Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (11 page)

By morning, Gandhi had made his decision. He “gently suggested to the girls that they might let him cut off their fine long hair”. At first they were reluctant. He kept the pressure up and managed to win the elderly women of the farm over to his side. The girls came around after all, “and at once the very hand that is narrating this incident set to cut off their hair. And afterwards analysed and explained my procedure before my class, with excellent results. I never heard of a joke again.”
¹⁴⁷

There is no mention of what punishment the same mind that had thought up the idea of cutting the girls’ hair had thought up for the boys.

Gandhi did indeed make the space for women to participate in the national movement. But those women had to be virtuous;
they had to, so to speak, bear “marks” upon their person that would “sterilise the sinner’s eye”. They had to be obedient women who never challenged the traditional structures of
patriarchy.

Gandhi may have enjoyed and learned a great deal from his ‘experiments’. But he’s gone now, and left his followers with a legacy of a joyless, joke-free world: no desire, no sex—which he described as a poison worse than snakebite
¹⁴⁸
—no food, no beads, no nice clothes, no dance, no poetry. And very little music. It is true that Gandhi fired the imagination of millions of people. It’s also true that he has debilitated the political imagination of millions with his impossible standards of ‘purity’ and righteousness as a minimum qualification for political engagement:

No questions seem to have arisen as to how one was to carry one’s
husband
with one. Nor any thoughts on whether satyagraha would be effective, for example, against the hoary tradition of marital rape.

In 1909, Gandhi published his first and most famous political tract,
Hind Swaraj
. It was written in Gujarati and translated into English by Gandhi himself. It is considered to be a piece of genuinely original thinking, a classic. Gandhi himself remained pleased with it to the end of his days.
Hind Swaraj
defines Gandhi in the way
Annihilation of Caste
defines Ambedkar. Soon after it
was published, copies of it were seized in Bombay, and it was banned for being seditious. The ban was lifted only in 1938.
¹⁵⁰

It was conceived of as Gandhi’s response to Indian socialists, impatient young nihilists and nationalists he had met in London. Like the
Bhagvad
Gita
(and
Jotiba Phule’s
Gulamgiri
),
Hind
Swaraj
is written as a conversation between two people. Its best and most grounded passages are those in which he writes about how Hindus and Muslims would have to learn to accommodate each other after swaraj. This message of tolerance and inclusiveness between Hindus and Muslims continues to be Gandhi’s real, lasting and most important contribution to the idea of India.

Nevertheless, in
Hind Swaraj
, Gandhi (like many right-wing Hindu nationalists would do in the future)
¹⁵¹
superimposes Hinduism’s spiritual map—the map of its holy places—on the territorial map of India, and uses that to define the boundaries of the country. By doing so, consciously or unconsciously, Gandhi presents the Homeland as unmistakably Hindu. But he goes on, in the manner of a good host, to say that “a country must have a faculty for
assimilation” and that “the Hindus, the Mohammedans, the Parsees and the Christians who have made India their country, are fellow countrymen”.
¹⁵²
The time Gandhi spent in South Africa—where the majority of his clients, and later his political constituency, were wealthy Muslim businessmen—seems to have made him more attentive to the Muslim question than he might have otherwise been. For the sin of this attentiveness, this obviously unforgivable complexity, he paid with his life.

The rest of
Hind Swaraj
is a trenchant (some say lyrical) denunciation of modernity. Like the
Luddites, but with no calls for machine smashing, it indicts the industrial revolution and modern machinery. It calls the British Parliament a “sterile woman” and a “prostitute”. It condemns doctors, lawyers and the railways, and dismisses Western civilisation as “satanic”. It
might not have been a crude or even excessive adjective to use from the point of view of the
genocide of tens of millions of people in the Americas, in Australia, the Congo and West Africa that was an inalienable part of the colonial project. But it was a little odd, considering Gandhi’s proposals for an “Imperial Brotherhood”. And even odder, considering his respect for the British and his disdain for the uncivilised “raw Kaffir”.

“What then is civilisation?” the ‘Reader’ eventually asks the ‘Editor’. The Editor then launches into an embarrassing, chauvinistic reverie of a mythical India: “I believe that the civilisation India has evolved is not to be beaten in the world.”
¹⁵³
It’s tempting to reproduce the whole chapter, but since that isn’t possible, here are some key passages:

Gandhi’s valorisation of the mythic village came at a point in his life when he does not seem to have even visited an Indian village.
¹⁵⁵
And yet his faith in it is free of doubt or caveats.

Other than the vague allusion to the idea of people following an ancestral occupation or trade that was rewarded by a “regulation wage”, caste is absent in Gandhi’s reverie. Though Gandhi later insisted that
untouchability had troubled him since he was a boy,
¹⁵⁷
in
Hind Swaraj
he makes absolutely no mention of it.

Around the time
Hind Swaraj
was published, the first biographies of Gandhi were also published:
M.K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa
by Reverend Joseph Doke (a minister of the Johannesburg Baptist Church) in 1909, and
M.K. Gandhi: A Sketch of His Life and Work
in 1910 by
Henry S.L. Polak, one of Gandhi’s closest friends and most admiring of disciples. These contained the first intimations of coming Mahatmahood.

In 1910, the separate British colonies of
Natal, the Cape, the
Transvaal and the
Orange Free State united to become the Union of South Africa, a self-governing Dominion under the British crown, with
Louis Botha as its first Prime Minister. Segregation began to harden.

Around then, only three years before he was to leave South Africa, Gandhi condescendingly began to admit that Africans were the original inhabitants of the land:

By now he seems to have forgotten that he had actively collaborated with the Whites in their wars to forcibly occupy the country, appropriate the land and enslave Africans. Gandhi chose to ignore the scale and extent of the brutality that was taking place around him. Did he really believe that it was the “negroes’ goodwill” that allowed Indian merchants to ply their trade in South Africa, and not, despite its
racist laws, British colonialism? In 1906, during the
Zulu rebellion, he had been less woolly about things like “goodwill” when he said, “We are in Natal by virtue of British Power. Our very existence depends on it.”

By 1911, the anxiety of the White folks about the burgeoning Indian population led to legislation that stopped the import of labour from India.
¹⁵⁹
Then came 1913—the year the first volume of Marcel Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu
was first published, the year
Rabindranath Tagore won the
Nobel Prize for literature—South Africa’s year of blood. It was the year the foundations for
apartheid were laid, the year of the Land Act, legislation that created a system of tenure that deprived the majority of South Africa’s inhabitants of the right to own land. It was the year African women marched against the
Pass Laws that herded them into townships and restricted inter-province movement, the year White mine workers and railway workers, and then African mine workers, went on strike. It was the year Indian workers rose against a new three-pound tax and against a new marriage law that made their existing marriages illegal and their children illegitimate. The year the three-pound tax was imposed on those who had worked off their indenture and wanted to live on in South Africa as free citizens. Being unaffordable, the tax would have forced workers to re-indenture and lock themselves into a cycle of servitude.

For the first time in twenty years, Gandhi aligned himself politically with the people he had previously taken care to distance himself from. He stepped in to ‘lead’ the Indian
workers’ strike. In fact, they did not need ‘leading’. For years before, during and after Gandhi, they had waged their own heroic resistance. It could be argued that they were fortunate to have escaped Gandhi’s attentions, because they did not just wage a resistance, they also broke caste in the only way it can be broken—they transgressed caste barriers, got married to each other, made
love and had babies.

Gandhi travelled from town to town, addressing coal miners and plantation workers. The strike spread from the collieries to the sugar plantations. Non-violent satyagraha failed. There was rioting, arson and bloodshed. Thousands were arrested as they defied the new immigration bill and crossed the border into the
Transvaal. Gandhi was arrested too. He lost control of the strike. Eventually, he signed a settlement with
Jan Smuts. The settlement upset many in the Indian community, who saw it as a pyrrhic victory. One of its most controversial clauses was the one in which the government undertook to provide free passage to Indians who wished to return permanently to India. It reinforced and formalised the idea that Indians were sojourners who could be repatriated. (In their 1948 election manifesto the apartheid National Party called for the repatriation of all Indians. Indians finally became full-fledged citizens only in 1960, when South Africa became a republic.)

P.S. Aiyar, an old adversary of Gandhi’s, had accused him of being primarily concerned with the rights of the passenger Indians. (During the struggle against the first proposal of the draft Immigration Bill in 1911, while some Indians, including Aiyar, were a
gitating for the free movement of all Indians to all provinces, Gandhi and Henry Polak were petitioning for six new entrants a year to be allowed into the Transvaal.)
¹⁶⁰
Aiyar was editor of the
African Chronicle
, a newspaper with a predominantly Tamil readership that reported the terrible conditions in which indentured labourers worked and lived. About the Gandhi–Smuts
settlement, Aiyar said that Gandhi’s “ephemeral fame and popularity in India rest on no glorious achievement for his countrymen, but on a series of failures, which has resulted in causing endless misery, loss of wealth, and deprivation of existing rights”. He added that Gandhi’s leadership over the previous two decades had “resulted in no tangible good to anyone”. On the contrary, Gandhi and his band of passive resisters had made themselves “an object of ridicule and hatred among all sections of the community in South Africa”.
¹⁶¹
(A joke among some Blacks and Indians goes like this: Things were good then, back in 1893. Gandhi only got thrown
off
a train. By 1920, we couldn’t even get on one.
¹⁶²
)