The First World
War began with the murder of an Austrian Archduke
by a Serbian assassin in June of 1914, and soon mushroomed into
a conflict that gripped Europeanpe and the world in four years of
strategic stalemate and unparalleled butchery. When war was declared
in August, Gandhi was in England, where he immediately began organizing
a medical corps similar to the force he had led in the Boer War.
But ill health soon forced his return to India, where he received
a wildly enthusiastic welcome. In his absence, his fame as the
politician-saint of South Africa and the founder of satyagraha had
spread throughout India, and now cheering crowds cried "Mahatmaji"
("ji" being a suffix connoting affection) wherever he appeared.
"Mahatma" meant "Great Soul," an appellation applied to the holiest
men of Hinduism, and was first conferred upon Gandhi by the great
Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1913. Gandhi,
of course, insisted that all souls were equal, and found bothersome
the religious adulation lavished upon him, even as it gave him great
practical power on the subcontinent. But despite his distaste
for it, Mahatma was a title he would bear until his death and beyond,
and while there were other Mahatmas in the India of his lifetime,
Gandhi is the only one remembered today.
Gandhi spent his first year in India in retirement from
public life. However, the year was punctuated by a brief visit
with the British Governor of Bombay (and future Viceroy of India),
Lord Willingdon, whom Gandhi promised to consult before he launched
any political campaigns, and then the death of G.K. Gokhale, Gandhi's political
mentor, an event that left him feeling somewhat adrift in the currents
of Indian political life. Indian nationalism was a fast- growing
phenomenon, as some members of the Indian National Congress had
begun to push for Swaraj, or "home-rule." But
Gandhi steered clear of these agitators, in part because he was
not yet certain that he agreed with them, and in part because he
had to resettle his family and the other inhabitants of the Phoenix
Settlement (and the Tolstoy Settlement, a twin he had founded near Johannesburg)
in India. To this end, he established a new settlement near the
town of Ahmedabad, the capital of the western province of Gujarati,
near where he had been born. It came to be known as the Satyagraha
ashram, ashram being an Indian word for
a communal settlement, and was officially founded on May 25, 1915.
Its initial inhabitants included some twenty-five people, all
sworn to chastity and poverty- -and among them was a family of untouchables,
India's lowest caste.
By living in a communal space with untouchables (whose
very presence, it was believed, defiled higher-caste Hindus), Gandhi deeply
offended many of his supporters and lost considerable financial
support. He was actually considering a move to the untouchable
district in Ahmedabad when a generous Muslim merchant donated enough
money to keep the ashram running for a year–by
which time Gandhi's communal life with the untouchables had become
slightly less of an outrage.
Gandhi's public life in India commenced in February of
1916, when he gave a speech at the opening of the new Hindu University in
the city of Benares. The speech was typical of Gandhi, as he urged
the assembled, westernized Indians that they would never be worthy
of self-government unless they looked out for their less fortunate
brethren. He then went on to catalogue the awful living conditions
of the lower classes that he had observed during his travels around
India–with a special focus, as always, on sanitation. The speech
enjoyed little popularity among the Indian intelligentsia, but Gandhi
hardly cared. He had begun to approve of the idea of home rule,
but he had no interest in exchanging government by a British elite
for rule by an Anglicized Indian elite. If swaraj was
to come to India, he argued, it must come as part of a wholesale
social transformation that stripped away the old burdens of caste
and crippling poverty.
During the war years, he set about putting these principles
into action. His intervention (and willingness, as always, to
face arrest) in the Champaran district on behalf of impoverished
indigo-cultivators led to a government commission being appointed
to investigate abuses by the indigo planters. At the same time,
he discovered what was to become one of his most effective weapons
in late years–the fast. He had always fasted as part of his personal
regimen, but when a group of striking Ahmedabad mill-workers, whose
cause he had supported, turned to violence in their struggle with
the mill-owners, he resolved to fast until they returned to his
principle of non-violence. As it happened, the fast only lasted
three days, as the two sides came to the bargaining table and hammered
out an agreement. But it set a precedent for later action, and
he would continue to use it as weapon in the arsenal of satyagraha–despite
criticism from those who condemned such behavior as little more
than a form of blackmail.
As the war in Europeanpe dragged to its conclusion in
1917-18, Gandhi began tramping about India, recruiting men for
the British Army. Although his dreams of home rule had grown stronger,
he was still loyal to Britain and to the ideals of the British
Constitution, with which he later declared to have "fallen in love."
But the Indian people, having listened to him preach non-violence
and resistance to unjust authority, had a difficult time accepting
him in the role of recruitment officer–how, they wondered, could
the apostle of peace ask them to take up arms in defense of the
Raj? Wearied from his journey, he fell ill with dysentery; it was
his first serious illness, and he resolutely resisted treatment,
preferring his own regimen. As a result he spent a long time as
a convalescent.
While Gandhi lay in bed in his ashram, the
war came to an end. In a sense, the long struggle had been a great
vindication of the British Empire and its Indian "jewel": the subcontinent
had remained loyal, for the most part, and Indian troops had fought
valiantly for the Empire around the globe. But the seeds of the
Raj's downfall were sown. Britain was drained, of both manpower
and will, and would never again regain the sunny optimism that
had characterized its 19th century rule. The interwar years would
soon bring a malaise to the Empire, as a series of mediocre governments
stood by impotently in the face of a hostile Germany's rise to
power and the progressive loss of their own domination. Meanwhile,
India was restive: the British had destroyed the world's only Muslim
power, the Ottoman Empire, and the loyalty of Indians Muslims was
questionable. And having fought a war whose supposed purpose was
to protect the rights of small states and independent peoples from
tyranny, the rhetoric of British rule in India had begun to ring
hollow.
In this atmosphere, the harried British government made
a frightful mistake. They elected to follow the recommendations
of the Rowlatt Committee, which advocated the retention of wartime restrictions
in India–including curfews and the suppression of free speech.
Gandhi, reading the soon-to-be-passed Rowlatt Act in his sickbed,
was too weak to mount a protest, but his loyalty to the Empire,
which he had long viewed as the guarantor of Indian liberties,
suffered a major blow; events of the next few years were to shatter
it entirely.
