Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (30 page)

By Gandhi’s standards, which derived from the Hindu value of
ahimsa
, or nonviolence, Chauri Chaura stood out as an abysmal, even frightening defeat. In his eyes, it showed that the country at large and the national movement in particular had never truly grasped the values of satyagraha. So, with more than fifteen thousand followers already in jail, he abruptly called a halt to
civil disobedience, suspending it for more than ten months, until the end of 1922. It was only because he insisted on suspending the campaign that Congress leaders who’d not yet gone to jail went along with his decision. “
I got the votes because I was Gandhi and not because people were convinced,” he wrote with the self-lacerating candor he could be relied on to display in his lowest moments. As “penance” for the fact that “murders were committed in my name,” he then fasted for five days.

Among those who expressed disappointment over the retreat were some, both Muslim and Hindu, who well understood that Gandhi was responding to what he deemed a moral imperative. If only they had a less exemplary, less principled leader, they seemed to say. “
Our defeat is in proportion to the greatness of our leader” was the way
Lajpat Rai, a Hindu and former Congress president, wryly put it. “To me,” said
Maulana Abdul Bari, the leading Muslim in the North Indian center of Lucknow, “
Gandhi is like a paralytic whose limbs are not in his control but whose mind is still active.” Neither statement was without a tinge of admiration, but each was more disillusioned than admiring. Gandhi had offered them satyagraha as a weapon; now, as the “expert in the satyagraha business,” he was yanking it back.

With his usual industriousness, Gandhi churned out a series of letters and articles explaining his stand to key followers and the nation at large, promising that the suspension would not be permanent, that civil disobedience would eventually be resumed and swaraj achieved, if not in a
year. The clearest statement of his position turned into a prophecy. No one, Gandhi included, could have realized that what he had to say in 1922 would accurately depict the circumstances of India’s independence, still a quarter of a century in the future, or his own ambivalent reaction to its achievement. “
I personally can never be a party to a movement half-violent and half non-violent,” he said, “even though it may result in the attainment of so-called swaraj, for it will not be real swaraj as I have conceived it.”

Even “so-called swaraj” was a long way off, a much bigger goal than any he had toiled for in South Africa. Swaraj as he had conceived it—a purer, cleansing independence, amounting to a social transformation—would never be within reach. It would survive as a permanent, ever-receding goal.

S
UPPOSE THAT
M
OHAN
G
ANDHI
, the young barrister who journeyed to South Africa in the last decade of the nineteenth century, had been persuaded by evangelical friends in Pretoria to convert to Christianity, that he’d then stayed on to build a profitable law practice in Johannesburg, living out his life there under apartheid, in a segregated township’s largest house. Would relations between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent be any different today? If different, would they be worse or better? The only point of proposing such a mind game is to underscore the role of chance and contingency, as well as character, in human affairs. Of course, the questions are unanswerable, but if we stay with the premise of a modern India minus Gandhi, it’s not impossible to imagine a Mohammed Ali Jinnah who remained an Indian nationalist and brushed off the idea of
Pakistan as the misbegotten dream of crackpots. Or a
Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted Indian independence on behalf of an elitist movement, wearing a suit and tie rather than the khadi homespun that became mandatory for aspiring leaders after the advent of the Mahatma. This isn’t to say that such scenarios would have been preferable to the one we designate as history, only to make the obvious point that other outcomes were possible. We can be reasonably certain at least that absent Gandhi, the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity wouldn’t have flourished earlier, the way it did for a few brief years when he came close to achieving a merger between the national and the Khilafat movements, or the mirage of one. Most days of most years, Hindus and Muslims in most parts of India still live peacefully at close quarters, showing exemplary tolerance of each other’s customs. Once, thanks to heavy lifting by Gandhi, their leaders were almost able to do so too.

Seen in perfect hindsight, powerful undercurrents all that time were carrying the two largest communities away from the reconciliation the leaders said they wanted. Such trends can be instructively traced in the life of a Hindu religious leader who was probably second only to Gandhi in stature in that era. This was Swami Shraddhanand, a revivalist in his own right, formerly known as Mahatma Munshi Ram, who loomed especially large in the Punjab and adjacent areas of North India. His views were close to Gandhi’s; if anything, he was more uncompromising in his abhorrence of untouchability. Long before Gandhi, he had the nerve to voice his approval of
intercaste
dining and even marriage, and, beyond that, of all but abandoning the caste system itself in the name of a more generous and capacious Hinduism. Though the two mahatmas were in basic sympathy, they could seldom agree on tactics or their reading of Muslim intentions.

Shraddhanand, an impulsive man, a courageous one too, was prepared to follow Gandhi but not to subordinate his own judgment. His life offers two powerful punctuation points in an account of Gandhi’s early efforts to bring Hindus and Muslims together. In the aftermath of Gandhi’s first venture in nonviolent political action on a national scale, the strike of 1919, Shraddhanand was invited to preach from the pulpit in India’s largest and most important mosque, Delhi’s Jama Masjid. Days before, he’d become a hero to Delhi’s Muslims as well as Hindus for baring his chest to troops attempting to turn back a march he was leading, daring them to fire. (Accounts differ on whether they were Gurkhas or Manipuris from the northeast.) No Hindu leader had ever before been invited to hold forth at the Jama Masjid, nor would this ecumenical invitation ever be repeated. In that instant, the swami, a hulking figure with a shaved head, wearing umber-colored robes, personified the unity for which Gandhi had tirelessly appealed.
When he intoned a Sanskrit prayer for peace, Om Shanti, “the whole audience followed me with one reverberating voice,” the swami wrote. Only six years later, he was shot and killed by a Muslim inflamed by Shraddhanand’s later writings against what he deemed a Muslim conspiracy, thus becoming in death the personification of looming conflict.

“
My heart refuses to grieve,” Gandhi said upon learning of the murder. “It rather prays that all of us may be granted such a death.” A “blessed death,” a martyr’s death, he called it, as if forecasting his own end.

The killer arrived at the door of the swami’s Delhi bungalow on a December afternoon and managed to talk his way into the room where a convalescing Shraddhanand was bedridden, saying he had religious
issues to discuss. The swami courteously invited him to return later when he hoped to be feeling stronger. The visitor then asked for a drink of water. Left alone with the great man, he pulled out a pistol and pumped two slugs into Shraddhanand’s chest. The assassin turned out to be a Muslim calligrapher named
Abdul Rashid. At his trial he explained that he blamed his victim for spreading blasphemies against the Prophet; then he was sentenced to hang, whereupon thousands of Muslims turned out for his funeral, hailing him, not his victim, as the true martyr.
The Times of India
spread a report that students and teachers at the celebrated Muslim seminary at Deoband recited the Koran five times over in order to ensure the assassin a place in “the seventh heaven.”

Clearly, there’d been a communal mood swing in the years between the swami’s unique exaltation at the Jama Masjid and the celebration of his killer’s last rites. In those years, Shraddhanand had veered in and out of alliance with Gandhi. When they differed, it was because the swami thought Gandhi either was too soft on Muslims or had not lived up to his own pleadings on behalf of untouchables. In his view, the two failings were cause and effect.

The very idea that Gandhi’s commitment to the struggle against untouchability could be challenged as halfhearted so early in his ascendancy over the national movement comes as a surprise. It’s not part of the received narrative. Gandhi himself spoke and wrote as if he’d made the issue of what he called “high and low” one of his signature causes from his early South African years on. He could never get used to having his good intentions questioned in this area. Yet among Dalits in today’s India the idea that Gandhi was a fair-weather friend, or no friend at all, has become a commonplace, one that’s overdue for reevaluation. In that context, his relations with Shraddhanand offer a useful point of departure for the telling of a story that has been insufficiently explored, for all the studies of this much-studied life.

At first the bond between the two mahatmas seemed solid. Gandhi himself traced it back to 1913, when he received funds for his final satyagraha campaign in Natal and the Transvaal from students of Mahatma Munshi Ram at his school, the
Gurukul, near the pilgrimage center of Hardwar in the foothills of the Himalayas. Munshi Ram had sent the students out to earn with the sweat of their brows funds to support the far-off indentured laborers marching as passive resisters.
His covering letter addressed Gandhi as “My dear brother.” Gandhi, who was twelve
years younger and not yet known by that reverential honorific, never forgot this. It was to the
Gurukul that he dispatched the first batch of his followers from the Phoenix Settlement when finally he pulled up stakes in South Africa. Within three months of his own arrival in India, Gandhi himself turned up there in 1915 for his first face-to-face encounter with Munshi Ram. Meeting the celebrated Hindu reformer in person was the real purpose of his visit to Hardwar; the mass spectacle of the
Kumbh Mela (and all the fetid insanitation to which it gave rise, which so shocked his sensibilities) was incidental.

The swami had been keeping a deliberate distance from the national movement but got swept up in it in support of the Mahatma-to-be.
In his view, Gandhi was leading a
dharma yudha
, a religious struggle.
The start of the noncooperation campaign in April 1919 was the occasion for Tagore’s call on Indians to recognize Gandhi as a mahatma. Yet shortly after Shraddhanand was hailed for his role in the campaign in Delhi, he quit the movement to protest the abruptness of Gandhi’s decision to shut the campaign down. The swami agreed that the movement wasn’t disciplined enough to prevent outbreaks of rioting in a vast land. It was more Gandhi’s high-handed way of deciding than the decision itself that he was protesting. “Thousands of people have been inspired by their feeling of trust in you … and have given up all worldly worries,” he wrote to Gandhi, resigning from the satyagraha committee. “The pity is that you at once bring out your pronouncements without even asking those people if they agree.”

It was neither the first time nor would it be the last that Gandhi heard such a complaint from key supporters. Yet Shraddhanand very soon gave in to pleas from Gandhi and others and again threw himself back into the national movement, only to find himself regularly on the losing end of tactical disagreements with a leader used to consulting only himself. The most significant of these, in his own mind, were over the issue of untouchability, on which Gandhi had taken a consistent stand from his first months back in India. From Shraddhanand he then encountered for the first time the criticism that he was unwilling to back up his powerful exhortations with deeds. The swami could be even less malleable than Gandhi. For more than two decades, he’d been a stalwart promoter of the purification ceremonies called shuddi that were used to bring untouchables and low-caste Indians into a broad-based Hindu fold in which caste divisions would be downplayed if not eliminated. The man who’d spoken at the Jama Masjid had demonstrated his willingness to stand with Gandhi—and Muslims—in the Khilafat cause. But he
bridled when he began to suspect that it was more of a priority for Gandhi than the struggle against untouchability.

So, in December 1919, at the
Indian National Congress session in Amritsar, it was the swami, not Gandhi, who dwelled on the matter. “
Is it not true,” he asked provocatively, “that so many among you who make the loudest noises about the acquisition of political rights are not able to overcome your feelings of revulsion for those sixty millions of India who are suffering injustice whom you regard as untouchable? How many are there who take these wretched brothers of theirs to their hearts?” Nine months later at the special Congress session in Calcutta, Shraddhanand tried and failed to get the subject on the agenda. Gandhi was among those who felt that the discussion of the noncooperation campaign had more urgency, that anything else would be a digression. Given that the preservation of the caliphate was one of the campaign’s declared aims, that amounted to saying the cause of the Muslims mattered more, for the moment at least, than the struggle against untouchability. “
That was a grave mistake,” the disappointed swami lamented. “Only at that time can non-cooperation with an enemy nation become a possibility, when full cooperation between ourselves has been achieved.”

Gandhi made sure the Congress took up untouchability more or less in earnest at its regular annual meeting, held in Nagpur a few months after the Calcutta gathering. But Shraddhanand was not the only one who had started to worry that the Mahatma might be soft-pedaling the issue. The Anglican priest
Charles F. Andrews, whom Gandhi addressed as “Charlie,” had become close to Munshi Ram in India before meeting Gandhi in South Africa and had then brought the two together. Andrews wrote a “Dear Mohan” letter to Gandhi—he was the only one of the Mahatma’s hundreds of correspondents who felt comfortable being so familiar—expressing his own fear that untouchability was slipping on his agenda. Gandhi was so upset by the criticism that he lay awake at two in the morning a month after the gathering at Nagpur and started framing his answer in his mind before rising at his usual hour of four to set down an emotional defense of his stand. Strong as the letter was, it confirmed the sense that he now saw untouchability as a cause that would have to wait its time. The Khilafat movement had priority because it was a prerequisite for unity between Hindus and Muslims, which was in turn a prerequisite for independence. But this was so, Gandhi argued with his usual capacity for disarming rationalization, not because untouchability was less important but because “
it is a bigger problem than that of gaining Indian independence.” He’d be able to
“tackle it better,” he said, if he gained independence “on the way.” Therefore, he predicted, India “may free herself from English domination before India has become free of the curse of untouchability.”