Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (41 page)

“
If we cheaply dismiss [the fast] with some ceremonials to which we are accustomed and allow the noble life to be wasted with its great meaning missed,” the poet declaimed on its first day, “then our people will passively roll down the slope of degradation to the blankness of
utter futility.” Seventy years old and ailing, Tagore then rushed by train across the subcontinent to be at Gandhi’s side in the prison near Poona. “Whole country profoundly stirred by Mahatmaji’s penance,” he cabled to a friend in London. “Sweeping reforms proceeding apace.” How sweeping they were on a village-to-village basis remained to be seen. Decades later it was not unheard of for untouchable women in villages to be assaulted for wearing metal bangles and rings or new saris in bright colors, adornments that could be read as offensively assertive, as denials of their abject status; landlessness, indebtedness, and forced labor remained extreme. There’s no sure way of measuring how many caste Hindu minds were profoundly affected and changed to some degree by Gandhi’s fast and subsequent crusade against untouchability; many millions might be a reasonable guess, but in India, where a million is a fraction of a percentage point, many millions could fall far short of the wholesale reformation he sought.

Tagore arrived at Gandhi’s bedside on the seventh and last day of the fast. Escorted into an isolated courtyard between two prison blocks, he found Gandhi curled up on a simple stringed cot, a
charpoy
, “under the shade of a young mango tree.” It was there on the fourth evening of the fast that Dr. Ambedkar had been brought to the bedside of the Mahatma, who appeared to be already much weakened, for the final stage of negotiations on what came to be known as the
Poona Pact.

“
Mahatmaji, you have been very unfair to us,” the untouchable leader began.

“It is always my lot to appear to be unfair. I cannot help it,” said Gandhi.

Soon they were into the “mathematical” details as they bore on legislative seats. “I want my compensation,” Ambedkar was heard to say. Presumably, he meant payback in seats for giving up the separate electorates. Untouchables, now powerless, needed political power, he said. Gandhi was flexible on seats but a stickler on the timing of a referendum to be held in five or ten years. “Five years or my life,” the prostrate but still hard-bargaining Mahatma said, seeming to give way to irritation at their next encounter, much like a Bania haggling over the price of a bolt of cloth. The issue was negotiated away. The final accord provided for joint electorates, reserved seats, and a referendum to be scheduled later, which proved to be never; in fact, Ambedkar had won nearly twice as many reserved seats in his negotiation with Gandhi as he’d been promised in
Ramsay MacDonald’s proposed award. “You have my fullest sympathy. I am with you in most things you say,” the Mahatma had
assured the untouchable leader at the outset. Now, it seemed to Ambedkar, he’d delivered.

“I have only one quarrel with you,” Ambedkar had replied, according to Mahadev’s diary. “That is you work for the so-called national welfare and not for our interests alone. If you devoted yourself entirely to the welfare of the Depressed Classes, you would become our hero.” That response may be the closest Ambedkar ever came to seeing Gandhi whole, as the stalwart of the national ideal. The exchange also anticipates the appeal Andrews was about to make in one of his “Dear Mohan” letters that Gandhi focus all his energies on the fight against untouchability. Without giving Ambedkar a direct answer, the fasting Mahatma managed to have the last word. “I am,” he said, “an untouchable by adoption, and as such more of an untouchable in mind than you … I cannot stand the idea that your community should either in theory or practice be separated from me. We must be one and indivisible.”

Whether the contest between Ambedkar and Gandhi is seen as fundamentally a test of principles or wills, the Mahatma’s elevation of the fast into what appeared, for the moment at least, to be his final do-or-die campaign had already produced some astonishing results. First there were the telegrams pouring in from all over the subcontinent proclaiming the opening of Hindu temples—some celebrated and revered, many obscure, some that would later turn out to have been nonexistent—to Gandhi’s Harijans. Then an emergency conference of caste Hindus hastily assembled in Bombay drafted a manifesto formally calling for equal access for untouchables to all public facilities—not just temples, but also roads, schools, and wells. “
No one shall be regarded as an ‘untouchable’ by reasons of birth,” it proclaimed.
A parallel gathering of high-caste Bombay women resolved that the barriers faced by untouchables “shall not continue a day longer.” Suddenly it became fashionable in various cities, in what proved to be a brief season of grace and loving kindness, for
Brahmans to demonstrate their good intentions by dining with untouchables. At
Benares Hindu University, a center of orthodoxy, sweepers and cobblers were invited to dinner. Branches of a newly formed Anti-untouchability League—later renamed the Harijan Sevak Sangh, or Harijan Service Society—were springing up all over; funds were collected to launch its programs of uplift.
Even Nehru, who acknowledged that he’d initially been put off by Gandhi’s “choosing a side issue for his final sacrifice,” was bowled over by the result. “What a magician,” he wrote, “was this little man sitting in Yeravda Prison, and how well he knew how to pull the strings that move people’s hearts!”

These gusts of pious intoxication seemed to douse Ambedkar’s habitual skepticism and sweep him along too. “
I will never be moved by these methods,” he’d said when he first heard of Gandhi’s intention to fast. “If Mr. Gandhi wants to fight with his life for the interests of the Hindu community, the Depressed Classes will also be forced to fight with their lives to safeguard their interests.” But he’d been moved in spite of himself over the ensuing ten days. The night before Gandhi was expected to break his fast, Ambedkar found himself showered with fervent promises and cheers at the Hindu conference in Bombay, a lovefest unlike anything he’d experienced.
He’d been in a fix, he acknowledged when finally he was called on to speak, having to choose between “the life of the greatest man in India” and “the interests of the community.” But the fasting Gandhi had eased the way, redeeming himself in Ambedkar’s eyes and blessing all untouchables. “I must confess that I was surprised, immensely surprised, when I met him, that there was so much in common between him and me.” If the Mahatma had been as forthcoming in London, Ambedkar said with some justice, “it would not have been necessary for him to go through this ordeal.” His only worry, he now said, was that caste Hindus might not abide by the accord. “Yes, we will! We will!” roared the crowd.

Gandhi wouldn’t take nourishment until he held in his hand the British government’s formal acceptance of the compromise, which meant the partial annulment of the Communal Award on which he’d set his sights. Finally, late in the afternoon of September 26, the document was delivered to him by the inspector general of prisons in a “red sealed envelope.” Thinking ahead, Gandhi asked the British officer to pass along his request that he be allowed to continue his campaign against untouchability even if he were to be kept in prison. A religious ceremony was then improvised. The prison authorities had thrown open its gates to inmates of the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad and other Gandhi followers. Restrictions on visitors had been all but abandoned, and about two hundred of them were now in attendance as the time came to end his self-imposed trial. First the courtyard was sprinkled with water, then Tagore was called on to sing a Bengali hymn he himself had set to music. He’d forgotten the melody, he later said, but he sang anyway. (“When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy,” the poet’s prayer began.) Finally,
Kamala Nehru, wife of Jawaharlal who was to die in a Swiss sanatorium four years later, readied a tumbler of orange, or what in India is called sweet lime, juice. (Possibly honey was mixed in, lemon juice with honey being one of Gandhi’s
favorite cocktails.)
Kasturba raised the glass to his lips. More hymns were sung, and heaped-up baskets of fruit, sent to Yeravda by well-wishers, passed from hand to hand. No prison had ever witnessed such a festival, Tagore reflected.

At the end of another overflow public meeting, this one in Poona the next evening, the poet wrote, “
The entire audience raising their hands accepted the vow of purifying our social life of grave wrongs that humiliate our humanity.”
The idea that untouchability was on its way out, that the Mahatma had transformed India and Hinduism with a one-week fast unto death, lingered for a matter of weeks, maybe months. Gandhi at this point seemed to be alone in warning of the danger of backsliding. The night his fast unto death ended, he thought to pledge that it would be resumed if the struggle against untouchability faltered.

Gandhi’s fast might conceivably have sown a harvest of enduring social reform had the British not kept the Mahatma and most of the Congress leadership locked away in order to prevent any resumption of
civil disobedience on a national scale. Three times in the next eight months Ambedkar dropped by Yeravda prison to consult with Gandhi. For a brief spell, the antagonism between the two receded from view; a kind of convergence now seemed to be faintly possible.
In his speeches to untouchable audiences, Ambedkar took to urging his followers to give up meat eating, an appeal Gandhi seldom failed to make to such gatherings in the hope that this would render them more acceptable in the eyes of pious Hindus. The untouchable leader now spoke more of national goals and political rights. Taking up one of the Mahatma’s themes, he wrote: “The touchables and untouchables cannot be held together by law, certainly not by any electoral law … The only thing that can hold them together is love … I want a revolution in the mentality of the caste Hindus.”

But the more important the opening of Hindu temples to untouchables became to Gandhi, the less important it seemed to Ambedkar. They could almost be said to be exchanging positions. For Gandhi now temple opening was “
the one thing that alone can give new life and new hope to Harijans, as no mere economic uplift can do.” For Ambedkar, the key issue was now social equality, not open temples. “
To open or not to open temples is a question for you to consider and not for me to agitate,” he said, addressing caste Hindus. “If you think it is bad manners not to respect the sacredness of the human personality, open your temples
and be a gentleman. If you would rather be a Hindu than a gentleman, then shut your doors and damn yourself. For I do not care to come.” When Gandhi vowed to start a new fast at the beginning of 1933 if the most important South Indian temple dedicated to the god Krishna, the Guruvayur, remained closed to untouchables, Ambedkar urged him not to bother. It’s “
not necessary for him to stake his life on such a comparatively small issue as temple entry,” Ambedkar said.

When from inside Yeravda prison he was about to launch his
Harijan
weekly—a successor to
Indian Opinion
and
Young India
—Gandhi reached out to Ambedkar, asking him for a “message” for the inaugural issue. The gesture evoked a sardonic response that fairly dripped with resentment. “It would be a most unwarranted presumption on my part,” Ambedkar wrote, “to suppose that I have sufficient worth in the eyes of the Hindus which would make them treat any message from me with respect.” So instead of a “message” he sent a “statement.” Apparently, he still did not like the implication that he might be engaged in a common cause with Hindu reformers, including Gandhi. He would simply tell Gandhi and Hindus some home truths. Gandhi made sure that
Harijan
published the tart covering note as well as the statement, which said: “There will be outcastes so long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.” His intention may have been to goad Gandhi rather than to pick a fight, but already they were drawing apart.
Eventually, they would both reject the pact they had jointly signed at Yeravda. Gandhi would call the limited use of separate electorates he’d finally agreed to when his life was at stake “a device of Satan, named imperialism.” Ambedkar would write: “
The Congress sucked the juice out of the
Poona Pact and threw the rind in the face of the Untouchables.”

The issue on which they soon diverged had hovered between them from the time of their first encounter. It was whether downtrodden untouchables could be effectively mobilized in their own behalf in the dusty exigencies of village India or were doomed to wait for caste Hindus to be moved by the religious penance and suffering of “the greatest man in India.” In the existing circumstances, each alternative was largely theoretical. The
effective mobilization of untouchables and the religious conversion of caste Hindus would each take generations; how many generations, it’s still—eight decades later—too soon to tell. Both have advanced, thanks in some measure to Gandhi and Ambedkar, not just in their lives but in what they’ve been taken to represent in India’s dreamy idealization of their struggles. But the pace can reasonably be described
as slightly faster than glacial, which is to say, grindingly slow, nowhere near revolutionary.

It took only five weeks after Gandhi ended the “epic fast” for a bill to be introduced in the
Madras Legislative Council making it illegal for a temple to remain closed to Harijans if the majority of caste Hindus who used the temple wanted it open. The aim of the bill was to take the decision out of the hands of Brahman priests, such as the Namboodiris at Vaikom, who typically had the final say. The legislative council had little power and needed the viceroy’s formal approval even to debate the bill. In the face of rising opposition from orthodox Hindus and the seeming indifference of Harijans, similar legislation introduced in the toothless central assembly stalled. For Gandhi, the legislation took on urgency as a referendum on untouchability.
When they met in February 1933, Gandhi implored Ambedkar to support the bills, or at least not oppose them.