Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (12 page)

Though it was not put down in writing, part of the Gandhi–Smuts settlement seems to have been that Gandhi would have to leave South Africa.
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In all his years in South Africa, Gandhi maintained that Indians deserved better treatment than Africans. The jury is still out on whether or not Gandhi’s political activity helped or harmed the Indian community in the long run. But his consistent attempts to collaborate with the British government certainly made the Indian community vulnerable during the rise of African nationalism. When Indian political activists joined the liberation
movement under African leadership in the 1950s and saw their freedom as being linked to the freedom of African people, they were breaking with Gandhi’s politics, not carrying on his legacy. When Indians joined the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s seeking to build a broader Black identity, they were actually upending Gandhian politics. It is these people, many of whom did their time in Robben Island with
Nelson Mandela and other African comrades, who have saved the South African Indian community from being painted as a
race of collaborators and from being isolated, even expelled, like the Indians in Uganda were in 1972.

That Gandhi is a hero in South Africa is as undeniable as it is baffling. One possible explanation is that after he left South Africa, Gandhi was
reimported
, this time as the shining star of the freedom struggle in India. The Indian community in South Africa, already cut adrift from its roots, was, after Gandhi left, further isolated and brutalised by the
apartheid regime. Gandhi’s cult status in India and his connection to South Africa would have provided South African Indians with a link to their history and their motherland.

In order for Gandhi to be a South African hero, it became necessary to rescue him from his past, and rewrite it. Gandhi himself began that project. Some writers of history completed it. Towards the end of Gandhi’s stay in South Africa, the first few biographies had spread the news, and things were moving fast on the messiah front. The young
Reverend Charles Freer Andrews travelled to South Africa and fell on his knees when he met Gandhi at the
Durban dock.
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Andrews, who became a lifelong devotee, went on to suggest that Gandhi, the leader of the “humblest, the lowliest and lost”, was a living avatar of Christ’s spirit. Europeans and Americans vied with each other to honour him.

In 1915, Gandhi returned to India via London where he was awarded something far better than the Queen’s chocolate. For his services to the British Empire, he was honoured with the Kaiser-e-Hind Gold Medal for Public Service, presented to him by
Lord Hardinge of Penshurst. (He returned it in 1920 before the first national
Non-Cooperation Movement.) Honoured thus, he arrived in India fitted out as the Mahatma—Great Soul—who had fought
racism and imperialism and had stood up for the rights of Indian workers in South Africa. He was forty-six years old.

To honour the returning hero,
G.D. Birla, a leading Indian industrialist (and a fellow
Bania), organised a grand reception
in Calcutta. The Birlas ran an export–import business based in Calcutta and Bombay. They traded in cotton, wheat and silver. G.D. Birla was a wealthy man who was chafing at the bit, offended by the racism he had personally encountered at the hands of the British. He had had several run-ins with the colonial government. He became Gandhi’s chief patron and sponsor and paid him a generous monthly retainer to cover the costs of running his ashrams and for his Congress party work. There were other industrialist sponsors as well, but Gandhi’s arrangement with G.D. Birla lasted for the rest of his days.
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In addition to mills and other businesses, G.D. Birla owned a newspaper,
Hindustan Times
, where Gandhi’s son, Devdas, eventually worked as managing editor.

So the Mahatma who promoted homespun khadi and the wooden charkha was sponsored by a mill-owner. The man who raged against the machine was kept afloat by industrialists. This arrangement was the precursor to the phenomenon of the corporate-sponsored NGO.

Once the finances were in place and the ashrams were up and running, Gandhi set off on his mission of rallying people against the British government, yet never harming the old hierarchies that he (and his sponsors) intrinsically believed in. He travelled the length and breadth of the country to get to know it. His first satyagraha was in Champaran, Bihar, in 1917. Three years prior to his arrival there, landless peasants living on the verge of famine, labouring on British-owned indigo plantations, had risen in revolt against a new regime of British taxes. Gandhi travelled to Champaran and set up an ashram from where he backed their struggle. The people were not sure exactly who he was.
Jacques Pouchepadass, who studied the
Champaran Satyagraha, writes: “Rumours … reported that Gandhi had been sent into Champaran by the Viceroy, or even the King, to redress all the grievances of the raiyats [farmers] and that his mandate
overruled all the local officials and the courts.”
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Gandhi stayed in Champaran for a year and then left. Says Pouchepadass, “It is a fact that from 1918 onwards, after Gandhi had left and the planters’ influence had begun to fade away, the hold of the rural oligarchy grew stronger than ever.”

To rouse people against
injustice and yet control them and persuade them to
his
view of injustice, Gandhi had to make some complicated manoeuvres. In 1921, when peasants (kisans) rose against their Indian landlords (zamindars) in the
United Provinces, Gandhi sent them a message:

Inferred from custom. We needn’t guess what that means. It’s the whole ball of wax.

Though Gandhi spoke of inequality and
poverty, though he sometimes even sounded like a socialist, at no point in his political career did he ever seriously criticise or confront an Indian industrialist or the landed aristocracy. This was of a piece with his doctrine of
trusteeship or what today goes by the term
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Expanding on this in an essay called “Equal Distribution”, Gandhi said: “The rich man will be left in possession of his wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably requires for his personal needs and will act as a trustee for the remainder to be used for society. In this argument, honesty on the part of the trustee is assumed.”
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To justify the idea of the rich becoming the “guardians of the poor”,
he argued that “the rich cannot accumulate wealth without the co-operation of the poor in society”.
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And then, to empower the poor wards of the rich guardians: “If this knowledge were to penetrate to and spread amongst the poor, they would become strong and would learn how to free themselves by means of non-violence from the crushing inequalities which have brought them to the verge of starvation.”
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Gandhi’s ideas of trusteeship echo almost verbatim what American capitalists—the Robber Barons—like
J.D. Rockefeller and
Andrew Carnegie were saying at the time. Carnegie writes in
The Gospel of Wealth
(1889):

The contradictions mattered little, because by then, Gandhi was far beyond all that. He was a sanatani Hindu (which is how he described himself), and an avatar of
Christ (which is how he allowed himself to be described). The trains he travelled in were mobbed by devotees seeking ‘darshan’ (a sighting). The biographer
D.G. Tendulkar, who travelled with him, describes the phenomenon as “mass conversions to the new creed”.

In his classic essay, “Gandhi as Mahatma”, the historian
Shahid Amin describes how the combination of cleverly planted rumours by local Congress leaders, adulatory—and sometimes hallucinatory—newspaper reporting, a gullible people and Gandhi’s extraordinary charisma built up mass hysteria which culminated in the deification of Mahatma Gandhi. Even back then, not everyone was convinced. An editorial in
The Pioneer
of 23 April 1921 said, “The very simple people in the east and south of the
United Provinces afford a fertile soil in which a belief in the power of the ‘mahatmaji’, who is after all little more than a name of power to them, may grow.” The editorial was criticising an article that had appeared in
Swadesh
, a Gorakhpur newspaper, that had published rumours about the miracles that surrounded Gandhi: he had made fragrant smoke waft up from a well, a copy of the Holy Quran had appeared in a locked room, a buffalo that belonged to an Ahir who refused money to a sadhu begging in the Mahatma’s name had perished in a fire, and a
Brahmin who had defied Gandhi’s authority had gone mad.
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The taproot of Gandhi’s Mahatmahood had found its way into a fecund rill, where feudalism met the future, where miracles met modernity. From there it drew sustenance and prospered.

The sceptics were few and did not count for much. Gandhi was by now addressing rallies of up to two hundred thousand people. The hysteria spread abroad. In 1921, the Unitarian minister
John Haynes Holmes of the Community Church in New York in a sermon called “Who is the Greatest Man in the World?” introduced Gandhi to his congregation as “The Suffering
Christ of the twentieth century”.
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Years later, in 1958, Martin Luther King, Jr would do the same: “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.”
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They presented Gandhi with a whole new constituency: a paradoxical gift for a man who so feared and despised Africans.

Perhaps because the Western
Christian world was apprehensive about the spreading influence of
the Russian Revolution, and was traumatised by the horror of the
First World War, Europeans and Americans vied to honour the living avatar of Christ. It didn’t seem to matter that unlike Gandhi, who was from a well-to-do family (his father was the prime minister of the princely state of Porbandar), Jesus was a carpenter from the slums of Jerusalem who stood up against the Roman Empire instead of trying to make friends with it. And he wasn’t sponsored by big business.

The most influential of Gandhi’s admirers was the French dramatist
Romain Rolland, who won the
Nobel Prize for literature in 1915. He had not met Gandhi when in 1924 he published
Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One with the Universal Being
. It sold more than a hundred thousand copies and was translated into several European languages.
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It opens with Tagore’s invocation from the
Upanishads:

Gandhi said he found a “real vision of truth” in the book. He called Rolland his “self-chosen advertiser” in Europe.
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By 1924, on the list of executives of his own organisation,
All-India Spinners Association, his name appeared as Mahatma Gandhi.
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Sad then, for him to say in the first paragraph of his response to
Annihilation of Caste
: “Whatever label he wears in the future, Dr Ambedkar is not the man to allow himself to be forgotten.” As though pointing to the profound horrors of the caste system was just a form of self-promotion for Ambedkar.

This is the man, or, if you are so inclined, the Saint, that
Doctor Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, born in 1891 into an Untouchable Mahar family, presumed to argue with.

Ambedkar’s father
Ramji Sakpal and both his grandfathers were soldiers in the British Army. They were Mahars from the
Konkan, then a part of the Bombay Presidency and, at the time, a hotbed of nationalist politics. The two famous Congressmen, Bal Gangadhar Tilak of the ‘garam dal’ (militant faction) and Gandhi’s mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, of the ‘naram dal’ (moderate faction), were both Chitpavan
Brahmins from the Konkan. (It was Tilak who famously said, “
Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it.”)

The Konkan coast was also home to Ambedkar’s political forebear,
Jotiba Phule, who called himself Joti Mali, the Gardener. Phule was from
Satara, the town where Ambedkar spent his early childhood. The Mahars were considered Untouchables and, though they were landless agricultural labourers, they were comparatively better off than the other Untouchable castes. In the seventeenth century, they served in the army of Shivaji, the Maratha king of western India. After Shivaji’s death, they served the Peshwas, an oppressive
Brahminical regime that treated them horribly. (It was the Peshwas who forced Mahars to hang pots around their necks and tie brooms to their hips.) Unwilling to enter into a ‘
trusteeship’ of this sort, the Mahars shifted their loyalty to the British. In 1818, in the
Battle of Koregaon, a small British regiment of Mahar soldiers defeated the massive army of the last Peshwa ruler,
Bajirao II.
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The British subsequently raised a Mahar Regiment, which is still part of the Indian Army.