2

THE YOUNG GANDHIAN

Politics was relatively quiet in India at the time of Jawaharlal’s return.
The leaders of the Swadeshi movement were in jail, and the government’s
apparent concession of the annulment of the partition of Bengal had
been balanced by the transfer of capital from Calcutta to Delhi, celebrated
by the pomposity of the King and Queen’s Delhi Durbar in 1911. The
Durbar, a British appropriation and reconfiguration of Mughal courtly
ceremony as a display of imperial power, was intended as a restatement
of imperial authority over India. ‘This silly show,’ Motilal had called it,
and quoted with approval the remarks to him of Sayajirao Gaekwad, the
ruler of the princely state of Baroda, ‘that it would have been all right if
we had not to act in it like animals in a circus.’^1 Motilal had nonetheless
dutifully attended the Durbar, and Jawaharlal, in England, had ordered
proper dress clothes for his father for the occasion. (The Gaekwad had later
been forced to apologise for a breach of etiquette – apparently he had
shown insufficient deference to the King and Queen at the Durbar, merely
bowing slightly to them and then walking away twirling his stick – and
Motilal felt that it would have been better for him to have behaved himself
than have had to make so ‘abject’ an apology.^2 )
The Geistof the Delhi Durbar – reluctant acquiescence in or quiet
acceptance of British hegemony – seemed still to haunt politics in India
in 1912, apart from the move towards secret societies engaging in indi-
vidual acts of terrorism against British rule. More mainstream political
groups were less adventurous. Some turned to quiet, self-strengthening