OF CASTE AND AMBEDKAR

Perhaps no one was personally closer to Gandhi than his English friend Charlie Andrews, whom he first met in South Africa in 1912. In August 1942, when Andrews was no more, Gandhi would say, ‘There were no secrets between us. We exchanged our hearts every day’.

In the summer of 1933, Andrews urged Gandhi to concentrate on the removal of untouchability ‘for the whole remainder of your life, without turning to the right or the left’. Recalling that Gandhi had ‘again and again’ said that with untouchability Indians were ‘not fit’ for Swaraj, Andrews asked his friend not to try ‘to serve two masters’. This is how Gandhi replied:

Now for your important argument about untouchability. But there is this initial flaw about it. My life is one indivisible whole. It is not built after the compartmental system—satyagraha, civil resistance, untouchability, Hindu-Muslim unity… are indivisible parts of a whole…

You will find at one time in my life an emphasis on one thing, at another time on other. But that is just like a pianist, now emphasizing one note and now [an]other. But they are all related to one another.

Adding that ‘full and final removal of untouchability’ was ‘utterly impossible without Swaraj’, Gandhi signed off as ‘Mohan’, for Andrews, addressed by Gandhi as Charlie, was one of the very few who called Gandhi by his first name.

Even as America fought first for independence and next for preserving its union before it could tackle slavery, Gandhi thought that India needed independence for overcoming the evils of caste arrogance and untouchability, but it had to be an independence that clearly recognized the evils.

Gandhi, as we saw, sounded the untouchability note early in his life, starting with boyhood clashes with his mother over playing with the ‘untouchable’ youngster Uka, who came to the Gandhis’ Rajkot home to clean it.

In South Africa in the 1890s, Gandhi hired Indians of ‘untouchable’ background in his law office, lodged some of them in his Durban home, and had that well-known fight in 1897 with Kastur over her reluctance to cheerfully remove an ‘untouchable’ lodger’s chamber pot, a fight that also revealed, as Gandhi confessed, his domineering nature.

At the end of 1908, when Indians arrested for defying South African laws were packed inside jails in groups, and a high-caste satyagrahi refused to sleep next to an ‘untouchable’, Gandhi expressed outrage. ‘This was humiliating’, Gandhi wrote in his journal, Indian Opinion, adding:

Thanks to these hypocritical distinctions of high and low and to the fear of subsequent caste tyranny, we have…embraced falsehood… I wish that Indians who join this movement also resort to satyagraha against their caste and their family and against evil wherever they find it.

The note became even stronger when Gandhi returned to India in 1915 and started a centre in Ahmedabad. Opposition to untouchability was one of the vows taken by those joining the centre, which Gandhi called an ashram.

When Dudabhai Dafda, an ‘untouchable’, was admitted to it with his wife, several objected, including a crucial colleague and relative, Maganlal Gandhi, and Maganlal’s wife, Santok, as also Gandhi’s wife Kastur.

To a friend in southern India, Gandhi wrote that he had told Kasturba that if she was unable to live with the ‘untouchable’ couple, ‘she could leave me and we should part good friends’. Kasturba yielded and stayed, but not Maganlal’s wife.

Santok fasted in opposition to the admission of Dudabhai and his wife, Gandhi fasted back, Santok and Maganlal packed their bags, said goodbye, and left. Later they returned, having, as Gandhi would say, ‘washed their hearts clean of untouchability’.

When they tried to take water from a well next door, Dudabhai and other members of the ashram were chased off by neighbours, and money ceased to come in. Gandhi was thinking of moving the ashram into an ‘untouchable’ settlement when a young industrialist then in his twenties, Ambalal Sarabhai, quietly drove up, handed Rs 13,000 to Gandhi, and left.

The tide soon turned, and Dudabhai and his wife, both showing forbearance, found increasing acceptance from neighbours, visitors and ashramites.

In February 1916, Gandhi said in Madras: ‘Every affliction that we labour under in this sacred land is a fit and proper punishment for this great and indelible crime that we are committing’.

At a meeting in Godhra in Gujarat in November 1917, where, as a police agent noted, Hindus, Muslims and untouchables were present, Gandhi declared that the higher castes would become ‘fit for Swaraj’ only when they stopped thinking of the untouchables as low.

When the Non-cooperation Movement for Swaraj was launched in 1920, the Congress, thanks to Gandhi’s insistence, made the abolition of untouchability a central political goal. Orthodoxy hit back, picking in particular on a decision by Gujarat Vidyapith, a university in Ahmedabad that Gandhi helped create, not to take students from schools that excluded ‘untouchables’.

A leading journal, Gujarati, alleged that Christians like Andrews had influenced Gandhi’s stand against untouchability, and Gandhi was warned that ‘the movement for Swaraj will end in smoke’ if ‘untouchables’ were admitted to schools endorsed by the movement.

Gandhi answered that he would rather reject Swaraj than abandon the ‘untouchables’, but the threat to back the Empire also came from some leaders of the ‘untouchables’, who argued that salvation for their people was ‘only possible through the British Government’.

In April 1921, Gandhi asked ‘untouchables’ in Ahmedabad to assert their self-respect and urged them to ‘cease to accept leavings from plates’ and to ‘receive grain only—good sound grain, not rotten grain—and that too only if…courteously offered.’ Gandhi added:

I prayed…today: ‘If I have to be reborn, I should be born an untouchable, so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings and the affronts levelled at them, in order that I may endeavour to free myself and them from that miserable condition.’

The ‘I should be born an untouchable’ sentence revealed, among other things, Gandhi’s realism. He knew that in the end the ‘untouchables’ would accept the lead only of one of their own. Still, he would try to win them and, at the same time, shame the orthodox.

In his journal he wrote that cruelties to the ‘untouchables’ constituted ‘an outrage grosser than that in the Punjab against which we have been protesting’. This was a reference to the Amritsar massacre. Repeating the thought at the Ahmedabad meeting, he added:

What crimes for which we condemn the Government as Satanic have we not been guilty of towards our untouchable brethren?… We make them crawl on their bellies; we have made them rub their noses on the ground; with eyes red with rage, we push them out of railway compartments—what more than this has British rule done?

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In Why Gandhi Still Matters, the Mahatma’s grandson and award-winning writer and scholar Rajmohan Gandhi, appraises Gandhi and his legacy by examining some of his most famous (and often most controversial) ideas, beliefs, actions, successes and failures. He analyses Gandhi’s commitment to democracy, secularism, pluralism, equality and non-violence, his gift to the world of satyagraha, the key strategies in his fight for India’s freedom, his opposition to caste discrimination and his equations with Churchill, Jinnah and Ambedkar, as also his failings as a human being and family man. Taken together, the author’s insights present an unsentimental view of aspects of Gandhi’s legacy that have endured and those that have been cast aside by power-hungry politicians, hate groups, casteist organizations, venal industrialists, terrorists and other enemies of India’s promise.