An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth

by M K Gandhi

  ‘If one

  Ponders on object of the sense, there springs

  Attraction; from attraction grows desire,

  Desire flames to fierce passion, passion breeds

  Recklessness; then the memory – all betrayed-

  Lets noble purpose go, and saps the mind,

  Till purpose, mind, and man are all undone.’

  The verses describe the state that is the opposite of brahmacharya. In 1888–89, young Gandhi was far from making brahmacharya, even in a limited sense of chastity and celibacy, a quest of his life. But what awakened in Gandhi a religious quest and longing that was to govern his entire life henceforth was the message contained in these two verses. That the only way to be in the world was to strive to reach the state of brahmacharya. This reading produced a keen desire in him to read the Gita in the original Sanskrit and in various Gujarati translations. The Gita became a lifelong companion and a spiritual guide. As his engagement with it deepened, he ‘by-hearted’ it in South Africa. By-hearted because its verses were not only committed to memory but they came to be etched on his heart.

  During his imprisonment in 1922 Gandhi composed a lexicographic dictionary and a concordance of each term in the Gita and its various meanings in the poem. This was published in 1936 as Gita Padarthkosha.23 The Gita was not only central to his life but several Ashram associates too wrote commentaries on and translated the Gita. The most celebrated among them are Vinoba Bhave, Kishorelal Mashruwala and Mahadev Desai. The text came to occupy a role of a guide not only to philosophical reflection but also for conduct. Gandhi said ‘The Gita has for years been an authoritative guide to belief and conduct for Satyagraha Ashram. It has provided us with a test with which to determine the corrections or otherwise of our conduct in question.’24 It became a measure of the ‘truth’ of their actions. ‘The Gita for me is a perennial guide to conduct. From it I seek support for all my actions and if, in a particular case, I don’t find the needed support, I would refrain from the proposed action or at any rate feel uncertain about it.’25

  In order that the Gita become the spiritual guide book for the ashramites, it was necessary that it be ever present as an object of contemplation; each ashramite was urged to commit the Gita to memory. It became an essential part of the Ashram prayers, both in the morning and the evening. The day at the Ashram began with the congregational morning prayer at 4.20 a.m., a time when the tiller of the soil and a true devotee of God woke up. The Ashram’s congregational activities ceased with the evening prayer at 7 p.m. So central was this prayer to the life of the Ashram community that Gandhi could claim, ‘Ever since the Ashram was founded, not a single day has passed to my knowledge without this worship.’26 During the morning prayers the recitation of the Gita was so arranged that the entire text was recited every fourteen days; later this was changed so that the recitation was completed in seven days.27 The eighteen verses of the second discourse of the Gita that describe the characteristics of sthitaprajna became part of the daily evening prayers. But the recitation of the Gita and committing it to memory hardly constitute following the truth of the Gita. The framework for conduct was provided by the Ashram vows. Gandhi said, ‘The Ashram life is conceived in the light of comprehensive and non-formal sanyasa of the Bhagvad Gita.’28

  As Gandhi dwelled in the Ashram and reflected on this journey in pursuit of Truth and brahmacharya, he was increasingly drawn to the Gita as a philosophical text. He decided to give a daily discourse on the Gita, hoping to elaborate on the incessant striving to lead his life by its ideals. The morning prayer provided the occasion. On 24 February 1926 Gandhi gave the first discourse; by the time he concluded the lecture series on 23 November 1926 he had given 218 discourses on the Gita. Gandhi had been commenting on stray verses and deducing his own meaning from them, often leaving his co-workers confounded by his interpretation. Not satisfied with his discourses they demanded that Gandhi also translate the Gita into Guajarati with notes. The year-long in-dwelling at the Ashram afforded the opportunity. Thus, along with his autobiographical narrative and daily discourses, Gandhi began the translation of the Gita so that the meaning he derived from it could be fully comprehended. Gandhi’s Gujarati translation of the Gita was published on the day that Gandhi, along with chosen satyagrahis, began his march to Dandi on 12 March 1930.

  Gandhi rarely made a claim to originality and even rarer it was for him to claim literary merit for his writings. But while presenting his translation he made a claim that no translation had made thus far. ‘This desire does not mean much disrespect to other renderings. They have their own place. But I am not aware of the claim made by the translators of enforcing their meaning of the Gita in their own lives. At the back of my reading there is the claim of an endeavour to enforce the meaning in my own conduct for an unbroken period of 40 years. For this reason I do indeed harbour the wish that all Gujarati men or women wishing to shape their conduct according to their faith should digest and derive strength from the translations here presented.’29 The path of the Gita, Gandhi said, was neither contemplation, nor devotion; the ideal was sthitaprajna. Gandhi adopted, and wanted the Ashram community to adopt, a mode of conduct, a self practice to attain a state where one acts and yet does not act. This mode, this disposition was yajna, sacrifice. The Gita declared that ‘together with the sacrifice did the Lord of beings create’30 and the world would sustain so long as there was sacrifice, as ‘sacrifice produced rain’.31 Gandhi found the word yajna full of beauty and power. He saw this ideal of sacrifice as the basis of all religions. Gandhi emphasized the aspect of cultivating the disposition of a yogi, and his exemplar was Jesus Christ. It was he who had shown the path. Gandhi said that the term yajna had to be understood in the way ‘Jesus put on a crown of thorns to win salvation for his people, allowed his hands and feet to be nailed and suffered agonies before he gave up the ghost. This has been the law of Yajna. From immemorial times without Yajna the earth cannot exist even for a moment.’32

  For Gandhi, an act of service was sacrifice, or yajna. But how does one perform sacrifice in daily life?

  His response was twofold; for one, he turned to the Bible and other was uniquely his own.

  ‘Earn thy bread by the sweat of thy brow’, says the Bible. Gandhi made this central to the life of the Ashram and borrowed the term ‘bread labour’ from Tolstoy to describe the nature of work. This was an eternal principal; it was dharma, duty, to perform bread labour, and those who did not perform this yajna, ate, according to the Gita, ‘stolen’ food. The other form of yajna was that which is peculiar to one’s times, as every age may and should have its own yajna, known as Yug-dharma, duty entailed upon one by the particular age. For Gandhi, the yajna of his times was spinning, his Yug-dharma. Spinning was an obligatory Ashram observance; each member was required to spin 140 threads daily, each thread measuring four feet. This spinning was called sutra-yajna, sacrificial spinning. One of the reasons for his decision to spend the year at the Ashram was to devote more attention to spinning and to resolving the organizational issues of the body that he had created, the All India Spinners Association.

  During the same year, students of the Gujarat Vidyapith that he had founded in 1920, and whose chancellor he was, invited him to give lectures. They wanted him to reflect on the life of Christ. The lectures on the Bible, specifically the Sermon on the Mount, began on 24 July 1926. The plan was to conduct these classes on each Saturday thereafter. But as soon as Gandhi began teaching the New Testament, he was ‘taken to task’ for reading it to the students. One correspondent asked, ‘Will you please say why you are reading the Bible to the students of the Gujarat National College? Is there nothing useful in our literature? Is the Gita less to you than the Bible? You are never tired of saying that you are a staunch Sanatani. Have you not now been found as a Christian in secret? You may say that a man does not become a Christian by reading the Bible. But is not reading the Bible to the boys a way of converting them to Christianity? Can the boys remain uninfluenced by the
Bible reading? Are they not likely to become Christians by reading the Bible? What is there specifically in the Bible that is not to be found in our sacred books? I do hope you will give an adequate reply and give preference to the Vedas over the Bible.’33

  Gandhi saw this hyper sensitivity as an indication of the intensity of ‘the wave of intoleration that is sweeping through this unhappy land’34 and refused the correspondent’s request to give preference to the Vedas over the Bible. To him, his study and reverence for the Bible and other scriptures was wholly consistent with his claim to be a Hindu. ‘He is no Sanatani Hindu who is narrow, bigoted and considers evil to be good if it has the sanction of antiquity and is to be found supported in any Sanskrit book.’35

  The charge of being a Christian in secret was not new. He found it both a libel and a compliment. It was a libel because there were still people in the world, especially at a time when he was writing and publishing the Autobiography, who believed that he was capable of being anything in secret, for the fear of being that openly. He declared, ‘There is nothing in the world that would keep me from professing Christianity or any other faith the moment I felt the truth of and the need for it.’36 This was a compliment, because therein Gandhi felt an acknowledgement, however reluctant, of his capacity for appreciating the beauties of Christianity. He wished to own up to that charge and the compliment.

  ~

  The Autobiography had to be written in Gujarati. This was not just a gesture, though Gandhi understood the importance of gestures in political life. The choice was also not made because he had hoped to serve the country through the mother tongue.

  If the Ashram, with its observances and the ashramic community that affirmed Gandhi’s experiments and quest, was one form of in-dwelling, the other form of dwelling within was through the Gujarati language. This in-dwelling was not only with the language of experiences and memory, but for Gandhi it was also about the very form that he wished to give to his autobiography. Just as he was urged by his associates to write the autobiography, ‘a God-fearing friend had his doubts, which he shared with me on my day of silence. “What has set you on these adventures?” he asked, “Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West. I know of nobody in the east having written one, except among those who have come under Western influence.”’37

  Gandhi was being reminded—if he needed to be so reminded—of the autobiography’s roots in early Christianity, and the emergence of the practice of writing the story of one’s life in nineteenth-century India. The autobiography had emerged along with the novel and the practice of writing history, principally amongst those who had acquired education of the English type and sought to reform, literally re-form themselves and their cultural milieu.

  There were two significant autobiographies written and published in Gujarati before Gandhi’s Atmakatha. Poet, lexicographer, reformer, historian and pioneering journalist Narmadashanker Lalshanker Dave (1833–1886) wrote in 1866, at the age of thirty-three, his autobiography, Mari Hakikat (My Factual Account). Narmad was the first one to write and publish an autobiographical account in Gujarati. ‘For someone like me to write his own story and moreover print and publish it during my lifetime itself may appear disrespectful to our people. I am not a learned man, nor a warrior, nor a religious leader, nor am I a wealthy philanthropist.’38 Narmad chose to introduce a self-conscious break with the past not ‘Either to be famous (I am already famous) or to amass wealth or position’39 but this act, he hoped, would allow him ‘to institute the practice of writing the autobiography which does not exist among us’.40 This impulse to modernize the literary culture is evident in many pioneering efforts at writing the autobiography in various Indian languages from mid- to late nineteenth century.

  The other published autobiography in Gujarati was that of Narayan Hemchandra. There is no written evidence that Gandhi had read these two autobiographies but he had read the writings of Narmad and was acquainted with Narayan Hemchandra to whom Gandhi devoted a chapter in the Autobiography. It is possible that Gandhi was not unfamiliar with their autobiographical narratives.

  Both these narratives are chronicles of the lives of the two authors. The lives of interiority, of their intellectual, spiritual or social strivings do not move the narrative.

  The God-fearing friend who cautioned Gandhi had these examples of the modernizing impulse before him when he cautioned Gandhi.

  Gandhi records that this argument had some effect on him. In one of the most creative transpositions of literary forms in Gujarati, Gandhi differentiated ‘a real autobiography’ and the story he would write. He wrote, ‘But it is not a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but these experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of the autobiography.’41 In the original Gujarati, Gandhi introduced this difference through two forms, jivan vrutant (autobiography or the chronicle of life) and atmakatha (the story of a soul). What Gandhi wanted to write was an atmakatha and not a jivan vrutant. This distinction gets blurred in the English rendering, ‘autobiography’. The atmakatha, Gandhi knew, would only be written in Gujarati, the language in which he communicated with the self and also the language in which he heard the ‘small, still voice’ speaking from within.

  The response that Gandhi gave to the friend who cautioned him also provides primacy to his experiments with Truth and not to the narration of his life story. This emphasis is captured in the Gujarati, where the title Satya Na Prayogo athva Atmakatha foregrounds the experiments with Truth. The order is reversed in the English translation, where ‘An Autobiography’ has primacy.

  Gandhi wrote the Autobiography in 166 instalments, which were serially published in Navajivan and its English translation followed in Young India, which was also republished in Indian Opinion and the American journal Unity. In January 1926, John Haynes Holmes, a minister of the community church wrote to Gandhi, ‘I am writing at this time not merely to state my gratitude for this forthcoming story of your immortal life but also to state my intention of publishing it in my paper, Unity, as it comes to me from week to week through the medium of your Journal.’42

  We should remind ourselves that the Autobiography was neither written nor placed before the readers as a ‘book’. The readers had the opportunity, while the Autobiography was being written, to respond to it. Gandhi confessed that he did not have a plan before him as he wrote the story of his experiments with Truth week after week for 166 weeks.

  Even after almost a year and a half into the exercise Gandhi wrote to Haynes, ‘I am unable to tell you when the autobiography will be finished. I have to write from day to day. I have mapped out no fixed plan. I write every week as past events develop in my mind.’43

  Gandhi claimed that he wrote at the prompting of the ‘dweller within’—‘Spirit’, as Mahadev Desai translated the term antaryami.

  On 24 July 1927 the chapter on ‘Intimate European Contacts’ (Chapter XI, Part IV) was published in Navajivan. In this chapter he felt it necessary to explain to the reader how the story was being written from week to week, an exercise that had begun in the December of 1925. He told them, ‘When I began writing it, I had no definite plan before me. I have no diary or documents on which to base the story of my experiments. I write first as the Spirit moves me at the time of writing. I do not claim to know definitely that all conscious thought and actions on my part is directed by the Spirit . . . I think it will not be improper to say that all of them were directed by the Spirit’.44 This claim of writing at the prompting of the antaryami, the dweller within, distinguishes an atmakatha from a jivan vrutant. Gandhi suggests that an atmakatha is not only the story of the soul in its quest for Truth, but it is written through a process which reveals that which was hitherto known only to the self and had come to subside in the self.

  And it is for this reason that Gandhi is aware of the inadequacy of the autobiography as history. ‘I know that I do not set down in this story all that I re
member, who can say how much I must give and how much omit in the interest of truth? And what would be the value in a court of law of the inadequate ex parte evidence being tendered by me of certain events in my life? If some busybody were to cross examine me on the chapters already written, he could probably shed much more light on them, and if it were a hostile critic’s cross-examination, he might even flatter himself for having shown up the hollowness of many of my pretentions.’45 Mahadev Desai also confirmed Gandhi’s doubts about the autobiography as history. He admitted that Gandhi wished to rewrite some parts. In a letter to G.A. Natesan, Gandhi’s long-time publisher in Madras, Mahadev Desai wrote, ‘Bapu has decided not to allow anyone to publish the Autobiography in Book form as it will have to be entirely revised after it is once finished in Young India, and it might have to be rewritten in parts if necessary in light of the criticism that appears and will appear in the press.’46

  Some of the criticism and responses that came were about the accuracy of Gandhi’s memory while recounting his life. In his recollection of his childhood in Rajkot in a chapter ‘Glimpses of Religion’, Gandhi wrote about the early grounding in a sense of equability with regard to all branches of Hinduism and its sister religions.47 He said therein that Christianity was an exception, for which he had developed a dislike. This dislike he attributed to the conduct of Christian missionaries who ‘used to stand in a corner near the high school and hold forth, pouring abuse on Hindus and their gods’.48 Conversion to Christianity required, according to Gandhi, consumption of beef and liquor and adoption of European costume.

  Rev. S.R. Scott49 wrote a repudiation in response. Gandhi and Rev. Scott, at that time serving in Surat, had earlier corresponded. Rev. Scott wrote to Gandhi, challenging his account, and said that he was the only Christian missionary serving in Rajkot during the years Gandhi referred to. Rev. Scott contended that he had never preached standing near the gates of the High School and ‘pouring abuse’ on Hindus gods was not his way of converting the hearts and minds of Hindus to Christianity. He wrote, ‘as a sincere lover of truth you cannot wish to lend the great weight of your authority to perpetuate such a wilfully malicious misrepresentation of Christian Missionaries’.50 Gandhi published this letter along with his response in the Young India of 4 March 1926. In his response, Gandhi declined to accept Rev. Scott’s version, claiming that though it took place forty years ago ‘the painful memory of it is still vivid before me’.51 On the question of beef eating and liquor drinking, Gandhi claimed to have written what he had heard; while accepting that he had no personal knowledge of that particular incident, Gandhi did not refrain from stating that this experience pointed to the contrary. ‘I have mixed freely among thousands of Christian Indians, I know very few who have scruples about eating beef or other flesh meats and drinking intoxicating liquors.’52