NOTES

EPIGRAPHS

1   “I do not know”: Gandhi to his son Harilal, Oct. 31, 1918, in Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 1, p. 260.

2   “I deny being a visionary”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 2, p. 201.

3   “I am not a quick despairer”: Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (hereafter CWMG), vol. 23, p. 4.

4   “For men like me”: Gandhi to Nirmal Kumar Bose, cited in Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition, and Reform, p. 272.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

1   “have been trying all my life”: Pyarelal, Epic Fast, p. 323.

2   “innumerable trunks”: CWMG, vol. 52, p. 399, cited in Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience, p. 316.

3   “He increasingly ceased”: Brown, Nehru, p. 106.

4   “the starving toiling millions”: M. K. Gandhi, Village Swaraj, p. 4.

5   “the emancipation”: Ibid., p. 6.

CHAPTER 1: PROLOGUE: AN UNWELCOME VISITOR

1   twenty-three-year-old law clerk: Gandhi had already qualified as a barrister in India, but saying he came to South Africa as a law clerk accurately describes his role in the case for which he was retained, as he himself later acknowledged: “When I went to South Africa I went only as a law clerk,” he said in 1937. CWMG, vol. 60, p. 101.

2   “Just as it is a mark”: Meer, South African Gandhi, p. 121.

3   “eternal negative”: Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth, p. 158.

4   The Gandhi who landed: Tinker, Ordeal of Love, p. 151.

5   “I believe in walking alone”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 495.

6   transgressing on the pavement: If this actually happened. T. K. Mahadevan suggests that the Indian who was pushed off the footpath may have been one C. M. Pillay, who wrote a letter to a newspaper describing an incident almost exactly like the one of which Gandhi complained. Mahadevan raises the suspicion that Gandhi read the letter and simply appropriated the experience. See Mahadevan, Year of the Phoenix, p. 25.

7   However, according to the scholar: Hunt, Gandhi and the Nonconformists, p. 40.

8   “I was tremendously attracted”: From an archival interview with Millie Polak broadcast by the BBC on May 7, 2004.

9   It’s a theme Gandhi: Nayar, Mahatma Gandhi’s Last Imprisonment, p. 298.

10   “Agent for the Esoteric”: CWMG, vol. 1, p. 141.

11   The word “coolie,” after all: Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson (London, reprint, 1985), p. 249. The Oxford English Dictionary accepts this derivation, suggesting the term may have been carried to China from Gujarat in the sixteenth century by Portuguese seamen. Another possible derivation is from the Turkish word quli, which means laborer or porter and may have found its way into Urdu. In South Africa the term had a racial tinge and was used specifically to refer to Asians, usually Indians, as noted in the OED Supplement.

12   “It is clear that Indian”: Meer, South African Gandhi, pp. 113–14.

13   “the Magna Charta”: Ibid., pp. 117–8.

14   In the many thousands: CWMG, vol. 8, p. 242.

15   At first he spoke only: Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, p. 51.

16   a fact of huge and obvious relevance: Bhikhu Parekh points out that it may have been easier to unite Hindus and Muslims in South Africa, for many of the traders Gandhi initially served there shared a common language and culture. See Parekh, Gandhi, p. 9.

17   When Johannesburg Muslims: CWMG, vol. 3, p. 366.

18   “We are not and ought not”: Ibid., p. 497, cited by Sanghavi, Agony of Arrival, p. 81.

19   “Here in South Africa”: CWMG, vol. 5, p. 290.

20   “The Hindu-Mahomedan problem”: Ibid., vol. 9, p. 507.

21   By sheer force of personality: Ibid., vol. 35, p. 385.

22   “I saw nothing in it”: M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 99.

23   Calling on the community: CWMG, vol. 5, p. 417.

24   “To give one’s life”: Ibid., vol. 60, p. 38.

25   Speaking for a second time: Ibid., vol. 5, p. 421.

26   close to endorsing that view: Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, p. 268.

27   “A man who deliberately”: CWMG, vol. 5, p. 420.

28   Years later, upon learning: Ibid., vol. 12, p. 264.

29   “criminal waste of the vital fluid”: Ibid., vol. 62, p. 279.

30   A nephew suggested: M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 109.

31   “I did not suggest”: Paxton, Sonja Schlesin, p. 36.

32   “Our ambition”: Sarid and Bartolf, Hermann Kallenbach, p. 15.

33   It also doesn’t demean Doke: CWMG, vol. 9, p. 415.

34   “as naked as possible”: Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth, p. 153.

35   “Mr. Gandhi’s ephemeral fame”: African Chronicle, April 16, 1913.

36   “So far as I can judge”: Nanda, Three Statesmen, p. 426.

37   Reminiscing, many years later: Nayar, Mahatma Gandhi’s Last Imprisonment, p. 380; see also Prabhudas Gandhi, My Childhood with Gandhiji, p. 142.

38   The indentured Indians”: Indian Opinion, Oct. 15, 1913.

39   “It was a bold, dangerous”: Indian Opinion, Oct. 22, 1913.

40   Later, back in India: Nirmal Kumar Bose, Selections from Gandhi (Ahmedabad, 1957) 2nd ed., pp. 106–7.

41   “the numberless men”: Pyarelal, Epic Fast, p. 12.

42   “I know that the only thing”: M. K. Gandhi, Young India, March 2, 1922, cited by Paul F. Power, ed., The Meanings of Gandhi (Honolulu, 1971), p. 71.

43   “The poor have no fears”: M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 287.

44   “the Natal underclasses”: Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, p. 242. Swan cites a letter from Gandhi to Kallenbach, dated July 13, 1913, that she located in the Sarvodaya Library at the Phoenix Settlement. The library was destroyed in the factional violence described in the author’s note at the beginning of this volume. As far as I have been able to discover, Swan’s quotation from this important letter may be all that survives from it.

45   “I believe implicitly”: Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ed., Penguin Gandhi Reader, p. 207.

46   “A Scavenger”: Nayar, Mahatma Gandhi’s Last Imprisonment, p. 254.

47   “The idea did occur to me”: Mahadev Desai, Diary of Mahadev Desai, p. 185.

48   most indentured laborers were low caste: Bhana, Indentured Indian Emigrants to Natal, pp. 71–83.

49   “realized my vocation”: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 338.

50   “a sorry affair”: Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, p. 229.

51   Indians lack a tragic sense: Naipaul, Overcrowded Barracoon, p. 75.

52   “The saint has left”: Hancock, Smuts, p. 345.

53   “that they have an instrument”: Ibid., p. 331.

CHAPTER 2: NO-TOUCHISM

1   “the least Indian”: Naipaul, Area of Darkness, p. 77 [my italics].

2   “the quintessence”: Nehru, Toward Freedom, p. 189.

3   “He looked at India”: Naipaul, Area of Darkness, p. 77.

4   “I was face to face”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 196.

5   “There were only a few”: Ibid., pp. 196–97.

6   Even as a boy: Andrews, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 113.

7   Just as racial segregation: Bayly, Caste, Society, and Politics in India, chap. 5, especially pp. 196, 210, 226.

8   “pollution barrier”: Ibid., pp. 189, 233.

9   Practices varied: The following studies have illuminating discussions on these points: Ibid., Dirks, Castes of Mind; and Mendelsohn and Vicziany, Untouchables.

10   the coinage “Hinduism”: See Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? p. 60, also p. 168.

11   Gandhi was then warned: Jordens, Gandhi’s Religion, p. 56.

12   “It was also a problem”: Prabhudas Gandhi, My Childhood with Gandhiji, p. 59.

13   Three years later: Photostat of the certificate is on display at the Sabarmati Ashram Museum.

14   The Bania in Gandhi: Doke, M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot, p. 52.

15   The prodigal son: Pyarelal, Early Phase, p. 281.

16   “I would not so much”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 78.

17   His standing with the Modh Banias: I am indebted to Narayan Desai, son of Mahadev, Gandhi’s secretary, for making this point in an interview in Barodi in April 2008.

18   “Wherever you see men”: O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict, and Ideology, p. 71.

19   “We are all brothers”: Tolstoy, Kingdom of God Is Within You, p. 88. According to Professor Donald Fanger of Harvard, the literal translation would be “carries out my chamber pot.”

20   What Is to Be Done?: Although the common English title of this Tolstoy volume is the same as that of a more famous tract by Lenin, the Russian titles are different. Professor Fanger says the literal translation of the Tolstoy would be “So What Must We Do?”

21   “when men of our circle”: Tolstoy, What Is to Be Done? p. 272. I’ve here substituted “latrines” for “sewers” on the advice of Professor Fanger.

22   “Gandhi,” Aurobindo said: Aurobindo, India’s Rebirth, p. 173.

23   But an Indian scholar: Mahadevan, Year of the Phoenix, pp. 70–71.

24   In any case, by August: Swan, in Gandhi: The South African Experience, pp. 48–50, casts doubt on the assumption that the young Gandhi provided the impetus for the formation of the Natal Indian Congress. She suggests that the traders who subsequently dominated the organization are likely to have employed Gandhi to advance their goals.

25   “To inquire into the conditions”: CWMG, vol. 1, p. 132.

26   “I lived in South Africa”: Ibid., vol. 33, p. 25.

27   His wounds have been treated: Ibid., vol. 2, p. 20.

28   It takes half a year: Meer, Apprenticeship of a Mahatma, p. 36.

29   “A regular stream”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 135.

30   “He emerged virtually”: Sanghavi, Agony of Arrival, p. 129.

31   Gandhi himself doesn’t go on: According to the Durban lawyer Hassim Seedat, who attempted to trace Gandhi’s legal papers from this era through the successor firm that inherited them only to be told that they had been thrown out.

32   “He will cause some trouble”: Britton, Gandhi Arrives in South Africa, p. 300. The location of this document isn’t specified in the book. Responding to an e-mail query, its author explained that he did his research “on and off for thirty years,” much of it in the archives of colonial Natal, in the branch of the National Archives in Pietermaritzburg, or in British Colonial Office files, now located at the National Archives in Kew.

33   “have no wish to see”: CWMG, vol. 1, pp. 273–74, cited by Naidoo, Tracking Down Historical Myths, p. 137.

34   “If that hatred”: CWMG, vol. 1, p. 143.

35   In finely honed understatement: Ibid., pp. 142–63.

36   “The class of Hindoos”: Critic, Jan. 11, 1895, as quoted in Pyarelal, Early Phase, p. 478.

37   Or, since Pyarelal: Pyarelal and Nayar, In Gandhiji’s Mirror, p. 7.

38   “The barbed shaft penetrated”: Pyarelal, Early Phase, p. 478.

39   “Has not a just”: Fischer, Essential Gandhi, p. 251. See also M. K. Gandhi, Selected Political Writings, p. 118.

40   “During my campaigns”: CWMG, vol. 13, p. 278.

41   “dark and stinking”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 149.

42   He then went into: Ibid., p. 150.

43   “But to clean those used: Ibid., pp. 243–44.

44   His pique becomes: CWMG, vol. 67, p. 2.

45   “close touch with suffering Indians”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 177.

46   “The Indians were not entitled”: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 76.

47   So while he has told us: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 189.

48   “General Buller had no intention”: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 77.

49   “For days they worked”: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 63.

50   “The agony of the General”: Pyarelal, Discovery of Satyagraha, p. 287.

51   curtained palanquin: This thought is suggested by the drawing on a French weekly magazine cover on display in the Museum Africa in Johannesburg. Showing a palanquin used for ferrying wounded officers, the drawing has a legend that describes it as an “ambulance Indienne” in the “guerre au Transvaal.” See Le Petit Journal: Supplément Illustré, Dec. 17, 1899.

52   detailed narrative of these events: Amery, “Times” History of the War in South Africa, vol. 1, pp. 245–97.

53   “Streams of wounded”: Reproduced in New York Times, March 3, 1900.

54   The recruits from the ranks: Meer, South African Gandhi, p. 751.

55   In the event, no Indians: Ibid., pp, 749–50.

56   At the time he finds: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 78.

57   “Bapu had found a use”: Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, p. 248.

58   In a contemporary send-up: Reprinted in African Chronicle, July 4, 1908.

59   “high-caste men married”: Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian South African Life (Cape Town, 2000), p. 13.

60   “These two Indians”: Bhana and Pachai, Documentary History of Indian South Africans, p. 26.

61   Except for a rare academic study: Such as Ebr-Vally, Kala Pani.

62   “without first trying”: Rolland, Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel, p. 23.

63   He condemned India’s: Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition, and Reform, p. 235.

64   Their suppression depresses: CWMG, vol. 18, pp. 375–76.

65   “into intimate touch”: Pyarelal, Discovery of Satyagraha, p. 396.

66   “A purer, a nobler”: Mahadevan and Ramachandran, Quest for Gandhi, p. 344.

67   “You will never know”: Shirer, Gandhi, p. 37.

68   “converted the whole carriage”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 212.

69   “in retrospect, Gandhi”: Pyarelal, Discovery of Satyagraha, p. 396.

CHAPTER 3: AMONG ZULUS

1   “We were then marched”: CWMG, vol. 8, p. 135.

2   Similarly, he would later: Enacted in 1907 by the all-white provincial legislature as soon as self-rule was restored to the former South African Republic. (The 1906 Asiatic Law Amendment Act, passed during the brief period that the Transvaal was counted as a crown colony, had been disallowed by Britain.) The legislation once again barred Indians with no history of previous residence in the Transvaal.

3   “The spirit of fanaticism”: Huttenback, Gandhi in South Africa, p. 198.

4   It would violate: Natal Mercury, Jan. 14, 1903. The Orange Free State, one of the four provinces in the original Union of South Africa, barred Indians from taking up residence for nearly ninety years longer, until the dismantling of apartheid.

5   “for the first time”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 126.

6   Brought to Johannesburg: Doke, M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot, p. 151; see also Meer, South African Gandhi, pp. 600–601; Itzkin, Gandhi’s Johannesburg, p. 30.

7   “a Native lying in bed”: Meer, South African Gandhi, p. 601.

8   “This refined Indian”: Doke, M. K. Gandhi: Indian Patriot, p. 152.

9   “a strong, heavily built”: Meer, South African Gandhi, p. 602.

10   “We may entertain”: Ibid., p. 601.

11   Is that, as some Indian scholars: They were speaking speculatively in private conversation.

12   In strict interpretation of caste: In the late 1960s, when I was a correspondent in India, I asked a Hindu religious figure, the Shankaracharya of Puri, whether he could imagine himself sitting and talking to an untouchable. He replied: “I’m talking with you.”

13   “the Indian is being dragged”: CWMG, vol. 1, p. 150.

14   “the raw Kaffir”: Ibid., vol. 2, p. 74.

15   “About the mixing”: Ibid., vol. 4, p. 131.

16   “If there is one thing”: Ibid., p. 89.

17   “We believe as much”: Ibid., vol. 3, p. 453.

18   “Oh, say have you seen”: Quoted in Mahadevan, Year of the Phoenix, p. 43, clipping in archive of Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad.

19   “A fair complexion”: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, pp. 8–9.

20   “Are Asiatic and Colored races”: “Mr. Gandhi’s Address Before the Y.M.C.A.,” Indian Opinion, June 6, 1908, in CWMG, vol. 8, pp. 242–46.

21   “If we look into the future”: CWMG, vol. 8, pp. 232–46.

22   “these hypocritical distinctions”: Meer, South African Gandhi, pp. 606–7; “My Second Experience in Gaol,” Indian Opinion, Jan. 30, 1909.

23   Possibly these are “Native Isaac”: Diary of Hermann Kallenbach, Sabarmati Ashram archive, Ahmedabad.

24   “It is understood”: CWMG, vol. 96, supp. vol. 6, p. 44.

25   “I regard the Kaffirs”: CWMG, vol. 10, cited by Green, Gandhi, p. 200.

26   Rajmohan Gandhi, his grandson: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 149.

27   And when it comes: The other two were the Reverend Walter Rubusana, who was elected to the Cape province provincial council, and John Tengo Jabavu, editor of a weekly newspaper printed in English and Xhosa in Cape Town, where Gandhi encountered him. See Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian South African Life (Cape Town, 2000), p. 118. Of course, the absence of other names in Gandhi’s writings of the period does not in itself demonstrate that he had no further encounters with African leaders. Recently, in an as-yet-unpublished memoir by a woman named Pauline Padlashuk, an account has come to light of a visit to Tolstoy Farm by Pixley ka Isaka Seme, who, like Dube, was an early officeholder of what became the African National Congress. “Mr. Gandhi told Dr. Seme about his passive resistance movement,” this white witness wrote.

28   A Zulu aristocrat: Shula Marks, “Ambiguities of Dependence: John L. Dube of Natal,” Journal of South African Studies 1, no. 2 (1975), p. 163.

29   “my patron saint”: Fredrickson, Black Liberation, p. 119.

30   president-general he was called: Dube himself did not attend the founding session of the new Congress in Bloemfontein. He was elected president in absentia.

31   “This Mr. Dubey”: CWMG, vol. 5, p. 55.

32   “They worked hard”: Fredrickson, Black Liberation, p. 119.

33   We know that Gopal: Ilanga lase Natal, Nov. 15, 1912. The entry in Kallenbach’s diary for that date, at the archive of the Sabarmati Ashram, doesn’t mention the visit to Inanda at all.

34   “To us at the Phoenix Settlement”: “A Great Zulu Dead,” Indian Opinion, Feb. 15, 1946.

35   “the solidarity between”: Jacob Zuma, in speech available online at www.info.gov.za/speeches/2000/000/0010161010a1002.htm.>.

36   The immediate provocation: The term “poll tax” as it was used in South Africa at that time had nothing to do with elections. See Surendra Bhana, “Gandhi, Indians, and Africans in South Africa,” paper presented at the Kansas African Studies Center, Sept. 12, 2002.

37   “For the Indian community”: CWMG, vol. 5, p. 366.

38   Gandhi had the rank: Ibid., p. 368. Another biographer, D. G. Tendulkar, following the Autobiography, makes it twenty-four, including nineteen ex-indentured. Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 1, p. 76.

39   In the next few weeks: This is the surmise of the leading South African scholar on this conflict, Jeff Guy, in his book Maphumulo Uprising, p. 101.

40   “I do not remember”: Prabhudas Gandhi, My Childhood with Gandhiji, p. 42.

41   But it did say: See Bhana, “Gandhi, Indians, and Africans in South Africa.”

42   In London, an exile: Green, Gandhi, p. 160.

43   “Mr. Gandhi speaks with”: Doke, M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot, p. 111.

44   “It was no trifle”: Ibid., p. 112.

45   “My heart was with the Zulus”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 279.

46   As late as 1943: Nayar, Mahatma Gandhi’s Last Imprisonment, p. 264.

47   “These themes”: Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth, p. 194.

48   In part, this may have: Marks, “Ambiguities of Dependence,” p. 54.

49   “No, I purposely did not”: CWMG, vol. 62, p. 199.

50   “Yours is a far bigger issue”: Ibid., vol. 68, p. 273.

51   “I venture to trust”: Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository, Government House 1457, Military Affairs, Bhambatha Rebellion Correspondence, Feb. 9, to Dec. 28, 1907. See also M. K. Gandhi to Gov. H. McCallum, Aug. 13, 1907. Thanks to Jeff Guy, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, who called this passage to my attention.

52   He had spoken of the need: Marks, “Ambiguities of Dependence,” p. 54.

53   “decency of wearing clothes”: Speech at the Natal Missionary Conference, at Durban Town Hall, July 4, 1911. Text in archive of Killie Campbell Library in Durban.

54   close to the Zulu royal house: In 1936—twenty-four years after he was elected president of the South African Native National Congress—John Dube was named “Prime Minister” of what was termed the Zulu nation by the reigning Prince Regent.

55   “Every other question”: “Sons of the Soil,” Indian Opinion, Aug. 30, 1913, quoted in Nauriya, African Element in Gandhi, p. 48.

56   “You must know that every one”: Reprinted in “Sons of the Soil,” cited by Nauriya, African Element in Gandhi, p. 48.

57   “About five hundred Indians”: Document in the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Center at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, File 1262/203, 3984, HIST/1893/14.

58   “people like Indians”: See Carl Faye, Zulu References for Interpreters and Students in Documents (Pietermaritzburg, 1923), which includes “Notes of Proceedings at Meeting with Zulus Held by John L. Dube at Eshowe, Zululand, 30 November 1912.”

59   “anti-Indianism”: Heather Hughes, “Doubly Elite: Exploring the Life of John Langalibalele Dube,” Journal of Southern African Studies vol. 27, no. 3 (Sept. 2001): footnote p. 446. The quotation from “The Indian Invasion” came to me in an e-mail from Ms. Hughes.

60   Later a Zulu newspaper: Roux, Time Longer Than Rope, p. 250.

61   “Indians cannot make common cause”: Harijan, Feb. 18, 1939.

62   “Indians and Africans must act”: A little more than two months before Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, she was delivering what was essentially an antiwar message, but not for Gandhi’s reasons.

63   That night, according to one: “I Remember,” privately circulated memoir by I. C. Meer, edited by E. S. Reddy and Fatima Meer.

64   “pogrom” against Indians: Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai offer a narrative and analysis of the 1949 riot in Monty Naiker: Between Reason and Treason (Pietermaritzburg, 2010), pp. 234–55.

65   “The inclusion of all”: CWMG, vol. 87, p. 414.

66   But few African leaders were ready: The conspicuous exception was Albert Luthuli who became president of the African National Congress in 1952. Four years earlier, a few months after Gandhi’s murder, Luthuli spoke of “the efficacy of nonviolence as an instrument of struggle in seeking freedom for oppressed people” in a speech at Howard University in Washington that anticipated Martin Luther King, Jr. The first South African to win the Nobel Peace Prize said blacks in the United States as well as Africa should go forward as Gandhi’s “undoubted disciples.” His notes for the speech are preserved in the archive of the Luthuli Museum in Groutville, KwaZulu-Natal, and cited by Scott Couper in his Albert Luthuli: Bound by Faith.

67   “Many of our grassroots”: Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 107, cited by Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner? p. 342.

68   Repeatedly, he courted arrest: Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner? pp. 353–55.

69   But Manilal had no organized: Ibid., p. 355.

70   At one meeting: Ibid., pp. 350–51.

71   “The principle was not”: Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 111. See also pp. 91, 99.

CHAPTER 4: UPPER HOUSE

1   “No man or woman living”: Gandhi to Kallenbach, June 16, 1912, quoted by Hunt and Bhana, “Spiritual Rope-Walkers.”

2   “a grim fight against”: CWMG, 2nd ed., vol. 58, pp. 118–19.

3   For five of those years: Kasturba moved to Tolstoy Farm with two sons in the latter half of 1910 and stayed till September 1912, when she moved back to Phoenix, according to Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner? pp. 96, 104.

4   Gandhi insists: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 270.

5   Colonial Natal was a place: Natal Mercury, June 15, 1903.

6   “no reason why we should”: Huttenback, Gandhi in South Africa, p. 244. Emphasis mine.

7   Finally, in 1908: Ibid., p. 235.

8   “I use all the money”: CWMG, vol. 6, p. 433.

9   “So I kept pouring out”: Gandhi, Autobiography, pp. 252–53.

10   “One day news came”: Prabhudas Gandhi, My Childhood with Gandhiji, pp. 44–45, 58.

11   “I could stay there only”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 270.

12   The two centers: Anand, Mahatma Gandhi and the Railways, p. 13.

13   Physically strong and quick-tempered: Meer, South African Gandhi, p. 1202.

14   According to Prema Naidoo: Interview with Prema Naidoo, Johannesburg, Nov. 2007.

15   “If Thambi Naidoo”: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 148.

16   “Mine would be considered”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 274.

17   Gandhi’s house still stands: Itzkin, Gandhi’s Johannesburg, p. 61.

18   “His voice was soft”: Interview with Millie Polak, 1954, from the BBC archive, broadcast on May 7, 2004.

19   When Harilal was married: Dalal, Harilal Gandhi, p. 10.

20   In a will drafted in 1909: CWMG, vol. 96, p. 9.

21   “He feels that I have”: Dalal, Harilal Gandhi, p. 30.

22   “almost in the same bed”: Harijan, May 29, 1937. Quoted in an article by Mahadev Desai on Kallenbach’s visit to India.

23   Gandhi early on made a point: CWMG, vol. 96, p. 9.

24   One respected Gandhi scholar: “[James D.] Hunt asserts that their relationship was clearly homoerotic while not homosexual.” As related by Weber, Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor, p. 74.

25   Kallenbach, who was raised: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 301.

26   He’d thus been in South Africa: Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, pp. 153–54.

27   “Your portrait”: CWMG, vol. 96, pp. 28–29.

28   The most plausible guesses: See Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia, 2000), p. 36: “Moreover, Gandhi’s focused attention on the problems associated with constipation, and his regular use of enemas, can be explained, at least in part, by the need he felt to keep his body immaculately clean.”

29   In the agreement dated: CWMG, vol. 96, pp. 62–63.

30   “For the last two years”: Sarid and Bartolf, Hermann Kallenbach, p. 16.

31   Later it is Kallenbach: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 294.

32   “I see death in chocolates”: CWMG, vol. 96, p. 71.

33   He sends Kallenbach: Ibid., p. 129.

34   a Dutch word: Jean Branford, A Dictionary of South African English (Cape Town, 1980), p. 147.

35   “Life is very short”: CWMG, vol. 9, p. 426, citing the original G. K. Chesterton article which appeared in The Illustrated London News, Oct. 2, 1909. See also Payne, Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 213.

36   “The English have not taken India”: M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, pp. 39, 114.

37   “Those in whose name we speak”: Ibid., p. 70.

38   “The primary object”: CWMG, 2nd ed., vol. 11, p. 428.

39   “I should like to slip out”: Ibid., p. 428.

40   “They are more useful”: M. K. Gandhi, “To the Colonial Born Indian,” Indian Opinion, July 15, 1911.

41   “That is my predominant occupation”: CWMG, 2nd ed., vol. 12, p. 49.

42   “makes us eat more”: Ibid., vol. 11, p. 169.

43   Now, when he eases up: Ibid., vol. 96, p. 96, where Gandhi informs Kallenbach of the dietary switch. For his earlier insistence on a saltless regime, which he said “purifies the blood to a high degree,” see vol. 11, pp. 130, 150, 507–8.

44   In Gandhi’s mind: Ibid., vol. 11, p. 190.

45   Upper House is wounded: Ibid., vol. 96, p. 220.

46   “Though I love”: Ibid., p. 166.

47   “a man of strong feelings”: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 171, cited in Weber, Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor, p. 71.

48   “morbid sensitiveness”: CWMG, vol. 96, pp. 118, 183.

49   The timing of Gandhi’s: Gandhi settled in Johannesburg following his application to the Johannesburg bar on February 16, 1903. Meer, South African Gandhi, p. 37.

50   “whose eyes were always”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 222.

51   “In these conversations”: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 269.

52   “I shall be there”: CWMG, vol. 11, p. 161.

53   His “inner voice”: As quoted, for instance, in Nayar, Mahatma Gandhi’s Last Imprisonment, p. 187.

54   Threatening renewed resistance: CWMG, vol. 11, p. 229.

55   Hundreds of other resisters: Huttenback, Gandhi in South Africa, pp. 264–65.

56   “a substitute for slavery”: Indian Opinion, March 10, 1908, included in Meer, South African Gandhi, p. 964.

57   “To a starving man”: Indian Opinion, Sept. 17, 1903, included in Meer, South African Gandhi, p. 969.

58   Indian Opinion carried: Indian Opinion, Sept. 16, 1911.

59   “In spite of your remarks”: CWMG, vol. 10, p. 465. See also Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, p. 211.

60   The most Gandhi had been hoping: CWMG, vol. 11, p. 130.

61   “If I felt like being free”: Ibid., vol. 96, p. 98.

62   A week later he wrote: Ibid., p. 99.

63   For nearly a year: African Chronicle, May 19, 1909, and March 25, 1911. Available on microfilm at the British Library.

64   “an absolute Hindu”: African Chronicle, June 15 and 8, 1912.

65   Just ten months later: African Chronicle, April 16, 1913.

66   “Mr. Gandhi may have been”: African Chronicle, June 10 and Jan. 10, 1914.

67   Though they’d agreed that: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 158.

68   Some days earlier: African Chronicle, Nov. 16, 1912.

69   Fifteen years after the fact: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, pp. 270, 242–43.

70   “Are we not to blame”: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 207.

71   “You must return”: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 268.

CHAPTER 5: LEADING THE INDENTURED

1   The status of Indians: Quoted in Millin, General Smuts, p. 230.

2   He wrote a long piece: CWMG, vol. 12, pp. 132–35.

3   “Then I am not your wife”: Ibid., p. 31.

4   “We congratulate our plucky”: Ibid., p. 66.

5   “I have sketched out”: Ibid., vol. 96, p. 121.

6   “resolving in my own mind”: Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience, p. 242.

7   “When this tax thus fell”: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, p. 273.

8   The government was too: Meer, South African Gandhi, p. 47.

9   On consecutive days: Kallenbach diary in the archive of the Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad. Naidoo is a Telugu, not a Tamil, name, but Thambi Naidoo was chairman of the Tamil Benefit Society in Johannesburg, where the term “Tamil” seems to have been used loosely to designate all those of South Indian origin who might also in that era have been called Madrasis.

10   That evening he and Gandhi: Kallenbach diary notes, July 3–7, 1913, in the archive of the Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad.

11   “ringleader”: Natal Witness, Oct. 18, 1913.

12   Gandhi had used the threat: CWMG, vol. 12, pp. 214–15.

13   “But the mere presence”: Ibid., p. 512.

14   “It may be difficult”: Ibid., p. 214.

15   Natal’s attorney general: Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 363.

16   “A peculiar position”: Natal Witness, Oct. 18, 1913.

17   As the message spread: Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 364.

18   “Any precipitate step”: African Chronicle, Oct. 18, 1913.

19   “Indians do not fight”: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 240.

20   Despite all these signals: Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 364.

21   “We do not believe”: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 253.

22   All the women he’d dispatched: Star, Nov. 1, 1913.

23   The procession: Bhana and Pachai, Documentary History of Indian South Africans, p. 143.

24   “They struck not”: Ibid., pp. 142–43.

25   Here a reporter: “The Great March: Mr. Gandhi at Work,” Indian Opinion, Nov. 19, 1913.

26   Gandhi, in the thick: “What the British Press Says,” Indian Opinion, Nov. 19, 1913.

27   Later he wrote: Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, pp. 296, 299.

28   “General Smuts will have”: Ibid., p. 300.

29   “He gave me strokes”: Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 372.

30   “Any government worth its salt”: Transvaal Leader, Oct. 29, 1913.

31   The Natal Coal Owners Association: Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 369.

32   Taking their cues: The Star, Nov. 10, 1913.

33   spread of the strike’s seeming flood tide: Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 393.

34   The first walkout: Transvaal Leader, Nov. 5 and 8, 1913.

35   At the height of the unrest: Report on Durban Police dated November 17 by Chief Magistrate Percy Binns, National Archives, Pretoria.

36   Rajmohan Gandhi suggests: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 167.

37   “The leaders of the movement”: “Progress of the Strike: The Durban Conference,” Indian Opinion, Oct. 29, 1913.

38   Nevertheless, Vahed and Desai: Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 384.

39   The plantation to which the food: In the apartheid era, a black township was laid out on lands that had belonged to the old Campbell estate. It was called KwaMashu. Few of its inhabitants were likely to know that “Mashu” was a Zulu rendering of “Marshall,” a tribute to the white planter who introduced Gandhi to Dube.

40   He’d told his supporters: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 298.

41   “carnival of violence”: The full text of Marshall Campbell’s letter to Gandhi dated Dec. 30, 1913, can be found at the Killie Campbell Library in Durban in a file that also contains a letter from Colin Campbell to his brother William and a subsequent letter from William to his father. None of these letters shed any light on the question of what the supposed ballistic examination showed about who fired the bullet that killed the indentured laborer Patchappen, if it was not the planter’s son.

42   “In all our struggles”: Ibid., pp. 298–99.

43   By his own testimony: Transvaal Leader, Nov. 28 and 29 and Dec. 19 and 23, 1913.

44   If he’d not been in jail: Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 394.

45   The Indians had refused: On November 14, according to Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 382.

46   A detachment of police: Ibid., p. 383.

47   These themes are regularly: Transvaal Leader, Nov. 19, 1913.

48   “The Indians were very excited”: Indian Enquiry Commission Report, presented to Parliament April 1914, p. 8 (available at House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, accessible through ProQuest).

49   “overwhelmed in numbers”: Transvaal Leader, Nov. 28, 1913.

50   The commission that looked: Indian Enquiry Commission Report, p. 10.

51   A witness told Reuters: Clipping on file in the National Archives, Pretoria.

52   An indentured laborer: Indian Opinion, Dec. 12, 1913.

53   The British governor-general: Lord Gladstone’s cable is on file at the National Archives, Pretoria. Contending that Botha and Smuts had reacted to the Indian strikes “with great forbearance,” the governor-general declared: “I deprecate official credence being given to outrageous charges telegraphed to India by those who were responsible for the strikes here.”

54   Most of his spare time: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 270.

55   He said he’d miss the solitude: Ibid., p. 272.

56   Gandhi used it to prepare: Ibid., p. 276.

57   “How glorious”: Ibid., p. 274.

58   “I saw that it was no matter for grief”: Ibid., p. 320.

59   But fresh out of jail: Ibid., p. 315.

60   “I explained that they had come out, not as indentured laborers”: Bhana and Pachai, Documentary History of Indian South Africans, p. 142.

61   In assigning to the strikers: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 660.

62   “Mr. Gandhi’s performance”: African Chronicle, Dec. 27, 1913, and Jan. 10, 1914. Aiyar was still at his old Durban address in Sept. 1944 when a wartime censorship office intercepted a letter, now on file at the National Archive in Pretoria, that he wrote to the New York office of the Indian National Congress seeking help on the publication of a book on race conflict in South Africa.

63   “a charter of our freedom”: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 483.

64   “a final settlement”: Ibid., p. 442.

65   These could be achieved: Ibid., p. 478.

66   “We need not fight for votes”: Ibid., p. 479.

67   Finally, he had to concede: Ibid., p. 477.

68   Between 1914 and 1940: Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian South African Life (Cape Town, 2000), pp. 16–17.

69   They had an understanding: Nanda, Three Statesmen, p. 467.

70   She’d not been consulted: Interview with Prema Naidoo, Johannesburg, Nov. 2007.

71   Gandhi thanked: CWMG, vol. 12, p. 474.

72   “I am, as ever”: Ibid., p. 486.

73   “I am under indenture”: Ibid., p. 472.

74   “The Atlantic”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 173.

75   “I have no Kallenbach”: CWMG, vol. 15, p. 341, cited in Sarid and Bartolf, Hermann Kallenbach, p. 64.

CHAPTER 6: WAKING INDIA

1   He was more “at home”: CWMG, vol. 13, p. 5.

2   “teach them why India”: Ibid., p. 195.

3   He makes a point: Hindustani, the spoken language of the North Indian street (and Bollywood), derives its vocabulary from both Sanskrit and Persian, through Hindi and Urdu.

4   “I should have thought”: CWMG, vol. 21, p. 14.

5   “In India, what we want”: Ibid., p. 73.

6   “I do not believe”: Ibid., vol. 16, p. 282.

7   “the malady of foot-touching”: Ibid., vol. 20, p. 511.

8   “In the mere touch”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 3, p. 286.

9   “At night”: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 233.

10   Later, his devoted English follower: News Chronicle (London), Sept. 7, 1930.

11   Gandhi’s first Indian Boswell: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 3, p. 265.

12   “We have come for the darshan”: Ibid., p. 264.

13   “the people got frightened”: CWMG, vol. 19, p. 374.

14   “the four pillars”: Ibid., vol. 23, p. 53.

15   The throngs that turned: See Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma,” pp. 290–340.

16   “No Indian who aspires”: CWMG, vol. 14, p. 201.

17   “morality in action”: Brown, Gandhi, p. 82.

18   Those Gandhi called: CWMG, vol. 14, pp. 80, 201.

19   Fewer than 1 million: Ibid., vol. 14, p. 203.

20   Seen that way: Ibid., vol. 13, p. 200.

21   Writing to Hermann Kallenbach: Ibid., vol. 96, p. 212.

22   “I am an outsider”: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 165.

23   But Gandhi had large ambitions: CWMG, vol. 13, p. 33.

24   At Gokhale’s death: Nanda, Three Statesmen, p. 170; also Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform, pp. 241–43.

25   They took seven vows: CWMG, vol. 13, p. 91.

26   About half its original intake: A thumbnail sketch of Imam Abdul Kader Salim Bawazir, originally of Johannesburg’s Hamidia Mosque, is provided by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, A Frank Friendship, p. 75.

27   “The object of the Ashram”: CWMG, vol. 13, p. 91.

28   “I cannot imagine”: Ibid., vol. 23, p. 102.

29   “an instrument for the revival”: As quoted by Rajmohan Gandhi in Eight Lives, p. 150.

30   “I believe that Hindus”: Cited in Rajaram, Gandhi, Khilafat, and the National Movement, p. 8.

31   Muhammad Ali, a polished: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 202.

32   “I came to observe”: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 349.

33   Soon he drafted: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 1, p. 162; Pyarelal and Nayar, In Gandhiji’s Mirror, p. 101.

34   “A humble and honest”: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 2, Satyagraha, p. 17.

35   “I have taken in a Pariah”: CWMG, vol. 96, p. 223.

36   “I have told Mrs. Gandhi”: Ibid., vol. 13, pp. 127–28.

37   “she’s making my life hell”: Ibid., vol. 96, p. 225.

38   “I had to undertake”: Ibid., p. 227.

39   “I have been deserted”: Ibid., p. 225.

40   Most will trickle back: Pyarelal and Nayar, In Gandhiji’s Mirror, p. 102.

41   “Your not being with me”: CWMG, vol. 14, p. 190.

42   He speaks of moving: Ibid., vol. 13, p. 128.

43   “She has beautifully resigned”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 1, p. 153.

44   “She cannot bring herself”: CWMG, vol. 25, p. 514.

45   “wall of prejudice”: Ibid., vol. 26, p. 295.

46   “This great and indelible crime”: Ibid., vol. 13, p. 233.

47   “Not a chest of indigo”: Pouchepadass, Champaran and Gandhi, p. 6.

48   “We have begun to convince”: CWMG, vol. 14, p. 538.

49   “All of us who worked”: Prasad, At the Feet of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 148. In recent years, a Swiss journalist with deep experience of India revisited the Champaran district to see how the initiatives Gandhi and his colleagues began decades earlier had developed. He found virtually no trace of them; instead, a climate of rampant political corruption and oppression. See Imhasly, Goodbye to Gandhi? pp. 57–86.

50   By one estimate: Shankar Dayal Singh, Gandhi’s First Step, p. 5.

51   Later he would call it: CWMG, vol. 19, p. 88.

52   Referring back to the Natal strikes: Ibid., vol. 13, p. 210.

53   India needed to adopt: Ibid., p. 232.

54   “The essence of his teaching”: Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 23, a passage taken from Nehru’s Discovery of India.

55   “This voice was somehow different”: Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 12, a passage taken from Nehru’s Glimpses of World History.

56   Elsewhere he acknowledges: CWMG, vol. 14, p. 392.

57   “I have traveled much”: Ibid., p. 298.

58   “Without any impertinence”: Ibid., vol. 19, p. 104.

59   “did not descend”: Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 23.

60   The political bargain: CWMG, vol. 14, pp. 377–82.

61   “I love the English nation”: Ibid., p. 380.

62   The recruiting agent in chief: Ibid., p. 443.

63   What better means: Ibid., p. 476.

64   “They will be yours”: Ibid., p. 454.

65   Fighting for the empire: Ibid., p. 440.

66   “It is clear”: Ibid., p. 485.

67   Finally, in August 1918: Ibid., p. 473.

68   He would later describe himself: Ibid., vol. 23, p. 4.

69   “My failure so far”: Ibid., vol. 14, p. 480.

70   Eventually, he goes through: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 202.

71   “How can twenty-two crore Hindus”: CWMG, vol. 16, p. 306.

72   One of these was a movement: Kepel, Jihad, pp. 44–45.

73   a complex religious: A sworn enemy of the Saudi royal family—the last caliph’s eventual successors as keepers of the holy places—bin Laden wasn’t fixated on Turks. A Saudi with family roots in Yemen, he held to the ideal of spiritual and temporal authority combined in one potentate and one theocratic state representing all believers. In a videotape made after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden said what Americans were finally experiencing was what “our Islamic nation has been tasting for more than eighty years of humiliation and disgrace.” The eighty years refer to the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, undermining the caliphate. In other words, he’s reviving the Khilafat cause, for which Gandhi campaigned. Faisal Devji has a provocative discussion of these connections in The Terrorist in Search of Humanity, in particular on pp. 120–30. “The Mahatma,” he writes, “was undoubtedly the most important propagator of the caliphate in modern times.”

74   “Bhai sahib!”: Jordens, Swami Shraddhananda, p. 114.

75   the month after the first Khilafat: Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 439.

76   “cheers, tears, embraces”: Minault, Khilafat Movement, p. 82.

77   In June the Central Khilafat Committee: CWMG, vol. 17, p. 543.

78   “It is the duty”: Ibid., vol. 18, p. 230.

79   Three months later: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 238.

80   Mohammed Ali Jinnah: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 234.

81   He left the Congress: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 242.

82   “After the Prophet”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 237.

83   “We laid the foundation”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 3, pp. 290–91.

84   Ultimately, the maulana: CWMG, vol. 23, p. 567.

85   By August 1921: Ibid., vol. 21, p. 10.

86   That was hardly an excuse: Minault, Khilafat Movement, pp. 145–49; Nanda, Gandhi, pp. 311–20.

87   Gandhi was pointing: CWMG, vol. 21, pp. 180–81.

88   “I wish to be in touch”: Ibid., vol. 24, pp. 456–57.

89   “It is against our scriptures”: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 289.

90   “I can wield no influence”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Eight Lives, p. 111.

91   For him, it was less: CWMG, vol. 20, p. 90.

92   It was a cause: Ibid., vol. 19, p. 92.

93   While it had nothing: Ibid., vol. 25, p. 200.

94   “I am striving”: Ibid., p. 202.

95   “the rest of the letter”: Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner? p. 175.

96   Shortly after the Mahatma: Payne, Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 355.

97   “Consider the burning”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 241. The economist Amartya Sen offers a contemporary view of the debate between the Mahatma and the poet over homespun versus manufactured cloth. “Except for the rather small specialized market for high-quality spun cloth,” he writes, “it is hard to make economic sense of hand-spinning, even with wheels less primitive than Gandhi’s charkha.” But Gandhi’s central point had as much to do with social justice, Sen recognizes, as economics. Sen’s discussion is in The Argumentative Indian, pp. 100–101.

98   “To a people famishing”: CWMG, vol. 21, p. 289.

99   “I got the votes”: Nanda, Gandhi, p. 347.

100   “Our defeat is in proportion”: Quoted in ibid., p. 346.

101   “Gandhi is like a paralytic”: Quoted in Minault, Khilafat Movement, p. 185.

102   “I personally can never”: CWMG, vol. 23, pp. 350–51, cited in Nanda, Gandhi, p. 344.

CHAPTER 7: UNAPPROACHABILITY

1   When he intoned: Jaswant Singh, Jinnah, p. 111.

2   “My heart refuses”: CWMG, vol. 32, pp. 452, 473–74.

3   The Times of India spread: Jaswant Singh, Jinnah, p. 113.

4   His covering letter: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 9, p. 304.

5   In his view, Gandhi: Jordens, Swami Shraddhananda, p. 110.

6   The start of the noncooperation: Tinker, Ordeal of Love, p. 151.

7   So, in December 1919: Jordens, Swami Shraddhananda, p. 117.

8   “Is it not true”: Ibid.

9   “That was a grave mistake”: Ibid., p. 119.

10   “it is a bigger problem”: CWMG, vol. 19, p. 289.

11   “While Mahatmaji stood”: Jordens, Swami Shraddhananda, p. 119.

12   “If all untouchables”: Ibid., p. 144.

13   This led to a public exchange: CWMG, vol. 23, pp. 567–69.

14   “No propaganda can be allowed”: Ibid., vol. 24, pp. 145, 148–49.

15   Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar: B. R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, p. 23.

16   “greatest and most sincere champion”: Ibid.

17   Although Gandhi had called: CWMG, vol. 19, p. 289.

18   “I am trying to make”: Ibid., vol. 25, p. 228.

19   Due to his many years: Ibid., vol. 26, p. 408.

20   “To endure or bear hardships”: Ibid., pp. 264–65.

21   “One caste, one religion”: Mendelsohn and Vicziany, Untouchables, p. 97.

22   at first ambivalent: Interview with M. K. Sanoo, Ernakulam, Jan. 18, 2009.

23   rename the boy: Interview with Dr. Babu Vijayanath, Harippad, Jan. 17, 2009. Malayala Manorama article of Oct. 15, 1927, describes naming ceremony.

24   an untouchable leader: Interview with K. K. Kochu, near Kottayam, Jan. 19, 2009. T. K. Ravindran suggests that this blinding may have been temporary in his book Eight Furlongs of Freedom, p. 108.

25   “I think you should let”: CWMG, vol. 23, p. 391.

26   The letter didn’t reach: Joseph, George Joseph, pp. 166–69. Gandhi’s version of these events can be found in Removal of Untouchability, a collection of his writings on that theme, pp. 107–14.

27   Despite the Congress support: CWMG, vol. 23, p. 471.

28   “I personally believe”: Ibid., p. 519.

29   The villages were divided: Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ed., Penguin Gandhi Reader, p. 221.

30   He would also argue: M. K. Gandhi, Selected Political Writings, pp. 124–25.

31   “I spoke to Gandhi repeatedly”: Mende, Conversations with Mr. Nehru, pp. 27–28.

32   “The caste system, as it exists”: CWMG, vol. 59, p. 45.

33   “If untouchability goes”: Chandrashanker Shukla, Conversations of Ganhiji (Bombay, 1949), p. 59.

34   harmful both to spiritual and national growth: Harijan, July 18, 1936, also in Gandhi, Removal of Untouchability, p. 36.

35   “no interest left in life”: Quoted in Coward, Indian Critiques of Gandhi, p. 61.

36   only remaining varna: CWMG, vol. 80, pp. 222–24, cited by Martin Green in Gandhi in India: In His Own Words (Hanover, N.H., 1987), pp. 324–26.

37   “the deep black ignorance”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, p. 86.

38   The meeting took place: CWMG, vol. 24, pp. 90–94. Quotations in these paragraphs are all drawn from a document summarizing conversations with two Vaikom emissaries.

39   On their return: Ravindran, Eight Furlongs of Freedom, p. 86.

40   The meeting sent: Ibid., p. 95.

41   The freed leaders threw: Ibid., p. 99.

42   On his release from jail: CWMG, vol. 24, pp. 268–69.

43   By the end of the year: Ibid., vol. 25, p. 349.

44   Standing on their sense: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, p. 58.

45   But it’s Indanturuttil Nambiatiri: Ravindran, Eight Furlongs of Freedom, pp. 164–91.

46   “I am not ashamed”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, p. 84.

47   The likelier explanation: CWMG, vol. 19, p. 571.

48   Perhaps Nehru’s summing-up: Mende, Conversations with Mr. Nehru, pp. 28–29.

49   “I am trying myself”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, p. 83.

50   “I have come here to create peace”: Malayala Manorama, March 14, 1925.

51   To break the impasse: Ravindran, Eight Furlongs of Freedom, pp. 187–90.

52   “We will forsake”: Raimon, Selected Documents on the Vaikom Satyagraha, p. 112.

53   accommodate to change: Interview with Krishnan Nambuthiri, Vaikom, Jan. 14, 2009.

54   a crowd of twenty thousand: Malayala Manorama, March 14, 1925.

55   “I claim to be a sanatani”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, pp. 68–70.

56   “A few days or forever”: Ibid., pp. 77, 81.

57   Caste, untouchability, and social action: Ibid., pp. 84–88.

58   In reality, the Gandhi: Interview with Babu Vijayanath, Harippad, Jan. 17, 2009. The visit is also summarized in Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, pp. 124–25.

59   “He thinks I shall have to appear”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, p. 88.

60   According to a police report: Ravindran, Eight Furlongs of Freedom, p. 340.

61   In one such clash: Interview with Dr. Babu Vijayanath, Hariippad, Jan. 17, 2009.

62   Hearing of the Mahatma’s: This verse was pointed out to me by M. K. Sanoo and subsequently located by journalists at Malayala Manorama who translated it.

63   Definitely it was Gandhi: Raimon, Selected Documents on the Vaikom Satyagraha, p. 203.

64   K. K. Kochu, a Dalit intellectual: Madhyamam, April 2, 1999.

65   “I only wish”: Interview with K. K. Kochu, Kaduthuruthi, Kottayam district, Jan. 18, 2009.

66   “How many among you”: Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi, vol. 6, pp. 114–15.

67   “Gandhi was sitting cross-legged”: An excellent description, but Mahadev Desai’s contemporaneous diary note makes it clear they reached Alwaye by boat and car. Ibid., p. 118.

68   In his account: Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, pp. 109–10.

CHAPTER 8: HAIL, DELIVERER

1   Discovering they were prepared: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 2, p. 140.

2   In the pointlessness: Ibid., p. 142. Emphasis mine.

3   His reaction to this onset: Ibid., p. 327.

4   “What is one to do”: CWMG, vol. 31, p. 504.

5   He blamed “educated India”: Ibid., p. 369.

6   Next he blamed the British: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, pp. 241–42.

7   “The government of India”: CWMG, vol. 32, p. 571.

8   “I am an optimist”: Ibid., vol. 31, p. 504.

9   “appears to be my inaction”: Ibid., p. 368.

10   “I am biding my time”: Brown, Gandhi, p. 213.

11   “Give me blood”: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 261.

12   “given up reading newspapers”: CWMG, vol. 31, p. 554.

13   At a mammoth All Parties Convention: Wells, Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity, p. 177.

14   “We are sons of this land”: Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists, p. 189.

15   Within weeks of this rupture: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 2, p. 334. Within two years Muhammad Ali would die in London.

16   “This is the parting”: Philips and Wainwright, Partition of India, p. 279.

17   a younger wife: Ruttie Jinnah was originally a Parsi, a member of a minority composed of Indians of Persian descent who retain their Zoroastrian religion, but converted to Islam before their marriage. On her death, she was buried in a Muslim cemetery with her former husband sobbing at her graveside.

18   Swaraj within a year: Brown, Gandhi, p. 222, draws the parallel to the 1921 campaign. January 26 is still celebrated in India as Republic Day; August 15, the date on which India actually became independent in 1947, is celebrated as Independence Day.

19   “For me there is only”: CWMG, vol. 31, pp. 368–69.

20   “In the present state”: Ibid., vol. 42, p. 382.

21   Civil disobedience, he told Nehru: Brown, Gandhi, p. 235.

22   “next to water and air”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 303.

23   The viceroy also stuck: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, pp. 271–72.

24   “The fire of a great resolve”: As quoted in Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 309.

25   “Hail, Deliverer”: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 273. Thomas Weber questions whether these words were ever uttered, noting their absence from contemporary accounts and arguing that the quotation first appeared in an article by a British journalist who was actually in Berlin on the day Gandhi reached Dandi. See “Historiography and the Dandi March,” in Gandhi, Gandhism, and the Gandhians.

26   “The last four months in India”: CWMG, vol. 44, p. 468.

27   Gandhi made a sly allusion: Ibid., vol. 48, p. 18.

28   “No living man”: Harold Laski opinion piece in Daily Herald (London), Sept. 11, 1931.

29   “Your Majesty won’t expect”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 3, p. 127.

30   By the time Ambedkar returned: B. R. Ambedkar, Letters, p. 220.

31   betrothed to him at the age of nine: The marriage apparently took place three years later, when he would have been seventeen and she twelve, although his biographers cannot agree on their ages. Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, p. 20, says he was seventeen; Omvedt, Ambedkar, p. 6, says he was fourteen.

32   For an untouchable youth: B. R. Ambedkar, Essential Writings, p. 52.

33   When he sought to study: Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, p. 18.

34   So Bhima took: Omvedt, Ambedkar, p. 4.

35   One of these campaigns: Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, p. 74.

36   “When one is spurned”: Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit, p. 163.

37   “I am a difficult man”: Omvedt, Ambedkar, p. 119.

38   “You called me to hear”: Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, p. 165.

39   “Gandhiji, I have no homeland”: Ibid., p. 166.

40   “Till I left for England”: Mahadev Desai, Diary of Mahadev Desai, p. 52.

41   “revelatory of the stereotypes”: Omvedt, Ambedkar, p. 43.

42   The go-betweens who set up: Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit, p. 166.

43   Their next meeting, in London: Omvedt, Ambedkar, p. 43.

44   Maybe Gandhi had been: Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit, p. 166.

45   “Who are we to uplift Harijans?”: Mahadev Desai, Diary of Mahadev Desai, p. 53.

46   Drawing the parallel himself: CWMG, vol. 48, p. 224.

47   “Dr. A. always commands”: Ibid., p. 208.

48   “He has a right even to spit”: Ibid., pp. 160–61.

49   “Above all, the Congress represents”: Ibid., p. 16.

50   Three days later: Ibid., p. 34.

51   “I fully represent the claims”: B. R. Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, vol. 3, contains transcripts of the Round Table Conference sessions quoted here. The exchanges between Gandhi and Ambedkar can be found on pp. 661–63 of that volume.

52   “This has been the most humiliating”: Shirer, Gandhi, p. 194, cited in Herman, Gandhi and Churchill, p. 372.

53   “a more ignorant”: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 3, Satyapath, p. 169.

54   Gandhi claimed to be: B. R. Ambedkar, Letters, p. 215.

55   “Mr. Gandhi made nonsense”: B. R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, p. 275.

56   As the London conference: B. R. Ambedkar, Letters, p. 215.

57   Nehru didn’t go into that: Nehru to S. K. Patil, Nov. 31, 1931, Nehru Memorial Museum archive, AICC Papers, G86/3031.

58   “Gandhi’s Good-Bye Today”: Daily Herald (London), Dec. 5, 1931.

59   Years later George Orwell: George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” in A Collection of Essays (Garden City, N.Y., 1954), p. 180.

60   But he was skeptical: Rolland, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 248.

61   Pope Pius XI sent his regrets: Nayar, Salt Satyagraha, p. 403; Slade, Spirit’s Pilgrimage, p. 151.

62   “No indeed”: Nayar, Salt Satyagraha, p. 403. Sushila Nayar completed the biography begun by her brother, who seldom signed himself by his full name, Pyarelal Nayar.

63   Before the letter could be mailed: Ibid., p. 405.

64   On January 4, 1932: Ibid., p. 414. The Englishman who describes this scene is the ethnologist Verrier Elwin.

CHAPTER 9: FAST UNTO DEATH

1   “The caste system supported”: Ajoy Bose, Behenji, p. 83.

2   Eventually he concluded: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 7, p. 154.

3   honor killings of daughters and sisters: Jim Yardley, “In India, Caste Honor and Killings Intertwine,” The New York Times, July 9, 2010, p. 1.

4   “I agree that Bapu”: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 3, Satyapath, p. 179.

5   “My life is one indivisible whole”: CWMG, vol. 55, p. 199.

6   This from the man: “The Removal of Untouchability,” Young India, Oct. 13, 1921.

7   The man he addressed: CWMG, vol. 19, p. 289.

8   a status he’d sometimes compared: Gandhi, Removal of Untouchability, p. 11.

9   By the time the award: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 3, pp. 159–60.

10   Gandhi assumed but wasn’t sure: Mahadev Desai, Diary of Mahadev Desai, p. 295.

11   “prepared to go”: “Suicide Threat,” Times of India, Sept. 14, 1932.

12   “Our own men will be critical”: Mahadev Desai, Diary of Mahadev Desai, pp. 293–94, 302. Nehru, who was in jail in this period, admitted in a note in his diary after the conclusion of Gandhi’s fast, “I am afraid I am drifting further and further away from him mentally, in spite of my strong emotional attachment to him. His continual references to God irritate me exceedingly. His political actions are often enough guided by an unerring instinct but he does not encourage others to think.” Cited in Brown, Gandhi, p. 270.

13   “What if I am taken”: Mahadev Desai, Diary of Mahadev Desai, p. 4.

14   “Sudden shock is the treatment”: Ibid., p. 301.

15   “Untouchable hooligans”: Ibid.

16   “What does MacDonald know”: Verma, Crusade Against Untouchability, pp. 38–39.

17   Then he thought temple entry: Ravindran, Eight Furlongs of Freedom, p. 79.

18   William L. Shirer: Shirer, Gandhi, pp. 208–10.

19   “With the Hindus and Musalmans”: Pyarelal, Epic Fast, p. 6.

20   “Do not believe for one moment”: Verma, Crusade Against Untouchability, p. 27.

21   Patel regularly speculated: Narayan Desai, The Fire and the Rose, pp. 568–69; Rajmohan Gandhi, Patel, pp. 226–28.

22   “He would not be satisfied”: Pyarelal, Epic Fast, p. 30.

23   “If God has more work”: Narayan Desai, The Fire and the Rose, p. 569.

24   “If we cheaply dismiss”: Tagore, Mahatmaji and the Depressed Humanity, pp. 11, 18.

25   Tagore arrived: Ibid., p. 22.

26   “Mahatmaji, you have been”: Pyarelal, Epic Fast, p. 59; Narayan Desai, The Fire and the Rose, p. 575; Verma, Crusade Against Untouchability, pp. 43–44.

27   “No one shall be regarded”: Verma, Crusade Against Untouchability, p. 44.

28   A parallel gathering: Pyarelal, Epic Fast, p. 239.

29   Even Nehru, who acknowledged: Nehru, Toward Freedom, p. 237.

30   “I will never be moved”: Times of India, Sept. 14, 1932.

31   He’d been in a fix: Pyarelal, Epic Fast, pp. 188–89.

32   Kasturba raised the glass: Ibid., pp. 79–80.

33   “The entire audience”: Tagore, Mahatmaji and the Depressed Humanity, p. 29.

34   The idea that untouchability: Pyarelal, Epic Fast, pp. 79–81.

35   In his speeches to untouchable: Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, pp. 234, 221.

36   “the one thing that alone”: CWMG, vol. 53, p. 131.

37   “To open or not to open”: Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, p. 229.

38   “not necessary for him”: The Times (London), Nov. 7, 1932.

39   Eventually, they would both reject: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 7, p. 151.

40   “The Congress sucked the juice”: Mankar, Denunciation of Poona-Pact, p. 109.

41   When they met in February 1933: Ibid., p. 160.

42   Ambedkar had agreed to join: Verma, Crusade Against Untouchability, pp. 62–63.

43   But within a year: B. R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, p. 135.

44   “Sin and immorality”: Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, p. 229.

45   As late as 1958: Verma, Crusade Against Untouchability, p. 196.

46   In May 1933: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 3, p. 201.

47   The time had come: Omvedt, Ambedkar, p. 61.

48   If any admiration: B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, pp. 84–86.

49   “Obviously, he would like”: B. R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, p. 277.

50   But there’s suggestive: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 597.

51   “a flair for action”: Nehru, Toward Freedom, p. 240.

52   He also knew that: This is made clear in a discussion between Nehru and Mahadev Desai, on August 23, 1934, summarized in an as-yet-unpublished English translation of a portion of Mahadev Desai’s diary on file at the Gandhi Memorial Library, pp. 121–24.

53   This provoked the Bengali: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 3, p. 205.

54   “Life ceases to interest me”: Ibid., p. 215.

55   “If Mr. Gandhi now feels”: Ibid., pp. 215, 217.

56   He was thus maneuvered: Ibid., p. 216.

57   An early conclusion: The reports by colonial officials on the Gandhi tour are on file in the archive of the Nehru Memorial Museum. Many but not all of these reports have been excerpted in Ray, Gandhi’s Campaign Against Untouchability.

58   “I am quite sure”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 3, p. 281.

59   “We can’t even say”: Unpublished English translation of a portion of Mahadev Desai’s diary, for autumn 1934, on file at the Gandhi Memorial Library. See p. 162.

60   “The only way we can”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 3, p. 280.

61   Near the end of the tour: Ray, Gandhi’s Campaign Against Untouchability, p. 220.

62   It so preoccupied him: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 362.

63   “Anything more opposed”: Nehru, Toward Freedom, p. 301.

64   Tagore said Gandhi’s logic: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, pp. 362–63.

65   “Our sins and errors”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 3, p. 250.

66   “I would be untruthful”: Ibid., p. 251.

67   The sanatanists were: Nayar, Preparing for Swaraj, pp. 207–8.

68   In Poona, near the end: Ray, Gandhi’s Campaign against Untouchability, p. 178.

69   “Dr. Ambedkar complained”: Ibid., pp. 46–47.

70   “the growing pauperism”: CWMG, 2nd ed., vol. 65, pp. 178–79.

71   “I have lost the power”: CWMG, vol. 59, p. 218.

72   He ended the tour at Wardha: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 3, p. 282.

73   “The sanatanists are now”: Ibid., p. 283.

74   “a profound error for me”: Ibid., p. 297.

75   He was going in the opposite: Ibid., pp. 280, 296.

76   “None of them knows”: CWMG, vol. 61, p. 403, cited in Brown, Gandhi, p. 292.

77   “What I am aiming for”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 4, p. 304.

CHAPTER 10: VILLAGE OF SERVICE

1   “The villagers have a lifeless life”: Nayar, Preparing for Swaraj, p. 301.

2   “a mechanical performance”: Harijan, Aug. 17, 1934.

3   Later he allowed himself: CWMG, vol. 60, p. 58.

4   “We have to work away”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 5, p. 245.

5   “We have to become speechless”: CWMG, 2nd ed., vol. 65, p. 432.

6   Now, by working again: CWMG, vol. 59, p. 179.

7   Once he resolved: Ibid, p. 312.

8   “Wardha became the de facto”: Weber, Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor, p. 104.

9   By the end of the decade: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 5, pp. 17–18.

10   “shame some Japanese”: Ibid., p. 14.

11   “You must not”: Ibid., p. 15. It’s not clear whether a translator, editor, or Gandhi himself was responsible for this odd misuse of the word “clout” for what might have been termed a codpiece, breechcloth, cup, or even “jewel case.” In one of its more obscure definitions, “clout” can refer to a leather or iron patch.

12   “Who knows”: Ibid., p. 347.

13   As might have been expected: Payne, Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, pp. 464–65. Also see Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, pp. 406–7.

14   “The people are completely shameless”: Narayan Desai, The Fire and the Rose, pp. 601–2.

15   No road, as yet: Slade, Spirit’s Pilgrimage, pp. 202–3.

16   “If you will cooperate”: CWMG, vol. 62, p. 332.

17   “a very charming”: Slade, Spirit’s Pilgrimage, p. 203.

18   The hut that he was to occupy: Nayar, Preparing for Swaraj, p. 366.

19   Ashram and village: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, pp. 380–81.

20   “Oh God”: CWMG, vol. 59, p. 402.

21   Gandhi’s letters were full: CWMG, 2nd ed., vol. 65, p. 371.

22   A Christian, he was known: Kumarappa had studied economics at Columbia University with Edwin Seligman, who also taught Ambedkar.

23   the last Western economist: See reference in E. F. Schumacher, who quotes Kumarappa briefly. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Point Roberts, Wash., reprint, 1999), p. 39.

24   “The Association”: CWMG, vol. 59, p. 452.

25   “Full-timers, whole-hoggers”: Ibid., p. 411.

26   “necessary adjustment”: Ibid., vol. 62, p. 319.

27   “So! You are already tired!”: Narayan Desai, The Fire and the Rose, pp. 602–3.

28   “If this does not work”: CWMG, vol. 62, p. 239.

29   When one of his workers: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 4, p. 96.

30   “The only way is to sit”: CWMG, vol. 62, p. 379.

31   “Our ambition is to make”: Ibid., p. 378.

32   Soon he came down: Slade, Spirit’s Pilgrimage, p. 207.

33   A United Nations survey: Malise Ruthven, “Excremental India,” New York Review of Books, May 13, 2010.

34   What such latter-day: Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who leads the Grameen Bank in neighboring Bangladesh, is aware of similarities between his approach to rural poverty and Gandhi’s, but does not cite the Mahatma as an influence on the development of his thinking in his book Banker to the Poor (New Delhi, 2007). The same is true of Fazle Hasan Abed, the leader of the even larger BRAC Bank, also in Bangladesh, another pioneer in what is called “social entrepreneurship.” See Ian Smillie, Freedom from Want (Sterling, Va., 2009).

35   According to one of the untouchable: Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, p. 268.

36   The observation had provoked: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 3, Satyapath, p. 172.

37   Within a few months: “Caste Has to Go,” Harijan, Nov. 16, 1935; CWMG, vol. 62, pp. 121–22.

38   Actually, their deepest difference: CWMG, vol. 67, p. 359.

39   As interpreted by D. R. Nagaraj: Nagaraj, Flaming Feet, p. 39.

40   From the standpoint: Ibid., pp. 24–25.

41   The impatience of the Ezhavas: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 4, p. 97.

42   “Would you preach the Gospel”: Ibid., p. 101.

43   In his weekly: CWMG, vol. 65, p. 296.

44   Indignant over the foreigner’s: Harijan, June 12, 1937.

45   “None of our Hindu subjects”: Mahadev Desai, Epic of Travancore, p. 40.

46   So the old man now recalled: Interview with the maharajah of Travancore, Jan. 15, 2009.

47   “truly captivating”: CWMG, vol. 64, p. 255.

48   At nearly every stop: Mahadev Desai, Epic of Travancore, pp. 218–19.

49   “I must tell you”: CWMG, vol. 64, p. 248.

50   Ever since his provocative: Ibid., p. 62.

51   “What a wide gap”: Ibid., p. 132.

52   “No worker who has not”: Ibid., p. 61.

53   “Gandhi’s asceticism”: Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition, and Reform, pp. 205–6.

54   “I can suppress the enemy”: Ibid., p. 207.

55   In Bombay, recuperating: CWMG, vol. 62, pp. 428–30.

56   In less graphic terms: Ibid., p. 212.

57   “the revolting things”: Saint Augustine, Confessions, translated by Garry Wills (New York, 2006), p. 27.

58   “He remains the same wreck”: Dalal, Harilal Gandhi, p. 105.

59   “That degrading, dirty”: CWMG, vol. 67, p. 61.

60   “For the first time”: Ibid., p. 37.

61   “I am after all”: Cited by Thomson, Gandhi and His Ashramas, p. 228.

62   “Not only have I not”: CWMG, vol. 64, p. 175.

63   “I am told that you are indifferent”: Ibid., vol. 65, p. 301.

64   By speaking of failure: Ibid., p. 240.

65   “There is a hiatus”: Thomson, Gandhi and His Ashramas, p. 219.

66   an ideal he brought home: Gandhi started advocating spinning before he’d ever touched a spinning wheel. The idea, he later said, came to him during his 1909 trip to London “as in a flash.” He didn’t even know the difference between a spinning wheel and a handloom. In Hind Swaraj, written on his 1909 voyage back to South Africa, he writes of “ancient and sacred handlooms” when, so it seems, he’s thinking of the charkha. See an extended footnote on this point by Anthony J. Parel in his edition of Hind Swaraj, p. 230. Narayan Desai makes the same point in the first volume of My Life Is My Message, p. 459.

67   “I am utterly helpless”: CWMG, vol. 65, p. 231.

68   “Unfortunately the higher castes”: CWMG, 2nd ed., vol. 70, p. 461.

69   “a strange medley”: Slade, Spirit’s Pilgrimage, p. 191.

70   “Quite a few are only temporary”: CWMG, vol. 67, p. 327.

71   “show the results”: Mark Lindley, J. C. Kumarappa: Mahatma Gandhi’s Economist (Mumbai, 2007), p. 144.

72   “Whatever I do”: CWMG, vol. 73, cited in Thomson, Gandhi and His Ashramas, p. 209.

73   As late as 1945: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 48.

74   It’s not difficult to feel: Thomson, Gandhi and His Ashramas, p. 227.

75   “We cannot command”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 5, p. 79.

76   “Let no one say”: Ibid., p. 245.

77   “How I should love”: CWMG, vol. 96, pp. 277, 284.

78   “There is something frightening”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, pp. 104–5.

79   The moment of reunion: Harijan, May 29, 1937.

80   Kallenbach wore a dhoti: Sarid and Bartolf, Hermann Kallenbach, p. 73.

81   “There are few people”: Shimoni, Gandhi, Satyagraha, and the Jews, pp. 28–29.

82   firm position on the subject: See CWMG, vol. 19, p. 472, where Gandhi, on March 23, 1921, disputes the British right to make a commitment on Palestine to the Jews.

83   “The sender’s name”: Shimoni, Gandhi, Satyagraha, and the Jews, p. 35.

84   “I quite clearly see”: CWMG, vol. 96, pp. 290, 292.

85   “In my opinion the Jews”: Sarid and Bartolf, Hermann Kallenbach, pp. 75–76.

86   Buber writes: Shimoni, Gandhi, Satyagraha, and the Jews, pp. 40–47.

87   “Will you listen”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 5, p. 160.

88   The letter to Hitler began: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 400.

89   “I can’t imagine anyone”: Mansergh and Lumby, Transfer of Power, vol. 5, p. 41.

90   “If there ever could be”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 400.

91   However, when Britain finally: Ibid., p. 425.

92   “I am in perpetual quarrel”: CWMG, vol. 70, p. 162.

CHAPTER 11: MASS MAYHEM

1   “Congressmen, barring individual”: CWMG, vol. 70, pp. 113–14.

2   As early as 1939: Ibid., p. 114.

3   To a bluff British general: Wavell, Viceroy’s Journal, p. 236.

4   “My life is entirely”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 6, p. 156.

5   It’s the first time: CWMG, vol. 70, p. 113.

6   Ten months later: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 436.

7   Through all his ins and outs: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 6, p. 125.

8   On August 8, 1942: Mansergh and Lumby, Transfer of Power, vol. 2, p. 622.

9   “the biggest struggle”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 6, p. 153.

10   “Mob violence remains”: Mansergh and Lumby, Transfer of Power, vol. 2, p. 853.

11   Indian nonviolence had always been: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 6, p. 129.

12   In 1942, days before: Jaswant Singh, Jinnah, p. 308.

13   “Give your blessings”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 6, p. 271.

14   “I thought you had come”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 88.

15   Not only had the Congress: Jaswant Singh, Jinnah, p. 540.

16   Putting it in writing: Ibid., p. 541.

17   “I am amazed”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 88.

18   His aim, Gandhi remarked: Ibid., p. 91.

19   “I have failed”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 6, p. 276.

20   “Though I represent nobody”: Ibid., p. 279.

21   This is so, at least: See, for instance, Jalal, Sole Spokesman.

22   “I could not make any”: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 437.

23   “Is there any reason”: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 4, Svarpan, pp. 225–26.

24   “In that hour of decision”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 239.

25   “India is not with me”: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 424.

26   “I’m not going to discuss”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 252.

27   “Sword will be answered”: Ibid., p. 464.

28   The district, known even then: Gandhi’s first involvement in the affairs of Noakhali district came in 1940 when he was approached by Hindus there who represented themselves as being threatened by Muslim violence. He urged them to defend themselves by nonviolent means but then added what was for him an unusual but not unprecedented piece of advice: “If the capacity for nonviolent self-defense is lacking, then there need be no hesitation in using violent means.” Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 5, p. 249.

29   Hindus had been beheaded: Scores of Hindu women were said to have been forced into marriage with Muslim men, but when Phillips Talbot caught up with Gandhi there, so he reported, just two cases of abduction and marriage had been proved. Talbot, American Witness to India’s Partition, p. 203.

30   “Shaheed sahib, everyone”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 358.

31   The impression he retains: Interview with Barun Das Gupta, Kolkata, Oct. 2009.

32   Before it burned out: The Muslim League claimed that fifty thousand Muslims had been slaughtered in Bihar. The official figure put the toll at under five thousand. The American Friends Service Committee estimated ten thousand, a tally Gandhi accepted on at least one occasion.

33   Suhrawardy didn’t press: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, pp. 387, 397.

34   “If Noakhali is lost”: Ibid., p. 405.

35   The answers, though Gandhi: Ibid., p. 356.

36   At his first large prayer: Ibid., pp. 370, 373.

37   Within a week, he found: Ibid., p. 378.

38   “If India is destined”: Ibid., pp. 379, 383.

39   “If the Hindus could live”: Ibid., p. 381.

40   In an analogous quest: Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, p. 47.

41   “I find myself in the midst”: Ibid., pp. 46–47.

42   But four days after: Ibid., p. 63.

43   “Hardly a wheel turns”: Talbot, American Witness to India’s Partition, p. 202.

44   If the size of the Hindu population: The figure generally given for the number of Hindus remaining in Bangladesh as a whole is on the order of 12 million, which would be about 10 percent of the country’s total population. In Pakistan, a country with a population nearly half again larger—about 170 million—only about 3 million Hindus remain. India’s Muslim population of 140 million—out of a total of 1.2 billion—is exceeded by those of only Indonesia and Pakistan.

45   “That’s due to lack”: Interview with Abdue Wahab, Joyag, Bangladesh, Oct. 2009. The chairman of the local Jamaat was not necessarily expressing a heretical view in speaking well of Gandhi. Faisal Devji notes that the movement’s founder, Abul Ala Mawdudi, “sang the Mahatma’s praises.” Devji, Terrorist in Search of Humanity, p. 133.

46   According to Narayan Desai: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 4, Svarpan, p. 271; CWMG, vol. 86, p. 162.

47   “My unfitness for the task”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 431.

48   “I can see there is some”: Ibid., p. 470.

49   The telegram to her father: CWMG, vol. 86, p. 215.

50   “Manu’s place can be nowhere”: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 4, Svarpan, p. 303.

51   It soon became obvious: Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, pp. 73–75.

52   A perfect brahmachari: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 591.

53   None of this would go on: Gandhi’s yajna with Manubehn has been discussed in varying degrees of detail in Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi; Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 4, Svarpan; Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2; Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles. It can also be followed in the correspondence in Gandhi’s Collected Works, especially vol. 86.

54   “I don’t want to return”: CWMG, vol. 86, p. 224.

55   “Of course she knows her art”: Ibid., vol. 96, p. 295.

56   “a deeply anguished”: Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, pp. 95, 101.

57   “Stick to your word”: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 4, Svarpan, p. 304.

58   “I like your frankness”: Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, p. 118.

59   Pyarelal was also drawn: CWMG, vol. 85, p. 221.

60   “I can see that you will not”: Ibid., vol. 94, p. 337.

61   “After a life of prolonged”: Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, p. 135.

62   He’d read Havelock Ellis: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 588.

63   “What is Freudian philosophy?”: Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, p. 158.

64   Bose’s basic point: Ibid., pp. 150–51.

65   “I do hope you will acquit me”: Ibid., p. 153.

66   “I saw your strength come back”: Ibid., p. 161.

67   Given that the Congress: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 551.

68   According to one account: Maksud, Gandhi, Nehru, and Noakhali, p. 41.

69   “I can never be disillusioned”: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 554.

70   “I feel a little out of my depth”: Brown, Nehru, p. 169.

71   “Jawaharlal is the only man”: Hingorani, Gandhi on Nehru, pp. 12–13.

72   his heir would never score high: Gandhi and Nehru had exchanged letters laying out their differences in October and November 1945. See Nehru, Bunch of Old Letters, pp. 509–16. Also see Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 8, pp. 302–6.

73   “He says what is uppermost”: Hingorani, Gandhi on Nehru, p. 12.

74   “He has made me captive”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2, p. 251.

75   “My voice”: CWMG, vol. 86, p. 295.

76   Basically, it said Gandhi: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2, p. 483.

77   When a member asked: See Amrita Bazar Patrika, Jan. 6, 1946.

78   “I suggest frequent consultations”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2, p. 482; CWMG, vol. 86, p. 286.

79   “Remember Bihar”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 557.

80   “You don’t know the joy”: Ibid., p. 509.

81   “It failed miserably”: From the diary of Nirmal Kumar Bose, p. 991, archive of the Asiatic Society, Kolkata.

82   “What in your opinion”: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 451.

83   Twice in nine weeks: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 380.

84   He could only demonstrate: From the diary of Nirmal Kumar Bose, p. 887, archive of the Asiatic Society, Kolkata.

85   “Our community today suffers”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, pp. 518, 520.

86   Early on he talked: Ibid., pp. 386, 372.

87   “There will be no tears”: Ibid., p. 321.

88   “If some ruffian”: Ibid., p. 505.

89   Speaking to dispossessed: CWMG, vol. 86, p. 305.

90   “He had told us”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 417.

91   “Giving equality”: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 436.

92   “If they still went on”: CWMG, vol. 86, p. 305.

93   The next week he twice urges: Ibid., pp. 348–50, 459.

94   “He has not always held”: From the diary of Nirmal Kumar Bose, p. 1251, archive of the Asiatic Society, Kolkata.

95   “listened quietly”: Talbot, American Witness to India’s Partition, p. 202.

96   There Gandhi stayed: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 559.

97   In Haimchar, which turned out: CWMG, vol. 87, p. 17.

98   Though little was said in public: Tidrick, Gandhi, p. 315.

99   Thakkar is finally persuaded: CWMG, vol. 87, p. 63.

100   According to a less: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 1, p. 587.

101   He’d said he was prepared: Ibid., p. 356.

102   Nehru had been so appalled: Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 445.

103   “But if I leave”: Manubehn Gandhi, Lonely Pilgrim, p. 157, cited by Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 4, Svarpan, p. 287. Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu, and the hero of the Ramayana, the Hindu epic. Gandhi takes his name as a synonym for “God.”

104   By June 1948: Chatterji, Spoils of Partition, pp. 112–19.

105   The gathering ended: The song they sang was a variation on an old devotional hymn, “Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram,” often described as Gandhi’s favorite hymn. Routinely, he would attach a line that proclaimed: “God or Allah is your name / Lord, bless everyone with this wisdom.” The words continue to recite many names for God, ending in a call for unity. On this occasion the improvised lyric included references to Buddhists and Christians.

CHAPTER 12: DO OR DIE

1   “The rest of my life”: CWMG, vol. 89, pp. 10–11.

2   The only way he could cling: Ibid., p. 21.

3   “Today he himself”: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 4, Svarpan, p. 393.

4   By then, hundreds of thousands: The influx of refugees is well described by Guha in India After Gandhi, pp. 97–108.

5   “The country was partitioned”: Lohia, Guilty Men of India’s Partition, p. 44.

6   An impatient Nehru said: Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, p. 388.

7   A pressing invitation: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 7, p. 162. He had also proposed giving the Viceregal Lodge to the Harijans.

8   Since Hindus and Muslims: Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, p. 110.

9   It was part of Gandhi’s proposal: Collins and Lapierre, Mountbatten and the Partition of India, pp. 34–35.

10   Mountbatten, understandably, declined: Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, p. 55.

11   “Thus I have to ask you”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2, p. 85.

12   When the viceroy first heard: Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, p. 52.

13   “Jinnah won’t be able”: Collins and Lapierre, Mountbatten and the Partition of India, p. 33.

14   Often the killings: CWMG, vol. 87, p. 52.

15   “I hate to hear”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2, p. 52.

16   “spent bullet”: Ibid., p. 309; Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, p. 208; see also M. K. Gandhi, Delhi Diary, p. 147.

17   “It is just possible”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2, p. 85.

18   “He realized that if his vision”: CWMG, vol. 89, p. 62.

19   “I do not like much”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2, p. 329.

20   “We have as much claim”: Ibid., p. 363.

21   “I am quite willing”: Ibid., p. 183.

22   “We don’t need your sermons”: Ibid., p. 367.

23   “Can’t you understand”: Ibid., p. 365.

24   When the BBC asked: Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, p. 224.

25   “I’ve run dry”: Tendulkar, vol. 8, Mahatma, p. 80.

26   “What if this is just”: CWMG, vol. 89, p. 55.

27   “One might almost say”: Ibid., p. 49.

28   “All this is due”: Gopalkrishna Gandhi, A Frank Friendship, p. 501.

29   “In the Punjab”: Ibid., p. 517.

30   “What is all this?”: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 4, Svarpan, pp. 422–23.

31   “The Calcutta bubble”: CWMG, vol. 89, p. 131.

32   “fiery weapon”: Ibid., p. 134.

33   The day after the attack: Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 154.

34   “When the heart is hard”: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 4, Svarpan, p. 434.

35   His old comrade: Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 158.

36   “This sudden upheaval”: CWMG, vol. 89, p. 49.

37   wonderfully dry description: Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom, pp. 81–82.

38   When he had to leave: Ibid., p. 90.

39   But rowdy Hindu hecklers: CWMG, vol. 89, p. 195.

40   “Anger is short madness”: Ibid., p. 167.

41   “Why do [the authorities] tolerate”: Ibid., p. 184.

42   “They are all mine”: Ibid., p. 480.

43   “These days, who listens to me?”: Ibid., p. 237.

44   “Ever since I came to India”: Ibid., p. 275. See also p. 524.

45   “What sin must I”: Ibid., p. 525.

46   “On the surface things”: Ibid., p. 483.

47   “Misdeeds of the Hindus”: Ibid., vol. 90, p. 228.

48   No single catastrophe: Some say it was his fifteenth or sixteenth fast. Narayan Desai makes it thirty. Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 4, Svarpan, pp. 472–73.

49   Mountbatten, now the governor-general: Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi, p. 612; Suhrawardy, Memoirs, p. 34; Ziegler, Mountbatten, p. 462; CWMG, vol. 96, p. 568.

50   “For some time my helplessness”: Manubehn Gandhi, Last Glimpses of Bapu, p. 108.

51   “Gandhiji is not prepared”: Azad, India Wins Freedom, p. 236.

52   “All his life he had stood”: M. K. Gandhi, Delhi Diary, p. 336.

53   By his assassin’s own testimony: Malgonkar, Men Who Killed Gandhi, p. 344; Tushar A. Gandhi, “Let’s Kill Gandhi!” p. 58.

54   Patel’s absence from Delhi: The home minister left Delhi to travel to Gandhi’s native Kathiawad region to bring the holdout princely states there into the Indian Union, a mission in which Gandhi had a personal interest. But he was also stung by the decision of the cabinet, under the pressure of Gandhi’s fast, to release the reserves he had only just frozen. Before leaving Delhi, he wrote to Gandhi asking that he be allowed to resign. Rajmohan Gandhi, Patel, pp. 462–63.

55   Of the unfreezing of the assets: Malgonkar, Men Who Killed Gandhi, p. 341, reproduction of paragraph 126 of Godse’s statement.

56   A few days earlier: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2, p. 711.

57   “Listen! Listen!”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 8, p. 273.

58   “God will keep me alive”: Manubehn Gandhi, Last Glimpses of Bapu, p. 224.

59   “The rulers of the country”: Ibid., p. 225.

60   “If somebody fired”: Ibid., pp. 222, 228, 234, 298.

61   “I have seen it”: Ibid., p. 279.

62   “Our salvation”: Ibid., p. 293.

63   Immediately after that meeting: Ibid., pp. 293–97.

64   Later Pyarelal would publish: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2, p. 819.

65   Never did it make its way: Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 4, Svarpan, p. 479.

66   On the way, walking: Manubehn Gandhi, Last Glimpses of Bapu, p. 308.

67   “There is no way”: Tushar A. Gandhi, “Let’s Kill Gandhi!” p. 780.

68   “The sound of bullets”: Manubehn Gandhi, Last Glimpses of Bapu, p. 309.

69   The killer Godse: Malgonkar, Men Who Killed Gandhi, pp. 250–51.

70   He said the last words: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2, p. 861.

71   The belief that he fulfilled: See Nandy, “Final Encounter,” pp. 470–93.

72   “a certain kind of bodily sacrifice”: Gyanendra Pandey quoted in Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours, pp. 190–91.

73   “Today we must forget that we are Hindus”: CWMG, vol. 90, pp. 403–4.

74   When it comes to the Father of the Nation: Payne, Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, pp. 598–99.

75   “Congress has now to govern”: Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Gandhi Is Gone, p. 61.

76   “What we need to consider”: Ibid., p. 60.

77   “Let no one say”: Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 5, p. 245.

78   “Whenever you are in doubt”: Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: Last Phase, vol. 2, p. 65. The note seems never to have been published in Gandhi’s lifetime. It is reproduced in an inset following p. 288 in the final volume of Tendulkar’s eight-volume biography, first published in 1954 by the Government of India.