I had my first sight of Gandhi in London in late 1976. Well, at least a sight of his wax model at Madame Tussaud’s museum; after all the Mahatma had been dead for over a quarter of a century by then. But even that sight moved me. That little brown man in a shawl, oversized nappy and carrying a stick, positioned among those grey men in grey suits or military uniforms, who were supposedly great world leaders, stood out. And, needless to say, not just because of his dress. He was Time magazine’s ‘Man of the Year’ in 1930 following his celebrated Salt March to the seaside village of Dandi to break the British salt laws and shake the foundations of the Empire. Seventy years later, he became runner up (to Albert Einstein) as Time’s ‘Person of the Century’.

He is one of the most recognized figures of recent history and has come to be seen not just as a saintly politician and the ‘Father of the Nation’ of the world’s largest democracy, but as the architect of mass nonviolent struggle and as the iconic godfather of things related to peace in general. If I was moved by seeing a wax reproduction, how much stronger must the experience have been for those who met the flesh and blood Gandhi at the peak of his fame?

After a day or two of being in even the most beautiful of places, we tend to become complacent about our surroundings. First impressions, so the saying goes, are often lasting impressions. While with people first impressions regularly prove to be totally misplaced, they are, at that time, real and raw, unshaped by later rationalization. And, moreover, first impressions are often surprisingly accurate. In some cases, especially where there has been powerful anticipation, the impact of a first meeting can be overwhelming (as seems to have been the case with Madeleine Slade – Mirabehn, and Lanza del Vasto – Shantidas, when they first met Gandhi). Very often, those meeting Gandhi did not take long to make the comment that what you saw was what you got. Gandhi, it seems, was a well integrated person who did not play games with those who sought him out (except to show very human and welcoming humour). Indeed, what his visitors saw was what they got. The first impressions were generally lasting.

 

Psychologists point out that we have an inbuilt bias to conflate the beautiful with the good. Many of Gandhi’s first time visitors (for example Nilla Cram Cook) mentioned that he was quite ugly to look at, but he was not a stranger with whom they locked eyes in a crowded room. People sought him out and these were not chance encounters. There were expectations, but still there do seem to be many cases of ‘love at first sight’ in the accounts. The lack of beauty certainly did not signal a lack of good. Several of those who sought his presence went on to dedicate themselves to the Mahatma and his cause after the first meeting. In essence, these first meetings with Gandhi took on life changing attributes. For example, the impact of that first meeting on a group of young Bihari lawyers (including Rajendra Prasad) was truly life altering. Many of them went on to be leading national activists, but one cannot help suspect that if they had not met Gandhi at Champaran most of them would have remained provincial attorneys.

 

When Gandhi was still an unknown young Indian in Rajkot, or a student in London, or even a lawyer in South Africa, who was there to write about him? Why would anyone record an everyday meeting? When he becomes famous, it is only natural for old memories to surface (and for the shadow of the current period to be cast backwards to contaminate those memories). Would T.S.S. Rajan have remembered the South African lawyer Mohandas Gandhi, who was a guest speaker at a London Indian students’ dinner some forty years earlier, if that speaker did not go on to become Mahatma Gandhi? Many of us have shared houses during our student days, but how many of us would remember a first meeting with our housemates if nothing extraordinary had happened? For example, in Gandhi’s case, fellow vegetarian, doctor Joshua Oldfield shared rooms for a while with him in London and, first some forty and then sixty years later, tried to remember his friend. He comes up with little more than high praise for Gandhi’s character and that he was a ‘young, shy, diffident youth, slim and a little weakly.’

There are many accounts of seeing Gandhi giving a speech during a Congress session, having a glimpse of him as his train stopped at a railway station, or of taking his darshan while he was conducting a prayer meeting. But these more distant sightings, while they may tell us about their affect on the viewer, tell us little about the Mahatma. Accounts of actual first meetings are different. They allows those who were with Gandhi for the first time to describe not only their initial reactions but also to describe the Mahatma, say something about his appearance and personality and give an account of what was happening around him.

One of the first recorded meetings with Gandhi is that by Lionel Curtis, a young South African official who had to deal with the issues of immigration. He recalls that he met Gandhi the young Johannesburg attorney, the first Oriental he had come into contact with, around 1903. In his brief description, Gandhi ‘was dressed in European clothes except for his Indian cap and gave me the impression of being an exceedingly able young lawyer. He started by trying to convince me of the good points in the character of his countrymen, their industry, frugality, their patience.’

 

There is little texture here, no colourful storytelling. And of course there is the problem presented by the vicissitudes of memory. We selectively perceive what happens around us (far too much happens for us to take everything in) and then reconstruct this perception in accordance with our ideas of what is important at the present time. Memory, in short, is a filtering process that leaves us twice removed from the ‘facts’. Usually the early accounts of meetings with Gandhi were written well after the event and well after he became famous. While this may allow biases into the accounts, and we need to remain cognizant of this fact, if Gandhi had not become famous there would have been little reason to have written about the meetings at all.

Interestingly, but perhaps not unexpectedly, some of those who were later to become his closest political co-workers had surprisingly little to say about what should have been their recorded historic first meetings. Nehru comes to mind. One would expect that a description of the Gandhi/Nehru first encounter would be well known in Indian history. Of course, Gandhi appears in Nehru’s writings, but Nehru does not write the way that Gandhi’s disciples do. He was Gandhi’s closest political lieutenant, then co-worker and finally heir. However, he wrote surprisingly little about his first meeting with the Mahatma. At one place he merely tells his reader that, ‘My first meeting with Gandhiji was about the time of the Lucknow Congress during Christmas 1916. All of us admired him for his heroic fight in South Africa, but he seemed very distant and different and unpolitical to many of us young men’, without further elaboration.

 

In his conversations with Tibor Mende in 1955, Prime Minister Nehru talked briefly about being ‘simply bowled over by Gandhi, straight off.’ He ‘worked as a kind of secretary to Gandhi.’ Nehru further explains: ‘I was searching for some method of action. And I did not agree with this business of throwing about bombs as some of our young men did. I thought it was silly. And now, he put forward a method of action. I jumped to it. I did not care for the consequences; I was enthusiastic.’ But there is never a single description of a first meeting, of circumstances or impressions. It is as though Gandhi was somehow always there. Something similar is the case with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Several of the other heavyweights of the Indian national movement, for example Annie Besant, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, B.R. Ambedkar and Jayaprakash Narayan say nothing, or at least nothing much, about their first meeting with Gandhi and even some of his closest friends and confidants seem not to have marked the occasion by a serious application of pen to paper. Often there is little more than a Nehruvian in passing ‘I first saw Gandhiji at the so and so Congress’ and later we learn how they worked with the Mahatma. Surprisingly we get little from his secretaries Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal, from his backers Jamnalal Bajaj and G.D. Birla, or from his close friends such as Rabindranath Tagore (although many of his stu dents wrote about Gandhi’s arrival at Shantiniketan) or Kaka Kalelkar.

 

This, of course, does not mean that only those of less historical consequence recorded their first meetings. There are detailed accounts containing the recollections of J.B. Kripalani, Sarojini Naidu, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Rajendra Prasad, and Lord Louis Mountbatten. There are many others also: South African colleagues such as Henry and Millie Graham Polak; celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, Parmahansa Yogananda, Margaret Sanger and Margaret Bourke-White; some of his closest devotees such as Vinoba Bhave, Mirabehn and J.C. Kumarappa; religious figures such as Joseph Doke, E. Stanley Jones and John Haynes Holmes; internationally renowned (or budding) writers and journalists such as Webb Miller, Louis Fischer, Vincent Sheean, Halide Edib, Negley Farson, Yone Noguchi, Katherine Mayo, Edgar Snow and William Shirer; and well known pacifists such as Romain Rolland, Muriel Lester, Lanza del Vasto, Horace Alexander and Reginald Reynolds; politicians such as Fenner Brockway and R.G. Casey; and an assortment of others who captured their first sighting of Gandhi in memorable prose in a way that added to our knowledge of the Mahatma. And the ‘flavour’ of the memorable prose of the journalists was quite different from that of the religious seekers or the merely curious.

A great many people, who were not well known or important in Indian political history, who were not literarily overly proficient, or who simply had nothing new to say, also went on to record their impressions of their first meetings. However, often their stories are along the lines of: ‘I entered the room and saw a dark semi-naked figure sitting on the floor plying a spinning wheel. He had a shaven head, large ears, a beak-like nose and protruding lower lip. He could not have been called handsome. Then he looked up at me and smiled. Everything suddenly changed. His beauty shone through. And [if it was not his day of silence] he said, "So, you have come", and beckoned me to sit by him.’ This is then frequently followed by a record of a conversation.

 

Someone who met Gandhi in the early South African days (such as the Polaks and Doke) met an impressive youngish local political activist. Many of those, like Madeleine Slade, who came after reading Romain Rolland’s book (Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One With the Universal Being) left a spiritually disillusioned Europe following the slaughter of World War I seeking new spiritual guidance or even a master. Those who met Gandhi after his Empire-shaking Salt March and civil disobedience campaign were meeting perhaps the most famous person on the planet. Their experiences had to be different. Hopefully in the accounts reproduced in my book, Gandhi at First Sight are more than vague clues to how something of the change in Gandhi’s recognition and fame affected the meetings, while the circumstances of the meetings themselves often illustrate this change. As one reads the accounts, given the limitations described above, it may be possible to evaluate what changes and what remains constant in Gandhi.

As already noted, personal observation does not guarantee an objective revelation of immutable facts. Occasionally Gandhi’s guests got things wrong or implied that things were different to what history tells us they were. For example, Newton Phelps Stokes gives us an excellent portrait of Gandhi on the Salt March. However, he estimates a crowd of 1,000 in the village where he caught up with Gandhi, when even the police reports, which tended to downplay numbers, put the crowd at 5,000. Hermon Ould was convinced that he had a brief conversation in a large crowd with ‘Gandhi’s wife’ (who in fact had died two years earlier). While there may be some factual errors, these are eyewitness reports and important for that fact alone. And they provide us with a wealth of new material about Gandhi and elucidate the affect he had on those around him.

 

As can be expected from first person first meeting accounts, we are provided with detailed descriptions of the Mahatma. We are offered an individual who is variously described as someone with kind eyes and warm smile, someone who is simple, childlike, selfless, humble, gentle, unassuming, considerate, friendly, courteous, punctual, tireless, sincere, truth seeking, vigorous, joyful, direct, open, loveable, wise, homely, transparent, courageous and saintly. Gandhi comes across as having strong powers of persuasion but also as an active listener; he has integrity and a sense of humour. He seems to be an astute judge of character and is eager to learn. He does not speak badly of others. This is an impressive list of attributes. Is it too good? Halide Edib pointed out that ‘those who know him become too emotional to be trusted to be objective.’ Can anyone then, following a meeting with the Mahatma, remain trustable enough to be objective?

 

Naturally, most of those who came to see the Mahatma were Gandhi-philes. That is why they came. Those who were not sympathetic to him would presumably not have sought him out. The exceptions were some of the big named newspapermen of the time (like Negley Farson and Edgar Snow). They were hardened individuals who had seen a great deal of the underbelly of world politics. They were not about to write a hagiography and were tough in their assessments of Gandhi, noting his political realism and even diabolical cunning. However, even they could not help saying something positive in the end, mentioning his sincerity, integrity, courage, and honest search for truth. This makes for a pretty impressive scorecard and could perhaps be fruitfully kept in mind by those who see it almost as their duty to debunk the ‘myth’ of the Mahatma.

Perhaps what becomes most obvious from these descriptions is how, after the Salt March, the demands on Gandhi’s time become extreme. Very few people seemed to have the type of selfless disposition which could trump their desire to impinge on the Mahatma’s time for their own edification. In short, while there were not many considerate souls like John Haynes Holmes, Shriman Narayan and Ould, or extremely shy ones like Muriel Lester, there were plenty of overzealous darshan seekers. Charlie Chaplin and Jo Davidson in London, Romain Rolland on the Continent, and Edib back in India, give us a glimpse of the circus of which the Mahatma had become the prime star. From about that time on, it would be rare that anyone could merely walk into Gandhi’s ashram and find him spinning alone under a tree as J.C. Kumarappa did, or be allowed to visit him in prison and find him almost alone as Nilla Cram Cook did. His schedule, to say the least, had become hectic.

Yet he managed to cope. The way Gandhi interacted with people who may have carried introductory letters but were nevertheless strangers may provide a clue as to how. Hallam Tennyson discovered that Gandhi was more interested in him than in the news he was carrying. This led him to discover ‘more of the essential greatness of Gandhi than we had ever learnt from studying his speeches or his life. India called him Bapu or "Father". Before we met him this merely seemed part of India’s passion for personalisation. But afterwards we realised that it was because Gandhi himself had such an amazing gift for personalising that he had become Bapu to others.’

 

Perhaps it could be argued that the way Gandhi charmed his interlocutors is little more than a practiced technique that he learned from Gokhale: a skill that seems to be a primary implement in the toolbox of any successful politician. After all, who knows how useful the person being talked to might become in the future? However, reading these accounts, Gandhi’s way of interacting does not seem to be a cynical exercise for possible future gain. None of those who recorded their first meetings with him mentioned that they felt manipulated. Although the renowned birth control movement leader Margaret Sanger occasionally felt that the Mahatma was not necessarily listening to her argument (and she may have added that, given the topic and his background, psychologically he could not afford to), it appears that these first meetings with Gandhi reinforce this aspect of his personality, an aspect that did not change with time. From the examples of the first meetings with Gandhi that I have found, it seems obvious that regardless of his fame or pressure on his time, he gave pretty well every visitor, high or low, the gift of his full attention. And they felt it.

 

* This article is based on the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’ to the author’s book, Gandhi at First Sight. Roli Books, Delhi, 2014. His other Gandhi related books are Going Native: Gandhi’s Relationship with Western Women (2011), Gandhi, Gandhism and the Gandhians (2006), and Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor (2004).