The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (The Robert Payne Library) Read online

  Robert Payne was born in Cornwall, England on December 4, 1911. He was educated at St. Paul’s School in London, at the Universities of Liverpool, Capetown in South Africa, and at the Sorbonne.

  During his lifetime he had over 100 books published on a wide range of subjects but he was known chiefly for his biographies of Gandhi, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Schweitzer, Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-shek, Winston Churchill. Book after book was praised in the United States, in England and in Europe. The critic Orville Prescott once remarked in The New York Times: “The important things about Robert Payne are his sensitive, astute intelligence, his vast erudition, and his magic power over words”.

  In 1946, when Robert Payne first visited India he interviewed Nehru and Jinnah. Later, in the 60’s, when he started work on this book he traveled to India several times to gather research material and to interview people who knew Gandhi well — J.B. Kripalani, Jayaprakash Narayan, Dr. Sushila Nayyar, R.R. Diwakar, Govindas Ramachandran among others.

  Robert Payne died in 1983. In the Obituary in The Times (London) it was said of him: “Prolific writer of high standard”.

  The Life and

  Death of

  MAHATMA

  GANDHI

  By Robert Payne

  Brick Tower Press

  Habent Sua Fata Libelli

  Copyright © 1969 by Robert Payne

  Copyright © 1997 by Sheila Lalwani Payne

  First published 1969 by

  E.P. Dutton Co., New York

  Brick Tower Press

  1230 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10128

  www.BrickTowerPress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without first obtaining written permission of the copyright owner.

  The author and publishers wish to acknowledge with gratitude permission granted by the Navajivan Trust to reprint in this book copyright material from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.

  Photographic Credits

  First photo section (following page 192): Pages 4, 6, 7, 10, Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya. Page 16, Hindustan Times. Page 5, Indian Opinion, Page 1, 3, 11, 12, Information Service of India, New York. Page 9: Photo Service Company, New Delhi. Page 2, Publications Division, Government of India. Page 13, United World Photos.

  Second Photo section (following page 416): Pages 4, 5, 7, 12, Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya. Page 8-9, Hindustan Standard. Page 13, Indian News. Page 1, 2, 11, 14, Information Service of India, New York. Page 16, Press Information Bureau, New Delhi. Page 6, Publications Division, Government of India. Page 3, The Times of India. Pages 10, 15 (upper right) Wide World Photos.

  Maps by Walter Hortens.

  For Patricia

  Contents

  Introduction

  13

  The Son of the Prime Minister

  17

  The White City

  19

  An Enchanted Childhood

  25

  Schoolboy

  31

  Growing Pains

  43

  The Young Lawyer

  59

  The London Years

  61

  The English Gentleman

  69

  Rajchandra

  79

  South African Adventure

  87

  An Agent of the Company

  89

  The First Clashes

  105

  The End of an Era

  115

  The Young Revolutionary

  129

  An Interlude in India

  131

  Phoenix

  140

  Sergeant Major Gandhi

  153

  A Deputation to London

  161

  The First Satyagraha Campaign

  170

  The Defiant Prisoner

  182

  A Passage to London

  197

  The Terrorists

  199

  A Confession of Faith

  210

  Hind Swaraj

  220

  The Triumph of the Will

  227

  Tolstoy Farm

  229

  The Voice from the Mountaintop

  236

  The Revolt of Harilal

  241

  The Coming of Gokhale

  247

  The Armies on the March

  254

  The War Comes

  274

  The Jungles and the Temples

  285

  An Apprentice to India

  287

  A Speech in Benares

  295

  The Fields of Indigo

  302

  Sabarmati

  320

  The Satanic Kingdom

  335

  Amritsar

  337

  The Storm Breaks

  346

  The Great Trial

  361

  The Silent Years

  369

  The Attack Renewed

  387

  The Salt March

  389

  Conversation with a Viceroy

  399

  Round Table Conference

  407

  A Meeting with Romain Rolland

  417

  The Years of the Locust

  429

  A Fast Unto Death

  431

  The Wounded Lion

  448

  A Meeting with Margaret Sanger

  460

  The Return of Harilal

  468

  Satyagraha

  477

  The Fire and the Fury

  483

  A Letter to Hitler

  485

  The Death of Kasturbhai

  497

  On the Eve

  508

  Journey into Terror

  517

  The Roads of Noakhali

  519

  A House in Calcutta

  531

  Death to Gandhi!

  547

  The Last Fast

  557

  A Slab of Guncotton

  567

  Triumph and Defeat

  581

  A Walk in the Garden

  583

  The Burning

  592

  The Inheritance

  600

  The Murderers

  609

  The Hatching of the Plot

  611

  The Murder

  624

  The Verdict of the Court

  635

  Appendixes

  649

  Genealogical Tree of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

  651

  Glossary

  652

  Selected Bibliography

  654

  Chapter Notes

  661

  Chronological Table

  679

  Acknowledgments

  685

  Index

  687

  Maps

  India Before Partition

  46-47

  South Africa Before 1914

  94-95

  Introduction

  IN THE FOLLOWING pages I have sought to draw a rounded portrait of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the son of a high official in an obscure princely court, who received from the poet Rabindranath Tagore the title of Mahatma. I especially wanted to see him striding vigorously along the dusty roads of South Africa and India,
and to be close enough to him, when he was among his companions or waging war against his enemies, to watch the changing expression of his eyes and the movement of his thought. I wanted to see him in those unguarded moments when men reveal most about themselves. There was much to be said for stripping away the legends that have accumulated around him and seeing him plain.

  He was a man who lived in public throughout the greater part of his life, eating, sleeping, bathing, thinking, writing and dreaming in full view of everyone who stayed in his ashram or accompanied him on his journeys, but such men have their own ways of concealing themselves. He wore many public masks and many private ones, and sometimes, like all men, he mislaid the masks and showed himself naked. Also, he was sometimes mischievous, and what seemed to be a mask was often his own face smiling with amusement because he had outwitted the observer.

  Sarojini Naidu, that glorious mountain of a woman, used to call him “our Mickey Mouse,” and it would be a mistake to underestimate that quality in him. Others proclaimed him to be a Messiah, half-brother to Buddha or Christ, possessing divine attributes, wholly selfless and devoting his life to the good of humanity. Those who believed this would kneel before him and touch his feet, or wait for days at a railroad station in the hope of catching a glimpse of him as his train passed in the night. The truth, of course, is that he was variable, and was sometimes Mickey Mouse, sometimes a Messiah speaking with tongues of flame. He acted many roles, and never wearied of his performances. Since he played these changing roles so well, he was sometimes accused of being a virtuoso performer with extraordinary powers of improvisation. In fact, he was the author of the play, the stage manager and most of the players.

  In our own age there have been two authentic political geniuses, Lenin and Gandhi. They left their stamp on history in such a way that it is likely that they will be remembered a thousand years from now, when all the other captains have been forgotten. They were both men who created revolutions single-handed, but while one was determined upon violent revolution, the other, employing peaceful weapons, was determined upon creation. One took vengeance on the human race, the other loved it. Gandhi showed that non-violent resistance was at least as powerful as guns; and he opened the way for more enduring conquests. Through him men have learned that no government, even the most tyrannical, is immune from non-violent resistance in the hands of determined and fearless men. No power on earth can resist the aroused consciences of men once they are disciplined and prepared to die for their beliefs. Gandhi was prepared to die: this was his most powerful weapon.

  All his life he threw himself into battle with the vigor of a young athlete. Ironically, the man who celebrated non-violence and first employed it on a nationwide scale, possessed a heroic temper and enjoyed nothing more than being in the midst of battle. “I love storms,” he said once, and he was never comfortable unless the lightning was playing and the thunder was roaring in his ears. The storms gathered at the end of his life, and he saw most of his dreams shattered. A few months before his death he watched India being tom apart into two bleeding fragments, and he may have known that his fight for Hindu-Muslim unity was doomed to failure. The agony of his last days was terrible to watch: to the very end he struggled against the partition of his country. Yet he had set the wheel in motion, and his triumphs were at least as memorable as his failures. He brought freedom and independence to India and he changed men’s minds.

  Most of the men who have profoundly affected history have possessed one-track minds: they have one aim, and spend their energies in obtaining it. Gandhi’s aims were various. His private aim was to see God face to face; he would capture Heaven by storm. His public aim was to topple the British Raj and to bring about the freedom and independence of India, and at the same time he wanted to bring about a transformation of Indian society to make her more worthy of her freedom. In his eyes it was not enough to be a revolutionary. He must be a theologian, a devoted follower of Krishna, a lawgiver, student of village life, sanitary engineer, authority on dietetics, doctor, defender of the untouchables, plenipotentiary, peacemaker, salt-gatherer. At the height of his fame and influence he enjoyed cleaning out latrines. When he was very old, he wandered almost alone into territory where men were murdering one another, offering himself as a simple sacrifice. But simplicity escaped him, and when he was shot down, he was no longer a man but a legend so much larger than life that it was as though a whole army or a whole nation had perished.

  Because he was so various and became so legendary, I have studied his early years at considerable length. So there is a good deal here about his boyhood and upbringing at Porbandar and Rajkot, and his first hard-fought campaigns in South Africa which prepared him for his campaigns in India. I have also discussed the circumstances of the assassination at length, and I have shown that this too was not quite so simple as it seemed to be. I have made no attempt to conceal the dark side of his nature, the thin black threads winding among the many-colored ribbons of his life. He was a bad father, a tyrant to his followers, and rarely made any effort to conceal the authoritarian streak he had inherited from his ancestors. He was fascinated by sex to the point of obsession, and long after he had taken a formal vow of chastity he would share his bed with women, saying that all animal passion had died in him and therefore he was behaving with perfect purity. Sometimes he believed in his own mahatmaship, and this was perhaps the most dangerous of all his beliefs. From his mother he inherited a profoundly religious temper, and his search for God was often at war with his search for earthly power and dominion. The contraries were mixed up in him. Though he proclaimed his humility, he was intolerant of criticism, and was more dictatorial and more self-indulgent than he knew. Though he was humble, he was very proud. He was the great innovator, but there was never a time when he was not enmeshed in tradition.

  But these strange and sometimes baffling contradictions lying within the dark undertow of his mind scarcely affect his great accomplishments, though they sometimes explain them. This stem, harsh, smiling, gentle man was even more complex than he suspected; and out of these complexities he built a fire that will never go out.

  In the life and death of Mahatma Gandhi we see re-enacted in our own time the supreme drama of humanity: that a prophet should arise and sacrifice himself so that others may live. He had a mind of great originality and daring, and perhaps never before on so grand a scale has any man succeeded in shaping the course of history while using only the weapons of peace.

  The Son of the Prime Minister

  I roamed about the villages in a bullock cart.

  As I was the son of a dewan,

  people fed me on the way with juwar roti

  and curds and gave me eight anna pieces.

  The White City

  THERE WAS a glory about the place. A seaman sailing across the Arabian Sea toward the coast of India would see a flash of white in the sky long before he could make out the small city; and he would know he was coming to Porbandar on the Kathiawar peninsula. As he came closer he would see the white walls rising, and beyond the plains lay the purple mountains. The city walls were twenty feet thick, designed to keep out the Arab freebooters of an earlier age. Walls and roofs were built of a wonderfully rich cream-colored limestone from the neighboring quarries, and the stone was soft and easily worked, though it hardened in time to the texture and beauty of marble. The sea swept around the city on three sides and sometimes completely surrounded it, so that it became necessary to build a white bridge to the plains. They called it “the white city.”

  Here on October 2,1869, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born, the third son of Karamchand Gandhi, the dewan or prime minister of the small princely state of Porbandar. According to the Hindu calendar he was born on the twelfth day of the dark half of the month Bhadarva. It was not an especially auspicious day, and he could expect to suffer great tribulations. The birth took place in a massively-built house three stories high, which had belonged to the Gandhi family for five generations. The house, though much alt
ered, survives. Though it looks more like a small fortress than an ordinary dwelling-house, the interior with its honeycomb of small dark rooms is disappointing; there are rooms which are scarcely larger than cupboards, oppressively hot in summer, and so dark that no sunlight ever penetrates them. Only the top story, built of wood, was light and airy, open to the winds; and from these rooms one could look out on the white roofs of the city and the fishing boats bobbing in the harbor. Next door was a temple dedicated to the god Krishna, and not far away was the palace of the ruling prince, called the Rana, carved out of the same marble-white stone.

  Karamchand Gandhi was a small, stocky, broad-shouldered, immensely dignified man with a quiet manner and a gift for diplomacy. He could be abrupt with his children, who always treated him with the deference due not only to a father but to the virtual ruler of the principality. He had married four times. His first two wives died, each leaving him a daughter, and when the third wife was suffering from an incurable disease he received her permission to take a fourth wife. He was then about forty, and Putlibai was about thirteen. She was a small quiet woman, remembered for her enchanting smile and rather prominent teeth. She belonged to the little-known Pranami sect, which combined elements of Mohammedanism and Hinduism, and was more concerned to establish an intimate relationship with God than to worship images or follow complex rituals. There was a Pranami temple in Porbandar, remarkable for its simplicity and the absence of images; instead, there were copies of the Koran and the Puranas, with the priests going from one sacred book, and one religion, to the other, as though it scarcely mattered what books were read so long as God was worshiped. The Pranami faith deeply influenced the young Gandhi; it taught charity, chastity, peaceful association between the followers of all religions, and a temperate life lived modestly. The use of drugs, tobacco, meat and wine was strictly prohibited. Consciously or unconsciously, Gandhi grew up with the beliefs of that strange sect born in the early days of the eighteenth century.