Mahatma Gandhi, page 45
Freight balance yesterday 0.0.9.
Stamps 0.2.6.
25 March
Sorabji left—I went to town on foot. Started at 3 and reached J.B. at 9-15.
1 April
Letters. Winterbottom, Maud, Mr. MacDonald, West, Langston, Halim—K. arrived—A boy—Feda came for the night. Ratanshi and Rajabali left.
4 April
Went to Johannesburg on foot and returned, K and I with Sorabji . . . Reached office at 8-50.
7 April
Mr. Phillip’s choir came. Ritch, Gordon and many others came . . . About 200 persons came etc. etc.
11 April
Both went to town on foot—West etc. came yesterday accompanied to Farm today.
18 April
Jamnadas and I left at six o’clock on foot. K. took 4-45 hours to reach J. and I six hours. etc. etc.
29 April
. . . Arrived at Farm at 6-20 a.m. along with the boys. K met us with the boys and turned back. Albert broke fifteen days old fast.
1 May
K and I went to J.B. on foot, starting at 1-40 a.m. and from there to Germiston. K went to Pretoria. Krishnaswamy came. Ba ill.
2 May
Went to town with K in the morning on foot. Took 5 hours—40 minutes.
28 June
Ba and I left for Durban.
Tickets to Dur(ban) 6.6.8.
Schlesin 0.3.0.
29 June
Arrived in Durban. Considerable inconvenience on the way. A good many people had come to the station. Meeting of Ottoman Cricket Club in the evening. Jamnadas and the two of us went to Phoenix by train.
30 June
Jamnadas and I left Phoenix on foot . . . Congress meeting in the evening . . . Problem of Colonial born (Indians). Night at Omar Sheth’s.
5 July
I and Purushothamdas left for Durban by the afternoon train. Left for J.B. in the evening.
Rail, phone, cycle 0.6.0
19 July
Three persons came and went back. Cold continues. Sorabji came in the evening. Telegram from the Interior that settlement stood. 25
And so on. Then Gokhale comes, receptions are held in Cape Town, Maritzburg and New Castle. Gokhale is to sail back and Gandhiji and Kallenbach accompany him as far as Zanzibar. One item simply says: ‘24 November At sea.’ Then they reach Mozambique, from Dar-es-salaam—and there’s the unhappy experience at Telia Bay (‘Interrogation by the police.’); and Gandhiji arrives back at the Tolstoy Farm for the baptism of Burnett’s son. And finally the important entry on 1 December—Wore Indian Dress’—for till now in South Africa he wore only western clothes.
It was all a quiet patient awaiting, the moving here and there and all about and around, only necessitated by urgent demands from one member, then the other, Johannesburg and Durban, Tolstoy Farm or Phoenix. During these days Gandhiji prepared himself for what he knew was coming, sent those away to their homes who were uncertain, or tired, and knew that this time if and when he would strike, it would be an all-out war, although it would still be a pilgrim’s war. 26
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Returning from Zanzibar, Gandhiji had to rush to Phoenix where an inmate was ill. Whenever anyone was ill, Gandhiji enjoyed the privilege of nursing. Was it because for him death and life were so close and in the mystery of death, he saw the prognosis of life (‘There is no life except through death.’)—the ultimate meaning of truth. Or was it his great need for giving tenderness—he received so little of it himself. Frail and so sensitive that speech came with difficulty, he had to live and move with a humanity in hurry, living in confusion and mythical values, and never caring for the other except in an instinctive, an awkward, way. Indians, of course, had love in them, but how undependable they were. What foul food they usually ate, how callous where they lived or how. And it was during this recess between the passing of the Provisional Settlement and the opening of the new Parliament (while ‘waiting on God’) that Gandhiji sorted out his problems, planned for the future, and wrote on how to keep well. He wrote a series of articles for Indian Opinion (which later became the book Guide to Health) where he meditates on the human body and its needs. He tells his readers that the universe is made of the five elements—earth, water, sky, fire and air, and says how the body, an image of the universe, has all of them and in the right proportions. A regulated diet would in fact keep the body as fit as a machine—the body, for example, has 238 bones, etc., etc. Indeed, if he admired the machine this was because it appeared to be such a symbolic replica of the human body—but without a soul. So what could you not do if only you could add a soul to it. You can attain the quietude of mind, which finally is what we all seek.
For Gandhiji illness seemed almost always mental. He could quote authorities from the West to show this was a scientific fact. Therefore to keep your mind fair is to keep your body strong. But since it’s the body that seems to house the mind (at least so it seems) why not give the body just what it wants, and the mind thus made free for whatever it may have to perform?
What then are the requisites of such an attitude towards good health? First of all, remember, what you eat makes your mind think what it thinks. Has not Milton said heaven and hell are but shades in the mind of man? And the Indians have said: The mind is the cause of bondage (hell) and liberation. Thus if you follow this argument you will realise ‘whether a person is ill or well, he is himself for the most part responsible’. One falls ill owing to one’s thoughts as well as to one’s deeds. And is it not a shame we reflect so little upon the relationship between the body and the mind? And whenever anything bodily happens we rush to a doctor—whether I am hurt by a thorn or bitten by a snake. To say man cannot understand these matters by himself, for himself, is ‘fraud’ pure and simple. Just as we accumulate filth outside our houses, we pile filth on filth inside us, fall desperately ill, and medicine only consolidates this filth, giving you mere appearance of well-being.
The first problem of health is one of having good, clean air. ‘Bad air is the cause of ninety per cent of the diseases.’ And air is not only inhaled through the nose but taken in through the skin as well. The pores are made just for that purpose. ‘Latrines, open spaces, narrow lanes (dirtied through misuse) and urinals, where these are separate, are the principal agencies for the defilement of air.’ Then again—we Indians do not care where we spit—we should, if need be, keep a spittoon. Further, our people do not mind throwing refuse anywhere—if only this could be thrown into the earth, the garbage becomes pure rich manure; it also keeps us away from every disease.
Further, one must not only learn to breathe fresh air but not to breathe through the mouth. This is not good for one’s health. The rooms where we sleep must also be full of fresh air—if possible, one should sleep in the open. ‘It is imperative that we inhale pure air for as long as possible, especially while sleeping.’ And light, remember, is just as important as air—hence hell is called dark.
If air is food, water is food as well. One can, as everyone knows, live on water for a long time and without food. In actual fact, water is seventy per cent of our body—and if we had no water in us we would weigh only ten or twelve pounds. But what is good water? Rain water alone is pure water—all the rest are more or less defective but in degrees. Hard water should be boiled before drinking. Also, most water contains salts, and vegetable matter, etc. Finally, one could go as far as to say, water is unnecessary for drinking—for most vegetables contain water anyway. Also, if anybody is inordinately thirsty one could be sure something is wrong with him.
Now let us come to food. Let us best get over the idea of what we should not eat before we decide what we should eat. Of course, nobody needs to be told that alcohol is bad and smoking as well.
Tolstoy has shown, in one of his stories, how a man wanted to kill his beloved (so jealous he was of her) but couldn’t decide on it, so he went to have a smoke, came back, and finally killed her. Apart from these evil effects on the mind, smoking weakens your lungs, corrupts your digestive system. Even tea and coffee are to be avoided—they also are poisons—which explains why in one of his letters Gandhiji notes with joy: ‘Ba has given up tea today.’ If you are so keen on coffee, you could make wheaten coffee drunk by all with such eagerness at the Tolstoy Farm—and if you are too lazy to roast and grind your own wheat, you have just to write to the manager of the Tolstoy Farm, and he will send it straight to you for just 9d. 27
As to what we can eat—it may be said in general that humanity on the whole is vegetarian, not because it is convinced of its virtue but because of necessity; not only people in India, but in China and Japan, Ireland and Italy too, they mostly practise vegetarian diet. And again: ‘The structure of the body would seem to indicate that Nature intended man to be a vegetarian.’ If we resemble the apes, we must also eat like them. And they live on fresh and dry fruit. Whereas the very stomach of the lion and the tiger is made differently to ours and that of the ape.
Now chemists have found that the fruit contains ‘all the elements necessary for human life’. Fruits such as bananas, oranges, dates, figs, pineapples, almonds, walnuts, peanuts, and coconut. Just as animals, say the scientists, can live on sun-ripened food, so could man. Cooking is totally unnecessary. Suppose we accept this to be true, how much of our time would be saved, and how wonderful it would be for our women not to blow the pipe and wash the sink, but to read and cultivate themselves. 28 Does it all look like a dream? Perhaps it does. But then one can and should live one’s dreams. That is what man is made for.
There was a very wise German called Just. He had written a book (Return to Nature) which showed fruit to be the natural diet of man. And, further, all you need is grown about and around you. And if you cannot eat only vegetables, you could of course eat cereals, pulses, beans, milk, etc. Wheat is the best grain of all. ‘It contains all the nutritive elements in good proportions.’ But the flour must be ground at home, of course. Then come the vegetables—they are really like grass and should be eaten with care. And pulses, though as good as meat, no doubt, are difficult to digest. ‘Those however, who cannot master their palate may eat them but with care.’
It goes without saying that chillies and spices of all sorts should be avoided. True they give taste to your food but they also vitiate your well-being. And so does, believe me, salt. There are even doctors who say salt is a poison, and if you do not eat salt even a snake bite has no effect on you, such medical testimony. Having given up salt himself, Gandhiji says he felt less lethargic. Kasturba who was ill and gave up salt for sometime felt so much better. ‘I am confident too that had the patient been able to give up salt completely, her malady would have been entirely eradicated.’
Some people think milk is good. This is dire superstition. For what the cow eats is as important as what she makes of it. Further, even a calf gives up milk when it has grown into a heifer, why not we? Olive oil, for example, could be a magnificent substitute for milk.
And now let us consider that important question: how much one should eat? People most often eat three or four times a day. This is unnecessary and makes the stomach into a refuse pit. When one has grown up, two meals a day suffice.
Not only food is important for health but also exercise. If possible everyone should be a farmer. And if you cannot, you should take to long walks—ten to twelve miles a day—so that you exert every day as much as a farmer does. Has not Thoreau, the American writer, said that ‘the writings of one who refuses to leave his house on the excuse of lack of time’, are bound to be anaemic. Speaking of his own experiences, he (Thoreau) says that when he wrote his best books, he was doing his longest walking. ‘Unless one exercises one’s body, one’s intellect will be dull. And walks are also good because we see the beauty of Nature.’
What should one wear? The simplest of clothes, the barest possible, for the body needs air. The body also is beautiful.
There should be very little hair on the head: ‘Dust, dirt and lice collect in long hair.’ And as for the feet, use not shoes if possible; they smell bad. Sandals are best for outside use; they are also cheap. If you want sandals, write to us at Phoenix; we make them and we will send them to you.
And in a letter written to Gokhale (immediately after these articles were completed), Gandhiji is solicitous of the great leader’s health. Gokhale was in England at that time. Had he found time to visit Just’s dietetic institute at Jungbor, he asks, or Dr. Kuhne’s nature cure centre? ‘I should,’ writes Gandhiji, ‘much appreciate a line about your health and the treatment you may be undergoing.’ If only the master could eat fruit, he would live long, and give India the leadership she needs.
* * *
Sure as Gandhiji’s instinct was—after all God had written the score as it were—and while his ‘inner voice’ felt what the next ordained movement was to be, General Smuts (as in the Boer War) made simple, heroic and ambivalent gestures, led as much by reason as by his puritanical instinct, so that he went from one dud act to the other, saved only by his patriotism, his moral courage, and, finally, his vast humanity. He was indeed never to be a great statesman, but a divided and a noble figure, the politician becoming stage by stage an elder, and a philosopher. With Gandhiji it was otherwise. Politics was only one mode in his diverse making—in actual fact he would have liked to give himself wholly to God, but the world too, he slowly realised, was made by God and meant to be the play of God. If we listened to Him carefully as we would a tree, a mountain, a man, we would play only His game, and He surely knows where He is leading us. But Smuts dealt with men when he dealt with politics, and with God when he spoke of the Deity—he had no intermediary instincts linking one with the other. Whereas with Gandhiji, layer behind layer of philosophical, nay metaphysical, solutions to a moral problem, or a moral escape from a metaphysical dilemma, had built itself up through millennia of tradition, and even when he did not know he felt and acted with his total being, and thus led his people to final victory. The dualism in Smuts created, so to say, its own complex universes, its focal contradictions, reminding one of his compatriot Van der Post and his Venture to the Interior.
Here was a silent young Colonel who was none other than Van der Post himself—and this (soon after the Second World War, that is after Abbyssinia and Burma, and the Japanese prisoner of war camp in Java) who was asked by Whitehall to go on a secret mission to Southern Africa—his home which he knows as himself. As he leaves London, a dualism appeared, a contradiction between what he was and what he had to perform. He went through flag-flying British outposts of deputy commissioners and commissioners, isolated, efficient, imperial—slipping through dawn and dusk to higher and yet higher reaches of the land (‘The physical fact of Africa is by far the most exciting and interesting thing about it. The tragedy is that it has not as yet produced the people and the towns worthy of its greatness.’)—jeeping through uneven and endurant roads, streets, footpaths, circling and marching through mists, rocks, dark silent cedars, finally reaching the heights of the Mlanje, dipped in wetness and wizardry. There he discovers a young, a happy couple, Vel and Dick Vance, living in perfect bliss if ever there was bliss (‘I had never seen two human beings more complementary, more sufficient unto themselves than these two.’) perched in a cabin with their new-born, Penelope, ‘crystal clear streams’ flowing about and around them. But the mountain should have been left alone. Man should never have interfered with these mountains. No, not for his own material betterment. 29 The mountain, the couple knew, was alive with breath and magic and myth; it was, as it were, a god who spoke, the tutelary deity of the English couple, and high protector of their child. No sickness or leopard would touch them. The Vances wanted no human being there either.
But when the mystery was being penetrated into, through pick-axe and jeep and camp and compass, the spirits were awakened: a fight among the gods (devas) and the anti-gods (asuras) took place. It was a frightful battle and dreadful to feel, under one’s feet, in the air, so to say—to feel beyond coming knowledge. After nine days of living in derelict cabins and tents, and probing the depths of nature, the vastness and intents of the mountain and the trees, Dick Vance, trying to take Van der Post and his companions across an easy and seemingly crossable stream, simply, inevitably Dick slipped from his roped vines, and was carried away into the eddyings of waterfall sounds and spirits of unsteady silences, his body never to be found again. The young Colonel Van der Post had to convey the message of this mysterious and tragic happening to the wife, who knowing as she did the mountain, also knew the mountain’s laws. The mountain had taken Dick to itself. And she had to go back to London with her child, Penelope. Who created the tragedy? asks Van der Post. He did it himself; his duality did it. Everywhere he stepped was a duality, a contradiction and thus the Garden of Eden—the ‘Whole’ of Smuts—was not destroyed, but Smuts’ politics was carried away. Who remained: the hill.
Such the dream that unfolds itself again and again in South Africa—not only with the Indian but with the Boer, the Coloured, the Kaffir. Africa would accept nothing less than its total self, the African Self. There’s an African way as there’s an Indian way, a great, young African way. Who dare disturb the growing mountain, the unique man and woman and holy child, the thumping and as yet unhumanised waterfall, the smell of rising cedar, itself covered with mist and total sleep? The African knows his earth, the Indian worships his, while the Westerner turns on himself unable to move or stay his humanity having no choice but separate the Greek from the Christian, the sage-hero from the sainted-worker, dividing singleness from the crowd. He alone could be (one day) the all, but the all-seeker—the fervent failure of dualised man. Do you seek wholeness of man or wholeness of Truth? such the question of history. He who knows the proper answer has to play his game outside of time. Hence satyagraha. Or, there’s the apartheid. 30 The answer is always a return of the forest echo. One goes nowhere when one knows the hill. One could of course go about the hill, but do not delve into her mysteries: you’ll be carried away by the arcane stream, and be made into the roots of cedar. Penelope now goes to London. The cedars will continue to stand swathed in garlands of vine and moss.
