In December 1924, Shaukat Ali and Gandhi chose to go together to Rawalpindi, where the refugees from Kohat were currently located. After the two men had visited the refugee camps, Gandhi told the Tribune newspaper that he hoped ‘the Mussalmans of Kohat will see their way to meet the refugees and invite them to return to Kohat under a promise of friendship and full security’.40
Gandhi now moved back south, towards the town of Belgaum, in the Deccan, the venue for that year’s Congress of which he had been chosen president. In his presidential address, Gandhi spoke with feeling about the prevailing ‘disunity and ill feeling’ among Hindus and Muslims. He then discussed the growing opposition within the Congress to the mandatory spinning that went with party membership. It remained his conviction that ‘every revolution of the charkha was bringing swaraj nearer and nearer to us’.41
And so ended the year 1924. In the ten months after Gandhi’s release, he had to retreat, regroup, reconsider. The enthusiasm of the non-cooperation movement had now visibly fizzled out. His leadership of the Congress was no longer unquestioned. And Hindu–Muslim riots were breaking out everywhere.
VII
While Gandhi had been pursuing Hindu–Muslim harmony in the North, the movement for the emancipation of ‘untouchables’ carried on in the South. The focal point remained Vaikom, the temple town whose roads were closed to lower castes. Among the new volunteers was E.V. Ramasamy, a radical Congressman with a deep antipathy to the caste system. Ramasamy threw himself into the struggle, being arrested twice. His commitment earned him the appellation Vaikom Virar, the valiant hero of Vaikom.42
In the second week of February 1925, the Travancore Legislative Council voted by the narrowest of margins (twenty-two to twenty-one) against the entry of ‘untouchables’ to the temple road. A satyagrahi from Vaikom now urged Gandhi to visit the town. If they did not have his sustenance and support, he said, the movement would wane, and perhaps die out altogether.43
In March, Gandhi visited Vaikom. He found the volunteers squatting in front of the barricades put up to guard the temple’s four entrances. Each batch was stationed for six hours, its members spinning or singing.
Gandhi asked the satyagrahis ‘to forget the political aspect of the programme’. We ‘are endeavouring to rid Hinduism of its greatest blot’, he remarked. The aim was to get all roads in Travancore to be opened up to the ‘untouchables’, as a prelude to an end to caste discrimination itself.44
Gandhi urged the protesters to cultivate a ‘detached state of mind’, adding that ‘three fourths of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world will disappear, if we step into the shoes of our adversaries and understand their standpoint’. Gandhi himself sought an audience with the high-caste Namboodiri Brahmins who were most bitterly opposed to granting the Ezhavas and Pulayas the right to walk on the roads outside the temple.
The conversation between Gandhi and the Namboodiri orthodoxy in Vaikom was recorded by Mahadev Desai. When asked why they treated the low castes so harshly, the leader of the Namboodiris—named Indanturuttil—said placidly that the Ezhavas and Pulayas were merely ‘reaping the reward of their karma’. It was for their (bad) behaviour in their past life that they had been relegated to the bottom of the pile in this one.
Gandhi told Indanturuttil Namboodiri that their conduct was as shocking, and as brutal, as the actions of General Dyer in Jallianwala Bagh. The Brahmin said, in justification, that the practice he and his caste men followed had been started by Adi Sankara, the eighth-century preacher from Kerala who had helped create a sense of unity among Hindus. Gandhi asked that if indeed this was an ancient custom, why was it not practised elsewhere in India? To this the Namboodiri answered: ‘Surely untouchability is there in every part of India. We carry untouchability a little further. That’s all.’
What, asked Gandhi, if the courts ruled in favour of granting access to the road to all regardless of caste? If that happened, said the Namboodiri, then ‘we should use the roads no longer, and we should leave the temples’.45
While in Travancore, Gandhi also visited Narayana Guru, the great Ezhava reformer among whose protégés was the originator of the Vaikom satyagraha, T.K. Madhavan. In Gandhi’s version of the meeting, when the Guru told him ‘religion was one’, he respectfully disagreed; in his view, ‘so long as there are different human heads, so long will there be different religions, but the secret of a true religious life is to tolerate one another’s religion’.
The two men were sitting in an open courtyard under a mango tree. As recorded in the Collected Works, Gandhi told Narayana Guru that ‘no two leaves of this very tree, under whose shadow we are sitting, are alike, though they spring from the same root, but, even as the leaves live together in perfect harmony and present to us a beautiful whole, so must we, divided humanity present to the outsider looking upon us as a beautiful whole’.46
The version told by the Guru’s biographers uses the same metaphor, but with a crucial twist. Here, Gandhi plucked two leaves from the tree, and, pointing to their different textures, sizes and shapes, said they illustrated the variety of humanity, and hence of their religious affiliations. In response, the Guru bit into the stem of one leaf, and then the other, and asked Gandhi to do so as well. He would find that the juice of the two stems tasted exactly the same. Likewise, men may appear to differ in size or skin colour or caste or religious identity, but in essence they were the same. Hence, Narayan Guru’s slogan, ‘One Caste, One God, One Humanity’.47
A poem attributed to Narayana Guru beautifully conveys his egalitarian and universalist philosophy. It reads well enough in English, and must surely be even more evocative in its native Malayalam. Here are a few lines:
One of kind, one of faith, and one of God is man
Of one womb, of one form, difference herein none
Within a species, is it not, that offspring truly bred?
The community of man thus viewed to a single caste belongs
Of the human species is even a Brahmin born,
And the Pariah too.48
Despite their different theological positions, Gandhi was greatly impressed by Narayana Guru, and by the manifest influence he had on the self-esteem of the Ezhavas. In a public meeting held in the state capital, Trivandrum, he said it ‘hurt his sense of religion, humanity and nationalism’, that someone like Narayana Guru could not enter the prohibited roads in Vaikom. He thought the issue should be settled by a popular referendum, or by an impartial arbitrator. Gandhi believed that ‘blind orthodoxy could not stand the fierce light of local public criticism provided it was sympathetic, non-violent and humble. There were only sixty thousand Brahmins, compared to eight lakh non-Brahmins and 17 lakh untouchables in [the State], and…they should not be refused the rights of common humanity.’49
On this trip, Gandhi also met the ruling maharani of Travancore, and urged her to have the obnoxious restrictions in Vaikom removed. Later in the year, some concessions were granted, with three sides of the road outside the temple being thrown open to all regardless of caste. But one side remained closed, while the temple itself remained out of bounds for all except caste Hindus.50
VIII
Gandhi had been prevented from visiting the riot-torn town of Kohat. He did, however, make several trips to Rawalpindi, where he had extensive conversations with the refugees. In the last week of March, six months after the riots themselves, Gandhi published a statement in Young India. He argued here that while there was provocation from both sides, the Muslim response was excessive, their ‘fury [knowing] no bounds’, with attacks on people and property (including temples and gurdwaras). Gandhi also blamed the local government, which had ‘betrayed callous indifference, incompetence and weakness’.
Gandhi advised the Hindus of Kohat, now in Rawalpindi, not to return to their home town ‘till there is complete reconciliation between them and the Mussalmans, and until they feel that they are
able to live at peace with the latter without the protection of the British bayonet’.
Young India also printed Shaukat Ali’s article on the Kohat riots. Their statements show subtle differences of emphasis. Gandhi pointed out that the Muslims were the aggressors, and that the government was criminally negligent. Shaukat Ali accepted that since the Muslims were in a majority they must take a greater share of the blame, but felt the Hindus had been unnecessarily provocative by publishing a pamphlet insulting the Prophet. He also said the old Muslim elite in the NWFP had been made insecure by the growing wealth of Hindu merchants who ‘aggressively’ flaunted their prosperity.51
Back in the days of Khilafat and non-cooperation, Gandhi and Shaukat Ali acted and felt like brothers. That now they could not even agree on a joint statement was reflective of a growing rift between the two men, and the two communities they represented.
The deteriorating relations between Hindus and Muslims depressed Gandhi, but cheered British imperialists. Lord Birkenhead, the secretary of state for India, wrote in glee to the viceroy, Lord Reading, that ‘I have always placed my highest and most permanent hopes [for the continuance of the British Raj] upon the eternity of the communal situation’.52
In the winter of 1924–25, the American scholar E.A. Ross was touring India. Ross, a professor of sociology at Wisconsin, met with a wide cross section of people, including Gandhi. He sympathized with Indian hopes and aspirations, but wondered if a free and united India would be feasible. He had observed the recent religious riots, and noticed the sentiment among educated Muslims that once they had been ‘the masters’ (of Hindus and of India). And so Ross presciently remarked: ‘The Punjab and Bengal have a majority of Mohammodans and, unless their feeling undergoes a wonderful change, it is possible that these great provinces would elect to remain outside an Indian Union just as North Ireland remains outside the Irish Free State.’53
IX
As, after his release from jail, Gandhi made his way back into the centre of Indian politics, he continued to be noticed and written about overseas. A sociologist at the State University of Iowa analysed how, through Gandhi and his movement, ‘new social values emerge through the actions of individual attitudes upon pre-existing social attitudes’.54 A Methodist minister and founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote of how Lenin and Gandhi had become ‘the two most influential men of this period’. Both were born middle class, both identified themselves with the masses, both commanded enormous prestige in their respective countries. Yet, they differed radically in their political programme—Lenin seeking to conquer the oppressor by force, Gandhi by a form of ‘spiritual resistance’.55
The most important foreigner to write about Gandhi was undoubtedly the French novelist Romain Rolland. Born in 1866, Rolland had never been to India, but had met and corresponded with his fellow Nobel laureate in literature, Rabindranath Tagore.
Rolland first heard of Gandhi in 1920, from the Bengali musician and mystic Dilip Kumar Roy, and from Tagore. They told him of Gandhi’s ‘extraordinary influence’ in India, and of his ‘ideal pacifism which the rest of the world pursues in vain’. Gandhi, Rolland learnt, was ‘a nationalist, but of the greatest, the loftiest kind, a kind which should be a model for all the petty, base, or even criminal nationalisms of Europe’.56
After Gandhi was jailed in March 1922, Rolland began work on a book about him. His sources were Gandhi’s own writings, reports in the Indian and European press, and pamphlets and books issued by the Madras publishers G.A. Natesan and S. Ganesan. His book was published in 1924 in French, and, in the same year, in an English translation in London and New York. It was called Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One with the Universal Being.
Romain Rolland was a man of faith, albeit one attracted more to individual mystics than to religious ceremonies or institutions. Gandhi appealed to him as a fellow ecumenist, and for his philosophy of non-violence, which spoke directly to a Frenchman who had just lived through the bloodiest war in European history. Praising Gandhi’s ‘childlike simplicity’ and ‘gentle and courteous’ manner, Rolland said the Indian leader had ‘introduced into human politics the strongest religious impetus of the last two thousand years’.57
Rolland’s book presented a factual overview of Gandhi’s life, interspersed with the author’s own comments and reflections. Rolland laid particular emphasis on the catholicity of Gandhi’s beliefs, his deep interest in religions other than his own, and his admiration for Western thinkers such as Tolstoy and Ruskin. He also provided an extended, and even-handed, discussion of the debates between Gandhi and Tagore.
The chronological narrative of Rolland’s book ended with Gandhi’s trial and arrest in 1922. ‘Ever since the great apostle’s voice has been silent,’ he wrote. ‘His body is walled in as in a tomb. But never did a tomb act as a barrier to thought, and Gandhi’s invisible soul still animates India’s vast body.’58
Rolland ended his book with some powerful passages on Gandhi’s message. ‘The world is swept by the wind of violence,’ he remarked. ‘All—be they nationalists, Fascists, Bolshevists, members of the oppressed classes, members of the oppressing classes—claim that they have the right to use force, while refusing this right to others.’ Meanwhile, ‘the church gives innocuous advice, virtuous and dosed, carefully worded, so as not to antagonize the mighty’.
In this ‘old, crumbling world’, there was ‘no refuge, no hope, no great light’—except Gandhi. Rolland ended with the mystical hope that
either Gandhi’s spirit will triumph, or it will manifest itself again, as were manifested, centuries before, the Messiah and Buddha, till there is finally manifested, in a mortal half-god, the perfect incarnation of the principle of life which will lead a new humanity on to a new path.59
Rolland sent a copy of his book to his fellow Gandhi worshipper, the American clergyman John Haynes Holmes. The two had not yet met, but had been in correspondence. ‘To see your name on the title page as the author of a book on Gandhi,’ wrote Holmes to Rolland, ‘has brought to me one of the most profound sensations of my life and I must thank you again not merely for sending me a copy of your book, but for having undertaken the task of writing it. You have done what nobody else could have done so efficiently and well.’
Holmes excitedly told Rolland of how, ‘in a strange and decidedly impressive sort of way, Gandhi is leaping into great prominence here in America, after a period of obscurity which began with his imprisonment’. A short biography of Gandhi had been published in Chicago, as well as an edition of Hind Swaraj, with an introduction by Holmes. And now, to round it off, came this ‘extraordinarily fine piece of work’ by Rolland.60
Gandhi himself read Rolland’s book when it appeared, and began to correspond with the author. But he does not seem to have read another assessment of his work, written by a writer as admired in his continent as the Frenchman was in his. This was José Carlos Mariátegui, a Peruvian by nationality, but known and read all across Latin America.61
Born in 1894, Mariátegui left Peru in 1920 to spend several years in Europe. On his travels he read about Gandhi in French and Spanish newspapers. He returned to his homeland in 1923, and two years later, published his first book, La Escena Contemporánea, collecting articles he had published in the press during his European sojourn. One section dealt with the ‘Orient’—this contained essays on the Turks, Tagore and Gandhi.
Mariátegui had closely read Rolland’s book, but as a secular socialist, agreed only with parts of it. While accepting that Gandhi was ‘one of the greatest figures of contemporary history’, he was not convinced of the merits of non-violence. Mariátegui saw Gandhi’s calling off of non-cooperation after Chauri Chaura as a mistake; as he put it, ‘this retreat, ordered at the moment of the greatest tension and a time of burning passions, debilitated the revolutionary wave’.
Mariátegui also had problems with Gandhi’s economic ideas. ‘Havin
g acquired the machine,’ he remarked, ‘it is difficult for humanity to renounce it.’ He also charged Gandhi with having exaggerated the defects of Western civilization. Western man was ‘not so prosaic and small-minded as many contemplative spirits and ecstatics imagine. Socialism and unionism, despite their materialist conception of history, are less materialistic than they appear. They support the interest of the majority, but they are inclined to ennoble and dignify life.’
While disagreeing with his politics, Mariátegui yet admired Gandhi’s personality. After Gandhi had come out of jail, he wrote, ‘the number of his supporters had declined. But if his authority as leader had eroded, his fame as ascetic and saint had spread. One journalist tells of how people from different races and all parts of Asia flocked to Gandhi’s dwelling. Without ceremony or protocol, Gandhi received everyone who came to him.’
That said, if one had to choose between the ‘moralism’ of Gandhi and the ‘realism’ of Lenin, the Peruvian had no doubt that he would choose the latter. Revolutions, argued Mariátegui, do ‘not come by fasting. The revolutionaries of all parts of the world have to choose between suffering violence and using it. If spirit and intelligence are not to be commanded by force, then it must be resolved to put force at the command of intelligence and spirit.’62
Rolland and Mariátegui present two verdicts on Gandhi, each fascinating and intriguing, but ultimately one set against the other—faith versus reason, spirit versus matter, morality versus instrumentalism, non-violence versus violence. Both, however, demonstrate the ever-wider interest in Gandhi, with the Indian in his ashram being scrutinized with fascinated awe by some of the world’s leading minds.
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