Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  Vaikom in those days had a population under five thousand. The crowd that gathered at the jetty, now the site of a monument to the Vaikom Satyagraha that wasn’t opened until 2008, stretched for nearly two miles, according to the report the next day in Malayala Manorama, the leading newspaper in Malayalam, the language of the region. Everyone was eager to see Gandhi, or nearly everyone. Missing was a quietly disillusioned George Joseph, who’d resigned from the Congress and returned to the practice of law. Also missing were the Brahmans who controlled the temple and their orthodox supporters. Standing on their sense of the protocol appropriate to their superior station, the temple’s priests had insisted that it was up to Gandhi to seek an audience with them.

  It was the first thing he did. The formal response granted him leave to call at the home of Indanturuttil Nambiatiri, the leader of the orthodox faction, in a section of the temple precincts off-limits to untouchables. Gandhi was there on sufferance himself. As a non-Brahman, the Bania prophet was of insufficient caste status to be invited into the priest’s actual house; instead, the meeting had to be held outdoors in a garden pavilion. The Travancore police had a stenographer on hand. Professor Ravindran rescued a transcript of the three-hour conversation from the archive of the old princely state. Today it can be read as an intriguing and comprehensive exposition of Gandhi’s views on caste, or as an example of his intellectual nimbleness under pressure. The question it raises is whether Gandhi was searching for the appearance of common ground with the orthodox, not unlike an American politician dancing his way through a meeting with evangelical Christians, or staking out an orthodox position of his own. Sometimes he’s Socratic, plying them with questions designed to undermine their certainties. But it’s Indanturuttil Nambiatiri who proves to be the more insistent cross-examiner.

  “Does Mahatmaji believe in the divinity of the Hindu shastras [scriptures]?” he starts out. Gandhi replies, “Yes.”

  “Does Mahatmaji believe in the Law of Karma?” Again the answer is “Yes.”

  “Does he believe in reincarnation?”

  “Yes.”

  That being the case, Gandhi is presented with the usual, one might even say normative, Hindu deduction: that the miserable lot of outcastes is punishment for bad behavior in past lives. “Let us grant that,” he replies, then counters by asking how that gives the high caste a right to do the punishing. The Brahman swats the question away. “We believe it is the ordinance of God,” he says.

  “True, true,” Gandhi replies, still sparring, still seeking to regain the initiative.

  Later, pressed on the same point, he continues to sound defensive: “I have granted to you that the differences of birth are due to differences of action. But that does not mean that you can consider one man low and another man high.” Gandhi here seems entangled in his own words. If his two propositions—that the untouchable are what they are because of misdeeds in previous lives, still, high and low must be considered equal—were not in total contradiction, they came close. Which, we have to ask, was most compelling for Gandhi, who means to be arguing here for the right of the unapproachables to approach fellow citizens in a public place? The answer should be obvious if his life up to this point is considered to have had any consistency. “No Indian is a coolie by birth,” he’d written in his first letter to a Pretoria newspaper when he was not yet twenty-five. He felt more “at home” with the indentured laborers with whom he’d marched in South Africa than with highborn Indians, he’d told a Bombay garden party less than two weeks after his return home. “I am not ashamed of calling myself a scavenger,” he would tell Travancore’s maharani, or queen, the very next morning, repeating a line he’d first used years before in South Africa. Yet here we find him muttering, “True, true,” when faced with a doctrine of predestination presuming evil done in past lives as a fundamental explanation for untouchability and the extremes of inequality it fosters. It’s possible that India and deeper reading in its scriptures over time had made him more orthodox. The likelier explanation is that he still could make himself believe in the possibility, as he once put it, of “cleaning Hindu society” and thought of himself here as being now engaged in such an exercise of public hygiene. In any case, it was nothing new for him to present himself as a sanatani, or orthodox, Hindu. He’d done so four years earlier in a speech to a conference of the “suppressed classes.” There could be no swaraj, he said then, “so long as the Hindus willfully regard untouchability as part of their religion.” What was new here was that he’d adjusted his timetable—untouchability’s end, as he’d suggested to Charlie Andrews, might have to wait for the departure of the British—so even if he was inclined to theological debate on the ironclad influence of past lives, now was not the time. It would be enough if he could persuade the priests to open the roads.

  Perhaps Nehru’s summing-up in that 1955 interview has some bearing on Gandhi’s surprising dance, his bobbing and weaving, at Vaikom: “His approach was not to go and irritate the masses in their deep convictions … Gandhi was always thinking of the masses and of the mind of India and he was trying to lift it in the right direction; to give it gradually more and more things to think about, yet without upsetting it or making it frustrated.” Put another way, he believed he could use moral suasion and his own example to build an inclusive sense, common to Brahmans and untouchables alike, of Indian nationhood.

  “I am trying myself to be a bridge between blind orthodoxy and those who are victims of that blind orthodoxy,” he explains. “I have come here to create peace and friendship between the orthodox and those who are agitating,” he’s quoted as saying in Malayala Manorama. In other words, he presents himself as having come not as a crusader but as a mediator. Self-ordained in this way, he won’t stand with one side in opposition to another, even at Vaikom, where it’s apparent to him that the orthodox represent no more than a small fraction of the population. To break the impasse, he offers a “sportsman-like” suggestion that the matter of open roads be settled by a referendum limited to caste Hindus. The high priest stolidly stands on principle. “We would not allow this question to be subject to a vote,” Indanturuttil Nambiatiri replies.

  Immediately after Gandhi exits through his gate, the Brahman holds a purification ceremony in the pavilion where the encounter occurred so as to banish any pollution that may have trailed behind the Mahatma. Today, by the old priest’s standards, the place is a veritable sink of pollution, for after his death in 1957, ownership of his residence passed to a trade union affiliated with the Communist Party, the Vaikom Taluk Toddy Tappers Union. A red flag now flies outside, hammers and sickles adorn the facade.

  After viewing this distinctly non-Gandhian monument to the vicissitudes of history, I went next door to another mildewed structure where Nambiatiri’s aged daughter and son-in-law still reside. The story I heard there was not one of stubborn resistance to change. A decade after Gandhi’s first visit, all temples in Travancore were finally thrown open by royal decree to any manner of Hindu, including outcastes. To avoid spiritual pollution, which had become inevitable in their view with the arrival of such unapproachable riffraff, many Namboodiris then stopped praying at the Shiva temple. This was what Indanturuttil Nambiatiri had vowed to do in his encounter with Gandhi if the temples and their approach roads were ever opened by royal decree. “We will forsake those temples and those roads,” he’d said. But when the time came, it turns out, the priest wasn’t among the boycotters. He continued to supervise the rituals at the Shiva temple; in other words, he clung to his job. “He was prepared to accommodate to change,” said the son-in-law, a retired botanist named Krishnan Nambuthiri. “He had a very balanced mind. He was not at all moved by emotions.”

  I asked how he felt about Gandhi. “He never hated him,” the old man said. In that answer, offered eighty-five years after Gandhi’s visit next door, sixty-one years after his murder, glowed a last dying ember of the orthodox view he’d encountered that day.

  Leaving the meeting with the Brahmans em
pty-handed, Gandhi went to address a crowd of twenty thousand that had been waiting nearby for word of some kind of outcome. It heard an admission of failure but not defeat. “As you know,” he began, “ever since I have set foot on Indian soil after a long exile in South Africa, I have been speaking frankly, fearlessly and freely on the question of untouchability.”

  It’s surprising that the Mahatma feels a need to establish his reformist credentials in this way. Possibly he’s aware that he’s addressing more than one audience. The first is made up of satyagraha demonstrators and their supporters, another the orthodox; finally, there were those, probably the majority, who are there to bathe in the ennobling mist of darshan. “I claim to be a sanatani Hindu,” he goes on, leaning in the other direction. “I have come, therefore, to reason with my orthodox friends. I have come to plead with them … I am sorry to confess I was not able to produce the impression I expected to produce on them.” The confidence that he would prevail, with which he’d started off his encounter with the Brahmans, is typically Gandhian. It doesn’t desert him here. He congratulates those who have been demonstrating for a year on the “gentlemanly battle” they’ve waged and counsels patience. What he calls a “reasonable solution” may yet be found without the intervention of the government. Essentially, he tells them they must wait until their suffering has moved the hearts of the priestly holdouts he himself had failed to move that afternoon. Reverential as they are, some in his audience shake their heads in dismay and disagreement.

  Gandhi runs into more doubts the next day when he meets the satyagrahis at their ashram. One wants to know how long the struggle will last. “A few days or forever,” he says offhandedly, setting a standard of selflessness but also placing himself far above the fray. That brings him back, yet again, to South Africa. He thought the first satyagraha campaign would be over in a month there. “It lasted exactly eight years,” he says. Someone then asks about fasting unto death. “I shall advise people to let you die,” the Mahatma unhelpfully replies.

  What exactly is hanging him up? As we follow Gandhi on his first of three Travancore tours, the question keeps arising. In their ambiguity, his own responses were at the time unsatisfying and still are. Outside Kerala, Gandhi’s role in the Vaikom Satyagraha is most often interpreted uncritically as a fulfillment of his values: his unswerving opposition to untouchability, his adherence to nonviolence. Inside Kerala, where this history is better known, it’s usually seen as having shown up a disguised but unmistakable attachment on his part to the caste system. Neither view is convincing. What really shows here is the difficulty of being Gandhi, of balancing his various goals, and, more particularly, the difficulty of social change in India, of taking down untouchability without cleaving his movement and sowing the “chaos and confusion” he feared. Not since his stand-down after the Chauri Chaura violence three years earlier had he been willing to launch a campaign of nonviolent resistance himself.

  Caste, untouchability, and social action are the subjects that come up for discussion when his tour delivers him to the headquarters of the local prophet of “one caste, one religion,” Narayan Guru. It’s the first meeting of the two rishis. They converse for a couple of hours. Gandhi then emerges to speak to hundreds of Narayan Guru’s followers. Presumably, these are mostly Ezhavas, a group that has virtually hauled itself out of untouchability. Gandhi addresses them, nevertheless, as members of the “depressed classes.” He speaks of “a wave of impatience going on not only in Travancore, but throughout the length and breadth of India, among the depressed classes.” He means impatience with the orthodox. “I assure you it is wrong,” he says. He also announces that he has wrung from Narayan Guru a pledge to take up spinning.

  The highly partial version of the encounter handed down over the generations by Narayan Guru’s followers places the guru and not the Mahatma in the role of tutor. It’s on that day, it’s said, that Gandhi’s understanding of caste was finally deepened and reformed. “That day he became a Mahatma,” Babu Vijayanath, son of the movement’s original organizer, told me, getting carried away with this guru-centric view. In reality, the Gandhi who came out of the meeting sounded just like the Gandhi who went in: as sure of himself and reliant on his own intuitions, as unlikely to be touched by the arguments of others. Narayan Guru told him untouchability would not end in a generation. “He thinks I shall have to appear in another incarnation, before I see the end of this agony,” Gandhi wryly reported. “I hope to see it in my lifetime, in this age.”

  There’s no evidence that the two men ever discussed a tactical disagreement they may have had. According to a police report discovered in Travancore’s archives, the guru had earlier expressed skepticism about Gandhi’s restrained tactics, wondering why the satyagrahis didn’t “assert their rights and enter the prohibited area forcibly.” The aftermath of the Mahatma’s visit provides circumstantial backing for this unattributed report. After the Vaikom Satyagraha ended, his direct influence in Travancore waned. Narayan Guru’s Ezhava followers, however, continued to press for entry at other temples, using more aggressive tactics, sometimes clashing with caste Hindus. In one such clash, at Thiruvarppu in 1926, the founder of the Vaikom movement, T. K. Madhavan, received a severe beating from which he never fully recovered, according to his son.

  Then as now, some of Narayan Guru’s followers were inclined to rate the Mahatma lower than their local prophet because of his reluctance to confront the orthodox. A story got about that India’s leader had reacted passively after being barred from the Devi temple at Kanyakumari, down south near the tip of the subcontinent, on grounds that his merchant-caste station was too lowly for him to be admitted. He wanted to worship in the temple, so the story in a local newspaper went, but instead meekly bowed to the order to halt and prayed outside, where he stood. Gandhi hardly ever prayed in temples, so the story, which is not well documented, may be viewed skeptically. What’s remembered still is the fierce excoriation of a local crusader against untouchability, a Malayalam poet named Sahodaran Ayyappan who’d earlier earned notoriety and risked ostracism by inviting Pulayas and other untouchables to a public feast. Hearing of the Mahatma’s supposed retreat, Ayyappan wondered in print about the contrast between the Gandhi who bravely challenged “the British lion” and the Gandhi who still “licks the feet of a Brahman … wagging his tail more shamelessly than a dog.”

  Definitely it was Gandhi who pulled the plug on the original movement by reaching a truce with Travancore’s police commissioner, an Englishman named W. H. Pitt, over the heads of local activists, in much the way he’d bargained with Smuts after the 1913 strikes in Natal. The terms of the deal were intentionally ambiguous: The police and their barricades would be withdrawn on condition that the demonstrators continued to stand back from the approach roads. The order barring them would meanwhile be wiped off the books. No rights would be inscribed. But after the orthodox got used to the idea that approachability might now become a practical reality, if not quite a civic right, on most of those roads, all castes and outcastes would be allowed to use them. That’s more or less what happened the following November, though entry to the temple was still forbidden to a majority of Hindus, all but the upper castes.

  Conspicuous in the whole Vaikom agitation was the absence of any organized effort to recruit Pulayas and other untouchables with less status than the upwardly mobile Ezhavas. Some did take part, but Travancore’s one recognized Pulaya leader, a figure with the single name Ayyankali—now memorialized by a large statue in a major traffic circle of the capital, Thiruvananthapuram—kept his distance from Vaikom and the movement to break down barriers to Hindu worship. His cause was the social uplift of his people through their own efforts, not Hindu reform. K. K. Kochu, a Dalit intellectual whom I met near Kottayam, has written that Ayyankali’s abstention from Vaikom—his “silence”—is what echoes down over the years for Dalits. That abstention reflects something other than indifference. It points to a rising impulse to act on their own behalf. When Gandhi, on a lat
er trip, finally was introduced to Ayyankali, he hailed him, it’s said, as “king of the Pulayas,” then invited him to declare his greatest wish. “I only wish that ten from our community would get B.A.’s,” the Pulaya king coolly replied.

  That wasn’t the future Gandhi painted when he met untouchables on his swing through Kerala. Repeating themes in his talk to indentured sugarcane workers in Natal at the end of 1913, he urged them to confront their own bad habits in order to measure up, to earn the equality, which would then be their just due as good Hindus.

  “How many among you can read and write?” a chastising Mahatma began one such talk.

  “How many are drunkards?”

  “How many eat dead flesh?”

  “How many eat beef?”

  “I know many of you don’t take your bath every day. I can see it from the condition of your hair … I know you will smell bad.” But he also said: “Many Hindus consider it a sin to touch you. I regard it as a sin to say and think that it is a sin to touch you.”

  This is the Gandhian dialectic, an exercise in fine-tuning a Hindu social order that crushes those at the bottom. In his own way, he’s working both sides of the disputed street, trying to tear down unapproachability while hoping to bring the unapproachables into conformity with standards usually deemed to be beyond them. What he’s not doing is calling on the “suppressed classes,” as he so often termed them, to do anything for themselves beyond bathe and watch what they put in their mouths. Once, in passing, he mentions the possibility that they could attempt passive resistance on their own behalf, but he doesn’t encourage it. It was one thing to march against white overlords for limited rights in South Africa, another now to march against Hindu traditionalists.