For the first time in twenty years, Gandhi aligned himself politically with the people he had previously taken care to distance himself from. He stepped in to “lead” the Indian workers’ strike. In fact, they did not need “leading.” For years before, during, and after Gandhi, they had waged their own heroic resistance. It could be argued that they were fortunate to have escaped Gandhi’s attentions, because they did not just wage a resistance, they also broke caste in the only way it can be broken—they transgressed caste barriers, got married to each other, made love, and had babies.
Gandhi traveled from town to town, addressing coal miners and plantation workers. The strike spread from the collieries to the sugar plantations. Nonviolent satyagraha failed. There was rioting, arson, and bloodshed. Thousands were arrested as they defied the new immigration bill and crossed the border into the Transvaal. Gandhi was arrested, too. He lost control of the strike. Eventually, he signed a settlement with Jan Smuts. The settlement upset many in the Indian community, who saw it as a pyrrhic victory. One of its most controversial clauses was the one in which the government undertook to provide free passage to Indians who wished to return permanently to India. It reinforced and formalized the idea that Indians were sojourners who could be repatriated. (In their 1948 election manifesto, the apartheid National Party called for the repatriation of all Indians. Indians finally became full-fledged citizens only in 1960, when South Africa became a republic.)
P. S. Aiyar, an old adversary of Gandhi’s, had accused him of being primarily concerned with the rights of the passenger Indians. (During the struggle against the first proposal of the draft Immigration Bill in 1911, while some Indians, including Aiyar, were agitating for the free movement of all Indians to all provinces, Gandhi and Henry Polak were petitioning for six new entrants a year to be allowed into the Transvaal.)161 Aiyar was editor of the African Chronicle, a newspaper with a predominantly Tamil readership that reported the terrible conditions in which indentured laborers worked and lived. About the Gandhi–Smuts settlement, Aiyar said that Gandhi’s “ephemeral fame and popularity in India rest on no glorious achievement for his countrymen, but on a series of failures, which has resulted in causing endless misery, loss of wealth, and deprivation of existing rights.” He added that Gandhi’s leadership over the previous two decades had “resulted in no tangible good to anyone.” On the contrary, Gandhi and his band of passive resisters had made themselves “an object of ridicule and hatred among all sections of the community in South Africa.”162 (A joke among some Blacks and Indians goes like this: Things were good then, back in 1893. Gandhi only got thrown off a train. By 1920, we couldn’t even get on one.163)
Though it was not put down in writing, part of the Gandhi–Smuts settlement seems to have been that Gandhi would have to leave South Africa.164
In all his years in South Africa, Gandhi maintained that Indians deserved better treatment than Africans. The jury is still out on whether or not Gandhi’s political activity helped or harmed the Indian community in the long run. But his consistent attempts to collaborate with the British government certainly made the Indian community vulnerable during the rise of African nationalism. When Indian political activists joined the liberation movement under African leadership in the 1950s and saw their freedom as being linked to the freedom of African people, they were breaking with Gandhi’s politics, not carrying on his legacy. When Indians joined the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s seeking to build a broader Black identity, they were actually upending Gandhian politics. It is these people, many of whom did their time in Robben Island with Nelson Mandela and other African comrades, who have saved the South African Indian community from being painted as a race of collaborators and from being isolated, even expelled, like the Indians in Uganda were in 1972.
That Gandhi is a hero in South Africa is as undeniable as it is baffling. One possible explanation is that after he left South Africa, Gandhi was reimported, this time as the shining star of the freedom struggle in India. The Indian community in South Africa, already cut adrift from its roots, was, after Gandhi left, further isolated and brutalized by the apartheid regime. Gandhi’s cult status in India and his connection to South Africa would have provided South African Indians with a link to their history and their motherland.
In order for Gandhi to be a South African hero, it became necessary to rescue him from his past and to rewrite it. Gandhi himself began that project. Some writers of history completed it. Toward the end of Gandhi’s stay in South Africa, the first few biographies had spread the news, and things were moving fast on the messiah front. The young reverend Charles Freer Andrews traveled to South Africa and fell on his knees when he met Gandhi at the Durban dock.165 Andrews, who became a lifelong devotee, went on to suggest that Gandhi, the leader of the “humblest, the lowliest and lost,” was a living avatar of Christ’s spirit. Europeans and Americans vied with one another to honor him.
In 1915, Gandhi returned to India via London where he was awarded something far better than the Queen’s chocolate. For his services to the British Empire, he was honored with the Kaisari-Hind Gold Medal for Public Service, presented to him by Lord Hardinge of Penshurst. (He returned it in 1920 before the first national Non-Cooperation Movement.) Honored thus, he arrived in India fitted out as the Mahatma—Great Soul—who had fought racism and imperialism and had stood up for the rights of Indian workers in South Africa. He was forty-six years old.
To honor the returning hero, G. D. Birla, a leading Indian industrialist (and a fellow Bania), organized a grand reception in Calcutta. The Birlas ran an export–import business based in Calcutta and Bombay. They traded in cotton, wheat, and silver. G. D. Birla was a wealthy man who was chafing at the bit, offended by the racism he had personally encountered at the hands of the British. He had had several run-ins with the colonial government. He became Gandhi’s chief patron and sponsor and paid him a generous monthly retainer to cover the costs of running his ashrams and for his Congress Party work. There were other industrialist sponsors as well, but Gandhi’s arrangement with G. D. Birla lasted for the rest of his days.166 In addition to mills and other businesses, G. D. Birla owned a newspaper, Hindustan Times, where Gandhi’s son, Devdas, eventually worked as managing editor.
So the Mahatma who promoted homespun khadi and the wooden charkha was sponsored by a millowner. The man who raged against the machine was kept afloat by industrialists. This arrangement was the precursor to the phenomenon of the corporate-sponsored NGO.
Once the finances were in place and the ashrams were up and running, Gandhi set off on his mission of rallying people against the British government, yet never harming the old hierarchies that he (and his sponsors) intrinsically believed in. He traveled the length and breadth of the country to get to know it. His first satyagraha was in Champaran, Bihar, in 1917. Three years prior to his arrival there, landless peasants living on the verge of famine, laboring on British-owned indigo plantations, had risen in revolt against a new regime of British taxes. Gandhi traveled to Champaran and set up an ashram from where he backed their struggle. The people were not sure exactly who he was. Jacques Pouchepadass, who studied the Champaran Satyagraha, writes: “Rumours … reported that Gandhi had been sent into Champaran by the Viceroy, or even the King, to redress all the grievances of the raiyats [farmers] and that his mandate overruled all the local officials and the courts.”167 Gandhi stayed in Champaran for a year and then left. Says Pouchepadass, “It is a fact that from 1918 onwards, after Gandhi had left and the planters’ influence had begun to fade away, the hold of the rural oligarchy grew stronger than ever.”
To rouse people against injustice and yet control them and persuade them to his view of injustice, Gandhi had to make some complicated maneuvers. In 1921, when peasants (kisans) rose against their Indian landlords (zamindars) in the United Provinces, Gandhi sent them a message:
Whilst we will not hesitate to advise kisans when the moment comes to suspend payment of taxes to Government, it is not contempl
ated that at any stage of non-cooperation we would seek to deprive the zamindars of their rent. The kisan movement must be confined to the improvement of the status of the kisans and the betterment of the relations between the zamindars and them. The kisans must be advised scrupulously to abide by the terms of their agreement with the zamindars, whether such agreement is written or inferred from custom.168
Inferred from custom. We needn’t guess what that means. It’s the whole ball of wax.
Though Gandhi spoke of inequality and poverty, though he sometimes even sounded like a socialist, at no point in his political career did he ever seriously criticize or confront an Indian industrialist or the landed aristocracy. This was of a piece with his doctrine of trusteeship or what today goes by the term Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Expanding on this in an essay called “Equal Distribution,” Gandhi said: “The rich man will be left in possession of his wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably requires for his personal needs and will act as a trustee for the remainder to be used for society. In this argument, honesty on the part of the trustee is assumed.”169 To justify the idea of the rich becoming the “guardians of the poor,” he argued that “the rich cannot accumulate wealth without the co-operation of the poor in society.”170 And then, to empower the poor wards of the rich guardians: “If this knowledge were to penetrate to and spread amongst the poor, they would become strong and would learn how to free themselves by means of non-violence from the crushing inequalities which have brought them to the verge of starvation.”171 Gandhi’s ideas of trusteeship echo almost verbatim what American capitalists—the Robber Barons—like J. D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were saying at the time. Carnegie writes in The Gospel of Wealth (1889):
This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of Wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer, in the manner which, in his judgement, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.172
The contradictions mattered little, because by then Gandhi was far beyond all that. He was a Sanatani Hindu (which is how he described himself) and an avatar of Christ (which is how he allowed himself to be described). The trains he traveled in were mobbed by devotees seeking “darshan” (a sighting). The biographer D. G. Tendulkar, who traveled with him, describes the phenomenon as “mass conversions to the new creed.”
This simple faith moved India’s millions who greeted him everywhere with cries of “Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai.” Prostitutes of Barisal, the Marwari merchants of Calcutta, Oriya coolies, railway strikers, Santhals eager to present khadi chaadars, all claimed his attention … wherever he went he had to endure the tyranny of love.173
In his classic essay, “Gandhi as Mahatma,” the historian Shahid Amin describes how the combination of cleverly planted rumors by local Congress leaders, adulatory—and sometimes hallucinatory—newspaper reporting, a gullible people, and Gandhi’s extraordinary charisma built up mass hysteria which culminated in the deification of Mahatma Gandhi. Even back then, not everyone was convinced. An editorial in The Pioneer of April 23, 1921, said, “The very simple people in the east and south of the United Provinces afford a fertile soil in which a belief in the power of the ‘mahatmaji’, who is after all little more than a name of power to them, may grow.” The editorial was criticizing an article that had appeared in Swadesh, a Gorakhpur newspaper, that had published rumors about the miracles that surrounded Gandhi: he had made fragrant smoke waft up from a well, a copy of the Holy Koran had appeared in a locked room, a buffalo that belonged to an Ahir who refused money to a sadhu begging in the Mahatma’s name had perished in a fire, and a Brahmin who had defied Gandhi’s authority had gone mad.174
The taproot of Gandhi’s Mahatmahood had found its way into a fecund rill, where feudalism met the future, where miracles met modernity. From there it drew sustenance and prospered.
The skeptics were few and did not count for much. Gandhi was by now addressing rallies of up to two hundred thousand people. The hysteria spread abroad. In 1921, the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes of the Community Church in New York in a sermon called “Who is the Greatest Man in the World?” introduced Gandhi to his congregation as “The Suffering Christ of the twentieth century.”175 Years later, in 1958, Martin Luther King, Jr. would do the same: “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.”176 They presented Gandhi with a whole new constituency: a paradoxical gift for a man who so feared and despised Africans.
Perhaps because the Western Christian world was apprehensive about the spreading influence of the Russian Revolution, and was traumatized by the horror of World War I, Europeans and Americans vied to honor the living avatar of Christ. It didn’t seem to matter that unlike Gandhi, who was from a well-to-do family (his father was the prime minister of the princely state of Porbandar), Jesus was a carpenter from the slums of Jerusalem who stood up against the Roman Empire instead of trying to make friends with it. And he wasn’t sponsored by big business.
The most influential of Gandhi’s admirers was the French dramatist Romain Rolland, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1915. He had not met Gandhi when in 1924 he published Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One with the Universal Being. It sold more than a hundred thousand copies and was translated into several European languages.177 It opens with Tagore ‘s invocation from the Upanishads:
He is the One Luminous, Creator of All, Mahatma,
Always in the hearts of the people enshrined,
Revealed through Love, Intuition and Thought,
Whoever knows him, Immortal becomes
Gandhi said he found a “real vision of truth” in the book. He called Rolland his “self-chosen advertiser” in Europe.178 By 1924, on the list of executives of his own organization, All-India Spinners Association, his name appeared as Mahatma Gandhi.179 Sad then, for him to say in the first paragraph of his response to Annihilation of Caste: “Whatever label he wears in the future, Dr. Ambedkar is not the man to allow himself to be forgotten.” As though pointing to the profound horrors of the caste system was just a form of self-promotion for Ambedkar.
This is the man, or, if you are so inclined, the Saint, that Doctor Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, born in 1891 into an Untouchable Mahar family, presumed to argue with.
THE CACTUS GROVE
Ambedkar’s father, Ramji Sakpal, and both his grandfathers were soldiers in the British Army. They were Mahars from the Konkan, then a part of the Bombay Presidency and, at the time, a hotbed of nationalist politics. The two famous congressmen, Bal Gangadhar Tilak of the “garam dal” (militant faction) and Gandhi’s mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, of the “ naram dal” (moderate faction), were both Chitpavan Brahmins from the Konkan. (It was Tilak who famously said, “Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it.”)
The Konkan coast was also home to Ambedkar’s political forebear, Jotirao Phule, who called himself Joti Mali, the Gardener. Phule was from Satara, the town where Ambedkar spent his early childhood. The Mahars were considered Untouchables and, though they were landless agricultural laborers, they were comparatively better off than the other Untouchable castes. In the seventeenth century, they served in the army of Shivaji, the Maratha king of western India. After Shivaji’s death, they served the Peshwas, an oppressive Brahminical regime that treated them horribly. (It was the Peshwas who forced Mahars to hang pots around their necks and tie brooms to their hips.) Unwilling to enter into a “trusteeship” of this sort, the Mahars shifted their loyalty to the British. In 1818, in the Battle
of Koregaon, a small British regiment of Mahar soldiers defeated the massive army of the last Peshwa ruler, Bajirao II.180 The British subsequently raised a Mahar Regiment, which is still part of the Indian Army.
Over time, a section of the Mahar population left their villages and moved to the city. They worked in the Bombay mills and as casual, unorganized labor in the city. The move widened their horizons and perhaps accounts for why the Mahars were politicized quicker than other Untouchable communities in the region.
Ambedkar was born on April 14, 1891, in the cantonment town of Mhow near Indore in Central India. He was the fourteenth and last child of Ramji Sakpal and Bhimabai Murbadkar Sakpal. His mother died when he was two years old, the same year that his father retired from the army. The family was brought up in the Bhakti tradition of Kabir and Tukaram, but Ramji Sakpal also educated his children in the Hindu epics. As a young boy, Ambedkar was skeptical about the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and their capricious lessons in morality. He was particularly distressed by the story of the killing and dismembering of the “low-born” Karna. (Karna was born of Surya, the Sun God, and the unmarried Kunti. Abandoned by his mother, he was brought up by a lowly charioteer. Karna was killed while he was repairing his chariot wheel on the battlefield by his half-brother Arjun on the advice of Krishna.) Ambedkar argued with his father: “Krishna believed in fraud. His life is nothing but a series of frauds. Equal dislike I have for Rama.”181 Later, in a series of essays called Riddles in Hinduism, published posthumously, he would expand on the themes of what he saw as inexcusable misogyny in Rama’s and Krishna’s slippery ethics.182
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