Gandhi’s Spiritual Politics: Austerity,Fasting and Secularism

An Austere Beginning

It is rather astonishing that very early on in his life, in his late teens and early twenties, during his fairly short stay of a little less than three years in London, Gandhi should have managed to get acquainted with such large number of people, people from very varied backgrounds with extremely diverse interests and ideas, unlike run-of-the-mill students in England. Surely this experience had something to do with his temperament, his ability to have a conversation with anyone whose views interested him irrespective of whether he agreed with them or not. The ‘argumentative Indian’ in him was irrepressible even in his early youth, his shyness notwithstanding.

A robust interest in ideas about dietary discipline, rather than a narrow obsessive concern with abstaining from the consumption of flesh, as has at times been assumed, ¹ took him to unusual eating places in London. On his voyage to England, he had already discovered aboard the ship that it was possible to have wholesome vegetarian food if one was not too finicky. He tells us that he requested

the chief steward to supply some vegetable foods and I had usually for breakfast oatmeal porridge, milk and stewed fruit and bread, butter and jam and marmalade and cocoa. For dinner I had rice, vegetable curry, milk and jam pastry, stewed fruit, bread and butter. For supper, bread, butter, jam, cocoa, some lettuce with pepper and salt and cheese. ²

Within three weeks of his arrival in London, he had located a good vegetarian restaurant offering a wide range of dishes at reasonable rates. ³ Besides, he had soon put in place arrangements for cooking some of his own meals in order to cut down on his expenses as well as to be able to have a more nutritious diet.

There were quite a few fashionable restaurants in London which catered to a clientele experimenting with forms of vegetarianism as part of an intellectual and spiritual quest. Some of the patrons propounded theosophical ideas, others sought to promote versions of vegetarianism, while yet others were connected with the Esoteric Christian Union. Gandhi’s engagement with vegetarianism and theosophy gave him access to overlapping intellectual circles comprising an assortment of characters with unorthodox ideas, lifestyles and fads. Charles DiSalvo perceptively observes,

[i]t was in his study of theosophy and his embrace of the cause of vegetarianism that he discovered a way to bridge the distance between faithfulness to himself and things Indian, on the one hand, and, on the other, his attraction to the higher strata of British society where, at least at the edges, theosophy and vegetarianism were thriving. ⁴

These were not necessarily people with the most progressive ideas, though they were often well meaning and had no intention of being nasty or disagreeable. Gandhi was at ease among them. He soon learnt to converse with these new friends, overwhelmingly English, on equal terms, which would have made him more self-confident. Thus, he exhibited no diffidence while accompanying a Gujarati writer, then residing in London, to call on the venerable Cardinal Manning, Catholic archbishop of Westminster. Although the meeting was very brief and formal, the cardinal’s personality left a deep impression on Gandhi who had just turned twenty. He was still somewhat in awe of him when he vividly recalled the meeting nearly thirty-seven years later, devoting several paragraphs to it in his autobiographical account (hereafter, Experiments). ⁵ There is a passing reference in these passages to the great 1889 strike of dock workers, in which Cardinal Manning intervened on the side of labour and helped to bring about a settlement that was favourable to the dock workers. ⁶ Surprisingly, Gandhi did not take much interest in the strike itself, surprising because this was a momentous struggle that was to transform the character of trade unionism in Britain. We can discern here a disinclination to be enthusiastic about left-wing ideas and radical mass mobilization. He was to remain steadfast in this attitude to the end of his life. The refusal to engage with socialist or Marxist thought marked the limits of his world view and goes a long way towards accounting for many of the contradictions in it. Gandhi seems to have been more attentive at that time to Manning’s simplicity and his reputation for frugality: ‘So far as food is concerned, his food did not cost Cardinal Manning more than nine shillings per week if what is written about him be true…. His strict abstinence from wines is notorious’. It was approvingly noted that ‘his ordinary meal, in public or private, is a biscuit or a bit of bread and a glass of water’. ⁷

Nineteenth-Century Saurashtra: The Curse of Colonialism

As we know, it was a respected family friend, Mavji Joshi, who had initially encouraged Mohandas to go to England with the objective of becoming a barrister. This was shortly after his father passed away in 1885. ⁸ Mavji’s advice carried considerable weight especially since his own son, Kevalram, was a busy lawyer and had contacts in England. Mohandas’ elder brother, Lakshmidas, who was present during this consultation at Rajkot, concurred with the suggestion, though with a few misgivings. ‘The zeal with which Gandhi hurled himself into the project of going to London’, ⁹ trying to mobilize funds, and obtaining the consent of family elders is revealing. He made a trip to Porbandar, the hometown of the Gandhi family, travelling on his own, both to seek the blessings of senior members of the family as well as to seek financial assistance. No aid was forthcoming. Besides, Gandhi had to put up with being snubbed by the principal British colonial official posted in Porbandar, his first face-to-face meeting with a European, when he approached him for support. The important point is that Gandhi continued to persevere. Twenty years later, he met the same official, Frederick Lely, at a formal get-together when he was in London in 1909 to gather political support for reversing recently introduced legislative measures in Transvaal aimed at further restricting the rights of Indians. Lely was then a member of the South Africa British Indian Committee constituted for this purpose, and referring to his earlier association with Gandhi’s paternal uncle Tulsidas at Porbandar remarked that ‘had he been alive now, [he] would have been proud of his nephew’. ¹⁰

It seems that some of his relatives expressed their displeasure, from a religious point of view with the notion of going overseas, as a way of evading a financial commitment. One of his cousins, Meghji, who had initially promised to furnish the sum of ₹5,000, the original estimated expense, grew indignant when he was actually touched for the sum. Meghji had assumed that Gandhi was just daydreaming. ‘He always acted the part of an enemy’ from the moment he was requested to actually provide the money: ‘He spoke ill of me before anybody and everybody. But I was quite able to disregard his taunts’. ¹¹ Mohandas was also not discouraged by the haughty response of J. W. Watson, the British officer in charge of the Kathiawar Agency (1881–9) headquartered in Rajkot, who grudgingly gave him a ‘trivial note of introduction’ claiming that it ‘was worth one lac of rupees’. Reflecting on this conversation a few weeks later, with some sarcasm but without bitterness, Gandhi remarked that it ‘now really makes me laugh’, thereby displaying a maturity beyond his years. ¹² Watson was not exactly a boor. He was a serious collector of artefacts of historical interest; items from his collection constituted the nucleus of a museum in Rajkot named after him. The Watson Museum is one of the major tourist attractions of the city today.

As the political agent for Kathiawar, Watson presided over the colonial administrative apparatus which exercised control over the vast peninsular region of Gujarat. The region was part of the Bombay presidency. Almost the entire territory of the peninsula of Kathiawar (or Saurashtra; the British preferred to use the Maratha administrative nomenclature, ‘Kathiawad’) was divided amongst numerous princely or ‘native’ states. These states were allowed varying degrees of autonomy, as components of the Indian empire, and were all subject to the authority of the British crown. The roughly 600 ‘native’ states in the subcontinent were spread over nearly 40 per cent of the territory of the Indian empire, areas that the British controlled indirectly. The Kathiawar Agency with its 375 odd ‘native’ states had the largest regional concentration of these political entities. ¹³ Most of these states were petty-chieftaincies, many of them tiny in size, while a few such as Bhavnagar and Junagarh were modestly large, though fairly small on a pan-Indian scale. Yet in terms of sheer numbers Saurashtra had an excess of feudal presence. Most of the states grouped into the Kathiawar Agency had acknowledged the East India Company’s supremacy soon after the Second Anglo-Maratha War (1802–5), with formal engagements being signed in 1807. The payment of tribute by the states to the company was regulated by these engagements, some of which were modified subsequently. During the 1860s, shortly after the Indian empire was placed directly under the British crown, an attempt was made to bring some order to the bewildering assortment of arrangements by which the colonial state controlled the states of the Kathiawar Agency. With their fondness for hierarchical organization, colonial officials ranked these states into seven classes. States at the top of the hierarchy, first-class and second-class states, had complete or almost complete civil and criminal jurisdiction, while these powers were progressively reduced for states placed lower down in the hierarchy. ¹⁴ Further, the number of gun salutes that a state was entitled to also indicated their place in the hierarchy, a conspicuous feature of what David Cannadine has referred to as ‘ornamentalism’, ‘hierarchy made visible, immanent and actual’. ¹⁵

It was in the context of the Kathiawar states that Henry Maine as law member of the governor-general’s council (1862–9) had put forth the notion of divisible sovereignty. According to Maine, sovereignty was divisible and princely rulers had some sovereign rights. But they were not independent rulers as they did not possess all the attributes of sovereignty. They were subordinate to the British crown which had ‘an almost unlimited right of interference for the better order of the States’. ¹⁶ This was an attempt to reconcile the status of princely rulers with the sovereignty of the crown in terms of international law. Though this argument was articulated in the specific context of Kathiawar, it became useful for defining the status of the rulers of ‘native’ states generally.

Gandhi’s father, grandfather and paternal uncle served in various capacities in at least four Kathiawar states: Porbandar, Rajkot, Wankaner and Junagarh. The Porbandar state, where Gandhi was born and spent the first few years of his childhood, had an area of about 1,400 sq km, containing 103 villages. ¹⁷ It was entitled to an eleven gun salute, the second lowest level in the table of gun salutes for the British Indian empire (nine gun salute states stood at the lowest rung of the ladder, while those entitled to twenty one gun salutes were at the top). The Porbandar rulers bore the title of ‘rana’. They were Jethwa Rajputs and the tract in which state was situated was known as Jetwad. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, rana Vikmatji or Vikramatji (r. 1831–86) was the incumbent prince. Porbandar was a first-class state, but in 1869 had been demoted to third-class status due to alleged administrative incompetence of the darbar, a standard tactic for disciplining princely states. Mysore, for instance, was administered by the British for half a century from 1831 to 1881. This was a major princely state, but for those fifty years its ruler had only a ceremonial presence.

Porbandar was restored to its earlier rank of a first-class state in 1886. At the same time, Vikmatji was deposed and the administration was taken over directly by the Bombay government, which appointed an administrator to oversee governance. ¹⁸ This further marginalized functionaries who had been traditionally attached to the court. Lely was the first official to be appointed to this post and had been in office for less than two years when Gandhi approached him with his request for financial assistance. The erstwhile rana would have been unable to help him; he did not even reside in Porbandar. Following the death of Vikmatji in 1900, his grandson Bhavsinhji became the ruler of the state, marking the end of British administration. However, full first-class powers were not restored to the rana until a few years later. ¹⁹ Porbandar state rendered tribute to the British Indian government, to Baroda and to the Junagarh state.

The complicated tributary obligations of the Kathiawar states were sorted out by the East India Company during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The company had found it necessary to accommodate arrangements which prevailed in Gujarat when it began the process of subjugating the region after the Second Anglo–Maratha War. In order to stabilize colonial rule, it preferred, by and large, to leave undisturbed the tributary obligations imposed in the pre-colonial era on the Kathiawar states, mainly by Baroda and, in the southern part of the peninsula, by Junagarh. The British mediated these relationships, fixed the quantum of the tribute, collected it from the respective states and deposited it in treasuries of the states to which the sums were owed. Simultaneously, they levied their own tribute. Needless to say, the presentation of tribute was symbolically an acknowledgement of the overlordship of the recipient. There were states which paid tribute to the British alone, while there were others which had to pay tribute to the British and to either Junagarh or Baroda, while some were obliged to present tribute to all three. In the late 1870s, the total tribute appropriated from Porbandar amounted to £3350 (gross revenue, £40,000).

The Rajkot state, with its sixty villages, was much smaller than Porbandar. It had an area of 1,240 sq km. It was a state of the second class. The ruler, with the formal title ‘thakur sahib’, paid tribute to the British and to Junagarh. The town was both the seat of the thakur sahib as well as the headquarters of the Kathiawar Agent. Colonial officialdom operated from a distinct part of the town, which also had a cantonment. We know of cricket matches played between separate teams representing Rajkot city and Rajkot cantonment, and of the presence of Mohandas at one of them when he was studying in high school. Apparently, he knew enough about the game to be able to make an informed comment on the performance of one of the players, as a schoolmate Ratilal Ghelabhai Mehta recalled several decades later. ²⁰

Mohandas’ father, Kaba, was appointed as karbhari of the Rajkot darbar in 1874, and rose to the position of diwan in 1876. In 1878, his services were loaned to the ruler of neighbouring Wankaner. ²¹ As a state of the second class, Wankaner was in the same category as Rajkot. It had an area of 975 sq km and contained seventy villages. Wankaner was obliged to give tribute to the British and to Junagarh. Mohandas’ father served as diwan in the Wankaner court from 1878 to 1879, when he resigned and returned to Rajkot. ²² He soon retired from active service, and ‘was a pensioner of the Rajkot State when he died’. ²³ Wankaner owed him a sum of over ₹30,000 for his services, at the time of his death. This was never paid, thus depriving the family of what might have been fairly substantial savings. ²⁴

Gandhi tells us that his father, in the course of his career, was also associated with the Rajasthanik sabha (or Rajasthanik court): ‘After ceasing to be the Prime Minister of Porbandar he became member of the Rajasthanik court’. ²⁵ This was a temporary judicial-cum-arbitration organ set up in Kathiawar at the initiative of the British to resolve disputes relating to the obligations and dues of possessors of giras estates, vis-à-vis the princely rulers of the region. These were hereditary fief-holders with estates comprising a village or a few villages, and exercised extensive authority within their estates, but were subject to the overall authority of the ruler of the state in which the respective estates were located, and ultimately to that of the British. ²⁶ Many of them were members of the clan of their ruling chief. A designated British officer presided over the Rajasthanik sabha, while its expenses were shared among the Kathiawar chiefs. Its functions included surveying and mapping. The court was established in 1873. It was initially constituted for a term of three years. However, its term was periodically extended until 1899, when it was disbanded. ²⁷ It had six Indian members who served as ‘assessors’, Kaba Gandhi being one of them. ²⁸ This was the assignment that brought him to Rajkot, where he lived for the rest of his life barring the brief Wankaner interlude.

The Junagarh state needs special mention since the Gandhi family had an important connection with it. Mohandas’ ancestors hailed from the qasba (small provincial town) of Kutiyana (Kutiana) located in Junagarh. Kutiyana is now in the Porbandar district. It is just 40 km from Porbandar town. The proximity of Kutiyana to Porbandar might have been one reason for the initial choice of that state by Mohandas’ ancestors for service in the darbar. However, the link with Kutiyana continued to be relevant. The opening passage of Gandhi’s Experiments places his grandfather Uttamchand in the court of the nawab of Junagarh saluting the ruler with his left hand because his right hand was ‘already pledged to Porbandar’. ²⁹ The story is probably apocryphal. It is unlikely that Uttamchand, well versed as he would have been in courtly etiquette as the diwan of Porbandar, was not aware that this was a major transgression which would have put an end to any possibility of being accepted as a courtier in Junagarh. Uttamchand was constrained to relocate to the ancestral base of the Gandhi family as he had been temporarily ejected from the Porbandar darbar. Later, ‘the nawab of Junagadh used his good offices to get Ota Bapa [Uttamchand] back to Porbandar’. ³⁰

The nearly 400 states of the peninsula, most of them small zamindaris with pretensions to royal status, with their mini darbars and kachehris (complex of judicial courts and administrative offices), together employed hundreds of state functionaries at different levels. It would have been impossible to find highly qualified personnel in such large numbers. Some rudimentary administrative skills, a working knowledge of legal procedures and the law, familiarity with bookkeeping and accountancy, and basic literacy would have been sufficient for entry into the official establishments of the rulers. Personal loyalty to one’s master combined with dedication would have helped to advance the careers of administrators, if they could survive court intrigues. As we have noted, Gandhi’s grandfather had to leave Porbandar when he came under a cloud. We are told that some ‘state intrigues’ had led him to seek the protection of the ruler of Junagarh. ³¹

Mohandas’ father, Karamchand, could hold important positions in several states despite his extremely inadequate formal learning:

He had no education, save that of experience. At best, he might be said to have read up to the fifth Gujarati standard. Of history and geography he was innocent. But his rich practical experience stood him in good stead in the solution of the most intricate questions and in managing hundreds of men. ³²

Such opportunities were rapidly shrinking by the time Gandhi came of age. Eight decades of colonial presence in Saurashtra had resulted in economic stagnation, which was reinforced by the peculiar political configuration of the region wherein extreme fragmentation resulted in unviable polities with access to resources on a miniscule scale, scarcely a prescription for any meaningful development. Whatever claims the British might have made about the glorious benefits of colonial rule, the fact is that there had been little progress in the region. Colonialism had a stifling impact. The historical situation in this region left a prominent mark on Gandhi’s personality.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the capital of imperial Kathiawar, Rajkot, was still in the bullock cart era. It took five days to cover the distance of 200 km between Rajkot and Porbandar. ‘There was no railway in those days’, Gandhi observed while describing his own journey in early 1888, ‘[i]t was a five days’ bullock-cart journey’. ³³ His father met with a serious accident, which hastened his death, in trying to reduce the duration to three days when he was hurrying towards Porbandar on the occasion of Mohandas’ wedding. The coach which had been provided for Kaba by the ruler of Rajkot to undertake the journey, ‘toppled over in the third stage, and he sustained severe injuries. He arrived bandaged all over’. ³⁴ For travelling to Bhavnagar to take admission in college after his matriculation, the camel cart of Abubakar Jamal was hired to take Mohandas part of the distance, the remaining being covered by train. ³⁵

The journey to London too commenced on a bullock cart. From Rajkot, Gandhi proceeded southwards to Jetpur, via Gondal, and thence by train eastwards to Dhola junction on the recently completed section of the Bhavnagar State Railway line. From Dhola, the route lay northwards to Wadhwan. This was quite a circuitous route, but would have been the least time-consuming, and the cheapest. The direct distance between Rajkot and Wadhwan, by road, was about 105 km. A road had had been built on this stretch in the late 1860s; the metalled road which connected Rajkot with Jetpur (72.5 km) was built shortly afterwards. ³⁶ The cart-cum-train route that Gandhi took traversed a total distance of about 315 km, nearly three times the distance by road between Rajkot and Wadhwan.

The Bhavnagar–Wadhwan line was opened in December 1880. This was the first rail link that Kathiawar had to the outside world. Earlier, in 1872, the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway had connected the Ahmedabad–Viramgam section of the main Bombay line, with Wadhwan. The Viramgam–Wadhwan line covered a distance of about 65 km. All these railway lines in Kathiawar were supervised by the British and were financed by the princely states. Bhavnagar, Gondal, Junagarh and Rajkot had to pool their meagre resources to develop a railway network for southern Kathiawar. Rajkot and Gondal were eventually connected by rail in 1896.

As late as the end of the 1870s, colonial Kathiawar had only three high schools and one college. ³⁷ Rajkot town could boast a prestigious school meant exclusively for princes of the ruling houses of Kathiawar, the Rajkot Rajkumar College, ‘a sort of Eton for the aristocracy of Western India’, which had been functioning since 1871 and of which Chester Macnaghten was the principal for twenty-five long years from 1871 until he passed away in 1896. ³⁸ This was an institution for the ‘political indoctrination’ of the young rajkumars. ³⁹ The high schools for ‘commoners’ included Alfred High School (also known as Kattyawar High School), in Rajkot, in which Gandhi studied. The school was named after Alfred (second son of Victoria; d. 1900) who was made Duke of Edinburgh in 1866. He survived an assassination attempt in 1868. Several institutions in the empire were named after Alfred at that time by way of thanksgiving.

J. M. Upadhyaya in his extremely well-researched work on Gandhi’s schooling, which has a wealth of historical detail based on archival material that has not been consulted in the original by authors of major canonical works on Gandhi, states that the name of the school (founded in 1853 as Rajkot English School) was changed to Rajkot High School in 1866 when it was upgraded and was then renamed Kattyawar High School in 1868, acquiring the name Alfred High School in 1907. ⁴⁰ In his recently published biography of Gandhi, R. Guha states that ‘[t]he school is referred to as “Alfred High School” in some recent biographies of Gandhi. However, it acquired that name only in 1907, long after Mohandas had left it’. ⁴¹ This statement is based entirely on Upadhyaya’s work. Upadhyaya himself had in another book cited a stone inscription placed in the school, where he had taught, which states that it was named ‘after Alfred … to commemorate his Indian visit in 1870’. In a frenzy of sycophancy, other states too had rushed to name institutions, including schools, after the Duke of Edinburgh, for which reason perhaps ‘this name was not recognized in the then records’. ⁴² Nevertheless, the two appellations continued to be used interchangeably. We do know that during Gandhi’s final year in school, 1887, when he appeared for the matriculation exam of the University of Bombay, his Rajkot school was officially known by both names. The then governor of Bombay, Lord Reay, in his address on the occasion of an official visit to Junagarh in 1887 made a specific reference to the school while commending the educational initiatives of the nawab of Junagarh:

Your Highness … [has] not been backward in promoting educational institutions. I find that you have spent on the Alfred High School at Rajkot a lakh of rupees. Such an institution founded by your generosity outside your own borders and not intended only for your co-religionists proves a noble and disinterested spirit. ⁴³

Spiritual Progress and Sheikh Mehtab’s Long Shadow

In his response to a question regarding what had motivated him to travel to Britain to study law, during the course of an interview with The Vegetarian on the eve of his departure from London in June 1891, Gandhi had candidly stated, ‘[i]n a word ambition’. ⁴⁴ This was not just personal ambition; he was expressing the ambitions of his social class, a section of which was threatened with impoverishment. The social group to which his family belonged, salaried professionals attached to the darbars of petty Kathiawar states, was anxious about its future given that it was becoming increasingly difficult to earn a livelihood the way it had been possible a few generations earlier. What is more, this was a social group which had little or no capital to invest in business, hardly possessed any landed property and had not been able to accumulate wealth through thrift even though they might have had lifestyles which were not too lavish. Such was the case with Gandhi’s family: ‘My father never had any ambition to accumulate riches and left us very little property’. ⁴⁵ Education was the key to better prospects, and this was something that Mohandas and his well-wishers were acutely aware of.

Access to institutions such as Alfred High School made it possible for young boys of Mohandas’ generation, belonging to families of salaried professionals, to find jobs in the petty darbars of Kathiawar or establishments supported by them. The careers of some of Gandhi’s contemporaries at the high school give us a sense of the ambitions of this social group, ambitions that Mohandas would have nurtured. One of his classmates, Tribhuvan Purshottam Bhatt, found employment in the Rajkot darbar as diwan; another, Amritlal Vardhaman Modi, became judicial secretary in the princely state of Dharangadhra; and Ratilal Ghelabhai Mehta, whom we have met earlier, joined Alfred High School as a teacher and went on to become its headmaster. Then there was Pranshankar Joshi, who studied with Mohandas at the Rajkot school and became his classmate at Samaldas College in Bhavnagar, where Gandhi was enrolled for a few months before going to England. Pranshankar later taught at a high school in Bombay before becoming the diwan of the Kathiawari state of Gondal. ⁴⁶ Similarly, Hargovind Vyas, one of the Sanskrit teachers in Alfred School, moved on to become a senior official in the Radhanpur darbar. ⁴⁷ Radhanpur was one of the princely states comprising the Palanpur Agency in Gujarat, north of Kathiawar. Another contemporary from Rajkot, Manilal Harilal Mehta, who was Gandhi’s classmate at Samaldas College, became joint chief justice of the Bhavnagar state.

Gandhi himself, and his family, took his schooling quite seriously so that as the youngest child in the family he was the best educated. As a student from the Soráth subregion of Saurashtra (in which both Porbandar and Junagarh were situated), he was eligible for scholarships endowed by Junagarh and the state of Jetpur which was also located in Sorath. ⁴⁸ Gandhi made it a point to give definite particulars in Experiments about the financial support he had received in school ⁴⁹ :

In the fifth and sixth [standard] I obtained scholarships of four and ten rupees respectively, an achievement for which I have to thank good luck more than any merit. For the scholarships were not open to all, but reserved for the best boys amongst those coming from the Sorath Division of Kathiawad. And in those days there could not have been many boys from Sorath in a class of forty to fifty.

His performance in the examination for the fifth standard was actually quite good. He was sixth among the thirty-four students (out of thirty-seven in the class) who sat for the annual exam. ⁵⁰ In the annual exam for the sixth standard, Gandhi stood fourth. His performance entitled him to an enhanced scholarship sum in the seventh standard (the uppermost standard), ₹10 rupees a month as he correctly recalled nearly four decades later. ⁵¹

Mohandas’ successful matriculation would have been regarded as quite an achievement for the family as a whole since this was considered the first step towards a career that would be in keeping with its aspirations, yielding a secure income from a profession that accorded with its social standing. As Gandhi noted in the interview to The Vegetarian mentioned earlier, ‘I matriculated at the Bombay University in the year 1887. Then I joined the Bhavnagar College, for unless you graduate at the Bombay University you get no status in society’. ⁵²

The advice of Mavji Joshi, that Mohandas ought to consider going to England to study law, was clearly intended to help him improve his chances of getting a good position in one of the Kathiawar darbars, rather than actually practicing as a barrister. Mere graduation from an Indian university would equip him for a clerical job at the most. As an England-returned barrister, he would have a competitive edge over other potential candidates. ‘The times are changed’, Dave pointed out to his elder brother, ‘[a]nd none of you can expect to succeed to your father’s gadi [gaddi] without having had a proper education’. ‘Now as this boy is still pursuing his studies’, he counselled,

you should all look to him to keep the gadi. It will take him four or five years to get his B.A. degree, which will at best qualify him for a sixty rupees’ post, not for a Diwanship. If like my son he went in for law, it would take him still longer, by which time there would be a host of lawyers aspiring for a Diwan’s post. I would far rather that you sent him to England. ⁵³

One can sense the desperation which actuated the fund-raising campaign of Mohandas and Lakshmidas. It was with great difficulty that some money was obtained, most of it on credit, which Lakshmidas for the time being undertook to repay. This amounted to ₹10,656, or £666 (£1 = ₹16), ⁵⁴ the precise figure mentioned by Gandhi in a letter addressed to Lely, written within a few months of his arrival in England. ⁵⁵ The letter may or may not have been conveyed to the Porbandar administrator by Lakshmidas to whom it was dispatched for onward transmission. In this letter, Gandhi made a fresh appeal to Lely for financial aid saying that he would need an additional £400 to cover his expenses. Through his own experience, his constant endeavour to reduce his expenses to the bare minimum, Gandhi arrived at a much lower figure than the total outlay he had originally estimated during the first few weeks of his stay in London, close to £1,100, while calculating the amount that an Indian student would require for studying law in Britain. By the time he left England, he reckoned that £420 would suffice for the purpose, assuming that the student was well informed and had given some thought to the matter. He considered anything beyond £420 to be absolutely superfluous. The minute details of the item-wise break-up provided by him, in the draft manuscript of his ‘Guide to London’, bear testimony to the care with which Gandhi made the optimum use of his very meagre resources. It would be worthwhile to quote at length the advice offered to young men (women were certainly not part of the intended audience) aspiring to become barristers. The reasoning advanced for the total worked out by Gandhi, £420 in all, goes beyond monetary considerations. It prefigures some of his later ideas about simple living and the value of being frugal ⁵⁶ :

I shall just diverge from my main subject. I am going immediately to point out that, from every point of view, the life you would have to lead on £420 would be happier than the life led by many a student in India. And mind, Rs. 10,000 would not supply you with luxuries. They would simply make you pine for more to vie with your luxurious brothers and thus, in fact, make you more miserable. Did you say one room in England would not be sufficient for you? I ask you, then, what have you been having here? Do you not sleep, even though you may be the son of a rich man, two or three in one room, a room without a carpet, without any furniture, surrounded by dirty ditches having hardly a window or two?

This is followed by some practical tips, reflecting the frustration he had to cope with upon his return to India ⁵⁷ :

[I]f you have Rs. 10,000, keep them. Only spend out of them Rs. 6,000 or the equivalent of £420. And the rest you will be able to command on your return to India.… It is absolutely necessary that you should have some money, [Rs.] 1,000, 2,000 or any such sum at your disposal. Then you would not regret having gone to England. On that you would be able to build your position, but, if you have not got the foundation money, any edifice you may hope to build without that foundation would crumble down to pieces and you would find yourself in the open air without an edifice. For there is no work awaiting you on your return. There may be empty honours and congratulations just to sting you.

Lakshmidas had to marshal the resources of the extensive family network of the Gandhis to obtain the sum required for Mohandas’ trip. Ten thousand rupees was a substantial quantity of hard cash for those who were part of this network. Even though most of the amount was to be a loan, the social stratum to which relatives and friends of the Gandhi family belonged did not have access to resources that could be quickly converted into ready money. ‘I know by personal experience’, Gandhi recalled upon his return to India, ‘how even persons who have promised on oath to give some pecuniary assistance, a loan mind you, not an absolute gift and whom you think [you] can safely depend upon prove false to their promises’. ⁵⁸ For this reason, the momentous step taken by Mohandas with the support of his elder brother was a bold one. This was the biggest hurdle that had to be overcome.

By comparison, the reservations expressed by some of the senior members of the family did not pose too much of a problem. At Rajkot and Porbandar, the disapproval, on religious grounds, was mild and easily taken care of. As Gandhi set out on the first lap of his journey, from Rajkot to Bombay, a host of well-wishers came to ‘bid me farewell’. ⁵⁹ He specifically names nearly twenty of them, including Kevalram. ⁶⁰ Several more greeted him en route: Dr Bhau and Kapurbhai at Gondal; at Dhola he was met by Narandas, Pranshankar, Narbheram, Anandrai, Vrajlal and Usmanbhai. Usmanbhai travelled with him by train until Wadhwan. This was indeed a warm send-off. Gandhi was not lonesome at the moment of parting. Such effusiveness on the part of so many people must have instilled more confidence in him. A few days prior to his departure, a get-together was organized by some of his former schoolmates, which got a brief mention in the press. Gandhi discovered that he had become something of a minor local celebrity. After all, it was not a routine occurrence at this time for a boy from a not-too-affluent family of small-town Saurashtra to embark upon a journey to England for higher studies.

At Bombay too, he was not entirely on his own. A few of his friends and relatives had escorted him to the port city. Here, he encountered more vociferous opposition to his venture. Some busybodies who claimed to be leaders of the jati to which the Gandhi family belonged tried to prevent him from proceeding to London by invoking religious injunctions against travelling overseas. Gandhi responded combatively. There was far too much at stake for him and his family for the plan to be abandoned. Moreover, he and his companions seem to have figured out that the so-called community elders had overestimated their clout. Their actions caused some annoyance, especially since preparations for the voyage had to be made hurriedly amidst continuing uncertainty over money.

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was becoming possible to disregard conservative religious practices that discouraged long-distance overseas travel, with sections of the Kathiawari elite shedding inhibitions about going to Europe. Mavji and Kevalram had both cited examples of individuals from Rajkot who had built successful careers upon their return from Britain where they had pursued higher studies. Besides, there was the ruler of the neighbouring Gondal state, Thakur Bhagvatsinhji (r. 1883–1944), who in 1883 became the first princely ruler of a Kathiawari state to visit Europe. Upon his return, he published a journal of his tour, thus publicizing his sojourn. In 1883 itself, the chief of Morvi state, situated close to Wankaner, also undertook a trip to England. Then in 1886, Bhagvatsinhji went to Edinburgh to study medicine, receiving an honorary LLD degree in 1887. ⁶¹ He took part in some of the official events organized in London to celebrate the golden jubilee of Victoria’s coronation and was conferred a knighthood on this occasion. Surely, there would have been excitement about this high honour among officials and hangers-on of darbars in the region. This was the mood from which Gandhi derived the strength to instinctively reject xenophobic exclusiveness.

Gandhi did not inhabit a ghettoized world. The small party which made its way to Bombay included his friend Sheikh Mehtab. The two had got acquainted in high school and became bosom pals. Mehtab was a few years older than Gandhi. His father worked in the prison establishment of the Gondal state. Much has been made of the short, but mostly unfavourable account, of their relationship in Experiments. Erik Erikson devoted several pages to an analysis of the relationship between Gandhi and ‘his evil friend’ Mehtab. ⁶² His interpretation of the psychological motivations that might have determined the nature of the association between the two has in turn been examined and commented upon in several writings on Gandhi, especially by Martin Green, and more recently by Thomas Weber. ⁶³

The story recounted in Experiments in the late 1920s has a very specific purpose, namely publicly owning up to a momentary deviation from the virtuous path of vegetarianism under the immoral influence of Mehtab (who is not named), more than forty years back, when the two were in school. By this time, Gandhi had traversed a vast distance in striving to discipline himself. The lapse marked the starting point of the journey, and in talking about it at this stage of his life, he wished to measure the progress his soul had made. It is a parable about truthfulness, obedience to parents, the meaning of ‘true friendship’ and abstention. Mehtab’s anonymous presence in it is incidental. Vegetarianism was central to Gandhi’s practice of abstinence, a crucial principle of his notion of self-restraint. Otherwise, what Gandhi describes in the two chapters entitled ‘A Tragedy’ and ‘A Tragedy (continued)’ were just ‘minor acts of adolescent rebellion’, ⁶⁴ quite innocent in themselves, such as surreptitiously eating meat a few times, and trying out ‘stumps of cigarettes’, rather, bidis, as kids are wont to (‘a relative’, not Mehtab, was responsible for the latter offence). ⁶⁵

The Mehtab to whom we are introduced by Gandhi in his ‘London Diary’ of 1888 is an intimate friend who is constantly by his side as he goes about enlisting support for the plan to go to England. In this account, a slightly incoherent narrative of juvenile revelry in which the two participate (subjected to close psychoanalytical scrutiny by Erikson) ⁶⁶ is placed alongside a mention of Mehtab’s unsuccessful ploy, at his own initiative, to extract from Meghji the money he had promised. ⁶⁷ Further, Rajmohan Gandhi has suggested that Sheikh Mehtab was the unnamed companion, referred to in Experiments, who guided Mohandas in choosing items for his wardrobe while they were in Bombay. ⁶⁸

The two friends remained in touch during Gandhi’s sojourn abroad, and subsequently upon his return to India. Following his decision in 1894 to stay on in Natal, Mehtab joined him there. Gandhi had set up a large establishment in a posh locality of Durban, Beach Grove, which his friend from Rajkot helped to manage. ⁶⁹ Within about a year, their friendship was over, never to be revived again. A disagreeable incident led to Mehtab’s unceremonious exit. ⁷⁰ Recalling the unpardonable misdemeanour of his erstwhile ‘companion’ (whose identity is not revealed), more than thirty years later, Gandhi demonstrated uncharacteristic anger in the chapter devoted to this episode in his Experiments. ⁷¹ Mehtab fell from grace absolutely and irrevocably. Again, this is a parable in which the mature Gandhi discerns divine intervention, a sign that his spiritual advance has divine approval: ‘But God came to the rescue as before. My intentions were pure, and so I was saved in spite of my mistakes, and this early experience thoroughly forewarned me for the future’. ⁷² To take this account literally is to miss the point.

Circa 1895 Gandhi had not yet commenced his ascent to sainthood. He was still an ordinary human being, with common emotions. That is why he reacted with such rage to Mehtab’s misdemeanour. His political and legal career in South Africa, more specifically in British Natal, had barely been launched. In a rabidly racist environment, Gandhi needed to be scrupulously proper in his own conduct and in that of those closely associated with him. He could not have afforded even a whiff of scandal. Besides, he was evolving his own uncompromising code of conduct based upon his understanding of ethical norms. As these norms became stricter and their application to himself more severe, he considered himself even more justified in his attitude towards Mehtab. The disgraced Mehtab subsequently stayed on in Durban, where he was employed in some capacity by a leading businessperson, Mohamed Cassim Camroodin, with whom Gandhi had political and professional ties. ⁷³ From a distance, Mehtab lent support to Mohandas’ political causes. In 1896, a Durban newspaper carried a letter penned by him in which he forcefully endorsed the views expressed by Gandhi in his well-known ‘Green Pamphlet’. The pamphlet had highlighted the deplorable conditions of racial discrimination under which Indians lived in Natal, and which caused the author of the pamphlet a great deal of trouble. ⁷⁴ A white mob attempted to fatally lynch Gandhi for the censure.

Later, when in 1907 an agitation was launched against the Asiatic Law Amendment Act in the British colony of Transvaal, Mehtab composed inspiring verses through which he expressed his support for the struggle. He had earlier published a compilation of his Urdu poetry. In a letter of September 1905 addressed to Chhaganlal Gandhi who was assisting with the editorial work of the Gujarati section of Indian Opinion, Mohandas had instructed him ‘not [to] take any notice’ of the book ‘written by Sheikh Mehtab [which] I have seen today’. ⁷⁵

The protest against the Act took the form of civil disobedience, defiance of the discriminatory law by refusing to comply with the requirement for Indians in Transvaal (which had recently become a British colony) to register with the authorities. Indians who failed to register were to be expelled from the colony. Gandhi as the main leader of the agitation, projected Ram Sundar Pundit, an Indian who had been a resident of Transvaal for a few years performing the functions of a priest for members of the community living in the Johannesburg suburb of Germiston, as the principal agitator in the first phase of the struggle. Ram Sundar was arrested, tried and sentenced to imprisonment for one month. His action received wide publicity. Gandhi met him in prison and published the gist of his ‘interview’ with Ram Sundar in Indian Opinion ⁷⁶ :

Please tell everyone that I am happy here. It would have been better if the Government had awarded me hard labour. After my release, I shall be prepared to go to gaol again for the sake of the community. While here, I have read all the poems on gaol-going. I have been deeply moved by them, especially by the poems of Mr. Mehtab. When I come out, I hope to see a copy of these poems in the hands of every Indian in Germiston.

Gandhi tried to distance himself from Ram Sundar’s fulsome praise of Mehtab’s compositions by pointedly remarking, ‘I have felt much hesitation in reproducing what Punditji said about the poems on gaol-going. But I have given the message as a matter of duty because he was very particular about it’. ⁷⁷ Soon, however, Mehtab’s satyagraha verses were appearing regularly in Indian Opinion. His poem ‘Satyagrahioni Tarif’ was published in Gandhi’s paper in July 1910. ⁷⁸ Another poem has a stanza of three lines in Fanagalo ⁷⁹ :

Ookala chalile zonke mulungu

Ayifuna

Manje chela funa Indian-ku

[Initially, all whites said they

did not want Indians.

Now they say they want Indians.]

This would have added to the appeal of the poem for those amidst the audience before which it was recited, who were familiar with this pidgin language used to communicate with Indian workers on sugarcane plantations, African miners and diverse other labouring people in southern Africa. Fanagalo began to evolve in the early nineteenth century as a mixed language combining elements of Afrikaans (which itself was in the process of evolving as a distinct language in this period) and English, with Xhosa and Zulu. Indians arriving in Natal from the 1860s onwards as indentured labour would have found it more convenient to use Fanagalo for communicating with those whose home language was either English or Zulu. It is, therefore, not surprising that Mehtab should have been sufficiently fluent in Fanagalo to be able to switch with dexterity from Urdu to pidgin to make some pithy comment. Moreover, his familiarity with at least four languages—Gujarati, Urdu, English and Fanagalo (maybe some Zulu)—would have given him access to a wide circle of contacts.

Whatever his relationship with Gandhi after the Beach Grove episode, and on Gandhi’s side it was far from cordial, Sheikh Mehtab had definitely become part of the larger circle of the politically conscious section of the Indian community in South Africa. He commanded respect within this circle, something that could not be easily ignored. This might have been one of the reasons for Gandhi’s reluctance to publicly acknowledge the bitterness which marked his attitude towards his former buddy. He did not allow personal rancour to distract him from his political purpose. Mehtab’s verses, which began to appear in the pages of Indian Opinion from 1909 onwards, continued to be published in the paper until almost the eve of Gandhi’s departure from South Africa in 1914. But reconciliation between the two seems to have been out of the question perhaps due to Gandhi’s firm resolve to have nothing whatsoever to do with Mehtab any longer. This in spite of the fact that members of the latter’s family participated actively in the South African satyagraha of 1913—the most radical phase of the Gandhi-led struggle against racial discrimination in South Africa. Mehtab’s wife Bai Fatima and his mother-in-law Hanifbai courted arrest in the satyagraha. They were sentenced to imprisonment for three months. ⁸⁰ Their photographs were subsequently published in the ‘Golden Number’ of Indian Opinion which came out in 1914. The ‘Golden Number’ was intended to be a record of the ‘Passive Resistance Movement in South Africa, 1906–1914’, and was profusely illustrated. The caption under the photograph of Bai Fatima reads: ‘Mrs. Sheik Mehtab. Mahomeden Indian Woman Passive Resister, who suffered imprisonment’. ⁸¹ Significantly, the photograph of Bai Fatima was placed alongside that of the sixteen-year-old ‘Valiamina Moodaly’ (Valliamma Munuswami Mudaliar) ⁸² who died as a result of the appalling conditions under which satyagrahis served their prison sentences, and attained the status of a martyr. Most probably, Mehtab himself did not directly participate in the satyagraha, though he was associated with a few high profile events organized by Gandhi around this time, as for instance the reception to welcome the anti-colonial missionary C. F. Andrews on his arrival in Durban in January 1914. Indian Opinion mentioned Mehtab as the composer of the songs sung in the honour of Andrews at the function. ⁸³ To be fair to Mehtab, he did sincerely strive to redeem himself.

After a gap of more than a decade, as we have noted earlier, Gandhi made a few allusions to Mehtab in his Experiments, none of them complimentary, without actually naming him. One would have assumed that they had parted (even if there may not have been a formal parting—we do not know whether the two were on talking terms) on a not-too-unpleasant note, recognizing that they were comrades committed to a common cause. It would be difficult otherwise to explain the mildly appreciative mention that Mehtab got in Indian Opinion just a few months prior to Gandhi’s departure. ⁸⁴

In the series of parables which were eventually included in Experiments, Gandhi had to strain his memory to recall moments of transgression in his early life. For someone who had a genuinely unblemished past, this was not easy. Childish adventures became major sins of the flesh in their retelling. Mehtab had the misfortune of being one of the characters in a story that was entirely about Gandhi. Once his identity was known, ⁸⁵ there was nothing to prevent his demonization. He was seen as someone who had tried to lead astray a pure soul, and he could also be given a name. The Beach Grove incident, as portrayed in much of the historiography on Gandhi, served to confirm the essentially immoral character of Mehtab. Having featured in a famous book as a villain, it was impossible for him to escape worldwide notoriety. The obligatory reference in biographical accounts to his alleged wickedness which might have compromised Gandhi’s goodness as a child has ensured his everlasting ignominy. As Erikson observes, ‘[n]obody seems to have a sympathetic word for the boy’. ⁸⁶

By maintaining complete silence about the later career of Mehtab in South Africa, and the occasions when the two crossed each other’s paths, Gandhi inadvertently reinforced his schoolmate’s negative image. It is relatively recently that a fuller picture has emerged. Martin Green in his study of Gandhi published in 1993 sheds some light on the activities of Mehtab in Natal insofar as he was connected with the resistance led by Gandhi. ⁸⁷ Subsequently, the writings of Burnett Britton, Surendra Bhana, Goolam Vahed and Rajmohan Gandhi have added to our information. ⁸⁸ Bhana and Neelima Shukla-Bhatt have made the satyagraha poetry of Mehtab accessible through their compilation of poems on this theme which appeared in Indian Opinion. ⁸⁹ These verses allow Mehtab to speak directly to us, rather than by means of Gandhi. It would suffice here to quote a few lines from the poems of the mature Mehtab to indicate the direction in which his political understanding had evolved:

If the whole community is brave

Eid and Diwali can be celebrated.

Otherwise the Union Jack will tear us apart

and fire will be ablaze. ⁹⁰

Sing the songs of Bande Mataram and Allah Akbar

Indians with shawls or Turkish caps,

Pick up the arrow of unity and

Shoot disunity down. ⁹¹

During the 1920s, he was earning a respectable living as a teacher of Gujarati in South Africa, as mentioned in a brochure of 1982 brought out by the Surat Hindu Association. ⁹² In accounting for Gandhi’s silence about Mehtab’s continuing presence on the periphery of his circle of acquaintances, we need to consider the possibility of an occasional lapse of memory in the text of Experiments. The text was put together over a period of slightly more than three years (November 1925 to February 1929), ⁹³ in 166 instalments. ⁹⁴ Gandhi did not proceed according to a pre-determined plan. Further, Gandhi was not engaged in preparing a systematic record of remembered events of his life. Tridip Suhrud has pointed out that he made a clear distinction between an autobiography or jivan vrutrant as a chronicle of one’s life, and atmakatha as ‘the story of a soul’. ⁹⁵ He was emphatic that what he was writing was the latter, and was aware that there might be inaccuracies. These were besides the point as they did not really alter the meaning he sought to convey by relating the story of his ‘experiments with truth’. ⁹⁶ Experiments is the story of the first fifty years of Gandhi’s life, begun when he was in his fifty-sixth year. One is reminded of the well-known autobiographical account of Banarsi Das, Ardhakathanak, written in the early seventeenth century. Banarsi Das was a prosperous trader, and a scholar of philosophy and religion, who lived in the era of the Great Mughals. He was the author of what might be regarded as one of the earliest specimens of an autobiography in North India. The title of this Braj Bhasha text in verse signifies the half-way mark of a fully lived life of 110 years which according to a belief among many of the Jain faith is the notional ideal figure of human existence on earth. Banarsi Das had attained the age of fifty-five when he set down his account (aradh kathan). ⁹⁷

More than half the narrative in Experiments is about Gandhi’s experiences in South Africa where he spent about two decades. He had reflected on these experiences in his Satyagraha in South Africa, the original Gujarati text of which had been published in 1924. ⁹⁸ This would have given him an opportunity to recollect incidents that were relevant to his narrative. We can be sure that Mehtab was not completely forgotten later on. He remained relevant as a reference point for Gandhi to gauge his own spiritual progress. Yet Gandhi retained no pleasant memories of him. We can make sense of many of the Mahatma’s statements by bearing in mind that he saw his entire life as a ceaseless endeavour to attain perfection through the accumulation of spiritual merit; hence, his concern to constantly measure the distance he had covered in the direction of his goal.

Fasting, Secularism, Martyrdom

In the summer of 1940, a minor incident occurred at Gandhi’s ashram in Sevagram involving some of the inmates. This incident, utterly trivial in itself, seriously annoyed Gandhi. In the first week of June, a pen and a letter went missing from Kasturba’s room in the ashram. Both belonged to Radha, one of the daughters of the late Maganlal. Maganlal was part of the extended Gandhi family, and had been an early disciple of Bapu. The pen, which does not appear to have been particularly valuable, was found lying in a remote corner in the ashram premises the next morning. The letter was not traced even after several weeks. Probably, it was destroyed. Some bits of paper which had been found near the spot from where the pen had been recovered could have been fragments of the letter. Obviously, whoever had removed these items panicked upon learning of the very serious view that Gandhi had taken of the act. The young women residing in the ashram who had access to Kasturba’s room all came under suspicion. After a preliminary enquiry, Gandhi concluded that this could not have been the work of any of the employees of the ashram. He narrowed down the list of suspects to five inmates, including Kasturba. It would have been quite unfair to omit her name. The ‘culprit’, he was insistent, would have to confess. This would have implied a public confession as nothing in the ashram was really a private affair.

As many as thirty-six documents pertaining to this episode are reproduced in the Collected Works. ⁹⁹ They are mostly letters, or notes, written by Gandhi, addressed either to permanent residents of the ashram collectively; or to Mahadev Desai; or to Pyarelal; or to one particular, unfortunate, suspect. The bulk of these are dated between 2 June and 18 June, and the last of this series is dated 11 November. If the responses (not reproduced) were to be added to this correspondence, we would have an amazingly large set of documents relating to a matter which could be easily dismissed as inconsequential. What is even more remarkable is that so much time should have been taken up by a minor indiscretion, which was obviously the outcome of petty jealousies among the young disciples who surrounded the great man, at a time when a major political crisis had been created a few months earlier by the fateful Lahore resolution of the All-India Muslim League (23 March 1940) demanding self-determination for Muslims of the British Indian empire.

Gandhi was determined not to ignore the ‘theft’; for him it amounted to a grave transgression, a sin. The sinfulness of the act was compounded by the refusal of the ‘culprit’ to confess. He felt that he was left with no alternative other than going on a purificatory fast. In a note addressed to one of his women disciples, Amtussalam, he communicated his resolve to commence fasting in case the sinner did not confess:

About today’s theft you will have to speak to all the girls who go to Ba’s room. Whoever has done it has done wrong. Hiding it will make it worse. If she does not confess the whole thing to me, I shall be compelled to fast. Convey this quietly to all the girls who go there. ¹⁰⁰

This note was written on 2 June, the first day of the commotion. Even five days later nobody had admitted guilt. He had meanwhile penned seventeen troubled letters on the subject. Exasperated by such intransigence, Gandhi declared that he would begin fasting on 8 June.

By this time, he was certain that Amtussalam had purloined the pen and the letter. Several months later, he was to acknowledge that he had erred in his judgement. ¹⁰¹ During the dark winter of 1946–7, she would accompany Gandhi on his mission to Noakhali and undertake an epic fast of twenty-five days in the hope of restoring some sanity amidst the madness of communal hatred and violence. ¹⁰²

On the eve of his proposed fast in 1940, Gandhi addressed all the inmates of the ashram, through a written communication, accusing her of the ‘theft’ and setting out his reasons for undertaking the fast ¹⁰³ :

I have to state with regret that my suspicion falls upon A. I am convinced that no servant has done this. So we are left with our own people. When I inquire further, only A. remains to be cleared. She has been closer to me than a daughter, her service has been immense, it is no small matter to suspect her. But I can see no other way. She is equally sure that she has not done it. Under these circumstances, a fast is the only easy way left to me. My fast may be considered as a measure of self-purification. Why should this suspicion arise in me? If she is innocent, then the suspicion indicates impurity in my love. Love never suspects. Faults cannot remain hidden to love. The loved ones feel secure. Ahimsa ordains that no one should look at A. with hatred. Everyone should continue to love her. Let no one presume that she is a liar and that my suspicion is well founded. I shall not be unhappy if she is found innocent. I shall dance with joy.

My fast commences tomorrow. I have no idea how long it will last. I shall be guided by the intelligence and strength that God may grant me. No one need worry.

What a sense of crisis the denunciation must have produced! There was a flurry of activity as attempts were made to persuade Gandhi not to go ahead with the fast—thankfully, he was persuaded. How could Amtussalam, many would have wondered, be so irresponsible as to divert Bapu’s attention from the pressing political issues to which he had to attend. The Muslim League was stirring up trouble, with some encouragement from governor-general Linlithgow. Simultaneously, the question of extending support to the British war effort had to be decided urgently. To consider the latter issue, an important meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) was scheduled to begin within ten days, on 17 June, at Wardha. The meeting turned out to be a stormy one as there were sharp differences between Gandhi, on the one hand, and many of the prominent members of the CWC, on the other hand, particularly Nehru, Azad (who was the president), Patel and Rajagopalachari, leading to an impasse. ¹⁰⁴ Surely, Gandhi would have foreseen that there would be a showdown at the meeting and that he might be isolated.

In the midst of all this, he was called upon to atone for a sin committed by one of his disciples who had unexpectedly swerved from the path of truth. At the same time, he had to undertake penance for this act as its perpetration signified that he had failed to ensure the spiritual well-being of the ashram. Ultimately, he himself was to blame. There must have been some backsliding on his part, ‘theft has brought me to the conclusion that I am a wholly incompetent person’. ‘That such a thing should happen in my very presence’, he declared, ‘indicates that my penance is defective. A pure heart is the real foundation of any penance. It is said that violence is subdued in the presence of non-violence, untruth in the presence of truth and stealing in the presence of non-stealing. What is my worth if untruth, violence and stealing survive in my presence? How can I give any battle? (emphasis added)’. ¹⁰⁵ Gandhi seems to be suggesting that he had realized that his soul had not progressed towards the goal of perfection to the extent that he had assumed. And if he had not accumulated sufficient spiritual merit after so many years of striving to be able to prevent moral lapses on a small scale, how was he to overcome colossal untruths such as the ‘“two-nations” theory’ with his truth. ¹⁰⁶ Of course, he himself did not differentiate between smaller and larger untruths. An untruth was an untruth.

These ruminations against the backdrop of the perceived wickedness of an ashram inmate suddenly evoked memories of Sheikh Mehtab. Incidents that had occurred almost sixty years earlier, when the two schoolmates were in their early teens, and Kasturba even younger, were referred to. The harsh words of Experiments were recalled in the latest utterances. ‘You know what a terrific quarrel I had with Ba’, he lamented, ‘she stayed away from me for a whole year. How shall I say what other things I did. But Ba showed courage. It was not a matter of stealing. It was something worse’. Gandhi was expressing his remorse in a letter of 3 June addressed presumably to Amtussalam. He went on to blame Mehtab for instigating the quarrel with Kasturba:

Shiekh Mehtab was behind this. He kept me under his thumb for more than ten years. On his suggestion, I came to doubt the character of Ba …. The hatchet was buried only after my return from England. It was then that I realized fully after many years how wicked Shiekh Mehtab was.

Eventually ‘he relented’, and alluding to the South African phase of Mehtab’s life, Gandhi hints at the possibility of redemption, ‘[h]e continued to worship me from a distance. This is a long tale, pleasant as well as pathetic’. ¹⁰⁷

Once again, Mehtab served the purpose of talking about the hurdles Gandhi had faced on his spiritual journey. His success in overcoming them signified divine approval, which was perhaps now being withheld. For this reason, he needed to go right back to the beginning to review his advance, or lack of it. Then, Mehtab had been the instrument of putting him to the test. Could the happenings in the ashram and in the wider world now be a sign of divine displeasure over his unsatisfactory progress? In her insightful biography of Gandhi, Kathryn Tidrick has interpreted his endeavour to become perfect as his way of seeking ‘to become one with God’. ¹⁰⁸ He had once declared that there was ‘no point in trying to know the difference between a perfect man and God’. ¹⁰⁹ It is not clear whether he thought that it was actually possible to become perfect. Tidrick argues that the early engagement with Esoteric Christianity had shaped his notion of becoming perfect, a state in which the seeker would be able to see God face to face. ¹¹⁰ James Hunt in his pioneering Gandhi and the Nonconformists explored the strong influence of Esoteric Christianity on the evolution of Gandhian thought. Elaborating on the profound impact that ideas propounded by thinkers associated with Esoteric Christianity had on the Mahatma, his secretary, Pyarelal, who knew him intimately, had explained to Hunt, ¹¹¹

The E.C.U. [Esoteric Christian Union]’s teaching had a more specific and lasting influence on his thought than Theosophy. The theosophical influence was more pervasive. It helped him rediscover his own religion, but the E.C.U.’s doctrine gave a very distinct colouring to his thoughts on some very vital aspects e.g. Brahmacharya, the doctrine of absolution through Christ’s suffering …. Whatever he absorbed in this extremely impressionable and formative phase of his development abode with him for life.

Dietary discipline and control of the palate were an integral part of the austerities to be practiced if he was to attain oneness with God—not for the affirmation of a politico-religious identity. It was ‘part of a religious effort to transcend his material nature’. ¹¹² Gandhi’s religiosity and piety prevented him from cynically mixing politics with religion. He refused in particular to equate religion with the politics of religious identity; this would have retarded his spiritual progress, would have contaminated his spirituality. Being religious, understood as an effort to acquire spiritual merit in the search for Truth, was a matter of individual exertion. This had nothing to do with political mobilization on the basis of aggressive assertions of religious identity, namely communal politics. Communalism, the form that the politics of religious identity acquired in colonial India in the period after the First World War, involved the use of religion and religious symbols to promote hate, divisiveness. The most significant feature of communal politics, involving the blatant use of religion for purely political purposes, was the emphasis on the distinctiveness and separateness of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ identities. The interests of the two communities were supposedly so different and antagonistic that there was no possibility of their having any shared concerns. This, it was alleged, rendered their (imagined) differences irreconcilable. Needless to say, communal politics became prevalent in India with a helping hand from the colonial state. Gandhi’s political practice on the other hand was uncompromisingly secular.

In the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, two lengthy columns are devoted to the several definitions of ‘secular’, ‘secularism’, etc. In almost all their shades of meaning, ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’ are words used to denote the separateness of worldly affairs and religious matters. ¹¹³ This is precisely the sense in which Gandhi would have used these terms. The most forceful enunciation of his position that I have come across is in his response to a question about the relationship between religion and the state in independent India. His reply was unambiguous:

If I were a dictator, religion and State would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The State has nothing to do with it. The State would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion. That is everybody’s personal concern! ¹¹⁴

Shortly after independence, speaking at a prayer meeting in Calcutta towards the end of August 1947, he further clarified his understanding of a secular state, stating,

[r]eligion was a personal matter and if we succeeded in confining it to the personal plane, all would be well in our political life.… If officers of the Government as well as members of the public undertook the responsibility and worked wholeheartedly for the creation of a secular State, we could build a new India that would be the glory of the world. ¹¹⁵

This was the ideological standpoint from which he refuted the ‘two-nations’ thesis of the Muslim League following the March 1940 resolution demanding self-determination for Muslims. The president of the League, M. A. Jinnah, had in his address at the Lahore session taunted Gandhi by asking him to explain as to why he was not ‘proud to say: “I am a Hindu and the Congress is a Hindu body”?’, since he himself was ‘not ashamed of saying that I am a Muslim and that the Muslim League is the representative of Muslims’. To this Gandhi replied in the following words: ‘I am proud of being a Hindu, but I have never gone to anybody as a Hindu to secure Hindu–Muslim unity’. Moreover, ‘whatever talks I had with Quaid-e-Azam or any other have been on behalf of the Congress which is not a Hindu organization’. He was not in politics as a Hindu, but as a Congressman. His reply to Jinnah ends by questioning the claim of the League to speak on behalf of all Muslims, ‘But surely it is permissible to dispute the authority of the 50,000 Muslims who listened to Quaid-Azam to represent the feelings of eight crores of Indian Muslims’. ¹¹⁶

In an article published in Harijan in the first week of April 1940, Gandhi put forth a compelling argument against the untruth of the ‘two-nations’ thesis. This was in terms of the shared historical experiences, shared religious traditions, of the Hindus and Muslims of India and their commonality.

He remained true to his secular principles right until the terrible end, sacrificing his life for upholding them. We know of his superhuman efforts to put a stop to the bloodbath that accompanied independence, at times with considerable success as for instance in Calcutta, and even more so in Delhi where he spent the last few weeks of his noble life. Large-scale violence had broken out in Delhi in the first week of September 1947 causing the flight of Muslims from the city. Many of those who remained within the city sought shelter in refugee camps of Delhi Muslims, one of the largest of which was located in Purana Qila. For the local administration the inhabitants of these camps were essentially the responsibility of the Government of Pakistan. The arrival of Gandhi in the city on 9 September brought about a major qualitative change. The rioting subsided. More importantly, Gandhi’s visit to the Purana Qila camp and his unequivocal statement that these were ‘our’ camps went a long way towards defining nationhood in secular terms at a time when the situation was very grim and hope for the secular position was fast receding. ¹¹⁸ Subsequently, Gandhi’s fast in January 1948 for the restoration of peace and harmony led to his assassination. It was then that the tide really turned; ‘[t]hus Gandhi achieved through his death even more than he had achieved through his fast’. ¹¹⁹