Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  The signatories proceeded to Bombay where, on the afternoon of Sunday, 25 September, a meeting was held in the hall of the Indian Merchants’ Chambers. Speeches were made by the key actors—Malaviya, Sapru, Rajagopalachari, M.C. Rajah and, most notably, B.R. Ambedkar. Here is part of what Ambedkar said:

  I believe it is no exaggeration for me to say that no man a few days ago was placed in a greater dilemma than I was. There was placed before me a difficult situation in which I had to make a choice between two difficult alternatives.

  There was the life of the greatest man in India to be saved. There was also before me the problem to try and safeguard the interests of the community which in my humble way I was trying to do…I am happy to be able to say that it has become [possible] through the co-operation of all of us to find a solution so as to save the life of the Mahatma and at the same time consistent with such protection as is necessary for the interests of the Depressed Classes in the future. I think in all these negotiations a large part of the credit must be attributed to Mahatma Gandhi himself. I must confess that I was surprised, immensely surprised, when I met him that there was so much in common between him and me. (Cheers).

  In those intense, agonizing days in Poona, several disputes arose between Ambedkar and the caste Hindu negotiators. The Doctor said that when these disputes were carried to Gandhi, ‘I was astounded to see that the man who held such divergent views from mine at the R[ound] T[able] C[onference] came immediately to my rescue and not to the rescue of the other side. I am very grateful to the Mahatma for having extricated me from what might have been [a] very difficult situation.’

  Later in his speech, Ambedkar warned the audience that joint electorates should not be seen as a perfect or total solution for the problems faced by the Depressed Communities. ‘Beyond this political arrangement’, ways had to be found to allow the Depressed Classes to ‘occupy a[n] honourable position, a position of equality of status within the community’.41

  IX

  On the day that Gandhi’s fast began, 20 September, Rabindranath Tagore addressed the students and staff of Santiniketan. He told them that ‘the penance the Mahatmaji has taken upon himself is not a ritual, but a message to India and to the world’. Gandhi was willing to lay down his life to dismantle a system whereby Indians had ‘banished a considerable number of our own people into a narrow enclosure of insult branding them with the sign of permanent degradation’.42

  On the 24th, Tagore left for Poona, by train. The journey was arduous at his age; he was past seventy, and he was travelling through the hottest and most humid parts of India. Two full days later, he arrived in Poona to be with Gandhi. An attendant around the prisoner’s bedside wrote of how, on the afternoon of the 26th, the poet, ‘bent with age and covered with a long flowing cloak proceeded step by step very slowly to greet Gandhiji who was lying in bed. Bapuji raised himself up a little bit, and affectionately embraced Tagore, and then began to comb his white beard with his shaking fingers, like a child. Soon afterwards he was exhausted, and went to sleep’.43

  As it turned out, shortly after they met in the prison courtyard, the news came that Ramsay MacDonald’s government had accepted the Poona Pact and would implement it. To celebrate, Tagore sang a verse from his Nobel Prize–winning poem, Gitanjali. Kasturba then offered her husband some orange juice, after which Gandhi served food to some ‘untouchable’ prisoners.44

  After the celebrations had died out, Gandhi dictated a statement to the press, thanking Ambedkar, Rajah and their colleagues. The Depressed Classes leaders, he said, could ‘have taken up an uncompromising and defiant attitude by way of punishment to the so-called caste Hindus for the sins of generations’. Instead, ‘they chose a nobler path and have thus shown that they have followed the precept of forgiveness enjoined by all religions’.45

  Perhaps the most interesting foreign comment on Gandhi’s ordeal appeared in the New Statesman, which printed a poem that began:

  So, thanks to the Mahatma’s fast,

  ‘untouchables’ and men of caste

  Have sensibly achieved, at last

  A reconciliation.

  Does this suggest a new technique

  For bringing faction, State and clique

  In more progressive lands, to seek

  Peace and co-operation?

  Later verses urged the adoption of Gandhi’s technique to Britain’s leaders to stop Germany rearming, to Ireland’s patriots to press Britain into giving further concessions, to the cricketer Herbert Sutcliffe to make the game’s notoriously parsimonious administrators pay professional sportsmen like him a fair wage.46

  X

  As a response to Gandhi’s fast, some Hindus resolved to start an ‘Anti-Untouchability League’. The industrialist G.D. Birla would serve as president, and the veteran social worker A.V. Thakkar as secretary. The league would have its headquarters in Delhi. Its objects included the opening, through non-violent means, of all public wells, roads, schools, temples and burning ghats to members of the Depressed Classes.

  When he heard of the formation of this Anti-Untouchability League, B.R. Ambedkar wrote Thakkar a fascinating letter outlining two routes for the emancipation of the ‘untouchables’. One was to foster ‘personal virtue’ in the Depressed Classes by making them stop drinking, attend schools, and read in libraries. The other was to confront the social disabilities they faced. Ambedkar strongly urged that the league adopt the latter approach, and launch a ‘campaign of civic rights’ to provide the Depressed Classes access to village wells, village schools, public employment, etc. Aware that this frontal attack might lead to conflict and even bloodshed, Ambedkar believed that ‘such a programme if carried into the villages will bring about the necessary social revolution in the Hindu Society without which it will never be possible for the Depressed Classes to get equal social status’. The ‘salvation of the Depressed Classes’, insisted Ambedkar, ‘will come only when the Caste Hindu is made to think and is forced to feel that he must alter his ways. For that you must create a crisis by direct action against his customary code of conduct.’

  Ambedkar also wanted the league to open up the weaving departments of cotton mills to the Depressed Classes. At the time, only the lowest-paid jobs such as scavenging or manual labour were available to them. With regard to the prejudice of Indian factory owners towards the Depressed Classes, Ambedkar pointed out that ‘like the Negro in America he is the last to be employed in days of prosperity and the first to be fired in days of adversity’.

  Finally, Ambedkar advocated the promotion of greater social intercourse between the Depressed Classes and caste Hindus. He suggested that the latter employ them in their houses as servants or welcome them as guests. ‘The live contact thus established will familiarize both to a common and associated life and will pave the way to that unity which we are all striving after.’ Ambedkar pressed this method of ‘fraternising with the untouchables’, even if it offended orthodoxy or led to the employers being ostracized by their caste men. Once more, Ambedkar drew an analogy, and this time a more powerful one, with race relations in America. The Depressed Classes, he insisted, ‘will never be satisfied of the bona fides of these caste Hindu sympathisers until it is proved that they are prepared to go to the same length of fighting against their own kith and kin in actual warfare if it came to that for the sake of the Depressed Classes as the Whites of the North did against their own kith and kin namely the Whites of the South for the sake of the emancipation of the Negro’.47

  The formation of this new Anti-Untouchability League was one response to the Poona Pact. A second response was to restart the process of Hindu–Muslim reconciliation. The prime mover was one of the few major Muslim leaders still left in the Congress, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Azad met with Madan Mohan Malaviya, and then the two in turn met their long-estranged comrade Maulana Shaukat Ali. Shaukat Ali now wired the viceroy asking him to release
Gandhi from prison so that he could help them reach ‘an amicable and lasting settlement’. Willingdon said that would not be possible, since the prisoner had not ‘definitely disassociate[d] himself from civil disobedience’.48

  XI

  After the September fast, the government modified the terms of Gandhi’s detention. Attempts at Hindu–Muslim reconciliation remained verboten. But Gandhi was now permitted visitors who came to discuss the anti-untouchability campaign. Another change was to allow Kasturba to stay on in the prison; she spent the days with her husband but slept elsewhere in the jail.

  After the Poona Pact, Gandhi had begun referring to the ‘untouchables’ as ‘Harijans’, a term meaning ‘Children of God’. He thought it less pejorative than ‘untouchable’ or its equivalent in Indian languages, less patronizing than the colonial coinage, ‘Depressed Classes’, and more indigenous-sounding than his own earlier alternative, ‘suppressed classes’.

  The term ‘Harijan’ had first been used by the medieval poet-saint Narasinha Mehta, whom Gandhi had long admired. ‘Not that the change of name brings about any change of status,’ he remarked, ‘but one may at least be spared the use of a term which is itself one of reproach.’49

  On 17 October—three weeks after his last visit—B.R. Ambedkar came to see Gandhi in Yerwada. He began by asking the prisoner to formally abandon civil disobedience and attend the third Round Table Conference, to be held in London in November. Ambedkar said, ‘The point is that if you do not come, we shall get nothing in England and everything will be upset. People like Iqbal who are enemies of the country will come to the forefront. We have to work any sort of constitution. Hence though I am a small man, I request you to come.’

  These words are quoted from Mahadev Desai’s notes of the meeting. Gandhi asked Ambedkar to elaborate this argument and write about it in the newspapers. If he made the plea public, Gandhi would ‘think over it’. Ambedkar replied: ‘It is not a thing that can be put down in writing. In it I have to say a lot that will hurt the Muslims and I cannot say that publicly.’

  The bulk of the discussions focused on the best way to end untouchability. In a statement issued several weeks after their meeting, Gandhi recalled Ambedkar telling him: ‘Let there be no repetition of the old method when the reformer claimed to know more of the requirements of his victims than the victims themselves.’ Ambedkar advised Gandhi to ‘tell your workers to ascertain from the representatives of the [Depressed Classes] what their first need is and how they would like it to be satisfied’. Ambedkar added that specially organized mixed dinners had ‘a flavour of patronage about them. I would not like to attend them by myself. The more dignified procedure would be to invite us to ordinary social functions without any fuss.’ Finally, Ambedkar told Gandhi that ‘even temple-entry, good and necessary as it is, may wait. The crying need is the raising of the economic status and decent behaviour in the daily contact.’

  Having quoted (from memory) these cautionary remarks by Ambedkar, Gandhi added: ‘I must not repeat here some of the harrowing details given by him from his own bitter experiences. I felt the force of his remarks. I hope every one of my readers will do likewise.’50

  The conversation pointed to the fundamental philosophical differences that—their recent pact notwithstanding—still existed between the two men. Ambedkar placed more faith in constitutional processes, in changes in the law—hence his plea to Gandhi to attend the London meeting. Gandhi saw more hope in social change, in the self-directed renewal of individuals and communities. Ambedkar emphasized the creation of jobs for ‘untouchables’; Gandhi the creation of a sense of spiritual equality between Hindus of all castes. As an upper-caste reformer, Gandhi was motivated by a sense of guilt, the desire to make reparation for past sins, whereas as one born in an ‘untouchable’ home, Ambedkar was animated by the drive to achieve a position of social equality and human dignity for his fellows.

  Two weeks after this meeting, Gandhi told a group of journalists that ‘I do not take the same light view that Dr. Ambedkar does of the temple-entry question….Nothing in my opinion will strike the imagination of the Hindu mass mind including Harijans as throwing [open] all public temples to them precisely on the same terms as caste Hindus….After all Hindu temples play a most important part in the life of the masses…’

  Gandhi added that he did not at all belittle the other disabilities that Ambedkar had pointed to (such as lack of access to education and dignified employment). However, he felt ‘the evil is so deep-rooted that one must not make the choice between different disabilities, but must tackle them all at once’.51

  XII

  After the Poona Pact was signed, Gandhi got a truckload of correspondence from orthodox Hindus appalled at his concessions to the Depressed Classes. Many pandits and shastris visited him to make the case that temple entry was against the scriptures. One visitor from Madras asked Gandhi to accept a compromise whereby ‘untouchables’ could enter the flagposts of temples (normally inside the boundary walls but outside the shrine itself), but not enter the sanctum sanctorum where the deity was placed. Gandhi answered that ‘there was no half-way house in the house of God. There is no such thing as temple-entry step by step. It should be unconditional and unqualified. The [“untouchables”] should be given the same equality of status as the other caste Hindus in the matter of public worship.’52

  The orthodox backlash against Gandhi also took the form of conferences and demonstrations. In the second week of October, a meeting of the ‘All Andhradesa Brahmana Mahasabha’ was held in Vijayawada, attended by 500 pandits from all over the province. Temple entry for ‘untouchables’ was condemned as being against the Shastras. One speaker said only trustees of temples could decide who could enter them, adding that the Sarda Act (passed in 1930 to raise the age at which Hindu girls could be married) was an even greater evil than temple entry. The meeting ended with a unanimous resolution condemning both temple entry and the Sarda Act.53

  On 17 December, Gandhi wrote to a friend: ‘Those who claim to be sanatanists have put themselves in a state of rage as if I was about to violate all that is good in Hinduism…I can safely say that no two letters among the mass of letters I am receiving from sanatanists have agreed about the definition of untouchability. They either swear at me or enter into argument that has no bearing on the subject….The correspondence I am having is a painful sign of decadence of Hinduism.’

  A week later, he wrote to another friend: ‘I am being visited by a great number of Shastris these days. Their plight is pitiful. It has become difficult to learn anything from them. They lack the capacity even to impart what they possess. And so I see them full of prejudices and hatreds.’

  A week later still, he wrote to a third friend that ‘I am having a glorious time with the Shastris. My knowledge of the letter of the Shastras is better but of true religion they are able to give me but little.’54

  XIII

  Two months after the Poona Pact was signed, Gandhi met with a deputation of ‘untouchables’. They asked Gandhi to take concrete economic measures to aid them, such as having them admitted in the weaving department of mills (where they were currently not allowed). Then they sharply asked Gandhi: ‘To what extent can we consider you as our man?’ Gandhi answered: ‘Since before Ambedkar was born, I have been your man. You will find all the things that he advocates in my old articles. Nobody has opposed untouchability in such strong language as I.’55

  This was something of an exaggeration. When Ambedkar was born in 1891, Gandhi was a law student in London. Two years later he went to South Africa, where he began slowly shedding the social prejudices he had been raised with. But it was only after his return to India in 1915 that he began thinking more seriously about the iniquities of caste. Even so, his approach was gradualist and incremental. To begin with, he attacked only the practice of untouchability, seeking to keep the rest of the structure of caste intact. Then, prodded by the Ezhava reformers of Kerala,
he began to advocate the practice of intermixing as well, most notably through the entry of ‘untouchables’ into the precincts of temples that had been barred to them. The next step was to allow, or even encourage, the eating together of people of different castes (including ‘untouchables’), this striking a major blow against Hindu custom and tradition, which expressly forbade upper castes from eating in the same place or from the same vessels as those ranked below them in the caste hierarchy.

  In the Hindu tradition, there was only one sin greater than eating with people of a different caste. This was to contract a marriage alliance with them. Even this last barrier Gandhi had begun to consider breaching. Thus, two months after the Poona Pact, Gandhi heard from a young Brahmin from Calcutta. This man had promised to marry a Shudra girl he knew, but was nervous to go ahead since his parents were against it. ‘I am in a fix,’ he told Gandhi. ‘I dare not offend my parents who are my makers and to whom I still owe my existence. On the other hand I cannot disown the girl…I see no way to bridge the difficulty in which I am placed, viz., to marry the girl and at the same time to earn the blessings of my parents.’ He beseeched the Mahatma ‘to hold out to me the torch so that I may see a path in the darkness which has enveloped me and is threatening to wipe out the existence of two poor souls’.

  Gandhi answered that he was ‘quite clear’ in his mind that ‘having given your word and heart to the girl, whether she is called a Shudra or what not, and as she is deeply attached to you, you cannot get out of this sacred pledge, whatever befalls you’. Then he added: ‘If the girl and you are really virtuous and would become householders, your parents will forgive the difference in caste and give you both their blessings.’56

  Back before Ambedkar was born, Gandhi would never have advocated the marriage of a Brahmin boy to a Shudra girl. He would not have seen its merits when he returned to India in 1915, or even a decade later. The transformations in Gandhi’s view of caste, his increasing willingness to challenge its prejudices and proscriptions, were a direct consequence of his encounters with reformers more radical than himself—namely, Narayana Guru and his followers, and more recently, Ambedkar. The birth and subsequent career of B.R. Ambedkar had a far greater impact on Gandhi than he was sometimes willing to acknowledge.