Fight, by all means, the monster that passes for varnashrama today, and you will find me working side by side with you. My varnashrama enables me to dine with anybody who will give me clean food, be he Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi, whatever he is. My varnashrama accommodates a Pariah girl under my own roof as my own daughter. My varnashrama accommodates many Panchama [fifth and lowest class, i.e., Untouchable] families with whom I dine with the greatest pleasure—to dine with whom is a privilege. My varnashrama compels me to bow down my head in all humility before knowledge, before purity, before every person, where I see God face to face.73
Gandhi’s views on caste during this initial decade (1916–26) mark the period that the first real change in his position occurred: the crucial distinction between the caste system and varnadharma emerged then. Throughout this decade, he was constantly harassed by Hindu conservatives, especially in his reform of untouchability; and the pace as well as the content of his views on caste reform must be seen in the context of his response to the Indian orthodox as well as to Western liberalism.
The last two decades of his career (1927–47) represent a progressive movement toward a radical critique of caste. In September and October of 1927, Gandhi made two noteworthy speeches on varna at Tangore and Trivandrum where the orthodox elements were formidable. The emphasis in both speeches is on social equality, justified with an appeal, not to Western ideas, but to the traditional Hindu concept of advaita, or the spiritual oneness of all being. The caste system’s most vicious feature, he argued, is that it has upheld the idea of inherited superiority. This is inconsistent with the spirit of Hinduism in general and the ideal of varna in particular: “There is nothing in common between varnashrama and caste.” Gandhi concluded his Tangore speech with an expression of his idealist approach to social reform:
You would be entitled to say that this is not how varnashrama is understood in these days. I have myself said times without number that varnashrama as it is at present understood and practiced is a monstrous parody of the original, but in order to demolish this distortion let us not seek to demolish the original. And if you say the idealistic varnashrama which I have placed before you is quite all right you have admitted all that I like you to admit. I would also urge on you to believe with me that no nation, no individual, can possibly live without proper ideals. And if you believe with me in the idealistic varnashrama, you will also strive with me to reach that ideal so far as may be.74
Not until 1932, does the vestige of orthodoxy seen in his support of caste restrictions on intermarriage and interdining disappear. These restrictions are now criticized as being “no part of the Hindu religion,” serving only to “stunt Hindu society.”75 Writing in 193 5 on this issue under the title “Caste Has To Go,” he insists that “in varnashrama there was and should be no prohibition of intermarriage or interdining.”76 His views on intermarriage, once loosened, culminated in the announcement of 1946 that “If anybody was not prepared to marry a Harijan Gandhi would not bless that marriage.”77 “If I had my way I would persuade all caste Hindu girls coming under my influence to select Harijan husbands.”78
Gandhi’s reinterpretation of varna emphasizes his dominant concern for social equality and harmony. An egalitarian democratic society, one in which no one was oppressed or driven to envy by the privileged status of another, must develop a cooperative spirit where no energy would be wasted in a competitive pursuit of material gain; it would be turned instead into some form of social service. “The law of varna is the antithesis of competition which kills.”79 He conceptualizes an organic social order:
The four varnas have been compared in the Vedas to the four members of the body, and no simile could be happier. If they are members of one body, how can one be superior or inferior to another? If the members of the body had the power of expression and each of them were to say that it was higher and better than the rest, the body would go to pieces. Even so, our body politic, the body of humanity, would go to pieces, if it were to perpetuate the canker of superiority or inferiority. It is this canker that is at the root of the various ills of our time, especially class war and civil strife. It should not be difficult for even the meanest understanding to see that these wars and strifes could not be ended except by the observance of the law of varna.80
If Gandhi’s approach to the reform of caste changed in the early 1930s from cautious reform to radical opposition, his attitude toward the institution of untouchability remained consistent: he was always unequivocally against it.81 His abhorrence of how India treated its untouchables was felt since childhood and he often expressed this during his South African experience.82 After his return to India, his campaign against the institution of untouchability became a major plank in his reform platform. In a speech of early 1916, he condemned untouchability in the strongest possible terms as “an ineffaceable blot that Hinduism today carries with it…. This miserable, wretched, enslaving spirit of untouchableness.” “It is, to my mind, a curse that has come to us, and as long as that curse remains with us, so long I think we are bound to consider that every affliction that we labor under in this sacred land is a fit and proper punishment for this great and indelible crime that we are committing.”83
Gandhi welcomed untouchable families into the community that he formed in Ahmedabad called Sabarmati (later Satyagraha) ashram. He had a particularly close relationship there during the 1920s with a Harijan couple, Ramijibhai and Gangabehn Badhia. These two and their family became vital contributors to that community. Ramjibhai, a skilled weaver when he joined the ashram in 1920, was known as “Gandhiji’s guru in khadi weaving.” Along with his son and son-in-law, he was among the seventy-nine volunteers chosen to join Gandhi on the salt march. Gandhi repeatedly cited Ramijibhai as an exemplary freedom fighter, a model for all Indians to follow.84 He soon came to see the fight against untouchability as an integral part of satyagraha, and its resolution as a prerequisite for swaraj. This necessary relationship of swaraj to the abolition of untouchability that Gandhi saw was seldom, however, seen by others. Thus one correspondent wrote to Young India:
I am unable to understand the relation between the existence of this evil and the establishment of Swaraj. After all, “unapproachability” is only one of the many evils of the Hindu society…. How is this an impediment to the obtaining of Swaraj and why do you make its removal a condition precedent to our fitness for Swaraj? Is it not possible for this to be set right when Swaraj is obtained, if not voluntarily, at least by legislation.85
Gandhi replied:
Swaraj for me means freedom for the meanest of our countrymen. If the lot of the Panchama [untouchable] is not improved when we are all suffering, it is not likely to be better under the intoxication of Swaraj. If it is necessary for us to buy peace with the Mussalmans as a condition of Swaraj, it is equally necessary for us to give peace to the Panchama before we can with any show of justice or self-respect talk of Swaraj. I am not interested in freeing India merely from the English yoke. I am bent upon freeing India from any yoke whatsoever. I have no desire to exchange “king log for king stork.” Hence for me the movement of Swaraj is a movement of self-purification.86
These last few sentences contain a vital element of Gandhi’s conception of freedom: the conviction that tyranny over another inevitably corrupts the character of the tyrant, and so enslaves the tyrant himself. “We have become ‘pariahs of the Empire’ because we have created ‘pariahs’ in our midst. The slave owner is always more hurt than the slave. We shall be unfit to gain Swaraj so long as we would keep in bondage a fifth of the population of Hindustan.”87
Again, speaking in 1928 on the reform of untouchability he asked, “Shall we not have the vision to see that in suppressing a sixth (or whatever the number) of ourselves, we have depressed ourselves? No man takes another down a pit without descending into it himself and sinning in the bargain. It is not the suppressed that sin. It is the suppressor who has to answer for his crime against those whom he suppresses.”88
&n
bsp; Despite these arguments, many Congressmen remained unconvinced of the connection between swaraj and the abolition of untouchability. At the Forty-First Congress of 1926, Mr. S. Srinivasa Aiyengar delivered the Presidential Address; after paying high tribute to Gandhi’s thought, he turned to the gospel of swaraj: “Our foremost duty is to keep constantly before our eyes the vision of swaraj, what it is, what it requires of us, and what it will not permit us.”89
Aiyengar, however, then moved on to ideas decidedly at variance with Gandhi’s position. He described the use of khadi and the abolition of untouchability as “vital aspects of our national movement.” But, he contended,
Neither foreign nor domestic critics are right when they assert that untouchability is a formidable obstacle for swaraj, or that its removal will automatically bring about swaraj. We cannot wait for swaraj till it is removed anymore than we can wait till caste is abolished …. I would deprecate the iterated rhetorical stress on untouchability as a serious impediment to swaraj.90
Gandhi was quick to note this comment on untouchability in Aiyengar’s address, and he soon answered it in Young India-.
There is, too, confusion regarding Swaraj. The term Swaraj has many meanings. When Sjt. Iyengar says that removal of untouchability has nothing to do with Swaraj, I presume he means that its existence can be no hindrance to constitutional advance. It can surely have nothing to do with dyarchy or greater and effective powers being given the legislatures….
Real organic Swaraj is a different question. That freedom which is associated with the term Swaraj in the popular mind is no doubt unattainable without not only the removal of untouchability and the promotion of heart unity between the different sections but also without removing many other social evils that can be easily named. That inward growth which must never stop we have come to understand by the comprehensive term Swaraj. And that Swaraj cannot be had so long as walls of prejudice, passion and superstition continue to stifle the growth of that stately oak.91
This was the aspect of untouchability Gandhi disliked most: the “walls of prejudice, passion and superstition” it created, prohibiting “promotion of heart unity between the different sections.” Gandhi uses, for the first time in this passage, the term “organic Swaraj” and this holds a special significance: it suggests a freedom that seeks to include a sense of social harmony. “Organic” as opposed to “constitutional” or “parliamentary” swaraj included individual civil liberty and national independence, but it also sought to go beyond these to a realization of “heart unity.”
Gandhi wanted, then, to establish an organic swaraj, a solid spirit of social unity, in three major areas on Indian society: among the untouchables and the various castes; between Hindus and Muslims; and, finally, he wished to overcome the considerable gap that had grown between the rural, traditional, largely illiterate villagers, on the one hand, and the urban, Westernized, educated classes on the other. Gandhi interpreted this last aspect of social separateness as another form of untouchability.
To me, the campaign against untouchability has begun to imply ever so much more than the eradication of the ceremonial untouchability of those who are labelled untouchables. For the city dweller, the villagers have become untouchables.92
The ulcer of untouchability has gone so deep that it seems to pervade our life. Hence the unreal differences: Brahamana and Non-Brahamana, provinces and provinces, religion and religion. Why should we not all be children of one Indian family and, further, of one human family? Are we not like branches of the same tree?93
I have not hesitated to say with great deliberation that, if we, Hindus, do not destroy this monster of untouchability, it will devour both Hindus and Hinduism. And when I ask you to purify your hearts of untouchability, I ask of you nothing less than this—that you should believe in the fundamental unity and equality of man. I invite you all to forget that there are any distinctions of high and low among the children of one and the same God.94
These ideas gained dramatic force in September 1932 when Gandhi fasted to shock his society out of its indifference to the evils of untouchability and also to persuade the Government to deal more constructively with it. Not everyone appreciated this fast, perhaps least of all Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, an articulate leader and member of the untouchable minority, whose criticisms of Gandhi are noted in the next chapter.95 However, Gandhi’s fast so inspired the novelist Mulk Raj Anand that he joined Gandhi’s ashram and then wrote an enduring work of Indian fiction entitled Untouchable (published in 1935). Anand saw in Gandhi’s action a striking truth: that the practice of untouchability had divided Indian society with a persuasive sense of exclusiveness and against this Gandhi’s inclusive spirit had spread unity and uplifted members of the harijan community. Anand conveyed this through the character of his harijan hero, Bakha, who meets the Mahatma in these circumstances:
At once the crowd, and Bakha among them, rushed towards the golbagh. He had not asked himself where he was going. He hadn’t paused to think. The word “Mahatma” was like a magical magnet, to which he, like all the other people about him, rushed blindly. The wooden boards of the footbridge creaked under the eager downward rush of his ammunition boots. He was so much in a hurry that he didn’t even remember that he was an Untouchable, and actually touched a few people. But not having his broom and basket with him, and the people being all in a flurry, no one noticed that a sweeper-boy had brushed past him.
At the foot of the bridge, by the tonga and motor-lorry stand, the road leading to the fort past the entrance of the golbagh looked like a regular racecourse. Men, women and children of all the different races, colors, castes and creeds, were running towards the oval. There were Hindu lallas from the piece-goods market of Bulandshahr, smartly dressed in silks; there were Kashmiri Muhammadans from the local carpet factories, immaculately clad in white cotton; there were the rough Sikh rustics from the near-by villages swathed in handspun cloth, staves in their hands and loads of shopping on their backs; there were fierce-looking red-cheeked Pathans in red shirts, followers of Abdul Gaffar Khan, the frontier Gandhi; there were the black-faced Indian Christian girls from the Salvation Army colony, in short, colored skirts, blouses and aprons; there were people from the outcastes’ colony, whom Bakha recognized in the distance, but whom he was not too anxious to greet; there was here and there a stray European—there was everybody going to meet the Mahatma, to pay homage to Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi. But he became aware of the fact of being a sweeper by the contrast which his dirty, khaki uniform presented to the white garments of most of the crowd. There was an insuperable barrier between himself and the crowd, the barrier of caste. He was part of a consciousness which he could share and yet not understand. He had been lifted from the gutter, through the barriers of space, to partake of a life which was his, and yet not his. He was in the midst of a humanity which included him in its folds, and yet debarred him from entering into a sentient, living, quivering contact with it. Gandhi alone united him with them, in the mind, because Gandhi was in everybody’s mind, including Bakha’s. Gandhi might unite them really. Bakha waited for Gandhi.
Gandhi did not disappoint: Bakha saw “something beautiful” in his face, “something intimate and warm about him. He smiled like a child.” After he heard Gandhi’s speech, an appeal to break down the social barriers of intolerance and make society “open to the Untouchables,”
Bakha stood on the branch of the tree spellbound. Each word of the concluding passage seemed to him to echo as deep and intense a feeling of /horror and indignation as his own at the distinction which the caste Hindus made between themselves and the Untouchables. The Mahatma seemed to have touched the most intimate corners of his soul. ‘To be sure, he is a good man,’ Bakha said.”
This was the moment of conversion:
Bakha felt thrilled. A tremor went down his spine. That the Mahatma should want to be born as an outcaste! That he should love scavenging! He adored the man. He felt he could put his life in his hands and ask him to do what he like
d with it. For him he would do anything.”96
Freedom with Equality: Swaraj and Sarvodaya
Anand’s story depicts the multiple sources of Gandhi’s charisma, the devotion inspired in a diverse mass of people. Gandhi reached Bakha with his empathy, an identification with feelings that “touched the most intimate corners of his soul,” with words such as these, that Gandhi addressed to India in 1941:
So far as Harijans are concerned, every Hindu should make common cause with them and befriend them in their awful isolation—such isolation as perhaps the world has never seen in the monstrous immensity one witnesses in India. I know from experience how difficult the task is. But it is part of the task of building the edifice of swaraj. And the road to swaraj is steep and narrow. There are many slippery ascents and many deep chasms. They have all to be negotiated with unfaltering steps before we can reach the summit and breathe the fresh air of freedom.97
Gandhi continually emphasized the necessity for identification with the villagers, who represented the masses of India, that their attitudes might be understood and their needs met.
We must first come in living touch with them [the masses] by working for them and in their midst. We must share their sorrows, understand their difficulties and anticipate their wants. With the pariahs we must be pariahs and see how we feel to clean the closets [toilets] of the upper classes and have the remains of their table thrown at us. We must see how we like being in the boxes, miscalled houses, of the laborers of Bombay. We must identify ourselves with the villagers who toil under the hot sun beating on their bent backs and see how we would like to drink water from the pool in which the villagers bathe, wash their clothes and pots and in which their cattle drink and roll. Then and not till then shall we truly represent the masses and they will, as surely as I am writing this, respond to every call. “We cannot do all this, and if we are to do this, good-bye to Swaraj for a thousand years and more,” some will say. I shall sympathize with the objection. But I do claim that some of us at least will have to go through the agony and out of it only will a nation full, vigorous and free be born.98
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