In 1944, as the world marked Mahatma Gandhi’s 75th birthday on October 2, a group of illustrious public figures gathered at the Town Hall in Manhattan for a celebration organised by the India League of America. Among the list of speakers at the function were Chinese-American painter and writer Mai-mai Sze, Indian poet and playwright Krishnalal Sridharani and William L Shirer, a well-known American foreign correspondent.
Shirer had long been an admirer of the Mahatma. Almost a decade and a half before that October celebration in New York, he had first set foot on Indian soil to work as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.
“For years, ever since I read of his first imprisonment in India in 1922 and had been overwhelmed by the eloquence of his words in his own defence at that famous trial, and then more recently read his autobiography and followed as best as I could in the Western press his efforts to free India, I had a feeling that perhaps he was the greatest living man on our planet,” Shirer wrote in his book Gandhi: A Memoir (1979).
One of Shirer’s goals in coming to India in 1930 was to interview Gandhi, but that never happened. The Mahatma was locked up in Yerwada Jail and, although Shirer stayed on in the country for months, he was not allowed to meet Gandhi.
“It had been a frustrating assignment,” Shirer wrote. “With his arrest and that of the other leaders of the Indian National Congress, and of tens of thousands of his most active followers, the momentum of his latest rebellion against British rule, which he launched that spring, had slackened.”
By February 1931, Gandhi would be free and Shirer came back to India, determined more than ever to meet him.
Caste and colonialism
On this visit, Shirer astutely observed the fissures in the country, from the political tensions to the racial and caste hierarchies under the Raj.
“Even with the prisons full to bursting there were still followers of his who gathered in the great cities to peacefully picket and demonstrate,” Shirer wrote. “I had watched them, men and women by the thousands, squatting on the pavement in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Lahore and other places, waiting for the inevitable lathi charge of British led police, or troops when they refused to disperse, and had seen them savagely beaten and then carted off to jail. It was a sickening sight, but I had marvelled at their magnificent discipline of non-violence, which the genius of Gandhi had taught them.”
The American correspondent noted that the British had their own rigid caste system in India. “The English ‘in trade’ were scarcely accepted socially by the British officials and army officers,” he wrote. “Indeed they were snubbed by them, but at least they had the satisfaction of being regarded as a cut above the ‘natives,’ even the highest of the Brahmans.”
He said there was a strict taboo on the British mixing socially with Indians no matter how “cultivated”. When he visited the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, he was told by his host, a high official, that “no Indian had ever crossed its portal”.
The British ruling class was annoyed with the way Shirer mingled with Indians. He recalled taking out an Indian Muslim and their daughter, who was one of the first women to enrol in a medical college, for dinner at the Taj Mahal Hotel. After dinner, he danced with the woman who, he said, looked beautiful in a crimson sari. He was told the next day by some English acquaintances that “it was never done” and that he should mend his way. Shirer refused.
“So far as I could see, the Englishmen who governed India were completely insensate to the fact that they were masters in someone else’s country, were unwanted and unloved there, and that their very presence, their arbitrary rule, their condescending attitude toward an ancient and highly civilised people whom they regarded as racially, socially, culturally and even intellectually inferior and not fit to govern themselves, was a constant humiliation to the Indian people,” he said.
Fresh perspectives
When Shirer arrived in Delhi, Gandhi was in the midst of negotiating with the Viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, the terms on which the civil disobedience movement could be called off.
“Busy as he was, Gandhi agreed to see me immediately,” Shirer recalled. “It was the first instance in his case, but far from the last, of this special capacity I have found in many great men: no matter how preoccupied by matters of the utmost importance, they somehow contrive to find time for less pressing business for the likes of me.”
Gandhi met Shirer a day before his 27th birthday. “As our talk began I tried to take in not only what Gandhi was saying but how he looked,” he said. “I had seen many photographs of him, but I was nonetheless very surprised at his actual appearance. His face at first glance did not convey at all the stature of the man, his obvious greatness. It was not one you would have especially noticed in a crowd. It struck me as not ugly, as some had said – indeed it radiated a certain beauty – but it was not uncommon either. Age – he was sixty-one – and fasting, an Indian sun and the strain of years in prison, of long, hard, nervous work, had obviously taken their toll, turned the nose down, widened it at the nostrils, sunk in his mouth just a little so that the lower lip protruded, and teeth were missing – I could only see two.”
Gandhi’s frail appearance, though, was deceptive, Shirer clarified. The leader of India’s freedom struggle was fit. In fact, later, when Shirer would join Gandhi on his walks, the American struggled to keep pace despite being just 27 and in good shape from hiking and skiing in the Austrian Alps.
He noticed a contrast between European leaders and Gandhi. Leaders in Europe were keen on impressing visitors with the “forcefulness of their personalities” and did not hide their ego. Gandhi, on the other hand, spoke kindly and softly without any pretence of trying to impress the visitor.
“How could so humble a man, I wondered, spinning away with his nimble fingers on a crude wheel as he talked, have begun almost single-handedly to rock the foundations of the British Empire, aroused a third of a billion people to rebellion against foreign rule, and taught them the technique of a new revolutionary method – non-violent civil disobedience – against which Western guns and Eastern lathis were proving of not much worth,” Shirer wrote.
During their first meeting, when Gandhi said he could not reveal the details of his talks with Irwin, the American asked him how he managed to succeed in getting his followers to be so disciplined in non-violence. “By love and truth,” Gandhi said, adding, “In the long run, no force can prevail against them.”
The two would go on to form a friendship. Of course, the Mahatma knew exactly what he could get from the young American journalist. With American power and influence rising, Gandhi felt it was important for the general public and the government in the United States to get news and views from India that were not tainted by British prejudice.
At the time, there were no American correspondents in India, besides Shirer. Even The New York Times got its India news from the Delhi correspondent of The Times, London, who Shirer described as an “able, hard-drinking English journalist, who laboured daily to put across an exclusively British view, the only one he understood”.
Shirer’s reports, which he cable from India for one dollar a word, did not just appear in the Chicago Tribune but also in US newspapers that subscribed to its syndicated news service. “They were giving for the American people for the first time, I believe, an unbiased account (not only the British but the Indian side) of the Indian revolution,” he said. Throughout his book, the American referred to the Indian independence struggle, led by Gandhi, as a peaceful revolution.
Shirer’s cables daily appeared in the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune as well, giving Europeans a fresh and wider perspective on India. “I did not know then – I found out later – that Gandhi, who was a shrewd appraiser of the means and the value of getting his message out to the world, attached more importance to my dispatches than I realised,” he wrote.
Critical eye
Although Shirer held the Mahatma in highest esteem and endorsed bracketing him with Jesus Christ and the Buddha, he did not hesitate to be critical of Gandhi.
He once asked Gandhi to explain the impressive participation of burqa-clad Muslim women in the civil disobedience movement. In reply, he was told it was “the work of God”. “It was the kind of answer I would often get from Gandhi, and I was not satisfied with it, not the first time, not later,” Shirer lamented. “It was his way of mixing religion with politics that so baffled not only the British and American correspondents such as I, but also his own people and especially his closest aides.” Jawaharlal Nehru could sometimes scarcely hide his irritation at such behaviour, Shirer wrote.
The American journalist also took issue with Gandhi calling the Western civilisation “satanic” in his 1909 book Indian Home Rule. Shirer asked him about this. Did he stand by his idea that an ideal state would be one without factories, railways, armies or navies, with as few hospitals, doctors and lawyers as possible? Gandhi smiled and listened to the long question with patience. Then, he responded, “Have I changed my mind? Not a bit! My ideas about the evils of modern Western civilisation still stand. If I republished my book tomorrow I would scarcely change a word, except for a few changes in the setting.”
This really shook Shirer, who asked Nehru his opinion on this matter. “Gandhiji says a lot of things like that,” Shirer quoted Nehru as saying. “Perhaps he thinks they are necessary to arouse the people. But I can’t believe he really means them. He is much too intelligent and experienced not to know that if a free India lapsed back to simpler times, it couldn’t survive in the modern world.”
Shirer said Gandhi was the first to admit publicly that he was far from perfect. Calling him a man of “paradoxes and contradictions”, the journalist wrote, “He had his fads, peculiarities and prejudices, and some of them, when I observed them or listened to him explain and defend them, struck me as outlandish.”
The American admitted his admiration for Gandhi bordered at times on adulation, but that did not stop him from calling out what he did not like about Gandhi. “The Mahatma was genuinely the humblest of men (though he was not unaware of his greatness), but I have seen him behave stubbornly and dictatorially to his co-workers, making what I felt were outrageous demands on some of them, as when he insisted that even those who were married, and happily, observe the celibacy he has imposed on himself in his late thirties after many years of what he called a lustful relationship with his own wife.”
William Shirer last met Mahatma Gandhi at the Second Round Table Conference in London at the end of 1931. The two kept in touch by mail and cable, and Shirer remained a lifelong admirer of Gandhi and a supporter of India. The American wrote over 15 books, mostly non-fiction, including the book he is best remembered for: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His Twitter handle is @ajaykamalakaran.
