His commitment was at once a moral obligation and a compromise, an evangelical crusade and a tactical retreat. To many of his followers, it meant he was putting the national movement on hold. To Gandhi himself, it must have seemed the only way forward. His secretary, Mahadev, was in jail. So were Nehru, Patel, Kasturba, even Mirabehn, among thousands of other Congress supporters. His arduous anti-untouchability crusade may have been inadequate in its preparation and follow-up; there may be little proof that it left an enduring impression on the psyches of caste Hindus who turned out by the tens of thousands to hear him (or at least see him).
Ambedkar seldom took note of it; Dalits today don’t celebrate it; Gandhi biographers pass over it in a few paragraphs. Yet, hurried and improvised as it undoubtedly was, there’s really nothing in Indian annals to which it can be compared. From November 1933 through early August 1934, a period of nine months, Mahatma Gandhi barnstormed strenuously against untouchability from province to province, one dusty town to the next, through the hot season and the rainy season, sometimes on foot from village to village, giving three, four, five speeches a day—six days a week, omitting only Mondays, his “silent day”—mostly to mammoth crowds, drawn by the man rather than his cause. In that time, he traveled more than 12,500 miles by rail, car, and foot, collecting more than 800,000 rupees (equivalent in today’s dollars to about $1.7 million) for his new Harijan fund. By comparison, an American presidential campaign can be viewed as a cushy, leisurely excursion on a luxury liner.
On tour by rail, circa 1934 (photo credit i9.1)
An early conclusion of a British official assigned to keep close tabs on Gandhi’s doings was that the frail old man in the loincloth, coming off two prolonged fasts in the previous ten months, was displaying “amazing toughness.” Soon it became routine for batteries of orthodox Hindus to intercept him at his rallies or along his route, zealously chanting anti-Gandhi slogans and waving black flags. In Nagpur, where the tour started, eggs were thrown from the balcony of a hall in which he was speaking; in Benares, where it ended, orthodox Hindus, called sanatanists, burned his picture. A bomb went off in Poona, and an attempt was made to derail the train on which he traveled from Poona to Bombay. At a place called Jasidih in Bihar, his car was stoned. Scurrilous anti-Gandhi pamphlets appeared at many of these places, targeting him as an enemy of Hindu dharma, a political has-been who promised much and failed to deliver, even calling attention to the massages he received from women in his entourage. Here we come upon the first signs of the viral subculture that would spawn his murder fourteen years later.
More generally, the cleavages among Hindus he had anticipated and feared were now out in the open, but he never turned back. Missionaries travel to lands they deem to be heathen; presenting himself as a Hindu revivalist, Gandhi took his campaign to his own heartland. He didn’t have one set piece, what’s now called a stump speech, but the same themes reappeared in a more or less impromptu fashion. They all led to the same conclusion. If India were ever to deserve its freedom, he preached, untouchability had to go. Yet at many of the rallies, untouchables were segregated in separate holding pens, either because they were afraid to be seen by caste Hindus as overstepping or because none of the local organizers was alive to the contradiction of putting untouchability on display at an anti-untouchability rally.
Such a tableau confronted Gandhi near the end of the tour when he reached the city of Bhavnagar in his native Gujarat, not far from a college he’d briefly attended. In anticipation of his visit, the civic fathers had thoughtfully set aside money for new, more or less sanitary quarters for the municipality’s Bhangis, or sweepers, the untouchables who did its dirtiest work; the plan was to show off Bhavnagar’s enlightened spirit by having the dedication of the project coincide with Gandhi’s visit. To that end, a large open-sided tent, a patchwork of bright colors called a shamiana, had been set up as it would be for any big celebration such as a wedding. “The Bhangis were not allowed to sit in the shamiana put up for the ceremony,” a British official reported to his superiors, “but sat outside where Gandhi joined them before proceeding to his seat in the sha-miana to lay the foundation stone.” Gandhi’s mixing with the Bhangis was the only diversion from the script. By stepping into the shamiana, he made things right again. What could he do? Not for the first time, he was up against an India that could be simultaneously worshipful and obdurate.
At a place called Satyabhamapur in the eastern state of Orissa, he was given another reminder of the rocklike durability of the customs he was trying to crack. The Mahatma invited ten members of a local untouchable group called Bauris, along with one Bhangi, to take their meals in his tent. “None of Mr. Gandhi’s party, however, dined with these guests,” another colonial official reported, laying on the requisite irony, “and the Bauris refused to dine with the sweeper.”
The Raj was keeping close tabs. Local officials were commanded to file reports at every stage of the tour. These then traveled up the colonial chain of command to provincial home secretaries, the national home secretary, and, ultimately, the secretary of state for India in Whitehall, each of whom then had an opportunity to add a wry, worldly comment to the file, a “minute,” as these notes were known. It was not an abiding interest in the progress of social reform that engaged the imperial officials at every level. They wanted to make sure Gandhi was abiding by his pledge to eschew political agitation for the duration of the tour, that he was not preparing the ground for his next campaign of civil disobedience, for they had long since been convinced that the frail figure in the loincloth had the power to paralyze their domain and, if allowed to proceed unchecked, shake its foundations; in that sense, he had made them wary believers in his nonviolent methods of resistance and put them on guard. The crowds he drew—100,000 in Calcutta, 50,000 in Madras (now Chennai), 40,000 in Cawnpore (Kanpur), 30,000 in Benares (Varanasi), up to 25,000 in a dozen other places—could more easily be attributed to curiosity and the unending quest for a saint’s darshan, the satisfying blankness of an immersion in his glow, than to zeal for his battle against untouchability. But they couldn’t be ignored.
Part of making sure that he wasn’t preparing the ground for future campaigns of civil disobedience was keeping track of his avid fund-raising, ostensibly for the new Harijan Service Society, or Sevak Sangh. Fearing that the money could be diverted to Congress coffers for political use, the British were intensely interested in knowing how much he was taking in and where it was going. So the local officials were instructed to report the exact amount of his “purses,” meaning the collections offered up in his honor at practically every stop, even in the poorest Harijan hovels and slums. Often these sums were reported down to the last rupee, occasionally down to the paise, or small change. An official in Travancore, for instance, reports that Gandhi auctioned off a ring that had been donated to his cause for the modest sum of three rupees and eight paise. Ladies with jewelry were immediate targets: in Karachi he was reported to have engaged in a tug-of-war with an elderly woman over a ring she was disinclined to relinquish. “The old lady resolutely refused to part with her ring and resisted Mr. Gandhi’s attempt to remove it forcibly,” an official reported. (Writing in the margin of the report, a higher official drily praised her for her display of Gandhian resistance.) Everything was subject to auction for the cause of Harijan uplift, including the gifts, silver boxes, and cups presented to him along the way—even his time. At some villages, he refused to step out of his car until he received a purse of sufficient weight; in one place, an additional fifty rupees proved sufficient. “Many women,” an official in Madras noted, “took the precaution of divesting themselves of their jewels before coming to his meetings.”
Gandhi, the unrelenting Bania turned mendicant, is an object of fascination, sometimes pity, for starchy officials who comment on his “rapacity for money” and “money-grubbing propensities” and then indulge in haughty speculation on whether his mahatmaship has been tarnished. “He was more like a chetti [or moneylender] co
ming around for his interest,” one report stated. “One could not but feel sorry for Gandhi,” this report said, “a poor old man come down in the world and being hustled about from one function to another, which he seemed only partially able to understand.” The officials observe him in different places, with different degrees of bias, at different stages of the tour but agree on several things: that the crowds that turned out to greet him were largely indifferent to his message about Harijans (in fact, could seldom hear it); that he started to soft-pedal and even omit his demands for the opening of temples once he hit the more orthodox Hindu precincts of South India; that it was an open question whether his tour was doing more to strengthen orthodoxy than it was to uproot the hardy weed called untouchability. Their skeptical narrative stands in counterpoint to the pious, heroic accounts of the crusade that appear in installments in Gandhi’s weekly Harijan, with its agate lists of newly opened temples and wells, newly dedicated separate but equal dormitories and schools for Harijan students, all leaving an impression of a cresting wave of irresistible social reform.
The contrast between the narratives of colonial bystanders and those of enthusiastic domestic adherents is only to be expected. But apart from their renderings of Gandhi’s own words, their most precious passages convey particular details more telling than any assessment. “At several places,” a British official notes in a part of Orissa where Gandhi’s party was denied permission to enter temples, “people were seen carrying away dust that had been touched by his feet.” Or there’s the description of a sweeper’s wife in Nagpur named Abhayanhar who donates her last two bangles. “Tears trickled down Abhayanhar’s cheeks,” a colonial official wrote. “Gandhi accepted the sacrificial offering and said he had reduced the Abhayanhars to poverty, that they were now true Harijans, the truest Banghis in Nagpur.” The official offers no comment; he simply describes what he has seen, leaving a sense that he has seen a communion he doesn’t understand but can’t get out of his mind.
The Mahatma’s own presence of mind, his reliable, low-key magnanimity, show up in these often hostile colonial reports in scattered asides on his disciplined, always calm treatment of orthodox demonstrators who turn out to jeer him and block his way. In Ajmer, in what’s now the state of Rajasthan, one of Gandhi’s most persistent antagonists, a Benares Brahman named Lal Nath, thrusts himself forward with a small contingent carrying black flags. He also displays a bleeding head, earned in a confrontation with some Gandhians who’d not gotten the message about nonviolence. Gandhi gives the crowd a stern lecture and invites Lal Nath to the platform to speak his piece against him; the Brahman is soon drowned out by cries of “Shame, shame.” In Buxar in Bihar, sanatanists lie down in front of the car carrying Gandhi to a mass meeting, and here too some of them have been beaten. Gandhi visits the injured sanatanists in the hospital and promises to do penance. Told then that the road to the rally is still blocked and that he might be attacked if he insists on going there, Gandhi serenely walks in on foot accompanied by four constables, parting a crowd of five thousand. In the Maharashtrian town of Saonar, where another posse of sanatanists seeks to halt his car, he offers its leader a ride to the rally he’s about to address.
A few of the authors of the official reports allow themselves to wonder whether more may be taking place here than has met the eye of their more jaded colleagues. The chief commissioner of Delhi writes that Gandhi, “even in his present role, still has very great influence.” He hazards a view that the tides of Indian opinion on untouchability may be slowly shifting. “Although perhaps 60 per cent of Hindus quietly determine not to treat untouchables as equals, they avoid public expression of their views.” Sounding optimistic, this high civil servant seems to be suggesting that a substantial minority of caste Hindus have already experienced a kind of conversion on the issue. An official in Bombay takes a similar line. “Though the majority would prefer the movement to fail, most of them,” he predicts, “are not likely to actively oppose it. The Sanatanists therefore cannot create a force sufficiently strong to combat and overcome Mr. Gandhi’s persistence.”
Gandhi himself advanced the idea that after all the orthodox propaganda against him, the passive absorption of his arguments by seemingly inattentive mass audiences added up to an advance. “I am quite sure that the message has appealed to the reason of the masses,” he said. “I am also fully aware that all of them are not yet prepared to translate their beliefs into practice. But then I consider it a tremendous gain that the masses have come to believe in the truth of the message.” Believe in it grudgingly, he meant. It might not affect their conduct much, he was saying, offering a conclusion not very different from that of the shrewdest colonial officials, but they could no longer justify caste oppression.
It was hard to know then, and it’s harder to know now, whether anything like the mental sea change Gandhi hoped for had actually occurred, or to measure the lasting effect. Sometimes he voiced his own doubts. Speaking in private to the tough-minded Vallabhbhai Patel, he was blunter than he allowed himself to be in public. “India is not yet converted to the spinning wheel and certainly not to the removal of untouchability. We can’t even say that the whole of the intellectual world is for its removal.” In this context, the “intellectuals” to whom he refers are those who were then calling themselves Socialists, talking up the possibilities of “class struggle,” and rejecting as “reactionary” and “irrelevant” his focus on untouchability, not granting or even recognizing that it defined the lives of the poorest Indians. The difference was not just one of political idiom. Their identification with the poorest was largely theoretical, resting on the premise that they could be lifted up after independence. Gandhi’s was becoming more urgent by the day. If anything, he seems more disposed at the end of the tour, having inspected scores, maybe hundreds of untouchable settlements, to speak in pointed ways about the abject circumstances of his Harijans and the social action that could make a difference. “The only way we can expiate the sin of centuries,” he said, “is to befriend the Harijans, by going to their quarters, by hugging their children as you would do your own, by interesting yourselves in their welfare, by finding out whether they have the fresh light and air that you enjoy as of right.” Hugging untouchable children might not amount to a social program or advance the cause of swaraj. But in the emerging divide between Gandhi and his movement, which side was really otherworldly and which one down-to-earth?
Near the end of the tour, in a balanced assessment and summing-up of all the accumulated intelligence at his disposal, the chief secretary of the Punjab writes: “People are more critical of his aims and objects and are no longer willing to follow him blindly. But it would be a mistake to regard him as a spent force. Given the occasion, he would still wield very great power and he is still more able than any other Indian to organize a big movement against Government.”
Whether Gandhi could organize a big, enduring movement against untouchability remained another question in his own mind, it seems, as much as that of the Raj’s agents. It so preoccupied him that when, at the start of 1934, northern Bihar was rocked by a huge earthquake that flattened villages and towns, devastating fields and crops and killing more than seven thousand, he instantly declared the catastrophe to be “divine chastisement” for the persistent sin of untouchability. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that Gandhi, at that point just beginning the third month of his anti-untouchability tour, was speaking more out of frustration than conviction. He often appealed to faith as a basis for moral action in society. But he didn’t normally go in for the kind of magical thinking that looks for signals of divine wrath in floods and droughts and all the other natural calamities that beset the subcontinent. Perhaps his interpretation of the earthquake, several times repeated as he met hard going on the South Indian portion of his tour, could be taken as a folksy rhetorical trope, as a tool designed to chip away at the resistance he faced. “He has come to realize that the strength of the antagonistic force is more formidable than he at fir
st imagined,” reported a British official, attempting to read his mind, several weeks after the disaster.
Nehru and Tagore had managed to support Gandhi’s fast unto death. Then, as we’ve seen, they opposed his second fast against untouchability. Now each was flabbergasted by the readiness of the Mahatma to use superstition to battle superstition. “Anything more opposed to the scientific outlook it would be difficult to imagine,” a momentarily disillusioned Nehru wrote in his autobiography, which he was composing in prison. “If the earthquake was a divine punishment for sin, how are we to discover for which sin we are being punished?—for, alas! we have so many.” Tagore said Gandhi’s logic “far better suits the psychology of his opponents than his own,” that the orthodox could just as easily blame the earthquake on his assault on Hindu dharma.
“Our sins and errors, however enormous,” wrote the poet, “have not enough force to drag down the structure of creation … We, who are immensely grateful to Mahatmaji for inducing his wonder-working inspiration, freedom from fear and feebleness in the minds of his countrymen, feel profoundly hurt, when any words from his mouth may emphasize the elements of unreason in those very minds … a fundamental source of all the blind powers that drive us against freedom and self-respect.”
In direct response, Gandhi only dug himself in deeper; he wasn’t about to deprive himself of a useful argument by conceding that the earthquake and the practice of untouchability in its environs might be unconnected: “I would be untruthful and cowardly if, for the fear of ridicule … I did not proclaim my belief from the house-top,” he retorted in Harijan. “I have the faith that our own sins have more force to ruin that structure [of creation] than any mere physical phenomenon. There is an indissoluble marriage between matter and spirit.”
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India Page 32