Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Read online

  RAJMOHAN GANDHI

  Mohandas

  A True Story of a Man, his People and an Empire

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  Chapter 1 BOYHOOD

  Chapter 2 LONDON AND IDENTITY

  Chapter 3 SOUTH AFRICA AND A PURPOSE

  Chapter 4 SATYAGRAHA

  Chapter 5 HIND SWARAJ

  Chapter 6 A GREAT MARCH

  Chapter 7 ENGAGING INDIA

  Chapter 8 THE EMPIRE CHALLENGED

  Chapter 9 BUILDING ANEW

  Chapter 10 ASSAULT—WITH SALT

  Chapter 11 NEGOTIATING REPRESSION

  Chapter 12 DREAM UNDER FIRE

  Chapter 13 ‘QUIT INDIA!’

  Chapter 14 REJECTED

  Chapter 15 WALK ALONE…

  Chapter 16 TO RAMA

  Footnotes

  Chapter 7: Engaging India

  Chapter 8: The Empire Challenged

  Chapter 9: Building Anew

  Chapter 10: Assault—with Salt

  POSTSCRIPT

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MOHANDAS

  A former parliamentarian in India, Rajmohan Gandhi currently teaches in the USA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Apart from several biographies, his works include Understanding the Muslim Mind and Revenge and Reconciliation: Understanding South Asian History, both published by Penguin India.

  To U., who (a bit like a key character in this story)

  is fearless by nature, independent and always giving

  PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

  ‘Recently, I have been going through Rajmohan Gandhi’s perceptive biography of Mahatma Gandhi. What always strikes one about Gandhiji was his ability to be both practical and idealistic at the same time … Mahatma Gandhi was one of the most modern minds of our times. He offered us a liberal framework to view the complexities of our social and political existence and take humanity forward’ —Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

  ‘Rajmohan Gandhi has a well-deserved reputation as a scholar of contemporary India and his book enhances that reputation. —Lloyd Rudolph, Outlook

  ‘Rajmohan strikes a fine balance in this comprehensive work, lacing the painstakingly detailed chronological account with just the right amount of interpretation … Rajmohan adopts the position of a detached observer … But the approach goes a long way in painting a portrait of Gandhiji that is very human, plausible, and easy to identify with’ —Mukund Padmanabhan, The Hindu

  ‘Rajmohan Gandhi is a scholar with access, empathy and a startling detachment for a man writing about his grandfather … The result is Mohandas, which draws threads through the various Gandhis to form a consistent pattern’ —Suresh Menon, Deccan Herald

  ‘Rajmohan Gandhi’s Mohandas is the final testimony to the maturing of the biography form in Indian literature … The Mahatma’s grandson has now written an account of his grandfather that resembles a finely executed miniature painting without compromising on the vast canvas that Gandhi’s life represented. Three significant features mark the excellence of this volume. It is written in the manner of a racy thriller without recourse to any gimmickry. [Two,] the author’s admiration for his subject does not slip into meaningless gushing, nor does the imperative of so-called objectivity lead him to lose affection for an incredible man and an equally incredible life. [Three, while] in most accounts of the Mahatma’s life, other individuals get dwarfed and overshadowed by his awesome personality and achievement, Rajmohan Gandhi has allowed every single individual who had anything to do with the Mahatma to breathe in a space of his or her own. The subtitle of the book, therefore, justifies itself in the full sense of its meaning. Rajmohan Gandhi’s book unravels all … aspects of a unique life and makes us believe, contrary to what Einstein said, that Gandhi was a man who indeed walked on this earth’ —Jyotirmaya Sharma, DNA

  ‘A more heroic tale has yet to be told. His grandson has told it … Rajmohan Gandhi has filled many gaps in our knowledge of the Mahatma, tapped new source material, explained decisions … [Mohandas] is meticulously researched, written in felicitous prose and is a delight to read’ —Khushwant Singh, Outlook

  ‘A thoroughly gripping narrative that interweaves the personal and public personae of the Mahatma … Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s story is a smacking good read and one that still inspires’ —The Hub

  ‘Illuminating, and likely to remain definitive for a long time’ —Ramaswami R. Iyer, Economic and Political Weekly

  Preface

  Started as an exercise to delineate the ‘true’ Gandhi, this project turned naturally and swiftly into a retelling of a modern-day epic involving an unusual hero, a complex people, and a powerful empire.

  With its sweep, its oscillations between glory and tragedy, the profusion of its characters, the richness (in infirmity and strength) of its (several) principal characters, and the valiant persistence of the chief among them, the story I have sought to relate is without doubt a classic. I only hope my retelling does not hopelessly undersell it.

  In some ways it is an unbelievable story. Einstein thought that ‘generations to come will scarce believe’ that Gandhi actually did what he did. Hence the reminder in the subtitle that this is a true story.

  But it is also an attempt to identify the ‘true’ Gandhi—to convey the truth about him. Though a popular metaphor, sixty years after his death, for innocence, ingenuity or courage, he is not clearly known as a person.

  The Good Boatman, an earlier study I did of Gandhi (also published by Viking/Penguin), attempted to answer some important questions, including why the subcontinent saw so much violence despite Gandhi’s nonviolence, and why Partition occurred despite his opposition. But it was not a biography. This one is.

  The metaphor has shrouded the man. A courageous, selfless, and nonviolent foe of oppression anywhere may be dubbed a Gandhi, even in places far from India, while a tormentor of the innocent may be called Gandhi’s new assailant, as happened in India during carnages in 1984, 1992 and 2002.

  But what was Gandhi like as a human being? Despite his fame, or perhaps because of it, Mohandas Gandhi the individual is not sufficiently felt, or seen, or understood.

  In India we think we know him. No face is more familiar. He looks at us from currency notes, postage stamps and billboards. We feel we can sketch the spectacles, the bald head, the loincloth, the pocket-watch. But familiarity is not knowledge.

  We think we also know what he stood for. Yet the obvious and predictable Gandhi may be very misleading, and the beliefs of the real man may have been quite different from what we think.

  Who was he, this timid lad who became a century’s conscience and led India to liberty? This discoverer of satyagraha, the one wanting to remove every tear from every eye, this pioneer of religious pluralism and dissenter from modernity, what was he like in his daily life, in his close relationships?

  What was he like in his confrontations, his face-offs with an Empire, with his own bitterly divided people, with his adversaries—and, perhaps his greatest confrontation, with himself?

  What was he like in his relationships with parents, wife and sons, with women in general and with his young female associates, and with political and non-political colleagues?

  Was he a politician or a saint? If both, how did these two Gandhis combine, and in what proportions? Or was he, as critics have alleged, someone who broke a pledge that he would rather die than accept Partition? Was he not an unfeeling husband and father? A man who did strange things in the name of chastity?
Or emasculated India in the name of nonviolence? Or patronized Dalits without empowering them?

  This study is a bid to free Gandhi the person from his image or images, and to present his life fully and honestly.

  Many have presented their versions of Gandhi, often powerfully. Assisted by his sister Sushila Nayar, Gandhi’s faithful secretary Pyarelal provided a remarkable multi-volume biography that began with Gandhi’s last phase, turned to his childhood and boyhood, and then covered the ‘middle’ decades. Earlier, D.G. Tendulkar had produced his eight-volume biography. B.R. Nanda, Louis Fischer and Geoffrey Ashe have each given us a memorable and popular volume, and they are not the only ones to have done so.

  Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth analyzed his subject’s tension-filled psychology and his oft-peculiar practices, and Martin Green has presented Gandhi as a New Age revolutionary. In 1909 Joseph Doke wrote the first Gandhi biography, in the 1920s Gandhi wrote his own account in My Experiments with Truth, dozens of other biographies followed, and more will be written.

  In the 1990s, Yogesh Chadha wrote a widely welcomed life of Gandhi. Recently, Narayan Desai, the son of Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary from 1917 to 1942, has published a significant four-volume Gandhi biography in Gujarati. An English translation is to follow. The numerous diaries into which Mahadev Desai entered many an enlightening detail were published earlier.

  Yet there seemed a need for the chronological, complete and candid portrayal attempted here. Studies written shortly after his assassination naturally stressed Gandhi’s final decade and some aspects of his personality, inevitably excluding other areas. Moreover, the early biographers produced their works without access to the vast amount of illuminating material now available to scholars.

  Perhaps time was needed before the whole of his life could be looked at as one piece, and a touchable, seeable, comprehensible Gandhi brought out.

  It was a tall order. I went for it in fear and trembling, praying that I might do some justice to the man and also to truth. God only knows how far I have succeeded or failed.

  This is the story of someone who was neither simple to understand, nor easy to live with, nor a stranger to error or to defeat, but who continues to inspire many and interest many more. It seeks to unravel Gandhi’s complexity, looks at his quirks, failures and weaknesses, and looks too for the secret behind the power of a frail man who renounced wealth, ease and rank.

  This metaphor for innocence was an exceedingly shrewd tactician and strategist. How he made his decisions, and recruited allies, are exercises portrayed here, as also his moves regarding India’s future leadership.

  In the epic I seek to retell, several stories intertwine with the story of Gandhi’s life. The stories of India’s freedom movement and the 1947 Partition and violence. The story of caste and untouchability. The story of Hindu-Muslim relations and of India’s princely states. The origins of modern Indian democracy. The story of modern Hinduism. Aspects of all these stories will be found in the pages that follow.

  Plus the story of a youth, a man, and an old man hungry to change history.

  For full disclosure, let me state that I am a grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, one of the fifteen grandchildren born to his four children, who were all sons. Nine grandchildren (four granddaughters and five grandsons) are living as of date, as well as a large number of great-grandchildren and their offspring, plus many Gandhis descending from his siblings and cousins. My father, Devadas, was Gandhi’s youngest son. I was twelve-and-a-half, a schoolboy in New Delhi, when the Mahatma was killed.

  But I am also, I hope, a scholar committed to facts and their discovery.

  The Gandhi portrayed in these pages emerges from a mass of material: letters, memoirs, diary jottings, records of conversations, talks, interviews, articles, books. A series of talented aides recorded his remarks and moods. Newspapers recorded his public utterances. His own journals carried Gandhi’s articles. He wrote an autobiography himself as well as a history of his South African satyagrahas. Foes, critics and psychoanalysts have exposed to view aspects of Gandhi missed by admirers. Several companions, and critical allies, have offered glimpses and interpretations.

  An important item from family archives has been used here for the first time (in Chapter Seven). This study benefits also from material recently brought before the public by Nilam Parikh and Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, granddaughters, respectively, of Harilal Gandhi and Manilal Gandhi, the Mahatma’s first and second sons.

  A biographer hoping to construct the ‘real’ Gandhi suffers not from a paucity of material but from its abundance. His task is to weigh and select, to decide what is significant, and discern true and perhaps hidden meanings.

  And a Gandhi biographer does not start from scratch. He owes large debts to (among others) numerous diarists, memoirists, other biographers, libraries and librarians, archives and archivists, and to the compilers of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.

  I acknowledge these debts as well as what I owe to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which allowed me to write this biography while discharging my responsibilities as a visiting professor and as the academic director of one of its living and learning communities. I thank the Navajivan Trust for permission to quote from Gandhi’s writings and utterances. And I thank Prita Maitra, my painstaking and uncomplaining editor at Viking/Penguin.

  This book has been written over a thirty-month period, but it has been thought about, and its questions wrestled with, for much longer. May it inform and interest the reader and, God willing, speak to today’s questions.

  July 2006

  Rajmohan Gandhi

  Chapter 1

  Boyhood

  Kathiawar, 1869-88

  Porbandar, where Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869, was a coastal town almost wholly encircled by the Arabian Sea and long engaged in trade with the Arab world and Africa. Since legend held that Krishna’s friend from childhood, Sudama, had lived there, it was at times called Sudamapuri. A wall of white limestone protected the town from waves and reflected the sun into the eyes of approaching sailors.

  The state of Porbandar (of which the town, with a population in 1869 of about 15,000, was a part) was ruled by an Indian prince on whom a British Resident kept a watchful eye. The India of the British Raj contained more than 500 ‘princely’ states of this sort, some larger than Porbandar, which had an area of about 600 square miles, and others smaller, all shown in yellow on the Raj’s maps.

  Territories ruled directly by the British were printed in red. From Rajkot, an inland city 120 miles to the east of Porbandar, a British agent supervised all the princely states of the Kathiawar (or Kathiawad) region, also known as Saurashtra—the conspicuous peninsula south of Karachi and north of Bombay that juts westward into the Arabian Sea.

  Gujarati was the language of Kathiawar, as also of the adjacent region (largely ‘red’ on the map) to its east, where the biggest city was Ahmedabad, and of the coastal lands (also ‘red’) to the north of Bombay, including the port city of Surat, one of Britain’s earliest Indian outposts.

  Bombay, an island acquired by the British from Portugal in the seventeenth century, had grown into western India’s greatest city (where a majority spoke Marathi), but the Raj’s top functionary, the Viceroy, ruled from Calcutta in the subcontinent’s east, off the Bay of Bengal (where Bengali was the popular language). The ancient city of Delhi, where the Mughals had reigned for three centuries (and where the populace spoke Hindustani), lay over 600 miles to the north of Ahmedabad.

  In 1857, only twelve years before Mohandas’s birth, Delhi and several places to its east, including some yellow ‘princely’ tracts, had witnessed a violent rebellion that nearly overthrew British rule over India, which had commenced in 1757. Learning that the new cartridges they were biting into contained not only beef, which was forbidden to the Hindus, but also pork, which was anathema to Muslims, the Raj’s sepoys, Hindus and Muslims, mutinied.

  But the rising was crushed, a
nd British power in India gathered an air of permanency by 1869, which was also the year in which the Suez Canal was built, shortening the journey between London and India. Songs, including one in Gujarati that Mohandas learnt as a boy, praised the peace the English had brought, yet resentment at alien rule sat close to the Indian skin.

  The hierarchy of cities, with London at the top of the heap and, among the cities named, Porbandar at the bottom—below Rajkot, which ranked below Ahmedabad—was matched by other hierarchies in India. Villages were subservient to towns, women to men, the young to the old, the unarmed to the armed, low castes to high castes, the untouchables to everyone else, Indian languages to English, and Indians to the white man.

  As between the deeply religious Hindus (a majority in most portions of India, including in Porbandar) and the less numerous yet equally religious followers of Islam, who had memories of pre-British Muslim hegemony, the question was of walls, not levels. Hindus and Muslims lived separate lives, often harbouring strong if uninformed feelings about those on the other side.

  For five generations or more, Mohandas’s forebears had served Kathiawar’s princes as administrators. Uttamchand or Ota Gandhi, Mohandas’s grandfather, was the most successful among them. The ruler of Porbandar made him a diwan or first minister of his territory, and Ota Gandhi, who enhanced the state’s irrigation and revenues, obtained for his master a Class One status from the British. Two of Ota’s sons—Karamchand, Mohandas’s father, and his younger brother Tulsidas—also became diwans of Porbandar.

  The Gandhis belonged to what was called the ‘Modh’ branch of the commercial caste of Vanias (or Banias). While ranked third in the Hindu hierarchy after Brahmins and Kshatriyas, Banias were seen, and saw themselves, as a ‘high’ caste.

  The three-storey house in Porbandar in which Mohandas was born, and in which numerous Gandhis, young and old, lived as a joint family, had been built about 100 years earlier. It bore marks from shelling ordered by a Porbandar princess serving as regent, Rani Rupaliba, who was angered by Ota Gandhi’s support of a state treasurer she disliked.