But the crowd at that one, now nameless, rail siding on the Gangetic plain hadn’t stayed on by the thousands through a long night to express its enthusiasm for Gandhi’s four pillars or its fellow feeling for Muslims or untouchables or even to enlist in his next nonviolent campaign. It had come to pay homage to the man, more than that, to a saint. The idea that he cared for them in a new and unusual manner had been communicated only too well. The idea that he had demands to make on them had gotten across in a wispy, vague, and incidental way, if at all. Gandhi’s actual goals could verge on the utopian, but they could also be, in this teeming Indian context, beside the point—sometimes, not nearly acceptable in the real world he meant to change. The throngs that turned out for him had their own ideas about what he was promising; often they seemed to be waiting for a messiah to usher in a golden age in which debts and taxes and the prevailing scarcities would cease to weigh on them. Sometimes they would call this dawning era of ease and sufficiency, if not plenty, the Gandhi Raj. Regularly speaking past his adherents, Gandhi found himself a prisoner of the expectations he aroused.
In his own supple, rationalizing mind there was seldom tension between his two roles, that of spiritual pilgrim and that of mass leader—spearhead of a national movement, tribune of a united India that had come into being first in his own imagining. When conflict did arise between the Gandhi personae, it was almost invariably the mass leader, not the spiritual pilgrim, who retreated. His career is punctuated by periods of seeming withdrawal from active leadership, similar to his withdrawal to Tolstoy Farm in South Africa between 1910 and 1912. But his retreats from politics were never final. Given India’s poverty, he would argue, the only fulfillment for a religiously motivated person was in service through politics. “No Indian who aspires to follow the ideal of true religion can afford to remain aloof from politics,” he said. This was Gandhi’s distinctive interpretation of dharma, the duty of a righteous man. Judith Brown, a British scholar, puts it well when she writes that for him it was “morality in action.”
Those Gandhi called “political sannyasis,” religious seekers who renounced the comforts of the world but lived in the world to make it better, had a duty “to mix with the masses and work among them like one of themselves.” That meant, first of all, speaking their languages rather than the language of the colonial oppressor, in which Gandhi himself happened to excel. The emphasis is original with him. It can be called Gandhian. It’s the self-invented Gandhi who came out of Africa, the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj, who took it on himself to dole out rations of bread and sugar to indentured miners in Natal about to court mass arrest by following him across a forbidden border.
On the Indian scene, all this seemed at first to push him to the periphery, an exotic and isolated creature. The Gandhian emphasis on speaking to the rural poor in their own languages left him instantly swimming against the tide in a largely Anglicized national movement that conducted most of its business in English. A president of the Indian National Congress, which Gandhi would eventually take over, had recently spoken warmly of “the spread of English education” as “perhaps [Britain’s] greatest gift to the people of India.” It had, this pre-Gandhian said, “instructed our minds and inspired us with new hopes and aspirations.” His assessment was a kind of fulfillment of the vision of Thomas B. Macaulay, the great British historian, who had argued in his landmark “Minute on Indian Education,” written in 1835, that the British could only rule India if they succeeded in forming “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
As a product of the Inner Temple in London, Gandhi might himself have been counted as a member of that class. Instead, he rebelled against the dominance of the colonialist’s language. Macaulay, in an ensuing, less-quoted passage, had also said it would be the responsibility of this Anglicized new class “to refine the vernacular dialects … and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.” There was an injunction that would have resonated with the populist in Gandhi. Whenever he could, he shunned English, though he’d been functioning in the language of India’s rulers for most of his adult life. Fewer than 1 million of India’s population then of 300 million, he pointed out sharply, “have any understanding of English. “All the existing agitation is confined to an infinitesimal section of our people who are a mere speck in the firmament,” he would say.
Such home truths went down hard. Even Gokhale may have backed off. He’d found Hind Swaraj regressive and unpalatable but nevertheless seems to have regarded Gandhi as a possible successor as leader of a tiny reformist vanguard, known as the Servants of India Society, he’d founded with the aim of infiltrating a cadre of totally disciplined, totally selfless nationalists into Indian public life. But before the great man’s death, it dawned on the newcomer that he might not fit in there. He was too singular; his history of strikes and passive resistance, his tendency to make himself the sole arbiter of the “truth” that gave force to satyagraha, his stand on the language issue, all set him apart even before he cast his lot in Indian politics. In other words, he came with his own doctrine, and it was not that of the Servants of India Society.
He showed his grief for Gokhale by walking barefoot everywhere he went for weeks after his guru’s demise. Pious and heartfelt as it was, the gesture also underscored Gandhi’s singularity, as if he were claiming a place for himself as Gokhale’s chief mourner. Seen that way, it was more likely to put off than to touch the surviving members of the Servants of India Society who found him, as he later said, “a disturbing factor.” Writing to Hermann Kallenbach four months after he returned home and shortly after his application to the Servants of India Society had finally been rebuffed, the newcomer acknowledged that his views, the ones he arrived with, were “too firmly fixed to be altered.”
“I am passing through a curious phase,” he went on. “I see around me on the surface nothing but hypocrisy, humbug and degradation and yet underneath it I trace a divinity I missed [in South Africa] as elsewhere. This is my India. It may be my blind love or ignorance or a picture of my own imagination. Anyway it gives me peace and happiness.” The same letter reports the establishment of his first Indian ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, his home region. “I am an outsider and belong to no party,” he remarked a year later.
The Kochrab Ashram had only two cottages and a total population of under fifty. But Gandhi had large ambitions for it. “We want to run our institution for the whole of India,” he wrote. Characteristically, in his self-assigned role of rule giver, he’d also drafted an eight-page constitution, which can be read as a redrafting, with a decidedly Gandhian twist, of the rules his guru had laid down for the Servants of India Society. At Gokhale’s death, only two dozen candidates had successfully completed a rigorous five-year training program under the stern tutelage of the “First Member,” as the founder referred to himself. They took seven vows, one involving a promise to live on a subsistence wage.
Gandhi, who declared himself his ashram’s “Chief Controller” in his draft of its constitution, promulgated vows that were more numerous and far-reaching. He demanded total celibacy of all “inmates,” even those who were married; “control of the palate” (on the understanding that “eating is only for sustaining the body”); a “vow of non-possession” (meaning that “if one can do without chairs, one should do so”); and a “vow against untouchability” (involving a commitment to “regard the untouchable communities as touchable”). Members were to speak their own Indian languages and learn new ones. They were also to take up spinning and handloom weaving. To the extent that these rules—written down within five months of his arrival in Bombay—were closely observed, the ashram could be expected to turn out a steady supply of replica Gandhis. About half its original intake included relatives and adherents who’d followed Gandhi from South Africa, including Thambi Nai
doo’s sons and a Muslim cleric from Johannesburg, Imam Abdul Kader Bawazir.
“The object of the Ashram,” Gandhi wrote, “is to learn how to serve the motherland one’s whole life.” So much self-denial was built into the lessons he proposed to give those he classed as “novitiates” that the appeal was sure to be severely limited on both sides of the communal divide. Meat-eating Muslims were bound to see the ashram as a Hindu retreat; that was, after all, the meaning of the word. Hindus had to wrestle with Gandhi’s views on untouchability, not to mention sex. (Celibate now for more than a decade, Gandhi was getting ever more crotchety on the subject. “I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of man and woman,” he would counsel his second son, Manilal, who found self-denial a trial.) Neither Muslims nor Hindus were inclined to fall in line with Gandhi when it came to the problem of human excrement and his Tolstoyan insistence that its removal be seen as a universal social obligation. Simply put, mass appeal was never going to be a prospect, or problem, for the ashram.
Even before its modest beginning in May 1915, Gandhi had his first encounters with an emerging Muslim leadership. His first week back, in fact, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the future founder of Pakistan, presided and gave the speech of welcome at a reception Bombay Gujaratis held for their native son. On the surface, the two men had much in common. Their families came from the same part of Gujarat, the coastal Kathiawad region, now more commonly known as Saurashtra; both were lawyers trained in London. But the parallel ended there. Jinnah’s grandfather was a Hindu who converted to Islam. Dapper in a bespoke suit, Jinnah welcomed the new arrival in the well-turned English sentences of a colonial gentleman. Gandhi, dressed like a Gujarati villager in vest, kurta, dhoti, and flattened turban, replied colloquially in his native language, already insinuating, without putting it in so many words, that the Anglicized professional elite could not by itself achieve India’s freedom.
At the time of this encounter, Jinnah was a rising figure in the Indian Congress, the national movement Gandhi had yet to join. To put it mildly, he wasn’t much given to religious enthusiasms, then or later. In politics, he would have insisted at the time, he was an Indian nationalist; he too had drawn close to Gokhale. Yet two years later he was persuaded to take out membership as well in the Muslim League, the movement he’d eventually lead out of India, impelled by injured pride and a somewhat cynical but undoubtedly effective argument—that Gandhi had turned the Congress into “an instrument for the revival of Hinduism and for the establishment of Hindu Raj.” The path to India’s partition would have many twists and turns, none harder to map than this: one of those who brought Jinnah the nationalist into the staunchly sectarian Muslim League was a Pan-Islamist named Muhammad Ali who then became Gandhi’s closest Muslim ally in the Congress.
Ali had a relatively humble background in the princely state of Rampur and an Oxford degree. With his elder brother, Shaukat, who’d won renown as a cricketer, he was already recognized among Muslims as a spokesman for beleaguered Islam within and beyond India. Specifically, the Ali brothers stoked and then gave voice to the community’s mounting anxieties over the decline of the Ottoman empire in the years leading up to the world war. The slow erosion of authority that ultimately undermined the Mughal emperors in nineteenth-century India now seemed to be recurring in what was still Constantinople. In his religious role as caliph, the sultan was held to be the highest authority in Sunni Islam, suzerain still of the holy places on the Arabian Peninsula and a successor of the Prophet. Though few Indian Muslims actually visited Constantinople, they may have taken that connection more seriously than most Turks. The Ottoman sultanate became for them a symbol of Islam’s standing in the modern world and therefore a cause for a minority community anxious about its own status in India.
By the time Gandhi met Muhammad Ali in Delhi in April 1915, a month before his ashram opened, the Alis’ passionate identification with the Ottoman cause had put them at cross-purposes with British power in India, which had cultivated and generally received the loyalty of Muslims who’d been educated in the English way. The sultan, after all, had just allied himself and his army with the German kaiser and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, against whom British Indian troops would soon be fighting, including many Muslims. Almost overnight, therefore, the Ali brothers had gone, in the eyes of the colonial authorities, from being seen as loyalists to potential agents of sedition. As the home ground shifted in response to far-off events, the Alis also found themselves closer to Indian nationalists who were overwhelmingly Hindu, among whom only one was in a position to intuit their feelings and identify with them. This was the newly arrived Gandhi, onetime mouthpiece for the Muslim merchant class of Durban and Johannesburg, a longtime veteran of political rallies in mosques. “I believe that Hindus should yield up to Mohammedans whatever the latter desire and that they should rejoice in so doing,” the South African Gandhi had said in 1909. “We can expect unity only if such large-heartedness is displayed.” The remark is recalled with some bitterness by Hindu nationalists to this day.
Muhammad Ali, a polished and sometimes florid polemicist in English as well as Urdu, had written admiringly of “that long-suffering man, Mr. Gandhi,” referring to his leadership in South Africa. He now welcomed Gandhi to Delhi, the former Mughal capital, newly designated as capital of British India. It was, Gandhi said, “love at first sight.” The two men wouldn’t meet again for more than four years, for the Ali brothers were placed under confinement—a loose form of house arrest—soon after this first encounter. Gandhi then made appeals for the release of the brothers one of his earliest political commitments in India. He and Muhammad Ali kept up a correspondence. By the time the brothers were freed from detention, Gandhi and the Alis were ready to take up each other’s causes.
That connection to Muslims would count soon enough. It would prove to be a crucial factor in Gandhi’s takeover of the Indian National Congress. What matters here is the evidence that even before he had launched his first campaign in India, even before he joined the Congress, Gandhi had strong convictions about the need for Hindus to make common cause with Muslims if Indians were to be one people. No doubt he exaggerated the extent to which this had actually happened among Indians in South Africa, but it was the first political lesson he’d learned there and a touchstone of his nationalist creed.
His urgent feelings about untouchability also derived from lessons learned on that other subcontinent. The way whites there treated Indians, he’d long ago concluded, was no worse than the way India treated its Pariahs, scavengers, and other outcastes. In his own mind these feelings were only deepened by his passionate engagement with the indentured strikers in Natal. Strictly speaking, only a minority of them may have counted as untouchable, but they were mostly lower caste, and, in Gandhi’s view, they were all sufficiently oppressed in a hierarchical system to make them virtual slaves. Caste lines blurred as they marched with him across the veldt. It was a contest of what he called “high and low,” and he’d finally found a way to align himself with the “low.”
The fresh memory of South Africa and the 1913 strikes, it can thus be argued, helped feed his feelings about untouchability when he returned to India. When he’d been home less than two months, he went to Hardwar in the Himalayan foothills at the time of the Kumbh Mela, a festival held every twelve years that draws masses of Hindu pilgrims, upwards of two million of them. The suffocating spectacle appalled him, not least because of his nagging preoccupation with sanitation and its opposite, which was everywhere on display. “I came to observe more of the pilgrims’ absent-mindedness, hypocrisy and slovenliness, than of their piety,” he later wrote. Soon he drafted the small entourage he’d transplanted from the Phoenix Settlement, who’d been staying nearby, to work as scavengers, scooping up excrement and shoveling dirt over the open-pit latrines used by the pilgrims. On a vastly larger scale, it was a reprise of his disillusioning first encounter with the Indian National Congress in Calcutta fourteen years earlier.
In his first
real controversy in India, he defied the traditional injunctions against social pollution even more directly, creating a scandal. The controversy spilled out of his ashram a few months after it was established, provoked by Gandhi’s acceptance of a Dhed as a resident there. Dheds traditionally deal with animal carcasses and hides—essentially they’re tanners—which is enough to brand them and their offspring forevermore as untouchable whether they’ve anything to do with hides or not. The idea wasn’t his own; it came in the form of a letter from a Gujarati reformer named A. V. Thakkar, usually called Thakkar Bapa, who’d remain Gandhi’s right arm on the issue of untouchability over more than three decades. “A humble and honest untouchable family is desirous of joining your ashram,” Thakkar wrote. “Will you accept them?”
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