HE went first to England, arriving there on the eve of the outbreak of the Great War. Immediately he set himself to the task of organising among the resident Indian community an Ambulance Corps for service at the Front. But ill health prevented his accompanying it and, upon his recovery, he was obliged to proceed to India, where he arrived, in 1915, just before the death of Gokhale.
Soon after his arrival, and in pursuance of a promise made to Gokhale, Gandhi began a year’s tour of his Motherland, after an absence of fourteen years. His overseas work against powerful odds and his great personal sacrifices had already established him firmly in the hearts and imagination of his countrymen, many of whom endowed him with the qualities of a superman, and the title of Mahatma (Great Soul) was conferred upon him by the people.
Gandhi’s first work after the tour was to establish near Ahmedabad an Ashram, or retreat, where a little group of men and women settled who had accepted his general principles. Here were tried out the methods of the simple collective life that had been begun in South Africa, without restrictions of class, creed, or caste. Soon a problem arose that tested the fundamental tenets of the settlement-some untouchables sought admission to it. Gandhi consulted his followers and it was agreed that the untouchables should not be refused. As a result, the financial support of the orthodox, upon which the Ashram had greatly depended, was withdrawn, and he found himself without resources. When he realised this, he declared: “We will then have to leave here and live in the untouchable quarter with them.” However, the situation was saved by a timely anonymous gift that enabled him to continue his work.
Meanwhile the agitation against indentured labour emigration to Britisri colonies overseas had been steadily growing and its suspension was demanded. Gandhi, who had in South Africa fought the system, which had been denounced by Sir W. W. Hunter as “semi-slavery,” now led the attack upon it once more, as degrading to India. All shades of opinion were united in support of this campaign. Success was reached in 1917, and, shortly after the War, indentured labour emigration was finally prohibited.
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People had by now begun to turn instinctively to Gandhi for help and leadership in obtaining redress of grievances. Complaints of the conditions of the indigo-cultivators in Champaran (Bihar) were brought to him. He went into the question, collected the facts, and sought an interview with the planters to discuss the matter; but he received scant sympathy or courtesy from them and, regarding him as a stranger, they requested his non-intervention. Nor were the authorities any more helpful. He proclaimed an open campaign against the methods of indigo cultivation and, disobeying an order to leave the district, was arrested. But his detention was of short duration. In court he gave a closely reasoned statement as to his position in Champaran, and telegraphed an appeal to the Viceroy to intervene, with the result that the proceedings were withdrawn and he was enabled to set up a private inquiry into the Champaran ryots’ grievances. Ultimately a committee of inquiry was set up by the Lieutenant Governor of Bihar, to which he was appointed. It found substantially in favour of the ryots and made important recommendations to which effect was duly given. So began the work that he had long hoped to undertake, of agrarian reform and the improvement of village conditions.
A labour dispute in the Ahmedabad mills led to his first public fast. Gandhi had extracted from the strikers a promise to stand firm and to do so without violence of word or deed. Too much, probably, was expected of them; they began to falter, and the strike looked like collapsing. To rally them again he took a tremendous resolution, vowing not to touch food until the strike was settled. He said afterwards that he realised that he had by his action placed an unfair burden upon the mill-owners, many of whom were his friends; for so great a following had Gandhi that they were compelled to come to terms rather than let ill befall him. Thus the strikers won, if not all they asked for, a considerable part of it, and a new weapon in dealing with public affairs was forged-that of suffering in one’s own person for the sins or errors of others. It implied no new doctrine, but as a method of securing redress of a collective wrong it had not been used before. It struck the public imagination. Satyagraha (Soul-force) was now to be pitted against physical force: would it prove a mightier power? Much was said and written about it and the method and circumstances of its exercise, and the influence which Gandhi had already gained over the minds and hearts of men grew rapidly.
No sooner was the mill strike over than a new struggle began, which put into operation Satyagraha. In Kaira district the crops failed, famine con
ditions threatened, and many cultivators were unable to pay the tax demands. Gandhi was called to their aid. He drafted a petition, and therein exercised the statutory right to ask for suspension of revenue collections; but the petition failed. Then Gandhi advised the sufferers and their sympathisers to refrain from attempting to pay; they should not sell their all and thus permanently impoverish or ruin themselves. “Refuse to pay,” he said, “Even those of you who can, and take the consequences at the hands of the Law.” News of the struggle spread over India; money was sent to help the fight. Time passed, and the peasants began to lose nerve under the threats of the officials and at the sight of their cattle and goods seized and sold. Standing crops in some cases were attached and Gandhi grew anxious as he saw the wavering of the people. Again something urgent had to be done. He therefore suggested to some of his followers that they should remove the crops themselves from a field that had been attached. He knew that this might mean their being arrested, but all were willing to test it out. They were arrested and given short terms of imprisonment. Fortunately the struggle ended soon by an agreed compromise. But the Kaira struggle was a great step in the awakening of the masses of India to a sense of their rights and their own ability to secure redress. They were not to sleep again.
Of Gandhi’s passion for unity amongst his countrymen much could be said. By pleading, by argument, by suffering and by example he sought most earnestly and diligently to weld into one strong whole the two main streams of Indian life, Hindu and Muslim. By his work for the Khalifat movement, under the leadership of the Ali brothers, he hoped to bring this desired end nearer, apart from the merits of the movement itself.
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It has to be confessed, however, that in this he was not successful, though many Muslims had enrolled under his banner and that of the Indian-National Congress, and many called him brother.
He hated killing in any guise. That it was done as organised warfare did not exalt it in his eyes. But to refrain from the fight through cowardice was to him a greater crime than that of war itself. One did not then refrain from killing out of love, but because of fear for one’s own person. So once again, and after much heart-searching, he led a recruiting campaign in the latter part of the Great War, on the ground that the quickest and straightest way to win Swaraj was to help to defend the Empire. Simultaneously, he addressed to the Viceroy an eloquent plea for a fuller understanding of India’s national sentiment and a due recognition of her place in the British Commonwealth of Nations.
Under the continued strain that he had put upon himself for so long, his health gave way and he came near to death. His doctors were baffled by his illness and urged him to take milk, which was the only food suited to his enfeebled condition. He had, however, for some time observed a vow not to take it, as a food calculated to stimulate the passions. With great subtlety, Mrs. Gandhi prevailed upon him to listen to the doctors by reminding him that his vow was against cow’s milk, but not against the milk of the goat. From then dates the goat as the symbol of Gandhi’s abstemiousness in diet.
Soon after his recovery came the Rowlatt Act, against which British India, towns and villages alike, was united. A hartal (general cessation of work) at the opening of the struggle was proclaimed and widely observed throughout the country. Thus his work of rousing and uniting India continued.
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Young India, a weekly newspaper, became his mouthpiece. His method of work had undergone no radical change from that of South Africa, but his field of action was now enlarged, and when his nationwide non-cooperation movement was started, the ground had been well prepared. ,
In 1920, whilst the Khalifat agitation was still in progress, the Punjab disorders occurred, as a result of post-war economic distress and in protest against oppressive administration. When the news became known of the manner in which they had been suppressed by Sir Michael O’Dwyer’s Government, culminating in the Jallianwala Bagh shooting at Amritsar, bitter indignation was voiced all over India. An official committee of inquiry was set up, but the Indian National Congress, which had appointed a sub-committee of its own, under Gandhi’s chairmanship, refused to collaborate. The sub-committee’s report, after meticulous examination of witnesses, was accepted by Indian opinion in preference to the milder one of the official committee. When the matter came up for discussion in the House of Commons, General Dyer’s action was condemned; but in the House of Lords, on the contrary, it was vindicated. This unfortunate result was deeply resented in India. Gandhi joined forces with those who, as a protest against what was regarded as British injustice and indifference to Indian sentiment and self-respect, were urging the boycott of the councils set up under the Montagu- Chelmsford reforms. He enunciated four stages in the programme of non- cooperation: (1) to give up titles and honorary offices; (2) to refuse to serve the Government in paid appointments or to participate in any manner in the working of the existing machinery of Government; (3) to decline to pay taxes in support of it; and (4) to ask the police and the military to withdraw cooperation from the Government.
He himself returned his Kaisar-i-Hind medal, and pursued an energetic campaign in support of his views in Young India. At a special session of the Congress his resolution to adopt non-cooperation throughout British India was carried by a large majority, though the minority was substantial and influential. His commanding influence over the Congress was finally established at the ensuing regular session. Had the movement succeeded as he had hoped, it would undoubtedly have gone far to paralyse the Government. But the “plan of campaign” did not work out as he had foreseen. Whilst jail became a familiar place to large numbers who followed him both in precept and in practice, the mass of the people, unprepared for the sacrifice and the self-discipline demanded of them, were unable to carry on the struggle with fortitude and calm. Internal troubles arose, many of the leaders is doubted the political wisdom of remaining out of the legislatures, and on various occasions mob-violence occurred. Gandhi was horrified by these evident failures of his passionately-held doctrine of Ahimsa (non-violence), and he called off the civil disobedience movement against which, he felt, God had set His face.
He was convinced that the masses were as yet unprepared for a great nonviolent struggle for freedom. Moreover, he had begun, to realise increasingly that seasonal unemployment and intemperance were playing havoc with the vitality and the economic resources of the people. In addition, they were weakened by social divisions. He accordingly began to devote himself to the preaching of the use of the charkha (hand-loom) and the spinning and weaving of khaddar (cotton-cloth) as a discipline and a primary means of improving village-welfare; the abolition of the liquor-traffic; and the removal of untouchability. He organised a movement for mass-education, so far as possible on a self-supporting basis, by methods combining training of the hand and the mind. But for him education was first a question of character development.
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In 1924, the year in which he fasted at Delhi to obtain Hindu-Muslim unity, he was unanimously elected president of the Congress and enunciated vigorously his economic and social programme. He also spoke fervently of his belief in India’s political goal as that of an equal member among the interdependent countries of the Commonwealth.
In place of Young India, which disappeared during a later non-cooperation campaign, he brought out the weekly Harijan, in order to advocate primarily the abolition of untouchability, but it was also used as his channel of communication regarding his many activities and interests, including his replies to correspondents from all over the world.
By 1929 a new atmosphere of intense emotion had developed with the growing self-consciousness of Nationalist India. There were now three main parties in the country: the Central Government, in whom was vested power, subject to the British Parliament; the Congress, full of spirit, restless energy, intense patriotic feeling and strong racial resentment; and the Moderates, widely experienced, but with little influence over the masses. At the Lahore Congress a notable difference of opinion occurred between Gandhi and Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, the then president of the Congress and spokesman of Young India. The latter pressed for a declaration of complete independence (Puma Swaraj); the former insisted upon an interpretation of the term in the sense of Dominion Self-Government. In the end, no hard and fast definition of Swaraj was made by the Congress, though Gandhi, as late as the beginning of 1937, once more proclaimed his belief in Dominion status for India, as defined by the Statute of Westminster, as a fulfillment of India’s political ambitions. He remained of the opinion that she could achieve the substance of independence whilst continuing, as an equal member, within the British Commonwealth of Nations (Harijan, June 24, 1939).
Gandhi always possessed a strange instinct for the use of dramatic gesture and symbolism, often with spectacular results. One such was his decision to start a new non-violent campaign to secure the abolition of the salt-tax, which was held to oppress the very poor. He and some colleagues, early in 1930, accordingly set out for the seashore at Dandi in order to break the law by preparing salt, a Government monopoly, and he was arrested and imprisoned. His example was followed, and soon civil disobedience was prevalent once more throughout the country and repressive measures were adopted by the Government.
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Another illustration of his gift for symbolic dramatisation was the public burning of foreign cloth, at his instance, partly to hit the Government’s revenues and partly in aid of the swadeshi (home industries) movement. The familiar “Gandhi cap,” part of the Congress uniform of khaddar, was another instance, for it was a replica of the convict’s cap worn by him in the Transvaal jail.
It had, however, already been realised, both at Delhi and in London, that the time was ripe for further constitutional advance in India. A Round Table Conference was called in London, but the Congress, at first, refused to participate in its deliberations. Lord Irwin, however, took steps soon after Gandhi’s
release from prison, to invite him to a meeting at Delhi, and shortly afterwards the Gandhi-Irwin Pact was announced (March 3, 1931), civil disobedience being suspended. The Pact was ratified at the Karachi session of the Congress.
Gandhi proceeded to London as its sole representative at the second Round Table Conference. In London, again in symbolic mood, he insisted upon living in a working-class district in order to be among the poor, and upon wearing his khaddar loin-cloth and shawl even when he visited King George V at Buckingham Palace. His heart, however, was not in the deliberations of the Conference, to which he made little effective contribution, but where he claimed to represent the impoverished masses and the “depressed classes” of India. He felt restless that he was adding little to the welfare of his “fellow-villagers” at home. He, however, took repeated occasion to deliver his message of non-violence to the Western world.
Upon his return to India, early in 1932, he found the stage set against all his hopes. Charges of breach of the Pact, under Lord Irwin’s successor, had been made by the Congress leaders and several of his closest colleagues had already been arrested or imprisoned before his arrival. He, too, was arrested and imprisoned, in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, upon his announcing the resumption of civil disobedience.
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One of the matters outstanding at the end of the Round Table Conference was the question of the representation of the minority communities. Owing to the inability of the Indian leaders there to agree upon quotas and methods of representation, the Prime Minister issued his Communal Award. Gandhi took deep offence at the segregation of thedepressed classes from the rest of the Hindu community, and undertook a “fast unto death” whilst still in jail, until the leaders of the community generally and of the depressed classes reached an agreement, which was subsequently adopted by the British authorities. Much resentment was, however, aroused in Hindu circles, especially in Bengal, at the limited representation left to the general Hindu body of electors after the claims of the depressed classes had been met. Criticism, too, was widespread in more thoughtful circles at the use of the fast by Gandhi in circumstances that bore the appearance of moral coercion, since nobody would willingly become responsible for the Mahatma’s death.
After Gandhi’s release, sometime later, when the civil disobedience movement had collapsed, he continued to devote himself to social and economic reform work. He gradually withdrew from political activities and ultimately resigned his membership of the Congress. But it had learnt to depend upon his advice and guidance, and he remained its unofficial leader and its referee and arbiter in great emergencies. This was particularly notable at the time when, with his strong support and after a reassuring pronouncement by the Viceroy, the new Indian constitution came into force, early in 1937, by the establishment of autonomy in the British Indian Provinces, in most of which Congress Governments were set up.
A further occasion of the demonstration of his powerful influence was when a change of Premier was brought about in the Congress Government in the Central Provinces after reference to him by the Working Committee of the Congress.
A striking illustration, however, of the unique position that he held as the acknowledged leader of the Indian nationalist forces was the fact that, after the re-election of Mr. S. C. Bose as President of the Congress by the Provincial Con-gress Committees, in spite of Gandhi’s support of another candidate, the annual session of the Congress that followed almost immediately reiterated its complete confidence in him, resolved to support his policies, and virtually instructed Mr. Bose to appoint a Working Committee that would enjoy Gandhi’s confidence. Mr. Bose, however, failed to secure the support of Gandhi’s nominees, and resigned the Presidentship, the new President, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, being an old colleague of the Mahatma’s and the new Working Committee being composed entirely of his supporters.
Another similarity symbolic episode in Gandhi’s career was his “fast unto death” early in 1939, at Rajkot. He determined upon this in order to compel the ruler of that small State to abide by what he contended the latter had undertaken in the appointment of the personnel of a committee to make proposals for constitutional reform in the State. He consented to abandon the fast after the dispute had been referred for an opinion to the Federal Chief Justice by the Viceroy, whom Gandhi had requested to intervene as the representative of the Paramount Power. In the result his contention was upheld; but to the general astonishment he subsequently renounced the advantages of the award as having been obtained by the coercion of the ruler and being thus “tainted with Himsa (violence).”
Two characteristic expressions of Gandhi’s independence of judgment call for notice. The first was his advice to the Congress leaders, in the face of Mr. Bose’s demand to present Britain with an ultimatum in the prevailing international crisis in order to compel her to grant India’s freedom, that it would not be proper or generous on her part to take advantage of Britain’s embarrassment in the international field, and his insistence that India must secure her substantial independence on her own merits and by her own united efforts.
The other was his uncompromising denunciation of widespread corruption within the Congress organisation and of the departure of large numbers of Congressmen from the method of truth and non-violence, laid down by the Congress at his instance as the fundamental tenet of its policy.
These are summarised in the following passage from a letter from Gandhi to Bose, in reply to the latter’s proposed ultimatum, under threat of a new intensive civil disobedience campaign, just before his resignation, expressing Gandhi’s profound disbelief that such a campaign could be conducted without violence:
“I smell violence in the air I breathe. Our mutual distrust is a bad form of violence. The widening gulf between Hindus and Moslems points to the same thing.”
By 1942, he had reached a position where he believed that independence was the only possible solution for India’s national grievances. In the same year he launched the ‘Quit India’ movement, which gathered momentum and culminated in independence, in 1947.
To his followers in India, and around the world, Gandhi was a saint – a mahatma, or great soul. His frugal lifestyle and ascetism, his simple handspun loincloth and his sandals marked him out as one of the teeming masses. But there were some people who opposed his pacifist philosophy and resented his acceptance of the nation’s partition. An attempt was made on his life in January 1948, but he survived. Ten days later he was not so lucky. On January 30, 1948, as he was on his way to a prayer meeting in Delhi, he was shot dead by Nathuram Godse, a young, fanatical Hindu journalist. Mahatma Gandhi has had a profound influence not only on India but upon world events. His courage, his integrity of purpose, the splendour of his idealism, his deep patriotism and his fine example of public conduct and personal sacrifice has earned him universal recognition and admiration.