Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (25 page)

Once again he drew explicitly on his experience in the Natal strikes, two years earlier. To move the nation, he would need to bring education to the poorest—just as he now claims to have done with the indentured in South Africa—to “
teach them why India is growing more and more abject.” Already, he’s on his way to turning his South African experience into a parable, editing out unfortunate details such as the outbreaks of violence in the sugar country, or the ambiguity of the movement’s results, especially the glaring shortfall in actual benefits for the indentured. Seasoned campaigner that he is, he’s now looking forward, not back, to the advent of mass politics in India. However flawed his analogy to South Africa, he’s declaring his ambition to jolt India with a program. It’s too soon to say what content he may give to that program, but it’s foreshadowed in some of the preoccupations he has carried with him, notably his concern for Hindu-Muslim unity and his condemnation of untouchability as a curse on India. The obvious difference is that from here on, he won’t just be striving to carve out some breathing room for a marginalized minority in a system he has little or no hope of changing. In India, he’ll have the opportunity and burden of trying to carry the majority with him, in an effort to overturn and replace the colonial rulers. Though he never voices an ambition to participate in government himself, he’ll have much to say about the direction of society under the leaders he’d eventually designate, its need for reform.

Remarkably, it takes less than six years for the repatriated politician, starting on this vastly enlarged stage with no organization or following beyond his immediate entourage, to accomplish some facsimile of the “awakening” he sought. His audacious goal, ratified by a national movement that had been revitalized—practically reinvented in his image—is captured in a slogan: “Swaraj within a year.” Swaraj, in Gandhi’s reinterpretation, remains a fuzzy goal, some form of self-government approaching but not necessarily including full independence. What’s radical is the promise that mass mobilization can make it a reality in just a year. And that fateful one year was to be 1921.

By then, Gandhi had come to be seen in a whole new light. No longer was he a guest of honor at tea parties. In the space of only two years—from the start of the hot season in April 1917, when he took up the cause of exploited peasants on indigo plantations in a backwater of northern Bihar, until April 1919, when he called his first nonviolent national strike—he had made his mark on India. Now, when he travels to promote
his swaraj, massive throngs turn out numbering in the thousands and tens of thousands, crowds that were ten, even twenty times the throng he’d faced at the Durban racecourse.
He makes a point of speaking in the vernacular, Gujarati or his still less than fluent Hindi—later, reaching for the broadest common denominator, he’d specify the demotic Hindustani as his preferred lingua franca—but he can usually be heard only in the front ranks of the crowds; and, when he barnstorms beyond North India, he’s forced to speak in a language that’s little or not at all understood by most of those within the sound of his voice.

It seems not to matter; the crowds keep swelling. The peculiarly Indian point of the commotion he inspires is, after all, not to hear but to view him: to gain or experience
darshan
, the merit or uplift that accrues to those who enter the spiritual force field of a
rishi
, or sage. For some in these crowds the vision of Gandhi is literally an apotheosis. They think they’re seeing not a mere mortal but an actual avatar of a god from the crowded Hindu pantheon. By the second half of 1921, as the clock runs out on his premature promise of swaraj, the prophet finds it necessary to protest his own deification. “
I should have thought,” he writes, “that I had in the strongest sense repudiated all claim to divinity. I claim to be a humble servant of India and humanity, and would like to die in the discharge of such service.” It’s no time for avatars, he insists. “
In India, what we want now is not hero-worship, but service.”

Early on, he’d expressed his own skepticism about these ephemeral transactions between leader and those who want to bask passively in his afterglow: “
I do not believe that people profit in any way by having darshan. The condition of him who gives it is even worse.” But he allowed it to become an almost daily, sometimes nightly, feature of his life. Not just at his public appearances but often when he worked and slept outside his ashrams, there were usually stupefied congregations of piously staring onlookers, ignoring his determination to ignore them.

Occasionally, the adulation, expressed in the surge of crowds pressing forward—their members reaching out to graze the leader’s feet with their fingertips, in a mark of humility and reverence—gets to be more than Gandhi can stand. In the English-language version of his weekly newspaper
Young India
—reincarnating
Indian Opinion
, still being printed in South Africa at the Phoenix Settlement—he complains of “
the malady of
foot-touching.” Later, he warns: “
In the mere touch of my feet lies nothing but the man’s degradation.” There’s plenty of such degradation to be had. “
At night,”
Louis Fischer reports, “his feet and shins were covered with scratches from people who had bowed low and
touched him; his feet had to be rubbed with Vaseline.”
Later, his devoted English follower Madeleine Slade, renamed by him Mirabehn, was reported by a Fleet Street journalist to “actually shampoo his legs every night.”

Gandhi’s first Indian Boswell and faithful secretary in these years,
Mahadev Desai, sees in the clamoring throngs a reflection of “the people’s love-mad insolence.” He’s writing in his diary about a specific incident in February 1921 at the last of a succession of rural train stops between Gorakhpur and Benares. At each, a crowd had been waiting, blocking the tracks, demanding to see Gandhi, who’d addressed nearly 100,000 earlier that day in Patna. “
We have come for the darshan of the Lord,” one man tells Mahadev, who has gone so far at one stop as to impersonate Gandhi in a vain effort to get his adherents, who have never seen an image of their hero, to back off.

Now it’s well past midnight. Yet another big crowd, after waiting for hours, converges on Gandhi’s third-class carriage. The touring Mahatma isn’t scheduled or inclined to speak. Mahadev pleads for silence so he can catch some sleep after a strenuous day, but deafening cries of “
Gandhi ki jai
”—“Glory to Gandhi”—rent the night sky. At last, a suddenly imperious Gandhi rises in a rage, his face twisted in an angry scowl Mahadev has never before seen. Once again, a clamorous mob made up of his supposed followers is hanging from the footboards of the train, preventing it from moving on. The apostle of nonviolence later admitted that he felt an urge to beat someone at that moment; instead of lashing out verbally, he beats and smacks his own forehead in full view of the crowd. Again he does it, then a third time. “
The people got frightened,” he wrote. “They asked me to forgive them, became quiet and requested me to go to sleep.”

This picture of an infuriated Mahatma assaulting himself in order to turn back an idolatrous, overwhelmingly rural crowd in the early hours of the morning obviously raises questions about the fundamental nature of his appeal. Gandhi by now had spelled out the program he seemed to promise in Surat. Practically all of it had been at the forefront of his thinking when he left South Africa, or is easily traceable to his preoccupations at Tolstoy Farm. Swaraj would come when India solidified an unbreakable alliance between Muslims and Hindus; wiped out untouchability; accepted the
discipline of nonviolence as more than a tactic, as a way of life; and promoted homespun yarn and handwoven fabrics as self-sustaining cottage industries in its numberless villages. He would call these “
the four pillars on which the structure of swaraj would ever
rest.” And the national movement—more to please him than out of conviction—would formally adopt his program as its own. In Ahmedabad in December 1921, as the year he’d given himself and India to achieve swaraj expired, the Indian National Congress would give no thought to spurning him as a failed prophet. Instead, it would vote to assign Gandhi “sole executive authority” over the movement, making him, in effect, a one-man Politburo in a period when most of his lieutenants and former rivals had been removed from the scene, having been jailed by the British authorities (who hadn’t quite figured out how to handle the Mahatma himself). The revivalist in him had been tirelessly pushing the four-part program forward in his writing and itinerant preaching, declaring each part in its turn to be absolutely necessary for swaraj, its very essence. The logical connections are sometimes clear only to him. Gandhi is capable of arguing that Hindu-Muslim unity cannot be achieved without spinning. Other times the banishment of untouchability becomes the highest priority. Not everyone understands, but his words become a creed for a growing band of activists spread across the land in places he has visited. Meanwhile, by 1921, the newly empowered political tactician is threatening
civil disobedience. As an expression of the discipline and mission Gandhi had taken on himself, his program offered a coherent vision. As practical politics, it could be, to put it mildly, a tricky if not impossible juggling act.

But the crowd at that one, now nameless, rail siding on the Gangetic plain hadn’t stayed on by the thousands through a long night to express its enthusiasm for Gandhi’s four pillars or its fellow feeling for Muslims or untouchables or even to enlist in his next nonviolent campaign. It had come to pay homage to the man, more than that, to a saint. The idea that he cared for them in a new and unusual manner had been communicated only too well. The idea that he had demands to make on them had gotten across in a wispy, vague, and incidental way, if at all. Gandhi’s actual goals could verge on the utopian, but they could also be, in this teeming Indian context, beside the point—sometimes, not nearly acceptable in the real world he meant to change.
The throngs that turned out for him had their own ideas about what he was promising; often they seemed to be waiting for a messiah to usher in a golden age in which debts and taxes and the prevailing scarcities would cease to weigh on them. Sometimes they would call this dawning era of ease and sufficiency, if not plenty, the
Gandhi Raj. Regularly speaking past his adherents, Gandhi found himself a prisoner of the expectations he aroused.

In his own supple, rationalizing mind there was seldom tension
between his two roles, that of spiritual pilgrim and that of mass leader—spearhead of a national movement, tribune of a united India that had come into being first in his own imagining. When conflict did arise between the Gandhi personae, it was almost invariably the mass leader, not the spiritual pilgrim, who retreated. His career is punctuated by periods of seeming withdrawal from active leadership, similar to his withdrawal to Tolstoy Farm in South Africa between 1910 and 1912. But his retreats from politics were never final. Given India’s poverty, he would argue, the only fulfillment for a religiously motivated person was in service through politics. “
No Indian who aspires to follow the ideal of true religion can afford to remain aloof from politics,” he said. This was Gandhi’s distinctive interpretation of
dharma
, the duty of a righteous man.
Judith Brown, a British scholar, puts it well when she writes that for him it was “
morality in action.”

Those Gandhi called “political
sannyasis
,” religious seekers who renounced the comforts of the world but lived in the world to make it better, had a duty “to mix with the masses and work among them like one of themselves.” That meant, first of all, speaking their languages rather than the language of the colonial oppressor, in which Gandhi himself happened to excel. The emphasis is original with him. It can be called Gandhian. It’s the self-invented Gandhi who came out of Africa, the Gandhi of
Hind Swaraj
, who took it on himself to dole out rations of bread and sugar to indentured miners in Natal about to court mass arrest by following him across a forbidden border.

On the Indian scene, all this seemed at first to push him to the periphery, an exotic and isolated creature. The Gandhian emphasis on speaking to the rural poor in their own languages left him instantly swimming against the tide in a largely Anglicized national movement that conducted most of its business in English. A president of the
Indian National Congress, which Gandhi would eventually take over, had recently spoken warmly of “the spread of English education” as “perhaps [Britain’s] greatest gift to the people of India.” It had, this pre-Gandhian said, “instructed our minds and inspired us with new hopes and aspirations.” His assessment was a kind of fulfillment of the vision of
Thomas B. Macaulay, the great British historian, who had argued in his landmark “Minute on Indian Education,” written in 1835, that the British could only rule India if they succeeded in forming “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a
class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

As a product of the Inner Temple in London, Gandhi might himself have been counted as a member of that class. Instead, he rebelled against the dominance of the colonialist’s language. Macaulay, in an ensuing, less-quoted passage, had also said it would be the responsibility of this Anglicized new class “to refine the vernacular dialects … and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.” There was an injunction that would have resonated with the populist in Gandhi. Whenever he could, he shunned English, though he’d been functioning in the language of India’s rulers for most of his adult life.
Fewer than 1 million of India’s population then of 300 million, he pointed out sharply, “have any understanding of English. “All the existing agitation is confined to an infinitesimal section of our people who are a mere speck in the firmament,” he would say.

Such home truths went down hard. Even Gokhale may have backed off. He’d found
Hind Swaraj
regressive and unpalatable but nevertheless seems to have regarded Gandhi as a possible successor as leader of a tiny reformist vanguard, known as the
Servants of India Society, he’d founded with the aim of infiltrating a cadre of totally disciplined, totally selfless nationalists into Indian public life. But before the great man’s death, it dawned on the newcomer that he might not fit in there. He was too singular; his history of strikes and passive resistance, his tendency to make himself the sole arbiter of the “truth” that gave force to
satyagraha, his stand on the language issue, all set him apart even before he cast his lot in Indian politics. In other words, he came with his own doctrine, and it was not that of the Servants of India Society.