Daughter Of Midnight - The Child Bride of Gandhi. Arun Gandhi
in floods that ravaged Porbandar at the turn of the century.
Her parents and her brother died young leaving no written record of family history except for the references in Grandfather’s writings to the Makanji family and Ba.
In our research my wife, Sunanda, and I had to depend on oral history, which was often clouded by the awe-inspiring memories of my grandfather. It was sometimes an exercise in patience and perseverance to keep the interviewee focused on Grandmother. Since 1960 we have recorded interviews with scores of people from all walks of life who knew Ba and had lived and worked with her.
Grandmother’s life story is unusual and inspiring. I hope you enjoy this labour of love.
Arun Gandhi, 1998
There is no record of the exact day of Kastur Kapadia’s birth.
In ancient India, official birth records were never properly kept. We know Grandmother was born in 1869, the same year as grandfather, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. They were also born in the same town: the coastal city of Porbandar, on India’s Kathiawar peninsula. Kathiawar is in the present-day state of Gujarat. Some have surmised that the difference in their ages was only a few months. Years later, long after Kastur had become Kasturba*, it is said they would sometimes playfully disagree about which one was the older. However, since Grandfather’s birth was October 2, 1869, and Ba’s birthday was in April, she must have had the better of any such arguments.
With two brothers — one older and one younger — little Kastur grew up as the only daughter and the middle child of wealthy and indulgent parents — Gokaldas and Vrajkunwerba Kapadia. Many Gandhi biographers have used Makanji rather than Kapadia as my grandmother’s family name, a confusion arising from the common Indian custom identifying sons by the names of their fathers. Kastur’s grandfather was Makanji Kapadia, so her father, Gokaldas, as the son of Makanji, was often addressed as Gokaldas Makanji rather than Gokaldas Kapadia. A leading citizen and one-time mayor of Porbandar, Gokaldas had inherited the trading house dealing in cloth, grain, and cotton shipments to markets in Africa and what was then known as Arabia. Prospering as a merchant, he had opened branches in Bombay and Calcutta, and added extensive real estate holdings in both those cities as well as in Porbandar, to the family fortune.
Porbandar was a city-state, a strip of coastal land no more than 24 miles wide at any point. It had a population of 72,000 according to the 1870 census. It was one of India’s many miniature principalities ruled by local Hindu and Muslim princes. It was known as “The White City” because its high walls and sturdy houses built of creamy-white limestone were visible for miles.
This limestone, somewhat clayish in quality, joins together more firmly after each rainfall, hardening to a marble-like texture and beauty. Porbandar still has the distinction of being the only place in India where a house can be built without cement. All one has to do is pile up the limestone blocks as desired and wait for the rains to come. Generations earlier the Kapadia and Gandhi homes, like others in old Porbandar, had been built that way.
By the late 1860s, Porbandar’s once-impenetrable walls were gone — destroyed by order of the British, the most recent foreign rulers to claim dominion over India. Through the agency of the British East India Company, a commercial enterprise chartered by Queen Elizabeth I on the last day of the 16th century — December 31, 1599— to engage in the spice trade, the British had gradually seized control of the subcontinent from a fragmented Mogul Empire. They had made their governance official in the mid-19th century, after putting down the hard-fought Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 (called Sepoy “Mutiny” by the British), and had declared India a Crown Colony of the British Empire under Queen Victoria. The British hold on India became tighter following the completion of the Suez Canal, which was opened in 1869, the very year that my grandparents were born.
Porbandar remained as originally built — a cluster of crowded homes and narrow lanes. The Indian tradition of large joint families, in which several generations and various branches of one family share living quarters and expenses, has created a sense of claustrophobia.
Here, in one such small room, in the bungalow-style house her parents shared with other family members, Kastur was born. Despite their wealth, the Kapadias did not live ostentatiously. Their home, though well appointed and handsomely furnished, had no garden or outdoor courtyard where children could play. A few houses down the lane was the Gandhi family home which had a small, private courtyard. Since the two families were friends and neighbours, it seems likely that the Kapadia children and the Gandhi children would have both played in the open courtyard.
They would not have been playmates for long, however. Girls and boys growing up in Hindu families lived in separate worlds, even as small children.
Mohandas was given free run of the entire neighbourhood, usually under the watchful eye of his older sister or the family nurse, Rambha. They had trouble keeping up with Mohan, who was full of curiosity. He would slip away to the courtyard of the nearby temple where there were trees to climb; or wander out into the streets to follow some ceremonial parade. He loved to tease his mother, scribbling all over the floor with chalk long before he learned to write, and once, as a very small child, he removed the statue of a god from its niche in the family prayer room so that he could sit there himself. His energies became more channelled when, at about the age of six, he began attending school in Porbandar. He struggled with alphabets and arithmetic but, as he reported in his autobiography many years later: “I recollect nothing more of those days than having learned, in company with other boys, to call our teacher all kinds of names.”
Kastur, meanwhile, was learning too — not arithmetic, and not in a schoolroom — but in the home of her parents. She was learning the art of being a good wife, mother and housekeeper. And since girls in India were married at a very early age, they had to start learning their marital responsibilities at an age when small girls today would be entering kindergarten.
She was learning the oft-told stories about the mythical heroines of India’s glorious past, all of whom were model wives. She learned of Anasuya, who proved faithful to her husband, a learned and holy man, when her chastity was tested by the gods; of Savitri, who outwitted the god of death to bring her husband back to life and win a kingdom for their children; of Taramati, the good wife of a virtuous king, who found a way to help her husband keep his vow of truthfulness when he was tested by the gods; of Sita, the beloved wife of the great Lord Rama.
There have been countless interpretations of child marriage as set forth in the Sutras, the ancient scriptures of the Hindus. Justification of the practice revolved around the need to preserve the virginity of young girls often threatened with rape and kidnapping by invading armies. Child marriages, it was said, protected girls living in large Indian households from the taint of becoming objects of untoward sexual advances. Even more importantly, child marriages saved young girls from becoming wayward themselves.
My grandfather, in his untiring battle against child marriage, would one day deal with such arguments: “Why this morbid anxiety about female purity? Why should men appropriate to themselves the right to regulate female purity? Have women any say in the matter of male purity?”
On a more practical level, child marriages were defended by some who believed that if a girl had to spend all her life in the home of her husband, it was best she learn to adjust from childhood. Whatever the origin or justification of the custom, for the Hindus living in Porbandar in the 1870s, the betrothal and marriage of girl children was an accepted and essential practice. Such a marriage was a union of families and not just of individuals.
Sometime in the year 1876, when Kastur Kapadia and Mohandas Gandhi were both seven years old, their fathers reached a preliminary agreement for their betrothal. Karamchand Gandhi, the father of Mohan was, like his father before him, the dewan or Prime Minister to the Rana of Porbandar, the local ruler. It was natural, therefore, for Gokaldas and Vrajkunwerba Kapadia to want to unite their family with that of their neighbours, the Gandhis, about whose history, probity, and suitability there could be no doubt.