8

HAIL, DELIVERER

 

THOUGH “not a quick despairer,” as he once said, Gandhi sometimes flirted with despair. He never gave in to it for long, but the year before he paid his visit to Vaikom, he’d been close to the edge. The low point came in the middle of 1924 at the Indian National Congress meeting in Ahmedabad, the one that watered down his resolution calling for daily spinning as an absolute prerequisite for membership in the movement. If he couldn’t persuade his supposed followers that the charkha, or spinning wheel, was the essential instrument of Indian self-reliance and freedom, the autocrat in him had been ready to require that they at least act as if they believed him. Discovering they were prepared to humor him but not be commanded, he described himself as “defeated and humbled.”

The proof of his sinking spirits lay in the fact that it was Gandhi himself who’d moved the watering down of his own resolution as a way of avoiding defeat for himself and a possible split. It was, he admitted, a kind of surrender. In the pointlessness of the debate and the maneuvering that accompanied it, he felt he heard God’s voice telling him, or so he later wrote in imitation King James English, “Thou fool, knowest not thou that thou are impossible? Thy time is up.” What he said in the open meeting was nearly as dark: “I do not know where I stand or what I should do.”

He’d lost not only command of the movement and a sense of direction. He also seems to have lost his firm conviction that he’d internalized its most accurate compass, that his inner quest would ultimately be synonymous with India’s. His reaction to this onset of uncertainty was to sideline himself from national politics, saying he’d not play an active role until the six-year prison term to which he’d been sentenced in 1922 finally expired in 1928, even though he’d been released after two years, even though, with perfect inconsistency, he’d immediately offered upon his release to resume his role as the movement’s “general.” During this self-imposed withdrawal, he’d confine himself, he said, to three topics: untouchability, spinning, and Hindu-Muslim unity. Before long, as a consequence of widespread communal violence, Hindu-Muslim unity had to be struck from the list of his ongoing projects. “What is one to do where one is helpless?” a plaintive Gandhi asked.

Sometimes he almost seemed to sulk. He blamed “educated India” for its tendency to “split into parties.” He still could see “only one way” forward himself: his way, to work “from bottom upward.” Next he blamed the British, “the third party” in Hindu-Muslim disputes, always casting about for new ways to divide and rule. “The government of India is based on distrust,” he said. (His point, on this occasion, was that it sowed distrust by favoring Muslims. Of course, if he’d not favored Muslims himself, the national movement would never have joined the Khilafat agitation.) Venturing into hyperbole, he finally allowed himself to sound as if he were blaming God:

Hindu-Muslim unity I made a mission of my life. I worked for it in South Africa, I toiled for it here, I did penance for it, but God was not satisfied, God did not want me to take any credit for the work. So I have now washed my hands. I am helpless. I have exhausted all my effort.

 

Surprisingly, by the time Gandhi speaks in this seemingly abject vein, he has actually started to rebound. He’d interrupted his ceaseless touring of the country to evangelize for the spinning wheel and then spent the whole of 1926 in his ashram outside Ahmedabad, explaining that he needed to rest and reflect. It has been called his “year of silence,” but he was hardly silent. Every week there were new articles for Young India, including the weekly installments of his autobiography. By January 1927, when he spoke of having “exhausted all my effort,” he was ready to get back on the hustings, to resume carrying his message across India. The more he speaks of his helplessness on Hindu-Muslim issues and remoteness from politics—the two, Hindu-Muslim issues and politics, were often synonymous in this period—the clearer it becomes that he views his retreat as a temporary phenomenon. A cross-cultural comparison comes to mind that may seem unhelpful, even wildly inappropriate. The Gandhi who sits at the Sabarmati Ashram in the mid-1920s, holding himself aloof from the politics of the national movement, pursues a strategy that another inner-directed politician would adopt in the waning days of the Third Republic in France several decades later, not in an ashram, but in a village called Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. It’s impossible to picture an unbending Charles de Gaulle sitting cross-legged. But Gandhi, as obviously as de Gaulle later, was not just holding himself aloof but biding his time, waiting for his country to summon him back to leadership on his own terms.

He says so in so many words, only sometimes he couches the thought in religious language. Whatever his doubts in 1924, he now seems certain he’ll be needed. “I am an optimist because I believe in the efficacy of prayerful thought,” he writes to a supporter toward the end of 1926, his year of retreat at the ashram. “When time for action has come, God will give the light and guidance. I therefore watch, wait and pray holding myself in momentary readiness to respond.” What “appears to be my inaction,” he says in that same period, defending his obsession with the promotion of the spinning wheel, “is really concentrated action.”

I am biding my time,” he finally wrote in a letter dated May 1928, “and you will find me leading the country in the field of politics when the country is ready. I have no false modesty about me. I am undoubtedly a politician in my own way, and I have a plan for the country’s freedom.”

The summons back to leadership came five or so months later, at approximately the same time as what would have been the end of his six-year prison term. By then, the first successful satyagraha campaign in years had wrung a government concession on high land taxes in Gujarat’s Bardoli district, the same battleground from which Gandhi had abruptly withdrawn six years earlier in reaction to the Chauri Chaura violence, aborting a painstakingly prepared campaign. Finally, under the leadership of Gandhi’s disciple Vallabhbhai Patel, Bardoli Two had restored faith in the tactics of militant nonviolence at a time when a young Bengali firebrand, Subhas Chandra Bose, was just starting to win notice and backing with a call to resistance that promised to be the opposite of passive. “Give me blood and I promise you freedom,” Bose said grandiloquently.

The Indian National Congress was deeply divided, not just between Hindus and Muslims, but generationally too, over proposals for constitutional reform designed to be served up as a set of demands to the British: in effect, an ultimatum. The proposals had been drafted by a committee chaired by Motilal Nehru, father of Jawaharlal, the future prime minister. The son, in the forefront of the younger generation, did not support the father’s report; neither did the Muslims, represented by Jinnah and Muhammad Ali, now on the verge of his final break with Gandhi. The drama and importance of the moment are probably clearer in the long perspective of history than they were at the time. Gandhi was the one figure in India who had any chance of steering the Nehru Report, as it was known, to formal acceptance by the Congress. That is what he was called upon to do by the senior Nehru in 1928. Being Gandhi, he took the call as the summons back to active leadership for which he’d been waiting for four long years.

So he didn’t fasten on the question of how many seats would be reserved for Muslims in the legislative assemblies of states where they were in a minority—that’s to say, most states. The Nehru Report had reneged on a promise the Congress had made to the Muslims twelve years earlier, before the rise of Gandhi: that they’d be able to elect their own representatives through separate electorates. Instead, it came up with the idea of reserving for Muslims a minimum number of seats in Hindu-majority provinces, in line with the proportion of Muslims in the population; in the national legislature, it was prepared to concede one-quarter of the seats to Muslims. Jinnah thought Motilal Nehru had set the price for this shift—measured in the number of reserved Muslim seats in the national assembly in particular—too low. Here was a moment for Gandhi to become active again on Hindu-Muslim questions, which had soured him on politics to the point, he said, that he’d “given up reading newspapers.” But he had never been much interested in constitutional mechanics; and though usually ready to make concessions in the cause of unity with Muslims, he was focused now on the practical demands of Congress politics and his own restoration, so he let the moment pass.

At a mammoth All Parties Convention held in Calcutta at the end of 1928, Jinnah advanced a series of amendments, the most important of which would guarantee Muslims one-third of the seats in a future central legislature as opposed to the 25 percent Motilal Nehru had contemplated. It wasn’t an offer made in the take-it-or-leave-it fashion that would later come to seem characteristic. In Calcutta he could hardly have sounded more accommodating. “We are sons of this land, we have to live together,” he said. “I believe there is no progress for India until Muslims and Hindus are united.” The Congress, which claimed to represent all Indians, including Muslims, turned a deaf ear. The Jinnah amendments were voted down, and Gandhi kept his distance.

Jinnah took it as a brush-off and walked away, taking with him Muhammad Ali, the Gandhi ally who’d worn khadi, proselytized for the spinning wheel, given up beef, and even, on the occasion of Gandhi’s 1924 fast of “penance” for Hindu-Muslim harmony in Ali’s own home, thought to present the Mahatma with a cow saved from the abattoir as a symbol of Muslim respect for Hindu values and sensitivities. Within weeks of this rupture, his brother Shaukat Ali was promising not to attend any meetings with Hindus for a year. “This is the parting of the ways,” Jinnah wrote at the time. Disgusted with politics and heartsore over his separation from a younger wife from a non-Muslim background whom he’d loved and by her subsequent early death, Jinnah moved to England for four years. “What is to be done? The Hindus are short-sighted and I think, incorrigible,” he’d remark to a friend. Gandhi wasn’t happy about the Congress’s treatment of Jinnah. But it’s doubtful that he ever saw the proud Bombay lawyer in these years as a potential mass leader of Muslims, let alone as a possible ally. Mohammed Ali Jinnah wore no religion on his well-tailored sleeves. How could the Mahatma conceive of speaking to Muslims through such a man?

Inside the Congress, there was still a fight to be waged over the details of the Nehru Report, which called on Britain to grant India dominion status within the British Commonwealth. Jawaharlal Nehru and Bose wanted an immediate declaration in favor of full independence by the Congress, leading the way to immediate confrontation, one that would remain nonviolent only if nonviolence succeeded. Gandhi countered with a temporizing resolution vowing that India would declare independence in two years if Britain failed to grant dominion status by then. Finally it was agreed that Britain would be given just one year—until the end of 1929—to act. That one year, so other resolutions promised, would be dedicated to the discipline of Gandhi’s “constructive program,” including the removal of untouchability, boycott of foreign cloth, promotion of khadi, prohibition, and the advancement of women. This was all on his insistence, showing he was once again in a position to lay down terms.

But, of course, when the year had passed, India still wasn’t a dominion and social reform remained stalled. Swaraj within a year hadn’t happened for a second time. So a symbolic independence day now had to be proclaimed for January 26, 1930. It was left entirely up to the Mahatma to decide how the long-threatened campaign of noncooperation would be conducted after that. The movement was larger than it had been at the time of Gandhi’s first takeover but harder to lead; by sheer inertia, it pulled in many directions while being herded to the one overriding goal of nationhood. Still, he was effectively back in the position of prime mover that had been formally bestowed on him a decade earlier. As he’d said during his period on the sidelines, “For me there is only one way.” That way was inherently confrontational, although it was expressed in a vocabulary of love and nonviolence. It included satyagraha, noncooperation, civil disobedience; the terms, not exactly synonymous, blended into one another, covering a spectrum of meanings that, by now, India and its colonial rulers had come to understand. But the specific tactics for the coming campaign eluded him for weeks.

His inspiration—God given, he’d say—came in two stages. In the first, he took account of his continuing disappointment with the Congress, his sense that it remained an undisciplined, ramshackle coalition of self-regarding interests with little or no serious commitment to social reform. “In the present state of the Congress no civil disobedience can be or should be offered in its name,” he wrote in a confidential note to the younger Nehru, whom he’d just designated as its president. The flames of the Chauri Chaura violence, now eight years in the past, still cast lurid shadows in the Mahatma’s mind. So his imagination carried him further back, all the way to South Africa, where he claimed to have started the Natal agitation with sixteen chosen ashramites, trained by him at Tolstoy Farm and the Phoenix Settlement. The political stakes were altogether different now. There a small, beleaguered minority sought minimum rights—the repeal of an oppressive tax designed to drive it from the land, an acknowledgment of rudimentary citizenship, permission if not the right to cross internal borders—in exchange for its tacit acknowledgment that political equality was not on the table, could not even be mentioned as a distant goal. Here not just equality but sovereignty—swaraj in the fullest possible meaning of self-determination—was the prize sought in the name of 320 million Indians, including the impoverished “dumb millions,” for and of whom the Mahatma habitually spoke.

Gandhi’s somewhat rosy version of his heroic personal history on the other subcontinent had merged with his vision of India’s destiny; for the moment, at least, they’d be identical. Civil disobedience, he told Nehru, “should be offered by me alone or jointly with a few companions even as I did in South Africa.”

The second inspiration—the specifics of what this “self-suffering” vanguard of satyagrahis would actually do, how it would address the common needs of all those millions, how it might be emulated—finally came after the symbolic independence day on January 26, 1930, and many stirring calls by Gandhi on his immediate entourage and the movement at large to steel themselves for struggle. When it came, it had all the beauty and simplicity of a fresh artistic vision realized for the first time, of a discovery in basic science. The self-proclaimed “expert in the satyagraha business” outdid himself this time, symbolically wrapping the nationalist urge for political freedom in the basic values of his “constructive program,” intended for the uplift of India’s lowliest, its most downcast.

This time the inspiration came in one syllable—salt. Gandhi had periodically experimented with a salt-free diet himself and pressed it on his disciples at Tolstoy Farm. But now he was prepared to campaign on the proposition that “next to water and air, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.” It was precious because it was needed by all and heavily taxed by an alien regime, which curtailed its local production. Since the days of the East India Company, the colonial authorities had counted on revenue derived from their salt monopoly and the tax on salt, paid by even the poorest households, Hindu or Muslim. Gandhi’s inspiration was that he could march to the shore of the Arabian Sea from the Sabarmati Ashram and there, at a place called Dandi, defy the law—and simultaneously unify India—by simply picking up a chunk of salt.

Sticking to the South African script, he first wrote to Lord Irwin, the viceroy, setting out his intentions and demands as he’d written to Smuts in 1913. “My ambition is no less than to convert the British people through nonviolence,” he wrote, “and thus make them see the wrong they have done to India.” The viceroy also stuck to the script. Rather than reply directly to the Mahatma, he had his private secretary send a stiff note as Smuts’s secretary had done, saying that Lord Irwin was sorry to hear that Gandhi planned to break the law and endanger public peace.

So for the first time since he led indentured strikers across the Transvaal border, sixteen and a half years earlier, Gandhi was ready to march again. In 1927, when he may have suffered a slight stroke, Gandhi’s health had broken down. Now, nearly three years later, at sixty-one, he set off on a sun-bathed March morning to tramp more than two hundred miles to the sea, promising never to return to the ashram until India had its freedom. (As events unfolded in the less than half year left to him after India’s actual independence in 1947, he never made it back to Ahmedabad.) “The fire of a great resolve is in him, and surpassing love of his miserable countrymen,” wrote Jawaharlal Nehru, who watched the launch. In his train followed seventy-eight, or maybe eighty, disciples, including, according to his grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi, two Muslims, one Christian, four untouchables (and therefore, by simple arithmetic, seventy-one, or seventy-three, caste Hindus). Very soon thousands were converging on the dirt roads and paths he traveled to witness this modest, unarmed procession bent on bringing down an empire. Leaning on a bamboo staff and walking ten or twelve miles a day barefoot, passing through scores of villages where blossoms and leaves had been strewn in his path as if for a conquering hero, Gandhi arrived at Dandi twenty-four days later and there, on the morning of April 6, 1930, stooped to harvest his bit of salt, a simple act of defiance swiftly emulated by tens of thousands up and down the subcontinent’s two coasts.

 

Dandi Beach, 1930, defying law by harvesting salt (photo credit i8.1)

 

Hail, Deliverer,” said the poet Sarojini Naidu, a good friend, standing by his side. Or so legend has it.

Not quite a year later, the Congress movement designated Gandhi as its sole representative, with full negotiating powers, to a conference on the path to Indian self-rule called by the British government. His prestige and authority had never stood higher. It had been an exceedingly crowded and packed twelve months, but Gandhi, whose Salt March had been the catalyst for a vast, largely peaceful upheaval that had shaken the pillars of the Raj, resulting in some ninety thousand arrests across India, had himself spent nearly nine of those months in the relative quiet and seclusion of Yeravda prison near Poona following his arrest on May 5. Just before the arrest, he’d ordered a nonviolent raid on a saltworks belonging to the state monopoly, at a place called Dharasana, 150 miles up the coast from Bombay. Sarojini Naidu, the poet, took the imprisoned leader’s place as field marshal, with twenty-five hundred resisters under her command. She ordered them to take the blows of the local police, armed with the long lead-tipped bamboo batons known as lathis, without so much as raising their hands to protect their heads.

There were hundreds of cracked heads and much bloodshed that day as the resisters advanced rank after rank in the greatest example of disciplined nonviolence in the face of officially sanctioned police violence before American civil rights marchers reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Alabama, thirty-five years later. The spectacle had a momentary impact across the world, a momentous one across India, inspiring illicit salt making on a grand scale up and down the two coasts, leading to scores of further confrontations, with the state now forced to use violence to quell nonviolent resisters in most regions of the subcontinent in its drive to restore its waning authority.

From the prison where he and his father were being held in Allahabad, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote at the end of July to Gandhi in Yeravda prison. “The last four months in India,” he said, “have gladdened my heart and have made me prouder of Indian men, women and even children than I have ever been … May I congratulate you on the new India you have created by your magic touch! What the future will bring I know not, but the past has made life worth living and our prosaic existence has developed something of epic greatness in it.”

Gandhi wasn’t freed until January 26, 1931. It was a grace note that the viceroy chose the Congress’s wishful, self-proclaimed “independence day,” which he might easily have ignored, for his release and that of other movement leaders. It was also a signal that the British hoped to break the impasse that civil disobedience had created, clear the jails by dangling the possibility of a political settlement, and perhaps even achieve the appearance of one by granting a measure of home rule on which the fuzzy word “dominion” might be pinned. Irwin freed Gandhi the way Smuts had all those years earlier, to enter direct negotiations with him personally, leading to an ambiguous agreement he’d then have to interpret and sell to the various parts of the national movement. Gandhi and the Congress had boycotted the first round of what was called the Round Table Conference in London that year, which was supposed to chart a path to self-rule for the vast territory of British India, stretching all the way from the Afghan border to the Burmese, encompassing present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It was important to the viceroy and Whitehall that he show up for the second round.

Britain wasn’t bargaining from a position of strength, just out of a habit of dominance. Deep into a worsening international economic crisis triggered by the bursting of the stock market bubble on Wall Street, its minority Labor Party government was preoccupied with growing millions of desperate unemployed in what wasn’t yet a welfare state, as well as questions hovering over the pound sterling, including how long it could remain tied to the gold standard and thus maintain its position as the leading reserve currency. From London’s perspective it was beginning to be possible to view India as a burden. Labor was the least imperial-minded of British parties; many of its members, including the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, had voiced sentiments that could be interpreted as anti-imperialist. It led a weak coalition, and India was not really high on its agenda. Still, it was possible to imagine circumstances in which it might be inclined to act.

If any such possibility existed, it was essentially snuffed out five days before Gandhi boarded the SS Rajputana in Bombay on August 29, 1931, on his first trip to Europe in sixteen years, which would also prove to be his last. Splitting his own party, Prime Minister MacDonald formed a national government in which what remained of his Labor Party had to share power with the Tories, the party that served in British politics as the High Church of the empire in general and the Raj in particular. Within ten days of Gandhi’s arrival in London, Britain went off the gold standard, devaluing the pound and rendering the vaunted Round Table Conference on the future of British India a sideshow before it had got through the opening round of speeches.

Gandhi made a sly allusion to these developments in his first speech at the conference, saying he understood that British statesmen were “wholly engrossed in their domestic affairs, in trying to make two ends meet.” Surrendering control of India, he suggested impishly, could be one way to balance the budget. Thereafter he paid as little attention to these shattering events in domestic British politics as his biographers have since. In shipboard interviews while still at sea, he’d expressed his wish to meet with Winston Churchill, the most strident of the Tory “die-hards” on India issues, but Churchill couldn’t find the time. The one previous meeting of the two men, a quarter of a century earlier, would thus remain their only face-to-face encounter. Instead of confronting his biggest antagonist in British public life as he’d hoped, Gandhi had a love-in at Westminster Palace with the small left-wing rump of the Labor Party that had gone into opposition. All along he seemed to understand that the political tides in Britain ensured that the conference would amount to less than an anticlimax, a mere episode, in the slow unraveling of India’s ties to the empire.

Gandhi’s arrival in London had been front-page news for a few days before, inevitably, his comings and goings and pronouncements were downgraded to briefer and briefer stories on the inside pages. “No living man has, either by precept or example, influenced so vast a number of people in so direct and profound a way,” wrote Harold Laski, the well-connected and, more to the point, well-disposed political theorist at the London School of Economics, in the pro-Labor Daily Herald. “The history of India in the last fifteen years is largely his history.”

But what he’d accomplished was “the easiest part of his task,” said Laski, firing off a barrage of rhetorical questions, the ones Gandhi himself regularly posed to his supporters: “Will he be able to bind Hindu and Muslim into a unified outlook? Can he break down the tragic barrier of caste? … What is he going to do for social freedom?”

These questions shaped the real agenda of the conference. If Indians today find any significance in the Mahatma’s last London visit, it’s not because of his encounters with Ramsay MacDonald or, beyond the conference hall, with Charlie Chaplin and George Bernard Shaw. It’s because the Round Table Conference, a virtual nonstarter on constitutional issues, became the scene of a political face-off between the national movement, in the person of Gandhi, and aspiring untouchables represented by their first authentic leader to be recognized at the national level, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. The clash of the two Indians may have occurred under the gilded imperial auspices of St. James’s Palace decades ago, beyond the memory of any living Indian. One of them may have been comparatively unknown in his own country, the other already canonized there and around the globe as the great spiritual figure of the age. But it resounds in Indian politics to this day, its implications still a matter of controversy. And it shook Gandhi to his core, showing him to be not without the sin of pride when it came to his claim of speaking for the “dumb millions.” In the years that followed, he’d redouble the energy he threw into his personal crusade against untouchability, if not into any reexamination of his approach to the issue, in part to justify to himself the large claims he’d made in London.

A wisp of triumphalism had attached to his arrival there. There were instants when Gandhi could be suspected of basking in his own celebrity (swapping platitudes with Chaplin, for instance, of whom he’d never heard until the appointment was set). Anyone who expected him to be overawed by London would have forgotten, or never have known, that he’d trudged its corridors of power on his previous visits there as a petitioner for the Indians of South Africa. The difference this time was more in the attire than the man. Invited with other Round Table delegates to tea at Buckingham Palace with George V, he was subjected to a gruff warning from the king himself against stirring up trouble in what the monarch quaintly took to be his domain. Gandhi knew very well whose domain it was and quietly held his ground. “Your Majesty won’t expect me to argue the point with you,” he replied evenly. Asked later whether he considered his attire appropriate to the regal surroundings, he was ready with a quip: “The King had on enough for both of us.”

Within two months of his visit to the palace, the colonial authorities would lock him up for the third time in what he sometimes called “the King’s Hotel”—that’s to say, Yeravda prison—in order to quash a campaign he was about to launch. A couple of years after that, he felt so sidelined again that he made a show of resigning from the Indian National Congress. More than ever, then, his pilgrimage was not without its ups and downs as he entered the thirties of the last century and his own sixties. In all of this, the encounter with Ambedkar proved to be pivotal.

By the time Ambedkar returned to India from his second round of studies in the West at the end of 1923, he was already one of the best-credentialed Indians of his era, with a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a second doctorate from the London School of Economics, both in economics, in addition to training in the law at Gray’s Inn in London. (In later years, he sometimes succumbed to an Indian tendency to show off degrees, writing on stationery on which his name was followed by a string of initials: “M.A., Ph.D., D.Sc., LL.D., D.Litt.”) As an untouchable, he was not just a standout; he was in a class by himself, plainly destined for leadership. Still only thirty-two, he looked for an entry into politics as soon as he could establish a livelihood for himself and the bride, betrothed to him at the age of nine, whom he married when he was just fourteen and who, like Gandhi’s Kasturba, then found herself left behind in India when her husband traveled overseas. His aca-demic achievements—financed in part by two reigning monarchs inclined to a reformist position on caste issues, the maharajahs of Baroda and Kolhapur—reflected his own grit and determination, which were not unconnected to the cultural aspirations of the Mahars, an upwardly mobile untouchable subcaste in what’s now the state of Maharashtra in western India, as these were transmitted to him by his father, a former army quartermaster.

For an untouchable youth in the early part of the century, he’d had a relatively sheltered boyhood but still had the experience, in his earliest schooling, of being treated as an insidious agent of pollution. His place in the classroom was in the corner, seated on a burlap sack (which he was made to carry to and from school to protect caste Hindus from accidental contact with something he’d touched). When he sought to study Sanskrit, he was steered to Persian instead, on grounds that the language of the Vedas, the earliest sacred texts, did not belong in the mouth or beneath the fingers of an untouchable. So when the time finally came for politics, it was all but inevitable that he’d see himself and be seen as a campaigner for the removal of caste barriers.

But he’d also learned that there could sometimes be a distinction between Brahmanism and Brahmans: that individual members of the high priestly caste could recognize the talents of an untouchable and offer support. His surname, in fact, was a testimonial to that possibility. Originally he’d been named Bhima Sankpal. Because the family name announced its lowly place in the caste system, his father decided to use the name of his native village instead, a common Marathi practice. So the Sankpals were to become the Ambavadekars. The new name had a pronunciation close to that of a Brahman teacher named Ambedkar who’d responded to the young untouchable’s promise and provided his lunch on a daily basis. So Bhima took his honored teacher’s name. In later life, he would continue to have Brahman supporters, and years after the death of his first wife, by which time he’d become a member of the Indian cabinet, he’d cross caste lines to marry a Brahman woman, an “intermarriage” that would be only a little less rare and shocking to caste sensibilities today than it must have been then.

Ambedkar’s earliest petitions and statements reflected his training. Not unlike Gandhi’s first petitions on behalf of Natal’s so-called British Indians, they were formal and reasoned in a lawyerly way. Setting out, he didn’t have anything like Gandhi’s flair for pamphleteering and self-dramatization, but, pos-sibly through imitation, these became learned attributes. Where Gandhi encouraged the burning of government permits and foreign cloth, Ambedkar and his followers burned the Manusmriti, a volume of traditional Hindu law bearing on caste. The gesture wasn’t as widely noted or imitated, but for Hindus who heard of it, it was undoubtedly more radical and inflammatory.

 

Ambedkar in London (photo credit i8.2)

 

Much later, in the last year of his life, after resigning from independent India’s first cabinet, in which he’d functioned as the prime draftsman of its constitution, he established an enduring role for himself as a religious leader by converting to Buddhism and calling on untouchables to follow his example. Over the next half century millions of Mahars and some others did so. Often this has entailed material sacrifice. With the outlawing of untouchability, independent India established a system of affirmative action, with “reserved” places in schools and government service for Dalits, also known officially as members of the “scheduled castes.” But the largely Hindu bureaucracy has been slow to certify that Buddhists could qualify for these benefits. Today the site of Ambedkar’s conversion has become a shrine and its anniversary an occasion for pilgrimage. Every October 14, throngs of at least 100,000, perhaps double that, converge on the city of Nagpur at a structure called Deekshabhoomi (which means “place of conversion” in the Marathi language) to celebrate Dhamma Chakra Pravartan Din (Mass Conversion Ceremony Day).

Not dedicated until 2001, the structure now stands as the cathedral of the Ambedkar movement. At first glance, the huge inverted cement bowl looks more like a suburban hockey rink than the Buddhist stupa it’s intended to evoke. Underneath the bowl is an open round hall with many pillars decorated with plaster lotus motifs, a seated figure of the Buddha, and a photographic display chronicling the life story of Babasaheb Ambedkar, as his followers now call the movement’s founder, using a loving honorific expressing filial feeling and reverence. Buddhism began in India, then all but disappeared for centuries until Ambedkar. It still hasn’t found its way home ritualistically. Incense, chanting, and monks are often missing from Deekshabhoomi, which makes the sanctuary seem sterile and almost vacant in comparison to the thronged Buddhist shrines of Colombo, Bangkok, or Phnom Penh. But the religion is obviously putting down roots. At nearby souvenir stands Buddhist tracts sell along with little plaster and wood statuettes of a standing Ambedkar, buttoned up in a double-breasted electric blue suit with a red tie, as prevalent as the seated Buddhas on sale in brass. There are also Ambedkar key rings, medallions, and images. Sometimes he’s shown standing beside Lord Buddha, partaking of his nimbus. If not a demigod, he’s at least a bodhisattva or saint.

A visitor to Nagpur lands at the sleek new Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar International Airport, from which there are regular flights to Bangkok and Dubai. A seminary for the training of Buddhist monks has recently opened with an enrollment of thirty-five acolytes under the leadership of a converted Dalit, Vimalkitti Gunasiri, who learned his Pali, the language of the sacred Buddhist texts, in Thailand. In addition, the University of Nagpur grants doctorates to students from what’s officially called its Post Graduate Department of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Thought. From the vantage point of the university or the Deekshabhoomi, the answer to the question of which figure, Gandhi or Ambedkar, has had the greatest impact on India’s religious life seems nothing less than self-evident.

Such a denouement could not have been imagined in 1930, even by Ambedkar, who, early on, seems to have derived a measure of inspiration from Gandhi and Gandhism. He led satyagraha campaigns to open public water supplies, from reservoirs or wells, to untouchables. One of these campaigns is said to have drawn sixteen thousand untouchables to a Maharashtra town called Mahad, where, an admiring biographer writes, they were “led for the first time in their history by a great leader of their own.” Another satyagraha under his command aimed at forcing open the main temple at the holy Hindu city of Nasik, where the young Gandhi had been made to undergo ritual purification. At one of the Mahad demonstrations, Gandhi’s picture is said to have been displayed. It’s also reported that the Mahatma’s name was chanted at demonstrations Ambedkar inspired or led. But Ambedkar’s judgment of the Mahatma was early tinged by noticeable disappointment. “Before Mahatma Gandhi,” he acknowledged, “no politician in this country maintained that it is necessary to remove social injustice here in order to do away with tension and conflict.” But why, he wondered aloud, had Gandhi not sought to make a vow to eliminate untouchability a prerequisite for Congress membership the way he’d insisted on daily spinning?

His conclusion was balanced and restrained to the point of sounding backhanded. “When one is spurned by everyone,” the young Ambedkar said in 1925 after Gandhi had visited Vaikom, “even the sympathy shown by Mahatma Gandhi is of no little importance.” By 1927, Ambedkar had been named a member of the provincial assembly of what was then called the Bombay Presidency, but there’s no clear indication that Gandhi, who still basically believed in boycotting such appointive positions and who, anyhow, claimed to have given up newspapers, took any notice of him or his campaigns, even those that adopted the method and name of satyagraha. The Mahatma accepted disciples; he did not normally seek them out. Ambedkar had not come to him, nor had he ever aligned himself with the national movement, ever tested its professed opposition to untouchability by offering himself as a potential leader.

So it wasn’t until August 1931, two weeks before Gandhi’s departure for the London conference, that the two men first met, in Bombay. The owlish Ambedkar was a proud and somewhat moody figure, normally aloof even from his own inner circle of adherents, acutely sensitive to slights. (“I am a difficult man,” he would later write, in an attempted self-portrait. “Ordinarily I am as quiet as water and humble as grass. But when I get into a temper I am ungovernable and unmanageable.”) This first meeting seems to have occurred at the Mahatma’s initiative—he’d even offered to call on the younger man—but according to the account handed down by an Ambedkar biographer, the untouchable leader felt snubbed when Gandhi continued a conversation without even glancing at his visitor when Ambedkar entered the room. Once he had Gandhi’s attention, he parried an invitation to set out his views on constitutional matters. “You called me to hear your views,” he said, according to the one surviving account. Ambedkar then listened impatiently as the Mahatma summarized his efforts on behalf of untouchables, finally making it clear that he regarded them as ineffectual and halfhearted.

Gandhiji, I have no homeland,” he said. The tone may have been plaintive or angry. The Mahatma may have been taken aback.

“I know you are a patriot of sterling worth,” Gandhi said, according to this account, apparently based on notes taken down by one of Ambedkar’s supporters.

“How can I call this land my own homeland and this religion my own wherein we are treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein we cannot get water to drink?” Ambedkar persisted, according to this account. (The “wherein’s” may be a clue that these remarks were reconstructed or translated by a lawyer, possibly Ambedkar himself.)

Gandhi’s one comment on the encounter overlooks the “we” in Ambedkar’s outburst as it has been handed down. The comment came a couple of years after the event, by which time he’d taken to using a new name for untouchables, calling them Harijans, or “children of God” (a term rejected by today’s Dalits as patronizing). “Till I left for England,” he said, speaking of Ambedkar, “I did not know he was a Harijan. I thought he was some Brahman who took a deep interest in Harijans and therefore talked intemperately.”

An American scholar, Gail Omvedt, calls that reaction “revelatory of the stereotypes about Dalits that Gandhi held.” It’s an understandable judgment but probably too easy. The go-betweens who set up the meeting had been caste Hindus friendly to Ambedkar. At Vaikom and elsewhere Gandhi had met Brahmans who campaigned conscientiously on behalf of untouchables. This could have been another such group. He’d also met untouchable leaders like Travancore’s Ayyankali. Further back, there was the eminently respectable Vincent Lawrence, the converted untouchable who’d served as his clerk in Durban, briefly lived in his house, and went on to be a community leader there. Gandhi knew untouchables could wear starched collars. But he’d never before met an untouchable intellectual like Ambedkar. No one had.

Their next meeting, in London about a month later, didn’t go any better. This time Gandhi summoned Ambedkar, who ended up speaking for three hours “while Gandhi, spinning, listened mutely,” according to Omvedt. No version of Ambedkar’s long monologue survives. His cause was the social uplift of untouchables, not independence, a subject on which he’d wavered. Did he consider the circumstances under which the two causes could be merged, or was he burning with grievance? Did Gandhi, for his part, say anything to suggest that Ambedkar could make a contribution to the national cause? The answers to these obvious questions are left to our imaginations, along with the question of whether it’s really likely that Gandhi would have sat mutely for three hours listening to Ambedkar’s harangue. All we know is that this second encounter was decidedly less than a success; the two men, whatever their intentions, continued to speak past each other.

If the Mahatma had nothing to say, why had he invited Ambedkar to call on him? The untouchable leader, already on edge over their impending public engagement at the Round Table Conference, concluded that the cagey older man was hoping to gather ammunition for the debate. That’s possible but not the only possibility. Maybe Gandhi had been hoping to find common ground and discovered instead that Ambedkar had stiffened his position. He’d once been opposed to separate electorates for his people on more or less nationalist principles; what he’d wanted, he said at the first Round Table Conference, was universal suffrage and guarantees of adequate representation. The Congress brushed off his moderate proposal, so now he wanted separate electorates, the same as the Muslims were seeking, though Ambedkar had previously spoken against the Muslim demand.

Gandhi’s failure to bargain at this point could even have been a token of grudging respect. It had been his position that caste Hindus had to clean up their own practices, not dictate the politics of the dispossessed. He was more than ready to lecture them on diet and sanitation. But he could also ask, “Who are we to uplift Harijans?” The “we” here meant caste Hindus. “We can only atone for our sin against them or discharge the debt we owe them, and this we can do only by adopting them as equal members of society, and not by haranguing them.”

In South Africa, Gandhi had the experience of making demands on behalf of a beleaguered minority to a political leader who grasped the justice of his claims but found it politically expedient to adopt a posture of obtuseness. Drawing the parallel himself, Gandhi said Ambedkar’s anger at Hindus reminded him of himself “in my early days in South Africa where I was hounded by Europeans wherever I went.” Did it ever occur to the Mahatma that in resisting Ambedkar for the sake of harmony in the movement he led, he was casting himself in the role of Smuts? He could be fierce in that resistance but never vituperative, writing of Ambedkar later: “Dr. A. always commands my sympathies in all he says. He needs the gentlest treatment.”

And on another occasion: “He has a right even to spit upon me, as every untouchable has, and I would keep on smiling if they did so.” This resolutely smiling face was not a mask. It was a measure of the man. But when he confronted Ambedkar at the Round Table Conference, Gandhi’s smile faded.

He may have meant to offer Ambedkar “the gentlest treatment,” may not have been thinking of Ambedkar at all, when he led off with a political barb, noting in the politest possible terms that the British had stacked the conference with political lightweights and nonentities as a way of diminishing, of getting around, the national movement. Gandhi, the recognized national leader, was just one of fifty-six delegates, placed by the imperial stage managers on an equal footing with British businessmen, maharajahs, and representatives of various minorities and sects. So Gandhi had a point, but the untouchable spokesman could have once again discerned condescension and taken offense. Then, heedless of overstatement, Gandhi allowed himself to claim, “Above all, the Congress represents, in its essence, the dumb, semi-starved millions scattered over the length and breadth of the land in its 700,000 villages.” Now we know this wasn’t really his reading of Indian reality. In the setting of St. James’s Palace, Gandhi was plainly glossing over his own disappointment in the Congress’s failure to do more than pay lip service to his “constructive program” for renewal at the village level. Less than two years earlier, he’d told Nehru that the movement couldn’t be trusted to conduct a civil disobedience campaign. But here he was allowing himself rhetorical leeway as the Congress’s spokesman and plenipotentiary, staking his claim on what was still not much more than an aspiration.

To Ambedkar’s sensitive ears, it was propaganda calculated to belittle him and his struggle for the recognition of untouchables as a distinct and persecuted Indian minority, therefore demanding rebuttal. If the Congress represented the poorest, what role could he have, standing outside the national movement as he did? Three days later Gandhi made a potentially soothing gesture, saying, “Of course, the Congress will share the honor with Dr. Ambedkar of representing the interests of the untouchables.” But in the next breath he swept Ambedkar’s ideas for untouchable representation off the table. “Special representation” for them, he said, would run counter to their interests.

The clash between Ambedkar and Gandhi became personal in a session of what was named the Minorities Committee, on October 8, 1931, a day after Prime Minister MacDonald called a snap election that would produce a Tory landslide behind the facade of a national unity government, giving the Tories more than three-quarters of the seats in the new House of Commons. It was Ambedkar who lit the fuse, ignoring the Mahatma’s offer to “share the honor” of representing the untouchables. He may have been nominated by the British, but, nevertheless, Ambedkar said, “I fully represent the claims of my community.” Gandhi had no claim, he now seemed to argue, on the support of untouchables: “The Mahatma has always been saying that the Congress stands for the Depressed Classes, and that the Congress represents the Depressed Classes more than I or my colleagues can do. To that claim I can only say that it is one of the many false claims which irresponsible people keep on making.”

 

Ambedkar, lower right; Gandhi, center, at Round Table Conference (photo credit i8.3)

 

The untouchable leader didn’t stop there. He went on to suggest that the takeover of British India by caste Hindus could be a threat to his people—the bulk of Gandhi’s “dumb millions”—fifty or sixty million untouchables by the estimates then in use. “The Depressed Classes are not anxious, they are not clamorous,” he said, “they have not started any movement for claiming that there shall be an immediate transfer of power from the British to the Indian people.”

Gandhi didn’t raise his voice—that was never his way—but he was plainly stung. In his long public life of more than half a century, there’s probably no other moment when he spoke as sharply—or as personally—as he now did in picking up the gauntlet Ambedkar had thrown down. This time there was no mention of sharing the honor of representing the untouchables. “I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast mass of the untouchables,” he said. “Here I speak not merely on behalf of the Congress, but I speak on my own behalf, and I claim that I would get, if there was a referendum of the untouchables, their vote, and I would top the poll.” In that highly charged instant, the Mahatma’s ego was as bare as his person.

However it’s regarded—as a challenge and response between two political leaders over an issue that was central to each man’s sense of mission, or as a description of reality as it then existed in the villages and slums of colonial India, or as a weighty constitutional issue bearing on the best interests of a minority, or as a portent of India’s future—the clash was heavily laden with meanings. After eight decades, these require some sorting out.

On the level of mundane Indian reality as it existed in the depths of the Depression era, Gandhi was unquestionably right when he said as he did that morning in the old Tudor palace, “It is not a proper claim which is registered by Dr. Ambedkar when he seeks to speak for the whole of the untouchables of India.” Most untouchables in India then would probably not have heard of Ambedkar; he was still little known outside his own region. If most untouchables had heard of any single political leader, it would have been Gandhi. So, yes, he might well have been expected to “top” his imagined poll. This is true even though, in his insistence that the problem of untouchability started with the warped values of caste Hindus and not with the untouchables themselves, he’d done next to nothing to organize and lead untouchables, whose cause, he again insisted, was “as dear to me as life itself.”

For all his ambition and maneuvering, Ambedkar would never fare well in electoral politics, and the parties he founded never achieved anything like a national following. Even today in Nagpur, in the heart of Ambedkar country, the last of his parties, the Republican Party, has mutated into no fewer than four distinct versions, each aligned with a particular Dalit leader sitting under a portrait of Ambedkar, claiming to be his true heir. Nevertheless, if a poll were held today in an attempt to measure the relative standing of the Mahatma and the man revered as Babasaheb among the former untouchables, now calling themselves Dalits, there can be little doubt that Ambedkar has finally caught up to Gandhi, that he would “top” it. He stood for the idea that they were the keepers of their own destiny, that they deserved their own movement, their own leaders, like all other Indian communities, castes, and subcastes, an idea that after four or five generations—despite all the fragmentation and corruption of caste-based electoral politics in the “world’s greatest democracy”—most Dalits finally appear to embrace.

On the constitutional issue and the best interests of untouchables, Gandhi had more to say that morning in the palace than his challenger. His essential argument was that any special representation for untouchables—in the form of separate electorates or reserved seats that only untouchables could hold—would work to perpetuate untouchability. “Let the whole world know,” he said, “that today there is a body of Hindu reformers who are pledged to remove this blot of untouchability. We do not want on our register and on our census untouchables classified as a separate class … Will untouchables remain untouchables in perpetuity? I would far rather that Hinduism died than that untouchability lived.”

This was as forceful and pure a statement of principle on the subject as this remarkable advocate ever managed. But he didn’t stop there. The encounter had shaken him. The previous week he’d negotiated futilely on constitutional formulas with Jinnah, the Aga Khan, and other Muslim leaders. Now here he was clashing with an untouchable, and even if he had the better of the argument for the moment, he was shrewd enough to understand that the forecast he’d made about the imminent collapse of untouchability remained a far-fetched boast. He’d already declared his sense of helplessness on the question of Hindu-Muslim unity. Did he now glimpse a similar impasse in his fight against untouchability? The achievement of communal unity and the end of caste persecution had been two of his four “pillars” of Indian freedom. At this turning point in London, he could hardly have felt confident about either cause.

How he really felt was implicit in what he had to say about his surprisingly staunch opponent that day. “The great wrong under which he has labored and perhaps the bitter experiences that he has undergone have for the moment warped his judgment,” Gandhi said of Ambedkar, after praising his dedication and ability. The Mahatma was again in the grip of the same caution that had led him to predict, during the Vaikom campaign, that “chaos and confusion” could be the result if the cause of temple entry were taken up by the national movement. If the untouchables were fortified with separate political rights, he now said, that would “create a division in Hinduism which I cannot possibly look forward to … Those who speak of the political rights of untouchables do not know their India, do not know how Indian society is today constructed.” Much lay between the lines here. Though he had not solved the question of untouchability, Gandhi had built a national movement and not just a movement; he’d evoked the sense of nationhood on which it was based. He needed to believe that this could finally be the answer to untouchability. He feared that caste conflict could be its undoing. Implicitly, he was acknowledging that the problem remained to be solved and pledging, once again, to be the one whose passion and example would bring the solution.

“I want to say with all the emphasis I can command,” he concluded with a vague but ominous warning, “that if I was the only person to resist this thing I would resist it with my life.” Here he was paraphrasing a line from his life-transforming speech in Johannesburg’s Empire Theater a quarter of a century earlier. At the turning points of Gandhi’s political life, it was always “do or die.”

It’s not clear that the British or Ambedkar or others at the Round Table Conference grasped the meaning of this warning on hearing it. They may have shrugged it off as rhetoric, failing to understand the importance of vows in the Mahatma’s life. But heading off “this thing”—the move not just to give untouchables supposed legal guarantees of equal rights but separate political rights that could be bartered for some measure of political power—had now become a Gandhian vow, complicating and making even more urgent his vow to end untouchability.

Both sides went away with hurt feelings. “This has been the most humiliating day of my life,” Gandhi remarked that evening. For his part, Ambedkar would later be quoted as having said of Gandhi that “a more ignorant and more tactless representative could not have been sent” to speak for the Congress at the conference. Gandhi claimed to be a unifying force and a man full of humanity, Ambedkar went on, but he had shown how petty he could be. Ambedkar is not the first person to feel personally offended by Gandhi in this way. If we cast our minds back over two decades to South Africa, we can hear echoes in Ambedkar of the bitter tirades Gandhi evoked from Durban’s P. S. Aiyar, the maverick Indian editor who complained that Gandhi presented himself as “a soul of perfection,” though he’d produced “no tangible good for anyone.”

Gandhi had taken no notice of the editor’s attempt to fight the head tax imposed on former indentured laborers, just as he’d later take no notice of Ambedkar’s adoption of satyagraha as a tactic to open up Hindu temples and village wells to untouchables. An ocean separated Ambedkar and Aiyar. They probably never heard of each other, but they ended up with the same sense of bitterness over a Gandhi they found elusive and immovable, a Gandhi who seemed to feel that fighting for the indentured or untouchables—causes with which he’d long identified himself—was illegitimate if it was done without his sanction, on time-tables other than his own. Ambedkar eventually revealed a sense of injury he’d nursed for years, so like Aiyar’s. “Mr. Gandhi made nonsense of satyagraha,” he wrote, referring to the Mahatma’s refusal to back one of his temple-entry campaigns. “Why did Mr. Gandhi do this? Only because he did not want to annoy and exasperate the Hindus.”

As the London conference was concluding, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to a supporter of the untouchable leader complaining that Ambedkar’s “behavior to Gandhiji had been exceedingly discourteous.” More than sharp words was at stake. In the archive of the Nehru Memorial in New Delhi, I came upon a letter Nehru wrote several days later in his official capacity as general secretary of the All India Congress Committee, tossing cold water on an ardent appeal on the subject of untouchability from a rising young congressman in Bombay named S. K. Patil. What the young congressman wanted was a clear stand in support of the Nasik satyagraha, which Ambedkar had launched before heading to London. It was time, he wrote, for Congress to “take sides” on the matter of temple entry; an “authoritative statement” was needed in support of the Nasik satyagraha. Patil, who’d emerge three decades later as a tough political boss in Bombay and a powerful member of the Nehru cabinet, was especially incensed by a Congress leader’s statement that the weapon of satyagraha should be reserved for the cause of independence, not be wasted on lesser, more parochial issues like temple entry. If that was the movement’s stand, he wrote, then “many of us have not understood Mahatmaji for whom satyagraha is a panacea for all evils.”

The rising young politician was unaware that Mahatmaji’s stand wasn’t nearly as clear-cut as he worshipfully imagined, that seven years earlier, at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha, Gandhi had actually ruled that the national movement shouldn’t get involved in “local” temple-entry campaigns. Nehru didn’t go into that history in his reply. He ducked the issue of temple entry for untouchables altogether, saying simply that satyagraha “should not be abused and made a cheap weapon.” The issue plainly struck him as a diversion from the main goals of the national struggle. By birth, a Kashmiri pandit, or Brahman, he’d dropped caste from his vocabulary in favor of class. Abolishing untouchability, in his view, was a task for an independent India, something that could be deferred until that long-awaited dawn. Nehru’s brush-off of Patil stands as a timely reminder of why Ambedkar was so sore. Congress could not, in fact, be relied on to “share the honor” of representing the untouchables. That was—and would remain—the weak point in Gandhi’s otherwise passionate stand.

London had been only round one. Gandhi and Ambedkar would soon clash again, over even higher stakes. Thereafter it wouldn’t be long before the rotund future Buddhist would give up on temple-entry campaigns, on Hinduism in general, and on Congress in particular. Gandhi, who’d promised to resist “this thing” with his life, may have been the only one who sensed what was coming.

GANDHI’S GOOD-BYE TODAY, said the headline in London’s Daily Herald on December 5. In a farewell interview, the Mahatma said that “something indefinable” had changed in the attitude of ordinary Britons toward India. Years later George Orwell, no dewy-eyed admirer, would seem to agree, suggesting that Gandhi’s great achievement may have been the creation in Britain of “a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence … Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air.” The best evidence for Orwell’s argument may be found in the three months Gandhi spent in England at the height of the Depression.

After stops in Paris and Switzerland, he arrived in Italy on December 11, hoping to meet the pope and Mussolini. The time in London inflated his sense of his stature on the world scene. Now he heard a calling to do what he could to head off another war in Europe. He was hopeful, he confided to the French writer Romain Rolland, that he could make some impression on his Rome stopover. Rolland had written a hagiographic tract hailing Gandhi as India’s “Messiah,” going so far as to compare him to Buddha and Christ as a “mortal half-god.” But he was skeptical about the Mahatma’s ability to move Il Duce.

Pope Pius XI sent his regrets but arranged for Gandhi to visit the Sistine Chapel. Unfortunately, there’s no image, other than what we can summon to our imaginations, of the slight figure in his loincloth and shawl gazing up contemplatively at a similarly attired, incomparably heftier Christ in The Last Judgment. More than likely, it was the Mahatma’s first and only real experience of Western painting on religious themes, if we omit the Jesus print he kept over his desk in his Johannesburg law office. He took it in with some patience, later pronouncing himself deeply moved by a pietà: probably the Michelangelo in St. Peter’s, possibly the Bellini in the Vatican museum. Then at six o’clock he was ushered into Mussolini’s spacious office (“as big as a ballroom, completely empty except for one big writing table,” wrote Gandhi’s English follower Madeleine Slade, the admiral’s daughter whom Gandhi had renamed Mirabehn). The dictator (in what Mirabehn described as “quite good English”) led the conversation, asking his visitor whether he’d “got anything” at the Round Table Conference.

 

At Bombay rally on return from Europe, December 1931 (photo credit i8.4)

 

No indeed,” Gandhi replied, “but I had not hoped I would get anything out of it.”

What would he do next? Mussolini wanted to know. “It seems I shall have to start a campaign of civil disobedience,” his guest said.

It remained a back-and-forth in this vein between two seasoned politicians until Mussolini solicited Gandhi’s thoughts on Europe. “Now you ask the question that I have been waiting for you to ask,” said the Mahatma, launching into what was effectively a summary of arguments about Western decadence he’d set down twenty-two years earlier in Hind Swaraj as he traveled back to South Africa from a previous unsuccessful mission to Whitehall. “Europe cannot go on the way it has been going on,” he said. “The only alternative is for it to change the whole basis of its economic life, its whole value system.”

Gandhi, who hadn’t bothered to study up on fascism, may have thought he was speaking against industrialization and colonialism, and therefore, by his lights, for peace. But his actual words could have been spliced seamlessly into one of Il Duce’s strident orations. The meeting thus ended on a note of harmony, but it was hardly a meeting of minds, in part because Gandhi had misread his host’s.

He sailed from Brindisi for home two days later. From shipboard he wrote to Romain Rolland praising Mussolini for his “service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about coordination between capital and labor … [and] his passionate love for “his people.” Appalled, Rolland wrote an emotional rebuttal, upbraiding his Messiah for passing such casual, ill-informed judgments. Before the letter could be mailed, he learned that Gandhi had been taken out of circulation.

On January 4, 1932, seven days after disembarking in Bombay, the Mahatma awakened at three in the morning to find the commissioner of police, an Englishman in full uniform, standing at the foot of his bed. “Bapu just waking [looked] old, fragile and rather pathetic with the mists of sleep still on his face,” a sympathetic British onlooker later wrote.

“Mr. Gandhi,” the commissioner said, “it is my duty to arrest you.”

“A beautiful smile of welcome broke out on Bapu’s face,” the onlooker went on, “and now he looked young, strong and confident.”