7

UNAPPROACHABILITY

 

SUPPOSE THAT MOHAN GANDHI, the young barrister who journeyed to South Africa in the last decade of the nineteenth century, had been persuaded by evangelical friends in Pretoria to convert to Christianity, that he’d then stayed on to build a profitable law practice in Johannesburg, living out his life there under apartheid, in a segregated township’s largest house. Would relations between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent be any different today? If different, would they be worse or better? The only point of proposing such a mind game is to underscore the role of chance and contingency, as well as character, in human affairs. Of course, the questions are unanswerable, but if we stay with the premise of a modern India minus Gandhi, it’s not impossible to imagine a Mohammed Ali Jinnah who remained an Indian nationalist and brushed off the idea of Pakistan as the misbegotten dream of crackpots. Or a Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted Indian independence on behalf of an elitist movement, wearing a suit and tie rather than the khadi homespun that became mandatory for aspiring leaders after the advent of the Mahatma. This isn’t to say that such scenarios would have been preferable to the one we designate as history, only to make the obvious point that other outcomes were possible. We can be reasonably certain at least that absent Gandhi, the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity wouldn’t have flourished earlier, the way it did for a few brief years when he came close to achieving a merger between the national and the Khilafat movements, or the mirage of one. Most days of most years, Hindus and Muslims in most parts of India still live peacefully at close quarters, showing exemplary tolerance of each other’s customs. Once, thanks to heavy lifting by Gandhi, their leaders were almost able to do so too.

Seen in perfect hindsight, powerful undercurrents all that time were carrying the two largest communities away from the reconciliation the leaders said they wanted. Such trends can be instructively traced in the life of a Hindu religious leader who was probably second only to Gandhi in stature in that era. This was Swami Shraddhanand, a revivalist in his own right, formerly known as Mahatma Munshi Ram, who loomed especially large in the Punjab and adjacent areas of North India. His views were close to Gandhi’s; if anything, he was more uncompromising in his abhorrence of untouchability. Long before Gandhi, he had the nerve to voice his approval of intercaste dining and even marriage, and, beyond that, of all but abandoning the caste system itself in the name of a more generous and capacious Hinduism. Though the two mahatmas were in basic sympathy, they could seldom agree on tactics or their reading of Muslim intentions.

Shraddhanand, an impulsive man, a courageous one too, was prepared to follow Gandhi but not to subordinate his own judgment. His life offers two powerful punctuation points in an account of Gandhi’s early efforts to bring Hindus and Muslims together. In the aftermath of Gandhi’s first venture in nonviolent political action on a national scale, the strike of 1919, Shraddhanand was invited to preach from the pulpit in India’s largest and most important mosque, Delhi’s Jama Masjid. Days before, he’d become a hero to Delhi’s Muslims as well as Hindus for baring his chest to troops attempting to turn back a march he was leading, daring them to fire. (Accounts differ on whether they were Gurkhas or Manipuris from the northeast.) No Hindu leader had ever before been invited to hold forth at the Jama Masjid, nor would this ecumenical invitation ever be repeated. In that instant, the swami, a hulking figure with a shaved head, wearing umber-colored robes, personified the unity for which Gandhi had tirelessly appealed. When he intoned a Sanskrit prayer for peace, Om Shanti, “the whole audience followed me with one reverberating voice,” the swami wrote. Only six years later, he was shot and killed by a Muslim inflamed by Shraddhanand’s later writings against what he deemed a Muslim conspiracy, thus becoming in death the personification of looming conflict.

My heart refuses to grieve,” Gandhi said upon learning of the murder. “It rather prays that all of us may be granted such a death.” A “blessed death,” a martyr’s death, he called it, as if forecasting his own end.

The killer arrived at the door of the swami’s Delhi bungalow on a December afternoon and managed to talk his way into the room where a convalescing Shraddhanand was bedridden, saying he had religious issues to discuss. The swami courteously invited him to return later when he hoped to be feeling stronger. The visitor then asked for a drink of water. Left alone with the great man, he pulled out a pistol and pumped two slugs into Shraddhanand’s chest. The assassin turned out to be a Muslim calligrapher named Abdul Rashid. At his trial he explained that he blamed his victim for spreading blasphemies against the Prophet; then he was sentenced to hang, whereupon thousands of Muslims turned out for his funeral, hailing him, not his victim, as the true martyr. The Times of India spread a report that students and teachers at the celebrated Muslim seminary at Deoband recited the Koran five times over in order to ensure the assassin a place in “the seventh heaven.”

Clearly, there’d been a communal mood swing in the years between the swami’s unique exaltation at the Jama Masjid and the celebration of his killer’s last rites. In those years, Shraddhanand had veered in and out of alliance with Gandhi. When they differed, it was because the swami thought Gandhi either was too soft on Muslims or had not lived up to his own pleadings on behalf of untouchables. In his view, the two failings were cause and effect.

The very idea that Gandhi’s commitment to the struggle against untouchability could be challenged as halfhearted so early in his ascendancy over the national movement comes as a surprise. It’s not part of the received narrative. Gandhi himself spoke and wrote as if he’d made the issue of what he called “high and low” one of his signature causes from his early South African years on. He could never get used to having his good intentions questioned in this area. Yet among Dalits in today’s India the idea that Gandhi was a fair-weather friend, or no friend at all, has become a commonplace, one that’s overdue for reevaluation. In that context, his relations with Shraddhanand offer a useful point of departure for the telling of a story that has been insufficiently explored, for all the studies of this much-studied life.

At first the bond between the two mahatmas seemed solid. Gandhi himself traced it back to 1913, when he received funds for his final satyagraha campaign in Natal and the Transvaal from students of Mahatma Munshi Ram at his school, the Gurukul, near the pilgrimage center of Hardwar in the foothills of the Himalayas. Munshi Ram had sent the students out to earn with the sweat of their brows funds to support the far-off indentured laborers marching as passive resisters. His covering letter addressed Gandhi as “My dear brother.” Gandhi, who was twelve years younger and not yet known by that reverential honorific, never forgot this. It was to the Gurukul that he dispatched the first batch of his followers from the Phoenix Settlement when finally he pulled up stakes in South Africa. Within three months of his own arrival in India, Gandhi himself turned up there in 1915 for his first face-to-face encounter with Munshi Ram. Meeting the celebrated Hindu reformer in person was the real purpose of his visit to Hardwar; the mass spectacle of the Kumbh Mela (and all the fetid insanitation to which it gave rise, which so shocked his sensibilities) was incidental.

The swami had been keeping a deliberate distance from the national movement but got swept up in it in support of the Mahatma-to-be. In his view, Gandhi was leading a dharma yudha, a religious struggle. The start of the noncooperation campaign in April 1919 was the occasion for Tagore’s call on Indians to recognize Gandhi as a mahatma. Yet shortly after Shraddhanand was hailed for his role in the campaign in Delhi, he quit the movement to protest the abruptness of Gandhi’s decision to shut the campaign down. The swami agreed that the movement wasn’t disciplined enough to prevent outbreaks of rioting in a vast land. It was more Gandhi’s high-handed way of deciding than the decision itself that he was protesting. “Thousands of people have been inspired by their feeling of trust in you … and have given up all worldly worries,” he wrote to Gandhi, resigning from the satyagraha committee. “The pity is that you at once bring out your pronouncements without even asking those people if they agree.”

It was neither the first time nor would it be the last that Gandhi heard such a complaint from key supporters. Yet Shraddhanand very soon gave in to pleas from Gandhi and others and again threw himself back into the national movement, only to find himself regularly on the losing end of tactical disagreements with a leader used to consulting only himself. The most significant of these, in his own mind, were over the issue of untouchability, on which Gandhi had taken a consistent stand from his first months back in India. From Shraddhanand he then encountered for the first time the criticism that he was unwilling to back up his powerful exhortations with deeds. The swami could be even less malleable than Gandhi. For more than two decades, he’d been a stalwart promoter of the purification ceremonies called shuddi that were used to bring untouchables and low-caste Indians into a broad-based Hindu fold in which caste divisions would be downplayed if not eliminated. The man who’d spoken at the Jama Masjid had demonstrated his willingness to stand with Gandhi—and Muslims—in the Khilafat cause. But he bridled when he began to suspect that it was more of a priority for Gandhi than the struggle against untouchability.

So, in December 1919, at the Indian National Congress session in Amritsar, it was the swami, not Gandhi, who dwelled on the matter. “Is it not true,” he asked provocatively, “that so many among you who make the loudest noises about the acquisition of political rights are not able to overcome your feelings of revulsion for those sixty millions of India who are suffering injustice whom you regard as untouchable? How many are there who take these wretched brothers of theirs to their hearts?” Nine months later at the special Congress session in Calcutta, Shraddhanand tried and failed to get the subject on the agenda. Gandhi was among those who felt that the discussion of the noncooperation campaign had more urgency, that anything else would be a digression. Given that the preservation of the caliphate was one of the campaign’s declared aims, that amounted to saying the cause of the Muslims mattered more, for the moment at least, than the struggle against untouchability. “That was a grave mistake,” the disappointed swami lamented. “Only at that time can non-cooperation with an enemy nation become a possibility, when full cooperation between ourselves has been achieved.”

Gandhi made sure the Congress took up untouchability more or less in earnest at its regular annual meeting, held in Nagpur a few months after the Calcutta gathering. But Shraddhanand was not the only one who had started to worry that the Mahatma might be soft-pedaling the issue. The Anglican priest Charles F. Andrews, whom Gandhi addressed as “Charlie,” had become close to Munshi Ram in India before meeting Gandhi in South Africa and had then brought the two together. Andrews wrote a “Dear Mohan” letter to Gandhi—he was the only one of the Mahatma’s hundreds of correspondents who felt comfortable being so familiar—expressing his own fear that untouchability was slipping on his agenda. Gandhi was so upset by the criticism that he lay awake at two in the morning a month after the gathering at Nagpur and started framing his answer in his mind before rising at his usual hour of four to set down an emotional defense of his stand. Strong as the letter was, it confirmed the sense that he now saw untouchability as a cause that would have to wait its time. The Khilafat movement had priority because it was a prerequisite for unity between Hindus and Muslims, which was in turn a prerequisite for independence. But this was so, Gandhi argued with his usual capacity for disarming rationalization, not because untouchability was less important but because “it is a bigger problem than that of gaining Indian independence.” He’d be able to “tackle it better,” he said, if he gained independence “on the way.” Therefore, he predicted, India “may free herself from English domination before India has become free of the curse of untouchability.”

A quarter of a century later, when independence finally was conceded by a war-weary, battered Britain, that forecast proved to be more than half-true: the curse of untouchability lived on. But then Gandhi had little or no time left to “tackle” it. In the present tense of 1921 and 1922, Shraddhanand came to suspect that Gandhi’s commitment to keeping Muslims in the national movement was stronger than his passion for uplifting the society’s outcastes. Like Tagore, he objected to the campaign to burn foreign cloth that might have gone to the very poor. But he went a step further, asking how come Gandhi could go easy on Muslim leaders who, instead of having to burn imported cloth, were given a pass to ship it to their brethren in Turkey. “While Mahatmaji stood adamant and did not have the least regard for Hindu feeling when a question of principle was involved,” he wrote, “for the Muslim dereliction of duty there was always a very soft corner in his heart.”

Swami Shraddhanand had his own problems with orthodox Hindus. Appointed to a Congress committee to work on the untouchability issue, he found that sufficient funds were never appropriated for that purpose, his own initiatives and proposals mysteriously derailed. In his view, the Congress wasn’t serious about what he deemed to be “the most important plank” in its program. So in January 1922—a little more than a month before Gandhi was arrested for the first time in India and jailed for nearly two years in order to head off another round of civil disobedience—the swami again resigned. On the rebound, he then threw himself into the Hindu Mahasabha, the party of Hindu supremacists. He imagined his new allies could not fail to grasp the urgency of his efforts to bring untouchables into the Hindu fold. Essentially, in his view, the outcastes were up for grabs. They would fall victim to Muslim proselytizers if caste Hindus failed to grant them justice. At stake, ultimately, was power on the subcontinent. “If all untouchables become Muslims,” the swami wrote, “then Muslims will become equal to the Hindus and at the time of independence, they will not depend on Hindus, but will be able to stand on their own legs.” But there was a catch. Shraddhanand’s form of shuddi, or purification, demanded social equality. That was too much for the Mahasabha. The Congress had at least paid lip service to his goals. The Mahasabha turned him down flat, stranding him yet again.

With Gandhi still in jail, Muhammad Ali became president of the Congress. His proposal for preserving Hindu-Muslim unity from the bitter competition for untouchable souls—and eventual votes—was to cook a deal under which half the untouchables would become Muslims, half accepted as Hindus. Apparently, there would be no need to consult the untouchables themselves. To Shraddhanand this just demonstrated the Muslim lust for power. He was further incensed when Ali was quoted as having said that he prayed that Gandhi would see the light of Islam, that until then the most errant Muslim could be surer of salvation than the purest Hindu. This led to a public exchange of letters between the swami and the maulana, but each pulled back from the brink of confrontation; the exchange was more notable for its careful courtesy, expressions of esteem, and reiteration of religious platitudes than for its polemical firepower.

In this same period, the swami twice visited Gandhi to lobby him over the lagging anti-untouchability effort and, it appears, discuss Muslim intentions (once while Gandhi was still in Yeravda prison in August 1923 and again in early 1924 when he was recuperating from an appendectomy that had become the occasion for his release). In particular, he complained about Muslim tabligh, or proselytizing efforts. Gandhi gave his answer in print in Young India, blaming proselytizing on both sides, shuddi as well as tabligh, for much of the tensions between Hindus and Muslims. It was one thing to preach a creed out of burning faith, Gandhi said, another to misrepresent the other religion in a way that inevitably undermined national unity. “No propaganda can be allowed which reviles other religions,” he wrote. “Intrepid and brave” as he was, Gandhi said, Shraddhanand spoke for the Hinduism of the Arya Samaj movement with which he’d long been identified, sharing its “narrow outlook and pugnacious habit.”

The swami’s political vicissitudes are worth dwelling on for the light they shed on Gandhi’s dilemma. The younger Mahatma, now in his fifties and fully fledged as a national leader, usually spoke as if his campaigns for unity between Hindus and Muslims and for basic rights and justice for the tens of millions of oppressed untouchables were mutually reinforcing, the warp and woof of swaraj. In fact, they were often in conflict, not merely for his attention or primacy in the movement he led, but at a local level where proselytizers and religious reformers battled for souls. And, truth to tell, neither cause—that of Hindu-Muslim unity nor justice for untouchables—had much appeal to caste Hindus, especially rural caste Hindus, who were the backbone of the movement Gandhi and his lieutenants were building. His political revival may have articulated the nation’s highest aspirations, but examined more closely at a regional or local level, it turned out to be a fragile coalition of competing, frequently clashing communal interests. Inspiring the movement was one of Gandhi’s tasks; holding it together was another, one that Shraddhanand, a Hindu reformer bent on brooking little or no compromise, didn’t have to shoulder. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who’d soon emerge as the modern leader of the untouchables, later called Shraddhanand their “greatest and most sincere champion.” Ambedkar was drawing a contrast to the other Mahatma, whom he’d come to regard as devious and untrustworthy—in other words, as a crafty politician.

The swami himself usually allowed his hopes for Gandhi to outweigh his disappointments. So even after Gandhi had publicly castigated him for weakening national unity, Shraddhanand continued to press the Mahatma to focus more on the untouchability issue. It was a pressure Gandhi could not ignore and perhaps welcomed. His long article taking on Shraddhanand in the context of Hindu-Muslim tensions hadn’t once alluded to the plight of the untouchables. Five months later, however, we find him replying to the swami, who’d asked, in particular, that he lend more open support and leadership to the first struggle on behalf of untouchables using his patented satyagraha methods. It targeted a long-standing ban on untouchables so much as walking on the roads approaching an ancient temple at Vaikom in the kingdom of Travancore, in what’s now the South Indian state of Kerala. Although Gandhi had called the cause of the untouchables “a passion of my life,” he’d been in the uncomfortable position of counseling the Vaikom demonstrators to go easy in their use of satyagraha methods he himself had inspired, on behalf of a cause he ostensibly championed. “I am trying to make the necessary arrangements for Vaikom,” he now wrote to Shraddhanand, who may have urged him to go to Travancore, where he’d yet to set foot. If so, the response is noncommittal. “I hope help will reach the satyagrahis” is all Gandhi says.

The note to the sometimes obstreperous swami is written from Muhammad Ali’s bungalow in Delhi, where Gandhi has just ended his twenty-one-day fast of “penance,” provoked by a string of worsening clashes between Hindus and Muslims. It’s late 1924, and he has been out of jail for half a year, but he’s still struggling to bridge fissures that had opened in the national movement while he was passing his meditative two years in Yeravda prison—fissures not only between Hindus and Muslims but between those (known as No Changers) pledged to continue his earlier strategy of noncooperation and a political faction (called Swarajists) more impatient for the trappings of power in a colonial framework. That faction had formed in the leader’s absence and was now bent on taking part in legislative councils the movement had vowed to boycott. Trying to function as a one-man balance wheel, Gandhi in this time is not only weakened physically but nearly immobilized politically; his one consistent strategy for moving forward involves the charkha, or spinning wheel. Hindus, Muslims, No Changers, Swarajists, all are enjoined to achieve self-reliance through spinning. (In June 1924, a few months after the Vaikom demonstrations began, Gandhi actually proposed that each member of the Congress be required to do a minimum amount of daily spinning; the motion provoked a Swarajist walkout and was instantly a dead letter even though it was eventually watered down and passed so as not to humiliate the revered but no longer paramount leader.)

 

Gandhi recuperating at Juhu Beach, after release from prison, 1924 (photo credit i7.1)

 

At this point, the isolated struggle in Vaikom, which Gandhi had yet to witness firsthand, was no longer getting his close attention. In all these ways, it was peripheral. Gandhi, from a distance, had championed the struggle in print in the pages of Young India but otherwise had done his best to keep it under his thumb. What’s at issue for him in Vaikom is a question that will hover over his leadership for the rest of his life: Could he continue to function as a national leader, or has he been driven by the diversity and complexity of India, with all the clashing aspirations arising from its communal and caste divisions, to define himself as leader of the Hindus? Could he simultaneously lead a struggle for independence and a struggle for social justice if that meant taking on orthodox high-caste Hindus, which would inevitably strain and possibly splinter his movement? Behind that question lurked an even more unsettling and long-lasting one, a question still debated by Dalits and Indian social reformers: Granted that Gandhi did much to make the practice of untouchability disreputable among modernizing Indians, what exactly was he prepared to do for the untouchables themselves beyond preach to their oppressors? It was such questions that—acting from afar—he’d been trying to finesse at Vaikom, with the result that this first use of satyagraha against untouchability was now in danger of languishing.

Vaikom’s Shiva temple sits in the center of a large walled compound, about the size of four football fields, reached on three sides by roads that cut through the bazaar of the smallish trading town southeast of Cochin, now Kochi. With the exception of a few shade-giving pipal trees, patches of grass, and a cement walk that can scald the bare feet of midday visitors required to shed their shoes or sandals at the gate, most of the area is packed earth that looks as if it’s regularly swept. The temple itself is an oblong wooden structure with a latticed outer wall that sits on a stone platform under a sloping roof made of the same clay tiles traditionally used in Kerala’s sturdier housing; at each of the four corners, a gold-painted statue of a bull—an animal symbolically associated with Shiva—reclines on its haunches. In the inner sanctum, Brahman priests assist worshippers making offerings to the deity. Today it’s not uncommon for the worshippers to include Dalits, former untouchables, and other members of lower castes who would have been barred from the Shiva temple in 1924. Sometimes these groups are the majority of visitors to the compound, drawn by the free midday meals available at the temple.

Recently, a seemingly heretical question has become a matter of public debate: whether non-Brahmans should be allowed to perform the priestly function in violation of caste rules. Today’s priests, after all, are civil servants, employed by a state government that calls itself Marxist and collects as revenue whatever remains after maintenance costs from the offerings worshippers bring. Such an issue would have been unimaginable at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha when the temple was administered by four priestly families, known by the name of their subcaste as Namboodiris (sometimes spelled Nambuthiris). The revenues they collected went to the maharajah of Travancore, a princely state that survived throughout the colonial period under watchful British oversight, occupying roughly the southern half of today’s Kerala.

What Gandhi had learned about untouchability growing up in Gujarat, then viewing the subject from the other side of the Indian Ocean during his long sojourn in Africa, had scarcely prepared him for the mad intricacies of caste as practiced in Kerala. Untouchability was one thing, what were called “unapproachability” and even “unseeability” were something else. A Travancore Brahman was supposed to never have to set eyes on the lowest class of untouchables. It was as simple and categorical as that. If he did, he would have to consider himself polluted and perform a purification rite. A member of a landowning caste called Nairs would be polluted if he allowed an Ezhava—the pronunciation falls somewhere between IRR-ava and ILL-ava—to come within forty paces of him; the prescribed distance for a Pulaya, a much lower stratum of untouchable, was sixty paces. Until the beginning of the last century, Pulayas were literally barred from public roads. They were expected to ring bells, rap sticks, or make honking noises to warn any caste Hindu nearby of the danger of pollution. Their mobility was more constrained than that of a plantation slave; indeed, they were bonded to specific landowners as field hands. Ezhavas (an upwardly mobile group who’d been by tradition toddy tappers), Tiyyas (coconut pluckers), Pulayas, and other subcastes at the bottom of the Kerala pyramid were uniformly barred from setting foot in the sacrosanct precincts of a place where Brahmans worshipped such as the Shiva temple at Vaikom; if they did, the shrine itself would be considered polluted and have to be purified. Yet, amazingly, those who were barred constituted a majority of those counted as Hindus in what’s now Kerala. The 1924 satyagraha was evidence that their tolerance of this oppressive state of affairs had worn very thin.

Due to his many years abroad, Gandhi wrote, he hadn’t known “many things that as an Indian I should have known.” Before the satyagraha campaign, he hadn’t ever heard of unapproachability. Its existence, he said, “staggered and puzzled me.” He was especially puzzled because Travancore had a well-justified reputation for promoting literacy and education. It could also be called worldly, if the Arabian Sea were taken to be the world. The watery coastal region of what’s now Kerala—a land of bays, canals, lagoons, inland islands, glassy paddy fields reclaimed for large stretches from the sea—had been involved in the spice trade for centuries. Hindus, when untouchables were counted under that rubric, made up a bare majority of its population. Tallied together, Muslims and Christians amounted to 40 percent or more. There were even small communities of Jews, the newest of which had been settled near Cochin since the seventeenth century. Historians of a Marxist bent relate the oppression of untouchables in this riparian setting to the need to control field labor. By definition, the landowning castes didn’t plow, plant, sow, or reap. Travancore may have looked idyllic, but only a small proportion of its population got to experience it that way.

Gandhi supplied the inspiration for the Vaikom campaign with his harping on the evil of untouchability. He’d also furnished its method of resistance; after all, he’d coined the word “satyagraha” years before in South Africa. (“To endure or bear hardships” was his latest definition of the term by the time it was taken up in Kerala.) But it was Ezhavas who eventually gave the movement its impetus, and for all his stature as national leader the Mahatma was decidedly not their Moses. They had their own. He was called Sri Narayan Guru, an Ezhava who’d founded a religious movement with its own temples, teachings, and social values. Narayan Guru might be seen as a Hindu Protestant. His impact on twentieth-century Kerala was as powerful as that of John Wesley on eighteenth-century England. “One caste, one religion, and one God for man” had been his mantra; he’d been preaching on that text since well before Gandhi returned to India. His followers revered him but didn’t follow him all the way; specifically, they didn’t admit Pulayas and other lower-down untouchables to their temples; part of their own self-promotion from untouchability was to treat these lower orders as untouchables irredeemably. According to his biographer M. K. Sanoo, Narayan Guru was at first ambivalent about the satyagraha at Vaikom, telling his people they should get their house in order by opening their own temples to untouchables before demanding that the Namboodiris and other higher castes make way for Ezhavas. But eventually he blessed the movement, supported it with money, and, in a rare political outing, even traveled to Vaikom and prayed for the demonstrators.

An ardent supporter of Narayan Guru appears to have been first to frame the idea of nonviolent resistance at Vaikom and, having made contact with Gandhi as early as 1921, followed up with the Indian National Congress and its branch in Kerala. His name was T. K. Madhavan, and it was at his initiative that an Untouchability Committee was formed in early 1924 under Congress auspices to spearhead the campaign. Madhavan was so grateful for support of the Congress that he impulsively named his son after its president, Muhammad Ali. Even in that heyday of Hindu-Muslim unity, the idea of giving the name of Islam’s Prophet to a Hindu was too startling to be accepted and proved indigestible; no one in the Madhavan clan would use it. So when Gandhi finally visited Kerala, he was asked to rename the boy. Or so the aged man that the boy became, now far along in his ninth decade, told me when I visited him in the Kerala town of Harippad. Babu Vijayanath was sitting under a freshly garlanded portrait of Narayan Guru, who, he insisted, was his father’s inspiration, far more than Gandhi.

Nowadays, a visitor is surprised to discover, Narayan Guru all but overshadows Gandhi in many Kerala precincts. But in early 1924 it was the Mahatma who had the stature and authority of national leader. In a program of political action carrying the Congress imprimatur, his word was law. But was this a program of political action, open to all supporters? Gandhi, the first to pose the question, surprised his followers by answering it in the negative, handing down an edict that said non-Hindus had no business taking part in the demonstration. This came hardly a week after the first attempt at satyagraha in Vaikom, which had already been scaled back, at Gandhi’s urging, from the original plan of Madhavan’s committee.

That plan, modest enough, hadn’t been to attempt to enter the temple’s walled compound, let alone approach the sanctum. It had been simply to march down the three approach roads and pray at the temple gates. This would mean ignoring, in a classic act of civil disobedience, official signs on each road about 150 yards from the compound forbidding the lowest castes and untouchables to proceed any farther. A moat in the form of a drainage ditch, stretches of which are still clearly visible, delineated the boundary that couldn’t be crossed. The danger of spiritual pollution was deemed to be too great. (From the dark, bilious look of the water sitting stagnant in the ditch and in the large pool adjacent to the temple where worshippers still bathe, other kinds of pollution might more easily have been imagined.) The roads were deemed not to be public roads but to belong to the temple. Paradoxically they remained open to cows, dogs, Muslims, and Christians, including non-Hindus who were converted untouchables. The civic right to walk on public roads was more important to many of the participants in the campaign than the religious right to worship in a Brahman temple.

Gandhi had led a march of more than two thousand striking indentured laborers across a forbidden border in Africa ten years earlier. Now here he was—on an issue he called a “passion” of his life, one of the “four pillars” of swaraj—inventing arguments to keep a lid on mass action, however nonviolent. Wary of the very idea of a march, he counseled against any attempt to push past the roadside signs ordering potential carriers of pollution to turn back. In response to his signals, the plan was changed in time for the first satyagraha demonstration at Vaikom on March 30, 1924. The marchers stopped well short of the signs, then three designated satyagrahis—a Nair, an Ezhava, and a Pulaya—stepped forward to the invisible pollution barrier, where, after a time, they sat and prayed until the Travancore authorities obliged them by taking them into custody and sentencing them to six months each in jail. Each succeeding day, three more volunteers stepped forward to take their place, with the same results. The orthodox also were supposed to believe in the Hindu value of ahimsa, or nonviolence, that Gandhi regularly cited. But it was not necessarily their practice. On more than one occasion, the Travancore police didn’t intervene when gangs of thugs, operating on behalf of the orthodox, attacked the satyagrahis with sticks, iron rods, and bricks. Some of the victims had sufficient caste status to be eligible to enter the temple themselves, but they’d been infected with the new thinking, inspired by Gandhi. One man, a Nair, was tied to a tree and kicked in the groin. Another, a Brahman named Raman Ilayathu, had raw lime paste rubbed into his eyes, blinding him; an untouchable leader, a Pulaya named Amachal Thevan, was also reported to have been blinded in this way.

From the beach bungalow where he was recuperating near Bombay, Gandhi warmly praised the discipline and courage of the Vaikom satyagrahis. But he all but excommunicated the leader of the movement he knew best. This was George Joseph, probably his most dedicated follower among Indian Christians. A member of the Syrian Christian community, which has been prominent in Kerala for more than a millennium, Joseph had given up a lucrative practice as a barrister to join Gandhi’s ashram near Ahmedabad; had been recruited by Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal’s father, to edit a nationalist paper called the Independent in Allahabad; had then spent more than two years in jail before understudying Gandhi as editor of Young India while the Mahatma himself went to prison. Now, after all that, he was being told by Gandhi to back off, told that he had no place in the Vaikom Satyagraha because it was a Hindu affair.

I think you should let the Hindus do the work,” Gandhi wrote. “It is they who have to purify themselves. You can help by your sympathy and by your pen, but not by organizing the movement and certainly not by offering satyagraha.”

The letter didn’t reach George Joseph in time. By April 10, with Madhavan and others already arrested, this Christian leader found himself in charge of the campaign and faced with a tactical dilemma. The police had put up a barricade and, in an attempt to tamp down the negative publicity Travancore was getting, were no longer making arrests. Therefore, he telegraphed Gandhi, he’d told the demonstrators to start fasting. “Advise if change procedure necessary,” his SOS said. “Urgent.” The next day the police either revised their tactics again or made an exception for Joseph: he telegraphed to say he’d been arrested and to urge Gandhi to send a leader of stature, or perhaps his son Devadas, to take his place.

The Vaikom Satyagraha wasn’t two weeks old by the time these crossed messages sorted themselves out. Gandhi, it finally became clear, not only was opposed to non-Hindus like Joseph playing any role. He also was opposed to using fasting as a weapon to force the pace. Fasts were to be used not coercively against those who opposed you politically, the rule giver in Gandhi now decreed, but only against allies and loved ones when they backslid on pledges. Gandhi thus set a standard from which, as we shall see, he’d eventually deviate himself. In this case, there were other strictures. He was also opposed to Congress supporters from outside Travancore flooding in as volunteers to bolster the campaign, though he himself had previously invited outsiders to support his own early efforts in Bihar and Gujarat. Some Sikhs who’d journeyed the length of the subcontinent, traveling from the Punjab to set up a kitchen to feed the satyagrahis, were urged to return home. And he dragged his heels on naming a leader from the outside; the leadership, he felt, ought to remain local. Despite the Congress support that Madhavan had painstakingly organized, Gandhi now took the view that the struggle at Vaikom could not be considered an appropriate Congress project. The national movement, he said, should not “come into the picture.” It had as its goal the end of British rule, but, he reasoned, Travancore was outside the British imperium, being technically still an Indian princely state. Individual Congress members might take part, the leader ruled as if from on high, but only as individuals. The movement, which had so recently been mobilized nationally on the fate of the Khilafat in distant Constantinople, had to keep its hands off.

As usual, Gandhi came up with ingenious rationalizations for each of these stands, all pointing to one conclusion: righteous as he considered it to be, he wanted the Vaikom agitation to remain a small local affair; it could not be inflated into a test case for the anti-untouchability platform he himself had given the national movement, especially at a time when he felt his grip on the movement to be slipping.

His considerations were national and political, also religious. Under pressure to say where he stood on the issue of caste, he defined himself in orthodox terms, then added ambiguous qualifications and escape clauses that made his pronouncements suspect in the ears of the system’s strict adherents. “I personally believe in varnashrama,” he would say, meaning the four-way division of all Hindus according to their hereditary occupations as priests, warriors, merchants, or tillers; then he’d add, “Though it’s true I have my own meaning for it.” He wouldn’t dwell on his “own meaning,” because he was trying, for reasons more political than religious, to reassure high-caste Hindus without abandoning his basically reformist position.

The ambiguity was intentional. On a theoretical level, he drew his version of the four varnas more from John Ruskin than from the Hindu scriptures; in this view, they were roughly equal rather than hierarchical, a flexible framework for stability in the social cooperative that Gandhi wished Indian villages to be, which had little to do with what Indian villages actually were or had ever been. The villages were divided on the narrow lines of distinctive subcastes, where every tiny social advantage had to be fought for or guarded, not the broad categories of varna, which Gandhi somehow managed, later, to redefine as “true socialism.” He would also argue that traditional varnashrama was “based on absolute equality of status” before conceding that such a caste system was “today non-existent in practice.” Translated into secular terms, this was like saying that true capitalism would be utopian socialism. What Gandhi offered was a revivalist’s vision; no such equality existed in actual villages. Whatever his deepest intention, it could easily be interpreted as a whitewashing of caste. Gandhi meant to coax the high caste, not confront them. In that way, he promised social stability, not upheaval. So he made a point of saying in this period that the abolition of untouchability would not entail caste Hindus having to dine with former untouchables, let alone marry their daughters to them, though he himself never hesitated to flout caste rules on dining. Beneath the ambiguity lay a seeming contradiction with which he’d wrestle for the next two decades: his insistence that it was possible to banish untouchability while retaining caste, with a little refurbishing, a humanizing makeover, as an organizing principle of Indian society.

Was this what he really thought, or was it a tactical feint? Years later, after the Mahatma’s death, Jawaharlal Nehru would tell an interviewer that Gandhi had confided to him on more than one occasion that his ultimate aim in his fight against untouchability was to bring down the caste system once and for all. Here’s Nehru’s 1955 account:

I spoke to Gandhi repeatedly: why don’t you hit out at the caste system directly? He said that he did not believe in the caste system except in some idealized form … that the present caste system is thoroughly bad and must go. I am undermining it completely, he said, by my tackling untouchability. You see … he had a way of seizing one thing and concentrating on it. If untouchability goes, he said, the caste system goes; so, I am concentrating on that.

 

Nehru might be suspected of trying to gloss over the ambiguities in Gandhi’s position here. But in a 1934 letter to an American, the Mahatma came close to using the words Nehru later ascribed to him. “The caste system, as it exists at present, is certainly the bane of Hindu life,” he wrote. “The great movement of removal of untouchability is an attack on the evil underlying the caste system.” He came even closer in conversation that same year with a member of his entourage. “If untouchability goes,” he said, “the castes as we know them today go.” Eventually, he’d shed his idealization of varna. In 1936 he said caste was “harmful both to spiritual and national growth.” In 1942 he was quoted as saying he’d have “no interest left in life” if caste continued. Finally in 1945 he said the only remaining varna embraced shudras—traditionally the lowest order, basically the peasantry—and “ati-shudras, or Harijans or untouchables.” Ati in this context meant beyond, lower down. Once again, he was saying it was sinful to believe in “high and low.” He admitted that his views had changed, that he was no longer bent on putting an acceptable face on the caste system. He’d always maintained that the only reliable guide to his thinking on an issue was the last thing he’d said.

That may have been his final thought about caste, but it wasn’t the burden of what he had to say eighteen years earlier at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha. Then the contrast between Gandhi’s words in condemning “the deep black ignorance of blind orthodoxy” and the severe restrictions he placed on those striving to adhere to his precepts so befuddled his Travancore followers that they dispatched two of their own to sit at the revered leader’s feet and hear how he reconciled his preaching with the tactical restraints he’d been urging.

The meeting took place in the campaign’s eighth week. Gandhi was asked why it was all right for Hindus to demonstrate in support of a distant Khilafat but not all right for non-Hindus to support the right of “unapproachables” to use a public road in Travancore; why untouchability and unapproachability had to be considered, in view of the Congress’s pronouncements on the subject, a local Vaikom issue rather than a large national question; why if their maharajah was revered and loved as a benevolent ruler, his loyal subjects couldn’t use fasting “to melt [his] heart and to conquer him through their sufferings” in accord with Gandhi’s own teachings on satyagraha.

The Mahatma’s answers pursue whatever tortuous logic comes to hand; they’re also insistent and categorical; when he doesn’t duck questions, he recasts them, then tosses them back without retreating an inch. “Outside help weakens the strength of your sacrifice,” he declares. Similarly, “This is a purely Hindu question and, therefore, the non-Hindus have no place in the struggle.”

It’s not clear whether he’s speaking here as leader of the Hindus or of the national movement. Since he’s Gandhi, no one demands clarification on that score. In his solicitude for the feelings of orthodox Hindus, his answers can be read both ways. “Non-Hindu interference,” he says, would “offend the orthodox section whom you have to convert and conquer through your love.” Here Gandhi seems to speak as a Hindu. Even if the issues at Vaikom were to be viewed as national, he further argues, it would be “neither desirable nor practicable that the whole India or the central organization should fight out such questions. It will lead to chaos and confusion.” Here he’s the national leader suggesting, if not quite saying, that the Congress is divided enough already.

The two Travancore representatives who went to see Gandhi, both high-caste Hindus sympathetic to the cause of the untouchables, gained little clarity on a way forward for their movement, which Gandhi has effectively downgraded. On their return, they found the satyagraha camp in “utter confusion.” So writes T. K. Ravindran, a Kerala historian who conducted extensive research in Travancore’s Malayalam-language archives and then wrote the only narrative history of the movement based on such primary sources. In its efforts to interpret and abide by Gandhi’s injunctions, the movement was sputtering. Swami Shraddhanand showed up to bless a joint gathering of thousands of low-caste Ezhavas and high-caste Nairs that set a new benchmark simply by happening. The meeting sent a delegation to the maharajah supporting the satyagraha and calling for reform.

Then, in August, the rajah died. Since his heir was a child, an aunt was installed as regent. Her first act was to free all those jailed over five months for taking part in the satyagraha. The freed leaders threw themselves into gathering signatures from high-caste Hindus on petitions “respectfully and humbly [praying] that Your Gracious Highness may be pleased to command that all roads and all classes of public institutions may be thrown open to all classes of Your Gracious Highness’s humble subjects without distinction of caste or creed.” A cold official response dashed such hopes. It was then that the unrelenting Swami Shraddhanand urged Gandhi not to let the Vaikom cause languish.

The Gandhi who finally arrived by motorboat at the Vaikom jetty on March 9, 1925, nearly a year after the start of the satyagraha campaign he’d been managing by remote control, had recently made a show of giving up his leadership of the national movement. It was the first of many such supposed withdrawals from national politics by the Mahatma.

On his release from jail in February 1924, he’d offered the Indian National Congress what he termed his “application for employment as general.” He meant, of course, commanding general. A general, he then insisted, “must have soldiers who would obey.” By the end of the year, he was characterizing himself merely as “a non-violent soldier,” acknowledging that he could no longer “command universal assent.” Seen from within the movement, he’d taken a step back, all but removing himself from day-to-day politics. Seen from outside, he was still national leader. In Kerala, his arrival was a huge event. A small armada of fishing boats and flat-bottomed craft used for hauling rice and other freight converged on the one bearing the leader, flanked by two long, ornate “snake boats,” outsize racing shells designed to carry dozens of rowers, helmsmen, even musicians on major ceremonial occasions. Obviously, this was such an occasion.

Vaikom in those days had a population under five thousand. The crowd that gathered at the jetty, now the site of a monument to the Vaikom Satyagraha that wasn’t opened until 2008, stretched for nearly two miles, according to the report the next day in Malayala Manorama, the leading newspaper in Malayalam, the language of the region. Everyone was eager to see Gandhi, or nearly everyone. Missing was a quietly disillusioned George Joseph, who’d resigned from the Congress and returned to the practice of law. Also missing were the Brahmans who controlled the temple and their orthodox supporters. Standing on their sense of the protocol appropriate to their superior station, the temple’s priests had insisted that it was up to Gandhi to seek an audience with them.

It was the first thing he did. The formal response granted him leave to call at the home of Indanturuttil Nambiatiri, the leader of the orthodox faction, in a section of the temple precincts off-limits to untouchables. Gandhi was there on sufferance himself. As a non-Brahman, the Bania prophet was of insufficient caste status to be invited into the priest’s actual house; instead, the meeting had to be held outdoors in a garden pavilion. The Travancore police had a stenographer on hand. Professor Ravindran rescued a transcript of the three-hour conversation from the archive of the old princely state. Today it can be read as an intriguing and comprehensive exposition of Gandhi’s views on caste, or as an example of his intellectual nimbleness under pressure. The question it raises is whether Gandhi was searching for the appearance of common ground with the orthodox, not unlike an American politician dancing his way through a meeting with evangelical Christians, or staking out an orthodox position of his own. Sometimes he’s Socratic, plying them with questions designed to undermine their certainties. But it’s Indanturuttil Nambiatiri who proves to be the more insistent cross-examiner.

“Does Mahatmaji believe in the divinity of the Hindu shastras [scriptures]?” he starts out. Gandhi replies, “Yes.”

“Does Mahatmaji believe in the Law of Karma?” Again the answer is “Yes.”

“Does he believe in reincarnation?”

“Yes.”

That being the case, Gandhi is presented with the usual, one might even say normative, Hindu deduction: that the miserable lot of outcastes is punishment for bad behavior in past lives. “Let us grant that,” he replies, then counters by asking how that gives the high caste a right to do the punishing. The Brahman swats the question away. “We believe it is the ordinance of God,” he says.

“True, true,” Gandhi replies, still sparring, still seeking to regain the initiative.

Later, pressed on the same point, he continues to sound defensive: “I have granted to you that the differences of birth are due to differences of action. But that does not mean that you can consider one man low and another man high.” Gandhi here seems entangled in his own words. If his two propositions—that the untouchable are what they are because of misdeeds in previous lives, still, high and low must be considered equal—were not in total contradiction, they came close. Which, we have to ask, was most compelling for Gandhi, who means to be arguing here for the right of the unapproachables to approach fellow citizens in a public place? The answer should be obvious if his life up to this point is considered to have had any consistency. “No Indian is a coolie by birth,” he’d written in his first letter to a Pretoria newspaper when he was not yet twenty-five. He felt more “at home” with the indentured laborers with whom he’d marched in South Africa than with highborn Indians, he’d told a Bombay garden party less than two weeks after his return home. “I am not ashamed of calling myself a scavenger,” he would tell Travancore’s maharani, or queen, the very next morning, repeating a line he’d first used years before in South Africa. Yet here we find him muttering, “True, true,” when faced with a doctrine of predestination presuming evil done in past lives as a fundamental explanation for untouchability and the extremes of inequality it fosters. It’s possible that India and deeper reading in its scriptures over time had made him more orthodox. The likelier explanation is that he still could make himself believe in the possibility, as he once put it, of “cleaning Hindu society” and thought of himself here as being now engaged in such an exercise of public hygiene. In any case, it was nothing new for him to present himself as a sanatani, or orthodox, Hindu. He’d done so four years earlier in a speech to a conference of the “suppressed classes.” There could be no swaraj, he said then, “so long as the Hindus willfully regard untouchability as part of their religion.” What was new here was that he’d adjusted his timetable—untouchability’s end, as he’d suggested to Charlie Andrews, might have to wait for the departure of the British—so even if he was inclined to theological debate on the ironclad influence of past lives, now was not the time. It would be enough if he could persuade the priests to open the roads.

Perhaps Nehru’s summing-up in that 1955 interview has some bearing on Gandhi’s surprising dance, his bobbing and weaving, at Vaikom: “His approach was not to go and irritate the masses in their deep convictions … Gandhi was always thinking of the masses and of the mind of India and he was trying to lift it in the right direction; to give it gradually more and more things to think about, yet without upsetting it or making it frustrated.” Put another way, he believed he could use moral suasion and his own example to build an inclusive sense, common to Brahmans and untouchables alike, of Indian nationhood.

I am trying myself to be a bridge between blind orthodoxy and those who are victims of that blind orthodoxy,” he explains. “I have come here to create peace and friendship between the orthodox and those who are agitating,” he’s quoted as saying in Malayala Manorama. In other words, he presents himself as having come not as a crusader but as a mediator. Self-ordained in this way, he won’t stand with one side in opposition to another, even at Vaikom, where it’s apparent to him that the orthodox represent no more than a small fraction of the population. To break the impasse, he offers a “sportsman-like” suggestion that the matter of open roads be settled by a referendum limited to caste Hindus. The high priest stolidly stands on principle. “We would not allow this question to be subject to a vote,” Indanturuttil Nambiatiri replies.

Immediately after Gandhi exits through his gate, the Brahman holds a purification ceremony in the pavilion where the encounter occurred so as to banish any pollution that may have trailed behind the Mahatma. Today, by the old priest’s standards, the place is a veritable sink of pollution, for after his death in 1957, ownership of his residence passed to a trade union affiliated with the Communist Party, the Vaikom Taluk Toddy Tappers Union. A red flag now flies outside, hammers and sickles adorn the facade.

After viewing this distinctly non-Gandhian monument to the vicissitudes of history, I went next door to another mildewed structure where Nambiatiri’s aged daughter and son-in-law still reside. The story I heard there was not one of stubborn resistance to change. A decade after Gandhi’s first visit, all temples in Travancore were finally thrown open by royal decree to any manner of Hindu, including outcastes. To avoid spiritual pollution, which had become inevitable in their view with the arrival of such unapproachable riffraff, many Namboodiris then stopped praying at the Shiva temple. This was what Indanturuttil Nambiatiri had vowed to do in his encounter with Gandhi if the temples and their approach roads were ever opened by royal decree. “We will forsake those temples and those roads,” he’d said. But when the time came, it turns out, the priest wasn’t among the boycotters. He continued to supervise the rituals at the Shiva temple; in other words, he clung to his job. “He was prepared to accommodate to change,” said the son-in-law, a retired botanist named Krishnan Nambuthiri. “He had a very balanced mind. He was not at all moved by emotions.”

I asked how he felt about Gandhi. “He never hated him,” the old man said. In that answer, offered eighty-five years after Gandhi’s visit next door, sixty-one years after his murder, glowed a last dying ember of the orthodox view he’d encountered that day.

Leaving the meeting with the Brahmans empty-handed, Gandhi went to address a crowd of twenty thousand that had been waiting nearby for word of some kind of outcome. It heard an admission of failure but not defeat. “As you know,” he began, “ever since I have set foot on Indian soil after a long exile in South Africa, I have been speaking frankly, fearlessly and freely on the question of untouchability.”

It’s surprising that the Mahatma feels a need to establish his reformist credentials in this way. Possibly he’s aware that he’s addressing more than one audience. The first is made up of satyagraha demonstrators and their supporters, another the orthodox; finally, there were those, probably the majority, who are there to bathe in the ennobling mist of darshan. “I claim to be a sanatani Hindu,” he goes on, leaning in the other direction. “I have come, therefore, to reason with my orthodox friends. I have come to plead with them … I am sorry to confess I was not able to produce the impression I expected to produce on them.” The confidence that he would prevail, with which he’d started off his encounter with the Brahmans, is typically Gandhian. It doesn’t desert him here. He congratulates those who have been demonstrating for a year on the “gentlemanly battle” they’ve waged and counsels patience. What he calls a “reasonable solution” may yet be found without the intervention of the government. Essentially, he tells them they must wait until their suffering has moved the hearts of the priestly holdouts he himself had failed to move that afternoon. Reverential as they are, some in his audience shake their heads in dismay and disagreement.

Gandhi runs into more doubts the next day when he meets the satyagrahis at their ashram. One wants to know how long the struggle will last. “A few days or forever,” he says offhandedly, setting a standard of selflessness but also placing himself far above the fray. That brings him back, yet again, to South Africa. He thought the first satyagraha campaign would be over in a month there. “It lasted exactly eight years,” he says. Someone then asks about fasting unto death. “I shall advise people to let you die,” the Mahatma unhelpfully replies.

What exactly is hanging him up? As we follow Gandhi on his first of three Travancore tours, the question keeps arising. In their ambiguity, his own responses were at the time unsatisfying and still are. Outside Kerala, Gandhi’s role in the Vaikom Satyagraha is most often interpreted uncritically as a fulfillment of his values: his unswerving opposition to untouchability, his adherence to nonviolence. Inside Kerala, where this history is better known, it’s usually seen as having shown up a disguised but unmistakable attachment on his part to the caste system. Neither view is convincing. What really shows here is the difficulty of being Gandhi, of balancing his various goals, and, more particularly, the difficulty of social change in India, of taking down untouchability without cleaving his movement and sowing the “chaos and confusion” he feared. Not since his stand-down after the Chauri Chaura violence three years earlier had he been willing to launch a campaign of nonviolent resistance himself.

Caste, untouchability, and social action are the subjects that come up for discussion when his tour delivers him to the headquarters of the local prophet of “one caste, one religion,” Narayan Guru. It’s the first meeting of the two rishis. They converse for a couple of hours. Gandhi then emerges to speak to hundreds of Narayan Guru’s followers. Presumably, these are mostly Ezhavas, a group that has virtually hauled itself out of untouchability. Gandhi addresses them, nevertheless, as members of the “depressed classes.” He speaks of “a wave of impatience going on not only in Travancore, but throughout the length and breadth of India, among the depressed classes.” He means impatience with the orthodox. “I assure you it is wrong,” he says. He also announces that he has wrung from Narayan Guru a pledge to take up spinning.

The highly partial version of the encounter handed down over the generations by Narayan Guru’s followers places the guru and not the Mahatma in the role of tutor. It’s on that day, it’s said, that Gandhi’s understanding of caste was finally deepened and reformed. “That day he became a Mahatma,” Babu Vijayanath, son of the movement’s original organizer, told me, getting carried away with this guru-centric view. In reality, the Gandhi who came out of the meeting sounded just like the Gandhi who went in: as sure of himself and reliant on his own intuitions, as unlikely to be touched by the arguments of others. Narayan Guru told him untouchability would not end in a generation. “He thinks I shall have to appear in another incarnation, before I see the end of this agony,” Gandhi wryly reported. “I hope to see it in my lifetime, in this age.”

There’s no evidence that the two men ever discussed a tactical disagreement they may have had. According to a police report discovered in Travancore’s archives, the guru had earlier expressed skepticism about Gandhi’s restrained tactics, wondering why the satyagrahis didn’t “assert their rights and enter the prohibited area forcibly.” The aftermath of the Mahatma’s visit provides circumstantial backing for this unattributed report. After the Vaikom Satyagraha ended, his direct influence in Travancore waned. Narayan Guru’s Ezhava followers, however, continued to press for entry at other temples, using more aggressive tactics, sometimes clashing with caste Hindus. In one such clash, at Thiruvarppu in 1926, the founder of the Vaikom movement, T. K. Madhavan, received a severe beating from which he never fully recovered, according to his son.

Then as now, some of Narayan Guru’s followers were inclined to rate the Mahatma lower than their local prophet because of his reluctance to confront the orthodox. A story got about that India’s leader had reacted passively after being barred from the Devi temple at Kanyakumari, down south near the tip of the subcontinent, on grounds that his merchant-caste station was too lowly for him to be admitted. He wanted to worship in the temple, so the story in a local newspaper went, but instead meekly bowed to the order to halt and prayed outside, where he stood. Gandhi hardly ever prayed in temples, so the story, which is not well documented, may be viewed skeptically. What’s remembered still is the fierce excoriation of a local crusader against untouchability, a Malayalam poet named Sahodaran Ayyappan who’d earlier earned notoriety and risked ostracism by inviting Pulayas and other untouchables to a public feast. Hearing of the Mahatma’s supposed retreat, Ayyappan wondered in print about the contrast between the Gandhi who bravely challenged “the British lion” and the Gandhi who still “licks the feet of a Brahman … wagging his tail more shamelessly than a dog.”

Definitely it was Gandhi who pulled the plug on the original movement by reaching a truce with Travancore’s police commissioner, an Englishman named W. H. Pitt, over the heads of local activists, in much the way he’d bargained with Smuts after the 1913 strikes in Natal. The terms of the deal were intentionally ambiguous: The police and their barricades would be withdrawn on condition that the demonstrators continued to stand back from the approach roads. The order barring them would meanwhile be wiped off the books. No rights would be inscribed. But after the orthodox got used to the idea that approachability might now become a practical reality, if not quite a civic right, on most of those roads, all castes and outcastes would be allowed to use them. That’s more or less what happened the following November, though entry to the temple was still forbidden to a majority of Hindus, all but the upper castes.

Conspicuous in the whole Vaikom agitation was the absence of any organized effort to recruit Pulayas and other untouchables with less status than the upwardly mobile Ezhavas. Some did take part, but Travancore’s one recognized Pulaya leader, a figure with the single name Ayyankali—now memorialized by a large statue in a major traffic circle of the capital, Thiruvananthapuram—kept his distance from Vaikom and the movement to break down barriers to Hindu worship. His cause was the social uplift of his people through their own efforts, not Hindu reform. K. K. Kochu, a Dalit intellectual whom I met near Kottayam, has written that Ayyankali’s abstention from Vaikom—his “silence”—is what echoes down over the years for Dalits. That abstention reflects something other than indifference. It points to a rising impulse to act on their own behalf. When Gandhi, on a later trip, finally was introduced to Ayyankali, he hailed him, it’s said, as “king of the Pulayas,” then invited him to declare his greatest wish. “I only wish that ten from our community would get B.A.’s,” the Pulaya king coolly replied.

That wasn’t the future Gandhi painted when he met untouchables on his swing through Kerala. Repeating themes in his talk to indentured sugarcane workers in Natal at the end of 1913, he urged them to confront their own bad habits in order to measure up, to earn the equality, which would then be their just due as good Hindus.

How many among you can read and write?” a chastising Mahatma began one such talk.

“How many are drunkards?”

“How many eat dead flesh?”

“How many eat beef?”

“I know many of you don’t take your bath every day. I can see it from the condition of your hair … I know you will smell bad.” But he also said: “Many Hindus consider it a sin to touch you. I regard it as a sin to say and think that it is a sin to touch you.”

This is the Gandhian dialectic, an exercise in fine-tuning a Hindu social order that crushes those at the bottom. In his own way, he’s working both sides of the disputed street, trying to tear down unapproachability while hoping to bring the unapproachables into conformity with standards usually deemed to be beyond them. What he’s not doing is calling on the “suppressed classes,” as he so often termed them, to do anything for themselves beyond bathe and watch what they put in their mouths. Once, in passing, he mentions the possibility that they could attempt passive resistance on their own behalf, but he doesn’t encourage it. It was one thing to march against white overlords for limited rights in South Africa, another now to march against Hindu traditionalists.

His last stop in Travancore was at Alwaye, now called Aluva, about forty miles north of Vaikom, where a young Cambridge graduate teaching at a local Christian college witnessed his arrival. “Gandhi was sitting cross-legged in a third-class compartment, his curious gargoyle face showing no special awareness of the crowd and the notables and the cheers of the students.” So Malcolm Muggeridge remembered the scene years later.

In his account, thousands of poor villagers pressed forward as usual “to take the dust from his feet.” Then Gandhi “caught sight of some untouchables in a sort of roped-off enclosure.” Brushing past students shouting political slogans and notables waiting to lay marigold garlands over his head, he went to the untouchables and “started singing with them what sounded like a rather lugubrious hymn, to the obvious consternation of the notables.”

In his memoir, written late in life, the English writer doesn’t dwell on that moment; his narrative reels off into reflections on the course of the independence movement and the history through which he has lived. But before dismissing Gandhi as an upholder of the system with a deliberately ambiguous message—in other words, as a hypocrite—as some Kerala intellectuals seem inclined to do when they consider Vaikom all these years later, we might pause at that scene in Alwaye. If it was as Muggeridge later described it, what was Gandhi saying and to whom? In the roped-off enclosure, he was raising the subject of common humanity, not only for the sake of the untouchables, but for the students and the notables and the villagers who’d taken the dust from his feet. And, as so often in his unusually well-recorded life, it’s the action rather than the always earnest, sometimes contradictory, sometimes moving words that leaps off the page.