Gandhi's Katha
Like the peasants of Avadh, the man who was to become known as the "Father of Indian Independence" articulated a vision of Ramraj that was rooted in a fervent devotion to the Manas . His own account of his childhood exposure to the text reflects a style and milieu of performance that should by now be familiar to readers:
What, however, left a deep impression on me was the reading of the Ramayan before my father. During part of his illness my father was in Porbandar. There every evening he used to listen to the Ramayan. The reader was a great devotee of Ram—Ladha Maharaj of Bileshvar. . . . He had a melodious voice. He would sing the dohas (couplets) and caupais[*] (quatrains), and explain them, losing himself in the discourse and carrying his listeners along with him. I must have been thirteen at that time, but I quite remember being enraptured by his reading. That laid the foundation of my deep devotion to the Ramayan. Today I regard the Ramayan of Tulasidas as the greatest book in all devotional literature.[90]
A perusal of the entries under "Ramayan" and "Tulsidas" in the indexes to Gandhi's voluminous collected works suggests the extent of what Gandhi termed "the fascination that Tulsidas has wrought on me." To the well-known personae of Gandhi the lawyer, political organizer, and · wandering holy man should perhaps be added that of Gandhi the kathavacak , who used Manas verses as proof texts (praman[*] ) to buttress political arguments. These citations sometimes helped him in difficult ideological situations, such as when (only seven days before his assassination) he addressed the faithful at his evening prayer meeting in New Delhi on the subject of Subhas Chandra Bose, whose birthday it was:
Today is Subhas Babu's birthday. . . . Subhas Babu was a votary of violence while I am a devotee of ahimsa[*] [non-injury]. But what does it matter? I know that the most important thing is that we should learn from other people's virtues. As Tulsidas says,
The Lord has created this world full of lifeless
and living things and virtues and vices.
The wise, like the swan, take the milk of virtue
and leave out the waste of water.[91]
We should be like the swan and take the milk of virtue. Man has virtues as well as vices. We should emulate him in his virtues and forget his deficiencies. Subhas was a great patriot. He laid down his life for the country.[92]
Gandhi often explained his own political activities by referring to the Ramayan narrative; thus, when he was queried about the inspiration for the Noncooperation Movement, he cited the Sundar kand[*] passage in which Sita, though a helpless prisoner of Ravan, boldly refused to submit to his wishes[93] Addressing a meeting of untouchables in 1925, he reminded them of Ram's compassion for the lowly: "You might be acquainted, if you have known Tulsidas' Ramayan, with the fact that Ramchandra, Sita and Lakshman had very affectionately embraced the untouchable Guha and I want to see the same repeated once again in India. . . . I would therefore appeal to Hindus of the higher castes present here that, if they call themselves Sanatan Dharmi, if they love the cow, they should not hate members of the untouchable classes."[94]
Although Gandhi-the-devotee's personal faith in the Manas is beyond doubt, it is also apparent that Gandhi-the-politician knew how to use homely adaptations of its imagery to solicit mass support. Campaigning for the Swadeshi movement in 1925, Gandhi told a rural crowd, "You should bear in mind that, in the days of Shri Ramchandra, neither rich nor poor used any foreign cloth and the khadi [homespun] produced in the country was in the general use of all."[95] Later that year while urging the use of his beloved home spinning-wheel (carkha ), he regaled a women's gathering with a bit of domestication worthy of any kathavacak : "Gandhiji said that . . . they must try to become like Sita of yore who was the soul of Ramraj . In the days of Sita every household had its carkha just as they find a hearth in every home. Sita also spun on her own carkha which might have been bedecked with jewels and probably ornamented with gold, but all the same it was still a carkha ."[96]
The notion of Ramraj forms a recurring theme in Gandhi's discourse. He used the term to articulate his dream of an independent India, often equating it with or preferring it to the term svaraj (self-rule) used by other Congress leaders.[97] It was here that Gandhi-the-politician and Gandhi-the-devotee came together, for Ramraj was "not only the political Home Rule but also dharmaraj . . . which was something higher than ordinary political emancipation."[98] Something higher perhaps, but also something more thoroughly Indian. Westerners who read translations of Gandhi's Hindi speeches and writings, wherein the word "dharma" is rendered "righteousness," "truth," or "justice," are understandably liable to interpret these ideas according to the Judaeo-Christian notion of a universal ethic that admits no exceptions. Resonances of this worldview are of course present in Gandhi's thought and language, as they are in those of many other English-educated Indian leaders. Yet it is important to recognize that, for the vast majority of Gandhi's listeners, the word "dharma" referred to an infinitely particularized and situational code of behavior, fundamental to which was the notion of the inherent inequality of human beings. Dharma was not a monolithic law that every one of these unequal individuals obeyed, but rather a cosmic framework within which they pursued their respective courses. The tra-
ditional view has always been that authority and punishment (danda[*] , or "the rod") were necessary to keep individuals on course and so to insure harmony; thus, a kingdom governed according to dharma was necessarily an authoritarian one. Gandhi tried to circumvent this problem by interpreting Tulsi's epic as a metaphor for spirtual experience rather than an account of historical realities: "Tulsidas had nothing to do with the Ram of history. Judged by historical test, his Ramayan would be fit for the scrap heap. As a spiritual experience his book is almost unrivalled, at least for me. . . . It is the spirit running through the book that holds me spell-bound."[99] It was Gandhi's insistence on reading the "spirit" rather than the letter of the Manas that made possible his original interpretations of its basic themes and his successful use of them as slogans to unify—even if only temporarily—diverse groups within his society. Thus, he could offer such startling interpetations of Ramraj as the following, in which Tulsi's vision of a divine authoritarianism is transformed into a divinely democratic populism by appealing to the moral principle of self-abnegation: "Ramraj means rule of the people. A person like Ram would never wish to rule."[100]
The contrast between spirit and letter returns us to the problem of transcendence and order. It was the spirit of Gandhi that caught the imagination of the masses: the charismatic sadhu who traveled the countryside quoting their beloved Ramayan, preaching homely virtues and causing distant thrones to tremble. During the peasant uprisings in Avadh, his name figured in the wildest rumors; at times he was thought to have already overthrown the government at Delhi.[101] The "letter" of Gandhi sometimes proved harder to pin down, harder still to follow. To the long-suffering peasants of Avadh, it proved to consist, in February 1921, of a set of seventeen printed orders under the heading "Attainment of Swaraj or redress of grievances is impossible unless the following rules are strictly observed." The detailed directives displayed a characteristic Gandhian concern for nonviolence yet, as Pandey has shown, they also served to undercut every one of the achievements and strengths of the peasant movement. They forbade the withholding of taxes and rent, however unjust, and required the abandonment of all acts of even
nonviolent resistance, such as Gandhi himself would lead elsewhere. In Pandey's interpretation, "for tactical reasons as much, it appears, as out of any concern for non-violence," the apostle of Ramraj spearheaded the Congress's desertion of the peasants and thus indirectly served the interests of a class of petty aristocrats whom the lieutenant governor of the United Provinces had cynically hailed as "the only friends we have" and Jawarharlal Nehru later described as "complete parasites."[102] But then we have already seen that the spirit of Tulsi's Ramraj was inherently paradoxical and reflected, together with a longing for transcendent freedom, a fear of worldly disorder.