Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  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?”

  For Gandhi there was only one possible answer. He called his Dhed “learned.” Probably that just meant he was literate. He was named Dudabhai Malji Dafda, Duda for short. “Greater work than passive resistance has commenced,” Gandhi wrote in one of his weekly letters to Hermann Kallenbach, who was still marooned in London by the war. “I have taken in a Pariah from these parts. This is an extreme step. This has caused a breach between Mrs. Gandhi and myself. I lost my temper. She tried it too much.”

  The first confrontation leads to another that, as Gandhi relates it a week later, comes close to replicating the scene in Durban in which the barrister Gandhi dragged his wife to the gate of his house after she objected to cleaning his formerly untouchable law clerk’s chamber pot. Evidently, Ba’s views on the issue hadn’t much evolved over eighteen years. “I have told Mrs. Gandhi that she could leave me,” he writes a week later. Two weeks after that, he’s still complaining that “she’s making my life hell.” Finally, after more than a month, Gandhi finds a way to bend Ba to his will. He refuses to eat a staple of his highly restricted diet; that is, he gives up nuts. Nuts! “I had to undertake partial starvation,” he tells Kallenbach, without a trace of irony. In context, he means to convey the full pathos of his situation as he experienced it.

  The breakdown isn’t just marital. Scarcely four months after starting the ashram—nine months after returning to India—Gandhi is faced with a virtual walkout by his disciples over the presence of the Dheds. “I have been deserted by most helpers,” he complains, “and the burden is all falling on my shoulder assisted by two or three who are remaining staunch.” Most will trickle back, but one who stays away permanently is Gandhi’s own sister, Raliatbehn. “Your not being with me has given me a wound that will never heal,” he later writes to her.

  Contributions from Ahmedabad industrialists and merchants, on which he has been relying to keep the place going, suddenly dry up. Offended neighbors fend off not only Duda but all members of the ashram seeking to use nearby wells. The effect on Gandhi is to make him, once his year’s vow of silence on Indian issues elapses, even more insistent in his condemnation of untouchability. He speaks of moving out himself—“shifting to some Dhed quarters and sharing their life.” But an anonymous gift from the leading Ahmedabad industrialist, Ambalal Sarabhai, keeps the ashram running. Duda is joined by his wife, Dani, and finally, in complete surrender, Ba bows to Gandhi’s request that they adopt Duda and Dani’s daughter, Lakshmi, as their own. “She has beautifully resigned herself to things she used to fight,” Gandhi says in a letter to Sonja Schlesin, his former secretary in South Africa. Ba’s conversion, it turns out, was only on the surface. Seven years later Gandhi complains, “She cannot bring herself to love [Lakshmi] as I do.” She’s still surrounded, he says in 1924, by a “wall of prejudice.”

  The resistance the social reformer encountered to the admission of untouchables to his ashram didn’t silence him. But if the shrewd politician that he also was had harbored any illusion that the fight against untouchability might be a popular cause, he now learned that a moral argument that could be uttered fairly easily from a platform in India’s sophisticated precincts had the potential to backfire when words became deeds. In his earliest campaigns in rural India, Gandhi never ducked the question of untouchability. “This great and indelible crime,” he called it, mincing no words. But mostly it remained incidental to whatever his immediate cause happened to be.

  Take, for instance, that of the oppressed tenant farmers of the Champaran, in the Himalayan foothills of northern Bihar, who were forced by a corrupt combination of local law, taxation, chronic indebtedness, and crude force to devote a portion of the land they farmed to growing indigo plants on which they seldom earned a meaningful return. The indigo, in demand in Europe as a dye for fine fabrics, went to a class of British planters who leased the land, including whole villages, from large Indian landlords called zamindars; with the land came the tenants, who then had little or no bargaining power against the planters. It would be hard to argue that the state of these peasants, called ryots, was any better than that of the indentured laborers in South Africa; in many cases, it was probably worse. The system had grown up over nearly a century. “Not a chest of indigo reaches England without being stained with human blood,” a British official once wrote.

  Gandhi was invited into the Champaran in early 1917. He had never heard of the district; hardly anyone there had ever heard of him. Ordered to leave by the collector, the local representative of colonial authority, Gandhi politely defied the order, then stayed up nights sending missives in all directions until the national movement and everyone from the viceroy on down knew he was facing arrest. Crowds of rough, unlettered tenant farmers gathered to protect him; youthful nationalists made their way to the Champaran as would-be satyagrahis; and the viceroy intervened to cancel his expulsion.

  Within weeks Gandhi himself was appointed to an official commission investigating the complaints of the tenant farmers—it would recommend they be freed from any compulsion to grow indigo—and newly minted Gandhian workers, some from the ashram near far-off Ahmedabad on the other side of India, were opening schools and giving lectures on sanitation in Champaran villages. “We have begun to convince the people,” a Gandhian worker said in a letter to the Mahatma, “that there is no loss of prestige in at least covering the feces with earth by doing it ourselves for them.” No record was kept on how many villagers took to doing it for themselves.

  On their leader’s insistence, the workers were also learning to ignore the usual rules against eating in the company of anyone from a lower caste. One of these early Gandhians, a young lawyer, left this testimony: “All of us who worked with him, and who, till then, had been observing this restriction and dining only with our caste people, gave it up and began to eat together—to eat not only with members of the so-called higher castes but even with people from whom even water was not acceptable. And the important thing is we did it openly and not in secrecy or privately. We used to do it surrounded by villagers who had come from distant places, and we took our food together in their presence.” The young lawyer, Rajendra Prasad, passed up a position as a judge and stayed on as a Gandhian. Years later he became president of the Indian National Congress; in 1948 he became independent India’s first president, its ceremonial head of state.

  By sheer example and force of personality, Gandhi began to assemble the core of what would become a movement. It can’t be said this happened spontaneously; he worked too hard, usually rising at four in the morning. His intense focus on the details of his various struggles and on the individuals who followed in his train, his prodigious program of writing and speaking, make it plain there was a driving force. But he was more method and example than plan in these early years back in India, going on short notice where he seemed to be wanted and needed. Defining himself in these improvised ventures, he found disciples like the youthful Prasad, some of whom would become leaders of a postcolonial India that was not yet on anyone’s horizon, except perhaps Gandhi’s. Months after Champaran came another rural campaign, this one against ruinous colonial taxes following crop-destroying rains in the Kheda district of Gujarat, which Gandhi assigned to another young
lawyer he’d drawn to his side. Vallabhbhai Patel would be another future president of the Indian National Congress and a deputy prime minister after independence.

  By one estimate, Gandhi spent 175 days in Bihar in 1917 working on the Champaran struggle. Later he would call it his “birthplace,” meaning it was his first immersion in rural India. Referring back to the Natal strikes, he’d spoken of the need for educated Indians to work with “the poorest of the poor.” Now he was finally doing it himself on home ground. India needed to adopt a “habit of fearlessness,” he said. More than anything, that was what his new adherents saw in him. “The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth and action allied to these,” Jawaharlal Nehru would write. It was also the essence of the man. “This voice was somehow different from others,” Nehru said. “It was quiet and low, and yet it could be heard above the shouting of the multitude; it was soft and gentle, and yet there seemed to be steel hidden away somewhere in it … Behind the language of peace and friendship there was power and the quivering shadow of action and a determination not to submit to a wrong.”

  This preoccupation with “fearlessness” may explain another of the surprising, seemingly inexplicable twists in Gandhi’s long career on two continents, a choice echoing the one he made in 1906 when he threw himself into the campaign to put down the Zulus. Gandhi has a way of repeating himself, of recycling old answers when confronting new questions. This time, seeming to brush aside the vows of nonviolence that he made his disciples take, he pledged to devote himself to recruiting Indian troops for the war in Europe, where they’d fill in the ranks of British forces depleted by the carnage. The staunchly pro-British Gandhi who’d voiced loyalty to the empire, who’d recruited stretcher bearers in two South African conflicts, had seemed to fade into the background after his last fruitless trip to London on behalf of the “British Indians” of the Transvaal in 1909. That Gandhi was altogether absent from the pages of Hind Swaraj, the nationalist tract written that year on the voyage back to South Africa, in which he likened the British parliament to a whore. Again in wartime, he now reappears, unctuously promising his loyal support as part of a political bargain that the Bania in him proposes in letters to the viceroy and the viceroy’s secretary, at the end of April 1918, letters that recall his sometimes wheedling appeals to Smuts.

  Gandhi is still, for all practical purposes, an independent operator in India, not yet head of a movement. Elsewhere he acknowledges at about the same time that he is “but a child of three” in Indian politics. Still, he writes with the conviction of one who now thinks he can speak for the country and its people. This is no pose but what he has recently come to believe. “I have traveled much,” he’d said a month earlier, “and so come to know the mind of India.” A few years later, on the strength of his Champaran and Kheda experiences and his subsequent traveling through rural India, he would make this boast even more emphatic: “Without any impertinence I may say I understand the mass mind better than anyone amongst the educated Indians.” This was the end of 1920; he’d been back in India for not quite six years, actively campaigning in its villages for a little less than three. Yet the claim was accepted thereafter, perhaps because it had already become obvious that he’d made a connection in that relatively brief time with rural India that no politician with longer experience could begin to match. If so, it’s only in the specific context of Champaran and Kheda that we can understand Nehru’s observation that the former barrister, recently repatriated out of Africa, “did not descend from the top; he seemed to emerge from the millions of India.” It wasn’t sorcery but his willingness to take on obscure issues in obscure places, to act decisively on the conviction that what he’d learned in another place about building a mass movement could apply at home.

  The political bargain he offered the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, in April 1918 boiled down to this: if the Raj would allow some semblance of a positive outcome in the Kheda district, where it had been confiscating the land and livestock of peasants who’d taken a Gandhian pledge to withhold taxes on their property; and if it would show a new sensitivity to Muslim grievances that had deepened during the war, by allowing him to visit the Ali brothers, who were interned in central India, and by pressing the cause of what he called “the Mahomedan states” (meaning Turkey but not using the word because Turkey was now an enemy of Britain); if it did these things, gave him the gestures he needed, then the author of the doctrine of satyagraha, of unswerving nonviolence, would throw himself into the war effort as the viceroy’s “recruiting agent-in-chief.” The Bania insists that his support is “ungrudging and unequivocal,” but then he lays down his conditions. “I love the English nation, and I wish to evoke in every Indian the loyalty of the Englishman,” the special pleader now pleads.

  The British are as adept as Smuts in exploiting Gandhi’s eagerness for a deal without giving anything tangible in return. The Ali brothers remain interned; his appeal to see them goes unanswered. An order had already been transmitted down the chain of command to go easy on the Kheda confiscations, but this is done on the quiet, denying Gandhi and the civil disobedience campaign he fostered any obvious moment of victory or recognition of the role he has played. Gandhi, fobbed off with official expressions of gratitude for his loyal stand, is left to fulfill his pledge.

  A depressing episode ensues. The recruiting agent in chief goes back to Kheda with the aim of enlisting twenty men from each of six hundred villages, a total of twelve thousand new soldiers. Where he was received as a savior months before, he’s now sometimes heckled. Fearlessness is what he’d been trying to inculcate. What better means is there than military training, he now discovers, to “regain the fearless spirit”? His arguments, expressed in a series of leaflets and speeches as he trudges for the better part of three months through heat and dust and monsoon rain, from village to village, become far-fetched and contradictory. He implores wives to send their husbands to sacrifice themselves on behalf of the empire, blithely promising, “They will be yours in your next incarnation.” Fighting for the empire, he now argues, is “the straightest way to swaraj.” An India that has shown military prowess, his reasoning goes, will no longer need Britain to defend it. Fighting is a necessary step on the way to nonviolence. “It is clear that he who has lost the power to kill cannot practice non-killing.” The Mahatma’s powers of rationalization can still amaze and confound; they’re inexhaustible, but he is not.

  Finally, in August 1918, he collapses with dysentery after having admitted that he has enlisted “not a single recruit.” He would later describe himself as “not a quick despairer.” This time he struggles to draw a positive lesson from his experience. “My failure so far suggests that people are not ready to follow my advice. They are ready, however, to accept my services in a cause which suits them. This is as it should be,” he writes to his fourth son, Devadas. It’s a basic political lesson.

  Eventually, he goes through the motions of submitting a list of about a hundred recruits, made up largely of co-workers, relatives, and members of the ashram; as he approaches his fiftieth birthday, his own name heads the list. But by then the war is practically at an end, and Gandhi, bedridden for months with dysentery and a gathering sense that he’d lost his way, is at a personal nadir. In this generally gloomy and weakened state, he also undergoes surgery for hemorrhoids and doesn’t reenter politics until the following February. Slightly shamefaced, he attributes his recovery to a compromise of his dietary principles. A decade earlier he’d given up milk on account of the aphrodisiac qualities he attributed to it. Now he allows himself to be persuaded by Kasturba that he’d only taken a vow against cow’s milk, not goat’s milk. He gives in to her pressure, even though he suspects he’s being self-serving in accepting her dubious rationale. Goat’s milk proves to have hidden restorative powers. Within little more than a year, he reemerges as not simply the most intriguing and original figure in the nationalist movement but the dominant one, a leader who can sometimes be questioned and even circumvented but
who henceforth can no longer be challenged.

  Another key to this remarkable rebound—beyond the intense impressions of actual village conditions gathered in a brief period—is the tie he had taken care from the outset of his reimmersion in India to establish to Indian Muslims, his readiness to fight their battles on grounds that there could be no better way than that to promote national unity. The end of the world war relieved Gandhi of his self-imposed obligation to recruit troops. It also deepened the alienation into which Indian Muslims had been sinking over the Turkish question. In defeat, the Ottoman Empire faced dismemberment; its sultan, whom many of them recognized as their caliph—invested, in their view, with spiritual authority that was no less than papal—was being stripped in the war’s aftermath of his control of Mecca and Medina and the other holy places. The struggle to save the caliphate, known on the subcontinent as the Khilafat, was portrayed in India’s mosques as nothing less than a struggle for Islam, an occasion for jihad and even for hijrat, meaning voluntary migration to a truly Muslim country such as Afghanistan, if Lloyd George’s imperial government remained impervious to the appeals of the subcontinent’s faithful.

  No one outside India seriously cared about the feelings of Indian Muslims on this issue or granted them any standing to be heard on it. This was true not only of the victorious Allies now dictating the peace but also of the Arab world, which was hardly sorry to be relieved of Turkish rule; it was even true of most Turks, who’d wearied of the sultan and his decadent court. To most Hindus as well, the future of the Khilafat would have been a matter of profound indifference had they not been exposed to Gandhi’s tireless and ingenious rationalizations for making its preservation a primary goal of India’s national movement. Even then, few understood what it was all about. Gandhi’s knowledge of Islamic history derived from his reading in South Africa of Washington Irving’s Life of Mahomet and an English translation of the Koran. He didn’t try to make the case for the Khilafat. He offered a simple syllogism, telling Hindus it was of supreme importance to their Muslim brethren and, therefore, to national unity, and, therefore, to them. Using an Indian measure that stands for ten million, he asked, “How can twenty-two crore Hindus have peace and happiness if eight crore of their Muslim brethren are torn in anguish?”