THE CASTE SYSTEM SUPPORTED by Gandhiji is the reason for the plight of Dalits today. Gandhi was not for the Dalits but against them. He insulted Dalits by calling them Harijans.” Among India’s ex-untouchables, this wasn’t a heretical or even an unconventional judgment when voiced in the early 1990s by an aspiring politician named Mayawati who later rose to be chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state on the Gangetic plain with a population larger than Russia’s by a margin of fifty million; among upwardly mobile Dalits, it was the received wisdom. Mayawati then developed national aspirations that made it necessary for her to soften somewhat her estimate of the Father of the Nation. But the idea that Gandhi was an “enemy” of the most oppressed and deprived of India’s poor—the very people to whom he’d professed to have dedicated his life, in whose image he’d deliberately remade his own—lingers in the small galaxy of Dalit Web sites in cyberspace. It’s, after all, traceable directly to Babasaheb Ambedkar, who, in one of his less measured pronouncements, branded Gandhi “the number one enemy” of the untouchables. In the heat of controversy, it’s usually forgotten that the mercurial Ambedkar also called Gandhi “India’s greatest man.”
In ongoing debates about Gandhi’s attitude to untouchables and caste, it’s never difficult to quote the Mahatma against himself. Over half a century he wrote and spoke on the subject with deep conviction, in most instances anyway, but his tactics needed readjusting in different places, at different times. Decades after encouraging intercaste and intercommunal dining at the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, or among field workers in his early Indian campaigns such as in the Champaran district of Bihar, he told caste-obsessed audiences in South India, where he was seeking to open minds on the untouchability question, that intercaste dining was a matter of private choice, a personal issue. Before such audiences, he was even more chary about discussing intercaste marriage. Without putting it quite so crassly, he all but assured high-caste Hindus that they could give up the wicked practice of untouchability without ever having to worry about their daughters marrying beneath themselves in the caste system, let alone marrying untouchables. Yet the same Gandhi, in defiance of orthodox Hindus, finally decreed that only intercaste marriages could be performed at his ashram. Eventually he concluded that intercaste marriage wasn’t merely permissible but possibly the solution since it would tend to produce “only one caste, known by the beautiful name Bhangi.” Considering that a Bhangi, or sweeper, is sometimes despised even by other untouchables, it was a radical thought. (One that remains radical, a lifetime later, in an India in which three fourths of those approached in opinion surveys still voice disapproval of intercaste unions, and where that disapproval not infrequently gets expressed in so-called honor killings of daughters and sisters who stray.)
When Ambedkar unsettled many of his followers by taking a Brahman wife after independence and Gandhi’s death, his fellow cabinet member Vallabhbhai Patel wrote him a congratulatory letter noting kindly, or maybe pointedly, that the leader whose sincerity he’d so fiercely questioned would have been pleased. “I agree that Bapu, if he had been alive, would have blessed the marriage,” a more mellow Ambedkar wrote back.
To say that Gandhi wasn’t absolutely consistent isn’t to convict him of hypocrisy; it’s to acknowledge that he was a political leader preoccupied with the task of building a nation, or sometimes just holding it together. This is never clearer than in a reply he sent to his soul mate Charlie Andrews, the Anglican priest he first encountered at the end of his stay in South Africa. Andrews, who regularly functioned as Gandhi’s personal emissary in England and farther-flung parts of the empire, had urged him to concentrate all his efforts on his fight against untouchability, even if that meant stepping back from the independence movement. “My life is one indivisible whole,” Gandhi wrote back. And so were his causes and concerns, listed in the letter to Andrews as “satyagraha, civil resistance, untouchability, Hindu-Muslim unity”—plus, he might have said, assorted add-ons such as diet, prohibition, spinning, hygiene, sanitation, education through vernacular languages, and women’s rights, including the right of widows to remarry and the abolition of child marriage—all “indivisible parts of a whole which is truth.” And if they were all thought of as one, Gandhi went on in direct reply to the plea from Andrews:
I can’t devote myself entirely to untouchability and say, “Neglect Hindu-Muslim unity or swaraj.” All these things run into one another and are interdependent. You will find at one time in my life an emphasis on one thing, at another time on [an]other. But that is just like a pianist, now emphasizing one note and now [an]other.
In this case, the pianist also sees himself as composer and conductor. “Full and final removal of untouchability,” he now says, “is utterly impossible without swaraj.” This from the man who as early as 1921 had described “the removal of untouchability as an indispensable condition of the attainment of swaraj.” It’s hard not to view this as a reversal or contradiction. But for the pianist himself, it was just a variation on a theme, a matter of emphasizing now one note and now another. His friend Andrews should have recognized it as such. The man he addressed familiarly as Mohan had long ago warned him, as we’ve seen, that English domination would probably have to end before India could “become free of the curse of untouchability.” That was also back in 1921, so this particular contradiction could hardly be described as newly minted; if anything, it was closer to being a constant feature of his effort to keep India on the path he’d tried to chart. In Gandhi’s view, the fact that his best efforts had put an end to neither English domination nor untouchability by 1933 seemed only to strengthen his conviction that these struggles were indivisible parts of a whole. So if he now decided to concentrate on untouchability, he wasn’t backing off from the swaraj struggle as Andrews urged and Nehru feared. By his own lights, he was plunging in again.
Still, this time around his agenda had been shaped by others: first Ambedkar, the seemingly irreconcilable untouchable leader, with his demand for separate electorates for the fifty million or so members of the officially designated “depressed classes” he claimed to represent; and then Ramsay MacDonald, the onetime sympathizer with the Indian national struggle now fronting for what was basically a Tory government set on preserving imperial rule. The Round Table Conference had ended with a promise by the British prime minister to devise the compromise formula for elections on the subcontinent—the Communal Award, it was called—that the various Indian communal groups and parties had failed to hammer out among themselves. When finally handed down from Whitehall in August 1932, the award put the royal seal of approval on Ambedkar’s demand. In the future, untouchables, like Muslims, would get to elect their own representatives to all Indian legislative bodies; eventually, if the award stood, Gandhi’s claim that he and the Congress movement were their real representatives would be put to the severest possible test. Increasingly, the Congress might then be seen not as the national movement but as a loose coalition of Hindus desperate to preserve its majority. This was the outcome—the kind of “special representation” for untouchables—that Gandhi, now sixty-three, had vowed at the conference to “resist with my life” for the high-principled reason that it would tend to institutionalize, and thus perpetuate, untouchability, a status he’d sometimes compared to slavery as he had the indenture system in South Africa.
MacDonald’s Communal Award specified that the separate electorate for untouchables would be phased out after twenty years. This might have been intended as a small concession to Gandhi; the arrangement would not be perpetual. In any case, Gandhi was once again sidelined. By the time the award came down, he’d been securely under wraps in Yeravda prison near Poona for seven and a half months, immobilized there, or so the British thought, even though Gandhi had written from prison as early as March to the secretary of state for India, Sir Samuel Hoare, to give fair warning that the vow he’d voiced in London was “not said in the heat of the moment nor by way of rhetoric.” If a decision were now taken to create separate electorates for the so-called depressed classes, the letter said, “I must fast unto death.” Gandhi assumed but wasn’t sure that his warning had been conveyed to MacDonald; after five months, it still hadn’t leaked into the public sphere.
India and the world didn’t learn of Gandhi’s intention to put his life on the line over the narrow issue of untouchable representation until a week before the date he’d set for the start of his fast. The news broke with the release, finally, in London of his letter to Hoare and a subsequent one to MacDonald that set the date for September 20. His jailers soon discovered that, once again, they’d underestimated the Mahatma’s ingenuity and determination. His ability to act forcefully and work his will from inside Yeravda’s thick walls bears comparison to Harry Houdini’s escapes from a padlocked and submerged trunk, only the agility involved here was strictly mental and psychological. Few wondered whether his threat to “fast unto death” unless the award was withdrawn was a trick. The Times of India, a Bombay newspaper edited and written by British journalists in that era, headlined Gandhi’s “Suicide Threat” and wrote editorially that he’d now shown himself to be “prepared to go to any length that fanaticism may dictate.”
The Mahatma had limited privileges as a prisoner: he was allowed to receive visitors and carry on his vast correspondence as long as he steered clear of overt politics; he was capable of dictating fifty letters a day, as if Yeravda were just the latest of his ashrams. Once his fast was accepted by the prison authorities as unavoidable, the restrictions were loosened further so he could take part in political negotiations. So the prisoner, though out of sight, was back onstage as an actor. In no time, he’d provoked a huge crisis for the British, his supporters, and, not least of all, Dr. Ambedkar; a national and international commotion; a storm of anxiety and soul-searching, political maneuvering and forced retreats, all unfolding according to his script. The central issue may have involved nuts-and-bolts politics—the sharing of power with a hopelessly powerless group—but Gandhi found a way to explain his stand in religious terms. Once again he saw himself in a struggle for the souls of Hindus and for an enlightened, egalitarian Hinduism he still hoped to promote as a substitute for a hierarchical, oppressive religious order, which he saw clearly enough even as he sought to infiltrate it from the inside.
To underline what he deemed to be the religious nature of his stand, Gandhi had deliberately responded to only the part of Ramsay MacDonald’s award dealing with untouchables, saying nothing about the distribution of seats, the voting rights of Muslims, and other controversial points on which he opposed the decision. Those points were merely political, he explained to his secretary, Mahadev Desai, who was with him at Yeravda. Mahadev had argued that there was a broader political case that needed to be made before India and the world if the fast were to be understood and accepted, that Gandhi needed to deal with more than untouchables in his letter to the prime minister. Gandhi got the point but was unmoved. “Our own men will be critical. Jawaharlal will not like it at all. He will say that we have had enough of such religion,” he acknowledged. “But that does not matter. When I am going to wield a most powerful weapon in my spiritual armory, misinterpretation and the like may never act as a check.” A few days later he said, “It is for me a religious question and not a political question.”
Retreating into the religious realm is the Mahatma’s way of ringing down the curtain on debate, of announcing he has heard the inner voice that vouchsafes the “truth” on which he relies. Months earlier at Yeravda, after dispatching the first warning to the secretary of state for India, he’d cut off a discussion of the possible political fallout from a fast by drawing this same line. “What if I am taken for a madman and die? That would be the end of my mahatmaship if it is false and undeserved,” he’d said then. “I should be concerned only with my duty as a man of religion.”
The principles on which he bases his distinction between the religious and the political when it comes to untouchable voting rights may be inaccessible to a secular Westerner living outside India in the seventh decade of its independence. But for the sake of discussion, it’s worth attempting a deeper look. On the surface, the Mahatma’s explanation to Mahadev and to his other fellow jailbird, the tough political operative Vallabhbhai Patel, has more to do with his own sense of what he can accomplish as a leader than with any principles on which all Hindus are likely to agree. He says once again that he feels “helpless” on the Muslim question, that, therefore, it will have to be dealt with politically later. With caste Hindus, he believes, he still has the option of resorting to shock therapy on the untouchability question. “Sudden shock is the treatment required,” he tells Mahadev and Patel.
If he fails, he foresees “bloodshed” across India between untouchables and caste Hindus. What’s surprising in this lurid vision—and perhaps more than a little revealing—is that it’s not the downtrodden untouchable whom he sees in this instance as the passive victims of such anarchic conflict. What he imagines, in this one instance anyway, is an uprising from below in which caste Hindus become the victims. “Untouchable hooligans will make common cause with Muslim hooligans and kill caste Hindus,” he gloomily predicts. Gandhi was sometimes accused by Jinnah, Ambedkar, and others of siding instinctively with his own. Here, if only in a single uncharacteristic sentence, he convicts himself. The essence of his religious duty, it seems, is saving caste Hindus from themselves and the retribution that awaits them if they don’t embrace his prescriptions for reform. Usually, his forebodings are more firmly rooted in the lopsided sociology of Indian villages where the traditional victims would be the probable victims of mob violence. “What does MacDonald know of the ‘unapproachables’ and the ‘invisibles’ in the villages of Gujarat?” he asks Mahadev in such a moment. “They would be crushed.”
His urgent sense of mission makes it possible for him to brush off his own strictures at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha, eight years earlier, against fasting as a weapon to soften the hearts of “touchable” caste Hindus on untouchability in general and temple entry in particular. Then he thought temple entry for untouchables should be a local issue; now, suddenly, he’s about to make it an urgent national issue; and fasting unto death—a coercive weapon by any measure—is now a religious duty laid on the leader who’d argued, when it served his purposes, that fasting that compels someone to yield “not because he sees the error of his ways but because he cannot bear to see the death of a person who in his opinion perversely chooses to die … [was] the worst form of coercion which militates against the fundamental principles of satyagraha.” This time he calls it a “penance,” meaning that he was undertaking “self-suffering” for the sins of caste Hindus. But Ambedkar—and, to a lesser extent, the British—could only experience the fast as a form of compulsion.
In simplest terms, a method that could be classed as immoral when pursued by others was a religious obligation when undertaken by himself.
William L. Shirer, the youthful correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who’d already made a career of interpreting Gandhi, pronounced himself “baffled” by the Mahatma’s willingness to die in order to deny the untouchables assured seats in provincial legislatures. “I would have expected Gandhi to support this necessary safeguard for his beloved untouchables,” the journalist later wrote. From Vienna, he sent Gandhi a cable asking for an explanation. “You must not be startled by my presuming to know the interests of the depressed classes more than its leaders,” Gandhi cabled back in mid-fast. “Though I am not untouchable by birth, for the past fifty years I have been untouchable by choice.” (Gandhi’s camp, it seems, leaked the exchange to The Times of London before Shirer had a chance to file on it, a sign of how far ahead of his time he was in his aptitude for manipulating the press.)
The American journalist’s incomprehension was understandable. Even today, it’s not easy to sort out Gandhi’s motives. Pyarelal, his confidant and eventual biographer, makes it plain that narrow political calculations were not entirely foreign to what he’d soon glorify as “the Epic Fast.” In his book of that title, he writes, “With the Hindus and Musalmans struggling to maintain balance of power and the Sikh claim thrown in between, to accommodate the Depressed Class’s demand was a mathematical impossibility.” There’s only one way to understand Pyarelal. “Mathematical” has to do with the number of seats that could conceivably be subtracted from the Congress total under the formula allowing separate electorates for untouchables. It’s a point Gandhi never touched on in his letters and public statements except to dismiss it. “Do not believe for one moment that I am interested in the numerical strength of Hindus,” he said. But Vallabhbhai Patel regularly speculated on the ways separate electorates could be manipulated by the British to the disadvantage of the Congress. “There is a deep conspiracy in this,” he said of the Communal Award. Patel’s calculations added up to the political argument Gandhi forswore, but it wasn’t an argument for putting his leader’s life on the line. In fact, Patel’s only reason for supporting the fast was that he knew how hopeless it would be to quarrel with Gandhi’s “still small voice.” On his own, he couldn’t fashion an argument for the fast unto death.
The Mahatma’s own thought process isn’t easily traced, but clearly it starts with his vow in London to resist Ambedkar’s call for separate electorates with his life, even if he was the last opponent remaining. In London he had opposed not just separate electorates but any “special arrangements” for untouchables, even for a period of limited duration. Yet on the eve of the fast, with feverish negotiations in search of a compromise that would save his life already under way, he let it be known that he could accept reserved seats for untouchables as long as the general electorate was allowed to choose among a slate of untouchable candidates in the districts “reserved” for them. The choice of these candidates would be left up to untouchable voters in these districts in a kind of a primary; thus the “separate electorate” would exist for one round, to be replaced by a “joint electorate” in the general election. This was close to Ambedkar’s original position, which had once been unacceptable to the Congress. So now, suddenly, the Mahatma was offering his life to block not “special arrangements” for untouchables but merely one particular kind of special arrangement, separate electorates in a general election. With joint electorates—untouchables voting along with everyone else in the “reserved” districts—the Congress would remain in a strong position to elect its own untouchables, even in cases where it failed to secure the support of most untouchable voters. But if Gandhi could now accept an election law that perpetuated the special status of untouchables, in effect recognizing them as an oppressed minority, despite the arguments he’d raised in London, what could be his justification for his fast? What made it a religious penance? Was securing a narrow political advantage by heading off separate electorates a cause worth dying for? Could that plausibly be singled out as the goal?
It wasn’t an argument Gandhi could comfortably make to himself, let alone to the country at large. The fight against separate electorates could be justified only if it were part of a larger reformation of Hindu values and society, the one on which Gandhi had been insisting practically since his return from South Africa. Still, the Mahatma waited until the very eve of his fast before springing this huge, additional condition on his supporters. “He would not be satisfied by a mere political agreement between caste Hindus and the Depressed Classes,” according to a summary of his remarks made at the time. “He wanted untouchability to go once [and] for all.” Very quickly, then, a fast against a special voting advantage for untouchables had to be reinterpreted and promoted as a fast against untouchability itself. This is what made it a religious duty in Gandhi’s eyes, a penance.
While negotiations continued and Gandhi’s followers geared up a new offensive against caste oppression, the Mahatma himself spent the eve of his fast dictating farewell letters. As always when he prepared himself for a large undertaking, his thoughts drifted back to South Africa and Hermann Kallenbach, whom he’d last seen in London seventeen years earlier. “If God has more work to take from this body it will survive the fiery ordeal,” he wrote to Kallenbach in a note that hovered melodramatically between farewell and au revoir. “Then you must try some early day to come and meet. Otherwise good-bye and much love.”
The appeal to the country was hardly raised before a reply was heard, one that seemed at first resounding. At temples across India caste Hindus who had hitherto barred untouchables suddenly proclaimed their eagerness to welcome and embrace their previously outcaste brethren—whom Gandhi was trying to re-brand as Harijans—if that’s what it would take to keep their Mahatma alive. Temple openings were presented as a kind of security deposit, as proof of a new spirit of generosity and civic-mindedness on the part of caste Hindus. So here we have a double paradox: Gandhi, who’d opposed the use of fasts on temple-entry issues at Vaikom, was now ready to seize on temple openings as proof of the efficacy of his own fast against the Communal Award, which had been transmuted at the hands of this master political alchemist and dramaturge into a fast against untouchability. What’s clearer than his deeply intuitive thought process is the instant impact his decision had. Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who’d stood against his call for bonfires of foreign cloth, instantly seized on the urgency of what he termed Gandhi’s “ultimatum” to the Hindu majority.
“If we cheaply dismiss [the fast] with some ceremonials to which we are accustomed and allow the noble life to be wasted with its great meaning missed,” the poet declaimed on its first day, “then our people will passively roll down the slope of degradation to the blankness of utter futility.” Seventy years old and ailing, Tagore then rushed by train across the subcontinent to be at Gandhi’s side in the prison near Poona. “Whole country profoundly stirred by Mahatmaji’s penance,” he cabled to a friend in London. “Sweeping reforms proceeding apace.” How sweeping they were on a village-to-village basis remained to be seen. Decades later it was not unheard of for untouchable women in villages to be assaulted for wearing metal bangles and rings or new saris in bright colors, adornments that could be read as offensively assertive, as denials of their abject status; landlessness, indebtedness, and forced labor remained extreme. There’s no sure way of measuring how many caste Hindu minds were profoundly affected and changed to some degree by Gandhi’s fast and subsequent crusade against untouchability; many millions might be a reasonable guess, but in India, where a million is a fraction of a percentage point, many millions could fall far short of the wholesale reformation he sought.
Tagore arrived at Gandhi’s bedside on the seventh and last day of the fast. Escorted into an isolated courtyard between two prison blocks, he found Gandhi curled up on a simple stringed cot, a charpoy, “under the shade of a young mango tree.” It was there on the fourth evening of the fast that Dr. Ambedkar had been brought to the bedside of the Mahatma, who appeared to be already much weakened, for the final stage of negotiations on what came to be known as the Poona Pact.
“Mahatmaji, you have been very unfair to us,” the untouchable leader began.
“It is always my lot to appear to be unfair. I cannot help it,” said Gandhi.
Soon they were into the “mathematical” details as they bore on legislative seats. “I want my compensation,” Ambedkar was heard to say. Presumably, he meant payback in seats for giving up the separate electorates. Untouchables, now powerless, needed political power, he said. Gandhi was flexible on seats but a stickler on the timing of a referendum to be held in five or ten years. “Five years or my life,” the prostrate but still hard-bargaining Mahatma said, seeming to give way to irritation at their next encounter, much like a Bania haggling over the price of a bolt of cloth. The issue was negotiated away. The final accord provided for joint electorates, reserved seats, and a referendum to be scheduled later, which proved to be never; in fact, Ambedkar had won nearly twice as many reserved seats in his negotiation with Gandhi as he’d been promised in Ramsay MacDonald’s proposed award. “You have my fullest sympathy. I am with you in most things you say,” the Mahatma had assured the untouchable leader at the outset. Now, it seemed to Ambedkar, he’d delivered.
“I have only one quarrel with you,” Ambedkar had replied, according to Mahadev’s diary. “That is you work for the so-called national welfare and not for our interests alone. If you devoted yourself entirely to the welfare of the Depressed Classes, you would become our hero.” That response may be the closest Ambedkar ever came to seeing Gandhi whole, as the stalwart of the national ideal. The exchange also anticipates the appeal Andrews was about to make in one of his “Dear Mohan” letters that Gandhi focus all his energies on the fight against untouchability. Without giving Ambedkar a direct answer, the fasting Mahatma managed to have the last word. “I am,” he said, “an untouchable by adoption, and as such more of an untouchable in mind than you … I cannot stand the idea that your community should either in theory or practice be separated from me. We must be one and indivisible.”
Whether the contest between Ambedkar and Gandhi is seen as fundamentally a test of principles or wills, the Mahatma’s elevation of the fast into what appeared, for the moment at least, to be his final do-or-die campaign had already produced some astonishing results. First there were the telegrams pouring in from all over the subcontinent proclaiming the opening of Hindu temples—some celebrated and revered, many obscure, some that would later turn out to have been nonexistent—to Gandhi’s Harijans. Then an emergency conference of caste Hindus hastily assembled in Bombay drafted a manifesto formally calling for equal access for untouchables to all public facilities—not just temples, but also roads, schools, and wells. “No one shall be regarded as an ‘untouchable’ by reasons of birth,” it proclaimed. A parallel gathering of high-caste Bombay women resolved that the barriers faced by untouchables “shall not continue a day longer.” Suddenly it became fashionable in various cities, in what proved to be a brief season of grace and loving kindness, for Brahmans to demonstrate their good intentions by dining with untouchables. At Benares Hindu University, a center of orthodoxy, sweepers and cobblers were invited to dinner. Branches of a newly formed Anti-untouchability League—later renamed the Harijan Sevak Sangh, or Harijan Service Society—were springing up all over; funds were collected to launch its programs of uplift. Even Nehru, who acknowledged that he’d initially been put off by Gandhi’s “choosing a side issue for his final sacrifice,” was bowled over by the result. “What a magician,” he wrote, “was this little man sitting in Yeravda Prison, and how well he knew how to pull the strings that move people’s hearts!”
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 seeming 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.
His commitment was at once a moral obligation and a compromise, an evangelical crusade and a tactical retreat. To many of his followers, it meant he was putting the national movement on hold. To Gandhi himself, it must have seemed the only way forward. His secretary, Mahadev, was in jail. So were Nehru, Patel, Kasturba, even Mirabehn, among thousands of other Congress supporters. His arduous anti-untouchability crusade may have been inadequate in its preparation and follow-up; there may be little proof that it left an enduring impression on the psyches of caste Hindus who turned out by the tens of thousands to hear him (or at least see him).
Ambedkar seldom took note of it; Dalits today don’t celebrate it; Gandhi biographers pass over it in a few paragraphs. Yet, hurried and improvised as it undoubtedly was, there’s really nothing in Indian annals to which it can be compared. From November 1933 through early August 1934, a period of nine months, Mahatma Gandhi barnstormed strenuously against untouchability from province to province, one dusty town to the next, through the hot season and the rainy season, sometimes on foot from village to village, giving three, four, five speeches a day—six days a week, omitting only Mondays, his “silent day”—mostly to mammoth crowds, drawn by the man rather than his cause. In that time, he traveled more than 12,500 miles by rail, car, and foot, collecting more than 800,000 rupees (equivalent in today’s dollars to about $1.7 million) for his new Harijan fund. By comparison, an American presidential campaign can be viewed as a cushy, leisurely excursion on a luxury liner.
On tour by rail, circa 1934 (photo credit i9.1)
An early conclusion of a British official assigned to keep close tabs on Gandhi’s doings was that the frail old man in the loincloth, coming off two prolonged fasts in the previous ten months, was displaying “amazing toughness.” Soon it became routine for batteries of orthodox Hindus to intercept him at his rallies or along his route, zealously chanting anti-Gandhi slogans and waving black flags. In Nagpur, where the tour started, eggs were thrown from the balcony of a hall in which he was speaking; in Benares, where it ended, orthodox Hindus, called sanatanists, burned his picture. A bomb went off in Poona, and an attempt was made to derail the train on which he traveled from Poona to Bombay. At a place called Jasidih in Bihar, his car was stoned. Scurrilous anti-Gandhi pamphlets appeared at many of these places, targeting him as an enemy of Hindu dharma, a political has-been who promised much and failed to deliver, even calling attention to the massages he received from women in his entourage. Here we come upon the first signs of the viral subculture that would spawn his murder fourteen years later.
More generally, the cleavages among Hindus he had anticipated and feared were now out in the open, but he never turned back. Missionaries travel to lands they deem to be heathen; presenting himself as a Hindu revivalist, Gandhi took his campaign to his own heartland. He didn’t have one set piece, what’s now called a stump speech, but the same themes reappeared in a more or less impromptu fashion. They all led to the same conclusion. If India were ever to deserve its freedom, he preached, untouchability had to go. Yet at many of the rallies, untouchables were segregated in separate holding pens, either because they were afraid to be seen by caste Hindus as overstepping or because none of the local organizers was alive to the contradiction of putting untouchability on display at an anti-untouchability rally.
Such a tableau confronted Gandhi near the end of the tour when he reached the city of Bhavnagar in his native Gujarat, not far from a college he’d briefly attended. In anticipation of his visit, the civic fathers had thoughtfully set aside money for new, more or less sanitary quarters for the municipality’s Bhangis, or sweepers, the untouchables who did its dirtiest work; the plan was to show off Bhavnagar’s enlightened spirit by having the dedication of the project coincide with Gandhi’s visit. To that end, a large open-sided tent, a patchwork of bright colors called a shamiana, had been set up as it would be for any big celebration such as a wedding. “The Bhangis were not allowed to sit in the shamiana put up for the ceremony,” a British official reported to his superiors, “but sat outside where Gandhi joined them before proceeding to his seat in the sha-miana to lay the foundation stone.” Gandhi’s mixing with the Bhangis was the only diversion from the script. By stepping into the shamiana, he made things right again. What could he do? Not for the first time, he was up against an India that could be simultaneously worshipful and obdurate.
At a place called Satyabhamapur in the eastern state of Orissa, he was given another reminder of the rocklike durability of the customs he was trying to crack. The Mahatma invited ten members of a local untouchable group called Bauris, along with one Bhangi, to take their meals in his tent. “None of Mr. Gandhi’s party, however, dined with these guests,” another colonial official reported, laying on the requisite irony, “and the Bauris refused to dine with the sweeper.”
The Raj was keeping close tabs. Local officials were commanded to file reports at every stage of the tour. These then traveled up the colonial chain of command to provincial home secretaries, the national home secretary, and, ultimately, the secretary of state for India in Whitehall, each of whom then had an opportunity to add a wry, worldly comment to the file, a “minute,” as these notes were known. It was not an abiding interest in the progress of social reform that engaged the imperial officials at every level. They wanted to make sure Gandhi was abiding by his pledge to eschew political agitation for the duration of the tour, that he was not preparing the ground for his next campaign of civil disobedience, for they had long since been convinced that the frail figure in the loincloth had the power to paralyze their domain and, if allowed to proceed unchecked, shake its foundations; in that sense, he had made them wary believers in his nonviolent methods of resistance and put them on guard. The crowds he drew—100,000 in Calcutta, 50,000 in Madras (now Chennai), 40,000 in Cawnpore (Kanpur), 30,000 in Benares (Varanasi), up to 25,000 in a dozen other places—could more easily be attributed to curiosity and the unending quest for a saint’s darshan, the satisfying blankness of an immersion in his glow, than to zeal for his battle against untouchability. But they couldn’t be ignored.
Part of making sure that he wasn’t preparing the ground for future campaigns of civil disobedience was keeping track of his avid fund-raising, ostensibly for the new Harijan Service Society, or Sevak Sangh. Fearing that the money could be diverted to Congress coffers for political use, the British were intensely interested in knowing how much he was taking in and where it was going. So the local officials were instructed to report the exact amount of his “purses,” meaning the collections offered up in his honor at practically every stop, even in the poorest Harijan hovels and slums. Often these sums were reported down to the last rupee, occasionally down to the paise, or small change. An official in Travancore, for instance, reports that Gandhi auctioned off a ring that had been donated to his cause for the modest sum of three rupees and eight paise. Ladies with jewelry were immediate targets: in Karachi he was reported to have engaged in a tug-of-war with an elderly woman over a ring she was disinclined to relinquish. “The old lady resolutely refused to part with her ring and resisted Mr. Gandhi’s attempt to remove it forcibly,” an official reported. (Writing in the margin of the report, a higher official drily praised her for her display of Gandhian resistance.) Everything was subject to auction for the cause of Harijan uplift, including the gifts, silver boxes, and cups presented to him along the way—even his time. At some villages, he refused to step out of his car until he received a purse of sufficient weight; in one place, an additional fifty rupees proved sufficient. “Many women,” an official in Madras noted, “took the precaution of divesting themselves of their jewels before coming to his meetings.”
Gandhi, the unrelenting Bania turned mendicant, is an object of fascination, sometimes pity, for starchy officials who comment on his “rapacity for money” and “money-grubbing propensities” and then indulge in haughty speculation on whether his mahatmaship has been tarnished. “He was more like a chetti [or moneylender] coming around for his interest,” one report stated. “One could not but feel sorry for Gandhi,” this report said, “a poor old man come down in the world and being hustled about from one function to another, which he seemed only partially able to understand.” The officials observe him in different places, with different degrees of bias, at different stages of the tour but agree on several things: that the crowds that turned out to greet him were largely indifferent to his message about Harijans (in fact, could seldom hear it); that he started to soft-pedal and even omit his demands for the opening of temples once he hit the more orthodox Hindu precincts of South India; that it was an open question whether his tour was doing more to strengthen orthodoxy than it was to uproot the hardy weed called untouchability. Their skeptical narrative stands in counterpoint to the pious, heroic accounts of the crusade that appear in installments in Gandhi’s weekly Harijan, with its agate lists of newly opened temples and wells, newly dedicated separate but equal dormitories and schools for Harijan students, all leaving an impression of a cresting wave of irresistible social reform.
The contrast between the narratives of colonial bystanders and those of enthusiastic domestic adherents is only to be expected. But apart from their renderings of Gandhi’s own words, their most precious passages convey particular details more telling than any assessment. “At several places,” a British official notes in a part of Orissa where Gandhi’s party was denied permission to enter temples, “people were seen carrying away dust that had been touched by his feet.” Or there’s the description of a sweeper’s wife in Nagpur named Abhayanhar who donates her last two bangles. “Tears trickled down Abhayanhar’s cheeks,” a colonial official wrote. “Gandhi accepted the sacrificial offering and said he had reduced the Abhayanhars to poverty, that they were now true Harijans, the truest Banghis in Nagpur.” The official offers no comment; he simply describes what he has seen, leaving a sense that he has seen a communion he doesn’t understand but can’t get out of his mind.
The Mahatma’s own presence of mind, his reliable, low-key magnanimity, show up in these often hostile colonial reports in scattered asides on his disciplined, always calm treatment of orthodox demonstrators who turn out to jeer him and block his way. In Ajmer, in what’s now the state of Rajasthan, one of Gandhi’s most persistent antagonists, a Benares Brahman named Lal Nath, thrusts himself forward with a small contingent carrying black flags. He also displays a bleeding head, earned in a confrontation with some Gandhians who’d not gotten the message about nonviolence. Gandhi gives the crowd a stern lecture and invites Lal Nath to the platform to speak his piece against him; the Brahman is soon drowned out by cries of “Shame, shame.” In Buxar in Bihar, sanatanists lie down in front of the car carrying Gandhi to a mass meeting, and here too some of them have been beaten. Gandhi visits the injured sanatanists in the hospital and promises to do penance. Told then that the road to the rally is still blocked and that he might be attacked if he insists on going there, Gandhi serenely walks in on foot accompanied by four constables, parting a crowd of five thousand. In the Maharashtrian town of Saonar, where another posse of sanatanists seeks to halt his car, he offers its leader a ride to the rally he’s about to address.
A few of the authors of the official reports allow themselves to wonder whether more may be taking place here than has met the eye of their more jaded colleagues. The chief commissioner of Delhi writes that Gandhi, “even in his present role, still has very great influence.” He hazards a view that the tides of Indian opinion on untouchability may be slowly shifting. “Although perhaps 60 per cent of Hindus quietly determine not to treat untouchables as equals, they avoid public expression of their views.” Sounding optimistic, this high civil servant seems to be suggesting that a substantial minority of caste Hindus have already experienced a kind of conversion on the issue. An official in Bombay takes a similar line. “Though the majority would prefer the movement to fail, most of them,” he predicts, “are not likely to actively oppose it. The Sanatanists therefore cannot create a force sufficiently strong to combat and overcome Mr. Gandhi’s persistence.”
Gandhi himself advanced the idea that after all the orthodox propaganda against him, the passive absorption of his arguments by seemingly inattentive mass audiences added up to an advance. “I am quite sure that the message has appealed to the reason of the masses,” he said. “I am also fully aware that all of them are not yet prepared to translate their beliefs into practice. But then I consider it a tremendous gain that the masses have come to believe in the truth of the message.” Believe in it grudgingly, he meant. It might not affect their conduct much, he was saying, offering a conclusion not very different from that of the shrewdest colonial officials, but they could no longer justify caste oppression.
It was hard to know then, and it’s harder to know now, whether anything like the mental sea change Gandhi hoped for had actually occurred, or to measure the lasting effect. Sometimes he voiced his own doubts. Speaking in private to the tough-minded Vallabhbhai Patel, he was blunter than he allowed himself to be in public. “India is not yet converted to the spinning wheel and certainly not to the removal of untouchability. We can’t even say that the whole of the intellectual world is for its removal.” In this context, the “intellectuals” to whom he refers are those who were then calling themselves Socialists, talking up the possibilities of “class struggle,” and rejecting as “reactionary” and “irrelevant” his focus on untouchability, not granting or even recognizing that it defined the lives of the poorest Indians. The difference was not just one of political idiom. Their identification with the poorest was largely theoretical, resting on the premise that they could be lifted up after independence. Gandhi’s was becoming more urgent by the day. If anything, he seems more disposed at the end of the tour, having inspected scores, maybe hundreds of untouchable settlements, to speak in pointed ways about the abject circumstances of his Harijans and the social action that could make a difference. “The only way we can expiate the sin of centuries,” he said, “is to befriend the Harijans, by going to their quarters, by hugging their children as you would do your own, by interesting yourselves in their welfare, by finding out whether they have the fresh light and air that you enjoy as of right.” Hugging untouchable children might not amount to a social program or advance the cause of swaraj. But in the emerging divide between Gandhi and his movement, which side was really otherworldly and which one down-to-earth?
Near the end of the tour, in a balanced assessment and summing-up of all the accumulated intelligence at his disposal, the chief secretary of the Punjab writes: “People are more critical of his aims and objects and are no longer willing to follow him blindly. But it would be a mistake to regard him as a spent force. Given the occasion, he would still wield very great power and he is still more able than any other Indian to organize a big movement against Government.”
Whether Gandhi could organize a big, enduring movement against untouchability remained another question in his own mind, it seems, as much as that of the Raj’s agents. It so preoccupied him that when, at the start of 1934, northern Bihar was rocked by a huge earthquake that flattened villages and towns, devastating fields and crops and killing more than seven thousand, he instantly declared the catastrophe to be “divine chastisement” for the persistent sin of untouchability. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that Gandhi, at that point just beginning the third month of his anti-untouchability tour, was speaking more out of frustration than conviction. He often appealed to faith as a basis for moral action in society. But he didn’t normally go in for the kind of magical thinking that looks for signals of divine wrath in floods and droughts and all the other natural calamities that beset the subcontinent. Perhaps his interpretation of the earthquake, several times repeated as he met hard going on the South Indian portion of his tour, could be taken as a folksy rhetorical trope, as a tool designed to chip away at the resistance he faced. “He has come to realize that the strength of the antagonistic force is more formidable than he at first imagined,” reported a British official, attempting to read his mind, several weeks after the disaster.
Nehru and Tagore had managed to support Gandhi’s fast unto death. Then, as we’ve seen, they opposed his second fast against untouchability. Now each was flabbergasted by the readiness of the Mahatma to use superstition to battle superstition. “Anything more opposed to the scientific outlook it would be difficult to imagine,” a momentarily disillusioned Nehru wrote in his autobiography, which he was composing in prison. “If the earthquake was a divine punishment for sin, how are we to discover for which sin we are being punished?—for, alas! we have so many.” Tagore said Gandhi’s logic “far better suits the psychology of his opponents than his own,” that the orthodox could just as easily blame the earthquake on his assault on Hindu dharma.
“Our sins and errors, however enormous,” wrote the poet, “have not enough force to drag down the structure of creation … We, who are immensely grateful to Mahatmaji for inducing his wonder-working inspiration, freedom from fear and feebleness in the minds of his countrymen, feel profoundly hurt, when any words from his mouth may emphasize the elements of unreason in those very minds … a fundamental source of all the blind powers that drive us against freedom and self-respect.”
In direct response, Gandhi only dug himself in deeper; he wasn’t about to deprive himself of a useful argument by conceding that the earthquake and the practice of untouchability in its environs might be unconnected: “I would be untruthful and cowardly if, for the fear of ridicule … I did not proclaim my belief from the house-top,” he retorted in Harijan. “I have the faith that our own sins have more force to ruin that structure [of creation] than any mere physical phenomenon. There is an indissoluble marriage between matter and spirit.”
The sanatanists were the largest of the anti-Gandhi groups that turned out with black flags and calls for boycotts of his rallies, but they weren’t the only protesters he attracted. In Nagpur, at the start of the tour, untouchables from Ambedkar’s own Mahar community were conspicuous by their absence. Two months later, in Travancore, a group called the Self-Respect League appealed to untouchables to boycott Gandhi. In Shiyali, near Coimbatore in what’s now Tamil Nadu, two hundred Dalits marched under black flags in opposition to a mahatma ostensibly crusading in their behalf. In Poona, near the end of the tour, there were more boycott appeals by untouchable groups identified with Ambedkar, who, nevertheless, had come himself to call on Gandhi a few days earlier in Bombay. “Dr. Ambedkar complained that the Congress people took interest in the question of the removal of untouchability so long as Mr. Gandhi was present,” according to a colonial official’s second- or thirdhand intelligence report, “but the moment his back was turned it was forgotten.” In his public summing-up, Gandhi pronounced untouchability to be on “its last legs,” but his private assessment may have been closer to Ambedkar’s. Within a month of the tour’s end in August 1934, he let it be known that he was considering “retiring” from the Congress movement on various grounds, including its blatant failure to address “the growing pauperism of the dumb millions.”
Six weeks later, he made it official. Fourteen years had passed since he’d first taken over the movement. “I have lost the power to persuade you to my view,” he told a Congress meeting. “I have become helpless. It is no use keeping a man like me at the helm of affairs, who has lost his strength.” That plaintive “helpless” can be read as a clear, poignant, and, most likely, conscious echo of Gandhi’s admissions seven years earlier that he’d lost all hope of being able to sustain the alliance between Muslims and Hindus he’d forged at the time of the Khilafat agitation. It might also be interpreted as another coy bid for a renewed mandate. But this time he seemed to know what the outcome would be.
His tour has just ended. But in saying he felt “helpless,” he is speaking not simply of Harijan uplift but also of his whole program of social reform—called the “constructive program”—featuring spinning, prohibition, sanitation, hygiene, education in local languages, an enhanced role for women, along with the struggle against untouchability. The Congress had been paying lip service to it for a decade, but its heart, he now realizes, is elsewhere; it’s set on gaining political power, provisionally in the new legislatures, ultimately in an independent India.
He may not have been speaking narrowly or exclusively about untouchability, but it’s not much of a stretch to conclude that if Gandhi ended his marathon feeling helpless about the Congress’s commitment to his programs of social reform in general, he felt helpless too about its commitment to the specific struggle that had preoccupied him almost entirely for the previous two years, ever since the “epic fast” that had briefly seized the country. He ended the tour at Wardha in central India, his new base of operations, on August 5, 1934, and, two days later, embarked on yet another fast, one of “personal purification” and, he said, prayer for the purification of the Congress. “Purity of this, the greatest national organization,” he said, “cannot but help the Harijan movement, since the Congress is also pledged to the removal of the curse.” After all the touring and praying, the legislation on opening up Hindu temples to Harijans was allowed to die in the central assembly on August 23. “The sanatanists are now jubilant,” Gandhi commented. “We must not mind their joy.”
A few weeks later, a noticeably disconsolate Gandhi finally acknowledged that his approach to the issue of untouchability “differed from that of many, if not of most Congressmen” who, he said, “consider that it was a profound error for me to have disturbed the course of the civil resistance struggle by taking up the question in the manner, and at the time I did.” Here he was talking again about “the most intellectual Congressmen,” now disposed to call themselves Socialists. He was going in the opposite direction from them, he said. He still believed in what he called “the spinning sacrifice” as the “living link” to “the Harijans and the poor”—those he’d been accustomed to describing as “the dumb millions”—but, now he conceded, “a substantial majority of Congressmen have no living faith in it.”
In Gandhi’s view, the would-be Socialists—however high-minded, however committed—had little or no connection to the India where most Indians resided. “None of them knows the real conditions in Indian villages or perhaps even cares to know them,” he observed.
The idea that two Indias could be distilled from the country’s myriad versions of itself—the bourgeois one of urban sophisticates and the depressed one of rural misery—would offer a handy framework for speeches and polemics for decades to come. It wasn’t the worst distortion. Perhaps there’s an omen or at least some perspective in these bits of trivia: the week of Gandhi’s “epic fast,” Joan Bennett was starring in Careless Lady at the Roxy Talkie in Bombay and Eddie Cantor in Palmy Days at the Pathé, singing, “There’s nothing too good for my baby.” It wouldn’t have been only British expatriates who filled the movie palace seats or turned out to ooh and aah over the new Chrysler Plymouths on sale at New Era Motors. (What came to be called Bollywood was still a gleam in the eyes of the earliest Indian filmmakers. They’d yet to invade the countryside or hit on the formula of song, dance, and heartache that would become their touchstone. But running alongside mass politics, mass popular culture would soon be in the offing.)
Few congressmen had seen as much of the world beyond India’s shores that embraced such fanciful artifacts as Gandhi. He remained convinced that it held no answers for India. In the aftermath of his tour, his penchant for circling back on himself, for reenacting formative stages of his past, again took hold. Just as he withdrew to Tolstoy Farm outside Johannesburg a quarter of a century earlier, just as he retreated from politics during periods of convalescence in 1918 and 1924, Gandhi now proposed to open a new chapter in his life at what he would later name the Satyagraha or Sevagram Ashram outside Wardha, in the boondocks, a small market town in an especially poor, drought-prone, malaria-prone, snake-infested district west of Nagpur in the center of India. There he’d concentrate on showing that his constructive program, with its emphasis on village industries and cleanliness, personal and public, could furnish the 700,000 villages on the as-yet-undivided subcontinent with a replicable model. His retirement from Congress politics would be more symbolic than permanent. Supposedly retired—he never formally rejoined the movement—he’d continue to express views, even attend meetings; and when he did, his will almost always proved to be sovereign. He’d also intervene forcefully as a sort of deus ex machina in Congress leadership fights—for instance, in 1939 when he opposed the election of Subhas Chandra Bose as president and then, after Bose squeaked through, helped undermine him. Pretending to be on the sidelines in Wardha, he was not shy about wielding his authority through his reliable lieutenants in the party’s hierarchy. Nevertheless, he never again occupied a formal leadership position and never again claimed, as he had in London, that he was the true leader of the untouchables. In Bombay, a crowd of eighty thousand gave him a standing ovation on what was supposed to be his valedictory day as a congressman, then heard him warn that he’d be “watching from a distance [the] enforcement of principles for which Congress stands.”
He meant, of course, his principles. “What I am aiming for,” said the man who was supposedly stepping back from the struggle, “is the development of the capacity for civil disobedience.” He’d resigned, it soon became clear, but he’d not really retired.