Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (37 page)

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

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

Ambedkar in London
(photo credit i8.2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How can I call this land my own homeland and this religion my own wherein we are treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein we cannot get water to drink?” Ambedkar persisted, according to this account. (The “wherein’s” may be a clue that these remarks were reconstructed or translated by a lawyer, possibly Ambedkar himself.)

Gandhi’s one comment on the encounter overlooks the “we” in Ambedkar’s outburst as it has been handed down. The comment came a couple of years after the event, by which time he’d taken to using a new name for untouchables, calling them Harijans, or “children of God” (a
term rejected by today’s
Dalits as patronizing). “
Till I left for England,” he said, speaking of Ambedkar, “I did not know he was a Harijan. I thought he was some Brahman who took a deep interest in Harijans and therefore talked intemperately.”

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

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

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

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

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

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