Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (35 page)

Though Gandhi came to command a universal audience, he was specifically a man of his time, place and opportunity. His time was the first half of the twentieth century, the century of disillusionment; his place was an India still primitive and illiterate, but given new cohesion by modern communications and political ideas; his opportunity was the waning confidence of a generally kindly, certainly not sadistic Empire. ‘We all feel’, Lord Minto the Viceroy had written in 1907, ‘that we are mere sojourners in the land, that we are only camping, and on the march.’ Gandhi’s time had come.

He was an Anglophile. ‘Hardly ever have I known anybody’, he wrote of himself in his youth, ‘to cherish such loyalty as I did to the British Constitution…. I vied with Englishmen in loyalty to the throne.’ He was decorated for his courage in the Boer War, and for years continued to declare his devotion, if not to the British Empire, at least to the British: ‘The Emperorship must go, but I should love to be an equal partner with Britain, sharing her joys and sorrows.’ In many ways indeed his ideas were those, orientally tempered, of an English gentleman, and he often Anglicized Indian philosophical techniques. One of his favourite poems was Kipling’s ‘If’, one of his favourite hymns was Newman’s ‘Lead, Kindly Light’. Even politically, he was often attuned to the public school spirit. ‘True democracy’, he once wrote, ‘is not inconsistent with a few persons representing the spirit, the hope and the aspirations of those
whom they claim to represent’—Lord Milner’s views exactly.

Over the years his ideas of national independence became fused with thoughts about human dignity, raising the struggle for Indian emancipation to a level beyond the vision of the Easter Rising heroes, or the groping patriots of Nyasaland. For Gandhi Indian nationhood was only an aspect of human fulfilment, applicable to all, and it was lucky for him that the British in India were, by and large, tolerant and sympathetic rulers, so that he was able to work out his moralities on a political stage, without being shot on the spot.

Gandhi’s revolutionary formula was a conglomeration of foibles, dogmas and contradictions—political ambition, social theory, religious precept, racial pride, personal intuition. He rationalized it all into a single metaphysic, and called it
satyagraha
—truth-force. If imperialism was essentially a glorification of force,
satyagraha
was just the opposite—it postulated, Gandhi said, ‘the conquest of an adversary by suffering in one’s own person’. It was indiscriminate in application. By its means Gandhi pulled together all the separate threads of Indian discontent, social, economic, political, historical, and wove them into a radical movement of incalculable power.
Satyagraha
was the means: the end was
swaraj,
independence, which was as much a personal as a national condition. India could not be herself while aliens ruled her, and Indians could not be altogether themselves.

To the Indian masses Gandhi became semi-divine. They believed him capable of miraculous feats, flying or vanishing, and at the peak of his powers his hold over their emotions was absolute. Women of all ranks became passionate nationalists; an army of children, the Monkey Army, became the couriers and scavengers of the movement, like the Fianna Boys in Ireland. The people did not understand him, though, and he did not always understand them. He was repeatedly warned, by friends as by enemies, that
satyagraha,
hazily grasped by a vast illiterate populace, would inevitably lead to violence: nevertheless, when the Rowlatt Acts were announced, he launched a nation-wide protest against them. The result was savagery all over India. Everywhere the mob came out in Gandhi’s name, breaking windows in Calcutta, destroying offices in Bombay, molesting the missionary in Amritsar.

The British seriously thought they might have a second Mutiny on their hands, and responded with massive troop movements, arrests, curfews and prohibitions. ‘I have made a Himalayan miscalculation’, Gandhi said, surveying the bloodshed and misery that swept across the country: and in Amritsar General Dyer gave the order to fire.

Gandhi recognized that force as such could not expel the Raj. British firepower was still overwhelming in India, and there were many more Dyers ready to obey their inherited instincts of command. Other revolutionary methods were needed. Most Indian rebels appealed to the past—Gandhi looked to the future. ‘He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths’, wrote Nehru. Until Gandhi, Nehru said, fear was dominant in India—fear of the army, of the police, of prison, of unemployment, of starvation, of usury, of landlords and agents. Fear kept things as they were, and allowed the British to retain control. Gandhi changed all that. He deliberately made use of India’s disadvantages, her poverty and backwardness, to reinforce his own methods, and so very soon became master of the Indian political scene. The Indian National Congress closed its ranks behind him, and the constitutionalists who wished to progress more sedately towards more limited goals were left impotent and discredited.

Though his own misjudgement had caused it, Amritsar convinced Gandhi that compromise with the British was now impossible—sinful, he said at the time. General Dyer could not have guessed it, but his prompt action in the Bagh that day was a signal of retreat. So horrified was the world by the massacre, so shaken and even remorseful were the British themselves, so infuriated were the Indians, that
swaraj
immediately assumed a new force, and from that movement until the end of the Empire, the true initiative was always with the Indians. In a moral sense, thanks to the sacrifice in the Jallianwalla Bagh, they were free already.

It was to prove a muddled and ambiguous progress. Sometimes
the impetus seemed to wane, and the British thought the worst was over. Sometimes Gandhi withdrew from politics, devoting his energies to more eccentric causes—his movement for the spinning of cloth, for instance, which, with its preposterous cameos of plump financiers and bony politicians sitting ungainly at their spinning-wheels, struck even the devoted Nehru as ludicrous. Sometimes non-violence failed, and the Indian masses burst into riot again. They were convulsive times in India, not because anything solid was achieved, but perhaps because both sides were beginning to sense their own strengths and weaknesses—the Indians riding the tide of history, but weakened by their own feuds and rivalries, the British gradually relinquishing the will to rule. The balance was changing, and if people did not always realize it consciously, unknowingly they responded, British and Indians alike.

Once in the 1920s Gandhi was arrested, to be charged with subversion, and the puzzled, almost pained sensitivity of the presiding magistrate, Robert Broomfield, exactly reflects the bewilderment of the time. The case was heard in the Circuit House at Ahmedabad, in Gandhi’s own province of Gujarat. This was not a court-room, but a house used by visiting judges and officials, and was chosen because it stood on the outskirts of the city, away from the mob and close to the British cantonment. The court was simply a room, and though European policemen guarded the door, and a clutch of British officials sat in the front seats, and Sir Thomas Strangman the Advocate-General had come especially from Bombay to conduct the prosecution, still the atmosphere. was informal. There was no dock or witness-box. Most of the spectators wore the white homespun of the patriotic movement, and when Gandhi entered the room, wearing only a loin-cloth himself, they stood to their feet
in his honour.

Case No 45 of the Ahmedabad Sessions,
Rex
Imperator
v
Gandhi,
opened at noon, March 18, 1922. Gandhi was charged with sedition, because of articles he had written in his political journal
Young
India,
and he admitted his guilt at once—indeed, he urged it. He had come to the conclusion, he said, that the British connection with India was fatal to the welfare of the country, so that it had been a privilege to write articles demanding its end. ‘To preach disaffection towards
the existing system of government has become almost a passion with me…. I am here therefore to invite and submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me, for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.’

These were confusing submissions, to a conventionally educated official of the Indian Civil Service. Broomfield was thirty-nine then, a slight man but of some presence, the son of a London barrister. He had been in India for fourteen years, but nothing in his training and experience could have prepared him for the peculiar accused who now stood before him, surrounded by his friends and supporters, looking spindly, saintly and almost demure. Gandhi made a very long statement to the court, and in the course of it suggested, not very seriously perhaps, that only two courses were open to the judge—to resign his post on the grounds that the law was bad, or to hand down the severest possible sentence. Gandhi spoke gently, and everyone was impressed, even the policemen and the sceptical Strangman, who thought the courtesies rather overdone. Broomfield himself was clearly touched by the occasion, and he produced a judgement that would be quoted always, when the manners and values of the British Raj were later to be debated.

‘Mr Gandhi,’ he said, ‘you have made my task easy in one way by pleading guilty to the charge. Nevertheless what remains, namely the determination of a just sentence, is perhaps as difficult a proposition as a judge in this country could have to face. The law is no respecter of persons. Nevertheless it will be impossible to ignore the fact that you are in a different category from any person I have ever tried or am likely to have to try. It would be impossible to ignore the fact that, in the eyes of millions of your countrymen, you are a great patriot and a great leader. Even those who differ from you in politics look upon you as a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life.’

There were few people in India, said the judge (optimistically perhaps if he counted the British) who would not sincerely regret that Gandhi could not be left at liberty. But it was so. He was going to sentence the Mahatma, said Judge Broomfield, to six years’ imprisonment, as a balance between what was due to the prisoner and what seemed to be needed in the public interest: ‘and I should
like to say in doing so that if the course of events in India should make it possible for the Government to reduce the period and release you, no one will be better pleased than I.’
1

The course of events soon did, for Gandhi spent less than two years in his prison at Poona, during which time he not only read Kipling, Gibbon, Jules Verne and the entire text of the Mahabharata, but learnt Tamil and was operated on for appendicitis by the local English surgeon. Broomfield’s careful and courteous judgement, though, typified the English attitude to this slippery and inexplicable opponent—by turns fascinated and repelled, trusting and suspicious, hostile and appeasing.

The British were groping in India. Once the proudest trophy of the Crown, it was becoming an awkward anachronism, a captive nation that fitted no category. Nobody really knew what best to do about it, because few really believed, in their heart of hearts, that Indians were capable of governing themselves. ‘To me it is perfectly inconceivable’, said Lord Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India in 1925, ‘that India will ever be fit for Dominion self-government’, while it was Ramsay MacDonald the Socialist who once observed that parliamentary democracy could no more be transferred to India than ice in an Englishman’s luggage. H. G. Wells thought the Englishman in India was like a man who had fallen off a ladder on the back of an elephant, ‘and doesn’t know what to do or how to get down’.

Since the beginning of the Indian Empire there had been a conflict of views, between those who believed India must remain for ever British, and those who thought the highest purpose of the imperialists must be to prepare the sub-continent for modern
nationhood—the trustee conception of imperialism, against the law-and-order school. Even in the 1920s both views were common. King George V, for example, subscribed distinctly to the permanency theory. ‘I suppose the real difficulty’, he wrote, ‘is the utter lack of courage, moral and political, among the natives….’ T. E. Lawrence, on the other hand, thought the time already overdue for a British withdrawal—the Indian Empire had lasted too long, and was evidently failing. In the field there were undoubtedly many British members of the ICS who thought the Empire was only now approaching its
raison
d’être
—the careful transfer of responsibility to Indian hands that had been the declared purpose of its presence for more than a century.

At home successive British Governments wavered in their policies, offering a nibble of freedom one year, apparently discouraging all progress the next. The Coalition Government of 1918 gave India dyarchy, the Conservative Government of 1927 set up an Indian Commission of Inquiry, under Lord Simon, which included no Indians at all. The Prime Minister of the Labour Government of 1929 was Ramsay MacDonald, who promptly ate his words about parliamentary democracy for India, and announced that within months rather than years there was likely to be an Indian Dominion within the British Commonwealth. Whatever their party, they were all at sixes and sevens. They had lost the touch of Empire, and far from commanding events, bemusedly responded to them. All they could offer the Indian rebels was gradual constitutional advance, embodied in conferences, legal proposals and commissions of inquiry, and having as its only aim an Indian Dominion modelled as far as possible on the Westminster model.

It was not enough for Gandhi, who had long lost his faith in the imperial system, and was committed now to absolute independence, like the Irish rebels of 1916. Inner voices, he said, had persuaded him that a new revolutionary campaign was necessary, and to launch it he declared an Independence Day. On January 26, 1930, at meetings all over India, citizens were invited to make a pledge of independence
—
MAHATMA EXPECTS EVERYONE TO DO HIS DUTY
, said the lead headline in the
Bombay
Chronicle
—and soon afterwards Gandhi set off upon an allegorical mission of defiance, to mark the moment when the British Raj no longer had meaning for Indian patriots. He wanted to do something that would be instantly understood by the Indian masses, whose grasp of political issues was hazy and whose conception of Empire was decidedly fluid—
most
Indians, even then, had probably never set eyes upon an Englishman. Gandhi decided deliberately to challenge an official ruling that everyone knew: the Government monopoly on the production and sale of salt.