The khadi he wore, the Gandhi he kept: A Dalit memoir that refuses easy answers

By Rajiv Shah 

Recently, I received a message from someone I had known since my Gandhinagar days, when I represented the Times of India from 1997 to 2012. He wanted to send me the English translation of a memoir he had written: "Homes Without Windows". Thin, short, and darker in complexion than me, he would occasionally come down to my office in Akhbar Bhawan. His name is Chandu Maheria.

Seen through a middle-class lens, Maheria had an unimpressive personality. But that didn't concern me. I knew little about his background, except what he had told me — that he worked in the state education department, and if I am not mistaken, in its midday meal section. Whenever I met someone new, I would try to find out whether there was a story in them. Education interested me: that was my selfish reason for talking to him.

Once, speaking on the phone, I asked Maheria to stop by my office on his way home to Gandhinagar, as he said he had a story. I was momentarily hesitant: he would have to arrange a drop to my office and back, since he did not drive a scooter. So I decided to meet him instead in the canteen of the Old Sachivalaya, where he had his office. Meeting him there directly, I felt, was also a better idea than going to his office, which might have exposed his closeness to a journalist.

Much later, after my retirement, I discovered that he was regarded quite a buff — a respected one at that — in Dalit circles: an intellectual and a committed writer, one who could speak extensively on Dalit issues. I saw him speak at meetings at Dalit Shakti Kendra, an empowerment-cum-technical school for teenagers founded by the well-known human rights leader Martin Macwan, located off Ahmedabad. I found him very sharp.

Until I received the book, all I knew about it was that it had been praised by the eminent historian of modern India, Ramachandra Guha, who called it a "truly remarkable and compellingly readable memoir" — a comment that had appeared on Facebook. With the book in hand, I began to randomly glance through it.

But contrary to the anti-Gandhi views prevalent among most Dalit intellectuals across India, this is what I found him stating: "Gandhi might have been anything — call him whatever names — but one thing he was certainly not was anti-Dalit. Oh no, never. Alas!"

This made me take a deeper look at the book and see what Maheria, a Dalit and a firm follower of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, thinks about Gandhi. Though a very reluctant reader, I read through its approximately 230 pages in a couple of sittings.

Largely a personal account, the memoir describes how Maheria spent his early life in extreme poverty, growing up in a working-class chawl of Ahmedabad as the son of a mill worker — until he shifted to Gandhinagar on securing a government job. They lived in what he describes as "the squalid, tumble-down, cheek-by-jowl dwellings in the backstreets of the city, dubbed as the heart of the state."

Maheria describes how Dalits from different parts of Gujarat had settled in the chawls: "Our chawl was inhabited by the Rohits, people of the tanner caste, who had migrated from Charotar, a large swathe of fertile land covering districts like Kheda and Anand in central Gujarat", and "the Vankars, people of the weaver caste, from Mehsana, a district in north Gujarat."

Belonging to different Dalit sub-castes, all of them would daily queue up for the dirty common toilet. He underlines, "A strange thing to say, but it was in these queues that I learnt my first lessons in social inequality."

According to him, "All these people were extremely beleaguered, a harried lot that had come here to escape poverty, untouchability, oppression and exploitation, and yet they saw hierarchy and hatred as natural ways of being, such that even the slightest breach in the set order resulted in exchanges of expletives and blows."

Pointing out that "all this cheek was for toilets that were no better than hellholes", he states, "Though not untouchability in its conventional sense, these practices were rooted in direct discrimination, in an ordained difference between the high and the low, that had seeped right up to the bottom of the caste order."

Offering an example of intra-Dalit casteism, he gives the example of Neno Ma'raj, a man of the priestly Garoda caste, considered the highest among the Dalits. "A mill worker of no consequence, Ma'raj would, in a blatant exhibition of his caste pride, lay his string cot out on the footpath every evening and lounge there like a maharaja, a veritable badshah holding his royal court." 

He explains, "In his exhaustive, eye-opening study of the forms of untouchability practised by non-Dalits and Dalits (among themselves) in Gujarat, my friend Martin Macwan has pegged the numbers at ninety-eight and ninety-nine, respectively." 

Explaining caste discrimination and related issues through personal anecdotes, Maheria reveals why he believes a section of Dalit intellectuals' anti-Gandhi stance has gone overboard. None of them, he feels, will admit that no other leader fought untouchability like Gandhiji. Indeed, the book's chapter "That Fellow, Gandhido" particularly excited me.

Maheria starts by stating that he likes wearing khadi as it suits his "short body and slim build", and explains why his mother didn't like it. The fabric was anathema to her. She would take a dig at him, saying, "You look like a ditto Gandhiyo in this pair." An unlettered woman who had picked up the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate through household conversations, her "pet peeve was, 'None but that fellow, Gandhiyo is responsible for erecting these caste enclosures'."

Yet Maheria graphically describes how, growing up in the working-class chawls, much of his early education happened in the suburb's Municipal School No. 3-4, whose principal was a man called Balawantbhai Parmar. "A Dalit by birth, he was a thorough Gandhian. Clad in khadi kurta and khadi dhoti, with a topping of Gandhi cap, when he moved around, the earth shook. Such a disciplinarian the man was."

Stating that his "formative years were spent among Gandhian, Ambedkarite and communist activists and their respective liberal-radical activism", Maheria reminisces about the Gandhians' "prolific welfare activities and women-centric programmes" of Majoor Mahajan Sangh and Jyoti Sangh, respectively.

He says, "Our lonesome chawls received substantial footfall of Gandhian leaders and activists on an almost daily basis. As a result, the atmosphere in the chawls in general remained electric. I received my pre-primary education in a wonderful, Jyoti Sangh-supported Anganwadi, a childcare centre unlike its present-day, state-funded counterparts that are mired in corruption and inefficiency."

He continues, "The service-oriented women of the Jyoti Sangh made repeated rounds of the chawls during summer vacations, unbothered about the baking sun overhead or the squalor all around, to persuade Dalit mothers to send their children to the Anganwadi. Little wonder that the image of Jasubehn, our loving Anganwadi teacher, in her signature white khadi saree and a winsome smile about her eyes, has survived intact in my mind after all these years..."

He adds, "It was she who first held my hand and helped me trace the lines of Gujarati alphabets and numerals. It was from her that I first learnt the sarvadharma prarthana, the all-religion prayer so close to Gandhi's heart."

Further: "Those 'sisters', from posh families and in swank white sarees, plodding the narrow, labyrinthine chawls and selflessly working for the welfare of women and children, had won people's hearts; the chawlwallahs acknowledged and appreciated their single-minded devotion to service no end."

One of them, Shantabehn Patel, a senior sister of the Sangh, had made a small-time mill worker her sworn brother, just to rid him of the habit of drinking. "Tying a rakhi on his wrist in the presence of the chawl residents, she had made him promise, placing the life and love of a sister at stake, never to touch liquor again."

"Today", he regrets, "when I see small children sell liquor and lurch around in drunken stupor in Rajpur — where Maheria's chawl stood — a mix of painful realisation and profound remorse weighs me down, that now no upper-caste woman worth her salt will come forward to swear the addicts as her brothers or sons and wean them off the bane of booze."

Maheria describes how, despite being a consistent topper, he was never given an opportunity to speak publicly at school events, including the school's prayer assembly. However, he adds, his inborn talent was first spotted and then "lovingly nurtured by those Gandhi pathshalas" that imparted him with "informal, but life-transforming, education."

"Back then", he notes, "the Majoor Mahajan Sangh celebrated Gandhi's birth anniversary and other programmes only in working-class suburbs and with great fanfare... As a part of these celebrations, huge public meetings were held where various competitions for mill workers' children were organised. True to my temperament and expertise, I participated in elocution and essay-writing competitions..."

During those competitions, he would "win household essentials like hankies, towels and bedsheets." The "precious lesson" in public speaking and discursive writing he received in the Gandhian institution later made him represent his school in an interschool elocution competition, where he received a copy of 'The Story of My Experiments with Truth' as a prize from Babubhai Patel, the then Chief Minister of Gujarat.

According to Maheria, "Majoor Mahajan Sangh, in those days, was a name to reckon with; it held sway over a large chunk of the public imagination. Leaders of the Sangh like Arvind Buch, Shantilal Shah, Manhar Shukla, Navinchandra Barot, and others showed up in the chawls every other day and held public meetings."

Maheria further recalls, "Those were not the days, unlike today, of every house having a dedicated toilet. The chawlwallahs used public toilets whose squalid condition, in a way, reflected the destiny of those Dalit suburbs. I vividly remember Bhailal Patel, the Gandhian chairman of the municipal corporation's Health Committee, who was often seen in Rajpur at seven sharp in the morning, literally breathing down the neck of the sanitary worker on duty to clean every single corner and cranny of those reeky, soiled toilets."

He comments, "I don't recall if he ever recoiled in disgust or involuntarily curled up his nose while overseeing the execution of that dirty, dishonourable job." Yet he regrets, "As I grew up, the frequency of the Gandhians' rounds to our chawls appreciably tapered off." He points out, "The last time I saw a Gandhian activist pace up and down Dalit chawls was during the anti-reservation riots of 1981; it was Babal Mehta, the last of the thorough Gandhians whose heart was lacerated by the torn social fabric of his city."

"To put it bluntly", he comments, "the dicey, dithering position of the Gandhians on the idea of and the movement for reservation became the root cause of their retreat — not only from Rajpur but from emergent Dalit political discourse altogether. It was a turning point in history. A point of departure, more accurately."

According to Maheria, "In contemporary Dalit discourse, it is a taboo to utter even a few words in favour of Gandhi — for a lay Dalit individual, to say nothing of a Dalit karmashila or writer — so dominant and pervasive is the climate of Gandhi-bashing among Dalits."

He underlines, "There are some legitimate reasons for it; no one can deny that. But I refuse to be smothered by them. I have criticised Gandhi in no uncertain terms whenever the context justly demanded it, but at the same time I have not turned tail whenever I felt that Gandhi needed to be defended from trumped-up charges."

Believes Maheria, "The role of the Gandhians in Gujarat during the anti-reservation riots of 1981 morphed the Dalit bitterness towards Gandhiji into deep hatred... Today, things have come to such a pass that one rarely encounters Gandhi's photograph in a Dalit household, especially in cities... The Gandhians have played no small part in bringing about this sorry situation."

Yet he firmly believes that it was Gandhiji who "helped place the Dalit question at the centre stage of India's social and political life". Indeed, Gandhi "courageously allowed a 'Harijan' family to take residence in Kochrab Ashram at the risk of outraging many of his associates and endangering the financial security of the ashram."

Gandhi's fight against, suggests Maheria, has had its social impact. Ahead of his retirement in the second half of the 2010s, Maheria was transferred to Dhoraji, a town near Junagadh, which he agreed to accept as it came with a promotion. Here, he writes, "I must confess that none of the people who knew about my being a 'Harijan' ever practised untouchability with me. Every day, I took lunch with my non-Dalit colleagues as their equal."

And yet, he underlines, "The attitude of the upper castes wasn't above board all the time. For I didn't even realise when and how my initial residential address in Jamanavad, a non-Dalit area, got changed to Baharpura. In weddings and other social ceremonies, non-Dalit staff invited their Dalit colleagues — but they wouldn't attend similar events that their Dalit colleagues organised."

Further, while he was greatly impressed to learn of a common crematorium in the town serving the entire Hindu community, he was shocked to discover that a separate space was earmarked for Dalits to bury their dead. "Thus, though the crematorium was common, it was partitioned along the logic of caste."