The actor Boris Karloff, born William Pratt, had an elder brother called Frederick Greville Pratt, who joined the Indian Civil Service from Oxford at the age of 21. He was born in the same year as my grandfather Mohandas Gandhi, better known as the Mahatma, and died a year after his assassination.
After 20 eventful years in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India in 1915 and started his ashram just outside the city of Ahmedabad.
Pratt too arrived in Ahmedabad in 1915, to become Commissioner of the Northern Division of Bombay Presidency - in other words the ruler, on behalf, ultimately, of the King Emperor of India, of the region known as Gujarat. As befitted his position, Pratt lived in Shahibag ('the imperial gardens'), built by the 17th-century Mughal emperor, Shahjehan.
These days I often find myself in Shahibag, which now houses the papers, personal effects and photos of Vallabhbhai Patel, whose biography I am writing. Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru together administered India between Independence in 1947 and December 1950, when Patel died. Nehru was Prime Minister and Patel was styled Deputy Prime Minister, but they shared power equally and jointly.
Shahibag does not retain the splendour of its Mughal days. The insignia of the British Raj and the hum of a powerhouse have gone too. Time's ravages have disfigured the buildings. The river alongside is bone dry, for Ahmedabad, like much of Gujarat, faces a great drought, and the garden is struggling. But peacocks wander in and out, towers, tiles and trees try to tell their tales, and it is not hard to evoke the past.
The Mughal past interests me enormously. Shahjehan's grandfather Akbar tried valiantly, if not always wisely, to unite the Muslims from whom he sprang with the Hindus who formed the bulk of the country. My grandfather the Mahatma, a Hindu, made a heroic effort towards the same goal. But it is yet to be attained in a lasting sense, and the continuing India-Pakistan discord is not unrelated to the Hindu-Muslim question, though the two things are different. I look at the sand where the river should be and pray for a stream, and pray too that sandy, stony and suspicious hearts on both sides of the India-Pakistan divide may be moistened.
Yet Pratt enters my mind more often than Shahjehan, for he was involved in fierce clashes with my subject, Patel. Proud, self-controlled, a peasant's son who sweated and scraped his way to London's Inns of Court, Vallabhbhai Patel was a flourishing barrister before he fell under Gandhi's spell, discarded a life of affluence and threw himself into the struggle for freedom. If Pratt was the Raj's Commissioner in Gujarat, Patel was the commander of the anti-Raj forces. Pratt once asked Patel, in the course of one of their conflicts, to call, if he wished, at his office. 'You can call, if you wish, at my office,' Patel replied.
Fluent in Gujarati, Pratt had served unsparingly when famine hit Gujarat, but he didn't agree when Gandhi, Patel and company claimed that Indians could replace the Raj. He and the Mahatma met several times in 1917 - 19 and frequently disagreed. Pratt and Patel met less frequently but disputed more often. Then, early in 1920, Pratt did a most unusual thing, but before I disclose it I must refer to Jallianwalla Bagh.
389 Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were killed in Amritsar on 13 April 1919, when Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer's troops used gunfire to disperse about 10,000 people gathered in a walled-in space called Jallianwalla Bagh. Three days before, an Indian mob had set fire to buildings in Amritsar, four Englishmen had been murdered and an English schoolmistress assaulted.
The Indian National Congress held a session in Amritsar in December 1919. Gandhi, not yet the father of the freedom movement, attended, as did Patel. So did Annie Besant, the Irishwoman who had made India her home.
A resolution condemning the massacre was on the agenda. Word went round that someone was going to propose an amendment with criticism of the Indian excesses that preceded it.
'No son of an Indian mother could draft such an amendment,' commented a Congress leader, hinting at Annie Besant's hand.
Then Gandhi declared that he had authored the amendment, and 'spoke as if his life depended upon the question', as a participant, K M Munshi, would recall. Hostile at first, the house voted with him in the end.
Frederick Pratt was on furlough in London at the time. He read of Gandhi's speech and sent him the following letter:
Dear Mr Gandhi
During my absence from India, I have been in fairly close touch with Indian affairs through the newspapers, both English and Indian, and a week or two ago, when I read the account of your speech in the Amritsar Congress... I felt that I would like to write and congratulate you on the stand you took.
Our relations in the past have not been altogether harmonious. Speaking for myself only, I feel sure that there have been hard thoughts and hard words against you, which were not justified. But the future matters far more than the past, and I wish to grasp the hand of fellowship and cooperation, in the same spirit in which you extended it...
Yours sincerely, F Pratt
If I share this little-known and, for me, newly discovered slice of history with readers of For a Change, and also entertain a hope that some descendant of Frederick Pratt might get in touch with me, it is because I believe that brown and white hands, and black and yellow hands as well, must meet in an honourable bond.
They can so meet - and I believe this despite every wounding disappointment - in Fiji, in Sri Lanka, in South Africa, in Central America, and everywhere else, even in much-loved India, torn by cruel strife. They can meet if, in the spirit of Frederick Pratt's letter, I look for a while only at my slips, and you at yours, and both see that no matter the past, the future matters far more.
Rajmohan Gandhi, an Indian journalist and author.
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