Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  The Mahatma had limited privileges as a prisoner: he was allowed to receive visitors and carry on his vast correspondence as long as he steered clear of overt politics; he was capable of dictating fifty letters a day, as if Yeravda were just the latest of his ashrams. Once his fast was accepted by the prison authorities as unavoidable, the restrictions were loosened further so he could take part in political negotiations. So the prisoner, though out of sight, was back onstage as an actor. In no time, he’d provoked a huge crisis for the British, his supporters, and, not least of all, Dr. Ambedkar; a national and international commotion; a storm of anxiety and soul-searching, political maneuvering and forced retreats, all unfolding according to his script. The central issue may have involved nuts-and-bolts politics—the sharing of power with a hopelessly powerless group—but Gandhi found a way to explain his stand in religious terms. Once again he saw himself in a struggle for the souls of Hindus and for an enlightened, egalitarian Hinduism he still hoped to promote as a substitute for a hierarchical, oppressive religious order, which he saw clearly enough even as he sought to infiltrate it from the inside.

  To underline what he deemed to be the religious nature of his stand, Gandhi had deliberately responded to only the part of Ramsay MacDonald’s award dealing with untouchables, saying nothing about the distribution of seats, the voting rights of Muslims, and other controversial points on which he opposed the decision. Those points were merely political, he explained to his secretary, Mahadev Desai, who was with him at Yeravda. Mahadev had argued that there was a broader political case that needed to be made before India and the world if the fast were to be understood and accepted, that Gandhi needed to deal with more than untouchables in his letter to the prime minister. Gandhi got the point but was unmoved. “Our own men will be critical. Jawaharlal will not like it at all. He will say that we have had enough of such religion,” he acknowledged. “But that does not matter. When I am going to wield a most powerful weapon in my spiritual armory, misinterpretation and the like may never act as a check.” A few days later he said, “It is for me a religious question and not a political question.”

  Retreating into the religious realm is the Mahatma’s way of ringing down the curtain on debate, of announcing he has heard the inner voice that vouchsafes the “truth” on which he relies. Months earlier at Yeravda, after dispatching the first warning to the secretary of state for India, he’d cut off a discussion of the possible political fallout from a fast by drawing this same line. “What if I am taken for a madman and die? That would be the end of my mahatmaship if it is false and undeserved,” he’d said then. “I should be concerned only with my duty as a man of religion.”

  The principles on which he bases his distinction between the religious and the political when it comes to untouchable voting rights may be inaccessible to a secular Westerner living outside India in the seventh decade of its independence. But for the sake of discussion, it’s worth attempting a deeper look. On the surface, the Mahatma’s explanation to Mahadev and to his other fellow jailbird, the tough political operative Vallabhbhai Patel, has more to do with his own sense of what he can accomplish as a leader than with any principles on which all Hindus are likely to agree. He says once again that he feels “helpless” on the Muslim question, that, therefore, it will have to be dealt with politically later. With caste Hindus, he believes, he still has the option of resorting to shock therapy on the untouchability question. “Sudden shock is the treatment required,” he tells Mahadev and Patel.

  If he fails, he foresees “bloodshed” across India between untouchables and caste Hindus. What’s surprising in this lurid vision—and perhaps more than a little revealing—is that it’s not the downtrodden untouchable whom he sees in this instance as the passive victims of such anarchic conflict. What he imagines, in this one instance anyway, is an uprising from below in which caste Hindus become the victims. “Untouchable hooligans will make common cause with Muslim hooligans and kill caste Hindus,” he gloomily predicts. Gandhi was sometimes accused by Jinnah, Ambedkar, and others of siding instinctively with his own. Here, if only in a single uncharacteristic sentence, he convicts himself. The essence of his religious duty, it seems, is saving caste Hindus from themselves and the retribution that awaits them if they don’t embrace his prescriptions for reform. Usually, his forebodings are more firmly rooted in the lopsided sociology of Indian villages where the traditional victims would be the probable victims of mob violence. “What does MacDonald know of the ‘unapproachables’ and the ‘invisibles’ in the villages of Gujarat?” he asks Mahadev in such a moment. “They would be crushed.”

  His urgent sense of mission makes it possible for him to brush off his own strictures at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha, eight years earlier, against fasting as a weapon to soften the hearts of “touchable” caste Hindus on untouchability in general and temple entry in particular. Then he thought temple entry for untouchables should be a local issue; now, suddenly, he’s about to make it an urgent national issue; and fasting unto death—a coercive weapon by any measure—is now a religious duty laid on the leader who’d argued, when it served his purposes, that fasting that compels someone to yield “not because he sees the error of his ways but because he cannot bear to see the death of a person who in his opinion perversely chooses to die … [was] the worst form of coercion which militates against the fundamental principles of satyagraha.” This time he calls it a “penance,” meaning that he was undertaking “self-suffering” for the sins of caste Hindus. But Ambedkar—and, to a lesser extent, the British—could only experience the fast as a form of compulsion.

  In simplest terms, a method that could be classed as immoral when pursued by others was a religious obligation when undertaken by himself.

  William L. Shirer, the youthful correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who’d already made a career of interpreting Gandhi, pronounced himself “baffled” by the Mahatma’s willingness to die in order to deny the untouchables assured seats in provincial legislatures. “I would have expected Gandhi to support this necessary safeguard for his beloved untouchables,” the journalist later wrote. From Vienna, he sent Gandhi a cable asking for an explanation. “You must not be startled by my presuming to know the interests of the depressed classes more than its leaders,” Gandhi cabled back in mid-fast. “Though I am not untouchable by birth, for the past fifty years I have been untouchable by choice.” (Gandhi’s camp, it seems, leaked the exchange to The Times of London before Shirer had a chance to file on it, a sign of how far ahead of his time he was in his aptitude for manipulating the press.)

  The American journalist’s incomprehension was understandable. Even today, it’s not easy to sort out Gandhi’s motives. Pyarelal, his confidant and eventual biographer, makes it plain that narrow political calculations were not entirely foreign to what he’d soon glorify as “the Epic Fast.” In his book of that title, he writes, “With the Hindus and Musalmans struggling to maintain balance of power and the Sikh claim thrown in between, to accommodate the Depressed Class’s demand was a mathematical impossibility.” There’s only one way to understand Pyarelal. “Mathematical” has to do with the number of seats that could conceivably be subtracted from the Congress total under the formula allowing separate electorates for untouchables. It’s a point Gandhi never touched on in his letters and public statements except to dismiss it. “Do not believe for one moment that I am interested in the numerical strength of Hindus,” he said. But Vallabhbhai Patel regularly speculated on the ways separate electorates could be manipulated by the British to the disadvantage of the Congress. “There is a deep conspiracy in this,” he said of the Communal Award. Patel’s calculations added up to the political argument Gandhi forswore, but it wasn’t an argument for putting his leader’s life on the line. In fact, Patel’s only reason for supporting the fast was that he knew how hopeless it would be to quarrel with Gandhi’s “still small voice.” On his own, he couldn’t fashion an argument for the fast unto death.

  The Mahat
ma’s own thought process isn’t easily traced, but clearly it starts with his vow in London to resist Ambedkar’s call for separate electorates with his life, even if he was the last opponent remaining. In London he had opposed not just separate electorates but any “special arrangements” for untouchables, even for a period of limited duration. Yet on the eve of the fast, with feverish negotiations in search of a compromise that would save his life already under way, he let it be known that he could accept reserved seats for untouchables as long as the general electorate was allowed to choose among a slate of untouchable candidates in the districts “reserved” for them. The choice of these candidates would be left up to untouchable voters in these districts in a kind of a primary; thus the “separate electorate” would exist for one round, to be replaced by a “joint electorate” in the general election. This was close to Ambedkar’s original position, which had once been unacceptable to the Congress. So now, suddenly, the Mahatma was offering his life to block not “special arrangements” for untouchables but merely one particular kind of special arrangement, separate electorates in a general election. With joint electorates—untouchables voting along with everyone else in the “reserved” districts—the Congress would remain in a strong position to elect its own untouchables, even in cases where it failed to secure the support of most untouchable voters. But if Gandhi could now accept an election law that perpetuated the special status of untouchables, in effect recognizing them as an oppressed minority, despite the arguments he’d raised in London, what could be his justification for his fast? What made it a religious penance? Was securing a narrow political advantage by heading off separate electorates a cause worth dying for? Could that plausibly be singled out as the goal?

  It wasn’t an argument Gandhi could comfortably make to himself, let alone to the country at large. The fight against separate electorates could be justified only if it were part of a larger reformation of Hindu values and society, the one on which Gandhi had been insisting practically since his return from South Africa. Still, the Mahatma waited until the very eve of his fast before springing this huge, additional condition on his supporters. “He would not be satisfied by a mere political agreement between caste Hindus and the Depressed Classes,” according to a summary of his remarks made at the time. “He wanted untouchability to go once [and] for all.” Very quickly, then, a fast against a special voting advantage for untouchables had to be reinterpreted and promoted as a fast against untouchability itself. This is what made it a religious duty in Gandhi’s eyes, a penance.

  While negotiations continued and Gandhi’s followers geared up a new offensive against caste oppression, the Mahatma himself spent the eve of his fast dictating farewell letters. As always when he prepared himself for a large undertaking, his thoughts drifted back to South Africa and Hermann Kallenbach, whom he’d last seen in London seventeen years earlier. “If God has more work to take from this body it will survive the fiery ordeal,” he wrote to Kallenbach in a note that hovered melodramatically between farewell and au revoir. “Then you must try some early day to come and meet. Otherwise good-bye and much love.”

  The appeal to the country was hardly raised before a reply was heard, one that seemed at first resounding. At temples across India caste Hindus who had hitherto barred untouchables suddenly proclaimed their eagerness to welcome and embrace their previously outcaste brethren—whom Gandhi was trying to re-brand as Harijans—if that’s what it would take to keep their Mahatma alive. Temple openings were presented as a kind of security deposit, as proof of a new spirit of generosity and civic-mindedness on the part of caste Hindus. So here we have a double paradox: Gandhi, who’d opposed the use of fasts on temple-entry issues at Vaikom, was now ready to seize on temple openings as proof of the efficacy of his own fast against the Communal Award, which had been transmuted at the hands of this master political alchemist and dramaturge into a fast against untouchability. What’s clearer than his deeply intuitive thought process is the instant impact his decision had. Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who’d stood against his call for bonfires of foreign cloth, instantly seized on the urgency of what he termed Gandhi’s “ultimatum” to the Hindu majority.

  “If we cheaply dismiss [the fast] with some ceremonials to which we are accustomed and allow the noble life to be wasted with its great meaning missed,” the poet declaimed on its first day, “then our people will passively roll down the slope of degradation to the blankness of utter futility.” Seventy years old and ailing, Tagore then rushed by train across the subcontinent to be at Gandhi’s side in the prison near Poona. “Whole country profoundly stirred by Mahatmaji’s penance,” he cabled to a friend in London. “Sweeping reforms proceeding apace.” How sweeping they were on a village-to-village basis remained to be seen. Decades later it was not unheard of for untouchable women in villages to be assaulted for wearing metal bangles and rings or new saris in bright colors, adornments that could be read as offensively assertive, as denials of their abject status; landlessness, indebtedness, and forced labor remained extreme. There’s no sure way of measuring how many caste Hindu minds were profoundly affected and changed to some degree by Gandhi’s fast and subsequent crusade against untouchability; many millions might be a reasonable guess, but in India, where a million is a fraction of a percentage point, many millions could fall far short of the wholesale reformation he sought.

  Tagore arrived at Gandhi’s bedside on the seventh and last day of the fast. Escorted into an isolated courtyard between two prison blocks, he found Gandhi curled up on a simple stringed cot, a charpoy, “under the shade of a young mango tree.” It was there on the fourth evening of the fast that Dr. Ambedkar had been brought to the bedside of the Mahatma, who appeared to be already much weakened, for the final stage of negotiations on what came to be known as the Poona Pact.

  “Mahatmaji, you have been very unfair to us,” the untouchable leader began.

  “It is always my lot to appear to be unfair. I cannot help it,” said Gandhi.

  Soon they were into the “mathematical” details as they bore on legislative seats. “I want my compensation,” Ambedkar was heard to say. Presumably, he meant payback in seats for giving up the separate electorates. Untouchables, now powerless, needed political power, he said. Gandhi was flexible on seats but a stickler on the timing of a referendum to be held in five or ten years. “Five years or my life,” the prostrate but still hard-bargaining Mahatma said, seeming to give way to irritation at their next encounter, much like a Bania haggling over the price of a bolt of cloth. The issue was negotiated away. The final accord provided for joint electorates, reserved seats, and a referendum to be scheduled later, which proved to be never; in fact, Ambedkar had won nearly twice as many reserved seats in his negotiation with Gandhi as he’d been promised in Ramsay MacDonald’s proposed award. “You have my fullest sympathy. I am with you in most things you say,” the Mahatma had assured the untouchable leader at the outset. Now, it seemed to Ambedkar, he’d delivered.

  “I have only one quarrel with you,” Ambedkar had replied, according to Mahadev’s diary. “That is you work for the so-called national welfare and not for our interests alone. If you devoted yourself entirely to the welfare of the Depressed Classes, you would become our hero.” That response may be the closest Ambedkar ever came to seeing Gandhi whole, as the stalwart of the national ideal. The exchange also anticipates the appeal Andrews was about to make in one of his “Dear Mohan” letters that Gandhi focus all his energies on the fight against untouchability. Without giving Ambedkar a direct answer, the fasting Mahatma managed to have the last word. “I am,” he said, “an untouchable by adoption, and as such more of an untouchable in mind than you … I cannot stand the idea that your community should either in theory or practice be separated from me. We must be one and indivisible.”

  Whether the contest between Ambedkar and Gandhi is seen as fundamentally a test of principles or wills, the Mahatma’s elevation of the fast into what appeared, for the moment at least, t
o be his final do-or-die campaign had already produced some astonishing results. First there were the telegrams pouring in from all over the subcontinent proclaiming the opening of Hindu temples—some celebrated and revered, many obscure, some that would later turn out to have been nonexistent—to Gandhi’s Harijans. Then an emergency conference of caste Hindus hastily assembled in Bombay drafted a manifesto formally calling for equal access for untouchables to all public facilities—not just temples, but also roads, schools, and wells. “No one shall be regarded as an ‘untouchable’ by reasons of birth,” it proclaimed. A parallel gathering of high-caste Bombay women resolved that the barriers faced by untouchables “shall not continue a day longer.” Suddenly it became fashionable in various cities, in what proved to be a brief season of grace and loving kindness, for Brahmans to demonstrate their good intentions by dining with untouchables. At Benares Hindu University, a center of orthodoxy, sweepers and cobblers were invited to dinner. Branches of a newly formed Anti-untouchability League—later renamed the Harijan Sevak Sangh, or Harijan Service Society—were springing up all over; funds were collected to launch its programs of uplift. Even Nehru, who acknowledged that he’d initially been put off by Gandhi’s “choosing a side issue for his final sacrifice,” was bowled over by the result. “What a magician,” he wrote, “was this little man sitting in Yeravda Prison, and how well he knew how to pull the strings that move people’s hearts!”