My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  Gandhi himself arrived in Vaikom in March 1925 to arbitrate. He consulted with the Brahmin priests of the temple—who did not allow him, a non-Brahmin, to enter the sanctum—and the Queen of Travancore, and negotiated a compromise: the roads were realigned so that they were no longer within “polluting” distance from the temple. The contentious portion of the road remained closed to Christians and Muslims as well as avarnas (Untouchables) who continued to have no right to enter the temple. Saying he was “unable to satisfy the orthodox friends” Gandhi advised the “withdrawal of satyagraha,”198 but the local satyagrahis continued with their struggle. Twelve years later, in November 1936, the Maharaja of Travancore issued the first Temple Entry Proclamation in India.199

  If one of Gandhi’s first major political actions was the “solution” to the problem of the Durban Post Office, Ambedkar’s was the Mahad Satyagraha of 1927.

  In 1923, the Legislative Council of Bombay (whose elections had been boycotted by the Congress) passed a resolution, the Bole Resolution, that allowed Untouchables to use public tanks, wells, schools, courts, and dispensaries. In the town of Mahad, the municipality declared that it had no objection if Untouchables used the Chavadar Tank in the town. Passing a resolution was one thing, acting on it quite another. After four years of mobilization, the Untouchables gathered courage and, in March 1927, held a two-day conference in Mahad. Money for the conference was raised by public contribution. In an unpublished manuscript, the scholar Anand Teltumbde quotes Anant Vinayak Chitre, one of the organizers of the Mahad Satyagraha, saying that forty villages contributed Rs 3 (six cents) each, and a play about Tukaram was staged in Bombay that made Rs 23 (forty-seven cents), making the total collection Rs 143 (two dollars and ninety-three cents). Contrast this with Gandhi’s troubles. Just a few months before the Mahad Satyagraha, on January 10, 1927, Gandhi wrote to his industrialist-patron, G. D. Birla:

  My thirst for money is simply unquenchable. I need at least Rs 200,000—for Khadi, Untouchability and education. The dairy work makes another 50,000. Then there is the Ashram expenditure. No work remains unfinished for want of funds, but God gives after severe trials. This also satisfies me. You can give as you like for whatever work you have faith in.200

  The Mahad conference was attended by about three thousand Untouchables, and a handful of progressive members of the privileged castes. (V. D. Savarkar, out of jail by now, was one of the supporters of the Mahad Satyagraha.) Ambedkar presided over the meeting. On the morning of the second day people decided to march to the Chavadar Tank and drink water. The privileged castes watched in horror as a procession of Untouchables walked through the town, four abreast, and drank water from the tank. After the shock subsided came the violent counterattack, with clubs and sticks. Twenty Untouchables were injured. Ambedkar urged his people to stay firm and not to strike back. A rumor was deliberately spread that the Untouchables planned to enter the Veereshwar temple, which added a hysterical edge to the violence. The Untouchables scattered. Some found shelter in Muslim homes. For his own safety, Ambedkar spent the night in the police station. Once calm returned, the Brahmins “purified” the tank with prayers, and with 108 pots of cow dung, cow urine, milk, curd, and ghee.201 The symbolic exercise of their rights did not satisfy the Mahad satyagrahis. In June 1927, an advertisement appeared in Bahishkrit Bharat (Excluded India), a fortnightly Ambedkar had founded, asking those members of the Depressed Classes who wished to take the agitation further to enlist themselves. The orthodox Hindus of Mahad approached the sub-judge of the town and got a temporary legal injunction against the Untouchables using the tank. Still, the Untouchables decided to hold another conference and regrouped in Mahad in December. Ambedkar’s disenchantment with Gandhi was still some years away. Gandhi had, in fact, spoken approvingly of the Untouchables’ composure in the face of the attacks from the orthodoxy, so his portrait was put up on stage.202

  Ten thousand people attended the second Mahad conference. On this occasion Ambedkar and his followers publicly burnt a copy of the Manusmriti,203 and Ambedkar gave a stirring speech:

  Gentlemen, you have gathered here today in response to the invitation of the Satyagraha Committee. As the Chairman of that Committee, I gratefully welcome you all…. This lake at Mahad is public property. The caste Hindus of Mahad are so reasonable that they not only draw water from the lake themselves but freely permit people of any religion to draw water from it, and accordingly people of other religions, such as Islam, do make use of this permission. Nor do the caste Hindus prevent members of species considered lower than the human, such as birds and beasts, from drinking at the lake. Moreover, they freely permit beasts kept by untouchables to drink at the lake.

  The caste Hindus of Mahad prevent the untouchables from drinking the water of the Chavadar Lake not because they suppose that the touch of the Untouchables will pollute the water or that it will evaporate and vanish. Their reason for preventing the Untouchables from drinking it is that they do not wish to acknowledge by such permission that castes declared inferior by sacred tradition are in fact their equals.

  It is not as if drinking the water of the Chavadar Lake will make us immortal. We have survived well enough all these days without drinking it. We are not going to the Chavadar Lake merely to drink its water. We are going to the Lake to assert that we too are human beings like others. It must be clear that this meeting has been called to set up the norm of equality …

  Time and again, Ambedkar returned to the theme of equality. Men may not all be equal, he said, but equality was the only possible governing principle because the classification and assortment of human society was impossible.

  To sum up, untouchability is not a simple matter; it is the mother of all our poverty and lowliness and it has brought us to the abject state we are in today. If we want to raise ourselves out of it, we must undertake this task. We cannot be saved in any other way. It is a task not for our benefit alone; it is also for the benefit of the nation.

  Even this will not be enough. The inequality inherent in the four-castes system must be rooted out…. Our work has been begun to bring about a real social revolution. Let no one deceive himself by supposing that it is a diversion to quieten minds entranced with sweet words. The work is sustained by strong feeling, which is the power that drives the movement. No one can now arrest it. I pray to god that the social revolution that begins here today may fulfil itself by peaceful means. We say to our opponents too: please do not oppose us. Put away the orthodox scriptures. Follow justice. And we assure you that we shall carry out our programme peacefully.204

  The thousands attending the conference were in a militant mood and wanted to defy the court injunction and march to the tank. Ambedkar decided against it, hoping that after hearing the matter, the courts would declare that Untouchables had the right to use public wells. He thought that a judicial order would be a substantial step forward from just a municipal resolution. Although the high court did eventually lift the injunction, it found a technical way around making a legal declaration in favor of the Untouchables205 (like the judge who, almost eighty years later, wrote the Khairlanji verdict).

  That same month (December 1927), Gandhi spoke at the All-India Suppressed Classes Conference in Lahore, where he preached a gospel opposite to Ambedkar’s. He urged Untouchables to fight for their rights by “sweet persuasion and not by Satyagraha which becomes Duragraha when it is intended to give rude shock to the deep-rooted prejudices of the people.”206 He defined duragraha as “devilish force,” which was the polar opposite of Satyagraha, “soul force.”207

  Ambedkar never forgot Gandhi’s response to the Mahad Satyagraha. Writing in 1945, in What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, he said:

  The Untouchables were not without hope of getting the moral support of Mr Gandhi. Indeed they had very good ground for getting it. For the weapon of satyagraha—the essence of which is to melt the heart of the opponent by suffering—was the weapon which was forged by Mr Gandhi, and who had led the Co
ngress to practise it against the British Government for winning swaraj. Naturally the Untouchables expected full support from Mr Gandhi to their satyagraha against the Hindus the object of which was to establish their right to take water from public wells and to enter public Hindu temples. Mr Gandhi however did not give his support to the satyagraha. Not only did he not give his support, he condemned it in strong terms.208

  Logically, the direction in which Ambedkar was moving ought to have made him a natural ally of the Communist Party of India, founded in 1925, two years before the Mahad Satyagraha. Bolshevism was in the air. The Russian Revolution had inspired communists around the world. In the Bombay Presidency, the trade union leader S. A. Dange, a Maharashtrian Brahmin, organized a large section of the Bombay textile workers into a breakaway union—the Girni Kamgar Union, India’s first communist trade union, with seventy thousand members. At the time a large section of the workforce in the mills were Untouchables, many of them Mahars, who were employed only in the much lower paid spinning department, because in the weaving department workers had to hold thread in their mouths, and the Untouchables’ saliva was believed to be polluting to the product. In 1928, Dange led the Girni Kamgar Union’s first major strike. Ambedkar suggested that one of the issues that ought to be raised was equality and equal entitlement within the ranks of workers. Dange did not agree, and this led to a long and bitter falling out.209

  Years later, in 1949, Dange, who is still a revered figure in the communist pantheon, wrote a book, Marxism and Ancient Indian Culture: India from Primitive Communism to Slavery, in which he argued that ancient Hindu culture was a form of primitive communism in which “Brahman is the commune of Aryan man and yagnya [ritual fire sacrifice] is its means of production, the primitive commune with the collective mode of production.” D. D. Kosambi, the mathematician and Marxist historian, said in a review: “This is so wildly improbable as to plunge into the ridiculous.”210

  The Bombay mills have since closed down, though the Girni Kamgar Union still exists. Mill workers are fighting for compensation and housing and resisting the takeover of mill lands for the construction of malls. The Communist Party has lost its influence, and the union has been taken over by the Shiv Sena, a party of militant Maharashtrian Hindu chauvinists.

  Years before Ambedkar and Dange were disagreeing about the internal inequalities between laborers, Gandhi was already an established labor organizer. What were his views on workers and strikes?

  Gandhi returned from South Africa at a time of continuous labor unrest.211 The textile industry had done well for itself during World War I, but the prosperity was not reflected in workers’ wages. In February 1918, millworkers in Ahmedabad went on strike. To mediate the dispute, Ambalal Sarabhai, president of the Ahmedabad Mill Owners’ Association, turned to Gandhi, who had set up his ashram in Sabarmati, just outside Ahmedabad. It was the beginning of Gandhi’s lifelong career as a labor union organizer in India. By 1920, he had managed to set up a labor union called the Majoor Mahajan Sangh—which translates as the Workers and Mill Owners Association. The English name was the Textile Labour Union. Anusuyaben, Ambalal Sarabhai’s sister, a labor organizer, was elected president for life, and Gandhi became a pivotal member of the advisory committee, also for life. The union did work at improving the hygiene and living conditions of workers, but no worker was ever elected to the union leadership. No worker was permitted to be present at closed-door arbitrations between the management and the union. The union was divided up into a federation of smaller, occupation-based unions whose members worked in the different stages of the production process. In other words, the structure of the union institutionalized caste divisions. According to a worker interviewed by the scholar Jan Breman, Untouchables were not allowed into the common canteen; they had separate drinking water tanks and segregated housing.212

  In the union, Gandhi was the prime organizer, negotiator, and decision maker. In 1921, when workers did not turn up for work for three days, Gandhi was infuriated:

  Hindu and Muslim workers have dishonoured and humiliated themselves by abstaining from mills. Labour cannot discount me. I believe no one in India can do so. I am trying to free India from bondage and I refuse to be enslaved by workers.213

  Here is a 1925 entry from a report of the Textile Labour Union. We don’t know who wrote it, but its content and its literary cadence are unmistakably similar to what Gandhi had said about indentured labor in South Africa more than thirty years before:

  They are not as a rule armed with sufficient intelligence and moral development to resist the degrading influences which surround them on all sides in a city like this. So many of them sink in one way or another. A large number of them lose their moral balance and become slaves to liquor habits, many go down as physical wrecks and waste away from tuberculosis.214

  Since Gandhi’s main sponsor was a mill owner and his main constituency was supposed to be the laboring class, Gandhi developed a convoluted thesis on capitalists and the working class:

  The mill-owner may be wholly in the wrong. In the struggle between capital and labour, it may be generally said that more often than not capitalists are in the wrong box. But when labour comes fully to realise its strength, I know it can become more tyrannical than capital. The mill-owners will have to work on the terms dictated by labour, if the latter could command the intelligence of the former. It is clear, however, that labour will never attain to that intelligence…. It would be suicidal if the labourers rely upon their numbers or brute-force, i.e., violence. By doing so they would do harm to industries in the country. If on the other hand they take their stand on pure justice and suffer in their person to secure it, not only will they always succeed but they will reform their masters, develop industries, and both masters and men will be as members of one and the same family.215

  Gandhi took a dim view of strikes. But his views on sweepers’ strikes, which he published in 1946, were even more stringent than those on other workers’ strikes:

  There are certain matters on which strikes would be wrong. Sweepers’ grievances come in this category. My opinion against sweepers’ strikes dates back to about 1897 when I was in Durban. A general strike was mooted there, and the question arose as to whether scavengers should join it. My vote was registered against the proposal. Just as a man cannot live without air, so too he cannot exist for long if his home and surroundings are not clean. One or the other epidemic is bound to break out, especially when modern drainage is put out of action. … A bhangi [scavenger] may not give up his work even for a day. And there are many other ways open to him for securing justice?216

  It’s not clear what the “other” ways were for securing justice: Untouchables on satyagraha were committing duragraha. Sweepers on strike were sinning. Everything other than “sweet persuasion” was unacceptable.

  While workers could not strike for fair wages, it was perfectly correct for Gandhi to be generously sponsored by big industrialists. (It was with this same sense of exceptionalism that in his reply to Annihilation of Caste he wrote, as point number one, “He [Ambedkar] has priced it at 8 annas, I would have advised 2 or at least 4 annas.”)

  The differences between Ambedkar and the new Communist Party of India were not superficial. They went back to first principles. Communists were people of The Book, and The Book was written by a German Jew who had heard of, but had not actually encountered, Brahminism. This left Indian communists without theoretical tools to deal with caste. Since they were people of The Book, and since the caste system had denied Shudra and Untouchable castes the opportunity of learning, by default the leaders of the Communist Party of India and its subsequent offshoots belonged to (and by and large continue to belong to) the privileged castes, mostly Brahmin. Despite intentions that may have been genuinely revolutionary, it was not just theoretical tools they lacked, but also a ground-level understanding and empathy with “the masses” who belonged to the subordinated castes. While Ambedkar believed that class was an important—and even primary—pri
sm through which to view and understand society, he did not believe it was the only one. Ambedkar believed that the two enemies of the Indian working class were capitalism (in the liberal sense of the word) and Brahminism. Reflecting perhaps on his experience in the 1928 textile workers’ strike, he asks in Annihilation of Caste:

  That seizure of power must be by a proletariat. The first question I ask is: Will the proletariat of India combine to bring about this revolution? … Can it be said that the proletariat of India, poor as it is, recognises no distinctions except that of the rich and poor? Can it be said that the poor in India recognise no such distinctions of caste or creed, high or low?217

  To Indian communists, who treated caste as a sort of folk dialect derived from the classical language of class analysis, rather than as a unique, fully developed language of its own, Ambedkar said, “[T]he caste system is not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers.”218

  Unable to reconcile his differences with the communists, and still looking for a political home for his ideas, Ambedkar decided to try and build one himself. In 1938, he founded his own political party, the Independent Labour Party. As its name suggests, the program of the ILP was broad-based, overtly socialist, and not limited to issues of caste. Its manifesto announced “the principle of State management and State ownership of industry whenever it may become necessary in the interests of the people.” It promised a separation between the judiciary and the executive. It said it would set up land mortgage banks, agriculturist producers’ cooperatives, and marketing societies.219 Though it was a young party, the Independent Labour Party did extremely well in the 1937 elections, winning sixteen of the eighteen seats it contested in the Bombay Presidency and the Central Provinces and Berar. In 1939, the British government, without consulting any Indians, declared that India was at war with Germany. In protest, the Congress Party resigned from all provincial ministries, and the provincial assemblies were dissolved. The brief but vigorous political life of the Independent Labour Party came to an abrupt end.