Daughter Of Midnight - The Child Bride of Gandhi. Arun Gandhi

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      In such conversations, Kasturbai undoubtedly shared some of her confused feelings about her husband and her marriage: how she thought about Mohandas all day long — it made the cooking and the chores go faster. How eager she was, they both were, to be alone together in their room at night. How playful he could be: mischievous in fact, but agreeably so. He had his strange little ways. He always kept a small lamp lit in their room, something she wasn’t used to. But she never objected; she truly wanted to please him in all things.

      Why, then, in the first few months of her marriage, had she defied her husband and gone against his wishes? Not just once, but repeatedly. She tried to explain to her friend and to herself.

      It was because Mohandas had changed. He had become another person: disagreeable and unreasonable. But was that any reason for defying him — something no good wife should ever do? How could she make him understand that she had her own life to live, her own duties to perform? She wanted to be a good wife, but she also had to be true to herself.

      Kastur loved to listen to the stories women told. Tales of the great heroines of ancient India. One of the stories Kastur often asked for was the true story of the brave queen Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi. In 1857, only a few years before Kastur herself was born, Rani had died on the battlefield. She was leading Indian troops against their colonial overlords. The British called this brief rebellion the Sepoy Mutiny.

      Kastur’s mother was pleased to tell her daughter the story of a woman’s selfless patriotism, hoping, perhaps, that her daughter would grow up to emulate the courage of Rani Laxmibai. Vrajkunwerba had no illusions that Kastur would ever lead troops into battle, of course, but there were many different ways a woman could be courageous.

      In Kasturbai’s absence Mohandas had studied hard, making up for time missed from school during the weeks of endless wedding celebrations. He wrestled with geography, and lost marks for his bad handwriting, but his marks in English and geometry were much improved. He was passed to a higher grade. This was better than the other recent Gandhi bridegrooms had done. Marriage marked the end of schooling for my grandfather’s older brother Karsandas, and his cousin Motilal in Porbandar.

      All the while Mohandas was devoting himself to his studies, his inmost thoughts had been centred on his wife. Desperately lonely for Kasturbai, fervently yearning for her return, he had devised an experiment for them to carry out, a new project to bring them closer together: he was going to teach his illiterate wife to read and write. His ambition, as explained in his autobiography, was “to make my wife an ideal wife…. [T]o make her live a pure life, learn what I learned, and identify her life and thought with mine.”

      He revealed the plan to Kasturbai as soon as she returned to Rajkot, keeping her awake late into the night outlining his course of instruction starting with the alphabet, and expecting her enthusiastic acceptance of the project. Instead, she seemed wary, unresponsive.

      In truth, Kasturbai was surprised and shocked. How could her husband be so unpredictable, so inconsistent? First, he had wanted her to become the most subservient wife. Now he was suggesting she should become the most emancipated and do something totally unconventional, something that went against all tradition. He wanted her to learn to read and write! Her misgivings were almost instinctual. But with her usual protective reticence, she said nothing.

      The experiment got underway. Each night in their room, the young couple would spread out the books Mohandas had selected, take up the slates he had provided, and go to work. But each night, just as regularly, they would abandon the effort almost as soon as it began, and go to bed. The trouble, according to Gandhi’s later recollections, was that Kasturbai, the reluctant student, “was not impatient of her ignorance.” He, the zealous instructor, found his fervour to teach his wife overwhelmed by his passion to make love to her.

      From Kasturbai’s point of view, there were larger problems. First was the matter of simple exhaustion. Her day was long and strenuous, but her studies with Mohandas could not begin until after nightfall. By that time she had neither the stamina nor the inclination to sit through the lessons he had prepared.

      More than that, Kasturbai had every reason to fear the effect her studies might have on her relationship with the other women in the Gandhi family, the women with whom she would be spending the rest of her days. Of the three daughters-in-law sharing the household, Kasturbai had come from the most prominent and most prosperous family. Her father had been mayor of Porbandar. She had grown up in an affluent home, wanting for nothing. Until now, their differences had been of no consequence, and Kasturbai had been careful to keep it that way. By word and deed, Vrajkunwerba and Putliba taught her that to prevent small misunderstandings from becoming lifelong feuds, the habitual practice of courtesy and consideration was essential in the crowded world of homebound women in an Indian joint family.

      What would happen now if she learned to read and write — became educated? Would her sisters-in-law feel she was trying to prove she was better than they were? Would she be subjected to their resentment, ridicule and condemnation? What would Putliba think of her? And what would she think of herself? Would her own attitude towards life change if education were forced upon her? Did she want to be changed? My grandmother had an indomitable spirit, but she was not yet inclined to pioneer a revolution. And a hundred years ago the idea of education for Indian women was revolutionary indeed.

      Kasturbai’s illiteracy was not unusual; quite the reverse. Except for a tiny number of wealthy princesses sent abroad for study, almost all Indian women in those days were illiterate. Not one woman in Kasturbai’s family — her mother, her mother-in-law, her sisters-in-law, Mohandas’ sister Raliatben — was able to read or write. Education outside the family home was unheard of. There were few schools of any kind and virtually none for girls.

      Mohandas’ ill-fated tutoring experiment continued sporadically for many weeks, being abandoned, then resumed several times before he was forced to admit that his attempts to educate his wife were failing. It was a failure my grandfather would lament repeatedly in later years, ascribing it to his own shortcomings — his “lustful love”.

      But it seems to me that Bapu’s assessment of this failure in no way took into account Ba’s point of view.

      And what was significant is this: she never protested or openly opposed her husband’s wishes. She simply chose not to master her lessons. A pattern was being set.

      Obsessed for so many months by the complexities of his new role as husband, Mohandas had made few close friends in school. Now, in his second year of high school, he and a Muslim schoolmate called Sheik Mehtab had struck up a friendship. A tall, handsome athletic youth, Mehtab lived across the street from the Gandhis. He was two or three years older than Mohandas and had originally been a friend and classmate of Mohandas’ older brother Karsandas. Unlike Karsandas, Mehtab was still attending the Rajkot high school where Mohandas saw him every day.

      Their friendship distressed Kasturbai. A perceptive judge of character, she suspected his intentions from the beginning. She soon learned that Mehtab was known in the neighbourhood as something of a wastrel who was lazy and boastful. Then she was told that neither Putliba nor Lakshimidas, Mohandas’ level-headed oldest brother, had ever considered Mehtab fit company for Karsandas.

      It should be noted that their objections were to Mehtab himself not his religion. The Kathiawar peninsula, somewhat cut off from the rest of India and therefore a frequent sanctuary for those fleeing persecution elsewhere, was remarkably free of the religious hatreds that beset other regions. For centuries, Buddhists, Muslims, Jains, Parsis, Christians, as well as adherents of all the varying sects of Hinduism (somewhat analogous to the various denominations of Protestantism) had found refuge there, living and СКАЧАТЬ