A Week with Gandhi/June 8, 1942
NEHRU SLEPT on a bed three feet from mine. He said that noises had disturbed him during the night. I never hear any noises. He told me he had come back last night at 9:15 from chatting with some friends in the ashram and thought he would spend the evening talking to me. But he found me sound asleep.
At six this morning Gandhi, surrounded by the usual group of eight or ten in white, went out for his usual walk. It is his silent day. He saw me on the porch and raised his arm high above his head in greeting. I spent the morning typing and talking to Nehru.
In the afternoon, Aryanaikam came over. He has studied with Dewey and Thorndike at Columbia University and took degrees at Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Oxford. He brought me a clean suit of white homespun khadi and also sandals, for he had noticed that the sand and gravel of Sevagram were wearing holes in my bedroom slippers. Apropos of his studies in America, he recalled a trip to New York on the “S.S. Berengaria” when the dining-room steward refused to serve him be cause he was brown. That stuck in his soul. His specialty is basic education, which means teaching peasant children crafts, chiefly spinning and weaving and agriculture. He said the Congress ministries had fostered this plan when they were in office in the Provinces between 1937 and 1939. But the British discouraged it. He showed me quotations from official British reports on education in India which stated that British methods had failed. He contended that the sole purpose of the educational system in India was to train clerks and government officials to work for the British. The government therefore was not interested, he said, in the education of the lower classes. It merely wished to educate part of the middle class which might serve it. The result was middle-class nationalism. Recently the British government had taken over the buildings of some teachers’ training schools.
Nehru, who had listened and agreed with Aryanaikam, asserted that if the British had applied to education a small part of what they spent on arms in peace-time in India the Indian peasant would not be so illiterate. Aryanaikam said the British always pleaded lack of funds to establish an adequate number of schools. He showed me the official British census figures: in 1921, seven per cent of the population of India were literate; in 1931, this had gone up to eight per cent. “Just imagine,” Aryanaikam exclaimed with an irony that was obviously painful to him, “one per cent increase in ten years.” The 1941 figures on illiteracy have been pronounced unreliable.
Gandhi’s silence ended early enough to enable him to receive me at three this afternoon for my usual daily interview. I started by saying that we had not even mentioned India’s biggest problem, the problem most difficult of solution.
“What’s that?” Gandhi demanded.
“India’s population,” I stated, “is increasing by five million each year. British official statistics show that the population of India increased from three hundred and thirty-eight million in 1931 to three hundred and eighty-eight million in 1941. Fifty million more mouths to feed and bodies to clothe and shelter. Fifty million more in ten years. How are you going to deal with that?”
“One of the answers might be birth control,” Gandhi said. “But I am opposed to birth control.”
“I am not,” I said, “but in a backward country like India birth control could not be very effective anyway.”
“Then perhaps we need some good epidemics,” Gandhi laughed.
“Or a good civil war,” I suggested gloomily. “But,” I went on, “Soviet Russia had famines, epidemics, and a civil war and yet her population grew very rapidly, and the Bolsheviks, in 1928, took certain economic measures.”
“You want to force me into an admission that we would need rapid industrialization,” Gandhi said. “I will not be forced into such an admission. Our first problem is to get rid of British rule. Then we will be free, without restraints from the out side, to do what India requires. The British have seen fit to allow us to have some factories and also to prohibit other factories. No! For me the paramount problem is the ending of British domination.”
This, obviously, was what he wanted to talk about; the vague future interested him less. “Well,” I asked, “how do you actually see your impending civil disobedience movement? What shape will it take?”
“In the villages,” Gandhi explained, “the peasants will stop paying taxes. They will make salt despite official prohibition. This seems a small matter; the salt tax yields only a paltry sum to the British government. But refusal to pay it will give the peasants the courage to think that they are capable of independent action. Their next step will be to seize the land.”
“With violence?” I asked.
“There may be violence, but then again the landlords may cooperate.”
“You are an optimist,” I said.
“They might cooperate by fleeing,” Gandhi said.
Nehru, who had been sitting by my side, said, “They might vote for confiscation with their legs just as you say in your Men and Politics that, as Lenin put it, the Russian soldier voted for peace with his legs in 1917—he ran away from the trenches. So also the Indian landowners might vote for the confiscation of their land by running away from the village.”
“Or,” I said, “they might organize violent resistance.”
“There may be fifteen days of chaos,” Gandhi speculated, “but I think we could soon bring that under control.”
“You feel then that it must be confiscation with out compensation?” I asked.
“Of course,” Gandhi agreed. “It would be financially impossible for anybody to compensate the landlords.”
“That accounts for the villages,” I said. “But that is not all of India.”
“No,” Gandhi stated. “Workingmen in the cities would leave their factories. The railroads would stop running.”
“General strike,” I said to myself. “I know,” I said aloud, “that you have in the past had a large following among the peasants, but your city working-class support is not so big.”
“No,” Gandhi acquiesced, “not so big. But this time the workingmen will act too, because, as I sense the mood of the country, everybody wants freedom, Hindus, Moslems, Untouchables, Sikhs, workers, peasants, industrialists, Indian civil servants, and even the Princes. The Princes know that a new wind is blowing. Things cannot go on as they have been. We cannot support a war which may perpetuate British domination. How can we fight for democracy in Japan, Germany, and Italy when India is not democratic? I want to save China. I want no harm to come to China. But to collaborate we must be free. Slaves do not fight for freedom.”
“Do you think,” I asked, “that the Moslems will follow you in your civil disobedience movement?”
“Not perhaps in the beginning,” Gandhi said. “But they will come in when they see that the movement is succeeding.”
“Might not the Moslems be used to interfere with or stop the movement?”
“Undoubtedly,” Gandhi agreed, “their leaders might try or the government might try, but the Moslem millions do not oppose independence and they could not, therefore, oppose our measures to bring about that independence. The Moslem masses sympathize with the one over-all goal of Congress: freedom for India. That is the solid rock on which Hindu-Moslem unity can be built.”
I made one last effort to bring the conversation back to the question of excess population. I could only get him to say that, “If there is large-scale industrialization, the state will of course have to lead the process.”
In the evening I went over to Mahadev Desai’s hut and watched him spin. He is the editor of Harijan, Gandhi’s English-language weekly, and he helped Gandhi to write his autobiography. He said he gave up his law practice at the age of twenty-five and has been closely associated with Gandhi ever since; that is, for the last twenty-five years. He told me that my talks with Gandhi have been the most important that he has had with any foreigner since 1939. He keeps complete notes of everything that Gandhi says, and he has notes of my conversations too. As we sat on the floor, I could understand how relaxing and pacifying the motions of spinning could be.
“All these days,” I said to Desai, “I have been listening carefully to Gandhi, and recording his words after each interview, and then rereading them and thinking about them and trying to fathom the source of Gandhi’s great influence. I have come to the conclusion, tentatively, that the chief reason for that influence is Gandhi’s passion.”
“That is right,” Desai said.
“What is the root of his passion?” I asked.
“This passion,” Desai explained, “is the sublimation of all the passions that flesh is heir to.”
“Sex?”
“Sex and anger and personal ambition. Gandhi can admit that he is wrong. He can chastise himself and take the blame for the mistakes of others, as when he called off a civil disobedience movement because it became violent. Gandhi is under his own complete control. That generates tremendous energy and passion within him.”
I have an impression that these Indians are much more honest than Westerners. They talk more honestly about themselves. They are more self-analytical and self-critical.