Mahatma
Gandhi's Significance for Today
(pdf available here)
Some of us will have
seen Richard Attenborough's film life of Gandhi since it was
first screened in 1982. It was inevitably selective and inevitably
it simplified and cut corners, and it was probably unfair to
Jinnah, the creator of Pakistan, but nevertheless it was, I
would say, taken as a whole, a faithful portrait of Gandhi.
I'm going to presuppose a basic knowledge of the course of Gandhi's
life, which everyone who has seen the film, and also many others,
will have. In making it Attenborough relied largely on Louis
Fischer's Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) . Fischer knew Gandhi
personally, living for a while in his ashram, observing his
way of life, eating with him, having long daily conversations
with him, observing his followers, listening to his interviews
with streams of visitors. Both before and since Fischer there
have been a great number of other biographies and studies, the
most recent full-length biographies being The Life and Death
of Mahatma Gandhi by Robert Payne (1969), Rediscovering Gandhi
by Yogesh Chadha (1997) and Gandhi's Passion by Stanley Wolpert
(2001). According to one recent writer, there are about 5,000
books of what he calls 'Gandhiana'. But possibly the most comprehensive,
balanced, and reliable critical biography is Gandhi: Prisoner
of Hope, by Judith Brown (1989), and based on a number of years
of a professional historian's research.
However a couple of books
have now appeared which take a rather different view of Gandhi.
These are not books primarily about Gandhi himself but about
the last days of the Raj. Patrick French, in Liberty or Death:
India's Journey to Independence and Division (1997), using British
government documents on the transfer of power, depicts Gandhi
as a charlatan. He speaks of 'The plaster Mahatma encapsulated
in Richard Attenborough's 1982 film', and says that 'Far from
being a wise and balanced saint, Gandhi was an emotionally troubled
social activist and a ruthlessly sharp political negotiator'
(17). Another writer, Lawrence James in Raj: The Making and
Unmaking of British India (1997), speaks of 'the facade of the
simple prophet-cum-saviour' (524). So there is a school of thought,
I think a small one, which sees Gandhi as a crafty politician,
a ruthless manipulator posing as a religious leader and presenting
a facade of spirituality. And we are now entering the phase,
which always comes at some point after the death of a great
man or woman, when a new generation of writers, needing something
new to say on the subject, are tempted to look for a way of
attacking the accepted view by starting a debunking trend. Indeed
there were always some among Gandhi's opponents who denounced
him as a charlatan. For example, Winston Churchill, in his famous
protest against Gandhi's presence at the independence negotiations,
said: 'It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi,
a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a
type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps
of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting
a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal
terms with the representative of the King-Emperor'. On the other
hand Churchill's contemporary and friend, Jan Smuts of South
Africa, who at one time would have largely agreed with Churchill
about this, later came to think differently. Smuts is recorded
to have said to Churchill: '[Gandhi] is a man of God. You and
I are mundane people' (Chadra, 382).
But there can be no doubt that
the myth-making tendency of the human mind has long affected
the public image of Gandhi. Some western enthusiasts have uncritically
glorified his memory, filtering out his human weaknesses; and
the popular picture of him among devotees in India has attained
mythic proportions, so that he is regarded by many as a divine
avatar or incarnation. But to enable us to see through those
clouds of adoration, there have until recently been some who
knew Gandhi; and over thirty years ago, when I was in India
for the first time, I was able to meet a number of people who
had known Gandhi, had vivid memories of him, and in most cases
had been deeply influenced by him. But apart from personal testimonies,
Gandhi's is probably the most minutely documented life that
has ever been lived. His own writings, including letters and
notes, speeches, interviews, newspaper articles, pamphlets and
books fill ninety-three volumes of The Collected Works of Mahatlma
Gandhi published by the Government of India. Hundreds of people
who knew him have published books and articles about him. And
so the available historical materials do enable us to form a
reasonably accurate and rounded picture of a life that was lived
so recently and so publicly and that has been recorded so fully
and from so many different angles.
Speaking of the clouds of adoration,
there is a little anecdote about Gandhi in Birmingham whilst
he was in Britain in 1931. He stayed, as you might expect, in
Woodbrooke, the Quaker Study Centre in Selly Oak. Next week
a lady who was an enthusiastic admirer of Gandhi stayed overnight
at Woodbrooke and was told that she would be in the guest room
in which Gandhi had slept the previous week. She was delighted
at the prospect of being able to say that she had slept in a
bed in which the Mahatma had slept. However when she went to
her room she found that there were two beds. So, resourcefully,
she set her alarm clock for the middle of the night, and when
it went off she moved from one bed to the other. At breakfast
next morning she asked as casually as she could, 'By the way,
which bed did Gandhi sleep in?', and was told, 'Oh Gandihji
always slept on the floor'.
But Gandhi himself would have
nothing to do with his own idealisation. He rejected the title
of Mahatma (great soul). He said, 'I myself do not feel like
a saint in any shape or form' (Young India, Jan.20, 1927). But
the ordinary village people of India began spontaneously to
see Gandhi as a mahatma, and as the title became universally
used, he had to put up with it. But neither he nor his friends
used it. In the earlier days his followers called him Bhai (brother),
and as he grew older Bapu (father), and referred to him as Gandhiji
- the ji being a common mark of respect. He was acutely, sometimes
painfully, conscious of his own faults. He blamed himself for
many misjudgements and mistakes, including the major one that
he called his 'Himalayan blunder' - his call to the people to
practice a mass non-violent revolt before they were ready for
it. So Gandhi was not ashamed to change his mind - I think he
would have liked the remark of John Maynard Keynes who, when
charged with having made a U-turn about something, said: 'When
I find that I've been mistaken I change my mind: what do you
do?'
Indeed one of the things about
Gandhi that I want to stress is that whilst he had basic convictions
about which he never wavered, yet within this rock-like consistency
of conviction his approach to life was always one of openness
to new experiences and new insights, willing to admit mistakes,
always ready to grow into a different and fuller understanding.
To quote Judith Brown, 'He saw himself as always waiting for
inner guidance, to which he tried to open himself by prayer,
a disciplined life, and increasing detachment not only from
possessions but also from excessive care about the results of
his earthly actions. He claimed to be perpetually experimenting
with satyagraha [spiritual-force or Truth-force], examining
[its] possibilities as new situations arose. He was, right to
the end, supremely a pilgrim spirit' (Brown, 80). And 'His profound
spiritual vision of life as a pilgrimage generated in him a
mental and emotional agility which responded to change as an
opportunity to be welcomed rather than resisted with fear' (Ibid.,
312-3). He did of course experience times of deep sorrow and
despair, particularly at the partition of India in 1947, which
he had tried so hard to avoid, with its terrible aftermath of
violence. Nevertheless Gandhi was basically an optimist, a believer
in the power of good ultimately to overcome evil, to the end
of his life. Margaret Chatterjee says, 'All who were close to
Gandhi have testified to his irresistible sense of fun, his
bubbling spirits which seemed to well up from an inner spring
in face of adversity . Those who knew him say that he was nearly
always genial and friendly, often laughing, often poking gentle
fun both at himself and at his friends' (Gandhi's Religious
Thought (1983, p. 108).
Gandhi was indeed a living
paradox, both extraordinarily attractive and yet powerfully
dominating, and in admiring him we ought to be aware of both
sides of his character. His moral insights were so strong and
uncompromising that he imposed them upon his followers by the
sheer force of conviction. This force arose above all from the
fact that Gandhi lived what he taught. He never taught an insight
or made a moral demand that he had not lived out in his own
life. Once, when asked by a foreign visitor what his message
was, he replied 'My life is my message' (Brown, 80). This is
why he was so challenging a person to encounter. People were
confronted not just by an idea which laid a claim upon them
but by a living incarnation of that idea. Indeed such was Gandhi's
overwhelming charisma that he could in effect be a dictator
within his immediate circle. And beyond his inner circle he
was capable of clever maneuvering to get his way within the
Congress movement. For example, in 1938-9 Subhas Chandra Bose
was elected, against Gandhi's wishes, as Congress President.
Bose believed in achieving freedom by violence, and was later
to lead the Indian National Army, composed of prisoners of war
held by the Japanese, in their advance through South East Asia,
aiming at the conquest of the British in India. Gandhi rejected
Bose's outlook and in 1939 engineered his downfall as Congress
President. It was this kind of political maneuvering that led
to Gandhi's being regarded by some as sly and devious, in the
words of a recent English critic, Patrick French, 'a ruthlessly
sharp political negotiator'. Some, probably thinking of saintliness
as inherently incompatible with politics, see Gandhi's considerable
political skill as nullifying his reputation for saintliness.
But why should not a saint be highly competent in practical
affairs? It is clear that Gandhi was politically formidable,
combining appeal to reason and evidence with an instinct for
the symbolic actions that would rally the Indian masses behind
him. But what to some was sly cunning was to others Gandhi's
ability so often to outwit those - whether the British rulers
or rival Indian leaders - who were trying to outwit him.
Indeed one reason, I would
suggest, why Gandhi is so significant today is that he was the
first great example of a typically modern phenomenon, the political
saint. I use the word 'saint' for want of a better, but by a
saint or mahatma I do not mean a perfect human being, because
then there would be no saints, but someone whom we spontaneously
feel to be much closer to God, or the ultimate realty, than
the rest of us. Before the rise of democracy such individuals
generally had no political power or, therefore, responsibility,
and saintliness typically took the form either of acts of individual
charity or of a life of secluded prayer and contemplation. But
since Gandhi - and many of them directly influenced by him -
we have seen Vinoba Bhave in India, Martin Luther King in the
United States, Osca Romero in San Salvador, Thich Naht Hahn
in Tailand, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu in South Africa,
as well as very numerous lesser figures in many places. For
each one of whom we have all heard there are probably fifty
who are only known locally. Dedication to needy and suffering
humanity has now become the main arena in which spiritual greatness
is expressed.
But returning to Gandhi, he was undoubtedly sometimes a difficult
person with whom to deal. Perhaps most importantly, Gandhi's
family sometimes found him hard to live with. As his demanding
ideals made him hardest on himself, they made him next hardest
on his sons, and the oldest of them broke down under the burden
of being the Mahatma's son, becoming estranged from him and
going to pieces in middle age. And Gandhi inherited the traditional
Indian understanding of the wifely role: he said, 'A Hindu husband
regards himself as lord and master of his wife who must ever
dance attendance on him' (Selected Works, I, 275), and during
the early years of their marriage his wife, Kasturbai, had a
good deal to put up with. But I have already stressed that Gandhi
was able to learn and change, and he later said, 'Her determined
submission to my will on the one hand and her quiet submission
to the suffering my stupidity involved on the other, ultimately
made me ashamed of myself and cured me of my stupidity in thinking
that I was born to rule over her; and in the end she became
my teacher in non-violence' (qtd. Ranjit Kumar Roy, Gandhi and
the Contemporary World, 225). And they became, for the greater
part of their long marriage, a model of mutual devotion. There
was incidentally, in the Sunday Times, 25 October 1998, an article
about the personal failures of great individuals, which included
a sentence about Gandhi, 'Mahatma Gandhi forced his wife to
clean out latrines as a punishment for her materialism'. This
is a wanton distortion to fit Gandhi into the writer's thesis.
Gandhi insisted that everyone in the ashram, including himself
and his wife and family, should do their share of the dirty
chores of the community. But this was not in any sense a punishment;
it was the practical democracy of the ashram.
Concerning Gandhi's sexuality,
which always fascinates western writers, the one thing that
they know about Gandhi, even if they know very little else,
is the vow of sexual abstinence that he made when he devoted
himself to community leadership, and his deliberate testing
of this vow for a while in old age by sleeping under the same
blanket with young women disciples. He believed that his power
as a spiritual and political leader depended on his inner soul-power,
which in turn depended on absolute faithfulness to his vows.
As he prepared to confront the crisis of Hindu-Muslim strife
in Bengal immediately after Independence he felt that he had
to be victorious in testing this most demanding of vows. However,
given the inevitability of hostile publicity, we must count
it as one of his blunders, and he was persuaded to end the experiment.
But - and this is the other side of the story - the inner spiritual
force which Gandhi maintained in this way was real and powerful.
To quote a recent historian, 'That more lives were not lost
in Bengal owed much to the pervasive influence of Mahatma Gandhi,
who had moved to Calcutta before Independence Day. There he
had taken up residence in one of the city's many poor districts,
living among the Untouchables and the dispossessed and threatening
to fast to death should violence break out. Miraculously, there
was no repetition of the mass murders that had disfigured Calcutta
a year earlier and the whole province of Bengal remained reasonably
calm' (Royle, The Last Days of the Raj, 195-6). . One of the
Viceroy's staff said that 'Hardened press correspondents report
that they have seen nothing comparable with this demonstration
of mass influence. Mountbatten's estimate is that he has achieved
by moral persuasion what four Divisions would have been hard
pressed to have accomplished by force' (Brown, 379). But Gandhi's
quite extraordinary moral and spiritual power and magnetism
arose from an absolute inner integrity, which included faithfulness
in keeping his vows. If he had failed in this his spirit would
have been broken within him, and his power to influence the
masses lost. This may be largely incomprehensible to the western
mind; and yet it made sense at the time to Gandhi, and it enabled
him to work what has been called the miracle of Calcutta.
Now a word about Gandhi as
a Hindu. What is sadly lacking in the contemporary critics whom
I have mentioned is that, as secular scholars, they have no
sense of the religious dimension of such a person as Gandhi.
They see him only as a politician. But everything that Gandhi
said shows that he was primarily a seeker after God, Truth,
the Ultimate, and a politician because this led him into the
service of his fellows and so into conflict with any form of
injustice. For him there was in practice no division between
religion and politics, for true religion expresses itself politically,
and the only way to achieve lasting political change is through
the inner transformation of masses of individuals, beginning
with oneself. He once said, 'Man's ultimate aim is the realization
of God, and all his activities, social, political, religious,
have to be guided by the ultimate aim of the vision of God.
The immediate service of all human beings becomes a necessary
part of the endeavor simply because the only way to find God
is to see Him in His creation and to be one with it. This can
only be done by service to all' (Harijan, August 29, 1936).
And there was ultimately no distinction, for Gandhi, between
one's own salvation and that of others.
It is sometimes said that Gandhi
was more a Christian than a Hindu, because his moral teaching
was so similar to that of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
Some Christians have assumed that Gandhi must have received
the ideal of love of enemy from the teaching of Jesus. However
this is not the case. He first met Christians, and first encountered
the New Testament, when he went to London as a young man to
study Law. But long before that he had been brought up on such
Hindu sayings as 'If a man gives you a drink of water and you
give him a drink in return, that is nothing. Real beauty consists
in doing good against evil' (Chatterjee, 50), and 'The truly
noble know all men as one, and return with gladness good for
evil done', which, as he says in his Autobiography (chap. 10),
became his guiding principle. As a Hindu his great object was
to attain to union with the ultimate reality which he called
God or Truth. But one of Gandhi's special insights was that
this quest can take the form of the service of truth in its
more immediate and relative forms - truthfulness in thought
and speech, truthfulness in dealing with one's opponents, truthfulness
in presenting a case, truthfulness in every aspect of life.
Another form of this insight was that the deluded state in which
humanity normally lives, in Hindu terms maya, illusion, takes
social, political, and economic forms. Moral delusion is institutionalized
in the structures of society. This was brought home to Gandhi
in South Africa when he was thrown off the train at Pietermaritzburg
because as a non-white barister he was traveling in a first-class
compartment. It dawned on him that racism was a spiritual delusion
embodied in an entrenched social system. As Rex Ambler says,
'The great illusion, the social maya, as we may call it, is
that human beings are fundamentally different from one another,
and that some are inherently superior to others and are, thereby,
entitled to dominate them. . . . His life's work was largely
devoted to the exposure of that illusion and the realization
of the hidden Truth of human oneness' (Hick & Hempel, eds,
Gandhi's Significance for Today, 93).
In Gandhi's ashrams the day
began and ended with prayer, readings (mainly from the Bhagavad
Gita), hymns (including some Christian hymns), and often a short
talk by Gandhi. But worship for him also took the form of spinning,
or sweeping the floor, or cleaning the latrines, or nursing
the sick, or attacking some specific injustice, or planning
some aspect of the campaign for independence. There was, for
him, no separation between religion and daily life.
Although a devoted Hindu, Gandhi
was a radical reformer, strongly opposed to many aspects of
traditional Hindu culture, such as animal sacrifices in the
temples, child marriages, and untouchability. 'Untouchability',
he said, 'is a soul-destroying sin. Caste is a social evil'
(Selected Works V, 444). For whilst he generally acknowledged
the traditional caste division of labour he did not see it as
religiously based, and he increasingly criticised its harmful
aspects. Indeed in his ashrams he overturned them. Here people
of all castes, colours, nationalities, and religions ate and
worked together, everyone, including Gandhi and his family,
joining equally in the manual labour traditionally allocated
to the Shudras (the lowest caste), and such dirty jobs as latrine
cleaning traditionally done only by the outcastes. He regarded
untouchability as a 'useless and wicked superstition' (Brown,
58), and was revolted by its defence in terms of the doctrine
of karma. In his eyes there was no difference between a Brahmin
and an outcaste; and he defended marriages between people of
different castes . He refused to wear the sacred thread of a
caste Hindu because 'If the Shudras may not wear it, I argued,
what right have the other varnas [castes] to do so? (Selected
Works II, 586-7). And whilst he supported the traditional Hindu
reverence for the cow, he said 'Cow protection, in my opinion,
includes cattle-breeding, improvement of the stock, humane treatment
of bullocks, formation of model dairies, etc. (Ibid., III, 636).
In short, Gandhi's moral insights had far greater authority
for him than established traditions, and in his maturity he
had no hesitation in sweeping away long accepted ideas and practices
that he regarded as harmful excrescences on the body of Hinduism.
Gandhi did however cleave to
certain basic Hindu beliefs which were the source of his practical
intuitions.
Two closely related Hindu beliefs are that in the depths of
our being we are all one, and that in the depths of each of
us there is a divine element. 'The chief value of Hinduism,'
Gandhi said, 'lies in holding the actual belief that all life
(not only human beings, but all sentient beings) are one, i.e.
all life coming from the One universal source, call it God,
or Allah, or Parameshwara' (Rhaghavn Iyer, The Moral and Political
Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, III, 315). Accordingly, 'To be true
to such religion one has to lose oneself in continuous and continuing
service of all life' (Ibid., I, 461). The unity of life means
that no one can be totally alien and irredeemably an enemy,
and that 'one's true self-interest consists in the good of all'.
Again 'All living creatures are of the same substance as all
drops of water in the ocean are the same in substance. I believe
that all of us, individual souls, living in this ocean of spirit,
are the same with one another with the closest bond among ourselves.
A drop that separates soon dries up and any soul that believes
itself separate from others is likewise destroyed' (Indian Opinion,
April 29, 1914).
This means in practice that
in situations of conflict there is something in the opponent
that can be appealed to - not only a common humanity but, in
the famous Quaker phrase (and Gandhi felt great affinity with
the Quakers), 'that of God in every person'. 'I have a glimpse
of God', he said, 'even in my opponents' (Iyer, I, 438). And
closely connected with this is the principle of ahimsa, non-killing,
and more generally non-violence. This is an ancient Hindu, but
more particularly Jain, principle. It obviously coheres with
the belief that all life is ultimately one and that there is
a divine element in every person. It means in practice that
in the midst of injustice the right way to deal with oppressors
- whether the South African government in its treatment of the
'coolies' or the British raj dominating and exploiting the people
of India, - is not violent revolt but an appeal to the best
within them by rational argument and by deliberate and open
disobedience to unjust laws even when this involves suffering,
violence and imprisonment. Willingness to suffer for the sake
of justice, appealing as it does to the common humanity of both
oppressor and oppressed, is the moral power for which Gandhi
coined the word satyagraha, the power of Truth, Reality. He
believed that a policy of non-aggression in the face of aggression,
of calm reason in response to blind emotion, of appeal to basic
fairness and justice, together with a readiness to suffer for
this, are more productive in the long run than meeting violence
with violence. He was convinced that there is always something
in the other, however deeply buried, that will eventually, given
enough time, respond. For 'Non-violence is the law of our species
as violence is the law of the brute. The spirit lies dormant
in the brute and he knows no law but that of physical might.
The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law - to the
strength of the spirit' (Iyer, II, 299) . But in order for this
to happen the satyagrahi must have the courage to face the oppressor
without fear. Without such courage, which Gandhi was able to
evoke in many of his followers, genuine non-violent action is
impossible. 'Non-violence', he said, 'is a weapon of the strong.
With the weak it might easily be hypocrisy' (Ibid., I, 294).
A satyagrahi can be non-violent precisely because he does not
fear the oppressor. 'Fear and love,' Gandhi said, 'are contradictory
terms. . . . My daily experience, as of those who are working
with me, is that every problem would lend itself to solution
if we are determined to make the law of truth and non-violence
the law of life. (Ibid).
However Gandhi was not opposed
to the use of force in all circumstances. He accepted that violence
was necessary in restraining violent criminals; and he said,
'I would support the formation of a militia under swaraj [self-rule]'
(Ibid., II, 298). 'In life', he said, 'it is impossible to eschew
violence completely. The question is, where is one to draw the
line?' (Ibid.) But in general, he insisted, 'non-violence is
infinitely superior to violence' (Ibid., II, 363)..
In the colonial India in which
Gandhi most notably applied his principles he had to carry the
masses with him. And so a great deal of his time was spent in
'consciousness raising' by public speaking, often to great crowds
throughout the country, by a constant stream of newspaper and
journal articles, and by interviews with individuals and groups
from both India and abroad. He knew that the ideal of total
non-violence, which involves loving one's enemy, was not going
to be attained by the masses in any foreseeable future. He said
that 'for me the law of complete Love is the law of my being.
. . But I am not preaching this final law through the Congress
or the Khalifat organisation. I know my own limitations only
too well. I know that any such attempt is foredoomed to failure'
(Young India, March 9, 1922). But although perfect non-violence
was an ideal rather than a present reality, something approaching
it, namely non-violent non-co-operation with the foreign ruler,
was possible and would eventually bring about the nation's freedom.
He said, 'I know that to 90 per cent of Indians, non-violence
means [civil disobedience] and nothing else' (Lamont Hempel
in Hick & Hempel, 5). Again, 'What the Congress and the
Khalifat organisations have accepted is but a fragment of the
implications of that law [of non-violence]. [But] Given true
workers, the limited measure of its application can be realised
in respect of vast masses of people within a short time' (Young
India, March 9, 1922). And he was able to convince a critical
mass of his fellow countrymen that a hundred thousand Englishmen
could only rule three hundred million Indians so long as the
Indians weakly submitted to their rule. If they had the courage
to withdraw their co-operation, and deliberately disobey unjust
laws - such as the salt tax, - the British raj would be helpless
and the imperial rulers would see that their position was both
morally and politically untenable. Although in 1930 there were
29,000 Congress activists in jail, the government could not
imprison millions; and although there might be further outbursts
of violence, like the terrible Amritsar massacre in 1919, the
world would react against this and in the end the imperial power
would be defeated and would have to depart. And in the end this
is what happened. After the 1939-45 war the Labour government
of Clement Attlee came to power in Britain and made the momentous
decision to grant full Indian independence. It was evident that
the demand and expectation for this were growing to the point
at which only brute force could check it, and this in an India
in which the whole administrative machinery had been gravely
weakened during the war, and when the British soldiers now wanted
to go home and were certainly not willing to become agents of
imperialist oppression. In 1946 the then Viceroy, General Sir
Archibald Wavell, reported to London that 'Our time in India
is limited and our power to control events almost gone' (French,
245).
And so, at this late stage, Independence had become virtually
inevitable. In that immediate situation it was the work, not
of Gandhi and the Congress, but of the collapse of British power.
But on a longer view this end-game was only made possible by
the progressive achievements of the independence movement during
the previous thirty years. It was Gandhi and his colleagues
who had made Indians proud of their culture and confident of
their capacity for self-rule, and who had built up the finally
irresistible expectation and demand for independence.
Throughout the long struggle
it was Gandhi who provided the inspiration, the moral authority,
and the immense unifying symbolic power. But in the detailed
negotiations during the final phase it was mainly Pandit Jahwarhalal
Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who moulded the settlement
on the Congress side - Nehru the brilliant, sophisticated, charismatic
disciple of Gandhi, chosen by him as Congress President at this
critical juncture, and Patel the shrewd, tough, forceful political
operator. And so the raj ended as Gandhi had always said it
would, with the British voluntarily handing over power and leaving
in friendship - despite the strong opposition at home by old-style
imperialists led by Winston Churchill. Instead of going in bitterness
and enmity, the British went with great pomp and ceremony, leaving
an India which has continued to this day to be a member of the
British Commonwealth. It seems very unlikely that history would
have taken this course but for Gandhi's influence over the previous
thirty years - somewhat as, more recently, it seems very unlikely
that apartheid in South Africa would have ended so peacefully
but for the personal influence of Nelson Mandela.
We can now try to formulate
the main lessons of Gandhi's life and thought for ourselves
today. Gandhi himself believed that his basic message would
only have its main impact many years after his own death. It
is a mistake, and one which secular historians are very prone
to make, to think of him only in the context of the movement
for Indian independence, inseparable though his memory is from
that. He did not see political independence as such as his great
aim, but rather a profound transformation of Indian society.
True swaraj meant freedom from greed, ignorance, prejudice;
and most of Gandhi's time was spent in trying to educate and
elevate the masses, dealing with basic questions of cleanliness,
sanitation, and diet, combating disease, and fostering mutual
help and true community. As Judith Brown writes, 'He visualised
a total renewal of society from its roots upwards, so that it
would grow into a true nation, characterised by harmony and
sympathy instead of strife and suspicion, in which castes, communities,
and both sexes would be equal, complementary and interdependent'
(Brown, 213). Thus Gandhi's vision went much further than the
immediate political aims that he shared with his colleagues
in the Indian National Congress. What elements of his long-term
project are relevant today?
First is the Gandhian approach
to conflict resolution, based on a belief in the fundamental
nature of the human person. Not however of human nature as it
has generally manifested itself throughout history, but of its
further potentialities, which can be evoked by goodwill, self-giving
love, and a sacrificial willingness to suffer for the good of
all. As Lament Hempel puts it, 'Gandhi's crowning achievement
may have been his ability to inspire homo humanus out of homo
sapiens' (Hempel, 5). But this was only in a number of individuals,
not in society as a whole. Individuals continue to be inspired
by Gandhi's teaching and example. But neither India nor any
other state has based its policies consistently on Gandhian
principles. It is particularly tragic that his own country has
failed to live up to his ideals. The rise of the Hindu supremicist
movement - which was responsible for Gandhi's assassination
- has intensified communal tensions, culminating in the destruction
of the Ayodia mosque in 1992. All this would make Gandhi weep.
Unregenerate human nature has triumphed once again over what
Gandhi called Truth - as it has over the teachings of enlightened
religious leaders in every century.
Nevertheless the attempt to
inspire humans to rise to true humanity must never cease. It
involves an unwavering commitment to fairness, truthfulness,
open and honest dealing, willingness to see the other's point
of view, readiness to compromise, readiness even to suffer.
In the familiar but in practice disregarded words of Jesus,
it requires us to love our enemies. Such a response refuses
to enter the downward spiral of mutual recrimination, hatred,
and violence. The lesson of history is not that this has been
tried and failed, but that the failure has been in not trying
it.
But ahimsa as practical politics is a long-term strategy. It
took time and patience and ceaseless effort and example to evoke
the limited realisation that non-violent action in India, even
simply as a tactic, is more effective than violent revolt. It
is thus pointless to ask how Gandhi would have fared in, for
example, Nazi Germany. He would no doubt have been quickly eliminated.
The more useful question is what would have happened if a Greman
like him had been at work there during the previous twenty years.
Another implication of Gandhi's
thought concerns ecology and the preservation of the earth and
the life on it. Here Gandhi anticipated the widespread Green
movement of today. To quote James Gould, 'Gandhi has emphasised
opposite values to those of the consumer society: the reduction
of individual wants, the return to direct production of foodstuffs
and clothing, and self-sufficiency rather than growing dependency.
As the limits of growth and the inherent scarcity of resources
broke upon the world in the 1960's, the Gandhian idea of restraint
suddenly made sense' (James Gould in Hick & Hempel, 12).
E.F. Schumacher, author of the influential Small Is Beautiful,
regarded Gandhi as the great pioneer in insisting that the rampant
growth of capitalist industrialism is incompatible with a sustainable
world ecosystem. Schumacher said, 'Gandhi had always known,
and rich countries are now reluctantly beginning to realise,
that their affluence was based on stripping the world. The USA
with 5.6% of the world population was consuming up to 40% of
the world's resources, most of them non-renewable. Such a life-style
could not spread to the whole of mankind. In fact, the truth
is now dawning that the world could not really afford the USA,
let alone the USA plus Europe plus Japan plus other highly industrialised
countries. Enough is now known about the basic facts of spaceship
Earth to realise that its first class passengers were making
demands which could not be sustained very much longer without
destroying the spaceship' (In Copley & Paxton, ed, op. cit.,
141). Gandhi saw this in terms of his native India, which was
then still a developing country in which people in the hundreds
of thousands of villages lived in extreme poverty. And so instead
of building up modem industries with labour saving machinery
in the cities, drawing the villagers into the urban slums, he
urged basic employment for all. He wanted 'production by the
masses rather than mass production'. Every policy should be
judged by its effects on the multitude of ordinary citizens.
For example, cottage industries, such as spinning, required
very little capital equipment and should be encouraged and supported
throughout the vast rural areas. That is what Gandhi saw as
the need at that time. Had he lived a generation later he would
no doubt have accepted industrialisation, but would have worked
to humanise it and to undo the great gap between the rich and
the poor.
In the matter of aid to impoverished
countries Gandhi was at least a generation ahead of his time.
In 1929 he wrote, 'The grinding poverty and starvation with
which our country is afflicted is such that it drives more and
more men every year into the ranks of the beggars, whose desperate
struggle for bread renders them insensible to all feelings of
decency and self-respect. And our philanthropists, instead of
providing work for them and insisting on their working for bread,
give them alms' (Selected Works, II, 647). But that aid should
be given in such a way as to free the recipients to help themselves
is now an accepted principle in international aid circles.
Gandhi's 'feminism' - though
that is not a term that he used - is also of interest today
in shifting the focus from the transformation of women to the
transformation of men. In the Indian context his concern for
the position of women in society was ahead of his time. He was
impressed when in England by the courage and dedication of the
suffragettes, although he did not approve of their occasional
resort to violence. And when women responded to his call in
South Africa and India, showing themselves as willing as the
men to face violent police action and jail, Gandhi saw that
they had an unique contribution to make. He was quick to see
that women could become the 'leader in the Satyagraha which
does not require the learning that books give but does require
the stout heart that comes from suffering and faith (Roy, 224).
Further, because for Gandhi true liberation always went much
further than political independence, to the humane transformation
of society, he 'believed that by taking part in the nationalist
struggle, women of India could break out of their long imposed
seclusion' (Hoda in Copley & Paxton, 141). His conception
of the kind of gender revolution that is needed was novel in
his time. For the wholehearted adoption of non-violence can
be seen as making for a gentler and less aggressive masculinity.
Sushila Gidwani puts the point challengingly in this way: 'Indian
feminism aims at changing men to become qualitatively more feminine
while modern feminism aims at changing women to become qualitatively
more masculine' (Hick & Hempel, .233)
And finally, another aspect
of Gandhi's thought which is relevant today. This is not novel
in the East but is highly controversial within Christianity,
though much less so today in many circles than in Gandhi's time.
This is his understanding of the relation between the great
world faiths. 'The time is now passed,' he said, 'when the followers
of one religion can stand and say, ours is the only true religion
and all others are false' (Indian Opinion, August 26, 1905).
In his youth Gandhi lived within a very ecumenical community.
He was particularly influenced by a Jain, Raychandbhai, who
introduced him to the idea of the manysidedness of reality (anekantavada),
so that many different views may all be valid. And this includes
religious views. Gandhi shared the ancient Hindu assumption
that 'Religions are different roads converging at the same point.
What does it matter that we take different roads so long as
we reach the same goal?' (Copley & Paxton, 239). He regarded
it as pointless, because impossible, to grade the great world
faiths in relation to each other. 'No one faith is perfect.
All faiths are equally dear to their respective votaries. What
is wanted, therefore, is a living friendly contact among the
followers of the great religions of the world and not a clash
among them in the fruitless attempt on the part of each community
to show the superiority of its own faith over the rest . . .
Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsis, Jews are convenient labels.
But when I tear them
down, I do not know which is which. We are all children of the
same God' (Harijan, April 18, 1936). However his 'doctrine of
the Equality of Religions', as it has been called, did not move
towards a single global religion, but enjoins us all to become
better expressions of our own faith, being enriched in the process
by influences from other faiths.
These, then, are ways in which
Gandhi's thinking was ahead of his own time and alive today
in our time. And underlying all this, as an available source
of inspiration for each new generation, is Gandhi's indomitable
faith in the possibility of a radically better human future
if only we will learn to trust the power of non-violent openness
to others and to the deeper humanity, and indeed divinity, within
us all. To most people this seems impossible. But Gandhi's great
legacy is that his life has definitively shown that, given true
dedication, it is possible in the world as it is.
©. John Hick. 2006
.