Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  Incomparably quixotic as it may appear today, the Indian struggle to preserve the authority of the Ottoman sultan became the preeminent Indian cause among Muslims. It’s easy to say that it was doomed from the start, but that wasn’t evident to them then. The coup de grâce wouldn’t come until 1924, when Mustafa Kemal, known as Atatürk, formally dissolved the caliphate, driving the last sultan into exile. Still the Khilafat movement lingered on in India, channeling the passion and resentments it had aroused into new reformist groupings, some of which had an influence beyond India that played back into the Arab world in significant ways. One of these was a movement called the Tablighi Jamaat, or Society for the Propagation of the Muslim Faith, usually known as Tabligh, which from its start in India became “the most important element of re-Islamization worldwide,” according to the French expert Gilles Kepel, “a striking example,” he says, of “a fluid, transnational, informal Islamic movement.” That may sound a little familiar: a complex religious and ideological lineage could be traced over nearly a century from Muhammad Ali and other Indian proponents of the cause to present-day Islamists, including Osama bin Laden, who made restoration of the caliphate one of Al Qaeda’s war aims when he proclaimed his struggle against the United States.

  Given that he deplored terrorism and was no Muslim, it would be simply wrong, not to say grotesque, to set Gandhi up as any kind of precursor to bin Laden. But the remote cause of the Khilafat was equally important in his rise. It was on his mind in 1918 when he wrote to the viceroy, on his mind a year later when he spoke in a Bombay mosque on the occasion of a national strike he’d called. The day of prayer and fasting was offered in April 1919 as a protest mainly against new legislation giving the colonial regime—in another haunting analogy to our own times—a slew of arbitrary powers it said it needed to combat terrorism. That supposedly nonviolent campaign quickly flared into riots in Bombay and Ahmedabad and “firings,” confrontations in which the constabulary or military trained their weapons on surging unarmed crowds in the name of order. The first firing was in Delhi, where five were killed; another came two weeks later in the Sikh stronghold of Amritsar. There, on April 13, 1919, in the most notorious massacre of the Indian national struggle, 379 Indians taking part in an unauthorized but peaceful gathering were gunned down by Gurkha and Baluchi troops under British command in an enclosed square called Jallianwala Bagh for defying a ban on protests. By then, Gandhi was on the verge of calling off the national strike; he’d made a “Himalayan miscalculation,” he said, in allowing himself to believe the masses were ready for satyagraha. To Swami Shraddhanand, an important Hindu spiritual leader in Delhi who questioned his bumpy, seemingly impulsive start-and-stop tactics, the Mahatma dismissively replied: “Bhai sahib! You will acknowledge that I’m an expert in the satyagraha business. I know what I’m about.”

  It took only six months for Gandhi to start paving the way to a resumed campaign. He had come up with a new tactic, which he named “non-cooperation.” He outlined it first to Muslims involved in the gathering Khilafat campaign, then in Delhi to a joint conference of Hindus and Muslims, also on the Khilafat. The concept, which can be found in embryo in Hind Swaraj, was initially sketchy, but Gandhi soon filled it in. Noncooperation came to mean withdrawing participation, in stages, from colonial institutions, rendering them hollow and useless. Lawyers and judges would be asked to boycott the courts; would-be legislators would not take part in existing councils and provincial assemblies the British were promising; students would gradually abandon state schools, attending instead new ones to be improvised along Gandhian lines, with instruction, of course, in Indian languages instead of English; officials would surrender the status and security of their jobs; and, ultimately, Indians would learn to turn their backs on service in the armed forces, especially in Mesopotamia—soon to be known as Iraq—which the British had snatched from the sultan; those who’d received medals from the Raj would be called on to return them; honorary titles would be renounced. It was an exhilarating vision. One by one the props under British rule would be removed. The vision changed the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Indians who joined the movement on a full-time basis. It inspired millions more.

  Muslims didn’t become unconditional converts to satyagraha as a doctrine. The Koran, after all, sanctions jihad in a just cause and doesn’t rule out violence. But for the better part of two years, the Hindu Mahatma won acceptance as their campaign’s chief tactician, the author of noncooperation. And with their support, he stepped to the fore for the first time in the national movement, on a unity platform embracing all his causes, among which the literally outlandish cause of preserving the caliphate in Constantinople for the Muslims of India regularly now emerged as first among equals. Gandhi had formed an ad hoc committee called the Satyagraha Sabha for his earlier agitation against the antiterrorism laws. Now, in December 1919, the month after the first Khilafat conference, he made what he later called “my real entry into Congress politics” at the movement’s annual session in Amritsar.

  There he was joined by the Ali brothers, Muhammad and Shaukat, just released from confinement. The Alis created a greater stir in Amritsar even than Gandhi. They were greeted, one scholar records, with “cheers, tears, embraces, and a veritable mountain of garlands.” A rising tide of Hindu-Muslim unity was now in the offing, hard to imagine in an era in which predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan confront each other as nuclear powers. By design, three conferences were taking place simultaneously: in addition to the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League and the Khilafat Committee were meeting. In June the Central Khilafat Committee named an eight-man panel, including the Ali brothers, “to give practical effect” to a program of noncooperation. Gandhi, the only Hindu among the eight, was listed first.

  The following September, Muslim votes ensured the adoption of Gandhi’s noncooperation program by a narrow margin at a special Congress session in Calcutta, with the preservation of the caliphate now underscored as a primary goal of the national movement. “It is the duty of every non-Moslem Indian in every legitimate manner to assist his Mussulman brother, in his attempt to remove the religious calamity that has overtaken him,” declared the resolution, written by Gandhi. Without Muslim votes, Gandhi’s first challenge to the Congress to adopt satyagraha would almost certainly have foundered. The Mahatma hadn’t won over the political elite; with the backing of the Alis, he’d swamped it. It was at Calcutta that he first held up the prospect of “swaraj within a year.”

  Soon-to-be Congress leader, 1920 (photo credit i6.1)

  Three months later, in December 1920, Shaukat Ali took the precaution of rounding up a flying force of burly “volunteers,” Muslims uncommitted to nonviolence, to face down any anti-Gandhi demonstrators at the annual Congress meeting, held that year in the Marathi-speaking city of Nagpur in central India. The so-called volunteers weren’t needed. Skepticism about noncooperation was still being voiced, but political opposition to Gandhi had melted away. His own example and relentlessness in argument, his mounting hold on the broader population and solid support from Muslims, all combined to make his leadership unassailable. The Nagpur Congress dutifully adopted Gandhi’s draft of a new constitution, extending the movement’s reach down to the villages for the first time, at least on paper. In another first engineered by him, it adopted the abolition of untouchability as a national goal. Swaraj would be impossible without it, Gandhi repeatedly said, but in fact the noncooperation campaign targeted two “wrongs” specifically attributed to the British—the threat to the Khilafat and their failure to punish those responsible for the Amritsar massacre. Untouchability might be, in Gandhi’s words, a “putrid custom,” but it was a Hindu wrong, an urgent issue, no doubt, but one without any obvious place on an agenda designed to rouse as many Indians as possible to nonviolent resistance to the colonial power.

  There was one conspicuous dissenter. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was heckled when he referred drily in a speech to “Mister” rather than “
Mahatma” Gandhi. He left the Congress after Nagpur, never to return, predicting that Gandhi’s mass politics would lead to “complete disorganization and chaos.” His departure, scarcely noted at the time, opened a tiny fissure in the nationalist ranks. It would become a gaping cleavage after orthodox Muslim elements drifted away from the movement with the waning of the Khilafat agitation. At this stage, it was not the nationalist goals of the Congress that had disillusioned Jinnah; he was still a convinced nationalist, an earnest believer in Hindu-Muslim reconciliation. Yet he was more a skeptic than a supporter of the Khilafat agitation. The readiness of Hindus—notably Gandhi—to exploit it was part of what alienated him.

  At the start of 1921, the sway that the Anglicized Bombay lawyer Jinnah would come to have over India’s Muslims could hardly have been foreseen, even by him. It was Muhammad Ali who then captured their imaginations, and Ali was still bound to the Mahatma. Understatement wasn’t Ali’s style. “After the Prophet, on whom be peace, I consider it my duty to carry out the commands of Gandhiji,” he declared. (The one-syllable suffix, as we’ve noted, is a common Indian way of showing respect for an elder or sage. Even today, in conversation, Gandhi is commonly referred to as “Mahatmaji” or “Gandhiji.”) For a time Muhammad Ali gave up eating beef as a gesture to Gandhi and all Hindus. Then, campaigning side by side with Gandhi across India, he took to wearing khadi, the homespun cloth the Mahatma embraced as a cottage industry, a means to swadeshi, or self-reliance, and, in the expanding Gandhian vision, as a mass self-employment scheme for village India and, therefore, its salvation. The weaving and wearing of khadi (sometimes called khaddar) would not only feed spinners, handloom operators, and their families; it would enable India to boycott imported cloth from British mills and thus stand as another form of noncooperation. The bearded maulana—an honorific given to a man learned in Islamic law—not only wore khadi; he became an evangelist for the charkha, or spinning wheel, in front of Muslim audiences. “We laid the foundation of our slavery by selling off the spinning wheel,” Muhammad Ali preached. “If you want to do away with slavery, take up the wheel again.” His support for such Gandhian tenets inevitably aroused criticism from fellow Muslims. Ultimately, the maulana had to defend himself against charges of “being a worshipper of Hindus and a Gandhi-worshipper.”

  The preservation of the caliphate remained Muhammad Ali’s most urgent cause, but his readiness to stand with Gandhi on issues that meant little to Muslims—spinning and even cow protection—became a kind of validation of the Mahatma’s rhetorical leaps, his constant juggling and merging of seemingly unconnected campaigns in an attempt to establish a stable common ground for Hindus and Muslims. Noncooperation was the most serious challenge the Raj had faced, and Gandhi was the movement’s undisputed leader. But then the big tent of Hindu-Muslim unity he’d erected began to sag and, here and there, collapse as violence between the two communities, an endemic phenomenon on the subcontinent, appeared to give the lie to all the vows and pledges that had been offered up in India on behalf of the soon-to-exit caliph in Constantinople. The impressive coalition Gandhi had built and inspired was proving to be jerry-built. By August 1921, a still hopeful Gandhi had to acknowledge that some Hindus were “apathetic to the Khilafat cause” and that it was “not yet possible to induce Mussulmans to take interest in swaraj except in terms of the Khilafat.”

  By far the worst violence came that same month in the rural Malabar district on the Indian Ocean coast, where a community of Muslims known as Mappilas, also Moplahs, rose in rebellion, crying jihad and brandishing the Khilafat flag, after a couple of skirmishes with the police in which two British constables had been killed. Tiny Khilafat kingdoms were then proclaimed by the insurgents, and in some of these, Hindu homes and temples were set ablaze, women raped, and children slaughtered. The doctrine of nonviolence had never reached the Malabar district; political meetings had, in fact, been banned there. That was hardly an excuse for the gruesomeness or scale of the carnage: six hundred Hindus reported killed, twenty-five hundred forcibly converted to Islam. Gandhi and Muhammad Ali were denounced as infidels when they called on the insurgent leaders to disavow violence. The Raj dealt severely with the rising, blaming the noncooperation movement and hanging some two hundred rebels.

  The next month Muhammad Ali was arrested on conspiracy charges at a train station in the Telugu-language region of southeastern India (today’s Andhra Pradesh), including the charge of “conspiracy to commit mischief,” while traveling with the Mahatma from Calcutta to Madras. The British, who’d been looking for an occasion to re-exert their authority, found it in a series of statements by the maulana arguing that Islamic law forbade Muslims to enlist or serve in their army. Gandhi’s reaction says a lot about the fecundity of his imagination, the range of his aspirations, and his adaptability as a political tactician. A week after seeing Ali hustled from the station by a police detachment, he appeared in the South Indian town of Madurai bare chested in a loincloth: in the attire, that is, that would be his unvarying guise for the rest of his life. It’s the way he’d been dressing at the ashram on the Sabarmati River, outside Ahmedabad, for several years; in public, he’d continued to wear a kurta, dhoti, and cap. This was the first public outing of his new, very basic costume.

  Being Gandhi, he hastened to explain the symbolic meaning of the change. His disrobing could be read in several ways: as a tribute to the imprisoned maulana and the other Khilafat leaders rounded up with him; or as a subtle shift of emphasis, a recognition that the Khilafat movement would soon be played out, at least as far as Hindus were concerned, that the larger national movement needed a new mobilizing tool. Gandhi had already seized on the spinning wheel for that purpose. For the goal of swadeshi to be achieved, he reasoned, there had to be enough hand spinning and hand weaving across India to replace the manufactured imported cloth being burned and boycotted as his campaign for swadeshi caught on. Without swadeshi and all it entailed, he now argued, there could be no swaraj. And only with swaraj—giving India the ability to engage diplomatically with the world—could there be any settlement of the Khilafat problem. Once the highest priority of the noncooperation movement, the preservation of the Khilafat was now to be seen as a potential by-product of its success. Gandhi was pointing the way to “full swadeshi” by showing the millions who were too poor to cover their whole bodies with newly woven homespun that it really wasn’t necessary. “Let there be no prudery about dress,” he now said. “India has never insisted on full covering of the body for males as a test of culture.”

  Later, he would explain the symbolism he invested in the loincloth by saying, “I wish to be in touch with the life of the poorest of the poor among Indians … It is our duty to dress them first and then dress ourselves, to feed them first and then feed ourselves.”

  If they could follow the winding path of his logic, Indian Muslims might see his wearing of the loincloth as proof of his continued devotion to the Khilafat cause. Otherwise there was a good chance they’d perceive Gandhi to be drifting away from them. Muhammad Ali might have pointed out, were he not by this time in detention in Karachi, that the culture that Gandhi was describing so avidly was distinctly Hindu. “It is against our scriptures to keep the knees bare in this fashion,” Maulana Abdul Bari, a leading religious authority who’d been prominent in the Khilafat agitation, subsequently informed the Mahatma.

  Gandhi was starting a new variation on the fugue he was forever composing out of his various themes. Recalling perhaps how few South African Muslims were at his side when he marched across the Transvaal border in the 1913 satyagraha, he’d understood from the start of the noncooperation campaign that he could only speak to Muslims through other Muslims: Muhammad Ali, for instance. “I can wield no influence over the Mussulmans except through a Mussulman,” he said. He’d also understood the improbability of the Khilafat as an Indian national cause. For him, it was less a cause than an investment: “the opportunity of a lifetime” for Hindus to demonstrate their stalwartness, the
ir trustworthiness, to Muslims who, he kept suggesting, if not quite promising, would be likely to respond in kind by respecting the tender feelings of Hindus for the sacred cow. Ergo, according to this logic, preserving the Khilafat was the surest way to preserve the cow. Nothing like this opportunity would “recur for another hundred years.” It was a cause for which he was “ready today to sacrifice my sons, my wife and my friends.” In the short run, it was also a way to bind Muslims into the national movement that, thanks in no small measure to their support, he now led. The odds against it working were overwhelming, but who can now say, considering all that has happened since in confrontations between Hindus and Muslims, that Gandhi had his priorities wrong?

  Gradually, he disengaged from the Khilafat agitation, which meant disengaging from Muslim politics, but Hindu-Muslim unity remained one of his main themes through to what might be called his tragic last act as Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other at the time of partition. In September 1924, Gandhi fasted for the first but not last time against Hindu-Muslim violence following riots in Kohat, a frontier town south of Peshawar in what’s now Pakistan. He said he was fasting for twenty-one days as a personal “penance.” The flash point for this killing spree, which resulted in an official death count of thirty-six and the flight of Kohat’s entire Hindu community, was a grossly blasphemous life of the Prophet written by a Hindu. While it had nothing to do with Gandhi, he held himself responsible in the sense that he’d been “instrumental in bringing into being the vast energy of the people” that had now turned “self-destructive.” To demonstrate that the fast was not against Muslims or on behalf of Hindus, the main sufferers on this occasion, he made a point of camping in Muhammad Ali’s Delhi bungalow during his starvation ritual. “I am striving to become the best cement between the two communities,” he wrote. Twenty-four years later he’d fast again in Delhi with the same purpose. On each occasion, Hindu and Muslim leaders, fearful of losing that “cement,” gathered at his bedside and vowed to work for peace. A shaky armistice would follow and hold until an obscure agitator, somewhere on the subcontinent, threw off the next spark.