About the Work
Mahatma Gandhi: 100 Years is a commemorative volume of essays assembled under the auspices of the National Committee for the Gandhi Centenary, with Zakir Husain serving as President, V. V. Giri as Vice-President, Indira Gandhi as Chairman of the Executive Committee, and R. R. Diwakar as Honorary Secretary. The book is edited by S. Radhakrishnan, with R. R. Diwakar and K. Swaminathan as associate editors, and was issued by the Gandhi Peace Foundation in New Delhi, distributed by Orient Longmans Limited. It was released on 2 October 1968, the first day of the Centenary Year, aided by a subvention from the National Committee. The centenary it honours falls on 2 October 1969, more than twenty years after Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January 1948.
“Man’s ultimate aim is the realization of God, and all his activities, political, social and religious, have to be guided by the ultimate aim of the vision of God.”
The volume follows a pattern Radhakrishnan had established nearly thirty years earlier, when he edited a collection of essays marking Gandhi’s seventieth birthday. The present book gathers new contributions in honour of the birth centenary, drawing on a wide range of voices—Indian statesmen, scholars, scientists, religious leaders, and international admirers. Two of the essays, by B. N. Rau and Herbert Read, are published posthumously. The Publishers’ Preface thanks the contributors, Radhakrishnan, Diwakar and Swaminathan for their editorial assistance, and T. K. Mahadevan for reading the manuscript.
The book opens with Radhakrishnan’s Introduction, followed by contributions from many named figures whose essays range across Gandhi’s political philosophy, his spiritual legacy, his economic thought, his approach to race and communal conflict, and his influence on movements for justice far beyond India. The result is less a single sustained argument than a chorus of testimonies—some analytical, some reminiscent, some devotional—united by the conviction that Gandhi’s life and thought remain urgently relevant to a world still gripped by violence, inequality, and spiritual confusion.
Context
The volume appears at a particular historical moment, and its concerns are inseparable from that moment. Radhakrishnan notes that the centenary falls more than two decades after Gandhi’s death, in a world standing at a crossroads. The greatest enemy humanity faces, he argues, is not disease, famine, or demographic explosion but nuclear weapons, which in war could destroy civilization and in peace inflict lasting damage. The arms race continues to grow, and without complete nuclear disarmament the temptation to use nuclear weapons remains real. Gandhi, Radhakrishnan insists, sought to prepare us for life in a disarmed world, and satyagraha is his substitute for war.
The book is also marked by the racial and civil rights struggles of the 1960s, particularly in the United States. Radhakrishnan recalls the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on 5 April 1968 and quotes King’s March 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial about his dream that the nation live out its creed that all men are created equal. Several contributors return to King’s death and to the wider movement he led. Horace Alexander, Louis Fischer, Homer A. Jack, and others examine the relationship between Gandhian non-violence and the American civil rights struggle, noting the sit-ins, Freedom Rides, bus boycotts, and marches that achieved concrete gains with minimum loss of life. The contrast with violent riots, which won no concrete improvement, is drawn sharply.
The context also includes the situation within India itself. Radhakrishnan observes that Gandhi struggled for communal harmony but did not fully succeed, and that partition was an admission of failure. Towards the end, Gandhi was lonely and frustrated; deep disillusion entered his soul before the assassin’s bullet entered his body. Communal disturbances persist, showing a long way to go. Inequalities between rich and poor nations breed discontent. Several contributors note the gulf between the masses, who have Gandhi in their hearts, and a ruling elite that has inherited the colonial tradition rather than the Gandhian one. Jayaprakash Narayan, quoted by Louis Fischer, stated on the anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination in 1968 that the Congress Party presented itself for propaganda purposes as the Gandhi party but completely neglected his teachings.
The international scene is equally present. Contributors write against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, the Sino-Soviet split, and the continuing struggle against racial discrimination in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the United States. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin describes the world’s state in 1967, with man-made devastation in Vietnam seeming more terrible alongside famine in India. Haile Selassie writes that Gandhi’s teachings of love, truth, and respect for others’ rights have become even more relevant when world peace is threatened with atomic and nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the human race. The book thus speaks from and to a world in crisis, seeking in Gandhi’s legacy resources for survival.
Structure of the Book
The volume is organised around Radhakrishnan’s Introduction and a sequence of essays by named contributors. The Introduction sets out the central themes: Gandhi as a revolutionary thinker who worked for a major change in human nature, the paradox of a world that does not consciously want nuclear war yet irrationally works toward it, the fatal imbalance between what man is and wishes to be, the role of saints rather than military leaders or politicians in saving peoples, Gandhi’s essentially religious nature, his use of fasts and prayers to produce a new human type, his faith in brotherhood, and his conception of satyagraha as based on love rather than hate. Radhakrishnan then addresses racial conflict as the greatest problem, recalls Martin Luther King Jr., discusses Gandhi’s struggle for communal harmony and his condemnation of partition, and notes the persistence of communal disturbances and inequalities between rich and poor nations.
The essays that follow take up these themes from different angles. Horace Alexander examines the excuses people make for rejecting non-violence—that it is too difficult, that the British were unusually humane, that violence is more effective—and rebuts them with evidence from South Africa, the American civil rights movement, and the example of Martin Luther King. He stresses Gandhi’s insistence that ends and means are closely interdependent, and that violence breeds violence and tyranny. M. C. Chagla argues that Gandhi’s greatest contribution to political philosophy is the doctrine of non-violence, but insists that Gandhi was equally concerned with spiritual non-violence, and that unless minds and spirits are cleansed, wars will not be abolished. Chagla also discusses Gandhi’s second great contribution—applying the doctrine of the dignity of man to Indian society, particularly in the struggle against untouchability—and his secularism, which emanated from a deep religious nature.
Suniti Kumar Chatterji offers reminiscences of Gandhi’s visit to Calcutta in the second decade of the century, describing the young man’s eagerness to glimpse the Mahatma and the striking simplicity of Gandhi’s appearance. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay examines Gandhi’s relationship with the Socialists, discussing the Kaira peasant struggle of 1918, the socialist critique of Trusteeship, Gandhi’s belief in austerity and simple living, his reservations about the movement in the Indian States, and the shifts in Congress-Socialist relations during World War II. Margaret Cole contributes a portrait of Gandhi the man. Morarji Desai’s tribute traces Gandhi’s transformation from a timid child into the greatest man of his age, his discovery of satya and ahimsa, his application of truth and non-violence to all situations, his sadness at partition, his conception of sarvodaya, his views on machinery and trusteeship, and his insistence on purity of means.
U. N. Dhebar’s essay follows, and R. R. Diwakar analyses Gandhi as a moral genius and man of action, a true Kshatriya for whom danger itself was lure, whose ahimsa had a double derivation—identity with all life and positive disinclination to use violence even for imposing truth. Louis Fischer writes of Martin Luther King Jr. as the most effective avowed disciple of Gandhi in America, discusses civil disobedience in the United States and elsewhere, and notes Jayaprakash Narayan’s judgment that the Congress Party had neglected Gandhi’s teachings while the common people kept him in their hearts. Indira Gandhi, V. V. Giri, and Valerian Cardinal Gracias contribute essays on Gandhi’s legacy, with Gracias reflecting on India as a spiritual land and on Gandhi as the Father of the Nation, a man of peace who saw that without firm religious belief there was no possibility of peace.
Richard B. Gregg offers an analogy between acquiring faith and learning to swim, explaining buoyancy and the transcendence of pairs of opposites as a model for the satyagrahi. Haile Selassie writes of Gandhi’s worldwide significance. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin contributes autobiographical reflections on her scientific work and her encounters with India, including her meeting with Radhakrishnan in Oxford and her visits to Gandhigram. Homer A. Jack examines the relationship between Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., drawing on King’s own writings about the Montgomery bus boycott, the influence of Gandhi’s method, and the role of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Bayard Rustin. W.E.B. Du Bois’s perspective is presented, including Gandhi’s 1929 message to Crisis magazine and Du Bois’s prediction that real human equality in the United States would come only under the leadership of another Gandhi. The student movements of 1960 are discussed, with Ezell Blair Jr. and James M. Lawson Jr. as examples of Gandhian influence.
Jagjivan Ram analyses caste and Hindu society, the failure of reformers from Mahavira and Buddha to Vivekananda and Ram Mohun Roy to change Hindu society, and Gandhi’s emergence as a rishi-like figure who realized that it was not British guns but India’s own imperfections that kept her in bondage. F. Cyril James discusses Gandhi’s global impact and legacy, noting how the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences had no biographical article on Gandhi while devoting long articles to Marx and Lenin, and how events overruled the judgments of Brailsford and Laski. Karl Jaspers, E. Stanley Jones, and Humayun Kabir contribute further essays, with Jaspers offering a philosophical appreciation, Jones drawing on his long friendship with Gandhi, and Kabir examining Gandhi’s significance for the modern world.
Inside the Book
The Centenary Volume and Its Making
The book opens with its front matter, establishing that this collection was published under the auspices of the National Committee for the Gandhi Centenary, with Zakir Husain as President, V. V. Giri as Vice-President, Indira Gandhi chairing the Executive Committee, and R. R. Diwakar as Honorary Secretary. Edited by S. Radhakrishnan with Diwakar and K. Swaminathan as associate editors, it was issued by the Gandhi Peace Foundation in New Delhi and distributed by Orient Longmans. The Publishers’ Preface recalls that nearly thirty years earlier Radhakrishnan had edited a similar volume of essays for Gandhi’s seventieth birthday; this new collection gathers fresh tributes for the birth centenary, including two posthumous essays by B. N. Rau and Herbert Read. Thanks are extended to contributors, editors, and to T. K. Mahadevan for reading the manuscript. Aided by a subvention from the National Committee, the volume was released on 2 October 1968, the first day of the Centenary Year.
Radhakrishnan’s Introduction: Gandhi and the Nuclear Age
Radhakrishnan’s Introduction opens by noting that the centenary falls on 2 October 1969, more than twenty years after Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January 1948, and sets out to consider his impact on India and the world. Gandhi is called a revolutionary thinker who worked for a major change in human nature, a voice belonging to the age to come. Revolutions, Radhakrishnan argues, rest on intensity of purpose rather than inertia. Humanity stands at a crossroads, and the greatest enemy is not disease, famine, or demographic explosion but nuclear weapons, which in war could destroy civilization and in peace inflict lasting damage. Gandhi sought to prepare us for life in a disarmed world. Satyagraha is his substitute for war, grounded in absolute adherence to truth, the practice of love, and self-suffering by the resister. The will to revolution is strongest when conditions are worst. Radhakrishnan notes the paradox that people do not consciously want nuclear war yet irrationally work toward it; the arms race grows, and without complete nuclear disarmament the temptation to use such weapons is real. He cites a Sanskrit verse on humans wanting the fruit of merit but not merit itself, and doing evil while not wanting its fruit. There is a fatal imbalance between what man is and wishes to be; we talk like wise men but act like lunatics. Inner disharmony reflects world unrest. Peoples are saved not by military leaders, industrial magnates, priests, or politicians but by saints of implacable integrity. Religion disciplines us to overcome discord and integrate personality. Gandhi was essentially religious, using fasts and prayers to produce a new human type—fearless, greedless, hateless. Man is still evolving. Self-righteousness breeds fanaticism; before God there is neither Greek nor barbarian, rich nor poor, master nor slave. For Gandhi religion is a personal encounter with the Divine, sought over forty years; in the spirit of Hindu religion he saw the Divine as both transcendental Absolute and personal God, a bhakta with unflinching faith. A truly religious person must lead and speak up, not compromise when he should stand fast. Gandhi’s faith in brotherhood is a call to make it immanent in life. Human nature is essentially good and opposed to tyranny, injustice, and authoritarianism. Gandhi appeals to men’s hearts to root out fear, guilt, and faith in force. Tolerance—appreciation of other faiths—is conviction without condescension. Peace is not the absence of conflict but the ability to cope with it. Satyagraha is based on love, not hate: loving one’s opponents and suffering to convert them; resistance to sin, not the sinner. It demands discipline and may entail self-sacrifice, suffering, fasting, imprisonment, and death, yet provides means consonant with the highest ends. The Cross shows that suffering love is more powerful than force.
Race, King, and the Limits of Gandhi’s Success
Radhakrishnan then addresses racial conflict as the greatest problem. Gandhi faced racial antagonism early in South Africa, seeking reconciliation of races and surrender of privileges. Race prejudice is man-made, a result of social training, not innate; the division into superior and inferior races is recent. The universal declaration of human rights pleads for racial equality and stresses human dignity. He recalls the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on Friday, 5 April, and quotes King’s March 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial about his dream that the nation live out its creed that all men are created equal, that Mississippi become an oasis of freedom and justice, and that his four children be judged by character, not skin colour. If America denies victory to violence and adopts King’s methods, it will recover its soul. In India Gandhi struggled for communal harmony but did not fully succeed; partition was an admission of failure. In December 1947, when Radhakrishnan last met Gandhi, he asked about partition, which Gandhi condemned strongly, saying it was a question of principle, not details, and no compromise was permissible on fundamental principles; Gandhi replied he was too old to start a campaign and his trusted lieutenants had agreed. Towards the end Gandhi was lonely and frustrated; deep disillusion entered his soul before the assassin’s bullet entered his body. Communal disturbances persist, showing a long way to go. Inequalities between rich and poor nations breed discontent; the poor will take by force if they must.
Horace Alexander: Excuses for Rejecting Non-Violence
Horace Alexander argues that people avoid Gandhi’s way because it is too hard; they are committed to old ways of thought and make excuses. One excuse holds that non-violent resistance to entrenched oppression is possible only for men of extraordinary courage like Gandhi himself. The rebuttal: some of Gandhi’s most impressive campaigns were carried through in South Africa, where his “non-violent armies” were ordinary, humble men and women. Another excuse: Gandhi said it was better to fight violently than to run away as cowards—so people seek to prove they are not cowards. Alexander replies that willingness of young men everywhere to offer their lives in violent conflict for nation or ideology hardly needs proving; what is rare is to die with a smile, love in the heart for the oppressor. If this generation is called to a great new adventure, this road—chosen by very few—may be the only road of salvation for the human race. Yet men in many lands have the courage to break from fixed stereotypes of traditional behaviour and have seen through the illusions of “armed defence”: in America, young men burn draft cards and cheerfully accept imprisonments and penalties from refusing conscription.
The “Humane British” Excuse and American Contrast
It is suggested the British were unusually humane to leaders of non-violent resistance; many governments would have shot Gandhi, Nehru and the rest. Looking only at the southern States of the American Union, such a contrast might seem justified: within recent years numbers of civil rights workers, both black and white, have been killed, and none of the guilty brought to justice. Many southern Whites believe the only good Negro is a dead Negro, just as men in various western lands think the only good Communist is a dead Communist. Yet however warped the Southern whites’ mentality, Rev. Martin Luther King, in his recently published book *Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
Morarji Desai on Truth, Non-Violence and Sarvodaya
Morarji Desai opens his tribute by tracing the astonishing arc of Gandhi’s life: the timid, mediocre child who rose to the noblest moral and spiritual height of his age. That ascent, Desai argues, began with a discovery made first at his mother’s knee and then through the deep thinking of a young seeker — satya, Truth, the “that which exists,” so that logically nothing exists but Truth, and Truth must therefore be the basis of all activity. From this came his second discovery, ahimsa, love for all living things, which Gandhi saw as the only effective mode of human interaction, a positive force superior to violence, granting equal status to every living creature. Applying truth and non-violence to every situation, he conquered hatred and suspicion in others; and because he spoke the people’s language and lived in utter simplicity, the masses understood him, enlisted in the freedom struggle, and through dialogue with the workers and leaders he gathered, brought a broad unanimity that had never existed before.
Desai does not flinch from the cost. Partition was the price of freedom, accepted against Gandhi’s wish because there seemed no choice, and Gandhi was sad when India became free. The atrocities in Pakistan and the retaliation in India caused him agony of heart; he wanted them faced non-violently, but there was not enough moral courage. Winning freedom, Desai insists, was only the outward manifestation of his success — the real success lay in rekindling the soul, enlightening hearts, and giving moral courage. Material progress means nothing if it stifles moral fervour; there are many affluent but few happy societies, and happiness comes from inner contentment, a life without conflicts of desire, lived as a spiritual quest.
Gandhi measured progress in human happiness, endorsing neither the utilitarian greatest good of the greatest number nor the affluent society that worships material development alone. He wanted a social order securing the greatest good of all — sarvodaya — with equal status, opportunity and freedom to develop, a simple society where economic progress and social justice go together. He was not opposed to material prosperity, nor did he reject machines in all circumstances: machinery should save time and labour for all, not a fraction, and machines should serve man, not man machines. Opposing the concentration of wealth and power, and knowing equal distribution impossible, he advocated equitable distribution to narrow disparities, and evolved the doctrine of Trusteeship — not approving capitalism, but giving capitalists the chance to hold wealth in trust for the people and use it for social good rather than personal enjoyment.
Desai warns that mankind now faces a threat greater than ever: nuclear annihilation, and a massive industrialization that may centralize economic power in a few hands and reduce man to an economic tool. In the West a point of satiation is reached when new appliances no longer thrill, and life is exposed to boredom; a developing nation must not repeat the error but keep the Gandhian concept of happiness in view. Gandhi held that man must pursue truth and non-violence for inner contentment, never taking action that could not be morally justified however expedient — purity of means mattered more than the desirability of the end, a lesson he learned in South Africa and insisted on throughout the freedom struggle. Even failing the end, pure means would ennoble man; if the means were pure, one was bound to reach the goal. Gandhi left no set doctrine of Gandhism, but his life reflects his philosophy, so basic it appeals to every human heart; urban intellectuals may not subscribe to his economics, but the common people will draw inspiration from him, and mankind has no better alternative — it will do well to look to Gandhi for its own survival.
R. R. Diwakar on the Moral Genius and the Warrior
R. R. Diwakar argues that Gandhi distinguished himself as a moral genius and man of action by not merely perceiving truth but actively establishing it against opposition. Where others would be satisfied knowing truth and sympathizing with sufferers, Gandhi would jump into the fray — a true Kshatriya, for whom danger itself was the lure. His ahimsa set him apart from other fighters for good causes: evil, injustice, exploitation and tyranny must be fought, but with non-violent, pure, moral weapons. Since no one can vouch for his own truthfulness to others, opponents must be convinced by non-violent means; no human being has the right to impose by violence or coercion anything he believes, even his own perception of truth. Violence is the law of the jungle, Gandhi declared, and love the law of the human species; he invited dialogue leading to truth as the common object of all.
Diwakar traces Gandhi’s non-violence to a double derivation: identity with all life, and a positive disinclination to use violence even to impose truth — the latter being the root of his principle of self-suffering. The inner experience of the unity of life and identity of interests means a relationship of love between individuals, groups and nations, expressed as mutual respect, friendliness and cooperation; even seeming conflicts of interest should be resolved only non-violently. In this perspective the truth of daily experience matters as much as abstract or transcendent truth, and the borderline between spiritual and daily life is wiped out — there is no scope for escapism into other-worldliness or individual salvation. Gandhi called for no surrender to evil and injustice, since surrender for any reason is moral and spiritual death, and he allowed no pleading of want of numbers or strength: man must fight evil not by evil but by developing inner strength and the power to suffer. Through his experiments he added new dimensions to truth and non-violence as examples of truth through non-violence alone.
Louis Fischer on Gandhi’s Living Legacy in America
Louis Fischer writes that the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. haunts America’s memory. King was the most effective and most beloved avowed disciple of Gandhi in America, believing in non-violence to the last; ten days before he died he told Negroes in Harlem that non-violence was their most potent weapon, and at thirty-nine he met Gandhi’s violent fate. King engaged with success in civil disobedience, the Gandhian method, used by Negroes and Whites against colour discrimination and by a mounting number of Americans against the war in Vietnam. The Reverend Dr. William Sloane Coffin, under indictment with Dr. Benjamin Spock for urging young men to resist the draft, spoke six days before King’s assassination in defence of radical obedience to conscience, giving man-made laws lower priority. After being Gandhi’s hut guest in 1942 and 1946, Fischer had tried to explain to American audiences why Gandhi fasted; the usual reaction was that fasting for a cause in America would be laughable. But fasts for peace were now common: in March 1968, 1,277 women students of Smith College fasted three days against the Vietnam war; 250 Princeton students, including the football captain, fasted for peace; students and professors fasted at Harvard and elsewhere, invoking Gandhi’s example. Young men were going to jail in thousands for refusing to fight, universities promising readmission without loss of status, and an Air Force captain was imprisoned for disobeying orders to train pilots for Vietnam. Gandhi, Fischer concludes, is very much alive in America.
Civil disobedience had also been practised in Poland and the Soviet Union. But what of India?
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Gandhian Method
The narrative turns to America, where Martin Luther King Jr. became minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954. When he was named head of the Montgomery Improvement Association in December 1955, the bus boycott it organized was, in its first days, driven by the language of Christian love rather than by any theory of passive resistance. King recalled that Jesus of Nazareth stirred the Negroes to protest with what he called the creative weapon of love. Only as the campaign unfolded did the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi begin to exert its influence, and King came to see the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of non-violence as a potent weapon for Negro freedom.
A week into the protest, a frail white woman named Juliette Morgan wrote to the Montgomery Advertiser comparing the bus boycott to the Gandhian movement in India. She did not long survive the white community’s rejection, dying in the summer of 1957—by which time Gandhi’s name was well known in Montgomery. King observed that people who had never heard of the little brown saint of India now spoke his name familiarly, that non-violent resistance had become the technique of the movement while love stood as its regulating ideal. Christ, he concluded, furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method. The Montgomery experience, King wrote, clarified his thinking on non-violence more than all the books he had read; it ceased to be merely an intellectual method and became a commitment to a way of life.
W.E.B. Du Bois and the Coming of Another Gandhi
W.E.B. Du Bois, the American Negro leader and contemporary of Gandhi, described in Gandhi Marg how he first became conscious of Gandhi’s work after the First World War through Lajpat Rai, Sarojini Naidu, and John Haynes Holmes. Leading the NAACP, he noted that the word Coloured in its name had not originally been confined to America, and he recalled discussions about inviting Gandhi to the United States—discussions that ended in the conclusion that the land was not civilized enough to receive a Coloured man as an honoured guest. When Du Bois asked Gandhi for a message for Crisis magazine, Gandhi wrote in 1929 that the twelve million Negroes should not be ashamed of being the grandchildren of slaves, since the dishonour lay in being slave-owners, and that the future belonged to those who would be pure, truthful, and loving.
After the Second World War, Du Bois recognized that a new Coloured world was arising free of Europe and America. Writing in early 1957, he asserted that only in the past year had American Negroes begun to see the possibility of applying the Gandhian programme to their own problems. He described the Montgomery Movement as an extraordinary unbending front of non-violence against the murderous mob that had hitherto ruled the South, and noted that it was not based on first-hand knowledge of Gandhi but arose from the truth of its underlying principles—a most interesting proof of the truth of the Gandhian philosophy. Real human equality and brotherhood in the United States, Du Bois predicted, would come only under the leadership of another Gandhi.
The Fellowship of Reconciliation, Rustin, and King’s Visit to India
King acknowledged all who helped him walk the Gandhian way. A chief ally was the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, whose secretary, the Reverend Glenn Smiley, spent weeks in Montgomery leading workshops on Gandhian non-violence. The Fellowship published a comic book on King whose first panel showed him preaching that years before the walk to freedom, a country of three hundred million people had won its independence by the same methods. Bayard Rustin, a founder of CORE and an early staff member of the Fellowship, counselled closely with King. King’s visit to India, where he saw for himself the results of a non-violent struggle for independence, had a great impact on him, and he became linked with Gandhi in the world’s mind—a widely known photograph shows him in his study with only a picture of Mohandas Gandhi on the wall.
The Student Sit-Ins and the Gandhian Thread
In 1960, Southern Negro students began a movement to open lunch counters, starting spontaneously in Greensboro, North Carolina. The student leader Ezell Blair Jr. explained that the non-violent method had been agreed upon because a year earlier he had seen a documentary film of Gandhi leaving jail, which revealed the price the Indian leader was willing to pay for India’s freedom; the students also remembered the Montgomery bus boycott led by King. Hundreds of students across the American South went to jail, and one woman wrote from prison that they believed King was right when he said they had to fill the jails in order to win their equal rights. The Reverend James M. Lawson Jr., a young divinity student in Nashville who had spent three years as a Methodist missionary in India and become a devotee of the Gandhian tradition, was a leader of the movement; as a clergyman in Memphis he later led the strike of Negro garbage workers that King was helping when he was assassinated.
Jagjivan Ram on Caste and the Citadel of Orthodoxy
The book then turns to Jagjivan Ram’s analysis of Hindu society. As society grows more complex, he argues, elaborate rules of purity and pollution are formulated to regulate marriage, property, and social intercourse; the low-born are barred from wells, schools, and temples, and their children are prevented from receiving the education that could enable social betterment. A Brahmin may aspire to moksha after death, while those on the lower rungs can aspire only to the next higher step, with Varna-Dharma enforcing the behaviour pattern that fixes each group’s position. These beliefs, Ram insists, are products of a socio-economic order shaped in a particular historical context, not of inherent psychological traits; they are not divinely ordained, though supposed to be so, and they continue to exercise strong influence even after material conditions have completely changed.
Mahavira and Gautama Buddha, symbolizing the revolt of the soul against ritualistic Brahminic orthodoxy, emphasized the superiority of right conduct over meaningless ritual—in vain. Saints Ramanand, Kabir, Nanak, and Raidas stressed the godliness of man and the sinfulness of denying him his status—in vain. Vivekananda emphasized that caste, the joint family, and rights of inheritance are social and legal, not religious, institutions—in vain. Ram Mohun Roy attempted a reinterpretation of Hinduism, a synthesis of European Enlightenment doctrines with Upanishadic ideas, and Swami Dayanand found in the Vedas inspiration for universal brotherhood. But Hindu society did not change; the citadel of orthodoxy held. The inherent weakness of Hindu society, Ram concludes, antedated Imperialism, probably attracted it, and undoubtedly sustained it.
Gandhi’s Emergence and His Wide Hinduism
Against this background Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi emerged on the Indian scene with austerity, humility, and saintliness, like a rishi of old stepped out of an epic. He realized that it was not British guns but India’s own imperfections that kept her in bondage, and he knew the weaknesses stemming from caste stratification, regionalism, social injustice, and ignorance. A devout Hindu, deeply and sincerely religious, his Hinduism was as wide as the skies. To minds conditioned by the smritikaras, by Kautilya, Machiavelli, and modern political thinking that separates the secular from the religious, his assertion that life was indivisible came like a breath of fresh air.
Kiesinger’s Conclusion: A New Platform for Politics
Kiesinger closes his tribute by arguing that in the nuclear age the threat of force can no longer serve as an instrument of policy; war can no longer be the continuation of politics by other means. On this conviction the German Government proposed to the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe a mutual, binding renunciation of the use and threat of force in settling outstanding political questions, expressly including the unresolved division of Germany. Only on such a renunciation, he suggests, could the Gandhian search for truth begin—a search for a basis on which justice and truth might be recognised as guiding principles on the road to peace, to which every nation is entitled. Gandhi expected that renunciation of force, joined to sincerity of aims, would make colonial powers see that his people could contribute to the peaceful cooperation of all nations, and Kiesinger believes he was not mistaken. He credits the Mahatma’s efforts in large measure for the fact that politics today rests on a moral basis respected by most nations. Gandhi lived to see India independent, yet independence day was for him a day of fasting and reflection: he stayed away from the celebrations of 15 August 1947, looking back on what had been won through heavy sacrifice and forward to perhaps greater tasks. Europeans watched him teach his people to resist without force while giving them a new unity; they saw a deeply religious man whose language a religiously rooted people understood, a statesman offering a common aim and a great vision, an apostle of non-violence in a violent world, incorruptible in principles that left no room for super-power rivalry or revolutionary class warfare. He mounted a wholly new platform on which outdated concepts faded. He was great because he served mankind and fought for the right of nations to live in peace and freedom—something Germany, at the heart of a divided Europe, deeply appreciates, sharing India’s admiration for the Mahatma called Father of the Nation.
J. B. Kripalani on Gandhi’s Spiritual Ideas
J. B. Kripalani insists that Gandhi was no philosopher or theoretician building a system to explain life and its ultimate goal; his ideas grew as he confronted practical situations and sought solutions. To understand his life and work one must understand his spiritual ideas and ideals, in whose light he conducted his struggles against group injustice and tyranny and carried out his reform programmes. British rule had provoked a review of existing ideas, ideals and institutions, and its first impact fell in the religious field, since most Indian ideas and institutions were bound up with religion. This produced reformist sects such as the Brahmo Samaj and Prarthana Samaj, alongside orthodox movements restating Hinduism’s basic doctrines—the Arya Samaj and the interpretations of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Vivekananda and Ramtirth, and the Theosophical movement under Mrs. Besant. This ferment was largely confined to Hindu society, since Hindus more than any other major Indian community had taken to the British-introduced education system. Gandhi was raised in a religious atmosphere, in a Hindu Vaishnava family touched somewhat by Jainism; his mother was devout, and his father often invited learned men of different faiths to discuss religious problems. In England his insistence on a vegetarian diet brought him into contact with idealist English vegetarians and with nineteenth-century English liberal thought; he studied the Bible, especially the New Testament, and familiarised himself with Tolstoy, Emerson and Thoreau. In South Africa he worked among people of many nations, races and colours and met Christian missionaries—some anxious to convert him to the “True Faith,” others concerned with his uplift work for countrymen who had become citizens there. All these contacts confirmed him in his own faith, Hinduism—but a Hinduism with little to do with its forms, ceremonials and institutions. He rejected everything contrary to reason and humanity. Though calling himself an orthodox Hindu, he did not subscribe to untouchability, nor believe in the caste system as it prevails in India, holding that God did not create men with badges of superiority or inferiority, and that no scripture labelling a human being inferior or untouchable by birth can command allegiance, being a denial of God and of Truth, which is God. He did not observe Hindu ceremonials or holidays and rarely visited temples except sometimes out of courtesy—and even then would not enter a temple closed to Harijans, his name for the so-called untouchables. He thought image worship and temple-going good for those who needed such props to faith. His Hinduism rested on the Upanishads and the Gita; like other great Hindu reformers he wrote a commentary on the Gita and moulded his life on its basic teachings. He was a karmayogi as the Gita describes, holding that good works must be performed in the spirit of sacrifice to the God of Humanity, especially in serving Daridranarayana, God the poor and downtrodden: “I am endeavouring to see God through service of humanity, for I know that God is neither in heaven, nor down below, but in every one.” In difficulty he had recourse to the Gita, the solace of his life. Work done as sacrifice, without attachment, without hankering after results, and with equanimity, could yield life’s highest good—“salvation,” or, as he often said with Hinduism’s best thought, “self-realization”: man’s ultimate aim is the realisation of God, and all activities—political, social, religious—must be guided by that ultimate aim, while the immediate service of all human beings is a necessary part of the endeavour, because the only way to find God is to see Him in His creation and be one with it.
Sucheta Kripalani on the Status of Indian Women
Sucheta Kripalani takes up the long subordination of women in India. Like the Shudras, women were declared unfit to recite Vedic hymns, and the Bhagavad Gita’s ninth chapter—promising salvation by devotion even to sinners, women, Vaishyas and Shudras—she reads as evidence that by the time it was composed women’s inherent inferiority was already accepted. The commentator Narada enjoined that women should ever remain dependent, and Manu is cited as disparaging them and relegating them to a lowly status: “Women, who are destitute of strength and knowledge of Vedic texts, are as impure as falsehood itself.” Over time orthodox Hindu society denied women higher learning and equality in religious and social life, coming to regard education itself as unbecoming and inauspicious for them. Yet some women, mainly from aristocratic families, pursued higher studies, so that women’s accomplishments appear in literature, music, painting and the fine arts. At the close of the ancient period the wife’s status resembled that of an obedient servant of the lord rather than a companion with coordinate authority and equal partnership in managing the household. The Manusmriti came to be held in the greatest reverence throughout India, so its texts relegating woman to a subordinate status were accepted by latter-day Hindu society. Even the non-conformist Buddha was not free of the idea: he long refused to admit women to his order, and when he did, he gave nuns an inferior position to monks.
Myrdal on Gandhi as an Enlightened Radical
Gunnar Myrdal casts Gandhi as an “enlightened radical liberal” across nearly every field he touched. He demanded revolutionary change in education rather than merely pushing more children through an unreformed colonial system built to serve the metropolitan power and the Indian upper class that flourished under its protection. Myrdal places him alongside modern philosophers of education, prominent in the United States and later the Soviet Union, and notes his war on contempt for manual work—elevating the dignity of all labour and binding it to social equality. Standing with the poor and downtrodden, he was more outspoken than any later Indian leader except occasionally Nehru in upbraiding his people for laziness and uncleanliness.
Myrdal concedes that some of Gandhi’s views seemed to contradict his rationalism: hostility to modern industrial technology and machines, and a pro-rural, anti-city bias. Yet recent recognition of agriculture’s importance has made these ideas seem less irrational, and even at the preparation of the Second Five Year Plan, planners compromised with Gandhian ideas by reserving consumption-goods production for traditional labour-intensive technology. On central State planning, where Indian policy deviated most from Gandhi, Myrdal sees forebodings of an evolution closer to Gandhi’s view: financial-term plans proved fictitious, and India now recognizes that development must encompass the entire social system—Gandhi’s view, though never elaborated. Gandhi held that politics should be rooted in morals, truly liberal principles; more questionable was basing morals on religion, though his syncretism stressed common humanitarian ideals while downplaying divisive rites and taboos. His adulation of sexual abstinence and hostility to contraception were anti-rationalistic, and his support for cow worship and sometimes idol worship contradicted his enlightened liberalism.
The India Gandhi Would Have Found
Myrdal ponders what Gandhi would have made of India after more than twenty years of independence. He would have confessed that the unbounded optimism of the Congress movement was mistaken: the social and economic revolution was postponed, then shelved. Inequalities widened and financial power concentrated; caste persisted obstinately despite constitutional condemnation; women’s rise remained empty except in the top upper classes; land and tenancy reforms were sham; education remained unreformed; rural uplift mainly favoured the better-off. Villagers—over eighty per cent—remained stagnant, and the landless poorer half may be worse off, with the population explosion contributing mightily to the failure. Gandhi might have modified his views on contraception and cow-slaughter, but would have seen these as peripheral to the political failure. He would have censured Indian politics as afflicted with a worsening moral illness like cancer, evidenced by corruption and increasing violence—riots and police brutality exceeding levels during the British struggle—and judged this as justification for his recommendation that Congress stay out of politics and become a voluntary social improvement organization. When Nehru and Congress leaders chose otherwise, this enabled ten years of relatively successful government but also acceptance of postponing the social and economic revolution. Gandhi would have stuck to his fundamental valuations, taken to the roads and village lanes anew, stirring the masses from stupor, with followers kept unified by his faith, resourcefulness, and humour. Myrdal believes India needs a spiritual leader of Gandhi’s greatness, love, and fearlessness to electrify the nation for revolutionary change.
Sushila Nayar: The Village as Hospital
Sushila Nayar describes Gandhi’s magnetism as rooted in respect for human personality—tolerant of others’ weaknesses, eager to draw out their best. In 1932 her mother went to Bombay to meet Gandhi returning from the Second Round Table Conference; her eldest brother had joined him during non-cooperation, abandoning his M.A. studies, and her second brother discontinued his to support the family. Her mother, in her fifties with diabetes, went to take leave; Gandhi asked how she could go before seeing them off to prison. She stayed nearly a week until midnight when they took him away, then followed him to prison, “Swaraj Mandir.”
As a freshly graduated medico in the late nineteen thirties, Nayar went with Gandhi to Sevagram, where he asked penetrating questions about health, nutrition, sanitation, and disease prevention. When cholera broke out, he asked her to control it with Ashram volunteers, telling her to “look upon the village as my hospital and every hut in it as a ward.” With bleaching powder and untrained co-workers they disinfected wells, gave intravenous fluids, inoculated others, and controlled the epidemic. She stayed nearly ten years, until his assassination.
Noakhali and the Barefooted Pilgrimage
In 1946 the Muslim League launched “Direct Action,” resulting in the Calcutta killings, met by parallel fury. Violence erupted in Noakhali, with repercussions in Bihar, and Gandhi set out on a “barefooted pilgrimage” of the affected areas. He saw widespread arson, murder, rape, forced conversions, forced marriages; Hindu houses were looted and burnt, people panicked, and mass exodus was feared. Gandhi posted each party member in a devastated village, pledged to lay down life non-violently before a hair on anyone’s head was touched. Workers needed individual courage rooted in living faith in God; only those unafraid to die and harbouring no anger qualified. Gandhi interviewed each. Nayar told him she was afraid but trying to overcome it; she and other girls thought he would provide means of self-destruction, but he expected confidence and faith in God. She said she was filled with anger but realized the poor were tools—the real culprits had launched Direct Action. Gandhi said she could go to an outpost, satisfied she was overcoming fear and anger. Nayar was posted at Changirgaon.
The Fast and the Bomb
During a fast, Gandhi refused orange juice in water, unlike his 1943 fast at the Aga Khan Palace: the earlier fast was “to capacity,” this one “to the finish” unless the madness ceased. He called it a test of faith—if his faith in God was perfect, acetone would disappear from his urine. Nayar argued with him, presenting a dissertation on the chemistry and physiology of acetone bodies in a fasting man, questioning how faith could alter tissue fat burning. Gandhi listened patiently, then asked with sadness and compassion: “Does your science know everything?” He cited the Bhagavad Gita verse about God permeating and sustaining the entire universe by a small fraction of His being—”ekamsena sthito jagati.” The effort exhausted him. Crowds of refugees came for his darshan, weeping and begging him to give up the fast, promising to abide by his decision in all matters. On the fifth day the fast was broken after pledges were signed by both Hindus and Muslims, and all his conditions were endorsed by representatives of every section.
Days later a Hindu fanatic named Madanlal exploded a bomb at Gandhiji’s prayer meeting. Gandhi chided the audience: “Why are you afraid? What can be better than to die in the act of prayer?” He added that he had no right to preach to them, questioning whether he could meet an assassin’s bullets unafraid, with God’s name on his lips and no hatred in his heart. The test came on January 30. His death shook India, Pakistan, and the whole world. A Muslim League leader, Mian Iftikharuddin, told Nayar with tears at Palam airport, arriving from Lahore: “Bapu’s assassin is not merely the man who pulled the trigger. All of us who doubted his word and did not follow his advice, are guilty.”
The Appeal to Britain and the Two-Year Detention
B. Shiva Rao opens this stretch with Gandhi’s appeal to Britain: India can indeed be held by the sword, and he does not doubt Britain’s capacity to hold her in subjection that way, but he asks what will actually serve Britain’s prosperity and economic freedom — an enslaved but rebellious India, or an India as an esteemed partner who shares Britain’s sorrows and fights beside her of her own will, not for the exploitation of a single race but conceivably for the good of the whole world. He does not want freedom so that a nation containing one-fifth of the human race may exploit any other race or individual; he would not deserve freedom, he says, if he did not treasure the equal right of every other race, weak or strong, to the same freedom. He longs to leave the British Isles convinced that an honourable and equal partnership between Britain and India is possible.
The British response was worse than a simple refusal. On his return to India Gandhi was detained for about two years, released only after a British-made constitution was placed on the statute-book. In the first elections under it, in early 1937, the Congress under his leadership won decisively. A powerful section of the party demanded “the wrecking of the Constitution from within” and a new one framed by an elected Constituent Assembly. Gandhi preferred a constructive approach free of bitterness, telling the author in the summer of 1937 that “The British are a decent people; it is easy to make a deal with them.” He called the new Constitution “an attempt, however limited it might be, to replace the rule of the sword by the rule of the majority,” and told the British they need not leave India, since they could stay comfortably if they accommodated themselves to Indian conditions.
War, the Cripps Offer, and the Untouchables
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Gandhi called for unconditional support for the British against Hitler — moral support only, consistent with non-violence. In the war’s first two years he initiated or encouraged moves for a wartime settlement with the British, with progressive Princes, and with the section of the Muslim League guided by Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan; every move was thwarted by the British Government, Churchill declaring: “I have not become the King’s first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Gandhi had unconquerable faith in his principles; future generations, the passage says, will marvel at a man who dared pin his faith on principles enunciated by Gautama Buddha.
The passage then recalls his leadership: first in South Africa in the early decades of the century, where he raised his voice against racial discrimination practised on settlers of Indian origin, fashioning passive resistance on a limited scale; success there opened his eyes to its wider application against India’s subjection. Arriving from South Africa in 1916, he did not favour demanding home rule at the end of the First World War, judging the time inappropriate while Britain fought Germany. His programme differed from predecessors who focused on constitutional reforms. The social, economic and cultural disabilities of the Untouchables, then numbering sixty million, had attracted reformers since the second half of the nineteenth century, who endured obloquy, ostracism and persecution; but until Gandhi the political and social streams of progress remained distinct. Fresh from South Africa, he saw the vital link between removing untouchability and India’s freedom. In 1917, at the Calcutta Congress presided over by Mrs. Annie Besant, a resolution adopted on his initiative urged removal of the disabilities imposed by custom on the depressed classes. Two years later he evolved a constructive programme giving complete eradication of untouchability topmost priority, declaring he would not sacrifice the Untouchables’ vital interests even for freedom: “I would far rather that Hinduism died than that untouchability lived.” In Young India in 1921 he wrote that without removal of the taint swaraj is meaningless, that workers should welcome social boycott and public execration, and that removal of untouchability is a most powerful factor in attaining swaraj.
Gandhi wanted the new Constitution to make untouchability an offence, but uncompromisingly opposed separate electorates for the Scheduled Castes, holding they would ensure bondage in perpetuity and perpetuate the stigma; with adult franchise the Untouchables would have complete security, since even the orthodox would approach them for votes. In 1942 Churchill’s government conceded through the Cripps offer India’s right to frame her own constitution after the war. The All-India Depressed Classes Federation declared no constitution acceptable without their consent, recognized the Scheduled Castes as distinct from Hindus and an important element in national life, and demanded provisions giving real security. At the war’s end the Congress accepted that its primary duty was protecting minorities’ religious, linguistic and cultural rights. Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant moved a resolution for an Advisory Committee on fundamental rights for minorities and tribal and excluded areas, telling the Assembly that imperialism thrives on strife and that unless minorities are fully satisfied, progress and undisturbed peace are impossible; minorities’ voices, he explained, would preponderate in the Committee. Dr. Ambedkar submitted an exhaustive note on safeguards and uplift. The Advisory Committee’s report rejected some proposals — reservation of seats in Cabinets as making parliamentary democracy unworkable, and certain electoral arrangements — to harmonize special claims with healthy national life, stating that the State should be run so that minorities stop feeling oppressed and that it is a fundamental duty of the State to bring backward minorities to the general level.
After Gandhi’s assassination on January 30, 1948, before the Assembly was halfway through, a grief-stricken nation decided to embody provisions for the advancement of Scheduled Castes and Tribes in the Constitution. In twenty years progress has been striking, though disabilities persist in rural and inaccessible areas.
Rukmini Devi’s Recollections
Rukmini Devi reflects that a centenary is an occasion for large-scale tributes, and she expects the whole world to honour Gandhiji in speech and writing at his hundredth birthday. Mere praise, she thinks, is unnecessary now; the real question is how the centenary can inspire others. First-hand knowers of Gandhiji are dwindling, and those who received inspiration from him must pass it on — difficult, because a great person’s direct influence is not easy to duplicate or transmit. She was not intimately associated with him, but the few occasions she saw and met him stayed in her memory. She first knew of him through Dr. Annie Besant, interned by the British Government at Ootacamund for her work for Indian Home Rule, and through Dr. Arundale, interned along with her. In those days Besant led the movement for Indian freedom; the country was thrilled by her, and people in every village and city praised her for championing India’s cause. While she was interned, Gandhiji declared he would march to Ootacamund with thousands of people to protest and to secure her release and that of Dr. Arundale and Mr. B. P. Wadia. The demand was so impressive that it had immediate effect: she was released along with her companions.
The Home Rule movement was followed by the satyagraha movement led by Gandhiji, which also produced an ideological disagreement between him and Dr. Besant. She opposed advising the general public, including students, to break the law, and wrote strongly against the whole idea behind non-cooperation. The author was then only sixteen and could not understand how such great people — each with thousands of followers, each an example of high spiritual living — could disagree so deeply. Loving Dr.
Main Arguments
The book advances several interlocking arguments about Gandhi’s life and thought. The first is that Gandhi was a revolutionary thinker whose work aimed at a major change in human nature, not merely a change in political arrangements. Radhakrishnan calls him a revolutionary whose voice belongs to the age to come, and argues that revolutions rest on intensity of purpose, not inertia. Gandhi sought to produce a new human type—fearless, greedless, hateless—through fasts, prayers, and personal example. The will to revolution, Radhakrishnan notes, is strongest when conditions are worst, and Gandhi’s genius lay in his ability to appeal to men’s hearts to root out fear, guilt, and faith in force.
The second argument concerns satyagraha as a substitute for war. Radhakrishnan defines it as based on absolute adherence to truth, practice of love, and self-suffering by the resister in conflict. It is based on love, not hate: loving one’s opponents and suffering to convert them; resistance to sin, not the sinner. It demands discipline and may entail self-sacrifice, suffering, fasting, imprisonment, and death, yet provides means consonant with the highest ends. The Cross shows that suffering love is more powerful than force. Horace Alexander stresses that non-violence demands greater courage, discipline, and persistence than violence, and that the choice is not between sitting still and starting a riot but between two kinds of action: resisting evil by violence or by non-violence. He argues that ends and means are closely interdependent, and that violence breeds violence and tyranny.
The third argument concerns the relationship between religion and politics. Radhakrishnan insists that Gandhi was essentially religious, and that for him religion is a personal encounter with the Divine, sought over forty years. In the spirit of Hindu religion he saw the Divine as both transcendental Absolute and personal God. A truly religious person must lead and speak up, not compromise when he should stand fast. M. C. Chagla argues that Gandhi’s secularism was part of the same philosophy: in respecting all religions he respected all human beings without labels. Unlike Nehru, whose secularism resulted from inborn rationalism, Gandhi’s emanated from a deep religious nature. He believed all religions aimed at the same goal though paths differ, and that religion should act as a bridge, not divide men. Chagla contends that the secularism India professes is not in accordance with Gandhi’s tenets but akin to the communal policy of the British Government, and that true secularism consists in not disqualifying a person because of caste or community.
The fourth argument concerns the dignity of man and the struggle against untouchability. Chagla holds that Gandhi’s second great contribution was applying the doctrine of the dignity of man to Indian society. For centuries a large section of fellow citizens was treated as sub-human, denied elementary human rights; no one did more than Gandhi to wipe out this blot. If the Constitution proclaims abolition of untouchability, it is largely due to the awakening Gandhi brought about in caste Hindus. Jagjivan Ram analyses the caste system in detail, arguing that elaborate rules of purity and pollution regulate marriage, property-relations, and social intercourse, and that these beliefs are products of a socio-economic order shaped in a particular historical context—not born of inherent psychological traits. Many reformers, from Mahavira and Buddha to Ramanand, Kabir, Nanak, Raidas, Vivekananda, Ram Mohun Roy, and Dayanand, attempted to change Hindu society, but the citadel of orthodoxy held. Gandhi emerged with austerity, humility, and saintliness, realizing that it was not British guns but India’s own imperfections that kept her in bondage.
The fifth argument concerns economic and social thought. Morarji Desai explains Gandhi’s conception of sarvodaya—the greatest good of all—with equal status, opportunity, and freedom to develop; a simple society where economic progress and social justice go together; and control of sensual pleasures. Gandhi was not opposed to material prosperity nor rejected machines in all circumstances; machinery should save time and labour for all, not a fraction, and machines should be for man, not man for machines. He evolved the doctrine of Trusteeship to transform capitalist society into socialist society—not approving capitalism, but instead of crushing capitalists, giving them opportunity to improve their outlook, holding wealth in trust for the people and using it for social good. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay discusses the socialist critique of Trusteeship, noting that socialists held wealth was unjustly acquired and should be expropriated, and that a change of heart could not set it right. Gandhi admitted that accumulation and preservation of wealth inevitably involve violence, and Trusteeship was conceived to avoid confiscation. He warned that if the owning class did not of its own accord become trustees, force of circumstance would compel reform or the alternative would be utter destruction.
The sixth argument concerns racial conflict and the worldwide struggle for justice. Radhakrishnan calls racial conflict the greatest problem, noting that Gandhi faced racial antagonism early in South Africa, seeking reconciliation of races and surrender of privileges. Race prejudice is man-made, a result of social training, not innate. The universal declaration of human rights pleads for racial equality and stresses human dignity. Horace Alexander, Louis Fischer, Homer A. Jack, and W.E.B. Du Bois all examine the American civil rights movement as a testing ground for Gandhian methods. Alexander notes the concrete gains won by non-violent action—desegregation of lunch counters, interstate travel, buses, passage of civil rights and voting rights laws—and the failure of riots to win any concrete improvement. Fischer notes that civil disobedience has been practised in Poland and the Soviet Union as well as the United States, and that young men are going to jail in thousands for refusing to fight in Vietnam. Du Bois predicts that real human equality and brotherhood in the United States will come only under the leadership of another Gandhi.
The seventh argument concerns the relationship between India and the world. Gandhi made clear again and again that he had no wish to see a free India lording it over any other nation or people, however small. Writing in Young India in 1925 he said: “It is not nationalism that is evil. It is the narrowness, selfishness, exclusiveness which is the bane of modern nations which is evil.” The better mind of the world desires not absolute independent States warring against one another but a federation of friendly interdependent States. F. Cyril James notes that when Gandhi returned to India in 1915, Tagore hailed him as Mahatma, though the Western world had not yet learned to appreciate his greatness. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences had no biographical article on Gandhi, and Brailsford concluded that only a rash theorist would draw any confident conclusion as to the efficacy of passive resistance. Events overruled these judgments, showing how the stone which the builder rejected became the head of the corner.
Key Concepts
Several concepts recur throughout the volume and give it its intellectual coherence. Satyagraha is the central concept, defined by Radhakrishnan as Gandhi’s substitute for war, based on absolute adherence to truth, practice of love, and self-suffering by the resister in conflict. It is based on love, not hate: loving one’s opponents and suffering to convert them; resistance to sin, not the sinner. It demands discipline and may entail self-sacrifice, suffering, fasting, imprisonment, and death, yet provides means consonant with the highest ends. Horace Alexander stresses that non-violence demands greater courage, discipline, and persistence than violence.
Ahimsa is closely related. Morarji Desai explains that Gandhi saw ahimsa as the only effective mode of interaction between human beings, capable of solving almost any problem of human relationship. Ahimsa is a positive concept, superior as a force to violence; it implies love and respect for all living creatures and gives equal status to all. R. R. Diwakar notes that Gandhi’s non-violence has a double derivation: identity with all life, and positive disinclination to use violence even for imposing truth. The latter was the root of his principle of self-suffering. Gandhi declared violence is the law of the jungle and love is the law of the human species.
Truth is the third central concept. Morarji Desai explains that “Sat” means “being,” “satya” means “that which exists,” so logically nothing exists except satya. Gandhi learned early, first from his mother, then through deep thinking as a young seeker, that satya should be the basis of all activity. He observed: God is Truth—perhaps better said, Truth is God. R. R. Diwakar argues that Gandhi distinguished himself as a moral genius and man of action by not merely perceiving truth but actively establishing it against opposition. Where others would be satisfied knowing truth and sympathizing with sufferers, Gandhi would jump into the fray. Since one cannot vouch for one’s truthfulness to others, convincing opponents must be by non-violent means. No human being has the right to impose by violence, physical force, or coercion anything he believes, even if it be truth of his own perception.
Trusteeship is the fourth key concept. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay explains that Trusteeship was devised because non-violence is incompatible with a feudalistic and capitalistic society; Gandhi admitted accumulation and preservation of wealth inevitably involve violence, and Trusteeship was conceived to avoid confiscation. He warned through the Harijan of 25 May 1941 that if the owning class did not of its own accord become trustees, force of circumstance would compel reform or the alternative would be utter destruction. Morarji Desai adds that Gandhi evolved the doctrine to transform capitalist society into socialist society—not approving capitalism, but instead of crushing capitalists, giving them opportunity to improve their outlook, holding wealth in trust for the people and using it for social good, not personal enjoyment alone.
Sarvodaya is the fifth key concept. Morarji Desai explains that Gandhi wanted a social order securing the greatest good of all—sarvodaya—with equal status, opportunity, and freedom to develop; a simple society where economic progress and social justice go together; and control of sensual pleasures, which have no known bounds. He endorsed neither the utilitarian greatest good of the greatest number nor the modern affluent society where material development is the sole criterion.
Purity of means is the sixth key concept. Morarji Desai stresses that Gandhi said man must pursue truth and non-violence for inner contentment, never taking action that could not be morally justified however expedient. Achievement of the end was not his criterion; purity of means was more important than desirability of the end. He realized the need for purity of means early during his struggles in South Africa and emphasized it with greater vigour as he grew, always insisting no impure means be used in the freedom struggle. Insistence on purity of means may not immediately seem to pay, but ultimately only through pure means can real happiness be achieved; immoral means cannot achieve a moral end.
Spiritual non-violence is the seventh key concept. M. C. Chagla argues that it is a mistake to think Gandhi merely preached physical non-violence; he was equally or more concerned with spiritual non-violence. Unless minds and spirits of men are cleansed, wars will not be abolished and the menace of destruction will hang over mankind. Spiritual violence is a threat: in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the United States, racial arrogance and racial divisiveness are increasingly marked; in India, the upsurge of regionalism and communalism emphasizes spiritual intolerance. Even in Government there is a tendency toward a monolithic society; independent and autonomous organs are under constant attack; nonconformity can only be practised at risk of political and even social ostracism.
The transcendence of opposites is the eighth key concept. Richard B. Gregg draws an analogy between acquiring faith and learning to swim. A large body of water can be regarded as danger and evil to the learning swimmer; danger and safety, evil and good are pairs of opposites mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita. The wise man aims to transcend these pairs. Neither opposite can be destroyed; both must be taken into a synthesis at a higher level. The swimmer transcends opposites by immersing himself in the water, trusting the threat of seeming evil has potentiality for ultimate good. Similarly, the satyagrahi puts himself at the mercy of the violent opponent, showing respect or love. The truth of the satyagrahi in the spark of human unity in the opponent is a creative force calling forth the spirit in the opponent.
Themes
The volume is organised around several deep and recurring themes that give it unity despite the diversity of its contributors. The first is the theme of Gandhi as a spiritual revolutionary. Radhakrishnan calls him a revolutionary thinker who worked for a major change in human nature and whose voice belongs to the age to come. Gandhi was essentially religious, using fasts and prayers to produce a new human type—fearless, greedless, hateless. Man is still evolving. Self-righteousness breeds fanaticism; before God there is neither Greek nor barbarian, rich nor poor, master nor slave. For Gandhi religion is a personal encounter with the Divine, sought over forty years; in the spirit of Hindu religion he saw the Divine as both transcendental Absolute and personal God, a bhakta with unflinching faith. A truly religious person must lead and speak up, not compromise when he should stand fast.
The second theme is the crisis of modernity. The book is written from within a sense of civilizational crisis. Radhakrishnan argues that humanity stands at a crossroads; the greatest enemy is not disease, famine, or demographic explosion but nuclear weapons, which in war could destroy civilization and in peace inflict lasting damage. There is a fatal imbalance between what man is and wishes to be; we talk like wise men but act like lunatics. Inner disharmony reflects world unrest. Peoples are saved not by military leaders, industrial magnates, priests, or politicians but by saints of implacable integrity. Morarji Desai notes that mankind faces a far greater threat than ever: with nuclear weapons, complete annihilation; massive industrialization may centralize economic power in a few hands and reduce man to an economic tool. Man may lose his existence or his human identity. In material well-being a point of satiation is reached when man ceases to be thrilled by further accretions; men in the West are no longer excited by new appliances, so life is exposed to boredom and zest diminishes. We must avoid tensions inherent in complex industrial life; for human happiness one must create and maintain peace within and without as a way of life.
The third theme is the unity of life. R. R. Diwakar argues that Gandhi’s inner experience of unity of life and identity of interests means relationship of love between individuals, groups, and nations. Mutual respect, friendliness, and cooperation are forms love takes. Even seeming conflict of interests should be resolved only by non-violent approach. In this perspective, truth of daily experience assumes as much importance as abstract or transcendent truth; the borderline between spiritual and daily life is wiped out. There is no scope for escapism into abstraction, other-worldliness, or individual salvation. Gandhi called for not surrendering to evil and injustice, since surrender for any reason is moral and spiritual death. He does not allow pleading want of numbers or lack of strength, because man must fight evil not by evil but by developing inner strength and power to suffer.
The fourth theme is the relationship between India and the world. Gandhi made clear again and again that he had no wish to see a free India lording it over any other nation or people, however small. Writing in Young India in 1925 he said: “It is not nationalism that is evil. It is the narrowness, selfishness, exclusiveness which is the bane of modern nations which is evil. Each wants to profit at the expense of, and rise on the ruin of, the other.” The better mind of the world desires not absolute independent States warring against one another but a federation of friendly interdependent States. F. Cyril James notes that when Gandhi returned to India in 1915, Tagore hailed him as Mahatma, though the Western world had not yet learned to appreciate his greatness.
