Politics and Peanuts: A Visit With Mahatma Gandhi

by LOUIS FISCHER

1

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI, the Mahatma, runs a thin weekly magazine in English called Harijan. He contributes signed articles to it and conducts a question-and-answer column.

Last March, a Cabinet Mission consisting of three top members of the British Labor Government came to India to reach a settlement about the granting of self-government. They saw Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other leaders of the Congress Party, which is the largest in the country, as well as Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Moslem League president, and many more political chieftains.

Finally, on May 16, the Cabinet Mission published its plan for giving India a national constitution and a national government. The question was, Will Indians accept the British scheme? The real question was, Will Mahatma Gandhi accept it? For Gandhi is the biggest thing in India.

Gandhi indulged in “four days of searching examination” and then he wrote a page-and-a-quarter article commending the Mission and declaring that its plan “is the best document the British government could have produced in the circumstances.” The Cabinet members, he declared, “have come to devise the easiest and quickest method of ending British rule.”

Every newspaper in India reprinted this Gandhi article from Harijan. Its text was cabled to Washington for the perusal of high officials and diplomats. Full excerpts appeared in the British press and elsewhere.

Immediately below Gandhi’s analysis of England’s history-making offer to liberate India, Harijan published a second article signed by the Mahatma, entitled “Mango Seed Kernel,” in which he extols the food value of the kernel as “a fair substitute for cereals and fodder.” And he added that it would be good “if every mango seed was saved and the kernel baked and eaten in place of cereals or given to those who need it.”

The very next piece in Harijan is likewise by Mohandas K. Gandhi and deals with nature cure, He is now devoting much of his time to nature cure. In fact, my first three days as the house guest of Gandhi were spent with him in the Nature Cure Clinic of Dr. Dinshah Mehta in the city of Poona. “Nature cure,” Gandhi writes in the article, “consists of two parts. First, to cure diseases by taking the name of God or Ramanama and, secondly, to prevent illness by the inculcation of right and hygienic living. . . . Where there is absolute purity, inner and outer,” he affirms, “illness becomes impossible.” Then he dilates on the value of milk. “Buffalo milk,” he asserts, “is no match for cow’s.”

This issue of Harijan is typical of others and characteristic of Gandhi. He is many-sided because he is interested in the life of the individual, and that life is many-sided. Time after time in the weekly numbers of Harijan, Gandhi turns his attention to the uses to which his fellow citizens can put the “ground nut,” as they call the peanut in India. A lady writes in, asking him why he does not condemn spitting, and he answers that he always has and does so now again.

In one contribution Gandhi defines independence for India; in another he urges a reduction in the sugar ration for candy-making; in a third he treats the problem of crime and criminals; in a fourth he expresses the hope that a free India will refrain from maintaining an army; in a fifth he lays down the rule that lying is never justifiable: “Truthtelling admits of no exceptions.”

To Gandhi, the mahatma saint, politics is not too big and peanuts are not too small.

I have met Lenin, Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Willkie, Stalin, Litvinov, Attlee, Einstein, Lloyd George, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many other famous people. I have never met a more remarkable person than Gandhi.

Gandhi says he hopes to live to be 125 years old. I lived with him for a week in a sizzling Indian village in the summer of 1942. This time I spent six days with him. I used to walk with him in the morning at 5.30. The first morning he asked me how I slept. I said that I had slept badly; a mosquito had stung me. “How did you sleep?” I inquired.

“I always sleep well,” he replied.

The next morning he again inquired how I had slept. I said, “Fine, and you?”

“Don’t ask,” he answered. “I always sleep well.”

The third morning I asked him how he had slept. “I told you not to ask,” he declared.

“I thought you had forgotten,” I teased.

“Ah,” he commented, “you think I am deteriorating. How did you sleep?”

“Don’t ask,” I said.

“One or two swallows don’t make a summer,” Gandhi laughed.

He loves to laugh and to joke. He can laugh at himself.

I traveled with him by train from Poona to Bombay, a three and one-half hours’ journey. He and his party, which consists of about ten secretaries and devotees and his doctor, occupied a special car, a third-class car furnished only with hard wooden benches. It rained torrents, and soon water began to drip from the roof. Gandhi wrote an article for Harijan. Then he corrected proofs of another article. Then he talked to me and to political leaders who had boarded the train for an interview. At all stations, despite the downpour, crowds assembled on the platform to see him. During one stop, several boys, soaked to their brown skins, stood outside the window yelling, “Gandhiji! Gandhiji!” (“Ji” is a suffix of respect.) They were about fourteen years of age.

I said to Gandhi, “What are you to them?”

He stuck two fingers up from the sides of his bald head and replied, “Horns. I am a man with horns. A spectacle.”

Having finished his work, Gandhi stretched out on a bench and fell asleep. He must have slept for an hour. He had to be awakened near Bombay.

2

ALMOST the most astonishing thing about Gandhi is that he lives in public twenty-four hours of every day and seems to thrive on it. His bed is a mattress placed on a board on the stone floor of the terrace of Dr. Mehta’s clinic. The terrace is open and level with the earth. Several disciples sleep on the same terrace near the master. I was given a room with a good bed.

At four in the morning I could hear the Mahatma and his group reciting prayers. Then he drinks orange or mango juice and answers letters by hand. He is seventy-seven. His handwriting is clear and firm. He sees well and hears well. Once a day Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, a Christian woman of an Indian prince’s family who has renounced everything to serve Gandhi as chief English secretary, reads the news to him from the mimeographed bulletins of a British telegraph agency. He never reads newspapers or listens to the radio.

But India comes to him in thousands of letters and hundreds of visitors. Every walk and talk, and every other act, is timed by the Mahatma’s nickel-plated dollar watch which hangs from a cord which holds up his dhoti, or handspun cotton loin cloth. He is extremely punctual. At the end of an hour’s conversation with one visitor, through which I had sat, he said to me, “Now come back in ten minutes.” I came back in ten minutes and he saw me for an hour. I always feel that I know what I know; I want to know what the other fellow knows. So I am as silent as possible in an interview. Gandhi did practically all the talking. He enjoys talking. Indeed, he enjoys everything he does, especially talking, walking, eating, and sleeping.

Several mornings it drizzled. “Surely, you are not going to walk in the rain,” I suggested.

“Oh, yes,” he countered, “come along. Don’t be an old man.”

He does not walk so fast as he did four years ago, but he strides along lustily and is not tired at the end of a forty-five minutes’ stroll. He returns, has a second breakfast, writes, receives callers, gets a very long massage from Dr. Mehta, and then sleeps.

“I fell asleep on the rack,” he said to me one noontime. He was referring to the massage table. Gandhi’s skin is soft and smooth. He is perfectly manicured and pedicured and always immaculate.

Gandhi spends the day — and sleeps during the day — on a pallet on the stone floor of his room. Food is brought to him in shining clean china dishes or brightly polished metal vessels. He subsists on raw and cooked vegetables, fruit, dates cooked in milk, milk puddings, and paper-thin native Indian pancakes. He does not eat bread or eggs or meat or fish and takes no coffee, tea, or spirits. His doctor says that a year ago he was healthier than three years ago, after his prison fast, but that he is not now so well as a year ago. That is probably due to three strenuous months of negotiations with the British Cabinet Mission in the murderous heat of New Delhi. The future of India was at stake and Gandhi was the central figure in all the conferences. Nehru, Patel, Azad, and their colleagues were consulted by the British ministers. The Congress Party’s Working Committee, its highest executive body, would deliberate on what action to take. But the final decision was formulated either in Gandhi’s mind or in talks on the floor of his hut in the middle of the street cleaners’ slum.

The slum is inhabited by Untouchables. Orthodox Hindus keep aloof from the Untouchables; they believe they are polluted by contact with Untouchables. Gandhi wants to wean the caste Hindu from his cruel mistreatment of the Untouchables. So whenever possible he lives among them. As a result, caste Hindus have commenced to use Untouchables as servants and cooks, and I was told on every hand in India that the barrier between Untouchable and caste Hindu is breaking down, especially in the cities. Gandhi has compelled sacred Hindu temples, closed for thousands of years to Untouchables, to open their doors to them.

“I am an Untouchable,” he said to me. He is not one by birth; he is a caste Hindu. But he identifies himself with the Untouchables so that other Hindus may do likewise. “I am a Hindu, I am a Moslem, a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist,” he added.

With few exceptions, Indians bow low before Gandhi when they come into his presence, and usually touch his feet. Often he bangs them on the back with his fist and tells them to stop. Then they “squat,” as he calls it, on the floor, and the interview begins. Anybody in the house may enter and listen. I have often come to the entrance of Gandhi’s room (there is no door) to find ten or more pairs of sandals and shoes on the threshold. I would slip mine off and join the company on the straw mats. But normally the talking is confined to Gandhi and the person to whom he has granted an appointment.

Congress Prime Ministers of Indian provinces come for his advice and instructions. Educators come to test their ideas on him. Whoever has a new scheme — and who in India hasn’t? — seeks his blessing. Individuals come to get help in solving personal problems. While I was with him an Untouchable couple who were unhappy in married life took up his time with their tale of woes. He spent hours with them. Peasants and workingmen request his help in introducing needed economic and social reforms.

I marveled at his energy. He never goes to bed before ten; yet on occasions when I passed him as he lay on the terrace ready for the night he would exchange some bantering remarks with me or tell me that if I prayed more I would sleep better. I was never up in time for morning prayers and sometimes absented myself from the public prayer meeting in the evening, which attracted hundreds and even thousands of townspeople, who at times stood through the services in a heavy rain. So did Gandhi.

3

GANDHI is supremely religious. The core of his religion is a faith in God, in himself as an instrument of God, and in non-violence as the way to God in heaven and to peace and happiness on earth. Belief in non-violence shapes all his political acts, thoughts, and statements.

Several times Gandhi alluded to the two world wars. I asked him why he did not preach non-violence to the West. “I am a mere Asiatic,” he replied with a laugh, “a mere Asiatic. But Jesus was an Asiatic also. I am a pupil of Jesus. Jesus was a Jew, the finest flower of Judaism. On the other hand, Paul was a Greek; he had an oratorical mind, a dialectical mind. Jesus had a great force, the love force. He believed in non-violence. Christianity was perverted when it became the religion of kings at the time of Constantine. Throughout the Middle Ages it was barbarism.

“How can I preach non-violence to the West,” he continued, “when I have not even convinced India? I am a spent bullet.” He realizes that the temper of the youth of his country is violent, impatient, and revolutionary. If the British had refused to part with power peacefully, a fire would have swept the Indian subcontinent and burned up every vestige of foreign domination. Asia is tired of bearing the white man’s burden. I found a mounting consciousness of the difference between the white and colored races.

Gandhi has dedicated his life to the independence of his country. Yet he does not wish to achieve that goal through violence. This is now his quarrel with the Socialist wing of the Congress Party. “I was a Socialist before he was born,” said Gandhi about Jayaprakash Narayan, the forty-five-year-old leader of the growing Socialist movement of India. Jayaprakash is a startling figure. He studied at the Universities of Wisconsin and Ohio, was a house-tohouse salesman of toilet articles in Chicago, and has had his share of jail sentences in India. Like Socialists in many other parts of the world, Jayaprakash is very anti-Communist and anti-Soviet. Gandhi loves him and he is devoted to Gandhi. But under Jayaprakash’s leadership the Indian Socialists adopted violent measures during the civil disobedience campaign which Gandhi launched in 1942. The Socialists practiced sabotage, organized an underground, hid from the police, and forcefully hampered the authorities. All these things are outlawed by Gandhi’s code of non-violence.

Gandhi proposes to use every possible means of obtaining independence through constitutional processes. He is not altogether trustful of British intentions, but he thinks the British mean well. The Socialists suspect the British, They are prepared for a final violent contest with them.

Gandhi is therefore at odds with the Socialists although he is the father of their desire for national liberation and shares their ultimate Socialist purpose.

“Independence,” Gandhi said, “means the removal of British control. It means complete freedom from British capitalists and their Indian counterparts. It also means freedom from armed defense forces. A country governed by even its own national army can never be morally free.”

Most of Gandhi’s followers go along with him in his first two objectives. They balk at the third, and even the Mahatma cannot convince them. Nor can he convince the Socialists to confine themselves to “non-violent non-coöperation.”

I felt he was rather sad, sadder than when I saw him in 1942, although his country is nearer independence. He is depressed because he fears that if freedom for India is attained by force, the same force can be utilized to take freedom from Indians.

Gandhi was anti-Japanese and anti-Nazi but he was anti-war because he thought the victorious powers would be incapable of making a peace based on armed might. He looks beyond the immediate target. He sees dictatorship threatening the world. He regards himself as the opposite pole from Stalin. Gandhi hallows the means; Stalin and all Communists hold that their ends justify the employment of any means.

Democracy is built on respect for the means. Gandhi is the pure democrat. He will forgo his end if the means are unholy.

But although the Mahatma has consecrated a lifetime of incessant work to teach the sanctity of means, he sees humanity and even his own India eying another path, the path of force that culminates in the pursuit of power for its own sake and the subjugation of the individual by the state and by huge agglomerations of wealth. Gandhi’s economic paradise would consist of self-sufficient villages engaged in farming and cottage industries, and a few small towns. He regards himself as the champion of the poor and little man.

Like most Indians, Gandhi is what I call “indocentric.” India is sick and it is like having a sick heart; you cannot forget it. Indians think primarily of their own problems. But in talking to Gandhi one sees the entire world in the mirror of India. No discussion with Gandhi about conditions and facts remains on that pedestrian level. He lifts it with a phrase to a higher plane, and soon one sees the topic of conversation in the larger philosophical aspect of the ultimate problems that confront man on this earth.

For Gandhi, a conversation with Sir Stafford Cripps and the cultivation of peanuts converge to one goal: the welfare of four hundred million Indians. Gandhi has submerged himself in them. That is why he is the most loved and therefore the most influential man in India. Hindus worship one God, but they also worship many gods and idols, and there are already idols of Gandhi in some Hindu temples.

“The gates of Heaven are waiting to receive Gandhi,” a hard-boiled Bombay financier said to me. Gandhi wants them to wait; he is working to make the earth more heavenly.

The East is so hungry, ragged, and unhappy, that it thinks with its stomach, sees with its nakedness, and feels with its misery. The hundreds of millions stand in awe of the mighty but they give their heart only to those who renounce personal advantage and dedicate themselves to the general welfare. Gandhi is the symbol of lifelong renunciation and dedication. He lives like Indians and he lives for India. Many differ with him; many reject his quaint ideas about continence, complete pacifism, and nature cure. But all respect his sincerity, wisdom, and passion for truth. When Gandhi contradicts himself, the Westerner says he is being inconsistent; the Easterner says Gandhi is being honest with himself.

The British know Gandhi’s great power over the Indian people and their first effort is to win him for their plans. Gandhi himself, however, disclaims wide influence. He says, “I am God’s servant.”

Seventy-seven is extremely old in a country where, as in India, the average age is twenty-seven, according to official British statistics. Gandhi’s good health and great energy are declared by his intimate co-workers to be due, first, to his regular habits; second, to his persistent care of his body; and third, to his unyielding desire to live and serve.