A legend through his campaigns

The missionary years in the second half of the 1920s became a period of reflection and renewal during the pursuit of intense social reform. Religion, the fountainhead of so much bitter strife, was constantly in his thoughts. The counterpoint of his passionate belief in the philosophy of his own faith was its degeneration in practice. Gandhi’s primary challenge was the eradication of ‘untouchability’, a cruel corruption of Hinduism’s ideals by orthodox catechism.

For Gandhi, religion was not an abstraction. ‘The relation between God and myself is not only at prayer but, at all times, that of a master and slave in perpetual bondage. Prayer is to me the intense longing of the heart to merge myself in the Master,’ he wrote to V.M. Tarkunde from Sabarmati on 30 October 1926 (Gandhi 1970, vol. 36, 447).

Hinduism was his path to the creator. He readily acknowledged that there were other paths, and every human being had the freedom to choose its form of worship. The Mahatma believed that as God had no religion, every religion led to God. It was only logical that he should be a fierce opponent of conversion: if all roads led to God, it was invidious to claim that any one road was superior. God’s grace was not the monopoly of any segment of the human race. Gandhi’s prayer meetings were a living embodiment of his beliefs. Prayers were offered in every denomination. They were also a means of communication with a wider public through his speeches. Rev. Andrews called him ‘a saint of action, rather than of contemplation’.

On 14 May 1927, Gandhi corrected Dr B.S. Moonje, a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, who had suggested that Gandhi had acknowledged that ‘untouchability’ was an integral part of Hinduism. Gandhi was not surprised for, in his words, Moonje’s ‘philosophy admitted of any means for beating an opponent with…. I do not regard untouchability as is now practised as a part of the Hindu religion, and that if I could persuade myself that it was, I should disown Hinduism…. Happily for me, my Hinduism does not bind me to every verse because it is written in Sanskrit…. But let me tell you with all deference that in spite of your literal knowledge of the shastras, yours is a distorted kind of Hinduism. I claim in all humility to have lived Hinduism all my life.’ This dispute, however, would not affect their friendship, he added (Gandhi 1970, vol. 38, 383, 384).

His preferred text was the Bhagavad Gita, which he described as his ‘spiritual dictionary’. He first read the Gita in 1890 while a student in London in Sir Edwin Arnold’s English verse translation, The Song Celestial, published in 1885. Sir Edwin, editor of the Daily Telegraph between 1873 and 1888, had served in India and spoke nineteen languages including Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu and Hindi. Appointed principal of Government Sanskrit College, Poona, in 1857, he returned home in 1861 to join the Telegraph newspaper. His 5,300-line verse biography of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, appeared in 1879 and sold more than a million copies. Gandhi met Arnold while studying law in London.

Gandhi’s moral compass was set in aparigraha, or non-possession, and sambhava, the equanimity that impelled action without thought of reward. He neither sought success nor feared failure. For him, the Mahabharata war was an allegory of conflict between good and evil within every individual. Lord Krishna was the atman, or soul of existence; his playmates the gopis, or milkmaids, were the 16,000 senses. Sacred texts could not be locked into conventional mind-cuffs, unresponsive to the evolution of time.

On 24 February 1926, Gandhi began a series of lectures on the Gita at Satyagraha Ashram, which are a tribute to his scholarship and innovative interpretation. ‘The Mahabharata is not history; it is a dharma-grantha,’ he said. His treatise examined the religious and ethical questions embedded in the narrative. A man could hardly describe even a drop of water; how could he describe an epic war literally? How could the hundred Kaurava brothers, children of the blind king Dhritarashtra, be born in the same instant? This had to be a metaphor. This conflict between dharma and adharma seen by Sanjaya through divine vision and recorded by the sage Vyasa was a personification of the eternal battle between virtue and vice. The human body was Kurukshetra, the battlefield. Gandhi’s long discourse on the Bhagavad Gita continued till November 1926 and merits a book of its own.

Lord Krishna defines a just war as a duty and asks the warrior-prince Arjuna to be patient and free of passion when doing his duty. Gandhi saw himself as another Arjuna even if critics taunted that he had become a god. For Gandhi, that would be blasphemy. As he said on 12 May 1926, ‘God is like a machine. He is His law. He is the author of law and He it is who administers it. What perfect order this represents!… The machine has been going on from eternity.… We should lose ourselves in God so completely that we do not remain separate from Him at all’ (Gandhi 1970, vol. 37, 75–354). Gandhi was being matter-of-fact when he said in 1922 that God had told him to withdraw the non-cooperation movement after the violence in Chauri Chaura.

His rationale for the non-cooperation movement lay in a principle from the Mahabharata that evil could not flourish by itself. British rule survived because it was supported by some Indians. The purpose of non-cooperation was to detach Indians from evil, causing its collapse. Westerners were understandably more quizzical about these ideas than Indians. In October 1927, Gandhi wrote to a ‘lifelong friend of India’, an American who had studied Christianity and Hinduism: ‘Believing as I do in the influence of heredity, being born into a Hindu family, I have remained a Hindu. I should reject it, if I found it inconsistent with my moral sense of my spiritual growth. On examination, I have found it to be the most tolerant of all religions known to me. Its freedom from dogma makes a forcible appeal to me inasmuch as it gives the votary the largest scope for selfexpression. Not being an exclusive religion, it enables the followers of that faith not merely to respect all the other religions, but it also enables them to admire and assimilate whatever may be good in the other faiths. Non-violence is common to all religions, but it has found the highest expression and application in Hinduism’ (Gandhi 1970, vol. 40, 290, 291).

Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading, appointed viceroy in 1921, thought after their first meeting that Gandhi’s moral views were admirable but found it difficult to understand their intrusion into politics. Gandhi maintained that there was no politics without religion. He prized Hinduism, but maintained that there was a pure faith which could transcend differences and bind one to the ‘truth within’ (Gandhi 1920). This was ‘the universal Religion of Tolerance’, which had no place for hatred and violence (Gandhi 1924).

(Excerpted with permission from MJ Akbar’s ‘Gandhi’; published by Bloomsbury India)