Great Soul

by Joseph Lelyveld

  The growth of the ashram was less than a mixed blessing, becoming another distraction from the village work that had drawn him to Segaon in the first place. “Oh God,” Gandhi said, “save me from my friends, followers and flatterers.”

  Today the nearest village houses are around the bend of a dirt road, a couple hundred yards from the ashram, a complex of dark wood structures with long sloping roofs that give an appearance reminiscent of a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto. Sevagram the ashram no longer serves Sevagram the village. With a bookshop, a canteen, and even some modest rooms to rent to pilgrims, it maintains itself as a tourist attraction. The village still looks poor, but some of the houses have TV antennas on their roofs and motorbikes leaning up against their cracked and mildewed cement walls. The houses stand on land that Bajaj signed over to Gandhi and Gandhi signed over to the village’s untouchables, who now call themselves Dalits rather than Harijans. When you stroll from the ashram to the one village that received more personal attention from the Mahatma than any other among the 700,000 that existed in his India, a statue comes into view beside a sports field. The figure on the pedestal is not wearing a loincloth. He’s wearing a suit painted an electric shade of blue and a painted red tie. It’s the figure of Babasaheb Ambedkar. And the former untouchables in what was once Gandhi’s chosen village—especially the younger ones—are likelier, when asked, to identify themselves as Buddhists than as Hindus.

  Ashram grew up around Gandhi as Sevagram (photo credit i10.1)

  For most of Gandhi’s first year in Wardha, he’d been less preoccupied with the actual human condition in the surrounding villages than with the task of birthing a new mass organization he’d dreamed up to infuse badly needed energy into his languishing campaign for village self-sufficiency through hand spinning and weaving. He’d invested excessive faith in the spinning wheel, the iconic charkha, as an invincible panacea for village poverty, he now concluded. By itself, it would not be enough to lift rural India out of its misery. Spinning and weaving would retain their place, but they needed to be supplemented by a whole array of traditional crafts that were losing out in competition with processed and manufactured goods being produced more cheaply in city factories and workshops. Villages had once known how to turn out their own handmade pens, ink, and paper; they ground their grains into flour, pressed vegetables for their oils, boiled unrefined sugar, tanned hides into leather, raised bees, harvested honey, ginned cotton by hand. For their own salvation, they needed to do so again, Gandhi taught; and it was a national need to support them not only by wearing homespun khadi but by consciously giving all they produced a preference over manufactured articles, to undo as far as possible the ravages of the Industrial Revolution.

  Starting from these premises, the nation’s leader suddenly had an urgent need to know whether hand-pounded rice and grain could be shown to be more nutritious than the polished products from the mills. Could hand-husked rice compete in price with mill-husked rice? What use could be made of the husk? Did spinning pay better than husking? Could oil be harvested from orange rinds? Gandhi’s letters were full of such questions; in his mind, the answers he received were building blocks of a revised strategy for gaining “the swaraj of our dreams, devoted to the welfare of villages.” His new organization needed a constitution, advisers, and a board that would be selfless and nearly full-time; it needed a table of organization reaching down to every district and, ultimately, every village in the vast country. Within a couple of months Gandhi had created all this, on paper at least, and the All India Village Industries Association (AIVIA) came into existence with its national headquarters in previously obscure Wardha, in a building donated, of course, by Gandhi’s angel, Bajaj. Gandhi recruited a chartered accountant from Bombay, with postgraduate training in economics from Columbia University, to serve as the organization’s director. A Christian, he was known at Columbia as Joseph Cornelius; by the time he got to Wardha, where he stayed until after Gandhi’s death, he had become J. C. Kumarappa. Today Kumarappa is occasionally mentioned in India as a pioneer theorist on sustainable farming and appropriate technology; the last Western economist who seems to have been conscious of him or Gandhi as thinkers with something useful to say about the world’s poorest was E. F. Schumacher, himself a dissenter from orthodox development doctrines whose book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered enjoyed a brief vogue when it appeared in 1973, twenty-five years after Gandhi’s death.

  The Mahatma denied that his fixation on village industries betokened any dilution of his campaign against untouchability, just as he’d denied a decade earlier that his renewed emphasis on the charkha represented a backing off from his campaign for Hindu-Muslim unity. Many of the spinners were untouchables, he pointed out. There was conspicuous overlap between AIVIA and other organizations he or his followers had launched to advance the Gandhian constructive program in the 700,000 villages: the recently formed Harijan Sevak Sangh, the intended beneficiary of the anti-untouchability tour; the older All India Spinners Association; the Gandhi Seva Sangh, brought into existence by the Congress to further the constructive program to which it paid lip service (not to mention the Goseva Sangh, an association for the protection of cows for which he’d become a patron). For most of these, the lawyer who’d last practiced in Johannesburg drafted constitutions and designed management structures, just as ever since 1920 he had for the Indian National Congress itself. AIVIA’s basic document didn’t hesitate to articulate a principle that all these organizations implicitly held in common. “The Association,” it declared, “shall work under the guidance and advice of Gandhiji.” The movement with the largest outreach, the spinners association, boasted that it had penetrated 5,000 villages, but this was a mere fraction of 1 percent of the 700,000.

  All the Gandhian organizations shared a common defect: a reliance, in theory, on selfless village interns—in Gandhi’s terms, satyagrahis—and the absence of any sure method for discovering, recruiting, training, or sustaining such a vast army of inspired, literate workers uninhibited by inherited constraints of caste. “Full-timers, whole-hoggers, with a live faith in the program and prepared immediately to make the necessary adjustment in their daily life,” he said, describing the attributes of the committed workers he sought as if he were placing a classified ad. The “necessary adjustment” would be to lower—drastically—their citified standards of living. They would need to cultivate a life of “rigorous simplicity,” he said. What the Maoist leadership in China would seek to do through terror, commands, peer pressure, and relentless ideological drilling when it launched its “down to the countryside” campaign during the Cultural Revolution three decades later, Gandhi hoped to achieve by inspirational example, his own and that of his closest followers. “Workers without character, living far above the ordinary life of villagers, and devoid of the knowledge required of them for their work can produce no impression on the villagers, whether Harijan or other,” he said. “If every one of such workers puts on his work a price which village service cannot sustain, ultimately these organizations must be wound up.”

  Even his closest followers had doubts. “What is the advantage of this work?” Mahadev’s son boldly asked the Mahatma. “There is no effect on the villagers. On the contrary they go on giving orders to us to clean various places.”

  “So! You are already tired!” Gandhi retorted in mock exasperation. He then offered pointers on how the work might be accomplished: “If I am in your place, I will observe carefully. If someone gets up after easing himself, I will immediately go there. If I see any rottenness in the excretia I will tell him gently, ‘Your stomach seems to be upset; you should try a particular remedy,’ and thus I will try to win him over.” After scooping the turds, he went on, he’d then plant flowers on the site and water them. “Cleanliness can be an art,” he concluded.

  Even at his most visionary, he sometimes lets slip a bleak forecast of what’s likely to prove possible, as if steeling himself for disappointment, for a noble failure, as he
sets out. “If [the villagers] abuse us,” he preaches to his acolytes when only beginning to contemplate the idea of living in a village himself, “let us bear it in silence … Let the people defecate wherever they choose. Let us not even ask them to avoid a particular place or go elsewhere. But let us go on cleaning up without a word …

  “If this does not work, then there is no such thing as non-violence,” he concludes.

  In which case, he seems to be saying, the work had still to be done as a matter of duty. When one of his workers asked for his formula for solving the problem of untouchability in villages, Gandhi replied: “Silent plodding.” On another occasion, he said: “The only way is to sit down in their midst and work away in steadfast faith, as their scavengers, their nurses, their servants, not as their patrons, and to forget all our prejudices, our prepossessions. Let us for a moment forget even swaraj.”

  This is what his Anglican soul mate Charlie Andrews had urged several years earlier, but of course, as Gandhi said then, he could never forget swaraj.

  Gandhi seemed to sense early that the qualifications he declared for what today might be called community organizing had scant potential—really, none at all—for rallying the nonviolent forces he was hoping to send en masse to the villages. “Our ambition is to make at least one member for each of our 700,000 villages,” he told a meeting of his village industries association, “but our actual membership is 517!” And many of those were AWOL. It was a conundrum he was hoping to crack during the solitary residence he planned for himself at Segaon. Mirabehn, the English admiral’s daughter, had to admit defeat in Sindi, where the villagers came to view her as a source of pollution after she drew water from the well used by the untouchables. Segaon, where she then preceded her teacher, wasn’t much better for her. On the verge of a breakdown, having already suffered a bout of typhoid, she was eventually sent off to the Himalayas in 1937 for a rest. After his first ten days at Segaon the previous year, at the height of the hot season, Gandhi himself was strongly urged by his doctors to seek relief in the hills near Bangalore. His rest cure lasted five weeks. It was June 16 before he returned, arriving again on foot in a monsoon downpour that had drenched him to the skin. Soon he came down with malaria.

  When the bare narrative of this effort to achieve “oneness” with India’s poorest is laid out, it can appear either futile or desperate. It’s the effort of the Mahatma to remain true to his vision of swaraj for the dumb millions, despite all that he has learned, or perhaps senses he has yet to learn, about village India. Yet from a distance of more than seven decades, what stands out is the commitment rather than the futility. He could easily have retired to a mansion belonging to one of his millionaire supporters and there directed the national movement from on high; no one would have asked why he wasn’t living like a peasant. In his tireless, pertinacious way in the village to which he’d attached himself instead, he was doing more than tilting at windmills. Once again Gandhi was refusing to avert his eyes from a suffering India that seemed largely to have escaped the notice of most educated Indians swept up in the movement he’d been leading.

  The degree to which this was true in the 1930s can be gauged by the degree to which it remains true in an India that has hailed itself as free and democratic for several generations. By 2009, after boasting four consecutive years of robust 9 percent growth in economic output, this rising and surprising new India, with its booming market economy at the high end, still had a quarter of its people living in conditions defined by the World Bank as “absolute poverty,” meaning that their per capita income was less than a dollar a day; the rate of poverty was declining as a percentage of the total population of nearly 1.2 billion, but in absolute numbers the total of some 300 million was undiminished, accounting for nearly one-third of the globe’s poorest people. Almost by definition their children were malnourished and underweight, more than likely to grow up illiterate, if they grew up at all. The number of Indians calculated to be living on less than $1.25 a day was over 400 million, larger than the total population at the time of independence when the poorest represented a bigger proportion of the total; today, as a minority, they can be viewed as a ragged coterie of interest groups and a drag on the rising middle class. Still only 33 percent of all Indians have access, according to the bank’s figures, to what it primly calls “improved sanitation.” A United Nations survey portrays this reality more bluntly, reporting that 55 percent of the population still defecates out of doors. Given the tripling of population since Gandhi’s time, the water supply in villages and towns can still prove vulnerable to disease-bearing organisms; human scavengers still have to be relied upon to carry off much of the subcontinent’s night soil, or human waste.

  Gandhian economics needs to be viewed in that sobering perspective before being written off as irrelevant or utopian in the era of globalization. His answers to conspicuous issues of rural mass poverty, underemployment, and chronic indebtedness may have been incomplete and untested. Not only did he reject birth control and recommend abstinence as a means of limiting population, but he had no scheme that addressed glaring inequities in land ownership and distribution beyond a wishful, woolly theory of “trusteeship” that basically relied on the benevolence of the wealthy. In his aversion to devices that can be classed as laborsaving, he was stubbornly wrongheaded. But at least he framed basic questions, grappling with the misery at the bottom of the social pyramid. And since that misery has hardly receded, even as living standards have risen for most Indians, it cannot be altogether surprising that Gandhian economics bears a certain resemblance to approaches currently favored by development specialists seeking to confront the same perennial, still urgent problems—for instance, with “microfinance” schemes designed to drive small-scale enterprises, including the traditional handicrafts he promoted, as engines of growth and employment in rural settings. What such latter-day schemes have in common with their unacknowledged Gandhian antecedents is the conviction that solutions must be found where the poorest live, must have some capacity to spark and mobilize their energies.

  Gandhi couldn’t have forecast and probably wouldn’t have admired many aspects of today’s globalized India, with its offshore islands of affluent expatriate life in California, New York, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere, transplanted and now thriving in cultures he’d long ago written off as incorrigibly materialistic: overdeveloped, in his view. Nor would he have been pleased by their repercussions at home, visible in high-rise Florida-style condo developments, largely financed by expatriate cash, spreading across fields where rice and wheat were once cultivated; in no way was this the India of that former expatriate’s dreams. Today in the villages and dense, dank shantytowns of the poorest states, mostly in North India, he’d find much that would look familiar. He’d discover that nearly two-thirds of all Indians still live in villages. A Gandhi reborn in these times would probably want to start a campaign somewhere—in Wardha, perhaps.

  On May 1, 1936, the day after Gandhi landed at Segaon, he received his first visitor there—none other than Babasaheb Ambedkar, who six months earlier had further estranged himself from the Mahatma by renouncing Hinduism and proclaiming his intention to convert to another religion. Ambedkar had just come from a conference of Sikhs in Amritsar where he’d openly flirted with the possibility of becoming a Sikh, praising the religion for regarding all its adherents as equals. The two leaders sat on the ground, under the guava tree where Gandhi had slept, debating the principles and politics of conversion. Neither one got much satisfaction from the encounter, but they agreed to meet again in Segaon. The inconclusive meeting seems to have been instigated by wealthy supporters of Gandhi who still hoped to keep Ambedkar and his followers in what the Mahatma called “the Hindu fold.”

  There may be hints here that Gandhi was making a roundabout attempt to woo Ambedkar. According to one of the untouchable leader’s biographers, Gandhi’s friends “asked Ambedkar why he did not join Gandhi’s camp, so that he might have boundless resources at his dispo
sal for the uplift of the Depressed Classes.” Ambedkar said they had too many differences. Nehru also had many differences with Gandhi, observed Jamnalal Bajaj, one of the go-betweens. Ambedkar huffily said it was a matter of conscience for him.

  The two leaders can be seen as reluctant antagonists, sometimes, in Conrad’s sense, as secret sharers—mirror images of each other, with Gandhi finding aspects of his driven, sometimes angry South African self in the younger man, and Ambedkar feeling resentful, even envious, of the sanctity in which the Mahatma wraps himself. “You and I are quite similar,” Ambedkar had remarked to Gandhi in the course of their negotiations at Yeravda prison.

  The observation had provoked laughter from members of Gandhi’s entourage within earshot, but the Mahatma himself had replied, “Yes, that’s true.” For nearly five years, ever since their first meeting in Bombay in August 1931 before sailing to the Round Table Conference, they’d been circling each other, sizing one another up, jousting at a distance, then putting out tentative feelers. They’d met in London, in Yeravda prison, possibly in Poona after Gandhi’s release, and now in Segaon but remained unable to strike an alliance. When Ambedkar was preoccupied with a temple-entry campaign, Gandhi withheld his support. When temple entry became the focus of Gandhi’s efforts to combat untouchability, Ambedkar contrarily said that social equality and economic uplift were the real issues. Now that Gandhi had settled on the edge of a village in which his Harijans were a majority in order to engage those very issues, Ambedkar was preoccupied with the need for untouchables to find a way out of Hinduism. If they were ever in sync, it was the way the two hands of a clock come together for an instant every hour. Or, perhaps, the way a chess game ends in stalemate. A couple of years earlier, Ambedkar had said the issue that divided them was Gandhi’s refusal to renounce the caste system. Within a few months, seemingly in response, Gandhi had written an article in Harijan titled “Caste Has to Go,” in which he said, “The present caste system is the very antithesis of Varnashrama,” the traditional fourfold ranking of inherited occupations, which he professed to uphold but only on his own terms, with the caveat that true varnashrama was “today non-existent in practice.” In any case, he argued, religious customs derived from Hindu scriptures that were in conflict with “reason” and “universal truths and morals” were unacceptable. Also, Gandhi’s article said, there “should be no prohibition of intermarriage or inter-dining.” It appeared the same week Ambedkar vowed he wouldn’t die a Hindu. By pleading for a varnashrama that, he said, didn’t exist, Gandhi left himself some wiggle room, whether out of conviction or political expedience—some cover, that is, with orthodox caste Hindus. Either way, his response wasn’t good enough for Ambedkar, who, predictably, dodged whatever opportunity there may have been to strike a religious accord.