A Man Called
Mahatma
by Leo Rosten
[courtesy: Reader’s
Digest, July 1983, pp.124-130.]
The skinny, bald,
half-naked Hindu in a loin cloth had walked for 24 days and over 240
miles, to Dandi, north of Bombay. He was recruiting villagers for a
peaceful demonstration against the overlords from England. He had
coined a name for the protest: Satyagraha, meaning ‘force of
truth’.
He had notified the
viceroy that he would deliberately break the law – by picking up a
pinch of dried salt at the water’s edge. No Indian was permitted to
pan salt, which was a monopoly of the English government. Now he
bent down, picked up a small lump of caked salt and held it high.
Ideally, native police would brutally break up the crowd. Then India
would rise up; offices would empty, railroads would stop running…
But not a single
policeman was present. Mahatma Gandhi decided that more provocations
were needed. So he announced a reckless and dramatic act: he and his
followers would raid the government salt works at Dharsana in the
name of the people. He was arrested now, but 2,500 of his followers
marched upon the salt works, where 400 police awaited them. The Satyagrahis were clubbed about the head and body. ‘Not one
raised an arm to ward off the blow,’ wrote Webb Miller of the United
Press. ‘The waiting marchers groaned and sucked in their breaths at
every blow, [then] marched on until struck down.’ The horror went on
for two hours, the phalanxes surging on, stomped, hurled into
ditches. Everywhere people lay moaning or unconscious. The date was
May 21, 1930. Miller’s chilling report raced to the farthest parts
of the globe. The salt-march massacre was a turning point in the
history of India – and, as it turned out, of the world.
This extraordinary man
called the Mahatma (‘Great Soul’) absolutely baffled the colonial
governors. They called him a crackpot, a hypocrite, a mystic. To the
rajahs and maharajahs in their palaces, he was a preposterous
rabble-rouser. To the Indian politicians struggling for home rule,
he was a deluded demagogue. To an incredulous Parliament in London,
he was a ‘troublemaker in a nappie’.
Touring India’s
engorged cities and squalid villages, he championed a revolutionary
weapon; peaceful disobedience. Early in his life, he read in the New
Testament: ‘…resist not evil – but whosoever shall smite thee on thy
right cheek, turn to him the other…’ Years later, he remembered that
‘the words went straight to my heart’. He appeared in the most
wretched parts of India, with a goat whose milk he drank. He was a
vegetarian. He addressed mass meetings; sometimes he would sit
absolutely silent, cross-legged, on a high platform – and his
audiences remained silent too, transfixed.
He held no office. He
commanded no soldiers. He had no formal authority. Yet he could
paralyze India, for at his word his followers simply stopped working
and crippled the nation’s offices, factories, railways. His votaries
deliberately invited arrest by the tens of thousands. He, himself,
spent some 2,100 days in Indian jails, after 249 in South Africa.
‘Jail is jail for thieves’, he said. ‘For me, it is a temple’. As a
masterstroke, he fasted. Nothing so haunted the satraps in Delhi or
the wisest men in Parliament as the nightmare of what might happen,
the length and breadth of India, if ‘this seditious fakir’, as
Winston Churchill growled, were to die of starvation. What could one
do with such a man?
He was born Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi in 1869, in Porbandar, India. The Gandhis were
middle-class Hindus (‘Gandhi’ means grocer) of the Vaishyas caste,
ranking just below the awesome Brahmans (priests, scholars) and the
Kshatriyas (noblemen, warriors). The Gandhis, strongly influenced by
a strict pacifist sect, abhorred the taking of life, even that of an
insect. Young Gandhi took as his models two holy figures from Hindu
mythology, one who represented Truthfulness and one who symbolized
Sacrifice. At the age of 13, he was married off to a 13-year-old
girl. Sent to London to study law, the shy, melancholy young Hindu
sought to turn himself into a proper Englishman. He practiced
elocution, studied French, even took dancing lessons.
After three years in
London, he passed his law exams and returned to India. A Moslem
company soon asked him to go to South Africa to help handle a
lawsuit. There a searing episode changed his life. First class
tickets to Pretoria had been purchased for him by his employer. At
Pietermaritzburg – the first stop of his journey by rail – a
European entered the compartment. Seeing a Colored, however English
his dress, the white man summoned the conductor, furious at sharing
a compartment with ‘a damn coolie’. Gandhi refused to go to the
baggage compartment and was thrown off the train. The humiliation
proved to be ‘the most creative experience of my life’, Gandhi said.
‘My active nonviolence began from that date’.
The gaunt, jug-eared
barrister began to urge his despised and voteless compatriots to
unite for ‘peaceful disobedience’. Gandhi had learned this doctrine
from reading Tolstoy and the American advocate of civil protest,
Henry David Thoreau. Soon Gandhi was expounding the doctrine of ahimsa (non violence). He admonished Indians in South Africa to
purge themselves of the ancient hatred that split Hindu from Moslem.
He drummed two injunctions into the minds of the ignorant; they must
be clean (public hygiene was an alien concept in India), and
they must set a moral example by practicing absolute truthfulness.
Gandhi began to
denounce a series of prejudicial acts by the South African
authorities; the restricting of travel by Indians, making strikes a
breach of law, holding only Christian marriages legal. After 50,000
Indians joined this Satyagraha campaign, the government
enacted a historic reform bill. Eventually he turned away from
politics to pursue his spiritual longings. ‘What I have been
striving for [all] these years is to see God face to face’. He
established an ashram, a working agrarian commune devoted to prayer,
meditation and humility. And in 1915, 22 years after he had arrived
in South Africa, he forsook his law practice to return to India.
India? The name is
misleading. For this was not a nation; it was a hodgepodge of
principalities, a patchwork of faiths and superstitions, a
conglomeration of creeds and cults and castes who slaughtered one
another in periodic orgies of fanaticism. Even today, India harbors
312 languages – 15 of them official – and some 1,400 dialects. The
land was besotted with myriad mythologies and superstititions, and
so ravaged by plagues and famine that it sometimes seemed to be the
domain of the dead. Most shocking were the Untouchables; 50
million social lepers yoked to the basest tasks, forbidden to
live in villages or drink from public wells or enter a caste temple;
bound to shout ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ as a warning to others of their
approach. It was to this India, in which cholera, typhoid,
hepatitis and dysentery felled millions, while billionaire
maharajahs wielded power over the docile masses, that Mohandas
Gandhi returned. ‘All India,’ he announced, ‘is my family’.
Gandhi established
another ashram and calmly declared that he welcomed: Untouchables!
He called them ‘Harijans’ (‘children of God’. His most loyal
disciples were horrified by this defiance of taboo. Even his
obedient wife, appalled, warned him that an ashram so ‘defiled’ was
certain to fail. For years thereafter Gandhi was harassed by
orthodox Hindus and by gangs of youths who would lie down in front
of any vehicle in which he rode. When his car was stoned, Gandhi
would get out and march straight into the mob, and sometimes he
would be so frustrated that he would cry ‘Kill me! Why are
you afraid to kill me?’
He never feared dying,
nor was he unduly upset by the death of others – if they died
‘innocently’, voluntarily. To him, death meant the achievement of
perfect Brahmacharya, the state of no sensuality, of
sinlessness. Ideally, death meant to be forever united with God. His
new ashram grew to over 200 souls, among them athiests, racists,
bigots, advocates of violence. When a startled visitor asked Gandhi
how he could accept them, he replied, ‘Mine is a madhouse, and I am
the maddest of the lot. But those who cannot see the good in those
people should have their eyes examined.’ When funds for the utopian
retreat were exhausted, Gandhi said, ‘We shall go to live in the
Untouchable quarter’. And they did.
‘Gandhiji’, as his
adoring followers now called him, began a campaign to persuade
Indians to boycott British goods. The exhilarations aroused by the
boycott soared beyond control. A mob of excited Satyagrahis
clashed with police in the village of Chauri Chaura. Twenty-two
policemen were hacked to pieces. Gandhi, stunned, canceled his
crusade. And those politicians who despised ahimsa, who
insisted that massive force would sooner achieve Indian
independence, berated the Mahatma. He was stoned, vilified, almost
assassinated. But he also became the acknowledged leader of India’s
National Congress, and the father of modern India.
His fame spread around
the world. Idealists and converts flocked to him. He was venerated
as an avatar (an incarnation of a deity). It is to Gandhi’s credit,
however, that he begged his disciples not to ‘treat me as a god’. To
an Englishman who sneered, ‘You are a saint meddling in politics’,
Gandhi replied, ‘No, I am a politician trying to be a saint.’ He
beseeched his followers to love those who reviled them. When his
political rivals taunted him because he refused to call the British
enemies, he said, ‘If we are just to them, we shall receive their
support’.
Gandhi’s conduct in
World War II was utterly bewildering to Westerners. When Japan
seemed about to invade India, Gandhi advised his countrymen; let the
Japanese take as much of India as they want, but make the conquerors
‘feel unwanted’. With England defending India, Gandhi wanted to call
a disobedience campaign to hasten Indian independence. That it would
also cripple the production of arms sorely needed by Indian, no less
than British, troops seems not to have disturbed him. And, in an
open letter to the besieged, bombed people of Britain, Gandhi urged
surrender: ‘Let them take possession of your beautiful island with
your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither
your souls nor your minds.’ He once wrote to the viceroy: ‘Hitler is
not a bad man.’ More incredible is the letter Gandhiji wrote to
Adolf Hitler on December 24, 1941:
“We have no doubt
about your devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you
are the monster described by your opponents. But many of your acts
are monstrous. We resist the British Imperialism no less than
Nazism…If there is a difference, it is [only] in degree.”
And if all this is too
much to believe, the Mahatma advised the desperate Jews of Europe to
rebuke Hitler by committing suicide en masse; this would be a noble
martyrdom, he promised; it would ‘arouse’ world opinion; it would
leave humanity ‘a rich heritage’.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah,
leader of the militant Moslem League, had long demanded the
partition of India, so that Moslems would have a separate homeland –
Pakistan: ‘I will not accept the replacement of English tyranny by
the tyranny of the Hindus’. Gandhi fiercely opposed partition,
predicting bloodshed. Jinnah proclaimed a ‘Direct Action Day’ on
August 15, 1946, in Bengal. One result of this was an outbreak of
unprecedented violence in Calcutta, where Hindu and Moslem mobs went
crazy – attacking, raping, beheading one another.
Two months later the
77 year-old Gandhi set forth for another bloodied city, Noakhali,
where Moslems had gone wild. With an interpreter and secretary, he
proceeded, barefoot, trying to still the terror, preaching his
gospel of love. He so walked for four months. Although his
effort succeeded around Noakhali, the violence spread like wildfire
to other provinces.
India became
independent on August 15, 1947. As Hindus and Sikhs moved eastward,
out of the newly created Pakistan, they clashed with Moslems from
East Punjab heading west to their new land. Literally millions of
people perished in the ensuing carnage. Gandhi, stricken, announced
that he would fast ‘to the end’ unless the blood bath stopped. To
the Mahatma’s bedside came Moslem, Sikh and Hindu leaders, pledging
themselves to stop the killings. But in September hideous riots
broke out in Delhi; again Gandhi fasted.
Orthodox Hindus were
incensed by the Mahatma’s call for love of the detested Moslems.
During one of Gandhi’s evening prayer meetings, a bomb exploded.
Gandhiji objected when police searched those who came to his next
meetings, telling the officers not to worry about his safety. ‘If I
have to die, I shall die at a prayer meeting.’ And so it happened.
He was on his way to a huge prayer meeting in 1948 when he was
killed – not by a Moslem but by a Hindu, a zealot who hated Gandhi’s
pro-Moslem and ‘Christian’ ways and blamed him for partition. Shot
at close range, in chest and abdomen, he cried ‘Hai Rama’
(‘Oh, God’).
The Mahatma’s ashes
were carefully portioned out to province governors, and tiny amounts
were cast into each of India’s sacred rivers. His great disciple and
chosen successor, Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke for uncountable millions
when he said, ‘The light has gone out of our lives, and there is
darkness everywhere.’
Today, not 40 yeas
after his death, the story of Mahatma Gandhi seems a medieval saga.
History, unlike movies, must reserve judgment on his achievement.
Some scholars believe that India’s independence was imminent, and
that the erratic and unrealistic Gandhi actually delayed it. The
success of Gandhi’s Satyagraha tells us as much about the
English as it does about passive resistance. For despite dubious
ordinances and harsh law enforcement, the English did remain
committed to decency. Gandhiji confessed: ‘I doubt if I ever could
have succeeded against any other nation.’
The Untouchables are
marginally better off because of him. But India’s hierarchy of
birth, riches and loathing still survives. Nor has India given the
world a shining example of Gandhi’s ideals. In 30 years, India has
waged three bloody wars with Pakistan. For all his beatification by
the masses, for all the nobility of his purpose, Gandhi was not a
saint. He had a sharp temper and a prickly temperament. He would not
work with many who would have strengthened a common cause. He was
often autocratic. His periods of silence, to say nothing of his
fasts, produced a bounty of ‘inner voices’, guiding (or misguiding)
him. His penchant for eloquent outbursts led him to cry, ‘I would
not flinch from sacrificing a million lives for India’s liberty!’
For a man who held that to take even an ant’s life is evil, the
offering of a million lies gives one pause.
In politics, Gandhi
was much shrewder than he appeared. Consider the political power of
his fasts. From his bare hut came messages, radio speeches,
interviews. Day by day, in this apparent march to death by
starvation, the world’s excitement mounted. Every minor scrap of
information held millions enthralled – and triggered marches from
Bombay to Boston to Berlin.
Gandhiji’s treatment
of his family was not heartwarming. His moral demands were so harsh
that they alienated his four sons. He took a vow of total celibacy
at the age of 37 and ordered his two older sons to make the same
lifelong commitment. When Harilal, the eldest, wanted to marry,
Gandhi refused to give him his blessing. Harilal converted to the
Moslem faith, became an alcoholic and died of tuberculosis.
Gandhi did not give
his children much education. He also denied elementary education to
his wife, who, for the 42 years after Gandhi took his vow of
celibacy, bore the burden of her husband’s compulsive rectitude. He
had said of her sad expression, ‘It is often like that on the face
of a meek cow. I see, too, that there is selfishness in this
suffering of hers.’ Gandhi’s celebrated celibacy embraced some
curious facts. It was widely rumored that the young girls of his
ashrams slept in his bed. Nor that the Mahatma violated his vows. He
just let the maidens hold him in their arms while he ‘tested’ his
self-control.
But Gandhi’s wiles and
quirks do not diminish his humanity or the superhuman magnitude of
his courage. He launched three great mass movements; against
colonialism, against racism, against religious intolerance. He gave
our modern world an electrifying vision of the potential of peaceful
resistance, and young men like Martin Luther King Jr. took him as
their model. Albert Einstein said, ‘Generations to come will scarce
believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon
this earth.’
Gandhi was flawed, as
we all are; he was driven by a corroding rage for ‘perfection’, as
few of us are. He is already a legend, the very incarnation of
compassion, a beacon of religious intolerance, champion of the poor
and the degraded, to whom he gave a new and historic sense of
self-respect. To the mega-millions, whatever his faults, he will
forever be; the Mahatma.
