The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi

PART ONE

Table of Contents

1

Dark, tranquil eyes. A small frail man, a thin face with large protruding ears. His head covered with a little white cap, his body clothed in coarse white cloth, barefooted. He lives on rice and fruit and drinks only water. He sleeps on the floor—sleeps very little, and works incessantly. His body does not seem to count at all. There is nothing striking about him, at first, except his expression of great patience and great love. W. W. Pearson, who met him in South Africa in 1918, instinctively thought of St. Francis of Assisi. There is an almost childlike simplicity about him.¹ His manner is gentle and courteous even when dealing with adversaries,² and he is of immaculate sincerity.³ He is modest and unassuming, to the point of sometimes seeming almost timid, hesitant, in making an assertion. Yet you feel his indomitable spirit. He makes no compromises and never tries to hide a mistake. Nor is he afraid to admit having been in the wrong. Diplomacy is unknown to him; he shuns oratorical effect or, rather, never thinks about it; and he shrinks unconsciously from the great popular demonstrations organized in his honor. Literally ill with the multitude that adores him,⁴ he distrusts majorities and fears mobocracy and the unbridled passions of the populace. He feels at ease only in a minority, and is happiest when, in meditative solitude, he can listen to the still small voice within.⁵

This is the man who has stirred three hundred million people to revolt, who has shaken the foundations of the British Empire, and who has introduced into human politics the strongest religious impetus of the last two thousand years.

2

His real name is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He was born in a little semi-independent state in the northwestern part of India, at Porbandar, the White City on the sea of Oman, October 2, 1868. He comes of an ardent and active race, which to this day has been split by civil strife; a practical race, commercially keen, which established trade relations all the way from Aden to Zanzibar. Gandhi's father and grandfather were both leaders of the people and met with persecution because of their independent spirit. Both were forced to flee for safety, their lives in peril. Gandhi's family was well-to-do and belonged to a cultivated class of society, but it was not of superior caste. His parents were followers of the Jaïn school of Hinduism, which regards ahimsa,⁶ the doctrine of non-injury to any form of life, as one of its basic principles. This was the doctrine which Gandhi was to proclaim victoriously throughout the world. The Jaïnists believe that the principle of love, not intelligence, is the road which leads to God. The Mahatma's father cared little for wealth and material values, and left scarcely any to his family, having given almost everything away to charity. Gandhi's mother was a very devout woman, a sort of Hindu St. Elisabeth, fasting, giving alms to the poor, and nursing the sick. In Gandhi's family the Ramayana was read regularly. His first teacher was a Brahman who taught him to memorize the texts of Vishnu.⁷ In later years Gandhi expressed regret at not being a better Sanskrit scholar, and one of his grievances against English education in India is that it makes the natives lose the treasures of their own language. Gandhi became, however, a profound student of Hindu scriptures, although he read the Vedas and the Upanishads in translation only.⁸

While still a boy he passed through a severe religious crisis. Shocked at the idolatrous form sometimes assumed by Hinduism, he became, or imagined he became, an atheist, and to prove that religion meant nothing to him he and some friends went so far as to eat meat, a frightful sacrilege for a Hindu. And Gandhi nearly perished with disgust and mortification.⁹ He was engaged at the age of eight and married at the age of twelve.¹⁰ At nineteen he was sent to England to complete his studies at the University of London and at the law school. Before his leaving India, his mother made him take the three vows of Jaïn, which prescribe abstention from wine, meat, and sexual intercourse.

He arrived in London in September, 1888, and after the first few months of uncertainty and deception, during which, as he says, he wasted a lot of time and money trying to become an Englishman, he buckled down to hard work and led a strictly regulated life. Some friends gave him a copy of the Bible, but the time to understand it had not yet come. But it was during his stay in London that he realized for the first time the beauty of the Bhagavad Gitâ. He was carried away by it. It was the light the exiled Hindu had been seeking, and it gave him back his faith. He realized that for him salvation could lie only in Hinduism.¹¹

He returned to India in 1891, a rather sad home-coming, for his mother had just died, and the news of her death had been withheld from him. Soon afterward he began practicing law at the Supreme Court of Bombay. He abandoned this career a few years later, having come to look upon it as immoral. But even while practicing law he used to make a point of reserving the right to abandon a case if he had reason to believe it unjust.

At this stage of his career he met various people who stirred in him a presentiment as to his future mission in life. He was influenced by two men in particular. One of them was the Uncrowned King of Bombay, the Parsi Dadabhai, and the other Professor Gokhale. Gokhale was one of the leading statesmen in India and one of the first to introduce educational reforms, while Dadabhai, according to Gandhi, was the real founder of the Indian nationalist movement. Both men combined the highest wisdom and learning with the utmost simplicity and gentleness.¹² It was Dadabhai who, in trying to moderate Gandhi's youthful ardor, gave him, in 1892, his first real lesson in ahimsa by teaching him to apply heroic passivity—if two such words may be linked—to public life by fighting evil, not by evil, but by love. A little later we will discuss this magic word of ahimsa, the sublime message of India to the world.

3

Gandhi's activity may be divided into two periods. From 1898 to 1914 its field was South Africa; from 1914 to 1922, India.

That Gandhi could carry on the South-African campaign for more than twenty years without awakening any special comment in Europe is a proof of the incredible short-sightedness of our political leaders, historians, thinkers, and believers, for Gandhi's efforts constituted a soul's epopee, unequaled in our times, not only because of the intensity and the constancy of the sacrifice required, but because of the final triumph.

In 1890-91 some 150,000 Indian emigrants were settled in South Africa, most of them having taken up abode in Natal. The white population resented their presence, and the Government encouraged the xenophobia of the whites by a series of oppressive measures designed to prevent the immigration of Asiatics and to oblige those already settled in Africa to leave. Through systematic persecution the life of the Indians in Africa was made intolerable; they were burdened with overwhelming taxes and subjected to the most humiliating police ordinances and outrages of all sorts, ranging from the looting and destruction of shops and property to lynching, all under cover of white civilization.

In 1893 Gandhi was called to Pretoria on an important case. He was not familiar with the situation in South Africa, but from the very first he met with illuminating experiences. Gandhi, a Hindu of high race, who had always been received with the greatest courtesy in England and Europe, and who until then had looked upon the whites as his natural friends, suddenly found himself the butt of the vilest affronts. In Natal, and particularly in Dutch Transvaal, he was thrown out of hotels and trains, insulted, beaten, and kicked. He would have returned to India at once if he had not been bound by contract to remain a year in South Africa. During these twelve months he learned the art of self-control, but all the time he longed for his contract to expire, so that he might return to India. But when at last he was about to leave, he learned that the South-African Government was planning to pass a bill depriving the Indians of the franchise. The Indians in Africa were helpless, unable to defend themselves; they were completely unorganized and demoralized. They had no leader, no one to guide them. Gandhi felt that it was his duty to defend them. He realized it would be wrong to leave. The cause of the disinherited Indians became his. He gave himself up to it, and remained in Africa.

Then began an epic struggle between spirit on one side and governmental power and brute force on the other. Gandhi was a lawyer at the time, and his first step was to prove the illegality of the Asiatic Exclusion Act from the point of view of law, and he won his case despite the most virulent opposition. In this connection he had huge petitions signed; he organized the Indian Congress at Natal, and formed an association for Indian education. A little later he founded a paper, Indian Opinion, published in English and three Indian languages. Finally, in order to work more efficaciously for his compatriots in Africa, he decided to become one of them. He had a lucrative clientele in Johannesburg (Gokhale says Gandhi was making at that time about five or six thousand pounds a year). He gave it up to espouse poverty, like St. Francis. He abandoned all ties in order to live the life of the persecuted Indians, to share their trials. And he ennobled them thereby, for he taught them the doctrine of non-resistance. In 1904 he founded at Phoenix, near Durban, an agricultural colony along Tolstoian lines.¹³ He called upon his compatriots, gave them land, and made them take the solemn oath of poverty. He took upon himself the humblest tasks.

For years the silent colony resisted the Government. It withdrew from the cities, gradually paralyzing the industrial life of the country, carrying on a sort of religious strike against which violence—all violence—was powerless, just as the violence of imperial Rome was powerless against the faith of the first Christians. Yet very few of these early Christians would have carried the doctrine of love and forgiveness so far as to help their persecutors when in danger, as Gandhi did. Whenever the South-African state was in serious difficulties Gandhi suspended the non-participation of the Indian population in public services and offered his assistance. In 1899, during the Boer War, he organized an Indian Red Cross, which was twice cited for bravery under fire. When the plague broke out in Johannesburg in 1904, Gandhi organized