Mahatma Gandhi, page 54
And now you are going. What shall we tell you that you do not have knowledge of; we are weak and we are frail and how many among us can live up to your truth, Father, how many, Bapu? Man is a beast of prey—he eats and he fornicates and he spits and he passes excreta in his backyard, and when he is angry he kills and gets killed. Forgive us if sometimes in our anger we argumentate hot with the whites, but we shall remember that such is not our way, such is not the way of our country, India—India of the sages, of Vishwamitra and Vasistha, of Sri Krishna and Sri Rama. We shall not forget what you told us, Bapu.
And how glad our hearts are that the City of Cape Town took you out in procession, yea, even here in Lanka, and that they spoke to you and swore to you, the white and the Coloured, the Chinese and the Indian, that they will work for the truth, and that they shall keep the tree of satyagraha growing like a large pipal tree. The larger it becomes the holier the shade, and mankind will build a platform around it, hang garlands to its trunk, put sandal and kumkum on its big face, and going round and round, worship the pipal tree with sacred thread, incense, tulasi-leaves and Ganges water. We shall worship the tree of satyagraha and it shall grow till its branches touch not only India and London, but all the wide, white world. Such your prayer, Bapu, and we shall honour it. And now as the ship that takes you away from us will shout and leave the African shores we prostrate before you and sing: Jaya Jaya Rama Rama, Victory to Sri Rama.
Auspicious the waters of the ocean will feel, father, and holy the earth wheresoever she will see you. May you live amongst us a hundred years.
Part Three
The Epilogue
The mohowa flower is red, rich and pulpy, loved by birds. And men. When the young monsoon rains swirl the forests into one active ocean of sounds, and the very trees begin, as it were, to cry and the animals run, turn and hide, as though the Goddess of the Hill were in commotion giving birth to a new calendar, a new kingdom, and suddenly, just as after prayers and worship, quietude settles into the sanctuary, the forest settles into a rain-pouring silence as if you could count the drops. Each flower of mohowa that’s fallen has, so to say, found its own place on the head or by the feet-jewels of the Goddess, for all the hill is the goddess herself, and little by little as streams form and run through the narrow lanes amidst trees, the flowers seek their own coincidences and rest. They rest thus, but the trees still drip rain, the animals slither through the trees leading their young, and sometimes even an old Santhal1 will walk on some mission to another hamlet, sheltered under his palm hat, going maybe towards his widowed sister-in-law or to the naming ceremony of his grandnephew. The Goddess is generous in her gifts, and the birds sometime slip between showers, and seek a flower for their young ones. It’s bad time for the young. Here and there an animal would have crushed a flower—a panther, a boar, a deer—and the flower yields blood-red juice. The deer will come and drink of it, for it intoxicates so—and the whole forest seems to be full of sound. Somewhere far away the drums beat and maybe worship is being done to the village divinity for it’s she who gave to us pouring rain.
Little groups of men and women, meanwhile, go from village to forest frontiers to seek the fallen flowers. They will gather it all, all, and when the time comes and it’s brewed, it yields a liquor that will shew the Goddess brighter. But while the rains stop, of course, the Santhal will go and gather the flowers, and bring them to you. For the tiger is friend to him and not to you. Sometimes on a quiet day when the mohowa is being gathered and nobody hears a sound, an old tiger will slip in and carry away a woman (but never a Santhal) and no shrieks and shouts will ever stop him from his prey. He has been hungry too long. And maybe it’s about here that in some past life, as the text says, the Buddha himself (still a Bodhisattva) gave himself to be eaten up by an old and tired tigress. ‘Wait,’ he said, did the Bodhisattva, ‘wait, and let me slip just a little higher, there, so that when your old teeth cut into the veins of my neck, blood will run straight down your gullet.’ Yes, it’s hereabouts too that among the Bihar hills the Buddha, later, had walked carrying his message of liberation from the bonds of the psycho-chemical components which we are, and once you are freed of those collocations, of course you are in Nirvana. Nirvana is where nothing is attained, for there is no one there to attain anything.
It’s hereabouts, once again, that Emperor Ashoka, after having conquered the confines of the Pathan-lands and even beyond up to Parthia and to the south and down as far as Mysore, he, the Emperor, having seen that horrible carnage—a hundred thousand killed in one battle, the battle of Kalinga—sick in sorrow, he, there and then stopped all war, and turned his total army into pilgrims of peace, forbade by edict the killing not only of men but even peacocks and deer, and sent emissaries of the good word to the fartherest Hellenic kings, to wit, to Ptolemy, Antigonus and Cyrus, so that soon Buddhists walked the streets of Alexandria, and the Buddha’s word honoured by the Mediterranean and on the other side through Persia it would reach China itself.
It’s also in this same Bihar that almost twenty-four centuries later the Mahatma came to talk of love to the indigo workers, who like the indentured workers in Africa, had become bond-slaves, so to say, of the white planters. It’s here in Champaran that he showed how the satyagraha he’d practised in Africa could be worked, and victory won through yagnya, sacrifice. It’s here again that he showed to the incredulous Indian that you must love the white rulers before you can fight them, and Gandhiji would go from officer to officer, test personally the verity of each particular incident, scrupulous as ever to every detail, and when the government saw the truth of this man, as in South Africa, the government had two views on the matter. The bureaucrat thought him a danger, the honest administrator took sides with him. But would the salvation of India be won this way? Many laughed and plotted and killed an Englishman in the Punjab, a police officer at Bombay, but Gandhiji would, with folded hands, say, brother, my brother this is not the great Indian way.—Pray, sir, what other way would be Indian?—To which the Mahatma would make answer: Do you want the true independence of the Indian people or do you want just a change of masters? Let us have swaraj—the rule of the Self and not self-rule. For the one leads to love and other to mighty greed. Either Indian independence is won through the way of love, or not at all.
In the middle of this forest of Ramgarh, then, came the Congress (1940). Every year the Indian National Congress built a temporary city for itself, just so as to take the congressmen straight to the people—and thus with festoons and fresh-cut roads, and bamboo huts, and elephants to draw the Congress President from wherever he or she alighted by train or car, a procession of almost a hundred thousand people would lead each year its new president to his august vocation. He would for that year be the voice of India; Nehru or Subhas Bose or Abul Kalam Azad, they were all the same—the Congress President would rule the politics of the country, but like the purohita to the king, Gandhiji would always be the high-priest. It was his voice that made India. ‘He is India.’2 It was his voice that people came to hear, his darshan, people in tens of thousands came for—by bullock cart and on foot, by train and bus and car and horse-carriage, they came, the peasant, the shop-keeper, the retired civil servant (when he was not afraid of the wrath of the masters), the industrialist, the intellectual, the barber, the Brahmin, and there were women and men volunteers too, who kept the whole town clean (sanitation was still one of the principal tenets of Gandhism) and Hindus and Muslims, and journalists from all over the world too, came to these annual sessions—and of course, spies. But what was there that the Congress could hide? Everything they said and did was known to the whole of Indian mankind. Gandhiji insisted on truth and Jawaharlal on gentlemanliness, that the British did not always understand—but they will. Give them time. They were now in a bad posture—the Second World War had come. In fact, even from the First World War they had understood little. They had promised Indian independence (in 1917) when they were in dire need of peace and help. And when the war was happily won by the allies, not self-rule but the massacre of innocents took its place. A British officer, Dyer, put his gun against a gunless crowd that had gathered in the name of Gandhiji, at Amritsar, and shot 377 men and woman and children and maybe more, but the records do not say it. He had just come back from the war, had General Dyer, and this was another aspect of the show, that was all. Many Britishers congratulated him on his quick suppression of sedition, but a few and some very important voices rose against this very un-English behaviour of his. (But the truth of the truth was, and never even whispered about, during this war Indian revolutionaries in California and Japan, in Afghanistan and in Mexico, had gathered tons on tons of gun and powder to blow up the British in India. But such the great secret of the Indians, the British knew it all—of the boat Kamagata Maru that was sailing down the Pacific from the shores of Ontario, and midway somewhere, the boat and its ammunition were seized—Britannia ruled the waves—and Britain would rule India come what may. Dyer’s massacre came as a reply to the hot-heads of the Kamagata Maru, and of such likes.) The supreme truth is that the might of the cannon can blow anything to pieces. Do you understand?
It was time therefore to start a satyagraha in India. The experiment in South Africa should prove even better here, this ‘the holy land where all acts work for good’, as the Puranas say. And wave after wave of satyagraha started, first the Swadeshi Movement, 1921-22, then the no-tax campaign of 1928, and finally the revolution of 1931-34 which almost brought the British Empire to a collapse. Yet Britain was not only able but noble and astute. Not only were the British imperialists but they tried hard to be gentlemen. Caught thus in their own dilemma, they were now fierce, now friendly, now calculating and now (at least in words) generous. The Labour Party in England was on the side of India, or so we thought. But when Hitler’s war came, India was declared a belligerent country, and no Indian consulted—India belonged to the British; they could do what they liked with her. British will rule, and the Labour Party will, now, rule India, with the others. Hitler was there, and later the Japanese—Hitlerism our principal enemy, so they argued, the British did. And Indian armies (mercenaries) went to fight with the British in Egypt, in the Middle-East. Whatever happens the road to India has to be kept free, otherwise there would be no empire. And like Napoleon, Hitler too wanted his route to India. Hitler believed Indians were not quite Aryans although, the swastika he wore came from the Indians, however he wore it the wrong side round—but he was not to be worried about such trifling historical inaccuracies. For him the Indians were to be pullers of water and hewers of wood (just as Kruger had thought) but the great Aryans, yellow this time, were to be the Japanese. Nehru was caught in a desperate dilemma—for he hated Hitler and the Japanese more than most of the upper-class British did, because of his Fabian views perhaps, but the British were now behaving here, in India, in their pure Teutonic manner. In fact, Smuts this time (as in the First World War, he was a member of the British Cabinet) sided with the Indians, not so Churchill. Roosevelt greatly admired the Indian nationalists, but war is war the British argued, there’s no morality about it. The Indian army was needed. Thus India had to be held slave.
High on the flag-flying platform, gaunt in his solitude, on this rain-washed morning, he stood, Gandhiji did, still in his girmico dress (but now stylised to a symbol, his knee-touching dhoti, his white and hard-wool shawl, his steel-rimmed glasses, his folded hands in worshipful obeisance to every man) and Nehru stood behind Gandhiji, and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the fiery and not violent Pathan chief, yet behind him, holding Nehru as an elder would a younger brother, and Sardar Patel, Gandhiji’s lieutenant, the man who did what he said and would not say what he did not mean, and Sarojini Naidu the poetess, who had left her gulmohurs and her maina birds for this extravaganza in political adventure—sharp in tongue and tender in action, and withal very intellectual—and the twenty thousand or thirty thousand or the fifty thousand men and women and children, hidden behind tree trunks, sheltered under arched branches, wet in clothes and dirty in their muddied looks and hair, the children held in arms or the young ones on men’s shoulders—the intellectuals with their glued-eyes and sharp fibered fingers, the communists, at that time still very angry with the British,3 the terrorists with side-looks and sharp quick gestures, short-haired, and all the whiteclad Congressmen, to whom this was at once a festival and a durbar—the annual tamasha—and a pilgrimage, where they saw their master and heard him, and he spoke to them and sometimes they made themselves heard (so that they could go back to their town, village, or city, in Mysore, in the Punjab, in Madras or Kumbakonam, and say, ‘I said this to Gandhiji, and this to the whole Congress in assembly!’) till sometimes Nehru pulled them with their shirt-tails or their stretched back and, fierce in his non-violent but dictatorial temper, yet before his master and himself, as a child, a prince, who’d be free till the father was there, and he could thus play all of his pranks till the day come when he too would have to stand up and affirm his truths, his biases and his diktats. To all there he turned in deep salutation, did Gandhiji, and then did he speak: Brothers, he seemed to say, this is an ancient land, and we walk today where the Buddha might have walked. Up there is the Ganges to whom the Saraju, Sri Rama’s Saraju, throws in her waters. And yet higher up is the Jumna where and on whose bank Sri Krishna, yes, the Yadava, from Dwaraka, he did come and give advice to Arjuna: Fight, for action is natural to man. Fight, but without your ego. The ego is made of the three modes of the self—the gunas—one essential, one active and one indolent, and beyond it the Self. Such his message, and such is what I have tried to live. Remember what Dharmaraja, that prince among the Pandavas did: He would never tell a lie even when he lost a kingdom. And Bhishma, who on his bed of arrows dying, spoke of the nobility of Truth. Yes, the Britishers have no understanding of us. As you know, the British and I have had a pact of friendship. I have loved in my time the British Empire and served it the best way I could. Now it’s all different, yet their distress must not be our opportunity. They are at war with Hitler. I say Hitler made this war. I also would like in my manner to help the British. But the British are so proud of themselves and of their possession, India, that we were all mortgaged to this war before we knew where we were. I say unto you, let us not harm them, yet let us not accept their arrogance. We must always be ready to be manly. Only the coward can be truly defeated. The courageous even in his death is a hero. And how much more so if one is non-violent, he the truest of true hero, the Mahavira.
I would have liked to have met Hitler personally. I wrote to him a long letter. The British would not forward it to him, but had I met him, I would have begged him on bended knees, Brother, don’t you see every man you kill is of divine essence? And what, in your short passage on this earth, would you get of all this carnage? Nothing but blood and cries of revenge—yet the British too, in their own way, talk the same Teutonic language when it suits them. Chamberlain will talk to Hitler because Hitler shows them his armaments. Chamberlain will not talk to us the same way—we have no cannons, machine guns, tanks. But we have, we in India, the best army in the world—the non-violent army. Nobody can defeat us even when they kill us. In satyagraha, I repeat, death is no defeat, Truth ever the victor. And with Truth is love. Not only should we practise love with the British, but also each one of us with his neighbour, whether he be a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Parsi or a Jew, and of course were the Japanese or French, Italian or American. And, we should not forget the Chinese, our neighbours, either.
Japan too has learnt all the evil methods of the West. She has now begun to conquer the Chinese whose culture had once conquered them. I would plead with the Japanese, as with the British. I would have written a letter to the Emperor Hirohito of Japan, but who will take it to him? Who will listen to me? I am a spent force, says Mr. Churchill. Perhaps I am. But India is not. So brothers, I say unto you all, let us spin that love between us, let us spin and weave such love that humanity be as of one substance made, one carpet for the tread of God. Perhaps, as some among you, the young, think I am a madman. But even the mad can sometimes speak the truth, you know. Maybe you will hear me, some of you will know, even one amongst you must know, what I say is true. I have always said, was there but one pure satyagrahi, victory is certain. After all, Sri Rama conquered Lanka and Sri Krishna the Kaurava hordes of hate. Brothers and sisters, let us worship the Truth. Shall we?
And yet, brother, as he began to talk, it was as if he were not speaking to you or to me or to anyone, or maybe to himself, and not even to himself but to his truth, to his God, and we who had been talking to one another, and each to the other, and each with himself to himself, our minds still caught in the memory of incident, in the memory of words (and looking at Jawaharlal and seeing his smile of comradeship and of spoilt child, and Abdul Ghaffar Khan who looked solemnly as if promising to the world, he it was the elder brother, and he would protect and subsume the whole world in good and bad for his younger brother, his Jawahar, and Patel standing still at a distance, solitary, with a look of one amused, as if to say: so you all think this is simple and it is not simple—and Rajagopalachari, wise, shrewd, cynical and sure, stood too white and unconvincing but there—and the communists in front crying gently to whisper, to heckle, Oh, never so loud, but just a cough or a slogan here and there, and yet now here, now there again saying, Oh, let’s get the British out and so on, and the Congressmen so filled with their pure-white innocence and importance, they felt they each knew and possessed their Gandhiji)—and amidst all these like the first notes of a raga, like the alaap, it began, the talk of Gandhiji, almost inaudible because of the screech of parrots and jays and the variegated cry of children, and even with the sound of women talking somewhere far away, and the sound of cooking vessels ever farther and beyond under the trees—but as the music moved from note to deeper note there was, as it were, a seeping of a drip-drop silence into the atmosphere—did anyone speak, if not who heard it all? Nobody heard it, so Nobody spoke, the air and the world seemed to say, and yet there was just this voice, one melody that without rising or falling, went on playing to itself, and we too, each of us, yes, even the communists, felt there was something happening to oneself, one was not listening to a speech or even to any sound, one was listening to sound itself, so to say thus, there was no listener—who was where, and what did we hear, and did we hear anything at all?—Yes, the British are there and they are in difficulty—one seemed to hear, and then a great white blank that seemed to hear and yet not hear. All was, as it were, set to one single note and each one heard his Gandhiji, and there was no one else than oneself, except for that high flag-staff and the spinning wheel, and then as time went and the sun came hot and even Nehru stood as though he too could neither stand nor think, but stare into himself—we were all staring into ourself—and when Gandhiji stopped it was as if we were suddenly awakened to a collateral world, and the bells (of the bulls) began to ring, and the children cried, and the men shouted to women, and Patel said something, and Nehru waved his hand at someone, and the Congress flag flew high, high, and the important people began to feel important (that is, those who stayed in the leader’s quarters) and Rajagopalachari and Patel all came down the dais, and walked back through the woods and passed the handicraft exhibits, and by bookshop displays, cottages, worshipping crowds, and round and around the Ashoka Pillar, to the Congress meetings where, of course, they all spoke in Hindi, chaste, hesitant or bastard, and some even in English, and Gandhiji listened to it all, spinning and spinning away. It was as though he were saying: Don’t you see action is more important than brave words? And they who thought they’d get the British out of the country the most vociferous. Gandhiji hardly ever spoke, but Nehru dramatised himself to extravagant idioms and positions, using high-flown Urdu, then elementary Hindi, and altogether mingled with many well-spoken English words like democracy, fascism, British Empire, cannons, tanks, aeroplanes, Viceroy: no, he would not hurt the English, of course, but he would not want the British to be British, and so on—Nehru never talked straight, it was as though he wanted you and he to think together on anything, and so often he never finished a sentence, but when the time came and he did give a smile, it was as though India could be adorned with just such a princely look—he would never let us down, whatever came, and he would fight the British. And that night, and the night after, when the voices of the speakers and the volunteers had become hoarse with misuse, the rains had been swept away by fierce kind winds, and each one was thinking of his train and his family, while Subhas Bose on the other side of this Congress ground, held his own angry Congress, and there they made mighty brave speeches about driving the British out and so on till finally they all went, too, went back to Calcutta, and thence in the middle of the night, of one night, did Subhas leave India, a Muslim fakir on pilgrimage and he reached, did he, through Afghanistan and other friendly countries like Russia to Hitler’s Germany, where indeed Hitler promised him many great things, and Subhas’ voice could now be heard from Berlin, on the radio, and then came the Japanese, and Subhas went to the Japanese, and he would build up a whole army to liberate India.
