Gandhi Trusted This Englishman More Than Almost Any Indian, and Yet Nobody Talks About Him

On

a Durban dock on the first day of 1914, an Anglican priest in a rumpled suit stepped off a ship, walked up to a forty-four-year-old Gujarati lawyer, and bent down to touch his feet. The Englishman belonged to the ruling race. The Indian was a man white South Africa dismissed as a coolie. Passers-by were scandalised. Charles Freer Andrews did not much care. He later wrote that their hearts had met in that first moment and never afterwards parted, and for the next twenty-six years he would be the closest friend Mohandas Gandhi had.

The Priest Who Came To Convert and Stayed To Serve

Andrews was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1871, the son of a minister in a small breakaway church, and grew up in a household straitened by a friend's betrayal of his father. He read Classics at Cambridge, was ordained in the Church of England, and in 1904 sailed for Delhi to teach at St Stephen's College under the Cambridge Mission. He arrived a conventional missionary. He did not remain one for long. Living alongside Indian colleagues, above all the principal Susil Kumar Rudra, he grew sickened by the casual racial arrogance of his countrymen and began to doubt the certainties he had been sent to preach.

The Meeting That Changed Two Lives

It was the Indian leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale who first told Andrews of the sufferings of Indians abroad, and Gokhale who asked him to sail for South Africa at the end of 1913 to help resolve the community's dispute with the government. There Andrews served as Gandhi's aide in the negotiations with General Jan Smuts, and helped settle the finer details of the eventual agreement. He was struck by how deeply this Hindu lawyer understood Christian teaching, and how completely he had made non-violence a way of living rather than a slogan. Andrews would come to call him a St Francis of the twentieth century.

The Man Who Called Gandhi Mohan

Nearly everyone addressed Gandhi as Gandhiji, or later as Bapu. Andrews called him Mohan, and appears to have been the only significant figure to do so. Gandhi called him Charlie, and also Christ's Faithful Apostle, a play on his initials. Gandhi said plainly that he could claim no deeper attachment to any person, and that he owned no closer friend on earth. It is a startling thing to sit with. At the height of a struggle to expel the British from India, the man leading that struggle held an Englishman among the dearest people in his life.

Deenabandhu, Friend Of The Poor

The affection was not sentimental. Andrews turned his energies on the ugliest machinery of empire, the indenture system, a form of debt bondage that had carried some 3.5 million Indians to plantations across the colonies. Sent to Fiji in 1915 to investigate, he walked the estates, questioned the labourers and their overseers, and came home to campaign relentlessly against what he called a vile system. He pressed ministers, wrote, argued and would not let the matter rest until indenture was ended. Gandhi and his students at St Stephen's gave him the name that stuck, Deenabandhu, friend of the poor. He also joined the Vaikom Satyagraha against untouchability, and in 1933 helped B.R. Ambedkar frame the demands of the Dalits.

The Hyphen Between Tagore and Gandhi

Andrews made his headquarters at Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan, and grew as close to the poet as to the Mahatma. Tagore's brother Dwijendranath coined the phrase that best describes him, calling Andrews the hyphen between Tagore and Gandhi, the man who kept two towering and often disagreeing Indians in conversation. He served as a channel to the other side too. Viceroys, secretaries of state and prime ministers opened their doors to him, even when he turned up at a London club in canvas shoes and frayed collars. Edwin Montagu, exasperated and admiring, called him God's own fool. Andrews used that access shamelessly, going to London ahead of the second Round Table Conference to argue Gandhi's honesty to a suspicious British establishment, and hiring an office for him near the venue when he arrived.

Swaraj Is Coming, Mohan

By the mid-1930s Gandhi had gently suggested that sympathetic Britons should leave the freedom struggle to Indians, and Andrews began spending more of his time teaching in Britain. He wrote three books on Gandhi, chiefly to persuade an English readership that the man they feared was telling the truth. He wrote of his own faith in What I Owe to Christ. He never grew rich, never held office, and never renounced his church.When he lay dying in Calcutta in April 1940, Gandhi crossed the country to sit at his bedside. Among the last things Andrews said to him was that swaraj was coming, and he addressed him, as always, as Mohan. He did not live to see it. Two colleges near Kolkata carry his name, a Delhi neighbourhood is called Andrews Ganj, and a hospital in Palakkad is named Deenabandhu. Outside those places, an Englishman who gave half his life to India and was loved by Gandhi more than almost anyone alive, has slipped quietly out of the story he helped to write.