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The Asoka Pillars: A Challenging Interpretation
by India International Centre Quarterly Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 55-57 (3 pages)  
Notes & News
January 1976

-- Lumbini On Trial: The Untold Story, Lumbini Is An Astonishing Fraud Begun in 1896, by T. A. Phelps
-- The True Chronology of Aśokan Pillars, by John Irwin
-- The Asoka Pillars: A Challenging Interpretation, by India International Centre Quarterly
-- The Buddha and Dr. Fuhrer: An Archaeological Scandal, by Charles Allen]-- The Buddha and Dr. Fuhrer: An Archaeological Scandal, by Charles Allen

Highlights:

Mr. Irwin rejected the long-standing claim that all these pillars had been commissioned at the personal behest of Asoka in order to bear edicts propagating his Dharma Of 'Law'....According to Mr. Irwin there was evidence to show that a number of the pillars were pre-Asokan, and that they represented not the beginnings of monumental art in India, but the culmination of a much more ancient tradition evolved on Indian soil. "The key to their history" he said, "is a cult of pillar as axis of the universe. The cult was more or less universal in the ancient world, and it was central to the early religious experience of man -- So much so that its influences are imprinted upon all later religions. The pillars traditionally called Asokan represent a significant survival of those influences".

He traced how the pillars had come to be called 'Asokan' in the first place. The story, he said, began in 1834 when James Prinsep unlocked the mystery of the Asokan script, forgotten for 2,000 years. The first inscription deciphered by him happened to be found on the shaft of a pillar then lying topless on the ground al Allahabad, and with the identification of its signatory as Asoka, the concept of an 'Asokan pillar' was born.

"At that time, nobody stopped to consider the implications of Asoka's 7th Edict, which instructed that his message should be engraved on stone pillars already standing. They were also unaware that, in spite of Asoka's order, a number of the pillars subsequently discovered would turn out to have no inscriptions at all. The fact that an Asokan inscription appeared at all on a pillar led to the uncritical assumption that all pillars of this artistic genre had been erected by Asoka....

His own starting-point, he said, was the opposite of all previous investigators, "Whereas they had begun by assuming that an Asokan inscription on a pillar was prima facie evidence of Asokan origin, mine is to say: Don't let's assume any pillar was erected by Asoka unless there is positive proof to that effect." On this basis, Mr. Irwin said there were only two. Both happen to be topless shafts found near the Indo-Nepal border, in the region where the Buddha-to-be was born. We know that Asoka erected them because their inscriptions say so. However, as mere stumps they are of no help to the art historian. "As to the remaining fourteen 'Asokan pillars' which have survived in whole or in part, nobody had so far even tried to prove that any of them were actually erected by Asoka. Nor has anyone explained why, in spite of Asoka's orders, a number of them were not inscribed at all. The latter question becomes more pertinent when it is realized that Asoka's instructions were issued twice (once near the beginning and once near the end of his reign), and also that one of the uninscribed pillars still stands today within a short distance of his capital city, Pataliputra (modern Patna).

"Are we to assume that the orders of this autocratic monarch were deliberately flouted for a quarter of a century by subjects living within a a day's walk of his place? and, if so, why?...

The truth will gradually transpire as we go along, and by the end we shall have a new insight into what so-called 'Asokan pillars' are all about.

"In the course of our enquiries we shall have a lot to learn about the cult of the cosmic axis or axis mundi...

"That such a cult flourished in the Ganges basin long before Asoka -- and before even Buddhism and the Indo-Aryans -- can be proved beyond doubt, I believe."...

The manner of erecting free standing pillars varied greatly and Mr. Irwin argued that such pillars belonged to a much earlier date.

Pillars such as those at Sankhisa and Rampurva which possessed elephant and bull capitals were, he asserted, of pre-Buddhist origin. And both these animals were fertility symbols of an earlier cult. Pillars which were fitted into stone shafts were of a later date since they bore Asokan inscriptions...

Moreover, he argued that the pillars ascribed to Asoka differed from each other and therefore failed to present a homogenous activity which should have existed had they been erected around the same period...

The idea of a cosmic pillar was used by Indian monarchs, he said, to identify their power with the maintenance of cosmic order.

-- The Asoka Pillars: A Challenging Interpretation, by India International Centre Quarterly, 1976

Mr. John Irwin, Head of the Oriental Department, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited India on a British Academy travel fellowship and gave a series of lectures at the National Museum, entitled 'Foundations of Indian Art '. He also delivered two of these lectures at the India International Centre on January 20 and 21, 1976.

THE CENTRAL theme of John Irwin's lectures was to propound a new and challenging interpretation of the famous pillars traditionally called 'Asokan'. Briefly Mr. Irwin rejected the long-standing claim that all these pillars had been commissioned at the personal behest of Asoka in order to bear edicts propagating his Dharma Of 'Law'. He also disassociated himself from the theory of leading European scholars of the last hundred years, from Vincent Smith to Sir Mortimer Wheeler, that these pillars were modelled on Perso-Hellenistic prototypes. Instead he saw the pillars as "religious in function and Indian in form and style". According to Mr. Irwin there was evidence to show that a number of the pillars were pre-Asokan, and that they represented not the beginnings of monumental art in India, but the culmination of a much more ancient tradition evolved on Indian soil. "The key to their history" he said, "is a cult of pillar as axis of the universe. The cult was more or less universal in the ancient world, and it was central to the early religious experience of man -- So much so that its influences are imprinted upon all later religions. The pillars traditionally called Asokan represent a significant survival of those influences".

He traced how the pillars had come to be called 'Asokan' in the first place. The story, he said, began in 1834 when James Prinsep unlocked the mystery of the Asokan script, forgotten for 2,000 years. The first inscription deciphered by him happened to be found on the shaft of a pillar then lying topless on the ground al Allahabad, and with the identification of its signatory as Asoka, the concept of an 'Asokan pillar' was born.

Until about a hundred years ago in India, Ashoka was merely one of the many kings mentioned in the Mauryan dynastic list included in the Puranas. Elsewhere in the Buddhist tradition he was referred to as a chakravartin/ cakkavatti, a universal monarch, but this tradition had become extinct in India after the decline of Buddhism. However, in 1837, James Prinsep deciphered an inscription written in the earliest Indian script since the Harappan, brahmi. There were many inscriptions in which the King referred to himself as Devanampiya Piyadassi (the beloved of the gods, Piyadassi). The name did not tally with any mentioned in the dynastic lists, although it was mentioned in the Buddhist chronicles of Sri Lanka. Slowly the clues were put together but the final confirmation came in 1915, with the discovery of yet another version of the edicts in which the King calls himself Devanampiya Ashoka.

-- The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to A.D. 1300, by Romila Thapar

In a study of the Mauryan period a sudden flood of source material becomes available. Whereas with earlier periods of Indian history there is a frantic search to glean evidence from sources often far removed and scattered, with the Mauryan period there is a comparative abundance of information, from sources either contemporary or written at a later date.

This is particularly the case with the reign of Aśoka Maurya, since, apart from the unintentional evidence of sources such as religious literature, coins, etc., the edicts of the king himself, inscribed on rocks and pillars throughout the country, are available. These consist of fourteen major rock edicts located at Kālsi, Mānsehrā, Shahbāzgarhi, Girnār, Sopārā, Yeṟṟaguḍi, Dhauli, and Jaugaḍa; and a number of minor rock edicts and inscriptions at Bairāṭ, Rūpanāth, Sahasrām, Brahmagiri, Gāvimath, Jaṭiṅga-Rāmeshwar, Maski, Pālkīguṇḍu, Rajūla-Maṇḍagiri, Siddāpura, Yeṟṟaguḍi, Gujarra and Jhansi. Seven pillar edicts exist at Allahabad, Delhi-Toprā, Delhi-Meerut, Lauriyā-Ararāja, Lauriyā-Nandangarh, and Rāmpūrvā. Other inscriptions have been found at the Barābar Caves (three inscriptions), Rummindei, Nigali-Sāgar, Allahabad, Sanchi, Sārnāth, and Bairāṭ. Recently a minor inscription in Greek and Aramaic was found at Kandahar.

The importance of these inscriptions could not be appreciated until it was ascertained to whom the title ‘Piyadassi’ referred, since the edicts generally do not mention the name of any king; an exception to this being the Maski edict, which was not discovered until very much later in 1915. The earliest publication on this subject was by Prinsep, who was responsible for deciphering the edicts. At first Prinsep identified Devanampiya Piyadassi with a king of Ceylon, owing to the references to Buddhism. There were of course certain weaknesses in this identification, as for instance the question of how a king of Ceylon could order the digging of wells and the construction of roads in India, which the author of the edicts claims to have done. Later in the same year, 1837, the Dīpavaṃsa and the Mahāvaṃsa, two of the early chronicles of the history of Ceylon, composed by Buddhist monks, were studied in Ceylon, and Prinsep was informed of the title of Piyadassi given to Aśoka in those works. This provided the link for the new and correct identification of Aśoka as the author of the edicts.

-- Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, by Romila Thapar

Legends about past lives

Buddhist legends mention stories about Ashoka's past lives. According to a Mahavamsa story, Ashoka, Nigrodha and Devnampiya Tissa were brothers in a previous life. In that life, a pratyekabuddha was looking for honey to cure another, sick pratyekabuddha. A woman directed him to a honey shop owned by the three brothers. Ashoka generously donated honey to the pratyekabuddha, and wished to become the sovereign ruler of Jambudvipa for this act of merit. The woman wished to become his queen, and was reborn as Ashoka's wife Asandhamitta. Later Pali texts credit her with an additional act of merit: she gifted the pratyekabuddha a piece of cloth made by her. These texts include the Dasavatthuppakarana, the so-called Cambodian or Extended Mahavamsa (possibly from 9th–10th centuries), and the Trai Bhumi Katha (15th century).

According to an Ashokavadana story, Ashoka was born as Jaya in a prominent family of Rajagriha. When he was a little boy, he gave the Gautama Buddha dirt imagining it to be food. The Buddha approved of the donation, and Jaya declared that he would become a king by this act of merit. The text also state that Jaya's companion Vijaya was reborn as Ashoka's prime-minister Radhagupta. In the later life, the Buddhist monk Upagupta tells Ashoka that his rough skin was caused by the impure gift of dirt in the previous life. Some later texts repeat this story, without mentioning the negative implications of gifting dirt; these texts include Kumaralata's Kalpana-manditika, Aryashura's Jataka-mala, and the Maha-karma-vibhaga. The Chinese writer Pao Ch'eng's Shih chia ju lai ying hua lu asserts that an insignificant act like gifting dirt could not have been meritorious enough to cause Ashoka's future greatness. Instead, the text claims that in another past life, Ashoka commissioned a large number of Buddha statues as a king, and this act of merit caused him to become a great emperor in the next life.

The 14th century Pali-language fairy tale Dasavatthuppakarana (possibly from c. 14th century) combines the stories about the merchant's gift of honey, and the boy's gift of dirt. It narrates a slightly different version of the Mahavamsa story, stating that it took place before the birth of the Gautama Buddha. It then states that the merchant was reborn as the boy who gifted dirt to the Buddha; however, in this case, the Buddha his attendant to Ānanda to create plaster from the dirt, which is used repair cracks in the monastery walls....

Rediscovery

Ashoka had almost been forgotten, but in the 19th century James Prinsep contributed in the revelation of historical sources. After deciphering the Brahmi script, Prinsep had originally identified the "Priyadasi" of the inscriptions he found with the King of Ceylon Devanampiya Tissa. However, in 1837, George Turnour discovered an important Sri Lankan manuscript (Dipavamsa, or "Island Chronicle") associating Piyadasi with Ashoka:

"Two hundred and eighteen years after the beatitude of the Buddha, was the inauguration of Piyadassi, .... who, the grandson of Chandragupta, and the son of Bindusara, was at the time Governor of Ujjayani."

— Dipavamsa.[34]

-- Ashoka, by Wikipedia

[I would like at this point to pay belated acknowledgement to my respected friend and colleague, Karl Khandalawala, which whom I have sometimes expressed differences of interpretation, in this case in opposing his view (which on hindsight appears to be entirely correct) that the Sarnath pillar reveals the influences of foreign (Achaemenid) influence. I hope this eminent art historian will now accept my personal apology and withdrawal. On this particular issue I am ready to admit that he was right, though I reserve my differences on other issues involving Asokan pillars. A further issue reflecting his correctness is embodied in the self-styled title Asoka used as the opening words of many of his inscriptions (Devanampiya Piyadassi), often translated as 'Beloved of the Gods." A century ago, this term was rightly recognised by the brilliant French Indologist Emile Senart, as borrowed from earlier Achaemenid inscriptions in Persia, yet since then ignored by all authorities writing on Asoka in English.]

-- The True Chronology of Aśokan Pillars, by John Irwin

"At that time, nobody stopped to consider the implications of Asoka's 7th Edict, which instructed that his message should be engraved on stone pillars already standing. They were also unaware that, in spite of Asoka's order, a number of the pillars subsequently discovered would turn out to have no inscriptions at all. The fact that an Asokan inscription appeared at all on a pillar led to the uncritical assumption that all pillars of this artistic genre had been erected by Asoka. And since the ornament of the capitals included floral motifs reminiscent of the Greek anthemion or 'honey suckle-pattern', it was too readily assumed that the pillars embodied Greek influence. Nobody paused to consider whether the 'honeysuckle-pattern' was really Greek in the first place, or whether the Greeks might not themselves have been borrowers."

After summarizing the whole course of thinking on 'Asokan pillars' over the last 150 years, Mr. Irwin then threw down his gauntlet, inviting the audience "to forget everything said and thought hitherto and to follow me on an entirely different track."

His own starting-point, he said, was the opposite of all previous investigators, "Whereas they had begun by assuming that an Asokan inscription on a pillar was prima facie evidence of Asokan origin, mine is to say: Don't let's assume any pillar was erected by Asoka unless there is positive proof to that effect." On this basis, Mr. Irwin said there were only two. Both happen to be topless shafts found near the Indo-Nepal border, in the region where the Buddha-to-be was born. We know that Asoka erected them because their inscriptions say so. However, as mere stumps they are of no help to the art historian. "As to the remaining fourteen 'Asokan pillars' which have survived in whole or in part, nobody had so far even tried to prove that any of them were actually erected by Asoka. Nor has anyone explained why, in spite of Asoka's orders, a number of them were not inscribed at all. The latter question becomes more pertinent when it is realized that Asoka's instructions were issued twice (once near the beginning and once near the end of his reign), and also that one of the uninscribed pillars still stands today within a short distance of his capital city, Pataliputra (modern Patna).

"Are we to assume that the orders of this autocratic monarch were deliberately flouted for a quarter of a century by subjects living within a a day's walk of his place? and, if so, why?

"When I began researching in this field, I thought up a hypothetical answer. Perhaps (I argued with myself) the pillars were left uninscribed because they were under worship in a non-Buddhist context -- in which case it might have been unseemly for Asoka, the great advocate of religious tolerance, to impose edicts propagating his own personal interpretation of religious 'Law'.

"At this stage, I am not going to say whether this hypothesis was ultimately sustained in light of the research which followed. The value of a hypothesis is in the line of enquiry it opens up. In this case it turned out to be an exciting one ........ The truth will gradually transpire as we go along, and by the end we shall have a new insight into what so-called 'Asokan pillars' are all about.

"In the course of our enquiries we shall have a lot to learn about the cult of the cosmic axis or axis mundi, which specialists in the history of religion are now enabling us to recognize as central to the pre-history of religion, more or less throughout the world. This is a relatively new branch of study of profound importance to the understanding of the origins of art -- and much else besides.

"That such a cult flourished in the Ganges basin long before Asoka -- and before even Buddhism and the Indo-Aryans -- can be proved beyond doubt, I believe."

In the cult of tile axis mundi, the pillar served as a link between the terrestrial and the celestial areas, emerging from the primordial waters and pointing heavenwards. The pillar, he said, was not conceived to stand alone but was usually accompanied by a sacred tree -- peepul, neem avasttha -- and the sacred mound or stupa, representing the cosmic triad. Such pillars were originally wooden and were probably identical to the Indradhwaja or portable standard, and the Vedic yupa. The manner of erecting free standing pillars varied greatly and Mr. Irwin argued that such pillars belonged to a much earlier date.

Pillars such as those at Sankhisa and Rampurva which possessed elephant and bull capitals were, he asserted, of pre-Buddhist origin. And both these animals were fertility symbols of an earlier cult. Pillars which were fitted into stone shafts were of a later date since they bore Asokan inscriptions and were crowned by the heraldic lion capital for example, those at Sanchi, Lauriya Nandangarh, Rampurva, Gothihawa and Topra. The lion denoting temporal authority, was, he said, of West Asian origin. It reached India around fourth century BC and could have been adopted by Asoka or by the preceding Nanda dynasty. Moreover, he argued that the pillars ascribed to Asoka differed from each other and therefore failed to present a homogenous activity which should have existed had they been erected around the same period.

The other focal points of Mr. Irwin's lectures concerned the 'inverted lotus' and the reliefs depicted on the abacus on top of the pillar. He maintained that the capitals of the early wooden pillar had been fashioned from gilded copper and were then attached to the top of the wooden pillar. In order to prevent the shaft from splitting under the weight of the capital, fabric and rope were bound around it. When translated into stone this came to resemble the inverted lotus. Mr. Irwin disagreed with the view that the floral relief carved on the abacus had been derived from the Greek 'honeysuckle' pattern. According to his interpretation, the floral relief represented the Egyptian 'blue lotus' -- a water symbol which reached India in the centuries preceding Asoka. The common goose also depicted on the abacus symbolized the hamsa which was the traditional symbol of the union between the individual and the cosmic. Along with the chakra, symbolizing the sun, the lotus, depicting unfolding life, the goose, he said, is part of the primeval myth of creation.

The idea of a cosmic pillar was used by Indian monarchs, he said, to identify their power with the maintenance of cosmic order. Mr. Irwin claimed that although India shared the cult of axis mundi with other ancient civilizations, she had evolved her own meaning and form for it, and foreign craftsman had in no way contributed to its construction as has hitherto been believed.

The style of the Sarnath inscription (fig. 13) recalls even more forcibly Princep's query about the Prayaga/Allahabad engraving: 'Why such carelessly cut letters on a shaft so regularly tapered and polished?' We now know that the Sarnath Pillar, in common with other 'Schism Pillars' already discussed, is among the first pillars inscribed by Asoka. Far from marking the culmination a a truly Asokan tradition (as I once supposed), it marked the beginning. Moreover, as now seems to be clear, it was inaugurated under the tutelage of craftsmen formerly employed in the Perso-Hellenistic tradition of the Achaemenid dynasty, who had apparently been brought to India by Asoka especially for that purpose.12 [I would like at this point to pay belated acknowledgement to my respected friend and colleague, Karl Khandalawala, which whom I have sometimes expressed differences of interpretation, in this case in opposing his view (which on hindsight appears to be entirely correct) that the Sarnath pillar reveals the influences of foreign (Achaemenid) influence. I hope this eminent art historian will now accept my personal apology and withdrawal. On this particular issue I am ready to admit that he was right, though I reserve my differences on other issues involving Asokan pillars. A further issue reflecting his correctness is embodied in the self-styled title Asoka used as the opening words of many of his inscriptions (Devanampiya Piyadassi), often translated as 'Beloved of the Gods." A century ago, this term was rightly recognised by the brilliant French Indologist Emile Senart, as borrowed from earlier Achaemenid inscriptions in Persia, yet since then ignored by all authorities writing on Asoka in English.]

-- The True Chronology of Aśokan Pillars, by John Irwin

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The True Chronology of Aśokan Pillars
by John Irwin
Artibus Asiae, Vol. 44, No., pp. 247-265 (19 pages)
1983

-- Lumbini On Trial: The Untold Story, Lumbini Is An Astonishing Fraud Begun in 1896, by T. A. Phelps

-- The True Chronology of Aśokan Pillars, by John Irwin

-- The Asoka Pillars: A Challenging Interpretation, by India International Centre Quarterly

-- The Buddha and Dr. Fuhrer: An Archaeological Scandal, by Charles Allen]-- The Buddha and Dr. Fuhrer: An Archaeological Scandal, by Charles Allen

Highlights:

Students of ancient India have been brought up in the belief that the nation's earliest sculptured monuments -- so-called 'Asokan' pillars -- have been inspired and erected by Asoka, first Buddhist ruler of a united India. This belief continues to be perpetuated up to the present day by leaders of the Archaeological Survey of India, fully aware that it was born and nurtured under the British raj over the last 150 years...

Both the Rampurva Bull and the Sankisa Elephant are, in my opinion, masterpieces of underestimated antiquity and importance. Both sculptures are unquestionably of pre-Asokan and even pre-Buddhist origin, as I suggested a decade ago in my Burlington Magazine series (see fn. 3, above). Since then, these conclusions have met with opposition in the West as well as in India; from Buddhists as well as non-Buddhists (although none has stated a case for his opposition). It is only now that public opinion is ready to listen. A decisive moment of change coincided with the publication in Berlin of my 1979 address to the Fifth Conference of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe, where I read a paper offering firm proof that the Allahabad/Prayaga (formerly, 'Allahabad-Kosam') Pillar -- shown here in its present-day form at fig. 3) had been another pre-Asokan Bull-pillar like the one found at Rampurva (fig. 1)...

[T]he Prayaga/Allahabad pillar now turns out to be the first surviving (so-called) 'Asokan' pillar to have been inscribed; as we now know (see fn. 7, above), that it was already standing with a plain shaft when it was engraved. The 'Schism Edict' was in fact the first pillar inscription of any kind known to have been executed. Its style is not truly calligraphic, but the work of a relatively inexperienced engraver working from a scaffold or ladder...

In my final remarks, I should like to correct a misjudgment in my 1973 lectures (see above, fn. 3). Looking at the pillars with a less mature eye, I singled out, as high watermark of the series, the Sarnath Pillar (fig. 12). That choice I now recant...Brilliant though the execution of the Sarnath capital undoubtedly is, we fall back on seeing it as essentially heraldic. The sentiment it expresses is correspondingly public, lacking in 'soul', as a mystic might say. It cannot on that account be placed in the highest category of creative art, or on equal terms with such pre-Asokan masterpieces as the Ramapurva Bull (fig. 1) and the Sankisa Elephant (fig. 2)....

The style of the Sarnath inscription (fig. 13) recalls even more forcibly Princep's query about the Prayaga/Allahabad engraving: 'Why such carelessly cut letters on a shaft so regularly tapered and polished?' We now know that the Sarnath Pillar, in common with other 'Schism Pillars' already discussed, is among the first pillars inscribed by Asoka. Far from marking the culmination a a truly Asokan tradition (as I once supposed), it marked the beginning. Moreover, as now seems to be clear, it was inaugurated under the tutelage of craftsmen formerly employed in the Perso-Hellenistic tradition of the Achaemenid dynasty, who had apparently been brought to India by Asoka especially for that purpose.12 [I would like at this point to pay belated acknowledgement to my respected friend and colleague, Karl Khandalawala, which whom I have sometimes expressed differences of interpretation, in this case in opposing his view (which on hindsight appears to be entirely correct) that the Sarnath pillar reveals the influences of foreign (Achaemenid) influence. I hope this eminent art historian will now accept my personal apology and withdrawal. On this particular issue I am ready to admit that he was right, though I reserve my differences on other issues involving Asokan pillars. A further issue reflecting his correctness is embodied in the self-styled title Asoka used as the opening words of many of his inscriptions (Devanampiya Piyadassi), often translated as 'Beloved of the Gods." A century ago, this term was rightly recognised by the brilliant French Indologist Emile Senart, as borrowed from earlier Achaemenid inscriptions in Persia, yet since then ignored by all authorities writing on Asoka in English.]

-- The True Chronology of Aśokan Pillars, by John Irwin

Students of ancient India have been brought up in the belief that the nation's earliest sculptured monuments -- so-called 'Asokan' pillars -- have been inspired and erected by Asoka, first Buddhist ruler of a united India. This belief continues to be perpetuated up to the present day by leaders of the Archaeological Survey of India, fully aware that it was born and nurtured under the British raj over the last 150 years. From the very first moment of Independence, official opinion in India has clung tenaciously to the old beliefs, reluctant to think the problem afresh. The first Indian Director -- the late N.P. Chakravarty -- set the tone in 1947 by declaring that 'it is impossible to suppose that the pillars were raised by anyone except Asoka'.1 [N.P. Chakravarty, 'The Rock-edicts of Asoka and some connected problems', Ancient India, Bulletin of Archaeological Survey of India, no. 4, 1947-48, p. 25. The author added: 'There is no room to doubt that the pillars are Buddhistic and were therefore set up by Asoka himself and no other ruler' (ibid., p. 25).] Twenty years later, the same opinion was repeated by his successor A. Ghosh, who insisted that any other conclusion was 'unthinkable'2 [A. Ghosh, 'The Pillars of Asoka -- Their Purpose', East and West, Is. M.E.O., Rome, Vol. 17, 1967, pp. 273-75.] -- a statement apparently intended to silence those independent scholars who had vaguely mooted the possibility that some of the pillars might have been already standing without inscriptions before Asoka came to the throne. None, however, had offered, or even dreamt of the possibility that some pillars eventually bearing Asokan inscriptions had been standing with plain shafts before he ruled. This is surprising, for in the first Minor Rock Edict, at Rupnath and at Sahasram, attributed to the eleventh year of his reign, Asoka ordered that his edicts should be engraved on stone pillars if there were stone pillars (available). In the seventh Pillar Edict, issued in the 26th year, he makes two separate references to pillars: in line 23 saying that for the purpose of propagating his Law (dhamma), he has erected Pillars of Law (dhammathambani); and in line 32, that in order that his message should endure it should be engraved wherever pillars or stone slabs are available. Here it is important to recognize that two unrelated things are being said: in line 23 that for the purpose of spreading his message he has erected a certain type of pillar (without saying how many, or where, or when); and in line 32, that quite apart from those pillars that he himself has erected, he wants his edicts engraved on stone pillars already existing -- by implication, not erected by himself.

Soon after beginning research in the 1960s on the origin and meaning of the so-called Asokan pillars, I reached the conclusion that there was no rational basis to the claim that all of them were Asokan, or even Buddhist monuments, but much evidence to the contrary.3 [Those ideas were first publicly advanced in my series of Lowell Institute Lectures on 'The Foundations of Indian Art' delivered at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1973, and later summarized in four successive issues of the Burlington Magazine, London, vols. 115-118, 1973-76, under the title '"Asokan" Pillars: a reassessment of the evidence.'] Among the sculptures so mis-attributed was the great Bull capital (fig. 1) excavated at Rampurva in 1908, which had been characterised by Sir John Marshall, the Director of Archaeology at that time, as 'an inferior piece of sculpture', and as 'wholly alien to the spirit of Indian art'.4 [Sir John Marshall and Alfred Foucher, The Monuments of Sanchi, vol. I, Calcutta, 1939, pp. 89-90; and J.H. Marshall, 'Archaeological Exploration in India 1907-08', Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, London, 1908, esp. p. 1088.]

A chance to make my indignation felt came in 1947-48 when, in a junior role as organising secretary of the British Royal Academy's great Winter Exhibition of The Art of India and Pakistan (the first major exhibition of Indian art ever held, intended in this case to celebrated the handing over of power), I was able to use what influence I could to ensure that the Bull capital was included among loans from India.

Moreover, I was even able to ensure that it had pride of place at the entrance to the exhibition. A pre-Asokan attribution was rejected for the catalogue;5 [The Art of India and Pakistan (edited by Leigh Ashton), being the Commemorative Catalogue of that Exhibition, compiled jointly by K. de B. Codrington, Basil Gray and John Irwin, London, 1950.] but it gave me pleasure when, on the return of the sculpture to India, it was singled out by the new Government for an honoured place in the portico of the President's Palace at Delhi, where it remains up to the present day -- still displayed as an 'Asokan capital'!

A second masterpiece belonging to the same art historical category, but less honoured in position, is the Sankisa Elephant (fig. 2) -- now imprisoned behind iron bars at its original site of excavation in 1862,6 [The original excavation report appears in Alexander Cunningham's article on 'Sankisa', Archaeological Survey Reports for the period 1862-65 (Calcutta 1871), vol. I, pp. xl-xli.] where its quality eludes the camera (hence my dependence at fig. 2 on a faded photography taken at the time of discovery, damaged and incomplete).

Both the Rampurva Bull and the Sankisa Elephant are, in my opinion, masterpieces of underestimated antiquity and importance. Both sculptures are unquestionably of pre-Asokan and even pre-Buddhist origin, as I suggested a decade ago in my Burlington Magazine series (see fn. 3, above). Since then, these conclusions have met with opposition in the West as well as in India; from Buddhists as well as non-Buddhists (although none has stated a case for his opposition). It is only now that public opinion is ready to listen. A decisive moment of change coincided with the publication in Berlin of my 1979 address to the Fifth Conference of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe, where I read a paper offering firm proof that the Allahabad/Prayaga (formerly, 'Allahabad-Kosam') Pillar -- shown here in its present-day form at fig. 3) had been another pre-Asokan Bull-pillar like the one found at Rampurva (fig. 1)7. [John Irwin, 'The Prayaga Bull pillar: another pre-Asokan monument?' included in Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe under the title South Asian Archaeology 1979, edited by H. Hartel, Dietrich Reimer, Berlin, 1981, Part II, pp. 313-340.] From this moment, letters from scholars in other parts of the world identifying themselves with conclusions arising from this thesis began coming in, and I then felt that the battle for recognition of pre-Asokan pillars would be won. This, I believe, will be reinforced when the second part of my Prayaga-Pillar thesis appears later this year in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, London, under the title 'Origins of the Pre-Asokan Pillar-cult at Prayaga (Allahabad)'8, [John Irwin, 'Origins of the pre-Asokan Pillar cult at Prayaga (Allahabad)', since published in the third part of the 1983 volume of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, London.] to be followed by another entitled 'Buddhism and the Cosmic Pillar', now in press as an offering to Felicitation Volume in honour of Professor Giuseppe Tucci to be edited by Prof. Gherardo Gnoli for the Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, Rome, due to be presented in June, 1984).

Here, I am leaving all that aside to embark on a different course, which is to offer a definitive chronology of the true Asokan pillar, discounting those we now know were pre-Asokan. In other words our aim is to state clearly the order and dates of those pillars we know were both carved and erected by Asoka -- which are they? The latter question can be answered only after we are clear about which ones they are not. They do not include the Prayaga (Allahabad) pillar, since we now know that that monument had been standing with a plain shaft before Asoka instructed his mahamatras to engrave it with his first six Pillar Edicts which were issued in 243 B.C.9 [P.H.L. Eggermont, The Chronology of the reign of Asoka Moriya, Leiden (Brills), 1956, p. 67, and Supplement III.] However, in addition to the latter were engraved two earlier edicts: the first of these had been addressed by Asoka to the nearest dharma-mahamatras or 'ministers of morality' located at the regional capital, Kosambi, 30 km. to the west; the second was one of those 'Schism Edicts' first discovered and translated by Alexander Cunningham in 1870, and published in facsimile nine years later in the first edition of Inscriptions of Asoka.10 [Alexander Cunningham, Inscriptions of Asoka, Archaeological Survey of India, Corpus inscriptionum Indicarum, Calcutta, 1879 (The 'Schism Edict' is reproduced in facsimile at Plate XXII under the heading 'Kosambi Edict'.] It is now important to recognise that nobody before Cunningham had known about this inscription -- and the reason why. My inability to publish an actual photograph, depending instead on a reproduction of Cunningham's facsimile (fig. 4), has nothing to do with bureaucratic restrictions forbidding a camera in the Fort: the truth is that even if I had been allowed to take my camera, I could not have photographed the inscription satisfactorily, since it is too high and awkwardly placed on the shaft to be taken from the ground without special lenses. It is likewise important to know that the height above ground-level at which the inscription now appears is not the original height, which was lower on the shaft. The explanation is that when the shaft was re-erected in 1837 (after lying for a long period on the ground), the antiquarians of the Bengal Asiatic Society who had planned the restoration, being ignorant of the religious function of a cosmic pillar and thinking of it only as a 'victory column', went out of their say to re-install it on a specially-designed plinth that it was never meant to have. Up-to-date knowledge about the ritual function of a cosmic pillar tells us that in ancient times they were erected as if to appear rising nakedly out of the subterranean Waters, the Cosmic Ocean of the cosmogony. The presence of a plinth could only serve as evidence that the older meaning had been forgotten. The most important point that transpires at the present stage of our thesis is that the Prayaga/Allahabad pillar now turns out to be the first surviving (so-called) 'Asokan' pillar to have been inscribed; as we now know (see fn. 7, above), that it was already standing with a plain shaft when it was engraved. The 'Schism Edict' was in fact the first pillar inscription of any kind known to have been executed. Its style is not truly calligraphic, but the work of a relatively inexperienced engraver working from a scaffold or ladder.

At the time the 'Schism Edict' was engraved, the location of the Prayaga/Allahabad pillar was already recognised as 'the holiest spot in India', and was venerated by all religious sects, as fully discussed in my two Prayaga papers (see footnotes 7 and 8, above). This spot coincided with the Holy Conference of two sacred rivers, the Ganga and the Yamuna, which was in turn synonymous in cosmogonic myth with the Spot at which Heaven and Earth were separated 'in the beginning' (in illo tempore).

The facsimile of fig. 5 shows the opening section of the Six Pillar Edicts as they appear on the shaft of the Prayaga/Allahabad Pillar. As long ago as 1835, James Prinsep (known as the 'father of Indian archaeology') placed this facsimile side-by-side with facsimiles of the same section as it appears on the pillars at Lauriya-Araraj, Lauriya-Nandangarh, and Delhi/Topra, noting that the Allahabad version was crude in comparison with the fine cutting of the others. This prompted him to ask: 'Why did such carelessly cut letters feature on a shaft so regularly tapered and polished?' The question is as pertinent today as it was in 1835 when it was left unanswered. In the meantime, Prinsep's re-discovery of the script resulted in his sensational revelation that the author was none other than the great Asoka -- thus laying the first firm foundations for the study of ancient India. In the ensuing excitement, the question was put aside and forgotten, never to be raised again -- until now, when we are at last in a position to answer.

Until about a hundred years ago in India, Ashoka was merely one of the many kings mentioned in the Mauryan dynastic list included in the Puranas. Elsewhere in the Buddhist tradition he was referred to as a chakravartin/ cakkavatti, a universal monarch, but this tradition had become extinct in India after the decline of Buddhism. However, in 1837, James Prinsep deciphered an inscription written in the earliest Indian script since the Harappan, brahmi. There were many inscriptions in which the King referred to himself as Devanampiya Piyadassi (the beloved of the gods, Piyadassi). The name did not tally with any mentioned in the dynastic lists, although it was mentioned in the Buddhist chronicles of Sri Lanka. Slowly the clues were put together but the final confirmation came in 1915, with the discovery of yet another version of the edicts in which the King calls himself Devanampiya Ashoka.

-- The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to A.D. 1300, by Romila Thapar

In a study of the Mauryan period a sudden flood of source material becomes available. Whereas with earlier periods of Indian history there is a frantic search to glean evidence from sources often far removed and scattered, with the Mauryan period there is a comparative abundance of information, from sources either contemporary or written at a later date.

This is particularly the case with the reign of Aśoka Maurya, since, apart from the unintentional evidence of sources such as religious literature, coins, etc., the edicts of the king himself, inscribed on rocks and pillars throughout the country, are available. These consist of fourteen major rock edicts located at Kālsi, Mānsehrā, Shahbāzgarhi, Girnār, Sopārā, Yeṟṟaguḍi, Dhauli, and Jaugaḍa; and a number of minor rock edicts and inscriptions at Bairāṭ, Rūpanāth, Sahasrām, Brahmagiri, Gāvimath, Jaṭiṅga-Rāmeshwar, Maski, Pālkīguṇḍu, Rajūla-Maṇḍagiri, Siddāpura, Yeṟṟaguḍi, Gujarra and Jhansi. Seven pillar edicts exist at Allahabad, Delhi-Toprā, Delhi-Meerut, Lauriyā-Ararāja, Lauriyā-Nandangarh, and Rāmpūrvā. Other inscriptions have been found at the Barābar Caves (three inscriptions), Rummindei, Nigali-Sāgar, Allahabad, Sanchi, Sārnāth, and Bairāṭ. Recently a minor inscription in Greek and Aramaic was found at Kandahar.

The importance of these inscriptions could not be appreciated until it was ascertained to whom the title ‘Piyadassi’ referred, since the edicts generally do not mention the name of any king; an exception to this being the Maski edict, which was not discovered until very much later in 1915. The earliest publication on this subject was by Prinsep, who was responsible for deciphering the edicts. At first Prinsep identified Devanampiya Piyadassi with a king of Ceylon, owing to the references to Buddhism. There were of course certain weaknesses in this identification, as for instance the question of how a king of Ceylon could order the digging of wells and the construction of roads in India, which the author of the edicts claims to have done. Later in the same year, 1837, the Dīpavaṃsa and the Mahāvaṃsa, two of the early chronicles of the history of Ceylon, composed by Buddhist monks, were studied in Ceylon, and Prinsep was informed of the title of Piyadassi given to Aśoka in those works. This provided the link for the new and correct identification of Aśoka as the author of the edicts.

-- Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, by Romila Thapar

Legends about past lives

Buddhist legends mention stories about Ashoka's past lives. According to a Mahavamsa story, Ashoka, Nigrodha and Devnampiya Tissa were brothers in a previous life. In that life, a pratyekabuddha was looking for honey to cure another, sick pratyekabuddha. A woman directed him to a honey shop owned by the three brothers. Ashoka generously donated honey to the pratyekabuddha, and wished to become the sovereign ruler of Jambudvipa for this act of merit. The woman wished to become his queen, and was reborn as Ashoka's wife Asandhamitta. Later Pali texts credit her with an additional act of merit: she gifted the pratyekabuddha a piece of cloth made by her. These texts include the Dasavatthuppakarana, the so-called Cambodian or Extended Mahavamsa (possibly from 9th–10th centuries), and the Trai Bhumi Katha (15th century).

According to an Ashokavadana story, Ashoka was born as Jaya in a prominent family of Rajagriha. When he was a little boy, he gave the Gautama Buddha dirt imagining it to be food. The Buddha approved of the donation, and Jaya declared that he would become a king by this act of merit. The text also state that Jaya's companion Vijaya was reborn as Ashoka's prime-minister Radhagupta. In the later life, the Buddhist monk Upagupta tells Ashoka that his rough skin was caused by the impure gift of dirt in the previous life. Some later texts repeat this story, without mentioning the negative implications of gifting dirt; these texts include Kumaralata's Kalpana-manditika, Aryashura's Jataka-mala, and the Maha-karma-vibhaga. The Chinese writer Pao Ch'eng's Shih chia ju lai ying hua lu asserts that an insignificant act like gifting dirt could not have been meritorious enough to cause Ashoka's future greatness. Instead, the text claims that in another past life, Ashoka commissioned a large number of Buddha statues as a king, and this act of merit caused him to become a great emperor in the next life.

The 14th century Pali-language fairy tale Dasavatthuppakarana (possibly from c. 14th century) combines the stories about the merchant's gift of honey, and the boy's gift of dirt. It narrates a slightly different version of the Mahavamsa story, stating that it took place before the birth of the Gautama Buddha. It then states that the merchant was reborn as the boy who gifted dirt to the Buddha; however, in this case, the Buddha his attendant to Ānanda to create plaster from the dirt, which is used repair cracks in the monastery walls....

Rediscovery

Ashoka had almost been forgotten, but in the 19th century James Prinsep contributed in the revelation of historical sources. After deciphering the Brahmi script, Prinsep had originally identified the "Priyadasi" of the inscriptions he found with the King of Ceylon Devanampiya Tissa. However, in 1837, George Turnour discovered an important Sri Lankan manuscript (Dipavamsa, or "Island Chronicle") associating Piyadasi with Ashoka:

"Two hundred and eighteen years after the beatitude of the Buddha, was the inauguration of Piyadassi, .... who, the grandson of Chandragupta, and the son of Bindusara, was at the time Governor of Ujjayani."

— Dipavamsa.[34]

-- Ashoka, by Wikipedia

[I would like at this point to pay belated acknowledgement to my respected friend and colleague, Karl Khandalawala, which whom I have sometimes expressed differences of interpretation, in this case in opposing his view (which on hindsight appears to be entirely correct) that the Sarnath pillar reveals the influences of foreign (Achaemenid) influence. I hope this eminent art historian will now accept my personal apology and withdrawal. On this particular issue I am ready to admit that he was right, though I reserve my differences on other issues involving Asokan pillars. A further issue reflecting his correctness is embodied in the self-styled title Asoka used as the opening words of many of his inscriptions (Devanampiya Piyadassi), often translated as 'Beloved of the Gods." A century ago, this term was rightly recognised by the brilliant French Indologist Emile Senart, as borrowed from earlier Achaemenid inscriptions in Persia, yet since then ignored by all authorities writing on Asoka in English.]

-- The True Chronology of Aśokan Pillars, by John Irwin

The answer presents itself in the following way. On every pillar now known with certainty to have been both inscribed and erected by Asoka, the lettering is neat and well-spaced: the evidence presents itself most clearly on the two pillars raised to commemorate Asoka's tour of the Buddhist Holy Spots in 257 B.C. (figs. 6a & b). In each case, the inscription actually says that Asoka was both the inscriber and the erector. How, then, do we explain the conspicuous difference between the lettering of these two inscriptions, on the one hand, and the crudeness at Prayaga/Allahabad, on the other?

Before trying to answer, it must first be considered exactly how stone-engravers in Asoka's time set about their task. We find that there were two alternative methods, according to whether a shaft was lying horizontally on the ground before erection, or was already standing as described in line 32 of the Seventh Pillar Edict.11 [E. Hultzsch, Insriptions of Asoka, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Oxford, 1925, p. 137.] In the former case, the answer can be supplied by anybody keeping their eyes open at building sites in India up to the present day. I have the record of many photographs. At fig. 7, for instance, we see a master-craftsman detailing a column to be built into a new Jain temple near Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, where it was taken in 1979, without the craftsman's knowledge, in order to illustrate his pose. Squatting is natural to the Indian physique and living habits. By sitting astride a column and looking down at his work, the craftsman achieves maximum control of the chisel. This is the position traditionally employed when the lines of an inscription are short; but if the text to be copied is a long one, like the Six Pillar Edicts, another position has to be sought, because after cutting the first few words, the whole column would have to be rolled over, in order to bring a fresh surface to the top; and at the end of each line, it would have to be rolled back to the starting-point for the beginning of the next line. For a long text, this is a very unsatisfactory method, since it involves great labour, with at least four rollings for each line, and forty or more for the usual ten lines -- no mean task for an Asokan column weighing some thirty tons!

A simpler method therefore becomes desirable, in order to reduce the need for frequent and laborious rolling. This can be achieved only by keeping the lines to be copied as short as possible, to facilitate progress from the end of one line to the next without any rolling at all. This is exactly what we find in the case of every pillar known to have been both inscribed and erected with the famous Six Pillar Edicts. The method characteristically adopted was to arrange the layout of the text on what printers in their jargon call the 'vertical box' system. In this way, each edict was arranged to face one of the four directions, which meant that no shaft would need to be rolled on the ground more than four times. (An example of this layout is indicated in the sketch at fig. 8).

Switching your mind next from a shaft lying on the ground before erection, to one already standing before it was engraved, the solution would then be the opposite. This is exactly what happened when the Prayaga/Allahabad Pillar was inscribed: there is every indication that the stonemason had been working from the shaky foundation of some kind of ladder or scaffold, the lines of the text being long, and almost completely circulating the shaft, thus minimizing the number of changes in level.

There is no need to spend more time on this part of my thesis, since it is fully discussed and illustrated in my 1979 paper (see above, fn. 7). There is, however, one exception to prove the rule, and here I allude to the Delhi-Topra inscription (figs. 9 and 10). In that case, the pillar bears -- in addition to the famous Six Edicts -- an even more famous Seventh, sometimes called 'Asoka's Last Testament,' because it was issued after the first Six, in the last years of Asoka's long reign.

Whereas the first Six had been engraved when the shaft was lying on the ground before erection, the Seventh was later added to the shaft when already standing. In this case only, the two methods were separately employed (fig. 9). Having started the Seventh Edict on the 'vertical box' principle described above, and illustrated here at figs. 8 and 10, a sudden change follows at line 31 where his predecessor had left off, already starting to lose control of level and uniformity of lettering. Breaking off at that point (fig. 10), he continues the Seventh Edict by the second method, carrying the remainder of the text right round the shaft (fig. 11).

In my final remarks, I should like to correct a misjudgment in my 1973 lectures (see above, fn. 3). Looking at the pillars with a less mature eye, I singled out, as high watermark of the series, the Sarnath Pillar (fig. 12). That choice I now recant. As I then put it, the great appeal of the Sarnath Pillar is a timeless quality, which I identified as 'worldly authority idealised.' Today, I see no reason to revise that description, since it fits with what we know of Asoka's political idealism. Yet, the world has since moved on, and many of us have no become innately suspicious of 'worldly authority idealised,' and see it as a shallow compliment. Brilliant though the execution of the Sarnath capital undoubtedly is, we fall back on seeing it as essentially heraldic. The sentiment it expresses is correspondingly public, lacking in 'soul', as a mystic might say. It cannot on that account be placed in the highest category of creative art, or on equal terms with such pre-Asokan masterpieces as the Ramapurva Bull (fig. 1) and the Sankisa Elephant (fig. 2).

Nobody is likely to doubt that the Sarnath capital is Asokan. In our present context, the most significant fact to be noted is that it is another of the 'Schism Pillars', as its inscription reveals (fig. 13). Therefore, we now know that it was carved before any lion-pillar bearing the Six Pillar Edicts, which were issued in 243 B.C.; it was inscribed at a time when experience in stone-engraving was still minimal in India.

The style of the Sarnath inscription (fig. 13) recalls even more forcibly Princep's query about the Prayaga/Allahabad engraving: 'Why such carelessly cut letters on a shaft so regularly tapered and polished?' We now know that the Sarnath Pillar, in common with other 'Schism Pillars' already discussed, is among the first pillars inscribed by Asoka. Far from marking the culmination a a truly Asokan tradition (as I once supposed), it marked the beginning. Moreover, as now seems to be clear, it was inaugurated under the tutelage of craftsmen formerly employed in the Perso-Hellenistic tradition of the Achaemenid dynasty, who had apparently been brought to India by Asoka especially for that purpose.12 [I would like at this point to pay belated acknowledgement to my respected friend and colleague, Karl Khandalawala, which whom I have sometimes expressed differences of interpretation, in this case in opposing his view (which on hindsight appears to be entirely correct) that the Sarnath pillar reveals the influences of foreign (Achaemenid) influence. I hope this eminent art historian will now accept my personal apology and withdrawal. On this particular issue I am ready to admit that he was right, though I reserve my differences on other issues involving Asokan pillars. A further issue reflecting his correctness is embodied in the self-styled title Asoka used as the opening words of many of his inscriptions (Devanampiya Piyadassi), often translated as 'Beloved of the Gods." A century ago, this term was rightly recognised by the brilliant French Indologist Emile Senart, as borrowed from earlier Achaemenid inscriptions in Persia, yet since then ignored by all authorities writing on Asoka in English.] In patronising the first pillar to incorporate his own conception of kingship, Asoka had broken away from the older, Indian conceptions expressed in pre-Asokan capitals. It might even be supposed that he was impatient of the earlier magico-religious associations of the brahmanical pillar-cult based on worship of Indra as 'king of the gods'. The latter had come into being when India was basically tribal or semi-tribal. Now the earlier cult was being challenged by concepts of imperial sovereignty Asoka had taken from the Achaemenid example. Hence, the moustachioed lions of the Sarnath capital (fig. 12) belong to a totally different tradition of animal sculpture, not only aesthetically, but also in terms of anatomical observation (fig. 14). The Sarnath Lions cannot be compared in any sense of style with the Rampurva Bull or the Sankisa Elephant (figs. 1 and 2) as repositories of the true Indian genius of animal art. We cannot escape the observation that the Sarnath Lions were first in the series of Lion capitals Asoka was subsequently to commission, inscribe, and erect, terminating with the capital excavated close to the site of the famous Bull (fig. 1) at Rampurva, the Lion now being preserved in Calcutta Museum (fig. 15).

When all has been said about the Sarnath monument, I do not believe that its famous lion capital was the first lion sculpture carved on Indian soil. In contradiction with other scholars, I have always felt that credit for that achievement should go to carvers of the Vaisali lion-pillar, as argued in part I of my Burlington series in 1973 (see fn. 3, above). (I bypass here what seems to me to be the specious case argued as recently as 1980 -- ostensibly by an officer signing himself as a member of the Archaeological Survey of India.13 [Kalyan Priya Gupta, 'New evidence from Kolhua (Vaisali) Pillar', in Puratattva, Bulletin of the Archaeological Society, New Delhi, 1979-80, pp. 145-47, with two pages of plates. Although he signs himself as an officer of the Archaeological Survey, the author's case is oddly compounded with a mixture of unacknowledged and distorted plagiarisms, inaccuracies, and absurdities (including the transposition of Prinsep -- spelt 'Princep' -- into the 18th century, long before he was born) and interspersed with amateurish archaeological sketches. I cannot afford space in this context to take it seriously, knowing that his 'new evidence' could not carry weight even with a first-year archaeological student.]) Asoka, after packing off to their Iranian homeland in 258 B.C. the Perso-Hellenistic tutors who had guided the creation of the Sarnath capital, next commissioned another lion capital in what was to mark the beginning of a new Indian tradition. It was also another 'Schism Pillar,' this time erected at Sanchi (fig. 16), carved in a style very close to the Sarnath capital and clearly modelled on the latter, perhaps within a few months or a year. Yet, it is not improbable that Perso-Hellenistic artists would have regarded as unintelligible some features of the Sanchi abacus with its Indianised tosu-eating geese (hamsas) previously familiar on pre-Asokan capitals. In fact, it was only in India, and never in Persia, that geese were used to represent the Cosmic Waters which, as we learn from other cosmogonic traditions (e.g. as recorded in the Book of Genesis, I, 6-7) divided the Waters above the firmament from those below.

It is no surprise to us that the Sanchi monument was yet another 'Schism Pillar', inscribed when it was already standing, and before the existence of any of Asoka's Six-Edict Pillars.14 [It is very much to the credit of H. Cousens, as an officer in the Archaeological Survey of Western India, that he commented in 1900: 'I think the (Sanchi) Pillar must have been engraved long after it was set up, the pillar simply offering a suitable surface for it. The lines are slanting and it is not by any means neatly engraved as it would have been in connection with the setting up of the pillar' (see fig. 17). H. Cousens, Progress Report of the Archaeological Survey of Western India, Government of Bombay, for the year ending June, 1900, p. 4. The only point on which disagreement might now be expressed is in his interposition of the word 'long,' since the interval is not likely to have been more than a few years (if as much).]

Figures


Fig. 1. Rampurva Bull capital, Calcutta Museum.


Fig. 2. Sankisa Elephant capital (after an old photograph taken in the 1860's, now in the India Office Library, London)


Fig. 3. The Allahabad/Prayaga pillar, as seen today in Allahabad Fort (Photo by Elinor Gadon)


Fig. 4. The 'Schism Edict' on the Allahabad shaft, as published by A. Cunningham in Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Vol. I, at Plate XXII after its first discovery in 1879.


Fig. 5. Facsimile of opening of Asoka's First Six Pillar Edicts (interlineated with a later -- medieval -- inscription), Allahabad (after E. Hultzsch, 1925).


Fig. 6a. Asoka's pillar inscriptions at Rummindei, after Klaus Ludwig Janert, Abstande und Schlussvokalverzeichnungen in Asoka-Inscriften, Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handscriften in Deutschland, Supplementband 10, Wiesbaden, 1972.


Fig. 6b. Asoka's pillar inscriptions at Nigali Sagar, after Klaus Ludwig Janert, Abstande und Schlussvokalverzeichnungen in Asoka-Inscriften, Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handscriften in Deutschland, Supplementband 10, Wiesbaden, 1972.


Fig. 7. A master mason detailing a column before being built into a new Jain temple north of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Taken by the author, without the attention of the mason, in 1979.


Fig. 8. Copy of an Edict as it appears on shaft of Lauriya-Araraj pillar shaft. (Drawn by Margaret Hall under author's direction)


Fig. 9. Edict nos. 6 and 7, photographed exactly as seen today on Delhi Topra pillar. (Photo by the author, 1979).


Fig. 10. Section of inscription on Delhi-Topra pillar shaft, showing exactly where Edict no. 6 ends and no. 7 continues at a later date, in the hands of another stonemason. After Janert.


Fig. 11. The finish of Edict no. 7 on the Delhi-Topra shaft, showing how it continues right round the column. After Janert.


Fig. 12. The Sarnath Lion capital (now in the site museum, Sarnath). Author's photograph.


Fig. 13. The Schism Edict, found as the only inscription on the Sarnath pillar when the stump of the shaft was excavated in 1905.


Fig. 14. Drawing of left forelimb of lion on Sarnath capital, contrasted with a real-life anatomical study, by Margaret Hall.


Fig. 15. The Lion capital of an Asokan pillar excavated at Rampurva, Bihar. Calcutta Museum, photographed by the author.


Fig. 16. Sanchi Lion capital, before restoration; now in the site museum, Sanchi.


Fig. 17. The 'Schism Edict', found as the only inscription on the Sanchi pillar when excavated in 1913.

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Part 1 of 7

Mahatma Gandhi
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 7/1/21

Meanwhile, in October 1906, there was an interesting encounter between two individuals in London. They were to be political rivals for several decades thereafter, and their respective ideologies were to divide Indian polity irrevocably. This was when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi came calling to India House and met Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.

In 1893, Gandhi had gone to South Africa as a young twenty-four-year-old lawyer. He was there on a temporary assignment, to settle a commercial dispute for an Indian trader. A year after his arrival, the court ruled in favour of his client. Just when he was preparing to return to India, a group of Indian merchants requested him to stay on and fight a bill before the Natal Assembly, a British colony, seeking to remove Indians from the voters’ list. Within a month, more than 10,000 signatures had been gathered and presented to the colonial secretary, Lord Ripon. The bill was temporarily set aside, but eventually passed as law in 1896, disqualifying voters of non-European origin. These events serendipitously catapulted Gandhi into the role of an unofficial campaigner for the rights of the disenfranchised.

While Shyamji was aware and appreciative of Gandhi’s work, he was deeply critical of the latter’s role in the Anglo-Boer War. The war broke out in 1899 between the British Empire and the Boers of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The Boers, or Afrikaners, were the descendants of original Dutch settlers of southern Africa. Following skirmishes with the British, they moved away to form their own independent republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. They lived peacefully with the British colonizers in their neighbourhood, till the discovery of diamonds and gold in the region aroused British avarice. The Boers offered a rigorous resistance to the British colonists in Natal and Cape Colony. Indians too were called upon to take sides. While Gandhi mentions that his ‘personal sympathies were all with the Boers’, his ‘loyalty to the British rule’ drove him ‘to participation with the British in that war’. His argument was:

I felt that, if I demanded rights as a British citizen, it was also my duty as such, to participate in the defence of the British Empire. I held then that India could achieve her complete emancipation only within and through the British Empire.[/size] So I collected to gather as many comrades as possible, and with very great difficulty got their services accepted as an ambulance corps.49

More than 500 Indians had signed up for the Indian Ambulance Corps and attended the wounded British soldiers at Spioenkop in Natal. Gandhi and others received war medals for their chivalry and loyalty to the Queen. In June 1903, Gandhi began a weekly called Indian Opinion —originating in four languages (English, Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil)—as a mouthpiece for the Indian community.

Despite his own non-confrontationist attitude with the British, Shyamji was critical of the support that Gandhi and the Indians gave to the British against the native Boers. Some of Gandhi’s critical and racist comments against the ‘blacks’ of Africa too drew the ire of the Indian Sociologist. Addressing the native Africans by a derogatory term ‘Kaffir’, Gandhi had demanded separate entrances for whites and blacks at the Durban post office and had objected to Indians being classed with the South African black natives. In Gandhi’s own words:

Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.50. . . Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized . . . they are troublesome, very dirty, and live almost like animals.51

Just before Gandhi’s visit to India House in 1906, the Bambatha Rebellion was spearheaded by the Zulus protesting against unjust British taxes after the Boer War. Thousands of Zulus were ruthlessly massacred and several injured. Here too Gandhi supported the British and requested them to recruit Indians in the British army fighting against the Zulus. In the July 1906 issue of the Indian Sociologist, Gandhi was bitterly criticized for his role in aiding the suppression and massacre of the Zulu rebels.

It was against this strained background with Shyamji on political ideology that Gandhi visited India House on 20 October 1906. Writing about Shyamji, Gandhi says:

He has founded India House at his own cost. Any Indian student is allowed to stay there against a very small weekly payment. All Indians, whether Hindus, Muslims or others can and do stay there. There is full freedom for everyone in the matter of food and drink. Being situated in fine surroundings, the place has a very good atmosphere. On the first day of our arrival, both Mr Ally and I went to stay at India House, and we were very well looked after. But as our work requires our getting in touch with important people and as India House is rather remote, we have been obliged to come and live at his Hotel at great expense.52

While no record is extant of an exclusive meeting or the experiences that Vinayak and Gandhi had at the latter’s short stay at India House, Harindra Srivastava quotes an anecdote narrated to him by an eyewitness, Pandit Parmanandaji of Jhansi, a veteran freedom fighter. Vinayak was busy cooking his meal when Gandhi joined him to engage in a political discussion. Cutting him short, Vinayak asked him to first eat a meal with them. Gandhi was horrified to see the Chitpawan Brahmin cooking prawns, and being a staunch vegetarian refused to partake. Vinayak had apparently mocked him and retorted: ‘Well, if you cannot eat with us, how on earth are you going to work with us? Moreover . . . this is just boiled fish . . . while we want people who are ready to eat the British alive.’53 This was obviously not a great first meeting and their differences only widened with time....

The Dhingra episode echoed across different parts of the world for a long time. The newspaper, Vande Mataram, that Aurobindo Ghose and others were bringing out in Calcutta, was suppressed after the Alipore Bomb case. This was revived as The Bande Mataram—a Monthly Organ of Indian Independence by Madame Bhikaji Cama and Lala Har Dayal. The Indian revolutionaries in Paris had also started the ‘Paris India Society’. The very first issue of The Bande Mataram that was published in Geneva on 10 September 1909 was dedicated to Dhingra and his memory. In a tribute titled ‘Dhingra—the Immortal’, it said:

Young India has produced another hero, whose words and deeds shall be cherished by the whole world for centuries to come. Dhingra’s declaration will be treasured in the archives of national and universal history as a precious heirloom for future generations. Dhingra has behaved at each stage of his trial like a hero of ancient times. He has reminded us of the history of Medieval Rajputs and Sikhs, who loved death like a bride. England thinks she has killed Dhingra: in reality, he lives forever and has given the death-blow to British sovereignty in India. Life immortal is his; who can take it away from him. All nations have watched Dhingra’s trial with bated breath, and have felt that New India is unconquerable because she can give birth to such heroic sons.

The Indian patriotic party, which has declared War of the Knife with England has issued a manifesto, in the course of which it says: ‘Dhingra has found out the secret of Life; he has discovered the path of Immortality. He has realized the highest destiny of Man . . . he has lifted himself above the common run of men and joined the company of the saints and heroes.’ These words sum up the attitude of India towards our patriot-martyr.

In time to come, when the British Empire in India shall have been reduced to ashes, Dhingra’s monument will adorn the squares of our chief towns, recalling to the memory of our children the noble life and the nobler death of him who laid down his life in a far-off land for the cause he loved so well. 142

The inaugural issue of Talwar, started by Virendranath Chattopadhyay from Paris in November 1909, also paid rich tributes to Dhingra.

But even though there was overwhelming support and appreciation for Dhingra in the months following his execution, there was an equal amount of condemnation of his act by several elements of the political spectrum. Leaders of the moderate wing of the Indian National Congress, quite like the eminent members of the Indian community of London, were deeply critical of Dhingra’s act. They believed that it decelerated the pace and tenor of the negotiations they had been having with the British for greater autonomy. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was stinging in his criticism of Dhingra. He wrote:

It is being said in defence of Sir Curzon Wyllie’s assassination that it is the British who are responsible for India’s ruin, and that, just as the British would kill every German if Germany invaded Britain, so too it is the right of any Indian to kill any Englishman. Every Indian should reflect thoughtfully on this murder. It has done India much harm; the deputation’s efforts have also received a setback. But that need not be taken into consideration. It is the ultimate result that we must think of. Mr Dhingra’s defence is inadmissible. In my view, he has acted like a coward. All the same, one can only pity the man. He was egged on to do this act by ill-digested reading of worthless writings. His defence of himself, too, appears to have been learnt by rote. It is those who incited him to this that deserve to be punished. In my view, Mr. Dhingra himself is innocent. The murder was committed in a state of intoxication. It is not merely wine or bhang that makes one drunk; a mad idea also can do so. That was the case with Mr. Dhingra. The analogy of Germans and Englishmen is fallacious. If the Germans were to invade [Britain], the British would kill only the invaders. They would not kill every German whom they met. Moreover, they would not kill an unsuspecting German, or Germans who are guests. If I kill someone in my own house without a warning—someone who has done me no harm—I cannot but be called a coward. There is an ancient custom among the Arabs that they would not kill anyone in their own house, even if the person be their enemy. They would kill him after he had left the house and after he had been given time to arm himself. Those who believe in violence would be brave men if they observe these rules when killing anyone. Otherwise, they must be looked upon as cowards. It may be said that what Mr. Dhingra did, publicly and knowing full well that he himself would have to die, argues courage of no mean order on his part. But as I have said above, men can do these things in a state of intoxication, and can also banish the fear of death. Whatever courage there is in this is the result of intoxication, not a quality of the man himself. A man’s own courage consists in suffering deeply and over a long period. That alone is a brave act, which is preceded by careful reflection. I must say that those who believe and argue that such murders may do good to India are ignorant men indeed. No act of treachery can ever profit a nation. Even should the British leave in consequence of such murderous acts, who will rule in their place? The only answer is: the murderers. Who will then be happy? Is the Englishman bad because he is an Englishmen? Is it that everyone with an Indian skin is good?143

Despite the criticism of the revolutionary methods, it was no mere coincidence that on 15 November 1909 the government introduced the Indian Councils Act, popularly known as the Morley–Minto Reforms. It was way back in 1906 that Viceroy Lord Minto had prepared a minute arguing for a greater say of Indians in governance, given their rising education levels and awareness. Yet till the revolutionary movement caught steam and a spate of bombings and political assassinations shook both India and Britain, there was little progress on the reforms. Finally, the Act legitimized the election of Indians to various legislative councils across India for the first time. The reforms also granted the request of Muslim groups that had come together under the umbrella of the Muslim League, formed in 1906, demanding separate electorates for their community. This remained a bone of contention for a long time, till it spelt its ultimate disaster on the subcontinent.

In fact, Gandhi too acknowledged the reason for the rapid implementation of these administrative reforms. When asked in an interview, if the Secretary of State Lord Morley’s reforms were driven by the fear of the revolutionaries, Gandhi candidly admitted that: ‘The English are both a timid and a brave nation. England is, I believe, easily influenced by the use of gunpowder. It is possible that Lord Morley has granted the reforms through fear, but what is granted under fear can be retained only so long as the fear lasts.’144

The questioner was confused with the self-contradiction in the reply and pointed that out:

Will you not admit that you are arguing against yourself? You know that what the English obtained in their own country they obtained by using brute force. I know you have argued that what they have obtained is useless, but that does not affect my argument. They wanted useless things and they got them. My point is that their desire was fulfilled. What does it matter what means they adopted? Why should we not obtain our goal, which is good, by any means whatsoever, even by using violence? Shall I think of the means when I have to deal with a thief in the house? My duty is to drive him out anyhow. You seem to admit that we have received nothing, and that we shall receive nothing, by petitioning. Why, then, may we not do so by using brute force? And, to retain what we may receive, we shall keep up the fear by using the same force to the extent that it may be necessary. You will not find fault with a continuance of force to prevent a child from thrusting its foot into fire? Somehow or other we have to gain our end.145

In response, he was given an extremely long-winding series of justifications, theological and philosophical constructs that largely contradicted each other, forcing him to move on to another question.

Exactly three years after their first meeting in October 1906, Gandhi met Vinayak again on 24 October 1909. The Indian community gathered to celebrate the festival of Vijayadashami, the tenth day following the nine-day festivities and fasting of Navaratri. To avoid British surveillance, Englishmen were also invited. Nearly seventy Indians participated. Gandhi was invited to preside over the meeting. He agreed on the condition that ‘no controversial politics were to be touched upon’146 and that he would rather speak on the greatness of the Ramayana. He was dressed in a swallow-tailed coat and stiff front shirt. In his address, Gandhi mentioned that the occasion of Vijayadashami that marked the victory of Lord Shri Ramachandra was a momentous one and that He needed to be honoured by every Indian as a historical personage. Gandhi went on:

Everyone, whether Hindu, Muslim or Parsi, should be proud of belonging to a country, which produced a man like Shri Ramachandra. To the extent that he was a great Indian, he should be honoured by every Indian. For the Hindus, he is a god. If India again produced a Ramachandra, a Sita, a Lakshmana and a Bharata, she would attain prosperity in no time. It should be remembered, of course, that before Ramachandra qualified for public service, he suffered exile in the forest for 12 years. Sita went through extreme suffering and Lakshmana lived without sleep all those years and observed celibacy. When Indians learn to live in that manner, they can, from that instant count themselves as free men. India has no other way of achieving happiness for herself.147

It was then Vinayak’s turn to speak. Indirectly puncturing holes in Gandhi’s arguments, he said that it would be worthwhile to remember that Vijayadashami is preceded by a nine-day fast to propitiate Goddess Durga, who is a symbol of war and annihilation of evil. He concurred with Gandhi that Ramachandra was the life and soul of India but urged the audience to remember that even he could not establish Rama Rajya (his kingdom) without slaying Ravana who symbolized tyranny, aggression and injustice. If Ramachandra had merely sat on a fast, it was unlikely that his kingdom could have been established. He went on:

Hindus are the heart of Hindustan. Nevertheless, just as the beauty of the rainbow is not impaired but enhanced by its varied hues, so also Hindustan will look all the more beautiful across the sky of future by assimilating all the best from the Muslim, Parsee, Jewish and other civilizations.148

Vinayak’s stirring speech won him many accolades from the audience. Barrister Asaf Ali who was present at the event described Vinayak as being as ‘fragile as an anemic girl, restless as a mountain torrent, and keen as the edge of a torpedo blade’. He later wrote that it was not an exaggeration to say that Vinayak was ‘one of the few really effective speakers I have known and heard, and there is hardly an orator of the first rank either here or in England whom I have not had the privilege of hearing’.149

The clash between the ideologies of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had only just begun....

Meanwhile, by mid-1914, unrest was brewing in Europe. What began as a conflict between Austria–Hungary and Serbia, leading to the assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, at Sarajevo, soon mushroomed into a conflict that gripped all Europe and the world in four years of strategic stalemate and unprecedented butchery. The conflagration pitted the Central Powers (Germany, Austria–Hungary and Turkey) against the Allies (France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan and later the United States of America in 1917) into one of the greatest watersheds of twentieth-century geopolitical history. It led to the fall of four imperial dynasties (Germany, Russia, Austria–Hungary and Turkey) and brought in its wake the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, destabilizing all Europe. It also sowed the seeds for a larger and more catastrophic conflict on the world stage.

With Britain’s entry into the First World War, all her colonies, including India, had no option but to be dragged into this conflict. Around 5 August 1914, the British War Council ratified the involvement of the British Indian Army and Indian soldiers into this conflict. The Indian Army had already been employed in several wars in China, Egypt, Sudan, Perak (in Malaysia) and Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia). However, Indians were not employed in conflicts involving ‘white enemies’, such as the Boer Wars,14 largely due to a racial strategy. It was rather unthinkable that the ‘black Indian’ should be seen hacking a ‘white European’ of any nationality, as that would embolden him to do similar things with his colonial masters back home. The horrors of 1857 had simply not left the British Indian government it seemed. Yet, as the conflict increased with every passing day, the dire necessity for soldiers made Britain disregard this policy of racial hierarchy in the army.

By the winter of 1914, Indian troops were at the western front and fought at the first Battle of Ypres. They were deployed as reinforcements in the battlefields of Europe and fought in most theatres of the war, including Gallipoli and North and East Africa and Mesopotamia. An estimated total of 1,215,318 soldiers were sent abroad to all the war zones —Mesopotamia, Egypt, France, East Africa, Gallipoli, Salonica, Aden and the Persian Gulf. Nearly 1.5 million volunteered to fight. About 47,746 were classed as killed or missing, with about 65,000 wounded. More than 101,439 casualties of Indian soldiers were reported. In addition, £3.5 million was paid by India as ‘war gratuities’ of British officers and men of the normal garrisons of India. A further sum of £13.1 million was paid from Indian revenues for the war. In cash and kind an estimate of £146.2 million was India’s gigantic contribution to Britain in this effort— something that is valuated at £50 billion, or even higher, today!15

The princely states and the Indian political bourgeoisie lapped this up as an opportunity driven by different motives. For the Indian princes who were virtually under British thraldom, it was yet another opportunity to ingratiate themselves to their colonial masters. Apart from ‘The Imperial Service Troops’ organized by the princely states and put in the service of Viceroy Lord Hardinge, assistance in kind also came in large quantities as did generous grants of money from the maharajas of Mysore, Jodhpur, Gwalior and the Nizam of Hyderabad. Food, clothes, ambulances, horses, labourers and motorcars were donated. The outpouring of Indian support overwhelmed even the British. It was largely believed by many that the moment Britain got into trouble, the whole of India would burst into a blaze of rebellion, more so given the efforts of the Germans to stir and support the anti-British unrest in India.

However, an irksome communal issue got intertwined with the war efforts with the Ottoman Empire of Turkey joining its forces with Germany against the British by end October 1914. The sultans of the Ottoman Empire claimed the highest position in Islam, that of the caliphate—an Islamic kingdom under the caliph, or Khalifah, the politico-religious successor of Prophet Muhammad himself and a leader of the entire ummah, or global Muslim community. Caliphates such as the Rashidun, the Umayyad and the Abbasid had existed in medieval times. The Ottoman Empire claimed its stake as the fourth caliphate in 1517 and took control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Such an exalted religious and political figure was naturally held in great reverence by Muslims of South Asia too. The British feared that the large contingent of Muslim soldiers in the army would not support them in this war against their Khalifah. The fear of desertion by the troops, or even jihad, if forced to fight against their Turkish ‘brethren’ constantly plagued the British. To assuage these fears, several Muslim leaders and princes had to publicly seek complete loyalty from the Muslim subjects and soldiers towards the British war efforts.

Along with the princely states, the nationalists of the time too pledged their support for Britain’s war efforts. These were driven by their calculation that unstinted support during a time of crisis might motivate Britain to speedily grant more concessions to their demands after the War. Annie Besant and Tilak, who dominated the national political scene, threw their might behind this popular sentiment. The Indian National Congress openly supported Britain during this crucial period. When war broke out, Gandhi was in England, where he began organizing a medical corps similar to the force he had led in aid of the British during the Boer War. In a circular dated 22 September 1914, he called for recruitment to his Field Ambulance Training Corps.16 Several Indians served in hospitals in Southampton and Brighton, and Gandhi himself, aided by his wife Kasturba, took nursing classes. But he soon fell ill with pleurisy and returned to India by January 1915.

Gandhi offered unconditional support to the British efforts right from the beginning. He strongly believed that it was not a good time to embarrass Britain or take advantage of her troubled situation to further the Indian liberation cause. ‘England’s need,’ he had said, ‘should not be turned into our opportunity and that it was more becoming and far-sighted not to press our demands while the war lasted.’17 On his return to India, he helped expand the recruitment bases for the British Indian Army from places like Gujarat that did not have the so-called traditional martial races. The apostle of non-violence was marching from village to village in 1918 in the most interior of villages of his home province, addressing mass gatherings in recruitment centres, enlisting people for the War....

But the reforms suggested by Montagu gathered steam. After all the deliberations, he drew up a report with Bhupendra Nath Bose, Lord Richard Hely-Hutchinson, sixth Earl of Donoughmore, William Duke and Charles Roberts. 61 The Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms, as they were called, eventually culminated in the Government of India Act, 1919.

A bicameral legislature was set up with two houses—the Legislative Assembly and the Council of State. The Legislative Assembly was to have 145 members of whom 103 were elected and the rest were nominated. Of these 103, fifty-one were elected from general constituencies, thirty-two by communal/separate constituencies (thirty by Muslims, two by Sikhs), and twenty by special constituencies such as landholders, Anglo-Indians, etc. The Council of State had sixty members—thirty-three elected and twenty-seven nominated by the Governor General. The life of the Central Legislative Assembly was for three years and the Council of State for five years. The franchise was extended, central and provincial legislative councils were given more authority, but the viceroy still remained accountable only to London.62

At the provincial level, significant changes were made whereby a Provincial Legislative Council was created with a majority of elected members. All the major provinces such as Bengal, Madras, Bombay, United Provinces, Punjab, Bihar, Central Provinces and Assam were to be ruled by a governor. Under a system called dyarchy, the rights of central and provincial governments were strictly demarcated. The central or reserved list had rights over defence, foreign affairs, telegraphs, railways, postal, foreign trade and so on, while the provincial or transferred list dealt with issues of health, education, sanitation, irrigation, jail, police, justice, public works, excise, religious and charitable endowments, etc.63

The reaction to the Government of India Act from Indians was on expected lines. The moderates, though not fully satisfied, advocated ungrudging cooperation within the contours of the new reforms to help them succeed. A strong section was inclined to reject it altogether. Tilak, who by then dominated the Congress after the death of Gokhale in 1915, stuck to a middle path of ‘Responsive Cooperation’ that would depend on how the government acted on each of its promises.

In its thirty-fourth session held at Amritsar in end December 1919, the INC, under President Chittaranjan Das, moved a resolution that stated that the ‘Reform Act is inadequate, unsatisfactory, and disappointing’. It urged parliament to take early steps towards establishing a fully responsible government in accordance with the principle of self-government. Das favoured a rejection of the reforms. It was in this session that Gandhi managed to make a significant impact on the Congress. Gandhi’s stand was explained in his article for Young India: ‘The Reforms Act . . . is an earnest of the intention of the British people to do justice to India and it ought to remove suspicion on that score . . . Our duty therefore is not to subject the Reforms to carping criticism but to settle down quietly to work so as to make them a success.’64

The Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms thus divided many Congress leaders and amid apprehensions of yet another ideological split, Chittaranjan Das arrived at a compromise. The resolution was reworded to state that: ‘The Congress trusts, that so far as may be possible they will work the reforms so as to secure an early establishment of full Responsible Government.’65 It also stated that the Congress was ‘not opposed to obstruction, plain, downright obstruction, when that helps to obtain our political goal’. The stand was akin to what Tilak advocated—one of ‘Responsive Cooperation’. Gandhi too added: ‘. . . that does not mean that we may sit with folded hands and may still expect to get what we want. Under the British Constitution no one gets anything without a hard fight for it . . . We must lay to heart the advice of the President of the Congress that we shall gain nothing without agitation.’66 ...

The Government of India continued with its policy of reforms along with repression. A committee was appointed in December 1917 to investigate the nature and extent of the revolutionary movement in India. It was also mandated to examine the difficulties that arose in the handling of such conspiracy cases. Justice S.A.T. Rowlatt, of the King’s Bench Division of His Majesty’s High Court of Justice, served as the chairman of this committee. The committee had full access to information in the government’s possession. This was termed the Rowlatt Sedition Committee.

The committee made an exhaustive report on the history and evolution of revolutionary activities in different parts of India and outside. Vinayak’s role in this was also detailed. It recommended a new legislation to replace the Defence of India Act, 1915. It sought to bring about strict laws to curtail the liberty of people in a drastic manner. Two bills were prepared on the basis of these recommendations—the Indian Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill No. I of 1919 and the Criminal Law (Emergency Powers) Bill No. II of 1919. The latter was passed into law, and named the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, 1919. It called for a speedy trial of offences by a special court consisting of three high court judges. The right to appeal was also stripped off the accused. Provincial governments were empowered to search at will anyone’s house that came under their radar of suspicion and round up the individual indefinitely without even an arrest warrant. The act intended to quell the publication, distribution and sale of prohibited works. 74

These sweeping emergency powers, through the Rowlatt Act, bestowed on the government were strenuously opposed by Indians of all shades of political thought. But the bill was passed and entered the statute books on 21 March 1919. This brought unprecedented limelight on Gandhi who had till then remained in the background with movements in Champaran advocating the plight of indigo cultivators and the mill workers of Ahmedabad. A small group was formed, consisting of Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel and Sarojini Naidu, to offer satyagraha, or peaceful resistance, to these new acts. This came to be known also as the Rowlatt Satyagraha. On 24 February 1919, they pledged that ‘in the event of these Bills becoming law and until they are withdrawn, we shall refuse civilly to obey these laws and such other laws as a Committee to be hereafter appointed, may think fit . . . we will follow truth and refrain from violence to life, person or property’.75 A Satyagraha Sabha with Gandhi as president called for a strike on 6 April 1919. Gandhi’s leadership was put to intense test during this first major pan-India campaign that he was embarking upon.

Disturbances had broken out all over the country, with riots and arson causing loss of lives and property. Disturbed by this, Gandhi called off the satyagraha on 18 April even before it could gather full steam. But large=scale ferment continued in the Punjab. This forced the government to bar Gandhi from entering the province. The government also imposed martial law with Brigadier General Reginald Dyer in command by 11 April 1919, though it was not formally declared before 15 April. Unaware of the law being imposed, approximately 6,000–10,000 unarmed people had gathered on 13 April 1919 for a public meeting at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. Soon after the meeting began, Dyer reached the spot without any warning to the attendees. He passed, with his infantry, through a narrow lane into Jallianwalla Bagh and at once deployed them to the right and left of the entrance in the Bagh’s square. The armoured cars remained outside the square and never came into action as the lane was too narrow for them to enter. The gates of the Bagh were shut and his troops stationed themselves on a raised ground. Without any warning, Dyer ordered indiscriminate firing on the mass of humanity that had gathered there. More than 1500 rounds were shot. Men, women, children and old people were caught in this firing and martyred. As per government records, nearly 379 were killed and more than 1200 wounded (the actual numbers were much more).

Dyer was anything but remorseful of this savagery and in fact boasted of his achievements and what he termed as a merciful act. He admitted that he could have dispersed them without firing but that would have been derogatory to his dignity as a defender of law and order. It was to maintain his self-respect, he claimed, that he decided to fire, leaving behind a trail of corpses. This brutality sent shock waves across India, more so at a time when the government was discussing administrative reforms and limited self-government. Ironically, Dyer was feted as a hero by the British. A fund created in his support by the Morning Post in London and another in Mussoorie in India collected a purse of £20,000.76

Viceroy Lord Chelmsford’s response to this genocide was indicative of the government’s attitude:

I have heard that Dyer administered Martial Law in Amritsar very reasonably and in no sense tyrannously. In these circumstances you will understand why it is that both the Commander-in-Chief and I feel very strongly that an error of judgment, transitory in its consequences, should not bring down upon him a penalty which would be out of all proportion to the offence and which must be balanced against the very notable services which he rendered at an extremely critical time.77

The massacre shook the nation and for the first time Gandhi’s trust in the British was eroded. He demanded a thorough inquiry into the carnage. The Hunter Commission was set up to investigate the matter. However, Gandhi did not wish to derail the process of reforms and cooperation with the government. On 21 July 1919, he issued a statement in which he said that on account of indications of goodwill on the part of the government and advice from many friends, he would not resume non-cooperation, as it was not his purpose to embarrass the government. Instead, he urged the satyagrahis to work for constructive programmes such as the use of indigenous goods and Hindu–Muslim unity.78...

From his clinic in Girgaum, Bombay, Narayanrao decided to do the unthinkable. He picked up his pen and wrote a letter to a man who was ideologically opposed to his brother, but nonetheless was fast emerging as a major political voice in the country—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. In the first of six letters, dated 18 January 1920, he wrote to Gandhi, Narayanrao sought the latter’s help and advice in securing the release of his elder brothers in the wake of the royal proclamation.

Yesterday [17 January] I was informed by the Government of India that the Savarkar brothers were not included in those that are to be released . . . It is now clear that the Indian Government have decided not to release them. Please let me hear from you as to how to proceed in such circumstances. They have already undergone a rigorous sentence for more than ten years in the Andamans and their health is utterly shattered. Their weight has come down from 118 lbs. to 95–100. Though they are given a hospital diet at present, their health does not show any sign of improvement. At least a change to some Indian jail of better climate is the most essential for them. I have received a letter from one of them very recently (one month back) in which all this is mentioned. I hope that you will let me know what you mean to do in this matter.1

One week later, on 25 January 1920, Gandhi replied and quite expectedly told him that he could do very little by way of assistance.

Dear Dr Savarkar, I have your letter. It is difficult to advise you. I suggest, however, your framing a brief petition setting forth facts of the case bringing out in clear relief the fact that the offence committed by your brother was purely political. I suggest this in order that it would be possible to concentrate public attention on the case. Meanwhile as I have said to you in an earlier letter I am moving in the matter in my own way.2

However, several months later, on 26 May 1920, Gandhi wrote an article in Young India titled ‘Savarkar Brothers’ and built a case for their release by the government.

Thanks to the action of the Government of India and the Provincial Governments, many of those who were undergoing imprisonment at the time have received the benefit of the Royal clemency. But there are some notable ‘political offenders’ who have not yet been discharged. Among these I count Savarkar brothers. They are political offenders in the same sense as men, for instance, who have been discharged in the Punjab. And yet these two brothers have not received their liberty although five months have gone by after the publication of the Proclamation . . . It is clear . . . that all the offences charged against Mr Savarkar (senior) were of a public nature. He had done no violence. He was married, had two daughters who died, and his wife died about eighteen months ago . . . the other brother . . . is better known for his career in London . . . He was charged also in 1911 with abetment of murder. No act of violence was proved against him either.

Both these brothers have declared their political opinions and both have stated that they do not entertain any revolutionary ideas and that if they were set free they would like to work under the Reforms Act, for they consider that the reforms enable one to work thereunder so as to achieve political responsibility for India. They both state unequivocally that they do not desire independence from the British connection. On the contrary, they feel that India’s destiny can be best worked out in association with the British. Nobody has questioned their honour or their honesty, and in my opinion the published expression of their views ought to be taken at its face value . . .

Now the only reason for still further restricting the liberty of the two brothers can only be ‘danger to public safety,’ for, the viceroy has been charged by His Majesty to exercise Royal clemency to political offenders in the fullest manner which in his judgment is compatible with public safety. I hold therefore that unless there is absolute proof that the discharge of the two brothers who have already suffered long enough terms of imprisonment, who have lost considerably in body-weight and who have declared their political opinions, can be proved to be a danger to the State, the Viceroy is bound to give them their liberty. The obligation to discharge them, on the one condition of public safety being fulfilled, is in Viceroy’s political capacity just as imperative as it was for the Judges in their judicial capacity to impose on the two brothers the minimum penalty allowed by law. If they are to be kept under detention any longer, a full statement justifying it is due to the public . . .

This case is no better and no worse than that of Bhai Parmanand who, thanks to the Punjab Government, has after a long term of imprisonment received his discharge. Nor need his case be distinguished from that of Savarkar brothers in the sense that Bhai Parmanand pleaded absolute innocence . . . The public are entitled to know the precise grounds upon which the liberty of the brothers is being restrained in spite of the Royal Proclamation which to them is as good as a royal charter having the force of law....3

Far removed from the hectic parleys that were going on regarding his release, on 4 November 1920, Vinayak was promoted to the position of a foreman in charge of manufacturing oil. After a brief probation he was confirmed as a permanent foreman. He drew a handsome monthly salary of Re 1 for this work! The coconut gardens and the oil from them were the main source of revenue in the Andamans. Cellular Jail had three big reservoirs full of oil ground out of the mills by prisoners. Big casks were filled with oil and exported to Calcutta and Rangoon and in return several thousand rupees accrued to the government treasury.

In addition to the shuddhi, sangathan and literacy movements that he spearheaded in jail, another issue close to Vinayak’s heart was the propagation of Hindi. Right from 1906, while in England, he had begun work to make Hindi the national language of India. In a linguistically diverse country such as India the exalting of a single language was bound to create tensions and differences. But it was also an important tool for national unity, Vinayak argued. Making Hindi the national language of the independent republic of India and Devanagari the script in which it was to be written, was something that all members of Abhinav Bharat pledged. It was long after 1906, and an initial rejection of the idea, that several other national leaders like Tilak and Gandhi espoused the cause of Hindi as the national language. Their acceptance followed agitations on the matter by the Nagar Pracharini Sabha of Benares and the Arya Samaj. In fact, the propaganda in favour of Hindi as India’s national language and encouraging patriotic writings in it was pioneered by Swami Dayanand Saraswati....

(Cont'd below)

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Part 2 of 7

Back in mainland India, a new movement was brewing. It is important to understand this issue because it sets the context in which Vinayak penned his magnum opus on Hindutva and his belief in the need for Hindu society to organize itself politically. The concept of Hindutva continues to be a contentious one in Indian politics even today.

The pan-Islamic feelings that the First World War created in the minds of several Indian Muslims, with the Ottoman Empire joining the Central forces against the Allied forces has been mentioned earlier. Their natural sympathy was with the Khalifa, the sultan of Turkey, who was also their religious head. But this conflicted with their loyalty as British Indian subjects. Realizing this, the British government assured Turkey of sympathetic treatment at the end of the War. Assurances to this effect were given by the British prime minister, Lloyd George, and the president of the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson. This instilled some hope among Indian Muslims.

However, these were dashed after the conclusion of the War and the terms of Armistice. Turkey was partitioned—Thrace was presented to Greece and the Asiatic portions of the Turkish Empire passed under the control of Britain and France in the guide of ‘mandates’. The sultan was reduced to a figurehead under the control of a high commission appointed by the Allied powers who ruled the nation in his name. This hugely agitated Muslims in India who felt let down and a storm broke out. An Indian Muslim delegation under Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar (1878– 1931) travelled to England in 1919 to convince the Turkish nationalist, Mustafa Kemal, not to depose the sultan of Turkey. By 1920–21, he formed a broad coalition with Muslim nationalists such as his brother, Shaukat Ali, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari and others.

Gandhi, who had launched the Non-cooperation movement in 1919 which came to an abrupt halt after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, decided to support them through his tool of satyagraha. This led to the birth of the Khilafat agitation in 1920. Gandhi wrote to the viceroy pleading for a just settlement of the Khilafat problem, going to the extent of placing it on the same level of political importance as home rule in India. He wrote in conclusion: ‘In the most scrupulous regard for the rights of those (Mohammedan) States and for the Muslim sentiment as to their places of worship, and your just and timely treatment of India’s claim to Home Rule lies the safety of the Empire.’16 Unsurprisingly, when the All-India Khilafat Conference met in Delhi on 23 November 1919, Gandhi was unanimously elected as its president. It urged the Muslims not to join the public war celebrations if the British failed to solve the Turkey problem. Gandhi urged the conference to consider the feasibility of non-cooperation as a means to compel the British government to redress the Khilafat wrong. The tenets of this included renunciation of honorary posts, titles, memberships of councils, giving up posts under the government, police and military forces and a refusal to pay taxes.17

As nationalist leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar mentions: ‘The movement was started by the Mahomedans. It was taken up by Mr. Gandhi with a tenacity and faith which must have surprised many Mahomedans themselves.’18 Ambedkar and several others opined that the movement was unsupportable because of the basic fact that the Turks, in whose interest the agitation was being carried out in distant India, ‘themselves favoured a republic and it was quite unjustifiable to compel the Turks to keep Turkey as a monarchy when they wanted to convert it into a republic’.19 But Gandhi was determined. As he noted in Young India dated 2 June 1920:

If I were not interested in the Indian Mahomedans, I would not interest myself in the welfare of the Turks any more than I am in that of the Austrians or the Poles. But I am bound as an Indian to share the sufferings and trials of fellow-Indians . . . the extent to which Hindus should join hands with the Mahomedans . . . is . . . expedient to suffer for my Mahomedan brother to the utmost in a just cause and I should, therefore, travel, the whole road so long as the means employed by him are as honourable as his end.

Ambedkar explains that the popularly held view that it was the Congress that initiated the Non-cooperation movement is erroneous. He opines that ‘the non-cooperation had its origin in the Khilafat agitation and not in the Congress movement for Swaraj: that it was started by the Khilafatists to help Turkey and adopted by the Congress only to help the Khilafatists: that Swaraj (Self-Rule) was not its primary object, but its primary object was Khilafat and that Swaraj was added as a secondary object to induce the Hindus to join it’.20

In a timeline that Ambedkar provides, he mentions that it was on 10 March 1920 that the Khilafat Committee met in Calcutta and ratified the concept of non-cooperation in its manifesto with Gandhi in attendance. The All India Congress Committee (AICC) that met in the interim on 30 May 1920 in Benares did not endorse Gandhi’s non-cooperation but merely expressed indignation on the terms of the Turkey agreement, urging the British to revise it. Other important items such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the repeal of the Rowlatt Act and bringing General Dyer and others to justice were the main demands of the resolution. Meanwhile, on 22 June 1920, the Khilafat Committee wrote to the viceroy that they would launch non-cooperation agitation by 1 August if their demands were not met. By 1 August, with no official word from the viceroy, the Khilafat Committee launched the Non-cooperation movement. Gandhi wrote to the viceroy about it and also the return of the medallions he had received for his loyalty to the British troops in the Boer War and the Zulu revolt. In his letter, he wrote: ‘I venture to return these medals, in pursuance of the scheme of Non-cooperation inaugurated today in connection with Khilafat movement.’21 No Hindu leader other than Gandhi participated in it and the Congress’s official role in it was uncertain.

It was thereafter that Gandhi persuaded the Congress to join hands with the Khilafat and this was adopted in the Congress session in Calcutta on 4 September 1920. In his speech with which he moved the resolution at the session, Gandhi stated:

The Mussulmans of India cannot remain as honourable men and followers of the faith of their Prophet, if they do not vindicate its honour at any cost. The Punjab has been cruelly and barbarously treated . . . and it is in order to remove these two wrongs . . . that I have ventured to place before this country a scheme of non-cooperation. 22

He, however, did not make it clear why this should be a priority only for the Indian Muslim community when their co-religionists from various parts of the Muslim world were themselves unperturbed by the dissolution of the caliphate. When Turkey itself favoured such a move, and when none of this made anyone in the Muslim world less honourable or disrespectful of their faith or the Prophet, why was such an assumption being made on behalf of only the Indian Muslims? If Punjab was a ‘wrong’ committed by the British (which it was), how was it that a resolution passed in the same city of Amritsar in 1919, barely months after the carnage, vouched for cooperation with the government reforms? The attainment of swaraj was added as a minor adjunct to the Khilafat movement. Ironically, Gandhi had overturned a resolution that he himself had insisted upon in the November 1919 Amritsar session of the Congress favouring cooperation with the British, loyalty to them and ensuring that the Reforms Act of 1919 worked successfully. Other than surrendering titles and giving up posts, withdrawal of children from government schools, boycott of foreign goods, withdrawal from British courts and other such measures were adopted.

The widely held narrative is that the Jallianwala Bagh massacre led to the birth of the Non-cooperation movement. But as the facts present themselves above, in the Amritsar Congress held in 1919, barely five months after the genocide, Gandhi himself advocated complete cooperation with the British in the wake of the reforms initiated in the royal proclamation and the Government of India Act, 1919. The government had remained studiously silent on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre for eight months and it took them a long time to even constitute an inquiry commission. Their reluctance was there for all to see by the time the Congress met in Amritsar in November 1919. Despite the somersault between the two Congress resolutions, prevailed upon by the same person and with no new facts emerging other than the Khilafat, it denotes the huge sway that Gandhi had begun to influence in the workings of the Congress and in such a short span of time.

Interestingly, it was Gandhi who advocated his favourite mantra of noncooperation to the Khilafat Committee, got it ratified there, and then prevailed upon the Congress to support the Khilafat and thereby the philosophy of non-cooperation too. It was a political master stroke and a daring attempt by Gandhi. For decades the Congress had tried in vain to enlist the support of Muslims. But with the Congress standing up for their cause, several Muslims and their leaders trooped to it, even though temporarily. It also enhanced the stature of Gandhi as a national leader and catapulted the Congress to a body that went beyond resolutions and conferences, to grass-roots mass movements. Of course, one could quibble on whether making the Khilafat movement a matter of such importance was of any relevance to the cause of Indian freedom. As historian R.C. Majumdar notes:

As to regarding the Khilafat as a matter of life and death to the Muslims, events were soon to prove that it was a rhetoric or hyperbole and can hardly be regarded as a serious fact; for in less than five years the Muslims of Turkey usurped the rights of the Caliph to a far greater degree than the British ever did, and not a leaf stirred in the whole Muslim world outside India. Unless, therefore, we are prepared to believe that the Muslims of India were the only true followers of the Prophet or the most genuine champions of the cause of Islam, it is difficult to understand or explain the weight they attached to the Khilafat question, save on the theory that it was a phase of that Pan-Islamic movement to which the Indian Muslims looked forward as the only guarantee against the influence of a Hindu majority with whom faith had linked them in India. 23

Whether Gandhi latched on to the Khilafat to launch his political career as the leader of mass agitations in India or put the theory of non-cooperation into practice, it did energize the sagging morale of the Congress. But his critics, like R.C. Majumdar, point out that by endorsing such extraterritorial allegiance and ‘by his own admission that the Khilafat question was a vital one for Indian Muslims, Gandhi himself admitted in a way that they formed a separate nation; they were in India, but not of India’.24 The mixing up of an issue far away from India and relegating the matter of Indian freedom to the background did not appeal to many Indians, especially Hindus.

Bipin Chandra Pal opined that this emergent pan-Islamism that was catching up in India too was ‘the common enemy of Indian nationalism in its truest and broadest sense’.25 Annie Besant too talks about how ‘the Khilafat was not sufficiently attractive to the Hindus’.26 Lala Lajpat Rai was more candid in his assessment of the Khilafat movement:

I have no intention of offending anybody’s susceptibilities, but if the existing conditions are properly analyzed, it will be seen that sectarianism and narrow-minded bigotry have been very much strengthened within the last three years. The Khilafat movement has particularly strengthened it among the Mohammedans, and it has not been without its influence and reaction on the Hindus and Sikhs . . . it was unfortunate that the Khilafat movement in India should have taken its stand on a religious, rather than political basis . . . it was still more unfortunate that Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of the Khilafat movement should have brought religion into such a prominence in connection with a movement which was really, and fundamentally, more political than religious.27

After his travels in the Muslim countries of Central Asia and Egypt and his interactions with the local Muslims, Lajpat Rai sounded a warning bugle when he said: ‘Indian Muslims are more pan-Islamic and exclusive than the Muslims of any other country of the globe, and that fact alone makes the creation of a united India more difficult than would otherwise be.’28

A few sceptic Hindus proposed that in the true spirit of Hindu–Muslim unity, a quid pro quo could be established—that Hindus render their wholehearted support to a cause of Muslim faith, in return for the latter eschewing cow slaughter that was a matter of faith for a vast majority of Hindus and which had caused communal tensions in the past. Gandhi debunked this idea with his hypothesis that ‘the test of friendship is assistance in adversity, and that too, unconditional assistance . . . if the Mahomedans feel themselves bound in honour to spare the Hindu’s feelings and to stop cow killing, they may do so, no matter whether the Hindus cooperate with them or not’.29

Others who opposed the Khilafat movement argued that the mobilized Muslims might invite the Afghans to invade India, in which case the country might be subjugated to Muslim Raj from British Raj.30 Chittaranjan Das wrote to Lala Lajpat Rai that he did not fear the seven crore Muslims of India, but ‘the seven crores of Hindustan, plus the armed hordes of Afghanistan, Central Asia, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Turkey will be irresistible’31 and posed a grave national threat to India. Gandhi discounted this fear too by saying he felt that ‘Hindus will not assist Mahomedans in promoting or bringing about an armed conflict between the British Government and the allies, and Afghanistan. British forces are too well organized to admit of any successful invasion of the Indian frontier’.

Meanwhile, Maulana Abdul Bari 32 had suggested that if the British continued with their obdurate stand of committing injustice to the Khalifa, Indian Muslims should give up the country in protest and migrate to a Muslim land or Dar-ul-Islam— Afghanistan. Following his fatwa, about 18,000 Muslims sold their properties to move to Afghanistan—a move that brought them severe ruin. Interestingly, instead of denouncing such a move, Gandhi, the leader of the Khilafat movement, said: ‘The flight of Mussulmans is growing apace—they are cheered en route. That it is better for them to leave [a] State which had no regard for their religious sentiment and face a beggar life than to remain in it even though it may be in a princely manner.’33 The seeds of Pakistan, it seemed, were sown three decades before it actually materialized.

Right from the very beginning, there were voices in the Muslim community that considered this a ruinous move. Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League opposed the Khilafat agitation.34 The All-India Shia Conference passed a resolution of loyalty to the British in its meeting held at Nagina, a town in Bijnore district of the United Provinces, on 3 April 1920. 35 The honorary secretary of the Khilafat Committee, Badruddin Koor, had cautioned:

If Muslims [of India] embark on this ruinous course, I am afraid we may have to suffer even long after Khilafat controversy terminates. It is clear that non-cooperation report emphasizes that the Indian Mussulman should refrain from violence and bloodshed. But those who are fully acquainted with the Muhamedan temperament and feelings and who see the Indian atmosphere as at present charged with religious incitement and fervour will hesitate to believe that the advice will be acted upon if non-cooperation is to be made a living factor. I do not expect a large and unwieldy community of uneducated and highly sensitive people goaded to disappointment and despair by the apathy of Great Britain and its allies in the Khilafat question will ever do so. The risk is therefore clear. 36

Ironically, prior to his initiation into the Khilafat, Muhammad Ali himself had scoffed at the very idea of Muslims joining hands with the Hindus or the Congress on any political issue. In an article, ‘The Communal Patriot’, in his newspaper, The Comrade, Ali had lampooned the efforts of Indian Muslims to join hands with the Congress to fight victimization of the Muslims of Tripoli and Persia. ‘What has the Muslim situation abroad to do,’ he wondered, ‘with the conditions of the Indian Muslims?’ He believed that the fundamental differences between the Hindu and Muslim communities needed to be sorted out before any alliance could be forged. ‘Have the questions that really divide the two communities lost their force and meaning?’ he wondered and rationalized: ‘If not, then the problem remains exactly where it was at any time in recent Indian history.’37 It remains unknown what had changed for him to do a volte-face and support what he had ridiculed a few years ago. Barring the Ali brothers, the fact that several Muslim leaders were sceptic of the non-cooperation method is explained by Jawaharlal Nehru:

I remember the meeting38 because it thoroughly disappointed me. Shaukat Ali, of course, was full of enthusiasm; but almost all the others looked thoroughly unhappy and uncomfortable. They did not have the courage to disagree, and yet they obviously had no intention of doing anything rash. Were these people to lead a revolutionary movement, I thought, and to challenge the British Empire? Gandhiji addressed them, and after hearing him they looked even more frightened than before. He spoke well in his best dictatorial vein . . . this is going to be a great struggle, he said, with a very powerful adversary . . . when war is declared martial law prevails, and in our nonviolent struggle there will also have to be dictatorship and martial law on our side if we are to win . . . these military analogies and the unyielding earnestness of the man, made the flesh of most of his hearers creep . . . as we were coming home from the meeting, I asked Gandhiji if this was the way to start a great struggle. I had expected enthusiasm, spirited language, and a flashing of eyes; instead we saw a very tame gathering of timid, middle-aged folk.39

That the Ali brothers had their misgivings about the nature of the movement even after joining it becomes apparent in the anecdote narrated by Swami Shraddhanand in his memoirs. A staunch Arya Samaji and a shuddhi activist, he had begun working with the Congress since its Amritsar session in 1919 that he presided over. He joined the nationwide protests against the Rowlatt Act and frequently interacted with maulanas to broker peace between the communities. In the Calcutta session of September 1920, he was sitting on the dais along with Shaukat Ali. He heard him loudly telling a few others in his company: ‘Mahatma Gandhi is a shrewd bania. You do not understand his real object. By putting you under discipline, he is preparing you for guerrilla warfare. He is not such an out and out non-violencist [sic] as you all suppose.’40 ‘I was shocked,’ said Shraddhanand, ‘to hear all this from the big brother and remonstrated with him, which he treated with humour.’

Shraddhanand tried to warn Gandhi about the possibility that his ‘motives were being misrepresented’. But these were not taken seriously. In the Khilafat conference at Nagpur, maulanas recited ayats from the Quran that contained frequent references to violent jihad ‘against and the killing of kafirs’. When Shraddhanand drew Gandhi’s attention to this, he ‘smiled and said: “They are alluding to the British bureaucracy”’. In reply, Shraddhanand told him that ‘it was all subversive of the idea of nonviolence and when a revulsion of feeling came, the Muhammadan Maulanas would not refrain from using these verses against the Hindus’.41 Once again Gandhi disregarded this politely.

Despite all these seemingly contradictory stands and opposition, Gandhi was obdurate that while the Khilafat was a matter of faith for Muhammad Ali, he himself would not mind ‘laying down my life for the Khilafat’. He hoped that this generous support would ‘ensure the safety of the cow, that is my religion, from the Mussalman knife’.42 He even advocated three slogans for Hindus and Muslims alike, to be chanted one after another in every congregation: ‘Allaho Akbar, Bande Mataram/Bharat Mata ki Jai, and Hindu-Musalman ki jai.’43 About the diffidence about the first slogan, an overtly religious Muslim one, he implored: ‘Hindus may not fight shy of Arabic words, when their meaning is not only totally offensive but even ennobling. God is no respecter of any particular tongue.’44 Speaking in Karachi on 22 July 1920, Gandhi warned the Hindus that if they did not help the Muhammadans in their time of trouble, their [own] slavery was a certainty.45 At a public meeting in Vadtal in Gujrat on 19 January 1921, Gandhi implored the masses:

I tell all the Hindu sadhus that if they sacrifice their all for the sake of the Khilafat, they will have done a great thing for the protection of Hinduism. Today the duty of every Hindu is to save Islam from danger. If you do this, God Himself will inspire them to look upon Hindus as friends and Hindus will look upon Muslims as friends.46

However, as the sceptics had predicted, within a year of the launch of the Non-cooperation movement, the Muslims were growing restive and impatient. It was not as easy to secure British concessions on this issue, as Gandhi’s promise had held out to them. Gandhi himself acknowledged that ‘in their impatient anger, the Musalmans ask for more energetic and more prompt action by the Congress and Khilafat organizations. To the Musalmans, Swaraj means, as it must mean, India’s ability to deal effectively with the Khilafat question.’ 47 He even advocated that he ‘would gladly ask for postponement of Swaraj activity if thereby we could advance the interest of the Khilafat’.

Muslim leaders such as Faqir Qayamuddin and Mohammad Abdul Bari jointly wrote to the president of the Central Khilafat Committee, Miya Mahomed Haji Jan Mohammad Chotani, on 14 May 1920:

Lessons of forbearance and patience are troublesome. Tell Mr Gandhi that while I myself will be guided by his advice, I will not restrain those people who in their haste go against it although I will not stimulate them, because in spite of entertaining different opinion, I have promised to go by his consent . . . but it should be borne in mind that we shall not sit (idle) relying upon him, but thanking him for his sympathy, will fulfil our religious obligation. This is a religious duty, which is unalterable. In its discharge, reliance can be placed on no one but God—whoever, whether Muslims or non-Muslims, prevent us from this, his tool will be included in the list of enemies.48

Other Muslim leaders too were unwilling to heed the advice of patience and continue the Non-cooperation movement with Gandhi in the absence of tangible results. They did exactly what was feared they might—invite the Amir of Afghanistan to invade India for the pan-Islamic cause. In his misguided enthusiasm, Gandhi went to the extent of even supporting such a move: ‘I would, in a sense, certainly assist the Amir of Afghanistan, if he waged a war against the British Government. That is to say, I would openly tell my countrymen that it would be a crime to help a government which had lost the confidence of the nation to remain in power.’49 Even his most ardent supporters were shocked by such statements that had no roots in pragmatism or practicality.

The Nagpur session of the Congress held immediately thereafter, in December 1920, cemented Gandhi’s influence over the party. It endorsed several ideas that were close to his heart—promotion of swadeshi or homespun clothes, enforcement of prohibition of alcohol, striving for Hindu–Muslim unity and declaring the charkha or spinning wheel as a key to Indian freedom. Most importantly, Gandhi promised the Congress that his method of struggle through non-cooperation would lead to the establishment of swaraj within a year. This raised the hopes of all the members who decided to give it their best shot. However, and most interestingly, what swaraj actually meant was never clearly defined. It was left open and malleable to anyone’s interpretation. Some called it self-rule and complete independence, others termed it limited self-rule within the British dominion, while the staunch Khilafatists linked to it a strong desire for Afghan invasion.

The Nagpur session endorsed Gandhi’s plan of a triple boycott— legislatures, courts and educational institutions maintained or aided by the government, as part of the Non-cooperation agitation. Eminent leaders appealed to students to leave their educational institutions and this was met with a wholehearted and enthusiastic response by the youth across India. Many of these youngsters organized themselves into the corps of National Volunteers—a group of young men of daring, militant character. Forceful and sometimes violent imposition of hartals, and picketing to prevent the sale of liquor and foreign goods were conducted in several places.50

As part of non-cooperation with the government, the Congress withdrew its candidates from the seats to the councils in an attempt to create an administrative deadlock. Gandhi had hoped that the Congress’s boycott of legislatures would lead to a wholesale abstention from the voting process by the voters too. ‘Will a single Moderate leader,’ asked Gandhi, care to enter any Council if more than half his electorate disapproved of his offering himself as a candidate at all? I hold that it would be unconstitutional for him to do so.’51 But he was mistaken. A quarter or less of the voters did not heed the Congress’s call and non-Congress candidates too contested the elections and were duly returned to the councils as well. They of course proved to be ineffectual in terms of true representation of the people. The Congress used this trump card to communicate that the elections held in the wake of the Reforms was not representative of the people’s mandate and was a complete failure. Even the British grudgingly acknowledged this, as Sir Frank Sly, the governor of the Central Provinces, mentioned in his speech on 22 November 1924: ‘At the first election many of the electors, under the influence of the NonCooperation movement, abstained from voting, and members were returned to the Legislative Council who could not claim to be really representative of public opinion, and some of them were unfit to exercise the responsibilities of their position.’52

Courts too were boycotted. Leaders of the Bar, like Motilal Nehru and Chittaranjan Das, gave up their practice as an example of sacrifice and this was emulated by several others. Large numbers of students began a boycott of their schools and colleges, and held protest marches, black flag processions and so on. All these activities under the larger umbrella of non-cooperation created, for the first time in modern Indian history, a dedicated rank and file of full-time freedom fighters.

The government followed an initial policy of indifference and then persecution when maintenance of law and order became a problem. Finally, Gandhi met the viceroy, Lord Reading, in Simla six times between 13 and 18 May 1921. The proceedings were largely unknown but in the meeting, the viceroy managed to extract a promise from Gandhi to secure an apology from the Ali brothers for allegedly making incendiary speeches calling to violence during the Non-cooperation movement.

The government had intercepted a telegram—a wire sent to the Amir of Afghanistan inviting him to invade India and urging him to not make peace with the British—written in Persian, allegedly by Muhammad Ali. Swami Shraddhanand mentions this incident in his memoir. Muhammad Ali had feigned complete ignorance in the matter as he knew neither Persian nor Arabic and he was made a maulana only by virtue of the duties of tabligh (conversion) that he had conducted. On reaching Anand Bhawan, Pandit Motilal Nehru’s Allahabad residence, Muhammad Ali took Shraddhanand aside and taking out a paper from his handbag, gave him a draft of a telegram to read. ‘What was my astonishment,’ noted Shraddhanand, ‘when I saw the draft of the selfsame telegram in the peculiar handwriting of the Father of the non-violent cooperation movement!’ 53 Gandhi reached Anand Bhawan the next day and when asked by Sharaddhanand about this matter, did not remember to have sent any such telegram.

To prevent their prosecution, as threatened by the viceroy in the Simla meeting, Gandhi managed to extract an apology from the Ali brothers. This lowered the prestige of Gandhi as well as that of the Ali brothers and weakened the Non-cooperation movement to an extent. The leaders were seen as striking deals with their opponent. The Ali brothers tried to wriggle out of the embarrassment by making several public statements that the apology was just incidental.

Subsequently, their call to Muslims, through convenient fatwas issued by clerics, which deemed working for the British as irreligious, led to their prosecution and sentence to two years’ rigorous imprisonment. This reinvigorated the flagging Non-cooperation movement and gave it new impetus. Nationwide strikes, agitations, boycott of the Prince of Wales Edward VIII’s visit and other programmes were implemented with great gusto, inviting repressive measures from the government. The movement was not without violence. In Bombay, in November 1921, protests degenerated into mob violence and looting, policemen were beaten up in three days of rioting and about fifty-eight civilians killed, with 400 injured.54 Gandhi expressed deep remorse at this violence.

The one year that Gandhi had declared for the attainment of swaraj was coming to an end. At this time, negotiations for an amicable settlement began with Chittaranjan Das and Madan Mohan Malaviya of the Congress acting as conduits between Gandhi and the viceroy. The latter stated his terms clearly. If the Congress agreed to call off the movement, the government would release all political prisoners imprisoned during the movement, and in due course, the Ali brothers too. They would also summon a Round Table Conference between the government and the Congress to settle the future constitution of India. Young Subhas Chandra Bose, who was an active volunteer of the movement and jailed for participation, reminisces:

Rightly or wrongly, the Mahatma had promised swaraj within one year. That year was drawing to a close. Barely a fortnight was left and within this short period something had to be achieved in order to save the face of the Congress and fulfil the Mahatma’s promise regarding swaraj. The offer of the Viceroy had come to him as a godsend. If a settlement was made before December 31st and all the political prisoners were released, it would appear to the popular imagination as a great triumph for the Congress. The Round Table Conference might or might not be a success, but if it failed, and the Government refused to concede the popular demands—the Congress could resume the fight at any time, and when it did so, it would command greater prestige and public confidence.55

But Gandhi’s insistence on the release of the Ali brothers as being contingent to any compromise ruined the deal. Chittaranjan Das who was playing interlocutor was ‘beside himself with anger and disgust. The chance of a lifetime, he said, had been lost.’56

Gandhi then embarked on a mass Civil Disobedience movement from Bardoli, a small tehsil in the Surat district of the Bombay Presidency, on 1 February 1922. Gandhi mentioned in his letter to the viceroy that this was to carry on till all prisoners convicted in the movement were released, the press freed from interference, and the redress of the Khilafat and Punjab wrongs was taken up. It was undoubtedly a bold ultimatum. From Bardoli the fire spread to Assam, Bihar, Central Provinces, Madras Presidency and other parts of India. No-tax campaigns, boycott of foreign goods and picketing were planned all over the country, shaking the very foundations of the British government.

On its part, the government did not take the developments lightly. On 6 February, the viceroy virtually declared war, bent upon crushing this upsurge. Just a day earlier, on 5 February, an incident in a small village called Chauri Chaura near Gorakhpur in the United Provinces inadvertently provided a way out of the deadlock. The police had opened fire on demonstrators, before running out of ammunition and locking themselves up in their station. The excited mob set fire to the police station and as the harried officers came running out, some twenty-two of them were hacked to death and their bodies thrown into the flames. After that, events progressed quickly. Gandhi decided to use the Chauri Chaura incident as an excuse to call off his movement at a time when it had peaked and agree to a Round Table Conference instead. In a speech on 10 February at Bardoli, calling off the much-hyped and anticipated movement, Gandhi blamed this on the fact that the ‘country at large has not accepted the teaching of non-violence. I must, therefore, immediately stop the movement for civil disobedience’.57 Two days later, on 12 February, the working committee called off the movement formally and with its adoption by the AICC in a fortnight, Civil Disobedience was history.

Sitting in faraway Port Blair, Vinayak was keeping a close watch on these massive political developments in mainland India. He denounced the Khilafat movement as an ‘aafat ’ or a calamity and menace to the country, warning that a wave of fanaticism would sweep the country and engulf it in its treacherous grip. [/b]

The death of Lokmanya Tilak in India gave a fillip to these movements. It is a belief current among us that when a great man dies, nature herself is unable to bear the shock and she erupts in hurricanes and typhoons, in pestilence and epidemics full of evil portent to the world. The exit from the Indian world of a powerful personality like Lokamanya Tilak ushered in the mad intoxication of Khilafat agitation conspiring with the cult of the Charka as a way to Swaraj in one year . . . The Non-cooperation movement for Swaraj based on these twin principles was a movement without power and was bound to destroy the power of the country. It is an illusion, a hallucination, not unlike the hurricane that sweeps over a land only to destroy it. It is a disease of insanity, an epidemic and megalomania.58

The abrupt calling off of the movement greatly dampened the enthusiasm of thousands of people who had been galvanized. As several historians and commentators have contended, it possibly pushed back the attainment of freedom by several years, if not decades. Writing about the popular sentiment in the country, Subhas Bose states:

The Dictator’s decree was obeyed at the time but there was a regular revolt in the Congress camp. No one could understand why Mahatma should have used the isolated incident at Chauri Chaura for strangling the movement all over the country. Popular resentment was all the greater because the Mahatma had not cared to consult representatives from the different provinces and because the situation in the country as a whole was exceedingly favourable for the success of the civil disobedience campaign. To sound the order of retreat just when public enthusiasm was reaching the boiling point was nothing short of a national calamity. The principal lieutenants of the Mahatma, Deshbandhu Das, Pandit Motilal Nehru, and Lala Lajpat Rai, who were all in prison, shared the popular resentment . . . Deshbandhu . . . was beside himself with anger and sorrow at the way Mahatma Gandhi was repeatedly bungling. He was just beginning to forget the December blunder when the Bardoli retreat came as a staggering blow. Lala Lajpat Rai was experiencing the same feeling and it is reported that in sheer disgust he addressed a seventy-page letter to the Mahatma from prison.59

Even Jawaharlal Nehru opined that they were very angry to learn ‘of this stoppage of our struggle at a time when we seemed to be consolidating our position and advancing on all fronts . . . the young people were even more agitated. Our mounting hopes tumbled to the ground and this mental reaction was to be expected.’ He found it deplorable that a remote village in an ‘out-of-the-way place’ now determined the end to a ‘national struggle for freedom’.60 As Romain Rolland stated in graphic terms:

It is dangerous to assemble all the forces of a nation, and to hold the nation, panting, before a prescribed movement, to lift one’s arm to give the final command and then, at the last moment, let one’s arm drop, and thrice call a halt just as the formidable machinery has been set in motion. One risks running the brakes and paralyzing the impetus.61

Realizing that Gandhi’s hold over the Congress was weakening, the government sprang into action. He was tried at Ahmedabad on 18 March 1922 on the charges of instigating disaffection against the government. He pleaded guilty and explained why he had turned from a British loyalist to an uncompromising non-cooperator. The sessions judge sentenced him to six years’ simple imprisonment. The chances of revival of a movement that was so wedded to a single personality fizzled out with this. The Congress split up, with senior leaders such as Chittaranjan Das and Motilal Nehru resigning from the party in anguish and forming a new organization called the Swaraj Party....

Meanwhile, in Alipore prison, Vinayak overheard interesting chatter between two sepoys who were deployed to keep a watch over him at night. They were talking to each other excitedly:

We are going to have Swaraj in two months. For a powerful yogi of the name of Gandhi has begun his fight with the Government. The British are helpless against him. For a bullet-shot does not hurt him. If put in prison, he knows how to come out of it. Such superhuman powers he possesses. He vanishes from his cell and is seen standing beyond the outer wall. Such is the magic he wields. This has happened several times. 64

Given the quick release from jail on each imprisonment, such myths abounded about Gandhi. There were similar legends about Vinayak too. He recounts a sepoy asking him, in an obvious reference to the Marseilles episode, how many days he had swum in the sea. When he replied that it had taken him only a short ten-minute swim to the quay, the sepoy was shocked and his belief in Vinayak’s miraculous powers was shattered! Vinayak recounts: ‘My habit of reporting correctly what happened at Marseilles had lost me many friendships in life and their reverence for me.’...65

Rahimatullah M. Sayani was an affluent Muslim belonging to the Khoja community who were disciples of the Aga Khan. He was associated with the Congress right from its inception. After Badruddin Tyabji, he was the second Muslim president of the Congress and presided over its twelfth annual session in Calcutta in 1896. In a candid presidential address, Sayani outlined, among other issues, the feelings of alienation among Muslims of India and attributed his reasons for the same. Sayani mentioned that before the advent of the British, the Muslims were the rulers of the country, with all the advantages of the ruling class. From the monarch to the courtiers to the landlords and officials, everyone was a co-religionist; the court language was theirs; they inherited positions of trust and responsibility that came along with emoluments and influence as their birthright. The Hindus, though part of the polity, were ‘tenants-at-will’ of the Muslims, were subservient and in awe of them.1 But a stroke of ill luck brought them down to the level of their Hindu countrymen. Being a ‘very sensitive race’ the Muslims resented this and would have nothing to do with their new rulers or their new fellow subjects, hitherto subordinates.

With the advent of English education in the country, the Hindus who were accustomed to learning a foreign language, as they had under their Muslim rulers, took to English naturally and easily. But the Muslims were yet to take to anything that ‘required hard labour and application, especially as they had to work harder than their former subjects, the Hindus’. They resented the idea of competing with those they considered inferior. The consequence of this was a turning of tables, with the Hindus becoming superior and the Muslim gradually being ‘ousted from their lands, their offices; in fact everything was lost, save their honour . . . they were soon reduced to a state of utter poverty. Ignorance and apathy seized hold of them while the fall of their former greatness rankled in their hearts’. The numbers proved Sayani’s claims. By 1867, eighty-eight Hindus and not a single Muslim had passed the MA and BA examinations.2

It is important to understand the long history behind this sense of alienation and separatism among a vast section of Muslims in India, particularly its leadership and clergy. This also becomes a prelude, setting the context in which Vinayak’s philosophy of Hindutva took birth. The political situation and the Hindu–Muslim equations prompted the urgency with which he composed such an exposition from the troubling confines of Ratnagiri prison. The leaderless disorientation in Hindu society, it being led in various directions and towards unrelated causes, and its own inherent divisions of caste and creed needed an intellectual response. Vinayak hoped to do that through his treatise.

There are numerous contradictions too. The same constitutional reforms that Vinayak endorsed in his petitions from Cellular Jail had provided the introduction for separate Muslim electorates. This move undoubtedly helped the later solidification of Indian politics on religious affiliation.

After the failure of the 1857 War of Independence, where reestablishing Bahadur Shah Zafar as the emperor of India was an important objective, the Wahabi movement of 1857–58, under Enayet Ali, did not join hands with the leaders of the 1857 movement. They fought for the establishment of a theocratic Islamic state, or dar-ul-Islam, in India. The Hindus were completely aloof from this long-drawn Wahabi struggle. After this, the Muslims as a community, by and large, did not take active part in any political organizations, including the INC. Being perceived as among the chief conspirators in 1857 further reduced their influence with the British and a general dejection gripped the community. At this point, Sir Syed Ahmed appeared as a beacon of hope. He took it as his mission to both mend fences between the Muslim community and the British, and also introduce the community to modern education. In fact, he published an entire tract, The Loyal Mohammedans of India, in which he took pains to explain that if there was any community in India that could be trusted and were fast bound with Christians, it was the Muslims of the country, who would be their staunch friends and loyalists. Inculcating this sense of loyalty to the British was one of the declared objectives of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College that he set up in Aligarh in 1877. He vehemently opposed those of the community who were against the British—be it ulemas or those associated with the Congress. According to Syed, the Congress was fighting for a representative government on British lines—one in which the majority voice reigned, which would entail a fourth of the population comprising Muslims getting a short shrift. He never tired of emphasizing that India was a conglomerate of several nations and that the Muslims formed a distinctive unit. In a speech, he articulates this belief:

In a country like India where homogeneity does not exist in any one of the fields (nationality, religion, way of living, customs, mores, culture, and historical tradition), the introduction of representative government cannot produce any beneficial results; it can only result in interfering with the peace and prosperity of the land . . . the aims and objects of the Indian National Congress are based upon an ignorance of history and present day realities; they do not take into consideration that India is inhabited by different nationalities; I consider the experiment which the Indian National Congress wants to make fraught with dangers and suffering for all the nationalities of India, specially for the Muslims. The Muslims are in a minority, but they are a highly united minority. At least traditionally they are prone to take the sword in hand when the majority oppresses them. If this happens, it will bring about disasters greater than the ones which came in the wake of the happenings of 1857 . . . the Congress cannot rationally prove its claim to represent the opinions, ideals, and aspirations of the Muslims.3

The thrust of his Aligarh movement was that Hindus and Muslims were separate entities with distinctive outlooks, conflicting interests, and in a way, separate nationalities. In fact, he was the first proponent of the ‘two-nation’ theory that was to have catastrophic results on the future of India. To quote Sir Syed:

In whose hands shall the administration and the Empire of India rest? Now, suppose that all English, and the whole English army, were to leave India, taking with them all their cannon and their splendid weapons and everything, then who would be rulers of India? Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations—the Mahomedans and the Hindus—could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other and thrust it down. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable.4

Regarding the Congress demand that a section of the viceroy’s council should be elected by the people, Sir Syed debated:

Let us imagine the Viceroy’s Council made in this manner. And let us suppose, first of all, that we have universal suffrage, as in America, and that all have votes. And let us also suppose that all Mohammadan electors vote for a Mohammadan and all Hindu electors for a Hindu member, and now count how many votes the Mohammadan member will have and how many the Hindu. It is certain that the Hindu member will have four times as many, because their population is four times numerous . . . and now how can the Mohammadan guard his interests?5

Thus, democratic representation or appointments based on competition would work to the Muslim detriment and result in a Hindu rule. As a result, British rule was in the best interests of the community, which should also stay away from political agitation and act as a counter to the agitating Hindus, Sir Syed postulated. That the Congress suffered from an acute lack of Muslim participation in its early years is seldom mentioned. Over the first twenty-one years, from 1885 to 1905, the average attendance of Muslim delegates in the first five sessions was 15 per cent; that fell to 5 per cent and below in the subsequent fifteen sessions.6 Muslims of Allahabad, Lucknow, Meerut, Lahore, Madras and other places passed resolutions condemning the Congress. Newspapers such as Mahomedan Observer, Victoria Paper, The Muslim Herald, Rafiq-i-Hind, and Imperial Paper spoke unequivocally against the Congress, as did a powerful Muslim organ of northern India—the Aligarh Institute Gazette.7 Riots over issues such as cow slaughter and processional music in front of mosques further widened the growing gulf between the two communities, which the British took advantage of.

For instance, Lord Curzon managed to win over Muslims who were initially opposed to the Partition of Bengal by convincing them that it was in their favour. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca, one of the most influential Muslim leaders of East Bengal, sided with the British. Many Muslims saw in the creation of the province of East Bengal and Assam a culmination of the dreams of the Aligarh movement—a separate Muslim unit within the Indian body politic. At a meeting held in Dacca on 30 December 1906, a resolution of prominent Muslim leaders upheld the Partition of Bengal plan and criticized the swadeshi movement raging against it.8

(cont'd below)

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Part 3 of 7

The British actively encouraged petitions from prominent Muslim leaders seeking employment of a due proportion from the community in government service, abolition of competitive examinations for the community for recruitment to services, appointments of Muslim judges in every high court and chief court, communal or separate electorates for municipalities and Muslim electoral colleges for elections to legislative councils. Correspondence between Viceroy Lord Minto’s private secretary, Colonel Dunlop Smith, and Muslim leaders clearly demonstrates this, where, among other things, he carefully orchestrates the whole plan of action:

But in all these matters I want to remain behind the screen and this move should come from you. You are aware, how anxious I am for the good of the Musalmans, and I would, therefore, render all help with the greatest pleasure. I can prepare and draft the address for you. If it be prepared in Bombay then I can revise it because I know the art of drawing up petitions in good language. But Nawabsaheb, please remember that if within a short time any great and effective action has to be taken, then you should act quickly.9

This ‘engineered’ deputation submitted its memorandum to Lord Minto who gladly accepted it. Ramsay Macdonald, the future prime minister of Britain, too had reminisced: ‘The Mahomedan leaders are inspired by certain Anglo-Indian officials and that these officials have pulled wires at Simla and in London, and of malice aforethought sowed discord between the Hindu and the Mahomedan communities by showing the Muslims special favours.’10 The British press also picked up and played on this division of interests within the country and that the distinctive Muslim views entitled them to be constituted as a separate entity.

Elated by the favourable reception from the government, the Muslim leadership felt the urgent need of a political association to voice their demands better and also act as a counter to the Congress. There was no pan-Indian organization of the Muslims; all they had were loosely knit local units and groups of nawabs and eminent persons. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca advocated the idea of a Central Muhammadan Association whose chief goals were to support the British government and to look after the rights and interests of all the Muslims of India, in addition to acting as a bulwark against the Congress. The scheme was accepted, and at a meeting held on 30 December 1906, it was resolved that a political association called All India Muslim League should be established. At a meeting held in Karachi on 29 December 1907, the aims of the League were drawn— promoting pro-British feelings and loyalty towards the government among Muslims, protecting the rights and interests of Muslims of India and preventing rise of feelings of hostility towards other communities, without prejudice to the earlier mentioned objectives.11 There was opposition to movements like the Shivaji festival promoting a Hindu leader—more so one who fought against the Mughals—as a national hero was anathema.12 The secretary of the League declared:

We are not opposed to the social unity of the Hindus and the Mussalmans . . . but the other type of unity (political) involves the working out of common political purposes. This sort of our unity with the Congress cannot be possible because we and the Congressmen do not have common political objectives. They indulge in acts calculated to weaken the British Government. They want representative Government, which means death for Mussalmans. They desire competitive examinations for employment in Government services and this would mean the deprivation of Mussalmans of Government jobs. Therefore, we need not go near political unity [with the Hindus]. It is the aim of the League to present Muslim demands through respectful request, before the Government. They should not, like Congressmen, cry for boycott, deliver exciting speeches and write impertinent articles in newspapers and hold meetings to turn public feeling and attitude against their benign Government.13

It was in this context of intense distrust and discord that we had earlier seen the letter from Ziauddin Ahmad—later vice chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University—to Abdullah Suhrawardy who was at India House in London, asking Muslims to refrain from participating in activities of Shyamji, Vinayak and other revolutionaries. The spirit of British loyalty and seeking distinctiveness from the Hindus and the Congress that Sir Syed had induced in the community was to remain for a long time with most leaders, barring a few exceptions. As Sir Percival Joseph Griffiths, a prominent businessman who also worked for Indian Civil Service largely in eastern India, noted: ‘Whatever may have been other effects of the foundation of the Muslim League, it set the seal upon the Muslim belief that their interests must be regarded as completely separate from those of the Hindus and that no fusion of the two communities was possible.’14

In its annual session held at Amritsar in December 1908, the Muslim League expressed vehement opposition to all the ‘mischievous efforts’ to unsettle the settled fact of the Partition of Bengal.15 In the Imperial Council in 1910, when Bhupendra Nath Bose raised the question of reversing the Partition of Bengal, members Shams-ul-Huda of Bengal and Mazhar-ul-Huq of Bihar strongly opposed the move. They warned that if the government meddled with this ‘beneficent measure, it would be committing an act of supreme folly and would create unrest and discontent where none existed now’.16 That the views of prominent leaders of the community remained unchanged is evident from Muhammad Ali’s speech as Congress president in 1923, in which he referred to the government’s policy of reversing the Partition of Bengal as an important cause for the alienation of the Muslims from the British government.17

Throughout 1907 and 1908, heated debates were held regarding separate electorates and the weightage that was proposed by the Muslim deputation and consented to by Viceroy Lord Minto. The Muslim leadership argued that owing to the vast social, cultural and religious differences between the two communities, they feared that a Hindu majority would not be able to deal with them suitably or represent them fairly. It was also pointed out that Muslims should get a greater representation in the different councils than was warranted by their numerical strength in the country’s population. The logic offered for this was rather perverse. The deputation had stated that Muslims had ruled India for 700 years before the British arrival and hence they had a natural claim to greater ‘political importance’, which should be reflected in the councils. They also maintained that the community had played a vital role in defending the country and this enhanced its importance further.

The Morley–Minto Reforms of 1909 not only awarded separate Muslim electorates, but also the number of their members in the council was much more than the numerical strength of their population. The seeds of discord and of being two separate nations had thus been sown several decades before the freedom movement took birth. Gopalkrishna Gokhale lamented:

It was a commonplace of Indian politics that there can be no future for India as a nation unless a durable spirit of cooperation was developed and established between the two great communities . . . the union of all communities is no doubt the goal towards which we have to strive, but it cannot be denied that it does not exist in the country today and it is no use proceeding as though it existed, when in reality it does not 18 . . . over the greater part of India, the two communities had inherited a tradition of antagonism which though it might ordinarily lie dormant, broke forth into activity at the smallest provocation. It was this tradition that had to be overcome.19

The eagerness of the Hindu leaders and the Congress to elicit Muslim support and forge a united front, disregarding the embers of discord and behaving like they never existed in the first place, made the Muslim leadership put a premium on their support. In the annual session of 1908, the Muslim League demanded an extension of the principles of communal representation to local bodies, appointment of both a Hindu and a Muslim to the Privy Council and a due share for Muslims in all state services.

At a joint session of the Congress and the Muslim League held at Lucknow in December 1916, the two parties agreed to allow the overrepresentation for the Muslims in the legislatures and councils. In return, the Muslim leaders agreed to join the Congress movement demanding Indian autonomy. Famously known as the Lucknow Pact, it was headed by Tilak from the Congress side and by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League. It demanded that four-fifths of the provincial and central legislatures be elected on a broad franchise and half the executive council members were to be Indians elected by the councils themselves. Most of these proposals were embodied in the Government of India Act, 1919. After its initial opposition, the Congress agreed to the proposal of separate electorates for Muslims in provincial council elections and for weightage beyond their population in all provinces except Punjab and Bengal, where Hindu and Sikh minorities were taken into consideration. It was heralded as a beacon of Hindu–Muslim unity. It paved a natural way for the Khilafat movement, briefly bringing together the two communities.

One of the most tragic offshoots of the Khilafat movement was the blood-curdling atrocities committed by the Moplahs (Mapillas) of the Malabar in August 1921. A band of fanatic Muslims, they were given to frequent violent outbreaks which were sometimes driven by economic factors and at others by religious reasons. Being tenants-at-will of Hindu landlords, or jenmis, they bore deep resentment against their masters who charged high rents for the lands they tilled. Spurred by the religious call of the Khilafat movement and the speeches of the Ali brothers, the Moplahs decided to strike decisively. Agrarian grievances of the Moplahs as an excuse for this pogrom does not convey the whole truth; the violence had theological sanction. The Manchester Guardian highlighted that despite agrarian grievances:

. . . one certain element is a desperate religious fanaticism . . . India broods the horror of the cold-blooded massacres by the Moplahs, still daily showing how Hindus fare in the hands of fanatical Mohammedans. The public, obscurely but rightly, connect the holocaust of Hindu lives and property with Khilafat preachers and realize that the rule even of the arrogant British is better than no rule.20

Though the Khilafat was a movement against the British, several past grievances got fused into the volatility of the situation. Weapons were organized and preparations made to declare the coming of the Islamic kingdom. One Khilafat leader, Ali Musaliar, was proclaimed the raja, Khilafat flags were raised, and Ernad and Walluvanad were declared Khilafat kingdoms. Unfortunately, it was the hapless Hindu community of Malabar, not the government, that bore the brunt of the outrage. Mass murders of Hindu families, brutal rapes of women in front of their family members, murders of pregnant women, desecration of temples, cow slaughter, forcible conversions, pillage, arson and loot reigned till the British troops took control. The tragic memorial of the women of Malabar to Lady Reading reads:

It is possible that your Ladyship is not fully appraised of all the horrors and atrocities perpetrated by the fiendish rebels; of the many wells and tanks filled up with the mutilated, but often only half-dead, bodies of our nearest and dearest ones who refused to abandon the faith of our fathers; of pregnant women cut to pieces and left on the roadsides and in the jungles, with the unborn babe protruding from the mangled corpse; of our innocent and helpless children torn from our arms and done to death before our eyes and of our husbands and fathers tortured, flayed and burnt alive; of our hapless sisters forcibly carried away from the midst of kith and kin and subjected to every shame and outrage which the vile and brutal imagination of these inhuman hell-hounds could conceive of; of thousands of our homesteads reduced to cinder-mounds out of sheer savagery and a wanton spirit of destruction; of our places of worship desecrated and destroyed and of the images of deity shamefully insulted by putting the entrails of slaughtered cows where flower garlands use to lie, or else smashed to pieces . . . we remember how driven out [of] our native hamlets, we wandered, starving and naked, in the jungles and forests.21

Sankaran Nair points out to several other tortures like skinning Hindus alive and making them dig their own graves before their slaughter.22

The Congress leaders disbelieved the stories from Malabar initially and Gandhi himself spoke of the ‘brave God-fearing Moplahs’ whom he described as patriots who were ‘fighting for what they consider as religion, and in a manner which they consider as religious’.23 He went on to add: ‘Hindus must find the causes of Moplah fanaticism. They will find that they are not without blame. They have hitherto not cared for the Moplah. It is no use now becoming angry with the Moplahs or Mussalmans in general.’24 Ironically, his allies, the Khilafatists, passed resolutions congratulating the Moplahs for their heroism. Rationalizing Gandhi’s strange stand, Sankaran Nair notes:

There are two possible answers. The first, and the most probable, is that the politician within him [Gandhi] had for the time being enthralled the saint—his aim was to keep the Hindu-Mahommedan entente alive; the second, that the saint had mastered the man: religious anarchy with all its horrors being infinitely to be preferred to law and order under Satanic British Rule.25

Criticizing Gandhi’s stand, Ambedkar wrote:

Any person could have said that this was too heavy a price for Hindu-Moslem unity. But Mr Gandhi was so much obsessed by the necessity of establishing Hindu-Moslem unity that he was prepared to make light of the doings of the Moplas and the Khilafats who were congratulating them . . . Speaking of the Muslim silence over the Mopla atrocities Mr Gandhi told the Hindus: The Hindus must have the courage and the faith to feel that they can protect their religion in spite of such fanatical eruptions. A verbal disapproval by the Mussalmans of Mopla madness is no test of Mussalman friendship. The Mussalmans must naturally feel the shame and humiliation of the Mopla conduct about forcible conversions and looting, and they must work away so silently and effectively that such a thing might become impossible even among the most fanatical among them.26

Gradually, as the horrors of Malabar became more pronounced on the national scene and punctured holes in the avowed unity that Gandhi had been propounding, the Congress Working Committee passed a lame resolution, mildly admonishing the Moplahs.

Whilst however condemning violence on the part of the Moplas, the Working Committee desires it to be known that the evidence in its possession shows that the provocation beyond endurance was given to the Moplas . . . the Working Committee regrets to find that there have been instances of so-called forcible conversion by some fanatics among Moplas, but warns the public against believing, in the Government and inspired versions.27

The efforts to minimize the scale and the impact of the carnage, just so that the farcical show of unity could be maintained nationally, were disgraceful. While a small incident in Chauri Chaura forced Gandhi to call off a well-oiled Civil Disobedience movement, one wonders how a blot that was much more heinous did not cause any ripples. The Muslim League too justified the Moplah outrage as a religious war against the British, in which the Hindus got caught in the crossfire as they were seen to be aiding the colonial masters. The Khilafat conference in its session at Cocanada held in 1923 expressed its solidarity with the Moplah ‘martyrs’. Shaukat Ali moved a resolution calling it a duty of every Muslim towards the brave Moplahs to provide for the maintenance of one Moplah orphan and that he and his brother would take the initiative for this. This was after the government intervened and crushed the uprising with a heavy hand, leaving several Moplahs dead.

Vinayak strongly condemned the barbarity of the Moplahs and the pusillanimity with which the Congress reacted to this, just to save their movement. He wrote several essays and articles warning people about the dangers and realities of the Khilafat and pan-Islamism movement—many of which were published after his release from jail. He wondered why there was no open debate or discussion with the Hindus of the country on whether they wanted to align with such a movement, and more importantly, if they were educated enough about its pros and cons.28 He lamented that most Hindus were not even aware of the history of political Islam or its theology. No wonder some of them had made generous invitations to the Khalifa to shift to India where he would be crowned as an unofficial religio-political head of all Indian Muslims. What kind of a suicidal and ignorant step was this? Vinayak questioned.

He also educated Indians about the differences in the approach towards the caliphate between Shia and Sunni Muslims. The Shias considered the Khalifa as someone from the Holy Prophet’s bloodline. The Sunnis had no such compunctions; it was sufficient that the Khalifa belonged to the Quraish community, just as the Prophet. The former believed that the person who occupied this position was one of great piety and blessed with spiritual powers, while the latter believed that removing a Khalifa, no matter how incompetent or corrupt he might be, was impossible. Given the theological differences between the two sects, it was almost impossible for them to have a common Khalifa or worship in the same mosque. That all the Muslims of the world would unite and select their Khalifa was not an option that the religious denominations granted them and the Muslim theologists and leaders of India knew this very well, argued Vinayak. Yet, to assert a false sense of unity and supremacy, they had beguiled the Hindus and the Congress that such a thing was possible and they needed to rally around the idea. What locus standi did an Indian Muslim, who was not free in his own country, have that his wish or voice would be accepted by the British and more by the larger Muslim world, wondered Vinayak. This despite a Muhammad Ali claiming from the rooftops that he was a Muslim first and an Indian later.29

The calamity Vinayak warned his compatriots about was of a possible invasion of India from an external power or the sanction of that power for the creation of islands of autonomous Muslim centres within India. He apprehended a possibility wherein the new Amir of Afghanistan, who had come to power after a bloody assassination of his predecessor, had been plotting an invasion of India for long. Unwittingly, the Congress and the Hindus were playing into these designs even as reports of Islamist religious soldiers, being trained for this purpose in Siberia were gathering steam, claimed Vinayak. The Moplah riots were just a trailer of what calamity was set to befall India, he warned.

At Ratnagiri prison, Vinayak decided to formulate an intellectual response to these very troubling socio-political realities of the times, postulating the fundamentals of Hindu identity and unification, despite the trying conditions of prison life and his failing health. Unlike his other works that were composed in Marathi, this book was in English. Evidently, the readership that he had in mind went beyond the Marathi-speaking populace; it was aimed at the country at large. Given the obvious strictures that he was under, Vinayak wrote the book under the nom de plume ‘A Maratha’. It was smuggled out of prison and later published by Narayanrao.

Right from his childhood, Vinayak had bemoaned the lack of unity and organization in Hindu society, ridden as it was with innumerable caste differences and other complexities. Finding an answer to ‘Who is a Hindu?’ seemed germane to him at this point of time. From the confines of jail, he had been watching with alarm Gandhi taking the Hindu community for a ride during the Khilafat agitation. The relative increase in the Muslim population that the census had established,30 and the uncertain status of untouchables and tribal groups as Hindus for enumeration purposes made the definition of a Hindu all the more critical.

Yet again, Vinayak employed the agency of history as he had during his work on the 1857 War of Independence to create a sense of identity, pride and belonging. About the constant insinuations about the book being an ode of hatred, especially towards the Muslims, historian Janaki Bakhle opines:

Savarkar is widely reviled in Indian history as an apostle of hate; through a reading of Hindutva I argue that he might better be understood as a spurned lover . . . Hindutva in its time was also a reminder to a Hindu community that even if Gandhi had left the political milieu, there was no need to worry. A political Hindu and a true nationalist was back and ready to lead India, even from behind prison walls. Hindutva was a pugilistic punch thrown against Gandhi in the competitive political ring for national leadership.31

-- Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past: 1883-1924, by Vikram Sampath

Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Studio photograph of Gandhi, 1931
Born: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 2 October 1869, Porbandar, Kathiawar Agency, British Raj
Died: 30 January 1948 (aged 78), New Delhi, India
Cause of death: Assassination (Gunshot wounds)
Monuments: Raj Ghat; Gandhi Smriti
Citizenship: British Raj (1869–1947); Dominion of India (1947–1948)
Alma mater: Alfred High School, Rajkot (1880 – November 1887); Samaldas Arts College, Bhavnagar (January 1880 – July 1888); Inner Temple, London (September 1888–1891) (Informal auditing student at University College, London between 1888 and 1891)
Occupation: Lawyer, Anti-Colonial; Nationalist, Political Ethicist
Years active: 1893–1948
Era: British Raj
Known for: Leadership of the campaign for India's independence from British rule; Nonviolent resistance
Notable work: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
Political party: Indian National Congress (1920–1934)[1]
Movement Indian independence movement
Spouse(s): Kasturba Gandhi (m. 1883; died 1944)
Children: Harilal; Manilal; Ramdas; Devdas
Parents: Karamchand Gandhi (father); Putlibai Gandhi (mother)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (/ˈɡɑːndi, ˈɡændi/;[2] 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was an Indian lawyer,[3] anti-colonial nationalist,[4] and political ethicist[5] who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule[6] and in turn inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā (Sanskrit: "great-souled", "venerable"), first applied to him in 1914 in South Africa, is now used throughout the world.[7][8]

Born and raised in a Hindu family in coastal Gujarat, western India, Gandhi trained in law at the Inner Temple, London, and was called to the bar at age 22 in June 1891. After two uncertain years in India, where he was unable to start a successful law practice, he moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit. He went on to live in South Africa for 21 years. It was in South Africa that Gandhi raised a family and first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights. In 1915, aged 45, he returned to India. He set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination. Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women's rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and above all for achieving swaraj or self-rule.[9]

Also in 1921, Gandhi adopted the use of an Indian loincloth (short dhoti) and a shawl (in the winter) woven with yarn hand-spun on a traditional Indian spinning wheel (charkha) as a sign of identification with India's rural poor. He also began to live modestly in a self-sufficient residential community, ate simple vegetarian food, and undertook long fasts as a means of self-purification and political protest. Bringing anti-colonial nationalism to the common Indians, Gandhi led them in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930 and in calling for the British to quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned many times and for many years in both South Africa and India.

Gandhi's vision of an independent India based on religious pluralism was challenged in the early 1940s by a new Muslim nationalism which demanded a separate Muslim homeland carved out of India.[10] In August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire[10] was partitioned into two dominions, the Hindu-majority India and the Muslim-majority Pakistan.[11] As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in the Punjab and Bengal. Eschewing the official celebration of independence in Delhi, Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to provide solace. In the months following, he undertook several hunger strikes to stop religious violence. The last of these, undertaken on 12 January 1948 when he was 78,[12] also had the indirect goal of pressuring India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan.[12] Some Indians thought Gandhi was too accommodating.[12][13] Among them was Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who assassinated Gandhi on 30 January 1948 by firing three bullets into his chest.[13]

Gandhi's birthday, 2 October, is commemorated in India as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Nonviolence. Gandhi is commonly, though not formally, considered the Father of the Nation in India[14][15] and was commonly called Bapu[16] (Gujarati: endearment for father,[17] papa[17][18]).

Biography

Early life and background

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi[19] was born on 2 October 1869[20] into a Gujarati Modh[definition needed] Bania family of the Vaishya varna[definition needed][21] in Porbandar (also known as Sudamapuri), a coastal town on the Kathiawar Peninsula and then part of the small princely state of Porbandar in the Kathiawar Agency of the Indian Empire. His father, Karamchand Uttamchand Gandhi (1822–1885), served as the diwan (chief minister) of Porbandar state.[22]

Although he only had an elementary education and had previously been a clerk in the state administration, Karamchand proved a capable chief minister.[23] During his tenure, Karamchand married four times. His first two wives died young, after each had given birth to a daughter, and his third marriage was childless. In 1857, Karamchand sought his third wife's permission to remarry; that year, he married Putlibai (1844–1891), who also came from Junagadh,[23] and was from a Pranami Vaishnava family.[24][25][26][27] Karamchand and Putlibai had three children over the ensuing decade: a son, Laxmidas (c. 1860–1914); a daughter, Raliatbehn (1862–1960); and another son, Karsandas (c. 1866–1913).[28][29]

On 2 October 1869, Putlibai gave birth to her last child, Mohandas, in a dark, windowless ground-floor room of the Gandhi family residence in Porbandar city. As a child, Gandhi was described by his sister Raliat as "restless as mercury, either playing or roaming about. One of his favourite pastimes was twisting dogs' ears."[30] The Indian classics, especially the stories of Shravana and king Harishchandra, had a great impact on Gandhi in his childhood. In his autobiography, he admits that they left an indelible impression on his mind. He writes: "It haunted me and I must have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number." Gandhi's early self-identification with truth and love as supreme values is traceable to these epic characters.[31][32]

The family's religious background was eclectic. Gandhi's father Karamchand was Hindu and his mother Putlibai was from a Pranami Vaishnava Hindu family.[33][34] Gandhi's father was of Modh Baniya caste in the varna of Vaishya.[35] His mother came from the medieval Krishna bhakti-based Pranami tradition, whose religious texts include the Bhagavad Gita, the Bhagavata Purana, and a collection of 14 texts with teachings that the tradition believes to include the essence of the Vedas, the Quran and the Bible.[34][36] Gandhi was deeply influenced by his mother, an extremely pious lady who "would not think of taking her meals without her daily prayers... she would take the hardest vows and keep them without flinching. To keep two or three consecutive fasts was nothing to her."[37]

In 1874, Gandhi's father Karamchand left Porbandar for the smaller state of Rajkot, where he became a counsellor to its ruler, the Thakur Sahib; though Rajkot was a less prestigious state than Porbandar, the British regional political agency was located there, which gave the state's diwan a measure of security.[38] In 1876, Karamchand became diwan of Rajkot and was succeeded as diwan of Porbandar by his brother Tulsidas. His family then rejoined him in Rajkot.[39]


Gandhi (right) with his eldest brother Laxmidas in 1886.[40]

At age 9, Gandhi entered the local school in Rajkot, near his home. There he studied the rudiments of arithmetic, history, the Gujarati language and geography.[39] At age 11, he joined the High School in Rajkot, Alfred High School.[41] He was an average student, won some prizes, but was a shy and tongue tied student, with no interest in games; his only companions were books and school lessons.[42]

In May 1883, the 13-year-old Mohandas was married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Makhanji Kapadia (her first name was usually shortened to "Kasturba", and affectionately to "Ba") in an arranged marriage, according to the custom of the region at that time.[43] In the process, he lost a year at school but was later allowed to make up by accelerating his studies.[44] His wedding was a joint event, where his brother and cousin were also married. Recalling the day of their marriage, he once said, "As we didn't know much about marriage, for us it meant only wearing new clothes, eating sweets and playing with relatives." As was prevailing tradition, the adolescent bride was to spend much time at her parents' house, and away from her husband.[45]

Writing many years later, Mohandas described with regret the lustful feelings he felt for his young bride, "even at school I used to think of her, and the thought of nightfall and our subsequent meeting was ever haunting me." He later recalled feeling jealous and possessive of her, such as when she would visit a temple with her girlfriends, and being sexually lustful in his feelings for her.[46]

In late 1885, Gandhi's father Karamchand died.[47] Gandhi, then 16 years old, and his wife of age 17 had their first baby, who survived only a few days. The two deaths anguished Gandhi.[47] The Gandhi couple had four more children, all sons: Harilal, born in 1888; Manilal, born in 1892; Ramdas, born in 1897; and Devdas, born in 1900.[43]

In November 1887, the 18-year-old Gandhi graduated from high school in Ahmedabad.[48] In January 1888, he enrolled at Samaldas College in Bhavnagar State, then the sole degree-granting institution of higher education in the region. But he dropped out and returned to his family in Porbandar.[49]

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Part 4 of 7

Three years in London

Student of law

Gandhi came from a poor family, and he had dropped out of the cheapest college he could afford.[50] Mavji Dave Joshiji, a Brahmin priest and family friend, advised Gandhi and his family that he should consider law studies in London.[51] In July 1888, his wife Kasturba gave birth to their first surviving son, Harilal.[52] His mother was not comfortable about Gandhi leaving his wife and family, and going so far from home. Gandhi's uncle Tulsidas also tried to dissuade his nephew. Gandhi wanted to go. To persuade his wife and mother, Gandhi made a vow in front of his mother that he would abstain from meat, alcohol and women. Gandhi's brother Laxmidas, who was already a lawyer, cheered Gandhi's London studies plan and offered to support him. Putlibai gave Gandhi her permission and blessing.[49][53]

On 10 August 1888, Gandhi aged 18, left Porbandar for Mumbai, then known as Bombay. Upon arrival, he stayed with the local Modh Bania community whose elders warned him that England would tempt him to compromise his religion, and eat and drink in Western ways. Despite Gandhi informing them of his promise to his mother and her blessings, he was excommunicated from his caste. Gandhi ignored this, and on 4 September, he sailed from Bombay to London, with his brother seeing him off.[52][54] Gandhi attended University College, London, a constituent college of the University of London.


Gandhi in London as a law student

At UCL, he studied law and jurisprudence and was invited to enroll at Inner Temple with the intention of becoming a barrister. His childhood shyness and self-withdrawal had continued through his teens. He retained these traits when he arrived in London, but joined a public speaking practice group and overcame his shyness sufficiently to practise law.[55]

He demonstrated a keen interest in the welfare of London’s impoverished dockland communities. In 1889, a bitter trade dispute broke out in London, with dockers striking for better pay and conditions, and seamen, shipbuilders, factory girls and other joining the strike in solidarity. The strikers were successful, in part due to the mediation of Cardinal Manning, leading Gandhi and an Indian friend to make a point of visiting the cardinal and thanking him for his work.[56]

Vegetarianism and committee work

Gandhi's time in London was influenced by the vow he had made to his mother. He tried to adopt "English" customs, including taking dancing lessons. However, he did not appreciate the bland vegetarian food offered by his landlady and was frequently hungry until he found one of London's few vegetarian restaurants. Influenced by Henry Salt's writing, he joined the London Vegetarian Society and was elected to its executive committee[57] under the aegis of its president and benefactor Arnold Hills. An achievement while on the committee was the establishment of a Bayswater chapter.[26] Some of the vegetarians he met were members of the Theosophical Society, which had been founded in 1875 to further universal brotherhood, and which was devoted to the study of Buddhist and Hindu literature. They encouraged Gandhi to join them in reading the Bhagavad Gita both in translation as well as in the original.[57]

Gandhi had a friendly and productive relationship with Hills, but the two men took a different view on the continued LVS membership of fellow committee member Dr Thomas Allinson. Their disagreement is the first known example of Gandhi challenging authority, despite his shyness and temperamental disinclination towards confrontation.

Allinson had been promoting newly available birth control methods, but Hills disapproved of these, believing they undermined public morality. He believed vegetarianism to be a moral movement and that Allinson should therefore no longer remain a member of the LVS. Gandhi shared Hills' views on the dangers of birth control, but defended Allinson's right to differ.[58] It would have been hard for Gandhi to challenge Hills; Hills was 12 years his senior and unlike Gandhi, highly eloquent. He bankrolled the LVS and was a captain of industry with his Thames Ironworks company employing more than 6,000 people in the East End of London. He was also a highly accomplished sportsman who later founded the football club West Ham United. In his 1927 An Autobiography, Vol. I, Gandhi wrote:

The question deeply interested me...I had a high regard for Mr. Hills and his generosity. But I thought it was quite improper to exclude a man from a vegetarian society simply because he refused to regard puritan morals as one of the objects of the society[58]

A motion to remove Allinson was raised, and was debated and voted on by the committee. Gandhi's shyness was an obstacle to his defence of Allinson at the committee meeting. He wrote his views down on paper but shyness prevented him from reading out his arguments, so Hills, the President, asked another committee member to read them out for him. Although some other members of the committee agreed with Gandhi, the vote was lost and Allinson excluded. There were no hard feelings, with Hills proposing the toast at the LVS farewell dinner in honour of Gandhi's return to India.[59]

Called to the bar

Gandhi, at age 22, was called to the bar in June 1891 and then left London for India, where he learned that his mother had died while he was in London and that his family had kept the news from him.[57] His attempts at establishing a law practice in Bombay failed because he was psychologically unable to cross-examine witnesses. He returned to Rajkot to make a modest living drafting petitions for litigants, but he was forced to stop when he ran afoul of a British officer Sam Sunny.[26][57]

In 1893, a Muslim merchant in Kathiawar named Dada Abdullah contacted Gandhi. Abdullah owned a large successful shipping business in South Africa. His distant cousin in Johannesburg needed a lawyer, and they preferred someone with Kathiawari heritage. Gandhi inquired about his pay for the work. They offered a total salary of £105 (~$17,200 in 2019 money) plus travel expenses. He accepted it, knowing that it would be at least a one-year commitment in the Colony of Natal, South Africa, also a part of the British Empire.[26][60]

Civil rights activist in South Africa (1893–1914)


This bronze statue of Gandhi commemorating the centenary of the incident at the Pietermaritzburg Railway Station was unveiled by Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Church Street, Pietermaritzburg, in June 1993

In April 1893, Gandhi aged 23, set sail for South Africa to be the lawyer for Abdullah's cousin.[60][61] He spent 21 years in South Africa, where he developed his political views, ethics and politics.[62][63]

Immediately upon arriving in South Africa, Gandhi faced discrimination because of his skin colour and heritage, like all people of colour.[64] He was not allowed to sit with European passengers in the stagecoach and told to sit on the floor near the driver, then beaten when he refused; elsewhere he was kicked into a gutter for daring to walk near a house, in another instance thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg after refusing to leave the first-class.[65][66] He sat in the train station, shivering all night and pondering if he should return to India or protest for his rights.[66] He chose to protest and was allowed to board the train the next day.[67] In another incident, the magistrate of a Durban court ordered Gandhi to remove his turban, which he refused to do.[68] Indians were not allowed to walk on public footpaths in South Africa. Gandhi was kicked by a police officer out of the footpath onto the street without warning.[69]

When Gandhi arrived in South Africa, according to Herman, he thought of himself as "a Briton first, and an Indian second".[70] However, the prejudice against him and his fellow Indians from British people that Gandhi experienced and observed deeply bothered him. He found it humiliating, struggling to understand how some people can feel honour or superiority or pleasure in such inhumane practices.[66] Gandhi began to question his people's standing in the British Empire.[71]

The Abdullah case that had brought him to South Africa concluded in May 1894, and the Indian community organised a farewell party for Gandhi as he prepared to return to India.[72] However, a new Natal government discriminatory proposal led to Gandhi extending his original period of stay in South Africa. He planned to assist Indians in opposing a bill to deny them the right to vote, a right then proposed to be an exclusive European right. He asked Joseph Chamberlain, the British Colonial Secretary, to reconsider his position on this bill.[62] Though unable to halt the bill's passage, his campaign was successful in drawing attention to the grievances of Indians in South Africa. He helped found the Natal Indian Congress in 1894,[26][67] and through this organisation, he moulded the Indian community of South Africa into a unified political force. In January 1897, when Gandhi landed in Durban, a mob of white settlers attacked him[73] and he escaped only through the efforts of the wife of the police superintendent. However, he refused to press charges against any member of the mob.[26]


Gandhi with the stretcher-bearers of the Indian Ambulance Corps during the Boer War.

During the Boer War, Gandhi volunteered in 1900 to form a group of stretcher-bearers as the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps. According to Arthur Herman, Gandhi wanted to disprove the imperial British stereotype that Hindus were not fit for "manly" activities involving danger and exertion, unlike the Muslim "martial races".[74] Gandhi raised eleven hundred Indian volunteers, to support British combat troops against the Boers. They were trained and medically certified to serve on the front lines. They were auxiliaries at the Battle of Colenso to a White volunteer ambulance corps. At the battle of Spion Kop Gandhi and his bearers moved to the front line and had to carry wounded soldiers for miles to a field hospital because the terrain was too rough for the ambulances. Gandhi and thirty-seven other Indians received the Queen's South Africa Medal.[75][76]


Gandhi (left) and his wife Kasturba (right) (1902)

In 1906, the Transvaal government promulgated a new Act compelling registration of the colony's Indian and Chinese populations. At a mass protest meeting held in Johannesburg on 11 September that year, Gandhi adopted his still evolving methodology of Satyagraha (devotion to the truth), or nonviolent protest, for the first time.[77] According to Anthony Parel, Gandhi was also influenced by the Tamil moral text Tirukkuṛaḷ after Leo Tolstoy mentioned it in their correspondence that began with "A Letter to a Hindu".[78][79] Gandhi urged Indians to defy the new law and to suffer the punishments for doing so. Gandhi's ideas of protests, persuasion skills and public relations had emerged. He took these back to India in 1915.[80][81]

Europeans, Indians and Africans

Gandhi focused his attention on Indians while in South Africa. He initially was not interested in politics. This changed, however, after he was discriminated against and bullied, such as by being thrown out of a train coach because of his skin colour by a white train official. After several such incidents with Whites in South Africa, Gandhi's thinking and focus changed, and he felt he must resist this and fight for rights. He entered politics by forming the Natal Indian Congress.[82] According to Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, Gandhi's views on racism are contentious, and in some cases, distressing to those who admire him. Gandhi suffered persecution from the beginning in South Africa. Like with other coloured people, white officials denied him his rights, and the press and those in the streets bullied and called him a "parasite", "semi-barbarous", "canker", "squalid coolie", "yellow man", and other epithets. People would spit on him as an expression of racial hate.[83]

While in South Africa, Gandhi focused on racial persecution of Indians but ignored those of Africans. In some cases, state Desai and Vahed, his behaviour was one of being a willing part of racial stereotyping and African exploitation.[83] During a speech in September 1896, Gandhi complained that the whites in the British colony of South Africa were degrading Indian Hindus and Muslims to "a level of Kaffir".[84] Scholars cite it as an example of evidence that Gandhi at that time thought of Indians and black South Africans differently.[83] As another example given by Herman, Gandhi, at age 24, prepared a legal brief for the Natal Assembly in 1895, seeking voting rights for Indians. Gandhi cited race history and European Orientalists' opinions that "Anglo-Saxons and Indians are sprung from the same Aryan stock or rather the Indo-European peoples", and argued that Indians should not be grouped with the Africans.[72]

Years later, Gandhi and his colleagues served and helped Africans as nurses and by opposing racism, according to the Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela. The general image of Gandhi, state Desai and Vahed, has been reinvented since his assassination as if he was always a saint when in reality his life was more complex, contained inconvenient truths and was one that evolved over time.[83] In contrast, other Africa scholars state the evidence points to a rich history of co-operation and efforts by Gandhi and Indian people with nonwhite South Africans against persecution of Africans and the Apartheid.[85]

In 1906, when the British declared war against the Zulu Kingdom in Natal, Gandhi at age 36, sympathised with the Zulus and encouraged the Indian volunteers to help as an ambulance unit.[86] He argued that Indians should participate in the war efforts to change attitudes and perceptions of the British people against the coloured people.[87] Gandhi, a group of 20 Indians and black people of South Africa volunteered as a stretcher-bearer corps to treat wounded British soldiers and Zulu victims.[86]


Gandhi photographed in South Africa (1909)

White soldiers stopped Gandhi and team from treating the injured Zulu, and some African stretcher-bearers with Gandhi were shot dead by the British. The medical team commanded by Gandhi operated for less than two months.[86] Gandhi volunteering to help as a "staunch loyalist" during the Zulu and other wars made no difference in the British attitude, states Herman, and the African experience was a part of his great disillusionment with the West, transforming him into an "uncompromising non-cooperator".[87]

In 1910, Gandhi established, with the help of his friend Hermann Kallenbach, an idealistic community they named Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg.[88] There he nurtured his policy of peaceful resistance.[89]

In the years after black South Africans gained the right to vote in South Africa (1994), Gandhi was proclaimed a national hero with numerous monuments.[90]

Struggle for Indian independence (1915–1947)

See also: Indian independence movement

At the request of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, conveyed to him by C. F. Andrews, Gandhi returned to India in 1915. He brought an international reputation as a leading Indian nationalist, theorist and community organiser.

Gandhi joined the Indian National Congress and was introduced to Indian issues, politics and the Indian people primarily by Gokhale. Gokhale was a key leader of the Congress Party best known for his restraint and moderation, and his insistence on working inside the system. Gandhi took Gokhale's liberal approach based on British Whiggish traditions and transformed it to make it look Indian.[91]

Gandhi took leadership of the Congress in 1920 and began escalating demands until on 26 January 1930 the Indian National Congress declared the independence of India. The British did not recognise the declaration but negotiations ensued, with the Congress taking a role in provincial government in the late 1930s. Gandhi and the Congress withdrew their support of the Raj when the Viceroy declared war on Germany in September 1939 without consultation. Tensions escalated until Gandhi demanded immediate independence in 1942 and the British responded by imprisoning him and tens of thousands of Congress leaders. Meanwhile, the Muslim League did co-operate with Britain and moved, against Gandhi's strong opposition, to demands for a totally separate Muslim state of Pakistan. In August 1947 the British partitioned the land with India and Pakistan each achieving independence on terms that Gandhi disapproved.[92]

Role in World War I

See also: The role of India in World War I

In April 1918, during the latter part of World War I, the Viceroy invited Gandhi to a War Conference in Delhi.[93] Gandhi agreed to actively recruit Indians for the war effort.[94][95] In contrast to the Zulu War of 1906 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when he recruited volunteers for the Ambulance Corps, this time Gandhi attempted to recruit combatants. In a June 1918 leaflet entitled "Appeal for Enlistment", Gandhi wrote "To bring about such a state of things we should have the ability to defend ourselves, that is, the ability to bear arms and to use them... If we want to learn the use of arms with the greatest possible despatch, it is our duty to enlist ourselves in the army."[96] He did, however, stipulate in a letter to the Viceroy's private secretary that he "personally will not kill or injure anybody, friend or foe."[97]

Gandhi's war recruitment campaign brought into question his consistency on nonviolence. Gandhi's private secretary noted that "The question of the consistency between his creed of 'Ahimsa' (nonviolence) and his recruiting campaign was raised not only then but has been discussed ever since."[94]

Champaran agitations

Main article: Champaran Satyagraha


Gandhi in 1918, at the time of the Kheda and Champaran Satyagrahas

Gandhi's first major achievement came in 1917 with the Champaran agitation in Bihar. The Champaran agitation pitted the local peasantry against their largely British landlords who were backed by the local administration. The peasantry was forced to grow Indigofera, a cash crop for Indigo dye whose demand had been declining over two decades, and were forced to sell their crops to the planters at a fixed price. Unhappy with this, the peasantry appealed to Gandhi at his ashram in Ahmedabad. Pursuing a strategy of nonviolent protest, Gandhi took the administration by surprise and won concessions from the authorities.[98]

Kheda agitations

Main article: Kheda Satyagraha

In 1918, Kheda was hit by floods and famine and the peasantry was demanding relief from taxes. Gandhi moved his headquarters to Nadiad,[99] organising scores of supporters and fresh volunteers from the region, the most notable being Vallabhbhai Patel.[100] Using non-co-operation as a technique, Gandhi initiated a signature campaign where peasants pledged non-payment of revenue even under the threat of confiscation of land. A social boycott of mamlatdars and talatdars (revenue officials within the district) accompanied the agitation. Gandhi worked hard to win public support for the agitation across the country. For five months, the administration refused but finally in end-May 1918, the Government gave way on important provisions and relaxed the conditions of payment of revenue tax until the famine ended. In Kheda, Vallabhbhai Patel represented the farmers in negotiations with the British, who suspended revenue collection and released all the prisoners.[101]

Khilafat movement

Every revolution begins with a single act of defiance.

In 1919, following World War I, Gandhi (aged 49) sought political co-operation from Muslims in his fight against British imperialism by supporting the Ottoman Empire that had been defeated in the World War. Before this initiative of Gandhi, communal disputes and religious riots between Hindus and Muslims were common in British India, such as the riots of 1917–18. Gandhi had already supported the British crown with resources and by recruiting Indian soldiers to fight the war in Europe on the British side. This effort of Gandhi was in part motivated by the British promise to reciprocate the help with swaraj (self-government) to Indians after the end of World War I.[102] The British government, instead of self government, had offered minor reforms instead, disappointing Gandhi.[103] Gandhi announced his satyagraha (civil disobedience) intentions. The British colonial officials made their counter move by passing the Rowlatt Act, to block Gandhi's movement. The Act allowed the British government to treat civil disobedience participants as criminals and gave it the legal basis to arrest anyone for "preventive indefinite detention, incarceration without judicial review or any need for a trial".[104]

Gandhi felt that Hindu-Muslim co-operation was necessary for political progress against the British. He leveraged the Khilafat movement, wherein Sunni Muslims in India, their leaders such as the sultans of princely states in India and Ali brothers championed the Turkish Caliph as a solidarity symbol of Sunni Islamic community (ummah). They saw the Caliph as their means to support Islam and the Islamic law after the defeat of Ottoman Empire in World War I.[105][106][107] Gandhi's support to the Khilafat movement led to mixed results. It initially led to a strong Muslim support for Gandhi. However, the Hindu leaders including Rabindranath Tagore questioned Gandhi's leadership because they were largely against recognising or supporting the Sunni Islamic Caliph in Turkey.[104][108][109][110]

The increasing Muslim support for Gandhi, after he championed the Caliph's cause, temporarily stopped the Hindu-Muslim communal violence. It offered evidence of inter-communal harmony in joint Rowlatt satyagraha demonstration rallies, raising Gandhi's stature as the political leader to the British.[111][112] His support for the Khilafat movement also helped him sideline Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had announced his opposition to the satyagraha non-co-operation movement approach of Gandhi. Jinnah began creating his independent support, and later went on to lead the demand for West and East Pakistan. Though they agreed in general terms on Indian independence, they disagreed on the means of achieving this. Jinnah was mainly interested in dealing with the British via constitutional negotiation, rather than attempting to agitate the masses.[113][114][115]

By the end of 1922 the Khilafat movement had collapsed.[116] Turkey's Atatürk had ended the Caliphate, Khilafat movement ended, and Muslim support for Gandhi largely evaporated.[106][107] Muslim leaders and delegates abandoned Gandhi and his Congress.[117] Hindu-Muslim communal conflicts reignited. Deadly religious riots re-appeared in numerous cities, with 91 in United Provinces of Agra and Oudh alone.[118][119] Archives of the ZBW

Non-co-operation

Main article: Non-co-operation movement

With his book Hind Swaraj (1909) Gandhi, aged 40, declared that British rule was established in India with the co-operation of Indians and had survived only because of this co-operation. If Indians refused to co-operate, British rule would collapse and swaraj would come.[120]


Gandhi with Dr. Annie Besant en route to a meeting in Madras in September 1921. Earlier, in Madurai, on 21 September 1921, Gandhi had adopted the loin-cloth for the first time as a symbol of his identification with India's poor.

In February 1919, Gandhi cautioned the Viceroy of India with a cable communication that if the British were to pass the Rowlatt Act, he would appeal to Indians to start civil disobedience.[121] The British government ignored him and passed the law, stating it would not yield to threats. The satyagraha civil disobedience followed, with people assembling to protest the Rowlatt Act. On 30 March 1919, British law officers opened fire on an assembly of unarmed people, peacefully gathered, participating in satyagraha in Delhi.[121]

People rioted in retaliation. On 6 April 1919, a Hindu festival day, he asked a crowd to remember not to injure or kill British people, but to express their frustration with peace, to boycott British goods and burn any British clothing they owned. He emphasised the use of non-violence to the British and towards each other, even if the other side used violence. Communities across India announced plans to gather in greater numbers to protest. Government warned him to not enter Delhi. Gandhi defied the order. On 9 April, Gandhi was arrested.[121]

People rioted. On 13 April 1919, people including women with children gathered in an Amritsar park, and a British officer named Reginald Dyer surrounded them and ordered his troops to fire on them. The resulting Jallianwala Bagh massacre (or Amritsar massacre) of hundreds of Sikh and Hindu civilians enraged the subcontinent, but was cheered by some Britons and parts of the British media as an appropriate response. Gandhi in Ahmedabad, on the day after the massacre in Amritsar, did not criticise the British and instead criticised his fellow countrymen for not exclusively using love to deal with the hate of the British government.[121] Gandhi demanded that people stop all violence, stop all property destruction, and went on fast-to-death to pressure Indians to stop their rioting.[122]

The massacre and Gandhi's non-violent response to it moved many, but also made some Sikhs and Hindus upset that Dyer was getting away with murder. Investigation committees were formed by the British, which Gandhi asked Indians to boycott.[121] The unfolding events, the massacre and the British response, led Gandhi to the belief that Indians will never get a fair equal treatment under British rulers, and he shifted his attention to Swaraj or self rule and political independence for India.[123] In 1921, Gandhi was the leader of the Indian National Congress.[107] He reorganised the Congress. With Congress now behind him, and Muslim support triggered by his backing the Khilafat movement to restore the Caliph in Turkey,[107] Gandhi had the political support and the attention of the British Raj.[110][104][106]


Gandhi spinning yarn, in the late 1920s

Gandhi expanded his nonviolent non-co-operation platform to include the swadeshi policy – the boycott of foreign-made goods, especially British goods. Linked to this was his advocacy that khadi (homespun cloth) be worn by all Indians instead of British-made textiles. Gandhi exhorted Indian men and women, rich or poor, to spend time each day spinning khadi in support of the independence movement.[124] In addition to boycotting British products, Gandhi urged the people to boycott British institutions and law courts, to resign from government employment, and to forsake British titles and honours. Gandhi thus began his journey aimed at crippling the British India government economically, politically and administratively.[125]

The appeal of "Non-cooperation" grew, its social popularity drew participation from all strata of Indian society. Gandhi was arrested on 10 March 1922, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment. He began his sentence on 18 March 1922. With Gandhi isolated in prison, the Indian National Congress split into two factions, one led by Chitta Ranjan Das and Motilal Nehru favouring party participation in the legislatures, and the other led by Chakravarti Rajagopalachari and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, opposing this move.[126] Furthermore, co-operation among Hindus and Muslims ended as Khilafat movement collapsed with the rise of Atatürk in Turkey. Muslim leaders left the Congress and began forming Muslim organisations. The political base behind Gandhi had broken into factions. Gandhi was released in February 1924 for an appendicitis operation, having served only two years.[127]

Salt Satyagraha (Salt March)

Main article: Salt Satyagraha

[Video File]
Original footage of Gandhi and his followers marching to Dandi in the Salt Satyagraha

After his early release from prison for political crimes in 1924, over the second half of the 1920s Gandhi continued to pursue swaraj. He pushed through a resolution at the Calcutta Congress in December 1928 calling on the British government to grant India dominion status or face a new campaign of non-cooperation with complete independence for the country as its goal.[128] After his support for World War I with Indian combat troops, and the failure of Khilafat movement in preserving the rule of Caliph in Turkey, followed by a collapse in Muslim support for his leadership, some such as Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh questioned his values and non-violent approach.[106][129] While many Hindu leaders championed a demand for immediate independence, Gandhi revised his own call to a one-year wait, instead of two.[128]

The British did not respond favourably to Gandhi's proposal. British political leaders such as Lord Birkenhead and Winston Churchill announced opposition to "the appeasers of Gandhi" in their discussions with European diplomats who sympathised with Indian demands.[130] On 31 December 1929, the flag of India was unfurled in Lahore. Gandhi led Congress in a celebration on 26 January 1930 of India's Independence Day in Lahore. This day was commemorated by almost every other Indian organisation. Gandhi then launched a new Satyagraha against the tax on salt in March 1930. Gandhi sent an ultimatum in the form of a polite letter to Lord Irwin, the viceroy of India, on 2 March. Gandhi condemned British rule in the letter, describing it as "a curse" that "has impoverished the dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation and by a ruinously expensive military and civil administration...It has reduced us politically to serfdom." Gandhi also mentioned in the letter that the viceroy received a salary "over five thousand times India's average income."[131] British violence, Gandhi promised, was going to be defeated by Indian non-violence.

This was highlighted by the Salt March to Dandi from 12 March to 6 April, where, together with 78 volunteers, he marched 388 kilometres (241 mi) from Ahmedabad to Dandi, Gujarat to make salt himself, with the declared intention of breaking the salt laws. The march took 25 days to cover 240 miles with Gandhi speaking to often huge crowds along the way. Thousands of Indians joined him in Dandi. On 5 May he was interned under a regulation dating from 1827 in anticipation of a protest that he had planned. The protest at Dharasana salt works on 21 May went ahead without him see. A horrified American journalist, Webb Miller, described the British response thus:

In complete silence the Gandhi men drew up and halted a hundred yards from the stockade. A picked column advanced from the crowd, waded the ditches and approached the barbed wire stockade... at a word of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shot lathis [long bamboo sticks]. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off blows. They went down like ninepins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls... Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders.[132]

This went on for hours until some 300 or more protesters had been beaten, many seriously injured and two killed. At no time did they offer any resistance.

This campaign was one of his most successful at upsetting British hold on India; Britain responded by imprisoning over 60,000 people.[133] Congress estimates, however, put the figure at 90,000. Among them was one of Gandhi's lieutenants, Jawaharlal Nehru.

According to Sarma, Gandhi recruited women to participate in the salt tax campaigns and the boycott of foreign products, which gave many women a new self-confidence and dignity in the mainstream of Indian public life.[134] However, other scholars such as Marilyn French state that Gandhi barred women from joining his civil disobedience movement because he feared he would be accused of using women as a political shield.[135] When women insisted on joining the movement and participating in public demonstrations, Gandhi asked the volunteers to get permissions of their guardians and only those women who can arrange child-care should join him.[136] Regardless of Gandhi's apprehensions and views, Indian women joined the Salt March by the thousands to defy the British salt taxes and monopoly on salt mining. After Gandhi's arrest, the women marched and picketed shops on their own, accepting violence and verbal abuse from British authorities for the cause in the manner Gandhi inspired.[135]

Gandhi as folk hero


Indian workers on strike in support of Gandhi in 1930.

Indian Congress in the 1920s appealed to Andhra Pradesh peasants by creating Telugu language plays that combined Indian mythology and legends, linked them to Gandhi's ideas, and portrayed Gandhi as a messiah, a reincarnation of ancient and medieval Indian nationalist leaders and saints. The plays built support among peasants steeped in traditional Hindu culture, according to Murali, and this effort made Gandhi a folk hero in Telugu speaking villages, a sacred messiah-like figure.[137]

According to Dennis Dalton, it was the ideas that were responsible for his wide following. Gandhi criticised Western civilisation as one driven by "brute force and immorality", contrasting it with his categorisation of Indian civilisation as one driven by "soul force and morality".[138] Gandhi captured the imagination of the people of his heritage with his ideas about winning "hate with love". These ideas are evidenced in his pamphlets from the 1890s, in South Africa, where too he was popular among the Indian indentured workers. After he returned to India, people flocked to him because he reflected their values.[138]

Gandhi also campaigned hard going from one rural corner of the Indian subcontinent to another. He used terminology and phrases such as Rama-rajya from Ramayana, Prahlada as a paradigmatic icon, and such cultural symbols as another facet of swaraj and satyagraha.[139] These ideas sounded strange outside India, during his lifetime, but they readily and deeply resonated with the culture and historic values of his people.[138][140]

Negotiations

The government, represented by Lord Irwin, decided to negotiate with Gandhi. The Gandhi–Irwin Pact was signed in March 1931. The British Government agreed to free all political prisoners, in return for the suspension of the civil disobedience movement. According to the pact, Gandhi was invited to attend the Round Table Conference in London for discussions and as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress. The conference was a disappointment to Gandhi and the nationalists. Gandhi expected to discuss India's independence, while the British side focused on the Indian princes and Indian minorities rather than on a transfer of power. Lord Irwin's successor, Lord Willingdon, took a hard line against India as an independent nation, began a new campaign of controlling and subduing the nationalist movement. Gandhi was again arrested, and the government tried and failed to negate his influence by completely isolating him from his followers.[141]

In Britain, Winston Churchill, a prominent Conservative politician who was then out of office but later became its prime minister, became a vigorous and articulate critic of Gandhi and opponent of his long-term plans. Churchill often ridiculed Gandhi, saying in a widely reported 1931 speech:

It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace....to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.[142]

Churchill's bitterness against Gandhi grew in the 1930s. He called Gandhi as the one who was "seditious in aim" whose evil genius and multiform menace was attacking the British empire. Churchill called him a dictator, a "Hindu Mussolini", fomenting a race war, trying to replace the Raj with Brahmin cronies, playing on the ignorance of Indian masses, all for selfish gain.[143] Churchill attempted to isolate Gandhi, and his criticism of Gandhi was widely covered by European and American press. It gained Churchill sympathetic support, but it also increased support for Gandhi among Europeans. The developments heightened Churchill's anxiety that the "British themselves would give up out of pacifism and misplaced conscience".[143]

Round Table Conferences


Gandhi and his personal assistant Mahadev Desai at Birla House, 1939

During the discussions between Gandhi and the British government over 1931–32 at the Round Table Conferences, Gandhi, now aged about 62, sought constitutional reforms as a preparation to the end of colonial British rule, and begin the self-rule by Indians.[144] The British side sought reforms that would keep Indian subcontinent as a colony. The British negotiators proposed constitutional reforms on a British Dominion model that established separate electorates based on religious and social divisions. The British questioned the Congress party and Gandhi's authority to speak for all of India.[145] They invited Indian religious leaders, such as Muslims and Sikhs, to press their demands along religious lines, as well as B. R. Ambedkar as the representative leader of the untouchables.[144] Gandhi vehemently opposed a constitution that enshrined rights or representations based on communal divisions, because he feared that it would not bring people together but divide them, perpetuate their status and divert the attention from India's struggle to end the colonial rule.[146][147]

The Second Round Table conference was the only time he left India between 1914 and his death in 1948. He declined the government's offer of accommodation in an expensive West End hotel, preferring to stay in the East End, to live among working-class people, as he did in India.[148] He based himself in a small cell-bedroom at Kingsley Hall for the three-month duration of his stay and was enthusiastically received by East Enders.[149] During this time he renewed his links with the British vegetarian movement.


An admiring East End crowd gathers to witness the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi, 1931

After Gandhi returned from the Second Round Table conference, he started a new satyagraha. He was arrested and imprisoned at the Yerwada Jail, Pune. While he was in prison, the British government enacted a new law that granted untouchables a separate electorate. It came to be known as the Communal Award.[150] In protest, Gandhi started a fast-unto-death, while he was held in prison.[151] The resulting public outcry forced the government, in consultations with Ambedkar, to replace the Communal Award with a compromise Poona Pact.[152][153]

Congress politics

In 1934 Gandhi resigned from Congress party membership. He did not disagree with the party's position but felt that if he resigned, his popularity with Indians would cease to stifle the party's membership, which actually varied, including communists, socialists, trade unionists, students, religious conservatives, and those with pro-business convictions, and that these various voices would get a chance to make themselves heard. Gandhi also wanted to avoid being a target for Raj propaganda by leading a party that had temporarily accepted political accommodation with the Raj.[154]

Gandhi returned to active politics again in 1936, with the Nehru presidency and the Lucknow session of the Congress. Although Gandhi wanted a total focus on the task of winning independence and not speculation about India's future, he did not restrain the Congress from adopting socialism as its goal. Gandhi had a clash with Subhas Chandra Bose, who had been elected president in 1938, and who had previously expressed a lack of faith in nonviolence as a means of protest.[155] Despite Gandhi's opposition, Bose won a second term as Congress President, against Gandhi's nominee, Dr. Pattabhi Sitaramayya; but left the Congress when the All-India leaders resigned en masse in protest of his abandonment of the principles introduced by Gandhi.[156][157] Gandhi declared that Sitaramayya's defeat was his defeat.[158]

World War II and Quit India movement

Main article: Quit India Movement


Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi in 1946

Gandhi opposed providing any help to the British war effort and he campaigned against any Indian participation in the World War II.[159] Gandhi's campaign did not enjoy the support of Indian masses and many Indian leaders such as Sardar Patel and Rajendra Prasad. His campaign was a failure.[159] Over 2.5 million Indians ignored Gandhi, volunteered and joined the British military to fight on various fronts of the allied forces.[159]

Gandhi opposition to the Indian participation in the World War II was motivated by his belief that India could not be party to a war ostensibly being fought for democratic freedom while that freedom was denied to India itself.[160] He also condemned Nazism and Fascism, a view which won endorsement of other Indian leaders. As the war progressed, Gandhi intensified his demand for independence, calling for the British to Quit India in a 1942 speech in Mumbai.[161] This was Gandhi's and the Congress Party's most definitive revolt aimed at securing the British exit from India.[162] The British government responded quickly to the Quit India speech, and within hours after Gandhi's speech arrested Gandhi and all the members of the Congress Working Committee.[163] His countrymen retaliated the arrests by damaging or burning down hundreds of government owned railway stations, police stations, and cutting down telegraph wires.[164]

In 1942, Gandhi now nearing age 73, urged his people to completely stop co-operating with the imperial government. In this effort, he urged that they neither kill nor injure British people, but be willing to suffer and die if violence is initiated by the British officials.[161] He clarified that the movement would not be stopped because of any individual acts of violence, saying that the "ordered anarchy" of "the present system of administration" was "worse than real anarchy."[165][166] He urged Indians to Karo ya maro ("Do or die") in the cause of their rights and freedoms.[161][167]


Gandhi in 1942, the year he launched the Quit India Movement

Gandhi's arrest lasted two years, as he was held in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune. During this period, his long time secretary Mahadev Desai died of a heart attack, his wife Kasturba died after 18 months' imprisonment on 22 February 1944; and Gandhi suffered a severe malaria attack.[164] While in jail, he agreed to an interview with Stuart Gelder, a British journalist. Gelder then composed and released an interview summary, cabled it to the mainstream press, that announced sudden concessions Gandhi was willing to make, comments that shocked his countrymen, the Congress workers and even Gandhi. The latter two claimed that it distorted what Gandhi actually said on a range of topics and falsely repudiated the Quit India movement.[164]

Gandhi was released before the end of the war on 6 May 1944 because of his failing health and necessary surgery; the Raj did not want him to die in prison and enrage the nation. He came out of detention to an altered political scene – the Muslim League for example, which a few years earlier had appeared marginal, "now occupied the centre of the political stage"[168] and the topic of Muhammad Ali Jinnah's campaign for Pakistan was a major talking point. Gandhi and Jinnah had extensive correspondence and the two men met several times over a period of two weeks in September 1944, where Gandhi insisted on a united religiously plural and independent India which included Muslims and non-Muslims of the Indian subcontinent coexisting. Jinnah rejected this proposal and insisted instead for partitioning the subcontinent on religious lines to create a separate Muslim India (later Pakistan).[10][169] These discussions continued through 1947.[170]

While the leaders of Congress languished in jail, the other parties supported the war and gained organizational strength. Underground publications flailed at the ruthless suppression of Congress, but it had little control over events.[171] At the end of the war, the British gave clear indications that power would be transferred to Indian hands. At this point Gandhi called off the struggle, and around 100,000 political prisoners were released, including the Congress's leadership.[172]

Partition and independence

See also: Indian independence movement and Partition of India


Gandhi with Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1944

Gandhi opposed the partition of the Indian subcontinent along religious lines.[173] The Indian National Congress and Gandhi called for the British to Quit India. However, the Muslim League demanded "Divide and Quit India".[174][175] Gandhi suggested an agreement which required the Congress and the Muslim League to co-operate and attain independence under a provisional government, thereafter, the question of partition could be resolved by a plebiscite in the districts with a Muslim majority.[176]

Jinnah rejected Gandhi's proposal and called for Direct Action Day, on 16 August 1946, to press Muslims to publicly gather in cities and support his proposal for the partition of the Indian subcontinent into a Muslim state and non-Muslim state. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the Muslim League Chief Minister of Bengal – now Bangladesh and West Bengal, gave Calcutta's police special holiday to celebrate the Direct Action Day.[177] The Direct Action Day triggered a mass murder of Calcutta Hindus and the torching of their property, and holidaying police were missing to contain or stop the conflict.[178] The British government did not order its army to move in to contain the violence.[177] The violence on Direct Action Day led to retaliatory violence against Muslims across India. Thousands of Hindus and Muslims were murdered, and tens of thousands were injured in the cycle of violence in the days that followed.[179] Gandhi visited the most riot-prone areas to appeal a stop to the massacres.[178]


Gandhi in 1947, with Lord Louis Mountbatten, Britain's last Viceroy of India, and his wife Edwina Mountbatten

Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy and Governor-General of British India for three years through February 1947, had worked with Gandhi and Jinnah to find a common ground, before and after accepting Indian independence in principle. Wavell condemned Gandhi's character and motives as well as his ideas. Wavell accused Gandhi of harbouring the single minded idea to "overthrow British rule and influence and to establish a Hindu raj", and called Gandhi a "malignant, malevolent, exceedingly shrewd" politician.[180] Wavell feared a civil war on the Indian subcontinent, and doubted Gandhi would be able to stop it.[180]

The British reluctantly agreed to grant independence to the people of the Indian subcontinent, but accepted Jinnah's proposal of partitioning the land into Pakistan and India. Gandhi was involved in the final negotiations, but Stanley Wolpert states the "plan to carve up British India was never approved of or accepted by Gandhi".[181]

The partition was controversial and violently disputed. More than half a million were killed in religious riots as 10 million to 12 million non-Muslims (Hindus and Sikhs mostly) migrated from Pakistan into India, and Muslims migrated from India into Pakistan, across the newly created borders of India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan.[182]

Gandhi spent the day of independence not celebrating the end of the British rule but appealing for peace among his countrymen by fasting and spinning in Calcutta on 15 August 1947. The partition had gripped the Indian subcontinent with religious violence and the streets were filled with corpses.[183] Some writers credit Gandhi's fasting and protests for stopping the religious riots and communal violence.[180]

Death

Main article: Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi

At 5:17 pm on 30 January 1948, Gandhi was with his grandnieces in the garden of Birla House (now Gandhi Smriti), on his way to address a prayer meeting, when Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, fired three bullets into his chest from a pistol at close range. According to some accounts, Gandhi died instantly.[184][185] In other accounts, such as one prepared by an eyewitness journalist, Gandhi was carried into the Birla House, into a bedroom. There he died about 30 minutes later as one of Gandhi's family members read verses from Hindu scriptures.[186]

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru addressed his countrymen over the All-India Radio saying:[187]

Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere, and I do not quite know what to tell you or how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more. Perhaps I am wrong to say that; nevertheless, we will not see him again, as we have seen him for these many years, we will not run to him for advice or seek solace from him, and that is a terrible blow, not only for me, but for millions and millions in this country.[188]

Memorial where Gandhi was assassinated in 1948. His stylised footsteps lead to the memorial.

Godse, a Hindu nationalist with links to the extremist Hindu Mahasabha,[189] made no attempt to escape; several other conspirators were soon arrested as well.[190][191] They were tried in court at Delhi's Red Fort. At his trial, Godse did not deny the charges nor express any remorse. According to Claude Markovits, a French historian noted for his studies of colonial India, Godse stated that he killed Gandhi because of his complacence towards Muslims, holding Gandhi responsible for the frenzy of violence and sufferings during the subcontinent's partition into Pakistan and India. Godse accused Gandhi of subjectivism and of acting as if only he had a monopoly of the truth. Godse was found guilty and executed in 1949.[192][193]


Gandhi's funeral was marked by millions of Indians.[194]

Gandhi's death was mourned nationwide. Over a million people joined the five-mile-long funeral procession that took over five hours to reach Raj Ghat from Birla house, where he was assassinated, and another million watched the procession pass by.[194] Gandhi's body was transported on a weapons carrier, whose chassis was dismantled overnight to allow a high-floor to be installed so that people could catch a glimpse of his body. The engine of the vehicle was not used; instead four drag-ropes manned by 50 people each pulled the vehicle.[195] All Indian-owned establishments in London remained closed in mourning as thousands of people from all faiths and denominations and Indians from all over Britain converged at India House in London.[196]

Gandhi's assassination dramatically changed the political landscape. Nehru became his political heir. According to Markovits, while Gandhi was alive, Pakistan's declaration that it was a "Muslim state" had led Indian groups to demand that it be declared a "Hindu state".[192] Nehru used Gandhi's martyrdom as a political weapon to silence all advocates of Hindu nationalism as well as his political challengers. He linked Gandhi's assassination to politics of hatred and ill-will.[192]

According to Guha, Nehru and his Congress colleagues called on Indians to honour Gandhi's memory and even more his ideals.[197][198] Nehru used the assassination to consolidate the authority of the new Indian state. Gandhi's death helped marshal support for the new government and legitimise the Congress Party's control, leveraged by the massive outpouring of Hindu expressions of grief for a man who had inspired them for decades. The government suppressed the RSS, the Muslim National Guards, and the Khaksars, with some 200,000 arrests.[199]

For years after the assassination, states Markovits, "Gandhi's shadow loomed large over the political life of the new Indian Republic". The government quelled any opposition to its economic and social policies, despite these being contrary to Gandhi's ideas, by reconstructing Gandhi's image and ideals.[200]

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Part 5 of 7

Funeral and memorials

Gandhi was cremated in accordance with Hindu tradition. Gandhi's ashes were poured into urns which were sent across India for memorial services.[201] Most of the ashes were immersed at the Sangam at Allahabad on 12 February 1948, but some were secretly taken away. In 1997, Tushar Gandhi immersed the contents of one urn, found in a bank vault and reclaimed through the courts, at the Sangam at Allahabad.[202][203] Some of Gandhi's ashes were scattered at the source of the Nile River near Jinja, Uganda, and a memorial plaque marks the event. On 30 January 2008, the contents of another urn were immersed at Girgaum Chowpatty. Another urn is at the palace of the Aga Khan in Pune (where Gandhi was held as a political prisoner from 1942 to 1944[204][205]) and another in the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Los Angeles.[202][206]

The Birla House site where Gandhi was assassinated is now a memorial called Gandhi Smriti. The place near Yamuna river where he was cremated is the Rāj Ghāt memorial in New Delhi.[207] A black marble platform, it bears the epigraph "Hē Rāma" (Devanagari: हे ! राम or, Hey Raam). These are widely believed to be Gandhi's last words after he was shot, though the veracity of this statement has been disputed.[208]

Principles, practices, and beliefs

Gandhi's statements, letters and life have attracted much political and scholarly analysis of his principles, practices and beliefs, including what influenced him. Some writers present him as a paragon of ethical living and pacifism, while others present him as a more complex, contradictory and evolving character influenced by his culture and circumstances.[209][210]

Influences


Gandhi with poet Rabindranath Tagore, 1940

Gandhi grew up in a Hindu and Jain religious atmosphere in his native Gujarat, which were his primary influences, but he was also influenced by his personal reflections and literature of Hindu Bhakti saints, Advaita Vedanta, Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, and thinkers such as Tolstoy, Ruskin and Thoreau.[211][212] At age 57 he declared himself to be Advaitist Hindu in his religious persuasion, but added that he supported Dvaitist viewpoints and religious pluralism.[213][214][215]

Gandhi was influenced by his devout Vaishnava Hindu mother, the regional Hindu temples and saint tradition which co-existed with Jain tradition in Gujarat.[211][216] Historian R.B. Cribb states that Gandhi's thought evolved over time, with his early ideas becoming the core or scaffolding for his mature philosophy. He committed himself early to truthfulness, temperance, chastity, and vegetarianism.[217]

Gandhi's London lifestyle incorporated the values he had grown up with. When he returned to India in 1891, his outlook was parochial and he could not make a living as a lawyer. This challenged his belief that practicality and morality necessarily coincided. By moving in 1893 to South Africa he found a solution to this problem and developed the central concepts of his mature philosophy.[218]

According to Bhikhu Parekh, three books that influenced Gandhi most in South Africa were William Salter's Ethical Religion (1889); Henry David Thoreau's On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849); and Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894). Ruskin inspired his decision to live an austere life on a commune, at first on the Phoenix Farm in Natal and then on the Tolstoy Farm just outside Johannesburg, South Africa.[64] The most profound influence on Gandhi were those from Hinduism, Christianity and Jainism, states Parekh, with his thoughts "in harmony with the classical Indian traditions, specially the Advaita or monistic tradition".[219]

According to Indira Carr and others, Gandhi was influenced by Vaishnavism, Jainism and Advaita Vedanta.[220][221] Balkrishna Gokhale states that Gandhi was influenced by Hinduism and Jainism, and his studies of Sermon on the Mount of Christianity, Ruskin and Tolstoy.[222]

Additional theories of possible influences on Gandhi have been proposed. For example, in 1935, N. A. Toothi stated that Gandhi was influenced by the reforms and teachings of the Swaminarayan tradition of Hinduism. According to Raymond Williams, Toothi may have overlooked the influence of the Jain community, and adds close parallels do exist in programs of social reform in the Swaminarayan tradition and those of Gandhi, based on "nonviolence, truth-telling, cleanliness, temperance and upliftment of the masses."[223][224] Historian Howard states the culture of Gujarat influenced Gandhi and his methods.[225]

Leo Tolstoy


Mohandas K. Gandhi and other residents of Tolstoy Farm, South Africa, 1910

Along with the book mentioned above, in 1908 Leo Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindu, which said that only by using love as a weapon through passive resistance could the Indian people overthrow colonial rule. In 1909, Gandhi wrote to Tolstoy seeking advice and permission to republish A Letter to a Hindu in Gujarati. Tolstoy responded and the two continued a correspondence until Tolstoy's death in 1910 (Tolstoy's last letter was to Gandhi).[226] The letters concern practical and theological applications of nonviolence.[227] Gandhi saw himself a disciple of Tolstoy, for they agreed regarding opposition to state authority and colonialism; both hated violence and preached non-resistance. However, they differed sharply on political strategy. Gandhi called for political involvement; he was a nationalist and was prepared to use nonviolent force. He was also willing to compromise.[228] It was at Tolstoy Farm where Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach systematically trained their disciples in the philosophy of nonviolence.[229]

Shrimad Rajchandra

Gandhi credited Shrimad Rajchandra, a poet and Jain philosopher, as his influential counsellor. In Modern Review, June 1930, Gandhi wrote about their first encounter in 1891 at Dr. P.J. Mehta's residence in Bombay. He was introduced to Shrimad by Dr. Pranjivan Mehta.[230] Gandhi exchanged letters with Rajchandra when he was in South Africa, referring to him as Kavi (literally, "poet"). In 1930, Gandhi wrote, "Such was the man who captivated my heart in religious matters as no other man ever has till now."[231] 'I have said elsewhere that in moulding my inner life Tolstoy and Ruskin vied with Kavi. But Kavi's influence was undoubtedly deeper if only because I had come in closest personal touch with him.'[232]

Gandhi, in his autobiography, called Rajchandra his "guide and helper" and his "refuge [...] in moments of spiritual crisis". He had advised Gandhi to be patient and to study Hinduism deeply.[233][234][235]

Religious texts

During his stay in South Africa, along with scriptures and philosophical texts of Hinduism and other Indian religions, Gandhi read translated texts of Christianity such as the Bible, and Islam such as the Quran.[236] A Quaker mission in South Africa attempted to convert him to Christianity. Gandhi joined them in their prayers and debated Christian theology with them, but refused conversion stating he did not accept the theology therein or that Christ was the only son of God.[236][237][238]

His comparative studies of religions and interaction with scholars, led him to respect all religions as well as become concerned about imperfections in all of them and frequent misinterpretations.[236] Gandhi grew fond of Hinduism, and referred to the Bhagavad Gita as his spiritual dictionary and greatest single influence on his life.[236][239][240] Later, Gandhi translated the Gita into Gujarati in 1930.[241]

Sufism

Gandhi was acquainted with Sufi Islam's Chishti Order during his stay in South Africa. He attended Khanqah gatherings there at Riverside. According to Margaret Chatterjee, Gandhi as a Vaishnava Hindu shared values such as humility, devotion and brotherhood for the poor that is also found in Sufism.[242][243] Winston Churchill also compared Gandhi to a Sufi fakir.[142]

On wars and nonviolence

Support for wars

Gandhi participated in forming the Indian Ambulance Corps in the South African war against the Boers, on the British side in 1899.[244] Both the Dutch settlers called Boers and the imperial British at that time discriminated against the coloured races they considered as inferior, and Gandhi later wrote about his conflicted beliefs during the Boer war. He stated that "when the war was declared, my personal sympathies were all with the Boers, but my loyalty to the British rule drove me to participation with the British in that war. I felt that, if I demanded rights as a British citizen, it was also my duty, as such to participate in the defence of the British Empire. so I collected together as many comrades as possible, and with very great difficulty got their services accepted as an ambulance corps."[245]

During World War I (1914–1918), nearing the age of 50, Gandhi supported the British and its allied forces by recruiting Indians to join the British army, expanding the Indian contingent from about 100,000 to over 1.1 million.[103][244] He encouraged Indian people to fight on one side of the war in Europe and Africa at the cost of their lives.[244] Pacifists criticised and questioned Gandhi, who defended these practices by stating, according to Sankar Ghose, "it would be madness for me to sever my connection with the society to which I belong".[244] According to Keith Robbins, the recruitment effort was in part motivated by the British promise to reciprocate the help with swaraj (self-government) to Indians after the end of World War I.[102] After the war, the British government offered minor reforms instead, which disappointed Gandhi.[103] He launched his satyagraha movement in 1919. In parallel, Gandhi's fellowmen became sceptical of his pacifist ideas and were inspired by the ideas of nationalism and anti-imperialism.[246]

In a 1920 essay, after the World War I, Gandhi wrote, "where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Rahul Sagar interprets Gandhi's efforts to recruit for the British military during the War, as Gandhi's belief that, at that time, it would demonstrate that Indians were willing to fight. Further, it would also show the British that his fellow Indians were "their subjects by choice rather than out of cowardice." In 1922, Gandhi wrote that abstinence from violence is effective and true forgiveness only when one has the power to punish, not when one decides not to do anything because one is helpless.[247]

After World War II engulfed Britain, Gandhi actively campaigned to oppose any help to the British war effort and any Indian participation in the war. According to Arthur Herman, Gandhi believed that his campaign would strike a blow to imperialism.[159] Gandhi's position was not supported by many Indian leaders, and his campaign against the British war effort was a failure. The Hindu leader, Tej Bahadur Sapru, declared in 1941, states Herman, "A good many Congress leaders are fed up with the barren program of the Mahatma".[159] Over 2.5 million Indians ignored Gandhi, volunteered and joined on the British side. They fought and died as a part of the Allied forces in Europe, North Africa and various fronts of the World War II.[159]

Truth and Satyagraha


Plaque displaying one of Gandhi's quotes on rumour

Gandhi dedicated his life to discovering and pursuing truth, or Satya, and called his movement satyagraha, which means "appeal to, insistence on, or reliance on the Truth".[248] The first formulation of the satyagraha as a political movement and principle occurred in 1920, which he tabled as "Resolution on Non-cooperation" in September that year before a session of the Indian Congress. It was the satyagraha formulation and step, states Dennis Dalton, that deeply resonated with beliefs and culture of his people, embedded him into the popular consciousness, transforming him quickly into Mahatma.[249]


"God is truth. The way to truth lies through ahimsa (nonviolence)" – Sabarmati, 13 March 1927

Gandhi based Satyagraha on the Vedantic ideal of self-realization, ahimsa (nonviolence), vegetarianism, and universal love. William Borman states that the key to his satyagraha is rooted in the Hindu Upanishadic texts.[250] According to Indira Carr, Gandhi's ideas on ahimsa and satyagraha were founded on the philosophical foundations of Advaita Vedanta.[251] I. Bruce Watson states that some of these ideas are found not only in traditions within Hinduism, but also in Jainism or Buddhism, particularly those about non-violence, vegetarianism and universal love, but Gandhi's synthesis was to politicise these ideas.[252] Gandhi's concept of satya as a civil movement, states Glyn Richards, are best understood in the context of the Hindu terminology of Dharma and Ṛta.[253]

Gandhi stated that the most important battle to fight was overcoming his own demons, fears, and insecurities. Gandhi summarised his beliefs first when he said "God is Truth". He would later change this statement to "Truth is God". Thus, satya (truth) in Gandhi's philosophy is "God".[254] Gandhi, states Richards, described the term "God" not as a separate power, but as the Being (Brahman, Atman) of the Advaita Vedanta tradition, a nondual universal that pervades in all things, in each person and all life.[253] According to Nicholas Gier, this to Gandhi meant the unity of God and humans, that all beings have the same one soul and therefore equality, that atman exists and is same as everything in the universe, ahimsa (non-violence) is the very nature of this atman.[255]


Gandhi picking salt during Salt Satyagraha to defy colonial law giving salt collection monopoly to the British.[256] His satyagraha attracted vast numbers of Indian men and women.[257]

The essence of Satyagraha is "soul force" as a political means, refusing to use brute force against the oppressor, seeking to eliminate antagonisms between the oppressor and the oppressed, aiming to transform or "purify" the oppressor. It is not inaction but determined passive resistance and non-co-operation where, states Arthur Herman, "love conquers hate".[258] A euphemism sometimes used for Satyagraha is that it is a "silent force" or a "soul force" (a term also used by Martin Luther King Jr. during his "I Have a Dream" speech). It arms the individual with moral power rather than physical power. Satyagraha is also termed a "universal force", as it essentially "makes no distinction between kinsmen and strangers, young and old, man and woman, friend and foe."[259]

Gandhi wrote: "There must be no impatience, no barbarity, no insolence, no undue pressure. If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy, we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause."[260] Civil disobedience and non-co-operation as practised under Satyagraha are based on the "law of suffering",[261] a doctrine that the endurance of suffering is a means to an end. This end usually implies a moral upliftment or progress of an individual or society. Therefore, non-co-operation in Satyagraha is in fact a means to secure the co-operation of the opponent consistently with truth and justice.[262]

While Gandhi's idea of satyagraha as a political means attracted a widespread following among Indians, the support was not universal. For example, Muslim leaders such as Jinnah opposed the satyagraha idea, accused Gandhi to be reviving Hinduism through political activism, and began effort to counter Gandhi with Muslim nationalism and a demand for Muslim homeland.[263][264][265] The untouchability leader Ambedkar, in June 1945, after his decision to convert to Buddhism and a key architect of the Constitution of modern India, dismissed Gandhi's ideas as loved by "blind Hindu devotees", primitive, influenced by spurious brew of Tolstoy and Ruskin, and "there is always some simpleton to preach them".[266][267] Winston Churchill caricatured Gandhi as a "cunning huckster" seeking selfish gain, an "aspiring dictator", and an "atavistic spokesman of a pagan Hinduism". Churchill stated that the civil disobedience movement spectacle of Gandhi only increased "the danger to which white people there [British India] are exposed".[268]

Nonviolence


Gandhi with textile workers at Darwen, Lancashire, 26 September 1931

Although Gandhi was not the originator of the principle of nonviolence, he was the first to apply it in the political field on a large scale.[269] The concept of nonviolence (ahimsa) has a long history in Indian religious thought, with it being considered the highest dharma (ethical value virtue), a precept to be observed towards all living beings (sarvbhuta), at all times (sarvada), in all respects (sarvatha), in action, words and thought.[270] Gandhi explains his philosophy and ideas about ahimsa as a political means in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth.[271][272][273]

Gandhi was criticised for refusing to protest the hanging of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Udham Singh and Rajguru.[274][275] He was accused of accepting a deal with the King's representative Irwin that released civil disobedience leaders from prison and accepted the death sentence against the highly popular revolutionary Bhagat Singh, who at his trial had replied, "Revolution is the inalienable right of mankind".[129] However Congressmen, who were votaries of non-violence, defended Bhagat Singh and other revolutionary nationalists being tried in Lahore.[276]

Gandhi's views came under heavy criticism in Britain when it was under attack from Nazi Germany, and later when the Holocaust was revealed. He told the British people in 1940, "I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them."[277] George Orwell remarked that Gandhi's methods confronted "an old-fashioned and rather shaky despotism which treated him in a fairly chivalrous way", not a totalitarian power, "where political opponents simply disappear."[278]

In a post-war interview in 1946, he said, "Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs... It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions."[279] Gandhi believed this act of "collective suicide", in response to the Holocaust, "would have been heroism".[280]

Gandhi as a politician, in practice, settled for less than complete non-violence. His method of non-violent Satyagraha could easily attract masses and it fitted in with the interests and sentiments of business groups, better-off people and dominant sections of peasantry, who did not want an uncontrolled and violent social revolution which could create losses for them. His doctrine of ahimsa lay at the core of unifying role played by the Gandhian Congress.[281] But during Quit India movement even many staunch Gandhians used 'violent means'.[282]

On inter-religious relations

Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs

Gandhi believed that Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism were traditions of Hinduism, with a shared history, rites and ideas. At other times, he acknowledged that he knew little about Buddhism other than his reading of Edwin Arnold's book on it. Based on that book, he considered Buddhism to be a reform movement and the Buddha to be a Hindu.[283] He stated he knew Jainism much more, and he credited Jains to have profoundly influenced him. Sikhism, to Gandhi, was an integral part of Hinduism, in the form of another reform movement. Sikh and Buddhist leaders disagreed with Gandhi, a disagreement Gandhi respected as a difference of opinion.[283][284]

Muslims

Gandhi had generally positive and empathetic views of Islam, and he extensively studied the Quran. He viewed Islam as a faith that proactively promoted peace, and felt that non-violence had a predominant place in the Quran.[285] He also read the Islamic prophet Muhammad's biography, and argued that it was "not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the Prophet, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission."[286] Gandhi had a large Indian Muslim following, who he encouraged to join him in a mutual nonviolent jihad against the social oppression of their time. Prominent Muslim allies in his nonviolent resistance movement included Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Abdul Ghaffar Khan. However, Gandhi's empathy towards Islam, and his eager willingness to valorise peaceful Muslim social activists, was viewed by many Hindus as an appeasement of Muslims and later became a leading cause for his assassination at the hands of intolerant Hindu extremists.[287]

While Gandhi expressed mostly positive views of Islam, he did occasionally criticise Muslims.[285] He stated in 1925 that he did not criticise the teachings of the Quran, but he did criticise the interpreters of the Quran. Gandhi believed that numerous interpreters have interpreted it to fit their preconceived notions.[288] He believed Muslims should welcome criticism of the Quran, because "every true scripture only gains from criticism". Gandhi criticised Muslims who "betray intolerance of criticism by a non-Muslim of anything related to Islam", such as the penalty of stoning to death under Islamic law. To Gandhi, Islam has "nothing to fear from criticism even if it be unreasonable".[289][290] He also believed there were material contradictions between Hinduism and Islam,[290] and he criticised Muslims along with communists that were quick to resort to violence.[291]

One of the strategies Gandhi adopted was to work with Muslim leaders of pre-partition India, to oppose the British imperialism in and outside the Indian subcontinent.[106][107] After the World War I, in 1919–22, he won Muslim leadership support of Ali Brothers by backing the Khilafat Movement in favour the Islamic Caliph and his historic Ottoman Caliphate, and opposing the secular Islam supporting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. By 1924, Atatürk had ended the Caliphate, the Khilafat Movement was over, and Muslim support for Gandhi had largely evaporated.[106][292][107]

In 1925, Gandhi gave another reason to why he got involved in the Khilafat movement and the Middle East affairs between Britain and the Ottoman Empire. Gandhi explained to his co-religionists (Hindu) that he sympathised and campaigned for the Islamic cause, not because he cared for the Sultan, but because "I wanted to enlist the Mussalman's sympathy in the matter of cow protection".[293] According to the historian M. Naeem Qureshi, like the then Indian Muslim leaders who had combined religion and politics, Gandhi too imported his religion into his political strategy during the Khilafat movement.[294]

In the 1940s, Gandhi pooled ideas with some Muslim leaders who sought religious harmony like him, and opposed the proposed partition of British India into India and Pakistan. For example, his close friend Badshah Khan suggested that they should work towards opening Hindu temples for Muslim prayers, and Islamic mosques for Hindu prayers, to bring the two religious groups closer.[295] Gandhi accepted this and began having Muslim prayers read in Hindu temples to play his part, but was unable to get Hindu prayers read in mosques. The Hindu nationalist groups objected and began confronting Gandhi for this one-sided practice, by shouting and demonstrating inside the Hindu temples, in the last years of his life.[296][193][297]

Christians

Gandhi criticised as well as praised Christianity. He was critical of Christian missionary efforts in British India, because they mixed medical or education assistance with demands that the beneficiary convert to Christianity.[298] According to Gandhi, this was not true "service" but one driven by an ulterior motive of luring people into religious conversion and exploiting the economically or medically desperate. It did not lead to inner transformation or moral advance or to the Christian teaching of "love", but was based on false one-sided criticisms of other religions, when Christian societies faced similar problems in South Africa and Europe. It led to the converted person hating his neighbours and other religions, and divided people rather than bringing them closer in compassion. According to Gandhi, "no religious tradition could claim a monopoly over truth or salvation".[298][299] Gandhi did not support laws to prohibit missionary activity, but demanded that Christians should first understand the message of Jesus, and then strive to live without stereotyping and misrepresenting other religions. According to Gandhi, the message of Jesus was not to humiliate and imperialistically rule over other people considering them inferior or second class or slaves, but that "when the hungry are fed and peace comes to our individual and collective life, then Christ is born".[300]

Gandhi believed that his long acquaintance with Christianity had made him like it as well as find it imperfect. He asked Christians to stop humiliating his country and his people as heathens, idolators and other abusive language, and to change their negative views of India. He believed that Christians should introspect on the "true meaning of religion" and get a desire to study and learn from Indian religions in the spirit of universal brotherhood.[300] According to Eric Sharpe – a professor of Religious Studies, though Gandhi was born in a Hindu family and later became Hindu by conviction, many Christians in time thought of him as an "exemplary Christian and even as a saint".[301]

Some colonial era Christian preachers and faithfuls considered Gandhi as a saint.[302][303][304] Biographers from France and Britain have drawn parallels between Gandhi and Christian saints. Recent scholars question these romantic biographies and state that Gandhi was neither a Christian figure nor mirrored a Christian saint.[305] Gandhi's life is better viewed as exemplifying his belief in the "convergence of various spiritualities" of a Christian and a Hindu, states Michael de Saint-Cheron.[305]

Jews

According to Kumaraswamy, Gandhi initially supported Arab demands with respect to Palestine. He justified this support by invoking Islam, stating that "non-Muslims cannot acquire sovereign jurisdiction" in Jazirat al-Arab (the Arabian Peninsula).[306] These arguments, states Kumaraswamy, were a part of his political strategy to win Muslim support during the Khilafat movement. In the post-Khilafat period, Gandhi neither negated Jewish demands nor did he use Islamic texts or history to support Muslim claims against Israel. Gandhi's silence after the Khilafat period may represent an evolution in his understanding of the conflicting religious claims over Palestine, according to Kumaraswamy.[306] In 1938, Gandhi spoke in favour of Jewish claims, and in March 1946, he said to the Member of British Parliament Sidney Silverman, "if the Arabs have a claim to Palestine, the Jews have a prior claim", a position very different from his earlier stance.[306][307]

Gandhi discussed the persecution of the Jews in Germany and the emigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine through his lens of Satyagraha.[183][308] In 1937, Gandhi discussed Zionism with his close Jewish friend Hermann Kallenbach.[309] He said that Zionism was not the right answer to the problems faced by Jews[310] and instead recommended Satyagraha. Gandhi thought the Zionists in Palestine represented European imperialism and used violence to achieve their goals; he argued that "the Jews should disclaim any intention of realizing their aspiration under the protection of arms and should rely wholly on the goodwill of Arabs. No exception can possibly be taken to the natural desire of the Jews to find a home in Palestine. But they must wait for its fulfillment till Arab opinion is ripe for it."[183]

In 1938, Gandhi stated that his "sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became life-long companions." Philosopher Martin Buber was highly critical of Gandhi's approach and in 1939 wrote an open letter to him on the subject. Gandhi reiterated his stance that "the Jews seek to convert the Arab heart", and use "satyagraha in confronting the Arabs" in 1947.[311] According to Simone Panter-Brick, Gandhi's political position on Jewish-Arab conflict evolved over the 1917–1947 period, shifting from a support for the Arab position first, and for the Jewish position in the 1940s.[312]

On life, society and other application of his ideas

Vegetarianism, food, and animals

Gandhi was brought up as a vegetarian by his devout Hindu mother.[313][314] The idea of vegetarianism is deeply ingrained in Hindu Vaishnavism and Jain traditions in India, such as in his native Gujarat, where meat is considered as a form of food obtained by violence to animals.[315][316] Gandhi's rationale for vegetarianism was largely along those found in Hindu and Jain texts. Gandhi believed that any form of food inescapably harms some form of living organism, but one should seek to understand and reduce the violence in what one consumes because "there is essential unity of all life".[314][317]

Gandhi believed that some life forms are more capable of suffering, and non-violence to him meant not having the intent as well as active efforts to minimise hurt, injury or suffering to all life forms.[317] Gandhi explored food sources that reduced violence to various life forms in the food chain. He believed that slaughtering animals is unnecessary, as other sources of foods are available.[315] He also consulted with vegetarianism campaigners during his lifetime, such as with Henry Stephens Salt. Food to Gandhi was not only a source of sustaining one's body, but a source of his impact on other living beings, and one that affected his mind, character and spiritual well being.[318][319][320] He avoided not only meat, but also eggs and milk. Gandhi wrote the book The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism and wrote for the London Vegetarian Society's publication.[321]

Beyond his religious beliefs, Gandhi stated another motivation for his experiments with diet. He attempted to find the most non-violent vegetarian meal that the poorest human could afford, taking meticulous notes on vegetables and fruits, and his observations with his own body and his ashram in Gujarat.[322][323] He tried fresh and dry fruits (Fruitarianism), then just sun dried fruits, before resuming his prior vegetarian diet on advice of his doctor and concerns of his friends. His experiments with food began in the 1890s and continued for several decades.[322][323] For some of these experiments, Gandhi combined his own ideas with those found on diet in Indian yoga texts. He believed that each vegetarian should experiment with their diet because, in his studies at his ashram he saw "one man's food may be poison for another".[324][325]

Gandhi championed animal rights in general. Other than making vegetarian choices, he actively campaigned against dissection studies and experimentation on live animals (vivisection) in the name of science and medical studies.[315] He considered it a violence against animals, something that inflicted pain and suffering. He wrote, "Vivisection in my opinion is the blackest of all the blackest crimes that man is at present committing against God and His fair creation."[326]

Fasting

See also: List of fasts undertaken by Mahatma Gandhi


Gandhi's last political protest using fasting, in January 1948

Gandhi used fasting as a political device, often threatening suicide unless demands were met. Congress publicised the fasts as a political action that generated widespread sympathy. In response, the government tried to manipulate news coverage to minimise his challenge to the Raj. He fasted in 1932 to protest the voting scheme for separate political representation for Dalits; Gandhi did not want them segregated. The British government stopped the London press from showing photographs of his emaciated body, because it would elicit sympathy. Gandhi's 1943 hunger strike took place during a two-year prison term for the anticolonial Quit India movement. The government called on nutritional experts to demystify his action, and again no photos were allowed. However, his final fast in 1948, after the end of British rule in India, his hunger strike was lauded by the British press and this time did include full-length photos.[327]

Alter states that Gandhi's fasting, vegetarianism and diet was more than a political leverage, it was a part of his experiments with self restraint and healthy living. He was "profoundly skeptical of traditional Ayurveda", encouraging it to study the scientific method and adopt its progressive learning approach. Gandhi believed yoga offered health benefits. He believed that a healthy nutritional diet based on regional foods and hygiene were essential to good health.[328] Recently ICMR made Gandhi's health records public in a book 'Gandhi and Health@150'. These records indicate that despite being underweight at 46.7 kg Gandhi was generally healthy. He avoided modern medication and experimented extensively with water and earth healing. While his cardio records show his heart was normal, there were several instances he suffered from ailments like Malaria and was also operated on twice for piles and appendicitis. Despite health challenges, Gandhi was able to walk about 79000 km in his lifetime which comes to an average of 18 km per day and is equivalent to walking around the earth twice.[329]

Women

Gandhi strongly favoured the emancipation of women, and urged "the women to fight for their own self-development." He opposed purdah, child marriage, dowry and sati.[330] A wife is not a slave of the husband, stated Gandhi, but his comrade, better half, colleague and friend, according to Lyn Norvell.[330] In his own life however, according to Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert, Gandhi's relationship with his wife were at odds with some of these values.[136]

At various occasions, Gandhi credited his orthodox Hindu mother, and his wife, for first lessons in satyagraha.[331] He used the legends of Hindu goddess Sita to expound women's innate strength, autonomy and "lioness in spirit" whose moral compass can make any demon "as helpless as a goat".[331] To Gandhi, the women of India were an important part of the "swadeshi movement" (Buy Indian), and his goal of decolonising the Indian economy.[331]

Some historians such as Angela Woollacott and Kumari Jayawardena state that even though Gandhi often and publicly expressed his belief in the equality of sexes, yet his vision was one of gender difference and complementarity between them. Women, to Gandhi, should be educated to be better in the domestic realm and educate the next generation. His views on women's rights were less liberal and more similar to puritan-Victorian expectations of women, states Jayawardena, than other Hindu leaders with him who supported economic independence and equal gender rights in all aspects.[332][333]

Brahmacharya: abstinence from sex and food

Along with many other texts, Gandhi studied Bhagavad Gita while in South Africa.[334] This Hindu scripture discusses jnana yoga, bhakti yoga and karma yoga along with virtues such as non-violence, patience, integrity, lack of hypocrisy, self restraint and abstinence.[335] Gandhi began experiments with these, and in 1906 at age 37, although married and a father, he vowed to abstain from sexual relations.[334]

Gandhi's experiment with abstinence went beyond sex, and extended to food. He consulted the Jain scholar Rajchandra, whom he fondly called Raychandbhai.[336] Rajchandra advised him that milk stimulated sexual passion. Gandhi began abstaining from cow's milk in 1912, and did so even when doctors advised him to consume milk.[234][337] According to Sankar Ghose, Tagore described Gandhi as someone who did not abhor sex or women, but considered sexual life as inconsistent with his moral goals.[338]

Gandhi tried to test and prove to himself his brahmacharya. The experiments began some time after the death of his wife in February 1944. At the start of his experiment, he had women sleep in the same room but in different beds. He later slept with women in the same bed but clothed, and finally, he slept naked with women. In April 1945, Gandhi referenced being naked with several "women or girls" in a letter to Birla as part of the experiments.[339] According to the 1960s memoir of his grandniece Manu, Gandhi feared in early 1947 that he and she may be killed by Muslims in the run up to India's independence in August 1947, and asked her when she was 18 years old if she wanted to help him with his experiments to test their "purity", for which she readily accepted.[340] Gandhi slept naked in the same bed with Manu with the bedroom doors open all night. Manu stated that the experiment had no "ill effect" on her. Gandhi also shared his bed with 18-year-old Abha, wife of his grandnephew Kanu. Gandhi would sleep with both Manu and Abha at the same time.[340][341] None of the women who participated in the brahmachari experiments of Gandhi indicated that they had sex or that Gandhi behaved in any sexual way. Those who went public said they felt as though they were sleeping with their aging mother.[338][339][342]

According to Sean Scalmer, Gandhi in his final year of life was an ascetic, and his sickly skeletal figure was caricatured in Western media.[343] In February 1947, he asked his confidants such as Birla and Ramakrishna if it was wrong for him to experiment his brahmacharya oath.[338] Gandhi's public experiments, as they progressed, were widely discussed and criticised by his family members and leading politicians. However, Gandhi said that if he would not let Manu sleep with him, it would be a sign of weakness. Some of his staff resigned, including two of his newspaper's editors who had refused to print some of Gandhi's sermons dealing with his experiments.[340] Nirmalkumar Bose, Gandhi's Bengali interpreter, for example, criticised Gandhi, not because Gandhi did anything wrong, but because Bose was concerned about the psychological effect on the women who participated in his experiments.[341] Veena Howard states Gandhi's views on brahmacharya and religious renunciation experiments were a method to confront women issues in his times.[344]

Untouchability and castes

Gandhi spoke out against untouchability early in his life.[345] Before 1932, he and his associates used the word antyaja for untouchables. In a major speech on untouchability at Nagpur in 1920, Gandhi called it a great evil in Hindu society but observed that it was not unique to Hinduism, having deeper roots, and stated that Europeans in South Africa treated "all of us, Hindus and Muslims, as untouchables; we may not reside in their midst, nor enjoy the rights which they do".[346] Calling the doctrine of untouchability intolerable, he asserted that the practice could be eradicated, that Hinduism was flexible enough to allow eradication, and that a concerted effort was needed to persuade people of the wrong and to urge them to eradicate it.[346]

According to Christophe Jaffrelot, while Gandhi considered untouchability to be wrong and evil, he believed that caste or class is based on neither inequality nor inferiority.[345] Gandhi believed that individuals should freely intermarry whomever they wish, but that no one should expect everyone to be his friend: every individual, regardless of background, has a right to choose whom he will welcome into his home, whom he will befriend, and whom he will spend time with.[345][346]

In 1932, Gandhi began a new campaign to improve the lives of the untouchables, whom he began to call harijans, "the children of god".[347] On 8 May 1933, Gandhi began a 21-day fast of self-purification and launched a year-long campaign to help the harijan movement.[348] This campaign was not universally embraced by the Dalit community: Ambedkar and his allies felt Gandhi was being paternalistic and was undermining Dalit political rights. Ambedkar described him as "devious and untrustworthy".[349] He accused Gandhi as someone who wished to retain the caste system.[151] Ambedkar and Gandhi debated their ideas and concerns, each trying to persuade the other.[350][351] It was during the Harijan tour that he faced the first assassination attempt. While in Poona, a bomb was thrown by an unidentified assailant (described only as a sanatani in the press[352]) at a car belonging to his entourage but Gandhi and his family escaped as they were in the car that was following. Gandhi later declared that he "cannot believe that any sane sanatanist could ever encourage the insane act ... The sorrowful incident has undoubtedly advanced the Harijan cause. It is easy to see that causes prosper by the martyrdom of those who stand for them."[353]


Coverage of the assassination attempt, The Bombay Chronicle, June 27, 1934

In 1935, Ambedkar announced his intentions to leave Hinduism and join Buddhism.[151] According to Sankar Ghose, the announcement shook Gandhi, who reappraised his views and wrote many essays with his views on castes, intermarriage, and what Hinduism says on the subject. These views contrasted with those of Ambedkar.[354] Yet in the elections of 1937, excepting some seats in Mumbai which Ambedkar's party won, India's untouchables voted heavily in favour of Gandhi's campaign and his party, the Congress.[355]

Gandhi and his associates continued to consult Ambedkar, keeping him influential. Ambedkar worked with other Congress leaders through the 1940s and wrote large parts of India's constitution in the late 1940s, but did indeed convert to Buddhism in 1956.[151] According to Jaffrelot, Gandhi's views evolved between the 1920s and 1940s; by 1946, he actively encouraged intermarriage between castes. His approach, too, to untouchability differed from Ambedkar's, championing fusion, choice, and free intermixing, while Ambedkar envisioned each segment of society maintaining its group identity, and each group then separately advancing the "politics of equality".[345]

Ambedkar's criticism of Gandhi continued to influence the Dalit movement past Gandhi's death. According to Arthur Herman, Ambedkar's hatred for Gandhi and Gandhi's ideas was so strong that, when he heard of Gandhi's assassination, he remarked after a momentary silence a sense of regret and then added, "My real enemy is gone; thank goodness the eclipse is over now".[266][356] According to Ramachandra Guha, "ideologues have carried these old rivalries into the present, with the demonization of Gandhi now common among politicians who presume to speak in Ambedkar's name."[357]

Nai Talim, basic education

Main article: Nai Talim

Gandhi rejected the colonial Western format of the education system. He stated that it led to disdain for manual work, generally created an elite administrative bureaucracy. Gandhi favoured an education system with far greater emphasis on learning skills in practical and useful work, one that included physical, mental and spiritual studies. His methodology sought to treat all professions equal and pay everyone the same.[358][359]

Gandhi called his ideas Nai Talim (literally, 'new education'). He believed that the Western style education violated and destroyed the indigenous cultures. A different basic education model, he believed, would lead to better self awareness, prepare people to treat all work equally respectable and valued, and lead to a society with less social diseases.[360][361]

Nai Talim evolved out of his experiences at the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, and Gandhi attempted to formulate the new system at the Sevagram ashram after 1937.[359] Nehru government's vision of an industrialised, centrally planned economy after 1947 had scant place for Gandhi's village-oriented approach.[362]

In his autobiography, Gandhi wrote that he believed every Hindu child must learn Sanskrit because its historic and spiritual texts are in that language.[44]

Swaraj, self-rule

Main article: Swaraj

Gandhi believed that swaraj not only can be attained with non-violence, but it can also be run with non-violence. A military is unnecessary, because any aggressor can be thrown out using the method of non-violent non-co-operation. While the military is unnecessary in a nation organised under swaraj principle, Gandhi added that a police force is necessary given human nature. However, the state would limit the use of weapons by the police to the minimum, aiming for their use as a restraining force.[363]

According to Gandhi, a non-violent state is like an "ordered anarchy".[363] In a society of mostly non-violent individuals, those who are violent will sooner or later accept discipline or leave the community, stated Gandhi.[363] He emphasised a society where individuals believed more in learning about their duties and responsibilities, not demanded rights and privileges. On returning from South Africa, when Gandhi received a letter asking for his participation in writing a world charter for human rights, he responded saying, "in my experience, it is far more important to have a charter for human duties."[364]

Swaraj to Gandhi did not mean transferring colonial era British power brokering system, favours-driven, bureaucratic, class exploitative structure and mindset into Indian hands. He warned such a transfer would still be English rule, just without the Englishman. "This is not the Swaraj I want", said Gandhi.[365][366] Tewari states that Gandhi saw democracy as more than a system of government; it meant promoting both individuality and the self-discipline of the community. Democracy meant settling disputes in a nonviolent manner; it required freedom of thought and expression. For Gandhi, democracy was a way of life.[367]

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Part 6 of 7

Hindu nationalism and revivalism

Some scholars state Gandhi supported a religiously diverse India,[368] while others state that the Muslim leaders who championed the partition and creation of a separate Muslim Pakistan considered Gandhi to be Hindu nationalist or revivalist.[369][370] For example, in his letters to Mohammad Iqbal, Jinnah accused Gandhi to be favouring a Hindu rule and revivalism, that Gandhi led Indian National Congress was a fascist party.[371]

In an interview with C.F. Andrews, Gandhi stated that if we believe all religions teach the same message of love and peace between all human beings, then there is neither any rationale nor need for proselytisation or attempts to convert people from one religion to another.[372] Gandhi opposed missionary organisations who criticised Indian religions then attempted to convert followers of Indian religions to Islam or Christianity. In Gandhi's view, those who attempt to convert a Hindu, "they must harbour in their breasts the belief that Hinduism is an error" and that their own religion is "the only true religion".[372][373] Gandhi believed that people who demand religious respect and rights must also show the same respect and grant the same rights to followers of other religions. He stated that spiritual studies must encourage "a Hindu to become a better Hindu, a Mussalman to become a better Mussalman, and a Christian a better Christian."[372]

According to Gandhi, religion is not about what a man believes, it is about how a man lives, how he relates to other people, his conduct towards others, and one's relationship to one's conception of god.[374] It is not important to convert or to join any religion, but it is important to improve one's way of life and conduct by absorbing ideas from any source and any religion, believed Gandhi.[374]

Gandhian economics

Main article: Gandhian economics

Gandhi believed in the sarvodaya economic model, which literally means "welfare, upliftment of all".[375] This, states Bhatt, was a very different economic model than the socialism model championed and followed by free India by Nehru – India's first prime minister. To both, according to Bhatt, removing poverty and unemployment were the objective, but the Gandhian economic and development approach preferred adapting technology and infrastructure to suit the local situation, in contrast to Nehru's large scale, socialised state owned enterprises.[376]

To Gandhi, the economic philosophy that aims at "greatest good for the greatest number" was fundamentally flawed, and his alternative proposal sarvodaya set its aim at the "greatest good for all". He believed that the best economic system not only cared to lift the "poor, less skilled, of impoverished background" but also empowered to lift the "rich, highly skilled, of capital means and landlords". Violence against any human being, born poor or rich, is wrong, believed Gandhi.[375][377] He stated that the mandate theory of majoritarian democracy should not be pushed to absurd extremes, individual freedoms should never be denied, and no person should ever be made a social or economic slave to the "resolutions of majorities".[378]

Gandhi challenged Nehru and the modernisers in the late 1930s who called for rapid industrialisation on the Soviet model; Gandhi denounced that as dehumanising and contrary to the needs of the villages where the great majority of the people lived.[379] After Gandhi's assassination, Nehru led India in accordance with his personal socialist convictions.[380][381] Historian Kuruvilla Pandikattu says "it was Nehru's vision, not Gandhi's, that was eventually preferred by the Indian State."[382]

Gandhi called for ending poverty through improved agriculture and small-scale cottage rural industries.[383] Gandhi's economic thinking disagreed with Marx, according to the political theory scholar and economist Bhikhu Parekh. Gandhi refused to endorse the view that economic forces are best understood as "antagonistic class interests".[384] He argued that no man can degrade or brutalise the other without degrading and brutalising himself and that sustainable economic growth comes from service, not from exploitation. Further, believed Gandhi, in a free nation, victims exist only when they co-operate with their oppressor, and an economic and political system that offered increasing alternatives gave power of choice to the poorest man.[384]

While disagreeing with Nehru about the socialist economic model, Gandhi also critiqued capitalism that was driven by endless wants and a materialistic view of man. This, he believed, created a vicious vested system of materialism at the cost of other human needs, such as spirituality and social relationships.[384] To Gandhi, states Parekh, both communism and capitalism were wrong, in part because both focused exclusively on a materialistic view of man, and because the former deified the state with unlimited power of violence, while the latter deified capital. He believed that a better economic system is one which does not impoverish one's culture and spiritual pursuits.[385]

Gandhism

Main article: Gandhism

Gandhism designates the ideas and principles Gandhi promoted; of central importance is nonviolent resistance. A Gandhian can mean either an individual who follows, or a specific philosophy which is attributed to, Gandhism.[98] M. M. Sankhdher argues that Gandhism is not a systematic position in metaphysics or in political philosophy. Rather, it is a political creed, an economic doctrine, a religious outlook, a moral precept, and especially, a humanitarian world view. It is an effort not to systematise wisdom but to transform society and is based on an undying faith in the goodness of human nature.[386] However Gandhi himself did not approve of the notion of "Gandhism", as he explained in 1936:

There is no such thing as "Gandhism", and I do not want to leave any sect after me. I do not claim to have originated any new principle or doctrine. I have simply tried in my own way to apply the eternal truths to our daily life and problems...The opinions I have formed and the conclusions I have arrived at are not final. I may change them tomorrow. I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and nonviolence are as old as the hills.[387]

Literary works


Young India, a weekly journal published by Gandhi from 1919 to 1932

Gandhi was a prolific writer. One of Gandhi's earliest publications, Hind Swaraj, published in Gujarati in 1909, became "the intellectual blueprint" for India's independence movement. The book was translated into English the next year, with a copyright legend that read "No Rights Reserved".[388] For decades he edited several newspapers including Harijan in Gujarati, in Hindi and in the English language; Indian Opinion while in South Africa and, Young India, in English, and Navajivan, a Gujarati monthly, on his return to India. Later, Navajivan was also published in Hindi. In addition, he wrote letters almost every day to individuals and newspapers.[389]

Gandhi also wrote several books including his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Gujarātī "સત્યના પ્રયોગો અથવા આત્મકથા"), of which he bought the entire first edition to make sure it was reprinted.[349] His other autobiographies included: Satyagraha in South Africa about his struggle there, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, a political pamphlet, and a paraphrase in Gujarati of John Ruskin's Unto This Last.[390] This last essay can be considered his programme on economics. He also wrote extensively on vegetarianism, diet and health, religion, social reforms, etc. Gandhi usually wrote in Gujarati, though he also revised the Hindi and English translations of his books.[391]

Gandhi's complete works were published by the Indian government under the name The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi in the 1960s. The writings comprise about 50,000 pages published in about a hundred volumes. In 2000, a revised edition of the complete works sparked a controversy, as it contained a large number of errors and omissions.[392] The Indian government later withdrew the revised edition.[393]

Legacy and depictions in popular culture

See also: List of artistic depictions of Mahatma Gandhi, List of things named after Mahatma Gandhi, and List of roads named after Mahatma Gandhi

• The word Mahatma, while often mistaken for Gandhi's given name in the West, is taken from the Sanskrit words maha (meaning Great) and atma (meaning Soul). Rabindranath Tagore is said to have accorded the title to Gandhi.[394] In his autobiography, Gandhi nevertheless explains that he never valued the title, and was often pained by it.[395][396][397]
• Innumerable streets, roads and localities in India are named after M.K.Gandhi. These include M.G.Road (the main street of a number of Indian cities including Mumbai and Bangalore), Gandhi Market (near Sion, Mumbai) and Gandhinagar (the capital of the state of Gujarat, Gandhi's birthplace).[398]
• Florian asteroid 120461 Gandhi was named in his honor in September 2020.[399]

Followers and international influence


Statue of Mahatma Gandhi at York University


Mahatma Gandhi on a 1969 postage stamp of the Soviet Union


Mahatma Gandhi at Praça Túlio Fontoura, São Paulo, Brazil.


Largest Gandhi statue located between Vidhana Soudha and Vikasa Soudha, Bengalur

Gandhi influenced important leaders and political movements. Leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States, including Martin Luther King Jr., James Lawson, and James Bevel, drew from the writings of Gandhi in the development of their own theories about nonviolence.[400][401][402] King said "Christ gave us the goals and Mahatma Gandhi the tactics."[403] King sometimes referred to Gandhi as "the little brown saint."[404] Anti-apartheid activist and former President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, was inspired by Gandhi.[405] Others include Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan,[406] Steve Biko, and Aung San Suu Kyi.[407]

In his early years, the former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela was a follower of the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi.[405] Bhana and Vahed commented on these events as "Gandhi inspired succeeding generations of South African activists seeking to end White rule. This legacy connects him to Nelson Mandela...in a sense, Mandela completed what Gandhi started."[408]

Gandhi's life and teachings inspired many who specifically referred to Gandhi as their mentor or who dedicated their lives to spreading Gandhi's ideas. In Europe, Romain Rolland was the first to discuss Gandhi in his 1924 book Mahatma Gandhi, and Brazilian anarchist and feminist Maria Lacerda de Moura wrote about Gandhi in her work on pacifism. In 1931, notable European physicist Albert Einstein exchanged written letters with Gandhi, and called him "a role model for the generations to come" in a letter writing about him.[409] Einstein said of Gandhi:

Mahatma Gandhi's life achievement stands unique in political history. He has invented a completely new and humane means for the liberation war of an oppressed country, and practised it with greatest energy and devotion. The moral influence he had on the consciously thinking human being of the entire civilised world will probably be much more lasting than it seems in our time with its overestimation of brutal violent forces. Because lasting will only be the work of such statesmen who wake up and strengthen the moral power of their people through their example and educational works. We may all be happy and grateful that destiny gifted us with such an enlightened contemporary, a role model for the generations to come. Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.

Lanza del Vasto went to India in 1936 intending to live with Gandhi; he later returned to Europe to spread Gandhi's philosophy and founded the Community of the Ark in 1948 (modelled after Gandhi's ashrams). Madeleine Slade (known as "Mirabehn") was the daughter of a British admiral who spent much of her adult life in India as a devotee of Gandhi.[410][411]

In addition, the British musician John Lennon referred to Gandhi when discussing his views on nonviolence.[412] At the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in 2007, former US Vice-President and environmentalist Al Gore spoke of Gandhi's influence on him.[413]

US President Barack Obama in a 2010 address to the Parliament of India said that:

I am mindful that I might not be standing before you today, as President of the United States, had it not been for Gandhi and the message he shared with America and the world.[414]

Obama in September 2009 said that his biggest inspiration came from Gandhi. His reply was in response to the question 'Who was the one person, dead or live, that you would choose to dine with?'. He continued that "He's somebody I find a lot of inspiration in. He inspired Dr. King with his message of nonviolence. He ended up doing so much and changed the world just by the power of his ethics."[415]

Time Magazine named The 14th Dalai Lama, Lech Wałęsa, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Aung San Suu Kyi, Benigno Aquino Jr., Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela as Children of Gandhi and his spiritual heirs to nonviolence.[416] The Mahatma Gandhi District in Houston, Texas, United States, an ethnic Indian enclave, is officially named after Gandhi.[417]

Gandhi's ideas had a significant influence on 20th-century philosophy. It began with his engagement with Romain Rolland and Martin Buber. Jean-Luc Nancy said that the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot engaged critically with Gandhi from the point of view of "European spirituality".[418] Since then philosophers including Hannah Arendt, Etienne Balibar and Slavoj Žižek found that Gandhi was a necessary reference to discuss morality in politics. Recently in the light of climate change Gandhi's views on technology are gaining importance in the fields of environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology.[418]

Global days that celebrate Gandhi

In 2007, the United Nations General Assembly declared Gandhi's birthday 2 October as "the International Day of Nonviolence."[419] First proposed by UNESCO in 1948, as the School Day of Nonviolence and Peace (DENIP in Spanish),[420] 30 January is observed as the School Day of Nonviolence and Peace in schools of many countries[421] In countries with a Southern Hemisphere school calendar, it is observed on 30 March.[421]

Awards


Monument to Gandhi in Madrid, Spain

Time magazine named Gandhi the Man of the Year in 1930. The University of Nagpur awarded him an LL.D. in 1937.[422] Gandhi was also the runner-up to Albert Einstein as "Person of the Century"[423] at the end of 1999. The Government of India awarded the annual Gandhi Peace Prize to distinguished social workers, world leaders and citizens. Nelson Mandela, the leader of South Africa's struggle to eradicate racial discrimination and segregation, was a prominent non-Indian recipient. In 2011, Time magazine named Gandhi as one of the top 25 political icons of all time.[424]

Gandhi did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize, although he was nominated five times between 1937 and 1948, including the first-ever nomination by the American Friends Service Committee,[425] though he made the short list only twice, in 1937 and 1947.[426] Decades later, the Nobel Committee publicly declared its regret for the omission, and admitted to deeply divided nationalistic opinion denying the award.[426] Gandhi was nominated in 1948 but was assassinated before nominations closed. That year, the committee chose not to award the peace prize stating that "there was no suitable living candidate" and later research shows that the possibility of awarding the prize posthumously to Gandhi was discussed and that the reference to no suitable living candidate was to Gandhi.[426] Geir Lundestad, Secretary of Norwegian Nobel Committee in 2006 said, "The greatest omission in our 106-year history is undoubtedly that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace prize. Gandhi could do without the Nobel Peace prize, whether Nobel committee can do without Gandhi is the question".[427] When the 14th Dalai Lama was awarded the Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi".[426] In the summer of 1995, the North American Vegetarian Society inducted him posthumously into the Vegetarian Hall of Fame.[428]

Father of the Nation

Indians widely describe Gandhi as the father of the nation.[14][15] Origin of this title is traced back to a radio address (on Singapore radio) on 6 July 1944 by Subhash Chandra Bose where Bose addressed Gandhi as "The Father of the Nation".[429] On 28 April 1947, Sarojini Naidu during a conference also referred Gandhi as "Father of the Nation".[430][431] However, in response to an RTI application in 2012, the Government of India stated that the Constitution of India did not permit any titles except ones acquired through education or military service.[432]

Film, theatre and literature

A five-hour nine-minute long biographical documentary film,[433] Mahatma: Life of Gandhi, 1869–1948, made by Vithalbhai Jhaveri[434] in 1968, quoting Gandhi's words and using black and white archival footage and photographs, captures the history of those times. Ben Kingsley portrayed him in Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi,[435] which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was based on the biography by Louis Fischer.[436] The 1996 film The Making of the Mahatma documented Gandhi's time in South Africa and his transformation from an inexperienced barrister to recognised political leader.[437] Gandhi was a central figure in the 2006 Bollywood comedy film Lage Raho Munna Bhai. Jahnu Barua's Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara (I did not kill Gandhi), places contemporary society as a backdrop with its vanishing memory of Gandhi's values as a metaphor for the senile forgetfulness of the protagonist of his 2005 film,[438] writes Vinay Lal.[439]

The 1979 opera Satyagraha by American composer Philip Glass is loosely based on Gandhi's life.[440][441] The opera's libretto, taken from the Bhagavad Gita, is sung in the original Sanskrit.[442]

Anti-Gandhi themes have also been showcased through films and plays. The 1995 Marathi play Gandhi Virudh Gandhi explored the relationship between Gandhi and his son Harilal. The 2007 film, Gandhi, My Father was inspired on the same theme. The 1989 Marathi play Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy and the 1997 Hindi play Gandhi Ambedkar criticised Gandhi and his principles.[443][444]

Several biographers have undertaken the task of describing Gandhi's life. Among them are D. G. Tendulkar with his Mahatma. Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in eight volumes, Chaman Nahal's Gandhi Quartet, and Pyarelal and Sushila Nayyar with their Mahatma Gandhi in 10 volumes. The 2010 biography, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India by Joseph Lelyveld contained controversial material speculating about Gandhi's sexual life.[445] Lelyveld, however, stated that the press coverage "grossly distort[s]" the overall message of the book.[446] The 2014 film Welcome Back Gandhi takes a fictionalised look at how Gandhi might react to modern day India.[447] The 2019 play Bharat Bhagya Vidhata, inspired by Pujya Gurudevshri Rakeshbhai and produced by Sangeet Natak Akademi and Shrimad Rajchandra Mission Dharampur takes a look at how Gandhi cultivated the values of truth and non-violence.[448]

"Mahatma Gandhi" is used by Cole Porter in his lyrics for the song You're the Top which is included in the 1934 musical Anything Goes. In the song, Porter rhymes "Mahatma Gandhi' with "Napoleon Brandy."

Current impact within India


The Gandhi Mandapam, a temple in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu in India, was erected to honour M.K. Gandhi.

India, with its rapid economic modernisation and urbanisation, has rejected Gandhi's economics[449] but accepted much of his politics and continues to revere his memory. Reporter Jim Yardley notes that, "modern India is hardly a Gandhian nation, if it ever was one. His vision of a village-dominated economy was shunted aside during his lifetime as rural romanticism, and his call for a national ethos of personal austerity and nonviolence has proved antithetical to the goals of an aspiring economic and military power." By contrast, Gandhi is "given full credit for India's political identity as a tolerant, secular democracy."[450]

Gandhi's birthday, 2 October, is a national holiday in India, Gandhi Jayanti. Gandhi's image also appears on paper currency of all denominations issued by Reserve Bank of India, except for the one rupee note.[451] Gandhi's date of death, 30 January, is commemorated as a Martyrs' Day in India.[452]

There are three temples in India dedicated to Gandhi.[453] One is located at Sambalpur in Orissa and the second at Nidaghatta village near Kadur in Chikmagalur district of Karnataka and the third one at Chityal in the district of Nalgonda, Telangana.[453][454] The Gandhi Memorial in Kanyakumari resembles central Indian Hindu temples and the Tamukkam or Summer Palace in Madurai now houses the Mahatma Gandhi Museum.[455]

Descendants


Family tree of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. Source: Gandhi Ashram Sabarmati

Gandhi's children and grandchildren live in India and other countries. Grandson Rajmohan Gandhi is a professor in Illinois and an author of Gandhi's biography titled Mohandas,[456] while another, Tarun Gandhi, has authored several authoritative books on his grandfather. Another grandson, Kanu Ramdas Gandhi (the son of Gandhi's third son Ramdas), was found living in an old age home in Delhi despite having taught earlier in the United States.[457][458]

See also

• Religion portal
• Hinduism portal
• India portal
• Philosophy portal
• Gandhi cap
• Gandhi Teerth – Gandhi International Research Institute and Museum for Gandhian study, research on Mahatma Gandhi and dialogue
• List of civil rights leaders
• List of peace activists
• Seven Social Sins (AKA Seven Blunders of the World)
• Trikaranasuddhi

References

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2. "Gandhi". Archived 14 January 2015 at the Wayback Machine Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
3. B. R. Nanda (2019), "Mahatma Gandhi", Encyclopædia BritannicaQuote: "Mahatma Gandhi, byname of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, (born October 2, 1869, Porbandar, India – died January 30, 1948, Delhi), Indian lawyer, politician, ..."
4. Ganguly, Debjani; Docker, John (2008), Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives, Routledge, pp. 4–, ISBN 978-1-134-07431-0 Quote: "... marks Gandhi as a hybrid cosmopolitan figure who transformed ... anti-colonial nationalist politics in the twentieth-century in ways that neither indigenous nor westernized Indian nationalists could."
5. Parel, Anthony J (2016), Pax Gandhiana: The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford University Press, pp. 202–, ISBN 978-0-19-049146-8 Quote: "Gandhi staked his reputation as an original political thinker on this specific issue. Hitherto, violence had been used in the name of political rights, such as in street riots, regicide, or armed revolutions. Gandhi believes there is a better way of securing political rights, that of nonviolence, and that this new way marks an advance in political ethics."
6. Stein, Burton (2010), A History of India, John Wiley & Sons, pp. 289–, ISBN 978-1-4443-2351-1, Gandhi was the leading genius of the later, and ultimately successful, campaign for India's independence.
7. McGregor, Ronald Stuart (1993). The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. p. 799. ISBN 978-0-19-864339-5. Retrieved 31 August 2013. Quote: (mahā- (S. "great, mighty, large, ..., eminent") + ātmā (S. "1. soul, spirit; the self, the individual; the mind, the heart; 2. the ultimate being."): "high-souled, of noble nature; a noble or venerable man."
8. Gandhi, Rajmohan (2006). Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire. p. 172. ISBN 978-0-520-25570-8. ...Kasturba would accompany Gandhi on his departure from Cape Town for England in July 1914 en route to India. ... In different South African towns (Pretoria, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and the Natal cities of Durban and Verulam), the struggle's martyrs were honoured and the Gandhi's bade farewell. Addresses in Durban and Verulam referred to Gandhi as a 'Mahatma', 'great soul'. He was seen as a great soul because he had taken up the poor's cause. The whites too said good things about Gandhi, who predicted a future for the Empire if it respected justice.
9. Maeleine Slade, Mirabehn. Gleanings Gathered at Bapu's Feet. Ahmedabad: Navjivan publications. Retrieved 4 March 2019.
10. Khan, Yasmin (2007). The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. Yale University Press. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-300-12078-3. Retrieved 1 September 2013. Quote: "the Muslim League had only caught on among South Asian Muslims during the Second World War. ... By the late 1940s, the League and the Congress had impressed in the British their own visions of a free future for Indian people. ... one, articulated by the Congress, rested on the idea of a united, plural India as a home for all Indians and the other, spelt out by the League, rested on the foundation of Muslim nationalism and the carving out of a separate Muslim homeland." (p. 18)
11. Khan, Yasmin (2007). The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. Yale University Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-300-12078-3. Retrieved 1 September 2013. Quote: "South Asians learned that the British Indian Empire would be partitioned on 3 June 1947. They heard about it on the radio, from relations and friends, by reading newspapers and, later, through government pamphlets. Among a population of almost four hundred million, where the vast majority lived in the countryside, ..., it is hardly surprising that many ... did not hear the news for many weeks afterward. For some, the butchery and forced relocation of the summer months of 1947 may have been the first they know about the creation of the two new states rising from the fragmentary and terminally weakened British empire in India." (p. 1)
12. Brown (1991), p. 380: "Despite and indeed because of his sense of helplessness Delhi was to be the scene of what he called his greatest fast. ... His decision was made suddenly, though after considerable thought – he gave no hint of it even to Nehru and Patel who were with him shortly before he announced his intention at a prayer-meeting on 12 January 1948. He said he would fast until communal peace was restored, real peace rather than the calm of a dead city imposed by police and troops. Patel and the government took the fast partly as condemnation of their decision to withhold a considerable cash sum still outstanding to Pakistan as a result of the allocation of undivided India's assets because the hostilities that had broken out in Kashmir; ... But even when the government agreed to pay out the cash, Gandhi would not break his fast: that he would only do after a large number of important politicians and leaders of communal bodies agreed to a joint plan for restoration of normal life in the city."
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Part 7 of 7

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435. Dwyer, Rachel (2011). "The Case of the Missing Mahatma:Gandhi and the Hindi Cinema" (PDF). Public Culture. Duke University Press. 23 (2): 349–76. doi:10.1215/08992363-1161949. Archived (PDF) from the original on 21 March 2017.
436. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1957) online
437. Melvani, Lavina (February 1997). "Making of the Mahatma". Hinduism Today. hinduismtoday.com. Archivedfrom the original on 3 February 2012. Retrieved 26 January 2012.
438. Pandohar, Jaspreet (Reviewer). "Movies – Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara (I Did Not Kill Gandhi) (2005)". BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). Archived from the original on 4 July 2015. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
439. Lal, Vinay. "Moving Images of Gandhi" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
440. Kostelanetz, Richard; Flemming, Robert (1999). Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism. University of California Press. p. 102. ISBN 978-0-520-21491-0.
441. Philip Glass (2015). Words Without Music: A Memoir. Liveright. pp. 192, 307. ISBN 978-1-63149-081-1.
442. Kostelanetz & Flemming 1999, p. 168.
443. "It's fashionable to be anti-Gandhi". DNA. 1 October 2005. Archived from the original on 22 June 2013. Retrieved 25 January 2013.
444. Dutt, Devina (20 February 2009). "Drama king". Live Mint. Archivedfrom the original on 30 April 2013. Retrieved 25 January 2013.
445. Kunzru, Hari (29 March 2011). "Appreciating Gandhi Through His Human Side". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 31 January 2012. Retrieved 26 January2012. (Review of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India by Joseph Lelyveld).
446. "US author slams Gandhi gay claim". The Australian. Agence France-Presse. 29 March 2011. Archived from the original on 1 May 2013. Retrieved 26 January 2012.
447. Kamath, Sudhish (28 February 2011). "A Welcome Effort". The Hindu. Archived from the original on 2 February 2014. Retrieved 24 January2014.
448. Pandit, Unnati (5 March 2019). "Bharat Bhagya Vidhata' captivates the audience". The Live Nagpur. The Live Nagpur. Retrieved 7 May 2019.
449. Ghosh, B. N. (2001). Contemporary issues in development economics. Psychology Press. p. 211. ISBN 978-0-415-25136-5.
450. Yardley, Jim (6 November 2010). "Obama Invokes Gandhi, Whose Ideal Eludes India". Asia-Pacific. Archived from the original on 17 August 2013. Retrieved 22 January2012.
451. "Reserve Bank of India – Bank Notes". Rbi.org.in. Archived from the original on 26 October 2011. Retrieved 5 November 2011.
452. Chatterjee, Sailen. "Martyrs' Day". Features. Press Information Bureau. Archived from the original on 2 February 2012. Retrieved 30 January2012.
453. Kaggere, Niranjan (2 October 2010). "Here, Gandhi is God". BangaloreMirror.com. Archived from the original on 4 October 2013. Retrieved 29 January 2011.
454. "Mahatma Gandhi Temple"Archived 5 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine. Mahatma Gandhi Temple Website,
455. Abram, David; Edwards, Nick (2003). The Rough Guide to South India. Rough Guides. p. 506. ISBN 978-1-84353-103-6. Retrieved 21 January2012.
456. Gandhi, Rajmohan. Mohandas (a Biography). PRHI.
457. "Kanu Gandhi, Gandhiji's grandson and ex-Nasa scientist, dies". Hindustan Times. 8 November 2016. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
458. "Lodged in old age home in Delhi, Gandhi's grandson looks to Rajkot". Hindustan Times. 22 June 2016. Retrieved 29 October 2018.

Bibliography

Books

• Ahmed, Talat (2018). Mohandas Gandhi: Experiments in Civil Disobedience ISBN 0-7453-3429-6
• Barr, F. Mary (1956). Bapu: Conversations and Correspondence with Mahatma Gandhi (2nd ed.). Bombay: International Book House. OCLC 8372568. (see book article)
• Bondurant, Joan Valérie (1971). Conquest of Violence: the Gandhian philosophy of conflict. University of California Press.
• Brown, Judith M. (2004). "Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand [Mahatma Gandhi] (1869–1948)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,Oxford University Press.[ISBN missing]
• Brown, Judith M., and Anthony Parel, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi (2012); 14 essays by scholars
• Brown, Judith Margaret (1991). Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-05125-4.
• Chadha, Yogesh (1997). Gandhi: a life. John Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-24378-6.
• Dwivedi, Divya; Mohan, Shaj; Nancy, Jean-Luc (2019). Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics. Bloomsbury Academic, UK. ISBN 978-1-4742-2173-3.
• Louis Fischer. The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1957) online
• Easwaran, Eknath (2011). Gandhi the Man: How One Man Changed Himself to Change the World. Nilgiri Press. ISBN 978-1-58638-055-7.
• Hook, Sue Vander (2010). Mahatma Gandhi: Proponent of Peace. ABDO. ISBN 978-1-61758-813-6.
• Gandhi, Rajmohan (1990), Patel, A Life, Navajivan Pub. House
• Gandhi, Rajmohan (2006). Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25570-8.
• Gangrade, K.D. (2004). "Role of Shanti Sainiks in the Global Race for Armaments". Moral Lessons From Gandhi's Autobiography And Other Essays. Concept Publishing Company. ISBN 978-81-8069-084-6.
• Guha, Ramachandra (2013). Gandhi Before India. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-385-53230-3.
• Hardiman, David (2003). Gandhi in His Time and Ours: the global legacy of his ideas. C. Hurst & Co. ISBN 978-1-85065-711-8.
• Hatt, Christine (2002). Mahatma Gandhi. Evans Brothers. ISBN 978-0-237-52308-4.
• Herman, Arthur (2008). Gandhi and Churchill: the epic rivalry that destroyed an empire and forged our age. Random House Digital, Inc. ISBN 978-0-553-80463-8.
• Jai, Janak Raj (1996). Commissions and Omissions by Indian Prime Ministers: 1947–1980. Regency Publications. ISBN 978-81-86030-23-3.
• Johnson, Richard L. (2006). Gandhi's Experiments with Truth: Essential Writings by and about Mahatma Gandhi. Lexington Books. ISBN 978-0-7391-1143-7.
• Jones, Constance & Ryan, James D. (2007). Encyclopedia of Hinduism. Infobase Publishing. p. 160. ISBN 978-0-8160-5458-9.
• Majmudar, Uma (2005). Gandhi's Pilgrimage of Faith: from darkness to light. SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-6405-2.
• Miller, Jake C. (2002). Prophets of a just society. Nova Publishers. ISBN 978-1-59033-068-5.
• Pāṇḍeya, Viśva Mohana (2003). Historiography of India's Partition: an analysis of imperialist writings. Atlantic Publishers & Dist. ISBN 978-81-269-0314-6.
• Pilisuk, Marc; Nagler, Michael N. (2011). Peace Movements Worldwide: Players and practices in resistance to war. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-0-313-36482-2.
• Rühe, Peter (2004). Gandhi. Phaidon. ISBN 978-0-7148-4459-6.
• Schouten, Jan Peter (2008). Jesus as Guru: the image of Christ among Hindus and Christians in India. Rodopi. ISBN 978-90-420-2443-4.
• Sharp, Gene (1979). Gandhi as a Political Strategist: with essays on ethics and politics. P. Sargent Publishers. ISBN 978-0-87558-090-6.
• Shashi, S. S. (1996). Encyclopaedia Indica: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Anmol Publications. ISBN 978-81-7041-859-7.
• Sinha, Satya (2015). The Dialectic of God: The Theosophical Views Of Tagore and Gandhi. Partridge Publishing India. ISBN 978-1-4828-4748-2.
• Sofri, Gianni (1999). Gandhi and India: a century in focus. Windrush Press. ISBN 978-1-900624-12-1.
• Thacker, Dhirubhai (2006). ""Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand" (entry)". In Amaresh Datta (ed.). The Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature (Volume Two) (Devraj To Jyoti). Sahitya Akademi. p. 1345. ISBN 978-81-260-1194-0.
• Todd, Anne M (2004). Mohandas Gandhi. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7910-7864-8.; short biography for children
• Wolpert, Stanley (2002). Gandhi's Passion: the life and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-972872-5.

Scholarly articles

• Danielson, Leilah C. "'In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi': American Pacifists, Christianity, and Gandhian Nonviolence, 1915–1941." Church History 72.2 (2003): 361–388.
• Du Toit, Brian M. "The Mahatma Gandhi and South Africa." Journal of Modern African Studies 34#4 (1996): 643–660. online.
• Gokhale, B. G. "Gandhi and the British Empire," History Today (Nov 1969), 19#11 pp 744–751 online.
• Juergensmeyer, Mark. "The Gandhi Revival – A Review Article." The Journal of Asian Studies 43#2 (Feb., 1984), pp. 293–298 online
• Kishwar, Madhu. "Gandhi on Women." Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 41 (1985): 1753–758. online.
• Murthy, C. S. H. N., Oinam Bedajit Meitei, and Dapkupar Tariang. "The Tale Of Gandhi Through The Lens: An Inter-Textual Analytical Study Of Three Major Films-Gandhi, The Making Of The Mahatma, And Gandhi, My Father." CINEJ Cinema Journal 2.2 (2013): 4–37. online
• Power, Paul F. "Toward a Revaluation of Gandhi's Political Thought." Western Political Quarterly 16.1 (1963): 99–108 excerpt.
• Rudolph, Lloyd I. "Gandhi in the Mind of America." Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 47 (2010): 23–26. online.

Primary sources

• Abel M (2005). Glimpses of Indian National Movement. ICFAI Books. ISBN 978-81-7881-420-9.
• Andrews, C. F. (2008) [1930]. "VII – The Teaching of Ahimsa". Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas Including Selections from His Writings. Pierides Press. ISBN 978-1-4437-3309-0.
• Dalton, Dennis, ed. (1996). Mahatma Gandhi: Selected Political Writings. Hackett Publishing. ISBN 978-0-87220-330-3.
• Duncan, Ronald, ed. (2011). Selected Writings of Mahatma Gandhi. Literary Licensing, LLC. ISBN 978-1-258-00907-6.
• Gandhi, M. K.; Fischer, Louis (2002). Louis Fischer (ed.). The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work and Ideas. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-1-4000-3050-7.
• Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1928). Satyagraha in South Africa (in Gujarati) (1 ed.). Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. Translated by Valji G. Desai
• Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1994). The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India. ISBN 978-81-230-0239-2. (100 volumes). Free online access from Gandhiserve.
• Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1928). "Drain Inspector's Report". The United States of India. 5 (6–8): 3–4.
• Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1990), Desai, Mahadev H. (ed.), Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, ISBN 0-486-24593-4
• Gandhi, Rajmohan (2007). Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People. Penguin Books Limited. ISBN 978-81-8475-317-2.
• Guha, Ramachandra (2013). Gandhi Before India. Penguin Books Limited. ISBN 978-93-5118-322-8.
• Jack, Homer A., ed. (1994). The Gandhi Reader: A Source Book of His Life and Writings. Grove Press. ISBN 978-0-8021-3161-4.
• Johnson, Richard L. & Gandhi, M. K. (2006). Gandhi's Experiments With Truth: Essential Writings by and about Mahatma Gandhi. Lexington Books. ISBN 978-0-7391-1143-7.
• Todd, Anne M. (2009). Mohandas Gandhi. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4381-0662-5.
• Parel, Anthony J., ed. (2009). Gandhi: "Hind Swaraj" and Other Writings Centenary Edition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-14602-9.

External links

• Media from Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations from Wikiquote
• Texts from Wikisource
• Data from Wikidata
• Mahatma Gandhi at Curlie
• Gandhi's correspondence with the Indian government 1942–1944
• About Mahatma Gandhi
• Gandhi at Sabarmati Ashram
• Works by Mahatma Gandhi at WorldCat Identities
• Works by Mahatma Gandhi at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Mahatma Gandhi at Internet Archive
• Works by Mahatma Gandhi at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Newspaper clippings about Mahatma Gandhi in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

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Part 1 of 2

Syed Ahmad Khan
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 7/1/21

-- Chapter V. The Three Bureaus of Information, Excerpt from "Influential Centres of Disaffection": Indian Students in Edwardian London and the Empire that Shaped Them, by William H. Cowell
-- William Lee-Warner, by Wikipedia
-- James Broun-Ramsay, 1st Marquess of Dalhousie, by Wikipedia
-- Theodore Morison, by Wikipedia
-- National Indian Association, by Wikipedia
-- Royal India Society [India Society] [Royal India and Pakistan Society] [Royal India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society], by Wikipedia
-- Northbrook Society [Northbrook Indian Society] [Northbrook Club] [Northbrook Indian Club], by The Open University: Making Britain
-- Thomas Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook, by Wikipedia
-- Thomas Walker Arnold, by Wikipedia
-- Indian Political Intelligence Office, by Wikipedia
-- John Wallinger, by Wikipedia
-- Mansfield Smith-Cumming, by Wikipedia
-- Shivaji [Chhatrapati Shivaji], by Wikipedia
-- All-India Muslim League, by Wikipedia
-- Ain-i-Akbari, by Wikipedia

Rahimatullah M. Sayani was an affluent Muslim belonging to the Khoja community who were disciples of the Aga Khan. He was associated with the Congress right from its inception. After Badruddin Tyabji, he was the second Muslim president of the Congress and presided over its twelfth annual session in Calcutta in 1896. In a candid presidential address, Sayani outlined, among other issues, the feelings of alienation among Muslims of India and attributed his reasons for the same. Sayani mentioned that before the advent of the British, the Muslims were the rulers of the country, with all the advantages of the ruling class. From the monarch to the courtiers to the landlords and officials, everyone was a co-religionist; the court language was theirs; they inherited positions of trust and responsibility that came along with emoluments and influence as their birthright. The Hindus, though part of the polity, were ‘tenants-at-will’ of the Muslims, were subservient and in awe of them.1 But a stroke of ill luck brought them down to the level of their Hindu countrymen. Being a ‘very sensitive race’ the Muslims resented this and would have nothing to do with their new rulers or their new fellow subjects, hitherto subordinates.

With the advent of English education in the country, the Hindus who were accustomed to learning a foreign language, as they had under their Muslim rulers, took to English naturally and easily. But the Muslims were yet to take to anything that ‘required hard labour and application, especially as they had to work harder than their former subjects, the Hindus’. They resented the idea of competing with those they considered inferior. The consequence of this was a turning of tables, with the Hindus becoming superior and the Muslim gradually being ‘ousted from their lands, their offices; in fact everything was lost, save their honour . . . they were soon reduced to a state of utter poverty. Ignorance and apathy seized hold of them while the fall of their former greatness rankled in their hearts’. The numbers proved Sayani’s claims. By 1867, eighty-eight Hindus and not a single Muslim had passed the MA and BA examinations.2

It is important to understand the long history behind this sense of alienation and separatism among a vast section of Muslims in India, particularly its leadership and clergy. This also becomes a prelude, setting the context in which Vinayak’s philosophy of Hindutva took birth. The political situation and the Hindu–Muslim equations prompted the urgency with which he composed such an exposition from the troubling confines of Ratnagiri prison. The leaderless disorientation in Hindu society, it being led in various directions and towards unrelated causes, and its own inherent divisions of caste and creed needed an intellectual response. Vinayak hoped to do that through his treatise.

There are numerous contradictions too. The same constitutional reforms that Vinayak endorsed in his petitions from Cellular Jail had provided the introduction for separate Muslim electorates. This move undoubtedly helped the later solidification of Indian politics on religious affiliation.

After the failure of the 1857 War of Independence, where reestablishing Bahadur Shah Zafar as the emperor of India was an important objective, the Wahabi movement of 1857–58, under Enayet Ali, did not join hands with the leaders of the 1857 movement. They fought for the establishment of a theocratic Islamic state, or dar-ul-Islam, in India. The Hindus were completely aloof from this long-drawn Wahabi struggle. After this, the Muslims as a community, by and large, did not take active part in any political organizations, including the INC. Being perceived as among the chief conspirators in 1857 further reduced their influence with the British and a general dejection gripped the community. At this point, Sir Syed Ahmed appeared as a beacon of hope. He took it as his mission to both mend fences between the Muslim community and the British, and also introduce the community to modern education. In fact, he published an entire tract, The Loyal Mohammedans of India, in which he took pains to explain that if there was any community in India that could be trusted and were fast bound with Christians, it was the Muslims of the country, who would be their staunch friends and loyalists. Inculcating this sense of loyalty to the British was one of the declared objectives of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College that he set up in Aligarh in 1877. He vehemently opposed those of the community who were against the British—be it ulemas or those associated with the Congress. According to Syed, the Congress was fighting for a representative government on British lines—one in which the majority voice reigned, which would entail a fourth of the population comprising Muslims getting a short shrift. He never tired of emphasizing that India was a conglomerate of several nations and that the Muslims formed a distinctive unit. In a speech, he articulates this belief:

In a country like India where homogeneity does not exist in any one of the fields (nationality, religion, way of living, customs, mores, culture, and historical tradition), the introduction of representative government cannot produce any beneficial results; it can only result in interfering with the peace and prosperity of the land . . . the aims and objects of the Indian National Congress are based upon an ignorance of history and present day realities; they do not take into consideration that India is inhabited by different nationalities; I consider the experiment which the Indian National Congress wants to make fraught with dangers and suffering for all the nationalities of India, specially for the Muslims. The Muslims are in a minority, but they are a highly united minority. At least traditionally they are prone to take the sword in hand when the majority oppresses them. If this happens, it will bring about disasters greater than the ones which came in the wake of the happenings of 1857 . . . the Congress cannot rationally prove its claim to represent the opinions, ideals, and aspirations of the Muslims.3

The thrust of his Aligarh movement was that Hindus and Muslims were separate entities with distinctive outlooks, conflicting interests, and in a way, separate nationalities. In fact, he was the first proponent of the ‘two-nation’ theory that was to have catastrophic results on the future of India. To quote Sir Syed:

In whose hands shall the administration and the Empire of India rest? Now, suppose that all English, and the whole English army, were to leave India, taking with them all their cannon and their splendid weapons and everything, then who would be rulers of India? Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations—the Mahomedans and the Hindus—could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other and thrust it down. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable.4

Regarding the Congress demand that a section of the viceroy’s council should be elected by the people, Sir Syed debated:

Let us imagine the Viceroy’s Council made in this manner. And let us suppose, first of all, that we have universal suffrage, as in America, and that all have votes. And let us also suppose that all Mohammadan electors vote for a Mohammadan and all Hindu electors for a Hindu member, and now count how many votes the Mohammadan member will have and how many the Hindu. It is certain that the Hindu member will have four times as many, because their population is four times numerous . . . and now how can the Mohammadan guard his interests?5

Thus, democratic representation or appointments based on competition would work to the Muslim detriment and result in a Hindu rule. As a result, British rule was in the best interests of the community, which should also stay away from political agitation and act as a counter to the agitating Hindus, Sir Syed postulated. That the Congress suffered from an acute lack of Muslim participation in its early years is seldom mentioned. Over the first twenty-one years, from 1885 to 1905, the average attendance of Muslim delegates in the first five sessions was 15 per cent; that fell to 5 per cent and below in the subsequent fifteen sessions.6 Muslims of Allahabad, Lucknow, Meerut, Lahore, Madras and other places passed resolutions condemning the Congress. Newspapers such as Mahomedan Observer, Victoria Paper, The Muslim Herald, Rafiq-i-Hind, and Imperial Paper spoke unequivocally against the Congress, as did a powerful Muslim organ of northern India—the Aligarh Institute Gazette.7 Riots over issues such as cow slaughter and processional music in front of mosques further widened the growing gulf between the two communities, which the British took advantage of.

For instance, Lord Curzon managed to win over Muslims who were initially opposed to the Partition of Bengal by convincing them that it was in their favour. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca, one of the most influential Muslim leaders of East Bengal, sided with the British. Many Muslims saw in the creation of the province of East Bengal and Assam a culmination of the dreams of the Aligarh movement—a separate Muslim unit within the Indian body politic. At a meeting held in Dacca on 30 December 1906, a resolution of prominent Muslim leaders upheld the Partition of Bengal plan and criticized the swadeshi movement raging against it.8

The British actively encouraged petitions from prominent Muslim leaders seeking employment of a due proportion from the community in government service, abolition of competitive examinations for the community for recruitment to services, appointments of Muslim judges in every high court and chief court, communal or separate electorates for municipalities and Muslim electoral colleges for elections to legislative councils. Correspondence between Viceroy Lord Minto’s private secretary, Colonel Dunlop Smith, and Muslim leaders clearly demonstrates this, where, among other things, he carefully orchestrates the whole plan of action:

But in all these matters I want to remain behind the screen and this move should come from you. You are aware, how anxious I am for the good of the Musalmans, and I would, therefore, render all help with the greatest pleasure. I can prepare and draft the address for you. If it be prepared in Bombay then I can revise it because I know the art of drawing up petitions in good language. But Nawabsaheb, please remember that if within a short time any great and effective action has to be taken, then you should act quickly.9

This ‘engineered’ deputation submitted its memorandum to Lord Minto who gladly accepted it. Ramsay Macdonald, the future prime minister of Britain, too had reminisced: ‘The Mahomedan leaders are inspired by certain Anglo-Indian officials and that these officials have pulled wires at Simla and in London, and of malice aforethought sowed discord between the Hindu and the Mahomedan communities by showing the Muslims special favours.’10 The British press also picked up and played on this division of interests within the country and that the distinctive Muslim views entitled them to be constituted as a separate entity.

Elated by the favourable reception from the government, the Muslim leadership felt the urgent need of a political association to voice their demands better and also act as a counter to the Congress. There was no pan-Indian organization of the Muslims; all they had were loosely knit local units and groups of nawabs and eminent persons. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca advocated the idea of a Central Muhammadan Association whose chief goals were to support the British government and to look after the rights and interests of all the Muslims of India, in addition to acting as a bulwark against the Congress. The scheme was accepted, and at a meeting held on 30 December 1906, it was resolved that a political association called All India Muslim League should be established. At a meeting held in Karachi on 29 December 1907, the aims of the League were drawn— promoting pro-British feelings and loyalty towards the government among Muslims, protecting the rights and interests of Muslims of India and preventing rise of feelings of hostility towards other communities, without prejudice to the earlier mentioned objectives.11 There was opposition to movements like the Shivaji festival promoting a Hindu leader—more so one who fought against the Mughals—as a national hero was anathema.12 The secretary of the League declared:

We are not opposed to the social unity of the Hindus and the Mussalmans . . . but the other type of unity (political) involves the working out of common political purposes. This sort of our unity with the Congress cannot be possible because we and the Congressmen do not have common political objectives. They indulge in acts calculated to weaken the British Government. They want representative Government, which means death for Mussalmans. They desire competitive examinations for employment in Government services and this would mean the deprivation of Mussalmans of Government jobs. Therefore, we need not go near political unity [with the Hindus]. It is the aim of the League to present Muslim demands through respectful request, before the Government. They should not, like Congressmen, cry for boycott, deliver exciting speeches and write impertinent articles in newspapers and hold meetings to turn public feeling and attitude against their benign Government.13

It was in this context of intense distrust and discord that we had earlier seen the letter from Ziauddin Ahmad—later vice chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University—to Abdullah Suhrawardy who was at India House in London, asking Muslims to refrain from participating in activities of Shyamji, Vinayak and other revolutionaries. The spirit of British loyalty and seeking distinctiveness from the Hindus and the Congress that Sir Syed had induced in the community was to remain for a long time with most leaders, barring a few exceptions. As Sir Percival Joseph Griffiths, a prominent businessman who also worked for Indian Civil Service largely in eastern India, noted: ‘Whatever may have been other effects of the foundation of the Muslim League, it set the seal upon the Muslim belief that their interests must be regarded as completely separate from those of the Hindus and that no fusion of the two communities was possible.’14

In its annual session held at Amritsar in December 1908, the Muslim League expressed vehement opposition to all the ‘mischievous efforts’ to unsettle the settled fact of the Partition of Bengal.15 In the Imperial Council in 1910, when Bhupendra Nath Bose raised the question of reversing the Partition of Bengal, members Shams-ul-Huda of Bengal and Mazhar-ul-Huq of Bihar strongly opposed the move. They warned that if the government meddled with this ‘beneficent measure, it would be committing an act of supreme folly and would create unrest and discontent where none existed now’.16 That the views of prominent leaders of the community remained unchanged is evident from Muhammad Ali’s speech as Congress president in 1923, in which he referred to the government’s policy of reversing the Partition of Bengal as an important cause for the alienation of the Muslims from the British government.17

Throughout 1907 and 1908, heated debates were held regarding separate electorates and the weightage that was proposed by the Muslim deputation and consented to by Viceroy Lord Minto. The Muslim leadership argued that owing to the vast social, cultural and religious differences between the two communities, they feared that a Hindu majority would not be able to deal with them suitably or represent them fairly. It was also pointed out that Muslims should get a greater representation in the different councils than was warranted by their numerical strength in the country’s population. The logic offered for this was rather perverse. The deputation had stated that Muslims had ruled India for 700 years before the British arrival and hence they had a natural claim to greater ‘political importance’, which should be reflected in the councils. They also maintained that the community had played a vital role in defending the country and this enhanced its importance further.

The Morley–Minto Reforms of 1909 not only awarded separate Muslim electorates, but also the number of their members in the council was much more than the numerical strength of their population. The seeds of discord and of being two separate nations had thus been sown several decades before the freedom movement took birth. Gopalkrishna Gokhale lamented:

It was a commonplace of Indian politics that there can be no future for India as a nation unless a durable spirit of cooperation was developed and established between the two great communities . . . the union of all communities is no doubt the goal towards which we have to strive, but it cannot be denied that it does not exist in the country today and it is no use proceeding as though it existed, when in reality it does not 18 . . . over the greater part of India, the two communities had inherited a tradition of antagonism which though it might ordinarily lie dormant, broke forth into activity at the smallest provocation. It was this tradition that had to be overcome.19

-- Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past: 1883-1924, by Vikram Sampath

Traces of the Great: A medieval history of the Delhi Sultanate
by Francis Robinson
the-tls.co.uk
June 30, 2017


The city walls of Tughluqabad, Delhi; from El mundo en la mano, 1878|© Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

IN THIS REVIEW: TARIKH-I FIROZ SHAHI, Translated by Ishtiyaq Ahmad Zilli 396pp. Primus Books. £46.95 (US $69.95), Ziauddin Barani

Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi by Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) is the most important history of India’s Delhi Sultanate, which was founded by Turkish invaders in the thirteenth century. It covers the high point of the Sultanate from the beginning of the reign of Balban in 1266 through to the sixth year of Firoz Shah Tughluq in 1357. If it did not exist, our knowledge of this important period in the establishment of Muslim power in South Asia would be much diminished.

That we have this history at all is the result of the will of one of the remarkable Muslims of nineteenth-century India, Syed Ahmed Khan. Later in the century, he fashioned the lineaments of Islamic modernist thought and founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, which was designed to enable his class to continue to have under the British the positions of power it held under the Mughals. Earlier in the century, he had become obsessed by the relics of the Sultanate that lay all around him in Delhi. These he recorded in one of his early publications, Asar as-Sanadid (1847/1853), which translates as “Traces of the Great”. It was Ahmed Khan who, with the help of Captain Nassau Lees and Maulvi Kabiruddin Ahmed, compiled the first printed edition of the Persian text of the Tarikh, using one complete manuscript and three incomplete manuscripts to finish what Ishtiyaq Ahmad Zilli tells us is the first Persian edited text. It was published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Calcutta) in 1862 and was one of the achievements which earned him his Fellowship of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Zilli’s translation is the first complete translation into English of Barani’s history. Several excerpts were translated in the nineteenth century, the largest and most used being that which appeared in the third volume of Henry Miers Elliot and John Dowson’s History of India as Told by its own Historians. The value of this particular excerpt has been increasingly undermined by the blatant imperial purpose of the volumes as a whole. “Though”, Elliot tells us in his preface of 1849, “the intrinsic value of these works may be small . . . they will make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantages accruing to them from our rule.” It is understandable why Zilli, who has taught Sultanate history for many years at Aligarh Muslim University, should wish to produce a complete English text…

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, KCSI
Born: 17 October 1817, Delhi, Mughal Empire
Died: 27 March 1898 (aged 80), Aligarh, British India
Nationality: British Indian
Other names: Sir Syed
Notable work: The Mohammadan Commentary on the Holy Quran (Tafsir on QURAN).
Awards: Star of India
Era: 19th century
School: Islamic and Renaissance philosophy
Institutions: East India Company; Indian Judicial Branch; Aligarh Muslim University; Punjab University; Government College University
Main interests: Pragmatism, Metaphysics, language, aesthetics, Christianity and Islam
Notable ideas: Two-nation theory, Muslim adoption of Western ideas
Influences: Thomas Walker Arnold, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Gottlieb Leitner
Influenced: Pakistan Movement, Aligarh Movement, Muslim League, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, Ziauddin Ahmad, Pervez Musharraf, and his ideas remain critical in the national politics of Pakistan

Syed Ahmad Taqvi bin Syed Muhammad Muttaqi[1] KCSI (Urdu: سید احمد خان‎; 17 October 1817 – 27 March 1898), commonly known as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (also Sayyid Ahmad Khan), was an Islamic pragmatist,[2] Islamic reformer,[3][4] philosopher, and educationist[5] in nineteenth-century British India.[6][7] Though initially espousing Hindu-Muslim unity, he became the pioneer of Muslim nationalism in India and is widely credited as the father of the two-nation theory, which formed the basis of the Pakistan movement.[8][9][10][11] Born into a family with strong debts to the Mughal court, Ahmad studied the Quran and Sciences within the court. He was awarded an honorary LLD from the University of Edinburgh in 1889.[12][9][7]

In 1838, Syed Ahmad entered the service of East India Company and went on to become a judge at a Small Causes Court in 1867, retiring from 1876. During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, he remained loyal to the British Raj and was noted for his actions in saving European lives.[3] After the rebellion, he penned the booklet The Causes of the Indian Mutiny – a daring critique, at the time, of various British policies that he blamed for causing the revolt. Believing that the future of Muslims was threatened by the rigidity of their orthodox outlook, Sir Ahmad began promoting Western–style scientific education by founding modern schools and journals and organising Islamic entrepreneurs.

In 1859, Syed established Gulshan School at Muradabad, Victoria School at Ghazipur in 1863, and a scientific society for Muslims in 1864. In 1875, founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, the first Muslim university in Southern Asia.[13] During his career, Syed repeatedly called upon Muslims to loyally serve the British Raj and promoted the adoption of Urdu as the lingua franca of all Indian Muslims. Syed criticized the Indian National Congress.[14]

Syed maintains a strong legacy in Pakistan and among Indian Muslims. He strongly influenced other Muslim leaders including Allama Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. His advocacy of Islam's rationalist tradition, and at broader, radical reinterpretation of the Quran to make it compatible with science and modernity, continues to influence the global Islamic reformation.[15] Many universities and public buildings in Pakistan bear Sir Syed's name.[16]

Aligarh Muslim University celebrated Sir Syed’s 200th birth centenary with much enthusiasm on 17 October 2017. Former President of India Pranab Mukherjee was the chief guest.[17][18]

Early life

Do not show the face of Islam to others; instead show your face as the follower of true Islam representing character, knowledge, tolerance and piety.

— Sir Syed Ahmad Khan

Syed Ahmad Taqvi 'Khan Bahadur' was born on 17 October 1817 in Delhi, which was the capital of the Mughal Empire in the ruling times of Mughal Emperor Akbar II. Many generations of his family had since been highly connected with the administrative position in Mughal Empire. His maternal grandfather Khwaja Fariduddin served as Wazir (lit. Minister) in the court of Emperor Akbar Shah II.[19] His paternal grandfather Syed Hadi Jawwad bin Imaduddin held a mansab (lit. General)– a high-ranking administrative position and honorary name of "Mir Jawwad Ali Khan" in the court of Emperor Alamgir II. Sir Syed's father, Syed Muhammad Muttaqi,[20] was personally close to Emperor Akbar Shah II and served as his personal adviser.[21]

However, Syed Ahmad was born at a time when his father was regional insurrections aided and led by the East India Company, which had replaced the power traditionally held by the Mughal state, reducing its monarch to figurehead. With his elder brother Syed Muhammad bin Muttaqi Khan, Sir Syed was raised in a large house in a wealthy area of the city. They were raised in strict accordance with Mughal noble traditions and exposed to politics. Their mother Aziz-un-Nisa played a formative role in Sir Syed's early life, raising him with rigid discipline with a strong emphasis on modern education.[22] Sir Syed was taught to read and understand the Qur'an by a female tutor, which was unusual at the time. He received an education traditional to Muslim nobility in Delhi. Under the charge of Lord Wellesley, Sir Syed was trained in Persian, Arabic, Urdu and orthodox religious subjects.[23] He read the works of Muslim scholars and writers such as Sahbai, Rumi and Ghalib.[citation needed] Other tutors instructed him in mathematics, astronomy and Islamic jurisprudence.[24][25] Sir Syed was also adept at swimming, wrestling and other sports. He took an active part in the Mughal court's cultural activities.[26]

Syed Ahmad's elder brother founded the city's first printing press in the Urdu language along with the journal Sayyad-ul-Akbar.[citation needed] Sir Syed pursued the study of medicine for several years but did not complete the course.[24] Until the death of his father in 1838, Sir Syed had lived a life customary for an affluent young Muslim noble.[24] Upon his father's death, he inherited the titles of his grandfather and father and was awarded the title of Arif Jung by the emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar.[27] Financial difficulties put an end to Sir Syed's formal education, although he continued to study in private, using books on a variety of subjects.[26] Sir Syed assumed editorship of his brother's journal and rejected offers of employment from the Mughal court.[26]

Career


Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Justice Syed Mahmood, he was the first Muslim to serve as a High Court judge in the British Raj.

Having recognized the steady decline in Mughal political power, Sir Syed decided to enter the service of the East India Company. He could not enter the colonial civil service because it was only in the 1860s that Indians were admitted.[28] His first appointment was as a Serestadar (lit. Clerk) at the courts of law in Agra, responsible for record-keeping and managing court affairs.[28] In 1840, he was promoted to the title of munshi. In 1858, he was appointed to a high-ranking post at the court in Muradabad, where he began working on his most famous literary work.

Acquainted with high-ranking British officials, Sir Syed obtained close knowledge about British colonial politics during his service at the courts. At the outbreak of the Indian rebellion, on 10 May 1857, Sir Syed was serving as the chief assessment officer at the court in Bijnor.[citation needed] Northern India became the scene of the most intense fighting.[29] The conflict had left large numbers of civilians dead. Erstwhile centres of Muslim power such as Delhi, Agra, Lucknow and Kanpur were severely affected. Sir Syed was personally affected by the violence and the ending of the Mughal dynasty amongst many other long-standing kingdoms.[citation needed] Sir Syed and many other Muslims took this as a defeat of Muslim society.[30] He lost several close relatives who died in the violence. Although he succeeded in rescuing his mother from the turmoil, she died in Meerut, owing to the privations she had experienced.[29]

Social reforms in the Muslim society were initiated by Abdul Latif who founded "The Mohammedan Literary Society" in Bengal. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan established the MAO College which eventually became the Aligarh Muslim University. He opposed ignorance, superstitions and evil customs prevalent in Indian Muslim society. He firmly believed that Muslim society would not progress without the acquisition of western education and science. As time passed, Sir Syed began stressing on the idea of pragmatic modernism and started advocating for strong interfaith relations between Islam and Christianity.

Causes of the Indian Revolt

Sir Syed supported the East India Company during the 1857 uprising, a role which has been criticised by some nationalists such as Jamaluddin Afghani. In 1859 Sir Syed published the booklet Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind (The Causes of the Indian Revolt) in which he studied the causes of the Indian revolt. In this, his most famous work, he rejected the common notion that the conspiracy was planned by Muslim elites, who resented the diminishing influence of Muslim monarchs. He blamed the East India Company for its aggressive expansion as well as the ignorance of British politicians regarding Indian culture. Sir Syed advised the British to appoint Muslims to assist in administration, to prevent what he called ‘haramzadgi’ (a vulgar deed) such as the mutiny.[31]

Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali wrote in the biography of Sir Syed that:

"As soon as Sir Syed reached Muradabad, he began to write the pamphlet entitled 'The Causes of the Indian Revolt' (Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind), in which he did his best to clear the people of India, and especially the Muslims, of the charge of Mutiny. In spite of the obvious danger, he made a courageous and thorough report of the accusations people were making against the Government and refused the theory which the British had invented to explain the causes of the Mutiny."[32]

When the work was finished, without waiting for an English translation, Sir Syed sent the Urdu version to be printed at the Mufassilat Gazette Press in Agra. Within a few weeks, he received 500 copies back from the printers. One of his friends warned him not to send the pamphlet to the British Parliament or to the Government of India. Rae Shankar Das, a great friend of Sir Syed, begged him to burn the books rather than put his life in danger. Sir Syed replied that he was bringing these matters to the attention of the British for the good of his own people, of his country, and of the government itself. He said that if he came to any harm while doing something that would greatly benefit the rulers and the subjects of India alike, he would gladly suffer whatever befell him. When Rae Shankar Das saw that Sir Syed's mind was made up and nothing could be done to change it, he wept and remained silent. After performing a supplementary prayer and asking God's blessing, Sir Syed sent almost all the 500 copies of his pamphlet to England, one to the government, and kept the rest himself.

When the government of India had the book translated and presented before the council, Lord Canning, the governor-general, and Sir Bartle Frere accepted it as a sincere and friendly report. The foreign secretary Cecil Beadon, however, severely attacked it, calling it 'an extremely seditious pamphlet'. He wanted a proper inquiry into the matter and said that the author, unless he could give a satisfactory explanation, should be harshly dealt with. Since no other member of the Council agreed with his opinion, his attack did no harm.

Later, Sir Syed was invited to attend Lord Canning's durbar in Farrukhabad and happened to meet the foreign secretary there. He told Sir Syed that he was displeased with the pamphlet and added that if he had really had the government's interests at heart, he would not have made his opinion known in this way throughout the country; he would have communicated it directly to the government. Sir Syed replied that he had only had 500 copies printed, the majority of which he had sent to England, one had been given to the government of India, and the remaining copies were still in his possession. Furthermore, he had the receipt to prove it. He was aware, he added, that the view of the rulers had been distorted by the stress and anxieties of the times, which made it difficult to put even the most straightforward problem in its right perspective. It was for this reason that he had not communicated his thoughts publicly. He promised that for every copy that could be found circulating in India he would personally pay 1,000 rupees. At first, Beadon was not convinced and asked Sir Syed over and over again if he was sure that no other copy had been distributed in India. Sir Syed reassured him on this matter, and Beadon never mentioned it again. Later he became one of Sir Syed's strongest supporters.

Many official translations were made of the Urdu text of The Causes of the Indian Revolt. The one undertaken by the India Office formed the subject of many discussions and debates.[33] The pamphlet was also translated by the government of India and several members of parliament, but no version was offered to the public. A translation which had been started by a government official was finished by Sir Syed's great friend, Colonel G.F.I. Graham, and finally published in 1873.[32]

Influence of Mirza Ghalib


The court of Akbar, an illustration from a manuscript of the Ain-e-Akbari

In 1855, he finished his scholarly, well researched and illustrated edition of Abul Fazl's Ai'n-e Akbari, itself an extraordinarily difficult book. Having finished the work to his satisfaction, and believing that Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib was a person who would appreciate his labours, Syed Ahmad approached the great Ghalib to write a taqriz (in the convention of the times, a laudatory foreword) for it. Ghalib obliged, but what he did produce was a short Persian poem castigating the Ai'n-e Akbari, and by implication, the imperial, sumptuous, literate and learned Mughal culture of which it was a product. The least that could be said against it was that the book had little value even as an antique document. Ghalib practically reprimanded Syed Ahmad Khan for wasting his talents and time on dead things. Worse, he praised sky-high the "sahibs of England" who at that time held all the keys to all the a’ins in this world.[34]

The poem was unexpected, but it came at the time when Syed Ahmad Khan's thought and feelings themselves were inclining toward change. Ghalib seemed to be acutely aware of a European[English]-sponsored change in world polity, especially Indian polity. Syed Ahmad might well have been piqued at Ghalib's admonitions, but he would also have realized that Ghalib's reading of the situation, though not nuanced enough, was basically accurate. Syed Ahmad Khan may also have felt that he, being better informed about the English and the outside world, should have himself seen the change that now seemed to be just round the corner.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan never again wrote a word in praise of the Ai'n-e Akbari and in fact gave up taking an active interest in history and archaeology. He did edit another two historical texts over the next few years, but neither of them was anything like the Ai'n: a vast and triumphalist document on the governance of Akbar.[35]

Scholarly works


First issue of the journal Muhammadan Social Reformer dated 24 December 1870, it was a pioneering publication initiated by Sir Syed to promote liberal ideas in Muslim society.

While continuing to work as a junior clerk, Sir Syed began focusing on writing, from the age of 23 (in 1840), on various subjects (from mechanics to educational issues), mainly in Urdu, where he wrote, at least, 6000 pages.[36][37] His career as an author began when he published a series of treatises in Urdu on religious subjects in 1842. He published the book Asaar-us-sanadeed (The Remnants of Ancient Heroes) documenting antiquities of Delhi dating from the medieval era. This work earned him the reputation of a cultured scholar. In 1842, he completed the Jila-ul-Qulub bi Zikr-il Mahbub and the Tuhfa-i-Hasan, along with the Tahsil fi jar-i-Saqil in 1844. These works focused on religious and cultural subjects. In 1852, he published the two works Namiqa dar bayan masala tasawwur-i-Shaikh and Silsilat ul-Mulk. He released the second edition of Ansar-as-sanadid in 1854.[38] He also started work on a commentary on the Bible – the first by a Muslim – in which he argued that Islam was the closest religion to Christianity, with a common lineage from Abrahamic religions.[24] He began with Genesis and Matthew, the first books of the Old and New Testament, but quit his project before even completing those first two. His other writings such as Loyal Muhammadans of India, Tabyin-ul-Kalam and A Series of Essays on the Life of Muhammad and Subjects Subsidiary Therein helped to create cordial relations between the British authorities and the Muslim community.

He was also a reader of Darwin and, while not agreeing with all of his ideas, he could be described as a sort of theistic evolutionist like his contemporary Asa Gray, and one of the first in the Islamic world, finding the arguments supporting such view through his own scientific research but also quoting earlier Islamic scholars like Al-Jahiz, Ibn Khaldun and Shah Waliullah.[39]