Mahatma Hunter

"You think it hot, today? You should feel it in Calcutta! Most people last only five years in India. That was the length of my appointment--long enough! For my duty as Advocate General of Bengal was to act as a sort of personal court of final appeal. Perhaps the greatest single problem which cropped up to face me was whether or not to prosecute Mahatma Gandhi. . . . Will you gentlemen have more tea?"

The gentlemen had rowed out, sweating, into the great crescent river-harbor of New Orleans, La., to the Japanese world cruise ship Santos Mam. There they had found a huge, six-foot, blue-eyed Englishman of 58, who admitted to having been from 1917 to 1922 the most potent jurist in India, the Advocate General of Bengal, a post second in dignity only to the Viceroyship. Sipping their tea, the gentlemen of the press gave eager heed to Sir Thomas Clarke Pilling Gibbons. Lady Gibbons poured.

"In the second place, the Indians are not fundamentally an honest people. If Great Britain really desires to keep India, she must keep a firm rule. They cannot govern themselves."

Came a query: "Sir Thomas, you were speaking of having prosecuted Mahatma Gandhi. 'Mahatma' means 'Saint,' doesn't it?"

"As near as I can explain it, Gandhi was a god in the eyes of the people. That is what the word 'Mahatma' signifies. Men working on the roadside, clerks in offices, great potentates--all knew Gandhi and respected his immense power. He was the leader of that great anti-British policy of noncooperation which had as its aim making it impossible for England to rule India.

"Well, it fell upon me to decide whether or not he would be prosecuted. We did put him in jail, as you know, and he made no effort to escape. That ended him with his worshipers; and, after his release, a man took his place who was really a far more dangerous person than Gandhi himself.

"He was another barrister, a very well educated young Indian named C. R. Das. That fellow once made a legal speech for 19 consecutive days. And he never once failed to talk sense. For those entire 19 days, he advanced the soundest kind of legal arguments. He only made one little slip, by which we were able to catch him up.

"Finally he got to be too dangerous. I prosecuted him also and put him in jail for six months for sedition."

Significance. To hear Sir Thomas, apostle of "Rule Britannia" one would suppose the Mahatma, apostle of "Rule India," entirely down and out. Actually, Gandhi, a tense, passionate ascetic, usually clad only in a loin cloth and a sash, was easily the dominant figure of the last Indian National Congress. The Occidental press was poorly represented, and only recently* has the picturesque story of the Congress come to light. It sat in a great tent of hand-woven khaddar, at Gauhati, in remote Upper India. Great palms and forest trees canopied the Congress tent, the 5,000 delegates and spectators slept in the open or in bamboo huts along the shores of the broad Brahmaputra dotted with tiny islands. The delegates have no official status, but theirs is a voice that speaks for India; vast, three times more populous than the U. S., downtrodden, inarticulate. . . .

On the day before the Congress began to sit Mahatma Gandhi opened a huge, multiform exhibit of the numberless goods he has taught Indians to manufacture themselves, that they may become self-sufficient and no longer dependent on British traders. Hand-woven fabrics from hand-spun threads were most prominent; but carved and simply manufactured articles loomed in profusion. The local Assamite women, considered the loveliest in India, drifted in hundreds about the fair and among the delegates, chattering earnestly of India for the Indians. . . .

Potent Delegates: 1) President of the Congress Srinavasa Jyenger of Madras, who smiled indulgently when two children sent to present him with a wreath ran and gave it to Mahatma Gandhi with the unerring judgment of babes; 2) Pundit Motilal Nehru, active head of the Swaraj (nonCooperation) party, a man of the dry intellectual type who is carrying forward earnestly the cause still inspired by Gandhi; 3) Pundit Madan Mohan Malavya, most graceful, polished and commanding of Indian orators, clad in a long white coat, tight white trousers, a turban; 4) Madame Sarojini Naidu, politician-poetess, first among Indian feminists.

Proceedings: 1) the Congress passed with unusual harmony a great many resolutions of detail, reaffirmed its tenacious purpose of noncooperation; 2) the chief bogey of disunion reappeared, exemplified by an old politician-journalist, beady-eyed, bushy-haired, black-spectacled, who shouted: "Who among you cares anything for this political humbug? . . . There is only one problem before India today, and that is Hindu-Mohammedan unity!"

Sadly many a delegate admitted in his heart that this union is still as remote as an entente between Roman Catholics and Christian Scientists.

*Through the Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung and, in the U. S., the Living Age.