My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  The gist of it was that the caste Hindus wanted the power to close the door on Untouchables, but on no account could Untouchables be given the power to close the door on themselves. The masters knew that choice was power.

  As the frenzy mounted, Ambedkar became the villain, the traitor, the man who wanted to dissever India, the man who was trying to kill Gandhi. Political heavyweights of the garam dal (militants) as well as the naram dal (moderates), including Tagore, Nehru, and C. Rajagopalachari, weighed in on Gandhi’s side. To placate Gandhi, privileged-caste Hindus made a show of sharing food on the streets with Untouchables, and many Hindu temples were thrown open to them, albeit temporarily. Behind those gestures of accommodation, a wall of tension built up, too. Several Untouchable leaders feared that Ambedkar would be held responsible if Gandhi succumbed to his fast, and this in turn, could put the lives of ordinary Untouchables in danger. One of them was M. C. Rajah, the Untouchable leader from Madras, who, according to an eyewitness account of the events, said:

  For thousands of years we had been treated as Untouchables, downtrodden, insulted, despised. The Mahatma is staking his life for our sake, and if he dies, for the next thousands of years we shall be where we have been, if not worse. There will be such a strong feeling against us that we brought about his death, that the mind of the whole Hindu community and the whole civilised community will kick us downstairs further still. I am not going to stand by you any longer. I will join the conference and find a solution and I will part company from you.239

  What could Ambedkar do? He tried to hold out with his usual arsenal of logic and reason, but the situation was way beyond all that. He didn’t stand a chance. After four days of the fast, on September 24, 1932, Ambedkar visited Gandhi in Yerawada prison and signed the Poona Pact. The next day in Bombay he made a public speech in which he was uncharacteristically gracious about Gandhi: “I was astounded to see that the man who held such divergent views from mine at the Round Table Conference came immediately to my rescue and not to the rescue of the other side.”240

  Later, though, having recovered from the trauma, Ambedkar wrote:

  There was nothing noble in the fast. It was a foul and filthy act…. [I]t was the worst form of coercion against a helpless people to give up the constitutional safeguards of which they had become possessed under the Prime Minister’s Award and agree to live on the mercy of the Hindus. It was a vile and wicked act. How can the Untouchables regard such a man as honest and sincere?241

  According to the pact, instead of separate electorates, the Untouchables would have reserved seats in general constituencies. The number of seats they were allotted in the provincial legislatures increased (from 78 to 148), but the candidates, because they would now have to be acceptable to their privileged caste–dominated constituencies, lost their teeth.242 Uncle Tom won the day. Gandhi saw to it that leadership remained in the hands of the privileged castes.

  In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes how, in the United States, criminalization and mass incarceration have led to the disenfranchisement of an extraordinary percentage of the African American population.243 In India, in a far slyer way, an apparently generous form of enfranchisement has ensured the virtual disenfranchisement of the Dalit population.

  Nevertheless, what to Ambedkar was a foul and filthy act appeared to others as nothing less than a divine miracle. Louis Fischer, author of perhaps the most widely read biography of Gandhi ever written, said:

  The fast could not kill the curse of untouchability which was more than three thousand years old… but after the fast, untouchability forfeited its public approval; the belief in it was destroyed…. Gandhi’s “Epic Fast” snapped a long chain that stretched back into antiquity and had enslaved tens of millions. Some links of the chain remained. Many wounds from the chain remained. But nobody would forge new links, nobody would link the links together again…. It [the Poona Pact] marked a religious reformation, a psychological revolution. Hinduism was purging itself of a millennial sickness. The mass purified itself in practice…. If Gandhi had done nothing else in his life but shatter the structure of untouchability he would have been a great social reformer…. Gandhi’s agony gave vicarious pain to his adorers who knew they must not kill God’s messenger on earth. It was evil to prolong his suffering. It was blessed to save him by being good to those whom he had called “The Children of God.”244

  On the great occasion of the Poona Pact, contradicting the stand he took at the Round Table Conference, Gandhi was quite willing to accept Ambedkar’s signature on the pact as the representative of the Untouchables. Gandhi himself did not sign the pact, but the list of the other signatories is interesting: G. D. Birla, Gandhi’s industrialist-patron; Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, a conservative Brahmin leader and founder of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha (of which Gandhi’s future assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a member); V. D. Savarkar, accused of conspiracy in Gandhi’s assassination, who also served as president of the Mahasabha; Palwankar Baloo, an Untouchable cricketer of the Chambhar caste, who was celebrated earlier as a sporting idol by Ambedkar and whom the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha propped up as an opponent of Ambedkar;245 and, of course, M. C. Rajah (who would, much later, regret his collusion with Gandhi, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Congress).246

  Among the (many) reasons that criticism of Gandhi is not just frowned upon, but often censored in India, “secularists” tell us, is that Hindu nationalists (from whose midst Gandhi’s assassins arose, and whose star is on the ascendant in India these days) will seize upon such criticism and turn it to their advantage. The fact is there was never much daylight between Gandhi’s views on caste and those of the Hindu right. From a Dalit point of view, Gandhi’s assassination could appear to be more a fratricidal killing than an assassination by an ideological opponent. Even today, Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism’s most aggressive proponent and a possible future prime minister, is able to invoke Gandhi in his public speeches without the slightest discomfort. (Modi invoked Gandhi to justify the introduction of two antiminority legislations in Gujarat—the anticonversion law of 2003, called the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, and the amendment to the old cow-slaughter law in 2011.247) Many of Modi’s pronouncements are delivered from the Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar, a spanking new convention hall whose foundation contains sand brought in special urns from each of Gujarat’s eighteen thousand villages, many of which continue to practice egregious forms of untouchability.247

  After the Poona Pact, Gandhi directed all his energy and passion toward the eradication of untouchability. For a start, he rebaptized Untouchables and gave them a patronizing name: Harijans. “Hari” is the name for a male deity in Hinduism, “jan” is people. So Harijans are People of God, though in order to infantilize them even further, in translation they are referred to as “Children of God.” In this way, Gandhi anchored Untouchables firmly to the Hindu faith.248 He founded a new newspaper called Harijan. He started the Harijan Sevak Sangh (Harijan Service Society), which he insisted would be manned only by privileged-caste Hindus who had to do penance for their past sins against Untouchables. Ambedkar saw all this as the Congress’s plan to “kill Untouchables by kindness.”249

  Gandhi toured the country, preaching against untouchability. He was heckled and attacked by Hindus even more conservative than himself, but he did not swerve from his purpose. Everything that happened was harnessed to the cause of eradicating caste. In January 1934, there was a major earthquake in Bihar. Almost twenty thousand people lost their lives. Writing in the Harijan on February 24, Gandhi shocked even his colleagues in the Congress when he said it was God’s punishment to the people for the sin of practicing untouchability. None of this stopped the Congress Party from continuing with a tradition it had invented: it once again fielded mock Untouchable candidates in the 1934 elections to the Central Legislature.250

  Gandhi could not, it appears, conceive of a role for Untouchables other than as victims in need of ministration. That they had also been psychologica
lly hardwired into the caste system, that they too might need to be roused out of thousands of years of being conditioned to think of themselves as subhuman, was an antithetical, intimidating idea to Gandhi. The Poona Pact was meant to defuse or at least delay the political awakening of Untouchables.

  What Gandhi’s campaign against untouchability did, and did effectively, was to rub balm on injuries that were centuries old. To a vast mass of Untouchables, accustomed only to being terrorized, shunned, and brutalized, this missionary activity would have induced feelings of gratitude and even worship. Gandhi knew that. He was a politician. Ambedkar was not. Or, at any rate, not a very good one. Gandhi knew how to make charity an event, a piece of theater, a spectacular display of fireworks. So, while the Doctor was searching for a more lasting cure, the Saint journeyed across India distributing a placebo.

  The chief concern of the Harijan Sevak Sangh was to persuade privileged castes to open up temples to Untouchables—ironic, because Gandhi was no temple-goer himself. Nor was his sponsor G. D. Birla, who, in an interview with Margaret Bourke-White, said, “Frankly speaking, we build temples but we don’t believe in temples. We build temples to spread a kind of religious mentality.”251 The opening of temples had already begun during the days of Gandhi’s epic fast. Under pressure from the Harijan Sevak Sangh, hundreds of temples were thrown open to Untouchables. (Some, like the Guruvayur temple in Kerala, refused point-blank. Gandhi contemplated a fast but soon changed his mind.252) Others announced that they were open to Untouchables but found ways of humiliating them and making it impossible for them to enter with any sort of dignity.

  A Temple Entry Bill was tabled in the Central Legislature in 1933. Gandhi and the Congress supported it enthusiastically. But when it became apparent that the privileged castes were seriously opposed to it, they backed out.253

  Ambedkar was sceptical about the temple entry program. He saw that it had a tremendous psychological impact on Untouchables, but he recognized temple entry as the beginning of “assimilation”—of Hinduizing and Brahminizing Untouchables, drawing them further into being partners in their own humiliation. If the “infection of imitation” of Brahminism had been implanted in Untouchables even when they had been denied entry into temples for centuries, what would temple entry do for them? On February 24, 1933, Ambedkar issued a statement on temple entry:

  What the Depressed Classes want is a religion that will give them equality of social status … nothing can be more odious and vile than that admitted social evils should be sought to be justified on the ground of religion. The Depressed Classes may not be able to overthrow inequities to which they are subjected. But they have made up their mind not to tolerate a religion that will lend its support to the continuance of these inequities.254

  Ambedkar was only echoing what a fourteen-year-old Untouchable Mang girl, Muktabai Salve, had said long ago. She was a student in the school for Untouchable children that Jotirao and Savitri Phule ran in Poona. In 1855, she said, “Let that religion, where only one person is privileged and the rest are deprived, perish from the earth and let it never enter our minds to be proud of such a religion.”255

  Ambedkar had learned from experience that Christianity, Sikhism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism were not impervious to caste discrimination. In 1934, he had a reprise of his old experiences. He was visiting the Daulatabad fort, in the princely state of Hyderabad, with a group of friends and co-workers. It was the month of Ramzan. Dusty and tired from their journey, Ambedkar and his friends stopped to drink water and wash their faces from a public tank. They were surrounded by a mob of angry Muslims calling them “Dheds” (a derogatory term for Untouchables). They were abused, nearly assaulted, and prevented from touching the water. “This will show,” Ambedkar writes in his Autobiographical Notes, “that a person who is Untouchable to a Hindu, is also Untouchable to a Mohammedan.”256

  A new spiritual home was nowhere in sight.

  Still, at the 1935 Yeola conference, Ambedkar renounced Hinduism. In 1936, he published the incendiary (and overpriced, as Gandhi patronizingly commented) text of Annihilation of Caste that set out the reasons for why he had done so.

  That same year, Gandhiji too made a memorable contribution to literature. He was by now sixty-eight years old. He wrote a classic essay called “The Ideal Bhangi”:

  The Brahmin’s duty is to look after the sanitation of the soul, the Bhangi’s that of the body of society … and yet our woebegone Indian society has branded the Bhangi as a social pariah, set him down at the bottom of the scale, held him fit only to receive kicks and abuse, a creature who must subsist on the leavings of the caste people and dwell on the dung heap.

  If only we had given due recognition to the status of the Bhangi as equal to that of the Brahmin, our villages, no less their inhabitants would have looked a picture of cleanliness and order. I therefore make bold to state without any manner of hesitation or doubt that not till the invidious distinction between Brahmin and Bhangi is removed will our society enjoy health, prosperity and peace and be happy.

  He then outlined the educational requirements, practical skills, and etiquette an ideal bhangi should possess:

  What qualities therefore should such an honoured servant of society exemplify in his person? In my opinion an ideal Bhangi should have a thorough knowledge of the principles of sanitation. He should know how a right kind of latrine is constructed and the correct way of cleaning it. He should know how to overcome and destroy the odour of excreta and the various disinfectants to render them innocuous. He should likewise know the process of converting urine and night soil into manure. But that is not all. My ideal Bhangi would know the quality of night soil and urine. He would keep a close watch on these and give timely warning to the individual concerned …

  The Manusmriti says a Shudra should not amass wealth even if he has the ability, for a Shudra who amasses wealth annoys the Brahmin.257 Gandhi, a Bania, for whom the Manusmriti prescribes usury as a divine calling, says: “Such an ideal Bhangi, while deriving his livelihood from his occupation, would approach it only as a sacred duty. In other words, he would not dream of amassing wealth out of it.”258

  Seventy years later, in his book Karmayogi (which he withdrew after the Balmiki community protested), Narendra Modi proved he was a diligent disciple of the Mahatma:

  I do not believe they have been doing this job just to sustain their livelihood. Had this been so, they would not have continued with this kind of job generation after generation…. At some point of time somebody must have got the enlightenment that it is their (Balmikis’) duty to work for the happiness of the entire society and the Gods; that they have to do this job bestowed upon them by Gods; and this job should continue as internal spiritual activity for centuries.259

  The naram dal and the garam dal may be separate political parties today, but ideologically they are not as far apart from one another as we think they are.

  Like all the other Hindu reformers, Gandhi too was alarmed by Ambedkar’s talk of renouncing Hinduism. He adamantly opposed the religious conversion of Untouchables. In November 1936, in a now-famous conversation with John Mott—an American evangelist and chairman of the International Missionary Council—Gandhi said:

  It hurt me to find Christian bodies vying with the Muslims and Sikhs in trying to add to the numbers of their fold. It seemed to me an ugly performance and a travesty of religion. They even proceeded to enter into secret conclaves with Dr. Ambedkar. I should have understood and appreciated your prayers for the Harijans, but instead you made an appeal to those who had not even the mind and intelligence to understand what you talked; they have certainly not the intelligence to distinguish between Jesus and Mohammed and Nanak and so on…. If Christians want to associate themselves with this reform movement they should do so without any idea of conversion.

  J. M.: Apart from this unseemly competition, should they not preach the Gospel with reference to its acceptance?

  G: Would you, Dr. Mott, preach the Gospel to a cow? Well, some
of the untouchables are worse than cows in understanding. I mean they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow. You can only preach through your life. The rose does not say: “Come and smell me.”260

  It’s true that Gandhi often contradicted himself. It’s also true that he was capable of being remarkably consistent. For more than half a century—throughout his adult life—his pronouncements on the inherent qualities of Black Africans, Untouchables, and the laboring classes remained consistently insulting. His refusal to allow working-class people and Untouchables to create their own political organizations and elect their own representatives (which Ambedkar considered to be fundamental to the notion of citizenship) remained consistent, too.261

  Gandhi’s political instincts served the Congress Party extremely well. His campaign of temple entry drew the Untouchable population in great numbers to the Congress.

  Though Ambedkar had a formidable intellect, he didn’t have the sense of timing, the duplicity, the craftiness, and the ability to be unscrupulous—qualities that a good politician needs. His constituency was made up of the poorest, most oppressed sections of the population. He had no financial backing. In 1942, Ambedkar reconfigured the Independent Labour Party into the much more self-limiting Scheduled Castes Federation. The timing was wrong. By then, the national movement was reigniting. Gandhi had announced the Quit India Movement. The Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan was gaining traction, and for a while caste identity became less important that the Hindu–Muslim issue.