Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (36 page)

The salt monopoly was an old staple of Anglo-Indian affairs. It affected the lives of every citizen, and it affected the state of Government—half the retail price of salt went in taxes. Gandhi conceived the idea of publicly producing a quantity of salt himself, out of sea water, and inviting the Indian people to do the same in a universal gesture of self-respect. It was a masterly application of
satyagraha
. It was easy, it was harmless, it had moral content, it would appeal to everyone and it had a fine historical quality, like throwing tea into Boston Harbor. On March 12, 1930, Gandhi set off from his headquarters in Ahmedabad on his Salt March to the Indian Ocean. He was making for a village called Dandi, 250 miles away on the Gujarati coast, and he turned the twenty-four days of the march into a triumphant pilgrimage.

There is a film of the walk, and in it we see the prophet and his followers striding cheerfully, vigorously and jerkily towards their goal. Seventy-eight people started off with Gandhi, all dressed in white homespun; but they grew into thousands along the way, and were followed by rich but less robust supporters in motor cars, and often escorted by boys on bicycles, or straggling crowds of locals, or tooting companies of minstrels, as they marched along the dusty tracks, between the rich pasture-lands, under the heavy hanging trees of Gujarat. It is an almost Italian landscape there, like some hotter and poorer extension of the Po valley, and there was an almost Virgilian composure to Gandhi’s progress.

Farmers knelt beside the road when he passed; women came out of their houses to offer him food, rest or comfort, as though he were on his way not simply to a political demonstration, but to his own
Calvary. When they came to a village they stopped, and Gandhi, accepting with a princely calm the obeisance of the elders, climbed to a platform or a mound and addressed the people: when he moved on the elders generally went with him—nearly 400 village headmen resigned their posts to join the march. Gandhi bore himself like a great leader, temporal as well as spiritual, and fragile though his figure was, in the old newsreel pictures he seems to stride through those scenes powerfully, head bowed, staff in hand, and to stand head and shoulders above the crowds of his admirers, disciples, sightseers and welcoming committees—who, tacitly keeping at a distance from him, accentuated this air of supremacy, and made it look as though some physical aura surrounded the Mahatma, like an electric field.

Nobody interfered with the Salt March. The Government stayed prudently aloof, and on April 5 the great company of patriots approached the isolated fishing and boating village of Dandi. It was only a hamlet really, a little cluster of houses, a mosque and a Hindu temple, pleasantly encouched in green trees and reachable only by crossing an expanse of sedgy and treeless flatland. It was an amphibious kind of village, rather Venetian, lagoon-like. The track there was half under water when Gandhi came—as he put his foot in the mud he exclaimed with delight ‘It feels like velvet!’—and this curious environment, with the fresh sea air, and the western breezes, put him in high spirits.

Dandi was the simplest possible place. There was not even a radio in the village. The men lived by fishing or transporting goods up and down the coast in their sailing-vessels. Life was hard, and Dandi men travelled widely in search of jobs, so that the villagers had relatives in most parts of India, and knew all about the phenomenon of Gandhi. There were scenes of wild excitement as he entered the village, dancing, music, prayers beneath the great banyan tree, and he was taken along the single street to a two-storey villa, the property of rich Muslim sympathizers, which was to be his lodging. Dandi was not exactly on die sea. An expanse of tidal marsh, crossed by a wooden causeway, lay between it and the coastal reef, where the village fishing boats were drawn up on the sand: and here each day, when the tide was out, patches of salt were
left for the picking. The plan was that Gandhi would go to a spot immediately below the villa, early next morning when the light was good, and pluck a lump of salt from the ground in frank and exuberant contempt of the law.

The world watched Dandi that day. Interest was enormous everywhere, especially in America, and scores of reporters and cameramen had arrived from Bombay to record the occasion. The little village was crammed with sightseers, and there were crowds camping on the hard salty ground around it, and a constant flow of traffic from the town of Navsari, ten miles away across the flats. In the morning, when Gandhi’s aides went to the appointed spot to make things ready, the tide having ebbed, they found that unfortunately there was no salt there—police agents, it was suggested, had brushed it into the mud during the night. It did not matter, though. They found some elsewhere, and by the time Gandhi emerged from the villa after his morning prayers, surrounded by his disciples and followed by photographers, all was ready.

It was a pity in a way that the Mahatma did not in fact, as legend was persistently to suggest, make his way into the Indian Ocean to pluck the salt from the sea itself. The brilliant light, the endless sandy beach, the boats lined up picturesquely on the foreshore, the slow surf off the Arabian Sea, the solitary saintly figure stepping into the water—it would have made an unforgettable vignette. Never mind, the truth was remarkable enough, and in a matter of hours newspapers across the world carried photographs of the Mahatma stooping like a bony seabird to pick up his illicit mineral from the mud. The crowd burst into song and slogan, and the news agency men sprinted back to their hired cars to get their pictures away.

Some nights later, when Gandhi and his followers were camping beside a river in the village of Karadi, five miles away, a police posse arrived from Navsari. Its British commander entered the hut where Gandhi was sleeping, beside the silent river, and shone a torch in his face. His Majesty’s magistrate had arrived with a warrant for Gandhi’s arrest, in the small hours of the morning to avoid a riot. The Mahatma was to be held under a law of 1827, allowing Authority to detain a suspect without trial indefinitely:
and when he had cleaned his teeth and said his prayers, they took him away to prison once more.
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Again he was not there long, for the events he had started with the Salt March rolled on all around him and made his imprisonment a dangerous embarrassment for the British. He had launched a gigantic new wave of patriotic protest—like releasing a spring, Nehru thought—and all over India people responded once more. Suddenly salt was everything. People ostentatiously made it, or gave it away to crowds, or dug it out of the earth, or auctioned it (Gandhi’s original spoonful was sold for 1,600 rupees). People rioted over salt, newspapers were banned because of it, soldiers mutinied, professors led their entire classes to collect it from the seashore. In the cotton town of Sholapur revolutionary workers formed their own administration. In Wadila 1,500 people raided the Government salt depot. The British responded fiercely, with violent police action and mass arrests. Most of the Congress leaders were gaoled and by the end of May, 1931, nearly 100,000 Indian patriots were in prison. ‘May I congratulate you’, wrote Nehru without irony, from his prison to Gandhi’s, ‘on the new India you have created by your magic touch?’

Certainly the Salt March publicized India’s discontent as nothing had before. World opinion everywhere turned against the Raj, and the British were forced more obviously upon the defensive. They were not really in a coercive mood. They were resigned rather than resentful now, and there were no massacres this time. On most
levels relations between the races were cordial enough.
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Besides, the King’s Viceroy in India was above all a man of God and of peace. Lord lrwin indeed toyed with the idea of entering upon a fast himself, in the Gandhian manner, to bring peace to India by self-redemption, and though he was dissuaded from this unprecedented gesture, still his approach to Indian politics was tinged with an abnegatory mysticism.

Tall, high-crowned, grave, imposing, Lord lrwin was one of the more remarkable of the Viceroys. His presence was given a mediaeval piquancy by an atrophied and handless left arm, as though he had been maimed by some stroke of sorcery, but in many ways he was an imperial modernist. The son of a great Yorkshire landowner, a devout High Anglican, a Fellow of All Souls and the biographer of John Keble the divine, he was by no means a reactionary. His instincts were conciliatory, and he had already made many enemies at home by publicly announcing his view that Dominion status was the natural end of Indian constitutional progress (though privately he had added, for he was not a strong man, that he thought it ‘wholly improbable whether now or in the near future’). He was not at ease with the arrests, baton charges, declarations of martial law, by which the British responded to the Salt March rising, and in fact felt a strong fellow-feeling for Gandhi as a colleague in metaphysics. He had met the Mahatma several times, and felt he understood him. After all, he said, when people remarked upon Gandhi’s infuriating ways, ‘some people found Our Lord very tiresome.’

In January 1931, accordingly, Irwin decided to release Gandhi from his purposeless imprisonment, and invited him to come to Delhi to negotiate a settlement of India’s problems. This was drastic action indeed, and the consequent meetings between the Viceroy and the Revolutionary were to become legendary and notorious. It happened that in 1929 Lord lrwin had moved into the immense new palace that had been completed for the Viceroys at
New Delhi—a stone epitome of British authority in India. Here it was, in the most magnificent of all the imperial palaces, that the two men met, the Viceroy aristocratically at ease in that stateliest of homes, the Mahatma, fresh out of prison, barefoot, with his staff and
dhoti
. Gandhi had first suggested the meetings, asking to see Irwin ‘not as a Viceroy, but as a man’, and it was as equals, almost as comrades, that the incongruous principals met. The spectacle enthralled the world. Foreign correspondents rushed to Delhi, and wondering crowds watched through the wrought-iron gates on the afternoon of February 17, 1931, as the Mahatma, huddled in a shawl against the winter chill, clambered up the monumental steps of the palace and disappeared inside. This was not an Imperial Power summoning its subjects for instruction: this was an exchange between sovereignties.

They met eight times, talking in Irwin’s chintzy and comfortable study in the west wing of the palace. Gandhi’s small figure, padding along the interminable corridors, became almost a familiar of the house, and innumerable anecdotes of his relationship with the Viceroy went the Delhi rounds. They laughed a good deal, it seemed. They exchanged badinage sometimes. Gandhi was quite ready to be amused at himself, and when they toasted each other in non-alcoholic liquors, and Gandhi chose water, lemon and a pinch of salt, Irwin wryly regretted that it must be
excise
salt. Once they talked late into the night, and then Gandhi, wrapping his shawl around his shoulders and grasping his willow staff, set off down the long viceregal drive to walk the five miles home to the house where he was staying. ‘Goodnight, Mr Gandhi,’ called the tired Viceroy into the night, ‘goodnight, and my prayers go with you!’

The agreement they reached meant little. For the moment it ended the disturbances, but it displeased Indians by its moderation, and British conservatives by its concessions. Though Gandhi said the talks had been conducted ‘with much sweetness’, the Viceroy, looking back on their meetings in later life, admitted that the Mahatma was ‘not a very practical person to deal with’. The meeting represented something altogether new, nevertheless, in the old dialogue between Britons and Indians. From the Indian point of view it was a significant advance, and Gandhi and Irwin appeared
together in innumerable cartoons and posters, and even gave their names jointly to a match factory. To old-school imperialists it was a surrender—‘taking tea with treason’. No longer did the Raj decree, it seemed: it bargained over non-alcoholic refreshments in the Viceroy’s study. Winston Churchill, a seer among imperialists, instantly recognized the truth of it. He was revolted, he said in a famous Parliamentary anathema, by ‘the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now turned seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy’s palace … to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor’.
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By his own lights he was right to be sickened, for he had truly seen in Irwin’s hospitality the pattern of the imperial end. It was a glimpse of the inevitable. As Nehru later wrote, ‘the best of individuals seem to me to play a relatively unimportant role when vast elemental forces are to play against each other’: no splendour of palace, no hauteur of satrap, neither coercion nor conciliation, could now stay the decline of Empire.
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Later in the year Gandhi went to England, to a Round Table conference convened by MacDonald’s Labour Government. The conference did not achieve much. Gandhi proved particularly difficult, irritating the Indian Muslim delegates as much as he did the British, and the British went ahead with their own ponderous constitutional plans for India. The Mahatma, though, made a profound impression upon the kindly British public, who never forgot him. The publicity was enormous. One day he was toothlessly smiling as the women of a Lancashire textile factory gave him
three cheers in their flowered pinafores. Next day he was bartering quips with London street-urchins—‘Hey, Gandhi, where’s your trousers?’—and boldly drinking cider at a luncheon meeting of the London Vegetarian Society. He exchanged ideas with Charlie Chaplin and Bernard Shaw, and was given two woolly dogs and three pink candles by a group of children on his birthday, October 2.
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Nearly everyone was delighted by him, but Churchill refused to see him, and a group of Oxford dons found his dialectic unpersuasive—‘now I understand’, exclaimed one exasperated scholar, ‘why they made Socrates drink the hemlock.’