INDIA: Pinch of Salt

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Typical moments in Gandhi's life:

Meat: Seeing that the English rulers of India were great, strapping John Bulls, guessing that this physique was due to meat, Mr. Gandhi resolved to violate the most sacred religious tenet of Hinduism: he ate a steak. His stomach, his mind and his soul quickly experienced a most excruciating triple torture. Thereafter the poor great man—the much-to-be-sympathized-with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—resolved that even to free Mother India, dearer to him than life, he could not pollute himself with meat.

Women: Aged 12, he was married to the present Mrs. Gandhi, then also aged 12 but in the bud of womanhood which blows so early in India. Mr. Gandhi, who at 12 enjoyed the prospect rather than the substance of manhood, became troubled and ashamed when his child-wife openly mocked him for his immaturity.

Time set all this right, but one night, years later. Mr. Gandhi who wished to sit up with his sick father, was persuaded by Mrs. Gandhi to come to bed. The remorse of the Mahatma, when a servant knocked on the bedroom door and announced his father's death, prostrated him for two days. Not until Mrs. Gandhi passed middle age could he regard her as an intellectual helpmate.

*Drawn for TIME by Artist Vladimir Perfilieff of Philadelphia and Manhattan.

*See Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas, by C. F. Andrews (Macmillan, 1930, $3), pp. 290-99.

*Opium is also a British monopoly in India.

†Placid inaction by an Indian native soldier, after his British officer has commanded him to act, is of course the death-punishable crime of mutiny.

**General Dyer was promoted and retired from the British Army after his order to British troops in 1919 to fire on Indians had resulted in the death of 400 natives, the wounding of 1,200.

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