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GANDHI TRAVELLED TO London on the SS Rajputana on 29 August 1931, taking with him Mirabehn, Mahadev Desai, Pyarelal and his son Devdas. He was the sole Congress representative as well as having plenipotentiary powers to make decisions over last-minute proposals. Sarojini Naidu travelled with them as a delegate representing Indian women; G.D. Birla went representing the business community. Gandhi travelled second-class but spent most of his time on deck, dictating letters and holding court to those who were interested in seeing him.

He had been uncertain whether to go at all, in the absence of a settlement of Hindu-Muslim differences and because of non-observance of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, but he eventually succumbed to divine guidance. ‘My faith is in God,’ he said, via Associated Press. ‘He seems to have made my way clear for me to go to London. Therefore I expect He will use me as His instrument for the service of humanity.’¹ Asked by the press if he were going to take advisers he replied: ‘My adviser is God. If I had any idea to take advisers I would have taken them as delegates.’²

An American preacher, John Haynes Holmes, described Gandhi at this time:

He has a shaven head, protruding ears, thick lips, and a mouth that is minus many of its teeth. But his dark complexion is richly beautiful against the white background of his shawl, his eyes shine like candles in the night, and all over is the radiance of a smile like sunshine on a morning landscape. What impresses you is not the physical appearance but the spiritual presence of this man. You think at once of his simplicity, his sincerity, his innocence. He approaches you with all the naturalness and spontaneity of a little child.³

There had been much discussion in India as to what Gandhi would wear in the notoriously bad English climate; for him it was a test of what he had become, and he was unhesitating. He went as a representative of ‘the semi-starved, almost naked villager’ and as such would wear only his loincloth: ‘My loin cloth is an organic evolution in my life. It came naturally, without effort, without premeditation;’ he determined ‘to add nothing more to the loin cloth than the climate peremptorily demands.’⁴

It was raining when he disembarked at Folkestone; he was first taken to the Quaker headquarters, the Friends’ Meeting House, where he was welcomed by a crowd led by the socialist writer Laurence Housman. The composition of this welcoming committee showed where support for Gandhi lay in England: in the churches, in the women’s organisations and with the political left as represented by trade unions and the Labour Party whose stalwart Fenner Brockway was present that day.

Gandhi went on to Kingsley Hall, a mission to the poor in the East End of London, where he was a guest of Muriel Lester, a pacifist and prohibitionist who had visited him at the Sabarmati Ashram. He had been invited to stay in grand places in the fashionable West End but made a point of saying he wanted to live among his own people, the poor. “There is no surplus furniture to be found in all the settlement,’ he reported excitedly, ‘the inmates occupy tiny rooms called cells.’⁵

Gandhi had a cell leading from an open terrace. It was five feet wide and seven or eight feet long with bare walls, furnished only with a table, a chair and a thin pallet on the floor. He established a regime: at three he was woken for prayer, then took a rapid walk through the streets, followed by breakfast, a meeting with his secretaries and interviews. At ten o clock he would take a car to the conference, ‘followed by panting detectives, and some of his staff clutching the famous spinning wheel and the green rush basket containing his food,’ as an observer put it.⁶ At seven o’clock he conducted his evening prayers, then interviews and conferences lasted into the night. His stamina was remarkable but his busy schedule may have prevented him from getting the best out of the conference; he was often seen to be listening quietly to debates with his eyes closed, perhaps asleep.

The mission was besieged by well-wishers, the curious and journalists. American interest in Gandhi was shown by a half-hour broadcast on CBS in which he promoted his ideal of a bloodless revolution for Indian liberty. He already had a fascinated following in the US; Time magazine had made ‘Saint Gandhi’ 1930s ‘man of the year.’ He met one of the other instantly recognisable world icons, Charlie Chaplin. Gandhi had been unwilling to see Chaplin, as he said he did not have any interest in actors and had never seen a film, but on being told of Chaplin’s childhood poverty he did meet him. He also met Lloyd George and gave a talk to his old friends of the Vegetarian Society.

His great pleasure in London was visiting the homes of the poor. Muriel Lester described how, followed by a large crowd as he usually was, he decided to visit families in a neighbouring street:

In and out of the houses he went on both sides of the street. The women were inordinately proud. They had had no idea he was coming; some were at their ironing, some cleaning, but all were ready to display every corner of their little domain for him to inspect, and ask about and to admire. He wanted to know what work the men round about did, the rent of the houses, the work of the sanitary authorities so far as drains and cleanliness were concerned, what provision was made for the care of the family during unemployment... They showed him their pets, their rabbits and their chickens; occasionally there was a piano to be proud of, and always it was obvious how the best was being made of everything and how anything that possessed any sort of beauty was cherished.⁷

Sometimes irreverent East End children would shout after him: ‘Gandhi, where’s your trousers?’

His wit endeared him to a public used to strait-laced politicians and gave the world the typical Gandhi anecdotes that have been endlessly repeated. Asked what he thought of Western civilisation, he replied that he thought it would be a good thing. When asked, after meeting the king, whether he thought himself underdressed, he explained that ‘the king had enough on for both of us.’

At the request of Charles Andrews he visited Lancashire mill towns, where he met workers who had been hit hard, at a time of economic depression and high unemployment, by the swadeshi policy of resisting foreign cloth. He described the living standard of the poor in India—far worse than that of the poor in England, he asserted—and explained how he was attempting to revivify the cottage industries in his own country. At one moment, captured on film, he was surrounded by the mainly women mill-hands who put their arms around him and cheered him. He also spoke to people in the great institutions of empire: boys at Eton and scholars at Oxford and Cambridge. One of the dons at Oxford, the missionary and historian Edward Thompson, remarked: ‘Not since Socrates has the world seen his equal for absolute self-control and composure,’ but he was quite able to understand, he added, why the Athenians had made Socrates drink hemlock.⁸

Life at Kingsley Hall may have been more congenial to Gandhi but it was inconvenient for a conference that was being held eight miles away. So Andrews and Harry Polak, who were managing his affairs in London, rented 88 Knightsbridge, where Gandhi’s staff stayed and which he used as an office.

As they prepared for the voyage to London, the political scene in Britain had been changing. On 24 August the Labour government had been replaced by a Conservative-dominated coalition, though with Ramsay MacDonald still prime minister. It was generally the case that nationalists in India had best look to the Liberals or Labour for boons, but party policies were converging in the 1930s on the need for constitutional reform, and the process that resulted in the Government of India Act of 1935 was conducted in a parliament with a large Conservative majority. British parliamentarians had their own timetable; the reform of Indian political institutions continued almost despite the nationalists who, after all, were not asking for better government under the British. When Gandhi arrived at the conference it was obvious why he had been in two minds as to whether to go: sitting with sixty-eight other representatives from British India, twenty-three from the princely states and twenty from the UK, he was just one voice among many. His claim to represent the whole of India was regarded with disdain by those who felt he represented only his own idiosyncratic viewpoint. His decision to attend alone and not take up the other Congress places had been splendid from the point of view of what would later be called public relations: all media attention was focused on him. But in the conference hall it left him isolated and looking unrepresentative. Nor was his performance exemplary; though Gandhi was clearly the most senior Indian at the conference, observers were disappointed. An anonymous writer in The Times said:

The expectation formed in many quarters here of seeing a man of commanding gifts was not fulfilled. He had no mastery of detail: constitutional problems did not interest him. He was no orator; his speeches were made seated and delivered slowly in low, level tones, which did not vary whatever his theme might be. His interventions in discussion were mainly propagandist and often had little real connection with the matter in hand. He made no real constructive contribution to the work of the conference.’⁹

He explained his difficulties in a conversation with George Bernard Shaw, to whom he confided that the conference ‘requires more than the patience of a Job. The whole thing is a huge camouflage, and harangues that we are treated to are meant only to mark time. Why not, I ask them, announce your policy and let us make our choice? But it does not seem to be in the English political nature to do so.’¹⁰ In fact, it was not in Gandhi’s political nature to appreciate that the procedure of holding discussions with interested parties until a solution was reached really was the policy. For Gandhi, public life was a search for truth which, when he satisfied himself he had found it, he then had to present to the rest of the world, using all means to have them accept it. British politicians would be happy with a compromise in which no one died.

In particular, before independence could be considered, the British were committed to a solution to the existing communal differences. They insisted that minorities had to be protected: Muslims, untouchables, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis and Europeans. In addition, no move the British made towards independence or democracy could be binding on the whole of India, but only on the three-fifths of the nation controlled by Britain; the princes must decide their future in their part of the country. The Muslim League claimed to represent all India’s Muslims, Gandhi’s Congress claimed to represent all Indians; their differences were irreconcilable. Moreover, Gandhi had particular problems in his claims to represent the untouchables, who asked for separate electorates, as did all other minorities with the exception of the Sikhs. But the others were non-Hindus while untouchables were part of Hinduism, perversely, by virtue of being ritually excluded from it.

The untouchables’ representative was Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who felt he had a better claim to represent the outcastes than did Gandhi. The son of an untouchable who served in the British army, he had attended primary school and, though segregated and treated with brutality, he had excelled. He was the first untouchable student at the Government High School in Bombay, despite cruel discrimination, and then the first untouchable to receive higher education. He won a scholarship to study at Columbia University in the US, where he took a PhD in economics; he continued his studies in London at the London School of Economics where he took another PhD and was called to the Gray’s Inn Bar. Back in India in the 1920s he led civil rights movements campaigning to allow untouchables access to drinking-water and to temples.

Gandhi could lecture his high-caste friends like the Nehrus about suffering and the poor, but there was nothing he could tell Ambedkar. The untouchables’ leader saw the elevation of his fellows as best taking place through education and improving living conditions. He felt untouchability was a product of a system that was itself pernicious; he argued that the caste system should be abolished—in counterpoint to Gandhi, who defended it but wanted it to embrace untouchables.

The two were bitterly divided on the issue of electorates: Ambedkar supported a separate electorate and reserved seats for untouchables; Gandhi opposed statutory protection except for the minority Muslim religious communities and the Sikhs. He felt Hinduism should reform so as to outlaw untouchability. He felt separate electorates would divide Indian society: ‘I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast mass of the untouchables,’ he said. A separate electorate for untouchables would enshrine the principle of their degradation in law: ‘Will untouchables remain untouchables in perpetuity? I would far rather Hinduism died than that untouchability lived.’¹¹ Separate electorates would divide villages, subverting Gandhi’s vision of a reformed Hinduism where caste Hindus would realise their responsibilities towards untouchables.

When Ramsay MacDonald, chairing the minorities committee, seemed to endorse the demand for separate electorates, Gandhi wanted to withdraw from it. The conference ended without agreement on the basis of a constitution; but three committees were to continue to work on aspects of the problem until the next conference took place. Gandhi argued at the plenary session of the conference that civil disobedience, not argument, was the answer to India’s problems, with the suggestion that civil disobedience was the only alternative to terrorism.

Gandhi’s return journey took him via Paris, where vast crowds greeted him at the Gare du Nord, then to Switzerland where he was a guest of Romain Rolland. Inquisitive Europeans troubled the great man: an Italian lady wrote to ask Gandhi the ten winning numbers in the next Lotto; Swiss-German nudists wanted to enlist him in their cause; the press set up camp around Rolland’s villa and the hotels were full of people who had come to look at Gandhi in the celebrity-seeking Western model of darshan.

Rolland and Gandhi spent time together pondering the eternal principle of God, though Rolland found Gandhi so determined in his own views that little discussion was possible. In one revealing remark, speaking in English (translated into French by Rolland’s sister), Gandhi said he had learned little from history: ‘My method is empiric, all my conclusions are based on personal experience.’¹² He went on to Italy where he had an audience with Mussolini: independent India wanted a democratic constitution, he assured him—not, as Mussolini suggested, a dictatorship.

If, for the British, the round-table conference was a failure, in not having provided a constitutional solution, it was a huge success for Gandhi who had made of it a world showcase for himself. The Gandhi brand of ascetic living and devout, defiant speech, laced with a hint of mischief, was now compounded with the image of Gandhi the loinclothed spinner. For every newspaper reader, political cartoons made him an instantly recognisable figure.

For Congress the conference was a marked disaster. The party was now so closely connected with Gandhi that independent action was not possible; it would be sixteen years before Congress leaders were able to exercise action independently of him. Congress should have been at the conference pulling together all the different factions in India, doing deals and setting up a federation. The failure to do so was the first major mistake that set India on the road to partition. Gandhi was a great leader but a poor politician: he should have left the politics to men like Nehru and Rajagopalachari.

When Gandhi disembarked from the SS Pilsna at Bombay on 28 December 1931, it was to a tumultuous welcome; for the masses the Mahatma could do no wrong. There had, however, not only been no progress—in a number of ways the situation was worse than when he left the country: there was more violence and politics was more fragmented. The government was now using emergency powers to deal with the terrorist incidents and civil disobedience in Bengal and the North-West Frontier Province. With Gandhi’s permission (from England) a no-rent campaign had been started by Congress in the United Provinces, aimed against the high taxes that were collected with the rents. The response from the new Viceroy Lord Willingdon, formerly known to Gandhi when he was Governor of Bombay, was to imprison the leaders. Gandhi suggested civil disobedience would have to be reintroduced, and he was duly arrested on 3 January 1932. Willingdon remarked that ‘to have to deal with a man who is a mixture of a saint and a “bania” is very trying indeed.’¹³ For the British the message was that negotiating with Gandhi had brought neither positive results constitutionally nor civil peace in India.

Gandhi was taken to his old ‘home,’ Yeravda jail. Vallabhbhai Patel was at this time a fellow prisoner, and Gandhi’s secretary Mahadev Desai later joined them. Gandhi was allowed to write and receive unlimited amounts of letters on non-political subjects.

New emergency ordinances were issued, providing the authorities with sweeping powers to suppress unrest. Thousands defied the ordinances and were imprisoned or beaten by police with lathis. If this was, literally, the stick of the policy, there was also the carrot of constitutional change wending its slow way through the corridors of power. ‘The dogs bark but the caravan passes on,’ said Secretary of State for India Sir Samuel Hoare in response to the disturbances in India. A history of the subcontinent told from the viewpoint only of Congress makes these civil disturbances seem a driving force of change, while in fact change was proceeding at its own pace. There were also many in the Indian political world prepared to trust the British to progress towards independence; while the key events of the 1930s saw Congress losing the initiative, the British succeeded in creating a more advanced democracy than existed anywhere else in the East. Gandhi realised the way forward and was now discussing whether Congress would stand for office under the new constitution. He even asked Patel which portfolio he would want in a home rule cabinet: ‘I will take the beggar’s bowl,’ said Patel, telling Gandhi what he wanted to hear. He fully expected to be prime minister and, indeed, he came close to it.¹⁴

Gandhi’s tacit acceptance of the ongoing constitutional developments was diverted when the government’s provisional scheme for minority representation was announced in August 1932. The proposals were for separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims, as there had been previously, but also for untouchables or the ‘depressed classes’ as the British expression had it. Gandhi wrote to Ramsay MacDonald on 18 August 1932 declaring: ‘I have to resist your decision with my life. The only way I can do so is by declaring a perpetual fast unto death from food of any kind save water with or without salt and soda.’¹⁵ Characteristically, though this letter was written on 17 August, Gandhi declared the fast would begin on 20 September, thereby allowing maximum lead-in time to attract publicity so as to put pressure on the government.

MacDonald in a long and considered letter expressed surprise that ‘you propose to adopt the extreme course of starving yourself to death... solely to prevent the Depressed Classes, who admittedly suffer from terrible disabilities today, from being able to secure a limited number of representatives of their own choosing to speak on their behalf in the legislatures.’¹⁶ ‘What a capacity he had to give shocks to people!’ wrote Nehru, who was ‘angry with [Gandhi] at his religious and sentimental approach to a political question’ and because he had chosen ‘a side-issue for his final sacrifice.’¹⁷ Congress leaders may have been disdainful of the fast, but they could not lose Gandhi; as well as being the subject of their genuine affection, he was the totem without which Congress could not claim to represent the masses.

As far as Ambedkar was concerned, ‘the Mahatma’s ways of thinking are strange and are certainly beyond my comprehension’; far from wishing to augment the minimal political power now within the untouchables’ grasp, ‘on the contrary he has staked his very life in order to deprive them’ of the little they were being offered.¹⁸

On the day he began the fast Gandhi wrote to Mirabehn: ‘As I wrote that first letter conveying my vow, I thought of you and Ba... How would you two bear the thing?’¹⁹ For much of the fasting period he stayed in the prison yard nursed by Sarojini Naidu who had been transferred from the women’s area of the prison. Kasturba was later moved from another prison to be with him. Again, the same old story,’ the long-suffering wife commented.²⁰

Pressure was now being applied to Ambedkar, who was aware that Gandhi’s death would result in a massacre of untouchables throughout India. The leaders of Congress and wealthy supporters met with Ambedkar in Birla House, Bombay, on the day the fast started. They worked out together a complex scheme of nomination and reserved seats for untouchables and put it to Gandhi. Deputations were allowed to see him in jail—the authorities knew they would not be urging him to continue with the fast. His blood pressure had become dangerously high, putting him in real danger.

Ambedkar saw him on 22 September, when Gandhi was already weakened by two days of fasting; then returned on the second and third days and negotiated over issues such as the number of reserved seats untouchables would have and the proposed primaries for untouchable candidates. The final solution—not for separate electorates but for a larger number of reserved seats—was, as Ambedkar said, available at the round-table conference, but it was rejected by Gandhi. Ambedkar remarked: ‘I responded to the call of humanity and saved the life of Mr Gandhi by agreeing to alter the Communal Award [the distribution of seats among the religious communities] in a manner satisfactory to Mr Gandhi.’²¹

The agreement known as the Yeravda Pact was drafted and signed by the chief negotiators, then cabled to London where Andrews and Polak submitted it to the government. It was a Sunday and not an easy day to assemble politicians, but realising the danger of delay Ramsay MacDonald and Sir Samuel Hoare met at 10 Downing Street until midnight and the government in India and in London announced approval of the pact on 26 September. Gandhi broke his fast with a glass of orange juice that same day.

Ambedkar thought of the fast as a political stunt but it was undeniable that Gandhi had moved caste Hindus to address the question of untouchability in a way that they had not done before. They opened temple doors to untouchables, allowed them to use wells and even fraternised with them. This was a short-lived reform, the temples were soon closed again, but the principle had been stated. It was said that the fast marked the turning point for untouchability: previously it had been socially improper to consort with untouchables; afterwards, to practise untouchability was the mark of a reactionary bigot. Gandhi’s supporters presented the event as ‘the epic fast,’ which was used as a title of a book by Pyarelal. In it Rajagopalachari compared Gandhi’s fast to Socrates’ suicide and Jesus’ death on the cross. This was excessive; excruciating though it was, it was not even the most extreme fast that Gandhi had put himself through.

Gandhi had to some extent regained the initiative as national leader with his action over the untouchables. He consolidated his position by launching, in 1933, an eight-page English-language weekly, Harijan, replacing his paper Young India which had been suppressed by the government. At almost the same time, now adept at the newspaper business he launched the Hindu Harijan Sevak (Servant of Harijans) and the Gujarati Harijanbandhu (Brother of Harijans). ‘Harijan,’ meaning ‘children of God,’ was Gandhi’s term for untouchables, which he started using in September 1932. Ambedkar considered it patronising and it is, at best, a euphemism for outcastes, its use a demonstration that Gandhi did not truly believe the untouchables would be assimilated into the caste system. Ambedkar represented the opinion of untouchables towards Gandhi: ‘How can they believe him to be their friend when he wishes to retain caste and abolish untouchability, it being quite clear that untouchability is only an extended form of caste and that therefore without the abolition of caste there is no hope of abolition of untouchability?’²²

Gandhi was interested in removing untouchability, but was constrained by wanting also to preserve Hinduism intact. He said: “We must endeavour to bring orthodoxy to our point of view, if it is at all possible. In any case we may do nothing to hurt anybody’s susceptibilities.’²³ He proposed a scheme whereby temples would be open some times in the day for untouchables and for those who supported their admission, but at other times closed to untouchables and open to others for whom untouchability was ‘a deep religious conviction.’²⁴ A few years later, in 1935, he moved towards the abolition of caste, but again made it a matter of conscience—if collective conscience—rather than of policy, saying ‘the sooner public opinion abolishes it the better.’²⁵

Soon after his ‘epic fast’ Gandhi felt there was not enough response to his work on untouchability. He considered himself responsible, and also blamed members of the ashram who had failed to be sufficiently pure; an inmate of the ashram had been carrying on a clandestine affair and when letters were found, they were of course given to Gandhi—ashramites delighted in denouncing each other. Gandhi therefore declared he would fast again, for twenty-one days from 8 May 1933, against untouchability and for the spiritual strength of its opponents. Considering that a six-day fast had nearly killed him, this was a dangerous exercise. The government decided they had had enough, and not wanting to be considered in any way responsible for his death they set him free on the day he started the fast. He survived, finishing it on 29 May in a mansion in Poona. He was uncertain about the future of civil disobedience: he argued with Congress for it to continue, then announced it was at an end, then said individual acts of civil disobedience were to continue. His was a rudderless ship.

Gandhi proposed meeting the Viceroy to bring some solution to the conflict, but he was in no position to bargain. The Viceroy refused to see him. Gandhi held less fascination for Willingdon than he had for his predecessor: ‘Gandhi is a sort of Jekyll and Hyde,’ he said, ‘and while he may have his saint-like side, on the other he is the most Machiavellian, bargaining little political humbug I have ever come across.’²⁶ The Gandhi magic was no longer working, either on the British or on Congress, which was now splintering, radicals such as Subhas Chandra Bose leading one faction, the left wing leading another, and orthodox Hindus, another.

Gandhi had declared on the Dandi march that he would not return to the Sabarmati Ashram until victory had been achieved and the salt tax abolished. He did not return to make it his permanent home. The ashram had not been paying land tax and therefore its goods had been seized and sold by government collectors. The community had been restive without him, and he was doubtless sick of their squabbling. Eventually, in 1933, he closed the ashram; the site became a trust for the assistance of untouchables and was renamed the Harijan Ashram.

The same year he intended to undertake a march from the ashram to Ras in Kheda, in solidarity with peasants there who had lost their-lands, but he and his thirty-two companions were arrested before they could do so. He was released and arrested again, for refusing to comply with orders restricting his movements. He sent ashram members to conduct individual acts of civil disobedience, but there were now too few to make a difference. Gandhi was again arrested, went on another fast and was released. Nothing was working for him—not the untouchability campaign, nor the ashram nor civil disobedience. He was soon telling ashramites to find jobs to keep themselves rather than courting jail again. He would finally call off civil disobedience in all its forms in April 1934.

Late in September 1933 he moved to Wardha in the Central Provinces, close to India’s geographical centre, where he was the guest of a leading financier and cotton merchant, Jamnalal Bajaj. He gave Gandhi the land to set up a new ashram beside the nearby village of Segaon. Another reason for Gandhi’s going there was that one of his followers, the scholarly and ascetic Vinoba Bhave, had been working near Wardha. The location for the new ashram, which he called Sevagram (Village of Service), was terrible even for that region: the climate was harsh and the land was flat, baked dry in the long summers and whipped by dusty whirlwinds. Before the ashramites came, the place was home only to scorpions and poisonous snakes—and these remained, to be non-violently removed with tongs away from the living areas. Relief came with the monsoon, but then the waterlogged land was a breeding ground for mosquitoes. A dirt road connected the ashram to Wardha, the nearest town. The village of Segaon was populated mainly by untouchables stricken by disease and malnutrition. There were no shops or facilities, except for a well. A follower described Gandhi in the village: ‘One of my earliest memories of Bapu is seeing him trudge along the tracks sweeping up the excrement that the villagers had left around like dogs, even by the well. This was his way of setting an example, of teaching the villagers the most elementary lesson of all the lessons he wanted to teach—that human and animal filth was the main cause of disease throughout the land.’²⁷

The ashram was a collection of mud and bamboo huts around a gravel courtyard; the inhabitants set up communal latrines and used the effluent as fertiliser for growing their staple crops of sugar cane and vegetables. A typical day was described by a former ashramite. A clock in the dining hall was synchronised to Gandhi’s ever-present watch (he liked to make use of all the time allotted to him). At 4 a.m. when the gong sounded, Abha, a girl who tended to Gandhi’s needs (and later married his grand-nephew Kami), came with a lamp and his toilet articles. These consisted of an iron bowl, a tumbler of water, a powder made from charcoal and the shells of almonds and walnuts, and a twig from a neem tree. Gandhi would set about brushing his remaining teeth (before they were removed in December 1936) or his gums and cleaning his tongue, while Abha took away the brass spittoon that he kept by his bed. He would put on a clean dhoti and his spectacles and walk to a tree at the end of the courtyard where he sat cross-legged on a cushion. The ashramites, including Kasturba, gathered for prayers at 4.20 precisely. The ashram had its own prayer book, the Ashram Bhajanavali, which incorporated prayers and hymns from various traditions, added to by ashram visitors. A typical prayer meeting would involve a Buddhist chant, a Hindu prayer, a reading from the Koran, a Zoroastrian (Parsi) prayer and a Christian hymn—Gandhi’s favourite was ‘Lead, Kindly Light.’ The ashramites would chant invocations to God under various names of the Hindu tradition—‘Hare Krishna’ ‘Hare Ram’ and so on. Gandhi enjoyed the chant more and more as it grew faster and louder: ‘Nothing thrilled Bapu more. He was in ecstasy as the names of God rolled over us.’²⁸

Gandhi would return to his hut for his morning drink of bicarbonate of soda, honey and lemon juice in hot water, then settle in for one and a half hours of work. He worked on an upside-down soap box with a khadi cloth covering it. On this makeshift desk were a few sparse and often handmade items, old pens, loose nibs and ink. He was attended by Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal who was now joined by his younger sister Sushila Nayar, a Western-trained doctor who used to monitor Gandhi’s blood pressure and would also take Hindi dictation. When Mirabehn was staying with him she would work with the English-language material, but he kept her at a distance after 1935. Gandhi was also constantly in contact with his workers in the field, people who were promoting his ideas for national improvement and who reported back to him.

At 6.30 a.m. he would take his morning walk, accompanied by ashram children and revered by pilgrims and local peasants along the way, some of whom would prostrate themselves as he passed. In 1932 he had stopped the practice of putting his hands on the shoulders of accompanying women to support himself. He explained: ‘I was unconscious of doing any wrong, so far as I can recollect, till some years ago at Sabarmati an intimate of the ashram told me that my practice, when extended to grown-up girls and women, offended the accepted notion of decency.’²⁹ Still unconvinced that there was anything wrong in it—and it does not look out of place in the many photographs of Gandhi taken during the last ten years of his life—in 1936 he resumed walking with physical support from ashram girls, usually Abha and Sushila. He called them his ‘walking sticks.’ His first question to them would be ‘Did you have a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?’³⁰ His preoccupation with bowels was unabated—he taught these ashramites how to administer enemas to each other, as he had at other ashrams.

Sushila Nayar had been visiting Gandhi since her mother had taken her, aged six, to see him in 1920. As she sat on his lap he told her mother to gift the girl to him. She later visited the ashram as a teenager and, after taking a medical degree, became his personal physician. Like other ashram members, she thought little of his physical requests—perhaps they seemed less bizarre because so much in the ashram was outside the realms of ordinary behaviour. Sushila often slept with Gandhi. She said: ‘There was nothing special about sleeping next to Bapu... I used to sleep with him, just as I would with my mother. He might say, “My back aches, put some pressure on it.” So I might put some pressure on it or lie down on his back and he might just go to sleep. In the early days, there was no question of calling this a brahmacharya experiment. It was just part of the nature cure.’³¹ In these ‘early days’ of Sushila’s life with Gandhi he still had a wife, Kasturba, with whom he might have slept chastely. There was no conflict between these women, however. Kasturba had a close relationship with Sushila. If Sushila had a rival for Gandhi’s affections, it was the now exiled Mirabehn.

His relationship with Abha was particularly warm; she described their banter: ‘Once, I was bathing him and he asked me to hurry up. He had an appointment. He told me to hurry up three times and I said, “You are a renowned Mahatma and yet you are so impatient, like any other common mortal. What does it matter if you’re a little late?’” Gandhi liked her spirit—he laughed: ‘Only a mother would dare talk to her child the way you talk to me.’³²

After his walk he would return to his quarters and ‘spend at least twenty minutes squatting on the commode’ in his bathroom. According to a woman ashramite who spoke with the writer Ved Mehta in the early 1970s, Gandhi ‘was completely unselfconscious about urinating and defecating, rather like a child. He believed that these bodily functions were as natural and as sacred as eating, and used to say “The bathroom is a temple, it should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy eating there.” If any of us wanted to talk to him, we could go in and out as we pleased.’³³ Gandhi frequently drew comparisons between eating and defecating: ‘The process of eating is as unclean as evacuation, the only difference being that, while evacuation ends in a sense of relief, eating, if one’s tongue is not held in control, brings discomfort.’³⁴ After performing this function, Gandhi would be helped on to a high bamboo table and Sushila and Abha massaged his body with mustard oil and lime juice. He would return to the bathroom for a bath, sitting in the tub while Pyarelal shaved him. He then settled down for another hour’s paperwork before visiting the sick of the ashram, giving massages or administering enemas as his notions of nursing might lead him.

The ashramites all ate together at 11 a.m.; more than 100 people would be in the hall, many of them vying for Gandhi’s attention. They had learned they could most easily attract his attention by being ill, so the ashram often gave the impression of being a home for the sick. In order to eat, Gandhi had to be brought his dentures in a bowl of water, which he would fish out and insert. He chewed the food thoroughly, taking about an hour over a meal and finishing with goat’s milk. As a relish with the steamed vegetables he ate ground neem leaves and crushed garlic, both of which he believed were good for health. After lunch he went to sleep in his hut with a mud poultice on his head and stomach that had been prepared by Abha. He would write or give interviews in this state. Mahadev Desai recorded: ‘In the hot season a mud bandage on the head is an additional item,’ and Gandhi delighted in describing to visitors ‘the wonderful properties of mother earth.’³⁵

Gandhi continued to try to educate Kasturba, and after his sleep would have her reading from a Gujarati primer and copying out letters; although she could read by now, she was said to forget the following day what she had been taught. Her strength was in practical work, in organising the ashram as a giant household. She controlled the kitchen and subverted the austere regime as much as she could. She kept sweets for the ashram children and secretly served guests tea and coffee.

Gandhi would spend another twenty minutes on the commode, then proceed to an hour or two of spinning cotton. He would sometimes receive visitors while spinning, workers from the constructive programme of village service, Congress members and various officials seeking his advice. Secretaries were constantly in attendance taking notes, which Gandhi reviewed, and if he thought they were of sufficient interest he would have them published in one of his weekly newspapers. His day continued with another sleep, then more reading and writing until the evening meal at five, another long walk and an evening prayer meeting illuminated by kerosene lamps. This meeting would incorporate a sermon by Gandhi on sanitation, celibacy or some other favourite topic. There would be a roll call of the ashramites to check how much yarn each had spun during the day, and they were free to talk or sleep while Gandhi returned to his hut to read and have an enema before retiring. By 9.30 the lanterns were out and the ashram asleep.

Birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger visited Gandhi in 1935 and inspected the cotton-growing, paper-making, oil-pressing and turn-wheel irrigation that he promoted. She wrote: ‘I was not enthusiastic. It seemed so pitiable an effort, like going backward instead of forward.’ The principle of trying to extend this to all of India amounted to ‘trying to keep millions labouring on petty hand processes merely in order to give them work to do by which they might exist.’³⁶

As his grandchildren grew up, Gandhi engaged them in his version of public service. His son Ramdas’s eldest daughter Sumitra was an intelligent, self-willed child who resisted Gandhi’s attempt to deny her education as he had her father. He wanted all his grandchildren to go to his Basic Education Centre at Sevagram Ashram but Sumitra refused to have anything to do with it. ‘It led to a lot of dissension between grandfather and me,’ she later recalled. ‘He was very angry’ When she was ten, however, and was obviously not bending to his will, he let her go to a high school that was a little like an English boarding school. After she had graduated from there, Gandhi again tried to steer her away from education: ‘What is the need for further formal education?’ he said. ‘Come and be my secretary—I will train you.’

Sumitra replied: I don’t want to be one of your inferior secretaries who wash your clothes and utensils, organise your meals, make appointments, usher people in and out, and are filled with self-importance.’ She had noted, she later said, that ‘the really superior people, like Nehru, were never Grandfather’s secretaries. They had been educated in England and were so independent they didn’t feel the need to live with him at all.’³⁷ Whatever his faults, Gandhi always admired honesty and courage, and he allowed her to go to university in India. Later Sumitra studied in the US and returned home to become a member of parliament.

Despite Nehru’s respect for Gandhi’s power over the masses, he was extremely critical of his attitude to sex which he described in 1936 as ‘unnatural and shocking... I think Gandhiji is absolutely wrong in this matter. His advice may fit in with some cases, but as a general policy it can only lead to frustration, inhibition, neurosis and all manner of physical and nervous ills.’³⁸ Nehru felt he had a personal life in which sex played a part but did not obsess him or divert him from other activities.

Early in December 1935 Margaret Sanger attempted the thankless task of trying to persuade Gandhi to support birth control. She suggested easily available contraceptives as a means of promoting planned parenthood. He argued that sex was sinful except explicitly for the production of children. He referred to his own life: ‘I know from my own experience that as long as I looked upon my wife carnally, we had no real understanding... The moment I bade goodbye to a life of carnal pleasure, our whole relationship became spiritual. Lust died and love reigned instead.’ If Kasturba’s opinion on these matters were ever canvassed, it has not been recorded, though he did reveal that ‘very often she would show restraint, but she rarely resisted me although she showed disinclination very often.’³⁹

Sanger gives an illuminating picture of Gandhi in his sixties, not appearing to entertain new ideas, but just stating his own well-rehearsed opinions, ‘I felt his registering of impressions was blunted,’ she said. ‘While you were answering a question of his, he held to an idea or train of thought of his own, and as soon as you stopped, continued as though he had never heard you... In fact, despite his claim to open-mindedness, he was proud of not altering his opinions.’⁴⁰ Desai remarks, however, that Gandhi was moved to approve of the rhythm method of birth control, which he felt at least provided for some self-restraint over the ‘unsafe’ periods. He was plagued with erotic thoughts during an illness a few days after seeing Sanger: ‘I was disgusted with myself,’ he said in the pages of Harijan. ‘The moment the feeling came I acquainted my attendants and the medical friends with my condition. They could give me no help... The confession of the wretched experience brought much relief to me.’⁴¹

Primabehn Kantak, one of his principal women supporters, felt this article was a little opaque and asked in a letter for more information. ‘I had a discharge,’ he replied, but added reassuringly: ‘but I was awake and the mind was under control.’⁴² Presumably she enquired further because he later went on to explain with candour:

I have always had involuntary discharges. In South Africa they occurred at intervals of several years. Here in India they have been of months... If my brahmacharya had been completely free from discharges, I would have been able to place before the world very much more than I have succeeded in doing. But it seems practically impossible that a person who has indulged in sex gratification from the age of fifteen to thirty, maybe with his own wife only, can, on taking a vow of brahmacharya, control the discharge of his vital fluid completely.⁴³

In the mid-1930s he was still writing to Harilal, who was attempting a reconciliation. ‘Have you touched liquor any time after you wrote your first letter to me from there? Have you indulged in sexual pleasure through mind, speech or body? Do you smoke?’ he demanded, with the usual threat—to a man who was now forty-six—‘If at any time you break your word to me or if it is proved that you have deceived me, I should fast for at least seven days.’⁴⁴ Later he wrote that Harilal had visited him and seemed to have stayed off alcohol and had no ‘carnal passion except a desire to marry, but was still addicted to smoking; Gandhi allowed him ‘three cigarettes a day with my permission.’⁴⁵

Harilal relapsed. His whole life seemed an angry tirade against his treatment by his father: he would get drunk in public, consort with prostitutes, and he engaged in dubious business dealings, using the Gandhi name. On 14 May 1936 he made a public conversion to Islam in Bombay. Gandhi responded in a press statement: ‘Harilal’s apostasy is no loss to Hinduism and his admission to Islam is a source of weakness to it if, as I apprehend, he remains the same wreck that he was before... excessive indulgence has softened his brain and undermined his sense of right and wrong, truth and falsehood.’⁴⁶ He was offended by the public rejoicing among Muslims over the incident, for which he could see no religious motivation.

In 1933 Gandhi toured the country, covering 13,000 miles by third-class train, by car and on foot, preaching against untouchability, holding as many as five meetings a day. He raised money for the drilling of wells for untouchables and the funding of schools. While clean water and education were good in themselves, a separate provision for those denied the use of community facilities confirmed the separateness of untouchables.

His visits were the occasion for informal dinners and concerts to bring the communities together, and sometimes there would be a ceremonial opening of temples to untouchables. The change may have been short-lived in many places, and the temples closed again when he left, but the statement had been made. More seriously, from the point of view of a sincere reformer, Gandhi was suffering the curse of fame: people came to see him, for the darshan of this celebrated figure—they were not particularly interested in what he had to say. He pleaded: ‘I have no new religion to give, no new truth to expound. My humble role is that of a scavenger both literally and spiritually. I know the outward art of cleaning the streets, commodes and latrines, and I am endeavouring to the extent of my ability to clean my inside also, so that I may become a faithful interpreter of the truth as I may see it.’⁴⁷ Gandhi could be frank about the ignorance of the crowds; to a questioner who asked why untouchables should not choose to convert to Islam or Christianity to escape Hindu oppression he replied: ‘Some of the untouchables are worse than cows in understanding. I mean they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow.’⁴⁸ He was still anxious to keep untouchables in the Hindu fold, though, particularly after 1935 when, disgusted with Hinduism’s inability to provide for basic human rights, the untouchables’ representative Ambedkar declared his intention to convert to a new religion.

Gandhi’s stand against untouchability prompted violent orthodox Hindus to hold alternative meetings at venues where he was due to appear, burn pictures of him and wave black flags when he arrived. At one time, in Poona, a bomb was thrown at a car in which he was believed to be travelling and seven people were injured.

A large part of Bihar province suffered a severe earthquake on 15 January 1934. Thousands died and tens of thousands were left homeless. Gandhi took a detour to embrace the stricken area, walking between villages and bringing comfort but also, surprisingly, chastisement. The earthquake, he said, was a punishment for sin, particularly the sin of untouchability.

The first time he addressed this line of thought, at a public meeting in Tinnevelly, he said: A man like me cannot but believe that this earthquake is a divine punishment sent by God for our sins.’⁴⁹ Then later: ‘Believe with me that for this absolutely unthinkable affliction in Bihar your sins and my sins are responsible... I tell you the conviction is growing on me that this affliction has come to us because of this atrocious sin of untouchability.’⁵⁰ Addressing the questions Why punish now for an age-old sin? Why punish Bihar and not the south of the country, for example? he said: ‘I am not God. Therefore I have but a limited knowledge of His purpose.’⁵¹ His practical explanation of the mechanism in play here, if one can call it that, was an association of ethical principles with cosmic phenomena: ‘Physical things originate from the same source of energy as spiritual, and so there is no impassable gulf between physical and spiritual things.’⁵² Gandhi was widely criticised by his more sophisticated supporters, notably by Rabindranath Tagore, who pointed out that he had opened the way for the orthodox to claim the earthquake was a result of divine anger at Gandhi’s work against untouchability.

He resigned from Congress in October 1934, unable to unite its feuding factions. The future, at least the immediate future, was going to be constructed by the constitution builders, precisely the area of leadership for which Gandhi had no time. He correctly judged he had little to offer the political process at this stage. ‘Hand-spinning by the Congress intelligentsia has all but disappeared,’ he lamented, ‘the general body of them have no faith in it.’ He was being blamed for the hypocrisy and evasiveness of Congress personnel, paying lip-service to his principles but following their own political ends.⁵³ He explained: ‘I am leaving Congress to lift the weight which has been suppressing it, in order that it may grow, and I may grow myself.’ In reply to questions he was even more explicit: ‘I feel today that I have lost the power to persuade you to my view. I have become helpless. It is no use keeping a man like me at the helm of affairs, who has lost his strength.’⁵⁴

The prize for nationalists was now real power in the legislatures—a course gingerly approached by Congress, then embraced with enthusiasm. In what was a triumph for patient constitution-building by the British, all sections of Indian society joined in the elections held in 1935 under the old electoral regulations (the Government of India Act of 1935 was not yet in force). The result was a picture of a divided India: the government and their supporters gained two-fifths of the seats, Congress and the orthodox Hindu ‘Congress nationalists’ two-fifths, and the independents (mainly Muslims) a fifth. Jinnah emerged as the leader of the Muslim independents; his skill in wielding the votes of his balancing group showed him as the political master of this cohort of Indian democrats.

The Secretary of State for India Sir Samuel Hoare had worked diligently to produce a workable constitution. A select committee was set up to consider the results of the round-table conferences. After almost two years, 1933–4, against fierce criticism from the Conservative right wing led by Winston Churchill, the result was the new Government of India Act. Its provisions for federation, including the princely states, were never put into effect—discussions were still proceeding when the Second World War broke out—but provincial autonomy under eleven directly elected governors and legislatures was highly successful.

The election of 1937 showed Congress leaders demonstrating their ability to make contact with the people—Nehru covered 50,000 miles using every conveyance from elephant to aeroplane; a total of ten million people saw him. Gandhi made no political speeches but walked from village to village promoting his new All-India Village Industries Association for the improvement of the poor, in what was now a nationwide application of the ideas he had taken from John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy and burnished himself.

The Congress secured absolute majorities in five of the eleven major provinces and was the largest single party in three others. After the usual dithering over whether to assume any power that was short of absolute, Congress took office in March 1937, forming ministries in six provinces. The Muslim League made a poor showing, with less than 5 per cent of the total Muslim vote. Congress members showed their political inexperience with a triumphalism that implied the current balance of power would last for ever; they felt no need to ally with the Muslim League, even though the League’s social and economic programmes were similar to their own. They treated the League more as a political opposition than fellow Indians striving for a common goal.

Muslim League candidates were refused cabinet positions unless they joined Congress. Mohammad Ali Jinnah contacted Gandhi over the situation in Bombay where the League had done particularly well amongst the Muslim electorate, but the sage replied with a mystic pronouncement: ‘My faith in unity is as bright as ever; only I see no daylight out of the impenetrable darkness, and in such distress, I cry out to God for light.’⁵⁵ Jinnah wanted to meet Gandhi but he said he was guided by Abul Kalam Azad, a Muslim member of Congress, and Jinnah should speak to him. Thus easily and with no apparent appreciation of the dangers, Gandhi cast aside the chance of Hindu-Muslim unity at the highest political level. The haughty Jinnah did not take rejection lightly: he would soon be speaking of Congress as a Hindu party that was conspiring to deny Muslims a say in government. The end result of this thinking would be separatism, a notion that was fast gaining acceptance in Muslim circles.

In a move that had attracted little attention at the time a scholar called Choudhary Rahmat Ali, inspired by discussions at the unglamorous third round-table conference that finished in 1933, had suggested a name for a Muslim nation that could be carved out of India. Taking letters from the names Punjab, Afghan Province (the North-West Frontier) Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan he made the semi-acrostic ‘PAKISTAN,’ which was close to the Urdu word ‘Pakistan: land of the pure. Now the Muslims had something to aim for.