Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Shaming the Hindus

  I

  In the autumn of 1932, while Ambedkar and Gandhi played out their differences in Poona, the most powerful man in India was perched high on a hilltop in the Himalaya. Every summer, the viceroy and his establishment moved to Simla, along with senior officials of the government. Here, they watched what was going on in the plains below with a mixture of dismay and disgust.

  In late August, when Gandhi announced he would fast if the Communal Award was not withdrawn, Lord Willingdon wrote to his sister from the Viceregal Lodge: ‘I should like to let the little man kill himself, but suppose we can’t do that.’ Then, shortly before the fast began, he wrote that with Gandhi’s life on edge, ‘these neurotic and emotional folk will kick up an awful hullaballoo over this, but we must sit down, and see it through. What a life!’1

  Five days into Gandhi’s fast, Willingdon wrote to his sister again: ‘What extraordinary people these are, and has anything like the present situation ever arisen in history in any country. The one person who takes all these things in her stride is B. [his wife]. Such matters as Gandhi and Constitutional Reforms don’t really worry her too much. What she excels in are her entertainments which are wonderful and which keep everybody in the best of tempers.’2

  The next letter, written three weeks after the Poona Pact was signed, began with the viceroy in a better mood: ‘We are both very well,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘and the climate here just now is gorgeous. Quite cold at night but lovely in the day time in these marvellous Himalayas with a chain of snow mountains all round.’3

  In the middle of October, the government moved to Delhi for the winter months. Lord Willingdon now immediately dashed to Poona and back, 1800 miles by air, not to meet the Raj’s most famous prisoner, but to see a horse he owned perform in the Poona races. The horse won, which helped, as did reports from his officials that the debate about the Depressed Classes was dying down. ‘Gandhi’s starvation stunt is getting forgotten,’ wrote Willingdon to his sister, predicting that ‘its results won’t be very considerable’.4

  Poona was much closer to Delhi than to Simla. The news travelled more quickly, and it wasn’t always what the viceroy wanted to hear. In December, he learnt that, upset by the laggard reaction of caste Hindus to the anti-untouchability movement, Gandhi was contemplating a fresh fast. Willingdon’s last letter for 1932 was more angry and despairing than any that preceded it:

  Gandhi is still troubling us with his threats of starvation. He really is a curious little beast. At the bottom of every move that he makes which he always says is inspired by God, one discovers the political manoeuvre….I wonder what Britain or America would do if Ramsay Mac or Hoover for some reason decided to starve to death. They’d tell them not to be d_d fools!5

  II

  The year 1933 began with Gandhi in jail, and still obsessed with the abolition of untouchability. On 3 January, he issued a statement containing the opinion of some learned Sanskrit scholars, based on their examination of the relevant texts, that ‘no class of persons today bears the brand of permanent untouchability’; therefore, the Depressed Classes should have the same rights to temples, schools, wells and roads as members of the four varnas.6

  In early February, Ambedkar came to see Gandhi in Yerwada. The conversation, as recorded by Mahadev Desai, suggested that the Poona Pact had not entirely reconciled the two men. ‘We want our social status raised in the eyes of the savarna Hindus,’ Ambedkar told Gandhi. ‘If it cannot be I should say goodbye to Hinduism….I am not going to be satisfied with measures which would merely bring some relief….I don’t want to be crushed by your charity.’

  ‘In accepting the Poona Pact you accept the position that you are Hindus,’ responded Gandhi. ‘I have accepted only the political aspect of it,’ answered Ambedkar. ‘The Hindu mind does not work in a rational way,’ he continued. ‘They have no objection to the untouchables touching them on the railway and other public places. Why do they object to it in the case of temples?’

  Gandhi answered that this was precisely why he had taken ‘up the question of temple-entry first of all because these people want to cling to untouchability in the temples….I ask them to grant the [“untouchables”] equal status before God. It will raise their status.’7

  III

  After Gandhi’s arrest in January 1932, the publication of Young India had been discontinued. In February 1933, Gandhi announced the publication of a new weekly to replace it. It would be called Harijan, and be edited by an associate of A.V. Thakkar’s named R.V. Shastri. The first print run was of 10,000 copies. It would carry no advertisements. Gandhi also planned to bring out two companion journals, Harijan Sewak, in Hindi, and Harijanbandhu, in Gujarati.

  The inaugural issue of Harijan was dated 11 February 1933. Gandhi wrote as many as seven pieces, on various aspects of the problem of untouchability. One related to the growing divergence between him and Dr B.R. Ambedkar. When they met on 4 February, Gandhi had asked him for a message for the first issue of Harijan. Ambedkar complied, but in characteristically blunt terms. This was his message: ‘The outcaste is a bye-product of the caste system. There will be outcastes so long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system. Nothing can help to save Hinduism…except the purging of the Hindu faith of this odious and vicious dogma.’

  Gandhi was unnerved by the message. For, it struck at the root of his own idealized conception of varnashramadharma, the division of labour according to caste. He wanted untouchability to go, he wanted all occupations to have the same value—for a Bhangi to have the same status as a Brahmin—but he wasn’t yet prepared to let go of the idea of varna altogether.

  Gandhi printed Ambedkar’s message, with an explanation and response of his own, ten times the length. He accepted that the caste system ‘has its limitations and its defects, but there is nothing sinful about it, as there is about untouchability, and, if it is a bye-product of the caste system it is only in the same sense as an ugly growth is of a body, or weeds of the crop….It is an excess to be removed, if the whole system is not to perish. Untouchability is the product, therefore, not of the caste system, but of the distinction of high and low that has crept into Hinduism and is corroding it.’

  Gandhi ended by asking for all reformers to come together on a common platform. Whether they believed in varnashrama (as he did) or rejected caste altogether (as Ambedkar did),

  the opposition to untouchability is common to both. Therefore, the present joint fight is restricted to the removal of untouchability, and I would invite Dr. Ambedkar and those who think with him to throw themselves, heart and soul, into the campaign against the monster of untouchability. It is highly likely at the end of it we shall find that there is nothing to fight against in varnashrama. If, however, varnashrama even then looks like an ugly thing, the whole of Hindu society will fight it.8

  Each issue of Harijan was eight pages long, these printed in two columns on foolscap paper. A single copy was priced at one anna, while an annual subscription cost four rupees. Some issues started with a list of temples and wells thrown open to, and schools started for, Harijans in the previous week. Other issues began with poems on the theme of social or caste equality; yet others with a statement issued by Gandhi reminding caste Hindus of the resolutions passed after the Poona Pact, committing them to open wells, schools, roads and temples to those of any caste or none.

  Gandhi asked the authorities for permission for his new weekly to be distributed to the prisoners in Yerwada jail. The government refused, on the grounds that if Gandhi and his followers were ‘permitted to supply prisoners with free literature on the untouchability question, a similar privilege cannot be refused to the Sanatanists who hold different views with equal strength of feeling’.9

  Gandhi had renamed his weekly Harijan because he believed that the campaign t
o abolish untouchability was as vital as winning political freedom. India, young and old, present and future, had to commit itself to this sacred cause. The name quickly gained currency; among the Hindu middle classes, and the nationalist press, the ‘untouchables’ were now regularly referred to as Harijans. However, the euphemism was rejected by B.R. Ambedkar, who never used the appellation to describe his people.

  Meanwhile, the Anti-Untouchability League formed in the wake of Gandhi’s fast had been renamed the Harijan Sewak Sangh, or the Service of the Untouchables Society. This was in part because Gandhi wanted to make the term ‘Harijan’ popular; in part because the Poona reformer V.R. Shinde already ran an Anti-Untouchability League. Someone who was unhappy with the new name was C. Rajagopalachari. He felt ‘it means a continued recognition of untouchables as such’. He would rather have had ‘Untouchability Abolition League’, since what they were striving for was ‘really abolition of a slave status and the phrase “Abolition” would be suggestive and emphatic…Service to a group of men is not really the object and aim, if we think about it. It is really the doing away with the evil.’10

  Rajagopalachari wrote likewise to G.D. Birla and A.V. Thakkar, president and secretary of the Harijan Sewak Sangh respectively. Thakkar was a long-time member of the Servants of India Society, and had earlier founded a Bhil Seva Sangh. Rajagopalachari thought both those names logical, since India was a nation and Bhils a tribe, and both would remain whether one served them or not. But here the purpose was to abolish the practice of untouchability. Hence he wished the new body to be called ‘“Untouchability Abolition League” or Society, the word abolition being the most prominent part of the name’.11

  Gandhi was agnostic about Rajagopalachari’s idea. ‘The Sangh will not succeed or fail,’ he wrote, ‘because of the name. It will be judged by its work.’12 However, since it came from a colleague he enormously respected, he asked Birla and Thakkar to consider Rajaji’s suggestion. They rejected it, on the grounds that the name of the society had only very recently been changed from ‘Anti-Untouchability League’ to ‘Servants of the Untouchables Society’. The change of name, wrote Thakkar to Rajagopalachari, was approved by the board, and announced in the press, while stationery had also been printed incorporating the new name. Now, just as ‘all have got used to the changed name’, wrote Thakkar, came the suggestion ‘that it should be changed a second time’. Thakkar admitted that there was ‘much logic’ in the argument that the aim was not to keep ‘untouchables’ as untouchables forever. However, he continued, ‘if we now suggest this second change to the Board, every one will ridicule us, and may not agree to this second change. Not only the members of the Board, but the public at large and the Press will justifiably ridicule the proposal, if it is put into effect.’ Therefore, the board was ‘averse to the change, though it is reasonable, merely because it is not expedient to do so’.13

  It was a typically Indian scenario. Bureaucratic inertia had triumphed over logic and reason. Worry about adverse commentary in the press, and irritation at the thought of printing stationery afresh, meant that the status quo prevailed. So the name ‘Harijan Sewak Sangh’ remained, although the alternative would have been less patronizing, more direct.

  IV

  Inspired by Gandhi’s campaign, Congress members of the central legislature had introduced a Temple Entry Bill to throw open all shrines to the Depressed Classes. This provoked the head priest of one of India’s most famous shrines, the Jagannatha Temple in Puri, to write an open letter to the viceroy. The Puri Shankaracharya claimed that ‘these Bills, if and when passed, will really mean the sounding of the Death-knell of all possibilities for Sanatanists to lead quiet and peaceful lives of Spirituality according to the dictates of their Religion and their Conscience’. He reminded the viceroy of Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858 promising non-interference in religious matters. The Puri priest also targeted ‘“Truth-Adorers” like Mr. Gandhi’, advising them to ‘seek methods of peaceful intellectual persuasion and not of coercive legislation’.14

  Another ‘open letter’ was penned by the head priest of the Sankeshswar-Karavir Peeth, a widely visited and well-endowed temple in southern India. This noted that the movement to abolish untouchability had ‘come to a head under the evil influence of Mr. Gandhi who is guided by political motives’. It complained that ‘not a single Sanatanist was consulted’ on the Poona Pact, and ‘still it has become binding on the Sanatanists’.

  ‘If one closely studies Mr. Gandhi’s writings,’ commented this Hindu priest, ‘it is clear that his religion consists of the dictates of his own heart. In fact, he and his followers do not want the authority of any religion as such, and are, in fact enemies of all the existing religions in the world.’ The priest was convinced that ‘it is Mr. Gandhi’s ambition to force his personality on the whole world as the coming prophet of his new order of things akin to Bolshevism by destroying the hold of all other old religions and of their respective Heads. The Temple-entry movement is only the thin end of the wedge. The real motive is far deeper. They want to ultimately get a hand in the administration of temples and to divert the temple funds towards the Congress objective.’

  In attacking Gandhi, this Hindu seer underscored his own loyalty to the British Empire. Observing that most servants of Europeans in India were from the lowest castes, he claimed that ‘Mr. Gandhi hopes that by raising the social and religious status of the untouchables by his anti-untouchability work, this menial staff could be persuaded to leave off at a moment’s notice the services of their European Employers, whose lot could then be made a hundred times more miserable than in the worst days of the Non-co-operation movement…’15

  In his struggle to abolish untouchability, Gandhi was caught between radicals and reactionaries. For some, like Ambedkar, he was going too slow. For others, like the priestly orthodoxy, he was going too fast. There was a third group unhappy with Gandhi’s social reform work. This comprised many of his own partymen. As the chief secretary of the United Provinces reported: ‘The younger members of the Congress party are definitely opposed to Mr. Gandhi on the Harijan question and regard the movement as reactionary and a waste of time and money.’16 One young Congressman complained to Stanley Reid, the editor of the Times of India, that ‘Gandhi is wrapped up in the Harijan movement. He does not care a jot whether we live or die; whether we are bound or free.’17

  In January 1933—four months after Gandhi’s fast in prison—a Congressman wrote a long letter to him from Nasik. The correspondent told Gandhi he had ‘a high regard for the moral and spiritual grandeur of your selfless character’. But he could not ‘see eye to eye’ with Gandhi ‘as regards the Untouchability question’.

  The Nasik Congressman criticized Gandhi’s programme on four counts.

  First, ‘90 per cent of caste Hindus are against temple-entry and you have waged a war on the major portion of Hindus in which you will fail’;

  Second, Gandhi was ‘wounding the susceptibilities of caste Hindus and thus alienating their sympathies which you could have better utilised for the political and economic regeneration of India’;

  Third, that Gandhi had involved non-Hindus in a matter concerning Hindus. ‘To invoke help from foreigners and ask them to make laws teasing Hindus is no phase of patriotism!’;

  Finally, by focusing on anti-untouchability work, Gandhi was ‘killing Congress which is the only politically representative body in the Nation. Ranade, Gokhale and Tilak, though they were social reformers, kept social and religious questions apart from politics and therefore they could do something to rouse the nation.’18

  In February 1933, a recent prisoner in the civil disobedience campaign wrote to Gandhi saying he ‘cannot understand this curious haste for the uplift of the Harijans’. The young patriot accused Gandhi of betraying those who courted arrest for the sake of swaraj. The leader of the struggle against foreign rule was ‘today acting faithlessly to[wards] these prisoners. Instead
of carrying on the very satyagraha for which these prisoners are rotting in jail, you are today occupying your followers with the Harijans.’

  This correspondent was ‘surprised’ to see a report of a recent speech by Rajaji arguing that ‘today the work for the Harijans is more important than the acquiring of Swarajya’. ‘Do you believe this?’ the critic asked Gandhi. ‘If you do believe it, why do you not say so publicly, so that the prisoners now rotting in jail may obtain their freedom?’19

  Gandhi had in fact been saying such things publicly. Before and after the Nagpur Congress of 1920, he insisted that the abolition of untouchability was as important as the achievement of political freedom. The young critic did not perhaps recall those events of a decade earlier; what moved him instead were more recent events such as the opposition to the Simon Commission, the Lahore Congress and its Purna Swaraj declaration, and above all, the Salt March. Hence the charge of betrayal. The truth was that Ambedkar’s challenge had compelled Gandhi to reverse his priorities. Politics had now to recede, while social reform came to the fore once more.

  Facing criticism from all sides, Gandhi found cheer in the support of the friends he most valued. Jawaharlal Nehru, then in jail in Dehra Dun, was reading the first issues of Harijan, where, as he wrote to Gandhi, he was ‘delighted to see the old rapier-touch of over-much kindness and inexhaustible patience which extinguishes, or as you say neutralises, the opponent. I pity the poor Sanatanists. With their anger and abuses and frantic cursing, they are no match for this kind of subtle attack.’20