THE MAHATMA
By A. Srinivasa Raghavan
MAHATMA
GANDHI was a Colossus. From 1921 onwards to the day of his death, he towered
over the Indian scene and was during the last years of his life the most
significant figure in world history. The earlier years–his boyhood, his
education both here and in England and his magnificent advocacy of an almost
lost cause in South Africa–are merely the formative period in which his giant
stature was moulded and cast in the relentless forge of life. Those who knew
him later were with a few exceptions so overwhelmed that they were content to
gaze ‘all wonder and a wild surmise’ at this peak in the Darien of the Spirit.
Those who had known him earlier did not, however, know all his secret then.
They had seen the hesitant barrister who believed more in honourable compromise
than in forensic success, the sleepless public worker to whom no work was too
small or mean and who shouldered all the responsibility for the lapses of his
followers, the intrepid satyagrahi whose faith moved something harder than
mountains–cruelty and greed and the pack-spirit of selfish men. And yet so
powerful is the blindness that nearness breeds that they missed seeing in the
work and the suffering and the triumph of those years the making of a Mahatma.
It was given to the intuition of a poet, Rabindranath Tagore, to recognise at
once the phenomenal nature of Gandhiji’s make up. Now that this man of destiny
has been gathered to rest, his early friends who have seen the last of his life
for which the first was made, can look back and make of their reminiscence a
revelation.
Mr.
H. S. L. Polak gets this opportunity in his sketch of the early years of
Mahatma Gandhi’s life.* As the Mahatma’s closest colleague and lieutenant in
South Africa, Mr. Polak has access to a wealth of intimate detail and
first-hand information. He shapes them with admirable restraint and balance
into a lucid narrative. The chapter on ‘What Gandhi found in South Africa’ and
the one on ‘The Birth of Satyagraha’ are models of condensation and of what can
be achieved by the objective approach. This approach is at once the strength
and the weakness of Mr. Polak’s account. Rising with Mr. Polak above the mass
of details, we see spread out before us the chart of a time that was out of
joint; and Gandhiji’s achievement in South Africa presents itself to us in
clear, firm lines. The whole story of the South African struggle is unfolded,
sharp and distinct,–the iniquity of the Asiatic Law Amendment Act, the heroic
fight of the Indian community against it, the agitation in India for ending the
evil of indentured labour recruitment, the fateful march across the Natal
border and the triumph. But the perspective is historical, not biographical.
For one who has shared with Gandhiji all the varying fortunes and tribulations
of that golden dawn, Mr. Polak is strangely cold. But for a ripple of emotion
here and there, the narrative moves on in ordered smoothness, more a chronicle
of South African history, than a record of the growth of an individual soul. Selection,
order, proper distribution of emphasis, correlation of the chronological with
the logical, in a word, all the merits of the objective method are here. But
Mr. Polak’s reminiscence does not flower under the warmth of his knowledge of
Gandhiji’s later life into a revealing analysis of his personality.
Mr.
H. N. Brailsford who follows with a discussion of ‘the middle years’
(1915-1939) adopts the same method. But he remembers to let himself go. He is
not hampered by the inhibitions of a colleague or a disciple. He takes a firmer
stand than Mr. Polak on his own personality and submits Gandhiji’s way of life
to a searching analysis. Commenting on Gandhiji’s words,
“In
the matter of religion, I must restrict myself to my ancestral religion”,
Brailsford
asks
“If
each of us is bound to his ancestral religion, did Gandhi deny the possibility
of reaching objective truth, valid in every latitude?”
Then
he pauses for a while and points out not an answer to the question but a fact
that dissolves it:
“I
do not know how Gandhiji would have answered this question. But it is important
to point out that he did seem to recognise an authority superior even to Hindu
tradition–his own social conscience, the Inner Voice which often spoke to him
in terms that demanded obedience……It was his own instinctive humanity that
spoke first….; the unconvincing appeal to history was an afterthought.”
Mr.
Brailsford is equally frank in speaking of Gandhiji’s asceticism:
“One
bows with respect before the austerity which can be content with this extreme
simplicity. But is it wholly admirable? The Indian road to God narrows and
empties the universe. It achieves unity too easily by omission.”
Does
it, we ask, and before we decide to argue the matter out, Mr. Brailsford adds a
penetrating remark:
“The
strangest thing about him was that, with all his rejection of the joys of life,
this man was habitually happy and even gay...From this ascetic, the moderns of
the West have a long lesson to learn of forgotten wisdom.”
Mr.
Brailsford keeps the lesson waiting and asks how it is possible to do one’s
duty, as Gandhiji wanted us to do, to one’s ‘immediate neighbours’ when the
steamship and the aeroplane have given that status to all mankind. He is
chivalrous enough to postulate Gandhiji’s probable defence: “Why should you
increase your needs and get electricity from Wales, tea from Assam and
groundnuts from Africa and thus multiply your neighbours? Why must you have
these things? Your ancestors did without them.” This is simplicity with a vengeance
but not Gandhiji; the Mahatma might have been simple but he was no simpleton.
And Mr. Brailsford’s reply to this imagined defence is characteristic:
“Is
the readiness of a man to ‘do without’ really a proof of his spirituality? Too
often it springs from the inertia caused by malnutrition, malaria and the heat
of summer.”
The
heat of an Indian summer may be bad enough but not incomparably so. England has
its fogs.
And
yet it must be granted that Mr. Brailsford’s vision remains singularly
unclouded in spite of this clash between his formal socialism and faith in
machinery with Gandhian ‘real socialism’ and ‘dread...of our being able to
produce all that we want, including our foodstuffs out of a conjurer’s hat’.
Mr. Brailsford is indeed objective and analytical but his enthusiasm for the
subject of his study is unmistakable and even where he disagrees with
Mahatmaji, his estimate of the great soul is full of reverent discernment.
Speaking of how Gandhiji sounded the retreat in 1922 when the decisive battle
was about to begin, Mr. Brailsford suggests that a magnificent opportunity was
lost because of lack of ‘unflinching revolutionary leadership.’ The spirit of
revolt had spread over the Indian continent and even the erstwhile inert masses
had fallen in line roused by the passion for redressing the liquidation of the
Caliphate and the massacre at Jallianwala. The battle was about to be joined
and freedom seemed just round the corner when the general of the army of
emancipation called off civil disobedience and, dashing the hopes of millions,
fell back on ‘constructive’ work and the Khaddar programme. Gandhiji’s defence
could well have been that the country was not ready for a non-violent war. The
Moplah rebellion and the tragedy at Chari Chaura would have supported this
defence incontestably. Gandhiji himself admitted this but he claimed
enigmatically that apart from the country’s unreadiness, he was not
ready, he had not done enough penance and earned God’s blessing. The call of
the inner voice had bidden the political leader and tactician to desist and the
bidding was obeyed. Mr. Brailsford’s training treats this as regrettable but he
is able to rise about it to understanding:
“Sometimes,
this enigmatic genius seems to be acting and thinking like a contemporary
European, and then suddenly he dives into the Middle Ages. In order to
understand him, we have to use our historical imagination, as if we were
studying the life of St. Francis or Savonarola. The puzzle is to grasp as a
single harmonious personality Gandhi the tactician and organizer and Gandhi the
saint….There were not two Gandhis, the saint and the tactician. The key to the
puzzle is that Gandhiji thought and acted on two planes, one of them physical,
the other moral. Sometimes he talked, and seemed to be acting, as if he
accepted the ‘common-sense’ mechanical or psychological interpretations of
life, society and politics which his contemporaries assumed. But for him there
was a second world. He believed literally in God’s government of the universe.”
Round
this man of God revolves in Mr. Brailsford’s pages all the tumult, the passion,
the bargaining, the hopes and fears and conflicts of a nation
in revolt. It was also a nation in the making. The magic names of Champaran and
Kaira and Ahmedabad inspired in the masses the realisation
that their freedom was in their hands. The Khilaphat movement forged a
brotherhood such as had not been for ages between the Hindus and the Muslims,
which while it lasted was real and of incalculable benefit. Gandhiji’s crusade
against untouchability which seemed to many at the time to burke the main
political issue, cleansed an age-long sore; and gave a new vigour to Hindu
society. Khaddar the utility of which was questioned by formal economics,
justified itself as a powerful short-term measure and as the symbol of the
nation’s self-respect. The successive waves of non-co-operation, the agitation
against drink, the ticketing of foreign cloth, the new meaning given to the
gospel of village uplift, the huge mass meetings where religion and politics
met and blended into a compelling call for action–all these and in everyone of
these Gandhiji was the central figure–put strength and life into a country that
sorely needed them. Mr. Brailsford’s narrative of this momentous period when
India was emerging as a nation is exhilarating. His sympathy gives him insight
and he certainly has felt the thrill that his words communicate. He is
balanced, even critical, it is true, but not cold. There is the glow of
enthusiastic understanding in his account of the fateful years in India before
the Second World War; and he does not forget the man of fate, the Angel of
Ahimsa, who rode on the storm of those years and directed it.
Lord
Pethick-Lawrence takes up the narrative from the point where Mr. Brailsford
leaves off. The events of the period, 1939–1948, that he chronicles are still
fresh in our minds and while appreciating his sincerity and his anxiety to be
fair, it is not possible for us to concur with him in all that he says.
The
background–the world-war and the reactions that it produced on Gandhiji and the
Congress and the country–is sketched in the main with remarkable clarity and
truth. But the negative politics of the Muslim League and its unscrupulous
exploitation of every situation to force on the Congress its two-nation theory,
are not duly emphasised. Nor is it made clear that the Congress view of the
Cripps offer was right. The Cripps offer did give a convenient handle for the
division of India and supported indirectly the ideology of the Muslim League.
It was this apple of discord that the Cripps offer threw that accelerated the
movement for partition till it became a whirlwind against which all the sanity
of statesmanship and even the saintliness of Gandhi could not prevail. It was
this, not so much its failure in its immediate purpose, that made the Cripps
mission ill-fated. It led to the disagreement over the interpretation of the
term ‘Hindu-Muslim parity’ as applied to the composition of the new Viceroy’s
Executive Council which was proposed in lieu of an interim National Government.
It influenced the participants in the weary negotiations that the Cabinet
Mission of 1946 carried on with leaders, real and nominal. It led the British
Cabinet itself to issue a statement on 6th December 1946 to the effect that in
each one of the zones into which the Cabinet Mission had suggested to group the
Provinces, the voting was to be by majority of members present and not by
provinces. The British Cabinet of the time had not started the trouble, it is
true; age-long suspicion, fanaticism, and the inevitable evils of foreign rule
had done it; but the Cabinet in its anxiety to hold the scales even between the
Muslim League and the Congress had put its weight on one side and, though the
scales were even, justice was not served.
All
this, however, it might be argued, is beside the point. To discuss it at length
would mean shifting the emphasis from Gandhiji to history. Quite so. But to the
extent that history serves as the background to a study of Gandhiji, unless it
is sketched properly, the portrait itself will suffer from false chiaroscuro.
Fortunately, this does not happen, because in regard to other things, Lord
Pethick-Lawrence’s account is acceptable and also Gandhiji is too great to
suffer much through wrong lighting. Against the background of the World War and
the threat of Japanese invasion, the pacifism, violence and repression, the
famine in Bengal and the tragic communal riots in three of the Provinces, the
Mahatma’s figure is sketched truly as rising to its most glorious heights till
at the sunset hour on 30th January 1948, it vanished from here in a halo of
martyrdom.
The
objective approach has done its best in the 320 pages of this really
stimulating book, ‘Mahatma Gandhi’. In the end, however, the feeling remains
that though we have a clear and a fairly just picture of the amazingly virile
part he has played in history, we have not touched him and got to know him as
one of us. To get over this feeling, we have to turn to a frankly subjective
approach. It is not Gibbon but Boswell who can help us. And so, we turn eagerly
to the pages of ‘Incidents of Gandhiji’s Life’**. We expect that history,
politics and economics will for the moment recede into the background and we
will surprise Mahatmaji in the thousand and one details of daily routine into
yielding us his secret. We are not disappointed. It is true that some of the
contributors to this volume tend, in spite of Mr. Shukla’s warning, to exceed
the limits of a confession or reminiscence. This is to be expected when we
remember the large number of contributors and make allowance for the
differences of temperament and attitude on the one hand and degrees of intimacy
with Gandhiji on the other. Everyone cannot be a Boswell, let us admit, even if
given the chance, and few get it. It requires a hero, perhaps, to be a Boswell;
most certainly, it requires one who can chirp engagingly and unabashed about
one’s personal relationships. Lionel Fielden, for instance, is frankly bitter,
though he does not say it and he is in no mood to say much, while Wanda
Dynowska (Umadevi) confesses that she dislikes being personal-though she
reveals half unwillingly the wonderful considerateness and magnanimity that
Gandhiji showed even to those who disagreed with him. Bhagavan Das is hardly a
Boswell, but he talks with the wisdom of age and scholarship about Gandhiji’s
unflinching moral courage and frankness, and ends on a light note with a
reference to his experiment for Truth over the untried potency of mango juice.
G. D. Birla gives us significant vignettes and ends with quoting Gandhiji’s
words: ‘In any case, if God desires me to serve for 125 years, He will sustain
me.’ Has God been so cruel as to take him away from us when our need of him is
greater than ever, we wonder!
And
so the several voices go on, some tender and affectionate, some reverent, some
amazed and frankly puzzled, and the figure of the Mahatma slowly takes shape in
our minds. We see him in the Ashram, in the train, at a public meeting, among statesmen,
among peasants, among women and children but we see him. The familiar smiling
figure walks, stick in hand, briskly before us, jokes, plays with children,
argues knotty points in ethics, religion, philosophy and politics, prescribes
cures for the body and the mind, moves from crowd to crowd through the length
and breadth of our land, cheering, strengthening, inspiring, making heroes out
of straw, reminding us of the Lord’s promise to mankind in the Gita: “Whenever
there is misery and ignorance, I come.” We do not know whether the Lord does
come but here before our eyes, we have seen one of His servants walking this
earth and shedding the light of Love and Truth and we call him reverently ‘the
Mahatma’.
* Mahatma Gandhi by H.
S. L. Polak, H. N. Brailsford and Lord Pethick-Lawrence, with a Foreword by
Sarojini Naidu. Oldhams Press, London. Demi. 8vo. 320 pages.
Price 12s. 6d.
** Incidents of
Gandhiji’s Life, by Fifty-four Contributors. Edited by Chandrashanker
Shukla. Vora & Co., Bombay. Demi 8vo. 344 pages. Price Rs. 10/8