but took Gokhale’s advice to feel his way into it rather than jump in at
the deep end. He spent a year touring India, during which his mentor
Gokhale died. Setting up an ashramfor himself near Ahmedabad, on the
model of his ashramin South Africa, he began to explore the possibilities
of using his political strategy of satyagrahaor ‘truth force’ – his version of
civil disobedience – in Indian politics.
Jawaharlal first met Gandhi in the winter of 1916, at the Lucknow
Congress, but was unable at the time to relate to his style. The reasons
would not have been hard to find. Gandhi’s politics seemed particularly
elusive, and often contradictory. Despite being a protagonist of non-
violence, which he publicly claimed was the essence of ‘Hinduism’,
Gandhi supported the British war effort, on the grounds that Indians,
as subjects of the Empire, had certain duties if they expected rights. At
the same time, he appealed for the British to release the Ali brothers,
interned for their support of the Ottoman cause, and later to be Gandhi’s
allies in the Khilafat Movement, putting before the government the
possibility of greater harmony between government and Muslims if they
should do this. Gandhi’s recruitment speeches stressed the return of
Indian ‘manhood’ through participation in the war, through learning to
use arms, and therefore being able to protect their women. Such patri-
archal, military rhetoric might have seemed unbecoming of a man of
non-violence – but no one was to accuse Gandhi of consistency, especially
as they got to know him better. He was a bit of an enigma for the elite
group of politicians with whom he now began to work. His dramatic use
of clothing, imitating peasant dress, his spinning wheel, his asceticism,
his self-conscious anti-intellectualism and his Hindu rhetoric, even as he
talked of Hindu–Muslim unity, were anathema to many who thought
of themselves as modern, secular intellectuals – the Nehrus, for instance –
as well as to many elite Hindu revivalists, who certainly had not intended
to make peasants of themselves. (Nor did Gandhi, for that matter; but they
did not know this at the time.) And yet Gandhi had successes to show for
this strange style of politics, in South Africa, and then in local conflicts
in India in 1917 and 1918, where he was able to engineer a number
of compromises: in Champaran, Bihar, where he took up the cause of the
peasants against European indigo planters, in Ahmedabad, where he
negotiated a pay rise for the workforce in the cotton mills, and in Kheda,
Gujarat, where he intervened on behalf of poor cultivators. He began to
command some respect.
THE YOUNG GANDHIAN 33