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VILLAGE OF SERVICE

 

IF GANDHI’S SHOW IN 1934 of retiring from the Congress movement he’d led and symbolized for nearly a generation had an inner logic, it lay in his acknowledgment that all the Gandhian programs and resolutions it had ratified over the years had made little difference. What the Congress hadn’t accomplished under his leadership, he now undertook to do on his own. On one level, he was shaming his supposed followers; on another, he was refusing to give up on his deepest commitments. The new course he set for himself obviously bore some relation to his own submerged doubts about the effectiveness of the anti-untouchability crusade he’d just completed. What he saw on the tour convinced him that his fond promise that cottage industry spinning and weaving could be the salvation for underemployed, landless, debt-enslaved villagers—untouchables and touchables alike—had been overblown and undersold. The spinning wheel had yet to change their grim reality.

The villagers have a lifeless life,” he now said. “Their life is a process of slow starvation.” More speeches, he seemed to be saying, could not be the answer. The last part of the anti-untouchability tour, with the ambiguous response of the mammoth crowds he drew, had been for him, he said at its end, “a mechanical performance and a drawn-out agony.” Later he allowed himself to disparage the tour as a “circus.” He needed now to come to grips with village realities. “We have to work away silently,” he said on one occasion. On another he vowed, “We have to become speechless manual laborers living in the villages.”

India, of course, would not allow him to go silent; nor, as the main contributor to a weekly newspaper, could he silence himself. Turning sixty-five, he found himself standing restlessly at a crossroads. Here again, we see him reliving an earlier chapter in his life. His urge to get down to constructive work in villages obviously reprised his withdrawal from mass politics in South Africa in 1910, when he and Hermann Kallenbach set up their short-lived Tolstoy Farm. Then he made it his mission to master the basics of farming and the education of children. Now, by working again from the bottom up, he was rededicating himself to turning the tide on what he called, at his tour’s end, the downward spiral of poverty he’d seen for himself in villages across the country. After acting out the self-scripted drama of his farewell to the Indian National Congress in Bombay in late October 1934, Gandhi went immediately back to Wardha. A further cross-cultural trivia note: the week he landed there turns out to have been the exact week that—half a world away geographically, and a world away culturally—Cole Porter’s Anything Goes was having its first performances on the road at Boston’s Colonial Theatre; there every evening the romantic lead playing opposite the young Ethel Merman crooned the oxymoronic lyric:

You’re the top!

You’re Mahatma Gandhi.

You’re the top!

You’re Napoleon brandy.

 

Gandhi wouldn’t have been amused by this saucy paean to his international celebrity, in the unlikely event he was ever made aware of it. Nothing could have been more alien to his spirit than the Jazz Age cutting loose Porter was ever so lightly satirizing.

For most of the next eight years (a total of 2,588 days “on station,” as Indians used to say), sorry, dusty, out-of-the-way Wardha, where temperatures before the monsoon rains soared as high as 118 degrees during his time there, would be his base and main arena of operations. Once he resolved to put down roots, Gandhi was already on the rebound, pronouncing himself “full of plans for village reconstruction.” It would be wrong to say he left no mark on the district—dedicated Gandhians can still be found there in small numbers—but the overall result fell far short of the social transformation and healing he initially sought. In recent years, Wardha district has been best known in the proud, supposedly “shining” India of the early twenty-first century as the epicenter for an epidemic of suicides among hopelessly indebted cotton farmers, thousands of whom in the surrounding region are said to have taken their lives over the last two decades after watching commodity prices plummet in the new global marketplace. No one since Gandhi has thought of pointing to it as a model for rural reform.

In the Mahatma’s time, his very presence made Wardha a destination. The Working Committee of the Congress Party, its top leadership unit, dutifully trooped to Wardha at least six times to seek his counsel and receive his blessing, though he was now officially a detached alumnus. He’d intended his resignation as a statement that he could neither impose his priorities on the movement nor let go of them. It had been a gesture, an expression of his disappointment. It had also been something of a sham. The party still revolved around him, if not all the time, at least whenever it needed to unravel a tangled issue. “Wardha became the de facto nationalist capital of India,” an American scholar writes with pardonable hyperbole.

A motley array of foreign delegations—politicians, pacifists, religious leaders, do-gooders of all complexions—also found its way into this remote hinterland with the expectation that Gandhi could be drawn into a discussion of issues uppermost in their minds, anything from nature cures or nutrition to the fate of the West and the threat of another world war. He was all too easily drawn. Called on to speak as a seer, he seemed determined not to disappoint. By the end of the decade, he was freely doling out advice on how his techniques of nonviolent resistance, if adopted by “a single Jew standing up and refusing to bow to Hitler’s decrees,” might be enough to “melt Hitler’s heart.” A Chinese visitor received a similar lecture: nonviolence, Gandhi said, might “shame some Japanese.” A representative of the African National Congress of South Africa was told that its leadership had alienated itself from the masses by its adoption of Western dress and manners. “You must not … feel ashamed of carrying an assagai, or of going around with only a tiny clout round your loins,” said the Mahatma, implicitly offering his own sartorial transformation as a pragmatic political tactic worthy of emulation. His sense that he might have a prophetic role to play only deepened as war clouds darkened. “Who knows,” he wrote from Wardha in 1940, “that I will not be an instrument for bringing about peace between Britain and India but also between the warring nations of the earth.” Presumably on account of his influence, India was “the last hope of the world.”

Only one foreign visitor in these years seemed ready to resist his increasing tendency to translate his experience into dogma. Margaret Sanger, the founder of the movement that became Planned Parenthood, a proponent of enlightened female sexuality and contraception, stopped by in January 1936 for a conversation in which she stressed the life-enhancing nature of sexual intimacy for women as well as men. As might have been expected, Gandhi took an opposing view, expounding on brahmacharya as a spiritual discipline; his conversation with the American—unlike any he’d previously had with a woman—seems to have sent his worrisomely high blood pressure higher and, by some accounts, left him in a state near nervous collapse.

Physically and emotionally, he was already nearing the edge. A little more than a year after he arrived in the district, Gandhi had decided that it wasn’t enough for him to assign his disciples to settle in the most remote villages in a remote district. He needed to understand why they found it such hard going. Typically, he instructed them to begin their missions of service by volunteering as village sanitation officers and scavengers (scooping up human excrement wherever it was to be found, usually beside rural pathways, and then digging proper latrines). The example was not always as effective as he expected. “The people are completely shameless,” wrote his faithful secretary and diarist, Mahadev Desai, whose duties included serving as a one-man cleanup detail in an exceptionally unresponsive village called Sindi. “They do not have any feeling at all. It will not be surprising if within a few days they start believing that we are their scavengers.”

Gandhi concluded there was only one way for him to understand why villagers were proving so impervious to the selfless example his satyagrahis set before them. What was needed was for him—the man recognized by most of India and most of the world as the country’s leader—to settle in a village and live there all by himself, with none of his usual entourage. It made perfect sense to Gandhi but not to his closest associates, who were already nervous about his health and jealous of any change in the Mahatma’s life that would limit the time they got to spend in his presence.

The village he selected in Wardha district for this latest of his “experiments with truth” was then called Segaon. It happened to be adjacent to orange and mango orchards owned by an important backer and underwriter of the Mahatma, a wealthy trader named Jamnalal Bajaj who’d been, in the theatrical sense, the angel who produced Gandhi’s relocation in Wardha and the host who’d provided lodging for the Mahatma and his entourage. Bajaj also owned the land on which Segaon’s untouchables—two-thirds of its population of over six hundred—huddled; the revenues he collected from the village would subsidize Gandhi’s latest experiment.

No road, as yet, connected Segaon to the district’s market town, four miles away. India’s leader arrived there on foot on April 30, 1936, and, two days later, told the villagers of his intentions. “If you will cooperate with me,” he said, “I shall be very happy; if you will not, I shall be content to be absorbed among you as one among the few hundred that live here.” As related by Mirabehn, the headman, “a very charming and aristocratic old man, made a graceful and honest speech in which he welcomed the idea of Gandhi coming to live amongst them, but made it quite clear that he personally would not be able to cooperate in Bapu’s Harijan program.” The hut that he was to occupy, on Segaon’s outskirts, had yet to be completed, so that night a makeshift tent was strung up for him under a guava tree. Since there were wild animals in the area—cheetahs, panthers—a trench had to be dug around the patch of ground on which the Mahatma was to sleep. Using the excuse that they were overseeing the completion of his dwelling, several of his entourage slept beside him.

As might have been expected, the Mahatma’s ambition to spend a night alone in Segaon would never be fulfilled. Before long, the whole entourage, amounting at times to nearly a hundred persons, was ensconced there. He’d not planned to make his dwelling the center of an ashram, but that’s what it became. Thanks largely to Jamnalal Bajaj’s generosity, new buildings went up, a road was put through and, eventually, even a phone line so the Mahatma could be reached by the viceroy’s offices in New Delhi and the hill station of Simla, to which the top echelons of the Raj retreated in summer when Wardha broiled. Segaon, the village Gandhi briefly intended to make the focus of his energies, inevitably became a sideshow. Fittingly, after March 1940, it would take the name of the ashram that had spontaneously mushroomed alongside it. Ashram and village were both called Sevagram, meaning “Village of Service.”

The growth of the ashram was less than a mixed blessing, becoming another distraction from the village work that had drawn him to Segaon in the first place. “Oh God,” Gandhi said, “save me from my friends, followers and flatterers.”

Today the nearest village houses are around the bend of a dirt road, a couple hundred yards from the ashram, a complex of dark wood structures with long sloping roofs that give an appearance reminiscent of a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto. Sevagram the ashram no longer serves Sevagram the village. With a bookshop, a canteen, and even some modest rooms to rent to pilgrims, it maintains itself as a tourist attraction. The village still looks poor, but some of the houses have TV antennas on their roofs and motorbikes leaning up against their cracked and mildewed cement walls. The houses stand on land that Bajaj signed over to Gandhi and Gandhi signed over to the village’s untouchables, who now call themselves Dalits rather than Harijans. When you stroll from the ashram to the one village that received more personal attention from the Mahatma than any other among the 700,000 that existed in his India, a statue comes into view beside a sports field. The figure on the pedestal is not wearing a loincloth. He’s wearing a suit painted an electric shade of blue and a painted red tie. It’s the figure of Babasaheb Ambedkar. And the former untouchables in what was once Gandhi’s chosen village—especially the younger ones—are likelier, when asked, to identify themselves as Buddhists than as Hindus.

 

Ashram grew up around Gandhi as Sevagram (photo credit i10.1)

 

For most of Gandhi’s first year in Wardha, he’d been less preoccupied with the actual human condition in the surrounding villages than with the task of birthing a new mass organization he’d dreamed up to infuse badly needed energy into his languishing campaign for village self-sufficiency through hand spinning and weaving. He’d invested excessive faith in the spinning wheel, the iconic charkha, as an invincible panacea for village poverty, he now concluded. By itself, it would not be enough to lift rural India out of its misery. Spinning and weaving would retain their place, but they needed to be supplemented by a whole array of traditional crafts that were losing out in competition with processed and manufactured goods being produced more cheaply in city factories and workshops. Villages had once known how to turn out their own handmade pens, ink, and paper; they ground their grains into flour, pressed vegetables for their oils, boiled unrefined sugar, tanned hides into leather, raised bees, harvested honey, ginned cotton by hand. For their own salvation, they needed to do so again, Gandhi taught; and it was a national need to support them not only by wearing homespun khadi but by consciously giving all they produced a preference over manufactured articles, to undo as far as possible the ravages of the Industrial Revolution.

Starting from these premises, the nation’s leader suddenly had an urgent need to know whether hand-pounded rice and grain could be shown to be more nutritious than the polished products from the mills. Could hand-husked rice compete in price with mill-husked rice? What use could be made of the husk? Did spinning pay better than husking? Could oil be harvested from orange rinds? Gandhi’s letters were full of such questions; in his mind, the answers he received were building blocks of a revised strategy for gaining “the swaraj of our dreams, devoted to the welfare of villages.” His new organization needed a constitution, advisers, and a board that would be selfless and nearly full-time; it needed a table of organization reaching down to every district and, ultimately, every village in the vast country. Within a couple of months Gandhi had created all this, on paper at least, and the All India Village Industries Association (AIVIA) came into existence with its national headquarters in previously obscure Wardha, in a building donated, of course, by Gandhi’s angel, Bajaj. Gandhi recruited a chartered accountant from Bombay, with postgraduate training in economics from Columbia University, to serve as the organization’s director. A Christian, he was known at Columbia as Joseph Cornelius; by the time he got to Wardha, where he stayed until after Gandhi’s death, he had become J. C. Kumarappa. Today Kumarappa is occasionally mentioned in India as a pioneer theorist on sustainable farming and appropriate technology; the last Western economist who seems to have been conscious of him or Gandhi as thinkers with something useful to say about the world’s poorest was E. F. Schumacher, himself a dissenter from orthodox development doctrines whose book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered enjoyed a brief vogue when it appeared in 1973, twenty-five years after Gandhi’s death.

The Mahatma denied that his fixation on village industries betokened any dilution of his campaign against untouchability, just as he’d denied a decade earlier that his renewed emphasis on the charkha represented a backing off from his campaign for Hindu-Muslim unity. Many of the spinners were untouchables, he pointed out. There was conspicuous overlap between AIVIA and other organizations he or his followers had launched to advance the Gandhian constructive program in the 700,000 villages: the recently formed Harijan Sevak Sangh, the intended beneficiary of the anti-untouchability tour; the older All India Spinners Association; the Gandhi Seva Sangh, brought into existence by the Congress to further the constructive program to which it paid lip service (not to mention the Goseva Sangh, an association for the protection of cows for which he’d become a patron). For most of these, the lawyer who’d last practiced in Johannesburg drafted constitutions and designed management structures, just as ever since 1920 he had for the Indian National Congress itself. AIVIA’s basic document didn’t hesitate to articulate a principle that all these organizations implicitly held in common. “The Association,” it declared, “shall work under the guidance and advice of Gandhiji.” The movement with the largest outreach, the spinners association, boasted that it had penetrated 5,000 villages, but this was a mere fraction of 1 percent of the 700,000.

All the Gandhian organizations shared a common defect: a reliance, in theory, on selfless village interns—in Gandhi’s terms, satyagrahis—and the absence of any sure method for discovering, recruiting, training, or sustaining such a vast army of inspired, literate workers uninhibited by inherited constraints of caste. “Full-timers, whole-hoggers, with a live faith in the program and prepared immediately to make the necessary adjustment in their daily life,” he said, describing the attributes of the committed workers he sought as if he were placing a classified ad. The “necessary adjustment” would be to lower—drastically—their citified standards of living. They would need to cultivate a life of “rigorous simplicity,” he said. What the Maoist leadership in China would seek to do through terror, commands, peer pressure, and relentless ideological drilling when it launched its “down to the countryside” campaign during the Cultural Revolution three decades later, Gandhi hoped to achieve by inspirational example, his own and that of his closest followers. “Workers without character, living far above the ordinary life of villagers, and devoid of the knowledge required of them for their work can produce no impression on the villagers, whether Harijan or other,” he said. “If every one of such workers puts on his work a price which village service cannot sustain, ultimately these organizations must be wound up.”

Even his closest followers had doubts. “What is the advantage of this work?” Mahadev’s son boldly asked the Mahatma. “There is no effect on the villagers. On the contrary they go on giving orders to us to clean various places.”

So! You are already tired!” Gandhi retorted in mock exasperation. He then offered pointers on how the work might be accomplished: “If I am in your place, I will observe carefully. If someone gets up after easing himself, I will immediately go there. If I see any rottenness in the excretia I will tell him gently, ‘Your stomach seems to be upset; you should try a particular remedy,’ and thus I will try to win him over.” After scooping the turds, he went on, he’d then plant flowers on the site and water them. “Cleanliness can be an art,” he concluded.

Even at his most visionary, he sometimes lets slip a bleak forecast of what’s likely to prove possible, as if steeling himself for disappointment, for a noble failure, as he sets out. “If [the villagers] abuse us,” he preaches to his acolytes when only beginning to contemplate the idea of living in a village himself, “let us bear it in silence … Let the people defecate wherever they choose. Let us not even ask them to avoid a particular place or go elsewhere. But let us go on cleaning up without a word …

If this does not work, then there is no such thing as non-violence,” he concludes.

In which case, he seems to be saying, the work had still to be done as a matter of duty. When one of his workers asked for his formula for solving the problem of untouchability in villages, Gandhi replied: “Silent plodding.” On another occasion, he said: “The only way is to sit down in their midst and work away in steadfast faith, as their scavengers, their nurses, their servants, not as their patrons, and to forget all our prejudices, our prepossessions. Let us for a moment forget even swaraj.”

This is what his Anglican soul mate Charlie Andrews had urged several years earlier, but of course, as Gandhi said then, he could never forget swaraj.

Gandhi seemed to sense early that the qualifications he declared for what today might be called community organizing had scant potential—really, none at all—for rallying the nonviolent forces he was hoping to send en masse to the villages. “Our ambition is to make at least one member for each of our 700,000 villages,” he told a meeting of his village industries association, “but our actual membership is 517!” And many of those were AWOL. It was a conundrum he was hoping to crack during the solitary residence he planned for himself at Segaon. Mirabehn, the English admiral’s daughter, had to admit defeat in Sindi, where the villagers came to view her as a source of pollution after she drew water from the well used by the untouchables. Segaon, where she then preceded her teacher, wasn’t much better for her. On the verge of a breakdown, having already suffered a bout of typhoid, she was eventually sent off to the Himalayas in 1937 for a rest. After his first ten days at Segaon the previous year, at the height of the hot season, Gandhi himself was strongly urged by his doctors to seek relief in the hills near Bangalore. His rest cure lasted five weeks. It was June 16 before he returned, arriving again on foot in a monsoon downpour that had drenched him to the skin. Soon he came down with malaria.

When the bare narrative of this effort to achieve “oneness” with India’s poorest is laid out, it can appear either futile or desperate. It’s the effort of the Mahatma to remain true to his vision of swaraj for the dumb millions, despite all that he has learned, or perhaps senses he has yet to learn, about village India. Yet from a distance of more than seven decades, what stands out is the commitment rather than the futility. He could easily have retired to a mansion belonging to one of his millionaire supporters and there directed the national movement from on high; no one would have asked why he wasn’t living like a peasant. In his tireless, pertinacious way in the village to which he’d attached himself instead, he was doing more than tilting at windmills. Once again Gandhi was refusing to avert his eyes from a suffering India that seemed largely to have escaped the notice of most educated Indians swept up in the movement he’d been leading.

The degree to which this was true in the 1930s can be gauged by the degree to which it remains true in an India that has hailed itself as free and democratic for several generations. By 2009, after boasting four consecutive years of robust 9 percent growth in economic output, this rising and surprising new India, with its booming market economy at the high end, still had a quarter of its people living in conditions defined by the World Bank as “absolute poverty,” meaning that their per capita income was less than a dollar a day; the rate of poverty was declining as a percentage of the total population of nearly 1.2 billion, but in absolute numbers the total of some 300 million was undiminished, accounting for nearly one-third of the globe’s poorest people. Almost by definition their children were malnourished and underweight, more than likely to grow up illiterate, if they grew up at all. The number of Indians calculated to be living on less than $1.25 a day was over 400 million, larger than the total population at the time of independence when the poorest represented a bigger proportion of the total; today, as a minority, they can be viewed as a ragged coterie of interest groups and a drag on the rising middle class. Still only 33 percent of all Indians have access, according to the bank’s figures, to what it primly calls “improved sanitation.” A United Nations survey portrays this reality more bluntly, reporting that 55 percent of the population still defecates out of doors. Given the tripling of population since Gandhi’s time, the water supply in villages and towns can still prove vulnerable to disease-bearing organisms; human scavengers still have to be relied upon to carry off much of the subcontinent’s night soil, or human waste.

Gandhian economics needs to be viewed in that sobering perspective before being written off as irrelevant or utopian in the era of globalization. His answers to conspicuous issues of rural mass poverty, underemployment, and chronic indebtedness may have been incomplete and untested. Not only did he reject birth control and recommend abstinence as a means of limiting population, but he had no scheme that addressed glaring inequities in land ownership and distribution beyond a wishful, woolly theory of “trusteeship” that basically relied on the benevolence of the wealthy. In his aversion to devices that can be classed as laborsaving, he was stubbornly wrongheaded. But at least he framed basic questions, grappling with the misery at the bottom of the social pyramid. And since that misery has hardly receded, even as living standards have risen for most Indians, it cannot be altogether surprising that Gandhian economics bears a certain resemblance to approaches currently favored by development specialists seeking to confront the same perennial, still urgent problems—for instance, with “microfinance” schemes designed to drive small-scale enterprises, including the traditional handicrafts he promoted, as engines of growth and employment in rural settings. What such latter-day schemes have in common with their unacknowledged Gandhian antecedents is the conviction that solutions must be found where the poorest live, must have some capacity to spark and mobilize their energies.

Gandhi couldn’t have forecast and probably wouldn’t have admired many aspects of today’s globalized India, with its offshore islands of affluent expatriate life in California, New York, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere, transplanted and now thriving in cultures he’d long ago written off as incorrigibly materialistic: overdeveloped, in his view. Nor would he have been pleased by their repercussions at home, visible in high-rise Florida-style condo developments, largely financed by expatriate cash, spreading across fields where rice and wheat were once cultivated; in no way was this the India of that former expatriate’s dreams. Today in the villages and dense, dank shantytowns of the poorest states, mostly in North India, he’d find much that would look familiar. He’d discover that nearly two-thirds of all Indians still live in villages. A Gandhi reborn in these times would probably want to start a campaign somewhere—in Wardha, perhaps.

On May 1, 1936, the day after Gandhi landed at Segaon, he received his first visitor there—none other than Babasaheb Ambedkar, who six months earlier had further estranged himself from the Mahatma by renouncing Hinduism and proclaiming his intention to convert to another religion. Ambedkar had just come from a conference of Sikhs in Amritsar where he’d openly flirted with the possibility of becoming a Sikh, praising the religion for regarding all its adherents as equals. The two leaders sat on the ground, under the guava tree where Gandhi had slept, debating the principles and politics of conversion. Neither one got much satisfaction from the encounter, but they agreed to meet again in Segaon. The inconclusive meeting seems to have been instigated by wealthy supporters of Gandhi who still hoped to keep Ambedkar and his followers in what the Mahatma called “the Hindu fold.”

There may be hints here that Gandhi was making a roundabout attempt to woo Ambedkar. According to one of the untouchable leader’s biographers, Gandhi’s friends “asked Ambedkar why he did not join Gandhi’s camp, so that he might have boundless resources at his disposal for the uplift of the Depressed Classes.” Ambedkar said they had too many differences. Nehru also had many differences with Gandhi, observed Jamnalal Bajaj, one of the go-betweens. Ambedkar huffily said it was a matter of conscience for him.

The two leaders can be seen as reluctant antagonists, sometimes, in Conrad’s sense, as secret sharers—mirror images of each other, with Gandhi finding aspects of his driven, sometimes angry South African self in the younger man, and Ambedkar feeling resentful, even envious, of the sanctity in which the Mahatma wraps himself. “You and I are quite similar,” Ambedkar had remarked to Gandhi in the course of their negotiations at Yeravda prison.

The observation had provoked laughter from members of Gandhi’s entourage within earshot, but the Mahatma himself had replied, “Yes, that’s true.” For nearly five years, ever since their first meeting in Bombay in August 1931 before sailing to the Round Table Conference, they’d been circling each other, sizing one another up, jousting at a distance, then putting out tentative feelers. They’d met in London, in Yeravda prison, possibly in Poona after Gandhi’s release, and now in Segaon but remained unable to strike an alliance. When Ambedkar was preoccupied with a temple-entry campaign, Gandhi withheld his support. When temple entry became the focus of Gandhi’s efforts to combat untouchability, Ambedkar contrarily said that social equality and economic uplift were the real issues. Now that Gandhi had settled on the edge of a village in which his Harijans were a majority in order to engage those very issues, Ambedkar was preoccupied with the need for untouchables to find a way out of Hinduism. If they were ever in sync, it was the way the two hands of a clock come together for an instant every hour. Or, perhaps, the way a chess game ends in stalemate. A couple of years earlier, Ambedkar had said the issue that divided them was Gandhi’s refusal to renounce the caste system. Within a few months, seemingly in response, Gandhi had written an article in Harijan titled “Caste Has to Go,” in which he said, “The present caste system is the very antithesis of Varnashrama,” the traditional fourfold ranking of inherited occupations, which he professed to uphold but only on his own terms, with the caveat that true varnashrama was “today non-existent in practice.” In any case, he argued, religious customs derived from Hindu scriptures that were in conflict with “reason” and “universal truths and morals” were unacceptable. Also, Gandhi’s article said, there “should be no prohibition of intermarriage or inter-dining.” It appeared the same week Ambedkar vowed he wouldn’t die a Hindu. By pleading for a varnashrama that, he said, didn’t exist, Gandhi left himself some wiggle room, whether out of conviction or political expedience—some cover, that is, with orthodox caste Hindus. Either way, his response wasn’t good enough for Ambedkar, who, predictably, dodged whatever opportunity there may have been to strike a religious accord.

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 Mahatma 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.

He remains the same wreck that he was before,” Gandhi writes, in an open letter “To My Numerous Muslim Friends,” prior to the re-conversion. “I do not mind whether he is called Abdullah or Harilal,” the letter says, “if, by adopting one name for the other, he becomes a true devotee of God which both the names mean.”

But, of course, he does mind. Harilal continues to disappoint, and so, it’s beginning to seem, will the village of Segaon, even though he has had the assistance of at least three additional workers there. Still, Gandhi seems to be back in command of his busy life, until April 14, 1938, when, just as he’s preparing for a crucial meeting in Bombay with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who has deflected a couple of invitations to rural Segaon, it all happens again—another erection, another wet dream. Nearing his seventieth year, not only is the Mahatma upset, but, as he later writes to Mirabehn, “That degrading, dirty, torturing experience of 14th April shook me to bits and made me feel as if I was hurled by God from an imaginary paradise where I had no right to be in my uncleanliness.”

A week after the ejaculation, he issues a troubled, less explicit statement to the press saying, “For the first time in my public and private life I seem to have lost self-confidence … I find myself for the first time during the past fifty years in a Slough of Despond. I do not consider myself fit for negotiations or any such thing for the moment.”

Are we dealing with one history in this relatively compact time frame or several? Even with some unraveling, the answer can never be obvious. Disappointments are piling up. Gandhi, it seems, has found it necessary to shoulder them all. Normally, he’s able to keep his disappointments—with himself, with Harilal, with the pace of reconstruction in Segaon, with the rising violence between Muslims and Hindus, with the meager returns on the work for Harijans—in separate compartments. On a daily basis, his demeanor remains cheerful. He’s as diligent as ever, writing his articles, keeping up his devotions and correspondence, offering advice to his wide family circle, his most devoted acolytes, and strangers, with all his usual firmness and assurance. He never used the word “sublimation,” but he was familiar with the concept. “The man who sits idle cannot control his passionate urge,” he said once. “The remedy, therefore, is to keep the body engaged in work.” So he fills his days with minutely scheduled tasks. Still, when he admits to feeling let down, a little depressed, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the feeling has a specific source or many, hard to trace the boundaries of the slough of despond he has now entered. Does his flawed brahmacharya really undermine the village strategy? Or could it be the other way round?

I am after all a sinking ship,” he remarks to his faithful Mahadev in September 1938. “Who would want to sail in such a ship?”

Segaon represents his abiding commitment to the “dumb millions.” But the story of his involvement there turns out to be a sad one. Here is Gandhi coming to grips with the reality of the Indian village, which he has fervently idealized ever since Hind Swaraj, written nearly three decades earlier, before he’d left South Africa, before he’d even thought to test his ideas at Tolstoy Farm. He never breaks his tie to the village, but it takes less than a year before it becomes evident that he’s dis-appointed.

At the end of 1936, before his Travancore trip, he’s assailed by a politician there for sounding off on local conditions when he has never even succeeded in getting temples opened up in Ahmedabad, his base for his first sixteen years back in India, where he was on home ground as a Gujarati. Gandhi replies with touching Gandhian directness: “Not only have I not succeeded in having temples opened in Ahmedabad but I have not succeeded in having temples opened even in Wardha after my having established myself there. And what is even more damaging to my reputation is that I have not succeeded in having the only two caste temples in Segaon opened to the Harijans of the little village.”

Six months later Gandhi calls a meeting in Segaon to scold the villagers. He has two complaints. One is that they’ve shirked an obligation they’ve freely undertaken to supply labor and rocks for a road between his quarters on the outskirts and the village itself, which would connect to a wider road being put through to the town of Wardha. The other involves the old business of sanitation. Gandhi and his co-workers, it seems, are no longer scooping up the village’s turds, perhaps because doing so inevitably renders them untouchable in the villagers’ eyes and thus makes it harder for them to be accepted. In what appears to be a tactical retreat, therefore, the ashram has actually hired a scavenger for the village. Still the villagers don’t cooperate. They continue to defecate along the lanes and refuse to hire out their carts for the removal of human manure.

I am told that you are indifferent to all that is happening,” the Mahatma says. “I cannot make your village neat and clean and sweet-smelling without your cooperation. We have engaged a scavenger here. We pay for his service, but it is for you to keep your streets and lanes clean … Nowhere do we come across such apathy.”

Gandhi has just returned from an interlude in Gujarat. From there he’d written to a co-worker in Segaon apologizing for his “failure” to spend more time in the village. He has other jobs, he pointed out. By speaking of failure, he said, he didn’t “mean that we have not been able to do anything at all. But whatever we have done cannot be said to be of much value.” The next day he wrote again, telling one correspondent that his “real work” is still in Segaon and another, “My heart is there.” These are reminiscent of letters, long years before, from the Transvaal to the Phoenix Settlement explaining his long absences.

Mahadev Desai sums up the situation in 1940, four years after Gandhi’s arrival in Segaon-Sevagram. “There is a hiatus between the villagers and us,” he acknowledges. “There is yet no living link between us … [We have] not succeeded in coming down to their level and becoming one with them.”

By then, various realities have come crashing in on Gandhi. Village reality is one, but also there are the unresolved political issues between Muslims and Hindus and the looming involvement of the colonial power in another world war. Gandhi never loses faith in the central importance of his “constructive program.” In his writings and pronouncements, he campaigns for its principles until the day of his death. But one by one, he has been forced to recognize that he has been checked on the causes he’d singled out as “pillars” of swaraj. Mainly these were Hindu-Muslim unity, the struggle against untouchability, and village industries as symbolized by the spinning wheel, each an ideal he brought home to India with him, shaped in large measure by his experience on another subcontinent.

On Hindu-Muslim unity he’d acknowledged feeling “helpless” as early as 1926. Eleven years later he repeats the word in a note to Jinnah: “I am utterly helpless. My faith in unity is as bright as ever; only I see no daylight out of the impenetrable darkness and, in such distress, I cry out to God for light.”

On untouchability, he writes after the end of his tour in 1934, “Unfortunately the higher castes have failed to identify themselves with their humbler fellows … I have no excuse to offer.”

On village work, he’s forced to acknowledge his failure to recruit the corps of self-sacrificing satyagrahis he’d counted on dispatching to the 700,000 villages. He even has doubts about the dozens drawn to his immediate ambit at Sevagram. Here too he speaks of feeling “helpless.” He cannot prevent the place from becoming a magnet for persons of uncertain dedication—in Mirabehn’s words, “a strange medley of various kinds of cranky people.” Sizing them up, the Mahatma himself says, “Quite a few are only temporary inhabitants and none of them will stay on after my death.” In 1940 he makes one of his service organizations, the Gandhi Seva Sangh, commit “hari-kari” because it has attracted unprincipled timeservers and job seekers. Five years later he acknowledges that the All India Village Industries Association, which he had started with such high hopes in 1934, didn’t “show the results it might have.”

Whatever I do is for the poor,” Gandhi finally said with the same unflinching honesty, “but today I am unable to prove it in Sevagram.” As late as 1945, he’s still pondering plans to draw volunteers to Sevagram to give the village a good cleanup—a clear sign that a decade of Gandhian ministrations has failed to persuade the villagers to do it for themselves.

It’s not difficult to feel sorry for the Gandhi who carries on in his last decade after having been forced to acknowledge that many of his most cherished values and programs have not taken root, the Gandhi who recognizes a decade before it comes to pass that swaraj was now more likely to come as a result of a war that would exhaust the colonial power than as a “solid awakening” by a united people who’d achieved self-mastery. “Any extraneous event may put power into our hands,” he observed in 1937. “I would not call that swaraj of the people.”

It can also be argued that the aging Gandhi, carrying on in the face of such profound disappointments, is as true to himself as he had ever been when he allowed himself to imagine that India could be talked into a social transformation. Seldom does he give in to the politician’s usual temptation to blithely sweep away any sense of letdown, to proclaim victory at every juncture. This unsatisfied Gandhi, the one who doesn’t know how to pretend, is the one who still makes a claim on Indian social conscience, such as it is.

We cannot command results,” he said. “We can only strive.” It’s in these years that he had to recognize that the movement that held his image aloft was now marching on without him. “Let no one say that he is a follower of Gandhi,” he then said. “It is enough that I should be my own follower.”

It’s also at this time that he’s finally reunited with the dearest of his early followers, Hermann Kallenbach. The Litvak architect from Johannesburg by way of East Prussia, who’d been barred from India and then interned by the British as an enemy alien after the outbreak of World War I, finally lands in Bombay in May 1937. He’d eventually been repatriated to Germany in a prisoner exchange. Adrift there after the armistice, he didn’t complete his interrupted journey to Gujarat and Gandhi but found his way back to Joburg instead, where he soon reestablished himself in the comfortable life of a big-time property developer that Gandhi had earlier persuaded him to give up.

Years passed, but the Mahatma never quite let go of his dream of having his old Jewish housemate again at his side, running his Indian ashrams the way he’d run Tolstoy Farm. When they resumed correspondence after the war, they were still Lower House and Upper House. “How I should love to hug you and see you face to face and have you by me during my travels!” Upper House wrote in 1921, when he was already the undisputed leader of the Indian national movement. Twelve years later, writing from South India in the midst of his crusade against untouchability, he still sounds ardent. “You are always before my mind’s eye,” he tells Lower House. “When are you coming?” These letters offer a glimpse of a loneliness Mahatma Gandhi continued to feel even in the midst of his ashrams, his inner circle of dedicated attendants and followers, and the huge throngs drawn to his public appearances. Maybe that’s what Pyarelal is getting at when, later, he’s moved to write in his diary, “There is something frightening in Bapu’s utter spiritual isolation.”

The moment of reunion between the Joburg architect and India’s leader was captured by Mahadev Desai in Harijan. Kallenbach lingered in Bombay only long enough to pick up an ample khadi wardrobe, then caught a train up the coast that stopped not far from a Gujarati village near the shore where Gandhi was taking a respite from Segaon. He arrived before dawn during morning prayers. “After how many years?” Gandhi asked when prayers were done. Kallenbach bowed at his feet. “Twenty-three,” he said as they embraced. “With childish delight,” according to Mahadev, Gandhi lifted up a lantern to examine his long-lost friend’s features, then pulled at his hair. “So the hair has all turned gray,” he said.

Upper House then asked whether Lower House had sailed in first or second class. It was a test to see how far he had lapsed back into his old materialist ways. “Tourist class,” the visitor said. “I knew that would be the first question you would ask me.”

Kallenbach wore a dhoti, sometimes went bare chested like his host, slept under the stars near Gandhi. It was almost as if twenty-three years had disappeared, he wrote to his brother. He’s “just like one of us,” said a gratified Gandhi. It doesn’t seem, however, that the architect was seriously tempted by the old idea of shutting down his practice and moving to the ashram. What’s clear is that his trip had a purpose beyond reconnecting with his old friend; he had a mission. He’d been recruited to make the case for the Zionist cause in Palestine to the Indian leader.

 

Gandhi and Kallenbach reunited, June 1937 (photo credit i10.2)

 

The impetus came from the head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency in Palestine. Under the British mandate, the agency was the de facto government for the small but growing community of Jewish settlers; the Political Department functioned as its foreign ministry. Its head was Moshe Shertok, who, as Moshe Sharett, would become Israel’s second prime minister, succeeding David Ben-Gurion. Shertok, seeking a connection to “the greatest of living Hindus,” had learned of Kallenbach’s existence from a recent visitor to South Africa. Instantly, it seems, he wrote a long letter to the architect. “There are few people whom circumstances have placed in a position enabling them to render service of an extraordinary character,” the letter said. “I am advised and believe that you are at the present moment such a person … You are in a unique position to help Zionism in a field where the resources of the Jewish people are so meager as to be practically non-existent.”

Kallenbach signed on. Two months before arriving in Bombay, he met Shertok in London and also Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist movement and future first president of Israel. Then he stopped in Palestine, where he was particularly impressed by the early kibbutzim, which reminded him, with their emphasis on hand labor and simple living, of the values Gandhi had inculcated at Tolstoy Farm. (After his death in Johannesburg in 1945, his ashes would be buried at Kibbutz Degania on the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s oldest kibbutz, where Tolstoy’s influence on the first settlers had been especially marked.) There is no sign that Lower House mentioned his briefings by prominent Zionists to Upper House. But he can hardly be said to have been acting undercover; he’d been openly a Zionist since the days when they lived together in Joburg, when he alternately studied Hebrew and Hindi as he tried to decide whether he’d be moving to Palestine or India.

Now, in the month they had together in 1937, Gandhi eagerly entered into a discussion of the rights and wrongs of Arab-Jewish strife in Palestine. He’d had a firm position on the subject since 1921, at the high tide of the Khilafat movement. Basically, his position was that Indian Hindus ought to support their seventy million Muslim brethren on what was for them an issue of religious principle. His friend urged him to pay sympathetic attention to the Zionist side of the argument. Gandhi promised he would. Kallenbach then had the Jewish Agency furnish the Mahatma with a twenty-five-page essay on the historic, spiritual, and political underpinnings of Zionism, prepared especially for him. “The sender’s name is not given,” Gandhi noted, but he found the piece “very impressive, deeply interesting.” So impressive that he was moved to consider proposing an effort to mediate between Arabs and Jews under his supervision, with Hermann Kallenbach, now back in Johannesburg, as his lead mediator. “I quite clearly see that if you are to play any part in bringing about an honorable settlement,” Gandhi writes the architect, “your place is in India.” Apparently concerned that his friend might suspect that pressure was being applied for personal reasons, Gandhi adds: “All this I say irrespective of the domestic arrangement between us.” Gandhi himself seems as ardent as ever. His wishes are unambiguous, but with what seems an effort, he practices restraint. “I must not force the pace,” he writes to his friend in Joburg a half year later. “You must come in your own good time.”

After Kallenbach’s return to South Africa, Gandhi had turned his hand to distilling his view of the problem in a draft he sends on to his Zionist friend for his approval. “In my opinion the Jews should disclaim any intention of realizing their aspiration under the protection of arms and should rely wholly on the goodwill of Arabs. No exception can possibly be taken to the natural desire of the Jews to found a home in Palestine. But they must wait for its fulfillment till Arab opinion is ripe for it.” Gandhi basically wants the Jews to become satyagrahis, the Arabs too. Kallenbach, half won over, sends the draft on to Chaim Weizmann. It’s never published.

His offer to mediate in Palestine is just a beginning. At a time when the Mahatma feels increasingly stymied in his efforts to reform India, he becomes increasingly inclined to issue encyclicals on international problems. Obviously, his frustration at home is not the only reason for his readiness to speak out. The world is hurtling toward catastrophe, and as the appointed keeper of the doctrine of nonviolence he feels a responsibility to make himself heard. A series of moral pronouncements flows from his humble quarters near Segaon. In all, they are a mixed bag, full of trenchant moral insights, desperate appeals, and self-deluding simplicities. A subsequent statement on Palestine draws an anguished rebuke from the theologian Martin Buber, a refugee from Hitler who has become prominent in the earliest version of a Jewish peace movement. Buber writes that he “has long known and honored” Gandhi’s voice, but what he hears on Palestine he finds “barren of all application to his circumstances.” He then goes on to dissect a pronouncement of the Mahatma’s on German Jews. Gandhi has prescribed satyagraha as the answer to Nazi barbarism. He has found “an exact parallel” between the plight of the Jews under Hitler and that of the Indians in his time in South Africa. Buber tells Gandhi he lived under Nazi rule before becoming a refugee and saw Jewish attempts at nonviolent resistance. The result was “ineffective, unobserved martyrdom, a martyrdom cast to the winds.”

There’s reason to believe that Buber’s letter, dispatched to Segaon from Jerusalem in March 1939, never reached Gandhi. In any case, by then the Mahatma had already left a distressing trail of futile, well-intentioned missives. He’d written to the Czechs on the uses of satyagraha to combat storm troopers and to the viceroy, offering to mediate between Hitler and his Western prey, including Britain. Within several months, he’d write the first of two letters to the führer himself. “Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?” he asked rhetorically, in a desperate, naive mix of humility and ego. The British, who monitored his mail, made sure the letter went nowhere. The letter to Hitler began with the salutation “My friend.” Hitler had already indicated what he thought of the Mahatma and his nonviolence. “All you have to do is to shoot Gandhi,” he advised a British minister.

Eventually, after the outbreak of war and his own final imprisonment, Gandhi would write to Churchill offering his services in the cause of peace. “I can’t imagine anyone with Gandhi’s reputation writing so stupid a letter,” a new viceroy, Lord Wavell, confides to his diary after intercepting it.

Unrealistic, self-regarding, and dubious in their reasoning as most of these letters were, Gandhi’s basic understanding of Churchill’s “gathering storm” wasn’t always unfocused. “If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified,” he wrote. “But I do not believe in any war.”

The onetime sergeant major had volunteered as a noncombatant in the Boer and Zulu wars. He’d offered to serve as the “recruiting agent-in-chief” for the viceroy at the end of the previous world war, even inscribing himself as a candidate for enlistment at the age of fifty. Now, for the first time, he was striking a truly pacifist stance. This can only be understood in the Indian context. The looming issue was whether the national movement could barter its support for the war effort in exchange for a reliable promise of freedom. Put another way—in the way most Indian nationalists at the time understood it—the pivotal issue was whether India could be asked to fight for the freedom of the colonial power when the colonial power’s commitment to India’s freedom was still uncertain. Gandhi’s dogmatic pronouncements on the application of satyagraha to the Jewish-Arab conflict and the menace of Nazi Germany can best be interpreted as trial runs for the penultimate chapter of the Indian struggle. It was as if he sensed that he’d be called back one last time from Segaon to lead his movement, and that this time he might have to put aside whatever lingering loyalty he might still have felt to the British.

However, when Britain finally entered the war, following the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Gandhi’s immediate instinct was to tell the viceroy that he viewed the struggle with “an English heart.” This viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, had proclaimed India’s entry into the war the previous day without consulting any Indian. Summoned to the Viceregal Lodge in Simla, Gandhi had offered no protest, not even a mild complaint, over this stunning oversight—stemming from habitual presumption and a calculated refusal to negotiate—that would soon ignite a prolonged struggle between the colonial authority and the Indian national movement. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, but only after much wavering, Gandhi would again take on the mantle of leadership to set out the strategy for that confrontation. It would pit him against the British at the height of the war. But in Simla the day after the viceroy’s declaration, under the illusion that he had established a warm personal tie to Linlithgow—not unlike what he sentimentally imagined his tie to Smuts to have been a quarter of a century earlier in South Africa—Gandhi by his own testimony “broke down,” shedding tears as he pictured the destruction of the houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and the heart of London. “I am in perpetual quarrel with God that he should allow such things to go on,” he wrote the next day. “My nonviolence seems almost impotent.”