Part 5 (1/2)
The following September, Muslim votes ensured the adoption of Gandhi's noncooperation program by a narrow margin at a special Congress session in Calcutta, with the preservation of the caliphate now underscored as a primary goal of the national movement. ”It is the duty of every non-Moslem Indian in every legitimate manner to a.s.sist his Mussulman brother, in his attempt to remove the religious calamity that has overtaken him,” declared the resolution, written by Gandhi. Without Muslim votes, Gandhi's first challenge to the Congress to adopt satyagraha would almost certainly have foundered. The Mahatma hadn't won over the political elite; with the backing of the Alis, he'd swamped it. It was at Calcutta that he first held up the prospect of ”swaraj within a year.”
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Soon-to-be Congress leader, 1920 (photo credit i6.1) (photo credit i6.1)
Three months later, in December 1920, Shaukat Ali took the precaution of rounding up a flying force of burly ”volunteers,” Muslims uncommitted to nonviolence, to face down any anti-Gandhi demonstrators at the annual Congress meeting, held that year in the Marathi-speaking city of Nagpur in central India. The so-called volunteers weren't needed. Skepticism about noncooperation was still being voiced, but political opposition to Gandhi had melted away. His own example and relentlessness in argument, his mounting hold on the broader population and solid support from Muslims, all combined to make his leaders.h.i.+p una.s.sailable. The Nagpur Congress dutifully adopted Gandhi's draft of a new const.i.tution, extending the movement's reach down to the villages for the first time, at least on paper. In another first engineered by him, it adopted the abolition of untouchability as a national goal. Swaraj would be impossible without it, Gandhi repeatedly said, but in fact the noncooperation campaign targeted two ”wrongs” specifically attributed to the British-the threat to the Khilafat and their failure to punish those responsible for the Amritsar ma.s.sacre. Untouchability might be, in Gandhi's words, a ”putrid custom,” but it was a Hindu wrong, an urgent issue, no doubt, but one without any obvious place on an agenda designed to rouse as many Indians as possible to nonviolent resistance to the colonial power.
There was one conspicuous dissenter. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was heckled when he referred drily in a speech to ”Mister” rather than ”Mahatma” Gandhi. He left the Congress after Nagpur, never to return, predicting that Gandhi's ma.s.s politics would lead to ”complete disorganization and chaos.” His departure, scarcely noted at the time, opened a tiny fissure in the nationalist ranks. It would become a gaping cleavage after orthodox Muslim elements drifted away from the movement with the waning of the Khilafat agitation. At this stage, it was not the nationalist goals of the Congress that had disillusioned Jinnah; he was still a convinced nationalist, an earnest believer in Hindu-Muslim reconciliation. Yet he was more a skeptic than a supporter of the Khilafat agitation. The readiness of Hindus-notably Gandhi-to exploit it was part of what alienated him.
At the start of 1921, the sway that the Anglicized Bombay lawyer Jinnah would come to have over India's Muslims could hardly have been foreseen, even by him. It was Muhammad Ali who then captured their imaginations, and Ali was still bound to the Mahatma. Understatement wasn't Ali's style. ”After the Prophet, on whom be peace, I consider it my duty to carry out the commands of Gandhiji,” he declared. (The one-syllable suffix, as we've noted, is a common Indian way of showing respect for an elder or sage. Even today, in conversation, Gandhi is commonly referred to as ”Mahatmaji” or ”Gandhiji.”) For a time Muhammad Ali gave up eating beef as a gesture to Gandhi and all Hindus. Then, campaigning side by side with Gandhi across India, he took to wearing khadi khadi, the homespun cloth the Mahatma embraced as a cottage industry, a means to swades.h.i.+ swades.h.i.+, or self-reliance, and, in the expanding Gandhian vision, as a ma.s.s self-employment scheme for village India and, therefore, its salvation. The weaving and wearing of khadi (sometimes called khaddar khaddar) would not only feed spinners, handloom operators, and their families; it would enable India to boycott imported cloth from British mills and thus stand as another form of noncooperation. The bearded maulana maulana-an honorific given to a man learned in Islamic law-not only wore khadi; he became an evangelist for the charkha charkha, or spinning wheel, in front of Muslim audiences. ”We laid the foundation of our slavery by selling off the spinning wheel,” Muhammad Ali preached. ”If you want to do away with slavery, take up the wheel again.” His support for such Gandhian tenets inevitably aroused criticism from fellow Muslims. Ultimately, the maulana had to defend himself against charges of ”being a wors.h.i.+pper of Hindus and a Gandhi-wors.h.i.+pper.”
The preservation of the caliphate remained Muhammad Ali's most urgent cause, but his readiness to stand with Gandhi on issues that meant little to Muslims-spinning and even cow protection-became a kind of validation of the Mahatma's rhetorical leaps, his constant juggling and merging of seemingly unconnected campaigns in an attempt to establish a stable common ground for Hindus and Muslims. Noncooperation was the most serious challenge the Raj had faced, and Gandhi was the movement's undisputed leader. But then the big tent of Hindu-Muslim unity he'd erected began to sag and, here and there, collapse as violence between the two communities, an endemic phenomenon on the subcontinent, appeared to give the lie to all the vows and pledges that had been offered up in India on behalf of the soon-to-exit caliph in Constantinople. The impressive coalition Gandhi had built and inspired was proving to be jerry-built. By August 1921, a still hopeful Gandhi had to acknowledge that some Hindus were ”apathetic to the Khilafat cause” and that it was ”not yet possible to induce Mussulmans to take interest in swaraj except in terms of the Khilafat.”
By far the worst violence came that same month in the rural Malabar district on the Indian Ocean coast, where a community of Muslims known as Mappilas, also Moplahs, rose in rebellion, crying jihad and brandis.h.i.+ng the Khilafat flag, after a couple of skirmishes with the police in which two British constables had been killed. Tiny Khilafat kingdoms were then proclaimed by the insurgents, and in some of these, Hindu homes and temples were set ablaze, women raped, and children slaughtered. The doctrine of nonviolence had never reached the Malabar district; political meetings had, in fact, been banned there. That was hardly an excuse for the gruesomeness or scale of the carnage: six hundred Hindus reported killed, twenty-five hundred forcibly converted to Islam. Gandhi and Muhammad Ali were denounced as infidels when they called on the insurgent leaders to disavow violence. The Raj dealt severely with the rising, blaming the noncooperation movement and hanging some two hundred rebels.
The next month Muhammad Ali was arrested on conspiracy charges at a train station in the Telugu-language region of southeastern India (today's Andhra Pradesh), including the charge of ”conspiracy to commit mischief,” while traveling with the Mahatma from Calcutta to Madras. The British, who'd been looking for an occasion to re-exert their authority, found it in a series of statements by the maulana arguing that Islamic law forbade Muslims to enlist or serve in their army. Gandhi's reaction says a lot about the fecundity of his imagination, the range of his aspirations, and his adaptability as a political tactician. A week after seeing Ali hustled from the station by a police detachment, he appeared in the South Indian town of Madurai bare chested in a loincloth: in the attire, that is, that would be his unvarying guise for the rest of his life. It's the way he'd been dressing at the ashram on the Sabarmati River, outside Ahmedabad, for several years; in public, he'd continued to wear a kurta, dhoti, and cap. This was the first public outing of his new, very basic costume.
Being Gandhi, he hastened to explain the symbolic meaning of the change. His disrobing could be read in several ways: as a tribute to the imprisoned maulana and the other Khilafat leaders rounded up with him; or as a subtle s.h.i.+ft of emphasis, a recognition that the Khilafat movement would soon be played out, at least as far as Hindus were concerned, that the larger national movement needed a new mobilizing tool. Gandhi had already seized on the spinning wheel for that purpose. For the goal of swades.h.i.+ to be achieved, he reasoned, there had to be enough hand spinning and hand weaving across India to replace the manufactured imported cloth being burned and boycotted as his campaign for swades.h.i.+ caught on. Without swades.h.i.+ and all it entailed, he now argued, there could be no swaraj. And only with swaraj-giving India the ability to engage diplomatically with the world-could there be any settlement of the Khilafat problem. Once the highest priority of the noncooperation movement, the preservation of the Khilafat was now to be seen as a potential by-product of its success. Gandhi was pointing the way to ”full swades.h.i.+” by showing the millions who were too poor to cover their whole bodies with newly woven homespun that it really wasn't necessary. ”Let there be no prudery about dress,” he now said. ”India has never insisted on full covering of the body for males as a test of culture.”
Later, he would explain the symbolism he invested in the loincloth by saying, ”I wish to be in touch with the life of the poorest of the poor among Indians...It is our duty to dress them first and then dress ourselves, to feed them first and then feed ourselves.”
If they could follow the winding path of his logic, Indian Muslims might see his wearing of the loincloth as proof of his continued devotion to the Khilafat cause. Otherwise there was a good chance they'd perceive Gandhi to be drifting away from them. Muhammad Ali might have pointed out, were he not by this time in detention in Karachi, that the culture that Gandhi was describing so avidly was distinctly Hindu. ”It is against our scriptures to keep the knees bare in this fas.h.i.+on,” Maulana Abdul Bari, a leading religious authority who'd been prominent in the Khilafat agitation, subsequently informed the Mahatma.
Gandhi was starting a new variation on the fugue he was forever composing out of his various themes. Recalling perhaps how few South African Muslims were at his side when he marched across the Transvaal border in the 1913 satyagraha, he'd understood from the start of the noncooperation campaign that he could only speak to Muslims through other Muslims: Muhammad Ali, for instance. ”I can wield no influence over the Mussulmans except through a Mussulman,” he said. He'd also understood the improbability of the Khilafat as an Indian national cause. For him, it was less a cause than an investment: ”the opportunity of a lifetime” for Hindus to demonstrate their stalwartness, their trustworthiness, to Muslims who, he kept suggesting, if not quite promising, would be likely to respond in kind by respecting the tender feelings of Hindus for the sacred cow. Ergo, according to this logic, preserving the Khilafat was the surest way to preserve the cow. Nothing like this opportunity would ”recur for another hundred years.” It was a cause for which he was ”ready today to sacrifice my sons, my wife and my friends.” In the short run, it was also a way to bind Muslims into the national movement that, thanks in no small measure to their support, he now led. The odds against it working were overwhelming, but who can now say, considering all that has happened since in confrontations between Hindus and Muslims, that Gandhi had his priorities wrong?
Gradually, he disengaged from the Khilafat agitation, which meant disengaging from Muslim politics, but Hindu-Muslim unity remained one of his main themes through to what might be called his tragic last act as Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other at the time of part.i.tion. In September 1924, Gandhi fasted for the first but not last time against Hindu-Muslim violence following riots in Kohat, a frontier town south of Peshawar in what's now Pakistan. He said he was fasting for twenty-one days as a personal ”penance.” The flash point for this killing spree, which resulted in an official death count of thirty-six and the flight of Kohat's entire Hindu community, was a grossly blasphemous life of the Prophet written by a Hindu. While it had nothing to do with Gandhi, he held himself responsible in the sense that he'd been ”instrumental in bringing into being the vast energy of the people” that had now turned ”self-destructive.” To demonstrate that the fast was not against Muslims or on behalf of Hindus, the main sufferers on this occasion, he made a point of camping in Muhammad Ali's Delhi bungalow during his starvation ritual. ”I am striving to become the best cement between the two communities,” he wrote. Twenty-four years later he'd fast again in Delhi with the same purpose. On each occasion, Hindu and Muslim leaders, fearful of losing that ”cement,” gathered at his bedside and vowed to work for peace. A shaky armistice would follow and hold until an obscure agitator, somewhere on the subcontinent, threw off the next spark.
Gandhi the politician retained a cool realist's grip on his own limitations in this highly charged sphere after the waning of the Khilafat cause. Never was it more clearly and coldly displayed than in 1926, when his second son, Manilal, now resettled in South Africa, realized he was in love with a young Muslim woman in Cape Town whose family had played host to his father in years gone by. Her name was Fatima Gool, and she was known as Timmie. When word of the interfaith love match reached Gandhi at his ashram in Gujarat, he wrote to his son telling him he was free to do as he wanted. Then, as his great-granddaughter Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie observes in her finely wrought biography of Manilal, ”the rest of the letter in fact closed the doors on free choice.”
Generally speaking, Gandhi deplored marriage as a failure of self-restraint (ever since he unilaterally declared himself a brahmachari brahmachari) and religious conversion as a failure of discipline (since he briefly contemplated it for himself in his Pretoria days). So he was hardly likely to celebrate intermarriage as a realization of Hindu-Muslim unity. His letter reads like a dry lawyer's brief, or a political consultant's memo, devoid of any expression of feeling for his son or the Gool family. Of its several arguments, the most forceful and hardest to refute is the politician's: ”Your marriage will have a powerful impact on the Hindu-Muslim question...You cannot forget nor will society forget that you are my son.” Persevering idealist though he was, he was seldom softhearted, least of all when it came to his sons.
Did the revivalist ever really believe that swaraj could come in a year, or that the caliphate could be preserved? The question is little different from asking whether modern political candidates believe the dreamy promises they make at the height of a campaign. For Gandhi, who was introducing modern politics to India, the question is especially fraught because he was seen by his own people in his own time and place as a religious figure, more saintly than prophetic, more inspiring than infallible. He could thus be expected to lay down unmeetable conditions to achieve unreachable goals. At a certain level of abstraction from what we're accustomed to calling reality, what he offered in 1920 and 1921 as a vision was obvious and inarguable, even and especially when it defied normal expectations. After all, if 100 million spinning wheels had produced enough yarn in a few months to clothe 300 million Indians, if state schools and courts had all emptied and colonial officials at every level found they had no one to ring for-if Hindu and Muslim India was that united and disciplined-then independence would would have been within reach. Gandhi was telling his people that their fate was in their own hands; that much he surely believed. It was when these things failed to happen as he said they could that disillusion set in and the movement veered off course and slowed. have been within reach. Gandhi was telling his people that their fate was in their own hands; that much he surely believed. It was when these things failed to happen as he said they could that disillusion set in and the movement veered off course and slowed.
Shortly after the Mahatma donned his ”symbolic disguise,” as Robert Payne, one of his legion of biographers, termed his loincloth, he was challenged on the level of reality by Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet, a n.o.bel laureate by the time he met Gandhi in 1915, and, later, the admirer who first conferred on him the t.i.tle Mahatma. Tagore now wrote that Gandhi had ”won the heart of India with his love” but asked how he could justify the bonfires of foreign cloth promoted by his followers in a country where millions were half-clothed. The gist of Tagore's high-minded argument was that Indians needed to think for themselves and beware of blindly accepting such simplistic would-be solutions as the spinning wheel, even from a Mahatma they rightly revered. ”Consider the burning of cloth, heaped before the very eyes of our motherland s.h.i.+vering and ashamed in her nakedness,” he wrote. Gandhi swiftly replied with what may have been his most stirring prose in English, offering his retort on a less elevated level of reality, that of village India: To a people famis.h.i.+ng and idle, the only acceptable form in which G.o.d can dare to appear is work and the promise of food as wages. G.o.d created man to work for his food, and said that those who ate without work were thieves. Eighty per cent of India are compulsory thieves half the year. Is it any wonder if India has become one vast prison? Hunger is the argument that is driving India to the spinning wheel...The hungry millions ask for one poem-invigorating food. They cannot be given it. They can only earn it. And they can earn it only by the sweat of their brow.
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Gandhi at his charkha, 1925 (photo credit i6.2) (photo credit i6.2)
As far as the polemical exchange went, Gandhi may have bested Tagore, but soon he had to confront his own doubts. He was under pressure from impatient followers, Khilafat activists in particular, to launch an intensified campaign of ma.s.s civil disobedience that would fill colonial jails. Gandhi tried to defer the campaign or at least limit its scope. Unsure that he had enough disciplined workers under his command, he worried about seeing his nonviolent campaign spill over into ma.s.s rioting, as it had in 1919, once demonstrators finally confronted the police. The month after the exchange with Tagore, rioting in Bombay caused him to suspend civil disobedience. Less than three months later, it happened again.
The authorities had banned public meetings. This spelled opportunity for satyagraha; across India, Congress leaders and followers by the thousands defied the ban, got themselves arrested, and went to jail. As the prisons filled, Gandhi fired off congratulatory telegrams to the most prominent inmates, hailing them as one might hail a cla.s.s of new graduates. Their jailing, his telegrams a.s.serted, was wonderful news. Then a lethal clash at an obscure place in North India called Chauri Chaura moved Gandhi to order another suspension of his campaign-the third in less than three years-against the advice of close a.s.sociates.
What happened in Chauri Chaura on February 5, 1922, fulfilled his worst fears. An angry crowd of roughly two thousand surrounded a small rural police station after having been fired on by a police detachment, which had then withdrawn and taken cover inside the building. The frustrated crowd, now a mob, soon set it ablaze. Driven out, policemen were hacked to death or thrown back into the flames; in all, twenty-two of them had been slaughtered with their a.s.sailants, so it was later said, shouting noncooperation catch-cries, including ”Mahatma Gandhi ki jai”-”Glory to Mahatma Gandhi.”
By Gandhi's standards, which derived from the Hindu value of ahimsa ahimsa, or nonviolence, Chauri Chaura stood out as an abysmal, even frightening defeat. In his eyes, it showed that the country at large and the national movement in particular had never truly grasped the values of satyagraha. So, with more than fifteen thousand followers already in jail, he abruptly called a halt to civil disobedience, suspending it for more than ten months, until the end of 1922. It was only because he insisted on suspending the campaign that Congress leaders who'd not yet gone to jail went along with his decision. ”I got the votes because I was Gandhi and not because people were convinced,” he wrote with the self-lacerating candor he could be relied on to display in his lowest moments. As ”penance” for the fact that ”murders were committed in my name,” he then fasted for five days.
Among those who expressed disappointment over the retreat were some, both Muslim and Hindu, who well understood that Gandhi was responding to what he deemed a moral imperative. If only they had a less exemplary, less principled leader, they seemed to say. ”Our defeat is in proportion to the greatness of our leader” was the way Lajpat Rai, a Hindu and former Congress president, wryly put it. ”To me,” said Maulana Abdul Bari, the leading Muslim in the North Indian center of Lucknow, ”Gandhi is like a paralytic whose limbs are not in his control but whose mind is still active.” Neither statement was without a tinge of admiration, but each was more disillusioned than admiring. Gandhi had offered them satyagraha as a weapon; now, as the ”expert in the satyagraha business,” he was yanking it back.
With his usual industriousness, Gandhi churned out a series of letters and articles explaining his stand to key followers and the nation at large, promising that the suspension would not be permanent, that civil disobedience would eventually be resumed and swaraj achieved, if not in a year. The clearest statement of his position turned into a prophecy. No one, Gandhi included, could have realized that what he had to say in 1922 would accurately depict the circ.u.mstances of India's independence, still a quarter of a century in the future, or his own ambivalent reaction to its achievement. ”I personally can never be a party to a movement half-violent and half non-violent,” he said, ”even though it may result in the attainment of so-called swaraj, for it will not be real swaraj as I have conceived it.”
Even ”so-called swaraj” was a long way off, a much bigger goal than any he had toiled for in South Africa. Swaraj as he had conceived it-a purer, cleansing independence, amounting to a social transformation-would never be within reach. It would survive as a permanent, ever-receding goal.
7.
UNAPPROACHABILITY.
SUPPOSE THAT M MOHAN G GANDHI, the young barrister who journeyed to South Africa in the last decade of the nineteenth century, had been persuaded by evangelical friends in Pretoria to convert to Christianity, that he'd then stayed on to build a profitable law practice in Johannesburg, living out his life there under apartheid, in a segregated towns.h.i.+p's largest house. Would relations between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent be any different today? If different, would they be worse or better? The only point of proposing such a mind game is to underscore the role of chance and contingency, as well as character, in human affairs. Of course, the questions are unanswerable, but if we stay with the premise of a modern India minus Gandhi, it's not impossible to imagine a Mohammed Ali Jinnah who remained an Indian nationalist and brushed off the idea of Pakistan as the misbegotten dream of crackpots. Or a Jawaharlal Nehru who accepted Indian independence on behalf of an elitist movement, wearing a suit and tie rather than the khadi homespun that became mandatory for aspiring leaders after the advent of the Mahatma. This isn't to say that such scenarios would have been preferable to the one we designate as history, only to make the obvious point that other outcomes were possible. We can be reasonably certain at least that absent Gandhi, the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity wouldn't have flourished earlier, the way it did for a few brief years when he came close to achieving a merger between the national and the Khilafat movements, or the mirage of one. Most days of most years, Hindus and Muslims in most parts of India still live peacefully at close quarters, showing exemplary tolerance of each other's customs. Once, thanks to heavy lifting by Gandhi, their leaders were almost able to do so too.
Seen in perfect hindsight, powerful undercurrents all that time were carrying the two largest communities away from the reconciliation the leaders said they wanted. Such trends can be instructively traced in the life of a Hindu religious leader who was probably second only to Gandhi in stature in that era. This was Swami Shraddhanand, a revivalist in his own right, formerly known as Mahatma Muns.h.i.+ Ram, who loomed especially large in the Punjab and adjacent areas of North India. His views were close to Gandhi's; if anything, he was more uncompromising in his abhorrence of untouchability. Long before Gandhi, he had the nerve to voice his approval of intercaste dining and even marriage, and, beyond that, of all but abandoning the caste system itself in the name of a more generous and capacious Hinduism. Though the two mahatmas were in basic sympathy, they could seldom agree on tactics or their reading of Muslim intentions.
Shraddhanand, an impulsive man, a courageous one too, was prepared to follow Gandhi but not to subordinate his own judgment. His life offers two powerful punctuation points in an account of Gandhi's early efforts to bring Hindus and Muslims together. In the aftermath of Gandhi's first venture in nonviolent political action on a national scale, the strike of 1919, Shraddhanand was invited to preach from the pulpit in India's largest and most important mosque, Delhi's Jama Masjid. Days before, he'd become a hero to Delhi's Muslims as well as Hindus for baring his chest to troops attempting to turn back a march he was leading, daring them to fire. (Accounts differ on whether they were Gurkhas or Manipuris from the northeast.) No Hindu leader had ever before been invited to hold forth at the Jama Masjid, nor would this ec.u.menical invitation ever be repeated. In that instant, the swami, a hulking figure with a shaved head, wearing umber-colored robes, personified the unity for which Gandhi had tirelessly appealed. When he intoned a Sanskrit prayer for peace, Om Shanti, ”the whole audience followed me with one reverberating voice,” the swami wrote. Only six years later, he was shot and killed by a Muslim inflamed by Shraddhanand's later writings against what he deemed a Muslim conspiracy, thus becoming in death the personification of looming conflict.
”My heart refuses to grieve,” Gandhi said upon learning of the murder. ”It rather prays that all of us may be granted such a death.” A ”blessed death,” a martyr's death, he called it, as if forecasting his own end.
The killer arrived at the door of the swami's Delhi bungalow on a December afternoon and managed to talk his way into the room where a convalescing Shraddhanand was bedridden, saying he had religious issues to discuss. The swami courteously invited him to return later when he hoped to be feeling stronger. The visitor then asked for a drink of water. Left alone with the great man, he pulled out a pistol and pumped two slugs into Shraddhanand's chest. The a.s.sa.s.sin turned out to be a Muslim calligrapher named Abdul Ras.h.i.+d. At his trial he explained that he blamed his victim for spreading blasphemies against the Prophet; then he was sentenced to hang, whereupon thousands of Muslims turned out for his funeral, hailing him, not his victim, as the true martyr. The Times of India The Times of India spread a report that students and teachers at the celebrated Muslim seminary at Deoband recited the Koran five times over in order to ensure the a.s.sa.s.sin a place in ”the seventh heaven.” spread a report that students and teachers at the celebrated Muslim seminary at Deoband recited the Koran five times over in order to ensure the a.s.sa.s.sin a place in ”the seventh heaven.”