Part 8 (1/2)

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On tour by rail, circa 1934 (photo credit i9.1) (photo credit i9.1)

An early conclusion of a British official a.s.signed to keep close tabs on Gandhi's doings was that the frail old man in the loincloth, coming off two prolonged fasts in the previous ten months, was displaying ”amazing toughness.” Soon it became routine for batteries of orthodox Hindus to intercept him at his rallies or along his route, zealously chanting anti-Gandhi slogans and waving black flags. In Nagpur, where the tour started, eggs were thrown from the balcony of a hall in which he was speaking; in Benares, where it ended, orthodox Hindus, called sanatanists sanatanists, burned his picture. A bomb went off in Poona, and an attempt was made to derail the train on which he traveled from Poona to Bombay. At a place called Jasidih in Bihar, his car was stoned. Scurrilous anti-Gandhi pamphlets appeared at many of these places, targeting him as an enemy of Hindu dharma, a political has-been who promised much and failed to deliver, even calling attention to the ma.s.sages he received from women in his entourage. Here we come upon the first signs of the viral subculture that would sp.a.w.n his murder fourteen years later.

More generally, the cleavages among Hindus he had antic.i.p.ated and feared were now out in the open, but he never turned back. Missionaries travel to lands they deem to be heathen; presenting himself as a Hindu revivalist, Gandhi took his campaign to his own heartland. He didn't have one set piece, what's now called a stump speech, but the same themes reappeared in a more or less impromptu fas.h.i.+on. They all led to the same conclusion. If India were ever to deserve its freedom, he preached, untouchability had to go. Yet at many of the rallies, untouchables were segregated in separate holding pens, either because they were afraid to be seen by caste Hindus as overstepping or because none of the local organizers was alive to the contradiction of putting untouchability on display at an anti-untouchability rally.

Such a tableau confronted Gandhi near the end of the tour when he reached the city of Bhavnagar in his native Gujarat, not far from a college he'd briefly attended. In antic.i.p.ation of his visit, the civic fathers had thoughtfully set aside money for new, more or less sanitary quarters for the munic.i.p.ality's Bhangis, or sweepers, the untouchables who did its dirtiest work; the plan was to show off Bhavnagar's enlightened spirit by having the dedication of the project coincide with Gandhi's visit. To that end, a large open-sided tent, a patchwork of bright colors called a shamiana shamiana, had been set up as it would be for any big celebration such as a wedding. ”The Bhangis were not allowed to sit in the shamiana put up for the ceremony,” a British official reported to his superiors, ”but sat outside where Gandhi joined them before proceeding to his seat in the sha-miana to lay the foundation stone.” Gandhi's mixing with the Bhangis was the only diversion from the script. By stepping into the shamiana, he made things right again. What could he do? Not for the first time, he was up against an India that could be simultaneously wors.h.i.+pful and obdurate.

At a place called Satyabhamapur in the eastern state of Orissa, he was given another reminder of the rocklike durability of the customs he was trying to crack. The Mahatma invited ten members of a local untouchable group called Bauris, along with one Bhangi, to take their meals in his tent. ”None of Mr. Gandhi's party, however, dined with these guests,” another colonial official reported, laying on the requisite irony, ”and the Bauris refused to dine with the sweeper.”

The Raj was keeping close tabs. Local officials were commanded to file reports at every stage of the tour. These then traveled up the colonial chain of command to provincial home secretaries, the national home secretary, and, ultimately, the secretary of state for India in Whitehall, each of whom then had an opportunity to add a wry, worldly comment to the file, a ”minute,” as these notes were known. It was not an abiding interest in the progress of social reform that engaged the imperial officials at every level. They wanted to make sure Gandhi was abiding by his pledge to eschew political agitation for the duration of the tour, that he was not preparing the ground for his next campaign of civil disobedience, for they had long since been convinced that the frail figure in the loincloth had the power to paralyze their domain and, if allowed to proceed unchecked, shake its foundations; in that sense, he had made them wary believers in his nonviolent methods of resistance and put them on guard. The crowds he drew-100,000 in Calcutta, 50,000 in Madras (now Chennai), 40,000 in Cawnpore (Kanpur), 30,000 in Benares (Varanasi), up to 25,000 in a dozen other places-could more easily be attributed to curiosity and the unending quest for a saint's darshan, the satisfying blankness of an immersion in his glow, than to zeal for his battle against untouchability. But they couldn't be ignored.

Part of making sure that he wasn't preparing the ground for future campaigns of civil disobedience was keeping track of his avid fund-raising, ostensibly for the new Harijan Service Society, or Sevak Sangh. Fearing that the money could be diverted to Congress coffers for political use, the British were intensely interested in knowing how much he was taking in and where it was going. So the local officials were instructed to report the exact amount of his ”purses,” meaning the collections offered up in his honor at practically every stop, even in the poorest Harijan hovels and slums. Often these sums were reported down to the last rupee, occasionally down to the paise paise, or small change. An official in Travancore, for instance, reports that Gandhi auctioned off a ring that had been donated to his cause for the modest sum of three rupees and eight paise. Ladies with jewelry were immediate targets: in Karachi he was reported to have engaged in a tug-of-war with an elderly woman over a ring she was disinclined to relinquish. ”The old lady resolutely refused to part with her ring and resisted Mr. Gandhi's attempt to remove it forcibly,” an official reported. (Writing in the margin of the report, a higher official drily praised her for her display of Gandhian resistance.) Everything was subject to auction for the cause of Harijan uplift, including the gifts, silver boxes, and cups presented to him along the way-even his time. At some villages, he refused to step out of his car until he received a purse of sufficient weight; in one place, an additional fifty rupees proved sufficient. ”Many women,” an official in Madras noted, ”took the precaution of divesting themselves of their jewels before coming to his meetings.”

Gandhi, the unrelenting Bania turned mendicant, is an object of fascination, sometimes pity, for starchy officials who comment on his ”rapacity for money” and ”money-grubbing propensities” and then indulge in haughty speculation on whether his mahatmas.h.i.+p has been tarnished. ”He was more like a chetti chetti [or moneylender] coming around for his interest,” one report stated. ”One could not but feel sorry for Gandhi,” this report said, ”a poor old man come down in the world and being hustled about from one function to another, which he seemed only partially able to understand.” The officials observe him in different places, with different degrees of bias, at different stages of the tour but agree on several things: that the crowds that turned out to greet him were largely indifferent to his message about Harijans (in fact, could seldom hear it); that he started to soft-pedal and even omit his demands for the opening of temples once he hit the more orthodox Hindu precincts of South India; that it was an open question whether his tour was doing more to strengthen orthodoxy than it was to uproot the hardy weed called untouchability. Their skeptical narrative stands in counterpoint to the pious, heroic accounts of the crusade that appear in installments in Gandhi's weekly [or moneylender] coming around for his interest,” one report stated. ”One could not but feel sorry for Gandhi,” this report said, ”a poor old man come down in the world and being hustled about from one function to another, which he seemed only partially able to understand.” The officials observe him in different places, with different degrees of bias, at different stages of the tour but agree on several things: that the crowds that turned out to greet him were largely indifferent to his message about Harijans (in fact, could seldom hear it); that he started to soft-pedal and even omit his demands for the opening of temples once he hit the more orthodox Hindu precincts of South India; that it was an open question whether his tour was doing more to strengthen orthodoxy than it was to uproot the hardy weed called untouchability. Their skeptical narrative stands in counterpoint to the pious, heroic accounts of the crusade that appear in installments in Gandhi's weekly Harijan Harijan, with its agate lists of newly opened temples and wells, newly dedicated separate but equal dormitories and schools for Harijan students, all leaving an impression of a cresting wave of irresistible social reform.

The contrast between the narratives of colonial bystanders and those of enthusiastic domestic adherents is only to be expected. But apart from their renderings of Gandhi's own words, their most precious pa.s.sages convey particular details more telling than any a.s.sessment. ”At several places,” a British official notes in a part of Orissa where Gandhi's party was denied permission to enter temples, ”people were seen carrying away dust that had been touched by his feet.” Or there's the description of a sweeper's wife in Nagpur named Abhayanhar who donates her last two bangles. ”Tears trickled down Abhayanhar's cheeks,” a colonial official wrote. ”Gandhi accepted the sacrificial offering and said he had reduced the Abhayanhars to poverty, that they were now true Harijans, the truest Banghis in Nagpur.” The official offers no comment; he simply describes what he has seen, leaving a sense that he has seen a communion he doesn't understand but can't get out of his mind.

The Mahatma's own presence of mind, his reliable, low-key magnanimity, show up in these often hostile colonial reports in scattered asides on his disciplined, always calm treatment of orthodox demonstrators who turn out to jeer him and block his way. In Ajmer, in what's now the state of Rajasthan, one of Gandhi's most persistent antagonists, a Benares Brahman named Lal Nath, thrusts himself forward with a small contingent carrying black flags. He also displays a bleeding head, earned in a confrontation with some Gandhians who'd not gotten the message about nonviolence. Gandhi gives the crowd a stern lecture and invites Lal Nath to the platform to speak his piece against him; the Brahman is soon drowned out by cries of ”Shame, shame.” In Buxar in Bihar, sanatanists lie down in front of the car carrying Gandhi to a ma.s.s meeting, and here too some of them have been beaten. Gandhi visits the injured sanatanists in the hospital and promises to do penance. Told then that the road to the rally is still blocked and that he might be attacked if he insists on going there, Gandhi serenely walks in on foot accompanied by four constables, parting a crowd of five thousand. In the Maharashtrian town of Saonar, where another posse of sanatanists seeks to halt his car, he offers its leader a ride to the rally he's about to address.

A few of the authors of the official reports allow themselves to wonder whether more may be taking place here than has met the eye of their more jaded colleagues. The chief commissioner of Delhi writes that Gandhi, ”even in his present role, still has very great influence.” He hazards a view that the tides of Indian opinion on untouchability may be slowly s.h.i.+fting. ”Although perhaps 60 per cent of Hindus quietly determine not to treat untouchables as equals, they avoid public expression of their views.” Sounding optimistic, this high civil servant seems to be suggesting that a substantial minority of caste Hindus have already experienced a kind of conversion on the issue. An official in Bombay takes a similar line. ”Though the majority would prefer the movement to fail, most of them,” he predicts, ”are not likely to actively oppose it. The Sanatanists therefore cannot create a force sufficiently strong to combat and overcome Mr. Gandhi's persistence.”

Gandhi himself advanced the idea that after all the orthodox propaganda against him, the pa.s.sive absorption of his arguments by seemingly inattentive ma.s.s audiences added up to an advance. ”I am quite sure that the message has appealed to the reason of the ma.s.ses,” he said. ”I am also fully aware that all of them are not yet prepared to translate their beliefs into practice. But then I consider it a tremendous gain that the ma.s.ses have come to believe in the truth of the message.” Believe in it grudgingly, he meant. It might not affect their conduct much, he was saying, offering a conclusion not very different from that of the shrewdest colonial officials, but they could no longer justify caste oppression.

It was hard to know then, and it's harder to know now, whether anything like the mental sea change Gandhi hoped for had actually occurred, or to measure the lasting effect. Sometimes he voiced his own doubts. Speaking in private to the tough-minded Vallabhbhai Patel, he was blunter than he allowed himself to be in public. ”India is not yet converted to the spinning wheel and certainly not to the removal of untouchability. We can't even say that the whole of the intellectual world is for its removal.” In this context, the ”intellectuals” to whom he refers are those who were then calling themselves Socialists, talking up the possibilities of ”cla.s.s struggle,” and rejecting as ”reactionary” and ”irrelevant” his focus on untouchability, not granting or even recognizing that it defined the lives of the poorest Indians. The difference was not just one of political idiom. Their identification with the poorest was largely theoretical, resting on the premise that they could be lifted up after independence. Gandhi's was becoming more urgent by the day. If anything, he seems more disposed at the end of the tour, having inspected scores, maybe hundreds of untouchable settlements, to speak in pointed ways about the abject circ.u.mstances of his Harijans and the social action that could make a difference. ”The only way we can expiate the sin of centuries,” he said, ”is to befriend the Harijans, by going to their quarters, by hugging their children as you would do your own, by interesting yourselves in their welfare, by finding out whether they have the fresh light and air that you enjoy as of right.” Hugging untouchable children might not amount to a social program or advance the cause of swaraj. But in the emerging divide between Gandhi and his movement, which side was really otherworldly and which one down-to-earth?

Near the end of the tour, in a balanced a.s.sessment and summing-up of all the acc.u.mulated intelligence at his disposal, the chief secretary of the Punjab writes: ”People are more critical of his aims and objects and are no longer willing to follow him blindly. But it would be a mistake to regard him as a spent force. Given the occasion, he would still wield very great power and he is still more able than any other Indian to organize a big movement against Government.”

Whether Gandhi could organize a big, enduring movement against untouchability remained another question in his own mind, it seems, as much as that of the Raj's agents. It so preoccupied him that when, at the start of 1934, northern Bihar was rocked by a huge earthquake that flattened villages and towns, devastating fields and crops and killing more than seven thousand, he instantly declared the catastrophe to be ”divine chastis.e.m.e.nt” for the persistent sin of untouchability. It's not far-fetched to imagine that Gandhi, at that point just beginning the third month of his anti-untouchability tour, was speaking more out of frustration than conviction. He often appealed to faith as a basis for moral action in society. But he didn't normally go in for the kind of magical thinking that looks for signals of divine wrath in floods and droughts and all the other natural calamities that beset the subcontinent. Perhaps his interpretation of the earthquake, several times repeated as he met hard going on the South Indian portion of his tour, could be taken as a folksy rhetorical trope, as a tool designed to chip away at the resistance he faced. ”He has come to realize that the strength of the antagonistic force is more formidable than he at first imagined,” reported a British official, attempting to read his mind, several weeks after the disaster.

Nehru and Tagore had managed to support Gandhi's fast unto death. Then, as we've seen, they opposed his second fast against untouchability. Now each was flabbergasted by the readiness of the Mahatma to use superst.i.tion to battle superst.i.tion. ”Anything more opposed to the scientific outlook it would be difficult to imagine,” a momentarily disillusioned Nehru wrote in his autobiography, which he was composing in prison. ”If the earthquake was a divine punishment for sin, how are we to discover for which sin we are being punished?-for, alas! we have so many.” Tagore said Gandhi's logic ”far better suits the psychology of his opponents than his own,” that the orthodox could just as easily blame the earthquake on his a.s.sault on Hindu dharma.

”Our sins and errors, however enormous,” wrote the poet, ”have not enough force to drag down the structure of creation...We, who are immensely grateful to Mahatmaji for inducing his wonder-working inspiration, freedom from fear and feebleness in the minds of his countrymen, feel profoundly hurt, when any words from his mouth may emphasize the elements of unreason in those very minds...a fundamental source of all the blind powers that drive us against freedom and self-respect.”

In direct response, Gandhi only dug himself in deeper; he wasn't about to deprive himself of a useful argument by conceding that the earthquake and the practice of untouchability in its environs might be unconnected: ”I would be untruthful and cowardly if, for the fear of ridicule...I did not proclaim my belief from the house-top,” he retorted in Harijan Harijan. ”I have the faith that our own sins have more force to ruin that structure [of creation] than any mere physical phenomenon. There is an indissoluble marriage between matter and spirit.”

The sanatanists were the largest of the anti-Gandhi groups that turned out with black flags and calls for boycotts of his rallies, but they weren't the only protesters he attracted. In Nagpur, at the start of the tour, untouchables from Ambedkar's own Mahar community were conspicuous by their absence. Two months later, in Travancore, a group called the Self-Respect League appealed to untouchables to boycott Gandhi. In s.h.i.+yali, near Coimbatore in what's now Tamil Nadu, two hundred Dalits marched under black flags in opposition to a mahatma ostensibly crusading in their behalf. In Poona, near the end of the tour, there were more boycott appeals by untouchable groups identified with Ambedkar, who, nevertheless, had come himself to call on Gandhi a few days earlier in Bombay. ”Dr. Ambedkar complained that the Congress people took interest in the question of the removal of untouchability so long as Mr. Gandhi was present,” according to a colonial official's second- or thirdhand intelligence report, ”but the moment his back was turned it was forgotten.” In his public summing-up, Gandhi p.r.o.nounced untouchability to be on ”its last legs,” but his private a.s.sessment may have been closer to Ambedkar's. Within a month of the tour's end in August 1934, he let it be known that he was considering ”retiring” from the Congress movement on various grounds, including its blatant failure to address ”the growing pauperism of the dumb millions.”

Six weeks later, he made it official. Fourteen years had pa.s.sed since he'd first taken over the movement. ”I have lost the power to persuade you to my view,” he told a Congress meeting. ”I have become helpless. It is no use keeping a man like me at the helm of affairs, who has lost his strength.” That plaintive ”helpless” can be read as a clear, poignant, and, most likely, conscious echo of Gandhi's admissions seven years earlier that he'd lost all hope of being able to sustain the alliance between Muslims and Hindus he'd forged at the time of the Khilafat agitation. It might also be interpreted as another coy bid for a renewed mandate. But this time he seemed to know what the outcome would be.

His tour has just ended. But in saying he felt ”helpless,” he is speaking not simply of Harijan uplift but also of his whole program of social reform-called the ”constructive program”-featuring spinning, prohibition, sanitation, hygiene, education in local languages, an enhanced role for women, along with the struggle against untouchability. The Congress had been paying lip service to it for a decade, but its heart, he now realizes, is elsewhere; it's set on gaining political power, provisionally in the new legislatures, ultimately in an independent India.

He may not have been speaking narrowly or exclusively about untouchability, but it's not much of a stretch to conclude that if Gandhi ended his marathon feeling helpless about the Congress's commitment to his programs of social reform in general, he felt helpless too about its commitment to the specific struggle that had preoccupied him almost entirely for the previous two years, ever since the ”epic fast” that had briefly seized the country. He ended the tour at Wardha in central India, his new base of operations, on August 5, 1934, and, two days later, embarked on yet another fast, one of ”personal purification” and, he said, prayer for the purification of the Congress. ”Purity of this, the greatest national organization,” he said, ”cannot but help the Harijan movement, since the Congress is also pledged to the removal of the curse.” After all the touring and praying, the legislation on opening up Hindu temples to Harijans was allowed to die in the central a.s.sembly on August 23. ”The sanatanists are now jubilant,” Gandhi commented. ”We must not mind their joy.”

A few weeks later, a noticeably disconsolate Gandhi finally acknowledged that his approach to the issue of untouchability ”differed from that of many, if not of most Congressmen” who, he said, ”consider that it was a profound error for me to have disturbed the course of the civil resistance struggle by taking up the question in the manner, and at the time I did.” Here he was talking again about ”the most intellectual Congressmen,” now disposed to call themselves Socialists. He was going in the opposite direction from them, he said. He still believed in what he called ”the spinning sacrifice” as the ”living link” to ”the Harijans and the poor”-those he'd been accustomed to describing as ”the dumb millions”-but, now he conceded, ”a substantial majority of Congressmen have no living faith in it.”

In Gandhi's view, the would-be Socialists-however high-minded, however committed-had little or no connection to the India where most Indians resided. ”None of them knows the real conditions in Indian villages or perhaps even cares to know them,” he observed.

The idea that two Indias could be distilled from the country's myriad versions of itself-the bourgeois one of urban sophisticates and the depressed one of rural misery-would offer a handy framework for speeches and polemics for decades to come. It wasn't the worst distortion. Perhaps there's an omen or at least some perspective in these bits of trivia: the week of Gandhi's ”epic fast,” Joan Bennett was starring in Careless Lady Careless Lady at the Roxy Talkie in Bombay and Eddie Cantor in at the Roxy Talkie in Bombay and Eddie Cantor in Palmy Days Palmy Days at the Pathe, singing, ”There's nothing too good for my baby.” It wouldn't have been only British expatriates who filled the movie palace seats or turned out to ooh and aah over the new Chrysler Plymouths on sale at New Era Motors. (What came to be called Bollywood was still a gleam in the eyes of the earliest Indian filmmakers. They'd yet to invade the countryside or hit on the formula of song, dance, and heartache that would become their touchstone. But running alongside ma.s.s politics, ma.s.s popular culture would soon be in the offing.) at the Pathe, singing, ”There's nothing too good for my baby.” It wouldn't have been only British expatriates who filled the movie palace seats or turned out to ooh and aah over the new Chrysler Plymouths on sale at New Era Motors. (What came to be called Bollywood was still a gleam in the eyes of the earliest Indian filmmakers. They'd yet to invade the countryside or hit on the formula of song, dance, and heartache that would become their touchstone. But running alongside ma.s.s politics, ma.s.s popular culture would soon be in the offing.) Few congressmen had seen as much of the world beyond India's sh.o.r.es that embraced such fanciful artifacts as Gandhi. He remained convinced that it held no answers for India. In the aftermath of his tour, his penchant for circling back on himself, for reenacting formative stages of his past, again took hold. Just as he withdrew to Tolstoy Farm outside Johannesburg a quarter of a century earlier, just as he retreated from politics during periods of convalescence in 1918 and 1924, Gandhi now proposed to open a new chapter in his life at what he would later name the Satyagraha or Sevagram Ashram outside Wardha, in the boondocks, a small market town in an especially poor, drought-p.r.o.ne, malaria-p.r.o.ne, snake-infested district west of Nagpur in the center of India. There he'd concentrate on showing that his constructive program, with its emphasis on village industries and cleanliness, personal and public, could furnish the 700,000 villages on the as-yet-undivided subcontinent with a replicable model. His retirement from Congress politics would be more symbolic than permanent. Supposedly retired-he never formally rejoined the movement-he'd continue to express views, even attend meetings; and when he did, his will almost always proved to be sovereign. He'd also intervene forcefully as a sort of deus ex machina in Congress leaders.h.i.+p fights-for instance, in 1939 when he opposed the election of Subhas Chandra Bose as president and then, after Bose squeaked through, helped undermine him. Pretending to be on the sidelines in Wardha, he was not shy about wielding his authority through his reliable lieutenants in the party's hierarchy. Nevertheless, he never again occupied a formal leaders.h.i.+p position and never again claimed, as he had in London, that he was the true leader of the untouchables. In Bombay, a crowd of eighty thousand gave him a standing ovation on what was supposed to be his valedictory day as a congressman, then heard him warn that he'd be ”watching from a distance [the] enforcement of principles for which Congress stands.”

He meant, of course, his principles. ”What I am aiming for,” said the man who was supposedly stepping back from the struggle, ”is the development of the capacity for civil disobedience.” He'd resigned, it soon became clear, but he'd not really retired.

10.

VILLAGE OF SERVICE.

IF G GANDHI'S SHOW IN 1934 of retiring from the Congress movement he'd led and symbolized for nearly a generation had an inner logic, it lay in his acknowledgment that all the Gandhian programs and resolutions it had ratified over the years had made little difference. What the Congress hadn't accomplished under his leaders.h.i.+p, he now undertook to do on his own. On one level, he was shaming his supposed followers; on another, he was refusing to give up on his deepest commitments. The new course he set for himself obviously bore some relation to his own submerged doubts about the effectiveness of the anti-untouchability crusade he'd just completed. What he saw on the tour convinced him that his fond promise that cottage industry spinning and weaving could be the salvation for underemployed, landless, debt-enslaved villagers-untouchables and touchables alike-had been overblown and undersold. The spinning wheel had yet to change their grim reality. of retiring from the Congress movement he'd led and symbolized for nearly a generation had an inner logic, it lay in his acknowledgment that all the Gandhian programs and resolutions it had ratified over the years had made little difference. What the Congress hadn't accomplished under his leaders.h.i.+p, he now undertook to do on his own. On one level, he was shaming his supposed followers; on another, he was refusing to give up on his deepest commitments. The new course he set for himself obviously bore some relation to his own submerged doubts about the effectiveness of the anti-untouchability crusade he'd just completed. What he saw on the tour convinced him that his fond promise that cottage industry spinning and weaving could be the salvation for underemployed, landless, debt-enslaved villagers-untouchables and touchables alike-had been overblown and undersold. The spinning wheel had yet to change their grim reality.

”The villagers have a lifeless life,” he now said. ”Their life is a process of slow starvation.” More speeches, he seemed to be saying, could not be the answer. The last part of the anti-untouchability tour, with the ambiguous response of the mammoth crowds he drew, had been for him, he said at its end, ”a mechanical performance and a drawn-out agony.” Later he allowed himself to disparage the tour as a ”circus.” He needed now to come to grips with village realities. ”We have to work away silently,” he said on one occasion. On another he vowed, ”We have to become speechless manual laborers living in the villages.”

India, of course, would not allow him to go silent; nor, as the main contributor to a weekly newspaper, could he silence himself. Turning sixty-five, he found himself standing restlessly at a crossroads. Here again, we see him reliving an earlier chapter in his life. His urge to get down to constructive work in villages obviously reprised his withdrawal from ma.s.s politics in South Africa in 1910, when he and Hermann Kallenbach set up their short-lived Tolstoy Farm. Then he made it his mission to master the basics of farming and the education of children. Now, by working again from the bottom up, he was rededicating himself to turning the tide on what he called, at his tour's end, the downward spiral of poverty he'd seen for himself in villages across the country. After acting out the self-scripted drama of his farewell to the Indian National Congress in Bombay in late October 1934, Gandhi went immediately back to Wardha. A further cross-cultural trivia note: the week he landed there turns out to have been the exact week that-half a world away geographically, and a world away culturally-Cole Porter's Anything Goes Anything Goes was having its first performances on the road at Boston's Colonial Theatre; there every evening the romantic lead playing opposite the young Ethel Merman crooned the oxymoronic lyric: was having its first performances on the road at Boston's Colonial Theatre; there every evening the romantic lead playing opposite the young Ethel Merman crooned the oxymoronic lyric: You're the top!You're Mahatma Gandhi.You're the top!You're Napoleon brandy.

Gandhi wouldn't have been amused by this saucy paean to his international celebrity, in the unlikely event he was ever made aware of it. Nothing could have been more alien to his spirit than the Jazz Age cutting loose Porter was ever so lightly satirizing.

For most of the next eight years (a total of 2,588 days ”on station,” as Indians used to say), sorry, dusty, out-of-the-way Wardha, where temperatures before the monsoon rains soared as high as 118 degrees during his time there, would be his base and main arena of operations. Once he resolved to put down roots, Gandhi was already on the rebound, p.r.o.nouncing himself ”full of plans for village reconstruction.” It would be wrong to say he left no mark on the district-dedicated Gandhians can still be found there in small numbers-but the overall result fell far short of the social transformation and healing he initially sought. In recent years, Wardha district has been best known in the proud, supposedly ”s.h.i.+ning” India of the early twenty-first century as the epicenter for an epidemic of suicides among hopelessly indebted cotton farmers, thousands of whom in the surrounding region are said to have taken their lives over the last two decades after watching commodity prices plummet in the new global marketplace. No one since Gandhi has thought of pointing to it as a model for rural reform.

In the Mahatma's time, his very presence made Wardha a destination. The Working Committee of the Congress Party, its top leaders.h.i.+p unit, dutifully trooped to Wardha at least six times to seek his counsel and receive his blessing, though he was now officially a detached alumnus. He'd intended his resignation as a statement that he could neither impose his priorities on the movement nor let go of them. It had been a gesture, an expression of his disappointment. It had also been something of a sham. The party still revolved around him, if not all the time, at least whenever it needed to unravel a tangled issue. ”Wardha became the de facto nationalist capital of India,” an American scholar writes with pardonable hyperbole.