From my window I see two woman walking slowly in the hot sun. I hear, on the main road at the bottom of the hill, the tinkle of a bull's bell collar: somewhere down there a cart is being pulled. 

        If I were in a daydreamy sort of mood, a convenient image might form itself in my mind now. It might seem to me that the bullock cart symbolized India's rhythm, the bull's ass swaying slowly back and forth as it drags the cart with its lazy-looking driver down the road. Also, I might begin to feel that this was the subcontinent's basic pace: slow motion. And that this, in turn, was a reflection of something inside the people: a fundamental laid-backness, a refusal to go too fast, a suicidal attempt not to move, to hold onto the past. In such a vision the bullock cart, of course, would represent the past. 

        I see something else through the window: a water buffalo grazing on the side of the hill. A boy, standing next to the buffalo swats its hip with a stick to get it going. The buffalo moves' forward two slow steps, then stops and starts grazing again. The boy, looking around absent-mindedly, waits a minute, then swats the animal with a stick again. And again the same pattern is repeated: the buffalo takes a few slow steps forward, stops and starts grazing. 

        On the basis of the almost somnambulistic quality of this scene, it might be possible to feel that this is another proof of the fact that everything in India moves slowly, that it's become, even, a racial characteristic of the people. They luxuriate in bodily tranquility, in not overdoing anything. One rationale for accepting such a vision could be that the hot sun, beating on the population over the centuries, has forged such passivity into the single most noticeable national attribute. 

        An interesting approach, but stupid, meaningless. 

        The image of universal Indian slowness is typical, not in the sense that it's an accurate portrayal of either India or Indian people, but in the sense that it's a typical western appraisal of what India and the Indian people are like—unchanging India. static, tropical, somehow fundamentally reluctant to move. This is the commodity sold to the unwary. It comes from all sides. As one contemporary writer says in a recent book, "In India...every- thing proceeds at the rate of the slowest member." His basic point is that in traveling to India one is, strangely, traveling into the past. He talks about the "ancient, unchanged spectacle of raw endurance." The reader is drawn into a falsely poeticized dream-world in which even the simple magpie -- described as an "archaeopteryxian snakebird" in order to persuade the reader that it's some sort of holdover from prehistory -- becomes a symbol of India's ancientness, its unchangingness. The message is that once the foreigner steps onto Indian soil he/she becomes "part explorer, part time-traveler." The final consequence of such poeticization is the dehumanization of the people. Marketplace crowds made up of distinct individuals are transformed in this western writer's fantasy into "crowds...like a vast grey amoeba." Certainly no one's going to have a human relationship with an amoeba. The stage is set for the degrading objectification of a whole population. 

        As mentioned above, typical is one word for such a picture. Colonialist is another. But such a picture can only exist in disregard of the historical data. It robs the people of their history as an active world-changing people; it robs them of the fact that like all people of all nations their very presence in the world has changed the world, has transformed nature, has resulted in the evolution of the productive forces, has moved history itself in certain irreversible directions. 

        But the fact is that for Westerners interested in India, the correct historical data isn't always easy to come by. First one has to scrape away the crap, the crud that has been carefully built up into an almost impregnable sediment by the so-called experts. Even upper class Third World intellectuals have been drafted for the purpose of falsifying India. Take, for example, V.S. Naipaul's writings on India which first appeared in the "New York Review of Books," the prestigious journal of U.S. academics. How pleased these people must have been to find out from Naipaul's essays that the working classes of India were just as worthless (when compared to intellectuals) as the laboring classes of the United States: truckdrivers, hardhats, secretaries, clerks, etc. Naipaul's claim is that after studying Indian history and examining the residue of that history as it exists in the modern era one discovers that all the subcontinent has been left with "is a peasantry that cannot comprehend the idea of change." 

        Such attitudes, unfortunately, aren't exceptions. There are many distorted pictures of India available in the West and they all serve a political purpose: hauling India into the US dominated capitalist orbit. Every portrait of India which depicts the country as a backward nation, seething with a dangerously dense population strangling on its own blind self-multiplication serves this purpose, the implications of such portraits being that in order for India to achieve even minimal stability it needs the West s guidance. Even the picture the counter-culture has drawn serves the same purpose in a convoluted sort of way. By characterizing India as a land of gurus and wandering holy men it has emphasized India as an historical artifact left over from some primitive stage of human development. Neither of these portraits really gets close to the basic question: what is India like? Certainly Alien Gmsberg's meaningless metaphysical comment about India, that it's "the wonderworld where Man knows he's in a dream," is no help in getting at the real India.

        ***** 
       

        This is my third time here. It still takes time to adjust. 

        Coming back, at first everything exists at the level of physical sensation. For instance, the sensation of color. Bright silk and cotton saris, the pale reddish orange of the soil, blond bales of hay in the middle of pale green fields, sunlight drenching the dark stones on the dirt path in front of our house, white jasmine or yellow marigolds in the black hair of many of the women, peasants (men and women) spitting quick spurting streaks of tobacco juice onto the roads. Color, all around. 

        Also there's the sensation of new smells. In the fields and in the vegetable markets, the pungent odor of coriander. Or, in both city and countryside, the inescapable smell of roaming animals -- goats, sheep, water buffalo, cows. And in the villages, as well as in certain sections of the cities, there's the sometimes vague sometimes strong stench of open-ditch sewage systems 

        But the basic sensation is the sheer feeling of existence, human existence. People doing things. What exactly are they doing? Some of the activity of course is immediately identifiable; for example Laxshmi, a woman who lives in a small mud brick hut in Vijaynagar, uses her knife to shave thin strips of bamboo from a bamboo pole. She does this crouched inside the doorway of her house. The bamboo strips will be used to weave baskets that she'll sell. She's a widow with eight children and this is how she makes a living. Therefore, what Laxshmi is doing crouched inside the doorway of her hut is no mystery: she's working to survive. 

        But there are other activities that aren't so easily identifiable. For instance, on a street in Belgaum a man beats a crude flat drum (it looks something like a tambourine) with a stick The simple regular beating of the stick against the drum makes a surprisingly lively music. The man's surrounded by young children. I go closer. Next to him, on a small wooden platform, is a tiny chair decorated like a throne—a chair just big enough maybe, for a two year old child. Sitting in this chair, a bright garland of flowers around its neck and a small hat of flowers on its head, is a dead monkey stiff with rigor-mortis. Some passers- by put coins in a small box that the drummer has placed on the platform next to the monkey. The exact reason for the dead monkey's enthronement is unclear to me. It has something to do with an old Indian myth concerning Hanuman, the monkey god One thing is certain: this is precisely the kind of image, exotic and apparently bizarre, that's been hawked in the West as typical of Indian life. But for the moment this doesn't interest me. The fact is that the scene is just raw sensation to me; my attention is caught, I note the details, but I don't quite understand. 

        The reality, however, is that most of what one sees is recognizable. Definable. 

        Take, as an example, the Saturday market in Belgaum Wide mats are spread out on the ground, piled with grains vegetables, fruits. The marketplace streets are jammed, people bumping into each other, shouting, trying to find out where they can get the best buy. Coolies, pulling long flat handcarts stacked with different kinds of merchandise, try to make their way through the crowds. Inevitably, they get stuck behind tight knots of pedestrians. Eventually, though, they maneuver themselves free and are on their way again. All the while they're trying to wend their way through the crowds, they're talking to people: get out of my way, stand over on the side, I'm coming through watch out. All over—activity, noise. 

        Yes. The marketplace is buzzing with life. The air is filled with chaff from rice, wheat and barley. On the ground, great piles of red chilies sprawl like rolling hills of fire on straw mats, while nearby women haggle over potential prices with potential customers. You move through the crowd, amazed by the action, the color. Large mounds of white onions brightly reflect the sunlight. A man weighs a bunch of grapes on a scale. Three women vegetable sellers get up and chase away a stray cow that has started nosing around their cauliflowers and cabbages People step aside as a bullock cart, loaded with grainsacks makes its way haltingly through the packed streets. Then, quickly glimpsed, an isolated image: in a group of women sitting on the ground selling vegetables, there's one heavyset woman with a weather-beaten brown basket turned upside down over her head blocking the sun. Yes, the heat, the light, are intense It's impossible to describe the intensity. It's almost as if you can see the light drilling thin holes into everything it touches One woman shouts at Suman: "Buy my last dozen bananas so I can get out of this sun and go back to my village. I've been sitting here all morning; I can't take it anymore." 

        This, then, is the so-called mysterious East, the supposed paradise of slowness. 

        Look: a man carries a 150 Ib. grainsack on his back. He's bent over in such a way that his chest is almost parallel to the ground He's struggling to hold onto the end of the sack nearest his neck. To do this, his arms are positioned so that the elbows jut out sideways like two knobby wings. He's a middle-aged man a few days' white stubble on his chin and cheeks. Eyes darting this way and that, he looks for little tunnels in the thick Saturday crowd that he can pass through. When he gets bottled up in the crowd, he makes a few quick hissing sounds, a signal to people that he s trying to get by. Up close, one can see the face's tightness, a sign of the physical strain. 

        And similarly: in the wholesale section of the market a man's backed up against the side of a truck. He has on nothing except a pair of torn khaki shorts. Above him, the lorry's loaded with big sacks filled with coconuts. Two men have seated themselves on some of these sacks, while a third is in the process of lifting one of the sacks over the wooden side-panels and lowering it onto the shoulders of the man below. The coolie in the khaki shorts bends forward slightly, preparing to receive the sack. The man above lowers the sack as far as he can while still retaining his balance, then lets it drop the final half a foot to the waiting coolie's back. When the full weight of it lands, for a split second the coolie's face is twisted into a teeth-gritting grimace Then he throws his hands over his shoulders, secures the sack with two iron hooks and, bending further forward in order to keep the sack balanced on his back, walks toward the cab end of the truck where another worker helps him dump the sack onto a pile of similar sacks. Relieved of his burden now. the coolie stands up straight and stretches his back. Then he returns to the other end of the truck and the same process is repeated. 

        From one end of the street to the other: work. The street's crammed with lorries whose cargoes are being unloaded- wheat salt, barley, coconuts, limes, betel nuts. There are also trucks with large cylindrical tanks on the back, some filled with cooking oil others with kerosene. On the back-end of the tanks, there are spigots from which metal drums are being filled. When a drum's tilled and then sealed shut with a soldering iron, someone rolls it off down the street. As the drum rolls, it makes a thumping thunder-like noise. In one place, just outside a shop front, a sack of salt is broken open and a man weighs out a large quantity of it on a set of six foot high scales. In another place, the same process occurs with red chilies. All this time, men with heavy burlap bags on their backs try to make their way between parked trucks and walking people. The temperature's 101 degrees. Someone cuts open a sack of flour, a white dry powder floats in the air like visible heat. You look around and you think to yourself: in a place like this, a quart of sweat should sell for a thousand rupees But no it doesn't. According to the lean-faced accountant in the wholesale gram shop, "Some people are born to be pack animals mules. 

        Born to be. A familiar phrase. A cheap rationale.

        1 
        Always, there has been a strange semi-mythological quality to the United States' relationship to India. From the first exploratory European contact with the North American continent, the "discovery" of that continent was linked to a search for a western route to materially rich, exotic India. The discovery of the so-called New World was the furthest thing from Columbus' mind:

                    Out of nowhere 
                    over the calm sunlit waters 
                    the Santa Maria came 
                    looking 
                    for India, 
                    gold 
                    & by mistake it bumped 
                    against 
                    a gigantic rock 
                    an accidental continent 
                    a steppingstone 
                    to dreamland. 

        As a matter of fact, when Columbus first landed in the Americas he thought he'd found the oriental location of the place the Bible referred to as Ophir, from which the Queen of Sheba brought the gold, almug trees, and jewels she presented to Solomon, king of the Jews. 
        
        Columbus's search for the orient's material wealth was the basis for a later western myth in which India was seen as a source of "spiritual" wealth. This myth grew up slowly but regularly over the centuries. In this myth, India's material wealth—spices, grains, textiles—became, not an end in itself, but an analogy for the transcendental riches it was hoped would be found there, in this the supposedly most metaphysical of all countries. This transformation—from a search for material wealth to a search for spiritual wealth—was limited, of course, to the myth. In the real world of cross-cultural interactions, as part of a process of colonialization, India's natural resources were plundered and its population reduced to a nation of slave-laborers. 
        
        A good example of the emergence of the myth of India's spiritual riches can be found in Emerson, the 19th century U.S. essayist. 
        
        For Emerson, Indian thinking was associated with purely mental liberation. For him, Hindu philosophy was "as sublime as heat and night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics visit in turn each noble and poetic mind." 
        
        Here, Hindu philosophy, which supposedly represents a certain perfection of thought, is compared to a still, hot, windless night, to the immense silences of ocean and space. What's interesting about this description is that there's nothing human in it. Mere humanity is drowned out in the vastnesses of Eternal Thought; mind seems to have split off from body and become free, having entered a zone of pure thinking. With the naive confidence of a man half a planet away, Emerson said, "The orient has always tended to this (metaphysical) largeness." But while Emerson was writing such descriptions of what he considered to be the definitive nature of Indian thinking throughout the ages, the Indian economy, as a result of being colonialized, was undergoing gigantic upheavals. India's manufacturing industries based on handicraft production were destroyed, and the subcontinent was transformed from a net exporter of its own goods to a net importer of foreign goods, as well as being converted into a supplier of raw materials for British industry. Yet Emerson, unsnagging himself from the rocks of history and floating like a balloon into the sky, could say, "The East is grand and makes Europe seem like the land of trifles." It goes without saying that the this-world realism of much Indian thinking, that part of Indian philosophy which is unesoteric and down-to-earth, was totally ignored by Emerson. Lines from the Upanishads like: 

                    If, when looking at this, you see that, 
                    And if, when looking at that, you see this, 
                    Then 
                    You will never be saved 
                    went unmentioned. 

        As did bold statements like this, from the13th-century South Indian woman poet, Adyakki Lakkamma: 

                    Is it charity 
                    when devotees hand out food 
                    supposedly for free 
                    but get a profit 
                    and then say 
                    this is their duty? 

        Such statements were ignored by Emerson because his relationship to the subcontinent was basically a colonialistic one; he scanned he history of Indian thinking opportunistically, merely to find verification for his own philosophical preconceptions. Just as the colonializing nation objectifies the colonialized nation by reducing it to a "thing" that can be used for the self-aggrandizement of the home country, so the liberal, supposedly sympathetic western philosopher reduces the colonialized's philosophy to a "thing" that can be exploited along the lines of his/her own cultural biases and needs. This was Emerson's situation. In other words, subcontinent philosophy was there for him to do with as he willed, for him to decide what was and what wasn't worthwhile in it. This typifies the colonializing philosopher's power, his "freedom." In the instance at hand, India was nothing more than an intellectual trinket, or a sort of pill for stimulating fantastic dreams, for the man who has been referred to as the seer of Concord. Whether intentionally or not, Emerson's emphasis on Hindu meta- physics, at the expense of all other Indian social relations, indirectly supported a picture of India as a continent filled with thin-chested men sitting in the lotus position and chanting the single word "Om." One of the consequences of this was that Emerson created an image of the subcontinent that fitted neatly into the western worldview of his time: that the orient was inhabited by lethargic other-worldly populations incapable of entering the modern world without guidance. 



        2 
        Over the years, the West's preoccupation with India's apparent psychological remoteness from western modes of existence has resulted in some predictably distorted (and self-serving) views. One such view -- that exemplified, in part, by Emerson -- pits the empirical West against the spiritual, subjective east. The special form this attitude has taken m the U.S. is that the U.S., pinnacle of western empirical/technological development, is the counter-image of India, the metaphysical continent par excellence with a population prone to meditativeness and quests for transcendence. Coming from North American, where some of the prime exponents of Indian culture are western-born Hari Krishna devotees who baldheadedly parade the streets in saffron robes, it should be easy to understand how widespread this myth is in the popular imagination. 
        
        In order to understand the implications of such attitudes it's necessary to view them historically, in the context of their original cultural/political development. In an essay by the historian RomilaThapur, precisely this problem is dealt with. 
        
        Increasingly trade contacts between Europe and Asia from the fifteenth century led to a gradual interest on he^art of various European scholars and missionaries in the culture of Asia. In the case of India the micros began with a study of languages, particularly Sanscrit and Persian. These studies gained momentum at the end of the eighteenth century with the founding of the ^loyal Asiatic Society and the systematic recording of work on what was regarded as the classical tradition of India. Most of the work was done by scholars who came o be called Indologists. Those of them who studied Sanscrit became great enthusiasts of the culture of the Aryan speaking peoples. 
        
        The basic point is that increasing economic contact with the subcontinent created the material basis for an acceleration of western interest in Indian culture. Scholars rather than merchants oversaw this part of the West-East confrontation. The question is: what were the historical motives that involved these Orientalists in the methodical distortion of Indian culture? A primary reason was that many of the Orientalists were persons who were alienated from their own society and were extremely suspicious of the historical changes which Europe was undergoing, particularly as a result of industrialization. Thus they searched for Utopias elsewhere, and for many these lay in the ancient cultures of the Orient. 
        
        The fact that many Indologists operated at least partially out of a strong feeling of alienation from their own society explains the element of mystification in their approach to the subcontinent. But it didn't stop there. The interpretation of India that glorified its past — the so-called anciency of its wisdom -- didn't remain a harmless plaything in the hands of academic intellectuals. It resulted in the build-up of a set of assumptions about the Indian population that were to become an integral part of the colonial rationalization for occupying India. 
        
        The implicit faith in the spirituality of Indian culture is one such assumption. The theory that Indians were always concerned with metaphysics and philosophical speculation and not with the mundane things of everyday living has now become an accepted idea. 
        
        One can immediately see the practical usefulness (for the colonializing power) of such an attitude. In the western vision concrete realities like Indian industrial underdevelopment could be conveniently attributed to the transcendental and otherworldly psychological bias of the population. The logical conclusion was that down-to-earth western pragmatism was the missing ingredient on the subcontinent, the potential catalyst for "full" development. The West was only too willing to offer what it had, to help out, to provide a pragmatic guiding light. In this way colonialism was rationalized, transformed in the western mind from an exploitive act into an act of pure generosity. 
        
        But the idea of Indian spirituality wasn't just used in the West to rationalize colonialism. It was also used in India to facilitate the development of a colonial consciousness in the people, especially those of the educated sectors. The myth that Indians were prone to metaphysics and philosophical speculation was propounded by apparently disinterested western ideologues, who secretly believed this might be an effective way of keeping the minds of Indians away from such mundane but essential things as...freedom from foreign rule. The notion was eagerly taken up by Indian scholars who found in it an ideal counterpoise to their humiliation at being subservient to a foreign power. 
        
        In this way, one aspect -- the ideological aspect -- of the colonialization process was brought to fruition. It was forgotten that 

        Indian culture did not have a monopoly on spiritual content. The same characteristics as are associated with Indian spirituality can be found in many other ancient cultures and are frequently recognizable in traditional societies. Not surprisingly, the ancient Indians never saw themselves as more spiritual than their neighbors in adjoining or far-away lands. Nor did visitors from other equally significant cultures, such as the Greeks, the Chinese and the Arabs notice any markedly distinctive spiritual characteristics. 



        3 
        The attitudes we've discussed so far in this section aren t, of course, without their modern parallels. 
        
        The 1960s were a momentous time in the U.;?., characterized by social and psychological upheavals. One aspect of this was that India was rediscovered by masses of North Americans It was as if the Santa Maria had finally sailed into the Bay of Bengal its crew on their knees, sniffing flowers and dropping acid and proclaiming the discovery of new zones of consciousness. 
        
        It the beginning of the 60s, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were setting the tone of a "new" emergent culture with statements like: 
        
        We have become more aware of the undiscovered universe within, of the unchartered regions of consciousness... but what are the stimuli necessary and sufficient...to open up the "potential forms of consciousness?" There are many. Indian philosophers have described hundreds of ways. 
                
        Certain parts of the counterculture, searching for methods of liberating themselves from the overly materialistic consumer-oriented U.S. society, made India their own. Indian music, yoga, the Bhagavad Gita, imported gurus, all were essential ingredients of this new movement. Somehow the idea of the lone saddhu (an Indian holy man) wandering in search of spiritual enlightenment got fused with a western prototype: the hip, footloose drifter. For many of the wandering disenchanted, India became a symbol of an alternative way of life, of transcendence. Some actually circled the world and went to the subcontinent, to study music or meditation or just to get close to "something ancient that we've lost in the west." For many others who didn't leave the U.S., the journey still occurred, but in an inner psychological way. India symbolized freedom, escape. 
        
        In the 60s, the McCarthy-era lobotomization of U.S. consciousness ended. Repressed dissent surfaced, and for many of the young it seemed as if the raw gut of life in the U.S. was being exposed for the first time. Many developed a vision of the U.S. as a bizarre futuristic nightmare, as, in the words of Alien Ginsberg, "a sphinx of cement and aluminum that bashed open their skulls and ate their brains and imagination." In this context, the reason for fascination with India was clear: culturally it still contained many elements that were pre-modern and pre-technological. Third World underdevelopment had romantic precedence over western overdevelopment. The feeling ran high that there was nowhere to go in the States, no way to be free. Moving outward from the inner cities you entered the ugly industrial fringes of the major metropolitan centers, and beyond that, there was suburbia...and the quickest way out of suburbia was nirvana. In a strange way, for many of the young time and history had become something to be "overcome." In the words of the poet Gary Snyder: 
        
                    Arms shielding my face 
                    Knees drawn up 
                    Falling through flicker 
                    Of womb after womb, 
                    through worlds, 
                    Only begging, Mother 
                    must I be born again? 
        
        But the flower children weren't just foolish rejecters of U.S. society. They were a sociological phenomenon born out of a major disturbance in the national consciousness. The U.S. was supposedly the most technologically advanced and economically able country in the world, yet what this meant in fact was that people were reduced to the daily performance of alienating and tedious tasks. In the factory and in the office it was becoming increasingly impossible to have any kind of meaningful relation-ship to one's work. Related to this was the additional factor that human value was determined by property ownership and its adjunct, the capacity to consume. What's more, the fairly high rate of employment during the 60s was a direct result of the well-groomed war industry; involvement in Vietnam was the pin holding together the disintegrating cloth of the U.S. economy. On top of this, it was obvious that large "umbers of Third World people in the U.S. suffered a form of domestic colonialization analogous to what was being done to their counterparts in underdeveloped nations, where whole populations were exploited as cheap labor by U.S. multinationals and as markets for surplus U.S. goods. And in the background there was always the gothic music of napalm canisters exploding in Vietnam. There was nothing in all this to excite young people to patriotism, to stimulate any blind "yeses" to the indigenous culture. 
        
        One consequence of these material conditions was the flourishing of a rebellious romanticism that signified the need to transcend the "fallen" capitalist world. Young people were in search of something pure, uncontaminated: a new innocence. One of the options was far flight, either into the inner worlds of the spirit, or outward into exotic cultures and rituals....This was the background against which the old distorted picture of India reemerged, ripe for new exploitation. 
        
        Underdeveloped and with still tangible traces of a culture that flowed back thousands of years into the remote primitive past, India became, in the hands of certain sections of the counterculture, the perfect medicine for white western alienation, for this feeling of being imprisoned in this awful stone moment/in the streams/of change." Obsession with India was a baroque occurrence that could only have happened in a capitalist country (where everything, at one time or another, is trans- formed into a commodity) during a period of major disillusionment To the dispossessed, India represented a less complex, more colorful, more stable world. India became pure "idea," a compulsive thought stuck in the mind of a generation that felt itself on the brink of either extinction or liberation. India: where women wore jasmine in their hair, where coconuts were broken open before gods, where goats and water buffalo roamed the streets, where there was a still-living tradition of herbal medicine that appealed to the need of young westerners to "return to the natural, to the things of the earth." 
        
        But just as important as these things, there was also a prevalent Indian philosophy (popularized by western writers who hadn't tried to grasp the dialectical relationship between Indian thinking and Indian social relations) that said the world was may a, illusion. True freedom resided in the interior struggle to free oneself from ego-domination, and in so doing to penetrate the world of illusion in which everything appeared isolated from everything else and to discover instead the mystical interconnectedness of everything. For people unwilling to accept any of the existing political revolutionary traditions, such a philosophy seemed to offer the only possibility of release from insecurity, anxiety. The word revolution changed meanings; it came to mean inner psychic transformation, rather than social transformation. And so, a pseudo-Indian vision of consciousness became god. Each individual was seen as the potential incarnation of the ultimate cosmic power: pure mind. But the new notion of transcendence also included the idea of fidelity to the earth, to nature. This aspect of transcendence was articulated in the philosophy of flower-power, which was conceived of as a spiritual getting-back-to-the-earth power. The new philosophy was depicted as a sort of fist, smelling of lilies, in the face of U.S. capitalism. It had the quality of being different and invigorating. 
        
        Or so those promoting the new attitudes liked to think. 
        
        But beneath the surface of this modern, supposedly open-to-life primitivism, there were specific neocolonialistic thought and behavior patterns. Theoretically, the counterculture represented a rejection of U.S. capitalism/imperialism. For instance, Standard Oil of Indiana's holding up (through government influence in the 60s) of food shipments to India during a time of famine and mass starvation, as a way of coercing the Indian government to open its doors to Standard Oil's economic expansion on the subcontinent, was typical of the kind of economic aggression the counterculture repudiated as inhumane. But on the other hand. the counterculture was inadequate in detecting within itself a more subtle, though still concretely neocolonialistic, attitude. Having discarded the factual India of actual social relations, it had created instead a fantasy India, based on the old western myth that the Indian people were metaphysical and non-empirical. This exotic package was developed and marketed as the supreme escape valve. One can see Emerson here lurking in the shadows, smiling and pointing the way to: LIBERATION. 
        
        Those involved in India-obsession displayed, on the whole, a self-protecting innocence with regard to their actions. It was as if they'd gouged out their eyes with lotus stems. A secret Utopian assumption that young white U.S. citizens could "become Indian in the same way that one could become an engineer or schoolteacher indicated the culturally schizophrenic nature of this modern East-West confrontation. People simply didn't grasp the symbolic significance of what they were doing. For instance, in the 60s, studying yoga became a mass fad because physical discipline and meditation were perceived as necessary aspects of the process of simplifying, even dewesternizing, the self. But implicit in a westerner's studying yoga is a rejection of one's own cultural background, whereas, for an Indian, studying yoga is an act of becoming connected to her/his cultural-religious roots This difference, of course, makes them fundamentally distinct and nonequivalent experiences. Another example of the kind of confusion that characterized the new relationship between West and East was that for those who went to India on some sort of spiritual quest, the freedom to travel half way around the world to satisfy a fantasy—one of the advantages of being brought up at the center of an economic empire—wasn’t scrutinized in terms of its being a privilege that inevitably (if ignored) contaminated one's relationship to the very society one wanted to experience. 
        
        In summation, it can be said that such cross-cultural escapades were limited precisely where they should have been strongest: the counterculture couldn't comprehend how ; nothing "Indian" was being done at all, whereas something quite "North American" was. Such innocence, of course, was actually the mask behind which hid the power of international class privilege. 
        
        To the extent that India has come to represent an exotic place of self-discovery for westerners, it is being treated neocolonialistically. India is still there to satisfy the needs of westerners; its doors are expected to remain open so that each western whim can enter undisturbed. In this countercultural neocolonialism, India's reality is determined by western fantasy. The actual India—a semi-feudal, semi-capitalist country in which workers, both urban and agrarian, are oppressed by a ruling elite—is entirely left out. Union struggles, women's demonstrations against high prices, bands of guerrillas fighting in the countryside to expropriate land from the largest landlords—all these are missing. What we have instead is a series of images ripped out of context: a swami sitting crosslegged on a straw mat, an Indian god with flowers in his hair, lyrical-looking women carrying water-vessels on their heads, etc. The raw materials being plundered in this narrow picture of the subcontinent are no longer material but "spiritual." 
        
        This is the children's version of the older generation's more blunt form of economic aggression.

        The colonial myth of Indian spirituality has persisted into the present era in many different forms, some of which we've already seen. Another example of such persistence is that, according to certain contemporary historians and India-watchers, India's most ancient traditions have put on a modern face, and transcended the materialism of the West, in Mohandas Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence. If we accept this vision— that Gandhian nonviolence was an organic outgrowth of India's finest centuries-old traditions, and that Gandhi's genius lay in his ability to organize a mass anti-imperialist movement on the basis of an indigenous spiritual world-vision as opposed to a western materialist one—then we will be compelled to accept the possibility that India is somehow unique among modern nations. Such a view, if adopted, would have some significant consequences: for instance, that social change, if it comes to India, is likely to be initiated by some gentle-eyed guru type rather than, as we have increasingly seen happening in various Third World countries, through militant alliances between peasants and workers. 

        In reality, however, there's no historical basis for accepting the notion that Gandhi's politics were either uniquely pure or especially successful. 

        The fact is that Gandhi's vision was, from the beginning, a limited one. It would be unhistorical to suggest that people accepted his leadership because they felt a deep cultural attachment to his notions of nonviolence. There were many other, just as important, reasons. The most dramatic of these was his famous willingness, after winning people's trust, to employ a unique form of psychological blackmail in order to diminish resistance to his leadership. He would throw in the face of those who challenged him a threat to fast until death unless his organizational and philosophical directives were adhered to. Such tactics reveal a fundamental flaw in that perspective on Gandhian nonviolence which claims that, as an organizing tool, it was a highly egalitarian process. In reality, Gandhi's vision was basically authoritarian: it was always expressed as a power "over the people" as opposed to springing from them and taking direction from them. 

        This is precisely why the period of Gandhi's leadership was so dramatic. Not only was he struggling against British rule, he was also struggling against his own people, using every device at his disposal to get them to accept his version of the meaning of freedom. So, on occasions when the nationalist movement erupted spontaneously into truly revolutionary forms—for instance, the setting up of a people's "parallel government" in Satara district in 1942—he did everything within his power to crush such militancy. Behind all his talk about truth with a capital T, there was a glaring disrespect for the people's — the peasants' and workers' — vision of what form the Independence movement should take. There's no doubt that Gandhi pictured himself as the nationalist movement's spiritual center, as a sort of transcendent ego whose job it was to control the masses, who were like a continually upsurging and undisciplined id. 

        Such arrogance had serious political side-effects. A close-up view of these side-effects can be garnered by examining the way in which Gandhi handled a labor dispute in Ahmedebad in 1918. 

        The source of the Ahmedebad labor troubles was a disagreement between millhands and millowners over a wage increase. In the ensuing struggle, Gandhi intervened on behalf of the workers, assisting them in their efforts to get a 35 wage raise. But Gandhi demanded payment for his participation: the exploited must submit to his moral authority. His view, therefore, on how the battle against the owners should be fought,' would have to prevail. One of the consequences of this was that at the beginning of the conflict, Gandhi insisted the workers put aside their militancy and instead trust in an arbitration process. Those arbitrating on their behalf with the owners would be Shankerlal Banker, an upper-class disciple of Gandhi's, a local lawyer named Patil, and Gandhi, also a lawyer (a fact sometimes obscured by those who romanticize him). It isn't surprising that the workers, feeling to different degrees alienated from these procedures, went on strike against Gandhi's counsel. Gandhi, who was out of town at the time, immediately returned and, according to one report, "scolded the workers" and "apologized to the owners." Gandhi was too late, however; the strike had been turned into a lock-out. The owners wouldn't budge. 

        To Gandhi, there was nothing contradictory in his patronizing attitude toward the workers. It was part of his policy of bringing "no harm to either party in a dispute." In his vision, the workers' going on strike had been an act of premature aggression against the owners. As such, it wasn't to be tolerated. His goal was to impose on the workers' class anger, as a sort of restraining force, a highly abstract concept of justice. This concept included the notion that even if capital was guilty of exploiting labor, this didn't give workers the right to "unfairly" take advantage of their employers. Gandhi's puritanism never failed to flinch when confronted with the kinds of sudden anger-bursts that inevitably accompany serious class conflict. 

        Given this, it isn't difficult to see how Gandhi must have appeared in a confusing light to many of these millhands, as when, for instance, he offered to personally escort scabs into the mills if the occasion arose. To say the least, what Gandhi required of the workers was severe: that, in the middle of their labor struggle, they put aside their "lower worldly" instincts and submit themselves to the "highest" principles of justice. Any tendency on their part toward action of a so-called lower nature had to be in Gandhi view curtailed by the spiritually advanced leadership. This was in keeping with his practice of continually transforming questions of social struggle into questions of personal spiritual struggle ("What I want to achieve—what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years-is self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain Moksha.") For Gandhi, the world was merely a testing ground, the religious arena in which the individual quested for transcendence. Even collective social struggle drew its basic meaning from the fact that it was a useful discipline for facilitating individual spiritual growth. 

        Gandhi applied this perspective to the owners as well as to the workers. He felt the owners' major problem wasn t inherent in the inordinate power they held over their workers, but rather had to do with the fact that they had abdicated their socially ordained responsibilities towards those workers -- i.e., . to guide them, to set a good example, to be fair with them, etc. Gandhi believed the owners could be converted to the right path without jeopardizing the paternalistic structure of their relationship to heir employees. It was a question of getting them to understand their karma, their pre-ordained role in life, As one student of Gandhi's thinking has pointed out: "Gandhi affirmed not only that it was not possible to abolish class distinctions but also that it was not desirable to do so....According to his interpretation o trusteeship-wealth belonged to society as a whole, and it just happened that some persons were in charge of the use of that wealth for the whole society -- i.e., they were trustees. 

        The fact that Gandhi accepted such a vision is key to understanding his own self-view as an activist: he was the instrument of moral edification for all the Indian classes. The problem wasn't between this class and that class, but was rather a question of an individual moral sluggishness, on the part of many people from different classes, that had to be overcome. He would be the match that would ignite the dried firewood of future redemption in the hearts of the people. 

        All this was evident at Ahmedebad. On the one hand, Gandhi was persistently trying to persuade the millowners (some of whom were his personal friends) to be more generous when it came to setting wage scales. When simple discussion proved unsuccessful, his methods of persuasion became more militant; he got the workers to take a pledge that they wouldn't return to work, under any circumstances, until a 35 percent wage increase was established. But this didn't mean Gandhi's allegiance was onesidedly in favor of the workers. In a series of pamphlets issued by Gandhi during the dispute, the top-down, leader-led nature of his relationship to the millhands was amply revealed, as was the fact that the workers were under an obligation to prove themselves "worthy" if they wanted him and his people to keep defending their rights. 

        The pamphlets contained moral instructions that ranged from advising the workers "to harbor no grudge" against the owners to telling them that one of the goals of their leaders was to raise their (the workers') "moral level." They were also told that because the leaders had an impartial, objective interest in justice for everyone, they (the leaders) would put the full weight of their support behind the owners if it ever came to be shown that the workers were failing to fulfill their obligations to their employers. In other words, Gandhi's task as he saw it was to lead everyone, workers and owners alike, through the forge of self- purification. It's not surprising that as time dragged on and the dispute wasn't resolved, the workers, for the most part feeling themselves reduced to passive observers of their own struggle, began to lose interest and started giving expression to their desire to go back to work, even without the wage increase. 

        But for Gandhi such an option was inconceivable, since the workers' pledge not to return to work until their grievances were satisfied had, for him, a sort of religious sanctity. So, faced with the millhands' growing dissent, Gandhi resorted to his talent for historical drama to see him through the critical situation and to insure that his vision of how it should all end would triumph. He told the workers: "I cannot tolerate for a minute that you break your pledge. I shall not take any food, nor use a car till you get 35 percent increase or all of you die fighting for it." His response, then, to the workers' disaffection was a fast to the death. His life was now on the line. This had a double effect. On the one hand, by setting a radical example for the workers, he compelled them to step back in line. After all, if he died it would somehow be their responsibility, since he was putting his life on the chopping-block for their sakes. On the other hand, he was exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on the millowners, since they had a personal stake in his survival: some of them were his personal friends. 

        Eventually, in the course of the drama of Gandhi's fast, a compromise was reached and the dispute resolved. It is interesting to see how, on the day the lock-out ended, Gandhi, in giving a speech to the millhands, used the example of their pledge-taking as a way of driving home the point that they, the workers, were for all practical purposes spiritually undernourished and were therefore in need of further guidance until such a time as they achieved full spiritual maturity. He said: 

                                             After twenty years' experience, I have come to the conclusion that I am 

                                             You have yet to learn how and when to take a pledge. 

        This is the fully ripened patriarchal Gandhi, with his vision of the masses as a sort of vast childlike mob to be pitied and given a helping hand. And in the final analysis, only his hand would do. 

        Ahmedebad, however, was only one situation. We have to go further to get a fuller, more complete picture of Gandhi's social/political role as a key figure within the Independence movement. 

        Gandhi's great effectiveness as a nationalist leader grew out of his capacity, even though he was at best an unorthodox Hindu, to fit into the traditional role of the guru, or spiritual leader, by recreating that role in his own image. By dewesternizing himself and by apparently stripping himself of class affiliation and choosing a life of simplicity and renunciation, he seemed, from the perspective of a significant portion of the population, obviously different from many of the other Congress leaders And as a proselytizer for Truth—as someone whose chosen path was to stand above factional interest -- his difference from other leaders was all too easily described at the popular level as the difference between saint and worldly politicians. The fact that Gandhi was seen as the "Mahatma" (although he himself didn't choose the term -- a great spiritual person -- proved in the long run to be immensely valuable to the Congress Party, which was to emerge as the crucial political formation within the Independence movement. 

        In order to understand Gandhi's value to the Congress Party, it's first necessary to recognize that, up until his appearance as a major nationalist leader, the mass base of the Congress-led self-determination movement was extremely limited. A large majority of people were suspicious of, even disinterested in, a movement controlled by the country's elite. What did the lower castes and classes have in common with rich people's attempts to wrestle a certain amount of power from the British? 

        Gandhi helped change all this. As his national stature grew, he became a sort of popular symbol, a living guarantee, of the class-impartiality and democratic nature of the nationalist movement. As the conscience of that movement, the feeling went, he could be relied upon to steer it in the right direction if it veered off course. Subsequently, Gandhi's major political role -- regardless of whatever broader intentions he might have had -- was to mobilize people under the bourgeois-dominated Congress Party. By stubbornly persisting in the notion that the interests of the different classes were ultimately harmonious, and by accepting the contingent belief that if class conflict did arise he, as the conscience of the movement, would be able to singlehandedly diminish its negative effects, Gandhi became the efficient tool of a particular class: the bourgeoisie. 

        We can take Gandhi's position on the untouchables as an example of how, even when fighting in behalf of the oppressed against the Congress Party leadership, he was—although he achieved limited dramatic gains—incapable of laying the social and political groundwork that would have insured effective elimination of oppression. To the extent that Gandhi's failure in this area is traceable to his own peculiar brand of willful romanticism, we have to acknowledge this failure as a representative weakness of his vision. 

        The name "Harijans" that Gandhi imposed on the untouchables is illustrative of his tendency to idealize reality in a socially dangerous way. Harijan means "children of God, and as such the name suggests something specific about the nature of the people being referred to: that, in terms of human development, they are pre-adolescent, helpless, innocent in the romantic sense of being purer and more immune to evil than "experienced" adults. Gandhi's choice of terms wasn't arbitrary; as we have seen before, he saw the lower classes as children in need of guidance from an intelligent father. 

        In relation to the untouchable question, Gandhi s self-chosen position was once more that of being everyone s moral instructor. On the one hand. the childlikeness of the untouchables required that they be raised up or spiritually elevated into mature "experimenters with Truth; like Gandhi. In this situation, of course, Gandhi was to be the advisor the untouchables the followers. On the other hand, there was the problem of the Congress Party leadership, upper caste and primarily from property-owning backgrounds. Gandhi's role in relation to these people, as he saw it, was to persuade them that they weren't adequately sensitized to the plight of the untouchables, or, by extension to their own moral responsibility to take pity on, and offer a helping hand to, those historically less fortunate than they. 

        Inevitably his approach down-played the economic or class nature of the relationship between non-caste untouchables and the different castes that made up the rest of the population. Although the untouchables had been legally liberated from slavery in the mid-19th century, in reality this liberation meant little more than a transition from being serfs bound to particular masters to being low-paid discriminated-against (but "free") agricultural laborers. Those who weren’t field laborers remained anchored from generation to generation to particular hereditary tasks like cleaning cremation sites or making leather from the skins of dead animals. the skins of dead animals. The point is that they were allotted those jobs that, although socially necessary, were perceived to be the most menial and debasing. In other words, the untouchables were the sediment, the rock-bottom laboring base of society. What Gandhi failed to perceive was that to effectively release the untouchables from such bondage would require a radical curtailment of the power of the dominant classes, who were in fact the greatest beneficiaries of Indian society's hierarchical structure. What Gandhi substituted for actual social revolution, however, was the idea that people, both at the top and at the bottom of society, could be changed through a consciousness- raising process akin to religious conversion. 

        But converting people wasn't easy. On the one hand, Gandhi was confronted with those sections of the population who resisted any tampering whatsoever with the existing social structure. On the other hand, he had to deal with radical untouchables who were far more progressive than he was and who demanded the abolition of the whole caste system from top to bottom, a position too revolutionary for Gandhi. In response to this situation, he attempted to steer what at first appeared to be a reasonable compromise course. As time passed, however, it became clear that this compromise process had a serious restraining effect on the untouchable movement as a whole. 

        One writer, Gail Omvedt, in an article entitled "Gandhi and the Pacification of the Indian National Revolution," shows how Gandhi, in working out his position on untouchability, devoted a good deal of his time to rebutting lower-caste attacks on the caste system. Her aim is to put into perspective the generally-held view that Gandhi was an undeviating supporter of full rights for untouchables. She makes it clear the facts are contrary to such a vision. Where leadership sprang from the ranks of the untouchables themselves, Gandhi resisted it; he was terrified that if the radical goals of militant leaders like Ambedkar were realized, it would have too upsetting an impact on society as a whole. 

        Once again we are exposed here to Gandhi's patriarchal dimension. He viewed the untouchables as ignorant children, helpless, in need of guidance; their projected solutions to the inequities of the caste system were too daredevilish and irresponsible; only his solutions made sense. Although he acknowledged that the caste system was corrupt, he maintained it could be reinvigorated. Omvedt shows how in Gandhi's struggle against the oppressiveness of untouchability, he didn't argue for the abolition of the caste system per se, but rather demanded that the untouchables—who, according to Hindu ideology, were so low that they were outside of or "below" the caste system itself—should be absorbed into the lowest castes, j among those "who were the masses working for the elite." She then goes on to say what should be obvious, that "for Untouchables who were already involved in movements demanding/a// human rights" Gandhi's position was at best "an evasion." 

        Omvedt also gives another example of Gandhi's contra- dictions with regard to the untouchable issue. In this instance, the problem at hand was how the untouchables would be integrated into the electoral system. The untouchable leader Ambedkar, representing the opinion of the untouchable community, had one opinion. Gandhi, predictably, had another. 

        Ambedkar...was Gandhi's antagonist in his (Gandhi's) major fast over the question of untouchability. This was undertaken in opposition to the decision of the government of India to give a separate electorate to Untouchables, i.e., certain seats would be reserved to them in the legislatures and only Untouchables would vote for their representatives. Gandhi saw this as a major attack on the "unity" of the Hindu community and threatened to fast to death in opposition. While this fast took on the connotation of urging caste Hindus to reform their ideas regarding untouchability (and its compromise was later seen as radical by the orthodox), in fact it was primarily against the Untouchables' demand for separate electorates and primarily against their acknowledged political spokesman, Ambedkar.... 

        Pressure on Ambedkar to compromise was intense. For all the moral aura surrounding satyagraha techniques, which urged that they should win the freely given agreement of opponents, moral blackmail was in fact the primary aspect of this fast-to-death by Gandhi. Ambedkar was well aware of the existence of Untouchables isolated and powerless in villages throughout India and of the fury that would be unleashed against them if Gandhi died. He capitulated; a compromise was reached...which gave the Untouchables an in- creased number of seats but allowed caste Hindus as well to vote for Untouchable representatives-and given the numerical superiority of caste Hindus and the wealth and organization of the Congress, this meant that Untouchables favorable to Congress have invariably been elected. 

        To say the least, this isn't the typical way that Gandhi's influence is portrayed by his followers. Gandhi, demystified and naked in the raw spotlight of history, is definitely different from the slightly blurry and saintly image of popular legend. 

        Gandhi was powerful. Yet we have to remember that his embrace didn t completely engulf the Independence movement Throughout the period of the nationalist struggle, there were incidents that shattered the fabric of Gandhian nonviolence, revealing the massive and radical nature of the Indian people’s discontent. In the post-Independence period, these indents have frequently been depicted as unfortunate deviations from the generally high moral caliber of the freedom struggle. A better way to look at these incidents, though, is to see them as symbolizing the great difficulty that the dominant classes :ho provided the official leadership of the nationalist movement had in trying to contain the radical emotions of the people who' formed the foundation, the substratum, of that movement. Such a perspective will also enable us to see Gandhi more clearly, since it’s an important aspect of his historical position that, at the edges of his moral authority, there were occurrences that implicitly denied the legitimacy of that authority 

        Here are some cases in point. When Sarvar Bharat Singh, on 8 April 1929, threw a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi, his act immediately became for many Indians a popular symbol of their willingness, if necessary, to fight fire with fire. Similarly, when in order to finance a bomb factory they were planning to build, militant nationalists boarded a train on the Lucknow-Saharanpur line and stole a government strongbox containing 5000 rupees, it was a sign of a growing consciousness within India that verbal negotiations and "gentlemanly" behavior weren't going to suffice if the freedom movement was going to mature into a full-scale, nation-wide, anti-imperialist movement. 

        But it wasn't just in militant acts like these, sponsored as they were by revolutionary groups that differed ideologically from the Congress leadership, that the precarious hold of the Congress leaders on the masses of people was displayed. Often the Congress itself was in the position of inadvertently bringing into being, or uncovering, depths of discontent among the people that it felt intimidated by. 

        One example of this is the mass non-cooperation movement which, under Gandhi's guidance, was launched by the Congress in 1930 and lasted until 1934. According to Gandhi, the ideological axle of the movement was to be passive resistance; the population, from one end of the country to the other, would simply refuse to cooperate with the British authorities. Such nonviolent resistance, it was thought, would throw a great wrench into the vulnerable machinery of British power. But the reality turned out to be significantly different from the aspiration. 

        As the mass movement consolidated itself and people began to feel their collective power, they often stepped beyond the limits set for them by their leadership. For instance, In Sholapur key sections of the population (especially the city's textile workers, who played a leading role) came together and effectively dissolved the power of the local British administration and, for a few days, took control of the city. Or again: in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India, the peasants, who had launched a radical no-rent campaign, provided a grassroots militant alternative to Gandhi's more benign conception of noncooperation. With such a sprawl of unrest spilling across the subcontinent, in the end Gandhi was forced to call off the mass movement that he himself had launched. He bemoaned the fact that people were still not spiritually mature enough, that they were as yet inadequately prepared to assume the responsibilities of true nonviolence. Once again, in his eyes, the population had displayed their unworthiness, their underdevelopment. 

        Another example of the Congress's precarious hold on the population happened in Bombay in early 1946, on the very eve of Independence, when there occurred the most serious uprising of Indian military personnel in the British armed forces since the nation-shaking Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. 

        On 18 February 1946, seamen of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied on the ship Talwar, which was docked in the Bombay harbor. This was a coordinated anti-imperialist act directed at British colonial power within India. But what began as a revolt on a single ship soon mushroomed into something far larger and more paralyzing. First it spread to all the ships and flotillas within the harbor, bringing close to 20,000 seamen into the orbit of the revolt. When the British ordered Indian soldiers into the harbor to suppress the mutiny, the soldiers refused to open fire on their brother sailors. This added vital emotional fuel to the uprising. The feeling spread that if all Indians, on shore as well as in the harbor, refused to acknowledge British authority, their respective positions would be reversed and the Indians would usurp power. British troops were called in and ordered to attack the mutineering seamen; a pitched battle was fought but its result was inconclusive. Only one thing was certain: the Royal Indian Navy seamen hadn't yet been defeated. 

        The British finally responded to the crisis by threatening a full-scale massacre. On 21 February Admiral Godfrey issued a statement to the Indians in which he announced that if they didn't surrender immediately, he would orchestrate the annihilation of the whole Indian navy. Unfortunately for the British, rather than intimidating the Indian sailors the Admiral's proclamation had a reverse effect; it forced them to consciously step up their attempts to secure support from the whole Bombay population. People's response was immediate; a sympathetic general strike was called and Bombay, the "entranceway to India," was shut down for three days. Violent clashes occurred in the streets as British guns swung into action. In the final counting, somewhere between 200 and 300 Indians had been murdered as they persisted in their refusal to accept the dictates of the British. Yet, in spite of the dead, a feeling of freedom was in the air, a sense that the fight had, at last, begun. 

        By this time the rebellion had escalated to such a point that it represented a threat, not only to the British, but also to the official leaders of the nationalist movement, who were involved in trying to negotiate a "peaceful" way to get the British to depart from the subcontinent so the reins of power could smoothly pass into their own hands. But now there were dangerous signs that what was going on in Bombay was infectious. Indian air force personnel as far south as Bangalore announced their solidarity with the uprising in Bombay, and police in some major subcontinent cities were doing the same. The Congress leadership was concerned. They feared such spontaneous outbursts of mass anger because they knew only too well how these outbursts could swell into open class warfare, the lower classes pitted against the more privileged sectors. 

        Wary of what would happen if the Bombay rebellion went unchecked, the Congress leadership intervened with all the prestige at its disposal. National leaders encouraged the upsurging sailors to call off their mutiny, promising that they (the national leaders) would take up the seamen's grievances with the British. From this point on, both the British and the Congress leaders inaugurated a wholesale attempt to defuse and depoliticize the militant symbolism of the most violent incident of the Independence struggle. They stated unilaterally that the causes of the rebellion were minor and rectifiable, having to do only ^ with wage scales and living conditions on board ship. The high level of political consciousness that had emerged during the revolt, as exemplified by the alliance between the insurgent sailors and Bombay's working classes, was written out of the story. But even at the moment of surrender, the rebelling naval men insisted, through their coordinating committee, on the basic political nature of their mutiny and how this represented the Indian people's struggle for self-determination. "We surrender to India and not to the British," they said. 

        At the time, of course, the full irony of this statement wasn't realized: that even though they were bowing to the wishes of other Indians and not to he British authorities, it was still a surrender, a capitulation not just to the imperialists but also to the class interests represented by the Congress leadership. 

        After the mutiny had officially ended, street-rioting continued in Bombay for a number of days. People, although in a slightly chaotic and confused way, were expressing their unease at having to submit to the high-sounding language of the national leaders. They felt that something was wrong, that they were being misled.