Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  Both sides went away with hurt feelings. “This has been the most humiliating day of my life,” Gandhi remarked that evening. For his part, Ambedkar would later be quoted as having said of Gandhi that “a more ignorant and more tactless representative could not have been sent” to speak for the Congress at the conference. Gandhi claimed to be a unifying force and a man full of humanity, Ambedkar went on, but he had shown how petty he could be. Ambedkar is not the first person to feel personally offended by Gandhi in this way. If we cast our minds back over two decades to South Africa, we can hear echoes in Ambedkar of the bitter tirades Gandhi evoked from Durban’s P. S. Aiyar, the maverick Indian editor who complained that Gandhi presented himself as “a soul of perfection,” though he’d produced “no tangible good for anyone.”

  Gandhi had taken no notice of the editor’s attempt to fight the head tax imposed on former indentured laborers, just as he’d later take no notice of Ambedkar’s adoption of satyagraha as a tactic to open up Hindu temples and village wells to untouchables. An ocean separated Ambedkar and Aiyar. They probably never heard of each other, but they ended up with the same sense of bitterness over a Gandhi they found elusive and immovable, a Gandhi who seemed to feel that fighting for the indentured or untouchables—causes with which he’d long identified himself—was illegitimate if it was done without his sanction, on time-tables other than his own. Ambedkar eventually revealed a sense of injury he’d nursed for years, so like Aiyar’s. “Mr. Gandhi made nonsense of satyagraha,” he wrote, referring to the Mahatma’s refusal to back one of his temple-entry campaigns. “Why did Mr. Gandhi do this? Only because he did not want to annoy and exasperate the Hindus.”

  As the London conference was concluding, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to a supporter of the untouchable leader complaining that Ambedkar’s “behavior to Gandhiji had been exceedingly discourteous.” More than sharp words was at stake. In the archive of the Nehru Memorial in New Delhi, I came upon a letter Nehru wrote several days later in his official capacity as general secretary of the All India Congress Committee, tossing cold water on an ardent appeal on the subject of untouchability from a rising young congressman in Bombay named S. K. Patil. What the young congressman wanted was a clear stand in support of the Nasik satyagraha, which Ambedkar had launched before heading to London. It was time, he wrote, for Congress to “take sides” on the matter of temple entry; an “authoritative statement” was needed in support of the Nasik satyagraha. Patil, who’d emerge three decades later as a tough political boss in Bombay and a powerful member of the Nehru cabinet, was especially incensed by a Congress leader’s statement that the weapon of satyagraha should be reserved for the cause of independence, not be wasted on lesser, more parochial issues like temple entry. If that was the movement’s stand, he wrote, then “many of us have not understood Mahatmaji for whom satyagraha is a panacea for all evils.”

  The rising young politician was unaware that Mahatmaji’s stand wasn’t nearly as clear-cut as he worshipfully imagined, that seven years earlier, at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha, Gandhi had actually ruled that the national movement shouldn’t get involved in “local” temple-entry campaigns. Nehru didn’t go into that history in his reply. He ducked the issue of temple entry for untouchables altogether, saying simply that satyagraha “should not be abused and made a cheap weapon.” The issue plainly struck him as a diversion from the main goals of the national struggle. By birth, a Kashmiri pandit, or Brahman, he’d dropped caste from his vocabulary in favor of class. Abolishing untouchability, in his view, was a task for an independent India, something that could be deferred until that long-awaited dawn. Nehru’s brush-off of Patil stands as a timely reminder of why Ambedkar was so sore. Congress could not, in fact, be relied on to “share the honor” of representing the untouchables. That was—and would remain—the weak point in Gandhi’s otherwise passionate stand.

  London had been only round one. Gandhi and Ambedkar would soon clash again, over even higher stakes. Thereafter it wouldn’t be long before the rotund future Buddhist would give up on temple-entry campaigns, on Hinduism in general, and on Congress in particular. Gandhi, who’d promised to resist “this thing” with his life, may have been the only one who sensed what was coming.

  GANDHI’S GOOD-BYE TODAY, said the headline in London’s Daily Herald on December 5. In a farewell interview, the Mahatma said that “something indefinable” had changed in the attitude of ordinary Britons toward India. Years later George Orwell, no dewy-eyed admirer, would seem to agree, suggesting that Gandhi’s great achievement may have been the creation in Britain of “a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence … Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air.” The best evidence for Orwell’s argument may be found in the three months Gandhi spent in England at the height of the Depression.

  After stops in Paris and Switzerland, he arrived in Italy on December 11, hoping to meet the pope and Mussolini. The time in London inflated his sense of his stature on the world scene. Now he heard a calling to do what he could to head off another war in Europe. He was hopeful, he confided to the French writer Romain Rolland, that he could make some impression on his Rome stopover. Rolland had written a hagiographic tract hailing Gandhi as India’s “Messiah,” going so far as to compare him to Buddha and Christ as a “mortal half-god.” But he was skeptical about the Mahatma’s ability to move Il Duce.

  Pope Pius XI sent his regrets but arranged for Gandhi to visit the Sistine Chapel. Unfortunately, there’s no image, other than what we can summon to our imaginations, of the slight figure in his loincloth and shawl gazing up contemplatively at a similarly attired, incomparably heftier Christ in The Last Judgment. More than likely, it was the Mahatma’s first and only real experience of Western painting on religious themes, if we omit the Jesus print he kept over his desk in his Johannesburg law office. He took it in with some patience, later pronouncing himself deeply moved by a pietà: probably the Michelangelo in St. Peter’s, possibly the Bellini in the Vatican museum. Then at six o’clock he was ushered into Mussolini’s spacious office (“as big as a ballroom, completely empty except for one big writing table,” wrote Gandhi’s English follower Madeleine Slade, the admiral’s daughter whom Gandhi had renamed Mirabehn). The dictator (in what Mirabehn described as “quite good English”) led the conversation, asking his visitor whether he’d “got anything” at the Round Table Conference.

  At Bombay rally on return from Europe, December 1931 (photo credit i8.4)

  “No indeed,” Gandhi replied, “but I had not hoped I would get anything out of it.”

  What would he do next? Mussolini wanted to know. “It seems I shall have to start a campaign of civil disobedience,” his guest said.

  It remained a back-and-forth in this vein between two seasoned politicians until Mussolini solicited Gandhi’s thoughts on Europe. “Now you ask the question that I have been waiting for you to ask,” said the Mahatma, launching into what was effectively a summary of arguments about Western decadence he’d set down twenty-two years earlier in Hind Swaraj as he traveled back to South Africa from a previous unsuccessful mission to Whitehall. “Europe cannot go on the way it has been going on,” he said. “The only alternative is for it to change the whole basis of its economic life, its whole value system.”

  Gandhi, who hadn’t bothered to study up on fascism, may have thought he was speaking against industrialization and colonialism, and therefore, by his lights, for peace. But his actual words could have been spliced seamlessly into one of Il Duce’s strident orations. The meeting thus ended on a note of harmony, but it was hardly a meeting of minds, in part because Gandhi had misread his host’s.

  He sailed from Brindisi for home two days later. From shipboard he wrote to Romain Rolland praising Mussolini for his “service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about coordination between capital and labor … [and] his passionate love for “his people.” Appalled, Rolland wrote a
n emotional rebuttal, upbraiding his Messiah for passing such casual, ill-informed judgments. Before the letter could be mailed, he learned that Gandhi had been taken out of circulation.

  On January 4, 1932, seven days after disembarking in Bombay, the Mahatma awakened at three in the morning to find the commissioner of police, an Englishman in full uniform, standing at the foot of his bed. “Bapu just waking [looked] old, fragile and rather pathetic with the mists of sleep still on his face,” a sympathetic British onlooker later wrote.

  “Mr. Gandhi,” the commissioner said, “it is my duty to arrest you.”

  “A beautiful smile of welcome broke out on Bapu’s face,” the onlooker went on, “and now he looked young, strong and confident.”

  9

  FAST UNTO DEATH

  THE CASTE SYSTEM SUPPORTED by Gandhiji is the reason for the plight of Dalits today. Gandhi was not for the Dalits but against them. He insulted Dalits by calling them Harijans.” Among India’s ex-untouchables, this wasn’t a heretical or even an unconventional judgment when voiced in the early 1990s by an aspiring politician named Mayawati who later rose to be chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state on the Gangetic plain with a population larger than Russia’s by a margin of fifty million; among upwardly mobile Dalits, it was the received wisdom. Mayawati then developed national aspirations that made it necessary for her to soften somewhat her estimate of the Father of the Nation. But the idea that Gandhi was an “enemy” of the most oppressed and deprived of India’s poor—the very people to whom he’d professed to have dedicated his life, in whose image he’d deliberately remade his own—lingers in the small galaxy of Dalit Web sites in cyberspace. It’s, after all, traceable directly to Babasaheb Ambedkar, who, in one of his less measured pronouncements, branded Gandhi “the number one enemy” of the untouchables. In the heat of controversy, it’s usually forgotten that the mercurial Ambedkar also called Gandhi “India’s greatest man.”

  In ongoing debates about Gandhi’s attitude to untouchables and caste, it’s never difficult to quote the Mahatma against himself. Over half a century he wrote and spoke on the subject with deep conviction, in most instances anyway, but his tactics needed readjusting in different places, at different times. Decades after encouraging intercaste and intercommunal dining at the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, or among field workers in his early Indian campaigns such as in the Champaran district of Bihar, he told caste-obsessed audiences in South India, where he was seeking to open minds on the untouchability question, that intercaste dining was a matter of private choice, a personal issue. Before such audiences, he was even more chary about discussing intercaste marriage. Without putting it quite so crassly, he all but assured high-caste Hindus that they could give up the wicked practice of untouchability without ever having to worry about their daughters marrying beneath themselves in the caste system, let alone marrying untouchables. Yet the same Gandhi, in defiance of orthodox Hindus, finally decreed that only intercaste marriages could be performed at his ashram. Eventually he concluded that intercaste marriage wasn’t merely permissible but possibly the solution since it would tend to produce “only one caste, known by the beautiful name Bhangi.” Considering that a Bhangi, or sweeper, is sometimes despised even by other untouchables, it was a radical thought. (One that remains radical, a lifetime later, in an India in which three fourths of those approached in opinion surveys still voice disapproval of intercaste unions, and where that disapproval not infrequently gets expressed in so-called honor killings of daughters and sisters who stray.)

  When Ambedkar unsettled many of his followers by taking a Brahman wife after independence and Gandhi’s death, his fellow cabinet member Vallabhbhai Patel wrote him a congratulatory letter noting kindly, or maybe pointedly, that the leader whose sincerity he’d so fiercely questioned would have been pleased. “I agree that Bapu, if he had been alive, would have blessed the marriage,” a more mellow Ambedkar wrote back.

  To say that Gandhi wasn’t absolutely consistent isn’t to convict him of hypocrisy; it’s to acknowledge that he was a political leader preoccupied with the task of building a nation, or sometimes just holding it together. This is never clearer than in a reply he sent to his soul mate Charlie Andrews, the Anglican priest he first encountered at the end of his stay in South Africa. Andrews, who regularly functioned as Gandhi’s personal emissary in England and farther-flung parts of the empire, had urged him to concentrate all his efforts on his fight against untouchability, even if that meant stepping back from the independence movement. “My life is one indivisible whole,” Gandhi wrote back. And so were his causes and concerns, listed in the letter to Andrews as “satyagraha, civil resistance, untouchability, Hindu-Muslim unity”—plus, he might have said, assorted add-ons such as diet, prohibition, spinning, hygiene, sanitation, education through vernacular languages, and women’s rights, including the right of widows to remarry and the abolition of child marriage—all “indivisible parts of a whole which is truth.” And if they were all thought of as one, Gandhi went on in direct reply to the plea from Andrews:

  I can’t devote myself entirely to untouchability and say, “Neglect Hindu-Muslim unity or swaraj.” All these things run into one another and are interdependent. You will find at one time in my life an emphasis on one thing, at another time on [an]other. But that is just like a pianist, now emphasizing one note and now [an]other.

  In this case, the pianist also sees himself as composer and conductor. “Full and final removal of untouchability,” he now says, “is utterly impossible without swaraj.” This from the man who as early as 1921 had described “the removal of untouchability as an indispensable condition of the attainment of swaraj.” It’s hard not to view this as a reversal or contradiction. But for the pianist himself, it was just a variation on a theme, a matter of emphasizing now one note and now another. His friend Andrews should have recognized it as such. The man he addressed familiarly as Mohan had long ago warned him, as we’ve seen, that English domination would probably have to end before India could “become free of the curse of untouchability.” That was also back in 1921, so this particular contradiction could hardly be described as newly minted; if anything, it was closer to being a constant feature of his effort to keep India on the path he’d tried to chart. In Gandhi’s view, the fact that his best efforts had put an end to neither English domination nor untouchability by 1933 seemed only to strengthen his conviction that these struggles were indivisible parts of a whole. So if he now decided to concentrate on untouchability, he wasn’t backing off from the swaraj struggle as Andrews urged and Nehru feared. By his own lights, he was plunging in again.

  Still, this time around his agenda had been shaped by others: first Ambedkar, the seemingly irreconcilable untouchable leader, with his demand for separate electorates for the fifty million or so members of the officially designated “depressed classes” he claimed to represent; and then Ramsay MacDonald, the onetime sympathizer with the Indian national struggle now fronting for what was basically a Tory government set on preserving imperial rule. The Round Table Conference had ended with a promise by the British prime minister to devise the compromise formula for elections on the subcontinent—the Communal Award, it was called—that the various Indian communal groups and parties had failed to hammer out among themselves. When finally handed down from Whitehall in August 1932, the award put the royal seal of approval on Ambedkar’s demand. In the future, untouchables, like Muslims, would get to elect their own representatives to all Indian legislative bodies; eventually, if the award stood, Gandhi’s claim that he and the Congress movement were their real representatives would be put to the severest possible test. Increasingly, the Congress might then be seen not as the national movement but as a loose coalition of Hindus desperate to preserve its majority. This was the outcome—the kind of “special representation” for untouchables—that Gandhi, now sixty-three, had vowed at the conference to “resist with my life” for the high-principled reason that it would tend to insti
tutionalize, and thus perpetuate, untouchability, a status he’d sometimes compared to slavery as he had the indenture system in South Africa.

  MacDonald’s Communal Award specified that the separate electorate for untouchables would be phased out after twenty years. This might have been intended as a small concession to Gandhi; the arrangement would not be perpetual. In any case, Gandhi was once again sidelined. By the time the award came down, he’d been securely under wraps in Yeravda prison near Poona for seven and a half months, immobilized there, or so the British thought, even though Gandhi had written from prison as early as March to the secretary of state for India, Sir Samuel Hoare, to give fair warning that the vow he’d voiced in London was “not said in the heat of the moment nor by way of rhetoric.” If a decision were now taken to create separate electorates for the so-called depressed classes, the letter said, “I must fast unto death.” Gandhi assumed but wasn’t sure that his warning had been conveyed to MacDonald; after five months, it still hadn’t leaked into the public sphere.

  India and the world didn’t learn of Gandhi’s intention to put his life on the line over the narrow issue of untouchable representation until a week before the date he’d set for the start of his fast. The news broke with the release, finally, in London of his letter to Hoare and a subsequent one to MacDonald that set the date for September 20. His jailers soon discovered that, once again, they’d underestimated the Mahatma’s ingenuity and determination. His ability to act forcefully and work his will from inside Yeravda’s thick walls bears comparison to Harry Houdini’s escapes from a padlocked and submerged trunk, only the agility involved here was strictly mental and psychological. Few wondered whether his threat to “fast unto death” unless the award was withdrawn was a trick. The Times of India, a Bombay newspaper edited and written by British journalists in that era, headlined Gandhi’s “Suicide Threat” and wrote editorially that he’d now shown himself to be “prepared to go to any length that fanaticism may dictate.”