“Little is ever heard of her, little is ever written of her, but the life at Sevagram has flown round Kasturba Gandhi dominated by the spirit of her sacrifices and her untold patience and understanding. Her gifts to the nation have been no less than her husband’s,” journalist Ela Sen wrote about Kasturba Gandhi in her 1942 book, Wives of Famous Men.
Death came to Kasturba on February 22, 1944, while she was yet a detenu in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune (then Poona) sharing imprisonment with her husband, Mahatma Gandhi.
Soon after the arrest of Gandhi together with members of the Congress Working Committee on August 8, 1942, Kasturba was told by the Bombay police that, although she was not under arrest, she could accompany her husband if she liked. Kasturba declined the order but was arrested the next day.
Seventy-four at the time of her death, Kasturba was at the forefront of the freedom struggle of this country ever since the days of the South African Satyagraha.
In a message in March 1922, after Gandhi’s arrest in the non-cooperation movement launched then, she appealed to the citizens of the country to “wholeheartedly concentrate” on the movement. Edited excerpts from her letter:
My dear countrymen and countrywomen,
My dear husband has been sentenced today to six years’ simple imprisonment. While I cannot deny that this heavy sentence has to some extent told upon me, I have consoled myself with the thought that it is not beyond our powers to reduce that sentence and release him by our own exertions long before his term of imprisonment is over.
I have no doubt that, if India wakes up and seriously undertakes to carry out the constructive programme of the Congress, we shall succeed not only in releasing him, but also in solving to our satisfaction all the three issues for which we have been fighting and suffering for the last 18 months or more.
The remedy, therefore, lies with us. If we fail, the fault will be ours. I, therefore, appeal to all men and women who feel for me and have regard for my husband to wholeheartedly concentrate on the constructive programme and make it a success.
Among all the items of the programme, he laid the greatest emphasis on the spinning wheel and khaddar. Our success in these will not only solve the economic problem of India in relation to the masses, but also free us from our political bondage. India’s first answer, then, to Gandhiji’s conviction should be that:
(a) All men and women give up their foreign cloth and adopt khaddar and persuade others to do so;
(b) all women make it a religious duty to spin and produce yarn every day and persuade others to do so; and
(c) all merchants cease trading in foreign piece goods.
This letter was a result of her sustained efforts along side her husband in the country’s freedom struggle.
In the early days of the political and social activities of Gandhi, Kasturba did not seem to have taken much interest, but it slowly awakened.
The first spark came at the Phoenix Settlement in Durban, South Africa, when Gandhi was discussing with women inmates their participation in a Satyagraha, after which she immersed herself in the freedom struggle.
Frequent jail-going, however, shattered her health irreparably, causing her at least three near death experiences and several bouts of haemorrhaging.
But she remained undeterred in her devotion to country, and her husband.
“She sat by her husband’s side, simple and serene and dignified in the hour of triumph as she had proved herself simple, serene and dauntless in the hour of trial and tragedy. I have a vision too of her brave, frail, pain-worn hand which must have held aloft the lamp of her country’s honour undimmed in one alien land, working at rough garments for wounded soldiers in another.
“The great South African leader (Gandhi), who had moulded heroes out of clay, was reclining, a little ill and weary, on the floor eating his frugal meal of nuts and fruits, which I shared and his wife was busy and content as though she were a mere modest housewife absorbed in a hundred details of household service, and not the world-famed heroine of a hundred noble sufferings in a nation’s cause.”
Thus wrote Sarojini Naidu, giving her impression of Kasturba in a letter to Hansa Jivraj Mehta in February, 1915.
Kasturba’s later life only underlined this impression.
