My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  97.Rupa Viswanath, in The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), details the history of the colonial state’s alliance with the landed castes against landless Dalits in the context of the Madras Presidency.

  98.Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 7.

  99.BAWS 9, 1.

  100.Ibid., 3.

  101.See Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (Boston: First Harvard University Press, 2012), chapter 3, “In Praise of Prejudice,” especially 47–48.

  102.Cited from Young India, March 23, 1921, in ibid., 81.

  103.Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined, 55–56.

  104.Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). First published 1973.

  105.BAWS 17, part 1, 369–75.

  106.Nathuram Godse, Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Surya Bharti Prakashan, 1998), 43.

  107.BAWS 3, 360.

  108.Cited in BAWS 9, 68.

  109.Harijan, September 30, 1939, in CWMG 76, 356.

  110.See Ramachandra Guha, India before Gandhi (New Delhi: Penguin, 2013).

  111.Tidrick, Gandhi, 106.

  112.For an archive of Gandhi’s writings about his years in South Africa (1893–1914), see G. B. Singh, Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004).

  113.Maureen Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985), 52.

  114.Kaffir is an Arabic term that originally meant “one who hides or covers”—a description of farmers burying seeds in the ground. After the advent of Islam, it came to mean “non-believers” or “heretics,” those “who covered the truth (Islam).” It was first applied to non-Muslim Black people encountered by Arab traders along the Swahili coast. Portuguese explorers adopted the term and passed it on to the British, French, and Dutch. In South Africa, it became a racial slur the Whites and Afrikaners (and Indians like Gandhi) used to describe native Africans. Today, to call someone a Kaffir in South Africa is an actionable offense.

  115.CWMG 1, 192–3.

  116.Ibid., 200.

  117.For a history of indentured labour in South Africa, see Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–1914 (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2010).

  118.Between the early 1890s and 1913, the Indian population in South Africa tripled, from 40,000 to 135,000; Guha, India before Gandhi, 463.

  119.Ibid., 115.

  120.CWMG 2, 6.

  121.Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (London: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 33–34.

  122.During World War II, he advised the Jews to “summon to their aid the soul-power that comes only from non-violence” and assured them that Herr Hitler would “bow before their courage” (Harijan, December 17, 1938, in CWMG 74, 298). He urged the British to “fight Nazism without arms” (Harijan, July 6, 1940, in CWMG 78, 387).

  123.CWMG 34, 18.

  124.CWMG 2, 339–40.

  125.The Natal Advertiser, October 16, 1901, in CWMG 2, 421.

  126.CWMG 5, 11.

  127.Ibid., 179.

  128.Jeff Guy, The Maphumulo Uprising: War, Law, and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion (Scotsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005), 212.

  129.According to a note on the first page of CWMG, vol. 34: “Gandhiji started writing in Gujarati the history of Satyagraha in South Africa on November 26, 1923, when he was in the Yeravada Central Jail; vide Jail Diary, 1923. By the time he was released, on February 5, 1924, he had completed 30 chapters … The English translation by Valji G. Desai, which was seen and approved by Gandhiji, was published by S. Ganesan, Madras, in 1928.”

  130.Ibid., 82–83.

  131.Ibid., 84.

  132.Of a total population of 135,000 Indians, only 10,000, who were mostly traders, lived in the Transvaal. The rest were based in Natal. Guha, India before Gandhi, 463.

  133.CWMG 5, 337. This is from Clause 3 from Resolution 2 of the Five Resolutions passed by the British Indian Association in Johannesburg, following the “Mass Meeting” of September 11, 1906.

  134.Indian Opinion, March 7, 1908, in CWMG 8, 198–99.

  135.CWMG 9, 256–7.

  136.Indian Opinion, January 23, 1909, in CWMG 9, 274.

  137.In a letter dated May 18, 1899, to the Colonial Secretary, Gandhi wrote: “An Indian may fancy that he has a wrong to be redressed in that he does not get ghee instead of oil” (CWMG 2, 266). On another occasion: “The regulations here do not provide for any ghee or fat to Indians. A complaint has therefore been made to the physician, and he has promised to look into it. So there is reason to hope that the inclusion of ghee will be ordered” (Indian Opinion, October 17, 1908, in CWMG 9, 197).

  138.Indian Opinion, January 23, 1909, in ibid., 270.

  139.Young India, April 5, 1928, in CWMG 41, 365.

  140.Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 74.

  141.Cited in Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 265.

  142.Ibid., 270.

  143.Cited in Omvedt, Seeking Begumpura, 219.

  144.In G. P. Deshpande, ed., Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule (New Delhi: LeftWord, 2002), 25.

  145.Ibid., 38–40.

  146.Cited in Ambedkar, “What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables,” in BAWS 9, 276.

  147.See Jad Adams, Gandhi: Naked Ambition (London: Quercus, 2011), 263–65; and Rita Banerji, Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008), especially 265–81.

  148.CWMG 34, 201–2.

  149.Hind Swaraj in Parel, “Hind Swaraj” and Other Writings, 106.

  150.Ibid., 97.

  151.See Gandhi’s preface to the English translation of Hind Swaraj, in ibid., 5).

  152.Savarkar, the militant Hindutva ideologue, said a true Indian is one whose pitrabhoomi (fatherland) as well as punyabhoomi (holy land) is India—not some foreign land. See his Hindutva, 105.

  153.Parel, “Hind Swaraj” and Other Writings, 47–51

  154.Ibid., 66.

  155.Ibid., 68–69.

  156.Ramachandra Guha wrote in India before Gandhi: “Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj in 1909 at a time he scarcely knew India at all. By 1888, when he departed for London, at the age of nineteen, he had lived only in towns in his native Kathiawar. There is no evidence that he had travelled in the countryside, and he knew no other part of India” (383).

  157.Parel, “Hind Swaraj” and Other Writings, 69–70.

  158.Gandhi wrote this in 1932, in connection with the debate around separate electorates for Untouchables, in a letter to Sir Samuel Hoare, Secretary of State for India. Cited in BAWS 9, 78.

  159.Indian Opinion, October 22, 1910, in CWMG 11, 143–4. Cited also in Guha, India before Gandhi, 395.

  160.Guha, India before Gandhi, 463.

  161.Ibid., 406.

  162.Aiyar quoted in Lelyveld, Great Soul, 21.

  163.Personal communication, Ashwin Desai, professor of sociology at University of Johannesburg.

  164.Lelyveld, Great Soul, 130.

  165.Tidrick, Gandhi, 188.

  166.See Renold, “Gandhi.” Also see Louis Fischer, A Week with Gandhi (New Delhi: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942), quoted by Ambedkar: “‘I said I had several questions to ask him about the Congress Party. Very highly placed Britishers, I recalled, had told me that Congress was in the hands of big business and that Gandhi was supported by the Bombay Mill-owners who gave him as much money as he wanted. ‘What Truth is there in these assertions,’ I asked. ‘Unfortunately, they are true,’ he declared simply … ‘What portion of the Congress budget,’ I asked, ‘is covered by rich Indians?’ ‘Practically all of it,’ he stated. ‘In this ashram, for instance, we could live much more poorly than we do and spend less money. But we do no
t and the money comes from our rich friends’.” Cited in BAWS 9, 208.

  167.Cited in Shahid Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 293.

  168.Young India, August 18, 1921, in CWMG 23, 158.

  169.Harijan, August 25, 1940, in CWMG 79, 133–34.

  170.Ibid., 135.

  171.Ibid.

  172.Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth, North American Review, no. 391 (1889), http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Carnegie.html.

  173.Cited in Amin, Gandhi as Mahatma, 290–91

  174.Ibid., 291–2.

  175.Tidrick, Gandhi, 191.

  176.Cited in Singh, Gandhi, 124.

  177.Tidrick, Gandhi, 192.

  178.Ibid., 194.

  179.Ibid., 195.

  180.Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World, 48.

  181.This is from the unpublished preface to Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma (1956). It first appeared as part of a book of Ambedkar’s prefaces, edited by Bhagwan Das and entitled Rare Prefaces (Jullundur: Bheem Patrika, 1980). Eleanor Zelliot later published it on the Columbia University website dedicated to Ambedkar’s life and selected works. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/ambedkar_buddha/00_pref_unpub.html.

  182.BAWS 4, 1986.

  183.On May 20, 1857, the Education Department issued a directive that “no boy be refused admission to a government college or school merely on the ground of caste.” Geetha Nambissan, “Equality in Education: The Schooling of Dalit Children in India,” in Dalits and the State, ed. Ghanshyam Shah (New Delhi: Concept, 2002), 81.

  184.For an annotated edition of this essay, see Rege, Against the Madness of Manu. It also appears in BAWS 1.

  185.B. R. Ambedkar, Ambedkar: Autobiographical Notes, ed. Ravikumar (Pondicherry: Navayana, 2003), 19.

  186.Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, 36–37.

  187.AoC 17.5.

  188.Prashad, “The Untouchable Question,” 552. In his speech at the Suppressed Classes Conference in Ahmedabad on April 13, 1921, reported in Young India on April 27, 1921, and May 4, 1921 (reproduced in CWMG 23, 41–47), Gandhi discussed Uka at length for the first time (42). Bakha, the main protagonist in Mulk Raj Anand’s iconic novel Untouchable (1935), is said to be inspired by Uka. According to the researcher Lingaraja Gandhi, Anand showed his manuscript to Gandhi, who suggested changes. Anand says: “I read my novel to Gandhiji, and he suggested that I should cut down more than a hundred pages, especially those passages in which Bakha seemed to be thinking and dreaming and brooding like a Bloomsbury intellectual.” Lingaraja Gandhi further says: “Anand had provided long and flowery speeches to Bakha in his draft. Gandhi instructed Anand that untouchables don’t speak that way: in fact, they hardly speak. The novel underwent metamorphosis under the tutelage of Gandhi” (xx). Lingaraja Gandhi, “Mulk Raj Anand: Quest for So Many Freedoms,” Deccan Herald, October 3, 2004.

  189.Navajivan, January 18, 1925, in CWMG 30, 71. In the account of Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai, this speech from Gujarati is rendered differently: “The position that I really long for is that of the Bhangi. How sacred is this work of cleanliness! That work can be done only by a Brahmin or by a Bhangi. The Brahmin may do it in his wisdom, the Bhangi in ignorance. I respect, I adore both of them. If either of the two disappears from Hinduism, Hinduism itself would disappear. And it is because seva-dharma (self-service) is dear to my heart that the Bhangi is dear to me. I may even sit at my meals with a Bhangi by my side, but I do not ask you to align yourselves with them by inter-caste dinners and marriages.” Cited in Gita Ramaswamy, “Mohandas Gandhi on Manual Scavenging,” in India Stinking: Manual Scavengers in Andhra Pradesh and Their Work (Chennai: Navayana, 2005), 86.

  190.Renold, “Gandhi,” 19–20. Highly publicized symbolic visits to Dalit homes has become a Congress Party tradition. In January 2009, in the glare of a media circus, the Congress Party’s vice president and prime ministerial candidate, Rahul Gandhi, along with David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, spent a night in the hut of a Dalit family in Simra village of Uttar Pradesh. For an account of this, see Anand Teltumbde, “Aerocasteics of Rahul Gandhi,” Economic & Political Weekly, November 2, 2013, 10–11.

  191.Vijay Prashad, Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 139.

  192.BAWS 1, 256.

  193.Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, 41.

  194.Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World, 91.

  195.See George Gheverghese Joseph, George Joseph: The Life and Times of a Kerala Christian Nationalist (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003), 166. Objecting to Sikhs running a langar (free, common kitchen) for the satyagrahis of Vaikom, Gandhi wrote in Young India (May 8, 1924), “The Vaikom satyagraha is, I fear, crossing the limits. I do hope that the Sikh free kitchen will be withdrawn and that the movement will be confined to Hindus only” (CWMG 27, 362).

  196.Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, a Tamil Brahmin known affectionately as Rajaji, was a close friend and confidant of Gandhi. In 1933, his daughter Leela married Gandhi’s son Devdas. Rajagopalachari later served as the acting governor general of India. In 1947, he became the first governor of West Bengal, and in 1955 received the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award.

  197.Cited in Joseph, George Joseph, 168.

  198.Young India, August 14, 1924, in CWMG 28, 486.

  199.Joseph, George Joseph, 169.

  200.G. D. Birla In the Shadow of the Mahatma: A Personal Memoir (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1953), 43.

  201.Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, 79.

  202.Speaking at a Depressed Classes Conference in 1925, Ambedkar said: “When one is spurned by everyone, even the sympathy shown by Mahatma Gandhi is of no little importance.” Cited in Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005), 63. Gandhi visited Mahad on March 3, 1927, a fortnight before the first satyagraha, but unlike at Vaikom he did not interfere. For an account of the second Mahad Satyagraha when a copy of the Manusmriti was burnt, see K. Jamnadas, “Manusmriti Dahan Din,” Round Table India, July 14, 2010, roundtableindia.co.in.

  203.According to Anand Teltumbde’s unpublished manuscript on the two Mahad conferences, Resolution No. 2 seeking a “ceremonial cremation” of the Manusmriti was proposed by G. N. Sahasrabuddhe, a Brahmin, who played an important role in the March events as well; it was seconded by P. N. Rajbhoj, a Chambhar leader. According to Teltumbde, “There was a deliberate attempt to get some progressive people from non-untouchable communities to the conference, but eventually only two names materialised. One was Gangadhar Nilkanth Sahasrabuddhe, an activist of the Social Service League and a leader of the cooperative movement belonging to Agarkari Brahman caste, and the other was Vinayak alias Bhai Chitre, a Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu.” In the 1940s, Sahasrabuddhe became the editor of Janata–another of Ambedkar’s newspapers.

  204.Arjun Dangle, ed., Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1992), 231–33.

  205.Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, 170.

  206.Cited in Prashad, “The Untouchable Question,” 555.

  207.Gandhi outlined the difference between satyagraha and duragraha in a speech on November 3, 1917: “There are two methods of attaining one’s goal: Satyagraha and Duragraha. In our scriptures, they have been described, respectively, as divine and devilish modes of action.” He went on to give an example of duragraha: “the terrible War going on in Europe.” Also, “The man who follows the path of Duragraha becomes impatient and wants to kill the so-called enemy. There can be but one result of this. Hatred increases” (CWMG 16, 126–28).

  208.BAWS 9, 247.

  209.On the fallout with the Girni Kamgar Union, see Anand Teltumbde, “It’s Not Red vs. Blue,” Outlook, August 20, 2012. For how Dange and the Communist Party worked toward ensuring Ambedkar’s defeat in the Bombay City North constitue
ncy in the 1952 general election, see S. Anand, “Between Red and Blue,” Outlook, 16 April 16, 2012. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar writes in History, Culture and the Indian City: Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): “The decision by the socialists and the communists not to forge an electoral pact, let alone join together to combine with Ambedkar’s Scheduled Castes Federation, against the Congress lost them the Central Bombay seat. Dange, for the CPI, Asoka Mehta for the socialists and Ambedkar each stood separately and fell together. Significantly, Dange instructed his supporters to spoil their ballots in the reserved constituency for Central Bombay rather than vote for Ambedkar. Indeed, Ambedkar duly lost and attributed his defeat to the communist campaign. Although the communists could not win the Central Bombay seat, their influence in Girangaon, including its dalit voters, was sufficient to decisively influence the outcome. The election campaign created a lasting bitterness. As Dinoo Ranadive recalls, ‘the differences between the dalits and the communists became so sharp that even today it has become difficult for the communists to appeal to the Republicans’ or at any rate to some sections of dalit voters” (161). “Republicans” here refers to the Republican Party of India that Ambedkar had conceived of a short while before his death in December 1956. It came to be established only in September 1957 by his followers, but today there are over a dozen splintered factions of the Republican Party of India.

  210.D. D. Kosambi, “Marxism and Ancient Indian Culture,” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 26 (1948): 274.

  211.For an account of this, see Jan Breman, The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), especially chapter 2, “The Formalization of Collective Action: Mahatma Gandhi as a Union Leader” (40–68).

  212.Ibid., 57.

  213.Shankerlal Banker cited in ibid., 47.

  214.Annual Report of the Textile Labour Union, 1925, cited in ibid., 51.

  215.Navajivan, February 8, 1920, cited in BAWS 9, 280.

  216.Harijan, April 21, 1946, in CWMG 90, 255–56.

  217.AoC 3.10 and 3.11.

  218.AoC 4.1, emphasis in original.