Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  In late April and early May, Gandhi travelled through the Madras Presidency, visiting the towns and villages from which the indentured labourers in Natal had come. In a speech in Mayavaram, he said it was ‘no part of real Hinduism to have in its hold a mass of people whom I would call “untouchables”. If it was proved to me that this is an essential part of Hinduism, I for one would declare myself an open rebel against Hinduism itself.’38

  From the town of Nellore, Gandhi wrote to his friend Albert West, who had helped found the Phoenix settlement, and was now running it more or less on his own. ‘I am going through very varied experiences,’ wrote Gandhi to West. ‘India continues to satisfy my aspirations. I see much to dishearten me and I see much to encourage me.’39

  For part of the tour in South India, Gandhi was accompanied by V.S. Srinivasa Sastri. Although they had argued about Gokhale’s legacy, their personal relations remained civil. In Mayavaram, Sastri translated Gandhi’s speeches from English into Tamil. This was noble of him, since his diary entry after the event read: ‘Procession: tedious and annoying.’40 The refined scholar recoiled from the spontaneous (but to him somewhat vulgar) show of affection for Gandhi by the ordinary Tamil.

  IX

  In his first few months in India, Gandhi was continuously on the move. He had no office or secretariat—not even a permanent address. Only a few letters written to him in this period survive. They suggest that he was becoming known across the country. In April he was invited to the third Andhra conference, to be held in Vizagapatnam in the middle of May. The conference was part of a wider movement to create a cohesive state of Telugu speakers, then spread across different provinces and chiefdoms. Its organizers hoped that Gandhi, by blessing the Andhra movement, would endorse the ‘spread of knowledge and culture through the medium of the mother-tongue and the speedy realisation of Indian nationhood by the division of the country into autonomous units on linguistic basis’.41

  In the same week, a letter in Hindi was posted to Gandhi from the Himalayan foothills. ‘Since you are touring India now and have decided to serve the country,’ it said, ‘please improve the conditions of the people in the Himalaya.’ The writer enumerated the problems of hill peasants: the extraction of forced labour by officials, restrictions on access to forests (a vital source of fuel and fodder), no proper schools for their children. ‘Since you are an experienced man,’ the correspondent told Gandhi, ‘I have related our problems to you. Please come to Naini Tal and Almora, so that I can acquaint you with our difficulties….Do begin the good work from here and carry on till Cape Comorin.’42

  Some letters asked for advice, others offered it. A Bombay editor wrote to complain about Gandhi’s strident criticisms of modern life, since despite its many faults, ‘Western civilization, taken as a whole, tends more strongly to justice for all than any older civilization.’ ‘Your career and character is such a vast public asset,’ the editor told Gandhi, ‘that one feels that it is a pity it should be rendered less useful than it might and should be by this prejudice, as I must hold it to be, against modernity as such.’43

  Among the letters Gandhi received in the early months of 1915 was one from his son, Harilal. Unlike previous letters between the two, this was not handwritten, but printed. Harilal had originally intended to release it to the public, but in the end sent it only to family and close friends.

  Gandhi and his eldest son had a deeply troubled relationship. Shortly after Harilal was born, in July 1888, his father left to study law in London. Between 1893 and 1896 Gandhi again lived alone, in Durban. The family were reunited for a few years, but then separated again, as Harilal studied in high school in India while his parents and brothers lived in South Africa.

  In 1906, Harilal journeyed to South Africa to join the family. He stayed there for four years, in which time he went to jail in the satyagrahas led by Gandhi. He wished to become a barrister like his father. But Gandhi insisted that his eldest son abandon personal ambition and work selflessly for the community. Harilal resisted, and in 1910, now in his early twenties, returned to India to continue his studies.44

  After Gandhi himself returned to India, father and son met, only to fight once more. On 14 March 1915, Gandhi wrote to a nephew: ‘[T]here has been a misunderstanding between Harilal and me. He has parted from me completely. He will receive no monetary help from me.’45

  After this quarrel, Harilal composed the long letter that he then had printed. The letter rehearsed their decade of disagreement, the son saying that the father had ‘oppressed’ him, and paid him ‘no attention at all’. ‘Whenever we tried to put across our views on any subject to you,’ said Harilal, ‘you have lost your temper quickly and told us, “You are stupid, you are in a fallen state, you lack comprehension.”’ Harilal also accused Gandhi of bullying Kasturba, writing: ‘It is beyond my capacity to describe the hardships that my mother had to undergo.’

  Gandhi had disapproved of Harilal’s marriage, since he fell in love and chose his bride, rather than, as was the custom, have his parents choose a wife for him. Harilal’s relationship with his wife, Chanchi, was intensely romantic; this wasn’t to Gandhi’s liking either, since he believed sex was strictly for procreation and a true satyagrahi should be celibate. Harilal emphatically disagreed. ‘No one can be made an ascetic,’ he told his father. ‘A person becomes an ascetic on his own volition…I cannot believe a salt-free diet, or abstinence from ghee or milk [all of which Gandhi preached and practised] indicates strength of character and morality.’

  Harilal claimed he spoke on behalf of his younger brothers as well. Gandhi had imposed his will on his four sons, without ever giving them a hearing. ‘My entire letter stresses one point,’ remarked Harilal. ‘You have never considered our rights and capabilities, you have never seen the person in us.’ The argument stated, at length and with force, Harilal ended on a note of contrition:

  You know I have not disobeyed you on purpose. It is possible that my views are wrong. I hope that they prove to be wrong—if I realise that they are wrong I shall not hesitate to reform myself. In the deep recesses of my conscience, my only desire is that I be your son—that is, if I am good enough to be your son.46

  Harilal’s criticisms were, on the whole, fair. For, Gandhi was the traditional overbearing Hindu patriarch: insensitive to the wishes and desires of his wife; demanding that his children obey his instructions even when they had reached adulthood. Even now, Gandhi failed to reflect on where he might have gone wrong. ‘One will not easily find a parallel to what Harilal has done,’ wrote Gandhi to his nephew Narandas: ‘When a son writes in that manner, there is bound to be bitterness between father and son…Harilal has written to say that he has recovered his calm and that he is sorry he wrote that letter. The letter was all error, and I know that, with experience, he will understand things better.’47

  X

  In the second week of May, Gandhi returned to Gujarat, his travels temporarily on hold. He wished to start a community of social workers that would be a model of its kind. He had chosen the city of Ahmedabad as his base. There were several reasons for this. Ahmedabad had prosperous Hindu and Jain merchants who could fund his projects. The language of the city was his mother tongue, Gujarati. Ahmedabad was located in British India, but—unlike Bombay, Calcutta or Madras—was not greatly influenced by British culture. It had a large Muslim population, allowing him to test his ideas of religious pluralism. And it did not yet have a political leader with an all-India reputation.

  Sited on the banks of the Sabarmati River, Ahmedabad was a thriving commercial centre, a major market for gold, cloth and grain. Its Hindu and Jain businessmen were legendary for their acumen. Some fifty textile mills were established here in the decades before Gandhi arrived, earning the city the moniker, ‘the Manchester of India’.

  The population of Ahmedabad in 1915 was about 240,000. The bulk of the population still lived within the medieval city walls; slo
wly, families were shifting out, building residential colonies on the open land across the river.48

  An Ahmedabad businessman who had come forward to back Gandhi was the mill owner Mangaldas Girdhardas.49 On 11 May, Gandhi submitted to Mangaldas a meticulously detailed description of all that the proposed ashram in Ahmedabad would need. The items listed included the number and size of cooking pots, cups, plates, frying pans, kettles, carpenter’s and cobbler’s tools, agricultural implements, inkstands, blackboards, chamber pots, and maps (of Gujarat, the Bombay Presidency, India and the world). The ashram would have about fifty inmates. Its annual expenditure (excluding land and buildings) would be in the region of Rs 6000.50

  Gandhi had hoped to acquire at least ten acres for the ashram. That was not immediately forthcoming, so he rented a building from a local barrister named Jivanlal Desai. This was located in Kochrab, across the river from the main city. Desai’s bungalow was spacious; with a dozen rooms spread across two floors, a lovely tiled roof and a large garden. It would do until a larger plot was identified and purchased.51

  On 20 July 1915, Gandhi and a few followers formally took over the building in Kochrab. On the same day, he drafted a constitution for the ashram. Inmates had ‘to learn how to serve the motherland one’s whole life’. They would take personal vows of truth, non-violence, celibacy, non-stealing, non-possession and ‘control of the palate’. They would also commit themselves to the wearing and promotion of hand-spun cloth and the abolition of untouchability. A school for children would also be established, with instruction in the mother tongue.

  Gandhi had founded two such settlements in South Africa. One, Phoenix, took the name of a nearby railway station. The second was called Tolstoy Farm, since the land originally belonged to his fellow Tolstoyan, Hermann Kallenbach. Among the names suggested for Gandhi’s first Indian settlement were ‘Sevashram’ (the home of service) and ‘Tapovan’ (the home of austerities). Gandhi eventually decided to call it ‘Satyagraha Ashram’, which, as he noted, conveyed ‘both our goal and our method of service’.

  The daily routine of the ashram was similar to that of Phoenix. The inmates woke up at 4 a.m., and bathed. Community prayers (with hymns and texts drawn from Hindu, Christian, Parsi and Muslim traditions) were followed by breakfast. The adults spent the bulk of the day doing manual labour, the children alternating between classes and work. The evening meal was followed by a second round of prayers. The children were to go to bed by 9 p.m., and adults by 10 p.m.52

  Gandhi had circulated the ashram’s constitution to a few friends. One, the Moderate politician Satyananda Bose, wrote a searing critique of the emphasis on brahmacharya, or celibacy. While self-control and self-discipline were important attributes, did one have to enforce them in such a rigorous way? ‘It is not desirable that the country should be peopled by monks and nuns,’ remarked Bose acidly. If the ‘best men’ were ‘called away as celibate Sannyasis’, wrote Bose, ‘the society will consist of mediocres’.53

  Gandhi’s reply is unavailable. For him, abstinence from sex was absolutely an article of faith. An early teacher, the Jain preacher Raychandbhai, had termed celibacy ‘that state supreme’, whereby an individual surrendered his desires to ‘tread the path trodden by the wise and the great’. Another major influence, Leo Tolstoy, also embraced celibacy in later life, celebrating it as ‘a man’s liberation from the lusts’.54

  Gandhi’s obsession with celibacy was akin to that of early Christian ascetics in North Africa and the Middle East. For them, writes one historian of the subject, ‘sex typified the kingdom of evil’. They believed that ‘the supremely dangerous desires inside us are sexual’. In later life, the most famous of these celibates, St Augustine, looked back on the sexual encounters of his youth with ‘horror and disdain’.55

  Like St Augustine, Gandhi gave up sex in his thirties, when fully capable of enjoying its pleasures. Having once experienced it vigorously, and even fathered four children, he came to view sex with disgust. Gandhi was not a young virgin when he embraced celibacy (as was and often still is the case with many Buddhist, Christian, Jain as well as Hindu monks). Neither was he an old man. Yet Gandhi felt that he had arrived at brahmacharya too late. Now, those who came under his own influence were asked—or mandated—to take the vow as early as possible.56

  XI

  By early September, the ashram had about thirty members. They included Gandhi’s own family, some Indians from South Africa, and a handful of brave young men who had abandoned their careers in pursuit of an ideal. Recruits were welcome, so long as they were willing to take the vows. The social worker A.V. Thakkar now wrote to Gandhi that ‘a humble and honest untouchable family is desirous of joining your Ashram. Will you accept them?’

  This letter, recalled Gandhi in his autobiography, ‘perturbed’ him.57 He had taken a public stance against the practice of untouchability. However, in matters of caste the Hindus of Ahmedabad were cautious and conservative. So soon after he had moved to their city, should he challenge their prejudices in so open a manner?

  Varnashramadharma, the rules of caste, strictly forbade members of different castes from living under the same roof or eating at the same table. In July 1915, there were no ‘untouchables’ in the ashram, but there were members from the four main orders: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Sudra. To justify their cohabitation, the ashram manifesto as drafted by Gandhi said: ‘The Ashram does not follow the varnashram dharma.’ This, he argued, was because the inmates were in the stage of sannyas (renunciation) where such rules did not apply. Then, in a bow to orthodox opinion, Gandhi added: ‘Apart from this, the Ashram has a firm belief in the varnashram dharma. The discipline of caste seems to have done no harm to the country…There is no reason to believe that eating in company promotes brotherhood ever so slightly.’58

  Shortly after Gandhi reached India, he had received a long letter on the problem of untouchability from a friend in South Africa. The writer, a Tamil Christian named J.M. Lazarus, told Gandhi that in the Madras Presidency, ‘even today, a Pariah dare not walk into a Street inhabited by Brahmins, nor will he even wear his Dhotis below his knees before his Brahmin Lord, nor will he even draw his drinking water from a well used by the Brahmins’.

  Comprising some 15 per cent of the Indian population, the ‘untouchables’ were confined to professions such as scavenging and leatherwork, which caste Hindus regarded as ‘unclean’. Though technically Hindus, they were not considered part of the varna system, and not allowed to worship in temples, nor allowed to draw water from the same wells as upper-caste Hindus. In some parts of India even the sight of an ‘untouchable’ was said to ‘pollute’ the Brahmins. The economic degradation and social humiliation that ‘untouchables’ in India experienced had no parallel elsewhere in the world.*2

  Under British rule the situation of the ‘untouchables’ had marginally improved. They could convert to Christianity (as Lazarus had himself done), or abandon their traditional, stigmatized professions to take up jobs in factories and government offices. The growing movement for self-government was no doubt welcome, argued Lazarus, but where did it place the ‘untouchables’? Gandhi’s Tamil friend argued that the Congress was dominated by high-caste men who had ‘not done anything to elevate the oppressed classes’. He worried that if India got political independence, ‘the Brahmins could again pursue their old Steam Roller Policy upon this much neglected and wretched community’.

  Lazarus asked Gandhi to pay this ‘great question’ his fullest attention. He understood that ‘by bringing this question forward it may hamper Congress’s aims in some respects and so it behooves us to find some solution of the difficulty’. For, if a solution was not found, ‘the realisation of the ideal of a National India is an utter impossibility’.59

  Gandhi himself believed that the practice of untouchability was immoral and unjust. Friends like Lazarus pushed him to make its abolition an active part of his programme. On the other side, he was sen
sible of the strong feelings of the orthodox Hindu. Gandhi was himself not a Brahmin; born in the Bania, or merchant caste, and without a deep knowledge of Sanskrit, he did not have a formal mandate to prescribe what Hindus should or should not do.

  A.V. Thakkar’s letter to him had now placed Gandhi in a quandary. Should he accept the ‘untouchable’ family recommended by Thakkar, or would that imperil the future of the ashram?

  Gandhi decided to accept Thakkar’s suggestion. The family consisted of Dudhabhai, his wife, Danibehn, and their baby daughter, Lakshmi. When they arrived at the Satyagraha Ashram on 11 September, there was much grumbling, not least from Gandhi’s own family members. Kasturba was not happy with this decision to defy the orthodox. Danibehn was prevented from drawing water from the common well until Gandhi said in that case he would not use the well either.60

  On 23 September, Gandhi wrote to Srinivasa Sastri about the turmoil caused by the admission of the ‘untouchable’ family. ‘There was quite a flutter in the Ashram,’ he remarked. ‘There is a flutter even in Ahmedabad. I have told Mrs. Gandhi she could leave me and we should part good friends. The step is momentous because it so links me with the suppressed classes mission that I might have at no distant time to carry out the idea of shifting to some Dhed quarters and sharing their life with the Dheds.’61