Kasturba , livre ebook

Arun Gandhi

KASTURBA
A Life
Foreword by Lord Richard Attenborough
Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication
Introduction


Foreword
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Illustrations
Chronology
Follow Penguin
Copyright
About the Author
Arun Gandhi was born in 1934 in South Africa. At ten he was sent to India to stay with his grandfather, the Mahatma, for eighteen months, and witnessed Gandhi s national campaign of nonviolence first-hand. In 1957 Arun returned to India to work as a journalist for the Times of India. With his wife Sunanda he founded the Centre for Social Unity and in 1991 they opened the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence in Tennessee.
By the Same Author
A Patch of White
Kasturba-Wife of Gandhi
Morarji Papers: The Rise and Fall of the Janata Party Government
World Without Violence: Can Gandhi s Dream Become Reality?
Testament to Truth
Voices of Poverty (with Sunanda Gandhi and Sten Berg)
This book is dedicated to my wife, Sunanda, whose help in researching the life of my grandmother, Kasturba, was tremendous, and to all the unknown women around the world whose selfless sacrifice enables their husbands to attain positions of prominence.
Introduction
A n unknown Eastern philosopher once said: Nothing can ever grow under a banyan tree. This is as true of individuals. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi s stature was by far more enormous than a banyan tree - it dwarfed everyone else. My grandmother, Kastur, and my father, Manilal, were two who submerged their identities and blended themselves into his image and philosophy.
For those brought up in a modern western society such acts of self-sacrifice in the interest of a person, a programme or a philosophy are difficult to understand and accept. In the eastern society it is the family and legacy that supercedes every other consideration.
Western scholars have, understandably, blamed Mohandas Gandhi for not giving others a chance to flourish or blossom. However, my grandfather had a vision; a world view that transcended the self. Consequently, neither Kastur nor my father ever thought about their personal achievements or accomplishments and preferred to merge their lives into that of my grandfather. The vision, the quest, the world was more important to them than their personal image.
For everyone who knew her, Kastur was always Ba or Great Mother , Grandmother. My greatest regret will always be that I did not get the opportunity to know her better. The last time I met my grandmother I was just five years old. This was in 1939. My father, Manilal, her second son, had chosen to live in South Africa to work for nonviolent social and political change, a movement that my grandfather had started in 1893.
Since my father was the only one of the four Gandhi sons to adopt voluntary poverty and devote his life to nonviolence, our family reunions in India had to be judiciously spaced out, on an average of once in three or four years.
For most of us who have grown up in eastern culture the daily affirmation of love, as in western families, is unheard of. Our parents or grandparents never told us that they loved us. They did not have to because their actions and concerns for us conveyed their love more eloquently than words could express. I just knew that the whole family loved me.
Apart from my love for Ba what compelled me to research the life of Grandmother was the fact that the few existing references, or memoirs of those who lived with her, depicted her as an ever-bumbling fool who had no idea what her husband was trying to achieve.
I refused to believe this could be true. It was not my or my parents experience. She may not have gone to school and could not read or write much but received from her parents, her parents-in-law and the family, the best upbringing one can hope for. I did not want history to record a negative image of my grandmother. Our painstaking research confirmed that she played a significant role in the struggle for India s freedom and in the making of the Mahatma .
Without her unstinted cooperation, my grandfather could not have achieved the spiritual heights that he did. Many a wife has left her husband for much less than what Grandmother was asked to give up. She made the sacrifice not simply because Grandfather wanted her to but because she was convinced it was the right way.
Imagine for a moment the all-too-familiar scenario where a wife refuses to cooperate with her husband in whatever he is trying to achieve. It would, most certainly, lead to domestic disharmony and even a breakup of the alliance. Grandmother never followed anyone slavishly. She followed with conviction just as my father, Manilal, did.
In his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth, my grandfather confesses that he learned the rudiments of nonviolence from my grandmother. She was never passive, nor aggressive, but always stood up for what she was convinced was right and just. When Grandfather was in the wrong she did not argue with him but quietly, nonviolently, led him to the realisation of the truth. That, Grandfather said, is the true essence of the philosophy of nonviolence.
Researching my grandmother s life was not easy. She wrote very little herself. Her family records, as well as the government records of births and deaths, were washed away in floods that ravaged Porbandar at the turn of the century.
Her parents and her brother died young leaving no written record of family history except for the references in Grandfather s writings to the Makanji family and Ba.
In our research my wife, Sunanda, and I had to depend on oral history, which was often clouded by the awe-inspiring memories of my grandfather. It was sometimes an exercise in patience and perseverance to keep the interviewee focused on Grandmother. Since 1960 we have recorded interviews with scores of people from all walks of life who knew Ba and had lived and worked with her.
Grandmother s life story is unusual and inspiring. I hope you enjoy this labour of love.

Arun Gandhi, 1998
This book commemorates the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948.
I must acknowledge with heartfelt gratitude Carol Lynn Yellin s help in editing this manuscript, for her suggestions and for her advice. I am eternally grateful to her.
Foreword
When I began in-depth research for the film Gandhi, one of the most endearing revelations was the importance of the role played by the Mahatma s wife, Kastur.
Ba , as she was known, was an extraordinary woman: forgiving, courageous and incredibly loyal. As Gandhiji s most devoted disciple, she was also his severest and most influential critic. The marriage was not one of their own choosing, yet it developed into a true love match, largely through Ba s willingness to share every aspect of the spartan lifestyle her husband imposed on himself and his closest followers.
Ba was portrayed in the film by a remarkable actress called Rohini Hattangady. She, I sincerely believe, captured the essence of a woman who was no mere footnote in history but the Mahatma s partner in every sense of the word.
And now, through the words of her grandson, Arun, Ba s story is at last set down for posterity. A labour of love that is welcome indeed.

Lord Attenborough CBE
1
T here is no record of the exact day of Kastur Kapadia s birth.
In ancient India, official birth records were never properly kept. We know Grandmother was born in 1869, the same year as grandfather, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. They were also born in the same town: the coastal city of Porbandar, on India s Kathiawar peninsula. Kathiawar is in the present-day state of Gujarat. Some have surmised that the difference in their ages was only a few months. Years later, long after Kastur had become Kasturba * , it is said they would sometimes playfully disagree about which one was the older. However, since Grandfather s birth was October 2, 1869, and Ba s birthday was in April, she must have had the better of any such arguments.
With two brothers - one older and one younger - little Kastur grew up as the only daughter and the middle child of wealthy and indulgent parents - Gokaldas and Vrajkunwerba Kapadia. Many Gandhi biographers have used Makanji rather than Kapadia as my grandmother s family name, a confusion arising from the common Indian custom identifying sons by the names of their fathers. Kastur s grandfather was Makanji Kapadia, so her father, Gokaldas, as the son of Makanji, was often addressed as Gokaldas Makanji rather than Gokaldas Kapadia. A leading citizen and one-time mayor of Porbandar, Gokaldas had inherited the trading house dealing in cloth, grain, and cotton shipments to markets in Africa and what was then known as Arabia. Prospering as a merchant, he had opened branches in Bombay and Calcutta, and added extensive real estate holdings in both those cities as well as in Porbandar, to the family fortune.
Porbandar was a city-state, a strip of coastal land no more than 24 miles wide at any point. It had a population of 72,000 according to the 1870 census. It was one of India s many miniature principalities ruled by local Hindu and Muslim princes. It was known as The White City because its high walls and sturdy houses built of creamy-white limestone were visible for miles.
This limestone, somewhat clayish in quality, joins together more firmly after each rainfall, hardening to a marble-like texture and beauty. Porbandar still has the distinction of being the only place in India where a house can be built without cement. All one has to do is pile up the limestone blocks as desired and wait for the rains to come. Generations earlier the Kapadia and Gandhi homes, like others in old Porbandar, had been built that way.
By the late 1860s, Porbandar s once-impenetrable walls were gone - destroyed by order of the British,