Great Soul_ Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India Part 7

He may have meant to offer Ambedkar "the gentlest treatment," may not have been thinking of Ambedkar at all, when he led off with a political barb, noting in the politest possible terms that the British had stacked the conference with political lightweights and nonent.i.ties as a way of diminis.h.i.+ng, of getting around, the national movement. Gandhi, the recognized national leader, was just one of fifty-six delegates, placed by the imperial stage managers on an equal footing with British businessmen, maharajahs, and representatives of various minorities and sects. So Gandhi had a point, but the untouchable spokesman could have once again discerned condescension and taken offense. Then, heedless of overstatement, Gandhi allowed himself to claim, "Above all, the Congress represents, in its essence, the dumb, semi-starved millions scattered over the length and breadth of the land in its 700,000 villages." Now we know this wasn't really his reading of Indian reality. In the setting of St. James's Palace, Gandhi was plainly glossing over his own disappointment in the Congress's failure to do more than pay lip service to his "constructive program" for renewal at the village level. Less than two years earlier, he'd told Nehru that the movement couldn't be trusted to conduct a civil disobedience campaign. But here he was allowing himself rhetorical leeway as the Congress's spokesman and plenipotentiary, staking his claim on what was still not much more than an aspiration.

To Ambedkar's sensitive ears, it was propaganda calculated to belittle him and his struggle for the recognition of untouchables as a distinct and persecuted Indian minority, therefore demanding reb.u.t.tal. If the Congress represented the poorest, what role could he have, standing outside the national movement as he did? Three days later Gandhi made a potentially soothing gesture, saying, "Of course, the Congress will share the honor with Dr. Ambedkar of representing the interests of the untouchables." But in the next breath he swept Ambedkar's ideas for untouchable representation off the table. "Special representation" for them, he said, would run counter to their interests.

The clash between Ambedkar and Gandhi became personal in a session of what was named the Minorities Committee, on October 8, 1931, a day after Prime Minister MacDonald called a snap election that would produce a Tory landslide behind the facade of a national unity government, giving the Tories more than three-quarters of the seats in the new House of Commons. It was Ambedkar who lit the fuse, ignoring the Mahatma's offer to "share the honor" of representing the untouchables. He may have been nominated by the British, but, nevertheless, Ambedkar said, "I fully represent the claims of my community." Gandhi had no claim, he now seemed to argue, on the support of untouchables: "The Mahatma has always been saying that the Congress stands for the Depressed Cla.s.ses, and that the Congress represents the Depressed Cla.s.ses more than I or my colleagues can do. To that claim I can only say that it is one of the many false claims which irresponsible people keep on making."

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Ambedkar, lower right; Gandhi, center, at Round Table Conference (photo credit i8.3) (photo credit i8.3)

The untouchable leader didn't stop there. He went on to suggest that the takeover of British India by caste Hindus could be a threat to his people-the bulk of Gandhi's "dumb millions"-fifty or sixty million untouchables by the estimates then in use. "The Depressed Cla.s.ses are not anxious, they are not clamorous," he said, "they have not started any movement for claiming that there shall be an immediate transfer of power from the British to the Indian people."

Gandhi didn't raise his voice-that was never his way-but he was plainly stung. In his long public life of more than half a century, there's probably no other moment when he spoke as sharply-or as personally-as he now did in picking up the gauntlet Ambedkar had thrown down. This time there was no mention of sharing the honor of representing the untouchables. "I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast ma.s.s of the untouchables," he said. "Here I speak not merely on behalf of the Congress, but I speak on my own behalf, and I claim that I would get, if there was a referendum of the untouchables, their vote, and I would top the poll." In that highly charged instant, the Mahatma's ego was as bare as his person.

However it's regarded-as a challenge and response between two political leaders over an issue that was central to each man's sense of mission, or as a description of reality as it then existed in the villages and slums of colonial India, or as a weighty const.i.tutional issue bearing on the best interests of a minority, or as a portent of India's future-the clash was heavily laden with meanings. After eight decades, these require some sorting out.

On the level of mundane Indian reality as it existed in the depths of the Depression era, Gandhi was unquestionably right when he said as he did that morning in the old Tudor palace, "It is not a proper claim which is registered by Dr. Ambedkar when he seeks to speak for the whole of the untouchables of India." Most untouchables in India then would probably not have heard of Ambedkar; he was still little known outside his own region. If most untouchables had heard of any single political leader, it would have been Gandhi. So, yes, he might well have been expected to "top" his imagined poll. This is true even though, in his insistence that the problem of untouchability started with the warped values of caste Hindus and not with the untouchables themselves, he'd done next to nothing to organize and lead untouchables, whose cause, he again insisted, was "as dear to me as life itself."

For all his ambition and maneuvering, Ambedkar would never fare well in electoral politics, and the parties he founded never achieved anything like a national following. Even today in Nagpur, in the heart of Ambedkar country, the last of his parties, the Republican Party, has mutated into no fewer than four distinct versions, each aligned with a particular Dalit leader sitting under a portrait of Ambedkar, claiming to be his true heir. Nevertheless, if a poll were held today in an attempt to measure the relative standing of the Mahatma and the man revered as Babasaheb among the former untouchables, now calling themselves Dalits, there can be little doubt that Ambedkar has finally caught up to Gandhi, that he would "top" it. He stood for the idea that they were the keepers of their own destiny, that they deserved their own movement, their own leaders, like all other Indian communities, castes, and subcastes, an idea that after four or five generations-despite all the fragmentation and corruption of caste-based electoral politics in the "world's greatest democracy"-most Dalits finally appear to embrace.

On the const.i.tutional issue and the best interests of untouchables, Gandhi had more to say that morning in the palace than his challenger. His essential argument was that any special representation for untouchables-in the form of separate electorates or reserved seats that only untouchables could hold-would work to perpetuate untouchability. "Let the whole world know," he said, "that today there is a body of Hindu reformers who are pledged to remove this blot of untouchability. We do not want on our register and on our census untouchables cla.s.sified as a separate cla.s.s...Will untouchables remain untouchables in perpetuity? I would far rather that Hinduism died than that untouchability lived."

This was as forceful and pure a statement of principle on the subject as this remarkable advocate ever managed. But he didn't stop there. The encounter had shaken him. The previous week he'd negotiated futilely on const.i.tutional formulas with Jinnah, the Aga Khan, and other Muslim leaders. Now here he was clas.h.i.+ng with an untouchable, and even if he had the better of the argument for the moment, he was shrewd enough to understand that the forecast he'd made about the imminent collapse of untouchability remained a far-fetched boast. He'd already declared his sense of helplessness on the question of Hindu-Muslim unity. Did he now glimpse a similar impa.s.se in his fight against untouchability? The achievement of communal unity and the end of caste persecution had been two of his four "pillars" of Indian freedom. At this turning point in London, he could hardly have felt confident about either cause.

How he really felt was implicit in what he had to say about his surprisingly staunch opponent that day. "The great wrong under which he has labored and perhaps the bitter experiences that he has undergone have for the moment warped his judgment," Gandhi said of Ambedkar, after praising his dedication and ability. The Mahatma was again in the grip of the same caution that had led him to predict, during the Vaikom campaign, that "chaos and confusion" could be the result if the cause of temple entry were taken up by the national movement. If the untouchables were fortified with separate political rights, he now said, that would "create a division in Hinduism which I cannot possibly look forward to...Those who speak of the political rights of untouchables do not know their India, do not know how Indian society is today constructed." Much lay between the lines here. Though he had not solved the question of untouchability, Gandhi had built a national movement and not just a movement; he'd evoked the sense of nationhood on which it was based. He needed to believe that this could finally be the answer to untouchability. He feared that caste conflict could be its undoing. Implicitly, he was acknowledging that the problem remained to be solved and pledging, once again, to be the one whose pa.s.sion and example would bring the solution.

"I want to say with all the emphasis I can command," he concluded with a vague but ominous warning, "that if I was the only person to resist this thing I would resist it with my life." Here he was paraphrasing a line from his life-transforming speech in Johannesburg's Empire Theater a quarter of a century earlier. At the turning points of Gandhi's political life, it was always "do or die."

It's not clear that the British or Ambedkar or others at the Round Table Conference grasped the meaning of this warning on hearing it. They may have shrugged it off as rhetoric, failing to understand the importance of vows in the Mahatma's life. But heading off "this thing"-the move not just to give untouchables supposed legal guarantees of equal rights but separate political rights that could be bartered for some measure of political power-had now become a Gandhian vow, complicating and making even more urgent his vow to end untouchability.

Both sides went away with hurt feelings. "This has been the most humiliating day of my life," Gandhi remarked that evening. For his part, Ambedkar would later be quoted as having said of Gandhi that "a more ignorant and more tactless representative could not have been sent" to speak for the Congress at the conference. Gandhi claimed to be a unifying force and a man full of humanity, Ambedkar went on, but he had shown how petty he could be. Ambedkar is not the first person to feel personally offended by Gandhi in this way. If we cast our minds back over two decades to South Africa, we can hear echoes in Ambedkar of the bitter tirades Gandhi evoked from Durban's P. S. Aiyar, the maverick Indian editor who complained that Gandhi presented himself as "a soul of perfection," though he'd produced "no tangible good for anyone."

Gandhi had taken no notice of the editor's attempt to fight the head tax imposed on former indentured laborers, just as he'd later take no notice of Ambedkar's adoption of satyagraha as a tactic to open up Hindu temples and village wells to untouchables. An ocean separated Ambedkar and Aiyar. They probably never heard of each other, but they ended up with the same sense of bitterness over a Gandhi they found elusive and immovable, a Gandhi who seemed to feel that fighting for the indentured or untouchables-causes with which he'd long identified himself-was illegitimate if it was done without his sanction, on time-tables other than his own. Ambedkar eventually revealed a sense of injury he'd nursed for years, so like Aiyar's. "Mr. Gandhi made nonsense of satyagraha," he wrote, referring to the Mahatma's refusal to back one of his temple-entry campaigns. "Why did Mr. Gandhi do this? Only because he did not want to annoy and exasperate the Hindus."

As the London conference was concluding, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to a supporter of the untouchable leader complaining that Ambedkar's "behavior to Gandhiji had been exceedingly discourteous." More than sharp words was at stake. In the archive of the Nehru Memorial in New Delhi, I came upon a letter Nehru wrote several days later in his official capacity as general secretary of the All India Congress Committee, tossing cold water on an ardent appeal on the subject of untouchability from a rising young congressman in Bombay named S. K. Patil. What the young congressman wanted was a clear stand in support of the Nasik satyagraha, which Ambedkar had launched before heading to London. It was time, he wrote, for Congress to "take sides" on the matter of temple entry; an "authoritative statement" was needed in support of the Nasik satyagraha. Patil, who'd emerge three decades later as a tough political boss in Bombay and a powerful member of the Nehru cabinet, was especially incensed by a Congress leader's statement that the weapon of satyagraha should be reserved for the cause of independence, not be wasted on lesser, more parochial issues like temple entry. If that was the movement's stand, he wrote, then "many of us have not understood Mahatmaji for whom satyagraha is a panacea for all evils."

The rising young politician was unaware that Mahatmaji's stand wasn't nearly as clear-cut as he wors.h.i.+pfully imagined, that seven years earlier, at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha, Gandhi had actually ruled that the national movement shouldn't get involved in "local" temple-entry campaigns. Nehru didn't go into that history in his reply. He ducked the issue of temple entry for untouchables altogether, saying simply that satyagraha "should not be abused and made a cheap weapon." The issue plainly struck him as a diversion from the main goals of the national struggle. By birth, a Kashmiri pandit, or Brahman, he'd dropped caste from his vocabulary in favor of cla.s.s. Abolis.h.i.+ng untouchability, in his view, was a task for an independent India, something that could be deferred until that long-awaited dawn. Nehru's brush-off of Patil stands as a timely reminder of why Ambedkar was so sore. Congress could not, in fact, be relied on to "share the honor" of representing the untouchables. That was-and would remain-the weak point in Gandhi's otherwise pa.s.sionate stand.

London had been only round one. Gandhi and Ambedkar would soon clash again, over even higher stakes. Thereafter it wouldn't be long before the rotund future Buddhist would give up on temple-entry campaigns, on Hinduism in general, and on Congress in particular. Gandhi, who'd promised to resist "this thing" with his life, may have been the only one who sensed what was coming.

GANDHI'S GOOD-BYE TODAY, said the headline in London's Daily Herald Daily Herald on December 5. In a farewell interview, the Mahatma said that "something indefinable" had changed in the att.i.tude of ordinary Britons toward India. Years later George Orwell, no dewy-eyed admirer, would seem to agree, suggesting that Gandhi's great achievement may have been the creation in Britain of "a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence...Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air." The best evidence for Orwell's argument may be found in the three months Gandhi spent in England at the height of the Depression. on December 5. In a farewell interview, the Mahatma said that "something indefinable" had changed in the att.i.tude of ordinary Britons toward India. Years later George Orwell, no dewy-eyed admirer, would seem to agree, suggesting that Gandhi's great achievement may have been the creation in Britain of "a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence...Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air." The best evidence for Orwell's argument may be found in the three months Gandhi spent in England at the height of the Depression.

After stops in Paris and Switzerland, he arrived in Italy on December 11, hoping to meet the pope and Mussolini. The time in London inflated his sense of his stature on the world scene. Now he heard a calling to do what he could to head off another war in Europe. He was hopeful, he confided to the French writer Romain Rolland, that he could make some impression on his Rome stopover. Rolland had written a hagiographic tract hailing Gandhi as India's "Messiah," going so far as to compare him to Buddha and Christ as a "mortal half-G.o.d." But he was skeptical about the Mahatma's ability to move Il Duce.

Pope Pius XI sent his regrets but arranged for Gandhi to visit the Sistine Chapel. Unfortunately, there's no image, other than what we can summon to our imaginations, of the slight figure in his loincloth and shawl gazing up contemplatively at a similarly attired, incomparably heftier Christ in The Last Judgment The Last Judgment. More than likely, it was the Mahatma's first and only real experience of Western painting on religious themes, if we omit the Jesus print he kept over his desk in his Johannesburg law office. He took it in with some patience, later p.r.o.nouncing himself deeply moved by a pieta: probably the Michelangelo in St. Peter's, possibly the Bellini in the Vatican museum. Then at six o'clock he was ushered into Mussolini's s.p.a.cious office ("as big as a ballroom, completely empty except for one big writing table," wrote Gandhi's English follower Madeleine Slade, the admiral's daughter whom Gandhi had renamed Mirabehn). The dictator (in what Mirabehn described as "quite good English") led the conversation, asking his visitor whether he'd "got anything" at the Round Table Conference.

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At Bombay rally on return from Europe, December 1931 (photo credit i8.4) (photo credit i8.4)

"No indeed," Gandhi replied, "but I had not hoped I would get anything out of it."

What would he do next? Mussolini wanted to know. "It seems I shall have to start a campaign of civil disobedience," his guest said.

It remained a back-and-forth in this vein between two seasoned politicians until Mussolini solicited Gandhi's thoughts on Europe. "Now you ask the question that I have been waiting for you to ask," said the Mahatma, launching into what was effectively a summary of arguments about Western decadence he'd set down twenty-two years earlier in Hind Swaraj Hind Swaraj as he traveled back to South Africa from a previous unsuccessful mission to Whitehall. "Europe cannot go on the way it has been going on," he said. "The only alternative is for it to change the whole basis of its economic life, its whole value system." as he traveled back to South Africa from a previous unsuccessful mission to Whitehall. "Europe cannot go on the way it has been going on," he said. "The only alternative is for it to change the whole basis of its economic life, its whole value system."

Gandhi, who hadn't bothered to study up on fascism, may have thought he was speaking against industrialization and colonialism, and therefore, by his lights, for peace. But his actual words could have been spliced seamlessly into one of Il Duce's strident orations. The meeting thus ended on a note of harmony, but it was hardly a meeting of minds, in part because Gandhi had misread his host's.

He sailed from Brindisi for home two days later. From s.h.i.+pboard he wrote to Romain Rolland praising Mussolini for his "service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about coordination between capital and labor...[and] his pa.s.sionate love for "his people." Appalled, Rolland wrote an emotional reb.u.t.tal, upbraiding his Messiah for pa.s.sing such casual, ill-informed judgments. Before the letter could be mailed, he learned that Gandhi had been taken out of circulation.

On January 4, 1932, seven days after disembarking in Bombay, the Mahatma awakened at three in the morning to find the commissioner of police, an Englishman in full uniform, standing at the foot of his bed. "Bapu just waking [looked] old, fragile and rather pathetic with the mists of sleep still on his face," a sympathetic British onlooker later wrote.

"Mr. Gandhi," the commissioner said, "it is my duty to arrest you."

"A beautiful smile of welcome broke out on Bapu's face," the onlooker went on, "and now he looked young, strong and confident."

9.

FAST UNTO DEATH.

THE CASTE SYSTEM SUPPORTED by Gandhiji is the reason for the plight of Dalits today. Gandhi was not for the Dalits but against them. He insulted Dalits by calling them Harijans." Among India's ex-untouchables, this wasn't a heretical or even an unconventional judgment when voiced in the early 1990s by an aspiring politician named Mayawati who later rose to be chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state on the Gangetic plain with a population larger than Russia's by a margin of fifty million; among upwardly mobile Dalits, it was the received wisdom. Mayawati then developed national aspirations that made it necessary for her to soften somewhat her estimate of the Father of the Nation. But the idea that Gandhi was an "enemy" of the most oppressed and deprived of India's poor-the very people to whom he'd professed to have dedicated his life, in whose image he'd deliberately remade his own-lingers in the small galaxy of Dalit Web sites in cybers.p.a.ce. It's, after all, traceable directly to Babasaheb Ambedkar, who, in one of his less measured p.r.o.nouncements, branded Gandhi "the number one enemy" of the untouchables. In the heat of controversy, it's usually forgotten that the mercurial Ambedkar also called Gandhi "India's greatest man." by Gandhiji is the reason for the plight of Dalits today. Gandhi was not for the Dalits but against them. He insulted Dalits by calling them Harijans." Among India's ex-untouchables, this wasn't a heretical or even an unconventional judgment when voiced in the early 1990s by an aspiring politician named Mayawati who later rose to be chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state on the Gangetic plain with a population larger than Russia's by a margin of fifty million; among upwardly mobile Dalits, it was the received wisdom. Mayawati then developed national aspirations that made it necessary for her to soften somewhat her estimate of the Father of the Nation. But the idea that Gandhi was an "enemy" of the most oppressed and deprived of India's poor-the very people to whom he'd professed to have dedicated his life, in whose image he'd deliberately remade his own-lingers in the small galaxy of Dalit Web sites in cybers.p.a.ce. It's, after all, traceable directly to Babasaheb Ambedkar, who, in one of his less measured p.r.o.nouncements, branded Gandhi "the number one enemy" of the untouchables. In the heat of controversy, it's usually forgotten that the mercurial Ambedkar also called Gandhi "India's greatest man."

In ongoing debates about Gandhi's att.i.tude to untouchables and caste, it's never difficult to quote the Mahatma against himself. Over half a century he wrote and spoke on the subject with deep conviction, in most instances anyway, but his tactics needed readjusting in different places, at different times. Decades after encouraging intercaste and intercommunal dining at the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, or among field workers in his early Indian campaigns such as in the Champaran district of Bihar, he told caste-obsessed audiences in South India, where he was seeking to open minds on the untouchability question, that intercaste dining was a matter of private choice, a personal issue. Before such audiences, he was even more chary about discussing intercaste marriage. Without putting it quite so cra.s.sly, he all but a.s.sured high-caste Hindus that they could give up the wicked practice of untouchability without ever having to worry about their daughters marrying beneath themselves in the caste system, let alone marrying untouchables. Yet the same Gandhi, in defiance of orthodox Hindus, finally decreed that only intercaste marriages could be performed at his ashram. Eventually he concluded that intercaste marriage wasn't merely permissible but possibly the solution since it would tend to produce "only one caste, known by the beautiful name Bhangi." Considering that a Bhangi, or sweeper, is sometimes despised even by other untouchables, it was a radical thought. (One that remains radical, a lifetime later, in an India in which three fourths of those approached in opinion surveys still voice disapproval of intercaste unions, and where that disapproval not infrequently gets expressed in so-called honor killings of daughters and sisters who stray.) When Ambedkar unsettled many of his followers by taking a Brahman wife after independence and Gandhi's death, his fellow cabinet member Vallabhbhai Patel wrote him a congratulatory letter noting kindly, or maybe pointedly, that the leader whose sincerity he'd so fiercely questioned would have been pleased. "I agree that Bapu, if he had been alive, would have blessed the marriage," a more mellow Ambedkar wrote back.

To say that Gandhi wasn't absolutely consistent isn't to convict him of hypocrisy; it's to acknowledge that he was a political leader preoccupied with the task of building a nation, or sometimes just holding it together. This is never clearer than in a reply he sent to his soul mate Charlie Andrews, the Anglican priest he first encountered at the end of his stay in South Africa. Andrews, who regularly functioned as Gandhi's personal emissary in England and farther-flung parts of the empire, had urged him to concentrate all his efforts on his fight against untouchability, even if that meant stepping back from the independence movement. "My life is one indivisible whole," Gandhi wrote back. And so were his causes and concerns, listed in the letter to Andrews as "satyagraha, civil resistance, untouchability, Hindu-Muslim unity"-plus, he might have said, a.s.sorted add-ons such as diet, prohibition, spinning, hygiene, sanitation, education through vernacular languages, and women's rights, including the right of widows to remarry and the abolition of child marriage-all "indivisible parts of a whole which is truth." And if they were all thought of as one, Gandhi went on in direct reply to the plea from Andrews: I can't devote myself entirely to untouchability and say, "Neglect Hindu-Muslim unity or swaraj." All these things run into one another and are interdependent. You will find at one time in my life an emphasis on one thing, at another time on [an]other. But that is just like a pianist, now emphasizing one note and now [an]other.

In this case, the pianist also sees himself as composer and conductor. "Full and final removal of untouchability," he now says, "is utterly impossible without swaraj." This from the man who as early as 1921 had described "the removal of untouchability as an indispensable condition of the attainment of swaraj." It's hard not to view this as a reversal or contradiction. But for the pianist himself, it was just a variation on a theme, a matter of emphasizing now one note and now another. His friend Andrews should have recognized it as such. The man he addressed familiarly as Mohan had long ago warned him, as we've seen, that English domination would probably have to end before India could "become free of the curse of untouchability." That was also back in 1921, so this particular contradiction could hardly be described as newly minted; if anything, it was closer to being a constant feature of his effort to keep India on the path he'd tried to chart. In Gandhi's view, the fact that his best efforts had put an end to neither English domination nor untouchability by 1933 seemed only to strengthen his conviction that these struggles were indivisible parts of a whole. So if he now decided to concentrate on untouchability, he wasn't backing off from the swaraj struggle as Andrews urged and Nehru feared. By his own lights, he was plunging in again.

Still, this time around his agenda had been shaped by others: first Ambedkar, the seemingly irreconcilable untouchable leader, with his demand for separate electorates for the fifty million or so members of the officially designated "depressed cla.s.ses" he claimed to represent; and then Ramsay MacDonald, the onetime sympathizer with the Indian national struggle now fronting for what was basically a Tory government set on preserving imperial rule. The Round Table Conference had ended with a promise by the British prime minister to devise the compromise formula for elections on the subcontinent-the Communal Award, it was called-that the various Indian communal groups and parties had failed to hammer out among themselves. When finally handed down from Whitehall in August 1932, the award put the royal seal of approval on Ambedkar's demand. In the future, untouchables, like Muslims, would get to elect their own representatives to all Indian legislative bodies; eventually, if the award stood, Gandhi's claim that he and the Congress movement were their real representatives would be put to the severest possible test. Increasingly, the Congress might then be seen not as the national movement but as a loose coalition of Hindus desperate to preserve its majority. This was the outcome-the kind of "special representation" for untouchables-that Gandhi, now sixty-three, had vowed at the conference to "resist with my life" for the high-principled reason that it would tend to inst.i.tutionalize, and thus perpetuate, untouchability, a status he'd sometimes compared to slavery as he had the indenture system in South Africa.

MacDonald's Communal Award specified that the separate electorate for untouchables would be phased out after twenty years. This might have been intended as a small concession to Gandhi; the arrangement would not be perpetual. In any case, Gandhi was once again sidelined. By the time the award came down, he'd been securely under wraps in Yeravda prison near Poona for seven and a half months, immobilized there, or so the British thought, even though Gandhi had written from prison as early as March to the secretary of state for India, Sir Samuel h.o.a.re, to give fair warning that the vow he'd voiced in London was "not said in the heat of the moment nor by way of rhetoric." If a decision were now taken to create separate electorates for the so-called depressed cla.s.ses, the letter said, "I must fast unto death." Gandhi a.s.sumed but wasn't sure that his warning had been conveyed to MacDonald; after five months, it still hadn't leaked into the public sphere.

India and the world didn't learn of Gandhi's intention to put his life on the line over the narrow issue of untouchable representation until a week before the date he'd set for the start of his fast. The news broke with the release, finally, in London of his letter to h.o.a.re and a subsequent one to MacDonald that set the date for September 20. His jailers soon discovered that, once again, they'd underestimated the Mahatma's ingenuity and determination. His ability to act forcefully and work his will from inside Yeravda's thick walls bears comparison to Harry Houdini's escapes from a padlocked and submerged trunk, only the agility involved here was strictly mental and psychological. Few wondered whether his threat to "fast unto death" unless the award was withdrawn was a trick. The Times of India The Times of India, a Bombay newspaper edited and written by British journalists in that era, headlined Gandhi's "Suicide Threat" and wrote editorially that he'd now shown himself to be "prepared to go to any length that fanaticism may dictate."

The Mahatma had limited privileges as a prisoner: he was allowed to receive visitors and carry on his vast correspondence as long as he steered clear of overt politics; he was capable of dictating fifty letters a day, as if Yeravda were just the latest of his ashrams. Once his fast was accepted by the prison authorities as unavoidable, the restrictions were loosened further so he could take part in political negotiations. So the prisoner, though out of sight, was back onstage as an actor. In no time, he'd provoked a huge crisis for the British, his supporters, and, not least of all, Dr. Ambedkar; a national and international commotion; a storm of anxiety and soul-searching, political maneuvering and forced retreats, all unfolding according to his script. The central issue may have involved nuts-and-bolts politics-the sharing of power with a hopelessly powerless group-but Gandhi found a way to explain his stand in religious terms. Once again he saw himself in a struggle for the souls of Hindus and for an enlightened, egalitarian Hinduism he still hoped to promote as a subst.i.tute for a hierarchical, oppressive religious order, which he saw clearly enough even as he sought to infiltrate it from the inside.

To underline what he deemed to be the religious nature of his stand, Gandhi had deliberately responded to only the part of Ramsay MacDonald's award dealing with untouchables, saying nothing about the distribution of seats, the voting rights of Muslims, and other controversial points on which he opposed the decision. Those points were merely political, he explained to his secretary, Mahadev Desai, who was with him at Yeravda. Mahadev had argued that there was a broader political case that needed to be made before India and the world if the fast were to be understood and accepted, that Gandhi needed to deal with more than untouchables in his letter to the prime minister. Gandhi got the point but was unmoved. "Our own men will be critical. Jawaharlal will not like it at all. He will say that we have had enough of such religion," he acknowledged. "But that does not matter. When I am going to wield a most powerful weapon in my spiritual armory, misinterpretation and the like may never act as a check." A few days later he said, "It is for me a religious question and not a political question."

Retreating into the religious realm is the Mahatma's way of ringing down the curtain on debate, of announcing he has heard the inner voice that vouchsafes the "truth" on which he relies. Months earlier at Yeravda, after dispatching the first warning to the secretary of state for India, he'd cut off a discussion of the possible political fallout from a fast by drawing this same line. "What if I am taken for a madman and die? That would be the end of my mahatmas.h.i.+p if it is false and undeserved," he'd said then. "I should be concerned only with my duty as a man of religion."

The principles on which he bases his distinction between the religious and the political when it comes to untouchable voting rights may be inaccessible to a secular Westerner living outside India in the seventh decade of its independence. But for the sake of discussion, it's worth attempting a deeper look. On the surface, the Mahatma's explanation to Mahadev and to his other fellow jailbird, the tough political operative Vallabhbhai Patel, has more to do with his own sense of what he can accomplish as a leader than with any principles on which all Hindus are likely to agree. He says once again that he feels "helpless" on the Muslim question, that, therefore, it will have to be dealt with politically later. With caste Hindus, he believes, he still has the option of resorting to shock therapy on the untouchability question. "Sudden shock is the treatment required," he tells Mahadev and Patel.

If he fails, he foresees "bloodshed" across India between untouchables and caste Hindus. What's surprising in this lurid vision-and perhaps more than a little revealing-is that it's not the downtrodden untouchable whom he sees in this instance as the pa.s.sive victims of such anarchic conflict. What he imagines, in this one instance anyway, is an uprising from below in which caste Hindus become the victims. "Untouchable hooligans will make common cause with Muslim hooligans and kill caste Hindus," he gloomily predicts. Gandhi was sometimes accused by Jinnah, Ambedkar, and others of siding instinctively with his own. Here, if only in a single uncharacteristic sentence, he convicts himself. The essence of his religious duty, it seems, is saving caste Hindus from themselves and the retribution that awaits them if they don't embrace his prescriptions for reform. Usually, his forebodings are more firmly rooted in the lopsided sociology of Indian villages where the traditional victims would be the probable victims of mob violence. "What does MacDonald know of the 'unapproachables' and the 'invisibles' in the villages of Gujarat?" he asks Mahadev in such a moment. "They would be crushed."

His urgent sense of mission makes it possible for him to brush off his own strictures at the time of the Vaikom Satyagraha, eight years earlier, against fasting as a weapon to soften the hearts of "touchable" caste Hindus on untouchability in general and temple entry in particular. Then he thought temple entry for untouchables should be a local issue; now, suddenly, he's about to make it an urgent national issue; and fasting unto death-a coercive weapon by any measure-is now a religious duty laid on the leader who'd argued, when it served his purposes, that fasting that compels someone to yield "not because he sees the error of his ways but because he cannot bear to see the death of a person who in his opinion perversely chooses to die...[was] the worst form of coercion which militates against the fundamental principles of satyagraha." This time he calls it a "penance," meaning that he was undertaking "self-suffering" for the sins of caste Hindus. But Ambedkar-and, to a lesser extent, the British-could only experience the fast as a form of compulsion.

In simplest terms, a method that could be cla.s.sed as immoral when pursued by others was a religious obligation when undertaken by himself.

William L. s.h.i.+rer, the youthful correspondent for the Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune who'd already made a career of interpreting Gandhi, p.r.o.nounced himself "baffled" by the Mahatma's willingness to die in order to deny the untouchables a.s.sured seats in provincial legislatures. "I would have expected Gandhi to support this necessary safeguard for his beloved untouchables," the journalist later wrote. From Vienna, he sent Gandhi a cable asking for an explanation. "You must not be startled by my presuming to know the interests of the depressed cla.s.ses more than its leaders," Gandhi cabled back in mid-fast. "Though I am not untouchable by birth, for the past fifty years I have been untouchable by choice." (Gandhi's camp, it seems, leaked the exchange to who'd already made a career of interpreting Gandhi, p.r.o.nounced himself "baffled" by the Mahatma's willingness to die in order to deny the untouchables a.s.sured seats in provincial legislatures. "I would have expected Gandhi to support this necessary safeguard for his beloved untouchables," the journalist later wrote. From Vienna, he sent Gandhi a cable asking for an explanation. "You must not be startled by my presuming to know the interests of the depressed cla.s.ses more than its leaders," Gandhi cabled back in mid-fast. "Though I am not untouchable by birth, for the past fifty years I have been untouchable by choice." (Gandhi's camp, it seems, leaked the exchange to The Times The Times of London before s.h.i.+rer had a chance to file on it, a sign of how far ahead of his time he was in his apt.i.tude for manipulating the press.) of London before s.h.i.+rer had a chance to file on it, a sign of how far ahead of his time he was in his apt.i.tude for manipulating the press.) The American journalist's incomprehension was understandable. Even today, it's not easy to sort out Gandhi's motives. Pyarelal, his confidant and eventual biographer, makes it plain that narrow political calculations were not entirely foreign to what he'd soon glorify as "the Epic Fast." In his book of that t.i.tle, he writes, "With the Hindus and Musalmans struggling to maintain balance of power and the Sikh claim thrown in between, to accommodate the Depressed Cla.s.s's demand was a mathematical impossibility." There's only one way to understand Pyarelal. "Mathematical" has to do with the number of seats that could conceivably be subtracted from the Congress total under the formula allowing separate electorates for untouchables. It's a point Gandhi never touched on in his letters and public statements except to dismiss it. "Do not believe for one moment that I am interested in the numerical strength of Hindus," he said. But Vallabhbhai Patel regularly speculated on the ways separate electorates could be manipulated by the British to the disadvantage of the Congress. "There is a deep conspiracy in this," he said of the Communal Award. Patel's calculations added up to the political argument Gandhi forswore, but it wasn't an argument for putting his leader's life on the line. In fact, Patel's only reason for supporting the fast was that he knew how hopeless it would be to quarrel with Gandhi's "still small voice." On his own, he couldn't fas.h.i.+on an argument for the fast unto death.

The Mahatma's own thought process isn't easily traced, but clearly it starts with his vow in London to resist Ambedkar's call for separate electorates with his life, even if he was the last opponent remaining. In London he had opposed not just separate electorates but any "special arrangements" for untouchables, even for a period of limited duration. Yet on the eve of the fast, with feverish negotiations in search of a compromise that would save his life already under way, he let it be known that he could accept reserved seats for untouchables as long as the general electorate was allowed to choose among a slate of untouchable candidates in the districts "reserved" for them. The choice of these candidates would be left up to untouchable voters in these districts in a kind of a primary; thus the "separate electorate" would exist for one round, to be replaced by a "joint electorate" in the general election. This was close to Ambedkar's original position, which had once been unacceptable to the Congress. So now, suddenly, the Mahatma was offering his life to block not "special arrangements" for untouchables but merely one particular kind of special arrangement, separate electorates in a general election. With joint electorates-untouchables voting along with everyone else in the "reserved" districts-the Congress would remain in a strong position to elect its own untouchables, even in cases where it failed to secure the support of most untouchable voters. But if Gandhi could now accept an election law that perpetuated the special status of untouchables, in effect recognizing them as an oppressed minority, despite the arguments he'd raised in London, what could be his justification for his fast? What made it a religious penance? Was securing a narrow political advantage by heading off separate electorates a cause worth dying for? Could that plausibly be singled out as the goal?

It wasn't an argument Gandhi could comfortably make to himself, let alone to the country at large. The fight against separate electorates could be justified only if it were part of a larger reformation of Hindu values and society, the one on which Gandhi had been insisting practically since his return from South Africa. Still, the Mahatma waited until the very eve of his fast before springing this huge, additional condition on his supporters. "He would not be satisfied by a mere political agreement between caste Hindus and the Depressed Cla.s.ses," according to a summary of his remarks made at the time. "He wanted untouchability to go once [and] for all." Very quickly, then, a fast against a special voting advantage for untouchables had to be reinterpreted and promoted as a fast against untouchability itself. This is what made it a religious duty in Gandhi's eyes, a penance.

While negotiations continued and Gandhi's followers geared up a new offensive against caste oppression, the Mahatma himself spent the eve of his fast dictating farewell letters. As always when he prepared himself for a large undertaking, his thoughts drifted back to South Africa and Hermann Kallenbach, whom he'd last seen in London seventeen years earlier. "If G.o.d has more work to take from this body it will survive the fiery ordeal," he wrote to Kallenbach in a note that hovered melodramatically between farewell and au revoir. "Then you must try some early day to come and meet. Otherwise good-bye and much love."

The appeal to the country was hardly raised before a reply was heard, one that seemed at first resounding. At temples across India caste Hindus who had hitherto barred untouchables suddenly proclaimed their eagerness to welcome and embrace their previously outcaste brethren-whom Gandhi was trying to re-brand as Harijans-if that's what it would take to keep their Mahatma alive. Temple openings were presented as a kind of security deposit, as proof of a new spirit of generosity and civic-mindedness on the part of caste Hindus. So here we have a double paradox: Gandhi, who'd opposed the use of fasts on temple-entry issues at Vaikom, was now ready to seize on temple openings as proof of the efficacy of his own fast against the Communal Award, which had been trans.m.u.ted at the hands of this master political alchemist and dramaturge into a fast against untouchability. What's clearer than his deeply intuitive thought process is the instant impact his decision had. Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who'd stood against his call for bonfires of foreign cloth, instantly seized on the urgency of what he termed Gandhi's "ultimatum" to the Hindu majority.

"If we cheaply dismiss [the fast] with some ceremonials to which we are accustomed and allow the n.o.ble life to be wasted with its great meaning missed," the poet declaimed on its first day, "then our people will pa.s.sively roll down the slope of degradation to the blankness of utter futility." Seventy years old and ailing, Tagore then rushed by train across the subcontinent to be at Gandhi's side in the prison near Poona. "Whole country profoundly stirred by Mahatmaji's penance," he cabled to a friend in London. "Sweeping reforms proceeding apace." How sweeping they were on a village-to-village basis remained to be seen. Decades later it was not unheard of for untouchable women in villages to be a.s.saulted for wearing metal bangles and rings or new saris in bright colors, adornments that could be read as offensively a.s.sertive, as denials of their abject status; landlessness, indebtedness, and forced labor remained extreme. There's no sure way of measuring how many caste Hindu minds were profoundly affected and changed to some degree by Gandhi's fast and subsequent crusade against untouchability; many millions might be a reasonable guess, but in India, where a million is a fraction of a percentage point, many millions could fall far short of the wholesale reformation he sought.

Tagore arrived at Gandhi's bedside on the seventh and last day of the fast. Escorted into an isolated courtyard between two prison blocks, he found Gandhi curled up on a simple stringed cot, a charpoy charpoy, "under the shade of a young mango tree." It was there on the fourth evening of the fast that Dr. Ambedkar had been brought to the bedside of the Mahatma, who appeared to be already much weakened, for the final stage of negotiations on what came to be known as the Poona Pact.

"Mahatmaji, you have been very unfair to us," the untouchable leader began.

"It is always my lot to appear to be unfair. I cannot help it," said Gandhi.

Soon they were into the "mathematical" details as they bore on legislative seats. "I want my compensation," Ambedkar was heard to say. Presumably, he meant payback in seats for giving up the separate electorates. Untouchables, now powerless, needed political power, he said. Gandhi was flexible on seats but a stickler on the timing of a referendum to be held in five or ten years. "Five years or my life," the prostrate but still hard-bargaining Mahatma said, seeming to give way to irritation at their next encounter, much like a Bania haggling over the price of a bolt of cloth. The issue was negotiated away. The final accord provided for joint electorates, reserved seats, and a referendum to be scheduled later, which proved to be never; in fact, Ambedkar had won nearly twice as many reserved seats in his negotiation with Gandhi as he'd been promised in Ramsay MacDonald's proposed award. "You have my fullest sympathy. I am with you in most things you say," the Mahatma had a.s.sured the untouchable leader at the outset. Now, it seemed to Ambedkar, he'd delivered.

"I have only one quarrel with you," Ambedkar had replied, according to Mahadev's diary. "That is you work for the so-called national welfare and not for our interests alone. If you devoted yourself entirely to the welfare of the Depressed Cla.s.ses, you would become our hero." That response may be the closest Ambedkar ever came to seeing Gandhi whole, as the stalwart of the national ideal. The exchange also antic.i.p.ates the appeal Andrews was about to make in one of his "Dear Mohan" letters that Gandhi focus all his energies on the fight against untouchability. Without giving Ambedkar a direct answer, the fasting Mahatma managed to have the last word. "I am," he said, "an untouchable by adoption, and as such more of an untouchable in mind than you...I cannot stand the idea that your community should either in theory or practice be separated from me. We must be one and indivisible."

Whether the contest between Ambedkar and Gandhi is seen as fundamentally a test of principles or wills, the Mahatma's elevation of the fast into what appeared, for the moment at least, to be his final do-or-die campaign had already produced some astonis.h.i.+ng results. First there were the telegrams pouring in from all over the subcontinent proclaiming the opening of Hindu temples-some celebrated and revered, many obscure, some that would later turn out to have been nonexistent-to Gandhi's Harijans. Then an emergency conference of caste Hindus hastily a.s.sembled in Bombay drafted a manifesto formally calling for equal access for untouchables to all public facilities-not just temples, but also roads, schools, and wells. "No one shall be regarded as an 'untouchable' by reasons of birth," it proclaimed. A parallel gathering of high-caste Bombay women resolved that the barriers faced by untouchables "shall not continue a day longer." Suddenly it became fas.h.i.+onable in various cities, in what proved to be a brief season of grace and loving kindness, for Brahmans to demonstrate their good intentions by dining with untouchables. At Benares Hindu University, a center of orthodoxy, sweepers and cobblers were invited to dinner. Branches of a newly formed Anti-untouchability League-later renamed the Harijan Sevak Sangh, or Harijan Service Society-were springing up all over; funds were collected to launch its programs of uplift. Even Nehru, who acknowledged that he'd initially been put off by Gandhi's "choosing a side issue for his final sacrifice," was bowled over by the result. "What a magician," he wrote, "was this little man sitting in Yeravda Prison, and how well he knew how to pull the strings that move people's hearts!"

These gusts of pious intoxication seemed to douse Ambedkar's habitual skepticism and sweep him along too. "I will never be moved by these methods," he'd said when he first heard of Gandhi's intention to fast. "If Mr. Gandhi wants to fight with his life for the interests of the Hindu community, the Depressed Cla.s.ses will also be forced to fight with their lives to safeguard their interests." But he'd been moved in spite of himself over the ensuing ten days. The night before Gandhi was expected to break his fast, Ambedkar found himself showered with fervent promises and cheers at the Hindu conference in Bombay, a lovefest unlike anything he'd experienced. He'd been in a fix, he acknowledged when finally he was called on to speak, having to choose between "the life of the greatest man in India" and "the interests of the community." But the fasting Gandhi had eased the way, redeeming himself in Ambedkar's eyes and blessing all untouchables. "I must confess that I was surprised, immensely surprised, when I met him, that there was so much in common between him and me." If the Mahatma had been as forthcoming in London, Ambedkar said with some justice, "it would not have been necessary for him to go through this ordeal." His only worry, he now said, was that caste Hindus might not abide by the accord. "Yes, we will! We will!" roared the crowd.

Gandhi wouldn't take nourishment until he held in his hand the British government's formal acceptance of the compromise, which meant the partial annulment of the Communal Award on which he'd set his sights. Finally, late in the afternoon of September 26, the doc.u.ment was delivered to him by the inspector general of prisons in a "red sealed envelope." Thinking ahead, Gandhi asked the British officer to pa.s.s along his request that he be allowed to continue his campaign against untouchability even if he were to be kept in prison. A religious ceremony was then improvised. The prison authorities had thrown open its gates to inmates of the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad and other Gandhi followers. Restrictions on visitors had been all but abandoned, and about two hundred of them were now in attendance as the time came to end his self-imposed trial. First the courtyard was sprinkled with water, then Tagore was called on to sing a Bengali hymn he himself had set to music. He'd forgotten the melody, he later said, but he sang anyway. ("When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy," the poet's prayer began.) Finally, Kamala Nehru, wife of Jawaharlal who was to die in a Swiss sanatorium four years later, readied a tumbler of orange, or what in India is called sweet lime, juice. (Possibly honey was mixed in, lemon juice with honey being one of Gandhi's favorite c.o.c.ktails.) Kasturba raised the gla.s.s to his lips. More hymns were sung, and heaped-up baskets of fruit, sent to Yeravda by well-wishers, pa.s.sed from hand to hand. No prison had ever witnessed such a festival, Tagore reflected.

At the end of another overflow public meeting, this one in Poona the next evening, the poet wrote, "The entire audience raising their hands accepted the vow of purifying our social life of grave wrongs that humiliate our humanity." The idea that untouchability was on its way out, that the Mahatma had transformed India and Hinduism with a one-week fast unto death, lingered for a matter of weeks, maybe months. Gandhi at this point seemed to be alone in warning of the danger of backsliding. The night his fast unto death ended, he thought to pledge that it would be resumed if the struggle against untouchability faltered.

Gandhi's fast might conceivably have sown a harvest of enduring social reform had the British not kept the Mahatma and most of the Congress leaders.h.i.+p locked away in order to prevent any resumption of civil disobedience on a national scale. Three times in the next eight months Ambedkar dropped by Yeravda prison to consult with Gandhi. For a brief spell, the antagonism between the two receded from view; a kind of convergence now seemed to be faintly possible. In his speeches to untouchable audiences, Ambedkar took to urging his followers to give up meat eating, an appeal Gandhi seldom failed to make to such gatherings in the hope that this would render them more acceptable in the eyes of pious Hindus. The untouchable leader now spoke more of national goals and political rights. Taking up one of the Mahatma's themes, he wrote: "The touchables and untouchables cannot be held together by law, certainly not by any electoral law...The only thing that can hold them together is love...I want a revolution in the mentality of the caste Hindus."

But the more important the opening of Hindu temples to untouchables became to Gandhi, the less important it seemed to Ambedkar. They could almost be said to be exchanging positions. For Gandhi now temple opening was "the one thing that alone can give new life and new hope to Harijans, as no mere economic uplift can do." For Ambedkar, the key issue was now social equality, not open temples. "To open or not to open temples is a question for you to consider and not for me to agitate," he said, addressing caste Hindus. "If you think it is bad manners not to respect the sacredness of the human personality, open your temples and be a gentleman. If you would rather be a Hindu than a gentleman, then shut your doors and d.a.m.n yourself. For I do not care to come." When Gandhi vowed to start a new fast at the beginning of 1933 if the most important South Indian temple dedicated to the G.o.d Krishna, the Guruvayur, remained closed to untouchables, Ambedkar urged him not to bother. It's "not necessary for him to stake his life on such a comparatively small issue as temple entry," Ambedkar said.

When from inside Yeravda prison he was about to launch his Harijan Harijan weekly-a successor to weekly-a successor to Indian Opinion Indian Opinion and and Young India Young India-Gandhi reached out to Ambedkar, asking him for a "message" for the inaugural issue. The gesture evoked a sardonic response that fairly dripped with resentment. "It would be a most unwarranted presumption on my part," Ambedkar wrote, "to suppose that I have sufficient worth in the eyes of the Hindus which would make them treat any message from me with respect." So instead of a "message" he sent a "statement." Apparently, he still did not like the implication that he might be engaged in a common cause with Hindu reformers, including Gandhi. He would simply tell Gandhi and Hindus some home truths. Gandhi made sure that Harijan Harijan published the tart covering note as well as the statement, which said: "There will be outcastes so long as there are castes. Nothing can emanc.i.p.ate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system." His intention may have been to goad Gandhi rather than to pick a fight, but already they were drawing apart. Eventually, they would both reject the pact they had jointly signed at Yeravda. Gandhi would call the limited use of separate electorates he'd finally agreed to when his life was at stake "a device of Satan, named imperialism." Ambedkar would write: "The Congress sucked the juice out of the Poona Pact and threw the rind in the face of the Untouchables." published the tart covering note as well as the statement, which said: "There will be outcastes so long as there are castes. Nothing can emanc.i.p.ate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system." His intention may have been to goad Gandhi rather than to pick a fight, but already they were drawing apart. Eventually, they would both reject the pact they had jointly signed at Yeravda. Gandhi would call the limited use of separate electorates he'd finally agreed to when his life was at stake "a device of Satan, named imperialism." Ambedkar would write: "The Congress sucked the juice out of the Poona Pact and threw the rind in the face of the Untouchables."

The issue on which they soon diverged had hovered between them from the time of their first encounter. It was whether downtrodden untouchables could be effectively mobilized in their own behalf in the dusty exigencies of village India or were doomed to wait for caste Hindus to be moved by the religious penance and suffering of "the greatest man in India." In the existing circ.u.mstances, each alternative was largely theoretical. The effective mobilization of untouchables and the religious conversion of caste Hindus would each take generations; how many generations, it's still-eight decades later-too soon to tell. Both have advanced, thanks in some measure to Gandhi and Ambedkar, not just in their lives but in what they've been taken to represent in India's dreamy idealization of their struggles. But the pace can reasonably be described as slightly faster than glacial, which is to say, grindingly slow, nowhere near revolutionary.

It took only five weeks after Gandhi ended the "epic fast" for a bill to be introduced in the Madras Legislative Council making it illegal for a temple to remain closed to Harijans if the majority of caste Hindus who used the temple wanted it open. The aim of the bill was to take the decision out of the hands of Brahman priests, such as the Namboodiris at Vaikom, who typically had the final say. The legislative council had little power and needed the viceroy's formal approval even to debate the bill. In the face of rising opposition from orthodox Hindus and the seeming indifference of Harijans, similar legislation introduced in the toothless central a.s.sembly stalled. For Gandhi, the legislation took on urgency as a referendum on untouchability. When they met in February 1933, Gandhi implored Ambedkar to support the bills, or at least not oppose them.

"Supposing we are lucky in the case of temple-entry, will they let us fetch water from the wells?" Ambedkar asked.

"Sure," Gandhi replied. "This is bound to follow."

Ambedkar hesitated. What he wanted from Gandhi, the Mahatma wasn't ready to provide-an unambiguous denunciation of the caste system to show he was in earnest about his contention that all Hindus were created equal. Ambedkar had agreed to join the board of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, whose const.i.tution said as much, promising Harijans "absolute equality with the rest of Hindus" and requiring its members to declare: "I do not consider any human being as inferior to me in status and I shall strive my utmost to live by that belief." But within a year he resigned, convinced that this Gandhian organization dedicated to the service of his people was dominated by caste Hindus who were basically uninterested in mobilizing Harijans, as Ambedkar had proposed, in "a campaign all over India to secure to the Depressed Cla.s.ses the enjoyment of their civic rights."

Finally Ambedkar concluded that the temple-entry legislation had to be read as an insult, another reason to move away from the Mahatma. "Sin and immorality cannot become tolerable because a majority is addicted to them or because the majority chooses to practice them," he said. "If untouchability is a sinful and immoral custom, in the view of the Depressed Cla.s.ses it must be destroyed without any hesitation even if it was acceptable to the majority."

The same issue-whether Harijan basic rights could be put to a vote by caste Hindus-came up in the conflict over Guruvayur temple. Still locked up at Yeravda but permitted by the authorities to agitate on Harijan issues from behind prison walls, Gandhi kept scheduling and postponing a fast on the opening of the celebrated Krishna temple. A poll was taken in the temple's surroundings, confirming his belief that most caste Hindus were now ready to wors.h.i.+p with Harijans. But the temple remained closed to them until after independence in 1947. As late as 1958, ten years after Gandhi's murder, a deflated and dispirited Harijan Sevak Sangh was counting it as a victory that a couple more temples in Benares were at last being opened to Harijans whose equality it had proclaimed a quarter of a century earlier.

In May 1933, when Gandhi finally started his next fast-his second over untouchability in seven months-he was immediately released from jail. Though it lasted twenty-one days-two weeks longer than the so-called epic fast-this second round caused less of a stir. Tagore wrote to say it was a mistake. Nehru, still in jail in Allahabad, threw up his hands. "What can I say about matters I do not understand?" he wrote in a letter to Gandhi.

Ambedkar by this time was looking the other way. Within two years, his movement ended the temple-entry campaigns it had been carrying on in a desultory fas.h.i.+on over the previous decade. The time had come, he proclaimed, for untouchables-now starting to call themselves Dalits, not Harijans-to give up on Hinduism. "I was born a Hindu and have suffered the consequences of untouchability," he said and then immediately vowed: "I will not die a Hindu."

If any admiration, any ambivalence lingered in Ambedkar's feelings about Gandhi after their final falling-out, he labored to repress it. Much of his energy in his late years went into a renewal-and escalation-of bitter polemics against him. "As a M