Many of the scores of letters to Mahatma Gandhi that Srinivasa Sastri wrote were from his home in Mylapore, Madras (now Chennai). The house was named “Swaagatham” (“welcome“!).
I have visited that house several times in the 1980s when Karthik (Sastri’s great grandson), my friend, used to invite me there late afternoons for an hour or two to exchange and compare notes on how each was preparing then for upcoming the final Charterred Accountancy examinations. So feverishly tense used to be our exam-preparations that simply to relieve ourselves of pent-up nervous tension, we often to used to play shuttle-badminton in the large front-yard of Sastri’s home. After we had both sweated it out in a strenuous workout in a game or two, we’d relax and chat a bit, seated on old-style wicker-chairs kept out in the porch. Karthik’s mother, Srinivasa Sastri’s grand-daughter, I remember, a very kindly and gracious lady (she’s now in her 90s and, bless her, still lives happily with son, Karthik), used to serve us cool lemon juice or hot coffee to lift up our spirits and drive our examination blues away.
Sastri’s “swaagatham” house was situated on V.M.Street (Venkatachala Mudali Street) that today veers off from Dr Radhakrishna Salai to Luz, Mylapore via the Madras Sanskrit College and Tiruvalluvar Statue. The house I remember was a very spacious, sprawling and stately bungalow adjacent to the Childrens Club. It was a two-storied building with large frontage, airy rooms with vaulting high-roof, long cool verandahs and broad balconies. Whenever I visited that house, in my mind, I couldn’t help imagining the Rt. Hon’ble Srinivasa Sastri’s himself striding in spirit around the very spot I happened to be standing upon…. It was a very horripilating, humbling feeling indeed.
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One of the very first things that Sastri intended to do on his return to India from South Africa was to write from his home in “Swaagatham” a full-fledged report of his mission solely for the eyes of Mahatma Gandhi. He was aware that during the course of his assignment in South Africa, many people from there as from within India, had been feeding Gandhi in drips and dribbles with all sorts of information on Sastri’s activities. Such informal and informant channels of communication were giving Gandhi positive feedback while a few others were funneling only negative stuff about him.
Gandhi’s son Maniklal Gandhi was one such person.
Maniklal who lived in Durban South Africa was the Editor of a newspaper called “The Indian Opinion“. It had, in fact, been founded earlier by Mahatma Gandhi himself. The news paper was advocating for the rights of the Indian community and hence was also covering and publicising Sastri’s activities as India’s Agent-General there. Initially, Maniklal was extremely unhappy with Sastri’s public speeches and stated positions on how he intended to serve the Indian community’s cause in South Africa. He too like many of Sastri’s detractors felt that Sastri was bending over backwards to ingratiate himself with the British Ruling dispensation in South Africa, trying to placate and appease them. In his letters to his father, Maniklal minced no words about what he felt about Sastri’s speeches and work.
Gandhi read his son Maniklal’s reports, however, with more than a pinch of salt. The Mahatma had greater faith in his friend Sastri than he had in his own son’s instinct and political judgement. He made no secret of his feelings directly to Sastri in a very candid and very affectionately worded letter.
My dear brother.
I am watching what is happening but consider it wise not to say anything. But I shall not hesitate to intervene when necessary.
What I find disturbing is a para in Manilal’s letter which I translate below:
“I am not quite satisfied with his speeches. He crosses the limits in praising the Empire and the benefits conferred by it on India. He thinks it necessary thus to please the Europeans. He seems to believe that thus only shall we secure something. The effect of these speeches cannot be good in India. He (the publisher?) has therefore asked me not to print them in ” Indian Opinion”.“
He has not the faculty of discrimination to see that we are like blood brothers even though we do not hold the same views about tbe Empire. I have not said to him much about this letter of his beyond warning him against coming to hasty judgements and telling him that you do honestly believe the Empire activity to be on the whole heneficial.
But you will of course not hesitate to summon him before you and speak to him if necessary as you would to your own son. … For he is a good boy and brave boy. …
Sastri had been keen to brief Gandhi through a comprehensive report of his mission in South Africa to disabuse him of any negative impressions the Mahatma might have gathered from the negative drip feedback fed to him by some quarters that included even Maniklal, the Mahatma’s son. Sastri felt that if Gandhi was convinced about the success of his South African mission, he needed to worry little about what others in the INC or elsewhere thought about him.
However, to Sastri’s chagrin, he could not send in such a report since Gandhi at that time was serving a sentence in jail in Yerawada.
” (I felt) ….the first thing to do on return to the shores of India was to go to Mahatma Gandhi and make a report to him of our doings. To no one could a prior report be made. If he approved of our work, that was enough– this was the feeling not merely of myself, who may be considered to have a weakness for Mahatma Gandhi, but of all with whom I was associated (as colleagues). And if I may for the first time publish a secret, it was also the feeling of the members of the Government of India. How sad I must feel now, you can imagine, when it is not possible for me to make similar report to the one man in all India who has a right to form a judgement of South African affairs and lead public sentiment in the country! “
Gandhi of course, as his later correspondence below reveals — and before Sastri’s return to India and the submission of his intended report — acknowledged openly that the trust he had had placed in Sastri to do the job in South Africa stood completely vindicated. And that he had also been right not to place too much trust in his son Maniklal’s own assessment of Sastri’s work.
SABARMATI: 26th February 1928
My dear Brother
I have been duly receiving the duplicates of your demi-official notes for Sir Muhammad Habibullah. Manilal and others too keep me informed of your movements. Already urgent letters are being received to implore you not to leave South Africa at the end of your year. They say you are already counting your months. And they are trembling in their shoes, and more than they, am I trembling, and perhaps my trembling is weightier because of the absence of shoes. For, I really feel that except for grave reasons of health it would be a national tragedy for you to leave South Africa at the present moment. And I am sorry to have to say– but it is true — that no one else can successfully replace you at the present moment. The familiarity that your stay in South Africa might have produced has certainly not bred contempt; on the contrary, it has gained greater respect for you from those whose respect counts for the work.
And just as you have gained influence amongst the Europeans, you have gained staunch adherents amongst our own countrymen. You may not desert them. Do please therefore let me have a reassuring letter. Of course I don’t know what the Government may want you to do.
With love, Yours sincerely
M. K. GANDHI
P.S: If you were here, you would not appreciate our polities just now.
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Mahatma Gandhi, amongst the many other versatile qualities that he possessed, was also a prolific writer and correspondent. His himself founded a magazine called “Harijan“. Through countrywide circulation of this magazine, Gandhi intended to keep up a continuous line of mass communication with vast followers and countrymen all across India. Anyone during that period of the Freedom Struggle who wished to know Gandhi’s thinking, ideas or his mind on any matter of national importance — be it political, economic, social, religious or spiritual — would have have had to subscribe and read regularly the Mahatma’s epistles published in the Harijan.
After the inaugural issue of Harijan was printed and went into circulation, Gandhi sent a copy of it to Srinivasa Sastri to elicit his editorial opinion on it and especially on the lead article the Mahatma had authored. The ensuing correspondence between Sastri and Gandhi was meant to be private but then Gandhi found it to be not only hilarious but also so very educative that he had had Sastri’s letter subsequently published for general public consumption! Sastri picked up and pointed out to him half a dozen faults in grammar, syntax and style in the content of the Harijan article penned by Gandhi . Gandhi accepted Sastri’s masterly lessons on the finer aspects of English grammar and composition with with all the good grace, humour, humility and gratitude of a middle- school boy in class!
GANDHI-SASTRI LETTERS: THE SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD
“I wrote to the Rt. Hon. Shrivasa Sastri for a message to the ‘ Harijan‘. And I received a characteristic reply marked ‘ private‘. The letter seemed to me to be too good to be suppressed. I, therefore, wired for permission to publish it. The reply wire was as characteristic as the letter.
“Firstly inappropriate to ‘ Harijan’, secondly offensive to partisans, ill requital for your steadfast affection.
However, if perchance useful, please publish.”
And here is the letter.
Private
MYLAPORE: 13th February 1933
Dear Brother,
Thanks for your affectionate letter, in which you ask for a message to your new baby.
I am going to change towards you. It is necessary in your interest, no matter what effort it costs me.
You live in a difficult world. Waking or dreaming, you are racked by thoughts of sin and penance, confessions and truth-quests, satyagraha and moral self-flagellation. Those having sent home my dart of criticism, I folded my hands and prayed. “Enlighten me, for my soul is cast in doubt and you know all.”
“I have written objecting to (your) too frequent references to the Inner Voice” that talk to you or correspond with you continually pose doubts and serious problems, only deepening the grimness and suffocation around you. Few bring lightness of talk, familiar expletives, innocent jokes, revealing banter. You badly need a privileged jester in your establishment.
Have you read a story called Ardath by Ouida? The hero there has a critic whose business is to expose his errors and bring to light the flaws in his character. Being a professional fault-finder, he overdoes his part in the end and defeats his first object. I shall vary my function from time to time and disappear from the scene every now and then. But I will endeavour to awaken parts of your mind long gone to sleep and to supply elements of nourishment which it has long been without. Of course, you can stop the medicine if it disagrees and you cannot stand it! That would be a sign to me that the disease had gone too far.
You are an extraordinarily correct writer of English.
The ordinary reader will not detect any slips on your part. They are not only rare but of a subtle nature. The eye of a schoolmaster, made acute by dwelling on trivialities of grammar, can alone see them. Here are some, all from the first number of the ‘ Harijan‘ and from the parts bearing your name.
Page 3. ” If it is a bye-product of the caste system, it is only in the same sense that an ugly growth is of a body“. (‘ That ‘ is fast undergoing a change in English, but this use is far in excess of present usage. Better say ‘ in which an ugly growth is a bye-product of a body’.)
Also read the whole passage again. Don’t you say in effect ‘ If the caste system is a bye-product of the caste system ‘?
Page 3. ” The outcaste-ness, in the sense we understand it, has therefore to be destroyed altogether.” (A slip similar to the above. Between ‘ sense‘ and ‘ we‘, insert ‘in which‘.)
Page 4. “Caste Hindus have to open their temples to Harijans, precisely on the same terms as the other Hindus.” (Say ‘ the same terms as ‘ to ‘ the other Hindus‘. Else, it would mean that the other Hindus opened their temples on certain terms to Harijans.)
Page 7. “Beyond this I may not go, for the reason I have already stated and which the reader should respect.” (Insert ‘ which ‘ after ‘ reason‘. The conjunction ‘and‘ must not be made to connect a suppressed ‘which ‘ and an expressed ‘ which ‘.)
Page 8. ” Untouchahility has a great deal to answer for the insanitation of our streets and our latrines.‘ (Idiomatically, ‘ for ‘ is part of the verb ‘ answer ‘ and cannot govern ‘ the insanitation‘. We must insert ‘ in ‘ after ‘for‘, though the sentence become inelegant. I would recast it: ‘ Untouchahility is answerable for a great deal of the insanitation &e.‘).
Page 8. ‘ Therefore a person who is to attend to scavenging, whether it is a paid bhangi or an unpaid mother, they are unclean until they have washed themselves clean of their unclean work.”
(The looseness is, perhaps, the result of rapid dictation unchecked by subsequent reading. ‘ A person ‘ is left hanging in the air. The plurals’ they ‘ themselves‘ and “their” are justifed by the common gender required.
Still, the discord of number is apparent to the point of harshness and may be avoided. Read ‘ A person…….. is unclean until washed clean of the unclean work.‘)
Let me add a criticism of substance.
On page 7 you answer a question under the heading ” Seeking or Giving?” The paragraph has gained brevity at the expense of clearness. The difference between giving cooperation and seeking it requires more elucidation. Likewise the analogy of love leading to feeding in one case and starving in anothe.r But you are obscure and even baffling when you say that your policy of non-cooperation with Government allows of your seeking its cooperation whenever your purpose is, in your opinion, “very sacred and altogether good“. Most sensible people follow this rule in ordinary life: not seeking co-operation when they don’t care and seeking it when they care. They don’t proclaim it as a policy or give it a grand name.
Ever yours affectionately
V. S. SRINIVASAN
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Gandhi went on to add another footnote-comment after reproducing in full in the next issue of Harijan Sastri’s Letter verbatim:
I wanted to share this letter with the public, because such a letter would help any publicist and his cause and that in an unexpected manner, more so when written without any thought of publication.
Let the student note in passing Sastri’s love for the language he has mastered as few men have done. He is a purist in everything. We badly need purists in our country. I want only purists as fellow-workers in this glorious campaign of abolition of untouchabilty.
As to the purity of the language of ‘ Harijan’, whatever faults are found notwithstanding Sastri’s warning will be shared with me by Sastri, the Editor, and by Mahadev Desai, who shares with the schoolmaster the weakness for writing correctly in the language which for the moment he is using.
I must leave the reader to find out for himself or herself the many other beauties of Sastri’s letter. If he will do so, he must read the letter three or four times and look up all the references in the first issue of ‘Harijan’.
M. K. GANDHI
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Today, those of us who admire Gandhi, Sastri … and still love the beauties of the English language… would do well indeed, as Gandhi had urged, to “read the letter three or four times and look up all the references in the first issue of ‘Harijan‘”.
(to be continued)
Sudarshan Madabushi