It is fascinating the way a previously obscure figure in the Gandhi story belatedly takes centre stage. Previous biographies usually pick up on a Dr Mehta greeting Gandhi at the Victoria hotel in London 29th September 1888, Gandhi still in summer flannels and in his admiration for Dr Mehta's top hot fluffing it up the wrong way. Dr Mehta was but a bit player, the highly Anglicised Indian instructing the gauche Gandhi how to assimilate to Victorian London. It took Ramachandra Guha in his recent biography to show that, to the contrary, Dr Mehta became Gandhi's closest Indian friend and indispensable as a patron, indeed he draws a parallel with Friedrich Engels as patron and disciple of Karl Marx. Now comes Professor Mehrotra's labour of love, a compendium volume of a brief biography and a compilation of Dr Mehta's leading publications. And Dr Mehta's great-grand-nephew, Arun Mehta is its publisher. Possibly all along Mehta's central presence should have been obvious in the light of his being one of the three represented as the Reader in dialogue with Gandhi as the Editor in Gandhi's seminal text, Hind Swaraj. Anthony Parel adds Shamji Krishnavarma and V D Savarkar as the other two. The text is added to this volume. Here is a case study of the way in which the guru-disciple roles become reversed, Dr Mehta's instruction in British mores giving way to Gandhi's in Hindu values, and of course one of Gandhi's central ambitions was to win over the Anglicised Indian to an alternative Indian vision.
Born 27 February 1864, Kathiawadi and Jain, educated in Rajkot, trained as a doctor in the Grant Medical School, Bombay and then at the Free University in Brussels, with a doctorate in surgery, at the same time qualifying as a lawyer in the Middle temple, (so in London to greet Gandhi), a highly successful professional career seems to have been his for the asking and he was indeed appointed Chief Medical Officer to Idar state in 1895, but he gave all this up to emigrate to Rangoon in 1899. Not enough is said here of a common admiration with Gandhi for the Jain jeweller and guru figure Raychandbhai but this seems to have been the reason why Gandhi and Mehta became close friends in Bombay in 1891. He had opened a jewellery shop in 14 Mogul street, Rangoon in 1895. Was this in his blood as a Jain? I suspect a determining influence was his visiting Gandhi in Durban in 1898 and experiencing racism first hand: “I was not in Cape Town for more than two hours before they made me feel that I was in a place where the colour of the skin counted for everything and man for nothing.’ (quoted p. 375)When Mehta died 3 August 1932 after prolonged ill health, Gandhi wrote:” I had no greater friend than Doctor in the whole world and for me he is still alive”. (quoted p. 194)
It is now clear that Gandhi's whole satyagraha project would have been impossible without Mehta's financial support. Gandhi kept in touch with Mehta, visiting him in Rangoon December 1901. Mehta was active in the Congress cause and became President of the Burma Provincial Congress Committee 1910. He raised funds for Gandhi’ struggle in South Africa. Mehta became his leading financier. Between 1910 and 1914 he transferred 32,000 rupees to Gandhi. This saved the Phoenix farm from poverty. Mehta observed: “it is a notorious fact that Gandhi has not laid by anything against a rainy day”. (quoted p. 342) Once again Gandhi visited Rangoon March 1915. Mehta conjured up a plan for a banking system offering cheap credit to Congress ventures. He made substantial contributions to the setting up of the Sabarmati ashram in Ahmedabad and built his own house there though only occasionally was he to visit. In the end he offered Gandhi unlimited credit. How else could Gandhi have been able to give up his income as a lawyer and embark on the non-cooperation campaign? Yet we do not learn how Mehta made his wealth as a diamond merchant. It is often held against Gandhi that after Mehta's death he fell back on the Indian industrialists, G. D. Birla and Jamnalal Bajaj, to subsidise his constructive programme. Yet for all his financial support Gandhi did not take Mehta into his political confidence, Mehta only learnt about the launching of non-cooperation in 1920 from the press and though he was an early protagonist of non-payment of the salt tax, he likewise heard of the Salt March to Dandi in 1930 indirectly.
But there were other ways in which the paths of Gandhi and Mehta crossed and that was in highly personal family affairs. Mehta had sent his daughter, Jeki, to join the Phoenix ashram. He also sent his prospective son-in-law, Manilal Doctor to the ashram, to prove a reluctant contributor to its bread labour, though the marriage went ahead in May 1912. But then Manilal Doctor took off for Fiji with a French mistress and events fell apart. Earlier, Dr Mehta had described Manilal Gandhi, Gandhi's second oldest son, as “a chip of the same old block” and “(he)is going to be a perfect brahmachari” but how wrong he was. Manilal fell for Jeki and had an affair. It is here that the personal and the political Gandhi become so hard to connect. Gandhi was to go onto two fasts, seriously impairing his health. His attitude to Jeki is ambiguous, seeing his claim to her as an adopted daughter as stronger than Dr Mehta's as her father. The first fast was in despair at the liaison and Manilal was to find himself refused any right to marriage, without his Father's consent, in fact withheld till 1927. It seems a spate of lying by Jeki prompted a second fast. She was now sent to Fiji to join her husband though later she reappears in the Sabarmati ashram, her husband by then living in Aden. But Mehrotra reveals even darker aspects of Gandhi at the time, a horrific row breaking out with Kasturba, all to do with Jeki's behaviour. Gandhi is quoted as writing: in a letter to Kallenbach: ”she is the most vicious woman I have ever met”. He continues: “she teaches me emptiness of the world. Yes, man who wishes to work with detachment must not marry. . . You cannot attach yourself to a particular woman and yet live for humanity.” If Mehrotra pronounces such notions as unGandhian, they reflect the intense strain of this marital breakdown. But, of course, at the same time Gandhi was leading the most extensive satyagraha struggle to date against indentured labour. Connecting the personal and the political, lies at the heart of reading the conundrum of Gandhi. During his visit to Mehta in Rangoon in 1915 Robert Payne tells us Gandhi's eldest son, Harilal was their equally fraught subject of conversation.
Although Mehta wholly endorsed Gandhi's political methods in South Africa and India this did not rob him of an independent political voice. He was the first, in a letter to Gokhale 8 November 1909, ahead of Rabindranath Tagore, to name Gandhi a Mahatma. In his long essay M K Gandhi and the South African Problem he pleaded with Gandhi to leave South Africa and to take up the leadership of the nationalist struggle in India straightaway but Gandhi put off his return till 1915. Already by 1910 the authorities in Rangoon branded him ‘an ardent advocate of Swadeshi: needs watching.’ He was, to quote Mehrotra, “seen as easily the most prominent person in the public and social life of Burma.” (p. 16) He took up such causes as the intolerable conditions of deck passengers between Calcutta and Rangoon, on the gratuitous vaccination of labourers on arrival from India. If Sir Harcourt Butler as Governor had tolerated such protest his reactionary successor Sir Reginald Craddock did not and, blaming Mehta for unrest in 1918, subjected him to an Externment order. Mehta, and it seems the public, protested and the order was shelved:” this was probably the first instance in British Indian history when the design of a provincial government to banish an alleged political activist from its territory was frustrated by the force of public opinion”. (p. 128) Part of the Congress delegation in London in 1919 he opposed the Montford reforms. It would have been interesting to be told how Mehta in fact connected with the Burmese opposition, divided in its response to these reforms, and fatally, so for it opened the way by the 1930s to a far more aggressive tribal Burmese nationalism. Ill-health prevented Mehta from any active participation in the politics of the 1920s.
Yet the most revealing question has to be the extent to which this highly Anglicised Indian came into line with Gandhi's critique of ‘modern’ civilisation, a term he preferred to ‘western’. He was opposed to the mere accumulation of wealth and to capitalism and one has to assume he fell back on Gandhi's ideal of trusteeship to justify his own personal wealth. He drew on the ideas of Kropotkin to defend the simple life, the primacy of agriculture and the value of artisan manufacture. In his 1911 address Hindu Social Ideals to the Hindu Social Club, which he had himself set up in 1901, he seemingly endorses all of Gandhi's rhetoric for the traditional Hindu way of life in Hind Swaraj, caste included. He was to become even more radical than Gandhi in promoting the use of Indian vernacular languages at all levels of education: ‘language is in very truth man himself’. (quoted p. 89) One has to wonder, for a writer of such accomplished English prose, how difficult this be. He invariably quoted European and British authors in his defence of tradition such as Max Mueller and Colonel Tod. But could this European trained doctor come wholly into line with Gandhi's attack on western medicine?
For Gandhi converting the Anglicised Indian to his values was crucial. It was just as exciting a challenge of course to win over Europeans and in this regard there is a strong parallel between Gandhi's relationship to Kallenbach and to Mehta. If Gandhi had a case against British trained Indian lawyers he was on shakier ground when it came to Indian doctors trained in western medicine. Could Mehta agree with Gandhi's indictment: “medical science is the concentrated essence of Black Magic. Quackery is infinitely preferable to what passes for high medical skill” (quoted p. 382)? It is true that Mehta early on opposed Pasteurising techniques and vaccination against smallpox. From his experience as Chief Medical Officer in Idar, however, he came up with sensible pragmatic measures of better hygiene and public sanitation to counter cholera and the plague. One suspects his true animus, expressed in his diatribe to a meeting of India medical men in London 10 October 1919, was against the way Indian doctors were marginalised in British India:” no civilised people on the face of the earth are excluded therefrom as we are excluded.” (quoted p. 170) It seems probable that Mehta had some reservations on Gandhi's beliefs. Certainly he travelled to London In the 1920s to seek medical help.
We have to thank Ramachandra Guha and S. R. Mehrotra for finally doing justice to the life and career of Dr Pranjivan Mehta.
