India (21 page)

Bhave’s Italian biographer, holidaying away from Europe, can at times get carried away by the Oriental wisdom of his subject, so suited to the encompassing physical wretchedness; and the book is padded out with the master’s sayings. (Bhave, though he has published, doesn’t believe in writing books: he has to be savoured in his sayings.) This is the political Bhave: ‘The will of the people by itself equals 1. The state by itself equals 0. Together these make 10. Does 10 equal 10 because of 1 or because of the 0?’ And this is Bhave (pre-1956) on the wickedness of the machine: ‘Are the richest crops gathered in America, where the sowing is done from the air, or in China, where all the land is cultivated by hand on miniature allotments?’

It is hard to imagine now, but in 1952, when newly independent India was taken at its own valuation in many countries, Bhave
appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine. The successor to the mahatma, and almost a mahatma himself! This was not long after Bhave had started his ‘Land Gift’ scheme. It was his Gandhian attempt to solve the problem of the Indian landless, and it is the venture with which his name is still associated. His plan was to go about India on foot, to walk and walk, perhaps forever, asking people with land to give some to the landless. The
Time
cover was captioned with a Bhave saying: ‘I have come to loot you with love.’

The idea of the long walk was borrowed from Gandhi. But it was based on a misunderstanding. Gandhi’s walks or marches were purely symbolic; they were intended as gestures, theatre. In 1930 Gandhi had walked in slow, well-publicized stages from Ahmedabad to the sea, not to do anything big when he got there, but just to pick up salt, in this way breaking an easily breakable law and demonstrating to all India his rejection of British rule. In 1947, in Bengal, he had walked in the Noakhali district, just to show himself, hoping by his presence to stop the communal killings.

These were fairly long walks. But Bhave – as usual – intended his own walk to be much, much longer, to be, it might be said, a career; and he didn’t intend it to be symbolic. He was aiming at nothing less than land-redistribution as he skittered through the Indian villages, hoping, by the religious excitement of a day, to do what could (and can) be done only by law, consolidating administration, and years of patient education. It was like an attempt at a Gandhian rope trick: the substitution of spirituality for the machinery of the state. It tied in with Bhave’s avowed Gandhian aim of seeing the state ‘wither away’. India, released by Gandhi from subjection, was now to regenerate itself by the same spiritual means. All the other ‘isms’ of the world were to be made obsolete. It was an open, breathtaking experiment in Gandhian magic; and the interest of
Time
magazine, the interest of the West – always important in India, even at its most spiritual – kept the excitement high.

It became fashionable to walk with Bhave. It became, in the
words of Lanza del Vasto, ‘the new pilgrimage’. For a few weeks early in 1954 Lanza del Vasto walked with Bhave; and Vasto – Gandhian though he was, with a best-seller about Gandhi under his belt, and hoping to do something with Bhave too – Vasto found the going rough. Even in his awestruck account a European-accented irritation keeps breaking in at the discomforts and disorder of the Bhave march: the bad food, peppery and oversalted; the atmosphere of the circus, the constant noise, the worshipping crowds chattering like aviaries, easily distracted, even in the presence of the master; Bhave’s own followers, incapable of talking in anything but shouts, constantly publicly belching and hawking and farting. Vasto tries hard to understand; a prisoner of his pilgrimage, he tries, by a natural association of ideas, to find in the torment of the nightly camp ‘the innocence of the fart … the sportings of a lovable people which loves to communicate’.

And every day there is the next village, and the hard clay roads of Bihar. Always, Bhave strides ahead, in the lead. No villager, however worshipping or rapturous, must run across his path or walk in front of him. It is permitted only to follow – sainthood, and the salvation it offers (contained in the mere sight of the saint), has its stringencies. At one stage Bhave, for no apparent reason, seems to have his doubts and seems to be dropping hints of a fast against the ‘laziness’ of some of his staff (which includes a press officer) and the ‘meanness’ of some other people. Clearly, things have been going on behind the scenes that Vasto doesn’t know about. But long before then it has occurred to the reader that, in spite of all the sermons, this walk is just a walk; that nothing, or very little, is being done; that none of those chattering villagers may be either giving or getting land; that everybody is just declaring for God.

In the early days there had been talk of a university to serve the special needs of the movement, and someone had given land for it not far from the site of the Buddha’s Enlightenment. Bhave was asked about the university one day. He said, ‘The ground is there and I’ve had a well dug on it. The passer-by will be able to draw a
bucket of water and drink his fill.’ But the questioner wanted to know about the university. ‘What will be its aims, statutes, and syllabuses?’ Bhave said: ‘The ground is there, the well is there. Whoever wants to drink will drink. What more do you want?’

Even for a saint, this was living dangerously. But Bhave was Bhave, and it was seven more years before he gave up the long walk and settled down quietly as a sage, sinking into the stupor of meditation.

Magic hadn’t worked; spirituality hadn’t brought about land-redistribution or, more importantly, the revolution in social attitudes that such a redistribution required. The effect, in fact, had been the opposite. The living saint, officially adulated, preceded by magical reports, offering salvation to all who cast eyes on him, was a living confirmation of the rightness of the old ways, of the necessity for old reverences. Bihar, where Bhave did much of his walking, remains – in matters of land and untouchability – among the most backward and crushed of the Indian states.

Bhave, even if he understood Gandhi’s stress on the need for social reform, was incapable of undermining Hindu India; he was too much part of it. The perfect disciple, obeying without always knowing why, he invariably distorted his master’s message. Once, on the march, he said that untouchables did work human beings shouldn’t do; for that reason they should be given land, to become tillers. This might have seemed Gandhian; but all that the words could be taken to mean was that latrine-cleaners were latrine-cleaners, that untouchables were untouchables. The whole point of Gandhi’s message was lost.

Hindu speculation can soar high; but Hindu religious practices are elemental, and spirituality for most people is a tangible good, magic. Bhave offered spirituality as just such a good; and he could offer it as a commodity in which, as Gandhi’s heir, he was specially licensed to deal. At a public meeting in 1962 – at Shantiniketan, the university founded by the poet Tagore to revive the arts in India – Bhave described himself as ‘a retailer of spirituality’. At Shantiniketan!
Such was Bhave’s security in India; to such a degree had the rational thought of a man like Tagore been chewed up by the cultural primitivism of Gandhian India.

Some years before, in a memorable statement made during the great days of the long walk, Bhave had described himself as the fire. It was his duty simply to burn; it was for others to use his fire. Humility, once it becomes a vow, ceases to be humility, Gandhi said in his autobiography; and Bhave’s interpretation of his function in India is as vain and decadent as it appears. It was a perversion of the
Gita’s
idea of duty, a perversion of the idea of
dharma;
it was the language of the magician.

Bhave, with his simplicity and distortions, offered Gandhianism as a kind of magic; and he offered himself as the magician. Gandhi, the South African, was too complex for India. India made the racial leader the mahatma; and in Bhave the mahatma became Merlin. He failed, but that did not tarnish his sainthood. He had failed, after all, only because the times were bad; because, as so many Indians say, offering it as the profoundest wisdom, since the death of Gandhi truth has fled from India and the world. In a Black Age, Bhave had virtuously attempted old magic; and on his eightieth birthday he was honoured in New Delhi. Paunchy Congressmen in crisp white homespun sat on the platform and some made speeches. Mrs Gandhi, after a little fumbling, carefully garlanded his portrait.

The latest – censored and incomplete – news about Bhave is that in June 1976 he started a public fast. In this fast, which he must have considered his last public act, there is still the element of Gandhian parody. Gandhi, too, did a famous last fast. But Gandhi’s fast – his last expression of pain and despair in partitioned India – was against human slaughter in the Punjab and Bengal. Bhave’s last fast, if the reports are correct, was against cow-slaughter.

It seems to be always there in India: magic, the past, the death of the intellect, spirituality annulling the civilization out of which it issues, India swallowing its own tail.

With the dismantling, during the Emergency, of its borrowed or inherited democratic institutions, and with no foreign conqueror now to impose a new order, India for the first time for centuries is left alone with the blankness of its decayed civilization. The freedoms that came to independent India with the institutions it gave itself were alien freedoms, better suited to another civilization; in India they remained separate from the internal organization of the country, its beliefs and antique restrictions. In the beginning it didn’t matter. There were development plans. India industrialized, more effectively than is generally supposed; it more than doubled its production of food; it is now the world’s fourth largest producer of grain. And out of this prodigious effort arose a new mutinous stirring, which took India by surprise, and with which it didn’t know how to cope. It was as though India didn’t know what its Independence had committed it to.

The population grew; the landless fled from the tyranny of the villages; the towns choked; the restlessness created by the beginnings of economic development – in a land immemorially abject – expressed itself in the streets, in varying ways. In this very triumph of democracy lay its destruction. Formal politics answered less and less, became more and more formal; towards the end it had the demeanour of a parlour game, and became an affair of head-counting and floor-crossing. And the Indian press, another borrowed institution, also failed. With its restricted view of its function, it matched the triviality of the politics; it became part of the Indian anarchy. It reported speeches and more speeches; it reduced India to its various legislative chambers. It turned into national figures those politicians who were the least predictable;
and both they and the freedom of the press vanished with the Emergency.

The dismantled institutions – of law and press and parliament – cannot simply be put together again. They have been undone; they can be undone again; it has been demonstrated that freedom is not an absolute in independent India. Mrs Gandhi has given her name to the Emergency, and impressed it with her personality. It is unfortunate that this should be so, because it has simplified comment on one side and the other, and blurred the true nature of the crisis. With or without Mrs Gandhi, independent India – with institutions of government opposed to its social organization, with problems of poverty that every Indian feels in his bones to be beyond solution – would have arrived at a state of emergency. And the Emergency, even with Mrs Gandhi’s immense authority, is only a staying action. However it is resolved, India will at the end be face to face with its own emptiness, the inadequacy of an old civilization which is cherished because it is all men have but which no longer answers their needs.

India is without an ideology – and that was the failure of Gandhi and India together. Its people have no idea of the state, and none of the attitudes that go with such an idea: no historical notion of the past, no identity beyond the tenuous ecumenism of Hindu beliefs, and, in spite of the racial excesses of the British period, not even the beginnings of a racial sense. Through centuries of conquest the civilization declined into an apparatus for survival, turning away from the mind (on which the sacred
Gita
lays such stress) and creativity (Vinoba Bhave finding in Sanskrit only the language of the gods, and not the language of poets), stripping itself down, like all decaying civilizations, to its magical practices and imprisoning social forms. To enable men to survive, men had to be diminished. And this was a civilization that could narrow and still appear whole. Perhaps because of its unconcealed origins in racial conquest (victorious Aryans, subjugated aborigines), it is shot through with ambiguous beliefs that can either exalt men or abase them.

The key Hindu concept of
dharma –
the right way, the sanctioned way, which all men must follow, according to their natures – is an elastic concept. At its noblest it combines self-fulfilment and truth to the self with the ideas of action as duty, action as its own spiritual reward, man as a holy vessel. And it ceases then to be mysterious; it touches the high ideals of other civilizations. It might be said that it is of
dharma
that Balzac is writing when, near the end of his creative life, breaking through fatigue and a long blank period to write
Cousine Bette
in eight weeks, he reflects on the artist’s vocation:

And Proust, too, killing himself to write his book, comes close to the concept of
dharma
when, echoing Balzac, he says that in the end it is less the desire for fame than ‘the habit of laboriousness’ that takes a writer to the end of a work. But
dharma
, as this ideal of truth to oneself, or living out the truth in oneself, can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralysing obedience the highest spiritual good. ‘And do thy duty, even if it be humble,’ says the Aryan
Gita
, ‘rather than another’s, even if it be great. To die in one’s duty is life: to live in another’s is death.’