Great Soul_ Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India Part 5

The following September, Muslim votes ensured the adoption of Gandhi's noncooperation program by a narrow margin at a special Congress session in Calcutta, with the preservation of the caliphate now underscored as a primary goal of the national movement. "It is the duty of every non-Moslem Indian in every legitimate manner to a.s.sist his Mussulman brother, in his attempt to remove the religious calamity that has overtaken him," declared the resolution, written by Gandhi. Without Muslim votes, Gandhi's first challenge to the Congress to adopt satyagraha would almost certainly have foundered. The Mahatma hadn't won over the political elite; with the backing of the Alis, he'd swamped it. It was at Calcutta that he first held up the prospect of "swaraj within a year."

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Soon-to-be Congress leader, 1920 (photo credit i6.1) (photo credit i6.1)

Three months later, in December 1920, Shaukat Ali took the precaution of rounding up a flying force of burly "volunteers," Muslims uncommitted to nonviolence, to face down any anti-Gandhi demonstrators at the annual Congress meeting, held that year in the Marathi-speaking city of Nagpur in central India. The so-called volunteers weren't needed. Skepticism about noncooperation was still being voiced, but political opposition to Gandhi had melted away. His own example and relentlessness in argument, his mounting hold on the broader population and solid support from Muslims, all combined to make his leaders.h.i.+p una.s.sailable. The Nagpur Congress dutifully adopted Gandhi's draft of a new const.i.tution, extending the movement's reach down to the villages for the first time, at least on paper. In another first engineered by him, it adopted the abolition of untouchability as a national goal. Swaraj would be impossible without it, Gandhi repeatedly said, but in fact the noncooperation campaign targeted two "wrongs" specifically attributed to the British-the threat to the Khilafat and their failure to punish those responsible for the Amritsar ma.s.sacre. Untouchability might be, in Gandhi's words, a "putrid custom," but it was a Hindu wrong, an urgent issue, no doubt, but one without any obvious place on an agenda designed to rouse as many Indians as possible to nonviolent resistance to the colonial power.

There was one conspicuous dissenter. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was heckled when he referred drily in a speech to "Mister" rather than "Mahatma" Gandhi. He left the Congress after Nagpur, never to return, predicting that Gandhi's ma.s.s politics would lead to "complete disorganization and chaos." His departure, scarcely noted at the time, opened a tiny fissure in the nationalist ranks. It would become a gaping cleavage after orthodox Muslim elements drifted away from the movement with the waning of the Khilafat agitation. At this stage, it was not the nationalist goals of the Congress that had disillusioned Jinnah; he was still a convinced nationalist, an earnest believer in Hindu-Muslim reconciliation. Yet he was more a skeptic than a supporter of the Khilafat agitation. The readiness of Hindus-notably Gandhi-to exploit it was part of what alienated him.

At the start of 1921, the sway that the Anglicized Bombay lawyer Jinnah would come to have over India's Muslims could hardly have been foreseen, even by him. It was Muhammad Ali who then captured their imaginations, and Ali was still bound to the Mahatma. Understatement wasn't Ali's style. "After the Prophet, on whom be peace, I consider it my duty to carry out the commands of Gandhiji," he declared. (The one-syllable suffix, as we've noted, is a common Indian way of showing respect for an elder or sage. Even today, in conversation, Gandhi is commonly referred to as "Mahatmaji" or "Gandhiji.") For a time Muhammad Ali gave up eating beef as a gesture to Gandhi and all Hindus. Then, campaigning side by side with Gandhi across India, he took to wearing khadi khadi, the homespun cloth the Mahatma embraced as a cottage industry, a means to swades.h.i.+ swades.h.i.+, or self-reliance, and, in the expanding Gandhian vision, as a ma.s.s self-employment scheme for village India and, therefore, its salvation. The weaving and wearing of khadi (sometimes called khaddar khaddar) would not only feed spinners, handloom operators, and their families; it would enable India to boycott imported cloth from British mills and thus stand as another form of noncooperation. The bearded maulana maulana-an honorific given to a man learned in Islamic law-not only wore khadi; he became an evangelist for the charkha charkha, or spinning wheel, in front of Muslim audiences. "We laid the foundation of our slavery by selling off the spinning wheel," Muhammad Ali preached. "If you want to do away with slavery, take up the wheel again." His support for such Gandhian tenets inevitably aroused criticism from fellow Muslims. Ultimately, the maulana had to defend himself against charges of "being a wors.h.i.+pper of Hindus and a Gandhi-wors.h.i.+pper."

The preservation of the caliphate remained Muhammad Ali's most urgent cause, but his readiness to stand with Gandhi on issues that meant little to Muslims-spinning and even cow protection-became a kind of validation of the Mahatma's rhetorical leaps, his constant juggling and merging of seemingly unconnected campaigns in an attempt to establish a stable common ground for Hindus and Muslims. Noncooperation was the most serious challenge the Raj had faced, and Gandhi was the movement's undisputed leader. But then the big tent of Hindu-Muslim unity he'd erected began to sag and, here and there, collapse as violence between the two communities, an endemic phenomenon on the subcontinent, appeared to give the lie to all the vows and pledges that had been offered up in India on behalf of the soon-to-exit caliph in Constantinople. The impressive coalition Gandhi had built and inspired was proving to be jerry-built. By August 1921, a still hopeful Gandhi had to acknowledge that some Hindus were "apathetic to the Khilafat cause" and that it was "not yet possible to induce Mussulmans to take interest in swaraj except in terms of the Khilafat."

By far the worst violence came that same month in the rural Malabar district on the Indian Ocean coast, where a community of Muslims known as Mappilas, also Moplahs, rose in rebellion, crying jihad and brandis.h.i.+ng the Khilafat flag, after a couple of skirmishes with the police in which two British constables had been killed. Tiny Khilafat kingdoms were then proclaimed by the insurgents, and in some of these, Hindu homes and temples were set ablaze, women raped, and children slaughtered. The doctrine of nonviolence had never reached the Malabar district; political meetings had, in fact, been banned there. That was hardly an excuse for the gruesomeness or scale of the carnage: six hundred Hindus reported killed, twenty-five hundred forcibly converted to Islam. Gandhi and Muhammad Ali were denounced as infidels when they called on the insurgent leaders to disavow violence. The Raj dealt severely with the rising, blaming the noncooperation movement and hanging some two hundred rebels.

The next month Muhammad Ali was arrested on conspiracy charges at a train station in the Telugu-language region of southeastern India (today's Andhra Pradesh), including the charge of "conspiracy to commit mischief," while traveling with the Mahatma from Calcutta to Madras. The British, who'd been looking for an occasion to re-exert their authority, found it in a series of statements by the maulana arguing that Islamic law forbade Muslims to enlist or serve in their army. Gandhi's reaction says a lot about the fecundity of his imagination, the range of his aspirations, and his adaptability as a political tactician. A week after seeing Ali hustled from the station by a police detachment, he appeared in the South Indian town of Madurai bare chested in a loincloth: in the attire, that is, that would be his unvarying guise for the rest of his life. It's the way he'd been dressing at the ashram on the Sabarmati River, outside Ahmedabad, for several years; in public, he'd continued to wear a kurta, dhoti, and cap. This was the first public outing of his new, very basic costume.

Being Gandhi, he hastened to explain the symbolic meaning of the change. His disrobing could be read in several ways: as a tribute to the imprisoned maulana and the other Khilafat leaders rounded up with him; or as a subtle s.h.i.+ft of emphasis, a recognition that the Khilafat movement would soon be played out, at least as far as Hindus were concerned, that the larger national movement needed a new mobilizing tool. Gandhi had already seized on the spinning wheel for that purpose. For the goal of swades.h.i.+ to be achieved, he reasoned, there had to be enough hand spinning and hand weaving across India to replace the manufactured imported cloth being burned and boycotted as his campaign for swades.h.i.+ caught on. Without swades.h.i.+ and all it entailed, he now argued, there could be no swaraj. And only with swaraj-giving India the ability to engage diplomatically with the world-could there be any settlement of the Khilafat problem. Once the highest priority of the noncooperation movement, the preservation of the Khilafat was now to be seen as a potential by-product of its success. Gandhi was pointing the way to "full swades.h.i.+" by showing the millions who were too poor to cover their whole bodies with newly woven homespun that it really wasn't necessary. "Let there be no prudery about dress," he now said. "India has never insisted on full covering of the body for males as a test of culture."

Later, he would explain the symbolism he invested in the loincloth by saying, "I wish to be in touch with the life of the poorest of the poor among Indians...It is our duty to dress them first and then dress ourselves, to feed them first and then feed ourselves."

If they could follow the winding path of his logic, Indian Muslims might see his wearing of the loincloth as proof of his continued devotion to the Khilafat cause. Otherwise there was a good chance they'd perceive Gandhi to be drifting away from them. Muhammad Ali might have pointed out, were he not by this time in detention in Karachi, that the culture that Gandhi was describing so avidly was distinctly Hindu. "It is against our scriptures to keep the knees bare in this fas.h.i.+on," Maulana Abdul Bari, a leading religious authority who'd been prominent in the Khilafat agitation, subsequently informed the Mahatma.

Gandhi was starting a new variation on the fugue he was forever composing out of his various themes. Recalling perhaps how few South African Muslims were at his side when he marched across the Transvaal border in the 1913 satyagraha, he'd understood from the start of the noncooperation campaign that he could only speak to Muslims through other Muslims: Muhammad Ali, for instance. "I can wield no influence over the Mussulmans except through a Mussulman," he said. He'd also understood the improbability of the Khilafat as an Indian national cause. For him, it was less a cause than an investment: "the opportunity of a lifetime" for Hindus to demonstrate their stalwartness, their trustworthiness, to Muslims who, he kept suggesting, if not quite promising, would be likely to respond in kind by respecting the tender feelings of Hindus for the sacred cow. Ergo, according to this logic, preserving the Khilafat was the surest way to preserve the cow. Nothing like this opportunity would "recur for another hundred years." It was a cause for which he was "ready today to sacrifice my sons, my wife and my friends." In the short run, it was also a way to bind Muslims into the national movement that, thanks in no small measure to their support, he now led. The odds against it working were overwhelming, but who can now say, considering all that has happened since in confrontations between Hindus and Muslims, that Gandhi had his priorities wrong?

Gradually, he disengaged from the Khilafat agitation, which meant disengaging from Muslim politics, but Hindu-Muslim unity remained one of his main themes through to what might be called his tragic last act as Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other at the time of part.i.tion. In September 1924, Gandhi fasted for the first but not last time against Hindu-Muslim violence following riots in Kohat, a frontier town south of Peshawar in what's now Pakistan. He said he was fasting for twenty-one days as a personal "penance." The flash point for this killing spree, which resulted in an official death count of thirty-six and the flight of Kohat's entire Hindu community, was a grossly blasphemous life of the Prophet written by a Hindu. While it had nothing to do with Gandhi, he held himself responsible in the sense that he'd been "instrumental in bringing into being the vast energy of the people" that had now turned "self-destructive." To demonstrate that the fast was not against Muslims or on behalf of Hindus, the main sufferers on this occasion, he made a point of camping in Muhammad Ali's Delhi bungalow during his starvation ritual. "I am striving to become the best cement between the two communities," he wrote. Twenty-four years later he'd fast again in Delhi with the same purpose. On each occasion, Hindu and Muslim leaders, fearful of losing that "cement," gathered at his bedside and vowed to work for peace. A shaky armistice would follow and hold until an obscure agitator, somewhere on the subcontinent, threw off the next spark.

Gandhi the politician retained a cool realist's grip on his own limitations in this highly charged sphere after the waning of the Khilafat cause. Never was it more clearly and coldly displayed than in 1926, when his second son, Manilal, now resettled in South Africa, realized he was in love with a young Muslim woman in Cape Town whose family had played host to his father in years gone by. Her name was Fatima Gool, and she was known as Timmie. When word of the interfaith love match reached Gandhi at his ashram in Gujarat, he wrote to his son telling him he was free to do as he wanted. Then, as his great-granddaughter Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie observes in her finely wrought biography of Manilal, "the rest of the letter in fact closed the doors on free choice."

Generally speaking, Gandhi deplored marriage as a failure of self-restraint (ever since he unilaterally declared himself a brahmachari brahmachari) and religious conversion as a failure of discipline (since he briefly contemplated it for himself in his Pretoria days). So he was hardly likely to celebrate intermarriage as a realization of Hindu-Muslim unity. His letter reads like a dry lawyer's brief, or a political consultant's memo, devoid of any expression of feeling for his son or the Gool family. Of its several arguments, the most forceful and hardest to refute is the politician's: "Your marriage will have a powerful impact on the Hindu-Muslim question...You cannot forget nor will society forget that you are my son." Persevering idealist though he was, he was seldom softhearted, least of all when it came to his sons.

Did the revivalist ever really believe that swaraj could come in a year, or that the caliphate could be preserved? The question is little different from asking whether modern political candidates believe the dreamy promises they make at the height of a campaign. For Gandhi, who was introducing modern politics to India, the question is especially fraught because he was seen by his own people in his own time and place as a religious figure, more saintly than prophetic, more inspiring than infallible. He could thus be expected to lay down unmeetable conditions to achieve unreachable goals. At a certain level of abstraction from what we're accustomed to calling reality, what he offered in 1920 and 1921 as a vision was obvious and inarguable, even and especially when it defied normal expectations. After all, if 100 million spinning wheels had produced enough yarn in a few months to clothe 300 million Indians, if state schools and courts had all emptied and colonial officials at every level found they had no one to ring for-if Hindu and Muslim India was that united and disciplined-then independence would would have been within reach. Gandhi was telling his people that their fate was in their own hands; that much he surely believed. It was when these things failed to happen as he said they could that disillusion set in and the movement veered off course and slowed. have been within reach. Gandhi was telling his people that their fate was in their own hands; that much he surely believed. It was when these things failed to happen as he said they could that disillusion set in and the movement veered off course and slowed.

Shortly after the Mahatma donned his "symbolic disguise," as Robert Payne, one of his legion of biographers, termed his loincloth, he was challenged on the level of reality by Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet, a n.o.bel laureate by the time he met Gandhi in 1915, and, later, the admirer who first conferred on him the t.i.tle Mahatma. Tagore now wrote that Gandhi had "won the heart of India with his love" but asked how he could justify the bonfires of foreign cloth promoted by his followers in a country where millions were half-clothed. The gist of Tagore's high-minded argument was that Indians needed to think for themselves and beware of blindly accepting such simplistic would-be solutions as the spinning wheel, even from a Mahatma they rightly revered. "Consider the burning of cloth, heaped before the very eyes of our motherland s.h.i.+vering and ashamed in her nakedness," he wrote. Gandhi swiftly replied with what may have been his most stirring prose in English, offering his retort on a less elevated level of reality, that of village India: To a people famis.h.i.+ng and idle, the only acceptable form in which G.o.d can dare to appear is work and the promise of food as wages. G.o.d created man to work for his food, and said that those who ate without work were thieves. Eighty per cent of India are compulsory thieves half the year. Is it any wonder if India has become one vast prison? Hunger is the argument that is driving India to the spinning wheel...The hungry millions ask for one poem-invigorating food. They cannot be given it. They can only earn it. And they can earn it only by the sweat of their brow.

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Gandhi at his charkha, 1925 (photo credit i6.2) (photo credit i6.2)

As far as the polemical exchange went, Gandhi may have bested Tagore, but soon he had to confront his own doubts. He was under pressure from impatient followers, Khilafat activists in particular, to launch an intensified campaign of ma.s.s civil disobedience that would fill colonial jails. Gandhi tried to defer the campaign or at least limit its scope. Unsure that he had enough disciplined workers under his command, he worried about seeing his nonviolent campaign spill over into ma.s.s rioting, as it had in 1919, once demonstrators finally confronted the police. The month after the exchange with Tagore, rioting in Bombay caused him to suspend civil disobedience. Less than three months later, it happened again.

The authorities had banned public meetings. This spelled opportunity for satyagraha; across India, Congress leaders and followers by the thousands defied the ban, got themselves arrested, and went to jail. As the prisons filled, Gandhi fired off congratulatory telegrams to the most prominent inmates, hailing them as one might hail a cla.s.s of new graduates. Their jailing, his telegrams a.s.serted, was wonderful news. Then a lethal clash at an obscure place in North India called Chauri Chaura moved Gandhi to order another suspension of his campaign-the third in less than three years-against the advice of close a.s.sociates.

What happened in Chauri Chaura on February 5, 1922, fulfilled his worst fears. An angry crowd of roughly two thousand surrounded a small rural police station after having been fired on by a police detachment, which had then withdrawn and taken cover inside the building. The frustrated crowd, now a mob, soon set it ablaze. Driven out, policemen were hacked to death or thrown back into the flames; in all, twenty-two of them had been slaughtered with their a.s.sailants, so it was later said, shouting noncooperation catch-cries, including "Mahatma Gandhi ki jai"-"Glory to Mahatma Gandhi."

By Gandhi's standards, which derived from the Hindu value of ahimsa ahimsa, or nonviolence, Chauri Chaura stood out as an abysmal, even frightening defeat. In his eyes, it showed that the country at large and the national movement in particular had never truly grasped the values of satyagraha. So, with more than fifteen thousand followers already in jail, he abruptly called a halt to civil disobedience, suspending it for more than ten months, until the end of 1922. It was only because he insisted on suspending the campaign that Congress leaders who'd not yet gone to jail went along with his decision. "I got the votes because I was Gandhi and not because people were convinced," he wrote with the self-lacerating candor he could be relied on to display in his lowest moments. As "penance" for the fact that "murders were committed in my name," he then fasted for five days.

Among those who expressed disappointment over the retreat were some, both Muslim and Hindu, who well understood that Gandhi was responding to what he deemed a moral imperative. If only they had a less exemplary, less principled leader, they seemed to say. "Our defeat is in proportion to the greatness of our leader" was the way Lajpat Rai, a Hindu and former Congress president, wryly put it. "To me," said Maulana Abdul Bari, the leading Muslim in the North Indian center of Lucknow, "Gandhi is like a paralytic whose limbs are not in his control but whose mind is still active." Neither statement was without a tinge of admiration, but each was more disillusioned than admiring. Gandhi had offered them satyagraha as a weapon; now, as the "expert in the satyagraha business," he was yanking it back.

With his usual industriousness, Gandhi churned out a series of letters and articles explaining his stand to key followers and the nation at large, promising that the suspension would not be permanent, that civil disobedience would eventually be resumed and swaraj achieved, if not in a year. The clearest statement of his position turned into a prophecy. No one, Gandhi included, could have realized that what he had to say in 1922 would accurately depict the circ.u.mstances of India's independence, still a quarter of a century in the future, or his own ambivalent reaction to its achievement. "I personally can never be a party to a movement half-violent and half non-violent," he said, "even though it may result in the attainment of so-called swaraj, for it will not be real swaraj as I have conceived it."

Even "so-called swaraj" was a long way off, a much bigger goal than any he had toiled for in South Africa. Swaraj as he had conceived it-a purer, cleansing independence, amounting to a social transformation-would never be within reach. It would survive as a permanent, ever-receding goal.

7.

UNAPPROACHABILITY.

SUPPOSE THAT M MOHAN G GANDHI, the young barrister who journeyed to South Africa in the last decade of the nineteenth century, had been persuaded by evangelical friends in Pretoria to convert to Christianity, that he'd then stayed on to build a profitable law practice in Johannesburg, living out his life there under apartheid, in a segregated towns.h.i.+p's largest house. Would relations between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent be any different today? If different, would they be worse or better? The only point of proposing such a mind game is to underscore the role of chance and contingency, as well as character, in human affairs. Of course, the questions are unanswerable, but if we stay with the premise of a modern India minus Gandhi, it's not impossible to imagine a Mohammed Ali Jinnah who remained an Indian nationalist and brushed off the idea of Pakistan as the misbegotten dream of crackpots. Or a Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted Indian independence on behalf of an elitist movement, wearing a suit and tie rather than the khadi homespun that became mandatory for aspiring leaders after the advent of the Mahatma. This isn't to say that such scenarios would have been preferable to the one we designate as history, only to make the obvious point that other outcomes were possible. We can be reasonably certain at least that absent Gandhi, the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity wouldn't have flourished earlier, the way it did for a few brief years when he came close to achieving a merger between the national and the Khilafat movements, or the mirage of one. Most days of most years, Hindus and Muslims in most parts of India still live peacefully at close quarters, showing exemplary tolerance of each other's customs. Once, thanks to heavy lifting by Gandhi, their leaders were almost able to do so too.

Seen in perfect hindsight, powerful undercurrents all that time were carrying the two largest communities away from the reconciliation the leaders said they wanted. Such trends can be instructively traced in the life of a Hindu religious leader who was probably second only to Gandhi in stature in that era. This was Swami Shraddhanand, a revivalist in his own right, formerly known as Mahatma Muns.h.i.+ Ram, who loomed especially large in the Punjab and adjacent areas of North India. His views were close to Gandhi's; if anything, he was more uncompromising in his abhorrence of untouchability. Long before Gandhi, he had the nerve to voice his approval of intercaste dining and even marriage, and, beyond that, of all but abandoning the caste system itself in the name of a more generous and capacious Hinduism. Though the two mahatmas were in basic sympathy, they could seldom agree on tactics or their reading of Muslim intentions.

Shraddhanand, an impulsive man, a courageous one too, was prepared to follow Gandhi but not to subordinate his own judgment. His life offers two powerful punctuation points in an account of Gandhi's early efforts to bring Hindus and Muslims together. In the aftermath of Gandhi's first venture in nonviolent political action on a national scale, the strike of 1919, Shraddhanand was invited to preach from the pulpit in India's largest and most important mosque, Delhi's Jama Masjid. Days before, he'd become a hero to Delhi's Muslims as well as Hindus for baring his chest to troops attempting to turn back a march he was leading, daring them to fire. (Accounts differ on whether they were Gurkhas or Manipuris from the northeast.) No Hindu leader had ever before been invited to hold forth at the Jama Masjid, nor would this ec.u.menical invitation ever be repeated. In that instant, the swami, a hulking figure with a shaved head, wearing umber-colored robes, personified the unity for which Gandhi had tirelessly appealed. When he intoned a Sanskrit prayer for peace, Om Shanti, "the whole audience followed me with one reverberating voice," the swami wrote. Only six years later, he was shot and killed by a Muslim inflamed by Shraddhanand's later writings against what he deemed a Muslim conspiracy, thus becoming in death the personification of looming conflict.

"My heart refuses to grieve," Gandhi said upon learning of the murder. "It rather prays that all of us may be granted such a death." A "blessed death," a martyr's death, he called it, as if forecasting his own end.

The killer arrived at the door of the swami's Delhi bungalow on a December afternoon and managed to talk his way into the room where a convalescing Shraddhanand was bedridden, saying he had religious issues to discuss. The swami courteously invited him to return later when he hoped to be feeling stronger. The visitor then asked for a drink of water. Left alone with the great man, he pulled out a pistol and pumped two slugs into Shraddhanand's chest. The a.s.sa.s.sin turned out to be a Muslim calligrapher named Abdul Ras.h.i.+d. At his trial he explained that he blamed his victim for spreading blasphemies against the Prophet; then he was sentenced to hang, whereupon thousands of Muslims turned out for his funeral, hailing him, not his victim, as the true martyr. The Times of India The Times of India spread a report that students and teachers at the celebrated Muslim seminary at Deoband recited the Koran five times over in order to ensure the a.s.sa.s.sin a place in "the seventh heaven." spread a report that students and teachers at the celebrated Muslim seminary at Deoband recited the Koran five times over in order to ensure the a.s.sa.s.sin a place in "the seventh heaven."

Clearly, there'd been a communal mood swing in the years between the swami's unique exaltation at the Jama Masjid and the celebration of his killer's last rites. In those years, Shraddhanand had veered in and out of alliance with Gandhi. When they differed, it was because the swami thought Gandhi either was too soft on Muslims or had not lived up to his own pleadings on behalf of untouchables. In his view, the two failings were cause and effect.

The very idea that Gandhi's commitment to the struggle against untouchability could be challenged as halfhearted so early in his ascendancy over the national movement comes as a surprise. It's not part of the received narrative. Gandhi himself spoke and wrote as if he'd made the issue of what he called "high and low" one of his signature causes from his early South African years on. He could never get used to having his good intentions questioned in this area. Yet among Dalits in today's India the idea that Gandhi was a fair-weather friend, or no friend at all, has become a commonplace, one that's overdue for reevaluation. In that context, his relations with Shraddhanand offer a useful point of departure for the telling of a story that has been insufficiently explored, for all the studies of this much-studied life.

At first the bond between the two mahatmas seemed solid. Gandhi himself traced it back to 1913, when he received funds for his final satyagraha campaign in Natal and the Transvaal from students of Mahatma Muns.h.i.+ Ram at his school, the Gurukul, near the pilgrimage center of Hardwar in the foothills of the Himalayas. Muns.h.i.+ Ram had sent the students out to earn with the sweat of their brows funds to support the far-off indentured laborers marching as pa.s.sive resisters. His covering letter addressed Gandhi as "My dear brother." Gandhi, who was twelve years younger and not yet known by that reverential honorific, never forgot this. It was to the Gurukul that he dispatched the first batch of his followers from the Phoenix Settlement when finally he pulled up stakes in South Africa. Within three months of his own arrival in India, Gandhi himself turned up there in 1915 for his first face-to-face encounter with Muns.h.i.+ Ram. Meeting the celebrated Hindu reformer in person was the real purpose of his visit to Hardwar; the ma.s.s spectacle of the k.u.mbh Mela (and all the fetid insanitation to which it gave rise, which so shocked his sensibilities) was incidental.

The swami had been keeping a deliberate distance from the national movement but got swept up in it in support of the Mahatma-to-be. In his view, Gandhi was leading a dharma yudha dharma yudha, a religious struggle. The start of the noncooperation campaign in April 1919 was the occasion for Tagore's call on Indians to recognize Gandhi as a mahatma. Yet shortly after Shraddhanand was hailed for his role in the campaign in Delhi, he quit the movement to protest the abruptness of Gandhi's decision to shut the campaign down. The swami agreed that the movement wasn't disciplined enough to prevent outbreaks of rioting in a vast land. It was more Gandhi's high-handed way of deciding than the decision itself that he was protesting. "Thousands of people have been inspired by their feeling of trust in you...and have given up all worldly worries," he wrote to Gandhi, resigning from the satyagraha committee. "The pity is that you at once bring out your p.r.o.nouncements without even asking those people if they agree."

It was neither the first time nor would it be the last that Gandhi heard such a complaint from key supporters. Yet Shraddhanand very soon gave in to pleas from Gandhi and others and again threw himself back into the national movement, only to find himself regularly on the losing end of tactical disagreements with a leader used to consulting only himself. The most significant of these, in his own mind, were over the issue of untouchability, on which Gandhi had taken a consistent stand from his first months back in India. From Shraddhanand he then encountered for the first time the criticism that he was unwilling to back up his powerful exhortations with deeds. The swami could be even less malleable than Gandhi. For more than two decades, he'd been a stalwart promoter of the purification ceremonies called shuddi that were used to bring untouchables and low-caste Indians into a broad-based Hindu fold in which caste divisions would be downplayed if not eliminated. The man who'd spoken at the Jama Masjid had demonstrated his willingness to stand with Gandhi-and Muslims-in the Khilafat cause. But he bridled when he began to suspect that it was more of a priority for Gandhi than the struggle against untouchability.

So, in December 1919, at the Indian National Congress session in Amritsar, it was the swami, not Gandhi, who dwelled on the matter. "Is it not true," he asked provocatively, "that so many among you who make the loudest noises about the acquisition of political rights are not able to overcome your feelings of revulsion for those sixty millions of India who are suffering injustice whom you regard as untouchable? How many are there who take these wretched brothers of theirs to their hearts?" Nine months later at the special Congress session in Calcutta, Shraddhanand tried and failed to get the subject on the agenda. Gandhi was among those who felt that the discussion of the noncooperation campaign had more urgency, that anything else would be a digression. Given that the preservation of the caliphate was one of the campaign's declared aims, that amounted to saying the cause of the Muslims mattered more, for the moment at least, than the struggle against untouchability. "That was a grave mistake," the disappointed swami lamented. "Only at that time can non-cooperation with an enemy nation become a possibility, when full cooperation between ourselves has been achieved."

Gandhi made sure the Congress took up untouchability more or less in earnest at its regular annual meeting, held in Nagpur a few months after the Calcutta gathering. But Shraddhanand was not the only one who had started to worry that the Mahatma might be soft-pedaling the issue. The Anglican priest Charles F. Andrews, whom Gandhi addressed as "Charlie," had become close to Muns.h.i.+ Ram in India before meeting Gandhi in South Africa and had then brought the two together. Andrews wrote a "Dear Mohan" letter to Gandhi-he was the only one of the Mahatma's hundreds of correspondents who felt comfortable being so familiar-expressing his own fear that untouchability was slipping on his agenda. Gandhi was so upset by the criticism that he lay awake at two in the morning a month after the gathering at Nagpur and started framing his answer in his mind before rising at his usual hour of four to set down an emotional defense of his stand. Strong as the letter was, it confirmed the sense that he now saw untouchability as a cause that would have to wait its time. The Khilafat movement had priority because it was a prerequisite for unity between Hindus and Muslims, which was in turn a prerequisite for independence. But this was so, Gandhi argued with his usual capacity for disarming rationalization, not because untouchability was less important but because "it is a bigger problem than that of gaining Indian independence." He'd be able to "tackle it better," he said, if he gained independence "on the way." Therefore, he predicted, India "may free herself from English domination before India has become free of the curse of untouchability."

A quarter of a century later, when independence finally was conceded by a war-weary, battered Britain, that forecast proved to be more than half-true: the curse of untouchability lived on. But then Gandhi had little or no time left to "tackle" it. In the present tense of 1921 and 1922, Shraddhanand came to suspect that Gandhi's commitment to keeping Muslims in the national movement was stronger than his pa.s.sion for uplifting the society's outcastes. Like Tagore, he objected to the campaign to burn foreign cloth that might have gone to the very poor. But he went a step further, asking how come Gandhi could go easy on Muslim leaders who, instead of having to burn imported cloth, were given a pa.s.s to s.h.i.+p it to their brethren in Turkey. "While Mahatmaji stood adamant and did not have the least regard for Hindu feeling when a question of principle was involved," he wrote, "for the Muslim dereliction of duty there was always a very soft corner in his heart."

Swami Shraddhanand had his own problems with orthodox Hindus. Appointed to a Congress committee to work on the untouchability issue, he found that sufficient funds were never appropriated for that purpose, his own initiatives and proposals mysteriously derailed. In his view, the Congress wasn't serious about what he deemed to be "the most important plank" in its program. So in January 1922-a little more than a month before Gandhi was arrested for the first time in India and jailed for nearly two years in order to head off another round of civil disobedience-the swami again resigned. On the rebound, he then threw himself into the Hindu Mahasabha, the party of Hindu supremacists. He imagined his new allies could not fail to grasp the urgency of his efforts to bring untouchables into the Hindu fold. Essentially, in his view, the outcastes were up for grabs. They would fall victim to Muslim proselytizers if caste Hindus failed to grant them justice. At stake, ultimately, was power on the subcontinent. "If all untouchables become Muslims," the swami wrote, "then Muslims will become equal to the Hindus and at the time of independence, they will not depend on Hindus, but will be able to stand on their own legs." But there was a catch. Shraddhanand's form of shuddi, or purification, demanded social equality. That was too much for the Mahasabha. The Congress had at least paid lip service to his goals. The Mahasabha turned him down flat, stranding him yet again.

With Gandhi still in jail, Muhammad Ali became president of the Congress. His proposal for preserving Hindu-Muslim unity from the bitter compet.i.tion for untouchable souls-and eventual votes-was to cook a deal under which half the untouchables would become Muslims, half accepted as Hindus. Apparently, there would be no need to consult the untouchables themselves. To Shraddhanand this just demonstrated the Muslim l.u.s.t for power. He was further incensed when Ali was quoted as having said that he prayed that Gandhi would see the light of Islam, that until then the most errant Muslim could be surer of salvation than the purest Hindu. This led to a public exchange of letters between the swami and the maulana, but each pulled back from the brink of confrontation; the exchange was more notable for its careful courtesy, expressions of esteem, and reiteration of religious plat.i.tudes than for its polemical firepower.

In this same period, the swami twice visited Gandhi to lobby him over the lagging anti-untouchability effort and, it appears, discuss Muslim intentions (once while Gandhi was still in Yeravda prison in August 1923 and again in early 1924 when he was recuperating from an appendectomy that had become the occasion for his release). In particular, he complained about Muslim tabligh tabligh, or proselytizing efforts. Gandhi gave his answer in print in Young India Young India, blaming proselytizing on both sides, shuddi as well as tabligh, for much of the tensions between Hindus and Muslims. It was one thing to preach a creed out of burning faith, Gandhi said, another to misrepresent the other religion in a way that inevitably undermined national unity. "No propaganda can be allowed which reviles other religions," he wrote. "Intrepid and brave" as he was, Gandhi said, Shraddhanand spoke for the Hinduism of the Arya Samaj movement with which he'd long been identified, sharing its "narrow outlook and pugnacious habit."

The swami's political vicissitudes are worth dwelling on for the light they shed on Gandhi's dilemma. The younger Mahatma, now in his fifties and fully fledged as a national leader, usually spoke as if his campaigns for unity between Hindus and Muslims and for basic rights and justice for the tens of millions of oppressed untouchables were mutually reinforcing, the warp and woof of swaraj. In fact, they were often in conflict, not merely for his attention or primacy in the movement he led, but at a local level where proselytizers and religious reformers battled for souls. And, truth to tell, neither cause-that of Hindu-Muslim unity nor justice for untouchables-had much appeal to caste Hindus, especially rural caste Hindus, who were the backbone of the movement Gandhi and his lieutenants were building. His political revival may have articulated the nation's highest aspirations, but examined more closely at a regional or local level, it turned out to be a fragile coalition of competing, frequently clas.h.i.+ng communal interests. Inspiring the movement was one of Gandhi's tasks; holding it together was another, one that Shraddhanand, a Hindu reformer bent on brooking little or no compromise, didn't have to shoulder. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who'd soon emerge as the modern leader of the untouchables, later called Shraddhanand their "greatest and most sincere champion." Ambedkar was drawing a contrast to the other Mahatma, whom he'd come to regard as devious and untrustworthy-in other words, as a crafty politician.

The swami himself usually allowed his hopes for Gandhi to outweigh his disappointments. So even after Gandhi had publicly castigated him for weakening national unity, Shraddhanand continued to press the Mahatma to focus more on the untouchability issue. It was a pressure Gandhi could not ignore and perhaps welcomed. His long article taking on Shraddhanand in the context of Hindu-Muslim tensions hadn't once alluded to the plight of the untouchables. Five months later, however, we find him replying to the swami, who'd asked, in particular, that he lend more open support and leaders.h.i.+p to the first struggle on behalf of untouchables using his patented satyagraha methods. It targeted a long-standing ban on untouchables so much as walking on the roads approaching an ancient temple at Vaikom in the kingdom of Travancore, in what's now the South Indian state of Kerala. Although Gandhi had called the cause of the untouchables "a pa.s.sion of my life," he'd been in the uncomfortable position of counseling the Vaikom demonstrators to go easy in their use of satyagraha methods he himself had inspired, on behalf of a cause he ostensibly championed. "I am trying to make the necessary arrangements for Vaikom," he now wrote to Shraddhanand, who may have urged him to go to Travancore, where he'd yet to set foot. If so, the response is noncommittal. "I hope help will reach the satyagrahis" is all Gandhi says.

The note to the sometimes obstreperous swami is written from Muhammad Ali's bungalow in Delhi, where Gandhi has just ended his twenty-one-day fast of "penance," provoked by a string of worsening clashes between Hindus and Muslims. It's late 1924, and he has been out of jail for half a year, but he's still struggling to bridge fissures that had opened in the national movement while he was pa.s.sing his meditative two years in Yeravda prison-fissures not only between Hindus and Muslims but between those (known as No Changers) pledged to continue his earlier strategy of noncooperation and a political faction (called Swarajists) more impatient for the trappings of power in a colonial framework. That faction had formed in the leader's absence and was now bent on taking part in legislative councils the movement had vowed to boycott. Trying to function as a one-man balance wheel, Gandhi in this time is not only weakened physically but nearly immobilized politically; his one consistent strategy for moving forward involves the charkha, or spinning wheel. Hindus, Muslims, No Changers, Swarajists, all are enjoined to achieve self-reliance through spinning. (In June 1924, a few months after the Vaikom demonstrations began, Gandhi actually proposed that each member of the Congress be required to do a minimum amount of daily spinning; the motion provoked a Swarajist walkout and was instantly a dead letter even though it was eventually watered down and pa.s.sed so as not to humiliate the revered but no longer paramount leader.) [image]

Gandhi recuperating at Juhu Beach, after release from prison, 1924 (photo credit i7.1) (photo credit i7.1)

At this point, the isolated struggle in Vaikom, which Gandhi had yet to witness firsthand, was no longer getting his close attention. In all these ways, it was peripheral. Gandhi, from a distance, had championed the struggle in print in the pages of Young India Young India but otherwise had done his best to keep it under his thumb. What's at issue for him in Vaikom is a question that will hover over his leaders.h.i.+p for the rest of his life: Could he continue to function as a national leader, or has he been driven by the diversity and complexity of India, with all the clas.h.i.+ng aspirations arising from its communal and caste divisions, to define himself as leader of the Hindus? Could he simultaneously lead a struggle for independence and a struggle for social justice if that meant taking on orthodox high-caste Hindus, which would inevitably strain and possibly splinter his movement? Behind that question lurked an even more unsettling and long-lasting one, a question still debated by Dalits and Indian social reformers: Granted that Gandhi did much to make the practice of untouchability disreputable among modernizing Indians, what exactly was he prepared to do for the untouchables themselves beyond preach to their oppressors? It was such questions that-acting from afar-he'd been trying to finesse at Vaikom, with the result that this first use of satyagraha against untouchability was now in danger of languis.h.i.+ng. but otherwise had done his best to keep it under his thumb. What's at issue for him in Vaikom is a question that will hover over his leaders.h.i.+p for the rest of his life: Could he continue to function as a national leader, or has he been driven by the diversity and complexity of India, with all the clas.h.i.+ng aspirations arising from its communal and caste divisions, to define himself as leader of the Hindus? Could he simultaneously lead a struggle for independence and a struggle for social justice if that meant taking on orthodox high-caste Hindus, which would inevitably strain and possibly splinter his movement? Behind that question lurked an even more unsettling and long-lasting one, a question still debated by Dalits and Indian social reformers: Granted that Gandhi did much to make the practice of untouchability disreputable among modernizing Indians, what exactly was he prepared to do for the untouchables themselves beyond preach to their oppressors? It was such questions that-acting from afar-he'd been trying to finesse at Vaikom, with the result that this first use of satyagraha against untouchability was now in danger of languis.h.i.+ng.

Vaikom's s.h.i.+va temple sits in the center of a large walled compound, about the size of four football fields, reached on three sides by roads that cut through the bazaar of the smallish trading town southeast of Cochin, now Kochi. With the exception of a few shade-giving pipal trees, patches of gra.s.s, and a cement walk that can scald the bare feet of midday visitors required to shed their shoes or sandals at the gate, most of the area is packed earth that looks as if it's regularly swept. The temple itself is an oblong wooden structure with a latticed outer wall that sits on a stone platform under a sloping roof made of the same clay tiles traditionally used in Kerala's st.u.r.dier housing; at each of the four corners, a gold-painted statue of a bull-an animal symbolically a.s.sociated with s.h.i.+va-reclines on its haunches. In the inner sanctum, Brahman priests a.s.sist wors.h.i.+ppers making offerings to the deity. Today it's not uncommon for the wors.h.i.+ppers to include Dalits, former untouchables, and other members of lower castes who would have been barred from the s.h.i.+va temple in 1924. Sometimes these groups are the majority of visitors to the compound, drawn by the free midday meals available at the temple.

Recently, a seemingly heretical question has become a matter of public debate: whether non-Brahmans should be allowed to perform the priestly function in violation of caste rules. Today's priests, after all, are civil servants, employed by a state government that calls itself Marxist and collects as revenue whatever remains after maintenance costs from the offerings wors.h.i.+ppers bring. Such an issue would have been unimaginable at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha when the temple was administered by four priestly families, known by the name of their subcaste as Namboodiris (sometimes spelled Nambuthiris). The revenues they collected went to the maharajah of Travancore, a princely state that survived throughout the colonial period under watchful British oversight, occupying roughly the southern half of today's Kerala.

What Gandhi had learned about untouchability growing up in Gujarat, then viewing the subject from the other side of the Indian Ocean during his long sojourn in Africa, had scarcely prepared him for the mad intricacies of caste as practiced in Kerala. Untouchability was one thing, what were called "unapproachability" and even "unseeability" were something else. A Travancore Brahman was supposed to never have to set eyes on the lowest cla.s.s of untouchables. It was as simple and categorical as that. If he did, he would have to consider himself polluted and perform a purification rite. A member of a landowning caste called Nairs would be polluted if he allowed an Ezhava-the p.r.o.nunciation falls somewhere between IRR-ava IRR-ava and and ILL-ava ILL-ava-to come within forty paces of him; the prescribed distance for a Pulaya, a much lower stratum of untouchable, was sixty paces. Until the beginning of the last century, Pulayas were literally barred from public roads. They were expected to ring bells, rap sticks, or make honking noises to warn any caste Hindu nearby of the danger of pollution. Their mobility was more constrained than that of a plantation slave; indeed, they were bonded to specific landowners as field hands. Ezhavas (an upwardly mobile group who'd been by tradition toddy tappers), Tiyyas (coconut pluckers), Pulayas, and other subcastes at the bottom of the Kerala pyramid were uniformly barred from setting foot in the sacrosanct precincts of a place where Brahmans wors.h.i.+pped such as the s.h.i.+va temple at Vaikom; if they did, the shrine itself would be considered polluted and have to be purified. Yet, amazingly, those who were barred const.i.tuted a majority of those counted as Hindus in what's now Kerala. The 1924 satyagraha was evidence that their tolerance of this oppressive state of affairs had worn very thin.

Due to his many years abroad, Gandhi wrote, he hadn't known "many things that as an Indian I should have known." Before the satyagraha campaign, he hadn't ever heard of unapproachability. Its existence, he said, "staggered and puzzled me." He was especially puzzled because Travancore had a well-justified reputation for promoting literacy and education. It could also be called worldly, if the Arabian Sea were taken to be the world. The watery coastal region of what's now Kerala-a land of bays, ca.n.a.ls, lagoons, inland islands, gla.s.sy paddy fields reclaimed for large stretches from the sea-had been involved in the spice trade for centuries. Hindus, when untouchables were counted under that rubric, made up a bare majority of its population. Tallied together, Muslims and Christians amounted to 40 percent or more. There were even small communities of Jews, the newest of which had been settled near Cochin since the seventeenth century. Historians of a Marxist bent relate the oppression of untouchables in this riparian setting to the need to control field labor. By definition, the landowning castes didn't plow, plant, sow, or reap. Travancore may have looked idyllic, but only a small proportion of its population got to experience it that way.

Gandhi supplied the inspiration for the Vaikom campaign with his harping on the evil of untouchability. He'd also furnished its method of resistance; after all, he'd coined the word "satyagraha" years before in South Africa. ("To endure or bear hards.h.i.+ps" was his latest definition of the term by the time it was taken up in Kerala.) But it was Ezhavas who eventually gave the movement its impetus, and for all his stature as national leader the Mahatma was decidedly not their Moses. They had their own. He was called Sri Narayan Guru, an Ezhava who'd founded a religious movement with its own temples, teachings, and social values. Narayan Guru might be seen as a Hindu Protestant. His impact on twentieth-century Kerala was as powerful as that of John Wesley on eighteenth-century England. "One caste, one religion, and one G.o.d for man" had been his mantra; he'd been preaching on that text since well before Gandhi returned to India. His followers revered him but didn't follow him all the way; specifically, they didn't admit Pulayas and other lower-down untouchables to their temples; part of their own self-promotion from untouchability was to treat these lower orders as untouchables irredeemably. According to his biographer M. K. Sanoo, Narayan Guru was at first ambivalent about the satyagraha at Vaikom, telling his people they should get their house in order by opening their own temples to untouchables before demanding that the Namboodiris and other higher castes make way for Ezhavas. But eventually he blessed the movement, supported it with money, and, in a rare political outing, even traveled to Vaikom and prayed for the demonstrators.

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 cla.s.sic 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 wors.h.i.+ppers 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 partic.i.p.ants in the campaign than the religious right to wors.h.i.+p 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 "pa.s.sion" of his life, one of the "four pillars" of swaraj-inventing arguments to keep a lid on ma.s.s 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 Independent in Allahabad; had then spent more than two years in jail before understudying Gandhi as editor of in Allahabad; had then spent more than two years in jail before understudying Gandhi as editor of Young India 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. 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 leaders.h.i.+p, 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 p.r.o.nouncements suspect in the ears of the system's strict adherents. "I personally believe in varnashrama 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 rea.s.sure 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 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 absol