Taste of Life: The anatomy of a fast

Gandhi said the fast had brought him “indescribable peace within”. He rejected the idea that he had undertaken it simply to mortify his body

At noon on May 8, 1933, within Yerwada Central Jail, Mahatma Gandhi drank a glass of water with salt and soda, beginning a 21-day fast. Before nightfall, the colonial state ordered his release, fearing the consequences should the 63-year-old prisoner die in custody. Gandhi was taken to Parnakuti, the stone villa of Lady Premlila Vithaldas Thackersey. There, on an open terrace, Gandhi spent the next three weeks enduring the physical strain of what was perhaps his most misunderstood political method: the fast for self-purification (atmashuddhi).

Gandhi saw fasting as a way of cleansing politics and bringing it closer to his spiritual ideals. (HT FILE)

Gandhi saw fasting as a way of cleansing politics and bringing it closer to his spiritual ideals. Eight months earlier, in September 1932, his “fast unto death” against Ramsay MacDonald’s Communal Award had produced the Poona Pact, securing joint electorates with reserved seats for the Depressed Classes.

Soon after the Poona Pact, Gandhi warned the Hindu public that he would again undertake a fast if the anti-untouchability programme was not seriously adhered to.

Gandhi realised that many of the hopes raised by the euphoria surrounding his 1932 fast had not materialised.

The decision itself had come suddenly. On the night of April 28–29, Gandhi said, he was awakened by a voice that told him: “Thou must go on a fast.” When he asked how long, the answer was 21 days; when he asked when it should begin, the answer was “tomorrow”. He later said that he had struggled against the call before finally accepting it.

On May 2, 1933, he wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru, who was then incarcerated in Dehradun: “The Harijan movement is too big for mere intellectual effort. There is nothing so bad in all the world. My life would be a burden to me, if Hinduism failed to throw off this evil. And yet I cannot leave religion and therefore Hinduism... It is a personal matter between me and my Maker.”

Three days before beginning his penance, Gandhi wrote from Yerwada to explain what he meant by a fast for self-purification. He distinguished it from a political hunger strike, saying it was not meant to force either the government or the Sanatanists, but was an appeal to the highest in himself and his associates.

In “Harijan”, he further wrote: “The fast is an appeal to the heart of the caste Hindus. If it does not touch their hearts, it will mean that my penance was flawed, or that God wills that I must perish in the effort. But let no one fast mechanically in imitation of me. Fasting without a pure heart and without an imperative call from within is merely physical torture and an offence before God.”

An organisation representing members of the so-called “lower castes” had suggested that the fast was unnecessary because “Harijans did not need caste Hindus’ assistance”. Gandhi replied that “from its own standpoint, the Association is right”. In a public statement on May 8, he clarified that the fast was never meant to confer a favour upon Harijans, but to cleanse caste Hindus and their co-workers. (Gandhi, “Statement Explaining Object of Fast”, 8 May 1933, CWMG, Vol. 55)

Among secular nationalists, the fast caused ideological distress. In his jail diary, Nehru wrote: “I felt angry with him at his religious and priestly approach to this question, and his frequent references to God... Was this engine of mass action to be jerked around whenever his ‘inner voice’ decreed? And what would become of the national movement if he simply starved himself to death over an internal religious dispute?”

But Nehru sent Gandhi a conflicted, supportive wire to which Gandhi replied that political self-rule (Swaraj) could not be separated from the struggle against social tyranny: “No work of genuine national liberation can prosper if the foundations are rotten with social tyranny.”

At 12:15 pm on May 29, 1933, having completed 504 hours without food, Gandhi prepared to break his penance on Parnakuti’s upper veranda. Following recitations from the Upanishads, the Quran, and the singing of Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali hymn “When the heart is hard and parched up”, Gandhi addressed the gathering in a whisper: “I did not undertake this fast for any material gain, nor from any desire to exert pressure upon the government or my friends. I undertook it in obedience to a call which I could not resist. It was a search for purity. For 21 days, God has sustained this frail frame beyond all human expectations... The fast is over, but the work for which it was undertaken has only just begun. Until untouchability is wiped out from the face of Hinduism root and branch, there can be no rest for me, and no rest for any true Hindu.”

Gandhi then accepted diluted sweet lime juice from a boy from a community then subjected to untouchability.

Writing in ‘Harijan’ on July 8, 1933, Gandhi addressed readers who questioned what had spoken to him. He said that the voice of God, of conscience, of truth, and “the still small Voice” meant the same thing to him.

Gandhi admitted that he could offer no proof that would compel another person to accept his interpretation. “Not the unanimous verdict of the whole world against me could shake me from the belief that what I heard was the true voice of God,” he wrote.

Gandhi acknowledged that he had wondered whether he was under “self-delusion” or was merely the prey of his own heated imagination. He ultimately rejected that explanation.

Gandhi said the fast had brought him “indescribable peace within”. He rejected the idea that he had undertaken it simply to mortify his body.

Then he gave his most concise description of the 21 days: “The fast was an uninterrupted twenty-one days’ prayer whose effect I can feel even now.”

For Gandhi, fasting required discipline of “all the senses and organs”. He believed that the fast had shown him things about the “Harijan movement” that he had not previously understood. It brought him “some revelations of impurities among workers of which I had no knowledge whatsoever”. The fast, he said, was for “all the workers, known and unknown, in the Harijan cause”.

“The work of removal of untouchability is not merely a social or economic reform,” he wrote. Its purpose was to “touch the hearts of the millions of Hindus” who sincerely believed that untouchability was a God-made institution.

Gandhi regarded the doctrine of inherited high and low status as something that had “poisoned Hinduism”. The remedy could not therefore be confined to economic relief or political reform. It had to appeal to what he called “the highest in man”.

The fast was one such appeal.

Note: The term “Harijan” is retained here when quoting Gandhi or referring to terminology used by him and his contemporaries. The term is now considered outdated and is generally avoided.