Gandhi & Churchill (52 page)

The Yeravda and Sabarmati years form a confluence. They were a time for listening to what Gandhi called his “inner voice” and for reimmersing himself in the principles that motivated his life and thought.

The first of those principles, which he articulated in his
Gita
lectures, was that satyagraha meant nothing without a religious focus. “I believe politics cannot be divorced from religion,” he told an American interviewer soon after his release.
¹⁹
Gandhi had been so caught up with the day-to day politics of Noncooperation, he realized, that he had lost sight of the movement’s spiritual basis; if he lost sight of what he was trying to accomplish through Swaraj, others would, too. Violence and death at Chaura Chauri had been the result.

He had found a new appreciation for the
Gita
’s message of selfless sacrifice and of redemption of the individual through moral action, regardless of consequences. “If one man gains spiritually,” he wrote in December 1924, “the whole world gains with him; and if one man fails, the world fails to that extent.”
²⁰
That included saving humanity from industrial society. “It is not possible to conceive of gods inhabiting a land which is made hideous by the smoke and din of mill chimneys and factories”—or of men who were spiritually whole.
²¹

This was why the
charkha,
the spinning wheel of ancient India, became so important to him. Even when growing up in India, Gandhi had never actually seen one. However, in 1917 a friend discovered a traditional spinning wheel in the neglected storeroom of a house in Vijapur.
²²
Gandhi painstakingly learned how to wind threads using its constantly turning spindles and wheel (
charkha
means “wheel”). To him the charkha represented India before the British came: an India at spiritual peace with itself, as well as economically and culturally self-sufficient. For the rest of his life, no day was complete without two or even three hours crouched beside his charkha, with the regular “humming of the wheel serving as the background music of his thoughts.”
²³

Gandhi fervently believed that by spinning their own cotton and making their own clothes, Indians would not only free themselves from the “evils” of market capitalism; they would also experience the spiritual regeneration that was essential to Swaraj. “It is my certain conviction,” he once told an audience, “that with every thread I draw, I am spinning the destiny of India.”
²⁴
Behind his back Congress politicians laughed or became impatient when he sang the charkha’s praises. They had walked out on him when he brought it up at the Ahmedabad meeting. Some of them knew, even if Gandhi did not, that far from being a symbol of contented village life, the charkha had always been an unheard of luxury to India’s rural masses.
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But they dutifully learned to use the wheel (Jawaharlal Nehru became so proficient that he could turn out 300,000 yards of thread a year), and the homespun khadi cap and dhoti became the de facto uniform of the Indian National Congress. By January 1925 Gandhi could say, “The key to Swaraj lies in fulfilling three conditions alone—the charkha, Hindu-Moslem unity, and in the removal of untouchability.” These became Gandhi’s program for the future, his blueprint for a spiritual “revolution” in India. But achieving them proved more difficult than ending British rule.

In 1924 the gulf between Hindu and Muslim, which Gandhi had tried to bridge during the Khilafat satyagraha, was wider and deeper than ever. His former allies, the Ali brothers, were mired in pan-Islamic politics and completely estranged from the Congress—and from Gandhi. At Yeravda Gandhi had tried to study Urdu and read histories of Islam, in hopes of understanding the challenges the Muslims faced in a Hindu-dominated society.
²⁶
But neither he nor Congress politicians ever fully came to grips with the unstable combination of pride, hope, vulnerability, and fear that drove India’s Islamic minority and its spokesmen. Gandhi could never accept that the same public religious gestures that made the Hindu masses revere him as a
sadhu
(holy man) made Muslims suspicious and uneasy, made them feel that Gandhi too would sell them out in the end. Even his constant invocation of the god Rama and
Rama Raj
(the future rule of Rama across India) seemed to many a virtual declaration of war on their faith.
²⁷

For all his talk about religious reconciliation, Gandhi could not ignore the fact that like everyone else, he was sitting on a sectarian powder keg. In September 1924 Muslims in Kohat on the Northwest Frontier ran riot, murdering Hindus who fled for their lives until troops arrived. At Sabarmati Gandhi held a five-day fast in protest. But the sporadic outbursts of communal violence never stopped. In the United Provinces alone there were more than 88 serious outbreaks in four years, killing 81 and injuring 2,300 more. By 1927 Gandhi was admitting, “I dare not touch the problem of Hindu-Moslem unity. It has passed out of human hands and has been transferred to God’s hands alone.”
²⁸

Equally disturbing was the status of India’s
dalits
or untouchables, and the larger question of India’s caste system. There was a time, shortly after his return to India, when Gandhi had been willing to view the role of caste “with guarded approval,” as encouraging self-discipline among caste and
jati
members.
²⁹
Untouchability was another matter. Gandhi said it poisoned the Hindu caste system, “as a drop of arsenic would poison an entire tank of milk.” His readings of the Hindu classics, like the
Upanishads,
had convinced him that untouchability was an aberration, an excrescence on orthodox Hindu social values and ideals. Gandhi refused to believe that the faith of his fathers could be callously indifferent to the fate, or even existence, of nearly sixty million fellow human beings—so callous that untouchable men could be lynched for wearing their mustaches with points turned up instead of down.
³⁰

“Untouchability for me,” he told an American interviewer, “is more insufferable than British rule. If Hinduism embraces [it], then Hinduism is dead and gone.”
³¹
Instead, Gandhi started preaching a revised ideal vision of caste, called
varnasharmadharma,
in which the ancient fourfold division of Hindu society would represent a division of labor, not claims of superior or inferior status.
³²

Few, however, were willing to be convinced, including (or especially) the
dalits
themselves. They were learning from their Muslim counterparts how to find spokesmen who would represent their interests directly to the Raj and the Hindu majority, rather than rely on the kindness of strangers like Gandhi. On the other side, old-fashioned Hindu nationalists like Tilak and radicals like Vinayak Savarkar saw upholding the age-old taboos as essential to their faith. Popular protests against Gandhi’s “heresy” on untouchability broke out in 1925 and 1926. Even at Sabarmati, Gandhi had to give up trying to get Hindu disciples to share food with the untouchables in the ashram.
³³

For Gandhi, it was all part of the same issue. How could he bring peace and unity to a subcontinent where every social identity was built on difference and conflict? At Sabarmati he was willing to take a stab at it.

During his three-year withdrawal from politics, the ashram became his laboratory for spiritually transforming India. Here forty or so men, women, and children grew their own food, spun their own thread, made their own clothes, prayed and sang, and recited the
Bhagavad Gita
. At its core were the disciples who had followed him from Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, including his family. Although close political disciples like Patel and Prasad often visited the ashram, they were never part of it. Instead, its inhabitants formed a special cadre of Gandhi intimates, with whom he shared everything
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and who were willing to live by the rules of the Mahatma.

One of them was Mahadev Desai. He had been a lawyer, poet, and collector of local folk songs when Gandhi met him in Ahmedabad in 1917. The slim, sensitive Desai was twenty-five years old; Gandhi forty-eight. “Leave everything else,” Gandhi said to him, “and come to me.” Mahadevbhai became Gandhi’s surrogate son, replacing the errant Harilal, and even closer than Manilal. Although he was married, Desai felt no compunction about moving to the ashram and becoming Gandhi’s personal secretary and amanuensis.

Everyone agreed that Mahadev wrote with a strong, beautiful hand; he even had Gandhi’s style of expressing himself. In conversation he was known to often finish Gandhi’s sentences for him. As personal secretary, Desai brought order and coherence where it had often been lacking. A usual comment after a long meeting with the Mahatma was “We will know what he said when we get Mahadevbhai’s notes.”
³⁴

Desai’s son Narayan has left a vivid memoir of the ashram and the gallery of personalities who inhabited it in the late 1920s. There was Kasturbai, the busy matriarch who spoiled the children and scolded Gandhi for feeding the guests too much. There was Bhansali, a recluse and former teacher of French who had taken a twelve-year vow of silence. When someone stepped on his foot in the dark, and he cried out involuntarily, he had his lips sewn shut with a copper wire in penance. There was Premabehn Kantak, a twenty-something female disciple who tried to maintain some discipline over the horde of children who were constantly under foot. There was even a police spy, Ismailbhai, who tried to bribe the boys and girls with sweets in order to find out what the adults were talking about.
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And there was Gandhi himself, who often joined the children in the fun; he used his watch to keep time for their relay races and went swimming in the Sabarmati River. He also supervised the young people’s plays and musical programs after supper, like a benevolent Victorian patriarch in a London suburb. To Narayan and the other children, he was always “Bapu,” or Father—while Narayan’s own father was merely “Uncle.”

Apart from Bapu himself, the center of life at Sabarmati was its large bronze bell. It tolled out the time for every activity in the community, from rising in the predawn morning to the midday and evening meals, to going to bed at night. One day the children decided to count how many separate rings it made. They counted fifty-six.
³⁶
At mealtimes the great bell would ring once to summon everyone to the dining hall. At the second ring the hall doors shut. At the third ring the diners began their prayers. Entering the hall after the second ring required the forgiveness of the Mahatma himself.
³⁷

Mealtime was the opportunity for Gandhi to experiment in new diets. He knew his attitude toward food veered very far from the conventional, even for a vegetarian. He even published a column in
Young India
titled “Confessions of a Food Faddist.” But like voluntary celibacy and spinning, diet was yet another path to Gandhi’s austere version of Swaraj, meaning “rule over the self.”

Even the most dedicated ashramites had trouble keeping up. At Tolstoy Farm in South Africa meals had normally consisted of a range of vegetable and lentil dishes, along with nuts, hard-baked whole-meal bread and butter, and green salads. Then Gandhi shifted to eating only fruits and nuts; then only
sun-baked
fruits like raisins.
³⁸

Gandhi was still avoiding cooked foods when he returned to India in 1915. “No fire should be necessary in the making of food,” he told a skeptical Srinivasa Sastri, “fire being unnatural.” (One of his favorite books at the time was Adolf Just’s
Return to Nature
.)
³⁹
He also felt that cooking food forced women to spend their lives in the kitchen, just as his mother had done. But raw vegetables put an intolerable strain on his digestive system, especially after his bout with dysentery in prison. In August 1929 another flare-up forced him to give up uncooked food. He was soon experimenting with raw but soaked grains instead—hardly a digestive improvement.
⁴⁰

Like the meals, the ashram rules for adults were austere and monastically strict, “sometimes harsh as well.”
⁴¹
Like monks in a Buddhist monastery, entrants, including women, shaved their heads. They took vows to always tell the truth, to eschew all forms of violence, to own no possessions, and to practice celibacy—although Gandhi found celibacy impossible to enforce with all the married couples living under his roof and had to make it voluntary.
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For the children, however, like Narayan Desai and Gandhi’s grandchildren, Sabarmati was a nonstop summer camp. Since there was almost no schooling or book learning, life was a series of games. On Gokul Ashtami, Krishna’s birthday, the adults and children gathered to chant the
Bhagavad Gita
. The children dressed in the costume Lord Krishna wore when he was a young cowherd and would run out bare-chested in loincloths and red turbans to graze the cattle. On the way home, they would munch on sweets made in the dairy. (Adults, on the other hand, were allowed almost no cows’ milk products.)
^†74
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The children learned songs like “Don’t kill, learn to die—this is what Gandhiji teaches” and “Think of prison as a temple” and “The spinning wheel is an arrow that will pierce the government’s heart.” And all the ashram’s children learned to spin thread “nonstop,” although it too became a kind of game. Some boys and girls would work at their charkhas as much as eight hours a day, chanting and laughing. Others organized a twenty-four-hour “charkha-thon,” switching off in relays like medieval monks chanting a perpetual mass.
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