Mahatma Gandhi

One more name has been added to the number of men and women who, for their services to the Indian peoples, have been raised to the position of sainthood. The names of Tulsidas, Ramdas, Mirabai, and Kabir are venerated by all Indians, and their religious songs sung and pondered over, not only by the educated men and women, but particularly by the masses also. The last pearl to be added to the necklace which Mother India wears is Mahatma Gandhi. Dozens of biographies of him already exist, and hundreds more will be written immediately. His tragic death has given a profound shock to all peoples of the world.

Abraham Lincoln, after a fratricidal war had been brought to an end, and the attempt to divide the United States into two nations had been thwarted, was planning to bind up the wounds caused by that war and to lay down a policy of healing and justice. But just as he was entering upon his new plan of service, he was struck down by the hand of an assassin. In a similar manner, just as Mahatma Gandhi had planned a campaign of work to bind the tragic wounds in the invisible body of other India, and to unite once again the two halves of India–India and Pakistan–at least in spirit, the hand of an assassin brought to an end his labours.

As a tribute to the work which he did, my aim is to give only a few ideas concerning his work. Historians in the generations to come will assess his work at a truer value than anyone can do at the moment.

Gandhiji ¹ was in the core of his being a rebel and a militant, but he was a rebel for Humanity’s sake, one who sought nothing for himself, but was militant against the evils which surrounded the peoples of India, and in South Africa against the injustices meted out to them by South African white legislation. One remarkable attribute of his character which makes him shine out more than any Indian leader is that during his lifetime all his work was for the masses of India. Never for a moment were their hardships of livelihood and difficult conditions of travel and other lack of amenities forgotten by him. The theme of his life was ‘for the masses’, and in the light of this aspiration alone must the work that he did be assessed in all that he succeeded and in all that he failed.

There is little need here to narrate the story of the work which he did to bring India to national liberation. There is a long list of noble patriots, from the beginning of the Indian National Congress in 1885, who prepared the way for him, one of the most powerful being Annie Besant. But it was Gandhiji who made Swaraj or ‘autonomous India’, a ‘self-ruling’ India, not only the hope and dream of the educated classes, but also of the millions of the so-called uneducated masses. He made the four hundred millions in India feel as a unity.

As did all great souls, Gandhiji tried to raise all the millions to his own level of purity in every thought, word and deed, and he radiated the spirit of Harmlessness. During all his campaigns for the denunciation of England and its administration, however seemingly violent were his phrases, there never was a particle of hatred in his heart towards those whom he denounced. He thought, when he appealed to the millions of India to join in his political work, that they also would be able to create a revolution against England with no hatred in their hearts. His creed of ‘non violence’ and Satyagraha (relying on Truth), as he initiated what practically amounted to revolution, seemed the ideal of Peace upon earth put into practice in a world of turmoil and oppression. He succeeded in living this life himself; but he had to admit profound disappointment at the incidents of violence which were the result of his own campaign of revolution and reconstruction, which in theory was to be ‘non violent’. Again and again, after he had started a campaign for ‘Non cooperation’, as when he called on the people not to pay taxes, on the legal profession to abstain from working in the English courts, and on college students to abstain from going to the lectures, and when in 1921, at the time of the visit of the Prince of Wales, he proclaimed in Bombay a hartal or ‘silent mourning’ with a stoppage of all business, he had to admit that on many an occasion the result was an outbreak of violence. No wonder, therefore, that once he wrote:

“A rapier run through my body could hardly have pained me more. I have said times without number that Satyagraha admits of no violence, no pillage, no incendiarism; and still in the name of Satyagraha we burnt down buildings, forcibly captured weapons, extorted money, stopped trains, cut off telegraph wires, killed innocent people and plundered shops and private houses. If deeds such as these could save me from the prison house or the scaffold, I should not like to be so saved.”

Nevertheless, his dream that all, irrespective of education, culture, caste or class, could be pure in heart as he was himself was never modified by him. It was his dream, as his life was brought to a tragic close, that he would succeed in bringing a completely new spirit in India that would unite Hindu and Muslim and bring an era of “Peace on earth, and goodwill to men”.

Gandhiji had another great dream, which was that of all who truly love India. This was to make a caste-less India. Caste has been modified considerably of late in certain of its old harsh restrictions, particularly against the ‘Pariahs’ or ‘untouchables’. Nevertheless, many of the evils of caste distinction still seem as hard and rigid as ever. One significant phrase, which he coined for the untouchables who had euphoniously been called ‘Panchamas’, or fifth caste, was to abolish the idea of untouchability and coin the name ‘Harijan’, that is, ‘the people of God’. No longer are the words ‘Pariah’ and ‘untouchable’ used by anyone in India, or even ‘Depressed Classes’. Once he coined a phrase, which has dropped into the ground of Indian consciousness, to the great loss of her spirituality. This is the word ‘Daridra Narayan’. ‘Narayan’ is one of the most ancient names for God; and ‘daridra’ is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘poor’, ‘destitute’. ‘Daridra Narayan’ was used by Gandhiji as a spiritual designation to describe the poor and helpless, particularly the Harijans. It had the significance, “God the poor man, God the destitute.”

One of the strangest elements in his character was his fasting. Fasts are a part of Hindu religion, as a means of purification and self-recollectedness. But they only last for twenty-four hours. There is in Islam the very severe fasting, from an hour and half before sunrise to sunset each day during the month of Ramzan, so severe that not a drop of water must be drunk. This Muhammadan fast, which is obligatory upon all Muslims, except those who are old or sick, means a very severe testing when the month falls, as sometimes it does, in the season of the greatest heat. Gandhiji fasted not so much to purify himself but as an act of atonement for the sins committed by others. So great was his influence that naturally his prolonged fasts, bringing him to the verge of death, brought about the result that, for the time at least, the evil against which he was agitating ceased.

One noteworthy characteristic in Gandhiji’s inner life was that he tried all the time to be in communion with God. As he has said again and again, he never launched any campaign of resistance or began a fast without long inner meditation and trying to be sure that what he was about to do was as God would have him do. In old days in England, Cromwell in politics and in warfare had the same quality of belief that a divine mandate guided him. One of the greatest charms of Gandhiji was that he was utterly self-revealing, and in his journals and books he had nothing to hide from public gaze and so spoke frankly of his hopes, aspirations, mistakes and failures. All the ‘memoirs’ which such a great man might have left to be published after his death, Gandhiji gave to a vast public which read with eagerness all he had to say.

In a manner that no one ever before had become, Mahatma Gandhiji was as the Conscience of India. During, his later years, through voice and pen, he brought into high light one evil after another in the lives of the Indian people, particularly lately corruption in politics after India gained Independence, which needed to be clearly recognised if there was to be any betterment. One of his last actions, as all know, was the denunciation of the horrible atrocities committed after the separation of India into India and Pakistan. He succeeded, by his fast in Calcutta after Independence Day, in forestalling a carefully planned massacre which one group of violent people had planned against another section of the community.

I wonder if the ultimate future for Mahatma Gandhi will be what has been the destiny of the teachers before him. That destiny is to put the teacher on a pedestal, build statues of him, offer him songs and garlands, and little by little forget how the teacher lived and died that all might act in accordance with his teaching. In Palestine, where the Jews had a religious life full of ritual observances, Jesus Christ denounced the evils of the Jews of his time in the words: “Woe unto you, hypocrites, for ye pay tithes of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law–judgment, mercy and faith; these ought ye to have done.” At the moment there is intense, almost hysterical, glorification of Mahatma Gandhi, and at meetings all pledge themselves to commit themselves to his ideals of harmlessness and service. But India is in the throes of a second birth; party and caste divisions are acute. True, there is no longer a foreign ruler against whom to agitate; but among Indians themselves? Will it be a regenerated India in the spirit of India’s ancient ideals of spirituality and culture? Or an India after a foreign model with, as in some Western countries, fratricidal parties and policies, and brother killing brother in the name of Patriotism?

I end this brief tribute with the prayer in the ceremony for the dead in the Catholic Church: “Rest in the eternal grant unto him, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon him!”

¹ It is usual in central and Northern India to add the honorific particle ‘ji’ to a name; hence Gandhi ji familiarly.