Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (46 page)

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If this does not work, then there is no such thing as non-violence,” he concludes.

In which case, he seems to be saying, the work had still to be done as a matter of duty.
When one of his workers asked for his formula for solving the problem of untouchability in villages, Gandhi replied: “Silent plodding.” On another occasion, he said: “
The only way is to sit down in their midst and work away in steadfast faith, as their scavengers, their nurses, their servants, not as their patrons, and to forget all our prejudices, our prepossessions. Let us for a moment forget even swaraj.”

This is what his Anglican soul mate Charlie Andrews had urged several years earlier, but of course, as Gandhi said then, he could never forget swaraj.

Gandhi seemed to sense early that the qualifications he declared for what today might be called community organizing had scant potential—really, none at all—for rallying the nonviolent forces he was hoping to send en masse to the villages. “
Our ambition is to make at least one
member for each of our 700,000 villages,” he told a meeting of his village industries association, “but our actual membership is 517!” And many of those were AWOL. It was a conundrum he was hoping to crack during the solitary residence he planned for himself at Segaon. Mirabehn, the English admiral’s daughter, had to admit defeat in Sindi, where the villagers came to view her as a source of pollution after she drew water from the well used by the untouchables. Segaon, where she then preceded her teacher, wasn’t much better for her. On the verge of a breakdown, having already suffered a bout of typhoid, she was eventually sent off to the Himalayas in 1937 for a rest. After his first ten days at Segaon the previous year, at the height of the hot season, Gandhi himself was strongly urged by his doctors to seek relief in the hills near Bangalore. His rest cure lasted five weeks. It was June 16 before he returned, arriving again on foot in a monsoon downpour that had drenched him to the skin.
Soon he came down with malaria.

When the bare narrative of this effort to achieve “oneness” with India’s poorest is laid out, it can appear either futile or desperate. It’s the effort of the Mahatma to remain true to his vision of swaraj for the dumb millions, despite all that he has learned, or perhaps senses he has yet to learn, about village India. Yet from a distance of more than seven decades, what stands out is the commitment rather than the futility. He could easily have retired to a mansion belonging to one of his millionaire supporters and there directed the national movement from on high; no one would have asked why he wasn’t living like a peasant. In his tireless, pertinacious way in the village to which he’d attached himself instead, he was doing more than tilting at windmills. Once again Gandhi was refusing to avert his eyes from a suffering India that seemed largely to have escaped the notice of most educated Indians swept up in the movement he’d been leading.

The degree to which this was true in the 1930s can be gauged by the degree to which it remains true in an India that has hailed itself as free and democratic for several generations. By 2009, after boasting four consecutive years of robust 9 percent growth in economic output, this rising and surprising new India, with its booming market economy at the high end, still had a quarter of its people living in conditions defined by the
World Bank as “absolute poverty,” meaning that their per capita income was less than a dollar a day; the rate of poverty was declining as a percentage of the total population of nearly 1.2 billion, but in absolute numbers the total of some 300 million was undiminished, accounting for nearly one-third of the globe’s poorest people. Almost by definition
their children were malnourished and underweight, more than likely to grow up illiterate, if they grew up at all. The number of Indians calculated to be living on less than $1.25 a day was over 400 million, larger than the total population at the time of independence when the poorest represented a bigger proportion of the total; today, as a minority, they can be viewed as a ragged coterie of interest groups and a drag on the rising middle class. Still only 33 percent of all Indians have access, according to the bank’s figures, to what it primly calls “improved sanitation.”
A
United Nations survey portrays this reality more bluntly, reporting that 55 percent of the population still defecates out of doors. Given the tripling of population since Gandhi’s time, the water supply in villages and towns can still prove vulnerable to disease-bearing organisms; human scavengers still have to be relied upon to carry off much of the subcontinent’s night soil, or human waste.

Gandhian economics needs to be viewed in that sobering perspective before being written off as irrelevant or utopian in the era of globalization. His answers to conspicuous issues of rural mass poverty, underemployment, and chronic indebtedness may have been incomplete and untested. Not only did he reject birth control and recommend abstinence as a means of limiting population, but he had no scheme that addressed glaring inequities in land ownership and distribution beyond a wishful, woolly theory of “trusteeship” that basically relied on the benevolence of the wealthy. In his aversion to devices that can be classed as laborsaving, he was stubbornly wrongheaded. But at least he framed basic questions, grappling with the misery at the bottom of the social pyramid. And since that misery has hardly receded, even as living standards have risen for most Indians, it cannot be altogether surprising that Gandhian economics bears a certain resemblance to approaches currently favored by development specialists seeking to confront the same perennial, still urgent problems—for instance, with “microfinance” schemes designed to drive small-scale enterprises, including the traditional handicrafts he promoted, as engines of growth and employment in rural settings.
What such latter-day schemes have in common with their unacknowledged Gandhian antecedents is the conviction that solutions must be found where the poorest live, must have some capacity to spark and mobilize their energies.

Gandhi couldn’t have forecast and probably wouldn’t have admired many aspects of today’s globalized India, with its offshore islands of affluent expatriate life in California, New York, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere, transplanted and now thriving in cultures he’d long ago written
off as incorrigibly materialistic: overdeveloped, in his view. Nor would he have been pleased by their repercussions at home, visible in high-rise Florida-style condo developments, largely financed by expatriate cash, spreading across fields where rice and wheat were once cultivated; in no way was this the India of that former expatriate’s dreams. Today in the villages and dense, dank shantytowns of the poorest states, mostly in North India, he’d find much that would look familiar. He’d discover that nearly two-thirds of all Indians still live in villages. A Gandhi reborn in these times would probably want to start a campaign somewhere—in Wardha, perhaps.

On May 1, 1936, the day after Gandhi landed at Segaon, he received his first visitor there—none other than Babasaheb Ambedkar, who six months earlier had further estranged himself from the Mahatma by renouncing Hinduism and proclaiming his intention to convert to another religion. Ambedkar had just come from a conference of
Sikhs in Amritsar where he’d openly flirted with the possibility of becoming a Sikh, praising the religion for regarding all its adherents as equals. The two leaders sat on the ground, under the guava tree where Gandhi had slept, debating the principles and politics of conversion. Neither one got much satisfaction from the encounter, but they agreed to meet again in Segaon. The inconclusive meeting seems to have been instigated by wealthy supporters of Gandhi who still hoped to keep Ambedkar and his followers in what the Mahatma called “the Hindu fold.”

There may be hints here that Gandhi was making a roundabout attempt to woo Ambedkar.
According to one of the untouchable leader’s biographers, Gandhi’s friends “asked Ambedkar why he did not join Gandhi’s camp, so that he might have boundless resources at his disposal for the uplift of the Depressed Classes.” Ambedkar said they had too many differences. Nehru also had many differences with Gandhi, observed
Jamnalal Bajaj, one of the go-betweens. Ambedkar huffily said it was a matter of conscience for him.

The two leaders can be seen as reluctant antagonists, sometimes, in Conrad’s sense, as secret sharers—mirror images of each other, with Gandhi finding aspects of his driven, sometimes angry South African self in the younger man, and Ambedkar feeling resentful, even envious, of the sanctity in which the Mahatma wraps himself. “You and I are quite similar,” Ambedkar had remarked to Gandhi in the course of their negotiations at Yeravda prison.

The observation had provoked laughter from members of Gandhi’s entourage within earshot, but the Mahatma himself had replied, “Yes, that’s true.” For nearly five years, ever since their first meeting in Bombay in August 1931 before sailing to the Round Table Conference, they’d been circling each other, sizing one another up, jousting at a distance, then putting out tentative feelers. They’d met in London, in Yeravda prison, possibly in Poona after Gandhi’s release, and now in Segaon but remained unable to strike an alliance. When Ambedkar was preoccupied with a temple-entry campaign, Gandhi withheld his support. When temple entry became the focus of Gandhi’s efforts to combat untouchability, Ambedkar contrarily said that social equality and economic uplift were the real issues. Now that Gandhi had settled on the edge of a village in which his Harijans were a majority in order to engage those very issues, Ambedkar was preoccupied with the need for untouchables to find a way out of Hinduism. If they were ever in sync, it was the way the two hands of a clock come together for an instant every hour. Or, perhaps, the way a chess game ends in stalemate. A couple of years earlier, Ambedkar had said the issue that divided them was Gandhi’s refusal to renounce the caste system.
Within a few months, seemingly in response, Gandhi had written an article in
Harijan
titled “Caste Has to Go,” in which he said, “The present caste system is the very antithesis of Varnashrama,” the traditional fourfold ranking of inherited occupations, which he professed to uphold but only on his own terms, with the caveat that true varnashrama was “today non-existent in practice.” In any case, he argued, religious customs derived from Hindu scriptures that were in conflict with “reason” and “universal truths and morals” were unacceptable. Also, Gandhi’s article said, there “should be no prohibition of intermarriage or inter-dining.” It appeared the same week Ambedkar vowed he wouldn’t die a Hindu. By pleading for a varnashrama that, he said, didn’t exist, Gandhi left himself some wiggle room, whether out of conviction or political expedience—some cover, that is, with orthodox caste Hindus. Either way, his response wasn’t good enough for Ambedkar, who, predictably, dodged whatever opportunity there may have been to strike a religious accord.

Actually, their deepest difference wasn’t over doctrine but over sociology, whether untouchables could be, should be, seen as “a separate community” or as an integral part of village India and, by extension, Hindu society as a whole.
As interpreted by
D. R. Nagaraj, a compelling cultural critic from the South Indian state of Karnataka, Ambedkar regarded the Indian village as “irredeemable” as a social setting for
untouchables. Nagaraj, from a lowly subcaste of weavers himself, had endured bonded labor as a child and so had reason to identify himself with Ambedkar’s view. But he was simultaneously large-minded enough to champion Gandhi’s side of the argument. The high-caste townsman who’d been inspired to recast himself in peasant’s garb felt the villages had to be redeemed if there were to be any future for India’s poorest.

That tension is what would make the picture of Gandhi and Ambedkar lounging under the guava tree on the outskirts of a broiling Segaon on the Mahatma’s first full day there in 1936 so poignant, so emblematic, if such a picture actually existed. Even if he wasn’t wearing the starched winged collar that he often favored in this period, the scholarly, corpulent Ambedkar would probably not have looked comfortable in the village setting to which Gandhi, who gave a new definition to spareness, had long since adapted himself. In their face-off, each has a case, neither a workable solution embracing both touchables and untouchables.
From the standpoint of today’s
Dalits, so Nagaraj wrote, “there is a compelling need to achieve a synthesis of the two.” Gandhi and Ambedkar, he argued, “are complementary at a fundamental level.” What Gandhi offers, this writer said, is the understanding that “the liberation of the untouchable is organically linked to the emancipation of village India.” What Ambedkar offers is his insistence that it must include the possibility of liberation from their despised hereditary roles. Trapped in his own paternalism, the man known as the Mahatma wanted everyone to understand that the scavenger’s work was honorable and essential. Ambedkar wanted everyone to understand that it was not at all fated, that this same untouchable could ignore the traditional vocation decreed by his caste just as Gandhi the Bania had. (“He has never touched trading which is his ancestral calling,” Ambedkar noted in one of his more telling thrusts.) The emphasis of the man revered as Babasaheb was on equal rights. Maybe that’s why, decades later, the villagers of Segaon-Sevagram put up his statue, although it was Gandhi and not Ambedkar who gave them their land.

Ambedkar and his followers were not the only untouchables talking conversion in this period. To the south, in the princely state of Travancore, now part of Kerala, there was a distinct restlessness among the upwardly mobile Ezhavas, who had provided the main impetus for the Vaikom Satyagraha. Some Ezhava leaders were reported to have held discussions about the possibility of a mass conversion with the Syrian Christian
bishop of Kottayam, near Cochin, the leader of a sect that traced its history in South India back to a legendary visit by Saint Thomas in the second century. The bishop’s seat was also near Vaikom, where the Shiva temple still barred Ezhavas and all other untouchables a decade after the satyagraha campaign that Gandhi had tried to control at a distance. The settlement he’d negotiated there with the British police commissioner had, like the one he’d negotiated with Smuts in South Africa, left the fundamental issues unresolved.
The impatience of the Ezhavas had risen from year to year, to the point that they were even reported to be putting out feelers too to the
London Missionary Society. There was also ferment among
Pulayas, a more abject group of Kerala untouchables, some of whom had just become
Sikhs.