Gandhi & Churchill (11 page)

In short, caste gave every Hindu a social identity that was confirmed and sanctified by religious ritual, while at the same time it gave every religious rite in Hinduism a solid and concrete place in the social bedrock. It was so concrete, in fact, that the basic framework would remain unchallenged for more than two thousand years. Far from being rigid or outmoded, the caste system would adapt to new conditions, occupations, and even religious trends. As any visitor to India knows, it is still going strong today. There are more than five thousand castes in India, and new ones spring up every day.
¹⁹

But the coming of the caste system also generated a creative tension. This was a tension between what one had to do as part of the Vedic hierarchy—one’s duty or
dharma
—and the impulse to break free from that rigid system, to escape to a higher level of individual spiritual wholeness and freedom.

That impulse was embodied first in the ancient set of commentaries on the
Vedas
called the
Upanishads,
which offered a path to becoming one with a higher reality, the World Spirit or Brahman.
²⁰
It would continue with the Jains and their spiritual leader Mahavira, who respected the sanctity of all life, compared to the blood-soaked Vedic sacrifices, and were nonviolent. (Gandhi would be a great admirer of the Jains.) In the sixth century
C.E
. that same impulse would reach its crescendo in the teachings of India’s greatest and most influential spiritual figure, Gautama Buddha.

For fifty years this former north Indian prince taught others his unique path to liberation or
nirvana,
creating small retreats or
ashramas
of disciples and converts—the first monastic communities in the world. After the Buddha’s death, his disciples continued to spread his message of the Middle Way, of how to be “free from anger, fear from malice, pure in mind, and master of oneself,” with a missionary zeal. Four hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Buddhism would become the first truly universal religion, spreading from India to Ceylon, Tibet, China, Japan, and Indonesia. By 700
C.E.
Buddhism was the largest single spiritual faith in the world.

But the Buddha’s presence on his own country and culture was marginal. Over the centuries his followers would steadily shrink away, except in certain parts of the south. Even in his home region he became forgotten. It was British scholars, not Indians, who would eventually discover that the Buddha was Indian and would even pinpoint his birthplace—all less than thirty years before Gandhi was born.
²¹

For in the end, the traditional Hindu foundation was too strong and too flexible to be overturned or replaced. It ended up absorbing its Buddhist challenger, just as it had absorbed pre-Vedic gods like Shiva and the festivals, myths, and legends of the myriad peoples and cultures who lived on the subcontinent. Hinduism had become India itself. Nothing else held it together. Over the centuries it would face down all challengers, either by words or by swords.

Among the first challengers were the Greeks. One hundred and fifty years after the Buddha’s death, Alexander the Great arrived on the banks of the Indus with his Macedonian army, after a twenty-two-thousand-mile thirteen-year march and fresh from his conquest of Persia. For two years he fought against a civilization that already included one-quarter of the world’s population.
²²
He defeated a great king on the banks of the Jhelum River and had coins struck in Babylon bearing an image of an elephant to commemorate his victory. He nearly lost his life in combat against a wild warrior tribe in the hill country of western Punjab; he had the West’s first encounter with Indian yogis;
^*14
and he eventually declared victory and headed back to Persia. Yet he barely cracked the outer shell of a civilization that was now centered on cities rising along the mighty river Ganges, from Delhi and Benares to Patna and Calcutta. Like the Ganges itself, it was a vast and slow-moving world that stood aloof from its neighbors to the west and to the east, thanks to its unique religion and its distinct social and cultural patterns. The basic lesson of Indian history was already established. Material power like kingdoms, and kings, including Alexander the Great, comes and goes. But spiritual power, embodied in religion and caste and spiritual unity with Brahman, the changeless essence of the universe, lasts forever.

Prime exhibits of the transitory nature of political power were India’s own dynasties. In 305
B.C.E.
a prince from the central Ganges Valley named Chandragupta Maurya rose up against the princes Alexander had left behind and seized lands beyond the Indus, turning Kandahar and Kabul into the western outposts of a mighty Indian Empire. His son Bindusara and grandson Ashoka would push that empire to the south and southeast, with the conquest of the kingdom of Kalinga. The Mauryas were the equivalent of China’s Chin dynasty, political unifiers of a great civilization for the first time in its history.

Wall paintings at Ajanta reveal the magnificence of Mauryan rule. They show the king surrounded by noblemen, Brahmin priests, acrobats, snake charmers, standard-bearers, musicians blowing conch shells, and horses and elephants arrayed in pearls, plumes, and gold pendants. Moving just one pillar for Ashoka’s palace at Palipurta required a cart of forty-two wheels, drawn by 8,400 men. The imperial storehouses held gold and silver by the ton, diamonds and rubies by the pound.
²³

Amassing all this wealth and power required incessant war of the most brutal and merciless kind. According to the Greek ambassador at their court, the Mauryans maintained the largest standing army on earth, with more than 700,000 men, 9,000 elephants, and 10,000 chariots. The court’s treatise on strategy and diplomacy, the
Arthashastra,
India’s equivalent of Machiavelli’s
The Prince,
prescribes an eighteen-day cycle of torture for captured rebels or traitors, suggesting a different method of torture for each day. Ashoka’s own inscriptions tell us that in order to complete the conquest of Kalinga, he killed 100,000 people and ethnically cleansed another 150,000, while tens of thousands more died of starvation and exposure.
²⁴

But Ashoka grew sick of the endless cycle of slaughter and conquest and turned to the teachings of the Buddha for his own peace of mind, and to reform his kingdom. All humanity were his children, he declared, and he would henceforth rule through the Law of Righteousness and
ahimsa,
or nonviolence: “For the Beloved of the Gods [i.e., Ashoka] desires safety, self-control, justice and happiness for all beings.” He established a new class of officials to look after the well-being of his subjects, and he banned animal sacrifice. He had fruit trees planted along the empire’s roads in order to provide travelers with food and shade, collected more than seven thousand relics of the Buddha, and invited Buddhist monks into his court while sending others to foreign capitals.
²⁵

His high-mindedness and renunciation of violence would earn him the admiration of future generations of Indians, including Gandhi. His four-lion crowned pillars became the official seal of India. But perhaps not surprisingly, his legacy did not last. The kingdom fell apart shortly after his death in 232
B.C.E.
, and within fifty years the Mauryan Empire had vanished. The old ruthless laws of the jungle replaced the Law of Righteousness, and it would take five hundred years of chaos before another dynasty of worthy successors arose, the Guptas.

The Gupta Empire marks the “classical” period of Indian history, with a flourishing of architecture and art, including Buddhist and Hindu carvings of exquisite splendor and complexity; of language, with the poetry of Kalidasa, the “Shakespeare of India” and author of the Sanskrit drama
Shakuntala;
and of religious thought, along with wars of breathtaking savagery. Under the Guptas a Hindu society of clearly defined castes first emerged, built around an agricultural economy of landlords and peasants; it would survive right down to Gandhi’s time and beyond. By the time the dynasty collapsed under assault by the Huns in the sixth century
C.E.
, Indian civilization was ready to survive, and even defy, the next waves of catastrophic change.

The first was the coming of Islam and the rise of the Mughals. Despite their name, the Mughals were not Mongols at all but Turks. However, the dynasty’s founder, Babur, claimed descent both from Tamurlaine and from the mighty Genghis Khan, and so the Mongol or Mughal appellation stuck. In 1526 Babur’s army crushed his Muslim rival’s forces at Panipat, only fifty miles from Delhi, scattering his enemy’s elephants with artillery. A year later he defeated the proud Hindu Rajput princes. The empire of Babur and his successors, Akbar, Shah Jahan (builder of the Taj Mahal), and Aurangzeb, would possess more territory, wealth, and splendor than any kingdom India had ever seen—except with Muslims instead of Hindus in charge.

The two religions could not have been more different. Islam preached the existence of one God, Allah, instead of the pantheon of gods and goddesses of the Hindus. It preached the brotherhood of all believers, instead of the hierarchic inequalities and inequities of caste. And it condemned all religious imagery, like Hindu temple carvings and the statues surrounding Buddhist shrines, as blasphemous idolatry. Islamic zealots destroyed thousands of Hindu sites or converted them into mosques. Buddhist sites were virtually obliterated.
²⁶
The complexity of Hindu caste law and dietary ritual also made little sense to Muslims, who butchered and ate the Brahmin cows that Hindus treated as sacrosanct.

But under the Mughals, both Hindus and Muslims in India found a
modus vivendi,
if not exactly common ground. Babur and Akbar patronized Hindu artists and builders. High-caste Hindus served as administrators and tax collectors for their empire, and Hindu generals and soldiers became the core of their army. In turn, Muslims became a permanent part of the social landscape of India, making up almost one-quarter of the population in the Punjab, Sind, and Baluchistan to the west and in Bengal to the east—although only 14 percent in Gandhi’s home province of Gujarat and less than a tenth in the center and south of India were Muslims.
²⁷

Some Hindu princelings, especially among the Marathas and the Rajputs, never submitted to Muslim rule. Fierce insurgencies raged back and forth across the Hindu heartland of central India for more than a century. Babur’s great-grandson Aurangzeb was engaged in crushing one in 1690, when the East India Company made its first appearance in Calcutta.

To the Mughals, the English, like other Europeans in India, seemed only a minor distraction. They were too few in number and too paltry in wealth and power to worry about, especially since Babur’s successors had their hands full keeping their empire together and dealing with outside intruders from Afghanistan and Persia. When Bahadur Shah I died in 1712, no Indian could have imagined that these uncouth and (from a religious point of view) unclean Europeans or
feringhi
would soon hold the balance of power in the subcontinent.

They gained it precisely because they offered the two things everyone needed in the dog-eat-dog world of late Mughal politics: guns and soldiers. Mughal official and Hindu insurgent alike saw the French, the British, and their sepoy regiments as allies of convenience for their own power grabs. It was the Maratha chieftain Morari Rao who chose to back Clive at Arcot against a hated Muslim rival, and it was the emperor’s renegade viceroy in Bengal, Siraj-ad-Daula, who mobilized his army in support of the French until Clive’s victory at Plassey stripped him of power.

Some fought hard against the seemingly inexorable British conquest, just as they had against the Mughals. Haidar Ali was a Muslim adventurer, unable to read or write, who carved out a territory for himself around Mysore in southern India. He and his son Tipu Sahib fought bravely against the British for nearly three decades until Tipu finally succumbed to Lord Wellesley’s sepoys and British infantry at the siege of Seringapatam in 1799.

Similarly, the proud Marathas were a warrior caste who had converted to Hinduism after settling in India from central Asia many centuries before. They seized the opportunity of collapsing Mughal rule to make their own bid for control of the entire empire, British or no British. Maratha power was finally checkmated at the Battle of Panipat in 1761, this time not by a European power but by a combined Afghan-Mughal army.

Panipat was the Gettysburg of Indian history. Never again would Maratha fortunes rise so high or their armies march so far north. Never again would any native Indian ruler have a chance of dominating the subcontinent. After Panipat the only power left that could hold India together was the East India Company, and the British.

In general, most Indians, whether Hindu or Muslim, preferred British rule to chaos. They also preferred trade with the English to being plundered by Persians or Afghans or their own homegrown bandits. It was true the British were foreigners, but the Mughals had been foreigners, too—although the new language of governance was English instead of Persian, and the new rulers’ religion was Christianity instead of Islam. Privately, high-caste Hindus were horrified by the English, who wore leather gloves and hats made from dead animals next to their skins, who ate food that any Brahmin would call disgusting offal, who allowed their women to talk and argue loudly at the dinner table, and who made low-caste and untouchable Indians their intimate servants—in some cases, even their mistresses.
²⁸

But for those at the top of Indian society, British rule brought an administration that was fair, uncorrupt, and comfortably distant. Indian elites in the three presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay were content to submit to the East India Company’s rules, serve in its armies, and help it collect money to pay for them as long as they were left alone to get on with their normal affairs. It was for those at the bottom, especially in eastern India, that the British brought disaster.