This captivating book is the first collection ever published of the letters Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Charles Andrews wrote to one another, turn by turn, over nearly 30 years. Each of these remarkable people speaks openly and freely to the two others — their very closest friends — about matters simultaneously of enormous political moment and intense personal importance.
Uma Das Gupta has selected about 600 items from over 1,100 letters and telegrams totalling thousands of pages. With an introduction which is itself a historical education, she has divided the book into significant phases of the three men’s lives and the many struggles they were involved in over white rule in South Africa and over the long, troubled road to the end of British rule over India. The short commentary which opens each chapter is never intrusive, and helpful footnotes accompany almost every document, though one such dates Manu at 8300 BC. Crucially, however, Das Gupta lets the three speak for themselves, which they do with often painful self-awareness and sensitivity; of themselves they demanded all that it takes to act against evil without hating those who do evil.
Andrews, who had already been an Anglican missionary in India for eight years, met Tagore in London in 1912, at one of the latter’s poetry readings; he immediately decided to join Tagore at Santiniketan. The book covers the friendships between all three, and goes on to Gandhi’s and Andrews’s time in South Africa, Tagore’s creation of the Santiniketan Ashram and his development of the Phoenix School, and World War I; it then moves to the 1919 Simla Conference and on through other major issues to the kinds of message Gandhi and Tagore respectively sought to convey.
Late in 1913, Andrews acted on advice from Tagore and Gopal Krishna Gokhale to go and meet Gandhi. On disembarking at Durban, he went to the slight, ascetic figure standing on the dockside in a white kurta and dhoti of rough cotton — the material indentured labourers wore — and touched his feet.
Letters connect
The three had no option but to write letters; for long periods they were separated by vast distances across land and sea and often fell sick with the effort they expended in the cause of Independence. From his true home, Santiniketan, Andrews constantly moved to and between Delhi, Shimla, South Africa, Fiji, East Africa, the U.S., Australia, and Britain. Tagore travelled to five continents 34 times in all; Gandhi worked in South Africa for years, and then travelled the length and breadth of India for decades.
The underlying narrative is of course political. Gandhi, working on a private legal action in South Africa in 1893, took up the matter of Indians’ position in the country and founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894. Andrews, disturbed by the Church’s collusion with imperialism and white racism, was horrified by what he saw in South Africa, and spoke out for Africans and Indians. In 1914, he renounced his mission and reshaped his religious practice.
He later condemned the whole imperial project, and despite being uncomfortable in political life he always spoke his mind to the many he knew in high places, including the viceroys Lord Hardinge and Lord Irwin, and Ramsay MacDonald, thrice the Prime Minister.
The letters often show sharp disagreements too. Gandhi, who had served in the Boer War, shook Andrews and Tagore by calling for Indian volunteers to join the British in World War I. He argued that accepting conscription would turn Indians into government troops but that volunteering — the million Indians who participated equalled the number of all other British troops involved — would place a moral obligation on Britain after the war.
The fully intentional British betrayal of any such obligation greatly strengthened the Independence struggle; the Rowlatt Act and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre — which Gandhi, on the evidence, called premeditated — led to the Non-cooperation Movement, but here Tagore, with his sense of all that humanity shares, differed with Gandhi.
Yet the movement’s effect in uniting Indians had Andrews’s approval, even if Andrews and Tagore respectively had reservations about what Andrews called Gandhi’s ‘moral fervour’ over celibacy, and over alcohol and opium.
Differences of opinion
Tagore and Andrews, furthermore, felt that Gandhi significantly underestimated the social urgency of ending untouchability, though Gandhi himself had no illusions about several bigoted factions in the Indian National Congress.
Urban students’ avoidance of village life and work dismayed Andrews, and Tagore was very disturbed by problems which could not be blamed on the colonials. In contrast to what he considers ubiquitous intellectual energy in western life, he says, ‘In our Indian University we simply have the results of this energy — but not the living velocity itself — and therefore our mind is burdened and not quickened by our education.’
All three knew what immense responsibilities they bore, but they never wavered in their struggle for Indian independence and for an end to the global evils of racism and aggressive nationalism. Tagore and Andrews lived to see India close to Independence; the ailing Andrews said, in perhaps his last words to Gandhi, “Mohan, swaraj is coming.”
Friendships of ‘Largeness and Freedom’: Andrews, Tagore, and Gandhi — An Epistolary Account; edited by Uma Das Gupta, Oxford University Press, ₹1,495.
