Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (34 page)

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 ennobling 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 rishis. 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 classes.” He speaks of “a wave of impatience going on not only in Travancore, but throughout the length and breadth of India, among the depressed classes.” He means impatience with the orthodox. “I assure 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 “assert
their rights and enter the prohibited area forcibly.” The aftermath of the Mahatma’s visit provides circumstantial 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 clashing 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 passively after being barred from the
Devi temple at Kanyakumari, 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 worship 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 documented, 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 Smuts 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 worship. 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 classes,” as he so often termed them, to do anything for themselves beyond bathe and watch what they put in their mouths. Once, in passing, he mentions the possibility that they could attempt passive 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-class 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.” Brushing 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.

T
HOUGH
“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 membership 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 God’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 compass, 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.