INSIGHT

Such exploitation robs a spiritual act of all its value. The dreaded event may never come to pass. All I know is that there is, as far as I am aware, no possibility of its coming…. I, therefore, implore the public to dismiss from their minds and be unaffected by the remote possibility of fast by me in this campaign against untouchability and to accept my assurance that, if such a fast does come, it will have come in obedience to the call of Truth, which is God. I will not be a traitor to God to please the whole world.

I had gone to sleep the night before without the slightest idea of having to declare a fast next morning. At about twelve o’clock in the night something wakes me up suddenly, and some voice – within or without, I cannot say

– whispers, ‘Thou must go on a fast’. ‘How many days?’ I ask. The voice again says, ‘Twenty-one days’. ‘When does it begin?’ I ask. It says, ‘You begin tomorrow’. I went off to sleep after making the decision.

The following day Gandhi issued a

A tempest has been raging within me for some days, and I have been struggling against it. On the eve of the Harijan Day, the voice became insistent, and said: ‘Why don’t you do it?’ I resisted it. But resistance was in vain, and the resolution was made to go on an unconditional and irrevocable fast for 21 days commencing from Monday noon, the 8 May, ending on Monday noon, the 29 May.

I am a habitual prisoner. The prison walls have never been known to have warped my judgment, nor induced in me the habit of brooding. All my imprisonments have been periods of intense activity leaving me no time for brooding. I have undoubtedly brooded over the wrongs done to the Harijans. But such brooding has always resulted in a definite exaction on my part.… My claim to hear the voice of God is not new. Unfortunately, there is no way of proving my claim except through results. God will not be God, if He allowed Himself to be the object of proof by His creatures…. God’s ways are inscrutable. And who knows, He may not want my death during the fast to be more fruitful of beneficent results than my life?

God bless you… I am fully convinced that He has guided you in your decision. I have been praying that He may grant you strength to go successfully through your great vrata and have faith that He will…. Some great tapasvis are watching you with tender care, and vast millions are praying for you (CWMG, LXI: 57).

The fast is against nobody in particular, and against everybody who wants to participate in the joy of it without, for the time being, having to fast himself or herself. But it is particularly against myself. It is a heart prayer for purification of self and associates, for greater vigilance and watchfulness.

It is worth sacrificing precious life for the sake of India’s unity and her social integrity. Though we cannot anticipate what effect it may have upon our rulers, who may not understand its immense importance for our people, we feel certain that the supreme appeal of such self offering to the conscience of our own countrymen will not be in vain. I fervently hope that we will not callously allow such national tragedy to reach its extreme length. Our sorrowing hearts will follow your sublime penance with reverence and love (Bhattacharya, 133-34).

When they [Sanatanist Hindus] realise that it cannot be broken before its period, even if every temple was opened and untouchability wholly removed from the heart, they will perhaps admit that it cannot be regarded as in any way coercive. The fast is intended to remove bitterness, to purify hearts and to make it clear that the movement is wholly moral, to be prosecuted by wholly moral persons.

As I was struggling against the coming fast, you were before me as it were in flesh and blood. But it was no use. How I wish I could feel that you had understood the absolute necessity of it. The Harijan movement is too big for mere intellectual effort. There is nothing so bad in all the world. My life would be a burden to me, if Hinduism failed me. I love Christianity, Islam and many other faiths through Hinduism. Take it away and nothing remains for me. But then I cannot tolerate it with untouchability – the highand-low belief. Fortunately Hinduism contains a sovereign remedy [fasting] for the evil. I have applied the remedy. I want you to feel, if you can, that it is well if I survive the fast and well also if the body dissolves in spite of the effort to live…. And surely death is not an end to all effort. Rightly faced, it may be but the beginning of a noble effort. But I won’t convince you by argument, if you did not see the truth intuitively.

for the progressively inclined among them

– was otherwise self-evident – that the struggle for freedom could not be an exclusively political project.

The last straw, for many, was the suspension for six weeks, at Gandhi’s behest, of the already languishing Civil Disobedience Movement. However, because they considered Gandhi’s leadership to be still indispensable, most Congress leaders protested directly to him or among themselves. There were, though, two prominent exceptions. Subhas Chandra Bose and Vithalbhai Patel, who were then away in Europe, demanded Gandhi’s removal from the leadership of the Congress. Even as Gandhi – insisting that the age of miracles was not over – was hoping through his fast to touch the hearts at least of his colleagues and collaborators, the two eminent leaders declared to the whole world:

A Wide Chasm

Sufficiently illustrative as the above examples are, nothing reveals more starkly the powerlessness of Gandhi’s purest exercise in non-violence than its failure to appeal to Tagore. The two great men, even earlier, had serious differences. But those differences had arisen from Tagore’s acute understanding of actual or potential excesses in Gandhi’s world view, including his non-violence. This time it was different. So far as general principles were concerned, like recourse to fasting unto death for a worthy public purpose, Tagore had already been unabashedly overwhelmed by Gandhi’s 1932 fast. But the 1933 fast he refused to bless. Half of what he said to justify the refusal – duty to preserve precious life – was a reversal of the very argument he had advanced to bless the 1932 fast. The other half – about the insufficiency of information

– appears unconvincing. Beginning with the warning issued at the time of breaking the first fast to the endless subsequent appeals, Gandhi had said enough to explain his compulsion.

I am not detecting duplicity or bad faith in Tagore. My concern is different. Tagore was not exceptional in his response. He was, though, exceptional in his sensitivity and empathetic reach. If neither the eloquence of Gandhi’s pleas nor, following the failure of those pleas, the eloquence of the 21-day penance could touch one such as Tagore, what chance did, and does, pure non-violence have of succeeding on its own?

“Succeeding on its own” implies a success that comes from convincing the others

– followers as well as the adversaries – of the rightness of the cause at issue. It is not the result of such factors as convergence of interest or psychological coercion. Whatever limited success Gandhi’s 1932 fast achieved was not the success of non-violence. The fast, in terms of non-violence, was a failure. The Yervada Pact, thanks to which the fast ended, was precipitated by a universally shared anxiety to save Gandhi’s life. It was an internally differentiated anxiety in terms of its source, character and intensity. Taking them as emblematic figures, the anxiety of Tagore was not the same as that of Ambedkar. Also, the Pact had little to do with the various groups’ and individuals’ acceptance of Gandhi’s uncompromising and humane rejection of “untouchability”. Were it otherwise, the 1933 fast would not have been necessary. At the very least, there would have been greater understanding than there was of the compulsion of that fast for Gandhi.

The great enthusiasm among the caste Hindus for the 1932 fast was the result of a partial convergence of sentiment with Gandhi. That convergence is expressed in Tagore’s effusive telegram where he describes the fast as one undertaken “for the sake of India’s unity and her social inte grity”. There the convergence ended. It did not extend to what Gandhi understood unity and social integrity to be. In that regard, judging by Gandhi’s subsequent disillusionment, helplessness, and relative loneliness, there remained a wide chasm.

The convergence was about something – the form of India’s unity and social integrity – that, for caste Hindus, was precious enough to deserve the sacrifice of a life as precious as Gandhi’s. That with regard to which there was no convergence – expiation as a necessary beginning for social unity – did not deserve, in their view, even a fast for a limited duration. Over that all kinds of reservations and objections began to crop up. These ranged from theological arguments against suicide to political warnings against dissipating national energies, and psychologistic diagnosis that Gandhi might have lost the capacity for balanced thinking as a result of his prolonged incarceration.

As always, there was at work a fluid ensemble of different factors, such as material and ideal interests, reason and passion. It affected people powerfully and – adding to that power – more often than not stealthily.

Two months after the completion of the fast that he had refused to bless, and within less than a year of hailing Gandhi’s “sublime penance” on behalf of India’s unity and social integrity, Tagore disowned the Yervada Pact. Condemning it publicly for being detrimental to the “country’s permanent interest”, and finding it “terribly ominous” that neither the British government nor the Indian leaders were willing to amend it, he protested that he had been inveigled into endorsing the Pact. He said (Bhattacharya 199-200):

Although Tagore announced his volteface on the Yervada Pact two months later, it is likely that he had started reconsidering his position when Gandhi asked him to bless the sequel to the Yervada fast. If so, his simmering reservations also must have held him back. Explicitly he did not say so in his reply to Gandhi. But it is plausible that in saying that he did not have “the entire background of thoughts and facts” against which to judge Gandhi’s new fast, Tagore had in mind the as yet not clear background that would, within the next two months, turn him against the Yervada Pact. Assuming that relevant material is available, a deeper study may perhaps tell us something more definitive.

Be that as it may, Tagore did not ask Gandhi for extra information. Nor did he

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think it necessary or proper to discuss his misgivings with “Mr Gandhi” before denouncing the Yervada Pact. Gandhi learnt about it from the newspapers, and wrote to “Gurudev”:

Impossible Possibility

It may be pertinent to recall that Tagore, who was now complaining of injustice to Bengal and seeing in that injustice a perpetual threat to peaceful government of the country, had soon after the Yervada Pact written a glowing letter to Gandhi, asking him to do something similar to solve the Hindu-Muslim problem. Tagore had in that letter suggested that, following the generosity shown to the depressed classes in the Yervada Pact, some extra concessions could be made to the Muslims for the sake of forging communal unity. He had, besides, added that no one else but Gandhi possessed the power to accomplish this. The same generosity towards the depressed classes was now rankling as injustice because – though Gandhi would not agree – Bengal was to bear a little more than its proportional share of that generosity.

Tagore, we may further recall, was a professed humanist. He had in his fiction as also in discursive writing consistently exposed the hideousness of nationalism.

Once, for whatever reason, he was without an inner readiness to respond, even a Tagore missed the grandeur of that all-too-brief exercise in pure non-violence.

Even scholarship on Gandhi has not, in the intervening 75 years, discerned the historic importance of that moment. Seen from the perspective of the 1933 fast, much of our understanding of the possibility of Gandhian non-violence among humans will require serious revision. And that revision is likely to be rather pessimistic. The worst it can suggest is the impossible possibility of non-violence, not its impossibility. Gandhi, by virtue of having been, has ruled out that impossibility. At the same time, closely examined, his having been may not warrant the kind of hopes that are all too easily entertained. For, even he was not the success that both academically and popularly he is believed to have been. He himself had no illusions about the actual success of non-violence. But, then, we have neglected his final selfassessment as well. Despite that selfassessment, though, he never lost faith in the potential power of non-violence.

New from SAGE!

References

Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi ed. (1997): The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore 1915-1941 (New Delhi: National Book Trust).

Chopra, P N ed. (1994): The Collected Works of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (Delhi: Konark Publications), Volume IV.

Gandhi, Mahatma (1999): The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book) (New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India), 98 volumes [referred to as CWMG].

Gandhi, Rajmohan (2006): Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire (Penguin/ Viking, New Delhi).

Pyarelal (1932): The Epic Fast, Mohanlal Maganlal Bhat, Ahmedabad.

Tendulkar, Dinanath Gopal (1944): Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House), 8 volumes.

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