A Week with Gandhi/June 4, 1942
I was up early and took a tonga with Gandhi’s dentist for Sevagram, the village which is Gandhi’s home when he is not in jail. The dentist said that England had been “an understanding master.” I tried to make him talk about Gandhi. He insisted on talking politics.
The tonga stopped. I jumped out and there stood a tall, brown-and-white figure—Gandhi. I walked towards him with long, quick steps. He held his hand on the shoulders of two women who walked on either side of him. His thin brown legs were bare up to his loincloth. Leather sandals on his feet; a cape of cheesecloth around his shoulders; a folded white kerchief on his head. He said, “Mr. Fischer,” with an English accent, and we shook hands. He greeted the dentist, turned about, and I followed him to a flat, thick board resting on two metal trestles. He sat down, put his hand on the board, and said, “Sit down.” He said, “Jawaharlal has told me about your book and the type of person you are, and we are glad to have you here. How long will you stay?” I told him I could stay a few days.
“Oh,” he exclaimed, “then we will be able to talk much.”
A young man walked over to him, bowed low to his feet, and swayed up and down. “Bas, bas,” Gandhi muttered. I imagined it meant “Enough,” and later found that my guess was right. Soon two other young men did the same thing, and again Gandhi shooed them off.
I asked him why he had chosen this village to live in. He said so-and-so, and he mentioned a name which I didn’t get, had chosen it for him. I made no comment, but he noticed that I didn’t catch the Indian name, and so he said Mira Ben was Miss Slade, an Englishwoman who had long been associated with him. He explained that it was her idea that he should live in a village in the center of India, and he had asked her to find the place. He did not wish to live inside the village because it was too unhygienic and noisy. “It is better here, on the outskirts.” The dentist started talking about false teeth, and Gandhi explained to him that the bite in the sets he wore was imperfect. A woman brought out a brass bowl filled with water and three sets of artificial teeth, and I decided to go. Gandhi said, “You will walk with me in the evening and morning, and we will have other opportunities to talk.” I bowed and went away.
I was given the freedom of Sevagram’s guest house—a one-room mud hut with earthen floor and bamboo roof. There are several beds in the room. Leading from the room is a tiny kitchen and also a water room with a stone floor on which stood a large number of tin and brass buckets and two tin washtubs, which “Bai”—the aged maid kept filling with water carried in jars on her head from the village well. Gandhi had told me that I would be in the care of Kurshed Ben, or Sister Kurshed. Miss Kurshed Naoroji is a Parsi, aged about forty. She wore a coarse yellow home spun sari. She had studied singing in France and Italy for six years, but had dropped her musical career fifteen years ago and has since been a constant disciple of Gandhi. Her family are millionaires. Her grandfather, who died during the first World War at the age of ninety-five, was the first Indian member of the British House of Commons. Saklatvala, another Parsi—and a Communist, was the third and last Indian member of the British Parliament.
Kurshed Ben is intelligent and quick. I argue with her that there has been an overemphasis here on Indian nationalism. An independent India, I contend, might become Fascist, and then it would have less freedom than under the British. She rejects this reasoning. She wants the British out first, and then the Indians will solve their own problems. “We want to be alone,” Kurshed said. “It is like a housewife who has had guests staying with her for too long, and she is impatient to see them leave, and can think of nothing else but the pleasure of the moment when she sees them going out through the front door.”
Kurshed took me visiting to several members of the Gandhi “ashram,” or community. They are all Congress field-workers or Gandhi’s secretaries, or just people who arrive and stay for a while to sit at the naked feet of the master. They come from various parts of India, and sometimes speak different Indian languages, so that they must communicate with one another in English. The children are very beautiful. I stopped in at Mahadev Desai’s hut. I found him, bald and paunchy, dressed only in a loincloth, sitting on a floor mat spinning on a primitive “charka.” His wife was in the next room, clothed in a much-twisted sari, doing likewise. Desai spins five hundred yards a day. The charka is a very simple machine which any peasant could make or buy cheaply. Desai said he travels a good deal and spins on trains. But he had never noticed anybody else doing it. Thanks to Gandhi’s propaganda and personal example, hundreds of thousands of Indian peasants had taken up home spinning in order to develop village industry and provide clothes for the almost-naked millions. “But the habit has not spread very far,” Desai admitted, “and spinning is no factor in India’s national economy.”
At eleven A. M., when I was starved, Kurshed took me over to Gandhi’s house, which is about a hundred yards from the guest house. It is a one story affair with walls of matting and a roof of poor red tiles. I left my bedroom slippers on the outside cement step and walked in and remained in the tiny anteroom from which I could see the one chief room of the house. Gandhi was lying on a white pallet on the earthen floor, and one of his disciples sat on the ground near this bed and pulled a rope which moved a board, with a black cloth hanging from it, suspended from the ceiling. This is supposed to take the place of an electric fan. There is no electricity in the village. Gandhi got up and said to me, “Now put on your shoes and hat. Those are the two indispensable things here. Don’t get a sunstroke.” A woman brought him a folded, moistened cheesecloth for his head. Then, putting one hand on Kurshed, who walked one step in front of him, he said to me in friendly fashion, “Come along.” We passed two houses and came to a common dining hall built of matting. I left my shoes outside, as Gandhi did, gave my sun helmet to Kurshed, who found a place for it on a peg on the wall, and took a seat on the ground which Gandhi indicated, two removed from him. Between us was the asthmatic Narendra Dev, a leader of the Indian Socialist Party which is affiliated with Congress. I sat down on a strip of matting about a foot wide. Gandhi sat on a pillow. To his left was his toothless wife, Kasturba. She is seventy. He is seventy-three.
The dining hall has two long walls connected by a third back wall. Where one enters, it is open to the elements. Near the entrance is a table covered with jars and trays of food. The women sit apart. I watched some bright-eyed, brown-faced children, some of them three, five or eight years old, the children of the members of the ashram. Soon every person had a brass tray in front of him, and several waiters were moving noiselessly on bare feet, depositing food on the trays. Several pots and pans were placed before Gandhi. He opened them and started dishing out food to his neighbors. I had been given a metal tumbler full of water. Gandhi handed me a bronze bowl filled with a vegetable mush in which I thought I discerned chopped spinach leaves and pieces of squash. Then he uncovered a metal container and gave me one hard, paper-thin wheat-cake. A woman poured some salt into my tray and handed me a bowl of hot milk. Soon she came back with two boiled potatoes in their jackets and some soft, flat wheat cakes baked brown. Gandhi turned to me and said, with a smile, “I am serving you, but you must not eat until the prayer.” I told him I had noticed that the children were not touching their food and so I knew I mustn’t. The thirty-odd people in the room, all dressed in white and squatting on the brown floor, were receiving their food and not eating it. Diners passed food to one another with their hands. A gong sounded, and a tall, healthy looking man in white shorts stopped waiting on the trays and closed his eyes, leaving only a white slit open—it made him look blind—and started a high-pitched chant in which all the others, including Gandhi, joined. The prayer ended with “shaanti, shaanti, shaanti,” which, Dev told me, means “peace.”
I had been given a teaspoon for the vegetable mess , but most people fished it out with their round wheat-cakes folded in four. A woman waitress poured some liquid butter on my wheat-cakes. With a liberal use of salt, the food was not too untasty. I got some sugar to take away the taste of the boiled cow-milk (Gandhi has given up goat milk and now encourages the consumption of cow milk throughout India in the hope that more attention will be paid to the breeding of healthy cattle).
Gandhi ate continuously, only stopping to serve food to his wife, Kurshed, Dev, and me. His hands are big and his fingers are big and well-formed. His knees are pronounced bulges and his bones are wide and strong. His skin is smooth and clean. His hands do not shake as he digs into the pots. His wife fanned him frequently with a straw fan. She looks the symbol of silent self-effacement.
Once Gandhi interrupted to say, “You have lived in Russia for fourteen years. What is your opinion of Stalin?”
I felt very hot, and my hands were sticky, and so I replied briefly, “Very able and very ruthless.”
“As ruthless as Hitler?” Gandhi asked. “At least,” I replied. After a pause, Gandhi turned to me again and said, “Have you seen the Viceroy?”
“Yes,” I said, but Gandhi dropped the subject.
I was discovering my ankles. Too much of my weight was resting on them. The Indians know how to distribute their bodily weight, but I hadn’t learned. I stood one leg on its foot, and felt a bit more comfortable. Gandhi said to me, “I see you have come to a standstill.”
“No,” I replied, “I find the food surprisingly good.”
“You can have all the water you want,” he said. “We take good care that it is boiled. And now you must eat your mango.”
I said I had been observing others eat it, and would now, for the first time in my life, try one. Kurshed suggested that I would need a bath when I was through. I started peeling the mango. Gandhi and others laughed. Gandhi explained that they usually turned it in their hands and squeezed it to make it soft, and then sucked out the contents, but I was right to peel it to see whether it was good. He said, “You will earn a medal of courage for being ready to eat as we do.” I had finished the meal and Kurshed indicated with her head that I could go before Gandhi got up. I bowed to him, got my hat and shoes, and left. Kurshed said Gandhi would see me at three.
Indians usually do not shake hands. When they meet or part, they put their two palms together at the level of their mouths, smile sweetly, and sway. It makes them look very kindly and innocent. When I bowed to Gandhi, he gave me the touch-palm goodbye.
I went home, slept from twelve to one, and got up covered with perspiration. I took my third bath of the day in the water room; I simply stood and poured water over me from a small bronze vessel.
At a few minutes to three, I walked across the hundred yards of hot gravel and sand which separated my house from Gandhi’s. The heat made the whole inside of my head feel dry. The temperature was a hundred and ten. When I entered Gandhi’s room, six men in white were sitting on the floor of his room. A woman in a black sari was pulling the rope of the fan. There was only one decoration in the room, a glass-covered, black-and white print of Jesus Christ, on which were printed the words, “He is our peace.” Gandhi sat on the pallet which is his bed. There was a board behind his back and a pillow between the board and his back. He was wearing gold-rimmed glasses, and writing a letter with a fountain pen. His legs were crossed scissors-fashion. He held a small board on one knee, and on the board was the pad on which he wrote. Three other fountain pens stood in holes in a hand-made wooden stand. Left of his bed were some books piled neatly on the floor. He said to me, “Come sit down in the coolest place here beside the woman working the fan.” I sat down in a corner and leaned my back against the matting. Gandhi said, “If you do not mind, these people will remain here. They will not speak. If you object, they can go.” Dev was there and Desai, and several other members of the ashram, including Kurshed. I did not very much like the idea of an interview in company, but I said, “No,” and got settled.
“Now I am fully at your disposal,” Gandhi announced.
I said, “I feel that the Cripps mission was a turning point in Indian history. The country is probably now beginning to grasp the significance of Cripps’s failure, and from that understanding big things might flow. I therefore wish to know why, in your opinion, Cripps failed.”
“When Cripps arrived,” Gandhi began, “he sent me a telegram asking me to come see him in New Delhi. I did not wish to go, but I went because I thought it would do some good. I had heard rumors about the contents of the British government’s offer he brought to India, but I had not seen the offer. He gave it to me, and after a brief study, I said to him, ‘Why did you come if this is what you have to offer? If this is your entire proposal to India, I would advise you to take the next plane home.’ Cripps replied, ‘I will consider that.’”
“What is your criticism of the Cripps offer?” I inquired. “Didn’t it promise you dominion status with the right to secede from the British Commonwealth?”
“C. F. Andrews [Manchester Guardian correspondent in India and for years an intimate friend of Gandhi’s] always used to assert that dominion status is not for India,” Gandhi declared. “We have not the same relation to Britain as the dominions which are white and settled, for the most part, by emigrants from Britain or their descendants. We do not wish any status conferred on us. If a status is conferred on us, it means we are not free. As to secession, there are big flaws. One of the chief flaws is the provision in the Cripps proposal regarding the princes. The British maintain that they must protect the princes under treaties which they forced on the princes for Britain’s advantage. The Maharajah of Bikaner, and I take him as any X, Y, Z, reigned before the British came and had more power then than now. The second flaw is the recognition of Pakistan. The differences between Hindus and Moslems have been accentuated by British rule. Now they have been given their maximum scope by the Cripps offer. Lord Minto started this when he was Viceroy [1909] by establishing separate electorates for the two religious communities, and since then the British have sought to divide us still further. Lord Curzon was a great administrator. I never met him as I have met Chelmsford, Irwin [Halifax], and Linlithgow. But he said one thing to one man, another to a second man, and still a third thing to a third man. With Sir Samuel Hoare, I know whom I am talking to. I know where he stands. But not with Curzon. The division of Bengal, as carried out by Curzon, was a necessary reform. It was a good measure. But it had the effect of dividing the province according to religion. Cripps introduced this same principle in his offer; that is the second big flaw. There can be no unity in India, therefore, as long as the British are here.”
“Well,” I said, “you did not like the outlines of the post-war settlement proposed by Cripps. But was there nothing desirable in the interim or immediate provisions? Did you not think that, irrespective of the plan for the future, there might be some value in the immediate arrangements which would give your people experience in government and earn you the right to demand freedom after the war?”
“Roughly,” Gandhi replied, “this was the spirit in which I approached it. But when I saw the text of the Cripps offer, I was certain that there was no room for cooperation. The main issue was defense. In war time, defense is the chief task of government. I have no desire to interfere with the actual conduct of the war. I am incompetent to do so. But Roosevelt has no special training in strategy, or if he has it is partial.” He hesitated a moment. “Or, let me take Churchill.”
“No,” I said, “you needn’t hesitate to take Roosevelt as an example. I understand the point.”
“The point is,” Gandhi asserted, “that in war time there must be civilian control of the military, even though the civilians are not as well trained in strategy as the military. If the British in Burma wish to destroy the golden pagoda because it is a beacon to Japanese airplanes, then I say you can not destroy it, because when you destroy it you destroy something in the Burmese soul. When the British come and say, we must remove these peasants to build an airdrome here, and the peasants must go today, I say, ‘Why did you not think of that yesterday and give the poor people time to go, and why don’t you find places for them to go to?’”
“If these are the matters which you wish Indians to control,” I suggested, “I am sure General Wavell would have regarded them as interference in the prosecution of the war.”
“The British,” Gandhi declared with a smile, “offered us wartime tasks like the running of can teens and the printing of stationery, which are of minor significance. Though I am no strategist, there are things we could have done which would have been more conducive to success in the war. The British have fared so badly in the Far East that they could do with help from us.”
“Apparently, then,” I summarized, “you placed chief stress on defense.”
He agreed.
“Did Nehru and other Congress leaders take the same view?”
“I hope so,” he replied. “I hope Nehru takes the same view, and that the Maulana Sahib [Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the Moslem president of the Congress Party] takes the same view.”
“In other words,” I said, “you found nothing good in the Cripps proposals?”
“I am glad you put this direct and definite question to me,” he exclaimed. “No. I found nothing good at all in them.”
“Did you tell that to Cripps?” I inquired.
“Yes,” he answered. “I said to Cripps, ‘You performed a miracle in Russia.’”
“Why did you say that?” I interrupted. “It wasn’t Sir Stafford Cripps who brought Russia into the war, but a gentleman named Adolf Hitler.”
Gandhi laughed, and his friends laughed. “But I and thousands of Indians,” he protested, “believed that it was Cripps who performed the miracle.”
“Didn’t Cripps protest when you said that?” I asked.
“No,” Gandhi said laughingly, “he took the compliment. We thought Stalin had asked for British aid before the invasion of Russia.”
“No, that is not correct,” I said. “After the invasion, Russia got help and is now obtaining in creasing help from America and Britain. But before the attack, Stalin, fearing Hitler, could show no friendship for Britain or for Cripps.”
“In any case,” Gandhi continued, “I asked Cripps to perform a miracle here too, but it was not in his power.”
I said, “I think there is a vast popular ferment going on in England. I flew to England last summer and stayed nine weeks. The mass of the people are resolved not to be ruled after the war by the sort of people who ruled them before the war and brought on this war. Cripps could become the expression and embodiment of this popular protest. His rise to office is therefore an encouraging phenomenon.”
“Yes,” Gandhi interpolated, “and a discouraging one too, for I wonder whether Cripps has the qualities of a great statesman. It is very discouraging to us that the man who was a friend of Jawaharlal’s and had been interested in India should have made himself the bearer of this mission.”
Apparently something went through Gandhi’s mind—probably that my hour with him was drawing to a close—for he said, apropos of nothing, “Lord Sankey once told me to take care of myself, and I said to him, ‘Do you think I would have reached this green old age if I hadn’t taken care of myself?’ This is one of my faults.”
“I thought you were perfect,” I said with a smile.
He said, laughing, “No, I am very imperfect. Before you are gone you will have discovered a hundred of my faults, and if you don’t I will help you to see them.” He looked down at the large nickel watch which hung by a chain from the waistline of his loincloth, and said to me, “Now, I have given you an hour.”
I got up, bowed, and left. During the hour, a Moslem woman without teeth had come in once to change the moistened cloth on his chest. He him self had several times taken the kerchief from his head, rolled it up, immersed it in a tumblerful of, water , wrung it out , and put it back on his head. Every time he took off the cloth I had a better view of his little face, with its short, black-and-white, but chiefly white, stubble moustache on his narrow upper lip—so narrow in fact that the fat down-pointed nose tip almost meets the lip. His lower lip is very sensitive and expressive. His eyes are soft. The face is the small lower extension of a big, bulging head with large ears extending abruptly away from it.
A few minutes after I returned to the guest house, Dev, the Socialist leader, arrived with a member of the ashram to discuss India and Russia and the war. They were passionately anti-British. Dev said he was sorry that this was so, but India had suffered at the hands of England and their views were an emotional reaction to national suffering.
I wanted to have a complete record of what Gandhi had said to me, and so, after Dev and his friend had left, I took off the jacket of the blue striped pajama suit which I had worn for the Gandhi interview and settled down to type notes. After five minutes, I was tired and running with perspiration. I took another splash bath in my water room. As I sat on the terrace, typing, I watched a young Indian woman who walked to and fro in front of the house. She was barefooted and wore a tight blue homespun bodice around her breasts and shoulders, leaving a strip bare to the waist. From the waist down to her feet she wore a sari, the train of which she held under one arm and wrapped around her neck and head. The sari was of bright yellow with a broad, bright-red border, so that every time she passed, I, with my eyes on the typewriter, had the impression of a flame. She carried on her head a large red earthen jar filled with water, and supported it with one arm, which was bare except for a bright metal bracelet at the wrist. When she returned a moment later, after having poured the water into a barrel outside the house opposite, the jar was lying on its side, nestling in a round, rag cup on the top of her head. Hour after hour, in the blazing sun, she did this difficult chore. A short pipe would have relieved her of all this hard work.
I wrote until I was exhausted from the heat, and then chatted with Kurshed. Dinner was at five, announced by a soft gong. The meal started with the usual prayer. A member of the ashram whosat near Gandhi and talked with him in Hindustani used an English word. I said that reminded me of the open-air Congress mass meeting I had attended in New Delhi the day after I arrived in India. The main speaker had been Mrs. Asaf Ali (Hindu wife of Dr. Asaf Ali, a Moslem member of the Congress Working Committee). She too had spoken Hindustani, but I had taken down the English words she used. They were: “foreign policy,” “exploitation,” “social position,” “efficiency,” “British Imperialism,” “non-cooperation,” “India Office,” and “refugees.” Gandhi enjoyed the list immensely. A man sitting near by said there was an other English phrase they all knew: “student spies.” The government used some university students to spy on others, he said. Gandhi said, “This is one of my indictments of British rule.”
Gandhi asked me about the terror in Soviet Russia. I gave him details from my experience in Russia. “Then England and the United States,” Gandhi volunteered, “are the only democratic countries left in the world.”
“It is surprising,” I corroborated, “how democratic England remains despite the war. There is also Sweden.”
“Yes?” Gandhi commented incredulously.
“And Switzerland. And the British dominions,” I added.
“For whites,” Gandhi interjected. “I know. I have lived in South Africa.” He returned to his food.
I went back to the hut for a bath. All I had to do to take a bath was to slip off my pajamas and sandals and fill a bowl with water and hold it over my head and tilt it. Refreshed, I made my way again to Gandhi’s house at 6.15 P.M. I waited outside a minute until Gandhi came out. He carried a long stick of bamboo. Dr. Das, Gandhi’s physician who lives in the ashram, accompanied us and so did several young men and women. Gandhi leaned his hands on the shoulders of two of the women. A group of young men visitors from outside the village had posted themselves not far from Gandhi’s house to catch a glimpse of him as he passed. Their faces pictured awe and devotion. They touched palms in front of their lips and bent forward low from the waist. Gandhi made a remark to them which made him and them laugh. A second group of older men, one with a big paunch, looked eagerly as though in the hope of getting a greeting, but failed. We took the dusty road that wound around ploughed fields. Gandhi invited questions from me with a “Now?”
“You helped recruit soldiers for the British Army in the first World War,” I began. “When this war started, you said you wished to do nothing to embarrass the British government. Now, obviously, your attitude has changed. What has happened?”
“In the first World War I had just returned from South Africa,” he explained. “I hadn't yet found my feet. I wasn’t sure of my ground. This did not imply any lack of faith in non-violence. But it had to develop according to circumstances, and I was not sufficiently sure of my ground. There were many experiences between the two wars. Nevertheless, I announced after some talks with the Viceroy in September, 1939, that the Congress movement would not obstruct this war. I am not the Congress. In fact, I am not in the Congress. I am neither a member nor an officer of the Party. Congress is more anti-British and anti-war than I am, and I have had to curb its desires to interfere with the war effort. Now I have reached certain conclusions. I do not wish to humiliate the British . But the British must go. I do not say that the British are worse than the Japanese.”
“Quite the contrary,” I interjected.
“I would not say quite the contrary,” he re joined. “But I do not wish to exchange one master for another. England will benefit morally if she withdraws voluntarily and in good order.”
Gandhi then talked at length and scarcely stop ping for breath—although we were walking at a fast pace and it was still hot—about what he called British atrocities in Bengal and elsewhere. He said he had received letters only today telling how villagers were being driven from their homes without notice and without compensation in order to make way for the construction of airdromes. “This,” he commented, “impedes the war effort, although it appears to be part of the war effort. I am more than ever convinced that Britain cannot win this war unless she leaves India.”
It was dark when we returned to Gandhi’s house. He lay down on one of the wooden beds in the courtyard, and asked me to sit down on one near by. The Moslem woman brought him a dry chest cloth and then proceeded to wipe his feet. I expressed the view that England might have made mistakes in India and engaged in repression at times, but that a foreign dictatorship which conquered the country would be infinitely worse. In reply, he talked at length and with bitterness about the Amritsar Massacre in 1919 and other violent British acts in India. He insisted that he was more moderate than the people and that some Indians were so anti-British they would not mind the victory of Japan.
He made a move to get up, and I said it was time for me to go. He said, “No, come to prayers.”
It was now black night. I followed Gandhi to an open spot about fifty yards from his house, where the members of the ashram, about seventy in all, mostly dressed in white, squatted on the ground on three sides of a square. The women were on the left side of the square, and the men on the two other sides. Gandhi said, “Fischer, can you squat here?” and I sat down next to where he had taken his position in the center of the fourth side of the square, with his face to the congregation. The Moslem woman sat behind him and fanned him with a straw fan. Some of the worshippers had kerosene lanterns which were shaded with paper on one side so that the light would not shine into the eyes of persons opposite. One such lamp stood at Gandhi’s side. The prayer meeting started when Gandhi commenced to recite a verse. All joined in the chant, and he kept pace with them and his voice sounded clearly above all the rest. Then a song leader started to sing, and a man beside him beat tiny metal cymbals and everybody sang a sort of wailing song which sounded part Chinese, part a falsetto, monotone Arabic. Later Gandhi read from a thick volume of Hindu scriptures. A prayer for peace ended the services.