CAWNPORE
Personally I have little use for political speaking. If I know something about the question at issue, I find it quite unnecessary to listen to an orator who repeats in a summarised, and generally garbled, form the information I already possess; knowing what I do, I am quite capable of making up my own mind on the subject under discussion without listening to his rhetorical persuasions. If, on the other hand, I know nothing, it is not to the public speaker that I turn for the information on which to base my judgment. The acquisition of full and accurate knowledge about any given subject is a lengthy and generally boring process, entailing the reading of many books, the collating of numerous opinions. It therefore follows, inevitably, that the imparting of knowledge can never be part of a public speaker’s work, for the simple reason that if his speeches are boring and lengthy—and boring and lengthy they must be, if he is to give anything like a fair and full account of the facts—nobody will listen to him.
Now it happens that I have a prejudice in favour of information. I like to know what I am doing and why. Hence, when I am ignorant, I go to the library, not to the public meeting. In the library, I know, I shall be able to collect enough facts to permit me to form an opinion of my own. At the public meeting, on the other hand, the speaker will give me only a garbled selection of the available facts, and will devote the bulk of his time and energies to persuading me by means of rhetoric to adopt his opinions. Political speaking is thus of no use to me. Either I know enough about the point at issue to make the oratory of politicians entirely superfluous; or else I know so little that their oratory is apt to be misleading and dangerous. In the first case I am in a position to make up my own mind; in the second I am not, and I do not desire to have my mind made up for me.
The All-India Congress at Cawnpore lasted for three days, and in the course of those three days I listened to more political speeches than I had previously listened to in all the years of my life. Many of them were in Hindi and therefore, to me, incomprehensible. Of the speeches in English most were eloquent; but for the reasons I have set out above they were of little use to me. If the Congress was impressive—and it did impress me, profoundly—it was not by reason of the oratory of the delegates. Oratory in large quantities is always slightly ridiculous. Particularly if it is the oratory of people who are not in a position to give effect to their words.
The English in India are very quick in seeing this absurdity. Possessing as they do the power to act, they have no need to talk. It is easy for them to mock the powerless and disinherited Indians for the luxuriant copiousness of their eloquence. The Indians themselves are quite aware of the absurdity of so much oratory. “We talk too much,” an old Indian said to me. “But at least that’s doing something. In my young days we didn’t even talk.” In the beginning was the word . . . Words are creative. In the long run they have a way of generating actions. But it was not, I repeat, by the oratory that I was impressed. It was by the orators and by their audience.
Imagine an enormous tent, a hundred yards or more in length by sixty in width. Looking up, you could see, through the thin brown canvas of its roof, the shadows of wind-blown flags, and from time to time the passing silhouette of a kite or slowly soaring vulture. The floor of the tent and the platform were decently covered with matting, and it was on this matting—for there were no chairs—that the delegates sat, and sat unflinchingly, I may add, from before noon till long after sunset, six hours, seven hours and, on the last day, nearly nine. Those nine foodless hours of squatting on the floor were very nearly my last. By the time they were over, I was all but dead of sheer fatigue. But the delegates seemed positively to enjoy every moment of them. Comfort and regular meals are Western habits, which few, even of the wealthy, have adopted in the East. The sudden change to discomfort and protracted starvation is very painful to Western limbs and loins, western hams, and Western stomachs.
It was a huge crowd. There must have been seven or eight thousand delegates packed together on the floor of the tent. In the old days, I was told, it would have been a variegated crowd of many-coloured turbans and fezes, interspersed with European hats and sun helmets. But now, since the days of non-co-operation, nobody wears anything but the white cotton “Gandhi cap.” It is an ugly headgear, like a convict’s cap. The wearers of it find the similitude symbolic. All India, they say, is one great gaol; for its inhabitants the convict’s is the only suitable, the only logical uniform. From our exalted seats on the platform we looked down over what seemed a great concourse of prisoners.
It was the size of the crowd that first impressed me. Mere quantity is always impressive. The human observer is small and single. Great numbers, huge dimensions overawe him into feeling yet more solitary and minute. In the world of art even ugliness and disproportion can impress us, if there be but enough of them. The buildings which flank Victoria Street in London are architecturally monstrous; but they are so high, and the monotonous stretch of them is so long, that they end by taking on a certain grandeur. The individuals composing a Derby or Cup Final crowd may be repulsive both in appearance and character; but the crowd is none the less a magnificent and impressive thing.
But at Cawnpore it was not only the quantity of humanity assembled within the Congress tent that impressed; it was its quality too. Looking through the crowd one was struck by the number of fine, intelligent faces. These faces were particularly plentiful on and in the neighbourhood of the platform, where the leaders and the more important of their followers were assembled. Whenever I remarked a particularly sensitive, intelligent or powerful face, I would make inquiries regarding its owner. In almost every case I found he had spent at least six months in gaol for a political offence. After a little practice, I learned to recognise the “criminal type” at sight.
CAWNPORE
“Pusillus, persona contemptibilis, vivacis ingenii et oculum habens perspicacem gratumque, et sponte fluens ei non deerat eloquium.” Such is William of Tyre’s description of Peter the Hermit. It would serve equally well as a description of Mahatma Gandhi.
The saint of popular imagination is a person of majestic carriage, with a large intellectual forehead, expressive and luminous eyes, and a good deal of waved hair, preferably of a snowy whiteness. I do not profess to be very well up in hagiology; but my impression is that the majority of the saints about whom we know any personal details have not conformed to this ideal type. They have been more like Peter the Hermit and Mahatma Gandhi.
The qualities which make a man a saint—faith, an indomitable will, a passion for self-sacrifice—are not those that extrinsicate themselves in striking bodily stigmata. Men of great intellectual capacities generally look what they are. Sometimes it happens that these persons are further possessed of saintly qualities, and then we have the picturesque saint of popular imagination. But one can be a saint without possessing those qualities of mind which mould the face of genius into such striking and unforgettable forms.
Looking through the crowd in the Congress tent the casual observer would have been struck by the appearance of Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, the President of the Congress, of Pandit Motilal Nehru, the leader of the Swarajist Party. These people, he would have said, are somehow intrinsically important; their faces proclaim it. It is probable that he would never even have noticed the little man in the dhoti, with the shawl over his naked shoulders; the emaciated little man with the shaved head, the large ears, the rather foxy features; the quiet little man, whose appearance is only remarkable when he laughs—for he laughs with the whole-hearted laughter of a child, and his smile has an unexpected and boyish charm. No, the casual observer would probably never even have noticed Mahatma Gandhi.
CAWNPORE
In the West we admire a man who fasts in order to break a world’s record or win a wager; we understand his motives and can sympathise with them. But the man who goes out for forty days into the wilderness (and forty days, it may be added, are nothing in comparison with modern records), the man who fasts for the good of his soul has become incomprehensible to us. We regard him with suspicion and not, as our ancestors would have done, with reverence. So far from worshipping him, we think that he ought to be put into an asylum. With us, the ascetic, the mortifier of the flesh
