Gandhi and the Viceroys

From the first British Viceroy whom he encountered Gandhi received a decoration; the last, ten years ago, sat beside his funeral pyre. During the stormy intervening period he came into contact, and often into conflict, with six others; Francis Watson describes how each relationship marked a different stage in the long historical process that culminated in 1947.

Francis Watson | Published in History Today Volume 8 Issue 2 February 1958

It is ten years since Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was assassinated by one of his own countrymen in the capital of an independent India. It is nearly twenty-seven years—no more—since that other New Delhi event, during Lord Irwin’s Viceroyalty, characterized in the House of Commons by Winston Churchill as “the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy’s palace, there to negotiate and to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”

In the course of Gandhi’s Indian career (he was in his forty-sixth year when he returned to his homeland early in 1915), he had contacts of some kind with the last eight Viceroys and Govemors-General of British India—three before the Irwin watershed (Hardinge, Chelmsford, Reading), and four afterwards (Willing-don, Linlithgow, Wavell, Mountbatten).