A great article from the archives. January 30, 1947. Courtsey Time Mangazine.
On a turf-covered plain near Delhi, a splendid assemblage gathered Jan. 1, 1877. The High Officers and Ruling Chiefs of India took their seats behind a gilt railing in an amphitheater of blue, white, gold and red, to hear Queen Victoria proclaimed first Empress of India. They rose to their feet as a flourish of trumpets announced the arrival, across 800 feet of red carpet, of His Excellency the Viceroy, Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Second Baron Lytton. The proclamation was read, the Royal Standard was hoisted, and artillery fired a grand salute of 101 salvos. Mixed bands played God Save the Queen, then trumpeted the blaring march from Tannhduser. Richly caparisoned elephants trumpeted too, and rushed wildly about with trunks erect when they heard the roll of musketry.
His Highness the Maharaja Sindia was first to congratulate (in absentia) the new Empress: "Shah-en-Shah Padishah [Queen of Queens], May God bless you. The Princes of India bless you and pray that your sovereignty and power may remain steadfast forever."
Bleats of a Goat. "Forever" might have been a longer time if it had not been for a scrawny, timid schoolboy then in the northwest India town of Porbandar on the Arabian Sea, 700 miles away. Mohandas Kamarchand Gandhi was eight years old at the time of the Great Durbar at Delhi. He was already sensitive about his British rulers. His schoolmates used to recite a bit of doggerel:
Behold the mighty Englishman! He rules the Indian small, Because being a meat eater He is five cubits* tall.
Although his parents were pious Vaishnavas (a Hindu sect which strictly abstains from meat eating), Gandhi was goaded a few years later into sampling goat meat to emulate the British. "Afterwards," he reported, "I passed a very bad night. . . . Every time I dropped off to sleep, it would seem as though a live goat were bleating inside me; and I would jump up full of remorse."
Gandhi's frail body never grew beyond no pounds, but the youthful conscience matured into a towering spirit that laid the meat eaters low, five cubits or not. Winston Churchill had once called Gandhi "a half-naked, seditious fakir. . . . These Indian politicians," he said in 1930, "will never get dominion status in their lifetimes." But 70 years after the Great Durbar both Gandhi and Churchill were still alive, and freedom was only 50 days away.
Froth of a Flood. Last week in New Delhi, Queen-Empress Victoria's great-grandson, Rear Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, Viceroy of India, was working hard to get out of India as fast as he could. To Hindu and Moslem politicos responsible for setting up two new dominions in India before mid-August he sent memos reminding them "only 62 more days," "only 55 more days." The British did not rely on Hindu and Moslem leaders' continuing to work together. The British wanted to clear out before India blew up in their faces.
On the outskirts of New Delhi, in the dingy, dungy Bhangi (untouchable) Colony, Gandhi was not jubilant, although the British were leaving at last. To him, the violence and disunity of India were a personal affront. To Gandhi, ahimsa (nonviolence) is the first principle of life, and satyagraha (soul force, or conquering through love), the only proper way of life. In the whitewashed, DDT-ed compound which serves him as headquarters, Gandhi licked his soul wounds: "I feel [India's violence] is just an indication," he told his followers, "that as we are throwing off the foreign yoke, all the dirt and froth is coming to the surface. When the Ganges is in flood the water is turbid."
Ironically, Gandhi himself, who has spent a lifetime trying to direct the waters into disciplined channels, had helped to roil his people into turbulence. What he had called the "dumb, toiling, semi-starving millions," who revered (and sometimes worshiped) Gandhi, could understand him when he cried for their freedom; they could not always understand him when he told them they must not use violence to win that freedom. "To inculcate perfect discipline and nonviolence among 400,000,000," he once said, "is no joke."
A Young Bird Knows. Gandhi seriously began his own self-discipline when he went to South Africa as a London-educated vakil (barrister) at the age of 23. There he first felt the full weight of the white man's color bar. More & more he neglected a lucrative law practice to lead his fellow Indians in a fight against local anti-Indian laws.
A British friend lent him Count Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. The Russian Christian's doctrine of nonviolent resistance to unjust rule gripped the Hindu lawyer's mind. "Young birds," wrote Tolstoy, ". . . know very well when there is no longer room for them in the eggs. ... A man who has outgrown the State can no more be coerced into submission to its laws than can the fledgling be made to re-enter its shell."
Gandhi broke his shell. He decided manual labor was essential to the good life; he still thinks Indians will find peace only through making their own clothes on the charka (spinning wheel). So he gave up a legal practice bringing in about £5,000 a year, moved to a farm settlement where his helpers worked the ground, and began to get out a newspaper, Indian Opinion.
Gandhi mobilized local Indians for his first civil disobedience campaign. They won repeal of some anti-Indian laws from an obstinate South African Government. In 1915, aged 45, he returned to Bombay, the hero of India.
Colossal Experiment. The first year after his return Gandhi toured much of India. The gentle ascetic in loincloth, walking among the villages, won the hearts of millions of Indians. "Gandhi says" became synonymous with "The truth is," for many a peasant and villager. When simple peasants crowded round to see him (many tried to kiss his feet), Gandhi tried to stop "the craze for darshan" (beholding a god).
The Mahatma (Great Soul), as he came to be called, insisted he was a religious leader, not a politician. "If I seem to take part in politics," he said, "it is only because politics today encircle us like the coils of a snake from which one cannot get out no matter how one tries. I wish to wrestle with the snake. ... I am trying to introduce religion into politics."
Applied to India, that meant to Gandhi that people could not be pure in thought, word and deed unless they were their own masters. So he began to work for Indian independence. He found India's "struggle" for independence in the hands of a few well-educated Indians. The Indian National Congress,* was a polite debating society, pledged to win dominion status for India by "legitimate" means. Gandhi converted it into a mass movement. Indian peasants did not worry about independence until Gandhi told them to.
British repressive measures after World War I convinced Gandhi that the British would never willingly give India dominion status. So he organized satyagraha. This first campaign came near to unseating the British Raj. "Gandhi's was the most colossal experiment in world history, and it came within an inch of succeeding," admitted the British governor of Bombay.
Himalayan Miscalculation. But passive resistance always erupted into violence. When he saw the bloodshed that followed his call for resistance, Gandhi was overwhelmed with remorse. He called off his campaign in 1922, admitted himself guilty of a "Himalayan miscalculation." His followers were not yet self-disciplined enough to be trusted with satyagraha. To become a "fitter instrument" to lead, Gandhi imposed on himself a five-day fast.
The pattern repeated itself in later years. The ways of passive action—the sari-clad women lying on railway tracks, the distilling of illicit salt from the sea, the boycotting of British shops, the strikes, the banner-waving processions—would lead to shots in the streets, to burning and looting. Gandhi always punished himself for his followers' transgressions by imposing a fast on himself.
With each fast, each boycott, and each imprisonment (by a British Raj which feared to leave him free, feared even more that he would die on their hands and enrage all India), Gandhi came closer to his goal of a free India. With the same weapons he got in some blows at his favorite social evils—untouchability, liquor, landlord extortions, child marriages, the low status of women.
But as he wrestled, India and Indian politics changed along the road. The Indian National Congress, which claimed to represent Indians of every religious community, finally had to admit that Mohamed Ali Jinnah spoke for the Moslems. Left-wing groups left the Congress, Communists led by Puran Chandra Joshi threatened the placid order of the agricultural, home-industrial India which Gandhi strove for. The Congress leadership (since 1941 Gandhi has ruled only from the sidelines) passed more & more to a group of well-to-do conservatives bossed by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
The only outstanding exception was socialistic Jawaharlal Nehru. Indian independence was certain to be followed by a struggle for economic power. For all these bewildering problems Gandhi had an answer: hurt no living thing; live simply, peacefully, purely. But fewer & fewer listened to that part of his advice. Just as Gandhi had outgrown the shell of the British Raj, so Indian nationalism, Hindu and Moslem, showed signs of outgrowing Gandhi's teachings.
Horse Trading. The India of New Delhi politicians was little concerned with soul force. Old (70), rabble-rousing Mohamed Ali Jinnah, head of the Moslem League, was greeted by followers with shouts of "Shah-en-Shah Zindabad" (Long live the King of Kings). His birthplace, Karachi, would probably be capital of the new Pakistan, possibly be renamed Jinnahabad.
Jinnah was already using his new power to disrupt India further. In the face of Jawaharlal Nehru's blunt warning to the Indian princes ("We will not recognize the independence of any state in India"), Jinnah began courting them. Most princes had already decided to join Hindu India (see map), but the Nizam of Hyderabad (a Moslem) and Maharaja of Travancore (a Hindu) had each said he would go it alone. Jinnah dangled alliance-bait before them: "If states wish to remain independent ... we shall be glad to discuss with them and come to a settlement." Big Kashmir, still on the fence, was ruled by a Hindu, but its 76% Moslem population would probably bring it into Pakistan sooner or later.
Last week Harry St. John B. Philby, Briton-turned-Moslem, familiar intriguer in the Arab world and intimate of Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud, arrived in India "to buy tents." He went into a huddle with Moslem Leaguers and Hyderabad officials. Delhi was sure Jinnah was angling for the support of Moslem states in the Middle East.
His Pakistan would be strong agriculturally (with a wheat surplus in the rich Punjab, 85% of the world's jute an eastern Bengal), but weak industrially.
Pakistan would begin its career with no cotton mills, jute mills, iron or steel works,† copper or iron mines. Jinnah hoped to compensate for this weakness with foreign support, might keep Pakistan a British dominion even if Hindu India declared complete independence.
What Will Happen? But these maneuverings were remote from the India of mud and dung and (endless toil, which wondered in bewilderment what was happening to it. The little man in India had never asked for Pakistan or Hindustan or even for independence, except when his leaders told him. He was scarcely aware who ruled him. Recently a tattered Hindu peasant helped to repair a blowout on a car in the Punjab. Asked what he thought of the Government in New Delhi (now a temporary, joint Hindu-Moslem Cabinet, operating under viceregal veto), he replied, "I never heard of it."
If the symbol of unity at New Delhi was remote, the communal hatred that had forced the partition now faced was real enough. On both sides of the new dividing line, between Pakistan and Hindu India, minority groups wondered what to do. A Moslem tonga (two-wheeled carriage) driver, who had lived 20 years in Delhi, thought of moving to the Punjab. "I will wait and see what happens," he said. "If there is any trouble, I will send for my mother, my sister and my two buffalo, on my farm in the United Provinces." But it would cost him $50 to move to the Punjab—and the meager amount he collects in fares barely pays for food on the black market. Besides, he was still paying off a $200 debt incurred when he had tried vainly to save the life of a typhoid-stricken son.
A Hindu milkman in Bombay thought of moving his 68-year-old father from the Lahore district (which will go to Pakistan). "We own half a dozen cows and bullocks and three-quarters of an acre of land. My father would hate to leave our village and breathe the foul air of Bombay. I, my wife and five children are sharing a one-room apartment with another couple with three children. How can I accommodate my father? But I must bring him down. I cannot abandon him to Pakistan."
A Pathan watchman from the North-West Frontier Province thought he might have to go back to the barren soil of his native district. "The Hindu who owns the firm where I work has given me notice, saying he cannot trust foreigners to guard his shop. Who will give me jobs now? What will happen to my family?"
Who Will Pay? A Hindu chaprasi (office boy) in a Delhi Government office, who owned three acres of land in a Pakistan district, thought he had better bring his wife and family to Delhi. But then he would have to sell his land. "Who will pay a good price for my property?" he asked. "I tried to sell it recently, but some Moslems who were originally prepared to purchase it now say they will get it anyway, once Pakistan comes into being, for little or no money."
All along the prospective border between Pakistan and Hindu India, minorities were on the move. From little villages in the Moslem Punjab, Hindu and Sikh traders and moneylenders trekked to Delhi or the United Provinces. Among them were men who had been in charge of rationing food and clothing during the war, and men who profited by high wartime prices.
Returning Punjabi soldiers last year had turned in hate against the moneylenders, merchants and all their coreligionists. In Bengal it had been the same. While 1½ million died of famine, landowners and food dealers, Moslem and Hindu alike, had reaped profits of 1½ billion rupees. "Every death in the famine," estimated the Woodhead Famine Enquiry Commission two years ago, "was balanced by roughly a thousand rupees of excess profit." The economic grievance of peasants against landlords and profiteers became a religious fight.
In the cities, as always, the warnings of conflict and disorder were sharpest. Throngs of wartime jobholders were idle. In sweltering Calcutta, it took but the flick of a Moslem cigaret butt against the flanks of a sacred Hindu cow, or a Hindu tonga driver's bumping a Moslem child, to start a fight that would engulf the city. Last week Calcutta was still divided into "Pakistan" and "Hindustan" quarters, with strong points bristling with .barbed wire and machine guns. A Hindu driver dared not cross into a Moslem quarter, nor a Moslem into "Hindustan." In Bombay, where Hindus and Moslems had formerly lived mixed in together, streetcar signs now said "Pakistan Bombay," meaning the Moslem quarter.
"Are You Happy?" With the political leaders' agreement to partition India had come a lull in communal fighting. But last week it flared again at Lahore in the Punjab. In the Gurgaon district near Delhi, Moslem and Hindu-Sikh tribes still burned and looted each other's villages. There, for the first time in communal riots, firearms were used on a big scale by each side. The embattled tribes had been turning out homemade wooden rifles, six feet long. In a divided India, where 38 million Moslems are still within the borders of Hindu India, 18 million Hindus and two million Sikhs within Pakistan, few supposed that political deals in Delhi could really repair the breach between religious communities.
One Moslem, who had lost his leather works in riots at Amritsar, no longer cared whether he was in Pakistan or Hindustan. Unshaven and ragged, Chaudhri Ahmen Hasan wandered aimlessly among the ruins of his property, carrying a big framed photograph of Jinnah. From time to time Hasan paused and addressed the picture: "Are you happy now, Qaid-e-Azam [Great Leader]? You have at last achieved Pakistan."
One Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi, still hoped to bring Hindus and Moslems together in a united India. If, in spite of divisive forces, India's 400 million really form themselves into a nation in the modern sense, Gandhi will have brought off (almost as a by-product of his larger purpose) a revolution greater than Danton's, bigger than Lenin's. The subcontinent had never been a nation; its separate peoples had, however, tolerated each others' very different ways of life. As both a politician and a Great Soul. Gandhi knew that if tolerance was replaced by permanent hatred, there would be not just two Indias, but no India. For India's future, nonviolence was not a philosopher's dream, but a political necessity.
Far closer than Queen Victoria's little isle was the Soviet Union which might, like Britain before it, exploit the weakness of a divided India to win hegemony. Already Puran Chandra Jpshi, India's grinning Communist leader,' and other Russian agents had a small (50,000), growing, tightly organized machine within India. If dissension grew in India, Joshi's grin (and Russia's chance) would grow with it.
Road to Noalchali. Across the northern frontier, in the Tajik Socialist Soviet Republic, loomed Mt. Stalin (24,590 ft.) and Mt. Lenin (23,386 ft.), mightiest peaks of the U.S.S.R. Gandhi's thoughts last week turned to the lowest part of India, the mushy flats of Noakhali at the mouth of the Ganges. That part of Bengal, where Moslems and Hindus are mixed, will become part of Pakistan.
Noakhali was the first place Gandhi visited last spring in his tour of India's riot areas. Barefoot, staff in hand, leaning on his grandniece Manu, he had padded through the water-soaked fields and the mixed Moslem-Hindu villages, preaching peace. Last week Gandhi planned a symbolic return. "My work is in Noakhali," he said. "Nobody will prevent me from going there." For Gandhi considered himself a citizen of both new Indian states. "I will go freely to all parts of India . . . without a passport." The question was, would other Indians be able to do the same?
*Length of biblical (and British) cubit: 18 inches. David's Goliath towered six cubits and a span (9 ft. 9 in.).
*Allan Octavian Hume, a British theosophist and retired civil servant, founded the Congress in 1885. He persuaded the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, that the best way to combat growing unrest in the villages was to let Indian leaders discuss political development.
†The great 1,2500,000-ton plant at Jamshedpur is owned by the Parsi Tata clan and manned mostly by Hindus.
