Gandhi asked Ambedkar to send him cases of continuing discrimination that came to his notice. He then said that on his tours, he had noticed a ‘change for the better’, but ‘progress in that direction would be accelerated if he had the Doctor’s valued co-operation’.77
In the third week of June, Gandhi arrived in Poona, a great, historic city, once home to the Peshwa kings, still home to some of the most learned scholars in the Hindu tradition. Prior to Gandhi’s arrival, a procession of several hundred Sanatanists, led by a man dressed in black and riding a black horse, marched through the streets, bearing placards saying, ‘Oppose the Temple Entry Bill’, ‘Victory Follows Tradition’, and ‘Do Not Give Reception to Gandhi the Destroyer of the Hindu Religion’.78
The anger against Gandhi in Poona soon took a more extreme form. On the evening of the 25th, he was being driven to a public meeting at Poona’s municipal hall. Kasturba, who had recently completed her prison term, was with him. At 7.25 p.m. a car drove up to the hall, and the boy scouts band, thinking it was Gandhi’s, began playing a tune of welcome. As the music began, a bomb was thrown from the upper storey of a house. It missed the car and exploded on the street, injuring five people, including a policeman. The bomb was aimed at Gandhi, but as it happened, the car the assailants had targeted was not his. He arrived a little later than expected; his vehicle had been held up at a railway crossing, and reached the venue three minutes after the explosion.79
In its editorial published the next day, the Bombay Chronicle offered thanks that Gandhi’s life was saved. While Gandhi was unharmed, said the newspaper, ‘every Indian will hang his head down in shame today because evidently it was the hand of an Indian which threw the bomb and the kind of an Indian that conceived the Satanic idea of taking away a life that has been dedicated to the service of fellow-beings in a purer and more devoted manner than that of any living human being…’80
In his own statement to the press, Gandhi said: ‘The sorrowful incident has undoubtedly advanced the Harijan cause.’ He continued: ‘I am not acting for martyrdom, but if it comes in my way…I shall have well earned it, and it will be possible for the historian of the future to say that the vow I had taken before Harijans that I would, if need be, die in the attempt to remove untouchability was literally fulfilled.’
Gandhi asked his followers to exercise restraint. ‘Let the reformers not to be incensed against the bomb-throwers or those who may be behind them.’ He would like them instead ‘to redouble their efforts to rid the country of the deadly evil of untouchability’.81
Those behind this unsuccessful attempt on Gandhi’s life were not identified or caught. But they were almost certainly right-wing Hindus, angered by his campaign against untouchability.
XVII
Gandhi’s Harijan tour had now gone on for a full eight months. With him on his journeys across India were members of his staff and a few intrepid reporters. An Andhra journalist who covered the tour wrote of how it had consolidated Gandhi’s place in the affections of the ordinary Indian, who ‘ran after him in crowds on foot out of the cities and sought just to touch the hem of his garments. Whether it was in the forest regions of Betul in biting winter, or on the parched dreary waste of Bellary in the hottest part of the day, whether it was in the populous cities on the plains, or in the quiet hamlets hanging on the heights of the Western Ghats—unbounded was the enthusiasm of men, women and children to catch a glimpse of him who had sworn to fast unto death to uplift the seventy million people who are depressed and made lowly and humble by age-old oppression.’82
In the last week of July, Gandhi arrived in Banaras, chosen as the last stop on the Harijan tour for its religious significance. On 29 July, speaking to the central board of the Harijan Sewak Sangh, he complained about the quality of the social workers who had joined his anti-untouchability campaign. ‘They have not given their whole time to their work,’ he said, adding: ‘They do it in a leisurely fashion.’ What he wanted, and the country needed, were individuals ‘whose sole ambition is to devote themselves body, mind and soul to the Harijan cause. If we had ten thousand such workers—I make bold to say even if we had a thousand, we should have startling results.’
The next day, he addressed a public meeting in which the conservative element was significant, if not preponderant. A locally respected priest, one Pandit Devanayakcharya, speaking before Gandhi, had insisted that untouchability was sanctioned by the Shastras and thus part and parcel of the Hindu dharma. According to a police informer in attendance, the pandit ‘spoke clearly and forcibly and held the attention of the audience until he spoilt any effect he might have had by undue verbosity and was eventually shouted down’.83
Gandhi spoke after the pandit. Describing the practice of untouchability as ‘a blot on Hinduism’, he noted that in Banaras and elsewhere in India, ‘a dog can drink from a reservoir, but a thirsty Harijan boy may not. If he goes, he cannot escape being beaten. Untouchability as practised today considers man worse than a dog.’
Gandhi dealt with the problem of untouchability on several other occasions during this visit to Banaras. In one speech, he chastised the municipality for making Harijans live in the dirtiest and most disease-prone parts of the city, ‘in a place unfit even for cattle’. In another, he deplored the restrictions on inter-dining and intermingling so prevalent in Hindu society. He categorically stated that ‘birth and observance of form cannot determine one’s superiority or inferiority. Character is the only determining factor.’ He went on: ‘God did not create men with the badge of superiority or inferiority, and no scripture which labels a human being as inferior or untouchable because of his birth can command our allegiance…’84
Let’s consider these sentences again. Birth cannot determine one’s superiority or inferiority. Character is the only determining factor. Gandhi had clearly considerably moved on from his previously timid, hesitant attempts to question untouchability while keeping the structure of varna intact.
Back in 1916, Gandhi had chosen Banaras to make his first major political speech since his return to India. Now, almost two decades later, this ancient city of the Hindus was the place where Gandhi concluded his year-long campaign against the scripturally sanctified practice of untouchability.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A Second Sabbatical
I
Ever since his return from Europe, Gandhi had concerned himself almost exclusively with social matters. Through 1932 and 1933, and the first half of 1934 as well, he had focused on the abolition of untouchability. Stung by Ambedkar’s challenge, he had sought to awaken the sometimes dormant, more often absent, conscience of his fellow Hindus against this pernicious practice.
In these years, Gandhi had, willy-nilly, shut out the world. But the world would not stop taking notice of him. In February 1932, a professor of sociology at the Yale Divinity School named Jerome Davis wrote to the social worker Jane Addams, asking her to nominate Gandhi for the Nobel Peace Prize. Addams had won the prize herself the previous year. She certainly knew about Gandhi; keen to meet him when she toured India in 1923, she was denied the chance by his being in jail.
Jerome Davis was a left-wing internationalist, who was born in Tokyo, had worked in Russia, and been a labour organizer. ‘It seems to me’, wrote Davis to Addams, that ‘there is no one in the world today who has worked more sincerely and consistently than he [Gandhi] has for soul force and peace as over against the vise of militarism and arms’. Then he added: ‘Perhaps it is too much to hope that the [Nobel] Committee would have enough impartiality to choose him, but surely those of us who do recognize the world wide character of his influence, and the heroic achievement of his efforts for peace and justice, can do no more than suggest his name to the Committee.’
In her reply, Jane Addams declined to take the request forward. In 1932 no Nobel Peace Prize was awarded. The following year, it went to the British pacifist Norman Angell. In March 1934, Davis wrote to Jane A
ddams again. He had prevailed upon the Chicago magazine Christian Century to nominate Gandhi for the Nobel Peace Prize, and wanted her to second their endorsement. Once more, Davis told Addams that ‘there is no one in the world today who is more entitled to the prize than Gandhi’. He added, with a touch of exasperation: ‘Would it not be a very gracious thing for you to write to the committee making this nomination?’
Addams wrote back, saying she’d rather recommend the Danish educationist Peter Manniche instead. Davis, not to be put off, said in that case he would renew his campaign in 1935. ‘I am counting on you to write next fall nominating Gandhi,’ he wrote to her.1
Gandhi did not know of this correspondence. But the recommendation of the Christian Century was brought to his attention by the Quaker Agatha Harrison. In its issue of 14 March 1934, the journal had asked: ‘Why not award the Nobel Peace Prize to Gandhi?’ Then it went on: ‘It would be no personal favour to him and he probably does not want it. The honour would not greatly impress him and he would not know what to do with the money except to give it away.’ ‘These are all high qualifications for the prize,’ commented the Christian Century. Noting further that the prize’s original intention was ‘to encourage bold dreamers and prophetic spirits whose ideas are too far ahead of their time to win attention without some adventitious aid’, the journal believed Gandhi was a more worthy candidate than some ‘practical politicians who merely negotiated another mile of treaty or took another mile of trench in the long campaign of humanity against bloodshed’. If Gandhi was ‘not the most logical candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize’, insisted the Christian Century, then ‘the popular idea of the function and purpose of that prize needs to be revised’.
Agatha Harrison was a regular reader of the Christian Century; and, as it turned out, she was with Gandhi in India in the summer of 1934 when this particular issue reached her, redirected from London. Harrison read the article on a Monday, the Mahatma’s day of silence. She marked the passages praising and promoting Gandhi, and handed it over to him. He read it through, twice, asked for a pencil and piece of paper, on which he wrote: ‘Do you know of a Dreamer who won attention by “Adventitious Aid”?’ Asked by Agatha Harrison if he wished to comment further, he shook his head, with (as she recalled) ‘an amused smile’.2
II
Another curious manifestation of the Western interest in Gandhi in these years concerns the German priest Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, executed in 1945 for his opposition to Hitler and the Nazis, has since become a hero for religiously minded people (not just Christians) fighting political tyranny. His connection with Gandhi remains little known.
Bonhoeffer first heard of Gandhi as a teenager, from his grandmother, herself a pioneer in the fight for greater rights for women. This was in 1924, when he was seventeen. As he grew older, he read more about Gandhi, and was attracted both to his religious pluralism and his practice of non-violent resistance. In 1931—shortly before he was ordained as a priest—Bonhoeffer wrote to his twin sister Sabine that he wanted to travel to India to meet with Gandhi.3 As he told a friend, he believed that Germans had much to learn from other cultures, and it was from the East in particular that the ‘great solution would come’.4
In 1931, Bonhoeffer’s trip to India was aborted due to lack of funds. But the idea would not go away. In May 1934, he told his grandmother he was determined to meet Gandhi, whose ‘heathenism has more of the Christian spirit than our State Church’.5 Fellow Christians put him in touch with C.F. Andrews, who wrote to Gandhi saying that ‘If Pastor Bonhoeffer comes to India to enquire about what is being done for World Peace through Ahimsa or Satyagraha, I do hope you will be able to see him. I met him in Switzerland and was greatly impressed by his convictions.’6
Bonhoeffer also shared his India plans with the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Given the complicity of the churches with Nazism, he thought Gandhi could aid German Christianity in rediscovering the message of the Sermon on the Mount. ‘I plan to go to India very soon,’ he told Niebuhr, ‘to see what Gandhi knows about these things and to see what is to be learned there.’7
In October 1934, Bonhoeffer wrote Gandhi a remarkable letter from London, where he was then temporarily based. This letter has not (so far as I can tell) been seen by the two men’s previous biographers. Addressing Gandhi as ‘Revered Mahatmaji’, Bonhoeffer told him that ‘Europe and Germany are suffering from a dangerous fever and are losing both self-control and the consciousness of what they are doing’. As a pastor, Bonhoeffer felt that ‘only Christianity can help our western peoples to a new and spiritually sound life’. Then he added: ‘But Christianity must be something very different from what it has become in these days.’
Bonhoeffer was convinced that ‘everything seems to work for war in the near future, and the next war will certainly bring the spiritual death of Europe’. What was needed therefore, was ‘a truly spiritual living Christian peace movement. Western Christianity must be reborn as the Sermon on the Mount.’ Having studied Gandhi and his movement, Bonhoeffer thought that ‘we Western Christians should try to learn from you what realisation of faith means, what life devoted to political and racial peace means’. The German knew that the Indian was not a Christian himself, yet, as he pointed out, ‘the people whose faith Jesus praised mostly did not belong to the official Church at that time either’.
Bonhoeffer told Gandhi of his ‘great admiration’ for ‘your personal work among the poorest of your fellowmen, for your educational ideals, for your stand for peace and non-violence, for truth and its force, which has convinced me that I should definitely come to India next winter…’ He hoped to come with a friend, a physicist. Having contemplated the journey for many years now, he did not, he told Gandhi, ‘want to accuse myself of having missed the one great occasion in my life to learn the meaning of Christian life, of real community life, of truth and love in reality’.8
Gandhi wrote back, inviting the duo to come ‘whenever you like’ to ‘share my daily life’. They could stay in the ashram, contributing Rs 100 per month each to its expenses (apart from paying for their own travel). Gandhi added two warnings: that the food would be vegetarian; and that he himself might have to go to prison, in which case Bonhoeffer would ‘have to be satisfied with remaining in or near one of the institutions that are being conducted under my supervision’.9
As it turned out, Bonhoeffer could not accept Gandhi’s invitation. Whether it was due to lack of funds or worry that Gandhi would be in prison, the sources do not say. But it remains an intriguing thought—what if Bonhoeffer had spent several months with Gandhi in 1934–35, and, on his return, had conducted or led a non-violent campaign against the Nazis? At this stage, Hitler’s regime was not completely in control. The attacks on Jews had commenced, but the Nuremberg Laws were not yet enacted. And the invasion of Austria lay several years in the future. The Nazis were far more ruthless than the British colonialists in India, and would have acted early to suppress any mass protest. Even so, had a movement of satyagraha, led by a charismatic Christian pastor, taken place in Germany in 1935, it could perhaps have awakened sensitive men and women in the West to the horrors that lay ahead if they did not intervene.
III
On 5 August 1934, his Harijan tour concluded, Gandhi returned to Wardha in the Central Provinces, which he had now chosen to be his home base, replacing Ahmedabad. His friend and disciple Jamnalal Bajaj lived there. Wardha’s great advantage—apart from Bajaj’s presence—was that it was close to the geographical centre of India.
In early September, Gandhi wrote Vallabhbhai Patel a long letter expressing his disquiet at ‘the vital difference of outlook between many Congressmen and myself’. He told Patel that ‘the best interests of the Congress and the nation will be served by my completely severing all official or physical connection with the Congress’.
Gandhi then turned to the ‘growing group of socialists’ in the Congress. He praised Jawaharlal Nehru,
‘their undisputed leader’, as ‘courage personified’. Other members of the group were ‘respected and self-sacrificing co-workers’. That said, Gandhi had ‘fundamental differences’ with the socialists on economic and political issues. How could they be resolved?
Gandhi understood perfectly well that by reason of ‘the moral pressure’ at his command, he could suppress or contain the socialists. Yet, he told Patel that ‘for me to dominate the Congress in spite of these fundamental differences is almost a species of violence which I must refrain from’.10 Patel’s reply is unavailable, but he seems to have requested Gandhi to postpone his decision till the next session of the Congress, due in Bombay in October.
Word of this exchange leaked out to the press, so, in a statement of 17 September, Gandhi confirmed that ‘the rumour that I had contemplated severing all physical relations with the Congress was true’. He spoke of his differences with the socialists, and of his own continuing commitment to Hindu–Muslim harmony, the abolition of untouchability, the promotion of khadi, and the revival of village industries. He added that in pursuit of this programme, ‘personally I would like to bury myself in a Frontier village’. In the NWFP, his admirer Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan had persuaded his fellow Pathans to abandon their taste for battle in favour of non-violent resistance. Gandhi felt that Ghaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgars (Servants of God) could potentially ‘contribute the largest share to the promotion of [a] non-violent spirit and of Hindu–Muslim unity’.11
Gandhi’s decision to retire from the Congress delighted the viceroy. When he heard that his bête noire was ‘likely to be out of action for some time’, Willingdon wrote to his sister: ‘I can’t help feeling grateful to Providence for giving me this relief!’12
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