Politics in independent India has shown a tremendous obsession with Gandhi. Khadi, worn by most politicians, protests through Satyagraha, hunger strikes, voluntarily courting arrest, civil disobedience, all carry the indelible stamp of the politics practised by Gandhi during the course of the national movement. Most rituals and symbols of Indian politics today emanate from Gandhi. It would appear to any outside observer that politics in independent India is deeply influenced and inspired by Gandhi and his ideals.
Such a conclusion would be wholly wrong. The ritualistic obsession with Gandhi is accompanied by an amazing ignorance about him. Indian politics today is completely devoid of anything remotely Gandhian. It would be fair to say that since Gandhi has been elevated, or reduced, to the level of an abstraction or a mere idea to be celebrated, we have done away with the need to understand him and engage with his legacy.
The first basic misunderstanding pertains to the kind of individual Gandhi was. Anyone trying to construct Gandhi on the basis of his pictures of 1920s and 1930s would easily conclude that he was an illiterate poor villager clad only in a peasant dhoti. This of course would be a completely false picture. The truth is that Gandhi was born in a reasonably affluent Gujarati family. His father was a Diwan in a princely state, combining the functions of a chief minister and an estate manager. Gandhi went to good schools to study and lived his early life mostly in cities—Rajkot, Kathiawad, Ahmedabad and later Calcutta and Bombay. For his higher studies he went to England and acquired a Law degree from London. After spending three years in England, Gandhi spent around 21 years in South Africa. It was only in 1915 after returning to India that Gandhi began to encounter and experience village life from close quarters. He was also a full-time journalist who set up a press in 1903 and started a paper Indian Opinion from Johannesburg. In short, he was an anglicised, West-trained, cosmopolitan, lawyer-cum-journalist.
If Gandhi was no illiterate peasant, he was no Mahatma either, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. The Mahatma-hood had been conferred upon him by Rabindranath Tagore as early as in 1915, when Gandhi was only 46 years old. The conventional Indian understanding of a Mahatma is that of an otherworldly saint-renouncer. Gandhi could be considered a Mahatma in the restricted sense that he firmly believed in the moral foundations of social life. He was convinced that our collective social life must be rooted in a moral conception. But apart from this, Gandhi was no saint renouncer. He constantly thought about and engaged with the world he lived in. And he was always busy with trying to solve some social problem or the other. Between his return to India in 1915 and his death at the hands of a fanatic in January 1948, Gandhi was constantly busy grappling with some important issue or the other. Consider the following. In 1925 he was involved in a social movement in Vykom (Travancore) seeking to open temples, wells and roads for the lower castes. In 1938, he led the struggle against the ruler of Rajkot, a princely state, for introducing some democratic rights for the people. In 1917, 1918 and 1928, he led the peasant movements in Champaran (Bihar), Kheda and Bardoli (both in Gujarat) against forced cultivation of indigo, enhanced revenue and high taxes imposed by the government, respectively.
In 1918, Gandhi led the strike of the Ahmedabad textile workers for an enhancement of wages and undertook a hunger strike for the first time. In April 1919, he was at the helm of a civil liberty campaign against the Rowlatt Act imposed by the British, under which anyone could be arrested without any notice or warrant. During 1920–22, 1930–34, 1940 and 1942, Gandhi led huge anti-imperialist struggles against the British rule. Gandhi thus led movements against caste oppression, for democratic rights in a princely state, peasant movements, strike by industrial workers, movement for civil liberties and direct struggles against British imperialism, all within a span of less than 33 years.
This was not all. During 1933–34, Gandhi undertook a long tour on foot, called Harijan tour, in which he went from one village to another in order to open public wells and temples for the lower castes. Further, he spent around five months in Bengal (November 1946–March 1947) visiting the areas hit by communal violence and trying to restore communal unity there. He also underwent imprisonment six times for a total period of more than five years. Gandhi was also the full-time editor of the English weekly Young India, started in 1919 and renamed Harijan in 1934. He wrote editorials, articles and also answered questions from the readers. Gandhi set up three major organisations—Harijan Sevak Sangh, All India Spinners Association and Hindustani Prachar Sabha. He wrote many books during this period, the most important being his autobiography (The Story of My Experiments with Truth, published during 1927–29) and Satyagraha in South Africa (1928).
All this was done in a period of around 32 years. Could he have done it if he had been a Mahatma of a renouncer variety?
From the above description, what is the kind of picture of Gandhi that emerges? That he was a man fully dedicated to the service of humanity, a social reformer committed to purge Hindu religion and society of its evils, a leader determined to infuse moral values in human conduct, and a visionary involved in a mammoth social engineering project in which men and women will live their lives by moral standards. Gandhi lived a life of service. He had a blueprint of an ideal social order in his mind and he devoted all his life towards its realisation. He was committed to the idea of a transformation in human life without violence or coercion. He never gave up the effort. Nor did he give up the thought that all this was possible. If he thought that this could be achieved in his lifetime, he would be considered either too ambitious or too naive. He obviously did not succeed in his endeavour. But even the severest of his critics would not deny that he was sincere and truthful—albeit impractical—in his mission.
The question is: what made Gandhi what he was? Is there an explanation? Or should we simply give up the effort by declaring him as idiosyncratic?
Some explanation can be found in an amazing and rare combination of continuity and change. There were certain traits he picked up early in his life and they remained with him throughout. A certain edifice of a wholesome life got constructed early in his life and continued to guide his actions till the very end. At the same time, Gandhi also displayed a rare flexibility in being adept at growing and changing. He possessed a rare capacity for incorporating new changes in his personality and interactions with the world outside. As he himself wrote in 1933: “I would like to say to the diligent reader of my writings and to others who are interested in them that I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my search after truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things. Old as I am in age I have no feeling that I have ceased to grow inwardly or that my growth will stop at the dissolution of the flesh. What I am concerned with is my readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, and, therefore, when anybody finds any inconsistency between any two writings of mine, if he still has faith in my sanity, he would do well to choose the later of the two on the same subject.”
So what remained constant and what changed?
Very early in his life Gandhi decided that he would lead a life of service to human community. It did not matter where this community was located. It could be the indentured Indian labourers in South Africa, or the peasants of Champaran, or the Indian people suffering under British imperialism, or the people of England corrupted and dehumanised by their own imperialism, or entire humanity increasingly cut off from its roots and swept aside by the huge tidal wave of modernisation. His life was at the service of a cause. In his life of service he learnt the techniques of assertion without aggression and standing up to injustice without giving in. All this of course was to be done wholly non-violently.
In his diagnosis of what ailed human civilisation, Gandhi identified two fundamental elements—poverty and discrimination. The two were independent of each other. India, his own society, suffered from both. But he also saw the affluent European societies being gripped by the virus of discrimination. His own remedy for this malady was that the world could be transformed through human effort. Contrary to the dominant doctrines of his times, he did not look upon humans as passive members of the social order in which they lived, whose lives would be transformed following a change in the social order. Gandhi credited humans with a capacity for independent action, capable of transforming the social order. As a result, Gandhi constantly worked on humans, training them, organising them, educating them and preparing them for action. He evolved his technique of non-violent Satyagraha (action leading to the triumph of truth) and declared that Satyagraha could never fail if the individuals could be trained to practise it properly. He wrote in his weekly Young India: “I have repeatedly stated that Satyagraha never fails and that one perfect Satyagrahi is enough to vindicate Truth. Let us all strive to be perfect Satyagrahis. The striving does not require any quality unattainable by the lowliest among us. For Satyagraha is an attribute of the spirit within. It is latent in every one of us. Like Swaraj, it is our birthright. Let us know it.” The privileging of organised and trained individuals over any laws of social action was one trait that remained constant with Gandhi. This human force had to be constantly pushed into a life of service.
If service of humanity through non-violent Satyagraha was one feature that remained constant, an uncompromising faith in religion was another. Early on in his life, a search for a source of morality led him to explore religion. And he explored them all. The Vaishnav Hinduism was inculcated to him during his early socialisation. His first exposure to religion was through his mother. In England he came into contact with Christians of various denominations. He also read Bhagavat Geeta (in English) and the New Testament in England. Many years later he read the Quran. In South Africa he came into contact with his Muslims patrons and Evangelical well-wishers. Both in England and in South Africa he moved in very different and diverse circles. He engaged with them with empathy and compassion, but always as an outsider. His search for a perfect religion took him to the shores of many faiths. Interestingly he was looking for a religion that did not monopolise Truth and which recognised the prevalence of Truth in other religions. Through this journey he discovered what was common to all religions—Truth as a moral force. This discovery took away from him the need to adopt any particular religion as his own. So even though he remained a Vaishnav Hindu denominationally, he became a universalist in matters of faith. For Gandhi, the importance of religion was not so much in specific rituals—each religion had its own—but in morality, which was common to all religions. He began to distinguish the two with the use of ‘R’ (Religion as a source of faith and morality) and ‘r’ (many religions). “There are many religions, but there is one Religion”, he would say. He also explained this plurality at one end and oneness at the other through the imagery of the tree. Just as a tree had one trunk and many branches, so did Religion. Religion had one trunk but many branches. This Religion became his great ally, his greatest strength and his biggest shelter in times of crisis and despondency.
It is thus clear that Gandhi’s basic philosophic vision of human life and the techniques for transforming it remained unchanged throughout his life. What however changed was the manner in which he understood the nature of the world being transformed in a modern direction. In England he witnessed the dissolving old world and the triumphantly emerging modern industrial society. He encountered the optimists celebrating the arrival of the new order capable of taking humanity to the shores of prosperity and happiness. He also met the pessimists who bemoaned the loss of soul under the new world order but looked on helplessly at the juggernaut of industrialism. Gandhi was attracted to the pessimists, but temperamentally he was not given to passivity and resignation. He was initially convinced that industrialism was a ‘curse’ that had gripped human society. In his book Hind Swaraj (1909) written during the ship journey from London to South Africa, he delineated the ills of the new industrial civilisation and also tried to suggest a way out of it. His understanding was that the whole of mankind had moved away from its original moorings and—without reaching the destination—was floating around without any rudder or compass. Fully convinced that the industrial civilisation could only enslave humanity, not liberate it, Gandhi raised a fundamental question: Is there a way out?
There is no evidence that Gandhi found the answer (though he never admitted it). But there is evidence that Gandhi’s basic outlook to modernity began to undergo a change. During the course of the national movement, Gandhi came into contact with some of the finest minds of the times. And, as he transformed the national movement with his leadership, he was also transformed by it. Gandhi began to look differently at the entire paraphernalia of the industrial civilisation he had dismissed earlier in Hind Swaraj—hospitals, courts, parliamentary democracy, bureaucracy, modern State, modern science, etc. He began to see their utility for human life. Without abandoning his basic position on the modern industrial civilisation, he now began to see it as an important instrument. ‘How to use the instrument in one’s favour without being enslaved by it’ was now his concern. There is plenty of evidence that by the 1940s Gandhi’s uncompromising opposition had been moderated quite a bit. He was still not a ‘convert’ to the new world. But he could see that the new world, given the intervention by trained, organised and committed men and women, was indeed capable of alleviating the basic problems of poverty and discrimination.
In July 1946, 18 months before his death, Gandhi spelt out his vision of an ideal social order. He wrote: “In this structure of innumerable villages there will be ever widening, never ascending, circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life . . . sharing the majority of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units. Let India live for this true picture, though never realisable in its completeness. We must have a proper picture of what we want before we can have something approaching it.”
This was Gandhi’s dream. Nobody knows how such a world can be achieved. But hardly anyone would disagree that it is a world well worth aspiring for.
Email: salil@aud.ac.in
