Gandhi & Churchill (10 page)

BRIHADARANYAKA UPANISHAD, EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.E.

W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL GREW UP AT THE
very center of empire. By contrast, Mohandas Gandhi grew up in a small but prosperous town of less than fifteen thousand people set in a small princely state in the western Indian province of Gujarat.
¹
He saw the world from a tiny corner of a vast sub-continent, distant from the momentous crosscurrents set off by the Raj. Gandhi never even saw an Englishman until the family moved to Rajkot when he was seven.

While Churchill was isolated and neglected as a child, Gandhi had constant attention from a large and loving family.
²
“Mohan” was his mother’s darling, a mischievous boy with a large head and ears, and thin, ungainly legs. He would disappear from the house without warning, and his nursemaid would find him climbing trees or hiding from her in the temple. A servant would take him for a ride in a bullock cart through the villages around Porbandar. “As I was the son of a
diwan,
” Gandhi remembered decades later, “people fed me on the way with
juwar roti
[millet cakes] and gave me eight anna pieces.”
³

This carefree life was overshadowed by his dignified and strict father, a figure of distinction in his child’s mind and also in the community’s. Karamchand was the
diwan
or chief adviser to the local
rana,
a post he had held since 1847 and that his father held before that.
⁴
“My father was a lover of his clan,” Gandhi tells us in his autobiography, “truthful, brave, and generous, but short-tempered.”
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Karamchand Gandhi was an important player in local politics, the classic big frog in a small pond.
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Every morning groups of suitors would squat on his veranda, hoping to ask some favor or tell some grievance. Every evening twenty or thirty men would appear for dinner to discuss the latest events, while “Kaba” (Karamchand’s family nickname) presided and solemnly peeled vegetables for the meal.
⁶

Gandhi’s father was a man of piety, a member of the Hindu Modh Bania caste. The Banias were a commercial caste; at one time the Gandhis had been moneylenders. (The name itself means “seller of perfumes.”) But more central to the Gandhi household were the colorful rites and rituals of the Vaishnava sect, whose
bhakti
or devotion to Lord Krishna were part of daily routine. The Vaishnava temple next to the Gandhi house overflowed with songs and music, with men and women setting out ceremonial meals and masses of red, pink, blue, and yellow flowers. One of Gandhi’s earliest memories would be of the sharp, musty smell of rotting flowers as he visited the temple every day with his mother.
⁷

Putlibai joined the Gandhis in their Vaishnava rites and prayers. But she belonged to another local Hindu sect, the Pranamis, and went to daily worship at their temple just two hundred yards away. Pranamis abstained from alcohol and practiced vegetarianism and moderation in all things. Their festivals included a striking blend of Hindu and Muslim practices. (Muslims numbered about a fifth of the population of Gujarat.) On the altar in the Pranami temple there was even a copy of the Koran. At least one biographer has seen Pranami’s influence on Gandhi’s later religious outlook, including his respect for Islam.
⁸

Gandhi himself tells us that his earliest and most valuable religious lesson came from his nursemaid. When he was not much more than four or five, she taught him to recite the
Ramanama,
saying the name of the god Rama over and over again, as a way to assuage his fear of ghosts and evil spirits in the dark. Rama was the divine hero of the Hindu national epic; a shrine to Rama stood in Karamchand’s office. And so reciting the
Ramanama
became the bedrock of Gandhi’s Hindu faith, his “infallible remedy” in times of crisis and even disease.

“
Ramanama
purifies while it cures,” he liked to say, “and therefore it elevates.” Gandhi would credit the simple little prayer with curing one of his father’s friends of leprosy. Later, he would tell women whose husbands had been massacred by Muslims to recite the
Ramanama
as consolation. It would be on Gandhi’s lips when he died.
⁹

Highbrow Hindus would dismiss all this as part of Gandhi’s small-town outlook. Indeed, high-caste Brahmins considered the exuberant Vaishnava rites vulgar and unseemly.
¹⁰
Later, when Gandhi would explore the deeper reaches of Hindu philosophy, he too would find popular Hinduism’s endless round of boisterous, even bawdy, festivals and garishly decorated temples distasteful. The smell of the decaying temple flowers he remembered had also made him sick; and when he witnessed the sacrifices to the goddess Kali in her temple in Calcutta in 1901, with rivulets of blood flowing down the stones, he was horrified.

All the same, his childhood in provincial Porbandar, instead of a Westernized city like Calcutta or a cosmopolitan one like Bombay, gave Gandhi a simple and straightforward religious base that he could share with millions of poor people from every region of India, people whose lives were still untouched by the Clives, Ripons, and Randolph Churchills. It would be one of the principal bonds between them. It helps to explain why throughout Gandhi’s life people would walk miles to remote rail stations where he was supposed to stop, and wait hours, sometimes days, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, touch his feet, and recite the
Ramanama
with him.

This humble link is crucial, not just for understanding Gandhi but for putting the whole British Raj in perspective. For the British, their experience in India was full of drama, change, and progress. “To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition,” as one of them, Thomas Macaulay, enthused, and then to have brought India “the imperishable empire of our arts, and morals, our literature and our laws,” was “the proudest day in English history.”
¹¹

But the vast majority of Indians spread out over a subcontinent the size of Europe without Russia experienced no change. What change occurred, they had been taught to see as largely an illusion. Indians had seen plenty of history over four thousand years, but what mattered to them in this vast, slow-moving society was precisely the forces that resisted history: their land, their religion, and the very nature of Indian society itself.

That society’s roots ran incredibly deep, as deep as the world’s oldest civilizations. They still do. The
Rig Veda
is certainly the oldest religious hymn in daily use. Four-thousand-year-old rites associated with the worship of Shiva are still performed today, making it the oldest continuous religious cult in the world. Villagers still worship at shrines dedicated to gods and goddesses with roots in the Stone Age.
¹²
Compared to this unequaled staying power, the British Raj seemed very transitory—like every other ruler or conqueror in Indian history. Gandhi made his own view plain in 1909, in his
Hind Swaraj
. “History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of love or of the soul,” he wrote, “a record of the interruption of the course of nature.” In short, from Gandhi’s perspective, history was meaningless: perhaps no other view separated him so much from a man like Winston Churchill. But here Gandhi reflected the larger Indian cultural experience, in which everything that happens is only another brief turn “of the supreme wheel of the empire of Truth.” From the Indian perspective, even the British appeared as only a dot on the vast canvas of Indian civilization.
¹³

That civilization had its beginnings not very far from Gujarat, in the Indus River Valley at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, cities which are today in Pakistan. Lothal, the active port of Harappan civilization, was less than two hundred miles from Rajkot. There, more than thirty centuries before Gandhi’s birth, great merchants and priest-kings conducted trade across the Indian Ocean with their counterparts in the ancient Fertile Crescent, in Akkad and Sumer. By 2200
B.C.E.
, five hundred years before Hammurabi issued his law code in Babylon, the civilization of the Indus Valley was a flourishing urban world of small brick houses and straight narrow streets, clean, efficient, and uniform, ruled by all-powerful theocrats whose temples were the very cities themselves.
¹⁴

Eventually every trace of the great cities vanished, as did their counterparts in the Fertile Crescent. When Gandhi was born, few Indians even knew of the Harappans’ existence. But their successors left their mark on India, such as the Hindi words for money
(pana)
and trader
(vanik).
Even Gandhi’s own caste (Bania) is a derivation of the name that the Indus Valley’s successors gave to these wealthy and businesslike people, the Panis. The earliest representations of the god Shiva in the typical yoga pose appear on ceramic seals from Mohenjo-Daro, as does the humped bull. The Harappans also cultivated a taste for body ornaments, bracelets, and bangles that would survive down to Gandhi’s day and beyond. Once, when Gandhi visited a museum at the ancient Gandharan city of Takshashila or Taxila displaying some of these ancient bracelets, he exclaimed with surprise, “Just like my mother used to wear.”
¹⁵

For all their sophistication, however, the Indus Valley peoples had no iron, and as the centuries passed, their basic technologies remained unchanged. Their society’s very uniformity and efficiency became a trap. In the third millennium before the Christian era, when invaders from Central Asia swept down, the peoples of the Indus Valley were either unable or unwilling to resist. Their world was finished. The Aryans, horsemen warriors who were part of a great incursion that swept across Iran and Europe at the same time, had arrived.

The Aryans were as arrogant as they were tough: their very name,
Arya,
meant “master” or “noble.” Scholars now agree there was probably no invasion at all, merely a slow, steady migration of Aryan tribes and clans into the perimeter of a civilization that was in a state of advanced decay, until one day they realized they were in charge.

Like their distant cousins the primitive Greeks, who took over the Mycenaean world at almost the same time, the Aryans found themselves possessors of the remnants of a society more sophisticated than their own. Like the Greeks, they brought to the cultural table their own set of gods: Varuna the sky god (like the Greeks’ Uranus), Agni the fire god and god of ritual sacrifice, and Indra the god of war. Out of this aggressively masculine religious framework the Aryan priests (or
brahmins
) and warriors (or
rajyas
) built a stratified society of conqueror and conquered. The Brahmins accompanied their elaborate rituals with recitations in a distinct priestly language (later written down as Sanskrit), which would generate the
Vedas,
the oldest extant body of religious literature in the world. The Aryans also composed two of the world’s greatest (and longest) epic poems, the
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharata,
which is eight times longer than the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
put together and three times longer than the Bible—all without the benefit of writing. These Vedic recitations, both sacred and secular, form the bedrock of Indian and Hindu culture.

The Aryans carried their culture with them as they gradually spread eastward from the Indus Valley. By now they had divided themselves into four distinct classes or
varnas
: a priest elite of
brahmanas
or Brahmins; the warrior ruling class of
rajyas
or
kshatriyas
; farmers and artisans or
vaishyas
; and at the very bottom, almost ignored by the Vedic religious conventions, the
shudras,
or serfs and laborers. Everyone else, from the survivors of the Indus Valley people to the aboriginal tribes they encountered on their wanderings, were
niravasita,
“excluded” or
candala
. They were forbidden to live in sight of an Aryan village and were relegated to the most menial tasks, such as cremating the dead. These
candala
would be the original “untouchables”—people so despised that they could not even enter a town without first striking a wooden clapper to warn the inhabitants of the approaching pollution.
¹⁶

Eventually the original
classes
of Vedic society became the social
castes
of Hindu society. Hundreds of
jatis
or subdivisions and
gotras
or subcastes were scattered in every region of India, but all found their place within the hierarchic whole. Originally caste membership determined how you worshipped the gods and participated in the Vedic ceremonies. But eventually its rules dictated whom you married, where you lived, what you ate and how you ate it, and how you dressed and marked your body—even how you moved your bowels and when you had sex.
¹⁷

Membership in a caste brings formal rules and rituals to follow, an unwritten guidebook for life on how to avoid pollution and loss of caste in this life and, since Hinduism embraces the notion of reincarnation, the next. It even (except for Brahmins) offers a council to perfect the rules or decide difficult cases for caste members. For the believer, caste and
gotra
formed, as it were, a giant support group that reconciled them to their lot in life and showed them how to achieve holiness, even as part of the lowest caste. To be an outcaste in traditional Hindu society was more than just a social or religious stigma. It meant to be thrown out of the most basic relationships that make life meaningful, to be relegated to cultural squalor, to
tamas
or a terrible darkness—a fate that, since it carried over into the next life, was literally worse than death.
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