His last stop in Travancore was at Alwaye, now called Aluva, about forty miles north of Vaikom, where a young Cambridge graduate teaching at a local Christian college witnessed his arrival. “Gandhi was sitting cross-legged in a third-class compartment, his curious gargoyle face showing no special awareness of the crowd and the notables and the cheers of the students.” So Malcolm Muggeridge remembered the scene years later.
In his account, thousands of poor villagers pressed forward as usual “to take the dust from his feet.” Then Gandhi “caught sight of some untouchables in a sort of roped-off enclosure.” Brushing past students shouting political slogans and notables waiting to lay marigold garlands over his head, he went to the untouchables and “started singing with them what sounded like a rather lugubrious hymn, to the obvious consternation of the notables.”
In his memoir, written late in life, the English writer doesn’t dwell on that moment; his narrative reels off into reflections on the course of the independence movement and the history through which he has lived. But before dismissing Gandhi as an upholder of the system with a deliberately ambiguous message—in other words, as a hypocrite—as some Kerala intellectuals seem inclined to do when they consider Vaikom all these years later, we might pause at that scene in Alwaye. If it was as Muggeridge later described it, what was Gandhi saying and to whom? In the roped-off enclosure, he was raising the subject of common humanity, not only for the sake of the untouchables, but for the students and the notables and the villagers who’d taken the dust from his feet. And, as so often in his unusually well-recorded life, it’s the action rather than the always earnest, sometimes contradictory, sometimes moving words that leaps off the page.
8
HAIL, DELIVERER
THOUGH “not a quick despairer,” as he once said, Gandhi sometimes flirted with despair. He never gave in to it for long, but the year before he paid his visit to Vaikom, he’d been close to the edge. The low point came in the middle of 1924 at the Indian National Congress meeting in Ahmedabad, the one that watered down his resolution calling for daily spinning as an absolute prerequisite for membership in the movement. If he couldn’t persuade his supposed followers that the charkha, or spinning wheel, was the essential instrument of Indian self-reliance and freedom, the autocrat in him had been ready to require that they at least act as if they believed him. Discovering they were prepared to humor him but not be commanded, he described himself as “defeated and humbled.”
The proof of his sinking spirits lay in the fact that it was Gandhi himself who’d moved the watering down of his own resolution as a way of avoiding defeat for himself and a possible split. It was, he admitted, a kind of surrender. In the pointlessness of the debate and the maneuvering that accompanied it, he felt he heard God’s voice telling him, or so he later wrote in imitation King James English, “Thou fool, knowest not thou that thou are impossible? Thy time is up.” What he said in the open meeting was nearly as dark: “I do not know where I stand or what I should do.”
He’d lost not only command of the movement and a sense of direction. He also seems to have lost his firm conviction that he’d internalized its most accurate compass, that his inner quest would ultimately be synonymous with India’s. His reaction to this onset of uncertainty was to sideline himself from national politics, saying he’d not play an active role until the six-year prison term to which he’d been sentenced in 1922 finally expired in 1928, even though he’d been released after two years, even though, with perfect inconsistency, he’d immediately offered upon his release to resume his role as the movement’s “general.” During this self-imposed withdrawal, he’d confine himself, he said, to three topics: untouchability, spinning, and Hindu-Muslim unity. Before long, as a consequence of widespread communal violence, Hindu-Muslim unity had to be struck from the list of his ongoing projects. “What is one to do where one is helpless?” a plaintive Gandhi asked.
Sometimes he almost seemed to sulk. He blamed “educated India” for its tendency to “split into parties.” He still could see “only one way” forward himself: his way, to work “from bottom upward.” Next he blamed the British, “the third party” in Hindu-Muslim disputes, always casting about for new ways to divide and rule. “The government of India is based on distrust,” he said. (His point, on this occasion, was that it sowed distrust by favoring Muslims. Of course, if he’d not favored Muslims himself, the national movement would never have joined the Khilafat agitation.) Venturing into hyperbole, he finally allowed himself to sound as if he were blaming God:
Hindu-Muslim unity I made a mission of my life. I worked for it in South Africa, I toiled for it here, I did penance for it, but God was not satisfied, God did not want me to take any credit for the work. So I have now washed my hands. I am helpless. I have exhausted all my effort.
Surprisingly, by the time Gandhi speaks in this seemingly abject vein, he has actually started to rebound. He’d interrupted his ceaseless touring of the country to evangelize for the spinning wheel and then spent the whole of 1926 in his ashram outside Ahmedabad, explaining that he needed to rest and reflect. It has been called his “year of silence,” but he was hardly silent. Every week there were new articles for Young India, including the weekly installments of his autobiography. By January 1927, when he spoke of having “exhausted all my effort,” he was ready to get back on the hustings, to resume carrying his message across India. The more he speaks of his helplessness on Hindu-Muslim issues and remoteness from politics—the two, Hindu-Muslim issues and politics, were often synonymous in this period—the clearer it becomes that he views his retreat as a temporary phenomenon. A cross-cultural comparison comes to mind that may seem unhelpful, even wildly inappropriate. The Gandhi who sits at the Sabarmati Ashram in the mid-1920s, holding himself aloof from the politics of the national movement, pursues a strategy that another inner-directed politician would adopt in the waning days of the Third Republic in France several decades later, not in an ashram, but in a village called Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. It’s impossible to picture an unbending Charles de Gaulle sitting cross-legged. But Gandhi, as obviously as de Gaulle later, was not just holding himself aloof but biding his time, waiting for his country to summon him back to leadership on his own terms.
He says so in so many words, only sometimes he couches the thought in religious language. Whatever his doubts in 1924, he now seems certain he’ll be needed. “I am an optimist because I believe in the efficacy of prayerful thought,” he writes to a supporter toward the end of 1926, his year of retreat at the ashram. “When time for action has come, God will give the light and guidance. I therefore watch, wait and pray holding myself in momentary readiness to respond.” What “appears to be my inaction,” he says in that same period, defending his obsession with the promotion of the spinning wheel, “is really concentrated action.”
“I am biding my time,” he finally wrote in a letter dated May 1928, “and you will find me leading the country in the field of politics when the country is ready. I have no false modesty about me. I am undoubtedly a politician in my own way, and I have a plan for the country’s freedom.”
The summons back to leadership came five or so months later, at approximately the same time as what would have been the end of his six-year prison term. By then, the first successful satyagraha campaign in years had wrung a government concession on high land taxes in Gujarat’s Bardoli district, the same battleground from which Gandhi had abruptly withdrawn six years earlier in reaction to the Chauri Chaura violence, aborting a painstakingly prepared campaign. Finally, under the leadership of Gandhi’s disciple Vallabhbhai Patel, Bardoli Two had restored faith in the tactics of militant nonviolence at a time when a young Bengali firebrand, Subhas Chandra Bose, was just starting to win notice and backing with a call to resistance that promised to be the opposite of passive. “Give me blood and I promise you freedom,” Bose said grandiloquently.
The Indian National Congress was deeply divided, not just between Hindus and Muslims, but gene
rationally too, over proposals for constitutional reform designed to be served up as a set of demands to the British: in effect, an ultimatum. The proposals had been drafted by a committee chaired by Motilal Nehru, father of Jawaharlal, the future prime minister. The son, in the forefront of the younger generation, did not support the father’s report; neither did the Muslims, represented by Jinnah and Muhammad Ali, now on the verge of his final break with Gandhi. The drama and importance of the moment are probably clearer in the long perspective of history than they were at the time. Gandhi was the one figure in India who had any chance of steering the Nehru Report, as it was known, to formal acceptance by the Congress. That is what he was called upon to do by the senior Nehru in 1928. Being Gandhi, he took the call as the summons back to active leadership for which he’d been waiting for four long years.
So he didn’t fasten on the question of how many seats would be reserved for Muslims in the legislative assemblies of states where they were in a minority—that’s to say, most states. The Nehru Report had reneged on a promise the Congress had made to the Muslims twelve years earlier, before the rise of Gandhi: that they’d be able to elect their own representatives through separate electorates. Instead, it came up with the idea of reserving for Muslims a minimum number of seats in Hindu-majority provinces, in line with the proportion of Muslims in the population; in the national legislature, it was prepared to concede one-quarter of the seats to Muslims. Jinnah thought Motilal Nehru had set the price for this shift—measured in the number of reserved Muslim seats in the national assembly in particular—too low. Here was a moment for Gandhi to become active again on Hindu-Muslim questions, which had soured him on politics to the point, he said, that he’d “given up reading newspapers.” But he had never been much interested in constitutional mechanics; and though usually ready to make concessions in the cause of unity with Muslims, he was focused now on the practical demands of Congress politics and his own restoration, so he let the moment pass.
At a mammoth All Parties Convention held in Calcutta at the end of 1928, Jinnah advanced a series of amendments, the most important of which would guarantee Muslims one-third of the seats in a future central legislature as opposed to the 25 percent Motilal Nehru had contemplated. It wasn’t an offer made in the take-it-or-leave-it fashion that would later come to seem characteristic. In Calcutta he could hardly have sounded more accommodating. “We are sons of this land, we have to live together,” he said. “I believe there is no progress for India until Muslims and Hindus are united.” The Congress, which claimed to represent all Indians, including Muslims, turned a deaf ear. The Jinnah amendments were voted down, and Gandhi kept his distance.
Jinnah took it as a brush-off and walked away, taking with him Muhammad Ali, the Gandhi ally who’d worn khadi, proselytized for the spinning wheel, given up beef, and even, on the occasion of Gandhi’s 1924 fast of “penance” for Hindu-Muslim harmony in Ali’s own home, thought to present the Mahatma with a cow saved from the abattoir as a symbol of Muslim respect for Hindu values and sensitivities. Within weeks of this rupture, his brother Shaukat Ali was promising not to attend any meetings with Hindus for a year. “This is the parting of the ways,” Jinnah wrote at the time. Disgusted with politics and heartsore over his separation from a younger wife from a non-Muslim background whom he’d loved and by her subsequent early death, Jinnah moved to England for four years. “What is to be done? The Hindus are short-sighted and I think, incorrigible,” he’d remark to a friend. Gandhi wasn’t happy about the Congress’s treatment of Jinnah. But it’s doubtful that he ever saw the proud Bombay lawyer in these years as a potential mass leader of Muslims, let alone as a possible ally. Mohammed Ali Jinnah wore no religion on his well-tailored sleeves. How could the Mahatma conceive of speaking to Muslims through such a man?
Inside the Congress, there was still a fight to be waged over the details of the Nehru Report, which called on Britain to grant India dominion status within the British Commonwealth. Jawaharlal Nehru and Bose wanted an immediate declaration in favor of full independence by the Congress, leading the way to immediate confrontation, one that would remain nonviolent only if nonviolence succeeded. Gandhi countered with a temporizing resolution vowing that India would declare independence in two years if Britain failed to grant dominion status by then. Finally it was agreed that Britain would be given just one year—until the end of 1929—to act. That one year, so other resolutions promised, would be dedicated to the discipline of Gandhi’s “constructive program,” including the removal of untouchability, boycott of foreign cloth, promotion of khadi, prohibition, and the advancement of women. This was all on his insistence, showing he was once again in a position to lay down terms.
But, of course, when the year had passed, India still wasn’t a dominion and social reform remained stalled. Swaraj within a year hadn’t happened for a second time. So a symbolic independence day now had to be proclaimed for January 26, 1930. It was left entirely up to the Mahatma to decide how the long-threatened campaign of noncooperation would be conducted after that. The movement was larger than it had been at the time of Gandhi’s first takeover but harder to lead; by sheer inertia, it pulled in many directions while being herded to the one overriding goal of nationhood. Still, he was effectively back in the position of prime mover that had been formally bestowed on him a decade earlier. As he’d said during his period on the sidelines, “For me there is only one way.” That way was inherently confrontational, although it was expressed in a vocabulary of love and nonviolence. It included satyagraha, noncooperation, civil disobedience; the terms, not exactly synonymous, blended into one another, covering a spectrum of meanings that, by now, India and its colonial rulers had come to understand. But the specific tactics for the coming campaign eluded him for weeks.
His inspiration—God given, he’d say—came in two stages. In the first, he took account of his continuing disappointment with the Congress, his sense that it remained an undisciplined, ramshackle coalition of self-regarding interests with little or no serious commitment to social reform. “In the present state of the Congress no civil disobedience can be or should be offered in its name,” he wrote in a confidential note to the younger Nehru, whom he’d just designated as its president. The flames of the Chauri Chaura violence, now eight years in the past, still cast lurid shadows in the Mahatma’s mind. So his imagination carried him further back, all the way to South Africa, where he claimed to have started the Natal agitation with sixteen chosen ashramites, trained by him at Tolstoy Farm and the Phoenix Settlement. The political stakes were altogether different now. There a small, beleaguered minority sought minimum rights—the repeal of an oppressive tax designed to drive it from the land, an acknowledgment of rudimentary citizenship, permission if not the right to cross internal borders—in exchange for its tacit acknowledgment that political equality was not on the table, could not even be mentioned as a distant goal. Here not just equality but sovereignty—swaraj in the fullest possible meaning of self-determination—was the prize sought in the name of 320 million Indians, including the impoverished “dumb millions,” for and of whom the Mahatma habitually spoke.
Gandhi’s somewhat rosy version of his heroic personal history on the other subcontinent had merged with his vision of India’s destiny; for the moment, at least, they’d be identical. Civil disobedience, he told Nehru, “should be offered by me alone or jointly with a few companions even as I did in South Africa.”
The second inspiration—the specifics of what this “self-suffering” vanguard of satyagrahis would actually do, how it would address the common needs of all those millions, how it might be emulated—finally came after the symbolic independence day on January 26, 1930, and many stirring calls by Gandhi on his immediate entourage and the movement at large to steel themselves for struggle. When it came, it had all the beauty and simplicity of a fresh artistic vision realized for the first time, of a discovery in basic science. The self-proclaimed “expert in the satyagraha business” outdid himself t
his time, symbolically wrapping the nationalist urge for political freedom in the basic values of his “constructive program,” intended for the uplift of India’s lowliest, its most downcast.
This time the inspiration came in one syllable—salt. Gandhi had periodically experimented with a salt-free diet himself and pressed it on his disciples at Tolstoy Farm. But now he was prepared to campaign on the proposition that “next to water and air, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.” It was precious because it was needed by all and heavily taxed by an alien regime, which curtailed its local production. Since the days of the East India Company, the colonial authorities had counted on revenue derived from their salt monopoly and the tax on salt, paid by even the poorest households, Hindu or Muslim. Gandhi’s inspiration was that he could march to the shore of the Arabian Sea from the Sabarmati Ashram and there, at a place called Dandi, defy the law—and simultaneously unify India—by simply picking up a chunk of salt.
Sticking to the South African script, he first wrote to Lord Irwin, the viceroy, setting out his intentions and demands as he’d written to Smuts in 1913. “My ambition is no less than to convert the British people through nonviolence,” he wrote, “and thus make them see the wrong they have done to India.” The viceroy also stuck to the script. Rather than reply directly to the Mahatma, he had his private secretary send a stiff note as Smuts’s secretary had done, saying that Lord Irwin was sorry to hear that Gandhi planned to break the law and endanger public peace.
Great Soul Page 26
