This Fellow Gandhi Again!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 168, 11 September 1942, Page 6

This Fellow Gandhi Again!

SINCE our article on Gandhi appeared a fortnight ago we have had several inquiries from correspondents for more information about him. Here is an attempt, necessarily sketchy, to meet that demand, with Gandhi's own biography, edited by the Rev. C. F. Andrews and published by Allen and Unwin, supplying most of the material.

OHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI is the son of the Prime Minister of an Indian State, the nephew of another, and the grandson of a third. The family, however, was ‘not a rich one, nora particularly learned ‘one either, and Gandhi himself confesses ‘that he was only a "mediocre student" and learnt nothing from his early schooling except "how to abuse his teacher." At the age of 13 he was married-not merely betrothed, he points out. It appears that he was actually betrothed by his parents three times, the first two of his intended brides having died as children. The third betrothal took place when he was seven, though he had no recolléction of it himseff. Of his wedding at the age of 13 he writes, "I do not think it meant more to me then than the prospect of good clothes to wear, drum beating, marriage processions, rich dinners, and a strange girl to play with," but his experience made him in later

life a strong opponent of the Hindu custom of child-marriage. Actually it was successful in his own case; he must have been a very difficult husband, but his wife has stayed with him, nursing him in his illnesses, even sometimes sharing his imprisonments. After marriage, Gandhi continued at school. He was painfully shy, introspective, and he disliked organised sports, though he has always been fond of walking. One of his educational theories, taken from his account of his early life, is worth quoting: "Children should first be taught the art of drawing before learning how to write. Let the child learn his letters by observation just as he draws different objects, such as flowers and birds. He will then write a beautifully formed hand" Gandhi himself never did. From an early age Gandhi took an interest in all branches of religious faith -and tolerated them all except Christianity! What caused him to develop a sort of dislike of Christianity was, he says, the habit of some Christian missionaries in India of pouring scorn on all other faiths. Later he came to revise his views but it was the New Testament, and particularly the Sermon on the Mount, that impressed him. The Old Testament, he confesses, sent him to sleep! Passage To England GANDHIS father «died when he was 16. The elders of his family decided to send him to England to study law, but the decision was strongly opposed by one section of his caste. In fact, he became a partial outcast as a result, and remains so to this day. ‘Those who remember the Gandhi who insisted on wearing a loin cloth at formal gatherings on a later visit to England might have been even more surprised if they had seen the young Hindu law student who stepped from the boat at

Southampton on his first visit. He had worn his black suit on the boat to save his best clothes, and disembarked into an English winter clad in immaculate white flannels! In London he had trouble at first over his vegetarian diet and must have been a constant source of worry to his landladies. For a while he set out to be a young man of culture, taking dancing, ,elocution, and violin lessons. Then he gave up trying to be a social figure and lived in London on 17/- a week, First Visit To South Africa FTER passing his law examinations and becoming a member of the English Bar, Gandhi returned to India, still a very young man, still more interested in "food reform" than almost anything else. As a lawyer he was not very successful and when he got on the wrong side of a British Political Agent (it was partly his own fault, he confesses) he realised that his chances of ever making a place in his profession in India were slight. So he accepted an offer to go to South Africa on legal business for a Moslem firm. He reached Durban in May, 1893. He had been in South Africa only about two days when he encountered race prejudice against the Indians. Because he was a Hindu he was ordered to remove his turban in a courthouse; he was not allowed to travel first-class by train; he was assaulted by a coachman; he could not secure accommodation at hotels, and when at last he did he was not at first allowed to eat with the other guests; he had to»secure a special pass to go out after 9 p.m.; and he was kicked off the footpath outside President Kruger’s house. These experiences led him to take up the cause of the Indians in South Africa. At Pretoria he made the first public speech of his life, urging the Indians to improve their own ways, and especially their sanitary conditions, and suggesting the formation of an Indian association to protect their interests. Then, with his law suit satisfactorily settled, he returned to India in 1896, War, Plague, Rebellion UT he soon went back to South Africa at the request of the Indian community, to lead their agitation against a £3 poll tax on indentured labourers who wished to remain in South Africa. But by this time Gandhi’s work and his speeches were getting into the press. The Europeans in South Africa were aroused against him, and when he landed again in Durban he was attacked by a mob and was only rescued from it by the wife of the Police Superintendent, and later from lynching, by the cool wits of the Superintendent. When the trouble died down Gandhi refused to take legal action against his assailants. "This is a religious question with me," he said. (Continued on next page)

THE MAHATMA’S OWN STORY,

(Continued from previous page) When the Boer War broke out Gandhi organised an Indian Ambulance Corps on the British side which saw a good deal of active service, and was mentioned in General Buller’s despatches. After the Boer War he had for a while a large legal practice in Johannesburg, and in 1904 he launched the paper Indian Opinion which later, under the influence of Ruskin’s book Unto This Last, he decided to operate from a community farm. In Johannesburg he organised the Indian community to fight and beat an outbreak of the black plague, and during a Zulu rebellion in Natal he again led an Indian Ambulance Corps. About this time Gandhi’s ideas on strict sexual continence began to crystallise; also his famous technique of Satyagraha or "non-violence." His name for it, Satya@raha (Sat-truth; Agraha-firmness) was coined as the result of a competition in his own newspaper. Settlement With General Smuts HE first major opportunity for putting this technique into practice arose when, to the issue of the £3 poll tax on Indians, was added a decision in 1913 that marriages by Indians in South Africa were not considered legal unless celebrated according to Christian rites and registered by the Registrar of Martiages. In protest, a number of Indian women (including Mrs. Gandhi) courted atrest and imprisonment; Indian miners went on strike, and Gandhi led a march of about 6,000 " passive resisters" from Natal to the Transvaal. Gandhi and many of the others were arrested and sent to gaol, But when the South African Government became embarrassed at the same time by a strike’of European railway employees, Gandhi refused to embarrass it further and held aloof. Conditions thus became favourable for a settlement of the Indian dispute with General Smuts. The General himself has said that Gandhi is the only man who has ever beaten him.

Then Gandhi went to London, arriving just as the Great War broke out. He urged Indians to volunteer; but because of an attack of pleurisy was himself forced to return to India. Civil Disobedience In India JN 1917 the struggle which Gandhi had launched in 1894 against indentured immigration from India ended with the abolition of the system by the British Government. But in that year occurred the first direct case of civil disobedience in India, when Gandhi made an issue with the Government of India over the condition of the Indian peasantry in the Champaran district. Gandhi was convicted of an offence, but the Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, ordered the charge against him to be withdrawn and he continued with his inquiry into the condition of the peasantry. About this time, Gandhi engaged in recruiting speeches to persuade Indians to support the British Government’s war effort, About this time also he almost died of dysentery. Hardly had he recovered when he started mass civil disobedience (the Great War was then over) against the

Rowlatt Act. It started with a general hartal (a closing of all shops and places of business as a sign of mourning) but violence developed, and Gandhi called off the campaign, condemned his violent followers, and himself went on a penitential fast, in admission of his own grave mistake-his " Himalayan miscalculation" he called it-of launching non-violent resistance on a large scale before his people were, as he said, properly trained and disciplined for it. By 1920 Gandhi had launched another type of campaign, this time of nonviolent non-co-operation, involving in its programme a boycott of imported and mill-manufactured cloth and, bound up with this, the development of the Khadi or hand-spinning movement, one of Gandhi’s favourite hobby horses. Gandhi’s own story, as told in his autobiography, ends at this point. Since then his career has become increasingly bound up with the rise of the Indian Congress Party, with him leading the party at one time, at another time at odds with its policy, and with the figure of Jawaharlal Nehru coming more and more into the picture. But by 1921, the year at which Gandhi’s autobiography closes, the pattern of his life was well formed, with his prejudices and principles crystallised, and with his title of Mahatma ("The Great Soul") already bestowed, and with his technique of Satyagraha already well-developed, and tested in action, The remaining chapters, with their record of civil disobedience (sometimes undertaken en masse, sometimes singly) of periods in prison and out of it, of fasts, penances, conferences, and attempts to solve the problems of Hindu " untouchability " and Hindu-Moslem disunity, and to gain Swaraj (self-government) for India, add little to the story already told here.

A "Crank" About Food ANDHI cheerfully acknowledges himself to be a crank. But some of his ideas-about fasting and diet restriction for example — seem to have been inherited. He records that his mother was a deeply religious woman who was constantly observing fasts. Once she vowed not to take food without first seeing the sun; and since this happened in the rainy season, when the sun often fails to appear for day after day, she missed many meals. Meat-eating is abhorrent to pious Hindus, but as a boy Gandhi once tasted the forbidden dish because he had been persuaded by a friend that it was meat that made the British strong enough to rule India; unless the Indians also took to eating meat they would never be able to "free India from ,the foreign yoke." But Gandhi’s first meal of meat made him physically sick; in addition he was overcome with remorse at having violated the code of his-parents and ancestors. He decided that some other way must be found to free India. Since then he has never tasted meat -nor cow’s milk either, though once, during a very severe attack of dysentery which brought him to death’s door, he broke his vow to the extent of. accepting goat’s milk. He suffered pangs of conscience as a result-but recovered from the dysent He is now 73, and insists that whatever else they have done for him his fasts have lengthened his life