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Mohandas Gandhi

1869–1948

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TIME LINE

1869 (Oct. 2): Born in Porbandar to Karamchand and Putlibai Gandhi.

1883: Marries Kasturbai at age 13.

1885: Father dies.

1888: Son Harilal born. Goes to London to study law.

1891: Returns to India from London.

1891–93: Fails as a lawyer in India.

1892: Son Manilal born.

1893: Moves to South Africa to serve in a Muslim law firm. Forced off Maritzburg train.

1894: Establishes Natal Indian Congress in South Africa.

1897: Nearly killed by mob of white settlers in Durban but refuses to press charges. Son Ramdas born.

1899–1902: Organizes Indian corps of medics for British side of Boer War; awarded a medal.

1900: Son Devadas born.

1903: Begins major movement in direction of renunciation of possessions, communal living, and a handicraft economy. Helps create Indian Opinion newspaper.

1906: Takes personal vow of celibacy; does not consult Kasturbai.

1906 (Aug. 22): Publication of draft of Indian Registration Act inflames South African Indian resistance.

1906 (Sept. 11): Takes lead of Johannesburg mass meeting calling for resistance to such a law.

1907: Imprisoned for defiance of newly passed Asiatic Registration Act.

1908: Gandhi law office becomes HQ for Satyagraha (Soul Force) resistance movement.

1909 (July–Nov.): Travels to London to push for end to anti-Indian legislation in South Africa.

1909–10: Buys Tolstoy Farm, a place of refuge for resisters and their families. Writes his first book, on Indian self-rule.

1913 (Mar.): South African Supreme Court nullifies marriages of Indians, Muslims, and Sikhs.

1913 (Nov.): Imprisoned for leading striking Indian miners on trek to immigrate to Transvaal; 50,000 Indians begin strike, leading to first meaningful negotiations between Gandhi and government.

1914 (July): Indian Relief bill passed: free Indians can now enter Cape Colony; Hindu, Muslim marriages now legally valid.

1914 (Aug.): Arrives in England two days before World War I starts.

1915 (Jan.): Declared to be a Mahatma (Great Soul) by R. Tagore.

1915 (May): Returns to India and establishes Satyagraha Ashram.

1917 (Apr.): Goes to Champaran to inquire about conditions of local farmers.

1919 (Mar.): Britain passes harsh Rowlatt Act for colonial India. Gandhi engages in first use of fasting for protest.

1919 (Apr. 13): 400 dead and 1,000 injured in Jallianwala Bagh (Amritsar) Massacre.

1920 (Sept.): Begins total noncooperation movement against British rule.

1921 (Dec.): Becomes leader of Indian National Congress; creates new constitution.

1922: Amid intensifying British oppression, calls for boycott of all things British. Arrested for first time in India; sentenced to six years in prison; serves two. 30,000 resisters sent to jail, overwhelming authorities.

1924: Goes on 21-day fast to protest Muslim-Hindu conflict and violence and call for reconciliation.

1927: Publishes first volume of autobiography Story of My Experiments with Truth.

1929: Publishes second volume of autobiography.

1930 (Mar. 12): Leads Salt March to protest British tax on salt. Recognized leader of Indian independence movement.

1930 (Nov.)–1931 (Jan.): Imprisoned and unable to attend first Round Table conference to discuss India’s self-rule.

1931 (Mar.): Signing of Gandhi-Irwin Pact, signifying the two are equals.

1931 (Sept.–Dec.): Second Round Table conference produces no meaningful progress.

1932 (Sept.): Fasts on behalf of the Dalits.

1934 (Sept. 17): Announces retirement from politics to focus on village economics.

1939 (Mar. 3): Announces fast unto death in effort to form a People’s Council in Rajkot.

1942 (Aug. 9): Arrested for encouraging civil disobedience on behalf of the Quit India Movement; rioting and violence break out across India.

1944 (Feb. 22): Kasturbai dies.

1944 (May 6): Released from his last prison sentence.

1946 (Mar. 23): British Cabinet Mission arrives in India.

1946 (Aug. 16): Direct Action Day inflames Hindu-Muslim tensions, resulting in massive bloodshed.

1946 (Sept. 2): Formation of interim government of India.

1947 (June 15): United Kingdom passes Indian Independence Act.

1947 (Aug. 15): Indian independence and, to Gandhi’s despair, partition of India and Pakistan.

1948 (Jan. 12): Announces fast to end Hindu-Muslim violence in Delhi.

1948 (Jan. 30): Assassinated by member of militant Hindu faction.

INTRODUCTION

It is one thing for a moral leader to inspire us. It is another entirely to inspire generations of other moral leaders. In the years following Mohandas Gandhi’s death, leaders such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would look to him for moral inspiration and guidance. Millions in India, and countless more around the globe, continue to remember him with reverence. Gandhi is one of those rare leaders whose legacy is as important as the life he led. Gandhi was declared a “Mahatma,” or “Great Soul,” before he was fifty years old, long before Indian independence, for which we know him best today. He has inhabited that title in the decades since.

Such an outsized legacy is also a source of trouble when studying Gandhi. Amusingly, many famous Gandhi quotes turn out to have never left the Mahatma’s lips. “Be the change you wish to see in the world” is, at best, a bumper-sticker paraphrase of a longer reflection on personal transformation.1 The famous “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you . . .” litany is not Gandhi at all; it seems to have originated at a 1918 trade union convention speech in Cincinnati, Ohio.2 Gandhi’s reputation is such that any quote has an added level of moral authority when his name is attached to it.

You may need to be convinced that some of the leaders in this volume belong here, but we suspect you did not balk at Gandhi’s name. Most of us accept Gandhi as a moral leader before we ever encounter the details of his life. Few have heard of the troublesome parts of his legacy. Today, this makes Gandhi one of the most contested of all the leaders we profile. No leader, except perhaps Nelson Mandela, is more tightly linked with one nation’s sense of identity. New scholarship on Gandhi’s life seems to some an unnecessary attack on the memory of a great man, and to others a long-overdue correction. Gandhi’s legacy is such that everyone either wants to have him on “their team” or to demolish his legend entirely.

Mohandas Gandhi was a prophet of nonviolence in an age when world wars and genocidal terror killed tens of millions. He was a visionary whose critiques of the global economy ring true today, even as his prescriptions for those ills remain questionable. He spoke of gentleness and integrity in a world that sees such qualities as symptomatic of naiveté. All this is true—as are some of the disturbing truths about the man that we will explore below. Mohandas Gandhi tried to show how people of different faiths might dialogue and interrelate with respect and love. The challenge for us is to engage with his memory in the same way.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Both William Wilberforce and Florence Nightingale sought reform of the British Empire’s rule in India. It is interesting to wonder what might have happened if they had met with greater success or devoted more time to that project. Perhaps the world would not know Gandhi’s name. Or, perhaps, Gandhi or someone like him would have emerged nonetheless. After all, forward-looking Britons such as Wilberforce and Nightingale were interested in a kinder, gentler imperialism—not its end. They sought reform, not revolution. But as the twentieth century proved, people will not forever tolerate living under the thumb of foreign powers.

Great Britain dominated India from the mid-1700s, when the British East India Company spread its tentacles across the subcontinent. About a decade before Gandhi was born, the British Crown took charge, ending some of the East India Company excesses that Wilberforce opposed. The change began a nearly century-long period called the British raj and introduced problems of its own. The royal government partnered with powerful and wealthy Indian elites who ruled hundreds of principalities, some massive in size. Hundreds of millions of people in one of the most densely populated lands in the world were subject to a small island on the other side of the world.

The British government imposed high taxes to support a bureaucracy to oversee the continent and a large standing army to enforce its rule. It also supported landowners who exploited poor peasant farmers. By Gandhi’s time, an Indian middle class had emerged that desired more economic freedom than British exploitation would permit. As Gandhi would note repeatedly, India had become dependent on Britain. For example, Indian farmers would produce cotton for export and then buy British-made clothing, where once they had produced their own. Gandhi did not want an isolated India or an exploited India. He envisioned India and Britain interdependent and on equal footing. But any such move would threaten imperial power. Quite often, the British raj decided to quell threats with sword and gun.

The British controlled territory that today makes up the countries of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Three-quarters of India’s population was Hindu and one-quarter Muslim, a division that would shape the later years of Gandhi’s life. Many Muslim Indians were converts from Hinduism, and some of those converted to escape the caste system that structured Hindu society. Portions of the country were predominantly Muslim or Hindu, but in much of the country the two groups lived alongside each other. India also includes multiple ethnic groups and areas, like Bengal, with distinct cultural and linguistic heritages. The British took advantage of such divisions to maintain their rule.

Gandhi’s India was an unequal and hierarchical society. Its central feature was a religiously ordained Hindu caste system. At the top were Brahmins, originally priests and teachers; then followed warrior Kshatriyas, trader Vaishyas, and laborer Shudras. Within these broad categories were thousands of subcastes. Caste was defined from birth. Being born in a low caste was attributed to mistakes in a former life, and living well enough to deserve reincarnation into a higher caste was the main hope for upward mobility. At the bottom and utterly outside the caste system were the Dalits, then known as untouchables, about whom we will have more to say below.

Already in Gandhi’s time, the caste system was showing signs of weakness. Occupations often did not align with caste, which had more to do with political power and social class. For example, though a Brahmin might drive a taxicab, he must not marry below his caste. (Gandhi’s views on the subject notoriously shifted over the course of his life.) Westerners often expressed horror at the caste system, ignoring the racial caste systems within their own societies. And unfettered Western-style capitalism brought with it a new type of inequality, based on wealth instead of caste.

Gandhi is so linked with Indian independence that it is easy to forget that he became the man we know today first in South Africa, a nation that had been under British control since the Napoleonic wars. There he underwent a personal transformation and piloted the techniques that led him to be deemed a “Mahatma.” There, too, imperial powers fostered divisions to maintain control. The population was divided between whites, blacks, “coloreds” of mixed race, and Indians, most of whom had immigrated to South Africa seeking work. Indians, dismissed with the racial slur “coolies,” faced discrimination and abuse from white South Africans even while benefiting from advantages unknown to the majority black population.

Gandhi lived during the height of the British Empire. It spanned the globe, dominating nearly one-quarter of the world population, and India was its crown jewel. By the fiftieth anniversary of his death, dozens of new countries had emerged as centuries of European colonial rule collapsed. Gandhi stands at the center of the story of the peoples of the colonized world rising up to claim dignity, freedom, and political independence.

EARLY AND PRIVATE LIFE

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in the small western India seaside town of Porbandar. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, was chief minister of Porbandar, and his grandfather had held the same role. Gandhi’s mother, Putlibai, was his father’s fourth wife—Karamchand married three times but had been widowed repeatedly. She was an illiterate, deeply devout woman, a follower of Vaishnavism, a form of Hinduism. She also had affection for Jainism, a nontheistic Indian religion focused on personal growth and discipline through ascetic practices. It is easy to look at the later course of Gandhi’s life and see the influence of his parents in the man who would blend deep spirituality with political organizing.

Early on, though, few of Gandhi’s gifts were evident. Mohandas was a poor student and struggled to learn. Quiet, shy, and small, he was envious of the bigger children at school. He was even a bit rebellious as a young man, once trying meat—forbidden to Hindus—and smoking cigarettes. Like some in this book, Gandhi was born into privilege. His father owned three homes, and Mohandas had his own nurse as a child. Unlike others, he renounced that wealth and advantage to an extreme degree. By the end of his life, the family fortune had dwindled dramatically. Despite his later asceticism, however, it is easy to see how his family’s position carried Gandhi through his rough younger years.

His parents arranged his marriage according to the custom of the time. The parents informed neither Mohandas nor his spouse, Kasturbai, until the preparations were complete. Gandhi and Kasturbai were only thirteen when they were married and, though he came to love Kasturbai deeply, one can hardly say it was a happy marriage. They were separated for long periods of time during their younger years. Gandhi spent thirty-three months in London away from Kasturbai but deemed it “a long and healthy” separation. Later, before leaving for South Africa for three years, he attempted to console her by saying, “We are bound to meet again in a year.”3

Two years after marrying Kasturbai came an incident that marred Gandhi’s view of sex. He was massaging the leg of his ill father but asked his uncle to relieve him so that he could go have sex with his wife. While he was in Kasturbai’s bed, a servant knocked and summoned Gandhi to his father’s room. The elder Gandhi was dead by the time Mohandas arrived. It produced a sick feeling of guilt. “If passion had not blinded me,” Gandhi ruminated forty years later, “I should have been spared the torture of separation from my father during his last moments. . . . The shame of my carnal desire at the critical moment of my father’s death . . . is a blot I shall never be able to efface or forget.”4

Sexual desire remained a source of torment for Gandhi. He and Kasturbai had four children. But in 1906, at the age of thirty-seven, he declared the relationship celibate. Kasturbai had no say in the matter. She later seemed less a wife to Gandhi and more a supporter of his causes. Gandhi did, by all accounts, love her, and he was devastated when she passed away. Their four sons, meanwhile, struggled greatly. Gandhi seemed more affectionate toward his grandchildren than his children. As immensely compassionate as Gandhi could be, he would have been a difficult man to have as a husband or father.

In 1888, Gandhi left India to study law in England. He considered studying medicine and wrestled for some time with the decision. Going to England was controversial. Relatives resisted the move and informed him he would become an “outcaste” if he went to England. Even at a young age, however, Gandhi was not easily swayed from his chosen path. He went to England anyway. There he studied law, improved his English, and read the Christian Bible. He found much of it boring but became quite intrigued with Jesus’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. He took other religious traditions seriously, and his exploration of them renewed and fortified his own beliefs. In England, in fact, he first read the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text. He also adopted a strict vegetarian diet.

Gandhi faced the same tension imposed on millions of colonized peoples. He had to discern whether—and where—to assimilate to the dominant culture and where to hold dearly to his own. He had to negotiate the benefits of British education without losing his own core sense of identity. He dressed like an English gentleman and followed British customs, even as his spiritual growth drew him back to his roots. The result was a British-trained lawyer who eventually led two movements that deliberately violated the law in order to protest British rule. Despite his training, however, he was a poor lawyer and failed in his first attempt to make a living in India. With few options, he took a job in South Africa.

Not long after arriving in South Africa, Gandhi purchased a first-class ticket to travel from the Natal province to Pretoria, in Transvaal. After boarding at Maritzburg, a white man entered Gandhi’s car and, upon seeing Gandhi, left. He returned with two railway employees. The officials insisted that Gandhi, as a brown-skinned Indian, move to the baggage car. When he refused, he was forcibly removed from the train. “That chilly night in the Maritzburg station waiting room,” Louis Fischer writes, “the twenty-four-year-old Indian lawyer began to think of himself as a David assailing the Goliath of racial discrimination.”5

Gandhi was not afraid of the consequences of his refusal to give up his seat. Fearlessness is, in fact, a recurrent theme in Gandhi’s life. He was famously committed to nonviolence but once declared, “Where there is a choice between cowardice and violence, I would choose violence.”6 Cowardice, he thought, would tarnish one’s self-respect. Fischer says, “Gandhi himself had no fear; it is this more than any other quality which accounts for his growth from the ordinary person he was in his twenties and early thirties to the mountain of a man he ultimately became. He did not fear governments, jails, death—it would unite him with his God—illness—he could conquer it—hunger, unpopularity, criticism, or rejection.”7

Less than a week after the train incident, Gandhi gave his first public address on the topic. He called a meeting of South African Indians and, standing before the gathered crowd, denounced the racial discrimination they all knew so well. It marks a turning point between what Fischer describes as “the mediocre, unimpressive, handicapped, floundering M. K. Gandhi, barrister-at-law, who left England in 1891, and the Mahatma of the twentieth century who led millions.”8 In the years to come, Gandhi would transform himself spiritually, personally, and politically, and leave multiple countries and millions of lives forever altered in the process.

VOCATION

To recount every march, fast, speech, strike, boycott, meeting, campaign, confrontation, and act of civil disobedience Mohandas Gandhi undertook would require more pages than we have available. We can instead summarize Gandhi’s career in two periods: the struggle against discrimination in South Africa and the long campaign for independence in India. In South Africa, Gandhi solidified his spiritual beliefs and practices and put them into action. In India, the man already famous for his victories in South Africa turned his attention to winning independence through mass boycotts and noncooperation.

The relationship between Gandhi’s religion and his politics has always been up for debate. The two are intertwined and inseparable. “Men say I am a saint for losing myself in politics. The fact is I am a politician trying my hardest to be a saint,” he once said.9 In Hinduism, he found spiritual resources that he deployed in opposition to British injustice. But spirituality was no mere tool. Gandhi sought to purify himself and his people in order to prepare them for independence—in order to be worthy of it and to live afterward in community.

In South Africa, he began the metamorphosis from young English barrister to ascetic Hindu. Gandhi “had a violent nature and his subsequent mahatma-calm was the product of long training in temperament-control. He did not easily become an even-minded, desireless yogi. He had to remold himself. Recognizing his deficiencies, he made a conscious effort to grow and change and restrain his bad impulses. He turned himself into a different person.”10 Gandhi’s spiritual outlook was defined by renunciation of earthly pursuits. The perfect life, he felt, could be summarized in just one word: desirelessness.

The Hindu concept of bramacharya, Gandhi wrote, “signifies control of all the senses at all places in thought, word, and deed.”11 The beginning of this life is self-restraint. Still holding on to guilt over not being present at his father’s death, Gandhi found the bramacharya notion of celibacy appealing. But his ascetic practices went far beyond sex. Gandhi adopted a strict diet consisting mainly of fruit. He wore simple, traditional Indian garb and later insisted that it be homespun instead of purchased from abroad. Along with taming physical appetites, he sought to restrain the emotions he felt, the words he spoke, and the possessions he owned. By his later years, he had only a handful of personal belongings. “Perfect Bramacharis,” Gandhi insisted, “are perfectly sinless. They are therefore near to God. They are like God.”12 He never made the same claim about himself but displayed an astonishing commitment to self-discipline and an ascetic life.

To most of us, such a lifestyle sounds tremendously difficult. Gandhi was adamant that it was no burden. Where we see a harsh and crushing code of behavior, Gandhi simply saw the substitution of one pleasure for another. “Only give up a thing,” he wrote, “when you want some other condition so much that the thing has no longer any attraction for you, or when it seems to interfere with that which is more greatly desired.”13 Think of the way we are surprisingly capable of great selflessness when it comes to the ones we love. What Gandhi denied himself in physical pleasures he gained in spiritual peace.

Gandhi made a sharp distinction between earthly and spiritual pursuits and presented them as at odds with each other, a sharply dualistic outlook common to ascetics in many traditions. This risks de-emphasizing real-world experiences to an unhealthy extreme and minimizing the importance of pain and suffering. But Gandhi’s personal transformation drove him unreservedly out into the world. He did not believe renunciation made people passive—quite the contrary. Renunciation left him less concerned with his own needs than with the people facing injustice and hardship around him. He transformed his appetite for food or sex into a hunger for improving the conditions he saw around him.

There is a long-standing debate about whether social transformation comes as a result of changed policies or changed hearts and minds. Gandhi not only favored both but also saw the two as inextricably linked. Amid struggles to change laws and reform governance, he fixed his eyes on the ultimate challenge. “Prejudices cannot be removed by legislation,” he wrote. “They yield only to patient toil and education.”14 For Gandhi, personal transformation prepares people to change structures. Changed structures free both oppressors and oppressed to explore new values. He rejected as a false choice the idea of the two as separate paths.

Renunciation was, in fact, Gandhi’s political strategy. It can be summed up in one word: Satyagraha, or “Soul Force.” The core of Satyagraha is nonviolent noncooperation. For instance, a law in South Africa banned the movement of Indians between two territories. Gandhi organized thousands of Indians to travel anyway and deliberately violate the law. They bore the consequences without violence and overwhelmed jails with their sheer numbers. Gandhi himself was imprisoned multiple times throughout his life. Similarly, in mass strikes across South Africa, tens of thousands of Indians risked their livelihoods by laying down their tools in pursuit of a greater good. Soul Force was communal renunciation in pursuit of justice.

Political Satyagraha requires personal discipline. Consider what it takes to face abuse, threats, violence, and jail without raising a hand in angry response. And political Satyagraha transforms people. Imagine how such peaceful courage changed the hearts of those who witnessed it. Personal transformation made one ready to engage in the Satyagraha movement, and the Satyagraha movement won both better policies and the conversion of those in power.

In South Africa, Gandhi first put these ideas into action and proved they could work. Gandhi sought to win the hearts of the British rather than humiliate them. He hoped, as Fischer puts it, “if he practiced the Sermon on the Mount, [South African leader Jan] Smuts would remember he was a Christian.”15 By 1914, Gandhi had won the end of travel restrictions and compulsory registrations as well as the recognition of non-British marriages in South Africa. He had not “won a victory over Smuts, he won Smuts over. The settlement came not when Smuts had no more strength to fight but when he had no more heart to fight.”16 Smuts went from fiercely repressing Gandhi’s efforts in South Africa to offering him public praise the rest of his life. In recognition of his accomplishments, Indian novelist R. Tagore first declared Gandhi a “Mahatma,” or “Great Soul,” in 1915.

That same year, Gandhi returned to his homeland and established the Satyagraha Ashram. Gandhi lived collectively with hundreds of other people in an open environment. The ashram became a place of pilgrimage where the leading lights of Indian independence converged to plot strategy. Gandhi placed great emphasis on working collectively. In every campaign, he consulted and collaborated with others—though he did not always follow their lead. More of a spiritual leader than political operative, he hoped to instill virtues and a different culture in those who lived and studied alongside him.

Gandhi was opposed to British rule, but he never came to loathe the British people themselves. In fact, he sought equal standing for India within the British dominion, even encouraging Indian troops to serve in World War I. He was, though, a fierce critic of Western imperialism, industrial economies, and the way Christianity had become political cover for colonial projects. Structures, not individuals, were his enemy. To attack those structures, he promoted total noncooperation with the British occupiers—from refusal to participate in local government to rejecting British food, culture, and clothing. He sought both to instill love of Indian culture and place overwhelming pressure on the British government.

In 1930, Gandhi set out from his ashram with a handful of followers. Walking across the country, he denounced the heavy British tax on salt and laws against Indians producing their own. Without refrigeration, salt was essential to preserve food. As he walked toward the Arabian Sea, the crowds grew and grew. After hundreds of miles, he arrived at the shore and picked up the natural salt that developed there—in violation of British law. His symbolic action sparked hundreds of thousands to do the same. Sixty thousand were arrested in response, including Gandhi. The Salt March was the moment the Indian people declared themselves free. Actual independence took seventeen more years. Bloody revolution would have been quicker, but Gandhi would not permit it.

Independence was not as easy as the British simply pulling up oars and sailing away. There were massive questions about the structure of the new government and who would be represented. One of Gandhi’s most effective tactics in shaping this new society was the hunger strike. He announced his intention to forgo food, even to the point of death, unless certain conditions were met. He nearly died multiple times while fasting between 1915 and 1948. His fasts were effective because he was already a revered figure, and everyone who loved him scrambled to do what was necessary to prevent his death. Only a figure of great moral standing has that sort of power.

In 1932, Gandhi fasted in opposition to a plan to have non-caste Dalits vote in separate elections. Dalits live at the bottom rung of society and are not even considered a proper caste. They are forced to do the most demeaning tasks in society and are sometimes known as “untouchables” because in traditional Hindu teaching touching a Dalit makes one unclean. The separate elections plan had the strong support of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the leading Dalit politician, who felt separate elections would grant Dalits more power. But Gandhi insisted on everyone voting in the same election. His intention may have been admirable, yet it was against the wishes of the Dalit community and might have reduced their political power.

Another problem for Indian independence was representation of Hindus and Muslims. The question was whether the territory Gandhi knew as India would remain as one country or be partitioned in two: one majority-Hindu and one majority-Muslim. To further complicate matters, most partition plans required slicing up areas united by language and ethnicity, such as the Bengal region. Gandhi, once again, insisted on complete union. His dream of a free and united India was politically impossible. Gandhi would later despair that the partition of India and Pakistan robbed him of joy over independence.

Gandhi devoted the last years of his life to ending violence between Hindus and Muslims. After vigilante killings and mob retaliation claimed countless lives in Kolkata, Gandhi, by then an elderly man, walked hundreds of miles from village to village throughout the region around the city. He held prayers with both Muslims and Hindus and preached the possibility of peace and a life together.

Both Muslim and Hindu extremists hated him for his commitment to a country of “complete friendship between the Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Jews, a friendship not to be broken.”17 Threats on his life increased. Someone threw a homemade bomb at him. Then, on January 30, 1948, Gandhi led an interfaith prayer service. As he rose and held his hands aloft, a Hindu extremist with a gun stepped in front of him and fired three times. Gandhi murmured, “Oh God,” and collapsed, dying instantly.

LEGACY AND CRITICISM

Lord Mountbatten, the man tasked with presiding over India’s departure from the British Empire, later told a British audience that Gandhi was, in Indian eyes, “not compared with some great statesman, like Roosevelt or Churchill. They classified him simply in their minds with Muhammad and with Christ.”18 Gandhi’s martyrdom and legacy have only enhanced his legend in the years since.

Gandhi’s legacy hinges on successful resistance in South Africa and India. In South Africa, mass resistance helped overturn laws targeting Indians. Gandhi’s efforts in South Africa did not extend to breaking down the early apartheid-style laws that discriminated against blacks and “coloreds” as well as Indians. In fact, Gandhi’s views on race have sparked controversy. Students at the University of Ghana recently protested the installation of a statue of Gandhi, citing scholarship that argues that Gandhi was outraged that Indians were being treated like blacks. Whether his views on race evolved, as they did on other issues, is still debated.

Gandhi became the beloved parent of Indian independence and is still loved by most Indians today. Over a period of thirty years, working in close partnership with others, he overcame the British raj in a contest of wills. He did not set out to destroy, hurt, or humiliate the British. Satyagraha was, in his words, “the vindication of truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but on one’s self.” Instead of crushing opponents, they should be “weaned from error by patience and sympathy.”19 Against the organized violence of the British government, Gandhi sought to spark organized nonviolence in the form of civil disobedience. “My ambition,” he declared, “is no less than to convert the British people through nonviolence.”20

Whenever people anywhere march en masse, boycott businesses, or engage in civil disobedience, they walk in Gandhi’s footsteps. Gandhi did not invent these tactics, but he popularized them and gave them a moral legitimacy. He himself spent around twenty-five hundred days in jail. In particular, Gandhi made the hunger strike a common protest tactic—perhaps too common. Gandhi was very quick to leap to fasts in order to solve thorny problems. As admirably sacrificial as his hunger strikes were, there is also something deeply coercive about a person threatening one’s own life unless others come to an agreement.

Many of the protest tactics we see today are legacies of Gandhi’s work. His practice, though, went deeper than most contemporary resistance, uniting means and ends, character and action, vision and discipline, into integrated political action. Gandhi’s most enduring term is Satyagraha, “Soul Force.” He crafted a set of spiritual principles—nonviolence, self-restraint, love of enemies, absorbing rather than inflicting violence—and he showed how they can win a people’s independence.

Gandhi desperately sought peace between Muslims and Hindus, but his ambition extended far beyond: “My mission is not merely the brotherhood of Indian humanity. My mission is not merely the freedom of India. But through realization of the freedom of India, I hope to realize and carry on the brotherhood of man.”21 He studied Jewish and Christian Scriptures and remarked, “If then I had to face only the Sermon on the Mount and my own interpretation of it, I should not hesitate to say, ‘Oh, yes, I am a Christian.’ . . . But negatively I can tell you that much of what passes as Christianity is a negation of the Sermon on the Mount.”22 In his loving nonviolence, Gandhi, a Hindu, was a better Christian than many who have claimed that label.

Part of Gandhi’s legacy is thus as a pioneer of serious interfaith dialogue. Western Christians would do well to take to heart Gandhi’s more challenging critiques. Gandhi, from his non-Western vantage point, was able to see how Christianity had become twisted to help Westerners feel superior to other cultures. Gandhi saw Jesus of Nazareth as an Asian man who nonviolently resisted empire but whose memory had been made an exclusive property of Europeans and distorted to endorse empire. Christians from the global South have made this same argument from within the Christian tradition, developing much-needed postcolonial perspectives on Christian faith and practice.

Gandhi faced untold amounts of criticism during his lifetime. The various British governments he defied found him to be somewhere between a nuisance and a traitor. His fellow independence activists sometimes saw his work on castes, economic self-sufficiency, and interreligious peace as distractions. And of course, we cannot forget it was one of his own people, an Indian Hindu, who claimed his life. How did he handle such criticism? Gandhi was stubborn about his ascetic way of life. In matters of larger strategy, however, he was open to admitting failure. “Moral authority is never retained by attempting to hold on to it,” he replied when questioned about whether missteps would diminish him. “It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.”23

Gandhi did not succeed in his quest to return India to reliance on local village economies. He pushed for small-scale agriculture and local production of goods, particularly spun cotton wool, and in later years spent an hour each day spinning wool. He dressed like a simple monk—even, one time, while visiting the queen—and few dared to appear in front of him in anything but homespun traditional garb. Gandhi resisted imperial exploitation. He also resisted industrialization that too often crushed working masses for the benefit of a rich few, thus creating fertile ground for authoritarian and anti-religious Communist ideologies. Since industrialization also brought economic development and public health benefits, his efforts seemed like a quaint backwardness standing in the way of progress. In many ways, though, Gandhi was ahead of his time. Throughout the world, people are rediscovering that small-scale, sustainable agriculture and locally made products benefit human communities and all of God’s creation.

Gandhi also struggled to overcome divisions within India. His approach to caste remains controversial, especially as new reviews of his writings unearth indications of bias against Dalits. We would do well to listen with open minds to Dalits who criticize his actions instead of rushing to his defense. It appears likely that Gandhi was both ahead of some peers on the question of caste and nowhere near where he should have been. Gandhi’s desperate efforts to prevent sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims also largely failed. India and Pakistan were born as separate nations. Millions were displaced and countless killed, and tensions remain fraught. Experts consider the conflict between these two nations, armed with nuclear weapons, one of the most potentially catastrophic situations in the world.

In the last few years, there has been new attention to Gandhi’s relationship with young women. Even an adoring biographer such as Fischer notes that Gandhi “encouraged boys and girls, some of them adolescents, to bathe together at the spring. For the girls’ safety, he was always present, and ‘My eyes followed the girls as a mother’s eye follows a daughter.’ No doubt the boys’ eyes followed too.”24 Most disturbingly, a number of biographies claim that Gandhi would test his sexual self-restraint by forcing young women and girls to sleep naked in bed with him. One was his grandniece. Gandhi did not test himself in this way with his own wife or women his own age. It seems his actions traumatized these young girls. Letters from Gandhi associates describe the girls as later frequently “weeping” and appearing “depressed.” He also would have young women bathe and massage him while he was nude.25

Close associates expressed horror at the time. Gandhi’s secretary left the ashram in protest after Gandhi refused to accede to his demands to cease such behavior. But, in a familiar pattern, accusations were brushed under the rug in order to protect Gandhi’s reputation. These revelations are sufficiently disturbing that we gave serious discussion to not including Gandhi in this volume. All moral leaders have imperfections, and many have messy personal lives. Gandhi appears to have abused his authority and his status as a moral leader to act in a sexually predatory manner. At the least, he undermined his own claims to nonviolence with coercive practices involving minors. These are serious claims and not to be taken lightly.

In the end, we include Gandhi for several reasons. First, his legacy and influence have outgrown the man himself. The American civil rights movement would be unrecognizable without Gandhi’s example. His method became the default paradigm for morally driven social change. Second, Gandhi is a cautionary tale. As we write this, the news is full of stories of powerful men using that power to assault, harass, and coerce women into sex against their will. Gandhi forces us to ask where we allow such behavior to go unpunished in our own lives. Clergy sexual abuse in Christian communities, for instance, remains shockingly high despite efforts to educate congregations and their leaders.

Too often, those who report abuse are blamed for instigating it and accused of trying to damage the reputation of a great man. If Gandhi’s actions horrify you, imagine how society might have reacted if one of the women involved had written a tell-all book and gone on CNN to talk about it. Gandhi is an important historical figure, then, because he both contributed to public morality and exposes our frightening toleration of immorality. As historians further explore his behavior, there may come a point where Gandhi has no place in the pantheon of moral greats. For now, we ask you to debate that question for yourself—and to consider how hero worship can make us willfully blind to abusive behavior.

LEADERSHIP LESSONS

Mohandas Gandhi’s life and work offer a number of important lessons about moral leadership:

In an atmosphere plagued with violence and vengeance, Gandhi convinced his followers to take suffering on themselves instead of inflicting it on others. In the opening years of an age of excess, he spoke of simplicity and self-denial. Amid horrific wars, he sought to convert people in power, not coerce them. At the height of colonial empires, he was a voice for self-determination. While Muslims and Hindus were murdering each other in the streets, he died at the hands of a fellow Hindu horrified by his dream of communities living in peace. That legacy is as admirable as his treatment of young women is disturbing.

“What I did,” Gandhi said at the end of his life, “was a very ordinary thing. I declared that the British could not order me around in my own country.”26 Yet he could have led the South African Indian community in a guerrilla war or asked the Indian people to spill blood. He did not. Gilbert Murray once said of Gandhi, “Be careful with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasures, nothing for comfort or praise or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy because his body which you can always conquer gives you so little purchase over his soul.”27 Gandhi was an utterly one-of-a-kind Hindu sage and yet also a wily political operator. It was a potent mix.

When Gandhi was assassinated, leaders around the world struggled to give voice to the loss. His personal failings being unknown at the time, millions saw instead the man who forsook violence, who denounced sectarian hatred, who sought to love enemies instead of despising them, who shared a vision of universal peace at a time when the world was tearing itself apart. United States secretary of state George C. Marshall said, “Mahatma Gandhi was the spokesman for the conscience of mankind.”28 Louis Fischer, journalist and personal friend of Gandhi, put it this way: “His legacy is courage, his lesson truth, his weapon love. His life is his monument. He now belongs to mankind.”29

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Discuss nonviolent civil disobedience as a social change strategy. In which situations is it effective or ineffective? Can it still work today?
  2. What turned Gandhi from the nobody he was as late as 1892 into the powerful activist he was by 1894?
  3. Discuss Gandhi’s asceticism and its positive and negative contribution to his life and work.
  4. What do you make of how Gandhi acted toward women, including his own wife and numerous young women? How does this change your opinion of him?
  5. Gandhi and Christianity had an interesting relationship. What should Christians learn?

FOR FURTHER READING

Dalton, Dennis. Mahatma Gandhi: Selected Political Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.

Ellsberg, Robert. Gandhi on Christianity. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991.

Fischer, Louis. Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World. New York: Signet Classics, 1954.

Gandhi, Mohandas K. Mahatma Gandhi: The Essential Writings. Edited by Judith Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

———. The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Boston: Beacon, 1957.

  

1. Brian Morton, “Falser Words Were Never Spoken,” New York Times, August 29, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/falser-words-were-never-spoken.html.

2. C. Eugene Emery Jr., “Donald Trump Falls for Phony Gandhi Quote: ‘First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You . . .’” PolitiFact, March 3, 2016, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/mar/03/donald-trump/donald-trump-falls-phony-gandhi-quote/.

3. Louis Fischer, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (New York: Signet Classics, 1954), 32.

4. Fischer, Gandhi, 32.

5. Fischer, Gandhi, 20.

6. Fischer, Gandhi, 96.

7. Fischer, Gandhi, 97.

8. Fischer, Gandhi, 16.

9. Fischer, Gandhi, 35.

10. Fischer, Gandhi, 29.

11. Fischer, Gandhi, 33.

12. Fischer, Gandhi, 33.

13. Fischer, Gandhi, 33.

14. Fischer, Gandhi, 25.

15. Fischer, Gandhi, 35.

16. Fischer, Gandhi, 49.

17. Fischer, Gandhi, 205.

18. Fischer, Gandhi, 185.

19. Fischer, Gandhi, 35.

20. Fischer, Gandhi, 105.

21. Mohandas Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi: The Essential Writings, ed. Judith Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 19.

22. Fischer, Gandhi, 143.

23. Fischer, Gandhi, 70.

24. Fischer, Gandhi, 43.

25. See Girja Kumar, Mahatma Gandhi’s Letters on Brahmacharya, Sexuality and Love (New Delhi: Vitasta, 2011), and Rita Banerji, Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 265–81.

26. Fischer, Gandhi, 64.

27. Fischer, Gandhi, 50.

28. Fischer, Gandhi, 4.

29. Fischer, Gandhi, 208.