Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

708 Pages·2009·3.65 MB·English

by  Arthur Herman

CONTENTS

Title Page
Dedication
Map
Prologue

ONE: The Churchills and the Raj
TWO: Lord Randolph Takes Charge
THREE: Illusions of Power: The Gandhis, India, and British Rule
FOUR: Awakening: Gandhi in London and South Africa, 1888–1895
FIVE: Awakening II: Churchill in India, 1896–1899
SIX: Men at War, 1899–1900
SEVEN: Converging Paths, 1900–1906
Photo Insert I

EIGHT: Brief Encounter, 1906–1909
NINE: Break Point, 1909–1910
TEN: Parting of the Ways, 1911–1914
ELEVEN: A Bridgehead Too Far, 1914–1915
TWELVE: Gandhi’s War, 1915–1918
THIRTEEN: Bloodshed, 1919–1920
FOURTEEN: Noncooperation, 1920–1922
FIFTEEN: Reversal of Fortunes, 1922–1929
SIXTEEN: Eve of Battle, 1929
SEVENTEEN: Salt, 1930
EIGHTEEN: Round Tables and Naked Fakirs, 1930–1931
NINETEEN: Contra Mundum, 1931–1932
Photo Insert II

TWENTY: Last Ditch, 1932–1935
TWENTY-ONE: Against the Current, 1936–1938
TWENTY-TWO: Edge of Darkness, 1938–1939
TWENTY-THREE: Collision Course, 1939–1940
TWENTY-FOUR: From Narvik to Bardoli, April 1940–December 1941
TWENTY-FIVE: Debacle, 1941–1942
TWENTY-SIX: Quit India, 1942
TWENTY-SEVEN: Showdown, 1943
TWENTY-EIGHT: Triumph and Tragedy, 1943–1945
TWENTY-NINE: Walk Alone, 1945–1947
Photo Insert III

THIRTY: Death in the Garden, 1947–1948
THIRTY-ONE: Lion in Twilight, 1948–1965

Conclusion: Triumph and Tragedy

Significant Dates

Glossary of Terms

Acknowledgments

Notes

Reference List

Photograph credits

About the Author

Also by Arthur Herman

Copyright
To Beth, with all my love,
for her unfailing help and support.

PROLOGUE

I see no being which lives in the world without violence.
MAHABHARATA

MUTINY. THE NEWS HAD SPREAD THROUGH the hot dusty streets of Cawnpore and
its European quarters like a monsoon wind. The native sepoys or soldiers at the
garrison at Meerut just outside Delhi had shot their British officers and were
marching on the ancient Mughal capital. Other sepoys, it was said, were
scrambling to join them. Cawnpore’s English families, ensconced in their
comfortable bungalows and surrounded by native servants, felt uneasy. Between
Calcutta to the southeast and Peshawar to the north, a distance of thirteen
hundred miles, there was exactly one battalion of British troops of seven
hundred men. Very suddenly, in a few short days in May 1857, British rule in
India, which had seemed so stable and secure for the past half-century, found
itself on the edge of the abyss.
One question burned in everyone’s mind. Would the sepoy regiments in
Cawnpore remain loyal or join the rebels? One of those wondering was William
Shepherd. He served in the garrison’s Commissariat Office and had just moved
his widowed sister’s family to Cawnpore. Like many who worked for the British
in India, Shepherd was of mixed race, half-Indian and half-English. “Everyone
in the station seemed to think something dreadful was about to happen.”1 He
knew that the small garrison town on the bank of the Ganges was weak and
isolated, and that the native troops in Cawnpore outnumbered the whites by ten
to one. If they mutinied, the nearest help would be more than fifty miles away in
Lucknow, assuming the soldiers there remained loyal. Shepherd also sensed that
he and other so-called half-castes, or anyone who worked with the British, would
be in mortal danger if the Cawnpore sepoys joined the rebellion.
But would they? Shepherd certainly thought so. In an unguarded moment,
some of them had revealed the depth of their resentment toward the British, and
their paranoia. “See what deep plots are being laid against us,” the Cawnpore
sepoys told him. They had already refused the new cartridges issued from the
arsenal at Dum Dum for their Enfield rifles, which rumor said were smeared
with pig grease so that any Muslim soldier would be polluted and any Hindu
soldier would break his caste. It was fear of those same cartridges that had set off
the mutiny in Meerut. Now the rumor was that their British officers were
secretly mixing the commissariat flour with pig and cow bones, for the same
purpose: to make them all badhurrum, or outcastes.
Shepherd knew this was a lie but did not dare to contradict them. But he did
ask why they would wish to attack civilians and others like himself who had
done them no harm. They gathered menacingly around him, shouting over and
over: Suffun suffa! Suffun suffa! “Enough is enough!” It was time to wipe the
slate clean. Time to drive the British out of India.
One veteran sepoy, with bristling mustache and piercing eyes, almost rushed
at Shepherd.
“Oh you are all one, all of the same breed,” he cried. “You are serpents, and
not one of you shall be spared!” That night Shepherd moved his family out of
the city and into Cawnpore’s only entrenched position, the old dragoon hospital,
to the west of town.2
There he found the mood had degenerated to hysteria. Europeans and
Eurasians were scrambling to get their families inside the compound, unnerved
by rumors of impending trouble and angry stares from the locals. Trunks,
suitcases, valises, bundles, and boxes were piled in profusion. Children ran
under foot while weary officers tried to maintain order and their wives and
sisters sat exhausted in the heat. Native servants and ayahs crouched fearfully in
the corner. The hospital overflowed with “people…of every color, sect, or
profession,” an officer remembered later, “all in terror of the imaginary foe.”3
But Major-General Hugh Wheeler, commander of the garrison, was still
confident. Wheeler was sixty-seven. He had been born and raised in India; even
his wife was Indian. He thought he knew his sepoys as well as anyone did, and
like most old-school British officers, he spoke fluent Hindustani. On May 18,
even as panicky whites were pouring into the hospital and laborers were put to
work building a four-foot mud wall around it, Wheeler was writing to officials in
Calcutta, “All is well in Cawnpore.”4
Besides, if any real trouble did break out, Wheeler knew he could count on the
support of the local raja of Bithur. The raja, generally known as Nana Sahib, was
one of the literally hundreds of local Indian princes who kept their independence
from the British East India Company and still governed more than half of India.
Nana Sahib was not one of the great princes like the nizam of Hyderabad or the
maharaja of Mysore, who between them ruled more territory than France and
Germany put together. But he was wealthy, well spoken, and at thirty-five years
old in the prime of life. He and Wheeler had dined together; played billiards and
hunted tigers together. Nana Sahib belonged to the same Hindu caste as
Wheeler’s wife. There was no Indian Wheeler trusted more. So when the raja
appeared at the end of May with five hundred troops and cavalry dressed in
glittering breastplates and helmets and flowing robes, to pledge his support to
the British, Wheeler was so grateful he turned the garrison’s treasury over to the
prince for safekeeping.
It was a fatal mistake. After Nana Sahib’s father died in 1851, the government
in Calcutta had decided in its infinite wisdom to cut off the raja’s pension. Nana
Sahib appealed to the East India Company’s directors in Leadenhall Street in
London; they refused to interfere. In 1857 Nana Sahib faced total ruin.5 Behind
his sleek demeanor Nana Sahib hated the British, and he was already scheming
to become the sepoys’ leader.
On the warm night of June 4 Shepherd and his family were sleeping out on the
hospital’s veranda when a commotion woke him up. An anxious crowd of whites
had gathered. Shepherd asked what was wrong.
Someone hissed, “Listen!” and pointed in the direction of the tents of the
native Second Light Cavalry. In the predawn blackness Shepherd could hear the
sounds of men saddling horses. There were cries and shouts. Then a sudden
blaze of light split the darkness.
The native troopers had set the regimental riding master’s house on fire and
cut down their senior native officer, or rissaldar-major, who refused to join
them. The next morning he was brought back still alive to the hospital enclave,
his body covered with saber wounds. He died in agony a few days later. By then
another body had been discovered, that of Mr. Murphy of the East India Railway,
with three bullets in his head. On June 6 the mutineers, with Nana Sahib at their
head, set up cannon around the enclave, while others ran riot through the city
and shot any remaining Europeans or native Christians they found. The siege of
Cawnpore had begun.6
It would last for eighteen terrible days. More than nine hundred people, men,
women, and children, Europeans and Indians, were jammed into the hospital
enclosure and its two brick buildings, one of which had only a thatched roof.
They had no way to reach the garrison at Lucknow, who were about to be
besieged themselves. Everyone who volunteered to try to sneak out to find help
(including eventually William Shepherd) was either killed or captured. The