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Gandhi's Passion This page intentionally left blank GANDHI'S PASSION The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi STANLEY WOLPERT OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXTORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and an associated company in Berlin Copyright © 2001 by Stanley Wolpert First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 2001 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, 10016 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2002 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wolpert, Stanley. Gandhi's passion : the life and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi / Stanley Wolpert. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-513060-X (cloth) ISBN 0-19-515634-X (pbk.) 1. Gandhi, Mahatma, 1869-1948. 2. Statesmen—India—Biography. 3. Nationalists—India—Biography. DS481.G3 W64 2001 954.03'5'092—dc21 [B] 00-045298 35798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper for John Kenneth Galbraith who has so generously shared his love of India, his friendship and his wisdom This page intentionally left blank PREFACE F OR MORE THAN half a century, from the day I first set foot on Indian soil, February 12, 1948, the day one-seventh of Mahatma Gandhi's ashes were immersed in waters off Bombay, I have been fas- cinated by the remarkable life and tragic death of the man Indians call "Great Soul" (Mahatma) and "Little Father" (Bapu). Stepping ashore at Bombay's bustling gateway to India I found myself surrounded by more people than I had ever seen, millions of white-clad mourners headed to Chowpatty beach, where a glistening white ship bore the urn filled with a portion of Gandhi's remains. As that bright vessel weighed anchor, thousands waded after it in the bay, hoping to touch the Mahatma's ashes before they were swallowed by the sea. At that time I knew no more about Gandhi than that he was called the Father of India yet had been murdered by an Indian of his own Hindu faith. The many questions raised by what I saw and heard that day changed the course of my life from marine engineering to Indian history. A decade later, when I began teaching at UCLA, I wrote my first book about Gandhi, a fic- tionalized story of his assassination, published as Nine Hours to Rama. Over the next four decades I periodically considered writing the history of Gandhi's life and his leadership of the Indian National Congress. After a year or two of trying in vain to plumb the ocean of Gandhiana with its con- flicting currents, however, I returned enthusiastically to teaching, opting to tackle other subjects and less enigmatic lives. Though invariably daunted by Gandhi's elusive personality and the extent of his archive, I kept hoping that greater maturity and deeper knowledge of India would help me to un- derstand the Mahatma's mentality and reasons for his often contradictory behavior. [ vii ] Preface After completing my India, A New History of India, Morley and India, Jinnah of Pakistan, Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan, and Nehru: A Tryst with Des- tiny, I decided it was time to return to the challenge of Gandhi. That was five years ago, when all ninety volumes of The Collected Works of Ma- hatma Gandhi had been published by Navajivan Press, in Ahmedabad, where Gandhi had founded his first Indian ashram. On my first visit to the famous Satyagraha Ashram, fewer than five volumes of his letters and papers were in print, though all letters written by or to him were then being indexed and filed chronologically by his disciples. The daily diaries and biographical works of Gandhi's faithful sec- retaries, Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal Nayar, were by then also in print, as was D. G. Tendulkar's exhaustive eight-volume chronicle, entitled Ma- hatma. After Mahadev's early death, Pyarelal took up his task and published two massive volumes called Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase. He was still working on another two, called Mahatma Gandhi: The First Phase, when he died. Pyarelal's sister, Dr. Sushila Nayar, one of Gandhi's most intimate disciples, completed her brother's labors the year I dined at her home in Delhi four years ago. I almost decided then to abandon my "Gandhi" once again, feeling that perhaps I had nothing new to add to what was known about the amazing man who called his life an "open book," and fearing that at age sixty-eight, completing my research and writing might take longer than my lifetime. Then, on May 11, 1998, I flew into Delhi to speak at India's Inter- national Center and learned that India had just exploded three under- ground nuclear bombs in Pokhran. A few days later Prime Minister Vajpayee announced, following several further successful explosions, that India had "a very big bomb" and was a "nuclear weapons State."1 The popular response in New Delhi and throughout most of India was eu- phoric. Much to my amazement, hardly any Indian voices were raised against so complete a departure from everything Mahatma Gandhi be- lieved in and had tried to teach throughout his mature life. His total faith in nonviolent love (ahimsa) as the surest path to peace, as well as Hinduism's "highest Religion," seemed forgotten by most of his newly militant, pride- ful heirs. "Hatred can be overcome only by love," Gandhi argued, insist- ing, "Let us keep our hearts and hands clean. Then we can ask for justice before the whole world. . . . [A]rms have to be given up. We cannot protect ourselves with arms."2 When asked by several Americans whether the atom bomb might not help to universalize ahimsa as "nothing else can?" Gandhi replied: "So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages. . . . Mankind has to get out of violence only through non-violence."3 I resolved that May to write my book on the life and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. I am deeply indebted to many wise friends for sharing their mem- [ viii ] Preface oirs of and insights into the life of Gandhi with me. My Sanskrit guru and friend, Professor W. Norman Brown, was the first of my teachers to tell me how singularly wise a man Gandhi was. A few years later, when I returned to India in 1957,1 was privileged to meet and walk with Mahatma Gandhi's foremost follower, Vinoba Bhave. Our neighbors in Poona, Rao Sahib and Pama Patwardhan, were close friends of Vinoba and thanks to them, my wife and I were welcomed to join Vinoba's entourage during his Gramdan ("Gift of Village") pilgrimage of Southern Maharashtra State on December 23, 1957, my thirtieth birthday. I vividly recall Vinobaji's unadorned frail body and totally unaffected, unpretentious spirit as well as the brilliance of his mind, and I have always felt that meeting and listening to him was as close as I ever came to meeting Gandhi himself. The Patwardhan brothers often reminisced about Gandhi in our nightly conversations and helped dis- pel some of the myths and much of the mystery that still shrouds his memory. Jaya Prakash (JP) Narayan, another good friend of Rao Sahib and Achyut Patwardhan, volunteered to join Vinoba's Jivandani ("Gift of Life") movement while I was still in India, and I also met him as well as his good wife, who had long been an intimate disciple of Mahatma Gandhi. Dr. Sushila Nayar, the only other lifelong follower of Mahatma Gandhi with whom I met in Delhi in 1996, thanks to our mutual friend and Gand- hian disciple, D. C. Jha, was much like Vinoba Bhave, totally devoid of pre- tense, her mind as sharp in its memory of her greatest patient as was her tongue in its defense of his unblemished character. Madame Vijaya Lakshmi ("Nan") Pandit, with whom I enjoyed several teas during the last decade of her life, in New Delhi, once told me that Mahatma Gandhi's "influence for the good" in her life was "as great" as her adored older brother Jawaharlal Nehru's influence had been. I never met any of Gandhi's sons, but I have recently had the pleasure of speaking at some length with Ma- hatma Gandhi's two most brilliant grandsons, Dr. Rajmohan Gandhi, whose Good Boatman sketches a sensitive illuminating portrait of Gand- hi's personality and mind, and Ambassador Gopal Gandhi, who was then assisting President K. R. Narayanan, in whose Rashtrapati Bhavan I met with him in January 2000, thanks to our good friend, former prime minister Inder Kumar Gujral. Over the last four decades I have learned so much about Gandhi from so many scholars and friends that I could not possibly mention or ad- equately thank all of them for contributing to my understanding of his life and legacy but must rest content to name just a few. My dear friend, Pro- fessor Stephen Hay of the University of California-Santa Barbara, who has devoted so much of his life to a meticulous study of Gandhi's early life and times, has been most generous and helpful, sharing his excellent published papers and entire library of Gandhiana with me. Thanks to Steve, I have come to appreciate the importance of Jainism to Gandhi's philosophy and [ ix ]