Away with ancient purdah! Come out of the kitchens quick! Fling the pots and pans rattling into the corners! Tear the cloth from your eyes, and see the new world! Let your husbands and brothers cook for themselves. There is much work to be done to make India a nation!49
V. THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
The westernized students—The secularization of heaven—The Indian National Congress
In 1923 there were over a thousand Hindus studying in England, presumably an equal number in America, perhaps an equal number elsewhere. They marveled at the privileges enjoyed by the lowliest citizens of western Europe and America; they studied the French and American Revolutions, and read the literature of reform and revolt; they gloated over the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Constitution; they went back to their countries as centers of infection for democratic ideas and the gospel of liberty. The industrial and scientific advances of the West, and the victory of the Allies in the War, gave to these ideas an irresistible prestige; soon every student was shouting the battle-cry of freedom. In the schools of England and America the Hindus learned to be free.
These Western-educated Orientals had not only taken on political ideals in the course of their education abroad, they had shed religious ideas; the two processes are usually associated, in biography and in history. They came to Europe as pious youths, wedded to Krishna, Shiva, Vishnu, Kali, Rama . . .; they touched science, and their ancient faiths were shattered as by some sudden catalytic shock. Shorn of religious belief, which is the very spirit of India, the Westernized Hindus returned to their country disillusioned and sad; a thousand gods had dropped dead from the skies* Then, inevitably, Utopia filled the place of Heaven, democracy became a substitute for Nirvana, liberty replaced God. What had gone on in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century now went on in the East.
Nevertheless the new ideas developed slowly. In 1885 a few Hindu leaders met at Bombay and founded the “Indian National Congress,” but they do not seem to have dreamed then even of Home Rule. The effort of Lord Curzon to partition Bengal (that is, to destroy the unity and strength of the most powerful and politically conscious community in India) roused the Nationalists to a more rebel mood; and at the Congress of 1905 the uncompromising Tilak demanded Swaraj. He had created the word50 out of Sanskrit roots still visible in its English translation—“selfrule.” In that same eventful year Japan defeated Russia; and the East, which for a century had been fearful of the West, began to lay plans for the liberation of Asia. China followed Sun Yat Sen, took up the sword, and fell into the arms of Japan. India, weaponless, accepted as her leader one of the strangest figures in history, and gave to the world the unprecedented phenomenon of a revolution led by a saint, and waged without a gun.
VI. MAHATMA GANDHI
Portrait of a saint—The ascetic—The Christian—The education of Gandhi—In Africa—The Revolt of 1921—“I am the man”—Prison years—’Young India”—The revolution of the spinning-wheel—The achievements of Gandhi
Picture the ugliest, slightest, weakest man in Asia, with face and flesh of bronze, close-cropped gray head, high cheek-bones, kindly little brown eyes, a large and almost toothless mouth, larger ears, an enormous nose, thin arms and legs, clad in a loin cloth, standing before an English judge in India, on trial for preaching “non-coöperation” to his countrymen. Or picture him seated on a small carpet in a bare room at his Satyagrahashram,—School of Truth-Seekers—at Ahmedabad: his bony legs crossed under him in yogi fashion, soles upward, his hands busy at a spinning-wheel, his face lined with responsibility, his mind active with ready answers to every questioner of freedom. From 1920 to 1935 this naked weaver was both the spiritual and the political leader of 320,000,000 Indians. When he appeared in public, crowds gathered round him to touch his clothing or to kiss his feet.51
Four hours a day he spun the coarse khaddar, hoping by his example to persuade his countrymen to use this simple homespun instead of buying the product of those British looms that had ruined the textile industry of India. His only possessions were three rough cloths—two as his wardrobe and one as his bed. Once a rich lawyer, he had given all his property to the poor, and his wife, after some matronly hesitation, had followed his example. He slept on the bare floor, or on the earth. He lived on nuts, plantains, lemons, oranges, dates, rice, and goat’s milk;52 often for months together he took nothing but milk and fruit; once in his life he tasted meat; occasionally he ate nothing for weeks. “I can as well do without my eyes as without fasts. What the eyes are for the outer world, fasts are for the inner.”53 As the blood thins, he felt, the mind clears, irrelevancies fall away, and fundamental things—sometimes the very Soul of the World—rise out of Maya like Everest through the clouds.
At the same time that he fasted to see divinity he kept one toe on the earth, and advised his followers to take an enema daily when they fasted, lest they be poisoned with the acid products of the body’s self-consumption just as they might be finding God.54 When the Moslems and the Hindus killed one another in theological enthusiasm, and paid no heed to his pleas for peace, he went without food for three weeks to move them. He became so weak and frail through fasts and privations that when he addressed the great audiences that gathered to hear him, he spoke to them from an uplifted chair. He carried his asceticism into the field of sex, and wished, like Tolstoi, to limit all physical intercourse to deliberate reproduction. He too, in his youth, had indulged the flesh too much, and the news of his father’s death had surprised him in the arms of love. Now he returned with passionate remorse to the Brahmacharia that had been preached to him in his boyhood—absolute abstention from all sensual desire. He persuaded his wife to live with him only as sister with brother; and “from that time,” he tells us, “all dissension ceased.”55 When he realized that India’s basic need was birth-control, he adopted not the methods of the West, but the theories of Malthus and Tolstoi.
Is it right for us, who know the situation, to bring forth children? We only multiply slaves and weaklings if we continue the process of procreation whilst we feel and remain helpless. . . . Not till India has become a free nation . . . have we the right to bring forth progeny. . . . I have not a shadow of doubt that married people, if they wish well to the country and want to see India become a nation of strong and handsome, well-formed men and women, would practice self-restraint and cease to procreate for the time being.56
Added to these elements in his character were qualities strangely like those that, we are told, distinguished the Founder of Christianity. He did not mouth the name of Christ, but he acted as if he accepted every word of the Sermon on the Mount. Not since St. Francis of Assisi has any life known to history been so marked by gentleness, disinterestedness, simplicity, and forgiveness of enemies. It was to the credit of his opponents, but still more to his own, that his undiscourageable courtesy to them won a fine courtesy from them in return; the Government sent him to jail with profuse apologies. He never showed rancor or resentment. Thrice he was attacked by mobs, and beaten almost to death; not once did he retaliate; and when one of his assailants was arrested he refused to enter a charge. Shortly after the worst of all riots between Moslems and Hindus, when the Moplah Mohammedans butchered hundreds of unarmed Hindus and offered their prepuces as a covenant to Allah, these same Moslems were stricken with famine; Gandhi collected funds for them from all India, and, with no regard for the best precedents, forwarded every anna, without deduction for “overhead,” to the starving enemy.57
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869. His family belonged to the Vaisya caste, and to the Jain sect, and practised the ahimsa principle of never injuring a living thing. His father was a capable administrator but an heretical financier; he lost place after place through honesty, gave nearly all his wealth to charity, and left the rest to his family.58 While still a boy Mohandas became an atheist, being displeased with the adulterous gallantries of certain Hindu gods; and to make clear
his everlasting scorn for religion, he ate meat. The meat disagreed with him, and he returned to religion.
At eight he was engaged, and at twelve he was married, to Kasturbai, who remained loyal to him through all his adventures, riches, poverty, imprisonments, and Brahmacharia. At eighteen he passed examinations for the university, and went to London to study law. In his first year there he read eighty books on Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount “went straight to my heart on the first reading.”59 He took the counsel to return good for evil, and to love even one’s enemies, as the highest expression of all human idealism; and he resolved rather to fail with these than to succeed without them.
Returning to India in 1891, he practised law for a time in Bombay, refusing to prosecute for debt, and always reserving the right to abandon a case which he had come to think unjust. One case led him to South Africa; there he found his fellow-Hindus so maltreated that he forgot to return to India, but gave himself completely, without remuneration, to the cause of removing the disabilities of his countrymen in Africa. For twenty years he fought this issue out until the Government yielded. Only then did he return home.
Traveling through India he realized for the first time the complete destitution of his people. He was horrified by the skeletons whom he saw toiling in the fields, and the lowly Outcastes who did the menial work of the towns. It seemed to him that the discriminations against his countrymen abroad were merely one consequence of their poverty and subjection at home. Nevertheless he supported England loyally in the War; he even advocated the enlistment of Hindus who did not accept the principle of non-violence. He did not, at that time, agree with those who called for independence; he believed that British misgovernment in India was an exception, and that British government in general was good; that British government in India was bad just because it violated all the principles of British government at home; and that if the English people could be made to understand the case of the Hindus, it would soon accept them in full brotherhood into a commonwealth of free dominions.60 He trusted that when the War was over, and Britain counted India’s sacrifice for the Empire in men and wealth, it would no longer hesitate to give her liberty.
But at the close of the War the agitation for Home Rule was met by the Rowland Acts, which put an end to freedom of speech and press; by the establishment of the impotent legislature of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms; and finally by the slaughter at Amritsar. Gandhi was shocked into decisive action. He returned to the Viceroy the decorations which he had received at various times from British governments; and he issued to India a call for active civil disobedience against the Government of India. The people responded not with peaceful resistance, as he had asked, but with bloodshed and violence; in Bombay, for example, they killed fifty-three unsympathetic Parsees.61 Gandhi, vowed to ahimsa, sent out a second message, in which he called upon the people to postpone the campaign of civil disobedience, on the ground that it was degenerating into mob rule. Seldom in history had a man shown more courage in acting on principle, scorning expediency and popularity. The nation was astonished at his decision; it had supposed itself near to success, and it did not agree with Gandhi that the means might be as important as the end. The reputation of the Mahatma sank to the lowest ebb.
It was just at this point (in March, 1922) that the Government determined upon his arrest. He made no resistance, declined to engage a lawyer, and offered no defense. When the Prosecutor charged him with being responsible, through his publications, for the violence that had marked the outbreak of 1921, Gandhi replied in terms that lifted him at once to nobility.
I wish to endorse all the blame that the learned Advocate-General has thrown on my shoulder in connection with the incidents in Bombay, Madras, and Chauri Chaura. Thinking over these deeply, and sleeping over them night after night, it is impossible for me to dissociate myself from these diabolical crimes. . . . The learned Advocate-General is quite right when he says that as a man of responsibility, a man having received a fair share of education, . . . I should have known the consequences of every one of my acts. I knew that I was playing with fire, I ran the risk, and if I was set free I would still do the same. I felt this morning that I would have failed in my duty if I did not say what I say here just now.
I wanted to avoid violence. I want to avoid violence. Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered had done an irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply sorry for it, and I am therefore here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenuating act. I am here, therefore, to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.62
The Judge expressed his profound regret that he had to send to jail one whom millions of his countrymen considered “a great patriot and a great leader”; he admitted that even those who differed from Gandhi looked upon him “as a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life.”63 He sentenced him to prison for six years.
Gandhi was put under solitary confinement, but he did not complain. “I do not see any of the other prisoners,” he wrote, “though I really do not see how my society could do them any harm.” But “I feel happy. My nature likes loneliness. I love quietness. And now I have opportunity to engage in studies that I had to neglect in the outside world.”64 He instructed himself sedulously in the writings of Bacon, Carlyle, Ruskin, Emerson, Thoreau and Tolstoi, and solaced long hours with Ben Jonson and Walter Scott. He read and re-read the Bhagavad-Gita. He studied Sanskrit, Tamil and Urdu so that he might be able not only to write for scholars but to speak to the multitude. He drew up a detailed schedule of studies for the six years of his imprisonment, and pursued it faithfully till accident intervened. “I used to sit down to my books with the delight of a young man of twenty-four, and forgetting my four-and-fifty years and my poor health.”65
Appendicitis secured his release, and Occidental medicine, which he had often denounced, secured his recovery. A vast crowd gathered at the prison gates to greet him on his exit, and many kissed his coarse garment as he passed. But he shunned politics and the public eye, pled his weakness and illness, and retired to his school at Ahmedabad, where he lived for many years in quiet isolation with his students. From that retreat, however, he sent forth weekly, through his mouthpiece Young India, editorials expounding his philosophy of revolution and life. He begged his followers to shun violence, not only because it would be suicidal, since India had no guns, but because it would only replace one despotism with another. “History,” he told them, “teaches one that those who have, no doubt with honest motives, ousted the greedy by using brute force against them, have in their turn become a prey to the disease of the conquered. . . . My interest in India’s freedom will cease if she adopts violent means. For their fruit will be not freedom, but slavery.”66
The second element in his creed was the resolute rejection of modern industry, and a Rousseauian call for a return to the simple life of agriculture and domestic industry in the village. The confinement of men and women in factories, making with machines owned by others fractions of articles whose finished form they will never see, seemed to Gandhi a roundabout way of burying humanity under a pyramid of shoddy goods. Most machine products, he thought, are unnecessary; the labor saved in using them is consumed in making and repairing them; or if labor is really saved it is of no benefit to labor, but only to capital; labor is thrown by its own productivity into a panic of “technological unemployment.”67 So he renewed the Swadeshi movement announced in 1905 by Tilak; self-production was to be added to Swaraj, self-rule. Gandhi made the use of the charka, or spinning-wheel, a test of loyal adherence to the Nationalist movement; he asked tha
t every Hindu, even the richest, should wear homespun, and boycott the alien and mechanical textiles of Britain, so that the homes of India might hum once more, through the dull winter, with the sound of the spinning-wheel.68
The response was not universal; it is difficult to stop history in its course. But India tried. Hindu students everywhere dressed in khaddar; highborn ladies abandoned their Japanese silk saris for coarse cloths woven by themselves; prostitutes in brothels and convicts in prison began to spin; and in many cities great Feasts of the Vanities were arranged, as in Savonarola’s day, at which wealthy Hindus and merchants brought from their homes and warehouses all their imported cloth, and flung it into the fire. In one day at Bombay alone, 150,000 pieces were consumed by the flames.69
The movement away from industry failed, but it gave India for a decade a symbol of revolt, and helped to polarize her mute millions into a new unity of political consciousness. India doubted the means, but honored the purpose; and though it questioned Gandhi the statesman, it took to its heart Gandhi the saint, and for a moment became one in reverencing him. It was as Tagore said of him: