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To Government House at Malabar Hill, with a scarlet-clad bodyguard, rode the Viceroy. On the long white stairway of Government House he met India—officers, naval, military and civil, provincial governors, maharajas, envoys of potentates, dignitaries of the Anglican Church, judges of India's High Court. At the top of the stairs stood Lord Reading, the departing Viceroy. The oath of office was administered and for five years Lord Irwin personified the British Raj in India.
In the Viceroy's House in New Delhi unassuming Lord Irwin lived as India expected him to—more sumptuously than his King did in Buckingham. Bejeweled Princes held his train on ceremonial occasions. At extravagant durbars, at elephant and tiger hunts, he was the guest of honor of India's fabulous maharajas. His coach had eight magnificently caparisoned horses with postilions. An official in scarlet & gold held the Viceregal umbrella over Lord Irwin's modest head. Servants in embroidered gowns waved brushes of white horsehair to keep mosquitoes from his skin.
Mahatma Irwin. Before his five-year term was up Lord Irwin had the Mahatma M. K. Gandhi and growing civil disobedience on his viceregal hands. But the Yorkshireman had the advantage, in dealing with the unruly, ascetic Mahatma, of being also a man of piety. The Mahatma, although determined to wipe British rule from India, found the new Governor General a "man I can trust to tell me what he thinks." Even after Lord Irwin had put Gandhi in jail, the Saint referred to His Excellency as the "Christian Viceroy," "one of the noblest of Englishmen." He met Gandhi as a "man, not a Viceroy," and the Mahatma greeted him as "my dear friend."
British Sunday supplements featured Lord Irwin as the "British Mahatma," a man of deeply religious feeling who at last understood mystic India. Actually, Lord Irwin was as tough as most governors general. The press was gagged; Indian police beat political strikers with staves. Peaceful picketing was made a crime. Failure to pay taxes was rigidly punished, as were agitators who suggested nonpayment. Some 47,000 persons in all, including virtually all prominent Indian Nationalists, were locked up without any libertarian nonsense.
Once when Gandhi went on one of his famous fasts unto death, Lord Irwin remarked: "Gandhi is now speaking in a language the Indian people understand. If I were to get in the hallway of the government buildings at New Delhi, squat on the floor and refuse to eat a bite until the Indian civil-disobedience movement came to terms, the trouble would be over in a few days. Of course, before these few days could elapse, my Liberal, Conservative and Labor colleagues in London would send for me to come home and would have a padded cell waiting for me on my arrival."