The year 2025 marks the centenary of a characteristic phase of evolution in Mahatma Gandhi’s life. The 26th volume of The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi offers a glimpse of this. A 100 years ago, in February and March, two occurrences shaped Gandhi’s evolution. The first was his maiden encounter with Hindu-Muslim conflict in the subcontinent and the second was an engagement with a grotesque manifestation of casteism. The first happened in the north-western part of British India, in Kohat (in present-day Pakistan) and the latter in Vaikom, in the princely state of Travancore (now Kerala).

In 1915, in an interview with Madras Mail, Gandhi affirmed something that speaks plainly about the making of his worldview:

Madras Mail: Was this period of probation imposed on you by Mr Gokhale (Gopal Krishna) because you had been away from India for so very many years?

Gandhi: Yes, that was his great argument; because I was away from India for nearly 28 years and all my ideas were formed outside India, and, therefore, a corrective in the shape of personal contact with present-day conditions was, in his opinion, absolutely necessary.”

Against this backdrop, his experiences at Kohat and Vaikom in the first three months of 1925, reshaped him and laid the roadmap for his future work in India.

Gandhi’s main interventions between 1915 and 1925 do not seem to suggest that the Hindu-Muslim rift and caste conflict were among his core political concerns. Of course, there were glimpses of the emerging Gandhi in his statements during the Khilafat movement. “If the Hindus understand that the seven crore Muslims are their fellow countrymen and that they will not be able to live at enmity with them, they will see that it is their greatest duty to live with the Muslims and die with them, he said. The Khilafat movement (1919-’22) saw Gandhi make common ground with the Ali brothers (Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali) and campaign against the colonial powers on the Hindu-Muslim unity platform.

Returning to Kohat, this town was predominantly Muslim, with Hindus, Sikhs and Jains together making up a little under a third of its population. In the deep south, Travancore had 16 different castes among the Hindus who comprised 45% of its population, while 27% were Christians and 7% were Muslims. Gandhi faced these two unalike essentials of the British Indian fabric, totally different in content compared to all the satyagrahas he had led from 1915 to then. Communal tensions erupted in Kohat in 1924. In three days, all Hindus and Sikhs had to vacate the town. A weakened Khilafat movement paved the way for a new kind of Muslim identity politics in India and Gandhi had to engage with this threat to his idea of Indian society for the first time.

On February 3, Gandhi left for Rawalpindi with Shoukat Ali to address Hindu and Sikh refugees from Kohat. His interventions were partially successful, as were his deliberations in March, in Vaikom.

A momentous satyagraha had started at Vaikom, a temple town in March 1924, for the right of untouchables to walk on the public road circling the temple. Gandhi was deeply involved in the movement, at the insistence of TK Madhavan, the reformist Congress leader and editor in Kerala. The Brahmin leader in Vaikom, Indamthuruthi Nambiatiri refused to let Gandhi, a vaishya per the varnashrama dharma, to enter his house: The debate happened in the courtyard. When Nambiatiri mentioned that whatever the untouchables suffer in this birth is the result of their earlier karmas, Gandhi replied, “Your stand is similar to the power-language that General Dyer (Dyerism was the word Gandhi used) had used against the innocent people of Jallianwala Bagh”. Two days later, on March 12, Gandhi called on Narayana Guru, the philosopher-reformer-poet and a moral force behind the Vaikom satyagraha, in his ashram in Sivagiri, Varkala, and his first question to Guru was “whether there was sanction for untouchability in the Hindu’s philosophical texts”. Guru’s reply was a categorical “no”.

Meanwhile, there were alarming reports from Kohat. On March 26, when Gandhi addressed a meeting of the depressed classes in Bombay, he spoke about Vaikom and later, said he wanted to prioritise all his actions around the lessons from Kohat and Vaikom: Hindu-Muslim unity and removing untouchability. On the anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in the first week of April, Gandhi called these two objectives the foundation of India’s struggle for freedom: “Anything without that foundation will be like a building built on sand,” he said.

S Gopalakrishnan is a writer, broadcaster, and founder of the podcast, Dilli Dali. The views expressed are personal