Indian Summer Page 3
Within weeks, the British government sent its troops to the Company’s aid. The British comeback would prove to be as brutal as it was predictable. Whole villages were burnt, men lynched and shot, and women raped. The streets of Delhi were stormed and lay filled with the bloated and stinking corpses of sepoys, provoking an outbreak of cholera which killed many of the remaining inhabitants. Holy idols were smashed as the plunderers searched for hidden jewels. Muslim rebel leaders were sewn into pigskins, and force-fed pork; Hindus were doused with cows’ blood. Other instigators were strapped to the muzzles of cannon, and blown to pieces.20 Bahadur Shah II ran away, and hid in the tomb of Akbar’s father, Humayun – a mausoleum to the south of Delhi that stood as a monument to prouder Mughal days. The British found him, carried him off, and confined him to a house in Delhi; there he was kept to be gawped at by any European who cared to inspect him.21 One family had a particularly lucky escape. Police Constable Gangadhar Nehru was fleeing Delhi across the Jumna River with his wife, Indrani, and their four children. The family was from Kashmir, with the typically pale skins and hazel eyes of that region’s people – so pale that some British soldiers mistook one of the daughters for an English girl, and accused Gangadhar of kidnapping her. Only his son’s proficiency in English, and the testimony of a passerby, saved the family.22 Four years later, Indrani would give birth to another son, Motilal Nehru, who would in his turn father the first prime minister of independent India.
And so, in 1858, the relationship between Britain and India moved into its most intense phase: the raj.23 On 2 August, the Government of India Act transferred all the East India Company’s rights to the British Crown – which made it clear that the status quo would remain. Across great expanses of India, the maharajas, rajas and nawabs would be left in charge, with only a British Resident present in their capitals to keep an eye on things. The East India Company had long reasoned that ruling would be far easier through existing structures than through new creations. The landowners and princes propped up by the British enjoyed almost unlimited power, and consequently felt no need to challenge the British raj. In 1858, Queen Victoria proclaimed: ‘We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligation of duties which bind us to all our other subjects. In their prosperity will be our strength; in their contentment our security; and in their gratitude our best reward.’24
In response to this spirit of cooperation, India became the favourite investment opportunity of European financiers. Industry boomed, with the production and processing of tea, coffee, cotton, jute and indigo. New roads and railways criss-crossed the plains, and wove in and out of the hills. The first steamships began to arrive at Bombay. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, it was possible to get from Europe to India in just three weeks – half the time it had taken aboard the old sailing boats. Young Britons would often serve a tour of duty in India, either on military or civil service. It was easy for these fellows to get used to the luxuries to which a white skin and the low cost of living entitled them. Attitudes hardened, rather than liberalized, as the Empire went on: Indians were commonly referred to as ‘natives’ in the eighteenth century, ‘coolies’ by the end of the nineteenth, and ‘niggers’ by the beginning of the twentieth. Eventually, the Britons would return to sleepy cottages in the Home Counties, bringing back rugs, jewels and a taste for curried food, along with a dreamy nostalgia for their days as lords of a tropical paradise. The enthusiasm caught on at the highest level. Queen Victoria herself, the first and last Empress Regnant of India, was deeply interested in Indian culture and even learnt to speak Hindustani. She was tutored by her most trusted attendant, Abdul Karim, to whom she developed an attachment that verged on the romantic. Though she never made it to India herself, she sent her son, the future Edward VII, to meet the princes and shoot tigers in 1875. He was accompanied by a young aide-de-camp, Prince Louis of Battenberg.25
By the late nineteenth century, the cream of Indian society began to enjoy its British connections. Fashionable Indians went to Oxford or Cambridge for their education, and London for their tailoring: they read voraciously the classics of English literature, and often spoke English as their first language. New generations were growing up with notions of equality, democracy, citizenship, blind justice and fair play, only to discover that none of these rights actually applied to them. Indians were all but prevented from joining the administration of their own country by the deliberately obstructive entry procedure for the Indian Civil Service. Certain clubs, public places and even streets were designated ‘Europeans only’.
The Indian upper classes found it hard to reconcile their proud Anglophiliac upbringings with the reality of their exclusion. At Eton, Harrow and Winchester, they identified themselves with the gilded youth of a glorious empire. Only in adulthood did they discover that their race relegated them to the second rank. ‘The fact that the British Government should have imposed this arrangement upon us was not surprising; but what does seem surprising is that we, or most of us, accepted it as the natural and inevitable ordering of our lives and destiny’, wrote one of those Harrow-educated sons of India, many years later. ‘Greater than any victory of arms or diplomacy was this psychological triumph of the British in India.’26
Those words would be written by Gangadhar Nehru’s grandson, Jawaharlal Nehru. But in 1877, Britain was still ascending towards the peak of its global influence. Exactly 300 years after a sorcerer had suggested the idea to another Queen of England, Victoria assumed the imperial throne in absentia during a splendid durbar in Delhi, her crown resting on a gilded cushion. As the massed ranks of the Indian Army cheered their new Empress, one of the most terrible famines of all history was underway in the south. Five million would waste and die, while the Viceroy and his government clucked about maintaining ‘strict regard for the severest economy’ and refused to undertake any further ‘disastrous expenditure’.27 The mechanisms of Empire had primed India for revolution. The only surprise would be just how long it would take.
CHAPTER 2
MOHAN AND JAWAHAR
ON 2 OCTOBER 1869, A SON WAS BORN INTO A MIDDLE-CLASS family in Gujarat, a collection of princely states under British authority on the western coast of India. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had an ordinary childhood, culminating, as ordinary childhoods often do, in a teenage rebellion. This revealed a boy whose desire to experiment was usually halted by an immobilizing timidity in the actual act of defiance. He tried smoking, and stole gold from his family to finance it; but this upset him morally, and so he stopped. Though from a strictly vegetarian family, he tried eating meat; but this upset him physically, and then morally as well, and then he dreamt of a live goat trapped in his stomach, bleating, so he stopped that too. Once he was egged on to visit a prostitute, but stood in the brothel having a crisis of confidence until the woman shouted at him to go away. On another occasion, he and a cousin ventured into the jungle to kill themselves by overdosing on datura, the narcotic seeds of the thorn apple – but, once they found the plant, they lost their nerve.1
This boy’s family was reasonably well off and of a middling but respectable caste. Hindu society had been divided for over 1700 years into four main castes, reflecting second-century social groups: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants), and Sudras (farmers). Within each of these were hundreds of minute subdivisions, and below them a mass of outcastes, or ‘untouchables’ – those unfortunates who, condemned by the bad karma of previous incarnations, were destined to spend their lives sweeping, begging, scrubbing latrines and cleaning up corpses. The Gandhi family were Vaishyas, and within that were of the Bania subdivision. Banias were notorious for being hard-bargaining salesmen, a trait which young Mohan evidently inherited, and would one day apply to spiritual and political ends with unprecedented effect.
Mohan’s rebellion was perhaps more unusual because the supposed cure for youthful misbehaviour had already been administered. Karamchand and Putliba Gandhi had already married their thirteen-year
-old son to a girl from a staunchly religious family. The girl who had been chosen, Kasturbai Makanji (known according to local tradition as Kasturba later in life, when she became matriarch of the household) was also just thirteen.2
During daylight hours, etiquette decreed that Mohan and Kasturbai should ignore each other completely. Even an affectionate word between husband and wife was considered taboo. As darkness fell, they were left to their own devices – though neither had much idea what those should be. Mohan went to the bazaar to buy pamphlets, hoping to learn about his conjugal rights and duties. He was taken with the concept of fidelity, and decided it should be his task to extract this from little Kasturbai. He told her that she could no longer leave the house without his consent.
But, despite her youth, Kasturbai had already mastered the most effective technique available to women who live in extremely restrictive societies: that of passive resistance. She was a devout Hindu from a very traditional background, and would not openly disobey her husband. Instead, she found a loophole.
Mohan’s mother asked Kasturbai to accompany her to the temple every day. Because this request was made in the daytime, when the young spouses were not supposed to communicate, Kasturbai was unable to ask Mohan’s permission. To disobey the command of the matriarch, on the other hand, would have been a terrible sin. So Kasturbai went with Putliba to the temple, and returned to have her first fight with her husband, which she won by the sheer power of logic. Mohan was forced to remove the restrictions he had placed on Kasturbai.3
This small incident would hardly be worthy of note, except for the fact that it formed the basis for Gandhi’s entire political method. In later years, when he found that he was at a disadvantage being an Indian in a white world, he would remember and develop the tactic of a woman in a man’s world. All Gandhi’s most famous tactics – passive resistance, civil disobedience, logical argument, non-violence in the face of violence, emotional blackmail – had came from Kasturbai’s influence. He freely admitted this: ‘I learned the lesson of non-violence from my wife.’4
Though his father had been Prime Minister of the princely state of Porbandar, young Mohan had not yet found any reason to involve himself in politics. Porbandar was over 800 miles from Bombay, where, in 1885, a Scotsman called Allan Octavian Hume founded the Indian National Congress. Congress enjoyed no legal status, but acted as a forum and a mouthpiece for Indian (as well as progressive British Indian) opinion. It was far from being a revolutionary organization; its foundation was approved by the Viceroy.5 Its modest claims included a greater share of government for educated Indians, along with citizenship and equal rights with other members of the British Empire.
In Gujarat, Mohan and Kasturbai went through adolescence, and Kasturbai became pregnant for the first time. But their lives were to be disrupted by the illness of Mohan’s father, Karamchand, who was consigned to his bed with a fistula in 1885. The son took on the duty of nurse. ‘Every night whilst my hands were busy massaging my father’s legs, my mind was hovering about the bedroom,’ he admitted. It was an ill-fated juxtaposition. One night, Mohan’s uncle offered to massage Karamchand. Eagerly accepting, Mohan went to Kasturbai. Though it was considered a sin against God to have sex with a pregnant woman, Mohan did so; and, just five or six minutes afterwards, received the most horrible shock of his young life. A servant knocked at the door to tell him his father had died.
Mohan rushed to Karamchand’s room, overwhelmed with grief and, more importantly, with guilt. ‘I saw that, if animal passion had not blinded me, I should have been spared the torture of separation from my father during his last moments’, he later wrote. In the boy’s distraught mind, his lust had killed his father. Pleasure was immediately conflated with destruction. In the development of his philosophy and his life, Mohan began to look for salvation in self-denial and discomfort. His father’s death was ‘a blot I have never been able to efface or forget’, he confessed at the age of fifty-six.
As if to confirm Mohan’s sense that he had brought a curse upon himself, Kasturbai gave birth to a weak and ailing infant. ‘I may mention that the poor mite that was born to my wife scarcely breathed for more than three or four days,’ wrote Gandhi. ‘Let all those who are married be warned by my example.’6
In June 1888, the couple had a healthy baby, Harilal. Three months after his son was born, Mohandas Gandhi set sail for London.
Going to London was a brave move for the nineteen-year-old Mohandas. He faced opposition from his mother, who made him swear a solemn vow in front of a Jain monk to abstain from what she correctly imagined were the corrupting influences of London life: eating meat, drinking and whoring. He faced even more daunting opposition from the Bania community. When the elders in Bombay heard that Mohandas was planning to cross the Arabian Sea, they met to discuss the matter – and concluded that, because none of them had ever been to Britain, it must be ‘polluting’ to do so. If Mohandas went, he would be rejected by his caste, and would forever rank among the outcaste sweepers and scavengers.7 Mohandas ignored these dire pronouncements, and got on the next boat. He would not see his wife and child again for three years.
In 1888, London was one of the greatest and richest cities on earth. Mohandas was not impressed, finding it expensive and strange, with bland food and incomprehensible customs. ‘At night the tears would stream down my cheeks, and home memories of all sorts made sleep out of the question’, he wrote.8 He had an interest in medicine but, mindful of his family’s opposition to the dissection of dead bodies, instead enrolled at the Inner Temple to study law.9 In London, Mohandas dressed in a very different garb from the one in which he would eventually find fame. He was seen in Piccadilly wearing a pin-striped morning suit, stiff Gladstonian collar, silk topper and spats over his patent shoes, as well as what a fellow Indian student remembered as being ‘a rather flashy tie’.10 But this fashionable rig represented a meticulous nature, not profligacy. Adrift in the decadent luxury of London, Mohandas tended towards ever more stringent economies. He lodged in one room in Baron’s Court. He walked everywhere. He stopped ordering spices from India, and subsisted on a diet of porridge, cocoa and plain boiled spinach. He became popular: with one bottle of wine between each four students at Inner Temple dinners, everyone wanted to sit beside the teetotaller from Gujarat.11
One day he stumbled across one of Victorian London’s few meat-free restaurants, the Centre in Farringdon Road, and joined the Vegetarian Society of England.12 Thanks to his new friends in the Society, he started reading Christian writers, such as Leo Tolstoy and John Ruskin, who would rank among his strongest influences. They also induced him to read the Bhagavad Gita for the first time.13 From this point he began to develop his personal philosophy. It was rooted in Hindu scripture, but incorporated many of the anti-materialistic and abstinent values of early Christianity and Jainism. He considered it to be applicable to all faiths. Central to his message was a motto: ‘God is truth’.14
Mohandas returned to India in 1891. He went through a purification ceremony to re-enter his caste, and began to practise law in Bombay. The results were lacklustre. When, in 1893, a businessman offered him a job in South Africa for three years, he decided it was best to take this opportunity, and left his family again.
The trip to South Africa was to change the course of his life. For the first time, Gandhi would experience the full force of colonial racism. Only a week after his arrival, he was physically thrown from a train at Maritzburg. Having bought a first-class ticket, he had presumed it was his right to sit in the first-class compartment. The conductor thought otherwise, and had him ejected by a policeman. He proceeded by stagecoach, and was beaten up by the coach-leader because he had asked to sit inside the coach, rather than on a dirty piece of sackcloth on the footboard. On his eventual arrival in Johannesburg, the Grand National Hotel refused to let the well-dressed Indian barrister have a room.15
Mohandas Gandhi had arrived in what was, for an Indian, one of the most hostile territories on earth. The 150
,000 Indians in South Africa were described in the statute books as ‘semi-barbarous Asiatics, or persons belonging to the uncivilised races of Asia’, and were subject to an array of punitive restrictions designed to make their lives as difficult and unprofitable as possible.16 Gandhi launched a campaign that demanded equal rights for Indians in South Africa as citizens of the British Empire. On 22 May 1894, he inaugurated the Natal Indian Congress – modelled on the Indian National Congress, of which he had read but never yet attended. The suspicion of the authorities was immediately aroused. Two years later, when he brought his wife and children to South Africa, it was made obvious that the Gandhis were not welcome. The port supervisors refused to let their ship dock for twenty-three days. When they disembarked, Gandhi was attacked by a mob of white men, who threw stones, bricks and eggs at him, before setting on him with punches and kicks. He was saved by the wife of the police superintendent, who bravely interposed herself, armed only with a parasol. Later that day, a lynch mob surrounded the house where the Gandhi family was hiding.
For once in his life, Gandhi was persuaded not to confront his enemies, on the grounds that this would put his family and friends in even more danger. Instead he disguised himself as a policeman, with a tin pan wrapped under his turban for defence, and thus attired made it to the local police station.17 He had been so badly beaten after getting off the ship that it was two days before he could make a statement, but he refused to bring charges against his attackers.18 This disinclination to see punishment enacted distinguished Gandhi from other political agitators. Here was something new – and it would attract murmurs of surprise, and even admiration, in the international press.