ABSTRACT
Leaving Nagpur for Bombay towards the end of December 1935, I stopped over at Wardha, an insignificant country town but the spiritual centre of the Gandhi movement. I was glad to see Gandhi with a fitting background in his Ashram, a monastery or refuge, where, unlike the ancient ascetic, this modern prophet responds to every pulsation of hope or pain in his nation’s life. In view of his illness, he was lying down in a tent pitched upon the flat roof of a two-storeyed concrete house, square in form with a yard in the centre. I found him with a saintly little smile revealing his broken teeth, stretching out his bare legs, as lean as a cricket’s and as stiff as steel wire, which one of his disciples was shampooing. I found difficulty in connecting this seemingly simple and unaffected man with the heroic fasts that had made the mammoth soul of England once tremble in fear. Noticing that he put on his head something wrapped in cotton cloth, I asked him what it was. He said that it was wet earth which, according to his doctors’ advice, was good for a man like him whose blood pressure was high. Then with a smile in which cynicism and philosophy commingled, he explained: “I sprang from Indian earth. So it is Indian earth that crowns me.”
