Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India Page 5

  “The saint has left our shores, I sincerely hope forever,” wrote his leading South African antagonist and occasional negotiating foil, Jan Christian Smuts, then the defense minister. An “unwelcome visitor” at the beginning of his long sojourn, a “saint” at the end but obviously still unwelcome, it wasn’t easy to say what Gandhi had accomplished beyond his remarkable self-creation and the example he’d set. A top British official worried that he might have shown South Africa’s blacks “that they have an instrument in their hands—this is, combination and passive resistance—of which they had not previously thought.” It would be years before that hypothesis would be seriously tested.

  But for Gandhi himself, South Africa had been more than an overture. Between his arrival and his departure, he’d acquired some ideas to which he was committed, others that he’d only begun to try out. Satyagraha as a means of active struggle to achieve a national goal belonged to the first category; satyagraha involving the poorest of the poor fit the second. These were what he carried in his otherwise meager baggage when, finally, he came out of Africa.

  Another conceivable variation on this theme—struggle not only involving the poorest but specifically for their benefit—never quite materialized in South Africa. It would prove even harder to conceive of in the circumstances of the India to which he returned.

  To understand how Gandhi’s time in South Africa set him on his brilliantly original, ultimately problematic course, we need to delve deeper into some of the episodes that made up this long tryout, to see how his experiences there shaped his convictions, how those convictions shaped a sense of mission and of himself that was close to fully formed by the time he headed home for good.

  2

  NO-TOUCHISM

  “… the least Indian of Indian leaders.”

  V. S. NAIPAUL’S WORDS were intentionally surprising, even startling. What a way to describe the iconic figure in a loincloth whom the Cambridge-educated Nehru called “the quintessence of the conscious and subconscious will” of village India. How could Gandhi be at once “the least Indian” and “the quintessence” of the country’s deepest impulses? I was newly arrived in India toward the end of 1966 when I came upon Naipaul’s line. For me it was the most memorable in his scorching, sometimes hilarious first book on India, An Area of Darkness, published in 1964. It spoke to Gandhi’s time in South Africa, to the question of how it had shaped him.

  I’d landed as a correspondent in New Delhi, coming from South Africa via London myself, just as Gandhi had in 1915, which may suggest why I was susceptible to the flattering argument that outsiders saw the country more clearly than its most sophisticated inhabitants. In the first generation after independence, it was insolent if not heretical for any Indian, especially one born in Trinidad and resident in London, to argue that India’s father figure, its beloved Bapu, as he was called in his ashrams and beyond, had come into his own overseas—in Africa, of all places—and had been forever changed by the traumatic but unavoidable experience of having to look on his motherland through what had become foreign eyes. In other words, the way Naipaul himself saw India. The writer was blunt. He didn’t waste words; that was an essential part of his genius. Basically, he was saying that Gandhi was appalled by the country he’d later get credit for liberating. It was the social oppression of India and its filth—the sight of people blithely squatting in public places to move their bowels and then, just as blithely, leaving their turds behind for human scavengers to remove—that accounted for the Mahatma-to-be’s reforming zeal. “He looked at India as no Indian was able to,” the young Naipaul wrote; “his vision was direct, and this directness was, and is, revolutionary.”

  Naipaul found supporting evidence in the Autobiography, a book he would continue to mine every decade or so for new insights into “the many-sided Gandhi.” In this earliest excavation, he concentrated on a visit by Gandhi to Calcutta on a return home in 1901 that he’d originally intended to make permanent. Gandhi doesn’t know it yet, but he still has a dozen years ahead of him in South Africa. Within a year, he’ll allow himself to be summoned back from India. This is the pre-satyagraha Gandhi, still only thirty-two, the writer of lawyerly petitions to remote officials, not yet a leader of mass protests. Gandhi is in Calcutta—now called Kolkata—to attend his very first annual meeting of the Indian National Congress, a movement he’d one day transform and dominate but that, at this stage, hardly knows his name.

  Naipaul doesn’t waste words on context, but a little helps. Calcutta, at the start of the last century, is “the packed and pestilential town” Kipling described, but it’s also in those days still the seat of the viceroy, capital of the Raj, “second city” of the empire, and capital as well of an undivided Bengal (a Muslim-majority area by a thin margin, taking in the entire Ganges delta including all the present Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal). Not just that, it has been an important seedbed of Hindu reform movements and is now on the verge of a period of ferment that might be called prerevolutionary. In these respects, it’s India’s St. Petersburg. A political newcomer, Gandhi has been granted a scant five minutes to speak about the situation Indians confront in far-off South Africa. In nobody’s eyes but his own is the arrival of this lawyer, lately from Durban, a big deal. He’s as central to the proceedings as a delegate from Guam or Samoa at an American political convention.

  But look what happens. Naipaul brilliantly swoops in on three paragraphs in the Autobiography. They need no magnification. Twenty-five years later, when Gandhi wrote about this first encounter with the Congress, he still sounded astonished, really aghast. “I was face to face with untouchability,” he said, describing the precautions high-caste Hindus from South India felt they had to take in Calcutta in order to dine without being polluted by the sight of others. “A special kitchen had to be made for them … walled in by wicker-work … a kitchen, dining room, washroom, all in one—a close safe with no outlet … If, I said to myself, there was such untouchability between the delegates of the Congress, one could well imagine the extent to which it existed amongst their constituents.”

  And then there was the problem of shit, which was not unconnected, since sweepers, scavengers, Bhangis, call them what you will, were deemed to be the lowest, most untouchable of all outcastes. Here’s Gandhi again:

  There were only a few latrines, and the recollection of their stink still oppresses me. I pointed it out to the volunteers. They said pointblank, “That is not our work, it is the scavenger’s work.” I asked for a broom. The man stared at me in wonder. I procured one and cleaned the latrine … Some of the delegates did not scruple to use the verandahs outside their rooms for calls of nature at night … No one was ready to undertake the cleaning, and I found no one to share the honour with me of doing it.

  If the Congress had stayed in session, Gandhi concludes tartly, conditions would have been “quite favourable for the outbreak of an epidemic.” A quarter of a century lies between the Calcutta meeting and his rendering of this memory. Conditions have improved but not enough. “Even today,” he says, in his insistent, hectoring way, “thoughtless delegates are not wanting who disfigure the Congress camp … wherever they want.” (Forty years later, when I attended my first session of the All India Congress Committee, the party—in power then for a generation—had discovered the Indian equivalent of the Porta-Potty.)

  Naipaul considers Gandhi’s fierce feelings about sanitation and caste an obvious by-product of his time in South Africa. He doesn’t go further into their genesis. Gandhi tells another story, but it’s incomplete; it doesn’t begin to explain his readiness to do the scavenger’s job in the Calcutta latrine, his eventual readiness to make this one of his signature causes. He says he has been opposed to untouchability since the age of twelve, when his mother chided him for brushing shoulders with a young Bhangi named Uka and insisted he undergo “purification.” Even as a boy, he says in his various renditions of this incident, he could find no logic in his mother’s demand, though, he adds, he
“naturally obeyed.”

  The memory isn’t unique to Gandhi or his era. Indians living today, when the practice of untouchability has been forbidden by law for more than sixty years and now is more or less disowned by most educated Indians, can recall similar lessons in distancing from their childhoods. This is true among Indians even in South Africa, where the existence of untouchability was seldom acknowledged and never became an issue of open debate. On a recent visit to Durban, I heard a story like Gandhi’s from an elderly lawyer friend who recalled his mother refusing to serve tea to one of his schoolboy pals whom she identified as a Pariah. (Yes, that outcaste South Indian group gave us the English word.) But Gandhi’s experience as a boy doesn’t explain his behavior in Calcutta. At the age of twelve, he didn’t think of helping Uka empty the Gandhi family’s latrine, and his readiness to shrug off untouchability didn’t instantly mature into a passion to see it abolished. The path he followed to the Calcutta meeting has twists and turns and leads ultimately through South Africa. But it starts in India, where untouchability was coming into disrepute among enlightened Hindus well before Gandhi made himself heard on the subject. Coming into disrepute, that is, among a smallish sector of an Anglicized elite that had been educated to one degree or another in English. At the same time, according to persuasive recent scholarship, the actual practice of untouchability was becoming more rigid and oppressive in the villages where the elite seldom ventured. This happened as upwardly mobile subcastes sought to secure their own status and privileges by drawing a firm line between themselves and dependent groups they conveniently branded as “unclean” but systematically exploited. Just as racial segregation became more rigid and formally codified in the Jim Crow era in the American South and the apartheid years in South Africa, the barriers of untouchability were, in general, not lowered but raised even higher in colonial India, according to this line of interpretation.

  What outsiders and many Indians think they know and understand about the caste system and the phenomenon of untouchability owes much to colonial taxonomy: the unstinting efforts of British classifiers—district officials called commissioners, census takers, and scholars—to catalog its multiplicity of subgroupings and pin them down the way Linnaeus defined the order of plants. Outlining the system, they tended to freeze it, imagining they had finally uncovered some ancient structure undergirding and explaining the constant flux, jostling, and blur of contending Indian social groups and sects. But the fixed system they thought they had delineated could not be pinned down; shot through with all the inconsistencies, ambiguities, and clashing aspirations of the actual India, not to mention its undeniable oppressiveness, it kept shifting and moving. Not all very poor Indians were regarded as untouchable, but nearly all those who came to be classed as untouchable were wretchedly poor. Shudras, peasants in the lowest caste order, could be looked down upon, exploited, and shunned on social occasions without being considered polluting by their betters. Some untouchable groups practiced untouchability toward other untouchable groups. If one group could be considered more polluting than another, untouchability could be a matter of degree. Still, to be born an untouchable was almost surely to receive a life sentence to an existence beyond the pale, though the location of what the scholar Susan Bayly calls the “pollution barrier”—the boundary between “clean” Hindu groups and those deemed to be “unclean” or polluting—might shift from place to place or time to time. In some regions, South India in particular, contact with even the shadow of an untouchable could be regarded as polluting. In few regions, however, were supposedly untouchable women secure from sexual exploitation by supposedly “clean” higher-caste men.

  Some outcaste groups managed, over a stretch of generations, to promote themselves out of untouchability by ceasing to practice trades that were regarded as polluting such as picking up night soil or handling dead carcasses or working in leather. Others found they could distance themselves from their lowly origins by converting to Christianity and Islam. (Among Christians, in a shadowy carryover belying missionary promises, not to mention the Sermon on the Mount, some Indian Christians continued to treat others as untouchable.) Practices varied from region to region, as did the authority of high-caste Brahmans, the priestly types who rationalized the system and were, usually, its chief beneficiaries. The British and the missionaries who followed in their train taught members of the broad spectrum of various overlapping sects, devoted to various gods, that they belonged to a great encompassing collective called Hinduism. Simultaneously and more important, Indians were making the discovery for themselves. (Ancient Persians described “Hindus” more than two millennia before the British arrived; and recent scholarship suggests that the coinage “Hinduism” was first accomplished by an Indian, early in the nineteenth century.) Similarly, members of specific groups that were targets of untouchability—Chamars, Mahars, Malas, Raegars, Dusadhs, Bhangis, Doms, Dheds, and many more—learned they were all members of a larger group called untouchables. In short order, some began to draw the conclusion that they could make common cause for their own advancement.

  Before Gandhi made his final return from South Africa to India, Brahmans were running schools in Maharashtra for the education of untouchables. They didn’t necessarily, however, make a practice of eating with those they were uplifting. A movement called the Arya Samaj, concerned about the number of untouchables converting to Christianity and—given the then-theoretical possibility that votes might one day be counted in India—even more concerned about the number converting to Islam, instituted a ritual of shuddi, or purification, for untouchables who could be lured into “the Hindu fold” (as Gandhi would later describe it). Here again the equality they offered was strictly limited; followers of the movement were not even consistent on the question of whether the “purified,” or reconverted untouchables, should be allowed to draw their water from wells used by higher castes. Perhaps it would be just as well if they were given their own separate but equal wells. It was enough not to consider the practitioners of polluting trades polluted. Higher-caste reformers saw no need for them to undertake such dirty, distasteful tasks themselves.

  In later years, Gandhi displays at least a passing familiarity with this reformist history without ever acknowledging it influenced his own thinking. The theme of a memoir subtitled “The Story of My Experiments with Truth”—in the literary sense, its conceit—is that he had always been an independent operator, fearlessly making his own discoveries based almost entirely on his own experience. In the political realm, he never really portrays himself as a follower, even when he writes about his close ties to Gokhale, the Indian leader who cleared a path for his return to India, seeing Gandhi as a potential heir, and whom he acknowledged as a political guru. In the religious realm, he also acknowledged one guru, a philosophizing Jain poet (and diamond merchant) in Bombay named Shrimad Rajchandra, from whom he sought guidance when feeling pressed by Christian missionaries in his Pretoria days. But Rajchandra, who died early, in 1901, was no social reformer. Gandhi posed a series of questions to this sage. Included in his response was advice on what’s called varnashrama dharma, the rules of proper caste conduct. Gandhi was then warned not to eat with members of different castes and, in particular, to shun Muslims as dining companions.

  Much as he admired, even revered, Rajchandra, these strictures against out-of-caste dining gave him no pause. It took years for members of Gandhi’s own household who remained orthodox to become accustomed to nonsectarian dining. “My mother and aunt would purify brass utensils used by Muslim friends of Gandhiji by putting them in the fire,” recalled a young cousin who grew up on the Phoenix Settlement. “It was also a problem for my father to eat with Muslims.” Later, back in India, Gandhi sometimes argued that the reluctance of Hindus to eat with Muslims was just another offshoot of the untouchability he deplored. “Why should Hindus have any difficulty in mixing with Mussalmans and Christians?” he asked in 1934. “Untouchability creates a bar not only between Hindu and Hindu but between man
and man.”

  The question of how he came upon his independent views still needs some untangling. In Gandhi’s own telling, after being warned against physical contact with the untouchable Uka at age twelve, he was not confronted with caste as a significant question until he resolved to go to London to study law. Then the mahajans, or elders, of the Modh Banias—the merchant subcaste to which all Hindu Gandhis belong—summoned him to a formal hearing in Bombay, now Mumbai, where he was spoken to severely and warned that he’d face what amounted to excommunication if he insisted on crossing the “black water,” thereby subjecting himself to all the temptations of flesh (principally, meat, wine, and women) that can be assumed to beckon in foreign parts. If he went, he was told, he’d be the first member of the subcaste to defy this ban. Then only nineteen, he stood up to the elders, telling them they could do their worst.

  We can surmise that the mahajans were already fairly toothless, for Gandhi’s orthodox mother and elder brother Laxmidas supported him: in part, because he solemnly took three vows in front of a Jain priest to live abroad as a Bania would at home, in part because his legal training was seen as a key to the extended family’s financial security. What we cannot do is conclude that this younger Gandhi was already in open rebellion against the caste system. In asserting his independence, he stopped well short of renouncing the caste that had just effectively declared him untouchable, warning its members that dining or close contact with him would be polluting. Three years later, when he returned from London, a docile Gandhi traveled with Laxmidas to Nasik, a sacred place in Maharashtra, to submit to a “purification” ritual that involved immersion in the Godavari River under the supervision of a priest who then issued certificates, which Gandhi preserved, saying he had performed his ablutions. The Bania in Gandhi, who always kept a frugal eye on accounts and expenditures, made a point of complaining to his first biographer, Doke, nearly two decades later, that the priest had charged fifty rupees.