The Hindus (107 page)

VIOLENCE: DYER AT AMRITSAR

After World War I, India was a different world, but still the iconic massacres, like those surrounding the 1857 Rebellion, continued. It was 1919. There had been fierce protests against British rule, an orgy of arson and violence that left five Europeans dead. The British forbade all meetings and demonstrations. A peaceful group assembled in Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, an open space hemmed in by houses, to celebrate the feast day of Baisakhi. Brigadier General Reginald Dyer marched his troops in and, without any warning, gave the order to fire on the crowd; they ceased firing only when they ran out of ammunition. Because the British were blocking the only gate to the enclosure, the crowd was trapped. More than twelve hundred men, women, and children were seriously wounded, and three to five hundred were killed.

Dyer, who already had a reputation for brutality (he had had prisoners beaten, sometimes in public, and made Indians crawl on the street), was proud of what he had done. The House of Lords passed a measure commending him, and he was designated a “defender of the Empire.” Nor was he ever punished.
^ks
But Winston Churchill referred to the massacre as “a monstrous event,” the British press expressed shocked outrage, and Dyer’s action was condemned worldwide. The House of Commons officially censured him, and he resigned in 1920. Tagore returned his Nobel Prize, and Nehru’s father abandoned his Savile Row suits and took to wearing Gandhian homespun.
³⁶

And the rest, as they say, is history: Indian nationalists, under the banner of the Congress Party, succeeded, after decades of often violent Indian protests and equally violent British reprisals (both imprisonments and executions), in winning independence from the British in 1947.

 

NONVIOLENCE: GANDHI

One of the key figures in the independence movement was Mahatma Gandhi, who reacted to Amritsar with one of his fasts against the British. Pleading for an honorable and equal partnership between Britain and India, held not by force but “by the silken cord of love,” he argued: “Fasting can only be resorted to against a lover, not to extort rights but to reform him, as when a son fasts for a father who drinks. My fast at Bombay and then at Bardoli was of that character. I fasted to reform, say, General Dyer, who not only does not love me, but who regards himself as my enemy.”
³⁷

Gandhi frequently used fasting as a weapon to reform (or coerce) others; on one occasion, he fasted to get Congress to agree to regard the Pariahs (whom he called Harijans [People of God]) as a Hindu community, and he succeeded; separate Harijan electorates were abolished, and more seats were reserved exclusively for Harijan members.
³⁸
Fasting, in the dharma texts, was usually a restoration for sins and errors, and Gandhi always had a strong sense of his own shortcomings; the fasting dealt with that too. Thus his fasting was intended first to control himself, then to control his own people, getting them to unite in protest but to pull back from violence; and then to control the British, getting them to let him out of jail on several occasions and, eventually, to quit India. He had more success with the British than with his own people.

Drawing on the nonviolent Jaina and Vaishnava traditions of his native Gujarat, Gandhi, who came from a merchant (Baniya) caste, developed the idea of what he called
satya-graha
—“holding firmly on to truth” (
satya,
like
sati,
derived from the verb “to be” in Sanskrit)—first in South Africa, on behalf of the Indian community there, and then in India, on behalf of the Harijans, elevating suffering and denial into a quasireligious discipline, like yoga or meditation.
³⁹
He used fasting as a weapon of the weak
⁴⁰
against the British, as Indian women had used it against their husbands for centuries (often simultaneously withholding sexual access, locking themselves into the “anger room,” as Kaikeyi did in the
Ramayana
). Gandhi said that you cannot fast against a tyrant, that he fasted to “reform those who loved me.” Refuting the binary sexual attributes as the British generally applied them to male colonizers and feminized colonized subjects (the Rape of India syndrome), he made female fortitude, self-sacrifice, and self-control the model of national character for both men and women. Thus he invented a gendered nationalism that expressed an androgynous model of virtue,
⁴¹
which he regarded as the essence of both bravery—indeed virility—and the female qualities of endurance and nonviolence.

Gandhi was a one-man strange bedfellow. His insistence on celibacy for his disciples caused difficulty among some of them, as did his habit of sleeping beside girls young enough to be called jailbait in the United States, to test and/or prove his celibate control or to stiffen his resolve. But this practice drew not so much upon the Upanishadic and Vaishnava ascetic traditions, which were the source of many of Gandhi’s practices, as upon the ancient Tantric techniques of internalizing power, indeed creating magical powers, by first stirring up the sexual energies and then withholding semen.

On the question of eating beef, Gandhi was also ambivalent. As a child he had heard popular poems recited by schoolboys: “Behold the mighty Englishman /He rules the Indian small,/Because being a meat-eater/He is five cubits tall.”
⁴²
Thus, in contradiction of the reasons to eat meat outlined in many Hindu texts, Gandhi felt as if the natural order—the laws of violence and power—required him to eat meat in order to defeat the British. But eating meat was not natural for Gandhi, who was raised in a Vaishnava family that practiced strict vegetarianism,
⁴³
in Gujarat, where Jainism was strong.

In the end Gandhi used the image of calf love (
vatsalya
), the love of and for a mother cow, particularly the Earth Cow, Mother Earth, as a key symbol for his imagined Indian nation, and though he also tried to include Muslims in the family, cow protection was a factor in the failure of his movement to attract large-scale Muslim support. His attitude to cows was, however, an essential component of his version of nonviolence (
ahimsa
), which, in Gandhi’s hands, came to mean not just opposition to blood sacrifice but what others called passive
^kt
nonresistance
⁴⁴
and I would call passive-aggressive nonresistance, against the British, without spilling their blood any more than an adherent of traditional
ahimsa
would spill the blood of a sacrificial animal.

Gandhi was well aware that there had never been true nonviolence in India (or anywhere else, for that matter). He once remarked, “Indeed the very word, nonviolence, a negative word, means that it is an effort to abandon the violence that is inevitable in life.”
⁴⁵
If you’ve read this far, you will know that Gandhi could not simply pick up off the rack a nonviolence already perfected by centuries of Hindu meditation; it was a much-disputed concept. Gandhi had to reinvent nonviolence before he could use it in an entirely new situation, as a political strategy, against the British Raj. But he had a rich tradition to draw upon. Writing about the
Gita,
Gandhi granted, “It may be freely admitted that the Gita was not written to establish
ahimsa
. . . . But if the Gita believed in
ahimsa
or it was included in desirelessness, why did the author adopt a warlike illustration? When the Gita was written, although people believed in
ahimsa,
wars were not only not taboo, but no one observed the contradiction between them and
ahimsa.
”
⁴⁶

Hindu idealists gladly embraced the Gandhian hope that the Hindus might set an example for the human race in passive resistance, a hope bolstered by their desire to prove to the disdainful British that the Hindus were not the lascivious, bloodthirsty savages depicted in the colonial caricature. Thus an ancient Hindu ideal was appropriated and given new power by Hindus (such as Gandhi) who had been influenced by Western thinkers (such as Tolstoy) who were acquainted with the neo-Vedantins as well as with German idealists who had been reading the Upanishads (originally through Persian, Muslim translations), making these ideas more attractive both to Westerners and to Hindus still living under the shadow of Western domination.

But if Gandhi hoped that the ancient Hindu ideal of nonviolence, even in its modern incarnation, would succeed in the postcolonial context, he was whistling in the dark. His method succeeded against the British but could not avert the tragedy of Partition.
^ku
Gandhi’s nonviolence failed because it did not pay sufficient attention to the other, more tenacious ancient Hindu ideal that had a deeper grip on real emotions in the twentieth century: violence. For as Krishna pointed out in the
Bhagavad Gita,
it is quite possible to adhere to the mental principles of nonviolence while killing your cousins in battle. (Gandhi wrote a translation, into Gujarati, and commentary to the
Gita
in which he interpreted the
Mahabharata
war as symbolic and read metaphorically Krishna’s exhortations to Arjuna to kill his enemies.) The Vedantic reverence for non-violence flowered in Gandhi; the Vedic reverence for violence flowered in the slaughters that followed Partition. Then more active civil disobedience replaced passive noncooperation, and terrorism also increased. On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was shot to death by Nathuram Godse, a Pune Brahmin who had ties with the militant nationalist organization called the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteers’ Organization).
⁴⁷

Gandhi was concerned with control on both the political level (control of violence) and the personal (control of sensuality). The threats to both were united in the British control of Hindu addiction to opium, for opium, along with indigo (the dye used for European uniforms) and tea, was one of the great Raj cash crops.
⁴⁸
The East India Company forced Indian peasants to cultivate the poppy from which opium is produced,
⁴⁹
which was then exported to China in exchange for silks and tea (thereby producing opium addicts in China); when the Chinese resisted, the company dispatched its Indian sepoys to fight and die for the company’s cause. But not all the opium got to China. In Kipling’s
Kim,
Kim’s father dies of opium and the woman he lives with sells it; Kipling speaks of “the opium that is meat, tobacco, and medicine to the spent Asiatic,” a tolerant (if racist) attitude that was, oddly enough, shared by some missionaries, who would not begrudge to the desperately poor the pill of opium that was for some, the missionaries said, their only stimulant. But Kipling neglects to mention that opium also meant death for many people. More precisely, it meant death and taxes. Before the British introduced an opium tax for the first time, opium had been untaxed and used fairly cheaply by all classes of people, in both the towns and the villages. The tax didn’t make the addicts give it up, but increased their already desperate poverty.
⁵⁰

Alcohol was a more pervasive problem than opium and has deeper and more complex roots in Hindu culture, but it too became a political problem under the Raj, also through a new form of taxation in Gujarat in the 1920s. What has been called the Devi movement started in South Gujarat among a group of Adivasis, a tribal group whom caste Hindus in the nineteenth century regarded as non-Hindus because they ate meat (anything but cattle and horseflesh) and drank liquor.
⁵¹
(This definition conveniently ignored the fact that many Hindus ate meat and drank liquor, yet reform movements often argued that giving up meat and wine was a way of giving up being a tribal and becoming part of the four-class system.)
⁵²
More precisely, the Adivasis drank toddy (
tadi
), the fermented juice of a palm tree (coconut, palmyra, or date palm; in South Gujarat, it was mostly date palm), and
daru,
made chiefly from the flowers of the mahua tree (
Madhuca indica
) and said to be seven times as strong as toddy (15 to 30 percent alcohol). Both drinks were cheap to make and not very strong.
⁵³
“God gave the Brahmin ghee [clarified butter, used in Vedic sacrifices] and the Bhil [a tribal people] liquor,” a local proverb goes, and these Adivasis believed (as the Vedic Indians had) that the gods also enjoyed sharing a drink with them at various rituals. At funerals, the corpse too was given a drink. They drank toddy in part because it was so much cleaner and healthier than water, but they strongly disapproved of addictive drinking.

The Adivasis did not regard women as property but allowed them to divorce, remarry (even if widowed), and commit adultery (which they regarded as an offense but not a grave offense). And they were anti-Brahmin (some even regarded Brahmin killing as an act of merit) and regarded literacy in Hindu texts as “a cultural force which they had always done their best to keep at bay.” The Hinduism to which they were exposed in school was primarily Arya Samaj, amounting to devotion to a Hindu deity (in particular Krishna), a daily bath, and no meat, no blood sacrifice, and, worst of all, no
daru
or toddy.

The Adivasis had always made toddy and
daru
privately at home until the late nineteenth century, when the colonial and various princely states, the capitalists who manufactured liquor in central distilleries, and the liquor dealers (who in South Gujarat were almost all Parsis) combined forces to control and tax liquor, just as the British had taxed opium. But toddy is best consumed within hours of fermenting; by storing it until it could be taxed and sold, the British ruined it; by the time it got to the shops it was weak and tasteless, and expensive, and hard to get. The Parsis who sold it came to town “mounted on a fine horse with a gun and a whip”; they raped the Adivasi women and forced the girls into prostitution for touring officials. This happened so often that the Adivasis devised a ceremony of purification for women whom the Parsis had raped. Thus colonial administrators and landed castes took the Adivasis’ land, took their crops, took their women, took bribes, and exploited their labor.