Gandhi's Moral Politics 9781138082731, 9781351237222

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GANDHI’S MORAL POLITICS

This volume explores the scope and limits of Mahatma Gandhi’s moral politics and its implications for Indian and other freedom movements. It presents a set of enlightening essays based on lectures delivered in memory of the eminent historian B.R. Nanda along with a new introductory essay. With contributions by leading historians and Gandhi scholars, the book provides new perspectives on the limits of Gandhi’s moral reasoning, his role in the choice of destination by Indian Muslim refugees, his waning influence over political events, and his predicament amid the violence and turmoil in the years immediately preceding partition. The work brings together wide-ranging insights on Gandhi and revisits his religious views, which were the foundation of his morality in politics; his experience of civil disobedience and its nature, deployment and limits; Satyagraha and non-violence; and his struggle for civil rights. The volume also examines how Gandhi’s South African phase contributed to his later ideas on private property and self-sacrifice. This book will be of immense interest to researchers and scholars of modern Indian history, Gandhi studies, political science, peace and conflict studies, and South Asian studies; to researchers and scholars of media and journalism; and to the informed general reader. Naren Nanda is Chairman of the B.R. Nanda Trust and is based in the United Kingdom.

Mahatma Gandhi, Noakhali, November 1946 Photograph courtesy of National Gandhi Museum, New Delhi.

GANDHI’S MORAL POLITICS Edited by Naren Nanda

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Naren Nanda; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Naren Nanda to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-08273-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-23722-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To The Memory Of B.R. Nanda Biographer, Historian and Institution-Builder (1917–2010)

CONTENTS

List of illustrationsix Notes on contributorsx Prefacexii 1 Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Nanda, and the historians: an introductory essay

1

T.N. MADAN

2 Gandhi and Punjab

35

RAJMOHAN GANDHI

3 Gandhi and civil disobedience: the limits of moral politics

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JUDITH M. BROWN

4 Why Gandhi matters

72

RAMACHANDRA GUHA

5 Unity or partition: Mahatma Gandhi’s last stand, 1945–1948

84

SUGATA BOSE

6 Princes, subjects and Gandhi: alternatives to citizenship at the end of empire JOYA CHATTERJI

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7 Gandhi, customs and excise and the democracy of objects

126

ISABEL HOFMEYR

Index142

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 6.1 Map of undivided India in 1947 showing princely states 6.2 The Dasara festival 6.3 Princes setting off for shikar 6.4 Gandhidham Samadhi 6.5 Detail of Gandhidham Samadhi

103 111 113 117 118

Tables 6.1 Refugees registered in Bhopal State up to 16 October 1947 6.2 Distribution of Sindhi refugees, 1948 6.3 Distribution of Sindhi refugees, October 1948

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104 107 108

CONTRIBUTORS

Sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University, USA. His books include A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (2009) and His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire (2011). Judith M. Brown is Emeritus Professorial Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, UK, and Emeritus Beit Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth. She is a specialist on the history of the Indian subcontinent, particularly in the 20th century. Among her numerous works are political biographies of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, an introduction to modern India well used by university students, a new edition of the essential writings of Gandhi, and a study of the South Asian diaspora. She has taught at Cambridge, Manchester and Oxford Universities. Joya Chatterji is Professor of South Asian History at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, UK. She is editor of the journal Modern Asian Studies and the Director the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK. She has published widely on partition, migration, refugees and borderlands. Rajmohan Gandhi is researching on post-East India Company, South Indian history and is interested in the world role of today’s India. He does occasional teaching in India and the United States. His latest books are Why Gandhi Still Matters: An Appraisal of the Mahatma’s Legacy (2017) and Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic’s Beginnings (2016). Ramachandra Guha is a historian based in Bengaluru, India. His books include India after Gandhi (2008), a pioneering environmental

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history, an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (2003) and The Unquiet Woods (2000). Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, USA. Her award-winning books include Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (2013) and The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (2004). T.N. Madan is former Director and Honorary Professor (Sociology), Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi, India. He is former Chairman and Distinguished Senior Fellow (Adjunct), Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. Elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, in 1989, he was made Docteur Honoris Causa by the University of Paris, Nanterre, France, and honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian Sociological Society in 2008. In 1984 he was Visiting Professor of Anthropology and the History of Religion at Harvard University, USA, and in 1995 occupied the Radhakrishnan Chair in Humanities and the Social Sciences at Hyderabad University. He has been an author and editor of over a dozen books and many research articles and essays.

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PREFACE

When B.R. Nanda, biographer and historian, passed away in 2010, we, in the trust named after him, instituted an annual lecture in his memory. Along with an introductory essay written for this volume, this publication brings to a wider audience essays based on the first six B.R. Nanda memorial lectures delivered during the period 2011–2016. We wanted the lectures to be serious academic contributions of lasting value which, in this first series, are related to the subject of Gandhi and the freedom struggle. That our invitations to deliver these memorial lectures were accepted so graciously and unhesitatingly by the distinguished scholars whose essays are published here was gratifying for us and a reflection of the professional and personal regard in which they held B.R. Nanda. The heart of Nanda’s interest lay in Gandhi and the Indian freedom movement. It was from that centre, but always linked to it, that his work spawned to cover the territory that it did. If Gandhi and the freedom movement were at the core of his passion, the biography was his favourite genre. His five biographies, Mahatma Gandhi (1958), The Nehrus: Motilal and Jawaharlal (1962), Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and the British Raj (1977), In Gandhi’s Footsteps: The Life and Times of Jamnalal Bajaj (1990) and Road to Pakistan: The Life and Times of Mohammad Ali Jinnah (2010), were interspersed with Gandhi, Pan Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism (1989), a history of the Khilafat movement and the forces that influenced Muslim Politics in India, The Making of a Nation: India’s Road to Independence (1988) as well as collections of essays, including Gokhale, Gandhi and the Nehrus (1974), Gandhi and His Critics (1985), Jawaharlal Nehru: Rebel and Statesman(1995), In Search of Gandhi (2002) and a memoir first published pseudonymously in 1948 and again under his authorship as Witness to Partition (2003). xii

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His scholarship over six decades made a rich contribution to modern Indian History. But that was not his only contribution to it. Equally significant was his foundational leadership of The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi, as its first Director, from 1965 to 1979. His interest in Modern Indian History happily combined with his managerial experience in the Indian Railways to provide him with the institution-building skills which he so successfully brought to bear in his role as Director of the NMML. The NMML, is perhaps one of the most comprehensive resource bases on Modern Indian History. It is, and no doubt will continue to be, of immense value to successive generations of historians of India. B.R. Nanda’s contributions to modern Indian History as a writer and as an institution builder were recognised through numerous awards, the most significant amongst them, The Dadabhai Naoroji Award (1981), The Padma Bhushan (1988) and the Padma Vibhushan (1988). T.N. Madan’s introductory essay ‘Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Nanda and the Historians’ brings us a picture of Nanda, the man and the writer. Madan builds this picture both from what the six lecturers had to say about him but also from up close, by sharing his own reflections on their friendship – one which began professionally and deepened over time. Madan introduces the six essays lectures and draws common themes on Gandhi’s moral politics and finally concludes with a section on Gandhi and his religious views, which were the foundation of his morality in politics. In his essay ‘Gandhi and the Punjab’, Rajmohan Gandhi focuses on Punjab’s partition and the upheaval and tragedy marking it, discussing Gandhi’s limited ability to influence events in that State. Earlier on, Gandhi lacked a strong local team and leadership to work through and with. Later, as partition neared, his efforts to avert it made little headway, as he was by then himself a declining force in the Congress. Judith Brown revisits ‘Gandhi’s own experience of civil disobedience – the nature, deployment and limits of this theoretically most moral form of politics’– in her essay ‘Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The limits of moral politics’. She finds Satyagraha was a success where it was ‘directed at a clear and relatively restricted local or regional goal’. But Gandhi, ‘encountered almost insuperable problems’ in satyagraha campaigns at a national level because even many of his closest followers thought of it as an expedient – not a moral force – in public life. Ultimately, crucially important though it was, Satyagraha was only one of a number of contributors to Indian Independence. xiii

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In his essay ‘Why Gandhi Matters’, Ramachandra Guha begins by remembering another 9/11 – in 1906. On that day, with the launch of Satyagraha for the first time, Gandhi took the struggle of South African Indians beyond a strictly legalistic route to that of civil disobedience coupled with scrupulous non-violence, a method that has since travelled across continents. He goes on to discuss how fundamental the inseparability of non-violence and religious pluralism were for Gandhi as well as his role as what he calls a ‘serial or multiple reconciler’. Sugata Bose’s ‘Unity or Partition: Mahatma Gandhi’s Last Stand, 1945–1948’ deals with Gandhi’s unsuccessful efforts to try and preserve India as a single unified entity. As Bose says, once it was became clear that the British would be leaving, ‘Gandhi’s relevance to the Congress as a leader of mass movements diminished’, and his views held less and less sway. It was to ending the circle of vicious communal violence and to picking up the pieces of the human tragedy of partition – in Bengal, in Bihar, in Delhi – that Gandhi devoted himself in the last period before his assassination in January 1948. Joya Chatterji’ s essay ‘Princes, Subjects and Gandhi: Alternatives to Citizenship at the end of Empire’ examines a little studied subject – the flow of migrants at Partition into the Princely States rather than into the States of India and Pakistan. She explores the migrant motivations and hopes in fleeing where they did. She discusses the response of the Princes to the refugees as they offered a possible haven of constancy within a confusing flux with a hope of greater justice and protection. Joya Chatterji explores Gandhi’s concept of kingship and his engagement with States in dealing with refugee resettlement. In this as in many other issues in that last phase of his life, he was at odds with the rest of the Congress leadership. In ‘Gandhi, Customs and Excise and the Democracy of Objects’ Isabel Hofmeyr enquires into the development of Satyagraha, beginning from Gandhi’s first use of it in South Africa to oppose the Asiatic Registration Bill in 1907 and going on to its first deployment in India in 1915 in opposition to the Viramgam customs line, a tariff cordon. As she says, ‘In South Africa, his campaigns focussed on the struggle for civil rights’. She observes that in India ‘the imperial drain of the Indian economy directed his attention to objects and commodities as the locus of swadeshi mobilisations’. She illustrates this through insights from the salt satyagraha and the promotion of khadi and the boycott of British textiles. I would like to thank Rajmohan Gandhi, Judith Brown, Ramachandra Guha, Sugata Bose, Joya Chatterji and Isabel Hofmeyr for having

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so generously agreed to deliver these first six B.R. Nanda memorial lectures and also for their permission to publish these essays. I would also like to thank T.N. Madan for contributing the introductory essay to this volume and for his invaluable help and advice in editing this volume. I am happy to say that the publication of this volume at this time marks two anniversaries in 2017 – the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence in 1947 and the centenary of B.R. Nanda’s birth in 1917. As the proud son of a distinguished father, it gives me a particular pleasure that we are marking his birth centenary with this publication. Naren Nanda

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1 MAHATMA GANDHI, B.R. NANDA, AND THE HISTORIANS An introductory essay T.N. Madan1 You know, some people ask me to write on Gandhi, but I can’t. If I were a poet I might be able to do so. —Jawaharlal Nehru

This book comprises revised versions of the first six B.R. Nanda Memorial Lectures (2011–2016) delivered annually under the auspices of the B.R. Nanda Trust. Together, the distinguished lecturers have given an exemplary start to this laudable effort to honour the memory of the late Bal Ram Nanda (1917–2010) – civil servant, historian, biographer, and scholar extraordinaire, and the first Director (1965–1979), indeed the architect, of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML). The primary concern of Nanda’s work as an author was the life and times of Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948). He authored five biographical studies, three historical works, and numerous essays, some of them collected in three volumes. It is appropriate therefore that all six lecturers should have chosen to speak about aspects of Gandhi’s political career and the widespread influence of his ideas during his lifetime and thereafter. Gandhi declared that engagement in the politics of liberation was his yuga dharma, and indeed of all people fighting for their legitimate rights, first in South Africa and then for three decades in India. Again appropriately, each speaker began with a tribute to B.R. Nanda. I am sure that in the coming years some of the lecturers will discuss the large body of published research work bequeathed to us by him. In this introductory essay I shall, first, briefly recapitulate what the lecturers said about Nanda and, then, offer my own observations on 1

T.N. M A D A N

Nanda’s life and work and my reminiscences of him over three decades of friendship. Although unlike the lecturers I am not a professional historian (I am a sociologist), I have throughout my academic career been deeply interested in biographical and historical works. It is this interest that led me to read all of Nanda’s books. Our personal relationship began as an acquaintance between two individuals which gradually matured into a friendship between two families. In the third section of the essay I shall try to capture as well as I can, but briefly, the kind of historical figure that Gandhi emerges as from the reflections of the six lecturers. Finally, I shall offer some observations of my own about Gandhi’s conception of religious faith and its many manifestations.

B.R. Nanda, exemplary scholar Rajmohan Gandhi, who gave the inaugural address of the series, observes that Nanda’s personality was defined by ‘restraint of speech’, letting his pen do the talking. He never was overbearing in his interaction with other scholars. As an author, his work bore testimony to his meticulousness in research, thoughtfulness in consideration of the available evidence, clarity of interpretative insights, and felicity in writing. These qualities of Nanda’s personality and of style of authorship are also referred to by the other lecturers, each in their own manner. Thus, Judith Brown acclaims Nanda as ‘a scholar of distinction’, immersed in his ‘historical interests’, ‘meticulous’ in his research, ‘quiet and painstaking’, and disdainful of ‘flashiness’ in writing and kowtowing to ‘contemporary fad or fashion’. She pointedly refers to an admirable aspect of Nanda’s biographical studies, namely his avoidance of hagiography. In his very first biography, the classic on Gandhi,2 she quotes him emphasizing the importance of treating Gandhi as what he was, an extraordinarily self-disciplined, open-minded, and thoughtful person, not as some kind of a Hindu divinity. Ramchandra Guha pays tribute to Nanda as the author of ‘groundbreaking books’ and as the architect of ‘India’s only professionally run modern archive’. He also acknowledges his indebtedness to Nanda for ‘encouragement’ throughout his career as a scholar. Singling out the biography of Gopal Krishna Gokhale as his favourite Nanda book, he also writes that Gandhi and His Critics provided the inspiration for his essay.3 Sugata Bose recalls his extemporary introductory remarks on the occasion of the fourth B.R. Nanda Memorial Lecture in a short note (specially written at the request of the editor, Naren Nanda). He had first met Nanda when still ‘a school student’. His father, Sisir Kumar 2

G andhi , N anda , and the historians

Bose, had taken him along on a visit to the NMML. The elder Bose, founder of the Netaji Research Bureau in Calcutta, and Nanda would have had much to tell each other about their respective fledgling institutions. Sugata Bose had in later years met Nanda on his own on several occasions. ‘B.R. Nanda’, writes Bose, ‘was a perfect gentleman and a liberal historian in the best sense of the adjective’. He considers Nanda’s books ‘thoroughly researched and beautifully crafted works of history and biography, especially his studies of Gandhi’. He says his lecture in Nanda’s ‘honour’ was inspired by the latter’s ‘poignant memoir’ of partition.4 ‘One cannot imagine a more humane account of a terrible human tragedy’. Joya Chatterji refers to Nanda as a ‘foundational figure’ in the historiography of modern India. She applauds ‘his role as founderdirector of one of our great institutions, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library for seventeen years’, which ‘now holds the world’s most impressive archive on the making of modern India’. She underscores the contemporary relevance of ‘the values that prompted Nanda to take up his pen’ – the values of free inquiry and tolerance – which are in critical need of reaffirmation today. Like Bose, she refers to Nanda’s first book as a work whose subject is in a particular manner the subject of her essay too – the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. The last of the lecturers, Isabel Hofmeyr, draws attention to the widespread and lasting influence of Nanda as ‘a preeminent scholar of India’. She provides interesting numerical evidence of this influence: ‘133 editions and versions of his works, appearing in 601 publications in 4 languages with 9,580 library holdings across the world’. She also underscores the influence of Nanda’s work in academic circles in South Africa. The foregoing summary of tributes by six distinguished scholars of three countries (although a Harvard professor, Bose is an Indian citizen) is a matter of great satisfaction and a testimony to the quality and lasting value of Nanda’s scholarly work. This is in a sense independent of his personal qualities and role as an institution builder, which also draw rich tributes from them. B.R. Nanda fully deserves to be remembered in the distinctive manner of the institution of an ongoing series of annual memorial lectures.

B.R. Nanda, scholar and friend B.R. Nanda was born in 1917 in Rawalpindi (now in Pakistan) in an urban, educated, Punjabi Hindu family. The world of his parents was an amalgam of tradition and modernity, permeated with religion, 3

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and exposed to 19th century socio-religious reform movements, notably the Arya Samaj. While the women were homemakers, men pursued modern occupations. Nanda’s father and grandfather were both employees of the Public Works Department in the province of Punjab. After his early schooling in Rawalpindi, Nanda joined Government College, Lahore, from which he graduated in 1939 with distinction, obtaining a master’s degree in history. But he did not opt for a career in research and teaching, notwithstanding his scholarly bent of mind. Like most educated young men of his time, the obvious career choice was civil service. He once told me that he even attempted to join the Indian Civil Service, the ‘steel frame of the Raj’, so-called, but did not succeed. Eventually, in 1942, he joined the Indian Railways in an administrative cadre. The revolutionary role of the railways in transforming a ‘stagnant India’ had been anticipated by Karl Marx. Jawaharlal Nehru was ambivalent about them, considering them, on the one hand, the networks that brought closer to one another the far flung regions of the country and, on the other, regarding them as chains binding India in colonial bondage. Nanda had different postings from time to time, all in West Punjab. He married Janak Khosla, daughter of a distinguished officer of the state of Patiala, in 1946. Janak also had her school and collegiate education in Lahore. They raised their two sons, Naren and Biren, in Delhi. He kept busy with his official work, and, at the same time, keenly watched the course of political events in India. Gandhi had by then emerged as the most influential national leader, but Punjab had produced its own public figures of high stature and not only within the ranks of the Indian National Congress (INC). One of the more notable of these leaders had been Lala Lajpat Rai; in his later years Nanda undertook to edit his voluminous collected works.5 At home, Nanda was, as his elder son, Naren, once told me, a somewhat self-absorbed person, who, apart from being busy with his official duties, was an avid reader of books (including some on Indian philosophy), and came across as a thoughtful, rational person. There was religion at home in the form of devotional prayers and rituals, but these were organized by Nanda’s wife. Years later, it was at her initiative that the family went on a tirtha yatra (pilgrimage) to South India. Again, it was Janakji who took her husband to the Ramakrishna Mission in Delhi to listen to discourses on the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. Later, in 1966, she persuaded her husband to visit the spiritual leader Swami Muktananda, who gradually emerged as a major influence in their lives. Nanda dedicated his later books to this guru, but otherwise did not speak about their special relationship. 4

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Nanda had not been put through the ‘holy thread’ initiation ceremony – Punjabi Kshatriyas did not observe this custom – which according to orthodox Hindu tradition, made one ‘twice born’ (dvija). But he did indeed have a second birth, as it were, in 1948, in a personally more significant sense, when he heard of the assassination of Gandhi. The previous year had seen the traumatic partition of the country in August, marked by unprecedented violence, involving mass killings and movement of refugees in both directions across the newly established boundaries between west and east Punjab. As late as December 1946, Nanda recalls in his first book,6 nobody in Punjab – Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh – had imagined that such intense mutual hatred could ever overwhelm the reasonable Punjabis. It did happen, however, much to every one’s shock and sorrow. After partition, the Nandas migrated to India in 1947 itself. Nanda had postings mostly in Delhi, except one year in Ferozepore. He once told me that, as a railway officer, he expected that the trains would run as before on their tracks which cut across the newly established frontiers – that, for instance, the Frontier Mail would still go from Peshawar to Calcutta (Kolkata) and back. It was in a Ferozepore bookstore, which he would often visit after office hours, that he was told by the bookseller that Gandhi had been assassinated. The date was January 30. Nanda experienced an unexpected emotional trauma. He obviously spoke about this to not only me but many others also, including Rajmohan Gandhi, who recalls the conversation in his essay in this book. The emotional turmoil that Nanda experienced left him not only shattered but also puzzled. Why did he experience Gandhi’s assassination as a deep personal loss? Nanda was of course familiar with Gandhi’s prominent position in the freedom struggle and the reverence in which masses and leaders alike held him. There are many references to Gandhi in Witness to Partition. But he never had earlier felt personally close to the Mahatma, and yet his death was a personal loss. Straightaway Nanda started to read carefully everything about Gandhi and Gandhi’s own writings that he could find. Whatever disappointment the compulsion of leaving their ancestral home in Punjab he and his family must have experienced, being in India gave him much better access to published materials pertaining to Gandhi and the independence movement. The materials he read, mainly books, including many by Gandhi himself, are listed in the ‘Select Bibliography’ at the end of his Gandhi biography.7 The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi only began to come out in the same year as his book, 1958.8 He does not seem to have drawn on any original or other archival materials in a big 5

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way, although he did visit the National Archives in New Delhi. He did not have the time or the resources to go to London and other places for his research. In the circumstances, Nanda’s achievement – a welldocumented book – was truly remarkable, a result of his dedication to the chosen objective and of his meticulousness in study and writing. It certainly was the most comprehensive single volume biography of Gandhi published in the ten years since his death. Hundreds of books and research papers on Gandhi’s life and work have been published since then, and to the best of my knowledge no author has found fault with the factual basis of Nanda’s narrative. With the Gandhi biography Nanda found his vocation as a biographical historian, although he continued to work for the railways and had no immediate plans to work on other biographies. He had taken ten years to find an answer to the question of Gandhi’s hold over him that had struck him like lightning in 1948, and was content. Incidentally, the book gives us intimations of Nanda’s method of research and style of writing: factually grounded but not excessively burdened with a baggage of footnotes and references; precise, even austere, and lucid in expression; unsullied by extravagances of any kind but not lacking in literary felicity; primarily narrational but not lacking in interpretive commentary and insights. He did not, however, profess any sophisticated theory of human history or historiography. At the most, one could call him a ‘liberal’ for whom the dignity of the individual and the equality of nations in free association are both a historical imperative and a moral value. Looking at the whole body of Nanda’s work, one could describe his overall perspective (borrowing the philosopher W.B. Gallie’s words) as marked by a ‘synoptic mastery of a period or epoch’, so that one may be able to genuinely contribute ‘to the interpretation of even a minor corner or fact of it’.9 The element of interpretation, I may add, gained in salience with each subsequent work following the first. Going back to the Gandhi biography, Nanda once told me that when he was sure he had a publishable manuscript, he knew that as a civil servant he was expected to take permission of the government for publication. For this to happen, he would have to submit the manuscript to his superiors in the bureaucracy for scrutiny. He was anxious that not only would it take many months or more to get the approval but it could come with the requirement of some changes and even deletions. He was simply not willing to take this risk and therefore took what could have been a bigger risk, displeasure of the authorities concerned in the government. To seek a publisher, he knew that no reputable publisher would publish a book on Gandhi under a pseudonym. 6

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After careful consideration, he sent the manuscript to the wellknown London publisher George Allen and Unwin, who had published many books on India by Indian and non-Indian authors. The manuscript was dispatched, and Nanda waited apprehensively, but he did not have to wait long. He received a letter of unconditional acceptance, and the book was published a year later. Nanda’s career as an author had been launched, but even he was not sure of this at that time. He continued to work for the Northern Railway in a senior administrative position and was stationed in Delhi. He also continued to read books on the Indian freedom movement from the middle of the 19th century onwards. He had long been a collector of books, and his personal library steadily grew in size. Reviews of the Gandhi biography also started to come out in India and abroad, and they generally were not merely positive but even laudatory. And then something totally unexpected happened. In March 1959, Nanda met Nehru by appointment to present to him a copy of the Gandhi biography. That Jawaharlal Nehru would perhaps have read the book, Nanda had hoped, but that he would be asked by Nehru to write a biography of his father was a possibility he had not even imagined. What transpired at the meeting is best recalled in Nanda’s own words. ‘Apparently, he knew about the book (Nanda is being typically modest), [and] he asked me whether I would do a book on his father. “My father has been dead twenty-eight years, but I never encouraged anyone to write on him”’.10 Obviously, Nehru not merely ‘knew’ about Nanda’s Gandhi biography but thought highly of it. He promised Nanda unfettered access to all relevant family papers and also ‘arranged’ for his access to the records of the National Archives of India and of the Uttar Pradesh (UP) Government, and to the Gandhi Memorial Museum Library. Nehru also invited Nanda to a luncheon meeting where the only other persons present were Vijayalakshmi Pandit and Indira Gandhi. Subsequently, Nehru agreed to talk with Nanda every time he requested an interview. Work on the book began immediately and was completed in an astonishingly short time – one year. Obviously, Nehru had judged Nanda’s capabilities very well. Nanda sent the manuscript to Allen and Unwin. He informed Nehru about this, and also sent him a copy for his comments. Within a few weeks, Nehru sent for Nanda. He said, ‘ “Nanda, I figure too much in your book, don’t I”? I said, “You figure too much in the book because you figured too much in your father’s life”. He smiled’.11 Nehru had detected just two errors: a wrong date (which Nanda writes was actually a typographical error), and a misspelled French word. A speculative flourish of Nanda’s that Nehru 7

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would have played golf if he had joined the Indian Civil Service (ICS) was just that, Nehru commented! What author would have expected such unqualified approval from a person like Nehru, whose own historical studies are major classics of the 20th century? And what better testimonial could there have been acknowledging Nanda’s talents as a biographer? Nanda had ‘arrived’, and without waste of any time began research on a biography of Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915). There were no hesitations now, and in the coming years the civil servant blossomed into a renowned biographer, historian, and institution builder – work which occupied him for the rest of his life. Nanda’s keen interest in 20th-century Indian politics had led him to closely follow developments in the politically vibrant Bombay Province (since divided into the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat), where stalwarts like Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) and Gokhale were two amongst the most notable public figures. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was yet another such leader; more about him below. Besides Bombay, Nanda had also been interested in the politics of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), from where the Nehrus hailed. Gokhale had visited Gandhi in South Africa and, on return, paid him rich tributes in 1909 at the annual conference of the INC. And Gandhi was to acknowledge him as his political guru. Ironically, Gokhale died the very year – 1915 – Gandhi returned to India with encouragement from him. Nanda’s decision to write a biography of Gokhale was only to be expected. I may add in passing that Bengal, which had been the scene of much political turmoil since the beginning of the 20th century, did not interest Nanda much because of his central concern with Gandhi, who had not made any significant impact on the leaders and events of the province. Nehru passed away in 1964, two years after the book he had requested had been published, although it was about not only his father but himself too. In 1965, the Government of India decided to set up the NMML. Nanda was the obvious choice for undertaking this challenging and prestigious task. Over the next fourteen years, he worked hard and with imagination to build a remarkable institution, to which some of the contributors to this book have made fulsome reference. At this point, I would like to make a digression to recall how I came to know Nanda personally. Amongst other regular activities at the NMML that Nanda initiated were the periodic seminars on significant subjects, the proceedings of most of which were published, and some of them were edited for publication by the indefatigable Director (Nanda) 8

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himself. In 1975, I received a letter from him asking me if I would be willing to contribute to a series of lectures-seminars that the NMML had decided to organize during the International Woman’s Year. A meeting, our first ever, followed in his office, and it turned out to be a very pleasant one. I told him of my being an avid reader of biographies and English-language fiction and offered to write a paper on ‘the Indian woman at home’ based on a few biographical works. He was enthusiastic. In the course of our conversation, I told him that the references to women in his Gandhi and Nehru biographies were rather sparse! In the lectures-seminars series, I made a presentation and Nanda included my essay in the volume comprising the seminars-lectures.12 Thereafter, we met on a few occasions, but a deeper and lasting relationship began in 1978. I had recently joined the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) as Member-Secretary (chief executive), and Nanda was shortly retiring from the NMML. By that time some discussions between him and my predecessor at ICSSR, J.P. Naik, regarding the award of a National Fellowship to him on his retirement, had taken place. This Fellowship is considered the highest honour that ICSSR may bestow on a scholar. He visited me in my office, and a date for his assuming the Fellowship was decided. He told me that he was already working on a book on Gandhi’s efforts in the early 1920s to involve Indian Muslims in the national movement under the aegis of the INC, and would like his ongoing research to be treated as his Fellowship project. Nanda had brought with him a copy of his Gokhale biography published earlier that year to give to me.13 I read the book almost immediately in spite of the fact that I had no particular knowledge or deep interest in Gokhale and his work. The Gandhi and Nehru books had not captured my interest as much as this one did, and it remains my favourite Nanda book. (Ram Guha says the same in his essay in this volume.) Actually, I said this to Nanda himself, and he was interested in what I had to say. He agreed that the character of his writing had definitely changed from the Nehru book onwards, as he not only began to study unpublished and archival sources but also felt more confident of his abilities. He also gave me an earlier book of his essays, which is an important companion volume to the three biographies.14 The Gokhale biography is indeed an outstanding work, rich in its sources, empathetic in his approach, insightful in interpretation, and felicitous in style. In Richard Tucker’s opinion, it was ‘one of a tiny handful of truly superior biographies of modern Indian leaders’. Tucker went so far as to authoritatively write: ‘We will not need another biography of [Gokhale] in the near future’.15 9

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Work on the book on Muslim participation in the national movement was taking him longer than he had expected, perhaps because he was attempting another genre, a historical work. Although Gandhi remained central to it, the book was not a biographical study. But a sudden distraction irrupted. Richard Attenborough’s epic film Gandhi was released worldwide in 1982 and was received with much acclaim everywhere – from the United States of America to India and Japan. This in turn infuriated some people in the West, and a series of articles highly critical of Gandhi’s public and personal lives appeared in the press. Nanda read some of these and was deeply distressed. He decided to put aside work on the Muslim book, and commenced composing a response to the critics of Gandhi. These critics were not only from the West but also India. Thus, as he put it in the Preface to his 1985 book, Gandhi and His Critics, ‘He [Gandhi] was the bete noire of orthodox Hindus’, and an attempt had been made in Poona in 1934 even to kill him. And his assassin in 1948 was also a Poona Brahman. But, Nanda observes, ‘Gandhi was patient with his critics’.16 He decided to take up a wide range of criticisms for scrutiny and evaluation, and rejected virtually all of them as being the product of either ignorance or malice. We also read a comment by Nanda, all too rare, on his method: ‘Though my approach is broadly thematic, I have not ignored chronology’.17 In the course of writing Gandhi and His Critics, he discussed with me a few times his choice of themes and his approach. I particularly remember his asking me what I knew of the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose, his book on Gandhi in Noakhali,18 and his views on Gandhi’s relations with women in the context of his vow of brahmacharya (chastity). It just happened to be the case that both my wife and I knew Bose quite well (he belonged to the generation of our teachers) and had read his book. I remember suggesting to Nanda to avoid getting involved in psychoanalytical controversies, and he took my suggestion seriously and deleted a few passages from the manuscript. He graciously mentions in the Preface that I had read a couple of chapters of the draft version of the book. Thereafter, he showed me the complete typescripts of all his books except the Jinnah book, obviously because his time was running out in 2009. He does mention, however, our discussions during the writing of this last work. It was not long after the publication of Gandhi and His Critics that he sent me the complete bound typescript of his next book,19 which I found a hard read, far removed in content and style from what he had earlier written. I did not have any substantial comments to offer, only a few general observations. He did not object to my lack of significant response and sent me a copy of the book when it was published 10

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in 1989. It is noteworthy that Nanda never again wrote an original historical work. Instead, he wrote a biography of Jamnalal Bajaj,20 which he had decided to write while working on the Muslim book. He explains in the Preface how he had felt that a preoccupation with Gandhi’s political campaigns had led to a regrettable neglect of his deep involvement in social reform and other ‘constructive’ activities, ‘the troughs in the waves of his satyagraha struggles’, as he calls them.21 Nanda illumines these ‘troughs’ by going into the involvement of one of India’s leading businessmen-entrepreneurs, Jamnalal Bajaj, in the organizational aspects of the INC and Gandhi’s non-political engagements. In this sense, this book is not only about Bajaj but also Gandhi, the social reformer – his campaigns on behalf of the ‘Untouchables’ (so-called), whom he renamed Harijan (children of God), the propagation of khadi, and the promotion of an ethical notion of capitalism. Nanda was now into his early seventies and had been a tireless author for four decades – in addition to being an institution builder, travelling within India and abroad, in search of primary data and attending seminars and conferences. Fortunately, he enjoyed good health and was blessed with a remarkable calmness of temper. The silent influence of the spiritual guru Swami Muktananda on both the Nandas was immense, but (as I said earlier) he did not talk about it. Janakji was more forthcoming, and a painting of the Swami done by her adorned one of the walls of the drawing room of their home in New Delhi. She also made some portraits of Gandhi which show him in thoughtful poses. After the Bajaj book was published, Nanda decided to relax a bit and revisit his scholarly essays, mainly about Gandhi and Nehru. These pursuits resulted in two books, which comprised revised versions of published texts.22 Alongside an earlier work,23 the three volumes are invaluable supplements to the biographies and, in an important sense, complete them. They also stand on their own, and are, perhaps, of more general interest. Like his other books, the Gandhi and Nehru collections were very well received by reviewers and readers. As Judith Brown recalls in her essay (included here), Nanda was very pleased with her review of the Nehru book.24 (He sent me a photocopy of it.) Brown had characterized the work as ‘a cautious book, meticulous in its use of archival resources and careful in its judgements’. Such praise coming from a professional historian specializing on modern India, who was an Oxford professor, pleased Nanda, because he often told me that professional historians in India, particularly those with strong 11

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ideological commitments, had tended to ignore his work. Following the emergence of the ‘history from below’ perspectives of the ‘Subaltern Studies Group’ (SSG) in the 1980s, interest in Nanda’s work perhaps weakened further. The contrasting SSG perspective on Gandhi, the Chauri Chaura incident (mentioned elsewhere in this essay), and the national movement generally is insightfully illustrated by Amin’s important book on the subject.25 Understandably, Nanda was not sympathetic to this approach – missing the wood for the trees, as he put it – and said as much in a review of the book in a news magazine, although he called it ‘the most painstaking study ever made of this incident’.26 When he was working on the two books of essays in the 1990s, I suggested to him several times that there was a complete historical narrative of the entire independence movement embedded in his books waiting to be culled out and put together in a chronological framework. Extracts from the books could be linked together by newly written commentary, and this is precisely what he did. It turned out that Ralph Buultjens (of New York University) also had made a similar suggestion to him.27 I believe it is an exercise in bringing together interconnected events and personalities of the earlier works, and should be easily accessible to the interested general reader who may not be inclined to read the heavier biographical and historical studies. Towards the end of the century, when Nanda was in his eighties, his interests were alive and his mind was active. I am sure the idea was already in his mind, but when some of his friends such as Sri Ram Mehrotra, one of the leading historians of the national movement, and I suggested a biography of Jinnah, he did not say he had already written enough! My argument was simple; his magnificent body of work on Gandhi (which included biographies of Gokhale, Gandhi’s political guru; Nehru, his closest political comrade of whom he was very fond and whose father he respected; and Bajaj, his faithful collaborator in organizational work) was incomplete without a biography of his main political rival, Jinnah. A Jinnah biography would complete the oeuvre. (I did not mention Ambedkar, knowing Nanda’s negative assessment of his role in the freedom movement. In any case, the disagreements between Gandhi and Ambedkar are a subtext of the main narrative of the struggle against colonialism.) When, sometime later, Nanda told me that his book on Jinnah was proceeding well, I was both pleased and apprehensive – pleased because what had seemed valuable to me was being done, but apprehensive simply because he never liked Jinnah. I remember a number of occasions when I played the devil’s advocate and told Nanda that 12

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Gandhi, and Nehru too, were responsible for driving Jinnah into communal politics by refusing to grant him the kind of regard which, for instance, Motilal Nehru had for him. I particularly remember a conversation as late as 2007 (at a ninetieth birthday lunch hosted by his family), as the book was nearing completion, when he told me that Jinnah was a brilliant man, all right, but he was unprincipled and opportunistic. I wondered how he would be able to bring that respectful empathy to his task which is a defining characteristic of the earlier biographies. Nanda’s decision to write a political biography of Jinnah was courageous, to say the least, because of his personal antipathy towards him. It was also, and more notably, remarkable because, curiously, no Indian historians had considered it worth their while to write such a book, leaving the task to non-Indians, particularly Pakistanis. There are, of course, many scholarly studies by Indians which discuss Jinnah’s role over half a century, first as a votary of a united independent India and then (the 1940s onwards) as the principal advocate of the carving of Pakistan out of the subcontinent. Already, Nanda had begun to experience age-related health problems, but his resolve was firm. I was concerned and inquired about the status of the Jinnah work to learn that only the concluding chapter remained to be written. Frequent spells of indisposition disrupted his normal routines, but his determination to complete the book was firm. He did not call for any assistance, although it would have been readily forthcoming. No greater testimony is needed to Nanda’s integrity as a scholar and author. Somehow, between spells of incapacitating illness, Nanda completed the work in 2009 and asked me about a suitable publisher who would not take too long to bring out the book. I recommended Routledge and requested Omita Goyal, their chief of acquisitions, to collect the typescript from him. Advance copies of the book were ready early in 2010.28 He was pleased with the quality of copy editing and production, and told me so on telephone. My wife and I called on the Nandas at their home on the 25th of March. He gave us an inscribed copy of the book and told me that he would like me to be a speaker at the formal release of the book. I asked him that day about his conception of the craft of writing biographies. He was in a cheerful mood, although far from well, and gave me a multipoint answer. He emphasized that the guiding principle is the quest for ‘the truth’ of the biographee’s life and work. The first task, then, is the collection of relevant and reliable evidence, which should be carefully examined without any preconceived notions. The 13

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writing should be dispassionate and coherent. This did not mean, however, that the biographer should not present his judgements to the readers, but that care must be taken not to impose these on them – readers should rather be stimulated to come to their own conclusions. Nanda did not mention a theoretical perspective of any kind whatsoever. In a thoughtful concluding remark, he said the subject has to be a ‘hero’, a ‘leader’ of people who ‘shows the way’, but left unclarified what makes a person a hero. He did say, though, that the hero knows even when only a teenager that he is destined for great achievements; he must have ‘ambition and a sense of purpose’. When I finally asked him if he would have liked to write about any other ‘hero’ of the freedom movement, he was silent for a moment and then said, ‘No’. I persisted and asked if he might have done a book on Vallabhbhai Patel. He replied, ‘Perhaps’. Needless to add, Nanda obviously was deeply influenced by the late 19th century view, associated with historians like Thomas Carlyle, that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men’. I read the Jinnah biography with immense interest. It lacks the richness of material of the Gokhale book, or the respectful but not uncritical admiration for the subject that stands out in the Gandhi and Nehru books, but it is not wanting in empathy. It shows no signs of the hostility that had always come through in our conversations, and my fears were quietened. And it is gracefully written. Here is an insightful comment: Indeed [Jinnah’s] political career seemed star-crossed. He was conscious of his abilities, he was confident, he was ambitious, and he had set his sights high. But it was a strange irony that whenever he was about to reach the top of the political ladder, events beyond his control brought him down.29 Although the above is written in the context of the political events of the early 1930s, it surely could also be said of any earlier or subsequent stage of Jinnah’s chequered political career, including, ironically, the creation of ‘a moth-eaten Pakistan’, to use his own words uttered in petulance during the last phase of negotiations with the Viceroy and the Congress leaders. At the formal release of the book (where historian Sri Ram Mehrotra and senior journalist Inder Malhotra also spoke), I pointed out that Nanda had noted that the young Jinnah in his London days had wanted to join the theatre and play the role of Romeo. In the event, his life had something of a Shakespearean tragic hero about it: his hubris was, perhaps, his ‘tragic flaw’ of character. 14

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About two months after the formal release of the Jinnah biography, Bal Ram Nanda passed away on May 30, 2010, leaving behind a monumental body of work and – amongst his family members and numerous friends and admirers – memories of a splendid life lived purposefully and with utter honesty and immense dignity. Within the inner family circle, he was survived by his wife Janak – she passed away in 2012 – and his sons Naren and Biren and their families.30

Gandhi: moral politics In this section, I will not, contrary to what may perhaps be expected, attempt to summarise the six essays contained in this book, which is not to deny that each illumines various aspects of Gandhi’s leadership and particular phases of the freedom movement. I shall instead describe the kind of person that Gandhi emerges as from the essays: a charismatic leader who made the masses believe that without their participation, India would not attain swaraj, which connoted ‘home rule’ in his earlier days but was later expanded to stand for complete independence. Complete independence was the political expression of a much larger holistic idea of which self-mastery was the foundation. Moreover, he insisted that good ends could only be achieved by good means, that the freedom movement comprising many episodes had to be truth-based and non-violent (satyagraha). He emphasized the importance of reconciling conflicting interests arising from regional and community identities for the furtherance of national goals. Between them, the lecturers-essayists highlight select events from the Non-Cooperation movement of the 1920s, which Gandhi conceived and led, to the partition of India on August 14, 1947, which he unwaveringly but unsuccessfully opposed. Gandhi had famously said that partition could occur only over his dead body. It did happen, however, in the midst of his tireless efforts to restore communal harmony in far-flung riot-torn places of north India. He let it be known that he would spend the rest of his life in Pakistan: he would, thus, reject the morally illegitimate division of the country. But that was not to be. A Hindu fanatic, who saw in Gandhi the arch enemy of his community’s interests, assassinated him on January 30, 1948. Rajmohan Gandhi reminds us in his essay ‘Gandhi and Punjab’ (see below pp. 35–56) that, at the very beginning of his participation in the struggle for freedom, Gandhi had encountered an early formulation of what came later to be known as ‘the two nation theory’. The exponent was Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), a distinguished Hindu leader of Punjab, who said in 1924 that a ‘united India’ was not possible, 15

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that it would have to be partitioned into ‘a Muslim and non-Muslim India’. This was almost twenty years before the Indian Muslim League adopted the resolution for the creation of Pakistan in 1940 at Lahore, the city of Lajpat Rai’s political life. This was ‘untruth’ for Gandhi, not in the empirical sense, for there were both commonalities and conflict of interests between the different religious communities of Punjab, but in a moral sense. Rajmohan Gandhi highlights some of the geographical and cultural differences within Punjab, which Gandhi had ignored, selecting those (like language) which were common to all Punjabis. He proclaimed ‘mutual forbearance and toleration’ as ‘the law of life’. It is obvious that the ‘law’ Gandhi spoke about was a moral imperative. As Rajmohan Gandhi quotes him, ‘Mingling in the mud of Jallianwalla Bagh, the blood of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims’ could have ‘sealed’ an enduring ‘pact’, but it did not happen, much to Gandhi’s sorrow. After 1919 and well into the 1940s, Gandhi came time and again to Punjab and tried to influence political developments there. In 1919 itself, he managed to get the INC, meeting not far from the Bagh, to adopt his resolution condemning the ‘massacre’ and also the killing three days earlier of five Englishmen in Amritsar. In the essayist’s words, ‘In Amritsar, Gandhi gave a new meaning to Indian honour’, and enabled ‘the Indian National Congress to capture the high moral ground’. To preserve the ideal of unity, Gandhi was willing to make what ordinarily would have been considered political deals (e.g. the merger of the Khilafat campaign in the Non-Cooperation movement); for him they were moral compacts. Unfortunately, ‘Hindu-Muslim recriminations’ were like a running sore and ‘a common struggle against the empire was no guarantee of Hindu-Muslim unity’, which does not mean that Gandhi’s efforts were unwise. Rajmohan Gandhi’s essay focuses on Mahatma Gandhi’s politics, but it is clear that the writer regards Gandhi’s morals as high and his integrity as irrefutable. On occasion, however, Gandhi did allow personal loyalties to influence him, Rajmohan notes, and thus detract from his moral stature. ‘The Limits of Moral Politics’ (pp. 57–71) is the theme of Judith Brown’s essay. These limits show up when one revisits Gandhi’s ‘practice of Civil Disobedience’, which she characterizes as a ‘theoretically most moral form of politics’. In Brown’s portrait of him, Gandhi is primarily a moral person for whom participation in politics was an imperative, and ‘no retreat into a spiritual world’ was possible. He was very much a this-worldly man, notwithstanding his personal asceticism. Gandhi himself called engagement in political activity, as already 16

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noted, ‘the yuga dharma’ of Indians living in colonial bondage, chastising ‘those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics’ as people who ‘do not know what religion means’ (an affirmation quoted by Brown from Gandhi’s 1927 autobiography (pp. xx – xx).31 Moral politics entailed many responsibilities for its practitioner. For example, an open mind (‘go on learning and experimenting’, in Brown’s words), combined with the willingness to admit one could be wrong. It was such an admission that led Gandhi to suspend the NonCooperation movement in 1922 after the Chauri Chaura violence.32 It seems to me that Gandhi wedded his ethic of conscience to an ethic of consequences – a difficult thing to do, particularly for a politician. The pursuit of moral politics, moreover, posed many practical problems for Gandhi: for example, the challenge of the change of scale. In Brown’s words, the passage from ‘the local to the national’ involved the risk that ‘local groups brought their own hopes and demands into his non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements’. The larger and internally more diverse the political arena, the greater the responsibility of the leader to attend to ‘the interlocking issues of organization and discipline’, and Gandhi did not shirk this. Gandhi’s politics was moral and also modern. It was ‘moral’ insofar as it focused on values also and not merely interests, and ‘modern’ in view of his emphasis on the efficiency of organizational matters. Discipline was raised to the level of a value. Doing so surely was relevant in view of the fact that the Congress was not a political party in the usual sense of the term but a movement comprising divergent interest groups. To seek efficiency of instruments was essential without abandoning a fundamental moral principle, namely, that ‘means and ends’ never are separable. Amongst Gandhi’s comrades, even those closest to him, no one was his equal in moral courage. Brown reminds us that Jawaharlal Nehru boldly admitted in his 1936 autobiography that, for him, and indeed for ‘the National Congress as a whole, the non-violent method was not and could not be a religion or an unchallengeable creed or dogma’. Whatever may have been Gandhi’s vision of the future, the ‘goal’ of his followers in the national movement was, in Brown’s words, ‘to inherit the raj rather than to instigate moral revolution’. And it was not only the goals and values of his collaborators but also ‘the nature of the opponent’ that limited or facilitated the pursuit of moral politics. In the present case, the opponents were the British and they were guided by their own values and practical compulsions of managing the empire. As Brown puts it, ‘the fate of the raj was decided at the intersection of the political worlds of India and Britain’, and ‘weakened’ by 17

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other ‘longer-term wider influence’, beyond ‘the influence of Gandhi and his moral politics’. Brown concludes by recalling that, according to Nanda, ‘Gandhi was no saint, but a perceptive and highly disciplined man, who was constantly learning from the situations in which he found himself, and stuck to his moral values as he became a highly significant figure in Indian politics’. Brown’s Gandhi, and Nanda’s too, are essentially one and the same in their moral politics. Additionally, Brown emphasizes that ‘Gandhi’s moral politics have become firmly established as part of the human repertoire of political activity’. She presents Gandhi as a global figure. Needless to add, this recognition came only after his martyrdom. As is well known, Gandhi’s name was proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize more than once but without success. The global significance of Gandhi is also the burden of Ramchandra Guha’s ‘Why Gandhi Matters’ (pp. 72–83). He tells us that Nanda’s Gandhi and His Critics provided him ‘the inspiration’ for his essay. (Actually, Nanda, too, wrote on the ‘relevance’ of Gandhi).33 Guha takes us back to a public meeting in Johannesburg that Gandhi organized on September 11, 1906, to protest against certain proposed moves of the Transvaal government ‘to end Asian immigration and to place restrictions on Asians already in the colony’. The response to his call was tremendous. The assembled gathering passed a resolution to abandon the cautious legalistic ‘incrementalism of petition writers’, and also to shun the violent methods of European revolutionaries. Gandhi warned his audience that the ‘struggle will be prolonged’, and would in all likelihood invite stringent punishments like flogging. If the Indian community was united and courageous, he assured them, they would in the end be victorious. The resolve and the adopted method of non-violent protest against injustice by what Guha calls ‘the first 9/11’ was named satyagraha by Gandhi. The objective was ‘to nurture rather than destroy’, the latter of which the perpetrators of 9/11/2001 did in New York; indeed, it was ‘to enrich and dignify human life rather than to debase and degrade it’. Guha’s Gandhi is a bold, clear-headed, upright man and an innovator in his methods. He derived his strength from being a person of faith for whom the unity of humankind was a moral verity that transcended all historical cleavages. (I will have more to say on Gandhi as a man of faith in the fourth section of this essay.) In India, Guha observes, Gandhi widened the scope and spread of protest against injustice, but he remained wedded to satyagraha and the ideal of reconciliation. There was no scope in his philosophy of life for foes or the absolute other. Gandhi highlighted the obstacles on 18

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the rough road to freedom, above all lack of unity and the practice of various kinds of social discrimination by Indians amongst themselves. He unfalteringly promoted, Guha notes, the spirit of democratic selfgovernance and the ‘ethos’ of tolerance and religious pluralism. While Gandhi derived much inspiration from the Western as well as the Eastern cultural traditions and expressions of dissent, his own influence turned out to be crucially important to liberation movements worldwide. ‘Freedom and justice with reconciliation – that is the message’, Guha writes, ‘of Gandhi and Mandela, King and Havel, the Dalai Lama and Aung Suu Kyi’. What, then, survives of Gandhi’s message and example today? Guha believes that his undying legacy includes: opposition to authoritarianism and injustice in every sphere, the philosophy and practice of non-violence, concern for the environment, respect for all religious faiths, humility of attitude and the willingness to acknowledge one’s errors of judgement, and the supreme value of ‘personal integrity’ in public life. The image of Gandhi as a reconciler between peoples and amongst people also stands out in Sugata Bose’s essay ‘To Work for Unity: Gandhi’s Last Stand’ (pp. 84–100). Bose describes the cataclysmic and unimaginably bloody events in Punjab, Bengal, and elsewhere in 1946–1948, and highlights Gandhi’s unceasing efforts until his very last breath to unite people at all levels and restore communal harmony. The manner in which events unfolded from 1945 onwards (after the end of the Second World War and the release of political prisoners in India) was marked by the marginalization of Gandhi from the central forums of political negotiations. Like Brown, Bose also writes about this. (Gandhi’s 1944 fruitless efforts to arrive at a settlement with Jinnah had been his individual initiative.) In 1946, Bose writes, Gandhi met in Delhi with the Indian National Army’s (INA’s) prisoners of war awaiting their trial and lauded the inter-religious harmony that had prevailed amongst them. He deeply regretted the communal divisiveness which had come to possess Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. He nostalgically recalled, Bose tells us, how, speaking ‘with one voice’, the leaders of Non-Cooperation in the early 1920s, led by Gandhi, had ‘delivered the message of Hindu-Muslim unity and swaraj to the masses’. The years 1946 and 1947 were marked by widespread and largescale communal riots in Bengal, Bihar, Punjab, and the United Provinces. Believing at first that this was happening only in isolated urban areas, the ‘eruption of violence in the rural backwaters of Noakhali’ (in East Bengal) ‘came as a rude shock’ to Gandhi. From then onwards, Gandhi emerged as a pilgrim on his ‘Do or die’ mission, going from province to province. As Bose points out, this aged man approaching 19

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eighty, worked unceasingly – even undertaking fasts unto death in Calcutta and Delhi – to restore calm and amity, to reiterate the messages of love, tolerance, and reconciliation. He drew his strength from being a man of religion. Bose writes: ‘Gandhi insisted that he acted as a true Hindu in his efforts to befriend Muslims’. His advice to the Viceroy and the Congress leaders – the latter had in the past always consulted him – was not to give up the ideal of a united, free India. But they all together decided to divide the country along communal lines. He continued to ‘walk alone’ – reminiscent of Tagore’s exhortation in his haunting song ekla chalo re! – and did not give up. In September 1947, Bose recalls, he told the nation in a radio broadcast that the capital of independent India, Delhi, ‘looked like a city of the dead’, and warned, ‘If India fails, Asia dies’. It was in this same Delhi that in January 1948 Gandhi undertook what turned out to be his last fast unto death for the restoration of sanity and communal harmony.34 Through his travels in Bengal and Bihar and his fasts in Calcutta and Delhi, Gandhi sought, as Bose puts it, to convert the violence around him into ‘a personal ordeal’ – taking Christ-like personal responsibility for the moral lapses of others. Once again, leaders of the warring communities gave him assurances which he trusted that they would bury the hatchet and tread the path of non-violence and love. He broke his fast on January 18 only to be assassinated twelve days later by a Hindu fanatic. He died, as he had always hoped, with the name of God on his lips. Bose recalls his uncle, Sarat Chandra, a prominent politician and admirer of English literature, quote Shakespeare on hearing the news, ‘When comes such another’? Gandhi was dead, but not his ideas and ideals. Joya Chatterji writes in her ‘Princes, Subjects and Gandhi’ (pp. 101–125), about the first horrendous aftermath of Partition – the movement of refugees across the newly created borders within the subcontinent – borders across which Nanda believed, as I noted above, the railway trains would still run, but not carrying murderers, dead bodies, and for months on end, refugees. Chatterji’s essay is particularly concerned with Muslim refugees fleeing their homes in India, but not all of them headed for West or East Pakistan. Considerable numbers of them (she provides such figures as are available) sought shelter in independent Muslim princely states within the new India, notably Hyderabad and Bhopal, even when this meant going farther away than escape to Pakistan would have been. This choice may seem rather puzzling and in need of some explanation. ‘A part of the answer’, Chatterji writes, ‘must surely be that these states . . . appeared to offer a measure of constancy in a 20

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terrifying world of change’. The princes were, of course, subservient to the British, the paramount power in undivided India but, in fact, they managed to appear to their subjects as men and women of substance, particularly in the larger states, and no mere wearers of hollow crowns. The ‘would be subjects believed that nawabs, rajas and ranis could and would protect them more effectively than the Indian army’. Chatterji adds: ‘Migrants to the states also had powerful expectations of justice – ad’l – a central tenet of kingship’. ‘Many kings and queens responded energetically to these expectations, albeit in the idioms of “modern” monarchical patronage’. The qualifier is necessitated, perhaps, by Chatterji having earlier invoked the traditional notion of rajadharma. But, Chatterji asks, ‘what does this have to do with Gandhi, a tragic Lear-like figure in the last days of his life’? Her answer is interesting: ‘A certain amount . . . [because] for Gandhi princely states actually had a key role both in the protection of minorities and the rehabilitation of refugees after independence’. This applied to both Hindu and Muslim rulers. ‘Until his last, then, Gandhi continued to have faith not only in the capacity but [also] the will of a Muslim ruler of a princely state to protect Hindu subjects’. As early as 1925, Gandhi had stated a basic maxim, which Chatterji quotes: ‘If the institution of kingship has a moral basis, Princes are not independent proprietors but only trustees of their subjects for revenue received from them. It can therefore be spent for them only as trust money . . . [as in] the English Constitution’. This same principle of ‘trusteeship’ was applied by Gandhi to the owners of capital in relation to the workers employed by them. Chatterji’s Gandhi is, then, a unique person – borrowing Faisal Devji’s evocative phrase, ‘an impossible Indian’ – whose mind and heart probed all the corners of human endeavour and responsibility, weighing them in the balance of moral justice. Indeed, he left hardly any aspect of public (and private) life unconsidered, not even customs and excise rules under colonial regimes. In the sixth and last essay in this book (pp. 126-141), Isabel Hofmeyr discusses Gandhi’s encounters with these administrative procedures and their implications for people’s access to ‘objects’ (goods) at the beginning of the 20th century in South Africa and then, in 1915, in India at the borders of the princely states of Kathiawad and British India. Guha, as noted above, recalls the birth of satyagraha as philosophy and practice in Johannesburg in 1906. Gandhi had assured his audience that true satyagrahis cannot but be victorious in the end. Hofmeyr begins with 1908, when the campaign became redundant following Gandhi’s agreement with Jan Smuts about a settlement. This 21

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unforeseen development made Gandhi ‘turn towards a more inward and spiritual view of satyagraha’. The importance of this change lies, Hofmeyr observes, in Gandhi’s complete break with Western civilization and its notions of industrial progress and the institutions of the modern state. (Hind Swaraj was published in 1909.) Going into the details of the manner in which customs and excise regimes operated as a controlling mechanism in South Africa and India, Hofmeyr picks out a significant aspect of Gandhi’s thought, his ‘theory of the object’ as illustrated by the moral and political meanings he attached to commodities like khadi and common salt, which attracted the attention of the authorities. From the very beginning, Gandhi was against the imposition of excise duties. As situations developed, he made more nuanced responses, even as his own public career developed, from the championing of ‘civil rights (of movement, residence and trade’) in South Africa towards the assertion of political rights, such as ‘demands for universal franchise or economic calls for fiscal autonomy’ in India. In other words, Gandhi’s examination of ‘the objectives and practices of colonial governance’, led him from a concern with ‘people’ in South Africa to, besides people, ‘objects’ in India. ‘The various strategies’ employed by Gandhi were ‘a necessary part of constructing an anti-imperial order in which objects were radically redefined in order to lay bare the unjust structure of empire, a way of asserting an alternative sovereignty over these objects’. In the conceptualization of the moral dimension of the 1930 salt satyagraha, he used familiar but powerful imagery. Hofmeyr quotes from Gandhi’s speeches: ‘Our body is a fort . . . And once salt has entered the fort, it should not be allowed to be forced out . . . From today we should begin cultivating the strength of will to see that a fist holding salt does not open even if the wrist is cut off’. We see here, as indeed in all major political and social struggles he launched, Gandhi’s use of words (swaraj, Harijan), phrases (Quit India, Do or die), and objects (the spinning wheel, khadi, common salt) as strategies of mass mobilization and symbols of defiance against unjust colonial rule and social injustices rampant in Indian society. Whatever the strategies designed and the symbols forged, their moral grounding is present. Gandhi as a charismatic leader was as moral as he was political. A close reading of the six essays reveals a composite portrait of Gandhi as a multidimensional man. He emerges as a moralist who yet was a pragmatist, a thinker who was a man of action, a respecter of tradition but also an advocate of radical politics and social reform 22

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and reconstruction, a person ever engaged in the refinement of his own moral fibre but not in an egocentric manner, always mindful of the inseparability of the individual and society, an individualist who led mass movements – seemingly a man of contradictions but actually a holistic visionary. To live as such without loss of self-control, one needs unshakeable moral conviction, and, obviously, he had it. Gandhi honestly believed that whenever in critical public or private situations faced with practical and moral dilemmas, an inner light illumined his path ahead. His ‘still small voice’ spoke to him: he heard in it the ‘Voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth’.35 In short, he was a believer in divine providence, a man of faith. It would be appropriate to conclude this section of the introduction by briefly outlining B.R. Nanda’s presentation of Gandhi as a man of faith. For limitations of space, I will confine myself to just two sources. Chapter 8 of the biography, albeit a short one, is foundational to Nanda’s portrait of Gandhi as a man of faith.36 He writes that it was Gandhi’s mother rather than his father who was ‘completely wrapped in religion’, and had a formative influence on him in his impressionable years. One may well say that Gandhi suckled religiosity with his mother’s milk. Earlier in the biography, Nanda writes about the years Gandhi spent in England as a law student where he came into contact with vegetarian circles and conceptualised a connection between ‘dietics and religion’.37 The immediate effect of these contacts and of the moral basis of vegetarianism was ‘to give a new poise to him in England and to draw him out of his shell’.38 He became an author for the first time in his life and contributed nine articles to a journal devoted to vegetarianism. He read with avid interest Edwin Arnold’s biographical poem on the Buddha (The Light of Asia) and an English verse translation of the Bhagavad Gita (The Song Celestial). These two small books made a significant and enduring impression on the young Gandhi. He would have been about twenty at this time, still impressionable but with an ability to make judgements. The Buddha’s immense compassion made a deep and lasting impression upon him. The image of the Buddha with a lamb on his shoulder chastising a group of Brahmans about to proceed with an animal sacrifice stayed with him all his life; he often spoke or wrote about it. From the Bhagavad Gita he derived much illumination, and even called it his ‘mother’. His translation of the work into Gujarati provides the best statement one can find about what moral insights and strength he derived from it, including the supreme values of selfless action (anasakti, e.g. 2: 47) and the importance of reason (buddhi, e.g. 2: 62–63).39 23

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Another contact in the same circle brought the Bible to his notice. The impact of the New Testament as a whole and of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, Chapters 5, 6, 7), in particular, with Jesus’s emphasis on unconditional love and forgiveness, on his thinking and character is very well known. In 1916 he said that ‘the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount competes on almost equal terms with the Bhagavad Gita for the domination of my heart’.40 Suffice it to say, these early readings laid the foundations of Gandhi’s religious pluralism. In Nanda’s words, ‘In his lifetime Gandhi was variously labeled a Sanatanist (orthodox) Hindu, a renegade Hindu, a Buddhist, a Theosophist, a Christian, and “a Christian-Mohemedan”. He was all these and more; he saw an underlying unity in the clash of doctrines and forms’.41 Elsewhere in the biography, Nanda discusses the religio-ethical nature of some of Gandhi’s fundamental beliefs, notably the imperatives of truthfulness, non-violence, and chastity. In 1990, Nanda observes at the very outset in a lecture, ‘Gandhi and Religion’: ‘It is a curious paradox that though Gandhi’s attitude to religion holds the key to the understanding of his life and thought, its nuances and significance have often been missed by his admirers as well as critics’.42 Nanda surely would have, if asked, exempted certain biographers, such as Judith Brown,43 who happily is a contributor to this volume, and authors of monographic studies, notably Chatterji and Jordens,44, 45 from this stricture. Developing his own point of view, Nanda writes: ‘Gandhi’s religious quest helped him to mould not only his personality but the political technique with which he confronted racialism [sic] in South Africa and colonialism in India’.46 From his formative years as a social and political activist in South Africa, and later all though his life, Gandhi was, Nanda observes, a firm believer in the ‘underlying unity of all religions’ and of the criterion of reason. Truth, Non-violence, and Reason were equally fundamental to Gandhi’s conception of the moral life. He had said, Nanda quotes, ‘on matters which cannot be reasoned out, that which conflicted with Reason must be rejected’.47 Nanda insightfully comments on the broad ‘symbolic’ rather than narrowly religious connotation of many of Gandhi’s basic ideas and activities, such as the notion of Rama Rajya, which stood for ‘the utopia’, or the evening prayer meetings which ‘were not held in temples’. Nanda might have added that, except as a child taken there by his mother, Gandhi never went to temples to pray, nor ever did he have one in any of his ashrams. He clarifies: ‘[T]he symbols used by Gandhi had ceased [for him] to be exclusively Hindu’.48 Gandhi’s conception of religion as personal faith was reiterated by him time and again, just as he never wavered from   

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the fundamental universal principle of the moral basis of human life across religious traditions. Gandhi’s contribution to the development of the idea of secularism as sarvadharma samabhava was rooted in these principles rather than in the arguments generally invoked in the West or India itself. Gandhi’s secularism bypasses the state. It is more about people’s (collective) attitudes and values and about individual moral integrity and social responsibility. Nanda notes the irony of the fact that Jinnah, who for most of his life favoured a secular view of life and politics in the modern (Western) sense of the perspective, had ended in the company of the votaries of an Islamic state of Pakistan, ‘while Gandhi, wholly religious, worked to established a secular state’.49 I may parenthetically add that the secular state of Gandhi’s conception was minimalist, not at all concerned with religious beliefs and practices of the citizenry. As the English author Roderick Matthews puts it, ‘India was fortunate to inherit the best of Gandhi. Pakistan has had to make do with the worst of Jinnah’.50

Gandhi: religion, reason, and pluralism There is much that one would like to write about Gandhi as a man of faith, an idea that, it seems to me, runs through the six essays and also colours Nanda’s portrait of Gandhi, but this must await another occasion. I have already intruded oftener than perhaps desirable in presenting the ideas and theses of the six contributors and Nanda himself. I will, therefore, limit myself here to a few brief remarks on Gandhi’s ideas about ‘religion’, ‘reason’, and ‘religious pluralism’, all three emphasized by Nanda. I shall not be detained here by the controversy about the applicability or otherwise of the term ‘religion’ to aspects of cultural traditions outside the Semitic family of religions. To learn what Gandhi meant by ‘religion’ in general is not too difficult, because he spoke and wrote about it all his life. Besides the Collected Works, many compact valuable anthologies of his religious beliefs, practices, and teachings in his own words are available. Understanding and interpreting Gandhi’s thinking on religion and ethics and being a Gandhian are, of course, two different enterprises. Moreover, I would like to make it clear that I am neither a Gandhi scholar nor a Gandhian, but reasonably familiar with his writings on religion in general and on particular religious traditions. A perusal of the primary and secondary sources I have consulted over many years leads me to think that Gandhi’s core ideas on religion, religiosity, and religious pluralism were formulated during the 25

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first three decades of the 20th century, beginning in South Africa in March 1905, where he intermittently gave three short public lectures on religion covering Hinduism (inclusive of Buddhism), Islam, and Christianity.51 Thereafter, he usually reiterated or occasionally refined them. This process of refinement was a result of his own experience (‘experiments’) and reflection rather than a deep study of different religious traditions. (His refusal to recognize Buddhism as a heterodoxy, or lack of awareness of the distinctiveness of Indian Islam, is each a case in point.) I will take up here a remarkable statement published in Young India on May 12, 1920. Gandhi wrote: Let me explain what I mean by religion. It is not the Hindu religion which I certainly prize above all other religions, but the religion which transcends Hinduism, which changes one’s very nature, which binds one indissolubly to the truth within and which ever purifies. It is the permanent element in human nature which counts no cost too great in order to find full expression and which leaves the soul utterly restless until it has found itself, known its Maker, and appreciated the true correspondence between the Maker and itself.52 At least six interrelated key notions are packed into the above short statement. Gandhi begins with the idea of plurality of religious traditions which are to be understood in terms of a transcendent conception of religion. Religion is not really about external behaviour but the inner experience of ‘truth’, and immanence is an essential characteristic of it – it is a ‘permanent element of human nature’. A theocentric notion of a ‘Maker’ is crucial to it, which entails the endeavour to discover the ‘true correspondence’ [oneness] of the inner self and the Maker. I may recall here that etymologically one of the connotations of religion is ‘to bind (religare)’. In sociological literature, too, the ideas of setting apart (conveyed in the notion of ‘the sacred’) and connecting (for instance through rituals) are crucial to the understanding of any religious tradition. In spite of its remarkable clarity and comprehensiveness, something surely is unclear or missing. Is Gandhi’s conception of religion dogmatic, unquestionable? And is external behaviour – the social bond – insignificant for a religious person? Does valorisation of the inward experience rob relations between human beings of all significance? Far from it. Just two months after the statement unpacked above, Gandhi wrote in the same journal on July 21, 1920: ‘I reject any religious doctrine 26

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that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality. I tolerate unreasonable religious sentiment when it is not immoral’.53 Two questions arise, it seems to me, from the above critical elucidation of the notion of religion. First, what does the criterion of ‘appeal to reason’, imply? And, second, what is the source of ‘morality’? Rejecting the notion of the unquestionability of scriptures, Gandhi observed (in the very same year, 1920): ‘In my view, that which reason cannot understand and which the heart does not accept can be no shastra, and I think that anyone who wants to follow dharma in its purity cannot but admit this principle’.54 The supremacy of reason is here enunciated, but only in association with ‘the heart’, which I would paraphrase as the combination of logical thinking (e.g. he once asked a Christian missionary why God should have only one son?) with the ethic of conviction or conscience. Gandhi’s rejection of the traditional practice of ‘untouchability’, shastric authority for it notwithstanding, is an outstanding example of the combination of reason and ethics. Moreover, the location of untouchability in the domain of moral belief and practice underscores the social dimension of religiosity in Gandhi’s thinking. Several serious problems regarding reason and morality in Gandhi’s formulation remain, such as their exact connotation. I believe morality can be identified in terms of a set of universal ethical imperatives, which are explicitly or implicitly affirmed in all major religious traditions. One of Gandhi’s favourite hymns, which was sung at the prayer meetings, ‘Vaishnava jana to . . .’ of Narsi Mehta (1414–1479), contains a comprehensive list of such moral virtues or ethical imperatives, including altruism, chastity, compassion, greedlessness, humility, selfcontrol, and truthfulness.55 Gandhi himself derives from Patanjali’s yoga sutras the five yamas, or what he called ‘cardinal virtues’, namely ‘non-violence, truth, non-stealing, celibacy, non-possession’, which obviously are universal in character.56 He often referred to truth/truthfulness as ‘the sovereign virtue’.57 But how about reason? What exactly did Gandhi mean when he made it, alongside morality, the touchstone of the validity (acceptability) or otherwise of scripture? He considered all scriptures to be inspired but not direct divine revelations (the word of God); they are, he maintained, inspired human creations. It is thus that he could say that ‘all religions are true’ and ‘all have some error in them’.58 Another formulation presents the argument underlying this conclusion: ‘For me different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree. Therefore they are equally true, though being received and interpreted through human instruments 27

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equally imperfect’.59 The nature of these ‘instruments’ is also clarified: ‘[W]hilst I believe that the principal books [of scripture] are inspired, they suffer from a process of double distillation. Firstly, they come through a human prophet and then through the commentaries of interpreters’.60 This, then, is the paradox: scripture has to stand the test of human reason, but human reason, the capacity to understand and interpret, is imperfect. The paradox may be resolved only by listening to the ‘still small voice’ within which is ‘the voice of God’. Actually, Gandhi himself draws the boundary which human reason simply cannot cross because of its limitations: ‘Reason is powerless to know [God] . . . Faith is essential in this matter. My logic can unmake and make innumerable hypotheses . . . But my faith runs so very much faster than my reason that I can challenge the whole world and say “God is, was and ever shall be” ’.61 Elsewhere (in 1936) he described ‘God’ as the absolutely undeniable ‘as-yet-Unknown-Truth’.62 The Gandhian position may be said to be the reverse of the famous (1793) Kantian formulation of ‘religion within the limits of reason alone’. It is, then, clear that the criterion of reason applies to scripture but not to faith. While religious faith is regarded by Gandhi as inherent in human nature, he also considers the plurality of its expression irrefutable and valid. And this makes room for religious plurality as a fact of human history, and the attitude that it entails, namely, equal respect for all faiths, sarvadharma samabhava, becomes an ethical universal. A few final observations on how Gandhi achieved this conviction. Here we have scholars like Chatterjee and Jordens to guide us,63 but this is not the place to discuss their perspectives; I will use them only as sources for the present purpose. The notion of ‘tolerance’ is often invoked as a guiding principle in Gandhi’s acknowledgement of the plurality of religious traditions. Actually, Gandhi did in earlier years in India (after his return from South Africa) use and advocate it, but he was quite uncomfortable doing so, for ‘tolerance’ implies ‘a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one’s own’. He considered ‘mutual respect’, or ‘respect for all’, suggested to him by close follower Kaka Kalekar (1885–1981), also ‘patronising’ at first, but eventually decided in 1930 that ‘the Ashram observance hitherto called “sahishnuta” (toleration) would be replaced by “respect for all religions” ’.64 The notion of samabhava, when glossed as the resolve to, in his own words, ‘entertain the same respect for religious faiths of others as we accord to our own, thus admitting the imperfections of the latter’, would be in conformity with the spirit of ahimsa.65

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Gandhi’s unending quest for truth brought him to an acceptable degree of intellectual and emotional satisfaction (appealed to his reason and heart) when he discovered the epistemological theories of anekantavada (‘many sidedness of reality’) and syadvada (‘qualified certainty’) in Jaina philosophy. Gandhi said (in 1924) that he had made these ideas ‘peculiarly his own’, and ‘had no objection to being called an anekantavadi or a syadvadi, that is to say, one who accepts the many sidedness of truth’.66 Such a perspective can, Chatterji comments, ‘accommodate apparent contradictions through pointing out that ever changing reality presents itself in different ways, according to distinguishable perspectives’.67 To quote Gandhi himself: It is this doctrine that has taught me to judge a Mussalman from his own standpoint and a Christian from his . . . . I can [now] love [others] because I am gifted with the eye to see myself as others see me and vice versa. My anekantavada is the result of the twin doctrines of satya and ahimsa.68 Chatterjee appropriately comments: ‘Gandhi’s appeal is to moral imagination’.69 Having accepted the plurality of religious traditions, he did not recognize any further reason for syncretising them. Indeed, Gandhi may reasonably be said to have believed and advocated that no individual or community of faith can be truly religious in moral isolation. The value of ‘the other’ lies in its ‘otherness’. One needs the others to enrich and deepen one’s own religious sensibility.70 Gandhi’s pluralism was not a rosary, as it were, for one to count the beads strung together by an ‘attitude’. It was rather a moral endeavour to know each bead as best as one may – some more deeply than others – and then select aspects of each to internalize them (to make them one’s own). As early as 1921, Gandhi said in the context of Hindu-Muslim unity to which he was wholly dedicated, that the objective was not ‘uniting religions’, but ‘uniting hearts, despite the separateness of religions’.71 There is a kind of dialectic of imperatives here, the ethical and the political. Moral reason for Gandhi was, of course, the foundation of all truthful endeavour. Hindu-Muslim unity was also a political imperative to free India and Indians not merely from colonial bondage but more importantly from the tightening stranglehold of the ‘satanic Western industrial civilization’. This unity to be true had to be an act of faith – a union of hearts – and not just political expediency, which is situational and not durable.

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A quarter century later, under the shadow of widespread communal riots from Bengal to Punjab, he spoke in deep anguish at his prayer meeting in Delhi on September 13, 1947. Addressing Hindus in particular, he declared, ‘I am a Hindu, a true Hindu, a sanatani Hindu. Therefore, I am also a Muslim, a Parsi, and a Christian, and a Jew too’.72 The obvious implication is that anyone who is truly religious is, ipso facto, multireligious. Gandhi’s religious pluralism is participatory; to participate meaningfully one must not lose one’s identity (as one does through conversion). Affirmation and practice of participatory pluralism, rather than tolerance of or deference to others’ religious beliefs and practices (an external relationship); the limitations of human reason and the humility to acknowledge fallibility; and qualified certainty as a processual way of knowing in place of absolute certainty (an arrived-at-state-ofbeing) – these are the crucial elements of Gandhi’s position on religious pluralism. And, of course, the bedrock of this and everything else in his multifaceted thinking is Truth and Non-Violence: ‘[N]on-violence is the law of our species’, he said, ‘as violence is the law of the brute’.73 The foregoing quotation from the concluding paragraph of Nanda’s classic biography of Gandhi begins with the doubts that assailed him regarding the realization of Gandhi’s ideal of the good society. These doubts were assuaged, however, by the firm conviction that if humanity was to be saved from total annihilation at its own hands, Gandhi’s principles and practice in the domains of politics and social reconstruction would undoubtedly retain their relevance.

* * * To conclude: Gandhi had been dead ten years when André Malraux asked Jawaharlal Nehru what had been his ‘greatest difficulty since Independence’. Nehrus’ ‘instantaneous’ reply had been, the creation of ‘a just State by just means’, echoing Gandhi’s philosophy of means and ends. He had added, ‘Perhaps, too, creating a secular State in a religious country’.74 From the latter part of Nehru’s response it is clear that, unlike Gandhi, he regarded religion and secularism as mutually exclusive, and secularism as an attribute of the just state. He thus departed from Gandhi’s holistic vision. Around the same time (1958), Frank Moraes pointedly asked Nehru if ‘in times of difficulty and crisis he ever pondered over what Gandhi would have done’. Nehru answered with an unambiguous ‘no’, but after affirming that at such times he does wish he could ‘recapture [Gandhi’s] serenity of mind

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and calmness of spirit’.75 This is not the place, however, to dwell upon Nehru’s ambivalence so well captured in the epigraph of this essay. Sixty years later, today all major Indian political leaders and most intellectuals too, I think, are in the context of the religion-secularism dichotomy closer to Nehru than Gandhi, notwithstanding the customary tributes to the ‘Father of the Nation’. And yet amongst an increasing number of thinking people worldwide, Gandhi is enjoying an ‘afterlife’ as an exemplar of the good life in his vision of religion and morality, which I have briefly sketched above.76 The present book bears testimony to this reawakened interest in ways of life which provide viable alternatives to the prevailing paradigms and may be derived from Gandhi’s ideas and ‘experiments’. This surely would have pleased B.R. Nanda, thoughtful biographer of Gandhi and Nehru and interpreter of their ideas.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Naren Nanda for inviting me to write this introductory essay and providing me with some biographical details. I thank him, Sudhir Chandra, Saurabh Dube, and Anil Nauriya for reading an earlier draft of the essay and for advice on some crucial points of the argument. Ajay Skaria’s help in tracing the sources of some quotations from Gandhi’s writings was invaluable. Nehru’s musings on writing on Gandhi that I have used as the epigraph occur in a 1960 conversation between him and Nanda recalled by the latter in the introduction to the 2008 edition of his biography of the Nehrus, father and son (see note 8). 2 B.R. Nanda, Gandhi: A Biography, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Originally published, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958. 3 B.R. Nanda, Gandhi and His Critics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985. 4 B.R. Nanda, Witness to Partition: A Memoir, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2003. Enlarged edition of B.R. Nanda, Punjab Uprooted, Bombay: Hind Kitabs, 1948. 5 B.R. Nanda, ed., The Complete Works of Lala Lajpat Rai, Vols. 1–15, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2003–2010. 6 B.R. Nanda, Witness to Partition. 7 Nanda, Gandhi. 8 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 99 Volumes, New Delhi: Publications Division, Govt. of India, 1958 onwards. 9 W.B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, London: Chatto and Windus, 1964, p. 53. 10 B.R. Nanda, The Nehrus: Motilal and Jawaharlal, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 9. Originally published, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1962. 11 Nanda, The Nehrus, p. 9.

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12 B.R. Nanda, ed., Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976. 13 B.R. Nanda, Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and the British Raj, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. 14 B.R. Nanda, Gokhale, Gandhi, and the Nehrus, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974. 15 Richard Tucker, ‘Review of “Gokhale”, by Nanda’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 15(1), pp. 122–125. 16 Nanda, Gandhi . . . Critics, p. VIII. 17 Ibid. 18 N.K. Bose, My Days with Gandhi, Calcutta: Nishana, 1953. 19 B.R. Nanda, Gandhi: Imperialism, Pan-Islamism and Nationalism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989. 20 B.R. Nanda, In Gandhi’s Footsteps: The Life and Times of Jamnalal Bajaj, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990. 21 Ibid., p. XI. 22 B.R. Nanda, Jawaharlal Nehru: Rebel and Statesman, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995; In Search of Gandhi: Essays and Reflections, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. 23 Nanda, Gokhale, Gandhi, and the Nehrus. 24 Nanda, Jawaharlal Nehru. 25 Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–92, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Originally published, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 26 B.R. Nanda, ‘ “Chauri Chaura Recalled”, Review of Amin’, Event, Metaphor . . ., India Today, 15 April 1995. 27 B.R. Nanda, The Making of a Nation: India’s Road to Independence, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1998. 28 B.R. Nanda, Road to Pakistan: The Life and Times of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, New Delhi: Routledge, 2010. 29 Ibid., p. 159. 30 After completing his Chemical Engineering degree at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi, Naren Nanda (born 1949) pursued a career in the ‘private sector’, working with Hindustan Lever in India and later with the parent company Unilever in the United Kingdom. He retired in 2003 and lives in London with his wife Jyoti Nanda, who is a practicing psychologist and psychotherapist. Biren Nanda (born 1955) obtained an M.A. Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, and joined the Indian Foreign Service. He retired in 2015, having served as ambassador to Indonesia and finally as the Indian High Commissioner in Australia. He now lives in New Delhi with his wife, Rukmani. 31 M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, London: Jonathan Cape, [1927] 1960, p. 420. 32 Nanda, Gandhi, pp. 231–232. 33 Nanda, ‘The “Relevance” of Gandhi’, in Gokhale, Gandhi and the Nehrus, 1974, pp. 60–76. 34 See Sudhir Chandra, Gandhi: An Impossible Possibility, translated from Hindi by Chitra Padmanabhan, New Delhi: Routledge, 2017. This book is a sensitive meditation upon Gandhi’s last years and his ‘sorrow’ on realizing that the roots of violence were too deep in Indian society and culture

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for his efforts to build bridges across divisions to have been successful. Gandhi, however, never gave up his ideal of ahimsa, a timeless truth (see particularly chapter 4, ‘The Possibility of Ahimsa’).   Actually, Gandhi always had doubts about the general acceptability of ahimsa as a creed, and finally severed formal ties with the Congress in 1940 over this issue. He had written in 1931: ‘I don’t believe that a large number [of Indians] will become non-violent all at once. I am a believer in the law of “karma” . . . How then is it possible for the meritorious deeds of each and every one to ripen at one and the same time’? See Richard Sorabji, Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values, London: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 93. 35 M.K. Gandhi, My Religion, compiled and edited by Bharatan Kumarappa, Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1955, p. 46. 36 Nanda, Gandhi, pp. 64–72. 37 Ibid., pp. 28–30. 38 Ibid., p. 29. 39 Mahadev Desai, The Gospel of Self-less Action or the Gita According to Gandhi, Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1946. 40 Gandhi, The Collected Works, Vol. 13, 1964, p. 36. 41 Nanda, Gandhi, pp. 71–72. 42 Nanda, In Search of Gandhi, p. 11. 43 Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989. 44 Margaret Chatterji, Gandhi’s Religious Thought, London: Macmillan, 1983; Gandhi and the Challenge of Religions Diversity: Religious Pluralism Revisited, New Delhi: Promilla & Co., 2005. 45 J.T.F. Jordens, Gandhi Religion, London: Macmillan, 1998. 46 Nanda, In Search of Gandhi, p. 20. 47 Ibid., p. 21. 48 Ibid., p. 28. It should be added, however, that his personal religiosity apart, Gandhi was fully aware of the importance of offering puja in temples for Hindus generally. It was thus that he made ‘temple entry’ without any caste restrictions a core element of his Harijan uplift movement. 49 Ibid., p. 29. 50 Roderick Matthews, Jinnah Versus Gandhi, New Delhi: Hanchette, 2012, p. 6. 51 Gandhi, The Collected Works, Vol. 4, New Delhi: Government of India, 1964, pp. 369–407. 52 Gandhi, My Religion, p. 3, original emphasis. 53 Ibid., p. 4. 54 Raghavan Iyer, ed., The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. I, Civilization, Politics and Religion, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 69. 55 Iyer, The Moral and Political Writings, pp. 66–68. 56 See Bindu Puri, The Tagore-Gandhi Debate on Matters of Truth and Untruth, New Delhi: Springer, 2015, p. 34. 57 I will not engage here with the larger question of whether what we consider ‘universals’ are not only products of specific historical situations. This is true of ‘cultural universals’, but there are a priori ‘mind universals’ also. For an illuminating discussion, see Akeel Gilgrami, ‘Gandhi’s

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Integrity: The Philosophy Behind the Politics’, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 5(1), 2002, pp. 79–93. ‘Universality suggests that a moral value, whether or not someone in particular holds it, applies to all persons’. 58 Iyer, Moral and Political Writings, p. 536. 59 M.K. Gandhi, ‘A Christian Letter’, Harijan, 30 January 1937. Reproduced in Collected Works, Vol. 70, 1977, pp. 66–68. 60 J.S. Mathur, ed., Gandhi in the Mirror of Foreign Scholars, New Delhi: Gandhi National Museum, [n.d.] 2008, p. 359. 61 Gandhi, My Religion, p. 34. 62 M.K. Gandhi, [My Religion], Contemporary Indian Philosophy, edited by S. Radhakrishnan and J.H. Muirhead, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936, p. 21. 63 Chatterjee, Gandhi’s Religious Thought, and Jordens, Gandhi Religion. 64 Chatterjee, Gandhi and the Challenge of Religious Diversity, p. 334. 65 Jordens, Gandhi’s Religion, p. 154. 66 I may add that Gandhi’s anekantavad embraced not only religious diversity but actually life in totality. As he told the musicologist Dilip Roy, ‘To me life is far too great a mystery, far too sacred, and a gift of gods to be appraised adequately from one particular angle’. Dilip Kumar Roy, Among the Great, Pune: Krishna Mandir, 2006, p. 51. 67 Chatterjee, Gandhi and the Challenge of Religious Diversity, p. 306. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., p. 307. 70 It is noteworthy that Dara Shukoh (1615–1659) came to a similar conclusion after a close reading of the Quran. His reflections led to him to express his ‘desire’ to study ‘all heavenly books [including the Upanishads], for . . . what might be in one book compendious in another might be found diffusive, and from the detail of one, the conciseness of the other might become comprehensible’. Wm. Theodore de Bary, gen. ed., Sources of Indian Tradition, Vol. 1, New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, p. 440. 71 Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol. 22, 1966, p. 289. Cited by Ajay Sakaria, Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016, p. 220. 72 Gandhi, Prarthan Pravachan, Vol. 1, New Delhi: Sasta Sahitya Mandal, 1954, p. 307, my translation. 73 See Nanda, Gandhi, p. 522. 74 André Malraux, Antimemoirs, translated from French by Terence Kilmartin, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968, p. 145. 75 Frank Moraes, Witness to an Era, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1973, p. 168. 76 See, for example, Claude Markovits, The Un-Gandhian Gandhi: The Life and Afterlife of the Mahatma, translated from the French by the author, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2003. Lloyd I. and Susanne H. Rudolph, Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; Faisal Devji, An Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, Ajay Skaria, Unconditional Equality.

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2 GANDHI AND PUNJAB Rajmohan Gandhi

The last word in the title of this essay, ‘Gandhi and Punjab’, stands for the Punjab that was, that pre-1947 land, a kingdom in the first half of the 19th century and at other times a province of larger empires. It was a space that once included today’s Indian and Pakistani Punjabs and the Indian states of Haryana and Himachal.1 For decades now, that Punjab of old has ceased to exist as a political entity. Even before 1947, of course, Punjab was hardly uniform. Its many parts differed from one another in soil, temperature, population density, religion, caste, sect, and other ways. What was and is common to much of old Punjab and most of its inhabitants, whether in India or Pakistan, is the Punjabi language, which seems to have existed for a thousand years or more, though spoken in several dialects and written in more than one script. In addressing ‘Gandhi and Punjab’, I will largely focus on Punjab’s 1947 partition and the upheaval and tragedy marking it, and I start by recognizing that India’s partition was essentially the division of two provinces, Bengal and Punjab. Other parts of the subcontinent were impacted by that 1947 event and in some cases totally changed by it – the city of Delhi, for instance, and the city of Karachi. But Punjab and Bengal were the subcontinent’s only portions where amidst tragic bloodshed and abrupt migrations a linguistic and cultural community that had lasted for centuries was cut into two. There always was, we should acknowledge, something like a natural demarcation between western and eastern Punjab. In the 1880s, Denzil Ibbetson, British civil servant and enumerator of Punjab’s castes and tribes, suggested that to an observer moving his gaze from west to east, cultural and demographic changes appeared ‘with some suddenness about the meridian of Lahore, where the great rivers enter the

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fertile zone and the arid grazing grounds of the West give place to the arable plains of the East’.2 Western Punjab, much of it quite dry, seemed to contain, in comparison with central or eastern portions, a higher Muslim percentage, a lower population density, and fewer towns. Including princely states, all of Punjab had a population in 1941 of 34.3 million. Of this total, 53.2% were estimated to be Muslims, 29.1% Hindus, and 14.9% Sikhs. Hindus and Sikhs, taken together, outnumbered Muslims in the Jalandhar and Ambala divisions, that is, in today’s Indian states of Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal, though it seems that in 1941 Muslims may have formed a majority in towns such as Jalandhar, Ludhiana, and Hoshiarpur.3 But a separation of Punjab into a western half and an eastern half was logical only if India’s Muslim-majority parts had to be grouped together as a different country. To Gandhi this was far from being a given. He felt that independent India could contain some provinces where Muslims were in a majority and other provinces where Hindus outnumbered Muslims, as was the case under British rule and before that under Mughal rule. Even if separation into two Punjabs had a rational basis, the upheaval and cruelties marking it created a trauma for the India of 1947. It was a cross which the people of both parts of Punjab and Gandhi carried; it is a weight that many continue to carry, consciously or not. Blessed with hindsight, we ask why Punjab’s partition, if it had to come, was not arranged with greater planning and without bloodshed. For more than thirty years, Gandhi’s aim, and the desire of the great majority of Indians, was India’s independence as a united nation. It was in October 1939, soon after the start of World War II but five months before the Muslim League’s famous Lahore resolution, that Gandhi first addressed the demand for a separate Muslim-majority nation. In a letter sent to Gandhi, an unnamed schoolteacher from Punjab, described by Gandhi as ‘a Muslim friend’, had asked Gandhi to accept the justice of such a demand. By 1939 there was a climate for this demand. Some Muslims, but also some Hindus, had said that India’s Hindus and Muslims constituted two nations. One of the first to suggest this was the outstanding leader from Punjab, Lala Lajpat Rai, born in 1865 in eastern Punjab. Writing in December 1924 in The Tribune, a newspaper launched in Lahore in 1881, Lajpat Rai said: Under my scheme the Muslims will have four Muslim States: (1) The Pathan Province or the North-West Frontier 36

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(2) Western Punjab (3) Sindh and (4) Eastern Bengal . . . [T]his is not a united India. It means a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India. Though advocating separation, it appears that Lajpat Rai envisaged a center of some kind. Thirteen years after Lajpat Rai’s proposal, Vinayak D. Savarkar, presiding at the 1937 session of the Hindu Mahasabha in Ahmedabad, declared: India cannot be assumed today to be a Unitarian . . . nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main: the Hindus and the Moslems in India.4

* * * To return to the Muslim schoolteacher’s demand in October 1939, this is what Gandhi wrote in response in his journal, Harijan: Why is India not one nation? Was it not one during, say, the Moghul period? Is India composed of two nations? If it is, why only two? Are not Christians a third, Parsis a fourth? Are the Muslims of China a nation separate from the other Chinese? Are the Muslims of England a different nation from the other English? How are the Muslims of the Punjab different from the Hindus and the Sikhs? Are they not all Punjabis, drinking the same water, breathing the same air and deriving sustenance from the same soil? What is there to prevent them from following their respective religious practices? What is to happen to the handful of Muslims living in the numerous villages where the population is predominantly Hindu, and conversely to the Hindus where, as in the Frontier Province or Sind, they are a handful? The way suggested by the correspondent is the way of strife. Live and let live or mutual forbearance and toleration is the law of life. That is the lesson I have learnt from the Koran, the Bible, the Zend-Avesta and the Gita. (Harijan, October 28, 1939)5 In these sentences, we find Gandhi’s core reasons for opposing Partition. One, all Punjabis, Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs, drink the same water, 37

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breathe the same air, and derive sustenance from the same soil. Two, all religions teach live and let live, mutual forbearance, and toleration. It is a common-sense argument. He also makes a third point: if Hindus dominate one half, and Muslims the other, what happens, he asks, to the dominated in the two halves? It was thirty years earlier, in 1909, when Punjabis first heard of Gandhi. He was 40 years old and living in South Africa. Founded in 1885, the INC was meeting in Lahore for its annual session. Addressing the session, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, one of the country’s most eminent leaders, spoke about Gandhi. Eight years earlier, in the winter of 1901–1902, Gokhale had hosted young Gandhi in his residence in Calcutta, where the Imperial Council, of which Gokhale was a member, periodically met. This is what Gokhale said to the INC in Lahore in December 1909: It is one of the privileges of my life that I know Mr Gandhi personally, and I can tell you that a purer, nobler, a braver and a more exalted spirit has never moved on this earth . . . [He] is a man among men, a hero among heroes, a patriot among patriots, and we may well say that in him Indian humanity at the present time has really reached its high watermark.6 Whatever they made of Gokhale’s praise, Lahorites attending the INC session thus heard of Gandhi in 1909, which was also the year of the Minto-Morley Act, or the Indian Councils Act, providing among other things for a 30-member Punjab Legislative Council. This Council was to comprise officials, nominated non-officials, and a handful of elected members, voted in by property-owning and educated Indians – from separate electorates.

* * * Here let us step back and remind ourselves that Punjab’s long story includes Sufis and Sikh Gurus, war and peace, Khatri and Arora writers and officials, Akbar (who spent many years in Lahore), Jahangir (who is buried in Lahore), Aurangzeb (who built Lahore’s Badshahi Mosque), Dara Shikoh (still loved in Lahore), Banda Bahadur, Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah, Nadir Shah, Ahmad Shah Abdali, Ranjit Singh, brutal wars between the British and the Sikh kingdom, the British conquest, 1857, the Lawrence brothers, the canal colonies, Sir Ganga Ram, Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and a good deal more.

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At ground level, Punjab’s story included both accommodation and strife. The tradition of Guru Nanak and Baba Farid continued to foster peace. Compassion was practiced. Two Pashtun horse dealers saved Guru Gobind Singh’s life. Yet over time there were bitter conflicts and a clash between purity of birth and purity of belief. Elites on one side were anxious to avoid a polluting touch; elites on the other side were eager to replace an impure belief. Common people put this clash to one side and carried on with their daily lives, at times helping one another, or working for one another, or trading with one another. But ambitious men used the communal divide to climb. There was another element in Punjab’s story. The sword, the whip, and the gun, including cannons that in exemplary punishment fired rebels into the air, shattering bodies into pieces, were used to bring Punjabis in line. The Empire’s armies recruited Jat and other Sikhs, Jat, Rajput and other Muslims, and Jat, Dogra, and other Hindus. Many Punjabis were proud to belong to the nursery of the Empire’s soldiers. Money or influence was obtained when Punjabis joined the Empire’s armies, or, earlier, Ranjit Singh’s army, or, before that, Punjab’s armed bands, promoting in some sections a weapon culture.

* * * The Indian Councils Act of 1909 represented a modest political advance for Indians, including Punjabis, but there was conflict between political progress and Hindu-Muslim trust. Though confined to a handful of seats, elections triggered dislike and mistrust. Punjab’s Hindu-owned Urdu newspapers like Hindustan, Punjabi, Jhang Sial, and Akash, and Muslim-owned papers like Watan and Paisa Akhbar attacked the other community and its journals. The Hindustan of Lahore argued that Punjab’s Hindus should safeguard their ‘communal interests’, abandon the INC and start a Hindu Sabha, a counterpart to the Muslim League, which had been founded in 1906 in Dhaka.7 At its founding in 1906, the Muslim League asked for separate electorates for Muslims, a request granted by an empire looking for ways to solidify Indian divisions. The empire also agreed with the League that in any councils created in India, Muslims would have weightage, that is, a representation larger than what the population ratio warranted. The year 1907 saw the first big split in the INC, placing Bal Gangadhar Tilak and G.K. Gokhale on opposing sides, the so-called garam

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dal and the naram dal. In 1915, the year when Gandhi returned for good from South Africa and the year when Gokhale died, the INC was reunited. In 1916 came the consequential Congress-League Pact, put together in Lucknow by Tilak and Annie Besant from the Congress and by Jinnah from the Muslim League side. Congress and the League agreed to work jointly for ‘early self-government’ with direct elections, separate electorates for Muslims and Sikhs, and ‘weightage’ for religious minorities in provincial and central councils. This meant Muslims getting weightage in provinces like UP and Bihar, Hindus getting weightage in Bengal, and Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab. Gandhi played no role over the Lucknow Pact. In the years that followed, the Lucknow Pact was criticized on both sides. Hindu voices said that Tilak and the INC should have never agreed to separate electorates for Muslims and Sikhs. Muslim leaders in Punjab said that weightage gave political leverage to a Hindu-Sikh minority which already enjoyed educational and economic advantages. In 1911–1912, Punjab’s Muslims, numbering about 53% in the province, made up only 24% of Punjab’s college students and 24% also in the province’s schools.8

* * * April 13, 1919, Baisakhi Day, changed everything. So, at least, it seemed. Mingling in the mud of Jallianwalla Bagh, the blood of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims sealed what could have become a longterm pact. For weeks prior to the massacre, Punjab’s Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus, inspired by Gandhi’s call for a nonviolent defiance of the Rowlatt Act, had shown amazing solidarity. In discussion among themselves, the British admitted that ‘opposition to the Rowlatt Act and admiration of Gandhi were practically universal’ in Punjab.9 Gandhi said that it was the Raj’s short temper that caused the Jallianwalla massacre, and also that worse than the massacre was the humiliating British order that men and women should ‘crawl on their bellies’ on the street where an Englishwoman had been attacked, and another order that violators of rules should be flogged.10 Dissatisfied with the Hunter Commission’s terms of inquiry into the massacre, the INC decided on a parallel investigation by a Congress committee comprising Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das, M.R. Jayakar, and Abbas Tyabji.

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Primarily it was Gandhi who shouldered the committee’s burden, spending about three months in different parts of the Punjab and interviewing numerous witnesses on the inhumanities that had occurred. In the end, it was he who wrote the committee’s report.11 Those three months of travel and listening in 1919 bonded Gandhi with Punjab, which he was getting to know for the first time. After his return to India in 1915, he had spent time in Santiniketan, Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Bombay, Champaran in Bihar, the Kheda district of Gujarat, and South India, but not in Punjab. Earlier, in South Africa, he had found companions from all parts of India, but Punjabis were a small minority among South Africa’s Indians, even though Harbat Singh, one of the first Indians to die in the South African satyagraha, was most probably a Sikh. On this 1919 Punjab tour, Gandhi visited most, if not all, of the following places in Punjab: Lahore, Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Kasur, Gujranwala (which was bombed from the air by the British), Wazirabad, Nizamabad, Akalgarh, Ramnagar, Hafizabad, Sheikhupura, Lyallpur, Gujarat, and Sargodha. Everywhere, in addition to collecting evidence, Gandhi promoted khaddar and the charkha and found many Punjabi women responsive. He also sought funds for a Jallianwalla memorial, not, said Gandhi, to engender ‘ill-will or hostility to anyone’, but as ‘a symbol of the people’s grief’ and a reminder of ‘the sacrifices, through death, of the innocent’.12 Donations were slow in coming until Gandhi declared that if necessary he would sell his ashram in Ahmedabad to finance the memorial. This declaration was a factor in the decision of a 19-year-old Punjabi, Pyarelal Nayar, to join Gandhi. Encountering him during his Punjab tour, Pyarelal thought that Gandhi conveyed ‘a calm assurance of strength’ and ‘an access to some hidden reservoir of power which could find a way even through an impenetrable granite wall’.13 Later in 1919, when the INC met for its annual session in Amritsar, on a site close to Jallianwalla Bagh, Gandhi drafted a resolution which condemned the massacre and deplored the killing, three days before the massacre, of five Englishmen in Amritsar. At first the Congress rejected the second part of the resolution, but a remarkable intervention from Gandhi produced a second vote and an acceptance of the resolution in its original form. In Amritsar, Gandhi gave a new meaning to Indian honor, enabled the INC to capture the moral high ground, and put the Empire on the defensive.

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But would he win Punjab, the nursery of soldiers, the empire’s sword arm, a land that venerated weapons, for satyagraha, for nonviolent struggle? And win it also for other great goals of his: Hindu-Muslim-Sikh unity, the abolition of untouchability, and the end of highand-low in Hindu society? Gandhi had handicaps. He did not speak Punjabi. His Hindustani had a Gujarati flavor. Most importantly, in Punjab he lacked political teammates of the kind he had found in some other parts of India. In Gujarat, among many others, he had Vallabhbhai Patel. In Bihar, he had Rajendra Prasad, also among others. In the Tamil country, he had Rajagopalachari. In UP, he had Jawaharlal. In Punjab? Lala Lajpat Rai, the Punjab lion, was four years older than Gandhi. They had much in common – an interest in Black rights, for one thing. Lajpat Rai had met African American leaders during the years of World War I he spent in the United States. Both Lajpat Rai and Gandhi were ready for any sacrifice and any odds. But their teamwork was partial. They differed on the possibility of a united Hindu-Muslim political front and of a united free India with Hindus and Muslims as equal partners. We do not, however, know what would have happened had Lajpat Rai not died early. Wounded by the Empire’s lathis, the lion of Punjab died at the end of 1928. Earlier that year, he had come closer to Gandhi, agreeing with him, and with Motilal Nehru, president for the year of the Congress, that if for the sake of Hindu-Muslim unity joint electorates were accepted across India, Punjab’s Muslim majority should be freed from the burden of minority weightage. In publicly taking this position, Lajpat Rai went against most Hindu and Sikh leaders in Punjab, who were attached to minority weightage in the legislature. Lajpat Rai argued that even with minority weightage, Muslims, thanks to their numbers, had become dominant in Punjab. If Punjab’s Hindus and Sikhs were willing to forego weightage, they would, he said, secure joint electorates and de facto Hindu rule in Hindu-majority portions of India and later at the centre.14 But the proposal of giving up something local for a larger national prize fell on unresponsive ears. Punjab’s Hindu and Sikh leaders did not want to lose weightage.

* * * A few years before Lala Lajpat Rai’s death, Punjab saw the swift emergence and an equally swift collapse of a Hindu-Muslim-Sikh front.

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Jallianwalla had fired all Indians for Swaraj, and England’s and France’s treatment of a defeated Turkey and the placing of Islam’s holy places under European control had angered India’s Muslims. In 1920 and 1921, the INC and the Muslim League stood as one in the audacious campaign for Nonviolent Noncooperation that Gandhi launched in 1920. Believing that India had been given a once-in-a-hundred-years opportunity for a Hindu-Muslim front, Gandhi thought that Nonviolent Noncooperation could secure three lifelong objectives of his: Swaraj, Hindu-Muslim friendship, and capturing India’s Muslims and Hindus from the appeal of violence into nonviolent satyagraha. The response was astonishing. Across India, thousands tossed away jobs and careers and embraced prison. In the words of Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistani scholar intensely skeptical of Gandhi, there were ‘unprecedented displays of Hindu-Muslim goodwill’. Gandhi had helped fashion ‘an extraordinary alliance’.15 All Punjabis seemed to join hands, including Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh women. An important piece in the story of the early 1920s is the successful and nonviolent Akali movement for reform that was strongly and intimately connected to Noncooperation. Accounts of the Sikh role in Noncooperation can be seen in several Sikh histories, including J.P.S. Uberoi’s 1996 study.16 During this period, in addition to Lala Lajpat Rai, other remarkable Punjabis, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs shared the platform with Gandhi, some briefly, others for longer, a few for the rest of their lives. Swami Shraddhanand, previously known as Mahatma Munshi Ram, stood with Gandhi for some months, the poet Iqbal, and the future Sir Fazli Husain, founder of Punjab’s Unionist Party, for a few days.17 Maulana Zafar Ali, powerful speaker, writer, and influential editor, also worked for many years with Gandhi, as did the Europe-educated Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, hailing from the large community of Kashmiris settled in Amritsar and Lahore – for the rest of his life – though often he differed strongly with Gandhi. Sardul Singh Caveeshar was another associate for many years who served briefly as the INC President. Akali leaders were close to Gandhi until the late 1920s. Abdullah Bukhari of Amritsar, the fiery and at times indiscreet orator who was as passionate for universal Islam as he was for Indian independence, was for years on the same side as Gandhi and with the INC, as was Dr Satya Pal, whose arrest along with that of Dr Kitchlew and of Gandhi had sparked off the Jallianwalla unrest.

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Yet none of these personalities quite became a teammate with Gandhi the way say Patel, Prasad, Rajaji, Jawaharlal, Maulana Azad, Kripalani, Jayaprakash Narayan, and Rammanohar Lohia had or would become, not to mention Badshah Khan, who was in a class by himself. And those who did become Gandhi’s inseparable teammates in Punjab for the rest of their lives – talented and productive persons like Pyarelal Nayar and his sister Sushila, and Bibi Amtus Salaam of Rajpura – did not acquire influence across Punjab the way, for example, the Nehrus, Patel, Prasad, Badshah Khan, and Rajaji had done in their parts of India or beyond. There was Gulzarilal Nanda, but he made Gujarat rather than Punjab his karmabhoomi. Gandhi’s influence in different parts of India was a function, in part, of his own charisma and the strength of his fellow fighters and teammates at national, provincial, district, town, and village levels. In Punjab, he lacked a strong high-level political team – a lack partially connected, one suspects, to Punjab’s demographics. Punjab and Bengal were single-language Muslim-majority provinces where, unlike in other Muslim-majority provinces, non-Muslims made up a large minority. Also, in its Sikhs, Punjab possessed a vigorous minority which had dominated or ruled Punjab from the 1760s to the late 1840s. Punjab posed not just a Hindu/Muslim challenge but a Sikh/Muslim/Hindu one. Gandhi and Punjab needed a Muslim-Hindu-Sikh team that would stay together no matter what and guide all Punjabis. Without such a team, Gandhi was helpless in Punjab.

* * * To return to 1919–1922, the apparent miracle of that phase was too good to last. Turkey let India’s Muslims down by abolishing the khilafat for which India’s Muslims said they were ready to die. A crowd of noncooperators in Chauri Chaura in eastern UP let Gandhi down by killing trapped policemen. And in Punjab, Muslims and non-Muslims tried to outsmart one another by asking the other community to resign from the Raj’s offices and colleges while quietly pocketing every opening themselves. The fact was that the bulk of India’s educated classes were reluctant to risk their Empire-linked careers. Thousands showed great courage, but tens of thousands of others did not. Their caution about defying the Raj was as human as the unwillingness of the Chauri Chaura demonstrators to remain nonviolent.

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Emerging in 1924 from a two-year imprisonment, Gandhi found Hindu-Muslim relations in a sorry state. He responded through an article in Young India, ‘Hindu-Muslim tension: Its cause and cure’. Noting that in Punjab news sheets from both sides were ‘using abusive language and reviling the religion of the opponent’, he said he felt a ‘wave of violence coming’. He was not asking Indians, Gandhi pointed out, to respond with absolute nonviolence to villainy, or against ‘thieves, robbers, or . . . nations that may invade India’. If attacked, Gandhi wrote, Hindus should fight to protect loved ones. However, ‘the means for the attainment of Swaraj must be nonviolent’. Also, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Parsis ‘must not settle their differences by resort to violence’. Hindu-Muslim disputes should be settled through arbitration or in courts of law. The essay asked Muslims not to think of Hindu leaders like Malaviya, Lajpat Rai, and Swami Shraddhanand as enemies. Hindus were given identical advice. Abdul Bari, the Lucknow-based adviser of the Ali brothers, had made hurtful remarks, but he had also apologized. The Ali brothers were ‘not faultless’. Yet, ‘being full of faults myself, I have not hesitated to seek and cherish their friendship’. He was not going to forsake his friends, whether Hindu or Muslim, he concluded (Young India, 29 May 1924).18 History is sobering. It tells us that almost every initiative or battle towards self-government in India was followed by Hindu-Muslim recrimination. This was true of 1857, of the founding of the INC, of the Lal-BalPal Swadeshi campaign in 1906–1911, of the 1909 Indian Councils Act, and of the 1919–1922 Noncooperation struggle, which was fought over the Rowlatt Act, the Punjab wrongs, and the Khilafat question. The recrimination did not necessarily prove that the preceding initiative or battle was unwise. The lesson to learn was that a common struggle against the empire was no guarantee of Hindu-Muslim unity. Also needed were positive or constructive programs for national renewal. After Noncooperation, several Muslim stalwarts parted company with Gandhi and the INC, including Jinnah and the Ali brothers, as did a few Hindu stalwarts like Swami Shraddhanand. However, Muslim leaders such as Ajmal Khan, Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, Abul Kalam Azad, Badshah Khan, and Saifuddin Kitchlew, who were enlisted in 1919–1922, remained with the INC until the end, even though, Kitchlew was the only Punjabi (or Kashmiri-Punjabi) among them.

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At the end of 1928, Jinnah, supported by Maulana Muhammad Ali, made a proposal for a joint front. He would forgo separate electorates, Jinnah said, if weightage for Punjab’s Hindus and Sikhs and Bengal’s Hindus was withdrawn and if in a central legislature Muslims, a quarter of the country’s population, were given one-third of the seats. Meeting in Calcutta at the end of 1928, the INC said it could concede 27% of the seats in a central assembly but would reject the other demands. Gandhi said that while he could accept the proposals, Punjab’s Hindus and Sikhs were firmly opposed, adding that he could not press the Congress to override Punjab’s Hindus and Sikhs. The years from 1929 to 1931 saw the Bhagat Singh phenomenon, coinciding with the Lahore Congress of 1929–1930, presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru. On the banks of the Ravi, the INC announced complete independence as its goal, and Gandhi declared that Civil Disobedience was on the anvil. Soon the Salt March heralded a great nationwide defiance, which Churchill would describe as the worst humiliation the empire had faced in its history,19 but Punjab’s role in that disobedience was relatively modest. Young Bhagat Singh’s fearless defiance and resistance, his trial in Lahore and his being hanged along with Sukhdev and Rajguru stirred many people, yet Bhagat Singh, too, lacked a Sikh-Muslim-Hindu team that would stay together, come what may. Neither the Hindustan Republican Association nor the Nau Jawan Sabha nor the Kirti-Kisan Party, bodies with which Bhagat Singh was associated, could attract the bulk of Punjabis to its fold. Moreover, sharp dissension, at times culminating in betrayal, weakened the revolutionaries. Then there was the Unionist Party, founded in the 1920s and drawing its strength from beneficiaries in the canal colonies, and from the Land Alienation law in Punjab, which the British had enacted in 1900 in support of farmers threatened by debt. The Unionist Party reflected the interests of numerous pro-Empire Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu landholders, but it could not appeal to the Empire’s foes, or to the landless, or to urban workers or traders. The Raj granted special voting rights and gifts of land to soldiers in Punjab. Combined with franchise restrictions, this bounty gave the Unionists crucial advantages over the Congress. In 1937, the Unionists won provincial power, limited though that power was. After 1922, the Congress steadily lost the bulk of the large Muslim support it had acquired. From that point until the mid-1940s, the Congress in Punjab was a largely Hindu, urban party, though containing a few eminent

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Muslims and Sikhs. The Muslim League in Punjab, too, was for long essentially an urban party. Bringing together, for the sake of Hindu-Muslim-Sikh unity, the anti-Empire Congress and the pro-Empire Unionists seemed an impossible goal in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. Much later, however, in early 1946, when elections to the Punjab legislature held on a limited franchise gave the Muslim League 75 out of Punjab’s 86 Muslim seats, the Unionists, who won 21, the Congress, with 51, and the Akalis and other Sikhs, who had 21, formed a coalition ministry, after attempts to form a League-Unionist or a League-Akali coalition both failed. Khizr Hyat Tiwana, the Premier in this Unionist-Congress-Sikh coalition, was reviled by angry Muslims in Lahore as ‘Sardar Khizar Singh’. After a year’s civil disobedience by the Muslim League, the Khizr ministry was brought down in March 1947. Earlier, in November 1939 and again in May 1940, Gandhi had made moves towards the then Punjab Premier belonging to the Unionist Party, Sikandar Hyat Khan. The Raj applied pressure on Sikandar and the moves failed, yet Gandhi’s attempt to forestall Partition by wooing the Unionists, who wanted a united and autonomous Punjab, is of interest.20

* * * Between these two overtures from Gandhi to Sikandar, the League had met in Lahore and asked for Pakistan. In a resolution moved by the premier of Bengal, Fazlul Huq, the League declared that it would accept nothing short of ‘separate and sovereign Muslim states, comprising geographically contiguous units . . . in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the north-western and eastern zones of India’.21 But these units or their boundaries were not specified, and there was also a suggestion of more than one Muslim state being demanded. A delegate at Lahore asked whether the imprecise wording would not justify partitioning Punjab and Bengal. Liaquat Ali Khan, the League’s general secretary, gave this answer: If we say Punjab that would mean that the boundary of our state would be Gurgaon, whereas we want to include in our proposed dominion Delhi and Aligarh, which are centres of

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our culture . . . Rest assured that we will [not] give away any part of Punjab.22 In September 1944, when Gandhi and Jinnah met 14 times in Jinnah’s Malabar Hill house in Bombay, Gandhi said he could accept a separation after independence if a referendum in Muslim-majority areas in the northwest and the east favored it. In rejecting Gandhi’s proposal, Jinnah objected, among other things, to Gandhi’s idea of ‘bonds of alliance between the separated portions’. Jinnah thought such bonds would dilute Pakistan’s independence. And Jinnah flatly rejected the idea that East Punjab and West Bengal could stay out of the proposed Pakistan.

* * * In November 1945, a little over a year after the Gandhi-Jinnah talks, an unexpected candle cast a flicker of hope for Punjab. Three Punjabis, one a Sikh, the second a Muslim, and the third a Hindu, were together charged in the Red Fort for treason. The trial of the INA’s Dhillon, Shah Nawaz, and Sehgal provided a visual image of Punjabi and Indian unity. Sadly, this candle, too, enjoyed only a short life. Before long, former INA officers and soldiers were involved as Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus in communal disputes in Punjab. In the following year, 1946, three British Cabinet Ministers spent three months in India. Jinnah told them that the League would not be satisfied with anything less than a Pakistan made up of ‘all six provinces (all of Punjab, Sindh, the NWFP, Baluchistan, all of Bengal, and Assam) and complete sovereignty’.23 The Congress, on the other hand, made clear its opposition even to a ‘small’ Pakistan if it was totally sovereign, if it preceded independence, and if the NWFP, where the Congress had recently defeated the League, was compelled to join it. In response, the Cabinet Mission produced its famous three-tier plan of provinces, groups, and a union, a plan which its chief architect, Cripps, later admitted was ‘purposely vague’.24 Conflicting interpretations of the proposal were presented to the Congress and the League, and a game was played by all sides. Provinces may join a large Muslim-majority group, the Congress was told. Provinces shall join the group, the League was assured. Congress and the League were both told that those not accepting the longterm plan would not be taken into an interim government that would precede independence, yet acceptance under one’s own interpretation would still be taken as acceptance. 48

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Gandhi hated the ambiguity and denounced it. ‘You do not know how uneasy I feel’, Gandhi wrote to Cripps on April 29. ‘Something is wrong’.25 He said stronger things to the Working Committee. Yet Gandhi did not intervene when Patel, Nehru, Azad, CR, and Prasad said they would play the game and enter the interim government. Jinnah’s Direct Action of August 1946 was an unwise response to what he saw as the Congress’s success in the less-than-honest game. In August, great violence was triggered in Calcutta, in October in Noakhali, and in November in Bihar. The Empire’s doublespeak, the Congress’s cleverness, and the League’s recklessness had brewed poison. A year later, in October 1947 – after India was free, partitioned, and more poisoned – a Gandhi who had been publicly expressing his distress received a letter from a friend urging him not to lose heart. Gandhi was told that he was ‘the only instrument to further the divine purpose in India’. This is what Gandhi replied: I am not vain enough to think that the divine purpose can only be fulfilled through me. It is as likely as not that a fitter instrument will be used to carry it out . . . May it not be that a man purer, more courageous, more farseeing is wanted for the final purpose?26 Here Gandhi selects farsightedness as a critical virtue. Did he perhaps regret not revolting at the game of deception that all three sides – the INC, the League, and the British – played during the visit to India of the Cabinet Mission? The Gandhi who despite his profound unease did not try to bring the game of the 1946 summer to a halt was devoted to Nehru, Patel, and company. For thirty years, these younger colleagues had been like sons and brothers to him. At his call, they had gone to prison, often for years at a time. Moreover, this 1946 Gandhi had accepted his marginalization, which had occurred right after the long Quit India imprisonment, during which Patel, Nehru, and company decided that henceforth they would make their own political decisions. After all, the Patel who emerged in 1945 from the Ahmednagar detention was seventy years old.

* * * It is this marginalization that explains the number of days Gandhi took to inform Nehru and Patel of his discontent at the March 1947 49

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decision of the Working Committee which sealed the partition of Punjab and thereby of India as a whole. The background is well known. After Noakhali, Gandhi was in Bihar, attempting to bring courage to victims and realization of wrongdoing to perpetrators, when, following Khizr’s resignation and excited remarks from Master Tara Singh, large-scale killings of Sikhs and Hindus occurred in Rawalpindi and Multan. Responding to the killings, and responding also to pressure from Punjab’s Hindus and Sikhs, the Congress Working Committee asked for Punjab’s partition on March 8, 1947. On March 9, Gandhi learned of the Working Committee resolution from newspapers in Bihar. Despite a request from Gandhi to Kripalani, the Congress President, no emissary had been sent to brief him or obtain his views. It was only on March 20 that Gandhi wrote to Jawaharlal about it: I have long intended to write to you asking you about the Working Committee resolution on the possible partition of the Punjab. I would like to know the reason behind it. Gandhi added in this letter that he was against any partition based on ‘compulsion’ or on ‘the two-nation theory’. While he could think of a ‘willing consent’ to partitioning a province following ‘an appeal to reason and heart’, the Working Committee resolution seemed a submission to violence.27 Two days later he wrote to Patel: ‘If you can, please explain your resolution about the Punjab’. Nehru answered, saying that he was convinced that Punjab’s ‘immediate division’ was ‘the only answer to partition as demanded by Jinnah’, and added: ‘I found people in the Punjab agreeable to this proposal except Muslims as a rule’. Patel wrote that the resolution was ‘adopted after the deepest deliberation . . . The situation in the Punjab is far worse than in Bihar. The military has taken over control’.28 Writing from Punjab around March 20, an unnamed friend informed Gandhi that while there was ‘a semblance of peace . . . through military occupation, [e]veryone is preparing openly for a fight and is busy collecting arms’.29 For decades, Punjabis had been coached by the Empire, through separate electorates, weightage, and other means, to think of themselves as Muslims, Sikhs, or Hindus rather than as Punjabis. During the colonial period and earlier, Punjabis had learned to worship the sword and the gun, and Punjab had contributed more soldiers to the 50

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Empire than the rest of India. Moreover, this Punjab also contained a virulent media. Nonviolent satyagraha, Hindu-Muslim-Sikh unity, putting hostility aside – these were tough demands to make in the Punjab of March 1947. Refusing, however, to accept defeat, Gandhi made an ingenious lastditch attempt to keep Punjab and India together. By now Mountbatten had arrived in New Delhi, replacing Wavell. The train to Partition was gathering speed. Reaching Delhi on April 1, Gandhi proposed to Mountbatten, and to Nehru, Patel, Azad, and other Congress leaders, a Jinnah-led central government to be installed with the INC’s agreement and support. This, Gandhi thought, could remedy polarization in Punjab, avert an explosion, and preserve the unity of Punjab and Bengal, and of India as a whole. A key component of Gandhi’s Jinnah proposal was that Punjab’s growing private militias – Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh – should be disbanded. Reckoning that the Congress majority in the Central Assembly would prevent the proposed Jinnah ministry from going too far, Gandhi also recalled that during their 1944 talks Jinnah had refused to draw a clear picture of Pakistan. To Gandhi this revealed Jinnah’s interest in a role in a united India. He thought the League leader might accept the offer. If he did, peace and unity could return to an India about to be free. Here was an answer at the top that might simultaneously restore mutual confidence at ground level and enable the winding down of private militias. How Mountbatten, supported by his staff, which included the skillful V.P. Menon, worked to scuttle this plan, and how after opposition from Nehru, Patel, and company Gandhi felt compelled to drop it is a well-recorded story that need not be repeated here.30 By this juncture, India’s leaders were confabulating more with the Raj than with the man who had brought them to freedom’s shore. Was Gandhi’s plan, which was never put to Jinnah, a chance for peace and unity in the Punjab and India of 1947? Calling it a Solomon-like solution, one of Jinnah’s biographers, Stanley Wolpert, would speculate that the League leader would have accepted it, but who can say for sure?

* * * At the end of July 1947, Gandhi took a train for Rawalpindi, en route to Kashmir. The journey to Kashmir and back enabled Gandhi to be in 51

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Amritsar, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Wah, and the Panja Sahib Gurdwara in Hasan Abdal. On the eve of this trip, he said in Delhi (July 29): [W]e should fast and pray on August 15. I may say that I do not intend to mourn. But it is a matter of grief that we have no food and no clothes. Human beings kill human beings. In Lahore, people cannot leave their houses for fear that they will be killed.31 This trip in July–August 1947 was his last physical contact with central and western Punjab. In November and December 1947, he twice visited Panipat in eastern Punjab in an unsuccessful bid to persuade its Muslims not to migrate to Pakistan. This is what he told them: If . . . you want to go of your own will, no one can stop you. But you will never hear Gandhi utter the words that you should leave India. Gandhi can only tell you that you should stay, for India is your home. And if your brethren should kill you, you should bravely meet death . . . The Ministers have assured you that they will protect you even at the risk of their own lives. Still if you are resolved to go and do not place any trust in their word there is nothing further I can say to you. What can I do to reassure you? If I should die tomorrow, you [may] again have to flee . . . You have to decide for yourselves . . . But today, having heard you and seen you, my heart weeps. Do as God guides you.32 On Independence Day, Gandhi was in Calcutta. News of Punjab’s violence made him want to go there, but Nehru and Patel advised him not to. He would not be able to do anything in Punjab, said Patel. On August 30, Gandhi wrote to Nehru, ‘Left to myself I would probably rush to the Punjab and if necessary break myself in the attempt to stop the warring elements from committing suicide’.33 But fresh killings in Calcutta caused him to stay there and launch a fast against the violence. The fast worked, and peace returned to Calcutta. On September 7, Gandhi boarded a train for Delhi en route to the Punjab. Finding Delhi to be ‘a city of the dead’, however, he stopped there, reckoning that Delhi would ‘decide the whole country’s destiny’, that a fire here would burn all of Hindustan.34

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From September 9, 1947 until January 30, 1948, he was at Birla House, New Delhi, rather than in Punjab, though he spent a good deal of time with Punjabi refugees. West Punjab was on Gandhi’s itinerary for February and March 1948. Among those he expected to work with in Lahore were Mian Iftikharuddin, the League leader who earlier had been a major Congress figure in Lahore, and his wife Ismat. Had Gandhi found himself in either East or West Punjab in August or September 1947, the months when the bulk of the killings occurred, would he have prevented the killings? Despite what Gokhale had said in Lahore in 1909, Gandhi was not a superman. In 1921, after a visit to Punjab by Gandhi, the Empire’s police triumphantly recorded, in so many words, a finding that Punjabis did not think Gandhi was ‘a superman’.35 Gandhi would not have objected to such a finding, whether in 1921 or 1947. It is to be doubted, moreover, that even a superman could have swallowed all the poison let loose in Punjab in August and September, or put all that poison back into a giant bottle. How the poison was brewed and let loose is the more important question. How to prevent new rounds of brewing and outpouring is perhaps an even more important question. In Punjab and elsewhere, human beings have from time to time tapped the springs of truth and reconciliation. They have also, from time to time, sown seeds of coercion and revenge. In Punjab, which he frequently visited in the 1920s and the 1930s, and elsewhere, the non-superman Gandhi, helped by Punjabi colleagues, located wells of truth, reconciliation, and partnership. But Gandhi’s were not the only feet moving about on Punjab’s good earth. While many others, too, looked there for peace and compassion, there were also those who sowed unhealthy seeds, or sharpened knives, or stored acid, or collected lathis, daggers, and guns, or spread poison through the printed and the spoken word.

* * * This writer and his wife, Usha Gandhi, have made a small effort to recover stories of insaniyat from Partition memories. In 2005 in Lahore, we collected accounts of how in 1947 Sikhs and Hindus rescued Muslims, and Muslims rescued Hindus and Sikhs. A retired squadron leader and former cricketer from Pakistan, Chaudhry Muhammad Hayat, seventy-six years old in 2005, told us

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of his boyhood in an illiterate Jat family in a village called Nichra near the town of Gujarat, and of the role of his hero, the Sikh schoolteacher Bhagat Saab, who with prodding and scholarship money had pushed Hayat to enter school and succeed in life. ‘But for Bhagat Saab’, Hayat told us, ‘I would still be cutting grass today’. Recalling one boyhood occasion when Bhagat Saab had handed him money, Hayat broke down, as he also did when speaking of a trainload of Hindu and Sikh refugees killed in 1947 near Gujarat station and seeing their bodies. Earlier Bhagat Saab had turned pale, Hayat said, when a train with dead Muslim bodies arrived from the east. Until his disappearance in the autumn of 1947, Bhagat Saab, who was in failing health, lived with Hayat and his family. All the Hindus and Sikhs in Hayat’s village had been protected by its Muslims and taken to safety. Hayat said he once took Bhagat Saab on the back of a bicycle to a hakim in Sialkot and back – a journey of two nights and a day. But there was no improvement. Then one day he just disappeared. Hayat, who looked for him everywhere, does not know what happened. He told us what Bhagat Saab once said to him: ‘God sends us to different homes with different religions. We get our religion through God’s choice. Can we be blamed for it’? ‘Inse achha insaan main naeen dekkha (I haven’t seen a better human being)’, Hayat added. In 1947, there were many like Bhagat Saab and Muhammad Hayat – many more than we will ever know – who saw themselves as Punjabis and human beings drinking the same water, breathing the same air and deriving sustenance from the same soil, and who looked after fellow humans. Recovering their deeds, and emulating their compassionate courage, we may, God willing, add happier pages to Punjab’s unfinished story.

Notes 1 In the lecture from which this essay is drawn, the writer said the following about B.R. Nanda, in whose memory the lecture was given: One of my anxieties this evening is with the size of my lecture. How can I speak at length in honour of one whose personality was almost defined by restraint in speech? Balram-ji Nanda never felt a need to impose his views, let alone his voice. To use cricket language, his bat and ball did the talking. He did his meticulous research, debated the issues in his sharp mind, arrived at his clear insights, and wrote his brilliant texts. At seminars or social settings, therefore, he relaxed and spoke only when required.

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  For this writer, it was a learning experience to know B.R. Nanda, a gainful experience to obtain his advice, and a civilizing experience to converse with him. When, meeting him for the first time, the writer asked Nanda about his Gandhi biography, he answered: ‘Gandhiji had been killed and I found myself crying. I was surprised, for I was extremely critical of him. Who is this man for whom I shed tears even when I didn’t like him? I must find out’.   Nanda’s debate with himself led to what remains to date the most studied and most readable Gandhi biography and thereafter to a sequence of outstanding works on modern Indian history.   Born in Rawalpindi in 1917, first in the M.A. exam of the University of Punjab, railway official, historian, author, builder and director of the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, and recipient of the Padma Vibhushan, B.R. Nanda was also a gracious and selfless human being. His equally gracious partner in life and art, the stately Janak Nanda, was one of India’s finest painters. 2 Denzil Ibbetson, Panjab Castes, Lahore: 1882; reprint, Lahore: Mubarak Ali, 1974, p. 11. 3 Gopal Krishan, ‘Demography of the Punjab, 1849–1947’, www.global. ucsb.edu/punjab/journal_11_1/6_krishan.pdf 4 Quoted by A.G. Noorani, Frontline, Chennai, 15–28 March 2003. 5 M.K. Gandhi, ‘Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi’, Vol. 70, 1939, p. 283. Gandhi Heritage Portal. https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/ the-collected-works-of-mahatma-gandhi 6 Speech in Lahore, 1909, quoted in D.G. Karve and B.V. Ambekar, eds., Speeches and Writings of G.K. Gokhale, Vol. 2, Bombay: Asia, 1966, p. 420. 7 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 160–161. 8 David Page, Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control, 1920–1932, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 12. 9 Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, p. 205. 10 M.K. Gandhi, Autobiography, New York: Dover, 1983, p. 426. 11 Ibid., p. 431. 12 CW 19: 307. 13 Pyarelal Nayar and Sushila Nayar, In Gandhiji’s Mirror, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 5–7. 14 Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, pp. 308–309. 15 Ibid., p. 237. 16 J.P.S. Uberoi, Religion, Civil Society and the State: A Study of Sikhism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. 17 Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, p. 210. 18 CW 28: 43–62. 19 Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1928–1935, Vol. V, New York: Chelsea House, 1974, pp. 4, 995. 20 Letter from Gandhi to Sikandar Hyat Khan, 1 November 1939 (CW 77: 72); telegram from Gandhi to S.H. Khan, 25 May 1940 (CW 78: 246); Viceroy Linlithgow to Hope, Governor of Madras, 8 May 1941, Linlithgow Papers, India Office Library, London; and account provided to the

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author of this essay in New Delhi in 1974 by B. Shiva Rao, New Delhi correspondent of The Hindu and intermediary between Hyat Khan and K. Srinivasan, editor of The Hindu, who met Gandhi’s close colleague, C. Rajagopalachari, in Trichy Jail. 21 A.H. Merriam, Gandhi vs Jinnah, Calcutta: Minerva, 1980, p. 67. 22 Quoted in C.M. Naim, ed., Iqbal, Jinnah and Pakistan, Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1979, p. 186. 23 Penderel Moon, ed., Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal, London: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 246. 24 House of Commons Debates, 8 June 1946, quoted by S.R. Mehrotra in C.H. Phillips and M.D. Wainwright, eds., The Partition of India, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970, p. 218. 25 Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase, Vol. 1, Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1956, p. 204. 26 CW 97: 39. 27 CW 94: 153–154. 28 Ibid., 154, 168. 29 Ibid., 176. 30 Told in Rajmohan Gandhi, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire, New Delhi: Penguin, 2007, pp. 603–609. 31 CW 96: 174–175. 32 CW 97: 443–444. 33 CW 96: 304. 34 CW 89: 237, 465. 35 Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, p. 227.

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3 GANDHI AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE The limits of moral politics Judith M. Brown I was greatly honoured to deliver the second lecture in memory of Dr B.R. Nanda.1 Among his many books, his first, the biography of Mahatma Gandhi, published in 1958, is one of my personal favourites and also one of his most significant contributions to historical scholarship. As he hoped it would, it inaugurated a tradition of serious scholarship into Gandhi’s life and work. In his preface he wrote something which was remarkable given the fact that this was just a decade after Gandhi’s assassination: ‘[I]t is important that the image of Gandhi does not become that of a divinity in the Hindu pantheon, but remains that of a man who schooled himself in self-discipline, who made his life a continual process of growth, who shaped his environment as much as he was shaped by it, and who tenaciously adhered to certain values to which civilized humanity pays lip-service while flouting them in practice’.2 It is in that same spirit that I chose to examine the difficult topic of Gandhi’s ideal and practice of civil disobedience and the limits of his ‘moral politics’. We of course live in a very different world from the one when Nanda was writing in 1958. Gandhi has become a global figure and, you could say, almost ‘global property’. He has inspired activists and thinkers in many spheres of life, and many people have co-opted him in pursuit of their own political and social agendas.3 In particular, his practice of civil resistance to state power has inspired and encouraged people in many continents and contexts – from the Civil Rights campaign in the United States of America, to resistance to the satellite regimes of the Soviet Union, to those who braved the Chinese state in Tiananmen Square, to numerous other protest movements.4 Today, the turmoil in the Arab world has made the viability of popular, non-violent resistance an issue which is contemporary and 57

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urgent. So it seems important to revisit Gandhi’s own experience of the practice of civil disobedience – the nature, deployment and limits of this theoretically most moral form of politics, which was his hallmark and particular contribution to Indian political life.

I But first let us consider Gandhi’s own vision. Undergirding Gandhi’s thinking and practice was an insistence that anyone with a moral understanding of the nature of human life had to become politically involved. There could be no religious quietism, no retreat into a spiritual world. There had to be concern for morality in the lives of humans, groups and societies, for it was there that Truth was to be found. Perhaps the clearest exposition of this is to be found in the conclusion to his autobiography. To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.5 It followed from this that if the truth-seeking person became involved in the inevitably murky world of politics, with its inherent compromises, he or she must try to act in ways which were as moral as possible and did as little damage as possible to other political activists, both friends and opponents, and to their integrity; and which also opened the way for transformation rather than coercion. He was also insistent that the ends never justified the means – but rather that the means were intimately linked to the end: moral means would inevitably lead to a good end, whereas evil practice would lead to evil outcomes. This cluster of beliefs led Gandhi, from his first tentative public steps in South Africa, to a commitment to non-violence as the key to moral and transformative political action. As you will know, he called it satyagraha, truth-force, to distinguish it from passive resistance as commonly understood among English speakers.6 One of the most remarkable of Gandhi’s personal qualities was his ability to go on learning and experimenting in almost every aspect of his life – from religious observance, to health care, to diet, and of course in the translation of non-violence into practical political action. He was proud of his continual experimentation with satyagraha and likened himself to a scientist in a laboratory. So the practice of 58

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non-violence under his tutelage ranged from individual action, by himself in Champaran in 1917 or in the protests against India’s involvement in the Second World War when he handpicked those who were to make personal declarations and court jail, to group action as in local movements of resistance to land revenue demands, to national movements of resistance to the British raj as in 1920–1922, 1930–1934 and 1942. Clearly there was no single or simple blueprint for civil resistance: it had to be tailored to the occasion, to the opponent and to the capacity of potential resisters. Moreover, on occasion he would abort a whole movement if he felt that it threatened to disintegrate into violence and so negate the whole political dynamic he believed underpinned non-violence. The most dramatic example of this was in 1922, after the murder of a group of Indian policemen in Chauri Chaura, UP, during the Non-cooperation Movement. Perhaps the most original aspect of Gandhi’s thinking about nonviolence was his insistence that it was not a political option to be used or discarded at will. Nor could it be deployed by just anyone. For him, satyagraha was part of a moral and disciplined life.7 This applied of course to individuals who would become activists. But it also coloured his whole attitude to building a free Indian nation. A nation which would be secure in its identity and capable of governing itself would first need to engage in socio-economic transformation, ridding itself of internal divisions and caring for the poor and weak. This lay at the heart of his definitions of Swaraj (self rule, Home Rule), most clearly elaborated in his 1909 pamphlet Hind Swaraj; and in his other, far less well known but equally significant, pamphlet written in 1941, Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place. (It is interesting that he wrote these two seminal works at great speed while travelling, in the first instance on a ship taking him from Britain to South Africa, and in the second on one of his innumerable Indian train journeys!) In the Constructive Programme, written when Congress was debating the nature of non-violent resistance to the raj during the war, he made it very clear what role he saw for civil disobedience. It could be used to achieve the redress of a local wrong: it could be used to change attitudes by appealing to conscience, and it could be deployed on a single issue (like salt or free speech) in the struggle for freedom – but not for a general cause like independence. So its role was very limited compared with the broader work of construction: and indeed constructive work in society, and its economic underpinnings was essential to the proper practice of civil resistance. In a memorable concluding phrase he wrote, ‘For my handling of civil disobedience without the constructive programme will be like a paralysed hand attempting to lift a spoon’.8 59

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II Let us turn now to Gandhi and the practice of civil disobedience in India and investigate the problems associated with it and the limits of his ‘moral politics’. The first of these I will call the problem of extending non-violent action from the local to the national. It is evident from the historical records that those non-violent campaigns led or masterminded by Gandhi which were most ‘successful’, in terms of achieving a clear goal, were local ones on very specific local issues. Among them were his individual campaign in 1917 in Champaran, Bihar, when the local government tried to exclude him from the district for raising consciousness about the problems of peasant farmers growing indigo on unfavourable terms, his campaign organizing mill workers in Ahmedabad in 1918 on the issue of pay against their Indian employers, and two campaigns against land revenue demands in Gujarat in 1918 and 1928. The success of these different satyagrahas lay in crucial common characteristics. They were directed at a clear local and relatively restricted goal, and they involved relatively small numbers of people who were amenable to discipline by Gandhi or exercised social discipline among themselves as a distinct group. Moreover, they were directed against a private or governmental opponent, for whom acceding to demands was both possible and also a more productive option from a broader and longer perspective. For example, the provincial government of Bombay Presidency in 1918 and 1928 might have faced down Gandhi and his Gujarati followers if it had just followed the logic of provincial politics. But the Presidency was part of British India, and the necessities of all-India politics put pressure on the Bombay administration to achieve a local peaceful settlement for the political good of the greater whole. When Gandhi planned and led national satyagraha campaigns, he faced a very different situation. In trying to lead non-violent resistance to the raj on such a scale, to extend his vision and implementation of non-violent politics from the local to the national, he encountered almost insuperable problems. In the first place, there was the issue of motivation, or what one might call the agendas different people brought to his campaigns. In local campaigns there was a clear goal, such as withdrawal of a raised land revenue demand. On the national scale, he faced a subcontinent composed of many different regions with their own local political worlds. How was he to offer an ideology of the nation which would make sense to and appeal within these worlds, and how was he to offer a national campaign of action which suited the political situations of regional and sub-regional groups? His 60

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very broad ideology of swaraj or independence was not just ideological conviction on his part. It also offered a hospitable vision of a new India with which many different regional and socio-economic groups could align and into which they could pour their own very varied hopes for the future. However, in practice there were huge problems when local groups brought their own hopes and demands into his noncooperation and civil disobedience campaigns, which he planned with a national goal in mind. They no doubt brought Gandhian campaigns a far wider support base than any previous style of national politics. Contemporaries constantly commented on the dramatic change in the Indian political scene when Gandhi appeared and his ability to attract huge crowds of the admiring, the curious and the politically active. But popular response to an undoubtedly charismatic figure was only a part of this – and a fickle part, as Gandhi well knew. Moreover, those who actively participated in his campaigns often had their own local agendas, their own problems they wished to solve, and their hope was that association with such a figure and with a national campaign would give them local leverage. The implications of this phenomenon were for Gandhi twofold: the danger that local activists might lose interest or commitment to a national campaign if it no longer suited the rationale of their local politics, or that they might refuse to end a campaign in defiance of the logic of a national vision and programme. Related to this problem were the interlocking issues of organization and discipline. Both were necessary if satyagraha was to be extended successfully on a national scale. For organization, Gandhi really had to rely on the structures of the INC – because it was the only political party or movement which had any semblance of countrywide coverage. With national satyagraha in mind, Gandhi in 1920 attempted to reorganize Congress and make it not just national in spread but also a party of depth, down to the level of district and taluka. This briefly appeared to be a very successful development. But when renewed national satyagraha was under discussion at the end of the 1920s, he discovered that very often below the level of the province Congress had little in the way of a functioning organization and needed total reconstruction. Just one example indicated the depth of the crisis. Sri Prakasa and Jawaharlal Nehru inspected the Congress in UP. As Prakasa wrote in his report of May 1929: During the last four years the Congress organization in our province, as perhaps, in other provinces also, had become dormant. Soon after the upheaval caused by the Non-co-operation movement had subsided, propaganda and work in the 61

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villages was more or less given up; and as the natural result of this the Congress machinery could not function effectively . . . in more than half of the districts, the district committees, have either disappeared or have existed nominally on paper. Even the provincial office suffered from the prevailing reaction and remained only in name.9 Congress only developed a permanent and effective national organization from the late 1930s, when it became clear that it needed one in order to guarantee its electoral success under the provisions of 1935 Government of India Act. So for most of the time Gandhi had to make do with a precarious organization, supplemented by various ad hoc bodies and in some areas by ashrams dedicated to his constructive work. It was no wonder that on crucial occasions he limited the practice of non-violent resistance to hand-picked groups of his own choosing, whom he could in turn discipline. The famous Salt March of 1930 was one such case, as was the carefully controlled series of individual protests against Indian involvement in the war in 1940–1941. He spent much time, energy and ink preaching and teaching about the necessary character and discipline required of those who wished to practice non-violent resistance. In particular campaigns he also issued instructions for activists to ensure peaceful and civil behaviour.10 In practice, Gandhi’s ability to insist on discipline across the country was severely limited by the lack of a serious organizational base. In broad terms, the more popular his movements became, the less he was able to control them and those who were involved with them. A seminal study of Gorakhpur district in UP during the non-cooperation movement showed how the figure of Gandhi was understood or misunderstood at the local level and how far he was from controlling local peasant attitudes and behaviour within the umbrella movement of a national satyagraha.11 This was particularly important for him because undisciplined behaviour, and particularly outbreaks of violence, either against other Indians or against the raj, negated the whole political dynamic of non-violent resistance, as well as its ideology. Violence against other Indians would deeply damage a movement which aimed to be as national as possible and depended for its leverage on very widespread support. Violence directed at the raj made it easy for the state’s machinery of coercion and control to swing into action against protestors – as in 1942. After the tragedy of Chauri Chaura in 1922, Gandhi struggled with the issue of violence among his alleged followers, and how much violence on the periphery of his campaigns he could tolerate if satyagraha was to be a viable national mode of politics and not one 62

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which had to be regularly aborted – to the disquiet and incomprehension of his closest adherents.12 If the problems of extending the practice of civil resistance onto a countrywide stage were significant limits on Gandhi’s ability to achieve a national moral politics, so were the uneasy alignments between ideology and pragmatism between Gandhi and his adherents among the articulate political class, and particularly in Congress itself, on the question of non-violent resistance. From the non-cooperation movement of 1920–1922 onwards it was clear that few of those we could call politically active in provincial and national politics shared with Gandhi an ideological commitment to satyagraha – and just as few shared his vision of swaraj. Most recognised that violent resistance against the raj only brought down violent retribution and that non-violent modes of political action stood far more chance of success. Few of them were revolutionaries in intent, and to most of them violence was distasteful as well as counter-productive. But where the rules of permissible political action were laid down by the raj, and where the institutions of what they considered legitimate politics were within British control, there were times and issues when Indian politicians felt hamstrung and powerless. In such situations, a strategy of non-violent non-cooperation with the imperial regime looked potentially profitable. Nehru’s reflections on non-violent politics show clearly the pragmatism of many of his contemporaries. He wrote that in 1921, during the non-cooperation movement, he felt immense joy at being freed by Gandhi from a mental and spiritual burden and given a sense that it was possible to oppose the raj and work for a new and free India. It was like a kind of intoxication, as they worked with excitement and optimism. ‘Above all’, he wrote, ‘we had a sense of freedom and a pride in that freedom. The old feeling of oppression and frustration was completely gone’.13 But as the campaign ended he was profoundly upset by Gandhi’s insistence that because violence had broken out it should be called off. For Nehru non-violence was not a matter of principle or belief.  . . . but for us and for the National Congress as a whole the non-violent method was not, and could not be, a religion or an unchallengeable creed or dogma. It could only be a policy and a method promising certain results, and by those results it would have to be finally judged. Individuals might make of it a religion or incontrovertible creed. But no political organisation, so long as it remained political, could do so.14 Nehru was surely correct in his assessment of the attitude of most of his contemporaries. A few were undoubtedly captivated by Gandhi as an individual and by his ideology, and most of them went to work in his ashrams or his khadi (handspun cloth) and other constructive 63

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campaigns. But most of those active in Congress or on its periphery were pragmatic in their attitude. If civil resistance seemed to have potential – in opposing the regime and in uniting them in opposition, then they would give it a chance. But they were equally content to work the institutions of politics, particularly the reformed legislatures with their increased powers, if this seemed more productive in any given situation. This lies behind the fluctuations in Gandhi’s ability to act as a leader in Indian politics, and the way in which Congress in particular adopted civil resistance as a political tactic in specific situations and never as a total, long-term strategy. In 1934, for example, Gandhi realised bleakly that most Congressmen wished to revert to constitutional politics in anticipation of greatly increased power for those who were elected to the provincial legislatures under the forthcoming constitutional reforms. He announced that Congress should give up satyagraha and leave it to him alone. As he wrote to Vallabhbhai Patel, It is but right that those who daily attend legislatures in their thoughts should do so physically as well. Then alone will they be able to judge the relative advantages and disadvantages of that policy. Is it not better that one who daily eats jalebi[s] in his imagination should eat the real thing and know the wisdom or folly of doing so?15 Very soon he was lamenting that his one-time allies and colleagues had merely stepped into British shoes after their electoral success in 1936– 1937 and were behaving much like their predecessors in provincial government. In his own mind, and given his own vision of swaraj, Gandhi had provided a total blueprint for the practice of politics and the creation of a free India. His compatriots disagreed. Gandhi’s style of ‘moral politics’ might be attractive and productive in certain circumstances, when it seemed necessary to embark on outright opposition to the raj with as much popular support as possible. But such circumstances were the exception, and pragmatism guided their choice of political tactics because their goal was to inherit the raj rather than to instigate moral revolution. There is a final issue which must concern us as we consider the limits on moral, non-violent politics from the evidence that Gandhi’s life offers us. That is the nature of the opponent, particularly if that opponent is a state. Many of those who have emulated Gandhi in opposing authoritarian regimes have found to their cost that the state’s violence is more powerful than their non-violence.16 Of course in Gandhi’s own day, people criticised his insistence on non-violence by citing the example of Hitler’s treatment of Germany’s Jewish population, and asking 64

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what non-violence could have achieved for them. Gandhi believed that satyagraha’s success could not be measured in terms of obvious political achievements. In his world view, it could exert morally transformative power even if it was offered by a single person. However, if we are to enquire into the viability of his style of moral politics we need to understand why it is that some states are more amenable to non-violent opposition than others. This variation essentially depends on their sources of strength and stability, and conversely their vulnerabilities, and the way that non-violent resistance might probe those vulnerabilities and achieve considerable leverage. So I turn now to the late British raj in India and the extent to which it was vulnerable to non-violent resistance. The British raj was totally dependent on Indian cooperation of various kinds. There were tiny numbers of British on the subcontinent, and of course they never developed a settler society in this country. According to the 1921 Census, the European population in British India was just under 157,000, of whom 45,000 were women. The males were either in business or in government service. Interestingly, the number of British troops in India was only 60,000. By contrast, the total population under direct British rule was 247 million. (I should say that when I cited these figures in one of my books my publisher refused to believe me and asked me to check again!) British rule consequently depended, for its stability and smooth functioning, on those thousands of local people who were prepared to work in its civilian government, in the police and in the army. Apart from its paid allies, it relied on the many local notables who essentially made deals with the foreign rulers to keep their particular patches peaceful in return for social recognition and political influence. Gandhi was in one sense right when in Hind Swaraj he wrote that ‘The English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them’.17 The raj also relied totally on Indian taxpayers to finance its functioning – from the day-to-day running of government to the pensions of expatriate civil servants paid out in Britain, to the upkeep of the India Office itself in Whitehall. There were two other essential foundations of British rule. One was legitimacy in India itself – the extent to which Indians were prepared to accept British rule as morally legitimate or were at least prepared to acquiesce in its presence. The other was international acceptance – whether or not there were global forces and ideologies which shored up colonial rulers the world over, and the British in particular, or conversely began to challenge imperialism and the raj. At least until the Great War there was both domestic and international support for, or acquiescence in, British rule. 65

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Gandhi’s moral politics were particularly powerful in this sort of context. Although he had no formal intellectual training in politics, and was entirely self-taught as a political activist, he seemed to recognise acutely the sources of British strength and consequently their vulnerability to certain sorts of challenges. Satyagraha was designed perhaps primarily to challenge the legitimacy of British rule and to spread across the subcontinent and deep down in society the belief that change was possible, that the foreign rulers could be removed or transformed, and that the destiny of the Indian people was in their own hands. It was this transformation in attitudes to which Nehru testified in his Autobiography. Countless others, far less notable, felt the same and were prepared to defy the raj even to the point of going to prison for peaceful resistance. Gandhi’s genius was not just to speak and write about a new India. Satyagraha was itself political theatre – a demonstration of the power of the Indian people quite literally to take their country into their own hands. The marches and processions which were so carefully choreographed showed that Indians were reclaiming physical space from imperial control. The Salt campaign demonstrated Indian activists taking back the resources of their country into their own hands in contravention of a government monopoly. Moreover, when police violently dispersed demonstrations of unarmed protestors, including women, the news spread rapidly via the domestic and international press. The influence of such political theatre was deeply discomforting to the British. They wished to portray themselves as a civilising influence, and such news spreading within India, to Britain and globally undermined their standing and the justification of their presence in India. Gandhi, personally, with his simplicity of clothing and lifestyle, and of course through his khadi campaign, single-handedly challenged the legitimacy of the foreign raj and its cultural influence (including the Westernised lifestyles of many of his compatriots who worked with the British) and tried to show that the free India for which he was working would be for the ordinary folk and would provide answers for their problems. As much as challenging the legitimacy of British rule, Gandhian non-violent resistance also probed the greatest vulnerability of the raj – its reliance on Indian cooperation. Withdrawal of cooperation by many thousands of people threatened the British just where they needed Indian support. Gandhi was of course a trained lawyer, and he realised that to counsel the disobedience of the police and army, and of taxpayers en masse, would be construed as rebellion. Consequently, withdrawal of cooperation should be carefully planned and controlled, as in the case of very localised anti-land revenue campaigns, 66

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and often directed primarily at symbols of British influence – schools, universities, law courts, the legislatures, the salt and liquor monopolies. In contrast, when in 1942 he agreed to non-violent resistance to British rule itself rather than its particular manifestations, he had little time to plan the campaign as he had previous ones, and the immediate incarceration of the Congress leadership left Quit India rudderless and un-Gandhian. If we are to understand not just these manifest strengths of Gandhi’s moral politics in the particular circumstances of India under the raj but also the limits to those politics, we do also have to attempt some sort of assessment of their longer and deeper effect. To what extent did varieties of civil resistance fundamentally destabilise British rule and contribute to British withdrawal from the subcontinent in 1947? Here we need to remember the complexities of state decision-making and the many influences, internal and external, domestic and international, which contribute to major shifts of policy. In the case of the British, the complexities were the greater because they were operating in three interlocking political systems – that of India itself, their own domestic politics and the global politics of the Second World War and its aftermath. One thing should be said from the outset – that civil resistance never made British rule impossible or even made the constitution unworkable. Indeed the working of the 1935 Government of India Act was a very considerable success both for the British and for those Indian politicians who now took over the reins of government in the provinces. Despite Gandhi’s teaching on the power of moral politics and despite his campaigns of civil resistance, in broad terms those enfranchised continued to vote in large numbers, candidates stood for election and worked within the legislatures, people generally continued to pay their taxes and aspirants were keen on jobs in government service. Lawyers continued to serve their clients and teachers continued to teach. Certainly on occasion non-cooperation hit the public finances – for example, when people stopped buying government-controlled liquor or when thousands of extra prisoners who had no intention of escaping needed to be housed, guarded and fed. Certain areas did fall out of government control for short periods of time – parts of the Malabar region in the non-cooperation campaign, parts of Bombay city during civil disobedience and parts of Bihar in 1942. But far more important was the gradual erosion of British legitimacy among many Indians. This is difficult to measure, but we know this not just from the rhetoric of political campaigning but from people’s memories and from government assessments at the time of public mood and the 67

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reliability of those whom it considered its supporters. Even down at the district level it was becoming clear that the key man with prestige and clout in politics and public life was less and less the district officer, but the MLA, the Member of the local Legislative Assembly, who could now get things done and could provide patronage and protection. This example shows the complexity of political change because of course the policy of the British in responding to political challenge with constitutional reform, as a means of re-establishing their power on a new footing, was gradually undermining their own prestige and power simultaneously with the influence of Gandhian moral politics. In the final months of the raj, senior British officials in India and England debated whether it would be at all possible to re-establish the raj and to hang on while the politicians came to an agreement on the nature of the new Indian polity. They concluded that any renewed civil resistance would be deeply destructive of what loyalty remained among their allies and their paid officials, and that they would have to consider staying on for at least a decade to protect these people. The conclusion was that this would be impossible – not least because the British parliament and public would not stand for it. Indian troops would almost certainly not remain loyal to the British, and the British troops which would be needed would probably refuse to fight in such a situation. Moreover, world opinion would be against Britain, and she would be in an impossible position in the United Nations.18 The fate of the raj was decided at the intersection of the political worlds of India and Britain. But longer-term and wider influences also weakened the raj, ones which had much less to do with India’s own politics or the influence of Gandhi and his moral politics. The ICS, the Indian Civil Service, the so-called steel frame of the raj, was itself weakened as fewer British recruits offered to work in India in the years after the Great War, and this in turn depressed the total number in the service as the numbers of Indian and European recruits were kept equal. On the economic front, the Great Depression had loosened the economic ties between Britain and India, and increasingly Britain had far less of a capital stake in the subcontinent and relied less on its bilateral trade with India. Further, as the price paid for raw materials declined, Britain’s need of Indian products in her global network of trade and finance declined. But it was the Second World War which fatally weakened Britain’s raj. Britain’s total financial dependence on the United States of America during and after the conflict made her vulnerable to American political pressure. It was this pressure which led to the Cripps Offer of 1942 and a commitment to total independence after the war. So the different sources of vulnerability, Indian 68

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and international, to which the raj was open, came together to put intolerable pressure on the imperial regime. They were compounded in some places by outbreaks of internecine violence which neither the British nor Indian leaders could control. Wavell, the penultimate Viceroy, confided to his diary on December 31, 1946, that although the British were still legally and morally responsible for what happened in India, ‘we have lost nearly all power to control events; we are simply running on the momentum of our previous prestige’.19 I have examined Gandhi’s vision of a new and moral politics marked by non-violent resistance, and in particular I have tried to examine some of the limits on the practice of such politics when Gandhi attempted to work on a subcontinental scale and incorporate large numbers of people in national campaigns against the British raj. I concluded by looking at the role of non-violent resistance in the final ending of British rule. What emerges most clearly is the complexity of politics – whether the politics of opposition or the politics of imperial government. In this complexity, people with all their limitations of vision and ability have to try to act in ways which seem both proper and productive to them. As B.R. Nanda wrote so many years ago, Gandhi was no saint, but a perceptive and highly disciplined man who was constantly learning from the situations in which he found himself and stuck to his moral values as he became a highly significant figure in Indian politics. At the end of his life Gandhi was deeply saddened because he felt his compatriots and many of his closest followers had never understood what he meant by satyagraha and had never really attempted to live it as a moral force in public life. Perhaps we can have a longer perspective. Non-violent resistance may have had only a limited part to play in India’s own struggle for freedom. But Gandhi’s moral politics have become firmly established as part of the human repertoire of political activity, influential in certain kinds of situations and against opponents with distinctive types of vulnerability. They appeal to those who feel that even if politics is a messy business and full of compromise, it is still right to use means which are as moral as possible. So it is with justification that Gandhi has become a global figure of inspiration.

Notes 1 For historians of India who, like me, began their professional careers over forty years ago, B.R. Nanda was a name to be reckoned with, and also a knowledgeable and generous guide to the archival materials which were being collected on Indian political history from that time. As the

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founder-director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), he helped to make it the extraordinary resource for scholars that it is today, and from him stemmed the pervasive welcoming atmosphere and the understanding of the value of the Library and the Archive – a value which is not only national but global. He was a man in that long tradition in India of a civil servant who was also a scholar of distinction. I first met him when I was a young researcher working on my doctoral thesis and first book based on it. The last time was on a sunny spring afternoon in 2001 when we sat in his garden in New Delhi, talking gently about the historical interests we both shared.   He was a historian’s historian, if I can put it that way. He had a profound commitment to honesty in scholarship, and his work was rooted in meticulous research in the available evidence in a quiet and painstaking way, without flashiness or any bowing to contemporary fashion or fad. His interest lay mainly in the people who worked for India’s political freedom, and his succession of books reflected this: Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography (1958), followed by studies of Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, and of G.K. Gokhale, Gandhi’s mentor in Indian politics; an account of the life of Jamnalal Bajaj, businessman and follower of Gandhi; and latterly an illuminating series of essays on aspects of the life and personality of Jawaharlal Nehru. I had the honour of reviewing a number of these in the Times Literary Supplement, and tucked into my copy of Jawaharlal Nehru: Rebel and Statesman I still have a letter from him thanking me for my review. As he realised, it was a review which had been difficult to write, as the editors had asked me to review it in tandem with another study of Nehru which was the complete antithesis of the scholarship which he himself embodied. 2 B.R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography, Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1950, p. 7. 3 David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas, London: Hurst & Company, 2003; and his ‘Gandhi’s Global Legacy’, in Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, ch. 12, pp. 239–257. 4 Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds., Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 5 M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (first pub.1927), London: Jonathan Cape, 1966, p. 420. 6 For some convenient sources on Gandhi’s vision of non-violence as political action, see Part V of Judith M. Brown, ed., Mahatma Gandhi: The Essential Writings (New Edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 7 Indian Opinion, 29 May 1909, in ibid., pp. 327–330. 8 Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place, ibid., pp. 164–184. An excellent modern translation of Hind Swaraj with notes is Anthony Parel, ed., Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 9 Report of Sri Prakasa, 5 May 1929 to J. Nehru, NMML, AICC Papers, 1929, File No. P 24. For further evidence on the disorganization of Congress see Judith M. Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma

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in Indian Politics 1928–34, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 49–51. 10 See some examples in Brown, ed., Mahatma Gandhi: The Essential Writings, pp. 330–340. 11 Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1920–2’, in R. Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 1–61. 12 As Jawaharlal Nehru reflected on Gandhi’s suspension of non-cooperation after Chauri Chaura, ‘If this was the inevitable consequence of a sporadic act of violence, then surely there was something lacking in the philosophy and technique of a non-violent struggle’. J. Nehru, An Autobiography, London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1936, p. 82. 13 Ibid., p. 69. 14 Ibid., p. 84. 15 Gandhi to Vallabhbhai Patel, 18 April 1934, CWMG, vol. 57, pp. 403– 405. Gandhi was referring to a form of Indian sweet in this humorous comment! 16 On non-violent movements in global politics since Gandhi, see Roberts and Garton Ash, eds., Civil Resistance and Power Politics. 17 Parel, ed., Gandhi: Hind Swaraj, p. 39. 18 The internal discussions among the British about what they could and could not do in India are found in the official collection of documents entitled, Constitutional Relations Between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power 1942–7. Vol. IX, London: HMSO, 1980, has several key assessments from late 1946: see e.g. pp. 68–69, 174. 19 P. Moon, ed., Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal, London: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 402.

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4 WHY GANDHI MATTERS Ramachandra Guha1

I The 11th of September, or 9/11 for short, is a date commemorated with great sentiment and feeling in the city of New York. It is also remembered and marked all over the world. It is a day, and date, that signifies both the depths of human barbarity as well as the heights of human resilience. The barbarity was represented by the men who destroyed the World Trade Centre, the resilience of the men and women of many nationalities who lost their loved ones on that day, and yet, with an exemplary patience and courage, have since rebuilt their lives. This essay remembers another 9/11, one that took place in another city and another continent. The 9/11 I now speak of strove to nurture rather than destroy, to enrich and dignify human life rather than debase and degrade it. This was a 9/11 which, if we understand its message correctly and apply it sincerely, has the power and the potential to deepen democracy, diminish violence, and help construct a more just and caring society. Let us go back, then, to Sunday, the 11th of September 1906 – mark the day and month, the 11th of September – a 9/11 that took place ninety-five years before the other, better-known 9/11. On this day, some 3,000 men and women assembled in the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg. Mostly Indians and Chinese, they had come to protest a new, racial law imposed by the Government of the Transvaal which sought to deny those who were not white-skinned the elementary rights of citizenship. The Transvaal government had passed an Ordinance seeking to end Asian immigration and to place sharp restrictions on Asians already in the colony. They were to produce fingerprints, carry an identity card at all times, and be confined to locations, so that they would not, so to say, ‘contaminate’ the ruling whites. The resistance to the Ordinance 72

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was led by Mohandas K. Gandhi. Once a lawyer, Gandhi was now a full-time activist and a figure of considerable authority in the immigrant community. To protest the Ordinance, the Indians of the Transvaal organized a public meeting on the 11th of September. On the day, shops and stalls run by Indians stopped work at 10 a.m. The meeting began at three in the afternoon; however, the doors were opened at noon to accommodate the people coming in from the suburbs and the countryside. By 1:30 p.m. the theatre was packed to overflowing. The scene inside was described by a correspondent of the Rand Daily Mail: Even in its palmiest days [wrote the journalist], the old variety theatre could never have boasted of a larger audience than that which assembled yesterday. From the back row of the gallery to the front row of the stalls there was not a vacant seat, the boxes were crowded as surely they had never been crowded before, and even the stage was invaded. Wherever the eye lighted was fez and turban, and it needed but little stretch of the imagination to fancy that one was thousands of miles from Johannesburg and in the heart of India’s teeming millions. Five resolutions were presented to and passed by the meeting. One outlined what in the ordinance was repugnant; a second asked the Transvaal Government to withdraw it. Two others conveyed the sentiments of those present to the Imperial authorities in London. The crucial resolution enjoined the audience to court arrest if their demands were not met. It said that In the event of the Legislative Council, the local Government, and the Imperial Authorities rejecting the humble prayer of the British Indian community of the Transvaal in connection with the Draft Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance, this mass meeting of British Indians here assembled solemnly and regretfully resolves that, rather than submit to the galling, tyrannous, and un-British requirements laid down in the above Draft Ordinance, every British Indian in the Transvaal shall submit himself to imprisonment and shall continue to do so until it shall please His Gracious Majesty the King-Emperor to grant relief. Speaking to the audience, Gandhi said the responsibility for advising them to go to prison was his. ‘The step was grave, but unavoidable’, 73

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he remarked: ‘In doing so, they did not hold a threat, but showed that the time for action – over and above making speeches and submitting petitions – had arrived’. Gandhi added that he had ‘full confidence in his countrymen’. He knew he could trust them, and he knew also that, when occasion required a heroic step to be taken, he knew that every man among them would take it. Gandhi warned his compatriots of the hardships along the way. ‘It is quite possible’, he said, ‘that some of those who pledge themselves may weaken at the very first trial’. For ‘we may have to remain hungry and suffer from extreme heat and cold. Hard labour is likely to be imposed upon us in prison. We may even be flogged by the warders’. Gandhi nonetheless urged his colleagues to join him ‘in pledging ourselves, knowing full well that we shall have to suffer things like these’. The leader was clear that the ‘struggle will be prolonged’. But, ‘provided the entire community manfully stands the test’, he foresaw that ‘there can only be one end to the struggle, and that is victory’. Thus far the movement to get the Indians a fair deal in South Africa had followed a strictly legalistic route. Letters, petitions, court cases, delegations – these were the means by which Gandhi and his fellows had attempted to challenge policies which bore down unfairly on them. Now, however, they were threatening to defy this new law and go to jail. The meeting of 11th September 1906 rejected the cautious incrementalism of petition-writers. But it also rejected the violent methods then very fashionable among revolutionaries. In Europe, anarchists and socialists sought to bring about political change by assassinating kings, generals and prime ministers. These methods were being emulated in India, where young radicals sought likewise to kill colonial administrators in a bid to frighten the British into leaving the country. When the Transvaal Government refused to yield, Gandhi and his colleagues courted arrest. They declined to carry passes – or burnt them, defied night-time curfews and hawked without a license. Between 1907 and 1914, several thousand Indians were put in jail by the South African authorities. Gandhi himself served three long prison sentences. The methods of protest mandated by that other 9/11, the first 9/11, were given a particular name by Gandhi. He called them satyagraha, or truth force. After he returned to India in 1915, he applied them with even greater force, and as much truth, to mobilize public opinion in favour of political freedom. Gandhi led three major, countrywide campaigns of civil disobedience against British colonial rule. These scrupulously eschewed violence. Millions of Indians participated in 74

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these protests. They came from all strata of society – in His Majesty’s prisons, lawyers rubbed shoulders with peasants, artisans with mill-owners.

II In India, Gandhi is known as the Father of the Nation. This is just – for he did more than anyone else to prepare Indians for freedom, to make them aware of the cleavages of religion, caste and gender, to nurture the democratic and plural ethos of the Indian Constitution. India’s debt to Gandhi is immense. Gandhi’s own debts, however, ranged beyond India. While influenced by indigenous traditions of non-violence, his ideas were modified and refined through reading the works of the Russian Leo Tolstoy, the Englishman John Ruskin, and the American Henry David Thoreau. And it was South Africa, not India, that was the first, crucial crucible of his experiments in nonviolent resistance. Gandhi was, and remains, a genuinely transnational figure. He was transnational in the range of his influences and in the reach of his thought. After his death, his techniques of non-violent protest have been successfully used in several continents. Martin Luther King and his colleagues applied the force of truth to shame the American government into outlawing discrimination based on race, among other things. Across Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and their comrades used the power of non-violence to replace Communist dictatorships with democratic regimes. The heritage and methods of Gandhi can also be discerned in the movements for democracy currently under way in the Arab world. Even when they are not immediately successful, non-violent protests along Gandhian lines have sharply highlighted the arbitrary use of power by authoritarian governments. The National League of Democracy, led by the indefatigable Aung Saan Suu Kyi, and the movement for Tibetan autonomy, led by the dignified and resolute Dalai Lama, are justly admired across the world. When democracy and pluralism finally come to Myanmar and China – as they will, and must – the citizens of these countries will have reason to recall, and gratefully remember, the sacrifices of these non-violent resisters. That meeting in Johannesburg in September 1906 thus sowed many seeds – seeds of resistance to colonial or authoritarian rule, that helped usher in the end of imperialism and the emergence of democratic regimes. Even when countries are formally free, and formally democratic, non-violence can play a crucial role in challenging injustice and 75

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discrimination. Such was the case in the United States of the 1950s and 1960s, when the denial of equal rights of citizenship for AfricanAmericans was confronted, and overcome, by the civil rights movement. And such is the case in India today, where multiparty democracy and an independent judiciary exist side-by-side with pervasive social inequalities. In his own country, Gandhi’s methods of satyagraha have been applied in different ways and to different ends. In the 1970s, peasants in the Himalaya launched the Chipko movement, protesting deforestion caused by timber merchants by threatening to hug the trees. In the 1980s, tribals in central India launched a series of satyagrahas in protest against a massive dam that would submerge their homes, lands, and shrines, and devastate large areas of forest as well. More recently, in 2011, tens of thousands of Indians held rallies and fasts in Delhi and other cities to protest against the large-scale corruption of the country’s political class. These movements have all drawn inspiration from Gandhi, carrying his portrait, humming the hymns he liked, starting or ending their campaigns on the day he was born, October 2, or the day he died, January 30. Those two days are important in the life of an individual, any individual, who whether famous or obscure, is known by when he or she entered this world and when he or she left it. However, when considered as a historical figure, as a figure of past importance and contemporary relevance, a third day is perhaps as significant in Gandhi’s life. This is September 9, 1906, the day when, speaking to a crowd of merchants, hawkers, and laborers in Johannesburg, Gandhi gave birth to the idea of protesting against unjust laws and against authoritarian rulers, but doing so non-violently. May the 9/11 that destroyed the World Trade Centre never be repeated, but may the 9/11 whose ripples and echoes helped hasten the end of apartheid, bestowed freedom on India, enabled AfricanAmericans to claim equal rights, and ended Communist rule in Eastern Europe live on in public memory to animate the non-violent struggles for democracy and social justice that have still to be waged in our imperfect and insecure world.

III The theory and practice of non-violence was undoubtedly Gandhi’s greatest contribution to public affairs. But there were other contributions too. One such was to the theory and practice of interfaith harmony. 76

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Gandhi was born in 1869, a decade after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This was a time of widespread skepticism among the educated classes in Europe, a sentiment captured in the title of Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘God’s Funeral’. Outside the Continent, this was also a time of heightened missionary activity. In their new colonies in Africa and Asia, European priests sought to claim the heathen for Christianity. For his part, Gandhi rejected both the atheism of the intellectuals as well as the arrogance of the missionaries. He did not think science had all the answers to the mysteries of the universe. Faith answered to a deep human need. Yet Gandhi did not think that there was one privileged path to God either. He believed that every religious tradition was an unstable mixture of truth and error. From these three beliefs followed a fourth, which was that Gandhi rejected conversion and missionary work. He encouraged inter-religious dialogue, so that individuals could see their faith in the critical reflections of another. Gandhi once said of his own faith that he had ‘broaden[ed] my Hinduism by loving other religions as my own’. He invented the interfaith prayer meeting, where texts of different religions were read and sung to a mixed audience. At an International Fellowship of Religions, held at his ashram in Sabarmati in January 1928, he said that ‘We can only pray, if we are Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu, or if we are Mussalmans, not that a Hindu or a Christian should become a Mussalman, nor should we even secretly pray that anyone should be converted [to our faith], but our inmost prayer should be that a Hindu should be a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim and a Christian a better Christian. That is the fundamental truth of fellowship’. What does it mean to be a better Hindu, or Muslim, or Christian? The sacred texts of all religions have contradictory trends and impulses; sanctioning one thing, but also its opposite. Gandhi asked that we affirm those trends that oppose violence and discrimination or which promote non-violence and justice. The high priests of Hinduism claimed that the practice of Untouchability was sanctioned by the scriptures; Gandhi answered that in that case the scriptures did not represent the true traditions of the faith. Islamic texts might speak of women in condescending or disparaging terms in one place and in terms of reverence and respect in another; surely a Muslim committed to justice would value the second above the first? Likewise, a Christian must privilege the pacifism of Jesus’s life above passages in the Bible calling for retribution against people of other faiths. There was, in Gandhi’s life and work, an inseparable bond between non-violence and religious pluralism. When, in the late 1930s, violent 77

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conflicts erupted between Jewish settlers and Palestinian peasants, with both sides claiming to act in the name of their faith, Gandhi remarked that ‘a religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb’. A decade later, aged seventy-seven, Gandhi walked through the riot-torn districts of eastern Bengal, healing the wounds. When independence came to India the following August, Gandhi refused to celebrate, for political freedom had come on the back of sectarian violence. When the violence would not abate, Gandhi began a fast-unto-death in Calcutta. His act shocked and shamed the people of the city, who came around, slowly. A group of representative Hindus and Muslims met him with a written promise ‘that peace and quiet have been restored in Calcutta once again’. The undertaking added: ‘We shall never again allow communal strife in the city. And shall strive unto death to prevent it’. Gandhi now called off his fast, and proceeded to Delhi. The Muslims of this city had been savagely attacked by Hindus and Sikhs, themselves inflamed by pogroms against their co-religionists in Pakistan. Gandhi abhorred this politics of revenge and retribution. He went on another fast in protest. His health rapidly declined. He was persuaded to break his fast after an all-party delegation pledged that ‘we shall protect the life, property and faith of Muslims and that the incidents which have taken place in Delhi will not happen again’. An old, frail man, had, by the force of moral example, helped bring peace to two very large cities. He now wished to proceed to the Punjab, where the rioting had been especially fierce. Before he could go, he was murdered by a religious fanatic. But his example, and achievements, lie before us. For we live now in a time marked by arrogant atheism on the one side and religious bigotry on the other. Bookshops are awash with titles proclaiming that God does not exist; the streets are muddied and bloodied by wars between competing fundamentalisms. Gandhi’s faith may be of vital assistance here in promoting peace and harmony between people who worship different Gods or no God at all. Back in 1919, while seeking to forge an entente cordiale between India’s two major religious groupings, Gandhi asked them to collectively take this vow: With God as witness we Hindus and Mahomedans declare that we shall behave towards one another as children of the same parents, that we shall have no differences, that the sorrows of each will be the sorrows of the other and that each shall help the other in removing them. We shall respect each 78

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other’s religion and religious feelings and shall not stand in the way of our respective religious practices. We shall always refrain from violence to each other in the name of religion. It only remains for me to add: what Gandhi asked of Hindus and Muslims in India in 1919 should be asked again of them today, asked also of Jews and Arabs in Palestine, of Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka, and of Christians and Muslims in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Africa.

IV Gandhi was, so to say, a serial or multiple reconciler. He sought to reconcile Hindus and Muslims, but also men and women, low castes and high castes, and North Indians and South Indians. Through his satyagraha campaigns, Gandhi brought more women into public life than any other modern politician. Apart from the great Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar, no one did more than Gandhi to delegitimize the practice of Untouchability. And Gandhi vigorously promoted linguistic pluralism. India today is a flawed and fault-ridden democracy. But it is a democracy nonetheless. That, unlike so many ex-colonial countries, the Government of India regularly conducts free and fair elections; that women have equal rights under the Constitution; that India has successfully nurtured linguistic diversity; that the state is not identified with a particular religion; that it has extensive programmes of affirmative action for those of underprivileged background – these achievements are owed to a generation of visionary nation-builders, among whom Gandhi was – in all senses – pre-eminent. Other countries may do well to avoid India’s many failures, which include widespread poverty, massive environmental degradation, political corruption, and crony capitalism. But they may yet learn a lesson or two from India’s successes. Indeed, some already have. For a full fifty years after its founding in 1912, the African National Congress followed the path of non-violence. It was with some reluctance and much deliberation that it decided that the white racist regime was too deeply entrenched to be shaken by satyagraha. Still, the violence the African National Congress used was highly focused and designed to minimize the loss of human life. State offices and state infrastructure projects were attacked but not state officials, and never civilians. In some thirty years of ‘armed struggle’, perhaps a few hundred people were killed. It was not violence, but the cumulative impact of decades of mass struggle, that finally ended apartheid and brought in a democratic political order. 79

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As a resister, Nelson Mandela did not strictly follow the Gandhian method. But as a ruler he unquestionably did. After the ending of apartheid, he too promoted the path of reconciliation – with the white race, and among the different sections of South African society. That the Constitution of democratic South Africa refused to privilege a particular race, religion, or linguistic group owed something to the Indian, or one might even say, Gandhian, experience. Freedom and justice, but with reconciliation – that is the message of Gandhi and Mandela, King and Havel, the Dalai Lama and Aung Saan Suu Kyi. It is a message that must resonate with the democrats of those Asian and African countries currently in the grip of authoritarian or sectarian regimes.

V In 1998, the editors of Time Magazine chose the scientist Albert Einstein as the ‘Person of the Century’. They ranked Gandhi joint second, along with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One doesn’t know about FDR, but Einstein would have been both appalled and embarrassed at being placed above Gandhi. He venerated Gandhi, writing to him in September 1931 that ‘you have shown through your works, that it is possible to succeed without violence even with those who have not discarded the method of violence. We may hope that your example will spread beyond the borders of your country, and will help to establish an international authority, respected by all, that will take decisions and replace war conflicts’. The last line of this letter seems to anticipate the creation of the United Nations. Eight years later, Einstein expressed his admiration for Gandhi in even more extravagant terms. This is what he wrote about him: A leader of his People, unsupported by any outward authority, a politician whose success rests not upon craft nor the mastery of technical devices, but simply on the convincing power of his personality; a victorious fighter who has always scorned the use of force; a man of wisdom and humility, armed with resolve and inflexible consistency, who has devoted all his strength to the uplifting of his people and the betterment of their lot; a man who has confronted the brutality of Europe with the dignity of the simple human being, and thus at all times rises superior.

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Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth. Einstein had no doubt that Gandhi was the greatest person of his age – perhaps of any age. In the early 1930s, when he was teaching in Berlin, portraits of three icons hung in his study. These were the physicists Max Planck and Michael Faraday, and Mohandas K. Gandhi. In the early 1950s, when Einstein was based in Princeton, a photograph of Gandhi was still displayed in his office. But Planck and Faraday had disappeared. When asked about this, Einstein replied that the discoveries of physics had recently resulted in the atom bomb. On the other hand, the reputation of Gandhi had been further enhanced in the last decades of his life. What remains of Gandhi today? What should remain of Gandhi today? Some of his teachings are plainly irrelevant. For example, his ideas on food (his diet consisted chiefly of nuts and fruits and boiled vegetables), medicine (he wished to treat cancer with water baths), and sex (he imposed a strict celibacy on his followers) can hardly find favor with the majority of humans. That said, there are at least four areas in which Gandhi’s ideas remain of interest and importance. The first (and perhaps most obvious) area is non-violent resistance. That social change is both less harmful and more sustainable when achieved by non-violent means is now widely recognized. A study of some sixty transitions to democratic rule since World War II by the think-tank Freedom House, found that ‘far more often than is generally understood, the change agent is broad-based, non-violent civic resistance – which employs tactics such as boycotts, mass protests, blockades, strikes, and civil disobedience to delegitimate authoritarian rulers and erode their sources of support, including the loyalty of their armed defenders’. These, of course, were all methods of protest pioneered by Gandhi. The second area is faith. Gandhi was at odds both with secularists who confidently looked forward to God’s funeral and with monotheists who insisted that theirs was the one true God. Gandhi believed that no religion had a monopoly on the truth. He argued that one should accept the faith into which one was born (hence his opposition to conversion) but seek always to practice it in the most broad-minded and non-violent way. And he actively encouraged friendships across religions. His own best friend was a Christian priest, C.F. Andrews. At the time, his position appeared eccentric; in retrospect, it seems to be precocious. In a world riven by religious misunderstanding, such friendships can help cultivate mutual respect and recognition, and thereby diminish conflict and violence.

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The third area is the environment. The rise of China and India has brought a long-suppressed, and quintessentially Gandhian, question to the fore: how much should a person consume? So long as the West had a monopoly on modern lifestyles, the question simply did not arise. But if most Chinese and most Indians come, like most Americans and most Englishmen, to own and drive a car, this will place unbearable burdens on the earth. Back in 1928, Gandhi had warned about the unsustainability, on the global scale, of Western patterns of production and consumption. ‘God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West’, he said. ‘The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom [England] is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts’. Gandhi’s life and legacy have profound implications for the way we live and relate to the environment today. An aphorism attributed to him runs as follows: ‘The world has enough for everybody’s need, but not enough for everybody’s greed’. Recent scholarship suggests that he never said these precise words in this exact order. However, the sentiments they convey and contain are undoubtedly his own. Gandhi’s respect for other religions, other races, other species, was intimately connected with his philosophy (and practice) of non-violence. He opposed injustice and authoritarian rule, but without arms. He reached out to people of other faiths with understanding and respect. Where the proselytizer took his book to the heathen – backed sometimes with the bayonet and the bomb – Gandhi chose rather to studying Islamic and Christian texts, bringing to them the same open, yet not uncritical, mind that he brought to Hindu scriptures. And in promoting a resource-conserving lifestyle, Gandhi sought to eschew violence to the earth itself. The fourth area where Gandhi matters is public life. In his ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, George Orwell wrote that ‘regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!’ In an age of terror, politicians may not be able to live as open a life as Gandhi. There were no security men posted outside his ashram; visitors of any creed and nationality would walk in when they chose. Still, the politicians of today might at least emulate his lack of dissembling and his utter lack of reliance on ‘spin’. His campaigns of civil disobedience were always announced in advance. His social experiments were minutely dissected in the pages of his newspapers, the comments of his critics placed alongside his own. 82

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Gandhi’s political practice holds a salutary lesson (or two) for those who seek to change the world today. Gandhi once spoke of making a ‘Himalayan Blunder’; but contemporary activists, as much as contemporary politicians, are loath ever to admit to a mistake. Gandhi’s heightened self-awareness and openness to self-criticism stands in striking contrast to the arrogance of those in positions of power, who, in this decade after the more famous (and more notorious) 9/11, have promoted the politics of revenge and retribution, contributing to an escalating cycle of violence and counter-violence which may at last, and not a day too soon, be finally ebbing. This might then be the time, then, to recall the other 9/11, the 9/11 in Johannesburg which mandated non-violence as a means of securing justice, the 9/11 whose best exemplars have seen their adversary not as a demon or enemy but as being as human, and as fallible as themselves. Gandhi was a prophet, of sorts but by no means a joyless one. On a visit to London in 1931 he met a British monarch for the first and last time. When he came out of Buckingham Palace after speaking with George VI, a reporter asked whether he had not felt cold in his loincloth. Gandhi answered: ‘The King had enough on for both of us’. Another version has Gandhi saying: ‘The King wears plus-fours; I wear minus-fours’. In those self-deprecatory jokes lies a good deal of (still enduring) wisdom. Seven decades after his death, Gandhi matters for his pioneering of non-violent techniques of protest, or satyagraha; for his willingness to stake his life in the cause of religious peace and religious pluralism; for his respect for other living beings and for the earth; for the transparency and honesty of his personal and public life. For these reasons, and more, Gandhi matters, still.

Note 1 This essay draws on my B.R. Nanda lecture, delivered in New Delhi in December 2014. All historians of modern India owe B.R. Nanda two enormous debts: the first for the series of groundbreaking books that he published, the second for his establishment of the NMML. I have myself been greatly influenced by B.R. Nanda’s writings – his biography of Gopal Krishna Gokhale remains a particular favorite – while for more than three decades now I have made several research trips a year to the NMML, raiding the manuscript collections, oral histories and runs of old newspapers that its founder-director helped put in place. Beyond what I owe his books and the NMML he established, I also owe B.R. Nanda a personal debt, for he bestowed on me affection and encouragement from my earliest days as a scholar. I retain vivid memories of my visits to his Panchsheel Park house, where we discussed the art and craft of historical biography.

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5 UNITY OR PARTITION Mahatma Gandhi’s last stand, 1945–1948 Sugata Bose “My dear Sarat,” Mahatma Gandhi wrote from Haridwar on June 21, 1947, to Subhas’s elder brother, I have a moment to myself here. I use it for writing two or three overdue letters. This is one to acknowledge yours of the 14th inst. The way to work for unity I have pointed out when the geographical is broken. Hoping you are all well. Love, Bapu.1 Mountbatten’s partition plan announced on June 3 had shattered Gandhi’s lifelong dream of a united and independent India. He did not agree with the Congress Working Committee’s decision to accept it. He had “done his best to get people to stand by” the Cabinet Mission plan for a federal India, but “had failed”. He confessed on June 8 that he had been “taken to task” for supporting Sarat Bose’s scheme for a united sovereign Bengal, while acknowledging that Sarat was “undoubtedly his friend” and they were in correspondence with each other. His erstwhile lieutenants now considered him “a back number”. He asserted on June 11 that he was “as much of Pakistan, as of Hindustan”. Having stated his difference with Congress leaders, he nevertheless asked the All India Congress Committee (AICC) at its meeting on June 14 and 15 to swallow the unpalatable decision to partition. The AICC did, by 153 votes to 29.2 Even at the moment of his biggest political defeat, the indefatigable Mahatma would neither cede the moral high ground nor stop showing the way to work for unity. Already on June 6, he had urged the Union of India and Pakistan to vie with each other in doing well. “If Pakistan did better,” he said, “then the whole of India would be Pakistan, in which there would be neither majority nor minority, and all would be equal”. On June 12 he wondered if “the readjustment of the geography of India” 84

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meant two nations. He admitted that the territorial division made the challenge of unity difficult. Yet he urged the soon-to-be citizens of free India to “rise to the occasion and by their character and bravery, incorruptibility and toleration prove to the Muslims of Pakistan that in the Union there is no discrimination whatsoever on the ground of religion, caste or color and that the only test is merit which every industrious citizen of the Union will have ample opportunity to acquire”. The “real unity of India” depended on whether the shrines of Islam and Muslim seats of learning were honored equally with the others and Hindustani, “a compatible mixture of Hindi and Urdu” had a future.3 The partition of 1947 was not a tragedy foretold. As the Second World War drew to a close in 1945, efforts were under way to share power equitably once the British quit India. Even though the Gandhi-Jinnah talks of September 1944 had failed to achieve a breakthrough, the leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League in the central legislative assembly – Bhulabhai Desai and Liaquat Ali Khan – produced a formula in early 1945 for their respective parties to have an equal number of seats – 40% each – in an interim government. The Simla conference of June 1945 foundered on Jinnah’s insistence that the League should be allowed to nominate all the Muslim representatives. Gandhi drew an important distinction between religious communities and political parties. “You will quite unconsciously, but equally surely”, he wrote to Wavell, “defeat the purpose of the conference if parity between Caste-Hindus and Muslims is unalterable. Parity between the Congress and the League is understandable”.4 The Congress was at this stage demoralized, its leaders recently released from detention unsure about how to rekindle the freedom struggle that had been ruthlessly suppressed in 1942. At such a moment of uncertainty, the INA appeared before the country and the INC as a godsend. In September 1945 the AICC resolved that it would be “a tragedy if these officers, men and women, were punished for the offence of having labored, however mistakenly, for the freedom of India”.5 The Congress formed a defence committee led by Bhulabhai Desai and Tej Bahadur Sapru and invited other parties to join it. Once the trial began at the Red Fort of Sahgal, Dhillon and Shah Nawaz in November 1945, political parties and religious communities united in a popular movement against the hubris of the British raj. It was during the height of the Red Fort trial that Mahatma Gandhi forged a new intimate relationship with Bengal and began the process of acquiring his Bengali identity. On his visit to Bengal in December 1945, Gandhi’s first port of call was naturally Tagore’s abode of peace. “True monuments to the great”, he declared in Santiniketan, “are not statues of marble or bronze or 85

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gold. The best monument is to adorn and enlarge their legacy”. In Calcutta he paid homage to his rebellious son Subhas in the bedroom of the Elgin Road home from where he had made his great escape in 1941. Gandhi was in Medinipur on January 3, 1946, when news came that the Red Fort three, who had been sentenced to deportation for life on December 31, 1945, had been released. These Hindu, Muslim and Sikh soldiers of freedom came from Punjab, but the INA had undermined the British separation of martial and non-martial races and had large numbers of Tamils in its ranks. Gandhi urged INA soldiers he met in Madras to follow the lead of the Congress. On February 10, 1946, he decided to revive his journal, Harijan, after a gap of three and a half years. One of his first articles published on February 12 addressed the question of unity. “Netaji’s name”, Gandhi wrote, is one to conjure with. His patriotism is second to none. His bravery shines through all his actions. He aimed high but failed. But who has not failed? Ours is to aim high and to aim well . . . The lesson that Netaji and his army brings to us is one of self-sacrifice, unity – irrespective of class and community – and discipline. He urged Indians to “rigidly copy this trinity of virtues” and “rigidly abjure all violence”.6 Netaji, Gandhi told military men who came to visit him in Uruli Kanchan in March 1946, had “rendered a signal service to India by giving the Indian soldier a new vision and a new ideal”. The Mahatma initially harboured a hope that Netaji would return to join him in the work for unity. On March 30, 1946, Gandhi explained in the Harijan his earlier “feeling that Netaji could not leave us until his dreams of swaraj had been fulfilled”. “To lend strength to this feeling”, he added, “was the knowledge of Netaji’s great ability to hoodwink his enemies and even the world for the sake of his cherished goal”. His “instinct” had suggested to him “Netaji was alive”. He now could no longer rely on “such unsupported feeling”, as there was “strong evidence to counteract the feeling”. “In the face of these proofs”, the Mahatma wrote, “I appeal to everyone to forget what I have said and, believing in the evidence before them, to reconcile themselves to the fact that Netaji has left us. All man’s ingenuity is as nothing before the might of the one God. He alone is Truth and nothing else stands”.7 The ideal of unity that Netaji had instilled in his followers remained alive. On his return to Delhi in early April 1946, Gandhi visited INA prisoners in the Kabul Lines and the Red Fort. He was told that they had never felt any distinction of creed or religion in the INA. “But here 86

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we are faced with ‘Hindu tea’ and ‘Muslim tea’”, they complained. “Why do you suffer it”? Gandhi asked. “No, we don’t”, they said. “We mix ‘Hindu tea’ and ‘Muslim tea’ exactly half and half, and then serve. The same with food”. “That is very good”, exclaimed Gandhi, laughing.8 At the height of the non-cooperation and Khilafat movement in the early 1920s, Gandhi had not dined together with even his closest political comrades, Shaukat and Mohammad Ali. Eating, he had said, was one of the privately performed sanitary practices of life and the Ali brothers were indulgent of his “bigotry”, if his “self-denial could be so named”.9 On the matter of inter-dining he had happily changed with the times. He was nostalgic about the euphoria of the common political struggle a quarter of a century ago. “The Ali brothers and I used to go all over the country together like blood brothers”, he recalled on April 6, 1946. “We spoke with one voice, and we delivered the message of Hindu-Muslim unity and swaraj to the masses”. The climax of the joint movement had been reached in Delhi, where Swami Shraddhanand addressed a gigantic gathering of Hindus and Muslims in the Jumma Masjid. “It was a glorious day in India’s history”, Gandhi declared, “the memory of which, we shall always treasure”.10 Gandhi knew that the Muslim masses, by and large, had not been enthused by his civil disobedience and Quit India movements of the early 1930s and 1942. The remembrance of the early 1920s satyagraha and the example of the INA became recurring features of his discourses on unity. The Mahatma was in Delhi to hold talks with the Cabinet Mission that had recently arrived in India. By the spring of 1946 the British had reckoned that their hold on India was no longer tenable. The issue now was not whether the British could be forced to quit but rather how power was to be distributed among communities and regions upon the British withdrawal. Gandhi’s relevance to the Congress as a leader of mass movements diminished as soon as it was clear that the colonial masters had read the writing on the wall and were making up their mind to depart. However, he had not yet been completely elbowed aside. He was present at Simla in early May during the tripartite talks among the British, the Congress and the League to try to reach a constitutional settlement. “You have achieved a complete unity among the Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians, AngloIndians and Sikhs in your ranks”, Gandhi told sixty senior INA officers who came to see him in Simla. That was “no mean achievement” outside India and he urged them to keep that spirit of unity alive under Indian conditions.11 Unity, however, eluded the Congress and League leaders who had gathered in Simla, and the talks broke down on May 12, 1946. The Cabinet Mission was then left with no option but to issue a statement on May 16 based on the lowest common denominator of 87

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the Congress and League positions, proposing a three-tiered federal constitutional structure based on three groups of provinces. Gandhi had suggested to Cripps on May 8 that grouping was “really worse than Pakistan”.12 After a careful perusal of the May 16 statement, he rose above the usual nationalist suspicion of British perfidy to give a more measured opinion on May 20. It was, according to him, “the best document the British could have produced under the circumstances”. The possible infringement of provincial autonomy by the groups posed a potential problem. For example, could the North West Frontier Province be bundled into group B dominated by Punjab or Assam into group C against their will? In Gandhi’s interpretation, the provinces were free to join groups on terms attractive to them and were not being ordered to do so. His message to those worried by the grouping proposal and arbitrary assignment to groups was that there was “not the slightest cause for perturbation”.13 Grouping of provinces in the Muslim-majority sections B and C was of the essence for the All-India Muslim League, which had given up the demand for a fully sovereign Pakistan on that assurance. Even though both the Congress and the League formally accepted the Cabinet Mission proposal in June, Jawaharlal Nehru’s statement on July 11, after taking over from Maulana Azad as Congress President, that grouping may not last unnerved the League. With Jinnah calling for “direct action” to achieve the League’s demand for Pakistan, Calcutta exploded in violence on August 16, 1946, and sporadic killings gripped Bombay in September. “When will this orgy of madness end”? Gandhi-ji asked in anguish on his 77th birthday on October 2, 1946. “Killings in Calcutta, and stabbings in Dacca, Agra, Ahmedabad and Bombay”. Tagore’s song “Jiban jakhan shukaye jay kuranadharay esho” had never sounded more poignant – “when life is parched up, come with a shower of mercy”. Days later in an article titled “Hindu Pani and Muslim Pani”, Gandhi wrote: “A stranger travelling in Indian trains may well have a painful shock, when he hears at railway stations for the first time in his life ridiculous sounds about pani, tea and the like, being either Hindu or Muslim”. Even as late as September 1946 Gandhi had believed that violence was lodged in “the hearts of a handful of townspeople” and that as a villager he was “one with the ocean of Indian humanity”.14 The eruption of violence in the rural backwaters of Noakhali in the second week of October 1946 came as a rude shock, ensuring that the Bengal countryside became the venue of one of his most challenging experiments with truth. Noakhali and neighbouring Tippera were Muslim-majority districts in the vortex of an economic crisis marked by sluggish jute prices and skyrocketing food prices. Credit relations between mostly Hindu 88

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moneylender-landlords and Muslim peasants were in a state of disrepair, and Hindu traders were hated for their callous role in the famine of 1943. Demobilized ex-servicemen supplied an additional volatile element in a tense setting. Ghulam Sarwar, a former MLA who had lost to the Muslim League candidate in the recent provincial elections, led the attacks in quasi-military fashion against the vulnerable Hindu minority. Unlike earlier agrarian disturbances of the depression decade, there were murders, abductions of women and forced conversions on a large scale.15 It was “the cry of the outraged womanhood” that had especially called Mahatma Gandhi to Noakhali. Even before he could reach Bengal, however, terrible violence was unleashed on the Muslim minority in Bihar. “Is it nationalism”, Gandhi asked in indignation, “to seek barbarously to crush the fourteen per cent of the Muslims in Bihar”?16 He did not, however, interrupt his journey to Noakhali. The apostle of non-violence was destined to follow the trail of violence, putting out the embers after the fires had done their destruction and supplying a healing touch to those who had been singed by its flames. On his arrival in east Bengal, Gandhi fondly remembered his first visit to this region in the company of the Ali brothers during the noncooperation movement. This time he had come “not as a Congressman, but as a servant of God”. He told the beleaguered Hindu minority that the Muslims were “blood of our blood and bone of our bone”. He sought complete identification with the Bengali people. “I claim to be an Indian”, he asserted, “and, therefore, a Bengali, even as I am a Gujarati”. Once he settled down to live in the village of Srirampur from November 20, 1946, he diligently took lessons before the crack of dawn in learning Bengali. He explained why he had made himself a Bengali. Bengal had produced not just Tagore and Bankim, but also, as he put it, “the heroes of the Chittagong Armory Raid, however misguided their action might have been in my eyes”.17 He could not understand how there could be cowardice in a province with that lineage. Bengal might still solve the problem facing all of India. Based in remote Noakhali, Gandhi consistently argued in favor of provincial rights. He admitted that Subhas Bose had been right in contending in 1939 that Assam was a special case and that the Gopinath Bardoloi ministry should not resign along with the other provincial governments. “We look to the Congress”, Gandhi pointed out, “and then we feel that if we do not follow it slavishly, something will go wrong with it. I have said that not only a province but even an individual can rebel against the Congress and, by doing so, save it”. The Mahatma had a come a long way from imposing the discipline of the high command on provincial units. It was incumbent on the Congress 89

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and the League to make their policy “appeal to the reason of the recalcitrant province or groups”.18 Between January 7 and March 2, 1946, Mahatma Gandhi undertook a 116-mile pilgrimage on foot through 47 villages of Noakhali and Tippera. Manu Gandhi sang his favourite hymn “Vaishnava Janato” at the early morning prayers on the day he set out on his journey. At Bapu’s suggestion, the word Vaishnava would be occasionally replaced with Muslim and Isai during the singing of the chorus lines. In addition to bringing solace to those who had suffered, Gandhi candidly held forth on burning social and political questions of the day. On January 20 he reached the village of Shirandi where Amtus Salam was on the 24th day of her fast for the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity. He extracted a written pledge from Muslim leaders to maintain peace in the locality before advising her to break the fast with a sip of orange juice and to the chant of Koranic verses. The cause of communal riots, he bluntly said, was “the idiocy of both the communities”. Five thousand people gathered to hear him on January 22 at Paniala, which had hosted an inter-communal dinner a few weeks earlier. At Dalta on January 23, the Chowdhuris of the village gifted him with the plot of land on which his prayer meeting was held. He was glad that on the auspicious birthday of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose he had received this gift and had the privilege of staying at the home of a Scheduled Caste friend, Rai Mohan Mali. He reminded his audience that Netaji was “an Indian first and last” and that “he fired all under him with the same zeal, so that they forgot in his presence all distinctions and acted as one man”. Subhas had “in his life verified the saying of Tulsidas that all becomes right for the brave”. The next day at Muraim Gandhi stayed in the house of Habibullah Patwari and addressed the largest gathering of his tour. In Kamalapur in Tippera on February 21, Gandhi was asked point-blank whether he, who had been advocating inter-caste marriages, also favoured inter-religious marriages. He honestly answered that there was a time when he had not done so, but had quite a while ago decided that “an inter-religious marriage was a welcome event, whenever it took place”. It had to be based on “mutual friendship, either party having equal respect for the religion of the other”.19 Gandhi devoted the month of March 1947 to serving those who had suffered grievously in Bihar. As he moved from Bengal to Bihar, he disdainfully declined an urgent invitation to attend a Congress Working Committee meeting in Delhi, saying “that was not within his present beat”. On his arrival in Patna on March 5, he stated categorically that what the Hindus of Bihar had done to the Muslims was “infinitely 90

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worse” than the horrors in Noakhali.20 Accompanied by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, he visited ruined Muslim homes and asked Hindus to atone for their sins in the land of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas. By the time Gandhi had started to restore some calm in Bihar, news came of the violence that had engulfed Punjab. On Christmas Eve, 1946, the young B.R. Nanda had sat sipping hot tea at a crowded table in the “Lorangs” at Lahore. “The crowded road, the thronged restaurant, the rippling laughter of pretty women in prettier clothes”, he recorded, “this was the customary life of the gay town of Lahore”. He chatted with a Muslim friend about the Great Calcutta Killing, the Noakhali tragedy, and the Bihar frenzy, and they expressed satisfaction that their own province continued to be at peace. The “Punjabi character”, his friend claimed, was averse to the kind of hatred that appeared to have taken root in eastern India. Nanda made an accurate forecast that the tranquillity would last only as long as the Khizar Hayat Khan coalition government managed to stay in office.21 In the eyewitness account he wrote in December 1947 titled Punjab Uprooted, he held Clement Attlee, or rather the Prime Minister’s February 20 statement, to be immediately responsible for the outbreak of the Punjab disturbances in March 1947.22 It may have been more accurate to blame the responses of the Hindu Mahasabha, the Congress, the League and the Akali Dal to Attlee’s declaration that the British would quit by June 1948 at the latest. The Mahasabha was the first off the mark, demanding the partition of Punjab and Bengal. Jawaharlal Nehru followed suit. The Khizar government fell on March 2. With Gandhi away in Bihar, the Congress Working Committee passed a momentous resolution on March 8, 1947, calling for the partition of Punjab. Nehru explained that the principle of partition might have to be extended to Bengal as well.23 At the very end of March, Gandhi eventually came to Delhi and met Mountbatten. On April 1 he told the delegates to the Asian Relations Conference being held in the Purana Quila that he was in the capital as the Viceroy’s prisoner and Nehru’s prisoner. He lamented that Indians did not know how to maintain peace. Speaking at the concluding session the next day, he expressed his embarrassment at the shameful carnage unfolding before their very eyes and begged the visitors from abroad to “not carry the memory of that carnage beyond the confines of India”. Living among the dalits of the city, Gandhi preached the message of peace. His prayer services typically included Koranic verses along with excerpts from other religious scriptures. When one or two members of the audience objected to the recitation from the Koran, Gandhi altogether refused to hold the prayers. He was prepared to die cheerfully 91

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with the name of Rama and Rahim on his lips. As a sanatani Hindu, he claimed to be a Christian, a Buddhist and a Muslim at the same time. Taking a stand against religious conservatives on all sides, he declared that he saw no reason “why he should not read the kalma, why he should not praise Allah and why he should not acclaim Muhammad as the Prophet”. At the level of high politics, Gandhi broached the idea of letting Jinnah head the first government of free India to Mountbatten in the second week of April. Unable to persuade Nehru and Patel, he left for Bihar in mid-April. Before doing so, he signed with Jinnah a joint appeal that read as follows: “We denounce for all time the use of force to achieve political ends, and we call upon the communities of India, to whatever persuasion they may belong, not only to refrain from acts of violence and disorder, but also to avoid both in speech and writing, any word which might be construed as an incitement to such acts”.24 Gandhi insisted that he had acted as a true Hindu in his efforts to befriend the Muslims. To his critics, he cited Iqbal’s famous line: “Mazhab nahin sikhata apas men ber rakhna”. In both Noakhali and Bihar his motto was “do or die”. “My non-violence”, he explained, “bids me dedicate myself to the service of the minorities”. It was that sense of mission that called him back from Bihar to Delhi at the end of April to take part in a Congress Working Committee meeting and parleys with Mountbatten and Jinnah in the first week of May. “I feel sure”, Gandhi wrote to Mountbatten on his departure from Delhi for Bihar on May 8, “that the partition of Punjab and Bengal is wrong in every case, and a needless irritant for the Muslim League”. Non-partition of these provinces did not mean that the minorities there were to be neglected. Gandhi informed the Viceroy that he had spent “a very pleasant two hours and three quarters with Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah” on May 6. They had disagreed on Pakistan, but Jinnah had been “agreeably emphatic” about his commitment to non-violence.25 Between May 9 and May 14, 1947, in Sodepur, Gandhi explored the possibility of keeping Bengal united in a series of interviews with Sarat Chandra Bose, Abul Hashim and Husain Shaheed Suhrawardy. Gandhi told Hashim on May 10 that he had been trying to become a Bengali. His main reason for learning Bengali was to be able to read Tagore’s poems in the original. When Hashim professed that Hindus and Muslims alike revered the poet, Gandhi responded that the spirit of the Upanishads bound Tagore to the whole of Indian culture. What would Hashim have to say, he asked, if Bengal wished “to enter into a voluntary association with the rest of India”? On May 12 Gandhi gave Suhrawardy an undertaking in writing that so long as the Muslim League leader showed sincerity and undertook to preserve Bengal 92

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for the Bengalis – Hindus and Mussalmans, the Mahatma was prepared to act as “his honorary private secretary”. Having heard that the plan for a united, sovereign Bengal had received Gandhi’s blessings, Syamaprasad Mukherjee rushed to Sodepur on May 13. Gandhi wanted Mukherjee to evaluate the scheme on its merits. “An admission that Bengali Hindus and Bengali Mussalmans were one”, Gandhi told the Mahasabha leader, “would really be a severe blow against the two-nation theory of the League”.26 Sarat Bose sent a detailed draft of the united Bengal plan to Gandhi on May 20. Bapu responded from Patna on May 24, suggesting that “every act of Government must carry with it the cooperation of at least two-thirds of the Hindu members in the Executive and the Legislature” and that there should be “an admission that Bengal has a common culture and common mother tongue – Bengali” He promised to discuss the draft with the Working Committee and to telephone or telegraph if Sarat’s presence was needed in Delhi. The plan was refined further in light of Gandhi’s comments, and a final version sent to Mountbatten through the good offices of George Catlin, a British MP, who was a guest of Sarat Bose.27 On May 22, Patel asked Sarat Bose to “take a united stand” with the Congress leadership on partition of Punjab and Bengal. Sarat Bose retorted on May 27, saying “the united stand should be for a united Bengal and a united India”.28 On May 28, Mountbatten recorded two alternative broadcasts in London – broadcast A was to be used if both Punjab and Bengal were to be partitioned and broadcast B if it appeared probable that Bengal would remain unified under the auspices of a new coalition government.29 Once Mountbatten returned to India on May 30, Nehru and Patel vetoed the Bengali exception and so it was that broadcast A went on the air on June 3, 1947. At his prayer meetings between May 29 and June 2, Gandhi had maintained that if the Congress or the British went back on the letter and spirit of the Cabinet Mission’s paper of May 16, 1946, “it would be a breach of faith”.30 When the Congress Working Committee met to ratify the June 3 Partition Plan, Gandhi remonstrated with Nehru and Patel that they had not informed him of the partition scheme before committing themselves to it. With the exception of Gandhi, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Jai Prakash Narain and Rammanohar Lohia, no one spoke a word against partition at that meeting. In a last throw of the dice, Gandhi suggested that the Congress and the League should work out the modalities of partition and Pakistan without further British assistance now that Congress had conceded the principle of partition.31 His voice went unheeded since all his yes-men had now turned into his no-men. 93

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Once August 15, 1947, was set as the date for independence, Gandhi expressed his desire to spend that day in Noakhali. He did, however, take a detour to Kashmir and Punjab in early August. At Srinagar he made clear his view that the future of Kashmir “should be decided by the will of the Kashmiris”. On August 6 in Lahore, he told Congress workers that he was going to spend the rest of his life in East Bengal or West Punjab or, maybe the North West Frontier Province. Once he reached Bengal, he abandoned his plan of going to Noakhali on August 11 to work for “the return of sanity” to Calcutta, “this premier city of India”. On August 13 he moved in to a Muslim home in the Beliaghata neighbourhood of Calcutta in the company of Suhrawardy. To those who distrusted the Muslim League leader, he said that he had known Suhrawardy since the Faridpur political conference where Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das had taken him in the era of noncooperation. Ignoring the celebrations in New Delhi, Gandhi chose to spend Independence Day fasting and praying with those who were poor and obscure. The information and broadcasting department of the government of India asked him for a message. The Father of the Nation simply said that “he had run dry”.32 Peace and camaraderie reigned in Calcutta on August 15, 1947. In an editorial titled “Miracle or Accident” on August 16, the first anniversary of the Great Calcutta Killing, Gandhi narrated how Hindus were taken to masjids and Muslims to mandirs at the dawn of freedom and both communities shouted “Jai Hind” in unison. It was neither miracle, nor accident, but the willingness of human beings to dance to God’s tune. “We have drunk the poison of mutual hatred”, Gandhi wrote, “and so this nectar of fraternization tastes all the sweeter, and the sweetness should never wear out”.33 B.R. Nanda was right when he wrote that peace came to Bengal on August 15 “through the bowl of a beggar who begged from the citizens of riot-torn Calcutta for a little mutual forgiveness and goodwill”. He wondered if Gandhi’s presence in Lahore in mid-August might have saved Punjab.34 It was Eid on August 18, 1947. While Punjab descended into anarchy upon the announcement of Radcliffe’s award the day before, Hindus and Muslims wished each other “Eid Mubarak” in Calcutta. On August 21, Gandhi was happy to note that the Indian and Pakistani flags were being flown side by side at his prayer meeting.35 During the non-cooperation movement, Gandhi and Shaukat Ali had chosen three national slogans: “Allah-u-Akbar”, “Bande-Mataram” and “Hindu-Mussalman ki Jai”.36 Gandhi was delighted that the last cry was being revived. On August 23 he described “Allah-u-Akbar” as “a soul-stirring religious cry” that had a noble meaning and urged 94

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Hindus to utter the cry with their Muslim friends. “Bande Mataram”, according to Gandhi was “a purely political cry”. Tagore had resolved the controversy over the song in 1937 and many Bengalis had sacrificed their lives with that cry on their lips. As “Bande Mataram” was sung at the prayer meeting on August 29, Suhrawardy and other Muslims on the stage stood up to show their respect along with the rest of the audience. Gandhi alone remained seated because he believed standing up as a mark of respect for a national song was an unnecessary Western import and was not a requirement of Indian culture.37 Calcutta had a brief relapse into violence at the end of August and the beginning of September. It required a fast by the Mahatma from September 1 to September 4, 1947, to bring the errant Calcuttans into line. “Can you fast against the goondas”? Rajagopalachari had asked, seeking to dissuade Gandhi. “It is we who make the goondas”, Gandhi had replied. Having restored tranquillity in Calcutta, he was ready to leave for Delhi en route to Punjab on September 7. He wrote his farewell message to Bengal in Bengali: “Amaar Jibani Amaar Bani” (“My life is my message”.)38 On September 10, Gandhi made a 40-mile tour of Delhi, which he said in a nationwide broadcast “looked like a city of the dead”. Two days later he visited the Jumma Masjid, where 30,000 refugees had congregated, and the Purana Quila, that had been transformed from being the venue of an Asian international conference to a refugee camp for 50,000 helpless people. “If India fails”, Gandhi warned, “Asia dies”.39 The spirit of revenge and retaliation that vitiated the atmosphere in Delhi mortified him. B.R. Nanda had an insight into why it was so difficult to curb the post-partition lawlessness in Delhi and Punjab. “Communal passion is a passing emotion”, Nanda noted astutely, the vested interest in property is more permanent. When the first wave of blind violence had passed in the West Punjab, the lure of loot was the chief motive of violence; calculated homicide succeeded indiscriminate violence; it was no longer a fanatic’s leap in the dark but an adventurer’s firm foothold on a house, a shop, or a factory.40 More recently, Ayesha Jalal has depicted partition violence in Punjab as not about religion as faith but a scramble over zar (wealth), zameen (land) and zan (women) in the region’s patriarchal society amid the crumbling ruins of the British raj. That is what made separating at close quarters a colossal human tragedy.41 Gandhi had an inkling of what was really going on when he commented: “Irreligion masquerades as religion”.42 95

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After Pakistan and India went to war over Kashmir Gandhi reiterated that the people of Kashmir must decide their own future “without any coercion or show of it from within or without”. The rajas and maharajas of the princely states could at most serve as trustees. Whispers had reached his ears that Kashmir could be divided along religious lines, with Jammu for the Hindus and the Valley for the Muslims. He could not countenance “such divided loyalties and splitting up of Indian states into so many parts”. It was in such a grim domestic and international scenario that the first AICC session in postindependence India convened from November 15 to 17. Acharya Kripalani resigned as Congress President citing differences with the government of the day. Gandhi preferred to see the veteran socialist Narendra Deva as Kripalani’s successor, but others favoured Rajendra Prasad who took charge. Addressing the AICC in camera, Gandhi spoke some home truths. “No Muslim in the Indian Union”, he told the leaders of the party and government, “should feel his life unsafe”. During his post-prayer discourse on November 21, he noted that as many as 137 mosques in Delhi had been damaged, and he regarded “all such desecration as a blot upon Hinduism”. Noticing a lack of warmth in welcoming Muslims into the Congress, he asked them to serve the party from outside just as he was doing.43 On January 12, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi announced his momentous decision to start an indefinite fast to try to bring about a reunion of hearts among all communities. His reward would be “regaining India’s dwindling prestige and her fast fading sovereignty over the heart of Asia and, therethrough, the world”. As he commenced his fast, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” was sung followed by recitations from the Koran and Guru Granth and Hindu devotional songs. This was no ordinary fast. It was designed to avert a catastrophe and to assert that no one had a right to say India belonged to only the majority community and “the minority community can only remain there as the underdog”. The fast was for the Muslim minority in India and against Hindus and Sikhs of India and Muslims of Pakistan. Having conceded Pakistan, Gandhi did not want the government of India to be meanspirited in the sharing of the assets of undivided India. Even though Sardar Patel had ceased to be his “yes-man”, he did not want him to be singled out for censure and insisted on the Cabinet’s collective responsibility. On January 15, 1948, the government of India released Rs 55 crores that it had withheld from Pakistan on account of the outbreak of hostilities over Kashmir. “It ought to lead to an honourable settlement, not only of the Kashmir question”, Gandhi said the next day, “but of all the differences between the two dominions. Friendship 96

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should replace the present enmity”. However, it was only after receiving an ironclad written declaration signed by leaders of all the major organizations to restore goodwill among communities in Delhi and beyond that Gandhi broke his fast on January 18. There had been reports of the RSS fomenting trouble in different parts of the country, including Kathiawar and Rajkot in the Mahatma’s own Gujarat. Gandhi did not fail to remind the representatives of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS that they could not be indifferent to violence in places other than Delhi. “It would be a fraud upon God”, he warned, “if they did so”.44 Far away in Lake Success, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Zafrullah Khan informed the UN Security Council that “a new and tremendous feeling and desire for friendship between India and Pakistan” was “sweeping the subcontinent in response to the fast”. Gandhi himself was glad to be released from his duty in Delhi to be able to travel to Pakistan. He broke the fast to the chanting and singing of Japanese, Muslim, Parsi, Christian and Hindu scriptures and hymns and the recitation of the ancient mantra: Om Asato ma Sadgamaya Tamaso ma Jyotirgamaya Mrityorma amritam gamaya. (Lead me from untruth to truth, From darkness to light, From death to immortality.)45 The final week of the Mahatma’s life was rich with symbolism redolent of India’s unity. On January 23, 1948, Gandhi was “very glad” to take note of Subhas’s birthday, even though he “generally did not remember such dates” and “the deceased patriot believed in violence”, while he was wedded to non-violence. Subhas, according to the Mahatma, “knew no provincialism nor communal differences” and “had in his brave army men and women drawn from all over India without distinction and evoked affection and loyalty, which very few have been able to evoke”. A lawyer friend had requested Gandhi for a good definition of Hinduism. He did not have any, but suggested that “Hinduism regarded all religions as worthy of all respect”. Subhas Bose, according to him, was “such a Hindu” and so, “in memory of that great patriot”, he called upon his countrymen to “cleanse their hearts of all communal bitterness”. January 26 was Independence Day for Gandhi’s generation. “Let us permit ourselves to hope”, he said on that occasion, “that though geographically and politically India is 97

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divided into two, at heart we shall ever be friends and brothers helping and respecting one another and be one for the outside world”. The next day he was taken inside the sanctum sanctorum of Chishti’s shrine in Mehrauli where he was anguished to see the damage to the exquisite marble screens. He had come to make a pilgrimage, not a speech, and simply urged Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs to “never again listen to the voice of Satan and abandon the way of brotherliness and peace”.46 On the morning of January 30, 1948, Gandhi did not neglect to do his daily Bengali writing exercise, even though he had other pressing work, such as drafting a new constitution for the Congress.47 The sound of the shots fired at the Mahatma that evening by a Hindu fanatic echoed across the length and breadth of this great land. “The last few months of Gandhiji’s life and the manner of his death”, B.R. Nanda wrote, “constituted an epic struggle between an all-embracing humanism and sectarian fanaticism”.48 A 17-year old girl was attending an inter-regional and inter-caste wedding of a Bengali bride and Malayali groom in Calcutta that evening when she heard the stunning news that Gandhiji had been shot dead. She tried to persuade herself that it must be a rumour. A pall of gloom slowly descended on the gathering and the guests quietly departed. Returning home, she heard the radio playing the song “Samukhe Shanti Parabar” as the great soul began his journey across the ocean of peace.49 Sarat Bose loved English literature and Shakespeare as much as he had hated British rule. On receiving the heart-rending news that the Mahatma was no more, he remarked wistfully “When comes such another” – he might have added, if ever another.50

B.R. Nanda: a tribute This essay is adapted from the Fourth B.R. Nanda Memorial Lecture which I delivered in New Delhi in December 2014. I was a high school student when I first met B.R. Nanda in the spacious Director’s office of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. I had accompanied my father, Sisir Kumar Bose, on a trip to Delhi. B.R. Nanda and Sisir Kumar Bose had a shared interest in preserving for posterity the best traditions of our freedom struggle. My father had founded the Netaji Research Bureau, Kolkata, in 1957. Through decades of dedicated effort he managed to collect a trove of documents, letters, manuscripts, relics, memoirs, photographs, audio recordings and film footage connected to Netaji and the Indian independence movement from all corners of Asia and Europe and beyond. B.R. 98

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Nanda was fully aware of my father’s work. He became the founding Director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in 1966 and served with distinction for the next 17 years. In addition to the documentary archives, some of the oral histories for which he himself was the interviewer are of lasting value to researchers. Since he had state support and my father had none, he was always prepared to lend a helping hand in the common task of archiving the history in which Nehru and Bose played such leading roles. B.R. Nanda was a perfect gentleman and a liberal historian in the best sense of that adjective. I met him a few more times at Teen Murti when I was a student in Presidency College and later at the University of Cambridge. By that time I had read several of his thoroughly researched and beautifully crafted works of history and biography, especially his studies of Gandhi. My lecture in his honour is inspired by his poignant memoir Witness to Partition, which was first published in 1948 under the title Punjab Uprooted. One cannot imagine a more humane account of a terrible human tragedy.

Notes 1 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to Sarat Chandra Bose, 6 June 1947, reproduced in Sisir Kumar Bose, Sarat Chandra Bose: Remembering My Father, Kolkata: Netaji Research Bureau and New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2014, p. 211. 2 D.G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Volume Eight 1947–1948, Bombay: Vithalbhai K. Jhaveri and D.G. Tendulkar, 1954, pp. 6, 9–12, 18–20. 3 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 4 D.G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Volume Seven 1945–1947, Bombay: Vithalbhai K. Jhaveri and D.G. Tendulkar, 1953, pp. 8–9; Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 128. 5 Tendulkar, Mahatma: Volume Seven, p. 16. 6 Ibid., pp. 24, 35, 50, 60, 78. 7 Ibid., pp. 98–99. 8 Ibid., pp. 107–109. 9 Young India, 20 October 1921, cited in Sugata Bose, ‘Nation, Reason and Religion’. 10 Tendulkar, Mahatma: Volume Seven, p. 110. 11 Ibid., pp. 134–136. 12 Jalal, Sole Spokesman, p. 194. 13 Tendulkar, Mahatma: Volume Seven, pp. 142, 144–145. 14 Ibid., pp. 244, 262, 269–270. 15 Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 223–229.

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16 Tendulkar, Mahatma: Volume Seven, p. 296. 17 Ibid., pp. 298, 301, 305–306, 334. 18 Ibid., pp. 337–338, 362. 19 Ibid., pp. 355, 366–367, 369, 370–371, 399–402. 20 Ibid., pp. 407, 411. 21 B.R. Nanda, Witness to Partition: A Memoir, New Delhi: Rupa & Co, 2003, pp. 33–34. 22 Ibid., p. 40. 23 Jalal, Sole Spokesman, pp. 237–239. 24 Tendulkar, Mahatma: Volume Seven, pp. 426–432, 437, 444. 25 Ibid., pp. 454, 460, 462, 464. See also, Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, Calcutta: Nishana, 1953, pp. 218–222. 26 Tendulkar, Mahatma: Volume Seven, pp. 465–467; Bose, My Days with Gandhi, pp. 224–235. 27 Bose, My Days with Gandhi, pp. 235–236; Sisir Kumar Bose, Sarat Chandra Bose, pp. 210, 212–213; Sisir Kumar Bose, Subhas and Sarat: An Intimate Memoir of the Bose Brothers, New Delhi: Aleph, 2016, pp. 236–238. 28 Jalal, Sole Spokesman, pp. 280–281. 29 Bose, Sarat Chandra Bose, p. 214; Bose, Subhas and Sarat, p. 238. 30 Tendulkar, Mahatma: Volume Seven, p. 482. 31 Rammanohar Lohia, Guilty Men of India’s Partition, Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1960, pp. 9–11. 32 Tendulkar, Mahatma: Volume Eight, pp. 77, 81, 84, 87–88, 95. 33 Ibid., pp. 96, 97–98. 34 Nanda, Witness to Partition, pp. 81, 165. 35 Tendulkar, Mahatma: Volume Eight, pp. 102, 109. 36 Young India, 8 September 1920, cited in Sugata Bose, “Nation, Reason and Religion’. 37 Tendulkar, Mahatma: Volume Eight, pp. 110–111, 118. 38 Ibid., pp. 121–122. 39 Ibid., pp. 135–138, 160–162. 40 Nanda, Witness to Partition, p. 70. 41 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 504–562. 42 Tendulkar, Mahatma: Volume Eight, p. 190. 43 Ibid., pp. 197, 222, 233, 238, 275. 44 Ibid., pp. 299, 303, 306–308, 314–316, 320. 45 Ibid., pp. 322–323, 329. 46 Ibid., pp. 335–336, 338, 344. 47 Ibid., p. 346. 48 Nanda, Witness to Partition, p. 162. 49 Krishna Bose, Lost Addresses: A Memoir of India, 1934–1955, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2014, first published as Harano Thikana, Kolkata: Ananda, 2013, p. 133. 50 Sisir Kumar Bose, Subhas and Sarat, p. 242.

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6 PRINCES, SUBJECTS AND GANDHI Alternatives to citizenship at the end of empire Joya Chatterji1 This essay harks back to the period when B.R. Nanda, an outstanding student at Lahore University and subsequently a government servant in the Railways, began to write history. Nanda’s first and least known work, published under a pseudonym, was on the partition of India. This was not a book about great men, Nanda’s subsequent preoccupation, but of ‘ordinary people’ uprooted. Like him, I write of their actions during the upheavals of 1947. Gandhi is part of my story, but he is not the main focus, for the compelling reason that I am not a scholar of Gandhi. Yet Gandhi’s words and actions at this crucial juncture reveal unexplored dimensions of the Mahatma’s moral politics that call, I suggest, for deeper and more sustained investigation. The mass migrations after partition immediately conjure up images of refugee caravans crossing the Radcliffe Line between India and Pakistan. We assume that the frightened people who fled their homes faced a clear and binary choice between two republics – India and Pakistan – and between two alternative ‘modern’, postcolonial sovereignties. This is the official narrative of the new nations, and no historian (including me) who has studied refugees has challenged it. However, the story was far more complex and far more intriguing than that narrative. In 1947, thousands of people made other choices, choices that did not involve flight to ‘the other dominion’, choices that revealed a deep lack of trust in both the new republics. They escaped to princely states, seeking the protection of rajas, raosahebs, jamsahebs, nizams and nawabs. Just when the Constituent Assemblies of India and Pakistan were debating the terms of national citizenship, their would-be citizens fled in search of subjecthood.

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This essay attempts to piece together this little-known history, from fragmentary and scattered sources. It first discusses the patterns of migration, to give a sense of their scope and scale. Next, it teases out some of the hopes and expectations that animated the migrants, and princes’ responses to them. Finally, it touches briefly upon Gandhi’s engagement with these migrants and the princes whose shelter they sought. The very fact that many people of the subcontinent sought alternatives to republican citizenship, I argue, demands our attention. As things turned out, these aspirations for post-imperial subjecthood failed. Nonetheless, they are deeply significant in ways I hope to elucidate in my concluding remarks.

I In 1947, undivided India contained 562 princely states which varied enormously in size. The largest, Hyderabad, was about half the size of France and boasted 17 million subjects in the mid-20th century;2 the smallest was less than one square mile, with a population of barely 200.3 Together these principalities covered roughly a third of India’s territory, and accounted for one in four of its people. In broad terms, migrations to ‘subjecthood’, as they might be described, were of four ‘types’. The first was the flight from territories of former British India (now places in either India or Pakistan), to princely states. Prominent peninsular states acted as powerful magnets to panic-stricken Muslims from across India. Hyderabad and Bhopal were significant examples, but they were not alone. In the run up to, and after, partition, Hyderabad attracted three quarters of a million Muslim migrants.4 Immediately after partition, refugees also started pouring into Bhopal, an Afghan successor state established in the early 18th century.5 Nawab Hamidullah of Bhopal, recently Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes,6 had a ‘position and prestige’, in V. P. Menon’s jaundiced view, ‘out of all proportion to the size and revenue of his State’.7 Bhopal was one of the last princely states to accede to India – the other laggards being Travancore, Hyderabad, Dholpur and Indore (not all of whom had Muslim rulers).8 Bhopal city was about 500 miles due south of Delhi; and from late August 1947, thousands of Indian Muslims from the Central Provinces, the United Provinces, Gwalior and East Punjab made a beeline for it. Notably, these people chose to head south to Bhopal, rather than migrate west across the border into West Pakistan, which for many of these migrants was just as close as Bhopal, if not

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Figure 6.1  Map of undivided India in 1947 showing princely states Source: Prepared by Tina Bone Note: This is a historical map and is included here for representative purposes. The international boundaries, coastlines, denominations, and other information shown do not necessarily imply any judgement concerning the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such information. For current boundaries, readers may refer to the Survey of India maps. Map not to scale.

closer. By mid-October, 160,000 refugees had gathered in Bhopal9 (see Table 6.1), and more would continue to flow in. The sources make it clear that if Bhopal could not absorb them, these refugees were ready to march further south to Hyderabad, but they had no intention of going back to their homes, now in a new republican entity called India. As C.C. Desai of the States Department

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Table 6.1  Refugees registered in Bhopal State up to 16 October 1947 Location

Origin

Numbers

In Bairagarh camp

From Central Provinces From United Provinces From other provinces From Gwalior From other States Total in Bairagarh Unsorted -ditto-

32,225 6,896 750 23,279 9,000 72,150 12,000 4,000

In Bhopal city Unregistered arrivals since 16 October Elsewhere in Bhopal, in Begumganj, Sehore, Budni and smaller thanas and tehsils TOTAL IN BHOPAL STATE

-ditto-

4,000 92,150

Source: NAI/MoS/F.16-G(R)/47 Secret.

admitted, about 100,000 ‘Muslim refugees were clustered at Bhopal station’ in appalling conditions, because the Government of India had advised Bhopal’s nawab not to let them in; significantly the ‘refugees refuse[d] to get into [trains]’ leaving Bhopal for destinations in India.10 The Nizam of Hyderabad’s government was sympathetic to the plight of these refugees, and put on special trains within the state’s borders for them,11 but this only made the Indian government more suspicious of Hyderabad’s intentions, and it did all it could to prevent the movement of Muslim refugees from India, as well as from other states such as Bhopal, into the Nizam’s territories.12 But its attempts to stem these flows were ineffectual. Between August 1947 and September 1948, that is, between partition and the ‘police action’ that ended Hyderabad’s brief show of independence, Indian Muslims continued to migrate to Hyderabad.13 Refugees were attracted not only to ‘important’ states with vocal leaders. Perplexingly, they rushed to the smallest of principalities and a multitude of ‘little kingdoms’.14 As the Nawab of Pataudi wrote in September 1947, ‘refugees and wounded are pouring in as Pataudi town is the only place they feel safe’.15 Malerkotla, a small state in the Punjab ruled by the Afghan Sherwani dynasty, which famously remained peaceful during partition,16 was the destination for 40,000– 60,000 refugees fleeing the massacres in surrounding East Punjab.17 Mahmudabad, a minor Shia state near Lucknow, also drew hundreds of thousands of refugees, both Shia and Sunni, from the surrounding districts of the United Provinces.18 104

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Nor was it the case that Muslim refugees only went to states with Muslim rulers (although this was the dominant pattern). By 10 October 1947, the tiny state of Dholpur, whose ‘conservative’ Hindu Maharaja had long been the bane of the States Ministry, had already received about 20,000 Muslims. The Maharaja then agreed to absorb even more Muslim evacuees from amongst the unfortunates gathered at Bhopal station, an action that led one intelligence officer to remark on his strange ‘soft corner for these fellows’.19 The Maharaja, for his part, defended his actions in the name of ‘our precious national RAJNITI [politics] from our great cultures and outlook’, and ‘King Dharma’.20 To summarise, then, refugees fled both India and Pakistan in huge numbers for princely destinations. Significantly, many Muslim migrants fled to these princely states, despite the fact that Pakistan was often as close, if not closer, at hand. This strongly suggests they deliberately chose these destinations, shunning the new republics. The second stream was of refugees who abandoned their homes in one princely state to seek shelter in another. In this quest, they often passed through dominion territory, whether in India or Pakistan, but carried on by foot, cart or train until they reached the princely state of their choice. One example was the flight of Muslims from Ajmer, Bharatpur and Alwar, (where communal violence, particularly against people of the Meo community, achieved horrific proportions)21 to Tonk,22 a small state (founded in 1818 by Amir Khan, a prominent Pindari leader), due south of Jaipur. By mid-November 1947, ‘some 20,000’ Muslims had arrived in Tonk,23 chiefly from Alwar and Bharatpur. Another was the ‘unaccountable exodus of Muslims, in large numbers, particularly of weavers and other artisans’, from the Holkar state of Indore to Hyderabad.24 A third, as we saw in the case of Bhopal, was the flight of some 25,000 refugees from Gwalior, the Maratha state south of Agra and the Chambal river,25 to Bhopal state.26 All these refugees were Muslims who had previously lived peaceably as subjects of a Hindu ruler, but who now sought the protection of a Muslim nawab or nizam (albeit in states which had Hindu majorities). Once again, they chose to go to these states, rather than to Pakistan, although their homes were relatively close to Pakistan’s borders. A third form of ‘migration to subjecthood’ involved crossing the Radcliffe Line between India and Pakistan. But here some refugees, instead of seeking the protection of the other dominion, specifically sought to reach neighbouring principalities instead. One major stream of this kind was of mainly Sindhi Hindu refugees from the Khanate of Kalat in Balochistan to the Rajputana states in India. Another was the 105

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emigration of refugees into Bahawalpur, a largely barren desert state on the left bank of the Indus in Pakistan,27 mainly from East Punjab and Rajputana. We know a fair amount about this particular example because Penderel Moon, who took up an appointment in Bahawalpur just months before partition, left a detailed record in his celebrated memoir, Divide and Quit. The refugees were mainly from Ferozepur district in Indian (East) Punjab,28 and also from Bikaner.29 As Moon recorded, his ‘heart sank at the vast numbers’ of refugees, ‘a column that stretched all the way from MacLeodganj Road to Bahawalnagar’. He recalls: I was at a loss to understand why they had entered Bahawalpur instead of crossing the Sutlej into the (West) Punjab. They all said that Indian troops had scared them away from the road leading to the bridge over the river at Suleimanke and that they had therefore been compelled to turn aside into Bahawalpur.30 But Moon’s account is inconsistent. While suggesting that ‘some of them with connections in the West Punjab still wanted to get there’,31 Moon admits that ‘we could pick and choose among the refugees who actually entered our borders, passing onto the Punjab [only] those whom we did not like or were too numerous for us to absorb. But we could not control or even influence the movement of refugees from India and so determine which of them would enter Bahawalpur territory’. He also confesses to ‘pushing’ refugees ‘of very poor stuff’, those who were likely to be ‘a drag on the economy’, into West Punjab.32 Clearly, Bahawalpur was an attractive destination for refugees, and most were reluctant to leave it. Another flow of this kind, albeit moving in the opposite direction (chiefly from Hyderabad Sind), headed to Jodhpur state, which by the end of September 1947 had received upwards of 45,000 refugees.33All the bordering princely states clearly faced a refugee crisis: in late September, the Ministry of States wrote to the Prime Ministers not only of Jodhpur, but also Bikaner, Patiala, Jind, Malerkotla, Kapurthala, Faridkot and Nabha demanding information on refugee numbers in their states: ‘[S]uch information [is] essential for planning movement programmes’.34 Just as the officials of the Ministry in late 1947, so today’s investigators cannot establish the numbers who had flowed into each state along the border, but the panicky communications suggest that they were not insignificant.

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The fourth stream were refugees who first sought help from a dominion government, whether India or Pakistan – and when that failed them, marched on to a princely state. One such example was the migration of Muslims from Badwani state in Central India to Dhulia in the Bombay Presidency. There ‘the Congress Leaders’ apparently ‘encouraged’ them to return home, which they obediently did. But when they faced further attacks ‘at home’, they decided to seek refuge in Hyderabad. It is all but impossible to produce a reliable estimate of a total number for the people who joined one or other of these four streams. Few states kept records as precise as those of Bhopal, or if they did and they survive, these remain scattered across 500 mainly un-archived private collections. These movements took place before the census of 1951, by which time most states had disappeared, having been integrated into larger provinces. But two sources hint at their consistency and scale. In his study of Sindhi culture, Thakur notes that while the largest numbers of the Sindhi refugees went to Bombay, the substantial remainder who did not concentrated in Jaipur, Ajmer, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Kotah, Bhilwarah, Tonk, Alwar and Bharatpur, and the ‘old State[s] of Madhya Pradesh’.35 (See Table 6.2) By October 1948, the trend was even clearer: more refugees were heading for princely territories. (See Table 6.3) Even more revealing is the Government of India’s White Paper on States, published in 1950. This suggests that these trends had been so widespread, and so marked, that the distribution of India’s minorities changed dramatically between 1947 and 1950 with a marked Table 6.2  Distribution of Sindhi refugees, 1948 Ajmer Merwara at Deoli Bombay Baroda Bikaner State Jaipur State Jodhpur State Madhya Bharat Former Rajasthan Saurashtra Union Vindhya Pradesh Madhya Pradesh TOTAL Source: U.T. Thakur, Sindhi Culture, p. 31.

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10,200 2,16,500 10,700 8,900 33,200 11,800 3,400 15,800 45,500 15,400 81,400 4,52,800

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Table 6.3  Distribution of Sindhi refugees, October 1948 Ajmer Merwara Bombay Baroda State C.P. and Berar Jaipur State Jodhpur State Madhya Bharat Union Rajasthan Union Matsya Union Saurashtra Union Vindhya Pradesh

92,799 2,64,023 21,138 91,507 51,795 45,060 59,333 32,544 53,034 35,891 12,945

Source: U.T. Thakur, Sindhi Culture, p. 103.

clustering of minorities in princely territories. By 1950, in under three years since partition, the proportion of India’s Muslim population concentrated in princely territories had risen from 16% to 26%; of Christians from 46% to 50% and of Sikhs from 27% to 36%.36 These patterns of clustering demand an explanation. The migrations make one fact abundantly clear. At the end of empire, the people of the subcontinent were aware of the multiple sovereignties around them which coexisted in uneasy juxtaposition. When they migrated, they believed they had real options between meaningful polities of very different kinds. For many, startling though it may seem to us today, neither ‘India’ nor ‘Pakistan’ was their first choice of destination.

II Why was this? I now suggest some tentative answers to this question. A part of the answer must surely be the fact that these states – large and small – appeared to offer a measure of constancy in a terrifying world of change. In no small measure, this was a consequence of British policies of indirect rule: the British had propped up subsidiary allies after 1818, and after the Rebellion of 1857, ensured that no state, however small, was allowed to fail. Hence many ruling dynasties which might otherwise have collapsed or been absorbed into other polities, survived, and their very longevity seems to have fostered the popular belief in 1947 that even the tiniest of little kingdoms would somehow endure, even as large parts of British India dissolved in chaos. However ‘hollow’ were the crowns worn in miniature principalities such as the tiny Kathiawad states, or indeed Puddukottai in 108

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the south, the migrants seemed to think the heads which wore them would not tumble. Indeed, these huge movements of people demand that we re-examine the metaphor of the ‘hollow crown’.37 In 1947, in a moment of profound danger and crisis, would-be subjects cherished significant expectations of these polities and their rulers, expressed in petitions like this one from Abdul Wahid Khan, the former postmaster of Okara to ‘Her Highness, Rani Sahiba, Kalsia state’: Owing to this loss of lives and property, we the remaining four members . . . of my family are quite destitute and helpless, and in the name of justice we demand from your kind highness that full justice may please be meted out by taking the culprits to task and granting us compensation of the full loss. Hoping full justice and early reply.38 Above all, the migrants expected protection and justice. (Note that the postmaster used the word ‘justice’ three times in the two sentence cited above). To explain this dynamic, I draw on Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s and Muzaffar Alam’s account of the successor states of the 18th century. Subrahmanyam and Alam argue that these polities used a regional idiom consistently and successfully. They show that these polities ‘dug deep into the mythic resources of regions’. But they also argue that ‘the regional identities that were formed . . . were . . . the product of a complex interaction between region and empire’.39 They referred, of course, to the Mughal empire. But I suggest that these regional, often quasi-ethnic identities (and their mythic resources and idioms), continued to evolve in the 19th and 20th centuries, in no less complex interactions with the British empire. I also borrow Timothy Mitchell’s concept of the ‘state effect’.40 Mitchell argues that the state exists not only in a material sense, as a set of institutions, but also as an idea. Put simply, people ‘imagine’ the state in ways that are often rather more coherent than the state as it is materially practised. This ‘coherence’ in the popular imagination of what the state was – ‘the state effect’ – I suggest, was at play in princely states too, even if it was the product of different processes. Thomas Blom Hansen has developed Mitchell’s concept further by distinguishing between the ‘sublime’ and ‘profane’ dimensions of the ‘state effect’, showing how, when ‘a public order upset by riots’ in Bombay exposed the state’s everyday corruption and its ‘profane’ qualities, the Srikrishna Commission, which drew upon ‘the rhetoric 109

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of the state as a moral entity’,41 restored some sense of its existence as a sublime, ethical whole. For reasons that have partly to do with the sublime ‘state effect’ nurtured quite deliberately in these kingdoms, I suggest, would-be subjects believed that nawabs, rajas and ranis could and would protect them more effectively than the Indian army, in whom as Pataudi wrote, they had lost ‘all confidence’,42 despite the fact that most princely states had no armies whatsoever.43 Migrants to the states thus had powerful expectations of justice – ad’l – a central tenet of kingship, which, as Richard Eaton has argued, had taken powerful roots throughout the subcontinent by the 18th century.44 They voiced these expectations forcefully in innumerable petitions which asked for relief, compensation and even full-scale rehabilitation. Were these hopes fuelled by their awareness of contemporaneous practices of ‘modern’ kingship? It seems very likely. Recent scholarship suggests that, despite British attempts to bend the principalities to their purposes, and to rule them firmly (if indirectly), rajas and nawabs found ways of resisting British intrusion in many areas of courtly life, religious affairs and secular patronage, adapting or ‘inventing’ new institutions, traditions and ‘duties of kingship’ – rajadharma – by which they entrenched a sort of ‘monarchical modernity’ or established new forms of ‘minor sovereignty’45 over their subjects. Indeed, many of them sought to project their influence beyond the boundaries of their kingdoms. As the Indian government admitted in its White Paper of 1950, ‘In almost all the States, owing to the smallness of the size and the compact nature of the territory, the existence of autocratic government had made for easy co-ordination and quick solution of such problems as attracted the Ruler’s attention and interest’.46 This swift dispensation of justice by the Durbar compared favourably with the lumbering, opaque and expensive courts of British India where justice was, if not denied, endlessly delayed. While most states did not have laws recorded in codes accessible to the people (often simply borrowing the laws of British India mutatis mutandis and applying them where needed), they administered justice decisively and above all swiftly. If in most cases, ‘the decree of the Ruler was law, in a number of cases the Ruler not only constituted the source of justice but also personally administered it in actual practice’.47 The postmaster of Okara’s appeal to the Ranisaheba for justice is intelligible when viewed through this lens. Another crucial development was the hugely expanded worship of tutelary deities in princely states over more than a century, and the patronage of religious festivals, notably Dasara and Muharram, in 110

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the performance of which the kings and courts played a central part, and which, as Pamela Price has noted, enabled these kingdoms to be perceived as a ‘divinely protected area[s]’.48 The ‘proper’, and increasingly public, performance of these festivals by the nawab, raosaheb or ranisaheba was intended to reassure subjects that the kingdom would be protected by the divine grace of god or the regional tutelary deity. In Mysore, for instance, Dasara – during which the tutelary deity Chamundeshwari slays the demon Mahisasura – grew increasingly elaborate as the 19th century drew to a close. As the Resident observed in 1889, ‘The Maharaja sits as a God to be worshipped by the people . . . he assumes a scared character, and if not God himself, is held to represent for a time a kingly divinity . . . In this capacity he . . . presents himself to the homage, if not the adoration, of the people’.49 The numbers who came to Mysore city to view this spectacle and take part in the Dasara festival rose sharply in the early 20th century. By 1941, the festival is said to have drawn 150,000 visitors to a town whose regular population had been recorded, in 1931 as only 107,000 people.50 In addition, princes patronised artists and artisans, and maintained mosques, madrassas and endowed temples, and not merely within their own kingdoms. ‘Princely’ presentation supported the bathing ghats at Benaras, the Golden Temple at Amritsar and the holy places in Mecca and Medina.51 Other beneficiaries of what Pamela Price has

Figure 6.2  The Dasara festival Source: Archives of Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. Used with permission.

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called ‘dharmic largesse’52 included the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, Aligarh College, Benares Hindu University, the Deccan Educational Society and Khalsa College, just to name a few well-known ‘national’ institutions. By the mid-1920s, several princes had become adept at projecting their influence and reputation well beyond the boundaries of their states.53 The notion that kings were personally courageous was another message routinely disseminated by princes while making their presence felt within their states – usually done by ‘touring’ in conjunction with hunting excursions or shikar – which offered opportunities to display royal skills,54 and conspicuous devotion to their subjects. In one of several such stories that litter accounts of shikar, Mordaunt Pemberton describes going, in January 1933, on a hunt with ‘H.H’. of Jhalawar, a tiny principality not far from Indore, Soon after breakfast a shikar officer arrived from the jungle, where he had been tracking the pugmarks of the big panther, with a badly bitten arm. The animal had attacked him from behind . . . We went to the [nearest] dispensary where H.H. personally began to tend to him.55 Shikar is usually seen through the prism of craven collaboration with ‘hunting-shooting’ white residents, but, as Julie Hughes shows, these were also occasions which allowed monarchs to display ethical attitudes to the land and the environment, and indeed towards their subjects.56 Here again, if we read between the lines, we can see how princes adapted older traditions, norms and symbolism of shikar to the new setting of empire and evolving conceptions of monarchical modernity. The role of the ‘colonial-modern’ king as benevolent patron of the poor, the needy and the distressed is another pertinent aspect of this reconstitution of modern kingship. By the time of his death in 1868, Krishnaraja Wodeyar III of Mysore had racked up huge debts. When these were investigated, it turned out that the ‘bad habit’, which had put him into the clutches of the money-lenders, was distributing rice to the poor, his largest single creditor being a grain supplier in Mysore city, one Naga Shetty.57 Kingly ‘beneficence’, as Dirks has shown, had been central to the conceptions of sovereignty of the Vijaynagara kings, and their duties were to protect dharma, preside over a prosperous realm, ‘where the people, “unafflicted by calamities, were continually enjoying festivals” ’.58 Modern monarchs, it seems, adapted these notions of beneficence to late-colonial circumstances. Relief in times of ecological crisis and famine was a central arena of princely 112

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Figure 6.3  Princes setting off for shikar Source: Archives of Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. Used with permission.

activity, and as famine grew more frequent and more deadly in the 19th and 20th centuries, princes engaged more and more prominently in famine relief in ways that differed markedly from those of their British neighbours and overlords. Among the largest monuments to the princes’ engagement with famine relief is, of course, the Awadh Nawab’s Great Imambara complex in Lucknow, completed as early as 1791, believed to have cost a million rupees.59 Another is (the arguably less beautiful Beaux-Art or ‘Indo-Deco’ style) Umaid Bhavan palace in Jodhpur, built between 1929 and 1944 to provide work to the famished poor. Indore’s royal family created the Gangajali Fund ‘for use in grave emergency such as famine’.60 Hyderabad’s famine relief works are particularly well known, signalling as they did the distinctive political ethics of a patrimonial state in stark contrast to its British colonial counterpart. As Bhangya Bhukya61 and Eric Beverley tell us, an important preoccupation of the Nizam’s government was giving relief to the Indian victims of the late 19th century’s ‘Victorian holocausts’. In British India, famine relief was given on the cheap in return for hard labour. Asaf Jah Hyderabad instead wrote off land revenue demands and other taxes and debts. Recognising that by definition, victims weakened by famine were unable to work on heavy jobs such as road building, the Nizam’s government offered paid work for lighter tasks 113

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such as the repair of tanks and irrigation channels. As well as the free provision of victuals to those unable to work, the state of Hyderabad provided food to those who were unable to migrate to relief sites, and even offered land for grazing and cultivation to new migrants.62 Indeed, so extensive and successful were the Asaf Jah’s state’s famine relief policies that people began to migrate to Hyderabad in the late 19th century to take advantage of them.63 And crucially, the Nizam’s relief policy – about which his government was never slow to boast – was that it was given on exactly the same terms to immigrants from British India as to his own subjects. Hyderabad’s officials took great pains, moreover, to ensure that these charitable deeds received the widest publicity within the state as well as beyond. In volumes of photographs published between 1885 and 1902, the Nizam commissioned the famous photographer Lala Deen Dayal to document his ‘Good Works’. This context helps explain why refugees might have expected both protection and succour in princely states in 1947. There is a further point to consider. As Berenice Guyot Rechard has recently shown, ‘borderlanders’ living in the vicinity of rival sovereignties after decolonisation ‘were comparing what each one brought them, in both positive and negative terms’.64 Her work speaks of the anxiety-fuelled encounter between independent India and the People’s Republic of China along their eastern Himalayan border, and the migration of people between these two competing states, but her analysis has a relevance to the situation in the entire subcontinent in 1947, where huge internal border zones connected princely states and republican dominions, and their subjects. When, as Ishan Mukherjee recently noted, both the sacred and profane dimensions of ‘state effect’ in ‘India’ collapsed in 1947 in the face of riots, mass migration, looting and disorder,65 it is not impossible to understand why so many inhabitants of these internal borderlands chose the protection of princely states that seemed – at that moment – both more stable, more ‘sublime’ and more likely to offer protection and justice than two dominions which had yet to prove their capacity to govern. Many kings and queens seized on the opportunity and responded energetically to these expectations, albeit in the idioms of ‘modern’ monarchical patronage. Hyderabad sheltered and fed huge numbers of those who migrated to the state, spending Rs 1 crore 25 lakhs on ‘maintaining camps, providing houses, and settling them on lands’.66 A full year after partition, at the time of India’s ‘police action’, Hyderabad’s relief camps were still looking after refugees, long after India had shut down most of its own camps. Hamidullah of Bhopal also refused to turn the refugees away,67 despite intense pressure from 114

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the Government of India so to do, and long after the State’s ability to absorb and feed these extra mouths had been overwhelmed by the size of the refugee influx. The Nawab, interestingly, also refused to put his tiny military force at India’s disposal ‘to compel these refugees to get into the trains’ headed back to India. He gave Patel his reasons, in words that are deeply revealing: [it is] extremely difficult [for a Ruler] to exturn [sic] people who have entered its territories in great distress and in a condition of physical exhaustion, and who are seeking refuge and protection in parts of the country where they feel they might receive sympathy and kindness. Bhopal also stressed how badly his own subjects would react if he acted otherwise: ‘Any force used against such persons is likely to excite the local populations who might with justification blame their Government for ruthless and non-humanitarian policies’.68 Concerns about how refugee flows – both inwards and outwards – would affect their kingdoms also preoccupied the rulers of princely states. The Nawab of Bahawalpur was desperately upset that his ‘loyal Hindu subjects’ had been ‘encouraged’ (by Penderel Moon) to emigrate to India while he was away in Europe on his annual tour, and looked askance at many of the Muslim refugees who had arrived in their stead.69 Significantly, the Nawab expressed the wish that only refugees from Indian princely states should be received and settled in Bahawalpur, since these people, ‘being accustomed to personal rule, would more readily accommodate themselves to (local) conditions and develop a loyalty to the Ruler’.70 He was not alone in attempting to bolster, and indeed refashion, a princely order deemed suitable for postcolonial times by recruiting, after the British departure, loyal new subjects of the ‘right type’. Dholpur, (a Hindu Maharaja) for his part sought to strengthen his position by absorbing those Muslim refugees who could not be accommodated in Bhopal, thereby bolstering his reputation as a dharmic ruler who cared for all his subjects, Hindu and Muslim alike, and tended the needy.71 Hyderabad also sought to attract Muslim artisans, notably weavers. The Rajputana, Punjab and Western Indian states were particularly keen to invite Hindu refugee merchants from Sindh to make their states their chosen destination. Gwalior offered to accept 400–500 refugee families, but only on the condition that they were ‘well-to-do’.72 And perhaps most bold of all these princely manoeuvres was that of Bharatpur, who – having driven out Meo Muslims in large numbers – began to invite members of the Jat 115

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community from Rohtak and surrounding areas to settle in Bharatpur, offering them key positions in the state. ‘The Bharatpur government’, a States department official alleged, was ‘dreaming of a Jatistan’.73

III By now the reader might well ask: what does this have to do with Gandhi, a tragic, Lear-like figure in the last days of his life? A certain amount, as it turns out. The sources on this period reveal fascinating hints that for Gandhi, the princely states had a key role to play after independence, both in the protection of minorities and the rehabilitation of refugees. Two particularly poignant stories, which relate to the last weeks of the Mahatma’s life, will make the point. The first has to do with Hindus who remained in Bahawalpur state after partition, but where in late November and December, fierce attacks on Hindu villages drove thousands out of the state into India. By December 1947, a call for the mass evacuation of all Hindus from Bahawalpur to India was becoming louder, and Penderel Moon argued that this would be for the best, since the state’s tiny (and, according to Moon, unruly) army and police force could not guarantee their safety. But Gandhi intervened, urging Bahawalpur’s Hindus to stay put. He had spoken with the Nawab, Gandhi told them, and he had received ‘the word of the Ruler that . . . the remaining Hindus could live in peace and safety, and [that] no one would interfere with their religion’.74 When pressure for evacuation continued to mount, Gandhi agreed to send a personal emissary to Bahawalpur. So in the third week of January 1948, Sushila Nayyar arrived in the state bearing a message from the Mahatma to the state’s Hindus, urging them to stay on and to rely on the Nawab’s reassurances. After touring the state herself, Nayyar concluded that Gandhi’s position was delusional: too much blood had been spilled, too many Hindus had left, and too Hindu many homes had already been occupied by incoming refugees, or locals, for the Mahatma’s message to have any chance of succeeding. By the time she returned to Delhi a week later, however, the Mahatma was dead. Until his last, then, Gandhi continued to have faith not only the capacity but the will of a Muslim ruler of a princely state in Pakistan to protect his Hindu subjects. The second vignette speaks volumes about Gandhi’s concern, by late September 1947, about the rehabilitation of Sindhis. To begin with, his particular preoccupation was the condition of ‘Harijans’ (or Dalits) who had remained behind in Sindh in Pakistan, and whom the government of Sindh was reluctant to give permission to leave. 116

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Gandhi believed that they were in great distress, and wrote letters urging the owners of Sindhi shipping firms to evacuate them to ports in Kathiawad.75 This broadened into a wider engagement, on Gandhi’s part, with the question of where Sindhi refugees should be settled. The Mahatma concluded that his home region of princely Kathiawad would be the best place of refuge for them. To achieve this, he set about persuading the Maharao of Kutch to donate land for the creation of a large Sindhi Hindu settlement. Within no time, he succeeded. The Maharao agreed to donate 15,000 acres of land abutting the (then small) port at Kandla. The grant was gazetted on 29 January 1948. On the morning of 30 January, just hours before he was assassinated, Gandhi received a telegram from the Dewan of Kutch informing him

Figure 6.4  Gandhidham Samadhi Source: Photograph by Uttara Shahani. Used with permission.

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Figure 6.5  Detail of Gandhidham Samadhi77 Source: Photograph by Uttara Shahani. Used with permission.

of the Maharao’s grant.76 The township established on the site is named Gandhidham in his memory. Here again we see evidence of Gandhi’s belief that princes, whether as patrons of refugees or as protectors of minorities, had a part to play in the postcolonial future of South Asia. In this matter, as in other matters of the moment, Gandhi was sharply at odds with his coadjutors in the Congress leadership, not least Nehru, whose view of the states was deeply unsympathetic, and who was clear that the rehabilitation of refugees was the job not of the princes, but of the government of India’s new republic. Let me underline that these interventions by the Mahatma came after Gandhi’s much 118

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better-known support of satyagrahas against many aspects of princely rule in the late 1930s and 1940s. I am not suggesting, remotely, some false revision by which Gandhi is metamorphised into an uncritical admirer of India’s princes. My hypothesis – and it is no more than that – is that the Mahatma had a different, and more nuanced, understanding of with what Janaki Nair describes as ‘monarchical modernity’,78 and with princely experiments with a different ‘truth’. Gandhi himself was, of course, a princely subject born and bred. His knowledge of parts of princely India, or ‘Indian India’ as it was often described in the late 19th century, was foundational and intimate. He had been raised in Kathiawad – a region dotted with small states, in one of which his father was the Dewan (or chief minister) of the ruler. He spent most of his later life in western India, a vast internal borderland region in which princely states were more numerous and prominent than in any other part of India. These polities were thus in no sense exotic or unfamiliar to him. At the start of his political career in South Africa, Gandhi’s work (as that of so many nationalists and social reformers) had been funded by leading Indian princes: Bikaner, Mysore and Hyderabad.79 In his first recorded thoughts on princes, he writes of being moved by their plight, dressed up like khansamas (or waiters) at Lord Curzon’s durbar.80 Seeing them attired ‘like women’, in silk achkans, pearl necklaces and bracelets, revealed to him the depth of their ‘slavery’ and emasculation.81 Arguably, then, for Gandhi, the rajas and nawabs were Indians. He was influenced by their own self-image as being oppressed – albeit in very particular ways – by British power. This was a viewpoint that many began to articulate more openly after Lord Reading’s viceroyalty, and it lay behind the princes’ move to join the proposed Indian federation, which eventually failed, in 1935. In 1925, addressing the Kathiawad Political Conference, Gandhi put forward his first serious and detailed thesis on kingship. In it, he argued that trusteeship was the ethical basis of kingship: If the institution of kingship has a moral basis, Princes are not independent proprietors but only trustees of their subjects for revenue received from them. It can therefore be spent for them only as trust money . . . [as in] the English Constitution. This resembled, of course, Gandhi’s much better-known and much criticised thesis on the responsibilities of the ideal capitalist, and the correct relationship between captains of industry and their workers. As with the mill-owning capitalists, he urged restraint upon the princes, 119

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asking them to ‘observe our ancient tradition that revenue is intended only for popular welfare’, and to abolish the practice (ancient or otherwise), of extracting cesses from their subjects. ‘My ideal of Indian states is Ram Rajya’, the Mahatma declared – a condition he believed the princes could achieve that should be their goal.82 In an interesting twist, Gandhi also referred to ‘ideal caliphs’ such as Abubakar and Hazrat Umar – who would ‘know public opinion by intuition’.83 Intriguingly, as late as 1936, Gandhi described Mysore under Wodeyar rule as ‘Ramrajya’.84 I offer these preliminary thoughts on Gandhi, princes and subjecthood to provoke discussion. Scholarship on a few individual states has, in the 21st century, begun to recognise how some princes had engaged, in distinctive ways, with modernity, and elaborated new practices and discourses of legitimacy within the framework of indirect rule. Perhaps the time has also come to reframe our understanding of Gandhi to take on board the influence of ‘monarchical modernity’ on his ethical politics. Perhaps ‘Ramrajya’ was more than just a metaphor for Gandhi. Certainly, until his last breath, he believed the wellrun princely state to be viable, legitimate and to have a postcolonial future. For him, the flight of refugees to these kingdoms after partition made perfect sense. For his colleagues in the Congress, by contrast, these movements were completely unintelligible. The governments of both India and Pakistan regarded these migrations as profoundly dangerous. In its Whiggish course, history was not on Gandhi’s side; nor was it on the side of refugees in search of subjecthood.

Conclusion These aspirations – whether princely, popular or Gandhian – failed. But ‘success’ is not, and should not be, the only subject of history (if that were our yardstick, there would be little material outside the chronicles of the victors for historians to study). These events represent a brief moment when alternative outcomes were imagined, and were deemed possible; and they challenge – and make briefly strange – the teleological histories of the nation with which we are so familiar. They call to mind Frederick Cooper’s account of the end of empire in Africa,85 a story rich and strange, with many possible endings, not all of them ‘the nation state’. Just as the inhabitants of West Africa, so also the people of the subcontinent dreamt different dreams in 1947. For a great many more than we have previously realised, the survival and flourishing of princely sovereignty seemed a distinct, and meaningful, possibility. 120

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In the period between 1947 and 1956, the princely states emerged as potentially powerful regional polities with distinct and embedded alternative claims to legitimacy. Some challenged and even threatened the very premises of the nation state, and this was not restricted to Hyderabad. ‘Language movements’ admittedly also began to articulate regional identities in other ways. But I suggest that the ideas of the linguistic region and of ethical kingship were not separate but were powerfully conjoined by late colonial monarchical practice and popular perception. This is why they came to be seen as such an immediate threat to India’s survival as a nation state. After partition, the mass migration of refugees to these princely states, and their emergence as a potential focus of alternative notions of sovereignty, legitimacy and belonging, helps to explain why national governments in India were uncompromisingly insistent on dismantling them so rapidly and so ruthlessly between 1948 and 1950. This account makes it easier to understand why the instruments of accession the princes signed (which in any event made few concessions to them) were rapidly torn up by the Government of India, why the states were swiftly bundled into larger provinces and why the Indian constitution of 1950 is shot through with tense republicanism, in no mood to make concessions to India’s monarchical past. Another conundrum – the sudden ubiquity of language movements and regionalisms arising apparently out of nowhere in 1947 – also begins to make sense when viewed from this perspective, and it offers us another entry point into the story of States Reorganisation in 1956. There are many possible ways, then, in which the actions of these frightened refugees who fled to states ruled by princes and ranis who received them with regal beneficence might help us to rethink the early history of the new nation. The Mahatma’s last-minute interventions in these affairs shed new and unfamiliar light on Gandhi’s vision of its future.

Notes 1 I thank the trustees of the B.R. Nanda Trust for the privilege of being able to acknowledge the debt of gratitude that every historian of modern India owes to B.R. Nanda, and to pay tribute to his role as founder-director of one of India’s great institutions, the NMML. Founded in 1964, just over half a century ago, today Teen Murti is a mecca for every historian of modern India the world over. It holds the world’s most impressive archive – at the time of writing almost one million pages of manuscripts – on modern India, an unrivalled newspaper collection and photographic records. Its library, now being digitised, will soon contain and preserve a

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priceless heritage of more than nine million documents. As its first director, Nanda laid the foundations on which the Museum and Library were built. The values that prompted Nanda to take up his pen after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 are under siege once again today. So also, it seems, is the independence of Teen Murti, and indeed of the historical profession itself. Perhaps there has never been a more appropriate moment to laud B.R. Nanda’s contribution and legacy, and to recall the ideals of tolerance that were close to his heart. 2 Government of India, White Paper on Hyderabad, Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1948, p. 2. 3 Barbara Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States: The New Cambridge History of India III.6, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 3. 4 ‘Note on the Refugee Problem of Hyderabad’, NAI/MoS/F. 10(27)-H/49, 1949. 5 Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States, p. 28. 6 V.P. Menon, Integration of the Indian States, Mumbai: Orient Longman, 1999 edition (1956), p. 97. 7 Ibid., p. 347. 8 Nicholas Mansergh, ed., Transfer of Power, Vol. 12, Doc. 302, ‘Viceroy’s Personal Report No. 15, L/PO/6/123:ff 208–22’. 9 H.H. Hamidullah of Bhopal to Vallabhbhai Patel, 6 October 1947. NAI/ MoS/F.16-G(R)/47 Secret. 10 File Note by C.C. Desai, 18 October 1947, NAI/MoS/F.16-G (R)/47 (Secret). 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 ‘Note on the refugee problem in Hyderabad’, NAI/MoS/F.10(27)/H-49. Also see Taylor C. Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 24. 14 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India: The Benares Region’, JAOS, 1962, pp. 313–314. 15 H.H. Pataudi to Major General Rajkumar Rajindersinghji, 5 Septem ber 1947. NAI/MoS/F.2(13)-PR/47, Secret. 16 Anna Bigelow, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 17 NAI/MoS/F.2(19)PR-47. 18 Personal interview with Suleiman Khan of Mahmudabad, Delhi, September 2014. 19 MAI/MoS/2(42)-PR/47, 1947. 20 Ibid. 21 Ian Copland, ‘The Further Shores of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing in Rajasthan’, Past & Present, (160), August 1998, pp. 203–239; Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity, Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1997. 22 NAI/MoS/F.2(23)-PR/1947. 23 ‘Tonk Affairs’, D.O. No. 296-P, NAI/MoS/F.2(23)-P.R. 24 Prime Minister, Indore, to C.C. Desai, 14 October 1947, NAI/MoS/F.16-G (R)/47 (Secret).

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25 Sir John Malcolm, A Memoir of Central India Including Malwa and Adjoining Provinces, 2 Vols. (first published 1823); and Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818: The New Cambridge History of India, II.4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 26 See Table 6.1 above. 27 Ramusack, The Princes of India, p. 40; and Richard R. Bennett, ‘The Greening of Bahawalpur’, Indo-British Review, Vol. 15, 1988, pp. 5–14. 28 Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: An Eyewitness Account of the Partition of India, New Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 1998, p. 179. 29 Ibid., p. 229. 30 Ibid., p. 179. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 229. 33 Report by A.S. Dhawan, 29 September 1947, NAI/MoS/ F.32-G(R)/47. (Secret) 34 Ministry of States to Prime Ministers, 19 September 1947. NAI/MoS/ F.32-G(R)/47.(Secret) 35 U.T. Thakur, Sindhi Culture, Delhi: Sindhi Academy, 1959, p. 32. 36 White Paper on Indian States (1950), Government of India Ministry of States, New Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1950, p. 18. 37 Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 38 Abdul Wahid Khan to Rani Sahiba, Kalsia State, 25 October 1947, NAI?MoS/PR Branch, 2(51)-PR/47. 39 Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Mughal State, 1526–1750, New Delhi: Oxford India Publications, 1998; ‘Introduction’, p. 68. 40 Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 85(1), March 1991, pp. 77–96. 41 Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘Governance and Myths of State in Mumbai’, in C.J. Fuller and Veronique Benei (eds.), The Everyday State in Modern India, London: Hurst, 2001, pp. 51–52. 42 Nawab of Pataudi to Major General Rajkumar Rajindersinghji, 5 September 1947, NAI/MoS/F.2(13)-P.R./47. 43 Chamber of Princes Questionnaire 1928, passim. 44 Richard Eaton, ‘Theorizing Historical Space in Pre-colonial India: Sovereignty, Religion, Literary Networks’, Birkbeck Lecture presented at Trinity College, Cambridge, October 2015. 45 Eric Lewis Beverley, Hyderabad, British India and the Word: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850–1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 46 White Paper (1950), p. 102. Emphasis added. 47 Ibid., p. 116. 48 Pamela Price, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 138. 49 ‘Note on Dusserah Durbar at Mysore 1889’ by Resident Oliver St John, cited in Aya Ikegame, Princely India Re-imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to the Present, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013, p. 153.

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50 Aya Ikegame, Princely India Re-imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to the Present, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013, p. 158. 51 Ramusack, The Princes of India, p. 141. 52 Price, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India, passim. 53 Ramusack, The Princes of India, p. 141. 54 Ibid., p. 134. 55 M. Pemberton Papers, Box 1, dairy entry, Tuesday 17 January 1933. Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge. 56 Julie E. Hughes, ‘Royal Tigers and Ruling Princes: Wilderness and Wildlife Management in the Indian Princely States’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 49, Part 4, July 2015, pp. 1210–1260. 57 Ikegame, Princely India Re-imagined, p. 24. 58 Dirks, The Hollow Crown, p. 37. 59 J.R.I. Cole, Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722–1859, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p. 95. 60 White Paper on Indian Sates (1950), Government of India Ministry of States, New Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1950, p. 66. 61 Bhangya Bhukya, ‘Between Tradition and Modernity: Nizams, Colonialism and Modernity in Hyderabad State’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLVIII(48), November 2013, ISSN: 2349-8846. 62 Beverley, Hyderabad, p. 175. 63 Ibid., pp. 172–175. 64 Berenice Guyot-Rechard, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, p. 25. 65 Ishan Mukherjee, ‘Agitations, Riots and the Transitional State in Calcutta, 1945–50’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2017). 66 ‘Note on the Refugee Problem of Hyderabad’, NAI/MoS/10(27)/H-49, 1949. 67 H.H. Hamidullah of Bhopal to Vallabhbhai Patel, 24 September 1947. NAI/MoS/F.16-G(R)/47 Secret. 68 Ibid. 69 Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 228. 70 Ibid., p. 229. 71 Central Intelligence Officer’s Report, 27 October 1947, NAI/MoS/2 (42)-PR/47 72 Uttara Shahani, personal communication. I am deeply grateful to Uttara for her practical help with this project, for being a critical interlocutor and a guide to elusive sources. 73 Superintendent, Eastern Rajputana States Agency to Ministry of States, 2 December, 1947, NAI/MoS/2 (30)-P.R./47. 74 Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 243. 75 Gandhi to Shantikumar N. Morarjee, 25 September 1947 (from Gujarati, Vol. 89, p. 235). Motilal Jotwani, ed., Gandhiji on Sindh and the Sindhis, Delhi: Sindhi Academy, ND. (Courtesy Uttara Shahani). 76 Gandhidham, Bombay: The Sindhu Resettlement Corporation, 1952. (I thank Uttara Shahani for generously sharing this document with me.)

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77 The translation of the commemorative text reads, ‘Bapu, by whose blessing it was swiftly resolved to construct a new township for the denizens of Sindh. On 12 February 1949, Bapu’s ashes/blessings were immersed in Kandla, and so it was resolved to call the new township Gandhidham. . . ’. 78 Janaki Nair, Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region Under Princely Rule, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 79 Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 54. 80 M.K. Gandhi, The Indian States’ Problem, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1941. Also see M.K. Gandhi, Autobiography, Vol. I, Part III, ch. 16, passim. 81 M.K. Gandhi, The Indian States’ Problem, p. 4. 82 Young India, 8 January 1925. 83 Ibid. 84 The Hindu, 1 January 1936. Also cited in Ikegame, Princely India Re-imagined. 85 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

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7 GANDHI, CUSTOMS AND EXCISE AND THE DEMOCRACY OF OBJECTS 1 Isabel Hofmeyr The idea that some of Gandhi’s key notions were shaped in South Africa is now well known. This appreciation has been gaining ground over the last two decades and has in part been enabled by the ending of apartheid in 1994, permitting a freer flow of scholars between the South Africa and India and allowing Indian researchers to consult sources in South Africa and vice versa.2 This new wave of scholarship has given us a renewed appreciation of how South Africa had made Gandhi Indian. Working in Durban (a port city constituted by imperial migration) and Johannesburg (a gold rush town), Gandhi encountered a motley cosmopolitan world and a diversity of Indian communities thrown together, a context that enabled him to imagine ‘India’ in a way not possible on the sprawling subcontinent itself.3 This context, simultaneously colonial and diasporic, underlined both the possibilities and the limits of nationalism. The latter setting suggested a capacious and portable understanding of the nation in which even the lowly diasporic subject might, in theory at least, be a locus of the nation. The colonial context and the obscenities of settler racism underlined the limits of nationalism often in visceral ways. As he noted in 1908, “Natal enjoys swarajya, but . . ., if we were to imitate Natal, swarajya would be no better than hell. [The Natal whites] tyrannize over the [natives], hound out the Indians, and in their blindness give free rein to selfishness”.4 This quotation comes from the conclusion of Sarvodaya, Gandhi’s translation of Ruskin’s Unto This Last, which appeared in the Gujarati section of Indian Opinion in June 1908. This conclusion is generally recognized as being a rehearsal for Hind Swaraj, which was to be written, at sea, in November of the following year. As many scholars have noted, 1908 was a pivotal year in Gandhi’s career, the point at which 126

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he decisively abandoned notions of industrial progress and Western civilization. In part, this change was linked to the collapse of the satyagraha campaign, precipitated by his agreement with Jan Smuts in early 1908, making him turn towards a more inward and spiritual view of satyagraha, a development reflected in the establishment of his second ashram, Tolstoy farm, outside Johannesburg.5 As Keith Breckenridge has argued, Gandhi’s rejection of modernity was intense and thoroughgoing, not the reaction of someone far outside the system, but rather that of an insider, or at least an aspirant insider. Indeed, as Breckenridge notes, Gandhi had long been something of a “volunteer bureaucrat” for the colonial state, especially in the field of administrative fingerprinting. He had mastered Edward Henry’s Classification and Uses of Fingerprints and was “an early advocate of administrative fingerprinting for South African Indians”, suggesting in 1904 that “illiterate Indians . . . provide thumbprints on promissory notes”.6 Gandhi’s interactions with the colonial state are hence more complex than first meets the eye. This chapter examines Gandhi’s engagement with one particular section of the colonial state, namely Customs and Excise, a productive vantage point to think about objects and property across empire, in turn a rich theme for revisiting Gandhian notions of anti-modernism and non-possession. The article proceeds in four steps. We begin by contrasting Gandhi’s interactions with, and ideas about, customs in South Africa and India. We then take a detour to the Durban customs house to examine how colonial customs actually operated. Our third section asks what such practices might mean for a Gandhian theory of the object and we touch briefly on khadi, salt and books. In conclusion, I draw out some of the larger issues at stake.

Gandhi and customs and excise The theme of customs and excise first surfaced visibly in Gandhi’s trajectory in India in 1915 in his encounter with the Viramgam customs line, a tariff cordon between the Kathiawar states and British India. The cordon comprised 11 land customs posts, 1 in Viramgam, where railway passengers were routinely harassed by customs officials, police and health inspectors.7 As Gandhi tells us in his autobiography, Bhai Motilal a public-spirited tailor approached him for assistance with this problem. Gandhi investigated further and raised the issue in various quarters, finally writing to the Viceroy, who by Gandhi’s account, agreed to abolish the cordon in 1917, although of 127

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course the decision to eradicate the cordon had less to do with Gandhi’s appeals and more with the border politics between the maritime princely states and British India.8 Preferential harbour charges and tariffs at the ports of the Kathiawar states alongside expanding railway infrastructure meant that certain goods coming via these states entered British Indian markets at prices lower than those coming through British Indian ports. The revenue-raising pressure precipitated by the First World War was an additional factor keeping the line in place from 1905 to 1917. It was again reinstituted in 1927 for a variety of reasons not relevant here. In the Preface to Satyagraha in South Africa, Gandhi has famously referred to this Viramgam episode as his first satyagraha in India, or at least a rehearsal, since in his estimation it was the threat of civil disobedience around this issue that shifted official thinking: “I am strongly of the opinion that the imminent possibility of Satyagraha was the chief factor in obtaining the desired redress”.9 Summing up the episode, he spoke out against the Viramgam customs cordon and indeed the idea of customs duties in general: “As we are against customs levy as such, whether or not there is police tyranny, we must emphasize the inherent injustice of the system. We would oppose the customs levy even if the police were gods”.10 In South Africa, by contrast, Gandhi held a far less critical view of customs. Two anecdotes illustrate this point. The first is well known and comes again from Gandhi’s autobiography. It features Parsee Rustomjee, Gandhi’s friend and supporter in whose house he sheltered after his near-lynching in 1897. A merchant and importer of goods from Bombay and Calcutta, Rustomjee is caught smuggling. A remorseful Rustomjee (“the tears rolling down his cheeks”) enjoins Gandhi’s help. Gandhi wisely keeps the matter out of the courts and speaks directly to a Durban customs official and the Natal attorney general (both of whom he knows), with Rustomjee being let off with a fine and a warning. In the words of the autobiography, “Rustomji reduced to writing the facts of the whole case, got the paper framed and hung it up in his office to serve as a perpetual reminder to his heirs and fellow-merchants”.11 The second anecdote comes courtesy of Ram Guha’s excellent biography Gandhi before India and is culled from oral tradition within the South African Indian community. The story again features Rustomjee who, on this occasion was “charged with the import of saffron, then a white monopoly. He prayed at the shrine of [the Tamil Sufi] Datta Peer, whereupon the saffron in his warehouse miraculously turned to cardamom, confounding the customs inspector”.12 128

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The stories form a neat diptych, with Rustomjee at its centre. In the one, he, via Gandhi, engages with the formal world of colonial bureaucracy paying his dues while on the other he eludes the same officials via the older networks of the Indian Ocean world: in this case Sufism and merchant circuits that predated the age of European empires, now of course labelled smuggling. Gandhi also forms part of the diptych, prominently in the first story, and in the second by implication, since this piece of oral lore acts as a sotto voce gloss on the tale from the autobiography, reflecting a more general scepticism about Gandhi amongst sections of the South African India community. Here Gandhi’s embrace of the colonial state and his moral rigidity are contrasted unfavourably with the flexible and more nimble networks of the Indian Ocean trading world. In these stories, Gandhi lines up on the side of colonial customs and apparently persuades his friend to do likewise. Customs and excise appears to be a necessary and benign function of the state and this indeed is largely how Gandhi understood their operation during his South African years. Unsurprisingly for someone whose extended family back in Porbandar included customs officials, he regarded payment of customs as a sign of civic worthiness and as a claim on respectability and citizenship.13 He always filled out his customs forms on the parcels he posted and paid duty on these he received, urging his colleagues at Phoenix to do the same, berating those who didn’t or who forgot.14 As our first anecdote illustrates, he was on friendly terms with customs officials in Durban (and, as matters turned out, also in Johannesburg).15 With regard to the larger picture, he followed debates on the South African customs union which laid the platform for modern-day South Africa in which the former British colonies and Boer republics were drawn together in 1910, and while he expressed strong reservations about this development and its implications for the Indian community, he still saw the customs union as a desirable step (in part because it removed internal land customs posts and made the movement of goods between Transvaal and Natal easier).16 His respect for customs and excise at times proves ironic: during his 1896 trip to India he wrote his famous Green Pamphlet and had the first edition printed in Bombay in August 1896, and the second in Madras in November of that year. He appears to have posted copies back to himself in Durban and to have paid Rs 6 and 6 annas customs duties on the parcel before leaving.17 This Green Pamphlet, of course, helped spark his near-lynching on his return to Durban: a three-line distorted summary of the pamphlet 129

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disseminated by Reuters provided a pretext for white settler vigilantes back in Natal to stoke their anti-Asian campaign.18 That he had paid customs on the parcel captures the contradiction of how Gandhi respected forms of colonial state protocol even as he was persecuted by the same state. Indeed, it may also have been possible that customs officials were involved in the difficulties that Gandhi and his co-passengers experienced in the lead up to his near-lynching. The ship in which he was travelling, the SS Courland and its companion the SS Naderi, lay out at sea for three weeks outside the Durban harbour under quarantine restrictions. While the records indicate that it was port health officials who visited the ship to check passengers and fumigate – and at times, destroy their luggage – this party may well have included customs officers. Another occasion on which Gandhi encountered the coercive power of customs came in March 1910 when a copy of the Gujarati edition of Hind Swaraj was seized in Bombay under the Indian Press Act and then banned under the Sea Customs Act (censorship being one of the functions that customs and excise take on).19 Yet these interactions with customs notwithstanding, Gandhi while in South Africa seems never to have had occasion to critically question the workings of customs and excise. But as we have seen, within a short period after his return to India he was denouncing the Viramgam customs cordon and tariff boundaries more generally. How might we explain this shift? In part, this question is easily answered. In South Africa, the satyagraha campaigns focused on the struggle for civil rights (of movement, residence and trade) rather than any political demands for universal franchise, or economic calls for fiscal autonomy. His South African years were hence largely taken up with questions of restrictions on the movement of people, where they could live and trade, what taxes they should pay and whom they could marry. In India of course the larger questions of political and economic independence shifted the scale of his thinking and operations. In particular, the imperial drain of the Indian economy directed attention to objects and commodities as a locus of swadeshi mobilizations. Put in rather bald terms, his South African campaigns focused mainly on people, his Indian crusades on people and objects. A second factor making customs more prominent in India was the sheer complexity and density of sea and land customs lines which crisscrossed the subcontinent. As N.J. Shah’s magisterial History of Indian Tariffs (1924) indicates, the subcontinent was littered with the debris of older transit duty systems, whether Mughal, Portuguese, French 130

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or changing layers of British policy. It was difficult to travel without tripping over some tariff boundary, new or old, as Shah indicates, all “objectionable, costly, vexatious, inconvenient and impracticable” (223).20 Put in slightly different terms, in moving from South Africa to India, Gandhi had to think about customs and tariffs in much more detail, in concrete rather than abstract terms. Viramgam, for example required him to consider the actual working of the cordon and the relationship between customs, police and health inspectors; the implications of the line for sovereignty of the maritime states; and, indeed, the actual and often defective working of the system. As Johan Mathew in his brilliant recent book Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea points out, the cordon, designed in part to staunch the silver trade across the Indian Ocean world, was extremely porous, crossing as it did the Thar Desert and the Rann of Kutch, “the world’s largest salt marsh” (167).21

Colonial customs and excise in practice In his famous Tariffs at Work, T.H. Higginson points out that most of us have only the vaguest notion of what customs and excise officials actually do. The broader economic and political dimensions of their work have been popularized through debates on protectionism and free trade but their day-to-day workings remain obscure, because in Higginson’s view, the practitioners who carry out these processes “act rather than . . . write”. Yet customs officials in fact wrote a lot, generating bureaucratic reports and memoranda which illuminate the procedures and processes that they followed. Let’s consider one such document, a report from the Commissioner of Customs and Excise in South Africa. In that year, all customs houses across the country had come under the scrutiny of the Public Service Commission, which was seeking to rationalize and streamline customs operations. Like all officials faced with the threat of managerial intervention, the Commissioner of Customs and Excise at Durban wrote an extensive report stressing both the indispensability and complexity of the operations carried out by his staff. Drawing on the Durban customs house as an example, the Commissioner indicated that it garnered in just under £2 million in revenue each year, a task executed by a staff complement of about 100, comprising inspectors, examiners, clerks, accountants, typists, boatmen, messengers, watchmen – these personnel all linked together by a blizzard of paperwork: ships’ manifests, bills of lading and entry, invoices, 131

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King’s warehouse registers, baggage shed inventories, motor launch service records and so on and so on. To get through any one day of business, the Commissioner had to possess a wide repertoire of knowledge which could involve anything from registering and transferring ships (akin to transferring property), to making provision for wrecked and distressed seamen, to registering the births and deaths that had occurred on the high seas. The Commissioner consequently required considerable legal knowledge on anything from food adulteration, to agricultural restrictions, public health, trade mark and intellectual property, arms and ammunition, sedition and obscenity. In addition to dealing with importers, passengers, crew, the public and his own staff, the Commissioner interacted with a range of bodies in the port and beyond: Water Police, Railway Police, Port Authorities, Public Health department and importantly, the Immigration department.22 Yet this system of daily administration was by no means preordained or pregiven but was something that each customs house had to elaborate and invent. In theory, of course, the life of the customs officials was governed by the tariff book, which specified the various categories into which articles were to be assigned for purposes of duty. This process may sound fairly straightforward until one actually sees a tariff handbook, invariably a volume of several hundred pages. In the British imperial world, such handbooks hubristically promised to account for every object in the British empire, but in their very form acknowledged the impossibility of this task – tariff books were generally interleaved – every alternative page was blank to allow officials to write in comments and recommendations for changes which were then forwarded to head office for inclusion in the next year’s edition.23 Much of the time of customs and excise officials was taken up trying to decide into which category items fell. One only has to flip through these volumes to grasp the intricacies of such customs operations. With dizzying speed, one moves from haberdashery, to haggis to hair, from palisade fencing to pancake flour (always of course with a get-out clause EOHP – except as otherwise herein provided). Disagreements were routine, both amongst customs officials and between officials and importers keen to obtain the lowest duty for their goods. Each such dispute generated a file and the state archives in South Africa abound with such material as committees attempted to adjudicate how objects should be categorized. Was a substance butter or margarine? Could medicinal herbs be classified as tea? Were soup squares the same as stock? Was there any difference between poppy seed in a packet (which could be detained under the opium laws), as opposed 132

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to poppy seed for culinary use? Fabric proved particularly tricky as officials debated whether a particular bolt of cloth should be entered as printed tartan or gingham with swatches included.24 These dockside nominalists engaged with objects in detail – sniffing, tasting, feeling – attempting to classify and define objects in an attempt to make them real in the world of colonial indeterminacy. An observation from two early historians of customs is apposite here: “Customs history, properly studied, may be found fruitful of striking lessons. Possibly the most novel of these is the vital importance of discriminating clearly between names and things”.25 Another level of difficulty facing customs official was deciding which law applied where, especially in port cities where different legal systems intersected most densely. One example comes from the realm of copyright, a task that fell to Customs and Excise, who had to deal with printed material entering the colony (indeed in South Africa until at least the 1930s Customs and Excise was the part of the state that dealt with policy issues on copyright). Customs officials faced a crow’s nest of legislation: imperial law from the metropolis, colonial law pertaining to the colony and then from 1887 hovering somewhere above were the articles of the Berne Convention. Unsurprisingly, most officials had little grasp of these various laws, and when illegal reprints were detained or arrested (to use the language of Customs and Excise), no one knew how to proceed. In Durban in 1915, officials seized a consignment of foreign reprints that included copies of Treasure Island and Kidnapped. The Collector of Customs dithered – should he seize the books in terms of the colonial copyright legislation or the imperial law? While the books languished in the dockside warehouse, this query was batted between Customs and Excise and the Justice department with no clear answer emerging.26 In another instance, this time in 1948, a customs official at Windhoek in what was then South West Africa, now Namibia (a German colony placed under South African mandate after 1918), seized copies of Lady Windermere’s Fan that had been reprinted in Germany. Again no one seemed sure what to do. After much bureaucratic jostling, the books had to be released: imperial copyright legislation apparently did not apply in mandated states.27 As these episodes on copyright indicate, administrative procedures were not self-evident, or indeed even prescribed, and customs officials had to generate protocols on the basis of whatever logic made sense to them. In Durban, one such logic arose from the colonial port city itself, a key node of imperial maritime-border making whose architecture was increasingly militarized and fortified, driven by the imperative of 133

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Immigration Restriction and policing the global colour line. Customs officials worked cheek by jowl with Immigration Restriction officials – indeed, the two functions were at times collapsed in one person. Inevitably the logics of the two departments intersected.28 In upholding the global colour line, immigration officials at Durban were particularly zealous in inventing or adapting protocols to keep out as many immigrants of colour as possible. One of these was the notorious writing test (in European languages and roman script) which created the notion that those with literacy were Europeans and all Europeans possessed literacy. These procedures become a way of constructing ‘race’ itself as source or origin.29 On the customs and excise side, objects too were subject to an informal writing test through the provision of the Merchandise Marks Act, which required that all commodities passing through customs bear a mark of origin purporting to indicate where they had been made (Made in England, Made in Australia and so on). While any script could be used on objects, this information has to appear as well in roman script and in English. Indeed, in some cases the English language itself was considered as a mark of origin. Or, as one handbook explained, “[I]f any names, trade-marks, or descriptions in the English language or any English words at all appear on the goods, wrappings or containers, they are considered . . . as purporting to be of British origin”. Goods produced outside Britain but with English markings had to carry clear signs of what was called “counter-indication” showing that despite the English words on the product, the commodity had not been manufactured in Britain. Exporters from the United States were advised that “the words ‘Made in the U.S.A’ in letters as large and as conspicuous as any other English wording, should be printed on every article, label, or wrapper bearing any words in the English language”. In some cases, the mania for inscription went to extraordinary lengths. In the case of writing paper, “if so much as a watermark containing English lettering appears in sheets of paper, a counterindication of origin must also be watermarked into each sheet, wherever the water-mark occurs”.30 These types of regulations formed part of a mania of marking, enough to sustain several handbooks which instructed exporters on how objects had to be inscribed with marks of origin.31 The handbooks are veritable thesauruses of inscription, replete with instructions on how objects had variously to be “impressed, embossed, die-stamped, cast, engraved, etched, printed, applied, stamped, incised, stenciled, painted, branded, molded, punched, cast”, along with an appropriate range of adverbs: “indelibly, visibly, conspicuously, durably”.32 The 134

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designers of these regulations had to tussle with the shape of the object itself to determine where best it should be marked: on the stem of pipe, the face of clock, every two yards on selvedge of fabric, on the address section of postcard, on the rind of the bacon, the flange of the printing block and so on. In the case of chilled beef, each side had to bear indication of origin “in a continuous series of words . . . extending longitudinally: From the hock joint to the neck . . . provided that . . . if the name of the country of production comprises more than one word, such words may be placed vertically one beneath the other instead of in a continuous line”.33 “Made in”, “produced in”, “printed in” or “copyrighted in” all stood as marks of origin; indeed, the English in which they appeared spoke of source, which was of course implicitly understood as English and white. Like immigration officials who judged people by the “mark or origin”, customs officials followed a similar logic that enabled them to govern the intersecting problem of distance, mobility and border-making. If something came from far away, how could one be certain that it was in fact what it purported to be? Also, was it authentic, genuine, pure and uncontaminated enough to be allowed to cross the border? Gandhi’s concerns may seem very far removed from those of the colonial customs official. Yet as someone involved in a nationalist movement that sought to demarcate swadeshi from foreign goods, he faced many of the same problems. Let’s turn, then, to examine some lives of the Gandhian object.

The Gandhian object Much of the swadeshi movement turned on a strategy of turning tariff (or lack thereof) into affect. Or as one khadi enthusiast reported: “[T]he thin foreign scarves lay heavier on [my] shoulders with the weight of [our] helpless dependence on foreign manufacture whereas [my] coarse Khaddar lay light as a feather on her body”.34 Yet, the business of telling what was foreign and what not proved as thorny an issue for nationalists as it did for customs officials. During the Bengal swadeshi movement, for example, British cloth had been relabelled as “Made in Germany” and while in subsequent years, the definition of foreign expanded beyond just Britain, the problem of authentification persisted.35 Indeed, as many discussions on khadi have demonstrated, the process of generating “indigenous” fabric depended on an extensive infrastructure of Khadi Boards, Departments, and Committees. Part of their function was to authenticate cloth through a process of 135

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marking and certifying, providing an alternative order of marks of origin, vouching for the purity of the article.36 Likewise, Congress-seals on bales of foreign cloth attempted to prevent impure items from circulating.37 Unsurprisingly, some of the documentation accompanying khadi production rather resembles that of customs and excise.38 The Salt Satyagraha generated not dissimilar strategies. Salt taken or manufactured by satyagrahis was auctioned, a type of voluntary excise duty which at the same time acted as a guarantor of authenticity in a context where it must have been difficult to fathom whether any salt was of satyagraha origin or not. A related customs and excise theme emerged in the Salt March when Gandhi urged supporters to take untaxed salt from Portuguese India and the princely states and then refuse to pay duty at the border with British India, an attempt to use the customs boundary against itself. Themes of purity were also evident in the temperance campaigns and cutting down of toddy palms that accompanied the salt satyagraha and sought to reform the ordinary folk.39 These various strategies were, of course, a necessary part of constructing an anti-imperial order in which objects were radically redefined in order to lay bare the unjust structures of empire, a way of asserting an alternative sovereignty over those objects. This question of the status of the object is one that has been addressed in recent philosophical work on Gandhi. Ajay Skaria’s Unconditional Equality examines Gandhi’s changing theory of the subject and its implication for a subject-object relation. In brief, Skaria traces Gandhi abandonment of liberal ideals of the rational, autonomous individual, a view which posits a hierarchy of people and objects, moving from the most rational to the least with certain categories of persons at the top and objects at the bottom. Such a hierarchy ensconced the most rational as having despotic domain over lesser peoples and the realm of objects. As Skaria demonstrates, Gandhi attempted to topple this hierarchy by undoing the notion of God as the originary source of sovereignty, moving instead towards the idea of God as Sat, or satya, which Skaria glosses as the “realization or accomplishment of being”. Skaria comments: “In satyagraha, . . . we encounter an equality that comes after the death of God; we now have creatures without a sovereign Creator. Their absolute equality, moreover, is irreducibly and tumultuously plural because it must include all being (not only humans but also animals and things)”.40 In this equation, the subject cannot simply claim sovereignty over the object. Instead, the subject has to abandon its monarch-like status and become an object among objects. This idea can be clarified with 136

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an image from the salt campaigns, notably that of the fist clasping the salt, even unto death. This trope appeared frequently in comments like: “So long as your wrists are intact, do not let your fist be loosened. Your fists will acquire the strength of iron if you have faith in Satyagraha” or “Our body is a fort . . . And once salt has entered that fort, it should not be allowed to be forced out of it even if horses are made to trample on your heads. From today we should begin cultivating the strength of will to see that a fist holding salt does not open even if the wrist should be cut off”.41 This emphasis on grasping the salt at all costs was of course an attempt to increase the rate of arrest and conviction, to flood the jails and paralyse the system. Satyagrahis had to hang on to the salt since this would be the evidence which would convict them. [The honour of the nation] cannot be yielded up except to the force that will break the hand to pieces . . . Let the people defend the salt in their possession till they break with the attempt, but they should do so without malice, without anger, without an angry word. The police have the easiest way open to them of taking possession of the salt. Let them arrest the civil resisters and they can take possession of the salt for they have possession of their persons. But it can become forfeit only after conviction, not before.42 The satyagrahi does not enjoy sovereignty over the salt nor is he able to confer freedom on the salt. He certainly gives protection to the salt in the fort of his body but equally appears to imprison it in his fortbody and his vice-like grip. The salt however is not agentless and in due course will convict the satyagrahi, in all senses of that word: it will constitute the evidence which will precipitate a judicial verdict and sentence and it will fortify the satyagrahis beliefs and ideas (giving him more conviction). The salt and satyagrahis appear as accomplices of, or accessories to each other. In Skaria’s terms, both appear to exert “agraha” over each other – “a taking hold, eagerness, enthusing, persistence, demanding, seizing” (as he glosses the word), a joint effort in the work of grasping “sat” or truth and being.43 This relationship of “agraha” captures rather well another subjectobject relation, namely that of a book and its reader – both take hold of, and seize each other, they enthuse each other, and persist with each other. The relationship is not one of owner to object, rather it is that of a collective of accomplices. This configuration of reader and book is 137

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echoed in Gandhi’s well-known rejection of intellectual property rights (although as Shyamkrishna Balganesh shows he did make pragmatic use of these rights when Macmillan published his autobiography for the British and US markets and in relation to some of his translation rights).44 Such intellectual property rights presuppose that one can hold property in one’s own person, that one can be sovereign over oneself and one’s objects. However, this idea reinscribes the ideal of the liberal subject as a monarch of being. Gandhi’s rejection of the idea exemplifies an attempt to refigure the relationship of subject and object, or, as Skaria says, to discover the tumultuous plurality of all being.

Conclusion If you follow academic fashions, this line of argument might sound rather familiar. In a world beset by environmental crisis, the question of how to factor in the non-human (climate, oceans, animals and so on) has become pressing and is now investigated across a range of disciplines which seek to undo the premise of “humans as monarchs of being”. One route has been to unseat the privileged status of human subjects, making them objects among objects rather than a favoured point of reference. Investigating such themes is not simply a matter of paying more attention to the object (although that is part of the story). Or as Levi Bryant notes in the Democracy of Things: “[R]ather than treating objects as entities opposed to a subject, I treat all entities, including subjects, as objects”. As Bryant notes, we need to think about how things equally exist rather than how they exist equally.45 This object-oriented philosophy of course sounds not dissimilar to Gandhian thinking as set out by Skaria. So, as ever, Gandhi is ahead of the game, proposing a democracy of objects or rather, subjectsbecome-objects in which all equally exist (rather than exist equally). This chapter has set out some of the historical trajectories of this Gandhian democracy of objects. Gandhi’s encounters with objects took shape in an imperial economy with a gallimaufry of goods funnelled through imperial bureaucracies of market and state. Customs and excise sought to solve this trouble with objects through an idealist or anti-realist orientation. Rather like dockside epistemologists, they dealt with objects as a problem of human-decreed representation, of the subject having sovereignty over the object or to hark back to our customs historians quoted earlier on, the problem of names and things. Yet Gandhi as we have seen was in effect a realist in philosophical inclination – interested in objects as equally existing with subjects who were not “monarchs of being” but were rather “among beings”. 138

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Notes 1 This paper comprised the final in the series of commemorative series of lectures for B.R. Nanda. The lecture opened by pointing to Nanda’s global reach. One measure of his influence can be found in the records of the World Catalogue, the supra-catalogue of the world’s major libraries. Spread across these institutions are 133 editions and versions of his works, appearing in 601 publications in four languages with 9,580 library holdings across the world. In South Africa, Nanda’s influence is equally apparent. There are 40 copies of his various works housed in university and public libraries. 2 For examples, see special issue on ‘South Africa/India: Reimagining the Disciplines’, South African Historical Journal, Vol. 57, Special Issue, 2007, pp. 1–152; Isabel Hofmeyr and Michelle Williams, eds., South Africa and India: Rethinking the Global South, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2011; Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India, London: Penguin, 2013. 3 For examples, see Radhika Mongia, ‘Gender and the Historiography of Satyagraha in South Africa’, Gender and History, Vol. 18(1), 2006, pp. 130–149; Surendra Bhana and Goolam Vahed, The Making of a Political Reformer: Gandhi in South Africa, 1893–1914, New Delhi: Manohar, 2005; Keith Breckenridge, ‘Gandhi’s Progressive Disillusionment: Thumbs, Fingers, and the Rejection of Scientific Modernism in Hind Swaraj’, Public Culture, Vol. 23(2), 2011, pp. 331–348; Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Gandhi, Mandela and the African Modern’, in Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (eds.), Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 119–136; Robert A. Huttenback, Gandhi in South Africa: British Imperialism and the Indian Question, 1860–1914, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971; Eric Itzkin, ‘The Transformation of Gandhi Square: The Search for Socially Inclusive Heritage and Public Space in the Johannesburg City Centre’ (Dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 2008), pp. 54–76; Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, New York: Knopf, 2011; Claude Markovits, The UnGandhian Gandhi: The Life and Afterlife of the Mahatma, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003; Anthony Parel, ‘The Origins of Hind Swaraj’, in Judith M. Brown and Martin Prozesky (eds.), Gandhi and South Africa: Principles and Politics, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996, pp. 35–66; Maureen Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985. 4 CWMG 8: 458. 5 Keith Breckenridge, ‘Gandhi’s Progressive Disillusionment: Thumbs, Fingers, and the Rejection of Scientific Modernism in Hind Swaraj’, Public Culture, Vol. 23(2), 2011, pp. 331–348; Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, New York: Knopf, 2011; Claude Markovits, The Un-Gandhian Gandhi: The Life and Afterlife of the Mahatma, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003; Maureen Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985. 6 Breckenridge, ‘Gandhi’s Progressive Disillusionment’, p. 334. 7 This account is drawn from Report of the Indian States Enquiry Committee (Financial) 1932, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932, 108

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ff; A.B. Trivedi, Kathiawar Economics, Bombay: Self-published, 1943, p. 241; Review of the Customs Administration in India 1930–31, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1932, p. 7. 8 M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, translated by Mahadev Desai, ch. 126, e-version. 9 M.K. Gandhi, ‘Preface’, in Satyagraha in South Africa, Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1928, p. 8. 10 CWMG, 15: 39. 11 Gandhi, An Autobiography, ch. 124. 12 Guha, Gandhi, p. 94. 13 Ibid., p. 19; CWMG, 1: 378. 14 CWMG, 1: 473; 6: 223, 298; 7: 60. 15 CWMG, 3: 442. 16 CWMG, 9: 296; 11: 87. 17 This item appears at the end of a 13-page list of “out-of-pocket” expenses that Gandhi prepared for the Natal Indian Congress, which had funded his trip. The final item on this list dated 29 November 1896, reflects a payment of Rs 100 to the Madras Standard for printing of a pamphlet (presumably the second edition). After this item there is a grand total of all his expenses (Rs 1,766) followed by the entry “paid customs on pamphlet Rs 6.6” (CWMG, 1:473). Gandhi left Bombay for Durban on Nov 30. The entry “paid customs for pamphlets” clearly happened after Nov 29. Where did he pay the customs? Did he post the parcel in Bombay on the day he left and pay customs there? Or, rather heartbreakingly, did he collect the parcel in Durban after his near-lynching and still pay customs on it? Another possibility is that he had the pamphlets with him on the ship and as I indicate below customs officials visited his ship when it was anchored outside the Durban harbour under quarantine and he paid customs to them. This latter option seems unlikely since if the Green Pamphlet which had caused the entire storm had been found by customs officials who would have been sympathetic to the vigilantes, this would no doubt have entered the historical record. 18 Saumendranath Bera,‘Confronting the Colonial Order: Gandhiji, the Green Pamphlet and Reuter’, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Dipankar Sinha, and Barnita Bagchi (eds.), Webs of History: Information, Communication, and Technology from Early to Post-colonial India, New Delhi: Manohar, 2005, pp. 209–230. 19 Anon., ‘The 1910 Banning of Hind Swaraj’, Gandhi Marg, July‑September  1993, pp. 240–254. 20 N.J. Shah, History of Indian Tariffs, Thacker: Bombay, 1924. 21 Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea, Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. 22 National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria. SAB, SKD 25, 4/3/7, Commissioner of Customs and Excise to Public Service Commission, 15 September 1922. 23 South African Railways and Harbours, Official Railway Tariff Handbook, Johannesburg: Office of the General Manager of Railways, 1911. 24 National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria, DCU 76, 670/06; DCU 85, 1416/06; DCU 82, 1091/06; DCU 74, 574/06; DCU 65, 1031/06.

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25 Henry Atton and Henry Hurst Holland, The King’s Customs: Vol II: An Account of Maritime Revenue, Contraband Traffic, the Introduction of Free Trade, and the Abolition of the Navigation and Corn Law, from 1801 to 1855, New York: August M. Kelly, 1967, originally published 1910, p. VI. 26 National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria, DEA 202 a10/8X. 27 National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria, DEA 202 A10/6/2-A10/9x. Vol 2. 28 Andrew MacDonald, ‘Strangers in a Strange Land: Undesirables and Border-controls in Colonial Durban, 1897-c.1910’ (MA thesis, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, 2007). 29 For an account of the precise workings of Immigration in Durban and Cape Town, see Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘Betwixt the Oceans: The Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins (1905– 1915)’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 42(3), 2016, pp. 463– 481; Andrew Macdonald, ‘Strangers in a Strange Land: Undesirables and Border-controls in Colonial Durban, 1897-c.1910’ (MA thesis, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, 2007); A. MacDonald, ‘Colonial Trespassers in the Making of South Africa’s International Borders 1900 to c. 1950’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012). 30 Roberta P. Wakefield, Foreign Marks of Origin Regulations, Washington: US Department of Commerce: Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce: US Government Printing Office, n.d.; The Merchandise Marks Manual, compiled by L.F. Morshead, Calcutta: No Publisher, 1908. 31 Wakefield, Foreign Marks, pp. 82, 83. 32 These are extracts from Wakefield, Foreign Marks. 33 Wakefield, Foreign Marks, p. 22. 34 Mahatma Gandhi, The Wheel of Fortune, Madras: Ganesh, 1922, p. 27. 35 Christina Lubinski, ‘Global Trade and Indian Politics: The German Dye Business in India Before 1947’, Business History Review, Vol. 89(3), 2015, pp. 503–530. 36 Lisa N. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007, pp. 12–28. 37 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947, Delhi: Macmillan, 1983, p. 295. 38 All India Spinners Association (AISA), Khadi Guide, AISA: Ahmedabad, 1927, p. 75; and The Merchandise Marks Manual, Calcutta: Government Printer, 1910, p. 8. 39 Thomas Weber, On the Salt March: The Historiography of Mahatma Gandhi’s March to Dandi, New Delhi: Rupa, 2009, pp. 376, 396, 436. 40 Ajay Skaria, Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016, p. XIV. 41 Quoted in Weber, Salt March, pp. 429, 379–380. 42 Ibid., p. 428. 43 Skaria, Unconditional Equality, p. 203. 44 Shyamkrishna Balganesh, ‘Gandhi and Copyright Pragmatism’, California Law Review, Vol. 101(6), 2013, pp. 1705–1762. 45 Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011, pp. 40, 19.

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Page numbers in bold indicate a table. African-Americans 76 Ahimsa 28 – 29, 32n34 Akash 39 Alam, Muzaffar 109 Ali, Maulana Zafar 43 Ali, Mohammad 87 Aligarh College 112 All India Congress Committee 84 Allah-u-Akbar 94 – 95 Ambedkar, B. R. 79 Andrews, C. F. 81 anekantavada (many sidedness of reality) 29 apartheid 76, 79 – 80, 126 Asian immigration, in South Africa 72 – 74; see also South Africa Attlee, Clement 91 Azad, Abul Khalam 45, 49, 51 Azad, Maulana 44, 88 Bahawalpur: evacuation of Hindus from 116; Gandhi’s emissary to 116; Muslim refugees 115; refugees into 105 – 106, 115 Bajaj, Jamnalal 11 – 12, 70 Balganesh, Shyamkrishna 138 “Bande Mataram” 94 – 95 Bari, Abdul 45 Benares Hindu University 112 Bengal: eastern 37, 78, 94; Gandhi’s farewell address 95; Gandhi’s relationship and travels in 20, 30, 85 – 86, 88 – 90, 92; Hindus

40, 93; Mussulmans 93; Nanda’s interest 8; partition with Punjab 35, 47, 91 – 92; peace 94; riots 19, 88; sovereignty 84, 93; swadeshi movement unity with Punjab 51; west 48 Besant, Annie 40 Beverley, Eric 113 Bharatpur 105, 107, 115 – 116 Bhopal: refugees in 20, 102 – 104, 104, 105, 107, 114 – 115 Bhukya, Bhangya 113 Bihar: Champaran 59 – 60; Gandhi’s work in 20, 50, 60, 90 – 92; Muslims in 40; riots 19, 49, 89 Bikaner 106, 107, 119 Bombay Presidency 60, 107 Bose, Nirmal Kumar 10 Bose, Sarat Chandra 89 – 90, 97 Bose, Sisir Kumar 98 Bose, Subhas Chandra 89 – 90, 97 Bose, Sugata 19 – 20 brahmacharya (chastity) 10 Breckenridge, Keith 127 Britain: British cabinet 48 – 49; British rule foundation 65 – 66; British troops in India 65; Cabinet Mission’s paper 93; civil disobedience against 74 – 75; cloth and textiles 135; Constitutional relationship with India 71n18; economic ties with India; expatriates 65; fate of the

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raj 17 – 18, 68; image 66; Indian civil resistance 67 – 69; indirect rule 108; influence in India 67; opposition to Rowlatt Act 40; Punjab’s Land Alienation law 46; withdrawal from India 87, 91, 115; World War II 85 British see Britain British India: access to goods 21; Bombay Presidency 60; chaos 108; European population 65; famine relief 113 – 114; justice system 110; territory flights 102 British raj: Census of 1921 65; civil disobedience 57 – 69; destabilisation 67 – 69; European population in 65; foundations of 65; non-violent resistance 66 – 77; population 65 B. R. Nanda Memorial Lectures (2011–2016) 1 – 2,  98 B. R. Nanda Trust 1, 121n1 Brown, Judith 2, 11, 16 – 18, 19, 24 Buddhism 26 Bukhari, Abdullah 43 Buultjens, Ralph 12 Calcutta: Gandhi’s fast in 19 – 20, 78; Gandhi’s travel 41, 86; INC meeting 46; killings/violence in 49, 52, 88, 91, 95, 98; peace and camaraderie 94 cardinal virtues 27; see also Gandhi, Mahatma Caveeshar, Sardul Singh 43 Champaran see Bihar Chatterji, Joya 3, 20 – 21, 24, 29 Chauri Chaura violence (1922) 12, 17, 44, 59, 62 – 63, 71n12 China 37, 75, 82, 114 Christians: Gandhi’s identification as 24, 30, 92; numbers in India 108; Gandhi’s take on Christianity 26, 37, 77, 87 civil disobedience 17, 46 – 47, 57 – 69, 74 – 75, 81 – 82, 87,  128 Classification and Uses of Fingerprints (Henry) 127 Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, The (Gandhi) 5 – 6, 25

Commissioner of Customs and Excise, South Africa 131 complete independence 15, 46 Congress see Indian National Congress (INC) Congress-League Pact see Lucknow Pact Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place (Gandhi) 59 copyright 133, 135 Cripps, Sir Richard 48 – 49, 88 Cripps Offer of 1942 68 Curzon, Lord 119 customs and excise, in colonial state: Gandhi and 127 – 131; in practice 131 – 135 customs officials, colonial era 131 – 135; categorising materials/ items and 132 – 133; copyright and 133; Immigration Restriction 134; laws and 133; protocols and 133 – 134 Dalai Lama 75 Dalit 79, 91, 116; see also Harijan Darwin, Charles 77 Das, C. R. 40, 94 Dasara festival 111 Dayal, Lala Deen 114 Deccan Educational Society 112 Delhi, Gandhi’s tour of 95 Desai, Bhulabhai 85 Desai, C. C. 103 – 104 Deva, Narendra 96 Dholpur: Muslim refugees in 105 Divide and Quit (Moon) 106 Durban, South Africa 126 Einstein, Albert 80 – 81 Empire Theatre, Johannesburg, South Africa 72 English language 134 excise officials, colonial era 131 – 135 famine relief works of Hyderabad 113 – 114 Faraday, Michael 81 Farid, Baba 39 Ferozepur (East Punjab) 106

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INDEX

First World War 128 Freedom House 81 Gandhi, Mahatma 1; on “Allahu-Akbar” 95; anekantanaba 34; aphorism attributed to 82; assassination of 15; Bengal farewell address 95; brahmacharya 10; as charismatic leader 15; civil disobedience and 16 – 17, 57 – 69; The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 5 – 6, 25; colonial state and 127; customs and excise 127 – 131; Einstein on 80 – 81; on environment 82; on evacuation of Hindus from Bahawalpur 116; farewell address in Bengal 94; George VI and 83; as global property 57 – 58; Gokhale on 38; on Hindu-Muslim unity 29; ideal caliphs 120; indefinite fast 96 – 97; influence in Bengal 20, 30, 85 – 86, 88 – 90, 92; interfaith harmony and 76 – 79; journey to Kashmir 51 – 52; moral reason for 29; national satyagraha campaigns 60 – 61; openness to self-criticism 83; Orwell on 82; political campaigns 11; Punjab and 15 – 16, 35 – 54; reason why he matters 72 – 83; on rehabilitation of Sindhi refugees 116 – 118; rejection of modernity 127; on religion 25 – 30; religious pluralism 29 – 30; South African protests 72 – 74; tour of Delhi 95; yuga dharma 1 Gandhi, Manu 90 Gandhi, Rajmohan 2, 15 – 16 Gandhi, Usha 53 Gandhi and His Critics (Nanda) 2, 10 – 11,  18 Gandhi before India (Guha) 128 Gandhi-Jinnah talks of September 1944 48, 85 Gangajali Fund 113 George VI, King 83 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna 2, 39 – 40 Government of India Act 62 Goyal, Omita 13

Great Depression 68 Great Imambara complex, Lucknow 113 Green Pamphlet (Gandhi) 129 – 130 Guha, Ramchandra 2, 128 Gujarat 42 Hamidullah of Bhopal (nawab) 102, 114 – 115 Hansen, Thomas Blom 109 – 110 Hardy, Thomas 77 Harijan 37, 86 Havel, Vaclav 75 Hayat, Chaudhry Muhammad 53 – 54 Henry, Edward 127 Higginson, T. H. 131 Hind Swaraj (Gandhi) 22, 59, 65, 126, 130 Hinduism 26, 97; untouchability and 77 Hindu-Muslim unity 16, 29, 78 – 79; see also Punjab “Hindu Pani and Muslim Pani” 88 Hindu Sabha 39 Hindustan 39 Hindustan Republican Association 46 Hindu villages, attacks on 116 History of Indian Tariffs (Shah) 130 – 131 Hitler, Adolf 64 – 65 Hofmeyr, Isabel 3 home rule see swaraj Hunter Commission 40 Huq, Fazlul 47 Husain, Fazli 43 Hyderabad 102; famine relief works 113 – 114; Muslim migrants 102; relief camps 114 Ibbetson, Denzil 35 ICSSR see Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) ideal caliphs 120 Iftikharuddin, Mian 53 Imperial Council 38 indefinite fast 96 – 97 India: China and 82; customs in 130 – 131; as flawed and fault-ridden democracy 79

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INDEX

Indian Civil Service (ICS) 68 Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) 9 Indian Councils Act of 1909 38 – 39,  45 Indian National Army (INA) 85 – 87 Indian National Congress (INC) 11; Amritsar session of 1919 41; civil resistance as a political tactic of 64; Lahore session of 1909 38; Lahore session of 1929 – 1930 46; Lucknow Pact 40; Muslim leaders in 45; as national organization 61 – 62; in Punjab 46 – 47; split 39 – 40; Working Committee 49 – 50, 84, 90 – 93 Indian Opinion 126 Indian Press Act 130 intellectual property rights 138 inter-caste marriages 90 interfaith harmony 76 – 79 International Fellowship of Religions 77 inter-religious marriages 90 Islam 26; universal 43

Khan, Amir 105 Khan, Badshah 44 Khan, Khan Abdul Ghaffar 91, 93 Khan, Khizar Hayat 91 Khan, Liaquat Ali 47 – 48, 85 Khan, Sikandar Hyat 47 Khan, Zafrullah 97 Khana, Abdul Wahid 109 Khilafat movement 16, 45, 87 Kidnapped 133 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 75 Kirti-Kisan Party 46 Kitchlew, Saifuddin 43 Kolkata see Calcutta Kripalani, Acharya 96 Lady Windermere’s Fan 133 Lahore 94 Lal-Bal-Pal Swadeshi campaign in 1906 – 1911  45 land revenue demands 59 – 60 Lohia, Ram Manohar 93 Lucknow Pact 40

Jalal, Ayesha 43, 95 Jallianwala Bagh massacre 16, 40 – 41 Jayakar, M. R. 40 Jewish settlers and Palestinian peasants 78 Jhang Sial 39 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 8, 46; biography of 12 – 15; Direct Action of August 1946 49; Islamic state of Pakistan and 25, 48; Lucknow Pact and 40 Jodhpur state 106 Johannesburg, South Africa 126 Jumma Masjid, Delhi 87, 95 Kalekar, Kaka 28 Kashmir 94, 96 Kathiawad 119; Sindhi refugees in 117 – 118 Kathiawad Political Conference (1925) 119 khadi 11, 64 Khalsa College 112

Maharao of Kutch 117 – 118 Mahmudabad, Lucknow 104 Malerkotla, Punjab 104 Malhotra, Inder 14 Mali, Rai Mohan 90 Malraux, André 30 Mandela, Nelson 80 Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (Mathew) 131 Mathew, Johan 131 Mehrotra, Sri Ram 12, 14 Menon, V. P. 51, 102 Merchandise Marks Act 134 migrations, types 102 – 108 Minto-Morley Act see Indian Councils Act of 1909 Mitchell, Timothy 109 monarchical modernity 110, 112, 119 – 120; see also princely states Moon, Penderel 106, 116 Moraes, Frank 30 moral politics 16 – 18 moral reason 29 Motilal, Bhai 127

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INDEX

Mountbatten, Louis 51; Gandhi and 91 – 92; Jinnah and 92; partition plan 84, 92 Mukherjee, Ishan 114 Muslim League 43; demand for Pakistan 47 – 48; foundation 39; Lahore resolution 16, 36, 39; Lucknow Pact 40; in Punjab 47; separate electorates for Muslims 39 Myanmar 75 Mysore: Dasara festival in 111; Wodeyar rule 120 Naik, J. P. 9 Nair, Janaki 119 Nanak (Guru) 39 Nanda, Bal Ram 1 – 15, 57, 101; age-related health problems 13; authorship style 2; Bajaj’s biography 11; birth and early life 3 – 4; Bose on 2 – 3; Brown on 2, 11; Chatterji on 3; death 15; Gandhi and His Critics 2, 10 – 11, 18; Gandhi on 2; Guha on 2; Hofmeyr on 3; Jinnah’s biography 12 – 15; NMML and 1, 3, 8 – 9; personality 2; on professional historians 11 – 12; tribute to 98 – 99; Witness to Partition 5, 99; works 1 Nanda, Gulzarilal 44 Narain, Jai Prakash 93 National League of Democracy 75 national satyagraha campaigns 60 – 63 Nau Jawan Sabha 46 Nawab of Bahawalpur 115 Nawab of Pataudi 104 Nayar, Pyarelal 41, 44 Nayyar, Sushila 116 Nehru, Jawaharlal 63 – 64; Lahore Congress of 1929 – 1930 46; Malraux and 30; on non-violence 63 Nehru, Motilal 40 Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) 1, 3, 8 – 9 Netaji see Bose, Subhas Chandra Nizam of Hyderabad 104

NMML see Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) Noakhali, East Bengal 88 – 90; Gandhi and 94; violence in 19, 49, 88 Non-Cooperation movement 15; Khilafat campaign and 16 non-violence 19 – 20, 24, 27, 45; African National Congress 79; Gandhi’s philosophy of 58 – 59, 64 – 65, 76 – 79, 82, 92; Nehru on 63; religious pluralism and 77 – 78 Nonviolent Noncooperation 43 North West Frontier Province 48, 88, 94 On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 77 Orwell, George 82 Paisa Akhbar 39 Pal, Satya 43 Palestinian peasants, Jewish settlers and 78 Panipat, Punjab 52 participatory pluralism 30; see also religious pluralism partition of India 15, 85 – 99; accounts of humanity 53 – 54; Gandhi on 49; mass migrations after 101; modalities of 93 – 94; plan of 84, 93; see also Punjab Patel, Vallabhbhai 42, 50, 64 Patwari, Habibullah 90 Pemberton, Mordaunt 112 Planck, Max 81 Prakasa, Sri 61 – 62 Prasad, Rajendra 42, 96 Price, Pamela 111 – 112 princely states: borderlanders living 114; Gandhi and 116 – 120; geographical size 102; hunting excursions (shikar) 112; modern monarchs/kingship 112 – 116; refugees and 102 – 108; worship of deities 110 – 111 Punjab 35 – 54; Congress in 46 – 47; Gandhi’s tour of 41; Hindu-Muslim-Sikh front 42 – 44; Jallianwala Bagh massacre 16,

146

INDEX

40 – 41; Land Alienation law 46; language 35; Muslim leaders in 40; Muslim League in 47; as Muslim-majority provinces 44; newspapers 39; partition of 1947 35 – 54; story of 38 – 39; Unionist Party 43, 46 – 47 Punjabi 39 Punjabi language 35 Punjab Legislative Council 38 Punjab Uprooted (Nanda) 91, 99 Purana Quila, Delhi 95 Radcliffe Line 101 Rai, Lala Lajpat 15 – 16, 36 – 37, 43; Gandhi and 42 Rajagopalachari, C. 42, 95 Ram, Mahatma Munshi see Shraddhanand, Swami Ramrajya 120 Rand Daily Mail 73 Reading, Lord 119 reason: and religion 27 – 28 Rebellion of 1857 108 Rechard, Berenice Guyot 114 refugees: being turned away 114 – 115; into Bhopal 102 – 104; caravans 101; into Jodhpur state 106; at Jumma Masjid 52; Muslim 20, 105, 107; from one princely state to another 105, 107, 121; Punjabi 53; rehabilitation 116; violence against 54; religion: Gandhi and 25 – 30; immanence 26; interfaith harmony 76 – 79; reason and 27 – 28; respect for 28; and secularism 30; tolerance 28 religious faith: Gandhi’s conception 2, 19, 28 religious pluralism 19, 25 – 28, 29 – 30, 75, 77 – 78,  83 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 80 Rowlatt Act 40, 45 Rustomjee, Parsee 128 – 129 Saab, Bhagat 54 sahishnuta see tolerance Salaam, Bibi Amtus 44 Salt March 46, 62, 136

samabhava 28 Sapru, Tej Bahadur 85 sarvadharma samabhava 25, 28 Sarvodaya (Gandhi) 126 Sarwar, Ghulam 89 satyagraha: characteristics 60; experimentation with 58; methods of 76; national campaigns 60 – 61; as political theatre 66; see also non-violence Satyagraha in South Africa (Gandhi) 128 Savarkar, Vinayak D. 37 Sea Customs Act 130 Second World War 36, 81, 85; Britain’s raj and 68; India’s involvement in 59 secularism: as an attribute of just state 30; dichotomy 31; Gandhi’s contribution 25; Gandhi at odds with secularists 81 Shah, N. J. 130 – 131 Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee 112 Shraddhanand, Swami 4, 11, 43, 45, 87 Simla conference of June 1945 85 Sindhi refugees 105; distribution of 107 – 108; rehabilitation of 116 – 118 Singh, Bhagat 46 Singh, Gobind 39 Singh, Master Tara 50 Skaria, Ajay 136 – 138 Smuts, Jan 127 South Africa: apartheid 79 – 80; customs 127 – 133; India’s fight for legitimate rights 1, 21 – 22, 74; Gandhi living in 38 – 40; Gandhian influence 80, 119; incarceration of Indians 74; Nanda’s influence 139n1; non-violent resistance 75, 126; Punjabis in 41; Transvaal Government 72 – 74 Srikrishna Commission 109 – 110 state effect 109 – 110, 114 Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) 12 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 109 Suu Kyi, Aung Saan 75 Swadeshi movement see Bengal

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INDEX

swaraj (home rule) 15, 19, 43, 45, 59 – 61, 63, 86 – 87,  126 syadvada (qualified certainty) 29 Tagore, R. 20, 85, 88 – 89, 92 – 95 Tariffs at Work (Higginson) 131 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 8, 39 – 40 Tiwana, Khizr Hyat 47 tolerance 3, 16, 20, 28 – 30, 37 – 38, 62 – 63, 121n1 Transvaal Government, South Africa 18, 72 – 74 Treasure Island 133 Tribune, The 36 two nation theory 15 – 16, 50, 93 Tyabji, Abbas 40 Uberoi, J.P.S. 43 Unconditional Equality (Skaria) 136 Unionist Party 43, 46 – 47 United Provinces 19, 102, 104, 104

United States 76 Unto This Last (Ruskin) 126 untouchability 22, 42, 77, 79 Untouchables see Dalit; Harijan “Vaishnava Janato” 27, 90 Victorian holocausts 113 Viramgam customs cordon 127 – 131 Walesa, Lech 75 Watan 39 Wavell, Archibald 51, 69, 85 White Paper of 1950 107, 110 Witness to Partition (Nanda) 5, 99 Working Committee (INC) 49 – 50, 84, 90 – 93 World War I see First World War World War II see Second World War Young India 26, 45 yuga dharma 1, 17

148