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Bhikhu Parekh

Gandhi A Very Short Introduction

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford o x 2 6 d p

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Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Spain by Book Print S. L.

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

List of illustrations ix

Abbreviations x

1 Life and work 1

2 Religious thought 35

3 Human nature 49

4 Satyāgraha 64

5 Critique of modernity 78

6 The vision of a non-violent society 92

7 Critical appreciation 111

Glossary 127

Bibliographical background 129

Further reading 133

Index 135

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to Pratap Mehta, Sudipta Kaviraj, Noel O’Sullivan,

Judith Brown, and Terry McNeill for their valuable comments on the

whole or parts of this book. Terry McNeill additionally ensured a happy

academic environment in which to work. Pratap Mehta and Sudipta

Kaviraj, whose knowledge of the Indian philosophical tradition is

greater than mine, alerted me to issues I would otherwise have

overlooked. During our 35 years of friendship Noel O’Sullivan has

influenced my thinking in ways I cannot easily identify, and for which

I thank him warmly. Fred Dallmayr, Anthony Parel, Thomas Pantham,

Leroy Rouner, Meghnad Desai, Homi Bhabha, the late and much missed

Ushaben Mehta, Ronald Terchek, and Usha Thakkar have placed me in

their debt by discussing my ideas on Gandhi with me over many years.

I owe thanks to Sir Keith Thomas and Rebecca Hunt for their helpful

comments on the final draft, and to my brother Chandrakant Shroff

and to C. B. Patel for their friendship and kindness over the years. I thank

Sue Wiles for typing the book and Amalendu Misra for preparing the

index.

I dedicate the book to the victims of intercommunal violence in India,

and to my good friend Lakshmi Mal Singhvi who in his quiet way has

done much to promote religious harmony.

This book first appeared under the title Gandhi in the Past Masters Series

of Oxford University Press. As it now appears in a new series, I’ve made a

few changes in the text, many of them minor and largely stylistic. The

book is different enough to be a new entity, yet sufficiently similar to

the old to count as its reincarnation.

List of illustrations

1 Gandhi in 1942 2

From Mahatma Gandhi: The Last

Phase, Pyarelal (Navajivan Publishing

House, 1965)

2 Gandhi as a law student in

London in 1890 4

Henry Guttmann/Hulton Getty

3 Gandhi on the Salt March,

12 March 1930 22

From Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent

Power in Action, Dennis Dalton

(Columbia University Press, 1993)

4 Gandhi walking through

the riot-torn areas of

Noakhali, late 1946 30

From Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent

Power in Action, Dennis Dalton

(Columbia University Press, 1993)

5 Gandhi with Nehru in

1936 33

From Gandhi on Nehru, Hingorani

(1993)

6 ‘The odd thing about

assassins . . .’ Cartoon by

Mauldin from the Chicago

Sun-Times, 1968 113

© Chicago Sun-Times

7 Gandhi’s worldly

possessions 124

From Gandhi on Nehru, Hingorani

(1993)

Abbreviations

The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 90 volumes (New Delhi:

Publications Division of the Government of India, 1958–84) are cited by

volume number and page.

A An Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with Truth, tr.

Mahadev Desai (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966).

B Judith Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (London: Yale University

Press, 1991).

F Louis Fischer, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (New

York: New American Library, 1954).

G Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (Bombay: Bharatiya

Vidya Bhavan, 4th combined edition, 1983).

K Martin Luther King, Jr, Stride towards Freedom: The Montgomery

Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).

M The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Raghavan

Iyer, 3 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

All the Sanskrit and Hindi words used in the book are defined in the

Glossary.

Chapter 1

Life and work

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869 in the coastal town of

Porbandar, one of scores of tiny princely states and now part of the

Indian state of Gujarat. Although the Gandhis, meaning grocers, were

merchants by caste, they had risen to important political positions.

Mohandas’s father was the chief administrator and member of the court

of Porbandar, and his grandfather that of the adjacent tiny state of

Junagadh.

Gandhi grew up in an eclectic religious environment. His parents were

followers of the largely devotional Hindu cult of Vishnu (or

Vaishnavites). His mother belonged to the Pranami sect, which

combined Hindu and Muslim religious beliefs, gave equal honour to

the sacred books of the Vaishnavites and the Koran, and preached

religious harmony. Her religious fasts and vows, observed without

exception all her life, left an abiding impression on her son. His father’s

friends included many Jains who preached a strict doctrine of non-

violence and self-discipline. Gandhi was also exposed to Christian

missionaries, but Christianity was not a significant presence in his

childhood. Like many Hindus he unselfconsciously imbibed a variety of

religious beliefs, but had no deep knowledge of any religious tradition

including his own.

Gandhi was a shy and mediocre student, and completed his school

1

1. Gandhi in 1942

education with average results. He was married to Kasturbai when they

were both 13 years of age, an experience that turned him into a bitter

enemy of child marriage. Sex understandably obsessed him greatly in

his early years. One night when he was 16 years of age, he left his dying

father to spend some time with his wife. His father’s death during his

short absence hurt him deeply. Although many commentators have

used this incident to explain his hostility to sex, there is little real

evidence to support this view. In his autobiography Gandhi only said the

incident created a deep sense of ‘shame’ in him. What is more, he

continued to enjoy his wife’s company for several years afterwards and

went on to raise four sons. He did not become seriously interested in

celibacy until nearly 16 years after the incident and, although the sense

of guilt played a part, his real reason was a desire to conserve his

physical and spiritual energies for the important political struggles on

which he had then embarked.

Gandhi left for England in 1888 to train as a lawyer, after giving a pledge

to his mother that he would avoid wine, women, and meat. In the early

months he lived the life of an English gentleman, buying himself a

morning suit, a top hat, and a silver-headed cane, and taking lessons in

dancing, elocution, and the violin. As the money ran out and after he

had narrowly escaped a sexual temptation, better sense prevailed, and

Gandhi turned to the more serious aspects of English life. Like many

other colonial leaders he discovered the West and the East at more or

less the same time, and one through the other. He read widely about

British and European law and politics, interacted with theosophists, and

studied Christianity, finding the Old Testament somewhat disagreeable

but the New deeply moving. He also read about his own religious

tradition, especially the Gita and Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia, which

respectively initiated him into the Hindu and Buddhist philosophies.

Gandhi was called to the bar in June 1891 and left for India two days

later.

Gandhi’s legal career in India was disappointing. He was too shy to open

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2. Gandhi as a law student in London in 1890

his mouth in court and had to give away his first barrister’s brief to a

colleague. He turned to drafting applications and managed to make

ends meet. However, the work did not interest him much, and it also

exposed him to court intrigues which he found tiresome. When a

Muslim firm in South Africa sought his services as a lawyer and a

correspondence clerk, Gandhi readily accepted the offer. He sailed for

South Africa in 1893 intending to spend a year there but instead stayed

on for 21 years.

South Africa

South Africa was a turning point in Gandhi’s life. It confronted him with

many unusual experiences and challenges, and profoundly transformed

him. Within a week of his arrival he had an experience that changed the

course of his life. When travelling from Durban to Pretoria, he was

thrown out of a train in the middle of the night for daring to travel first-

class, and spent the rest of the night shivering in the waiting room at

Petermaritzburg station. The distraught Gandhi debated whether to

return to India or stay on and fight for his rights, and resolved to do the

latter. The next day he travelled to Charlestown without difficulty, but

the driver of the stagecoach that carried him to Johannesburg refused

to let him travel inside, and asked him to sit next to him. Gandhi

reluctantly agreed. Later he was asked to move and sit on a mat on the

floor. Smarting under a sense of injustice, he refused, whereupon the

driver started beating him and tried to push him off the coach until his

fellow passengers saved him. Some months later he was kicked into the

gutter by a sentry for daring to walk past President Kruger’s house in

Pretoria (A 91–6).

Indians who had begun to migrate to South Africa from the 1860s as

indentured labourers to work on sugar and coffee plantations suffered

all kinds of indignities and discrimination, especially in Natal and

Transvaal, where they were heavily concentrated. In April 1894, when

Gandhi was about to return to India for good, the legislature of Natal

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was debating the Indian Franchise Bill, which would have taken away

Indians’ voting rights. Gandhi’s Muslim employer urged him to stay on

to lead the fight, and he readily agreed. He founded the Natal Indian

Congress and his campaign succeeded in partially reducing the

harshness of the Bill. His similar campaigns against immigration

restrictions and discriminatory licensing laws were much less successful.

He increasingly began to complain that constitutional pressures,

petitions, and rational persuasion were making no impact on

‘prejudiced’ minds, and wondered what else he should do.

He found the answer a few years later. When Transvaal passed a law in

1907 requiring the registration and fingerprinting of all Indians and

giving the police the power to enter their houses to ensure that the

inhabitants were registered, Gandhi hit upon his well-known method of

satyāgraha. It was a form of non-violent resistance and involved

peaceful picketing of registration centres, burning registration cards,

courting arrest, and gracefully accepting such punishment as was

meted out. Gandhi’s protest resulted in some concessions which,

however, fell short of his original demands. It was followed by another

satyāgraha, this time involving Indian women and miners, against such

measures as the imposition of poll tax, the refusal to recognize Indian

marriages, immigration regulations, and the system of indentured

labour. This had greater success and led to the passage of the Indian

Relief Act in 1914.

During his 21 years in South Africa, Gandhi’s ways of thought and life

underwent important changes. Indeed the two became inseparable for

him. Thought came to have no meaning for him unless it was lived out,

and life was shallow unless it reflected a carefully thought-out vision of

life. Every time Gandhi came across a new idea, he asked if it was worth

living up to. If not, he took no further interest in it. But if the answer was

in the affirmative, he integrated it into his way of life, ‘experimented’

with its ‘truth’, and explored its moral logic. This approach deeply

influenced his attitude to books. He read little, and only what was

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practically relevant. But when a book gripped his imagination, he

meditated on it, brooded over its message, put its central ideas into

action, and ‘grew from truth to truth’. He mainly read religious and

moral literature including Plato’s Apology and William Salter’s Ethical

Religion (1889), the first of which he translated and the second

summarized into his native Gujarati. Three books that influenced him

deeply during his stay in South Africa were Henry Thoreau’s On the

Duty of Civil Disobedience (1847), a ‘masterly treatise’; Tolstoy’s The

Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893), which ‘overwhelmed’ him and in

which he claimed to have first discovered the doctrine of non-violence

and love; and John Ruskin’s Unto this Last (1862), whose ‘magical

influence’ was a ‘turning point’ in his life (A 250). Inspired by Ruskin,

Gandhi decided to live an austere life on a commune, at first on the

Phoenix Farm in Natal and then on the Tolstoy Farm just outside

Johannesburg.

During this period Gandhi embarked on a number of experiments

involving diet, child-rearing, nature cure, and his personal and

professional life. Under the influence of a medical book that greatly

impressed him, he even delivered his fourth son himself. He became

convinced that a political leader must be morally pure, and embarked

on a programme of personal moral development. Constantly

challenged by the ubiquitous Christian missionaries to explain and

defend his religious beliefs convincingly or convert to Christianity,

Gandhi often felt lost. The Hindu concepts of ātman (soul) and moksha

This book [Unto this Last] was impossible to lay aside, once I had

begun it. I discovered some of the deepest conviction reflected

in it. Johannesburg to Durban was a twenty-four hours’ journey.

The train reached there in the evening. I could not get any sleep

that night. I determined to change my life in accordance with

the ideals of the book.

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(liberation) puzzled him greatly, and he had to write to his mentor

Raichandbhai in India for clarification and guidance. Since Gandhi

learned about his religion in South Africa in a confrontational context

and without access to a rich and living Hindu tradition, his knowledge of

it was largely based on reading and reflection, and remained shallow

and abstract. Like many other things in his life, he made up his brand of

Hinduism as he went along, with all the attendant advantages and

disadvantages.

In South Africa Gandhi made close Jewish friends, one of whom

bought the 1,100-acre Tolstoy Farm for him, and acquired

considerable knowledge of the beliefs and practices of the only major

religion to which he had not hitherto been exposed. He called Jews

the ‘untouchables of Christianity’ whose persecution, like that of their

Hindu counterparts, was based on a deeply corrupted and gross

misreading of a great religion (lxviii. 137). Gandhi also cultivated close

Christian friends, especially the British missionary C. F. Andrews

(1871–1940), of whom he said that there was no one else to whom he

had a ‘deeper attachment’ (F 130). Under their influence Gandhi

renewed his study of Christianity and integrated several aspects of it

into his brand of increasingly redefined Hinduism, particularly the

idea of suffering love as exemplified in the image of crucifixion. The

image haunted him all his life and became the source of some of his

deepest passions. He wept before it when he visited the Vatican in

Rome in 1931; the bare walls of his Sevagram āshram made an

exception in favour of it; Isaac Watts’s ‘When I survey the wondrous

Cross’, which offers a moving portrayal of Christ’s sorrow and

sacrifice and ends with ‘love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul,

my life, my all’, was one of his favourite hymns; and in many dark

moments of his life he articulated his suffering in the image of Christ

on the Cross.

In South Africa Gandhi acquired political skills and learned lessons,

some of which served him well and others ill on his return to India. He

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understood the value of journalism, and started and used the weekly

Indian Opinion to propagate his ideas. He also saw how demoralized and

incapable of concerted action his countrymen had become. Rather than

fight for their rights, they expected others to do it for them and in the

meantime circumvented discriminatory rules by bribing government

officials. Not surprisingly he repeatedly rebuked them, urged them to

‘rebel’ against themselves, and warned them that ‘those who behave

like worms should not blame others for trampling upon them’. Gandhi

also learned the art of self-projection and political networking. He

wrote about his work to influential people abroad including Tolstoy,

assiduously cultivated important Indian and British leaders, and ensured

that his activities were well reported in India and Britain. In South Africa

he had little difficulty uniting Hindu and Muslim traders, many of whom

shared a common language and culture. He generalized this experience

and both underestimated the distance between the two communities

in India and exaggerated his own ability to bridge it.

Return to India

Gandhi had gone to South Africa an insecure, timid, and unsuccessful

lawyer. He left it for India in 1914 a self-confident, proud, deeply

religious, and well-known political leader. His reasons for leaving South

Africa are not entirely clear. Although he thought and wrote otherwise,

his successes there were rather limited and he must have known that he

could not do much more. By contrast he had acquired quite a name and

had established useful contacts in India, and might have thought that

he had an important role to play there. Whatever his reasons, he

returned home equipped with a new method of action and a long-

meditated programme for India’s regeneration. Gandhi was in those

days an enthusiastic supporter of the British Empire. He thought it

stood for great ideals with which he had rightly ‘fallen in love’, had given

him unrestricted access to Britain and South Africa, and had exposed

him to many new ways of life and thought. Not surprisingly he urged his

countrymen in London and India to support the British war effort, he

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raised an ambulance corps in London in 1914, and recruited for the

British army in India in 1918. Although a votary of non-violence, he

insisted that his loyalty to the Empire required him to give it his full

support in times of need.

After his arrival in India, Gandhi travelled throughout the country with

‘his ears open and mouth shut’, as his ‘political guru’ the great liberal

leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale had advised him to do, to get to know the

country he had left over two decades ago. His observations led him to

two crucial conclusions. First, although independence was not yet on

the agenda, there was considerable opposition to the increasingly

oppressive colonial rule and a widespread demand for representative

institutions. The ‘begging’ and ‘demeaning’ methods of the Indian

National Congress, founded in 1885 and dominated by middle-class

professionals, had proved ineffective, and the terrorist movement,

whose spokesmen he had first encountered in London during his

student days and with whom he had debated the ethics of violence

during his subsequent visits, was gaining ground. Gandhi shared the

latter’s impatience and admired its courage and patriotism, but strongly

disapproved of its violence on both moral and prudential grounds.

Violence was inherently evil, not a viable option for a people who had

been disarmed by the colonial rulers, and unlikely to build up moral

courage, cultural self-confidence, and the capacity for concerted action

among the masses. Gandhi thought that the method of satyāgraha that

he had developed in South Africa was India’s best hope.

Secondly, Gandhi’s study of India convinced him of its ‘degenerate’

status. He had noticed it in South Africa and written about it in Hind

Swarāj, his first book, in which he offered a systematic analysis of India’s

predicament and its resolution (M i. 199–264). Thanks to the centuries

of foreign rule, Indians had become deeply divided, caste-ridden,

conformist, fragmented, selfish, contentious, cowardly, demoralized,

and lacking in a social conscience and civic virtues. Unless the country

was revitalized and ‘reborn’, it could neither win nor sustain its

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independence. Accordingly, Gandhi worked out a comprehensive

syllabus of national regeneration, which he appropriately called the

Constructive Programme. Typically Gandhian in its content, it included

both small and large items, covering different areas of life and some

chosen largely for their symbolic value. It included such ‘absolutely

essential’ proposals as Hindu–Muslim unity, the removal of

untouchability, a ban on alcohol, the use of khādi (hand-spun cloth), the

development of village industries, and craft-based education. It also

included equality for women, health education, use of indigenous

languages, adoption of a common national language, economic

equality, building up peasants’ and workers’ organizations, integration

of the tribal people into mainstream political and economic life, a

detailed code of conduct for students, helping lepers and beggars, and

cultivating respect for animals.

Although some of these proposals were rather trivial, none were

without value. For example, the use of khādi was intended to provide a

national uniform and create at least a measure of outward equality in a

highly unequal society, to generate a sense of solidarity with the poor,

to bring economic pressure to bear on the British government, and to

reduce foreign imports. The use of regional languages was intended to

bridge the vast and widening chasm between the masses and the

Westernized elite, ensure cultural continuity, encourage authenticity of

thought and action, and to forge indigenous tools of collective self-

expression. The development of village industries was intended to help

the poor in the villages, guarantee them gainful work, arrest migration

to the cities, and, above all, to sustain what Gandhi took to be the

necessary social and geographical basis of Indian civilization.

For Gandhi the well-planned satyāgrahas and the Constructive

Programme, especially the latter, held the key to India’s moral

regeneration and political independence. For nearly 30 years he single-

mindedly devoted all his energies to both. He needed a united team of

men and women with complementary talents, and skilfully identified,

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nurtured, and welded them. Sometimes he took over whole families,

used their members to reinforce each other’s commitment to his cause,

and even became their honorary senior member, resolving internal

tensions and exercising considerable emotional influence especially over

the women and the young. He skilfully linked various families and

created a deeply bonded national network, with himself as its venerated

head. Since he needed a journal to carry his message in his own words,

he started and edited Navajivan, to which he later added Harijan. He

required funds, and so he cultivated and shrewdly managed India’s half

a dozen richest industrialists. He needed to awaken and unite his

countrymen, and so he initiated a series of well-planned satyāgrahas,

each appealing to a clearly targeted constituency. He required a

powerful political organization, and rebuilt the Indian National Congress

from the bottom upwards.

Above all Gandhi needed to mobilize the masses. After long reflection

and experimentation he evolved a distinct mode of discourse that was

also a form of praxis. Convinced that human actions derived their

emotional energy from the ‘heart’, which could only be addressed and

activated by judiciously selected symbols, he evolved a powerful cluster

of culturally evocative symbols including the spinning wheel, the khādi,

the cow, and the ‘Gandhi cap’ (a white cotton cap popularized by him).

The spinning wheel, for example, which Gandhi asked everyone to ply,

served several symbolic purposes. It was a way of gently rebelling

against modern technological civilization and affirming the dignity of

India’s rural way of life. It united the cities and the villages and the

Westernized elite and the masses, and was an ‘emblem of their

fellowship’. The spinning wheel also established the dignity of manual

labour and those engaged in it and challenged the traditional Indian

culture which despised both. It symbolized social compassion, for those

who did not need the proceeds of its products were urged to give away

those products to the needy, an infinitely superior moral act to the

patronizing donation of money. And it also forced the individual to be

alone with himself and observe silence for at least some time during the

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day. Gandhi not only evolved countless symbols of this kind but also

became one himself. Partly by conscious design and partly as

spontaneous expressions of his whole way of life, his dress, language,

mode of public speaking, food, bodily gestures, ways of sitting, walking,

and talking, laughter, humour, and staff became symbols of a specific

way of life. Each evoked deep cultural memories, spoke volumes, and

conveyed highly complex messages.

Gandhi’s symbols did not appeal to emotions alone, for he also offered a

rational defence of them; neither were they mystical or arcane, for

they were all drawn from the daily lives of ordinary Indians. They

appealed to both the head and the heart, interests and cultural

memories, the present and the past, and were designed to reach out to

the ‘whole being’ of his countrymen and mobilize their moral energy. In

their own ways they created a new aesthetics and a kind of private

public world of discourse to which the colonial government had no

access. No other leader before Gandhi had worked out such a clear,

comprehensive, and powerful strategy of action, and none possessed

either his massive self-confidence or his organizational and

communicative skills. It was hardly surprising that he exercised

unparalleled influence on Indian political life for nearly a quarter of a

century.

For Gandhi the struggle for political independence had to be run in

tandem with and subordinated to the larger struggle for Indian

regeneration. If political independence became the sole or even the

more important of the two goals, the country ran the risk of valuing

political power for its own sake, encouraging careerism, giving greater

prestige to office-holders than to grass-roots workers, and so on.

Although Gandhi’s view had its merits, it also created problems for him.

The struggles for independence and moral regeneration had different

logics and sometimes came into conflict; in addition, the struggle for

independence involved both satyāgrahas and working within the

representative institutions provided by the colonial state, and again

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these sometimes pulled in different directions. Many Indian leaders

did not share the priority Gandhi gave to moral regeneration and the

Constructive Programme, and took the opposite view that political

independence was the necessary condition of moral regeneration

and had to come first. While Gandhi judged a satyāgraha from the

standpoint of its effect on Indian society and its regeneration, they

judged it on the basis of how it affected conventional politics and

furthered their demand for representative institutions. Furthermore,

since Gandhi had not clearly worked out the relationship between

conventional politics, satyāgraha, and the Constructive Programme,

and since it had to be constantly redefined in the light of changing

circumstances, his overall strategy remained somewhat

incoherent, rendering his leadership occasionally erratic and

unpredictable.

Gandhi knew this and sought to come to terms with it. He argued that

different individuals had different talents and dispositions, and were

suited for different kinds of work. Some felt most happy doing

constructive work, others were happier participating in satyāgrahas, yet

others were best suited for conventional politics. The political struggle

should accommodate this plurality, and leave each individual free to do

what he or she was best at. This both gave a sense of personal fulfilment

and ensured the necessary division of labour, which the great task of

Indian regeneration and independence required. As for himself, Gandhi

said he felt most at home with constructive work and to a lesser extent

with satyāgraha, and wholly ill at ease with conventional politics. He

therefore concentrated on the first two, largely leaving the last to those

suited for it. Although conventional politics could not be so easily

disengaged from the other two, this was a sensible compromise and

worked reasonably well. It also meant that Gandhi’s relationship with

the Congress remained loose and fluid. The Congress retained

considerable autonomy and was never merely an instrument of his will;

for his part he retained his freedom of action and was not just a

Congress leader.

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Although Gandhi’s satyāgrahas in India followed the broad pattern of

those in South Africa, he also introduced, as we shall see later, several

changes to suit new circumstances and needs. The idea of fasting was

one of them and became a subject of much debate throughout his life.

For reasons to be discussed later, Gandhi had no doubt whatever that his

fasts were not hunger-strikes, nor forms of moral or emotional

blackmail, nor ways of evoking and exploiting others’ pity, but forms of

self-sacrifice and represented a perfectly moral method of action. His

past experiences had convinced him that human actions sprang from

‘both the head and the heart’, and that individuals could not be shaken

out of complacency on issues of vital moral importance by sermons and

arguments alone. One had to touch their hearts and activate their

consciences, and fasting was one of the most effective ways to do so. As

Gandhi understood its nature and mechanism, the idea of fasting had

two distinct sources, the Hindu practice of tapas (penance) and the

predominantly Christian idea of suffering love. The fast was an act of

self-imposed suffering designed both to purify oneself and to energize

the consciences of those addressed by it.

Leadership of the Independence Movement

Thanks to his well-received work in South Africa and successful

leadership of the Champaran and Kaira satyāgrahas of 1917 and 1918

respectively and of the Ahmedabad textile workers’ strike of 1918,

Gandhi became an influential national leader within four years of his

return to India. His moralistic language, complex personality, clarity of

vision, use of culturally suffused symbols, manners, enormous self-

confidence, and courage to stand up to the established leadership both

impressed and intrigued his countrymen, and added to his charisma.

When the unpopular Rowlatt Acts, passed in March 1919 and directed

primarily at ‘revolutionary conspiracies’, continued the wartime

restrictions on civil liberties, Gandhi felt confident enough to launch his

first national satyāgraha later that year, involving an effective nation-

wide hartāl (cessation of work) and mass demonstrations. Contrary to

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his expectations, it was marred by cases of arson, looting, and violence

against some Englishmen. Gandhi described it as his ‘Himalayan

miscalculation’ and called it off, an action he was to repeat three years

later in another context. The fear of public humiliation or losing his

moral authority did not bother him in the least, for it was ‘more

honourable’ to admit mistakes than to sacrifice one’s principles, and in

any case ‘moral authority is never retained by attempting to hold onto

it’.

Some violence still continued and the colonial government banned all

public meetings in the Punjab. When one was held in Jallianwalla Bagh

in Amritsar on 13 April 1919, Brigadier General Dyer ordered his troops to

fire on the unarmed crowd without a prior warning, killing 379 people

and wounding 1,137. The incident and the Hunter Commission’s

subsequent exoneration of Dyer discredited the colonial rule in the eyes

of most Indians, and Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy that he could retain

‘neither respect nor . . . affection’ for the colonial government. A few

months later he wrote three important articles declaring sedition a

‘duty’ and demanding an end to British rule.

Gandhi launched a Non-cooperation Movement in 1920, which lasted for

about two years. It was inspired by the brilliantly simple but dangerous

idea that, since the colonial state owed its continuance to the co-

operation of its subjects, it would disintegrate if they withdrew their

support and set up alternative institutions to fill the vacuum. Gandhi

promised independence ‘within a year’ if non-cooperation was total

and widespread. It was to be practised in several stages, and involved

resignation from government services, refusal to use courts and schools

and at a later stage to pay taxes and serve in the armed forces, and the

burning of foreign cloth. Many were disturbed by Gandhi’s proposal not

only because they thought it unrealistic but also because of its anti-

statist and quasi-anarchist implications. Gandhi rejoined that non-co-

operation was a way of demonstrating the hollowness of the colonial

state and the average Indian’s complicity in it, and of reconstituting the

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new state on a popular basis. His idea of burning foreign cloth also

provoked much unease, and some, including India’s poet laureate

Rabindranath Tagore, wondered if Gandhi was not stoking the flames of

narrow nationalism and even xenophobia. Gandhi vehemently rejected

the charge. Foreign cloth symbolized conspicuous display of wealth,

‘infatuation’ with things foreign, use of dress as a badge of Western

identity, and economic domination by the colonial masters. To burn it

was to ‘purge’ or ‘purify’ oneself of all this. It had the additional

advantages of building up indigenous industries, fostering the cultural

self-confidence of the masses, and hitting British economic interests

(xxi. 102; xl. 84–5).

For his leadership of the Non-cooperation Movement, Gandhi was

arrested and tried in March 1922. He characteristically subverted the

trial by refusing to adhere to its logic. He did not hire a lawyer and faced

the prosecutor alone, symbolizing the helplessness of subject India

before a well-organized colonial state. He did not defend himself either,

and not only pleaded guilty but also asked the judge to take into

account some of the incriminatory material he had ignored. He turned

his trial into a trial of colonial rule itself, using the occasion to explain

why ‘from a staunch loyalist and co-operator’ he had ‘become an

uncompromising dis-affectionist and non-co-operator’ and suggesting

that there was something profoundly wrong with a system of rule which

required incarceration of the likes of him. He ended by presenting the

judge with a moral dilemma: if he approved of the prevailing system, he

had a duty to inflict the ‘severest penalty’ on Gandhi; if he felt uneasy

about the latter, he had a duty to condemn the system and resign

(G 254–8).

The deeply moved British judge rose to the occasion. He bowed to

Gandhi and remarked that he was in a ‘different category from any

person I’ve ever tried or am likely to have to try’. He reluctantly

sentenced him to six years’ imprisonment, saying that, if for some

reason the government were to release him sooner, no one would be

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‘better pleased’ than he. Gandhi responded by thanking the judge both

for the most courteous manner in which he had treated him and for

imposing a sentence that was ‘as light as any judge’ could have imposed

under the circumstances. The trial, a remarkable episode in British

colonial history, highlighted Gandhi’s style of operation, the raj’s

capacity for decency, and the gentlemanly manner in which the two

sometimes conducted their relations. Significantly, the colonial

government never tried Gandhi again, though it did incarcerate him on

several occasions.

The Non-cooperation Movement served notice on the raj and made

political independence a widely shared national goal. It radicalized a

large number of Indians, drew them into political life, and extended the

organizational reach and social basis of the Congress. It also led to a

large body of voluntary institutions, greatly expanded civic space, and

reduced the moral hold of the colonial state. However, it failed in its

basic objective of paralysing the colonial state by establishing an

alternative one behind its back. It demanded sacrifices of careers only a

few were willing to make, and implied a hostility to Western institutions

that only a few shared. Not surprisingly students who had boycotted

government schools began to return, lawyers resumed their practice,

and an influential body of nationalist leaders insisted on participating in

municipal, provincial, and national legislative bodies. Contrary to

Gandhi’s calculations, the movement unwittingly alienated many

Muslims. Their middle classes did not wish to give up their hard-won

careers or abandon colleges and universities. When Mohamed Ali tried

to close down the Muslim college at Aligarh, he was beaten off by

parents and trustees. Indeed many Muslims thought that Gandhi’s plan

was a Hindu conspiracy to hold back their progress!

Gandhi was released early from prison on grounds of health. He was

elected President of the Congress in 1924, the only time he accepted a

position within it. He was deeply worried about the growing separation

between India’s various communities, especially the Hindus and the

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Muslims, which the Non-cooperation Movement had not only

highlighted but also in some cases accentuated. His well-meaning but

ill-advised support for the Muslim leaders’ campaign against the British

abolition of the Turkish Caliphate in 1919 had not promoted

intercommunal unity either. Instead it strengthened the hold of the

ulemas, alienated Mohamed Ali Jinnah and other secular Muslim leaders,

encouraged pan-Islamism, and provoked Hindu suspicions of Muslim

disloyalty. Gandhi now decided to tackle the question of Hindu–Muslim

unity, and embarked on a 21-day fast in 1924 to create ‘mutual respect

and tolerance’ between them. Apart from placing the subject high on

the national agenda and encouraging some Hindu–Muslim cooperation,

his fast achieved little.

Gandhi felt that he needed to concentrate on his Constructive

Programme in order to build up the unity and self-confidence Indians

needed to fight against the colonial rule and eventually to sustain their

independence. He therefore turned to improving the status of women,

removing untouchability, encouraging cottage industries, propagating

the spinning wheel, and popularizing vernacular languages. He decided

to observe a year of silence in 1926 and devote it to calm reflection,

social work, and conserving his emotional energy. He had long believed

in the regenerative power of silence and had for years observed

Mondays as days of silence, communicating when unavoidable by notes

scribbled with a pencil stub. As he wrote to B. C. Roy in May, 1928:

I am biding my time, and you will find me leading the country in the field

of politics when the country is ready. I have no false modesty about me. I

am undoubtedly a politician in my own way, and I have a scheme for the

country’s freedom. But my time is not yet . . .

(CW, 36. p. 287)

Gandhi’s time came in 1930. From the mid-1920s onwards terrorism and

industrial strife were on the rise. The representative institutions

established since 1919 had proved disappointing. Their powers were

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severely limited, and they were starved of resources. The deteriorating

world economic situation affected India and led to considerable unrest.

Gandhi felt that there was ‘a lot of violence in the air’ and that some

form of civil disobedience was necessary not only because the situation

demanded it but also to provide a safety valve for growing discontent

and to avoid a split within the Congress itself. He was, however, worried

that in the country’s current mood even the most peaceful forms of

disobedience ran the risk of turning violent. After ‘furiously thinking day

and night’, Gandhi decided to launch a satyāgraha against the

government’s decision to tax salt in 1930. The protest involved breaking

the law by making salt on the seashore. Officially it was to be his, not

Congress’s, satyāgraha, limited to himself and his carefully chosen

associates, and involved a pledge by all that they accepted non-violence

not just pragmatically but as an article of faith and would adhere to it

even under the greatest provocation. Gandhi chose salt as an issue

because it affected all Indians, united Hindus and Muslims, bore most

heavily on the poor, and highlighted the inhumanity of the raj. Since the

revenue it generated was marginal to the government, the protest was

also unlikely to provoke harsh reprisals.

Along with 78 male companions representing various regions and

religions, Gandhi, then 61 years of age, started his 24-day march south

towards the coastal village of Dandi some 241 miles away. It was

reminiscent of his five-day march into Transvaal in 1913 accompanied by

a group of over 2,000 people. He covered between 10 and 15 miles a day,

cheered and sometimes joined by hundreds of people from the

surrounding villages, carrying copies of the Gita and quoting from both

it and the Bible, and embarrassing the conscience of the Christian

government by drawing a parallel between Gandhi’s and Christ’s

confrontation with the authorities. With the whole of India urging him

on and the world press reporting his daily progress, Gandhi finally

reached Dandi on 5 April. With the consummate showmanship of a

great political artist, he picked up a palmful of salt in open defiance of

the government’s ban. Along India’s sea-coast and in its numerous

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inlets, thousands of people, mainly the peasants, followed his example

and made salt illegally. They were beaten, sometimes brutally, and

60,000 of them including Gandhi were arrested and incarcerated for

various lengths of time. The salt satyāgraha convinced Indians that

colonial rule was vulnerable, and that they could end it if only they had

the necessary will. It sent out a similar message to the British

government. It demonstrated the inhumanity of the colonial

government. And it also internationalized the Indian struggle for

independence and exposed the British government to considerable

world pressure.

The 1930 satyāgraha led to negotiations in London, where Gandhi

arrived in September 1931, 17 years after his last visit. A popular and

much sought-after figure, he met many leaders of opinion, Oxford

academics, religious figures, and even George Bernard Shaw and Charlie

Chaplin. He visited different parts of the country including Lancashire,

where he apologized to the textile workers for the damage his boycott

of British cloth had caused them and asked for their sympathetic

understanding. He made a ‘never to be forgotten’ visit to C. P. Scott of

the Manchester Guardian, ‘the most impartial and the most honest

paper in Great Britain’ (xlviii. 433). He visited the King at Buckingham

Palace dressed in his usual loincloth, which he had adopted in 1922 as a

mark of his identification with the poor, throwing over his shoulders a

shawl that he had worn in Britain to protect him against the cold. When

a journalist commented on his sparse attire, he replied that ‘the King

had enough on for both of us’. When a year later Winston Churchill

called him a ‘half-naked fakir’, Gandhi thanked him for the ‘compliment’

and wrote that ‘he would love to be a naked fakir but was not one as yet’

(F 565).

In the conference room itself Gandhi’s impact was far more limited,

partly because he was always ill at ease in formal gatherings, partly

because he did not take the negotiations seriously, and partly because

he was treated there not as the supreme representative of the Indian

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people as he saw himself but as one of its several community leaders

making equal claims on the British government’s attention. The

negotiations involved reconciling conflicting interests, and Gandhi

found them somewhat tiresome. As they proceeded he realized yet

again that, if India was to win its independence, he needed to win over

its minority communities, especially the ‘untouchables’ and the

Muslims. Both raised difficult problems, the latter far more than the

former.

During the London negotiations, leaders of the ‘untouchables’

demanded a separate electorate of the kind enjoyed by Muslims since

1909 and Sikhs, Europeans, and others since 1919. It involved each

community voting for its own representatives. Many colonial

administrators, including the authors of the Montagu Chelmsford

Report of 1918, had argued that separate electorates were ‘divisive’ and

a ‘very serious hindrance’ to common citizenship, but the colonial

government retained and kept extending them to earn minority loyalty

and support. Gandhi protested against their extension to the

‘untouchables’ in the strongest terms both at the London conference

and afterwards. In his view, unlike the other minorities, they were a part

of Hindu society, and giving them a separate electorate would

perpetuate their status as ‘untouchables’ and absolve the caste Hindus

of their moral responsibility to fight against the practice of

untouchability. Political calculations were not far from Gandhi’s mind

either, for the separate electorate would have reduced the numerical

strength of the Hindu majority, encouraged minority alliances against

it, and fragmented the country yet further. Gandhi did not mind

reserved seats for the ‘untouchables’, for which all including the caste

Hindus were to be able to vote, but he could not countenance separate

electorates for them (li. 62–5, 116–20, 143–5).

When the British government ignored his protest and granted the

separate electorate in the Communal Award of August 1932, Gandhi,

who was then in prison, took the only course of action open to him,

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namely to embark on a fast. The ‘untouchable’ leader Babasaheb

Ambedker condemned the fast as a ‘political stunt’, a ‘vile and wicked

act’, but most Hindus including Tagore, otherwise a critic of fasting,

thought it wholly justified. After five days of hard bargaining by

Ambedker, a compromise was reached. The demand for a separate

electorate was dropped, and in return the ‘untouchables’ received far

more reserved seats than the Award had given them and special sums of

money for their educational uplift. Gandhi realized that Hinduism was

‘on the brink of an active volcano’, and threw himself into his anti-

untouchability work with greater zeal and commitment than before.

The last struggle

Hindu–Muslim relations did not have such a happy outcome. During

the 1930s they were strained, but there was no cause for concern.

Gandhi thought he had done much to bring the two communities

together at the personal and political levels, and that things would

improve once the colonial government with its policy of ‘divide and

rule’ was out of the way. The Congress enjoyed support among the

Muslim masses, and included several Muslim leaders of provincial and

even national stature. The provincial elections of 1937 were crucial,

especially as the 1935 Act had granted considerable autonomy to the

provinces and was generally seen as paving the way for Indian

independence. The Congress did very well in the general constituencies

and, although it performed badly in Muslim constituencies, so did the

Muslim League. The Congress formed ministries in all but four

provinces.

The 1937 election results presented the Congress with both a challenge

and an opportunity. It realized that Muslims were not behind it and

should be won over, but also that they were not behind the League

either and could be won over. Accordingly it launched a programme of

‘mass contact’ with a view to reassuring them that it posed no threat to

their religious and other interests. The Muslim League read the situation

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in more or less the same way and launched a rather vicious campaign of

its own, aimed at arousing Muslim fears and sense of insecurity.

Realizing how much and how quickly the Muslim masses were

becoming ‘communalized’, the Congress called off its programme and

urged the League to make a reciprocal gesture. Jinnah, the leader of the

League, not only refused to call off the campaign but intensified it.

Jinnah, Gandhi’s greatest adversary, was a complex figure, and their

relationship was full of strange paradoxes. Jinnah came from the same

part of India as Gandhi, shared his language and culture, and was a

lawyer like him. His family were first-generation Hindu converts. ‘Jinnah’

was a Hindu name and reflected the fairly common practice among

Hindu converts of retaining part of their original name. Like Gandhi,

Jinnah too adored Gokhale and regarded him as his political mentor.

Like him, Jinnah had spent many years abroad. And although they

worked out very different responses to India, both alike retained an

outsider’s perspective. Neither of them was intimately familiar with

Indian history or his own religious tradition. Unlike Gandhi, Jinnah was

not religious and strongly disapproved of the introduction of religion

into politics. He had married a much younger Zoroastrian girl, enjoyed

alcohol, and had no objection to pork. He knew Gandhi’s charm and

manner of establishing personal relationships, and carefully insulated

himself against them. He spoke to him in English rather than their native

Gujarati, shook hands with him rather than using the traditional Indian

form of greeting with folded palms, and addressed him formally as ‘Mr

Gandhi’ in preference to the more respectful ‘Gandhiji’. Gandhi, who

had succeeded in winning over or at least commanding the deepest

respect of almost all his opponents, including such strong-minded

leftist leaders as Subhas Bose and M. N. Roy, failed before a man who

was closer to him in many respects than his other opponents.

Jinnah obviously could not mobilize the vast and illiterate Muslim

masses without simplifying the political reality and offering them a

naive and rather distorted conception of themselves and their place in

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India. He introduced the language of religious nationalism and

dramatically changed the character of the political debate. Hitherto he

and the League had argued that the Muslims were a minority

community entitled to a separate electorate and constitutional

safeguards; they now began to argue that they were a nation, a distinct

cultural and political unit entitled to full equality of status with the

Hindus, and that India consisted of two nations. Although Jinnah was

initially content to plead for their equality within a single state, the

momentum of events soon got out of control and he became a strong

advocate of the separate state of Pakistan.

During his negotiations with Jinnah, Gandhi challenged his two-nations

theory. He argued that the language of nationalism was both

inapplicable to India and inherently absurd. Unlike the European

countries, India was not a nation but a civilization, which had over the

centuries benefited from the contributions of different races and

religions and was distinguished by its plurality, diversity, and tolerance.

Hindus and Muslims, most of them Hindu converts, shared a common

culture and, since even their religions had deeply influenced each other,

they could not possibly be called separate nations. Furthermore, the

very idea that each nation should have its own state was preposterous

and impractical. In any case, the new state of Pakistan would include a

large number of Hindus, even as India would include millions of

Muslims. Since both states were bound to be multi-religious and had to

find ways of accommodating minorities, there was no reason why an

undivided India could not do the same. Gandhi told Jinnah that although

he himself did not consider Pakistan a ‘worthy ideal’, he was prepared

to accept it if Jinnah agreed to a plebiscite in Muslim majority areas.

What in Gandhi’s view Jinnah was not entitled to do was to arouse

religious passions and threaten mass violence if he did not get his way

(lxxii. 334).

Although the two-nations theory was untenable, Muslim fears were

deep and genuine. Muslims had ruled over Hindus for centuries and

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feared reprisal or at least discrimination in independent India. The

increasing use by Congress of socialist rhetoric frightened away Muslim

landlords and upper classes, from whom many of the ardent advocates

of Pakistan were drawn. The Congress had also missed the opportunity

to win over Jinnah and the Muslim League during its period of office

between 1937 and 1939, and to prevent an opportunistic alliance

between the middle-class Muslims of which Jinnah was a spokesman

and the feudal classes whom he had long loathed. It was this alliance

that made Pakistan possible and at least partly explains its subsequent

tragic history. Given more time, a more relaxed political environment, a

less manipulative colonial government, and greater sensitivity and

goodwill on the part of the Congress and Muslim leadership, ways

could perhaps have been found to allay these fears. Under the

circumstances many well-meaning constitutional schemes to keep the

country together collapsed without a fair trial, and the much-dreaded

partition of the country with all the attendant violence became

inevitable.

While the bulk of Congress leadership came round to accepting the

partition, Gandhi resisted it not because he was worried about India’s

territorial shrinkage but because he considered it a ‘falsehood’. It

denied a thousand years of Indian history and the basic spirit of Indian

civilization, and rested on the inherently ‘evil’ principle of religious

nationalism. He was also afraid that it would lead to much bloodshed

and permanently sour the relations between the two countries. When

he realized that the fast he had long threatened was likely to make

matters worse, he gracefully accepted the partition and strove to create

a climate that would both minimize violence and maximize future

reconciliation. By and large he saw the partition in the image of the

Hindu joint family. Those who could not live together were free to set

up a separate household to avoid constant quarrels, but there was no

reason why they should deny their shared history, hate and kill each

other, reject cooperation on matters of common interest, and not aim

at future reconciliation.

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During the last few months of his life, Gandhi fought heroically against

the corybantic wave of violence that had gripped most of north India.

For many years past he had been plagued by profound political and

spiritual doubts. He had often expressed anxiety about the future of

India and the outcome of his personal, moral, and spiritual struggles,

had even wondered if he was the right national leader and urged others

to take over his burden, and had left Congress in 1934 to allow it to take

decisions without being constrained by his towering presence (lviii. 404;

B 284–9). Now he had no doubts about his course of action, for his duty

could not be clearer. Knowing that the ‘day of reckoning’ that he had

long feared had at last come, he decided, at the age of 77, to put his

non-violence to the ‘final test’. Everything he had stood for was at stake,

and his very God was on trial. Since Gandhi had been loyal to God all his

life, the latter would not let him down in his and his country’s greatest

hour of need. Gandhi now became a transcendental, God-possessed

figure with no other mission than to tame the ‘demon’ of violence.

The personal and the political were inseparable for Gandhi. Every time

he had faced a momentous political struggle in the past, he had turned

inward to concentrate his being and summon up all his moral and

spiritual energy. ‘How can a damp matchstick kindle a log of wood?’

(M ii. 69). The battle against the horrendous intercommunal violence

required a more intense inner search than ever before. His religious faith

dictated that good always triumphed over evil and that all violence

dissolved in the presence of non-violence. The continuing violence had

to be explained, and Gandhi characteristically blamed himself. God or

cosmic energy was not working through him because of some deep

inadequacy in him. Although he thought that he had eliminated all

traces of violence in himself, he must be wrong. The only possible

source of violence could be the presence of unconscious sexuality, for

Gandhi a form of aggression. Accordingly he decided to put his celibacy

to the severest test by embarking on the extraordinary experiment of

sleeping naked with carefully chosen female associates, partly to flush

out such residues of sexuality as might still remain, and partly to

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generate the immense energy he thought he needed to subdue the evil

raging around him. The experiment generated great unease, and he

wrote publicly about it. Although he was attacked, ridiculed, and

shunned by some of his colleagues, he remained resolute. Just because

his countrymen had made him a Mahātma, he was not prepared to

conform to their expectations of him. His life was his and he had to

follow truth as he saw it. If that meant losing his Mahātma-hood, he was

only too happy to ‘shed the burden’. Gandhi’s experiments assured him

that he was totally pure and that his God had not forsaken him.

In order to fight violence Gandhi had only one weapon left, his life,

and only one way to use it, namely to make a sacrifice of it by means

of well-calculated fasts designed to awaken the consciences and

mobilize the moral energies of his misguided countrymen. In utter

disregard of his physical safety and frequently murmuring ’kyā karoon,

kyā karoon’ (what shall I do? what shall I do?), he began his pilgrimage

of peace to the Noakhali district of Bengal, the scene of the worst

Hindu–Muslim violence (F 163–6). He stayed there from October 1946

to February 1947, walking from village to village, living in the huts of

those willing to put him up, listening to their stories of atrocities,

calming passions, and consoling the distressed and bereaved. He

walked 18 hours a day and covered 49 villages. Sometimes his path

was strewn with filth and brambles and, since as a pilgrim of peace he

often walked barefoot, his feet became sore and developed chilblains.

He had to cross bridges consisting of nothing more than loosely

fastened bamboo poles, and sometimes he narrowly missed falling

into the mud several feet below. There were also several threats on his

life and a couple of violent scuffles. Undeterred, he continued his

work, summoned up immense physical energy in his disintegrating

body, and by the sheer force of his personality succeeded in restoring

peace in Bengal and elsewhere.

When India became independent on 15 August 1947, Gandhi did not go

to Delhi to participate in the celebrations or to unfurl the national flag,

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4. Gandhi walking through the riot-torn areas of Noakhali, late 1946

and did not even send a message. He remained busy fighting violence

several hundred miles away, and saw no reason for celebration. Soon

after independence when Calcutta became the theatre of mass

violence, Gandhi rushed to the city. When all his appeals failed, he

began a fast unto death on 2 September 1947, just as he had done a few

months earlier. Within three days he had performed a ‘miracle’. Many

who had been busy killing arrived at his bedside, wept at his tormented

body, surrendered their weapons, and gave him a written undertaking

that they would allow no more violence to occur, if need be at the cost

of their lives. Lord Mountbatten was not exaggerating when he said that

Gandhi had achieved single-handed what a body of 50,000 well-armed

soldiers had failed to achieve in the Punjab. Gandhi saw no miracle, for it

only confirmed his lifelong conviction that ‘soul-force’ was infinitely

more powerful than the physical. And he needed no thanks, for his fast

had given him ‘ineffable joy’ and a profound sense of ‘inner peace’

bordering on the experience of the divine (B 377–82).

From Calcutta Gandhi rushed to Delhi, where riots were raging. He

visited Muslim areas and reassured their frightened residents. He also

visited camps full of Hindu refugees from Pakistan who had lost all their

possessions; some had lost their loved ones, and all were full of anti-

Muslim hatred. Alone and unprotected, he consoled them, told them

that there was ‘no gain in returning evil for evil’, and pleaded with them

to show forgiveness. Angry and bitter Hindus sometimes broke up his

multi-religious prayer meetings. Some objected to his recitations from

the Koran and, since he would not compromise, the meetings

sometimes ended abruptly. Gandhi even ventured into a meeting of 500

members of the RSS, a paramilitary body of Hindu militants, and

warned them that their intolerance was ‘killing’ Hinduism. In order to

shock the ‘conscience of all’ in both India and Pakistan, he commenced

his last fast on 13 January 1948 to create ‘real peace’ in place of the

deadly calm imposed by the troops, and to pressure the government of

India not to renege on its solemn promise to transfer to Pakistan, which

was then already at war with India, its share of collective assets.

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Although many exasperated Hindus accused him of political naivety and

pro-Muslim sympathies, most conceded that he was only being true to

his principles and had nothing but India’s stability and honour at heart.

After five days Gandhi got what he had asked for. As he ended his fast,

which was much admired in Pakistan, he feared for the two countries

and broke down in tears. Gandhi’s repeated triumphs against human

savagery stunned his awestruck countrymen and made him a sublime

and sanctified figure, an object of deepest pride and reverence even to

those who were otherwise critical of his fasts and religious appeals. It

was almost as if they felt that he had atoned for and redeemed them

and lightened the burden of their shame and guilt.

Gandhi knew that violence was drawing closer to him. There had been

several threats on his life; a bomb had been dropped at his prayer

meeting 10 days before his death and he had refused to be frightened

of ‘a mere bomb’; he received abusive letters accusing him of

appeasing Muslims and calling him ‘Mohamed Gandhi’; ‘Death to

Gandhi’ was a frequent chant at some of his meetings; and even his

close friends showed impatience with him. He knew that he might be

killed any day, but rejected all offers of protection. Indeed, it would

seem that the violence had not only sapped his will to live but also

created a positive desire to die a violent death in the hope that his

death might achieve what his life had not. He evidently told his great-

niece the night before his death that he should be called a ‘true

Mahātma’ only if ‘someone shot me and I boldly received his bullet in

my bare chest without a murmur and while continuing to chant the

name of Rama’. The following day a well-educated, highly articulate,

modernist, and militant Hindu, who ideologically stood for almost all

that Gandhi rejected, killed him after first bowing to him in reverence.

Gandhi died instantly, allegedly murmuring ‘hey Ram’. His

assassination on 30 January 1948 had a cathartic effect. It discredited

Hindu extremists, chastened moderate Hindus, reassured the

minorities, and pulled the mourning nation back from the brink of

disaster.

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Gandhi survived Indian independence by just under six months. During

that brief period when he was not busy fighting violence, he spent his

time nurturing the Indian state and worrying about its future. He

regularly advised Nehru, a secular socialist whom he had declared his

‘political heir’ several years earlier and who now was the Prime Minister

of the country. He reconciled the growing differences between Nehru

and some of his senior colleagues, urged his activist followers to leave

Nehru alone to get on with the task of state-building, defended Nehru’s

departures from Gandhi’s own ideals, and approved of sending troops

to Kashmir. As for India’s future course of action, Gandhi articulated his

vision in terms of the tripartite strategy on which he had relied for

nearly 30 years. The state was to be relatively autonomous and left in

5. Gandhi with Nehru in 1936

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charge of those suited for conventional politics. The Congress, which

had spearheaded the struggle for independence, was to dissolve itself

and be reborn as a national organization pursuing the Constructive

Programme, keeping a watchful eye on the state, and, when it acted

unjustly, leading satyāgrahas against it. Since these were the tasks on

which Gandhi had himself concentrated, he was in fact proposing that

the Congress should institutionalize, preserve, and perpetuate his spirit.

It spurned his advice, denying Gandhi’s spirit an organizational

incarnation.

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Chapter 2

Religious thought

The cosmic spirit

Gandhi was a deeply religious thinker. Although he was profoundly

influenced by Hinduism, Christianity, and Jainism, his religious thought

cut across all of them and was in a class by itself. Belief in God was

obviously its basis. However, since Gandhi thought that the term ‘God’

implied a being or a person, he preferred to use such terms as eternal

principle, supreme consciousness or intelligence, cosmic power, energy,

spirit, or shakti. Later in life he preferred to speak of satya (ultimate

reality or Truth), and regarded this as the ‘only correct and fully

significant’ description of God. Following Indian philosophical

traditions, he used the term satya to refer to the ultimate ground of

being, to what alone persists unchanged in the midst of change and

holds the universe together. For a long time he had said, ‘God is Truth’,

implying both that Truth was one of God’s many properties and that the

concept of God was logically prior to that of Truth. In 1926 he reversed

the proposition and said, ‘Truth is God’. He regarded this as one of his

most important discoveries and thought that it crystallized his years of

reflection. For him the new proposition had several advantages over the

old. It avoided anthropocentrism, and implied that the concept of Truth

was prior to that of God and that calling it God did not add anything

new to it. Since the sincere atheist too was in his own way seeking to

unravel the mystery of the universe and search for truth, the new

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formulation provided the common basis for a dialogue between him

and the believer. Gandhi knew many atheists with deep spiritual and

even mystical feelings, and was anxious not to put them outside the

pale of religious discourse (M i. 461, 566–92).

For Gandhi, Truth or cosmic spirit was beyond all qualities including the

moral. As he put it, ‘Fundamentally God is indescribable in words . . .

The qualities we attribute to God with the purest of motives are true for

us but fundamentally false’ (L 200–2). And again, ‘beyond the personal

God there is a Formless Essence which our reason cannot comprehend’.

Although the cosmic power was without qualities including personality,

Gandhi argued that human beings often found it difficult to avoid

personalizing it. The human mind was so used to the world of senses

that it felt deeply disoriented when required to think in non-qualitative

terms. Furthermore, human beings were not only thinking but also

feeling beings, and the ‘head’ and the ‘heart’ had different

requirements. The quality-free cosmic power or pure intelligence

satisfied the head but was too remote, abstract, and detached to satisfy

the heart. The heart required a being with a heart, one who aroused the

deepest feelings and to whom one could become emotionally bonded,

and required a personal God.

Gandhi articulated the nature of the cosmic spirit as follows. As one

would expect in a man of action, he saw the cosmic spirit from the

perspective of a life of action rather than contemplation. First, it was

‘pure’ or disembodied consciousness, not the consciousness of some

being, for the latter would then have to be other than consciousness,

but rather consciousness simpliciter. Secondly, it acted in a rational and

orderly manner and was never arbitrary or capricious. Thirdly, it was

active and represented infinite shakti, force, or energy. Fourthly, it

pervaded, informed, and structured the universe. Fifthly, it was

benevolent. Since the cosmic spirit is supposed to be beyond good and

evil, it is not entirely clear what Gandhi meant by calling it benevolent.

He seems to have thought that although it was beyond good and evil in

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the conventional moral sense, and although its actions were not

amenable to moral evaluation, the fact that the universe functioned

in a stable and rational manner, was conducive to the well-being of

all living beings, and offered the necessary conditions for the good

life showed that it had a structural bias towards good and was

regulated by a well-meaning spirit. When its actions appeared cruel in

human terms, as in the case of natural and social calamities, they

should not be hastily judged but accepted as part of an

incomprehensible but basically benevolent design. Sixthly, the cosmic

power was ‘mysterious’ in the sense that, although human beings

could acquire some knowledge of its nature and mode of operation,

their knowledge was necessarily limited and tentative. Finally,

although the cosmic power was omnipotent, it was subject to self-

imposed limitations. Human freedom was one of them, and hence

the cosmic power disposed but did not predetermine human beings

to act in specific ways. Its omnipotence thus left space for human

frailties, choices, and evil. For Gandhi evil was not an independent

principle, but something ‘permitted’ or ‘allowed’ by the cosmic

power.

Since the cosmic spirit was not a being or a person, Gandhi sometimes

referred to it as ‘it’. Since, however, it represented consciousness and

intelligence, he also referred to it as ‘He’ (though never as ‘She’). The

distinctive nature of Gandhi’s conception of cosmic power will become

clearer if we compare it with the better-known Christian view of God. In

its standard and popular version, the latter stresses his three features.

First, God is an extra-cosmic being who pre-exists and is outside the

universe. Second, he creates and imposes laws on the universe and

ensures its orderly existence. Third, he is not only infinitely loving but

also infinitely powerful, for to create and impose laws on the sun and

the stars and the seas is obviously a dazzling and awe-inspiring display

of power. The three features are closely related. As the creator of the

universe, God is necessarily extra-cosmic, and power is obviously one of

his most striking characteristics.

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Gandhi viewed the cosmic spirit differently. Since the universe for him

was eternal, the question was not one of creating but one of ordering

and structuring it. His cosmic spirit was therefore not a creator but a

principle of order, a supreme intelligence infusing and regulating the

universe from within. Unlike a supreme being who can and perhaps

must be extra-cosmic, a principle of order cannot be. Like most Indian

thinkers, Gandhi was puzzled not so much by the material world as by

living beings, not by the rhythmic and orderly movement of the stars

and the seas but by the baffling phenomenon of life with its ‘mysterious’

origins, diverse forms, and their ingenious and complex mechanisms.

God’s awe-inspiring powers and dazzling feats did not interest or even

impress him; in fact he thought that to stress them was to detract from

God’s true nature and inspire fear and awe rather than love and

intimacy. Instead he stressed the cosmic spirit’s intelligence, subtlety,

skill, energy, and gentle and elusive manner of operation.

Gandhi agreed that the existence of the cosmic spirit was incapable of

rational demonstration, but disagreed about the implications of this. By

itself reason could not prove the existence of anything, not even chairs

and tables; therefore, if it were to be the sole criterion of existence, we

would have to deny the existence of the world itself. Furthermore,

Gandhi could not see why only what satisfied reason should be deemed

to exist. He rejected the view that it was the highest human faculty. If it

was the highest because it said so, the argument was circular. As for the

other faculties, they said no such thing. Reason was obviously an

extremely important human faculty and should be assigned its due

place in life, but it could not be made the sovereign arbiter of all others.

Every belief must ‘pass the test’ of reason, but that did not mean that it

could not transcend or go beyond it. Reason laid down the minimum

not the maximum, and specified what we may not but not what we must

believe.

Gandhi went further. Following the long line of Indian sages he argued

that the existence of God was a matter of experiential certainty. Like

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many profound experiences in life, the experience of feeling God’s

presence did not come naturally to all. One needed to go through a long

spiritual training and become a pure soul in order to qualify for the

experience, and those who had done so had invariably spoken of

‘feeling’, ‘seeing’, or ‘hearing’ God. Gandhi claimed that his own life had

borne out the truth of this. Since the existence of God could not by its

very nature be rationally demonstrated, all that a believer could ask the

sceptic to do was to undergo the required training and find things out

for himself (M i. 504).

Gandhi agreed that to go beyond observation and reason was to enter

the realm of faith, but saw nothing wrong in this. Human beings went

beyond reason in most areas of life and could not live without faith, be it

a faith in themselves, their family and friends, their ability to achieve

difficult goals, or the belief that the sun would rise and the world would

not come to an end tomorrow. Even hard-headed scientists relied on the

faith that the universe was governed by laws, had a rational structure,

and was amenable to human understanding. Although their faith was

fully justified, it was none the less an act of faith and not a matter of

rational demonstration. The important and the only legitimate question

therefore was not whether but when faith was ‘justified’, and how to

separate ‘rational’ from ‘blind’ faith.

Although Gandhi nowhere stated them clearly, he often invoked the

following four criteria to determine when faith was rational or justified.

First, it should relate to matters falling outside the purview of

observation and reason. Whether or not elephants could fly or there was

a cat in the next room was amenable to empirical verification and not a

matter of faith. Second, faith should not contradict observation and

reason. Third, since faith involved going beyond what could be observed

and demonstrated, one must show that it was called for by, and had a

basis or warrant in, experience. Finally, faith was a calculated gamble in

situations where the available evidence was inconclusive, and was

justified if it had beneficial consequences.

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Gandhi contended that faith in the existence of the cosmic spirit

satisfied all four criteria. The cosmic spirit lay outside the world of

observation and rational demonstration, and belief in it not only did not

contradict but was intimated and called for by human experience. The

order and regularity of the universe could not be explained in terms of

natural laws alone, for there was no obvious reason why the universe

should be governed by laws at all and not be in perpetual chaos, or why

it should be governed by laws that were stable and hospitable to life.

Matter by itself could not create life, nor could its laws explain the

sophisticated ways in which even the minutest living beings adjusted to

their often hostile environment. Gandhi also found it mysterious that

life persisted in the midst of destruction. Such destructive forces as

earthquakes, floods, and storms could easily have snuffed it out a long

time ago. Yet life had continued to persist, flourish, and throw up

increasingly higher forms. Again, although both good and evil existed in

the universe, good not only survived but also triumphed in the long run.

In the short run and in individual cases, it might not, but ‘if we take a

long view, we shall see that it is not wickedness but goodness which

rules the world’. Indeed, evil itself could not last unless sustained by

good. Gangs of murderers might go about killing everyone in sight, but

they must at least trust and help one another. Good was self-sufficient

whereas evil was parasitic, and it was basic to life in a way that evil was

not. The fact that the universe had a structural bias towards good and

was not amoral could not be explained without postulating a cosmic

spirit, Gandhi argued.

Turning now to the fourth criterion of rational faith, Gandhi contended

that faith in the existence of the cosmic spirit was a better guide to life

than its opposite. It made the tragedies of life easier to bear,

encouraged human beings to care for and love one another, and

guarded them against the cynicism provoked by the ingratitude and

meanness of their fellows. It also helped them resist the temptation to

bend moral rules to suit their narrow personal interests, inspired them

to great acts of sacrifice, and gave them the strength to undertake

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actions and take risks they otherwise would not. Even if one did not feel

absolutely certain of the existence of the cosmic spirit, belief in it had

beneficial consequences and was a ‘better hypothesis’ than its opposite.

Unlike many believers, Gandhi advanced not the familiar strong thesis

that there was an omnipotent God who created and presided over the

universe, but a much weaker one that there was ‘some’ spiritual power

who informed and ‘gently’ guided the universe. Even this weaker thesis,

however attractive it might otherwise appear, is not without its

difficulties. While claiming to take full account of reason, Gandhi

assigned it a limited place and defined it in extremely narrow terms. So

long as a belief was not patently absurd, it was deemed to be consistent

with or permitted by reason. In this view there is no effective check on

what beliefs one may hold, and even belief in ghosts and witches cannot

be ruled out. On a more rigorous view of reason one might reach a

different conclusion from Gandhi’s. If one defined it in terms of the

available body of scientific knowledge about the nature of the universe,

belief in the existence of the cosmic spirit would appear problematic

and certainly not as self-evident as Gandhi maintained. The order and

regularity in the universe and the emergence of life can be explained

without postulating the cosmic spirit, the alleged victory of good over

evil in the natural and human world has only a limited basis in fact, and

the pervasive violence of the natural and social world which Gandhi

bemoaned is not easy to reconcile with a benevolent spirit. As for

Gandhi’s appeal to experiential certainty, it has a point but is not free of

difficulties. The Buddha did all that Gandhi asks for, and evidently found

nothing. What is more, one generally finds what one earnestly looks for

and, if one does not, one could always be accused of not being pure or

rigorous enough or of following a wrong regime of training.

Religion

For Gandhi religion represented the way human beings conceived and

related to God. Since he postulated both impersonal and personal

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conceptions of God, he distinguished two different levels of religion.

The ‘formal’, ‘customary’, ‘organized’, or ‘historical’ religions were

based on distinct conceptions of God whom they reduced to the limited

categories of the human mind and invested with anthropomorphic

attributes. They involved prayer, worship, rituals, asking God for

favours, and so on and were all sectarian. For Gandhi popular Hinduism,

Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and all other religions belonged to this

category. The ‘true’, ‘pure’, or ‘eternal’ religion transcended them. It

dispensed with rituals, worship, and dogmas, and involved nothing

more than a belief in the cosmic spirit and the commitment to realize

it in all areas of one’s life. Such a religion represented the purest form of

spirituality and acknowledged that the divine was too complex to be

fully grasped by any one religion. It ‘transcended’ but did not

‘supersede’ organized religions, which were all legitimate though

limited articulations of it, and constituted their common ‘basis’ and

connecting ‘link’.

For Gandhi religion was concerned with how one lived, not what one

believed; with a lived and living faith and not the ‘dead bones of

dogmas’ (M i. 503). It had nothing to do with theology, which over-

intellectualized religion, reduced it to a set of dogmas, and privileged

belief over conduct. For Gandhi not theology but morality was the core

of religion, and the latter was to be judged not by the philosophical

coherence and subtlety of its system of beliefs as was argued by

Christian missionaries, but by its ideals and the quality of life they

inspired. As he put it:

I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my

windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be

blown about my houses as freely as possible. But I refuse to be

blown off my feet by any.

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Amongst agents of the many untruths that are propounded in the world

one of the foremost is theology. I do not say that there is no demand for

it. There is a demand in the world for many a questionable thing. But

even those who have to do with theology as part of their work have to

survive their theology. I know two good Christian friends who gave up

theology and decided to live the gospel of Christ.

(M i. 517)

For Gandhi every major religion articulated a unique vision of God and

emphasized his different attributes. The idea of God as loving Father and

the concomitant emphasis on universal love, forgiveness, and

uncomplaining suffering was most fully and movingly developed by

Christianity. ‘I cannot say that it is singular, or that it is not to be found

in other religions. But the presentation is unique.’ Austere and rigorous

monotheism, the rejection of intermediaries between human beings

and God, and the spirit of equality were ‘most beautifully’ articulated in

Islam. The clear distinction between the impersonal and personal

conceptions of God, the emphasis on non-attachment to the world

while remaining active within it, the principle of the unity of all life, and

the doctrine of non-violence were unique to Hinduism. For Gandhi

every religion had a distinct moral and spiritual ethos and represented a

wonderful and irreplaceable ‘spiritual composition’. There was truth in

each of them but that did not mean that they were all true, for they also

contained some falsehood. Since each was unique, ‘it is impossible to

estimate the merits of various religions’, let alone establish a hierarchy

among them, in just the same way that it was impossible to compare

and grade different artistic and musical traditions or great literary works

(lxxv. 70).

Like many Indian thinkers, Gandhi was uneasy with the idea of revealed

religion. He found the concept of revelation logically and morally

problematic, the former because it presupposed that God was a person,

the latter because it implied that he had favourites. God did give a

helping hand to sincere seekers and guided them in moments of grave

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crisis – Gandhi claimed to have been a beneficiary of such guidance

himself – but that was very different from the traditional concept of

exhaustive divine self-revelation. For Gandhi, Jesus, Muhammad, Moses,

and others were great spiritual explorers or ‘scientists’ who led

exemplary lives, ‘discovered’ some of the profoundest truths about

human existence, and received a measure of divine grace at critical

moments in their lives; but they were neither perfect nor Sons of God or

divine emissaries. God’s revelation was available to all who became

worthy of it by the quality of their lives, and largely took the form of

practical guidance at critical moments.

Since God was infinite, and since the limited human mind could grasp

only a ‘fragment’ of him and that too inadequately, every religion was

necessarily partial and limited (M i. 478). This was equally true of those

religions claiming to be directly revealed by him, for they were revealed

to fallible human beings and embodied in an inherently inadequate

human language. Religions therefore had much to offer each other and

benefited from a sympathetic dialogue. The proper attitude to other

religions was not one of toleration or even respect but sadbhāva

(goodwill). Toleration implied that they were mistaken, though for

various reasons one was willing to put up with them, and that one’s

own religion was ‘true’ and had nothing to learn from them; it thus

smacked of ‘spiritual arrogance’ and ‘condescension’. Respect was a

more positive attitude, but it too implied both an unwillingness to learn

from others and a desire to keep them at a safe distance. By contrast

sadbhāva implied ‘spiritual humility’, a ‘feel for other religions’, and a

willingness to see them flourish and learn from them.

For Gandhi, religion was the basis of life and shaped all one’s activities.

It could not be compartmentalized, reserved for special occasions or

days of the week, or viewed as a preparation for another world. To be

religious was to live in the constant presence of the cosmic spirit and to

translate that awareness in all one did. It affected the smallest as well as

the most momentous activities of one’s life, including how one sat,

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talked, ate, and conducted one’s personal, professional, and public life,

and was nothing more than their ‘sum total’. Since one lived out one’s

religious beliefs in all areas of life including the political, ‘those who say

that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion

means’ (M i. 37–6). This did not imply theocracy or rejection of the

secular state, for religion was a matter of freely and sincerely held beliefs

and ruled out all forms of coercion. Since the state was a coercive

institution, it should be secular in the sense that it should not

institutionalize, impose or favour a religion, or even support all religions

equally. This did not, however, mean that political life should be secular

and disallow religiously based appeals, arguments, or actions, as that

would violate citizens’ religious integrity and their freedom to express

their religious identity.

Religions are commonly thought of as closed worlds, almost like

sovereign states zealously guarding their territorial boundaries. Their

adherents are not allowed to belong to more than one religion or to

borrow the ideas and practices of another without feeling guilty or

worrying about the dilution of their religious identity. Gandhi took a

very different view. For him a religion was not an authoritative,

exclusive, and monolithic structure of ideas and practices, but a resource

from which one freely borrowed whatever one found persuasive. It was

thus a collective human property and formed part of mankind’s

common heritage. Every person was born into and deeply shaped by a

particular religious tradition, which as it were constituted his original

spiritual home, but other religions were not closed to him. Gandhi said

that, as a Hindu, he was an heir to Hinduism’s rich and ancient heritage.

As an Indian he was a privileged inheritor of India’s diverse religious and

cultural traditions. As a human being, all great religions were his

spiritual inheritance, to which he had as much right as their native

adherents. While remaining firmly rooted in his own tradition, he

therefore felt free to draw upon their moral and spiritual resources. To

express the two central ideas of rootedness and openness, he often

used the metaphor of living in a house with its windows wide open. The

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house was protected by walls and gave him a sense of security and

rootedness, but its windows were wide open to allow cultural winds

from different directions to blow into it and enrich the air he breathed.

‘āno bhadrā kritavo yantu vishvataha’ (May noble thoughts from all

over the world come to us) was one of his favourite classical maxims.

Gandhi took full advantage of his self-proclaimed intellectual freedom.

He abstracted what he took to be the central values of Hinduism and set

up a critical dialogue, even a confrontation, between them and those

derived from other religious traditions. Thus he took over the concept of

ahimsā (non-violence) from the Indian traditions, especially the

Buddhist and the Jain. However, he found it negative and passive and

reinterpreted it in the light of the activist and socially oriented Christian

concept of caritas. He felt that the latter was too emotive, led to worldly

attachments, and compromised the agent’s self-sufficiency, and so he

redefined it in the light of the Hindu concepts of anāsakti (non-

attachment) and nishkām karma (action without desire). His double

conversion, his Christianization of an Indian concept after he had

suitably Indianized the Christian concept, yielded the novel idea of an

active and positive but detached and non-emotive love. Again, he took

over the traditional Hindu practice of fasting as a penance, combined it

with the Christian concepts of vicarious atonement and suffering love,

interpreted each in the light of the other, and developed the novel idea

of ‘voluntary crucifixion of the flesh’. It involved fasting undertaken by

the acknowledged leader of a community to atone for the evil deeds of

his followers, awaken their sense of shame and guilt, and mobilize their

moral and spiritual energies for redemptive purposes.

Gandhi’s religious eclecticism disturbed many of his Christian and Hindu

admirers, who complained that it displayed spiritual shallowness and

lack of commitment and did injustice to the traditions involved. His

Christian associates argued that, since he had borrowed so much from

Christianity, he should take the next logical step of converting to it. For

his Hindu followers he should stop ‘Christianizing and corrupting’ his

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religion, and stay true to its central values. Gandhi was unrepentant. In

his view his so-called eclecticism was really a creative synthesis born

out of a sincere and relentless search for Truth, and signified not

shallowness but a desire to deepen his own and hopefully other

religious traditions and build vitally necessary bridges between them.

For him one did not have to be a Christian in order to feel entitled to

adopt Christian beliefs and practices. And one who did so did not

become a Christian. Indeed, the very terms Christian, Hindu, and Muslim

were deeply mistaken and a source of much intolerance. They reified

the respective religions, set up rigid boundaries between them,

sanctioned false proprietary claims, and created a psychological and

moral barrier against mutual borrowing.

In the ultimate analysis, argued Gandhi, there were neither Christians

nor Hindus, only human beings who freely helped themselves with the

moral and spiritual resources of these and other great religious

traditions (G 428). One might admire Jesus as a great soul, but also hold

the Buddha, Moses, and others in equally high esteem. Those who did

so belonged to their particular religions and also to several others. They

were Christians, Muslims, or Buddhists in the sense that these religious

traditions were their native homes or points of spiritual orientation, and

satisfied them the most. However, they also cherished and freely drew

upon other religious traditions, and carried parts of these into their

own. A sincere spiritual seeker welcomed all valuable insights and grew

from ‘truth to truth’ in his unending journey towards Truth. For Gandhi,

to be open to God was to be open to all religious traditions. The

fundamentalist who attempted to enclose God’s infinity within the

confines of a single religion and viewed others as rivals or enemies was

guilty of moral myopia, spiritual hubris, even blasphemy.

Gandhi’s dispute with his critics highlighted two very different

approaches to religion and religious truth. For him religion was a

resource, a body of insights to be extracted, combined, and interpreted

in the way he thought proper. His approach to religion was therefore

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profoundly ahistorical, uninhibited, anti-traditionalist and liberal, and

did not involve understanding religious traditions in their own terms.

For his critics a religion was uniquely grounded in a particular historical

event, possessed moral and spiritual authority, formed the basis of the

relevant community, and required a careful and faithful study of its

basic texts. Each approach had its merits and weaknesses. Gandhi’s

view placed the individual at the centre of the religious search, liberated

religion from the stranglehold of traditionalism and literalism,

encouraged fresh readings of scriptures, and made space for an inter-

religious dialogue. However, it also violated the historical integrity of

the religious tradition, de-institutionalized religion, and encouraged in

less competent hands an attitude of shallow cosmopolitanism. His

critics’ approach had the opposite virtues and vices.

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Chapter 3

Human nature

Gandhi’s theory of human nature was closely bound up with his views

on God and religion. It was complex, at places deeply ambiguous, and

not entirely consistent. Briefly, and at the risk of some

oversimplification, he thought that three fundamental facts

characterized human beings. First, they were an integral part of the

cosmos. Second, they were necessarily interdependent, and developed

and fell together. And third, they were four-dimensional beings made

up of the body, the manas, the ātman, and the swabhāva, whose

interplay explained their behaviour and formed the basis of morality.

We shall take each in turn.

The cosmocentric view

Unlike almost all the major traditions of Western thought, which neatly

separate human beings from animals and assign the former a supremely

privileged position on earth, Gandhi followed Indian traditions in taking

a cosmocentric view of human beings. The cosmos was a well-co-

ordinated whole whose various parts were all linked in a system of

yajna, or interdependence and mutual service. It consisted of different

orders of being ranging from the material to the human, each governed

by its own laws and standing in a complex relationship with the rest.

Human beings were an integral part of the cosmos, and were tied to it

by the deepest bonds. In Gandhi’s favourite metaphor, the cosmos was

49

not a pyramid of which the material world was the base and human

beings the apex, but a series of ever-widening circles encompassing

humankind, the sentient world, the material world, and the all-

including cosmos. Since the cosmic spirit pervaded or infused the

universe and was not outside it, the so-called natural world was not

natural or material but spiritual or divine in nature.

Since everything in the universe bore the mark of divinity, it needed to

be approached in a spirit of cosmic piety and maitri (friendliness).

Gandhi thought that the idea that God had given the universe to human

beings as a property to be used as they pleased was both incoherent

and sacrilegious. The former because God was neither a person nor

separate from the universe, the latter because the divine could not be

an object of property. The universe was a common inheritance of all

living beings, who were equally entitled to its resources and should live

in a spirit of mutual accommodation. Being rational, human beings

were the custodians of the rest of creation and should respect its rights

and cherish its diversity. Since their very existence so required, and since

nature constantly reproduced and replenished itself, they might help

themselves with such natural resources as they needed to live in

moderate comfort. They had no right to take more, for that amounted

to ‘theft’, nor to undermine the regenerative capacity of nature by

polluting and poisoning it, by rendering land barren and infertile, or by

exhausting its resources.

Since Gandhi considered all life sacred, he vacillated on the question of

whether human life was superior to the non-human. By and large he

thought that it was, because of the human capacities for rationality and

morality. However, the superiority was not ‘absolute’, for non-human

beings too were divine in nature and legitimate members of the

cosmos. Human beings might therefore take animal life only when

absolutely necessary, and then with a sense of regret. Poisonous snakes

and animals, which threatened crops, were not to be killed but caught

and released in safe places or driven away. Animals were not to be killed

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for food except when the climate or local circumstances so required,

and never for pleasure or even scientific experiments. The body needed

food, which contained life, required the use of insecticides, and involved

cultivation with its enormous destruction of life. Gandhi called the body

the ‘house of slaughter’ and was deeply anguished by the violence its

survival entailed. Since violence was built into the human condition and

thus unavoidable, he thought the only moral course of action was to

minimize it by reducing one’s wants and to compensate for it by taking

tender care of nature.

Human interdependence

That human beings were necessarily interdependent and formed an

organic whole was another ‘basic’ truth about them according to

Gandhi. Individuals owed their existence to their parents, without

whose countless sacrifices they would neither survive nor grow into

sane human beings. They realized their potential in a stable and

peaceful society, made possible by the efforts of thousands of

anonymous men and women. They became rational, reflective, and

moral beings within a rich civilization created by scores of sages, saints,

savants, and scientists. In short, every human being owed his humanity

to others, and benefited from a world to the creation of which he

contributed nothing. For Gandhi human beings were ‘born debtors’,

and involuntarily inherited debts that were too vast to be repaid. Even a

whole lifetime was not enough to pay back what they owed their

parents, let alone all others. Furthermore their creditors were by their

very nature unspecifiable. Most of them were dead or unknown, and

those who were alive were so numerous and their contributions so

varied and complex that it was impossible to decide what one owed to

whom. To talk about ‘repaying’ the debts did not therefore make sense

except as a clumsy and metaphorical way of describing one’s response

to unsolicited but indispensable gifts.

Given that the debts could never be repaid and the favours returned, all

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that human beings could do was to ‘recognise the conditions of their

existence’, and continue the ongoing universal system of

interdependence by discharging their duties and contributing to

collective well-being. They should look upon their lives as yajna, an

offering at the universal altar, and contribute to the maintenance and

enrichment of both the human world and the cosmos. As Gandhi put it,

‘Yajna having come to us with our birth we are debtors all our lives, and

thus for ever bound to serve the universe.’ Such service was not only

their duty but also their right, for without it they lacked the opportunity

to fulfil themselves and affirm their dignity. In Gandhi’s view, right and

duty were inseparable not only in the usual sense that one person’s

rights created corresponding duties for others, but in the deeper sense

that they were two different ways of looking at the same thing. One had

a duty to exercise one’s rights and a right to discharge one’s duties. We

shall return to this complex issue later.

Since human beings were necessarily interdependent, every human

action was both self- and other-regarding. It affected others and shaped

the agent’s own character and way of life, and necessarily influenced his

relations with others and with himself. When human beings developed

themselves, they awakened others to their potentialities and inspired,

encouraged, and raised them as well. And when they fell, others too

suffered damage. For Gandhi, human beings could not degrade or

brutalize others without degrading or brutalizing themselves, or inflict

psychic and moral damage on others without inflicting it on themselves

as well. This was so in at least three ways. To degrade others was to

imply that a human being may be so treated, and thus to lower the

moral minimum due to every human being from which all alike

suffered. Secondly, to degrade others was to damage their pride, self-

respect, and potential for good, and hence both to deny the benefits of

their possible contributions and to increase the collective moral,

psychological, and financial cost of repairing the damage they were

likely to do to themselves and others. Thirdly, as beings capable of

morality and critical self-reflection, human beings could not degrade or

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maltreat others without hardening themselves against the latter’s

suffering, building up distorted systems of self-justification, coarsening

their moral sensibilities, and lowering their own and the collective level

of humanity. As Gandhi put it, no man ‘takes another down a pit

without descending into it himself and sinning in the bargain’. Since

humanity was indivisible, every human being was responsible to and for

others and should be deeply concerned about how they lived.

Gandhi’s concept of indivisible humanity formed the basis of his critique

of systems of oppression and exploitation. Such dominant groups as the

whites in South Africa, the colonial governments in India and elsewhere,

and the rich and the powerful in every society believed that their

exploitation and degradation of their respective victims did not in any

way damage them as well. In fact it degraded and dehumanized them as

much as their victims, and sometimes even more. White South Africans

could not deprive blacks of their livelihood and dignity without

damaging their own capacity for critical self-reflection and impartial

self-assessment, and falling victim to moral conceit, morbid fears, and

irrational obsessions. In brutalizing blacks they also brutalized

themselves, and were only prevented by their arrogance from noticing

how sad and shallow their lives had become. They did enjoy more

material comforts, but that made them neither happier nor better

human beings. Colonial rulers met the same fate. They could not

dismiss their subjects as ‘effeminate’ and ‘childlike’ without thinking of

themselves as hypermasculine and unemotional adults, a self-image to

which they could not conform without distorting and impoverishing

their potential. In misrepresenting their subjects, they misrepresented

themselves as well and fell into their own traps. They also took home

the attitudes, habits, and styles of government acquired abroad, and

corrupted their own society. Colonialism did promote their material

interests, but only at the expense of their larger and infinitely more

important moral and spiritual interests. Since human well-being was

indivisible, a system of oppression had no winners, only losers, and it

was in the interest of all involved to end it.

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Four-dimensionality

In much of Western thought human beings are conceptualized either as

bipartite beings made up of the body and the mind or as tripartite

beings made up additionally of the soul. In Indian traditions they are

theorized differently. Following some of these traditions, Gandhi saw

human beings as four-dimensional in nature (M ii. 16–48). They had

bodies, which for Gandhi had a twofold ontological significance. The

body was self-enclosed, distinct, clearly separated from others, and

capable of maintaining its integrity only by preserving its separateness.

As such it was the source of the individualist ‘illusion’ that each human

being was self-contained and only externally and contingently related

to others. The body was also the seat of the senses, and thus of the

wants and desires associated with them. The senses were inherently

unruly ‘like wild horses’ and knew no restraint. Human desires were

similar in nature and, being capable of infinite extension, inherently

insatiable.

In addition to the body, the human being also had a mind (manas).

Gandhi’s view of the mind was highly complex and somewhat

ambiguous. The mind included chetanā (stream of consciousness),

which began at birth and ended with death. It included buddhi

(intelligence), which took many forms and operated at several levels,

and gave rise to such capacities as discernment, analytical reason,

insight, and intuition. The manas was also the seat of passions,

thoughts, memory, and moods. For Gandhi it was primarily an

instrument of knowledge and action, and sought to understand,

control, and find its way around in the world. Although distinct from the

body, it was closely tied up with it. Reflecting on its worldly experiences

as an embodied being, the human mind developed the notion of the

ego or self, the source of the human sense of agency and particularity.

Since the self desperately strove to preserve its separateness and

temporal continuity, the mind was inherently restless and insecure. It

was ‘crowded’ with memories, ‘weighed down’ by the emotional

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baggage of the past, obsessed with the future, and lacked suppleness

and the capacity for silence.

The ātman was the third dimension of human beings. Although it is

often translated as soul, and although Gandhi himself sometimes used

that term, it is better translated as spirit. As we saw, Gandhi believed

that the cosmic spirit permeated or infused all living beings. The ātman

referred to the cosmic spirit as manifested in them, and represented the

divine. For Gandhi, all living beings and not just humans had the ātman,

it was the same in all of them, and it was not a ‘spark’ or ‘part’ of the

cosmic spirit as he, borrowing the Christian vocabulary, sometimes

remarked, but one with and the same in nature as the totality of the

cosmic spirit. As Gandhi put it, ‘we have but one soul’ and are

‘ultimately one’. Since he regarded the heart as the most appropriate

metaphor for the soul, he often used the two terms interchangeably.

Being a manifestation of the cosmic spirit, the ātman shared many of

the latter’s basic attributes. Like the cosmic spirit, it was not an entity, a

thing or a being, but a ‘force’, an ‘active principle’, a ‘source of

intelligent energy’. It was eternal and indestructible, both active and a

spectator, and the ultimate ground of being. The destiny or the inner

telos of the ātman consisted in recognizing its identity with and merging

into the cosmic spirit, the state Gandhi called moksha or liberation from

the illusion of particularity.

Thus far Gandhi’s thought was in harmony with the classical Indian

traditions, especially the advaita or monistic tradition. He now gave it a

new twist, and argued that, since the cosmic spirit was manifested in all

living, especially human, beings, identification with it consisted in

identifying oneself with them in a spirit of universal love and service. By

giving the idea of moksha such a humanist or worldly orientation and

defining spirituality in moral terms, Gandhi gave the Indian traditions an

activist turn for which he was both much admired and criticized by his

countrymen.

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The belief that the ātman was not a particle or a spark but the totality of

the cosmic spirit led Gandhi, as it had done many a classical Hindu

writer, to develop an unusual notion of spiritual power. For him the

ātman was not a being or a thing but a force, a source of energy. Just as

the body was the source of physical energy, the ātman was the source of

spiritual force or energy. Since the ātman was identical with the cosmic

spirit, it obviously had access to the latter’s infinite energy which, if

tapped, could work wonders. Like many an Indian thinker, Gandhi

argued that, if the individual were to shed the illusion of particularity or

selfhood and become a transparent medium of the cosmic spirit, he

would be able to mobilize enormous spiritual energy within himself and

exercise great moral and spiritual power over his fellow men. This was

for him the secret of the powerful hold of Jesus, Muhammad, and the

Buddha over their followers. All through his life Gandhi strove to

generate such a spiritual power in himself, which was why his political

life was integrally bound up with his pursuit of moral perfection.

Finally, human beings had a distinct swabhāva or psychological and

moral constitution, made up of various tendencies and dispositions. For

Gandhi it was an obvious fact of life that, from their very birth onwards,

human beings exhibited different temperaments and psychological and

moral inclinations, were drawn to and repelled by different things, and

developed according to their inner bent. This unique individual nature

was ontologically as important, and as central to their identity, as the

universal human nature that they all shared in common. It held the

individual together and constituted the ground of his unique being or

ontological truth.

The natural uniqueness of each individual needed to be explained. God

could not be its source for he loved all human beings equally and would

have no obvious reason to endow them differently and unequally.

Parents could not be its source either, for their swabhāva was often quite

different from that of their children. Following almost all the major

Indian traditions, Gandhi thought that the only plausible ‘hypothesis’

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was that the individual’s swabhāva was a product of his previous life. In

addition to their physical bodies, human beings possessed a suks ˙

ma

s ˙

arira, a subtle and non-material ‘body’ or personality. It survived their

physical death, persisted through several lives, and formed the basis of

their unique personal identity or swabhāva. What is mistakenly called

transmigration of the ‘soul’ was really the transmigration of the suks ˙

ma

s ˙

arira. The latter was made up of the ‘impressions’ or ‘traces’ left behind

by the kind of life lived by the agent in his previous life. Since the subtle

or non-material ‘body’ was the product of the individual’s own past

deeds, it was capable of alteration in this one, and inclined, but did not

determine, him to act in specific ways.

Gandhi also thought that the law of karma, like the individual’s

swabhāva, implied rebirth. As we saw, since the cosmic spirit functioned

in a rational and orderly manner, not only the natural but also the moral

world was subject to unalterable laws. According to such religions as

Christianity and Islam, God judges human beings after their death, and

sends them to heaven or hell depending on the kind of life they have

lived on earth. Like other Indian thinkers Gandhi found this belief

incoherent. It presupposed that God was a being or a person, a view he

found unacceptable for reasons mentioned earlier. It also implied that

the judgement was made after death when human beings could do

nothing to mend their ways. For Gandhi, God, or rather the cosmic

power, was not a person but Law, and human actions produced their

inevitable consequences according to the operations of that Law. Since

human beings were responsible for the consequences of their actions

and must reap the harvest of all they sowed, and since one life was too

short for this, they had to go through several more until they succeeded

in securing liberation from the cycle of rebirths.

In Gandhi’s view then human beings were four-dimensional in nature,

possessing a body, a mind, a non-material personality, and a spirit. The

body was acquired at birth and disintegrated at death. The mind

derived some of its tendencies from the swabhāva, and the rest in the

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course of life, and was coeval with the body. The swabhāva, or subtle

non-material personality, though subject to alteration, persisted over

several lives and was the seat of intratemporal personal identity. The

spirit or soul was eternal and, unlike the other three, identical in all

human beings. The body and the soul represented two extreme points

of orientation, and the mind was drawn towards both. Whether it more

easily followed the demands of the body or the soul depended on the

individual’s swabhāva.

The body was the seat of particularity. It shut up individuals within

themselves, reinforced their sense of separateness, and encouraged

selfishness. By contrast the soul represented the principle of universality

and disposed them to break through the walls of selfhood and become

one with all living beings. The body-based illusion of particularity was

extremely difficult to shed, and required intense self-discipline,

conquest of the senses, sustained self-reflection, meditation, spiritual

exercises, and divine grace. Many Indian traditions saw no role for the

last but Gandhi did, largely under the Vaishnavite influence as mediated

by the traditional Christian idea of grace.

Although all human beings had a common spiritual destination, namely

moksha, they reached it in their own unique manner because of their

distinct psychological and spiritual constitution. They had to start by

accepting what they were, identify their native dispositions, and

progressively move at their own pace and by a path suited to them

towards their common destination. The spiritual training, the exercises,

the religion, or the way of life that helped some might positively harm

others.

The idea of one true religion or path to salvation was therefore logically

incoherent. To require all human beings to live by an identical formula

was to violate their ontological truth, to treat them as if they were not

who they were. Each individual had to discover his own swabhāva and

follow the spiritual path of development best suited to him. This did not

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mean that others could not or should not help him. His swabhāva was

manifest in his behaviour and way of life, and hence his friends, family,

and above all a spiritually enlightened guru could feel his spiritual pulse,

identify his constitutive tendencies and dispositions, and offer

appropriate advice and help. However, it was up to the individual

concerned to seek or follow their advice. If he rejected it and made

mistakes, he should be left free to do so, not because his life was his or

he alone knew his moral interests best as liberals argue, but because he

was ontologically unique. Respect for his integrity required that his

views and way of life should grow out of his way of looking at the world

and reflect his being or truth. That was why persuasion was qualitatively

different from coercion. Unlike the latter, it respected and reinforced

the other’s wholeness, and ensured that the new way of looking at the

world took root in and grew out of his changed being. For Gandhi all

compulsion was evil, justified only when an individual’s actions had

grave social consequences and could not be prevented in any other way.

And then no euphemism or verbal sophistry should be allowed to

obscure the fact that compulsion violated that individual’s truth or

integrity and was a regrettable necessity.

Like many Indian philosophers, Gandhi subsumed freedom under truth.

Since each individual had his own unique ontological truth or

constitution, he needed freedom to discover himself and develop at his

own pace. Freedom was the necessary basis and precondition of his

ability to be true to himself. To deny a person freedom was to force him

to be untrue to himself, to live by someone else’s truth, to plant a lie at

the very centre of his being. For Gandhi the case for freedom was

simple, and the same as that for truthfulness. Respect for truth implied

respect for human beings as they were constituted at a given point in

time and their need to follow the logic of their being. Love of truth

involved love of one’s fellow human beings in their uniqueness, not as

one would like them to be, and ruled out all attempts to ‘force them to

be free’ or sacrifice them at the altar of an abstract and impersonal

ideal.

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Moral theory

Gandhi’s theory of human nature was the basis of his moral theory. As

we saw, morality for him consisted in serving and becoming one with all

living beings. Negatively it involved refraining from causing them harm,

and positively it involved ‘wiping away every tear from every eye’ and

helping them realize their full moral and spiritual potential. In Gandhi’s

view, morality and spirituality or religion were inseparable. Since

spirituality consisted in becoming one with the cosmic spirit and

cultivating the love of all living beings, it necessarily entailed morality.

Conversely, the latter was embedded in and presupposed the former.

Gandhi’s reasoning is not easy to follow. By and large he seems to have

thought that, since morality involved unstinting and uncalculating

service of all living beings, no human being would have the reason, the

disposition, the passion, and the energy to do so without an appropriate

spiritual orientation. As he once put it, the moral man was like an

honest mercenary, whereas the spiritual man was like an ardent patriot.

Both did the right thing, but their actions varied greatly in their flavour,

dependability, commitment, and energy.

Although morality required disinterested concern for all living beings,

human beings had limited moral capacities, little knowledge of other

societies, and limited energy. They should therefore concentrate on

those they knew and to whom they were bound by ties of expectations,

always making sure that they did not promote their interests at the

expense of others. Moral life had to be lived locally and contextually, but

the demands of the context had to be constantly judged by the

imperatives of universal obligations. For Gandhi this was the only way to

guard against both abstract universalism that ignored the demands of

those to whom one had special ties and commitments, and an uncritical

devotion to the latter in disregard of wider duties.

For Gandhi, service to one’s fellow human beings was not a separate

and independent activity, but informed all one did. Being a husband, a

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father, a son, a friend, a neighbour, a colleague, a citizen, an employer,

or an employee were not so many discrete roles, each governed by its

own distinct norms and values, but different ways of realizing one’s

humanity and relating to one’s fellow men. As a neighbour, for

example, one should not only refrain from making a nuisance of oneself

but should also help one’s neighbours, take an active interest in their

well-being and the quality of their surroundings, and help create a

vibrant local community. A similar spirit of service and humanity should

infuse one’s manner of earning one’s livelihood, which should be looked

upon as a yajna, as one’s form of participation in the promotion of

communal well-being, of which monetary reward was not the purpose

but an incidental though necessary consequence. Gandhi thought that,

by bringing to his every activity the ‘sweet smell of humanity’, every

person could in his own small way help transform the quality of human

relationships and contribute to the creation of a better world. Such a

‘quiet, unostentatious service’ as consoling a widow, educating a

neighbour’s child, nursing a sick relative, and shopping for an invalid

friend, and thus ‘picking up one clod of earth’ from the entire mass of

human unhappiness, was just as important as the more glamorous

forms of social service and political action, and sometimes had more

lasting and beneficial results.

Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too

much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the

poorest and the weakest man whom you have seen, and ask

yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to

him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control

over his own life and destiny?

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Implications

Before concluding this chapter we should note three important features

of Gandhi’s theory of man. First, it bypassed the traditional Western

debate on whether human beings were naturally good or evil. Since

human beings had souls and were spiritual in nature, they had a deep

tendency towards good. However, this did not mean that they always

loved and pursued good, for they often lacked true self-knowledge,

were subject to the body-based illusion of particularity, and their

swabhāva might dispose them to do evil. All it meant was that human

beings had a deep-seated capacity to perceive and pursue good and

would act on it if that capacity were to be awakened and activated.

Secondly, Gandhi’s theory avoided the familiar homogenizing and

monistic impulse inherent in most theories of human nature. For these

theories, human beings have a specific nature or essence which dictates

how they ought to live. And since the essence is believed to be the same

in all, only one way of life is considered to be the best for them and may

legitimately be imposed on those falling short of it. Gandhi’s view of

human nature avoided that danger. Although all human beings had an

identical soul or spirit and hence a common destination, they were also

naturally unique and had different intermediate goals and ways of

realizing them. Gandhi’s view thus stressed both human identity and

difference, and left ample ontological space for autonomy and diversity.

As we saw, he explained human individuality in terms of a dubious

theory of rebirth. There is no reason why we cannot reject that theory

while appreciating his concern to ground diversity in the very structure

of our conception of human nature.

Thirdly, Gandhi was deeply uneasy with the ‘European’ ideas of rights

and duties and their artificial opposition. It is often argued that rights

and duties are mutually exclusive in the sense that nothing can be both

a right and a duty, and that rights are exercises of, and duties

restrictions on, freedom. As we saw, Gandhi viewed the matter very

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differently. For him the two were as inseparable as two sides of the

same coin, and mutually regulative. For example, self-development or

personal autonomy was a right because each individual was unique and

should be free to evolve a way of life suited to his psychological and

moral constitution. But it was also a duty because that was the only way

he could make his distinct contribution to society and discharge his

inescapable existential debts. Similarly one had a right to look after

one’s children because one had brought them into the world and

wished to make sure they flourished, as well as a duty because

otherwise they would be neglected, not develop into self-determining

and morally conscious agents, and become a burden on society. In

order to stress the inseparability of rights and duties, Gandhi preferred

to use the polysemic Sanskrit term dharma, which signified nature,

right, and duty. Since every human action was both a right and a duty

and had an individual and a social dimension, rights had to be defined

and exercised in a socially responsible manner, and duties defined and

discharged in a way that took account of the agent’s uniqueness and

claims (M ii. 65–8; M iii. 496–8).

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Chapter 4

Satyāgraha

As someone whose entire life was taken up with fighting against such

injustices as racial discrimination in South Africa, British rule in India,

and ugly social practices in his own society, Gandhi wondered how a

moral person should conduct such struggles. Traditionally people have

relied on rational discussion and violence, appealing respectively to

reason and the ‘body-force’. He found both methods unsatisfactory in

varying degrees, and explored one that relied on the hitherto untapped

‘soul-force’ or ‘truth-force’.

The limits of rationality and violence

For Gandhi, rational discussion or persuasion was the best way to

resolve conflict. In his view rational discussion worked under two

conditions. First, since human beings are fallible and partial, each

should make a sincere effort to look at the disputed subject from the

other’s point of view. If either party were to be dogmatic, self-righteous,

or obstinate, it would not be willing to question its view of the matter in

dispute, put itself into the shoes of the other, and appreciate why the

latter saw things differently.

Secondly, human reason did not operate in a psychological and moral

vacuum. Human beings were complex creatures full of prejudices,

sympathies, and antipathies, all of which distorted and circumscribed

64

the power of reason. If a person did not care for others, had no fellow-

feeling for them, or thought them subhuman, he would not take their

interests into account and would find all kinds of reasons to ignore

those interests. Even if he rationally appreciated the equal claims of

their interests, he would lack the motive to respect and promote them.

Gandhi appealed to his own experiences. He had tried to convince white

South Africans that blacks and Asians were entitled to equal rights; the

British rulers that Indians should be free to govern their own affairs; the

high-caste Hindus that untouchability was an abominable practice; and

in each case his opponents either failed to see the force of his

arguments, or dismissed them by specious counter-arguments, or

conceded them but refused or failed to act on them. In Gandhi’s view

this was because their range of sympathy was too narrow to include

their victims. In his favourite language, the head and the heart formed a

unity, and if the heart rejected someone, the head tended to do so too.

The rationalist belief that human beings were guided and motivated

solely by the ‘weight’ of the argument was false, a ‘piece of idolatry’, an

act of ‘blind faith’. Thanks to selfishness, failure of moral imagination,

hatred, ill-will, and deep prejudices, human beings did not often have

either an open mind or an open heart. Although desirable in principle,

rational discussion was of limited value in practice. ‘To men steeped in

prejudice, an appeal to reason is worse than useless’ (iv. 237).

Realizing the limits of rational discussion, many turned to violence as

the only effective method of securing justice. Some took a purely

instrumental view of it, and thought it fully justified if it produced the

desired results. Others agreed it was morally undesirable, but justified it

when it was likely to result in the elimination of a greater evil. Gandhi

was particularly disturbed by the ease with which violence had been

rationalized and used throughout history. He appreciated that it was

often born out of frustration, that many who used it hated it and

resorted to it only because they saw no other way to fight entrenched

injustices, and that much of the blame for its use had to be laid at the

doors of morally blind and narrow-minded dominant groups. While he

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S a

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h a

was therefore prepared to condone spontaneous violence under

unbearable conditions or grave provocation, he was totally opposed to

it as a deliberate method of social change (M ii. 264–87; xxvi. 486–92).

The use of violence denied the ontological facts that all human beings

had souls, that they were capable of appreciating and pursuing good,

and that no one was so degenerate that he could not be won over by

appealing to his fellow-feeling and humanity. Furthermore human

beings sincerely disagreed about what was the right thing to do, ‘saw

truth in fragment and from different angles of vision’, and all their

beliefs were fallible and corrigible. In Gandhi’s view the use of violence

denied this. In order to be justified in taking the extreme step of

harming or killing someone, one had to assume that one was absolutely

right, the opponent totally wrong, and that violence would definitely

achieve the desired result. The consequences of violence were

irreversible in the sense that a life once terminated or damaged could

never be revived or easily put together. And irreversible deeds required

infallible knowledge to justify them, which was obviously beyond

human reach. Gandhi acknowledged that, taken to its logical extreme,

his theory of ‘relative truth’ undermined the very basis of action, for no

man could ever act if he constantly entertained the nagging doubt that

he might be wholly mistaken. However, he thought that one should at

least acknowledge one’s fallibility and leave room for reflection and

reconsideration, and that, being irreversible and emotionally charged,

violence did not allow this.

Gandhi also rejected violence on moral grounds. Morality consisted in

doing what was right because one believed it to be right, and required

unity of belief and conduct. Since the use of violence did not change the

opponent’s perception of truth, it compelled him to behave in a manner

contrary to his sincerely held beliefs, and violated his moral integrity.

Gandhi further argued that violence rarely achieved lasting results. An

act of violence was deemed to be successful when it achieved its

immediate objectives. However, if it were to be judged by its long-term

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consequences, our conclusion would have to be very different. Every

apparently successful act of violence encouraged the belief that it was

the only effective way to achieve the desired goal, and developed the

habit of turning to violence every time one ran into opposition. Society

thus became used to it and never felt compelled to explore an

alternative. Violence also tended to generate an inflationary spiral.

Every successful use blunted the community’s moral sensibility and

raised its threshold of violence, so that over time an increasingly larger

amount became necessary to achieve the same results. In Gandhi’s view

the facts that almost every revolution so far had led to terror, devoured

its children, and failed to create a better society were a proof that the

traditional theory of revolution was fatally flawed.

Finally, for Gandhi the means–end dichotomy lying at the heart of most

theories of violence was false. In human life the so-called means

consisted not of implements and inanimate tools but of human actions,

and by definition these could not fall outside the jurisdiction of morality.

The method of fighting for an objective was not external to but an

integral part of it. Every step towards a desired goal shaped its

character, and utmost care had to be taken lest it should distort or

damage the goal. The goal did not exist at the end of a series of

actions designed to achieve it; it shadowed them from the very

beginning. The so-called means were really the ends in an embryonic

form, seeds of which the so-called ends were a natural flowering. Since

this was so, the fight for a just society could not be conducted by

unjust means.

A non-violent revolution is not a programme of seizure of

power. It is a programme of transformation of relationships,

ending in a peaceful transfer of power.

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Soul-force

Gandhi concluded that, since the two methods of fighting against

injustice were inadequate or deeply flawed, we needed a new method.

It should activate the soul, mobilize the individual’s latent moral

energies, appeal to both the head and the heart, and create a climate

conducive to peaceful resolution of conflict conducted in a spirit of

mutual goodwill. Gandhi thought that his method of satyāgraha met

this requirement. He first discovered and tried it out during his

campaigns against racial discrimination in South Africa, and kept

perfecting it in the course of his struggles against British rule in India

and the unjust practices of his own society.

For Gandhi satyāgraha, meaning civil insistence on or tenacity in the

pursuit of truth, aimed to penetrate the barriers of prejudice, ill-will,

dogmatism, self-righteousness, and selfishness, and to reach out to and

activate the soul of the opponent. However degenerate or dogmatic a

human being might be, he had a soul, and hence the capacity to feel for

other human beings and acknowledge their common humanity. Even a

Hitler or Mussolini was not beyond redemption. They too loved their

parents, wives, children, friends, and pet animals, thereby displaying the

basic human capacity for fellow-feeling. Their problem was not that

they lacked that capacity but rather that it was limited to a few, and our

task was to find ways of expanding it. Satyāgraha was a ‘surgery of the

soul’, a way of activating ‘soul-force’. For Gandhi ‘suffering love’ was the

best way to do this, and formed the inspiring principle of his new

method. As he put it:

I have come to this fundamental conclusion that if you want something

really important to be done, you must not merely satisfy the reason, you

must move the heart also. The appeal of reason is more to the head, but

the penetration of the heart comes from suffering. It opens up the inner

understanding in man. Suffering is the badge of the human race, not the

sword. (xlviii. 189)

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Confronted with an injustice, the satyāgrahi sought a dialogue with his

opponent. He did not confront the latter with a dogmatic insistence on

the justice of his demands. He knew he could be partial and biased, and

invited his opponent to join him in cooperatively searching for the

‘truth’ or the most just course of action concerning the matter in

dispute. As Gandhi put it, ‘I am essentially a man of compromise

because I am never sure that I am right.’ When the dialogue was denied

or reduced to an insincere exercise in public relations, the satyāgrahi

took a principled stand on what he sincerely believed to be his just

demands, and patiently and uncomplainingly suffered whatever

violence was done to him. His opponent saw him as an enemy or a

troublemaker. He refused to reciprocate, and saw him instead as a

fellow human being whose temporarily eclipsed sense of humanity it

was his duty to restore. Since his sole concern was to evoke a moral

response in his opponent, he did everything possible to put him at ease

and nothing to harass, embarrass, anger, or frighten him, hoping

thereby to trigger in him a slow, intensely personal, and highly complex

process of self-examination. The moment his opponent showed

willingness to talk in a spirit of genuine goodwill, he suspended the

struggle and gave reason a chance to work in a more hospitable climate.

Like Kant and John Rawls, Gandhi argued that every community

required a widespread sense of justice to hold it together. But unlike

them he argued that the sense of justice was highly cerebral and needed

a deeper and emotionally charged sense of shared humanity to give it

depth and energy. The sense of humanity consisted in the recognition

of the fundamental ontological fact that human well-being was

indivisible, that in degrading and brutalizing others human beings

degraded and brutalized themselves, and that they could not sustain a

shared collective life without a spirit of mutual concern. The sense of

humanity constituted the community’s vital moral capital, without

which it had no defences against or resources to fight the forces of

injustice, exploitation, and oppression. The slow and painful task of

cultivating and consolidating the sense of humanity, and thereby laying

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the foundations of a truly moral community, was a collective

responsibility, which the satyāgrahi took it upon himself to discharge.

He assumed the burden of the common evil, sought to liberate both

himself and his opponent from its tyrannical automatism, and helped

reduce the prevailing level of inhumanity. As Gandhi put it, the old

sages ‘returned good for evil and killed it’. The satyāgrahi took his stand

on this ‘fundamental moral truth’.

In all his satyāgrahas Gandhi observed certain basic principles. They

were preceded by a careful study of the situation, patient gathering of

facts, a reasoned defence of the objectives, a popular agitation to

convince the opponent of the intensity of the satyāgrahi’s feeling, and

an ultimatum to give him a last chance for negotiation. Throughout the

satyāgraha, the channels of communication with the opponent were

kept open, the attitudes on either side were not allowed to harden, and

intermediaries were encouraged. The satyāgrahi was required to take a

pledge not to use violence or to resist arrest or confiscation of his

property. Similar rules were laid down for the satyāgrahi prisoner, who

was expected to be courteous, to ask for no special privileges, to do as

he was ordered, and never to agitate for conveniences ‘whose

deprivation does not involve any injury to his self-respect’.

Gandhi explained the effectiveness of satyāgraha in terms of the

spiritual impact of suffering love. The satyāgrahi’s love of his opponent

and moral nobility disarmed the latter, defused his feelings of anger and

hatred, and mobilized his higher nature. And his uncomplaining

suffering denied his opponent the pleasure of victory, mobilized neutral

public opinion, and created in him a mood conducive to calm

introspection. The two together triggered the complex process of

critical self-examination on which a satyāgraha relied for its ultimate

success. Love by itself was not enough, as otherwise the satyāgrahi

could quietly expostulate with his opponent without launching a

campaign, nor was suffering by itself enough, for it had no value and

was even counterproductive if accompanied by hatred and anger. Love

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spiritualized suffering, which in itself had only a psychological value;

suffering gave love its psychological energy and moral power. In

Gandhi’s view, we knew so little about the operations of the human soul

that it was not easy to explain rationally how non-violence worked. ‘In

violence there is nothing invisible. Non-violence, on the other hand, is

three-fourths invisible’, and it acted in such a ‘silent and

undemonstrative’ manner that its working always retained an air of

mystery.

Although Gandhi continued to maintain that suffering love was

omnipotent and, when pure, capable of ‘melting even the stoniest

hearts’, he knew that reality was quite different. Most satyāgrahis were

ordinary human beings whose tolerance, love, determination, and

ability to suffer had obvious limits, and their opponents were

sometimes too prejudiced and callous to be swayed by their suffering.

Not surprisingly, Gandhi was led to introduce such other forms of

pressure as economic boycott, non-payment of taxes, non-cooperation,

and hartāl (cessation of work), none of which relied on the spiritual

power of suffering love alone. His vocabulary too became increasingly

aggressive. He began to talk of ‘non-violent warfare’, ‘peaceful

rebellion’, a ‘civilized form of warfare’, a ‘war bereft of every trace of

violence’, and ‘weapons’ in the ‘armoury’ of the satyāgrahi, all intended

to ‘compel’ and ‘force’ the opponent to negotiate. As was to be

expected, Gandhi’s political realism triumphed over his moral idealism,

and, despite his claims to the contrary, his satyāgrahas were not always

purely spiritual in nature.

In addition to these and other methods, Gandhi introduced the highly

controversial method of fasting. He knew that his fasts caused

considerable unease among his critics and followers, and went to great

lengths to defend them. He argued that his fast was a form of suffering

love and had a fourfold purpose. First, it was his way of expressing his

deep sense of sorrow and hurt at the way in which those he loved had

degraded themselves and disappointed him. Second, as their leader he

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felt responsible for them, and his fast was his way of atoning for their

misdeeds. Third, it was his last desperate attempt, an ‘intense spiritual

effort’, to stir their ‘sluggish conscience’, to ‘sting them into action’,

and to mobilize their moral energies. For a variety of reasons his

countrymen had temporarily lost their senses, as in the case of

communal violence, or become insensitive to injustice and suffering, as

in the case of untouchability, or had shown utter lack of self-discipline,

as when a satyāgraha became violent. By suffering himself and inducing

sympathetic suffering in them, he said he intended to persuade them to

reassess their actions. Finally, the fast was intended to bring the

quarrelling parties together and to get them to resolve their differences

themselves, thereby both deepening their sense of community and

developing their powers of self-determination and conflict-resolution.

Gandhi agreed that his fast exerted considerable pressure on his

intended target, but thought it on balance fully justified. Evil had

occurred and needed to be fought. Moral appeals had failed. He could

therefore either acquiesce in the evil, which was immoral, or use the

only means available to a man of non-violence. The fast did exert moral

pressure, but there was nothing improper in it. And it was not coercion

or blackmail because it did not threaten others with personal harm.

Obviously they did not want him to die, but that was because they loved

him, and there was nothing immoral in appealing to their love in this

way, especially when its purpose was to make them better human

beings.

Since the fast could easily be misused for selfish purposes and even

degenerate into blackmail, Gandhi imposed strict limits on it. First, it

could only be undertaken against those with whom one was bound by

the ties of love and never against strangers, which was why his fasts

were directed against his countrymen and rarely against the colonial

government. Secondly, the fast must have a concrete and clearly

specified purpose, which its addressee can easily understand and

respond to. Thirdly, the purpose must be morally defensible especially

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in the eyes of its intended target. Fourthly, it should not in any way be

designed to serve one’s personal interests. Fifthly, it should not ask

people to do what they are incapable of doing, or involve great

sacrifices. And finally, it should only be undertaken by one who is an

acknowledged moral leader of his people, has a long record of working

for their welfare, and an unblemished moral character (xxiv. 95–9; xxv.

199–202).

The limits of satyāgraha

Gandhi’s theory of satyāgraha, which goes right to the heart of his

theory of human nature, was a highly original and creative contribution

to theories of social change and political action. He was right to stress

the limits of rational discussion and the dangers of violence, and explore

new forms of political praxis that broke through the narrow straitjacket

of the reason–violence dichotomy. Satyāgraha took full account of the

rational and moral nature of human beings and stressed the value of

rational discussion and moral persuasion. And it was also sensitive to

the human capacities for intransigence and moral blindness and sought

to overcome these by awakening the shared humanity of the parties

involved and transforming their mutual perceptions and relationships.

Satyāgraha aimed not just to resolve existing disagreements but to

build deeper moral and emotional bonds, and thus both give the

compromise reached a firmer foundation and make future conflicts less

likely and less intractable.

While the moral and political significance of Gandhi’s satyāgraha is

beyond doubt, it is not the panacea he thought it was. Although he was

right to stress the unity of reason and morality, or the head and the

heart as he called it, he was wrong to think that all or even most social

conflicts could be resolved by touching the opponent’s heart. They

sometimes occur because persons of goodwill take very different views

of what constitutes human well-being. On the basis of the principle of

the sanctity of human life, some find abortion, euthanasia, and war

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morally unacceptable while others reach the opposite conclusion. It is

difficult to see how Gandhi’s method can resolve these differences and

the consequent conflicts.

Gandhi was probably right to argue that human beings are generally

affected by the suffering of others and regret that suffering even if they

are unable or unwilling to do anything about it. However, he overlooked

the fact that, if they thought the suffering deserved, their reaction

would be different. Not the suffering per se but one’s judgement of it

determines one’s response to it, and that in turn depends on one’s

beliefs about which individuals may deeply disagree. The Sharpeville

massacre left many a white South African unmoved, the pictures of the

Vietnamese victims of American napalm bombs did not disturb the

consciences of many Americans, and the brutal Nazi treatment of the

Jews had no effect on many a German.

Gandhi was wrong to argue that satyāgraha never failed and that it was

effective under all conditions. If he had said that it was a self-chosen way

of being in the world and that one would die rather than kill irrespective

of the outcome, his view would have made moral though not political

sense. To his credit he insisted that satyāgraha was meant to succeed

and achieve practical results. And that subjected his claim to a different

kind of scrutiny. It was an article of faith for him that all human beings

had souls, which could be ‘touched’ and ‘activated’. As a result he did

not and could not acknowledge that some human beings might be

profoundly distorted and beyond hope. Satyāgraha presupposes a sense

of decency on the part of the opponent, an open society in which his

brutality can be exposed, and a neutral body of opinion that can be

mobilized against him. It also presupposes that the parties involved are

interdependent, as otherwise non-cooperation by the victims cannot

affect the vital interests of their opponents, and that the victims have

both sufficient self-confidence and a reasonably effective organization

to fight against injustices. Human skeletons in the Nazi concentration

camps could hardly have launched a satyāgraha, nor would it have

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succeeded in a closed and ruthless totalitarian system. As Martin Buber

wrote to Gandhi, where there is no witness, there can be no

martyrdom, and without the latter satyāgraha loses its moral force.

Hayim Greenberg, editor of The Jewish Frontier and an admirer of

Gandhi, wrote to him, ‘a Jewish Gandhi in Germany, should one arise,

could function for about five minutes and would be promptly taken to

the guillotine’. Gandhi replied that Hitler too was a human being, that

the Jews, who were going to be slaughtered anyway, should have

asserted their dignity and freely chosen their way of death, and that

such an action was bound to have an effect on ordinary Germans, if not

immediately at least a little later (lxviii. 137–41). His reply had a point,

but it rested on an uncritical faith in the power of non-violence, and

showed little understanding of the complex ways in which totalitarian

systems brutalized the community, demoralized the victims, distorted

public discourse, and undermined the basic preconditions of

satyāgraha.

Gandhi’s satyāgraha has much to be said for it, but it cannot be a

catholicon. Although Gandhi insisted otherwise, violence need not be

accompanied by hatred and ill-will or be uncontrolled. Like non-violence

it too can be restrained, measured, born out of love for both the victims

and the perpetrators of injustice, and used to arrest human

degradation. Gandhi would have been wiser to insist not on one

‘sovereign’ method of action but on a plurality of methods to be used

singly or in combination with others as the situation required. Since

different circumstances require different responses, violence might

sometimes achieve results that non-violence either cannot or do so only

at an unacceptably high price in human suffering.

Although Gandhi’s satyāgraha had its limitations and he was wrong to

claim ‘sovereign efficacy’ for it, it is a powerful, novel, and

predominantly moral method of social change. Not surprisingly, it has

been borrowed and tried out in different countries with suitable

adjustments to local circumstances. The United States is an excellent

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example of this. Many black American leaders had gone to India from

the early 1930s onwards to seek his advice and study his method. He

was so impressed with their commitment that he remarked that ‘it

may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of

non-violence will be delivered to the world’ (ixii. 202). The American

civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s under the leadership of

Martin Luther King confirmed Gandhi’s hope. Embarking on ‘a serious

intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil’, King turned to a

number of writers including Marx, and found them all unhelpful. A

sermon by Mordecai Johnson, the then President of Howard University,

in 1950 alerted him to the importance of Gandhi’s satyāgraha. King read

Gandhi closely, found ‘intellectual and moral satisfaction’ in his

writings, and wrote (K 73):

As I read I became deeply fascinated by [Gandhi’s] campaigns of non-

violent resistance . . . The whole concept of ‘Satyāgraha’ . . . was

profoundly significant to me. As I delved deeper into the philosophy of

Gandhi my scepticism concerning the power of love gradually

diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of

social reform. Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the

ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships . . . But

after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was. Gandhi was

probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above

mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social

force on a large scale . . . It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and

non-violence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had

been seeking for so many months.

King shared Gandhi’s belief in the power of suffering love, his

abhorrence of violence, emphasis on both the head and the heart,

concern to raise the consciousness and build up the self-confidence of

the victims of injustice, and stress on the crucial role of effective

organization and an inspiring leader. King, however, could not apply

Gandhi’s method to the American situation without suitably revising it.

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He was a Christian, and hence Gandhi’s metaphysics had only a limited

appeal to him. As he put it, ‘Christ furnished the spirit and motivation

[for non-violent resistance], while Gandhi furnished the method’ (K 67).

Gandhi’s fasts, his belief in the spiritual power of personal purity, and

the concomitant emphasis on simple living and the conquest of the

senses had no attraction for King. This is puzzling for Christ’s crucifixion

is the central motif of Christianity, and one would have expected King to

explore ways of reaffirming and re-enacting it and mobilizing its

immense symbolic potential in his repertoire of political action, as

Gandhi did with his fasts. Again, given the fact that King was operating

within a largely democratic context and wanted black integration into

American society, Gandhi’s method of non-cooperation with the

established legal, political, and cultural institutions was of little

relevance to him. In some respects King seems to have been more

acutely aware than Gandhi of the power of evil (an awareness reinforced

by the intellectual influence of the American Protestant theologian

Reinhold Niebuhr, who both admired and stressed the limits of Gandhi’s

non-violence), and guarded himself and his followers against the

‘illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the

dangers of a false idealism’ (K 81). King’s civil rights movement showed

both the universal relevance of Gandhi’s satyāgraha and the need for

its creative adaptation and development.

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Chapter 5

Critique of modernity

Modern industrial civilization has been a subject of much agonized

debate since its emergence in the early years of the nineteenth century.

It is characterized by such features as rationalism, secularization,

industrialization, the scientific culture, individualism, technological

mastery of nature, the drive towards globalization, and liberal

democracy. Few writers were entirely happy or unhappy with all of

these. The only question was whether they thought that on balance

modern civilization was a force for good or evil. The answer depended

on their criteria of evaluation, the way in which they related its desirable

and undesirable features, and whether in their view the latter were

contingent and eliminable or deeply embedded in and hence

inseparable from its overall structure. Not surprisingly such writers as

J. S. Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Carlyle, Thoreau, Ruskin, Tolstoy,

Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim reached different conclusions.

Whether they admired, criticized, or condemned modernity, they all did

so from a European perspective.

Lack of self-restraint

Although Gandhi had the advantage of observing modern civilization

from both the European and non-European perspectives, he was more

familiar with and sympathetic to the latter, and saw it primarily through

the eyes of one of its victims. He called it modern rather than European

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or Western partly to highlight its historical specificity, and partly to

emphasize that Europe itself had long nurtured a different civilization

that had much in common with its non-European counterparts,

including the Indian.

For Gandhi, every civilization was inspired and energized by a distinct

conception of human beings. If that conception was mistaken, it

corrupted the entire civilization and made it a force for evil. In his view

that was the case with modern civilization. Although it had many

achievements to its credit, it was fundamentally flawed, as was evident

in the fact that it was aggressive, imperialist, violent, exploitative,

brutal, unhappy, restless, and devoid of a sense of direction and

purpose. Gandhi thought that this was because modern civilization

neglected the soul, privileged the body, misunderstood the nature and

limits of reason, and had no appreciation of the individual swabhāva. In

the light of our earlier discussion, it is easy to see why Gandhi thought

that such a view radically misconceived and violated the inner balance

and hierarchy of human nature (M i. 199–264).

As we saw, the body had two basic characteristics for Gandhi. It

enclosed the agent within himself or herself and bred individualism, and

it was the seat of desires. Since modern civilization privileged the body,

it was necessarily driven by the two interdependent principles of self-

interest and undisciplined self-indulgence. It was appetitive, dominated

by desires, given over to unrestrained satisfaction of wants, and lacked a

sense of limits and moral depth. It was ‘materialist’ in its nature and

orientation in the sense that it valued material possessions and

consumption to the exclusion of almost everything else, and made the

economy its centre. Driven by greed and ruthless competition, the

economy led to the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth in the

hands of a ‘few capitalist owners’. They had only one aim, to make

profit, and only one means to do so, to produce goods that satisfied

people’s ever-increasing wants. They had a vital vested interest in

constantly whetting jaded appetites, planting new wants, and creating

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a mental climate in which not to want the goods daily pumped into the

market was to be abnormal. Not surprisingly, little value was attached

to self-discipline or moral regulation of desires, the very emblem of

human dignity.

The capitalist search for profits led to mechanization and ‘industrialism’.

In Gandhi’s view, machines relieved drudgery, created leisure, increased

efficiency, and were indispensable when there was a shortage of labour.

Their use should be guided by a well-considered moral theory indicating

how human beings should live, spend their free time, and relate to one

another. Since modern civilization lacked such a theory and was only

propelled by the search for profit, it mechanized production without

any regard for the wider moral, cultural, and other consequences.

Machines were introduced when there was no obvious need for them

and even when they were likely to throw thousands out of work. For

Gandhi, mechanization or the fetishism of technology was closely tied

up with the larger phenomenon of industrialism, another apparently

self-propelling and endless process of creating larger and larger

industries with no other purpose than to produce cheap consumer

goods and maximize profit. Since modern economic life followed an

inexorable momentum of its own without anyone being in charge of it,

it reduced human beings to helpless and passive spectators and

represented a new form of slavery, more comfortable and invidious and

hence more dangerous than the earlier ones.

Based on the beliefs that unless one was constantly on the move one

was not alive, and that the faster the tempo of life the more alive one

Civilization, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the

multiplication but in the deliberate and voluntary restriction of

wants. This alone promotes real happiness and contentment

and increases the capacity for service.

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was, modern civilization was inherently restless and lacked stability. It

aimed to conquer time and space and developed increasingly speedier

modes of transport and communication. Cars were replaced by trains,

and the latter by planes, but no one asked why one needed to travel so

fast and what one intended to do with the time saved. Thanks to its

restlessness and ‘mindless activism’, mistakenly equated with

dynamism and energy, modern civilization undermined man’s unity

with his environment and fellow men, and destroyed stable and long-

established communities. In the absence of natural and social roots and

the stable and enduring landmarks which alone gave human beings a

sense of identity and continuity, they had become abstract,

indeterminate, empty, and related to each other at best by mutual

indifference, at worst by mutual hostility.

As a result moral life suffered a profound distortion. It became as

abstract as the human beings whose relations it regulated, and replaced

virtues by a set of impersonal rules. Morality was seen not as an

expression and realization of human dignity, but as a restriction of

freedom, a kind of tax one had to pay in order to be able to enjoy one’s

residual freedom unhindered. It was therefore reduced to the barest

minimum, requiring little more than what was needed to prevent

people from harming or destroying each other.

Since moral life lacked the nourishing soil of the sentiments of goodwill

and mutual concern, it increasingly depended on the non-moral motive

of fear. Modern man took care not to harm others lest they should harm

him, and he did a good turn to them as an investment for the future.

Morality was reduced to reciprocal egoism or enlightened self-interest.

Since self-interest was not a moral principle, Gandhi argued that

enlightened self-interest was not one either. In modern civilization,

morality was a form of prudence, a more effective way of pursuing self-

interest, and was virtually exorcized out of existence.

In Gandhi’s view, modern civilization denuded morality of its vital

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internal dimension and ignored what he called the quality of the soul.

For him jealousy, hatred, meanness, ill-will, perverse pleasure at

another’s misfortunes, and sordid thoughts and fantasies were moral

impurities reflecting an ill-developed and coarse soul, and the moral

agent should endeavour to eliminate them. Being concerned only to get

on in the world and lead a comfortable life, modern man not only saw

no value in the purity of his soul and the quality of his motives but also

found such preoccupations a hindrance. Not a generous, reflective, self-

critical, sensitive, and tender-hearted but a tough, aggressive,

ambitious, and self-centred person was the ideal and the necessary

basis of modern civilization.

Modern man, Gandhi went on, spent most of his energy trying to steady

himself in a hostile and unstable environment. He had neither the

inclination nor the ability to slow down the tempo of his life, be alone

with himself, look inwards, reflect on his pattern of life, and nurture the

inner springs of energy. He lived outside himself and was exhausted

both physically and spiritually. Inwardly empty and frightened to face

himself, he was easily bored, and feverishly looked for new sources of

energy and amusement. Gandhi thought that modern civilization had a

depressing air of ‘futility’ and ‘madness’ about it and was likely to

destroy itself before long.

In Gandhi’s view the exploitation of one’s fellow human beings was built

into the very structure of modern civilization. Consumers were

constantly manipulated into desiring things they did not need and

which were not in their long-term interest. Workers were made to do

boring jobs at subsistence wages under inhuman conditions, and given

little opportunity or encouragement to develop their intellectual and

moral potential. The poor were treated with contempt, weaker races

were regarded as subhuman and bought and sold, and weaker nations

were conquered and mercilessly oppressed and exploited. For Gandhi

European imperialism was a natural expression of the aggressive and

exploitative impulse lying at the heart of modern civilization.

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In Gandhi’s view modern civilization rested on and was sustained by

massive violence. It involved violence against oneself for, in a society of

ambitious, competitive, and mutually fearful persons, no one could

flourish or even survive without developing a regimented and

aggressive psyche. It also involved violence against other persons at

both the personal and collective levels. Since individuals felt threatened

by others and desperately sought to keep them at a manageable

distance, they relied on the use or threat of verbal, emotional, moral,

and even physical violence, ultimately backed up by the concentrated

violence of the state. Relations between organized groups, classes, and

states were even more tense and aggressive and scarred by open or cold

wars. Modern civilization also involved an egregious amount of violence

against nature. The latter’s resources were ruthlessly exploited and its

rhythm and balance disturbed, and the animals were freely killed or

tortured for food, sport, fancy clothes, and medical experiments. In

Gandhi’s view violence ‘oozed from every pore’ of modern society, and

had so much become a way of life that human beings today were in

danger of losing the capacity to notice its pervasive presence, let alone

find ways of dealing with it. Although it claimed to be based on such

values as human dignity, equality, freedom, and civility, modern

civilization was inherently militarist and violent. The colonial conquests,

slavery, the two world wars, the countless civil and external wars that

had characterized European history for the past few centuries, the Nazi

murder of Jews, and so on formed a pattern too consistent and

recurrent to be dismissed as accidents or aberrations. When once asked

what he thought of European civilization, Gandhi replied that ‘it would

be a good idea’.

Naive rationalism

For Gandhi another great weakness of modern civilization was its failure

to understand the nature and limits of reason. It defined reason in

largely positivist terms, made it the sole source of knowledge and

action, and indiscriminately extended it to all areas of life. In other

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words it made a ‘fetish’ of reason and constructed an untenable and

ultimately ‘irrational’ ideology of rationalism. Gandhi saw reason as an

important human faculty with an indispensable role in human life, but

rationalism was an altogether different matter. As he put it:

Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason to submit to the

test of reason and universal assent . . . But rationalism is a hideous

monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of

omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of stock

and stone believing it to be God. I plead not for the suppression of

reason, but an appreciation of its inherent limits.

Gandhi believed that rationalism was a false and pernicious doctrine.

Certain areas of human experience such as religion transcended reason

and required faith. They obviously had to satisfy reason but they could

not be confined within its narrow limits. In addition, in some areas of

human experience such as morality and politics, reason was inherently

inadequate and needed to be guided by wisdom, tradition, conscience,

intuition, and moral insight. Since the conclusions of reason were

necessarily tentative and liable to constant subversion by superior

arguments, they could never form the basis of human life. Rationalism

valued only one form of knowledge, namely the scientific. It therefore

marginalized, ignored, or suppressed many valuable human faculties

and forms of knowledge and had a deep anti-pluralist bias and a strong

streak of intolerance. According to it human life was transparent, fully

knowable if not today then tomorrow, and whatever could not be

scientifically known either did not exist or was not worth knowing.

Rationalism therefore bred the ‘arrogant’ and ‘irrational’ belief that

human beings had the ability to shape the world in the way they liked. It

lacked a sense of its own limits, a feel for the contingency and

unpredictability of life, a capacity to listen to the half-articulated

whispers of the human soul and to live with ambiguities.

Rationalism also abstracted reason from other human faculties and the

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wider way of life, and used it to judge and grade individuals and

societies and to justify the domination of those deemed to be less

rational. For Gandhi rationalism was inherently hierarchical and

missionary, and had a deep imperialist orientation. He had in mind the

ways in which racists in South Africa and British imperialists in India

treated their subjects and legitimized their rule. Finally, rationalism had

a tendency to homogenize individuals and suppress their diversity. It set

up identical ideals for all human beings, held up only one kind of life as

the highest or truly human, and expected all to conform to it. It thus

ignored both their inescapably unique swabhāva and the vastly different

ways in which they defined and led the good life. Gandhi thought that

each individual had his own distinct identity, and was rooted in a

specific cultural tradition. What was good for others was not necessarily

good for him, and even when it was, he had to achieve it in his own

unique way. Rationalism ignored this vital truth and violated human

integrity.

Statist culture

Gandhi argued that the highly centralized and bureaucratic modern

state enjoying and jealously guarding its monopoly of political power

was a necessary product of modern civilization. Competitive and

aggressive persons ruthlessly pursuing their interests could only be held

together by an intimidating and well-armed state. Since they were

strangers to one another and lacked the bonds of goodwill and mutual

concern, their relations could only be regulated by impersonal rules

enforced by a powerful and bureaucratic state capable of reaching out

to all areas of individual life. The centralization of production in the

modern economy created social and economic problems of national

and international magnitude, and again required a centralized political

agency to deal with them. Unemployment, poverty, and the social and

economic inequalities created by the modern economy led to acute and

legitimate discontent, and required a well-armed state to deter

desperate citizens from resorting to violence. The centralized modern

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state was also necessary to protect international markets and overseas

investments.

For Gandhi the state had a vested institutional interest in remaining at

the centre of social life and creating the illusion that the problems of

society were too complex and intractable to be solved by ordinary

citizens acting individually or collectively, and were best left to the state

and its official agencies. Even as the state monopolized all political

initiative and fostered a statist political culture, it tended to monopolize

all morality. Since its isolated and morally impoverished citizens lacked

organic bonds and the capacity to organize and run their social relations

themselves, the state was the sole source of moral order. The state

came to be seen as the highest moral institution whose preservation

was a supreme moral value justifying often pointless sacrifices of human

lives. All moral sentiments were sucked into it, all moral energies were

appropriated by it, all moral norms were judged in terms of its interests,

and its laws were deemed to be the sole determinants of collective

morality. Dying for the state was considered a supreme virtue, and

fighting in its wars the highest duty. Disobeying its laws was strongly

disapproved of, and all attempts to weigh its actions in the moral scale

were discouraged, on the ground that political life was either inherently

amoral or governed by its own distinct morality.

Almost like Marx, Gandhi argued that, although the state claimed to be

a moral institution transcending narrow group interests and pursuing

the well-being of the whole community, it was in fact little more than

an arena of conflict between organized interests, manipulated and

controlled by the more powerful among them. Since persons of

independent spirit and honour generally avoided it, it was largely in the

care of morally shallow individuals keen to forge convenient alliances

with and pursuing the interests of dominant groups. Gandhi thought

that in these respects the democratic government was no better than

the undemocratic, being just as vulnerable to the pressures of the

dominant classes and just as ruthless and ready to use violence to

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protect their interests. Whatever the rhetoric, modern democracy was

basically a form of government in which a ‘few men capture power in

the name of the people and abuse it’, a ‘game of chess’ between rival

parties with the people as ‘pawns’. Although the fact that a democratic

government was periodically elected by and accountable to ordinary

people made a difference, it also served to ‘camouflage’ and confer

moral legitimacy on class rule. Gandhi took a dim view of parliamentary

democracy. It was in the grip of the dominant party, was not subject to

regular popular control, and its debates often bore little relevance to

issues of long-term interest to citizens.

Response to modernity

Although Gandhi was convinced that the foundations of modern

civilization were ‘rotten’, he did not dismiss it altogether and praised

what he took to be its three great achievements. First, he admired its

scientific spirit of inquiry. He observed:

I have been a sympathetic student of the Western social order, and I have

discovered that underlying the fever that fills the soul of the West, there

is a restless search for Truth. I value that spirit. Let us study our Eastern

institutions in that spirit of scientific inquiry.

(xxxii. 219)

Not that the scientific spirit was unknown in the pre-modern West or

ancient India. Rather it was stifled by traditionalists and denied the full

scope it had received in the modern age. For Gandhi the scientific spirit

I look upon an increase of the power of the state with the great-

est fear, because while apparently doing good by minimizing

exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroy-

ing individuality, which lies at the root of all progress.

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stood for intellectual curiosity, rigorous pursuit of truth, and critical

examination of established beliefs. While modern civilization was right

to cherish it, it defined this spirit in narrowly positivist and aggressive

terms and extended it to areas of life where it was least applicable. Here

as elsewhere it grasped an important truth but turned it into a

falsehood by misunderstanding it and ignoring its limits.

For Gandhi the second great achievement of modern civilization

consisted in understanding the natural world and bringing it under

greater human control. Being body-centred, it concentrated most of its

energies on improving the material conditions of life. It had developed

the human capacity to anticipate and control natural calamities,

eliminate diseases, improve health and public hygiene, prolong life, and

reduce or relieve human drudgery. Gandhi contended that since these

and other achievements were secured within a fundamentally flawed

framework, they had suffered a profound distortion. It was important to

preserve and prolong life, but modern civilization had turned it into the

highest value and cultivated a morbid fear of death. Machines had a

place in life, but modern civilization had no theory of how to use them

and within what limits.

Third, in Gandhi’s view modern civilization had greatly contributed to

the organizational side of life. It cultivated civic virtues, respect for

rules, the capacity to subordinate the personal to collective interest,

public morality, mutual respect, and punctuality. Gandhi argued that,

although he had ‘thankfully copied’ many of these ‘great’ qualities

without which his personal and especially political life would have been

poorer, modern civilization had once again misinterpreted them and

ignored their limits. It reduced morality to enlightened self-interest and

undermined its autonomy. It rightly subordinated the individual to

collective interest, but failed to provide sufficient room for diversity. It

rightly stressed the value of organization, but over-institutionalized

human life and left no space for conscientious objection and the lonely

dissenter. It was right to emphasize rules, but wrong not to appreciate

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that they could never exhaust moral life and were precarious unless

grounded in finer human impulses.

For Gandhi, then, modern civilization was a highly complex human

achievement, and the response to it had to be equally complex,

avoiding both its uncritical glorification and undiscriminating rejection.

The foundations of modernity were shaky but it had genuine

achievements to its credit. Since the latter were secured within a

fundamentally mistaken framework, they had to be purged of their

distortions before they could be incorporated into a more satisfactory

framework. For example, it was not enough to say that mechanization

was bad but the machines were good, or that rationalism should be

rejected but the spirit of rational inquiry retained. Modern machines

were products of the materialist civilization which determined their

nature, place in life, and mode of operation, and were not culturally

neutral. A differently constituted civilization had to use the available

scientific knowledge to develop different kinds of machines and put

them to different uses. Other achievements of modern civilization had

to be subjected to a similar critical and ‘cleansing’ process.

An assessment

Although Gandhi’s citique of modern civilization bore a strong

resemblance to those of Rousseau, Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Marx, it

contained several original insights derived from the two great

advantages he enjoyed over them. As one belonging to a despised

race and an oppressed country, he grasped the darker side of

modern civilization with unusual clarity. He saw that although

Europe championed the great ideals of human dignity, freedom,

and equality, it defined them in an ideologically biased manner and

used them to justify slavery, colonialism, racism, and other patently

evil practices.

Furthermore, as an heir to the rich and differently structured Indian

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civilization, Gandhi brought to his critique of modern civilization a

perspective not easily available to its Western critics. He was able to see

it from the outside and uncover its hidden assumptions, contradictions,

and limitations. He saw that contrary to its self-understanding, modern

civilization was suffused with the spirit of aggression and violence, that

its conception of rationality was narrow and biased, that its view of

morality was impoverished and shallow, that its approach to religion

was excessively credal and dogmatic, and that its view of individual and

collective identity ignored their inherently porous, fluid, and ambiguous

nature.

Gandhi’s advantages were also his disadvantages. Since he largely

concentrated on the darker side of modern civilization, he overlooked

some of its great achievements and strengths. And since he saw it

from the outside, he oversimplified it and failed to appreciate its

complex structure and the full range and depth of its moral vision.

Although preoccupied with the endless satisfaction of material

desires, modern civilization is also guided by the search for personal

independence and autonomy, a non-hierarchical social structure,

social justice, and the passionate concern to understand the human

world and master the natural environment. It encourages selfishness

and greed, but it also fosters human unity, individuality, equality,

liberty, creativity, rationality, intellectual curiosity, and all-round

human development. And although it conveniently misdefines some

of these values and restricts them to the privileged few, that neither

diminishes their world-historical importance nor detracts from the

fact that they represent a collective human heritage. Materialist at

one level, modern civilization also has a moral and spiritual

dimension.

Gandhi’s analysis of modern civilization made it difficult for him to give

an adequate account of what he took to be its major achievements. He

treated the rise of the scientific spirit and the development of the civil

and organizational virtues as if they were accidental products of

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modern civilization, and failed to appreciate that they were deeply

bound up with it and could not have developed outside it. Gandhi was

thus caught up in the paradoxical position of wanting to appropriate

part of the ‘spirit’ of modern civilization while rejecting the very

institutions and social structure that embodied and nurtured it. This

does not mean that one must accept or reject modern civilization in

toto, but rather that one needs to take a more dialectical view of it than

Gandhi did, showing the internal relations between its strengths and

limitations and using its own emancipatory potentialities to go

beyond it.

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Chapter 6

The vision of a non-violent

society

Deeply unhappy with the basic thrust of modern civilization, Gandhi

spent most of his adult life exploring an alternative. In Western thought

such exploration has generally taken the form of constructing a utopian

or ideal society. Gandhi believed that, since different societies had

different histories and traditions, the search for a single model was both

incoherent and dangerous. It reproduced and reinforced the positivist

rationalism of modern society, and encouraged the tendency to shape

all societies in a single mould. For him, all that a critic could and should

do was to suggest the general principles that should govern the good

society, leaving each society free to realize them in its own unique way.

Gandhi’s regulative principles of the good society were derived from his

theory of human nature discussed earlier. As we saw, human beings

were for him the trustees of the rest of creation, interdependent, and

four-dimensional in nature. In Gandhi’s view these ontological ‘truths’

yielded the following principles. First, the good society should be

informed by the spirit of cosmic piety. Since human beings were not

masters or owners but guardians of the rest of creation, they should so

organize their collective life that it respected the latter’s integrity,

diversity, rhythm, and inner balance, and made no more demands on it

than was required by a life of moderate comfort.

Secondly, since human beings are interdependent, the good society

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should discourage all forms of exploitation, domination, injustice, and

inequality, which necessarily coarsen human sensibilities and depend on

falsehoods for their continued existence, and should find ways of

institutionalizing and nurturing the spirit of love, truthfulness, social

service, cooperation, and solidarity.

Thirdly, since human beings are spiritual in nature, the good society

should help them develop their moral and spiritual powers and create

the conditions for swarāj (self-rule or autonomy). For Gandhi swarāj

referred to a state of affairs in which individuals were morally in control

of themselves, did what was right, resolved their differences and

conflicts themselves, and dispensed with external coercion. They

possessed an uncompromising sense of independence and self-respect,

and found it a matter of shame to turn to the state or any other external

agency to discipline them and regulate their social relations. For Gandhi

swarāj thus presupposed self-discipline, self-restraint, a sense of mutual

responsibility, the disposition neither to dominate nor be dominated by

others, and a sense of dharma. A free society could not be sustained in

the absence of these and related moral powers and virtues. Without

them individual liberty was liable to constant misuse, produced

consequences harmful to the moral agent as well as others, required an

increasingly powerful state to deal with these consequences, and thus

ultimately negated itself. Gandhi thought this to be the case with the

liberal society of the West, whose much-vaunted liberty never

amounted to genuine swarāj or self-rule.

Fourthly, the good society should cherish epistemological pluralism. It

should appreciate that reason, intuition, faith, traditions,

intergenerationally accumulated collective wisdom, and emotions are

all valuable sources of knowledge, and make their own distinct

contributions to understanding and coping with the complexities of

human life. The good society should encourage a dialogue, a creative

interplay, between them, and not allow one of them to acquire a

hegemonic role or become the arbiter of all others. For Gandhi reason

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was an important human faculty and all claims to knowledge should

pass its test, but that did not mean other human faculties should mimic

it or function and validate their claims to knowledge in the same way as

it did.

Finally, since each individual has a distinct swabhāva or moral and

psychological constitution and comes to terms with life in his or her

own unique way, the good society should provide the maximum space

for personal autonomy. It should respect each person’s ‘truth’ or

integrity and allow them the freedom to plan their lives. They might

make mistakes, but should be left free to learn from them. Since human

lives overlap and since each human being is his brother’s keeper, they

have a duty to point out each other’s limitations in a spirit of charity and

love and render such help as is needed. However, this should not involve

any form of coercion, least of all the legal, except when their behaviour

damages clearly defined collective interests.

Gandhi applied these principles to different areas of life, especially the

economic and the political. We shall take each in turn. He frequently

observed that his guiding principles were far more important than his

specific proposals, and that those who shared the former might

legitimately disagree with the latter. His proposals, furthermore, were

made in the Indian context and, unlike his guiding principles, did not

claim universal applicability.

The economy

For Gandhi both capitalism and communism, the two dominant

economic systems of his time, were morally unacceptable. Capitalism

was based on the morally problematic institution of private property.

Since human powers and talents were socially derived, they were a

social trust and could not form the basis of private property. Nature too

was a collective human heritage, and could not be privately owned. And

since every manmade object was a product of social cooperation, no

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single individual had an exclusive claim on it. Furthermore capitalism

was driven by greed, encouraged aggressive competitiveness,

multiplied wants, ruthlessly exploited nature, created vast

inequalities, fostered arrogance among the rich and a deep sense

of inferiority and hatred among the poor, and in general degraded

all (M iii. 467–78).

Although communism was free of some of these evils, it had others, and

was just as bad, if not worse. It was materialist and consumerist in its

orientation and did not represent a higher civilization. Although it

encouraged sharing and cooperation, it imposed these by force and did

little to develop the moral energies of its citizens. It insisted on

uniformity and ignored the demands of individual swabhāva. Since it

invested the state with both economic and political power, its statism

posed the gravest threat to human dignity and self-respect. Above all,

communism was established and continued by means of massive

violence with all its attendant evils (M iii. 552–95).

As an alternative to both, Gandhi proposed his well-known theory of

trusteeship. It was intended to avoid the evils and combine the

advantages of the capitalist and communist forms of ownership, and

represented an attempt to socialize property without nationalizing it. A

rich man was allowed to retain his property, but was expected to hold

his wealth and personal talents in trust and to use them for the service

of society. ‘To insist on more would be to kill the goose that laid the

golden eggs.’ If he owned a firm, a factory, or a large tract of land, he

was to work alongside his employees, make profit by just means, pay

decent wages, take no more than what he needed for a moderately

comfortable life, plough the rest into his business or use it for worthwhile

social purposes, involve his workers in decision making, and provide

healthy working conditions and welfare schemes. For Gandhi such an

economic arrangement had capitalists but not capitalism, socialism but

not state ownership, and used capitalist managerial skills to achieve

socialist purposes (M iii. 510–14).

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Gandhi conceded that such a voluntary form of socialism or

‘renunciation’ was rare, and that only one of his many capitalist friends

had come close to it. In his view the sustained pressure of educated

and organized public opinion, including a satyāgraha, was the best way

to establish trusteeship. If that did not work, he was reluctantly

prepared to impose it by law. The law would prescribe the

remuneration to be paid to the trustee ‘commensurate with the

service rendered and its value to society’. He was free to choose his

heir, but the choice had to be finalized by the state. Gandhi thought

that such a cooperative decision checked both. The trustee retained

formal ownership of his property but his use of the profit, his income,

and his choice of heir, were subject to state control. As Gandhi put it, ‘I

desire to end capitalism almost if not quite as much as the most

advanced socialist and even communist. But our methods differ, our

languages differ.’ Gandhi’s ideas on trusteeship were vague and

underwent much revision. Despite his vacillations and confusions, he

remained convinced that the two dominant forms of ownership,

namely the capitalist and the communist, were both morally flawed,

and that there had to be better alternatives. It is difficult to see how his

idea of trusteeship could work in modern society, but it is not without

historical parallels. Although it lacked an institutional form, it was to be

found in the traditional Indian village community, and in different

forms in classical Athens and Rome and the rural communities of

medieval Europe.

For Gandhi economic life in a good society should not be autonomous

and overbearing but embedded in and guided by moral considerations.

A society’s wealth consisted in the character of its members, not in the

quantity of its material objects, and the purpose of its economic

arrangements should be to create the necessary economic basis of the

good life. This ensured that it had a sense of limit built into it and

remained subject to collective human control.

All its adult members should work for their livelihood as a matter of

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both right and duty, the former because only through work could they

develop their self-respect, initiative, capacity to cooperate with others,

and self-discipline; the latter because work was one of the principal

ways to contribute to social well-being and participate in the moral life

of the community. Gandhi therefore thought it essential that every

adult should have a guaranteed right to work. To deny it to him was to

deny him both his right to moral self-development and the opportunity

to discharge his social obligations. Welfare payments were a poor

substitute for this, for while they sustained the body, they did nothing

to develop moral and spiritual powers.

For reasons discussed earlier, Gandhi thought that human beings gained

their full moral stature only in small, relaxed, and interdependent

communities. Since the latter lacked vitality without an autonomous

economic basis of their own, he argued that production should be

decentralized and that each community should become relatively self-

sufficient in its basic needs. As Gandhi imagined it, the village land was

to be owned in common, farming done on a cooperative basis, the

produce equitably divided, and only the surplus land used for cash

crops. The villages were to encourage locally based industries and

crafts, take pride in using local products, and import only what they

could not themselves produce.

Since the village communities were to form the basic units of the

economy, the nature, pace, and scale of industrialization were to be

planned accordingly. Although large-scale industries were necessary,

they should be restricted to the minimum, located in the cities, and

only allowed to produce what the self-sufficient communities

themselves could not. Since competition between them could easily

lead to the present situation of unlimited production and widespread

unemployment, it was to be strictly regulated. Gandhi was also worried

about competition between the large urban-based industries and the

village industries, which he thought would necessarily lead to the

latter’s destruction. A national plan was to be prepared, based on a

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detailed survey of what could be produced locally and what share of the

market was to be reserved for this. This was the only way urban

exploitation of the villages could be avoided. Gandhi was not opposed

to machines but to yantravād (literally machinerism or indiscriminate

mechanization), not to industry but to industrialism, and was deeply

disturbed by the way in which greed-driven industrialization created

mass unemployment, undermined human dignity, rendered people

rootless, destroyed local communities, and caused moral and social

havoc. He therefore advocated appropriate or intermediate

technology, an ecologically safe mode of production, and a humanist

or people-based rather than a product-based or consumerist

economy.

Gandhi argued that, since the means of production of the basic

necessities of life affected human survival and freedom and could easily

lead to the most dangerous forms of exploitation, they should be

owned by the state. It should either set them up itself or nationalize the

existing ones. In the latter case, although the state should suitably

reward their owners, it could not be expected to pay them a full market

price, both because the industries were the products of collective

communal effort and because the state could not raise the requisite

money without imposing additional taxes on its citizens and thus

‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’.

For Gandhi the state should lay down the minimum and maximum

incomes. Since all socially useful activities were equally important, and

since gross inequalities were morally corrupting and divisive, the

income differential between them, necessary as it was because of

human weakness, should be ‘reasonable and equitable’ and diminish

over time. Gandhi thought that, once human beings came to see

themselves as trustees of their talents and appreciated the value of a

cohesive moral community, they would render their services out of a

sense of pride and duty and find the incentive of higher incomes deeply

offensive.

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The state

As we saw, Gandhi was deeply uneasy with the modern state. It was

abstracted from society, centralized, bureaucratic, obsessed with

homogeneity, and suffused with the spirit of violence. He thought that,

since all the prevailing forms of government took the modern state for

granted and represented different ways of organizing it, they were

inherently incapable of tackling its structural defects. Even liberal

democracy, the least objectionable of them all, did little to integrate

state and society, decentralize political power, involve citizens in the

conduct of public affairs, and reduce the extent and depth of internal

and external violence. For Gandhi the vital task today was to explore

alternatives not just to the contemporary forms of government but to

the very institution of the state.

For Gandhi a society based on swarāj, a ‘true democracy’ as he called it,

was the only morally acceptable alternative to the modern state. It was

shāsanmukta, or free of domination and coercion, and institutionalized

and nurtured lokshakti, or people’s power. People here were, and knew

themselves to be, the sole source of political power, and governed their

affairs themselves. Swarāj involved not just the periodic accountability

of government but the daily exercise of popular power, not just the

enjoyment of civil and political rights but the constantly confirmed

consciousness of being in charge of one’s destiny, not just liberty but

power (M iii. 235–75).

As Gandhi imagined it, the swarāj-based polity would be composed of

If we are to be non-violent, we must not wish for anything on

this earth which the meanest or the lowest of human beings

cannot have.

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small, cultured, well-organized, thoroughly regenerated, and self-

governing village communities. Although he was not entirely clear on

this point, he expected these communities to manage their local affairs

themselves and to elect a small body of people to enforce their

decisions. They would administer justice, maintain order, and take

important economic decisions, and would be not merely administrative

but powerful economic and political units. As such they would have a

strong sense of solidarity, provide a genuine sense of community, and

act as nurseries of civic virtues.

Beyond the relatively self-sufficient villages the country would be

organized in terms of ‘expanding circles’. The villages would be grouped

into districts, these into provinces, and so on, each governed by

representatives elected by its constituent units. Each tier of government

would enjoy considerable autonomy and a strong sense of community,

would both sustain and limit the one above it, and deal with matters of

common interest to its constituent communities. Each province would

draw up its own constitution to suit local requirements and in

conformity with that of the country as a whole. The central government

would wield enough authority to hold them all together, but not

enough to dominate them. Gandhi was opposed to direct elections to

the central assembly because they would be divisive and encourage

corruption, and because the average voter was unlikely to be

knowledgeable enough about the large issues of national policy to vote

intelligently. The polity so constructed would not be a collection of

isolated atoms but a ‘community of communities’, a unity of unities, a

whole composed of wholes, a ‘living organism’ not an impersonal

machine.

When a society consisted of different cultural and religious

communities, Gandhi saw no need to homogenize them or even to

subject them to a uniform system of laws. The attempt to do so was

unnecessary, because cultural diversity not only did not undermine the

unity of the state but gave it moral and cultural depth, and was also

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dangerous, because dismantling well-established communities was

likely to provoke resistance and deprive their members of a sense of

rootedness and power. Gandhi therefore insisted that the wider society

should cherish its cultural communities and respect their languages,

cultures, institutions, personal laws, and educational institutions. He

agreed that some of their social practices might be morally offensive,

but did not think that that justified government intervention. Coercion

was generally evil, state intervention was bound to provoke resistance,

and no practice could be eradicated without tackling its deeper moral

roots. In Gandhi’s view the offensive practices were best dealt with by

the reformist campaigns of the enlightened members of the

community concerned. Once they had discredited them and created

the right climate, the law should consolidate and enforce the prevailing

consensus.

Gandhi insisted that the state should be secular in the sense that it

should not enforce, institutionalize, patronize, or financially support one

or more religions. Religion was a personal though not a private matter.

It had a deep social and political relevance, and hence religious

discourse had its proper place in political life. While religion should

enjoy respectable public presence and make its distinct contribution to

the conduct of public affairs, the institutions of the state should in no

way be associated with it. The state was concerned not with the quality

of the human soul, which was best left in the care of the individual and

society, but solely with secular or worldly interests. Gandhi was in

favour of religious education in schools, and did not think that it

detracted from the secular character of the state as long as all religions

were taught in a ‘spirit of reverence and broad-minded tolerance’ and

with a view to encouraging an inter-religious dialogue. In his view such

education could create religious harmony and foster a climate of

moral self-discipline, thereby decreasing the need for state coercion

(M i. 450–1).

Since Gandhi disapproved of centralization and ‘state worship’, he

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suggested that many of the functions currently discharged by the state

should be devolved on the local communities. One example will suffice

to indicate what he had in mind. As a lawyer familiar with the modern

system of administering justice, he was convinced that it was a most

unfortunate and easily dispensable institution. It was expensive,

dilatory, bureaucratic, and obsessed with uniformity. It treated human

beings as passive objects in no way involved in the resolution of their

conflicts and, despite its claim to get to the truth of the matter,

privileged those capable of hiring the best lawyers.

Gandhi suggested that the local communities should become the

centres of a radically redefined system of justice. Ideally they should

encourage their members to settle their disputes themselves, and help

create a moral climate in which to allow conflicts to occur or get out of

control was widely regarded as a mark of personal inadequacy and a

matter of shame. When conflicts could not be so resolved, local

communities should provide people’s courts made up of men and

women enjoying widespread trust and respect. Acting as communal

forums rather than as agencies of the state, the courts should be

concerned not just with the administration of justice, for that left the

roots of the conflicts untouched, but with the permanent resolution of

underlying problems. And they should not just ‘administer’ justice as

abstractly defined by the law, but help evolve more sensitive and

individualized notions of justice by creatively interpreting the law in the

light of the prevailing principles of social morality, natural justice, and

common sense. Ideally they should aim not so much to apportion

blame and punish the guilty as to restore the ruptured fabric of society,

foster the spirit of goodwill and fair play, and increase the disputants’

capacity to live together as members of a shared community.

In Gandhi’s view such an arrangement would have many advantages

over the present system of justice. Justice would be swift, inexpensive,

easily intelligible, and dispensed without an elaborate judicial and legal

establishment. The decisions reached would be grounded in the

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community’s own system of values and carry greater moral authority.

Since they would be based on the direct involvement of the parties

concerned, they would be finely tuned to the complexity of the

situation, fairer than at present, and would help raise the moral level of

the community. Gandhi thought that if similar measures to integrate

state and society and to encourage greater communal responsibility

and initiative were to be introduced in other areas of life as well, the

state would be transformed from an overbearing and central institution

of society into its subordinate though obviously indispensable agency,

interacting with others in a spirit of equal partnership and resorted to

only when all else failed.

In Gandhi’s view a truly democratic and non-violent society would not

need the armed forces. It would have no aggressive designs on its

neighbours. If it were attacked, it should rely on non-violent resistance.

And if that failed and resulted in its conquest, it should rely on

satyāgraha, including non-cooperation, to render the new government

ineffective. Every government needed the support or at least the

acquiescence of its subjects, and it would not last long if its united,

determined, and non-violently trained subjects denied it all forms of

active and passive support. Gandhi appreciated that this was an

‘Euclidean’ ideal but insisted that it was worth aiming at, and that in the

meantime the best defence for a country was to rely on the

combination of a small armed force and non-violently trained citizenry,

supported by well-organized international economic and political

pressure (xc. 503, 511; xxxvii. 271).

Gandhi felt the same way about the police. In his view armed police did

not reduce crime but encouraged equally well-armed criminals, and

generated a vicious cycle. Besides, crimes sprang from causes too deep

to be tackled by the police. Ideally the community should become self-

policing. Since that again was a ‘Euclidean’ ideal and since ‘no

government worth its name can suffer anarchy to prevail’, the good

society should establish a small and specialized police force (lxxi. 226).

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The latter should carry only defensive weapons, be trained in non-

violent methods of crowd control, work closely with the community,

take on the role of social workers, and generally rely on their moral

authority and the pressure of public opinion. They might become

targets of criminal violence and even get killed. In Gandhi’s view such

martyrdom was likely to shake up the community, including the

criminal, mobilize its moral energies, and over time reduce if not the

extent, at least the level of criminal violence. In cases of large-scale riots

and social disturbances, of which he had considerable experience,

Gandhi argued that the police should be assisted by peace brigades

made up of non-violently trained and locally or nationally respected

citizens (lxxii. 403).

Gandhi was deeply troubled by the institution of the prison, where he

had in all spent just under six years of his life. Prisons degraded and

brutalized their inmates, were costly to run, absolved society of its

responsibility for the causes of crimes, and so coarsened its moral

sensibility that it saw nothing wrong in treating human beings as if they

were wild animals to be kept in cages. For Gandhi, criminals were

human beings endowed with the capacity to recognize evil and respond

to good. To give up on any of them was an act of sacrilege and

unworthy of a truly humane and non-violent society. Every act of crime

signified a breakdown in the society’s moral order, and both indicted

and challenged it. Locking up the perpetrator was to lose an otherwise

valuable member of society, incur the cost of his upkeep, and forfeit the

opportunity to take a critical and constructive look at social institutions

and practices.

In Gandhi’s view, human beings committed crimes for a variety of

reasons, such as poverty, a sense of injustice, lack of self-discipline,

selfishness, and ill-will, and each required a sensitive response. If the

crimes were caused by the first two, the community bore

considerable responsibility for them and had a duty to tackle their

roots. In other cases, the criminal bore much but not the whole of the

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responsibility. In such cases society should seek the support of the

criminal’s family, friends, neighbours, religious leaders, and the widely

respected members of his community, and give them all the

necessary help, encouragement, and incentive to reintegrate him into

the community and develop in him the capacities for self-discipline,

social concern, and moral responsibility. If that did not help,

imprisonment might become necessary not so much to punish the

criminal as to create an environment conducive to his moral reform.

Ideally prisons should become workshops as well as educational and

moral institutions, training criminals to become useful members of

society in a humane environment and working closely with their

families and friends to explore the forms of moral and social

rehabilitation best suited to their individual needs. They would then

cease to be brutal institutions operating on the dark margins of

society and governed by practices considered intolerable in other

institutions, and would instead become schools of reform subject to

the same spirit of humanity that governed other areas of life (iii. 413;

xiv. 1–6; xxiii. 508–12; xxiv. 224).

A citizen’s responsibility

For Gandhi, neither consent nor will nor fear but cooperation was the

basis of the state. Every state, democratic or otherwise, depended on

the active or passive cooperation of its citizens. Since it was an agency

of action, cooperation with it consisted in rendering it specific services

such as carrying out its orders, paying taxes, fighting wars, and obeying

laws. The state did not exist independently of its citizens, and was

ultimately nothing more than a system of institutionalized cooperation

between them.

Since the state was a vast and complex organization involving

thousands of conscious and unconscious acts of daily cooperation by

millions of citizens, they did not usually notice that they in fact

sustained it and were morally responsible for its actions. And if they did,

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they excused themselves on the grounds that each of them was only an

insignificant cog in a mighty wheel. Gandhi considered this a most

dangerous fallacy. A mighty river was made up of individual drops, each

of which contributed to its creation; the state was no different. Further,

as a moral being every citizen had a duty to ask how he personally

contributed to the maintenance of the state and whether he was happy

about it. Citizens were responsible for their actions, and their

responsibility was in no way diminished by what others did or failed to

do.

Every government was tempted to misuse its power, and a democratic

government was in that respect no better than an autocratic one. What

distinguished the two was the fact that one did and the other did not

succumb to the temptation. And this was so because, unlike the

autocratic government, the democratic government knew that if it

did succumb, its citizens would refuse to cooperate with it.

Notwithstanding all its institutional checks and balances, a

democratic government could easily turn evil if its citizens became

apathetic or vulnerable to corruption and manipulation. The virtues

and vices of a government were not inherent in it but derived from

those of its citizens. As Gandhi put it:

Rulers, if they are bad, are not so necessarily or wholly by reason of birth,

but largely because of their environment. But the environment are we

[sic] – the people who make the rulers what they are. They are thus an

exaggerated edition of what we are in the aggregate . . . If we will reform

ourselves, the rulers will automatically do so.

(M ii. 355)

As moral beings, citizens had a duty to decide to whom they should

give their loyalty and support and under what conditions. Their self-

respect and dignity required that their loyalty should not be

unconditional or taken for granted. When a law was just, they had a

‘sacred duty’ to give it their ‘willing and spontaneous obedience’. If it

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was unjust or morally unacceptable, they had the opposite duty. To

obey it was to ‘participate in evil’ and incur moral responsibility for

its consequences. It was a ‘mere superstition’ and an attitude worthy

of a ‘slave’ to think that all laws, however unjust, deserved to be

obeyed. Gandhi insisted that laws should not be judged in isolation

from the general character of the state. If the state was intrinsically

or mainly good, its occasional lapses should not be judged too

harshly. No state was infallible and no one could be its member on

his own terms.

For Gandhi, when citizens disobeyed a law, they should satisfy two

conditions. First, their disobedience should be civil; that is, it should be

public and non-violent, and they should show why they found the law

unacceptable and should submit themselves to the prescribed

punishment. Second, they should have earned the adhikār or moral

right to disobey the law. Civil disobedience or non-cooperation with an

otherwise good government was a serious matter with potentially grave

consequences and required mature deliberation. Only those were

entitled to resort to it, who had as a rule obeyed its laws, demonstrated

their loyalty to the state, and proved their moral maturity by not

turning every disagreement into an occasion for flaunting their

consciences. When such otherwise law-abiding citizens disobeyed a law,

their ‘respectful disobedience’ deserved a reasoned response. Rather

than ruthlessly put them down, the government should appreciate that

such acts nurtured the citizens’ sense of moral responsibility and built

up a vital moral capital that was bound to be useful to society in the

long run. They also saved the government from falling all-too-easy prey

to the temptation to abuse its power, and acted as a safety valve for

popular discontent. Unlike an anarchist, who is ‘an enemy of the state’,

such a civil resister is its ‘friend’ and his action is the ‘purest type of

constitutional agitation’ (xx. 19).

Although Gandhi nowhere elaborated the criteria for evaluating the law,

he thought that it was bad if it did one or more of the following. First, it

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was bad if it ‘demeaned’ and ‘degraded’ its subjects in their own or

others’ eyes, and required them to behave in a manner inconsistent

with human dignity. Gandhi thought that the Nazi treatment of Jews

and the white treatment of blacks in South Africa during his time there

fell in this category. Second, a law was bad if it was patently partisan in

its intent or outcome and discriminated against specific racial, religious,

and other groups. And finally, a law was bad if it was repugnant to the

vast majority of citizens and if opposition to it was universal. Its intrinsic

merits, if any, were unimportant. The fact that it was passed in

contempt of widespread opposition implied that the government

treated its subjects with disdain. Such a law also involved a great deal of

violence in the sense that most people either disobeyed it and had to be

punished, or obeyed it out of fear of violence, and in either case it

brought the state into disrepute.

Since majority rule violated the integrity of the minority and ‘savoured

of violence’, and since unanimity was often impossible, all decisions in a

non-violent society should be arrived at by rational discussion

conducted in a spirit of goodwill and open-mindedness. For Gandhi

rational discussion should avoid the rationalist fallacy mentioned earlier,

and become not an exchange of arguments but an interpenetration of

perspectives, a genuine fusion of minds and hearts. When that

happened, the parties involved expanded each other’s consciousness

and range of sympathy, reconstituted each other’s ways of looking at

the world, and were reborn as a result of the encounter. In extreme

cases, when no consensus was possible, the majority was to decide the

matter after taking full account of minority views and strength of

feeling, not because it was always right but because it was likely to be

less mistaken or biased. If some citizens still felt deeply troubled by the

decision, they were entitled to claim exemption from and in rare cases

even to disobey it.

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An assessment

Gandhi’s vision of a non-violent society is informed by a powerful

concern to place human beings at the centre of economic and political

life, and contains many valuable insights. His emphases on the moral

and cultural implications of the economic system, a humane process of

production, sustainable development, a more balanced relation to

nature, the right to gainful employment, and decentralized production

are all well taken. So too are his imaginative explorations of new ways of

reconstituting the state, new forms of state–society partnership, a

non-violently constituted political order, humane ways of dealing with

crime, a communally grounded system of justice, and politically

responsible citizenship. Not surprisingly, many of these ideas have

inspired new movements of thought not only in India but also

elsewhere.

Gandhi’s vision, however, suffers from several limitations. He postulates

largely rural and self-sufficient village communities, and it is difficult to

see how these are possible in a globally integrated economy, except on

the naive assumption that a society can somehow turn its back on the

rest of the world. The fact that Gandhi allows large-scale industries adds

to his difficulties. It is naive to imagine that large-scale industries can be

expected to remain confined to their officially allocated sphere, that

they will respect the moral logic of the self-sufficient rural communities,

that a national plan can neatly separate their respective spheres of

operation, or that the two will not generate morally and economically

incompatible ethos. This is not to deny that all this can be done, but

rather that it requires a closed economy and a strong and authoritarian

state, to both of which Gandhi was rightly opposed.

Gandhi’s view of the state runs into similar difficulties. He was acutely

aware of the need to eliminate poverty, reduce economic inequalities,

ensure social justice, and to abolish such ugly social practices as

untouchability. He appreciated that some large industries needed to be

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nationalized, and that the capitalists were unlikely to become trustees

of their industries unless compelled to do so by the law. He also

recognized that no polity could be held together unless its members

shared a common sense of citizenship and saw themselves as ekprajā (a

single people). It is difficult to see how all this can be achieved by a

loosely structured and highly decentralized polity made up of largely

autonomous communities whose members have limited contacts and

share little in common. Taken together Gandhi’s proposals require a

fairly strong central government, an effective bureaucracy, a system of

national planning, an institutional structure for articulating national

public opinion, an internally articulated network of public spaces, and a

coercive machinery to deal with the vested interests who might not be

hospitable to Gandhi’s idea of trusteeship. A polity with these and other

features is not very different from the modern state.

Like many a moral idealist Gandhi found it difficult to appreciate the role

of coercion in social life and come to terms with the state. He

considered organized coercion to be inconsistent with human dignity,

yet he could not avoid acknowledging that it was necessary to achieve

the conditions for realizing, sustaining, and even generating the

consciousness of human dignity. He condemned the state as an amoral

and ‘soul-less’ machine, yet he could not deny that, as a vehicle for

realizing worthwhile social goals, it was also moral in nature. While

Gandhi was right to attack the statist political culture and explore new

ways of mobilizing the individual and collective moral energies of its

citizens, he was wrong to think that any modern community could

dispense with the state altogether or make do with one that was weak,

held in low esteem, and commanded little loyalty.

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Chapter 7

Critical appreciation

Even five decades after Gandhi’s death, opinions about his

achievements remain deeply divided. For his critics he was too

implacably hostile to modernity to offer an adequate understanding of

its nature, let alone provide answers to its malaise. He was basically a

man of action whose major contribution consisted in leading his

country’s struggle for independence. Some of his critics regard even this

as a mixed legacy. In their view his basically conservative, puritanical,

pro-bourgeois, and pacifist thought hindered the development of

radical political movements, harmed the long-term interests of the

dalits (formerly untouchables), burdened the Indian psyche with a sense

of guilt about economic development, hampered the emergence of a

strong and powerful state, and perpetuated unrealistic and confused

ideas about human sexuality. His introduction of religious language into

politics alienated the Muslims and rendered the partition of the country

unavoidable. And his flawed strategy of national regeneration failed to

develop the conventional forms of institutional politics, especially the

ideologically based political parties that independent India badly

needed and in whose absence its political life suffered grave damage.

Gandhi’s admirers take a radically different view. For them he was a man

of both thought and action, a rare combination. As a man of thought,

he saw through the madness of modernity, and offered an alternative

vision that combined the best insights of both the pre-modern and

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modern world-views while avoiding the self-indulgent individualism and

moral complacency of the currently fashionable post-modernism. He

also discovered a uniquely moral method of political change in the form

of satyāgraha, and provided an effective alternative to violence. As a

man of action he led the greatest anti-colonial struggle in history,

encouraged a humane and liberal form of patriotism, showed how to

lead a successful political life without compromising one’s integrity, and

offered a rare example of morally responsible leadership. Christian

commentators, who suggestively have long compared him to and even

seen him as the twentieth-century version of Jesus Christ, argue that he

was the first man in history to show how to relate religion and politics

without corrupting either and to give political life a much-needed

spiritual basis. Some of Gandhi’s admirers go even further and contend

that we should not be surprised if one day he were to prove as

influential and be placed on the same footing as Jesus Christ and the

Buddha.

Although Gandhi’s detractors and admirers make some valid points,

they evaluate both him and his legacy in somewhat superficial terms.

He was certainly a creative thinker, a political leader, a social reformer, a

deeply religious person, and so on, and in each role he had his strengths

and weaknesses, some of which were indicated in earlier chapters.

Gandhi, however, also operated at a much deeper level, and to ignore

that is to miss out what was distinctive to him.

The vision of non-violence

All his adult life Gandhi sought to articulate and live out an original and

powerful vision of human existence. As we have seen, he was deeply

troubled by violence in all its crude and subtle forms, and passionately

yearned to lead a life of true non-violence. He wondered if and how it

was possible to be profoundly at peace with oneself, other human

beings, and with one’s natural and social environment, how to live

without hurting and harming a single living being and even wishing to

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6. ‘The odd thing about assassins . . .’ Cartoon by Mauldin from the Chicago Sun-Times, 1968

do so. He relentlessly explored the logic of that vision, sincerely tried to

live it, and experimented with ways to overcome the inevitable

obstacles.

Since mankind had long accepted violence as the inescapable basis of

life and organized its affairs on the opposite vision to his, Gandhi was

led to ask the deepest and most searching questions about the

traditional ways of thought and life. He asked why human beings

thought they had a right to exploit nature and use other living beings

for their purposes. He asked why there should be such a coercive

institution as the state, indeed why human beings should be subjected

to coercion at all when it so clearly violated their dignity, and what kind

of society would eliminate the need for it. He felt deeply troubled about

the armed forces, the police, the prisons, and the wars, all of which

seemed to him an affront to human dignity and indicative of a profound

failure of moral and political imagination. He felt no less troubled by the

violence and dehumanization of both capitalism and communism, and

asked if there was a more moral way of organizing the economy.

Gandhi carried his search for non-violence into the realm of the human

mind itself, and asked how one should relate to one’s thoughts, beliefs,

and feelings in a truly non-violent manner. It was important to co-

ordinate and harmonize one’s ideas, but to systematize them into a

neat and logically coherent theory was to do violence both to the

inherently fluid world of experience and to the inescapably tentative

process of thinking itself. It was necessary to hold firm beliefs and pass

judgements on individuals and situations, but one needed to ensure

that these did not do violence to the inherent ambiguity of the subject

matter or to other ways of looking at it. A sense of identity – personal,

religious, political, and so on – was important, but it should not be

defined in rigid, static, and exclusive terms as it then did psychological

and even physical violence to those excluded by it as well as suppressed

and did violence to its own internal plurality. Gandhi wondered how

identity could be determinate without becoming rigid, give one a sense

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of rootedness without turning it into a prison, create a sense of

boundary without making it a barrier to dialogue.

Thanks to his passionate commitment to a non-violent vision of human

life, Gandhi challenged conventional wisdom, broke through traditional

categories of thought, stretched the boundaries of imagination in all

areas of life, and opened up new philosophical and practical

possibilities. Gandhi’s questions demand answers. And if we reject his

answers, as we are bound to do in several cases, we need to provide

alternative answers. He requires us to think afresh about things we have

long taken for granted, and therein lies his greatest contribution and

true originality.

Gandhi’s vision was intensely moralistic, and yet it remained remarkably

free from the utopianism, romanticism, fanaticism, and despair that

have often shadowed moralism. This was so because he took great care

to ensure that his vision was not itself pervaded by the spirit of violence.

He did not think of it as an ideal to realize but as a moral compass with

which to navigate one’s way through life. He also made ample

allowance for the fact that different individuals were bound to interpret

and articulate the vision differently, and thus avoided dogmatism and

fanaticism. Gandhi’s vision was also sensitive to the limitations of the

human condition, and encouraged compromise and accommodation. It

was striking that when his countrymen disappointed him, as they did

during periods of intercommunal violence, he did not become bitter,

condemn them for not being worthy of him and his ideals, despair of

them, or withdraw from the scene. He persisted in his task, patiently

appealed to them, rebuked but rarely blamed them, never flew into a

rage or felt self-righteous and superior, and generally succeeded in

evoking the desired response.

As for the content of Gandhi’s vision, it had its strengths and limitations.

He rightly argued that human beings were interdependent in ways they

did not often appreciate, and that in brutalizing and degrading others

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they brutalized and degraded themselves as well. This led to a

fascinating theory of social criticism and change. He showed that

victims of injustices were never totally innocent, that an unjust system

took its toll on both its victims and alleged beneficiaries, and that it was

in the interest of both to change it. Rather than polarize the battle

against injustice and place the onus of struggle on its victims, Gandhi’s

view turned it into a shared moral task to which all alike had a duty to

contribute.

Such a view runs the risk of degenerating into a sentimental and

politically naive humanism attacking such vague and abstract targets as

‘the system’ or ‘the evil in the human heart’. Gandhi avoided that

mistake. Since the dominant groups upheld and benefited from an

unjust system, they formed the immediate targets of struggle and had

to be fought. However, since not they personally but the system was the

real source of injustice, it was the ultimate target of attack. Unlike

sentimental humanists Gandhi identified enemies and knew whom to

fight against, but unlike conventional revolutionary theorists he also

saw them as victims and hence as potential partners in a common

emancipatory struggle. Gandhi’s thought thus had room for both

indignation and love, both struggle and cooperation. This enabled him

to stress the unity of means and ends, the moral dimension of politics,

and a non-Manichean and cooperative view of political struggle, all of

which lay at the basis of his remarkable theory of satyāgraha.

Transcending liberalism

Gandhi’s vision enabled him to articulate an impressive moral and

political theory that combines the important insights of both liberalism

and communitarianism. Like liberals he stressed freedom but defined it

very differently. For him freedom consisted in being true to oneself, in

living by one’s own light and growing at one’s own pace, and

represented a form of wholeness or integrity. It involved knowing and

accepting oneself as one was, recognizing one’s limits and possibilities,

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and making choices on the basis of that knowledge. If my way of life

suited me, enabled me to do what I wanted to do, and I was content with

it, I did not cease to be free simply because I had not chosen it. Freedom

did not consist in choice per se, as some liberals argue, nor in making

choices considered to be higher, as the idealists argue, but in making

choices that were in harmony with and capable of being integrated into

one’s way of life. It had nothing to do with the number of alternatives

available to the agent either. If these alternatives did not include what

one needed, they had no significance. And if what one needed was the

only choice available, the absence of others in no way diminished one’s

freedom. Gandhi subsumed freedom under truth and offered a novel

way of defending it. Only the free man, that is, one able to make his

choices and decisions himself, was able to discover, develop, and live by

his unique ontological truth. Freedom was thus the necessary basis and

precondition of one’s ability to be true to oneself. To deny a man

freedom was to force him to be untrue to himself and to live by

someone else’s truth. For Gandhi the case for freedom was the same as

that for truthfulness.

Even as Gandhi radically redefined the concept of freedom, he

redefined the concept of equality. In much of the liberal and socialist

literature on the subject, equality is defined in comparative,

contractual, competitive, and individualist terms. Gandhi argued that

human beings were necessarily interdependent, rose and fell together,

and were born subject to non-repayable debts. Since society was

necessarily a fellowship of unique and interdependent beings, the

concept of equality had to be defined in non-comparative, non-

competitive, and non-atomistic terms. In Gandhi’s view it basically

consisted in each individual enjoying full access to his or her

community’s economic, political, moral, and cultural resources in order

to realize his or her unique potential, not an abstract human potential

as determined by a philosophical conception of human nature or by an

arbitrary moral standard but their potential as uniquely constituted

beings.

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As progressive and reflective beings individuals ‘grew from truth to

truth’ and strove to enrich, deepen, and reconstitute their being.

Equality consisted in all alike being able to do so. It did not mean that I

should get what others get, but rather that I should get what I need for

my development. And it was not only in my interest but in that of all

others that they should treat me equally, for in degrading and

demeaning me they degraded and demeaned themselves as well and

deprived themselves of the contribution I would make as a rich human

being. Equality thus was not a narrowly individualistic concept or a

synonym for uniformity. It was at bottom a relationship of mutuality

and fellowship.

Gandhi also redefined the concepts of right and duty. Like liberals he

valued rights, but he insisted that they were inseparable from duties

and needed to be defined and exercised in a socially responsible

manner. He stressed the importance of justice, but insisted that it was

not the highest value and became legalistic, competitive, and narrowly

distributivist unless grounded in and energized and limited by the larger

values of human fellowship and solidarity. Like liberals he valued

tolerance, but unlike them he insisted that it was condescending and

judgemental and needed to be replaced by a logically and morally more

satisfactory concept of goodwill. Gandhi similarly redefined the concept

of citizenship, and stressed the ideas of political participation, self-

discipline, concern for others, and personal responsibility that are often

ignored in liberal writings.

Gandhi also sketched the outlines of a highly suggestive non-

rationalist theory of rationality. Although he took a rather narrow view

of reason, he rightly argued that it was not the only valuable or even

the highest human faculty. This enabled him to cherish and champion

faculties, modes of cognition, forms of knowledge, and styles of

reasoning and discourse that are often devalued in a narrowly positivist

world-view, and to create a theoretical and moral space for traditions,

intuition, collective wisdom, and feelings. Gandhi’s view that each

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civilization, religion, and way of life had its strengths and limitations

enabled him to highlight both the possibility and the necessity of an

intercultural dialogue, and to argue that learning and borrowing from

other traditions in no way compromised one’s loyalty to one’s own. As

we have seen, he himself freely borrowed ideas from different traditions,

brought them into a creative interplay, and arrived at new ones that

none of these traditions alone could have generated on its own.

His concept of satyāgraha is a good example of this. It has resonance in

both Hindu and Christian religious traditions, but it has never been a

part of either. It is basically composed of three important ideas, namely

the spiritual nature of human beings, the power of suffering love, and

the skilful use of the latter to reach out to and activate the moral

energies of others. The first metaphysical belief is common to both

Hinduism and Christianity and indeed to all other religions; the

ontology of suffering love is unique to Christianity, and Gandhi himself

said that he borrowed it from the latter: the idea that the ‘soul’ is

energy, that two ‘souls’ can directly communicate by non-lingual

means, and that they can influence and activate each other is an

important part of Hindu epistemology and informs complex forms of

yoga. Since by and large Christianity lacks the third, and Hinduism the

second element, one needed to be deeply familiar with both traditions

in order to arrive at anything resembling the Gandhian concept of

satyāgraha.

Limitations

While highlighting some of the neglected dimensions of human

existence, Gandhi’s intensely moralistic vision also blinded him to

several others. He either ignored or took a dim view of the intellectual,

scientific, aesthetic, sensuous, and other aspects of life. He rarely saw a

film, read a book of poetry, visited an art gallery, watched a game, or

took any interest in history, archaeology, modern science, wildlife,

unspoilt nature, and India’s natural beauty. This was not because he was

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intellectually incurious, for he showed remarkable experimental vitality

in the matters that most interested him, but because his moralistic

vision prevented him from seeing the significance of these and other

activities. When the discovery of the North Pole was announced, he

wondered what good it had done to the world and why it should arouse

excitement. When he visited the Vatican museum, he briskly swept past

Botticelli’s and Michelangelo’s frescos, but stood motionless and wept

before a painting of the crucifixion. For Gandhi the care of the soul was a

full-time job requiring undivided attention, and the arts and sciences

were relevant only to the extent that they promoted that supreme goal.

Such a single-minded view of life naturally generated enormous energy

and enabled him to explore moral and spiritual life in great depth and

without distraction, but it also led to the devaluation of other human

pursuits and forms of excellence and to the lack of a critical and wider

perspective on the nature and relative significance of the moral and

spiritual life itself.

Gandhi’s view of human life made it difficult for him to explain and

come to terms with evil. For him good was real, positive, self-subsistent,

omnipotent, whereas evil was epiphenomenal, negative, parasitic upon

and only made possible by the absence or weakness of the good. Since

his thought did not prepare him for evil, he was constantly puzzled by it.

With his long experience of fighting against injustices, he obviously

knew better than most that human beings could be selfish, dogmatic,

prejudiced, self-righteous, but not that they could also be ‘brutes’ or

‘savages’. His theory of human nature could only explain savagery as a

temporary loss of humanity capable of being set right by an appropriate

surgery of the soul. When he was confronted with the depth and extent

of intercommunal brutality, he felt morally disoriented and could not

make sense of it. As we saw, he fought an extraordinarily courageous

battle against it, but his victories were temporary, lacked institutional

permanence, and remained heavily dependent on his increasingly

declining charisma and the diminishing goodwill of his morally

overstretched countrymen.

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Like many religious idealists, Gandhi had great difficulty in

understanding the nature and role of force and violence in human

affairs. For him physical force was always evil and could at best have

only a limited prudential justification. That was why he refused to

accept that the state could be a moral institution, or that its use of force

could serve moral purposes. He had similar difficulties with violence. For

him non-violence never failed; if it did, it was not pure enough and the

fault lay with its agent. As Gandhi grew older, his views began to

change. He saw that the state could be an instrument of social justice

and equality, and that it needed the armed forces. And he also saw that

violence was sometimes not only practically unavoidable but also

moral, and needed to be judiciously combined with non-violence in a

balanced theory of social change. However, these concessions were ad

hoc, tentative, grudging, and not fully integrated into his theories of the

state and non-violence. While his practice showed much realism, his

theories remained ‘Euclidean’ or idealistic, exposing him to the

mistaken but understandable charge of hypocrisy, as when he

condoned violence during the Quit India movement of 1942 and gave

his ‘tacit consent’ to the dispatch of Indian troops to Kashmir in 1947.

Rather than insist on a pure theory and permit impure practices, the

more sensible thing would have been to legitimize and regulate the

latter by making space for them within the theory itself.

Gandhi’s impoverished view of human life prevented him from

appreciating the central principles and internal dialectic of modern

civilization. His critique of it made many telling points and exposed its

racist, imperialist, violent, and irrational underside, but it also missed

out and distorted a good deal. He took little account of its commitment

to the values of equality, individuality, critical self-reflection, and social

justice, its passionate desire to understand and master natural and

social forces, its restless search for a better society, and the way in which

it has brought different civilizations and cultures together and made

them a universally accessible human resource. Even the ideas of

universal love and indivisible humanity, which Gandhi rightly cherished,

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are inconceivable outside the interdependent world made possible by

modern civilization. Gandhi’s emphasis on the human need for roots

and the value of small communities is well taken, but his local

communities are too isolated and self-contained to be realistic and too

parochial and self-absorbed to avoid becoming moral prisons. Small

communities built behind the back of and in relative contempt of

modern civilization are quite different in nature from those that enjoy

full access to and delight in drawing upon its diverse resources. Gandhi

was too realistic not to see this and kept modifying his views. But his

heart hankered after the simplicity of rural life and remained in tension

with his head.

Life

We turn finally to Gandhi’s life, his only ‘real book’ as he called it and by

which alone he wished to be judged. It had a rare sweep and grandeur.

There have been greater saints, religious and social reformers, spiritual

seekers, moralists, statesmen, nationalist leaders, and organizers than

he, but it is difficult to think of one who was all these and fought

simultaneously on so many fronts with varying degrees of success. For

the first 30 odd years of his life he dutifully obeyed the conventions of

his society and married, raised children, and discharged his social

obligations. Thereafter his life underwent a profound change and was

dominated by a Buddha-like passion for moksha. As we saw, moksha

meant three things to him: first, complete mastery of all the senses

including sexuality; second, a totally pure and transparent mind freed of

fear, jealousy, pettiness, meanness, vanity, and other base passions; and

third, dissolution of the sense of selfhood by becoming one with all

living beings in a spirit of universal love and service. Although the first

two related to the personal and the third to the social and political areas

of life, the separation was purely notional and ultimately incoherent for

Gandhi. The search for moral purity when dissociated from an active

concern for others was self-centred and ultimately a form of self-

indulgence; the reverse signified a moral busybody and a form of

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escapism. For Gandhi one had to seek one’s perfection not outside but

within the world, not away from but in the midst of struggles against

injustices, inequalities, oppression, and other evils.

While carrying on great campaigns against racism in South Africa,

British rule in India, and the injustices of his own society, Gandhi also

continued his struggle to become as pure and diaphanous as a human

being could be. He identified his moral and spiritual limitations and set

about overcoming them one by one. In his case the success did not

come in a sudden act of illumination or grace, such as sometimes

transforms a person’s life overnight, but after a painful and protracted

struggle. Over time he conquered his great love of food, easily aroused

anger, arrogance, a strong streak of vanity, selfishness, possessiveness,

jealousy, personal attachments, physical cowardice, and personal

ambition, and increasingly became spiritually ‘lighter’. Sex had

obsessed him in his early adolescence, and he strove not just to

suppress or even master it but totally to eliminate it in his pursuit of

‘absolute’ innocence. We have already seen what that involved. The

struggles at all levels were fierce and marked by moments of deep self-

doubt and despair, but he persisted and fashioned a life which, though

narrow in its focus and not altogether free of human limitations, had an

enormous depth and a rare moral and spiritual beauty.

Four random incidents of his remarkable life reveal the nobility of the

soul he crafted and the great virtues he cultivated. During one of his

many periods of incarceration, a black warder was bitten by a scorpion.

When Gandhi heard his screams, he rushed to the spot, called for a

doctor, and in the meantime started sucking out the poisoned blood,

without the slightest thought for his life and in utter disregard of his

own bleeding gums caused by dental surgery just a few days before. He

went on spitting out the sucked blood until the victim felt relief, and

was gone before the latter and others had a chance to thank him.

Indulal Yajnik, his one-time colleague and a prominent socialist, turned

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7. Gandhi’s worldly possessions

against him and wrote a vicious attack on him. He regretted this

later and went to Gandhi to apologize. It was Gandhi’s day of silence.

He saw Yajnik among his visitors and before the latter could say

anything greeted him with a reassuring smile, and sent him a hastily

scribbled note complimenting him for changing his views only once

whereas he, Gandhi, had done so far more often. Poor Yajnik was

in tears.

As we have seen, he rose to incredible heights during the years of

intercommunal violence and staked everything in his fight against it.

He did so for two related reasons (B 372–82). His entire life had been

based on the passionate conviction that soul-force or non-violence

was infinitely more powerful than brute force, and he felt that he had

to prove its truth. He also seems to have thought that he could

perhaps have handled Hindu–Muslim relations differently, that he

had made mistakes, that he bore some responsibility for the violence,

and that it was his dharma to fight and atone for it. Gandhi vastly

exaggerated his share of responsibility and was excessively harsh on

himself. However, for someone with his conscience and standards of

self-evaluation, even the smallest error of judgement required

penance. It is difficult to think of many higher examples of morally

sensitive political leadership.

Maulana Azad, the Congress President in 1946, had, without Gandhi’s

knowledge and against his considered view, sent Stafford Cripps, the

visiting British minister, a confidential note saying that he and the

Congress had an open mind on the partition of India. When Cripps

called on Gandhi, he was surprised to find that latter knew nothing

about the note, and left it with him to mull over. When Azad went to see

Gandhi the next day, Gandhi asked him if there was any communication

between him and Cripps. Azad told a lie. Although his note to Cripps

was lying on Gandhi’s desk, Gandhi kept quiet. After Maulana’s

depature Gandhi’s secretary copied out the note for future use. Gandhi

rebuked him, asked him to tear up the copy and return the original to

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Cripps, and blamed himself for being unworthy of Maulana’s

trust!

A man of wisdom and humility, armed with resolve and inflex-

ible consistency, who has devoted all his strength to the uplift-

ing of his people and the betterment of their lot; a man who has

confronted the brutality of Europe with the dignity of the sim-

ple human being and thus at all times risen superior.

Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a

one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.

Einstein on Gandhi

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Glossary

adhikār a right; a right that is earned or deserved

advaita non-dualism, monism

ahimsā non-violence, absence of a desire to harm a living being

anāsakti non-attachment

āshram a commune of spiritual aspirants organized around a guru

ātman soul or spirit

buddhi intelligence

chetanā consciousness

dalits those previously untouchables. The untouchables were people

considered so low as to be placed outside the pale of normal physical

contact

dharma duty, moral law, characteristic activity of a class of objects or

beings

ekprajā a sense of belonging to a single community

fakir Muslim ascetic or mendicant

hartāl cessation of work as an expression of protest

karma action, law of moral retribution

khādi hand-spun cloth

lokshakti people’s power, power generated by people’s collective

action

Mahātma great soul. An honorific title conferred on Gandhi by

Rabindranath Tagore

maitri friendliness

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manas mind

moksha liberation, release from the cycle of rebirth

nishkām karma disinterested action

sadbhāva goodwill, a wish to see someone flourish

satya truth

satyāgraha non-violent resistance

satyāgrahi one who engages in non-violent resistance

shakti energy or power

shāsanmukta free of domination or coercive rule

suks ˙

ma s ˙

arira non-material ‘body’ or configuration that accompanies

an individual through his successive lives

swabhāva distinct psychological and moral constitution of each

individual

swarāj self-rule, individual or collective autonomy

tapas penance

ulema Muslim theologian

untouchables see dalits

yajna any activity undertaken in the spirit of sacrifice to a deity

yantravād mechanization as an end in itself or for its own sake

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Bibliographical background

Men of action are generally too busy or discreet to write about their

thoughts and experiences except after their retirement, and sometimes

not even then. Yet the writings of Gandhi, who led an unusually active

life, fill 90 volumes and even they are incomplete! The fact that he

enjoyed leisure during the just under six years that he spent in prison

provides only a small part of the explanation, for much of his writing

was not done in prison. The deeper explanation is to be found in the way

he defined action and the kind of active life he led. Action for him was

intended not so much to achieve certain results as to live out a specific

way of life, which he naturally needed to explain to his countrymen.

Besides, the way of life could not be worked out in advance, and hence

his whole life became one long series of ‘experiments’. It is striking that

the word ‘experiment’ occurs frequently in Gandhi’s writings and that

he called his autobiography Experiments with Truth or Autobiography.

Since the meaning and implications of his experiments were not always

clear to him or to others, he had to write about them. As he wrote, he

evoked strong responses, to which he had to respond. For Gandhi

writing thus became inseparable from action. He was therefore never

too busy to write because writing was an integral part of his business.

Gandhi’s ideas are to be found in two kinds of writings, those written by

him and by his close associates and secretaries. Gandhi’s own writings

consist of seven books; numerous articles and editorials in the four

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weekly journals that he edited at various times in his life; interviews,

some of them long and probing, with journalists and foreign visitors;

letters to his perplexed associates, followers, and total strangers; and

important speeches at various religious, cultural, and political

meetings. Most of these are included in the 90 volumes of his Collected

Works. Gandhi’s seven books include Hind Swarāj, Satyāgraha in South

Africa, Autobiography, Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place,

Discourses on the Gita, Āshram Observances in Action, and A Guide to

Health, all published by Navajivan, Ahmedabad.

Gandhi’s secretaries and associates have published several volumes

describing his day-to-day activities and conversations with them and

visitors. Among these Pyarelal’s Mahātma Gandhi: The Early Phase, Vol. 1,

and The Last Phase, Vol. 1, Books 1 and 2 (Ahmedabad, 1956) are the best.

They largely deal with younger and older Gandhi’s social and political

thought and activities. For intimate insights into his inner struggles and

views about individuals, events, and life in general, the best accounts

are 15 volumes of Mahadev Desai’s posthumously published Diary

(Ahmedabad, 1960–74), and two volumes of Manuben Gandhi’s

Delhima Gandhiji (Ahmedabad, 1964 and 1966) sadly not yet translated

into English. Both of them wrote in Gujarati, their own and Gandhi’s

native language. Manu Gandhi was Gandhi’s great-niece, and Mahadev

Desai, his secretary from 1917 to 1942, was in Gandhi’s own words ‘more

than a son’ to him.

Gandhi wrote most of his books in his native Gujarati partly as a matter

of principle, partly to develop the language, and partly to show how

other Indian languages should be written. Since their English

translations were done in a hurry and since he only checked a couple

and that rather too quickly, they are generally unreliable. The English

translations of Mahadev Desai’s works by V. G. Desai are no better. Since

hardly any foreign commentator and only a few Indian commentators

seem to read Gujarati, their works remain flawed. For a fuller discussion

of this, see my ‘Gandhi and his Translators’, Gandhi Marg, June 1986.

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There is no plan to retranslate Gandhi’s or his close associates’ writings,

and that is a big handicap to Gandhi scholars with no knowledge of

Gujarati. I have relied on the Gujarati originals and corrected the

translations when necessary. A. Parel, ed. Hind Swarāj (Cambridge, 1997)

is the best translation of Gandhi’s seminal work with a valuable

introduction.

Biography

Gandhi has been the subject of over 20 biographies and over 25

biographical sketches in English. The first one, by his friend Revd Joseph

J. Doke, M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa (London, 1909), is

of considerable historical value because it was written with Gandhi’s co-

operation and before he became a world figure. Many subsequent

biographies were written by journalists who met and stayed with him

for different lengths of time. Among them Louis Fischer’s two books

cited in the Abbreviations are the best. One of the most recent and

impressive biographies is by Judith Brown, cited in the Abbreviations.

No biography of Gandhi so far has been able fully to capture and

illuminate the complexity, tensions, and apparent contradictions of his

personality, or to elucidate the sources of his powerful emotional hold

over so many of his associates as well as his countrymen in general. This

is not surprising, for a good biographer would need to be fully familiar

with all the major religious traditions that shaped him, master Gujarati,

and possess a deep intuitive understanding of the social and cultural

milieu in which he grew up. And even then the biographer would suffer

from the disadvantage of not having reliable biographies of Gandhi’s

closest associates including his wife, Mahadev Desai, Miraben and Manu

Gandhi. It is striking that many of his biographers are Christians and that

few Indian scholars so far have attempted a major biography based on

primary sources in South Africa and elsewhere.

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Further reading

Thought

For Gandhi’s philosophical and religious thought, see Margaret

Chatterjee, Gandhi’s Religious Thought (London, 1983), R. Iyer, The Moral

and Political Thought of Mahātma Gandhi (New York, 1973), and

B. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform (Delhi, 1999). For Gandhi’s

moral and political thought, see R. Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought

of Mahātma Gandhi (New York, 1973), B. Parekh, Gandhi’s Political

Philosophy (London, 1989), and R. Terchek, Gandhi: Struggling for

Autonomy (Lanham, 1998).

Gandhi’s non-violence and satyāgraha have rightly attracted much

attention. For good discussions, see J. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence

(Berkeley, 1965), G. Sharp, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power

(Ahmedabad, 1960) and The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston, 1973),

and D. Dalton, Mahātma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action (Columbia,

NY, 1993). For a good study of whether and how Gandhi’s method could

have been applied by the German Jews, see Gideon Shimoni, Gandhi,

Satyāgraha and the Jews (Jerusalem, 1977). The book analyses Gandhi’s

correspondence with Jewish writers and relations with his Jewish

friends. H. Raines, My Soul is Rested (New York, 1983) discusses the effect

of the Salt March on the imagination of African Americans. For a good

discussion of Gandhi’s influence on African Americans, see S. Kapur,

Raising up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston,

1992).

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For Gandhi’s controversial experiments in celibacy, see N. K. Bose, My

Days with Gandhi (Delhi, 1974) and B. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and

Reform (Delhi, 1999). This was once an extremely sensitive subject. As

Bose explains in the preface, Navajivan, Gandhi’s official publisher,

refused to publish his book, while I was attacked as ‘Hindu Rushdie’

and faced some opposition. The fact that the opposition soon died

down and that no harm was threatened to me suggests that this is now

an accepted area of investigation. To cover it adequately would require

access to the diaries of Manu, one of the women involved in Gandhi’s

experiments. The diaries do seem to exist and were last seen in 1963,

but their current whereabouts are unknown. The other women, all now

dead, did not keep diaries, but accounts of their conversations with

others on the subject do exist.

For short and balanced accounts of Gandhi’s life, work, and thought, see

A. Copley, Gandhi (London, 1987) and D. Rothermund, Mahātma Gandhi

(Delhi, 1991). For a critical study of the recent commentaries on

Gandhi’s political thought and role, see Thomas Pantham, Political

Theories and Social Reconstruction: A Critical Survey of the Literature on

India (Delhi 1995). Given Gandhi’s habits, dress, and intriguing

personality, he became the subject of countless cartoons, which give a

good idea of how his baffled British contemporaries tried to make sense

of him. For an excellent collection, see Gandhi in Cartoons (Ahmedabad,

1970).

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to

illustrations.

A advaita 55

Ali, Mohamed 18

Ambedker, Babasaheb 24

Andrews, C. F. 8

animal life 50–1

armed forces 103

Arnold, Edwin 3

assassination, of Gandhi 32, 113

ātman 7–8, 55–6

see also soul

atonement 46

authenticity 11

autonomy 63, 90, 93, 94

Azad, Maulana 125

B Bengal 29

body 51, 54, 57, 58, 79

Bose, Subhas 25

British Empire 9

colonial rule 10, 16–17, 20–1, 64

Buber, Martin 75

Buddha 47, 56, 112

Buddhism 3, 47

C Calcutta 31

capitalism 79–80, 94–5, 96

Carlyle, Thomas 78

caste system 1, 10

celibacy 3

test of 28–9

see also sex

Champaran 15

Chaplin, Charlie 21

Christianity 3, 7–8, 42–3, 46–7,

57, 119

Churchill, Winston 21

citizens, responsibilities of 105–8,

118

civil disobedience 107

civilization, see modern

civilization

civil rights movement, United

States 76

coercion 59, 94, 100–1, 110,

114

colonialism 10, 16–17, 20–1, 53,

64

communism 94, 95, 96

communities 61, 69–70, 97–102,

109, 122

competition 97

compulsion see coercion

conscience 15, 72

Constructive Programme 11–14,

19, 34

cooperation 105

see also communities

cosmic spirit 35–41, 50, 55–6, 92

cosmopolitanism 48

cosmos 49–50

cottage industries 11, 19, 97

crime 103–5

Cripps, Stafford 125

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crucifixion 8, 77

culture 12, 15

statist 85–7

D Dandi, march to 20–1

debts 51–2

defence 103

Delhi 31

democracy 86–7, 99, 106

dharma 63, 93, 125

dialogue 69, 93

dignity 80, 81, 89, 110, 114

diversity 62, 100–1

see also individuality

division of labour 14

Durkheim, Emile 78

duties 52, 62–3, 118

Dyer, Brigadier General 16

E economy 94–8

education 1–3

energy 35, 56

see also soul-force

England 3

equality 89, 117–18

Europe 79, 89

see also modern civilization

evil 40, 62, 72, 120

exploitation 53, 69, 82, 98

F faith 39–41, 84

fasts 15, 46, 71–3, 76–7

against violence 29, 31–2

for Hindu–Muslim unity 19

over separate electorates for

untouchables 23–4

fellowship 68

see also communities; equality

foreign cloth, burning of 16–17

four-dimensionality 54–9

freedom 59, 89, 93, 94, 116–17

G Gita 3, 20

God 35–9, 41–4, 47, 50, 57

see also religion

Gokhale, Gopal Krishna 10, 25

good 40, 62, 120

goodwill 44, 118

grace 58

Greenberg, Hayim 75

H Harijan 12

Hinduism 1, 8, 42–3, 45–7, 119

Hindu–Muslim relationships

18–19, 24–33, 125

Hitler, Adolf 68, 75

human dignity 80, 81, 89, 110, 114

humanity 53, 61, 69

human nature 49–63, 79

cosmocentric view 49–51

four-dimensionality 54–9

human interdependence 51–3,

92–3

implications 61–3

moral theory 60–1

Hunter Commission 16

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I identity 56–8, 62, 85, 90, 114

imperialism 82

see also colonialism

independence 10–11, 13, 20–3,

29–30

leadership of independence

movement 15–24

India:

colonial rule 10, 16, 20–1, 64

Gandhi’s return to 9–15

independence 10–11, 13, 20–3,

29–30

regeneration programme

10–14

Indian Franchise Bill, Natal 6

Indian National Congress 10, 12,

24, 27, 34

Gandhi’s relationship with 14,

18, 28

Indian Opinion 9

Indian Relief Act 6

individuality 56–7, 58–9, 62, 79,

85

industrialism 80, 97, 98

inequalities 95

see also equality

integrity 59, 66, 85, 112, 116

see also authenticity

interdependence 49

of human beings 51–3, 92–3

Islam 42, 57

J Jains 1

Jallianwalla Bagh 16

Jesus 44, 47, 56, 112

Jews 8, 74–5

Jinnah, Mohamed Ali 19, 25–7

Johnson, Mordecai 76

journalism 9

Judaism 42

justice 69, 102–5, 118

K Kant, Immanuel 69

karma, law of 57

Kasturbai 3

khādi 11, 12

King, Martin Luther 76–7, 113

Koran 1

L languages, indigenous 11, 19

laws 106–8

disobeying of 107

legal career 3–5, 4

liberalism 116–19

liberty see freedom

life 40

animal life 50–1

of Gandhi 122–6

love 70

suffering love 15, 46, 68, 70–1,

76

M machines 80, 88, 89, 98

Marx, Karl 76, 78, 86, 89

mass contact programme 24

Mill, J. S. 78

mind 54–5, 57–8

In d

e x

137

minority views 108

modern civilization 78–91, 121–2

lack of self-restraint 78–83

naive rationalism 83–5

response to 87–9

statist culture 85–7

moksha 7–8, 55, 58, 122

Montagu Chelmsford Report 23

morality 56, 60–1, 66, 69–70, 73

modern civilization 81, 86, 90

moral regeneration 10–14

Moses 44, 47

Muhammad 44, 56

Muslim League 24–6, 27

Muslims 18–19, 23, 24–33, 47

Hindu–Muslim relationships

18–19, 24–33, 125

Mussolini 68

N Natal 5–6

Natal Indian Congress 6

nationalism 17, 26

natural resources 50–1

natural world 88

Navajivan 12

Nazi party 74, 108

Nehru, Jawaharlal 33

Niebuhr, Reinhold 77

Noakhali 29, 30

Non-Cooperation Movement

16–18

non-violence 20, 28, 46, 71, 108,

112–16

O obligations see duties

Old Testament 3

oppression 52–3, 69, 75

organization 88, 90

ownership 95–6

P Pakistan 27, 31–2

parliamentary democracy 87

see also democracy

patriotism 10, 112

persuasion 59, 64

Plato 7

police 103

post-modernism 112

power 56, 99

Pranami sect 1

prisons 104–5

R Raichandbhai 8

rationalism 83–5, 89, 92

rationality 39–40, 73, 90, 108, 118

limits of 64–7

Rawls, John 69

reason 38, 41, 64–5, 73, 83–4,

93–4

rebirth 57, 62

regeneration programme 10–14

relative truth 66

religion 41–8, 58, 60, 90, 101

cosmic spirit 35–41, 50, 55–6

see also God

respect 44

responsibilities, of citizens 105–8,

118

revelation 43–4

G a

n d

h i

138

revolution 67

rights 52, 62–3, 118

to work 96–7

Rousseau, J.-J. 89

Rowlatt Acts 15

Roy, B. C. 19

Roy, M. N. 25

Ruskin, John 7, 78, 89

S sadbhāva 44

Salter, William 7

salt tax satyāgraha 20–1, 22

satya 35

satyāgraha 6, 11–15, 64–77, 116,

119

against salt tax 20–2

limits of 73–7

limits of rationality and

violence 64–7

soul-force 68–73

scientific spirit 87–8, 90

Scott, C. P. 21

secularity 101

self 54–5, 56, 58

self-interest 81

self-respect 53

self-restraint, lack of 78–83

sex 3, 123

see also celibacy

Shaw, George Bernard 21

silence 19

socialism 96

society 92–4, 96, 101

see also communities; modern

civilization

soul 55–6, 58, 81–2, 119

soul-force 68–73

South Africa 5–9, 53

discrimination 5–6, 64, 68

spinning wheel symbol 12, 19

spirituality 55–6, 58–9, 60, 93

state 85–7, 99–105, 109–10

communism and 95

responsibilities of citizens

105–8

suffering 70, 72, 74

suffering love 15, 46, 68, 70–1, 76

swabhāva 56–9, 62, 94

swarāj 93

symbols 12–13

T Tagore, Rabindranath 17, 24

tapas 15

technology 80

theology 42–3

Thoreau, Henry 7, 78

Tocqueville, Alexis de 78

tolerance 44, 118

Tolstoy Farm, Johannesburg 7, 8

Tolstoy, Leo 7, 9, 78, 89

tradition 1, 46, 48, 119

Transvaal 5–6

trial (1922) 17

trusteeship 95–6, 98

truth 35–6, 47, 59, 117

relative truth 66

two-nations theory 26

U United States 75–6

In d

e x

139

universe 40, 41, 50

untouchability 19, 24

untouchables 23

separate electorates for 23–4

V village industries 11, 19, 97

violence 28–32, 66–7, 75, 121

communism and 95

criminal violence 103–4

human life and 51

limits of 64–7

modern civilization 83, 90

opposition to 10, 65–6

see also non-violence

W Watts, Isaac 8

Weber, Max 78

women, status of 19

work 96–7

X xenophobia 17

Y yajna 52, 61

Yajnik, Indulal 123–5

year of silence (1926)

19

G a

n d

h i

140

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