The person who missed Gandhi most was Maud Polak. With his departure, she would work under L. W. Ritch on the South African British Indian Committee. ‘She is throwing herself heart and soul into the work,’ wrote Ritch to her brother. ‘Gandhi has influenced her wonderfully and I am looking upon her as a sister.’ Precisely how wonderful the chief’s influence was is described in two little-known letters written by Gandhi himself to Henry Polak. On 11 November, the day before Meyer’s party, he wrote that Maud was ‘very seriously thinking’ of coming to South Africa. ‘Last evening she could not restrain herself, and told me she wanted to go to South Africa very badly and work for the cause.’ Gandhi said that while Maud was ‘very sweet-natured’ and ‘capable of great self-sacrifice’, he did
not know how far the Phoenix life would suit her … I have told her all I could about things. I have told her as well as I could about the jarring notes there, and I have told her, too, that there is no money in it. I have further told her how Millie herself finds it difficult to reconcile … to life at Phoenix … I have told her, too, that however much she may regard my view, and like it, I consider myself incompetent to enter into all a woman’s feelings, and when she has accessible to her Millie’s loving assistance and advice, she cannot do better than rely upon her judgment.74
Four days later, while on board ship, Gandhi wrote to Polak again about his sister’s growing attachment to himself and his cause. ‘She cannot tear herself away from me,’ he remarked:
I was watching her closely at the station. She was on the point of breaking down. She would not shake hands with me. She wanted a kiss. That she could not have at the station, not that she or I was afraid but it would be misunderstood. So she stood right on the platform … If all she has shown to be genuine she may eclipse you [in devotion to me].
Maud Polak had been desperately keen to accompany Gandhi to South Africa. Her sister-in-law Millie, probably at his urgings, filled her in on the ‘jarring notes’: namely, ‘beetles everywhere, spiders, ants in the milk, no baths, water bad, people half naked, filth too, lift a plate and you will find an insect underneath, snakes hanging from the tree, you have not only to tolerate this but love the insect life, you may not destroy any life …’ Maud Polak was undeterred by these descriptions – she still wanted to go where Gandhi was. South Africa was to her terra nova. Jobless, unmarried, stuck with her parents in London, it was a land with enormous appeal, not least because Gandhi lived there. The past four months had been spent almost continuously in his company. Maud’s feelings for Gandhi were intense, and probably romantic. (Years later, with his sister’s attachment to his friend in mind, Polak recalled that while Gandhi ‘was by no means good-looking by Indian standards … throughout his life many notable women were greatly attracted by his personality, and he always had women friends, both British and Indian.’)75
Maud Polak was attracted by Gandhi’s personality, and perhaps also by his profile – a successful lawyer, a leader of a popular movement, an Indian who parleyed with Secretaries of State and Members of Parliament. His feelings for her, on the other hand, were paternal. Gandhi’s letter to her brother Henry thus continues:
I have told her [Maud] that I consider Indian civilization to be the best in the world and therefore [what] it means for her to be more Indianized than you are. She revels in the thought. Such is the condition in which I have left her. Mrs. G[andhi] used to describe you as my first born lovingly. She would accept Maud as my first born lovingly. She I think will fill her life. Mark a father’s selfishness. You are to me – Chhota Bhai – a younger brother and yet more than a brother … Maud on the other hand can be my first born and therefore in some ways more than you are to me. She will claim more of me. Can I give it? Am I worthy of all affection? Is she worthy of it from me? Unless she is a downright impostor which she is not, she is quite capable of it. The other theory is that the whole thing is a nine days wonder due to the glamour of my personality. If so, I should be shot on sight. For if people can be so falsely enthused by me, I am useless – a power more for harm than good. However that may be, there is a huge problem for you and me to solve. May Maud go to Phoenix? If her affection is real it will be a sin for anybody to prevent that. I leave it at that.76
Gandhi also wrote to Millie, who, in London, had seen his friendship with her sister-in-law develop at rather close quarters. The ‘intensity of affection’ that Maud displayed, her insistence that she would go wherever Gandhi was – was ‘all this real’, he wondered, ‘or is it the glamour of my presence?’ Gandhi asked Millie now ‘to observe Maud, analyse her, cross-examine her and find out where she is. There is no present need of anybody at Phoenix. And yet if Maud is what she says she is, she will always be wanted.’77
To Millie, Gandhi likewise described Maud as ‘my first-born daughter’. Her devotion to him was apparently unconditional – so unlike the attitude towards him of his first-born biological son. In London, Maud could attend to Gandhi from daybreak to dusk, but in South Africa, of course, there were other claimants on his time. Henry and Millie Polak seem to have advised her to treat the friendship as a nine weeks’ wonder, and not to pursue Gandhi across the oceans.
Millie Polak has left a vivid portrait of Gandhi entertaining his guests in the Westminster Palace Hotel. At lunchtime, his friends and associates would come in to discuss the progress of the negotiations. As the guests trooped in,
the table in the centre, normally covered with a nice velvet cloth … would be cleared. Books and papers would get stacked upon the floor. Then newspapers would be spread over the table, and piles of oranges, apples, bananas, perhaps grapes, and a big bag of unshelled monkey- or pea-nuts, would be put ready. Mr Gandhi would ring for the waiter, and when an attendant, resplendent in white shirt and tail-coat, appeared, he would order tea and toast for those who desired it … Soon the silver tea-tray, beautifully appointed, would be brought in; then we would set to work, eating, drinking, talking and laughing. Some would walk about or stand, and the nut-shells would fly around the room, orange juice would run over the paper-covered table, and at the end of the meal the room looked rather as if an ill-bred party of schoolboys had been let loose in it … Mr Gandhi would be totally untroubled by all the mess and muddle in the room, and the waiter never lost his dignified gravity as he cleared away the rubbish.78
It had been an intense four and a half months in London, in which Gandhi had argued with Indian extremists, exchanged courtesies with British Baptists, and exchanged letters with the most famous Russian novelist of his time (or any other). He had developed a relationship of rare, if wholly non-sexual, intimacy with a young Englishwoman. Even so, the visit had to be reckoned a failure, for the concessions he had sought for Indians in the Transvaal were denied him. Letters written by his associates in the week of Gandhi’s departure keenly capture the disappointment. Lord Ampthill, writing to Lord Curzon, lamented that it was a Liberal Government that, for the first time in the history of the Empire, had instituted ‘an actual “colour” bar’. He planned to move a motion in the House of Lords, and expected Curzon to support him. The ‘spirit of the Transvaal Indians has not been broken,’ noted Ampthill. ‘Meanwhile, the question has become thoroughly understood in India and there will be irreparable mischief if the situation is not saved at once’.79
16
The Contest of Civilizations
On 13 November, 1909, Mohandas Gandhi and Hajee Habib boarded the SS Kildonan Castle, bound for Cape Town. For the next week Gandhi scarcely saw his companion at all. This was by choice, for he was occupied with writing a text whose contours had become clear in his mind those months in London. He wrote it in Gujarati, by hand, and at such a fast clip that he completed a draft in nine days. He was tired – turning now to his left hand to write letters – but satisfied. In 275 pages of manuscript, only a dozen lines seem to have been scratched out and rewritten.1
The Gujarati edition of the book was published in January 1910, with the title, Hind Swaraj. The English version,
dictated by Gandhi to Hermann Kallenbach, was called Indian Home Rule, and appeared two months later. (Both were printed on the press at Phoenix that also brought out Indian Opinion.) In either language it carries, a hundred years later, a singular status as the first book Gandhi published, and as the only extended, if not wholly considered, statement of his political and moral philosophy. Although many thematic collections of his writings appeared in his lifetime, Gandhi published only three books qua books. Since the other two were works of autobiography, Hind Swaraj carries even more weight as representing, so to speak, his most important political testament.2
Hind Swaraj was profoundly shaped by Gandhi’s recent stay in the United Kingdom. What he heard, saw and said in those four months fed directly and immediately into the writing of the book. There were, in particular, two provocations. The first was the murder of Curzon Wyllie and the flurry of excitement it provoked. Dhingra’s act, and its endorsement by young Indians such as Savarkar, alerted Gandhi to the appeal of violence among the young. To combat this, he needed to state – or restate – the case for non-violence.
The second provocation was more curious. In the third week of September 1909, the Illustrated London News published a withering attack on the idea of Indian nationalism. Its author was G. K. Chesterton, who was then writing a weekly column for the magazine. Chesterton was not especially known for his interest in Britain’s colonies; indeed, this may have been his only essay on the subject.
Chesterton had been reading Indian Sociologist, the journal published by Shyamaji Krishnavarma, and keenly followed by Indian students in England and the Continent. He thought their ideas unoriginal; as he wrote, ‘the principal weakness of Indian Nationalism seems to be that it is not very Indian and not very national’. There was a world of difference between ‘a conquered people demanding its own institutions and the same people demanding the institutions of a conqueror’. The Indian nationalists Chesterton was reading (and meeting)
simply say with ever-increasing excitability, ‘Give me a ballot-box. Provide me with a Ministerial dispatch-box. Hand me over the Lord Chancellor’s wig. I have a natural right to be Prime Minister. I have a heaven-born claim to introduce a Budget. My soul is starved if I am excluded from the Editorship of the Daily Mail’, or words to that effect.
If, on the other hand, one of these men had demanded a return to a pre-British past, on the grounds that ‘every system has its sins, and we prefer our own’, Chesterton would have considered ‘him an Indian Nationalist, or, at least, an authentic Indian’. This kind of Indian would have chosen Maharajas over civil servants, on the grounds that ‘I prefer one king whom I hardly ever see to a hundred kings regulating my diet and my children.’ Admitting the existence of sectarian differences in India, he would nonetheless have insisted that ‘religion is more important than peace’. ‘If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort,’ this authentic Nationalist would have told the alien ruler, ‘we never asked you to. Go and leave us with it.’3
Gandhi read Chesterton’s article, and its message resonated with him. He sent a piece to Indian Opinion which contained long excerpts from this article written by one ‘read by millions with great avidity’. He thought
Indians must reflect over these views of Mr Chesterton and consider what they should rightly demand. May it not be that we seek to advance our own interests in the name of the Indian people? Or, that we have been endeavouring to destroy what the Indian people have carefully nurtured through thousands of years?4
The views of Dhingra and Savarkar, and the gloss on them by Chesterton, persuaded Gandhi that he needed to write a manifesto for the freedom of India that was not derivative; that was based on the traditions of the subcontinent rather than on received models of European nationalism.
In late September 1909, when Chesterton’s article appeared, it was clear that the Indian deputation to London would return empty-handed. Gandhi was now free to make public statements about their mission – and about other matters. Two speeches he made form an important part of the background to the writing of Hind Swaraj. On 5 October, some expatriates in London held a meeting in support of the third Gujarati Literary Conference, being held in Rajkot. They asked Gandhi to speak. He urged his audience to cultivate pride in their mother tongue, noting that ‘one strong reason why the Boers enjoy swarajya [freedom] today is that they and their children mostly use their own language.’ As ‘the basis of my pride as an Indian’, he said,
I must have pride in myself as a Gujarati. Otherwise we will be left without any moorings … If only we make on Indian languages half the effort that we waste on English, thanks to certain notions of ours, the situation will change altogether … It is, therefore, a very good sign that Gujarati, Bengali, Urdu and Marathi conferences are beginning to be held.5
A week later, Gandhi spoke to the Hampstead Peace and Arbitration Society. The writer C. E. Maurice (a heterodox Christian) was in the chair. Rejecting Kipling’s claim that East and West could never meet, Gandhi observed that
there had been individual instances of English and Indian people living together under the same rule without a jarring note, and what was true of individuals could be made true of nations … [At the same time] to a certain extent it was true that there was no meeting place between civilisations … It seemed to him that the chief characteristic of modern civilisation [was that it] worshipped the body more than the spirit, and gave everything for the glorifying of the body. Their railways, telegraphs and telephones, did they tend to help them forward to a moral elevation?
Gandhi drew for himself and his audience a contrast between the holy Hindu city ‘Benares of old, before there was a mad rush of civilization’ and the Banaras of today, which was an ‘unholy city’. ‘Unless this mad rush was changed, a calamity must come. One way would be for them to adopt modern civilization; but far be it for him to say that they should ever do so. India would then be the football of the world, and the two nations [India and Britain] would be flying at each other.’6
The day after his Hampstead speech Gandhi wrote to Henry Polak about it. The talk and the discussion that followed had provoked in him a series of reflections and conclusions. He had come round to the view that ‘there is no impassable barrier between East and West’; rather, there was one between ancient and modern civilization. Thus ‘the people of Europe, before they were touched by modern civilisation, had much in common with the people of the East.’ India was now being damaged by modern artefacts such as the railway and telephones, with cities like Bombay and Calcutta becoming the ‘real plague spots’. If ‘British rule was replaced tomorrow by Indian rule based on modern methods,’ said Gandhi to Polak, ‘India would be no better’; in fact, then ‘Indians would only become a second or fifth edition of Europe or America.’ Therefore, ‘India’s salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during the past fifty years.’ Among the reforms proposed by Gandhi in this letter was that Indians should stop wearing machine-made clothing, whether manufactured in factories owned by Europeans or by Indians themselves.
Gandhi also felt that ‘it was simply impertinence for any man or any body of men to begin or contemplate reform of the whole world.’ Rather,
all of us who think likewise must take the necessary step; and the rest, if we are in the right, must follow. The theory is there: our practice will have to approach it as much as possible. Living in the midst of the rush, we may not be able to shake ourselves free from all taint. Every time I get into a railway car, or use a motor-bus, I know that I am doing violence to my sense of what is right.
His time in London had convinced him that ‘I was entirely off the track when I considered that I should receive a medical training.’ He now felt that modern hospitals ‘perpetuate vice, misery and degradation’; had there been no hospitals for the cure of venereal diseases, there would be ‘less sexual vice amongst us’. So it ‘would be sinful for me in any way whatsoever to take part in the abominations that go on in the hospitals’.7
T
he speeches to Gujaratis and pacifists were throat-clearing exercises, hesitant, abbreviated anticipations of the full-blown polemic that was Hind Swaraj. The book was written in the demotic mode, with an abundant use of metaphors. It was constructed around an imaginary conversation between a ‘Reader’, who was almost certainly modelled on Pranjivan Mehta, and an ‘Editor’, who, of course, was Gandhi himself.8 The sanction for this device came from tradition, for it was widely used in classical Indian literature, above all the Bhagavad-Gita, where Krishna answers and clarifies the doubts and anxieties of Arjuna.
The twenty short chapters of Hind Swaraj dealt with such subjects as the meanings of freedom and passive resistance, and the definition of ‘true civilization’. One chapter deals with ‘the condition of England’; five chapters with the ‘condition of India’.
The book begins by rehearsing the history of Indian nationalism since the founding of the Congress in 1885. Gandhi deplored the dismissal by young hotheads of Naoroji and Gokhale as lackeys of Empire. These moderates had prepared the way for what followed, and ‘it is a mark of wisdom not to kick against the very step from which we have risen higher. The removal of a step from a staircase brings down the whole of it.’ The partisanship of the radicals distressed him; it was, he remarked, ‘a bad habit to say that another man’s thoughts are bad and ours only are good, and that those holding different views from ours are the enemies of the country.’
The chapter on the condition of England is severe on British political institutions. ‘That which you consider the mother of Parliaments,’ the editor tells the reader, ‘is like a sterile woman and prostitute. The Parliament has not yet of its own accord done a single good thing, hence I have compared it to a sterile woman. The natural condition of that Parliament is such that, without outside pressure, it can do nothing. It is like a prostitute because it is under the control of ministers who change from time to time.’