Gandhi and Ambedkar debated with one another while they lived; now, long after their deaths, ideologues still represent them as political adversaries. In 1997, the right-wing journalist Arun Shourie published a book dismissing Ambedkar as a ‘false god’. He made two main charges against Ambedkar: first, that he sided with British colonialists rather than with Indian nationalists; and second, that he used sharp and occasionally abusive language against the Father of the Nation, Gandhi.
While he stopped short of calling him a traitor, Shourie repeatedly insinuated that Ambedkar worked against the interests of India and Indians. The first page of his book set the tone: ‘There is not one instance,’ claimed Shourie, ‘not one single, solitary instance in which Ambedkar participated in any activity connected with the struggle to free the country. Quite the contrary—at every possible turn he opposed the campaigns of the National Movement, at every setback to the Movement he was among those cheering the failure.’16
The very chapter titles of Shourie’s book charged Ambedkar with opportunism. One read: ‘Where Was Ambedkar in 1942? How Did He Get There?’ Another was ‘The Loyal Minister’. The text took these accusations further. Thus, Shourie remarked that ‘as Congress leaders rotted in jails [following the Quit India movement], Ambedkar was broadcasting over the radio on behalf of the British Government’.17
Shourie accused Ambedkar of uttering ‘calumnies’ about Indian culture and civilization, of ‘adding some even more garish colours to the caricature that the missionaries and rulers had put out’. He further charged him with being a collaborator, of seeking to divide the national movement in the manner of Jinnah and Syed Ahmad Khan, who urged the Muslims to side with the British, with Ambedkar later asking the Depressed Classes to do likewise. Shourie wrote that ‘Ambedkar and Jinnah became not just accomplices of Imperial politics, they became the best of agents, agents who had been so flattered into self-importance that they did not see that they had made the cause of the Imperial rulers their own’.18
In the 600 pages of Arun Shourie’s book, there was not one instance, not one single, solitary instance in which Shourie documented, or even acknowledged, the horrific discrimination against the ‘untouchables’ that was such a marked, and disfiguring, feature of the India in which Ambedkar and Gandhi lived. He did not pause to ask why, at crucial times in his political career, Ambedkar thought it necessary to side with the British. This was because the Congress was dominated by Brahmins and other upper castes, who had oppressed Dalits in the past, and might do so again if they came to power in independent India. In an interview in 1934, Ambedkar remarked: ‘I am sure there are many nationalists among the Depressed Classes and, if they have not joined the Congress, it is because they love their country more than they love the Congress.’19 Six years later, he put it more polemically, saying: ‘That the Congress is fighting for the cause of the country is humbug. The Congress is fighting to obtain the keys of power in its own hands.’20
This may have been slightly unfair to Congressmen like Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Kripalani, Congresswomen such as Sarojini Naidu and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. They were animated by a deep patriotism. But it was certainly true of lesser Congress leaders. Moreover, other great low-caste reformers such as Jyotirao Phule in Maharashtra and Mangu Ram (the leader of the Adi-Dharm movement in the Punjab) had also thought the Raj a lesser evil when compared to the Congress.21 For an ‘untouchable’ leader to take the side of the British government against the Congress was certainly a plausible and defensible political option.
Arun Shourie has now found his left-wing counterpart in the writer Arundhati Roy, who, in a book-length essay published in 2014, dismissed Gandhi as a false Mahatma. She claimed that Gandhi was a conservative defender of the caste system who changed his views ‘at a glacial pace’.22
In seeking to paint him as a slow-moving reactionary, Arundhati Roy made much of Gandhi’s idealized conception of varnashramadharma, while omitting to add that, from the time he returned to India, Gandhi sharply attacked the practice of untouchability. Let me refresh the reader’s memory by quoting once more two of the many remarks he made to this effect. As early as 1915, Gandhi said it was ‘no part of real Hinduism to have in its hold a mass of people whom I would call “untouchables”. If it was proved to me that this is an essential part of Hinduism, I for one would declare myself an open rebel against Hinduism itself.’ And in 1920, he stated:
We cannot compare the sufferings of the untouchables with those of any other section in India. It passes my understanding how we consider it dharma to treat the depressed classes as untouchables; I shudder at the very thought of this. My conscience tells me that untouchability can never be a part of Hinduism. I do not think it too much to dedicate my whole life to removing the thick crust of sin with which Hindu society has covered itself for so long by stupidly regarding these people as untouchables. I am only sorry that I am unable to devote myself wholly to that work.
In her critique of Gandhi, Arundhati Roy did not cite these remarks—or others like them. Instead, she presented Gandhi as a thoroughgoing apologist for caste, further arguing that this was in line with his views on race. Gandhi, she suggested, was casteist in India because he had been racist in South Africa. Roy claimed that Gandhi ‘feared and despised Africans’; this he certainly did in his twenties, but just as certainly did not in his forties and fifties. Reading Roy, one would not know that Gandhi decisively outgrew the racism of his youth, a fact that people of colour themselves acknowledged, and appreciated. This book has quoted letters written to Gandhi from African Americans ‘keenly and sympathetically’ following what they called his ‘great battle for righteous adjustment’, fought in ‘the common cause of the lowly’. And documented in the Collected Works are numerous visits by African Americans, as well as Africans, to Sevagram to seek Gandhi’s counsel. Why, if Gandhi was a racist, were black intellectuals and activists so keen to meet him, befriend him, and, in their own battles against social oppression, learn from his methods?
Both Arun Shourie and Arundhati Roy see history in terms of heroes and villains. Neither seeks to place the choices made by Gandhi and Ambedkar in context, seeking only to elevate one by disparaging the other. Roy has all of Ambedkar’s polemical zeal but none of his scholarship or sociological insight. Shourie, meanwhile, perhaps loves India as much as Gandhi did, but he loves it in the abstract, without empathy for those Indians who suffer discrimination at the hands of their compatriots. Both seek—by the technique of suppressio veri, suggestio falsi so beloved of ideologues down the ages—to prove a verdict they have arrived at beforehand: that Gandhi was the Enemy of the Dalits, for Roy; that Ambedkar was the Enemy of the Nation, for Shourie.
Gandhi’s commitment to ending untouchability was evident from soon after his return to India. Meanwhile, he steadily became more direct in his critique of the caste system as a whole. At first, he attacked untouchability alone, while leaving the other rules of caste intact. Then, through his temple-entry movement, he began advocating intermingling and inter-dining as well. Finally, he insisted that the only marriage he would solemnize in his ashram was one between a so-called ‘untouchable’ and a member of the upper castes, thus calling into question the very basis of the caste system itself.23
In her essay, Arundhati Roy made the astonishing charge that Gandhi was a ‘Saint of the Status Quo’. In truth, the Hindu leaders of his own time saw Gandhi as a dangerous revolutionary who sought to destroy the traditional social order. His campaign to abolish untouchability struck at the very core of Hindu orthodoxy. The Sankaracharyas were enraged that a mere Bania who knew little Sanskrit dared challenge scriptural injunctions that mandated untouchability. During Gandhi’s anti-untouchability tour of 1933–34, Hindu Mahasabha activists showed him black flags, threw faeces at him, and in Pune in June 1934 even attempted to assassinate him.
Indeed, Gandhi’s campaign was unpopular within his own Congress Party. Nehru, Bose, Patel and com
pany believed that the Mahatma should have set social reform aside and focused exclusively on the winning of swaraj.
In a speech to college students in Karachi in July 1934, Gandhi succinctly outlined his own position, between the radicals and the reactionaries. Ambedkar had recently told him there was ‘no Hindu family in Poona which would accept me as a colleague or friend’. ‘Whose shame is this?’ asked Gandhi of the Karachi students. ‘How can one who has been put to such treatment be won over?’ Then he added: ‘At the same time, we have to touch the heart of [the] Shankaracharya. Those two are poles apart. How can they be brought together? We stand between these two.’24
Among those who understood the depth of Gandhi’s challenge to Hindu orthodoxy was the British liberal J.A. Spender, who had travelled through India and closely studied Indian affairs. ‘Gandhi is often very irritating as a politician,’ he wrote in 1935, ‘but the work on which he is now engaged of rousing the Indian people to cast off this bondage is beyond all praise and the little periodical “Harijan” shows the fine spirit and high courage that he is bringing to it. Only an Indian, and only a very influential Indian who is prepared to stake everything in a battle against long-rooted custom and prejudice, could even make a beginning on it. Even Gandhi is met with the cry “Religion in Danger”.’25
As Gopal Guru has argued, despite not being an ‘untouchable’ himself, Gandhi felt ‘morally tormented’ by the practice of untouchability. He saw that it had a corrosive impact both on those who practised discrimination and those who were at the receiving end of such discrimination. This set him apart from socialists such as Jawaharlal Nehru, whose reading of inequality was economistic, with caste being entirely subsumed by class. Gandhi, on the other hand, saw ‘untouchability as a deeply social question’.26
To be sure, despite his courage and consistency in attacking untouchability, Gandhi’s approach could be patronizing. During his famous fast in Yerwada prison in 1932, he argued that if the suppressed castes ‘are ever to rise, it will not be by reservation of seats but will be by the strenuous work of Hindu reformers in their midst’. While putting the onus on the upper castes to reform themselves, this perspective robbed the Dalits of agency. Why couldn’t the suppressed castes rise through organizing themselves for (non-violent) action against injustice and discrimination?
In retrospect, Gandhi may have made a mistake in not endorsing Rajaji’s suggestion to rename the Harijan Sewak Sangh the Untouchability Abolition League. Normally so astute in understanding the importance of the right word, the most evocative symbol, he did not here perceive that ‘abolition’ conveyed a far more emphatic meaning than mere ‘service’. Moreover, the social workers who ran the Harijan Sewak Sangh placed more emphasis on fostering personal virtue in upper- and lower-caste individuals than in removing the civic and social disabilities that the ‘untouchables’ suffered from.
Perhaps the most subtle scholarly assessment of the Gandhi–Ambedkar relationship is contained in the social theorist D.R. Nagaraj’s book The Flaming Feet. Nagaraj argued that the narrative of Indian nationalism was akin to the Ramayana in that it had place for only one Great Hero, with everyone else asked to support, even revere, this central and defining character. But Ambedkar was too proud a man, too conscious of his abilities and his own historic role, to wish to play the role of Sugreeva to Gandhi’s Ram. Thus, he charted his own path, autonomous of and often antagonistic to that of Gandhi and the Congress. And yet, as D.R. Nagaraj showed, their exchanges and debates changed both men, with Gandhi increasingly more willing to acknowledge the material roots of discrimination, and Ambedkar, in turn, appreciating that moral transformation might be as important as legal reform.27
Nagaraj writes that ‘from the viewpoint of the present, there is a compelling necessity to achieve a synthesis of the two’. This is absolutely correct. Social reform takes place only when there is pressure from above and from below. Slavery would not have been abolished had not guilt-ridden whites like Abraham Lincoln responded to the critiques of the likes of Frederick Douglass. Civil rights would not have been encoded into law had Lyndon Johnson not recognized the moral power of Martin Luther King and his movement. The vote was granted to women in England only because the heroic struggles of the suffragettes were heeded by liberal male politicians, inspired by progressive thinkers such as John Stuart Mill.
Although they were rivals in their lifetime, from the vantage point of history, Gandhi and Ambedkar played complementary roles in the undermining of an obnoxious social institution. No upper-caste Hindu did as much to challenge untouchability as Gandhi. And Ambedkar was the greatest leader to emerge from within the ranks of the Dalits. Although the practice of untouchability has been abolished by law, discrimination against Dalits still continues in many parts of India. To end it fully, one must draw upon the legacy of both Ambedkar and Gandhi.
IV
There were, indeed still are, two fundamental axes of social inequality in India. Caste is one, and gender is the other. In his political career, Gandhi did not pay as much attention to the emancipation of women as he did to the abolition of untouchability. In his personal life, Gandhi often thought and acted like a Hindu patriarch. That said, over the thirty years he was in India, Gandhi did a great deal to undermine traditional gender hierarchies. He attacked the pernicious system of purdah which, at the time, was extensively practised in both Hindu and Muslim households. He energetically promoted the education of girls, in his own ashram school and in ‘national’ colleges as well. Within the ashram, there was no gendered division of labour; men had to cook and clean, and women to teach and spin yarn.
In the future India of Gandhi’s conception, women were to be fully equal to men. Once, when meeting with Congress workers in Bengal, Gandhi noted that few women were present, and those who were, not as forthcoming as the men. ‘Is Azad Hindustan’ (free India), he sharply asked, ‘then going to be for men only and are women for ever to be in Zenanistan?’ (i.e. behind the purdah).28
Gandhi’s greatest contribution to the emancipation of women, however, was to make them part of social and political movements. In his South Africa satyagrahas, Indian women (including his wife Kasturba) had courted arrest. When he returned to India, however, he at first kept women out of his civil disobedience campaigns. Except for a few wives of Congressmen arrested for selling khadi on the road, women were largely absent during the non-cooperation movement. However, after his release from prison, Gandhi worked actively to have Sarojini Naidu appointed president of the Congress. While Gandhi asked women to lead the picketing of liquor shops, he was initially not keen to have them participate in the Salt March; Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay persuaded him to reconsider, whereupon many women broke the salt law and courted arrest. A decade later, women participated in large numbers in the Quit India movement.
Gandhi did not use the language of modern feminism. While strongly supportive of women’s education, and open to women working in offices and factories, he thought the burden of child-rearing and homemaking should be borne by women. By the standards of our time, therefore, Gandhi must be considered conservative. By the standards of his own time, however, he was undoubtedly progressive, proof of which is the involvement of women in Congress meetings, in his satyagrahas, and in his programmes of constructive work. By contrast, there were few women active in Jinnah’s Muslim League, or in Ambedkar’s Scheduled Caste Federation, or in the Indian Liberal Party of Sapru and Srinivasa Sastri. And if we widen the comparative frame to take in countries other than India, many more women joined the freedom struggle led by Gandhi than the movements of Lenin, Mao, Ho or Castro.29
Even had the Labour Party in Britain or the Democrats in America a system of choosing presidents for one-year terms in 1925, it is hard to see either having a woman head the party, as Gandhi’s Congress did that year. Two decades later, when India became independent, it had a woman governor (Sarojini Naidu) and a woman Cabinet minister (Rajkumari Amrit Kaur), while the work
of refugee rehabilitation was led by other remarkable women, among them Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Mridula Sarabhai, Subhadra Joshi and Anis Kidwai. When the M.S. University was established in Baroda in 1949, it chose a woman (Hansa Mehta) as its vice chancellor. (It was to be another three decades before top American universities began choosing women presidents.)
Women were perhaps as prominent in public life in the India of the 1940s and 1950s as in the United States of the same period. And they were far more prominent than in the other newly independent countries of Asia or Africa. To be sure, these women ministers, governors, vice chancellors, etc. came from the upper-caste elite. Even so, in a culture whose two main religions, Hinduism and Islam, are so intensely patriarchal in their scripture as well as in their social practice, the rise of these women to positions of distinction and influence must count as one of Gandhi’s major (if insufficiently acknowledged) achievements.
V
After a visit to Yerwada prison in August 1932, the respected newspaper editor S.A. Brelvi called Gandhi ‘the truest nation-builder since [the Mughal Emperor] Akbar’s time’, adding, ‘of the two [he] will prove to be the greater’.30
In 1932, the independence of India lay many years in the future. But as a close observer of Gandhi’s politics, Brelvi understood how he was nurturing the nation-in-the-making. He had seen Gandhi build bridges between Hindus and Muslims, take the nationalist message to the south and east of the country, urge that ‘untouchables’ be treated as equals, and steadily undermine the patriarchy which characterized India’s two major religions, Hinduism and Islam.
India today is a flawed and fault-ridden democracy. Its many failures include widespread poverty, the malfunctioning of public institutions, political corruption and crony capitalism. On the other side, unlike so many ex-colonial countries, India regularly conducts free and fair elections; women have equal rights under the Constitution; it has successfully nurtured linguistic diversity; the state is not (or not yet) identified with a particular religion; and it has extensive programmes of affirmative action for those of underprivileged background. These achievements are owed to a generation of visionary nation builders, among whom Gandhi was—in all senses—pre-eminent.
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