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Reading
Gandhi
By
Tom Weber
TFF Associate
January 28, 2004
The Political Gandhi and the
Whole Gandhi
Our knowledge of the life of Mahatma Gandhi, when it
does not come from Attenborough's landmark film, is
generally provided by popular biographies. The
biographies, especially the most recent and best known
ones, such as those by Fischer and Nanda, tend to be
political biographies. Gandhi is the main player in
India's freedom struggle, the eventual "father of the
nation." His fight for the rights of Indians in South
Africa and his struggle for India's independence are
generally the main focus of the story. The central
narrative of the India phase of his life focuses on the
three main political campaigns that he led: the 1921-22
Noncooperation Movement, the 1930-33 Civil Disobedience
Movement and the 1942-43 Quit India Movement.
The lengthy periods between these campaigns spent on
self-discovery or anti-untouchability and other social
work are glossed over, seen as lulls in Gandhi's life.
This however gives a very limited view of the Mahatma and
different biographies of Gandhi could be written. How
about a spiritual or constructive work biography with the
political campaigns being mere extensions to these more
fundamental projects which are far from being periods of
marking time? A different picture of Gandhi would emerge,
and certainly not a less accurate picture. Gandhi's own
autobiography, The Story of my Experiments with
Truth, is not a political autobiography.
Swaraj - not only political
self-rule. Satyagraha - one of three gifts
Gandhi's talk of swaraj, that is independence or
freedom, is generally interpreted merely as independence
for the Indian nation from British rule. However, for
Gandhi political activism had a more elemental role. It
was to a large degree educative, helping to train the
soul and develop character so as to aid the quest for
individual perfection. Swaraj means self-rule and
to limit this to political self-rule is to largely miss
the point. The three campaigns are not three isolated
bursts of political activity, but examples of a lifelong
quest for swaraj temporarily focussed at the macro
level.
Narayan Desai, one of the few remaining Gandhians who
knew the Mahatma intimately (his father was Mahadev
Desai, Gandhi's chief personal secretary, and he grew up
in Gandhi's ashrams), who was a leading figure in the
post-Gandhi Gandhian movement and who is the most recent
Gandhi biographer, notes that Gandhi gave three great
gifts to humanity and that satyagraha,
Gandhi's nonviolent activism, representing the political
Gandhi, is only one of them. This however is the one that
English language books on Gandhi focus on. With this
focus, Gandhi's co-workers, the ones who take on staring
roles in the biographies, are Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar
Vallabhbhai Patel. The political Gandhi, however, is a
greatly diminished person and a more complete analysis of
the Mahatma would include comprehensive reference to
other important co-workers.
The Kingdom of God and the
Constructive Program: Gandhi's second gift
Gandhi held before himself, and attempted to place
before the masses, a picture of an ideal society that was
to be the goal of collective endeavour, as the approach
towards Truth was to be the goal for the individual. This
vision was summed up in the word "Ramrajya", the "Kingdom
of God," where there were equal rights for prices and
paupers, where even the lowliest person could get swift
justice without elaborate and costly procedures, where
inequalities that allowed some to roll in riches while
the masses did not have enough to eat were abolished, and
where sovereignty of the people was based on pure moral
authority rather than coercive power. Political
independence for the country may have been a step towards
Ramrajya, but was certainly no guarantee of it.
Gandhi firmly believed that all forms of exploitation
and oppression to a large degree rested on the
acquiescence of the victims. With this in mind he noted
that "exploitation of the poor can be extinguished not by
effecting the destruction of a few millionaires, but by
removing the ignorance of the poor and teaching them to
non-cooperate with the exploiters." It was again partly
for the educative purpose of pointing this out to the
oppressed that he instituted what he called the
"constructive program." Although this program was tied to
India's independence struggle, it was not merely a
tactical adjunct to assist in achieving that seemingly
larger and more important goal.
The constructive program involved future leaders in
the struggle and put them in contact with the masses
(working not just for the people, but with
them), helping to bring about the society Gandhi
envisaged in a future free India, and indeed a future
just world. In fact, Gandhi claimed that the wholesale
fulfillment of the constructive program "is complete
independence" because if the nation was involved in the
very process of rebuilding itself in the image of its
dreams "from the very bottom upwards," it would by
definition be free.
The program, in its original context, dealt mainly
with the problems of communal unity and the uplift of the
rural masses. This approach aimed to produce "something
beneficial to the community, especially to the poor and
unemployed" and provided "the kind of work, which the
poor and unemployed can themselves do and thus
self-respectingly help themselves."
In situations of social conflict and mass
satyagraha campaigns, Gandhi made it a point to
couple constructive work to civil disobedience, sometimes
seeming to say that constructive work was an aid to the
civil disobedience campaign and at other times putting
the formula around the other way. In fact civil
disobedience "without the constructive program will be
like a paralysed hand attempting to lift a spoon".
Perhaps it could even be said that large oppositional
satyagraha campaigns cannot be fully nonviolent if they
are not accompanied by some form of positive constructive
program. The constructive program, in Desai's scheme, is
the second of Gandhi's great gifts.
For Gandhi this constructive work offered replacement
for what the nationalists were opposing at the very time
they were opposing it. Without it, because fundamental
changes would not have been made, civil disobedience, if
it succeeded in overthrowing a set of oppressors, would
merely exchange one group of leaders with another similar
group. Contrasting himself with the "born politician"
Sardar Patel, Gandhi claimed that "I was born for the
constructive program. It is part of my soul. Politics is
a kind of botheration for me."
Further, during one of his major political campaigns,
Gandhi remarked that "the work of social reform or
self-purification ... is a hundred times dearer to me
than what is called purely political work", and during
another, following pressure to launch civil disobedience,
Mahadev Desai records Gandhi as having said that "in
placing civil disobedience before constructive work I was
wrong ... I feared that I should estrange co-workers and
so carried on with imperfect Ahimsa
[nonviolence]." Gandhi was well aware that
political freedom was easier to achieve than economic,
social and moral freedom in part because they are "less
exciting and not spectacular." Political biographies also
seem to be more exciting and spectacular than those
focussing on the social and moral aspects of Gandhi's
life. The main co-workers he had in his constructive
work, who, like Jamnalal Bajaj, are at least as important
to him as his political co-workers, tend to disappear
from the record.
Gandhi's third gift: the
eleven vows
If we look at Gandhi's relationship with his second
cousin Maganlal Gandhi and his spiritual heir Vinoba
Bhave we realise that there is even more to the Mahatma,
something obvious to Desai but that most biographies make
far too little of. Desai points out that there was a
third gift from Gandhi: his eleven vows, a set of rules
which established the code of conduct for his ashram
inmates and which are key to understanding Gandhi's
religious quest.
Gandhi firmly believed that life could not be
compartmentalised, that actions and the reasons on which
they are based, whether they be political, economic,
social or spiritual, are interrelated, and that these
actions have a direct bearing upon the achievement of the
ultimate aim of life. Gandhi himself named this aim as
"moksha", a liberation of the self, and claimed that his
life, including his "ventures in the political field are
directed to this same end." Again, although the spiritual
Gandhi does not fit too comfortably in primarily
political biographies except to set up the Mahatma as the
conscience of humanity, without understanding Gandhi's
spiritual quest, we do not understand Gandhi. As he is
secularised into an understandable actor on the political
stage we are left with no easy way of coming to terms
with a more whole Gandhi.
For Gandhi the vow was a powerful tool in the
spiritual quest because vows enable acts which are not
possible by ordinary self-denial to become possible
through extraordinary self-denial. Through his eleven
ashram vows, Gandhi turned personal virtues into public
values. The vows were to adhere to truth, nonviolence,
celibacy, non-possession, non-stealing, control of the
palate, fearlessness, equal respect for all religions,
bread labour (the dignity of manual work), the removal of
untouchability (as an institution and from one's own
heart), and swadeshi (the favouring of locally produced
goods, neighbourliness).
Gandhi spent a lifetime struggling with these vows.
And how could he have done otherwise? They constituted
the road map of the spiritual quest that was the great
endeavour of his life of which even his political
activities were in reality only a sub-branch. For Gandhi,
applying a set of techniques may have meant that
nonviolent political activism was more likely to achieve
its immediate political goals. However, living within the
rules required for a successful satyagraha
campaign as Gandhi understood it, also constituted the
type of life that is worth living.
Gandhi and his
Ashrams
Reading popular life and times books about Gandhi we
get a strong sense of the circumstances of the setting up
of his South African community known as Tolstoy Farm and
his Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. But the reasons for
the setting up of his first intentional rural community
in South Africa, known as Phoenix Settlement (that he
read a book the day before!), the leaving of Sabarmati
and the choice of the town of Wardha as the next
headquarters are far less clear. While the setting up of
Tolstoy Farm can be understood by reading about the
political Gandhi, only an understanding of a more whole
Gandhi and the spiritual and constructive work
relationships that were part of this, give us worthwhile
clues to his comings and goings from the other
ashrams.
It was the relatively short full-tilt soul-mate
relationship between Gandhi and the youthful Henry Polak,
in 1904, that led to the formation of Phoenix Settlement
and changed the course of Gandhi's life. Out of the
dialectical relationship with "chhotabhai" (younger
brother) Henry, Gandhi started his simple life
experiments, and that relationship made Gandhi receptive
to Ruskin's message in Unto This Last, a book
given to him by Polak, that helped set the tone for the
constructive program and Gandhi's economic philosophy,
and in the more immediate term the founding of Phoenix
Settlement.
The second intentional community was Tolstoy Farm. It
was to be run on the principles of simple living, bread
labour and spiritual practice in keeping with what Gandhi
and his next soul-mate, Hermann Kallenbach, saw as the
teachings of their spiritual mentor Leo Tolstoy.
Kallenbach not only allowed the setting up of the farm
through his financial support (in fact, legally, he was
the owner of the property), but the bond of love between
him and Gandhi and the experimental ferment of their
relationship set the climate for the move to Tolstoy Farm
and its communal living arrangements.
Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm, and underplayed
accounts of the relationships with Polak and Kallenbach,
are commented upon at reasonable length in Gandhi
biographies - because they are discussed in Gandhi's
autobiography and his book Satyagraha in South
Africa, the main sources of information on Gandhi's
South Africa years. The founding of Sabarmati Ashram is
also well covered for the same reason. However, the
abandonment of Sabarmati and the relocation to Wardha
came after the period covered in Gandhi's writings and
are, consequently, far less well documented.
There is some fairly often cited but poorly thought
through rhetoric about why Gandhi left Sabarmati and why
he eventually settled in the village of Sevagram near
Wardha. Most books tell us that he left Sabarmati when he
embarked on the historic Salt March in 1930 vowing not to
return until he had achieved independence for India.
Gandhi was not politically naive. He knew that he would
not achieve independence in a month or a year. In fact it
took another 17 years after the dramatic march to
Dandi.
He also knew that the campaign he was launching would
result in serious sacrifice for many, and he certainly
did not want his sacrifice to be any less than that of
his followers. They would possibly be stripped of their
lands and homes, could he do any less than give up his?
On the night before he set out for the seaside to make
illegal salt, the Mahatma informed a crowd of 10,000
which had gathered on the sandy expanse of the Sabarmati
river bank below the Ashram that he would not return
"till Swaraj is established in India. ... We are as good
as parting from the Ashram and from our homes. Only with
complete victory can we return to this place."
However, at this stage property had not been
confiscated and Gandhi could have vowed to make any
number of other sacrifices that would cause less distress
to those he was leaving behind. It seemed that he was
emotionally ready to leave the Ashram and this readiness
is not understandable without understanding Gandhi's
relationship with Maganlal.
The "spirit of the ashram" had departed with
Maganlal's sudden death in 1928 and the decision to leave
his home and ashram family became much less difficult for
the Mahatma than it seems possible from reading the
sections dealing with this in the English sources.
Although Maganlal is generally reduced to the young
person who helped to coin the term satyagraha as
the winner of a competition in Gandhi's South African
newspaper in 1907, the relationship Gandhi had with him
was one of the most important of his life. Maganlal was
the embodiment of Gandhi's ideal of what an ashram should
be, however because he was integral to the Gandhi of the
eleven vows rather than a fellow politician he disappears
from the (at least non-Gujarati) record almost
completely.
The same is true for Jamnalal Bajaj. When Gandhi left
Ahmedabad he could have set up his headquarters anywhere
in India. The Gandhi texts inform us that he chose Wardha
because it was the geographical centre of the mother
India, implying his own symbolic identification with the
country, that the location made it easier for followers
and fellow workers from all over the sub-continent to be
able to reach him, and because it could provide the
stepping stone to settling in an out of the way village.
In terms of sacrifice Wardha is ideal, providing a
thoroughly unpleasant environment for much of the year.
The thought of settling in a village did not come to
Gandhi till years after he had made Wardha the centre of
his activities. And the symbolic explanation does not
seem to be quite adequate to the task. The move is
intricately tied up with Gandhi's relationship with
Bajaj, a fellow spiritual seeker and leader of
constructive work activities who in childhood had been
taken from his parents and later adopted Gandhi as a
father by asking the Mahatma to adopt him as a son. It
was because of Bajaj the "son" who wanted his "father"
near him, that Gandhi ended up in this geographical
centre, Bajaj's home town. The popular English Gandhi
biographies make even less of Bajaj than they do of
Maganlal.
At Wardha, as at Sabarmati a few years before, Gandhi
became frustrated with the demands made on him, not least
by the squabbling, eccentric and dependent people he
managed to attract to himself. His nerves were affected
and he wanted space, to be alone. The poverty and filth
he saw around himself, perhaps exacerbated by the
constant demands on his time for articles and interviews,
forced him to realise that his political and literary
activities were not going to achieve the social changes
he so desired. He had been preaching his social message
for a long time with precious few indications that he was
being listened to.
The answer was to live alone in a village, to be an
example of the changes he wanted to see adopted by the
masses, by doing scavenging work directly with the
downtrodden. In this way he could get away from the
constraints that had taken over his life, and live the
simple life of service he craved. Bajaj, by the gift of
village land, held out the hope that this could be
achieved. However, by this time Gandhi had become a
victim of circumstances and the actions of his followers
in effect conspired to thwart his plans. By the mid-1930s
Gandhi wanted to be a simple villager, a simple villager
who ended up being followed by his retinue. Gandhi had
earlier claimed that ashram life was part of his nature,
later he craved solitude and the life of simple service.
In Ahmedabad he was consciously founding an ashram, in
Sevagram near Wardha, where his last ashram was located,
he was trying to escape from one.
Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm had been early
experiments in communal living and stepping stones on the
path to building a viable fully-fledged ashram around the
Mahatma. In South Africa, Gandhi wanted to finish the
political struggle quickly so that he could return to the
spiritual life of the commune. In India, Maganlal built
such a communal institution as a centre of political,
social and spiritual experimentation. Here Gandhi could
train his co-workers to be the nonviolent fighters in the
cause of the freedom struggle and his constructive
program. Although his headquarters at Wardha may have
started out as a continuation of the ashram at Sabarmati,
gradually Gandhi wanted to leave institutions behind. At
the time of his relocation to Sevagram, Gandhi was
distancing himself from power politics and Bajaj became
instrumental in assisting this move from a concentration
on the first to the other two gifts.
Without an understanding of more than the political
Gandhi, some of his most important relationships become
invisible to us, and without an understanding of these
relationships we cannot fully understand the whole
Gandhi.
The Influence of the
Political Gandhi or the Whole Gandhi?
Gene Sharp, the pre-eminent western theorist of
nonviolent activism, started off working with what I have
called the "whole Gandhi" but gradually came to the
realisation that the satyagrahi political activist
Gandhi was the most important given the dangers of war
and the imperatives of defence, as well as the
desirability of nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns
against oppressors and injustice. Satyagraha was
an excellent tool to defeat opponents rather than a
vehicle for more spiritual ends.
Where Gandhi remained at all, he became relatively
one-dimensional, a political actor who, stripped of his
more confusing trimmings, became palatable for Sharp's
particularly American audience, Gandhi's moral jiu-jitsu
having been replaced by a political one where, instead of
the moral balance being shifted, the political power of
the opponent was undermined. By secularising Gandhi in
this way, he mirrors the work of the English language
biographers when they write their stories about the
father of Indian independence.
Gandhi's method of political struggle is often
referred to in writings on the lives of the likes of
Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kui
and others, however Gandhi has also made a substantial
contribution, not commonly commented upon, in areas that
are outside the narrowly defined political arena. He also
had a large influence on important branches of the
disciplines of ecology, peace research and economics
through his profound influence on leading figures in the
disciplines, such as Arne Naess, Johan Galtung and
E.F.Schumacher.
Often the connection with Gandhi is played down or
overlooked by some of the later promoters of the fields
in the way that the founders never did, or, as the
founders came to an ever deeper understanding of the
whole Gandhi, the promoters tended to maintain their
focus on the earlier, more secular and less confusing (or
disturbing?) writings of the founders. For example, where
there is any awareness of them at all, cow protection and
khadi (hand-spun, hand-woven cloth) production may
have seemed even more anachronistic and irrelevant (and
indeed bizarre) to western audiences than they did to
some of Gandhi's English educated political co-workers.
Ironically these very practices, or at least the
philosophy behind them, were examined rather than
discarded out of hand by some and even touched profound
chords in western thinkers such as Næss and
Schumacher, and went into the formulation of what is now
known as "deep ecology" and appropriate technology and
human-centred "small is beautiful" economics.
Although Gandhi was something of a charismatic leader
and has been characterised as one of the outstanding
persons of the last century, he still lives in our
collective consciousness and his faults (a poor father,
at times intolerant and inconsistent, prone to anger,
often unreasonable in his demands and baffling in his
arguments etc.) and sense of humour are remembered and
they humanise him. Even if we just look at Gandhi the
political activist or Gandhi the saint we still see
someone with great power to influence others. While
George Orwell thought that Gandhi's basic aims were
reactionary and that his political methods could not have
worked against extremely repressive regimes, he still
managed to conclude that, "regarded simply as a
politician, and compared with other leading political
figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to
leave behind!"
If, however, we look at the whole Gandhi, instead of
just Gandhi the clean smelling politician or beyond
reproach saint, we see a person struggling very publicly
to discern the meaning of life, someone who not only knew
that there was something more to human existence than the
mundane, but had the courage to reach out for it and
admit to failure. Perhaps the importance of Gandhi is
best characterised by Louis Fischer when he perceptively
remarked that it "lay in doing what everyone could do but
doesn't", and George Woodcock when he noted that the
Mahatma, "with an extraordinary persistence ... made and
kept himself one of the few free men or our time", rather
than by merely pointing out that he helped to disband the
greatest empire ever known and was instrumental in
freeing a large section of humanity from colonialism.
In Gandhi's relationships with Polak, Kallenbach,
Maganlal Gandhi and Bajaj, we see a very human Mohandas
Gandhi, one who struggles with the same existential
questions about what it is that constitutes a good and
worthwhile life that so many of the rest of humanity at
times feels the necessity to confront. And many,
including Næss, Galtung, Schumacher and Sharp, have
asked (and still do ask) these questions when they try to
discern their place in the larger world, or when they
ponder the meaning of peace, when they even perhaps dimly
perceive that having may not be as important as
being, when they see their lives dominated by
machines which were supposed to be their servants, when
they realise that so-called progress is diminishing the
habitability of the planet, their only home, or when they
see injustice in the world and ask why it exists. Perhaps
this leaves the sneaking suspicion that maybe, just
maybe, the person hailed as a mahatma could have been
right when he said that "All mankind in essence are
alike. What is, therefore, possible for me, is possible
for everyone", and in this lies a large measure of the
significance and personal challenge of the whole Gandhi,
not merely Gandhi the famous Indian politician we so
often read about.
Copyright © 2004 TFF
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