Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  Such a denouement could not have been imagined in 1930, even by Ambedkar, who, early on, seems to have derived a measure of inspiration from Gandhi and Gandhism. He led satyagraha campaigns to open public water supplies, from reservoirs or wells, to untouchables. One of these campaigns is said to have drawn sixteen thousand untouchables to a Maharashtra town called Mahad, where, an admiring biographer writes, they were “led for the first time in their history by a great leader of their own.” Another satyagraha under his command aimed at forcing open the main temple at the holy Hindu city of Nasik, where the young Gandhi had been made to undergo ritual purification. At one of the Mahad demonstrations, Gandhi’s picture is said to have been displayed. It’s also reported that the Mahatma’s name was chanted at demonstrations Ambedkar inspired or led. But Ambedkar’s judgment of the Mahatma was early tinged by noticeable disappointment. “Before Mahatma Gandhi,” he acknowledged, “no politician in this country maintained that it is necessary to remove social injustice here in order to do away with tension and conflict.” But why, he wondered aloud, had Gandhi not sought to make a vow to eliminate untouchability a prerequisite for Congress membership the way he’d insisted on daily spinning?

  His conclusion was balanced and restrained to the point of sounding backhanded. “When one is spurned by everyone,” the young Ambedkar said in 1925 after Gandhi had visited Vaikom, “even the sympathy shown by Mahatma Gandhi is of no little importance.” By 1927, Ambedkar had been named a member of the provincial assembly of what was then called the Bombay Presidency, but there’s no clear indication that Gandhi, who still basically believed in boycotting such appointive positions and who, anyhow, claimed to have given up newspapers, took any notice of him or his campaigns, even those that adopted the method and name of satyagraha. The Mahatma accepted disciples; he did not normally seek them out. Ambedkar had not come to him, nor had he ever aligned himself with the national movement, ever tested its professed opposition to untouchability by offering himself as a potential leader.

  So it wasn’t until August 1931, two weeks before Gandhi’s departure for the London conference, that the two men first met, in Bombay. The owlish Ambedkar was a proud and somewhat moody figure, normally aloof even from his own inner circle of adherents, acutely sensitive to slights. (“I am a difficult man,” he would later write, in an attempted self-portrait. “Ordinarily I am as quiet as water and humble as grass. But when I get into a temper I am ungovernable and unmanageable.”) This first meeting seems to have occurred at the Mahatma’s initiative—he’d even offered to call on the younger man—but according to the account handed down by an Ambedkar biographer, the untouchable leader felt snubbed when Gandhi continued a conversation without even glancing at his visitor when Ambedkar entered the room. Once he had Gandhi’s attention, he parried an invitation to set out his views on constitutional matters. “You called me to hear your views,” he said, according to the one surviving account. Ambedkar then listened impatiently as the Mahatma summarized his efforts on behalf of untouchables, finally making it clear that he regarded them as ineffectual and halfhearted.

  “Gandhiji, I have no homeland,” he said. The tone may have been plaintive or angry. The Mahatma may have been taken aback.

  “I know you are a patriot of sterling worth,” Gandhi said, according to this account, apparently based on notes taken down by one of Ambedkar’s supporters.

  “How can I call this land my own homeland and this religion my own wherein we are treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein we cannot get water to drink?” Ambedkar persisted, according to this account. (The “wherein’s” may be a clue that these remarks were reconstructed or translated by a lawyer, possibly Ambedkar himself.)

  Gandhi’s one comment on the encounter overlooks the “we” in Ambedkar’s outburst as it has been handed down. The comment came a couple of years after the event, by which time he’d taken to using a new name for untouchables, calling them Harijans, or “children of God” (a term rejected by today’s Dalits as patronizing). “Till I left for England,” he said, speaking of Ambedkar, “I did not know he was a Harijan. I thought he was some Brahman who took a deep interest in Harijans and therefore talked intemperately.”

  An American scholar, Gail Omvedt, calls that reaction “revelatory of the stereotypes about Dalits that Gandhi held.” It’s an understandable judgment but probably too easy. The go-betweens who set up the meeting had been caste Hindus friendly to Ambedkar. At Vaikom and elsewhere Gandhi had met Brahmans who campaigned conscientiously on behalf of untouchables. This could have been another such group. He’d also met untouchable leaders like Travancore’s Ayyankali. Further back, there was the eminently respectable Vincent Lawrence, the converted untouchable who’d served as his clerk in Durban, briefly lived in his house, and went on to be a community leader there. Gandhi knew untouchables could wear starched collars. But he’d never before met an untouchable intellectual like Ambedkar. No one had.

  Their next meeting, in London about a month later, didn’t go any better. This time Gandhi summoned Ambedkar, who ended up speaking for three hours “while Gandhi, spinning, listened mutely,” according to Omvedt. No version of Ambedkar’s long monologue survives. His cause was the social uplift of untouchables, not independence, a subject on which he’d wavered. Did he consider the circumstances under which the two causes could be merged, or was he burning with grievance? Did Gandhi, for his part, say anything to suggest that Ambedkar could make a contribution to the national cause? The answers to these obvious questions are left to our imaginations, along with the question of whether it’s really likely that Gandhi would have sat mutely for three hours listening to Ambedkar’s harangue. All we know is that this second encounter was decidedly less than a success; the two men, whatever their intentions, continued to speak past each other.

  If the Mahatma had nothing to say, why had he invited Ambedkar to call on him? The untouchable leader, already on edge over their impending public engagement at the Round Table Conference, concluded that the cagey older man was hoping to gather ammunition for the debate. That’s possible but not the only possibility. Maybe Gandhi had been hoping to find common ground and discovered instead that Ambedkar had stiffened his position. He’d once been opposed to separate electorates for his people on more or less nationalist principles; what he’d wanted, he said at the first Round Table Conference, was universal suffrage and guarantees of adequate representation. The Congress brushed off his moderate proposal, so now he wanted separate electorates, the same as the Muslims were seeking, though Ambedkar had previously spoken against the Muslim demand.

  Gandhi’s failure to bargain at this point could even have been a token of grudging respect. It had been his position that caste Hindus had to clean up their own practices, not dictate the politics of the dispossessed. He was more than ready to lecture them on diet and sanitation. But he could also ask, “Who are we to uplift Harijans?” The “we” here meant caste Hindus. “We can only atone for our sin against them or discharge the debt we owe them, and this we can do only by adopting them as equal members of society, and not by haranguing them.”

  In South Africa, Gandhi had the experience of making demands on behalf of a beleaguered minority to a political leader who grasped the justice of his claims but found it politically expedient to adopt a posture of obtuseness. Drawing the parallel himself, Gandhi said Ambedkar’s anger at Hindus reminded him of himself “in my early days in South Africa where I was hounded by Europeans wherever I went.” Did it ever occur to the Mahatma that in resisting Ambedkar for the sake of harmony in the movement he led, he was casting himself in the role of Smuts? He could be fierce in that resistance but never vituperative, writing of Ambedkar later: “Dr. A. always commands my sympathies in all he says. He needs the gentlest treatment.”

  And on another occasion: “He has a right even to spit upon me, as every untouchable has, and I would keep on smiling if they did so.” This resolutely smiling face was not a mask. It was a measure of the man. But
when he confronted Ambedkar at the Round Table Conference, Gandhi’s smile faded.

  He may have meant to offer Ambedkar “the gentlest treatment,” may not have been thinking of Ambedkar at all, when he led off with a political barb, noting in the politest possible terms that the British had stacked the conference with political lightweights and nonentities as a way of diminishing, of getting around, the national movement. Gandhi, the recognized national leader, was just one of fifty-six delegates, placed by the imperial stage managers on an equal footing with British businessmen, maharajahs, and representatives of various minorities and sects. So Gandhi had a point, but the untouchable spokesman could have once again discerned condescension and taken offense. Then, heedless of overstatement, Gandhi allowed himself to claim, “Above all, the Congress represents, in its essence, the dumb, semi-starved millions scattered over the length and breadth of the land in its 700,000 villages.” Now we know this wasn’t really his reading of Indian reality. In the setting of St. James’s Palace, Gandhi was plainly glossing over his own disappointment in the Congress’s failure to do more than pay lip service to his “constructive program” for renewal at the village level. Less than two years earlier, he’d told Nehru that the movement couldn’t be trusted to conduct a civil disobedience campaign. But here he was allowing himself rhetorical leeway as the Congress’s spokesman and plenipotentiary, staking his claim on what was still not much more than an aspiration.

  To Ambedkar’s sensitive ears, it was propaganda calculated to belittle him and his struggle for the recognition of untouchables as a distinct and persecuted Indian minority, therefore demanding rebuttal. If the Congress represented the poorest, what role could he have, standing outside the national movement as he did? Three days later Gandhi made a potentially soothing gesture, saying, “Of course, the Congress will share the honor with Dr. Ambedkar of representing the interests of the untouchables.” But in the next breath he swept Ambedkar’s ideas for untouchable representation off the table. “Special representation” for them, he said, would run counter to their interests.

  The clash between Ambedkar and Gandhi became personal in a session of what was named the Minorities Committee, on October 8, 1931, a day after Prime Minister MacDonald called a snap election that would produce a Tory landslide behind the facade of a national unity government, giving the Tories more than three-quarters of the seats in the new House of Commons. It was Ambedkar who lit the fuse, ignoring the Mahatma’s offer to “share the honor” of representing the untouchables. He may have been nominated by the British, but, nevertheless, Ambedkar said, “I fully represent the claims of my community.” Gandhi had no claim, he now seemed to argue, on the support of untouchables: “The Mahatma has always been saying that the Congress stands for the Depressed Classes, and that the Congress represents the Depressed Classes more than I or my colleagues can do. To that claim I can only say that it is one of the many false claims which irresponsible people keep on making.”

  Ambedkar, lower right; Gandhi, center, at Round Table Conference (photo credit i8.3)

  The untouchable leader didn’t stop there. He went on to suggest that the takeover of British India by caste Hindus could be a threat to his people—the bulk of Gandhi’s “dumb millions”—fifty or sixty million untouchables by the estimates then in use. “The Depressed Classes are not anxious, they are not clamorous,” he said, “they have not started any movement for claiming that there shall be an immediate transfer of power from the British to the Indian people.”

  Gandhi didn’t raise his voice—that was never his way—but he was plainly stung. In his long public life of more than half a century, there’s probably no other moment when he spoke as sharply—or as personally—as he now did in picking up the gauntlet Ambedkar had thrown down. This time there was no mention of sharing the honor of representing the untouchables. “I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast mass of the untouchables,” he said. “Here I speak not merely on behalf of the Congress, but I speak on my own behalf, and I claim that I would get, if there was a referendum of the untouchables, their vote, and I would top the poll.” In that highly charged instant, the Mahatma’s ego was as bare as his person.

  However it’s regarded—as a challenge and response between two political leaders over an issue that was central to each man’s sense of mission, or as a description of reality as it then existed in the villages and slums of colonial India, or as a weighty constitutional issue bearing on the best interests of a minority, or as a portent of India’s future—the clash was heavily laden with meanings. After eight decades, these require some sorting out.

  On the level of mundane Indian reality as it existed in the depths of the Depression era, Gandhi was unquestionably right when he said as he did that morning in the old Tudor palace, “It is not a proper claim which is registered by Dr. Ambedkar when he seeks to speak for the whole of the untouchables of India.” Most untouchables in India then would probably not have heard of Ambedkar; he was still little known outside his own region. If most untouchables had heard of any single political leader, it would have been Gandhi. So, yes, he might well have been expected to “top” his imagined poll. This is true even though, in his insistence that the problem of untouchability started with the warped values of caste Hindus and not with the untouchables themselves, he’d done next to nothing to organize and lead untouchables, whose cause, he again insisted, was “as dear to me as life itself.”

  For all his ambition and maneuvering, Ambedkar would never fare well in electoral politics, and the parties he founded never achieved anything like a national following. Even today in Nagpur, in the heart of Ambedkar country, the last of his parties, the Republican Party, has mutated into no fewer than four distinct versions, each aligned with a particular Dalit leader sitting under a portrait of Ambedkar, claiming to be his true heir. Nevertheless, if a poll were held today in an attempt to measure the relative standing of the Mahatma and the man revered as Babasaheb among the former untouchables, now calling themselves Dalits, there can be little doubt that Ambedkar has finally caught up to Gandhi, that he would “top” it. He stood for the idea that they were the keepers of their own destiny, that they deserved their own movement, their own leaders, like all other Indian communities, castes, and subcastes, an idea that after four or five generations—despite all the fragmentation and corruption of caste-based electoral politics in the “world’s greatest democracy”—most Dalits finally appear to embrace.

  On the constitutional issue and the best interests of untouchables, Gandhi had more to say that morning in the palace than his challenger. His essential argument was that any special representation for untouchables—in the form of separate electorates or reserved seats that only untouchables could hold—would work to perpetuate untouchability. “Let the whole world know,” he said, “that today there is a body of Hindu reformers who are pledged to remove this blot of untouchability. We do not want on our register and on our census untouchables classified as a separate class … Will untouchables remain untouchables in perpetuity? I would far rather that Hinduism died than that untouchability lived.”

  This was as forceful and pure a statement of principle on the subject as this remarkable advocate ever managed. But he didn’t stop there. The encounter had shaken him. The previous week he’d negotiated futilely on constitutional formulas with Jinnah, the Aga Khan, and other Muslim leaders. Now here he was clashing with an untouchable, and even if he had the better of the argument for the moment, he was shrewd enough to understand that the forecast he’d made about the imminent collapse of untouchability remained a far-fetched boast. He’d already declared his sense of helplessness on the question of Hindu-Muslim unity. Did he now glimpse a similar impasse in his fight against untouchability? The achievement of communal unity and the end of caste persecution had been two of his four “pillars” of Indian freedom. At this turning point in London, he could hardly have felt confident about either cause.

  How he really felt was implicit in what h
e had to say about his surprisingly staunch opponent that day. “The great wrong under which he has labored and perhaps the bitter experiences that he has undergone have for the moment warped his judgment,” Gandhi said of Ambedkar, after praising his dedication and ability. The Mahatma was again in the grip of the same caution that had led him to predict, during the Vaikom campaign, that “chaos and confusion” could be the result if the cause of temple entry were taken up by the national movement. If the untouchables were fortified with separate political rights, he now said, that would “create a division in Hinduism which I cannot possibly look forward to … Those who speak of the political rights of untouchables do not know their India, do not know how Indian society is today constructed.” Much lay between the lines here. Though he had not solved the question of untouchability, Gandhi had built a national movement and not just a movement; he’d evoked the sense of nationhood on which it was based. He needed to believe that this could finally be the answer to untouchability. He feared that caste conflict could be its undoing. Implicitly, he was acknowledging that the problem remained to be solved and pledging, once again, to be the one whose passion and example would bring the solution.

  “I want to say with all the emphasis I can command,” he concluded with a vague but ominous warning, “that if I was the only person to resist this thing I would resist it with my life.” Here he was paraphrasing a line from his life-transforming speech in Johannesburg’s Empire Theater a quarter of a century earlier. At the turning points of Gandhi’s political life, it was always “do or die.”

  It’s not clear that the British or Ambedkar or others at the Round Table Conference grasped the meaning of this warning on hearing it. They may have shrugged it off as rhetoric, failing to understand the importance of vows in the Mahatma’s life. But heading off “this thing”—the move not just to give untouchables supposed legal guarantees of equal rights but separate political rights that could be bartered for some measure of political power—had now become a Gandhian vow, complicating and making even more urgent his vow to end untouchability.