A Little History - Part 2 - The Mahatma Meets the Volunteer's Wife

 

This article continues from last week's Part 1 in which I describe how Glan Davies and his fellow volunteers came to India and met Mahatma Gandhi for the first time, as well as the famine created in Bengal by British war policies.   If you missed that article, please read it here before reading this.  You can find it by clicking here.

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The Mahatma Goes (Back) to Prison

It was not yet dawn when the police arrived. Gandhi had been up until 2 a.m. working on his letters, so he was sleepy, but in his usual good humor when the police officer informed him that he was being arrested under the Defense of India Act of 1939.  This was not the first time for Gandhi to be sent to prison, but with the war underway and India's independence so close to fruition, the decision to send him back to prison took on much greater weight for the nation and for the world.  

He dressed, heard a Sanskrit hymn and a short reading from the Koran, picked up copies of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Koran and  Urdu primer and told the officer that he was ready.  A follower placed a garland of flowers around his neck.  His last request to his followers was that whatever  might follow, they must keep to the path of ahimsa (non-violence).  "Karenge ya marenge!" (do or die)," he said as he left - words that his followers repeated in rally after rally until he was finally released from prison nearly two years later.   

Gandhi was not the only leader of the Quit India movement arrested that day.  Others included Jawaharlal Nehru and many other senior leaders.  Gandhi's wife was arrested the same evening.  Riots broke out across the country and were particularly serious in Bombay.  

NYTimes reports the arrests

Soon after Japan entered World War II in December 1941 the British quickly lost their territories in Singapore, Malaya and Burma.  The logical assumption was that Japan's next target would be India.  British anxiety rose when the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose slipped out of police custody in Calcutta in 1941 and made his way via Afghanistan to Germany where he called for rebellion by Indians serving in the Indian army.  Anxiety grew further when Bose arrived in Japan in May 1943 to take charge of 'the  Indian National Army (INA) composed largely of Indian troops captured by the Japanese during the fall of Singapore.  In December 1943 Bose arrived in India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands and declared a 'provisional government of Free India'.  In March 1944 Japanese forces with an INA contingent invaded eastern India and major battles ensued around Imphal and Kohima before being pushed back to Burma by British, American, and Indian forces loyal to Britain.

Subhas Chandra Bose in the Japanese held Andaman Islands

In 1942 the (British) Government of India was naturally deeply suspicious of any moves by Indian nationalists at home. When Gandhi and leaders of the Congress party signed a 'Quit India' resolution, the Government moved quickly to imprison them.   Gandhi's arrest came just a few days after Glan Davies and the other FAU volunteers had met him in Sevagram at the beginning of August 1942 (last week I wrongly gave the date as early September).

Gandhi mounted progressively more serious hunger strikes in prison. Fearing that he might die in prison and knowing he effect this would have throughout India, the government finally released him on health grounds on May 6, 1944. 

While Gandhi was in prison the famine in Bengal had spun out of control. Desperate people from rural areas were coming into Calcutta to find food, but finding none, were dying in large numbers in the streets. The FAU and the Red Cross were the only agencies to address the crisis.

Richard Symonds was the deputy head of the FAU in Bengal and Glan Davies' boss. As described below, Symonds, and later Davies, faced hard choices when asked to join the Government of Bengal - the same government which had created the famine.  Naturally, Symonds and later Davies sought advice from the Mahatma.   

"The Friends' Ambulance Unit did what it could. Details are unimportant, any famine anywhere demands the same kind of action. But in the 'administrative breakdown' which afflicted Bengal, Quaker honesty and efficiency were conspicuous. The Governor, R. G. Casey, took matters into his own hands and invited Richard Symonds to join the government and coordinate relief and rehabilitation work throughout the province. By that time 1943 had given place to 1944 and Gandhi had been released. He was a sick and lonely man; his wife had died in jail, and so had his trusted secretary Mahadev Desai. 

Richard Symonds

But he was accessible, and Richard remembered the invitation he had given in 1942, and sought his advice about the major decision which Casey's offer entailed, taking Glan Davies with him. Gandhi got his two visitors to sing one of his favourite hymns, Lead Kindly Light, He told Richard that he must follow his own conscience but that he would not find it easy to be a Government official. 

In the event, Richard accepted Casey's invitation and began to tackle his gigantic job. Step by step the crisis was dealt with, and life in Bengal slowly returned to normal. The tide of war turned, and the Japanese invasion of India was halted at Kohima in Nagaland."   -  Excerpt from "An Indian Tapestry" by Marjorie Sykes and Geoffrey Carnall

Glan Davies later joined the government as  Joint Secretary of West Bengal and Commissioner of Rural Reconstruction.  In January 1945 Symonds asked Glan and his recently wed wife, Sujata, to deliver a message to Gandhi.  Gandhi had met Glan several times before, but this was the first occasion to meet Sujata.  Gandhi was very much impressed by Sujata, and then wrote back to Symonds, joking that Glan is guilty of 'theft' of this lovely Bengali bride and must now prove himself worthy:

Next week:  The Week of the Long Knives and a Miracle in Calcutta

1948 Kashmir - Symonds
with Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi

* Note:  Like Glan Davies, Richard Symonds went on to a distinguished UN career, serving after the partition of India on the UN Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) where he played a key role in the negotiations over the status of Kashmir.  

He later worked on the UN Technical Assistance Board, and was Resrep in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Tunisia.  He spent three years as a professorial fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex and authored several books on India and Pakistan. He died in 2006.

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