Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  These connections to India helped, as did Linlithgow’s friendship with the new prime minister, Stanley Baldwin. Although not as arrogant as Willingdon, like him the new viceroy did not reach out to the Congress leadership. The journalist B. Shiva Rao, then India correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, met Linlithgow and urged him to invite Gandhi for a meeting. He gave the same advice to the viceroy’s senior officials. Shiva Rao was told that Gandhi would have to apply for an interview, and also consent to have his name and request appear in the court circular. These conditions were naturally considered humiliating by Gandhi.2

  After Shiva Rao tried and failed, the industrialist G.D. Birla went to ask Linlithgow to meet Gandhi. The viceroy answered: ‘If I try to be overfriendly with the Congress, then I would be putting the other parties at a disadvantage.’ His officials had advised him that, if he invited Gandhi, the Muslims would be offended, while the prestige of the Congress would go up, helping it get more seats in the elections scheduled for next year.3 So, the most powerful man in India carefully kept his distance from the most influential Indian.

  II

  In the third week of June, Gandhi returned to Segaon from South India. The village, he wrote to an English friend, had ‘no post office, no store for foodstuffs of quality, no medical comforts and [was] difficult of access in the rainy season’.

  This was said with some pride, and satisfaction. For, Gandhi was quite excited about his new abode. He asked his (relatively) new disciple, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, to leave her manorial home in Simla and come stay with him in Segaon. He would have a hut built for her. His own hut, he told Amrit Kaur, ‘has thick mud walls, twice the breadth of [an] ordinary brick-wall. The mud is rain-proof. I think you will fall in love with the hut and the surroundings.’

  Gandhi’s hut had but one room, but this was quite large, twenty-nine feet by seventeen feet. Besides himself, it housed his wife Kasturba, a sadhu singer of bhajans, and a young co-worker. Amrit Kaur came as asked. The non-violent Pathan, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also arrived in Segaon to share Gandhi’s hut. Mahadev Desai, however, stayed for the moment in Wardha, making the daily commute to the village, taking down letters and articles he would later have typed up in the town.4

  Gandhi liked the idea of living in an isolated hamlet in the very centre of India. True, the railway passed not far from the village, but it took days and days to get to India’s major cities. Bombay was 450 miles away to the west. Delhi lay nearly 800 miles to the north, Calcutta 800 to the east. Madras was more than 600 miles to the south.5

  While Segaon was in the middle of nowhere, no sooner had Gandhi shifted there, it became the centre of everything. For, as Mira remarked, ‘although Bapu had left the Congress officially, yet the Congress had not left him. They wanted to go their own way, but whenever they got into difficulties they wanted Bapu to help them.’6 Kripalani, Patel, Rajagopalachari, Nehru, Maulana Azad, Sarojini Naidu and Rajendra Prasad—if these leaders wished to consult Gandhi, they had to make the obligatory trek to Segaon, taking the train to Wardha and then a bullock cart to their leader’s doorstep.

  To aid his Congress colleagues, Jamnalal Bajaj had improvised a vehicle, which he called the ‘Oxford’, since it consisted of an old Ford car pulled by a pair of oxen. When Nehru, Patel and company went to Segaon to see Gandhi, they used this means of transport; except in the monsoon, when a standard bullock cart had to do, since the Oxford’s tyres got stuck in the mud.7

  In July 1936, a crisis broke out in the upper echelons of the Congress. Several members of the party’s prestigious working committee, including Prasad, Patel and Rajagopalachari, resigned on the grounds that the president, Jawaharlal Nehru, was imposing his socialist views on the party, asking for land reforms and for greater rights for workers. The ‘preaching and emphasising of socialism’, they told Nehru, was ‘prejudicial to the best interests of the country and to the success of the national struggle for freedom’. These leaders, who had been with the Congress longer than Nehru had, resented being treated ‘as persons whose time is over, who represent and stand for ideas that are worn out and that have no present value…’8

  The dispute reached Gandhi. He persuaded the stalwarts to withdraw their resignation, later writing to Nehru that if his critics were (as he had charged) ‘guilty of intolerance, you have more than your share of it. The country should not be made to suffer for your mutual intolerance.’

  In an article for Harijan, Gandhi acknowledged that Nehru and he had differences. But on the key issue of non-violence, they were as one. ‘I cannot think of myself as a rival to Jawaharlal or him to me,’ he remarked. If, in their common goal of achieving swaraj, they ‘seem to be taking different routes’, Gandhi hoped that the ‘world will find that we had lost sight of each other only for the moment and only to meet again with greater mutual attraction and affection’.9

  III

  There was a crisis in Gandhi’s party, and another crisis brewing outside. In May 1936, B.R. Ambedkar published a searing critique of the Hindu social order. Entitled The Annihilation of Caste, this was originally an address to be delivered at the invitation of a reformist group in the Punjab. When his hosts received the text of Ambedkar’s speech, they withdrew the invitation, objecting to his argument that if Hindus did not abolish caste, the Depressed Classes should convert to another religion. Ambedkar went ahead and published the text at his own expense.

  Ambedkar had long been interested in the sociology of caste. He had written a seminar paper on the subject when studying at Columbia, although his doctoral dissertations there and at the London School of Economics were on economic subjects. However, since his return to India he had become increasingly interested, indeed preoccupied, with the pernicious effects of the caste system, and with how to end them.

  The text of The Annihilation of Caste ran to a mere sixty pages in print. In between a pamphlet and a book, it had the polemical zeal of the one and the scholarly rigour of the other. Ambedkar provided a magisterial overview of the history and sociology of the caste system, and of its theological justifications in the Hindu scriptures. He offered several illustrations of the cruelty and inhumanity of caste in practice. He characterized it as ‘a social system which embodies the arrogance and selfishness of a perverse section of the Hindus who were superior enough in social status to set it in fashion and who had authority to force it on their inferiors’. Caste had, he added, ‘completely disorganized and demoralized the Hindus’, and prevented them ‘from becoming a society with unified life and a consciousness of its own being’.

  Ambedkar then considered and disposed of the nationalist argument that political freedom must precede social emancipation. As he put it (in what was undoubtedly a tacit comparison between Gandhi and himself), ‘political tyranny is nothing compared to social tyranny and a reformer, who defies society, is a much more courageous man than a politician, who defies Government’. He also rejected the socialist argument that economic progress would on its own dissolve and destroy caste.

  Ambedkar turned next to the work of well-meaning social reformers such as the people who had originally invited him. He approved of inter-dining and even more of intermarriage, yet saw them as partial, incomplete reforms. ‘You must have [the] courage to tell the Hindus,’ wrote Ambedkar, ‘that what is wrong with them is their religion—the religion which has produced in them this notion of the sacredness of Caste.’ The enemy whom reformers ‘must grapple with, is not the people who observe Caste, but the Shastras which teach them this religion of Caste’.

  Ambedkar asked reformers to be more bold, to seek both the annihilation of caste and the delegitimization of the holy texts that justified it. For, ‘what is called Religion by the Hindus is nothing but a multitude of commands and prohibitions. Religion, in the sense of spiritual principles, truly universal, applicable to all races, to all countries, to all times, is not to be found in them…’ Ambedkar offered as the ideals to strive for the French
Revolution’s trinity of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. But, for Hindus to achieve this, they had to abolish caste altogether, and, with it, to both ‘discard’ and ‘destroy’ the ‘authority of the Shastras’.10

  The first edition of The Annihilation of Caste carries the date 16 May 1936. In the last week of the month, a conference of the Depressed Classes was held in Bombay. The meeting resolved that ‘change of religion was the only remedy for the community to attain equality and freedom’. Hindu festivals would no longer be observed, nor Hindu deities worshipped, nor pilgrimages to Hindu shrines undertaken.

  About 10,000 delegates attended the conference, including many women. Ambedkar gave the concluding speech, in Marathi, his two-hour-long peroration punctuated with cries of ‘Dr Ambedkar ki jai’.

  The Bombay Chronicle carried a two-column report on Ambedkar’s speech under the provocative headline: ‘Ambedkar’s Tirade Against Mahatma’. Ambedkar, according to this report, had outlined how Hinduism had failed the ‘untouchables’ both socially and spiritually. The Doctor ‘had also no belief in the reformers. Gandhiji, the author of the non-co-operation movement, was afraid, in his opinion, to wound the feelings of the caste-Hindus and had not offered Satyagraha in the interests of the Depressed Classes and for their emancipation.’11

  IV

  Gandhi read The Annihilation of Caste soon after it was published. Meeting a deputation of the Depressed Classes in Bangalore on 10 June, he remarked that ‘when Dr. Ambedkar abuses us, I say it serves us right’. Gandhi claimed that ‘Hinduism is a dying cult if it will not purge itself of untouchability and will perish, Ambedkar or no Ambedkar’.

  Later the same day, addressing a conference of Harijan workers, Gandhi praised Ambedkar as ‘intellectually…superior to thousands of intelligent and educated caste Hindus’. And yet, the ‘orthodox Brahmin will be defiled by the touch of Dr. Ambedkar and that because of his unpardonable sin that he was born a Mahar’.12

  Gandhi is only glancingly mentioned in The Annihilation of Caste. But he saw the text as a challenge to his own understanding of caste and Hinduism. So, after those first, impromptu reactions in Bangalore, he wrote a critique for publication in Harijan. Gandhi began by saying that ‘no Hindu who prizes his faith above life itself can afford to underrate the importance of his indictment’. For, ‘Dr. Ambedkar is not alone in his disgust. He is the most uncompromising exponent and one of the ablest among them. He is certainly the most irreconcilable among them.’

  Acknowledging the force of Ambedkar’s criticisms, Gandhi said the upper castes had, in response, got ‘to correct their belief and their conduct’. He himself was clear that ‘nothing can be accepted as the word of God, which cannot be treated by reason…’

  At the same time, Gandhi believed that Ambedkar had ‘over-proved his case’ by picking upon ‘texts of doubtful authenticity’ and the current ‘degraded’ practice of Hindus. Naming a whole array of reformers down the ages—from Thiruvalluvar and Chaitanya down to Rammohan Roy and Vivekananda—Gandhi asked whether Hinduism was indeed as ‘utterly devoid of merit as is made out in Dr. Ambedkar’s indictment’. Gandhi himself believed that ‘a religion has to be judged not by its worst specimens but by the best it might have produced. For that and that alone can be used as the standard to aspire to, if not to improve upon.’13

  Ambedkar replied to Gandhi immediately. He took up Gandhi’s claim that a religion must be judged by its best practitioners. Ambedkar agreed with this statement, but, he noted, ‘the question still remains—why the best number so few and the worst so many?’ His own answer was that ‘the religious ideal [of Hinduism] is a wholly wrong ideal which has given a wrong moral twist to the lives of the many and that the best have become best in spite of the wrong ideal’.

  In this rebuttal, Ambedkar, for the first time, adopted a personal, polemical tone in challenging Gandhi. In one place, he wrote that ‘the Mahatma appears not to believe in thinking’. In another, he complained of ‘the double role which the Mahatma wants to play—of a Mahatma and a Politician’. Others had made the same point before, while suggesting that Gandhi stick to religious matters. Ambedkar was less charitable. ‘As a Mahatma,’ he remarked, Gandhi ‘may be trying to spiritualize Politics. Whether he has succeeded in it or not Politics have certainly commercialized him. A politician must know that Society cannot bear the whole truth and that he must not speak the whole truth; if he is speaking the whole truth it is bad for his politics. The reason why the Mahatma is always supporting Caste and Varna is because he is afraid that if he opposed them he will lose his place in politics.’14

  Even as he was debating with Gandhi, Ambedkar had begun a parallel conversation with B.S. Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha. In the middle of June, the two met in Bombay. Moonje proposed to Ambedkar that he take the ‘untouchables’ wholesale into the Sikh faith, whereupon the Mahasabha would urge the acceptance of these ‘neo-Sikhs’ into the list of castes eligible for representation in the legislatures and in government bodies. Moonje was motivated by the fear that otherwise Ambedkar would convert to Christianity or Islam, faiths far more foreign to Hinduism.

  After the meeting, Ambedkar issued a long and most intriguing statement. This noted that conversion to either Islam or Christianity was a feasible option for the Depressed Classes, since both religions had immense financial resources. However, conversion to either faith would ‘denationalize the Depressed Classes’. If ‘they go to Islam’, he continued, ‘the number of Muslims [in India] will be doubled and the danger of Muslim domination also becomes real’. And if they became Christians, it would ‘help to strengthen the hold of the British on this country’.

  If the Depressed Classes became Muslims or Christians, argued Ambedkar, they ‘not only go out of the Hindu religion, but they also go out of the Hindu culture’. On the other hand, if they became Sikhs, they would ‘remain within the Hindu culture’. However, as a small community, the Sikhs lacked the financial resources to compete with Muslims and Christians. This was where upper-caste Hindus came in, for, as Ambedkar put it, they could ‘help the Sikhs to remove the political and financial difficulties’, by contributing money, and by modifying the Poona Pact to allow Depressed Class converts to Sikhism to remain eligible to vote for and contest reserved seats.15

  When Gandhi heard of this proposal, he deplored this ‘bargaining between Dr. Ambedkar and savarna Hindus for the transfer to another form of several million dumb Harijans as if they were chattels’. While Dr Ambedkar and his followers were perfectly free to change their faith, it was quite another matter for political parties ‘to assume such change for the mass of Harijans’. As he pointedly asked: ‘And who are we, the self-constituted leaders, to barter away the religious freedom of Harijans? Has not every Harijan, however dull or stupid he may be, the right to make his own choice?’16

  Interestingly, Christian and Muslim priests also reached out to Ambedkar. They hoped to get Ambedkar and his followers to join their faith instead.17

  In June 1936, an Italian Buddhist came to see Ambedkar in Bombay, clad in the robes of a priest, carrying a bowl and an umbrella. He had adopted the name Lokananda after conversion, and now lived in Ceylon. He told a reporter that he met Ambedkar ‘with the object of persuading him to become a Buddhist’. The Italian convert apparently believed ‘that he has succeeded in a fair measure in convincing Dr. Ambedkar that if Harijans agreed to their conversion to the Buddhist faith they would raise themselves morally, spiritually and socially and attain a higher status in society’.

  ‘I have reason to believe,’ the Buddhist missionary added, ‘that Dr. Ambedkar will come round to my view. My ambition is to convert all Harijans to Buddhism.’18

  Ambedkar stayed his hand, however. He met and spoke to representatives of several faiths without committing himself to any. Meanwhile, he launched a fresh broadside against Gandhi for opposing his talks with B.S. Moonje. ‘When Mr. Gandhi says this cannot be a matter for barter,’ he rema
rked, ‘my reply is that this argument cannot now lie in his mouth. At the time of the Poona Pact he treated the thing as one of barter. It is too late in the day now to ask people who are hungering for bread and for their elementary rights to live on spirituality.’

  Ambedkar continued: ‘Mr. Gandhi says that the removal of untouchability is a matter which must depend upon the voluntary effort of Savarna Hindus in the spirit of repentance. If I understand his meaning, his view is that in the removal of untouchability the untouchables should do nothing. They should wait and pray for Savarna Hindus to develop a conscience, to repent and change their ways. In my opinion, this view is as sensible as the view of a person who says to folks living in plague-stricken areas not to leave the area, but to wait and mind the disease till the municipal members repent of their neglect of duties and come forward to take measures to fight the disease.’19

  V

  Apart from brief trips to Banaras and Ahmedabad, and a week in hospital in Wardha (after he came down with malaria), Gandhi spent the second half of 1936 in Segaon. He was entirely comfortable in his new home. Charlie Andrews visited him in November, afterwards writing to a mutual friend that Gandhi ‘really has never looked so fit as he does now for many years past. His recovery is marvellous and he has really found himself again in this village and he is content from here to pray for the whole world and to use not his own power but God’s for the healing of the nations.’20