My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  It was given by the Mohammedans to the natives [who lived east of the river Indus] for the purpose of distinguishing themselves. It does not occur in any Sanskrit work prior to the Mohammedan invasion. They did not feel the necessity of a common name, because they had no conception of their having constituted a community. Hindu society as such does not exist. It is only a collection of castes.90

  When reformers began to use the word “Hindu” to describe themselves and their organizations, it had less to do with religion than with trying to forge a unified political constitution out of a divided people. This explains the reformers’ constant references to the “Hindu nation” or the “Hindu race.”91 This political Hinduism later came to be called Hindutva.92

  The issue of demography was addressed openly and head-on. “In this country, the government is based on numbers,” wrote the editor of Pratap, a Kanpur newspaper, on January 10, 1921.

  Shuddhi has become a matter of life and death for Hindus. The Muslims have grown from negative quantity into 70 million. The Christians number four million. 220 million Hindus are finding it hard to live because of 70 million Muslims. If their numbers increase only God knows what will happen. It is true that Shuddhi should be for religious purposes alone, but the Hindus have been obliged by other considerations as well to embrace their other brothers. If the Hindus do not wake up now, they will be finished.93

  Conservative Hindu organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha took the task beyond rhetoric, and against their own deeply held beliefs and practice began to proselytize energetically against untouchability. Untouchables had to be prevented from defecting. They had to be assimilated, their proteins broken down. They had to be brought into the Big House, but kept in the servants’ quarters. Here is Ambedkar on the subject:

  It is true that Hinduism can absorb many things. The beef-eating Hinduism (or strictly speaking Brahminism which is the proper name of Hinduism in its earlier stage) absorbed the non-violence theory of Buddhism and became a religion of vegetarianism. But there is one thing which Hinduism has never been able to do—namely to adjust itself to absorb the Untouchables or to remove the bar of untouchability.94

  While the Hindu reformers went about their business, anti-caste movements led by Untouchables began to organize themselves, too. Swami Achhutanand Harihar presented the Prince of Wales with a charter of seventeen demands including land reform, separate schools for Untouchable children, and separate electorates. Another well-known figure was Babu Mangoo Ram. He was a member of the revolutionary, anti-imperialist Ghadar Party established in 1913, predominantly by Punjabi migrants in the United States and Canada. Ghadar (Revolt) was an international movement of Punjabi Indians who had been inspired by the 1857 Mutiny, also called the First War of Independence. Its aim was to overthrow the British by means of armed struggle. (It was, in some ways, India’s first communist party. Unlike the Congress, which had an urban, privileged-caste leadership, the Ghadar Party was closely linked to the Punjab peasantry. Though it has ceased to exist, its memory continues to be a rallying point for several left-wing revolutionary parties in Punjab.) However, when Babu Mangoo Ram returned to India after a decade in the United States, the caste system was waiting for him. He found he was Untouchable again.95 In 1926, he founded the Ad Dharm movement, with Ravidas, the Bhakti saint, as its spiritual hero. Ad Dharmis declared that they were neither Sikh nor Hindu. Many Untouchables left the Arya Samaj to join the Ad Dharm movement.96 Babu Mangoo Ram went on to become a comrade of Ambedkar’s.

  The anxiety over demography made for turbulent politics. There were other lethal games afoot. The British government had given itself the right to rule India by imperial fiat and had consolidated its power by working closely with the Indian elite, taking care never to upset the status quo.97 It had drained the wealth of a once-wealthy subcontinent—or, shall we say, drained the wealth of the elite in a once-wealthy subcontinent. It had caused famines in which millions had died while the British government exported food to England.98 None of that stopped it from also lighting sly fires that ignited caste and communal tension. In 1905, it partitioned Bengal along communal lines. In 1909, it passed the Morley–Minto reforms, granting Muslims a separate electorate in the Central as well as Provincial Legislative Councils. It began to question the moral and political legitimacy of anybody who opposed it. How could a people who practiced something as primitive as untouchability talk of self-rule? How could the Congress Party, run by elite, privileged-caste Hindus, claim to represent the Muslims? Or the Untouchables? Coming from the British government, it was surely wicked, but even wicked questions need answers.

  The person who stepped into the widening breach was perhaps the most consummate politician the modern world has ever known—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. If the British had their imperial mandate to raise them above the fray, Gandhi had his Mahatmahood.

  Gandhi returned to India in 1915 after twenty years of political activity in South Africa and plunged into the national movement. His first concern, as any politician’s would be, was to stitch together the various constituencies that would allow the Indian National Congress to claim it was the legitimate and sole representative of the emerging nation. It was a formidable task. The temptations and contradictions of attempting to represent everybody—Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, privileged castes, subordinated castes, peasants, farmers, serfs, zamindars, workers, and industrialists—were all absorbed into the other-worldly provenance of Gandhi’s Mahatmahood.

  Like Shiva in the myth, who swallowed poison to save the world in the story of the Samudra Manthan—the churning of the Ocean of Milk—Gandhi stood foremost among his peers and fellow-churners and tried to swallow the poison that rose up from the depths as he helped to roil the new nation into existence. Unfortunately, Gandhi was not Shiva, and the poison eventually overwhelmed him. The greater the Congress Party’s impulse to hegemony, the more violently things blew apart.

  The three main constituencies it had to win over were the conservative, privileged-caste Hindus; the Untouchables; and the Muslims.

  For the conservative Hindus, the Congress Party’s natural constituency, Gandhi held aloft the utopia of Ram Rajya and the Bhagavad Gita, his “spiritual dictionary.” (It’s the book most Gandhi statues hold.) He called himself a “Sanatani Hindu.” Sanatan dharma, by virtue of being “eternal law,” positions itself as the origin of all things, the “container” of everything. Spiritually, it is a generous and beautiful idea, the very epitome of tolerance and pluralism. Politically, it is used in the opposite way, for the very narrow purpose of assimilation and domination, in which all religions—Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Christianity—are sought to be absorbed. They’re expected to function like small concerns under the umbrella of a larger holding company.

  To woo its second major constituency, the Untouchables, the Indian National Congress passed a resolution in 1917 abolishing untouchability. Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society, a founding member of the Congress, presided over the meeting. Ambedkar called it “a strange event.”99 He republished Besant’s essay (published in the Indian Review in 1909), in which she had made a case for segregating Untouchable children from the children of “purer” castes in schools:

  Their bodies at present are ill-odorous and foul with the liquor and strong-smelling food out of which for generations they have been built up; it will need some generations of purer food and living to make their bodies fit to sit in the close neighbourhood of a school room with children who have received bodies trained in habits of exquisite personal cleanliness and fed on pure food stuffs. We have to raise the Depressed Classes to a similar level of purity, not drag the clean to the level of the dirty, and until that is done, close association is undesirable.100

  The third big constituency the Congress Party needed to address was the Muslims (who, for caste Hindus, counted on the purity–pollution scale as mleccha—impure; sharing food and water with them was forbidden). In 1920, the Congress decided to ally with conservative I
ndian Muslims who were leading the pan-Islamist agitation against the partitioning of the Ottoman territories by the Allies after World War I. The sultan of the defeated Ottomans was the caliph, the spiritual head of Sunni Islam. Sunni Muslims equated the partition of the Ottoman Empire with a threat to the Islamic Caliphate itself. Led by Gandhi, the Congress Party leapt into the fray and included the Khilafat (Caliphate) agitation in its first national satyagraha. The satyagraha had been planned to protest the Rowlatt Act passed in 1919 to extend the British government’s wartime emergency powers.

  Whether or not Gandhi’s support for the Khilafat movement was just ordinary political opportunism is a subject that has been debated endlessly. The historian Faisal Devji argues convincingly that at this point Gandhi was acting with a certain internationalism; as a responsible “imperial subject” (which was how he saw himself in his years in South Africa), he was attempting to morally transform empire and hold it accountable to all its subjects.101 Gandhi called Khilafat an “ideal” and asked that the struggle of “Non-cooperation be recognised as a struggle of ‘religion against irreligion.’”102 By this he meant that Hinduism and Islam should join forces to transform a Christianity that, as Gandhi saw it, was losing its moral core. It was during the first Non-Cooperation Movement that Gandhi made religion and religious symbolism the central tenet of his politics. Perhaps he thought he was lighting a wayside fire for pilgrims to warm their souls. But it ended in a blaze that has still not been put out.

  By expressing solidarity with a pan-Islamic movement, Gandhi was throwing his turban into a much larger ring. Though he went to great lengths to underline his “Hinduness,” he was staking his claim to be more than just a Hindu or even an Indian leader—he was aspiring to be the leader of all the subjects of the British Empire. Gandhi’s support for Khilafat, however, played straight into the hands of Hindu extremists, who had by then begun to claim that Muslims were not “true” Indians because the center of gravity of Muslim fealty lay outside of India. The Congress Party’s alliance with conservative Muslims angered conservative Hindus as well as moderate Muslims.

  In 1922, when the Non-Cooperation Movement was at its peak, things went out of control. A mob killed twenty-two policemen and burnt down a police station in Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces (today’s Uttar Pradesh). Gandhi saw this violence as a sign that people had not yet evolved into true satyagrahis, that they were not ready for nonviolence and noncooperation. Without consulting any other leaders, Gandhi unilaterally called off the satyagraha. Since the Non-Cooperation Movement and the Khilafat movement were conjoined, it meant an end to the Khilafat movement, too. Infuriated by this arbitrariness, the leaders of the Khilafat movement parted ways with the Congress. Things began to unravel.

  By 1925, Dr. K. B. Hedgewar had founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist organization. B. S. Moonje, one of the early ideologues of the RSS, traveled to Italy in 1931 and met Mussolini. Inspired by European fascism, the RSS began to create its own squads of storm troopers. (Today they number in the millions. RSS members include former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, former home minister L. K. Advani, and four-time chief minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi.) By the time World War II broke out, Hitler and Mussolini were the RSS’s spiritual and political leaders (and so they still remain). The RSS subsequently declared that India was a Hindu nation and that Muslims in India were the equivalent of the Jews in Germany. In 1939, M. S. Golwalkar, who succeeded Hedgewar as the head of the RSS, wrote in what is regarded as the RSS bible, We, or Our Nationhood Defined:

  To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by purging the country of the semitic races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here … a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.103

  By 1940, the Muslim League, led by M. A. Jinnah, had passed the Pakistan Resolution.

  In 1947, in what must surely count as one of the most callous, iniquitous acts in history, the British government drew a hurried border through the country that cut through communities and people, villages and homes, with less care than it might have taken to slice up a leg of lamb.

  Gandhi, the Apostle of Peace and Nonviolence, lived to see the movement he thought he led dissolve into a paroxysm of genocidal violence in which half a million people (a million, according to Stanley Wolpert in A New History of India) lost their lives and almost twelve million people lost their homes, their past, and everything they had ever known.104 Through the horror of Partition, Gandhi did all he could to still the madness and bloodlust. He traveled deep into the very heart of the violence. He prayed, he pleaded, he fasted, but the incubus had been unleashed and could not be recalled. The hatred spilled over and consumed everything that came in its path. It continues to branch out, overground and underground. It has bequeathed the subcontinent a dangerous, deeply wounded psyche.

  Amidst the frenzy of killing, ethnic cleansing, and chest-thumping religious fundamentalism on both sides, the government of Pakistan kept its head about one thing: it declared that Untouchable municipal sweepers were part of the country’s “essential services” and impounded them, refusing them permission to move to India. (Who else was going to clean people’s shit in the Land of the Pure?) Ambedkar raised the matter with prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in a letter in December 1947.105 With great difficulty Ambedkar managed to help at least a section of the “essential services” get across the border. Even today in Pakistan, while various Islamist sects slaughter each other over who is the better, more correct, more faithful Muslim, there does not seem to be much heartache over the very un-Islamic practice of untouchability.

  Five months after Partition, in January 1948, Gandhi was shot dead at a prayer meeting on the lawns of Birla House, where he usually lived when he visited Delhi. His assassin was Nathuram Godse, a Brahmin and a former activist of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. Godse was, if such a thing is possible, a most respectful assassin. First he saluted Gandhi for the work he had done to “awaken” people, and then he shot him. After pulling the trigger, he stood his ground. He made no attempt to escape or to kill himself. In his book, Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, he said:

  [But] in India communal franchise, separate electorates and the like had already undermined the solidarity of the nation, more of such were in the offing and the sinister policy of communal favouritism was being pursued by the British with the utmost tenacity and without any scruple. Gandhiji therefore found it most difficult to obtain the unquestioned leadership of the Hindus and Muslims as in South Africa. But he had been accustomed to be the leader of all Indians. And quite frankly he could not understand the leadership of a divided country. It was absurd for his honest mind to think of accepting the generalship of any army divided against itself.106

  Gandhi’s assassin seemed to feel that he was saving the Mahatma from himself. Godse and his accomplice, Narayan Apte, climbed the gallows carrying a saffron flag, a map of undivided India and, ironically, a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, Gandhi’s “spiritual dictionary.”

  The Gita, essentially Krishna’s counsel to Arjuna during the battle of the Mahabharata (in which brothers fought brothers), is a philosophical and theological treatise on devotion and ethical practice on a battlefield. Ambedkar wasn’t enamoured of the Bhagavad Gita. His view was that the Gita contained “an unheard of defence of murder.” He called it a book that “offers a philosophic basis to the theory of Chaturvarna by linking it to the theory of innate, inborn qualities in men.”107

  Mahatma Gandhi died a sad and defeated man. Ambedkar was devastated. He wanted his adversary exposed, not killed. The country went into shock.

  All that came later. We’re getting ahead of the story.

  For more than thirty-five years before that, Gandhi’s Mahatmahood had billowed like a sail in the winds of the national movement. He captured the world’s imagination. He roused hundreds of thousands of people into direct political action. He was the cynosure of all eyes, the voice
of the nation. In 1931, at the Second Round Table Conference in London, Gandhi claimed— with complete equanimity—that he represented all of India. In his first public confrontation with Ambedkar (over Ambedkar’s proposal for a separate electorate for Untouchables), Gandhi felt able to say, “I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast mass of Untouchables.”108

  How could a privileged-caste Bania claim that he, in his own person, represented 45 million Indian Untouchables unless he believed he actually was a Mahatma? Mahatmahood provided Gandhi with an amplitude that was not available to ordinary mortals. It allowed him to use his “inner voice” affectively, effectively, and often. It allowed him the bandwidth to make daily broadcasts on the state of his hygiene, his diet, his bowel movements, his enemas, and his sex life and to draw the public into a net of prurient intimacy that he could then use and manipulate when he embarked on his fasts and other public acts of self-punishment. It permitted him to contradict himself constantly and then say: “My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with the truth as it may present itself to me in a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.”109

  Ordinary politicians oscillate from political expediency to political expediency. A Mahatma can grow from truth to truth.

  How did Gandhi come to be called a Mahatma? Did he begin with the compassion and egalitarian instincts of a saint? Did they come to him along the way?

  In his recent biography of Gandhi, the historian Ramachandra Guha argues that it was the two decades he spent working in South Africa that made Gandhi a Mahatma.110 His canonization—the first time he was publicly called Mahatma— was in 1915, soon after he returned from South Africa to begin work in India, at a meeting in Gondal, close to his hometown, Porbandar, in Gujarat.111 At the time, few in India knew more than some very sketchy, rather inaccurate accounts of the struggles he had been engaged in. These need to be examined in some detail because whether or not they made him a Mahatma, they certainly shaped and defined his views on caste, race, and imperialism. His views on race presaged his views on caste. What happened in South Africa continues to have serious implications for the Indian community there. Fortunately, we have the Mahatma’s own words (and inconsistencies) to give us the detail and texture of those years.112 To generations who have been raised on a diet of Gandhi hagiographies (including myself), to learn of what happened in South Africa is not just disturbing, it is almost stupefying.