A Week with Gandhi/June 5, 1942
I was up at four, after a refreshing night under the stars and moon. I slept on a bed made of rope netting attached to four wooden posts. The air during the night was cool. At six-fifteen, Dr. Das, my neighbor, came and said that Gandhi was tired and would not walk this morning. Kurshed brought me a breakfast of tea with biscuits, butter, honey, and mangoes. I ate quickly while flies and ants competed with me. After breakfast I typed notes but interrupted when Dev and Aryanaikam, a huge dark Ceylonese who was a leading Congress educator, came to talk about Russia. I voiced the view that independence was not enough, and that after independence India’s real headaches would start. Kurshed repeated her statement of yesterday that she wanted a free India even if it were fascist. If Bose (Subhas Chandra Bose, president of Congress in 1938, who escaped from India after the be ginning of the war and took up residence in Germany, whence be broadcast against British rule) entered India at the head of an Indian army, he could rally the whole country. The Japanese, she said, had liberated the Indian soldiers and officers captured in Hong Kong, Malay, Singapore, and Burma and were organizing them into special Indian units which, the Axis radio declared, would march into India and drive out the British. Bose, she said, was more popular than Nehru, and in certain circumstances had a stronger appeal than Gandhi.
Dev stated that, in recent years, under pressure from Nehru and other advanced thinkers, Congress had been paying more attention to economic and social questions, and had formulated a social program which he would find and give me.
Lunch at eleven. I was late in arriving. Gandhi was already seated on the floor of the mess hall. “Come along,” he said to me in friendly fashion as I appeared. I asked him whether he was well. “Yes,” he replied, “but I felt too tired to walk. You must walk alone or with some of our friends. Exercise is important.” I told him that only the chance of talking to him could induce me to walk in this heat. He laughed. He offered me a boiled onion from his pot. I turned it down and asked for raw onion instead. It stimulated my palate and was a relief from the flat food of the menu. Kurshed handed me a teaspoon, but Gandhi pushed a table spoon in my direction and said, “This is more consistent with your size.” When I got to my mango at the end of the meal, he handed me a homespun napkin. I said, “When in Rome I want to do as the Romans do and not be an exception.”
“You are,” he replied, “and besides I have a napkin too.”
At three in the afternoon I walked over to Gandhi’s house for my interview. Desai and an other secretary were on the floor writing replies to letters received by Gandhi. Kurshed took over the fan. I noticed a second decoration in the room: a dull-colored picture of a religious procession painted on the mud wall of the room. Also, on the wall behind Gandhi’s back were shallow reliefs of a palm tree and of a palm leaf on which was in scribed a large figure resembling the Arabic numeral three. This, Desai explained to me, was a religious symbol called “Ohm” which had the same significance as the Greek “logos.”
Gandhi came in, greeted me, and lay down on his bed. “I will take your blows lying down,” he said. The Moslem woman gave him a wet mud pack for his abdomen. He said, “This puts me in touch with my future.” I said nothing, and after a moment he remarked, “I see you missed that one.” I told him I hadn’t missed it, but thought he was too young to think about returning to the dust.
“Why,” he exclaimed, “you and I and all of us, some in a hundred and twenty years, but all sooner or later, will do it.” He paused and invited questions with a “Now?”
I said that when I hear a suggestion about some arrangement for the future I try to imagine how it would look if it were actually adopted. “I am sure you have done the same in connection with your proposal that the British withdraw. Then how do you see that withdrawal, step by step?”
“First,” he replied with deliberation, “there are the Princes who have their own armies. They might make trouble. I am not sure that there will be order when the British go. There could be chaos. I have said, ‘Let the British go in an orderly fashion and leave India to God.’ You may not like such unrealistic language. Then call it anarchy. That is the worst that can happen. But we will seek to prevent it. There may not be anarchy.”
“Could not the Indians immediately organize a government?” I suggested.
“Yes,” he responded quickly. “There are three elements in the political situation here: the Princes, the Moslems, and Congress. They could all form a provisional government.”
“In what proportion,” I asked, “would power and the posts be divided?”
“I do not know,” he replied. “Congress being the most powerful unit might claim the largest share. But that could be determined amicably.”
“It seems to me,” I said, “that the British cannot possibly withdraw altogether. That would mean making a present of India to Japan, and England would never consent to that, nor would the United States approve. If you demand that the British pack up and go bag and baggage, you are simply asking the impossible; you are barking up a tree. You do not mean, do you, that they must also with draw their armies?”
For at least two minutes Gandhi said nothing. The silence in the room was almost audible. “You are right,” he said at last. “No, Britain and America, and other countries too, can keep their armies here and use Indian territory as a base for military operations. I do not wish Japan to win the war. I do not want the Axis to win. But I am sure that Britain cannot win unless the Indian people be come free. Britain is weaker and Britain is morally indefensible while she rules India. I do not wish to humiliate England.”
“But if India is to be used as a military base by the United Nations, many other things are involved. Armies do not exist in a vacuum. For in stance, the United Nations would need good organization on the railroads.”
“Oh,” he exclaimed, “they could operate the railroads. They would also need order in the ports where they received their supplies. They could not have riots in Bombay and Calcutta. These matters would require cooperation and common effort.”
“Could the terms of this collaboration,” I urged, “be set forth in a treaty of alliance?”
“Yes,” he said, “we could have a written agreement with England.”
“Or with Britain, America and the others,” I amplified.
He nodded his head in assent.
“Why have you never said this?” I asked. “I must confess that when I heard of your proposed civil disobedience movement I was prejudiced against it. I believed that it would impede the prosecution of the war. I think the war has to be fought and won. I see complete darkness for the world if the Axis wins. I think we have a chance for a better world if we win.”
“There I cannot quite agree,” he argued. “Britain often cloaks herself in a cloth of hypocrisy, promising what she later doesn’t deliver. But I accept the proposition that there is a better chance if the democracies win.”
“It depends on the kind of peace we make,” I said.
“It depends on what you do during the war,” he corrected.
“I would like to tell you,” I began, “that American statesmen have great sympathy for the cause of Indian freedom. The United States government tried to dissuade Churchill from making the speech in which he declared that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to India. Important men in Washington are working on the idea of a Pacific Charter, but they tell me that they have not got very far because the first principle of such a charter would be the end of imperialism, and how can we announce that while Britain holds India?”
“I am not interested in future promises,” he asserted. “I am not interested in independence after the war. I want independence now. That will help England win the war.”
“Why have you not communicated your plan to the Viceroy?” I asked. “He should be told that you have no objection now to the use of India as a base for Allied military operations.”
“No one has asked me,” Gandhi replied. “I have written about my proposed civil disobedience movement in order to prepare the public for it. If you put me some direct questions in writing about this matter, I will answer them in Harijan [Gandhi’s English-language weekly magazine. “Harijan” means “Untouchable”]. Only make the questions brief.” “If you knew anything about my writing you would know,” I preached, “that I always try to be brief, direct, and squeeze out all the water.”
“Jawaharlal told me about you before you came,” Gandhi said. “He said you were honest and had no axe to grind. You don’t have several irons in the fire. He said you were a solid man. I can see that by looking at you,” he laughed.
“Yes, solid, at least physically,” I said.
“I have talked freely and frankly to you,” he declared. “I think you are a sahib loke.”
He laughed and I asked for help. “Did you say ‘sahib bloke’? Is that the English word bloke?” The whole company roared with laughter.
“No, loke,” he laughed. One secretary interpreted it as meaning “two gentlemen.” Mahadev Desai, sitting there with a thick mudpack diaper pinned on his head like a Cossack’s cap, said it meant “superfine.”
“Miss Katherine Mayo (author of Mother India),” Gandhi said when the laughter died down, “came here and I was good to her, and then she wrote only filth. You know what I have called her?”
“No,” I said. “Drain inspector,” Gandhi said.
“I come from a very poor family,” I said. “I know what it means to be hungry. I have always sympathized with the downtrodden and the poor. Many Americans feel the greatest friendship for India. I think it very unfortunate, therefore, that you have recently uttered some unfriendly words at the expense of America.”
“It was necessary,” Gandhi affirmed. “I wanted to shock. I think many Americans have a soft corner in their hearts for me, and I wished to tell them that if they continue to worship Mammon they will not make a better world. There is a danger that the democracies will defeat the Axis and become just as bad as Japan and Germany.”
“Of course there is a danger,” I broke in. “But many people said that England would go fascist if it went to war. Yet in fact England is more democratic now than she was before the war.”
“No,” he disagreed. “We see in India that this is not so.”
“At least in England,” I suggested.
“It cannot be true in England,” Gandhi insisted, “and not in the Empire. I cannot depend on your future goodness. I have labored for many decades for Indian national freedom. We cannot wait any longer. But I believe that there is good will for us.”
He paused, and I thought he looked very disconsolate. “England,” he said with deliberation, “is sitting on an unexploded mine in India and it may explode any day. The hatred and resentment against Britain are so strong here that Britain can get no help for her war effort. Indians enlist in the British Army because they want to eat, but they have no feeling in their hearts which would make them wish to help England.”
“If you permit me to summarize the suggestions you have made today about a settlement in India,” I said, “you have reversed the Cripps offer. Cripps offered you something and kept the rest for England. You are offering England something and keep the rest for India.”
“That is very true,” he agreed. “I have turned Cripps around.”
I saw from his watch that the end of the hour was approaching. I said I would not dare ask him to read my book, Men and Politics, which Dev had, but I hoped he would page through it. A secretary asked what “paging through” meant. Gandhi said, “It means looking first at the last page, then at the first page, then at a page in the middle.”
“And then throwing the book away and saying it is excellent,” I suggested. “Now I have kept you the agreed hour.”
“Yes, you have,” he said. “Go and sit in the tub.”
As I walked out of the house, I thought to my self, is that the Indian equivalent of go sit on a tack? But I thought it was a good idea anyway, only I decided to improve on it. When I got home I stripped, placed a small wooden packing case in one of the tin washtubs filled with water, folded a Turkish towel and put it on the packing case, then set a somewhat larger wooden packing case just outside the tub and put my portable typewriter on it. Having made these arrangements, I sat down on the box in the tub and typed my notes of the hour’s talk with Gandhi. At intervals of a few minutes, when I began to perspire, I filled a bronze bowl with water from the tub and poured it over my back and limbs. By that method I was able to type for a whole hour without feeling too tired.
Dinner at five. I arrived earlier than Gandhi, and when he came in he said to me, “That’s better.” This was a reference to my having been late at lunch. I said I didn’t know whether it was more polite to come earlier or later than he did. “Artificial politeness,” he said, “is taboo here. Come whenever you like.”
He again tried to make me take a boiled onion. Again I refused firmly. “You will be famished here,” he said. I told him I cheated between meals and had buttermilk and tea. I said I had improved on his suggestion to sit in a tub and read—I sat in a tub and wrote, and I described my method. He laughed loudly. He apologized because he would not walk this evening; he felt tired.
When he saw that I had finished the meal, he said, “Fischer, you can go whenever you please. Don’t stand on ceremony. As I told you before, we want no artificial politeness here.” I got up, found my hat and shoes, and when I was outside the dining hall he said to me, “Has anyone told you that Jawaharlal is coming here on Sunday?”
“No,” I said, “what day is this? I’ve lost count of the days.”
“Friday,” he laughed.
“Would you agree,” I asked, “to stand for a photograph with me?”
“If a photographer is around by accident,” Gandhi replied. “I have no objections to being seen on a photograph with you.”
“That,” I said, “is the biggest compliment you have paid me.”
“Do you want compliments?” he inquired. “Don’t we all?” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed, “but sometimes we have to pay too dearly for them.”
I went home, got back into the tub, and typed out four questions which Gandhi had promised to answer in Harijan.
I felt that my interview with Gandhi today was of historic importance. He had changed his mind on what was the crucial issue for India; instead of his former statement that ‘The British Must Go,’ he had said to me, ‘The British can stay and conduct the war from India.’ In other words, he was ready to tolerate the war effort and, under certain circumstances, support it. His statements to me had indicated his readiness to compromise on the vital issue of Indian independence.
I lolled in my bed which stands in the open not far from the guest house. Kurshed warned me not to step off the bed at night without taking hold of the lighted kerosene lantern she had placed on the porch near by; she said scorpions were abroad.
From a distance I heard the soft tones of the prayer meeting, and then fell asleep at about nine. The night was cool.