Degrees Of Touchiness

Gandhi Against Caste is a cruc­ial breakthrough, cutting thro­ugh the miasma on the subject. Nishikant Kolge divides Gandhi’s experience in five phases and argues that his approach towards caste was deeply rooted in ‘strategies’. Kolge uses a wide range of primary and secondary sources to analyse how Gandhi critiqued untouchability and caste prejudices from his ret­urn to India up to his death. We are informed that Gandhi was consistent in his militant, uncompromising att­ack on untouchability. Gandhi’s pers­onal practices show that he openly vio­lated most caste restrictions and built ashrams that functioned on princ­iples that rejected varnashrama dharma.

This book shows that although Gandhi was radically opposed to caste prejudice and untouchability, he was car­eful and gradual in what he demanded from Hindu society. He was aware that conservative, powerful Hindus were not yet ready for radical reforms. He understood that in his fight against untouchability, he needed to win caste-Hindus’ trust that he never wanted to destroy Hinduism, but to purify it. As his own political position strengthened and, I would add, as the res­istance to his critique of caste prejudices and untouchability waned, Gandhi felt freer to ask for tougher reforms.

In order to make the Hindu masses und­erstand and accept his anti-untouchability movement, Gandhiji in the 1920s frequently insisted on being a sanatani Hindu and defended both caste and varna. But he also asserted that inter-caste dining or marriage did not necessarily dep­rive a person of his caste status, since a man’s varna was inherited. Gandhi even emphasised some positive aspects of the system. Kolge points out that until the end of 1920, Gandhi only tried to destroy the notion that physical contact with ‘untouchables’ polluted a savarna Hindu. However, as Gandhi rose to power within the Congress by 1920-21, Kolge finds him to be in a position to wrest maximum political advantage for his beliefs. From 1920-27, he began to demand the entry of ‘untouchable’ children into schools (a less contentious issue).

As the Indian national movement moved into the civil disobedience phase (1930-34), Kolge argues that Gandhi’s public reputation enabled him to demand more sacrifices from caste-Hindus. The years from 1927 to 1932 saw Gandhi dem­anding that ‘untouchables’ must have the same right of temple-entry (a highly contentious issue) as other caste-Hindus. Even though Gandhi was writing in fav­our of the hereditary fourfold division of Hindu society, he was making vigorous attempts to disassociate varna from caste, and thus, began to advocate inter-marriage among the sub-castes (pp. 132-45).

Between 1932 and 1948, when Gandhi was at the peak of his glory, Kolge says, he could make statements that were blasph­emy to Hindu orthodoxy. He now admonished the caste system itself and clearly demarcated that “caste had to go”, as it only served to stunt Hindu society. Gan­dhi’s views, once loosened, culminated in the announcement in 1946 that in his Sew­­agram Ashram, couples could marry only on the condition that one party was an ‘untouchable’. His insistence on inter-­caste marriage may be seen as cutting at the roots of the caste system. A year earlier, in 1945, the notion of repudiating one’s varna had already entered Gandhi’s mind. He wrote that since everyone felt free to follow any calling, there prevailed only one varna, that is, of the Shudras. Once everyone was a Shudra, there would be no question of superiority or inferiority, inequality or discrimination.

Kolge’s analysis of Gandhi’s evolving strategy is meaningful, as it seeks to answer common questions, like: Did Gan­dhi endorse the fourfold division or was he truly against the caste system?

While we do get answers for Gandhi’s evolving ideas over the years, there is one yawning gap in the book. It is silent about the imperialist paradigm within which Gan­dhi lived and worked. He faced both the problem of the colonial state using caste to weaken the national movement and of not alienating orthodox Hindus to a point where they would break from the nationalist platform. For example, after he launched the Non-Cooperation Move­ment in 1920, orthodox Hindus war­ned Gandhi that unless ‘untouchables’ were excluded from the national schools, they would support the British Raj. Such factors shaped Gandhi’s strategy on caste. It must be noted that Gandhi made a distinction about the caste system, as it exi­sted in the past, from that in his own time. Moreover, while Gandhi initially did not deviate from the orthodox belief in varna system, he did stress on equality among the four varnas even at that stage.