The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A shy, briefless lawyer who could not ask a single question in a small-causes court turned his own body into a political instrument, going to jail, walking into mobs and starving himself in public, and so moved an empire and a subcontinent without ever commanding a soldier; the same absolute will that made him fearless in public made him a domineering husband and father, and let him coerce opponents, including the leader of the "untouchables", with the threat of his own death.
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Critical acts
- 1
Staying to fight: Pietermaritzburg and the Natal Indian Congress (1893-94)
In the waiting room he reasoned that "it would be cowardice to run back to India without fulfilling my obligation. The hardship... was superficial, — only a symptom of the deep disease of colour prejudice. I should try, if possible, to root out the disease and suffer hardships in the process." He went on to Pretoria.
- 2
Going to jail: the Transvaal satyagraha and the Smuts settlement (1906-14)
At the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg on 11 September 1906 the Indians resolved to defy the law and go to jail, with Gandhi saying "the responsibility for advising them to go to prison was his."
- 3
Champaran: refusing the order to leave (1917)
He wrote on the notice that he "did not propose to comply with it... till my inquiry was finished," stayed up all night writing instructions in case he was jailed, and in court pleaded guilty: "I have disregarded the order served upon me not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience."
- 4
Calling off non-cooperation after Chauri Chaura (1922)
He asked Congress workers at Bardoli whether to suspend the campaign; "all but three said the movement should go on," since retreat would disgrace the country. He concluded that even the "best workers" had "failed to understand the message of non-violence," and had the Working Committee suspend civil disobedience, advise peasants to pay their revenue, and…
- 5
The Salt March (1930)
Gandhi first warned the viceroy by letter, delivered by a young English Quaker, that unless the "evils" were dealt with he would "disregard the provisions of the salt laws." Irwin replied in two sentences through his secretary.
- 6
The last fasts: Calcutta and Delhi (1947-48)
He went out to the mob, then began an indefinite fast that would "end only if and when sanity returns to Calcutta." When Rajagopalachari warned that his death would make "the conflagration... worse," he answered: "At least I won't be there to witness it. I shall have done my bit. More is not given a man to do."
Maxims
Let the enemy trap himself in his own net
At Champaran Gandhi met an order to leave with a written refusal, a guilty plea and scrupulous courtesy, and "according to the law I was to be on my trial, but truly speaking Government was to be on its trial."
Suffer the hardship; never inflict it
His instruction to pickets in 1907, "A watchman's duty is to watch, not to assault," was the whole doctrine in one line. The strikers John Dube watched in 1913, who "refuse[d] to move despite being beaten by the police," converted a Zulu reformer who had…
Read your own mistakes through a convex lens
He called his 1919 error "Himalayan" in public and never regretted it, because only by magnifying one's own faults and shrinking others' can one reach "a just relative estimate."
Walk in by daylight, or they will say you hid
Told to land at Durban after dark, he came ashore at five in the afternoon so that his enemies could not say he was "funking it," and took the beating. See "The Mob at Durban."
Stop the march the moment your own side kills
After Chauri Chaura, against nearly every worker he had, he halted a national movement at its peak: "to start civil disobedience in an atmosphere of incivility is like putting one's hand in a snake-pit." See Act 4.
Part IThe Story
The Case He Could Not Argue
The first case of Mohandas Gandhi's legal career was worth thirty rupees. It was a "small cause" in Bombay, brought by one Mamibai, and nobody expected it to last a day. Gandhi, back from London with a barrister's qualification and no practice, appeared for the defendant and rose to cross-examine the plaintiff's witnesses.
"I stood up, but my heart sank into my boots. My head was reeling and I felt as though the whole court was doing likewise. I could think of no question to ask. The judge must have laughed and the vakils no doubt enjoyed the spectacle. But I was past seeing anything."
He sat down, told the agent he could not conduct the case, and handed back the fee. Another lawyer took it on for fifty-one rupees and found it "child's play."
It was not a one-off. At his school farewell he "could scarcely stammer" a few written words of thanks. In London, at a vegetarian dinner, he got no further than his first sentence and sat down "abruptly"; at Ventnor "my vision became blurred and I trembled," and a friend read his speech for him. In Bombay in 1896 he was still "too nervous to speak" and had his address read by someone else.
What he did with the weakness is the point. He did not force himself into oratory. He wrote everything down, preferred the brief, exact statement to the speech, and came to treat silence as "part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth." "My hesitancy in speech which was once an annoyance is now a pleasure," he wrote. "Its greatest benefit has been that it has taught me the economy of words... My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler." When he finally stood up to a judge with an empire watching — at Champaran in 1917, at his own trial in 1922 — it was to read a short prepared statement pleading guilty.
That briefless lawyer turned his own body into a political instrument. He went to jail, walked into mobs and starved himself in public, and so moved an empire and a subcontinent without ever commanding a soldier. The same absolute will that made him fearless in public made him a domineering husband and father, and let him coerce opponents — including the leader of the "untouchables" — with the threat of his own death. He is one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness, and he insisted, more than any of them, that his failures be on the record too.
By the Numbers
The Experiments
30 rupeesValue of the first case he could not argue
~7,000Peasant testimonies collected at Champaran in 1917
23Policemen killed at Chauri Chaura, after which he halted a national movement
78Marchers chosen to walk with him to the sea in 1930
~30,000Followers in jail by January 1931, by Time's count
148Reserved seats won by the Poona Pact, against the Award's 71
2 lakhDelhi citizens who signed a peace pledge to end his last fast
A Vow Is a Vow
He was born in 1869. At fifteen he stole, and wrote out a confession for his dying father, asking for punishment, because "there could not be a cleansing without a clean confession." His autobiography also records, against himself, his teenage "carnal lust" at his father's deathbed.
The shy young man was immovable on anything he had promised. In London, pressed to eat meat, he said: "I cannot argue about it. I am sure I cannot meet you in argument. But please give me up as foolish or obstinate... A vow is a vow. It cannot be broken." When an English doctor later told him, "You must either take beef-tea or die!", he answered that "it could not be God's will that I should break the oath that I made on my mother's knee."
He also learned in London a habit that would outlast every other: he "kept account of every farthing I spent," striking a balance every night. Handling "public funds amounting to lakhs" later in life, he credited the habit with the fact that he had never left debts.
A Night at Pietermaritzburg
Gandhi went to South Africa in 1893 because he had failed at the Bar in Bombay and Rajkot. The job was a brief on an accounts case for Dada Abdulla's firm, and he had to buy a book on book-keeping to understand it.
A week after landing he was put off a first-class carriage at Pietermaritzburg for being a "coloured" man. He spent a freezing night in the waiting room, not daring to ask for his overcoat "lest I might be insulted again." The local merchants told him such treatment was "nothing unusual." The obvious course, which he considered, was to finish the case and "return to India."
In the waiting room he reasoned that "it would be cowardice to run back to India without fulfilling my obligation. The hardship... was superficial, — only a symptom of the deep disease of colour prejudice. I should try, if possible, to root out the disease and suffer hardships in the process."
He went on to Pretoria and, having told his client from the start that he wanted "to settle the case out of court" because the opponent was a relative, did exactly that. When the case ended in 1894 and the Natal government moved to disenfranchise Indians, he stayed and built a permanent organisation. He named it the Natal Indian Congress, because "it savoured of cowardice to hesitate to adopt the name." It took subscriptions strictly in advance, employed a clerk to dun members, and ran on the rule that "no work was done unless there were funds on hand." "The Natal Indian Congress has never been in debt." When a merchant at Tongaat offered £3 instead of the expected £6, Gandhi's party sat up hungry all night until "at last, when day was already breaking, the host yielded."
"The merchants in the front row paid the bills," writes his biographer Ramachandra Guha, "whereas the barrister at the back did the work." Guha also argues the train incident has been overrated — on the train "Gandhi was the victim of one person's racism, expressed at one time alone" — and notes something the legend leaves out: "Socially or professionally, Gandhi had no dealings with the Africans who constituted the vast majority of the population of Natal." In 1896 he complained that Natal wanted "to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir." He had "pleaded for Indians to be distinguished from Africans, whom he then considered 'uncivilized'." That would change, slowly. A single brief turned into two decades in South Africa.
The Mob at Durban
At the turn of 1897 Gandhi returned to Natal with his wife Kasturba and their children. The white colonists, told by a Reuters summary that he had claimed in India that Indians in Natal were "robbed and assaulted, and treated like beasts," kept his ship in quarantine for weeks and held mass meetings in Durban.
The Attorney-General advised him to come ashore after dark. His friend F. A. Laughton did not like the idea of his "entering the city like a thief in the night," and the press had been saying Gandhi was hiding "in the lowest hold." So the two lawyers landed at five in the afternoon. White boys recognised him, the crowd came back, and Gandhi "became 'the object of kicks and cuffs, while mud and stale fish were thrown at him. One person also produced a riding-whip, and gave him a stroke.'" Jane Alexander, the police superintendent's wife, held the mob off with her parasol. Hidden in a friend's store while the crowd sang "We'll hang old Gandhi on a sour apple tree," he escaped disguised as a police peon, face blackened. "Eye-witnesses state that he bore himself stolidly and pluckily through the trying ordeal."
Then came the test he had set himself. The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, cabled that the assailants should be prosecuted, and Natal's Harry Escombe offered to arrest anyone Gandhi could name. "I do not want to prosecute any one... I do not hold the assailants to blame... The leaders, and, if you will permit me to say so, you are to blame." He had decided before he entered the room, and put it in writing on the spot. Guha singles out "Gandhi's complete lack of bitterness towards the ruling race": set upon by a white mob, "Gandhi chose to remember not his persecutors but the whites who stood by him."
Guha thinks Durban, not the train, was the more important episode — "more revealing of the racial politics of South Africa and of the challenges faced by Mohandas Gandhi himself."
The Chamber Pot
The man who would later wage war on untouchability learned equality by bullying his wife into it, and later told the story against himself.
In their Western-style house in Durban in 1898 there were no drains, so each room had a chamber pot, and Gandhi would not let a sweeper clean them. Kasturba cleaned the clerks' pots, but one clerk was a Christian "born of Panchama parents," an "untouchable" by birth, and to carry his pot "seemed to her to be the limit." Gandhi remembered her "chiding me, her eyes red with anger, and pearl drops streaming down her cheeks, as she descended the ladder, pot in hand."
It was not enough that she obey. "I would have her do it cheerfully. So I said, raising my voice: 'I will not stand this nonsense in my house.'" She shouted back, "Keep your house to yourself and let me go." Then: "I forgot myself, and the spring of compassion dried up in me. I caught her by the hand, dragged the helpless woman to the gate... and proceeded to open it with the intention of pushing her out."
She stopped him with the plain facts of her position: "Where am I to go? I have no parents or relatives here to harbour me. Being your wife, you think, I must put up with your cuffs and kicks? For Heaven's sake behave yourself, and shut the gate." He was ashamed, and shut it. He called himself "a cruelly kind husband. I regarded myself as her teacher."
Three years later, leaving Natal, he put every gift the community had given him — including a fifty-guinea necklace for Kasturba — into a trust, because "service was its own reward." He "somehow succeeded in extorting a consent from her." Her retort — "what right have you to my necklace?" — is the cost that goes with the principle. Guha's verdict on the household is blunt: "Gandhi was the traditional overbearing Hindu patriarch: insensitive to the wishes and desires of his wife; demanding that his children obey his instructions even when they had reached adulthood."
Ruskin on the Train
In 1904 he spent a night on the train to Durban reading Ruskin's Unto This Last, and drew three principles from it: "the good of the individual is contained in the good of all"; "a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's"; and "a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman, is the life worth living." "I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice." Within a week he had bought land for the Phoenix Settlement, a hundred-acre farm near Durban where his newspaper, Indian Opinion, would be printed and where "every one should labour, drawing the same living wage" — "£3... irrespective of colour or nationality."
He admitted the impulsiveness that came with this. He had told a colleague the paper would be profitable without checking the books, a "credulous habit for which my ambition to do more work than I can manage is responsible."
His life became a series of what he called "experiments with truth," for which he claimed "nothing more than does a scientist," who "never claims any finality about his conclusions." Diet, dress, household, celibacy, politics — each change was treated as data.
The Zulu campaign of 1906 convinced him "that a vow far from closing the door to real freedom opened it." "'I believe in effort, I do not want to bind myself with vows' is the mentality of weakness." That year he took the vow of brahmacharya, celibacy, which would become the arena where he tested himself hardest for the rest of his life.
To Jail
In August 1906 the Transvaal introduced an "Asiatic Ordinance" requiring every Indian, "regardless of age or gender," to register afresh with fingerprints and carry the certificate at all times. Gandhi's movement had so far "followed a strictly legalistic route. Letters, petitions, court cases, delegations." Petitions had failed.
At the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg on 11 September 1906, the Indians took a collective public vow to defy the law and go to jail, with Gandhi saying "the responsibility for advising them to go to prison was his." His instruction to the pickets outside the registration office became the whole doctrine in a line: "A watchman's duty is to watch, not to assault... Our whole struggle is based on our submitting ourselves to hardships, not inflicting them on anyone else, be he an Indian or European."
When his turn came he asked the court for the "heaviest penalty" and went to prison in January 1908, placed in the "native" block. He then agreed a compromise with Smuts — voluntary registration in return for repeal — and set off to register first. Pathans who thought he had "backed down too easily" beat him unconscious in the street. While doctors stitched his face "he would not have any chloroform." He registered from his sick-bed and wrote a 4,000-word defence of the deal. After Christian Europeans nursed him through it, he told Indians to "give up its anger against the whites... Mankind is one."
When Smuts did not repeal the Act, Gandhi burned certificates, went back to jail, and sent his own son Harilal across the border to court arrest again and again. He moved the families of the movement to Tolstoy Farm, Kallenbach's farm of more than 1,000 acres, where he taught the children himself on the rule "that the youngsters should not be asked to do what the teachers did not do." In 1913 he sent Kasturba and other women across the Transvaal border to be jailed, and eleven Tamil women brought 2,000 miners out on strike: "the presence of these brave women... acted like electricity." He led more than a thousand striking miners on a march into the Transvaal. By then he had begun to use "the neutral 'Africans' instead of the pejorative 'Kaffirs'," and to imagine a South Africa where all races would be "absolutely free men."
In 1914 the Indians' Relief Bill abolished a hated £3 tax and recognised Indian marriages. Smuts had to force it on his own party. Old comrades complained Gandhi had won "only one-and-a-half of the four points." Gandhi answered that "if they had not fought for the past eight years, no trace would have been left here of Indians as a self-respecting community." Smuts wrote: "the saint has left our shores — I sincerely hope for ever." The two men had fought for seven years and still kept "the old relation of respect."
Champaran
Back in India in 1915, Gandhi was an outsider. His mentor Gokhale told him to spend a year travelling before taking up public work, because at this stage "he probably knew South Africa better than he knew India." He travelled third class and arrived at Madras "like a family of peasants."
He founded the Satyagraha Ashram on vows of "truth, non-violence, celibacy, non-stealing, non-possession and 'control of the palate'," and within two months admitted an "untouchable" family. When the woman, Danibehn, was barred from the well, "Gandhi said in that case he would not use the well either," despite grumbling from his own family. He later adopted her daughter.
In 1917 a tenant named Rajkumar Shukla persuaded him to look into the indigo planters of Champaran in Bihar, who forced peasants to grow indigo under the tinkathia system. The planters told him he was "an outsider," the Commissioner "proceeded to bully me," and the police served him an order to leave the district.
He wrote on the notice that he "did not propose to comply with it... till my inquiry was finished," stayed up all night writing instructions in case he was jailed, and in court pleaded guilty: "I have disregarded the order served upon me not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience." "According to the law I was to be on my trial, but truly speaking Government was to be on its trial." He kept the Congress name out of it — "What we wanted was work and not name, substance and not shadow" — asked editors not to send reporters, and was scrupulously polite to officials. They "saw that I did not want to offend them personally," and so "instead of harassing me they gladly availed themselves of my... co-operation in regulating the crowds." By the end of May he had collected almost 7,000 peasant testimonies.
The case was withdrawn before sentence, and "the country thus had its first direct object lesson in Civil Disobedience." An enquiry committee with Gandhi as a member accepted the peasants' demand on tinkathia "in toto." "In this meeting with the peasants I was face to face with God, Ahimsa and Truth."
The next year, leading a strike of Ahmedabad mill workers, he drove each evening to the house of the mill-owner Ambalal Sarabhai "for tea," because "it was best if they discussed the dispute every day in a spirit of understanding and trust." "It was a pleasure to be pitched against him." When the strikers wavered — one said, "They come and go in their car; they eat sumptuous food, but we are suffering death-agonies" — Gandhi fasted for a public cause for the first time. Within three days the owners accepted arbitration. He later admitted that "my fast was not free from a grave defect... to fast against them would amount to coercion."
A Himalayan Miscalculation
In 1919 Gandhi launched protests against the Rowlatt Acts. They turned violent. He told a public meeting in Nadiad that he had made a "Himalayan miscalculation," and accepted the ridicule: "it is only when one sees one's own mistakes with a convex lens, and does just the reverse in the case of others, that one is able to arrive at a just relative estimate of the two." His diagnosis: "before one can be fit for the practice of civil disobedience one must have rendered a willing and respectful obedience to the state laws."
In 1920 he captured the Congress and rebuilt it into a mass party: linguistic provinces, district committees, a fifteen-member Working Committee, and membership open to anyone over eighteen for four annas. He launched non-cooperation, promising "swaraj in one year." Hindus and Muslims combined at a level not seen since 1857; tens of thousands courted arrest; "the British Raj was nervous."
That year he also told Kallenbach he had found "my spiritual wife" in Saraladevi Chaudhurani, until his friend C. Rajagopalachari — "the keeper of my conscience" — warned it would bring "unutterable shame and ruin."
On 4 February 1922, a crowd at Chauri Chaura set fire to a police station, and "twenty-three policemen perished in the conflagration." Gandhi asked his workers at Bardoli whether to suspend the campaign; "all but three said the movement should go on." He concluded that even the "best workers" had "failed to understand the message of non-violence," and had civil disobedience suspended. He fasted five days in atonement: "to start civil disobedience in an atmosphere of incivility is like putting one's hand in a snake-pit." "No provocation can possibly justify the brutal murder of men who had been rendered defenceless."
The decision "divided the Congress leadership"; Jawaharlal Nehru and the young radicals were "terribly cut up." The government arrested him within weeks. He pleaded guilty, described his profession as "a farmer and weaver," and received six years from a judge who said that "even those who differ from you in politics look upon you as a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life." To the radicals, the retreat left the movement adrift for years.
The March to the Sea
In 1930 the Congress committed itself to complete independence but had no agreed form of struggle. Gandhi chose salt. The viceroy's officials thought a salt campaign would produce at most "relatively small quantities of bad salt... sporadically." Motilal Nehru called it "quixotic." Sarojini Naidu wrote that "no one seems particularly enthusiastic." But salt was "next only to air and water... perhaps the greatest necessity of life," and it touched every community alike.
He warned the viceroy, Lord Irwin, by letter that unless the "evils" were dealt with he would "disregard the provisions of the salt laws." Irwin replied in two sentences through his secretary. On 12 March Gandhi set out from Sabarmati with seventy-eight chosen marchers, including "several 'untouchables', a few Muslims and one Christian." At sixty, with rheumatism, he walked daily and refused a pony. At Dandi on 6 April he "proceeded to pick up lumps of natural salt lying in a small pit," while Sarojini Naidu cried, "Hail, law breaker!"
The government faced two bad options. Officials complained that his "exemption from arrest is having an important effect in strengthening the civil disobedience movement," and that "the belief already prevalent that Gandhi has beaten Government and that Government dare not arrest him" was spreading. They arrested him after midnight on 5 May. At the Dharasana salt works, Webb Miller's report of police beating "unresisting volunteers" went round the world. By January 1931 Time counted some 30,000 of his followers in jail. Irwin released him and negotiated with him as an equal — which Winston Churchill attacked as "nauseating." Churchill understood exactly what the loincloth meant: "by the dress he wore — or did not wear... deliberately insulted... the majesty of the King's representative. These are not trifles in the East."
The pact itself was thin. Communists called it "a stab in the back of the toiling masses," and Gandhi could not save Bhagat Singh from the gallows. On reaching London for the Round Table Conference later that year he announced, "I am going to write to Mr. Winston Churchill and Lord Rothermere... asking if they will kindly give me an interview. That is not a joke. I have always to see those who have opposed me."
— Gandhi, on the eve of the Quit India campaignAt a time when I am about to launch the biggest fight in my life, there can be no hatred for the British in my heart.
The Fast Against Ambedkar
His most famous fast unto death was aimed at the leader of the very people he claimed to be saving.
At the Round Table Conference in 1931, B. R. Ambedkar asked for separate electorates for the "untouchables," the same protection the Muslims and Sikhs had been given. Gandhi said Ambedkar's bitter experience had "warped his judgment," claimed the Congress represented the untouchables too, and vowed that "if I was the only person to resist this thing, I would resist it with my life." When Ramsay MacDonald's Communal Award granted the separate electorates in August 1932, Gandhi began a fast unto death in Yerwada jail.
Ambedkar was "astounded." He would have understood a fast "for stopping riots between Hindus and Mahomedans," but this one "has staked his very life in order to deprive them of the little they have got." He could "never consent to deliver my people bound hand and foot to the caste Hindus." As Gandhi weakened, the pressure fell on one man. "If the most influential Indian of the age was to succumb to his fast," Guha asks, "how could Ambedkar continue to live with the burden of Gandhi's death on his head?" In prison Ambedkar told him, "I want political power for my community." Gandhi answered, "you are born an untouchable but I am an untouchable by adoption."
The Poona Pact gave the Depressed Classes 148 reserved seats in joint electorates, more than double the Award's seventy-one, and Ambedkar thanked Gandhi publicly. But he said he had faced a choice between "the life of the greatest man in India" and his people's interests. Gandhi then created a society through which caste Hindus would "make reparations for the sins of the past" — with no "untouchables" on its governing body. Ambedkar attacked it as a device "to create a slave mentality among the untouchables." "While condemning untouchability outright," Guha writes, "Gandhi was not prepared to criticize the caste system itself." He had argued that "caste has saved Hinduism from disintegration." In 1945 Ambedkar published What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables.
In 1934 Gandhi told an audience to be "'superstitious' enough with me to believe that the earthquake is a divine chastisement for the great sin" of untouchability. Tagore publicly deplored the linking of "ethical principles with cosmic phenomena." "It is impossible to justify Gandhi's statement," Guha writes.
You Measured Them for Me
The father of a nation could not let his own first son choose his life.
Harilal was born in 1888, just before his father left for London, and grew up largely apart from him. He wanted what his father had had — an English legal education — and a love marriage, which he made in 1906 against Gandhi's wishes. Gandhi wrote to his brother: "For the present at any rate I have ceased to think of him as a son." Harilal went to jail three times for the cause in South Africa, and was twice passed over for a London scholarship that Gandhi gave to others.
In May 1911 he slipped away with twenty borrowed pounds, leaving a letter: "Please do not consider that I have fled away. I am still the same obedient Harilal." Brought back, he talked with his father through the night. Gandhi recorded the charge "that I have kept all the four boys very much suppressed, that I did not respect their wishes at any time... and that I have often been hard-hearted," adding, "I pointed out his error." Harilal's summary was: "You did not allow me to measure my capabilities; you measured them for me." Guha calls it "a harsh but accurate judgement." Harilal also wrote that whenever the boys put their views, "you have lost your temper quickly and told us, 'You are stupid, you are in a fallen state, you lack comprehension.'"
The rest was ruin: an embezzlement charge, a failed firm trading on his name that his father publicly disowned, drink, and conversion to Islam in 1936. Gandhi could be tender — "I see in him all my faults magnified" — and savage: "Harilal is sanctifying his anatomy in the holy Ganga of liquor." Of the conversion he said he would have had no quarrel with a sincere one, "For I believe Islam to be as true a religion as my own."
When Kasturba died, Henry Polak, who had lived with the family, wired the press that she was a "devoted wife mother in many ways independent personality" but also a "real martyr husbands causes."
The Strangest Experiment
Independence came with Partition and massacre. In the winter of 1946–47 Gandhi, "closer to eighty than to seventy," walked through the villages of Noakhali in East Bengal where Hindus had been massacred, crossing streams on bamboo poles — "an act of heroism," Guha writes. He had come to believe that "the violence around him was in part a product or consequence of the imperfections within him." "What is it that is choking the action of my ahimsa?"
At the same time he asked his grand-niece Manu, "probably in her early twenties," whom he and Kasturba had raised after her mother died, to share his bed, "to test, or perhaps further test, his conquest of sexual desire." Guha calls the idea "a leap of faith, an abdication of reason, and perhaps also an expression of egotism." His interpreter Nirmal Kumar Bose objected. His stenographer Parasuram wrote that "the whole thing is considered wrong by the world," and left when Gandhi refused to stop. Vallabhbhai Patel was "very angry"; Vinoba Bhave replied that "a father never does it with his daughter even innocently." Gandhi's answer was that to stop would make him "a hypocrite": "If I do not appear to people exactly as I am within, wouldn't that be a blot on my non-violence?"
Manu's diary suggests she consented and saw him as "Mother Bapu," yet "there was a certain amount of imposition — from his side." Rajagopalachari had stopped him twice before. This time no one could.
The Last Fasts
Gandhi, "devastated that the freedom for which he had so long struggled had resulted in two nations, not one," had no office, army or party post. In Punjab, Mountbatten had 55,000 soldiers "and large scale rioting." On the last night of August 1947 a Hindu crowd stoned the derelict Muslim house in Calcutta where Gandhi was living with the former Muslim League premier H. S. Suhrawardy.
He went out to the mob, then began an indefinite fast that would "end only if and when sanity returns to Calcutta." When Rajagopalachari warned that his death would make "the conflagration... worse," he answered: "At least I won't be there to witness it. I shall have done my bit. More is not given a man to do." Rioters "placed their weapons at Gandhi's feet," leaders of every community signed a pledge to "strive unto death" against communal strife, and Mountbatten wrote that "in Bengal our force consists of one man, and there is no rioting."
In January 1948 he fasted again in Delhi, where refugees from Pakistan were driving Muslims from their homes and mosques. He asked Hindu audiences: "Are you going to annihilate all the three-and-a-half or four crore Muslims?... Am I going to save Hinduism with the help of such Hindus?" He set seven conditions, including the return of the mosques. Two lakh people signed a peace pledge, and the government released Pakistan's share of the sterling balances.
The Hindu Mahasabha denounced the fast as "weakening of the Hindu front." On 20 January a refugee exploded a bomb at his prayer meeting. "Gandhi, however, was unruffled. After the noise died down, he continued his speech." Ten days later, at the same place, Nathuram Godse shot him three times at point-blank range. With his eldest son estranged, the pyre was lit by his third son.
Guha concedes that his ecumenism had "erratic results": "from 1915 to 1948, periods of relative religious peace were followed by bouts of often savage violence." Even so, "he did radically reduce tensions between Hindus and Muslims, allowing the new nation state to craft institutions that could hold it together."
— Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with TruthI must reduce myself to zero... Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility.
Part IIThe Playbook
Gandhi never commanded a soldier, held a government office, or won an election to rule. He moved an empire with jail, marches, fasts and a spinning wheel — and with a relentless habit of publishing his own mistakes. The principles below are drawn from his methods. Several come with costs that he himself admitted, and some with costs he would not.
The principles
- 1.Turn your weakness into your method.
- 2.Run your life as a public experiment.
- 3.Pick the grievance every household can taste.
- 4.Break the law openly and make the state choose.
- 5.Fight the injustice, befriend the man.
- 6.Bind the crowd with a public vow.
- 7.Stop the march the moment your side kills.
- 8.Admit that the fast is a weapon.
- 9.Keep one friend who can stop you.
Principle 1
Turn your weakness into your method
Gandhi could not ask a single question in a small-causes court. Instead of forcing himself into oratory, he built a style around the handicap: written statements, read aloud by others when necessary; brief, exact speech; silence as discipline. Monday was his day of silence, kept even on the Salt March. "My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler."
The method suited his politics. A short guilty plea read in a calm voice, at Champaran and in 1922, did more than any courtroom performance could have.
Tactic: Instead of fighting your most obvious limitation, ask what working method it points to. Build the practice that makes the weakness irrelevant, then use the economy it forces on you.
Principle 2
Run your life as a public experiment
Gandhi framed everything — diet, dress, household, celibacy, mass politics — as an experiment whose results he would publish. "My experiments have not been conducted in the closet, but in the open." He confessed early and in public: the theft to his father, the "Himalayan miscalculation" of 1919, the "grave defect" of his first fast, the cruelty to Kasturba. Only by viewing "one's own mistakes with a convex lens" could one reach "a just relative estimate."
Public confession gave him credibility his critics could not easily dent. It also had a dark edge. The same refusal to separate private and public led to the Manu experiment, which he defended on the grounds that hiding it would be "a blot on my non-violence."
Tactic: Treat your methods as experiments and report the failures yourself, early and in your own words. But be careful which experiments you insist on running in the open.
Principle 3
Pick the grievance every household can taste
Gandhi fought specific laws, never abstractions: the £3 tax, the fingerprint rule, tinkathia, the salt monopoly. Officials thought salt too trivial and Motilal Nehru thought it quixotic. Gandhi saw that it was "the greatest necessity of life" after air and water, and that it touched every community alike. Guha calls him "normally so astute in understanding the importance of the right word, the most evocative symbol."
He then documented the grievance until a court or committee had to accept it — almost 7,000 testimonies at Champaran — and he kept causes narrow: "where the end might be political, but where the cause was non-political, one damaged it by giving it a political aspect."
Tactic: Choose one concrete, universal grievance that stands for all the others. Document it beyond dispute, and keep it narrow enough that no one can dismiss it as politics.
Principle 4
Break the law openly and make the state choose
Gandhi gave his opponent notice and a way out — he told the viceroy exactly which law he would break and when — and then broke it in public. This left the state two bad options: arrest him and create a martyr, or refrain and look weak. Officials in 1930 complained that "the belief already prevalent that Gandhi has beaten Government and that Government dare not arrest him" was spreading. At Champaran the Commissioner "only succeeded in trapping Government in the net which he had spread for me."
Then he pleaded guilty and asked for the full penalty. He held that only those who had "rendered a willing and respectful obedience to the state laws" were fit to disobey them.
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The Satyagraha Sequence
The pattern Gandhi repeated from Johannesburg to Dandi.
| Step | Example |
|---|---|
| Take a collective public vow. | Empire Theatre, Johannesburg, 1906. |
| Give the authorities notice and a way out. | Letter to Irwin before the Salt March, 1930. |
| Break one specific law in the open. | Picking up salt at Dandi, 6 April 1930. |
| Plead guilty and ask for the full penalty. | Johannesburg 1908; Champaran 1917; trial of 1922. |
| Halt if your own side turns violent. | Rowlatt protests 1919; Chauri Chaura 1922. |
Tactic: When you must defy a rule, do it openly, with notice, and accept the consequences in full. The more willing you are to pay the penalty, the harder it is for the other side to impose it.
Principle 5
Fight the injustice, befriend the man
Gandhi's style "was oriented towards reconciliation and compromise," and he sought his opponents out in person. He took tea every evening with the mill-owner he was striking against. He fought Smuts for seven years and kept "the old relation of respect." He wrote to Churchill asking for an interview: "I have always to see those who have opposed me." At Champaran, officials "saw that I did not want to offend them personally," and ended up helping him manage the crowds.
He refused to prosecute the men who tried to lynch him at Durban.
Tactic: Separate the policy you are fighting from the person enforcing it. Meet your opponent often, privately and courteously; it keeps the door to settlement open and makes you harder to demonise.
Principle 6
Bind the crowd with a public vow
"A vow far from closing the door to real freedom opened it." Every large struggle Gandhi led began with a pledge taken together: at the Empire Theatre in 1906; under a babul tree with the Ahmedabad strikers, who repeated daily that "they would rather die than break their word"; in the signed peace pledges that ended his fasts in Calcutta and Delhi. A pledge turned a crowd into a body of people who had promised something to each other in public.
He built institutions the same way. The Satyagraha Ashram ran on written vows. The rebuilt Congress of 1920, open to anyone for four annas, turned an elite club into a mass party.
Tactic: At the start of any hard collective effort, have people commit publicly and together to a specific, simple promise. Shared vows are harder to break than private intentions.
Principle 7
Stop the march the moment your side kills
Gandhi was willing to retreat in public at the height of his power. He called off the Rowlatt protests in 1919. After Chauri Chaura in 1922, against nearly every worker he had, he halted a national movement at its peak: "to start civil disobedience in an atmosphere of incivility is like putting one's hand in a snake-pit." He fasted in atonement for what others had done.
Each retreat protected the method's claim to be non-violent. Each also cost momentum, and Nehru and the radicals saw them as squandered chances.
Tactic: Decide in advance what conduct by your own side would make you stop, and announce it. When the line is crossed, stop — even at the peak — and take the blame yourself.
Principle 8
Admit that the fast is a weapon
Gandhi's fasts were penance and they were pressure. "Over the past thirty-five years, Gandhi had gone on fast every other year." In Ahmedabad he admitted that "to fast against them would amount to coercion." In Calcutta and Delhi in 1947–48, the lever worked on whole cities; in Bengal, Mountbatten wrote, "our force consists of one man."
Against Ambedkar the same lever was aimed at the leader of the people Gandhi claimed to champion. Ambedkar got more seats, but he had faced a choice between "the life of the greatest man in India" and his people's interests, and he never forgave it.
Tactic: If you use your own suffering or sacrifice to move others, call it what it is. Ask whether the person you are pressing is an oppressor or someone with less power than you.
Principle 9
Keep one friend who can stop you
Rajagopalachari, "the keeper of my conscience," stopped Gandhi's "spiritual marriage" in 1920 and, "after a very quarrelsome hour," stopped him publishing an account of his sexual failure in 1938. Mahadev Desai, his secretary, talked him out of a fast in 1942. Where Gandhi lacked such a check — in Noakhali, when he overrode Bose, Parasuram, Patel and Vinoba Bhave — he made the gravest misjudgement of his private life.
The same absolute will showed at home. "You did not allow me to measure my capabilities," Harilal told him; "you measured them for me."
Tactic: The stronger your convictions, the more you need at least one person with standing to overrule you. Choose them deliberately, and give them permission in advance.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Let the enemy trap himself in his own net. "According to the law I was to be on my trial, but truly speaking Government was to be on its trial."
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Suffer the hardship; never inflict it. "A watchman's duty is to watch, not to assault."
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Read your own mistakes through a convex lens. Magnify your faults and shrink others' to reach "a just relative estimate."
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Walk in by daylight, or they will say you hid. He landed at Durban at five in the afternoon, and took the beating.
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Stop the march the moment your own side kills. A movement at its peak is still not worth a snake-pit.
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Pick the grievance every household can taste. Salt, after air and water.
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A vow is a door, not a cage. "'I believe in effort, I do not want to bind myself with vows' is the mentality of weakness."
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Never spend money you have not collected. And never accept half the pledge.
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Refuse the gift that buys your service. And remember Kasturba asking what right you have to her necklace.
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Your fast is a weapon; admit it. Know whom you are pointing it at.
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Measure your son's life, and you will lose him. "You measured them for me."
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Keep one friend who can stop you. The years he had one, he was saved. The year he didn't, he was not.
