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.
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).
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