India (20 page)

Indians were not a minority in India; racial politics of the sort Gandhi knew in South Africa would not have been understood. And at least some of the ambiguities of his early days in India can be traced back to his wish to repeat his South African racial-religious experience, to get away from the divisive politics of religion and caste and region: his seemingly perverse insistence that India was not ready for self-government, that India had to purge itself of its own injustices first, his mystical definitions of self-government, his emphasis on the removal of untouchability, his support of trivial Moslem issues in order to draw Moslems and Hindus together.

He had no means, in India, of formulating the true racial lessons of South Africa; and perhaps he couldn’t have done so, any more than he could have described what he had seen as a young man in London in 1888. The racial message always merged into the religious one; and it involved him in what looked like contradictions (against untouchability, but not against the caste system; a passionate Hindu, but preaching unity with the Moslems). The difficult lessons of South Africa were simplified and simplified in India: ending as a holy man’s fad for doing the latrine-cleaning work of
untouchables, seen only as an exercise in humility, ending as a holy man’s plea for brotherhood and love, ending as nothing.

In the 1930s the Moslems fell away from Gandhi and turned to their own Moslem leaders, preaching the theory of two nations. In 1947 the country was partitioned, and many millions were killed and many more millions expelled from their ancestral land: as great a holocaust as that caused by Nazi Germany. And in 1948 Gandhi was killed by a Hindu for having undermined and betrayed Hindu India. Irony upon irony; but the South African Indian had long ago been lost in the Hindu mahatma; and mahatmahood in the end had worked against his Indian cause.

Jamnalal Bajaj, a pious Hindu of a northern merchant caste, was one of Gandhi’s earliest financial backers in India. He gave the land and the money for the famous ashram Gandhi founded at Wardha, a village chosen because it was in the centre of India. Bajaj died in 1942; and his widow, honouring his memory, gave away a lot of money to cow-protection societies. Ved Mehta recently went to interview the old lady for his book
Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles
. After Gandhi’s death in 1948, Mrs Bajaj said, she had transferred her loyalty to Vinoba Bhave, the man recognized as Gandhi’s successor. ‘I walked with Vinobaji for years,’ Mrs Bajaj told Mehta. ‘Ten or fifteen miles a day, begging land for the poor. It was very hard, changing camp every day, because I never eat anything I haven’t prepared with my own hands. Everyone knows that Moslems and Harijans have dirty habits.’ And the old lady, who had been chewing something, spat.

But the end was contained in the beginning. ‘For me there can be no deliverance from this earthly life except in India. Anyone who seeks such deliverance … must go to the sacred soil of India. For me, as for everyone else, the land of India is the “refuge of the afflicted”.’ This passage – which is quoted by Judith M. Brown in her study of Gandhi’s entry into Indian politics,
Gandhi’s Rise to Power
(1972) – comes from an article Gandhi wrote for his South African paper in 1914, at the very end of his time in South Africa,
just before he returned to India by way of England. After the racial battles, the South African leader, with his now developed antipathy to Western industrial civilization, was returning to India as to the Hindu holy land: even at the beginning, then, he was already too various, and people had to find in him what they wanted to find, or what they could most easily grasp.

Judith Brown quotes a letter to a relative, written a few months before the newspaper article: ‘The real secret of life seems to consist in so living in the world as it is, without being attached to it, that
moksha
[salvation, absorption into the One, freedom from rebirth] might become easy of attainment to us and to others. This will include service of self, the family, the community, and the State.’ This declaration of faith, apparently a unity, conceals at least four personalities. The Hindu dreams of nonattachment and salvation; the man exposed to Western religious thought thinks that the conduct of the individual should also make salvation easy for others; the South African Indian preaches the widest social loyalty (the community, the Indian community); the political campaigner, with his respect for (and dependence on) British law and institutions, stresses service to the state.

It was too much. Something of this complex South African ideology had to go in the holy land of India; and many things went. The racial intimations remained unexpressed; and what was utterly consumed – by holiness, the subjection of India, the lengthening of the Independence struggle, and the mahatma’s hardening antipathy to the machine, at once the symbol of oppression and the West – what was utterly consumed was that intrusive and unmanageable idea of service to the state.

For Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s successor in independent India, the Gandhian ideal is the ‘withering away’ of the state. Or so he said many years ago. What does it mean, the withering away of the state? It means nothing. It means this: ‘Our first step will be to get Gram-Raj [government by the village]: then lawsuits and disputes will be judged and settled within the village. Next it will be Ram-Raj
[the Kingdom of God]: then there will no longer be any lawsuits or disputes, and we shall all live as one family.’ Bhave said that more than twenty years ago (the quotation is from an admiring biography by an Italian, published in London in 1956). And something like that is still being said by others today, in the more desperate circumstances of the Emergency. ‘Wanted: a Gandhian Constitution’ is the title of a recent article in the
Illustrated Weekly of India
, which, since the Emergency, has been running a debate about the Indian constitution. The writer, a former state governor and ambassador, merely makes the plea for village government; he also takes the occasion to talk about his acquaintance with Gandhi; and the article is illustrated by a photograph of the writer and his wife sitting on the floor and using a quern, grinding their daily corn together in pious idleness.

It is what Gandhianism was long ago reduced to by the mahatmahood: religious ecstasy and religious self-display, a juggling with nothing, a liberation from constructive thought and political burdens. True freedom and true piety are still seen to lie in withdrawal from the difficult world. In independent India, Gandhianism is like the solace still of a conquered people, to whom the state has historically been alien, controlled by others.

Perhaps the only politician with something of Gandhi’s racial sense and his feeling for all-India was Nehru, who, like Gandhi, was somewhat a displaced person in India. At first they look so unalike; but only twenty years lay between the mahatma and the English-educated Nehru; and both men were made by critical years spent outside India. In his autobiography Nehru says he was infected by the prevailing, and fashionable, anti-Semitism at Harrow School; he could hardly have failed there to have become aware of his Indianness.

The irony is that in independent India the politicians who have come up are not far removed from the men whom Gandhi – short-circuiting the established Western-style politicians of the time – began to draw into politics in 1917. They are small-town men,
provincials, and they remain small because their power is based on the loyalties of caste and region. The idea of all-India is not always within their grasp. They have spoken instead, since the 1960s, only of India’s need for ‘emotional integration’; and the very words speak of fracture. The racial sense, which contains respect for the individual and even that concept of ‘the people’, remains as remote from India as ever. So that even Marxism tends to be only its jargon, a form of mimicry: ‘the people’ so often turn out to be people of a certain region and of a certain caste.

Gandhi swept through India, but he has left it without an ideology. He awakened the holy land; his mahatmahood returned it to archaism; he made his worshippers vain.

Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s successor, is more a mascot than a mahatma. He is in the old Indian tradition of the sage who lives apart from men, but not so far from them that they are unable to provide him with a life-support system. Before such a sage the prince prostrates himself, in order to be reminded of the eternal verities. The prince visiting the sage: it is a recurring theme in Indian painting, from both Hindu and Moslem courts. The prince, for all his finery, is the suppliant; the sage, ash-smeared or meagre with austerities or bursting with his developed inner life, sits serenely outside his hut or below a tree. There is no particular wisdom that the sage offers; he is important simply because he is there. And this is the archaic role – one or two centuries away from Gandhi in South Africa in 1893, Gandhi in India in 1917 – that Bhave has created for himself, in contemporary India, as Gandhi’s successor. He is not a particularly intelligent man and, as a perfect disciple of
the mahatma, not original; his political views come close to nonsense. But he is very old; something of the aura of the dead mahatma still hangs about him; and he is the man the politicians would like to have on their side.

For some time in the 1950s Bhave was associated with Jaya Prakash Narayan, who later became one of the opposition leaders. And there was some anxiety, when the Emergency was declared in June 1975 and Narayan was arrested, about what Bhave would say. But, as it happened, Bhave wasn’t talking at the time. It was the mahatma’s custom, in later years, to have a weekly day of silence. Bhave, in emulation of the mahatma, but always overdoing things, had imposed a whole year’s silence on himself; and there were still some months of this silence to go. Eventually, however, it was reported that various statements had been shown the old man – in the manner of those questionnaires that call for the ticking of boxes – and he had made some signs to indicate his support for the suspension of the constitution and the declaration of the state of Emergency.

When, later, he fell ill, Mrs Gandhi flew to see him; and her personal physician gave him a check-up. It was Mrs Gandhi who, under heavy security, spoke at the meeting held in Delhi to honour Bhave’s eightieth birthday; and it was in deference to Bhave – or so I heard it said – that, in all the uncertainty of the Emergency, Mrs Gandhi reproclaimed the prohibition of alcohol as one of the goals of the government. Six doctors in the meantime were looking after the old sage; thus cosseted, he lived through his year of silence and at last, in January 1976, he spoke. The time had come, he said, for India to move from rule by the majority to rule by unanimity. Which was quite astute for a man of eighty. The actual statement didn’t mean much; but it showed that he was still interested, that India was still protected by his sanctity.

Bhave in himself is nothing, a medieval throwback of whom there must be hundreds or thousands in India. But he is important because he is now all that India has as a moral reference, and
because for the last thirty years he has been, as it were, the authorized version of Gandhi. He has fixed for India the idea of the true Gandhian way. In spite of the minute documentation of the life, in spite of the studies and the histories, it is unlikely that in the Indian mind – with its poor historical sense, its capacity for myth – Gandhi will ever be more than Bhave’s magical interpretation of him.

When the politicians now, on one side or the other, speak of Gandhi or Gandhianism, they really mean Bhave. By a life of strenuous parody Bhave has swallowed his master. Gandhi took the vow of sexual abstinence when he was thirty-seven, after a great struggle. Bhave took the same vow when he was a child. It has been his way: in his parody all the human complexity of the mahatma has been dimmed into mere holiness. Bhave has from the start looked for salvation in simple obedience alone. But by obeying what in his simplicity he has understood to be the rules, by exaggerating the mahatma’s more obvious gestures, he has become something older even than the mahatma in his last phase.

Gandhi was made by London, the study of the law, the twenty years in South Africa, Tolstoy, Ruskin, the
Gita
. Bhave was made only by Gandhi’s ashrams and India. He went to the Ahmedabad ashram when he was very young. He worked in the kitchens, in the latrines, and sat for such long hours at the spinning wheel that Gandhi, fearing for the effect of this manual zeal on the young man’s mind, sent him away to study. He studied for a year in the holy city of Banaras. Lanza del Vasto, Bhave’s Italian biographer (
Gandhi to Vinoba: the New Pilgrimage
, 1956), gives some idea of the magical nature of these studies:

At Banaras one day a literature student asked Bhave about
Shakuntala
, the late-fourth-century Sanskrit play by the poet Kalidasa. It was a good subject to raise with someone who knew Sanskrit, because
Shakuntala
, which in translation reads only like a romance of recognition, is considered one of the glories of Sanskrit literature, and comes from what is thought of as a golden age of Indian civilization. But Bhave was fierce with the inquirer. He said, ‘I have never read the
Shakuntala
of Kalidasa, and I never shall. I do not learn the language of the gods to amuse myself with love stories and literary trifles.’

For Bhave’s biographer this is part of Bhave’s perfection. It is how Indian spirituality, taken to its limits, swallows up and annuls that very civilization of which Indians boast, but of which, generally, they know little. Bhave, in the vanity of his spiritual perfection, is more than a decadent Gandhian. His religion is a kind of barbarism; it would return men to the bush. It is the religion of poverty and dust. And it is not extraordinary that Bhave’s ideas about education should be like those of Mr Squeers. Get the children out into the fields, among the animals: it was, after all, the only education that the god Krishna received.