6

WAKING INDIA

 

GANDHI HAD TAKEN A VOW to spend his first year back in India readjusting to the swirl of Indian life. He’d promised his political mentor, Gokhale, that he’d make no political pronouncements in that time, take no sides, plunge into no movements. He’d travel the land, establish contacts, make himself known, listen, and observe. In loftier terms, he could be seen as trying to embrace as much of the illimitable Indian reality as he could. That proved to be quite a lot, more than any other political figure on the Indian scene had ever attempted.

Welcomed at first as an outsider, he became an itinerant guest of honor at civic luncheons and tea parties, hailed wherever he landed for his struggles in South Africa. His standard response was to protest, with becoming but not overly insistent modesty, that the “real heroes” on that other subcontinent had been the indentured laborers, the poorest of the poor, who had continued striking even after he’d been jailed. He was more “at home” with them, he claimed in the first of these talks, than he was with the audience he was now facing, Bombay’s political elite and smart set. In obvious ways, it was a questionable claim, but it described Gandhi, from his first pronouncements in India, as a figure focused on the masses. It was also about as provocative as he allowed himself to be over the course of 1915, his first year home. He could have taken Gokhale’s death, just five weeks after that speech, as a release from his vow but refrained from advancing anything like a leadership claim of his own. But then, with his vow expiring in the first days of 1916, he made it plain that he had drawn some conclusions. “India needs to wake up,” he told yet another civic reception, this one in the Gujarati town of Surat. “Without an awakening, there can be no progress. To bring it about in the country, one must place some program before it.”

Once again he drew explicitly on his experience in the Natal strikes, two years earlier. To move the nation, he would need to bring education to the poorest—just as he now claims to have done with the indentured in South Africa—to “teach them why India is growing more and more abject.” Already, he’s on his way to turning his South African experience into a parable, editing out unfortunate details such as the outbreaks of violence in the sugar country, or the ambiguity of the movement’s results, especially the glaring shortfall in actual benefits for the indentured. Seasoned campaigner that he is, he’s now looking forward, not back, to the advent of mass politics in India. However flawed his analogy to South Africa, he’s declaring his ambition to jolt India with a program. It’s too soon to say what content he may give to that program, but it’s foreshadowed in some of the preoccupations he has carried with him, notably his concern for Hindu-Muslim unity and his condemnation of untouchability as a curse on India. The obvious difference is that from here on, he won’t just be striving to carve out some breathing room for a marginalized minority in a system he has little or no hope of changing. In India, he’ll have the opportunity and burden of trying to carry the majority with him, in an effort to overturn and replace the colonial rulers. Though he never voices an ambition to participate in government himself, he’ll have much to say about the direction of society under the leaders he’d eventually designate, its need for reform.

Remarkably, it takes less than six years for the repatriated politician, starting on this vastly enlarged stage with no organization or following beyond his immediate entourage, to accomplish some facsimile of the “awakening” he sought. His audacious goal, ratified by a national movement that had been revitalized—practically reinvented in his image—is captured in a slogan: “Swaraj within a year.” Swaraj, in Gandhi’s reinterpretation, remains a fuzzy goal, some form of self-government approaching but not necessarily including full independence. What’s radical is the promise that mass mobilization can make it a reality in just a year. And that fateful one year was to be 1921.

By then, Gandhi had come to be seen in a whole new light. No longer was he a guest of honor at tea parties. In the space of only two years—from the start of the hot season in April 1917, when he took up the cause of exploited peasants on indigo plantations in a backwater of northern Bihar, until April 1919, when he called his first nonviolent national strike—he had made his mark on India. Now, when he travels to promote his swaraj, massive throngs turn out numbering in the thousands and tens of thousands, crowds that were ten, even twenty times the throng he’d faced at the Durban racecourse. He makes a point of speaking in the vernacular, Gujarati or his still less than fluent Hindi—later, reaching for the broadest common denominator, he’d specify the demotic Hindustani as his preferred lingua franca—but he can usually be heard only in the front ranks of the crowds; and, when he barnstorms beyond North India, he’s forced to speak in a language that’s little or not at all understood by most of those within the sound of his voice.

It seems not to matter; the crowds keep swelling. The peculiarly Indian point of the commotion he inspires is, after all, not to hear but to view him: to gain or experience darshan, the merit or uplift that accrues to those who enter the spiritual force field of a rishi, or sage. For some in these crowds the vision of Gandhi is literally an apotheosis. They think they’re seeing not a mere mortal but an actual avatar of a god from the crowded Hindu pantheon. By the second half of 1921, as the clock runs out on his premature promise of swaraj, the prophet finds it necessary to protest his own deification. “I should have thought,” he writes, “that I had in the strongest sense repudiated all claim to divinity. I claim to be a humble servant of India and humanity, and would like to die in the discharge of such service.” It’s no time for avatars, he insists. “In India, what we want now is not hero-worship, but service.”

Early on, he’d expressed his own skepticism about these ephemeral transactions between leader and those who want to bask passively in his afterglow: “I do not believe that people profit in any way by having darshan. The condition of him who gives it is even worse.” But he allowed it to become an almost daily, sometimes nightly, feature of his life. Not just at his public appearances but often when he worked and slept outside his ashrams, there were usually stupefied congregations of piously staring onlookers, ignoring his determination to ignore them.

Occasionally, the adulation, expressed in the surge of crowds pressing forward—their members reaching out to graze the leader’s feet with their fingertips, in a mark of humility and reverence—gets to be more than Gandhi can stand. In the English-language version of his weekly newspaper Young India—reincarnating Indian Opinion, still being printed in South Africa at the Phoenix Settlement—he complains of “the malady of foot-touching.” Later, he warns: “In the mere touch of my feet lies nothing but the man’s degradation.” There’s plenty of such degradation to be had. “At night,” Louis Fischer reports, “his feet and shins were covered with scratches from people who had bowed low and touched him; his feet had to be rubbed with Vaseline.” Later, his devoted English follower Madeleine Slade, renamed by him Mirabehn, was reported by a Fleet Street journalist to “actually shampoo his legs every night.”

Gandhi’s first Indian Boswell and faithful secretary in these years, Mahadev Desai, sees in the clamoring throngs a reflection of “the people’s love-mad insolence.” He’s writing in his diary about a specific incident in February 1921 at the last of a succession of rural train stops between Gorakhpur and Benares. At each, a crowd had been waiting, blocking the tracks, demanding to see Gandhi, who’d addressed nearly 100,000 earlier that day in Patna. “We have come for the darshan of the Lord,” one man tells Mahadev, who has gone so far at one stop as to impersonate Gandhi in a vain effort to get his adherents, who have never seen an image of their hero, to back off.

Now it’s well past midnight. Yet another big crowd, after waiting for hours, converges on Gandhi’s third-class carriage. The touring Mahatma isn’t scheduled or inclined to speak. Mahadev pleads for silence so he can catch some sleep after a strenuous day, but deafening cries of “Gandhi ki jai”—“Glory to Gandhi”—rent the night sky. At last, a suddenly imperious Gandhi rises in a rage, his face twisted in an angry scowl Mahadev has never before seen. Once again, a clamorous mob made up of his supposed followers is hanging from the footboards of the train, preventing it from moving on. The apostle of nonviolence later admitted that he felt an urge to beat someone at that moment; instead of lashing out verbally, he beats and smacks his own forehead in full view of the crowd. Again he does it, then a third time. “The people got frightened,” he wrote. “They asked me to forgive them, became quiet and requested me to go to sleep.”

This picture of an infuriated Mahatma assaulting himself in order to turn back an idolatrous, overwhelmingly rural crowd in the early hours of the morning obviously raises questions about the fundamental nature of his appeal. Gandhi by now had spelled out the program he seemed to promise in Surat. Practically all of it had been at the forefront of his thinking when he left South Africa, or is easily traceable to his preoccupations at Tolstoy Farm. Swaraj would come when India solidified an unbreakable alliance between Muslims and Hindus; wiped out untouchability; accepted the discipline of nonviolence as more than a tactic, as a way of life; and promoted homespun yarn and handwoven fabrics as self-sustaining cottage industries in its numberless villages. He would call these “the four pillars on which the structure of swaraj would ever rest.” And the national movement—more to please him than out of conviction—would formally adopt his program as its own. In Ahmedabad in December 1921, as the year he’d given himself and India to achieve swaraj expired, the Indian National Congress would give no thought to spurning him as a failed prophet. Instead, it would vote to assign Gandhi “sole executive authority” over the movement, making him, in effect, a one-man Politburo in a period when most of his lieutenants and former rivals had been removed from the scene, having been jailed by the British authorities (who hadn’t quite figured out how to handle the Mahatma himself). The revivalist in him had been tirelessly pushing the four-part program forward in his writing and itinerant preaching, declaring each part in its turn to be absolutely necessary for swaraj, its very essence. The logical connections are sometimes clear only to him. Gandhi is capable of arguing that Hindu-Muslim unity cannot be achieved without spinning. Other times the banishment of untouchability becomes the highest priority. Not everyone understands, but his words become a creed for a growing band of activists spread across the land in places he has visited. Meanwhile, by 1921, the newly empowered political tactician is threatening civil disobedience. As an expression of the discipline and mission Gandhi had taken on himself, his program offered a coherent vision. As practical politics, it could be, to put it mildly, a tricky if not impossible juggling act.

But the crowd at that one, now nameless, rail siding on the Gangetic plain hadn’t stayed on by the thousands through a long night to express its enthusiasm for Gandhi’s four pillars or its fellow feeling for Muslims or untouchables or even to enlist in his next nonviolent campaign. It had come to pay homage to the man, more than that, to a saint. The idea that he cared for them in a new and unusual manner had been communicated only too well. The idea that he had demands to make on them had gotten across in a wispy, vague, and incidental way, if at all. Gandhi’s actual goals could verge on the utopian, but they could also be, in this teeming Indian context, beside the point—sometimes, not nearly acceptable in the real world he meant to change. The throngs that turned out for him had their own ideas about what he was promising; often they seemed to be waiting for a messiah to usher in a golden age in which debts and taxes and the prevailing scarcities would cease to weigh on them. Sometimes they would call this dawning era of ease and sufficiency, if not plenty, the Gandhi Raj. Regularly speaking past his adherents, Gandhi found himself a prisoner of the expectations he aroused.

In his own supple, rationalizing mind there was seldom tension between his two roles, that of spiritual pilgrim and that of mass leader—spearhead of a national movement, tribune of a united India that had come into being first in his own imagining. When conflict did arise between the Gandhi personae, it was almost invariably the mass leader, not the spiritual pilgrim, who retreated. His career is punctuated by periods of seeming withdrawal from active leadership, similar to his withdrawal to Tolstoy Farm in South Africa between 1910 and 1912. But his retreats from politics were never final. Given India’s poverty, he would argue, the only fulfillment for a religiously motivated person was in service through politics. “No Indian who aspires to follow the ideal of true religion can afford to remain aloof from politics,” he said. This was Gandhi’s distinctive interpretation of dharma, the duty of a righteous man. Judith Brown, a British scholar, puts it well when she writes that for him it was “morality in action.”

Those Gandhi called “political sannyasis,” religious seekers who renounced the comforts of the world but lived in the world to make it better, had a duty “to mix with the masses and work among them like one of themselves.” That meant, first of all, speaking their languages rather than the language of the colonial oppressor, in which Gandhi himself happened to excel. The emphasis is original with him. It can be called Gandhian. It’s the self-invented Gandhi who came out of Africa, the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj, who took it on himself to dole out rations of bread and sugar to indentured miners in Natal about to court mass arrest by following him across a forbidden border.

On the Indian scene, all this seemed at first to push him to the periphery, an exotic and isolated creature. The Gandhian emphasis on speaking to the rural poor in their own languages left him instantly swimming against the tide in a largely Anglicized national movement that conducted most of its business in English. A president of the Indian National Congress, which Gandhi would eventually take over, had recently spoken warmly of “the spread of English education” as “perhaps [Britain’s] greatest gift to the people of India.” It had, this pre-Gandhian said, “instructed our minds and inspired us with new hopes and aspirations.” His assessment was a kind of fulfillment of the vision of Thomas B. Macaulay, the great British historian, who had argued in his landmark “Minute on Indian Education,” written in 1835, that the British could only rule India if they succeeded in forming “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

As a product of the Inner Temple in London, Gandhi might himself have been counted as a member of that class. Instead, he rebelled against the dominance of the colonialist’s language. Macaulay, in an ensuing, less-quoted passage, had also said it would be the responsibility of this Anglicized new class “to refine the vernacular dialects … and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.” There was an injunction that would have resonated with the populist in Gandhi. Whenever he could, he shunned English, though he’d been functioning in the language of India’s rulers for most of his adult life. Fewer than 1 million of India’s population then of 300 million, he pointed out sharply, “have any understanding of English. “All the existing agitation is confined to an infinitesimal section of our people who are a mere speck in the firmament,” he would say.

Such home truths went down hard. Even Gokhale may have backed off. He’d found Hind Swaraj regressive and unpalatable but nevertheless seems to have regarded Gandhi as a possible successor as leader of a tiny reformist vanguard, known as the Servants of India Society, he’d founded with the aim of infiltrating a cadre of totally disciplined, totally selfless nationalists into Indian public life. But before the great man’s death, it dawned on the newcomer that he might not fit in there. He was too singular; his history of strikes and passive resistance, his tendency to make himself the sole arbiter of the “truth” that gave force to satyagraha, his stand on the language issue, all set him apart even before he cast his lot in Indian politics. In other words, he came with his own doctrine, and it was not that of the Servants of India Society.

He showed his grief for Gokhale by walking barefoot everywhere he went for weeks after his guru’s demise. Pious and heartfelt as it was, the gesture also underscored Gandhi’s singularity, as if he were claiming a place for himself as Gokhale’s chief mourner. Seen that way, it was more likely to put off than to touch the surviving members of the Servants of India Society who found him, as he later said, “a disturbing factor.” Writing to Hermann Kallenbach four months after he returned home and shortly after his application to the Servants of India Society had finally been rebuffed, the newcomer acknowledged that his views, the ones he arrived with, were “too firmly fixed to be altered.”

“I am passing through a curious phase,” he went on. “I see around me on the surface nothing but hypocrisy, humbug and degradation and yet underneath it I trace a divinity I missed [in South Africa] as elsewhere. This is my India. It may be my blind love or ignorance or a picture of my own imagination. Anyway it gives me peace and happiness.” The same letter reports the establishment of his first Indian ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, his home region. “I am an outsider and belong to no party,” he remarked a year later.

The Kochrab Ashram had only two cottages and a total population of under fifty. But Gandhi had large ambitions for it. “We want to run our institution for the whole of India,” he wrote. Characteristically, in his self-assigned role of rule giver, he’d also drafted an eight-page constitution, which can be read as a redrafting, with a decidedly Gandhian twist, of the rules his guru had laid down for the Servants of India Society. At Gokhale’s death, only two dozen candidates had successfully completed a rigorous five-year training program under the stern tutelage of the “First Member,” as the founder referred to himself. They took seven vows, one involving a promise to live on a subsistence wage.

Gandhi, who declared himself his ashram’s “Chief Controller” in his draft of its constitution, promulgated vows that were more numerous and far-reaching. He demanded total celibacy of all “inmates,” even those who were married; “control of the palate” (on the understanding that “eating is only for sustaining the body”); a “vow of non-possession” (meaning that “if one can do without chairs, one should do so”); and a “vow against untouchability” (involving a commitment to “regard the untouchable communities as touchable”). Members were to speak their own Indian languages and learn new ones. They were also to take up spinning and handloom weaving. To the extent that these rules—written down within five months of his arrival in Bombay—were closely observed, the ashram could be expected to turn out a steady supply of replica Gandhis. About half its original intake included relatives and adherents who’d followed Gandhi from South Africa, including Thambi Naidoo’s sons and a Muslim cleric from Johannesburg, Imam Abdul Kader Bawazir.

The object of the Ashram,” Gandhi wrote, “is to learn how to serve the motherland one’s whole life.” So much self-denial was built into the lessons he proposed to give those he classed as “novitiates” that the appeal was sure to be severely limited on both sides of the communal divide. Meat-eating Muslims were bound to see the ashram as a Hindu retreat; that was, after all, the meaning of the word. Hindus had to wrestle with Gandhi’s views on untouchability, not to mention sex. (Celibate now for more than a decade, Gandhi was getting ever more crotchety on the subject. “I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of man and woman,” he would counsel his second son, Manilal, who found self-denial a trial.) Neither Muslims nor Hindus were inclined to fall in line with Gandhi when it came to the problem of human excrement and his Tolstoyan insistence that its removal be seen as a universal social obligation. Simply put, mass appeal was never going to be a prospect, or problem, for the ashram.

Even before its modest beginning in May 1915, Gandhi had his first encounters with an emerging Muslim leadership. His first week back, in fact, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the future founder of Pakistan, presided and gave the speech of welcome at a reception Bombay Gujaratis held for their native son. On the surface, the two men had much in common. Their families came from the same part of Gujarat, the coastal Kathiawad region, now more commonly known as Saurashtra; both were lawyers trained in London. But the parallel ended there. Jinnah’s grandfather was a Hindu who converted to Islam. Dapper in a bespoke suit, Jinnah welcomed the new arrival in the well-turned English sentences of a colonial gentleman. Gandhi, dressed like a Gujarati villager in vest, kurta, dhoti, and flattened turban, replied colloquially in his native language, already insinuating, without putting it in so many words, that the Anglicized professional elite could not by itself achieve India’s freedom.

At the time of this encounter, Jinnah was a rising figure in the Indian Congress, the national movement Gandhi had yet to join. To put it mildly, he wasn’t much given to religious enthusiasms, then or later. In politics, he would have insisted at the time, he was an Indian nationalist; he too had drawn close to Gokhale. Yet two years later he was persuaded to take out membership as well in the Muslim League, the movement he’d eventually lead out of India, impelled by injured pride and a somewhat cynical but undoubtedly effective argument—that Gandhi had turned the Congress into “an instrument for the revival of Hinduism and for the establishment of Hindu Raj.” The path to India’s partition would have many twists and turns, none harder to map than this: one of those who brought Jinnah the nationalist into the staunchly sectarian Muslim League was a Pan-Islamist named Muhammad Ali who then became Gandhi’s closest Muslim ally in the Congress.

Ali had a relatively humble background in the princely state of Rampur and an Oxford degree. With his elder brother, Shaukat, who’d won renown as a cricketer, he was already recognized among Muslims as a spokesman for beleaguered Islam within and beyond India. Specifically, the Ali brothers stoked and then gave voice to the community’s mounting anxieties over the decline of the Ottoman empire in the years leading up to the world war. The slow erosion of authority that ultimately undermined the Mughal emperors in nineteenth-century India now seemed to be recurring in what was still Constantinople. In his religious role as caliph, the sultan was held to be the highest authority in Sunni Islam, suzerain still of the holy places on the Arabian Peninsula and a successor of the Prophet. Though few Indian Muslims actually visited Constantinople, they may have taken that connection more seriously than most Turks. The Ottoman sultanate became for them a symbol of Islam’s standing in the modern world and therefore a cause for a minority community anxious about its own status in India.

By the time Gandhi met Muhammad Ali in Delhi in April 1915, a month before his ashram opened, the Alis’ passionate identification with the Ottoman cause had put them at cross-purposes with British power in India, which had cultivated and generally received the loyalty of Muslims who’d been educated in the English way. The sultan, after all, had just allied himself and his army with the German kaiser and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, against whom British Indian troops would soon be fighting, including many Muslims. Almost overnight, therefore, the Ali brothers had gone, in the eyes of the colonial authorities, from being seen as loyalists to potential agents of sedition. As the home ground shifted in response to far-off events, the Alis also found themselves closer to Indian nationalists who were overwhelmingly Hindu, among whom only one was in a position to intuit their feelings and identify with them. This was the newly arrived Gandhi, onetime mouthpiece for the Muslim merchant class of Durban and Johannesburg, a longtime veteran of political rallies in mosques. “I believe that Hindus should yield up to Mohammedans whatever the latter desire and that they should rejoice in so doing,” the South African Gandhi had said in 1909. “We can expect unity only if such large-heartedness is displayed.” The remark is recalled with some bitterness by Hindu nationalists to this day.

Muhammad Ali, a polished and sometimes florid polemicist in English as well as Urdu, had written admiringly of “that long-suffering man, Mr. Gandhi,” referring to his leadership in South Africa. He now welcomed Gandhi to Delhi, the former Mughal capital, newly designated as capital of British India. It was, Gandhi said, “love at first sight.” The two men wouldn’t meet again for more than four years, for the Ali brothers were placed under confinement—a loose form of house arrest—soon after this first encounter. Gandhi then made appeals for the release of the brothers one of his earliest political commitments in India. He and Muhammad Ali kept up a correspondence. By the time the brothers were freed from detention, Gandhi and the Alis were ready to take up each other’s causes.

That connection to Muslims would count soon enough. It would prove to be a crucial factor in Gandhi’s takeover of the Indian National Congress. What matters here is the evidence that even before he had launched his first campaign in India, even before he joined the Congress, Gandhi had strong convictions about the need for Hindus to make common cause with Muslims if Indians were to be one people. No doubt he exaggerated the extent to which this had actually happened among Indians in South Africa, but it was the first political lesson he’d learned there and a touchstone of his nationalist creed.

His urgent feelings about untouchability also derived from lessons learned on that other subcontinent. The way whites there treated Indians, he’d long ago concluded, was no worse than the way India treated its Pariahs, scavengers, and other outcastes. In his own mind these feelings were only deepened by his passionate engagement with the indentured strikers in Natal. Strictly speaking, only a minority of them may have counted as untouchable, but they were mostly lower caste, and, in Gandhi’s view, they were all sufficiently oppressed in a hierarchical system to make them virtual slaves. Caste lines blurred as they marched with him across the veldt. It was a contest of what he called “high and low,” and he’d finally found a way to align himself with the “low.”

The fresh memory of South Africa and the 1913 strikes, it can thus be argued, helped feed his feelings about untouchability when he returned to India. When he’d been home less than two months, he went to Hardwar in the Himalayan foothills at the time of the Kumbh Mela, a festival held every twelve years that draws masses of Hindu pilgrims, upwards of two million of them. The suffocating spectacle appalled him, not least because of his nagging preoccupation with sanitation and its opposite, which was everywhere on display. “I came to observe more of the pilgrims’ absent-mindedness, hypocrisy and slovenliness, than of their piety,” he later wrote. Soon he drafted the small entourage he’d transplanted from the Phoenix Settlement, who’d been staying nearby, to work as scavengers, scooping up excrement and shoveling dirt over the open-pit latrines used by the pilgrims. On a vastly larger scale, it was a reprise of his disillusioning first encounter with the Indian National Congress in Calcutta fourteen years earlier.

In his first real controversy in India, he defied the traditional injunctions against social pollution even more directly, creating a scandal. The controversy spilled out of his ashram a few months after it was established, provoked by Gandhi’s acceptance of a Dhed as a resident there. Dheds traditionally deal with animal carcasses and hides—essentially they’re tanners—which is enough to brand them and their offspring forevermore as untouchable whether they’ve anything to do with hides or not. The idea wasn’t his own; it came in the form of a letter from a Gujarati reformer named A. V. Thakkar, usually called Thakkar Bapa, who’d remain Gandhi’s right arm on the issue of untouchability over more than three decades. “A humble and honest untouchable family is desirous of joining your ashram,” Thakkar wrote. “Will you accept them?”

For Gandhi there was only one possible answer. He called his Dhed “learned.” Probably that just meant he was literate. He was named Dudabhai Malji Dafda, Duda for short. “Greater work than passive resistance has commenced,” Gandhi wrote in one of his weekly letters to Hermann Kallenbach, who was still marooned in London by the war. “I have taken in a Pariah from these parts. This is an extreme step. This has caused a breach between Mrs. Gandhi and myself. I lost my temper. She tried it too much.”

The first confrontation leads to another that, as Gandhi relates it a week later, comes close to replicating the scene in Durban in which the barrister Gandhi dragged his wife to the gate of his house after she objected to cleaning his formerly untouchable law clerk’s chamber pot. Evidently, Ba’s views on the issue hadn’t much evolved over eighteen years. “I have told Mrs. Gandhi that she could leave me,” he writes a week later. Two weeks after that, he’s still complaining that “she’s making my life hell.” Finally, after more than a month, Gandhi finds a way to bend Ba to his will. He refuses to eat a staple of his highly restricted diet; that is, he gives up nuts. Nuts! “I had to undertake partial starvation,” he tells Kallenbach, without a trace of irony. In context, he means to convey the full pathos of his situation as he experienced it.

The breakdown isn’t just marital. Scarcely four months after starting the ashram—nine months after returning to India—Gandhi is faced with a virtual walkout by his disciples over the presence of the Dheds. “I have been deserted by most helpers,” he complains, “and the burden is all falling on my shoulder assisted by two or three who are remaining staunch.” Most will trickle back, but one who stays away permanently is Gandhi’s own sister, Raliatbehn. “Your not being with me has given me a wound that will never heal,” he later writes to her.

Contributions from Ahmedabad industrialists and merchants, on which he has been relying to keep the place going, suddenly dry up. Offended neighbors fend off not only Duda but all members of the ashram seeking to use nearby wells. The effect on Gandhi is to make him, once his year’s vow of silence on Indian issues elapses, even more insistent in his condemnation of untouchability. He speaks of moving out himself—“shifting to some Dhed quarters and sharing their life.” But an anonymous gift from the leading Ahmedabad industrialist, Ambalal Sarabhai, keeps the ashram running. Duda is joined by his wife, Dani, and finally, in complete surrender, Ba bows to Gandhi’s request that they adopt Duda and Dani’s daughter, Lakshmi, as their own. “She has beautifully resigned herself to things she used to fight,” Gandhi says in a letter to Sonja Schlesin, his former secretary in South Africa. Ba’s conversion, it turns out, was only on the surface. Seven years later Gandhi complains, “She cannot bring herself to love [Lakshmi] as I do.” She’s still surrounded, he says in 1924, by a “wall of prejudice.”

The resistance the social reformer encountered to the admission of untouchables to his ashram didn’t silence him. But if the shrewd politician that he also was had harbored any illusion that the fight against untouchability might be a popular cause, he now learned that a moral argument that could be uttered fairly easily from a platform in India’s sophisticated precincts had the potential to backfire when words became deeds. In his earliest campaigns in rural India, Gandhi never ducked the question of untouchability. “This great and indelible crime,” he called it, mincing no words. But mostly it remained incidental to whatever his immediate cause happened to be.

Take, for instance, that of the oppressed tenant farmers of the Champaran, in the Himalayan foothills of northern Bihar, who were forced by a corrupt combination of local law, taxation, chronic indebtedness, and crude force to devote a portion of the land they farmed to growing indigo plants on which they seldom earned a meaningful return. The indigo, in demand in Europe as a dye for fine fabrics, went to a class of British planters who leased the land, including whole villages, from large Indian landlords called zamindars; with the land came the tenants, who then had little or no bargaining power against the planters. It would be hard to argue that the state of these peasants, called ryots, was any better than that of the indentured laborers in South Africa; in many cases, it was probably worse. The system had grown up over nearly a century. “Not a chest of indigo reaches England without being stained with human blood,” a British official once wrote.

Gandhi was invited into the Champaran in early 1917. He had never heard of the district; hardly anyone there had ever heard of him. Ordered to leave by the collector, the local representative of colonial authority, Gandhi politely defied the order, then stayed up nights sending missives in all directions until the national movement and everyone from the viceroy on down knew he was facing arrest. Crowds of rough, unlettered tenant farmers gathered to protect him; youthful nationalists made their way to the Champaran as would-be satyagrahis; and the viceroy intervened to cancel his expulsion.

Within weeks Gandhi himself was appointed to an official commission investigating the complaints of the tenant farmers—it would recommend they be freed from any compulsion to grow indigo—and newly minted Gandhian workers, some from the ashram near far-off Ahmedabad on the other side of India, were opening schools and giving lectures on sanitation in Champaran villages. “We have begun to convince the people,” a Gandhian worker said in a letter to the Mahatma, “that there is no loss of prestige in at least covering the feces with earth by doing it ourselves for them.” No record was kept on how many villagers took to doing it for themselves.

On their leader’s insistence, the workers were also learning to ignore the usual rules against eating in the company of anyone from a lower caste. One of these early Gandhians, a young lawyer, left this testimony: “All of us who worked with him, and who, till then, had been observing this restriction and dining only with our caste people, gave it up and began to eat together—to eat not only with members of the so-called higher castes but even with people from whom even water was not acceptable. And the important thing is we did it openly and not in secrecy or privately. We used to do it surrounded by villagers who had come from distant places, and we took our food together in their presence.” The young lawyer, Rajendra Prasad, passed up a position as a judge and stayed on as a Gandhian. Years later he became president of the Indian National Congress; in 1948 he became independent India’s first president, its ceremonial head of state.

By sheer example and force of personality, Gandhi began to assemble the core of what would become a movement. It can’t be said this happened spontaneously; he worked too hard, usually rising at four in the morning. His intense focus on the details of his various struggles and on the individuals who followed in his train, his prodigious program of writing and speaking, make it plain there was a driving force. But he was more method and example than plan in these early years back in India, going on short notice where he seemed to be wanted and needed. Defining himself in these improvised ventures, he found disciples like the youthful Prasad, some of whom would become leaders of a postcolonial India that was not yet on anyone’s horizon, except perhaps Gandhi’s. Months after Champaran came another rural campaign, this one against ruinous colonial taxes following crop-destroying rains in the Kheda district of Gujarat, which Gandhi assigned to another young lawyer he’d drawn to his side. Vallabhbhai Patel would be another future president of the Indian National Congress and a deputy prime minister after independence.

By one estimate, Gandhi spent 175 days in Bihar in 1917 working on the Champaran struggle. Later he would call it his “birthplace,” meaning it was his first immersion in rural India. Referring back to the Natal strikes, he’d spoken of the need for educated Indians to work with “the poorest of the poor.” Now he was finally doing it himself on home ground. India needed to adopt a “habit of fearlessness,” he said. More than anything, that was what his new adherents saw in him. “The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth and action allied to these,” Jawaharlal Nehru would write. It was also the essence of the man. “This voice was somehow different from others,” Nehru said. “It was quiet and low, and yet it could be heard above the shouting of the multitude; it was soft and gentle, and yet there seemed to be steel hidden away somewhere in it … Behind the language of peace and friendship there was power and the quivering shadow of action and a determination not to submit to a wrong.”

This preoccupation with “fearlessness” may explain another of the surprising, seemingly inexplicable twists in Gandhi’s long career on two continents, a choice echoing the one he made in 1906 when he threw himself into the campaign to put down the Zulus. Gandhi has a way of repeating himself, of recycling old answers when confronting new questions. This time, seeming to brush aside the vows of nonviolence that he made his disciples take, he pledged to devote himself to recruiting Indian troops for the war in Europe, where they’d fill in the ranks of British forces depleted by the carnage. The staunchly pro-British Gandhi who’d voiced loyalty to the empire, who’d recruited stretcher bearers in two South African conflicts, had seemed to fade into the background after his last fruitless trip to London on behalf of the “British Indians” of the Transvaal in 1909. That Gandhi was altogether absent from the pages of Hind Swaraj, the nationalist tract written that year on the voyage back to South Africa, in which he likened the British parliament to a whore. Again in wartime, he now reappears, unctuously promising his loyal support as part of a political bargain that the Bania in him proposes in letters to the viceroy and the viceroy’s secretary, at the end of April 1918, letters that recall his sometimes wheedling appeals to Smuts.

Gandhi is still, for all practical purposes, an independent operator in India, not yet head of a movement. Elsewhere he acknowledges at about the same time that he is “but a child of three” in Indian politics. Still, he writes with the conviction of one who now thinks he can speak for the country and its people. This is no pose but what he has recently come to believe. “I have traveled much,” he’d said a month earlier, “and so come to know the mind of India.” A few years later, on the strength of his Champaran and Kheda experiences and his subsequent traveling through rural India, he would make this boast even more emphatic: “Without any impertinence I may say I understand the mass mind better than anyone amongst the educated Indians.” This was the end of 1920; he’d been back in India for not quite six years, actively campaigning in its villages for a little less than three. Yet the claim was accepted thereafter, perhaps because it had already become obvious that he’d made a connection in that relatively brief time with rural India that no politician with longer experience could begin to match. If so, it’s only in the specific context of Champaran and Kheda that we can understand Nehru’s observation that the former barrister, recently repatriated out of Africa, “did not descend from the top; he seemed to emerge from the millions of India.” It wasn’t sorcery but his willingness to take on obscure issues in obscure places, to act decisively on the conviction that what he’d learned in another place about building a mass movement could apply at home.

The political bargain he offered the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, in April 1918 boiled down to this: if the Raj would allow some semblance of a positive outcome in the Kheda district, where it had been confiscating the land and livestock of peasants who’d taken a Gandhian pledge to withhold taxes on their property; and if it would show a new sensitivity to Muslim grievances that had deepened during the war, by allowing him to visit the Ali brothers, who were interned in central India, and by pressing the cause of what he called “the Mahomedan states” (meaning Turkey but not using the word because Turkey was now an enemy of Britain); if it did these things, gave him the gestures he needed, then the author of the doctrine of satyagraha, of unswerving nonviolence, would throw himself into the war effort as the viceroy’s “recruiting agent-in-chief.” The Bania insists that his support is “ungrudging and unequivocal,” but then he lays down his conditions. “I love the English nation, and I wish to evoke in every Indian the loyalty of the Englishman,” the special pleader now pleads.

The British are as adept as Smuts in exploiting Gandhi’s eagerness for a deal without giving anything tangible in return. The Ali brothers remain interned; his appeal to see them goes unanswered. An order had already been transmitted down the chain of command to go easy on the Kheda confiscations, but this is done on the quiet, denying Gandhi and the civil disobedience campaign he fostered any obvious moment of victory or recognition of the role he has played. Gandhi, fobbed off with official expressions of gratitude for his loyal stand, is left to fulfill his pledge.

A depressing episode ensues. The recruiting agent in chief goes back to Kheda with the aim of enlisting twenty men from each of six hundred villages, a total of twelve thousand new soldiers. Where he was received as a savior months before, he’s now sometimes heckled. Fearlessness is what he’d been trying to inculcate. What better means is there than military training, he now discovers, to “regain the fearless spirit”? His arguments, expressed in a series of leaflets and speeches as he trudges for the better part of three months through heat and dust and monsoon rain, from village to village, become far-fetched and contradictory. He implores wives to send their husbands to sacrifice themselves on behalf of the empire, blithely promising, “They will be yours in your next incarnation.” Fighting for the empire, he now argues, is “the straightest way to swaraj.” An India that has shown military prowess, his reasoning goes, will no longer need Britain to defend it. Fighting is a necessary step on the way to nonviolence. “It is clear that he who has lost the power to kill cannot practice non-killing.” The Mahatma’s powers of rationalization can still amaze and confound; they’re inexhaustible, but he is not.

Finally, in August 1918, he collapses with dysentery after having admitted that he has enlisted “not a single recruit.” He would later describe himself as “not a quick despairer.” This time he struggles to draw a positive lesson from his experience. “My failure so far suggests that people are not ready to follow my advice. They are ready, however, to accept my services in a cause which suits them. This is as it should be,” he writes to his fourth son, Devadas. It’s a basic political lesson.

Eventually, he goes through the motions of submitting a list of about a hundred recruits, made up largely of co-workers, relatives, and members of the ashram; as he approaches his fiftieth birthday, his own name heads the list. But by then the war is practically at an end, and Gandhi, bedridden for months with dysentery and a gathering sense that he’d lost his way, is at a personal nadir. In this generally gloomy and weakened state, he also undergoes surgery for hemorrhoids and doesn’t reenter politics until the following February. Slightly shamefaced, he attributes his recovery to a compromise of his dietary principles. A decade earlier he’d given up milk on account of the aphrodisiac qualities he attributed to it. Now he allows himself to be persuaded by Kasturba that he’d only taken a vow against cow’s milk, not goat’s milk. He gives in to her pressure, even though he suspects he’s being self-serving in accepting her dubious rationale. Goat’s milk proves to have hidden restorative powers. Within little more than a year, he reemerges as not simply the most intriguing and original figure in the nationalist movement but the dominant one, a leader who can sometimes be questioned and even circumvented but who henceforth can no longer be challenged.

Another key to this remarkable rebound—beyond the intense impressions of actual village conditions gathered in a brief period—is the tie he had taken care from the outset of his reimmersion in India to establish to Indian Muslims, his readiness to fight their battles on grounds that there could be no better way than that to promote national unity. The end of the world war relieved Gandhi of his self-imposed obligation to recruit troops. It also deepened the alienation into which Indian Muslims had been sinking over the Turkish question. In defeat, the Ottoman Empire faced dismemberment; its sultan, whom many of them recognized as their caliph—invested, in their view, with spiritual authority that was no less than papal—was being stripped in the war’s aftermath of his control of Mecca and Medina and the other holy places. The struggle to save the caliphate, known on the subcontinent as the Khilafat, was portrayed in India’s mosques as nothing less than a struggle for Islam, an occasion for jihad and even for hijrat, meaning voluntary migration to a truly Muslim country such as Afghanistan, if Lloyd George’s imperial government remained impervious to the appeals of the subcontinent’s faithful.

No one outside India seriously cared about the feelings of Indian Muslims on this issue or granted them any standing to be heard on it. This was true not only of the victorious Allies now dictating the peace but also of the Arab world, which was hardly sorry to be relieved of Turkish rule; it was even true of most Turks, who’d wearied of the sultan and his decadent court. To most Hindus as well, the future of the Khilafat would have been a matter of profound indifference had they not been exposed to Gandhi’s tireless and ingenious rationalizations for making its preservation a primary goal of India’s national movement. Even then, few understood what it was all about. Gandhi’s knowledge of Islamic history derived from his reading in South Africa of Washington Irving’s Life of Mahomet and an English translation of the Koran. He didn’t try to make the case for the Khilafat. He offered a simple syllogism, telling Hindus it was of supreme importance to their Muslim brethren and, therefore, to national unity, and, therefore, to them. Using an Indian measure that stands for ten million, he asked, “How can twenty-two crore Hindus have peace and happiness if eight crore of their Muslim brethren are torn in anguish?”

Incomparably quixotic as it may appear today, the Indian struggle to preserve the authority of the Ottoman sultan became the preeminent Indian cause among Muslims. It’s easy to say that it was doomed from the start, but that wasn’t evident to them then. The coup de grâce wouldn’t come until 1924, when Mustafa Kemal, known as Atatürk, formally dissolved the caliphate, driving the last sultan into exile. Still the Khilafat movement lingered on in India, channeling the passion and resentments it had aroused into new reformist groupings, some of which had an influence beyond India that played back into the Arab world in significant ways. One of these was a movement called the Tablighi Jamaat, or Society for the Propagation of the Muslim Faith, usually known as Tabligh, which from its start in India became “the most important element of re-Islamization worldwide,” according to the French expert Gilles Kepel, “a striking example,” he says, of “a fluid, transnational, informal Islamic movement.” That may sound a little familiar: a complex religious and ideological lineage could be traced over nearly a century from Muhammad Ali and other Indian proponents of the cause to present-day Islamists, including Osama bin Laden, who made restoration of the caliphate one of Al Qaeda’s war aims when he proclaimed his struggle against the United States.

Given that he deplored terrorism and was no Muslim, it would be simply wrong, not to say grotesque, to set Gandhi up as any kind of precursor to bin Laden. But the remote cause of the Khilafat was equally important in his rise. It was on his mind in 1918 when he wrote to the viceroy, on his mind a year later when he spoke in a Bombay mosque on the occasion of a national strike he’d called. The day of prayer and fasting was offered in April 1919 as a protest mainly against new legislation giving the colonial regime—in another haunting analogy to our own times—a slew of arbitrary powers it said it needed to combat terrorism. That supposedly nonviolent campaign quickly flared into riots in Bombay and Ahmedabad and “firings,” confrontations in which the constabulary or military trained their weapons on surging unarmed crowds in the name of order. The first firing was in Delhi, where five were killed; another came two weeks later in the Sikh stronghold of Amritsar. There, on April 13, 1919, in the most notorious massacre of the Indian national struggle, 379 Indians taking part in an unauthorized but peaceful gathering were gunned down by Gurkha and Baluchi troops under British command in an enclosed square called Jallianwala Bagh for defying a ban on protests. By then, Gandhi was on the verge of calling off the national strike; he’d made a “Himalayan miscalculation,” he said, in allowing himself to believe the masses were ready for satyagraha. To Swami Shraddhanand, an important Hindu spiritual leader in Delhi who questioned his bumpy, seemingly impulsive start-and-stop tactics, the Mahatma dismissively replied: “Bhai sahib! You will acknowledge that I’m an expert in the satyagraha business. I know what I’m about.”

It took only six months for Gandhi to start paving the way to a resumed campaign. He had come up with a new tactic, which he named “non-cooperation.” He outlined it first to Muslims involved in the gathering Khilafat campaign, then in Delhi to a joint conference of Hindus and Muslims, also on the Khilafat. The concept, which can be found in embryo in Hind Swaraj, was initially sketchy, but Gandhi soon filled it in. Noncooperation came to mean withdrawing participation, in stages, from colonial institutions, rendering them hollow and useless. Lawyers and judges would be asked to boycott the courts; would-be legislators would not take part in existing councils and provincial assemblies the British were promising; students would gradually abandon state schools, attending instead new ones to be improvised along Gandhian lines, with instruction, of course, in Indian languages instead of English; officials would surrender the status and security of their jobs; and, ultimately, Indians would learn to turn their backs on service in the armed forces, especially in Mesopotamia—soon to be known as Iraq—which the British had snatched from the sultan; those who’d received medals from the Raj would be called on to return them; honorary titles would be renounced. It was an exhilarating vision. One by one the props under British rule would be removed. The vision changed the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Indians who joined the movement on a full-time basis. It inspired millions more.

Muslims didn’t become unconditional converts to satyagraha as a doctrine. The Koran, after all, sanctions jihad in a just cause and doesn’t rule out violence. But for the better part of two years, the Hindu Mahatma won acceptance as their campaign’s chief tactician, the author of noncooperation. And with their support, he stepped to the fore for the first time in the national movement, on a unity platform embracing all his causes, among which the literally outlandish cause of preserving the caliphate in Constantinople for the Muslims of India regularly now emerged as first among equals. Gandhi had formed an ad hoc committee called the Satyagraha Sabha for his earlier agitation against the antiterrorism laws. Now, in December 1919, the month after the first Khilafat conference, he made what he later called “my real entry into Congress politics” at the movement’s annual session in Amritsar.

There he was joined by the Ali brothers, Muhammad and Shaukat, just released from confinement. The Alis created a greater stir in Amritsar even than Gandhi. They were greeted, one scholar records, with “cheers, tears, embraces, and a veritable mountain of garlands.” A rising tide of Hindu-Muslim unity was now in the offing, hard to imagine in an era in which predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan confront each other as nuclear powers. By design, three conferences were taking place simultaneously: in addition to the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League and the Khilafat Committee were meeting. In June the Central Khilafat Committee named an eight-man panel, including the Ali brothers, “to give practical effect” to a program of noncooperation. Gandhi, the only Hindu among the eight, was listed first.

The following September, Muslim votes ensured the adoption of Gandhi’s noncooperation program by a narrow margin at a special Congress session in Calcutta, with the preservation of the caliphate now underscored as a primary goal of the national movement. “It is the duty of every non-Moslem Indian in every legitimate manner to assist his Mussulman brother, in his attempt to remove the religious calamity that has overtaken him,” declared the resolution, written by Gandhi. Without Muslim votes, Gandhi’s first challenge to the Congress to adopt satyagraha would almost certainly have foundered. The Mahatma hadn’t won over the political elite; with the backing of the Alis, he’d swamped it. It was at Calcutta that he first held up the prospect of “swaraj within a year.”

 

Soon-to-be Congress leader, 1920 (photo credit i6.1)

 

Three months later, in December 1920, Shaukat Ali took the precaution of rounding up a flying force of burly “volunteers,” Muslims uncommitted to nonviolence, to face down any anti-Gandhi demonstrators at the annual Congress meeting, held that year in the Marathi-speaking city of Nagpur in central India. The so-called volunteers weren’t needed. Skepticism about noncooperation was still being voiced, but political opposition to Gandhi had melted away. His own example and relentlessness in argument, his mounting hold on the broader population and solid support from Muslims, all combined to make his leadership unassailable. The Nagpur Congress dutifully adopted Gandhi’s draft of a new constitution, extending the movement’s reach down to the villages for the first time, at least on paper. In another first engineered by him, it adopted the abolition of untouchability as a national goal. Swaraj would be impossible without it, Gandhi repeatedly said, but in fact the noncooperation campaign targeted two “wrongs” specifically attributed to the British—the threat to the Khilafat and their failure to punish those responsible for the Amritsar massacre. Untouchability might be, in Gandhi’s words, a “putrid custom,” but it was a Hindu wrong, an urgent issue, no doubt, but one without any obvious place on an agenda designed to rouse as many Indians as possible to nonviolent resistance to the colonial power.

There was one conspicuous dissenter. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was heckled when he referred drily in a speech to “Mister” rather than “Mahatma” Gandhi. He left the Congress after Nagpur, never to return, predicting that Gandhi’s mass politics would lead to “complete disorganization and chaos.” His departure, scarcely noted at the time, opened a tiny fissure in the nationalist ranks. It would become a gaping cleavage after orthodox Muslim elements drifted away from the movement with the waning of the Khilafat agitation. At this stage, it was not the nationalist goals of the Congress that had disillusioned Jinnah; he was still a convinced nationalist, an earnest believer in Hindu-Muslim reconciliation. Yet he was more a skeptic than a supporter of the Khilafat agitation. The readiness of Hindus—notably Gandhi—to exploit it was part of what alienated him.

At the start of 1921, the sway that the Anglicized Bombay lawyer Jinnah would come to have over India’s Muslims could hardly have been foreseen, even by him. It was Muhammad Ali who then captured their imaginations, and Ali was still bound to the Mahatma. Understatement wasn’t Ali’s style. “After the Prophet, on whom be peace, I consider it my duty to carry out the commands of Gandhiji,” he declared. (The one-syllable suffix, as we’ve noted, is a common Indian way of showing respect for an elder or sage. Even today, in conversation, Gandhi is commonly referred to as “Mahatmaji” or “Gandhiji.”) For a time Muhammad Ali gave up eating beef as a gesture to Gandhi and all Hindus. Then, campaigning side by side with Gandhi across India, he took to wearing khadi, the homespun cloth the Mahatma embraced as a cottage industry, a means to swadeshi, or self-reliance, and, in the expanding Gandhian vision, as a mass self-employment scheme for village India and, therefore, its salvation. The weaving and wearing of khadi (sometimes called khaddar) would not only feed spinners, handloom operators, and their families; it would enable India to boycott imported cloth from British mills and thus stand as another form of noncooperation. The bearded maulana—an honorific given to a man learned in Islamic law—not only wore khadi; he became an evangelist for the charkha, or spinning wheel, in front of Muslim audiences. “We laid the foundation of our slavery by selling off the spinning wheel,” Muhammad Ali preached. “If you want to do away with slavery, take up the wheel again.” His support for such Gandhian tenets inevitably aroused criticism from fellow Muslims. Ultimately, the maulana had to defend himself against charges of “being a worshipper of Hindus and a Gandhi-worshipper.”

The preservation of the caliphate remained Muhammad Ali’s most urgent cause, but his readiness to stand with Gandhi on issues that meant little to Muslims—spinning and even cow protection—became a kind of validation of the Mahatma’s rhetorical leaps, his constant juggling and merging of seemingly unconnected campaigns in an attempt to establish a stable common ground for Hindus and Muslims. Noncooperation was the most serious challenge the Raj had faced, and Gandhi was the movement’s undisputed leader. But then the big tent of Hindu-Muslim unity he’d erected began to sag and, here and there, collapse as violence between the two communities, an endemic phenomenon on the subcontinent, appeared to give the lie to all the vows and pledges that had been offered up in India on behalf of the soon-to-exit caliph in Constantinople. The impressive coalition Gandhi had built and inspired was proving to be jerry-built. By August 1921, a still hopeful Gandhi had to acknowledge that some Hindus were “apathetic to the Khilafat cause” and that it was “not yet possible to induce Mussulmans to take interest in swaraj except in terms of the Khilafat.”

By far the worst violence came that same month in the rural Malabar district on the Indian Ocean coast, where a community of Muslims known as Mappilas, also Moplahs, rose in rebellion, crying jihad and brandishing the Khilafat flag, after a couple of skirmishes with the police in which two British constables had been killed. Tiny Khilafat kingdoms were then proclaimed by the insurgents, and in some of these, Hindu homes and temples were set ablaze, women raped, and children slaughtered. The doctrine of nonviolence had never reached the Malabar district; political meetings had, in fact, been banned there. That was hardly an excuse for the gruesomeness or scale of the carnage: six hundred Hindus reported killed, twenty-five hundred forcibly converted to Islam. Gandhi and Muhammad Ali were denounced as infidels when they called on the insurgent leaders to disavow violence. The Raj dealt severely with the rising, blaming the noncooperation movement and hanging some two hundred rebels.

The next month Muhammad Ali was arrested on conspiracy charges at a train station in the Telugu-language region of southeastern India (today’s Andhra Pradesh), including the charge of “conspiracy to commit mischief,” while traveling with the Mahatma from Calcutta to Madras. The British, who’d been looking for an occasion to re-exert their authority, found it in a series of statements by the maulana arguing that Islamic law forbade Muslims to enlist or serve in their army. Gandhi’s reaction says a lot about the fecundity of his imagination, the range of his aspirations, and his adaptability as a political tactician. A week after seeing Ali hustled from the station by a police detachment, he appeared in the South Indian town of Madurai bare chested in a loincloth: in the attire, that is, that would be his unvarying guise for the rest of his life. It’s the way he’d been dressing at the ashram on the Sabarmati River, outside Ahmedabad, for several years; in public, he’d continued to wear a kurta, dhoti, and cap. This was the first public outing of his new, very basic costume.

Being Gandhi, he hastened to explain the symbolic meaning of the change. His disrobing could be read in several ways: as a tribute to the imprisoned maulana and the other Khilafat leaders rounded up with him; or as a subtle shift of emphasis, a recognition that the Khilafat movement would soon be played out, at least as far as Hindus were concerned, that the larger national movement needed a new mobilizing tool. Gandhi had already seized on the spinning wheel for that purpose. For the goal of swadeshi to be achieved, he reasoned, there had to be enough hand spinning and hand weaving across India to replace the manufactured imported cloth being burned and boycotted as his campaign for swadeshi caught on. Without swadeshi and all it entailed, he now argued, there could be no swaraj. And only with swarajgiving India the ability to engage diplomatically with the world—could there be any settlement of the Khilafat problem. Once the highest priority of the noncooperation movement, the preservation of the Khilafat was now to be seen as a potential by-product of its success. Gandhi was pointing the way to “full swadeshi” by showing the millions who were too poor to cover their whole bodies with newly woven homespun that it really wasn’t necessary. “Let there be no prudery about dress,” he now said. “India has never insisted on full covering of the body for males as a test of culture.”

Later, he would explain the symbolism he invested in the loincloth by saying, “I wish to be in touch with the life of the poorest of the poor among Indians … It is our duty to dress them first and then dress ourselves, to feed them first and then feed ourselves.”

If they could follow the winding path of his logic, Indian Muslims might see his wearing of the loincloth as proof of his continued devotion to the Khilafat cause. Otherwise there was a good chance they’d perceive Gandhi to be drifting away from them. Muhammad Ali might have pointed out, were he not by this time in detention in Karachi, that the culture that Gandhi was describing so avidly was distinctly Hindu. “It is against our scriptures to keep the knees bare in this fashion,” Maulana Abdul Bari, a leading religious authority who’d been prominent in the Khilafat agitation, subsequently informed the Mahatma.

Gandhi was starting a new variation on the fugue he was forever composing out of his various themes. Recalling perhaps how few South African Muslims were at his side when he marched across the Transvaal border in the 1913 satyagraha, he’d understood from the start of the noncooperation campaign that he could only speak to Muslims through other Muslims: Muhammad Ali, for instance. “I can wield no influence over the Mussulmans except through a Mussulman,” he said. He’d also understood the improbability of the Khilafat as an Indian national cause. For him, it was less a cause than an investment: “the opportunity of a lifetime” for Hindus to demonstrate their stalwartness, their trustworthiness, to Muslims who, he kept suggesting, if not quite promising, would be likely to respond in kind by respecting the tender feelings of Hindus for the sacred cow. Ergo, according to this logic, preserving the Khilafat was the surest way to preserve the cow. Nothing like this opportunity would “recur for another hundred years.” It was a cause for which he was “ready today to sacrifice my sons, my wife and my friends.” In the short run, it was also a way to bind Muslims into the national movement that, thanks in no small measure to their support, he now led. The odds against it working were overwhelming, but who can now say, considering all that has happened since in confrontations between Hindus and Muslims, that Gandhi had his priorities wrong?

Gradually, he disengaged from the Khilafat agitation, which meant disengaging from Muslim politics, but Hindu-Muslim unity remained one of his main themes through to what might be called his tragic last act as Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other at the time of partition. In September 1924, Gandhi fasted for the first but not last time against Hindu-Muslim violence following riots in Kohat, a frontier town south of Peshawar in what’s now Pakistan. He said he was fasting for twenty-one days as a personal “penance.” The flash point for this killing spree, which resulted in an official death count of thirty-six and the flight of Kohat’s entire Hindu community, was a grossly blasphemous life of the Prophet written by a Hindu. While it had nothing to do with Gandhi, he held himself responsible in the sense that he’d been “instrumental in bringing into being the vast energy of the people” that had now turned “self-destructive.” To demonstrate that the fast was not against Muslims or on behalf of Hindus, the main sufferers on this occasion, he made a point of camping in Muhammad Ali’s Delhi bungalow during his starvation ritual. “I am striving to become the best cement between the two communities,” he wrote. Twenty-four years later he’d fast again in Delhi with the same purpose. On each occasion, Hindu and Muslim leaders, fearful of losing that “cement,” gathered at his bedside and vowed to work for peace. A shaky armistice would follow and hold until an obscure agitator, somewhere on the subcontinent, threw off the next spark.

Gandhi the politician retained a cool realist’s grip on his own limitations in this highly charged sphere after the waning of the Khilafat cause. Never was it more clearly and coldly displayed than in 1926, when his second son, Manilal, now resettled in South Africa, realized he was in love with a young Muslim woman in Cape Town whose family had played host to his father in years gone by. Her name was Fatima Gool, and she was known as Timmie. When word of the interfaith love match reached Gandhi at his ashram in Gujarat, he wrote to his son telling him he was free to do as he wanted. Then, as his great-granddaughter Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie observes in her finely wrought biography of Manilal, “the rest of the letter in fact closed the doors on free choice.”

Generally speaking, Gandhi deplored marriage as a failure of self-restraint (ever since he unilaterally declared himself a brahmachari) and religious conversion as a failure of discipline (since he briefly contemplated it for himself in his Pretoria days). So he was hardly likely to celebrate intermarriage as a realization of Hindu-Muslim unity. His letter reads like a dry lawyer’s brief, or a political consultant’s memo, devoid of any expression of feeling for his son or the Gool family. Of its several arguments, the most forceful and hardest to refute is the politician’s: “Your marriage will have a powerful impact on the Hindu-Muslim question … You cannot forget nor will society forget that you are my son.” Persevering idealist though he was, he was seldom softhearted, least of all when it came to his sons.

Did the revivalist ever really believe that swaraj could come in a year, or that the caliphate could be preserved? The question is little different from asking whether modern political candidates believe the dreamy promises they make at the height of a campaign. For Gandhi, who was introducing modern politics to India, the question is especially fraught because he was seen by his own people in his own time and place as a religious figure, more saintly than prophetic, more inspiring than infallible. He could thus be expected to lay down unmeetable conditions to achieve unreachable goals. At a certain level of abstraction from what we’re accustomed to calling reality, what he offered in 1920 and 1921 as a vision was obvious and inarguable, even and especially when it defied normal expectations. After all, if 100 million spinning wheels had produced enough yarn in a few months to clothe 300 million Indians, if state schools and courts had all emptied and colonial officials at every level found they had no one to ring for—if Hindu and Muslim India was that united and disciplined—then independence would have been within reach. Gandhi was telling his people that their fate was in their own hands; that much he surely believed. It was when these things failed to happen as he said they could that disillusion set in and the movement veered off course and slowed.

Shortly after the Mahatma donned his “symbolic disguise,” as Robert Payne, one of his legion of biographers, termed his loincloth, he was challenged on the level of reality by Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet, a Nobel laureate by the time he met Gandhi in 1915, and, later, the admirer who first conferred on him the title Mahatma. Tagore now wrote that Gandhi had “won the heart of India with his love” but asked how he could justify the bonfires of foreign cloth promoted by his followers in a country where millions were half-clothed. The gist of Tagore’s high-minded argument was that Indians needed to think for themselves and beware of blindly accepting such simplistic would-be solutions as the spinning wheel, even from a Mahatma they rightly revered. “Consider the burning of cloth, heaped before the very eyes of our motherland shivering and ashamed in her nakedness,” he wrote. Gandhi swiftly replied with what may have been his most stirring prose in English, offering his retort on a less elevated level of reality, that of village India:

To a people famishing and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare to appear is work and the promise of food as wages. God created man to work for his food, and said that those who ate without work were thieves. Eighty per cent of India are compulsory thieves half the year. Is it any wonder if India has become one vast prison? Hunger is the argument that is driving India to the spinning wheel … The hungry millions ask for one poem—invigorating food. They cannot be given it. They can only earn it. And they can earn it only by the sweat of their brow.

 

 

Gandhi at his charkha, 1925 (photo credit i6.2)

 

As far as the polemical exchange went, Gandhi may have bested Tagore, but soon he had to confront his own doubts. He was under pressure from impatient followers, Khilafat activists in particular, to launch an intensified campaign of mass civil disobedience that would fill colonial jails. Gandhi tried to defer the campaign or at least limit its scope. Unsure that he had enough disciplined workers under his command, he worried about seeing his nonviolent campaign spill over into mass rioting, as it had in 1919, once demonstrators finally confronted the police. The month after the exchange with Tagore, rioting in Bombay caused him to suspend civil disobedience. Less than three months later, it happened again.

The authorities had banned public meetings. This spelled opportunity for satyagraha; across India, Congress leaders and followers by the thousands defied the ban, got themselves arrested, and went to jail. As the prisons filled, Gandhi fired off congratulatory telegrams to the most prominent inmates, hailing them as one might hail a class of new graduates. Their jailing, his telegrams asserted, was wonderful news. Then a lethal clash at an obscure place in North India called Chauri Chaura moved Gandhi to order another suspension of his campaign—the third in less than three years—against the advice of close associates.

What happened in Chauri Chaura on February 5, 1922, fulfilled his worst fears. An angry crowd of roughly two thousand surrounded a small rural police station after having been fired on by a police detachment, which had then withdrawn and taken cover inside the building. The frustrated crowd, now a mob, soon set it ablaze. Driven out, policemen were hacked to death or thrown back into the flames; in all, twenty-two of them had been slaughtered with their assailants, so it was later said, shouting noncooperation catch-cries, including “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai”—“Glory to Mahatma Gandhi.”

By Gandhi’s standards, which derived from the Hindu value of ahimsa, or nonviolence, Chauri Chaura stood out as an abysmal, even frightening defeat. In his eyes, it showed that the country at large and the national movement in particular had never truly grasped the values of satyagraha. So, with more than fifteen thousand followers already in jail, he abruptly called a halt to civil disobedience, suspending it for more than ten months, until the end of 1922. It was only because he insisted on suspending the campaign that Congress leaders who’d not yet gone to jail went along with his decision. “I got the votes because I was Gandhi and not because people were convinced,” he wrote with the self-lacerating candor he could be relied on to display in his lowest moments. As “penance” for the fact that “murders were committed in my name,” he then fasted for five days.

Among those who expressed disappointment over the retreat were some, both Muslim and Hindu, who well understood that Gandhi was responding to what he deemed a moral imperative. If only they had a less exemplary, less principled leader, they seemed to say. “Our defeat is in proportion to the greatness of our leader” was the way Lajpat Rai, a Hindu and former Congress president, wryly put it. “To me,” said Maulana Abdul Bari, the leading Muslim in the North Indian center of Lucknow, “Gandhi is like a paralytic whose limbs are not in his control but whose mind is still active.” Neither statement was without a tinge of admiration, but each was more disillusioned than admiring. Gandhi had offered them satyagraha as a weapon; now, as the “expert in the satyagraha business,” he was yanking it back.

With his usual industriousness, Gandhi churned out a series of letters and articles explaining his stand to key followers and the nation at large, promising that the suspension would not be permanent, that civil disobedience would eventually be resumed and swaraj achieved, if not in a year. The clearest statement of his position turned into a prophecy. No one, Gandhi included, could have realized that what he had to say in 1922 would accurately depict the circumstances of India’s independence, still a quarter of a century in the future, or his own ambivalent reaction to its achievement. “I personally can never be a party to a movement half-violent and half non-violent,” he said, “even though it may result in the attainment of so-called swaraj, for it will not be real swaraj as I have conceived it.”

Even “so-called swaraj” was a long way off, a much bigger goal than any he had toiled for in South Africa. Swaraj as he had conceived it—a purer, cleansing independence, amounting to a social transformation—would never be within reach. It would survive as a permanent, ever-receding goal.