Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (33 page)

Nehru might be suspected of trying to gloss over the ambiguities in Gandhi’s position here. But in a 1934 letter to an American, the Mahatma came close to using the words Nehru later ascribed to him. “
The caste system, as it exists at present, is certainly the bane of Hindu life,” he wrote. “The great movement of removal of untouchability is an attack on the evil underlying the caste system.” He came even closer in conversation that same year with a member of his entourage. “If untouchability goes,” he said, “the castes as we know them today go.” Eventually, he’d shed his idealization of varna. In 1936 he said caste was “
harmful both to spiritual and national growth.” In 1942 he was quoted as saying he’d have “
no interest left in life” if caste continued. Finally in 1945 he said the
only remaining varna embraced
shudras—
traditionally the lowest order, basically the peasantry—and “
ati
-shudras, or Harijans or untouchables.” Ati in this context meant beyond, lower down. Once again, he was saying it was sinful to believe in “high and low.” He admitted that his views had changed, that he was no longer bent on putting an acceptable face on the caste system. He’d always maintained that the only reliable guide to his thinking on an issue was the last thing he’d said.

That may have been his final thought about caste, but it wasn’t the burden of what he had to say eighteen years earlier at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha. Then the contrast between Gandhi’s words in condemning “
the deep black ignorance of blind orthodoxy” and the severe restrictions he placed on those striving to adhere to his precepts so befuddled his Travancore followers that they dispatched two of their own to sit at the revered leader’s feet and hear how he reconciled his preaching with the tactical restraints he’d been urging.

The meeting took place in the campaign’s eighth week. Gandhi was asked why it was all right for Hindus to demonstrate in support of a distant
Khilafat but not all right for non-Hindus to support the right of “unapproachables” to use a public road in Travancore; why untouchability and unapproachability had to be considered, in view of the Congress’s pronouncements on the subject, a local Vaikom issue rather than a large national question; why if their maharajah was revered and loved as a benevolent ruler, his loyal subjects couldn’t use fasting “to melt [his] heart and to conquer him through their sufferings” in accord with Gandhi’s own teachings on satyagraha.

The Mahatma’s answers pursue whatever tortuous logic comes to hand; they’re also insistent and categorical; when he doesn’t duck questions, he recasts them, then tosses them back without retreating an inch. “Outside help weakens the strength of your sacrifice,” he declares. Similarly, “This is a purely Hindu question and, therefore, the non-Hindus have no place in the struggle.”

It’s not clear whether he’s speaking here as leader of the Hindus or of the national movement. Since he’s Gandhi, no one demands clarification on that score. In his solicitude for the feelings of orthodox Hindus, his answers can be read both ways. “Non-Hindu interference,” he says, would “offend the orthodox section whom you have to convert and conquer through your love.” Here Gandhi seems to speak as a Hindu. Even if the issues at Vaikom were to be viewed as national, he further argues, it would be “neither desirable nor practicable that the whole India or the central organization should fight out such questions. It will lead to chaos and confusion.” Here he’s the national leader suggesting, if not quite saying, that the Congress is divided enough already.

The two Travancore representatives who went to see Gandhi, both high-caste Hindus sympathetic to the cause of the untouchables, gained little clarity on a way forward for their movement, which Gandhi has effectively downgraded.
On their return, they found the satyagraha camp in “utter confusion.” So writes
T. K. Ravindran, a Kerala historian who conducted extensive research in Travancore’s Malayalam-language archives and then wrote the only narrative history of the movement based on such primary sources. In its efforts to interpret and abide by Gandhi’s injunctions, the movement was sputtering. Swami Shraddhanand showed up to bless a joint gathering of thousands of low-caste Ezhavas and high-caste
Nairs that set a new benchmark simply by happening.
The meeting sent a delegation to the maharajah supporting the satyagraha and calling for reform.

Then, in August, the rajah died. Since his heir was a child, an aunt was installed as regent. Her first act was to free all those jailed over five
months for taking part in the satyagraha.
The freed leaders threw themselves into gathering signatures from high-caste Hindus on petitions “respectfully and humbly [praying] that Your Gracious Highness may be pleased to command that all roads and all classes of public institutions may be thrown open to all classes of Your Gracious Highness’s humble subjects without distinction of caste or creed.” A cold official response dashed such hopes. It was then that the unrelenting Swami Shraddhanand urged Gandhi not to let the Vaikom cause languish.

The Gandhi who finally arrived by motorboat at the Vaikom jetty on March 9, 1925, nearly a year after the start of the satyagraha campaign he’d been managing by remote control, had recently made a show of giving up his leadership of the national movement. It was the first of many such supposed withdrawals from national politics by the Mahatma.

On his release from jail in February 1924, he’d offered the
Indian National Congress what he termed his “application for employment as general.” He meant, of course, commanding general. A general, he then insisted, “must have soldiers who would obey.”
By the end of the year, he was characterizing himself merely as “a non-violent soldier,” acknowledging that he could no longer “command universal assent.” Seen from within the movement, he’d taken a step back, all but removing himself from day-to-day politics. Seen from outside, he was still national leader. In Kerala, his arrival was a huge event. A small armada of fishing boats and flat-bottomed craft used for hauling rice and other freight converged on the one bearing the leader, flanked by two long, ornate “snake boats,” outsize racing shells designed to carry dozens of rowers, helmsmen, even musicians on major ceremonial occasions. Obviously, this was such an occasion.

Vaikom in those days had a population under five thousand. The crowd that gathered at the jetty, now the site of a
monument to the Vaikom Satyagraha that wasn’t opened until 2008, stretched for nearly two miles, according to the report the next day in
Malayala Manorama
, the leading newspaper in Malayalam, the language of the region. Everyone was eager to see Gandhi, or nearly everyone. Missing was a quietly disillusioned
George Joseph, who’d resigned from the Congress and returned to the practice of law. Also missing were the Brahmans who controlled the temple and their orthodox supporters.
Standing on their sense of the protocol appropriate to their superior station, the temple’s
priests had insisted that it was up to Gandhi to seek an audience with them.

It was the first thing he did. The formal response granted him leave to call at the home of
Indanturuttil Nambiatiri, the leader of the orthodox faction, in a section of the temple precincts off-limits to untouchables. Gandhi was there on sufferance himself. As a non-Brahman, the Bania prophet was of insufficient caste status to be invited into the priest’s actual house; instead, the meeting had to be held outdoors in a garden pavilion. The Travancore police had a stenographer on hand. Professor Ravindran rescued a transcript of the three-hour conversation from the archive of the old princely state. Today it can be read as an intriguing and comprehensive exposition of Gandhi’s views on caste, or as an example of his intellectual nimbleness under pressure. The question it raises is whether Gandhi was searching for the appearance of common ground with the orthodox, not unlike an American politician dancing his way through a meeting with evangelical Christians, or staking out an orthodox position of his own. Sometimes he’s Socratic, plying them with questions designed to undermine their certainties.
But it’s Indanturuttil Nambiatiri who proves to be the more insistent cross-examiner.

“Does Mahatmaji believe in the divinity of the Hindu
shastras
[scriptures]?” he starts out. Gandhi replies, “Yes.”

“Does Mahatmaji believe in the Law of
Karma
?” Again the answer is “Yes.”

“Does he believe in reincarnation?”

“Yes.”

That being the case, Gandhi is presented with the usual, one might even say normative, Hindu deduction: that the miserable lot of outcastes is punishment for bad behavior in past lives. “Let us grant that,” he replies, then counters by asking how that gives the high caste a right to do the punishing. The Brahman swats the question away. “We believe it is the ordinance of God,” he says.

“True, true,” Gandhi replies, still sparring, still seeking to regain the initiative.

Later, pressed on the same point, he continues to sound defensive: “I have granted to you that the differences of birth are due to differences of action. But that does not mean that you can consider one man low and another man high.” Gandhi here seems entangled in his own words. If his two propositions—that the untouchable are what they are because of misdeeds in previous lives, still, high and low must be considered
equal—were not in total contradiction, they came close. Which, we have to ask, was most compelling for Gandhi, who means to be arguing here for the right of the unapproachables to approach fellow citizens in a public place? The answer should be obvious if his life up to this point is considered to have had any consistency. “No Indian is a coolie by birth,” he’d written in his first letter to a Pretoria newspaper when he was not yet twenty-five. He felt more “at home” with the indentured laborers with whom he’d marched in South Africa than with highborn Indians, he’d told a Bombay garden party less than two weeks after his return home. “
I am not ashamed of calling myself a scavenger,” he would tell Travancore’s maharani, or queen, the very next morning, repeating a line he’d first used years before in South Africa. Yet here we find him muttering, “True, true,” when faced with a doctrine of predestination presuming evil done in past lives as a fundamental explanation for untouchability and the extremes of inequality it fosters. It’s possible that India and deeper reading in its scriptures over time had made him more orthodox.
The likelier explanation is that he still could make himself believe in the possibility, as he once put it, of “cleaning Hindu society” and thought of himself here as being now engaged in such an exercise of public hygiene. In any case, it was nothing new for him to present himself as a
sanatani
, or orthodox, Hindu. He’d done so four years earlier in a speech to a conference of the “suppressed classes.” There could be no swaraj, he said then, “so long as the Hindus willfully regard untouchability as part of their religion.” What was new here was that he’d adjusted his timetable—untouchability’s end, as he’d suggested to Charlie Andrews, might have to wait for the departure of the British—so even if he was inclined to theological debate on the ironclad influence of past lives, now was not the time. It would be enough if he could persuade the priests to open the roads.

Perhaps Nehru’s summing-up in that 1955 interview has some bearing on Gandhi’s surprising dance, his bobbing and weaving, at Vaikom: “His approach was not to go and irritate the masses in their deep convictions … Gandhi was always thinking of the masses and of the mind of India and he was trying to lift it in the right direction; to give it gradually more and more things to think about, yet without upsetting it or making it frustrated.” Put another way, he believed he could use moral suasion and his own example to build an inclusive sense, common to Brahmans and untouchables alike, of Indian nationhood.

“
I am trying myself to be a bridge between blind orthodoxy and those
who are victims of that blind orthodoxy,” he explains. “
I have come here to create peace and friendship between the orthodox and those who are agitating,” he’s quoted as saying in
Malayala Manorama
. In other words, he presents himself as having come not as a crusader but as a mediator. Self-ordained in this way, he won’t stand with one side in opposition to another, even at Vaikom, where it’s apparent to him that the orthodox represent no more than a small fraction of the population.
To break the impasse, he offers a “sportsman-like” suggestion that the matter of open roads be settled by a referendum limited to caste Hindus. The high priest stolidly stands on principle. “We would not allow this question to be subject to a vote,” Indanturuttil Nambiatiri replies.

Immediately after Gandhi exits through his gate, the Brahman holds a purification ceremony in the pavilion where the encounter occurred so as to banish any pollution that may have trailed behind the Mahatma. Today, by the old priest’s standards, the place is a veritable sink of pollution, for after his death in 1957, ownership of his residence passed to a trade union affiliated with the Communist Party, the
Vaikom Taluk Toddy Tappers Union. A red flag now flies outside, hammers and sickles adorn the facade.

After viewing this distinctly non-Gandhian
monument to the vicissitudes of history, I went next door to another mildewed structure where Nambiatiri’s aged daughter and son-in-law still reside. The story I heard there was not one of stubborn resistance to change. A decade after Gandhi’s first visit, all temples in Travancore were finally thrown open by royal decree to any manner of Hindu, including outcastes. To avoid spiritual pollution, which had become inevitable in their view with the arrival of such unapproachable riffraff, many Namboodiris then stopped praying at the Shiva temple. This was what Indanturuttil Nambiatiri had vowed to do in his encounter with Gandhi if the temples and their approach roads were ever opened by royal decree. “
We will forsake those temples and those roads,” he’d said. But when the time came, it turns out, the priest wasn’t among the boycotters. He continued to supervise the rituals at the Shiva temple; in other words, he clung to his job. “He was prepared to
accommodate to change,” said the son-in-law, a retired botanist named
Krishnan Nambuthiri. “He had a very balanced mind. He was not at all moved by emotions.”