These gusts of pious intoxication seemed to douse Ambedkar’s habitual skepticism and sweep him along too. “I will never be moved by these methods,” he’d said when he first heard of Gandhi’s intention to fast. “If Mr. Gandhi wants to fight with his life for the interests of the Hindu community, the Depressed Classes will also be forced to fight with their lives to safeguard their interests.” But he’d been moved in spite of himself over the ensuing ten days. The night before Gandhi was expected to break his fast, Ambedkar found himself showered with fervent promises and cheers at the Hindu conference in Bombay, a lovefest unlike anything he’d experienced. He’d been in a fix, he acknowledged when finally he was called on to speak, having to choose between “the life of the greatest man in India” and “the interests of the community.” But the fasting Gandhi had eased the way, redeeming himself in Ambedkar’s eyes and blessing all untouchables. “I must confess that I was surprised, immensely surprised, when I met him, that there was so much in common between him and me.” If the Mahatma had been as forthcoming in London, Ambedkar said with some justice, “it would not have been necessary for him to go through this ordeal.” His only worry, he now said, was that caste Hindus might not abide by the accord. “Yes, we will! We will!” roared the crowd.
Gandhi wouldn’t take nourishment until he held in his hand the British government’s formal acceptance of the compromise, which meant the partial annulment of the Communal Award on which he’d set his sights. Finally, late in the afternoon of September 26, the document was delivered to him by the inspector general of prisons in a “red sealed envelope.” Thinking ahead, Gandhi asked the British officer to pass along his request that he be allowed to continue his campaign against untouchability even if he were to be kept in prison. A religious ceremony was then improvised. The prison authorities had thrown open its gates to inmates of the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad and other Gandhi followers. Restrictions on visitors had been all but abandoned, and about two hundred of them were now in attendance as the time came to end his self-imposed trial. First the courtyard was sprinkled with water, then Tagore was called on to sing a Bengali hymn he himself had set to music. He’d forgotten the melody, he later said, but he sang anyway. (“When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy,” the poet’s prayer began.) Finally, Kamala Nehru, wife of Jawaharlal who was to die in a Swiss sanatorium four years later, readied a tumbler of orange, or what in India is called sweet lime, juice. (Possibly honey was mixed in, lemon juice with honey being one of Gandhi’s favorite cocktails.) Kasturba raised the glass to his lips. More hymns were sung, and heaped-up baskets of fruit, sent to Yeravda by well-wishers, passed from hand to hand. No prison had ever witnessed such a festival, Tagore reflected.
At the end of another overflow public meeting, this one in Poona the next evening, the poet wrote, “The entire audience raising their hands accepted the vow of purifying our social life of grave wrongs that humiliate our humanity.” The idea that untouchability was on its way out, that the Mahatma had transformed India and Hinduism with a one-week fast unto death, lingered for a matter of weeks, maybe months. Gandhi at this point seemed to be alone in warning of the danger of backsliding. The night his fast unto death ended, he thought to pledge that it would be resumed if the struggle against untouchability faltered.
Gandhi’s fast might conceivably have sown a harvest of enduring social reform had the British not kept the Mahatma and most of the Congress leadership locked away in order to prevent any resumption of civil disobedience on a national scale. Three times in the next eight months Ambedkar dropped by Yeravda prison to consult with Gandhi. For a brief spell, the antagonism between the two receded from view; a kind of convergence now seemed to be faintly possible. In his speeches to untouchable audiences, Ambedkar took to urging his followers to give up meat eating, an appeal Gandhi seldom failed to make to such gatherings in the hope that this would render them more acceptable in the eyes of pious Hindus. The untouchable leader now spoke more of national goals and political rights. Taking up one of the Mahatma’s themes, he wrote: “The touchables and untouchables cannot be held together by law, certainly not by any electoral law … The only thing that can hold them together is love … I want a revolution in the mentality of the caste Hindus.”
But the more important the opening of Hindu temples to untouchables became to Gandhi, the less important it seemed to Ambedkar. They could almost be said to be exchanging positions. For Gandhi now temple opening was “the one thing that alone can give new life and new hope to Harijans, as no mere economic uplift can do.” For Ambedkar, the key issue was now social equality, not open temples. “To open or not to open temples is a question for you to consider and not for me to agitate,” he said, addressing caste Hindus. “If you think it is bad manners not to respect the sacredness of the human personality, open your temples and be a gentleman. If you would rather be a Hindu than a gentleman, then shut your doors and damn yourself. For I do not care to come.” When Gandhi vowed to start a new fast at the beginning of 1933 if the most important South Indian temple dedicated to the god Krishna, the Guruvayur, remained closed to untouchables, Ambedkar urged him not to bother. It’s “not necessary for him to stake his life on such a comparatively small issue as temple entry,” Ambedkar said.
When from inside Yeravda prison he was about to launch his Harijan weekly—a successor to Indian Opinion and Young India—Gandhi reached out to Ambedkar, asking him for a “message” for the inaugural issue. The gesture evoked a sardonic response that fairly dripped with resentment. “It would be a most unwarranted presumption on my part,” Ambedkar wrote, “to suppose that I have sufficient worth in the eyes of the Hindus which would make them treat any message from me with respect.” So instead of a “message” he sent a “statement.” Apparently, he still did not like the implication that he might be engaged in a common cause with Hindu reformers, including Gandhi. He would simply tell Gandhi and Hindus some home truths. Gandhi made sure that Harijan published the tart covering note as well as the statement, which said: “There will be outcastes so long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.” His intention may have been to goad Gandhi rather than to pick a fight, but already they were drawing apart. Eventually, they would both reject the pact they had jointly signed at Yeravda. Gandhi would call the limited use of separate electorates he’d finally agreed to when his life was at stake “a device of Satan, named imperialism.” Ambedkar would write: “The Congress sucked the juice out of the Poona Pact and threw the rind in the face of the Untouchables.”
The issue on which they soon diverged had hovered between them from the time of their first encounter. It was whether downtrodden untouchables could be effectively mobilized in their own behalf in the dusty exigencies of village India or were doomed to wait for caste Hindus to be moved by the religious penance and suffering of “the greatest man in India.” In the existing circumstances, each alternative was largely theoretical. The effective mobilization of untouchables and the religious conversion of caste Hindus would each take generations; how many generations, it’s still—eight decades later—too soon to tell. Both have advanced, thanks in some measure to Gandhi and Ambedkar, not just in their lives but in what they’ve been taken to represent in India’s dreamy idealization of their struggles. But the pace can reasonably be described as slightly faster than glacial, which is to say, grindingly slow, nowhere near revolutionary.
It took only five weeks after Gandhi ended the “epic fast” for a bill to be introduced in the Madras Legislative Council making it illegal for a temple to remain closed to Harijans if the majority of caste Hindus who used the temple wanted it open. The aim of the bill was to take the decision out of the hands of Brahman priests, such as the Namboodiris at Vaikom, who typically had the final say. The legislative council had little power and needed the viceroy’s formal approval even to debate the bill. In the face of rising opposition from orthodox Hindus and the se
eming indifference of Harijans, similar legislation introduced in the toothless central assembly stalled. For Gandhi, the legislation took on urgency as a referendum on untouchability. When they met in February 1933, Gandhi implored Ambedkar to support the bills, or at least not oppose them.
“Supposing we are lucky in the case of temple-entry, will they let us fetch water from the wells?” Ambedkar asked.
“Sure,” Gandhi replied. “This is bound to follow.”
Ambedkar hesitated. What he wanted from Gandhi, the Mahatma wasn’t ready to provide—an unambiguous denunciation of the caste system to show he was in earnest about his contention that all Hindus were created equal. Ambedkar had agreed to join the board of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, whose constitution said as much, promising Harijans “absolute equality with the rest of Hindus” and requiring its members to declare: “I do not consider any human being as inferior to me in status and I shall strive my utmost to live by that belief.” But within a year he resigned, convinced that this Gandhian organization dedicated to the service of his people was dominated by caste Hindus who were basically uninterested in mobilizing Harijans, as Ambedkar had proposed, in “a campaign all over India to secure to the Depressed Classes the enjoyment of their civic rights.”
Finally Ambedkar concluded that the temple-entry legislation had to be read as an insult, another reason to move away from the Mahatma. “Sin and immorality cannot become tolerable because a majority is addicted to them or because the majority chooses to practice them,” he said. “If untouchability is a sinful and immoral custom, in the view of the Depressed Classes it must be destroyed without any hesitation even if it was acceptable to the majority.”
The same issue—whether Harijan basic rights could be put to a vote by caste Hindus—came up in the conflict over Guruvayur temple. Still locked up at Yeravda but permitted by the authorities to agitate on Harijan issues from behind prison walls, Gandhi kept scheduling and postponing a fast on the opening of the celebrated Krishna temple. A poll was taken in the temple’s surroundings, confirming his belief that most caste Hindus were now ready to worship with Harijans. But the temple remained closed to them until after independence in 1947. As late as 1958, ten years after Gandhi’s murder, a deflated and dispirited Harijan Sevak Sangh was counting it as a victory that a couple more temples in Benares were at last being opened to Harijans whose equality it had proclaimed a quarter of a century earlier.
In May 1933, when Gandhi finally started his next fast—his second over untouchability in seven months—he was immediately released from jail. Though it lasted twenty-one days—two weeks longer than the so-called epic fast—this second round caused less of a stir. Tagore wrote to say it was a mistake. Nehru, still in jail in Allahabad, threw up his hands. “What can I say about matters I do not understand?” he wrote in a letter to Gandhi.
Ambedkar by this time was looking the other way. Within two years, his movement ended the temple-entry campaigns it had been carrying on in a desultory fashion over the previous decade. The time had come, he proclaimed, for untouchables—now starting to call themselves Dalits, not Harijans—to give up on Hinduism. “I was born a Hindu and have suffered the consequences of untouchability,” he said and then immediately vowed: “I will not die a Hindu.”
If any admiration, any ambivalence lingered in Ambedkar’s feelings about Gandhi after their final falling-out, he labored to repress it. Much of his energy in his late years went into a renewal—and escalation—of bitter polemics against him. “As a Mahatma he may be trying to spiritualize politics,” Ambedkar would write. “Whether he has succeeded in it or not, politics have certainly commercialized him. A politician must know that society cannot bear the whole truth, that he must not speak the whole truth if speaking the whole truth is bad for his politics.” Gandhi refuses to launch a frontal attack on the caste system, this disillusioned, brainy antagonist finally argues, out of fear that “he will lose his place in politics.”
Which is why, he concludes, “The Mahatma appears not to believe in thinking.”
The inconsistency was as much Ambedkar’s as Gandhi’s. The Poona Pact might have given them a basis for a fruitful division of labor, with Gandhi working to soften up Hindu attachment to the practice of untouchability, leaving room for Ambedkar to mobilize the impoverished and oppressed people Gandhi had named Harijans. More than politics and Ambedkar’s ambition got in the way. Gandhi wasn’t interested in mobilization outside the Congress. Ambedkar wanted his fair share of power but wasn’t prepared to be patronized, which was what would happen, he seemed sure, if he ever surrendered his independence to the Congress. Putting his case against Gandhi in the simplest terms, Ambedkar said: “Obviously, he would like to uplift the Untouchables if he can but not by offending the Hindus.” That sentence contains the essence of their conflict. Ambedkar had ceased to think of untouchables as Hindus; Gandhi had not. The basic question was whether they’d be better off in the India of the future as a segregated minority and interest group battling for its rights or as a tolerated adjunct to the majority with recognized rights, an issue, it’s fair to say, that remains unresolved after nearly eight decades.
After all his hard bargaining, the untouchable leader eventually discovered that the concessions he’d made to secure an agreement with the fasting Mahatma hadn’t elevated him to a national position; he was to get there by another route. As the years wore on, he found himself leader of a series of small cash-starved opposition parties whose influence seldom extended beyond his Mahar base in what became the state of Maharashtra. For this, with mounting asperity, he blamed Gandhi and the Congress. But there’s suggestive if somewhat sketchy evidence that, fifteen years after the pact, it may have been Gandhi who advanced Ambedkar’s name for a position in independent India’s first cabinet. As law minister, he then became the principal author of the 1950 constitution whose Article 17 formally abolished untouchability, a denouement Gandhi did not live to see. So the man now revered as Babasaheb by the ex-untouchables who today call themselves Dalits never reconciled himself with Gandhi, the politician he criticized for being unwilling to tell India “the whole truth,” who may, nevertheless, have been responsible for his elevation to the national position he craved.
Ambedkar had a point if he meant to say that Gandhi’s status as national leader owed something to a tendency to speak less than “the whole truth.” But the Mahatma was more apt to belittle his own mahatmaship than to deny being a politician. So hurling the epithet “Politician!” against this original, self-created exemplar of leadership—venerated, if imperfectly understood, by most Indians—didn’t take much insight or carry much sting. If Ambedkar was saying that the Mahatma’s insistence on “truth” as his lodestar was self-serving and therefore delusional, was he also saying he’d have admired the national leader more if he let go of that claim? Gandhi may have been a politician, but there were few, if any, like him in his readiness to summon his followers, or himself, to new and more difficult tests. By the summer of 1933 the man described by Nehru as having “a flair for action” was torn between competing causes, unable to decide whether to focus on a scaled-down campaign of civil disobedience or a full-throated crusade against untouchability. He could argue that the two causes were “indivisible,” but his movement and the colonial authorities, in their own ways, pushed him to a choice.
The British still held most of his top Congress colleagues in prison, a practical way of forestalling any new wave of resistance. But Gandhi knew that was precisely what the younger, more educated congressmen wanted. He also knew that the one sure consequence of calling for renewed civil disobedience would be his own reincarceration. First he tried suspending civil disobedience to concentrate on the Harijan cause. This provoked the Bengali firebrand Subhas Chandra Bose to write him off as a failure. Next he attempted to split the difference by calling for individual acts of civil disobedience, as opposed to mass resistance. The new tactic was too much for the British, too little for younger Congressmen like Bose and
Nehru. When he announced a small march in defiance of a ban on political demonstrations, he was promptly clapped back into Yeravda. In his previous imprisonment, he’d been allowed to work on his latest weekly newspaper inside the jail so long as it was limited to the discussion of the Harijan cause, which was why he called the paper Harijan. This time he was treated as an ordinary convict, with no privileges, no paper. Within two weeks he began yet another fast, his third in eleven months, and came close enough to killing himself that he had to be hospitalized. “Life ceases to interest me if I may not do Harijan work without let or hindrance,” he said.
The colonial authorities offered release on condition he abandon civil disobedience, echoing his stilted legalism in a manner that sounded belittling, even faintly mocking. “If Mr. Gandhi now feels,” an official statement said, “that life ceases to interest him if he cannot do Harijan work without let or hindrance, the Government are prepared … to set him at liberty at once so that he can devote himself wholly and without restriction to the cause of social reform.” First he rejected the idea of conditional release; then, released from the hospital unconditionally, he announced he’d not “court imprisonment by offering aggressive civil resistance” for most of the coming year. He’d accept the government’s terms as long as he didn’t have to acknowledge doing so. He was thus maneuvered into doing what Charles Andrews had urged him to do in the first place, giving way to what he now claimed to be “the breath of life for me, more precious than the daily bread.” He was speaking of “Harijan service,” which in his mind meant persuading caste Hindus to accept Harijans as their social equals. He couldn’t promise to devote himself wholly to that cause until equality was achieved—after all, there was still independence to be won—but he’d do so for the next nine months by touring the country from one end to the other, campaigning for a change of heart by caste Hindus and for funds to be devoted to the cause of “uplift” for his Harijans. Somewhat reluctantly, he thus sentenced himself to becoming a full-time social reformer for that stretch of time.
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India Page 31
