Gandhi

Introduction

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the preeminent leader of Indian
nationalism and the prophet of nonviolence in the 20th century, was
born, the youngest child of his father's fourth wife, on Oct. 2, 1869,
at Porbandar, the capital of a small principality in Gujarat in
western India under British suzerainty. His father, Karamchand Gandhi,
who was the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar, did not have much in
the way of a formal education but was an able administrator who knew
how to steer his way between the capricious princes, their
long-suffering subjects, and the headstrong British political officers
in power.

Gandhi's mother, Putlibai, was completely absorbed in religion, did
not care much for finery and jewelry, divided her time between her
home and the temple, fasted frequently, and wore herself out in days
and nights of nursing whenever there was sickness in the family.
Mohandas grew up in a home steeped in Vaishnavism (Vaisnavism)
--worship of the Hindu god Vishnu (Visnu)--with a strong tinge of
Jainism, a morally rigorous Indian religion, whose chief tenets are
nonviolence and the belief that everything in the universe is eternal.
Thus he took for granted ahimsa (noninjury to all living beings),
vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and mutual tolerance
between adherents of various creeds and sects. 

Youth.

The educational facilities at Porbandar were rudimentary; in the
primary school that Mohandas attended, the children wrote the alphabet
in the dust with their fingers. Luckily for him, his father became
dewan of Rajkot, another princely state. Though he occasionally won
prizes and scholarships at the local schools, his record was on the
whole mediocre. One of the terminal reports rated him as "good at
English, fair in Arithmetic and weak in Geography; conduct very good,
bad handwriting." A diffident child, he was married at the age of 13
and thus lost a year at school. He shone neither in the classroom nor
on the playing field. He loved to go out on long solitary walks when
he was not nursing his by now ailing father or helping his mother with
her household chores.

He had learned, in his words, "to carry out the orders of the elders,
not to scan them." With such extreme passivity, it is not surprising
that he should have gone through a phase of adolescent rebellion,
marked by secret atheism, petty thefts, furtive smoking, and--most
shocking of all for a boy born in a Vaishnava family--meat eating. His
adolescence was probably no stormier than that of most children of his
age and class. What was extraordinary was the way his youthful
transgressions ended.

"Never again" was his promise to himself after each escapade. And he
kept his promise. Beneath an unprepossessing exterior, he concealed a
burning passion for self-improvement that led him to take even the
heroes of Hindu mythology, such as Prahlada and Harishcandra
--legendary embodiments of truthfulness and sacrifice--as living
models.

In 1887 Mohandas scraped through the matriculation examination of the
University of Bombay and joined Samaldas College in Bhavnagar
(Bhaunagar). As he had suddenly to switch from his native language
--Gujarati--to English, he found it rather difficult to follow the
lectures.

Meanwhile, his family was debating his future. Left to himself, he
would have liked to be a doctor. But, besides the Vaishnava prejudice
against vivisection, it was clear that, if he was to keep up the
family tradition of holding high office in one of the states in
Gujarat, he would have to qualify as a barrister. This meant a visit
to England, and Mohandas, who was not too happy at Samaldas College,
jumped at the proposal. His youthful imagination conceived England as
"a land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization."
But there were several hurdles to be crossed before the visit to
England could be realized. His father had left little property;
moreover, his mother was reluctant to expose her youngest child to
unknown temptations and dangers in a distant land. But Mohandas was
determined to visit England. One of his brothers raised the necessary
money, and his mother's doubts were allayed when he took a vow that,
while away from home, he would not touch wine, women, or meat.
Mohandas disregarded the last obstacle--the decree of the leaders of
the Modh Bania subcaste (Vaisya caste), to which the Gandhis belonged,
who forbade his trip to England as a violation of the Hindu
religion--and sailed in September 1888. Ten days after his arrival, he
joined the Inner Temple, one of the four London law colleges.

England.

Gandhi took his studies seriously and tried to brush up on his English
and Latin by taking the London University matriculation examination.
But, during the three years he spent in England, his main
preoccupation was with personal and moral issues rather than with
academic ambitions. The transition from the half-rural atmosphere of
Rajkot to the cosmopolitan life of London was not easy for him. As he
struggled painfully to adapt himself to Western food, dress, and
etiquette, he felt awkward. His vegetarianism became a continual
source of embarrassment to him; his friends warned him that it would
wreck his studies as well as his health. Fortunately for him he came
across a vegetarian restaurant as well as a book providing a reasoned
defense of vegetarianism, which henceforth became a matter of
conviction for him, not merely a legacy of his Vaishnava background.
The missionary zeal he developed for vegetarianism helped to draw the
pitifully shy youth out of his shell and gave him a new poise. He
became a member of the executive committee of the London Vegetarian
Society, attending its conferences and contributing articles to its
journal.

In the vegetarian restaurants and boarding houses of England, Gandhi
met not only food faddists but some earnest men and women to whom he
owed his introduction to the Bible and the Bhagavadgita, the most
popular expression of Hinduism in the form of a philosophical poem,
which he read for the first time in its English translation by Sir
Edwin Arnold. The English vegetarians were a motley crowd. They
included socialists and humanitarians like Edward Carpenter, "the
British Thoreau"; Fabians like George Bernard Shaw; and Theosophists
like Annie Besant. Most of them were idealists; quite a few were
rebels who rejected the prevailing values of the late Victorian
Establishment, denounced the evils of the capitalist and industrial
society, preached the cult of the simple life, and stressed the
superiority of moral over material values and of cooperation over
conflict. These ideas were to contribute substantially to the shaping
of Gandhi's personality and, eventually, to his politics.

Painful surprises were in store for Gandhi when he returned to India
in July 1891. His mother had died in his absence, and he discovered to
his dismay that the barrister's degree was not a guarantee of a
lucrative career. The legal profession was already beginning to be
overcrowded, and Gandhi was much too diffident to elbow his way into
it. In the very first brief he argued in a Bombay court, he cut a
sorry figure. Turned down even for the part-time job of a teacher in a
Bombay high school, he returned to Rajkot to make a modest living by
drafting petitions for litigants. Even this employment was closed to
him when he incurred the displeasure of a local British officer. It
was, therefore, with some relief that he accepted the none-too-
attractive offer of a year's contract from an Indian firm in Natal,
South Africa.


South Africa.

Africa was to present to Gandhi challenges and opportunities that he
could hardly have conceived. In a Durban court, he was asked by the
European magistrate to take off his turban; he refused and left the
courtroom. A few days later, while travelling to Pretoria, he was
unceremoniously thrown out of a first-class railway compartment and
left shivering and brooding at Pietermaritzburg Station; in the
further course of the journey he was beaten up by the white driver of
a stagecoach because he would not travel on the footboard to make room
for a European passenger; and finally he was barred from hotels
reserved "for Europeans only." These humiliations were the daily lot
of Indian traders and labourers in Natal who had learned to pocket
them with the same resignation with which they pocketed their meagre
earnings. What was new was not Gandhi's experience but his reaction.
He had so far not been conspicuous for self-assertion or
aggressiveness. But something happened to him as he smarted under the
insults heaped upon him. In retrospect the journey from Durban to
Pretoria struck him as one of the most creative experiences of his
life; it was his moment of truth. Henceforth he would not accept
injustice as part of the natural or unnatural order in South Africa;
he would defend his dignity as an Indian and as a man.

While in Pretoria, Gandhi studied the conditions in which his
countrymen lived and tried to educate them on their rights and duties,
but he had no intention of staying on in South Africa. Indeed, in June
1894, as his year's contract drew to a close, he was back in Durban,
ready to sail for India. At a farewell party given in his honour he
happened to glance through the Natal Mercury and learned that the
Natal Legislative Assembly was considering a bill to deprive Indians
of the right to vote. "This is the first nail in our coffin," Gandhi
told his hosts. They professed their inability to oppose the bill, and
indeed their ignorance of the politics of the colony, and begged him
to take up the fight on their behalf.

Until the age of 18, Gandhi had hardly ever read a newspaper. Neither
as a student in England nor as a budding barrister in India had he
evinced much interest in politics. Indeed, he was overcome by a
terrifying stage fright whenever he stood up to read a speech at a
social gathering or to defend a client in court. Nevertheless, in July
1894, when he was barely 25, he blossomed almost overnight into a
proficient political campaigner. He drafted petitions to the Natal
legislature and the British government and had them signed by hundreds
of his compatriots. He could not prevent the passage of the bill but
succeeded in drawing the attention of the public and the press in
Natal, India, and England to the Natal Indians' grievances. He was
persuaded to settle down in Durban to practice law and to organize the
Indian community. In 1894, he founded the Natal Indian Congress of
which he himself became the indefatigable secretary. Through this
common political organization, he infused a spirit of solidarity in
the heterogeneous Indian community. He flooded the government, the
legislature, and the press with closely reasoned statements of Indian
grievances. Finally, he exposed to the view of the outside world the
skeleton in the imperial cupboard, the discrimination practiced
against the Indian subjects of Queen Victoria in one of her own
colonies in Africa. It was a measure of his success as a publicist
that such important newspapers as The Times of London and the
Statesman and Englishman of Calcutta editorially commented on the
Natal Indians' grievances.

In 1896 Gandhi went to India to fetch his wife Kasturbai and their
children and to canvass support for the Indians overseas. He met
prominent leaders and persuaded them to address public meetings in the
country's principal cities. Unfortunately for him, garbled versions of
his activities and utterances reached Natal and inflamed its European
population. On landing at Durban in January 1897, he was assaulted and
nearly lynched by a white mob. Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial
secretary in the British Cabinet, cabled the government of Natal to
bring the guilty men to book, but Gandhi refused to prosecute his
assailants. It was, he said, a principle with him not to seek redress
of a personal wrong in a court of law.

Resistance and results.

Gandhi was not the man to nurse a grudge. On the outbreak of the Boer
War in 1899, he argued that the Indians, who claimed the full rights
of citizenship in the British crown colony of Natal, were in duty
bound to defend it. He raised an ambulance corps of 1,100 volunteers,
out of whom 300 were free Indians and the rest indentured labourers.
It was a motley crowd: barristers and accountants, artisans and
labourers. It was Gandhi's task to instill in them a spirit of service
to those whom they regarded as their oppressors. The editor of the
Pretoria News has left a fascinating pen portrait of Gandhi in the
battle zone:

  After a night's work which had shattered men with much bigger 
  frames, I came across Gandhi in the early morning sitting by the
  roadside eating a regulation army biscuit. Every man in (General)
  Buller's force was dull and depressed, and damnation was heartily
  invoked on everything. But Gandhi was stoical in his bearing,
  cheerful and confident in his conversation and had a kindly eye.

The British victory in the Boer War brought little relief to the
Indians in South Africa. The new regime in South Africa was to blossom
into a partnership, but only between Boers and Britons. Gandhi saw
that, with the exception of a few Christian missionaries and youthful
idealists, he had been unable to make a perceptible impression upon
the South African Europeans. In 1906 the Transvaal government
published a particularly humiliating ordinance for the registration of
its Indian population. The Indians held a mass protest meeting at
Johannesburg in September 1906 and, under Gandhi's leadership, took a
pledge to defy the ordinance if it became law in the teeth of their
opposition, and to suffer all the penalties resulting from their
defiance. Thus was born satyagraha ("devotion to truth"), a new
technique for redressing wrongs through inviting, rather than
inflicting, suffering, for resisting the adversary without rancour and
fighting him without violence.

The struggle in South Africa lasted for more than seven years. It had
its ups and downs, but under Gandhi's leadership, the small Indian
minority kept up its resistance against heavy odds. Hundreds of
Indians chose to sacrifice their livelihood and liberty rather than
submit to laws repugnant to their conscience and self-respect. In the
final phase of the movement in 1913, hundreds of Indians, including
women, went to jail, and thousands of Indian workers who had struck
work in the mines bravely faced imprisonment, flogging, and even
shooting. It was a terrible ordeal for the Indians, but it was also
the worst possible advertisement for the South African government,
which, under pressure from the governments of Britain and India,
accepted a compromise negotiated by Gandhi on the one hand and the
South African statesman General Jan Christian Smuts on the other.

"The saint has left our shores," Smuts wrote to a friend on Gandhi's
departure from South Africa for India, in July 1914, "I hope for
ever." Twenty-five years later, he wrote that it had been his "fate to
be the antagonist of a man for whom even then I had the highest
respect." Once, during his not infrequent stays in jail, Gandhi had
prepared a pair of sandals for Smuts, who recalled that there was no
hatred and personal ill-feeling between them, and when the fight was
over "there was the atmosphere in which a decent peace could be
concluded."

As later events were to show, Gandhi's work did not provide an
enduring solution for the Indian problem in South Africa. What he did
to South Africa was indeed less important than what South Africa did
to him. It had not treated him kindly, but, by drawing him into the
vortex of its racial problem, it had provided him with the ideal
setting in which his peculiar talents could unfold themselves.

The religious quest.

Gandhi's religious quest dated back to his childhood, the influence of
his mother and of his home at Porbandar and Rajkot, but it received a
great impetus after his arrival in South Africa. His Quaker friends in
Pretoria failed to convert him to Christianity, but they quickened his
appetite for religious studies. He was fascinated by Tolstoy's
writings on Christianity, read the Qu`ran in translation, and delved
into Hindu scriptures and philosophy. The study of comparative
religion, talks with scholars, and his own reading of theological
works brought him to the conclusion that all religions were true and
yet every one of them was imperfect because they were "interpreted
with poor intellects, sometimes with poor hearts, and more often
misinterpreted."

Rajchandra, a brilliant young philosopher who became Gandhi's
spiritual mentor, convinced him of "the subtlety and profundity" of
Hinduism, the religion of his birth. And it was the Bhagavadgita,
which Gandhi had first read in London, that became his "spiritual
dictionary" and exercised probably the greatest single influence on
his life. Two Sanskrit words in the Gita particularly fascinated him.
One was aparigraha (nonpossession), which implied that man had to
jettison the material goods that cramped the life of the spirit and to
shake off the bonds of money and property. The other was samabhava
(equability), which enjoined him to remain unruffled by pain or
pleasure, victory or defeat, and to work without hope of success or
fear of failure.

These were not merely counsels of perfection. In the civil case that
had brought him to South Africa in 1893, he had persuaded the
antagonists to settle their differences out of court. The true
function of a lawyer seemed to him "to unite parties riven asunder."
He soon regarded his clients not as purchasers of his services but as
friends; they consulted him not only on legal issues but on such
matters as the best way of weaning a baby or balancing the family
budget. When an associate protested that clients came even on Sundays,
Gandhi replied: "A man in distress cannot have Sunday rest."

Gandhi's legal earnings reached a peak figure of  5,000 a year, but he
had little interest in moneymaking, and his savings were often sunk in
his public activities. In Durban and later in Johannesburg, he kept an
open table; his house was a virtual hostel for younger colleagues and
political coworkers. This was something of an ordeal for his wife,
without whose extraordinary patience, endurance, and self-effacement
Gandhi could hardly have devoted himself to public causes. As he broke
through the conventional bonds of family and property, their life
tended to shade into a community life.

Gandhi felt an irresistible attraction to a life of simplicity, manual
labour, and austerity. In 1904, after reading John Ruskin's Unto This
Last, a critique of capitalism, he set up a farm at Phoenix near
Durban where he and his friends could literally live by the sweat of
their brow. Six years later another colony grew up under Gandhi's
fostering care near Johannesburg; it was named Tolstoy Farm after the
Russian writer and moralist, whom Gandhi admired and corresponded
with. Those two settlements were the precursors of the more famous
ashrams (ashramas) in India, at Sabarmati near Ahmedabad (Ahmadabad)
and at Sevagram near Wardha.

South Africa had not only prompted Gandhi to evolve a novel technique
for political action but also transformed him into a leader of men by
freeing him from bonds that make cowards of most men. "Persons in
power," Gilbert Murray prophetically wrote about Gandhi in the Hibbert
Journal in 1918, "should be very careful how they deal with a man who
cares nothing for sensual pleasure, nothing for riches, nothing for
comfort or praise, or promotion, but is simply determined to do what
he believes to be right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy,
because his body which you can always conquer gives you so little
purchase upon his soul."

            Emergence as leader of nationalist India.

From 1915 to 1918, Gandhi seemed to hover uncertainly on the periphery
of Indian politics, declining to join any political agitation,
supporting the British war effort in World War I, and even recruiting
soldiers for the British Indian Army. At the same time, he did not
flinch from criticizing the British officials for any acts of
high-handedness or from taking up the grievances of the long-suffering
peasantry in Bihar and Gujarat. Not until February 1919, provoked by
the British insistence on pushing through the Rowlatt Bills, which
empowered the authorities to imprison without trial those suspected of
sedition, in the teeth of Indian opposition, did Gandhi reveal a sense
of estrangement from the British Raj. He announced a satyagraha
struggle. The result was a virtual political earthquake that shook the
subcontinent in the spring of 1919. The violent outbreaks that
followed--leading, among other incidents, to the killing by
British-led soldiers of nearly 400 Indians attending a meeting at
Amritsar in the Punjab and the enactment of martial law--prompted him
to stay his hand. But within a year he was again in a militant mood,
having in the meantime been irrevocably alienated by British
insensitiveness to Indian feeling on the Punjab tragedy and Muslim
resentment on the peace terms offered to Turkey following World War I.

By the autumn of 1920, Gandhi was the dominant figure on the political
stage, commanding an influence never attained by any political leader
in India or perhaps in any other country. He refashioned the
35-year-old Indian National Congress into an effective political
instrument of Indian nationalism: from a three-day Christmas-week
picnic of the upper middle class in one of the principal cities of
India, it became a mass organization with its roots in small towns and
villages. Gandhi's message was simple; it was not British guns but
imperfections of Indians themselves that kept their country in
bondage. His program of nonviolent noncooperation with the British
government included boycott not only of British manufactures but of
institutions operated or aided by the British in India: legislatures,
courts, offices, schools. This program electrified the country, broke
the spell of fear of foreign rule, and led to arrests of thousands of
satyagrahis, who defied laws and cheerfully lined up for prison. In
February 1922 the movement seemed to be on the crest of a rising wave,
but, alarmed by a violent outbreak in Chauri Chaura, a remote village
in eastern India, Gandhi decided to call off mass civil disobedience.
This was a blow to many of his followers, who feared that his
self-imposed restraints and scruples would reduce the nationalist
struggle to pious futility. Gandhi himself was arrested on March 10,
1922, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment. He
was released in February 1924, after an operation for appendicitis.
The political landscape had changed in his absence. The Congress Party
had split into two factions, one under Chitta Ranjan Das and Motilal
Nehru (the father of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister)
favouring the entry of the party into legislatures and the other under
C. Rajagopalachari and Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel opposing it. Worst
of all, the unity between Hindus and Muslims of the heyday of the
noncooperation movement of 1920-22 had dissolved. Gandhi tried to draw
the warring communities out of their suspicion and fanaticism by
reasoning and persuasion. And finally, after a serious communal
outbreak, he undertook a three-week fast in the autumn of 1924 to
arouse the people into following the path of nonviolence.

During the mid-1920s Gandhi took little interest in active politics
and was considered a spent force. But in 1927 the British government
appointed a constitutional reform commission under Sir John Simon, a
prominent English lawyer and politician, that did not contain a single
Indian. When the Congress and other parties boycotted the commission,
the political tempo rose. After the Calcutta Congress in December
1928, where Gandhi moved the crucial resolution demanding dominion
status from the British government within a year under threat of a
nation-wide nonviolent campaign for complete independence, Gandhi was
back at the helm of the Congress Party. In March 1930, he launched the
satyagraha against the tax on salt, which affected the poorest section
of the community. One of the most spectacular and successful campaigns
in Gandhi's nonviolent war against the British Raj, it resulted in the
imprisonment of more than 60,000 persons. A year later, after talks
with Lord Irwin, Gandhi accepted a truce, called off civil
disobedience, and agreed to attend the Round Table Conference in
London as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress. The
conference, which concentrated on the problem of the Indian minorities
rather than on the transfer of power from the British, was a great
disappointment to the Indian nationalists. Moreover, when Gandhi
returned to India in December 1931 he found his party facing an
all-out offensive from Lord Irwin's successor, Lord Willingdon, who
unleashed the sternest repression in the history of the nationalist
movement. Gandhi was once more imprisoned, and the government tried to
insulate him from the outside world and to destroy his influence. This
was not an easy task. Gandhi soon regained the initiative; in
September 1932, while still a prisoner, he embarked on a fast to
protest against the British government's decision to segregate the
untouchables (the depressed classes) by allotting them separate
electorates in the new constitution. The fast produced an emotional
upheaval in the country; an alternative electoral arrangement was
jointly and speedily devised by the leaders of the Hindu community and
the untouchables and endorsed by the British government. The fast
became the starting point of a vigorous campaign for the removal of
the disabilities of the untouchables whom Gandhi renamed Harijans,
"the children of God."

In 1934 Gandhi resigned not only as the leader but also as a member of
the Congress Party. He had come to believe that its leading members
had adopted nonviolence as a political expedient and not as the
fundamental creed it was for him. In place of political activity he
now concentrated on his "constructive programme" of building the
nation "from the bottom up"--educating rural India, which accounted
for 85 percent of the population; continuing his fight against
untouchability; promoting handspinning, weaving, and other cottage
industries to supplement the earnings of the underemployed peasantry;
and evolving a system of education best suited to the needs of the
people. Gandhi himself went to live at Sevagram, a village in central
India, which became the centre of his program of social and economic
uplift.

The last phase.

With the outbreak of World War II, the nationalist struggle in India
entered its last crucial phase. Gandhi hated fascism and all it stood
for, but he also hated war. The Indian National Congress, on the other
hand, was not committed to pacifism and was prepared to support the
British war effort if Indian self-government was assured. Once more
Gandhi became politically active. The failure of the mission of Sir
Stafford Cripps, a British cabinet minister, who came to India in
March 1942 with an offer that Gandhi found unacceptable, the British
equivocation on the transfer of power to Indian hands, and the
encouragement given by high British officials to conservative and
communal forces promoting discord between Muslims and Hindus impelled
him to demand in the summer of 1942 an immediate British withdrawal
from India. The war against the Axis, particularly Japan, was in a
critical phase; the British reacted sharply by imprisoning the entire
Congress leadership and set out to crush the party once and for all.
There were violent outbreaks that were sternly suppressed; the gulf
between Britain and India became wider than ever.

A new chapter in Indo-British relations opened with the victory of the
Labour Party in 1945. During the next two years, there were prolonged
triangular negotiations between leaders of the Congress and the Muslim
League under M.A. Jinnah and the British government culminating in the
Mountbatten Plan of June 3, 1947, and the formation of the two new
dominions of India and Pakistan in mid-August 1947.

It was one of the greatest disappointments of Gandhi's life that
Indian freedom was realized without Indian unity. Muslim separatism
had received a great boost while Gandhi and his colleagues were in
jail, and in 1946-47, as the final constitutional arrangements were
being negotiated, the outbreak of communal riots between Hindus and
Muslims unhappily created a climate in which Gandhi's appeals to
reason and justice, tolerance and trust had little chance. When
partition of the subcontinent was accepted--against his advice--he
threw himself heart and soul into the task of healing the scars of the
communal conflict, toured the riot-torn areas in Bengal and Bihar,
admonished the bigots, consoled the victims, and tried to rehabilitate
the refugees. In the atmosphere of that period, surcharged with
suspicion and hatred, this was a difficult and heartbreaking task.
Gandhi was blamed by partisans of both the communities. When
persuasion failed, he went on a fast. He won at least two spectacular
triumphs; in September 1947 his fasting stopped the rioting in
Calcutta, and in January 1948, he shamed the city of Delhi into a
communal truce. A few days later, on January 30, while he was on his
way to his evening prayer meeting in Delhi, he was shot down by
Nathuram Godse, a young Hindu fanatic.

            
Place in history.

The British attitude to Gandhi was one of mingled admiration,
amusement, bewilderment, suspicion, and resentment. Except for a tiny
minority of Christian missionaries and radical socialists, the British
tended to see in him at best a utopian visionary, at worst a cunning
hypocrite whose professions of friendship for the British race were a
mask for subversion of the British Raj. Gandhi was conscious of the
existence of this wall of prejudice, and it was part of the strategy
of satyagraha to penetrate it.

His three major campaigns in 1920-22, 1930-34, and 1940-42 were well
designed to engender that process of self-doubt and questioning that
was to undermine the moral defences of his adversaries and to
contribute, together with the objective realities of the postwar
world, to producing the grant of dominion status in 1947. The British
abdication in India was the first step in the liquidation of the
British Empire on the continents of Asia and Africa. Gandhi's image as
an archrebel died hard, but, as it had done to the memory of George
Washington, Britain, in 1969, the centenary year of Gandhi's birth,
erected a statue to his memory.

Gandhi had critics in his own country, and indeed in his own party.
The liberal leaders protested that he was going too fast; the young
radicals complained that he was not going fast enough; left-wing
politicians alleged that he was not serious about evicting the British
or liquidating such vested Indian interests as princes and landlords;
the leaders of the untouchables doubted his good faith as a social
reformer; and Muslim leaders accused him of partiality to his own
community.

Recent research has established Gandhi's role as a great mediator and
reconciler. His talents in this direction were applied to conflicts
between the older moderate politicians and the young radicals, the
political terrorists and the parliamentarians, the urban
intelligentsia and the rural masses, the traditionalists and the
modernists, the caste Hindus and the untouchables, the Hindus and the
Muslims, and the Indians and the British.

It was inevitable that Gandhi's role as a political leader should loom
larger in public imagination, but the mainspring of his life lay in
religion, not in politics. And religion for him did not mean
formalism, dogma, ritual, or sectarianism. "What I have been striving
and pining to achieve these thirty years," he wrote in his
autobiography, "is to see God face to face." His deepest strivings
were spiritual, but unlike many of his countrymen with such
aspirations, he did not retire to a cave in the Himalayas to meditate
on the Absolute; he carried his cave, as he once said, within him. For
him truth was not something to be discovered in the privacy of one's
personal life; it had to be upheld in the challenging contexts of
social and political life.

In the eyes of millions of his countrymen, he was the Mahatma (the
great soul). The unthinking adoration of the huge crowds that gathered
to see him all along his route made his tours a severe ordeal; he
could hardly work during the day or rest at night. "The woes of the
Mahatmas," he wrote, "are known only to the Mahatmas."

Gandhi won the affection and loyalty of gifted men and women, old and
young, with vastly dissimilar talents and temperaments; of Europeans
of every religious persuasion; and of Indians of almost every
political line. Few of his political colleagues went all the way with
him and accepted nonviolence as a creed; fewer still shared his food
fads, his interest in mudpacks and nature cure, or his prescription of
brahmacarya, complete renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh.

Gandhi's ideas on sex may sound quaint and unscientific. His marriage
at the age of 13 seems to have complicated his attitude to sex and
charged it with feelings of guilt, but it is important to remember
that total sublimation, according to the best tradition of Hindu
thought, is indispensable for those who seek self-realization, and
brahmacarya was for Gandhi part of a larger discipline in food, sleep,
thought, prayer, and daily activity designed to equip himself for
service of the causes to which he was totally committed. What he
failed to see was that his own unique experience was no guide for the
common man.

It is probably too early to judge Gandhi's place in history. He was
the catalyst if not the initiator of three of the major revolutions of
the 20th century: the revolutions against colonialism, racism, and
violence. He wrote copiously; the collected edition of his writings
runs to more than 80 volumes.

Much of what he wrote was in response to the needs of his co-workers
and disciples and the exigencies of the political situation, but on
fundamentals, he maintained a remarkable consistency, as is evident
from the Hind Swaraj ("Indian Home Rule") published in South Africa in
1909. The strictures on Western materialism and colonialism, the
reservations about industrialism and urbanization, the distrust of the
modern state, and the total rejection of violence that was expressed
in this book seemed romantic, if not reactionary, to the pre-World War
I generation in India and the West, which had not known the shocks of
two global wars, experienced the phenomenon of Hitler, and the trauma
of the atom bomb. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's objective of
promoting a just and egalitarian order at home, and nonalignment with
military blocs abroad doubtless owed much to Gandhi, but neither he
nor his colleagues in the Indian nationalist movement wholly accepted
the Gandhian models in politics and economics.

In recent years Gandhi's name has been invoked by the organizers of
numerous demonstrations and movements, but with a few outstanding
exceptions--such as those of his disciple the land reformer Vinoba
Bhave in India and the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King,
Jr., in the United States--these movements have been a travesty of the
ideas of Gandhi.

Yet Gandhi will probably never lack champions. Erik H. Erikson, a
distinguished American psychoanalyst, in his study of Gandhi senses
"an affinity between Gandhi's truth and the insights of modern
psychology." One of the greatest admirers of Gandhi was Albert
Einstein, who saw in Gandhi's nonviolence a possible antidote to the
massive violence unleashed by the fission of the atom. And Gunnar
Myrdal, the Swedish economist, after his survey of the socioeconomic
problems of the underdeveloped world, pronounced Gandhi "in
practically all fields an enlightened liberal." In a time of deepening
crisis in the underdeveloped world, of social malaise in the affluent
societies, of the shadow of unbridled technology and the precarious
peace of nuclear terror, it seems likely that Gandhi's ideas and
techniques will become increasingly relevant. (B.R.N.)

Bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with
Truth, 2 vol. (1927-29, reissued in 1 vol., 1983), tells the story of
his life up to 1921; his Satyagraha in South Africa, 2nd ed. (1950,
reprinted 1972), illuminates the formative two decades he spent in
South Africa. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 90 vol.
(1958-84), includes all his writings, speeches, and letters.

A biography by PYARELAL, Mahatma Gandhi, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1965-66),
provides a richly documented chronicle of Gandhi's early and last
years written by his former secretary. SUDHIR GHOSH, Gandhi's Emissary
(1967), is an autobiographical memoir of Gandhi's informal agent to
the British government in 1945-48. DINANATH G. TENDULKAR, Mahatma,
rev. ed., 8 vol. (1960-63, reprinted 1969), tells the story of
Gandhi's life mostly in Gandhi's own words extracted from his
published writings. LOUIS FISCHER, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950,
reissued 1983), is based largely on printed sources but includes the
author's vivid personal impressions of Gandhi and India in the 1940s;
BAL R. NANDA, Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography (1958, reissued 1968), is a
story of Gandhi's life as well as a critique of his thought and makes
use of unpublished government records and correspondence of Gandhi.
PENDEREL MOON, Gandhi and Modern India (1969), reflects a British
administrator's views on Gandhi the politician. HENRY S.L. POLAK,
HENRY M. BRAILSFORD, and FREDERICK W. PETHICK-LAWRENCE, Mahatma Gandhi
(1949, reissued 1962), is a good introduction for Western readers.
HORACE ALEXANDER, Gandhi Through Western Eyes (1969); and GEOFFREY
ASHE, Gandhi: A Study in Revolution (1968), are sympathetic and
analytical studies. ROBERT PAYNE, The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi
(1969), is a well-researched biography, with emphasis on the personal
rather than political aspect.

CHANDRAN D.S. DEVANESEN, The Making of the Mahatma (1969), covers
Gandhi's childhood and youth in detail. ERIK H. ERIKSON, Gandhi's
Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969), illuminates
Gandhi's life and technique by bringing to bear on them the insights
of psychoanalysis. Another psychological biography is E. VICTOR
WOLFENSTEIN, The Revolutionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi
(1967, reprinted 1971). See also JOSEPH J. DOKE, M.K. Gandhi: An
Indian Patriot in South Africa (1909, reprinted 1967); CALVIN KYTLE,
Gandhi: Soldier of Nonviolence, rev. ed. (1982); and GERALD GOLD,
Gandhi: A Pictorial Biography (1983).

ROBERT A. HUTTENBACK, Gandhi in South Africa: British Imperialism and
the Indian Question, 1860-1914 (1971), is a study of the Indian
community's struggle in South Africa; a study of Gandhi's role in
Indian politics and the nationalist movement is presented in JUDITH M.
BROWN, Gandhi's Rise to Power: Indian Politics 1915-1922 (1972), and
Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics, 1928-34
(1977). SUSANNE H. RUDOLPH and LLOYD I. RUDOLPH, Gandhi: The
Traditional Roots of Charisma (1983), which discusses Gandhi's
remaining influence, was originally published as the second part of
the authors' The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in
India (1967). FRANCIS G. HUTCHINS, India's Revolution: Gandhi and the
Quit India Movement (1973), is an interpretive study. GENE SHARP,
Gandhi as a Political Strategist (1979), is a study of the relation of
pacifist principles to political techniques; and JAI CHAND DEV SETHI,
Gandhi Today (1978), includes an analysis of Gandhian economics.

Among the books containing reminiscences of Gandhi, the more important
are: MILLIE G. POLAK, Mr. Gandhi: The Man (1931); JAWAHARLAL NEHRU, An
Autobiography (1936, reissued 1980); SARVEPALLI RADHAKRISHNAN (ed.),
Mahatma Gandhi: Essays and Reflections of His Life and Work, 2nd ed.
(1949, reissued 1977); CHANDRASHANKER SHUKLA (ed.), Incidents of
Gandhiji's Life (1949); NIRMAL KUMAR BOSE, My Days with Gandhi (1953,
reissued 1974); ELI S. JONES, Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation
(1948); and VINCENT SHEEAN, Lead, Kindly Light (1949). JAMES D. HUNT,
Gandhi in London (1978), documents his five visits, with little-known
details of those in 1906 and 1909. WILLIAM L. SHIRER, Gandhi: A Memoir
(1979, reprinted 1982), is based on the author's work as a journalist
in India in the 1930s.

Among the books highly critical of Gandhi are BHIMRAO R. AMBEDKAR,
What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945, reissued
1977); CHETTUR SANKARAN NAIR, Gandhi and Anarchy (1922); and INDULAL
K. YAJNIK, Gandhi As I Know Him, rev. ed. (1943). MARTIN B. GREEN, The
Challenge of the Mahatmas (1978), and Tolstoy and Gandhi: Men of Peace
(1983), are the first and the last books of the author's trilogy on
great leaders and their influence. RAGHAVAN N. IYER, The Moral and
Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (1973, reprinted 1978), compares
his concepts to those of Western thinkers. ARNE NAESS, Gandhi and the
Nuclear Age (1965), and Gandhi and Group Conflict (1974), explore
basic principles and assumptions of Gandhi's philosophical system.
GLYN RICHARDS, The Philosophy of Gandhi (1982), explores the relation
of his ideas to Hindu metaphysics and to contemporary philosophy. VED
MEHTA, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (1977), examines the spread of
Gandhi's ideas.

There are numerous anthologies of Gandhi's writings. Selected Writings
of Mahatma Gandhi (1951, reissued 1971), ed. by RONALD DUNCAN; and All
Men Are Brothers (1959, reissued 1980), ed. by KRISHNA KRIPALANI, are
judicious selections for the general reader. The Words of Gandhi
(1982) is an illustrated selection of quotations, collected and edited
by RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH.
          


Copyright (c) 1995 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. All Rights Reserved