Great Soul_ Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India Part 8

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On tour by rail, circa 1934 (photo credit i9.1) (photo credit i9.1)

An early conclusion of a British official a.s.signed to keep close tabs on Gandhi's doings was that the frail old man in the loincloth, coming off two prolonged fasts in the previous ten months, was displaying "amazing toughness." Soon it became routine for batteries of orthodox Hindus to intercept him at his rallies or along his route, zealously chanting anti-Gandhi slogans and waving black flags. In Nagpur, where the tour started, eggs were thrown from the balcony of a hall in which he was speaking; in Benares, where it ended, orthodox Hindus, called sanatanists sanatanists, burned his picture. A bomb went off in Poona, and an attempt was made to derail the train on which he traveled from Poona to Bombay. At a place called Jasidih in Bihar, his car was stoned. Scurrilous anti-Gandhi pamphlets appeared at many of these places, targeting him as an enemy of Hindu dharma, a political has-been who promised much and failed to deliver, even calling attention to the ma.s.sages he received from women in his entourage. Here we come upon the first signs of the viral subculture that would sp.a.w.n his murder fourteen years later.

More generally, the cleavages among Hindus he had antic.i.p.ated and feared were now out in the open, but he never turned back. Missionaries travel to lands they deem to be heathen; presenting himself as a Hindu revivalist, Gandhi took his campaign to his own heartland. He didn't have one set piece, what's now called a stump speech, but the same themes reappeared in a more or less impromptu fas.h.i.+on. They all led to the same conclusion. If India were ever to deserve its freedom, he preached, untouchability had to go. Yet at many of the rallies, untouchables were segregated in separate holding pens, either because they were afraid to be seen by caste Hindus as overstepping or because none of the local organizers was alive to the contradiction of putting untouchability on display at an anti-untouchability rally.

Such a tableau confronted Gandhi near the end of the tour when he reached the city of Bhavnagar in his native Gujarat, not far from a college he'd briefly attended. In antic.i.p.ation of his visit, the civic fathers had thoughtfully set aside money for new, more or less sanitary quarters for the munic.i.p.ality's Bhangis, or sweepers, the untouchables who did its dirtiest work; the plan was to show off Bhavnagar's enlightened spirit by having the dedication of the project coincide with Gandhi's visit. To that end, a large open-sided tent, a patchwork of bright colors called a shamiana shamiana, had been set up as it would be for any big celebration such as a wedding. "The Bhangis were not allowed to sit in the shamiana put up for the ceremony," a British official reported to his superiors, "but sat outside where Gandhi joined them before proceeding to his seat in the sha-miana to lay the foundation stone." Gandhi's mixing with the Bhangis was the only diversion from the script. By stepping into the shamiana, he made things right again. What could he do? Not for the first time, he was up against an India that could be simultaneously wors.h.i.+pful and obdurate.

At a place called Satyabhamapur in the eastern state of Orissa, he was given another reminder of the rocklike durability of the customs he was trying to crack. The Mahatma invited ten members of a local untouchable group called Bauris, along with one Bhangi, to take their meals in his tent. "None of Mr. Gandhi's party, however, dined with these guests," another colonial official reported, laying on the requisite irony, "and the Bauris refused to dine with the sweeper."

The Raj was keeping close tabs. Local officials were commanded to file reports at every stage of the tour. These then traveled up the colonial chain of command to provincial home secretaries, the national home secretary, and, ultimately, the secretary of state for India in Whitehall, each of whom then had an opportunity to add a wry, worldly comment to the file, a "minute," as these notes were known. It was not an abiding interest in the progress of social reform that engaged the imperial officials at every level. They wanted to make sure Gandhi was abiding by his pledge to eschew political agitation for the duration of the tour, that he was not preparing the ground for his next campaign of civil disobedience, for they had long since been convinced that the frail figure in the loincloth had the power to paralyze their domain and, if allowed to proceed unchecked, shake its foundations; in that sense, he had made them wary believers in his nonviolent methods of resistance and put them on guard. The crowds he drew-100,000 in Calcutta, 50,000 in Madras (now Chennai), 40,000 in Cawnpore (Kanpur), 30,000 in Benares (Varanasi), up to 25,000 in a dozen other places-could more easily be attributed to curiosity and the unending quest for a saint's darshan, the satisfying blankness of an immersion in his glow, than to zeal for his battle against untouchability. But they couldn't be ignored.

Part of making sure that he wasn't preparing the ground for future campaigns of civil disobedience was keeping track of his avid fund-raising, ostensibly for the new Harijan Service Society, or Sevak Sangh. Fearing that the money could be diverted to Congress coffers for political use, the British were intensely interested in knowing how much he was taking in and where it was going. So the local officials were instructed to report the exact amount of his "purses," meaning the collections offered up in his honor at practically every stop, even in the poorest Harijan hovels and slums. Often these sums were reported down to the last rupee, occasionally down to the paise paise, or small change. An official in Travancore, for instance, reports that Gandhi auctioned off a ring that had been donated to his cause for the modest sum of three rupees and eight paise. Ladies with jewelry were immediate targets: in Karachi he was reported to have engaged in a tug-of-war with an elderly woman over a ring she was disinclined to relinquish. "The old lady resolutely refused to part with her ring and resisted Mr. Gandhi's attempt to remove it forcibly," an official reported. (Writing in the margin of the report, a higher official drily praised her for her display of Gandhian resistance.) Everything was subject to auction for the cause of Harijan uplift, including the gifts, silver boxes, and cups presented to him along the way-even his time. At some villages, he refused to step out of his car until he received a purse of sufficient weight; in one place, an additional fifty rupees proved sufficient. "Many women," an official in Madras noted, "took the precaution of divesting themselves of their jewels before coming to his meetings."

Gandhi, the unrelenting Bania turned mendicant, is an object of fascination, sometimes pity, for starchy officials who comment on his "rapacity for money" and "money-grubbing propensities" and then indulge in haughty speculation on whether his mahatmas.h.i.+p has been tarnished. "He was more like a chetti chetti [or moneylender] coming around for his interest," one report stated. "One could not but feel sorry for Gandhi," this report said, "a poor old man come down in the world and being hustled about from one function to another, which he seemed only partially able to understand." The officials observe him in different places, with different degrees of bias, at different stages of the tour but agree on several things: that the crowds that turned out to greet him were largely indifferent to his message about Harijans (in fact, could seldom hear it); that he started to soft-pedal and even omit his demands for the opening of temples once he hit the more orthodox Hindu precincts of South India; that it was an open question whether his tour was doing more to strengthen orthodoxy than it was to uproot the hardy weed called untouchability. Their skeptical narrative stands in counterpoint to the pious, heroic accounts of the crusade that appear in installments in Gandhi's weekly [or moneylender] coming around for his interest," one report stated. "One could not but feel sorry for Gandhi," this report said, "a poor old man come down in the world and being hustled about from one function to another, which he seemed only partially able to understand." The officials observe him in different places, with different degrees of bias, at different stages of the tour but agree on several things: that the crowds that turned out to greet him were largely indifferent to his message about Harijans (in fact, could seldom hear it); that he started to soft-pedal and even omit his demands for the opening of temples once he hit the more orthodox Hindu precincts of South India; that it was an open question whether his tour was doing more to strengthen orthodoxy than it was to uproot the hardy weed called untouchability. Their skeptical narrative stands in counterpoint to the pious, heroic accounts of the crusade that appear in installments in Gandhi's weekly Harijan Harijan, with its agate lists of newly opened temples and wells, newly dedicated separate but equal dormitories and schools for Harijan students, all leaving an impression of a cresting wave of irresistible social reform.

The contrast between the narratives of colonial bystanders and those of enthusiastic domestic adherents is only to be expected. But apart from their renderings of Gandhi's own words, their most precious pa.s.sages convey particular details more telling than any a.s.sessment. "At several places," a British official notes in a part of Orissa where Gandhi's party was denied permission to enter temples, "people were seen carrying away dust that had been touched by his feet." Or there's the description of a sweeper's wife in Nagpur named Abhayanhar who donates her last two bangles. "Tears trickled down Abhayanhar's cheeks," a colonial official wrote. "Gandhi accepted the sacrificial offering and said he had reduced the Abhayanhars to poverty, that they were now true Harijans, the truest Banghis in Nagpur." The official offers no comment; he simply describes what he has seen, leaving a sense that he has seen a communion he doesn't understand but can't get out of his mind.

The Mahatma's own presence of mind, his reliable, low-key magnanimity, show up in these often hostile colonial reports in scattered asides on his disciplined, always calm treatment of orthodox demonstrators who turn out to jeer him and block his way. In Ajmer, in what's now the state of Rajasthan, one of Gandhi's most persistent antagonists, a Benares Brahman named Lal Nath, thrusts himself forward with a small contingent carrying black flags. He also displays a bleeding head, earned in a confrontation with some Gandhians who'd not gotten the message about nonviolence. Gandhi gives the crowd a stern lecture and invites Lal Nath to the platform to speak his piece against him; the Brahman is soon drowned out by cries of "Shame, shame." In Buxar in Bihar, sanatanists lie down in front of the car carrying Gandhi to a ma.s.s meeting, and here too some of them have been beaten. Gandhi visits the injured sanatanists in the hospital and promises to do penance. Told then that the road to the rally is still blocked and that he might be attacked if he insists on going there, Gandhi serenely walks in on foot accompanied by four constables, parting a crowd of five thousand. In the Maharashtrian town of Saonar, where another posse of sanatanists seeks to halt his car, he offers its leader a ride to the rally he's about to address.

A few of the authors of the official reports allow themselves to wonder whether more may be taking place here than has met the eye of their more jaded colleagues. The chief commissioner of Delhi writes that Gandhi, "even in his present role, still has very great influence." He hazards a view that the tides of Indian opinion on untouchability may be slowly s.h.i.+fting. "Although perhaps 60 per cent of Hindus quietly determine not to treat untouchables as equals, they avoid public expression of their views." Sounding optimistic, this high civil servant seems to be suggesting that a substantial minority of caste Hindus have already experienced a kind of conversion on the issue. An official in Bombay takes a similar line. "Though the majority would prefer the movement to fail, most of them," he predicts, "are not likely to actively oppose it. The Sanatanists therefore cannot create a force sufficiently strong to combat and overcome Mr. Gandhi's persistence."

Gandhi himself advanced the idea that after all the orthodox propaganda against him, the pa.s.sive absorption of his arguments by seemingly inattentive ma.s.s audiences added up to an advance. "I am quite sure that the message has appealed to the reason of the ma.s.ses," he said. "I am also fully aware that all of them are not yet prepared to translate their beliefs into practice. But then I consider it a tremendous gain that the ma.s.ses have come to believe in the truth of the message." Believe in it grudgingly, he meant. It might not affect their conduct much, he was saying, offering a conclusion not very different from that of the shrewdest colonial officials, but they could no longer justify caste oppression.

It was hard to know then, and it's harder to know now, whether anything like the mental sea change Gandhi hoped for had actually occurred, or to measure the lasting effect. Sometimes he voiced his own doubts. Speaking in private to the tough-minded Vallabhbhai Patel, he was blunter than he allowed himself to be in public. "India is not yet converted to the spinning wheel and certainly not to the removal of untouchability. We can't even say that the whole of the intellectual world is for its removal." In this context, the "intellectuals" to whom he refers are those who were then calling themselves Socialists, talking up the possibilities of "cla.s.s struggle," and rejecting as "reactionary" and "irrelevant" his focus on untouchability, not granting or even recognizing that it defined the lives of the poorest Indians. The difference was not just one of political idiom. Their identification with the poorest was largely theoretical, resting on the premise that they could be lifted up after independence. Gandhi's was becoming more urgent by the day. If anything, he seems more disposed at the end of the tour, having inspected scores, maybe hundreds of untouchable settlements, to speak in pointed ways about the abject circ.u.mstances of his Harijans and the social action that could make a difference. "The only way we can expiate the sin of centuries," he said, "is to befriend the Harijans, by going to their quarters, by hugging their children as you would do your own, by interesting yourselves in their welfare, by finding out whether they have the fresh light and air that you enjoy as of right." Hugging untouchable children might not amount to a social program or advance the cause of swaraj. But in the emerging divide between Gandhi and his movement, which side was really otherworldly and which one down-to-earth?

Near the end of the tour, in a balanced a.s.sessment and summing-up of all the acc.u.mulated intelligence at his disposal, the chief secretary of the Punjab writes: "People are more critical of his aims and objects and are no longer willing to follow him blindly. But it would be a mistake to regard him as a spent force. Given the occasion, he would still wield very great power and he is still more able than any other Indian to organize a big movement against Government."

Whether Gandhi could organize a big, enduring movement against untouchability remained another question in his own mind, it seems, as much as that of the Raj's agents. It so preoccupied him that when, at the start of 1934, northern Bihar was rocked by a huge earthquake that flattened villages and towns, devastating fields and crops and killing more than seven thousand, he instantly declared the catastrophe to be "divine chastis.e.m.e.nt" for the persistent sin of untouchability. It's not far-fetched to imagine that Gandhi, at that point just beginning the third month of his anti-untouchability tour, was speaking more out of frustration than conviction. He often appealed to faith as a basis for moral action in society. But he didn't normally go in for the kind of magical thinking that looks for signals of divine wrath in floods and droughts and all the other natural calamities that beset the subcontinent. Perhaps his interpretation of the earthquake, several times repeated as he met hard going on the South Indian portion of his tour, could be taken as a folksy rhetorical trope, as a tool designed to chip away at the resistance he faced. "He has come to realize that the strength of the antagonistic force is more formidable than he at first imagined," reported a British official, attempting to read his mind, several weeks after the disaster.

Nehru and Tagore had managed to support Gandhi's fast unto death. Then, as we've seen, they opposed his second fast against untouchability. Now each was flabbergasted by the readiness of the Mahatma to use superst.i.tion to battle superst.i.tion. "Anything more opposed to the scientific outlook it would be difficult to imagine," a momentarily disillusioned Nehru wrote in his autobiography, which he was composing in prison. "If the earthquake was a divine punishment for sin, how are we to discover for which sin we are being punished?-for, alas! we have so many." Tagore said Gandhi's logic "far better suits the psychology of his opponents than his own," that the orthodox could just as easily blame the earthquake on his a.s.sault on Hindu dharma.

"Our sins and errors, however enormous," wrote the poet, "have not enough force to drag down the structure of creation...We, who are immensely grateful to Mahatmaji for inducing his wonder-working inspiration, freedom from fear and feebleness in the minds of his countrymen, feel profoundly hurt, when any words from his mouth may emphasize the elements of unreason in those very minds...a fundamental source of all the blind powers that drive us against freedom and self-respect."

In direct response, Gandhi only dug himself in deeper; he wasn't about to deprive himself of a useful argument by conceding that the earthquake and the practice of untouchability in its environs might be unconnected: "I would be untruthful and cowardly if, for the fear of ridicule...I did not proclaim my belief from the house-top," he retorted in Harijan Harijan. "I have the faith that our own sins have more force to ruin that structure [of creation] than any mere physical phenomenon. There is an indissoluble marriage between matter and spirit."

The sanatanists were the largest of the anti-Gandhi groups that turned out with black flags and calls for boycotts of his rallies, but they weren't the only protesters he attracted. In Nagpur, at the start of the tour, untouchables from Ambedkar's own Mahar community were conspicuous by their absence. Two months later, in Travancore, a group called the Self-Respect League appealed to untouchables to boycott Gandhi. In s.h.i.+yali, near Coimbatore in what's now Tamil Nadu, two hundred Dalits marched under black flags in opposition to a mahatma ostensibly crusading in their behalf. In Poona, near the end of the tour, there were more boycott appeals by untouchable groups identified with Ambedkar, who, nevertheless, had come himself to call on Gandhi a few days earlier in Bombay. "Dr. Ambedkar complained that the Congress people took interest in the question of the removal of untouchability so long as Mr. Gandhi was present," according to a colonial official's second- or thirdhand intelligence report, "but the moment his back was turned it was forgotten." In his public summing-up, Gandhi p.r.o.nounced untouchability to be on "its last legs," but his private a.s.sessment may have been closer to Ambedkar's. Within a month of the tour's end in August 1934, he let it be known that he was considering "retiring" from the Congress movement on various grounds, including its blatant failure to address "the growing pauperism of the dumb millions."

Six weeks later, he made it official. Fourteen years had pa.s.sed since he'd first taken over the movement. "I have lost the power to persuade you to my view," he told a Congress meeting. "I have become helpless. It is no use keeping a man like me at the helm of affairs, who has lost his strength." That plaintive "helpless" can be read as a clear, poignant, and, most likely, conscious echo of Gandhi's admissions seven years earlier that he'd lost all hope of being able to sustain the alliance between Muslims and Hindus he'd forged at the time of the Khilafat agitation. It might also be interpreted as another coy bid for a renewed mandate. But this time he seemed to know what the outcome would be.

His tour has just ended. But in saying he felt "helpless," he is speaking not simply of Harijan uplift but also of his whole program of social reform-called the "constructive program"-featuring spinning, prohibition, sanitation, hygiene, education in local languages, an enhanced role for women, along with the struggle against untouchability. The Congress had been paying lip service to it for a decade, but its heart, he now realizes, is elsewhere; it's set on gaining political power, provisionally in the new legislatures, ultimately in an independent India.

He may not have been speaking narrowly or exclusively about untouchability, but it's not much of a stretch to conclude that if Gandhi ended his marathon feeling helpless about the Congress's commitment to his programs of social reform in general, he felt helpless too about its commitment to the specific struggle that had preoccupied him almost entirely for the previous two years, ever since the "epic fast" that had briefly seized the country. He ended the tour at Wardha in central India, his new base of operations, on August 5, 1934, and, two days later, embarked on yet another fast, one of "personal purification" and, he said, prayer for the purification of the Congress. "Purity of this, the greatest national organization," he said, "cannot but help the Harijan movement, since the Congress is also pledged to the removal of the curse." After all the touring and praying, the legislation on opening up Hindu temples to Harijans was allowed to die in the central a.s.sembly on August 23. "The sanatanists are now jubilant," Gandhi commented. "We must not mind their joy."

A few weeks later, a noticeably disconsolate Gandhi finally acknowledged that his approach to the issue of untouchability "differed from that of many, if not of most Congressmen" who, he said, "consider that it was a profound error for me to have disturbed the course of the civil resistance struggle by taking up the question in the manner, and at the time I did." Here he was talking again about "the most intellectual Congressmen," now disposed to call themselves Socialists. He was going in the opposite direction from them, he said. He still believed in what he called "the spinning sacrifice" as the "living link" to "the Harijans and the poor"-those he'd been accustomed to describing as "the dumb millions"-but, now he conceded, "a substantial majority of Congressmen have no living faith in it."

In Gandhi's view, the would-be Socialists-however high-minded, however committed-had little or no connection to the India where most Indians resided. "None of them knows the real conditions in Indian villages or perhaps even cares to know them," he observed.

The idea that two Indias could be distilled from the country's myriad versions of itself-the bourgeois one of urban sophisticates and the depressed one of rural misery-would offer a handy framework for speeches and polemics for decades to come. It wasn't the worst distortion. Perhaps there's an omen or at least some perspective in these bits of trivia: the week of Gandhi's "epic fast," Joan Bennett was starring in Careless Lady Careless Lady at the Roxy Talkie in Bombay and Eddie Cantor in at the Roxy Talkie in Bombay and Eddie Cantor in Palmy Days Palmy Days at the Pathe, singing, "There's nothing too good for my baby." It wouldn't have been only British expatriates who filled the movie palace seats or turned out to ooh and aah over the new Chrysler Plymouths on sale at New Era Motors. (What came to be called Bollywood was still a gleam in the eyes of the earliest Indian filmmakers. They'd yet to invade the countryside or hit on the formula of song, dance, and heartache that would become their touchstone. But running alongside ma.s.s politics, ma.s.s popular culture would soon be in the offing.) at the Pathe, singing, "There's nothing too good for my baby." It wouldn't have been only British expatriates who filled the movie palace seats or turned out to ooh and aah over the new Chrysler Plymouths on sale at New Era Motors. (What came to be called Bollywood was still a gleam in the eyes of the earliest Indian filmmakers. They'd yet to invade the countryside or hit on the formula of song, dance, and heartache that would become their touchstone. But running alongside ma.s.s politics, ma.s.s popular culture would soon be in the offing.) Few congressmen had seen as much of the world beyond India's sh.o.r.es that embraced such fanciful artifacts as Gandhi. He remained convinced that it held no answers for India. In the aftermath of his tour, his penchant for circling back on himself, for reenacting formative stages of his past, again took hold. Just as he withdrew to Tolstoy Farm outside Johannesburg a quarter of a century earlier, just as he retreated from politics during periods of convalescence in 1918 and 1924, Gandhi now proposed to open a new chapter in his life at what he would later name the Satyagraha or Sevagram Ashram outside Wardha, in the boondocks, a small market town in an especially poor, drought-p.r.o.ne, malaria-p.r.o.ne, snake-infested district west of Nagpur in the center of India. There he'd concentrate on showing that his constructive program, with its emphasis on village industries and cleanliness, personal and public, could furnish the 700,000 villages on the as-yet-undivided subcontinent with a replicable model. His retirement from Congress politics would be more symbolic than permanent. Supposedly retired-he never formally rejoined the movement-he'd continue to express views, even attend meetings; and when he did, his will almost always proved to be sovereign. He'd also intervene forcefully as a sort of deus ex machina in Congress leaders.h.i.+p fights-for instance, in 1939 when he opposed the election of Subhas Chandra Bose as president and then, after Bose squeaked through, helped undermine him. Pretending to be on the sidelines in Wardha, he was not shy about wielding his authority through his reliable lieutenants in the party's hierarchy. Nevertheless, he never again occupied a formal leaders.h.i.+p position and never again claimed, as he had in London, that he was the true leader of the untouchables. In Bombay, a crowd of eighty thousand gave him a standing ovation on what was supposed to be his valedictory day as a congressman, then heard him warn that he'd be "watching from a distance [the] enforcement of principles for which Congress stands."

He meant, of course, his principles. "What I am aiming for," said the man who was supposedly stepping back from the struggle, "is the development of the capacity for civil disobedience." He'd resigned, it soon became clear, but he'd not really retired.

10.

VILLAGE OF SERVICE.

IF G GANDHI'S SHOW IN 1934 of retiring from the Congress movement he'd led and symbolized for nearly a generation had an inner logic, it lay in his acknowledgment that all the Gandhian programs and resolutions it had ratified over the years had made little difference. What the Congress hadn't accomplished under his leaders.h.i.+p, he now undertook to do on his own. On one level, he was shaming his supposed followers; on another, he was refusing to give up on his deepest commitments. The new course he set for himself obviously bore some relation to his own submerged doubts about the effectiveness of the anti-untouchability crusade he'd just completed. What he saw on the tour convinced him that his fond promise that cottage industry spinning and weaving could be the salvation for underemployed, landless, debt-enslaved villagers-untouchables and touchables alike-had been overblown and undersold. The spinning wheel had yet to change their grim reality. of retiring from the Congress movement he'd led and symbolized for nearly a generation had an inner logic, it lay in his acknowledgment that all the Gandhian programs and resolutions it had ratified over the years had made little difference. What the Congress hadn't accomplished under his leaders.h.i.+p, he now undertook to do on his own. On one level, he was shaming his supposed followers; on another, he was refusing to give up on his deepest commitments. The new course he set for himself obviously bore some relation to his own submerged doubts about the effectiveness of the anti-untouchability crusade he'd just completed. What he saw on the tour convinced him that his fond promise that cottage industry spinning and weaving could be the salvation for underemployed, landless, debt-enslaved villagers-untouchables and touchables alike-had been overblown and undersold. The spinning wheel had yet to change their grim reality.

"The villagers have a lifeless life," he now said. "Their life is a process of slow starvation." More speeches, he seemed to be saying, could not be the answer. The last part of the anti-untouchability tour, with the ambiguous response of the mammoth crowds he drew, had been for him, he said at its end, "a mechanical performance and a drawn-out agony." Later he allowed himself to disparage the tour as a "circus." He needed now to come to grips with village realities. "We have to work away silently," he said on one occasion. On another he vowed, "We have to become speechless manual laborers living in the villages."

India, of course, would not allow him to go silent; nor, as the main contributor to a weekly newspaper, could he silence himself. Turning sixty-five, he found himself standing restlessly at a crossroads. Here again, we see him reliving an earlier chapter in his life. His urge to get down to constructive work in villages obviously reprised his withdrawal from ma.s.s politics in South Africa in 1910, when he and Hermann Kallenbach set up their short-lived Tolstoy Farm. Then he made it his mission to master the basics of farming and the education of children. Now, by working again from the bottom up, he was rededicating himself to turning the tide on what he called, at his tour's end, the downward spiral of poverty he'd seen for himself in villages across the country. After acting out the self-scripted drama of his farewell to the Indian National Congress in Bombay in late October 1934, Gandhi went immediately back to Wardha. A further cross-cultural trivia note: the week he landed there turns out to have been the exact week that-half a world away geographically, and a world away culturally-Cole Porter's Anything Goes Anything Goes was having its first performances on the road at Boston's Colonial Theatre; there every evening the romantic lead playing opposite the young Ethel Merman crooned the oxymoronic lyric: was having its first performances on the road at Boston's Colonial Theatre; there every evening the romantic lead playing opposite the young Ethel Merman crooned the oxymoronic lyric: You're the top!You're Mahatma Gandhi.You're the top!You're Napoleon brandy.

Gandhi wouldn't have been amused by this saucy paean to his international celebrity, in the unlikely event he was ever made aware of it. Nothing could have been more alien to his spirit than the Jazz Age cutting loose Porter was ever so lightly satirizing.

For most of the next eight years (a total of 2,588 days "on station," as Indians used to say), sorry, dusty, out-of-the-way Wardha, where temperatures before the monsoon rains soared as high as 118 degrees during his time there, would be his base and main arena of operations. Once he resolved to put down roots, Gandhi was already on the rebound, p.r.o.nouncing himself "full of plans for village reconstruction." It would be wrong to say he left no mark on the district-dedicated Gandhians can still be found there in small numbers-but the overall result fell far short of the social transformation and healing he initially sought. In recent years, Wardha district has been best known in the proud, supposedly "s.h.i.+ning" India of the early twenty-first century as the epicenter for an epidemic of suicides among hopelessly indebted cotton farmers, thousands of whom in the surrounding region are said to have taken their lives over the last two decades after watching commodity prices plummet in the new global marketplace. No one since Gandhi has thought of pointing to it as a model for rural reform.

In the Mahatma's time, his very presence made Wardha a destination. The Working Committee of the Congress Party, its top leaders.h.i.+p unit, dutifully trooped to Wardha at least six times to seek his counsel and receive his blessing, though he was now officially a detached alumnus. He'd intended his resignation as a statement that he could neither impose his priorities on the movement nor let go of them. It had been a gesture, an expression of his disappointment. It had also been something of a sham. The party still revolved around him, if not all the time, at least whenever it needed to unravel a tangled issue. "Wardha became the de facto nationalist capital of India," an American scholar writes with pardonable hyperbole.

A motley array of foreign delegations-politicians, pacifists, religious leaders, do-gooders of all complexions-also found its way into this remote hinterland with the expectation that Gandhi could be drawn into a discussion of issues uppermost in their minds, anything from nature cures or nutrition to the fate of the West and the threat of another world war. He was all too easily drawn. Called on to speak as a seer, he seemed determined not to disappoint. By the end of the decade, he was freely doling out advice on how his techniques of nonviolent resistance, if adopted by "a single Jew standing up and refusing to bow to Hitler's decrees," might be enough to "melt Hitler's heart." A Chinese visitor received a similar lecture: nonviolence, Gandhi said, might "shame some j.a.panese." A representative of the African National Congress of South Africa was told that its leaders.h.i.+p had alienated itself from the ma.s.ses by its adoption of Western dress and manners. "You must not...feel ashamed of carrying an a.s.sagai, or of going around with only a tiny clout round your loins," said the Mahatma, implicitly offering his own sartorial transformation as a pragmatic political tactic worthy of emulation. His sense that he might have a prophetic role to play only deepened as war clouds darkened. "Who knows," he wrote from Wardha in 1940, "that I will not be an instrument for bringing about peace between Britain and India but also between the warring nations of the earth." Presumably on account of his influence, India was "the last hope of the world."

Only one foreign visitor in these years seemed ready to resist his increasing tendency to translate his experience into dogma. Margaret Sanger, the founder of the movement that became Planned Parenthood, a proponent of enlightened female s.e.xuality and contraception, stopped by in January 1936 for a conversation in which she stressed the life-enhancing nature of s.e.xual intimacy for women as well as men. As might have been expected, Gandhi took an opposing view, expounding on brahmacharya as a spiritual discipline; his conversation with the American-unlike any he'd previously had with a woman-seems to have sent his worrisomely high blood pressure higher and, by some accounts, left him in a state near nervous collapse.

Physically and emotionally, he was already nearing the edge. A little more than a year after he arrived in the district, Gandhi had decided that it wasn't enough for him to a.s.sign his disciples to settle in the most remote villages in a remote district. He needed to understand why they found it such hard going. Typically, he instructed them to begin their missions of service by volunteering as village sanitation officers and scavengers (scooping up human excrement wherever it was to be found, usually beside rural pathways, and then digging proper latrines). The example was not always as effective as he expected. "The people are completely shameless," wrote his faithful secretary and diarist, Mahadev Desai, whose duties included serving as a one-man cleanup detail in an exceptionally unresponsive village called Sindi. "They do not have any feeling at all. It will not be surprising if within a few days they start believing that we are their scavengers."

Gandhi concluded there was only one way for him to understand why villagers were proving so impervious to the selfless example his satyagrahis set before them. What was needed was for him-the man recognized by most of India and most of the world as the country's leader-to settle in a village and live there all by himself, with none of his usual entourage. It made perfect sense to Gandhi but not to his closest a.s.sociates, who were already nervous about his health and jealous of any change in the Mahatma's life that would limit the time they got to spend in his presence.

The village he selected in Wardha district for this latest of his "experiments with truth" was then called Segaon. It happened to be adjacent to orange and mango orchards owned by an important backer and underwriter of the Mahatma, a wealthy trader named Jamnalal Bajaj who'd been, in the theatrical sense, the angel who produced Gandhi's relocation in Wardha and the host who'd provided lodging for the Mahatma and his entourage. Bajaj also owned the land on which Segaon's untouchables-two-thirds of its population of over six hundred-huddled; the revenues he collected from the village would subsidize Gandhi's latest experiment.

No road, as yet, connected Segaon to the district's market town, four miles away. India's leader arrived there on foot on April 30, 1936, and, two days later, told the villagers of his intentions. "If you will cooperate with me," he said, "I shall be very happy; if you will not, I shall be content to be absorbed among you as one among the few hundred that live here." As related by Mirabehn, the headman, "a very charming and aristocratic old man, made a graceful and honest speech in which he welcomed the idea of Gandhi coming to live amongst them, but made it quite clear that he personally would not be able to cooperate in Bapu's Harijan program." The hut that he was to occupy, on Segaon's outskirts, had yet to be completed, so that night a makes.h.i.+ft tent was strung up for him under a guava tree. Since there were wild animals in the area-cheetahs, panthers-a trench had to be dug around the patch of ground on which the Mahatma was to sleep. Using the excuse that they were overseeing the completion of his dwelling, several of his entourage slept beside him.

As might have been expected, the Mahatma's ambition to spend a night alone in Segaon would never be fulfilled. Before long, the whole entourage, amounting at times to nearly a hundred persons, was ensconced there. He'd not planned to make his dwelling the center of an ashram, but that's what it became. Thanks largely to Jamnalal Bajaj's generosity, new buildings went up, a road was put through and, eventually, even a phone line so the Mahatma could be reached by the viceroy's offices in New Delhi and the hill station of Simla, to which the top echelons of the Raj retreated in summer when Wardha broiled. Segaon, the village Gandhi briefly intended to make the focus of his energies, inevitably became a sideshow. Fittingly, after March 1940, it would take the name of the ashram that had spontaneously mushroomed alongside it. Ashram and village were both called Sevagram, meaning "Village of Service."

The growth of the ashram was less than a mixed blessing, becoming another distraction from the village work that had drawn him to Segaon in the first place. "Oh G.o.d," Gandhi said, "save me from my friends, followers and flatterers."

Today the nearest village houses are around the bend of a dirt road, a couple hundred yards from the ashram, a complex of dark wood structures with long sloping roofs that give an appearance reminiscent of a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto. Sevagram the ashram no longer serves Sevagram the village. With a bookshop, a canteen, and even some modest rooms to rent to pilgrims, it maintains itself as a tourist attraction. The village still looks poor, but some of the houses have TV antennas on their roofs and motorbikes leaning up against their cracked and mildewed cement walls. The houses stand on land that Bajaj signed over to Gandhi and Gandhi signed over to the village's untouchables, who now call themselves Dalits rather than Harijans. When you stroll from the ashram to the one village that received more personal attention from the Mahatma than any other among the 700,000 that existed in his India, a statue comes into view beside a sports field. The figure on the pedestal is not wearing a loincloth. He's wearing a suit painted an electric shade of blue and a painted red tie. It's the figure of Babasaheb Ambedkar. And the former untouchables in what was once Gandhi's chosen village-especially the younger ones-are likelier, when asked, to identify themselves as Buddhists than as Hindus.

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Ashram grew up around Gandhi as Sevagram (photo credit i10.1) (photo credit i10.1)

For most of Gandhi's first year in Wardha, he'd been less preoccupied with the actual human condition in the surrounding villages than with the task of birthing a new ma.s.s organization he'd dreamed up to infuse badly needed energy into his languis.h.i.+ng campaign for village self-sufficiency through hand spinning and weaving. He'd invested excessive faith in the spinning wheel, the iconic charkha, as an invincible panacea for village poverty, he now concluded. By itself, it would not be enough to lift rural India out of its misery. Spinning and weaving would retain their place, but they needed to be supplemented by a whole array of traditional crafts that were losing out in compet.i.tion with processed and manufactured goods being produced more cheaply in city factories and workshops. Villages had once known how to turn out their own handmade pens, ink, and paper; they ground their grains into flour, pressed vegetables for their oils, boiled unrefined sugar, tanned hides into leather, raised bees, harvested honey, ginned cotton by hand. For their own salvation, they needed to do so again, Gandhi taught; and it was a national need to support them not only by wearing homespun khadi but by consciously giving all they produced a preference over manufactured articles, to undo as far as possible the ravages of the Industrial Revolution.

Starting from these premises, the nation's leader suddenly had an urgent need to know whether hand-pounded rice and grain could be shown to be more nutritious than the polished products from the mills. Could hand-husked rice compete in price with mill-husked rice? What use could be made of the husk? Did spinning pay better than husking? Could oil be harvested from orange rinds? Gandhi's letters were full of such questions; in his mind, the answers he received were building blocks of a revised strategy for gaining "the swaraj of our dreams, devoted to the welfare of villages." His new organization needed a const.i.tution, advisers, and a board that would be selfless and nearly full-time; it needed a table of organization reaching down to every district and, ultimately, every village in the vast country. Within a couple of months Gandhi had created all this, on paper at least, and the All India Village Industries a.s.sociation (AIVIA) came into existence with its national headquarters in previously obscure Wardha, in a building donated, of course, by Gandhi's angel, Bajaj. Gandhi recruited a chartered accountant from Bombay, with postgraduate training in economics from Columbia University, to serve as the organization's director. A Christian, he was known at Columbia as Joseph Cornelius; by the time he got to Wardha, where he stayed until after Gandhi's death, he had become J. C. k.u.marappa. Today k.u.marappa is occasionally mentioned in India as a pioneer theorist on sustainable farming and appropriate technology; the last Western economist who seems to have been conscious of him or Gandhi as thinkers with something useful to say about the world's poorest was E. F. Schumacher, himself a dissenter from orthodox development doctrines whose book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered enjoyed a brief vogue when it appeared in 1973, twenty-five years after Gandhi's death. enjoyed a brief vogue when it appeared in 1973, twenty-five years after Gandhi's death.

The Mahatma denied that his fixation on village industries betokened any dilution of his campaign against untouchability, just as he'd denied a decade earlier that his renewed emphasis on the charkha represented a backing off from his campaign for Hindu-Muslim unity. Many of the spinners were untouchables, he pointed out. There was conspicuous overlap between AIVIA and other organizations he or his followers had launched to advance the Gandhian constructive program in the 700,000 villages: the recently formed Harijan Sevak Sangh, the intended beneficiary of the anti-untouchability tour; the older All India Spinners a.s.sociation; the Gandhi Seva Sangh, brought into existence by the Congress to further the constructive program to which it paid lip service (not to mention the Goseva Sangh, an a.s.sociation for the protection of cows for which he'd become a patron). For most of these, the lawyer who'd last practiced in Johannesburg drafted const.i.tutions and designed management structures, just as ever since 1920 he had for the Indian National Congress itself. AIVIA's basic doc.u.ment didn't hesitate to articulate a principle that all these organizations implicitly held in common. "The a.s.sociation," it declared, "shall work under the guidance and advice of Gandhiji." The movement with the largest outreach, the spinners a.s.sociation, boasted that it had penetrated 5,000 villages, but this was a mere fraction of 1 percent of the 700,000.

All the Gandhian organizations shared a common defect: a reliance, in theory, on selfless village interns-in Gandhi's terms, satyagrahis-and the absence of any sure method for discovering, recruiting, training, or sustaining such a vast army of inspired, literate workers uninhibited by inherited constraints of caste. "Full-timers, whole-hoggers, with a live faith in the program and prepared immediately to make the necessary adjustment in their daily life," he said, describing the attributes of the committed workers he sought as if he were placing a cla.s.sified ad. The "necessary adjustment" would be to lower-drastically-their citified standards of living. They would need to cultivate a life of "rigorous simplicity," he said. What the Maoist leaders.h.i.+p in China would seek to do through terror, commands, peer pressure, and relentless ideological drilling when it launched its "down to the countryside" campaign during the Cultural Revolution three decades later, Gandhi hoped to achieve by inspirational example, his own and that of his closest followers. "Workers without character, living far above the ordinary life of villagers, and devoid of the knowledge required of them for their work can produce no impression on the villagers, whether Harijan or other," he said. "If every one of such workers puts on his work a price which village service cannot sustain, ultimately these organizations must be wound up."

Even his closest followers had doubts. "What is the advantage of this work?" Mahadev's son boldly asked the Mahatma. "There is no effect on the villagers. On the contrary they go on giving orders to us to clean various places."

"So! You are already tired!" Gandhi retorted in mock exasperation. He then offered pointers on how the work might be accomplished: "If I am in your place, I will observe carefully. If someone gets up after easing himself, I will immediately go there. If I see any rottenness in the excretia I will tell him gently, 'Your stomach seems to be upset; you should try a particular remedy,' and thus I will try to win him over." After scooping the t.u.r.ds, he went on, he'd then plant flowers on the site and water them. "Cleanliness can be an art," he concluded.

Even at his most visionary, he sometimes lets slip a bleak forecast of what's likely to prove possible, as if steeling himself for disappointment, for a n.o.ble failure, as he sets out. "If [the villagers] abuse us," he preaches to his acolytes when only beginning to contemplate the idea of living in a village himself, "let us bear it in silence...Let the people defecate wherever they choose. Let us not even ask them to avoid a particular place or go elsewhere. But let us go on cleaning up without a word...

"If this does not work, then there is no such thing as non-violence," he concludes.

In which case, he seems to be saying, the work had still to be done as a matter of duty. When one of his workers asked for his formula for solving the problem of untouchability in villages, Gandhi replied: "Silent plodding." On another occasion, he said: "The only way is to sit down in their midst and work away in steadfast faith, as their scavengers, their nurses, their servants, not as their patrons, and to forget all our prejudices, our prepossessions. Let us for a moment forget even swaraj."

This is what his Anglican soul mate Charlie Andrews had urged several years earlier, but of course, as Gandhi said then, he could never forget swaraj.

Gandhi seemed to sense early that the qualifications he declared for what today might be called community organizing had scant potential-really, none at all-for rallying the nonviolent forces he was hoping to send en ma.s.se to the villages. "Our ambition is to make at least one member for each of our 700,000 villages," he told a meeting of his village industries a.s.sociation, "but our actual members.h.i.+p is 517!" And many of those were AWOL. It was a conundrum he was hoping to crack during the solitary residence he planned for himself at Segaon. Mirabehn, the English admiral's daughter, had to admit defeat in Sindi, where the villagers came to view her as a source of pollution after she drew water from the well used by the untouchables. Segaon, where she then preceded her teacher, wasn't much better for her. On the verge of a breakdown, having already suffered a bout of typhoid, she was eventually sent off to the Himalayas in 1937 for a rest. After his first ten days at Segaon the previous year, at the height of the hot season, Gandhi himself was strongly urged by his doctors to seek relief in the hills near Bangalore. His rest cure lasted five weeks. It was June 16 before he returned, arriving again on foot in a monsoon downpour that had drenched him to the skin. Soon he came down with malaria.

When the bare narrative of this effort to achieve "oneness" with India's poorest is laid out, it can appear either futile or desperate. It's the effort of the Mahatma to remain true to his vision of swaraj for the dumb millions, despite all that he has learned, or perhaps senses he has yet to learn, about village India. Yet from a distance of more than seven decades, what stands out is the commitment rather than the futility. He could easily have retired to a mansion belonging to one of his millionaire supporters and there directed the national movement from on high; no one would have asked why he wasn't living like a peasant. In his tireless, pertinacious way in the village to which he'd attached himself instead, he was doing more than tilting at windmills. Once again Gandhi was refusing to avert his eyes from a suffering India that seemed largely to have escaped the notice of most educated Indians swept up in the movement he'd been leading.

The degree to which this was true in the 1930s can be gauged by the degree to which it remains true in an India that has hailed itself as free and democratic for several generations. By 2009, after boasting four consecutive years of robust 9 percent growth in economic output, this rising and surprising new India, with its booming market economy at the high end, still had a quarter of its people living in conditions defined by the World Bank as "absolute poverty," meaning that their per capita income was less than a dollar a day; the rate of poverty was declining as a percentage of the total population of nearly 1.2 billion, but in absolute numbers the total of some 300 million was undiminished, accounting for nearly one-third of the globe's poorest people. Almost by definition their children were malnourished and underweight, more than likely to grow up illiterate, if they grew up at all. The number of Indians calculated to be living on less than $1.25 a day was over 400 million, larger than the total population at the time of independence when the poorest represented a bigger proportion of the total; today, as a minority, they can be viewed as a ragged coterie of interest groups and a drag on the rising middle cla.s.s. Still only 33 percent of all Indians have access, according to the bank's figures, to what it primly calls "improved sanitation." A United Nations survey portrays this reality more bluntly, reporting that 55 percent of the population still defecates out of doors. Given the tripling of population since Gandhi's time, the water supply in villages and towns can still prove vulnerable to disease-bearing organisms; human scavengers still have to be relied upon to carry off much of the subcontinent's night soil, or human waste.

Gandhian economics needs to be viewed in that sobering perspective before being written off as irrelevant or utopian in the era of globalization. His answers to conspicuous issues of rural ma.s.s poverty, underemployment, and chronic indebtedness may have been incomplete and untested. Not only did he reject birth control and recommend abstinence as a means of limiting population, but he had no scheme that addressed glaring inequities in land owners.h.i.+p and distribution beyond a wishful, woolly theory of "trustees.h.i.+p" that basically relied on the benevolence of the wealthy. In his aversion to devices that can be cla.s.sed as laborsaving, he was stubbornly wrongheaded. But at least he framed basic questions, grappling with the misery at the bottom of the social pyramid. And since that misery has hardly receded, even as living standards have risen for most Indians, it cannot be altogether surprising that Gandhian economics bears a certain resemblance to approaches currently favored by development specialists seeking to confront the same perennial, still urgent problems-for instance, with "microfinance" schemes designed to drive small-scale enterprises, including the traditional handicrafts he promoted, as engines of growth and employment in rural settings. What such latter-day schemes have in common with their unacknowledged Gandhian antecedents is the conviction that solutions must be found where the poorest live, must have some capacity to spark and mobilize their energies.

Gandhi couldn't have forecast and probably wouldn't have admired many aspects of today's globalized India, with its offsh.o.r.e islands of affluent expatriate life in California, New York, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere, transplanted and now thriving in cultures he'd long ago written off as incorrigibly materialistic: overdeveloped, in his view. Nor would he have been pleased by their repercussions at home, visible in high-rise Florida-style condo developments, largely financed by expatriate cash, spreading across fields where rice and wheat were once cultivated; in no way was this the India of that former expatriate's dreams. Today in the villages and dense, dank shantytowns of the poorest states, mostly in North India, he'd find much that would look familiar. He'd discover that nearly two-thirds of all Indians still live in villages. A Gandhi reborn in these times would probably want to start a campaign somewhere-in Wardha, perhaps.

On May 1, 1936, the day after Gandhi landed at Segaon, he received his first visitor there-none other than Babasaheb Ambedkar, who six months earlier had further estranged himself from the Mahatma by renouncing Hinduism and proclaiming his intention to convert to another religion. Ambedkar had just come from a conference of Sikhs in Amritsar where he'd openly flirted with the possibility of becoming a Sikh, praising the religion for regarding all its adherents as equals. The two leaders sat on the ground, under the guava tree where Gandhi had slept, debating the principles and politics of conversion. Neither one got much satisfaction from the encounter, but they agreed to meet again in Segaon. The inconclusive meeting seems to have been instigated by wealthy supporters of Gandhi who still hoped to keep Ambedkar and his followers in what the Mahatma called "the Hindu fold."

There may be hints here that Gandhi was making a roundabout attempt to woo Ambedkar. According to one of the untouchable leader's biographers, Gandhi's friends "asked Ambedkar why he did not join Gandhi's camp, so that he might have boundless resources at his disposal for the uplift of the Depressed Cla.s.ses." Ambedkar said they had too many differences. Nehru also had many differences with Gandhi, observed Jamnalal Bajaj, one of the go-betweens. Ambedkar huffily said it was a matter of conscience for him.

The two leaders can be seen as reluctant antagonists, sometimes, in Conrad's sense, as secret sharers-mirror images of each other, with Gandhi finding aspects of his driven, sometimes angry South African self in the younger man, and Ambedkar feeling resentful, even envious, of the sanct.i.ty in which the Mahatma wraps himself. "You and I are quite similar," Ambedkar had remarked to Gandhi in the course of their negotiations at Yeravda prison.

The observation had provoked laughter from members of Gandhi's entourage within earshot, but the Mahatma himself had replied, "Yes, that's true." For nearly five years, ever since their first meeting in Bombay in August 1931 before sailing to the Round Table Conference, they'd been circling each other, sizing one another up, jousting at a distance, then putting out tentative feelers. They'd met in London, in Yeravda prison, possibly in Poona after Gandhi's release, and now in Segaon but remained unable to strike an alliance. When Ambedkar was preoccupied with a temple-entry campaign, Gandhi withheld his support. When temple entry became the focus of Gandhi's efforts to combat untouchability, Ambedkar contrarily said that social equality and economic uplift were the real issues. Now that Gandhi had settled on the edge of a village in which his Harijans were a majority in order to engage those very issues, Ambedkar was preoccupied with the need for untouchables to find a way out of Hinduism. If they were ever in sync, it was the way the two hands of a clock come together for an instant every hour. Or, perhaps, the way a chess game ends in stalemate. A couple of years earlier, Ambedkar had said the issue that divided them was Gandhi's refusal to renounce the caste system. Within a few months, seemingly in response, Gandhi had written an article in Harijan Harijan t.i.tled "Caste Has to Go," in which he said, "The present caste system is the very ant.i.thesis of Varnashrama," the traditional fourfold ranking of inherited occupations, which he professed to uphold but only on his own terms, with the caveat that true varnashrama was "today non-existent in practice." In any case, he argued, religious customs derived from Hindu scriptures that were in conflict with "reason" and "universal truths and morals" were unacceptable. Also, Gandhi's article said, there "should be no prohibition of intermarriage or inter-dining." It appeared the same week Ambedkar vowed he wouldn't die a Hindu. By pleading for a varnashrama that, he said, didn't exist, Gandhi left himself some wiggle room, whether out of conviction or political expedience-some cover, that is, with orthodox caste Hindus. Either way, his response wasn't good enough for Ambedkar, who, predictably, dodged whatever opportunity there may have been to strike a religious accord. t.i.tled "Caste Has to Go," in which he said, "The present caste system is the very ant.i.thesis of Varnashrama," the traditional fourfold ranking of inherited occupations, which he professed to uphold but only on his own terms, with the caveat that true varnashrama was "today non-existent in practice." In any case, he argued, religious customs derived from Hindu scriptures that were in conflict with "reason" and "universal truths and morals" were unacceptable. Also, Gandhi's article said, there "should be no prohibition of intermarriage or inter-dining." It appeared the same week Ambedkar vowed he wouldn't die a Hindu. By pleading for a varnashrama that, he said, didn't exist, Gandhi left himself some wiggle room, whether out of conviction or political expedience-some cover, that is, with orthodox caste Hindus. Either way, his response wasn't good enough for Ambedkar, who, predictably, dodged whatever opportunity there may have been to strike a religious accord.

Actually, their deepest difference wasn't over doctrine but over sociology, whether untouchables could be, should be, seen as "a separate community" or as an integral part of village India and, by extension, Hindu society as a whole. As interpreted by D. R. Nagaraj, a compelling cultural critic from the South Indian state of Karnataka, Ambedkar regarded the Indian village as "irredeemable" as a social setting for untouchables. Nagaraj, from a lowly subcaste of weavers himself, had endured bonded labor as a child and so had reason to identify himself with Ambedkar's view. But he was simultaneously large-minded enough to champion Gandhi's side of the argument. The high-caste townsman who'd been inspired to recast himself in peasant's garb felt the villages had to be redeemed if there were to be any future for India's poorest.

That tension is what would make the picture of Gandhi and Ambedkar lounging under the guava tree on the outskirts of a broiling Segaon on the Mahatma's first full day there in 1936 so poignant, so emblematic, if such a picture actually existed. Even if he wasn't wearing the starched winged collar that he often favored in this period, the scholarly, corpulent Ambedkar would probably not have looked comfortable in the village setting to which Gandhi, who gave a new definition to spareness, had long since adapted himself. In their face-off, each has a case, neither a workable solution embracing both touchables and untouchables. From the standpoint of today's Dalits, so Nagaraj wrote, "there is a compelling need to achieve a synthesis of the two." Gandhi and Ambedkar, he argued, "are complementary at a fundamental level." What Gandhi offers, this writer said, is the understanding that "the liberation of the untouchable is organically linked to the emanc.i.p.ation of village India." What Ambedkar offers is his insistence that it must include the possibility of liberation from their despised hereditary roles. Trapped in his own paternalism, the man known as the Mahatma wanted everyone to understand that the scavenger's work was honorable and essential. Ambedkar wanted everyone to understand that it was not at all fated, that this same untouchable could ignore the traditional vocation decreed by his caste just as Gandhi the Bania had. ("He has never touched trading which is his ancestral calling," Ambedkar noted in one of his more telling thrusts.) The emphasis of the man revered as Babasaheb was on equal rights. Maybe that's why, decades later, the villagers of Segaon-Sevagram put up his statue, although it was Gandhi and not Ambedkar who gave them their land.

Ambedkar and his followers were not the only untouchables talking conversion in this period. To the south, in the princely state of Travancore, now part of Kerala, there was a distinct restlessness among the upwardly mobile Ezhavas, who had provided the main impetus for the Vaikom Satyagraha. Some Ezhava leaders were reported to have held discussions about the possibility of a ma.s.s conversion with the Syrian Christian bishop of Kottayam, near Cochin, the leader of a sect that traced its history in South India back to a legendary visit by Saint Thomas in the second century. The bishop's seat was also near Vaikom, where the s.h.i.+va temple still barred Ezhavas and all other untouchables