Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (31 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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