Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (36 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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