Mahatma Gandhi

by Dennis Dalton

  This call for service did not begin in modern India with Gandhi. He had said that he wished to serve India’s villagers “because I recognize no God except the God that is to be found in the hearts of the dumb millions…and I worship the God that is Truth or Truth which is God through the service of these millions.”99 Swami Vivekananda, an influential Hindu reformer, had set forth the same idea a generation earlier, and Gandhi knew this. Even the word which Gandhi used, Daridranarayan, to mean the divinity of the poor and needy, had been used by Vivekananda and the Bengali nationalist leader C. R. Das.100 But Gandhi did not derive this gospel of service from Das or Vivekananda alone. He had found it in numerous sources: the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy, texts and saints of the Indian tradition, and in the recollection of simple childhood experiences. Gandhi imbibed these influences and directed the lessons he learned toward problems of the Indian villager. Then he repeatedly connected his goal of village uplift, which he called Sarvodaya or social equality, to the other reforms. But it was his insistence on their connection to swaraj that bears emphasis: he asserted in 1924 that “truthful relations between Hindus and Muslims, bread for the masses and removal of untouchability. That is how I would define swaraj at the present moment…. Realization of the goal is in exact proportion to that of the means [of satyagraha]. This is a proposition that admits of no exception.”101

  Gandhi, moreover, was not the only major political leader of his time to call attention to the crucial importance of the Indian villages. C. R. Das in his Congress Presidential Address of 1922 had urged, as a requisite of Swaraj, the “organization of village life and the practical autonomy of small local centres.” Village communities must not exist as “disconnected units” but rather be “held together by a system of co-operation and integration.” “I maintain that real Swaraj,” Das declared, “can only be attained by vesting the power of Government in these small local centres”; and he suggested that the Congress “draw up a scheme of Government” based on this principle.102

  As a result of this recommendation, an Oudine Scheme of Swaraj was drafted by C. R. Das and Bhagavan Das,103 and presented to the Congress in early 1923. This plan urged the creation, after independence was granted, of a highly decentralized form of government, “a maximum of local autonomy,” and “a minimum of control by higher centres.”104 The organ of administration would be the panchayat, organized into village, town, district, provincial, and All-India units of government.105 The purpose behind this scheme was the uplift of India’s villages; and “the idea underlying this condition is that which has been discussed and emphasized before, the idea of spiritualizing politics by changing the whole culture and civilization of society from its present mercenary to a missionary basis.”106 Gandhi, then, was not unique among Congress leaders in his approach to the villages. His contribution lies in the sustained emphasis he gave to this aspect of his Constructive Program and in his use of traditional symbols and concepts for a problem that had psychological as well as political and economic roots.

  Gandhi had perceived what most early Congress moderates had ignored: not only that traditional language and symbols were needed to involve the people in the national movement, but also that the educated had to overcome a substantial psychological barrier to achieve any rapport at all with the peasantry. He directed his efforts toward both aspects of this problem. He approached the villagers through the use of the Indian tradition with his vision of sarvodaya. The endless pleas for village sanitation, personal hygiene, and basic education came to them this time, not from just another Westernized social reformer, but from a Mahatma. Gandhi remained equally concerned, however, with the other group he tried to persuade, the educated Westernized Indians. No single major proposal that Gandhi made during his period of Congress leadership induced greater ridicule than that concerning the use of the spinning wheel and the wearing of khadi. Gandhi asked Congressmen to wear the homespun cloth and to devote a certain amount of time each day to the spinning of yarn. The proposal was set forth in Congress resolutions and many members paid lip service to it. Few seemed to appreciate Gandhi’s purposes in advocating it.

  “I can only think of spinning,” Gandhi wrote, “as the fittest and most acceptable sacrificial body labor. I cannot imagine anything nobler or more national than that, for we should all do the labor that the poor must do and thus identify ourselves with them and through them with all mankind.”107 The wearing of khadi by each Indian Gandhi felt to be a privilege which should “make him proud of his identity with every drop of the ocean of Indian humanity.”108 The spinning wheel was seen as “the cement to bind the masses to us national servants,”109 the instrument for “creating an indissoluble bond between the rich and poor,”110 and “the symbol of social service of the highest order.”111 Few examples illustrate better than the spinning wheel Gandhi’s reliance upon the force of a symbol.

  Gandhi believed not only in a free, but also a harmonious and equal social order of sarvodaya. His campaign against untouchability was, above all, a movement to create a common feeling among castes and untouchables; his struggle for Hindu-Muslim unity sought a harmony of religious sympathies; and his attempt to advance the use of khadi and the spinning wheel was an effort at bridging the gulf between groups of educated Indians and the majority in the villages. Gandhi forever remained an apostle of harmony, but at the basis of this was the value of compromise. From a lesson learned early in his South African experience, he concluded, “All my life through, the very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise. I saw in later life that this spirit was an essential part of satyagraha”112

  Satyagraha—the power of nonviolence—remained the sine qua non for the attainment of swaraj and sarvodaya—freedom and equality alike. Only nonviolent means could produce the desired end, a free and equal social order. Gandhi’s belief in ahimsa, which he variously translated as “love” and “charity” as well as “nonviolence,” was for him a religious persuasion. “Experience has convinced me,” he concludes in his Autobiography, “that there is no other God than Truth. And if every page of these chapters does not proclaim to the reader that the only means for the realization of Truth is Ahimsa, I shall deem all my labor in writing these chapters to have been in vain…. this much I can say with assurance, as a result of all my experiments, that a perfect vision of Truth can only follow a complete realization of Ahimsa.”113 Nonviolent means were not only truthful but efficacious. “You need not be afraid,” he replied in 1925 to an Indian terrorist who had challenged the workability of his method, “that the method of nonviolence is a slow long drawn out process. It is the swiftest the world has seen, for it is the surest. You will see that it will overtake the revolutionaries whom you imagine I have misjudged.”114 He could say this because he knew that his appeal as a leader never lay merely in his evocation of the great ideals of freedom and equality, truth and nonviolence. His impact came from a singular ability to express these ideas in action.

  • CHAPTER THREE

  Critiques of Gandhi from His Contemporaries: Rabindranath Tagore and M. N. Roy

  To me all these demands of Mahatma Gandhi seemed not only extreme, but even crude and irrational. It appeared to me that his entire ideology was driven by a resolve to abandon civilized life and revert to a primitive existence.

  I thought that he was preaching the rejection not only of European civilization, but of Hindu civilization as well. I could see that he had not the slightest understanding of the higher features of Hindu culture, and of its complexity.

  —Nirad Chaudhuri recalling his view of Gandhi in 19211

  A balanced view of Gandhi’s theory in practice should consider the voices of some of his critics. And he has had many, both during his long political career and after his death. Among the most penetrating assessments of his thought and leadership were from those who actually knew him. Rabindranath Tagore and M. N. Roy were theorists in their own right and well acquainted with Gandhi. Their critiques differed substantially, yet
they shared the deep skepticism of Nirad Chaudhuri, the gifted author and contemporary of Gandhi. This chapter will be devoted largely to judgments of Gandhi by Tagore and Roy but it begins with a sample of the striking range of critical reactions that the Mahatma managed to evoke from his contemporaries.

  It is sometimes assumed that since Gandhi fought for noble causes such as the abolition of untouchability and developed a worldwide reputation as a saint he stood above criticism. On the contrary, some of the harshest condemnation came from Indian contemporaries who saw him either as a traitor to orthodox Hinduism for his attack on the caste system or as a caste Hindu who pretended to defend untouchables but in actuality advocated phony reforms that preserved all the evils of caste. The latter position was taken by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a leader of the untouchables, as mentioned in the previous chapter. Ambedkar knew Gandhi, disliked him intensely, and regarded his influence on India as wholly pernicious. “Few know,” he declared, “what tragedies the Untouchables as well as the country have had to go through on account of the illusions of Mr. Gandhi.” Among these destructive illusions was Gandhi’s idea of varna, discussed above, which was touted as a reform of caste whereas “It is simply a new name for the caste system and retains all the worst features.” Ambedkar was himself an untouchable and viewed Gandhi’s claims to be an “honorary harijan” as a pretentious and condescending insult. “The Untouchables must still hold that the best way to safeguard themselves is to say ‘Beware of Mr. Gandhi,’” because his entire philosophy was primitive and irrational. If followed, it meant “back to squalor, back to poverty and back to ignorance for the vast mass of the people.”2

  This criticism from Gandhi’s Indian compatriots was matched by that of his English rulers. Winston Churchill has earned a permanent place in Gandhiana for his characterization of the Mahatma, in 1931, as a “seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir…striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroyal palace …”3 Yet, even more extensive and vituperative than Churchill’s was the criticism of Lord Archibald Percival Wavell, the penultimate Viceroy of India, who held office from October, 1943 to March 1947. The years that Lord Wavell ruled India required many difficult and delicate negotiations with rival Indian parties, especially with the leaders of the Indian Congress and the Muslim League, as Wavell strove earnestly but fruitlessly to avoid partition of the country into two nations, India and Pakistan. Of all the leaders that he met, Wavell liked Gandhi the least. Indeed, it is clear from his detailed journal that he loathed the Mahatma. After a series of lengthy sessions with him, Wavell confided in his diary of September 26,1946, “… Gandhi at the end exposed Congress policy of domination more nakedly than ever before. The more I see of that old man, the more I regard him as an unscrupulous old hypocrite; he would shrink from no violence and blood-letting to achieve his ends, though he would naturally prefer to do so by chicanery and a false show of mildness and friendship.”

  Wavell never doubted that the Raj had served India well and Gandhi was its arch enemy: “His one idea for 40 years has been to overthrow British rule and influence and to establish a Hindu raj; and he is as unscrupulous as he is persistent.” He condemned Gandhi’s character and motives as much as his ideas. Thus his favored adjectives for the Mahatma are “malignant” and “malevolent” although his most colorful single sentence (and there are several to choose from) is perhaps this: “He is an exceedingly shrewd, obstinate, domineering, double-tongued, single-minded politician; and there is little true saintliness in him.” Even as he heard the news of Gandhi’s assassination, the most that Wavell could manage was this sober query: “I always thought he had more of malevolence than benevolence in him, but who am I to judge, and how can an Englishman estimate a Hindu? Our standards are poles apart.”4

  Wavell’s judgments of Gandhi are not typical of the Raj mainly because they are so clear and unequivocal. Most of Gandhi’s British rulers came forth with opinions that were decidedly ambivalent and perplexed. Representative of this ambivalence was the estimate of Lord Edward Irwin, a Viceroy of uncommon insight who was nonetheless befuddled by Gandhi, as will be argued at length in the next chapter. The sort of misunderstanding that came from high quarters of the Raj was expressed as early as 1917 by Edwin S. Montague, then Secretary of State for India, who did not see Gandhi as politically dangerous: “He is a social reformer; he has a real desire to find grievances and to cure them, not for any reasons of self-advertisement, but to improve the conditions of his fellowmen …. He dresses like a coolie, forswears all personal advancement, lives practically on the air, and is a pure visionary.” Gandhi, Montague concluded, was only interested in “helping the Government to find a solution” for certain social problems and represented no political threat to the Raj.5

  On the other side arose a legion of articulate Indian sympathizers who from their beginning came not to criticize Gandhi but to extol his virtues. The first of these was his mentor among Congress Moderates, G. K. Gokhale, who, as was noted above, Gandhi had damned with faint praise in Hind Swaraj. Cnly months before that tract appeared, Gokhale presented Gandhi to India in these terms: “He is a man who may be well described as a man among men, a hero among heroes, a patriot amongst patriots, and we may well say that in him Indian humanity at the present time has really reached its high watermark.”6

  Thirty-five years later, near the end of Gandhi’s long public career, Jawaharlal Nehru, soon to become independent India’s first prime minister, reflected back on the turning point of the nationalist movement. With an unparalleled eloquence that deserves to be quoted at length, Nehru wrote what remains as perhaps the most moving assessment of what Gandhi achieved:

  And then Gandhi came. He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths, like a beam of light that pierced the darkness and removed the scales from our eyes, like a whirlwind that upset many things but most of all the working of people’s minds. He did not descend from the top; he seemed to emerge from the millions of India, speaking their language and incessantly drawing attention to them and their appalling condition. Get off the backs of these peasants and workers, he told us, all you who live by their exploitation; get rid of the system that produces this poverty and misery.

  Political freedom took new shape then and acquired a new content. Much that he said we only partially accepted or sometimes did not accept at all. But all this was secondary. The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth and action allied to these, always keeping the welfare of the masses in view. The greatest gift for an individual or a nation, so we had been told in our ancient books, was abhaya, fearlessness, not merely bodily courage but the absence of fear from the mind. Chanakya and Yagnavalka had said, at the dawn of our history, that it was the function of the leaders of a people to make them fearless. But the dominant impulse in India under British rule was that of fear, pervasive, oppressing, strangling fear; fear of the army, the police, the widespread secret service; fear of the official class; fear of laws meant to suppress, and of prison; fear of the landlord’s agent; fear of the moneylender; fear of unemployment and starvation, which were always on the threshold. It was against this all-pervading fear that Gandhi’s quiet and determined voice was raised: Be not afraid.

  Was it so simple as all that? Not quite. And yet fear builds its phantoms which are more fearsome than reality itself, and reality when calmly analyzed and its consequences willingly accepted loses much of its terror.

  So, suddenly, as it were, that black pall of fear was lifted from the people’s shoulders, not wholly, of course, but to an amazing degree. As fear is close companion to falsehood, so truth follows fearlessness. The Indian people did not become much more truthful than they were, nor did they change their essential nature overnight; nevertheless a sea change was visible as the need for falsehood and furtive behavior lessened. It was a psychological change, almost as if some expert in psychoanalytical method had probed deep into the patient’s past, found out the origins of his complexes
, exposed them to his view, and thus rid him of that burden.

  There was that psychological reaction also, a feeling of shame at our long submission to an alien rule that had degraded and humiliated us, and a desire to submit no longer, whatever the consequences might be.7

  Tagore Versus Gandhi on the Meanings of Freedom and Power

  Not all Indians were as appreciative of Gandhi as Nehru, as the example of Dr. Ambedkar showed. In fact, Indian critics of the Mahatma abound by 1920, and they come from a wide range of perspectives. Only two of these perspectives will be presented here, one from an artist, India’s renowned poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the other from a prominent Marxist, M. N. Roy (1887–1954). Both are Bengali brahmins with elitist views on their society that lead them to share the criticisms of Gandhi expressed by Nirad Chaudhuri. While in most other respects Tagore and Roy could not be more different as social theorists, they are united in their strong criticism of Gandhi’s thought and leadership.8