“Today we must forget that we are Hindus or Sikhs or Muslims or Parsis,” he said on the eve of his final fast. “If we want to conduct the affairs of India properly we must be only Indians. It is of no consequence by what name we call God in our homes. In the work of the nation, all Indians of all faiths are one … We are Indians and we must lay down our lives in protecting Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs and all others.” That view is alive in India, even if it remains partially eclipsed in Gandhinagar.
When it comes to the Father of the Nation, contradictions not surprisingly abound. They start with the decision in the immediate aftermath of the assassination to put the military, still under the command of a British general, in charge of his funeral arrangements. Thus the era’s prophet of nonviolence was transported to the cremation ground on an army weapons carrier pulled by two hundred uniformed troops, preceded by armored cars, mounted lancers, and a police regiment. Air force planes dipped their wings and showered rose petals on the mourners. Later a naval vessel would be used for the immersion in the Ganges, near where it flows into the Jamuna, of bones picked from the cremation site. If (as Gandhi had written in his rudimentary Bengali on leaving Calcutta five months earlier) his life was his message, his death was a message that the Indian state now had license to reinterpret its meaning to suit its immediate requirements.
Weeks after his cremation on a tower of sandalwood, his political and spiritual heirs gathered at Sevagram, his last ashram, in a meeting that was supposed to consider how they would now go forward without him. The security forces, fearful of another assassination, insisted that the ashram be ringed with barbed wire to protect Prime Minister Nehru, who was due to attend. Uniformed police stood guard with fixed bayonets. Vinoba Bhave, widely considered Gandhi’s spiritual heir, noted that he was meeting Jawaharlal Nehru, his political heir, for the first time. This showed the degree to which the Mahatma had kept the activities of his ashrams and his political initiatives in separate spheres.
Cremation by the Jamuna, January 31, 1948 (photo credit i12.2)
Nehru acknowledged as much. In a speech that was both touching and revealing, he admitted that he often found it hard to understand Hindustani, the demotic amalgam of Hindi and Urdu that Gandhi promoted as a lingua franca, and that, anyway, he was illiterate in both Hindi and Urdu. He also confessed that he hadn’t bothered to keep track of his master’s cherished “constructive” programs, didn’t “know much about them in any detail,” and didn’t understand how Gandhi could have proposed to take the Indian National Congress out of politics now that it was responsible for running things. “Congress has now to govern, not to oppose government,” the prime minister said firmly. “So it will have to function in a new way, staying within politics.”
A little forlornly but without apologies, the prime minister then ticked off other large points of difference between Gandhi’s newly empowered political disciples and the man they all called Bapu: on the need for a modern military, for instance, or for rapid industrialization. Yet, he said, these differences were not fundamental. They were all still committed to Gandhi’s ideas, meaning presumably his broad goals of binding the nation and tackling poverty. “What we need to consider,” he said, “is why the ideas that had so much pull in Bapu’s hands do not have that same power in ours.”
Gandhi’s followers went their various directions, pursued their various programs, some of which continue to this day on their own small islands of Gandhian endeavor scattered around the vastness of India. In Wardha, I met Dr. U. N. Jajoo, a professor of medicine at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Science, affiliated with the Kasturba Gandhi Hospital, who starts the training of his students by requiring them to spend fifteen days in nearby villages where the institute has organized health insurance plans and sanitary latrines for each household, along with clean piped water, resulting in a steep drop in infant and childhood mortality rates. The students are expected to survey the health issues in each household, including the poorest, and return at least monthly for the five years of their training. The medicine is modern, the goals Gandhian, and maybe thirty villages have been covered so far. Dr. Jajoo spins the yarn for his own clothes.
In Ahmedabad, I spent a day with the Self Employed Women’s Association, known as SEWA, the largest movement in the country that might be called Gandhian, which brings primary health care, midwives, banking services, and training to impoverished, typically illiterate women—many of them Dalits, many Muslims—traditionally condemned to lives of unrelieved menial labor. Ela Bhatt, the movement’s founder, told me she’s more convinced of Gandhi’s relevance than she was when she first started organizing female “headloaders”—women tasked with hauling goods to market on their heads—nearly four decades ago. “He’s a measuring rod,” she said.
Gandhi lives in Dr. Jajoo, Ela Bhatt, and others, but they’ve had to find their own ways on the fringe of India’s rowdy, often corrupt power politics. No national movement survived him, an outcome he seems, on occasion, to have foreseen. “Let no one say he is a follower of Gandhi,” he said. Protean and infinitely quotable, Gandhi bequeathed an example of constant striving, a set of social values, and a method of resistance, one not easily applied to an India ruled by Indians, with a population nearly triple what it was when he perished.
One of the most widely known of his enduring exhortations is for sale as a printed sampler, ready for framing if not embroidering, at the gift shop of his first Indian ashram near Ahmedabad. It’s offered to schoolchildren and other tourists there for a few rupees as “Gandhiji’s Talisman.”
“Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test,” Gandhi urged in this undated note typed out in English just before or after independence, possibly to Pyarelal; possibly to D. G. Tendulkar, an even earlier biographer, the first to publish the note, which the Mahatma signed twice, in Hindi and Bengali; possibly to Manu, or to himself. “Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom you may 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? In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubt and your self melting away.”
Causing doubt and self to melt away is a traditional aim of Indian religious disciplines involving diet, meditation, and prayer. It’s causing them to melt away by means of social and political action that stands out as distinctively Gandhian. As leader and model, Gandhi himself mostly passed his “test.” But the hungry and spiritually starving millions in large measure remained.
Trying to build a nation, he couldn’t easily admit that their interests—those of Hindu and Muslim, of high caste and untouchable—often clashed. He struggled with doubt and self until his last days but made the predicament of the millions his own, whatever the tensions among them, as no other leader of modern times has. And so his flawed efforts as a social visionary and reformer can be more moving in hindsight than his moments of success as a national leader, if only because the independence struggle long ago reached its untidy end.
In India today, the term “Gandhian” is ultimately synonymous with social conscience; his example—of courage, persistence, identification with the poorest, striving for selflessness—still has a power to inspire, more so even than his doctrines of nonviolence and techniques of resistance, certainly more than his assorted dogmas and pronouncements on subjects like spinning, diet, and sex. It may not happen often, but the inspiration is still there to be imbibed; and when it is, the results can still be called Gandhian, even though the man himself, that great soul, never liked or accepted the word.
GLOSSARY
ahimsa: nonviolence.
Allah-o-akbar: “God is great,” an Arabic expression heard in Indian mosques.
Arya Samaj: Hindu reform movement.
Balmikis, Valmikis: name taken by untouchable sweepers, after Hindu saint.
Bapu: father, used affectionately for Gandhi.
Bhagavad Gita: portion of Hindu epic Mahabharata, embracing teachings of Krishna.
bhai: brother.
Bhangis: sweepers, viewed traditionally as untouchable.
bidi: small cigarette.
brahmacharya, brahmachari: celibacy, a person who vows celibacy.
Brahman: priestly caste.
bustee: shanty, shack.
Chamars: traditionally leather workers, tanners, seen as untouchable.
charkha: spinning wheel.
charpoy: rope bed.
chetti: moneylender.
Dalit: preferred name, nowadays, for untouchables.
darshan: gaining or giving merit by viewing someone or something deemed holy.
dharma: duty, true code or teaching, religion.
dharma yudha: holy struggle, war.
dhoti: wraparound loincloth, usually a single long strip of hand-loomed fabric.
diwan: chief minister, under a rajah, of an Indian princely state.
doba: Bengali word for pond.
Dwarkanath: another name for the god Krishna.
Ezhavas: an upwardly mobile South Indian subcaste, once considered untouchable.
Harijans: name Gandhi attempted to give untouchables, stands for “children of God.”
hijrat: exodus by Muslims from a land deemed unholy.
Hind Swaraj: title of 1909 Gandhi tract, meaning Indian self-rule.
Hindu Mahasabha: nationalist movement of orthodox Hindus.
Hindutva: “Hinduness,” doctrine of Hindu supremacy.
jati: an endogamous social grouping, not necessarily synonymous with caste.
jihad: Muslim striving for sanctified goals by means nonviolent or otherwise.
kala pani: “the Black Water,” standing mainly for the Indian Ocean as a buffer against Western ways.
karma: individual’s destiny, shaped by conduct in previous life.
khadi, khaddar: hand-loomed cloth.
Khilafat: caliphate, position in Sunni Islam involving supervision of holy places; Indian movement to preserve Ottoman Caliph.
ki jai!: cry or slogan meaning “glory to,” or “Long Live,” as in “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!”
Kolis: a loosely defined subcaste in western India with a reputation for lawlessness; possible root of “coolie.”
kurta: a loose-fitting tunic.
mahajans: caste elders.
Mahars: an upwardly mobile group in Maharashtra in western India, traditionally deemed untouchable.
mahatma: great soul, a spiritual honorific.
Manusmriti: ancient legal texts governing caste.
maulana: a Muslim religious scholar.
Modh Banias: the merchant subcaste into which Gandhi was born.
Panchama: an outcaste, or untouchable.
Pariah: an untouchable group in South India.
poorna swaraj: complete self-rule; as used by Gandhi, applied to social uplift as well as political independence.
Pulayas: group deemed untouchable in what’s now the state of Kerala.
Ramchandra: another name for the god Ram or Rama.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS): militant Hindu group banned after Gandhi’s assassination, backbone today of right-wing party; name means National Volunteer Association.
rishi: wise man or sage.
ryot: Indian peasant.
sadhu: an ascetic or holy man, often a mendicant.
sanatan, sanatanists: orthodox; orthodox Hindus.
sannyasi: a Hindu who has renounced the world.
satyagraha, satyagrahis: literally, “firmness in truth,” the name for Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolent resistance; those who take part in such campaigns.
shamiana: a colorful, sometimes embroidered tent, used in celebrations.
shastras: Hindu scriptures, holy texts.
sherwani: a long coat worn by Muslims.
shuddi: purification ritual used in religious conversions by Hindus; offered by reformist sects to untouchables.
Shudras: lowest order of caste, mostly peasant laborers, traditionally ranks above untouchables.
sjambok: whips made of rhino or hippo hide in South Africa.
swadeshi: self-reliance.
swaraj: self-rule.
tabligh: propagating religious observance by Muslims.
Vande Mataram: “Hail, Mother,” a nationalist cry, standing for Mother India.
varna: one of the four main caste orders.
varnashrama dharma: the rules of caste.
yajna: sacrifice of a religious nature.
zamindar: landowner.
GANDHI’S LIFE
A CHRONOLOGY
1869 Born October 2 in the small princely state of Porbandar, in Kathiawad region of present-day Gujarat, on the Arabian Sea.
1876 Family moves to Rajkot, where he attends school.
1883 Marries Kastur Makanji at age thirteen, after betrothal of seven years.
1885 Death of father, Karamchand Gandhi, called Kaba.
1888 Birth of eldest son, Harilal. Sails for England, studies law at Inner Temple.
1891 Completes studies, sails for Bombay.
1892 Birth of second son, Manilal. Admitted to Bombay bar.
1893 Sails to South Africa, arrives Durban.
1894 Becomes secretary of the Natal Indian Congress, opens law office in Durban. Reads Tolstoy’s Kingdom of God Is Within You.
1896 Returns to India; brings family back to Durban.
1897 Birth of third son, Ramdas.
1899 Leads Indian Ambulance Corps in Anglo-Boer War.
1900 Birth of fourth son, Devadas.
1901 Returns with family to India intending to resettle there. Attends Indian National Congress meeting in Calcutta.
1902 Called back to South Africa to lead fight against discriminatory legislation, brings family.
1903 Opens law office in Johannesburg, launches Indian Opinion, a weekly.
1904 Founds rural commune called the Phoenix Settlement north of Durban, inspired by Ruskin’s Unto This Last.
1906 Assisting in repression of Zulu uprising, raises corps of Indian stretcher bearers. Takes vow of celibacy. Addresses mass meeting of Transvaal Indians in Johannesburg, pledging resistance to Asiatic Registration Bill. Sails for London to seek redress.
1907 Starts first “passive resistance” campaign. Arrested in December, tried, ordered to leave Transvaal.
1908 Replaces term “passive resistance” with “satyagraha.” Sentenced to two months, released in three weeks. Assaulted by Pathans for reversing stand on registration boycott. Encourages burning of registration certificates. Arrested at Volksrust, sentenced to two months of hard labor.
1909 As campaign continues, arrested again for failing to produce registration document. Again lobbies in London, writes Hind Swaraj on voyage back to South Africa.
1910 Corresponds with Tolstoy, establishes Tolstoy Farm, another commune, with Hermann Kallenbach, a Jewish architect originally from East Prussia.
1911 Suspends campaign against discriminatory legislation on basis of pledge by General Smuts to ease the more onerous provisions.
1913 Abandons Tolstoy Farm, satyagraha resumed. Leads march of indentured miners from mining town of Newcastle in Natal into Transvaal in defiance of law, with 2,221 marchers. Arrested three times in three days, finally sentenced to nine months of hard labor. Strikes of indentured Indian laborers spread to sugar lands and cities. Released after less than six weeks.
1914 Again reaches accord with Smuts, suspends satyagraha. Leaving South Africa, sails to England, arriving as world war breaks out.
1915 Arrives in Bombay January 4, establishes ashram at Ahmedabad.
1916 Tours India, traveling third-class.
1917 Campaigns on behalf of indigo farmers, Champaran region of Bihar.
1918 Leads campaign on behalf of Ahmedabad mill workers. Further satyagraha against taxes on farmers in Gujarat’s Kheda district. Seeks unsucces
sfully to recruit Indians to join army for service in Europe.
1919 First national satyagraha, in the form of a strike, against repressive legislation. Arrested for defying order on entering Punjab, four days before massacre by British-led troops at Amritsar. Suspends campaign after subsequent outbreaks of violence.
1920 Indian National Congress adopts his program of “noncooperation.” Declares its aim to be achievement of swaraj, or self-rule, by nonviolent means. Emerges as Congress leader as well as leader of Khilafat, Muslim movement seeking restoration of Ottoman Caliph.
1921 Launches mass satyagraha over Punjab killings and Khilafat, promising swaraj in a year. Campaigns for charkha, or spinning wheel, and boycott of imported cloth.
1922 Suspends campaign over violence at Chauri Chaura, goes on five-day fast of “penance.” Charged with sedition, sentenced to six years in prison.
1924 Released from prison after appendicitis attack, having served two years. Goes on twenty-one-day fast to promote Hindu-Muslim unity.
1926 Autobiography is serialized in Young India and Navajivan, his English and Gujarati weeklies. Stays at ashram, ostensibly withdrawn from politics.
1928 Back in politics, supports call for declaration of independence if self-government is not granted within a year.
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