Here C.R. explained the devotional verses of the Alwars to fellow-prisoners and read Upton Sinclair and Thomas Hardy and also Thomas Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, which, as he wrote to Devadas, he found ‘truly beautiful.’30
C.R. added that prisoners around him were ‘making good progress’ with Hindi, with some ‘gurgling away at Urdu too.’ He himself was advancing in Sanskrit, helped by a political prisoner from Kerala, Narayana Menon.
Sanskrit grammar is too beautiful for mortals like me, but I have all the same done the first book of Hitopadesa and I am doing Panchatantram, starting at the fourth book.
Rules for interviews were hardened in the course of C.R.’s term in Vellore. A thick screen was placed between the prisoner and his visitor. When a protest C.R. made on the prisoners’ behalf went unheeded, the prisoners responded by forgoing interviews.
Eleven days before he was to be released, C.R. learned that his daughter Namagiri’s husband Varadachari had suddenly died in Trichy. It was Namagiri (‘Papa’) who had been ailing, but typhoid and pneumonia claimed Varadachari, who had come from Rangoon to look after Namagiri.
‘Papa is his (Rajaji’s) dearest child,’ the Mahatma correctly observed.31 C.R. received a wire from him: ‘You stand in no need of consolation from us. God must be your rock.’ Gandhi’s message for Namagiri was, ‘Remember you are daughter of brave father.’32
On 9 July C.R. was released. Early in August, in a fifty-minute talk, he fruitlessly probed the Madras Governor, Sir George Stanley, for a way out. At the end of August C.R. referred in the Press to ‘the torment of these eight months’ and said: ‘The hopes of honourable and fruitful negotiations were shattered in January.’33
With the arrest on 22 August of Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, C.R. became — in accordance with instructions left by Patel before his arrest in January — Acting President of Congress.
Their spirits affected by the deadlock, Congressmen needed a fresh inspiration. From behind prison walls Gandhi provided it.
Two months after being arrested, Gandhi had learnt that London was proposing separate electorates for the ‘untouchables’ — the Depressed Classes, as the Raj termed them. The Mahatma wrote to Sir Samuel Hoare, Secretary of State, that, as he had indicated at the RTC, he would fast unto death if the plan was implemented.
In August, nonetheless, through the so-called Communal Award, London announced that it was arranging a separate electorate for the ‘untouchables’. Gandhi’s response was to declare that his fast would commence on 20 September.
A worried C.R., wanting, as he put it, to ‘obstruct the sacrifice,’34 sought interviews with Gandhi. The Raj refused permission. C.R. wired the Mahatma a request to desist. Gandhi replied:
No cause for distress. On the contrary, I expect you to rejoice that a comrade of yours has this God-given opportunity for a final act of Satyagraha in the cause of the downtrodden.35
Was it proper for Gandhi, C.R. wondered, ‘to threaten to die if ignorant and superstitious men did not decide within a fortnight to be wise and courageous?’36 Answering a fresh plea from C.R., and sending ‘love and yet more love,’ the Mahatma expressed confidence that the former would ‘soon see the light out of the darkness.’37
There were two ways of saving Gandhi’s life. London could go back on the Award, or caste Hindus and ‘untouchables’ together could agree to an alternative. Hurdles across the second avenue were formidable. C.R. felt that satyagraha ‘may, in spite of its glory, fail to move age-long ignorance and superstitious power.’ ‘The only hope now left for us,’ he thought, was that ‘the policy of the British Government may be revised.’38 London, however, clarified that in the absence of an agreed alternative it would keep to the Award.
Then the unexpected happened. In a bid to earn, if they would give it, the trust of the Depressed Classes, Hindu society looked afresh at its settled customs.
C.R. prodded Hindu society. Because he was Acting President of the Congress, close to the Mahatma, and a Brahmin, his was a three-fold responsibility. At his suggestion, 20 September was marked by fasting in countless homes, including many where ‘untouchables’ lived.
Once the fast started, Hindu leaders were allowed to meet Gandhi to explore a solution. Seizing the opportunity, C.R. discovered that Gandhi was not only prepared but keen to give the ‘untouchables’ more seats in legislatures than London had given them in the Award. But he wanted them to give up the separate electorate.
C.R., Ambedkar and others negotiated with a weakening Gandhi who lay on a white hospital cot under a mango tree inside the Yeravada Jail campus. Ambedkar was prepared to go along with Gandhi’s proposal if seats were reserved for ‘untouchables’ for at least 25 years, and for longer if a referendum after 25 years showed that the Depressed Classses wished to retain them. However, Gandhi wanted a poll on the question in five years.
‘Five years or my life,’ said Gandhi. After a long discussion with his colleagues, Ambedkar said he could not agree to anything less than ten years. The way out was conceived by C.R., who asked Ambedkar if he would leave the time-table to be decided by mutual agreement in the future. Ambedkar agreed.
Hastening to Gandhi, C.R. conveyed his solution, adding, ‘I have done it on my own responsibility, taking it that you cannot but agree.’ The Mahatma listened with care, asked C.R. to repeat his solution, and expressed himself in one word, ‘Excellent.’
What became known as the Poona (or Yeravada) Pact was now rapidly drafted and signed. Both wings of the Depressed Classes, one led by Ambedkar and another by M.C. Rajah, consented to it. Malaviya agreed on behalf of the caste Hindus. C.R., other Congressmen on the spot, and Liberal leaders like Sapru and Kunzru also signed it.
C.R. and Ambedkar exchanged pens. The cabled text reached London on a Sunday. The Prime Minister was at a funeral in Sussex. On his return to 10 Downing Street, he conferred with Hoare till midnight.
On Monday morning word was received that the British Cabinet had accepted the Yeravada agreement. Still, it was not until Colonel Doyle, the Raj’s Inspector-General of Prisons, showed Gandhi an official piece of paper signifying acceptance that he broke the fast.
From the shade of a mango tree inside a prison a starving man had imposed his will on an Empire. More important, in order to save the life of its loved representative, Hindu society was at last admitting its injustice, and trying to deal with it.
Orthodox priests dined with the ‘untouchables’. Worshippers at a Bombay temple voted 600 to 1 for opening it to ‘untouchables’. By 2 October over a hundred temples in the country had been opened to them. On 1 October an Untouchability Abolition League was launched. On 1 November, the Madras Legislative Council asked the Government to legislate in favour of temple-entry.
The Economist of London (1.10.32) thought that the fast was ‘the most important event that has occurred in the history of Hinduism for centuries.’ ‘Before our very eyes the wonder has happened,’ said Tagore.39
When the fast ended, C.R.’s primary feeling was one of relief. By Hindu reckoning the day that followed was Gandhi’s birthday; C.R. termed it a day of ‘veritable rebirth.’ Some weeks later he reflected on the anxiety he had entertained:
As for Socrates’s friends it was difficult, so it was difficult for me too to remember that the goose can never be killed. I thought the body was the goose . . .
And he added:
The inhumanity [of untouchability] is so great and the superstition so obstinate that the death of the most loved . . . among us cannot be too great a price . . .
In the end, that drastic remedy was not asked for. Ambedkar would say that C.R. ‘came to our rescue when we were almost at a breaking point and had it not been for his ingenuity probably the agreement would not have come into being.’40
9
Switch
1932-35
If the Gulf within Hinduism was being bridged, why not a bid to unite Hindus and Muslims? The thought entered the minds of several including C.R. and Shaukat Ali.
C.R., Acting Congress President, proposed joint electorates and reserved legislature seats for Muslims and Sikhs. The conference accepted this application of the Yeravada formula, agreed to a 32 per cent Muslim quota in a national assembly, and endorsed the separation of Sind, which had a Muslim majority, from Bombay Presidency.
Describing the settlement as ‘the beginning of a new epoch of complete harmony,’ C.R. felt that it was Gandhi’s ‘fast that had changed . . . the hearts of the stoutest champions of particular interests’ (The Hindu, 18.11.32).
Others also saw a turning-point. Rajendra Prasad thought that the settlement was ‘laying the foundations of true nationalism and freedom.’ Shaukat Ali expected ‘the overwhelming majority of Muslims’ to accept the terms, and Azad hailed the outcome as one of the biggest achievements in Indian politics (Free Press, 20.11.32).
Alas, the jubilation was premature. The Hindu Mahasabha as well as prominent Muslim bodies rejected the Allahabad package. Greatly disappointed, C.R. would later describe the repudiation of the Allahabad agreement as a major tragedy of Indian polities; he seemed, in particular, to blame Pandit Malaviya’s alleged coolness towards the package.1
Allahabad seemed a brief diversion from the struggle against untouchability, which focussed, at this time, on the right of the Depressed Classes to enter temples.
During Gandhi’s fast a conference of Hindus had resolved that social and religious equality, including temple entry, would be guaranteed to ‘untouchables’ by ‘one of the earliest acts of the Swaraj Parliament,’ if it was not conceded before Swaraj. On breaking his fast, Gandhi had said: ‘I would hold myself hostage for the due fulfilment of the resolution.’2
Although in September two temples in Madras had been opened to the ‘untouchables’, or Harijans (People of God), as they were increasingly called, the South was resisting. Despite efforts, the gates of the Guruvayur temple near Calicut had not yielded.
Caste Hindus around Guruvayur seemed hesitant. Kelappan, a local reformer, wanted to fast on the issue. Gandhi asked him to put off the step and offered to fast himself if that remedy was required.
If they did not want Gandhi to fast, Guruvayur’s caste Hindus had to show their support for reform. C.R. asked them to do so through a referendum. Nearly 28,000 adult caste Hindus were living in the temple’s vicinity; C.R. would strive to influence them in favour of reform.
But if he was to devote himself to Guruvayur, C.R. announced, he could not remain Acting Congress President as well (The Hindu, 5.12.32). He therefore handed over the Congress burden to Rajendra Prasad.
The Guruvayur temple’s trustee, by tradition, was the Zamorin of Calicut. A year earlier, shortly before he died, the then Zamorin had asked the Governor of Madras to prevent the temple from ‘falling a prey into the hands of these iconoclasts.’3 The Raj sympathized with the Zamorin and his successor but learnt from Russell, the Collector of Calicut, that C.R.’s speeches were ‘swinging the mass of popular opinion towards temple entry.’4
When votes were tabulated at midnight on 24 December it was shown that 56 per cent of the caste Hindus supported Harijan entry, 9 per cent opposed it, 8 per cent were neutral, and 27 per cent said nothing. This was a clear mandate for reform. In two meetings in Yeravada on 29 December, C.R. supported by Kelappan, was able to persuade Gandhi to abandon his fast.
However, the temple doors did not open. The Zamorin claimed that the shrine was private and not bound to respect public opinion. When one of the South’s Sankaracharyas publicly supported the Zamorin, C.R. commented that the Sankaracharya ‘could not release himself from the orthodox prison in which he is interred’ (The Hindu, 12.12.32).
The Zamorin had also said, with some justice, that the laws of the Raj stood in his way. It seemed possible for two orthodox individuals to obtain an injunction against Harijan entry even if the trustee favoured it.
New legislation was called for. At C.R.’s urging, P. Subbaroyan prepared a Bill for the Madras Council enabling a majority of a temple’s devotees to regulate entry into it.
Without the Viceroy’s sanction, however, the Bill could not be discussed in the Madras Council. After C.R. had spent an hour with him, the Governor of Madras agreed to ‘support the request for sanction.’5
A vehement opponent of councils was now turning to them and to a Governor. Informing Devadas that he was having to call again on the Governor, C.R. wrote: ‘What a shame! But there it is, I have no time to think out conundrums. I go straight at it.’6
But he went to Yeravada and asked Gandhi whether, for the sake of the Harijan movement, he should not claim exemption from civil disobedience. Replied Gandhi:
Those who have the slightest doubt in their minds ought to give the benefit of the doubt to their initial pledge of civil disobedience. But if you feel you have a clear call, and it seems that you do, you must do Harijan work.7
The Viceroy, meanwhile, had ruled that provinces could not deal with religious issues. The battle now shifted to the Assembly in New Delhi where, at C.R.’s instance, Ranga Iyer, an elected member, put forward two Bills. One sought to prohibit disparities or discrimination against ‘untouchables’, the other to bring to the whole of India the benefits of the abortive Madras Bill.
At the end of January 1933, the second Bill obtained the Viceroy’s sanction for discussion. C.R. went to Delhi to enlist the support of legislators. His task was difficult. Orthodoxy was opposed. Malaviya was against the Bill, and Muslims in the Assembly were unclear whether to support the reform or merely watch the Hindus quarrel.
The Government, on its part, first tried to block discussion of the Bill and then encouraged opposition to it. The end, to come later in 1934, was pathetic. Faltering in face of orthodox pressure, Ranga Iyer withdrew the Bill.
Outside the Assembly, however, the Bill had not only registered the necessity for reform; it had given Congress a much-needed public platform at a time when bans, detentions and censorship had virtually silenced its voice.
Not all Congressmen welcomed the Harijan movement or C.R.’s preoccupation with the Bill. ‘Reform,’ it was alleged, was weaning men away from a political fight. In his prison, Jawaharlal Nehru thought that C.R.’s Assembly effort was strange and blameworthy.
As for orthodoxy, it was unsparing in its attacks on Gandhi and C.R. Predictably, the Mahatma defended C.R. in his new journal for social reform, Harijan, which the Raj allowed Gandhi to edit from prison. C.R.’s work with the MLAs, the Mahatma said, was ‘highly necessary’ (Harijan, 18.2.33).
C.R. was in his element lobbying the Assembly members. The columnist Pothan Joseph referred to C.R.’s ‘talent of adjusting his plea to the humour of his opponents’ and added:
If the Viceroy invites him to address a meeting of his executive council on the subject, the Government themselves would adopt the Bills . . . (Hindustan Times, 23.2.33)
By now a White Paper of the Raj, a precursor of the Government of India Act of 1935, had announced how India would be governed in the future. There would be a federation at the centre, to be joined, the Raj hoped, by the princely states. Provincial legislatures, elected under a fairly wide franchise, would enjoy substantial powers, but Governors or the Viceroy would have the right to veto them in certain fields.
The electorate would be divided by religion, Sind and Orissa would become provinces, and Burma would be formally separated.
Still banned, Congress could not discuss the scheme. Attempts to hold a session in Delhi in 1932 and another in Calcutta in 1933 were broken up by the Raj’s police. However, Congressmen could individually react to the White Paper.
None liked it, but it was clear that before long they would have to choose between complete boycott and a measure of cooperat
ion, however distasteful. The promotion of the Temple Entry Bill suggested that the latter course might be chosen.
Asked in February 1933 if Congresss thinking on councils was changing, C.R. replied:
It is never to be imagined that the Congress will hold on to any policy fanatically (The Tribune, 19.2.33).
True, C.R. and the Mahatma were at this juncture speaking only for themselves. Yet C.R. had only recently served as Acting Congress President, and The Statesman (24.2.33) recalled that he ‘had been second in command in the camp of the Mahatma for a number of years.’ His words were rather more than a straw in the wind; and Congress in fact had taken its first slow steps towards the council doors.
At the end of April 1933 Gandhi told his Yeravada companions that on 8 May he would commence a 21-day fast for the effectiveness of his Harijan movement. Because of his increasing age, the anxiety of Gandhi’s contemporaries in relation to his fasts grew with each succeeding one.
‘One thing is clear to me,’ observed C.R., ‘and that is he could not survive a fast for 21 days’ (The Hindu, 4.5.33). Patel, the Mahatma’s companion in prison, agreed. Calling on Gandhi at Yeravada, C.R. used stronger words:
You have lost your sense of proportion. You have a great fondness for conducting experiments. You are now experimenting with death . . . Can you show me even one person who approves of your step?
‘Andrews,’ replied Gandhi. C.R. shot back: ‘Andrews does not even know how to lock a room and he is talking about locking one’s life.’ Evidently, the Briton’s reputation for worldly wisdom was not high. Gandhi rejoined that he had to listen to his heart.
At this C.R. prescribed a medical examination to see if Gandhi could stand a 21-day fast: Gandhi had said he wanted to live, not to die. Shankerlal Banker, who was present at the conversation, backed the idea, but Gandhi said a medical test would show lack of faith.
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