Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  An ardent supporter of Narayan Guru appears to have been first to frame the idea of nonviolent resistance at Vaikom and, having made contact with Gandhi as early as 1921, followed up with the Indian National Congress and its branch in Kerala. His name was T. K. Madhavan, and it was at his initiative that an Untouchability Committee was formed in early 1924 under Congress auspices to spearhead the campaign. Madhavan was so grateful for support of the Congress that he impulsively named his son after its president, Muhammad Ali. Even in that heyday of Hindu-Muslim unity, the idea of giving the name of Islam’s Prophet to a Hindu was too startling to be accepted and proved indigestible; no one in the Madhavan clan would use it. So when Gandhi finally visited Kerala, he was asked to rename the boy. Or so the aged man that the boy became, now far along in his ninth decade, told me when I visited him in the Kerala town of Harippad. Babu Vijayanath was sitting under a freshly garlanded portrait of Narayan Guru, who, he insisted, was his father’s inspiration, far more than Gandhi.

  Nowadays, a visitor is surprised to discover, Narayan Guru all but overshadows Gandhi in many Kerala precincts. But in early 1924 it was the Mahatma who had the stature and authority of national leader. In a program of political action carrying the Congress imprimatur, his word was law. But was this a program of political action, open to all supporters? Gandhi, the first to pose the question, surprised his followers by answering it in the negative, handing down an edict that said non-Hindus had no business taking part in the demonstration. This came hardly a week after the first attempt at satyagraha in Vaikom, which had already been scaled back, at Gandhi’s urging, from the original plan of Madhavan’s committee.

  That plan, modest enough, hadn’t been to attempt to enter the temple’s walled compound, let alone approach the sanctum. It had been simply to march down the three approach roads and pray at the temple gates. This would mean ignoring, in a classic act of civil disobedience, official signs on each road about 150 yards from the compound forbidding the lowest castes and untouchables to proceed any farther. A moat in the form of a drainage ditch, stretches of which are still clearly visible, delineated the boundary that couldn’t be crossed. The danger of spiritual pollution was deemed to be too great. (From the dark, bilious look of the water sitting stagnant in the ditch and in the large pool adjacent to the temple where worshippers still bathe, other kinds of pollution might more easily have been imagined.) The roads were deemed not to be public roads but to belong to the temple. Paradoxically they remained open to cows, dogs, Muslims, and Christians, including non-Hindus who were converted untouchables. The civic right to walk on public roads was more important to many of the participants in the campaign than the religious right to worship in a Brahman temple.

  Gandhi had led a march of more than two thousand striking indentured laborers across a forbidden border in Africa ten years earlier. Now here he was—on an issue he called a “passion” of his life, one of the “four pillars” of swaraj—inventing arguments to keep a lid on mass action, however nonviolent. Wary of the very idea of a march, he counseled against any attempt to push past the roadside signs ordering potential carriers of pollution to turn back. In response to his signals, the plan was changed in time for the first satyagraha demonstration at Vaikom on March 30, 1924. The marchers stopped well short of the signs, then three designated satyagrahis—a Nair, an Ezhava, and a Pulaya—stepped forward to the invisible pollution barrier, where, after a time, they sat and prayed until the Travancore authorities obliged them by taking them into custody and sentencing them to six months each in jail. Each succeeding day, three more volunteers stepped forward to take their place, with the same results. The orthodox also were supposed to believe in the Hindu value of ahimsa, or nonviolence, that Gandhi regularly cited. But it was not necessarily their practice. On more than one occasion, the Travancore police didn’t intervene when gangs of thugs, operating on behalf of the orthodox, attacked the satyagrahis with sticks, iron rods, and bricks. Some of the victims had sufficient caste status to be eligible to enter the temple themselves, but they’d been infected with the new thinking, inspired by Gandhi. One man, a Nair, was tied to a tree and kicked in the groin. Another, a Brahman named Raman Ilayathu, had raw lime paste rubbed into his eyes, blinding him; an untouchable leader, a Pulaya named Amachal Thevan, was also reported to have been blinded in this way.

  From the beach bungalow where he was recuperating near Bombay, Gandhi warmly praised the discipline and courage of the Vaikom satyagrahis. But he all but excommunicated the leader of the movement he knew best. This was George Joseph, probably his most dedicated follower among Indian Christians. A member of the Syrian Christian community, which has been prominent in Kerala for more than a millennium, Joseph had given up a lucrative practice as a barrister to join Gandhi’s ashram near Ahmedabad; had been recruited by Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal’s father, to edit a nationalist paper called the Independent in Allahabad; had then spent more than two years in jail before understudying Gandhi as editor of Young India while the Mahatma himself went to prison. Now, after all that, he was being told by Gandhi to back off, told that he had no place in the Vaikom Satyagraha because it was a Hindu affair.

  “I think you should let the Hindus do the work,” Gandhi wrote. “It is they who have to purify themselves. You can help by your sympathy and by your pen, but not by organizing the movement and certainly not by offering satyagraha.”

  The letter didn’t reach George Joseph in time. By April 10, with Madhavan and others already arrested, this Christian leader found himself in charge of the campaign and faced with a tactical dilemma. The police had put up a barricade and, in an attempt to tamp down the negative publicity Travancore was getting, were no longer making arrests. Therefore, he telegraphed Gandhi, he’d told the demonstrators to start fasting. “Advise if change procedure necessary,” his SOS said. “Urgent.” The next day the police either revised their tactics again or made an exception for Joseph: he telegraphed to say he’d been arrested and to urge Gandhi to send a leader of stature, or perhaps his son Devadas, to take his place.

  The Vaikom Satyagraha wasn’t two weeks old by the time these crossed messages sorted themselves out. Gandhi, it finally became clear, not only was opposed to non-Hindus like Joseph playing any role. He also was opposed to using fasting as a weapon to force the pace. Fasts were to be used not coercively against those who opposed you politically, the rule giver in Gandhi now decreed, but only against allies and loved ones when they backslid on pledges. Gandhi thus set a standard from which, as we shall see, he’d eventually deviate himself. In this case, there were other strictures. He was also opposed to Congress supporters from outside Travancore flooding in as volunteers to bolster the campaign, though he himself had previously invited outsiders to support his own early efforts in Bihar and Gujarat. Some Sikhs who’d journeyed the length of the subcontinent, traveling from the Punjab to set up a kitchen to feed the satyagrahis, were urged to return home. And he dragged his heels on naming a leader from the outside; the leadership, he felt, ought to remain local. Despite the Congress support that Madhavan had painstakingly organized, Gandhi now took the view that the struggle at Vaikom could not be considered an appropriate Congress project. The national movement, he said, should not “come into the picture.” It had as its goal the end of British rule, but, he reasoned, Travancore was outside the British imperium, being technically still an Indian princely state. Individual Congress members might take part, the leader ruled as if from on high, but only as individuals. The movement, which had so recently been mobilized nationally on the fate of the Khilafat in distant Constantinople, had to keep its hands off.

  As usual, Gandhi came up with ingenious rationalizations for each of these stands, all pointing to one conclusion: righteous as he considered it to be, he wanted the Vaikom agitation to remain a small local affair; it could not be inflated into a test case for the anti-untouchability platform he himself had given the national movement, especially at a time when he felt his grip on the movement to
be slipping.

  His considerations were national and political, also religious. Under pressure to say where he stood on the issue of caste, he defined himself in orthodox terms, then added ambiguous qualifications and escape clauses that made his pronouncements suspect in the ears of the system’s strict adherents. “I personally believe in varnashrama,” he would say, meaning the four-way division of all Hindus according to their hereditary occupations as priests, warriors, merchants, or tillers; then he’d add, “Though it’s true I have my own meaning for it.” He wouldn’t dwell on his “own meaning,” because he was trying, for reasons more political than religious, to reassure high-caste Hindus without abandoning his basically reformist position.

  The ambiguity was intentional. On a theoretical level, he drew his version of the four varnas more from John Ruskin than from the Hindu scriptures; in this view, they were roughly equal rather than hierarchical, a flexible framework for stability in the social cooperative that Gandhi wished Indian villages to be, which had little to do with what Indian villages actually were or had ever been. The villages were divided on the narrow lines of distinctive subcastes, where every tiny social advantage had to be fought for or guarded, not the broad categories of varna, which Gandhi somehow managed, later, to redefine as “true socialism.” He would also argue that traditional varnashrama was “based on absolute equality of status” before conceding that such a caste system was “today non-existent in practice.” Translated into secular terms, this was like saying that true capitalism would be utopian socialism. What Gandhi offered was a revivalist’s vision; no such equality existed in actual villages. Whatever his deepest intention, it could easily be interpreted as a whitewashing of caste. Gandhi meant to coax the high caste, not confront them. In that way, he promised social stability, not upheaval. So he made a point of saying in this period that the abolition of untouchability would not entail caste Hindus having to dine with former untouchables, let alone marry their daughters to them, though he himself never hesitated to flout caste rules on dining. Beneath the ambiguity lay a seeming contradiction with which he’d wrestle for the next two decades: his insistence that it was possible to banish untouchability while retaining caste, with a little refurbishing, a humanizing makeover, as an organizing principle of Indian society.

  Was this what he really thought, or was it a tactical feint? Years later, after the Mahatma’s death, Jawaharlal Nehru would tell an interviewer that Gandhi had confided to him on more than one occasion that his ultimate aim in his fight against untouchability was to bring down the caste system once and for all. Here’s Nehru’s 1955 account:

  I spoke to Gandhi repeatedly: why don’t you hit out at the caste system directly? He said that he did not believe in the caste system except in some idealized form … that the present caste system is thoroughly bad and must go. I am undermining it completely, he said, by my tackling untouchability. You see … he had a way of seizing one thing and concentrating on it. If untouchability goes, he said, the caste system goes; so, I am concentrating on that.

  Nehru might be suspected of trying to gloss over the ambiguities in Gandhi’s position here. But in a 1934 letter to an American, the Mahatma came close to using the words Nehru later ascribed to him. “The caste system, as it exists at present, is certainly the bane of Hindu life,” he wrote. “The great movement of removal of untouchability is an attack on the evil underlying the caste system.” He came even closer in conversation that same year with a member of his entourage. “If untouchability goes,” he said, “the castes as we know them today go.” Eventually, he’d shed his idealization of varna. In 1936 he said caste was “harmful both to spiritual and national growth.” In 1942 he was quoted as saying he’d have “no interest left in life” if caste continued. Finally in 1945 he said the only remaining varna embraced shudras—traditionally the lowest order, basically the peasantry—and “ati-shudras, or Harijans or untouchables.” Ati in this context meant beyond, lower down. Once again, he was saying it was sinful to believe in “high and low.” He admitted that his views had changed, that he was no longer bent on putting an acceptable face on the caste system. He’d always maintained that the only reliable guide to his thinking on an issue was the last thing he’d said.

  That may have been his final thought about caste, but it wasn’t the burden of what he had to say eighteen years earlier at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha. Then the contrast between Gandhi’s words in condemning “the deep black ignorance of blind orthodoxy” and the severe restrictions he placed on those striving to adhere to his precepts so befuddled his Travancore followers that they dispatched two of their own to sit at the revered leader’s feet and hear how he reconciled his preaching with the tactical restraints he’d been urging.

  The meeting took place in the campaign’s eighth week. Gandhi was asked why it was all right for Hindus to demonstrate in support of a distant Khilafat but not all right for non-Hindus to support the right of “unapproachables” to use a public road in Travancore; why untouchability and unapproachability had to be considered, in view of the Congress’s pronouncements on the subject, a local Vaikom issue rather than a large national question; why if their maharajah was revered and loved as a benevolent ruler, his loyal subjects couldn’t use fasting “to melt [his] heart and to conquer him through their sufferings” in accord with Gandhi’s own teachings on satyagraha.

  The Mahatma’s answers pursue whatever tortuous logic comes to hand; they’re also insistent and categorical; when he doesn’t duck questions, he recasts them, then tosses them back without retreating an inch. “Outside help weakens the strength of your sacrifice,” he declares. Similarly, “This is a purely Hindu question and, therefore, the non-Hindus have no place in the struggle.”

  It’s not clear whether he’s speaking here as leader of the Hindus or of the national movement. Since he’s Gandhi, no one demands clarification on that score. In his solicitude for the feelings of orthodox Hindus, his answers can be read both ways. “Non-Hindu interference,” he says, would “offend the orthodox section whom you have to convert and conquer through your love.” Here Gandhi seems to speak as a Hindu. Even if the issues at Vaikom were to be viewed as national, he further argues, it would be “neither desirable nor practicable that the whole India or the central organization should fight out such questions. It will lead to chaos and confusion.” Here he’s the national leader suggesting, if not quite saying, that the Congress is divided enough already.

  The two Travancore representatives who went to see Gandhi, both high-caste Hindus sympathetic to the cause of the untouchables, gained little clarity on a way forward for their movement, which Gandhi has effectively downgraded. On their return, they found the satyagraha camp in “utter confusion.” So writes T. K. Ravindran, a Kerala historian who conducted extensive research in Travancore’s Malayalam-language archives and then wrote the only narrative history of the movement based on such primary sources. In its efforts to interpret and abide by Gandhi’s injunctions, the movement was sputtering. Swami Shraddhanand showed up to bless a joint gathering of thousands of low-caste Ezhavas and high-caste Nairs that set a new benchmark simply by happening. The meeting sent a delegation to the maharajah supporting the satyagraha and calling for reform.

  Then, in August, the rajah died. Since his heir was a child, an aunt was installed as regent. Her first act was to free all those jailed over five months for taking part in the satyagraha. The freed leaders threw themselves into gathering signatures from high-caste Hindus on petitions “respectfully and humbly [praying] that Your Gracious Highness may be pleased to command that all roads and all classes of public institutions may be thrown open to all classes of Your Gracious Highness’s humble subjects without distinction of caste or creed.” A cold official response dashed such hopes. It was then that the unrelenting Swami Shraddhanand urged Gandhi not to let the Vaikom cause languish.

  The Gandhi who finally arrived by motorboat at the Vaikom jetty on March 9, 1925, nearly a year after the start of
the satyagraha campaign he’d been managing by remote control, had recently made a show of giving up his leadership of the national movement. It was the first of many such supposed withdrawals from national politics by the Mahatma.

  On his release from jail in February 1924, he’d offered the Indian National Congress what he termed his “application for employment as general.” He meant, of course, commanding general. A general, he then insisted, “must have soldiers who would obey.” By the end of the year, he was characterizing himself merely as “a non-violent soldier,” acknowledging that he could no longer “command universal assent.” Seen from within the movement, he’d taken a step back, all but removing himself from day-to-day politics. Seen from outside, he was still national leader. In Kerala, his arrival was a huge event. A small armada of fishing boats and flat-bottomed craft used for hauling rice and other freight converged on the one bearing the leader, flanked by two long, ornate “snake boats,” outsize racing shells designed to carry dozens of rowers, helmsmen, even musicians on major ceremonial occasions. Obviously, this was such an occasion.