Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (10 page)

BOOK: Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition
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We were all prepared for hardships, but not quite for this experience. We could understand not being classed with the Whites, but to be placed on the same level with the Natives seemed to be too much to put up with. I then felt that Indians had not launched our
passive resistance too soon. Here was further proof that the obnoxious law was meant to emasculate the Indians … Apart from whether or not this implies degradation, I must say it is rather dangerous. Kaffirs as a rule are uncivilised—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.
133

A year later, the sixteenth of the twenty years he would spend in South Africa, he wrote “My Second Experience in Gaol” in
Indian Opinion
(16 January 1909):

I was given a bed in a cell where there were mostly Kaffir prisoners who had been lying ill. I spent the night in this cell in great misery and fear … I read the
Bhagvad
Gita
which I had carried
with me. I read the verses which had a bearing on my situation and meditating on them, managed to compose myself. The reason why I felt so uneasy was that the Kaffir and Chinese prisoners appeared to be wild, murderous and given to immoral ways … He [the Chinese] appeared to be worse. He came near the bed and looked closely at me. I kept still. Then he went to a Kaffir lying in bed. The two exchanged obscene jokes, uncovering each other’s genitals … I have resolved in my mind on an a
gitation to ensure that Indian prisoners are not lodged with Kaffirs or others. We cannot ignore the fact that there is no common ground between them and us. Moreover those who wish to sleep in the same room as them have ulterior motives for doing so.
134

From inside jail Gandhi began to petition the White authorities for separate wards in prisons. He led battles demanding segregation on many counts: he wanted separate blankets because he worried that “a blanket that has been used by the dirtiest of Kaffirs may later fall to an Indian’s lot”.
135
He wanted prison meals specially suited to Indians—rice served with ghee
136
—and refused to eat the “mealie pap” that the ‘Kaffirs’ seemed to relish. He also agitated for separate lavatories for Indian prisoners.
137

Twenty years later, in 1928, the ‘Truth’ about all this had transmogrified into another story altogether. Responding to a proposal for segregated education for Indians and Africans in South Africa, Gandhi wrote:

Indians have too much in common with the Africans to think of isolating themselves from them. They cannot exist in South Africa for any length of time without the active sympathy and friendship of the Africans. I am not aware of the general body of the Indians having ever adopted an air of superiority towards their African brethren, and it would be a tragedy if any such movement were to gain ground among the Indian settlers of South Africa.
138

Then, in 1939, disagreeing with
Jawaharlal Nehru, who believed that Black Africans and Indians should stand together
against the White regime in South Africa, Gandhi contradicted himself once more: “However much one may sympathise with the Bantus, Indians cannot make common cause with them.”
139

Gandhi was an educated, well-travelled man. He would have been aware of the winds that were blowing in other parts of the world. His disgraceful words about Africans were written around the same time W.E.B. Du Bois wrote
The Souls of Black Folk
: “One ever feels this two-ness—an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
140

Gandhi’s attempts to collaborate with a colonial regime were taking place at the same time that the
anarchist
Emma Goldman was saying:

The centralisation of power has brought into being an international feeling of solidarity among the oppressed nations of the world; a solidarity which represents a greater harmony of interests between the working man of America and his brothers abroad than between the American miner and his exploiting compatriot; a solidarity which fears not foreign invasion, because it is bringing all the workers to the point when they will say to their masters, ‘Go and do your own killing. We have done it long enough for you.’
141

Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), Gandhi’s contemporary from India, did not have his unfortunate instincts. Though she was born a
Brahmin, she renounced Hinduism for its
patriarchy and its practice of caste, became a
Christian, and quarrelled with the Anglican Church too, earning a place of pride in India’s anticaste
tradition. She travelled to the US in 1886 where she met
Harriet Tubman, who had once been a slave, whom she admired more than anybody she had ever met. Contrast Gandhi’s attitude towards the African people to Pandita Ramabai’s description of her meeting with Harriet Tubman:

Harriet still works. She has a little house of her own, where she and her husband live and work together for their own people … Harriet is very large and strong. She hugged me like a bear and shook me by the hand till my poor little hand ached!
142

In 1873, Jotiba Phule dedicated his
Gulamgiri
(
Slavery) to

The good people of the United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and self sacrificing devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery; and with an earnest desire, that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Shudra Brothers from the trammels of
Brahmin thraldom.
143

Phule—who, among other things, campaigned for
widow remarriage, girls’ education, and started a school for Untouchables—described how “the owners of slaves treated the slaves as beasts of burden, raining kicks and blows on them all the time and starving them”, and how they would “harness the slaves as bullocks and make them plough the fields in the blazing sun”. Phule believed that the Shudra and
Ati-Shudra would understand slavery better than anyone else because “they have a direct experience of slavery as compared to the others who have never experienced it so; the Shudras were conquered and enslaved by the Brahmins”.
144

The connection between
racism and casteism was made more than a century before the 2001
Durban conference. Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.

Despite all of Gandhi’s suffering in unsegregated South African prisons, the satyagraha against the
Pass Laws did not gain much traction. After leading a number of protests against registering and fingerprinting, Gandhi suddenly announced that Indians
would agree to be fingerprinted as long as it was voluntary. It would not be the first time that he would make a deal that contradicted what the struggle was about in the first place.

Around this time, his wealthy architect friend
Hermann Kallenbach gifted him 1,100 acres of farmland just outside Johannesburg. Here he set up his second commune, Tolstoy Farm, with one thousand fruit trees on it. On Tolstoy Farm he began his experiments in purity and spirituality, and developed his home-grown protocol for the practice of satyagraha.

Given Gandhi’s proposals to partner with the British in their colonisation of South Africa—and British reluctance to accept that partnership—satyagraha, appealing to your opponent with the force of Truth and
Love, was the perfect political tool. Gandhi was not trying to overwhelm or destroy a ruling structure; he simply wanted to be friends with it. The intensity of his distaste for the “raw Kaffir” was matched by his affection and admiration for the British. Satyagraha seemed to be a way of reassuring them, a way of saying: “You can trust us. Look at us. We would rather harm ourselves than harm you.” (This is not to suggest that satyagraha is not, and cannot, in certain situations, be an effective means of political resistance. I am merely describing the circumstances in which Gandhi began his experiments with satyagraha.)

Essentially, his idea of satyagraha revolved around a regimen of renunciation and purification. Renunciation naturally segued into a missionary approach to politics. The emphasis on purity and purification obviously derived from the caste system, though Gandhi inverted the goalposts and called his later ministrations to Untouchables a process of ‘self-purification’. On the whole, it was a brand of hair-shirt
Christianity combined with his own version of Hinduism and esoteric vegetarianism (which ended up underlining the ‘impurity’ of Dalits, Muslims and all the rest of us meat-eaters—in other words, the majority of the Indian
population). The other attraction was
brahmacharya
—celibacy. The practice of semen retention and complete sexual abstinence became the minimum qualification for a ‘pure’ satyagrahi. Crucifixion of the flesh, denial of pleasure and desire—and eventually almost every normal human instinct—became a major theme. Even eating came in for some serious stick: “Taking food is as dirty an act as answering the call of nature.”
145

Would a person who was starving think of eating as a ‘dirty act’?

Gandhi always said that he wanted to live like the poorest of the poor. The question is, can
poverty be simulated? Poverty, after all, is not just a question of having no money or no possessions. Poverty is about having no power. As a politician, it was Gandhi’s business to accumulate power, which he did effectively. Satyagraha wouldn’t have worked, even as much as it did, if it wasn’t for his star power. If you are powerful, you can live simply, but you cannot be poor. In South Africa, it took a lot of farmland and organic fruit trees to keep Gandhi in poverty.

The battle of the poor and the powerless is one of reclamation, not renunciation. But Gandhi, like many successful godmen, was an astute politician. He understood that the act of renunciation by someone who has plenty to renounce has always appealed to the popular imagination. (Gandhi would eventually discard his Western suit and put on a dhoti in order to dress like the poorest of the poor. Ambedkar, on the other hand, born unmoneyed, Untouchable, and denied the right to wear clothes that privileged-caste people wore, would show his defiance by wearing a three-piece suit.)

The irony is that while Gandhi was performing the rituals of poverty in Tolstoy Farm, he was not questioning the accumulation of capital or the unequal distribution of wealth. He was not holding out for improved working conditions for the indentured, or for the return of land to those it had been stolen from. He was
fighting for Indian merchants’ right to expand their businesses to the
Transvaal and to compete with British merchants.

For centuries before Gandhi and for years after him, Hindu rishis and yogis have practised feats of renunciation far more arduous than Gandhi’s. However, they have usually done it alone, on a snowy mountainside or in a cave set in a windblown cliff. Gandhi’s genius was that he yoked his other-worldly search for moksha to a very worldly, political cause and performed both, like a fusion dance, for a live audience, in a live-in theatre. Over the years, he expanded his strange experiments to include his wife as well as other people, some of them too young to know what they were being subjected to. Towards the end of his life, as an old man in his seventies, he took to sleeping with two young girls, Manu, his seventeen-year-old grand-niece, and Abha (who were known as his “walking sticks”).
146
He did this, he said, in order to gauge the degree of success or failure of his conquest over sexual desire. Leaving aside the very contentious, disturbing issues of consent and propriety, leaving aside the effect it had on the girls, the ‘experiment’ raises another distressing, almost horrifying question. For Gandhi to extrapolate from the ‘results’ of sleeping with two (or three, or four) women that he had, or had not, conquered heterosexual desire suggests that he viewed women not as individuals, but as a category. That, for him, a very small sample of a few physical specimens, including his own grand-niece, could stand in for the whole species.

Gandhi wrote at length about the experiments he conducted at Tolstoy Farm. On one occasion, he describes how he slept with young boys and girls spread around him, “taking care to arrange the order of the beds”, but knowing full well that “any amount of such care would have been futile in case of a wicked mind”. Then:

I sent the boys reputed to be mischievous and the innocent
young girls to bathe in the same spot at the same time. I had fully explained the duty of self-restraint to the children, who were all familiar with my Satyagraha doctrine. I knew, and so did the children, that I loved them with a mother’s love … Was it a folly to let the children meet there for bath and yet to expect them to be innocent?

The ‘trouble’ that Gandhi had been anticipating—spoiling for, actually—with a mother’s prescience, took place:

One day, one of the young men made fun of two girls, and the girls themselves or some child brought me the information. The news made me tremble. I made inquiries and found that the report was true. I remonstrated with the young men, but that was not enough. I wished the two girls to have some sign on their person as a warning to every young man that no evil eye might be cast upon them, and as a lesson to every girl that no one dare assail their purity. The passionate Ravana could not so much as touch Sita with evil intent while Rama was thousands of miles away. What mark should the girls bear so as to give them a sense of security and at the same time to sterilise the sinner’s eye? This question kept me awake for the night.

BOOK: Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition
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