C.R. was dropped from the Working Committee. Where would he ‘self-effacingly’ serve? C.R. had an answer.
He would tear himself away from his house in Salem Extension and put his roots down in a scarcely-known village: he would move to the patch in Pudupalayam offered by Ratnasabhapati Gounder. There he would raise an Ashram and practise, with any willing co-workers, the gospel of constructive work.
He would train khadi workers there, and work to attack the grip of untouchability and the hold of liquor. The Mahatma, with whom C.R. discussed the idea in Belgaum and, after the session, in Sabarmati, gave his blessing; and Jamnalal Bajaj, who had endowed a ‘Gandhi Seva Sangh’ to assist rural service, indicated that some money might be available.
A Bangalore meeting on 10 January, when, as he put it himself, C.R. spoke in his ‘finest propaganda style and kept the audience laughing,’ tempted him to ‘tramp the country all over India and address such meetings as of old.’ But he had given Gandhi his word to ‘settle down at Pudupalayam.’23
On 6 February 1925 the Ashram was ‘opened’ and C.R.’s feet set on a rough and almost unmapped path.
Around the Ashram, granite hills rose from an undulating earth. A fortress erected by Tipu, a reminder of bygone strength, looked down from Sankaridurg hill, 12 miles north of Pudupalayam.
Tipu’s British successors had built a railway line through Sankaridurg; but from there to Pudupalayam it was a dusty three-hour bullock-cart journey past ragi and cotton fields, palm trees and roadside shrines. Half-way, at Tiruchengode, stood an imposing rock, two thousand feet high, its bosom sheltering an ancient Ganesa temple. From Tiruchengode town, officials of the Raj administered about a tenth of Salem district, including Pudupalayam.
The village of about 150 dwellings did not even have a letter box. The red rocky earth around it was responsive to rain, but the latter by no means made a yearly appearance. Familiar with famine and superstition, the sweltering hamlet of Pudupalayam nevertheless possessed two advantages for C.R.
Firstly, Gounder, its landlord, was his ally. While giving the promised four-acre plot he had also seen to the erection of half a dozen thatched mud huts that comprised the Ashram. Secondly, around Pudupalayam lived numerous weavers who owned their cottage looms, as also ex-spinners, all women, who retained their spinning-wheels. They had been forced, after the advent of factory yarn, to consign these wheels to their attics.
But when the women heard that the Ashram was willing to supply cotton and pay them for spinning it into yarn, they brought their old wheels down and dusted them.
From the start the Ashram defied untouchability. Five ‘untouchable’ boys were enrolled as members, eating and living with the rest. An instant boycott ensued, and it looked as if Ashram members and their accomplices, the Gounder family, would have to live without milk or vegetables, or only with what one milkman was surreptitiously supplying.
A rumour that the Ashram would be torched proved to be false, but it caused its members to be trained in fire-fighting, a skill later used to tackle fires in nearby ‘untouchable’ settlements.
Narasimhan, 15, and Lakshmi, 12, were now part of C.R.’s new multicaste family of seventeen Ashramites. Along with Narasimhan and Lakshmi, C.R. occupied one of the thatched-roof huts until another hut with a tile roof was ready. An iron safe containing the Ashram’s cash was also kept here.
The ‘big room’ in the new dwelling was 12 feet by 5 feet; two tiny rooms next to it, one of them serving as a kitchen, completed the hut. A Madura lawyer who had given up his practice, N. Narayanan, was the Ashram manager. In charge of khadi production was C.R.’s young colleague from 1920, K. Santhanam.
For most members, the Ashram meant a new lifestyle: open-air prayers before dawn and at sundown, with all Ashramites participating; coarse meals shared by all together; encounters with snakes and scorpions; hours spent in trying to relieve the lives of the debt-laden, liquor-hit, and rejected poor.
For the last goal, the Ashram’s principal weapon was khadi. The women of the villages were enabled to spin. The weavers were persuaded, slowly and not without difficulty, to use handspun yarn, which being thicker, less even and more fragile than factory thread was harder to shuttle across a loom. The end-product, khadi cloth, was energetically hawked.
To begin with, the women spinners earned between a rupee and a rupee and a half a month; this sum, miserable even for the time, was yet often a quarter of what a family made. Within two months, a thousand women living in twenty villages around the
Ashram were spinning. By August 1925, 70 weavers were using handspun yarn.
Next in importance was the battle against liquor. On many a night a decorated cart pulled by a pair of bullocks (picked by C.R. at a cattle market) would carry him and some other Ashramites to neighbourhood hamlets. On reaching a village a drumbeat from the cart would announce the visit. A throng would surround the cart, peer at petromax-lit drawings depicting the fate of men who drank, and would listen to Ashram songs. Then the bullocks would be goaded to heave again for a repeat performance at the next village; five or six villages could be covered nightly.
Congress’s national leader of 1922-3 thus became, in 1925, an itinerant preacher in an obscure corner of the South. He was making a mark, for liquor agents soon tried to break up his meetings. Personal work followed propaganda. Importuned by a woman beaten by a drunken husband, C.R. sent for the man, the cobbler Veeran.
Veeran denied drunkenness. ‘You were drunk last night and hit your wife,’ C.R. again charged. ‘No sir, it is not true,’ repeated Veeran. Placing in Veeran’s hands a pair of chappals that he, Veeran, had made, C.R. said: ‘Swear on these chappals that you are telling the truth.’
Veeran fell at C.R.’s feet, owned up and vowed never again to touch liquor. Nor did he, till he died. Well before his death, Veeran took charge of the Ashram’s footwear unit.
Schools came up, first in Pudupalayam for the children of Ashramites and of adjoining hamlets, with C.R. as one of the teachers, and then in the quarters of ‘untouchables’ in different villages; the Ashram strove, not always successfully, for mixed classes in these.
Old wells were renewed and new ones dug where the ‘untouchables’ lived; fortunately, an Ashram inmate was a water diviner. Every week, Ashramites scrubbed and fed ‘untouchable’ children in nearby hamlets and dispensed modest medical aid. Until a doctor was enlisted, C.R. himself diagnosed and prescribed.
Also, C.R. and his friends drafted letters from aggrieved villagers to officials and helped sort out some of their disputes. When a warning from C.R. to the police chief in Tiruchengode resulted in policemen returning the bribes they had extorted in the village of Molipalli, the Ashram’s prestige soared.
Lakshmi, thirteen at the time, would later recall an exchange. Her father was perched on a ladder in their hut, fixing a mesh to keep cats out. Thinking that he might fall, she said, ‘Chinnan is around. Can’t he do it?’ ‘So it doesn’t matter if Chinnan falls and injures himself?’ C.R. asked. Born in the ‘low’ washerman caste, Chinnan was C.R.’s cook and helper.24
Yet C.R. was no pamperer. In the view of Chagan, a Muslim spinner who was an early Ashramite, every worker ‘was very careful in doing his allocated work lest he incurred Periya Ayya’s (the Big Master’s) disapproval.’25
Crushed by debts and forfeiting his land, Chinna Gounder drove the Ashram cart. In 1973 he told the author that shortly after he was hired C.R. had said to him: ‘I won’t accept your thumb impression, you will have to learn to write your name.’ Later, Chinna Gounder did that, and went on to pay off his debts and redeem his land.
Visiting the Ashram six weeks after it opened, Gandhi observed that ‘a little touch of kindness, a little touch of humanity and love’ had made the ‘untouchables’ ‘one flesh with the whole Ashram.’26
Early in 1925, Gandhi and Shaukat Ali had gone to Kohat in north-western India to inquire into a riot that had caused the Hindu minority to flee. The two did not agree on what had happened.
Young India published their separate reports. The partnership of the Mahatma and the Ali brothers was coming to an end.
In June, C.R. Das suddenly died in Darjeeling. Gandhi responded to his passing away by prescribing a Swarajist mould for Congress. The spinning franchise, C.R.’s pet, was made optional.
Sweating for khadi in the baking hinterland — in accordance, he thought, with the Mahatma’s deepest wish — C.R. felt offended. To him the declaration virtually amounted to Gandhi joining the Swaraj Party. He poured out his embittered feelings to Devadas:
I wish I had been a private gentleman, pure and simple — and I should then have been less of a fool than I am now. Why should this poor yarn franchise be made to die this slow and lingering death? I would prefer to kill it at once.27
This was crossed by a letter to C.R. from Gandhi:
You are . . . perhaps the nearest to me. My innermost being wants your approbation of what I am doing and thinking. I cannot always succeed in getting it, but it craves for your verdict . . . 28
Gandhi’s words melted and overwhelmed C.R. He wrote to Devadas:
Can I bear the great weight of his love? . . . I have replied that I approve of all that he has done. The truth is my fits of opposition are temporary outbursts of Adam. My soul has been surrendered long ago and I cannot but agree.29
In September, when the AICC met in Patna, the Swarajists accepted Gandhi’s offer and at last obtained control over the whole of Congress. Spinning would go on, it was agreed, under the aegis of a new body, the All India Spinners’ Association (AISA). C.R., Vallabhbhai, Rajendra Prasad and Jamnalal Bajaj were made members of the AISA executive.
Zealous though he was in his rural work, C.R. at times missed the old life. ‘I pine to see you all,’ he said in a letter to Devadas. He even followed cricket:
Do not think I have not been following the quadrangular match. Today’s exciting news at this far corner is up to the close of the Europeans’ second innings. I do feel that the Hindus will make the 355 runs somehow and win. (14.8.25)
As the year reached its end, an occasion arose for C.R. to break the letter of his pledge to boycott the courts. An ‘untouchable’ who had entered the temple of Tiruchannur near the famed Tirupati shrine was apprehended by the police, prosecuted for insulting religion, and sentenced to a Rs 75 fine or a month’s rigorous imprisonment.
Incensed by the conviction, C.R. acceded to a request to argue the appeal. However, he would not call himself ‘a defence lawyer’ or wear the required turban and coat. Covering his head and shoulders with a khadi sheet to show respect to the judge in Chittoor, he obtained permission to argue as the accused’s friend.
The old advocate was alive and kicking inside C.R. He felt, as he argued, that he had ‘never stopped practice these seven years.’ All that the outcaste had done, said C.R., ‘was to steal the Lord from the temple, keep him in the casket of his heart, and walk away.’
Was that, asked C.R., a crime? Was adoration an insult? Moreover, C.R. pointed out, no witness had deposed that his religious feelings had been wounded by the outcaste’s entry.
The accused was acquitted.30 The contagion caught on. Another ‘untouchable’ similarly charged was also acquitted. But the non-cooperator conscience had been shocked. Some Ashramites frowned at C.R.’s ‘return’ to the polluted courts, but he was defended by the Mahatma. C.R., wrote Gandhi,
would have been like a Pharisee if he had sat there still, gloating over the sanctimonious satisfaction of noncooperating, while the accused could have been discharged by his intervention.31
6
Ashram
1925-29
The Mahatma’s efforts to strengthen the Swaraj Party failed. Obstruction was a difficult policy to maintain in the face of the prizes the Raj was offering.
After Motilal Nehru accepted a nomination to the Skeen Committee on cadet training, and Vithalbhai Patel became President of the Central Assembly, Tambe, a Swarajist leader in the Central Provinces (C.P.), went a step further and joined the provincial Executive Council.
Nehru condemned Tambe’s action and was promptly counter- criticized by other Swarajists. By the end of 1925, the Swarajists were obstructing one another, not the Raj.
Though his warnings regarding councils had been proved right, C.R. saw a role for the Swarajists sitting there: they should demand prohibition. If the Raj came in the way, a lively political issue would emerge. ‘A poor man’s question like drink is the best fireworks even such as they (the Swarajists) want,’ he said to the Mahatma.1
S. Satyamurti, a prominent Swarajist, replied at first that Swaraj was the only issue, adding: ‘I would rather be a member of a free nation of drunkards than belong to a slave nation of teetotallers’ (The Hindu, 1.1.26). Pointing out that ‘a definite struggle will bring matters to a head,’ C.R. succeeded, as he put it in a letter to Mahadev Desai, in ‘samjhaving’ Satyamurti and the Madras Swarajist chief, Srinivasa Iyengar.2
In return for the Swarajists’ adoption of prohibition, C.R. agreed, in a public statement, to assist them in elections due later in 1926. This alignment, which accorded with Gandhi’s position, was probably also influenced by the worsening caste climate in the South.
C.R. thought that the prohibition plank, promising relief to the mostly non-Brahmin poor, would counter the Justice Party’s propaganda that Congress, still led in the South by Brahmin Swarajists, was anti-Brahmin.
However, C.R.’s support of the ‘Brahmin Swarajists’ incurred the displeasure of two influential non-Brahmins who had been his comrades for some years, E.V.R. and Varadarajulu Naidu, and also of Justice, the organ of the non-Brahmin party. Hitherto, as C.R. said in a letter to Mahadev Desai, he had been ‘a great favourite with the Justice people’ (6.2.26).
‘Your central work,’ Gandhi wrote to C.R. in March 1926, ‘is to develop the Ashram you have established. Everything else is subsidiary.’ By this time over 2,000 women around the Ashram were adding precious coins to their families’ means.
At the end of March C.R. felt he could afford a quick trip to Bihar and Ahmedabad. Rajendra Prasad had requested him to address the students of Patna National College, which had been started in 1920-1.
In Patna he explained that he was not ‘hiding himself amidst spinners and weavers.’ The truth was that they had lost a round of battle against the Raj because the capacity to suffer, which was their cannon, had been exhausted. Now, in places such as his Ashram, they were making more cannon for the future.
On the way back to his Ashram, before a large gathering in Ahmedabad, he again used a military expression. The spindle, he said, was the Indian masses’ pistol.
By the summer of 1926, 30,000 spinners were employed in making khadi in Tamil Nadu, but the Marathi-speaking region was cooler towards it. In this bearish territory C.R. achieved a breakthrough. At Nagpur’s Tilak National College he challenged students to live in the villages, ply the wheel and wear khadi.
Two students of the Government-run Morris College were in the audience; they pressed C.R. to speak at their college. With the Principal, a Mr Cheshire, in the chair, C.R. talked about destitute villagers:
Can you move these people from their homes? . . . You must find employment at their very doors . . . You do not solve the problem of hunger by industrialising India, but by making it industrious.
True, C.R. admitted, khadi was more expensive than mill cloth, but it was indecent to wear the latter. Not caring for the poor was indecency.
‘You are a hawker, sir. What are your wages, may we know?’ a student asked. ‘No wages, my friend,’ C.R. answered, ‘but the satisfaction of feeling that I have persuaded some of you to wear khadi.’ ‘It is a retrograde step, sir,’ the smart student rejoined. ‘Yes,’ C.R. agreed amidst loud applause, ‘as retrograde as asking a dishonest man to go back to honesty.’
‘Never was the effect of a speech more instantaneous,’ wrote Mahadev Desai. Mr Cheshire offered to wear khadi himself, as did a number of students. Many yards of cloth were
bought on the spot, and a Students’ Khadi Union was formed.3
The Swaraj Party was bruised afresh in 1926. A group opted for ‘responsive cooperation’ and formed the Indian National Party (INP). In August, Lajpat Rai left the Swarajists and helped Pandit Malaviya start the pro-Hindu Independent Congress Party. This was a reaction to Muslim assertions: Muhammad Ali had said that he prayed for the day when he would convert Gandhi to Islam.
Motilal Nehru, making his first approach to C.R. after the Gaya split, and Srinivasa Iyengar, who was chosen Congress President for 1926-7, sought C.R.’s help in the November elections. Iyengar had requested C.R.:
[to] bestir yourself and help support Congress prestige and organisation which are being shattered deliberately in Maharashtra, C.P. and U.P. by rebellious persons . . . A word by you at this time will have a very welcome effect.4
While not getting embroiled in North Indian quarrels, C.R. made a strong appeal to the Madras electorate to vote for Congress, i.e. Swarajist, candidates. United under Iyengar’s vigorous leadership, the Madras Swarajists fared well, winning more seats than the Justice Party, but not so their colleagues in the rest of the country. In the U.P. and the Punjab, the party was routed.
Pledged against becoming ministers, the Madras Swarajists kept Justice out by declaring support for a ministry of Independents led by C.R.’s friend and neighbour in Tiruchengode, Dr P. Subbaroyan.
At C.R.’s suggestion, an exhausted Gandhi spent over three months in 1927 in Mysore state, first in Nandi Hills, 35 miles from Bangalore, and then in the latter city. In both places he was the Maharaja’s guest; C.R. was his constant companion, along with Narasimhan and Lakshmi. Kasturba, Mahadev Desai and Devadas also joined Gandhi’s party, which reached Nandi in the second half of April.
At Nandi’s altitude there were ‘wonderful cloud effects at sunset’ and the climate was bracing. In two weeks the Mahatma turned the corner and the spring in his gait returned. C.R. acted as ‘jailor,’ keeping Gandhi’s visitors at bay and terminating his interviews.
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