My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), Gandhi’s contemporary from India, did not have his unfortunate instincts. Though she was born a Brahmin, she renounced Hinduism for its patriarchy and its practice of caste, became a Christian, and quarreled with the Anglican Church too, earning a place of pride in India’s anticaste tradition. She traveled to the US in 1886 where she met Harriet Tubman, who had once been a slave, whom she admired more than anybody she had ever met. Contrast Gandhi’s attitude toward the African people to Pandita Ramabai’s description of her meeting with Harriet Tubman:

  Harriet still works. She has a little house of her own, where she and her husband live and work together for their own people … Harriet is very large and strong. She hugged me like a bear and shook me by the hand till my poor little hand ached!143

  In 1873, Jotirao Phule dedicated his Gulamgiri (Slavery) to

  The good people of the United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and self sacrificing devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery; and with an earnest desire, that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Shudra Brothers from the trammels of Brahmin thraldom.144

  Phule—who, among other things, campaigned for widow remarriage, girls’ education, and started a school for Untouchables—described how “the owners of slaves treated the slaves as beasts of burden, raining kicks and blows on them all the time and starving them,” and how they would “harness the slaves as bullocks and make them plough the fields in the blazing sun.” Phule believed that the Shudra and Ati-Shudra would understand slavery better than anyone else because “they have a direct experience of slavery as compared to the others who have never experienced it so; the Shudras were conquered and enslaved by the Brahmins.”145

  The connection between racism and casteism was made more than a century before the 2001 Durban conference. Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.

  Despite all of Gandhi’s suffering in unsegregated South African prisons, the satyagraha against the Pass Laws did not gain much traction. After leading a number of protests against registering and fingerprinting, Gandhi suddenly announced that Indians would agree to be fingerprinted as long as it was voluntary. It would not be the first time that he would make a deal that contradicted what the struggle was about in the first place.

  Around this time, his wealthy architect friend Hermann Kallenbach gifted him 1,100 acres of farmland just outside Johannesburg. Here he set up his second commune, Tolstoy Farm, with one thousand fruit trees on it. On Tolstoy Farm he began his experiments in purity and spirituality and developed his home-grown protocol for the practice of satyagraha.

  Given Gandhi’s proposals to partner with the British in their colonization of South Africa—and British reluctance to accept that partnership—satyagraha, appealing to your opponent with the force of Truth and Love, was the perfect political tool. Gandhi was not trying to overwhelm or destroy a ruling structure; he simply wanted to be friends with it. The intensity of his distaste for the “raw Kaffir” was matched by his affection and admiration for the British. Satyagraha seemed to be a way of reassuring them, a way of saying: “You can trust us. Look at us. We would rather harm ourselves than harm you.” (This is not to suggest that satyagraha is not, and cannot be, in certain situations, an effective means of political resistance. I am merely describing the circumstances in which Gandhi began his experiments with satyagraha.)

  Essentially, his idea of satyagraha revolved around a regimen of renunciation and purification. Renunciation naturally segued into a missionary approach to politics. The emphasis on purity and purification obviously derived from the caste system, though Gandhi inverted the goalposts and called his later ministrations to Untouchables a process of “self-purification.” On the whole, it was a brand of hair-shirt Christianity combined with his own version of Hinduism and esoteric vegetarianism (which ended up underlining the “impurity” of Dalits, Muslims, and all the rest of us meat-eaters—in other words, the majority of the Indian population). The other attraction was brahmacharya—celibacy. The practice of semen retention and complete sexual abstinence became the minimum qualification for a “pure” satyagrahi. Crucifixion of the flesh, denial of pleasure and desire—and eventually almost every normal human instinct—became a major theme. Even eating came in for some serious stick: “Taking food is as dirty an act as answering the call of nature.”146

  Would a person who was starving think of eating as a “dirty act”?

  Gandhi always said that he wanted to live like the poorest of the poor. The question is, can poverty be simulated? Poverty, after all, is not just a question of having no money or no possessions. Poverty is about having no power. As a politician, it was Gandhi’s business to accumulate power, which he did effectively. Satyagraha wouldn’t have worked, even as much as it did, if it wasn’t for his star power. If you are powerful, you can live simply, but you cannot be poor. In South Africa, it took a lot of farmland and organic fruit trees to keep Gandhi in poverty.

  The battle of the poor and the powerless is one of reclamation, not renunciation. But Gandhi, like many successful godmen, was an astute politician. He understood that the act of renunciation by someone who has plenty to renounce has always appealed to the popular imagination. (Gandhi would eventually discard his Western suit and put on a dhoti in order to dress like the poorest of the poor. Ambedkar, on the other hand, born unmoneyed, Untouchable, and denied the right to wear clothes that privileged-caste people wore, would show his defiance by wearing a three-piece suit.)

  The irony is that while Gandhi was performing the rituals of poverty in Tolstoy Farm, he was not questioning the accumulation of capital or the unequal distribution of wealth. He was not holding out for improved working conditions for the indentured, or for the return of land to those it had been stolen from. He was fighting for Indian merchants’ right to expand their businesses to the Transvaal and to compete with British merchants.

  For centuries before Gandhi and for years after him, Hindu rishis and yogis have practiced feats of renunciation far more arduous than Gandhi’s. However, they have usually done it alone, on a snowy mountainside or in a cave set in a windblown cliff. Gandhi’s genius was that he yoked his otherworldly search for moksha to a very worldly, political cause and performed both, like a fusion dance, for a live audience, in a live-in theater. Over the years, he expanded his strange experiments to include his wife as well as other people, some of them too young to know what they were being subjected to. Toward the end of his life, as an old man in his seventies, he took to sleeping with two young girls, Manu, his seventeen-year-old grand-niece, and Abha (who were known as his “walking sticks”).147 He did this, he said, in order to gauge the degree of success or failure of his conquest over sexual desire. Leaving aside the very contentious, disturbing issues of consent and propriety, leaving aside the effect it had on the girls, the “experiment” raises another distressing, almost horrifying question. For Gandhi to extrapolate from the “results” of sleeping with two (or three, or four) women that he had, or had not, conquered heterosexual desire suggests that he viewed women not as individuals, but as a category. That, for him, a very small sample of a few physical specimens, including his own grand-niece, could stand in for the whole species.

  Gandhi wrote at length about the experiments he conducted at Tolstoy Farm. On one occasion, he describes how he slept with young boys and girls spread around him, “taking care to arrange the order of the beds” but knowing full well that “any amount of such care would have been futile in case of a wicked mind.” Then:

  I sent the boys reputed to be mischievous and the innocent young girls to bathe in the same spot at the same time. I had fully explained the duty of self-restraint to the children, who were all familiar with my Satyagraha doctrine. I knew, and so did the children, that I loved them with a mother’s love … Was it a folly to let the children meet there for bath and yet to expect them to be innocent?

  The “trouble” t
hat Gandhi had been anticipating—spoiling for, actually—with a mother’s prescience, took place:

  One day, one of the young men made fun of two girls, and the girls themselves or some child brought me the information. The news made me tremble. I made inquiries and found that the report was true. I remonstrated with the young men, but that was not enough. I wished the two girls to have some sign on their person as a warning to every young man that no evil eye might be cast upon them, and as a lesson to every girl that no one dare assail their purity. The passionate Ravana could not so much as touch Sita with evil intent while Rama was thousands of miles away. What mark should the girls bear so as to give them a sense of security and at the same time to sterilise the sinner’s eye? This question kept me awake for the night.

  By morning, Gandhi had made his decision. He “gently suggested to the girls that they might let him cut off their fine long hair.” At first they were reluctant. He kept the pressure up and managed to win the elderly women of the farm over to his side. The girls came around after all, “and at once the very hand that is narrating this incident set to cut off their hair. And afterwards analysed and explained my procedure before my class, with excellent results. I never heard of a joke again.”148

  There is no mention of what punishment the same mind that had thought up the idea of cutting the girls’ hair had thought up for the boys.

  Gandhi did indeed make the space for women to participate in the national movement. But those women had to be virtuous; they had to, so to speak, bear “marks” upon their person that would “sterilise the sinner’s eye.” They had to be obedient women who never challenged the traditional structures of patriarchy.

  Gandhi may have enjoyed and learned a great deal from his “experiments.” But he’s gone now, and left his followers with a legacy of a joyless, joke-free world: no desire, no sex— which he described as a poison worse than snakebite149—no food, no beads, no nice clothes, no dance, no poetry. And very little music. It is true that Gandhi fired the imagination of millions of people. It’s also true that he has debilitated the political imagination of millions with his impossible standards of “purity” and righteousness as a minimum qualification for political engagement:

  Chastity is one of the greatest disciplines without which the mind cannot attain the requisite firmness. A man who loses stamina becomes emasculated and cowardly…. Several questions arise: How is one to carry one’s wife with one? Yet those who wish to take part in great work are bound to solve these puzzles.150

  No questions seem to have arisen as to how one was to carry one’s husband with one. Nor any thoughts on whether satyagraha would be effective, for example, against the hoary tradition of marital rape.

  In 1909, Gandhi published his first and most famous political tract, Hind Swaraj. It was written in Gujarati and translated into English by Gandhi himself. It is considered to be a piece of genuinely original thinking, a classic. Gandhi himself remained pleased with it to the end of his days. Hind Swaraj defines Gandhi in the way Annihilation of Caste defines Ambedkar. Soon after it was published, copies of it were seized in Bombay, and it was banned for being seditious. The ban was lifted only in 1938.151

  It was conceived of as Gandhi’s response to Indian socialists, impatient young nihilists and nationalists he had met in London. Like the Bhagavad Gita (and Jotirao Phule’s Gulamgiri), Hind Swaraj is written as a conversation between two people. Its best and most grounded passages are those in which he writes about how Hindus and Muslims would have to learn to accommodate each other after swaraj. This message of tolerance and inclusiveness between Hindus and Muslims continues to be Gandhi’s real, lasting, and most important contribution to the idea of India.

  Nevertheless, in Hind Swaraj, Gandhi (like many right-wing Hindu nationalists would do in the future)152 superimposes Hinduism’s spiritual map—the map of its holy places—on the territorial map of India and uses that to define the boundaries of the country. By doing so, consciously or unconsciously, Gandhi presents the homeland as unmistakably Hindu. But he goes on, in the manner of a good host, to say that “a country must have a faculty for assimilation” and that “the Hindus, the Mohammedans, the Parsees and the Christians who have made India their country, are fellow countrymen.”153 The time Gandhi spent in South Africa—where the majority of his clients, and later his political constituency, were wealthy Muslim businessmen—seems to have made him more attentive to the Muslim question than he might have otherwise been. For the sin of this attentiveness, this obviously unforgivable complexity, he paid with his life.

  The rest of Hind Swaraj is a trenchant (some say lyrical) denunciation of modernity. Like the Luddites, but with no calls for machine smashing, it indicts the Industrial Revolution and modern machinery. It calls the British Parliament a “sterile woman” and a “prostitute.” It condemns doctors, lawyers, and the railways and dismisses Western civilization as “satanic.” It might not have been a crude or even excessive adjective to use from the point of view of the genocide of tens of millions of people in the Americas, in Australia, the Congo, and West Africa that was an inalienable part of the colonial project. But it was a little odd, considering Gandhi’s proposals for an “Imperial Brotherhood.” And even odder, considering his respect for the British and his disdain for the uncivilized “raw Kaffir.”

  “What then is civilisation?” the “Reader” eventually asks the “Editor.” The Editor then launches into an embarrassing, chauvinistic reverie of a mythical India: “I believe that the civilisation India has evolved is not to be beaten in the world.”154 It’s tempting to reproduce the whole chapter, but since that isn’t possible, here are some key passages:

  A man is not necessarily happy because he is rich or unhappy because he is poor. The rich are often seen to be unhappy, the poor to be happy. Millions will always remain poor … Observing all this our ancestors dissuaded us from luxuries and pleasures. We have managed with the same kind of plough as it existed thousands of years ago. We have retained the same kind of cottages we had in former times and our indigenous education remains the same as before. We have had no system of life-corroding competition. Each followed his own occupation or trade. And charged a regulation wage. It was not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our forefathers knew that, if we set our hearts after such things we would become slaves and lose our moral fibre…. A nation with a constitution like this is fitter to teach others than to learn from others. This nation had courts, lawyers and doctors, but they were all within bounds…. Justice was tolerably fair.155

  Gandhi’s valorization of the mythic village came at a point in his life when he does not seem to have even visited an Indian village.156 And yet his faith in it is free of doubt or caveats.

  The common people lived independently, and followed their agricultural occupation. They enjoyed true Home Rule. And where this cursed modern civilisation has not reached, India remains as it was before … I would certainly advise you and those like you who love the motherland to go into the interior that has yet not been polluted by the railways, and to live there for at least six months; you might be patriotic and speak of Home Rule. Now you see what I consider to be real civilisation. Those who want to change conditions such as I have described are enemies of the country and are sinners.157

  Other than the vague allusion to the idea of people following an ancestral occupation or trade that was rewarded by a “regulation wage,” caste is absent in Gandhi’s reverie. Though Gandhi later insisted that untouchability had troubled him since he was a boy,158 in Hind Swaraj he makes absolutely no mention of it.

  Around the time Hind Swaraj was published, the first biographies of Gandhi were also published: M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa by Reverend Joseph Doke (a minister of the Johannesburg Baptist Church) in 1909, and M. K. Gandhi: A Sketch of His Life and Work in 1910 by Henry S. L. Polak, one of Gandhi’s closest friends and most admiring of disciples. These contained the first intimations of coming Mahatmahood.

&n
bsp; In 1910, the separate British colonies of Natal, the Cape, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State united to become the Union of South Africa, a self-governing Dominion under the British crown, with Louis Botha as its first prime minister. Segregation began to harden.

  Around then, only three years before he was to leave South Africa, Gandhi condescendingly began to admit that Africans were the original inhabitants of the land:

  The negroes alone are the original inhabitants of this land. We have not seized the land from them by force; we live here with their goodwill. The whites, on the other hand, have occupied the country forcibly and appropriated it to themselves.159

  By now he seems to have forgotten that he had actively collaborated with the whites in their wars to forcibly occupy the country, appropriate the land, and enslave Africans. Gandhi chose to ignore the scale and extent of the brutality that was taking place around him. Did he really believe that it was the “negroes’ goodwill” that allowed Indian merchants to ply their trade in South Africa, and not, despite its racist laws, British colonialism? In 1906, during the Zulu rebellion, he had been less woolly about things like “goodwill” when he said, “We are in Natal by virtue of British Power. Our very existence depends on it.”

  By 1911, the anxiety of the white folks about the burgeoning Indian population led to legislation that stopped the import of labor from India.160 Then came 1913—the year the first volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu was first published, the year Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature—South Africa’s year of blood. It was the year the foundations for apartheid were laid, the year of the Land Act, legislation that created a system of tenure that deprived the majority of South Africa’s inhabitants of the right to own land. It was the year African women marched against the Pass Laws that herded them into townships and restricted interprovince movement, the year white mine workers and railway workers, and then African mine workers, went on strike. It was the year Indian workers rose against a new three-pound tax and against a new marriage law that made their existing marriages illegal and their children illegitimate. The year the three-pound tax was imposed on those who had worked off their indenture and wanted to live on in South Africa as free citizens. Being unaffordable, the tax would have forced workers to re-indenture and lock themselves into a cycle of servitude.