Under the knife
January 12, 2024
On January 12, 1924, Gandhi unexpectedly left Yeravda Prison. The jail doctor was unable to diagnose his ailment, but Colonel Maddox, chief surgeon from Pune’s Sasson Hospital, recognized it was his appendix. Maddox bundled him into his personal vehicle and rushed him to the hospital.
Gandhi had landed in Yeravda Prison two years earlier, arrested shortly after calling off the national civil disobedience campaign that had the British worried. Charged with sedition, he cheerfully pleaded guilty (again) and was sentenced to six years in prison. (He was also disbarred—not that he was practicing law in India.)
Last month I wrote about his previous jail sentence:
In November of 1913, Gandhi had been sentenced to a year in prison, nine months of it with hard labor, for his role in leading thousands of striking mine workers across South African borders without permits. He relished the prison sentence, writing, “the prospect of uninterrupted study for a year filled me with joy.”
This time, Gandhi had nearly two years of uninterrupted study. The prison library was well stocked; according to the Collected Works, he read “about 150 books on religion, literature, social and natural sciences.”(!) Scanning the list, they were mostly religious, but I wonder what he thought of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Someone sent him Equality, Edward Bellamy’s sequel to Looking Backward (1887-2000), which predicted equality between the sexes at the end of the century. Gandhi also began writing his own book, Satyagraha in South Africa.
At Sasson Hospital, Gandhi requested an Indian surgeon who had previously operated on him, but Col. Maddox decided it was too risky to wait. At 9:45 p.m., Gandhi scrawled his name with a shaky hand to a statement he had drafted. It requested the operation take place immediately and expressed his fullest confidence in Maddox’s ability. If he died under the knife, Gandhi hoped this public statement would minimize the public unrest.
There were external complications during the surgery—a thunderstorm knocked out power, and nurses held kerosene lamps for light—but it was successful. His recovery was slowed by the development of an abscess, and word got around that Gandhi was in the hospital instead of prison. Would the government throw him back behind bars when he was well?
They would not. On February 5, he was issued an unconditional release, although it would be another month before actually left the hospital. The news “gave him little pleasure.”1 He had been isolated from politics while incarcerated, free from the responsiblities of leadership, and the coalition he assembled in 1919 had drifted apart. It was time to get back to work; he resumed writing his newspapter column from his hospital bed.
Thus ended his years of “uninterrupted study.”
What book(s) would you read if you suddenly had the time?
The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (Payne, 1969) p. 373