GANDHI’S ENGLISH RHETORIC by Mark Lindley In an analysis of social power, Bertrand Russell once wrote:1 “Power over human beings may be classified by the manner of influencing individuals, or by the type of organisation involved. An individual may be influenced: (a) by direct physical power over his body, e.g. when he is imprisoned...; (b) by rewards and punishments as inducements, e.g. in giving or withholding employment; (c) by influence on opinion, i.e. propaganda in its broadest sense....” It was by influencing opinions that Gandhi brought down the largest empire in history, and in this light it seems to me that rhetoric was vital to his work and that one of the traditions he drew upon was the Western one, going back to Cicero and beyond, of lawyers prominent in politics and notable for their mastery of rhetoric. This essay focuses in loving detail on seven representative examples reflecting in miniature how Gandhi‟s rhetoric developed during the more than half-century of his political life (even though they are mostly not from his most famous writings or speeches). * My first selection is the last part of a letter-to-the-editor which Gandhi sent in 1894 to a local newspaper (in southern Africa) that had printed a racist editorial entitled “Rammysammy”.2 The editorial had opposed a petition to the Secretary for Colonies, Lord Ripon, seeking political franchise for Indian immigrants. (The word ”Natives” in Line 2 refers to Black Africans.) 01 “You put upon the franchise petition to Lord Ripon an interpretation it was never 02 meant to convey. The Indians do not regret that capable Natives can exercise the 03 franchise. They would regret if it were otherwise. They, however, assert that they 04 too, if capable, should have the right. You, in your wisdom, would not allow the 05 Indian or the Native the precious privilege under any circumstances, because they 06 have a dark skin. So long as the skin is white it would not matter to you whether it 07 conceals beneath it poison or nectar. To you the lip-prayer of the Pharisee, because 08 he is one, is more acceptable than the sincere repentance of the publican, and this, I 09 presume, you would call Christianity. You may; it is not Christ‟s. 10 “And in spite of such opinions held by you, a respectable newspaper in the Colony, 11 you impute falsehood to The Times of India. It is one thing to formulate a charge, it is 12 another to prove it. 13 “You end with saying that „Rammysammy‟ may have every right a citizen can 14 desire, with one exception, viz. political power. Are the heading of your leader and 15 its tenor consistent with the above opinion? Or is it un-Christian, un-English to be 16 consistent? „Suffer little children to come unto me‟, said the Master. His disciples (?) 17 in the Colony would improve on the saying by inserting „white‟ after „little‟. During 18 the children‟s fête organized by the Mayor of Durban, I am told there was not a 19 single coloured child to be seen in the procession. Was this a punishment for the sin 20 of being born of coloured parents? Is this an incident of the qualified citizenship you 21 would accord to the hated „Rammysammy‟? 22 “If He came among us, will He not say to many of us, „I know you not‟? Sir, may 23 I venture to offer a suggestion? Will you re-read your New Testament? Will you 25 ponder over your attitude towards the coloured population of the Colony? Will you 26 then say you can reconcile it with the Bible teaching or the best British traditions? 27 If you have washed your hands clean of both Christ and British traditions, I can have 28 nothing to say; I gladly withdraw what I have written. Only then it will be a sad day 29 for Britain and for India if you have many followers.” Gandhi was a budding young lawyer, faithful to the Empire. He addressed his White fellow subjects of Her Majesty in their own style of debating-club rhetoric. The first sentence smacks of academic or legal discourse; and likewise the use of the word “otherwise” in Line 3. Gandhi‟s point, however, was valid and he could reasonably expect the newspaper‟s editor to take it sportingly. Having thus scored a point, he used irony to launch a personal attack: “You in your wisdom” ... “and this, I presume, you would call Christianity.” The editor had presumably not mentioned Christianity, but Gandhi‟s ploy brought him to his religious arguments. (The ironies are complemented meanwhile by a metaphoric contrast in Line 7 between “poison” and “nectar”. The metaphor is inelegant, as the function of an animal‟s skin is not that of “concealing” poison or nectar.) The debating style is then maintained in several ways, among them: (1) a legal-style jibe: “It is one thing to formulate a charge, it is another to prove it” (and here again an English debating opponent would acknowledge the point with a smile); (2) using the word “respectable” (Line 10) to hint that The Times of India was really the more respectable paper; (3) the several question-marks; and (4) the clever point that since everyone desires not to be insulted by racist epithets, the editor had contradicted himself when he said that “Rammysammy” might “have every right a citizen can desire”, other than the franchise. Now the tone becomes more serious as Gandhi introduces a related fact – the absence of dark-skinned children from a recent children‟s festival – and broadens his indictment. Moral passion is expressed by the way in which the validity of what Gandhi is saying overrides this inconsistency and some others: there is a mismatch of tenses in Line 22 (“If He came..., will He not say...”), and Gandhi then offers two suggestions after having (rhetorically) asked permission (Lines 22-23) to offer only one. His third question (“Will you then say...?”), though syntactically like the other two, is not a suggestion at all. However, three is rhetorically a good number of questions to put, especially if they are successively shorter or else, as in this case, successively longer. Since the capitalised word “He” refers to Jesus, the phrase “washed your hands clean” evokes Pilate‟s responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus. Such hands are dirty even if they are “white” as well as washed. So there is deep irony in the subsequent use of the word “gladly”, the ostensible meaning of which is that Gandhi for his part is a good sport in a debate. The restrained conclusion, drawing on a wry contrast in Line 28 between “glad” and “sad”, may suggest to us, with historical hindsight, that mere debating could not obtain a satisfactory result. Nor could mere petitioning. Words had to be fortified by action to bring home Gandhi‟s message of fair play. Here we should recall that heavy sarcasm is unlikely to help win an antagonist‟s heart and pave the way for reconciliation. Gandhi in later years would never use sarcasm (nor caricature) when writing, and only occasionally, in minor lapses of discipline, when speaking. One such moment was in 1942 when an American visitor confirmed that George Washington Carver, a politically moderate Negro leader, was still subjected to racism in the USA:3 Gandhi: “Even this genius suffers under the hardship of segregation, does he not?” Visitor: “Oh yes, as much as any Negro.” Gandhi: “And yet these people [the American white majority] talk of democracy and equality! It is an utter lie.” Visitor: “But Dr. Carver is never bitter or resentful.” Gandhi: “I know; that is what we believers in non-violence have to learn from him. But what about the claim of these people who are said to be fighting [the War] for democracy?” Just as relevant historically are the following remarks from a letter sent in mid-January 1914 to Rabindranath Tagore by Charles Freer Andrews soon after his first meeting with Gandhi in Africa:4 “There are two Gods worshiped here, Money and Race.... The race question, I feel certain, is the most pressing of our age.” * The next selection is the last paragraph of an account, published in The Vegetarian in 1895, of a Trappist commune which Gandhi had visited in the South African province of Natal.5 (Trappists are a kind of Roman Catholic monks and nuns who practice vegetarianism, do manual labour, and take vows of silence.) 01 “Such are our vegetarians in Natal. Though they do not make of vegetarianism a 02 creed, though they base it simply on the ground that a vegetarian diet helps them to 03 crucify the flesh better, and though, perhaps, they are not even aware of the existence 04 of the vegetarian societies and would not even care to read any vegetarian literature, 05 where is the vegetarian who would not be proud of this noble band, even a casual 06 course with whom fills one with a spirit of love, charity and self-sacrifice, and who 07 are a living testimony of the triumph of vegetarianism from a spiritual point of view? 08 I know from personal experience that a visit to the farm is worth a voyage from 09 London to Natal. No matter whether one is a Protestant, a Christian or a Buddhist or 10 whatnot, one cannot help exclaiming, after a visit to the farm: „If this is Roman 11 Catholicism, everything said against it is a lie.‟ It proves conclusively, to my mind, 12 that a religion appears divine or devilish, according as its professors choose to make 13 it appear.” The short first sentence gives the reader of the article a hint that this will be the last paragraph. The word “our” expresses warmth (as the monks and nuns did not in any sense belong to Gandhi or his readers). The very long next sentence (down through Line 7) is based on a non-sequitur, inasmuch as a mere question (“where is the vegetarian...?”) cannot logically be contrary to given facts (“Though they do not make of vegetarianism a creed” etc.). It could readily have been six sentences instead. (“They do not make.... They base it.... Perhaps they are not.... Yet where is the vegetarian who would not...? Even a casual intercourse.... They are a living testimony....”). But then the tone would have been more solemn and less cheerful, whereas Gandhi wished (as the rest of the article shows) to convey cordially the idea that the Trappists were a cheerful lot. His long sentence does this, as its intricacies and friendly negatives are so much fun to keep track of. In the third sentence (“I know from personal experience....”) he indulged in a transparent hyperbole such as he normally avoided in later years. His trip from London had not really been just to visit the Trappists. Although the word “personal” here is redundant (because if one knows something directly from experience, it has to be personal experience), to include it prevents the next sentence from sounding impersonal even though it uses the impersonal pronoun twice (in Lines 9 and 10). The curious distinction made there between Protestants and Christians is an oblique indication that the remark in Lines 10-11 is addressed to British Protestants, who, Gandhi knew, tended to be snobbish toward Roman Catholics. The last sentence of the essay plays on the impersonal/personal contrast, by the witty paradox that something has been proven “conclusively” though perhaps only in Gandhi‟s own opinion. The sense of wit is extended through the alliteration of “divine” and “devilish”, through an oblique contrast between proof (which has to do with reality) and mere appearance, through the offbeat use of the word “professors” for people professing a religion, and through the penetrating suggestion that only by an act of will can they make their religion appear devilish (or divine). This rhetoric has the bloom of exuberant youth and yet is far gentler, as the subject warrants, than the “Rammysammy” letter of the year before. * The next selection5 is from a letter of 1918 to an academic economist, H. S. Jevons, whose father, W. S. Jevons,6 had also been an economist and had been instrumental in developing, in utilitarian supply-and-demand economics, the basic concept known today as “marginal utility”. An illustration of this concept is that while food is vital to us, the “marginal” utility of each “increment” in a day‟s diet is normally less than the utility of the prior increments (back to the most basic portion). The marginal utility of any kind of thing tends to decrease with the amount available, but does not in every case approach zero, because “There is hardly a limit to the desire for articles of aesthetic taste, science or curiosity, when once excited.”7 Gandhi‟s letter shows him reacting to some thoughts of a friendly academic steeped in this tradition. 01 “Dear Prof. Jevons, I have gone through your note. I like it in the main. We should 02 supply as many men as may be needed and this not through the official agency, but 03 by Home Rule Organizations. If we do this, we have Home Rule. 04 “I do not agree with your financial side. The comparison between England and 05 India is hopelessly misleading. England can afford, India is poverty-stricken. A few 06 have enriched themselves during the war. But the masses? I have come in the closest 07 touch with them in Kaira and Champaran. They have nothing. In Kaira, the exorbit08 ant demands of the Government have impoverished a people who were once rich 09 and powerful. In Champaran, the Planters have sucked the life-blood out of the 10 people. You talk of a rise in the salt tax and send a shudder through my body. If you 11 knew what is happening to the people owing to the tax, you would say, „Whatever 12 else is done, the tax must go today.‟... 13 “Enslavement of the nation is thorough. The Englishmen have not deliberately 14 meant it but they could not have done more if they had. I only cling to England be15 cause I believe her to be sound at heart and because I believe that India can deliver 16 her mission to the world better through England. If I had not this faith, I so thorough17 ly detest her act of disarming India, her haughty and exclusive military policy and her 18 sacrifice of India‟s riches and art on the altar of commercial greed, that I should 19 declare myself a rebel. 20 “I did not want to give you a long letter, but my pen would not be checked.” The first two sentences are almost telegraphic. (A telegram, omitting the personal pronouns, might read: “Letter received. Agree mostly.”) Since Jevons was far less renowned than Gandhi, this blunt approach conveyed respect by implying that Gandhi considered him a perfectly reasonable adult who needed no cajoling. But of course it was tactful to begin with an expression of agreement. (Gandhi was loyal to the Empire during World War I, as he hoped this would help win a modicum of self-rule afterwards. But British post-war policy disappointed him – the Rowlatt Act, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, etc. – and in 1920 he became president of the All-India Home Rule League.) His straightforward expression of disagreement about the “financial side” of Jevons‟ views was bold, inasmuch as he was not a professional economist like Jevons. The argument down to Line 7 is calmly set out in very efficient sentences. The fluffy sound of “hopelessly misleading” (Line 5) is made up for by the epigrammatic next sentence with only a comma between its two parts and with an unorthodox use of “afford” as an intransitive verb (in the first part) balancing the epithet “poverty-stricken” (in the second part). “Povertystricken” was not yet a common term. Then the moral tone of “exhorbitant” (Lines 7-8) precipitates a welling up of feeling to a high point in “sucked the life blood out” and “shudder.” The alliterations in Lines 8-11 (“impoverished ... people ... powerful ... planters ... people”; “sucked ... salt ... send a shudder”) have a stronger effect than if they would if they seemed contrived. The word “I” in Line 6 (“I have come in the closest touch with them”) is more personable than in Lines 1 and 4. Then a remarkable reference to “my body” (Line 10) impels Gandhi to appeal to Jevons‟s humane decency (“If you knew..., you would say....”). The repeated use of “I” in Lines 14-18 is a sign of Gandhi opening his heart. This was not a very English thing to do, hence the charming excuse, at the end of the letter, that his pen just went on of its own accord. * The next selection8 is the beginning and end of a eulogy of an English woman, written for British readers (at least culturally British): 01 “Newspapers tell us that Miss Emily Hobhouse is no more. She was one of the 02 noblest and bravest of women. She worked without ever thinking of any reward. 03 Hers was service of humanity dedicated to God. She belonged to a noble English 04 family. She loved her country, and because she loved it, she could not tolerate any 05 injustice done by it. She realized the atrocity of the Boer War. She thought England 06 was wholly in the wrong. She denounced the war in burning language at a time when 07 England was mad on it.... 08 “...When I came to India and the Rowlatt Act agitation was going on, she wrote 09 saying that I must end my life in prison if not on the gallows and that she did not 10 deplore it. She herself had full strength for such sacrifice. It was an article of faith 11 with her that no cause prospered without the sacrifice of its votaries. Only last year 12 she wrote to me saying that she was in active correspondence with her friend General 13 Herzog about the Indian cause in South Africa, asked me not to feel bitter against 14 him and told me to tell her what I expected of General Herzog. Let the women of 15 India treasure the memory of this great Englishwoman. She never married. Her life 16 was pure as crystal. She gave herself to God‟s service. Physically she was a perfect 17 wreck. She was paralytic. But in that weak and diseased body, she had a soul that 18 could defy the might of kings and emperors with their armies. She feared no man 19 because she feared God only.” The first three sentences are so full of stock British phrases that they could be taken for parody. The name “Miss Emily Hobhouse” evokes Jane-Austen-style domestic comedy, but the reference to the newspapers shows that Miss Hobhouse was a public figure. The second sentence begins to explain by telling us that she was remarkably noble and brave. (Gandhi could not call her “the noblest and bravest”, acquainted as he was with Indian women like Sarojini Naidu.) The two adjectives set an agenda for the paragraph: the next few sentences are about nobility (in more than one sense), the rest of the paragraph mainly about bravery. The unusual construction in Line 3 (“Hers was service...”) keeps the tone high. A very similar assertion in Line 16 is made with a straightforward word order (“She gave herself to God‟s service”), and that contrast will make way for the artifice, at the end of the essay, of putting the word “only” after “God” instead of before. There is an edifying irony in the phrase “burning language” (Line 6), as it is clear that Emily Hobhouse, unlike the people she criticised, did not cause the burning of live human beings. By calling the war an insane atrocity (Lines 5 and 7), Gandhi allows that she was patriotic (Line 4: “She loved her country”) as well as brave when she denounced the war. (He himself had not done so at the time, but had raised and led the Indian Ambulance Corps, and had even, in March 1900, addressed a meeting felicitating the British generals on their victory.9) Having taken as his main premise that Emily Hobhouse served humanity and God (Line 3), Gandhi leaves patriotism aside in the last paragraph as he moves on to her support of his cause in India. (In 1926 he had not yet endorsed purna swaraj, but he had been sent to jail for the crime of preaching disaffection with the imperial government.) The first paragraph mentions injustice, war, and “burning language”; in Lines 8-10 the text progresses to “agitation”, “prison” and even (whimsically) “the gallows”, and then implicitly to religion, as Gandhi, instead of saying, “She thought no cause prospered without sacrifices on the part of its supporters”, says that she had an “article of faith” about sacrifice by “votaries” (Line 11). Not every cause calls for that kind of sacrifice. The context shows that Gandhi had in mind, as we might expect, satyagraha, which was for him religious in nature. Satyagraha had been born in 1906 when a Muslim colleague in Johannesburg declared publicly before God, and advised others to do the same, that he would never submit to a certain unjust law.10 For a moment it occurred to Gandhi that religion should not be mixed with politics, but then he took the plunge and developed his great invention. He reminds us that he was a renowned leader and a headstrong man, by using a simple verb in reference to himself – “I came to India” (Line 8) – and an impersonal construction (“the ... agitation was going on”) to refer obliquely to the fact that he himself had led the agitation. (This is nicer than “I came, I saw, I conquered.”) Then Miss Hobhouse is portrayed (starting in Line 12) as someone who not only was subject to no husband, but also presumed to tell a headstrong a man like Gandhi what to do; and the sharp wording (“[she] told me to tell her what I expected of General Herzog”) shows that she was equally undaunted by a military general. This leads to the final theme: that a frail woman can be as strong as any man. It was a favourite theme of Gandhi‟s. He had read all about courage in the Gita but did not at all consider it a male prerogative. He said, “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”11 Her gender is dwelt on in Lines 14-15 (“Let the women of India treasure the memory of this great Englishwoman”), and her frailty in Lines 16-17, and then she is pitted against “kings and emperors with their armies”. (“Kings and emperors” might seem redundant, but they make a crescendo from General Herzog to God (Line 19) and they refer sharply to British imperialism from the time of Disraeli, who had Victoria proclaimed Empress of India, to that of Churchill, who in 1931 found it “nauseating” that Gandhi could “parley on equal terms with the representatives of the King Emperor”.) All this gives resonance to the contrast of genders in “she feared no man”, and may even make us wonder whether the god she feared instead was really male, as grammar requires and Christian art always depicts. The pacing in Lines 11-18 is striking. There is a tapering down from a noticeably long sentence of personal narration (“Only last year she wrote to me...”) to one of moderate length with a monumental-sounding imperative (“Let the women of India treasure the memory...”), to a symmetrical group (Lines 15-17) of short, descriptive remarks – symmetrical in that they contain 3, 6, 6, 6 and 3 words respectively – and then a release to a sentence of ordinary length to introduce the concluding epitaph. The information in the last of the short sentences makes a superbly pungent surprise (“She was paralytic”) and we may admire Gandhi‟s discipline in reserving it for here. But the strong taste of artifice in this essay would be inappropriate in a more important one, for instance in an essay on satyagraha or on consumerism. There is a subtle tension between the hint here of a possible afterlife and the phrase “is no more” in Line 1. The newspapers had presumably not used that phrase in reporting her death. Did Gandhi use it to suggest mukti? (He could have said “passed away”.) Surely her soul was not deeply attached to her wheelchair etc. In any case, few of his British readers could have imagined such a nuance, and the phrase “is no more” has the virtue of implying that he would miss her, or that she was some kind of titan. * The next excerpt is a reply sent by Gandhi in 1933 to an English child who had written him a supportive letter saying that she regarded him as a father to her.12 01 “My dear daughter, I was very pleased to get your letter. You are quite right in 02 addressing me as you have done. I enjoy the happiness of having thousands of daugh03 ters. You are a welcome addition to the ever-growing family; and since I, a puny 04 mortal, cannot cope with such a large family, I entrust you all to the safe keeping of 05 the All-powerful and Eternal Father, and so I never feel the burden of having a large 06 family; on the contrary, only the joy of possessing the truth remains.” Eight years earlier, a young English woman, the daughter of a very highly placed colonial official, had come to India to join Gandhi, and he had told her at their first meeting (when she fell to his feet), “You shall be my daughter.” He had given her an Indian name – Mirabehn – and she had become a dedicated and diligent worker in his cause, but also somewhat demanding of his emotional energy.13 Now he sensed the need to gently advise this English child, who was in any case too young to leave her parents for the rigours of Gandhian discipleship, not to take too personally the metaphor of their “father-daughter” relation. He honoured her with a personal reply, but carefully told her, with such warmth as not to give offence, that he had thousands of such daughters and was a “puny mortal” (Lines 3-4) who couldn‟t actually take care of them. Having thus given a proper perspective to the metaphor, he evoked a grander, related metaphor – of all people as children of the same, divine father – to suggest that someone would make up for his own inability to parent her. If we strip away both metaphors, the underlying message is, “Carry on with courage. One step enough....” That Gandhi was speaking down to her is indicated by his implying that he “possessed” the truth (Line 6). To an adult he would say that he was only a seeker after truth. For an adult, that is the distinction between a fanatic and a scientist, but it might have been too sophisticated for a child, or even unsettling. It may be pertinent to mention that forty years earlier, Gandhi, in his deepest encounter with Christianity when he was seriously considering the possibility of converting, had decided: “It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God.... If God could have sons, all of us were His sons.”14 * The next example consists of excerpts from an interview in 1931 with a delegation of unemployed cotton mill workers in England.15 01 “I would be untrue to you, I would be a false friend, if I were not frank with you.... 02 I strove with Lord Irwin last March for the liberty to boycott liquor and foreign cloth. 03 He suggested that I might give up the boycott for three months as a gesture and then 04 resume it. I said I could not give it up for three minutes. You have three million un05 employed, but we have nearly three hundred million unemployed for half the year. 06 Your average unemployment dole is seventy shillings. Our average income is seven 07 shillings and sixpence a month. 08 “That operative was right in saying that he was falling in his own estimation. I do 10 believe it is a debasing thing for a human being to remain idle and to live on doles. 11 Whilst conducting a strike, I would not brook the strikers remaining idle for a single 12 day and got them to break the stones or carry sand and work in public streets – ask13 ing my own co-workers to join them in that work. Imagine, therefore, what it must 14 be to have three hundred million unemployed, several millions becoming degraded 15 each day for want of employment, devoid of self-respect, devoid of faith in God. 16 “I dare not take before them the message of God. I may as well place before the 17 dog over there the message of God as before those hungry millions who have no 18 lustre in their eyes.... To them God can only appear as bread and butter. Well, the 19 peasants of India were getting their bread from their soil; I offered them the spinning20 wheel in order that they may get butter; and if I appear before the British public in 21 my loincloth, it is because I have come as the sole representative of those half22 starved, half-naked dumb millions. 23 “Even in your misery you are comparatively happy. I do not grudge you that happi- 24 ness. I wish well to you. But do not think of prospering on the tombs of the poor mil25 lions of India.... Do not attribute your misery to India. Think of the world forces that 26 are powerfully working against you. See things in the daylight of reason.” In 1929 Gandhi had attended in India a bonfire of foreign cloth (for which he was arrested and fined), and a year later he had called for the illegal production of salt (which he initiated at Dandi) to be accompanied by a boycott of foreign cloth and liquor. By 1932, only a quarter of British cotton exports were to India, instead of half as before World War I. The boycott was in response to a long-standing conflict of interests between British industrial capitalism and Indian cottage-industry. Already a hundred years earlier, a writer in England had predicted that because of British industrial ingenuity: “The Saxon weavers [i.e. in Germany] will find themselves eclipsed. France will be an importing country. The extensive manufactures at Syria, Armenia, and Persia, and even the Chinese will be equally paralyzed, as are the calico weavers now in Hindoostan.”16 And already in the mid-1830s, the Governor General of India had reported: “The misery [here] hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching on the plains of India.”17 While the reason for Gandhi‟s trip to England was to represent the Indian National Congress at a “RoundTable Conference” in London (which the British had organised in the wake of the March to Dandi), he said in a press interview, a few hours before arriving in England, that he would also visit Lancashire – where textile workers were suffering from unemployment because of the boycott which he had organised – even if this were to entail his being lynched.18 That he was not lynched was presumably due in part to his eloquence. There is a hint, in Lines 1-2, that he wished to be taken as a true friend of the unemployed British workers. Under the circumstances it would have been provocative to make such an assertion directly (“I am your true friend”), but it is nonetheless carefully substantiated. He depicts himself as (a) striving for liberty (Line 2) against a Tory aristocrat, Lord Irwin (the British viceroy in India), (b) conducting a strike (Line 11), and then, at some length, (c) caring for the rural working classes of India. He even calls himself their “sole representative” in England (Lines 21-22) and implies, by calling them “dumb,” that they sorely need him in this capacity. Having thus set out his credentials as a friend of working people, he suggests that capitalists are really to blame for the British workers‟ misery: “world forces ... powerfully working against you” (Lines 25-26). Impelled as he was by a passionate desire to arouse his audience‟s fellow-feeling for their brethren in India, Gandhi made remarkable (and probably spontaneous) use of some rhetorical devices such as demagogues also like to use. In Lines 1-6 we find a charming sequence of numbers: 3, 3, 3, 300, 70, 7, 6 and also a remarkable sequence of alliterations: “liberty ... liquor”, “March ... might ... months ... minutes ... million ... month”, and “seventy shillings ... seven shillings and sixpence.” This is followed up later by ”strike ... strikers ... single day ... stones ... sand ... streets” (Lines 11-12) and then “several millions” (Line 14), “spinning wheel” (Lines 1920) and “sole representative ... half-starved” (Lines 21-22), while the word “million[s]” becomes a refrain throughout. There are also alliterations on “h” and “d” (“hundred million ... hungry millions ... half-starved, half-naked millions”; “I do believe ... debasing ... doles ... degraded each day ... devoid [twice] ... dog ... dumb millions ... do not grudge ... do not think ... do not attribute”); but the two pivotal words, “God” and ”loincloth”, are conspicuously not in any such chain. Also notable is that the key-word “million[s]” occurs in a sequence of successively longer and then shorter phrases: Lines 4-5: “three million unemployed” 5 & 14: “three hundred million unemployed” 14-15: “several millions becoming degraded each day” 17-18: “hungry millions who have no lustre in their eyes” 21-22: “half-starved, half-naked, dumb millions” 24-25: “poor millions of India” I think these details were due to passion and genius rather than painstaking construction. Gandhi‟s spontaneity is evident in some minor rough spots in the logical connectives. The word “therefore” in Line 13 (“Imagine, therefore...”) refers back, not to the immediately preceding sentence, but to the premise, in Line 10, that “it is a debasing thing for a human being to remain idle”; and in referring to his loincloth (Line 21) Gandhi neglected to mention the pivotal point that it symbolized not only the poverty of Indians with nothing more than a loincloth to wear, but also, since it was handspun in India, the boycott (of British factory-made cloth) which he had organised to help alleviate that poverty. That he called himself (in Line 21) the sole representative in Britain of India‟s impoverished millions is another sign of spontaneity, inasmuch as his belief that none of the other delegates to the Round-Table Conference really represented them, though important to him personally and in his stance as a negotiator,19 was irrelevant to his defence in Lancashire of the boycott. Right after this expansive sentence (which starts in Line 18 with “Well, ...” and lasts through Line 22), there is a nice tapering down of sentence-lengths as Gandhi approaches as close as he might dare to calling himself explicitly a true friend of the unemployed British workers (“I wish well to you”). But of course the sentence lengths are on the whole less artfully varied in this spontaneous speech than in some of his articles. And yet notwithstanding this trivial lack of polish, the argument leading to the conclusion, “Even in your misery you are comparatively happy” (Line 23), is built up very logically. The first paragraph shows that his constituents in India are materially much worse off than his audience in Lancashire. The second paragraph is about the spiritual distress, due to idleness, afflicting both groups alike.20 Then the third paragraph synthesizes these two perspectives as Gandhi explains that people whose material deprivation has been so great that they are not only malnourished and inadequately clothed (“half-starved, half-naked”), but too weak to protest (“dumb”) and no longer with any lustre in their eyes – such human beings become, like mere animals,21 unable even to receive “the message of God”. The idea that “God can appear only as bread and butter” (Line 18) sounds quasi-Marxist, but according to Gandhi it applied only to people in really dire material straits and not to his audience: they could still receive the “message of God”, they could still, seeking Truth, “see things in the daylight of reason” (Line 26) – by which he meant not only (a) to discern in ruthless capitalism the cause of their troubles, but also (b) to have natural human compassion for the people in India who had suffered from it even more than they had. * My last selection is the beginning of a written message22 which Gandhi in January of 1948 issued upon ending his last fast, by means of which he had put an end to an orgy of violence against Muslims in New Delhi in revenge for ethnic cleansing in Pakistan. (The feud went back to some riots set off in Calcutta by Jinnah‟s Muslim League in August 1946 to force the establishment of Pakistan.) 01 “I embarked on the fast in the name of Truth whose familiar name is God. Without 02 a living Truth, God is nowhere. In the name of God we have indulged in lies, 03 massacres of people, without caring whether they were innocent or guilty, men or 04 women, children or infants. We have indulged in abductions, forcible conversions 05 and we have done all this shamelessly. I am not aware if anybody has done these 06 things in the name of Truth. With the same name on my lips I have broken the fast. 07 “The agony of our people was unbearable. Rashtrapati Dr. Rajendra Babu brought 08 over a hundred people representing the Hindus, Muslims, Sihks, representatives of 09 the Hindu Mahasabha, the Rashtriya Swayasevak Sangh and representatives of 10 refugees from the Frontier Province and Sind. In this very representative company 11 were present ... [here follows a long list of names and titles]. Telegrams after telegrams 12 came from Pakistan and the Indian Union.... I could not resist the counsel of all these 13 friends. I could not disbelieve their pledge that, come what may, there would be com14 complete friendship between the Hindus, Muslims, Sihks, Christians, Parsis and 15 Jews, a friendship not to be broken. To break that friendship would be to break the 16 nation. 17 “As I write, comforting telegrams are deluging me. How I wish that God will keep 18 me fit enough and sane enough to render the service to humanity that lies in front of 19 me! If the solemn pledge made today is fulfilled, I assure you that it will revive with 20 redoubled force my intense wish and prayer before God that I should be enabled to 21 live the full span of life doing service of humanity till the last moment.” This fast was (Gandhi said elsewhere) the most difficult one he ever took, and he was very weak physically when he composed this message. It is charged with sharp polarities: life vs death, sanity vs insanity, moral truth vs religion, Gandhi‟s inner turmoil (threatening his sanity: see Line 18) vs his loving determination to render service, and Mahatma Gandhi vs the people of India at their worst. The indictment in Lines 2-5 describes how religion had been instrumental in driving them mad. The word “we” refers, in Line 2, mainly to Gandhi‟s fellow Hindus acting in the name of God, but in Line 4 to his fellow Muslim Indians (acting likewise), and then in Line 5 to all such theists. He addresses them as “we” in order to make vivid his own sense of shame for their shameless indulgence (Lines 2 and 4). His distress and fatigue are expressed in this fluctuating “we” and in the use, in Lines 2 and 4, of mere commas instead of explicit connectives. (Routine logic would call for writing something like: “...lies, and massacres of people without caring whether they were men or women or children or even infants; we have indulged in abductions and forcible conversions; and we have done all this shamelessly.”) The indictment is prefaced by some theology (Lines 1-2). According to Gandhi‟s Hindu belief, souls are not distinct from God, they are God – but only if and when they partake of loving moral truth. While normally using a personal pronoun to discuss and praise his god, Gandhi often said that this was not a person and existed nowhere “above” but only in our hearts. In 1945 he had had the following exchange with an atheist friend and colleague at Sevagram:23 Gandhi: “All admit and respect truth. That truth I call God. For some time I was saying, „God is truth‟, but that did not satisfy me, so now [ever since 1930] I say „Truth is God‟.” Friend: “If truth is god, then why don‟t you say „Satyam‟ instead of „Raghupati Raghava‟? „Raghupati Raghava‟ conveys to others a meaning very different from what it conveys to you.” Gandhi: “Do you think I am superstitious? I am a super-atheist.” A year later he had remarked privately to another colleague that he wished religious people would turn atheist if that would curtail their communal hatred. And now, the public statement (in Lines 1-6) that he fasted in the name of truth alone was an even stronger expression of dismay with theism – but still not an irrevocable rejection, because God is invoked in Lines 17 and 20 and Gandhi explains that if the pledge of friendship is kept, then he can (1) pray again (presumably because God will exist again) and (2) wish to go on living. He had often in recent months said publicly that he preferred not to live out the ideal Hindu life-span of 125 years, and in November 1947 he told a friend, “Now we are daily growing more and more barbarous.... That is why I am praying within, „O Rama, now take me away soon‟.” (Obviously the word “within” means that it was a desperate inner wish and not an actual prayer offered up, for instance, at a prayer-meeting.) Yet here he says (Lines 19-21) that his will to live and serve humanity will, if religious people change radically their behaviour in India, be renewed and with it his capacity to pray in some normal sense of the word – which for him, however, was always a matter of praising, not of petitioning: he makes that clear elsewhere24 and it is why he refers in Line 20 to prayer “before God” rather than “to God”. Gandhi has often been called a simple man, but this theological language is fairly subtle. Nested within it is the political message (Lines 7-16). Here the two main poles are (1) Gandhi the beloved Mahatma and (2) a wide spectrum of other people; and the main concern is to convince people that they belong within the spectrum and should therefore honour the pledge. The language is not subtle. There are pompous lists of names and titles, and strong expressions are chosen: “agony” and “unbearable” (Line 7), “could not disbelieve”, “come what may” and “complete friendship” (Lines 13-14), “break the nation” (Lines 15-16) and then “deluging” (Line 17). Pregnant words are used deliberately more than once (“telegrams” in Lines 11 and 17, “friends” and “friendship” in Lines 13-15, “break” in Line 15, and “representative[s]” in Lines 8-10, as well as “people representing” in Line 8). A subtle expression, however, of linkage between Gandhi and his people is that it is unclear, in Line 7, whether their unbearable agony was due to entirely to their own suffering or also to his. * I have been examining Gandhi‟s rhetoric partly to render homage to him and partly for a more practical reason that is explained in the following excerpt from Russell‟s essay on power:25 “To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy. “Modern propagandists have learnt from advertisers, who led the way in the technique of producing irrational belief. Education should be designed to counteract [this].... I should begin in the infant school, with two classes [i.e. types] of sweets between which the children should choose: one very nice, recommended by a coldly accurate statement as to its ingredients; the other very nasty, recommended by the utmost skill of the best advertisers.... “The teaching of history ought to be conducted in a similar spirit. There have been in the past eminent orators and writers who defended, with an appearance of great wisdom, positions which no one now holds: the reality of witchcraft, the beneficence of slavery, and so on. I should cause the young to know such masters of eloquence, and to appreciate at once their rhetoric and their wrong-headedness. Gradually I should pass on to current questions....” Russell discusses also the problem of journalistic language in an age of patriotic and ideological propaganda. A memorable, spontaneous comment on this characteristic modern problem27 was made, around the time that Russell‟s book was published, by his chosen successor at Cambridge, the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein and an English student of his happened to see a newspaper headline saying that the German government had accused the British of trying to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Wittgenstein (who opposed Hitler) commented that he wouldn‟t be surprised if the allegation were true; but the student demurred: to attempt something like that would be, he said, incompatible with the British „national character‟. Wittgenstein – whom some people consider to have been the greatest Western philosopher of language – scolded the student:28 “What is the use of studying philosophy if ... it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends?!” Was Gandhi conscientious in his public use of language? The British said his “habit of reinterpreting” made it easy for him to quote himself in apparent contradiction to any view attributed to him;29 and Nehru admonished him:30 “You know how intensely I have admired you and believed in you as a leader who can lead this country to victory and freedom. I have done so in spite of the fact that I hardly agreed with anything that some of your previous publications ─ Indian Home Rule etc. ─ contained. I felt and feel that you were and are infinitely greater than your little books ... that you were very hasty in your judgements, or rather, having arrived at certain conclusions you were over-eager to justify them.... You have stated somewhere that India has ... reached a pinnacle of wisdom in the past. I entirely disagree with this viewpoint and I neither think that the so-called Ram-raja was very good in the past, nor do I want it back.” But this hardly means, I think, that Gandhi was not conscientious. His resort to dangerous phrases was due rather to the inordinate difficulty of making sense to hundreds of millions of people with a great variety of cultural backgrounds and yet mostly illiterate. (The difficulty has become even greater nowadays since the fourfold multiplication of India‟s population31 and the failure of elementary education to keep pace.) Some of Pyarelal‟s recollections of his early years “at the feet of the master” confirm that Gandhi aspired to a carefully disciplined use of language in politics:32 “Not a small part of my training consisted of unlearning what I had previously learnt at school or college: „Call for facts, do not speculate in the void.... Do not cite epigrams, distrust them.‟ ... Gandhiji gave us a passage from Milton‟s Areopagetica and asked us to point out a flaw which he had found in the writer‟s argument. The writer in that passage had argued that the intellect is the mind‟s eye. To suppress a book is, therefore, worse than to kill the author; for death only puts out the light of the eye, but to suppress a book is to put out the light of the mind which is God‟s most precious gift to man. „It is an overstatement of the case,‟ he [Gandhi] explained afterwards, „and that is bad advocacy. Besides, the work suppressed may not be the writer‟s best or last. If he lives, he may produce another and perhaps a better work. I had expected a writer of Milton‟s calibre to be more careful in his thinking.‟ ” NOTES 1. Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (London, 1938 and several later editions), first page of Chapter 3. After Russell‟s early publications culminating in Principia Mathematica (with A. N. Whitehead; 3 vols., 1910-13) made him the most eminent philosopher in the English-speaking world, the first world war (which he opposed so unequivocally that he was dismissed from Cambridge University in 1916 and sent to prison for six months in 1918) caused him to become deeply concerned with social issues and to write a series of books about them, from Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916) through Power: A New Social Analysis. 2. A Gandhi Reader, ed. K. Swaminathan and C. N. Patel (Orient Longman, 1983), p. . This is such a good anthology that I have taken several examples from it. 3. Harijan, 15/ii/1942, p. 4. Hugh Tinker, The Ordeal of Love: C. F. Andrews and India (OUP, 1979), p. 5. Collected Works, I, p. 186. 6. Letters and Journals of William Stanley Jevons. Edited by his Wife (London, 1886), p. 343. 7. W. S. Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (London, 1871; I cite from the 1931 edition), p. 81. 8. Gandhi Reader (cited in note 2), p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. K. P. Goswami, Mahatma Gandhi, A Chronology (Delhi, 1971), p. 10. 11. Collected Works, XXIII, p. 197. 12. Ibid., LII, p. 368. 13. Gandhi, An Autobiography..., Bk. II, Ch. 15. 14. See K. R. Gupta, ed., Mira Behn, Gandhiji’s Daughter Disciple. Birth Centenary Volume (New Delhi, Himalaya Seva Sangh, 1992); Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade), The Spirit’s Pilgrimage (2nd ed., Arlington VA, 1984), and New and Old Gleanings (Ahmedabad, 1964) 15. Gandhi Reader, p. 16. [Saxon weavers quote] 17. Cited in Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 13. 18. Goswami, op. cit. (in Note 10), p. 142. 19. During the negotiations in London, Gandhi declared, for instance: “I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast mass of the untouchables ... and I say that it is not a proper claim which is registered by Dr. Ambedkar when he seeks to speak for the whole of the untouchables of India.” (Collected Works, XLVIII, pp. 297f) 20. Just as Gandhi had, when mentioning (in Line 4) his boycott against liquor, tactfully refrained from advising his audience not to drink it, so also he tactfully refrained from advising them to alleviate their idleness by undertaking civic projects; but the idea was implicit in his account of having obliged the strikers in India to “work in public streets”. 21. When a Westerner told Gandhi in 1922: “Surely a man‟s soul is different from that of a crocodile ─ if it has one at all. You remember what Chesterton says about it: When a man is taking his sixth whisky and soda, and is beginning to lose control over himself, you come up to him and give him a friendly tap on the shoulder and say, „Be a man.‟ But when the crocodile is finishing his sixth missionary, you do not step up to it and tap it on the back and say, „Be a crocodile.‟ Doesn‟t this show [that] a man has an ideal in him to strive after in a way that no animal has?” – Gandhi laughed appreciatively and replied: “True, there is a difference between the souls of men and of animals. Animals live in a sort of perpetual trance, but man can wake up and become conscious of God. God says, as it were, to man, „Look up and worship Me; you are made in My image‟.” 22. Gandhi, Collected Works, XC, pp. 452f. 23. See my The Life and Times of Gora (Mumbai, Popular Prakashan, 2010). 24. Collected Works, XLI, p. 293: “A personal selfish prayer is bad whether made before an image or an unseen God.” 25. Russell, op. cit. (in Note 1), last chapter, last section. 26. Loc. cit.: “It would be instructive to compare the newspapers at crucial moments during the Great War with what subsequently appeared in the official history. And when the madness of war hysteria, as shown in the newspapers of the time, strikes your pupils as incredible, you should warn them that all of them, unless they are very careful to cultivate a balanced and cautious judgement, may fall overnight into a similar madness.” (Russell does not discuss religious demagogues, as they were not so powerful in his day as they have since become. Instead, he goes on: “I do not wish ... to preach a purely negative emotional attitude; I am not suggesting that all strong feeling should be subjected to destructive analysis. I am advocating this attitude only in relation to those emotions which are the basis of collective hysteria, for it is collective hysteria that facilitates wars and dictatorships. But wisdom is not merely intellectual: intellect may guide and direct, but does not generate the force that leads to action. The force must be derived from the emotions.... [For the development] of emotions that have desirable social consequences ... much depends upon early childhood; much, also, upon economic circumstances. Something, however, can be done, in the course of ordinary education, to provide the nourishment upon which the better emotions can grow, and to bring about the realisation of what may give value to human life.”) 27. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius (Jonathan Cape, 1990; 1991 edition: Vintage) p. 424.g 28. D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma. Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Bombay, 1951-54),VII, p. 230. 29. [Letter of 1928 from Nehru to Gandhi] 30. Pyarelal and Sushila Nayar, In Gandhiji’s Mirror (Delhi, 1991), pp. 9f.