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.
