A sympathy fast
December 3, 2023
This makes three fasting posts in a row, but that’s what Gandhi was doing in prison on this day. Today is also my third fast in two weeks; besides the 3-day fast for friendship, I observed a 3-day fast to remember Dorothy Day’s life, which ended November 29, 1980. And today, I’m commemorating Gandhi’s sympathy fast in December 1932.
It was a few months after the Epic Fast, in which Gandhi had successfully demanded Dalits—so-called untouchables—vote alongside the rest of the Hindus instead of being divided into a separate electorate. Gandhi had committed himself to the cause of abolishing the stain of untouchability, and when he heard it was not only being endorsed but enforced at a prison in Maharashtra to the south, he felt compelled to get involved.
The issue revolved around a prisoner, Appasaheb Patwardhan, who Gandhi described as “a great social reformer and a man of character whom any State would be proud to have as a citizen.”1 Patwardhan was similarly committed to equality among Hindus and demonstrated it by volunteering to work side-by-side with the Dalits he was imprisoned with. At some point in November, the prison superintendent banned him from doing so, assigning the sanitary work to Dalits and other low-caste prisoners.
Patwardhan objected, and put himself on a reduced diet in protest. When Gandhi heard about this, he wrote two letters to the superintendent requesting a reversal, and explaining he would begin a fast in solidarity with Patwardhan—not a mere reduction in diet—from his own jail cell if the matter was not reconsidered. Gandhi was told he would be allowed to do scavaging work if he desired, but nothing would change for Patwardhan. So he began his solidarity fast on the morning of December 3, 1932.
During the Epic Fast, all of India had been in a uproar, and the government wasn’t in any hurry to repeat the situation. On the morning of December 4, the superintentent asked for a few days to respond, and Gandhi suspended his fast, and similarly encouraged Patwardhan to end his reduced diet.
Gandhi threatened to resume his fast a couple of times, but in February, the British government announced high-caste prisoners would be permitted to volunteer for scavanging work. (Jail superintentendents still had discretion to veto it, however.) When the Associated Press asked him why it was so important to him, Gandhi explained he expected “high-caste men to render” all useful services, including “the most necessary service in the world.” He looked forward to the day when “we have ceased to consider it degrading … to do the necessary cleansing.”2
Appasaheb Patwardhan must have remained committed to his goal. In a footnote dated July 4, 1941, the editors of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi say he was “popularly known as the Gandhi of Maharashtra.”
Do you consider cleaning bathrooms to be “low caste” work?
Letter to E. E. Doyle (November 28, 1932)
Interview to Associated Press (February 13, 1933)