Mahatma Gandhi is one of those people whose position as a hero of history is assured. He overcame the most powerful empire on earth with the power of nonviolence. He is immortalised through his quotable epigrams like “Be the change that you want to see in the world” and “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” (which he never actually said).
But there’s another side to Gandhi, and it’s revealed in The Doctor and the Saint, Arundhati Roy’s fascinating introduction to a debate between Gandhi and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. This other side involves a defence of the caste system and inequality in India, racism against African people, and several episodes of rank hypocrisy. None of this negates his achievements and his importance to history, but it does allow us to reach a more rounded, realistic view of the man, which seems more useful than uncritical hero-worship.
Gandhi and Ambedkar
First of all, you may be wondering, as I did, who B.R. Ambedkar is and what the debate with Gandhi was about. Ambedkar was an early 20th century intellectual from a Dalit (known in those days as “Untouchable”) caste. Ambedkar wrote a book called Annihilation of Caste in 1936, and Gandhi responded by arguing against Ambedkar and defending the caste system. The edition I read, an ebook published in the UK by Verso Books, doesn’t contain the debate itself—it’s a standalone edition of Roy’s introduction, which is definitely lengthy, detailed and interesting enough to stand as a book by itself.
In case you’re also wondering why a 1936 debate between Gandhi and Ambedkar would be relevant or interesting today, consider these little facts that Roy shares with us:
- Every day, more than four Untouchable women are raped by Touchables.
- A crime is committed against a Dalit by a non-Dalit every 16 minutes.
- Every week, 13 Dalits are murdered and 6 are kidnapped.
- In recent years, some Dalits have been stripped and paraded naked, forced to eat shit, had their land seized, and been prevented from accessing drinking water.
- In 2005, Bant Singh, a Mazhabi Dalit Sikh, had both his arms and a leg chopped off for daring to file a case against the men who gang-raped his daughter.
So the caste system and its attendant evils are still relevant today, just as they were in 1936. (As well as these grim facts, Roy gives plenty more examples in the book.) The basic question of whether some people should have such massive power over the lives of others due to their birth is still very much alive today.
Gandhi and the Caste System
Given what we know about Gandhi and his struggles for social justice, it’s astonishing to see him come out on the side of the caste system in this book. Gandhi believed that the lower castes should be treated well, and he would clearly have condemned the violence described above. But he consistently defended the system itself and the custom of “hereditary occupation”, by which the entire trajectory of your life is determined by the caste you are born into.
In 1921, Gandhi wrote:
“To destroy the caste system and accept the Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. Hereditary occupation is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder.”
What comes across strongly in The Doctor and the Saint is Gandhi’s fear of disorder, which Roy links to the generous funding he received from industrialists such as G.D. Birla, who paid Gandhi a substantial monthly retainer from 1915 through to the end of Gandhi’s life to cover the cost of his ashrams and his political work.
Although Gandhi advocated strongly for poor people to be treated better, Roy writes, at no point in his political career did he ever seriously criticise or confront an Indian industrialist or the landed aristocracy. He believed instead in the notion of trusteeship, writing:
“The rich man will be left in possession of his wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably requires for his personal needs and will act as a trustee for there remainder to be used for society. In this argument, honesty on the part of the trustee is assumed.”
It’s a nice idea, but a quick look around the world today will show what became of that assumption. Ambedkar, on the other hand, believed that relaying on the charity of the rich was not enough. He described Hindu society as “a multi-storeyed tower with no staircase and no entrance. Everybody had to die in the storey they were born in.” Ambedkar wanted to tear down this nightmarish tower and build something fairer. Hence the debate.
Gandhi in South Africa
Gandhi’s early years in South Africa are often referred to as his political awakening, but what is not so well known is that he advocated for the rights of Indians at the expense of Africans. For example, he complained against the Durban Post Office having two entrances: one for Blacks and one for Whites. His proposed solution was not to unify the entrances, but to add a third entrance for Indians to spare them the indignity of using the same entrance as the “Kaffirs”.
In an open letter to the National Legislative Assembly, Gandhi argued that both the English and Indians were “sprung from common stock, called the Indo-Aryan,” and he complained:
“The Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir.”
You don’t see that one made into a Facebook meme, do you?
Much of this history was later rewritten, first by Gandhi himself and then by his many followers and admirers. The result is a skewed vision of a saintly figure, which Roy’s book does much to correct. There are many more examples beyond what I could cover in this post—more examples of Gandhi trying to position Indians above Africans in the colonial hierarchy, of volunteering to aid the British Empire in defeating a Zulu uprising, and later in India of opposing strikes and other protests that seemed to threaten the overall structure of society too much, or of limiting the Dalits’ democratic voice in the constitution of the new independent India.
The point, for me, is not to swing from the extreme of “Gandhi as saint” to a new extreme of “Gandhi as villain.” It’s to reach a deeper understanding of an important historical figure and to reinforce the simple truth that there are no saints and no villains. There are only human beings struggling to do their best while grappling with their own prejudices and external influences. They can achieve great things despite their flaws, and recognising these flaws does not diminish or negate their achievements—it just makes them real. Roy’s excellent introduction to the debate between Gandhi and Ambedkar tells us more about the real Gandhi than the inspirational quote memes clogging the internet.
If you enjoyed this post, please sign up for my free newsletter to stay updated. Or if you want more on Arundhati Roy, read South African writer Lucinda de Leeuw’s excellent guest post on The God of Small Things.