Great Soul_ Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India Part 4

The tone of Campbell's letters had been patronizing in a colonial way but not as hostile as might have been expected, considering all that had gone on at Mount Edgecombe. The Indians had refused to cut sugarcane for two weeks before the shootings. Local planters soon were calling for a show of force by mounted police to contain the agitation. Within a couple of days, bands of striking indentured laborers were reported to be roaming the neighborhood, armed with clubs and the long, razor-sharp knives used for cutting cane, stopping at residences of planters and their white managers to demand that Indian house servants come out and join the struggle. Or so the Durban newspapers reported.

A detachment of police, "both European and Native, galloped to Mount Edgecomb" from neighboring Verulam on November 17, The Natal Advertiser The Natal Advertiser said. The "native police...quickly got in among their natural enemies," meaning the indentured Indians, until they had to be restrained. The Africans were armed with a.s.segais, or spears, and the heavy Zulu war club known as a k.n.o.bkerrie, a carved staff ending in a bulbous hardwood head that could be wielded like a medieval mace. said. The "native police...quickly got in among their natural enemies," meaning the indentured Indians, until they had to be restrained. The Africans were armed with a.s.segais, or spears, and the heavy Zulu war club known as a k.n.o.bkerrie, a carved staff ending in a bulbous hardwood head that could be wielded like a medieval mace.

In reports by journalists and officials on clashes on the mines and in the sugar lands in these weeks, a standard story line unfolds. The forces of law and order are portrayed as restrained as long as they're kept under firm white command. The Indians are easily agitated, soon beyond reason, uncontrollable, nearly crazed, even when confronted by a well-armed constabulary with drawn firearms. The Indians fought with sticks and stones, the reports said; a handful are described as brandis.h.i.+ng cane knives. These themes are regularly reflected in headlines in the English-language press. POLICE SHOW EXEMPLARY PATIENCE POLICE SHOW EXEMPLARY PATIENCE, the Transvaal Leader Transvaal Leader a.s.sured its readers, even as a.s.sured its readers, even as COOLIES RUN AMUCK COOLIES RUN AMUCK.

Here's a judicial commission's eventual explanation of why Indian strikers had to be gunned down in the clashes at Mount Edgecombe: "The Indians were very excited and violent, and so determined were they that, though one of their number had been killed and several wounded...they had not been intimidated." A failure to use firearms, the commission concluded on the basis of testimony by militia officers, "might eventually have led to greater bloodshed." Ballistic evidence, it maintained, contradicted testimony by Indians who said the first shots had been fired by Campbell's son. The mounted police had to be called out, it explained, to deal with laborers committing the crime of disobeying a lawful order to return to work.

The police, members of the South African Mounted Rifles, had been "overwhelmed in numbers by the coolies" who charged "with all the suddenness characteristic of the Asiatic variableness of temper," the Transvaal Leader Transvaal Leader told its readers, hewing to the official line. The commission that looked into the Mount Edgecombe clashes also looked into a disturbance on November 21 at the Beneva Sugar Estates near Esperanza, where four strikers were killed after a display of Indian "variableness" forced the police to choose between using their weapons and leaving unarmed whites, including nearby women and children, "at the mercy of an excited crowd of almost two hundred Indians." The indentured cane cutters, in the official account, had resisted a police order to march to a nearby magistrate so they could be charged with desertion in an orderly way. Instead, they'd fallen supine and lain on their backs. "Get off your horses and come cut our throats," one of them unaccountably cries out in the official version, which the commissioners easily swallowed. When the police then approach on horseback, a seemingly possessed Indian leaps to his feet and smacks a trooper's horse with a stick, so hard that the animal falls down. Then, as the troopers withdraw, some with their revolvers unholstered, they're pursued by laborers with sticks. A witness told Reuters the Indians fought like "dervishes." told its readers, hewing to the official line. The commission that looked into the Mount Edgecombe clashes also looked into a disturbance on November 21 at the Beneva Sugar Estates near Esperanza, where four strikers were killed after a display of Indian "variableness" forced the police to choose between using their weapons and leaving unarmed whites, including nearby women and children, "at the mercy of an excited crowd of almost two hundred Indians." The indentured cane cutters, in the official account, had resisted a police order to march to a nearby magistrate so they could be charged with desertion in an orderly way. Instead, they'd fallen supine and lain on their backs. "Get off your horses and come cut our throats," one of them unaccountably cries out in the official version, which the commissioners easily swallowed. When the police then approach on horseback, a seemingly possessed Indian leaps to his feet and smacks a trooper's horse with a stick, so hard that the animal falls down. Then, as the troopers withdraw, some with their revolvers unholstered, they're pursued by laborers with sticks. A witness told Reuters the Indians fought like "dervishes."

The Indians are regularly described as demented or nearly so, but when press accounts and official judgments get down to explaining the origins of the violence, it's always the same story. On the sugar estates, as well as the mines, clashes had less to do with the "variableness" of the Indian temper than with orders to police and military units to use force in rounding up "ringleaders" and charging them with desertion if that was what it took to break the strike and get the indentured Indians back to work. With foremen on the mines and estates deputized as warders and given authority to swear in Africans as "special constables," the line between law enforcement and vigilantism soon blurred. An indentured laborer named Soorzai sought refuge at the Phoenix Settlement, having run off from a nearby plantation where he'd been thrashed. He soon died. In all of Natal only one white, a planter named Armstrong, was later charged with having gone too far. Seemingly at random, he'd picked out two Indians-neither in his employ, both Muslims, one said to be an imam-and had two of his African workers tear off their clothes, then hold them while he beat them repeatedly with sjambok and fists. Later he pursued the two already-battered men, repeating the whole performance not once but twice. The Armstrong case caught Fleet Street's attention. Downing Street then requested a report. Eventually, Armstrong was fined a hundred pounds. He was trying, he testified before sentencing, "to teach the whole tribe a lesson."

The reports on the crackdown that reached London also reached India, where the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, took it upon himself in a speech in Madras to voice India's "deep and burning sympathy" for Gandhi's followers "in their resistance to invidious and unjust laws." The viceroy followed the speech up with a cable urging a judicial commission to look into the shootings. Since the indenture system couldn't have existed without the Raj's agreement, the viceroy's intervention carried weight. The British governor-general in South Africa, more or less the viceroy's opposite number on this other side of the Indian Ocean, reacted furiously. Lord Gladstone-youngest son of the Victorian prime minister-praised the "great forbearance" of Botha and s.m.u.ts and fumed in a cable to London over "official credence being given to outrageous charges." The governor-general wanted nothing less than the viceroy's dismissal. By the time of this clash in the stratosphere of the empire, the strike was all but over. By December 10, according to official statistics relayed to London, 24,004 "coolies" were back at work, 1,069 in jail, only 621 still striking. (Of those counted as strikers, some may have found themselves suddenly jobless and therefore vulnerable to deportation. Employers were now hiring Africans to fill jobs Indians had held. At the Model Dairy, a popular Durban cafe, "white girls" had replaced Indian waiters who struck.) None of this was conveyed to the man who'd started it all. By his own description, instead of the hard labor to which he'd been sentenced, Gandhi was enjoying a respite in the special-status quarters reserved for him in the Bloemfontein jail. Most of his spare time, he wrote, was being devoted to the study of Tamil, the language of most of the indentured strikers, which had been eluding him for more than a decade. The spillover of the strike from the coalfields to the sugar lands combined with the bad press his response had won s.m.u.ts at home and abroad-for its initial restraint among his domestic critics, then, in London and elsewhere in the empire, for the shootings and floggings that the crackdown entailed-led him to recognize that this tussle with Gandhi had spun out of his control, that it had become too costly. He needed a face-saving way to back down and found it in the proposal for the judicial commission, which had two tasks, judging from the outcome. One was to whitewash the shootings, the other to propose a settlement forthcoming enough to close the book on Gandhi's satyagraha campaigns in South Africa.

Within a week of the viceroy's speech, the commission composed of three white men (one a longtime antagonist in Durban of Gandhi and the Indian community) had come into existence. Within a week of its appointment, it recommended that Gandhi, Kallenbach, and Polak be released, though they had nearly eight months to go on the sentences they'd received for lighting the fuse on the strikes.

Gandhi emerged from his five weeks of a meditative life in prison in a fighting mood. He didn't at first grasp that his campaigning days in South Africa were already at an end, that he was now only a month away from being able to claim victory in his struggle. Freed in Pretoria on December 18, he spoke that evening to supporters at the Gaiety Theater on Kort Street in Johannesburg. He said he'd miss the solitude and peace of jail, the opportunity it gave him for reflection. But he was ready to resume "the work on which he was engaged when he was convicted." Two days later, back in Durban, he told The Natal Mercury The Natal Mercury he'd seek "re-arrest and re-imprisonment" unless the judicial commission were enlarged to include "appointments from the European nationality known to possess no anti-Asiatic bias." That might not seem a huge demand; he wasn't asking, after all, for anything so precedent shattering as the appointment of an actual Indian to the panel considering the grievances of Indians; he was saying simply that Indian sentiments ought to be respected by at least some of its members. But in the Union of South Africa in 1913, it was a radical proposal, one the government instantly slapped down. he'd seek "re-arrest and re-imprisonment" unless the judicial commission were enlarged to include "appointments from the European nationality known to possess no anti-Asiatic bias." That might not seem a huge demand; he wasn't asking, after all, for anything so precedent shattering as the appointment of an actual Indian to the panel considering the grievances of Indians; he was saying simply that Indian sentiments ought to be respected by at least some of its members. But in the Union of South Africa in 1913, it was a radical proposal, one the government instantly slapped down.

A day later he appeared at the Durban racecourse with his head shaved, dressed again like an indentured Indian laborer-a long loose kurta worn over baggy pants-before a crowd much larger than any he could have drawn in the city before the heroic march and his jailing. Bouquets were thrust into his hands, full-throated cheers engulfed him. There may still have been pockets of dissenters, especially among the merchants in the old Natal Indian Congress, but the size of the crowd-around six thousand, the largest he'd ever faced-made it clear that the conspicuous erosion of support for Gandhi among Natal's Indians in the months and years before his last campaign had now been more than reversed. If not unchallenged, he was once again clearly preeminent. The march had been the crowning experience of his time in Africa; this rally now crowned the march.

Gandhi used it to prepare his supporters for more struggle, urging them to get "ready again to suffer battle, again to suffer imprisonment, to march out...to strike, even though this may mean death." He explained that he'd put on the garments of a laborer in mourning for those who'd been shot down. The bullets that killed the indentured, he said, had pierced his heart too. So went the Mercury Mercury's lengthy summary of his remarks. "How glorious it would have been if one of those bullets had struck him also, because might he not be a murderer himself...having advised Indians to strike?" Here he was, possibly for the first time, certainly not for the last, antic.i.p.ating the end he'd meet thirty-four years later. "The struggle for human liberty," by Gandhi's now standard definition, was "a religious struggle." At this point, the newspaper's white reporter interpolated the throng's cries of "Hear, hear" in his account. It was a struggle, said Gandhi, "even unto death."

Despite his play on the word "murderer," the leader here is as solemn and free from self-reproach as a head of state laying a wreath at a war cemetery. He's offering a demonstration of what he had been saying about satyagraha ever since 1906, even before he coined the word: that the resistance he offered might provoke violence even, or especially, if it succeeded in maintaining the discipline of nonviolence, that it demanded "self-suffering" and, sometimes, martyrs. Gandhi is saying that he himself might eventually be among them. He's not saying that the indentured laborers who fell in the Natal shootings paid too high a price or expressing much concern about the indentured who survived who were now back at the plantations and mines, if anything, even poorer and less free. Calling it a religious struggle took care of all that. As always, he was not speaking in sectarian or communal terms. He was too much of an ec.u.menicist to imply that it was a Hindu struggle, or a Hindu and Muslim struggle, or a struggle against people who happened to be Christians. He called it a religious struggle because of the sacrifice his followers, his satyagrahis, were prepared to make. It was another way of insisting that their motives were pure and disinterested, that they rose up not for themselves but for a future in which they might or might not have a share. If Gandhi ever thought of the possibility, even probability, that the indentured might have an actual stake in the strike-that some of them may have realized that their futures in South Africa could turn on the rollback of the head tax-he never found public words for the thought. Satyagraha was self-sacrifice, in his view, not self-advancement.

Gandhi is showing himself at this moment of symbolic near triumph and practical near stalemate to be anything but tenderhearted. He's an unconventional politician, but what he's saying is quite conventional for a leader in a conflict that remains unresolved. With the usual melodrama, he's saying that if more deaths were needed, Indians stood ready to pay the price. A couple of weeks later, reflecting on the death in jail of a seventy-year-old indentured laborer named Hurbatsingh, Gandhi elaborated on the theme. "I saw that it was no matter for grief if an old Indian like Hurbatsingh went to jail for India's sake and died while in prison," he said. It was a kind of fulfillment.

In donning the garb of the indentured and vowing to eat only one meal a day for as long as "this religious struggle" continued, he did more than declare himself to be in mourning. He completed the synthesis he'd been seeking throughout his two decades in South Africa between his public role and his questing inner self. The well-tailored attorney who went on retreats with Christian missionaries and immersed himself in Tolstoy had evolved step-by-step over those years into the leader of a movement that could capture ma.s.s support and, however fleetingly, international attention in an age when ma.s.s communications still depended on the printing press and the telegraph. As he'd later say himself, he'd found his vocation. His ongoing self-creation was now more or less complete.

Part of it was a new regard for the poorest Indians, which in South Africa meant the indentured. Soon he'd be scolding them again on their "addictions" to meat eating, tobacco, and drink. But fresh out of jail, he was "astonished," he wrote in a cablegram to Gokhale, "at the unlooked-for ability shown by indentured Indians without effective leaders.h.i.+p to act with determination and discipline." They had shown "unexpected powers of endurance and suffering."

He still had to deal with the reality of white-ruled South Africa. The outcome would not be clear-cut. Gandhi put on the clothes of the indentured, downtrodden, and outcaste, but they formed only a small portion of his audience at the Durban racecourse. He could speak of them and for them, but, mostly, he wasn't speaking to them. His words wouldn't reach thousands who'd followed his lead without ever having heard or glimpsed him and who now were doing hard time back on the mines and the sugar estates. They'd chanted religious and patriotic slogans when they marched to the Transvaal, so he had some basis for calling it a religious struggle. And he'd never promised to deliver a change in their living standard or terms of employment. It was a point he later ill.u.s.trated with an anecdote drawn from the early days of the march, offered as a kind of parable. One of the strikers had asked Gandhi for a hand-rolled cigarette known as a bidi bidi. "I explained that they had come out, not as indentured laborers, but as servants of India. They were taking part in a religious war and at such a time they must abandon addictions such as drinking and smoking...the good men accepted this advice. I was never again asked for money to buy a bidi."

In a.s.signing to the strikers a purely religious motive for their rising-and a.s.suming for himself sole authority to declare when the movement had attained its ends-Gandhi was short-circuiting normal politics, including protest politics. In the perspective of his long life, of the struggles he had yet to undertake, this too could be called typically Gandhian. One day soon he'd leave South Africa, and those who'd followed him there would be left with his word that something important had been achieved, left with the pride of having stood up and having not been cowed when they answered his call. Not a small thing, most of them may well have concluded. Meanwhile, while the leader was being lionized at the racecourse, prosecutions of his followers were continuing across the province. On the day of his release, thirty-two pa.s.sive resisters, including five women, had been sentenced to three months in jail for illegally entering the Transvaal.

With Gandhi's resurgence, the readers.h.i.+p of P. S. Aiyar's African Chronicle African Chronicle took a dive. Among Indians there was no longer much of a market for sharp, independent criticism of the leader. Still Aiyar battled on. Of the Durban speech, he wrote: "Mr. Gandhi's performance of penance is a poor consolation for those who have lost their bread winners and dear ones." Called on to end his carping, the editor vowed he'd "keep silent when he is in the grave and even there too our spirit will not be dead." took a dive. Among Indians there was no longer much of a market for sharp, independent criticism of the leader. Still Aiyar battled on. Of the Durban speech, he wrote: "Mr. Gandhi's performance of penance is a poor consolation for those who have lost their bread winners and dear ones." Called on to end his carping, the editor vowed he'd "keep silent when he is in the grave and even there too our spirit will not be dead."

As the calendar turned to 1914, Gandhi made a show of boycotting the judicial commission but slipped comfortably into renewed negotiations with s.m.u.ts. Before long the outlines of an agreement foreshadowed in their discussions became the commission's formal recommendations. Under this latest compromise the three-pound head tax on former indentured laborers would finally be sc.r.a.pped; the marriage law would be amended to make room for traditional Indian marriage customs except polygamy as practiced by Muslims, which would be neither legalized nor banned; immigration would be eased for a relatively small number of Indians with a record of prior residence in South Africa; and a tiny number of "educated" Indians would be admitted so that the color bar would not be absolute. In broader-but hopelessly vague-terms was the government's formal pledge that the laws would be administered justly. In little more than a month after Gandhi's release from jail, he and s.m.u.ts reached their latest and last accord. By the end of June, the white Parliament had enacted the Indian Relief Act. Gandhi then declared his eight-year, on-and-off satyagraha campaign ended. The new law, he said, was a "magna carta for Indians" (the same phrase he'd used twenty years earlier to characterize Queen Victoria's more sweeping proclamation, which now counted for nothing in the new Union of South Africa). Continuing on his verbal binge, he also termed it "a charter of our freedom" and "a final settlement."

Soon he was having to amend, if not swallow, such high-flown words as dissenters like P. S. Aiyar pointed out how far short of the legal equality for which Gandhi had once struggled his "final settlement" now fell. What had been true before the last campaign remained true afterward: not only would Indians still be without political rights, but they'd still require permits to travel from one South African province to another; still not be allowed to settle in the Orange Free State or expand their numbers in the Transvaal, where they'd still have to register under what Gandhi once decried as the "Black Act"; and they would still be subject to a tangle of local laws and regulations saying where they could own land or set up businesses. Nothing in the Indian Relief Act relieved the situation of indentured laborers still under contract who'd been the main body of strikers and marchers.

Nevertheless, the indenture system itself was clearly on its last legs. Natal had stopped importing contract laborers from India as early as 1911. The only way to keep the system going, then, was to persuade those still working off their indentures to sign new contracts when their five-year commitments were up. Now the head tax no longer figured in such deals, no longer hung over the heads of the indentured. It may be said that Gandhi deserved a measure of credit for India's eventual decision in 1917 to shut the system down altogether by halting the s.h.i.+pment of indentured laborers to island colonies like Fiji and Mauritius, which had continued recruiting them after South Africa stopped, that his campaigns in South Africa had helped force the Raj's hand by arousing indignation among Indians. But the end of the indenture system hadn't ever been one of the declared aims of those campaigns.

In a farewell letter to South African Indians, Gandhi conceded there were unmet goals, which he listed as the right to trade, travel, or own land anywhere in the country. These could be achieved, he said, within fifteen years if Indians "cultivated" white public opinion. On political rights, his farewell letter looked to no distant horizon. This was a subject to be shelved. "We need not fight for votes or for freedom of entry for fresh immigrants from India," it advised. "My firm conviction is that pa.s.sive resistance is infinitely superior to the vote," he told the Transvaal Leader Transvaal Leader. Speaking here was the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj Hind Swaraj who frankly scorned the parliamentary inst.i.tutions for which most Indian nationalists thought they were fighting. Finally, he had to concede that the "final settlement" was not really final. While "it was final in the sense that it closed the great struggle," he rephrased himself, awkwardly blurring the operative adjective, "it was not final in the sense that it gave to Indians all that they were ent.i.tled to." who frankly scorned the parliamentary inst.i.tutions for which most Indian nationalists thought they were fighting. Finally, he had to concede that the "final settlement" was not really final. While "it was final in the sense that it closed the great struggle," he rephrased himself, awkwardly blurring the operative adjective, "it was not final in the sense that it gave to Indians all that they were ent.i.tled to."

s.m.u.ts, who'd allowed himself to hope that he'd shelved the "Indian question" for the foreseeable future, considered Gandhi's reformulation a betrayal of their understanding. Gandhi couldn't express himself with his usual plainness on the question of how final the "final settlement" was because his "truth," in this instance, wasn't simple: the struggle had to end because he was leaving; he'd gotten all he could get. No one said it in so many words, but his departure was part of the deal.

White public opinion continued to harden, and Gandhi's rosy forecasts proved far off the mark. The situation of Indians in South Africa got worse, not better, after he turned his attention to India. They were no better than second-cla.s.s citizens and often less than that. Under apartheid, Indians were more relentlessly ghettoized and segregated than ever before, though never as severely oppressed and discriminated against as Africans. It took sixty years before they could travel freely in the only country nearly all of them had ever known, more than seventy years before the last restriction on Indian landholding had been repealed. Equal political rights came eventually-a full century after Gandhi first sought them. In the years immediately following his departure, the white government dangled promises of free pa.s.sage and bonuses to induce Indians to follow him home. Between 1914 and 1940, nearly forty thousand took the bait. Immigration had been halted, but the number of Indians continued to rise by natural increase. And naturally, then, the vast majority had only faint hand-me-down memories of the mother country. In 1990, as the apartheid system was collapsing, the Indian population of South Africa was estimated to have pa.s.sed one million. In Nelson Mandela's first cabinet, four of the ministers were Indian.

Though the future for the next several generations of South African Indians would prove bleak, the leader himself was almost free. His very tentative plan had been to sail directly to India with an entourage of about twenty and settle in Poona (now spelled Pune) in western India so as to be near the ailing Gopal Krishna Gokhale. They had an understanding that Gandhi would keep a perfect silence on Indian issues for an entire year (as Gandhi put it, "keep his ears open and his mouth shut"). Gandhi now offered to nurse Gokhale and serve him as secretary. But Gokhale headed for Europe, specifically Vichy, in hopes that the waters there might be good for his failing heart. He asked Gandhi to meet him in London.

All he had to do before sailing for Southampton was complete a round of farewells. In Johannesburg, Mrs. Thambi Naidoo, who'd had the courage to go to the mines in Natal to appeal to the indentured mine workers to strike before Gandhi arrived on the scene, was said to have fallen over in a faint when her husband rose at a dinner and asked his old comrade-not-in-arms to adopt the four Naidoo sons and take them with him to India. She'd not been consulted. Gandhi thanked the "old jailbirds" for their "precious gift." As his departure day neared, the indentured laborers with whom he'd marched became a preoccupation. He ended his farewell letter to the Indians of South Africa by penning these words above his signature: "I am, as ever, the community's indentured laborer." In Durban, he addressed indentured laborers as "brothers and sisters," then pledged: "I am under indenture with you for all the rest of my life."

Speaking for the last time to his most loyal supporters, the Tamils of Johannesburg, Gandhi concluded by dwelling on matters of caste. The Tamils had "shown so much pluck, so much faith, so much devotion to duty and such n.o.ble simplicity," he said. They'd "sustained the struggle for the last eight years." But after all that had been acknowledged, there was "one thing more." He knew that they had carried over caste distinctions from India. If they "drew those distinctions and called one another high and low and so on, those things would be their ruin. They should remember that they were not high caste and low caste but all Indians, all Tamils."

It's impossible at this distance to know what had prompted this admonition on that occasion in that setting, this hauling into the open of a question even Gandhi had mostly allowed to recede for much of his time in South Africa. Had some Tamils on the great march, or even at this farewell gathering, shown their fear of ritual pollution? Or was he thinking ahead to what he would face in India? The exact connections are hard to pin down, but in a more general sense they seem obvious. For Gandhi, the phenomenon of indentured labor, a system of semi-slavery, as he branded it, had fused in his South African years with that of caste discrimination. Whatever the underlying demographic facts showing the proportions of high caste, low caste, and untouchable among the indentured, these were no longer two things in his mind but one, a hydra-headed social monster that still needed to be taken on.

Finally, on the dock in Cape Town, as he was about to board the SS Kinfauns Castle Kinfauns Castle on July 18, 1914, he put a hand on Hermann Kallenbach's shoulder and told his well-wishers: "I carry away with me not my blood brother, but my European brother. Is that not sufficient earnest of what South Africa has given me, and is it possible for me to forget South Africa for a single moment?" They traveled third-cla.s.s. Kallenbach brought with him two pairs of binoculars to use on deck. Gandhi, seizing on them as a gross self-indulgence, a backsliding into luxury by his friend, tossed them overboard. "The Atlantic," Rajmohan Gandhi, his grandson, writes, "was enriched." Fatefully, the on July 18, 1914, he put a hand on Hermann Kallenbach's shoulder and told his well-wishers: "I carry away with me not my blood brother, but my European brother. Is that not sufficient earnest of what South Africa has given me, and is it possible for me to forget South Africa for a single moment?" They traveled third-cla.s.s. Kallenbach brought with him two pairs of binoculars to use on deck. Gandhi, seizing on them as a gross self-indulgence, a backsliding into luxury by his friend, tossed them overboard. "The Atlantic," Rajmohan Gandhi, his grandson, writes, "was enriched." Fatefully, the Kinfauns Castle Kinfauns Castle docked the day after the outbreak of a world war. Kallenbach moved with the Gandhis into a boardinghouse for Indian students and, in preparation for a new life with Gandhi in India, tried to concentrate on his Hindi and Gujarati studies. Gandhi sent off letters to Pretoria, New Delhi, and Whitehall, searching for a c.h.i.n.k in a bureaucratic wall that threatened to keep him from realizing his dream of having the Jewish architect at his side in India. No one was willing or able to authorize a German pa.s.sport holder to take up residence there in wartime. The viceroy wouldn't run "the risk." Gandhi delayed his own departure, but still the door stayed slammed. Eventually, Kallenbach was detained in a camp for enemy aliens on the Isle of Man, only to be returned to East Prussia in a prisoner swap in 1917. It was 1937 before the two men met again. "I have no Kallenbach," Gandhi lamented in his fifth year back in India. docked the day after the outbreak of a world war. Kallenbach moved with the Gandhis into a boardinghouse for Indian students and, in preparation for a new life with Gandhi in India, tried to concentrate on his Hindi and Gujarati studies. Gandhi sent off letters to Pretoria, New Delhi, and Whitehall, searching for a c.h.i.n.k in a bureaucratic wall that threatened to keep him from realizing his dream of having the Jewish architect at his side in India. No one was willing or able to authorize a German pa.s.sport holder to take up residence there in wartime. The viceroy wouldn't run "the risk." Gandhi delayed his own departure, but still the door stayed slammed. Eventually, Kallenbach was detained in a camp for enemy aliens on the Isle of Man, only to be returned to East Prussia in a prisoner swap in 1917. It was 1937 before the two men met again. "I have no Kallenbach," Gandhi lamented in his fifth year back in India.

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The Gandhis leaving South Africa (photo credit i5.5) (photo credit i5.5)

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Six months later arriving in Bombay (photo credit i5.6) (photo credit i5.6)

PART II.

INDIA.

6.

WAKING INDIA.

GANDHI HAD TAKEN A VOW to spend his first year back in India readjusting to the swirl of Indian life. He'd promised his political mentor, Gokhale, that he'd make no political p.r.o.nouncements in that time, take no sides, plunge into no movements. He'd travel the land, establish contacts, make himself known, listen, and observe. In loftier terms, he could be seen as trying to embrace as much of the illimitable Indian reality as he could. That proved to be quite a lot, more than any other political figure on the Indian scene had ever attempted. to spend his first year back in India readjusting to the swirl of Indian life. He'd promised his political mentor, Gokhale, that he'd make no political p.r.o.nouncements in that time, take no sides, plunge into no movements. He'd travel the land, establish contacts, make himself known, listen, and observe. In loftier terms, he could be seen as trying to embrace as much of the illimitable Indian reality as he could. That proved to be quite a lot, more than any other political figure on the Indian scene had ever attempted.

Welcomed at first as an outsider, he became an itinerant guest of honor at civic luncheons and tea parties, hailed wherever he landed for his struggles in South Africa. His standard response was to protest, with becoming but not overly insistent modesty, that the "real heroes" on that other subcontinent had been the indentured laborers, the poorest of the poor, who had continued striking even after he'd been jailed. He was more "at home" with them, he claimed in the first of these talks, than he was with the audience he was now facing, Bombay's political elite and smart set. In obvious ways, it was a questionable claim, but it described Gandhi, from his first p.r.o.nouncements in India, as a figure focused on the ma.s.ses. It was also about as provocative as he allowed himself to be over the course of 1915, his first year home. He could have taken Gokhale's death, just five weeks after that speech, as a release from his vow but refrained from advancing anything like a leaders.h.i.+p claim of his own. But then, with his vow expiring in the first days of 1916, he made it plain that he had drawn some conclusions. "India needs to wake up," he told yet another civic reception, this one in the Gujarati town of Surat. "Without an awakening, there can be no progress. To bring it about in the country, one must place some program before it."

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 ma.s.s politics in India. However flawed his a.n.a.logy 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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, ma.s.sive 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 darshan, the merit or uplift that accrues to those who enter the spiritual force field of a ris.h.i.+ ris.h.i.+, 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 G.o.d 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-wors.h.i.+p, but service."

Early on, he'd expressed his own skepticism about these ephemeral transactions between leader and those who want to bask pa.s.sively 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 Young India-reincarnating Indian Opinion 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 s.h.i.+ns 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-cla.s.s 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 las.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.saulting 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 a.s.sign 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s leader, not the spiritual pilgrim, who retreated. His career is punctuated by periods of seeming withdrawal from active leaders.h.i.+p, 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 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 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 ma.s.ses 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 Hind Swaraj, who took it on himself to dole out rations of bread and sugar to indentured miners in Natal about to court ma.s.s 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 a.s.sessment 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 cla.s.s who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s. Instead, he rebelled against the dominance of the colonialist's language. Macaulay, in an ensuing, less-quoted pa.s.sage, had also said it would be the responsibility of this Anglicized new cla.s.s "to refine the vernacular dialects...and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great ma.s.s 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 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 pa.s.sive 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. 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 pa.s.sive 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.

He showed his grief for Gokhale by walking barefoot everywhere he went for weeks after his guru's demise. Pious and heartfelt as it was, the gesture also underscored Gandhi's singularity, as if he were claiming a place for himself as Gokhale's chief mourner. Seen that way, it was more likely to put off than to touch the surviving members of the Servants of India Society who found him, as he later said, "a disturbing factor." Writing to Hermann Kallenbach four months after he returned home and shortly after his application to the Servants of India Society had finally been rebuffed, the newcomer acknowledged that his views, the ones he arrived with, were "too firmly fixed to be altered."

"I am pa.s.sing through a curious phase," he went on. "I see around me on the surface nothing but hypocrisy, humbug and degradation and yet underneath it I trace a divinity I missed [in South Africa] as elsewhere. This is my India. It may be my blind love or ignorance or a picture of my own imagination. Anyway it gives me peace and happiness." The same letter reports the establishment of his first Indian ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, his home region. "I am an outsider and belong to no party," he remarked a year later.

The Kochrab Ashram had only two cottages and a total population of under fifty. But Gandhi had large ambitions for it. "We want to run our inst.i.tution for the whole of India," he wrote. Characteristically, in his self-a.s.signed role of rule giver, he'd also drafted an eight-page const.i.tution, which can be read as a redrafting, with a decidedly Gandhian twist, of the rules his guru had laid down for the Servants of India Society. At Gokhale's death, only two dozen candidates had successfully completed a rigorous five-year training program under the stern tutelage of the "First Member," as the founder referred to himself. They took seven vows, one involving a promise to live on a subsistence wage.

Gandhi, who declared himself his ashram's "Chief Controller" in his draft of its const.i.tution, promulgated vows that were more numerous and far-reaching. He demanded total celibacy of all "inmates," even those who were married; "control of the palate" (on the understanding that "eating is only for sustaining the body"); a "vow of non-possession" (meaning that "if one can do without chairs, one should do so"); and a "vow against untouchability" (involving a commitment to "regard the untouchable communities as touchable"). Members were to speak their own Indian languages and learn new ones. They were also to take up spinning and handloom weaving. To the extent that these rules-written down within five months of his arrival in Bombay-were closely observed, the ashram could be expected to turn out a steady supply of replica Gandhis. About half its original intake included relatives and adherents who'd followed Gandhi from South Africa, including Thambi Naidoo's sons and a Muslim cleric from Johannesburg, Imam Abdul Kader Bawazir.

"The object of the Ashram," Gandhi wrote, "is to learn how to serve the motherland one's whole life." So much self-denial was built into the lessons he proposed to give those he cla.s.sed as "novitiates" that the appeal was sure to be severely limited on both sides of the communal divide. Meat-eating Muslims were bound to see the ashram as a Hindu retreat; that was, after all, the meaning of the word. Hindus had to wrestle with Gandhi's views on untouchability, not to mention s.e.x. (Celibate now for more than a decade, Gandhi was getting ever more crotchety on the subject. "I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of man and woman," he would counsel his second son, Manilal, who found self-denial a trial.) Neither Muslims nor Hindus were inclined to fall in line with Gandhi when it came to the problem of human excrement and his Tolstoyan insistence that its removal be seen as a universal social obligation. Simply put, ma.s.s appeal was never going to be a prospect, or problem, for the ashram.

Even before its modest beginning in May 1915, Gandhi had his first encounters with an emerging Muslim leaders.h.i.+p. His first week back, in fact, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the future founder of Pakistan, presided and gave the speech of welcome at a reception Bombay Gujaratis held for their native son. On the surface, the two men had much in common. Their families came from the same part of Gujarat, the coastal Kathiawad region, now more commonly known as Saurashtra; both were lawyers trained in London. But the parallel ended there. Jinnah's grandfather was a Hindu who converted to Islam. Dapper in a bespoke suit, Jinnah welcomed the new arrival in the well-turned English sentences of a colonial gentleman. Gandhi, dressed like a Gujarati villager in vest, kurta, dhoti, and flattened turban, replied colloquially in his native language, already insinuating, without putting it in so many words, that the Anglicized professional elite could not by itself achieve India's freedom.

At the time of this encounter, Jinnah was a rising figure in the Indian Congress, the national movement Gandhi had yet to join. To put it mildly, he wasn't much given to religious enthusiasms, then or later. In politics, he would have insisted at the time, he was an Indian nationalist; he too had drawn close to Gokhale. Yet two years later he was persuaded to take out members.h.i.+p as well in the Muslim League, the movement he'd eventually lead out of India, impelled by injured pride and a somewhat cynical but undoubtedly effective argument-that Gandhi had turned the Congress into "an instrument for the revival of Hinduism and for the establishment of Hindu Raj." The path to India's part.i.tion would have many twists and turns, none harder to map than this: one of those who brought Jinnah the nationalist into the staunchly sectarian Muslim League was a Pan-Islamist named Muhammad Ali who then became Gandhi's closest Muslim ally in the Congress.

Ali had a relatively humble background in the princely state of Rampur and an Oxford degree. With his elder brother, Shaukat, who'd won renown as a cricketer, he was already recognized among Muslims as a spokesman for beleaguered Islam within and beyond India. Specifically, the Ali brothers stoked and then gave voice to the community's mounting anxieties over the decline of the Ottoman empire in the years leading up to the world war. The slow erosion of authority that ultimately undermined the Mughal emperors in nineteenth-century India now seemed to be recurring in what was still Constantinople. In his religious role as caliph, the sultan was held to be the highest authority in Sunni Islam, suzerain still of the holy places on the Arabian Peninsula and a successor of the Prophet. Though few Indian Muslims actually visited Constantinople, they may have taken that connection more seriously than most Turks. The Ottoman sultanate became for them a symbol of Islam's standing in the modern world and therefore a cause for a minority community anxious about its own status in India.

By the time Gandhi met Muhammad Ali in Delhi in April 1915, a month before his ashram opened, the Alis' pa.s.sionate identification with the Ottoman cause had put them at cross-purposes with British power in India, which had cultivated and generally received the loyalty of Muslims who'd been educated in the English way. The sultan, after all, had just allied himself and his army with the German kaiser and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, against whom British Indian troops would soon be fighting, including many Muslims. Almost overnight, therefore, the Ali brothers had gone, in the eyes of the colonial authorities, from being seen as loyalists to potential agents of sedition. As the home ground s.h.i.+fted in response to far-off events, the Alis also found themselves closer to Indian nationalists who were overwhelmingly Hindu, among whom only one was in a position to intuit their feelings and identify with them. This was the newly arrived Gandhi, onetime mouthpiece for the Muslim merchant cla.s.s of Durban and Johannesburg, a longtime veteran of political rallies in mosques. "I believe that Hindus should yield up to Mohammedans whatever the latter desire and that they should rejoice in so doing," the South African Gandhi had said in 1909. "We can expect unity only if such large-heartedness is displayed." The remark is recalled with some bitterness by Hindu nationalists to this day.

Muhammad Ali, a polished and sometimes florid polemicist in English as well as Urdu, had written admiringly of "that long-suffering man, Mr. Gandhi," referring to his leaders.h.i.+p in South Africa. He now welcomed Gandhi to Delhi, the former Mughal capital, newly designated as capital of British India. It was, Gandhi said, "love at first sight." The two men wouldn't meet again for more than four years, for the Ali brothers were placed under confinement-a loose form of house arrest-soon after this first encounter. Gandhi then made appeals for the release of the brothers one of his earliest political commitments in India. He and Muhammad Ali kept up a correspondence. By the time the brothers were freed from detention, Gandhi and the Alis were ready to take up each other's causes.

That connection to Muslims would count soon enough. It would prove to be a crucial factor in Gandhi's takeover of the Indian National Congress. What matters here is the evidence that even before he had launched his first campaign in India, even before he joined the Congress, Gandhi had strong convictions about the need for Hindus to make common cause with Muslims if Indians were to be one people. No doubt he exaggerated the extent to which this had actually happened among Indians in South Africa, but it was the first political lesson he'd learned there and a touchstone of his nationalist creed.

His urgent feelings about untouchability also derived from lessons learned on that other subcontinent. The way whites there treated Indians, he'd long ago concluded, was no worse than the way India treated its Pariahs, scavengers, and other outcastes. In his own mind these feelings were only deepened by his pa.s.sionate engagement with the indentured strikers in Natal. Strictly speaking, only a minority of them may have counted as untouchable, but they were mostly lower caste, and, in Gandhi's view, they were all sufficiently oppressed in a hierarchical system to make them virtual slaves. Caste lines blurred as they marched with him across the veldt. It was a contest of what he called "high and low," and he'd finally found a way to align himself with the "low."

The fresh memory of South Africa and the 1913 strikes, it can thus be argued, helped feed his feelings about untouchability when he returned to India. When he'd been home less than two months, he went to Hardwar in the Himalayan foothills at the time of the k.u.mbh Mela, a festival held every twelve years that draws ma.s.ses of Hindu pilgrims, upwards of two million of them. The suffocating spectacle appalled him, not least because of his nagging preoccupation with sanitation and its opposite, which was everywhere on display. "I came to observe more of the pilgrims' absent-mindedness, hypocrisy and slovenliness, than of their piety," he later wrote. Soon he drafted the small entourage he'd transplanted from the Phoenix Settlement, who'd been staying nearby, to work as scavengers, scooping up excrement and shoveling dirt over the open-pit latrines used by the pilgrims. On a vastly larger scale, it was a reprise of his disillusioning first encounter with the Indian National Congress in Calcutta fourteen years earlier.

In his first real controversy in India, he defied the traditional injunctions against social pollution even more directly, creating a scandal. The controversy spilled out of his ashram a few months after it was established, provoked by Gandhi's acceptance of a Dhed as a resident there. Dheds traditionally deal with animal carca.s.ses and hides-essentially they're tanners-which is enough to brand them and their offspring forevermore as untouchable whether they've anything to do with hides or not. The idea wasn't his own; it came in the form of a letter from a Gujarati reformer named A. V. Thakkar, usually called Thakkar Bapa, who'd remain Gandhi's right arm on the issue of untouchability over more than three decades. "A humble and honest untouchable family is desirous of joining your ashram," Thakkar wrote. "Will you accept them?"

For Gandhi there was only one possible answer. He called his Dhed "learned." Probably that just meant he was literate. He was named Dudabhai Malji Dafda, Duda for short. "Greater work than pa.s.sive resistance has commenced," Gandhi wrote in one of his weekly letters to Hermann Kallenbach, who was still marooned in London by the war. "I have taken in a