India (12 page)

But it wasn’t because of the tea workers – that extra level of distress – that the revolutionaries chose Naxalbari. The tea workers were, in fact, left alone. The Naxalbari district was chosen, by men who had read the handbooks of revolution, for its terrain: its remoteness, and the cover provided by its surviving blocks of forest. The movement that began there quickly moved on; it hardly touched the real distress of Naxalbari; and now nothing shows.

The movement is now dead. The reprisals, official and personal, continue. From time to time in the Indian press there is still an item about the killing or capture of ‘Naxalites’. But social inquiry is outside the Indian tradition; journalism in India has always been considered a gracious form of clerkship; the Indian press – even before the Emergency and censorship – seldom investigated the speeches or communiqués or bald agency items it printed as news. And that word ‘Naxalite’, in an Indian newspaper, can now mean anything.

The communists, or that group of communists concerned with the movement, interpret events in their own way; they have their own vocabulary. Occasionally they circulate reports about the ‘execution’ of ‘peasant leaders’. The Naxalite movement – for all its tactical absurdity – was an attempt at Maoist revolution. But was it a ‘peasant’ movement? Did the revolutionaries succeed in teaching their complex theology to people used to reverencing a Master and used for centuries to the idea of
karma?
Or did they preach something simpler? It was necessary to get men to act violently. Did the revolutionaries then – as a communist journalist told me revolutionaries
in India generally should do – preach only the idea of the enemy?

It is the theory of Vijay Tendulkar, the Marathi playwright – who has been investigating this business as someone sympathetic to the Naxalites’ stated cause of land reform, as most Indians are sympathetic – it is Tendulkar’s theory that Naxalism, as it developed in Bengal, became confused with the Kali cult: Kali, ‘the black one’, the coal-black aboriginal goddess, surviving in Hinduism as the emblem of female destructiveness, garlanded with human skulls, tongue forever out for fresh blood, eternally sacrificed to but insatiable. Many of the Naxalite killings in Bengal, according to Tendulkar, had a ritualistic quality. Maoism was used only to define the sacrifice. Certain people – not necessarily rich or powerful – might be deemed ‘class enemies’. Initiates would then be bound to the cause – of Kali, of Naxalism – by being made to witness the killing of these class enemies and dipping their hands in the blood.

In the early days, when the movement was far away and appeared revolutionary and full of drama, the Calcutta press published gruesome and detailed accounts of the killings: it was in these repetitive accounts that Tendulkar spotted the ritualism of cult murder. But as the movement drew nearer the city, the press took fright and withdrew its interest. It was as an affair of random murder, the initiates now mainly teenagers, that the movement came to Calcutta, became part of the violence of that cruel city, and then withered away. The good cause – in Bengal, at any rate – had been lost long before in the cult of Kali. The initiates had been reduced to despair, their lives spoiled for good; old India had once again depressed men into barbarism.

But the movement’s stated aims had stirred the best young men in India. The best left the universities and went far away, to fight for the landless and the oppressed and for justice. They went to a battle they knew little about. They knew the solutions better than they knew the problems, better than they knew the country. India
remains so little known to Indians. People just don’t have the information. History and social inquiry, and the habits of analysis that go with these disciplines, are too far outside the Indian tradition. Naxalism was an intellectual tragedy, a tragedy of idealism, ignorance, and mimicry: middle-class India, after the Gandhian upheaval, incapable of generating ideas and institutions of its own, needing constantly in the modern world to be inducted into the art, science, and ideas of other civilizations, not always understanding the consequences, and this time borrowing something deadly, somebody else’s idea of revolution.

But the alarm has been sounded. The millions are on the move. Both in the cities and in the villages there is an urgent new claim on the land; and any idea of India which does not take this claim into account is worthless. The poor are no longer the occasion for sentiment or holy alms-giving; land reform is no longer a matter for the religious conscience. Just as Gandhi, towards the end of his life, was isolated from the political movement he had made real, so what until now has passed for politics and leadership in independent India has been left behind by the uncontrollable millions.

I
N
1888,
WHEN
he was nineteen, and already married for six years, Gandhi went to England to study law. It was a brave thing to do. Not the English law – which, however alien to a Hindu of 1888, however unconnected with his complicated rites and his practice of magic, could be mugged up, like another series of
mantras –
not the law, but the voyage itself. Hindu India, decaying for centuries, constantly making itself archaic, had closed up; and the rules of Gandhi’s Gujarati merchant caste – at one time great travellers – now forbade travel to foreign countries. Foreign countries were polluting to pious Hindus; and no one of the caste had been to England before.

To please his mother, Gandhi had taken vows not to touch wine, meat, or women while abroad. But these vows did not satisfy everybody. One section of the caste formally declared the young man an outcaste. But Gandhi, though timid, was obstinate. For a reason which he never makes clear – he was virtually uneducated, had never even read a newspaper – he passionately wanted to go to England. He began to be afraid that the caste might prevent his going; and, two months earlier than he had planned, he took a ship from Bombay to Southampton.

And this is how, in his autobiography,
The Story of My Experiments with Truth
, written nearly forty years later, when he had
become the Mahatma, Gandhi remembers the great adventure (the translation is by his secretary, Mahadev Desai):

That is the voyage: an internal adventure of anxieties felt and food eaten, with not a word of anything seen or heard that did not directly affect the physical or mental well-being of the writer. The inward concentration is fierce, the self-absorption complete. Southampton is lost in that embarrassment (and rage) about the white flannels. The name of the port is mentioned once, and that is all, as though the name is description enough. That it was late September was important only because it was the wrong time of the year for white flannels; it is not a note about the weather. Though Gandhi spent three years in England, there is nothing in his autobiography about the climate or the seasons, so unlike the heat and monsoon of Gujarat and Bombay; and the next date he is precise about is the date of his departure.

No London building is described, no street, no room, no crowd, no public conveyance. The London of 1890, capital of the world – which must have been overwhelming to a young man from a small Indian town – has to be inferred from Gandhi’s continuing internal disturbances, his embarrassments, his religious self-searchings, his
attempts at dressing correctly and learning English manners, and, above all, his difficulties and occasional satisfactions about food.

Sir Edwin Arnold, known for his verse translation of the
Gita
, is mentioned, but only mentioned and never described, though Gandhi must have been dazzled by him, and the poet wasted some time as vice-president of a vegetarian club Gandhi started and ran for a short while in Bayswater. There is an entertaining account of a very brief call, with a visiting Indian writer, on Cardinal Manning. But generally English people are far away in Gandhi’s London. There is no reference to plays (an account of a visit to an unnamed theatre turns out to be an anecdote about an uneaten dinner). Apart from a sentence about Cardinal Manning and the London dock strike, there is nothing about politics or politicians. The only people who come out of the void and make some faint impression are cranks, Theosophists, proselytizing vegetarians. And though they seem of overwhelming importance (Dr Oldfield, editor of
The Vegetarian
, ‘Dr Allinson of vegetarian fame’, Mr Howard or Mr Howard Williams, author of
The Ethics of Diet
, Mr Hills, a puritan and ‘proprietor of the Thames Iron Works’), they are hardly seen as people or set in interiors. They are only their names, their status (Gandhi is always scrupulous about titles), and their convictions.

And then, quite suddenly, Gandhi is a lawyer; and the adventure of England is over. As anxious as he had been to get to London, so he is now anxious to leave. ‘I passed my examinations, was called to the bar on the 10th of June 1891, and enrolled in the High Court on the 11th. On the 12th I sailed for home.’

And yet, curiously, it was again a wish for travel and adventure that two years later sent Gandhi to South Africa. He went on law business and intended to stay for a year. He stayed for twenty years. England had been unsettling only because it hadn’t been India. But in England Gandhi had ceased to be a creature of instinct; out of his unsettlement there, and his consequent self-searching, he had decided that he was a vegetarian and a Hindu by conviction. South Africa offered direct racial hostility; and Gandhi, obstinate as
always, was immeasurably fortified as a Hindu and an Indian. It was in South Africa that he became the Mahatma, the great-souled, working through religion to political action as leader of the Indian community, and through political action back to religion. The adventure never ceased to be internal: so it comes out in the autobiography. And this explains the most remarkable omission in Gandhi’s account of his twenty active years in South Africa: Africans.

Africans appear only fleetingly at a time of a ‘rebellion’, when for six weeks Gandhi led an Indian ambulance unit and found himself looking after wounded Africans. He says his heart was with the Africans; he was distressed by the whippings and unnecessary shootings; it was a trial, he says, to have to live with the soldiers responsible. But the experience did not lead him to a political decision about Africans. He turned inward and, at the age of thirty-seven, did what he had been thinking about for six years: he took the Hindu vow of
brahmacharya
, the vow of lifelong sexual abstinence. And the logic was like this: to serve humanity, as he was then serving the Africans, it was necessary for him to deny himself ‘the pleasures of family life’, to hold himself free in the spirit and the flesh. So the Africans vanish in Gandhi’s heart-searchings; they are the motive of a vow, and thereafter disappear.

Far away, at Yasnaya Polyana in Russia, Tolstoy, in the last year of his life, said of Gandhi, whose work he followed and with whom he exchanged letters: ‘His Hindu nationalism spoils everything.’ It was a fair comment. Gandhi had called his South African commune Tolstoy Farm; but Tolstoy saw more clearly than Gandhi’s English and Jewish associates in South Africa, fellow seekers after the truth. Gandhi really had little to offer these people. His experiments and discoveries and vows answered his own need as a Hindu, the need constantly to define and fortify the self in the midst of hostility; they were not of universal application.

Gandhi’s self-absorption was part of his strength. Without it he would have done nothing and might even have been destroyed. But
with this self-absorption there was, as always, a kind of blindness. In the autobiography South Africa is inevitably more peopled than England, and more variously peopled; there are more events. But the mode of narration is the same. People continue to be only their names and titles, their actions or convictions, their quality of soul; they are never described and never become individuals. There is no attempt at an objective view of the world. As events pile up, the reader begins to be nagged by the absence of the external world; when the reader ceases to share or follow Gandhi’s convictions, he can begin to feel choked.

Landscape is never described. I may be proved wrong, but in all the great length of
My Experiments with Truth
I believe there are only three gratuitous references to landscape. In 1893, on the way out to South Africa, Gandhi notices the vegetation of Zanzibar; three years later, returning briefly to India, he lands at Calcutta, ‘admiring the beauty’ of the Hooghly River. His only important experience of landscape comes at the age of forty-five when, back in India for good, he goes to Hardwar, a place of Hindu pilgrimage in the Himalayas. ‘I was charmed with the natural scenery about Hrishikesh and Lakshman Jhula, and bowed my head in reverence to our ancestors for their sense of the beautiful in Nature, and their foresight in investing beautiful manifestations of Nature with a religious significance.’

The outer world matters only in so far as it affects the inner. It is the Indian way of experiencing; what is true of Gandhi’s autobiography is true of many other Indian autobiographies, though the self-absorption is usually more sterile. ‘I see people having their being’: the Indian girl who said that of the Bombay crowds she saw on her return from Europe was trying hard. She was in the Indian tradition; like Gandhi in Southampton in 1888, she couldn’t describe what she hadn’t been able to take in. In India, as she said, she ‘related’ only to her family. The vogue word enabled her to boast in a modern-sounding way; but the word also covered up a traditional limitation of vision and response. The deficiency that she was able
to convert into boasting is an aspect of what is now being propagated as Hindu wisdom by those holy men who preach ‘meditation’ and expound the idea of the world as illusion.