XII
While Gandhi toured South India, Kasturba was in jail, serving out the sentence from her involvement in the civil disobedience movement. On New Year’s Day, 1934, Gandhi wrote his wife a long letter from Cuddapah. ‘Can you use your dentures?’ he asked. ‘Do you gargle with potassium permanganate water?’ For him to be free, and her to be in jail, was an unusual reversal of roles. Sensing that his wife would worry about him, he wrote: ‘As Mirabehn looks after the smallest detail, I don’t feel the discomfort of travelling at all.’
From personal matters, Gandhi then turned to ethical ones. He asked Kasturba to follow the ‘dharma of service’ both towards the prison officials and her fellow prisoners. ‘Behaving towards the officials in the spirit of service means never wishing them ill, showing them due respect and not deceiving them.’ Gandhi further advised Kasturba that ‘women undergoing imprisonment for criminal offences should be treated as if they were your blood-sisters’.
Three weeks later, Gandhi wrote Kasturba another letter, this time from Kanyakumari. ‘This is the farthest end of India,’ he informed her. ‘The Himalayas represent her head. We may, therefore, call this place Mother India’s feet, which are daily washed by the sea. Since nobody lives here, perfect silence reigns.’
From geographical information Gandhi turned to spiritual instruction. He reminded Kasturba, lonely in prison, that the Bhagavad Gita urges the cultivation of solitude. ‘We came into the world alone and shall leave it alone,’ he told her, adding: ‘Why, then, should we yearn for anybody’s companionship during the uncertain interval between birth and death?’ We should not shun the company of those we love, said Gandhi, but we should not desperately desire it either. Friends, parents, children, spouses were all fine in their time and place. But God was the ‘only true friend’, as well (as in the Gita) our most trusted charioteer. Thus, ‘one who cultivates solitude will never be unhappy anywhere, for he sees only Vishnu in all places’.
Gandhi and Kasturba had been married for fifty years. They had often been apart—in different cities, countries and continents. When they were not in the same place, he wrote to her regularly. Sadly, not many of Gandhi’s letters to Kasturba have survived; and virtually none of hers to him. To be sure, theirs was an unequal relationship. He was the teacher and she the pupil. Even so, these letters of 1934 bear testimony to the strength and depth of their marital bond.59
XIII
In the third week of January, a massive earthquake hit Bihar. When the news reached Gandhi, he was in the town of Tirunelveli. Speaking at a public meeting, he saw ‘a vital connection between the Bihar calamity and the untouchability campaign. The Bihar calamity is a sudden and accidental reminder of what we are and what God is; but untouchability is a calamity handed down to us from century to century. It is a curse brought upon ourselves by our own neglect of a portion of Hindu humanity.’
Here, Gandhi merely coupled the natural calamity of the earthquake and the social calamity of untouchability. In his next speech, in Tuticorin, he made the latter responsible for the former, asking his audience ‘to be “superstitious” enough with me to believe that the earthquake is a divine chastisement for the great sin we have committed and are still committing against those we describe as untouchables…’
Gandhi’s remarks reached his friend and critic, the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore at once issued a public statement deploring the linkage of ‘ethical principles with cosmic phenomena’. Indians were, he said, ‘immensely grateful’ to Gandhi for having made them free ‘from fear and feebleness’ through his social and political campaigns. Yet, Tagore was ‘profoundly hurt when any words from his [Gandhi’s] mouth may emphasize the elements of unreason’, especially when ‘this kind of unscientific view of things is too readily accepted by a large section of our countrymen’.60
Tagore’s chastisement of Gandhi is reasonably well known. Indeed, it was invoked again during the Nepal (and Bihar) earthquake of April 2015.61 It is impossible to justify Gandhi’s statement, but the biographer must set it in context. It stemmed from his frustration at the deep-rooted prejudices of his fellow Hindus, that he had been trying so long and heroically to combat.
In 1915, Gandhi had travelled across India in an attempt to get to know his country better. Now, this second all-India tour, conducted almost two decades after the first, sought to rouse the conscience of his compatriots against the pernicious practice of untouchability. In Gandhi’s own eyes, his Harijan tour was every bit as important as the Salt March of 1930. For, he had long believed that India would be fit for freedom only when it stopped treating a section of its own population as unfree, less than human. Yet, whereas the Salt March received widespread acclaim from his countrymen, the Harijan tour evoked indifference and even hostility from many Indians. For all his preaching, Gandhi’s compatriots warmed to the idea of political independence far more than to the ideal of social equality. This left him hurt, bitter, angry, confused—thus his superficially silly remarks about the earthquake in Bihar.
His irrational explanation of the Bihar earthquake did not stop Gandhi from working hard to bring succour to its victims. In every subsequent speech during his Harijan tour, he raised money for the reconstruction of homes and families in Bihar. He collected more than a million rupees, then a colossal sum, which was duly passed on to his old associate Rajendra Prasad, who was coordinating the relief efforts in his home state.62
Bihar was Gandhi’s karma bhumi, the first place in India where he had worked for any length of time. The towns and villages he had travelled through in 1917 had been devastated by the earthquake. The homes of friends and colleagues in Muzaffarpur, Champaran, Motihari and Bettiah were reduced to rubble. In the last week of January, he wrote Rajendra Prasad an anguished letter. ‘What do you advise me about my tour in Bihar?’ he asked. ‘Would it be proper for me to come there in connection with untouchability? Should I come there in connection with the alleviation of suffering? Will my not coming there be preferable?’63
XIV
In the end, Gandhi decided to complete his tour in South India before going to Bihar. In the third week of January, he was in the Tamil town of Devakottai, where there had recently been clashes between Harijans and Nattar landowners. Gandhi met the Nattars, his conversation with them, snatches of which are reproduced below, making for an interesting comparison with his exchange with the Ambedkarites of Akola:
Gandhi: I hear some Nattars, or many of you, object to Harijans wearing the clothes they wish to. You object to their making uses of the very temple to the building of which they have contributed. You insist on Harijans doing certain things for you. If any Harijan transgresses the limits, he comes in for bodily injury. Now I suggest to you it is wrong to injure any person bodily or otherwise when he does not do as you would have him to….But I want to go a step further. Just now I am touring from one end of India to the other to tell the Hindus that it is a sin to consider a single human being as an untouchable, that it is sinful to consider any single human being as lower than ourselves, that Harijans have the same rights as you and I and other Hindus have.
Nattar Representative: With regard to the dress, they [the Harijans] must not wear new modes of dress, when they come to our homes, and on festive and public occasions….We have fixed the mode of dress to many castes according to their vocations or customs. Customs must not be transgressed….I say that for Harijans not to observe customs is bad.
Gandhi: Things were done in many parts of India according to custom. But when people found they were wrong, they gave it up. No man—this is the law of the land—shall determine what is good for another man or what another should or should not do.64
Gandhi’s next stop was the Nilgiri hills, where he spent a week, mixing long walks through shola forests and tea estates with Harijan work. In one hamlet, he asked estate labourers from the Depressed Classes to hold him ‘hostage for the due fulfilment of
the [Poona] Pact’.65
After a week in the hills, Gandhi moved on, to the great temple towns of southern Tamil Nadu. At Srirangam, Gandhi was dismayed that the town’s hallowed Vaishnavite shrine was ‘not open to Harijans precisely in the same manner that it is open to caste Hindus’. A few days later, Gandhi was in Tanjore, home to the even older Brihadeeswara temple, a Saivite shrine this time, and one of the glories of Hindu architecture. On his morning walk, he had passed by the temple, which, as was customary in these parts of South India, rigorously excluded all except upper-caste Hindus. But then, ‘within probably a few seconds or a few minutes of passing by the temple’, Gandhi
saw the sun rising above the horizon. I asked myself whether he rose only for caste Hindus or whether he rose for Harijans as well. I discovered at once that he was absolutely impartial and had probably to rise more for the Harijans than for the caste Hindus, who had plenty of wealth and who had shut themselves up in their palaces, shutting out light even beyond the rise of the sun….If that temple designed by God opens out to the whole world, shall a man-built temple open less for Harijans?66
Gandhi was speaking at five or more meetings a day, each time ending with an appeal for funds. One colonial official, while obviously at odds with Gandhi’s politics, was nonetheless impressed by his ‘amazing toughness. Although obviously tired and exhausted…he did succeed in carrying through a programme which would have killed any weakling.’67
By now, a large amount of money—more than Rs 400,000—had been collected on the tour. Harijan’s issue for 2 March 1934 printed a list of draft rules for how it should be used. After the tour ended and the accounts were tabulated, the money would be distributed to the provinces and districts. Gandhi wanted that at least 75 per cent of the money collected in each town, district and province be spent for ‘the execution of schemes for Harijan welfare work’ within those territories themselves.68
In the next issue of Harijan, Gandhi printed a memorandum which had been submitted at Coonoor on behalf of the Harijans of the Tamil districts. This listed eighteen different kinds of disabilities they suffered at the hands of caste Hindus. These included lack of access to restaurants, hotels, shaving saloons, wells, tanks, post offices and of course, temples; prohibitions on burying or cremating their dead in villages where they lived; prohibitions on the kinds of clothes they could buy or wear; being shut out of public latrines and schools built by the State with public funds; harassment or even violence if their men rode bicycles; prohibitions on their commissioning musicians to perform at their weddings.
Having printed this ‘formidable catalogue’ of grievances, Gandhi commented that ‘the shame of caste Hindus will continue so long as these disabilities are practised in the name of religion, no matter to how little or great an extent’. He called upon Sanatanists to join hands with reformers such as himself ‘in protecting Harijans from humiliations heaped upon them in the name of religious custom’. He added: ‘There will be no rest for me nor society, so long as untouchability persists.’69
In the third week of March, Gandhi finally arrived in Bihar. He spent almost a month in the province, meeting relief workers and speaking to those rendered homeless. The ‘fair land’ he had witnessed in 1917 was now ‘a land of desolation’. In an interview with The Hindu, he painted a moving and meticulously detailed picture of what he had seen:
The rich fields covered with sand, rows upon rows of houses in towns and villages utterly destroyed, water and sand shooting up through stone or cement floors, walls and pillars waist-deep, palaces a heap of bricks, solitary walls or pillars standing as a mournful reminder of the glory that was, improvised huts every moment in danger of catching fire, old sites not capable of being built upon for fear of a subsidence during rains, cattle starving for want of fodder and some dying for want of water, add to this the very real danger of floods reaching areas hitherto untouched by rains.
In his speeches in Bihar, Gandhi urged all Congressmen and social workers to cooperate with the government in the work of reconstruction, for, in the face of this calamity, it was necessary to ‘forget the distinction between Hindus and Mussalmans as well as between Indians and Englishmen’.70
For this Bihar tour, the Quaker Agatha Harrison joined Gandhi and his party. ‘I thought I knew something of crowds,’ wrote Agatha Harrison to Charlie Andrews. ‘But I have never seen anything like the surge of people at these meetings. Often on the edge of the crowds there would be a fringe of elephants bearing, to my mind, a far too heavy burden of people—so great was the anxiety to see this apostle of non-violence.’71
From Bihar, Gandhi moved further east, to the province of Assam. In one speech, at Sibsagar, Gandhi said ‘he could not understand why the sweepers and workers in leather should be placed in the lowest strata of Hindu society. At some time or other, mothers performed the work of a sweeper. Doctors also did so.’72
XV
With civil disobedience effectively at an end, some Congress leaders were keen to revive the Swaraj Party and fight elections. It was the 1920s all over again; satyagraha, jail, and then, when out of jail, seeking once more to work the constitutional route to political progress. This time, however, Gandhi was more ready to welcome the compromise, less keen on seeing it as a capitulation. He would, he told Dr Ansari, welcome ‘a party of Congressmen pursuing that programme [of council entry] rather than [they] be made sullen, discontented and utterly inactive’.
On 1 May 1934, a group of Congress leaders came to Bihar to confer with Gandhi. They included Asaf Ali, Rajagopalachari, Ansari, Rajendra Prasad, K.F. Nariman and Sarojini Naidu. They urged him to suspend civil disobedience altogether, and throw his weight behind council entry. Gandhi was unwilling to go so far. He still wanted to retain the option of individual satyagraha. He would therefore restrict ‘civil disobedience to himself, provided that when and if he has the proposal for the extension of the programme of civil disobedience, the A.I.C.C. reserves the right of accepting it or not’. He also cautioned the constitutionalists that ‘your parliamentary programme will be nugatory, if Hindu–Muslim unity is not achieved’.73
The lineage of the Swarajists went back to the 1920s, and perhaps even earlier, if we plausibly see them as ideological descendants of the Moderates of the first decade of the century. On the other side of the political spectrum, a new caucus had been formed in the Congress. This called itself the Congress Socialist Party. Its members included M.R. (Minoo) Masani and Yusuf Meherally of Bombay, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay of Karnataka, Jayaprakash Narayan of Bihar, and Narendra Dev of the United Provinces. The informal leader or mentor of the Congress socialists was Jawaharlal Nehru.
In the last week of May, Minoo Masani called on Gandhi, then in rural Bihar. Masani, born into a westernized Parsi family, declined to get up for the prayers, but vigorously debated with Gandhi at other times of the day. Gandhi told him that ‘your socialistic system is based on coercion’. Masani answered that coercion was not an end for them, but used ‘for the good of the many’. Gandhi was unconvinced. ‘Violence is impatience,’ he pointed out, adding: ‘and non-violence is patience. Great reforms cannot be introduced without great patience. In violence lies the germ of future failure.’ If the socialists eschewed violence, Gandhi said to Masani, they would find ‘that there is not much difference between you and me. Both of us desire the welfare of the starving millions.’
Before he departed, Masani left a copy of the socialists’ programme with Gandhi. He read it carefully, before concluding that it seemed ‘to ignore Indian conditions’. The socialists assumed that workers and capitalists were locked in endemic conflict. Gandhi, on the other hand, believed the two sides could work for their mutual good, so long as ‘labourers and workers should know their rights and should also know how to assert them’.
The socialists’ manifesto called for ‘the progressive nationalization of all the instruments of production, distribution and exchange’. Gandhi t
hought this ‘too sweeping’, commenting archly that ‘Rabindranath Tagore is an instrument of marvellous production. I do not know that he will submit to being nationalized.’74
Gandhi’s view of the increasingly influential (and increasingly vocal) left wing in his party was decidedly mixed. ‘Among the Socialists,’ he wrote to a woman disciple, ‘there are many good people, and some have the spirit of self-sacrifice in them; there are some who possess a powerful intellect and some who are rogues. Almost all of them have westernized minds. None of them knows the real conditions in Indian villages or perhaps even cares to know them.’75
XVI
These meetings with left-wing and right-wing Congressmen only briefly distracted Gandhi. The next stop on his Harijan tour was Orissa, home to as many fabulous ancient temples as Tamil Nadu. He had decided that he would tour the villages on foot, rather than being conveyed by motorcar. He was now almost sixty-five. He had undergone several long fasts in recent years. And May in Orissa was boiling. Yet, he comfortably walked eight to ten miles a day, and enjoyed it. As he wrote to Kasturba: ‘One cannot propagate dharma by travelling in trains or cars, nor in bullock-carts. That can be done only on foot.’76
Gandhi now moved westwards, across the subcontinent, to Bombay. Here, he had a meeting with Ambedkar, who told him that instead of providing education or health facilities—properly the domain of the government—Gandhian social workers should ‘concentrate on the primary object of securing full civic rights for Harijans, such as the right to draw water from public wells and to send children to public schools, without any discrimination being exercised against them’.
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