Ramachandra Guha, Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom, Gurugram, Penguin Random House India Pvt. Ltd. 2022.
…This is a world governed by paranoia and nationalist xenophobia, with the rise of jingoism in country after country, and a corresponding contempt for ideas and individuals that emanate from outside the borders of one’s nation. Narrendra Modi and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in India, Donald Trump and the white supremacists in America, Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers in England, Xi Jinping and his Confucian Communist Party in China – all see themselves as uniquely blessed by history and by God. No foreigner, they believe, can teach them anything.
This book tells us that they can.—p. xix
…Her views on gender relations had markedly changed from her days in the West. As a socialist and suffragette, she had demanded full equality between the sexes. Now she was more inclined to the Hindu view that women’s roles and responsibilities were different from (and somewhat subordinate to) men’s. So, as she wrote in 1904, ‘the national movement for girls’ education must be on national lines: ‘it must accept the general Hindu conception of woman’s place in the national life’. That is to say:
It must see in the woman the mother and the wife, or, as in some cases, the learned and pious ascetic, the Brahmavadini of older days. It cannot see in her the rival and competitor of man in all forms of outside and public employment, as woman, under different economic conditions, is coming to be, more and more, in the West…. [T]he national movement for the education of girls must be one which meets the national needs, and India needs nobly trained wives and mothers, wise and tender rulers of the household, educated teachers of the young, helpful counsellors of their husbands, skilled nurses of the sick, rather than girl graduates, educated for the learned professions.
While most girls had to be prepared through education for a life of motherhood and household management, there would, admitted Mrs Besant,
always be some exceptional girls who need for the due evolution of their faculties a more profound and wider education, and these must be helped to what they need as individuals, each to her own line. Such girls may be born into India in order to restore to her the learned women of the past, and to place again in her diadem the long lost part of lofty female intelligence. {Annie Besant, The Education of Indian Girls (Banaras and London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1904), pp. 2-10, passim.}13—p. 10
In her lecture, Mrs Besant analysed the relations between England and India under three heads: that of religion, that of education, and that of political relations. On the first count, she remarked that “India has more to teach than she has to learn’. She thought there was nothing in Christianity that did not already exist in Indian spiritual traditions. With regard to education, she said that modern Western learning had to be adapted to Indian conditions. With regard to political relations, she observed that the destruction of Indian industries and high taxation had been among the unhappy consequences of British rule.—p. 14
…While she accepted that many British officials in India were hard-working and motivated by a sense of justice, nonetheless ‘they have a tendency to think they are so immensely superior to others that whatever is good for them is good for everybody else; they fail to understand the traditions and the customs which must exist in an ancient people, a people of high and complicated civilization….’ {Annie Besant, England and India (Harrogate: Theosophical Publishing Company, 1903), esp. pp. 7-8}22—p. 15
Mrs Besant insisted… While the coming of a foreign religion, Islam, ’caused inevitably disturbance and much evil feeling on both sides’, at the same time the new rulers ‘brought to the building of the Indian Nation most precious materials, enriching the Nationality and adding new aspects to its many-faced splendour’.@ Only the British were different; since they did not assimilate into the Indian soil, and since they went back to where they had come from.—p. 24
Annie Besant, How India Wrought for Freedom: The Story of the National Congress Told From Official Records (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1915), pp. ii-iii, xxiii-xxiv, xxxi, li-lii, lv-lix.—No foot notes number is given. I have to assume the next notes number as the reference for this one also.—db
…No longer. ‘It has seemed’, wrote Mrs Besant sarcastically, ‘as though it were the British aim to turn the Indian Nation into a race of clerks. The usurpation of all power, all decision-making, by the European colonists had created a pathetic feeling of dependence among the subject population. Thus ‘Indians hesitate, where they should act; they ask, where they should take, they submit, where they should resist; they lack self-confidence and the audacity that commands success’. Quoting Gokhale’s remark that ‘a kind of dwarfing or stunting of the Indian race is going on under the present system’, Mrs Besant insisted: “This is the deepest, gravest, wrong that Great Britain has inflicted on a once mighty and imperial race….’40—p. 24
40 Annie Besant, How India Wrought for Freedom: The Story of the National Congress Told From Official Records (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1915), pp. ii-iii, xxiii-xxiv, xxxi, li-lii, lv-lix.
….There were no half-measures with Mrs Besant; once she had chosen to become an Indian, she would be an Indian all the way through.—p. 28
Chelmsford and Montagu listened patiently to this extensive recapitulation of Mrs Besant’s life in India. She moved on next to the formation of the Home Rule League, which she said was partly inspired by a visit to Bengal, where she sensed a growing anger among the youth. She claimed that ‘the Home Rule League had drawn many young men away from the desire to join the revolutionary party, and therefore that it had been of immense service both to this country and to the Empire’.
At this point Montagu asked Mrs Besant her opinion of local government. Mrs Besant underlined its importance; noting that ‘villagers were not so densely ignorant as was made out; they had their own culture; they were shrewd and knew their business’. She urged the handing over of more power to District Boards and village councils.
The Viceroy now asked: ‘Suppose we gave you the whole of that scheme, why do you want Provincial autonomy as well?’ Mrs Besant answered that this too was necessary, since programmes of education, health, etc. needed supervision, direction, and the ability to raise funds within the province. The Viceroy then asked: ‘If you are given provincial autonomy, why do you want also to change the Imperial Council? Mrs Besant said it was for the same reason. ‘Your Government have the largest sources of supply. Unless we have a large majority and can control the purse, how are we able to get the money?’@—p. 44
@Annie Besant, Interview with Mr. Montagu’, undated typescript, in Reel 7, Annie Besant Papers, Theosophical Society, Chennai/Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.—No foot notes number is given. I have to assume the next notes number as the reference for this one also.–db
… ‘There is one thing I want to say before I go’, said Mrs Besant, ‘India is determined to be free, and if you do not meet her, you will be up against a Nation “Well, Mrs. Besant’, answered the Viceroy {Chelmsford} , it is we who have made that unity. To which she responded: ‘It is not a question of who made the unity, the point is that it is here. Granted that you made it, how are you going to face it now?’@—p. 45
@Annie Besant, Interview with Mr. Montagu’, undated typescript, in Reel 7, Annie Besant Papers, Theosophical Society, Chennai/Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.—No foot notes number is given. I have to assume the next notes number as the reference for this one also.–db
…For the past century, Indians had paid, in money and blood, for a series of wars that were not of their creation and not in their own interest; fought by the British against the Afghans and the Nagas, in Africa and in the Middle East. At the same time, India had seen its handicrafts destroyed under British rule; and got little by way of education or health care in return. They were not prepared to accept all this any more. There was, remarked Mrs Besant, now a ‘New Spirit in India’, represented in the awakening of the merchants, of the women, and of the masses, all representing in different ways ‘the cry of a Nation for Freedom, for Self-Rule’.@—p. 46
@ I have used the printed text of Annie Besant’s Presidential Address as available in Hom (Political), Proceeding, No. 10, May 1918, National Archives of India, New Delhi. —No foot notes number is given. I have to assume the next notes number as the reference for this one also.–db
Mrs Besant ended her two-hour-long address {in Calcutta Congress session 1917} with a stirring anticipation of the redemption of a land great in the past and destined to be even greater in the future: ‘India, which has been verily the Crucified among Nations, now stands on this her Resurrection morning, the Immortal, the Glorious, the Ever-Young: and India shall soon be seen, proud and self-reliant, strong and free, the radiant Splendour of Asia, as the Light and the Blessing of the World.”35—pp. 46-47
35 @ I have used the printed text of Annie Besant’s Presidential Address as available in Hom (Political), Proceeding, No. 10, May 1918, National Archives of India, New Delhi.
In her writings and speeches, Annie Besant interpreted the history of India in Hindu, even Brahmanical, terms. She went so far as to claim that it was Brahmins who had ‘given to India all that was greatest in her literature and arts’; that Brahmins were the ‘natural leaders of the people’ owing to their ‘high education’, their ‘brilliant intelligence’, their ‘powers of speech.’36 These sentiments justly provoked the ire of the emerging non-Brahmin movement in the Madras Presidency, especially since Mrs Besant seemed to think that
only Brahmins could lead India in the present as well.37—p. 47
36 Annie Besant to ‘Mr Wadia’ (prob E. E. of the ilk), 20 June 1915, H. P. Modi Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
37’Home Rule for India’, New India, 14 September 1915
….Justice [News paper of Justice Party in Tamilnadu] dismissed Mrs Besant’s influence on the grounds that ‘the people of India are very amenable to flattery especially by a European. It is by flattery that Mrs. Besant has secured so many Indians to follow her lead.’@—p. 48
@These paragraphs are based on Proceedings Nos 166-168, November 1915, Home (Political), National Archives of India, New Delhi. —No foot notes number is given. I have to assume the next notes number as the reference for this one also.–db
The Justice Party’s charge that Anne Besant was particularly well disposed to Brahmins and Brahminism was not without foundation. Yet it was expressed in perhaps excessively polemical language. Writing to her friend P. Kesava Pillai, Mrs Besant said: ‘Don’t trouble about the attacks on me in Justice; I do not mind them in the least, and they injure Justice, not me. I am entirely indifferent to what [the Justice Party leader] Dr Nair and his young men say or write.’39….—p. 48
Cf. Dinyar Patel, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020).
In the past, the person chosen as Congress President had ‘regarded it as essentially a one-day or at the most a one-week job’; performed only when the Congress was actually in session, as a reward for past services. Mrs Besant, however, argued that the President should be continuously active for a whole year, from one session to the next, deepening the Congress’s roots and organization across India, and working full-time for Home Rule.40….—p. 49
40 Annie Besant, How India Wrought for Freedom: The Story of the National Congress Told From Official Records (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1915), pp. ii-iii, xxiii-xxiv, xxxi, li-lii, lv-lix.
It was now more than five years since B. G. Horniman had been forcibly externed from India. Countless petitions and representations asking for his return had been ignored or rejected. Fed up with waiting, bored, lonely and without work in England, desperate to resume his interesting and active life in Bombay, he now decided to use less than straightforward means to go back to where he belonged.
In September 1925, Horniman applied for a passport to enable him to travel to France and Italy ‘for reasons of health’. A passport was granted to him on 13 October, endorsed for France and Italy, but not for India. After some weeks on the Continent, on 18 December Horniman sailed eastwards from Paris on a French boat, and without a passport valid for India. However, he did have a passport valid for France, and when the news of his adventure reached the India Office, they worried that he might land at a French by land into British India.
settlement in India (such as Pondicherry), and from there cross over
His Majesty’s Government were worried that Horniman was seeking (p. 78) to exploit a loophole in the law. Under the Indian Passport Act, local governments could direct the removal from British India of any undesirable person entering by sea into British India of through Afghanistan. But the law did not cover entry via French possessions.
From France Horniman was headed not to Pondicherry, but to British Ceylon. He had booked himself a second-class berth on the SS D’Artagnan, from Marseilles to Colombo. The ship’s list laconically described the passenger as ‘B. G. Horniman, Sans profession, Nationalité Anglaise,’ 54 {Note by New Scotland Yard, 19 February 1926, in I/PJ/12/12, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections, British Library, London.
The carrier was splendidly named for the ruse that the musketeer temporarily without a profession was attempting. The SS D’Artagnan, and Horniman with it, arrived at Colombo in the first week of January 1926. When the news reached Delhi, the new capital of British India, the authorities were taken aback. The Viceroy was informed that the Indian passport rules ‘do not admit of preventing his entry into British India if he proceeds from a port in Ceylon’. Writing to the Imperial Government in London on 7 January, the Viceroy said he was considering the ‘question of advisability of amending the rules, if time permits’.
The next day Horniman landed on the shores of British India sailing across the Palk Strait to the small port town of Rameswaram. He made his way from here to Madras; and from there by train to his adopted hometown, Bombay.
The Madras Government had to permit Horniman to land, as the as-yet-unamended Indian Passport Act did not allow them to prohibit it. The Viceroy, realizing that he had been tricked, wrote ruefully that ‘amendment cannot now be made applicable in this case. No action can therefore be taken against him unless he otherwise offends against the law.’ {Viceroy to Secretary of State for India, telegram of 7 and 10 January 1926, in ibid.
The Viceroy was angry that the renegade had found a way to return; the Governor of Bombay, absolutely livid. The Government of India’s Home Department, he complained, should have instructed the authorities in Madras not to let Horniman land, since an amendment to the law was being moved. Now, however, that the man was back, ‘any prosecution would probably only make things worse than they are once he has arrived in Bombay’.
Horniman’s return had made the Bombay Governor very angry (p.79) indeed. The journalist, he told the Viceroy, ‘is going to be a terrible embarrassment to me, and particularly arriving, as he does, just before my budget session, with a Bye-election in Bombay caused by [the Liberal leader M. R.] Jayakar’s resignation, which I felt certain of winning with a moderate man…’ The Governor could ‘only hope that I have exaggerated the importance of his coming; but, having read all the files concerning this gentleman, and knowing of his past relations with Governors and Government, I am certainly in for a great deal of trouble’.
Having expended his outrage, the Governor ended his letter in tones of sullen resentment. He would now have Horniman ‘very carefully watched, and every word he utters recorded; but he is clever enough to keep within the law, and at the same time use his tongue and pen to the detriment of peace and order’. {Sir Leslie Wilson, Governor of Bombay, to Lord Reading, Viceroy, 13 January 1926, in ibid.
Horniman landed on the southern coast of India on 8 January 1926. The next day, Gandhi sent this message for publication in the Bombay Chronicle: ‘My hearty greetings to Mr. Horniman. The Government deserves congratulations on redressing the grave wrong done to this brave Englishman and us. May his work prosper! India needs at the present moment all the assistance that her friends can give . {Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1958-1994) XXXIX, p. 386}
Gandhi did not know that the return of the renegade was owed entirely to his own bravery and desperation. Far from facilitating his re-entry, the Government had done all they could do to stop it. Their failure led to a lot of anger and recrimination within the colonial State, with Bombay blaming New Delhi (for not amending the rules in advance), and New Delhi in turn blaming Ceylon, for allowing the journalist to enter there, even though his passport did not specifically carry an endorsement for that colony, and although the Ceylon Government had previously been warned of Horniman’s ‘antecedents and his defective passport’. Chastised by the Government of India, Colombo answered that they had allowed the renegade to land because ‘they had no quarrel with Mr. Horniman and because they understood at the time that [the Government of India] would be able to stop his entry into India from Ceylon’. {Notes by Denys Bray, 25 March 1926; by M. I. Huk, 31 March 1926, both in File 34/29/1927,Home (Political), National Archives of India, New Delhi.
It was now too late to do anything about it. Six and a half years after the British Raj had (so they thought) deported B. G. Horniman from India for ever, they had him back on their hands.—pp. 78-80 [British]
…The League of Nations had revealed itself to be a closed club of arrogant and self-satisfied Westerners. It wanted ancient civilizations such as India and China to give up their history and ethos and become pale imitations of Europe instead. In their racial conceit, the Americans and the British had proved themselves to be the equal of the Germans. Just as the Germans believed in the “Kultur””, wrote Stokes disgustedly, ‘and their mission to force it upon the rest of the world, so we believe in our Western civilization. It is our “kultur”, and the world must accept it whether they want to or not…’ {Letter of 5 June 1919, Stokes Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library .}.—p. 88 [British]
…Now, as India sought to find itself, he warned against a reverse racism, of Indians setting themselves up as superior to those they were fighting against. Inspired by Tagore and by Gandhi, but in words that were unmistakably his own, Stokes wrote: ‘No culture is worth striving for which is grounded in selfishness. No nationalism is worth straining for that does not stretch beyond the interests of one’s race so as to include the interests of all humanity.’ {Stokes, The Failure of European Civilization as a World Culture, (Madras: S. Ganesan and Co., 1921)pp. 53-4, 56}—p. 93 [Race]
…He was convinced of the greatness of Gandhi, writing:
He stands for the noblest in our nature—and the Scribes and the Pharisees and Herodians are aghast. I don’t wonder at it; he sometimes makes one’s hair stand on end—but so did Christ. Indeed it seems to me that just as Jesus attacked the strongholds of selfishness and sin in the personal and social life, so Gandhi is continuing the operation in the economic, national and international life of our race. {Stokes to his mother, 13 August 1921, Stokes Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library]—p. 94 [Gandhi]
…{Bipan Chandra} Pal grumbled that ‘democratic principles were being sacrificed to the enthusiasm for, and adherence to, the view point of certain great Nationalist leaders’. Stokes disagreed with him, saying that at times of great crisis, it was important to trust and put one’s faith in a single leader….. Now, said Stokes, in India too (p.97)in an altogether wonderful way we have been granted the presence of a great and unique personality, altogether devoted to the voicing of the national aspiration… There are some men who can appeal to many, and many men who can appeal to a few, but only Mahatmaji has gripped the hearts of all India. He is, as it were, the very incarnate expression of India’s aspiration. His utter sincerity, his absolute fearlessness, his profound simplicity, his unflinching loyalty to our noblest longings, mark him as the one man to whom the masses and the classes can give their allegiance at a time of supreme crisis.’ [Stokes, ‘Our Duty’, Bombay Chronicle (Bombay), 4 August 1921, in Stokes Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.] –pp. 97-98 [Gandhi]
…Madeleine [Slade] recalled:
…. Then he mentioned India, not with any suggestion that my travels should take me there but in connection with a small book he said he had just written, and which was in the press, called Mahatma Gandhi. I looked blank.
“You have not heard about him?” he asked.
No, I replied.
So he {Romain Rolland}@told me, and added, “He is another Christ. [Madeleine Slade (Mira Behn), The Spirit’s Pilgrimage (London: Longmans, 1960), p. 58]p. 108 [Gandhi]
@ French writer and Winner of the Noble Prize for Literature in 1915.
….An America, she { Madeleine Slade alias Mira} wrote, the
….Every sort of question was asked about him, while the political aspect, so much to the fore in England, was of secondary importance to these American audiences. Gandhi the man, the Teacher, the apostle of Truth, was what they sought, and with such thirst and earnestness! [Madeleine Slade (Mira Behn), The Spirit’s Pilgrimage (London: Longmans, 1960), p. 58]pp. 187-8]—p. 129 [Gandi]
Mira [Madeleine Slade] also met Winston Churchill, who was opposed even to the meager devolution of powers the new Act proposed. Churchill told her emphatically: ‘The Indian nation does not exist. There is no such thing.’ [As recalled in Mira Behn, New and Old Gleanings, p. 16f. [Madeleine Slade (Mira Behn), New and Old Gleanings (second edition: Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1964), 16f]….—p. 131 [British, India]
In jail, Spratt had begun to read more books about India than he had ever done before. He ‘found it a little disturbing. It was clear that the history of India has been very different from that of Europe. India has substantially no slavery and no feudalism, and in the mediaeval period the merchant class appear to have put up no struggle for power such as their confréres in Europe conducted.’ What he read puzzled and confused him, since Marxism maintained ‘that all civilizations follow the same course of evolution’. The first seeds of doubt about the Communist ideology were being planted. [Philip Spratt, Blowing Up India: Reminscences and Reflections of a Former Comintern Emissary (Calcutta: Prachi Prakashan, 1955), p 56]—p. 147 [India, communism]
‘….Propaganda if it is to be not offensive, must be very unobtrusive and subtle.’ [P. Spratt] [Spratt to Seetha, 4 December 1931, Spratt Family Papers.]—p. 148 [propaganda]
…So Spratt wrote to Seetha:
…But everyone has not, I imagine, racial pride in the sense of a conviction that his own race is superior to all others. My own feelings in the matter, which I suppose are those of English people generally, are that every other people is inferior to us, except perhaps the Germans. The French are hopelessly inferior of course. They are vicious, and gourmets (or gourmands or something) and ‘mercurial’, and all sorts of things. Even the Americans we consider, rather uneasily, to be inferior. They mispronounce our language, invent incomprehensible expressions, and are unscrupulous in business. I don’t know why we like, or fail to disapprove of, the Germans. Because they drink beer, I think. Of course colour makes it worse. In fact only the colour prejudice is really serious, I think. I should like you to go to England, at least for some time. I fancy you would not find it very annoying, on this account at least. For we are fairly polite. But almost everybody would behave artificially towards you, and in the end you would find it intolerable.[Spratt to Seetha, c/o The Fort, Belgaum, 21 August 1935, Spratt Family Papers.]—p. 157 [British, Race]
It was from Ramana that {Dick} Keithahn learned that the ‘number one enemy’ of the social worker was not the poverty that he wished to eradicate, but his own ego, which got in the way of distinterested service. [Ralph Richard Keithanhn, Pilgrimage in India: An Autobiographical Fragment (Bangalore: The Christian Institute for the Studyof Religion and Society, 1973), p. 42]—p. 181 [ego, social service]
….Here, {Bangalore} the pioneering social reformer, R. Gopalaswamy Iyer had established a students’ home for those from Harijan (or ‘Untouchable’) backgrounds…..—p. 183 [Brahmins, Outcaste]
…Thus Keithahn brought out (as Bhagavan {Ramana Maharishi} smiled His blessing) the paramount importance of loving and ‘identifying’ with people in trouble and the ever-present danger of ego-boosting when service is undertaken not as sadhana for self-improvement but as a means of self-aggrandisement.[K. Swaminathan, ‘In His Presence’, Mountain Path, April 1988, pp. 104-0512—p. 183 [seva, service, self]
The Keithahns advised Indians not to be over-dependent modern medicine, which ‘all too often tends to enslave man… enslave him to drugs, to wrong habits, to wrong ideas of living, to bad habits of eating, sleeping, etc’. Folk medicine, they thought, offered great possibilities. Individual households could maintain their own kitchen gardens, plant trees for food and fuel, eschew sugar for jaggery, etc….(p. 186) They did not discount the value of modern medicine, but urged that it be ‘reoriented and integrated with the potential life of India’. [Ralph Richar Keithahn and Mildred McKie Keithahn, ‘Our Village Health’, Indian Journal of Social Work, 1944, pp. 52ff https://archieve.org/stream/inernet.dli.2015.92700/2015.92700. The-Indian-Joiurnal-Of-Social-Workvol61944-45-djvu.txt.]—pp. 186-87 [medicine]
…Gandhi gave his American admirer a brief audience, where he joked: ‘Keithahn, you are a very clever fellow: when you want to go home, you know how to do it! [Ralph Richard Keithanhn, Pilgrimage in India: An Autobiographical Fragment (Bangalore: The Christian Institute for the Studyof Religion and Society, 1973), p. 55] (This was a reference to the fact that the Raj paid the family’s passage to America.)—p. 189 [British]
The pamphlet ended with this statement, surely written mostly or wholly by Dick {Keithahn} himself:
One year in the U.S.A. leads us to the following conclusions:
1 The American Church is a chaplaincy to a pagan civilization.
5 Unless the creative forces formulate a united, nation-wide program of action immediately, America will grow in her economic imperialism and will be the greatest source of evil in the world.
11 America is still a land of hope; but evil has become so dominating, one fears seriously for the future. [Pamphlet, 1 December 1945, in Box 70, Martin Luther King Collection, Boston University Library.]—p. 190 [America]
{B.G.} Horniman told the students that he would ‘not recommend journalism as a career to anybody who was anxious to advance himself materially in life’. On the other hand, ‘for a man who had ideals in life, especially for any young man in India who wanted to serve national interests’, he would strongly recommend journalism, ‘because it was through the public press more than anything else that the interests of the country were protected and the national cause was ably advanced towards the goal which India desired’.[Times of India (Bombay) ,@ 17 September 1932]—p. 220 [journalism]
….the editorial continued:
….the demand for India’s freedom while expecting Indians to fight and sacrifice their resources a second time for the freedom of Europe.[Bombay Sentinel (Bombay), 4 September 1939]—p. 226 [West, India]
He [Horniman] added that while ‘the country, as a whole, is behind the demand for Swaraj without dilution’, through this Viceroy’s speech ‘once more we have to listen to all this pitiable stuff about the claims of the minorities, safeguards, gradual stages and what not, that British statesmen have exploited for the last fifty years or more to preserve British dominion over the people of India’. [B. G. Horniman, ‘Britain Must Think Again: Lord Linlithgow’s Statement an Insult’, BS, 17 October 1939]—p. 227 [British]
…The Communist Party of India (CPI) was now solidly supporting the Raj (since Hitler’s invasion of their Fatherland, Soviet Russia, had miraculously transformed an Imperialist War into a People’s War), and Maxwell was hopeful that the CPI’s student wing, the All India Students’ Federation, would be useful in counteracting Mira [Madeleine Slade] and the Congress….—p. 247 [communism]
….In the grounds of their prison, Mira [Madeleine Slade] made a small memorial to Mahadev [Desai] of stone and mud plaster, placed over the ground where his ashes were. On the flat top of this structure she carved the letter ‘OM’ in Devanagari, and at Gandhi’s suggestion added a cross next to it, with the star and crescent of Islam on the corners. Every morning Gandhi would visit this small shrine, place flowers on it, and read verses from the Gita. [Madeleine Slade (Mira Behn), The Spirit’s Pilgrimage (London: Longmans, 1960), p. 246] 27—p. 251 [Gandhi]
….Personally, I would say, give up the idea of Ashram life except for your own person. Then you won’t fee cramped and you can expand as high or as broad as the universe’. [Gandhi to Mira [Madeleine Slade]]—p. 256
She {Mira [Madeleine Slade]] said:
I am at peace with myself & feel infinite joy in Nature’s glory but
there is always the instinct to share the joy with another who knows
& understands. Joy is only complete when shared with that other.
But where is that other – God is there, but it is the very joy of God’s
presence that one seems to want to share. And so it is that a deep down loneliness rises to the surface from time to time. Not a sadness, but a loneliness. Commune of the spirit is so precious & so rare.[Mira Behn to Gandhi, 7 March 1947, in Volume 125, Series 4, M. K. Gandhi Papers, 12th/14th Instalments, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.]—p. 256 [loneliness]
…Now this deeply annoys many nationalists, who at bottom do not think of India as part of the world; they think India is unique, that foreign or ‘western’ (p.272) ideas do not apply to her, and presumably therefore that she happens to be having a private revolution of her own. [Philip Spratt, An Approach to Indian Constitutional Problem (Calcutta: Renaissance Publishers, 1946), esp pp. 14-15, 17-18, Cf. also Philip Spratt, India and Constitution Making (Calcutta: Renaissance Publishers, 1948]35 [Spratt to Manabendra Nath Roy]
This interpretation was not wholly convincing. For there was Jawaharlal Nehru, likewise a modern-minded man, likewise a thinker who saw India as part of the world revolution, but who was nonetheless adored by his countrymen. Why did Nehru succeed where Roy failed? Spratt should have asked the question—since he didn’t, I should briefly do so myself. Roy was away from India during the great countrywide protest movements led by Gandhi – the Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919, the Non-Cooperation movement of 1920-2 and the Salt March of 1930. During these upheavals Nehru was at Gandhi’s side, as his favourite disciple and anointed successor. The many years he spent in jail, and his fluency in Hindi, were further advantages Nehru had when compared to Roy.
With Nehru around, Roy simply had no chance to make a major impact on Indian politics after he returned to his homeland. He had been away too long. Spratt does not seem to have recognized this….—pp. 272-273 [West, India, Nehru]
With. Britain, and France determined to hold on to their colonial possessions, and Germany and Japan equally determined to wrest control of these territories from them, it seemed to Stokes that
the present holders cannot yield a share to others and yet survive, while the others cannot accept the present division and survive. The only way out—and I am convinced the only solution – lies in the termination of the entire imperial system and self-determination for all peoples large and small, weak or strong. This would doubtless involve were real hardship for the present enjoyers of empire and, at first, a much reduced standard of living until they had adapted their economy to the new conditions, but the world as a whole cannot afford [for] special nations the exclusive enjoyment of such privileges as the empire holders seek to retain, and in time they could so reconstruct their economy as to carry on without them.[See National Self-Realisation, pp. 239-43 (to Bose), 250-8 (to Gandhi), 259-62) (to Nehru). A copy of the letter to Gandhi is also in the Gandhi Papers in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.]—p. 284 [imperialism, colonialism]
While Indian patriots naturally wanted the whole system of imperialism to end, said Stokes to Gandhi, neither the British nor the German camp were prepared for such a solution. They all want to enjoy empire and if there is a war it will be a war for empire – not for the ending of it. In such a war there would be no question of one side’s fighting ‘for the right’ and the other for the wrongs; both would be fighting, the one for the retention and the other for the acquisition…. National Self-Realisation, pp. 239-43 (to Bose), 250-8 (to Gandhi), 259-62) (to Nehru). A copy of the letter to Gandhi is also in the Gandhi Papers in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.]—p. 284 [imperialism]
As a Quaker and as an Indian, Stokes had been resolutely opposed to all forms of imperialism. Yet he clearly saw how much more awful the German variety was than the British. As he told Gandhi,
The new imperialism that threatens will be of quite another order. The Germans are a logical people, with a dangerous tendency to implement their philosophy in terms of life and carry it out to its logical implications. Their conception of themselves as the loftiest expression of the human race and of their right to dominate ‘inferior peoples’ is a religion with them. They need no salve to quiet their conscience in doing so. Under the influence of Hitler they have become a people ‘with a mission’ and that is to make the earth and its peoples subserve the needs and the glory of Germany. In the carrying out of that mission they have shown themselves capable of the utmost ruthlessness. They have not hesitated coldly and calculatingly to take measures that inevitably sentence the aged and women and little children to destitution and death and to carry them out in the most shockingly callous manner…..
This spirit of coldly calculating ruthlessness combined with the new race philosophy of the Germans makes me feel that they are now in a frame of mind that perfectly fits them to be perpetuators of the wrong of imperialistic domination. Should they win to such an empire I think they are fitted to hold it long and neither violence nor non-violence would avail us. We should become mere hewers of wood and drawers of water to a nation whose conscience would not be wounded by bending all our activities to subserve its ends. Our nascent attempts to supply our own needs by factory and village industry would be crushed, and along with other subordinated races we should be set to supply the Reich with raw materials in exchange for the manufactured products that they would force upon us. A new caste system, based on race and power, would become firmly established with the German ‘Aryan’ as Brahman and Kshatriya, the other European peoples as Vaishya, and the non-European peoples as the Shudras of the world. Surely we cannot contemplate such a prospect with equanimity. National Self-Realisation, pp. 239-43 (to Bose), 250-8 (to Gandhi), 259-62) (to Nehru). A copy of the letter to Gandhi is also in the Gandhi Papers in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.]—p. 289 [race]
Stokes continued:
….For even now all appreciate that it was the determination of a few powers to retain a large part of the earth for their own particular exploitation that has forced other great powers into a mood of desperation and led them to enter upon the path of empire themselves, thereby bringing out all the darkest qualities in their nature. National Self-Realisation, pp. 239-43 (to Bose), 250-8 (to Gandhi), 259-62) (to Nehru). A copy of the letter to Gandhi is also in the Gandhi Papers in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.]—p. 290 [imperialism, colonialism]
…If we fight for democracy we must have democracy to fight for…..—p. 291 [Gandhi to Satanand Stoke] [Democracy]
…We won our Freedom by means of Bapu’s weapons. Why then have we so completely cast away Bapu’s ideals in the consolidation of that Freedom? Perhaps the answer is that those who have capacity to rule have not that faith, and those who have that faith have not capacity to rule….[Mira to Nehru, 30 August 1949; Nehru to Mira, 16 September 1949, in Krishna MurtiGupta, ed., Mira Behn Birth Centenary Volume (New Delhi: Himalaya Seva Sangh, 1992), pp. 213-14]—p. 298 [Gandhi]
To console herself and keep going, Mira had begun to write her own memories. In May 1958 she wrote to Rajaji that
….has come an urge to go West, at least for a time. It is no good my trying to say why—I have never known exactly ‘why’ in my life beforehand. I have simply followed the inner instinct, and that I have to do now. God will show the way as the days go by.[Mira to Rajaji, 6 May 1958, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth and Fifth Instalments, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.]34—p. 309 [instinct, leading]
In January 1959, shortly before leaving India for good, Mira heard of a proposed memorial for Gandhi, to be erected on the spot he was cremated, on the banks of the Jamuna in Delhi. This was to take the form of an artificial hillock through which four tunnels were to be cut. In the cavernous insides of this structure were to be fresco representations of Gandhi’s life story. Mira was appalled by the project, by its extravagance and its crudeness. In a letter addressed to her fellow Gandhians, she urged them to have the scheme scrapped, and replaced by something simple and understated. ‘Let it be flowers and flowers, and trees and trees’, she wrote ‘Above all let there by (p. 310) a sapling or cutting from the peepul tree at Sevagram by which Bapu always sat for his morning and evening prayers.’ She added: ‘We cannot add one iota to Bapu’s greatness by elaborate memorials. Let his greatness be felt by the very simplicity of the sacred spot.’ [Letter to the editor by Mira Behn, printed in Gandhi Marg, volume 3, number 4, 1959, pp. 312-14]39—pp. 310-311 [Gandhi]
….No doubt that is a good thing in as far as it prevents stagnation, but politics are becoming a bit of a curse al the world over, and result in everything being looked at from the point of view of votes. [Mira to Rajendra Prasad, 30 May 1961, Mira Behn Collection, Himalaya Seva Sangh, New Delhi].—p. 312 [politics]
….But this politics-business has blurred the clearness. With apologies to Shelley we might say of politics that ‘They, like a dose of dingy-coloured glass, stain the white radiance of untrammelled thought’. [Mira to Rajaji, 3 March 1963, in C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth andFifth Instalments, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library]—p. 315 [politics]
….But my whole being rises against distorted, bitter and vulgar anti-propaganda!…. [Mira to Rajaji, 3 March 1963, in C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth andFifth Instalments, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library]—p. 315 —p. 316 [propaganda]
I am also attracted by the policy of realistic non-Gandhian neutrality. Try to save something from the wreck. The difficulty is that (in most moods) I am not neutral. The communists won’t leave anyone alone: they force one to choose. It ceases to be a private quarrel between them and America. If they win, neutrality won’t save anything from the wreck, so unless one is willing to acquiesce in communism one must at least hope for their defeat. Then neutrality becomes rather like Orwell’s ‘making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’— a common British failing. In fact, I think the line is Kipling….
Thinking of these things, I sometimes get into a C[ommunist] P[arty] Mood. You do, too, I think. At least one would be spared the incompetence of the American leadership. What a mess they have got themselves into in Korea! I suppose it was a trap deliberately set for them….” [Spratt to M. N. Roy, 8 July 1950, MN Roy Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library]. [communist, America]
A major focus of Spratt’s work was to warn Indians against being seduced by the lure of Communism, which promised equality in theory, but delivered tyranny in practices….—p. 322 [communism]
…This disenchantment was most eloquently expressed in the volume The God that Failed, in which six celebrated writers – Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler and Richard Wright among them – explained why they had joined the Communist Party and why they had left it…..—p. 322 [This book was published US in 1949, and in UK in 1950 [communism]
…For, as the experience of the Soviet Union showed, ‘communism imposes restraints of varying degrees of severity on almost all kinds of intellectual activity’. The fiasco of Lysenkoism was but ‘a small illustration of the lack of respect for truth which distinguishes communist intellectual life. Political propaganda always has first place.’ [Philip Spratt, ‘The Appeal to Intellectuals’, in A. B. Shah and Nissim Ezekiel, eds., A New Look at Communism (Bombay: Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom, 1963), pp. 9-13]—p. 326 [communism]
…Thus, when the Prime Minister visited the People’s Republic of China in 1954, Spratt charged him with (p. 326) betraying ‘an old friend, Chiang [Kai-shek], who stood by us in the war’, while ‘turning a blind eye to Mao’s policy of debauching neighbouring countries with drugs, and using crores of dollars thus earned to finance his fifth-columns within them; blindness to Mao’s slaughter, in the best Stalin manner, of millions of his subjects for ideological deviations; and blindness even to military aggression which could have no other aim than to threaten India’. Spratt attacked both Nehru and his close aide V. K. Krishna Menon. He wrote sarcastically that Menon should be awarded ‘the Stalin Prize for the Most Ingenious Invention in Linguistics’, while Nehru should be given the ‘Mao Tse-tung Medal for Dupes (first class)’. [Philip Spratt, ‘Licking the Boot that Kicks You’, The Current, 22, September 1954]—pp. 326-327 [Nehru, communism]
…’ That government is best, which governs least’, Gandhi had proclaimed. How did his disciple’s commitment to nationalization, to the public sector occupying what Nehru called the ‘commanding heights of the economy’, square with this? Gandhi, wrote Spratt, had a ‘deep suspicion of governments – all governments, foreign and indigenous. He was the prince of individualists. That government is best which governs least. ‘ By now Spratt had come round to the view that socialism made for bad economics. This was because it has no solution of the problem of incentives. A man will work for fear of starvation, or to gain wealth. But socialism rules out both starvation and wealth. Why then should a man work? The socialist’s only possible answer is that the government must compel him to work by fear of punishment.’ In its coercive and elusive pursuit of equality, wrote Spratt, socialism sets up a society of slaves and slave-drivers’. [P. Spratt, ‘What Would Gandhi Say’, MysIndia, 3 June 1956]
In his writings, Spratt represented Nehru as, in effect, a crypto- Communist….—p. 327 [Nehru, socialism]
…He [Spratt] remarked that the Constitution had been framed when ‘the wave of nationalism, and therefore of centralism, was at its height’, whereas the ‘States are now foci of potent linguistic loyalties’.
What Spratt hoped for most of all was the decentralization of economic decision-making, not merely from the Centre to the states, but from the State to the individual. ‘There is no point’, he said,
in freeing oneself from the bureaucracy of Delhi, only to be enmeshed in the toils of the bureaucracies of Calcutta, Trivandrum or Madras. There are socialist federations, but their socialism negates their federalism, just as it negates their democracy. The aim of federalism is freedom, and the new turn in national affairs will come to nothing unless it promotes freedom.[P. Spratt, ‘Federalism and Freedom’, Swarajya, 8 Aprial 1967]6—p. 333 [socialism, federalism]
In the 1960s, Spratt published a series of essays exploring the ‘Hindu personality’ from a psychoanalytic point of view. There was, he argued, an absence of the Oedipus complex in India, ‘little trace of the infantile fantasy of attacking, castrating and killing the father’. Rather, there were ‘strong traces of the passive homo- sexual attitude to the father, and of propitiating him, submitting to him and castrating oneself in order to ward off his anger and gain his love’.
This submission of the child to the authority of the father, Spratt argued, explained the relative lack of rebelliousness in Hindu society. From the time they were born, boys were taught to revere the father and the ideas and institutions associated with him. Because tradition and custom had a hallowed, sanctified status, ‘the eternal rebelliousness of the West is conspicuously absent’.
This submission to older male authority, claimed Spratt, was also manifest in the devotion of the shishya (disciple) to the guru (teacher), and in the admiration for ascetics and holy men. ‘Thus a society in which the yogi is honoured above everybody else will deprecate youth and honour age, and will eliminate at the source the self-assertion of the young against the old.[Philip Spratt, ‘The Hindu Personality’, Freedom First, October 1964; idem, ‘The Impact of the West on India’, The Journal of Karnataka University – Social Sciences 1965; idem, ‘The Uniqueness of India’, essay published in Quest, sometime in the 1960s]
In 1968 Spratt reworked these essays into a full-length book, which he titled Hindu Culture and Personality: A Psycho-Analytic Study. This was based on wide and somewhat indiscriminate reading in Indian mythology, Indian philosophy, Indian history, and Indian sociology. The book’s main thesis was that the Hindu personality was inward-looking and ‘narcissistic’, whereas the Western (or Christian) personality was outward-looking and ‘punitive’. Spratt attributed this largely to differences in child rearing; unlike in the (p. 337) West, children in India were indulged and spoiled excessively by the mother, and sons did not enter into a rivalrous relationship with the father.
Unlike Spratt’s political and literary writings, his ventures into psychoanalysis were replete with technical jargon, His book is meandering and very long, yet it contains flashes of genuine insight. He argued that, because of their narcissism and self-absorption, and their veneration of male authority, social reform and political radicalism did not come easily to Hindus. Thus he wrote:
Hindus are abnormally tolerant of their rulers, whether hereditary monarchs, indigenous upstarts, foreign conquerors, or the popular leaders of the present day. A leader once established seems sure of continued favour for their lifetime. Occidentals and Muslims are more changeable in their attitude to leaders: the latent hostility to the father is always apt to come to the surface.[P. Spratt, Hindu Culture and Personality: A Psycho-Analytic Study (Bombay: Maniktalas, 1968), p. 73]
Spratt argued that, apart from practices of child-bearing, the institution of caste also explained why Hindus tended to favour the status quo, politically as well as socially. He observed:
The general tendency of the narcissistic psyche towards conservatism
is shown with special clarity in relation to caste because of its strong inclination towards attitudes of superiority…. The inward-looking libido inflates the ego and all with whom the ego identifies itself, in the first place the family and the sub-caste. No caste admits that it is without an inferior. The caste system is the narcissistic consciousness of superiority institutionalized. [P. Spratt, Hindu Culture and Personality: A Psycho-Analytic Study (Bombay: Maniktalas, 1968), p. 144] 44 [caste]
Not all of Spratt’s comparisons favoured the West over the East. In a discussion of race relations, he pointed out that while Hindus were extremely colour-conscious, their prejudice against dark skins was less intense than that shown by white Americans against black Americans. The Hindu colour prejudice was ‘completely satisfied by aloofness or withdrawal’, whereas white supremacism in the United States was overtly aggressive in a physical and social sense. [P. Spratt, Hindu Culture and Personality: A Psycho-Analytic Study (Bombay: Maniktalas, 1968), p. 174-75] [race]—pp. 337-338 [Hindu, India]
…Spratt launched into a tirade against the Mahatma’s chose successor Jawaharlal Nehru, claiming that, as Prime Minister, he ‘set about, in part deliberately, in part unwittingly, to erase almost all the effects of Gandhi’s work’.[P. Spratt, ‘Lenin’, a printed text of eight pages, probably published in a book, copy in Spratt Family Papers.@]—p. 339 [Nehru]
According to Spratt, Gandhi’s transformation from obscurity to greatness was enabled by his years outside the home and outside India. ‘Being uprooted from family and community so early in life’, Gandhi ‘was deprived of the psychological support that others enjoy, and he had to supply them himself’. Through his faith in himself, and in God, Gandhi became ‘a self-reliant individual, freed from dependence on society or tradition, accustomed to judge all things for himself’.[P. Spratt, ‘Delhi University Seminar on Gandhian Philosophy’, Swaraj, 25 October 1969]—p. 340 [Gandhi]
…Spratt’s analysis of how even right-wing parties are Leninists in inspiration speaks directly to how the Bharatiya Janata Party has exercised power in India today.—p. 341 [BJP] [Is our democracy and mind of people so weak to keep check on any authoriatanism—db]
…This may have been because Spratt was originally British, and a paper opposing the Government had to be careful not to overtly offend thin-skinned nationalists. The arrangement suited Spratt, a reticent man who never liked to thrust himself forward anyway.—p. 342 [British, nationalism]
…for the free economy is superior in every way to its rival, the Statist economy. But the free economy has never seriously and effectively tried to persuade the public of its merits. It is high time to begin.[P. Spratt, ‘Read History Right’, Swaraj, 14 February 1970]—p. 342 [Capitalism]
After he became editor, Spratt wrote much less often in Swarajya, one piece every two or three months instead of two or three pieces every month. The longest of these articles was published in May 1970, to mark the centenary of Lenin’s birth. It covered three full pages of the magazine. Early on, the writer offered this dry epigram: ‘Centenaries are not obituaries; after all this time sentiment can give way to truth.’ His article took apart myths propagated in other centennial assessments: that Lenin was ‘a man of peace’ when in fact ‘he burned with hatred and aggressiveness’; that he was a great Russian patriot when in fact ‘he would gladly sacrifice Russia for international socialism’; that he was a great anti-colonialist when in fact he suppressed Ukrainian nationalism while re-colonizing Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as bringing Muslim Central Asia under the Soviet yoke.
Spratt argued that the ‘moral debasement of politics is Lenin’s worst gift to mankind’. In the nineteenth century, ‘politics was becoming to some extent moralized’; but then, after Lenin came to power in Russia, ‘over a large part of the world, domestic politics was pursued by means of wholesale slaughter, torture, deceit and doctrination’. Spratt claimed that ‘if there had been no Lenin there would have been no Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Mao or Ho. It was he who opened the way to that totalitarian tyranny which has devastated the world in the past half-century.’ [P. Spratt, ‘The Lenin Centenary’, Swaraj, 23 May 1970] [communism]—p. 343
In another essay, Spratt perceptively pointed to the moral arrogance and vanity of the socialist intellectual and politician. Thus he wrote: ‘One who desires the State to reduce inequality is apt to think of the State as a person, usually himself, placed in personal relations with all the poor of the country and dispensing charity to them. This fantasy of exercising power and distributing bounty attracts many.
Spratt accepted that poverty is indeed, as the socialists argued, ‘a great problem’. But the socialist remedy, of State-directed or State- enforced attempts at redistribution, was worse than the disease, for, as demonstrated in country after country in the socialist bloc, ‘it destroys the most precious values of liberty, culture, personality and variety, and fails even to achieve the equality in the name of which it is undertaken.’ [P. Spratt, ‘The Ethics of Inequality’, Swaraj, 17 January 1970]52 [socialism]—p. 343
Spratt provided a penetrating, and in the event prescient, analysis of Indira Gandhi’s personality and leadership style. ‘In the situation of India at present, he said, ‘the truly democratic leader reconciles himself to cooperation with parties of considerably different opinions; the attempt to destroy and dominate lowers the tone of public life and suggests the would-be-dictator.’ [P. W=Spratt, ‘What We Must Do to Save Democracy’, Swaraj, 10 October 1970.53—p. 344 [Indra Gandi, dictator]
In January 1971, Indira Gandhi announced the holding of General Elections, a year ahead of schedule. Spratt argued that ‘the Prime Minister has designed it [the polls] as a referendum on her own merits as the national leader, and inevitably it has become a two-sided dispute between her admirers and her critics. He offered four major criticisms of Indira Gandhi’s record as Prime Minister since 1966. First, ‘her premature espousal of the demand for equality at the expense of development’. Second, ‘her failure to maintain order’, as manifested in the rising incidence of violence. Third, ‘her undemocratic ways’, as manifest in ‘her indifference to constitutional forms, culminating recently in threats to amend the Constitution and discipline the Supreme Court’. Fourth, ‘her dangerous collaboration with the Communists and Russia’.[P. Spratt, ‘A Four-Point Indictment’, Swaraj, 16 January 1971]—p. 344 [Indra Gandhi]
…She [Sarala Behn—Catherin Marry Heilenamm] believed that it was not so much the centrally-managed, well-financed and efficiently-run, large voluntary agencies, having mostly experts and employees carrying out given programmes, but self-evolved small bands of dedicated groups of individuals living among the common people, who jointly work in small areas, that would deliver the goods…..[Devendra Kumar, ‘Sarala Beh: A Tribute’, in Sarala Behn: Smriti Granth, p. 197]—p. 353 [organization]
…Keithahn remarked that ‘the evils of proselytism are not normally to be found in a Christian ashram. But I sometimes wonder whether the aggressiveness of a sectarian Paul is not more the example for Christians than the loving concerns of our Master for all who were in need.’[R. R. Keithahn, ‘Gandhiji, and the Christian Ashram’, Ashram Review, April 1948. Cf. also R. R. Keithahn, ‘Nation-Building in a Free India: Rural Reconstruction and Rural Welfare’, Sectioal Chairman’s Address to the Annual Indian Conference on Social Work, Jamshedpur, 23 December 1950, text in Keithahn Papers.]5—p. 367 [Christian ashram, conversion]
While a practising Christian till the end (unlike Stokes), Keithahn was resolutely opposed to the practice, not uncommon during the period of British rule, of missionaries offering material incentives to low-caste or working-class Indians to convert. In an article of 1953 he pointed out that Hindus were ‘more sensitive about these matters now that freedom has come and they are responsible for their own affairs. These activities will not be tolerated much longer.’ Keithahn therefore urged his co-religionists to ‘clean up their own act’. The Church in India, he wrote,
has a special responsibility to check on all their workers that there may be no material temptations offered for people to become (p. 370) Christians. In fact, we ought to lean backwards in these matters. In other words, if there is any legitimate help to be given to others it should be on the basis of need and never on the basis of caste or creed.[R. R. Keithahn, ‘Shall We Continue to Proselytize?’, Harijan, 5 December 1953]—pp. 370-371 [Christian charity]
….A very small percentage of the population in the world in the USA use the major part of our natural resources. This is an impossible way of life for man in general….[Ralph Richard Keithanhn, Pilgrimage in India: An Autobiographical Fragment (Bangalore: The Christian Institute for the Studyof Religion and Society, 1973), pp. 67-8]Keithahn himself an American but become Indian]—p. 375 [America
…In November 1960, after attending a meeting in Gandhigram, he sent a letter to friends overseas proclaiming:
A small group sit about a dining table at the Gandhi Gram Anniversary. Among us, Jagjivan Ram, Minister of India’s Railways, P. Kakkan, my old student and now a Minister of the Govt. of Madras, Sri Parameswaran, former Minister and now Member of Parliament – all Harijans!… And this within 15 years of freedom! In Andhra States the Chief Minister is a Harijan!
What a judgment upon the U. S. A. which cannot match this even after 100 years of freedom for the Negro! Something is seriously wrong with American Christianity and Democracy! [Circular Letter, I November 1960, Keithahn Papers]
This portrait was not inaccurate if confined to politics, where a constitutional quota of 15 per cent reserved for them had allowed Dalits to be represented in legislatures and ministries. No such quota existed for African Americans. However, in Indian society at large, caste discrimination was rampant, easily as rampant as racial discrimination in the United States. It may be that Keithahn’s own self-identification as an Indian had compelled him to so emphatically elevate his adopted homeland over his original one.—p. 376 [Outcaste]
Gandhi had coined the term ‘Harijan’, ‘Children of God’, in the 1930s to replace terms such as ‘Untouchables’ and ‘Pariah’, which were felt to be degrading and demeaning. Yet by the 1960s, ‘Harijan’ was increasingly regarded as patronizing by those to whom it referred. Had Keithahn’s suggestion been adopted, it may have rid the term of this pejorative and condescending connotation, by incorporating every human being on earth under its purview – regardless of race, caste, religion, and nation.—p. 378 [caste, outcaste]
Like his compatriot Samuel Stokes, Keithahn fell foul of the Church. Unlike Stokes, however, he did not change his religion and become a Hindu. He remained determinedly ecumenical, a position that confused (and sometimes angered) Hindu and Christian dogmatist alike.
In September 1965, Keithahn travelled to several parts of Tamil Nadu, speaking on the Gandhian concept of Sarvodaya (service for all) and on inter-religious dialogue. His talks went well, until he spoke to a group of earnest Christian seminarians at a town called Marthandam. What happened here is described in a circular letternhe wrote shortly afterwards:
However, they [the Seminarians] found it very difficult to swallow my Sarvodaya approach. Yesterday noon, just before I left, I gave them a little time to ask me further questions about their doubts. After some discussion, one of them said, ‘You are supporting Sarvodaya. Sarvodaya says all religions are equal. This is a great handicap in our evangelistic work. You are a great obstacle in our evangelistic work.’ I rose up and said, ‘If that is the blessing and gratitude that you give me, then let me go and work where my efforts are appreciated.’ Then I went back, did my packing and got the next bus back here [to Batlagundu].
Writing of this unhappy experience to his Christian friends over- seas, Keithahn remarked:
It is a tragedy if the young people who are being trained [to become] pastors still live in their text proof theology and compound. I tried to (p.379) help them to see that every layman was out in the secular world daily and had to make some witness there – that I was in the same world, only I had the privilege of working on a spiritual basis and this could be more effective. That approach, they could not understand at all. One wonders what place such a Christianity can have in this world. [R. R. Keithahn, ‘Modern Temple Bells of South Inda’, typescript in Keithahn Papers]—pp. 379-380 [Christianity]
His experience of these Hindu saints and their ashrams had led Keithahn to conclude that
our whole Christian expression in India needs to be rethought in the light of the fact of these great Indian thinkers, leaders and saints. Again and again, at certain points, they are closer to the Eternal Christ than are most so-called Christians. Again and again, they take some expression of Jesus Christ, as Gandhiji took the expression of the power of love, they apply it to particular problems they make us ashamed of our own Christian discipleship. [R. R. Keithahn, ‘Modern Temple Bells of South Inda’, typescript in Keithahn Papers]—p. 380 [Christian]
“It was the bounden duty of Indian patriots to have striven and even suffered for India’s Swaraj. They deserve the homage of all who have inherited the fruits of their efforts. But the Americans and the Britishers had no obligation to work and suffer for India’s freedom. And yet there were many of them who strove and sacrificed for India’s freedom. They deserve Indians’ gratitude even more” [Kodanda Rao, Foreign Friends of India’s Freedom, (Bangalore: The P. T. I. Book Company, 1973, pp. v-vii] (pp. 411-412).
Till she left for Europe in 1959, Mira worked for rural renewal and environmental sustainability in India. Later, from her home in the Vienna Woods, she scolded her fellow Gandhians for jingoistically following the Government line in the country’s dispute with China. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Spratt wrote and spoke against the creeping centralization of political power, against the Indian State’s denial of freedom to entrepreneurs, its curbs on individual liberty, and its attacks on the federal structure of the Indian Union. Through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Sarala devoted her energies and her intellect to empowering village women, while warning against the environmental consequences of consumerism and industrialism. All through these decades, Keithahn, in deepest South India, was working as tirelessly as Sarala in the Himalaya. Some of their concerns over- lapped – village self-sufficiency and ecological renewal, for example while others diverged, with Sarala focusing more on inequalities of gender and Keithahn more on inequalities of class.
Had Besant, Stokes and Horniman lived in independent India they would have surely followed the same sort of trajectory too. Besant might have campaigned to stop violence against women; Horniman against attacks on the press and sexual minorities; Stokes against aggressive and chauvinistic tendencies in his adopted Hindu faith. Like Mira, Sarala, Keithahn and Spratt, they would have been active conscience-keepers rather than unthinking nationalists in an India which had freed itself of British rule but whose people were still constrained by myriad forms of unfreedom.—p. 418
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