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In India, Mahatma Gandhi is officially Father of the Nation. Under his leadership India attained freedom from the British Empire through a thirty-year campaign based on complete nonviolence that ended with both sides allied in respect and friendship. That alone would secure his place in the history books, but not necessarily his place in a series of the world’s spiritual classics. For that we need to understand why he belongs not so much to twentieth-century history as to the timeless lineage of the world’s great mystics, kith and kin with Francis of Assisi and other luminous figures whose writing appears in this series. More than that, we need to understand what his special contribution to this lineage is. The mystics, though they teach universals, are also each unique. Each has an intuition or insight, so to speak, a particular message that arises as a deep response to the needs of the times. And here Gandhi shines like a beacon. He showed us the way out of the greatest problem of our age, that of the downward spiral of violence in every sphere of life that threatens to drag civilization back into barbarism if we do not learn to master it.

Most precious of all—like every great spiritual figure, but belonging to our own times—he gives us a glimpse of our evolutionary potential as human beings. He shows us that the spiritual life, far from being otherworldly, means living to one’s highest ideals and giving full expression to every facet of personality in a life of selfless service.

Even before he began his work in India, Gandhi was charged with being “a saint dabbling in politics.” Rather, he insisted, it was the other way around: he was an ordinary man with ordinary human frailties trying his best to apply basic ideals in whatever
field his passion for service led him. We need to think of him as an explorer, or perhaps a compulsive tinkerer like Thomas Edison, constantly experimenting with his character and conduct in search of what he called Truth in the midst of the messy details of real life. As he did so, he was constantly trying to explain it all to himself and to others. At any point in this volume we are dropping in on a lifelong conversation between the seeker after Truth and an endless train of critics, not the least of whom was he himself: “What did you mean by this? Why did you do that?” When he says he is “not a visionary” but a “practical idealist,” he means that he knows precisely where he is going but is constantly testing his next step.

Most of us who have survived a college education probably think of a book as some kind of edifice, or at least as a series of snapshots. But Gandhi’s words are a river. His collected works fill one hundred volumes, but only one of these,
Satyagraha in South Africa
, was written as a book. Virtually all the rest comprise speeches, letters, recorded conversations, and the brief columns in the weekly papers in which he opened his heart to an eager nation. Speaking mostly to Indians, he takes a good deal for granted. I must have read him weekly from college on, and it was like watching him think aloud. It makes an extraordinarily rich story, one of the twentieth century’s greatest dramas; but it is also, for all that, a flood of details.

We need a way to navigate through all this, and I think our best guide is Gandhi himself—but not Gandhi the writer or leader; we need a sense of Gandhi the man. And that requires first a little stage-setting.

Gandhi’s India

When Gandhi was born in 1869, India had already been under foreign domination for centuries. Remarkably, for the last hundred-odd years of this period, it lay in the grip not of an ordinary conqueror but of a mercantile operation, the British East India Company. Licensed by the Crown to pursue its fortunes by virtually any means it liked, including raising its own armies and waging war, the Company got a foothold on the subcontinent early in the eighteenth century and by 1757 had managed to secure control of the whole of north India. Sometimes in visible authority, often content to rule behind puppet regimes, it set about systematically
draining the wealth of India into private hands. The fortunes made were staggering even to contemporary eyes; historians have observed that Great Britain’s place in the Industrial Revolution was essentially financed by the loot of India.

The economic burden of this on Indians was equally staggering, though in those days no one was really looking. Within a generation cities became nightmarish extremes of wealth and poverty, with Calcutta, built by the Company, the most notorious example. But most Indians lived in villages and there, consequences were worse. Forced to grow crops for export instead of local use and then taxed heavily for the privilege of doing so, hundreds of thousands of villages under Company control lost all capacity to sustain themselves. By British figures, approximately four hundred thousand Indians died of starvation in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, but five million in the third quarter, and an appalling fifteen million between 1875 and 1900, the years in which Gandhi would come of age.

In 1857, after a century of this kind of exploitation, the spontaneous mutiny of some native troops exploded into open rebellion all over north India. That the fury spread so rapidly and erupted into such violence is a measure of how deep India’s anger ran. But the Mutiny was a collection of local explosions, without unity or coordination. The Company put it down like a series of brush fires, and a bloodbath of reprisals followed.

The tragedy haunted the rest of British rule. Fear just short of panic ran to the marrow on both sides. For the British, it was clear that survival depended on keeping India divided and on putting down even a hint of insubordination immediately and ruthlessly enough to “teach a lesson.” To Indians, it seemed equally clear that with a little more violence next time they might succeed. Fear and mistrust smoldered just under the surface on both sides, ready to burst into flame.

The near success of an accidental rebellion also made it obvious in London that so precious a possession as India could not remain solely in commercial hands. A few months later, with the wounds of the Mutiny still raw and open, India became an imperial colony, “the jewel in the Crown,” and the British government stepped in “to do things right.”

The long-term effects of this kind of domination on consciousness
may not be obvious to those who have not lived under such conditions. After two or three generations, beyond the political deprivation and economic exploitation, a people begins to lose confidence in itself. Indians now grew up in the belief that they were inferior, born to be ruled over, not fit to be masters in their own home. To survive they learned to “ape the Englishman.” The best and brightest went to London for their education and returned to careers in the bureaucracies of British India or, occasionally, to terrorism or revolution. In any case it was axiomatic that any road to success, personal or national, had to be by imitation of Western ways.

Into this world, just twelve years after India became a Crown colony, a boy named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born. He appears to have been, as he says, a very average youth, timid, inarticulate, painfully shy. Like everyone else whose family could afford it, he was sent off to London as a teenager to learn to become an English gentleman and to study law. Depressed by failure on his return, he decided to “try his luck” in a temporary job in South Africa, where a handful of Indian traders had made a niche for themselves in a community of a hundred thousand indentured Indian laborers working in mines and fields. A decidedly unpromising nobody, he left India in 1893 and dropped out of sight completely.

By the time he returned in 1915, this “nobody” was hailed as
mahatma
, or “great soul.” Those twenty years in South Africa hold the secret of the “essential Gandhi.” We will return to look there more closely, for it is that transformation—not just an extraordinary success story, but the utter remaking of personality—that holds Gandhi’s ultimate significance for us today.

I like to say I grew up not in British India but in Gandhi’s India, because I was born just a few years before his return and he dominated my world like a Colossus. I was too young (and my little village too isolated) to have much awareness of the tragedies that impelled him into national leadership in those early years. Only when I went to college, at the age of sixteen, did I discover his weekly “viewspaper,”
Young India
. Gandhi was pouring his heart out in those pages, and despite the country’s widespread illiteracy, I daresay his words reached into every one of India’s villages as copies of the paper were passed from hand to hand and read out to audiences everywhere along the way.

Today Gandhi is associated with marches and demonstrations. I
look back and realize with some surprise that in the currency of the time each of these grand events seemed to fizzle and that most of those years Gandhi spent not in marching but in rebuilding foundations, healing divisions, unifying the country by urging us to take responsibility for our own problems. If we got our house in order, he told us, independence would fall like a ripe fruit as a natural consequence.

He enlisted everyone in this task, not only the underdogs but the upper dogs too; some of India’s wealthiest industrialists were not only benefactors but personal friends. By his example, he led India’s leaders and elite to focus the work of independence on the seven hundred thousand villages that everyone had forgotten but that make up the heart of India. It was a completely characteristic approach: begin at home, begin with yourself, correct the underlying conditions, and suffer the consequences. The rest will fall into place.

One of the first lessons Gandhi had learned in South Africa was to begin by bringing people together onto higher ground. India was exploitable because it exploited our own people. We were weak because we were divided into innumerable factions, each seeking its own gain, making it simple to play us against each other—an old Roman Empire tactic practiced by the East India Company and made official imperial policy after the Mutiny. His analysis made perfect sense, once grasped, but it wasn’t a matter of politics to Gandhi. It was an obvious corollary of the unity of life, in which the welfare of all of us together was bound up with those whom the poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) called “the lowest, the lowliest, and the lost.”

These ideas sound conventional enough today, but to put them into practice is always a shock. In India they caused an earthquake. By linking independence with the way we treated one another, Gandhi shook the country from top to bottom. For centuries, millions of Indians who were considered below any caste had been cruelly exploited by caste Hindus. Gandhi made a cornerstone of his campaign for national freedom the freedom of those whom the rest of India called “untouchable.” He campaigned for them from the Himalayas to India’s southernmost tip.

Everywhere he told us that all of us were one and that we would never have the unity to throw off foreign rule, or even be worthy of self-government, until we ceased exploiting our own people. He
gave outcaste Hindus a new name—Harijans, “children of God”—and called on temples to open their doors to them and on caste Hindus to bring them into their homes. It was an impossible appeal because it attacked ways of thinking ground deep into unconscious conditioning for countless generations. Yet people all over India responded. Over and over I would think of the words of Jesus when he comes and tells the paralytic, “Arise, take up your bed and walk.” The man
had
to walk! And with equal joy and amazement, India arose too.

My college years were turbulent ones in Indian affairs. I must have been a junior on the night of December 31, 1929, when at the stroke of midnight the Indian Congress declared independence and unfurled the flag of a free India. Its motto, pure Gandhi, came from our most ancient scriptures:
Satyam eva jayate
, “Truth ever conquers.” Jawaharlal Nehru said later that on that night “we made a tryst with destiny.” Those were thrilling times for a village boy away at college, but they were only the beginning. Like the Americans with their Declaration of Independence, we had also made a tryst with war.

But this was to be a war without weapons. In March 1930, Gandhi wrote the British Viceroy that he intended to launch nonviolent resistance by marching to the sea to break a statute that made the sale and manufacture of salt a government monopoly, adding that he would accept the consequences cheerfully and that he was inviting the rest of India to do the same. That letter, Louis Fischer observes with pleasure, “was surely the strangest ever received by the head of a government.” But the Salt March provided brilliant theater. Gandhi and his small band of volunteers took fourteen days to reach the sea, stopping at every village along the way and making headlines around the world. By the time he reached the ocean the procession was several thousand strong. When he picked up a handful of sea salt from the beach and raised it as a signal to the rest of India, millions of people around the world must have watched him on the newsreels. But in India nobody needed the media. The country simply exploded in utterly nonviolent disobedience of British law.

What no one dared to expect was that in the face of police charges, beatings, arrests, and worse, the nonviolence held. Everyone knew Gandhi would drop the campaign if there was any violence on our
part, no matter what the provocation. We “kept the pledge” day after day, filling the jails literally to overflowing. Many veterans of those days recall their terms in prison as the high point of their lives; Gandhi had made “suffering for Truth” a badge of honor.

I can’t describe the effect this had on me, on all of India. Obviously it was high drama, but most significant for me was the human alchemy being wrought. These were ordinary people, family, friends, school chums, acquaintances, men and women we saw daily in the marketplace or at temple, at work or school; all ages, high caste and low, educated and ignorant, cultured and crude, rich beyond calculation and unbelievably poor. How had they suddenly become heroes and heroines, cheerfully stepping forward to be beaten with steel-tipped batons, hauled off to jail, stripped of their livelihoods, sometimes even shot? Called to be more than human, we looked around and saw that we were capable of it. Gandhi was right: the body might be frail but the spirit was boundless. We were much, much stronger than we had thought, capable of great things, not because we were great but because there was divinity in us all—even in those who swung the clubs and wielded the guns.

BOOK: The Essential Gandhi
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