Lessons from the death of two remarkable women

The grave of Valliamma R. Munuswamy Mudaliar, Johannesburg. [courtesy : Sharada Ramanathan]

‘Birthday’ is a standard word. But not ‘deathday’. Too inauspicious, perhaps. Too grim. But that is surely ahistorical. Some deathdays are to be celebrated for the persons who have died and the circumstances in which they have died bear out Donne’s famous lines: “Death be not proud… for those whom thou think’st thou doth overthrow die not.”

The 22nd of February — tomorrow — is the deathday of a woman who did her life proud by her death. Valliamma R. Munuswamy Mudaliar belonged to a Tamil family from the village of Thillaiyadi, now in the state’s Nagapattinam district. Her ancestors had been indentured, like several others from the Indian peninsula and even from ‘up North’, to work on plantations and in mines in South Africa.

In the early 1910s, these Indian labourers, poorly paid, uncivilly treated, without political or even civic rights, were riled by a racial poll tax — Three Pounds per head — that hurt their pride more than it hurt their purses. This, together with other disabilities like restrictions on movement between province and province and a requirement for getting registered on the basis of finger prints, was resisted by the affronted Indians who faced the consequences — stiff fines or jail. But when, on March 14, 1913, Justice Malcolm Searle, of the Cape Supreme Court, decreed every Indian marriage is invalid that is not registered before a Marriage Officer or celebrated according to Christian rites, more than pride was hurt. By a parallel order, Natal children of resident Indians or their parents were required to produce, if they needed admission in another province, certificates of birth. M.K. Gandhi memorialized the Minister for the Interior, General Smuts, to the effect that marriages celebrated according to Hindu, Muslim or Parsi rites were fully recognized by Indian law and that “it is a well-recognised fact that very few births are registered in India and it is practically impossible to produce certificates of birth except in rare cases.”

The collective selfhood of Indian-South Africans stood insulted, the honour of motherhood stood besmirched. Kasturba Gandhi asked her husband, “Then I am not your wife according to the laws of this country?” He said she was right, adding, “Our children are not our heirs.”

The community rose in a spontaneous protest. Indians, women leading, struck work and marched to break inter-province barriers to say, ‘We will not be humiliated thus.’ And they went on a great march, criss-crossing the border between the provinces of the Transvaal and Natal.

Valliamma, born in 1898 in Johannesburg, at 16 years of age, was among “the marching great” from the Transvaal side, Kasturba from the Natal side. Nearly 40,000 of them courted arrest, with nearly 10,000 being actually imprisoned, Valliamma among them. She went cheerfully and defiantly into the march and entered jail as a sense of duty to her motherland’s — India’s — greatness. Imprisoned in Maritzburg jail, she endured its rigours along with other women satyagrahis who included Kasturba. The sentence for ‘hard labour’ included the task of washing fellow prisoners’ clothes. Many fell ill, seriously ill. Valliamma, very seriously. Released when on the verge of death “with a fatal fever”, she just about managed to get back home where Gandhi came to see her. 

“She was confined to bed when I saw her,” he writes in his classic, Satyagraha in South Africa. “[H]er emaciated body was a terrible thing to behold.”

“‘Valliamma, you do not regret having gone to jail?’, I asked.

“‘Regret? I am even now ready to go to jail again if I am arrested,’ said Valliamma.

“‘But what if it results in your death?’ I pursued.

“‘I do not mind it. Who would not love to die for one’s motherland?’”

Thillaiyadi Valliamma died on February 22, 1914. Her remains are interred in Braamfontein Cemetery, Johannesburg. Gandhi writes: “Valliamma will live in the history of South African Satyagrahis as long as India lives.” Her deathday is a day of celebration, for India lives! A film on the life of this icon by Sharada Ramanathan is expected to be released shortly.

Thirty years later, her jail-mate was in prison again, this time in India. Kasturba had been permitted to join her husband, imprisoned in the Aga Khan’s Palace Prison in Poona, for having heralded the Quit India resolution, asking Britain to exit from India. And she was gravely ill.

A wedding anniversary occurred at this time — that of a fellow prisoner. Kasturba asked Gandhi, “How many years have we been married?” Gandhi looked at her and said, “Why, do you also want to celebrate your anniversary?” Everyone around them laughed, Kasturba too. She was 74 that year as was her husband. They had been married for sixty one years.

On January 6, 1944, Gandhi wrote to the prison authorities: “… the patient has got into very low spirits. She despairs of life… Her state is pitiful.” And he asked for permission to be given to near and dear ones to visit her. As also for an ayurvedic physician for she had faith in that system of medicine. Her health continued to deteriorate and on February 22, 1944, her husband’s hands clasping her, Kasturba died.

She was cremated in the grounds of the prison. A tulasi plant grows on the spot in Poona.

The House of Commons was told on March 2, 1944: “… She was receiving all possible medical care and attention…” Gratefully acknowledging the fact that the regular attendants did all they could, Gandhi responded by saying the help that was asked for, when at all given, was given after a long wait, and the ayurvedic physician was permitted to attend only after he had to tell the prison authorities that if he could not procure the help that she wanted he should be separated from her as he ought not to be made a helpless witness of the agonies she was passing through.

On the Valliamma-Kasturba Deathday, the following thoughts deserve reflection:

First, a prisoner is a prisoner but a woman prisoner is a whole family in prison by proxy because of those, especially minor children, who depend on her. According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s report for 2019, of the 4.5 lakh prisoners in India today, about 3.3 lakh are ‘under-trial prisoners’. The overwhelming number of these are going to be found to be innocent. State governments which are in charge of this ‘state subject’ must, especially in our Covid-19 times, see to the urgent release of the women among the undertrials under the salutary Section 436-A of the Criminal Procedure Code introduced in the CrPC in 2005 as, essentially, a human right measure.

Second, recalling what Gandhi said in South Africa about the lack of the practice of paper documentation in Indian families, we must ask: what papers can families required to produce them to establish their citizenship in the Republic of India possibly produce? Is it right, is it fair, for some fellow-citizens to be asked to produce such paper proof?

Third, Indian women in 1913-1914 South Africa responded to the unravelling of the man-woman bond in terms of religion, a cause to which Valliamma martyred herself. Is the classification of marriages by religion, in the Republic of India, as is being sought in certain sections of our body politic, legally sound, morally right and, above all, civilizationally justifiable?

No politicians, no lawyers, no agitation-addicts but two Indian women, one from India’s western seaboard, another from its southeastern, gifted with a rare commitment and great clarity, ask for February 22, their shared deathday, to be, for Indian women in prison or in fear, to be their Faithday.

courtesy : “The Telegraph”; 21 February 2021

What would the Mahatma have done now, with Covid-19 upon us

Vallabhbhai Patel and M.K. Gandhi with Manibahen Patel

Two questions have been put to me over these weeks: one, is it true that Gandhi was laid up with the Spanish flu in 1918? Two, what would he have been doing now, were he alive?

To answer the first: he was, it is true, ill, grievously ill, within a faltering heart-beat of death, when the pandemic was sweeping across the world. But he was not down with that deadly flu. A brief thumbing down history’s pages would be in order here.

Gandhi had been busy in Gujarat’s district of Kheda that year, with his new-found and invaluable associate, Vallabhbhai Patel, asking peasants hit by a crippling crop failure not to pay land taxes. His success in Champaran the previous year in the Indigo satyagraha had encouraged him to come to Kheda’s aid with the weapon of satyagraha. Frederick Pratt, the commissioner of the northern districts of Bombay Presidency, told Gandhi to desist. “In India,” said the Gujarat-knowing and Gujarati-knowing civil servant, “to defy the law of revenue is to take a step which would destroy all administration.” But the Gandhi-Patel duo persisted with the satyagraha and over 3,000 peasants signed a pledge not to pay the land tax and, despite severe penalties, most of them kept to the pledge. At the same time, with World War I’s shadow extending by the hour, a massive recruitment campaign had begun. The viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, who had come to know and grudgingly, perhaps, to respect Gandhi from the Champaran Indigo satyagraha, invited Gandhi to a war conference that he had called in Delhi in April. Gandhi made a one-sentence speech saying he supported the recruitment effort. But he spoke that sentence in Hindustani and by that simple and single gesture interlaced his support with India’s honour. And he did not suspend the Kheda satyagraha. Chelmsford seemed to understand Gandhi’s nuanced cooperation but Sir William Vincent, Home Member, saying to Gandhi that he had “given a lot of trouble to the local administration”, asked pointedly, “Well… have you brought a single recruit?” That was a taunt. But it worked. Gandhi plunged into an intense recruitment drive in the same district where he was conducting the satyagraha — Kheda. The raj reciprocated by accepting the Gandhi-Patel demand and in June the two leaders were able to announce that the peasants’ demands had been accepted by the raj. With that, being true to his word to the viceroy, Gandhi intensified his recruitment campaign. If Vincent had taunted him in Delhi, some of his ashram colleagues demanded from him a reconciling of ahimsa with army recruitment. His reply was more clever than convincing: first, ahimsa was often a screen for cowardice. Second, discipline — such as military discipline — can create a new self-confidence among Indians to cultivate a higher ahimsak vitality with which “we may even fight the [British] Empire should it play foul with us” and Kheda’s peasants could take India towards Dominion Status and one of them could even “aspire to the Viceregal office”. Plunging, for Gandhi, meant exactly that. He plunged into recruitment — also into exhaustion, breakdown.

The success that attended his satyagraha in Kheda eluded him completely in the recruitment drive. On August 11, in Kheda’s Nadiad, he simply collapsed. It was not just the failure to recruit but, one must here say with all objectivity, the conflict within him about ahimsa versus army recruitment took its toll. His own clever reply was not working within him. And he also managed to get into a vicious abdominal infection. “I have suffered indeed,” he wrote to C.F. Andrews on August 29. And to his son, Devadas, “It was all my fault.” Moving from Nadiad to Ambalal Sarabhai’s home in Ahmedabad and then to the Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi thought his end was near and on October 1, got his oldest son, Harilal, in Calcutta and Devadas, then in Madras, sent for. Recuperation was painful, and painfully slow.

Curious being the ways of Fate and curiouser still, always, in its ways with Gandhi, even as he recovered with agonizing slowness, his grandson, Shanti, Harilal’s eldest son, and Harilal’s wife, Gulab, or Chanchal as she was also known, fell mortally ill. And in their case there was no doubt about the cause. Victims of the great influenza epidemic sweeping across the continent, they died in the last week of October, within days of one another in the village of Patharada in Gujarat where they had gone, in vain, alas, for ‘health-change’. Kasturba had her three other motherless grandchildren from Gulab brought over to the ashram.

So, the Spanish flu that lasted about 15 months, making 500 million people sick worldwide and killing between 3 to 5 per cent of the world’s population, while not felling Gandhi, crippled his family.

Not far from where this tragedy was enacting itself, it struck another family that Gandhi was to become inseparable from. Hitting equally hard and poignant in a different, almost epic way. Abdul Ghaffar Khan, later to be known as Badshah Khan and Frontier Gandhi, had his son Ghani gripped by the Spanish flu. As the boy seemed to slip into its labyrinth, his mother, Ghaffar Khan’s wife, Mehr Qandh, prayed that god should spare her son and, if substitution was acceptable, take her life instead. Not to placate unreason but to place a historical fact on the table, as Ghani began to recover, Mehr began to sink and, very rapidly, Crossed Over. Ghani was to become an artist and poet, studying for a while at Santiniketan’s Kala Bhavana.

The second question, namely, “What would Gandhi have done now, with Covid-19 upon us?” is far more difficult to address for it deals not with facts but with suppositions. Yet it must not be dodged.

Gandhi was at his intense best when dealing with illness and epidemics, finding some quirky but very specific, practical and demanding ‘solutions’, in which the enforcing of hygiene regimes was central. Though actuated by his own sharply developed sense of the physical body’s working, he was very consultative — seeking and considering the advice of medical practitioners, both ‘Western’ and ‘Traditional’, but keeping well away from superstitious, ritualistic or irrational nostrums. He did not always heed medical advice but he did not ever dismiss it ab initio or without mature reflection.

Today, who can claim to know or say with any confidence what Gandhi would have done? No one. But Gandhi’s recorded example of coping with such situations tells us what he may and very likely would have done. These may yield the following pointers not as his, but as those of a vigilant and humble common sense:

1. Recognizing the legitimate authority and inherent conscientiousness of governments, we the governed should treat expert and official advice, especially about hygiene and disinfection, with respect and observe it scrupulously.

2. Similarly and simultaneously, recognizing the integrated experience and inherent good sense of us, the governed, the government should keep a helpline open — not from but to us — to seek public counsel on the measures particularly as related to restrictions. These must see who and how and where the restrictions hurt the people they are intended to help. Rules are best observed when they have louvres for genuine exceptions and exemptions such as for the space-less, job-less, family-less, the elderly, the physically and mentally challenged. If Chelmsford could hearken to the Kheda satyagraha in the midst of World War I, this is not asking too much of our administrations.

3. We should replace utterly useless commercial, political, sectarian icons with the real heroines and heroes of this human crisis — doctors and medical workers like nurses and lab technicians who are the brave and endangered Fire Brigade for this conflagration. And those providers of essential services who are working with unflagging and hazardous zeal.

4. Responding to Palagummi Sainath’s reminder on his PARI portal of heroism among the delicately interwoven economies of rural India weavers, toymakers, other artisans and craftspeople, farmers, labourers urban and rural, sanitation workers, displaced labourers, cancer patients from rural areas lying outside major hospitals, nomadic pastoralists, daily wagers, folk artists, fisherfolk, barbers, Dalits and adivasis in various occupations, offer to all of them, whose livelihoods have been cut off at this time, not just salutation but genuflection and — assistance.

Finally and most pertinently, in Gandhi’s spirit, we must de-throne, un-crown, and dismiss from its High Seat the cult of blind materialist goals that is decimating our collective lung and converting the human species into the planet’s Hitler, killing us in the gas chambers of our greed, our own Final Solution.

courtesy : “The Telegraph”, 19 April 2020

He disliked statues of himself, yet they exist everywhere

Nancy Cox-McCormack, sculpted M.K. Gandhi while he went about his work while attending the Second Round Table Conference. She presented his son, Devadas Gandhi, (who was present there) a small photograph of her work in progress, with “unfinished” written across it

Image provided by Gopalkrishna Gandhi

Gandhi has gone wholly, energetically unheeded in one matter. Learning that a Gandhi statue was proposed to be put up on the grounds of an ensuing session of the Congress, he wrote in Harijan on February 11, 1939: “It will be a waste of good money to spend Rs 25,000 on erecting a clay or metallic statue of the figure of man who is himself made of clay…” He went on to say he disliked the very idea of statues and images of him being put up.

But he was to relent and let at least four sculptors work on their clay models, ‘live’.

Eight years before his 1939 statement Gandhi permitted two American sculptors, Jo Davidson (1883-1952) and Nancy Cox-McCormack (1885-1967), to sculpt him while he went about his work. This was in the October of 1931, in London, when he was attending the Second Round Table Conference. These two and the British sculptor, Clare Sheridan (1885-1970, a cousin of Churchill, admirer of Lenin and, briefly, a lover of Charlie Chaplin), had importuned him to let them sculpt him, ‘undisturbed’. Davidson bantered as he carved the clay. “I see,” quipped Gandhi, “you make heroes out of mud.” Davidson responded, “And sometimes vice versa.” Cox-McCormack worked rather more silently, giving Gandhi’s son, Devadas (who was present), a small photograph of her work in progress, with “unfinished” written across it. Clare Sheridan, who observed Gandhi not just in the setting but even beyond, records: “I was present at a reception at the Carlton Hotel in honour of the Round Table delegates. There were innumerable politicians, several ex-Viceroys and a galaxy of Maharajahs. Gandhi did not want to seem unfriendly by abstaining, but worldly parties were not in his line. As a friendly gesture however, he put in an appearance, that is to say he ventured as far as the doorway, and there he stood enframed and hesitating. Almost immediately there was a general movement of the crowd towards him. The Maharajah of Bikaner, magnificently tall and imposing, was one of the first who went forward to greet him. Lady Minto, widow of a Viceroy and an old friend of my family’s, said to me: ‘I must know him — you must introduce me —’ and the two remained for some time absorbed in conversation.”

To Clara Quien (1903-1987), a sculptor of Dutch extraction, also belongs the distinction of having sculpted Gandhi ‘live’. Quien was a student of the Florentine master, Andreotti. With her husband, she travelled through Russia and China during World War I and lived for a significant period in the 1940s in the Kashmir Valley. Travelling in India, Quien got the opportunity to meet and sculpt Gandhi, in Sevagram.

Two non-sculpting artists, the British wood-engraver, Clara Leighton (1898-1989), and the expressionist draughtsman, Feliks Topolski (1907-1989), were also to work on him from life, on their charcoal and pencil drawings.

The sculpting interest has outlived Gandhi.

Fredda Brilliant (1903-1999), a Polish sculptor of “gypsy creativity”, was an ardent socialist. She has sculpted Thomas Mann, Georgi Dimitrov, Chekhov, Mayakovsky and John F. Kennedy among others. Her best-known work is, however, of a furrowed, introspecting Gandhi seated bare-chested and cross-legged, knees jutting out of the pedestal, at the centre of Tavistock Square, London. Brilliant did not see Gandhi but pored over many photographs of him with her sharp and highly critical eyes, which led to the making, by her sharp, sensitive hands, of her Gandhi.

Gandhi never visited China or Japan and one would imagine he had little impact on artists there. Not so. Beijing has an unusual Gandhi statue by Yuan Xikun, showing him reading a book that is held up by him. He looks like he could be a friend of one of the three Chinese poets Vikram Seth has translated. Gandhi is reading the book with care and — worry. What is the book? One will never know but if Yuan’s passion for the physical environment is anything to go by, the book is one that was unwritten in Gandhi’s time — Martin Rees’s deeply troubling work on the future of humankind — Our Final Century.

Likewise, there is an ineffably gentle statue of the Mahatma in Tokyo’s leafy Tetsugakudo Park in Nakano-ku. He is very Japanese-looking in that, very Zen, a survivor of Hiroshima. His palms are joined in a namaste that challenges the world of violence to rescue itself from itself. Nándor Wagner, a sculptor of Hungarian descent, had long made Japan his home and created a garden of philosophy with eight figures, including the Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tse, and — Gandhi.

Gandhi had a deeply fulfilling, formative association with Tolstoy, conducted wholly through correspondence, after his transformative reading of Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. But that apart, one would not imagine Gandhi having a ‘presence’ in Russia’s imagination. And yet, the sculptor, Dmitry Ryabichev, and his son, Aleksander Ryabichev, have been inspired to do a most extraordinary statue of Gandhi, seated, arm upraised in a posture that is as indefinable as it is unforgettable. It reminds one at once of Rodin’s The Thinker. The original is in Delhi’s Rajghat complex, an edition in Moscow, in the garden of the Indian ambassador’s residence.

South African Tinka Christopher’s young, wind-blown advocate Gandhi in Johannesburg stands, literally, on a stunning footing of its own. V.P. Karmarkar’s bronze statue of Gandhi in Nairobi, unveiled by the then vice-president of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, in 1956, has been historically and artistically compelling.

Latin America and Gandhi have an ideational connect that defies empirical explaining. There are, in Brazil alone, three Gandhi statues: one in the Ibirapuera park in São Paulo, another statue by Gautam Pal in the city of Londrina (Province of Paraná) and the third in Cinelandia in downtown Rio de Janeiro by the veteran Sankho Chaudhuri. But there it is, personifying the inspiration that Gandhi was for Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. The doughty Argentinian sculptor and peace activist has made a bronze statue of Gandhi that stands in Barcelona with his joined palms glistening — a sculpting coup. Barcelona, incidentally, is a portrait sculptors’ paradise boasting of statues, among others, of Anne Frank, George Orwell and John Lennon.

The latest Gandhi statue outside India is that by the Scottish sculptor, Philip Jackson (born 1944), standing in the company of Lincoln, Smuts, Churchill and Mandela, in Parliament Square, London. Jackson’s work captures the strong silence, the extraordinarily powerful simplicity of the subject. And it exemplifies Jackson’s description of his art as “grow(ing) out of the ground, the texture resembles tree bark, rock, or lava flow”.

The most overarching statue of Gandhi, anywhere, has to be Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury’s majestic bronze. That strident Gandhi is to be seen in editions of it beyond its original location in New Delhi. Ram Sutar’s meditative one, also in bronze, awes those who see it. Replicas of it have been sent across the world from India.

Gandhi statues in India and elsewhere have been subject to vandalism. Like those of the other greatly sculpted figure, B.R. Ambedkar, Gandhi statues have been disfigured and messed up by assailants, mainly from the Right. The radical Left has not spared them either. This is no surprise, given that he thought and lived challengingly.

But there is another sculpted Gandhi which survives, even thrives on, vandalism. This one is in no bronze or marble. It will be found in no art catalogue, no list of Gandhi-sculptures. It will not be considered ‘art’. In its frank depiction of the un-handsome looks of its subject it can have no peer. It shows him just as he was, only more un-prepossessing. It has been sculpted by what may be called the sculpting genius of our people. I refer to the ‘very ordinary’ cement-plaster bust of Gandhi that stands on dusty pedestals in the cities, towns and villages of India. This bust, for all its rusticity, says something vastly simpler but so much rarer than do the great bronzes and rock-cuts. It says, simply, ‘This man told no lies, was honest, bore no hatred towards anyone.’

This ubiquitous ‘common’ bust is, in a sense, like Cox-McCormack’s work, “unfinished”. Why so? Because Gandhi’s work among the people amid whom his bust stands is unfinished. And will so remain as long as fear rules freedom, corruption dominates governance and suspicion fans hatred between our communities.

courtesy : “The Telegraph”, 21 October 2018