Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  Actually, their deepest difference wasn’t over doctrine but over sociology, whether untouchables could be, should be, seen as “a separate community” or as an integral part of village India and, by extension, Hindu society as a whole. As interpreted by D. R. Nagaraj, a compelling cultural critic from the South Indian state of Karnataka, Ambedkar regarded the Indian village as “irredeemable” as a social setting for untouchables. Nagaraj, from a lowly subcaste of weavers himself, had endured bonded labor as a child and so had reason to identify himself with Ambedkar’s view. But he was simultaneously large-minded enough to champion Gandhi’s side of the argument. The high-caste townsman who’d been inspired to recast himself in peasant’s garb felt the villages had to be redeemed if there were to be any future for India’s poorest.

  That tension is what would make the picture of Gandhi and Ambedkar lounging under the guava tree on the outskirts of a broiling Segaon on the Mahatma’s first full day there in 1936 so poignant, so emblematic, if such a picture actually existed. Even if he wasn’t wearing the starched winged collar that he often favored in this period, the scholarly, corpulent Ambedkar would probably not have looked comfortable in the village setting to which Gandhi, who gave a new definition to spareness, had long since adapted himself. In their face-off, each has a case, neither a workable solution embracing both touchables and untouchables. From the standpoint of today’s Dalits, so Nagaraj wrote, “there is a compelling need to achieve a synthesis of the two.” Gandhi and Ambedkar, he argued, “are complementary at a fundamental level.” What Gandhi offers, this writer said, is the understanding that “the liberation of the untouchable is organically linked to the emancipation of village India.” What Ambedkar offers is his insistence that it must include the possibility of liberation from their despised hereditary roles. Trapped in his own paternalism, the man known as the Mahatma wanted everyone to understand that the scavenger’s work was honorable and essential. Ambedkar wanted everyone to understand that it was not at all fated, that this same untouchable could ignore the traditional vocation decreed by his caste just as Gandhi the Bania had. (“He has never touched trading which is his ancestral calling,” Ambedkar noted in one of his more telling thrusts.) The emphasis of the man revered as Babasaheb was on equal rights. Maybe that’s why, decades later, the villagers of Segaon-Sevagram put up his statue, although it was Gandhi and not Ambedkar who gave them their land.

  Ambedkar and his followers were not the only untouchables talking conversion in this period. To the south, in the princely state of Travancore, now part of Kerala, there was a distinct restlessness among the upwardly mobile Ezhavas, who had provided the main impetus for the Vaikom Satyagraha. Some Ezhava leaders were reported to have held discussions about the possibility of a mass conversion with the Syrian Christian bishop of Kottayam, near Cochin, the leader of a sect that traced its history in South India back to a legendary visit by Saint Thomas in the second century. The bishop’s seat was also near Vaikom, where the Shiva temple still barred Ezhavas and all other untouchables a decade after the satyagraha campaign that Gandhi had tried to control at a distance. The settlement he’d negotiated there with the British police commissioner had, like the one he’d negotiated with Smuts in South Africa, left the fundamental issues unresolved. The impatience of the Ezhavas had risen from year to year, to the point that they were even reported to be putting out feelers too to the London Missionary Society. There was also ferment among Pulayas, a more abject group of Kerala untouchables, some of whom had just become Sikhs.

  Talk of conversion brought out a proprietary, even condescending side of Gandhi’s attitude to those he interchangeably called “dumb millions” and “Harijans,” overlapping but not synonymous terms. In his own religious practice and in abstract discussion, he spoke as a kind of universalist, holding that all religions were different expressions of the same truths. But when it came to outsiders tempting his Harijans away from a Hinduism that systematically rejected them, he could be almost as adamant in opposing that temptation as he was against the rejection. “Would you preach the Gospel to a cow?” he challenged a visiting missionary. “Well, some of the untouchables are worse than cows in their understanding.”

  In his weekly Harijan, he printed a long letter from an American missionary woman objecting to such Gandhian depictions of untouchables, whom she found, so she said, “above, rather than below, the average of mankind.” Pushing all his buttons, as might be said these days even about a figure who had no buttons on his person, the American wondered “how you can live among them and hold such a superficial attitude to them? The only explanation that comes to my mind,” she said, “is that you either do not know them or you were insincere.”

  If the American wanted to provoke the Mahatma, she succeeded. Gandhi replied in prideful tones last heard out of his mouth six years earlier at the Round Table Conference in London. Indignant over the foreigner’s presumption, he claimed his conclusions were based “on close contact for years with tens of thousands of India’s masses, not as a superior being but feeling as one with them.” His retort begged the question of what he meant by “close contact.” Segaon was supposed to provide the answer.

  Preaching through his life was what he’d resolved to do there, but that vow was in constant tension with a long lineup of issues, movements, and gatherings whose proponents and organizers were always trying to reach in and, pleading necessity, pull him out of his village. A half year after Ambedkar’s visit in 1936, the religious ferment in Travancore provided one such occasion. Here, for once, there was something to celebrate—a proclamation in the name of the young maharajah, who’d only recently come of age, finally opening all Hindu temples controlled by his state or family to any untouchable inclined to be thought of as a Hindu. “None of our Hindu subjects should by reason of birth, caste or community, be denied the solace of the Hindu faith,” the decree declared.

  Gandhi’s supervision of the Vaikom movement may have had its ambiguous side in the mid-1920s, but he was no longer of two minds about temple entry as a national cause when he carried his anti-untouchability campaign into Travancore in 1934. On that tour, according to the current rajah—younger brother of the one who issued the decree and monarch of a state that no longer exists—Gandhi asked the crown prince, “Will you open the temples?” Today’s rajah, who was only twelve then, recalls hearing his brother pledge, “Yes.”

  A lively old man at the far end of his ninth decade, his tiny frame enveloped in a wraparound lungi, the Travancore maharajah said his sole remaining duty was to go alone to the temple of Vishnu every day when it’s closed to all other worshippers for exactly twelve minutes as it had always been down through the generations. There the rajah solemnly reports in private to the deity, as all his forebears had, on what has been happening in his former realm. He didn’t know why Dalits still called themselves Dalits; in his view, since untouchability had been abolished, there should be no such group. The decree opening the temples proved to be the dynasty’s last hurrah. “People call me a mahatma,” Gandhi said when he returned to take his victory lap around the state in 1937, reviving his struggle against untouchability after nearly three years. “They should call you a mahatma.” So the old man now recalled the greeting Gandhi bestowed on his brother after the decree.

  He hadn’t seen such crowds since he bade his supposed farewell to the Indian National Congress. Nor since his 1915 farewell tour in South Africa had he ridden such a wave of celebration and surging hope. Yet as he toured the state for nine days, these crowds were often hushed, seemingly out of reverence for the Mahatma and this moment, theirs as well as his. He was struck by the appearance of the people he called Harijans as he accompanied them into temples from which they’d always been barred. They were “truly captivating,” he noted, and “spotlessly clean.” Here in what had been the citadel not only of untouchability but also of unapproachability and unseeability, it was “a dream realized in a manner and in a place where the realization seemed almost unthinkable.
” Holding prayer meetings in newly opened temples at all his major stops, Gandhi occasionally gave an ecumenical nod to Christians and Muslims, but otherwise, speaking as a Hindu to Hindus, he was hardly secular. He prayed with caste Hindus and Harijans together as if they’d now finally been consecrated as what he’d always held them to be, one people. At nearly every stop he gave them a Sanskrit mantra, saying it was easier to grasp and more trustworthy than scripture. As he interpreted it, his mantra concerned surrender to a God who pervades every atom in the universe; it was about not coveting riches and things. He’d never been more overtly evangelical, more overtly Hindu. It doesn’t seem that he ever asked himself whether in this touring of temples and reciting of mantras he might be distancing himself from the large Muslim minority he’d previously championed, making it easier for Jinnah and other Muslim Leaguers to portray him as the leader of the Hindus posing as a national leader.

  Only at several stops in Travancore does the social reformer in Gandhi play more than a small supporting role to the evangelist. Still, at one of these, the Mahatma does step forward in his reformer’s guise as a truly great soul. Facing a huge congregation of the upwardly mobile formerly untouchable Ezhavas, he asks pointedly why they’re celebrating only the opening of the temples to themselves and not untouchables of a lower order such as Pulayas and Pariahs. “I must tell you,” he says, “if this vast assembly does not represent these Pulayas, then I am certain that there is no place in your midst for me.” The crowd stirs restively; as far as most Ezhavas are concerned, Pulayas are still untouchable, whatever the maharajah has decreed. He has been entering temples, Gandhi goes on, in the spirit of “an untouchable suddenly made touchable.” If they would follow in the same spirit, “You will not be satisfied until you have lifted up your brothers and sisters who are supposed to be the least and the lowest to heights which you have attained yourselves. True spiritual regeneration must include economic uplift and the removal of ignorance.”

  All that was needed was “immediate human contact” and “an army of volunteer workers of the right type.”

  A memorable moment. But in defining “the right type,” the Mahatma again lost touch with the common humanity he meant to serve. Brahmacharya had to be part of his program. He’d now gone a quarter of a century without sex, but lately he’d had trouble banishing thoughts of sex from his mind. Ever since his provocative chat with Margaret Sanger at the end of 1935, the subject kept breaking into the pages of the weekly Harijan, partly because of readers writing in to confess to the importance of sex in their marriages, or question his insistent view that marital sex could only be for procreation, not pleasure, or that “sexual science” should be taught but only so long as it was “the science of sex control.”

  The basic reason sex kept breaking in, it seems clear, was that the Mahatma simply couldn’t let the subject drop. In the weeks leading up to his Travancore trip, he’d twice written at length about the misadventures of one Ramnarayan, a social service worker in the Gandhian movement against untouchability in Gandhi’s native Porbandar—“an ideal Harijan worker,” in Gandhi’s view, until he learned that Ramnarayan had been sexually involved with not one but two young women. “What a wide gap between Ramnarayan, the mature servant of Harijans and Ramnarayan the slave of sexual desire!” wrote the Mahatma, naming names with the eagerness of a gossip columnist. Clearly, this hot item offered the movement for social reform he was struggling to build a lesson it couldn’t ignore. “No worker who has not overcome lust can hope to render genuine service to the cause of Harijans, communal unity, khadi, cow-protection or village reconstruction,” Gandhi decreed, more in anger than in sorrow.

  It wasn’t only a question of where he could find “an army of volunteer workers of the right type” to advance his many causes in the 700,000 villages. Sometimes he found himself asking whether he was of the right type to be leading it himself. The struggle of the aging Mahatma to achieve what he called “mastery” over his mind and passions after years of dedicated celibacy carries a powerful poignancy—not because it’s the antithesis of the scandals on which we normally feed, or because it enables us to view our own life choices as wholesome by comparison to those of this figure who was exemplary in so many other ways. It’s poignant, perhaps even tragic, because Gandhi finally convinces himself that there may be a causal relationship—not just an analogy—between his struggle for self-mastery and India’s struggle for independence. Just as every village needs a social service worker who has defeated lust, the nation needs a leader who—however pure his conduct—has banished wayward thoughts. If the leader fails in this important way, he may fail in others, causing the nation to suffer.

  Bhikhu Parekh, a British scholar of Gujarati background who has written the most careful and sensitive analysis of Gandhi’s sexual values and obsessions, provides necessary perspective. “Gandhi’s asceticism represented a relatively minor strand within the Hindu cultural tradition,” he writes. After all, most Hindu gods are married, and Lord Krishna, beloved for his dalliances, calls the sexual impulse divine. Hindus, says Parekh, celebrate sexual union “as a sacred activity in which time, space and duality are temporarily transcended.” That’s why so many of the Hindu temples Gandhi wanted to open are covered with erotic sculptures.

  The Mahatma’s quirky idea that his own self-mastery may be the key to India’s doesn’t define Gandhi in the last decade of his life but periodically haunts him despite the “rigorous simplicity” of his daily routines, programmed nearly to the minute—from his rising at 4:00 a.m. until he closed his eyes to sleep eighteen hours later—to keep unwelcome thoughts at bay. “I can suppress the enemy but have not been able to expel him altogether,” Gandhi wrote, acknowledging his sex urge.

  It’s in 1936, in the few months between his encounter with Margaret Sanger and his arrival at Segaon village, that he begins to worry about the adequacy of his brahmacharya. In Bombay, recuperating from a collapse brought on by high blood pressure, and from encounters with a dentist who was extracting all his teeth, the Mahatma “experienced a sudden desire for intercourse.” Over the years he’d acknowledged wet dreams, but this was different: he was wide awake. With his usual, disarming candor, he tells a female co-worker, whom he has praised as a fellow “votary of brahmacharya,” all about it.

  “Despite my best efforts,” he writes to her several months after the event, “the organ remained aroused. It was an altogether strange and shameful experience.”

  In less graphic terms, he has already gone public in Harijan. “Thank God,” he said there, “my much-vaunted Mahatmaship has never fooled me.” This is nothing so commonplace or tawdry as a public man admitting to an affair. In its directness and baring of his inner life, it’s more like the passage in Saint Augustine’s Confessions bemoaning “the revolting things I did, and the way my soul was contaminated by my flesh.” No one would normally expect to be told what Gandhi has taken it upon himself to reveal. He cannot keep silent, it seems, and go on. What may strike us as an exaggerated response to a normal personal experience of limited interest to others is for Gandhi an introduction to something approaching the dark night of the soul.

  Many things are happening at once. He’s trying to build an “army” of exemplary village workers who have mastered the urges he himself, in his late sixties, is still struggling to master. He commits himself to becoming one of those workers in his chosen Segaon, where his message is not embraced. He tours Travancore at the tip of the subcontinent one year and visits far-off Frontier Province—a battleground in today’s Pakistan—the next. He strategizes with the Congress leadership about whether it should take office on British terms after provincial elections. And, finally, through all this, he tries to find the right degree of closeness or distance that he as an inveterately judgmental father should maintain with his alcoholic eldest son, Harilal, not the least of whose many problems, in Gandhi’s view, has been his weakness for prostitutes since the early death of a wife he had loved. Four days before the Mahat
ma is due to move to Segaon, he meets Harilal in Nagpur. His forty-eight-year-old son asks for money; thinking it would go for drink, Gandhi refuses to give the handout. Then, only two weeks after Gandhi’s arrival in his chosen village—bringing with him his high blood pressure and anxiety over his own erotic nightmare—Harilal changes his name to Abdullah and converts to Islam. Five months later, having flung his Oedipal challenge as publicly as possible, taking to public platforms as a Muslim proselytizer, he converts back.