nonviolence than had his enemies.
India’s official independence day was August 15, 1947, but Gandhi
refused to participate in the celebrations. Instead, he was in Calcutta,
where there had been brutal rioting, fasting and praying in a Moslem
household. When the frenzy went so far that he could no longer cool it
and he was attacked in his bedroom by a mob, he decided to fast until
“sanity returns to Calcutta.” The fighting ceased immediately, and
before three days had passed civic leaders pledged it would not be
resumed. They kept their word, even while terror raged through the rest
of India.
The partition of the country into India and Pakistan initiated one of
the most calamitous religious wars in history. No matter how the lines
were drawn, some Moslems remained in Hindu territory and some Hindus
were trapped in Pakistan. In both places the majority turned on the
minority. It is estimated that as many as seven or eight million persons
were butchered. Another fifteen million were displaced as they fled
their homes to seek shelter in the opposite country, and their numbers
were reduced only by murder, famine, and disease.
“Both sides appear to have gone crazy,” said a heartbroken Gandhi. He
was then in Delhi, the nation’s capital, and even there the Hindus were
shamelessly slaughtering Moslems in the streets.
On October 2, 1947, Gandhi was seventy-eight years old. He had once
spoken of living to be 125, for he had so much to do, but he no longer
wished to. “There is nothing but anguish in my heart,” he said. “Time
was, whatever I said the masses followed. Today, mine is a lone voice …”
Every evening Gandhi held a prayer meeting at Birla House, where he
stayed, surrounded by his family and his disciples. Because he always
read verses from the Koran as well as from the Hindu scriptures, some
Hindus accused him of being pro-Moslem. At the same time, Moslems
demanded his reasons for opposing Pakistan.
Unable to halt the violence in the capital, Gandhi resorted to his
ultimate weapon. On January 13, 1948, he began a fast for peace in
Delhi. When the leaders of the Hindu community pledged they would cease
persecuting the Moslems, his heart lifted and he broke his fast. “Come
what may,” he said, “there will be complete friendship between the
Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Christians, and Jews …”
While he was still recovering from the fast he announced at a prayer
meeting one evening that he hoped to go to Pakistan to work for peace.
As he spoke there was an explosion. Someone had tried to kill him with a
crude bomb. No one was hurt and the assassin was caught. He was one of a
group of fanatic Hindus who wanted total war with Pakistan in order to
obliterate all Moslems. Because they felt Gandhi stood in their way,
these Hindus had decided to kill him.
On January 30, as was his custom, Gandhi held his outdoor prayer
meeting. In the front row of spectators sat another member of the
fanatic group, a thirty-five-year-old newspaper editor named Nathuram
Vinayak Godse. In his pocket was a small pistol.
As Gandhi walked through the crowd toward the platform where he would
sit, he raised his hands to his forehead in the traditional Hindu
blessing. It was about 5:10 P.M. Suddenly Godse rose in front of him and
rapidly fired three times.
“As for me,” Gandhi had once said, “nothing better can happen to a
satyagrahi than meeting death all unsought in the very act of
satyagraha, that is, pursuing truth.”
At the first shot Gandhi faltered. At the second shot his hands
dropped to his sides. With the third shot he crumbled and died. His last
words were Hey Rama, which mean, “0 God.”
That night Prime Minister Nehru told the Indian people and the world,
“The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere …
The light has gone out, I said, and yet I was wrong. For the light that
shone in this country was no ordinary light … A thousand years later
that light will still be seen … for that light represented … the living
truth.”
Postscript
The light of Gandhi’s teaching is seen in America today in the work
of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader and winner of
the 1964 Nobel Prize for Peace. In his book Stride Toward Freedom Dr.
King has written, “I had come to see early that the Christian
doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence
was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his
struggle for freedom … In other words, Christ furnished the spirit and
motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.”
In Stride Toward Freedom there is a chapter called “Pilgrimage to
Nonviolence” in which Dr. King discusses Gandhi’s influence on him and
analyzes the philosophy of Gandhian nonviolence. Excerpts from this
chapter follow:
“First, it must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a
method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because he
is afraid or merely because he lacks the instruments of violence, he is
not truly nonviolent. This is why Gandhi often said that if cowardice is
the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight … The method is
passive physically, but strongly active spiritually. It is not passive
nonresistance to evil, it is active nonviolent resistance to evil.
“A second basic fact that characterizes nonviolence is that it does
not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship
and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his
protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that these
are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of
moral shame in the opponent … The aftermath of nonviolence is the
creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is
tragic bitterness.
“A third characteristic of this method is that the attack is directed
against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be
doing the evil … We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons
who may be unjust.
“A fourth point that characterizes nonviolent resistance is a
willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows
from the opponent without striking back. ‘Rivers of blood may have to
flow before we gain our freedom, but it must be our blood,’ Gandhi said
to his countrymen. The nonviolent resister … does not seek to dodge
jail. If going to jail is necessary, he enters it ‘as a bridegroom
enters the bride’s chamber…’
“A fifth point concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not
only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit.
The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he
also refuses to hate him. At the center of nonviolence stands the
principle of love …
“A sixth basic fact about nonviolent resistance is that it is based
on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice.
Consequently, the believer in nonviolence has deep faith in the future.
This faith is another reason why the nonviolent resister can accept
suffering without retaliation. For he knows that in his struggle for
justice he has cosmic companionship …”
