Great Soul_ Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India Part 6

"True, true," Gandhi replies, still sparring, still seeking to regain the initiative.

Later, pressed on the same point, he continues to sound defensive: "I have granted to you that the differences of birth are due to differences of action. But that does not mean that you can consider one man low and another man high." Gandhi here seems entangled in his own words. If his two propositions-that the untouchable are what they are because of misdeeds in previous lives, still, high and low must be considered equal-were not in total contradiction, they came close. Which, we have to ask, was most compelling for Gandhi, who means to be arguing here for the right of the unapproachables to approach fellow citizens in a public place? The answer should be obvious if his life up to this point is considered to have had any consistency. "No Indian is a coolie by birth," he'd written in his first letter to a Pretoria newspaper when he was not yet twenty-five. He felt more "at home" with the indentured laborers with whom he'd marched in South Africa than with highborn Indians, he'd told a Bombay garden party less than two weeks after his return home. "I am not ashamed of calling myself a scavenger," he would tell Travancore's maharani, or queen, the very next morning, repeating a line he'd first used years before in South Africa. Yet here we find him muttering, "True, true," when faced with a doctrine of predestination presuming evil done in past lives as a fundamental explanation for untouchability and the extremes of inequality it fosters. It's possible that India and deeper reading in its scriptures over time had made him more orthodox. The likelier explanation is that he still could make himself believe in the possibility, as he once put it, of "cleaning Hindu society" and thought of himself here as being now engaged in such an exercise of public hygiene. In any case, it was nothing new for him to present himself as a sanatani sanatani, or orthodox, Hindu. He'd done so four years earlier in a speech to a conference of the "suppressed cla.s.ses." There could be no swaraj, he said then, "so long as the Hindus willfully regard untouchability as part of their religion." What was new here was that he'd adjusted his timetable-untouchability's end, as he'd suggested to Charlie Andrews, might have to wait for the departure of the British-so even if he was inclined to theological debate on the ironclad influence of past lives, now was not the time. It would be enough if he could persuade the priests to open the roads.

Perhaps Nehru's summing-up in that 1955 interview has some bearing on Gandhi's surprising dance, his bobbing and weaving, at Vaikom: "His approach was not to go and irritate the ma.s.ses in their deep convictions...Gandhi was always thinking of the ma.s.ses and of the mind of India and he was trying to lift it in the right direction; to give it gradually more and more things to think about, yet without upsetting it or making it frustrated." Put another way, he believed he could use moral suasion and his own example to build an inclusive sense, common to Brahmans and untouchables alike, of Indian nationhood.

"I am trying myself to be a bridge between blind orthodoxy and those who are victims of that blind orthodoxy," he explains. "I have come here to create peace and friends.h.i.+p between the orthodox and those who are agitating," he's quoted as saying in Malayala Manorama Malayala Manorama. In other words, he presents himself as having come not as a crusader but as a mediator. Self-ordained in this way, he won't stand with one side in opposition to another, even at Vaikom, where it's apparent to him that the orthodox represent no more than a small fraction of the population. To break the impa.s.se, he offers a "sportsman-like" suggestion that the matter of open roads be settled by a referendum limited to caste Hindus. The high priest stolidly stands on principle. "We would not allow this question to be subject to a vote," Indanturuttil Nambiatiri replies.

Immediately after Gandhi exits through his gate, the Brahman holds a purification ceremony in the pavilion where the encounter occurred so as to banish any pollution that may have trailed behind the Mahatma. Today, by the old priest's standards, the place is a veritable sink of pollution, for after his death in 1957, owners.h.i.+p of his residence pa.s.sed to a trade union affiliated with the Communist Party, the Vaikom Taluk Toddy Tappers Union. A red flag now flies outside, hammers and sickles adorn the facade.

After viewing this distinctly non-Gandhian monument to the vicissitudes of history, I went next door to another mildewed structure where Nambiatiri's aged daughter and son-in-law still reside. The story I heard there was not one of stubborn resistance to change. A decade after Gandhi's first visit, all temples in Travancore were finally thrown open by royal decree to any manner of Hindu, including outcastes. To avoid spiritual pollution, which had become inevitable in their view with the arrival of such unapproachable riffraff, many Namboodiris then stopped praying at the s.h.i.+va temple. This was what Indanturuttil Nambiatiri had vowed to do in his encounter with Gandhi if the temples and their approach roads were ever opened by royal decree. "We will forsake those temples and those roads," he'd said. But when the time came, it turns out, the priest wasn't among the boycotters. He continued to supervise the rituals at the s.h.i.+va temple; in other words, he clung to his job. "He was prepared to accommodate to change," said the son-in-law, a retired botanist named Krishnan Nambuthiri. "He had a very balanced mind. He was not at all moved by emotions."

I asked how he felt about Gandhi. "He never hated him," the old man said. In that answer, offered eighty-five years after Gandhi's visit next door, sixty-one years after his murder, glowed a last dying ember of the orthodox view he'd encountered that day.

Leaving the meeting with the Brahmans empty-handed, Gandhi went to address a crowd of twenty thousand that had been waiting nearby for word of some kind of outcome. It heard an admission of failure but not defeat. "As you know," he began, "ever since I have set foot on Indian soil after a long exile in South Africa, I have been speaking frankly, fearlessly and freely on the question of untouchability."

It's surprising that the Mahatma feels a need to establish his reformist credentials in this way. Possibly he's aware that he's addressing more than one audience. The first is made up of satyagraha demonstrators and their supporters, another the orthodox; finally, there were those, probably the majority, who are there to bathe in the enn.o.bling mist of darshan. "I claim to be a sanatani Hindu," he goes on, leaning in the other direction. "I have come, therefore, to reason with my orthodox friends. I have come to plead with them...I am sorry to confess I was not able to produce the impression I expected to produce on them." The confidence that he would prevail, with which he'd started off his encounter with the Brahmans, is typically Gandhian. It doesn't desert him here. He congratulates those who have been demonstrating for a year on the "gentlemanly battle" they've waged and counsels patience. What he calls a "reasonable solution" may yet be found without the intervention of the government. Essentially, he tells them they must wait until their suffering has moved the hearts of the priestly holdouts he himself had failed to move that afternoon. Reverential as they are, some in his audience shake their heads in dismay and disagreement.

Gandhi runs into more doubts the next day when he meets the satyagrahis at their ashram. One wants to know how long the struggle will last. "A few days or forever," he says offhandedly, setting a standard of selflessness but also placing himself far above the fray. That brings him back, yet again, to South Africa. He thought the first satyagraha campaign would be over in a month there. "It lasted exactly eight years," he says. Someone then asks about fasting unto death. "I shall advise people to let you die," the Mahatma unhelpfully replies.

What exactly is hanging him up? As we follow Gandhi on his first of three Travancore tours, the question keeps arising. In their ambiguity, his own responses were at the time unsatisfying and still are. Outside Kerala, Gandhi's role in the Vaikom Satyagraha is most often interpreted uncritically as a fulfillment of his values: his unswerving opposition to untouchability, his adherence to nonviolence. Inside Kerala, where this history is better known, it's usually seen as having shown up a disguised but unmistakable attachment on his part to the caste system. Neither view is convincing. What really shows here is the difficulty of being Gandhi, of balancing his various goals, and, more particularly, the difficulty of social change in India, of taking down untouchability without cleaving his movement and sowing the "chaos and confusion" he feared. Not since his stand-down after the Chauri Chaura violence three years earlier had he been willing to launch a campaign of nonviolent resistance himself.

Caste, untouchability, and social action are the subjects that come up for discussion when his tour delivers him to the headquarters of the local prophet of "one caste, one religion," Narayan Guru. It's the first meeting of the two ris.h.i.+s. They converse for a couple of hours. Gandhi then emerges to speak to hundreds of Narayan Guru's followers. Presumably, these are mostly Ezhavas, a group that has virtually hauled itself out of untouchability. Gandhi addresses them, nevertheless, as members of the "depressed cla.s.ses." He speaks of "a wave of impatience going on not only in Travancore, but throughout the length and breadth of India, among the depressed cla.s.ses." He means impatience with the orthodox. "I a.s.sure you it is wrong," he says. He also announces that he has wrung from Narayan Guru a pledge to take up spinning.

The highly partial version of the encounter handed down over the generations by Narayan Guru's followers places the guru and not the Mahatma in the role of tutor. It's on that day, it's said, that Gandhi's understanding of caste was finally deepened and reformed. "That day he became a Mahatma," Babu Vijayanath, son of the movement's original organizer, told me, getting carried away with this guru-centric view. In reality, the Gandhi who came out of the meeting sounded just like the Gandhi who went in: as sure of himself and reliant on his own intuitions, as unlikely to be touched by the arguments of others. Narayan Guru told him untouchability would not end in a generation. "He thinks I shall have to appear in another incarnation, before I see the end of this agony," Gandhi wryly reported. "I hope to see it in my lifetime, in this age."

There's no evidence that the two men ever discussed a tactical disagreement they may have had. According to a police report discovered in Travancore's archives, the guru had earlier expressed skepticism about Gandhi's restrained tactics, wondering why the satyagrahis didn't "a.s.sert their rights and enter the prohibited area forcibly." The aftermath of the Mahatma's visit provides circ.u.mstantial backing for this unattributed report. After the Vaikom Satyagraha ended, his direct influence in Travancore waned. Narayan Guru's Ezhava followers, however, continued to press for entry at other temples, using more aggressive tactics, sometimes clas.h.i.+ng with caste Hindus. In one such clash, at Thiruvarppu in 1926, the founder of the Vaikom movement, T. K. Madhavan, received a severe beating from which he never fully recovered, according to his son.

Then as now, some of Narayan Guru's followers were inclined to rate the Mahatma lower than their local prophet because of his reluctance to confront the orthodox. A story got about that India's leader had reacted pa.s.sively after being barred from the Devi temple at Kanyak.u.mari, down south near the tip of the subcontinent, on grounds that his merchant-caste station was too lowly for him to be admitted. He wanted to wors.h.i.+p in the temple, so the story in a local newspaper went, but instead meekly bowed to the order to halt and prayed outside, where he stood. Gandhi hardly ever prayed in temples, so the story, which is not well doc.u.mented, may be viewed skeptically. What's remembered still is the fierce excoriation of a local crusader against untouchability, a Malayalam poet named Sahodaran Ayyappan who'd earlier earned notoriety and risked ostracism by inviting Pulayas and other untouchables to a public feast. Hearing of the Mahatma's supposed retreat, Ayyappan wondered in print about the contrast between the Gandhi who bravely challenged "the British lion" and the Gandhi who still "licks the feet of a Brahman...wagging his tail more shamelessly than a dog."

Definitely it was Gandhi who pulled the plug on the original movement by reaching a truce with Travancore's police commissioner, an Englishman named W. H. Pitt, over the heads of local activists, in much the way he'd bargained with s.m.u.ts after the 1913 strikes in Natal. The terms of the deal were intentionally ambiguous: The police and their barricades would be withdrawn on condition that the demonstrators continued to stand back from the approach roads. The order barring them would meanwhile be wiped off the books. No rights would be inscribed. But after the orthodox got used to the idea that approachability might now become a practical reality, if not quite a civic right, on most of those roads, all castes and outcastes would be allowed to use them. That's more or less what happened the following November, though entry to the temple was still forbidden to a majority of Hindus, all but the upper castes.

Conspicuous in the whole Vaikom agitation was the absence of any organized effort to recruit Pulayas and other untouchables with less status than the upwardly mobile Ezhavas. Some did take part, but Travancore's one recognized Pulaya leader, a figure with the single name Ayyankali-now memorialized by a large statue in a major traffic circle of the capital, Thiruvananthapuram-kept his distance from Vaikom and the movement to break down barriers to Hindu wors.h.i.+p. His cause was the social uplift of his people through their own efforts, not Hindu reform. K. K. Kochu, a Dalit intellectual whom I met near Kottayam, has written that Ayyankali's abstention from Vaikom-his "silence"-is what echoes down over the years for Dalits. That abstention reflects something other than indifference. It points to a rising impulse to act on their own behalf. When Gandhi, on a later trip, finally was introduced to Ayyankali, he hailed him, it's said, as "king of the Pulayas," then invited him to declare his greatest wish. "I only wish that ten from our community would get B.A.'s," the Pulaya king coolly replied.

That wasn't the future Gandhi painted when he met untouchables on his swing through Kerala. Repeating themes in his talk to indentured sugarcane workers in Natal at the end of 1913, he urged them to confront their own bad habits in order to measure up, to earn the equality, which would then be their just due as good Hindus.

"How many among you can read and write?" a chastising Mahatma began one such talk.

"How many are drunkards?"

"How many eat dead flesh?"

"How many eat beef?"

"I know many of you don't take your bath every day. I can see it from the condition of your hair...I know you will smell bad." But he also said: "Many Hindus consider it a sin to touch you. I regard it as a sin to say and think that it is a sin to touch you."

This is the Gandhian dialectic, an exercise in fine-tuning a Hindu social order that crushes those at the bottom. In his own way, he's working both sides of the disputed street, trying to tear down unapproachability while hoping to bring the unapproachables into conformity with standards usually deemed to be beyond them. What he's not doing is calling on the "suppressed cla.s.ses," as he so often termed them, to do anything for themselves beyond bathe and watch what they put in their mouths. Once, in pa.s.sing, he mentions the possibility that they could attempt pa.s.sive resistance on their own behalf, but he doesn't encourage it. It was one thing to march against white overlords for limited rights in South Africa, another now to march against Hindu traditionalists.

His last stop in Travancore was at Alwaye, now called Aluva, about forty miles north of Vaikom, where a young Cambridge graduate teaching at a local Christian college witnessed his arrival. "Gandhi was sitting cross-legged in a third-cla.s.s compartment, his curious gargoyle face showing no special awareness of the crowd and the notables and the cheers of the students." So Malcolm Muggeridge remembered the scene years later.

In his account, thousands of poor villagers pressed forward as usual "to take the dust from his feet." Then Gandhi "caught sight of some untouchables in a sort of roped-off enclosure." Brus.h.i.+ng past students shouting political slogans and notables waiting to lay marigold garlands over his head, he went to the untouchables and "started singing with them what sounded like a rather lugubrious hymn, to the obvious consternation of the notables."

In his memoir, written late in life, the English writer doesn't dwell on that moment; his narrative reels off into reflections on the course of the independence movement and the history through which he has lived. But before dismissing Gandhi as an upholder of the system with a deliberately ambiguous message-in other words, as a hypocrite-as some Kerala intellectuals seem inclined to do when they consider Vaikom all these years later, we might pause at that scene in Alwaye. If it was as Muggeridge later described it, what was Gandhi saying and to whom? In the roped-off enclosure, he was raising the subject of common humanity, not only for the sake of the untouchables, but for the students and the notables and the villagers who'd taken the dust from his feet. And, as so often in his unusually well-recorded life, it's the action rather than the always earnest, sometimes contradictory, sometimes moving words that leaps off the page.

8.

HAIL, DELIVERER.

THOUGH "not a quick despairer," as he once said, Gandhi sometimes flirted with despair. He never gave in to it for long, but the year before he paid his visit to Vaikom, he'd been close to the edge. The low point came in the middle of 1924 at the Indian National Congress meeting in Ahmedabad, the one that watered down his resolution calling for daily spinning as an absolute prerequisite for members.h.i.+p in the movement. If he couldn't persuade his supposed followers that the charkha, or spinning wheel, was the essential instrument of Indian self-reliance and freedom, the autocrat in him had been ready to require that they at least act as if they believed him. Discovering they were prepared to humor him but not be commanded, he described himself as "defeated and humbled." "not a quick despairer," as he once said, Gandhi sometimes flirted with despair. He never gave in to it for long, but the year before he paid his visit to Vaikom, he'd been close to the edge. The low point came in the middle of 1924 at the Indian National Congress meeting in Ahmedabad, the one that watered down his resolution calling for daily spinning as an absolute prerequisite for members.h.i.+p in the movement. If he couldn't persuade his supposed followers that the charkha, or spinning wheel, was the essential instrument of Indian self-reliance and freedom, the autocrat in him had been ready to require that they at least act as if they believed him. Discovering they were prepared to humor him but not be commanded, he described himself as "defeated and humbled."

The proof of his sinking spirits lay in the fact that it was Gandhi himself who'd moved the watering down of his own resolution as a way of avoiding defeat for himself and a possible split. It was, he admitted, a kind of surrender. In the pointlessness of the debate and the maneuvering that accompanied it, he felt he heard G.o.d's voice telling him, or so he later wrote in imitation King James English, "Thou fool, knowest not thou that thou are impossible? Thy time is up." What he said in the open meeting was nearly as dark: "I do not know where I stand or what I should do."

He'd lost not only command of the movement and a sense of direction. He also seems to have lost his firm conviction that he'd internalized its most accurate compa.s.s, that his inner quest would ultimately be synonymous with India's. His reaction to this onset of uncertainty was to sideline himself from national politics, saying he'd not play an active role until the six-year prison term to which he'd been sentenced in 1922 finally expired in 1928, even though he'd been released after two years, even though, with perfect inconsistency, he'd immediately offered upon his release to resume his role as the movement's "general." During this self-imposed withdrawal, he'd confine himself, he said, to three topics: untouchability, spinning, and Hindu-Muslim unity. Before long, as a consequence of widespread communal violence, Hindu-Muslim unity had to be struck from the list of his ongoing projects. "What is one to do where one is helpless?" a plaintive Gandhi asked.

Sometimes he almost seemed to sulk. He blamed "educated India" for its tendency to "split into parties." He still could see "only one way" forward himself: his way, to work "from bottom upward." Next he blamed the British, "the third party" in Hindu-Muslim disputes, always casting about for new ways to divide and rule. "The government of India is based on distrust," he said. (His point, on this occasion, was that it sowed distrust by favoring Muslims. Of course, if he'd not favored Muslims himself, the national movement would never have joined the Khilafat agitation.) Venturing into hyperbole, he finally allowed himself to sound as if he were blaming G.o.d: Hindu-Muslim unity I made a mission of my life. I worked for it in South Africa, I toiled for it here, I did penance for it, but G.o.d was not satisfied, G.o.d did not want me to take any credit for the work. So I have now washed my hands. I am helpless. I have exhausted all my effort.

Surprisingly, by the time Gandhi speaks in this seemingly abject vein, he has actually started to rebound. He'd interrupted his ceaseless touring of the country to evangelize for the spinning wheel and then spent the whole of 1926 in his ashram outside Ahmedabad, explaining that he needed to rest and reflect. It has been called his "year of silence," but he was hardly silent. Every week there were new articles for Young India Young India, including the weekly installments of his autobiography. By January 1927, when he spoke of having "exhausted all my effort," he was ready to get back on the hustings, to resume carrying his message across India. The more he speaks of his helplessness on Hindu-Muslim issues and remoteness from politics-the two, Hindu-Muslim issues and politics, were often synonymous in this period-the clearer it becomes that he views his retreat as a temporary phenomenon. A cross-cultural comparison comes to mind that may seem unhelpful, even wildly inappropriate. The Gandhi who sits at the Sabarmati Ashram in the mid-1920s, holding himself aloof from the politics of the national movement, pursues a strategy that another inner-directed politician would adopt in the waning days of the Third Republic in France several decades later, not in an ashram, but in a village called Colombey-les-Deux-eglises. It's impossible to picture an unbending Charles de Gaulle sitting cross-legged. But Gandhi, as obviously as de Gaulle later, was not just holding himself aloof but biding his time, waiting for his country to summon him back to leaders.h.i.+p on his own terms.

He says so in so many words, only sometimes he couches the thought in religious language. Whatever his doubts in 1924, he now seems certain he'll be needed. "I am an optimist because I believe in the efficacy of prayerful thought," he writes to a supporter toward the end of 1926, his year of retreat at the ashram. "When time for action has come, G.o.d will give the light and guidance. I therefore watch, wait and pray holding myself in momentary readiness to respond." What "appears to be my inaction," he says in that same period, defending his obsession with the promotion of the spinning wheel, "is really concentrated action."

"I am biding my time," he finally wrote in a letter dated May 1928, "and you will find me leading the country in the field of politics when the country is ready. I have no false modesty about me. I am undoubtedly a politician in my own way, and I have a plan for the country's freedom."

The summons back to leaders.h.i.+p came five or so months later, at approximately the same time as what would have been the end of his six-year prison term. By then, the first successful satyagraha campaign in years had wrung a government concession on high land taxes in Gujarat's Bardoli district, the same battleground from which Gandhi had abruptly withdrawn six years earlier in reaction to the Chauri Chaura violence, aborting a painstakingly prepared campaign. Finally, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Gandhi's disciple Vallabhbhai Patel, Bardoli Two had restored faith in the tactics of militant nonviolence at a time when a young Bengali firebrand, Subhas Chandra Bose, was just starting to win notice and backing with a call to resistance that promised to be the opposite of pa.s.sive. "Give me blood and I promise you freedom," Bose said grandiloquently.

The Indian National Congress was deeply divided, not just between Hindus and Muslims, but generationally too, over proposals for const.i.tutional reform designed to be served up as a set of demands to the British: in effect, an ultimatum. The proposals had been drafted by a committee chaired by Motilal Nehru, father of Jawaharlal, the future prime minister. The son, in the forefront of the younger generation, did not support the father's report; neither did the Muslims, represented by Jinnah and Muhammad Ali, now on the verge of his final break with Gandhi. The drama and importance of the moment are probably clearer in the long perspective of history than they were at the time. Gandhi was the one figure in India who had any chance of steering the Nehru Report, as it was known, to formal acceptance by the Congress. That is what he was called upon to do by the senior Nehru in 1928. Being Gandhi, he took the call as the summons back to active leaders.h.i.+p for which he'd been waiting for four long years.

So he didn't fasten on the question of how many seats would be reserved for Muslims in the legislative a.s.semblies of states where they were in a minority-that's to say, most states. The Nehru Report had reneged on a promise the Congress had made to the Muslims twelve years earlier, before the rise of Gandhi: that they'd be able to elect their own representatives through separate electorates. Instead, it came up with the idea of reserving for Muslims a minimum number of seats in Hindu-majority provinces, in line with the proportion of Muslims in the population; in the national legislature, it was prepared to concede one-quarter of the seats to Muslims. Jinnah thought Motilal Nehru had set the price for this s.h.i.+ft-measured in the number of reserved Muslim seats in the national a.s.sembly in particular-too low. Here was a moment for Gandhi to become active again on Hindu-Muslim questions, which had soured him on politics to the point, he said, that he'd "given up reading newspapers." But he had never been much interested in const.i.tutional mechanics; and though usually ready to make concessions in the cause of unity with Muslims, he was focused now on the practical demands of Congress politics and his own restoration, so he let the moment pa.s.s.

At a mammoth All Parties Convention held in Calcutta at the end of 1928, Jinnah advanced a series of amendments, the most important of which would guarantee Muslims one-third of the seats in a future central legislature as opposed to the 25 percent Motilal Nehru had contemplated. It wasn't an offer made in the take-it-or-leave-it fas.h.i.+on that would later come to seem characteristic. In Calcutta he could hardly have sounded more accommodating. "We are sons of this land, we have to live together," he said. "I believe there is no progress for India until Muslims and Hindus are united." The Congress, which claimed to represent all Indians, including Muslims, turned a deaf ear. The Jinnah amendments were voted down, and Gandhi kept his distance.

Jinnah took it as a brush-off and walked away, taking with him Muhammad Ali, the Gandhi ally who'd worn khadi, proselytized for the spinning wheel, given up beef, and even, on the occasion of Gandhi's 1924 fast of "penance" for Hindu-Muslim harmony in Ali's own home, thought to present the Mahatma with a cow saved from the abattoir as a symbol of Muslim respect for Hindu values and sensitivities. Within weeks of this rupture, his brother Shaukat Ali was promising not to attend any meetings with Hindus for a year. "This is the parting of the ways," Jinnah wrote at the time. Disgusted with politics and heartsore over his separation from a younger wife from a non-Muslim background whom he'd loved and by her subsequent early death, Jinnah moved to England for four years. "What is to be done? The Hindus are short-sighted and I think, incorrigible," he'd remark to a friend. Gandhi wasn't happy about the Congress's treatment of Jinnah. But it's doubtful that he ever saw the proud Bombay lawyer in these years as a potential ma.s.s leader of Muslims, let alone as a possible ally. Mohammed Ali Jinnah wore no religion on his well-tailored sleeves. How could the Mahatma conceive of speaking to Muslims through such a man?

Inside the Congress, there was still a fight to be waged over the details of the Nehru Report, which called on Britain to grant India dominion status within the British Commonwealth. Jawaharlal Nehru and Bose wanted an immediate declaration in favor of full independence by the Congress, leading the way to immediate confrontation, one that would remain nonviolent only if nonviolence succeeded. Gandhi countered with a temporizing resolution vowing that India would declare independence in two years if Britain failed to grant dominion status by then. Finally it was agreed that Britain would be given just one year-until the end of 1929-to act. That one year, so other resolutions promised, would be dedicated to the discipline of Gandhi's "constructive program," including the removal of untouchability, boycott of foreign cloth, promotion of khadi, prohibition, and the advancement of women. This was all on his insistence, showing he was once again in a position to lay down terms.

But, of course, when the year had pa.s.sed, India still wasn't a dominion and social reform remained stalled. Swaraj within a year hadn't happened for a second time. So a symbolic independence day now had to be proclaimed for January 26, 1930. It was left entirely up to the Mahatma to decide how the long-threatened campaign of noncooperation would be conducted after that. The movement was larger than it had been at the time of Gandhi's first takeover but harder to lead; by sheer inertia, it pulled in many directions while being herded to the one overriding goal of nationhood. Still, he was effectively back in the position of prime mover that had been formally bestowed on him a decade earlier. As he'd said during his period on the sidelines, "For me there is only one way." That way was inherently confrontational, although it was expressed in a vocabulary of love and nonviolence. It included satyagraha, noncooperation, civil disobedience; the terms, not exactly synonymous, blended into one another, covering a spectrum of meanings that, by now, India and its colonial rulers had come to understand. But the specific tactics for the coming campaign eluded him for weeks.

His inspiration-G.o.d given, he'd say-came in two stages. In the first, he took account of his continuing disappointment with the Congress, his sense that it remained an undisciplined, ramshackle coalition of self-regarding interests with little or no serious commitment to social reform. "In the present state of the Congress no civil disobedience can be or should be offered in its name," he wrote in a confidential note to the younger Nehru, whom he'd just designated as its president. The flames of the Chauri Chaura violence, now eight years in the past, still cast lurid shadows in the Mahatma's mind. So his imagination carried him further back, all the way to South Africa, where he claimed to have started the Natal agitation with sixteen chosen ashramites, trained by him at Tolstoy Farm and the Phoenix Settlement. The political stakes were altogether different now. There a small, beleaguered minority sought minimum rights-the repeal of an oppressive tax designed to drive it from the land, an acknowledgment of rudimentary citizens.h.i.+p, permission if not the right to cross internal borders-in exchange for its tacit acknowledgment that political equality was not on the table, could not even be mentioned as a distant goal. Here not just equality but sovereignty-swaraj in the fullest possible meaning of self-determination-was the prize sought in the name of 320 million Indians, including the impoverished "dumb millions," for and of whom the Mahatma habitually spoke.

Gandhi's somewhat rosy version of his heroic personal history on the other subcontinent had merged with his vision of India's destiny; for the moment, at least, they'd be identical. Civil disobedience, he told Nehru, "should be offered by me alone or jointly with a few companions even as I did in South Africa."

The second inspiration-the specifics of what this "self-suffering" vanguard of satyagrahis would actually do, how it would address the common needs of all those millions, how it might be emulated-finally came after the symbolic independence day on January 26, 1930, and many stirring calls by Gandhi on his immediate entourage and the movement at large to steel themselves for struggle. When it came, it had all the beauty and simplicity of a fresh artistic vision realized for the first time, of a discovery in basic science. The self-proclaimed "expert in the satyagraha business" outdid himself this time, symbolically wrapping the nationalist urge for political freedom in the basic values of his "constructive program," intended for the uplift of India's lowliest, its most downcast.

This time the inspiration came in one syllable-salt. Gandhi had periodically experimented with a salt-free diet himself and pressed it on his disciples at Tolstoy Farm. But now he was prepared to campaign on the proposition that "next to water and air, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life." It was precious because it was needed by all and heavily taxed by an alien regime, which curtailed its local production. Since the days of the East India Company, the colonial authorities had counted on revenue derived from their salt monopoly and the tax on salt, paid by even the poorest households, Hindu or Muslim. Gandhi's inspiration was that he could march to the sh.o.r.e of the Arabian Sea from the Sabarmati Ashram and there, at a place called Dandi, defy the law-and simultaneously unify India-by simply picking up a chunk of salt.

Sticking to the South African script, he first wrote to Lord Irwin, the viceroy, setting out his intentions and demands as he'd written to s.m.u.ts in 1913. "My ambition is no less than to convert the British people through nonviolence," he wrote, "and thus make them see the wrong they have done to India." The viceroy also stuck to the script. Rather than reply directly to the Mahatma, he had his private secretary send a stiff note as s.m.u.ts's secretary had done, saying that Lord Irwin was sorry to hear that Gandhi planned to break the law and endanger public peace.

So for the first time since he led indentured strikers across the Transvaal border, sixteen and a half years earlier, Gandhi was ready to march again. In 1927, when he may have suffered a slight stroke, Gandhi's health had broken down. Now, nearly three years later, at sixty-one, he set off on a sun-bathed March morning to tramp more than two hundred miles to the sea, promising never to return to the ashram until India had its freedom. (As events unfolded in the less than half year left to him after India's actual independence in 1947, he never made it back to Ahmedabad.) "The fire of a great resolve is in him, and surpa.s.sing love of his miserable countrymen," wrote Jawaharlal Nehru, who watched the launch. In his train followed seventy-eight, or maybe eighty, disciples, including, according to his grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi, two Muslims, one Christian, four untouchables (and therefore, by simple arithmetic, seventy-one, or seventy-three, caste Hindus). Very soon thousands were converging on the dirt roads and paths he traveled to witness this modest, unarmed procession bent on bringing down an empire. Leaning on a bamboo staff and walking ten or twelve miles a day barefoot, pa.s.sing through scores of villages where blossoms and leaves had been strewn in his path as if for a conquering hero, Gandhi arrived at Dandi twenty-four days later and there, on the morning of April 6, 1930, stooped to harvest his bit of salt, a simple act of defiance swiftly emulated by tens of thousands up and down the subcontinent's two coasts.

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Dandi Beach, 1930, defying law by harvesting salt (photo credit i8.1) (photo credit i8.1)

"Hail, Deliverer," said the poet Sarojini Naidu, a good friend, standing by his side. Or so legend has it.

Not quite a year later, the Congress movement designated Gandhi as its sole representative, with full negotiating powers, to a conference on the path to Indian self-rule called by the British government. His prestige and authority had never stood higher. It had been an exceedingly crowded and packed twelve months, but Gandhi, whose Salt March had been the catalyst for a vast, largely peaceful upheaval that had shaken the pillars of the Raj, resulting in some ninety thousand arrests across India, had himself spent nearly nine of those months in the relative quiet and seclusion of Yeravda prison near Poona following his arrest on May 5. Just before the arrest, he'd ordered a nonviolent raid on a saltworks belonging to the state monopoly, at a place called Dharasana, 150 miles up the coast from Bombay. Sarojini Naidu, the poet, took the imprisoned leader's place as field marshal, with twenty-five hundred resisters under her command. She ordered them to take the blows of the local police, armed with the long lead-tipped bamboo batons known as lathis, without so much as raising their hands to protect their heads.

There were hundreds of cracked heads and much bloodshed that day as the resisters advanced rank after rank in the greatest example of disciplined nonviolence in the face of officially sanctioned police violence before American civil rights marchers reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Alabama, thirty-five years later. The spectacle had a momentary impact across the world, a momentous one across India, inspiring illicit salt making on a grand scale up and down the two coasts, leading to scores of further confrontations, with the state now forced to use violence to quell nonviolent resisters in most regions of the subcontinent in its drive to restore its waning authority.

From the prison where he and his father were being held in Allahabad, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote at the end of July to Gandhi in Yeravda prison. "The last four months in India," he said, "have gladdened my heart and have made me prouder of Indian men, women and even children than I have ever been...May I congratulate you on the new India you have created by your magic touch! What the future will bring I know not, but the past has made life worth living and our prosaic existence has developed something of epic greatness in it."

Gandhi wasn't freed until January 26, 1931. It was a grace note that the viceroy chose the Congress's wishful, self-proclaimed "independence day," which he might easily have ignored, for his release and that of other movement leaders. It was also a signal that the British hoped to break the impa.s.se that civil disobedience had created, clear the jails by dangling the possibility of a political settlement, and perhaps even achieve the appearance of one by granting a measure of home rule on which the fuzzy word "dominion" might be pinned. Irwin freed Gandhi the way s.m.u.ts had all those years earlier, to enter direct negotiations with him personally, leading to an ambiguous agreement he'd then have to interpret and sell to the various parts of the national movement. Gandhi and the Congress had boycotted the first round of what was called the Round Table Conference in London that year, which was supposed to chart a path to self-rule for the vast territory of British India, stretching all the way from the Afghan border to the Burmese, encompa.s.sing present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It was important to the viceroy and Whitehall that he show up for the second round.

Britain wasn't bargaining from a position of strength, just out of a habit of dominance. Deep into a worsening international economic crisis triggered by the bursting of the stock market bubble on Wall Street, its minority Labor Party government was preoccupied with growing millions of desperate unemployed in what wasn't yet a welfare state, as well as questions hovering over the pound sterling, including how long it could remain tied to the gold standard and thus maintain its position as the leading reserve currency. From London's perspective it was beginning to be possible to view India as a burden. Labor was the least imperial-minded of British parties; many of its members, including the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, had voiced sentiments that could be interpreted as anti-imperialist. It led a weak coalition, and India was not really high on its agenda. Still, it was possible to imagine circ.u.mstances in which it might be inclined to act.

If any such possibility existed, it was essentially snuffed out five days before Gandhi boarded the SS Rajputana Rajputana in Bombay on August 29, 1931, on his first trip to Europe in sixteen years, which would also prove to be his last. Splitting his own party, Prime Minister MacDonald formed a national government in which what remained of his Labor Party had to share power with the Tories, the party that served in British politics as the High Church of the empire in general and the Raj in particular. Within ten days of Gandhi's arrival in London, Britain went off the gold standard, devaluing the pound and rendering the vaunted Round Table Conference on the future of British India a sideshow before it had got through the opening round of speeches. in Bombay on August 29, 1931, on his first trip to Europe in sixteen years, which would also prove to be his last. Splitting his own party, Prime Minister MacDonald formed a national government in which what remained of his Labor Party had to share power with the Tories, the party that served in British politics as the High Church of the empire in general and the Raj in particular. Within ten days of Gandhi's arrival in London, Britain went off the gold standard, devaluing the pound and rendering the vaunted Round Table Conference on the future of British India a sideshow before it had got through the opening round of speeches.

Gandhi made a sly allusion to these developments in his first speech at the conference, saying he understood that British statesmen were "wholly engrossed in their domestic affairs, in trying to make two ends meet." Surrendering control of India, he suggested impishly, could be one way to balance the budget. Thereafter he paid as little attention to these shattering events in domestic British politics as his biographers have since. In s.h.i.+pboard interviews while still at sea, he'd expressed his wish to meet with Winston Churchill, the most strident of the Tory "die-hards" on India issues, but Churchill couldn't find the time. The one previous meeting of the two men, a quarter of a century earlier, would thus remain their only face-to-face encounter. Instead of confronting his biggest antagonist in British public life as he'd hoped, Gandhi had a love-in at Westminster Palace with the small left-wing rump of the Labor Party that had gone into opposition. All along he seemed to understand that the political tides in Britain ensured that the conference would amount to less than an anticlimax, a mere episode, in the slow unraveling of India's ties to the empire.

Gandhi's arrival in London had been front-page news for a few days before, inevitably, his comings and goings and p.r.o.nouncements were downgraded to briefer and briefer stories on the inside pages. "No living man has, either by precept or example, influenced so vast a number of people in so direct and profound a way," wrote Harold Laski, the well-connected and, more to the point, well-disposed political theorist at the London School of Economics, in the pro-Labor Daily Herald Daily Herald. "The history of India in the last fifteen years is largely his history."

But what he'd accomplished was "the easiest part of his task," said Laski, firing off a barrage of rhetorical questions, the ones Gandhi himself regularly posed to his supporters: "Will he be able to bind Hindu and Muslim into a unified outlook? Can he break down the tragic barrier of caste?...What is he going to do for social freedom?"

These questions shaped the real agenda of the conference. If Indians today find any significance in the Mahatma's last London visit, it's not because of his encounters with Ramsay MacDonald or, beyond the conference hall, with Charlie Chaplin and George Bernard Shaw. It's because the Round Table Conference, a virtual nonstarter on const.i.tutional issues, became the scene of a political face-off between the national movement, in the person of Gandhi, and aspiring untouchables represented by their first authentic leader to be recognized at the national level, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. The clash of the two Indians may have occurred under the gilded imperial auspices of St. James's Palace decades ago, beyond the memory of any living Indian. One of them may have been comparatively unknown in his own country, the other already canonized there and around the globe as the great spiritual figure of the age. But it resounds in Indian politics to this day, its implications still a matter of controversy. And it shook Gandhi to his core, showing him to be not without the sin of pride when it came to his claim of speaking for the "dumb millions." In the years that followed, he'd redouble the energy he threw into his personal crusade against untouchability, if not into any reexamination of his approach to the issue, in part to justify to himself the large claims he'd made in London.

A wisp of triumphalism had attached to his arrival there. There were instants when Gandhi could be suspected of basking in his own celebrity (swapping plat.i.tudes with Chaplin, for instance, of whom he'd never heard until the appointment was set). Anyone who expected him to be overawed by London would have forgotten, or never have known, that he'd trudged its corridors of power on his previous visits there as a pet.i.tioner for the Indians of South Africa. The difference this time was more in the attire than the man. Invited with other Round Table delegates to tea at Buckingham Palace with George V, he was subjected to a gruff warning from the king himself against stirring up trouble in what the monarch quaintly took to be his domain. Gandhi knew very well whose domain it was and quietly held his ground. "Your Majesty won't expect me to argue the point with you," he replied evenly. Asked later whether he considered his attire appropriate to the regal surroundings, he was ready with a quip: "The King had on enough for both of us."

Within two months of his visit to the palace, the colonial authorities would lock him up for the third time in what he sometimes called "the King's Hotel"-that's to say, Yeravda prison-in order to quash a campaign he was about to launch. A couple of years after that, he felt so sidelined again that he made a show of resigning from the Indian National Congress. More than ever, then, his pilgrimage was not without its ups and downs as he entered the thirties of the last century and his own sixties. In all of this, the encounter with Ambedkar proved to be pivotal.

By the time Ambedkar returned to India from his second round of studies in the West at the end of 1923, he was already one of the best-credentialed Indians of his era, with a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a second doctorate from the London School of Economics, both in economics, in addition to training in the law at Gray's Inn in London. (In later years, he sometimes succ.u.mbed to an Indian tendency to show off degrees, writing on stationery on which his name was followed by a string of initials: "M.A., Ph.D., D.Sc., LL.D., D.Litt.") As an untouchable, he was not just a standout; he was in a cla.s.s by himself, plainly destined for leaders.h.i.+p. Still only thirty-two, he looked for an entry into politics as soon as he could establish a livelihood for himself and the bride, betrothed to him at the age of nine, whom he married when he was just fourteen and who, like Gandhi's Kasturba, then found herself left behind in India when her husband traveled overseas. His aca-demic achievements-financed in part by two reigning monarchs inclined to a reformist position on caste issues, the maharajahs of Baroda and Kolhapur-reflected his own grit and determination, which were not unconnected to the cultural aspirations of the Mahars, an upwardly mobile untouchable subcaste in what's now the state of Maharashtra in western India, as these were transmitted to him by his father, a former army quartermaster.

For an untouchable youth in the early part of the century, he'd had a relatively sheltered boyhood but still had the experience, in his earliest schooling, of being treated as an insidious agent of pollution. His place in the cla.s.sroom was in the corner, seated on a burlap sack (which he was made to carry to and from school to protect caste Hindus from accidental contact with something he'd touched). When he sought to study Sanskrit, he was steered to Persian instead, on grounds that the language of the Vedas, the earliest sacred texts, did not belong in the mouth or beneath the fingers of an untouchable. So when the time finally came for politics, it was all but inevitable that he'd see himself and be seen as a campaigner for the removal of caste barriers.

But he'd also learned that there could sometimes be a distinction between Brahmanism and Brahmans: that individual members of the high priestly caste could recognize the talents of an untouchable and offer support. His surname, in fact, was a testimonial to that possibility. Originally he'd been named Bhima Sankpal. Because the family name announced its lowly place in the caste system, his father decided to use the name of his native village instead, a common Marathi practice. So the Sankpals were to become the Ambavadekars. The new name had a p.r.o.nunciation close to that of a Brahman teacher named Ambedkar who'd responded to the young untouchable's promise and provided his lunch on a daily basis. So Bhima took his honored teacher's name. In later life, he would continue to have Brahman supporters, and years after the death of his first wife, by which time he'd become a member of the Indian cabinet, he'd cross caste lines to marry a Brahman woman, an "intermarriage" that would be only a little less rare and shocking to caste sensibilities today than it must have been then.

Ambedkar's earliest pet.i.tions and statements reflected his training. Not unlike Gandhi's first pet.i.tions on behalf of Natal's so-called British Indians, they were formal and reasoned in a lawyerly way. Setting out, he didn't have anything like Gandhi's flair for pamphleteering and self-dramatization, but, pos-sibly through imitation, these became learned attributes. Where Gandhi encouraged the burning of government permits and foreign cloth, Ambedkar and his followers burned the Ma.n.u.smriti Ma.n.u.smriti, a volume of traditional Hindu law bearing on caste. The gesture wasn't as widely noted or imitated, but for Hindus who heard of it, it was undoubtedly more radical and inflammatory.

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Ambedkar in London (photo credit i8.2) (photo credit i8.2)

Much later, in the last year of his life, after resigning from independent India's first cabinet, in which he'd functioned as the prime draftsman of its const.i.tution, he established an enduring role for himself as a religious leader by converting to Buddhism and calling on untouchables to follow his example. Over the next half century millions of Mahars and some others did so. Often this has entailed material sacrifice. With the outlawing of untouchability, independent India established a system of affirmative action, with "reserved" places in schools and government service for Dalits, also known officially as members of the "scheduled castes." But the largely Hindu bureaucracy has been slow to certify that Buddhists could qualify for these benefits. Today the site of Ambedkar's conversion has become a shrine and its anniversary an occasion for pilgrimage. Every October 14, throngs of at least 100,000, perhaps double that, converge on the city of Nagpur at a structure called Deekshabhoomi (which means "place of conversion" in the Marathi language) to celebrate Dhamma Chakra Pravartan Din (Ma.s.s Conversion Ceremony Day).

Not dedicated until 2001, the structure now stands as the cathedral of the Ambedkar movement. At first glance, the huge inverted cement bowl looks more like a suburban hockey rink than the Buddhist stupa it's intended to evoke. Underneath the bowl is an open round hall with many pillars decorated with plaster lotus motifs, a seated figure of the Buddha, and a photographic display chronicling the life story of Babasaheb Ambedkar, as his followers now call the movement's founder, using a loving honorific expressing filial feeling and reverence. Buddhism began in India, then all but disappeared for centuries until Ambedkar. It still hasn't found its way home ritualistically. Incense, chanting, and monks are often missing from Deekshabhoomi, which makes the sanctuary seem sterile and almost vacant in comparison to the thronged Buddhist shrines of Colombo, Bangkok, or Phnom Penh. But the religion is obviously putting down roots. At nearby souvenir stands Buddhist tracts sell along with little plaster and wood statuettes of a standing Ambedkar, b.u.t.toned up in a double-breasted electric blue suit with a red tie, as prevalent as the seated Buddhas on sale in bra.s.s. There are also Ambedkar key rings, medallions, and images. Sometimes he's shown standing beside Lord Buddha, partaking of his nimbus. If not a demiG.o.d, he's at least a bodhisattva or saint.

A visitor to Nagpur lands at the sleek new Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar International Airport, from which there are regular flights to Bangkok and Dubai. A seminary for the training of Buddhist monks has recently opened with an enrollment of thirty-five acolytes under the leaders.h.i.+p of a converted Dalit, Vimalkitti Gunasiri, who learned his Pali, the language of the sacred Buddhist texts, in Thailand. In addition, the University of Nagpur grants doctorates to students from what's officially called its Post Graduate Department of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Thought. From the vantage point of the university or the Deekshabhoomi, the answer to the question of which figure, Gandhi or Ambedkar, has had the greatest impact on India's religious life seems nothing less than self-evident.

Such a denouement could not have been imagined in 1930, even by Ambedkar, who, early on, seems to have derived a measure of inspiration from Gandhi and Gandhism. He led satyagraha campaigns to open public water supplies, from reservoirs or wells, to untouchables. One of these campaigns is said to have drawn sixteen thousand untouchables to a Maharashtra town called Mahad, where, an admiring biographer writes, they were "led for the first time in their history by a great leader of their own." Another satyagraha under his command aimed at forcing open the main temple at the holy Hindu city of Nasik, where the young Gandhi had been made to undergo ritual purification. At one of the Mahad demonstrations, Gandhi's picture is said to have been displayed. It's also reported that the Mahatma's name was chanted at demonstrations Ambedkar inspired or led. But Ambedkar's judgment of the Mahatma was early tinged by noticeable disappointment. "Before Mahatma Gandhi," he acknowledged, "no politician in this country maintained that it is necessary to remove social injustice here in order to do away with tension and conflict." But why, he wondered aloud, had Gandhi not sought to make a vow to eliminate untouchability a prerequisite for Congress members.h.i.+p the way he'd insisted on daily spinning?

His conclusion was balanced and restrained to the point of sounding backhanded. "When one is spurned by everyone," the young Ambedkar said in 1925 after Gandhi had visited Vaikom, "even the sympathy shown by Mahatma Gandhi is of no little importance." By 1927, Ambedkar had been named a member of the provincial a.s.sembly of what was then called the Bombay Presidency, but there's no clear indication that Gandhi, who still basically believed in boycotting such appointive positions and who, anyhow, claimed to have given up newspapers, took any notice of him or his campaigns, even those that adopted the method and name of satyagraha. The Mahatma accepted disciples; he did not normally seek them out. Ambedkar had not come to him, nor had he ever aligned himself with the national movement, ever tested its professed opposition to untouchability by offering himself as a potential leader.

So it wasn't until August 1931, two weeks before Gandhi's departure for the London conference, that the two men first met, in Bombay. The owlish Ambedkar was a proud and somewhat moody figure, normally aloof even from his own inner circle of adherents, acutely sensitive to slights. ("I am a difficult man," he would later write, in an attempted self-portrait. "Ordinarily I am as quiet as water and humble as gra.s.s. But when I get into a temper I am ungovernable and unmanageable.") This first meeting seems to have occurred at the Mahatma's initiative-he'd even offered to call on the younger man-but according to the account handed down by an Ambedkar biographer, the untouchable leader felt snubbed when Gandhi continued a conversation without even glancing at his visitor when Ambedkar entered the room. Once he had Gandhi's attention, he parried an invitation to set out his views on const.i.tutional matters. "You called me to hear your views," he said, according to the one surviving account. Ambedkar then listened impatiently as the Mahatma summarized his efforts on behalf of untouchables, finally making it clear that he regarded them as ineffectual and halfhearted.

"Gandhiji, I have no homeland," he said. The tone may have been plaintive or angry. The Mahatma may have been taken aback.

"I know you are a patriot of sterling worth," Gandhi said, according to this account, apparently based on notes taken down by one of Ambedkar's supporters.

"How can I call this land my own homeland and this religion my own wherein we are treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein we cannot get water to drink?" Ambedkar persisted, according to this account. (The "wherein's" may be a clue that these remarks were reconstructed or translated by a lawyer, possibly Ambedkar himself.) Gandhi's one comment on the encounter overlooks the "we" in Ambedkar's outburst as it has been handed down. The comment came a couple of years after the event, by which time he'd taken to using a new name for untouchables, calling them Harijans, or "children of G.o.d" (a term rejected by today's Dalits as patronizing). "Till I left for England," he said, speaking of Ambedkar, "I did not know he was a Harijan. I thought he was some Brahman who took a deep interest in Harijans and therefore talked intemperately."

An American scholar, Gail Omvedt, calls that reaction "revelatory of the stereotypes about Dalits that Gandhi held." It's an understandable judgment but probably too easy. The go-betweens who set up the meeting had been caste Hindus friendly to Ambedkar. At Vaikom and elsewhere Gandhi had met Brahmans who campaigned conscientiously on behalf of untouchables. This could have been another such group. He'd also met untouchable leaders like Travancore's Ayyankali. Further back, there was the eminently respectable Vincent Lawrence, the converted untouchable who'd served as his clerk in Durban, briefly lived in his house, and went on to be a community leader there. Gandhi knew untouchables could wear starched collars. But he'd never before met an untouchable intellectual like Ambedkar. No one had.

Their next meeting, in London about a month later, didn't go any better. This time Gandhi summoned Ambedkar, who ended up speaking for three hours "while Gandhi, spinning, listened mutely," according to Omvedt. No version of Ambedkar's long monologue survives. His cause was the social uplift of untouchables, not independence, a subject on which he'd wavered. Did he consider the circ.u.mstances under which the two causes could be merged, or was he burning with grievance? Did Gandhi, for his part, say anything to suggest that Ambedkar could make a contribution to the national cause? The answers to these obvious questions are left to our imaginations, along with the question of whether it's really likely that Gandhi would have sat mutely for three hours listening to Ambedkar's harangue. All we know is that this second encounter was decidedly less than a success; the two men, whatever their intentions, continued to speak past each other.

If the Mahatma had nothing to say, why had he invited Ambedkar to call on him? The untouchable leader, already on edge over their impending public engagement at the Round Table Conference, concluded that the cagey older man was hoping to gather ammunition for the debate. That's possible but not the only possibility. Maybe Gandhi had been hoping to find common ground and discovered instead that Ambedkar had stiffened his position. He'd once been opposed to separate electorates for his people on more or less nationalist principles; what he'd wanted, he said at the first Round Table Conference, was universal suffrage and guarantees of adequate representation. The Congress brushed off his moderate proposal, so now he wanted separate electorates, the same as the Muslims were seeking, though Ambedkar had previously spoken against the Muslim demand.

Gandhi's failure to bargain at this point could even have been a token of grudging respect. It had been his position that caste Hindus had to clean up their own practices, not dictate the politics of the dispossessed. He was more than ready to lecture them on diet and sanitation. But he could also ask, "Who are we to uplift Harijans?" The "we" here meant caste Hindus. "We can only atone for our sin against them or discharge the debt we owe them, and this we can do only by adopting them as equal members of society, and not by haranguing them."

In South Africa, Gandhi had the experience of making demands on behalf of a beleaguered minority to a political leader who grasped the justice of his claims but found it politically expedient to adopt a posture of obtuseness. Drawing the parallel himself, Gandhi said Ambedkar's anger at Hindus reminded him of himself "in my early days in South Africa where I was hounded by Europeans wherever I went." Did it ever occur to the Mahatma that in resisting Ambedkar for the sake of harmony in the movement he led, he was casting himself in the role of s.m.u.ts? He could be fierce in that resistance but never vituperative, writing of Ambedkar later: "Dr. A. always commands my sympathies in all he says. He needs the gentlest treatment."

And on another occasion: "He has a right even to spit upon me, as every untouchable has, and I would keep on smiling if they did so." This resolutely smiling face was not a mask. It was a measure of the man. But when he confronted Ambedkar at the Round Table Conference, Gandhi's smile faded.