Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (44 page)

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
. “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 Shiyali, 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 pronounced untouchability to be on “its last legs,” but his private assessment 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 passed 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 assembly 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
at the Roxy Talkie in Bombay and Eddie Cantor in
Palmy Days
at the Pathé, 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 mass politics, mass popular culture would soon be in the offing.)

Few congressmen had seen as much of the world beyond India’s shores 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-prone, malaria-prone, 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 leadership 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 leadership 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.

I
F
G
ANDHI’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 leadership, 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 mass 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
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:

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, pronouncing 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 “shining” 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 leadership 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
Japanese.” A representative of the African National Congress of South Africa was told that its leadership had alienated itself from the masses by its adoption of Western dress and manners. “
You must not … feel ashamed of carrying an assagai, 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.”